Of Sisters and Shadows – Chapter 12

This is… manageable.

I mean, yes, Hellhound’s dogs pack a punch, and I feel guilty about now realizing that they have been actual dogs all along rather than projections like I always assumed, but between Amy and me, we should be able to handle this without any issue.

Other than, you know, the actual issue.

“What do you hope to accomplish here?” Hellhound’s shadow says, uncharacteristically normal, unlike all the other distorted versions of capes we’ve faced inside the mists.

The mists she’s stepping back into.

Because of course.

“Saving the day. It’s kind of the hero thing to do. I’d expect a villain to know that much,” I say as I keep silently spreading tendrils of my shield around Amy and the only human Hellhound.

“And what does saving the day mean to you?” A voice that is not as rough as that of the Undersiders’ heavy hitter asks, bouncing all around me, whispering across branches of starlit trees, racing over dry leaves on a forest floor.

Something tingles up my spine, and I force myself to keep my smile firmly in place.

“What is this, therapy for dummies? Aren’t you going to ask about my mother?” One of the reptilian wolves slinks closer, warily sniffing the air before I snap a sharp tendril of aura at his snout, and he yelps, jumping back into the other prowling animals.

Wait. I’m doing this wrong.

“That’s not my job, Victoria. You already overcame this,” she says, chiding me.

My teeth clench hard enough to hurt, and I ignore the monster talking.

Then I take that anger and… twist it.

I twist it into the anger of impotence. Of knowing that things are wrong and won’t ever get any better. I twist it into my lowest points. Into all the deaths I’ve witnessed or come to know.

And then I dig past the anger.

To the sorrow. To the fear.

To knowing that the world is twisted, and broken, and senseless. That I can’t do anything to ever improve it. That I’ll keep on fighting futilely and lose, again and again, until I can’t fight anymore. The fear that I’ll leave behind nothing but a world that would’ve been better off without me.

Because that’s my biggest fear. The only one I can never shake off.

And the fear that I flood my shield with as I snap it as far away from the two girls and three dogs beneath me as I can manage.

And so I impart my fear on wolves, coyotes, and whatever else the shadow has dragged here.

It’s an abstract fear. A human thing.

They don’t process it as such.

And so they run, or scramble away with eyes wide, or drop down and roll over with paws in the air, whining something keen and guttural that makes that thing crawling up my spine run cold.

I reinforce it. Feed on it. Throw it back at them.

And, for the first time in history, the wolf is the one scared of the girl in the forest.

***

I don’t know what Vicky just did, but I don’t like it.

I… there’re echoes of it. Of her emotions brushing against me, tugging at my own, and as romantic as it sounds, it’s utterly unpleasant.

“What… what is she doing?” Hellhound—because I refuse to call her Bitch unless I really mean it—says from above one of her…

Pets, I guess.

I suddenly understand why those E88 goons from the dog fighting rings were so thoroughly worked over. She may have given Vicky a run for her money.

“It’s one of her powers. She can send emotions through her aura,” I say as I keep grabbing her ankle so I can send my power to smooth and wrinkle her palms until every last bit of bark and grain of black earth drops down from no longer open sores.

“I don’t like it.”

“It… has its moments,” I say, immediately tamping down on my urge to blush as I remember just how little Vicky cared to hide her orgasm while she was bound by a horse I’ll need to reconstruct as soon as we get back home.

I mean… talk about sharing pleasure…

“What am I supposed to do?” the redhead asks.

“What?”

“Here. You’re fighting me. Her. Whatever. What do I do?”

And I think about it.

The shadow isn’t here, she’s… lurking in the mists, pulling that spooky ‘voice coming from everywhere and nowhere’ crap that I’m sure Vicky, nerd that she is, is eating up like a non-kale smoothie.

But this isn’t about fighting, is it?

Not really.

Not when…

I remember myself. Cruel and gentle. Poking at open wounds, tearing off scabs, pulling my heart open, and smiling all the way in maddening compassion.

