A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nineteen, Pt. 2
It looked like Jill if Jill had skin the shade of heroin dust and wore slops of tar and grease as clothing. It looked like Jill if some crazed sorcerer had taken Jill and stretched her out, if someone had elongated her five-foot-four frame into a warped six-foot-five. It looked like Jill if Jill had clawed fingers and all-white eyes and hair that bubbled and sizzled and fell out in gobs on the floor.
(underneath everything there’s just—)
Zoe and Sung-ho drew their sidearms and—
All the candles and candelabra went out. In the distant rest of the house, Zoe heard light bulbs bursting. Everything plunged to darkness, night sight invocations giving them the barest six-foot dim to make sense from. Muzzle flares strobed the room as Zoe and Sung-ho opened fire. In the microsecond flashes, Zoe saw this newborn Manifestation haul her sister to her feet.
“Hold!” she shouted, grabbing Sung-ho’s arm and pushing it down.
Sung-ho didn’t need further explanation. He followed the movement of his arm back to the floor, kneeling, and pressed his palms against the sigil-painted hardwood. His lips moved in inaudible syllables.
Zoe charged. If she could press the barrel of her gun against the monster maybe she could—
The plan died before any part of it hatched. In the second between seeing the creature hoisting her sister up and reaching the place where it had happened, the Manifestation had disappeared. Only Jill remained, lips peeling dry and hair splayed radial around her slack, unconscious face.
“We got a problem!” she shouted, louder than was necessary.
Tactical math flashed through her mind; the time it would take Sung-ho to cast a cantrip, the speed the Manifestation must move at—if it used traditional forms of locomotion at all, and the size and dimensions of the ritual space.
She spun around to rush back to Sung-ho and found the Manifestation standing two feet away.
Drops of diamorphine and oozing tar dripped off of her. It. Standing so close, Zoe noticed a pinprick of iris and pupil in the vast milky sclera of its gaze. Needletips and razor edges tipped its fingers.
It stepped forward and she stepped back.
With a breath, she brought her sidearm to bear and opened fire. The first two bullets blew through the Manifestation and—
suddenly the monster was inside her guard, too close to evade, and it swiped razor-needle claws across her armor. Supernaturally enhanced, the sharps shred through layers of knife-resistant material. Zoe backpedaled, firing once blindly, and parried the next blow with a forearm. Its third strike glanced her, stripping more protection from her body. She managed to get the barrel pointed at its center mass and squeezed the trigger. Another blare of flashbulb and thunder cracked between them.
The Manifestation bled into the darkness almost too fast to see.
Sung-ho finished the invocation. A surge of energy filled Zoe, sizzling between muscle fibers and along tendon and ligament. Mystic reinforcement buttressed her bones and wired her together. Strength bolstered her.
“Here!” she called out, moving the few feet of darkness between herself and Jill.
“It’s too dark,” Sung-ho said, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his gunhand. “We need flashlights.”
“Where are they?” Zoe asked.
Sung-ho paused. “I—I don’t know.”
“We have to move her,” Zoe said.
“What happened?” Sung-ho indicated the rips in her armor.
“The Manifestation. It’s still here somewhere.”
Sung-ho turned to scan the room. With their limited vision, they couldn’t make out more than a third of the chamber at a time. His grip tightened on his sidearm and stepped backwards, closer to Zoe.
“If we hurry, we can get her upstairs.” Zoe shoved her sidearm back in its holster.
“Alright, let’s go.” Sung-ho holstered his own pistol and bent to grab Jill’s legs. “Fast.”
They hauled Jill up and staggered out of the room. Whispers hissed in from the walls, countless voices rasping phlegmatic at them, the words too garbled and overlapped to make out individual sentences. Magic thickened the air, humming, and all the tiny hairs on their bodies bristled in reaction. Zoe backed up toward the kitchen and dining area, her back to the door. In the dimness that should’ve been darkness, neither of them had good sight on the other one’s rear.
They moved as quickly as possible—unfortunately, they were still quite slow.
