Chapter Text
We met the New Yorkers just outside of Aadhya’s huge pink house. They pulled up in their extravagant enclave RV and honked the horn (all thanks to Magnus, I was sure). I would’ve been immediately annoyed, except first I was deeply preoccupied with greeting Orion, and then Chloe, and it was some time after the round of kisses and hugs (I won’t spell out for you who got what) that entailed before I had to waste any ounce of attention on Magnus. He looked nearly the same as he had in the Scholomance — that is to say, pompously self-assured — and I found that I really, truly hadn’t missed him at all.
“Great to see you again, El,” he said smugly.
I inhaled deeply and said, “Tebow, I am going to pull out your intestines through your mouth.”
↫↭↬
There were a number of very good reasons to justify this road trip. First off, we’d spent most of the past year taking out the more major pressing maw-mouths all over the world (Africa, South America, and Asia were full of loads ), and in the meantime, we’d identified a good amount all over America, which we admittedly had left a bit neglected. A road trip seemed a solid way to knock out a good bunch of them. Second, New York was more than happy to send any of its many resources with us (and to remind me I was always welcome to come visit anytime I like), including their fanciful camper and some of their enclavers, and so that stupid road trip Magnus had suggested to Orion to suggest to me back in our senior year was going to happen after all. Also, it was summer, which meant Orion was off Scholomance guard duty and could join us (and this bit of timing was not important to me at all, and I had not missed Orion terribly and was not at all excited about the prospect of getting to spend our summer together). And since Orion was coming with us, New York was considerably less concerned about sending their top combat wizards to accompany us. Fortunately, this meant we had room for Chloe to join us. Much less fortunately, it meant Magnus could and did elbow his way onto this trip, no matter how much I protested. I suppose that all evened out — one non-necessary asshole to counteract one non-necessary, but actually pleasant travel-mate; yes, yes, principle of balance, and all that. Besides, Liesel had told me (when I’d reacted with outrage to learn that he was on her secondary maw-mouth network and she’d contacted him to help us make travel arrangements), he was a talented fighter, for someone who wasn’t a tertiary-order entity. And he had connections. Practically, it made sense for him to go with us.
Still, just because I understood didn’t mean I had to like it.
We took some time before we actually set out to go over our plan and protocol for when we saw maw-mouths and our itinerary and all those other lovely logistics. From Liesel, we’d acquired a list of places where maw-mouths had attacked or been sighted (mostly the names of cities and towns, although a good chunk were merely coordinates), accompanied by notes about their purported sizes and the damage they had done, and where they might be now. She’d even helpfully plotted out points on a map for us, in addition to her list. Magnus, of course, had to go ahead and say, “Yeah, that’s cool; I made my own itinerary too,” and because we all silently agreed that Aadhya was the closest thing we had to a trip leader, and because she wasn’t as unrepentantly dismissive of Magnus as I was, she actually heard him out. We all stood around while Magnus pulled out a list. His itinerary had many popular tourist spots on it, complete with ridiculous names like The World’s Largest Ball of Twine and Uranus Fudge Factory (I had exactly one guess for why Tebow had included the latter on his list, and if I turned out to be wrong, I would send him flowers). I already wanted to strangle Magnus about half the time just from his mere existence, but looking at the list, I wanted to strangle him about ten times more.
“Tebow, we are hunting for maw-mouths, not fun vacation stops,” I said irritably before Aadhya or anyone else could speak, and it was Chloe who cut in anxiously, “Well, I mean we should be prioritizing maw-mouth hunting, but — if we have time, maybe we can do those other things too?” Aadhya and the others were nodding to that, and I could hardly disagree without looking like a wanker, so I just grumbled a grudging agreement while Magnus shot a triumphant look at me. So our actual important destination list went up on the bulletin board that was for whatever reason inside the RV, and next to it went up Magnus’ asinine joyride list. All that was left to do after that was to say goodbye to Aadhya’s family, accept the vast heaps of food they insisted we bring, and then we were on our way.
↫↭↬
We didn’t quite make it out of the state before we ran into our first maw-mouth.
My cousin Pranav — he was one of the newer additions to the enclave-foundation-replacement project — called us right before it happened. He greeted us rather calmly with hello, I hope you’re all doing well , and with no warning switched to oh, also by the way, I’ve just had a vision about an enclave collapsing in Santa Barbara — did you happen to see any maw-mouths?
