The duelist 9, p.2
The Duelist 9, page 2
“Spoken like a true goddess Incarnate,” I said warmly.
Shay’s endless capacity for kindness and empathy never ceased to amaze me.
“He will, of course, need healing afterwards,” Anwaar continued in a cautionary tone, and she looked at Shay. “Hopefully, your abilities as the Incarnate will be able to counteract any… adverse effects he withstands from being taken into the Dark Realm.”
“I’ll do my best,” Shay said, and I believed her.
“If you can heal the Hearts of several Islands, you can manage one koala-man,” I encouraged her as I leaned over to kiss her temple. “Even one as blindingly clever as Jenner.”
“Your faith in me is astounding, husband,” Shay teased and kissed my cheek.
“Is it faith? When I actually know you’re basically a goddess?” I asked playfully. “Faith is the absence of that sort of knowledge, right?”
Shay shook her head at me, even as she grinned and blushed, but then she turned to look at Anwaar and her brother, and her expression grew more sober as she did.
“Jenner will be in safe hands,” she promised. “Provided you can keep Alex, Rylan, and Jenner safe in the Dark Realm.”
“As safe as anyone can be in the Dark Realm,” Horus remarked, and his arm went around Anwaar’s shoulders again. “We’ve got it, Shay. You can rely on us, remember. It’s not all on your shoulders. Or Alex’s. We’re all in this together.”
At those words, my traitorous mind started blasting High School Musical, which was a memory I’d kind of thought I’d repressed.
But cringey pop culture references aside, the falcon-man made a good point.
“We are,” I said. “I would’ve been dead here my first week if not for Zoie’s help. We’d all be dead several times over if not for how we help each other out. And if the lot of us can overpower people like Aiken, Luhrmann, and Krev, we can fix a stupid little curse in our friend’s brain.”
“Damn straight.” Horus grinned at me.
Jenner was obviously still asleep in his room, right where Horus had left him, and I settled into the armchair beside him. For a few moments, I just watched the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He didn’t look ill. He didn’t look like anything was wrong with him at all. He was just sleeping.
Somehow, that was worse than if he’d looked like he was on the brink of death. The ability to masquerade as if everything was fine felt like a lie, a cheat. My friend was suffering, in danger of dying, yet he looked like everything was fine.
“Alex,” Amaya said, and she softly rested a hand on my shoulder.
“This has to work,” I muttered, and I reached up to cover her hand with one of my own without turning away from Jenner. “Rylan?”
“Dad?” he answered, and he came to stand beside me looking dutiful and determined. Even though we weren’t related by blood, I could still somehow see an echo of myself in him. The way he set his jaw, maybe. The determination that glittered in his eyes.
“You ready?” I asked. “This is going to be… different. Different than any other time we’ve done this.” I knew non-Travelers could enter the Dark Realm because of Mozz’s power, but that didn’t mean it would be easy for Jenner to exist in that space. Rylan and I would have to be particularly careful.
“I’m ready,” he said, and he nodded firmly once. “When you are.”
“It might be easier if everyone else waits outside,” Anwaar advised.
“Of course, love,” Horus said, and he began to corral Zoie, Nova, and Amaya out of the room.
“One moment,” Zoie said, and she quickly darted under Horus’ arm with cat-like speed and grace. Then she knelt before the chair I was sitting in, with her blue eyes wide with concern. “Be safe, my love. I know you’re naturally resistant to the Dark Realm, but you’ve never taken a non-Traveler in there with you before…”
“I’ll be careful, Zoie, I promise,” I said, and I raised a hand to cup her cheek before leaning down to kiss the tip of her nose, then her lips. She was soft and warm as ever.
“Come back to me,” she whispered.
“Always,” I swore.
“And keep Rylan out of trouble,” she added, with the tiniest hint of a wry smile pulling at her lips. Then she reached up with both hands to cradle my face, and her thumbs stroked over my cheekbones.
