Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (7 page)

The Goblins and Hounds converged at them as if being turned loose from invisible leashes and they surged forward, scuttling and scrambling over the barren, rocky ground.

Seized with sudden terror, Jason backpedaled, stumbling into Sitri, then shoved his way past. He whirled around began to run, tearing off along the path of the narrow valley floor, his feet slapping painfully against the hard, frigid ground. From behind him, Sitri laughed, a disturbingly good-humored sound, someone watching the charming antics of a particularly amusing toddler.

Jason’s breath ballooned about his face with each strained and frantic gasp, and all the while, he could hear the Goblins and Hounds behind him in scraping, clattering, shrieking pursuit. As he whipped around a sharp bend in the chasm channel, he came to a skittering, stumbling halt, faced with the end of the line, literally—a steep cliff at least as tall as a twenty-story building towering above him.

“Oh, Jesus,” he moaned, and then they were upon him, Goblins and Hounds filling the narrow avenue behind him, piling one on top of the other, stopping together in an impenetrable mass.

Jason backpedaled, his heart hammering in terror as he pressed himself against the wall.
This can’t be real,
he thought.
It can’t. I’ve got to be dreaming. Any minute now, I’ll wake up. I might be screaming when I do it, yelling my head off, but I’ll wake up soon. Any minute now.

Movement out of the corner of his eye caught his gaze, and he looked up at the cliff wall on his left in time to see something sliding down the cragged surface in a thin, black stream. It moved like molten taffy, slowly but purposefully down the rocks, pooling in shallow recesses or along small outcroppings, then overflowing and slithering down to the ground.

What’s that?
he thought, and then some of the Goblins began to move forward, snapping their claws, stabbing at him with their stingers, forcing him to scuttle sideways.

They’re herding me toward it,
he realized in helpless terror.
Okay, time to wake up now. Sam, wake me up now, please. Hit me with your elbow, kick me, steal the covers, grab my pillow, grab my balls, —something, anything!

Nothing happened. The Hounds and Goblins continued pressing toward him, forcing him to move. Though he tried to keep away from the black, glittering pool of ichor, dancing clumsily on his tiptoes, when he finally had no choice but to step into it, it felt like his foot had just punched through a thin layer of brittle ice and plunged into an arctic stream.

He uttered a choked, strangled cry, because that sudden, frigid force stripped the strength from his leg and he crashed facedown to the ground. He could feel it engulfing him in an icy sheath, and when he looked back, he found it swallowing his leg, as smooth and fluid as oil or liquid mercury, flowing up to engulf his knee, then his thigh, then up to his hip.

“Jesus Christ,” he cried, trying vainly to kick the ooze off him. He slapped at it and it engulfed his fingers, then his hands and wrists, enveloping his arms, sliding in thick, fast-moving tendrils toward his shoulders and neck.

“Get it off me!” Thrashing now, Jason convulsed against the ground, arching his back and clawing at the ichor. It was like being wrapped in taffy—the more he struggled, the more hopelessly he became entangled. “
Get it off me! Get it off—”
”

His voice cut short in a choked gulp as it reached his head, sliding up over his chin in hundreds of tiny frozen tendrils and whipping into his mouth. He began to retch, clutching at his throat, gagging for choked breath as it slid up his nose, then flooded his throat, filling him from within and engulfing him from without.

When it was over, he huddled against the ground, shuddering, utterly spent, as if the shadow had drained every last measure and reserve of energy he had to spare.

“Hello again.” Sitri squatted, his elbows resting on his knees, and looked down at Jason, still wearing that irrepressible smile. “I see you’ve met my little friend. It’s called an
Eidolon.
They’re one of the most powerful, voracious entities in all of the Netherworlde. I’ve always wondered what it must be like…to have one ravage you like that…to have it devour you, claim you as its host.”

Jason pawed feebly at his throat. He tried to speak, his voice escaping in a low, tremulous moan.

“They’re drawn to fear,” Sitri said. “Eidolons, I mean. They feed off it. It makes them stronger. The more scared you are, the better.”