I remember the other Amy. Fighting the way I never allowed myself to fight, delving right into what I feared most about myself.

I remember her claws going through me. My blood raining on pulsing flesh that she had enslaved and turned into our battleground.

And then…

I shake my head, still not ready to revisit everything that happened that day, even if I’m supposed to have healed from it. Even if I’m supposed to be better because of it.

Even if I have Vicky with me.

But… Yes. I’m afraid. I’m still afraid and will be for years to come, waking up thinking I dreamed it all, that my sister’s love and acceptance is a delusion born out of sick obsession. That there never was a shadow, that it was all a feverish, yearning dream.

And yet…

I turn toward Hellhound without letting go of her ankle.

“What is your name?” I ask her, staring straight into brown eyes light enough that they could be the amber of her own shadow.

She looks back in silence.

“Rachel Lindt. My trigger is public,” she finally answers.

I nod.

“All right. Because I’m about to have a serious talk with you, and I don’t want to call you Hellhound, much less Bitch, during it.”

“Bitch—”

“Shut up, bitch.”

“I—” she stops herself, eyebrows scrunched together, and I feel the adrenaline spike as she processes the words.

“Right. Rachel. This is a… This is yours. Vicky and I can help, but this isn’t about us. So, you decide: do you want to run away?”

Her heart doesn’t still, but her eyes go from me to the animals recoiling away from Vicky and whatever she’s making them feel.

Then to the mists.

“Or what?” she asks.

“Or… You face her. Yourself. You let her tear you apart. You let her pull every single painful secret you have buried. And you accept it. You don’t deny the truth. Don’t hide from it. You embrace what she tells you. Learn from it. Grow from it.”

There is no silence between us. Not when the wind picks up, and the trees shake as howls, barks, and whining get louder and louder.

No silence.

But there’s a bit of quiet.

“And then?” Rachel asks, still not looking at me but at her three dogs. At the anxious animals huddled together and watching warily at the things beyond my sister’s reach.

“Then… Then you second trigger.”

“What?”

“That’s what this whole thing is: a machine to cause second triggers. Or to kill you in the process. And you need to confront yourself if you want to—”

“What… What does that even—”

I meet her eyes.

Because I plant my wingtips on the earth and rise up until I’m face to face with her, my irises shifting rapidly in color, glittering with metal deposits I saved just for this kind of thing as I light them up with bioluminescent fibers tangled in erratic patterns around my irises.

She recoils, almost falling down from her dog right before I grab her bare shoulder to steady her as her pet turns his neck at an impossible angle just to watch me warily.

Mutt, you just spent the past few minutes trying to lick me with that gross Gigerian tongue of yours. If you so much as growl at me, I’m counting it as spousal abuse.

“Rachel, thisis what it means. I used to only be able to use my power on others. Now? Now my flesh is whatever the Hell I want it to be. I’m pretty much immortal, except better than that second-rate Highlander crap because cutting off my head won’t—”

“I knew you liked that movie!” a ditzy blonde interrupts me from above.

“Shut up, Vicky! I’m trying to be a mysterious mentor character guiding my charge through her dark night of the soul! Don’t ruin the ambiance!”

“We’re surrounded by wolves in a forest at night while mysterious mists swirl around us! There’s no ruining this ambiance!”

“Oh, I agree,” Rachel says.

Except not the one I’m touching.

When somebody says that their blood runs cold? That’s not quite a figure of speech. Shock, fear, and other unpleasant emotions can make the body go into panic mode, and that includes all the capillaries near the surface of the body, near the skin, abruptly contracting, decreasing the flow of warmth from the core of the body to the outside of it.

It’s what makes you go pale, what makes your cheeks suddenly lose all color.

It’s what the Rachel we came to save is experiencing right now as she watches her counterpart step out of the mists, riding a dog very much like the one Rachel’s sitting on.

