Chapter 121

~~Jack~~

It was like staring through a window into another universe. Not like, was.

“Um ... what’s on the other side?” he said.

“The Realm of the Dead.”

Jack froze. Clara froze. The two slowly turned to look at each other, before they both stared at the giant creature squashed inside the hallway.

“Uh, what?” Clara said.

Sándor looked at them, and waited, quiet and stoic despite the massive bomb he’d just dropped on them.

“Sándor,” Jack said, “you’re going to have to fill us in, because you just sorta shattered a lot of preconceptions a lot of us probably have about death. Realm of the Dead?”

After a long, quiet moment in the spooky basement of an old, haunted hospital, Sándor gestured to the huge tear in the air in front of them again.

“I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know anything about it.”

“Then how do you know it’s the Realm of the Dead?”

“I have come across it before, as I’m sure the other Begotten have. But no living creature would want to stay within. It is a cold, heavy place. Ghosts wander within.”

Clara shook her head, obviously not happy about the gargoyle’s impulsiveness. “You went in?”

“I have before, and only for a moment now.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s dangerous as fuck?” Jack frowned at the gargoyle, but stopped himself from saying something stupid. If the man didn’t feel his life was worth being careful with, the reason why was obvious, and drawing attention to it was a bad idea. It sucked that the poor guy was still depressed, but understandable.

Jack still felt depressed sometimes, when memories of Julias or Mary came at him. Hell, sometimes he felt depressed about the hunters he’d killed, or worse, Mrs. Pavala, his first kill. But he had Antoinette to help him get past that. Sándor had no one.

“Ok ok,” Jack said, “let’s just ... let’s just approach this calmly. Sándor, you’ve been through this tear?”

“Yes. Again, only for a moment.”

“And you saw ... ghosts?”

“Yes.”

Jack stepped closer to the tear, and stared into it. “ ... ghost lights.”

“What?” Clara said. She stepped closer, and from the gasp, it was obvious she knew exactly what Jack meant.

Through the shadow, through the black and strange fog that filled the tear, there were lights. Green lights. They were subtle things, blurry, but they were there, and they were moving, far in the distance. Each gave off enough light that Jack could see some details in the environment, and he squinted as he tried to make out what he was looking at through the mist.

Rock? A cave? Whatever it was the lights were moving along, it looked like stone. Dark, oddly bending, curving stone. The harder he stared, the more he could see the drifting lights actually had shapes, shapes he recognized, human shapes. He shivered as he stared into another world, a dark, cold place, and he looked to Clara beside him.

“Have you ever seen Galaxy Quest?” he said, eyes still on the tear.

“Yeah. I—oh, the joke about whether there’s air.” Clara was just as shocked as Jack, and he could see her quivering as much as him.

“Yeah.” He looked back through the large tear, and tried to accept the reality of what he was looking at. No doubt about it, those were ghosts. They had that same, semi-transparent look Mary did, and they were missing their feet; not really missing, just, lost to the fog their own bodies seemed to generate. They hovered as they moved, with the same lack of nuanced movement he saw in Mary, corpses drifting around with no care for breathing, or flexing muscles, or anything.

Through the fog, they looked like drifting lights, like seeing distant street light through rain.

“We’re not going in there,” Jack said finally.

Clara sighed. “Why not? The air’s breathable, if Sándor’s been in there before.” But from the town of her voice, she knew why not.

“Even if the air is breathable, we’re not going because it’s dangerous.” Air didn’t mean anything to him anyway. “Because we don’t know what’s in there.”

“Sándor was fine.”

The gargoyle finally interjected. “I did not stay for long, whenever I entered this realm. Just enough to understand what I was looking at.”

Jack took a deep, useless breath. “Ok, it’s another realm, that much seems obvious. So we got a dream realm, a spirit realm, the physical realm, and now a realm of ... of ghosts.” It was tantalizing beyond belief, the desire to go through the tear and find out more. It wasn’t like Sándor couldn’t be wrong. He found a place filled with ghosts, and had made an assumption. Maybe it was just a place in the physical realm, where ghosts had a habit of collecting? Maybe some kind of deep cave, hidden in the Earth.

