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“Looks that way. Negotiations broke down. They have a way of doing that when I’m
involved. I don’t know why—I’m the most reasonable person I know. Guess you’d
better kill me now, huh?”
She expected him to back down, to slink away and return to fight another day. But she’d
forgotten the power of zealotry. He came forward again, his limbs blurring with speed.
“Get back!” she shouted, and Rondeau and B rushed for the far end of the car while
Marla retreated to the far wall opposite the door. The moment Mutex cleared the
threshold and entered the train, with just a couple of the frogs sluggishly hopping along
in his wake, Marla reversed her cloak.
At this higher level of consciousness, Mutex was visibly much slower than he had been
at Dalton’s, probably no faster than Marla herself. He was surrounded by an aura of
strangely flickering ruby light, and the distantly articulate part of Marla’s brain
recognized flickering shapes like hummingbirds in his aura. That was it, the way this
faster-than-the-eye magic of his worked. He had a coterie of the returned dead in the
form of hummingbirds, and he’d tapped into their magics to give himself the same
properties a hummingbird had, the ridiculous accelerated metabolism, the tremendous
speed and maneuverability. But it probably took a lot out of him. A hummingbird had to
eat, what, several times its own weight each day, just to fuel those metabolic processes?
Mutex was running out of energy, slowing down, and while Marla wasn’t certain she
could take him, she was reasonably confident that he couldn’t take her.
That was it for rational thought. After that, she gave in fully and became the beast,
something that ripped, and tore, and slashed, and gutted. She attacked Mutex with claws
of spectral form but formidable sharpness, and he dodged, and struck, but while he was
as fast as she, he lacked her savagery, her utterly instinctual grasp of the best places to
strike and the best methods to wound. Mutex fought too rationally, and he was simply
no match for her under these circumstances, and he retreated.
Unfortunately, while clothed in the purple, Marla lacked anything resembling an instinct
for self-preservation. This was a state akin to the berserker madness that Viking
warriors had once invoked, and so when Mutex fled she pursued him from the relative
safety of the train. Mutex scooped up handfuls of tiny frogs and flung them at her. She
batted the frogs away, but the poison still burned her. The pain did not slow her, only
enraged her further, and she continued rushing for Mutex, much to his surprise—clearly
he’d expected her to fall, dead from the poison. The red aura around him intensified,
deepening almost to the color of arterial blood, and he raced across the platform, up the
stairs in a flash, doubtless emptying whatever reserves of energy he held in his
desperate rush to escape.
With her prey gone, Marla raced back into the train, looking for more targets, and she
saw Rondeau and B. Before she could attack them, the tiny coherent compartment of
Marla’s mind wrested control of the cloak and reversed it back to white—at which point
she collapsed to the ground in horrendous pain. The alien intelligence asserted itself, but
uselessly, because it could not move her body—her flesh felt as if it had been etched
with acid. Then the soothing coolness of the cloak’s beneficent white side spread
through her, and it began the process of healing her wounds. She sweat profusely, and
where the drops of sweat hit the carpet, they burned through the fabric to the metal
below. Her teeth chattered, and she shivered, aware of Rondeau and B bending over her,