Chapter 12: I Can Stand My Own Ground

A murder of crows followed her as she stalked her prey. She led the Wild Hunt through the night, during the change of seasons, the liminal time. Her compatriots were men and elves and all things in between, and the crows followed their hideous wake for regular meals.

They rampaged through the fields of Europe, flying on the wind and carving scars into the land, ripping trees from their bases and sending dust and ash and snow exploding all around. A million souls cried out with each mile they crossed, either ripped apart or forced to join. The city of light fell to the tide of darkness, and the crows descended afterwards to feast.

At the edge of the city was a crater a hundred feet deep. Beneath a black sky threaded with red lightning, a young woman lay dead. She wore an Edwardian gown, and had white hair that flowed down to her waist. A plague doctor’s mask was fused to her face with fire, and liquefied flesh dripped off of her. Crows surrounded the corpse, but did not feed. When the Wild Hunt came upon them, the corpse rose from the crater and launched the crows at the Hunt. The murder was too much for the Hunt- Lacy’s eyes were gnawed from her skull, and her men and elves and monsters met the same fate.

Lacy screamed. She would not tolerate this. This dead woman would not stop her, would not force her to yield. She screamed, and the world froze, and the world burned, and the world drowned.

***

Lacy woke up gasping for breath, her heart a throbbing agony in her torso. Her sheets were soaked through with sweat, and she’d torn her fitted sheet while gripping in her sleep. Lacy sat up, gathered her knees around her chest and held them tight. She breathed through her nose and refused to blink. It was an accident, she thought. But if I’m gonna keep doing this, I’m not gonna be able to keep saying that. I’m gonna have to keep going, and I’m gonna have to keep fighting, and I’m gonna have to… Have to…

I’m gonna have to kill people again.

Hellfire crackled beneath her.

Her breathing shifted to her mouth and grew rapid. She uncurled her hands, released her grip around her knees, and made herself breathe slower. The damp sheets clung to her raw skin, fresh sprouts of body hair beginning to poke through. She forced herself out of bed and sat on the floor of her room, clearing a spot amidst the mess of gears and cogs and springs. She folded her legs together, and she sat up straight, and she opened her ears and listened.

The room was quiet but for her.

The house was quiet but for her.

And Danny. His heartbeat was faint inside the bathroom, slow and sorrowful.

She raised an eyebrow, then checked her phone and saw it was ten in the morning. He was usually at work by now.

She listened. The world outside was awash with rain. It hadn’t let up from yesterday, but rather kept its rhythm. So loud it almost drowned out everything else.

A car approached them. A small one, with a familiar heartbeat inside it.

Gwen.

And from the other direction, behind her house, from the woods- footsteps. Running, bounding towards them. Some on all fours. Some snarling and hissing and growling. None had heartbeats.

Lacy listened, and found radio static. It saturated the room for an eternal instant, and through it she heard Drew’s voice say, “You can’t run from this.”

She opened her eyes, ran out her room, and tore open the bathroom door to find Danny in his boxers, sprawled out in the tub with a half-drunk bottle of Irish whiskey. He hadn’t shaved in several days, by the look of it- his beard was overgrown and threatening to cover his mouth and neck. His eyes were glazed over and he stared at the ceiling like he was searching for something in it. He twitched slightly when he noticed Lacy, then nodded.

“Um…,” Lacy said. “It’s ten in the morning.”

“Yeah? What of it?!” Danny snapped.

“That- that- that’s not important right now,” Lacy said, shoving her hair out of her eyes. “We need to leave. Now. Right this second.”

Danny groaned. “Whyyyyy?”

“Because we’re in danger.”

“What kind of danger?”

“The kind I’ve been dealing with lately! The magic kind!”

He sat up, pinched his nose. “Oh shit.”

Outside, a car skidded to a halt, and rapping soon enough came upon the door. Lacy ran over and opened it, and let Gwen inside. “They’re coming. We need to go.”

Danny crawled out of the bathroom, still holding the bottle of whiskey. “Hey. I’m Danny. Who the hell are you?” he asked Gwen.

Gwen stammered, “Uh….”

Lacy said, “He’s up to speed. Come on, let’s-”

Three heartbeats. An otherwise silent cabin. The submachine gun fire of the spring rains. Five sets of footsteps, closing in on the cabin. Lacy pried the bottle from her friend’s hands, and he released it only with great reluctance. “Please, Danny, just listen to me. Put some clothes on, and then come with me and Gwen. It’s not safe here.”

As if on cue, the footsteps broke into a sprint, and were joined by a dozen more. And a dozen more. And a dozen more. All without heartbeats.

“Okay, okay,” Danny slurred, rubbing his eyes.

“NOW!” Lacy said. She hurried him into his room and tossed clothes at him.

They stumbled out the front door and into Gwen’s car, the thunderous footsteps closing in. They came into view, crashing into the car before it could start. Slate skin, red eyes, with fangs bared and claws sharpened. Many of them had degenerated into their feral forms, protruding jaws and pointed ears and rotting flesh. One leapt onto the roof of the car.

Danny screamed.

Lacy screamed louder.

Gwen screamed the loudest. She twisted the key in the ignition and reversed and slammed her foot on the gas. The ghoul stuck its claws into the windshield as they reversed, while the car slammed into another ghoul behind them. The wheels crushed its decaying bones beneath their weight and force.

More ghouls came. And more. And more.

They piled onto the car, blocking out the light with their bodies. All that remained was the sound of rain from above. Lacy’s entire body ached. Her mind was stretched thin as paper and threatened to tear. Beyond all the other noise was static, and beyond that static was silence.

From that silence, her Star descended.

“You can’t run from this,” Drew said to her from the darkness.

Her heart pounded. “I know,” Lacy said.

