K. McEntire - Lightbringer

She sniffled, drawing back slightly. “You promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

“’Kay.” Pulling away, Dora knelt down and sorted through her bag until she had her sketchbook in hand. She flipped to the last page and ripped the tree sketch free. “Take it. You promised.”

“I promise,” he agreed, taking her sketch and tucking it away before dropping a final kiss on her tousled curls.

Elle, balancing Tubs easily on her hip, followed Piotr down the stairs. One-handed, she loosened a dagger from her hip and slapped the flat of the blade against his upper arm until Piotr took the gift and tied it at his side. Like all Elle’s weapons, the dagger was honed to a razor-sharp edge and curved cruelly.

“Offer’s still open if you change your mind.” Elle jiggled Tubs until he giggled. “Isn’t that right? Isn’t it?” Tubs babbled happily and the warm haze of his energy surrounded them in a sweetly scented mist.

“Keep them safe.” Piotr momentarily considered kissing Elle’s cheek but thought better of it. Dagger or not, she was still pissed at him.

In the distance a trolley bell dinged, faint and faraway. The fog was starting to really move now, rolling across the streets in swift and steady waves, already up to Piotr’s knees. Up the street the living thronged together, ignoring the fog and the dank smell of rotting fish rising from the sea. Nearby a woman screamed laughter; for the living it would be piercing, but Elle and Piotr were cushioned by the years of empty silence and could barely hear the cry.

“You keep yourself safe,” Elle retorted. “Just cuz I hate you don’t mean I want you pushin’ up daisies. Again, I mean.” She smirked.

“I’ll try to do my best,” he replied gravely and left, moving swiftly towards the shifting, eddying crowd.

“You always do,” Elle sighed, waiting at the door until Piotr had vanished into fog and humanity. Then, fondly, she added, “Jackass.”

The rising wind whipped flurries of debris about Piotr’s ankles, lifting discarded shopping bags and candy wrappers into drifts like piles of autumn leaves. The brick streets beneath his shoes, warped into strange and twisted shapes by age and tectonic activity, were only the fading memories of the meticulously laid brick roads that had been before. Soon the remainder would crumble away, revealing concrete buckled by the California heat, already warped into rolling hills in the center, collecting water and spiritual debris with every summer storm.

Drifting along, letting the wind guide him as if he were as light as the trash spinning by, Piotr concentrated on the journey home rather than brood on what he’d just lost. It took all his will not to turn around and go back, to accept Elle’s generous sanctuary and learn to move among the living like a shadow. He couldn’t though, even if he wanted to. The sky had opened above him, rain poured down, and there were Walkers abroad.

Night was falling, brought in with the storm, and Piotr sped his pace, skidding down Highway 101’s embankment, kicking aside flattened disks of soda cans and sodden cardboard boxes in his wake. The steel mill, their treehouse sanctuary, was still many miles distant, hidden amid the sprawl of industrial buildings and businesses that once thrived at the edge of the city, near the humid stink of the canal. Carefully maintaining his balance on the rain-slick grass, Piotr almost missed the sharp cry of pain amid the drubbing of rain and cracks of blue lightning across the sky.

He paused and it came again, a brief shout from the tangle of buildings just south of the highway, articulate with fear. Stepping up his pace, Piotr followed the scream, heart thudding in his chest and breath coming in short, harsh bursts.

Just south of the water treatment plant three figures fought, sliding through the fog and reflected highway halogens like skaters across ice. Two were long and lean and white-clad— Walkers—but the third, Piotr was surprised to note, was a short, dark figure he recognized: Lily.

What is she doing here, so far away from her own turf? Piotr thought, but then he spotted moonlit steel. Lily was backed against the building, left thigh torn open clear to the bone and leaking silver essence in rivulets like blood; despite her wounds, Lily gave as good as she got, twin daggers flashing.

“Lily,” he cried, sprinting now, “hang on!”

Hearing him, Lily’s attention wavered for a critical instant. One Walker was attacking her face-on, but the moment she paused the other swooped in from the side, clawing her deeply across the hip.

“LILY!” Reaching her side, Piotr slammed the second Walker into the wall. Up close he could see a line of jaw beneath the white hood, and the teeth of the Walker where they poked through the rotting holes in its cheek. Coarse black stubble rasped against his hand as Piotr slapped the Walker’s head against the wall over and over again, curling one hand in the white cloak for purchase. A stench puffed out at him from the fabric, rot and wet decay, moist with a black stink like old sour dirt and albino, crawling things.

Then it laid hands on him, gripping him at the wrists, and Piotr was filled with cold.

The Walker’s icy touch sapped him almost immediately, drawing the strength from Piotr’s arms and chilling his fury away. He could still hear Lily’s raspy cries of pain but they were distant, unimportant, and slowly, under the Walker’s insistent pressure, Piotr’s fist loosened and fell away.

Laying a palm flat against Piotr’s chest, the Walker hissed in a slow and ragged language. Piotr felt a tug deep inside, a slow painful tearing like a hangnail peeling skin and nail away from the quick. He gasped for air but the pull lasted only a moment before the Walker drew his hand away in disgust.

“Too old,” the Walker snarled, taking Piotr by the back of his neck and shaking him like a naughty kitten. “No years from you!”

“Sorry ’bout that,” Piotr slurred and the Walker flung him away. Once outside the range of that intractable cold, Piotr could feel his will returning with the thawing of his limbs. Crawling on hands and knees, he made his way towards Lily, who’d collapsed in a heap only a few yards away. She appeared unconscious.

“No use,” hissed Piotr’s Walker. “No souls here. No life here. Only Rider filth.”

“The White Lady will shriek,” the other said, ignoring Piotr and nudging Lily with the toe of one white boot. “We should lick their bones in retribution.”

“Poshyel k chyertu,” Piotr cursed, reaching Lily’s side and blocking her protectively. “And you can rot there, for all I care!” Forgetting Elle’s dagger entirely, Piotr fumbled for Lily’s bone knives, still clutched in her fists.

His hand was kicked away. Piotr stubbornly stretched for the knives again but the Walker’s foot thrust down, grinding his wrist against the dirt. Skeletal fingers clad in loose gloves of their own rotting flesh pressed on his shoulders, pinning him to the ground. Behind him Lily moaned, eyes fluttering open.

“Piotr?”

“Da?” he gasped, trying not to breathe through his nose. The nauseating stench was all around them now, the cold seeping again into Piotr’s bones and thoughts, slowing his reaction time to a crawl, and trapping him like a fly in molasses. Frigid molasses.

Her voice came at him from a million miles away. “Piotr? What’s that light?”

Flush against his teeth Piotr’s tongue felt numb and dumb, his lips frozen shut, forming garbled words in slow motion. “What…light?”

But he could feel it now, the odd warmth that tickled his skin, melting the cold of the Watchers away in rivulets of sharp white light. The pinning hands and foot were abruptly gone, stripped away, and Piotr took advantage of their absence, staggering to his feet. The area lit up in a corona, spilling around corners and through windows, shining with a fierce insistence across the dusty, hardpan yard. It stretched impossibly far, illuminating even the distant highway with bright, clean light.