by Arref Mak
"You must be joking?" he twitched his cheek, but his voice showed even more animation.
I sighed, not tired, but with growing trepidation for my evident error, "No. I'm afraid not. I'm sure now. We are definitely lost."
Bishop looked about the countryside outside of the touring sedan. The blue foliage was turning a deep purple in the light of the setting sun. The fields were a aqua waving see of long grass. "This doesn't look any more strange than lots of places that we've been before. We've never been lost. At least," he corrected, "I've never been lost. How could we be lost since we were heading back to the Golden Circle?"
I chewed my lip, up ahead, a pull off at the side of the road, I slowed the powerful engine and eased the big motorcar onto the gravel. Once stopped, I shut down the engine. "I don't really know. When I first started Shadowshifting, as a young woman, I walked into some strange terrain at times, but that was deliberate. I've never gotten lost."
Bishop's agile mind pounced, his head swiveled around from looking out the side window. "If you've never been lost, then you don't know that you're lost now. Logically speaking. Why did you stop?"
In his own way, I knew he was trying to help. At the moment, his logic was just irritating. "I stopped because we aren't getting anywhere." He opened his mouth, I cut off his retort, "This Shadow is not letting us out. I've been trying to find a path for over an hour and we are no closer to the Golden Circle than we were this morning when we left the hostel."
He paused, but not for long, his mind grappling with answers, solutions, "Perhaps the nearest Shadows don't have powered vehicles?"
"That wouldn't matter," I pulled my scarf off, opened my purse and rummaged inside, "The motorcar would adapt around me or if the Shadow was completely foreign to flywheel engines, I would force the car to function long enough for us to find other transport." I found the chalk I was looking for- opened the door and got out onto the gravel surface of the pull-off.
The barest whisper announced Bishop getting out behind me.
"Some kind of attack, or a trap by your enemies?" He suggested.
I paced off three meters from the sedan. "Doubt it." I bent over and whispered a cantrip that forced the chalk to atomize, spraying white coating on the ground. Carefully, I started to circle the two of us. It only took a moment. Bishop posted himself to a passive pole position as I closed the ward.
He cocked his head, "Well, since you're not going to be able to teleport us out of something we can't shift out of--- you must be getting ready for some research. Unless we're going to be attacked by the roadway or the grass field." He yawned.
"Right again, professor. I'll just--- "
The sound intruded before I could finish. A growing hum that transformed to a rumble. We both looked up. Over the hill, a low slung motorcar in gleaming white, with chrome detailing and triple headlamps flashed down the country lane we had just quit. The styling was powerful, slightly conscious, and very upscale. The ether vibration I was feeling now, even inside the ward, could not be good. Something had arrived. Something unpleasant.
The newcomer braked suddenly, sliding about a hundred feet, slightly fishtailing but coming up perfectly across from Bishop and I. The car sat for a moment then, while road dust from the stop sailed off into the field.
The door unlatched on the far side. She got out. The small hairs on the back of my neck twisted awake and started to dance. I began to review my current list of racked spells. I felt something quiver in my stomach- foreboding- telling me to run.
She wore white, a suit tailored with dove gray lapels in contrast. A small stiff hat perched on her stark white hair with a light veil hovering over her dark green eyes. Shoes, stockings, even gloves-- she might have been on her way to a country club-- but my intuition said 'no'. She was here for me. My mouth voted with my neck hair and stomach by going dry. I didn't even know why I was frightened, and that irritated me no end. I had never felt anything like this before.
Then my fright transformed to the first sparks of genuine fear as she walked to the edge of the roadway and took a stance, not daring her high heels on the shifty gravel of the pull-off. Up close, I saw what I couldn't have known from a distance, her face was my face. A doppleganger.
That was all I had time to realize. That and the determined glint of danger in her eyes. The slight parting of her lips, a signal I had never seen in a mirror, but knew in my heart was a rush of excitement that she was feeling at this telling moment.
She tossed her white leather handbag aside on the blackened road, revealing that her hand held a gleaming chrome weapon. Time slowed down. My thoughts began to hiss with supernatural vigor even as the real world seemed to drag slower and slower. Some sort of slug thrower or dart gun. I whispered my first protective spell, my lips shook with the dilation between racing thoughts and stiff muscles, and the spell misfired. Painful arcane energy spilled over my hands, up my arms and across my shoulders.
