The Undead Pool

The Goddess’s eyes latched on to mine, chilling in intensity. “You took them,” she said, Ayer’s beautiful face and voice twisted in anger until they were ugly. I’d taught her that, either through my returning mystics or when she’d possessed me. Her power visibly danced over Ayer’s pale skin, cresting over him like a purple wave, little sparks of energy flashing like her eyes in the moonlight.

“You left them!” I backed up, wincing at the first cut of a thousand wings on my thoughts, and my mystics rose in outrage. “I brought them back to you! All of them! I freed them and brought them home! I don’t want them! Take them!”

Again she pushed Ayer forward, and he stumbled, almost falling when the block stopped him. “I can’t,” she said through him, and the rope dissolved. His skin, pale with death, was glowing. “You made them become. To take them back would make me become. I will not become. You will be ended, trickster Morgan!”

“What?” I kept moving, the long grass hissing against my legs. “No!” I didn’t understand, and Ayer’s expression bunched. I choked, hands rising to my neck as suddenly a wave of her mystics covered me, clogging my mouth and blinding my eyes with pinpricks of sensation. She was trying to suffocate me, and I staggered, panic rising.

My mystics rallied, rising from my skin to drive her eyes away and making the Goddess howl. In a wave of anger, she blew the grove apart. I fell, and from the corner of my sight I saw Etude spin away. Bis and Jenks were gone as well. Shaken, I knelt on the ground, my skin prickling with fire.

“You made them become!” the Goddess said, Ayer’s voice echoing in my ears as the vampire stood over me, the rank smell of dead vampire and soured river water filling my nose. “You lied. You stole them from me.”

“They’re right there!” I shouted, just wanting her to go away, and then I screamed as another wave of mystics arrowed to me, pain bending me double as my throat suddenly clogged with feathers.

“I brought them back!” I screamed, panicking as I tried to shove the mystics out of my mind, but they slipped around my demand, falling back into me like water. “Take them! They’ll adapt!”

“They. Will. Not!” she thundered through Ayer, and the vampire’s skin flamed white. “They have become. Not again! I will not become again!”

But suddenly I could breathe, and I stared as the Goddess’s mystics peeled from me in a visible wave, chased away by my own mystics.

No . . . The Goddess shrieked and flailed in anger, beating at nothing I could see. They hadn’t been chased away. Her mystics were changing, becoming, in a visible wave.

Shaking, I got to my feet, still trying to figure this out as Ayer stumbled backward, the Goddess wailing as the gold of my mystics slurried through her purple haze. Like rivers in reverse, tendrils of light snaked through the aura of power surrounding her. As Ayer spun and slapped, the tendrils grew, became threads, became streams, became sources for more tendrils that grew into nets.

It’s the becoming, I suddenly realized. It was me, the way I’d changed the mystics in order to survive them. I was seeing the concepts and ideas I’d given them snaking through the Goddess’s psyche, changing her in turn, making her become something different, in essence, killing her.

“You brought them to destroy me!” the Goddess wailed, and then her anger crested to a savage ruthlessness. “There is one Goddess!” she howled, a burst of energy spilling from her with the sound of wings in the wind. “Your thoughts will be forgotten. I will make them forget. They will be forgotten and you will die!”

Shit, this was not what I wanted to happen. “I was trying to help!” I shouted, then froze when her Ayer doll suddenly collapsed.

For a heartbeat, there was silence. The haze of her power flickered, falling in on itself with a little pop. My mystics milled in confusion in the moonlit grove stinking of ozone and crushed grass. The cement block remained, but she was . . . gone?

“Jenks?” I called hesitantly, and then screamed, stiffening when the Goddess dove into my mind, ripping through me as if to tear me to shreds.

“No!” I howled, feeling my mystics hum through the spaces in me, driving her off as she dug, burrowed, and tried to swamp me. If she succeeded, I’d be hers utterly, becoming her forever.

“Stop!” I demanded again, wrestling for control, and with a realization come too late, the Goddess recoiled in sudden terror. She’d attacked me, but wherever her thoughts touched to destroy and rend, my memories sparked, growing like an infection among her own thoughts. Just as before when she tried to break the hold the Free Vampires had on her, the more she fought, the more she lost.

And the Goddess wept as she felt herself change, become something else.

Please, stop! I cried in panic, and the mystics carried her deeper, forcing the change. Go back! I don’t want you!