“No promises.” I grinned and was well aware that Rylan could hear every word I was saying. “Kid’s getting to be more of a handful by the day. And your training will surely be paying off. It did for me.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rylan’s chest puff up proudly, and I flashed him a wink.
As Zoie got to her feet, she ruffled his hair, kissed his cheek, and then threw me one last meaningful glance before she let Horus lead her out of the room.
The room felt cavernous when they were gone. It was just me, Anwaar, Shay, and Rylan surrounding the still-asleep Jenner. I was sure Horus would be pacing incessantly outside, separated from his sister, his love, and his best friend as they prepared to plumb the very limits of what the Dark Realm could do, but I couldn’t think about that right now.
“Right,” I muttered. “We all ready, then?”
“Don’t try to force anything,” Anwaar advised me. “The Dark Realm is more mental than physical, I’m sure you know. Sometimes you have to take a step back and let things take shape by themselves. It’s like trying to catch smoke, otherwise.”
“Catching smoke,” I repeated with a nod. “Got it. Ry?”
“Ready,” Rylan said again.
I reached forward and took one of Jenner’s hands, and I took one of Rylan’s for good measure while he took Jenner’s other hand.
Linked in a triangle, Rylan and I then plunged in.
When I opened my eyes, we were standing in the Dark Realm. The forest of the In Between loomed over us with trees so tall I couldn’t see their tops, even as I saw a glittering moon in the sky above us.
No matter how many times I came here, I would never get used to it. It was… imprecise. Like a dream, which made sense. Only in retrospect would I ever fully realize things that didn’t make sense.
But for now, I needed to grip tight to my goal, my vision.
We needed to get the curse out of Jenner’s head.
Physically at least-- or, as physical as anything in the Dark Realm could be-- Jenner looked fine. His entire body had come with us, and he was lying on the forest floor in the same position as he’d been lying in the real world.
Rylan peered down at him, and when I looked up from Jenner to assess Rylan, I noticed his form was… different somehow. I couldn’t quite pin it down. He seemed… less here than normal. Maybe it was just a byproduct of his being able to change shape, and I just hadn’t noticed it before.
“Right,” Rylan said. “How do we…”
He trailed off and looked to me with an unsure expression.
“Do brain surgery on the psychic manifestation of our friend?” I finished, and I tried not to sound too dry. “No idea. But Anwaar said not to force it. Maybe the idea will… come to us.”
“Maybe you can just… reach inside and pull it out?” Rylan suggested. “If you picture it as like… a marble. Something that feels different to the rest of his, er, brain.”
I nodded as I considered this. If this place wasn’t physical, I didn’t have to be. One theory of multiple universes was that they occupied the same physical space, but the atoms vibrated at different frequencies, and we could only interact with and perceive a certain frequency. If I imagined Jenner as being one frequency, and the curse in his head as another, maybe I could reach inside his head and pull it out. Like a marble.
Only one way to find out.
“I’m not sure if I want to try the first attempt on Jenner’s actual mind,” I said. “Let’s try the ground first.”
“The ground?” Rylan repeated.
“Just so I know how to work it,” I said, and I knelt on the ground beside Jenner’s prone form. There were probably dream earthworms in the soil, right? I could manifest one if not. I just had to picture the worm as one frequency, one that matched me, so I could interact with it. The soil was something else entirely, as inconsequential as air.
I slowly pressed my right hand into the earth, but I only wanted my hand to go through, not all of me. I didn’t want to get stuck in whatever the center of the Dark Realm was.
Different frequency, I thought. Like reaching through sand, or air. The worm is solid, everything else is--
My hand suddenly lurched downwards, and I nearly overbalanced. Rylan let out a gasp, and I saw my arm had sunk into the ground almost up to the elbow and was cutting through the soil like a projector image with a shadow over part of the projection.
Slowly, I rummaged around while trying to move my arm. It seemed to work, but I couldn’t feel anything solid. I couldn’t feel anything at all.
“C’mon, worm,” I muttered. “Or a bug, or a stone, or something.”
