With a Golden Sword (DFZ Changeling Book 2), page 7
“I was the only person you knew,” he said with an exasperated look. “He kept us locked up alone in that house for years.”
“And I never would have survived it without you,” Lola assured him. “Every day, I was terrified Victor would decide I wasn’t worth the trouble and stop making my pills. You were the only thing in that place I wasn’t afraid of, my one good person. That’s why I can’t sit here and listen to you say you’re the same as Victor. You’re the only reason I survived him.”
“You would have made it without me,” Simon muttered, but he leaned into the hand she was still pressing against his cheek. “He really messed us up, didn’t he?”
“Abusers tend to do that,” Lola said. “But we’re not helpless kids anymore. I beat him. I don’t even need his pills now. And if I could do it, so can you.”
“How did you get free?” Simon asked, sounding more like himself as he finally straightened up.
Lola shook her head. “It’s a long story. I promise I’ll tell you everything later, but right now we have to get out of here before Victor catches us.”
“That’s the one thing he can’t do,” Simon said as he gestured at the red room. “Despite everything he’s done, this is still my death. Victor can send visions to torment me, but he can’t come in himself unless I allow it.”
“Then how did his stuff get here?” Lola asked, looking at the giant portrait of Victor Simon’s thread was tied to.
“I put that up myself,” he replied with a shamed look. “Like I said, he messed me up.”
“No judgment here,” Lola said, waving her hand. “He had me swallowing my own leash twice a day for twenty years. But if you control your death, how did he trap you?”
“Because that’s what he does,” Simon said bitterly. “When I was a kid, he had me make all these mental constructions as part of my training. I was terrified of him, so I didn’t question why. By the time I was old enough to realize I was building my own cage, it was too late to fix it.”
Lola sighed. “Childhood traumas are the deepest.”
“But you broke it,” he said, smiling for the first time since she’d spotted him. “Victor knew he wouldn’t be able to control my death once I grew up, so he built his prison to trap my conscious mind. I have zero control over that part of my brain when I’m in the coma, so even though I’m myself down here, up there, I’m still a terrified little kid who can’t see past what he’s about to do. I’ve had to watch myself relive that awful moment over and over, knowing I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I thought I’d be stuck like that forever.”
“Until you broke out,” Lola said with a grin.
“Until you broke me out,” he corrected, grinning back. “I saw everything you did. You made a really good me. Though, for the record, I would never be that sappy.”
“It’s a good thing I got there first, then,” she said smugly. “You were clearly in need of some sap.”
“I still don’t understand how you were able to enter the dream in the first place,” he said, ignoring that comment. “The way Victor had me make the prison, no one but him should’ve been able to get in.”
Lola puffed out her chest. “Did you forget who you’re talking to? I’m a changeling. No one can keep me out of anything.”
Simon chuckled at that. Lola smiled at the sound for a moment, and then her face fell into a frown. “There’s still one part I don’t get. If you’ve been sitting down here this whole time, what was the reliving-your-worst-memory thing supposed to do? Was Victor just torturing you for fun?”
“He was trying to break me,” Simon explained, looking grim again. “He’s trapped me like this on several occasions over the years. I can feel everything that happens to my younger self, but I can’t do anything to help. That’s how the prison works. It forces me to sit down here reliving my worst night over and over until I can’t take it anymore and beg Victor to let me out.”
Lola sighed bitterly. “He always was a fan of making people beg.”
“I wasn’t going to do it this time,” Simon swore. “I’d rather die than kiss his boots ever again. My plan was to run down the clock until my body gave up, but then you appeared.” His face broke back into a smile. “You beat him, Lola.”
“We beat him,” she said, grinning wide. “I knocked you out of the loop, but you were the one who broke his prison, and now you’re going to get us out of here.”
“I’m going to get you out,” Simon said, settling back onto his stool. “I’m staying.”
“What?” Lola shrieked, grabbing his shoulders. “Are you crazy? I’m not leaving you with him!”
“You won’t be,” he replied, waving his hand at the red room. “It might not be much to look at, but I’m king inside my own head. It’s one of the few tenets of blood magic I’ve always agreed with. Unless I let him in, Victor can’t touch me here, and that’s why this is going to work. He’s still out there doing horrible things, right?”
Lola nodded frantically. “He’s building an army of blood mages and has pretty much taken over the city. That’s why I rushed over the moment I found out where you were. If I don’t rescue you now, I might not get another chance.”
“That’s fine,” Simon said. “I don’t want to leave.”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, gripping his shoulders like she could force him to see how insane that sounded. “Weren’t you the one who wanted to drive away and never look back?”
“I did want that,” he said, “back when it was the only way to set you free, but you got there on your own.” He touched her face with a smile. “You don’t need me to rescue you anymore, Lola, so I’m going to do what I want. I’m going to take Victor down.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head wildly. “No, no, no, don’t do this to me, Simon! This is our chance to get away! You can’t—”
“The only thing I can’t do is keep tolerating this,” Simon said with a glare. “I’m not the first apprentice he’s done this to. There were others. Other kids before us that he used until they broke. I can’t just run away from that. Someone has to stop him, and thanks to you, I’m in the best position to do it.”
