Beyond the Pale (30 page)

Dragons didn’t goblinize, however. Ryan knew that much. Even elves and dwarfs were born in their true form. And dragons weren’t even metahuman.

Shapeshifters were sometimes animal, sometimes human. Maybe I can. . . .

Ryan gathered mana to him, and it seemed to come so easily now despite the foul and polluted stench of astral space around him. He focused on his own physicality, the very nature of himself. He saw how his aura and his physical nature were connected.

The magic he had been capable of before seemed child’s play now. Tweaking his aura to look like the surrounding astral landscape, hiding himself physically. It was all fundamental—the first tentative steps of a toddler.

Ryan used the gathered mana to change his aura in a fundamental way and thus to alter his physical shape. He forced his bones to shrink and his muscles to stretch. His head grew rounder as he morphed from drake shape, his wings disappearing as he regained his previous physical body.

In moments, Ryan stood in his human form in front of Axler and Grind, naked and sweating. The tower creaked again, throwing him off balance as it swayed violently in the breeze. “What the frag are you waiting for?” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Axler cocked her head to the side again, listening to Jane inside her head. She still eyed him suspiciously, but she and Grind lowered their weapons. And in the distance, Ryan heard the faint rhythm of an approaching helicopter.

“That should be Dhin,” Axler said. “Sorry, Ryan, we had to check with Jane to be sure you were you.”

Ryan nodded, then kneeled to get his gear. There wasn’t
time to get dressed, and his clothes were in tatters, but he wanted his weapons and his wristphone. “How could Jane tell?” he asked.

“She showed Nadja the recording from my headcamera. Harlequin and Aina have returned, claiming success at the bridge. They know what happened to you and told Nadja. She told us.”

Ryan nodded as he gathered up his gear. Even in human form, his senses were higher than they’d ever been and he saw the astral continuously.

Talon still lay unconscious on the metal platform, his face pale and slack. The mage’s spirit hadn’t returned from the site of the spike. He had been the one who’d healed Ryan at the last.

I hope you make it back, friend
, he thought.

“Well, Ryan . . .” Axler said. “What happened? Were you successful?”

Ryan nodded. “Yes, I think we were.” But there was melancholy in his voice. Ryan touched Talon’s face. The human’s aura was far, far away.

“Is he dead?” Axler asked, a rare tone of sadness in her voice.

Ryan shook his head. “His vitals are stable, but I fear his spirit may have been trapped or lost on the metaplanes.”

“Why do we always lose the mage?” Grind asked. “We’re going to get a bad rep.”

Ryan allowed himself a smile. “We haven’t lost him yet,” he said. “Talon is very resourceful; he has surprised me again and again. I’m just hoping he has one last trick in his bag.”

The sound of an approaching Hughes Airstar grew louder and louder as Dhin arrived with transport. Wind gusted around them as the ork rigger brought the helo close. He couldn’t land on the metal roof so he hovered over them. “Grind,” Ryan said. “Can you carry Talon?”

The dwarf inclined his black head. “I got him.”

He bent and lifted the mage with his third arm as Dhin lowered a rope from the chopper. Grind used his two free hands to grab the rope.

Another explosion shook the tower as a blinding white toroid of energy rolled out from the Locus. The wave was massive. Ryan watched it expand out from the stone like a tsunami. In seconds, it plowed up the hillside, flattening trees and blowing out buildings as it rose. It slammed into the base of the tower like a volcanic explosion.

The world tilted under Ryan as Grind hauled himself and Talon up the line and into the helicopter. The tower lurched and toppled then, its base sheared by the force of the explosion.

Axler yelled as she jumped for one of the ropes from the helo. But she hadn’t released her safety line, and her waist was still connected to the eyelet on the observation platform. The line jerked taut and pulled her down. She never reached the helicopter rope.

“Drek!” she yelled as she fell with the observation platform.

Ryan fell after her, riding the falling tower like he was surfing a crashing wave. “Axler,” he yelled, “cut your safety line!”

If she was still attached when the top impacted with the hillside, she would die instantly, her body whiplashed into the unyielding rock. All her bones pulverized.

Ryan might die too, but he didn’t think about that. He focused his magic and concentrated on changing his shape again. The mana came as easily as before, and in seconds, Ryan was in drake form for the second time.

He flapped his scaled wings and hovered in the smoky air for an instant. The sense of weightlessness, of flight, sent a thrill through him. Then he dove.

Axler, push away from the tower. I will try to catch you.

Ryan watched in absolute clarity as Axler, flying through the air, cut her tether to the observation platform,
and sailed through the sky like a tiny doll. Out and away
from the tower.

Ryan twisted in the air, nearly overcompensating and losing control as he swerved toward her.

Axler maintained an amazing calm and poise as she plummeted. Facing down death without flinching.

Ryan swooped in, his control over his new body growing by the second. He extended his hind legs and snatched at her. The claws that had been his feet protruded now with sharp talons, and he used them, sinking them into the flesh of her gut and leg as he latched onto her.

“Ahh!” Axler yelled, gritting her teeth against the pain of her flesh being pierced.

The ground rushed up at them as Ryan tried to bring himself level. Her extra weight pulling him down. Even in this form, he massed only slightly more than Axler. He tried to tap into his magic to help him. He didn’t know if his ability to fly was physical or magical, but he would try anything.

Meters behind them, the tower hit the ground with a deafening crash, sending a shower of tiny rock fragments over Ryan and Axler. Metal screeched and buckled behind them as the observation platform blew apart from the impact. Twisted bits of shrapnel and fragments of glass plowed into them.

