Chapter Fifty-eight
Crossing space in a blink was really just a matter of manipulating Time as well, if you thought about it. It took Time to go from point A to point B. Redirect those moments, and Point A became Point B. And just like that, you were there.
Helena heard the sound of ground crunching beneath shoes. She licked her lips and tasted blood. But it didn’t matter. Summoning a store of strength, she reached out through the grass and snatched up the gun that fit so well in her hand. The shoes moved faster now, running.
Helena closed her eyes, imagining the location she wanted to wind up in.
When she opened them again a split second later, she found herself in the quiet and enclosed driver’s seat of her car. The new position was instant torture to her injured spine, but she gritted her teeth and looked down at the gun she still held in her lap. “I have it,” she hissed aloud, wanting to fill the silence with some kind of sound or she would just scream.
Now what? she thought.
But there was no answer. Instead, there was the deafening sound of rending metal. Helena looked up to find the roof of her car being ripped away. But it wasn’t Amunet doing the damage this time; it was another monster from the alternate dimension.
The green drake flapped its large bat-like wings and hovered above the car, peering down at Helena like she was the soft, juicy fruit inside the shell it was painstakingly peeling apart. Helena temporarily forgot about her pain, waved her hand over the ignition of the Shelby, and willed it to start.
The engine revved to sweet, beautiful, rumbling life, and Helena thanked her lucky stars that at least she still had that ability. Her body instinctively wanted to do the driving on its own, but one attempt at pressing in the clutch with her left leg was enough to remind her that she was sorely injured. She sat back, relaxed her legs, and relied on her magic, figuring that if she could make the car start, then she could make it drive too.
She was right. She mentally shifted the vehicle into first, finessed the gas and clutch into that first tricky gear, and rolled out of park. The drake above her screeched in discontent, diving for her through the hole it had made. But she ducked – painfully – and willed the car to go faster. Grass and dirt flew out behind her tires as she steered the vehicle into the field, trying not to hit any of the figures that moved in front of her. She managed it, heading inward about thirty feet before she stopped, then spun it around on a dime to turn back around.
The drake faced her now, flapping steadily a few feet above the ground. It seemed to be considering the car in a new light. Perhaps Helena and her Shelby didn’t much resemble a piece of peel-able fruit any longer. Maybe the drake was thinking the car was actually another animal. With a smaller animal inside.
She gave the horn a long, loud honk just to seal the deal.
Whatever its conclusions, the drake decided to reconsider its dinner choice, because it flapped its wings harder and rose rapidly toward the decaying dome overhead.
Helena watched the mini-dragon fly out of her line of sight, then returned her attention to the tree line. Amunet stood like a ghost against the backdrop of trees, her face ashen, her blonde hair a mess, her clothing torn. But her eyes burned ever brightly in her fury, and at the moment it was all directed at Helena.
The Time Queen didn’t wait for her enemy to attack again. This time, she mentally shoved the car into gear and willed the gas pedal to the floor. The car spun out, but Amunet stayed where she was. Helena resigned herself to the notion that she might actually run someone over that night.
And then Amunet was lifting her hand and flicking her wrist just as Helena had seen Ahriman do earlier. The entire car flipped up from the ground and went end over end. Helena screamed as she was ejected through the hole in the roof created by the drake. She saw the forest and field and all of its many struggling inhabitants go by in a dark blur. She knew she was going to hit something awful and possibly break herself entirely.
A second later, she heard the crunching of metal as her car landed somewhere and took a solid beating. I’m next, she thought.
Helena, someone said.
She lifted her head and opened her eyes. She hadn’t even realized that she’d closed them. More surprising was what she found when they were open again.
She wasn’t falling. She was in fact floating. Helena hovered in place far above the ground, so high up she could nearly touch the top of the protective dome. Surrounding her body was a red and purple cloud of magic. It was the same magic that had given her the strength to attack the Nomads with the mobile home earlier. Now it seemed to have pulled her from the car that would have become her coffin and held her safely aloft a hundred and fifty feet above the ground.
She’d never been particularly fond of heights, but Helena felt perfectly safe in that moment, surrounded by that cocoon of magic. It was her magic, her strength. And it was stronger now than it had ever been.
She looked at her right hand and was both surprised and not surprised to see she still held the weapon. Through it all, she’d managed to keep her grip.
She smiled just a little, the reaffirmation of her strength boosting her enough that she straightened there in the sky and took a second to get her very strange bearings. She had a birds-eye view of the battle, and in the full moon light she was able to take a fairly quick head count.
The Vampire King was locked in combat with a pack of dire wolves, and he wasn’t alone. Two other Kings were assisting him. What he probably didn’t know was that the dire wolves of the Dark World fed on magical attacks. Battling them with spells of any kind only made them stronger – and bigger. Which probably explained why they had already grown to twice their normal size and were now requiring the help of several other Kings to control.
