Neverland's Library: Fantasy Anthology Read online

  Shay saw the torn sleeve and bloodstain.

  “What happened?” Esme asked, lifting her own goggles and narrowing her eyes. Shay could tell she was squaring on Mogg just a little, and he felt embarrassed by the smug flicker inside his chest.

  “Just caught it on something.” Mogg looked up and seemed to take note of Esme, then looked at Shay. “I’m fine.”

  Shay pulled up his goggles. “Still bleeding. They’ll sniff you out.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We’ll ‘pen it anyway,” Esme said, procuring her battered field kit.

  “Last thing I need is to get epi’ed up on an HK. Forget it.”

  “We’re not on an HK.”

  “Whatever.” They stood in a triangle, Mogg facing both of them down. “I’m fine. We’re wasting time.” He yanked his sleeve over the wound and his goggles down over his eyes.

  The Extractor started away from them and Shay looked at Esme, who shrugged and followed after. That’s when Shay made out a peculiar bit of signage, poking askew from a clump of dead bracken. Gallows Hill Park.

  He chewed the inside of his cheek. Why is that so familiar? Had they been to this place before? He would have remembered, surely.

  “Esme.”

  “What?”

  “Did you happen to see the name of our coords? Where are we?”

  “Some place called Salem.”

  Salem. Shay’s heart thumped beneath his sternum.

  Home.

  #

  They crossed an open field that was once a park where he’d played as a child—at least he believed so—and stepped onto a road where the cross sign read Witch Hill Drive. Shay didn’t recall many details from Salem’s proud history, but he knew enough. Four-hundred years ago the city was gripped in mass hysteria over the existence of cunning-folk. Centuries later, they dedicated a museum and named streets and parks after the merciless events.

  If they only knew how right they’d been. But you can’t drown out the arcane blood, you can’t smother it, burn it, crush it, or even lock it away. Magic was simply another force of Nature, however veiled and misunderstood. Shay had come to that conclusion some time ago, just as he imagined the Technocrat had, after their orders were altered from killing grubs to capturing and delivering them to Chrysalis.

  They checked Esme’s clicker, a brass and leather instrument fitted to her arm, coils and springs holding a circular gauge in place, before they entered a once-populated area. The device was calibrated to their target coordinates within a few dozen meters, and the gauge pointed them down a litter-strewn avenue between apartment buildings.

  Everything was surreal in its long familiarity. Shay felt as if he’d grown up not too far from there, and despite the refuse he was a little moved by how untouched portions were. They went cautiously through a car lot, sparse with still-parked vehicles soiled by shadow dust, bumpers plagued by rust, some with flat tires but otherwise unaffected. Shay swiped a dirty car window, peered inside at what looked like clothing, some empty bottles, various other junk, all the likely remains of a life once-lived some twenty years past.

  “Up ahead,” Esme muttered.

  He peered past Mogg down the avenue toward a wider street jumbled with empty automobiles and overgrown weeds. He could make out the shattered hulk of a sprawling building, most of it destroyed and jagged with exposed girders and weathered cement.

  “Pretty sure that’s the place,” Esme said, tapping the clicker’s gauge. The spaces between the instrument’s subdued, methodic clicks were briefer. As they neared the intersection and the ruins beyond, it continued to tick-tick a double-quick cadence; in addition to coords, the device had a filter that measured the amount of active shadow dust in the air—what the Theocrat referred to as arcane fallout.

  They paused at the street corner next to an overturned bus stop shelter. Some people were buried in the yard just beyond, it seemed, under piles of rocks, but portions had been dug up, and the surroundings were scattered with old human remains. Shay had long ago quit giving too much thought to scenes such as this.

  While Mogg edgily asked Esme to switch “that damn thing” off, Shay continued to scope the area, turning the dial on his goggles, clacking the lenses from visible light to thermal and back again. He noted a house close to the road still had a soiled, tattered American flag hanging there. He considered it a moment, then scanned past, read the faded words NSMC - Salem Hospital Parking on a dust-encrusted sign across the street.

  Then he saw something. The red-orange outlines of two figures across the hospital parking lot, close to the ruins of the building. “I got movement.”

  “Where?” Mogg asked.

  “Twelve o’clock, about two-hundred meters. A pair, at least.”