Ryan ignored the pain of the bombardment, the agony of the hundreds of tiny cuts that sprouted across his flesh and made him bleed. He ignored the imminent collision with the ground. He maintained focus on his own aura, and the connected aura of his friend, Kaylinn Axler. His friend who had saved his life more than once. He spread his wings and he willed himself to fly.

Tree tops brushed against Axler’s body as Ryan finally leveled out and brought them back up. He held onto Axler and flew higher.

“Thanks, Ryan,” Axler said. “I don’t know what happened to you—this new body—but I'm glad it did.”

Ryan grinned.
Me too, my friend. Me too.

As he rose into the sky, Ryan projected his thoughts to Dhin in the helicopter.
Dhin, lead on. I can carry Axler a ways. At least across the border.

With his acute hearing, Ryan caught Dhin’s response in the physical world, coming softly across the distance. “You got it, Bossman.” The helo’s nose dipped and it angled north.

A thrill of exhilaration rocketed through Ryan as he shot into the sky, following Dhin.
We won,
he thought.
We fragging won.

We beat Darke and the Enemy, and we ’re still alive.

All of us except Talon.

46

Lucero materialized on the plane of cracked rock and looked around. She seemed continually drawn to this place, and it seemed like a good location to start her search for the remnants of Thayla’s light and song. The site of the metaplanar bridge. A place once of immeasurable beauty and heart-wringing song. Transformed into the most hideous and foul-smelling hell.

Now, a verdant forest, rich with trees and ferns, grew at her back as she stared out across a white-washed desert at the spirit-cyborg standing on the edge of the cliff. Brilliant silver light radiated from him and the artifact that he held high over his head as he decimated the final span of the bridge on the far side.

When the cliff faces on both sides of the Chasm had been made completely flat and smooth, the cyborg-spirit lowered the artifact and the light abated somewhat. Lucero noticed that the forest around her was growing quickly, and she had to continually advance toward the cliff edge to avoid being overtaken.

Lucero had learned that with freedom she had gained control over her spirit form, and she had changed it to look like her old physical body when she had been alive and young. Now she took the form of a petite human woman with delicate features. Beautiful fine lines and bone structure. Her skin showed no sign of the runic scarring that had come from the use of blood magic.

The cyborg before her did not move even though he had completed the demolition of the bridge. It seemed to Lucero that he was resting.

I am called Lethe,
came a voice into her mind.
You are the seed of darkness, or what remains of her. You are the one who breached Thayla’s light.

“I am Lucero. I have come to repair the damage I have done.”

Thayla has fallen.

“I know. Perhaps her beauty can still be found.”

I
understand, Lucero. You seek hope.

“Yes.”

May I ask a favor of you?

“I am free, Lethe. I do not have to obey.”

The cyborg had not turned; he seemed to be studying his hand. The extendible fingers that wrapped around the heart-shaped artifact had become fused, and he could not retract them. The artifact was welded to him.

I do not order you to obey, Lucero. I am merely asking your help, one free spirit to another.

“What do you want?”

I managed to save all my friends, but one. A human mage named Talon. His spirit was taken away or thrown into an adjacent metaplane. I’m not sure what happened, but he is gone.

Lucero understood. “I will look for him,” she said. “I have much to atone for.”

Thank you.

Lucero left Lethe, still standing in an apparent stupor, the excess mana from the bridge’s demolition resonating
through him. Making his metal and flesh body vibrate and
give off light. She left him and searched the forest.

She searched across the planes, shifting from forest to grassy plain to scorched desert. She traveled as fast as she could, her urgency for atonement—even a tiny amount of it—driving her. Across wastelands and frozen tundra, glaciers and urban hellholes where millions of strange creatures lived in the midst of their own defecation and urine.

She knew what the human looked like; she knew the smell of his aura. And she knew she could find him.

How much time had passed before she came upon him, she did not know. He was staggering and nearly dead of thirst. Lost in the salt flats of a remote metaplane. The carcass of a tentacled creature—one of the agents of the
tzitzimine
—lay a few hundred meters from where she found him.

Their struggle must have brought them here,
she thought.
And he had barely managed to kill it.

“Are you Talon?” she asked.

His nod was a slight drop of his chin.

He had no strength to resist her. She scooped him up and carried him, flying desperately with his spirit in tow. She would carry Talon back to Lethe, who would send him into his physical body.

Talon looked at her with grateful, intelligent eyes. A look of such gratitude that she would never forget it. She was trying to save his life, and he placed his trust in her.

No one had ever counted so much on her before. She had never saved anyone before.

In life, she hadn’t even been able to save herself.

As she raced across the metaplanes, Lucero felt a glimmer of the light touch her. A peek at goodness and self-sacrifice. It was the best feeling she’d ever felt and it kept her warm for a long, long time.

47

Back at Dunkeizahn’s Georgetown Mansion, Ryan reclined in the overstuffed leather chair and sipped his cognac. Nearly asleep, his muscles relaxed and his cares gone for the moment, Ryan was in a state of extreme contentment.

Late afternoon sunlight streamed into the sitting room, filtering through the cherry trees in the garden outside. The smell of the cherry blossoms mingled with the aroma of the warm liquor, filling Ryan’s head with a blissful fog.

Ryan blinked to try to stay awake, focusing on the painted elf who sat in a matching leather chair across from him. Harlequin. Despite the early hour, Aina had retired to her room. Jane Foster sat on the floor with her back propped against Harlequin’s legs. Her blonde head lay to the side, resting on the soft leather upholstery. Asleep.

Harlequin gave Ryan a tired smile, and raised his own glass of cognac.

Ryan nodded, and lifted his glass. Hours had passed since he and his team had made it in safely across the Aztlan border and landed at a private airstrip in Austin.