The Void of Mist and Thunder (The 13th Reality #4) (13 page)

But there were dozens more of the floating mountains, and each one had more of the vines popping out of their surfaces, pointy ends focused on Tick. He took hold of his power, pulled it all back within his chest, sucking it in like a great vacuum. Then he used his eyes and mind to start destroying.

Looking this way and that, he hurled streaks of Chi’karda outward with each glance. They shot forward like streams of fire, arrows of might, smashing into each of the massive hunks of stone, dirt, and vegetation. The flying structures exploded, obliterated into dusty clouds that whipped away like the first one had. Tick barely had time to make sure he’d succeeded in destroying one before he had to look at the next threat.

Explosion after explosion, he destroyed them. Reaching with all his strength, he was able to send the Chi’karda beams farther and farther out, killing the vines as soon as they came into view.

Without warning, and just as he began to feel like he might get out of the mess, everything changed as quickly as one wink of his eye.

The endless gray sky disappeared, along with the fog of debris from the countless erupted balls of rock. Blackness replaced it, a sea of stars in the background, as if he floated in the deepest realm of outer space. His sense of movement also stopped, jarring him at first. Pulling in a deep breath, he heard the sound of his own gasp and felt his insides twist until he regained his equilibrium. All was silent as he hung there in the empty void.

Several seconds passed. Then each one of those pinpoints of light around him stretched out into a long beam of brightness, all of them pointed at Tick and moving at a blistering speed.

Lorena stood up, her mind so focused on the Barrier Wand that it felt as though she’d become one with it. The orange light of Chi’karda filled the room, blinding her vision. She couldn’t separate what the Ladies of Blood and Sorrow were doing from the power generated by her own efforts with the Wand. She’d never experienced anything like it. She wondered if this was how Tick felt when he was controlling the Chi’karda directly. She’d quit adjusting the dials and switches without even realizing it.

And then she remembered. She was in the Thirteenth Reality. Things were different here.

Lisa was at her side, keeping quiet—bless her heart—but a quick glance showed that the poor girl desperately wanted to know what was going on. Lorena went back to the business at hand, knowing she couldn’t risk breaking her concentration. She couldn’t put it into words or offer up a scientific explanation, but she had control over Chi’karda like never before, a link to Tick that she wasn’t going to let go of. She was going to bring him home.

Even if she had to die doing it.

At first the arrows of light made Tick feel as if he were in a spaceship that had shifted into warp speed, about to blast to another part of the galaxy. But he felt no sense of motion, and the angles were wrong. As he twisted and turned in the void, he saw long lines of pure whiteness stretching toward him from every direction, like strings of perfectly straight lightning. And he didn’t need a manual to know that their purpose was not to brighten his world so he could read a book.

The beams kept coming.

He could easily shift his body, even move away if he wanted to, but there was no point. The things were heading for him no matter where he looked. Unless he winked to another place, those long strings of white were going to reach him. Besides, where would he wink?
Could
he even wink out of the void? He felt surprisingly calm, confident he could deal with the problem.

The first needles of light reached his body.

Just like the vines, they wrapped around his arms and legs; some slipped across his chest, others slithered along his ribs and side and along his back. He fought at them by flailing and kicking out, but it did no good. The Chi’karda he’d gathered before still swelled inside of him. He lashed out with the power, but
that
did no good either. It was as if the ropes of light were without substance until they needed it to serve their purpose, gripping tightly to his body.

There were dozens of the ropes, then hundreds, thousands. They bled together into a brilliant display of pure white light, covering every inch of his body. Only his head remained free, and he twisted his neck to see what was happening, trying to squirm out of it.

The bindings tightened, squeezing the air out of his lungs, but curiously, Tick felt no panic. His breathing remained even. The white ropes kept coming, flying in like eels until they hit his body and wrapped around the other coils of light. He’d become nothing but a head, sticking out of a blinding ball of brilliance with tendrils of light leading away from him in every direction.

Tick knew he couldn’t let it keep going. He closed his eyes, pulled in more and more Chi’karda, filling his body and soul. He felt as if his insides were on fire. Still he kept at it, the power rushing into him like a falling deluge of scorching lava. He found himself liking it, loving the burn and surge of adrenaline, the power that filled him. He let it build, knowing he needed to unleash it but not wanting to. The earlier sensation of being tugged by a strong cable was still there, but it didn’t hurt anymore.

The beams of light quit coming, but it didn’t matter. He was wrapped neck to toe, unable to move a single muscle. The trailing ends of the ropes stretched out from his body in every direction, as if he were stuck in the middle of a giant spider web. All was silent and still, the light blinding.

The cords around him suddenly grew taut, then began to pull at his limbs and torso. Trying to rip his body into pieces.

Chapter 19

Fighting the Void

At first Tick didn’t feel the pain.