As they moved through the kitchen, soles over tile, the Manifestation attacked. To Zoe, it seemed to come out of nowhere, emerging from the dimness itself. It crashed into Sung-ho’s side and threw him onto the eat-in table. Jill dropped and Zoe stumbled backward. Sung-ho unsheathed a combat knife and sliced at nothing. Zoe lost her grip on Jill and tripped. She bounced off of the refrigerator and reached for her own knife sheath.
The Manifestation jittered, one moment at the eat-in table and the next just a foot from Zoe. Reverse-gripped, Zoe brought the sharp, serrated edge of a combat knife across the Manifestation’s chest. Foamy whiteness bubbled up from the wound. Before she could strike again, the Manifestation had her throat in one hand, her wrist in another. Zoe slammed into the fridge again, this time hard enough to hurt. With all the wards and invocations protecting them, the pain meant something. Her spine had cratered the side of the appliance.
Zoe’s off-hand shot up to grab the limb attached to her neck. She dug her nails into not-skin skin. One of the needletip-claws not-yet-cutting her shivered. It extended, the tip pressing into flesh, piercing it. Zoe kicked at her assailant’s legs and tried to pry its grip away from her throat.
Two gunshots thundered in the tiny space. Both hit the Manifestation in the back.
The third punctured the fridge, an inch and a half from Zoe’s head. The Manifestation had blurred again, melting back into shadow. Zoe almost lost balance as her feet touched the ground again, the sudden release taking her by surprise. She spun in useless circles, searching.
Sung-ho stepped off the table. “She disappeared.”
“It,” Zoe corrected. “And yes, it did.”
“Don’t you get it yet?” the gravelly, not-Jill voice taunted from inside the walls.
Gritting her teeth, Zoe ignored the question. “We need to move…”
“I’m everywhere,” the voice snarled, playing melody over a hissing symphony of whispers. “Under everything.”
Liquid dripped down from the ceiling. The walls twisted and warped like whorled curtains.
Sheathing his knife and using both hands to grasp his sidearm, Sung-ho moved toward Zoe. “Back to back.”
In formation, they squinted at the darkness. Zoe faced the corridor leading to the stairwell and Sung-ho faced the direction of the ritual space. Neither of them saw very far. Between them, Jill moaned drowsily. Sweat glistened down her face. Her eyeballs rolled beneath their lids; her chapped lips parted in unspoken syllable.
Zoe remembered a seal in Jill’s bedroom, a series of seals and wards Jill had used to lock a heroin kit away from herself. With some salt and a little investment of physical and mental energy, they could recharge and re-trigger it again. “If we can get upstairs, I think we can trap it,” she said.
“Big ‘if,’” Sung-ho replied.
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
They only waited for a second, but it felt much longer in the tense, whisper-static’d space.
Sung-ho lowered his barrel. “Okay. So far it’s only attacked to harry us, maybe we can make it.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that out loud.”
“It’s true whether I say it or not. Faster, this time.”
Jill stirred as they bent to pick her up. “What?” she asked, softly. “What’s going on?”
“Something went wrong,” Zoe said. “We have to get upstairs. Can you get up?”
“We have to hurry,” Sung-ho added.
Jill pushed herself up slowly, muscle-less and attenuated. “What happened?”
“We don’t have time to explain. The seals and wards in your room, are they still there?”
“They’re out of charge, but the sigils are still there…”
“We have to get to your room.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“There’s a monster,” Sung-ho answered. “We don’t know more than that.”
“Is it—is it my fault?” Jill seemed woozy, bleary-eyed.
“I don’t know,” Zoe said. “And it doesn’t matter. Come on.”
She took Jill’s arm and looped it across her shoulders. Sung-ho withdrew his sidearm. Tight-knit, they moved slowly down the dim hallway for the stairwell. They passed an intersection between foyer and bathroom and kept going. A choir of hisses garbled up from the hardwood. The walls moved like flexing muscles. Drips plopped down from the ceiling, heroin and morphine.
They started up the stairs.
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
