Authors: Rain Oxford
“I don’t know. He seems to not have one. He protects
the other one; maybe we can use threats to make him help us.”
I was ignoring them by this time, as I was close
enough to the little boy to put my hand on his head. His eyes opened, revealing
stone grey irises that were not completely circular. I could feel his pain, not
like it was a part of me, but as an observer. He didn’t fight me as I scanned
him with my energy. His body was broken in numerous places and he was bleeding
inside and out in too many places. With physical tools, it would be impossible
to stop all of the wounds in time to save his life, but with magic…
Something else brushed against my energy, not out of
threat or curiosity, but out of desperation. There was another soul inside this
boy, trapped and suffering for the both of them. This smaller being, as young
as the boy, wanted to help him. It was his beast.
I guess that it was no different than Rojan was for
me, except this beast was not ancient or wise. Dylan’s magic stirred inside me
like my absent fire had before. I released it exactly as I would my fire with
the deep intention to free the beast inside him.
Before the energy had finished flowing out of me, the
little boy was shifting into a tiny snake with scales that matched the color of
his eyes. The woman and man were going on and on about how the boy would live
now because he shifted. I wanted to yell at them that if they had taken better
care of him, he never would have been injured, but I kept my tongue, turned,
and walked back to Dylan. I found him standing outside the cage, looking
through the window on the far side of the room.
“Did they let you out?”
“Of course not. I picked the lock. I just wanted to
check out where we were. Better get back in,” he said. He went right back into
the cage and shut it. There was another clicking sound just as the door opened.
The woman was back and looked startled to see Dylan standing at attention.
“You seemed to have recovered.”
“And you brought my brother back. Now, your charge
bit me and my brother helped you. I think you owe us,” he said in their
language.
“How much time did I spend healing this world?”
he asked me.
“Why do you keep asking me that? I’ve told you
five times now that it took ten minutes.”
The woman looked suspicious. “What do you want from
me that you cannot get from your magic?”
“Information. Answer just one of my questions and you
will have been useful. There’s a cloud in the forest that hates the light. A
cloud of darkness.” He spoke quietly as if telling a ghost story, as if
speaking too loudly would draw the darkness to us. The woman’s eyes filled with
fear. “Ah, you know it, then,” he said with a smirk.
“It is a creature of death. It cannot be killed and
has terrorized the people of this world for hundreds of years.”
“But it is dark outside, and there are people walking
about.”
“Our pack has learned; the creature of death only
attacks those who shun magic. While most packs fear and ban magic and us for
using it, not one user of magic has ever been attacked.”
“It attacked us, and we use magic constantly.
Question two: The red books. I have seen them everywhere. They just look like
history books.”
“Everyone has a copy of our history. Where are you
two from that you know so little?” she asked.
He shrugged. “We are not from this world. I can only
speak your language because of magic. So tell me, every person of this world is
a shifter of some kind?” he asked. She just gaped at him until he rolled his
eyes. “You answered two of my questions. Let Mordon in here and then be on your
way,” he said dismissively, sounding a little like Rojan.
The woman did open the cage in order to let me in,
then locked it. When she walked out, I looked at Dylan. “You have the potential
to be very clever, when you are not being unwise.”
“Sometimes wisdom is knowing the right thing to say,
but for me, it usually is knowing when to shut up. We have to hurry. We have
ten minutes left.”
“Ten minutes to do what?” I asked.
“Ten minutes to live. I already said that.”
“What? You said thirteen minutes a while ago. That
was when you were dying of the snake bite. We aren’t dying.”
“No, we are perfectly healthy and fine and we’re not
dying. We’ll be fine for nine and a half minutes and then we’ll be dead.”
“But it was thirteen minutes fifteen minutes ago.”
“No, that wasn’t fifteen minutes ago. It’s been three
minutes since I was dying of the snake bite,” he insisted. I stared at him.
