Return of the Trickster by Eden Robinson (ebook voice reader TXT) 📗

wolves said, nudging the bear Trickster with its boot.

Use the sorcerer, said the blob.

No, Jared thought.

We need him weaker. He’s her eyes and ears and we need him distracted.

What?

Things are afoot.

The sorcerer circled him, chittering.

Act whipped. Bring her through. Try, try, to use your imagination.

“All right!” Jared said. “All right! Mallory, stop. Please.”

More whipped than that.

Once he gave himself permission to cry, he listened to himself grow increasingly pathetic.

“All right,” the coy wolf said. “But if you try anything funny, she’s dying horribly.”

Jared nodded, not trusting his voice.

Good. They’re buying it. You don’t need to go to the other universe yourself to bring the ogress back. You just need to pull her through.

Okay.

Just a heads-up, though, the little blob said. This is going to kill me.

Jared shook his head. I don’t want to do that.

I’m ready to die, Jared. I’m tired of this half-life. If you fail, I don’t want to be stuck in a living grave.

Jared looked at his mother. The things she would do to get him back if their places were reversed. Kill and die. Even if it meant joining with one of the last beings on Earth he ever wanted in his head.

“I need…I need the sorcerer,” Jared said. “He’s been stealing power from me since I got back. I need everything he stole returned to me.”

The sorcerer stopped wiggling around the floor.

“Liar!” the sorcerer screamed. “Liar! Lies, lies, lies!”

“Granny G?” the coy wolf said.

They all looked upwards, shifting uneasily as the sorcerer made the house shake.

After a long while of listening, the sorcerer said, “Everything will come back to me after?”

“Everything,” the coy wolf said.

The sorcerer crept over to Jared, tenderly stroking his shin. Then he reached up and ripped the charm away. Its mind was now in his, and he could see himself, all tasty and helpless in the chair. Gross bearish thing on the floor, but the Lady said they needed it, so the sorcerer drew from it, sucked it into himself and then let it flow into Jared, giving back what he’d stolen mixed with what the bear Trickster had left, memories of mountains and then summers with endless days, streams with salmon so thick you could walk across them like a carpet. Berries as sweet as sunlight.

Yes, Georgina thought, yes.

The sheer limitless power, the rush of feeding on Tricksters and then being able to mould the world to your wants, your needs, your whims. You swatted at the stupid fireflies that stung you like mosquitoes, driving you away from the ape men you’d been trying to chase. You were ready to put this rotten universe in your rear-view mirror.

The shock of being attached to her again, the way she’d ripped his arms off and cracked his bones, sucking on the marrow, and then dug through his torso to nibble on his organs, carefully choosing them as though she was picking bonbons from a candy box.

Oh, God, he thought.

Yes, yes, you are a God. A Goddess. You will move through the world and people will fear you. You will have an army of coy wolves, and when the world ends, you’ll all leave and never die, never grow old, never be at anyone’s mercy ever, ever again.

The little blob reached through dimensions, tugging the dewy thread that connected him to her, and dragged her through.

The root of supernatural ability is simply the realization that all time exists simultaneously. Encoded memories so frayed you think they’re extinct, but they wait, coiled and unblinking, in your blood and your bones. When you shift out of our dimension, you run the risk of dispersion so profound even the memory of you is obliterated. Universes are stubbornly separate. You are the wet and pulsing distillation of stars, a house of light made bipedal and carbon-based, temporary and infinite. You are also the void.

“Stop singing!” Georgina the ogress that had once been called Jwasins had screamed the last time Jared had been with her, her hands wrapping around his throat, throttling him like the brainless chicken she thought he was.

Chicken, Jared thought.

In the middle of the dining room, Georgina, sister of Wee’git, slid into their universe not as an ogress, but as a ten-foot-tall, snowy-white chicken. The coy wolves goggled. Jared felt the bear Trickster slide from life towards death, thinking Ha! as he went.

Jared hacked and sneezed and vomited until the little blob oozed out of his nose and fell with a wet plop in his lap, then faded as the bear Trickster faded, a shadow growing faint and then blinking out of existence.

The Chicken Ogress squawked and then flapped her wings, her rage choking all the satisfaction she’d been feeling. The coy wolves ducked her flapping wings.

You think you’ve won, the Chicken Ogress thought. But I’ve eaten enough Tricksters that I too can transform. Come, my pack, loan me your power.

None of the coy wolves moved. The sorcerer peeled off Jared’s shoe and his sock, and latched on to a toe like a baby to a breast.

“You’re a…chicken,” one of the coy wolves said.

I can turn myself back to an ogress. With your help.

Jared could feel the power leaving him, could feel the drain like a sliced artery.

I will never kill you, the sorcerer thought. You’re mine.

“I can serve an ogress,” another one said. “That’s kinda cool. You know. But, um.”

Unbelievers, Jwasins thought. You could have ruled at my side, you faithless beasts.

The giant chicken stepped on the sorcerer, who squealed as she pecked out his heart. Lightning shot from his fingers and she pranced away, tipping her head back and swallowing the heart whole. He scurried for the shelter of a wall while Georgina, suffused with his power, transformed her wings to ogress arms on her chicken body. She punched through the wall where the sorcerer had vanished, catching him by the ankle, flinching as he sparked her in a desperate attempt to get away.

“Bob!” Jared shouted.

The coy wolves in human form dissolved. Their skins turned into mushy blobs and rolled away. The creatures