Storykiller (31 page)

Tessa entered the woods and followed the relatively wide swath of destruction that most certainly had been the Troll. She was running after it at a good clip when she came around a large tree and pulled up short to avoid the giant shape standing in the path. She swore and backed up a few steps. A brown shape that was not the Troll she had been expecting stood on the path. Tessa blinked at it, and before her eyes, it shifted into a Bengal tiger.
Her
Bengal tiger, complete with a slight scarring on its shoulder where her blade had landed. The tiger roared and Tessa blinked at it again, stunned. It took two menacing steps toward her, and she shouted out “LA COLOMBE NOIRE!” The Black Dove snapped into her hand with a satisfying,
wet smack.

Tessa pointed the axe at the tiger. “You remember this? Well, I’ve about had it with you,” she said. The tiger seemed to almost smile at her and then shifted effortlessly into a monkey. Not a big one, but a fast, tricky one, and it scampered partway up a tree before Tessa could even register it. Tessa heard Micah and Brand in the woods somewhere behind her, and she saw the monkey hear it too. “You leave them out of this,” Tessa growled. The monkey, still with its shoulder scar, even in this new form, cackled and then clapped its hands three times in a decidedly human gesture. Thunder broke open the sky with each clap, and as it finished the last clap, another flash of lighting popped, the rain slowed, and all of a sudden Tessa couldn’t see.

It wasn’t like it had gotten darker, or her vision went blurry, it was like she didn’t have eyes. She was plunged into a blackness
so complete she couldn’t even begin to comprehend it. And yet everything else remained the same, the sounds of the woods, the feel of rain occasionally hitting her jacket, the smell of wet dirt. Tessa reached up with her free hand to touch her eyes and drew back horrified.

They were gone.

Her eyes were gone.

Tessa felt the terrifyingly smooth skin where her eyes used to be and a strangled cry escaped her throat, pathetic and feeble. She drew in a breath and prepared to let out a scream she hoped would rip the universe in two but heard Micah scream instead. It was a sound that curdled her blood, every damn inch of it. Tessa moved toward the sound but stumbled on a branch immediately and only kept from falling over by clutching at the trunk of a nearby tree.

“TESSA!!!!!!!!!!” Micah cried out desperately. Tessa swung The Black Dove all around her, trying to find the wide path the shape shifter had carved for her.

“MICAH!” Tessa called, “KEEP TALKING SO I CAN FIND YOU!!!” Tessa stumbled forward,
tripping and falling again. It was quiet for a long moment and so Tessa stopped, but then she heard Micah again.

“THIS WAY!”

Micah kept calling “this way” until Tessa was quite certain that she was all but upon them. “Ohmigod, Tessa! Your eyes!”

Micah drew back, horrified to see Tessa’s face, exactly the same as it had always been, except as though she had never had eyes, as if smooth pale skin had always been there instead of those piercing blue eyes ringed in heavy black eyeliner. Brand, his mouth looking the same as Tessa’s eyes, clutched at the edge of Micah’s sweatshirt. He met Micah’s eyes, and she could see tears spilling across his cheeks as he shook his head in horror and fear. Micah choked out a sob for both of them and clutched her glasses in her hand nearly snapping them in two.

Tessa groped blindly for her friend’s arm. “Where’s Brand?” Tessa asked, and then felt his hand. He was right there. “What…what’s wrong?” Tessa asked. Brand was never this quiet, it was almost more disturbing than not having eyes.

There was a long pause, and then Micah spoke, too loudly, considering that they were all standing there together. “Brand can’t talk, his mouth, his mouth is gone. It’s like your eyes. God, it’s horrible. What are we going to do?!”

Tessa felt tentatively up Brand’s arm and then touched his face, her thumb gently gliding over where his mouth should be. Sure enough, just like her eyes, where his mouth used to be was only flat smooth flesh. Like it was a third cheek or something.

Tessa choked back a sob.

She clutched Micah’s hand. “Are you okay?” There was another long pause and Tessa heard a faint scratching sound, and then Micah spoke again, again far too loudly.

“I can’t hear, Tessa. I, my ears, it’s the same for my ears as your eyes and Brand’s mouth, just swallowed up by flesh. Oh, God,” she wailed, breaking down again, fear pitching her voice wildly. Micah caught her breath and tried to continue. “Brand had a pen and a notebook in his bag. He’s writing down what you’re saying so I can read it, but I can’t hear you, I can’t hear anything.” Tessa reached for Micah who guided her hand up to where her ear should be and Tessa’s fingers slid over the smooth skin. “My glasses won’t stay on,” Micah said, rather hopelessly. “So I can barely see, too…unless I hold them up to my face.” Tessa could hear Micah spiraling and worried her friend was going to just outright lose it. “What are we going to do, Tessa?!”