“So what?” Lola cried. “This isn’t our job, Simon! We’ve already given Victor enough. Alberich is coming to kill him in a few days anyway, so let it go. Let someone else—”
“There is no one else,” he said angrily. “Do you really trust Alberich to beat him? You know Victor always has another plan.”
That was the same argument Lola had made to Morgan just a few hours ago, but she still shook her head. “That doesn’t mean we have to fight him!”
“That’s exactly what it means,” Simon argued. “Victor made my prison. He knows the only way I can get out of the coma is if I submit to him completely, but you broke his hold. Thanks to you, I can wake up on my own now, but he doesn’t know that. If I come out now, Victor will think I’m his.”
“Simon.”
“I’m always most obedient right after I wake up,” he went on, talking over her. “He has no reason to think this time will be different. If I go back to him now, he’ll trust me, which means this is the best chance I’ll ever get to stab him in the back. I can—”
“Simon, stop!” Lola yelled, making him jump.
He opened his mouth again right after, but Lola grabbed hold of his shirt.
“Just stop,” she pleaded, wrapping the soft fabric in her fists. “You always have all these ideas to bring down Victor, and they always end with us losing. Maybe this time will be different, but I can’t take that chance. I didn’t fight my way down here to let you go back to him!”
“I’m not going back to him. I’m going back for him.” He gave her a little smile. “Don’t you see? This is my chance to—”
“No,” Lola snapped, beating her hands against his chest. “Do you have any idea how much I risked to save you today? I’m not letting you throw that away on some stupid revenge plot!”
He grabbed her clenched hands with a scowl. “You’re the one throwing things away. Don’t you want to stop him?”
“Not if it costs your life!” She stared up at him with her heart in her eyes. “Please, Simon, I’m begging you, don’t do this. You know how Victor operates. It doesn’t matter if he’s expecting it or not. If you put yourself back in his power, he’ll never let you go.”
“He’s not a god, Lola,” Simon said, pushing her away. “I’m grateful you came to save me, but if we run now, we’ll be running and hiding forever while Victor keeps doing whatever the hell he wants. That’s not freedom. That’s letting him win.”
“This isn’t about winning,” Lola said in a disgusted voice. “Victor took everything from us. This is our chance to take something back! We can leave him behind. Let someone else—”
“There is no one else.” He pinned her with a scathing look. “I won’t trust our future to the fairy scumbag who helped Victor make this possible. For all we know, Victor and Alberich are still working together, and this whole ‘coming to kill him’ thing is just the next step in their plan. Even if they have truly become enemies, do you honestly believe our old master can be killed by someone as immature and thoughtless as the Nightmare King?”
Lola dropped her eyes. “Not really, but—”
“Then you understand.” He reached out to squeeze her shoulders. “I can’t say how much it means that you came to save me, but my mind’s made up. I won’t trust Victor’s downfall to a stranger. I have to make sure he’s dead with my own hands. That’s the only way any of us get free.”
Lola dropped her head. Then she dropped all the way to the ground, curling her arms around her legs with a sob. “I really hate you right now.”
“I love you, too,” Simon said, getting off his stool to hug her.
“You’d better not lose,” she said, hugging him back like she was trying to strangle him. “If you die because of this, I’ll kill you.”
“I’m not going to lose,” he said confidently as he helped her stand back up. “Have a little faith in your fellow monsters.”
“Don’t throw my own words back at me,” she grumbled, scrubbing her eyes. “I assume you have a plan.”
“Always,” Simon said with a sly smile. “I’m sure this comes as no surprise, but killing Victor is something I’ve put a lot of thought into. I can’t tell you the details because I’m going to need him to believe I came crawling back legitimately, and that’ll be a lot easier if we’re both ignorant. You’re just going to have to trust me.”
“I do trust you,” Lola said without hesitation. “It’s just…”
“Just what?”
She rubbed her hands over her face with a groan. “I just can’t believe I made it all the way down here and now I’m leaving without you. That makes me zero for two today.”
Simon frowned. “Zero for two?”
“I couldn’t save the Rider, either,” she explained. “He’s still trapped by his unbreakable knighthood oaths. Victor took his head away, too, so even if I did think of something, I couldn’t…” She trailed off, eyes growing huge. “Wait, you’re about to trick Victor into thinking you’re his loyal apprentice again, right?”
“That’s the plan,” Simon said. “Why do you ask?”
“You could find his head!” Lola said in a rush. “Valen—the Rider wants to beat Victor as badly as you do. He’s going to let Alberich’s knight kill him just so Victor will be left without a defense. But if you steal his head, he won’t be able to die even if he loses! He’ll just respawn like he always does!”
“Won’t that mess up his plans?” Simon asked with a scowl. “It sounds like he’s already got a solid strategy. I don’t think he’d thank me for—”
“Dying is not a strategy,” Lola snapped. “The two of you might be ready to throw yourselves away to spite Victor, but I’m not giving that bastard another thing. He doesn’t deserve any of our lives, so you’d better come back to me, Simon, and you’d better be carrying the Rider’s head.”
