“Work?”
“Yeah. I need to be able to do what I did last time, at the temple.”
She tilted her head. “Fight?”
“Fight.”
Nodding, she marched on, axe in one hand, dagger in the other, big shark smile on display, proud and happy. It was too adorable.
The path ahead was easy enough to follow, soft black dirt under his bare feet, twelve-foot tombstones around, and an empty path. If people could walk through traffic in dense cities with their eyes pointed down at a phone, he could follow the girls and work on his music skills.
“Okay, let’s see if I can…”
The fingers inside him were sore, but still working, like recovering from a serious workout. He tested them against the strings, and winced as his insides ached. He could still craft auras, and had a few times since the angel incident, but they didn’t have the same punch they used to. It was because he’d played the music so loud, it’d touched some sort of presence in Hell, something that mirrored his song and amplified it. Hitting the strings that hard had hurt him.
Did Mia do that to create that firestorm? She was probably aching more than he was.
Okay. Play the music. Sounded easy enough. Playing the strings didn’t require any skill from him, just intent and effort. And emotion. It was a weird blend of putting what he was, what he was feeling, and what he was thinking into the inner fingers so they played the strings as automatically as thinking about something.
Seeing Dao hurt had snapped something inside him, and he’d hit the strings so damn hard, something had answered back. Answered, and had made it easy for his mind to understand new ways of playing music, far beyond simple auras. Hell was connected to the strings, and he could make Hell dance.
In the same way a pianist could improv and play little tunes to mirror someone walking around and doing chores, music could convey action. All he had to do was think of music that conveyed the action, and the rest of his brain aligned with it. And with some effort, his intent and emotions could align with it, too. Hopefully.
David looked at the ground, and played a string, something sharp, something that felt like ‘stab’ and ‘forward’ and ‘up’. Nothing happened. He played the strings a little harder. Nothing happened.
He tripped on a stone, yelped, caught his weight on his palms, and groaned. Daoka clicked back at him, frowning.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Dusting himself off, he got up and got back to work. Walking and thinking about strings and music and shit was harder than expected, and he almost tripped again as he tried to weave some sort of ground spike. This was difficult.
“David,” Acelina said, standing over and behind him. “By Lucifer, what are you doing?”
“Trying to do what I did before.” Dodging specifics with Vicus nearby was annoying, but the last thing they needed was for more demons to know what he could do.
“Now?”
“I need to be useful. Last fight I was useful, but before that? I did nothing.”
“You defended yourself, the fight before that one. I saw it, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” He’d forgotten somehow. When that Cainite had tried to strike him down in the tunnel, when the Cainites had ambushed them, Acelina had unleashed her aura and turned the ambush into a clusterfuck rumble, eliminating their advantage. But one soul had gotten past her, up to David, and had tried to hit him. He’d blocked the attack in a flash of gold light.
The rune batlam shined in his mind. He’d used it. How the fuck had he used the rune? He could see it in the network of runes better now, attached to the rune ‘angel’ and ‘heaven’, but that didn’t help him. No matter how hard he thought about it, no matter how much he tried to summon it, the rune refused to listen to him.
He’d used the rune once, though. He could use it again. Finding out how was the problem. It’d come out as a reflex, which meant he had to get his brain out of the way if he wanted to trigger a rune he hadn’t learned how to use. The only rune he knew, genuinely knew how to use like it’d been unlocked, was the rune for a sacrifice ritual, to turn a soul’s resonance and essence into a contained reaction of destruction, and imbue it into a weapon. All the other runes he could see and read, but to ‘use’ them was beyond him.
“I don’t know how I did that,” he said. “But the stuff after Greg, the battle, I think I can do all that again. I just have to play the strings right.”
Acelina said nothing, but she stayed close, wings snug around her shoulders like a cape. It was relaxing, her guarding him; awesome as the Las were, they weren’t exactly reliable.
He scooped up some dirt and watched the soft, black bits crumble and fall between his fingers. He could feel it, sense it, know it was a part of Hell. A sixth sense had grown inside him, and told him every step he took was on something ‘there’, as if touching it hadn’t been enough before.
He scooped up some more dirt, and played it a tiny song in his palm, but it did not move. He played louder, hard enough his inner fingers ached, and he winced.
The dirt moved. Barely, a shift no bigger than the ones his feet created in the dirt, but unless he was going crazy — a distinct possibility — the dirt had moved. He tried again, plucking the strings and telling them to make the dirt stand, and again the dirt moved, but not enough to mean anything. Ripples, nothing more.
“Maybe I just need to heal,” he whispered to no one. “I… can’t hit the strings hard enough.”
Acelina leaned in close, and he almost jumped.
“How did you strike them hard last time?” Her head had come down low, right next to his, and she set one set of her claws on his shoulder. Scary.
“I… saw Dao get hurt, and it… overwhelmed me, you know?”
“A powerful emotional reaction.” She smiled, just a little one, but she had one of those big shark smiles filled with too many sharp teeth. Shark smiles were kinda cute on the Las, but on Acelina’s large, featureless, black face, it was outright terrifying. And kinda sexy, in a monstery way.
“I guess, yeah.”
“You are a sensitive little creature, aren’t you?”
He frowned. “I am. Is that a problem?”
“No, but you often come across as–”
“Robotic?”
“I was going to say introspective. What would a spire mother know of the fiction of the surface?”
Sighing, he stared at the dirt in his hands, and tried to make it move some more. Nothing.
“I am sensitive, and I do what I can to make sure it doesn’t get the best of me.”
“Except where the riiva is concerned.”