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, but the awareness was distant, as the cloak sealed her off from the pain of the poison leaving her body. And this was from the barest touch of only a few of the frogs, just glancing contact as she brushed them aside. If Mutex had lured her farther onto the platform, into the midst of the frogs, the poison would surely have overwhelmed even her cloak’s ability to cope with the pain and damage. As it was, she wondered if she would survive this much of the poison, but even that concern had a detached quality, as the alien intelligence maintained control, trying to hold on through the pain.
Finally she rolled over, and vomited weakly, and then B and Rondeau were helping her to her feet. Normally after the cloak healed her, Marla felt no ill effects at all, only a ferocious hunger, and while she was hungry now, she also ached, deep in her muscles. She thought Bethany had a good idea when it came to eating people, and she considered the possibility of snapping B’s neck and eating his flesh raw, perhaps taking in some of his seer’s power in the process. She reached for B’s throat to choke him and throttle him down, but her muscles trembled, and the best she could manage was a weak clutching at his shoulders.
Then Marla shuddered and pushed at the alien intelligence, and though it resisted her ferociously, it couldn’t hold on against her steady mental pressure, and Marla was herself again, although weak and famished.
The frogs hadn’t killed her, but it had been a near thing—which was fortunate, in a way, since if she’d been less damaged the cloak’s alien intelligence would have succeeded in killing B and eating a fair bit of him before Marla could reassert control.
She couldn’t face Mutex’s frogs again, not without some protection—there was no reason to think she’d be this lucky twice. She’d known that before, recognized the threat the frogs posed, but now that their poison had scalded her, she understood it more deeply, and knew they weren’t a problem she could simply improvise around.