Chapter 23: You Are the Hole in my Head

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After a day spent training, Lacy’s arms were heavy as lumber, and moving her legs was like dragging a forest behind her. It was the good kind of sore, a day’s labor in a worthwhile pursuit, filling her with endorphins and keeping her mind clear. Sweating and covered in dirt, she marched back into the empty hotel room and showered, relieved as the warm water soothed the aches and pains.

When she got out, Isabella had returned to their room. “Hey,” Isabella said. “Training?”

“Yeah. Feels great.”

“You look exhausted.”

“Side effect.” Lacy plugged in Isabella’s hair dryer. “What have you been up to today?”

“Meetings with the hunters, helping to coordinate our plans of attack. It was… It was like going to the dentist. Or like being a dentist. Or like being a dentist performing oral surgery on yourself.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Dear God, yes. It’s been decades since the Guild planned any kind of joint assault of more than ten people. It’s not in our nature- we tend to keep to ourselves, stay silent and stay in the dark. That way if the Sovereignty or any kind of government captures us, nobody knows too much and nobody can reveal too much. The problem with that is it makes everyone wicked accustomed to getting their own way all the time.”

“Ugh.”

“Anyway. We’ve got one more night off before the operation kicks into high gear and we start preparing to ship out. Anything you wanna do? I mean, I don’t really know what people do for fun in Peoria, but we can look for something.”

Lacy blushed as she began brushing out her hair, hoping the mirror didn’t betray too much. “Yeah. That sounds fantastic.”

“Why don’t I shower and then we can go find somewhere to get dinner?” Isabella asked.

“Yeah,” Lacy said.

Isabella showered, and they went to dinner together at a classically styled diner. They ate burgers and fries and milkshakes, they talked about music and their hometowns and about transitioning. When the check came, they both reached to pay for it, hands resting on top of each other. Confidence surged through Lacy as they left the diner, and as they passed the geysers, Lacy saw something out of the corner of her eye: the arctic fox, trotting happily down the street.

No, Lacy thought, I’m not letting anything interfere with tonight.

Lacy turned around and faced Isabella. The other girl hesitated, but Lacy leaned in, got on her tip-toes, and kissed her. Isabella flinched, but soon melted into her.

And then a thought entered Lacy’s head, one she knew wouldn’t leave her until it was either acted upon or suppressed with copious alcohol. And given the day’s previous conversation, the latter option appealed to her even less than usual. And so she said, “Wanna go back to our room for a bit? Put a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door?”

Isabella’s mouth opened, and she blinked, and she bit her lower lip.

For a moment, all that Lacy’s mind held was terror and shame.

But then Isabella stood up and smiled, and nodded.

Lacy led the way.

It was a long night. Much of it was awkward and slow, interrupted by long stretches of speech and instruction and reassurance, but they always got back around to where they meant to go and reached their intended destinations. More than once. Finally, they laid together in bed, tangled up in each other. Lacy stared at the ceiling fan as it rotated, basking in the afterglow, wondering if Isabella felt half as good as she did.

“How was I?” Isabella asked.

“You were fantastic,” Lacy said.

“Ah, you’re just saying that.”

“No, no honestly that was amazing! That was incredible! That was… You’re fishing for compliments.”

“I mean, yeah.”

“At least you’re honest about it.”

“You were great too, by the way,” Isabella said.

“Ah, no way.”

“No, really, you were.”

“I… Uh… Thanks.”

“Why are you being so- oh.”

“Oh?”

“That was your first time, wasn’t it?”

Lacy detached from their interlock and raised the blankets over herself.

“I see,” Isabella said. She joined Lacy under the covers, pressed her forehead against Lacy’s. Lacy’s heart caught on the edge of a beat, refusing to move. “Well I’m telling you that you did pretty well for yourself, and I’ve had some prior experience. Not a ton, but still.”

Lacy kissed her. Isabella kissed her back.

And then Isabella cracked like a glass and fell apart. Lacy screamed; everything around her began to break apart and fall away into an empty abyss of pitch black. Lacy fell through, fell and fell and fell, until a solid sheet of glass stretching into infinity appeared beneath her. She slammed into it, pain hammering her and jolting her awake as the whole of reality shattered.

Once more, she was back in the hotel room, lying in her own bed, flat on her back. A small, hairless monstrosity laid drooling on her chest. Lacy screamed as the creature’s claws reached into her skin, but she grabbed it by the ankle and slammed it into the wall, shattering all its bones.

Bent over, breathing through her mouth, wide-eyed, she looked around her.

Isabella was gone. In her place was another one of those creatures, wandering around the bed looking confused. Lacy grabbed it and killed it, screaming all the while. She called out for Isabella, but found nothing. Her bags were here, but her duster and World-Carver were both gone along with her. It was as if she’d just… Vanished.

