Authors: Kathy-Lynn Cross
The sound of squealing tires across the wet asphalt made me stop breathing and the whip of reason cracked against my skull. A familiar voice found its way back.
What was I thinking? Screw my pride. The Child. I must protect her.
I locked in the distance between each vehicle and tried to judge if I could get to the Water Raisers before they caused more road damage. The Earth Sculptor spat out a threatening hiss and reared up his front legs to make him appear bigger than me. He started to charge toward the road.
Right. Not going to happen.
Time for plan B. If only I had one…
Falling back on improvising skills, I had to figure out how to take two of them out at the same time and fast. It was the only way to make up for the lost seconds and still save the Child’s soul. Folding in the outer appendages, I held them tightly against each side so I would free fall to the ground below. Stretching out my senses, I located all four elementals. I did not want to become distracted and lose sight of the fuel truck because I knew the two water elementals were on the back tank, somewhere. Less than two miles before impact. Space, be damned. I let gravity do its part by embracing me with unseen hands guiding me to the earth’s surface.
I heard a time tremor beginning to implode during my descent. It resembled a circular motion of distorted heat vapors. That form of power was the House of Time’s most used weapon. Time would literally tick down. From the center of altered time, reality began to eat away at the barrier of displacement and when time caught up with itself, within the set circle, it sent out a shockwave making your ears pop. My ears were ringing from the echoed sound bouncing off the canyon walls. Everything sped up to real time again and I realized the ground was not going to be a soft landing, but I had less than a wing’s flap to recalculate everyone’s fate.
My serpent tail whipped and snapped in the air, making its presence known. It was made up of the same scales as the rest of my body, covering every inch from horns to serrated tip. It cracked the air again, telling me it wanted to be heard. An evil thought painted a smile across my snout. My tail was plan B. I opened my mouth for a blood-curdling screech while reshaping my form on the way down. I opened the right wing and kept the other one tucked to the side so I could make a quick change in the flight path.
Squinting as I hit the whipped up sands, I focused on the lone wind user. She moved to a different sand dune closer to the side of the road. I moved down as close to the sand as I dared while flying. Moving on the terrain, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the ground elemental was approaching from the left. Cocking my neck toward the Sculptor, I blew fire to slow his pace. Swinging to the right of the sand dune, the Evoker was sprinting toward the two-lane highway. I flew up fast, cutting off her route, making sure I was looking at her pale face. Her body went slack, from weakness or finding herself cornered. I was not sure which, nor did I care.
With the Earth Sculptor heading in our direction, I had only one chance. She started to run again. I landed behind her and whipped my tail down beside her. Making sure to slam the tip of it from the right to the left, I wanted to get my point across. She turned to face me. I curved my tail around her legs and took them right out from under her. Raising it high above her, I jammed the barb into her stomach. The air became rancid from her rapidly decaying shell. Tail muscles pushed her harder into the ground until the appendage cracked around her body. I placed my face over hers, unleashing rage with a single earsplitting roar.
The Earth Sculptor never slowed down, but that worked well with my plan. Having the wind user impaled on the tip was going to be useful so I tucked her and my tail under the fold of a wing and rolled to the right of the dirt dragon. He coiled his neck and roared. Wrong move. I jumped onto his back, used one claw to grab his snout and the other to secure his neck. He bucked and roared again fighting against my strength as his feet stumbled. Gravity helped out as the impostor fell forward with a grunt, repositioning to face me. I placed my snout next to his and growled as saliva hit the ground sizzling. He opened his mouth to respond, and I flipped my tail out from under the wing and crammed the decaying Evoker down his throat, then bolted straight up in the air. He started to get up and shake when he realized what I had done. The scream he unleashed filled the night’s sky, followed by the inevitable. The explosion was deafening, adding to the mix of falling clumps of dirt and rain.
With no time to revel in my triumph, I landed and ran to the spot where the crash was supposed to take place. Lifting one of my claws to block the headlights of the fuel truck, I saw the Water Raiser’s position better. The texture of the rain had changed with the drastic drop in temperature. Hail was restricting my vision and making it impossible to see more than a few feet in front of me. I let the gray, almost black, smoke filter through grinding teeth.
My nose pointed me in Alexcia’s direction, and I took off running on the wet pavement. The children in the pickup could see the lights of the oncoming truck by now. I could tell from all the screaming. Hers was the loudest scream, but it was the one I listened for. The truck swerved and banked up on the gravel a few times as they barreled forward to their end.
I took to the air as their headlights washed over me. Alexcia was asking for forgiveness from the other children. Why would she feel their death was her fault? She did not know who she was, did she? Her crying and pleading rubbed up my scales in the wrong direction. I roared as her friend Tod gunned the engine to his monster truck. Wait till they all get a load of Alexcia’s monster.
When I slammed into the front part of Tod’s truck and threw myself over the top of the cab, I dug claws into the back window and used nails to pull the top of the cab toward me. The move was similar to opening a large can of sardines. Kids screamed at me, as I knew they would. Alexcia started to but suddenly stopped and stared at my inhuman face. Her eyes told me everything she was feeling. For only a few ticks, time had no control over me. The beast in me was acting of its own accord as it growled at her with disdain. That’s when I took the opportunity to lunge, snatching her up. She did not even falter as she embraced my talons to steady herself. Alexcia had managed to shock the thrill of death out of me this time, gazing at me as if she knew who I was even in this horrific form.
As I turned away to depart, I remembered her pleas for forgiveness to her friends. Since their expiration date could not be changed, I gave in to her requests for the Vessels she called friends. I took a deep breath and blew my cloak’s mist into the cab so the kids would instantly fall asleep before impact. The mist would drift into their bodies and contain their souls. Then I could collect them with their last exhale.
