The next several days were spent shoring up all of the work Dantes had been doing to manipulate things within Mondego’s operations as well as outside of them. He stayed in touch with Jayson, Jayk, and Zak, monitored the sub bosses, and made sure that the gangs they’d antagonized were starting to move in the right direction. While doing all of that he also monitored the hundreds of mini-gardens he’d seeded throughout the city. Cutting his losses in those places where they’d never really thrive, and doubling his support of those that had taken root quickly. All the while he continued his own garden tending, messages to Mercedes, and the more traditional maintenance of his main gardens.
It was almost nightfall, when he was finishing watering a growing thornbush in the corner of his smallest garden. There was a sudden jolt up his arm and the watering can fell onto the dirt. Dantes looked at his right hand for a moment and felt another jolt of pain up it. He looked up to his forearm where the batmark, a tattoo in the shape of a wing, was full and shining golden.
“Fuck,” muttered Dantes as the pain went from a jolt to an agony suffusing his entire body. He clenched teeth together even as he felt them sharpening and elongating in his mouth. His fingers on his right hand began to lengthen as the rest of his body began to shrink down. The membrane between his fingers spread as his fingers extended, thinning and stretching until his arms and hands had become wings. His ears, already pointed, grew larger and more complex until he could hear the fluttering of a moth’s wings nearby. By the end of it, he was a medium sized bat curled on the muddy ground he’d just been watering.
Jacopo pulled him from the mud and helped him to remove it from his wings.
He looked over himself, noting that his wooden limb had also shrunk and approximated a wing as best he could. It seemed to have no issues adapting to any of the forms he’d taken so far, for which he was grateful. He let out a chattering sound that he presumed was the bat equivalent of a heavy sigh, and shifted himself back into his usual shape. Feeling the process in reverse was exactly as painful and grueling as the other direction. When he was done he looked up at the night sky, took another deep breath, and made the transformation again. He did this until the switch was almost as fast and painless as becoming a rat or roach had become for him. When he’d finally reached that point, he hesitated to transform back into himself from Batform.
He crawled up a nearby grate, and let out a tiny shriek, finding that he could tell exactly where everything was, not with his eyes, but with his ears. He tested it a few more times, his voice hitting that of a few other bats, a couple flying insects in the air, and even a pigeon out for a night flight. He launched himself into the air and began flapping his wings, rising higher and higher into the air.
Being a rat or a roach could be surprisingly fun. Crawling through hiding holes, climbing walls, they had a certain joy to them. None of that compared to flight though. He pushed himself against the powerful wind coming from the ocean, rising higher and higher, but knowing that there was a limit to how high he could climb instinctually. The bat's power wasn’t in its ability to fly high, but its ability to maneuver, so he decided to test that out for himself. He sped his wingbeats, moving not higher, but more and more quickly through the air. He dove into the open window of a warehouse, twisting himself between rows of equipment before rising back up, and diving through the barely open bottom stilt of another window. He let out a screech, and sensing a moth nearby, he moved to grasp it in his claws by another bat, this one was larger with brown fur, and it quickly fluttered away from him.
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“Jacopo?” he asked as he hastened his wingbeats to catch up.
“You are a slow hunter.”
Dantes caught up with him. “Well, I’ve always had more experience getting my meat from a butcher than snatching it from the air. Not that you’re much better. You steal food far more than you eat it.”
Jacopo let out the bat version of a shrug as he did a little spin in the air. “Stealing and hunting are very similar.”
“I wouldn’t know, but I’ll take your word for it.” Dantes landed against the overhang of a roof and stretched his wings a bit, resting.
Jacopo landed next to him, hanging several inches longer than he was. Dantes knew he was big for a rat, but was surprised to see him so big as a bat. Was he a particularly large roach when he transformed as well? If he was human how large would he be? He filed away those less meaningful questions for later.
“I thought there was nothing better than being a rat?”
Jacopo scratched the side of his head with one of his feet. “There isn’t.”
“I’ve seen you shift into a roach a few times, but that was only when you needed to. Did you need to this time?”
Jacopo was silent for a few moments. “I wanted to fly.”
Dantes hid his surprise. Jacopo was a harsh creature, all edges and focus. It was part of what Dantes admired about him, and was the thing about him he felt was most strongly leaking into his own soul from Jacopo’s. Still, Dantes didn’t want to call him out on the sudden showing of vulnerability, especially since any vulnerability at all was likely as a result of Dantes’s own personality leaking into him.
“Let’s fly then,” said Dantes, releasing his hold and free falling for nearly a second before spreading his wings and letting them catch the wind.
Jacopo followed and they began weaving and flying through the city. They dove through alleyways, slipped between tavern signs, and even swooped low enough to startle a few people out for late night walks, one of whom was almost certainly on his way to dispose of a poorly concealed corpse in a canvas bag he was dragging behind himself. They hunted moths attracted to the lanterns lit by the students of the mage academy. Dantes hadn’t often eaten in a non-human form, but found he didn’t mind it as much as he expected. Any aversion he was expecting to feel was overridden by the instincts of the form he was in.
As the sun was beginning to rise, which he could sense in his bones more than see, they made their way to Uptown. They reached the temple of the many gods, and Dantes began to push his new form. He flew higher and higher, feeling himself start to overheat from the effort, but nevertheless he pushed himself. Finally, he reached the head of a large gargoyle that jutted out from the Temple’s roof. He shifted back into his human form, panting and scattering a few sleeping pigeons. He let the pain of being in a non-human form too long wash over him, then forced himself to sit up.
Jacopo shifted back to himself as well, though he didn’t seem to have near the difficulty Dantes had at being outside of his own form for so long. Perhaps because he was closer to a bat naturally than Dantes was. He crawled onto Dantes’s shoulder as he slung his legs over the head of the gargoyle and gazed out over the city.
The sun was rising and Dantes sat watching as the light crept slowly across the city until it reached him. The warmth of it was pleasant on his skin. The city looked beautiful from where he was. The disorderly rows of buildings, the people moving across the streets like roaches, all of it seemed to make sense from where he was standing. He felt as if he could lift and hand and move everyone in any direction he wanted them to. It was an illusion though. The power he felt looking down on them, and the beauty he was seeing from where he sat. The truth of a city like Rendhold couldn’t be viewed from an idealized distance like the one at which he sat. You needed to be on the streets. To see all of the filth and degeneracy from up close. To smell the shit running down the streets, and see people’s eyes shift from contempt to fear as they saw you pass them by.
Still, thought Dantes as he stretched standing on the gargoyles back and looking down, it was a nice view.