Chapters 17-20

17

Jo-Mel slashes the arrow in two with a swift swipe of the katana, snapping its shaft just inches before the tip finds its mark.

“No time for that,” she says quite calmly for someone who'd just been fired upon. “You must find and free the boy. This one is dead, but its weavings will still have your son bound.”

“You stay right where you are,” Monique Felani says with deadly seriousness. She already has another arrow nocked and aimed at Jo-Mel's head.

“I can help. If you allow it.”

“Yeah, well, I don't know you like that. Ain't done so well with strangers so far.”

Lowering the katana, Jo-Mel says, “Understood. But I'm here at Askauri's behest and you should know that the wilds of the Incata are best navigated by the wit of two women.”

Peering closer, Monie says, “I know you...”

“Yes,” Jo-Mel says. “And you know that I mean you no harm, Monique Felani.”

18

Bealz is gone. No where to be found amongst the debris scattered about when Pickle-Me-Jack's enchantment collapsed. Monie, assisted by Jo-Mel, searches frantically for her son, but can find him nowhere.

They find the pieces of the battered wooden cart that Jack had pulled through the woods, but its contents had been scattered. They even managed to find and free several creatures, some even sentient, from their bindings. Most of those still wrapped in Jack's cacooning, though, were long dead.

Finally honing in on and tracing Bealz's essence down into the ether of the void, Jo-Mel knows where they must go.

“You'll have to open another gateway,” she says to Monique.

“Why? Where's my son?”

“When the demon's illusions collapsed, it created a vortex. He fell through. He's been pulled back through to Earth.”

Monique feels a pang of uncertainty. Here she stood, in her true form. Fiercely confident, capable. Scared to death. She felt as though she wore a new body. Or better yet, the same body stuffed into the skin of another.

It was Monique who wielded the flames, shaped her heart's desire upon the forge of an unwavering force of will.

Monie just wanted to hold her son. She only wanted to stroke his hair and face and shield him away and keep him safe.

The two women confronted themselves, each staring at the other with awe and disgust.

Taking a deep breath, she turns to Jo-Mel. “Let's go,” she says, closing her eyes and envisioning home. This time, with her awakening, she sees and follows the thread of her genetic line. She's allowed access to the magics of her familial histories.

The portal opens for her without the violent eruption of brute force she'd found necessary before. This time she slid easily between worlds as she took Jo-Mel's hand and stepped through, but her cipher was slightly off.

They weren't in Chicago.

19

Bealz was still wrapped up in Pickle-Me-Jack's webs. He was still trapped in a loop, a snippet of a recent, happy recollection. But the landscape had changed.

This was no longer his memory. He no longer recognized it. The sky had grown dark. A huge black storm cloud had suddenly settled in over the valley. It was a huge and terrible thing, shot through with roiling flame and lanced with lightning.

He shuddered in fear. It wasn't the storm that frightened him, though. He felt his mother near, felt her shielding him, almost, but couldn't see her. Bealz called out to her, his words carried away on the increasing winds. The ground thrums, he can feel the vibrations buzzing up through the soles of his feet, making his legs and knees wobble.

There is something else in the sky. Something fighting for position with the dark cloud. It was somehow darker than the storm, which was wickedly fierce and thunderous. Bealz didn't like to look at it. It made him feel uneasy, nauseous. Somehow unclean.

Like hundreds, thousands of tiny spiders crawling over his skin.

The struggle in the sky above his head crescendos. The storm surges, grows even more savage. The winds whipping against his face forced Bealz to his knees. The air became electrically charged. It felt as though the weight of the sky itself pressed down upon him as a tremendous explosion erupted, rocking and splitting the false illusion wide open.

Bealz fell down into the crack, tumbling down into the void.

As it slammed shut behind him he could see his mother, high amidst the roiling storm, wielding a fiery blade. Her movements were ethereal and deadly as she whips around in a wicked arc, arms fully extending, and takes the head of the kindly old man they'd met in the woods.

Coming to a sudden and jarring stop, wet with the rains that fell in torrents as the storm had completely consumed the dark presence in the sky above the Incata, Bealz is slammed unconscious and crumples into a heap in the alley behind Ms. Penny's burned out apartment building.

The building's upper floors had been destroyed. It looked as though it had been hit with rocket fire. The front and back entrances and most of the ground level windows had been boarded up with fresh planks of plywood. The air still smelled heavily of fire, ash and asbestos. Gray wisps of smoke spiraled up into the air, rising from the smoldering piles of rubble, steaming away the waters of the fire hoses.

The firemen had been gone for some hours now. The excitement of the exploding apartment building and the body pulled from the rubble had died back down into the usual depressing buzz of exaggerated rumor.

The foster kids who stayed in the top floor apartment were always gone during the day. Monie, the pretty, but crazy, lady who stayed there sometimes, was hardly ever around. So,then, it would either be Ms. Penny who they carried out zipped up inside a black body bag, or her dope head brother, who no one in the neighborhood would ever admit to missing.

None of the neighbors considered where Bealz was. Or at least none who cared.

20

Dakari, sitting in a diner in Englewood, a local's place on the Southside famous all over the city for its soul food, turns to look out the window and smiles.

How curious, he thinks. The boy had vanished, but now it appears as though he were back.

Once he'd inadvertently caused Askauri's shields to collapse, Dakari could feel Bealz's presence as it steadily thrummed around his Southside neighborhood. The boy had never been very far away from him. Dakari had reveled a bit in knowing that he could reach out to him, snap his damned neck at any time he wanted.

He would have done it too, just to see the anguish in one of the Royal's faces, right before Dakari killed the bastard along with his brat of a son.

But Dakari had his orders. He was to observe. To keep his distance. It was enough that he'd somehow disrupted Askauri's shield defenses. He had yet to explain that and he was sure that the answers would be inadequate. Dakari didn't look forward to paying the cost for that error.

When the boy had vanished, his essence winking out just as suddenly as it had appeared, Dakari feared the worst. He rather liked his head right where it was, so when Bealz's essence flared up again, he breathed a sigh of relief.

He knew just who to call.

“Mook, pay the man. We got thangs to do.”