The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (10 page)

Now that I could hear the breaths, it was easier to assess how close the beast was. By my estimate, it was about fifty feet. I hoped I was wrong about this.

In front of us, the beating of a thousand wings exploded and I screamed as loud as I could. No sound emerged from my mouth.

Screeches tore at our ears, and more sounds burst in patches around us. They reminded me of blue jays from the woods or even monkeys in the jungle. The wings grew louder, then they were gone, moving into the distance in the dark in their flutter.

My legs shook, and the darkness smelled of rot and decay, and something else. Something like flowers.

A hard
,
metallic musical note broke through the space. Two hard cones of something that seemed like light shot from the dark. The cones spread far and wide, and they remained suspended in the air, pointing up toward the sky, while the metallic tone stretched itself further and further in my ears.
 

The beams lowered toward the ground. They descended with grace and precision, until they were pointing at us like headlights in a deserted highway. The musical tone they emitted blasted my ears.

Then they stopped. The strange light from the beams allowed me to make out some details.
 

That is not light.

Light doesn’t look like that.

But what is it
,
then?

The beams allowed me to
understand
the positions of objects around me, giving me a rudimentary sort of vision. In fact, the beams allowed me to feel the textures and surfaces of the things around me, and in feeling those, I could create a sense that felt like normal vision.

I caught a glimpse of the solid ground. Flat and dry.

Beneath my hands I felt and understood the debris on the ground
.
The dusty bits clung to José María’s hoodie like lint, or like tiny, dusty chicken bones.

Not like chicken bones.

Like bones. They are human bones.

Baby bones.

I squeezed my brother’s shoulder. The beams allowed me to see details of his shape and body, though José María remained bathed in black darkness. It felt strange to see all parts of his skin, even his eyeballs
,
in pure black.

Then another change in the musical tone in front of us. I jerked my head forward.
 

The tone broke, and then the beams disappeared. The darkness swallowed everything again.

One noise remained: the breathing of the beast.

It took air in, exhaled, and the breaths inched closer toward us. José María tapped out their rhythm.
 

The breathing stayed steady, and a smell of cheese, mushroom and what I could only think was pus, wafted toward us. No more bells. Just the precise breaths of an animal I would never see.

We were being stalked. I had to hide us.

I yanked José María’s collar one more time, and we slid along the low wall, with our bellies pressed tight against the cold surface. How I wished that we could have even just a sliver of moonlight instead of this vacuum where I couldn’t even see my hands in front of me.
 

As we inched left on the wall, I heard footsteps come toward us, and then the sound of rocks and grit shifting. It was so very close. Holding on to my brother for dear life, I turned us around so we had our backs against the wall to protect us, or possibly hide us from the beast.

We slid downward into a squatting position, and I dug my nails into José María’s flesh. The wall scraped the back of my arms, but I didn’t care. Words were useless, and my urge to scream resulted in nothing but silence.

A roar detonated in front of us, and I realized that hiding behind this wall had been futile. It had somehow leaped, flown or gone around the wall.

It’s here.

A long tone burst forth into the air, and the bells rang. The cones of understanding swept over us, and as they spread wider, they amplified my cognition of the topography around me. I could feel every object, its position, its texture and exact shape as if a 3
-
D map had turned on in my brain. The beams floated about ten yards in front of us, and they allowed me to see through and into the darkness. Their haunting tone droned far and wide
.

What is this place?

When I understood what I was seeing, I cupped my hand over my mouth.

Up until that moment, I had spent nineteen years—my whole life—able to see the colors of the world. Red and indigo, emerald and brown, purple and blue, they came to life when the sun or artificial light radiated onto objects that could reflect them. In daylight, back in Chicago, I could see the blue of the lake, the gray of the skyline and the green of the trees. My favorite had always been green.

But nothing about that sunlight and those colors had prepared me for what I could feel and understand now through this dark.

We crouched in a vast place, like a desert. Rocks of all shapes and sizes lined the ground. I felt them in absolute detail. Some were razor
-
sharp, and now that I could see their jagged edges, I was surprised I hadn’t cut myself open when we jumped over the wall.
 

The ground was littered with little bones. And big bones, too. They resembled human bones, but I couldn’t be sure about all of them.

Off to the sides, I spotted crumbling chunks of stone, and a quick glance behind me showed me the wall where José María and I crouched. Its walls also reminded me of coal. The wall’s edges were decorated in shimmering runes that I couldn’t read.

I let go of José María’s hand, and I looked down at myself.
 

This is not normal.
 

I turned my palms up and down, over and over. No matter which way I moved them, the skin looked black as night. What’s more, I could feel and understand in incredible detail. The narrow ridges on my palms became like maps carved in onyx. Whatever the cones allowed me to see was magnified, allowing my to feel every single thing as if I had an electron microscope.

I turned the hands over, and the skin, with its imperfections and tiny triangular patterns, was as black as the downy hairs on the back of my hand. If this was what the light was doing to my skin—

I jerked my head to the left to look at my brother.

The fifteen-year-old who went by the name of José María Montes stared out at me through eyes whose irises and pupils were as black as crow feathers. His skin, his clothes and everything on his being looked as if it had been bathed in the thinnest layer of tar. He parted his lips in surprise as he stared at my own black face and skin, and I could see the inside of his mouth, with its tongue and teeth—all of it was black now. He moved his lips, but no sound came through. We could see each other finally, but we still couldn’t speak.

