The Magnificent 12

by Michael Grant

  Still, despite her nickname, Risky didn’t want to take any risks. For all she knew, the Magnificent Twelve might have fully assembled.

  Strangely enough, now that she had finalized her own plans, she kind of hoped the Magnificent Twelve had assembled. For a long, long time now Risky had been a (basically) supportive daughter. But somehow, since her first encounter with Mack, she’d begun to wonder.

  The thing was, the more she’d run into Mack, the more he had come to remind her of Gil. Not in terms of looks or muscle tone or ability to really rock the whole armor look, but in other ways. They both had a sense of humor. They both had spunk. They both foolishly believed they could defy her.

  And when Risky thought of Gil, she remembered that it was her mother who had broken them up. Sort of. If her mother hadn’t demanded that ridiculous temple . . . and then taken offense at the massive statue of Pikachu and demanded Gil be dismembered, Risky and he might have eventually been reconciled.

  They might have had a loving and mature relationship. Until Gil aged, because, let’s face it, he was mortal, and sooner or later his looks would go and then she’d eat him.

  Nevertheless, Risky and Gil could have had something lovely together. Something Risky had never had. Something she’d never even thought about since then. Until she’d met Mack.

  All Risky had really wanted to do with Gil was be with him by the rivers of Babylon and remember the good times they’d had together in Zion. She wept a little when she thought of it.

  The thing was, obviously the world and all its people should be ruled by a domineering, iron-fisted, twisted, evil, heartless overlord. No sensible person would argue with that. But Risky didn’t see why it should be the Pale Queen: Mother of Monsters, when it could just as easily be her, Risky: Fabulous Redhead.

  Although she would have to make people call her Ereskigal when they worshipped her, not Risky. Queen Ereskigal.

  Step One would be to await the outcome of the battle between her mother and the Magnificent Twelve. Risky was supposed to be there for that and to help her mother out, but she could always say she forgot. If her mother prevailed, well, Risky might be able to rush in and finish off a weakened Pale Queen.

  And if Mack prevailed? He would come back here, to his home, to Sedona. And then Risky would convince him to join her, thus eliminating the threat of the Magnificent Twelve, and rule the world on her own.

  Sweet.

  But she would need to lay the trap first so Mack didn’t have advance warning. For that, she needed her Destroyer.

  “Okay, Destroyer,” Risky said, prodding him with her toe. (He was lying on the ground.) “Time to get back to town. My mother’s assault on All That Is Good and Decent is well under way. Time for me to get busy.”

  “Urgh,” the golem Destroyer said. He was not talkative.

  “The first thing we have to do is empty the town. We need everyone to flee!”

  The Destroyer considered this for a moment. “Flee where?”

  “Out into the desert,” Risky said cruelly. “I don’t want Mack finding any support or any help at all. None!”

  “Okay,” the Destroyer said.

  But Risky didn’t like that. It sounded way too casual for a Destroyer. “You should say something like, ‘I obey!’ Or maybe, ‘All will worship you, mighty princess.’”

  “Urgh.”

  She was asking the Destroyer to make a choice, and that wasn’t going to work.

  “You have no initiative, do you know that?” Risky snarked. “Okay, do this. Whenever I give you an order, you say, ‘I obey the will of Ereskigal!’”

  “But all your friends call you Risky,” the Destroyer said.

  Risky smiled an evil smile and her green eyes glowed vindictively. “I have no friends.”

  Ah, but once upon a time, long, long ago, she had.

  LONG, LONG AGO WHEN RISKY HAD A FRIEND

  The opening of the temple went better than Risky had expected. The various animal sacrifices were successful—as you could see from the large copper bowl of hearts and the barrels of blood. The blood gutters worked just as well as Gil had promised.

  The Pale Queen complained that the temple was drafty. But Risky was used to her mother belittling everything she did. If Risky destroyed a village, the Pale Queen would point out the one pigsty Risky missed. She had always been critical of Risky. Nothing was ever good enough.

  But by the standards of the Pale Queen, her reaction to her new temple was pretty good.

  Until the unveiling of the statue.

  Oy. That didn’t go well.

  So in a rage the Pale Queen devoured the sculptors and demanded she be given Gil to chew on as well.

  But where was Gil? Gil had totally disappeared, it seemed. And now, the worm of doubt entered Risky’s thoughts. One of two things had happened. Either the Pale Queen had already eaten Gil, possibly without even knowing who he was. Or . . .

  Or Gil had run off with another girl!

  “Mom?” Risky demanded, hands on hips and staring up at her mother’s bloodstained mouth. (She was snacking on the big bowl of unicorn hearts, like someone with a bowl of cashews.) “Did you kill my boyfriend?”

  “Your what?”

  “My boyfriend,” Risky said defiantly. “Gil. The architect who designed this temple. I love him, Mom, and if you ate him I am going to be really mad.”

  “You’re too young to be dating!” the Pale Queen roared, which sent red spittle flying everywhere.