  “The hospital?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good eye. That’s where we’re headed.”

  #

  Near the hospital ruins they carefully picked their way. The grounds around it were a mass of once-organic coils, a stretch of tangled, vine-like tentacles with knife-long thorns. All of it had long-since petrified, had become either hard as granite or brittle as fossilized rottenstone. The stony shapes intersected automobiles, some overturned, others shattered.

  They paused by a sidelying city bus, ripped in two, the interior blackened, a few morbidly tossed skeletons, bones all but crystallized, sprawled reaching toward Shay, their mouths agape with silent screams.

  Mogg, his bald head shining with sweat, toed one with his boot, and it crumbled. “Good times,” he said low, then craned his neck toward the hospital. “They must’ve gone inside. See any signatures?”

  Shay shook his head. Esme did the same.

  The Extractor reached inside his coat and withdrew his favored weapon, a black-springed, brass-hooked quirt, which he used to envelop his prey. Shay had used a similar weapon on occasion, and they were brutally effective from a medium distance, keeping one outside most adversaries’ direct strike zone.

  “Time for Bunny,” Mogg said to Esme.

  “Time for Bunny,” she echoed. From her slingbag she procured a ball-shaped item in one hand, pulled a turnkey dangling from a leather necklace from beneath her collar with her other hand. She inserted the key into the ball and gave it several turns, then set it on the ashy ground. It was nothing new to Shay. Six thin reticulated legs of brass unfolded and the ball lifted up, now more of a thorax shape with moving gears atop it. Bunny was Esme’s clockwork spy, a spider-like automaton with a simple mosaic tube housed within a cylinder atop its body.

  Nobody ever questioned such a device, Shay thought. And why not? When did automatons become intelligent? How did Bunny know where to go? Shay reckoned he already knew, but the hunters in all the Technocrat’s ternions and the Bloc’s Unitech militia didn’t dare say the M-word, and neither did he.

  Bunny scuttled off toward the ruined building, quietly whirring, as Esme adjusted her spec goggles to attune to the automaton’s mosaic. Mogg went first, and Shay took Esme’s hand to lead her, since she was now seeing from Bunny’s crystalline ‘eyes.’

  The Extractor took cover in the shadow of a large petrified vine perhaps twelve meters from the building, and Shay and Esme joined him, putting their backs to the crumbly stone. Rottenstone powder fell on them. They waited, watched for heat signatures, and Shay brushed the chalk from his shoulders, took a deep breath through his nose, smelled the acrid dust likely caking the fine hairs in his nostrils.

  “C’mon, c’mon. Let’s see wha’ we got,” Mogg said, more to himself than anyone else. He seemed especially eager, even for ‘the Dog.’

  Esme’s tiny brass spy passed into a large hole within the hospital’s outer wall.

  “All right,” Esme breathed. “Okay…it’s a mess…glass and dust everywhere. But there’s a path.” She paused a moment, then: “We can move into the forward area. There’s no one.”

  “Let’s do it.” Mogg set off at a jog, put his back against the debris of a collapsed awning just outside the w
recked hospital entrance next to the remains of an emergency vehicle wedged midway through the steel frame doors. He waited for them to catch up, nodded, then pivoted and led the way in.

  #

  Glass and broken tile crunched beneath boots. Heaps of chairs and gurneys and wheelchairs. Intentionally placed. Creating a walkway through what used to be the main lobby. Shay didn’t like it. Esme raised her fist and they stopped; Bunny had discovered a tripwire, and now Shay liked it even less. This wasn’t some random place. Cunning-folk came here for a reason, and they didn’t want to be followed.

  They each stepped over the taut thread, rounded a dust-coated desk with RECEPTION printed across the front, then Bunny led them to a long hallway, navigating more traps. This time Shay made note of the faint patterns on the peeling paint of the walls, just above the threads.

  Witchmarks. Traceries. No, he thought, more like stains.

  Treasonous arcane sigils. Brands singed on already-scarred flesh. Signs of cunning-craft and those who wielded it.

  Another hallway, a placard indicating Wing B; beneath it, more words: Ward 3, Ward 4, Rehabilitation. Bunny rounded the corner, toward Rehab.

  Esme stopped them. “Something weird,” she whispered.

