The Chimera's Curse Page 20

  “Be at peace,” commanded Simon, laying a hand on the chimera’s mane and stroking it. The chimera shivered. Even from where Col was standing, he could hear the deep rumbling that now came from its throat: it was purring. Simon stood up and nodded to Mack.

  “Good,” said Mack, ducking his head as he came through the fence. On this signal, the others followed him. “Now for the fire.”

  Kullervo left George Brewer alone with his great-niece, pacing off to see the progress of the fire he had started. The firefighters were making little impression. Every time they had begun to gain control over a blaze, a new one erupted in a quite different part of the refinery. The fire had now reached the staff canteen, and the building itself was aflame.

  “Magnificent, isn’t he?” said George Brewer, watching the great bear stalk off into the night. He turned and sat down beside Connie, groaning as he lowered his worn limbs to the floor. “I didn’t understand, you see? I didn’t understand what he was really like when I attacked him.”

  Connie didn’t want to hear praise of Kullervo. She hadn’t yet recovered from the shock of seeing a dead man come back to life. “So why did you let everyone believe you were dead? Why didn’t you come home?”

  “I wanted to, at first,” said George. He gazed up at the flames flickering outside the windows, his face drawn with the memory of the early years in Kullervo’s service. “Until I saw that his way was better. He thought you might come along.”

  “What? How could he know?” Connie hugged her knees, resting her head on them, wishing she was anywhere else but here.

  “The eyes, my dear: the mark of the families to which universals are born. You’ve all had them, you know, all you universals. Sometimes the universal gift can lie fallow for many generations, but the eyes remind us that the bloodline persists to be discovered again one day. Your great-aunt Sybil had them, too, you know, showing that the Lionhearts still carried the gift.”

  “He knew about her eyes?” Connie asked in a hollow tone of voice. “How?”

  “I admit he did extract that from me.” George shuddered as if the memory was painful. “When he found that out, he said he would spare me because I might be useful to him one day. And so I am, it would seem.” He gave Connie a feeble grin. He’d lost most of his front teeth—Connie wondered if they had been knocked out; his hands and face bore many scars. Pity stirred in her.

  “Useful? How so?” she asked gently.

  “To explain to you, my great-niece, that it is no good fighting him. I should know: I watched many good men die at his hands.”

  “And you still serve him!” exclaimed Connie, now in disgust.

  George shook his head. “You don’t understand. It was we who attacked him—it was I who led them to their deaths. I have paid for my error ever since. Don’t fight him, my girl.”

  “I am not your girl. You’re not even my uncle.” Connie got up to distance herself from him. “You left my great-aunt thinking she was a widow. You never cared about what happened to her, did you?”

  “Oh, I cared,” George said sadly, and Connie knew he was speaking the truth. “But he wouldn’t let me go. He calls me his pet human.” He gave a humorless laugh.

  “Better to have died than live like that!”

  “Do you really think so?” he asked as if giving serious thought for the first time to this suggestion. “I would’ve preferred to die at the beginning. That was until I realized his way was right. I have been living in the north all these years with nothing to do but watch as humans heated up the world. It seemed to me that our reckless, greedy burning of fuel was like a sailor on a wooden raft setting light to his own vessel just to keep warm, paying no heed to the consequences. My disgust and hatred of my own kind grew as I watched the ice melt, the polar bears lose their habitat, the creatures being driven closer to the edge of extinction, and I found I no longer thought my own life was of any value. It no longer mattered if I lived or died: only if they survived. And they will survive only if you help him.” He raised his scrawny hand to clasp her sleeve. “Join with him. Help Kullervo save the world from humanity.”

  Connie could see the mad gleam in George Brewer’s eyes as he looked up at her. His years of isolation in the snowy wastes of the Arctic had unhinged him. If he could say those words and mean them, then he must have forgotten what it was to love another human. Having felt nothing but fear for the past few hours, Connie was flooded with the comforting warmth of the most powerful emotion she knew. She realized she had not forgotten for one moment what it was to love—not only other creatures but her own imperfect fellow humans; what she felt for brave, proud Col; for crazy, vibrant Rat; for argumentative, grumbling Simon; for complex, caring Evelyn; for her loving yet disapproving parents; for Jane and Anneena, innocently unaware of any of this; even for brash, courageous Mack; and for all her other friends. Yes, they were worth dying for. That was her greatest strength.