From the what he was looking at, and from how it felt, the cold death seeping out of the tear and into his undead body, he knew that wasn’t true. This was another place, a whole other world, and they were peeking into it. It felt wrong, as if the realm wasn’t meant for living, or even undead eyes.

“Is this where my sister will go, when she finally lets go of Mom, and the house?”

“Is this where my brother went?” Clara said. “Hell, is this where everyone goes when they die?”

They both looked at the gargoyle, but he shrugged and shook his head.

“I don’t know. Why would I know?”

“Because you’re centuries old and you’re a dream monster?” Clara said.

The titan sighed and shook his head again. “I have kept to myself ... for obvious reasons. I know little of ghosts, or spirits.” He grumbled and flicked his tail. “You’re the werewolf. You deal with spirits. Why don’t know you?”

“Uh, because I deal with spirits, not ghosts?”

“They are similar.”

“That’s like saying a tiger is similar to a tree, because they’re both carbon-based.”

“And yet, most people know how a tiger and tree function, largely because of their similarities.”

“Similarities?” She snorted, like a wolf would. “The fuck?”

“Relative to things like dreams, and spirits. A tiger and a tree can be touched. A tiger eats matter, so does a tree. They’re both biological.”

Jack smiled. This was progress. Sándor barely ever said more than three words at a time when Jack met him, and now he was borderline bickering with Clara. Well, she was awesome like that, no ridiculous games like Jennifer, or aggressiveness like Jessy.

“Either way,” he said, “I’m not stepping through this. I know Sándor did, but he shouldn’t have. We need to figure out more. Or, you know, ideally stop these tears from happening at all. There’s nothing to be gained from us going in there, and fucking with things. At best, we’d be risking our lives on a bad gamble that we might learn something.”

“Yeah, that makes sense and all,” she said, “except I don’t have a single other lead, and I don’t think you do either, as far as these tears go. This seems to be the only one that’s cut a hole so clearly through ... uh ... the ‘fabric of reality’.” She air quoted, and Jack struggled to suppress a laugh. “If more of these tears are going to be made, and if they cut through to this place, we should probably know how. Bad gamble or not, we need to make it if we don’t want this lead to go cold.”

Sighing, Jack paced back and forth. Clara had a point, except the first tear Jack had ever seen, had been between the physical world and the spirit one, and it’d failed to cut through the Gauntlet. Fiona had had to pry it open.

So, without a better idea, he shared the story with Clara and Sándor about how Fiona showed him and Damien a tear. He explained how Fiona took them to an old factory, found what seemed like nothing on the physical side, opened the pathway, took them through the Gauntlet, and then when they plopped out on the other side, saw a massive amount of damage.

“It was ... a lot sloppier than this,” he said, and he gestured to the tear in front of them.

“Well, that one had hit the Gauntlet,” she said. “Punching a hole through that ain’t easy. And ... and...” She stepped closer to the tear, and stuck her head in.

“For fuck’s sake!” Jack snapped his hand out for her, but she backed up before he could reach her.

“It’s here.”

He blinked at her before staring at the tear. “What’s here?”

“The Gauntlet. The barrier between the physical and the spiritual. It’s here. I can smell it.” With a heavy sigh, she reached out a hand for the tear, and through it. Jack didn’t stop her this time, eyes locked onto her hand. “It’s so thin.”

“Thin?”

“Thin.” She stuck her head through the tear again, looked around, and took a deep sniff. “Normally, your eyes can see a kind of gold or yellow air, right? And it’s here, but it’s so thin that I can barely see it, like a ... morning mist that’s pretty much evaporated. I can smell it, though.”

He couldn’t smell it. Probably a werewolf thing.

“Did the tear make it thin?” he said.

“Maybe. I ... I need to talk to Avery about this. She probably knows something about whatever we’re looking at, and—”

“You think Avery knows about this ... underworld?”

“She knows a lot of stuff she doesn’t like to share, cause she thinks the knowledge is dangerous.” Wincing, Clara looked down and put her hands in her pockets. “You may have noticed, talking with Jacob and all.”

Jack winced as well. Yeah, Avery was just one of those types of people.

“So, if the Gauntlet is here, then that means this place is, uh, part of the spirit world?” he said.

She shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, you don’t have to go through the Gauntlet to get to the dream world, right?” Sándor shook his head. “So, I mean, I guess? The Gauntlet keeps the Hisil and the Gurihal from merging, or overlapping or whatever. When it’s thin, spirits have an easy time jumping over, and even average Joe humans could find themselves walking through a hole and ending up in the spirit world. This is ... this is really fucking dangerous.”

“What can do this?” Sándor asked.

“Hmm. Only thing I can think of is the Hosts, beshilu. You’ve met azlu, Jack, but beshilu are rats, and they gnaw at the Gauntlet. And ... and ... and a spirit told us that the azlu didn’t come to Dolareido naturally.” She gestured to the tear. “Which makes me think something strange caused this, and the azlu showed up. They’re driven by instinct to weave web and strengthen the Gauntlet.”

Jack shivered. The azlu, monster spiders, straight out of a horror movie. Ugh.

“Azlu?”

She nodded to Sándor. “Ancient creatures from my side of the tracks. Spirit, but not quite spirit. Look like spiders. They like to break into the physical world, turn a human into a host, and grow into a—”

A giant claw snapped out from the tear, and slammed down into the air in front of Clara. She threw herself back, landing in a prowling crouch. Jack threw himself back too, almost screaming in surprise, and ended rolling along the hospital floor. Sándor jumped back as well, and the effect was far more disastrous, as his giant body smashed into the walls, tore into the drywall, and his claws left slashes through the tile floor. Worse, Jack managed to lift his head up in time to see the gargoyle’s tail slam into Clara, and send her rolling onto the floor next to Jack.

No way. No fucking way. Jack forced himself up onto his knees, and stared at the sight of the huge creature as it started to crawl its way through the tear. Before it got half its huge body through the opening, it slammed one of its bone scythe arms down at Clara again. It was massive, and way too fast for something that size. Clara was still recovering from getting a giant tail smashed into her, and couldn’t out of the way in time before the huge scythe claw cut into her leg above the knee. Meat on a hook. She screamed.

“Clara!” Jack jumped up to his feet, but he was too slow. The creature pulled back into the tear, and dragged Clara with it, leaving a messy streak of blood as it jerked Clara left and right.

Sándor, not quite knocked over, recovered far faster than Jack did, and the titan threw himself at the azlu monster like a tiger pouncing prey. He roared, and the hospital shook with the bellowing rumble, as the giant nightmare monster fell upon the equally massive spirit monster. Onto it, and then through the tear, dragging Clara with them.

“Jack!” she screamed, before she disappeared through the hole.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” Jack ran over to the tear, and peered through it. The mist flowed up and over his fingers, and he yanked his hand back as the unnatural cold seeped into his bones. After taking a second, he stepped back toward the tear, but he couldn’t see past the fog. Having three people suddenly fall through it must have stirred it.

He couldn’t smell anything through the tear, or taste. But he could hear quiet moans, past the battle screams of Clara and Sándor, and he could feel the strange cold.

“Jack! Do something!” Sándor’s voice. It cut through the strange, deadly silence, but it was quiet and distant.

Ok, ok, do something! Like some kind of bad joke, an azlu monster attacked just when they were talking about it. Well, they were hanging out by a tear through the Gauntlet, and considering what Clara said, it made sense that one of those weird spider monsters would be around. Except, it didn’t look like the Shadow Realm on the other side of the tear. Looked like Hades or something. The fuck was an azlu doing in there?

Go in? Sándor could—no, Sándor couldn’t. Sándor had just leapt through the tear, and into a different realm. Far as Jack knew, he was only merged with his Horror in the Dream Realm; it was a dream monster, after all. Outside of it, he’d probably go back to his human form. Still strong as all hell, but not like he was in the dream. And considering Jack’s previous experience with the azlu, he doubted Clara and Sándor could take it down if the Begotten was in his human form.

He shook his head hard, and jumped in. He still remembered what happened to Stephanie, and he wouldn’t let that happen to Clara. No fucking chance in Hell.

Passing through the tear, he caught a glimpse of the yellow and gold, the streaks of white, and endless mist he knew as the Gauntlet. Apparently, the werewolves saw it differently, or maybe they smelled or sensed more. For him, the Gauntlet was a numbing thing, but his eyes still worked, and he stared, eyes wide, as he quickly moved through the strange, golden realm he couldn’t even see from outside the tear. And then a second later, he was in a completely new realm, a new place, a new dimension he knew absolutely nothing about.

