A Knight to Remember (17 page)

“Carly,” I tell her warningly, but I’m rolling my eyes to the heavens and trying to suppress laughter.
 
“This,” I say, gesturing inside the car, “is Virago.
 
Virago, this is my best friend Carly.”

Virago exits the car smoothly, folding out of the seat like she’s making a theatrical entrance into my front yard.
 
She comes around the side of the car in a sensual, swaggering prowl, with her brow barely raised, and does a sweeping bow in front of Carly, complete with a hand at the small of her back.
 
She then takes Carly’s hand and brushes her soft lips gently over Carly’s knuckles.
 
This then makes my day because Carly actually blushes.

Carly
blushes.

“Oh, my God, hello,” she repeats breathlessly.
 
She peers over Virago’s graceful, bent form, mouth in an “o” as she stares at me with wide eyes, her face a combination of glee, utter shock and amazement.
 
“What the heck?” she mouths to me.

“Let’s all go on inside and get this over with,” I say then, getting out of the car and fishing the grocery bags from the back seat.
 
“Virago, do you want to grab your sword and armor?”

“What the
heck
?” Carly breathes again as Virago picks up the bundle of her armor from the back seat and hefts her sword over her shoulder.
 
And then, gently, takes the bags from my hand before striding toward the porch.
 

“She’s very chivalrous,” I say, hands on my hips as I follow after her with a smile.
 

“Did you hook up with a
knight
from the Knights of Valor Festival?
 
Wow.
 
Holly, I
like
this new side to you…” says Carly wonderingly as she follows after us.

“Um.
 
No, actually.”
 
I grimance.
 
“So, you’re not going to believe this…”

She actually
does
believe this.
 
Easily.
 
Carly’s the kind of person who, in high school, was starting a Cryptozoology club and a ghost hunters society long before ghost hunting got popular and long before they put shows about hunting Bigfoot on television.
 
I’d known that if anyone was going to believe Virago’s story and quest, it was going to be Carly, but I didn’t depend entirely on how enthusiastic she was going to be about it.

I should have known.

“Oh, my God, tell me what your world is like?” she murmurs adoringly, propping her elbows on my kitchen counter and leaning her chin in her hands.
 
Her eyes are practically sparkling and starry as she stares at Virago.

“Well,” says Virago slowly, carefully, as I spoon the coffee grounds into my coffee maker’s filter.
 
“It’s very different from this world…”
 
She trails off, considering how best to explain it.

“I mean…you have knights,” prompts Carly, cocking her head.

“And it’s very odd to me that you don’t,” says Virago with a grin.
 
“How do you keep your cities safe from other kingdoms?
 
How do you keep it safe from beasts?”

“Oh, my God,
you have beasts
?” Carly squeaks.
 
“Are they bad monsters?
 
And you have
kingdoms
?
 
What about princesses?
 
Do you have princesses?
 
And queens?”

“Carly,
we
have princesses on
our
world…” I mutter, replacing the coffee pot after I rinse it out and switching the coffee maker on.
 

“Yeah, but not
fairy princesses
.”

“They’re not fairy princesses…” Virago is starting, but Carly waves her hand, sitting bolt upright, eyes wide.

“Tell me about the
monsters
.”

“Well…I actually came through the portal with one.
 
A beast,” says Virago, eyes narrowing, clearing her throat.
 
“Unfortunately…I seem to have lost the beast.
 
Which is why I am here.
 
I must find the beast and remove it from your world, or it will create great havoc among your people,” Virago grimaces.

“Wait, wait, wait,” whispers Carly, and then her eyes go all wide, and she’s squeaking, jumping up and down for a second before she waves her hands, speaks:
 
“Oh, my God, you’re
never
going to believe this…” she tells us, dragging her laptop out of her bag and plunking it with a little more energy than I think any normal laptop could survive on the kitchen counter.
 
“So,” she begins quickly, “I work at our local public access television station—”

“She has no idea what television is,” I tell her, and her bubble bursts…for about a second.

“Well!
 
It’s like…seeing magical pictures.
 
On a magical piece of glass,” says Carly brightly.

Virago nods, considering this.

“And I’m a low-paid
producer
at this television station, which basically means…”
 
Carly thinks about this.
 
“It means that I
make
a lot of the very
bad
magical pictures on the magical piece of glass.”

“Some of them even involve puppets,” I say, chuckling, and Carly shoots me a dirty look.
 

“
Puppet Awesomeness and the Cool Lagoon
happens to be the most high quality show I work on, missy, so let’s not be sarcastic about it.”

“They have a shark made out of duct tape,” I tell Virago, knowing full well that she’ll have no idea what duct tape is.
 
But I needed to say it.
 
“They don’t have a big budget…”
 
I trail off as Virago looks at me blankly.
 
I smile, take the grocery bags from her.
 
“…I’m just going to put the fruit away.”

“No, no, stay, this is important…” says Carly, hooking my arm through hers.
 
She turns her attentions back on the laptop.
 
“
Anyway
, you know how I do that little local news program on Saturday mornings—this morning, actually.
 
Well
, last night, we got some great amateur footage, and you know how I’m into this sort of stuff…here, I’ll just show you.”

She brings up her video player and presses “file, open.”

She clicks “monster.”

“What the hell…” I whisper as the video begins.

It’s clearly nighttime in the video, and it’s quite difficult to make anything out, but the “exposure” setting has been turned up as high as possible, separating the shadows and objects from the darkness a little.
 
In the video, you can see trees being thrashed around by a high wind, a ton of rain…yeah, you could assume this is from last night.
 