Tessa shook her head. “I don’t know, but for starters, let’s get out of the woods. T
here’s something in here with us.” Tessa waited for Brand to write it down for Micah.

“Okay,” Micah said, taking a deep breath, and then added, “This way.” Micah placed Tessa’s hand on her shoulders, so that she could follow them
out of the woods. But just as they started to move forward, a clumsy little caravan, something big ran past them in the woods. Tessa stiffened and Micah shouted out “WHAT?!”

“Shhhh,” Tessa warned, and then heard some scratching,
which she thought was Brand again.

“Brand says he saw it, just a bit of it. He said it looked like a monkey.”

“Dammit,” Tessa cursed.

“What is it?!” Micah asked, still too loud.

“Mike, you have got to calm down, I can’t see anything so I have to be able to hear.”

Tessa assumed Brand did the translation because Micah said only
Okay
quietly to herself. Something passed by them again, even closer. Tessa was certain it was circling them, the circle becoming tighter each time. Tessa shouted out for The Black Dove. It came to her faithfully, and she felt only slightly better. She had no interest in accidentally decapitating her best friends instead of whatever this thing was. She heard it again, to her left, even closer than last time, followed by the furious scratching of Brand on his pad of paper.

“He said it changed shape,” Micah said, as if she was reading. “He says it looks like—” she paused and then Tessa heard her elbow him, “—you idiot, write more clearly, I can’t read it!” The scratching continued and Tessa listened for the monkey, or whatever it had changed into. “He says it looks like one of those Japanese demons—red, with the horns and the big mouths and eyes—” There was another long pause. “You mean an Oni Demon?” Micah asked Brand. He must have nodded because she drew in a sharp breath.

“What does that mean, Micah?” Tessa asked, still listening for the thing. More scratching, the circle growing ever tighter around them.

“I don’t know,” Micah said, unsure. “They’re Japanese folktales, my mom used to tell me stories about them—but they don’t usually shift, not like this one seems to. But it could be—” she got very silent. And as Tessa waited for Micah to finish the sentence, something hit her from the side and she went flying off the path and into the trees. Tessa had sensed it an instant before it happened, but not quickly enough to defend herself. She landed in the dirt and leaves, off the path, and away from her friends. The thing was on top of her, tearing at her. She twisted madly, trying to get away from it, but it drew sharp claws across the side of her face and the scratches burned enough that Tessa knew they were dangerously deep. She felt warm blood pour off her face, down her neck and into her tank top.

She could hear Micah and Brand not far away, freaking out. Tessa managed to kick the thing away from her finally and scrambled to her feet. She stood, with the axe in hand, listening for it, trying to pinpoint the sound, which was nearly impossible with all the dead leaves and rustling branches.

Suddenly Micah yelled out,
“Six o’clock!”

Brilliant girl
, Tessa thought. She turned her body so that she could swing at something coming at her from behind. She didn’t hit it directly with the blade of the axe, but she still managed to clip it, deflecting it away from her. She adjusted her grip on the axe and waited for Micah’s next instruction.

A moment later, Micah shouted, “Eight o’clock!” Tessa obeyed and The Black Dove whizzed through the air, glancing off something ineffectively. Tessa reset herself and waited, listening. But then Micah shrieked and shouted, “Twelve o’clock!”

Tessa hesitated. “YOU’RE at twelve o’clock!”

Micah screamed at the top of her lungs, “Twelve o’clock!!!”

Tessa raised her arm and threw the axe end over end at twelve o’clock and prayed it wasn’t going to land in one of their heads. She heard the axe bury itself in something not far away and then heard the familiar pop of it disappearing. She called for it again and as she did she heard Micah shriek an unholy sound. Tessa stumbled in the direction of the blood-curdling screams and tripped over something on the path. She reached down and immediately knew it was Brand. Her heart skipped a beat and she felt for his neck. He still had a pulse. Micah continued to shriek, and it was an inhuman, unfathomable sound. Unbearable.
Tessa felt helpless and had to curb the urge to cover her ears with her hands to make it stop.

It was the sound of someone being killed.

Robin paced the small room, his skin itching and hot and desperate to be free of the confined space and rules that he knew bound this place.

Story was everything and anything a person could imagine, quite literally, but there were things about it that felt so restrained to him. In Story more than anywhere else in the worlds, he was painfully aware that he was someone else’s creation. That he was bound by things utterly out of his control and forever beyond his reach. It was deeply ironic that he should keep trying to impress upon Tessa the way in which the rules of Fiction could not be broken, when in fact, he was, at his core, nothing but a rule breaker. The fact that he had been written as a rule breaker, and yet still had to—on some base and fundamental level—obey what was put to paper made him want to tear off his skin. And the fact that it was in fact rules of a sort that wrote him as a rule breaker was enough to screw with anyone’s head.