The power of Chi’karda within him burned so hot, so fierce, that he was unaware of all else except for a distant tugging sensation. Like he’d been thrown into a crowd and they were using his arms and legs as a wishbone. But the pain intensified, began to hurt. Bad. The pulling on his heart came back, too, as if two separate forces wanted to completely obliterate his body.

He screamed and released the power that had been building within, unleashing the Chi’karda with a mental burst of a detonation.

The bright whiteness of the ropes that had captured him was dimmed by the brilliance of orange light as Chi’karda erupted out of him. Streams of it shot from his body in arrows, and a cloud swelled from his skin, bulging underneath the cords like a burrowing animal.

The ropes held, pulling at him and continuing to jerk at his limbs and squeeze his middle. Pain stabbed at his joints and muscles. The pleasurable burn of power had been replaced by a different kind of fire, an agony that hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced.

He screamed again and sent waves of Chi’karda crashing out of him, focusing on the strings of frozen lightning as if the whole thing were a video game, his mind the joystick. Orange flames struck at them, disintegrating half of them in one swoop of power. Tick’s body snapped to the left, flying through the air as the severed ropes found life again, coming back at him and trying to reattach their ends to his arms and legs. He held his breath and continued the onslaught of Chi’karda, firing away at everything in sight.

Sprays of pure whiteness erupted in tiny explosions like bursts of electricity out of a live wire as his power severed more of the cords. More and more and more of them. His mind worked relentlessly as he tried to destroy the things attached to him while at the same time keeping the others at bay. He floated in that strange outer space, throwing flares of energy at anything that moved. The mix of white and orange was brilliant and blinding, almost making him lose his focus.

His body ripped free from the bindings.

Tick quit aiming then and simply threw all his power out in wave after wave, destroying whatever dared come at him. Explosions of light and sound. The black air trembled; his skull rattled; his skin seemed to vibrate on his bones like they might slip free of his body. He was completely blind; the whole world had gone white and hot. There was wind and thunder and the smell of ozone and burning charcoal. It all added together into a chaotic jumble of anarchy, driving Tick insane as he continued to thrust outward with the power of Chi’karda as fast as he could gather it. He didn’t know what else to do, and he was scared to stop.

Something tugged at his heart again. He felt it despite the madness all around him—that sensation of strings being pulled, of being yanked from the inside.

His body suddenly jerked away from the explosions of energy and flying white cords of lightning. He flew through the blackness of that place that had seemed like outer space, the raging battle he’d been fighting gone in a flash. Things changed around him. Instead of darkness, there was a blue haze, splotches of green and brown and red flying past him. Chunks of gray rock appeared, coming at him like a rain of meteors.

Tick used his mind to control his flight, dodging and flipping and accelerating to avoid the rocks. As he approached the biggest one, a jagged stone the size of a bus, he had to slam on his mental brakes, coming to a stop right before he smashed into the thing. This caused the tugging inside him to intensify, sending shocks of pain throughout his nerves.

He reached out and felt the hard surface of the rock. He crawled along it to the other side, then jumped off it by pushing with his legs. His body once again catapulted through the strange-colored air, and the hurtful tug on his heart lessened enough that he could bear it.

Things changed once again.

He dove into a thick liquid, almost like a gel. Cold wetness soaked his hair and clothes and skin as his perception changed. He could sense up and down, everything shifting around him until it felt as if he were near the bottom of a deep ocean, swimming upward even though his arms and legs did nothing to make it so. He tore through the dark waters.

There was just enough light raining down in wavering rays that he could see creatures coming toward him. Long, powerful leviathans that swam with their back fins beating against the current like the tail of a dolphin. But these monsters had arms and burning red eyes, and Tick knew they wanted to grab him and stop him from reaching whatever was tugging him forward.

The monsters reached out, swimming in all at once. Clawed hands reached viciously for his body, snatching and scratching as their fingers tried to gain purchase. Tick lashed at them, swinging sluggishly through the thick liquid as he continued his ascent. The creatures kept pace with him, trying their best to grab hold of his limbs or clothes. Kicking and squirming, he spun his body to make it harder to catch, and when one of the creatures latched on, he fought it off. He couldn’t see much of their faces—they were all shadows and angles—but their red eyes burned like rocks of lava.

Two of them grabbed his legs, wrapping their arms tightly around one each. They squeezed, and their claws dug into his skin. The unseen forces still pulled him toward some unknown destination through a place he didn’t even understand.

He burst through the surface, the two creatures still holding onto his legs as he rocketed toward a bright blue sky. The jellied water cascaded off them in blubbery droplets, and Tick looked down to see the faces of the monsters clearly for the first time. They weren’t human at all: their bodies looked like sharks with arms, and their heads were smooth and glistening. Their eyes seemed to glow even brighter.