And then there’s a bolt of lightning, which makes the laptop screen pure white for half a beat, and then, in front of the camera lens comes a…a
thing
.

A monster.

It’s gigantic.
 
Really, that’s the best word I can think of.
 
Gigantic
as it brushes its head against draping power lines, as tall as the trees I can see hardly silhouetted in the video.
 
There’s a crackle of electricity as the power lines fall, tugging out of their moorings on the poles by whatever this creature is.
 
They fall, spiraling around the beast.
 
It stalks forward, lumbering on all fours, and it has two twisting horns out of its sprawling skull, a long, wicked snout with teeth erupting at all sorts of odd angles, and slitted eyes that look reptilian as it turns and takes in the camera.
 
It opens its mouth, and suddenly I’m clamping my hands over my ears, and Virago goes white as a sheet, because the thing is bellowing/hissing/growling/screaming, just like it did last night, and the sound is so harsh, so surreal and angry and frightening, that I can never forget it.

It awakens something primeval in me, something so ancient that my oldest ancestors must have felt it when they were being hunted.

It’s then that I know fear.

“That’s it…” whispers Virago, stepping forward, hands balled into fists as she grips her sword tightly.
 
“How do I get to it?
 
How do I—”

“I don’t know,” says Carly in a stage whisper, clicking “x” on the video as it ends.
 
“That was sent in to us by one of our faithful viewers…”
 
She’s starting to sound like a segue way on a reality television show, and I clear my throat.
 
She flicks her gaze to mine, sighs, and tones down the drama a little.
 
“Anyway,” she continues, leaning back on the counter, “that video you just saw was sent in to us just last night.
 
The guy who got that footage took it on his cell phone.
 
He lives on one of the coastal streets, and he captured this just before he said that the beast dove off the pier into the ocean, and it disappeared.
 
We aired this clip, by the way, this morning on the news, and the phone’s been ringing off the hook, because a lot of people saw it but it wasn’t on a regular news station or anything like that.
 
They said we were reporting the
real
news,” she says with a big, proud smile.
 

This coming from the woman who said her highest rated news program, to date, had been about the local babies-in-diapers 500 race that happens every fourth of July…I suppose that’s pretty good.
 
I sigh, put my chin in my hands and gaze at her with a rueful smile—but my skin is still covered in goosebumps.

 
I hadn’t been able to see it clearly last night.
 
Seeing the beast somewhat clearly now…I shudder.
 
It was…terrifying.
 
Like a sort of reptilian bull.
 
Urgh.
 

…Could it really be that goddess from the story Virago’s mother told her?
 
The Goddess Cower?

“So,” says Carly, spreading her hands.
 
“I guess it went into the ocean.
 
It’s aquatic?”

Virago shakes her head.
 
She’s mulling things over now, pacing in small, tight circles, her new shoes squeaking on my kitchen’s tile floor until she goes out into the living room to pace on the carpeting there.
 
Shelley follows her loyally around and around the coffee table, her tail in a constant state of wagging-motion as she keeps her nose about a foot behind Virago, never wavering as Virago’s shadow.
 

“It went to the ocean…” Virago muses, head tilted up, eyes gazing at the ceiling as if it holds all the answers.
 
“Perhaps…”
 
She turns, her hands balled into fists, gazing at me, eyes wide.
 
“Perhaps it
did
need to heal.
 
Ocean water can be used for healing magic.
 
But this means that it will be able to heal much
faster
and
better
, if your oceans are anything like ours.
 
And I have a sinking suspicion they might be.”

I shrug, rub at my arms and my shoulders, sigh.
 
“Well, I doubt your world has pollution, so our oceans might not be as great at healing as yours.”
 
I grimace.
 
“But this means…”

“That the full moon is in three days,” says Virago, gazing at me.
 
“And the beast might rise again before three days comes.”

I bite at one of my nails, my stomach turning as I close my eyes, as I consider the implications.
 

“Whoa, whoa…” says Carly, glancing from me to Virago back to me again.
 
“What about this monster?”

Virago tells her.
 
And about the story of the Goddess Cower.
 
At the end of it, Carly’s sitting on the edge of the couch, her chin in her hands, her mouth open as she stammers:
 
“But…but…it could destroy…
everything?
”

I sit down beside her and Shelley comes over to put her pretty pointed nose in my lap, ears perked forward a little, one ear up, one ear down—classic Shelley.
 
She’s trying to cheer me up.
 

But that’s kind of impossible.
 

The monster could rise in less than three days.

And then…well.
 
I don’t want to imagine what will happen then.

Virago sits across from me, mouth closed in a tight line—just watching me with those brilliant ice-blue eyes, her true gaze a million miles away as she turns inward.

I want to reach across the space between us, take her hand.
 
Tell her this will all work out.
 
But I don’t.
 
I sit, still and stiff, with my dog pillowing her head on my lap forlornly.

We sit together in silence.
 

---

I can’t sleep.
 
Maybe it’s because every single time I close my eyes, I see images of the monster from the video flickering in my line of vision, and the images of the monster keep merging with the lightning flashing and how I saw the beast last night, only as a shadow, but so enormous, so monstrous.
 
So…huge.
 
All of this merges together in my mind’s eye, and I can’t tell the images apart anymore, how the monster looked in the video, and how the monster looked in my backyard.
 
I sigh, my hand over my eyes, and turn over one last time.
 
The sheets are hot, and Shelley is sleeping on my legs, her dead weight pressing me into the mattress, and both of my feet are fast asleep from her weight against them.
 
At this rate, I’m never going to get to sleep.