I had to do this. To save Jenner. There was no way I was just going to let him die. Or worse. His mind, I knew, was his most valued possession. He loved books, he thrived on sheer knowledge. His entire people had been plagued by that mist, which forced them to either turn mad and savage or leave their homes. I wasn’t going to fail him, I couldn’t, I--
My hand brushed something solid.
Something round and lumpy and solid, with a sharp edge. I wrenched my hand up and out of the soil I couldn’t feel, and then I stared at the small stone in my palm.
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “Holy shit. It worked!”
Rylan stared at the pebble, then at me, then back at the stone.
“You pulled it out,” he said. “You think you can do the same with Mr. Jenner?”
“Only one way to find out, right?” I grinned up at him and tossed the stone aside. Then I turned so I was knelt facing Jenner directly, and Rylan knelt on his other side.
“If he like, wakes up or something, you’ll have to keep him calm,” I said. “I think I can avoid disrupting his thoughts or scrambling his brain, because I won’t actually be physically interacting with it, but if he panics, I might lose my focus, or he might shift his own density.”
His mind might ‘expect’ to be able to feel my hand in his head, which, in a place like this, would probably make it real.
“Got it,” Rylan said determinedly, and I saw him square his shoulders.
“Okay,” I murmured to myself. “Just like the stone in the ground. The curse is a marble. Just a marble. You’re picking up a little glass marble.”
I laid my hand on Jenner’s forehead, and I was about to reach inside when his eyes opened.
Then he lunged forward to attack me.
Chapter 2
“Shit!” I yelped as Jenner collided into me and knocked me flat on my back.
He wasn’t particularly large or heavy, but he surprised me so much that I still went down.
“Jenner!” I cried out as the now-feral koala-man snarled and growled, and his teeth gnashed like he meant to rip out my throat. “Jenner, it’s me! It’s Alex!”
“Dad!” Rylan shouted, and he made to rush forward.
“Keep away, Ry!” I ordered as I struggled against Jenner. He wasn’t as strong as I was, but in this state, he was using every ounce of his strength while I didn’t want to use too much of my own in case I hurt him.
What had made him do this? Horus hadn’t mentioned anything about the curse trap in Jenner’s head turning him savage. Was it because Rylan and I had brought him into the Dark Realm?
No, I refused to believe that. The Dark Realm was scary and weird, but it wasn’t Knowledge, not like the Ocean. It had to be the curse. Even so, I’d never expected it to get so bad that Jenner wouldn’t even recognize me. If I didn’t already know this snarling koala-man I was currently wrestling against on the ground was my friend, I would have assumed he was one of the strange beasts that roamed this place.
Except I did already know he was my friend. Which made it all the more worrying.
“Jenner!” I said again, and I tried to roll so it would be my weight pinning him down. It would be easier to restrain him without hurting him like that. “It’s Alex! Your friend! You have to snap out of this!”
I could see even as I spoke that it was no use. Assuming Jenner could even understand what I was saying, he didn’t care.
I was about to give him a shove and flip him onto his back when Jenner suddenly went dead still. I froze, too, and some tiny spark of hope ignited in my chest that the erudite koala-man had returned to his senses.
“Jenner?” I asked carefully, but he wasn’t looking at me. Something off to the side, in the forest, had caught his attention, like a hunting dog that had scented a rabbit.
And, just as quickly, just as similar to a predator on the hunt-- which was especially odd considering I knew koalas weren’t a predatory species-- Jenner wrenched himself away from me and tore off into the trees of the forest of In Between.
“Mr. Jenner!” Rylan cried out, and he made to chase after him, but something forced him back. He bounced right off some invisible wall, like he was trapped in the clearing.
“Rylan?” I asked, but I knew he wouldn’t have an answer. He’d mentioned before about struggling to travel between clearings, unless he was called by someone, but he’d never said he was forced to stay in or out of one by an actual wall.
“I don’t know,” Rylan said, like I’d known he would, and he raised his hands and carefully pawed at the wall. Clearly, it didn’t hurt or shock him, like an electrified fence or something. It was just a barrier.
