Peach still wasn’t sure she trusted Smith. But as they walked through the barren wilderness, the burly man didn’t try anything stupid. She wasn’t one to judge someone by appearances, but she also dealt with too many creeps in her life. She could handle herself in a fight, but that didn’t mean she willingly walked into dangerous situations.
“I’m trying to figure you out,” Smith said. “You may be the most enigmatic woman I’ve ever met.”
“And you seem to be pulling out your five dollar words.”
“I can travel anywhere in the world whenever I want. You learn plenty when you spend one day in London and the next in Alexandria.”
“I suppose so,” Peach said. “I’ve traveled plenty and never spent much of that time learning new words.”
“To each their own and all that,” Smith said. “Where have you been?”
“Like a great man once said, I’ve been everywhere, man.”
“You a Johnny Cash fan?”
“He was an interesting but terribly conflicted man.”
“You saw that movie.”
“Movie?” She paused, trying to figure out what he was talking about. He looked strangely at her. She realized she committed a faux pas and quickly blurted, “yes, that movie.”
“You are a strange one. You don’t even know what movie I’m talking about do you.”
“Of course I do.”
“What was it called?”
“Johnny Cash.”
Smith shook his head. “And people call me elusive.”
Peach said nothing. This man was far too inquisitive for his own good. Ian was wonderful. He was far too wrapped in his own problems to even think about anything past what she offered him. This man wanted to know everything though.
“I don’t like talking about my past,” Peach said.
“Who does But you don’t hide your age well. I mean, you look great. I wouldn’t guess you were more than thirty at best. But clearly you’re far older. Good genes?”
“Something like that.”
He shook his head. “Do you ever give a straight answer?”
“Not when I can help it. Like I said. I don’t like to talk about my past. It’s not something I really want to think about.”
“I know the feeling. There’s definitely things I don’t like thinking about much. We all have demons in our past.”
You don’t know how dangerously close you are.
“My life is my own. I like to keep it that way.”
Smith looked around the barren wasteland. “I guess I figured we didn’t have anything else to talk about. There’s you and me and nothing. What do you plan to do, kick rocks?”
“I plan to find a way out of here. I plan to get free of this plane. I don’t know how, but we’re find an exit. I’m not willing to spend the rest of my life wasting away here.”
“Look, lady. I don’t want to be here anymore than you do. I’ve barely known either you or your buddies for more than a couple hours and already I’m lost in some fucking wasteland. You may be hot but that doesn’t mean I’m going to fucking bend over and take it from you because I tried to make conversation. As far as I’m concerned this whole fucking mess is your fault anyway.”
Peach stopped in her tracks and stared at Smith. “My fault? Have you lost your ever loving mind?”
“Who gave me the location? Who put the image in my damn head? You were the one that claimed to know where we’re going, but instead we end up here. This is your damn fault.”
“You have a lot of nerve, Smith. It was you that did the teleporting. My directions were good. It was you that screwed things up and dropped us in another plane of existence.”
“You’re the only one that even knew about other planes of existence. I still ain’t even sure what that means. But you seem to know all about it but are too busy playing mystery bitch to tell anyone anything.”
Peach ran towards him and drove both hands into his chest. Smith staggered back, but the blow didn’t do anything else. “Don’t piss me off, damn it! I can and will kill you!”
“You’re going to kill me? I have muscles bigger than you, you dumbass little ho. You couldn’t even hurt me if you tried.”
Peach felt the rage build inside her. She could feel it rising up, trying to get out, trying to destroy. The magic use made it worse. It made everything so easy to let slip away. She clutched at her chest. She felt the heart tattoo pulse beneath her hand. It wanted release and she wasn’t sure she could stop it.
“Please. Please run away. You have to get away from here.”
“What?”
“Please, you need to run. Now.”
She met his eyes. Smith’s face turned pale. He ran.
Peach clutched her chest. No, no, no. This is my body. This is my mind. You cannot have it.
She felt it crawling in the back of her skull. It had been too long since it was last released. It was so strong, maybe too strong.
Freedom. Destruction.
Peach knew the thoughts were not her own.
She rose up and her roar echoed through the emptiness all around her. It seemed to shake everything around her. Peach tried to walk, but her feet didn’t listen to her. It’s already too late. It has control.