  “I will not join with him. But I won’t fight him. He’ll have to kill me,” Connie said.

  An angry growl rumbled in the darkness. The walkway creaked as the great bear bounded back in. Kullervo took a swipe—Connie instinctively ducked, but the blow was not aimed at her. George Brewer was flung the full length of the walkway, smashing into the far wall. “You failed me!” snarled Kullervo. “All these years of waiting, and you failed me! You are a pathetic, useless human!”

  “Sorry, master,” George whispered as he slid to the floor. He did not move again.

  Kullervo turned back to Connie, his rage now deadly cold. So, you are going to refuse me after all? Just like the other universals I had to kill?

  I have no choice, she whispered. I’m not a murderer.

  You had a choice and you chose to die. You chose not to save your fellow creatures just to protect your own kind. I despise you for that. You are not worthy to be my companion. He sniffed her hair, the saliva from his jaws dripping on her shoulder. I will have great pleasure in exhausting your powers. Though young, you have proven stronger than many of the others and will make a good meal for me. Shall I start now?

  Connie took a pace backward and faced him, raising her shield so that the compass etched on its surface blazed into his eyes. She saw herself mirrored there—sharp and clear in the light of the shield. It gave her an idea.

  She took a breath. “Not so fast, Companion. I challenged you to meet me at the mark.”

  Kullervo gave a growl of delight. “So you are going to fight after all? If I must kill, then I prefer my prey to resist. The hunt is no fun without a chase.”

  “Meet me at the mark,” Connie repeated.

  The minotaur had taught her that an enemy will not wait; Connie closed her eyes and dashed to arrive first at the wall of encounters, the place deep in her mind where all the creatures with whom she’d bonded had left their mark and where Kullervo’s dark void was found. She could hear the hiss and suck of his presence through the wall, so close that it was hard to say where her mind ended and his began. But she was not going to let him in this time to take her over; nor was she going to exhaust her weak armory in a futile defense of the barrier. She was going to do what no other universal had done: she was going through.

  Abandoning the shield, Connie launched herself through the mark, diving like a seabird from a cliff. The wall of encounters crumbled and collapsed behind her. Her shadow-body lost its form once it was in the black void on the other side. She became a waterfall of silver tumbling down to meet him. She was in a place she had never been before—inside the shape-shifter’s very being. The mind of Kullervo stretched away on all sides with no beginning or end, appearing to her like a starless sky over a dark blue sea. But the waters were alive with potential, poised to shift into a new shape in the blink of an eye. Though starless, the sky was not without light. Flickering shapes—like the patterns cast over the North Pole by the Aurora Borealis—etched themselves briefly across the heavens before winking out. As she fell toward the waters below, Connie saw that these patterns were reflect
ed beneath her, the forms that Kullervo had mastered rippling in the sea, an endless stream of possibilities, bodies to inhabit, powers to assume.

  But there was one possibility Kullervo had never anticipated: his waters were about to receive a new form in the shape of an uninvited guest.

  Kullervo had no time to prepare himself for the unexpected attack from the girl he thought he’d subdued. The meeting of the two tides—the powers of the universal and of the shape-shifter—was like the meeting of two oceans at the continental cape. They crashed together, mingling, creating great shock waves.

  I challenge you—you must take my form, Connie urged the darkness. You must. She brought the imprint of herself into the very collision that sent his water soaring in the air. She wanted to give him knowledge of the human form—its wonders, its limitations, its strengths. But she received only rejection in return.

  The dark waters fled from the silver tide that swept through them. Even so, they could not escape mingling with the weak creature that they hated more than any other: a human.

