Not ever.
Chelle passed over the downed creature and landed, spinning away in a blurring series of pirouettes that made Anne's head spin in sympathy, as the last unman rose from the obsidian, its smoky cloak distorting its form. And Anne stalked forward to meet it.
The light around Anne's hands flared again, hardening as she drove a fist into the center of the wavering mass. The occulting shadowy mirage fled before her blow, revealing pale skin over lean flesh. The strike thudded into the unman, accompanied by a puff of evaporating darkness.
The thing's face, nose grotesquely flattened by its impact with the stone altar, twisted into a grimace of mixed pain and effort. A claw whipped out of the wavering cloak, and Anne wasn't quick enough to dodge. The raking blow landed on her shoulder, rocking her to the side. It was accompanied by the now-familiar golden flash, and the unman howled in frustration and pain. Anne rolled with the blow, and slammed another radiant blow into the thing's side, dispersing more of its protective umbra.
For desperate moments, they traded strikes, dodging and weaving. Each time Anne hit the unman, a bit more of its cloaking darkness dissipated. Every blow she took rocked her with unnatural strength, but the flaring light kept its wicked claws out of her flesh. Around them, Chelle spun and leapt.
Despite the cool darkness of Under Hill, sweat plastered Anne's hair to her her head and made tracks down her spine and between her breasts. Her chest heaved, sucking air into tired lungs. The repeated blows should have been bone breaking, but her unseen protector robbed them of force. She could still feel the bruises, however, and they were starting to take a toll.
Finally, the Anne slipped sideways, snapping a short kick at unman's leg. It stumbled forward, and she pivoted, driving her knee into its lower back with all the strength of her powerful legs.
The unman fell to its knees and reared back, its spine arching as it shrieked in consuming agony. Anne drove her fist downward, striking at the point where the thing's collarbones met its sternum. The snap of bone echoed in the suddenly still air.
Anne rode the blow down, striking through the target as she'd been taught, but thrusting the unman all the way prone to the obsidian stone surface. She pinned it to the volcanic glass, and the fight - and its horrific facsimile of life - went out of it. Pallid lids fluttered down over those soulless metal eyes and the cruel lines and hard planes relaxed, giving Anne a brief glimpse of what the unman might have been before submitting itself to the will that had given it shape.
Anne stood and blinked her eyes as the battle fury drained from her. She could feel every blow the vile trio had landed. She wanted to sleep for a week.
"Annie?" Trepidatious disquiet suffused Chelle's voice. Confusion and no small amount of fear lurked in her sister's beautiful eyes. Deep circles smudged purple under those eyes, and her oval face was all hard planes, reminding Anne strongly of Ryan. Chelle stood at the edge of the obsidian floor looking small and worn.
Anne looked down at herself, stunned to see the golden luminescence crawling over her body. It seemed to describe planes and solids, making it look as though she wore a suit of transparent amber armor. It was beautiful, and more than a little disturbing.
Anne opened her mouth to reply when a piercing keen shook the club. It was as though Anne had a tornado siren planted between her ears. The howling shriek was a physical force, and she was vaguely aware of falling to her knees, and of Chelle and the everyone else in her field of vision doing the same. For a moment, Anne thought her vision was blurring, but then she realized that the blocks upon which she knelt were actually shaking.
"Chelley," she screamed, as the room started to come apart.
When Chelle didn't respond, Anne scrambled across the heaving blocks toward her. Anne slid to a stop and wrapped her arms around her sister, heaving them both to their feet. They slide-stepped around the jouncing form of the dead unman, desperately trying to stay on their feet.
As she pulled them toward the stairs up, Anne noticed that everyone else seemed to have the same idea. She could see the former prey of the parasitic sentience awakening. Many were screaming. Most scrambled their own slip-sliding way to the stairs. No few seemed completely catatonic.
