Of Sisters and Shadows – Chapter 9

I am still… unsure about the mists.

I think my power is uniquely suited to navigate them, as I find myself in a dimly lit place that sings in emotion rather than sound, and I can… harmonize. I can hum along the chorus with my own aura tuned to reflect what is thrown at me, thrumming with every single one of the notes that the mists swirl with.

It would all be far easier if I wasn’t carrying Amy.

“Are we there yet?” she asks, knowing precisely what she’s doing, her infuriating grin flashing teeth that are the brightest sight in the almost uniformly gray environment I’m flying through.

“Say that again. Say that again, and I’ll find the nearest window to throw you off.”

“You say the sweetest things. Truly, best pillow talk I ever got. Ten out of ten, would fuck you with a vegetable horse again.”

I close my eyes and count to ten—an arbitrary number.

A process that is not hindered in the slightest by Amy trying to go through my shield to tickle me.

“First of all, this is the only pillow talk you’ve ever gotten, and possibly the only one you’ll ever get if you are always this much of a brat after having a non-solitary orgasm. Second, I am trying to finely tune my shield along waves of emotion that—”

“Let me touch you.”

“Amy, for fuck’s sake, keep it in your pants—”

“Let me touch you, and I can make you feel those emotions,” she says with uncharacteristic seriousness.

As the mists swirl around my ankles and tug at me with alien passions, I look down at her, at the girl I’m holding in a princess carry just to silently mock Princess Twilight Moonshadow Iris yet again.

She stares back up.

And I wet my lips.

It’s… It’s frightening. Knowing how strongly Amy always felt for me and how easily she could have made me reciprocate long before Shadows forced me to face her hidden side. It’s horrifying what Amy could do to me with a touch, a caress.

But it’s always been, hasn’t it?

She could kill me. Twist me. Turn me into something—someone else. But I have known that ever since she triggered and never paid it any mind, other than a dark thrill of silently exchanged glances at the thought of her healing me turning into something deeper the few times I was tempted to ask her to tweak my body. To make me something more.

But I never feared her.

I never feared her when I asked her to heal me, or to get rid of a pimple, or…

Or when I kissed her, holding her dying body in my arms, another Amy watching us as the mists sang.

I never feared her. Not Amy. Not my sister.

So, why should I fear my lover?

I bite my lip, anxious at the far too new thought, and lower my shield, my arms sagging slightly before I reinforce them yet again everywhere but where I’m holding her amid turbulent, pearly gray curlicues that sing of rage, betrayal, and bitter defeat.

Then her fingers ghost along the inside of my left wrist, her knees shifting over my arm as I shiver at her touch, and…

And my shield floods with it. With the indignation, with everything that so neatly aligns in a mind that is now anything but ordered as emotions violently clash and bring me both higher and lower, as pure hatred is born out of the desperation and—

And the mists part.

Below us, Hookwolf is fighting Hellhound.

No, Hookwolf’s Shadowis fighting Hellhound.

… Which quickly clarifies whose side I should be on despite there being two villains below me.

That, and it’s kinda hard not to feel at least a slight twinge of sympathy for the stocky girl kneeling on the cracked concrete floor, surrounded by three wary, growling, vaguely canine monstrosities, and holding a heavily bleeding, limp left arm while directing her own growl at the, you know, literal Nazi.

… Does it make me a bad person that I’m glad yet another Empire bastard has succumbed to the incarnation of their own hidden side?

“She’s going to die soon,” Amy comments in that detached tone I’ve only ever heard her use in the hospital. Which is a good thing, because it lets me focus as I dive down to our actual priority, the living cape, as I divide my shield into thin planes covering my left side.

The monsters growl and snap their jaws at me when I approach their master, the threats turning into confused cries as invisible tubes shatter between their teeth, and I try to gently push them away with curved wings made from my shield as I land in front of Hellhound and let Amy down to kneel by—

“Not me,” Hellhound says as she looks up at Amy wearing Panacea’s robes. At a healer she can’t fail to recognize. “Them first.”

And she weakly tilts her chin toward the monsters surrounding her. Guarding her, still trying to get around the invisible obstacles my shield’s turned into as they sadly whimper at being kept away from their mistress.

At monsters bleeding and limping. Suffering and not caring for it.

It’s… It’s enough to make me hesitate.

Both Amy and I turn to look back at the redheaded girl, to maybe try and convince her to accept healing before her… allies are treated, but then something screeches behind me, and I turn to see…

Not Hookwolf.

Not with the way he now looks. With how alien his body is as blades and pikes slide against one another, the metal whining under the stress as it bends and twists into ever more complex shapes that make its frame flow rather than walk, the torso and paws sprouting sharp, harpoon-like tendrils that dig through concrete before pulling the mass forward, clouds of powdered concrete flying up as something bigger than a bus cracks the floor under it.

Only the head is still that of a wolf, but, below the blazing eyes of the Shadow shining through a grid of broken knives…

Below that, sprouting from its chest in a vertical row under the snapping japws of the monstrous canine, there’s a tiger mask, the black stripes on the cheeks made from stretched, torn skin darkened with dried, flaking blood, and under it there’s a screaming woman’s head locked in a barbed wire cage, the rage on her so vivid it almost makes me forget it’s just metal, even if flowing, living metal.

Hookwolf. Stormtiger. Cricket. Together for one last time.

It lifts one of its misshapen paws, the limb curving in a single arc before it thrusts it forward, edge-lined spheres blasting off it like water thrown from a glass.

Except… Except each droplet of spiked metal is at least as big as my torso, so I fly up and in front of the pitiful monsters guarding Hellhound, and I focus on the threat in front of me and trust Amy to guard herself, because she’s surrounded, yes, but by living beings without ranged attacks.

