Christina Henry: Black Heart

The sprites gave a sharp cry as one, holding on to their heads. I was going about this the wrong way, apparently. The creatures must draw their power from the bank of the stream, not the stream itself. Or maybe they did draw power from the water, and the presence of dry land was like kryptonite. Either way, I could stop messing around with the water. Which was good, because I wasn’t making much headway in that arena.

I shifted position so that I was closer to the shore, and sent a full blast of nightfire into the land that ran along the lip of the stream. It exploded in a very satisfying way, raining earth over the water creatures.

As soon as the dirt splattered over them, steam rose from the creatures’ bodies at the points of impact. They screeched at me, the sounds horrible in my ears. Their voices were like pieces of broken glass grating together. I hit the bank with more nightfire, keeping up a continuous stream so that the creatures were pummeled over and over.

They screamed, they howled, they gnashed their watery jaws together, but they would not yield. These creatures didn’t know me. I never gave up, not in an argument with Beezle or a battle against a more powerful foe. And I was pissed. And hungry. And thirsty.

All of those things were merging inside me as white-hot anger. I just wanted my sword back. It didn’t have to be this difficult. How much more pain could these creatures take? When would they give up? When would they give in?

I was so busy working myself into a fury that I didn’t notice that most of the creatures were gone. Only one remained, hovering over the sword like a possessive spirit, refusing to let go despite the fact that it was obviously in extreme pain.

Now it was really down to a battle of wills. But I would win. I could feel it. I could taste it.

The more dirt I blasted at the creature, the more of its body was eaten away. After a while it was a gross, distorted version of itself. It looked like a Dalí painting, its limbs elongated. Huge chunks were missing from its head and torso.

I dropped my arms for a moment, overwhelmed by a strange pity for this pathetic thing. It was like a broken insect, a daddy longlegs that had its legs pulled off by some cruel child and was left with nothing but its body, quivering and crippled on the ground.

“Let go,” I said.

The creatures hissed at me in response.

“Let go,” I repeated. My anger had faded, and I’d lost my appetite for punishment. I didn’t want to hurt it anymore. I just wanted it to leave.

The creature rose up in response, showed me the full extent of the damage I’d done. It lifted its head in obvious pride, daring me to continue. But it would not leave, and I had started this, so I had to see it through.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and let my power flow.

The creature kept its head up and its body straight even as the structure of it disintegrated around him. After a while I couldn’t see it clearly anymore. My tears flowed too hard and too fast.

Finally, it was done. The creatures were gone. Whether I’d killed them or I’d frightened them away was irrelevant. I’d won. I flew down to the surface of the water, plunged my hand beneath it, and pulled out the sword.

“Yay for me,” I said sadly.

I touched down on the ground well away from the stream and prepared to open a portal home. At least the Retrievers were a known quantity. Here I could end up fighting who knew what freaky thing.

And really, Lucifer could help for a change. Surely he wouldn’t want his precious unborn grandchild to be taken by the Retrievers. Or maybe he did. Maybe it was part of some grand design of his. I wasn’t going to pretend to understand Lucifer. If I started thinking Lucifer’s actions made sense, then it was probably a bad sign.

I summoned up the energy necessary for a portal, concentrated on my destination and reached for the fabric of space and time.

When a portal is created, a seam is torn in that fabric. I’d never understood how to do this until I’d come completely into my powers. Now it seemed like a simple thing. Think of destination, carve a path home. Easy.

Except that when I tried to create that path, the world resisted . There was no other word for it. There was no space for me to cut a seam.

I exerted more power, more will, and all I succeeded in doing was making myself sweaty and frustrated.

“Just where in hell did you send me, Nathaniel?” I asked aloud.

So I couldn’t create a portal. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t an existing portal somewhere on this world. Every world had an escape hatch. I just had to find it.

I could wander aimlessly until I bumped into it. Or I could use a tracking spell to zero in on its location. The only trouble was I had no idea how large this world was. I could expend a lot of energy on finding the portal and then discover that I was too weak to get there.

I was already past the point of extreme hunger and was moving into that place where I was so hungry I couldn’t feel it. If I ate more than a couple of bites of anything at the moment, it would just make me feel sick. This was really bad, because I thought that my baby was eating up more than the usual amount of resources. My clothes weren’t flapping on me yet, but it wouldn’t be long before they were.

My priority was still to find edible food and water. But if there was a portal nearby, I could go directly there and eat when I got home. After I defeated the Retrievers. Or not.

Hunger and sleep deprivation were making me scattered. I made a concerted effort to pull myself together. Find the nearest portal. Make an action plan after that.

Using the tracking spell was going to be pretty distracting, so I needed to find a semi-safe place to close my eyes. I flew back to the tree where I’d napped earlier. I’d slept there for several hours without disturbance, so it seemed my best option. I settled down in my perch and tried to ignore my growling stomach.

Once, when Gabriel and Beezle had gone missing, I’d thrown a net of power over an alley and found a permanent portal in the middle of Chicago. I wanted to do something like that now, but given the potential size of this world, I needed to start small and expand slowly.

I visualized the net in my mind, imagined it settling over everything I could see. Once I felt I had a good grasp on it I expanded the net out slowly. I deliberately limited the parameters of the spell to a portal. If I expanded it to include anything with a magical signature, I’d end up getting a lot of signals. Anything with even a touch of magic, including the dragon, the water creatures, and the enchanted stream bank, would show up.

As the spell spread its fingers slowly outward, I could “see” the shape of the land underneath it. This jungle seemed to go on forever with nothing to interrupt it except the occasional body of water. There were streams, rivers, lakes, waterfalls. The ground undulated with softly rolling hills, and far in the distance, across the forest, were high, rocky peaks.

All of that water had to go somewhere, so I expected—and found—a huge body that could only be an ocean.

And still there was no portal.

For the first time I felt a little twinge like despair. It seemed impossible that I had survived such insane odds over and over again only to die of thirst or starvation on a lonely planet far from home.

Keep looking, I told myself. Keep going. If you’re not going to fight, you might as well have allowed the water creatures to take you.

My spell expanded outward, crossing the ocean. I sensed the movement of gigantic animals under the surface, and couldn’t help but think of Alerian. Lucifer’s brother. The water god.

He’d first appeared as something that looked a lot like a giant squid. I wondered whether Lucifer and Puck had managed to find out what Alerian wanted, why he had woken after such a long time. I wondered whether Chicago would still be there when I managed to get out of here, or if I would return to a smoking ruin.