He brushed Jason’s hair back from his temple, a nearly tender gesture that left his ear vulnerable and exposed. Jason heard a soft sound, tiny teeth ripping through flesh as the Wyrm that had taken sanctuary in Sitri’s hand began to gnaw its way loose once more.

“Eidolons are pretty much raw, primordial energy, so you need a Wyrm to bind them,” Sitri was saying as the first of the Wyrm’s slender tentacles reached out from just beneath the delta of his thumb, groping blindly, eagerly at Jason’s earlobe. “But Wyrms can’t feel fear, so I needed you to call the Eidolon.” Sitri’s smile widened. “And so you have.”

Jason mewled softly in frightened, muffled protest as he felt the Wyrm crawling up into his hair. He tried instinctively to shrug it away, to raise his hand and swat at it, but couldn’t move. It reached the outermost curve of his ear, then slid against his skin, prodding at the opening of his ear canal. He felt its thin fingerlike tentacles slap and grasp against his earlobe, then cried out in horrified, helpless disgust as it forced its way into his ear. He could feel it wriggling inside him, then a searing pain from somewhere deep inside his head.

Help me!
He wanted to scream, to claw at his ear, to rip the side of his head open if needed to get the goddamn thing out of his skull.
Make it stop! It’s eating its way into my brain!

****

Biting back a cry, Jason sat up in bed, his body glossed with sweat, his eyes wide. For a long, bewildered moment, he had no idea where he was, and when he remembered, the tension drained from his body in a long, heavy sigh.

Just a dream,
he thought, forking his fingers through his disheveled hair, pushing it back from his face.
Just a dream.

He got up, shuffling slowly toward the adjacent bathroom. Squinting as he turned on the lights, flooding the narrow confines of the room with sudden, blinding glare, he leaned over the sink and cupped his hand beneath the stream of the cold tap. He drank quickly, slurping down handful after handful.

Just a dream,
he told himself again, even though it felt
real
to him, like a memory inside his mind.

He was shivering, his skin ashen, his lips nearly blue with cold. He limped back to the bed and pulled the comforter loose of the mattress, wrapping it around himself. When this still didn’t have any immediate effect, he drew his hands out from beneath the heavy folds and rubbed them together, huffing his breath against them.

It’s freezing in here.
He glanced over his shoulder toward the windows. One had been propped open, left ajar. He stood again, went around the bed, then after a few firm shoves, forced the window closed. Parting the slats in the blinds with his fingertips to peer beyond its panes, he saw the cityscape painted in the shadow-draped hues of midnight, broken by the punctuating glare of streetlights. The bedside lamp had been left on, reflecting an irregular circumference of orange-amber light from over his shoulder.

It was strange to be in the apartment. As he looked around, in his mind, he could still easily picture the things that had once been here and there, things that he still half expected to see.

“It’s not much,” he’d told Sam the first time he’d brought her there, the night of their first date.

I kissed her for the first time that night.

She’d lived in a nice condo at the time but he still hadn’t known it, a posh, contemporary penthouse overlooking the bay, with a doorman in the lobby and bellmen in the elevators. His bedroom had been approximately the size of her walk-in closet, and had he known this, he would have been too ashamed to ever let her set foot in his home.

“It’s great!” She’d immediately gone to the windows. They all stood propped open, no screens, allowing the crisp, cool air outside to filter in. She’d leaned out fearlessly, recklessly, her hands braced against the sill, her eyes closed, her chocolate-colored hair fluttering in the breeze. “I love the view.”

“Yeah.” He’d leaned out with her, but his eyes had been on her, not the horizon. “It’s beautiful.” When she’d glanced at him, he’d felt embarrassed and pointed to redirect her gaze. “If the fog lifts just right, you can see clear over to the Bayside Bridge.”

All at once, she’d climbed up onto the sill and wriggled out onto the rickety, rusted fire escape landing. “Let’s go up on the roof.”

“Sam,” he’d exclaimed in startled protest. He’d never stepped out on the fire escape before, never used it for much of anything except as a spot to set potted plants out to die. He hadn’t even known if it would bear Sam’s slight and insignificant weight, much less his, and watched, wide-eyed and apprehensive, as she started up the ladder.

