Somehow, Gaul managed to sound grim even through the unemotional, machine-assisted telepathic uplink. It was a gift, Rebecca decided.
“Alright,” Rebecca said gritting her teeth. “No more fucking around.”
She came to a halt gratefully on the sidewalk, not too far from the gym she had just finished searching, and paused long enough to stop wheezing. Then she closed her eyes and reached out to the world around her.
Empathy normally requires line of sight to work, at the very least, and touch is necessary for all but the most basic operations. However, Rebecca was in a place that was familiar to her, and surrounded by students and faculty who had all done sessions with her, so she knew each individual Etheric Signature. Together, they made a web of signposts and waypoints, empathic telemetry radiating out from where she stood, a map of an invisible country that she was intimately familiar with. She was looking for one of the few emotions that stood out with the intensity of burning magnesium, radiant as white phosphorous. Distance was not an issue. Lust, particularly teenage lust, was the emotional equivalent of wildfire, and Alex and Eerie shone like beacons from a clearing not too far from her.
She could barely see the thing in poor Edward’s body that was approaching them. It radiated only the faintest traces of emotion, far less than anything else she had ever encountered. Even the savage Ghouls, who were barely sentient on an individual level, had a greater degree of consciousness and autonomy then this abomination.
There was no two ways about it. Whatever it was, it was dead. Dead and walking.
That gave Rebecca all sorts of unpleasant ideas.
Rebecca did something that she reserved for emergencies. She ran.
Alex helped Eerie back up to her feet, trying to keep himself between her and what could not possibly be Edward, while simultaneously keeping an eye on it, whatever it was. He managed, but it probably could have gone better. Still, there was a smoking hole in the ground next to them, rather than through them, so he didn’t figure on many complaints.
“Eerie,” he said, trying to calm down enough so that he could remember how to activate the protocol he hadn’t used since October. “Do you happen to know what kind of protocol Edward used to operate? What it does?”
Eerie pointed at the scar burnt along the grassy hillside.
“It does that,” she offered, appearing confused, but not at all frightened.
“That’s very helpful.”
Edward had looked better. His whole body his hideous wounded, with teeth marks ravaging his arms and neck, and his scalp hanging loosely to the side, connected to his head by a thin strand of tissue. His face had a strange, wet sheen to it, and his color was off; a vile greenish-grey below the surface of his skin that had worked its way into his straw blond hair like mildew. His eyes were uniformly black, twin pools of tar, leering out of a face that wouldn’t cooperate, too rubbery to allow for a normal range of expression. His jaw hung open comically, and his overall posture was slack and clumsy, as if his limbs were unfamiliar.
“Holy shit. Edward, are you a zombie? Eerie, are there real zombies?”
“I–I don’t think so, but I’m kind of… well, failing, so…”
“I think we should run. Because, if he is a zombie, he’ll be really slow, right?”
“Enough stupidity,” Edward slurred, black goo leaking from his distended jaw. “I’m not a zombie, Alexander Warner.”
Edward hadn’t talked that much when he was alive, but that was definitely not his voice. It was harsh, vaguely feminine, and had an accent that Alex couldn’t place, and was utterly vile coming from the mouth of corpse. Alex shrunk back a bit, and felt Eerie do the same behind him, but it wasn’t anything that Edward said. It was the voice, grating and harsh and inhuman, something that hit him right in the base of his stomach and made his own throat protest in sympathy. He didn’t remember the Horror’s scream, but he did remember his reaction to it, the instinctual drive to purge and divest from its influence, a reflexive and primal horror. This wasn’t as extreme, but it was a similarly upsetting sensation.
“I liked you better when you didn’t talk,” Alex said cautiously. “What kind of a thing are you now? Wait. Are you a werewolf? Do people become werewolves when they get bit by — ?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Edward spat, thick black fluid dribbling down his chin and across his chest. “Do I look like a damn Weir?”
“This is why I don’t ask many questions,” Alex said, urging Eerie away from Edward, edging toward the brush. “What the fuck is that stuff, anyway? Are you filled with like, oil or something?”
“Just die, kid,” Edward snarled, stretching out his arm, moving with fluidity that belied the awkwardness of his stance. A blue flash left Alex half-blind, and then there was a rapid sequence of loud snapping sounds. He actually saw the lightning arc first into the ground, then stretching toward them. He felt Eerie’s hand on the back of his neck, and he was certain that she said something in her musical voice, but he couldn’t be make out any of the words over the sound of the Black Door opening with a shrieking protest.
With the sound of ice fracturing, the world gave way. He could feel the tremendous mass of the Ether, pressing against the walls of reality, the delicate balance of forces that underlay the whole of the universe like a skeleton. There was a change in his perceptions that was at once subtle and dizzyingly profound.
He could see the lightning crawling through the air as if it moved through clear, heavy syrup. Beneath that, there was the underlying electromagnetic disturbance, the rough progression of the energetic waveform. There was no need, Alex realized, for something as crude as the massive vacuum effect he had used before. The Absolute Protocol operated with ludicrous ease, as automatic as lifting his arms or crossing his legs. Alex simply vented the lightning into the Ether discretely, disturbing nothing else, without the fuss and bother of opening anything more than a microscopic breach in the walls of reality. Edward raised his hand a second time and again he felt the nascent gathering of electromagnetic force, but that was even easier to shunt into the Ether before it fully manifested, allowing Alex to get Eerie to the tree line, while Edward was still staring accusatorily at his hand as if he expected it to answer for his protocol’s failure.
“At some point we need to have a talk about how you did that,” Alex said reassuringly, gently pushing Eerie into the woods. “Right now, though, I need you to find somebody, preferably Miss Aoki or Miss Gallow or someone like that, and bring them back here. Fast. Like, before I die. Please.”
Eerie nodded seriously and charged off through the brush. Alex turned to find Edward leering at him, as best he could with his distended jaw.
“I let her go, you know. Makes it easier,” he said, in his sickly, shrill voice. “Without your little girlfriend, you’re as good as dead.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you don’t know how to operate your protocol,” Edward said, putting both arms up, palms to the sky. “Once more with feeling, Alex?”
He didn’t see the arc this time. He felt it surging through him instead, for a bare instant, hot at the point of contact near the center his chest; and equally as hot, for some reason, in his left foot. There was stabbing, brilliant pain, the whole of his nervous system crying out simultaneously. Then his legs gave way beneath him, and he went crashing helplessly to the ground. He could see a trail of smoke rising from his ruined, partially melted sneaker, and found it strangely hard to look away.
“I told you,” the thing that used to be Edward croaked. “You should’ve had the girl stick around. She was all that was keeping you alive.”
Alex managed to roll over, but he couldn’t speak. His chest and diaphragm had seized up, and he was having terrible trouble breathing. He fought off panic and forced himself to inhale slowly, willing his lungs back into service. He managed one shallow, shaky breath, and then another. Edward lifted Alex by a handful of his shirt, pulling him up as if he weighed nothing, while Alex’s arms hung at his sides, numb and unresponsive.
“I thought you deserved an answer, you ignorant shit. Edward is gone. They brought me his body, and hollowed him out and poured myself inside, like a worm in an apple. Exactly like I’m going to do to you, as soon as you stop breathing. It shouldn’t bother you much. I know it won’t bother your girlfriend.”
Alex tried to say Eerie’s name, but all he managed was a strange noise. He still counted it as progress. Edward let him drop back to the ground unceremoniously, chuckling.
“You really haven’t noticed? Do you even know what a Changeling is? That girl is like a cuckoo. A doppelganger.”
