Excerpt: Six Sisters

Prologue
Trial By Fire

Bastian let himself have three seconds to orient himself. That was all the time he dared to take, and anyway, at this point he knew it was hopeless. Worse than hopeless, it had all been pointless to boot, because none of the things he’d learned would ever get back to his people. He would die, and the information he held, the story he had learned, would die with him. It would not be the first time, and he was sure that it would not be the last time.

When his three seconds were up, Bastian took a deep breath, gathered himself, and once again launched himself into a desperate run. The Colors were still behind him, and behind them, worse things still. He heard rustling, like canvas moving over itself, and stones grinding as great claws dug in deep. And the worst, the bone chilling, heart stopping sound of great teeth gnashing. Bastian did not want to know what made that sound.

He rounded a corner, pinwheeling his arms to keep himself from falling. Something scurried from off the wall and flew at his face; Bastian did not even stop to think about his next actions. One of the thin flexible knives had left his belt and his hand before he even realized that he’d moved at all. The little creature—Bastian never even saw what it was—fell with a screech, and Bastian kept running.

Even now, bleeding, running for his life—or toward his death, whichever way he preferred to think of it—he could almost believe that he was still in the hospital, still in the coma. There was still a small part of him that wanted that to be the case. At least a coma was something he could recover from, something that he could wake from. This nightmare, though... this nightmare was something he would never escape. Not even death would release him from these bonds he’d chosen for himself. Of that he was absolutely sure.

More than anything else in the world, though, he wished he could see her again. The girl who had no idea who she was, who even if she was told would never in a million years believe it. He would gladly accept a death a hundred times worse than the one awaiting him now, if only he could see that one girl again.

He started, suddenly, as the left side of his body exploded with a fiery, sharp pain. The wall to his left smoldered, a six foot wide hole blown into it. Basitan’s shirt and pants were shredded by the flying debris. They were closer now, close enough that Bastian knew it was finally time. They were close, and they never tired, while he slowed by the second. Aside from the injuries he’d sustained, the lingering blurriness of his vision, his lungs were burning with the strain of his sustained run. His stomach was screaming a protest, his legs felt like they were slowly being filled with lead. He could not keep this pace up for much longer.

The layout of the building was lost to him, or so nearly lost that the difference did not matter. He knew he was still in the sublevels, but where and how close to the surface he was, he had no way of knowing. He could only hope that when he finally stopped and made his last stand, he could inflict as much damage as was possible.

Exhausted, chest heaving, Bastian slid to a rough stop. His knees hit the ground, but only just barely; in a moment he was back on his feet again. The sounds of footsteps, voices, and weapons being readied were so close now that he knew it was only a matter of time before he was cornered. And above the noise of his human pursuers came the sound of scraping, the awful rending of stone.

Bastian threw the nearest door open and found himself in a room filled with computers. Each monitor spewed out information he couldn’t understand—or at least, mostly didn’t understand. There were some things he knew. Enough to realize that what he had inadvertently and oh so very fortunately stumbled into was a room filled with the very plans that five others before him had died trying to find. It was an utter miracle that he’d found it, and done it so haphazardly to boot. Perhaps this mission would not be such a waste after all.

Working as fast as he possibly could, Bastian barricaded that door and set to the task at hand. The few explosives he had left were placed in strategic locations near the computers, or on top of them, arranged so that when they went off, they would each fuel the next explosion, increasing the fire damage, or so Griffin had tried to explain to him, by forty three to fifty percent. The very last explosive, a small hand grenade that packed a huge punch, he kept in his hand. He pulled the pin and held it tightly to control the time of its detonation. With the trigger for the other bombs in his other hand, Bastian put his back to the corner and waited.

The door finally burst open with a spectacular and resounding crash that echoed even over the wailing alarm he’d set off much earlier, and right away the Colors poured in. A quick once over told him that there were two special units—double Greens, Blues, Yellows, and Violets—and a single Crimson commander. Bastian delighted in the opportunity to send one of those Crimson bastards back to Hell where he belonged.

“Drop your weapon!” came the automatic demand, issued by the Crimson.

Bastian smiled a terrible smile, one that made the lesser Colors step away from him nervously, and he held up the grenade. “You sure you want me to do that, Red?”

The Crimson bared his teeth at Bastian, but did not speak otherwise. They stayed like that for so long, Bastian actually forgot the presence of the rest of the Colors. All he saw was the Crimson. Even the background noise faded away. All he heard was the thundering of his own heart, and the uneven breathing of his vibrant enemy.