Except that gravity worked.

He sucked in a hard breath as he fell. The strange mist of the realm surrounded him, dark and gray, and he spun around in the air as he struggled to prepare for a landing. Through the mist, he could see the hints of drifting green, the strange rock pathways the ghosts hovered along, and the walls of the cavern. An enormous cavern. An enormous, colossal, holy fucking shit gigantic cavern.

He put out his hands and oriented himself until he felt the mist and air hitting him in the face and stomach. No longer spinning, her peered down and tried to see where the ground was. Still falling. Oh god, if he hit the ground at this speed, it was going to crumple him like a car careening off a bridge and landing nose first into the ravine below. He might survive it, being a corpse and all. The other two, he doubted.

There was howling, a quiet sound that drifted around him. Wherever it was coming from, it was around him, hitting him from all directions, but almost inaudible. The sound changed pitch, slowly going up and down, almost like a choir. Maybe it was a choir? There were lots of myths and legends about ghosts singing. And in the odd quiet of the endless fall, it did sound almost musical, haunting, and sad. It reminded him of Mary; not the Mary he knew, but Mary the ghost, haunting his old home, and carrying with her enough sadness that she hadn’t gone where she was supposed to go when she died.

That’s what this place felt like. Sadness, and regret.

The ground finally came up to meet him, and it was not fun. He was light, and he’d summoned vitae into his limbs to prepare for the impact. But it still hurt, and despite his best efforts, he felt something crunch. Bone. He screamed as something snapped in one of his legs, and the opposite arm.

A quick glance up showed the tear maybe a hundred feet over them, and out maybe five feet away from a colossal wall of rock. Dark, smooth rock, like the rock he’d landed on. A moment later, he could hear the screech of the monster, and the impact of its eight sharp feet hitting the rock as it fled.

Heal, now!

Immediately, the curse got to work, and shot vitae through his limbs and into his bones. It hurt, having his flesh force chunks of bone back into place. He could hear the crunching, grinding sounds of his body mending, and of muscle and skin sewing back together. Viktor would have been proud of how quickly he healed, and seconds later, his Beast told him he was repaired enough to at least get up and get moving.

He jumped and spun around. Now that he was on the ground and no longer falling through endless mist, vertigo hit him, and he stumbled as the shift in his weight threw him for a loop. He’d have vomited if he was human.

“Clara!? Sándor!?” Shit, fucking shit fuck. The fog was thick, but not so thick he couldn’t see for a hundred feet. At the edges of the fog, he could see movement, more ghost lights drifting along. If they noticed him, they didn’t care.

“Jack.” Sándor jogged up to him through the mist, panting quietly. Not injured. How? “That spider thing was half human.”

“Yeah, azlu do that. They possess a person, eat part of their brain like a parasite, literally turn them into a giant spider monster, and then they start eating people.”

The Begotten snorted. “And—”

A few falling pebbles forced the two of them to look up. It was hard to see through the mist, but Jack recognized the shapes of huge spiders crawling along the cave wall near the floating tear. Some dangled from web, and others stuck to the wall, sticking their butts out and shooting web at the tear.

“Us showing up must of scared them off,” Jack said, “until their enforcer came and ... and took Clara.” He didn’t know shit about azlu, or these Host monsters, except that the werewolves were super surprised to find two fully mutated azlu working together. “When I killed one, it split into hundreds of spiders like those.” He pointed up.

“Disgusting.”

“Where’s Clara?”

“I don’t know. When I jumped through and realized I was falling, I tried to fly, but losing my Horror in the air was disorienting.”

Jack raised a brow at the man. “You can fly without your Horror?”

“Yes. We can get back the way we came, but...” Frowning, Sándor looked down at the ground, and some blood that ran along the floor. A streak of it made it clear what happened: it’d dragged Clara off. “I saw the two of them struggling in the air, falling. The spider had meant to crawl down the wall, but my tackle ruined that. She hit her head at some point. She’s probably unconscious, or dead.”

“Shit. Shit shit shit shit.” He knew Uratha could heal from almost anything when transformed into their war form, but he doubted they were nearly as difficult to kill while still human; similar situation to the nightmare monster. Growling, he took off at a near sprint along the blood trail. Stupid, so fucking stupid of him to go with Sándor to check out the tear, without at least getting Damien. Of course it turned out to be dangerous. Shit always got dangerous, randomly, for no damn reason.

