by Matt Ryan
“Careful on this stuff,” Blane said. “You could fall right into a hole.”
“We don’t need someone dropping the ingredients or hurting themselves and not be able to make the stone,” Mom agreed.
“Exactly. Finally someone nearly as smart as me,” Blane said.
The ground changed even more as we got closer to the lava pit; it felt crunchy and it might have been my imagination, but it felt hotter. I bent down and took off my glove to touch the rough black surface. Yes, much warmer. Not enough to melt my shoes; more like the heat of a hand warmer.
“Oh, don’t worry, it’s just lava running underneath us,” Mark said. He moved closer to me and whispered, “Keep a portal stone in your hand. I don’t like this place. We shouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t have one,” I said.
“Stay close to me. I’ll bounce us out at the first sign of trouble.”
I took it all in, him standing next to me with the glow of the lava just bright enough to let me see the features of his face. He turned to me, catching me staring, only to give me a concerned look.
I need to make three more stones before our real life can begin, I reminded myself.
We walked a little ways closer to the inferno of lava before I stopped and held a hand in front of my face to block some of the heat. A burst of air popped at the surface and flung orange fiery goo into the air. It stuck to nearby rocks.
“This is crazy,” I said.
“I know, right?” Blane said with a big smile. “Okay, this is the place.”
Sarah and Mark got to work setting up the table and the ingredients.
“You want to make this one, Allie?” Mark asked.
“Yes,” I said, feeling Blane’s excitement.
“You hear that?” Blane said, and looked to the sky. “Hurry up and make it.”
I couldn’t hear a thing beyond the gurgling from the volcano. The volcano burped out a pocket of air and the sound rumbled past us. I placed my hands on the table and looked at the ingredients. I wasn’t familiar with any of them, but I knew to start with the dry ones. I poured in the silver-colored shavings and then the black pellets. Then I heard another sound, a rhythmic, thumping sound. It couldn’t be the pit of lava. It had a pattern.
“Hurry up,” Blane said.
My mom called out, but I’d already gone into my mixing zone. Nothing would distract me. I was holding the reddish liquid in my hand when a bright light flashed above me. The thumping sound pounded down at us and the wind swirled, nearly taking out the mixing table. Blane held the ingredients down as we all looked to the sky and the beacon of light shining down on us.
“Helicopter,” Mark said.
In the moonlight, I spotted the shape of it and watched as the person in it threw out more stones. The night sky lit up brighter than the sun, and the light hurt my retinas. I crouched down and rubbed my eyes, trying to blink them back to life.
Mom screamed out, “Niles, hit that copter with something!”
Blane laughed and looked up. “We can handle them. They’re nothing like the Chinese.”
“No, this is Quinn,” Mom said.
The chopper hovered over the lava pit long enough for me to spot the stone being dropped into it.
“Oh, crap,” I said. “They dropped a stone into the volcano.”
The others turned to face the bubbling goo. The molten rock began to build up like a rising loaf of bread. Mark took my hand, but I pulled it away before he could place the portal stone on it. I went back to the table and dumped the ingredients into the bowl. Anger and fear filled me as the lava frothed at the top of the lava pit and bubbled over the edge.
I went back to stirring. Feeling the ingredients through the spoon, I channeled my entire focus into the mix. I stirred and stirred, but nothing happened.
“What?” Blane said, looking at the fouled ingredients. “Mark, you make the next one. We only have ingredients for one more.”
“I’ve got this,” I said, and dumped the wasted ingredients. The bubbling lava sent pieces of itself flying across the sky.
“We don’t have much time on this one,” Mom said. “Maybe Mark should . . .”
“No,” I said. “I can make it.” Heat blazed against my face. I wiped the sweat from my brow and tossed in the dry ingredients, then dipped a clean spoon into the mix.