But this one has a saddle.

And is not alone.

Tens of hounds equipped with spiked or studded harnesses follow her, all of them grown, all of them warily advancing despite what Vicky is doing to them.

And then the shadow points at my sister and, through a black leather mask that would make me call her Hellhound without any kind of irony, smiles.

“Kill,” she says.

And her hounds leap.

***

Crap, crap, crap!

I knew I shouldn’t have gone for the stalling tactic! I knew I should have been proactive! I knew I shouldn’t have let the enemy recoup and rethink her tactics!

I knew a lot of things! I was smart! I should have listened to past me, because she was definitely smarter than I am!

I throw a quick look below me at the two girls and three dogs, but I honestly don’t know what else I can do other than—there!

I shoot down and dive right under the first of the dogs leaping at me. The black harness is thick and solid, and I need to stretch my shield past the reach of my fingers to grab the strap of leather running down the middle of its chest, but that means it should be strong enough to withstand me quickly turning around in midair, the yelping mass of muscle and bony spikes turning into an improvised flail that I smash against the first line of dogs leaping at me fast enough that they all bounce back, down and toward the still disoriented wolves, jackals, and whatever else the shadow has thought to add to her repertoire.

Then I spin once again and throw it straight at the shadow.

She whistles and her dog jumps aside, the one I just threw swallowed by the wall of yellowish fog behind her.

He doesn’t come back.

Which… gives me an idea.

Possibly a bad idea.

But past Vicky is no longer here to caution me against it.

It’s a shame. Past Vicky was really smart.

***

Vicky is… throwing dogs around.

And to the mists.

…

If this works, I’m filing a complaint. This seriously shouldn’t work. Not when the shadow keeps adjusting to everything that we do and raising the difficulty of the…

Boss fight.

…

I hate Leet.

With a passion.

“Rachel! You need to decide!” I say as I lengthen my nails and clad them in limpet teeth channeled around my body from the deposits in my wings, remembering to reinforce the nail beds and germinal matrix so they won’t be torn apart if I am really forced to use them as weapons.

Then I grow patches of photosensitive cells along the bones of my wings. No time for finesse—for lenses or complicated nerves—so I will only get a vague sense of motion if something tries to sneak up on—there.

I turn around and whip a blob of muscle relaxants straight into a skinless snout that should have no defenses against the thing entering its bloodstream, but Rachel’s power is complicated, and constantly adjusts and readjusts the canines under her sway, so I can’t come up with a ready-made solution for every single one of them—

Another dog jumps at—

“Angelica! Kill!”

And one of the three dogs on our side jumps over me and at a thing snaking around a thick tree in a way that suggests it has too many or too few paws.

“Good! Fight!” I say, getting carried away and not knowing why. “Let the bitch know who you are!”

“I am Bitch!”

“That’s the spirit!”

She growls.

I smirk.

And then I throw a glob of supercharged amanita muscaria extract at a former coyote who should get in touch with its shamanic roots.

***

This is getting out of hand.

Yes, the dogs I throw out don’t come back, and Amy and Hellhound seem to be holding their ground without too many issues, but…

But I don’t know what we’re doing.

So I fly down, straight past a whole pack of hounds snapping their jaws at me, taking away shattering wings of my shield with each attempt to stop me from reaching the shadow, and—

And I do.

I grab her throat with one hand and fly up, above everything. Above the circle of swirling mist and the barking monsters.

It’s just… A dark forest at night.

Surrounded by everything else.

The mists sing to me in their eternal song of chorused emotions, nothing else being clear enough to overwhelm the notes of Hellhound’s trigger event. The desperation, the fear, not for herself, but for another. The defeat, the loss, the…

“Who died?” I ask the shadow.

She smiles.

It’s gentle. Caring.

And it makes my stomach twist.

“It’s not what you think. But it’s close,” she says.

“That’s not an answer.”

