When his fist came up toward my face, I grabbed his arm and locked it in place.
So it would be easier for me to sniff the lovely bouquet of flowers he was offering me.
Yeah, that’s right—I rearranged the bottle’s molecules.
“Flowers?” I said. “For me? Why, Yuri, I didn’t know you cared.”
The Russian thug didn’t look so tough clutching an FTD Sweet Splendor Bouquet.
“You dare mock me?” thundered Abbadon.
He swept his arms up over his head, and the imaginary Russian hoodlum crumbled into a heap of gravel.
“Trust me, Daniel, you will beg to join me before I’m through with you.”
“Doubtful,” I said. “But go ahead. This is your rodeo—show me what else you’ve got.”
That’s when the magician played the most hurtful card in his hand: Mel!
Chapter 82
SHE WAS IMPRISONED inside a tiger cage of translucent force-field bars.
“Are you okay?” I shouted.
“I’m fine!” It was amazing to hear her voice. It had felt like centuries, somehow, since we’d talked for real.
I rushed toward the cage—
And was immediately blown back by a jolt of a couple thousand gigawatts.
It knocked me down, but I bounced right back up. Inching forward, I heard the surging throb of the high-voltage electrical charge. Mel was only ten feet away, but with the impenetrable force field between us, it might as well have been ten miles.
“I’m sorry, Daniel,” said Abbadon. “Until you fall to your knees and worship me, I can’t allow you to come any closer.”
“Don’t you dare do as he says,” Mel said, feisty as ever. “Don’t even listen to him!”
I gazed into her sky-blue eyes. For that instant, Abbadon wasn’t even in the room. It was just me and Mel.
“Has he hurt you?” I asked.
“No. But he lies like the devil.”
That made me grin. “Yeah. There’s a reason for that….”
“You know, Daniel,” snapped Abbadon, “you and Melody could be quite happy together.”
“We know that,” I said. “But having you around kind of ruins all the fun.”
“Not necessarily. If both of you swear your allegiance to me, then I give you my word: the two of you can go back to Kentucky and live like normal, ordinary teenagers. No more of this ‘protector of the planet’ nonsense. Why, you could prance about on ponies all day, every day. And then, when evening falls, you could hold hands and take long, moonlit strolls down to the malt shop.”
I arched both eyebrows.
So did Mel.
The malt shop? Abbadon was showing his age. I don’t think anybody’s gone on a date to a malt shop since Archie and Jughead were chasing Betty and Veronica.
But Abbadon was playing this temptation through.
As Mel and I stood frozen in disbelief, we saw duplicates of ourselves riding white horses across a creek. The other Daniel and Mel were laughing, having a grand time.
I even fell out of my saddle, right on cue, and went splashing into the creek.
“Ride much?” said the duplicate Mel with a gentle laugh.
“Um, not really,” said alternate me.
“You know, Daniel, you’re even cuter when you’re soaking wet,” said duplicate Mel, giggling, as I started peeling off my T-shirt and flexing my chest muscles like a junior Schwarzenegger. Abbadon definitely needed to hire some new scriptwriters for his alternate-reality soap opera.
I’d seen enough. “You mean we could become puppets for your amusement. Strike two, Abbadon. No sale.”
“Fine,” said Number 2. “Have it your way!”
And then he attacked me with everything in his arsenal.
Chapter 83
I GUESS YOU could say I had won the first two rounds.
Well, at least I survived. Abbadon couldn’t break me, mentally or emotionally.
So, for round three, he was just trying to break me.
As in, every bone in my body.
He hurled me off a cliff and down the jagged side of a mountain. My body was racked with pain as my limbs shattered, my spine crunched, my joints popped, and my head throbbed. All I could hear were my own groans and my internal organs smashing into one another.
Abbadon had transformed me into a rolling boulder.
“Surrender to me, Daniel!”
“Never,” I grunted, as best I could.
When my body—now made of rock, but somehow filled with all the sensation of a fragile human body—hit the boulder-strewn ravine five hundred feet beneath the jutting cliff, I bounced once, then burst into flames and became a rolling fireball. The pain was indescribable as every bit of my body burned, an inescapable inferno. The punishment went beyond gruesome. This was sheer torture.
“And it will go on for all eternity, Daniel,” gloated Number 2. “After all, this is hell! And you haven’t even begun to know pain yet.”
When my rocky meteorite of a body finally came to a stop, Abbadon snapped his fingers and turned me back into myself. But the flaming boulder didn’t disappear. I lurched forward, no longer in control of my body, and started to push the boulder back up the mountain.
I almost preferred plummeting down the cliff to this unparalleled agony. Abbadon may have been forcing me to push, but he wasn’t helping me with the massive weight at all. My broken bones intensified the horror, the impossibility of it all.
Somehow—stumbling, falling, almost crushed by my task—I reached the top of the cliff, after a stretch of time that could’ve been minutes, hours, or years.
And then it got even worse.
Abbadon turned me back into the boulder and hurled me off the other side of the mountain, my punishment becoming a never-ending cycle of pain.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Why hadn’t Dante written about this circle of hell in his Inferno?
