As it neared the tower, the light moved just to the side. The sound of little popping explosions came from its midst, like the sound of Dad letting go of wind sprites.
My hopes rose.
The light passed around to the opposite side of the tower. As it landed on the balcony directly opposite me, there was a flurry of fireworks crackling. I couldn’t see the light’s source. Only the light, as it spilled out past the walls of the tower.
Then footsteps on the metal. And women’s voices. Two people came around the balcony, shapes dark against the impossible light behind.
“Richie!”
I blinked and shook my head. My heart pounded. “Marti! Mom!”
In a flurry of feet pounding on metal, they closed the distance to me, both of them calling my name, falling to their knees and throwing their arms around me. I almost fell over. I laughed and reached for them with my free arm, not knowing what to think.
Mom and Marti had survived.
But Dad? Where was he?
He came around the balcony, his shape outlined by the light, and joined our embrace. I relished the feel of them by me, the fruity smell of Marti’s hair and their voices in my ears.
We just laughed and cried and didn’t say anything intelligible. It was enough just to be together again, enjoying a gigantic group hug.
Chapter 61: Coming to terms
There are rare moments in life when it all pays off. And I do mean rare.
-Elizabeth Van Bender
After a while we disengaged from the embrace. I examined them for signs that the nuke had affected them. Like extreme burns or atomic-born super powers. But I saw nothing, and my parents stepped away to look at me, as if making sure I hadn’t lost any limbs.
Marti squatted at my feet, casting a spell near the Tangle Rope. When she lit it, the rope ends split and the blue light fell away. Shaking her head, she put it into her purse. She helped me stand, and embraced me again. Mom handed me my sopping wet shirt, and after I’d put it on Marti took my hand in a grip so tight I worried that I might need surgery to remove her.
What to do about it? I thought of Sandra, and decided not to do anything about it right then. Not with my parents around.
“Why was your shirt off?” Mom said.
“I took it off so I could draw a protective spell on me. What the devil is that light?”
The white light sprayed from behind the tower, illuminating the countryside with such brilliance that it looked like the bushes on the ground burned. The eastern sky had turned a cloudy gray. The light rain had started, again.
Dad grinned and shook his head. “It’s the brink.”
I’d completely forgotten about the brink.
“It’s so bright,” I said. “Almost impossible to look at.”
He laughed. “It could be the most powerful brink ever made. I can’t imagine what we’ll be able to do with it.”
Mom glared at him and placed her hands on her hips.
“What do you mean, ‘What we’ll be able to do with it?’ You’re not doing anything with it.”
“It’s created,” he said. “We can’t let it go to waste.” He looked at me. “If anyone has a right to it, you do.”
“Me? All I did was nearly get us all killed.”
“True,” Marti said, “but the emotion was yours. Etiquette says the brink is yours unless you give it up. Plus, since the emotion was yours, you have priority with it.”
Admittedly, I liked the thought of owning the most powerful brink ever made, although I had no idea what to do with it. So far, I hadn’t seen many spells that seemed particularly useful for everyday use. It wasn’t like a cell phone, or something that had an obvious purpose. Except for the video calling spell.
“Come see it,” Dad said.
He turned, motioning for me to follow. I did, Marti on one side, and Mom on the other as she linked her arm in mine, and even leaned her head into my shoulder. I couldn’t remember her doing that. Not in recent years. Back during my cancer, she’d doted on me. She’d hugged me often and kissed my cheeks. Granted, I was younger, then. But since I became a rock star she’d become so much more stern and distant.
The reason why had become obvious in the past night.
And I owed her an apology.
I stopped. She and Marti took another few steps, and halted, but not before Mom’s arm came un-linked.
“Mom?”
She tilted her head at me. “Yes?”
“Things changed with us when I became a rock star. Between you and me.”
She looked at me for several seconds, and shrugged. “I guess they did.”
“You wanted to protect me.”
“Of course I did. You see—”
“I see why, now. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”
She shook her head and gestured to the west, toward the nuclear bomb. “Richie, I wasn’t protecting you from this.”
Marti grunted. “You didn’t know that once he got involved, nukes would start going off?”
Mom stepped back to me. She reached out and held my arms above the elbows.
“You were thrusting yourself into a grown-up world, and you were just a kid. You still are just a kid. I knew that the second you started doing adult things and being involved in adult things, you wouldn’t be a kid, anymore. I would sill prefer it if you hadn’t started doing these grown-up things.”