A particularly violent heave of the floor sent Anne to her knees. Her hand flew open and the lucky coin bounced away, disappearing into the swirling crowd. A pang of loss shot through Anne's core, as well as a flash of incandescent fear. Anne suppressed them both with the ease of long practice, and lifted Chelle back to her feet. They dashed for the stairs, moving in an odd bubble of space with the crowd flowing to either side.
"You!" The word encompassed a world of frustration, pain and anger. Anne saw frightening club owner appear out of the crowd at the bottom of the stairs, blocking their way out. More imprecations tumbled from its lush lips in that nauseatingly mellifluous voice. "You unlovely harridan! You creator of nothing! You destroyer of beauty!"
Anne's will crystallized. With one arm, she picked up Chelle, not thinking that her sister easily massed three-quarters of her own weight. Anne charged toward the ranting figure, determination evident in each stride.
"You dare fight me? In my place? Under Hill is me, pathetic worm! You have no more hope of escape than of beating-"
Anne reached the blockading thing-in-human-form and drove her fist upward. Unexpectedly, that golden blaze coalesced around her arm again, just as she struck the club owner. Whose furious mouthing ceased as though cut off with an axe. The slight, androgynous figure of the club owner flew backward to crash upon the steps, and Anne swept Chelle up and over, taking the steps three at a time.
The mass of the crowd behind carried them up and through the antechamber, which had changed drastically since Anne went down the stairs. The room was devoid of decoration. Bare cinderblock walls enclosed the space, covered with slimy mold that oozed downward to puddle on the floor. A floor covered in the detritus of the city. Food wrappers, newsprint, unidentifiable plastic and leaves. Bits of rotting food, and dead rats. It was disgusting, and Anne swore it hadn't been there on the way in, though it looked to have been undisturbed for weeks, or even months.
The door was the only thing the same. That heavy, ironbound oak door. It hung open, the enormous ogre of a bouncer nowhere to be found. Anne dragged Chelle through the yawning portal, certain her friends had some explaining to do. Avi might not have known - probably didn't, to be honest - that Under Hill was some kind of twisted fairy hell place. But Mike had a notion. He knew something, and she knew he did.
What had happened down there? What were those things, and where had the club gone? And what was Mike's lucky coin? What the hell was happening in her city?
PART FIVE
WIZARD TRAINING
5
Vincent stared again at the hands that had betrayed him. They'd once danced to his will and produced music to make proud men weep. No longer, though they looked no different than they had a few days earlier.
Nails kept short and well-filed. He'd used to chew them to the quick - until he bled - before he realized their ragged unevenness drove him to distraction. Basic hygiene training had done for that.
Blunt tips padded thickly with callus enabled him to handle the hottest of dishes with little ill-comfort. More importantly, he'd been able to play for hours. Long enough that muscle fatigue forced him to stop. He hadn't had a practice blister in years.
Long fingers sprang from broad palms. He'd been chastised often enough by his instructors over them. Not for merely possessing them. No, he'd been able to wrap his hands so far around the neck of his violin that he'd become lazy. Certain tough fingerings lost any difficulty.
Vincent's lips quirked at the old, familiar thought that perhaps some of his teachers had been more jealous than anything else. After all, he'd early graduated to pieces that he knew still challenged some of them.
His smile turned bittersweet. More bitter than sweet, truthfully: they'd never have to worry about him again. The fingers of his right hand, his bow hand, curled into a tight fist around the emblem of that horrible night.
"What's the matter, Vinnie?"
His mother's voice jerked Vincent out of the dark morass his thoughts had become in recent days. He stared at her in disbelief. Not over the nickname. She'd called him Vinnie since before he could remember. She wasn't going to stop anytime soon.
"Dr. Thomas said you haven't been to class in days."
Vincent scowled at his fingers. Dr. William Thomas was Vincent's violin tutor. A superlative musician who'd retired from touring in order to teach and record, Dr. Thomas had become almost a second father. The prospect of disappointing him plowed raw furrows in Vincent's bleeding soul.
