The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [137]
Just then, out of the direction of the dark asphalt sea behind them, there cried a loud youthful voice.
“Leave him alone!”
Andrew’s assailants instantly discarded him on the grass and turned to look, all at once, all in the same direction like a group of rogue vultures startled from their writhing quarry. Their rumpus had attracted an on-looking guest. To Andrew, the voice was relievingly similar to Bari’s; when he managed to turn over on his side to catch a glimpse of whatever it was the older youths were seeing, the figure he beheld did not match Bari’s voice.
There, on the edge of the blacktop but shy of the grass, too far into the shadows to be completely recognized, stood a boy of Andrew’s height and age. It was a boy in obscure clothing his hands in his pockets, glaring straight at them.
Ralston bitterly remarked to Andrew, “Who is this, your twin sister?”
The nameless Hispanic guy, the only one who refused participation in the beating, began to speak, the next to capture the attentions of all. Andrew maneuvered himself upon his back again to see.
No sooner than he’d begun to utter the first few syllables of whatever it was he was trying to say, the Hispanic friend without further warning bellowed in impromptu agony. His left hand grappled for a firm hold of a bar of the jungle gym beside him, as if he was fighting to pull away from an unseen something which held him where he stood. His bellows evolved next to screams. If his friends didn’t know any better, this teenager was spontaneously tripping off a drug far more psychedelic than weed.
On cue with a crescendo of screams there came an immense bloating from beneath the teenager’s shirt, like a balloon inflating between his chest and the clothing, stretching outwards from his ribs with knuckle indentations in the fabric as if he’d withdrawn his arms from his jacket and slipped them inside his t-shirt to exhibit a freakish delirium. But his hands were where they should be, clenching into fists at the mouths of his sleeves, one gripping a bar of the jungle gym and holding on for dear life. His shirt expanded until it spread-eagled his jacket. Tremendously thick black claws tore through the material to reveal bloodied, attenuated silvery hands outstretched and enlivened by a blinding light which arose from behind him and impaled him.
In the next instant, the teenager was split apart evenly by a vision somewhat resembling a monstrous luminescent earthquake crack, ripping apart clothing and reaching down past his groin, separating the boy in two, giving way to a dark and silver creature stepping from between his macabre halves. Each section of the young man flopped limply to the opposite side of the other, innards swelling into two mounds of twisted, seeping red flesh and bulging severed bone.
The being whose presence now filled the space where the nameless teenager stood moments before was not Bari. It held enough characteristics for Andrew to assume that it was another Watchmaid, or at least was related to the sort of creature Bari was. But Bari would’ve come to his rescue in a way where she wouldn’t kill anyone, for one thing, let alone in such a theatrically vile way. This being that now displayed herself before them hovered upon a stream of legless vaporous smoke, much like a genie, much like Bari, but the skin of this being was silver whereas Bari’s was coppertone brass, and her long hair and fingernails and the nipples of her breasts were a glossy thick black where Bari’s were, well, a flat black. Her radiant orange eyes penetrated all she surveyed quite like a Watchmaid’s, with eyes like Bari’s.
Salvatia’s dramatic advent climaxed with a yawning flex of her otherworldly arms in a languid ta-dah, emerging into human reality as one would get out of bed and face the new day. The bright light around her faded. She was there,