Mother's Blood--- I hadn't misspoken a spell in decades.
She laughed and sent me a saucy wink, "Good night, sweet princess." Her arms were both raised and braced, her hand double-gripping the butt of her weapon.
Bishop squalled like a steam leak. "Do something!" He crouched at the edge of the ward.
Too late. She pulled the trigger. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Too fast to see, missiles were hammered aside from their straight line path to me by something that shouldn't have been there. The physical shield that I had called had not misfired-- somehow it had actually worked. How?
Bishop stepped back from the slight hum of the ward, "I could have sworn your spell failed!"
"It did."
The white clad double tried to sneer, but it twisted to resemble something like bloodlust, she called across the distance of three yards, "Just a second, I came prepared for everything." So saying, she dropped the magazine out of the butt of the weapon. It bounced twice on the road. I could see the cartridges still unspent in it.
"Drop the ward and I'll take her or try something else, quick!!" Bishop hissed.
Even his voice sounded lower, my senses were reporting false on me. I didn't have much time to think why. Was this some kind of illusion? That almost made sense, except why would the attack have failed?
The attacker smiled, withdrew a different colored magazine clip from her pocket, and violently rammed it home into the pistol. No time for the spells. Something was wrong with the arcane environment here. I went after her mind. Eye contact was easy at this range. My opponent was staring me down like a tiger. I reached. The psyche claws of my skills led my attack.
Pain. Darkness. Blood.
The world slowed again.
I could hear my heart, for no reason that I could fathom, it skipped a beat and slowed. I was in her mind, but she was in mine. It made no sense, somehow we had perfectly penetrated each other, without touching any defenses. When she sensed me, she whirled within and struck out with her own mental weapons.
More pain. Darkness everywhere. I saw images I knew. Cochis. Mortis. The Golden Circle. Something in black that I had only ever seen in silver. There was something sick there that belonged to me. Or her. Belonged to both of us.
We were one.
I fought free enough to see with my own eyes. Outside my head, time was frozen in the perfect beauty that only total involvement in the psychic focus produces. The illusion of time standing still.
She had the weapon nearly back into position for another attempt. Just in the lower corner of my eye, Bishop stood frozen with his muscles bunched to their maximum- his head low, his tail high. Obviously, if I couldn't protect us, he had no intention of being shot standing still.
I studied her face, even as we slammed into each other's mental boundaries again.
She really should have been pretty.
I mean, that sounds ludicrous. I was looking at a near mirror. Except for the hair color and the make-up. Frozen like a statue by the moment's perception, she had a beauty that some had commented on in my own features. But she wasn't pretty. She was breathtaking, she was dangerous. She was a painted predator. A killer. The battle inside moved on by the fraction of a second and I knew that she had planned this, and just how powerful she would become after she had disposed of me.
I saw the broken images inside her. I felt the pain. She could, she was, overloading me with that pain. My own life was shallow by comparison to it. Everything that I had ever done, she had done it better with less help. For every mentor I had, she had a tormentor. For every friend, she had an enemy making her that much stronger. For every calm after a storm, she had weathered a greater storm, one after the other.
I not only couldn't beat her. I could barely understand her. I couldn't believe her. Her life was a living agony. A monstrous parody of my own life.
She had walked some kind of Broken Pattern and cemented her path to power. It had led her to me. A she would take me as her slave to even more power. Once she had burned out all of my sensibilities with her mastery of agony- I would be her puppet. Barely a thinking thing but with a tie to power she could never claim. The bright and shining power that I had always questioned as a birthright. I made the connection immediately that if she wanted it, it might save me now, before she could overwhelm me.
I reached.
As soon as I touched it, the silver Pattern in my mind, she was there. She slammed a tenfold force of pain into my mind. I blacked out. Perhaps half a second.
But in the realm of the mind- like a catnap.
I came to starting to crumple at the knees and quickly stiffened my stance. I thrust back with my mind at the fractures of blackness that seemed to be everywhere in my mind. Her power was awesome.
