Jack shivered. The azlu, monster spiders, straight out of a horror movie. Ugh.
"Azlu?"
She nodded to Sándor. "Ancient creatures from my side of the tracks. Spirit, but not quite spirit. Look like spiders. They like to break into the physical world, turn a human into a host, and grow into a--"
A giant claw snapped out from the tear, and slammed down into the air in front of Clara. She threw herself back, landing in a prowling crouch. Jack threw himself back too, almost screaming in surprise, and ended rolling along the hospital floor. Sándor jumped back as well, and the effect was far more disastrous, as his giant body smashed into the walls, tore into the drywall, and his claws left slashes through the tile floor. Worse, Jack managed to lift his head up in time to see the gargoyle's tail slam into Clara, and send her rolling onto the floor next to Jack.
No way. No fucking way. Jack forced himself up onto his knees, and stared at the sight of the huge creature as it started to crawl its way through the tear. Before it got half its huge body through the opening, it slammed one of its bone scythe arms down at Clara again. It was massive, and way too fast for something that size. Clara was still recovering from getting a giant tail smashed into her, and couldn't out of the way in time before the huge scythe claw cut into her leg above the knee. Meat on a hook. She screamed.
"Clara!" Jack jumped up to his feet, but he was too slow. The creature pulled back into the tear, and dragged Clara with it, leaving a messy streak of blood as it jerked Clara left and right.
Sándor, not quite knocked over, recovered far faster than Jack did, and the titan threw himself at the azlu monster like a tiger pouncing prey. He roared, and the hospital shook with the bellowing rumble, as the giant nightmare monster fell upon the equally massive spirit monster. Onto it, and then through the tear, dragging Clara with them.
"Jack!" she screamed, before she disappeared through the hole.
"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck." Jack ran over to the tear, and peered through it. The mist flowed up and over his fingers, and he yanked his hand back as the unnatural cold seeped into his bones. After taking a second, he stepped back toward the tear, but he couldn't see past the fog. Having three people suddenly fall through it must have stirred it.
He couldn't smell anything through the tear, or taste. But he could hear quiet moans, past the battle screams of Clara and Sándor, and he could feel the strange cold.
"Jack! Do something!" Sándor's voice. It cut through the strange, deadly silence, but it was quiet and distant.
Ok, ok, do something! Like some kind of bad joke, an azlu monster attacked just when they were talking about it. Well, they were hanging out by a tear through the Gauntlet, and considering what Clara said, it made sense that one of those weird spider monsters would be around. Except, it didn't look like the Shadow Realm on the other side of the tear. Looked like Hades or something. The fuck was an azlu doing in there?
Go in? Sándor could--no, Sándor couldn't. Sándor had just leapt through the tear, and into a different realm. Far as Jack knew, he was only merged with his Horror in the Dream Realm; it was a dream monster, after all. Outside of it, he'd probably go back to his human form. Still strong as all hell, but not like he was in the dream. And considering Jack's previous experience with the azlu, he doubted Clara and Sándor could take it down if the Begotten was in his human form.
He shook his head hard, and jumped in. He still remembered what happened to Stephanie, and he wouldn't let that happen to Clara. No fucking chance in Hell.
Passing through the tear, he caught a glimpse of the yellow and gold, the streaks of white, and endless mist he knew as the Gauntlet. Apparently, the werewolves saw it differently, or maybe they smelled or sensed more. For him, the Gauntlet was a numbing thing, but his eyes still worked, and he stared, eyes wide, as he quickly moved through the strange, golden realm he couldn't even see from outside the tear. And then a second later, he was in a completely new realm, a new place, a new dimension he knew absolutely nothing about.
Except that gravity worked.
He sucked in a hard breath as he fell. The strange mist of the realm surrounded him, dark and gray, and he spun around in the air as he struggled to prepare for a landing. Through the mist, he could see the hints of drifting green, the strange rock pathways the ghosts hovered along, and the walls of the cavern. An enormous cavern. An enormous, colossal, holy fucking shit gigantic cavern.