“Come on,” she said, looking down over her shoulder, her hair windswept in her face, her mouth still spread in that wide, infectious grin. “Quit looking at my ass and get up here.”

He’d laughed and followed, moving as gingerly as possible and grimacing at every unsettling creak and moan. When he’d reached the top, he’d found her standing treacherously close to the edge. The wind pushed her hair back from her face, molding her shirt against her torso, her nipples outlined in discernablediscernible bullet points through the thin fabric cups of her bra.

“Hey, no fair jumping,” he’d said. “I’m the one who’d have to clean up the sidewalk.”

“I’m not going to jump,” she’d replied with a laugh. “I have a really good sense of balance. And I’m not afraid of falling.”

She’d said this last with a pointed look in his direction that had let him know she didn’t necessarily mean taking a tumble off the edge of the roof. He’d kissed her because in that moment, he hadn’t been afraid of falling either.
It’s the landing you have to watch out for,
his father had told him once, and Jason supposed he’d landed hard from the moment his mouth had touched hers. Her lips had been cold, dry from the wind, somewhat sweet with the lingering flavor of strawberry lip gloss, and it had been all over.

Jason limped out of the bedroom, following the dark corridor toward the living room. A lamp was still aglow here and he saw Sam asleep on the couch, burrowed beneath a blanket. Bear was sleeping nearby, slumped between two chairs. Half seated, half slouched in one, with his feet propped on the other and a blanket draped over his bulky form. The dog had been lying between them, but at the sound of Jason’s bare feet against the wooden floor, it raised its head, its dark brown eyes spearing him as he stood in the doorway. Again it showed him its front teeth as it growled.

At this, Sam groaned. “Shut up, Barton,” she mumbled, rolling over and shrugging her shoulder, tugging the blanket into comfortable position around her.

Jason stood there for a long, uncertain moment. He wanted to go to her. Nothing else in that crazy, terrifying day had made any sense to him and he was lonely. At last, though, he turned, then walked back into the bedroom. He sat against the side of the bed and picked up the scrapbook Sam had brought him earlier.

Rather than read through the newspaper articles at the end about his murder, however, this time he flipped to the front of the book and began to look at photographs she’d pasted inside for safekeeping, poignant reminders of the life he and Sam had shared—a life that, for him at least, had ended less than twenty-four hours earlier. Each one brought with it a flood of memories and emotions. Here was a Halloween party when they’d dressed up as a nun and a priest, her in a full, dowdy habit and him in the old-fashioned floor-length black robe and starched white collar. Here was one of Sam in her chef’s toque and white jacket, her uniform in culinary school, while another showed Jason behind the bar, standing in front of the diamond-dust mirror, a stainless-steel cocktail shaker between his hands.

He paused at one in particular in which he stood, dressed in a suit and tie, with his arm around Sam and holding a certificate in the other. He was laughing as she stood on her tiptoes, planting a kiss on his cheek.

The day I got my GED,
he thought.
Something I never would have done without Sam.

“That was a good day,” she said from the bedroom doorway, and he jerked in surprise, startled and embarrassed by her discovery.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he began clumsily, but she shook her head as she walked over to join him.

“You didn’t.” She tucked her disheveled hair behind her ears and sat beside him. “Bear’s snoring. Sounds like a freight train rattling through the living room.”

She was so close, he could breathe in and smell the light, familiar fragrance of her shampoo. “Do you remember that?” she asked, looking down at the picture.

“Of course,” he replied with a nod, following her gaze. Diagnosed as dyslexic when he was in second grade, Jason had always been competent in mathematics and science but had consistently failed English subjects like spelling and reading comprehension. He’d fallen behind in his studies by third grade, then been held back to repeat fourth grade. The special education classes his teachers had enrolled him in had only compounded his humiliation and shame. While other children his age had been reading
Island of the Blue Dolphins
and
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H.NIMH,
he’d still struggled to make it through
Curious George
and
Go, Dog, Go!
By high school, he’d simply given up altogether and dropped out.

“I felt smart that day,” Jason remarked, looking down at the photograph of his graduation day. “Like I’d accomplished something.” He smiled somewhat sadly. “For once in my life.”