Paws and hooves too numb to feel the ground anymore, weight too slight to find traction, and hide and body barely substantial enough to be bitten, I wafted past Cassy on inertia that I was swiftly losing.
I stumbled, and would have tumbled if I hadn’t lost my connection to gravity from being so thin and on the verge of oblivion. Instead I spun in the air on three axes, like a party balloon low on helium that’s been kicked. But my view of the world around me was still spherical. I had not altered my ability to see in every direction. It was just upside down and sideways and topsy turvy in quick succession.
Cassy simply stood there, feet apart, arms at her sides. And I couldn’t see her face, as I was now behind her.
I metaphysically sensed rather than felt several new bites sink into my rapidly evaporating substance, and felt an emotion from myself I can only describe as not again.
This time it would be permanent.
But they drew no more substance from me.
They had no time to do so, yanked free of me along with all the others that had remained from my gauntlet.
And that’s when I realized that I had lost all sense of emotions around me before. During my marathon, the consumption of my being had drowned out all that I’d been eating for myself. So many of my senses had begun to dim, but that was the first to go. And now it returned in a burning flash.
The Swarm was panicked.
Cassy was a rich mix of determination, fury, horror, victory, fear, and quickly satiating hunger. As always, despite being an emanant, her emotions were complex and heady, slamming into my body and being like a storm.
The Overlords of Portland who were near enough for me to feed upon and sense them were aghast with trepidatious curiosity.
And the liminal teratovores that had been brought to bear against me, who were following in my wake, were pulling up short in surprise and terror.
As my spin slowed, I was able to focus on the side of Cassy’s face that I could see, and it looked like her mouth was wide open. She had the stance of someone pantomiming a huge cinematic superhuman inhale, but air was not what was moving.
The Swarm was.
It may have been projecting a manifestation of countless oversized insects, but it was still one being. And a part of it had come too close. And apparently, everyone could sense and maybe even see it being pulled past them from all corners of the property.
Cassy’s feeding, and the Swarm’s demise, took longer than I expected.
Perhaps that was my sense of time being dilated by crisis, but I also noticed a few nearby teratovores become bored with it and look at me. Hungry eyes began to consider whether they could make it around this new threat to get to the wispy, melt-in-your-mouth morsel on the other side of her. Me.
I was still so tiny, but from the emotion thrown my way, particularly from Cassy, I gained enough weight to root my feet on the ground again and stop my spin. It didn’t matter, but I found myself facing the way I’d come. Perhaps I’d managed to land that way on purpose.
And then, against old instincts, I sidled over to my half human teratovore friend and hid behind her legs, now barely reaching her knees I’d shrunk so much.
I still looked like nothing that had ever walked the Earth before, and I wasn’t paying any mind to my form. There was too much to keep track of now, but it was also a moment of relative rest. I was too busy taking breaths of ambient emotion to care.
And then the last of the Swarm was drawn into Cassy’s mouth and I saw her stance change. Taking a real breath, she turned her head to sweep a gaze across all the monsters before her, to settle on the gigantic sea monster looming above her from the river. Maybe simply because of its size, she chose to address it as the leader of our adversaries.
I felt her smooth, breathy voice as a honeyed hum throughout my physicality as she said, “You can be next, if you like. There’s enough room in here for all of you.”
Words I had never expected to come from her, but unmistakably in her voice.
The Mesozoic sea monster blinked.
I could sense the other Overlords, the ones who were further away, crowding forward, pushing the liminals up against us or out of the way, to get in on the conversation. And Cassy waited for them to stop moving, appearing to me from my diminished vantage to cast a meaningful glance at anyone who got too close, halting them in their tracks.
The national guard were an afterthought by then. The helicopter still circled, but at a safe distance since the oversized plesiosaurid beast had emerged from the river. And with the change in demeanor of the monsters around them, with a gap surreptitiously provided up the main drive of the property, the troops retreated without retrieving their vehicles. It was clear that their weaponry had no appreciable effect.
Notably, the personnel in the surveillance van remained where they were, as far as I could tell.
When all the movement settled down and stopped, Cassy explained things further, “Chord is gone. Gresham is now mine. I will honor the old pact as if I made it with you, better than Chord was planning to do. I now know the full extent of his plans, and what you expected of him. I will happily answer any of your questions, but even after that meal I’m pretty sure I’m still hungry.” She looked around at them, and then crooned through what sounded like a tight lipped smile, “So, maybe think twice before crossing the streets in my city. And. Oh.” She turned her torso to point down at me. “This one? She’s under my protection now.”
I was perhaps too discombobulated with relief and confusion to pay much attention to the short conversation that occurred after that.
I felt a little more than disconcerted that my entire world seemed to be dominated and shaped entirely by monsters that ate other monsters. To the point that I’d had to become one to survive what had just happened.
I still wasn’t actually a teratovore, though. I don’t think I’ll ever be one.
I don’t have the reflexes.
Nor the audacity.
Walking unmolested through the Willamette Greenway toward the intersection where we’d meet Greg and Ayden, once they untangled themselves from the worst of the traffic, we remained in silence for a while.
To avoid alarming any people we encountered, I was slowly transforming my projection into the form of a German shepherd. Something that could be a little threatening, but normal, a dog a woman might have for protection. But that we were walking calmly away from that up north was itself something that would have unsettled some people. Should have unsettled them. Given them pause, at least.
But I couldn’t feel those emotions yet. Not from humans. It would take me some time and energy to switch back to that. I was using Cassy’s roiling emotions to fuel my current modest transformation, which still took longer than I was accustomed to. I’d need to settle myself into a power station and utilize Milk’s trick to get back up to a tiny fraction of my former speed and power.