They didn’t think I could make the stone, and that fired me up. The heat from the expanding lava burned my face and I wanted to scream, but I focused it all into the mix. I dumped the last of the ingredients in and stirred. Wind blew past us as the helicopter continued to hover. The copter’s sound mixed with the sounds of churning liquid rock as it rose above the edges of the volcano, looking as if it might burst in a mighty explosion at any second. A piece popped and many chunks flew in the air, hissing as they landed with soft thuds.
Blane cowered and then disappeared. The coward. I raged and mixed. I couldn’t keep my eyes open; the heat was so intense, I thought my eyeballs would melt. The molten rocks spewed again, and this time I felt something hit my leg. There was no time to let the searing pain register, not yet. I needed to make this stone.
A clunk sounded in the bowl, and I blindly grabbed the stone with my gloved hand and turned to hug Mark. I felt his hand touch the back of my neck, and we jumped.
“Did you make the stone?” Blane asked, hovering over me.
I tried to speak, but my throat and lungs hurt and my answer came out in a raspy groan. My leg was on fire, my face burning. I rolled on the hard floor, feeling the grit and dirt against my raw arms.
Blane grabbed at my stone sack and dumped the stones out, then he went for my hands. I squeezed the master stone tight. “Give it,” he said.
“Get off of her.” Mark pulled Blane back and pushed him to the ground. Rolling me gently on my back, he looked over my body. He peeled a chunk of my pants off and threw it to the side. “Chang, tell me you’ve got something for this.”
The pain radiated through millions of nerve endings, and with each passing second, intensified. I looked down at my leg and saw a patch of blistered and dark red skin. I remembered that at the last second before we jumped, a piece of lava had landed on me. I whimpered as sharp needle pricks of pain shocked my whole body. I didn’t want to appear weak, but the memory of the fire poker and now this made all my will shrivel.
“Yeah, I have something.” Chang pulled out a stone and placed it directly on my burn. I screamed and grabbed Mark. “This is only going to dull the pain. We need to wrap it up.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Blane said. “There’s only one place left! She can suck it up. We’re almost there.”
“I have a few stones that could help her,” Sarah said. “I sort of became a healing stone expert raising Mark.”
I sat up and looked at her. Chang was right, the pain had dulled, but when I looked down at my leg, it looked like charred hamburger. But Sarah had kept Mark alive all those years, until I got him the life stone.
“Can you help me?” I asked.
“We can try,” Sarah said. As she walked next over and knelt down, Blane swore loudly and paced back and forth, mumbling about our incompetence.
I grimaced and adjusted my leg so Sarah could get a better view. Seeing her this close, it was easy to see Mark’s looks in her slim nose and defined jawline. She took my hand and placed a stone in it. “It isn’t a sure-fire thing like the life stone, but it should help your body heal itself.”
I looked down at my leg, hoping it would begin to clear up, but it looked more swollen and red than it had a few minutes ago. “Thank you,” I said.
“Let’s get some bandages on it,” Sarah said.
In a few minutes, Chang had used gauze and some ointments from his first aid kit on my wound. Each time he touched the burn, I winced and felt a sharp sting. At the end, he wrapped tape around my leg, securing the gauze.
“We’ll need to keep up with changing the bandages. Burns can be all kinds of nasty,” he said.
Mark helped me get to my feet and I saw Blane storming around in the background. He looked to be muttering to himself, and when I bent over to touch my bandage, he threw up his arms in frustration.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. This is what I’ve hitched my wagon to? Maybe I should have gone to Quinn. I doubt he’d be unprepared. The man can fly!” Blane said. “Now we’re just sitting here wasting time. We need to get to the next master stone.”
“Not now, Blane,” Mom said.
“Can’t you see she’s hurt?” Mark said.
“We don’t need her. You’ve shown us that,” Blane said. “We should leave right now, before Quinn gets another master stone.”
“Shut up, Blane,” Sarah said. “We’re done for tonight. If you’re truly the only person in the world who knows how to make this stone, then it won’t matter how many stones Quinn makes.”
