Song Selection: The Devil You Know— I Fight Dragons

***

I really liked Grimm when he was David. Liked him more than I liked any man I dated before him, not like that means much though. I have a habit of dating men and women who like to wrench my heart out of my chest and toss it into the gutter. So honestly, I shouldn't be surprised by Grimm. He's just that, but evolved like a heart-eating pokemon.

On the phone, he would talk for hours about the minutia of the universe, each element that made up stars, the squirming protoplasmic goop life evolved from, and theories of existence. While I made bad puns, he would talk to me about the "proto-consciousness theory," this idea that the universe and everything in it is at least pieced out of what makes things sentient, that maybe every molecule, every atom, possess sentience or at the very least could.

I like smart people, in general, because they counter my shit. That's why I cling to Riley, she keeps me from drinking bottles of soy sauce and painting murals on the apartment walls. Sometimes chaos just needs order. Sheer logic as opposed to sheer...whatever I am.

Even though David might've been a lie, or at least his name was, it turns out that's the person Grimm is. Smart. Poking and prodding and analyzing the universe; that's what he does, but this time I'm his subject. And not only his subject, but his Patrick, the guy he offers up the observations to. I guess it's all, 'if a tree falls in the forest' to him; if he figures out the workings of the universe and no ones there to hear it, did he even figure them out?

"Looks like the fire is connected to your level of exhaustion. The flame's shifted in color," he says, as I barely miss pawing his shirt for the sixth or so time; I've lost count. I'm gasping for breath. Every time I swipe at him, he disappears. When I try to run, he pops back into existence in front of me, just a little right or left so I don't slam into him. I spin and aim a strike at him, and it all happens over again. He disappears, I move, he reappears, I strike.

His observation's correct, worryingly so. The big white jets of flame are small, red and orange. I'm heaving, struggling to keep up. His eyes materialize first, that flash of red before his body slams into reality, so I'm like a bull, charging the color whenever I see it. And I'm getting slow, stumbling and righting myself in a haze as he toys with me. 

"Could be wired to your adrenaline response. Magic is very personal, very affected by what's happening in your brain and your body." He's sitting a couple of feet away from me, criss-cross, squinting. He's not even breathing heavy; I can barely manage to stay upright.

"Just—Stop—" I can hardly make the words out through my gasps. He appears in front of me one more time, reaching for me again with his bloodied hand. This isn't working, I'm fucked, I tell myself.

The fire dies on my hands.

"What's going on inside your head?" he asks, as if I'll tell him. He waggles his eyebrows as I collapse coughing to the ground on my hands and knees, because I can't hold out anymore. I've got more scabs than skin on my feet, more fluttering muscle in my lungs than actual air. "I told you I'd get my hands around your neck," he says.

I squeeze my eyes shut. How does he do it? How did I escape? There was a voice, the feeling of being torn out of this reality and being tossed into another, but the memory races through me, nothing to hook onto, like silt through open hands.

He presses his fingers into my throat and lifts me up easily, which, you know props to him for following through, his hands are around my neck. Like I did when I was blasted into the ether, I feel everything inside me, my heartbeat, the quiver of aching muscles in my legs and arms, the running of blood. I feel all that energy settle in my mouth, this buzzing, humming.

I'm too tired of his bullshit to be afraid, so I shove my own observation back in his face. "You can't kill me in the middle of the woods. You need me, need to do some kind of ritual on me, so shut up."

I've never felt this before. I'm pretty normal, by most means. The worst thing that's ever happened to me, physically, is puking after doing enough pushups and burpees to make all the oxygen sort of stop pumping to the right muscles. That shit hurt. But it's not the same kind of hurt as having someone hold you up, dangling by the throat. My brain is on fire. I reach for him, but he holds me just at his long arm's length, so my sad little flickers don't make it his scorch-able sleeve.

"You're going to be used for a good cause." He blinks at me, as if my body, my life, is something I'm tossing in a GoodWill donation bin. A good cause. "If you knew why I was doing this to you, you'd understand."

The fire's gone on my hands, but I feel something smoldering in me. I'm tired and I'm pissed. "Try me, Grimm. You've told me about quantum mechanics, you've told me about the layout of engines, about primordial consciousness, so let's see if you can convince me to die," I say.

