Zoe never thought she would fight children. She never imagined she would take the form of seven hounds to do so. She never doubted she would win.
But she was losing.
Not-Cassy’s inhuman children poured endlessly from the miasmic clouds surrounding the mausoleum. Though the bubble was only larger than a car, dozens upon dozens of the bald, feral little creatures raced out. More than Zoe had fought in the tunnels, and they were now unhampered by the claustrophobic underground. A carpet of gnawing, gibbering flesh, they charged across the snow. Trails of black smoke clung to them. Their eyes rolled in their hearts. Wet fangs and claws glittered in the sky’s dead ruby light.
Zoe’s body flowed into seven blades. She could still feel the disconnection of Not-Cassy’s technique. The way her body spread itself on a tide of will, floating, and she floated now. Consciousness spread as her hounds savaged the undead children in the graveyard.
Her Might translated to bites that crunched bone to powder. Hounds bounded forward and leaped over dug up graves. Zoe wasn’t as agile as she would like, so she charged in straight lines and shattered the tombstones.
A knot of children clung to the back of a hound. Tearing. Eating, even as the hound shook and snapped at them.
The white hound charged and bowled them away from the body of a hound almost torn to shreds. Blood on the snow. Bones exposed. A spark shone in the dark eyes and a snarl lingered amongst the fangs. The dying hound blended away, golden light, flowing smoke, and flesh became a thought. The white hound howled as it took in the remains of its fallen sibling.
Six hounds now but no more children charged from the miasmic sphere. The winter wind blew through the fighting, and the miasma dissipated and revealed the ancient stone mausoleum. Not-Cassy no longer stood in the doorway. The dark entrance beckoned, and with it the path back to Zoe’s friends and the cave by the river.
Zoe’s hounds bolted toward the opening.
With a burst of miasmic wisps, Not-Cassy appeared amongst them. Her hook swung and dug into the ribs of a hound. Flesh twisted around the tip, and with a flick, she sent the hound flying. It struck a marble angel with a high-pitched yelp. Grey wings shattered and heavy feathers fell in a cloud of dust. The hound slumped amongst a mound of rubble at the statue’s base. It twitched, not dead, but stunned. Not-Cassy charged toward it with her hook twirling above her head, but Zoe reclaimed the hound before she could. It dissipated as Not-Cassy shattered the statue’s base with a horrendous blow.
Two hounds diverted toward the foul creature. Not-Cassy swung at one, but it feinted. The other hound leaped at her from behind. Mid-air the hound shifted into Zoe. Her flying knee struck the back of Not-Cassy’s head with a sickening crack. Black blood spurted. She rolled across the snow as Not-Cassy slumped down.
Zoe pulled herself up onto her knees. It felt — wrong — to be in her own body after running as the hounds. She stared at the stumps of her wrists and ankles. They were healed completely smooth. No scars, but no hands or feet. Some part of her hoped they would reform with this expansive use of her New Flesh. She could feel that the Black Star had leeched her power. Those chains were shackles in truth. Here, kneeling in the snow, she was more powerful than she had ever been, but still, Rue’s wounds remained.
The New Flesh had not saved her.
Children screeched. They hunched on the surrounding tombstones like gargoyles. Nightmares played in their wide black eyes. Heads twitched as they watched her. Drooling. Lips peeled back as their tiny nipples hardened. Bulging veins trembled with accelerating heart rates.
The children leaped.
Zoe breathed.
[Empress in Time]
Mirror slipped from her pores and pooled at the end of her ankles and wrists. She felt the flutter across her heart as the mirror slipped up her arms and legs to form heavy gauntlets and boots. She stood, a cape of mirror flowing from her shoulders. Though her jumpsuit remained torn and scuffed, the mirrored clothing flowed perfectly. She felt Moth’s presence like a hand in hers.
A snarling maw chomped at her neck, but she stepped away. Her mirrored elbow crashed into the back of its skull and sent it flying away. More children bounded across the ground. Two leaped up. Moth appeared, half hollowed from stretching the Mirror essence so thin, and slapped them to the ground.
Not-Cassy rolled over and crawled away under the cover of her children’s attacks. The hounds charged toward her, but the offspring interfered. Not-Cassy vanished behind a gravestone — even her fetid stench faded away. Children chittered and screeched as hounds closed jaws around spindly flesh.
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But there were so many.
They leaped toward Zoe on mass. The crimson sky darkened as their slender bodies blocked the light. Zoe punched at the air. Her focus extended to the point beyond her fist. To the movement of the air. The wavering tremble of the world’s Skein. To the harmony.
She beckoned for collapse.
A dark point appeared beyond her fist as the disrupted harmony devoured light and atmosphere. Even as she summoned it into existence, it started fading away.
[Empress in Time]
With a sputter of Time essence, she captured the portal. With it frozen, she could feel its unique harmony, and so she stabilized the moment of destabilization.