Blane growled and paced. Many words were muttered under his breath, but he eventually conceded and left, headed toward the teachers’ hall.
“Mark, can you get Allie to her room for the night?”
“I can,” Mark said. “I can carry her if need be.”
“I can stand,” I said, and gingerly got to my feet.
Jackie and Bridget came running up. “There you guys are. What the hell?” Jackie said.
I put my arm over Mark for support and walked toward my room, but we didn’t make it that far. I sat on the dusty couch in the rec room and let Bridget slide over an ottoman to prop up my leg. Bridget and Jackie stared at the bandages that already had a wet, yellowish stain growing on them.
Bridget held a hand to her mouth. “I don’t think I can look at it.”
“She needs our help,” Jackie replied.
“Chang and Sarah already did what they could,” I said.
“Please, you think those amateurs know how to heal a burn?” Jackie huffed. “They never experienced years of stone wars. I know ways to heal all kinds of ailments. Now, let’s just take a look and see how bad it is.” She pulled on the tape.
I winced, more from anticipation than from pain, but she kept pulling and yanked the last bit off. My leg looked swollen and wrinkled. My heart raced as I stared at it. I’d been permanently scarred. For the rest of my life, I’d have to look down at my mangled leg and recall the time lava had struck me.
“Oh, god, I’m going to throw up.” Bridget gagged and backed away.
“What a baby. Are you telling me you’ve never seen a little skin bacon before?” Jackie said. “We’re going to get you fixed up, Red house style. All right?”
“Okay.”
Jackie made a stone in the adjacent room and brought it out a few minutes later. She smiled and held the stone directly over my wound. “This is going to sting a little at first, but in the long term, it’ll heal that sickening burn you’ve got there. I’m going to count to three. Ready? One . . .” She dropped the stone on my leg.
I jerked back, but it soaked right into my wound. My skin tightened and I thought my leg might rip open, but then it subsided and felt better.
“Try to walk.” Jackie grabbed my hand and yanked me up. I prepared for a fresh wave of pain, but it felt better; not great, but manageable.
Too bad it didn’t look better.
“See? I’ve got the good stuff.”
“Can we just wrap it back up?” Bridget asked.
Mark knelt next to me and put a fresh bandage on my leg.
“Feeling better?” Jackie asked.
“Yeah, thank you.”
“Now, I need a favor from you,” Jackie said.
“Sure. What is it?”
“I need you to get your mom to tell you where Leo is.”
I looked at the ground and then at Mark. I didn’t know where Leo was. As far as I was concerned, he’d been portaled by my mother a few days ago to some undisclosed alchemist prison. Jackie was holding her hands in front of her, and if I didn’t know her better, I’d think she was begging. For everyone else, it’d been over a month now. A month of Jackie not knowing whether her former lover, turned to back-stabbing troll, had really been imprisoned or simply killed by my mother.
“You tell me the truth. Were the teachers all in that room when you cleaned this place up?”
Jackie’s eyes narrowed. “That room was clean when I got here, but now that you mention it, there was a kind of crappy smell in there. Wait, you think your mom killed the teachers instead of putting them in prison? Do you think she killed Leo?”
“We saw her prison. You two lived in it, so I don’t think she’s beyond keeping prisoners. I’m sure they’re all hidden somewhere. I’ll do what I can to find where Leo is.”
“Thank you.”
“What is it?” I asked as Jackie averted her eyes.
“I found something in the books we took from Verity. I found a way to get Ned back.” Jackie reached into her pocket and pulled out a small velvet sack. She opened it and took out a soul stone.
“He’s your first love, isn’t he? I remember Ira and Carly mentioning it. How can you bring him back? I thought that was impossible.”
“So did I, until I found a book that laid out the exact way to bring a person back from a soul stone. We can save Ned.”
“And Ira, and the other thousand stones we took from Quinn?” The news swirled around in my head, along with endless possibilities and consequences. My mother wouldn’t like the idea of not getting the stone made, but if we could bring back the people trapped in the soul stones, we had to try.