Danny screamed. Gwen muttered under her breath, reached for magic. For her Star. It wouldn’t be enough- Gwen’s spells weren’t equipped for this many opponents at once, not during the day and not even with her own Star.

The car was lifted from the ground and tossed through the air.

“Be not afraid,” Drew said.

Lacy reached for her Star. It came through the ghouls, through the roof of the car, and settled on her palm. At first she felt nothing, an absence of sensation she knew all too well. She was alone in the blackness again, where she’d been before, where she’d wanted to escape, where she would live forever if she could. But that wasn’t an option.

Drew stood before her, hands in his pockets, his expression entirely neutral. “You’re absolutely sure about this?” he asked. “There’s no going back from here on in.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“You always have a choice, Lacy. Everyone always does. We simply delude ourselves into thinking otherwise. So I ask you once more: are you sure about this?”

Gwen. Danny.

The dead girl.

Her parents.

Everyone else who these monsters had killed, who would be killed if the ghouls weren’t stopped.

Herself. For the first time, she was concerned for her own life.

“I don’t wanna die,” Lacy said. “And I refuse to let my friends die. And I definitely can’t make up for what I did if I die here and now. If this is the trade-off, then so be it.”

Drew smiled. “Proud of you, girl.”

“Thank you,” Lacy smiled back.

Drew vanished, and for a moment, Lacy was alone in the blackness once again.

Then everything burned blue.

She gathered her fingers into a fist through an inch of soil. Every cell in her body ached with horrible pain, and as she forced herself to move the rust began to shed. Heat and strength and power surged through her, electrifying her one cell at a time. It all stemmed from her heart, beating and sending forth bolts of lightning throughout her body. Her arms came alive again, as did her legs, as did her eyes.

The car was wrapped around a tree, and Lacy was on her stomach with her face in the dirt. She shook her head and made herself sit up, and she saw Gwen and Danny next to her, both uninjured but thrown from the car, both unconscious.

A horde of ghouls charged them. They were in varying states of decay, some running on all fours as they charged. Lacy screamed, and forced the warmth from her heart into her legs, forced herself to her feet in spite of the raging pains that saturated them. The hurt dulled but did not vanish as she stood up. Her heart pounded, and sweat poured down her brow and back. Adrenaline fell from her brain through her body like a waterfall. She held out her hand, and she felt the shape of the words inside her mind. Her words gave it shape, and Starlight gave it power.

The simplest version seemed best as the ghouls began to close the gap between them. “PILEAR UISCE!”

A geyser of Starfire exploded inside her, and she released it all through her raised palm.

The rain became her own personal tommy gun. It gathered into her palm as a sphere, one drop at a time, pressurized as if in a boiler, and launched rapid-fire. Water-bullets tore through the ghouls like tissue paper, but not all of them hit the brain, and not all of them fell. Lacy screamed, forced more Starlight into her attack, forced more rain into her ammunition stock. She fired bullets with increasing rapidity, and her heart pounded faster and faster. The wind rose and swung like a storm of scythes, stripping trees of leaves and branches. Lacy’s chest burned in an intoxicating rush of power- she couldn’t remember the last time she felt so…

So…

So much.

The Star darted around her, then bounced backwards. It guided Lacy’s ears, and she pivoted a hundred and eighty degrees as the sound of new ghouls appeared behind her, from behind where her friends lay unconscious. She didn’t launch bullets, but rather a blade of water like a guillotine that cut the ghouls off at the neck as they burst from the treeline.

Her Star darted forty-five degrees to the left. Lacy aimed her bullet spray and fired, and tore through another swath of ghouls. Her heart beat faster than she could keep track of. Her arms began to ache again as she reached for more Starlight.

“L-Lacy?” she heard from behind her. Danny.

“Not now!” Lacy said.

Her ears twitched. Thirty degrees to the right. She spun, and her pool of water spun with her. Ten ghouls hissed as the bullets tore through them. She heaved up and down as her left arm went limp. She only had her non-dominant hand for aim now. Behind her, stirring. She spun; Gwen rose from the ground. She looked at Lacy, then looked above her at the Star. Gwen’s jaw went slack and her eyes bulged. Danny stared at Gwen, then Lacy, then back and forth a few times in bafflement.

Her Star went back to the cabin, and ghouls ran out from inside it, now armed with the knives she and Danny sold. She was burning through rain faster than it fell, creating massive patches of clear air in the middle of the storm, and so she tried a different tactic: “FREAMHACHA!”

Tree roots shot from the ground and plunged through the ghouls like spears, either stopping them short through the chest or braining them directly through the skull.

Pain shot through her right arm like lightning, and it fell limp at her side, dangling with her left. Shit shit shit shit shit, Lacy thought.

Her Star loomed above her, burning bright. It darted backwards, and Lacy pivoted once more. Behind her friends, a ghoul charged on all fours. Lacy couldn’t raise her arms, and her water bullets were impossible to aim without them. She heard thunder, and she sighed as she realized this might kill her. She gathered the Starlight through her mouth, ignited it, and screamed. It was as if her stomach was a boiling pot of water and air, shifting and turning and surging. It crackled and it exploded, and a wave of pure lighting shot from her mouth. As it hit the ghoul, its skin rippled and contorted as its eyeballs and brains melted out the sockets, and its papery flesh burst into flames.

Lacy heard no more footsteps approaching them, no more hissing, no more barring of fangs and claws, no more screeching.

Her Star returned to her, danced in front of her, then in front of her chest. She let it into her heart, and her breathing steadied. Her arms were limp and her legs were heavy with acid, but she was still breathing, and her friends were still alive.

“Holy shit,” Danny said from his spot on the ground.

Gwen’s face said basically the same thing.

Lacy gave them both a weak smile, then fell forward to meet the ground.

Everything went black.