  “I’m a thousand years old, Mother!”

  “Nonsense. If you’re a thousand years old, then I’m . . .” The Pale Queen glanced at her not-exactly-lifelike statue as if seeking reassurance that she was still young and beautiful. (If by young you meant two thousand years old and if by beautiful you meant a terrifying, tyrannosaurus-jawed, claw-handed, snake-eyed monster drenched in nine different kinds of blood.)

  “Just tell me if you ate Gil Gamesh!” Risky cried.

  “No. I don’t think so. Are there any mirrors in this place?”

  Risky ran from the temple determined to find Gil, to tell him of her love, and then most likely torture him for running out on her. But though she searched and searched, from Babylon to Erech to far-off Kom Ombo, and though she transformed herself into a huge bird of prey with incredible eyesight and flew over Mesopotamia, Egypt, Assyria, Cappadocia, Hyrcania, and other places that were totally real but so exotic that they would be unrecognized by spell-check far in the future, she could not find him.

  Risky as a lonely hawk became a familiar sight over the fields of Lydia, and her harsh birdlike cry, “Gil . . . squaaaaawk . . . Gil!” haunted the dreams of children in far-away Thracia.

  Slowly, slowly, her heart hardened. Sadness and loss and the frustration that came from not being able to hear Gil’s loving words and/or cries of pain would leave their mark on Risky.

  It was as if her heart had been frozen stiff. And nothing would begin to thaw that cold, cold heart until she first met Mack.

  Who she was now totally probably going to kill.

  Unless, of course, he was willing to help her rule the world through terror.

  Nineteen

  Here is the scene. The volcano’s cone now rose seven hundred feet above the agitated waves. A pillar of smoke rose all the way to the stratosphere.

  Lava belched from several different holes in the volcano and rolled red-hot and sluggish down to the water, where it sent up clouds of searing steam. The lava cooled, darkened, and formed new additions to the volcano.

  On the eastern face of the volcano a jagged hole made it seem as if the volcano had a mouth. It was a dark hole from which marched the Pale Queen’s terrible army.

  The stone causeway continued to rise from the sea and now came near to reaching to the Golden Gate Bridge itself. It grew almost as if it was something living, summoned from the bottom of the ocean. The causeway was perhaps four miles long in all, making it quite visible from land. And, indeed, TV cameras and phone cameras and every kind of
camera in between showed pictures that left the whole country, the whole world, staring in helpless horror.

  Marines and soldiers were being rushed to San Francisco by truck and plane and helicopter, but the nearest hardcore combat soldiers were about 450 miles away. And really all that San Francisco had at the moment were the San Francisco Police Department, the California Highway Patrol, and a handful of National Guardsmen.

  Coming down that causeway there were two miles’ worth of bad creatures. The Pale Queen had concentrated her shock troops for this attack. Although there were reports coming in of smaller attacks in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.

  Roughly at the midpoint of the causeway stood the Magnificent Eight. The Pale Queen’s army would have to get past them to reach the city and the world beyond. But if you were to look at it from the air, as the various TV cameras in helicopters were doing, it wouldn’t look like much of a contest. A massive, marching monster army versus nine kids.

  Xiao, Sylvie, Rodrigo, and Charlie were summoning the killing weapon that Charlie had imagined. It was assembling itself out of thin air, piece by piece. Clearly it would be an incredible thing when fully built. It stood on a tripod that looked as if it was made of elephant tusks twisted together. It resembled some massive machine gun, but a very old-school version with long, glittering barrels arranged in a cylinder. There was no knowing just what the building materials were—perhaps they weren’t real metals or minerals at all. They were pure imagination, the result of a bored English schoolkid scribbling away when he should have been studying English history.38

  Something about Charlie’s machine almost seemed to suggest it might be alive, and some elements of it looked more like knuckles or ligaments than steel.

  Mack, Jarrah, Dietmar, Valin, and Stefan were marching the totally wrong way, which is to say toward the onrushing fist of terrifying creatures. No more than three hundred feet separated Mack from certain destruction. Maybe less, because one of the Gudridan in the lead launched a three-pointed spear through the air.

  It flew straight and true toward Mack. But Mack was quick. He jumped to his left, expecting the spear to stick in the rock where he’d just been.

  Instead, a muscular hand, quick as a snake, shot out and grabbed the shaft of the spear. The forward momentum of the heavy weapon twisted Stefan around but did not knock him down.

  He switched the spear to his right hand, took three running steps, and hurled it right back at the surprised Gudridan.

  But the spear clattered off the invisible force field, and the Gudridan smiled. (Which is not something you want to see.)

  “No fair,” Stefan said, honestly outraged. “They can throw at us and we can’t throw back?”

  “That’s what we’re here to fix,” Mack said, trying to sound all tough and indifferent to fear.

  “Krik-ma is ‘break,’” Jarrah said.

  “Poindrafol is ‘shield,’” Dietmar said.