On my third crash down the cliff, I saw that Abbadon had found yet another way to blast pain through my whole being.
It was Mel.
Like me, she was being forced to roll a boulder of jet-black onyx up the mountain. When she got to the top, her body transformed into rock, like mine had, and started rolling down the other side of the cliff.
I was so messed up at that point I thought I even saw her flattened face pressing against the glassy-smooth surface of the stone as she flew by me in a lightning flash.
One thing I know I didn’t imagine, though: I could clearly hear her anguished cries for help!
Chapter 84
HEARING MEL’S WOEFUL cries ripped me up. Badly.
My spirit was nearly shattered, my will almost broken.
But, somehow, hearing Mel also reminded me of who I truly am.
The creator. The Protector.
The Alien Hunter who can do whatever I can imagine.
Mel had given me the strength to become myself again.
So when I rolled my boulder to the summit for the umpteenth time, I caught a glimpse of Abbadon, standing on a precipice with his arms akimbo, laughing triumphantly.
Hey, whatever he could do, I could do. Right?
So I imagined him becoming a boulder and cascading down the cliff right behind me.
But it didn’t happen.
On my return trip up to the summit, I imagined Number 2 blown to smithereens.
I mentally depicted every detail of his bodily explosion.
Still, it didn’t happen.
“Give it up, you weakling!” Number 2 shouted as I plummeted off the cliff again. “I can sense your feeble creations the instant you attempt to generate them. You are a disgrace to those of us who truly know how to use the gifts we have been given.”
I bounded back up.
Abbadon kept smirking at me.
“You know, Daniel, it’s a good thing your mother and father have already departed this realm. They would be absolutely appalled to see how unimaginative you actually are.”
I tumbled down the mountainside as Mel groaned and gasped on her way up.
I could hear what was left of our unbroken bones crunching. I could hear her whimpers as the boulder’s flames licked her skin.
Abbadon kept mocking me: “This is why your mommy and daddy left you all on your own, Daniel.”
I hit rock bottom and immediately started my return up the harsh slope.
“They could no longer endure the prolonged embarrassment of having you as their only son. Ha! They’re better off dead!”
I neared the top of the cliff.
Number 2’s taunts should’ve stung worse than bashing my bones against the boulders below.
But they didn’t.
Because he had just told me how to beat him.
Chapter 85
THE ANSWER WAS right there in Number 2’s barbs and jeers.
My mother and father.
Yes, they were brave and fearless, incredibly talented, loving, and strong.
But in the end, they died anyway. Because they were not immortal.
My mother had practically spelled it out to me over our last breakfast together: Death is always with us, Daniel. None of us is immortal. Eventually, we must all depart this realm and move on to the next.
Chordata, up on Alpar Nok, had given me the answer, too: The one known as the Fallen Soul was granted not immortality but a vastly extended life by an evil god known as The Prayer.
Even Xanthos had been dropping hints back at the stables: We are all mortal. Otherwise, we would be gods, no?
As a last gasp—and I mean that literally, because I didn’t know how much longer I could keep drawing breath after all that unfathomable pain—I imagined Number 2 dead.
I saw his soul being reduced to stardust and blown away on the wind.
I saw it and felt it and grokked it with every cell, every molecule of my being.
I had never focused so intently or so fiercely on any of the transformations I had pulled off in all my years as the Alien Hunter. I was giving this single vision every ounce of energy I had left.
If the metamorphosis didn’t kill Abbadon, it would surely kill me.
But why wasn’t he fighting me back? He said he could feel my meager imaginings and stop them easily. Was it because he couldn’t imagine himself dying? Did he think it was so impossible that even I couldn’t imagine it?
Big mistake.
I reached the top of the cliff just in time to see Abbadon roar as he burst into oily flames.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he screamed. “NOOOO NOOO NOOOO!” And suddenly he was in my head, fighting back with everything he had. But it was too late. My imagination had captured him, and his long life of destruction was finally over.
Instead of sparkling gold particles, his soul exploded into gleaming black specks of soot. At first he looked like a swarm of angry black flies clustered in the shape of a body. But then a stiff wind blew across the abyss and shot his inky essence skyward.
Fanned by the oxygen-rich gust, the cinders of Abbadon’s soul began to glow and then burn, turning as fiery red as his eyes.
In an instant, what was left of Number 2 became the flaming tail of a comet streaking up through the dome of the abyss, which, when Number 2’s mind faded into oblivion, became what it really was: the black, starlit sky.
The same thing happened to me and Mel.
Released from the grip of Number 2’s evil imaginings, we were two teenagers again, standing in a grassy meadow, watching a shooting star racing away from Earth.
Abbadon lit up the night sky like a sizzling fuse stretched across the heavens until the instant the thin line of his essence burned out and the sky went black.
“You finally found his weakness,” Mel said as we held hands and stared up at the twinkling stars.
“Yes,” I said.
“What was it?”
“He wasn’t a god. He was like us. He was mortal.”
Chapter 86
I SUDDENLY REALIZED where we were: Kentucky. At the Judges’ horse farm.