She realized the rumble continued around her. Something else was here. Something other than her—and it. This plane wasn’t as empty as it seemed.
Her body shuffled forward. Her arms hung low. Her head whipped back and forth as she slouched down, her senses acute. The thing that controlled her body didn’t care for appearances. It cared only for death. Destruction. Power. It was a beast of pure animal cravings.
Even it knew it was in a battle beyond its control. Something was coming for her, for them. The released beast hunched down and watched the ground shift before it. It was ready. Whatever came for them moved beneath the earth.
Peach felt her lips curl into a smile.
It came out of the dirt with a shot. The creature was a strange light gray color, not unlike the barren earth in which it lived. It was hairless with dry scaled skin. It was almost bipedal, but its lower limbs were short and multi-hinged. They moved with a blur, clearly meant to propel the creature through the ground at high speeds. The front limbs were far longer, each tipped with a three fingered hand. Each finger held a massive claw at least four inches in length. As it shot from the ground, those claws flashed towards Peach.
She turned and fell back. The animal flew past her. It struck the ground and instantly burrowed back under the earth.
The monster was a killer, but so was she—or rather, so was the beast that controlled her body.
Peach’s body lunged forward as the creature came out of the ground again to strike. This time she didn’t try to dodge. Instead she chased it down and struck out with her own hands. Her hands raked across the creature’s scaly skin. Peach felt the power surge out of her.
She knew the feeling well. She knew that the power had only one purpose. It was meant to kill. It had no other purpose.
A piercing scream came out of her victim. Its skin burned and flaked away. Within seconds, the cry strangled off. She released her grip and let the monster fall to the ground.
Peach felt the glee of the beast within. It reveled in the death of the creature. She didn’t know how to feel. The creature was a danger. It would have killed her if she didn’t fight back. But it wasn’t enough to embrace her beast.
Nothing would make her do that. She lived with the beast too long. Kept it in check too long. And it was time for her to do it again.
You’ve had your fun, she thought. Now give me my body back.
She could feel the beast rage against her. But its power was waning. The beast’s appetite was sated, whether it wanted more or not. It was now or never. Either she would take control or the beast would rule over her forever.
I won’t—can’t—let that happen, Peach thought. It is my life, not yours.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. She pushed against the monster in her head. She felt it fight back, but it was too full, too lazy. It couldn’t resist her not now. Slowly the beast’s power waned. Slowly she felt it retreat back into the depths of her subconscious.
Peach dropped to one knee. She was exhausted, but as she flexed her fingers, she knew her body was her own.
She pushed herself to her feet. Her body ached, but it was her own again. She raised her hands up to the eternal sunless sky, stretched as if waking from a long sleep. Her power was waning, expelled by the beast within her. She had used more of it than she had in nearly a decade. Peach knew well the dangers of letting it wane. Too long and the beast would again grow in power.
Comfortable her body was hers again, she turned her attention back to the creature that attacked her. Only the burnt skeleton remained, but something seemed eerily familiar about it.
No, no, that can’t be, she thought. She knew the creature only it was far too small. As if it’s a child.
The world started to shake again around her.
Peach knew that the slanath was coming for her. She knew it wanted her dead. And she knew she couldn’t fight it, not in her current condition.
The ground started to break as the massive animal rumbled towards her. It was easy to see a slanath’s approach once it neared the surface. It left a divot nearly three meters across as it moved through dirt or sand.
The unearthly creature was a deadly predator, but one able to survive for years with only minor sustenance. But a slanath would wait in its nest for years, sit until it heard even the faintest rumble from the surface. Then it would strike, a ravenous beat designed only to kill a surface creature.
She never saw or heard of a young slanath before. She didn’t even know how the creatures reproduced. But it seemed that the child stayed near its parent. Or at least it did until she killed it.
While the slanath was infamous to anyone as well traveled as her, she couldn’t begin to guess its motivations or its patterns. No one ever got near enough to the monsters to really study them. Peach couldn’t guess if the creature was smart enough to understand revenge. But it had to know its youngling was dead. It had to know that the surface prey was responsible for the death. And even if it knew nothing else, it wouldn’t save her from the creature’s hungry maw.