Marti said, “Like setting nukes off.”
Mom raised her eyebrows. “Among other things.”
Words faltered on my tongue. I hadn’t expected that from her, even if—as I considered it—I realized that she’d said things like that before. Especially about girls. I don’t know that I’d really understood it.
“I didn’t set the nuke off,” I said. “It was Nick. Although, it would be really awesome if I had set the bomb off. How many people can say that they’ve detonated an atomic bomb?”
Mom shrugged. “I guess I failed. I guess it’s inevitable that you grow up.”
Behind her, Dad harrumphed. “Very touching. Now can we tell him everything?”
Mom looked at him, her face resigned. She let out a sigh.
“I guess so. But not here. Not now. Let’s get to safety, first.”
I liked that idea, so started walking around the balcony, again. Mom re-linked her arm in mine, and I pulled her close. Marti still gripped my hand. A few more steps around the tower, and I had to squint to look down at the brink—or rather, at the foot-high stone urn that contained the brink. It had a marble texture to it, and the light from the brink shone through it, so it looked like a miniature sun.
“What awesome stuff are we going to do with it?” I asked. “Maybe achieve world peace?”
Dad stepped over to the urn and picked it up. “We should probably use some of it to pay back Intersoc. I think a little of this would start the process of healing the rift you’ve created with them.”
I grimaced, not liking the thought of giving them my hard-won, most-powerful-in-the-history-of-the-world brink.
“You’re the king of Intersoc?” I said.
He gave me a mysterious smile. “More or less.”
“That’s a lame response.”
Mom still had one arm linked in mine, but placed her free fist on her hip. “Quite a bit more than less.”
He gave me a weak smile. “I’ll tell you more when we’re safe.”
My initial inclination was to argue, but I gritted my teeth and smiled, trying to apply my newfound trust of them. I had a feeling it was going to be hard for a while yet.
He held the urn out to me. I hesitated for a moment, expecting the stone to be hot to the touch. But Dad pushed it toward me, and I took it. It was heavy and warm.
“So,” Marti said, “you sent Nick to Intersoc? Nice work.”
“How did you know?” I said.
Dad grinned. “Just as we were flying past you, the Council contacted me and said they had him and were ready to put him on trial. I told them to go ahead.”
“Why the hate?” I said. I mean, I got it, but wanted some details.
Mom just pursed her lips and shook her head.
“Your mother is banished from Intersoc,” Dad said. “Because of Nick.”
She grunted. “You’re not the first one he’s tricked.”
“I bet,” I said, “I’ll have to wait until we get to safety for the full story.”
Mom nodded.
“And you guys—how did you survive the nuclear bomb? Congratulations, by the way. Not many people can say they’ve survived the hypocenter of a nuke.”
“Marti saved us,” Mom said. “No doubt about it. She did an outstanding job on the barrier spell. It saved us from the radiation, heat, wind, and the force of the explosion.”
Marti beamed. “I’m just that good. But it did help that Nick had some kind of spell around the bomb, the emotion, and the multiplier. We’ve never seen the spell, and don’t know exactly what it did.”
“And the soldiers?” I asked.
“They seemed fine,” Dad said.
“Physically,” Marti said. “Mentally, they looked pretty shaken. But who can blame them?”
“I’m a little shaken, myself,” I said. “And you flew out with wind sprites?”
Dad nodded. “It took a little bit for our paralysis spells to wear off, but once Marti saw we would be fine from the blast, she extended the barrier out little by little, toward the brink. She had to make sure we didn’t go outside the barrier, or the firestorm would cook her.”
“There was a firestorm?”
Marti nodded. “If there’s one thing you never want to do, it’s be caught in the middle of a nuclear explosion. I know that seems obvious and all, but I just wanted to warn you. You know, just in case.”
A thought occurred to me. “Will SOaP want the brink?”
“Of course,” Dad said. “Agent Maynerd will try to get it from us, but we didn’t come here on assignment from him. He has no right to the brink.”
“Where on earth can we keep it?” I asked.
“I’m glad you asked,” Dad said. He lifted an arm, reached under, and pulled a vial off from a string. He unscrewed the lid, poured some brink into his hand, and put the lid back on. A few paces away, he began to draw a zip-door. “We should get going. It’s too dangerous here. The government is bound to show up.”
