The crowd all had their eyes focused on him. The torch had gone out on the floor completely now, and the vast room was only lit by the few left on the wall. Shadows ate up the rest.
They all looked at him with a burning intensity. If concern was written on their faces, he couldn’t tell because it was hidden underneath the masks.
But none of them blinked. None of them even moved.
Except for Roberta in the back, who shook with eyes jammed shut, wrinkles oozing from the eyeholes of the mask, arms out to her side as if trying to prevent invisible walls from crushing her.
“You gotta get up, Harold. Right now. She can’t hold it much longer.”
“What is she holding?” he asked.
“Time,” Sahara answered as nonchalantly as if she were telling him what the weather was like.
“Time?”
“Yes,” she gripped him, yanked him up.
“You’ve seen yourself in the womb and now time is breaking because of it.”
But Harold knew that was only half of the reason; the Shadows, both all around him and inside of his head, were.
Come home, Harold Storm.
“Move, you two. We must test the Prophecy. No more time to dilly-daddle.”
Harold stood on wobbly legs, but he stood nonetheless. And Roberta exhaled a great gust of breath as she let her arms fall to her sides. That familiar crack rushed Harold’s eardrums, causing him to grit his teeth.
But the crowd no longer stared at him. They had shifted their gazes back to Felix and the woman in a fraction of a second. A couple shook their heads. Must’ve sensed the lingering effects of Roberta’s magic.
“Felix is correct,” Roberta shouted from the back of the room.
“Thank you, Roberta,” Felix answered. A smile flashed inside the forest of facial hair that hung from his chin.
“He is here, now,” she said, walking towards Harold. “Electus — he is among us as we speak.”
“Enough!” Oliver said. “Enough of this nonsense. We must band together and fight now if we are to survive. Not wait on this mystical chosen one.”
“I can prove it,” Roberta said.
Oliver crossed his arms, cocked his head. “How?”
“Yes, Roberta, how?” Felix echoed, voice a mix of shaky uncertainty and fear.
“Harold, take off your mask,” she said, “and step onto the platform.”
The fear seized him like he were being called to the front of a classroom for sleeping during a lesson. He hesitated, visibly shook.
“We have no time, Harold.” And she stepped closer to him, gripped the mask, slipping it off and letting it clatter on the cobblestone with a bone-shattering noise.
“Demon!” Oliver shouted as the crowd around him took a few steps back, all except him, who drew his Deathblade in a flash. His was curvy and smooth, shined like a newly minted coin.
Roberta jumped in front of him.
“No! Stay back. I can prove to you that he is the one,” the Witch said. And she turned and looked to Harold with eyes that said I hope, before the look vanished. “Only Electus can wield the sword of Orkane without the consequences.”
But Harold had no idea what the crazy old Witch talked about. He knew he should’ve never trusted a nightmare, should’ve never chased his dreams. Had he been on a stage, he imagined a spotlight would’ve burned his flesh even more.
He swallowed hard, felt all of their eyes on him. Felt the tension of the crowd.
Felix watched as if he knew what was going on, despite nobody knowing. Not even Roberta.
“Show him the sword,” Roberta said.
Felix shifted uncomfortably. “Roberta, you know what could happen if I unlock it.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “He is the real deal.”
“No, I-I’m not — ” Harold began to say before Roberta pushed him towards the platform with more strength than any Witch had the right to possess.
He looked over his shoulder, saw the vultures staring at him as if he were roadkill on a scorching highway, ready to feast on his failures.
Felix shifted away from the woman’s embrace, whose eyes began to water. He gave her hand a caress before walking towards Harold.
“Well, son — should I say son?” A sarcastic smile curled up on his face.
Harold couldn’t speak. The last time he’d seen Felix alive he’d been suffering at the hands of Charlie and Beth, and then his subsequent visits were no less grim. Demons clawing at him on a beach, and then dark dreams full of deflated hope. This was his father standing in front of him. His real father. Somehow. Some way.
But the smirk on Felix’s face said he’d be gutting Harold if this spectacular show turned out to be a failure.
