Wild Thing (28 page)

Inside his cell, Godsson shrieked and raged louder, the light suddenly pulsing and sucking inwards, disorientatingly, as if the burning light wasn't flickering but
fighting
an opposite darkness.

Still she struggled against
Her
, her hands scooping and twisting across the large man's now-bare back, wrenching and tearing at threads she could hardly sense.

When she felt the last wisp slip away, retreating, she slumped in relief against his chest.

But only for a moment.  From behind her, the other two shamans finally reacted: started making weird words. 
Tryin’ ta cast a spell on me!
  She pushed hard, squirming free of the well-muscled man's embrace, dropping between his legs then twisting and jumping up to cling to his back, putting him between her and the other two like he was a human shield.

She felt rather than saw the spell wash past her, and grinned.  She hadn't been sure her maneuver would work.

No one moved.

It was suddenly real quiet in the corridor.  Even Godsson had gone silent, now.  But in a good way, she was sure.

The lights in his cell, like an aurora, winked out.

Still, no one spoke.

Finally, she dropped from the tall shaman's back and stepped back, dusting her hands with satisfaction.  She looked up at him, a little bit surprised at just how completely she'd shredded his clothing.  He stood there half-naked, tattered swathes of animal hide kind of dangling off him.

She turned, meeting several pairs of wide eyes watching her as she turned to her uncle.  'See, I
said
you needed me!'

She saw his worried gaze move from her to Godsson's window.  He frowned.  When she looked, she saw Godsson's strained face staring out at her.

She felt her brow crinkle.  She'd kind of expected him to look pleased, maybe even grateful.  But instead he just studied her.  Finally he looked from her to her uncle, and seemed to study him the same way, too.

Then all at once she was drowning in a torrent of questions.

She sneaked a look at her uncle, who was looking at her and shaking his head.  But with the danger past, her eyelids felt like she'd somehow had lead weights glued to them without her noticing.  The thought of her bed actually felt kind of nice.

The debriefing, in Harmon's opinion, was quite unsatisfactory.  The consensus, reached only after an embarrassing admission from
Angakkuq
Yakone, the Aleutian shaman, was that his mind had drifted and he had begun thinking of his wife.  Missing her.

This had provoked a physical reaction interpreted by Sara as evidence of an invisible seduction.  She attacked; the physical assault snapped Yakone from his reverie; Sara declared herself victorious; and Godsson, overhearing, ended his self-flagellation.

It was all too glib.  How could a grown man mistake a fourteen-year-old for his wife?

More and more, he suspected something new and unknown was at work.

But his had been a lone voice.  That a fourteen-year-old girl and a madman agreed with him had counted
against
that interpretation, not
for
.

Still more worrying was what lay ahead three years from now.  On top of the increasing ferocity would be another tri-annual high
and
a peak in the subsidiary cycle.  A “king tide.”

Worse still, Sara had looked like she had wanted to enter Godsson's cell tonight.  He had seen the way she kept eyeing the electronic keypad on the cell door. 
Heaven help her should she ever step inside.

Perhaps, by age seventeen, she could stomach the footage of that first solstice?  When his two co-workers had ventured inside to help.

He shuddered.  He would have nightmares tonight, he knew.

But at least this time no one had tried to shoot her
.

Chapter 31 

As it happened, Harmon had underestimated Sara's determination to physically enter Godsson's cell during the next attack, even though it was still a year off.

'It's not fair, Keepie.  Why does he have to fight it alone each time?'

'Because it's only a figment of his imagination, Sara.'  His own burgeoning doubts, though, made it hard to inject the necessary conviction into his voice.  'Going inside his cell would not help.'

'But I
can
help, Uncle!  I can sense it, and I've felt it, ripped it in my own hands, twice before.  I know I can help.  If you let me go inside, Godsson and I together can end it, once and for all!'

'No, Sara.  You don't know what happened, before.  It was the most ghastly thing I've ever seen.  Inhuman.'