She… She’s wearing biker leathers. Her gloves are precisely the kind of thing Hellhound should wear to avoid leaving half her hand scrapped on the pavement after a bad fall from one of her dogs.

She’s a villain. She could afford it.

But she doesn’t. She wears nothing like what her shadow is wearing. None of the practical gear. None of the harnesses for her dogs. And she only ever uses three of them.

So. A villain who’s less capable than what her shadow implies she could ever be.

Just like Amy’s shadow.

“What answer do you want, Victoria?” she asks, her hand slowly and almost tenderly closing around my wrist.

I lick my dry lips and peek down at Amy stabbing her right hand into the neck of a monster that immediately drops down.

Hellhound is riding around her, the three dogs acting in unison and ganging up on the chaotic melee of wild animals.

And I…

“How do we win?” I ask.

She smiles. This time, it’s not tender.

“Well, you could kill me,” she says. And, right before my hand around her throat closes, right as I finally realize that she shouldn’t be able to talk so easily while I hold her by her neck, she continues. “But that will only throw you out. Nothing will be solved. I’ll still be here. Waiting. For Rachel.”

My mouth thins as I try to think, to come up with… something.

“The power—” I start to say.

“No. You won’t get that from me as long as Rachel Lindt hasn’t died by my hand.”

That’s… Not the time.

“Then—”

“Let me fight her. One-on-one. Like we were doing before you got here.”

“You were about to kill her.”

“Yes, I was. Do you think I can still do it?”

***

Brutus. Angelica. Judas.

Mine.

My dogs. My… mine.

And I use them. They fight for me. Beside me.

But never like this. Not like that’s what they are for. Like that’s the only thing they are for.

I whistle a command, and Angelica jumps back before I spur Brutus on, running over the thing with a harness chasing Angelica. Then I snap my fingers twice, and Judas turns around to guard our back as I survey what I can do that Panacea isn’t already doing as a mountain of monsters keeps growing around the girl moving weirdly, impossibly, making my teeth grind when I try to predict what she’ll do.

And—

“Call them off!” Glory Girl says, dropping down between Panacea and me.

Carrying me in her arms.

“What?”

“Your dogs! She’ll send hers away if yours stay away from the fight.”

I jump down from Brutus.

“Brutus! Angelica! Judas! Stay!” I say.

And they sit down immediately.

Then the mists rise up and crash around us, the forest drowning in their amber light.

And then…

Then there’s only me.

The two of us.

“Rachel!” Panacea calls out from all around me. “Rachel, remember what I told you!”

“Yes, Rachel. Remember,” the other me says.

And… She’s once again dressed like I am.

Torn jeans. Stained bra. Boots.

Dirty hair, smudged face.

Ugly face.

Right in front of me.

Caressing me.

“Do you want me to kill you?” she asks kindly and sincerely.

I shake my head.

“Why? Why don’t you?” She tilts her head in confusion as if she doesn’t understand my answer.

And I…

“There’s… No reason. I just don’t want to die.”

“Ah. But do you want to live?”

Her hand is warm on my cheek, and I’m too afraid to nuzzle against it. I have to hold steady like I always do when people touch me. Suppress the urge to flinch away.

Or to hit first.

“Rachel. I asked you a question.”

I look into amber eyes.

And nod.

Her smile turns sad.

“And what does that mean?” she asks.

And I…

I think.

I remember.

Hiding away between dark trees just outside a big yard with a small pool. Carrying food for a small dog that kept growing up while tied to one of the elms.

I had tried to be kind to him. Good. I’d built him a shelter with twigs and grass, and he usually slept inside of it. He always seemed glad to see me. He would sometimes eat from my palm without biting me. Without hurting me.

Sometimes, he let me pet him.

I walked with him when I dared, grabbing the long piece of twine tied around his neck and moving between the dark trees, the bright windows of my home behind me.

Then I would leave, and I would feel guilty about the small dog tied to a thick tree so he wouldn’t run away. So he would still be there to bite me when I brought him his next meal.