He closes his eyes, drawing in a low, deep breath. "I don't need to do that." But he wants to, I know that. Any time he figured out a new reading of a book he loved, he'd light up my phone with excited, rambling paragraphs. Have you ever considered that Atlas Shrugged could accidentally be an argument against the author's governing philosophy? and I'd fire back No, its 3am, the wee hours of morning and wee inconvenient time for you to figure this out, and I'd fall asleep grinning, vague hot-takes about things I didn't care about causing boring dreams, my heart full and comforted by the flow of words that accompanied me as I slipped out of consciousness.

It's almost impossible to believe he'd kept this, whatever the hell he's doing, from me. He murmurs syllables, and I feel the energy inside me ramming up against my bones. Bronchial tubes opening and closing, twitches of electricity running up and down my nerves, the burning, bubbling of stomach acid.

For a second time, the world around me melts. But it's not stars and a whispery voice that greet me, its an ancient forest full of big trees and a million twinkling stars. It's so real; I can smell the pine, feel the chill of frigid wind. I can hear wingbeats and at every angle, blue, glowing orbs float buzzing in the air.

"You're cuter with your mouth shut," Grimm helpfully adds as I dangle there, not knowing what the fuck is going on, and not bothering to ask him. I'm not like him and Riley; I have superpowers, I've been teleporting in and out of other dimensional planes, everything I knew about reality I can crumple up and toss into the trash can. But that's more than fine with me. How do I melt metal? How am I on other planes of existence? Those are the wrong questions to ask, I don't need to know why. The unexplainable happens all the time, all around us. That's fine. I don't care.

Can I use my new powers to escape? That's the question I need to ask. That and, 'how late am I for work?'

In front of us on the mossy ground, a big cauldron bubbles, his old oak box sitting beside it. Voices whisper all around us, voices I don't understand. Which is, you know, fitting.

He finally lets me go. "This is my pocket dimension," he says. "It's the space between realities, like in Lovecraft stories, where the elder gods came from. That's how teleportation works. Jumping in and out of our dimension and this one."

This is what I mean. He revels in explanations, needs to unspool the universe and hold the thread to the light. I don't. I just want to get the fuck out of here. "How do you do it?" I ask, and his pretty red eyes light up.

There's nowhere to run, I'll just delaying the inevitable, getting lost in his dimension. So I just kind of sit there for a second, catching my breath. I've never been anywhere so pretty, the spicy smell of the trees. The velvety black sky, the blinking luminance of the light. I might as well have stepped into an enchanted forest for real, or the ones from old literature. Fairies and lovers, witches bent over cauldrons and magic cast over everything, everyone, like moonlight. Bubble bubble, toil and trouble... I might as well be in an old Shakespeare play; it's a slightly nicer place to die, I suppose. In the background, I hear music play, soft. Pop music.

"There shouldn't be any hows or whys to magic, but—" He winks. I could forget he had tried to murder me, just with the little wink and the mischief clear on his boyish face. "Quantum entanglement, I think."

"No, I mean, how do you access it." I'm holding my throat, breathing in the soft fragrance of his dimension.

He opens his oak chest, picking up a leather journal and silver pen. He sits down on the ground and opens the pages, eyeing me and scratching words into it. "Magic is different for everyone, Pat. Some people can access theirs through wild emotions, some through ritual, some through meditation."

"Superheroes use magic?"

"Mmhmm." He moves his hand quickly over his book. "Power activated by...what would you say? Were you reciting a prayer in your head? Cussing? My brother can activate his superspeed by shouting "fuck," but you know, he wouldn't deign to say that on most occasions because he feels like he'll dirty his soul if he does, so the word is powerful to him. Or maybe its your emotions?"

I bite my lip. "You can't expect me to answer you when I know you're going to kill me. I mean, why should I?"

He stretches his arms and yawns. His eyes fall half-lidded, if only for a second, and I he must be tired out by our one-sided fight in the cursed field. "Because if I can figure out what causes your powers, I'll probably know what piece of you I need. Might only need a thin slice of your brain, and who knows, you might survive that. But if you don't tell me..."

The thought of someone taking a piece of my brain, the image of it, makes me shudder. Brings tears to my eyes, but I focus on the cool form in front of me, his leg stretched out and tapping slow rhthmns on the ground. There isn't a why to the universe. No why for life, no why for physics, no why to the function of reality. It just is. But people always have a why. "Why do you need to do this to me?"

"The earth needs it." He shrugs, eying me up and down. "It's you or...or, it's not pretty, Pat. What caused the fire?"