  “What?” Mogg asked.

  She shook her head. “Can’t—” then gasped and snatched her goggles off. In the same instant something clanged and pieces of Bunny clattered back down the hall.

  #

  Esme froze, her eyes scanning the dark. Shay did the same, and his spec goggles revealed indistinct heat outlines. He realized a pair of humanoid figures, partially wrapped in a swift-crawling webwork of vines, had come into view from around the corner at the end of the hall.

  Synths! Amalgams of cunning-folk and sentient Medusae. They must have hidden themselves within their alien coils. Reports of such beings from other ternions had reached Shay’s ears, but his group had never actually encountered them before.

  Dozens of thorny tendrils filled the end of the hallway, slithering, propelling the cunning-folk toward them. They were on the attack. Shay was surprised. This was certainly something new.

  “Get behind me!” Mogg stepped in front, whirling his quirt, hooked ends slicing the air in sibilant whooshes.

  A viny tentacle sliced through the air. Mogg sidestepped it, and Shay pulled Esme by her coat sleeve out of the way. She still seemed a little stunned after Bunny’s destruction.

  Mogg charged, kept to the wall on their right, whipping his quirt forward. Score. The hooks bit flesh, snagged the synth in the body someplace above their shoulders—it was hard to say just where, on account of the darkness and sudden chaos. Medusae vines snatched the weapon’s tethers, and the cunning-folk let loose a high yet masculine squall as the appendages writhed and pulled.

  “That’s right, asshole!” Mogg roared, tugging back violently. “You like that?”

  The cunning-man screamed again.

  “Mister Kelley!” yelled the other cunning-folk, revealing an unmistakable female voice.

  “Fight, my dear,” the male synth growled.

  “Talons out!” Mogg yelled, calling for Shay and Esme to unsheathe their respective ternion-rods. He ducked a grabbing vine and tugged the quirt, getting another scream from the man.

  The female squared and sent multiple vines at them, snatched items littering the hall—a collapsed wheelchair, a fake plastic tree—and catapulted them.

  Mogg charged, his extraction rod out. Shay wanted to yell this wasn’t an HK, but he was too busy evading hurtling debris. A crash cart smashed the drywall behind him, spraying chalk powder and shadow dust, creating a large hole. Vines slithered forward, sprouting dagger-sized thorns.

  “This is crazy,” Esme said, avoiding a seeking tentacle. “We need to fall back!”

  “No!” yelled Mogg. “Come on!” He pushed forward and leaped at the cunning-man, hauling on his quirt like the reins on some unbroken beast. The vines tried to stop the Extractor but he was a big man and determined. He raised his extraction rod, steel talons open, and plunged it into the man’s chest as thorny vines encircled his legs, drawing him into the Medusae’s folds.

  “Aiggh!”

  “Mister Kelley!” the female synth shrieked, Medusae tentacles shuddering.

  “Run, Miss Ewing,” the man gurgled through bloody teeth. “Go quickly…”

  Shay had his channeling rod out and batted vines away, stepped aside from smaller ones trying to latch onto his ankles.

  “Get over here!” Mogg yelled over the cunning-man’s screams.

  “How?” Esme yelled, having the same difficulties.

  “Use your goddamned training! Fight or this bastard’s gonna lay my ass open!”

  “C’mon,” Shay said, and he willed them both forward.

  Somehow they wove their way through twenty feet of thrashing thorns and debris, arrived cut up and red-stained to Mogg’s extended hand within his bloody coat sleeve. Shay activated his channeling rod and its ends opened, bronze coils sliding out and over both his and Mogg’s hands, joining them together, Extractor and Channeler, and then Esme, their Diffuser, did the same to Shay’s other hand. He peered back at her. Esme was bleeding from a dozen cuts, some of them really open. They were in desperate straits if they didn’t siphon the cunning-man dry and use some of his essence to heal their more grievous wounds.

  The female synth had angled away from them. She couldn’t decide whether to press the attack or take her companion’s advice and flee. Shay could see her indecision, and it doomed her.