She said nothing, but sat forward eagerly, her whole posture urging him to continue.

'It was the first year.  The summer solstice,' and the start point – and maximum – of the strange secondary cycle: not that he would let Sara know of that.  'We didn't know what was happening, what was wrong.  Two of my co-workers, fellow therapists, both magically very capable, rushed into the cell despite my warnings.  They thought me cruel, uncaring, for not joining them.'

Sara leaned forward, hands gripping the air as if trying to drag the words from him faster.

'I stood in the doorway, uncertain whether I should enter, too.  But Godsson did something to them, something terrible.  They started… they
changed
, into monsters for him to fight, along with everything else he was doing to himself.'

'It's not
him
, Keepie, I keep telling you!  It's Her!'

He shook his head.  'Suppose it
was
“Her?”  That changes nothing! Right before my eyes they started…
transforming
.  And then Godsson had
three
opponents instead of one – and two of them were physically present in his cell.

'Poor fools.  He destroyed
them
in seconds.  Incinerated.'

'But Godsson wouldn't hurt
me
!'

'You can't know that!  He might.  Sara, you need to understand that during his episodes, Godsson is not himself.  You cannot predict his actions based on his normal behavior.'

'But it's not
him
that did it, it was Her.  And I can hurt Her.  So I can help Godsson.'

'Even if you're right, that it's not Godsson but “Her” who… altered my colleagues, what would protect
you
from suffering the same fate?'

'Godsson protects himself from Her.  He'd protect me, too.'

Her uncle kind of twitched forward, Sara saw, like he wanted to drop his head into his hands.  For a moment, she almost felt sorry for him.

But it was his own fault for being so stubborn.

Ten full seconds passed before Harmon spoke again, extra slowly.  'Sara, Godsson is mad.  He is not your friend.'

Sara's lips pressed into thin lines.

Harmon's hands twitched again.  'He has begun calling Melisande “
Lilith reborn,”
and you her-'

Harmon stopped suddenly, shutting his eyes.  Sara saw his lips purse, and his left hand clench.  Finally, he took a deep breath, shook his head, and opened his eyes again; then started all over again trying to convince her that Godsson thought she was bad.

But Sara knew Godsson just got mad with her because he
was
mad.  Not because he didn't
like
her!

In the end, Harmon stood up.  'Fine.  Come with me.  If
I
can't persuade you, perhaps seeing the incident for yourself will convince you.  I had not planned to show you this for some years, however.'

Shanahan had been shocked by the request after bringing them in to his office, and looked from Harmon to Sara.  But Harmon had to give the man credit: Shanahan took one look at the stubborn set of his ward's features, put two and two together with the request to view
that
footage, and shook his head.

'Sara, darlin’, you don't want to go into Godsson's cell.  No one goes into Godsson's cell.  Least not while he's conscious.  We even have-'

At Harmon's frantic cutting gesture the man caught himself, eyes widening.

'What?  We even have what?'

Shanahan ignored her, spinning back to his monitors and angling them right around so his visitors could see them – and he couldn't.  In seconds, both screens filled with views of Godsson's cell, and the room was filled with coruscating flashes of light and the mage's awful cries.  Shanahan winced, his eyes glued to the girl's, desperately willing her to be convinced.

From the screen, a voice shouted:
“We have to help him, he's under attack!”

The dialog played out exactly as Harmon remembered.  Sara stood entranced, watching a younger Alex Harmon standing wide-eyed in the doorway of Godsson's cell.

The nightmare scene unfolded.

Crowded into the corners of the room by Godsson's protective circle, Abrams and Li faced the same direction as Godsson, blasting away as if they too could see what he saw: drawn into the shared delusion, wrestling the same demons he did.