“Don’t complain to me, it felt like fifteen minutes, but it wasn’t. Something
is wrong with time and we have to find the way out. There’s a pattern, there’s
got to be a pattern. What’s the pattern? Those books, the history books.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t know yet. I can’t see it. I saw it, but what
did I see?” He gasped and fell back, barely making it to the bed.
I could feel his energy go wild, but he didn’t appear
to be in pain, so I just waited.
“Another world. A world I don’t know is reaching out
to me through my magic. Edward healed the world with my energy.”
“The little girl must have given him the pentagram,”
I said.
The energy settled down quickly and he breathed
easier. The door opened and I sighed, really just wanting everyone to leave us
alone until I could get a straight answer from Dylan about this “ten minutes to
live” thing.
This time it was a young girl who came in. She was
about ten and overly thin. Her hair was ginger and tied back and her skin had a
translucent paleness to it as if she had never seen the sun. She came straight
to the cage and stood there, as if unsure what to say. Dylan got up and crouched
in front of her.
“Do you need help?” he asked gently. She looked like
she wanted to run away, but nodded instead. “Are you injured?” She shook her
head. “Sick?” She shook her head again.
“Hungry,” she whispered.
“We have no food,” I said.
She glanced at me and then back at Dylan. “I cannot
drink from the snakes,” she said. As she spoke, I could see two little fangs
scraping against her lips. “Their blood is cold. There have been no visitors
for days and I am so hungry.”
“I thought everyone here was a shifter,” Dylan said,
backing away just a step.
She shook her head. “Everyone here is a beast. Most
are shifters.”
“But you are a vampire,” he said. Dylan had told me
about vampires before, and I certainly didn’t want to be this close to one. “My
magic can do anything,” he said gently. He reached out with his magic and
though it went into her, she didn’t look affected.
“You cannot heal hunger,” she said. She sat down,
clearly too weak to remain standing. I wanted to believe it was a ruse, but she
was so thin.
“I have not yet come against anything that doesn’t
respond to my magic.” He turned to me. “How long was---”
I rolled my eyes. “Twelve minutes. For the seventh
time, you spent twelve minutes trying unsuccessfully to heal this planet.”
“You don’t have to be so harsh about it. Isn’t twelve
minutes a long time?” he asked. “Why didn’t you interfere?”
I frowned as I remembered him trying to heal the
world. I remembered that I was worried over how long it was taking, but I was
constantly watching his energy and he seemed to be doing fine the whole time. I
never felt the need to interrupt, though maybe I should have. It hadn’t taken
him so long to heal the other worlds, except for Duran.
While I was busy recalling the event, Dylan had
gotten the cage open. I realized what he was doing in time to pull him back.
“Don’t you dare!”
“Are you really going to let a little girl starve to
death?”
“She’s not a little girl; she’s a vertically
challenged vampire.”
“She’s a starving vertically challenged vampire. I
can help her and if she tries to take too much, you can get her off me.”
“Absolutely not!”
“What if Sammy turned out to be a vampire? Would you
want someone to let him starve?” he asked.
“Sammy would never be a vampire. And if he were, he
would deserve any meal he wanted and no one would have the right to refuse
him.”
“She is someone’s little girl. She is someone’s
Sammy.”
“It’s a trap.”
“You know it isn’t. Even I know that,” he said. He
looked me right in the eyes and I sighed. This was absolutely ridiculous, but I
knew that look. He was a Guardian, unable to refuse anyone help at any cost. I
had to hope that if Rojan were here, he would be able to stop Dylan.
The stupid man offered his arm to the girl. She held
it firmly and was about to sink her little fangs into his skin when a flash of
light filled the room.
* * *
We were back in the wolf village. This time, it
looked even more desolate. It was still dark, but I didn’t feel the presence of
any lurking monster… on the other hand, I was without Rojan, so maybe there was
something there and I just couldn’t sense it.
“Something doesn’t make sense. Let’s go poke at it,”
Dylan said, walking off towards one of the houses.