But then the beast came in, and Bastian’s world reeled beneath his feet.

It was a horse, or at the very least, it was horse like. It was skeletal, its flesh—hairless, unlike a horse—hanging from its protruding bones. The head was long, the ears more bat like than anything, its glowing red eyes set more toward the front of its head like a predator, and with vertical slit pupils like a cat’s. It had two curved horns poking out from behind the ears, and sharp teeth with long, curved fangs extended a good five inches from the upper gums under the flaring nostrils. The teeth glistened ominously, as if the beast had worked itself into a terrible hunger. Following his line of sight down, Bastian found not hooves but three toed claws adorned with huge, wickedly curved black talons. The entire beast was pitch black, though its color seemed to swirl like black smoke.

But perhaps most shocking of all were the wings. Bastian could tell exactly where they sprouted from, but they were huge, rustling leather monstrosities. Jointed like a bat’s, they had claws at each finger joint, and each wing was easily as long as the length of the creature’s entire body.

So horrified by the sight of the black demon was Bastian that he did not immediately notice that the awful thing carried a rider. Tall, forbidding, and shrouded in shadow, Bastian could not determine a single distinguishing feature, not even gender. The only thing he could see were, right where the eyes would have been in a normal face, two points of pale light, burning fiercely but at the same time emitting such a coldness as Bastian had never felt before.

Bastian knew that creatures like these existed, of course. He’d heard the stories told to him by others, passed down from the mysterious and elusive Jovvi, and he knew the names and strategies to defeat them, and even some of their origins. But he had never before seen one, and he was not prepared. How could he have been? No one could possibly have explained the feeling of utter despair that enveloped him, or the hopelessness. Nor could they have told him of the hatred he would feel, the desire—no, the compulsion—to destroy anything pure and beautiful and good in the world.

If he’d been thinking, Bastian would have been ashamed of himself. He forgot entirely about the explosives he’d planted, and the detonator in his hand. The moment the creature and its unholy rider entered the room, Bastian had been wholly unaware of anything else. His mind was now almost gone entirely, nearly destroyed under the malevolent gaze of the rider. He did not even feel the warmth of his own piss that spread across the front of his jeans as he soiled himself.

No, if he’d been aware of himself, Bastian would not have been proud.

But in just the same was as he was not seeing the true form of the rider, so too would he not have seen himself as he truly was at that moment. Just as he saw the rider as something more than it was, the rider saw more of the truth of Bastian’s nature than Bastian could ever even have guessed at. What the rider saw was this: a mind burned away not by the horror of seeing something so close to pure evil that the human mind could not comprehend it, but rather by the power waking within him. Bastian was overtaken not by evil, but by his own burgeoning divinity. His form was illuminated in the dim room, outlined in fierce, glowing red. His eyes were not empty, but rather they were so full of life and love, and a great and terrible knowledge. And when Bastian’s muscle memory acknowledged the detonator he held and pressed the button, the first flare of flame that came was not from the explosion at all, or the subsequently dropped grenade.

Instead, the flame came from the bright and fiery wings that seemed to unfurl from Bastian’s shoulder blades right before the room exploded into an inferno.

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

At the same moment all across the country, six young women reacted. One of them, a girl with pixie features and long auburn red hair rolled over in her sleep, tucking into herself. She wrinkled her nose and squirmed, screwing her eyes shut tighter, as though a bright light had flared against the backdrop of her dreams. A few moments later, she breathed a single word, the name of a man she had never met, and now never would, and then she returned to peaceful slumber. In the morning, she would not remember it at all.

In other cities, five other girls with similar features and differing hair experienced similar reactions. One girl screamed in her sleep and brought a team of nurses racing to her room. Another whimpered and pulled the newspaper she was sleeping under tighter around her small body and burrowed deeper into sleep, lulled by the cars on the bridge above her that passed by, oblivious.

Yet another screamed, waking the lover lying beside her, only to shrug in confusion when woken and questioned. The fourth cried silent, heavy tears without ever waking.

The sixth and final woman was the only one who was awake when it happened. This one saw a bright flash, as though fireworks had been set off in front of her face, heard the sound of great wings rushing by her head, and felt the rushing heat of a raging fire warm her face. She instinctively flung her hands up in front of her face to protect herself, alarming and frightening the people on the crowded subway car around her. But when she opened her eyes she remembered none of it, and if she noticed the wary looks she was receiving from her fellow passengers, she pretended that she didn’t.

But her ears rang for the rest of the day.