Biological beings that she can incapacitate with a single touch. That she can use her wings to safely fend off before lashing out with her power. That she can kill or knock out with spores flying around her, or a jet of contact anesthetic, or, or…

Please, pleasebe all right, sis.

I slice one of the balls in half with a swipe of my shield, the single blade projected from my hand angled to have the next attack roll off it into another direction before a third one shatters it and bounces off with its momentum spent. I stop two more with reaching tendrils, but I wasted too much of my shield keeping Hellhound’s guardians at bay when I dropped Amy, so I am forced to fly down as fast as I can and reach out to the next one with my hands.

My shield shatters around them, my flight dropping along with my strength.

The spiked projectile would usually drop harmlessly to the floor below me.

But I’m faster than I usually am. Amy has made me faster, and stronger, and… and many things I’m still processing, so I’m able to close my hands around one of the blades circling the bizarre weapon, grateful to discover that Amy wasn’t lying when she said I’m now harder to cut, and my arms strain to use the cruel thing as my own shield despite how much it should weight. It’s still a struggle, my current strength far lesser than what’s available to me when my power assists me, but I am no longer a regular human when it is spent.

The tips of my boots brush the powdered concrete, and I adjust minutely every single muscle in my lower body to explode into motion as soon as I have the traction for it.

I can do this.

My heels touch the floor, and I lunge to the right and deflect the next ball with the one in my hands, the impact almost deafening as my arms shake with it, and then I twist around back to my left and throw the impromptu shield right at the last orb threatening Amy, sending it clattering off course right before it would’ve hit one of the snarling, cowering, pitiful monsters.

And then my own true shield comes back up, and I face a monster for whom I shall never feel pity.

Bring it on, you murderer.

***

Vicky is enjoying herself.

I think.

Her punches echo across this… warehouse? Yes, it seems to be an abandoned warehouse, and each of my sister’s blows rings like a gigantic gong, so loud that I had to tweak my hearing to filter it. So loud that Hellhound and her… companions shudder at each strike.

And that’s why I think Vicky is enjoying herself: because she’s not slicing him into Aryan tinsel with her shield, but pummeling him, flying around the bastard like a wasp, diving down to strike at him and sometimes through him, the metal screeching when she tears through it with sheer speed that not even Hookwolf seems able to keep up with

I suppress a brief burst of pride at it. Because Vicky was always fast, yes, even if not as fast as Crystal, but it’s only now that I have tweaked her nervous system that she can take full advantage of it. That she can do sudden stops and abrupt changes of direction that only the kind of flight that tells physics to fuck off and mind their own nerdy business can manage.

I suppress the pride, but, mostly, because she’s not here for me to gloat.

Instead, I have… this.

“Let me heal you before you bleed to death,” I tell the obstinate young woman holding together ribbons of flesh and slivers of bone.

“Them. First,” she snarls at me.

Again.

So, deciding that maybe arguing with somebody about to pass out from blood loss may not be the most effective use of my time at the moment, I turn around and…

…

Okay, these things are big.

I wonder If I could…

“Angelica, Brutus, Judas, sit,” Hellhound says with a voice stronger than she should be able to.

And, wincing and whining at their quite obvious wounds, the things obey.

I lick my lips out of habit before I decide to wet them in a more straightforward way now that my power allows me to do so, and I take a careful step forward, ready to lash out with my wings if one of them so much as bares its teeth at me—

“Sit! Friend!” she says.

And three long tails of bare flesh with no skin, barbed with bone spikes and what looks like chitinous quills, thump against the floor.

… They really are dogs, aren’t they?

And Vicky is fighting a Nazi supervillain who hurts dogs.

New Wave’s PR team (that is, Crystal and her social media addiction) is going to salivate over this.

So I carefully approach the one in the middle, one who has a long, jagged line of missing flesh down the front of its chest, and slowly raise my hand up for it to sniff—he’s licking me.

A giant, monsterized dog taller than I am is licking my hand.

All right, Amy, remember: squeeing in the field of battle is a very good way to lose cred in front of the supervillain you’re rescuing.

So, rather than allow myself to do what comes naturally and pet its misshapen, Jurassic head and tell him what a good boy he’s been, I let my power flow out and through him, finding out the actual dog inside of the flesh suit. Except the distinction is not so clear, as the animal seems to be… diffuse. His nervous system has spread through the enhanced flesh surrounding him, and it shares a circulatory system, even if it makes no sense for a heart sized for a regular dog to be supplying half an elephant’s worth of mass—that’s two extra hearts stored inside the chest cavity. That makes less sense, as coordinating three hearts at once would be a recipe for getting a clot-induced stroke in minutes, except there are plenty of blood thinners thrown around and wreaking merry havoc with… with…

This is fascinating.

It shouldn’t work. No, it doesn’t work. There’s… there’s something external constantly adjusting and tweaking, turning the impossible into functional, and…

And why isn’t it healing him?

I look up at big eyes peering down at me as a rough tongue studiously slides again and again between my fingers, the expressive eyebrows all dogs share after millennia of evolving to better emotionally blackmail us telling me of pain and hope for the human it’s being affectionate with to make it all better.

And I sigh.

“All right, but don’t think this makes us friends or anything,” I tell him.

And then his body shifts under my touch, the interconnected circulatory systems sealing off as his wounds knit together and muscle mass turns into more helpful tissue that I use mend organs that have yet to be named.

It whines something happy and relieved and tries to lick my face as I desperately shield myself with my wings before the nightmarish snout can reach me.

Meanwhile, Vicky keeps having fun.

Really, she’s so unprofessional.