“So, Daniel, has anyone ever told you that you’re amazing?” said Mel. Then she rocked up on her toes and kissed me on the cheek. “A very impressive first date.”
“Um, this was a date?”
“Well, we got to see that cheesy movie about our happy future. So, is your chest really that buff, or were those special effects?”
I was about to answer when I heard a voice in my head.
Welcome back, brudda.
“Xanthos!” I cried out loud.
“What?” Mel said as we both started running toward the barn. “He’s back from the dead?”
“I don’t think he ever died.”
“Yes, he did. They made me watch them kill him when they kidnapped me.”
“I don’t think that ever happened, either.”
“Uh, yes it did. I was there.”
“I know, but, well… I think Abbadon put all this in our heads, the way I do sometimes.”
We tore into the barn, and there he was—shaking out his snowy mane, pawing at the hay, giving us a happy whinny.
So, Daniel, you did not give sway to the negative way. Yah, mon?
I laughed and said, “Yah, mon,” right back at him.
I noticed a paint-spackled portable radio perched on a shelf outside Xanthos’s stall and switched it on, hoping to get confirmation that my theory was correct.
A newsreader came on: “And down in Washington they’re getting set for a spectacular fireworks extravaganza. With all of D.C.’s monuments and the U.S. Capitol in the background…”
I turned the radio off.
“Washington wasn’t destroyed?” Mel said, sounding confused.
“Well, it was—as long as Number 2 imagined it was.”
“And now that he’s gone…”
“Washington isn’t.”
“So you just basically saved Washington, New York, London, Beijing, Moscow… okay, the whole planet?”
“Yeah.”
“Incredible!” And she hopped up to give me another kiss.
Now Agent Judge strode into the barn, followed by Lieutenant Russell. They cleared their throats to announce their arrival.
“Um, hi, Daddy,” Mel said, blushing a little.
“You’re both safe?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “And as far as I can tell, everything on Earth has gone back to normal.”
“I’ll say,” said Lieutenant Russell, shooting me a wink.
“Daniel?” said Agent Judge.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m mighty impressed, son. Your parents would be proud.”
“Thank you, sir.”
When he said that, I remembered that my father and mother were gone. Forever.
Abbadon didn’t imagine them away. They had left on their own.
Life was really going to be different from here on out.
Chapter 87
ABOUT AN HOUR later I sat down in the meadow and stared up at the blanket of stars.
Number 2 was gone, erased from this realm for all time.
But if a fellow traveler from Alpar Nok could truly become the devil, what was I meant to become?
I had so wanted to slay that Russian gangster for what he had done to Dana. Did the rage and hatred that fueled Abbadon burn inside me, too?
I needed to talk to my parents.
Maybe they didn’t mean it when they said they were going away, never to come back.
“Dad?” I whispered. “Mom? I still need you.”
I closed my eyes and focused on their presence.
When I opened my eyes, I was still alone. In a field. Under the stars.
So, it was true. I couldn’t summon my parents.
Fine. I’d hash this all out with my friends. I summoned Willy and Dana, Joe and Emma.
They didn’t come.
“Look, you guys, I don’t even care if Dana and Willy are dating now or whatever. I need to talk.”
Still, they didn’t come.
A lump formed in my throat as I realized I was completely and utterly alone on Earth. A stranger stranded in a strange land. Being the Alien Hunter had taken a heavy toll on me. I had given up everything I ever had. My family. My friends. My shot at a normal life.
For a moment I wondered if I had also given up my incredible superpowers by forcing Number 2 to surrender his. Were we so linked, like the two sides of a coin, that what happened to him happened to me?
No, mon, said a friendly voice in my head. Otherwise, you would be stardust instead of staring at the stars, yah?
Okay, I wasn’t completely alone. I still had Xanthos, my spiritual advisor.
“Are you okay, Daniel?”
And, yes, I had Mel.
She sat down next to me.
“I was kind of worried when you disappeared from the dining room.”
“Guess I’m just not in the mood for ice cream tonight.”
“How about we go out for a malted?” Mel cracked, remembering Abbadon’s corny idea for a hot date.
“I’ll take a rain check,” I said with a smile.
“Thought you might want this.” She held up the slim computer that had been my main alien-hunting tool. “You left it inside.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I don’t really need to look at it. Number 1 is next. Number 1 has always been next.”
I hoped Number 1, The Prayer, had enjoyed watching Number 2 and me battle each other in our Armageddon death match. I figured Number 1 should stay tuned, because his own personal Armageddon was coming up… right after the break, as they say on American Idol.
For some odd and insane reason, that made me smile.
So in my next battle, I’d be going up against some kind of alien god, right?
Fine. I’d brush up on my Greek and Norse mythology. Read a few more Percy Jackson books.
Feeling better than I had in a long time, I draped my arm around Mel’s shoulder.
We gazed into each other’s eyes.
And I noticed something I had never seen before.
“Did Abbadon do that to you?”
“This?” She pointed at a long scar on her cheek. “No, Daniel—it’s always been there.”
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