It was too late. I found myself pushing at bindings. In that moment of blackness, I had lost everything. After leading her to the bright Pattern inside me, I had been crushed by her reserves of strength. Outmaneuvered. Defeated.
I shuddered. The world came back to normal speed. A black serpent twined through my thoughts. I stood up straight and relaxed, as she put that thought in my head.
She kept the pistol leveled at my torso. "Silver bullets in this one, princess. With the charge behind them, they will attain arcane motion and pop right through your little shield."
That told me something, now useless, about this Shadow. The magic here would have properties I could have used.
If I hadn't already lost.
"BhangBadea?" Bishop's voice low, with layers of concern. He couldn't know it was over now. And I couldn't tell him to run for cover.
She was as broken as the powers she had laid claim to. Her victory wasn't enough for her. She wanted to play with her victim. I understood too much, too late. This was something I should have foreseen. Something I could have prepared for given some imagination.
Too late.
"All pain is pleasure." She didn't change her ready stance. "Like this, princess." She pulled the trigger. Crack.
The round flashed amber as it went through the ward and I felt the tug as it slammed into my shoulder, knocking me off balance.
Bishop screamed.
I moaned as pleasure shot through my body. Then shuddered as I lost balance and slammed full-length across the ward line on the gravel covered ground. Pleasures arced and danced from my shoulder to my face, hips, knees and back again. She had cross wired all of my nerves to make her point and shot me because she could. My eyelashes fluttered as waves of sensation flowed off the pointed gravel pressed into the side of my face.
Bishop moved into my line of sight. A black blur moving across the ground, she redirected the pistol in a lightning motion, surprised that he was moving beyond the ward. But she shouldn't have been. I had broken it when I fell on it.
She had changed the balance of power herself.
Crack. Bishop buckled under a speeding round-- made no sound and flipped over to land still on his feet, rushing again. Her second shot at him missed.
Then it was over. He tore out her eyes first.
She was polished. She kept enough control to get me up on my feet, to search my knowledge of Bishop, to use my eyes, to pull the racked spell that would vaporize him from my list and have me use it on him.
But while she could handle the shock of his attacks- she couldn't cheat death. By the time I was spilling the phrases of the spell she ordered, she was dead and I just threw the spell away. Her mental presence dropped away like black oil into broken ground.
I was dirty, but alive.
I coughed to interrupt Bishop. "I think you've killed her three times now." I compressed my hand over my shoulder wound.
My blood spattered partner stopped, studied her frozen features for a moment, "Well. I guess she had it coming." He lowered his paw.
I walked back to our sedan and sat down on the running board, rested. "She had it coming."
Bishop gaited over, looked up at me, "You were pretty damned ineffectual."
I croaked a laugh, "She was better than I was."
He studied me carefully, "She looked like you, I notice. A sister? Even dead she looks like you."
"She was me, Bishop." I tried to stop staring at her white and red sprawled form.
"Howzat?"
"I'm not sure. I think it's the answer to a question that I've asked myself too many times. I think I just learned the answer. In a way, I think I had to answer the question for myself, and this was the answer. It has to do as well with how the Pattern works. Something I should have realized before. It's clear now, I just never thought of it before."
"You must be hurt bad, you're not making a lot of sense. She trapped us here to kill us, right?"
"Yes. Or I did."
"Stop that," he growled. "So we can go now that she's dead, right?"
"Yes. Nothing will stop us now."
"Did you know her?"
I thought a moment, how much could I say? "No. But I know her now. I understand what she was after. And where she was coming from."
"Good. How about telling me, since I just saved your life."
I cleared my throat of a lingering tightness, "In all of Shadow, it seems that even the most unique of events can have a parallel certainty. She was like me. She made of herself something beyond the pale. She wanted my power to add to her own. She worked herself against the strongest of opponents until she thought she was ready and then she came after me."
Bishop heard something in my words, he studied me, then glanced over his shoulder at the cooling body. "No. She wasn't like you."
I took a breath and determined that I wasn't going to start crying.
"Oh, yes. Actually, she was. She just took a wrong turn and got lost."
end