Harold just stood still, hoping he wouldn’t have to fight his father. Life was not Star Wars, no matter how much he wished it was. It was much worse. Full of terrible things.
Felix went to the wall, placed a hand on the stone. And his hands started to glow with an orange fire like Sahara’s had at the Great Vampire Tree. The stones shifted. Rock grinded against rock as bits of rubble fell to the cobblestones. A cavern emerged, deep and horribly black. From way in the back something else began to glow with an emerald light, but as the light buzzed, Harold saw the emerald turn to a sickly green, like oozing snot.
The crowd behind him dared not to breathe.
His heartbeat pumped black venom all throughout, and that voice went wild. The Shadows twirled inside of his mind.
You’re almost there, Harold Storm. Take the sword and strike them all down. End it before it can start.
Harold stared into the green light as if he were at the end of a very long hallway. But as his mind adjusted he realized it wasn’t far away at all. It happened to be a mere five feet in front of him, and from it a fire raged, bathing his skin in warmth, almost causing the dehydrated flesh to sweat.
His eyes narrowed at a large hunk of meat. He moved closer. The pupils popped first, a dull red, glassed over like the eyes of dead animal trophies on a hunter’s wall. Then the teeth, a yellowish white, also dull, but somehow sharp enough to cut right through titanium.
The Shadows in his head whispered with such ferocity, such fervor, that he could no longer make out the words. They had begun to blend together into a big, black mass. Like a tumor in his brain, in his soul.
He doubled over, pain wracking through his insides.
Took a deep breath. Tried to compose himself.
The lump turned out to be the head of some great, dinosaur-looking monster. One Harold could not have dreamt up in his sickest, most venom-induced nightmares. From it, straight down the top of its scaly, green flesh and through its chin, a sword had been planted like a nation’s flag on the moon.
A sword that put his Deathblade to shame. It shimmered with an icy calm that reminded him of a cold — deathly cold — February day, where the gray clouds masked the white sun, but enough light poked through to remind him that all was not lost. And looking at the sword, he got that same feeling.
All was not lost.
The Shadows had not yet consumed him. And once he touched the hilt of the sword, he’d be whole again. More whole than any bottle of whiskey could make him; more whole than Marcy could make him. He’d no longer feel as naked as he had ever since he’d sacrificed his key to the Eaters.
Harold leaned in closer, now drawn more by the blade than by the monstrosity that sat in the blackness. Engravings danced up the wolf-grey metal, and as Harold looked closer, he saw the Wolves — his Wolves — running the length of the blade. The dried black blood crusted around it brought the pictures out in more detail.
And for a second, the buzzing in his mind was hushed by the howls. Familiar howls that brought him back to his own blood-soaked paradise.
“Go on,” Roberta said, nudging him out of his reverie. She was right behind him, practically breathing down his neck, but he turned the opposite direction, scanning the room for those beautiful brown eyes beneath the vultu
re mask. And when he located them, once the howling had stopped, the fear disappeared.
“Go,” Roberta urged again, her look intense. All of their looks were. Especially Oliver, who lurched forward like a bystander of a car accident too afraid to help, but oh god, did he want to.
Harold took another step until the heat from the Demon’s head was almost too much to bear. He stuck his hand out, let it hover over the hilt, felt the fire prickle the charred flesh of his left palm, where that Deathblade used to be.
“Demon!” Oliver yelled. “No! No! Don’t let him touch it. He will kill us all.”
And before Harold could turn around, the tall man in the vulture mask jumped him.
CHAPTER 26
Oliver shoved him up against the giant head of the Demon — Hell Dinosaur — or whatever it was. It wasn’t soft; instead it was petrified, about as hard as the stone wall it hid behind.
The vultures closed in around him. Human eyes widened behind inhuman faces.
Oliver’s mask had been knocked off in the mayhem. His face twisted into a murderous grimace as he clawed at Harold’s.
Harold bucked, tried his best to fight back.
“Demon!” someone else from the crowd shouted.