We were on our date, Lacy thought, going through the last solid memory she had, one with scents and sensations attached to it. Everything after that was a blur, a very hot and sweaty blur. We were passing the geysers. I saw the fox. I turned around.

I turned around and she…

She…

She was holding World-Carver. Like she was ready to fight.

And she was pointing it at me.

What the hell?

Lacy ran her hands through her hair, trying to process everything, when a hideous cry of destruction rang throughout the city outside. She went over to the window and looked. Chaos was a bramble bush around downtown Peoria, gripping it tight with its tangled mass of thorned tendrils. Buildings burned, and people ran in the streets screaming for their lives. They were chased by men and women with fangs and claws and red eyes, some of whom were on all fours, some of whom had faces extended and mangled and warped, some of whom resembled reanimated bat flesh stitched across a human skeleton. They fought with guns and knives and claws and fangs, and some of them, the ones who still looked mostly human, with staves. Staves made of solid purple light. A building disintegrated until there was nothing but dust scattering in the swell of wind and sound amidst the raging crowd. She could not see it, could not hear it, but she knew Alistair was here.

Isabella-

A knocking came upon her door, frantic and desperate. Lacy gulped, twitched, then slowly walked up the door. She looked through the porthole, and saw Danny on the other side.

Lacy opened the door, grabbed her friend by the lapel, and pulled him inside the room. He was nearly acquainted with the floor before stumbling back into his balance.

“What’s going on?” Lacy said in a severe whisper.

“Besides the obvious?” Danny said, pointing to the window. He turned his head back to Lacy, then did a rapid double-take. “Gwen- wait, where’s Isabella?”

We were at the geysers, and when I turned around- “I have no idea.”

“What? What the hell does that mean?”

Lacy grimaced. When I turned around, she’d drawn her sword. “It means I have no idea. She was gone when I woke up, and then I looked out the window and saw all this shit!”

Danny blinked rapidly, pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbed his forehead. He’d been drinking- Lacy could smell it on him. “How the fuck does that happen?!” he said.

“I have no idea!” Lacy said. She was aiming at me. “But if I had to guess I’d say it’s connected to the Sovereignty of it all. Alistair is here- I can feel it. You said something about Gwen? Where are she and Quentin and Joshua?”

“Out there with the other hunters. They’ve dropped the pretense for the time being, and are trying to fight off the ghouls, help the cops and all that stuff. Let’s just get out of here. We should catch up to Gwen, and figure out what she needs us to do.”

“No,” Lacy said.

“No? What’d ya mean no?”

Lacy tapped her hand to her chest, and her Star came lighting forth. It shot through the room and situated itself in front of the door. Lacy followed it, opened the door, and went out into the hallway.

“That’s it? That’s your plan?” Danny called after her in a half-shout half-whisper.

“For now. You coming?” Aiming at me. Trying to kill me.

She received an annoyed grunt in response. Followed by his footsteps catching up to hers.

Lacy heard distantly the terrified occupants of the hotel, the civilians who had not gone out into the fight. They were in their rooms, hiding in terror, waiting for someone to fix this, to save them. The Star led them downstairs to the ground floor, out into the deserted lobby. Nobody was there, not even the staff. They must’ve either retreated upstairs or decided to take their chances outside and see if they could get out of the city.

“Should we barricade the place?” Lacy asked aloud.

“What if we need to get back in here?”

“Good point. Let’s move.”

The night air was dry and hot, the stars mostly blotted out by the city’s light pollution. The rich, earthy scent of Peoria washed over everything, even the massive amounts of spilt blood. The blue Star lunged forth into the city, up the street north of the hotel. Lacy ran after it, her arms and legs stiff from the day’s exertions, her chest heaving up and down as she made herself go faster and faster and faster. Danny, with his longer legs, kept pace more easily, his mildly diminished sense of balance the only impediment.

They made it to a four-way intersection. From the right, three teenagers, two boys and a girl, ran through in terror. They were pursued by four ghouls, two on the more human end of the spectrum, the others walking on their hands and growling.

Lacy planted her feet on the pavement. She held her hands up flat-palmed, pulled them back, and then pushed forward while screaming, “Faerie Wind!”

The wind coalesced around her hands and shot forward, all the air pressurizing and launching at the oncoming ghouls in a continued, thunderous assault. The more monstrous ones found their skin breaking and tearing in the sharp onslaught as Lacy forced more power into her tunnel, creating columns of wind like swords flying directly at her opponents. All four ghouls went tumbling backwards down the street, and Lacy chased after them. She jumped onto the nearest one and planted her knife in the creature’s forehead.

Another ghoul lunged at her, this one more human. It was male, with a head full of white hair and tan skin riddled with wind-scars. He swung a clawed hand at Lacy, who side-stepped and pivoted around the ghoul before jabbing her knife again. It landed in the ghoul’s chest, and she withdrew it quickly, but it didn’t register. The ghoul didn’t even flinch.