“And if not them,” Mom said, “the Sunbeams. Surely they’ve got word of this, by now.”
“Who are the Sunbeams?” I asked. “Or don’t I have clearance for that information?”
“Nick is a Sunbeam,” Dad said. He started to draw a zip-door. “Or was.”
“The Solar Flare?” I said.
“Yes,” Marti said.
“No,” Dad said.
They frowned at each other, and after a moment Dad shrugged.
“We used to think he was,” Dad said. “Until just a few hours ago.”
“He is,” Marti said.
“We don’t think so, anymore,” Mom said. “We’re starting to think he’s more like the personal assistant to the Solar Flare. Small potatoes compared to the Solar Flare.”
Marti rolled her eyes. “Then who do you think the Solar Flare is?”
“We’re not sure,” Dad said.
Finished drawing the zip-door, he turned to me and tapped the urn. “In fact, when you ask what we’re going to do with this, I highly recommend that we use it to take him down.”
I smiled. “I’m perfectly willing. But someone is going to have to teach me how to use some magic.”
Dad pulled out his lighter and touched it to the emblem. The flames lit, and the white doorway appeared.
“Very well,” he said, reaching his hand out to Mom, “let’s get on that. There’s no time like the present.”
Mom took his hand, and reached out to me. “Except,” she said, “that it’s way past Richie’s bedtime.”
I took her hand and nodded. “It’s practically child abuse that you haven’t tucked me in yet.”
Marti hadn’t let go of my hand, and so we were ready to go.
Dad led us through the door to his apartment in Washington D.C.
Not long after, the Solar Flare attacked.
THE END
Find out who the Solar Flare is, what plans he has for Richie, and how Richie copes with it all in Book 2 of the Van Bender Archives: Van Bender and the Incendiary Blade, available now.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Security up the ying yang
Chapter 2: The Inner Sanctum
Chapter 3: The ploy
Chapter 4: The coolest guy I’d ever met
Chapter 5: I didn’t learn this in science class
Chapter 6: Safe from what?
Chapter 7: The power of a crowd
Chapter 8: I have to go number two
Chapter 9: The long-practiced move
Chapter 10: It depends on how you define “tricked”
Chapter 11: Squeaky clean agent
Chapter 12: I nearly get whiplash—twice
Chapter 13: Surprise! Mom embarrasses me in front of my friends
Chapter 14: Puke in a bag
Chapter 15: Awkward
Chapter 16: Saving me
Chapter 17: A not-so-simple choice
Chapter 18: It hurts more than expected
Chapter 19: EPIC guard
Chapter 20: 50 MPH down a hallway
Chapter 21: Marti tries to sacrifice her hand
Chapter 22: Almost unstoppable
Chapter 23: Quadruple jeopardy
Chapter 24: I manage to escape bliss
Chapter 25: Busted
Chapter 26: Who to believe?
Chapter 27: Escape attempt
Chapter 28: Despite what they say
Chapter 29: Friends to the rescue
Chapter 30: I give rebellion a chance
Chapter 31: My first emblem
Chapter 32: We really only have one option
Chapter 33: Laying groundwork
Chapter 34: I miss out on a trip to Disneyland
Chapter 35: I get bamboozled
Chapter 36: The Code of Intersoc
Chapter 37: You’ll burn your eyes out
Chapter 38: A band mate gives me a chance
Chapter 39: I get skewered
Chapter 40: Just a toy
Chapter 41: Chase
Chapter 42: Traps
Chapter 43: Party at Intersoc!
Chapter 44: A life-and-death choice
Chapter 45: Dad blows my mind
Chapter 46: Return of the king
Chapter 47: Punishment for our crimes
Chapter 48: I can’t remember
Chapter 49: The value of an online thesaurus
Chapter 50: We take matters into our own hands
Chapter 51: Another world all around me
Chapter 52: My sensitive brain can’t handle it
Chapter 53: I puke on Marti. It’s awesome.
Chapter 54: Arguing with a lunatic
Chapter 55: A duel for the ages
Chapter 56: Another in a long string of questionable choices
Chapter 57: Alone, I battle evil
Chapter 58: Round and round
Chapter 59: I finally get some sleep
Chapter 60: Bright as the sun
Chapter 61: Coming to terms
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Van Bender and the Burning Emblems (The Van Bender Archives #1) Page 27