“I’ll always come back to you,” he promised, pulling her into his arms one last time.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Lola whispered, squeezing him extra tight before she stepped back. “If you’re really not coming with me, then it’s time for me to go. I left myself in a precarious position on your hospital bed.”
“At least I’m in a hospital this time,” Simon said cheerfully. “The last time Victor put me in a coma, he left me passed out in the basement.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’ll toss you up. Get your body and get out of there. I’ll follow in an hour to make sure Victor has no reason to suspect I had help. I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve got something, and Lola…?”
“Yeah?” she said, grabbing his fingers.
His face split into a huge grin. “Thanks for riding to my rescue.”
She was opening her mouth to say it was no more than he would have done for her when Simon swung his arm up. The move launched her into the air, sending her flying up, up, up through the heavy quiet of his still-unconscious mind before exploding back into the real world.
She came back to herself with a gasp, nearly knocking the little blue body she’d conjured to hide herself off the hospital bed. She grabbed one of the monitor wires at the last second, hauling herself back onto Simon’s pillow with slow, groggy jerks. She was still shaking off the shock of being tossed from death into life when a man’s surprised voice sounded across the room.
“What the—”
Lola froze, her shrunken body going still as her eyes flicked to the knot of men sitting in front of the hospital suite’s biggest TV.
There were four of them, all in their shirt-sleeves with their red coats—the same red coats featured in every Hero’s Army recruiting poster—thrown haphazardly over the back of the sofa. Two pizza boxes lay empty on the coffee table in front of them, along with a forest of beer cans and several guns. Three of the men were still watching the football game on the screen, but the fourth one was staring straight at her.
Lola flattened herself against Simon’s pillow with a curse. She was such an idiot. Just because the room had been empty when she’d arrived didn’t mean Victor had left Simon unguarded. The mages must have been out getting dinner when she’d come in. It was pure luck they hadn’t noticed her body while she was inside Simon’s mind. Now that she’d moved, though, they were all turning to stare, their disbelieving gazes doing more damage to her gossamer than their guns ever could.
“What is that?” asked the farthest, putting down his beer to squint in Lola’s direction. “A cat?”
“It looks like one of those paintings people do of sleep paralysis,” said another. “You know, where they draw the little demon crouching over the guy’s head to show—”
“Shut up,” ordered the man who’d spotted Lola first, grabbing his red coat and shoving his arms back into it as he walked toward the bed. “Did you idiots listen to nothing the Hero said? It’s obviously a fairy.”
Lola’s gossamer went stiff. She’d been struggling to hold her magic together under their scrutiny, but the moment the red-coated mage named her, everything changed. She was no longer in danger of being melted by their disbelief. As soon as the man invoked the Hero’s name, every human in the room believed in her completely.
The iron hand of their conviction had already grabbed her gossamer, molding her body to fit their expectations just like the coliseum crowd’s belief had molded her poor monster. When it was done, the tiny blue shape Lola had made to blend in with Simon’s sheets had morphed into something that looked more like a goblin than actual goblins did. She was still recovering from the shock of having someone else twist her magic when the red-coated mage popped something into his mouth. He swallowed whatever it was with a grimace, and then he threw out his arm like he was throwing a punch from across the room.
The magic that hit her next felt exactly like Victor’s. Lola knew he’d been gathering blood mages, but this was ridiculous. Even Simon’s magic didn’t feel this close. If the man in the red coat hadn’t obviously been a stranger, Lola would have sworn it was Victor himself pummeling her down.
It was certainly Victor’s style. The blast of magic hit her like a truck, filling her mouth with the horrible, metallic taste of her pills, but the real victim was her gossamer. It shattered on impact, which made no sense at all. Gossamer was the essence of flexibility. It was gooey and liquid, more likely to bend than to break.
Too bad no one had told the mage that. The moment his magic touched her, Lola cracked like a dropped dinner plate. It wasn’t until she actually started falling apart that she finally realized what was happening. This wasn’t some crazy new spell that broke the fundamental nature of gossamer. It was the bane. She’d just been smacked with the blood magic bane Queen Morgan was always ranting about, and wow, was it living up to the hype. The stupid mage hadn’t even hit her with that much magic, but the blow had gone through her like a baseball bat made of fairy kryptonite. At this rate, she was going to splinter to dust before the guards even made it to the bed.
There was nothing else for it. If Lola didn’t want to die here, she was going to have to get out of this body. Luckily, the blue goblin was only a tiny fraction of her total gossamer. Cutting it off wouldn’t hurt nearly as much as the car she’d sacrificed to the Rider. She’d even left her remaining magic in a convenient Lola shape for precisely this sort of emergency. As she closed her eyes to make the switch, though, Lola quickly realized that, unlike the rest of her fairy powers, moving between pieces of herself was one skill the removal of Victor’s blood seemed to have made worse.
She didn’t know if Tristan’s barrow was just too far away or if the fake personality she’d crafted for her doppelganger was clogging the path, but Lola couldn’t bridge the gap between her separated chunks no matter how hard she tried. She couldn’t even feel what the other her was doing. By the time she’d accepted that escape wasn’t happening, Victor’s goons were right on top of her.
