A second later I get my answer when a large tentacle rises from the fog and whips towards Jaak. Jaak turns but he’s too slow, his body is still changing. Hands are bigger, fingers slowly elongating and becoming claw-tipped.
He doubles over and with a roar. “Meadow!”
“Jaak! Run!”
He turns to me and his eyes go silver, horns start to push out of Jaak’s head and his face changes. Mouth pulling down, jaw getting bigger and longer and is that fur? I can’t get a look on account of the fog swirling up around him.
Jaak drops down to one knee with a pained moan.“Trust yourself, Meadow.” He turns his head away from me but I still see the silhouette transforming into…into…a monster? The tentacle lashes forward, it’s going to hit him.
Monster or not, he’s my husband. I took a vow and I meant it. I turn and grab the nearest thing I can. A dollhouse off a shelf and lob it at the tentacle. The dream house flies through the air with deadly accuracy and hits the tentacle. Brightly colored plastic explodes in every direction at the direct hit and the tentacle stops going for Jaak. It jerks to a stop and turns my way.
I rub my eyes and stare at it. Can a tentacle look? Is it looking at me? Above me the colored lanterns blink in and out, making it hard to see at first, but when I finally see it I can’t unsee it.
There’s an eyeball in the middle of the tentacle. It’s absolutely staring at me. It rears up and starts coming for me, the sickening sound of a body dragging across the store floor tells me that there’s a lot more of this tentacle beast than what I’m seeing. I back up a step and then another, and sure as shit there’s more tentacles starting to appear in the aisles.
“Think, Meadow,” I order myself. I have to do something and fast or I’m going to get ripped apart by these things. Fog rises up around me making it hard to see exactly where the tentacles are. They’re there and then they’re not with the next swirl of fog.
“Trust yourself, Meadow.”
I look down and see the warm glow of the bond I have with Jaak. It shoots out from me and into the fog, the light gone when it’s hardly a foot away from me. I could follow it to him. He’d figure this out but…but…I’m the backup Charlie summoned, aren’t I? Didn’t my best friend face down scarier things to save me? And Jaak soul-bonded me, nothing can hurt me, at least not indefinitely.
“Trust yourself,” I whisper and close my eyes. Granted it’s not the best locale for a soul-searching moment but one should always make lemonade out of lemons, or in this case, give a tentacle a black eye to save her husband.
I take in a steadying breath as the sound of the tentacles comes faster. It’s close, it’s looking for me in the fog too. It has to be or it would have found me by now, and that’s when I realize something. It can’t see any better than me in this fog. That’s an opportunity I can make use of. I back up and move into the aisle behind me. The move comes just in time as a tentacle slaps down where I just was but I don’t give it much thought. There’s something happening, it’s just the barest brush, so light that I might have missed it if I wasn’t desperate for it.
“Clear your mind,” I whisper again to myself and sink down to my knees. I don’t know where Jaak is. I can’t hear him anymore. The only noise I hear is the drag of the tentacles, the whipping sound they make as they cut through the air and shelves crashing to the ground.
“Meadow, you can do this. You can do this.” I reach out like I did before for the power I know is out there, that I know belongs to me. Fear washes over me and this I know, this I understand.I’ve been scared all my life from my dreams and through every hour. Fear is well known, my constant companion. I have always, always, run from what scares me. I’ve done everything I can to hide from what scares me but not this time.
Not this time.
I’m not going to run. Jaak is right, sometimes you need to take a stand and fight. I take in a deep breath and let it out, and give myself over to whatever is about to happen. My mind goes silent and the sounds stop like a light someone flipped off. I take a deep breath and sink deeper into the silence. When I was a kid, I used to pretend that I was an adventurer or princess waiting to be rescued by her prince charming. It was easy to slip and fall, break a leg or sprain an arm, I knew that but it didn’t stop me. That edge of fear and danger worked itself into me bit by bit that I learned not to freeze.
I learned to keep climbing and turn off my brain.
The older I got, I climbed jungle gyms and trees, higher and higher up. I moved on from jungle gyms and treehouses to the tops of buildings. My favorite had been the Hall of Worship because it was the tallest in town. I’d climb out on the roof and go higher until my fingers ached from holding my weight when it was too steep to stand. I’d lay there and watch the sun go down and the stars come out. It was so still and quiet in those stolen hours that I swore I could hear the earth move.
Right now is just like that.
Fear. Danger. Anxiety.
All of it rolls itself together until I can’t tell one from the other, it remakes itself, swallows me whole, and forces me to become something new too. The end result?
Power.
The lesson I learned as a girl comes back tenfold now. The only way to get through the fear is to own it, to go through it and not around. Only then does it become something useful.Power hums and snaps through my body, making me feel like I’m coming apart and being forced back together all at once, like a rubber band that’s been stretched too tight until it finally snaps back to where it should be. The power floods in more, so do other things.
Memories.
I see Jaak’s home. I know it’s his home, it’s the one I saw before but now it feels likemyhome. Lush, verdant, peaceful. There’s a song being sung in my ear while I’m being rocked, no, we’re being rocked. Mother. She sings of happiness and sleep, of the good tomorrow will bring. I’m calm, so safe. I see her again, the way her hand fits over mine as we walk through a field filled with flowers. They’re orange and red, they look like the sun. Delicate petals slide beneath my palms when I hold my hand out as we walk.
Everything changes and goes cold and there’s screams and the heat of a fire on my face. I’m too small to do anything but scream. The fields of flowers are on fire, my mother is gone. There’s no one left.
No one.
No one but me and then the man who comes. He crouches down to look at me and smiles. His face is wrong. There’s hate in his eyes, so much hate that I can feel it but I don’t move. He’s the only one here, there’s nowhere for me to go.
He flips a coin and smiles at me.