Jackie plopped down in a lounge chair. “It’s not as simple as you think. It takes the life of another to do it. Basically, you need a host and a slew of near-impossible ingredients to create the linking stone.”
“This is why you want Leo back, isn’t it? I just assumed you had unresolved feelings.”
“Hell, no. I want to choke him to death for what he did. I’ve considered memory stones to take him out of my mind, but I want to see him suffer. I want to see his life drift away as Ned consumes his body and comes back to life.”
“That’s sick,” Mark said.
“Really, Mr. Do-gooder? I know if something happened to Allie, you’d be the first person to lay hands on the innocent to bring her back. All I’m talking about is disposing of a worthless person for a great person.”
“Dark road to go down, Jackie,” Mark said.
“The darker, the better.”
“Jackie,” I said in an attempt to stop the back-and-forth. “Have you actually made this linking stone?”
She glanced back at the stone-making room. “Not yet, but I know you can. I would have asked Mark days ago, but I knew his golden constitution wouldn’t allow himself to be sullied with such tasks.”
“Yeah, I was searching the planet for Allie while you were playing lap dog to Cathy.”
“You idiot, why do you think I was doing that? You think I would have had access to the ingredients to create the stones you needed if I didn’t?”
“Stop it,” I said, and reached for my leg. It didn’t hurt, but I was using it to garner some sympathy—anything to distract them from each other. “So this whole ‘Mrs. C’ thing is a scam?”
“No, not entirely. I like your mom. She’s an all-business ass-kicker. It’s hard not to like that,” Jackie said. “So, you think you can make this stone?”
“I don’t know. We’re talking about the taking of another life here.”
“No, we aren’t. Leo’s stupid delicious body will still be here, but it’ll be Ned inside of it. Best of both worlds.”
“It still doesn’t feel right.”
“Come on. I’ve helped you since the moment you arrived through that hall. All I’m asking you to do is make me a stone. Make a friend a stone.”
“I don’t know.”
“Just think of how many stones you made for them.” She pointed to the teachers’ hall. “And you can’t make me one?”
“Fine, I’ll make it. But I hope you never use it.”
Jackie le
d me into the stone-making room, to the table with all the ingredients laid out and ready for me to mix. I sat in front of the bowl and mixed.
The stone clunked around a moment later and Jackie pulled the bowl closer to herself. Her grin looked as wide as the bowl as she plucked out the stone and wrapped it in a black cloth.
“Thank you,” Jackie said. “This calls for a celebration.”
“I really don’t have the energy for another block party,” I said.
“Who said anything about a party?”
I rubbed my eyes and let out a long breath. Making that stone had taken out more of me than usual. Or maybe I just wanted to get to my bed and lie down. The whole day seemed like a blur now, and finishing it off with making Jackie a strange stone hadn’t helped. A sinking feeling in my gut told me I shouldn’t have done it. The world didn’t need more killing, even if it saved the soul of another.
“I’m just going to bed,” I said.
“Hell, no. When my best friend makes me a stone, I repay that debt. You just name it, and I can get it for you. Or name a destination and I can get you there.”
“Really, I just want to go to bed. Tomorrow is going to be brutal.”
“Fine, but I owe you, Allie Norton. I owe you big time.” She hefted the wrapped stone and put it in her pocket.
I dragged my body up to my room and climbed into bed. Mark kissed my forehead and slept on the couch.
Nightmares of Quinn and my mom getting the stone filled my night. They each ruled the world like tyrants, creating and destroying. They wielded the stone’s power with complete dominance in mind.
When I woke up in the morning, breathing hard and sweating, Mark rushed to my side.
I sat up and looked at him. “I think one of us should take the stone.”
“If we take that stone, our lives as we know them are over,” Mark said.
“I think there’s a way to have it all, but first we need to make these master stones and get to the end of all this.”