“I think you’re banging your head against an open
door. So, it doesn’t bother you that we just appeared here when you were about
to save that girl?” I asked. The sky cracked with thunder and it was becoming
very cloudy. All we needed was to add rain to our problems.
“No, she’s saved. We need to find out what I’m
missing before we run out of time. We have eight minutes.”
“Why are you calm, then? Obviously, you know
something you’re not telling me.”
“Deception one-oh-one: Appear weak when you are
strong, and strong when you are weak. I do know what’s wrong, but I don’t know
why. The history books. All the red books are history books, and they are in
every house. Why is history so important here that everyone would have a book
in their house? The same book… no. They’re not the same.” He went inside one of
the cabins and I sighed before following him in. “They all look the same on the
outside, but look. The one they had at the snake village was much bigger.”
He plopped down on the ground and looked through it.
“There’s no mention of why they fear magic here. There’s no mention of magic at
all.”
“Why would there be in a history book?” I asked.
“Humans fear magic, too. Their history books are full
of wars, but also witch burnings. These people fear magic even more, so there
should be something about people being killed for doing magic or how magic
destroys people. Something. Why is there no magic in these… No magic… There’s
no magic.”
“There is, though. There’s magic all around us.”
“Not all over, and not always, but there is magic
missing. I have tried several times to do magic when it just flickered away. One
minute, everything will be fine, and the next there’s a blank. That also
explains why I couldn’t heal the world completely. Now magic is being erased in
history. It is possible that a lot of history is missing, as well. I’m going to
try and heal it again.”
He closed his eyes just as the room turned red.
“Wait, Dylan, look.” I went to the window and after a moment, Dylan opened to
door. The sky was deep red. It wasn’t the bright red of a sunset, but the
darker crimson of lava. It was incredibly sinister. “Get on with your healing,”
I said, shutting the door.
He sat down against the door and closed his eyes. The
moment he closed his eyes, I felt like I was being watched. The temperature of
the room cooled considerably and it got a little darker. No sound whispered in
the night inside or out, not even a slight wind.
He gasped and I could feel energy pulsing out of him.
It was an energy we hadn’t encountered before, and it was coming from inside
him. As I moved closer, he waved me off, but it took several minutes before he
could catch his breath.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s rejecting me. How long---”
“Seventeen minutes,” I interrupted. “I don’t
understand why you keep asking me that.”
He stood up and faced me. “Because your memory is changing,
because something is watching us, and because if we don’t heal this world in
three minutes, we will die,” he said. He was very close now and looked into my
eyes as if searching for something, even glanced from eye to eye. “Your eyes
are still mismatched,” he said.
“Yes, it’s a genetic abnormality; it’s permanent.”
“No, it’s a dragon abnormality. Your eyes changed
when Rojan was suppressed, which means, either Rojan is still here, or…” He
trailed off, clearly dreading his next thought.
“Or what?” I asked, hardly more than a whisper.
“I don’t want to worry you.”
“Oh, ‘We’re going to die in three minutes, but don’t
panic or anything.’”
“No, you can panic about that, I just don’t think you
should know where we are just yet,” he said. He was rambling and started
digging through the books.
“So you know where we are? It’s not the future?”
“Yes, I know exactly where we are, and no this isn’t
the future. Every time I connect to another world, it wastes minutes we don’t
have. The time we have diminishes faster the more magic I use. We have to
figure this out now. How do you feel?” he asked.
“Fine,” I answered. He winced. “What’s wrong with me
feeling fine?”
“Nothing, except I think you’re wrong. I think you’re
blocking your pain. Or maybe I am. Sit down.” I pulled the chair from the table
over and sat. “Stay there for a minute,” he said, heading for the door.
“Why? What are you getting?” I asked.
He stuck his head back in the open doorway. “Nothing,
I just didn’t want you to try and save me.” He disappeared outside.
I ran after him, but the door slammed closed as I
reached it. After a lot of struggle, I determined that the door wasn’t budging,
so I used the chair to break the window.