And then the creature roared from behind the beams of light. The bells rang again.
 

The beast had stalked us well, because when it pounced, we had nowhere to go.
 

Now I was able to understand more about the imminent violence that approached. Though the beast moved with the speed of a jungle cat, I could now understand how the cones had sprung from its head. The creature was the one making the cones with its dreadful musical tone.

The animal lunged.

The beams arced toward the sky, and they traveled over several yards, sweeping a over heaven that bore no stars.

As the beams crossed the air, I saw the beast in detail.

The body was long and ragged but human. Its sinewy arms and legs bare; the skin hairless and smooth. Its coal-black skin shone with the sickly texture of diseased skin. Its toenails were long and curved—talons. It was a body that looked ill and strong at the same time, as if someone had taken a corpse and given it incredible strength.

And the beams floated in front of its shoulders.

They are not headlights, and they’re not flashlights. Those beams are coming from its head.

I saw the creature’s face and its long jaw, its folded
-
back ears, the hard skull that tapered.

It was not a human head.

The shoulders supported an unnaturally large dog’s head. It was hairless and just as smooth as the human portion. The snarl in its jagged teeth was something I had only ever seen in animals like wolves or jackals.
 

The black light from those eyes lit up every detail of that monster as it shortened the distance between it and us, and its stringy biceps, its watery skin, the bits of gristle in its sharp teeth—I saw them all like my eyes were a telescope and a microscope.

And then it crashed into both of us.

The creature was even larger than I had expected, easily double the size of an average human, and the jaws of the beast looked wide enough for José María or me to crawl through.
 

The beast plunged into us, and our senses exploded. We heard the bells go off inside our very cells, and the stink of wet dog and rotted meat bloomed in my nose.
 

The black cones emanating from the eyes grew wider, thicker and clearer, and though I was living in a world made of night, I had to shield my eyes from the blast of sensation that allowed me to see into this world of coal.
 

The beast grabbed both of us by the neck, and it did not let go. It thrust its maw in our faces and it tore at our clothes. As it did so, ragged sounds emanated from its tissues. Then it lunged. Its flesh made music as it dragged José María along the rocks. The beast’s claws pinched my shoulder blades.

Maybe this is what that woman in Millennium Park felt when she got shot and trampled.

Clara, you didn’t look out for her. That woman’s death was your fault. You could have tried to save her. You should have found out her name.

God
,
I am sorry, she had said.

You should be sorry, too, Clara.

My body was tossed and turned, and the notes of the beast’s body drifted in the air. Then it dropped us on the rock. The beast roared and stood on its skinny legs. Its strength was incredible.
 

The dog head licked its chops, and the beast screamed at us. It was a scream filled with music—tinny drums and terrifying screeches.

It had knocked the wind out of me
,
and I sat up on the ground, trying to get in some air.

The creature darted away a few feet, and it turned around.
 

Its eyes locked on mine.

It crawled on all four human limbs toward me. My shoulder hurt, and a thin stream of blood poured from my head. I put my fingers to it, and I drew them away. The blood remained as black as my skin.

Behind the beast, I spotted the wall where we had fallen. To the right, I saw a shallow forest running up a small hill, and farther back, the giant mountain I had seen when we arrived.
 

The beast ran at me and grabbed me again by the shoulder, and it opened its jaw wide. It let out a roar, and it stuffed me all the way up to my waist inside its throat. Thick saliva coated the inside, and rotted meat got in my hair and in my mouth. I could hear its gut growling below. I scrambled to push myself back out, and I felt electric shocks throughout my body.
 

Then it bit down on me as hard as it could.

The teeth came down on my lower back and then on my belly, but they couldn’t even pierce my skin. The jaws came down again and again. It chewed. And each time, it failed. It was as if my body was made of stone.

The stink of death was all over the beast’s sandpaper tongue, and I was running out of air. It bit down again, working me over like an old bone, and then it spit me out.

It roared above me and screamed. This time
,
its shriek sent music into the sky. I saw a flock of dark shapes fly off in the distance.

This place has no stars.

That realization made me shudder.

Behind me, José María was curled into a ball, crying his eyes out, though no moans came forth. Bugs crawled over his shoulders and his legs, and they raised hooked stingers over his bare flesh, right over the long lines of his homemade Arkangel tattoos.

Scorpions.

Hundreds of them.

And then the beast pulled me around by the shoulders to face it.

Its eyes squinted, and it examined me, sniffing me at the same time as it inspected.

The beast stared at me with cold suspicion and rage.
 

From its thin loincloth, it produced a small knife, a blade that looked so tiny in comparison to his body that I wanted to laugh.

It plunged it into my arm, in the very center of my bicep. I shrieked. It squeezed my body, and blood gushed to my skin in its black inky sheen.

My blood flowed in thick spurts down my arm.

The beast held out its dog tongue. It cocked his hand and plunged the knife into the tip. He didn’t seem to feel any pain in its self-mutilation. It dug into the muscle until black blood sprang. Then it rolled out the tongue toward me.