He had sprayed his magic laughing gas. I was afraid, but there was something else. Something that had caused to powers to flare when the Pastor called me Patricia. I can feel the pattern, but I can't see it. Something...something... I hear the music in the background louder now.

Drop into the floor, let your body go
Dance with the devil you know
Or go home, they are watching now
Better show 'em how 

I lunge at him. The book will have the answers, everything he's told me. He's too caught up in holding the thread of the universe to the light, too caught up in thinking it through, that I wrench it out of his hands before he can stop me. His eyes flicker angrily, my fingers reaching up and just burning the very edges of his shirt. He grits his teeth at me, but just as he becomes a pair of red eyes, I grab on to his shirt.

We're back in the field, standing in the bloodied carcass he made out of the deer. I blink, the sudden sunlight searing my eyeballs, and let go of his shirt. We're surrounded now, by a herd of the creatures. But they're bigger than the ones I usually find outside the church. They're bony, with long, thin limbs, some gnarled, some too thin to hold up such a big creature. Some of them have exposed ribs, places where the fur is ripped away and the pulsing organs show, glistening red and pink. They have big bloody antlers, and I bite back a scream.

"Shit," he says. There must be over a hundred, so many dark eyes glinting at us, so many bared teeth that look far too sharp for a deer's. "Shit shit shit, wraiths!"

I'm not great at keeping myself out of trouble, but I got a couple of guiding priniciples that have served me well so far. And one of the big ones is that it's better to screw around with the devil you know, than the devil you don't. So when Grimm grabs my arm, I don't yank away.

His body fades, leaving only red eyes. But we don't end up in his dimension. They eyes just sit there, floating, as the deer hobble toward us. Their hides smell like rotting meat, their jaws popping open and exposing long, lolling tongues, and those sharp teeth.

Grimm gasps. "Fuck."

When the person with unknowable powers says that, the person who terrifies you, you're kind of screwed. I take a step back, his hand still wrapped around my arm. I close my eyes. Meditation, he said, emotions. I found my way out of this reality, and I can find it again. There comes a high-pitched whistle, the one I used to offer to the field every night.

I put my hand on the ground and whistle back. My heart slams and I try to cling to that feeling. When I first got shot out into the nothingness, I was one with everything happening inside my body. My consciousness stretched and clung to every catabolic process, every moving thing. Grimm, when he was David, talked me through this. The idea that everything has the ability to become conscious, its in their primordial structure as he would put it.

Grimm wrenches me off the ground. "Bastard! You can't just sit down and let them get you, I need to get you."

I can't let him distract me, so I let myself go like clay in the killer's hands. I picture everything inside me, I picture my heart, and its steady beat. I picture the coils of arteries and veins, I try to imagine the billions of red discs pressed against eachother that make up my blood. I try to picture what they'd see, and for a second I do. I see red.

I focus on air being cycled through my lungs, I focus on the balled DNA in my cells. My consciousness reaches tentatively out of my brain; I feel it creeping, something combustible and warm that tugs my cells, tugs the cells of the billion of micro-bodies crawling around inside my guts.

Grimm shouts, but I don't open my eyes, I just hold the feeling, the feeling that I'm billions of buzzing things all pressed together. The ground starts to fall away, and I (we-it feels like we) blink. I see the rolling black cloud emanating from the deer, the thing I saw hovering over me before the fire shot out of my hands.

But we're in my dimension. Stars against a black sky, far far below us, pink mountains and planes. Grimm's holding on to me, dangling off my arm. The redness is starting to slip out of his eyes, first it fades to maroon, then to a dull brown. He yanks his book out of my hands and tears a page out with his teeth.

"Did you see that?" His mouth is full of paper. "I need you so I can fix them."

"Huh?" But I can hardly hear him over the zapping of electricity, over the glug of fluids in this body, in me. His mouth moves, but I can't hear him now, the little bodies inside me are talking. Eat. Kill. Eat eat. Information. Construct. Flex. Invader! Invader!

"Shut up!" I shout. The connection snaps. I and Grimm fall, fall, into the Two Sparrows parking lot. I land hard, rolling on to my knees to even the impact, but it still richocets through me. I'm covered in sweat, and I'm trembling. Grimm recoils when he looks at the church, his hand loosening around my arm. When I glance over, he's wearing a plain white shirt and baggy blue jeans. This isn't my only form. He's changing, but I never see his face, because he runs away.

But I know he'll be back. I check my phone and sigh, relieved; I'm only two minutes late from break.