I was just beginning to feel the air and ground again, when Cassy looked down at me and asked, “Are you OK?”
It was such an absurd question, I missed a step and had to skip to keep my pace.
Of course, she meant, was I OK aside from all the obvious. Did I have a kernel of OK inside me?
“No,” I said, in monster speak to avoid confusing the absent onlookers. Then I realized I had the wherewithal to explain. “I don’t like what the world has become while I was busy playing with my favorite humans. And I don’t like what I’ve become in order to deal with it.”
“Yeah, that’s a mood,” she muttered, looking back up to the darkened trail ahead of us.
It was lit by street lights, but it wasn’t like daylight. There were plenty of shadows. It didn’t bother me, but I could feel a hint of caution from Cassy. A human reflex.
It was kind of weird to feel that. And, specifically, to feel that while our positions were reversed from the last time we’d walked together.
Now she was protecting me. And while I highly doubted she’d gained enough experience from consuming Felicity, the Swarm, and apparently Chord, to match my own, she’d held her own in a way I don’t think I ever could.
She clearly now knew more about local emanant politics than I did. Or, she carried herself like she did, and maybe that’s all that was needed.
Well, and a powerful vortex of consumption for a gullet.
“How about you?” I asked, glancing unnecessarily up at her.
“We’re…” she paused and corrected herself. “I’m still making sense of things.” She remained quiet for several steps and then sighed. “I don’t like eating, you know? Not really even before, all this. But this kind of eating feels wrong. I’m a killer now. A murderer. Even though they’re monsters, they’re people. And I know just how much of a person each one is after I eat them. And I think I’m dissociating about it. But, uh. There are side effects, too. They kind of make up for that, but in a weird way.”
“You sort of become them,” I offered, though I’d caught that slip and thought I knew what was actually going on. “You get their memories, and also their behaviors and ways of thinking. It’s what happens to me. It’s hard to stay yourself, but they don’t exactly end. I get it.”
It was both an offer for her to accept an explanation she could use as cover if she needed to and a prompt. It worked more as a prompt.
“Yeah, that’s the first part of it,” she said. “But, uh… OK, so I get their memories and motives and all that, but not their abilities. When Felicity fed herself to me, I couldn’t jump into other people’s minds, and I still can’t. And now I can’t change other emanants like Chord could.” She looked over at me meaningfully, but I’d caught the meaning from her words before she did so. “But I don’t think my brain makes sense of the new memories and identities very well. It doesn’t accept them. But they also don’t die. I know more faster, but I’m still me.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said, somewhat distracted by the emanant activity around us. I absently thought my suspicions were correct, but I wasn’t thinking about the ramifications. Our immediate safety felt more important.
Although the Overlords of Portland were not following us, and were making way for our retreat to Gresham, we had escorts. This organization amongst emanants was more orderly and regimented than I was used to seeing, or even contemplating. And it unsettled me.
Humanity had really influenced us.
And I knew from Fate Vine’s memories that our kind were more deeply entangled in humanity’s destiny than I’d known. Far more deeply.
And what had been here, with Chord’s little fiefdom, and what still was, with the Overlords of Portland, was so tiny. Just a sample of the political structure of the world.
Tomorrow would be the inaugural address of the President of the United States, a man who was reviled and feared by my friends and so many others. An obvious figurehead of a sweeping social movement built on a cultish long game of bigotry, exploitation, and highly questionable theology. And normally, I’d ignore that sort of thing. Such movements in human history have been frequent and fleeting to me (and an unfortunate source of sustenance, to be honest). But now I knew that everyone around me who was aware of things suspected that even his supporters and organization had emanant influences.
And, yep, that sparked an uncomfortable memory that hadn’t been mine before. Fate Vine had been one of them. And, so had Chord by partnership.
And this shift in politics would probably affect me personally. And certainly my human friends, of course. I was actually more worried about them, and how I could protect them, this time around.
The whole thing felt like the beginning of a new extinction level event, even if it might not be quite that.
Oh.
Oh, shit.
There was that thought again.
That surveillance van, if it had been part of Fate Vine’s machinations, had been equipped with new technology to detect and measure emanant presence.
What could that lead to?
I found myself looking back the way we had come.
“You seem really jittery,” Cassy said.
“It’s sort of my natural state,” I said, only half aware of my reaction. “I usually hide it better, though, I guess.”
“You’re so small.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ve lost so much of myself. I’m hardly here anymore. I need to find a source of energy so I can at least run when I need to.”
“Mm,” she acknowledged.
“One of those power stations that make a lot of buzzing noise would be a good source for me,” I told her. “There’s a lot of waste in those things. And it turns out that since Milk, uh, reconstituted me, I’m an enthalpiphage now. I’m still an affectivore, too. And a teratovore now, as well. But, uh, I’m basically Milk but with my memories instead.”
“I remember you explaining that earlier today. When we were still planning.”
“Right.”
She reached down and scratched behind my ears as if I was a real dog. It felt annoyingly good. “We can get you there. We can do that. Maybe we can even hunt down Chord’s livestock and feed them to you, if you’re comfortable with that. They’re mostly you, after all.”
I cringed, and looked up at her, “You’re okay with that idea?”
Cassy shrugged, “No. But we could still do it. Maybe you could just eat them partially, get your energy back, but leave them free to be themselves.”
“Maybe,” I reluctantly agreed.
Then I heard another voice come from her. A familiar one. And she was looking down at me with a raised eyebrow and a smirk I’d seen before.
“There is another option,” Felicity said. “A way that Cassy could protect you more securely while we hunt down your lost energy. It’d be an even bigger change for you, though.”