He put out his hands and oriented himself until he felt the mist and air hitting him in the face and stomach. No longer spinning, her peered down and tried to see where the ground was. Still falling. Oh god, if he hit the ground at this speed, it was going to crumple him like a car careening off a bridge and landing nose first into the ravine below. He might survive it, being a corpse and all. The other two, he doubted.
There was howling, a quiet sound that drifted around him. Wherever it was coming from, it was around him, hitting him from all directions, but almost inaudible. The sound changed pitch, slowly going up and down, almost like a choir. Maybe it was a choir? There were lots of myths and legends about ghosts singing. And in the odd quiet of the endless fall, it did sound almost musical, haunting, and sad. It reminded him of Mary; not the Mary he knew, but Mary the ghost, haunting his old home, and carrying with her enough sadness that she hadn't gone where she was supposed to go when she died.
That's what this place felt like. Sadness, and regret.
The ground finally came up to meet him, and it was not fun. He was light, and he'd summoned vitae into his limbs to prepare for the impact. But it still hurt, and despite his best efforts, he felt something crunch. Bone. He screamed as something snapped in one of his legs, and the opposite arm.
A quick glance up showed the tear maybe a hundred feet over them, and out maybe five feet away from a colossal wall of rock. Dark, smooth rock, like the rock he'd landed on. A moment later, he could hear the screech of the monster, and the impact of its eight sharp feet hitting the rock as it fled.
Heal, now!
Immediately, the curse got to work, and shot vitae through his limbs and into his bones. It hurt, having his flesh force chunks of bone back into place. He could hear the crunching, grinding sounds of his body mending, and of muscle and skin sewing back together. Viktor would have been proud of how quickly he healed, and seconds later, his Beast told him he was repaired enough to at least get up and get moving.
He jumped and spun around. Now that he was on the ground and no longer falling through endless mist, vertigo hit him, and he stumbled as the shift in his weight threw him for a loop. He'd have vomited if he was human.
"Clara!? Sándor!?" Shit, fucking shit fuck. The fog was thick, but not so thick he couldn't see for a hundred feet. At the edges of the fog, he could see movement, more ghost lights drifting along. If they noticed him, they didn't care.
"Jack." Sándor jogged up to him through the mist, panting quietly. Not injured. How? "That spider thing was half human."
"Yeah, azlu do that. They possess a person, eat part of their brain like a parasite, literally turn them into a giant spider monster, and then they start eating people."
The Begotten snorted. "And--"
A few falling pebbles forced the two of them to look up. It was hard to see through the mist, but Jack recognized the shapes of huge spiders crawling along the cave wall near the floating tear. Some dangled from web, and others stuck to the wall, sticking their butts out and shooting web at the tear.
"Us showing up must of scared them off," Jack said, "until their enforcer came and... and took Clara." He didn't know shit about azlu, or these Host monsters, except that the werewolves were super surprised to find two fully mutated azlu working together. "When I killed one, it split into hundreds of spiders like those." He pointed up.
"Disgusting."
"Where's Clara?"
"I don't know. When I jumped through and realized I was falling, I tried to fly, but losing my Horror in the air was disorienting."
Jack raised a brow at the man. "You can fly without your Horror?"
"Yes. We can get back the way we came, but..." Frowning, Sándor looked down at the ground, and some blood that ran along the floor. A streak of it made it clear what happened: it'd dragged Clara off. "I saw the two of them struggling in the air, falling. The spider had meant to crawl down the wall, but my tackle ruined that. She hit her head at some point. She's probably unconscious, or dead."
"Shit. Shit shit shit shit." He knew Uratha could heal from almost anything when transformed into their war form, but he doubted they were nearly as difficult to kill while still human; similar situation to the nightmare monster. Growling, he took off at a near sprint along the blood trail. Stupid, so fucking stupid of him to go with Sándor to check out the tear, without at least getting Damien. Of course it turned out to be dangerous. Shit always got dangerous, randomly, for no damn reason.
The rock floor of the ludicrously massive cavern was smooth, and while it did have rolling hills, they were shallow and short. But the mist was a problem. The smart side of him told him to slow down before he ran off a cliff or into a nest of the spider monsters. The desperate part of him told him he fucked up, and now Clara was going to die, like Stephanie, butchered.