  They sucked her Mister Kelley dry in an instant. The elderly man’s witchmark had been a hexagram-styled pattern across his balding forehead, and it, along with what most called the draw—or the torus within the more practiced covens—flowed through Mogg into Shay. The witchmark faded from the man’s weather-beaten flesh, as if erased, and the man groaned as Shay felt the essence flow. It hummed like a song in his breast, thumped, quavered, became the wings of a swift, the flutter of a ghost moth.

  Before Shay had a chance to open his eyes, to allow some magical healing energy to flood their veins, Mogg set upon the hesitating cunning-woman, his quirt hooking her flesh. As one he led them, pivoting the ternion, and the Extractor’s rod violently entered her, just above her left breast. Medusae vines thrashed, then drooped, going still. Nothing stood in the way of Mogg the Dog’s hunger.

  “It’s not…an HK…” Shay whispered, still agrip in the euphoria.

  “Shut up,” Mogg replied.

  Shay looked directly at the cunning-woman’s pale and oddly familiar witchmarked face, saw interlaced vortices with curlicue swirls in an intricate pattern. He saw, too, the fear and trepidation in her odd-colored eyes.

  Mismatched eyes. One blue, one green. Surf and turf.

  What a peculiar thought.

  No, a memory. Of what? A nickname. Little Surfin’ Turf.

  Could it be? They were in his hometown, after all. ‘Miss Ewing,’ the other synth had called her.

  “Tori?” Shay said aloud without realizing.

  She looked at Shay, confusion flashing.

  Then the arcane lines warbled through his flesh and bones.

  #

  A little girl in a summer dress. On a carousel. Pig tails. Sun-dappled nose. Frantic giggles right from the heart. “C’mon! Play with me, Shay!”

  No mark back then; it still lay hidden beneath unmarred skin.

  “Play with me!” One eye blue, one eye green.

  “Play with me…”

  #

  “Shay! What the FUCK!”

  Mogg pulled at his arm, nearly wrenched it from the socket. Shay looked around, blinked. Esme hung from his other arm, limp, a shard of white jutting from her forearm. Her rod uncoiled from his left hand and a welling sickness sent chills through him. She dropped to the floor.

  What happened? Shay had just thought to save his friend; that he didn’t want her to die. He wanted to save her. He wanted to go back to pig tails and carousels, before gods
and monsters awakened and the world turned to shit. But now this?

  “Let go!” Mogg yelled. He clubbed Shay with his extractor rod, striking him across the cheek.

  Pain stirred him to action. This was Mogg’s fault. They grappled atop the lifeless husk of the cunning-man as the Medusae vines petrified around them.

  “What did you do?” The Extractor pushed him back, his right arm still locked to Mogg’s left by the channeling rod. They spun together like a pair of drunken dancers, tumbled over some stony vines, rolled over Esme who lay unconscious or lifeless, hard to say.

  Shay’s coat snagged on something, tore open. Mogg landed atop him, a crushing weight that pushed the air from Shay’s lungs. The Extractor’s eyes widened as he registered what he was seeing all across Shay’s bared torso. Spirals and vortices, chevrons and pentagrams, and all other manner of arcane patterns. Witchmarks. Dozens. Tattooed on his skin. Siphoned and kept back though mission after mission rather than channeled to their Diffuser, to Esme.

  “You son of a bitch!” Mogg hissed. “I’ll kill you, traitor!”

  “We’re dead already,” said Shay. “We’ve been dead ever since the Technocrat took over, but you’re too blind to see it. Too busy stroking your ego to realize you’re just a pawn.”

  “Fuck you,” Mogg seethed, spittle spraying Shay’s face. “Let go of my fucking hand.”

  “You can evac my corpse.”

  “I’ll cut your goddamn arm off first.”

  “That’s what we should have done to yours, you selfish piece of shit. Might’ve saved your life.” Shay indicated Mogg’s right hand, bloodied, in the onset stages of arcane sickness, his flesh darkening, his ossifying bones sharp and misshapen.

  The witchmarks on Shay’s flesh started to itch, all of them, and he felt himself pooling some unknown force. Mogg sneered and suddenly stabbed the extractor rod’s talon into Shay’s chest.

  Shay gasped, realizing what Mogg intended. “You’ll kill us both. You can’t channel…”

  Mogg waved his wounded hand. “I’m already dead, remember? May as well take you with me, Shay. We can all go out together in a blaze of fuck-all.”