Then Abrams began changing, and a moment later, so too did Li.  Abrams
grew
, his clothes tearing at the seams, the limbs morphing, softening, lengthening, and between his legs, the obscene exaggeration there was echoed somehow in his other limbs.  Skin, thickly pulsing veins, all recognizably still human even as he morphed into something utterly monstrous.  Li, meanwhile, had changed into something… hungry.  Multiple mouths, yet with monstrously
human
teeth; long shaggy hair… They had thrown themselves forward at the mage's barrier, and somehow begun distorting it – something Harmon had never seen before, nor since.  Any Ward, no matter how weak, either remained perfect, or shattered.  They didn't
bend.

His hand twitched, remembering, and the younger Harmon on screen slammed the cell door shut, moments before a huge fireball whited out the monitors to perfect rectangles of intense white.  Two, three seconds passed, then the light winked off, leaving just the golden glow of the now once-more perfectly circular Wards, but the room was now wreathed in a thick fog – the water vapor released from the two incinerated
things
his co-workers had transformed into, in the space of just twenty-seven seconds.  Meanwhile, Godsson continued his raging fight against the unseen demons of his own mind.

Had it been enough?  Harmon hoped desperately that it had.  'Enough, Shanahan.'

The videos stopped instantly.

Even Sara looked shocked.  Her mouth worked, her fists clenching and unclenching.  Finally, she turned and plunged from the room, her footsteps faint but accelerating.

'By the Holy Mother, Dr Harmon, I never want to hear or see that again.'  He crossed himself.  'Did it work, d'you think?  Should you go after her?'

'No, Shanahan.  I
think
it worked.  Best if Sara wrestles herself on this topic, not I.  I
think
it worked.'

'Let's hope so, Dr Harmon.  She wouldn't want to be going into that room in the years ahead, by all the saints.'

'I agree, Mr Shanahan.  I
wholeheartedly
agree.  And thank you.'

Shakily, he left the office and then the small house, trying to wash the terrifying images from his mind.  If that evidence didn't dissuade her, nothing on Earth would.

So, why was he still so fearful?

Sara didn't stop running until she reached the point where she knew the Ward encircling the whole Institute held out all bad magical stuff.

Like
Her?

She hugged herself, suddenly scared of crossing the unseen barrier.  Then got angry at her cowardice.  She pictured her uncle sneering at her, and that was enough to force her across.

Besides, she wasn't sure the barrier really stopped Her.  Not properly.

What if She grabbed
me
right now; turned
me
into some disgusting monster like young-Keepie's friends?

She shuddered, her flesh crawling so badly that for an awful moment she thought it'd already started happening.

She needed to get a hold of herself.  Then almost sobbed, when she realized she
was
holding herself.  She let her arms drop, and forced herself to go on into the Forest.  Even if She did attack, she'd tear Her up, so there!

Besides, that happened
ages
ago.  Inside Godsson's cell.
  If She could have done it again since then, She would have.

She sighed and shut her eyes.  The image of the man who'd gone all swollen and
wriggly
inside his bloated flesh suddenly squirmed before her and she gasped and opened her eyes to focus instead on the trees.  But each time she shut them for more than a moment, she saw the two human monsters inside Godsson's cell.

And Keepie still thought it was Godsson doing it?  That She was just imaginary?  How could he be so
dumb?

'Agh!'

It meant she was the only one who could help Godsson.

And she still had no idea how to actually get into his cell, to fight alongside him.  Plus, now Keepie
and
Mr Shanahan knew she needed to, so they'd both be working extra hard to make sure she couldn't.

Unless… unless they decided that seeing the video had changed her mind?

She tilted her head to one side, considering the idea.  Could she just start
pretending
she didn't want to go into his cell any more?

The most horrible part, though, was that she didn't even really
want
to.  She wasn't certain Godsson could protect her.  Not really.  She wasn't sure he'd even be able to keep protecting
himself
.  Not if things kept getting worse each year.

Which meant that since she
had
to get into the cell, once she
did
, she might turn into some kind of disgusting monster like young-Keepie's friends had.

Or something even worse.