Lacy pulled backwards and dodged the flurry of strikes from the ghoul. She reached for her Star, for more wind. Lacy jumped while using a burst of wind to shove against the ground and gain a small measure of altitude. As she fell, she landed on the ghoul and plunged her knife into its face, killing it.

Another ghoul, this one on all-fours, charged at her, tackling her and pinning her to the ground. The size of this one’s ears was enormous, which reminded Lacy of something. Fighting off its fangs and claws searching for food, she searched for soundwaves, and when she found the high-pitched shrieking of car tires. She grabbed hold of it and stretched it over the street, using her free hand to wrap it around the ghoul’s ears like a ribbon. The ghoul screamed as the sound drilled into its ears. Lacy used her knife to put it out of its misery.

Her shoulders heaved up and down, and she breathed slowly.

Footsteps pounded nearby her, to her left, just beyond her peripheral vision. She spun, but not quickly enough. The final ghoul, female, human-looking, was upon her with claws closing in. She swung. A knife cascaded through the air and landed in the side of her skull. Lacy looked and saw Danny approaching her at a hurried clip. Lacy gave him the thumbs up. “I impress even myself sometimes,” Danny said, patting Lacy on the shoulder.

The three teenagers stood in the intersection, in shock and awe at what they’d witnessed.

“Go to the hotel down the street,” Lacy said to them quietly as she approached. “There will be places to hide in there, empty rooms. Lay low until this blows over.”

“This will blow over?” the girl said.

“Yes. I’ll make sure of it,” Lacy said.

“Thank you, sir,” another of the girls said.

“I’m a girl!” Lacy screamed as they ran away giving her strange looks.

“Where to now?” Danny asked, handing Lacy a sidearm from the inner pocket of his denim jacket.

Lacy’s Star shot down the street in the direction the ghouls had come from. Lacy shrugged and began to chase after it, Danny close behind.

She tried to kill me. The fox was trying to warn me.

Trusted her. Let her in.

She’s been working with Alistair this whole time- she led him here, told him when we’d be at the school, put that thing on my chest. One of those dream-eaters Gwen told me about, a mara- her mom’s side of the family. They’re all here, and Isabella has been working for them!
 

They ran into the cacophony, through rubble and wreckage and carnage, the Star guiding them. Two blocks in, they came upon two ghouls armed with guns, and sniped them from afar, one bullet apiece. They ran further in, and found a stock of collided cars forming a barricade outside a bank. Four ravenous, decayed ghouls bayed for blood outside the barricade, while a more intact leader stood at the center. She saw Lacy and Danny approach, and she snapped her fingers. A police baton made of purple light appeared in her hands.

Lacy could spare another bullet. But only one more- she wanted the rest in reserve, just in case. So she listened once again to the swelling noise of the city and parsed through it for individual sound strands, plucking a distant string of dogs whining and pulling it towards the ghouls, corralling them with it.

They all shrieked and fell, and Lacy pulled the trigger on her gun and watched the leader-ghoul’s brains decorate her troops. She ran forward then, knife in hand, to dispatch the rest of then, Danny joining her quickly thereupon.

“We should make sure the people inside are okay,” Lacy said, chest heaving. Offensive sound-magic was still exhausting; she needed to use it more sparingly. And train with it more once this was over. Seeing into the future, are we now? “I hear at least seven heartbeats, most of them panicking.”

“Alright, let’s hop to it then,” Danny said, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm.

They climbed over the cars, and Lacy fell seven feet down onto the pavement.

She opened the wooden door, walked into the lobby to find that there were not seven people hiding inside. There was only one single person, armed with a radio from the 1940s, playing a sixfold pulse of mortal terror.

The bank had a tile floor and teller’s windows on the right-hand side, and carpeted on the left where the cubicles and computers lived. In one of those cubicles was a woman in her late fifties, clad in a black pencil skirt and a long-sleeved, Jupiter-green silk blouse. Makeup immaculate as always, brown hair bound in a large, high bun not revealing a speck of gray. Her heels clicked on the tile floor as she walked into the center of the room, arms folded behind her back. Lacy stopped in the middle of the lobby, confoundment burning her insides like kindling. For a moment, all the noise vanished, and the silence was hideous instead of relaxing. “Mrs… Mrs. Woodrow?” Lacy stammered.

“Hello, Lacy,” Danny’s mother said. “It’s lovely to see you again.”

“But… But…”

The sheer bafflement dulled her senses momentarily. She didn’t notice Danny behind her until he was pressing the barrel of his gun against the back of her skull and lowering the hammer. “I’m sorry about this,” Danny said.

“What the hell is going on?” Lacy said, barely audible.

She heard Danny thump his own chest, and a red ball of light rose from the air behind her and began to dance around the bank lobby, keeping pace with her own Star.

“My Destiny,” Danny said.

The fox didn’t warn her this time.