But Rollo lived. He wanted to live. He wanted to live badly enough that he cried out for me to save him when my stepmother drowned him in front of me and forced me to watch.

“I don’t know,” I say. Because I don’t know what Rollo wanted other than to break free and run away.

What he did when I gave him the strength to.

“No. You know, Rach. You know what you want your life to be. Tell me, or we’ll fight again.”

I look into amber eyes.

She looks back.

And I…

I raise my hand and pet her cheek. Slowly. Feeling the peach fuzz on my hand. The warmth of her skin. A softness unlike that of my dogs, but that makes me feel…

Not that different.

She closes her eyes and leans into my touch, rubbing her face against my open palm like Angelica sometimes does when I lie on the sofa and she jumps on top of my belly before pretending to be asleep so I won’t force her to move.

I never do.

“I…” I don’t know what to say.

“Lisa. What did you—”

I want to deny it. I want to hide away from it. From being hurt again. From being thrown away, rejected, and…

And I remember Panacea talking to me like she expected me to learn something.

So… I try.

“I want to save her. I want her to be alive. I want her… to like me. To still care for me like I think she sometimes does when she changes the way she speaks just so I won’t be startled or angry. And… And I hope she does that because she cares, and not because she has to. I want… I want to be her friend,” I say.

And then I cry.

For the first time since I killed my stepmother with Rollo, I cry.

It pours out and doesn’t stop. My chest shakes, and my eyes burn, and my breath hitches. And then I am surrounded by thick, mannish arms, and cradled against a soft chest, with warm lips shushing me, murmuring in my ear.

And I hold me.

As I cry.

“It’s all right. No matter what, it’s all right. Because you are now… you are different, Rach. You admitted what you wanted, what you needed, and you’ll allow yourself to find it.”

“B—but…” I try to answer. To argue. To say that, no, that it won’t be all right. That I failed again. That I may have gotten killed another person I didn’t want to hurt.

That… That I should be the one who—

“Let it out. Let yourself know how hurt you are. But then promise me that you will move forward. That you’ll understand the hurt little girl you were and be kind to her. That you will do what I can no longer do.”

“What—”

“I am the shadow, the true self,” she whispers.

And then… the warmth seeps in.

Every time I was turned away, pushed away, rejected.

When they sent me to another home because I fought back against their true daughter.

When they just… didn’t care about me. And I was taken away.

When they died.

I… I kept wanting it. Craving it. This warmth I’m now feeling. This thing I could only find in my dogs, because they are loyal, and kind, and won’t ever hurt you if you don’t give them reason to.

Because I can understand them, even if I can’t understand others.

And so… I stopped trusting people. I stopped accepting this warmth when they offered it to me. I started pretending I didn’t want it. That I didn’t care. That I knew it would never be honest, and that they would hurt me for no reason I could understand.

I convinced myself of it. That I was better off without it.

But I kept wanting it.

And then I met… people who needed me.

To work with them, yes, but… But we lived together. And I started to know them. And I…

It had been so long since I had a conversation. An actual conversation that would be answered with more than caring, silent, soulful looks or happy barks.

‘Trigger events… Capes like to go on and on about them, Rach,’ Lisa told me one day as we were both half-sitting on our white sofa. ‘They rarely mention specifics, but… It’s always there. That thing they went through. That thing we all went through.

‘But it’s not so easy. It’s not a single thing. And that’s all right.

‘It’s all right if things keep hurting. It’s all right if things keep happening. It’s all right if you still need time.

‘Because, as long as we live, there’s still a chance for time enough to heal.’

I didn’t understand her. Not that time.

But now… Now, as the tears keep flowing, as the memories keep rushing, as the warmth of firm arms seeps into me…

I understand.

And, when I do, mannish arms fade away, and the warmth is no longer around me.

But inside me.

And, without knowing why, I mutter:

“I am not the shadow. I am the true self.”