A smart doctor—maybe a smart shaman—would diagnose the damn problem first, but apparently the whole warrior-princess costume obliterated any kind of rational thought I might’ve indulged in. I vaulted onto the cauldron with a yell and slapped my hands over their mouths just before the gray stuff slipped over their lips and down their throats.
About six things happened at once.
First off, somewhere way in the distance, I heard Billy Holliday bellowing, “Joanne Walker, what in holy living hell!?” As far as I was concerned, that pretty much made up the soundtrack for everything else that happened. Time stretched, extending into slow moments that crystallized everything around me into clarity and allowed me to discard that which was unimportant. On reflection, that included music, calls to 911, some shouting and the start of a stampede, but right then, those seven words made up the walls of the world for a brief and horribly long eternity.
The good news was that the gray film leaped off the dancers, who collapsed out from under my hands. The bad news was, it leaped from them to me, and I had a sudden intimate understanding of just what they’d been enduring.
Enduring. There’s a funny choice of words. It’s not one I’d think would apply to a scenario that couldn’t have lasted longer than five seconds, but under the film’s tenterhooks it was the only one that seemed appropriate.
It was trying to get in, trying to invade. I felt my muscles seize and bunch and rattle in just the way the dancers’ had, a million pinpricks of ice jabbing under my skin and trying to work their way beneath. I’d never been flayed and wasn’t eager to try it, but I thought it might feel like this: burning pain that did its best to defy words and to turn me into nothing more than a scream.
A scream. Screaming was bad. Not because I didn’t deserve to, because anybody being flayed probably deserves to scream, but because the stuff had a purpose, and thwarting flaying gray film was a worthy goal. I snapped my mouth shut and rolled my lips in, biting their insides to keep myself from indulging in the scream that would let the stuff in. Then I wondered if my nose was enough of an access point to let it in, and how I was going to breathe if I needed to pinch my nostrils shut, too.
Then again, if the hurting didn’t stop soon, I wasn’t going to care much about breathing. More or less reassured by the thought, I stopped worrying about it. Look, logic in the face of excruciating pain isn’t one of my strong points. It worked for me, which was all that mattered. Meantime, my stomach, eager to add its opinion on agony, violently rejected the fizzy pink drink I’d indulged in earlier.
It was significantly worse coming up than it’d been going down, and it hadn’t been good to begin with. Human nature trumped scary crawling gray stuff and I doubled over, expelling bright pink spew. The film retreated, apparently as disgusted by Technicolor vomit as I was. The lack of pain left me astonishingly clear-headed.
Clear-headed enough to see that more of the gray fog was bubbling up from the cauldron and flowing over its edges, hurrying toward the partygoers.
Toward people I’d invited to come have a good time tonight.
I forgot that I was probably the only one in the room who could see the goo. Forgot that I’d jumped up onto the cauldron like a madwoman and the two people I’d touched had collapsed, which, by any coherent standard, suggested I was dangerous. Forgot that my own magic had a visible component, and that I was in the middle of a very public place.
Or maybe I didn’t forget. Maybe I just didn’t care, because I’d had enough of innocent bystanders getting run over on my watch. Agony fled my bones, chased out by fury, and I smashed through sickness to call up the healing magic that was my heritage. I had no idea what I was up against, but that’d never stopped me before. Better to turn myself into a super-size McSnack for gray ooze than to let anybody else get eaten.
Silver power surged, its brilliant blue highlights making me feel like an electrical conduit. I could See it, blazing with righteous anger, and while I still couldn’t hear much beyond Billy’s shout, I’m pretty sure that was when the stampede started. Anybody in their right mind wanted to get the hell away from me. For a room as crowded as that one, it was amazing how everybody managed to jump back two feet and leave a circle of emptiness around me.
At least, I thought it was them lurching back. I had a certain amount of success with the idea of capturing things in nets, but a net wasn’t going to hold goop in. I went the bubble-boy route, sending a physical flare of magic from my core into a sphere around me. It was wholly possible that I shoved everybody out of my way, although I didn’t think that was very polite and shamany. Then again, a dead shaman had told me I’d walk a warrior’s path, so maybe I had license to metaphysically bludgeon people once in a while.
Either way, they were a bit farther out of harm’s way, and the cauldron-born ichor ran up against my sphere and began crawling upward, looking for egress and finding none. I figured it would take about two seconds before it reached the top and started dripping down on me. That meant I had about a second and a half to come up with a brilliant plan to stop it.
Time resumed its normal pace, two seconds blew by, and I was screwed.
There’s nothing especially attractive about shrieking like a little kid and curling up in a ball with your hands over your head, but that’s what I did. I didn’t want to face that skin-peeling sensation again. Even the idea made my eyes hot with tears, and if falling down and sobbing kept it away from me for another half second, I wasn’t too proud to grovel.
More than that went by before I realized my skin wasn’t being pulled off. I peeked through my fingers at the shell I’d built around myself and the cauldron.
Man. I had no idea what it looked like from the outside, but from within, it looked like a Gaussian blur of hell. Formless gray surged and slid around me, a relentless ocean of potential danger and pain. Color bled in, but only at the corners of my eyes: if I jerked to look straight on at it, red and black faded away, as if something living didn’t want to meet my gaze. Thin, bonelike hooks scratched at my arms and flinched back again. A sound crept in behind the small bones of my ears, something high and lost that reminded me of the banshee.
It made shapes out of the mist, emaciated wavering things with gaping eyes and mouths. They had the weight of age to them, pressing down on me as if, if they couldn’t scrape their way in through my skin, they’d crush me into component parts that could be absorbed into the gray.
A little belatedly, it occurred to me to wonder why they weren’t scraping their way inside my skin, and I stopped peeking through my hands to look at my fingers.
Seeing through your own skin is a bizarre effect. When my magic had first broken loose, there’d been so much to burn off I’d seen my flesh and blood as rainbows, shimmering with power. Over time that variety had faded to the silver and blue that I now considered to be mine, and right now that was what I saw: oil-slick pools of color burning in my veins and swimming through my muscles. All that magic had once been knotted up under my breastbone, making me sick with the need to act, but it’d become a much more integral part of me, almost always active to some degree, and ready to be called on in its full strength when I needed it.
Offhand, I guessed the gray slime wasn’t down with shamanic power, and that a human body rife with it wasn’t an appealing host. It had likely dared to attack me in the first place because I hadn’t called my power up actively: now that I’d turned it on, I was unfriendly territory. That suggested I was probably dealing with some kind of death magic, because while shamanism had as much to do with death as life, I was coming to think of it as a more or less inherently life-positive kind of magic. Though if I found myself using phrases like life-positive very often I was going to have to life-negative myself out of humiliation. Nobody says things like that. Jeez.
The point, though, was that if the nasty gray slime couldn’t get a foothold in me when I was topped up with blue