"I can't play anymore, Ma." His voice cracked and black despair washed through him at the admission. He'd managed to not say anything about it since the agonizing episode nearly two weeks earlier, and saying it out loud left a screaming void in Vincent's middle.
"I know what you lost," his mother whispered, her voice harsh. Then she laughed, low in her throat. It was her voice - she was the only other person in the entire apartment - but she'd never used that tone that he'd ever heard. It wormed its way deep into his mind and left slimy trails of innuendo.
Vincent's head snapped up to stare in horror at his mother. A brief shadow passed over her familiar face, and she looked at him with the same calm expression she usually wore.
"What did you say?" His voice cracked on the last word, and he swallowed convulsively, trying desperately to work moisture into his bone-dry mouth.
"I said, Vinnie, Sweetie, are you feeling all right?" His mother's dark eyes were full of concern for him, as they often seemed of late, and she'd twisted her apron into a knot around her hands.
Vincent stared hard at her.
"Didn't you hear me, Ma?" Vincent almost shouted. "I. Can't. Play. Violin."
His mother's mouth worked in silence for a moment.
"What do you mean, Vinnie? Are you hurt, or sick? What's preventing you from playing?"
"I, I don't know." Vincent stared into nothing, thinking back to that nightmarish episode at the nightclub he should never have been at in the first place. Images flashed across his vision. Heartrendingly beautiful music in a place out of a dream, full of enormous trees. Dancers so graceful they made him weep to watch. They'd all played in time, shifting back and forth in tempo and dynamic without conscious thought. Melody, harmony, counter-melody wove through each other seamlessly. It had been transcendent.
And then a figure limned in golden light brought the illusion crashing down. Their music - his music - had been glorious, but it was the burning of a firework. A magnificent fireball that consumed its fuel and disappeared. And after the screaming exodus from the dank pit the club had transformed into, Vincent had found he couldn't play.
"Well, have you tried?" His mother used the sweet, patient tone she always used when she thought Vincent was being stubborn.
His jaw clenched and his fingers knotted into fists, but when he spoke, his voice was hushed.
"When I pick up the violin," not
his
violin, not anymore, "it feels strange. I can't finger chords. The bow doesn't work right, and the notes don't come out pure." He stared, unseeing, at the floor. The pattern in the worn, yellow linoleum was so familiar, he could have drawn it in his sleep, but just then it was dark and alien. Ominous. He swallowed past the enormous lump in his throat. "My hands don't even know how to hold a violin anymore."
Lines of worry appeared in his mother's face, but they only echoed the yawning abyss in Vincent's heart. She opened her mouth when the doorbell rang, making them both jump. The sounds was clangorous in the hushed apartment.
"Oh, that's Dr. Thomas." The relief in her voice was gratingly apparent.
Vincent knew his mother loved him, but she'd never been able to handle conflict, especially when she didn't understand the source. He didn't understand the source of his turmoil, for that matter, but he knew his raw emotions were making her uncomfortable. He just didn't care. Couldn't care.
Vincent inhaled, not smelling the rich aroma of pasta carbonara heavy on the air. Nor did he smell the fear-cold sweat that sprang onto his face, though his mouth tasted of ashes and pain.
"I thought he might be able to help you, so when he called, I asked him to come over for dinner." A hint of old fear showed in her dark eyes when Vincent sprang to his feet. "You know, honey, to talk to you."
"How- but-" Vincent's mind shuddered and caromed from thought to thought, galvanized by sudden terror. His thoughts shattered and flew apart at at the image of trying to explain to his mentor why he couldn't make music.
Deeper, much farther down in his soul, a molten hot pool of rage simmered and roiled. He shouldn't have to explain a damn thing. He shouldn't have to look forward to a life of asking fat-faced idiots if they wanted fries with their burger. He should be preparing for the winter concert season, and gearing up for his senior recitals.