I reached out my own hand to test it, but I didn’t come into contact with anything. It was just air.
“What the hell?” I muttered and waved my arm around. Then I looked at Rylan. “Did you imagine this? Conjure it with your mind, maybe?”
“I don’t think this is like you reaching into the dirt.” Rylan shook his head. “I think this is because our minds are different. Mozz… did something to your head. And you’ve always been able to move more freely through this place than I have.”
“Maybe it’s because my Traveler blood is stronger,” I said, and I saw his concern for Jenner and tried to lighten his mood a little. “You’re only half-Traveler, I’m purebred.”
A tiny smile tugged at the corner of my son’s mouth, but he was still obviously preoccupied. Which was fair enough. I was worried about Jenner, too.
“You stay here,” I told him. “Once I find Jenner, I’ll try ‘broccoli,’ and you can CanterRy it up and come find us. You think you’ll be okay on your own?”
“Yeah, Dad, just go find Mr. Jenner.” Rylan nodded determinedly.
I could tell he was keen to prove himself as a capable young man, and no doubt he was just as keen to try out some of the stuff Zoie had been training him with. I couldn’t deny I was also pretty eager to see what he could do, but I wanted to save that for a situation where the sanity of one of my closest allies wasn’t hanging in the balance.
I was about to turn and head into the trees after Jenner when Rylan cried out.
“Wait!”
I looked back at him, and he was running for one of the trees on the other side of the clearing. He bent down, picked up a branch, and then jogged back to me. By the time he was standing in front of me and pushing the branch into my hands, it had transformed into a simple, but very effective-looking, sword.
“Just in case,” Rylan said to me. “Not for Mr. Jenner, but there could still be other dangers here.”
“What would I do without you?” I asked, and I smiled confidently and ruffled Rylan’s hair with my free hand. It wasn’t Swiftness or Decisiveness, my dual-blades imbued with demon cores, but it was a hell of a lot better than my bare hands.
Transformation in this place had always come easy to Rylan, and I wondered if he might be better suited to removing the curse from inside Jenner’s head once we found him. But that was a decision to make once we actually had Jenner with us, and he was calm enough to let us literally rummage around in his head.
“Be careful, Dad,” Rylan said, and for a moment he sounded so much younger than fourteen.
“Don’t worry about me, kiddo,” I promised. “Just keep an ear out for the safeword, all right?”
He nodded again, and then I took off into the forest.
I wasn’t much of a tracker, since I’d never really been one for nature, but even I could tell where Jenner had gone. There were footprints in the softer parts of the mud, broken twigs, and disturbed branches. I wondered if perhaps he’d been fleeing from something rather than running toward something else, because this looked more like someone doing everything in their power to get away than someone trying to stalk prey of some kind.
Just as long as Jenner didn’t intend to hunt me. I didn’t want to hurt him, but if he was going to rip my throat out, I wasn’t going to take that lying down, either.
The deeper I went into the trees, the creepier the forest became, so much so that I was sure it wasn’t only in my head. Or, maybe it was, because this whole place was sort of in my head.
Was I making it creepier because I expected it to be?
Either way, I knew the beasts roaming around in here were just as dangerous as their real-world counterparts, and I kept my guard up. Off in the distance, I could hear something fighting, presumably over food or a mate, and I was deciding to steer clear of them in my hunt for Jenner when I heard a cry.
An unmistakably koala-like cry.
I gritted my teeth and swore under my breath, because it had come from the direction of the fight. Jenner must have crossed some Dark Realm creature, or maybe he’d sought it out specifically for a fight. Either way, now I would have to go and directly confront the thing before he got himself killed. Even in his savage state, he was still smaller than me, weaker than me, and older than me. If he got into a fight with anything my size or larger, he probably didn’t stand much of a chance.
And, as I burst into another clearing, I swore again, because of course he’d gotten into a fight with something my-size-or-larger.