“No,” I said, throwing a look over my shoulder at Aadhya, whose eyes had gone wide. She scrambled for Liesel’s lists and maps, right as Chloe gasped and Magnus pulled over.
“Why’d you stop?” Orion asked.
From up front, Chloe said hesitantly, “I’m not sure, but for a moment in the trees, it looked like—”
“A maw-mouth,” Magnus broke in. “It was moving.”
“Pranav, I’ll call you back,” I said, and hung up.
“There’s nothing on Liesel’s maps,” Aadhya called out. “And if anyone knew about a maw-mouth in Jersey, my family would’ve heard of it. So either no one’s seen this one yet—”
“—or no one’s lived to talk about it,” I finished grimly.
Chloe wavered. “I mean, I guess we don’t know what we saw for sure —”
Liu, stroking her myna, joined Magnus and Chloe up front and asked, “Which direction was it heading?” After some brief discussion, she opened a window and said softly, “Go and have a look for us, won’t you?” The bird flew out, and we waited.
“Can’t that bird fly any faster?” Magnus asked after a couple minutes.
“His name is Xiao Ming,” Liu said, with uncharacteristic force. There was a pause — I think even she was surprised by her aggression. Then she added, “And he’s doing his best — the canopy is very thick. It’s hard to find the maw-mouth without getting too close.”
Magnus grumbled and folded his arms, but he shut up. We waited tensely.
After about ten minutes, Xiao Ming returned. Liu consulted it for a few moments, and then turned to face the rest of us.
“There is a maw-mouth,” she confirmed. “It is moving further into the forest.” Chloe’s face went pale.
“How big is it?” I asked.
Liu shut her eyes, concentrating. “Class III, I think.”
“Meaning?” Magnus asked.
I shot him an irritated look, but Aadhya answered, “Moderately sized. Maybe about 30-60 years old.”
“Oh, that’s not too bad then,” Orion said, and we all turned to glare at him. He at least had the decency to look embarrassed.
“It’s not good ,” Aadhya retorted. “New Jersey doesn’t have an enclave. So if the maw-mouth is here, that means it’ll probably go for either Philadelphia or—”
“New York,” Magnus finished, eyes hard. He made a fist. “That’s it. It’s going down.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Thank you, Magnus, yes, we were going to take it down anyway, even if your precious enclave wasn’t at risk—”
“El!” Aadhya said sharply. “Can you save your enclave-hating for after we kill the maw-mouth?”
She was right, but even so, it took a good bit of self-control for me to close my mouth. I eyed the dense trees on the side of the road and asked Magnus, “Can we take the RV in there?”
He frowned. “Part of the way, maybe. I wouldn’t count on it.”
“It’ll be hard to see it from inside the RV, anyway,” Orion said. “We should go on foot.”
“You guys really don’t have to come,” Aadhya said to Magnus and Chloe. “It might be a good idea for someone to stay with the RV anyway.”
“Oh, I’m coming,” Magnus said grimly.
Aadhya didn’t object, just nodded. “Chloe?”
She wavered. “Um, I—”
“You don’t have to,” Aadhya repeated.
She sighed. “I’ll come.” Liu smiled at her encouragingly. After that, we geared up, activated a few protective wards on the RV, and headed into the forest. We couldn’t just run — that would open us up to stumbling across the maw-mouth by accident and potentially having someone getting caught, which would be extremely unpleasant, not to mention there was no guarantee I could get them out before damage had been done — but we couldn’t exactly take our time, either; Liu had said the maw-mouth was moving, and we weren’t that far from New York. So Liu sent her myna ahead again and closed her eyes and directed us where to go.
“Of course there’d be a maw-mouth in New Jersey,” Magnus muttered as we moved.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Aadhya said testily.
Magnus blanched. “Nothing!” Hastily, he added, “I mean — El, where did your cousin say the maw-mouth came from again?”
“Santa Barbara,” I said, and it hurt me to give him even that tiny bit of information for free.
Magnus spread his hands. “See, it’s a California enclave! Maybe they were hoping it’d attack New York.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Aadhya replied. “Santa Barbara wasn’t made yesterday; if they were trying to target New York, why would their maw-mouth only get this close now?”
“Besides,” I added. “One Class III maw-mouth wouldn’t be enough to take out New York.”
Magnus grumbled. “It was just a thought. I’m no expert.”