The rock floor of the ludicrously massive cavern was smooth, and while it did have rolling hills, they were shallow and short. But the mist was a problem. The smart side of him told him to slow down before he ran off a cliff or into a nest of the spider monsters. The desperate part of him told him he fucked up, and now Clara was going to die, like Stephanie, butchered.

He ran faster. Mekhet and Daeva could use Celerity easily, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use it, too. Not as well, but he could. He reached into his core, found his vitae, and told it to do one very specific thing: run faster.

The sound of his shoes slapping the rock died in the heavy mist, and he looked down to make sure he was actually moving faster. He was. Each stride took him further and further, until it was more like a fast, hard leap with each step. Sándor couldn’t keep up, until he leaned forward, and his feet started to slam into the rock hard enough to spread vibrations. Jack glanced back enough to see a silhouette of the gargoyle, the enormous Horror, surrounding Sándor and going full Tyrannosaurus rex sprint, like a scene from Jurassic Park. Thud thud thud thud.

Twenty seconds later, they found the spider, not a long chase at all. It was big, heavy, and Jack and Sándor were light. The giant creature ran along the rock, eight hairy black legs covered in patchwork human skin. Clara dangled from its right, giant claw, limp, arms hanging underneath it, and small drops of blood falling as she bounced. A claw still skewered her leg, and each bounce was tearing the wound open more and more.

“Let go of her!” Jack threw himself at the strange spider monster’s body, and landed on the beast’s back. Like a centaur or drider, the human half jutted out from where the spider’s neck would be, connecting at the human’s waist. It twisted easily, and stared at Jack with black spider eyes that dotted the now bald human skull. Fucking. Gross.

Grosser was the mandibles, and how they opened spreading the torn cheeks of the human head the spider had basically grown out of. Grosser again, was the white shit it spat at Jack. His mind screamed acid, but it was probably spider silk. Either way, he was glad he jumped to the side.

Sándor charged in, and slammed himself into the giant spider monster’s ass. To see a man, a normal sized dude, slam into the spider with the weight of what was obviously his Horror, was a strange sight. The spider’s giant, hairy, gross ass bent inward at the point of impact, like one of those slow motion videos of a ball hitting a wall.

The spider went flying. Well, maybe not flying. It weighed thousands of pounds, but the fact it rolled over several times after Sándor’s impact was damn impressive. A glance back at the gargoyle showed the man had fallen to his hands and knees, and was struggling to get back up. Again, the silhouette of the gargoyle surrounded him, and Sándor flapped his four shadow wings hard as he came back up to his feet.

But, he wasn’t the gargoyle, not outside of the Dream. Everything he did to summon the Horror’s power was demanding on him, and Jack could see the exertion on his face as he ran at the spider while it was down, and sank his fingers through the exoskeleton along the spider’s ass, as if they were the claws of the gargoyle instead.

The monster got up quickly, and spun around to face Sándor, except the man was still attached to it. The spider slashed down behind him, and Sándor used the spider’s body as a wall, hiding behind and underneath it.

“Where’s Clara!?” Sándor shouted.

Jack lifted himself up from the ground and snapped his head around. Clara wasn’t on the thing’s claw anymore.

“I don’t know! I—”

A monstrous howl erupted, and relief washed over Jack as the enormous werewolf dove out of the fog, and leapt at the distracted monster. She flew high, going over twenty feet up before she fell down onto the azlu’s shoulder. Roaring with a primal need, she sank her claws into the monster, tearing and shredding, and doing more damage to the monster’s flesh in seconds, than Sándor had yet managed.

Jack looked around in a panic. There were no animals for him to summon here, no legion he could unleash on the monster. But just because he’d been stupid enough to check out the tear without his usual back up, didn’t mean he was so stupid he didn’t bring guns.

He pulled out his pistol, and started sinking bullets into the spider monster’s gut. It shrieked in agony, and spun around, trying to dislodge Sándor and Clara at the same time. No luck. They were both thoroughly stuck to the monster’s body, and while it could spin super fast with eight gigantic, sharp spider legs stabbing into the strange rock underneath them, it couldn’t get them off. Jack had to time his shots, to make sure he didn’t hit either of them, as the spider turned into a spin top.

