Book 2 Chapter 56: It Was a Nice View
The next several days were spent shoring up all of the work Dantes had been doing to manipulate things within Mondego’s operations as well as outside of them. He stayed in touch with Jayson, Jayk, and Zak, monitored the sub bosses, and made sure that the gangs they’d antagonized were starting to move in the right direction. While doing all of that he also monitored the hundreds of mini-gardens he’d seeded throughout the city. Cutting his losses in those places where they’d never really thrive, and doubling his support of those that had taken root quickly. All the while he continued his own garden tending, messages to Mercedes, and the more traditional maintenance of his main gardens.
It was almost nightfall, when he was finishing watering a growing thornbush in the corner of his smallest garden. There was a sudden jolt up his arm and the watering can fell onto the dirt. Dantes looked at his right hand for a moment and felt another jolt of pain up it. He looked up to his forearm where the batmark, a tattoo in the shape of a wing, was full and shining golden.
“Fuck,” muttered Dantes as the pain went from a jolt to an agony suffusing his entire body. He clenched teeth together even as he felt them sharpening and elongating in his mouth. His fingers on his right hand began to lengthen as the rest of his body began to shrink down. The membrane between his fingers spread as his fingers extended, thinning and stretching until his arms and hands had become wings. His ears, already pointed, grew larger and more complex until he could hear the fluttering of a moth’s wings nearby. By the end of it, he was a medium sized bat curled on the muddy ground he’d just been watering.
Jacopo pulled him from the mud and helped him to remove it from his wings.
He looked over himself, noting that his wooden limb had also shrunk and approximated a wing as best he could. It seemed to have no issues adapting to any of the forms he’d taken so far, for which he was grateful. He let out a chattering sound that he presumed was the bat equivalent of a heavy sigh, and shifted himself back into his usual shape. Feeling the process in reverse was exactly as painful and grueling as the other direction. When he was done he looked up at the night sky, took another deep breath, and made the transformation again. He did this until the switch was almost as fast and painless as becoming a rat or roach had become for him. When he’d finally reached that point, he hesitated to transform back into himself from Batform.
He crawled up a nearby grate, and let out a tiny shriek, finding that he could tell exactly where everything was, not with his eyes, but with his ears. He tested it a few more times, his voice hitting that of a few other bats, a couple flying insects in the air, and even a pigeon out for a night flight. He launched himself into the air and began flapping his wings, rising higher and higher into the air.
Being a rat or a roach could be surprisingly fun. Crawling through hiding holes, climbing walls, they had a certain joy to them. None of that compared to flight though. He pushed himself against the powerful wind coming from the ocean, rising higher and higher, but knowing that there was a limit to how high he could climb instinctually. The bat's power wasn’t in its ability to fly high, but its ability to maneuver, so he decided to test that out for himself. He sped his wingbeats, moving not higher, but more and more quickly through the air. He dove into the open window of a warehouse, twisting himself between rows of equipment before rising back up, and diving through the barely open bottom stilt of another window. He let out a screech, and sensing a moth nearby, he moved to grasp it in his claws by another bat, this one was larger with brown fur, and it quickly fluttered away from him.
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“Jacopo?” he asked as he hastened his wingbeats to catch up.