Liu said softly, “To be fair, maw-mouth movement patterns are erratic. This one could’ve been sleeping for a few years.” Xiao Ming returned and landed on her shoulder. She paused, then added, “Wait.”
We all froze.
Liu remained completely motionless for a minute longer, then whispered, “There is a small clearing up ahead. The maw-mouth has stopped there. But something’s not right.”
“Well, it’s a maw-mouth; how right can they ever get?” I asked.
“No.” Liu shook her head. “I don’t know what it is. The trees are too thick to see clearly. But something is…different. We should be careful.”
We were all tense. Aadhya said quietly, “El, you go first. Orion, go with her. Magnus and Liu, on that side. I’ll take Chloe on this side. We’ll both hold shields, and once we get close enough, we’ll combine and then flip it.”
“Flip it?” Magnus echoed. “Are you crazy?”
In most situations, it would’ve been a fair question. Obviously the first thing anyone wants to do when faced with a maw-mouth is — well, is to run away, but if running away isn’t an option, then the next best option someone would usually look for is to protect themselves as best as they can. And self-preservation was already drilled into enclave kids much more than the average indie wizard anyway. Flipping the shield would mean that we took the shield surrounding us and inverted it so that we had the maw-mouth inside the shield instead. But Magnus hadn’t been with us for the past year, where we’d discovered flipping the shield would stop the maw-mouth from running off too far, and also made the resulting mess much easier to clean up.
“You really want to argue about this right now?” Aadhya demanded. “We all have shield-holders anyway!”
“Yeah, but what’s that gonna do against a maw-mouth —”
“Hey man, they’ve been at this since September,” Orion of all people cut in. “I think they know what they’re doing.”
It was probably the closest thing to shut up Magnus had ever heard from Eternal Pushover Orion, and in defense of a non-enclaver like Aadhya, no less (well, Orion would’ve come to my defense too, had he thought I needed it—emphasis on thought —but that wouldn’t have surprised Magnus, as I was an anomaly in every conceivable sense). Shock passed over his face, and he actually fell into his position next to Liu and followed her without saying another word.
Aadhya seemed a little surprised too, as if she hadn’t expected Orion to actually speak up on her behalf. “Thanks,” she said to him, and he replied a little sheepishly, “Don’t mention it.”
“However lovely it is to see Orion actually having a spine and putting Tebow in his place for once,” I said. “We do have a maw-mouth to kill,” and both Orion and Aadhya refocused and we started through the trees. As soon as Orion and I were alone, however, I murmured to him, “Taking a page out of my book, I see,” to which he graciously replied, “Shut up,” and so when we finally broke through the trees to kill the maw-mouth, we were grinning stupidly. Of course, the universe decided that just wouldn’t do, and presented us with a scene that immediately wiped the smiles off our faces.
There were two maw-mouths. And they were currently trying to eat each other alive.
For a moment, we just stood there in shock. The two oozing creatures were rolling over each other, tentacles wrapping and struggling to absorb the other, all those mouths wailing at the feeling of being re-consumed, combining into an even greater mass of eternal misery and suffering. They seemed to be roughly about the same size too, which probably was prolonging the time it was taking for them to eat each other. This must’ve been what Liu was talking about; the something that was not right. The scene before us did seem completely and utterly not right.
“Oh,” Orion said faintly, as if he’d just remembered something vaguely inconvenient and unpleasant he hadn’t thought about in a while that he really would rather forget about as soon as possible. In all likelihood, he had. He’d never really talked about what it had been like when he had been inside Patience, hungry maw-mouth oozing everywhere all over him, trying to cram its way into every crevice of his being, and Orion pushing back, absorbing it from the inside out…
I swallowed down the bile and scream creeping up my throat — in the past year, I’d gotten used to the sight of maw-mouths quite a lot, to the point where I had even stopped expecting such physical reactions from myself, but I supposed that was all gone now — and whirled around, pulling Orion back into the cover of the shrubs. “We need to get to the others,” I whispered urgently.
“What? Why?”
“Our original strategy was built for taking down one moderate-sized maw-mouth, not two . Which could also become one much larger maw-mouth any moment now, and we don’t know when. And if the maw-mouths see me, they might try to run off. It’s better to wait right now for them to finish eating each other. And if we decide to put the shield around both maw-mouths, you’ll need to help the others to make a shield big enough for that.”