Bleeding everywhere but not slowing down, it came to a sudden stop, and kicked at Sándor using its hind legs. Sándor couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, and the spider’s back legs were perfectly capable of stabbing underneath its giant ass. The man screamed as one of them pierced his shoulder, and fell away from the spider as he let go.

Without Sándor distracting it, the monster looked to the huge wolf humanoid ripping at its arm and shoulder. Clara had managed to remove a chunk of its right shoulder, causing the arm she once dangled from to hang limp at the spider’s front side, but the other arm still worked. It raised its left claw scythe, and—

And it met eyes with Jack, as he stepped toward its front. The gun wasn’t doing shit, and with no time to summon the juggernaut within with the curse’s power, to turn this into a physical brawl, he had to do something and do it quick. He’d assumed he wouldn’t be able to use Dominate or Animalism on the monster, since it wasn’t a creature of flesh and blood. Except, it was partly human, in a strange, sick way.

When it met Jack’s eyes, and Jack met its strange, spider eyes, he reached out with Dominate, and the world came to a standstill. For a brief moment, the world froze, while Jack and the creature met minds.

The human part of the monster was alive, sort of. The brain was gone except for some minor remnants, and the spider had hijacked those remnants. Instead of being able to enter the creature’s mind, like Jack easily could with kine or animal, he stared at the spider creature from across a chasm. Walls surrounded them all, a giant dome of warped walls that oozed black and shifting colors. They were inside the mind of the host body, who should have been dead, but wasn’t.

Across the chasm between them in the strange dome, was the azlu, with a dozen of its brethren behind it, no longer in its human mutation shape. It was a spider, and it wasn’t a spider. It was something else, something old, something ancient, something covered in the dust and ashes of dead civilizations and dead monstrosities. It stood there on its eight legs, a large spider with large eyes, and it stared at him like he was nothing. Its strange, alien thoughts reached across the chasm like someone hollering with palms cupped around their mouths, except the thoughts were disgusting, vile, strangely loud, and driven by instinct.

To it, he was nothing more than an undead creature, a corpse that didn’t have the nerve to become dust and ashes like the things that came before. It would kill him as it and its other parts had done to many undone creatures. Parts?

Jack gulped as he looked past the spider and its kin, and glimpsed on the memories of the ancient creature behind it. Images, warped against the dome’s wall, started to form where the bleeding colors had been. An ancient land, with ancient creatures, ancient foliage, and ancient skies. A totally alien landscape, prowled by things his mind could not imagine. Giant wolves, rats, and spiders, but none of them looked right, as if each were some sort of spirit interpretation. Or, godly interpretation.

The spider in his mind hissed. It needed to protect the Gauntlet, to strengthen it. To understand why would be to ask how a normal spider learned to spin web. Instinct, an instinct so old and from a different realm, it defied flesh and blood. He was a corpse, standing in its path, and it’d kill him, the moment it’d killed the Forsaken Uratha and the Primordial Begotten.

The spider shut up real quick, as the Beast within and around Jack rose to bury them all in its shadow. The chasm suddenly seemed quite small, and no longer the insurmountable leap it’d been moments before. The spiders on the other side backed away, and fear overwhelmed their hairy bodies and eight legs, as their many eyes stared up at the swirling mass.

“This ... thing,” the curse whispered in that sleazy, demony voice that sounded eerily like Jack’s, “is just an animal. An animal from before even the Strix, but just an animal.”

“And how would you know?” Jack looked up over his shoulder at the Beast, frowning. “You have memories from my previous sires, but not—”

The giant black cloud of fangs, beaks, fur and feathers, pointed out toward the large spiders on the other side of the black chasm. It used a foggy limb to point, and the Beast showed a mix of claws and rat tails in its black mist.

“I can smell it, smell the age on it, and I know you can, too. It’s beyond old, and despite all that time, it remains nothing more than a useless bug. Look at it, Jack.” The Beast lowered itself, loomed over him, and set two titanic hands that looked like crow feet on his shoulders. “I wonder how many thousands and thousands of years this strange thing has existed, and despite all the time, it’s still just a bug to be squashed.”