Harold gasped as a fist or a heel struck his middle, causing his eyes to bug out, and his body to blare with red-hot pain.
“It’s mine! It’s mine!” Oliver shouted right by Harold’s ear, the breath misty on his face. “I am Electus. Me! Not you! That sword is my property.”
“Enough!” Felix bellowed. “Enough!” His voice shook dust loose from the wall. A cloud seemed to consume the two men entwined on the cobblestones.
Then a bolt of lightning struck the floor near Harold’s head. A sickening crack, felt like it busted his eardrums. Oliver yelled in pain. Blood-curdling screams. Smoke rose in electric-white wisps.
Oliver was off of him now, clutching his hand, where it hung limp and useless like a wet piece of paper. Harold knew it was where his curvy, new Deathblade would’ve came out, where his head would’ve been lopped off.
He took a great breath and pushed himself up, sick of it. Sick of the fighting, of being pushed around. He wasn’t even from this now, and still bullies like Oliver thought they could walk all over him.
No, that blade was his.
He was the Alpha. And the Alpha got what the Alpha wanted.
Dazed, he reached for the hilt, heard the Wolves howling. But Oliver would not be denied. Despite having one limp hand, and black streaks of soot from where the lightning had gotten too close to his face, he still went for the sword, acting like a petulant child.
“Mine!” he yelled.
On Harold’s hip, Felix gasped. “Oliver, no!” he said.
But it was too late.
The tall man in silk robes crackled. He went the route of a shooting star — skin burning red, bright and near blinding. Harold shielded his eyes, stumbled back until he hit the stone wall.
The last thing to go was Oliver’s hand. It hung there for a few seconds, fingers wrapped around the hilt like a dying man clutching a lover. Then the skin smoked that all too familiar orange and red smoke. Harold’s mind flashed to Nik’s body burning up into a pile of ash on a busy city sidewalk. The people that stared with mouths hung to their chests. The fear, and the cries came, followed by happiness.
Except there was no happiness around the Protectors’ crowd. Oliver might’ve come off as a jerk to Harold, but he seemed loved enough for his kin to hang their heads.
The woman willed herself not to cry — the one with no mask, that might’ve been Harold’s mother. Though he’d been having a hard time believing anything that had happened to him in the last few days. It was a wonder his head didn’t explode, or he hadn’t woke up gasping and covered in sweat at his shitty one bedroom apartment on the east side of Gloomsville with a killer hangover and normal features.
Instead, he watched a man spontaneously combust by some sort of magic he didn’t quite understand, but was more a part of them than he realized, or was just beginning to realize.
Even Felix whimpered at the sight of the robes that fell like a silk waterfall at the Demon’s head.
And suddenly Harold didn’t want to touch that sword at all. But the eyes were back on him; the spotlight blared. There were no Shadows to hide inside anymore.
A few people had taken off their masks, revealing wrinkled skin and wispy white beards. More beautiful, yet seasoned women whose high cheekbones and dark eyes carried a warrior’s demeanor. He could run, but knew they’d cut him down before he had the chance to get anywhere far. Plus, where would he go? Where was he even at? For all he knew, he’d find some door, probably a foot thick of withered stone, and it’d lead to the clouds where his momentum would carry him out into the great abyss beyond. Who knew how long he’d fall?
Felix raised a hand to the crowd. “Oliver was a fool,” he said, confirming what was in the back of everyone’s mind. “This show is over. Arrest the intruder.”
Two very large men wearing the same vulture skulls — but somehow barely covered their stony faces — lurched forward from the crowd. Their muscles rippled with each step.
The rest of the crowd stared in a kind of transfixed, stunned silence — even Roberta, and near the middle of the pack, Sahara too.
One of the large men — he thought of them as Realm Security Guards, not quite up there with Protectors yet —grabbed his bicep harshly, and yanked Harold.
But the Wolves were howling and a bodybuilding Wizard couldn’t even separate him from that. So with his free hand, he went for the hilt.
The guard’s grip loosened; the other stopped in his tracks once he saw what Harold meant to do.