Before Orion could respond, I spotted movement from the trees; the rest of them had broken through. Their shields were already formed, but when they saw the maw-mouths, their eyes widened. Like we had, they stood in shock, gawking at the gooey cannibalism taking place before them. Not to mention, I realized too late, as Chloe turned green and Magnus went pale, it must’ve been Magnus’ and Chloe’s first times actually seeing a maw-mouth. One was already bad enough, let alone two . Chloe emitted a little involuntary squeak, and some of the eyes on the maw-mouth closer to her and Aadhya rolled over to look at her. One of its tentacles started to disengage from the other maw-mouth and reach towards her — a lovely mid-fight snack of a couple adult wizards might be enough to turn the tide in its wrestling match — when Magnus, who was shaking, yelled, “Hey, asshole!” and zapped the maw-mouth with a fire blast. It did nothing, of course, except now the eyes on both maw-mouths rolled over to look at Magnus and Liu, and then back to Aadhya and Chloe, and all of a sudden both maw-mouths were reaching out tendrils to pull in the four healthy adult wizards that might just be enough to help them get the jump on the other.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, and then Orion and I were running through the trees and he was reaching for those horrible tendrils and I was shouting, “You’re already dead!” again and again: “You’re already dead! You’re already dead! You’re already dead! ”
Both of the maw-mouths collapsed, and fluids and blood and organs and eyes and mouths and body parts rushed over all of us like the world’s most gruesome tsunami, just barely held back by our shields, which I threw more mana into as soon as I could got some of my wind back. Chloe screamed, which honestly was a very appropriate response, and Aadhya pulled her into a hug. The only reason I wasn’t screaming myself was because I was used to it.
“Look,” Liu whispered, and we all did. Floating by us were a number of those familiar bodies curled into fetal positions, decidedly more than the two we would have expected. When the mess had finished draining away somewhat, we counted the total number of fetal bodies we spotted trapped inside the goo before they disintegrated entirely.
“Five,” Liu said faintly. Chloe turned away, hand over her mouth. Even Magnus looked a little sick.
“Maybe you were right after all, Magnus,” I said hollowly. “Partly, anyway.”
He lifted his head, blinking. “What?”
“Maybe Santa Barbara got together with a bunch of other California enclaves and all agreed to send their maw-mouths to New Jersey.” The more I spoke, the more I believed it myself. It all made too much sense. “Then they could feed off each other, get big and strong, sleep for a bit, wake up, and head straight to New York.”
“They wouldn’t…” Magnus started.
“If they had the guts to make a bloody maw-mouth, I don’t see why they wouldn’t decide to send it to the doorstep of someone they don’t much like,” I hissed.
“Stop it!” Aadhya snapped before Magnus could respond. She glared at the two of us. “It doesn’t matter. No enclave would ever admit to it, and anyway, the maw-mouths are gone now. We should head back to the RV and regroup.”
We did exactly that.
↫↭↬
We called Pranav back a while later; turned out that while we had been taking down the maw-mouths, I’d had some other cousins who’d had visions about several different California enclaves falling — exactly five in total, as it turned out. Apparently they’d argued among themselves which vision was meant to be right until they’d reached the same conclusion as us; there must’ve been more than one maw-mouth.
“Well?” I asked, after he relayed all this. “Did you manage to get to all of them in time?”
“Oh yes, El; we followed protocol. All of us immediately called or rushed off to the different enclaves as soon as we had visions and collected as many to help as we could, and then we replaced the foundations. I called you after I had taken care of Santa Barbara already. It was only when we tried to reach out to each other to talk about it that we started to argue. But the work is done. All the enclaves are still standing.” He paused, then added, “I would call your scary German friend, if I were you. The enclaves might talk to each other, and then…”
“I see,” I said. “Yes, I’ll call her. Thank you, Pranav.”
“Of course, El! Keep up the good work.”
I hung up, and turned back wearily to the others, who were all gathered on the couches. The RV was moving — I suppose it had some sort of self-driving mode.
“I called Liesel already,” Aadhya said. “She said she’ll get to work on it right away.”
“Wonderful,” I sighed, and went over to the couch and sank down next to Orion, who automatically put an arm around my shoulders. I leaned into him and shut my eyes.
Magnus spoke, his voice low. “Did the California enclaves really—was it actually—like you said?”
“Five California enclaves almost fell just now,” I said, opening one eye, and he fell silent and stared out the window.
We were all quiet for a long moment.
Aadhya tried for a wobbly smile. “Happy first day of the road trip, guys.”