  No! stormed Kullervo. He fought back, but he could no longer assault the frail mind of the universal as he had done in the past. Connie had totally abandoned herself to him and had left nothing behind for him to attack. She could not go back now even if she tried. She had become him, and he had to become her. Kullervo rose up into the form of a weather giant to blow the silver waves away, but the tide of the universal twisted around him, pulling the nascent form back into the sea. He writhed into the many-armed shape of the Kraken to cast her aside, but he could get no hold on the elusive being and it slid through his grasp like quicksilver.

  I’ll crush you! cursed Kullervo. I’ll stamp out every trace of your being, you foul creature, you monster! Images of rampaging creatures flickered across the sky like flashes of lightning.

  Take my form, the universal challenged him again. Defeat me that way if you must.

  Then the silver waters rose to the surface and began to close in around Kullervo’s darkness like a glove enveloping a hand, squeezing him into the tight confines of the form of a young girl.

  Find out what it is to be human, she urged him. We may be weak. We may be destructive. But we are part of this world, too. Acknowledge this and I’ll let you go. I’ll become whatever you want.

  Never! howled Kullervo, battering against the prison of the shape he most despised and had always resisted. He was not going to succumb to this trial she had thrust upon him.

  Connie sensed his resistance and sought for a way to soften it. If only they could be brought to understand each other, she thought, maybe they could find peace? She was prepared to risk it, but would he?

  You see, I can love even you, Kullervo—what we could have been—what we could still be. Remember—you once showed me. A shared memory crackled between them like an electric current as they relived the dance in the air—she had tumbled and twisted in the cloud of his being as he turned into dragon, phoenix, griffin. The silver water diverted from the human form it had been trying to take and assumed the form of each creature as they remembered together their dangerous game. But Connie had made a perilous concession. Kullervo took advantage of this lull in her onslaught and continued to play through the changes—fire imp, great bear, eagle. The shifts were coming faster and faster—Connie could not wrench him back on the path to take the human form. Instead she found herself being spun into more and more shapes—stretched into a great snake, sprouting the wings of a siren, heads of a cerberus, tail of a salamander. Hydra. Chimera. It was agony.

  I take you, Universal! roared Kullervo, exulting in her pain as he forced her to assume shape after shape. But this is even better than before, better than any of the others I have encountered. I have you here, inside me, you’ll never be exhausted, never escape. This game can go on for all eternity!

  No! gasped Connie, suddenly aware of the terrible danger she was in, scrambling to escape the kaleidoscope of shapes he was shifting her through. I challenged you to take my form. By the rules of the combat, you cannot refuse!

  Rock dwarf, wood sprite, kelpie, gorgon. Kullervo cackled with glee as he dragged her through more shapes, delighting in displaying the endless variety of his repertoire. Connie was drowned in pain beyond anything she had ever felt or imagined. She could feel her sense of self beginning to disintegrate under the onslaught; the silver tide was in danger of dispersing and being mingled forever with his darkness.

  What was it like to be human? She could no longer remember. She could not even recall what she looked like. Just let the pain stop, she cried. But she knew it would not.

  Nemean lion, cyclops, pegasus.

  Suddenly she remembered—not her own face, but that of Col, the companion to pegasi.

  Then came Rat, her aunt, Mack, Anneena, Jane—images of all the people she loved were seared into her mind with a power that only death could extinguish. The pegasus dissolved and out of the waters rose a silver Col, laughing as he flew on Skylark. Beside him, Rat emerged from the waves, chewing calmly on a piece of straw—Anneena waving her arms enthusiastically—Jane reading quietly—Simon grumbling about something—Evelyn dancing with Mack. Everywhere Connie looked, she saw the silver shape of the people she loved rising out of Kullervo’s waters, even her parents, who appeared watching the scene with characteristically shocked expressions.

  What are these abominations? screamed Kullervo, striking at the human shapes with clawing waves.

  Finally, out of the water rose a silver girl—among her friends once more, Connie could remember herself. The silver shapes joined hands with her in their midst, forming an unbreakable circle.

  Will you not learn to love this form, too? she asked Kullervo. We could be joined together as equals—live in peace.

  Never, he cursed her. I reject your way utterly.

  Then, my friends, let us complete the challenge, Connie said to her circle.

