Chapter 15

Sudden cold touched his forehead, and he instinctively flailed out with his arms, trying to push it away.

"Jesus!" came a voice that seemed familiar. Red hair flashed through his mind, but he was still disoriented, and couldn't place the name.

He was breathing heavily from the shock of being jerked from a deep sleep. He tried to open his eyes, but they wouldn't cooperate.

There was a rustle of movement, and then the voice floated past him again. He tried to hold onto the thread of her voice, but it was hard; he only caught pieces. "...don't know what your... drugs or something... what the fuck you were doing out there, anyway, Daniel... for hours without hearing anything, and then you just show up slumped over on the horse... scared..."

He tried to move his tongue, to push some of the cotton out of his mouth. "Kelly?" he mumbled.

Another rustle of movement, and then a hand cautiously touched his arm. "Daniel? Are you all right?" she said. Her voice sounded thick and muffled, though he couldn't tell whether that was just the fog in his head.

He coughed. "I don't know," he said. "Feels like I've got sawdust in my head." He forced his eyes open, winced at the light, and began trying to get his eyes to focus.

"God," she whispered. "Thank God." Silence for a moment, then, "I wasn't sure if you were going to come back out of it, you know that?"

He frowned and shook his head. His vision swam at the movement, and he closed his eyes again. "I can't even remember what happened. I -- I might later, I don't know. Everything's kind of fuzzy."

The cold hit his forehead again, and he jerked backwards. "Easy," she said soothingly. "Don't bruise me again, huh?" Her words held a slight edge of bitterness, and at the same time, a tinge of fear.

"What is this?" he said, clumsily raising one hand to his forehead. The texture was familiar.

"You've got a fever," she said. "A really high one. I don't have any thermometers around here -- I probably should've gotten one just to have around, for Mary --" Her voice cracked, and she was silent for a brief moment. "Anyway, your fever was bad enough. I could tell that much."

"Fever?" he said, opening his eyes again. Then again, he supposed it was probably true -- the washcloth had been on his forehead for less than two minutes, and already it was beginning to feel hot. "Damn. What happened to me?"

"I was kind of hoping you could tell me that," she said, her voice edged with a distinct chill. "You headed out that morning, didn't even want to say where you were going, and then you come back acting like a heroin addict going through withdrawal. Yeah, I kind of hoped you could tell me."

He tried to shake his head, but winced as the world swam around him. He let his hand slip off his forehead and fall where it may, which turned out to be right next to Kelly's hand on his arm. He focused on moving the fingers, running them across the back of her hand, then taking her hand in his.

She let out a long breath. "God, Daniel, you scared me," she said softly.

He squeezed her hand and drifted back into the realm of dreams.


It was afternoon when he found himself awake and feeling relatively coherent. A gentle rain was trickling down the windows and pattering on the grass and concrete outside. He lay still for a few minutes, letting himself come fully awake, and then experimentally began to raise himself to a sitting position. It worked better than he expected. The damp washcloth slipped off his forehead as he sat, and he dabbed it gently at his neck.

"Kelly?" he called into the rain-punctuated silence. There was no answer.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stopped suddenly, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass. He was just about to slip to the floor when he heard the front door open. "Kelly? Is that you?" he called.

There was a rustle of plastic, and then Kelly appeared in the bedroom doorway. "Looks like you're doing a lot better," she said, moving toward him. "Are you sure you should be up and about quite this soon, though?"

"How long have I been out?" he asked.

She took the washcloth from his hand and studied him for a moment. "Four days," she said.

"Jesus," he said, as she took the washcloth out toward the kitchen. He lay back and stared at the ceiling. "Four days," he whispered. "What the hell happened to me?"

She returned a moment later, with a freshly-moistened washcloth. "Lift your head a bit," she said, wiping the cloth across his shoulders and the back of his neck.

"Gaah," he mumbled. "That thing is cold."

"Hmh." She folded the washcloth over and settled it on his forehead again. "It's room-temperature water, Daniel. You've still got that fever."

"Crazy," he said. "Just crazy."

"So," she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and taking his hands in hers, "are you going to tell me what the hell you were up to that brought you back like that?"

He studied her hands for a long moment. "Like what?" he asked, looking up at her face. "How did I even get back here?"

"Goewyn carried you," she said, puzzled. "You were in bad shape. I'm not sure how you even held onto the saddle."

"What kind of shape?" he pressed. "What was I like when I showed up here?"

Her grip tightened on his hands. "Your hands were ice-cold," she said. "Probably your feet, too, though I didn't bother taking your shoes off right at first. But your face was just about burning away with fever, and you..." Her voice trailed off.

"I what?" he asked.

"Well," she said slowly, "you had burns all over your face and arms, Daniel. And some on your chest and stomach, too. There were a few second-degree burns in there. I'm a little amazed that you pulled through without any medicine or anything. Those burns did bad things to your fever. But... your right hand was hardly getting any circulation, and it actually looked like frostbite."

He started. "Oh, man. It did occur to me to think about frostbite, but I thought it was just the way the sword felt so cold." He met her questioning gaze. "Um, it's like the electric thing it was doing earlier, but more so." He shrugged uncomfortably, trying to smile. "But obviously it was more than just a little bit of electricity running into my hand."

She ran her fingers idly through the air an inch above his stomach. "Daniel, are you going to tell me what happened, or am I going to have to start tickling?"

He laughed. "Yeah. I, uh... I went back up to the power substation, where all those eggs were. And I started smashing the eggs." He shivered. "And the sword started getting really cold, and so did I. And... it was like part of me just wasn't there. I didn't feel like myself anymore. I was just swinging the sword." He fixed his eyes on the ceiling. "It was like... like a berserk rage, or something.

"And then the sword hit one of the transformers, and... it exploded. The transformer just exploded." He looked down at his shoulders, at the blisters that were already beginning to fade. "That's probably where I got the burns. From the transformers that exploded."

"Transformers? As in more than one?" she said, leaning over him until her hand rested on his far arm. "What happened? Did you hit more than one of them, or what?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I did." He searched for the words. "You remember, don't you, when I said that when the raptor got at Amanda, it felt like a ghost going right through me?"

She nodded, her hair brushing against his stomach. She let go of his arm and brushed her hair back over her shoulder. He watched silently.

"Well," he said slowly, "this was actually a lot like that. The more raptors I killed, the more eggs I smashed, the more I felt that kind of feeling." He shivered. "But then when I got the transformers, it was a warm kind of... well hell, of magic, I guess. I felt like I was freezing away, but the warm magic brought me back to my senses. A little bit, at least."

"So what the hell does that mean?" she said impatiently. "I hate talking about this stuff, you know. It always feels like we're both talking in riddles."

"Believe me, I'd make it easier if I could," he said. "How about this: I think there were two different kinds of magic there. The magic from the transformers -- that I managed to release, uh, a little explosively -- was life magic. That's why all the eggs were there in the power substation. Somehow, even though there wasn't any electricity anymore, some of that energy hung around as life magic."

"And the other?" she said guardedly.

"Came from smashing their eggs," he said. "And from killing them." He reached over to the blanket that he had evidently rolled off during his fevered sleep earlier, and pulled it over himself, shivering slightly. "It was... it was intoxicating. I could feel, literally, feel it running through my veins." He turned and looked intently into her eyes. "That's kind of what scares me about it. Because that magic came from death. And because I almost couldn't get enough of it. If I hadn't hit that first transformer, and if it hadn't brought me to my senses... I don't know if I would have made it back."


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