His fingers hovered over the ghost of Oliver’s and then with a confident force, he felt the cold metal fill his hands.
The Protectors gasped again.
Roberta started to laugh, low deep, Witchy laughs.
Harold pulled the blade out with ease. The Wolves were going crazy. Rabid. Frothing at the mouth in his head. He was back on the rock cliff, in the middle of a circle, surrounded by his pack mates. A gnarled bunch, ribs protruding from their blood-matted fur. They had the yellow eyes that matched Harold’s own — both his human and Protector form. He sat on his haunches, nearly taller than a grown man, and much taller than the rest of the Wolves.
He craved death, craved the kill. So did his pack, but the way they looked at him just said they were glad to have him back. And he nodded his muzzle, assuring them he was back for good.
The applause brought him to the great stone room. The Protectors had come closer. Most of the masks were off now, smiling faces in every directions. Eyes peered at him lighter and more alive. Like a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders, and now placed on to Harold’s. Nothing new.
A glow emanated from the blade, like a dying sunset. He felt the power course through him. That swagger came back, the one he’d lost with the key. Sahara caught his eye; her mask was off now, too. And her eyes seemed to burn even brighter. A slight smile teased on her lips, a risk of her showing teeth which wasn’t often, not as long as Harold had known her. The way she looked at him too — it reminded him of the way his pack had looked at him. Like he was king. Like he was the Protector with the most experience, the one you’d look up to in times of crisis.
Like he was Electus.
Then all that went out the window when the sky seemed to crack open again, and his body tingled with that unsettling, rubbery feeling.
Roberta’s laughter echoed in his ears through a whole millennium that only spanned a few seconds. And he was back in the darkness, surrounded by derelict cooking equipment and ruined walls. Back on the Lake.
CHAPTER 27
His head cleared itself from the muddle of time travel about two minutes after he opened his eyes, looking at the dirty floor of the Lake. Roberta and Sahara were already up and pacing around like giddy schoolgirls. Harold didn’t know why. Whatever they just went t
hrough was not something to be happy about. Unless…it had all been a dream. Seeing his father, reuniting with the Wolves, the sword, watching a Protector vanish in front of him.
He sat up with noticeably less pain, but his bicep still pulsed from where the guard had grabbed him. It couldn’t have been a dream. He looked to Sahara with Roberta at her side wearing a sickening smile on her face — the kind Harold imagined the Witch from Hansel and Gretel would’ve worn had she succeeded in cooking and eating the poor kids.
“What’s so great?” he asked, his voice distant. A quick glance outside showed the sky had grown an even darker shade of red and reminded him that the end was near. And right then, he’d never craved booze more strongly.
“You,” Sahara said.
The butterflies flapped their satin wings in the pit of Harold’s stomach. He felt his face flare up, but for once, was thankful that the ruined flesh couldn’t possibly get anymore flushed.
“You are our secret weapon,” Roberta said.
“Well, not much of a secret anymore,” Sahara answered. “Even the lowest of the Hellions probably know the name Harold Storm by now.”
Harold flashed a smile. “Good. I’m finally famous in all the Realms except for my own.”
“Come, Harold. We have work to be done,” Roberta said.
“Wait, where’s my sword? I had it in my hands.”
“It’s a thousand years in the past.”
Harold stood up, and he cringed at how little feeling he had in his legs, like they’d really been asleep for an entire millennium. Then he cocked his head at the Witch who somehow didn’t look like much of a corpse anymore. The smile and livelier eyes did much to help that aspect. She still wore the black funeral dress and a face with flaky, moist skin.
“How? I held it…felt its power.”
“You did, but you know what they say: You can’t change the past. Even a powerful Protector like yourself.”
“So Oliver didn’t die?”
“No, not there,” Roberta answered.
Beside her, Sahara nodded solemnly. “I never had the honor of knowing that asshole, but he certainly lived up to his reputation — bleh,” she said, blowing raspberries.
Shadowbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Realm Protectors Book 2) Page 14