  On her signal, they dived down into the dark waters that so hated them, taking into the very heart of Kullervo their knowledge of what it was to be human. His darkness and hate fought back, but used to invading the minds of others and bending them to his will, he discovered he was bound to hers; for he and his companion were equals: there was no force in him that could break her grip when she carried the challenge to him. Her love for humanity transfused like fire into his soul. It was a power beyond anything he knew. The universal whispered to him that if he embraced it, too, he might find there something to satisfy the emptiness inside him, the void that drove him to assume the shape of others. But he rejected her offer, attempting to push the knowledge away as if it was a poisoned chalice she held to his lips.

  As the silver radiance shone ever brighter, penetrating the darkest corners of his being, burning it away, Kullervo had nowhere to run from the searching light of the universal, no dark shadows he could twist to his purposes. His whole being was now ablaze as the elements disintegrated—water burned.

  Never equals! Not on your terms! he howled, his voice frail now like ash blown away on the wind.

  Then I take you. You are mine, the universal said sorrowfully. Forever.

  The silver girl stood alone on the barren rock. The dark tide had been consumed in the fire. Nothing remained but her.

  17

  Return to the Elements

  Connie opened her eyes. She was sitting propped up against the railing. The heat in the room had built unbearably since she had last been conscious. She coughed—the air reeked of oil fumes. Raising her head, she saw that Kullervo had gone; the great bear that had towered before her had disappeared. She corrected herself. No he hadn’t, he was still here, with her—

  He now was her.

  She clambered slowly to her feet and held out her hands. They glowed in the darkness with a strange silvery sheen as though they had been dipped in starlight. Taking a breath, she thought of a new form, a different shape: a sylph. Her body dissolved into a silver mist and then reshaped into the long-limbed, flowing form of a sylph before swift
ly slipping back to become a girl again.

  A faint round of applause—clap, clap, clap—came from the place where George Brewer had fallen. Reminded of the danger they were both still in, Connie dropped her hands and ran to his side.

  “Uncle George, let me help you,” she said, easing an arm under his head.

  The old man coughed. “No, my dear, you’ve done enough. I’ve seen what you’ve become—and it’s beautiful. Sybil would be proud.” He patted her on the arm. “Do you know…” His voice sank to a whisper. “I think your way was best…after all.” His last breath came in a soft hiss, and Connie knew that his broken body had released its spirit.

  A cloud of smoke belched from the stairwell. She had to get out. But what could she do with the body of a man everyone thought had died years ago?

  A fire imp whizzed into the hall overhead and ignited a pile of printouts stacked by a computer. The plastic casing of the machinery began to sag and melt like candle wax.

  “Leave him to us!” sang the fire imp. “His spirit is gone. We’ll return his body to the four elements.”

  Yes, that was the way it should be, thought Connie, laying the old man’s head gently on the floor; nature should get back what we had borrowed.

  No longer afraid of the blazing room around her, Connie walked toward the exit. This stairwell was also on fire; the plastic screen dripped molten droplets onto the floor. No one—or nearly no one—could escape that way.

  With a silver-shimmer like a heat haze, Connie dissolved into the flickering form of a fire imp and passed through the flames.

  The chimera tamed, Mack beckoned Mrs. Khalid and Liam forward. With a protective hand around the boy’s shoulders, Mrs. Khalid stepped across the parking lot and past the creature. It made no attempt to stop them, its eyes now closed as if it had fallen into sleep. Mrs. Khalid led Liam toward the heart of the fire: the two drum containers, burning more than a hundred feet away, the heat so intense even at this distance that Liam’s brow was shining with sweat. Deciding they were close enough, Mrs. Khalid leaned down and pointed Liam to the one on the right, then turned to the other. With a quick confirmatory glance at his mentor, Liam raised his hands to the sky as if cupping the hot draft of wind in his palms. In unison, two great tongues of fire ignited with an echoing whoosh. The flames leapt into the sky from the top of each drum. But they did not go out: they remained, flickering and dancing, taking the shape of two fire imps. They were as tall as skyscrapers, a vivid angry red, waving their long spiky fingers in gestures of rude defiance at the thin jets aimed at them from the engines on the other side of the wall of smoke.