Feeling her weight shift in my claws, I used the hood of the truck as a launching pad to take off into the night sky. Frozen water and air rushed us as I climbed higher into the hail-spitting clouds. She needed to be far away from the impact.
I was not even forty feet in the air when the blasting of the horn from the fuel tanker bounced off the red striped mountains. Air brakes were now making sharp squealing sounds when they locked up from hitting puddles of slippery mud and rocks. Since the driver had overcorrected, it jack-knifed around Tod’s truck. As it clamped around the vehicle, I whispered a promise of a quick death for each Vessel. My power glowed dark and fatal while the cloak’s mist came forth from the truck in a hiss. Using telepathy to guide it with blinking speed, the mist covered both cabs, consuming the souls of the children and the truck driver. The jolt from the power surge made my mouth water. I summoned it immediately, inhaling the mist containing what was left of their souls. I would keep what remained of them safe until I could find the Bridge Crosser in charge to take them to the gondolas.
The second explosion of the night plumed in an array of red and black shades. Appearing as a mushroom cloud, it lit up the night sky similar to the way a morning star changes the clouds before it wakes from slumber. Next, there was a searing wave of heat followed by sound waves crashing into me. If the water elementals had not evaporated by that time, they were long gone.
Using webbed wings to cocoon us as we fell back down to earth, the child sighed against me. I looked down at her, matching her sigh in a low rumble. With sleep taking over her from the leftover mist, she mumbled and snuggled deeper into my winged embrace.
With the veil of narrow sight ripped away, I absorbed every inch of this human child, completely taken aback by the way her features had altered since I had last seen her. She was not as small as I had remembered. That was what I got for passing my duties off to others. Her hair was much longer and she was curvier in places not previously there. Alexcia resembled her mother in ways I could not put into words. I was instantly hit in the gut with something resembling a forbidden feeling. Could it be for her? It did not seem right and made the inside of my stomach quiver. I have never had any other emotions toward the living other than the ones related to taking their lives. Never. Even though I knew, with every state of my being, I did not have a soul to power a heart to conjure up meaningless emotions.
What could I possibly feel for her?
I growled in confusion. What was this Child-of-Balance to me and why was she messing up my existence? I was taught that emotions make humans weak with their complexity and are seemingly unpredictable. How could I even fit into her life other than as her Unseen daemon caretaker? Why would I even consider any other option?
Feeling helpless, as if the human girl was falling without me wrapped around her, I could not shake the new emotion of wanting to be near her. As impossible as it seemed, a connection existed somehow. Not just by this Bond-Rite her mother and I had made, but by a link of power simmering between us. I needed to figure it out because the questions had been stacking up for the last decade, and I could not ignore them any longer. The decision was made before she took another breath… I would see to her safety myself. She had become my Child-of-Balance, even though she threw my own world off balance. From that day forward, I would protect her from the Houses of Time, Light, and Space. But most of all, I would protect her from me: the River Styx’s death dealer.
As I gazed upon this creature, the reality of the situation loomed heavy. She was saved without even a scratch or the scent of fear before facing demise. My face contorted from smelling something foul. It was the closest look I could manage under the circumstances. I was going to have to stage her part of the accident.
A strange heaviness took hold of me while I tried to flip around to land with her cradled in one claw. My weight smacking into the ground was masked by another explosion made by the gas tank from Tod’s truck. I fanned out both wings to shelter her from the heat, then released a low rumble of protest when she turned toward one of my talons and began to snore. Damn, maybe I used too much of the cloak’s slumber spell. At least I knew the children in the truck had not suffered.
The smell of fuel was not as strong now, so I knew the fire was going to burn without protest. This meant she was no longer in danger, from neither the vehicles nor the dead elementals… only me. I limped over to one of the closest sand dunes to the left of the small truck. Laying her down, facing up toward the heavens, she looked like a discarded child’s toy. Her clothes were torn and even charred in areas, but the jacket she wore covered up the important parts. It was good for me because it meant I would not have to stage the fire part of the accident. Her hair was in tangles but still framed her face in a way that complemented her features. I was starting to feel sick knowing I would have to ruin her perfect skin and maybe break a bone or two. Shaking my mane, I relaxed long enough so the bristled scales would return to normal. I closed my eyes, trying to convince myself the sick feeling was from the Earth Sculptor I had tried to eat the last time.
No Vessel could have walked away from a disaster of this magnitude without some damage to their outer shell. I was now on
stage and clean up
duty. This part was mandatory if the assignment was botched. She had to look like a survivor, ripped from the jaws of her own demise.
With a quick flick of my tail, I shattered some windshield glass. I used my mouth to scoop up the glass, wet sand, and some small pieces of torn metal. Positioning just above her, I opened my jaws. The fake debris did its job covering her with dirt and small cuts on the exposed skin. I winced, looking at a few that actually did the job too well. She was bleeding pretty badly from a ragged piece of metal stuck between her neck and collarbone. Another wedged into her right thigh.
An inner roar jolted me forward which made me react without thinking. Quickly, I licked her throat, then moved my snout down toward her leg to do the same. A soft hiss came from her neck as the saliva cauterized the wound. The smell of scorched blood and skin was heavy around her. As the bleeding stopped, I sniffed the air. She smelled and looked as though she had been thrown from the force of the explosion. Observing the wound on her leg, I lowered my nose, making a cautious effort to only touch the deep gash. I finished staging the scene by pacing around the body trying to make a groove in the sand to appear she had been shoved into the ground and then blown the rest of the way to safety.
To think that about an hour ago, the opportunity to break her would have snuffed the agitation, but now I struggled against normal resolve. The clan might toss me over to the Bridge Crossers if they knew my conflicts about this situation. Claws firmly placed into the scorched sand to steel my nerve, I lifted the right front foot to place it on her arm. The leg froze.