The slanath flew out of the dirt, face first. It was far larger than its child. A full grown slanath could be over twenty feet long, but this one was about a dozen. Still, the monster was formidable. Massive clawed limbs, as long as Peach was tall, twisted out from their tunneling positions and out towards her. Peach watched her death approach.
She didn’t have time to prepare a spell even if she had the energy to summon it. She was dead.
Then she wasn’t.
The path was suddenly different. The broken ground was gone. The dead slanath and its deadly parent were not in sight. She looked around, completely confused. Did the beast do this?
She realized a pair of hands were on her hips. They let go as she spun around. She raised a hand, ready to fight off whatever she faced now. If the slanaths were here, more dangers could lie in wait—
Smith looked at her, a crooked smile on his face. “You aren’t going to kill me are you? Because that would put quite the damper on the whole rescue thing.”
“I—thank you. I’m not going to kill you. I wasn’t myself then. Quite literally.”
“What do you mean?”
Peach scanned the land around them. The slanath would still know their presence. They could detect surface creatures for miles. It wouldn’t be long until they found them. But that wasn’t foremost on her mind.
“We can talk about that later. How did you get me out of there? I thought you couldn’t teleport?”
“I didn’t think I could either. But I realized I just couldn’t teleport back home. I hadn’t tried to teleport from one place here to another. I got no problems there.”
“You can teleport here.”
“That’s what I said, yeah.”
“Listen carefully, how far can you teleport?”
“Anywhere that I can see pretty much. Anywhere we’ve been. Beyond that, it’s a risk. It would be all guess work. I could teleport us into a rock or the ground or anything.”
Peach reached out with what little power she had. She tried to sense the life around her. It wasn’t a hard spell, barely a strain. But she was already weak. She reached out and grabbed Smith’s arm to brace herself.
“Are you okay?”
She heard Smith’s words, but her focus was outwards. She could feel the slanath. It was coming their way and it was hungry.
“We need to go.”
“As far away from here as you can take us. At least two or three miles. It doesn’t matter where. Just away. The slanath is coming back and it won’t leave us alone if we can’t get out of its range.”
“Slanath?”
“The monster. Just listen to me and do it, okay?”
He reached out and grabbed her. “Hold on then.”
Peach and Smith blinked away from where they were. A second later, they were somewhere else. They were still on the road, but much farther down the open, empty plane.
“There you go,” Smith said.
“Again. Get more distance.”
“What—?”
“Again!”
He teleported them away again. After the fourth jump, she told him he could stop. They were at least five miles from the slanath. Hopefully that was out of its range.
She pulled away from him. “We should be safe now. But we need to keep moving.”
“No,” Smith said. “I may just be the big dumb criminal to you, but I’ve had enough. I want answers and I want them now.”
“You’re right. I have answers and I owe them to you and everyone else. I’m not usually a person that likes to give very many of them. I like to keep to the shadows. I like to avoid confrontation. Kind of like you, I suspect.”
Smith said nothing.
“I was wrong. I thought we were on another plane of existence, a death realm. I’ve been to a couple in my times and they were always experiences I like to avoid remembering. But the slanath tells me that I was wrong. Those beasts aren’t extradimensional. They certainly wouldn’t be in a human death realm. No, the slanath isn’t an extradimensional threat. We’re on the other side of the galaxy, not in another realm.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Smith said. “I could teleport us if we were in space. I’ve been from here to Betelgeuse and haven’t seen anything like this. And no matter where I went, I could always teleport back.”
“You’ve traveled off world?”
“Regularly. Like you said, I don’t talk about it much.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Have you ever heard of Penance?”
“The prison system?”
“An entire solar system designed to hold in any criminal, but designed to hold just one being. And all of it is surrounded by a field that blocks any incoming ships, space-faring entities or—”
“—teleporters.”
“Exactly.”
“But how? How could we even get to Penance? No one can get in or out.”
“There’s only one way. Somehow, somewhere on this world, Penance has been linked to Earth. And there’s only one reason for that, one person that could be responsible for that.”
“The Great Destroyer,” Smith said.
Peach said nothing, but her silence said enough to both of them. They were in more danger than they ever imagined. And worse, Alli and Ian had no idea what they could be walking into.
Peach pulled out her two-way. “Alli, come on. Alli, please come on.”
Only silence answered.
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