Two other strapping male sovereigns were struggling rather comically with a small horde of Fearfells, around twenty or so in total by her count. They too knew nothing about how to deal with the monsters of the Dark World, and were failing miserably in their attacks. Only certain weapons could harm a Fearfell – and once again, magic did absolutely nothing to them.
In fact, magic worked differently or not at all against most of the creatures of the Dark World, making its inhabitants all the more deadly. She hadn’t called them Night Terrors for nothing. But none of the sovereigns below would know this. She hadn’t had time to warn them.
Directly below Helena was the King she had most wanted to find. He was literally neck and neck with the Nomad Ahriman, both men with their fists wrapped securely around the other’s throat. From the state of their clothing and hair, it was clear they’d been doing this a while and that the two were actually able to cause one another harm, if not mortal harm.
It was distressing for Helena to see William in that state, but at least he was alive. And the moment her eyes settled on him he broke free from Ahriman’s grip, elbowed him in the gut, knuckled him in the face, and turned into the Nomad, shoving telekinetically reinforced power against his enemy’s chest.
Ahriman went sailing. Helena guessed that both inhabitants had done a lot of “flying” over the course of their battle.
William looked up and settled his eyes on her.
Helena.
He was the one who had called her name a few seconds ago. He must have seen her there, floating in her magical cocoon. He’d wanted to help her, wake her up, make her see.
Even now, with monsters dancing their death into the world, and the shield failing, and the Kings losing their battles, and Amunet out there somewhere probably boasting in triumph because the bitch had managed to destroy every one of Helena’s cars, William still managed to seek her out of the chaos and find her with his green, green eyes.
He stood tall in the field below her and through his gaze, wrapped her up in his love. Helena felt her inner strength boosted. She felt her back healing faster and the pain ebbing, as if he and his warden cousin had just given her an injection of morphine and sodium amytal.
The thought made her smile. And he returned the smile knowingly.
It’s up to you now, he told her as if he knew something she didn’t. Helena could see that Ahriman was on his way back in. Split seconds alone had passed.
End this, Helena.
She remained trapped in the pull of his gaze for a short moment more, and then he let her go to turn and face the Nomad for the hundredth time.
Helena looked up as out in the field, a light sparked to life, illuminating the late night darkness. It was yellow-white and reminded her of the gradual brightening of a firefly’s thorax. Helena continued to wordlessly look on as several feet away from this light, another one was born.
Then another. And another.
One by one, glowing embers came to life across the battlefield, each a different color, each a different kind. There were twelve in all. Helena looked down at the gun in her hand and suddenly, just like that, she understood. She knew was coming and she knew what to do.
So she tightened her grip on the .357, and prepared herself.
All at once, the lights on the field shot upward in powerful beams, aimed directly for Helena. She gritted her teeth for the umpteenth time that night, took a deep breath, and shut her eyes tight, willing the beams of light to come in.
They struck her simultaneously, slamming into her from all sides. Twelve different kinds of magic converged on one living vessel, and behind her closed lids Helena’s world expanded. She saw endless night and the birth of stars, she felt the desire that came with beholding true beauty, and she experienced the satisfaction of justice well served. She swam in a miasma of shadow and red and came out to float amidst a sea of perfect, brilliant snowflakes. She felt her teeth sharpen into small, perfect fangs, and tasted the ecstasy of blood on her tongue. She comforted the dead and healed the wounded and changed into a hundred different magnificent beasts in order to run through the forest on all fours and fly through the rainbow skies over the Seelie Kingdom on wings of gold.
This power moved through her, painted her soul a kaleidoscope of brilliant hues, and coaxed from deep within her the Time Queen’s own brand of magic. She heard a distant ticking, familiar but clearer than she’d ever heard it before.
She opened her eyes and looked down to find her right hand still held the gun. But her left hand now held something too. It was a gold pocket watch. It was William’s pocket watch.
Helena was caught up in the spell now and did not waste time wondering how the intricately beautiful device had found its way into her possession. Instead, she recognized it at once, knew exactly how it worked, and popped it open with an expert press of her thumb. The gold lid snapped ajar with a sweet, perfectly crafted sound, revealing the intricate workings of the Time Realm within.
Any mortal looking upon the open watch would see only what they expected to see – twelve numbers on a dial, two hands, and a face of pearl or gold or some equally valuable material. Helena, however, saw so much more.
The numbers were there, though they warped and wavered with the many written numerical languages of the multiverse. And beneath this layer of numbers were the workings of an astrolabe, ancient and infinitely functional. Beyond the astrolabe was another layer. And just past that was another.
They stretched through the dimensions, keeping the Time for a thousand billion worlds and marking everything that had ever been, and everything that would ever be.
Helena peered down at the mechanisms and smiled. “Well what do you know?” she asked softly. “It’s Time.”
With that, the watch emitted a telling green glow, and magic more ancient than the history of magic itself poured from the tiny clock and into Helena’s hand. It moved through her like a blessing, filling her with a warmth that was almost too hot and a power that was very nearly too much. But she absorbed the Time magic, and just as she did with all of the magic that was swimming inside her now, she redirected it into the shining metal object in her other hand.