All this in a heartbeat as her fist moved up, and the children rained down toward her in a collapsing dome of gnashing death.
The portal expanded into a disk of pink light large enough to cover Zoe’s body. The border burned with darkness. The children struck the portal and screamed as it devoured their flesh. They twisted and thrashed in the air, but they were already falling.
Zoe kept her arm upraised as the collapsed circle expanded to shield her completely. Her Mirrored gloves rippled. Her boots slid. Moth trembled against Zoe, both souls struggling to stretch out the combination of Body Path and technique.
She fell to her knees when it collapsed. Air rushed in with a thunderclap. Body parts fell to the ground. Severed limbs and bisected heads. A spattering of bloody rain.
Tired, Zoe shifted into a hound and padded through the gravestones.
Three of her hounds dealt with the last of the children as the fourth barreled into the unguarded mausoleum. The tunnel stretched out below and she followed her nose. She didn’t know how to get back to her friends from above ground, but by following her path she could track her path backward. With one hound underground, she had four above — her body spread throughout many. The injuries from the unsummoned dogs collected in the back of her mind, but it was a pain she could ignore for now.
Especially with the elation of power singing through her veins. The portal still burned fresh in her mind. She moved in the hound's body with the confidence of a predator.
She moved toward the hilltop where it started. Some instinct called her. Some unheard voice. She ignored the tingling sense of a trap. If this was an ambush, then Not-Cassy was as stupid as she was evil.
She padded uphill as the battle died below.
The children were not as skilled as they were ferocious. Their skinny limbs and greedy fangs dripped the blood of hounds. Alive with battle, but decimated in number. The last of them crawled between headstones, gibbered like fevered monkeys, and snarled. Saliva dripped from maws, but they kept their distance. The hounds advanced, and the surviving children fled into the snowy graveyard.
Zoe let them go.
For Not-Cassy had appeared in a tremble of light.
She leaned against the gnarled tree where Zoe underwent her surgery. The corpse leaked like a bullet-riddled oil tank. White flesh stark and glowing like living bone. She grinned ear to ear and her eyes were hollow wells.
The hounds circled wary, poised, and growling, as the white hound stalked toward the corpse.
Zoe felt the power thudding through her heart. The stink of fear in her nostrils made her fur tingle. Her muscles thrummed with power. She was a beast. She was a killer.
Her will rode the white hound as she loomed above the stinking, corrupted figure that once housed a human mind. A heavy paw capable of shattering stone pushed the corpse’s lolling head.
Not-Cassy’s glassy eyes met Zoe’s. She snarled, some echo of Barkly’s consciousness underneath hers. A savage loyalty that shifted under her thoughts like a horse’s muscles under a saddle. She let the snarl become her own as she prepared to rip the monstrous woman’s face from her skull.
Not-Cassy chuckled.
“I would never beat you in a fight. That’s not my purpose.”
An approaching hound shifted into Zoe. she crouched on the snow, bracing herself on knees and stumps. The white hound remained.
“You are a parasite,” Zoe growled. “You’re worthless.”
“How you wish that were true,” Not-Cassy said as a giggle escaped the hole in her cheek. “How you wish I hadn’t already infected you so thoroughly. Think you can kill me with something as paltry as violence?”
“That’s a lie,” Zoe said as she crawled forward. “I watched the surgery. You only removed that traitor!”
The hounds snarled at the mention of the Black Star. The intensity of her rage shocked Zoe. It hurt so much. There was a hole in her head where a friend should have been. A chasm in her heart. Why had it happened?
“How did the Black Star system know that you could do this?”
“Just because it spoke into your head does not mean it spoke to you alone,” Not-Cassy said with a fractured leer.
“Why?” Zoe pounded the snow. “Why fight me? Why did you do this?”
Not-Cassy smiled.
“What if I don’t say?”
“Does it hurt when you’re not the special one? Just because you have fate’s finger up your ass doesn’t make you any more than a puppet, dearie. Puppets and muppets and poppets and moppets and not one of them is anything more than tinder for the flames of time. Enjoy these fleeting moments in the light for your purpose is only darkness and filth as the system grinds —”
The white hound’s jaws closed around Not-Cassy’s skull and crunched. Bone popped like an egg in her mouth. The rotten brain exploded. Black gunk burst into her mouth and down her throat. It burned like acid — one last trick from Not-Cassy. Noxious smoke billowed from the white hound’s mouth as its face melted from the inside out.
Thick clouds of blackened smoke streaked with sulfurous yellow. The erupting cloud violated the sky. A purple light spread across the swirling crimson. Insectile shrieks rose from the distant streets as the unsettling color settled over them.
The curves of the smoke resembled fat thighs, that melted and circled and rose, a bulging stomach hanging heavy with life and food, it swirled away, pendulous breasts, and the smoke shifted and the bodies faded and grew as faces swirled in the smoke and gazed with eyes of burning violet.