  “Is that a shield?” Mack asked. “We’ve seen what happens when you’re not specific enough.” He was referring to the fact that he’d needed to specify that Valin was using a scimitar, not just any old sword.

  Valin smiled tightly. “You really don’t know much, do you, my ancient enemy—I mean, well, Mack. Use the prefix simu. It means ‘like.’ Simu-poindrafol should mean ‘thing like a shield.’”

  “Grab hands, now or never!” Jarrah cried, because at that moment the advancing army decided they were tired of walking and broke into a run.

  Mack held Jarrah’s hand and she Dietmar’s and he Valin’s, while Stefan scowled fearlessly at doom.

  “Krik-ma simu-poindrafol!”

  The next three things happened very fast and almost all together.

  1) A sheen of bright blue light seemed to outline and define the barrier, which was revealed as a sort of long tube that ran the length of the Pale Queen’s army.

  The light did not disappear. But at the front, at the part between Mack and the mad beasts, an emptiness appeared, a hole.

  2) The first row of monsters surged like a crashing wave. They came on with a weird melding of awful war cries, ranging from the Skirrit’s metallic locust sound to the Tong Elves’ deep-throated bellowing of their tong names. The Bowands, those thin bow-handed creatures, screeched like boiled cats and fired their deadly darts. The Gudridan made a tigerish huffing sound.

  3) Charlie yelled, “Fire!” A shaft as long as a basketball player and as thick as a beach umbrella’s pole shot over Mack’s head. It went straight through a leaping Gudridan, then a Tong Elf, then two more Tong Elves and a Skirrit.

  The spear trailed a wire that snapped tight, stopping the weapon’s flight. Prongs snapped out of the side of the spearpoint, and the whole thing went flying back, reeled in faster than a yo-yo.

  A Skirrit, three Tong Elves, and a Gudridan were impaled like some hideous shish kebab, yanked wildly back toward Charlie’s machine.

  Mack had foreseen a problem with this: Charlie’s speargun would soon be buried in dead monsters. But the instant the monsters cleared the protection of the invisible barrier, they exploded into vapor.

  The spear was sucked back into its barrel bearing no traces of the monsters that had just been killed.

  “Nice touch!” Mack yelled to Charlie.

  “That wasn’t me,” Charlie yelled back, but there was no more time to discuss the matter because if you thought the Pale Queen’s army would just turn and run away in terror, you’d be sadly mistaken. They had something much scarier behind them—the Pale Queen—than they had in front of them.

  So after a stunned pause, the creatures charged again, loud as ever.

  Mack yelled, “Back! Back behind the speargun!”

  They fell back, and Rodrigo, who was operating the speargun now, cranked it up to maximum effect.

  The result was slaughter.

  The spears shot out one at a time, speared Bowands and bugs and giants, yanked them back, and reduced them to air pollution. The ten barrels turned in the drum, bringing a new spear into firing position every second.

  In the first minute the spears flew and withdrew sixty times. The slaughter was appalling and the air was clouded with the stinking vapor left behind by the creatures’ dissolution.

  And yet, despite this fearsome destruction, the Pale Queen’s army kept pushing forward, and soon Mack and Stefan and Dietmar were hauling the machine back, foot by foot, even as it fired frantically.

  There have been many epic battles in history that involved a tiny, outnumbered band of heroes borne down upon by irresistible forces. The Spartans at Thermopylae. The English navy and the Spanish Armada. The 101st Airborne at the Battle of the Bulge. The Ewoks of Endor against the Imperial Stormtroopers.

  But never in history had so few stood against so many. Eight twelve-year-olds and one fifteen-year-old ex-bully against tens of thousands.

  And they were not going to win.

  Not as the Magnificent Eight at least.

  Twenty

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN SEDONA

  The Destroyer picked up an SUV—it happened to be a Toyota RAV4, not that it matters—and he threw that SUV—it happened to be blue—again, not that it matters—into the front wall of a house.

  The SUV crushed the front door, collapsed the porch, shattered the window, and scared the residents pretty well.

  It was a miracle no one was hurt.

  The Destroyer then kicked a fire hydrant, which snapped off clean and sent a giant plume of water spraying up into the air.

  He didn’t exactly know what the limits were to his power. Risky had tried to explain, but whenever he tried to pay attention, his thoughts would drift away to . . . well, he could no longer remember what to call the creature in his memory. But she was a girl, he was pretty sure of that. And she was cute edging toward pretty.

  But he had no time for that now. He was the Destroyer.

  The Destroyer formerly known as Mack’s golem grabbed an elm tree by the trunk and heaved up on it. Sure enough it
came free after some resistance, ripping out topsoil, grass, and bits of sidewalk. He opened his baleful mouth and breathed out. Flames!

  But the tree didn’t burn, really, not the way he’d hoped. The wood was still green and fresh so it mostly just kind of steamed and twisted. He threw the whole thing onto the roof of a pleasant stucco bungalow.

  People heard loud crashes and car alarms and began to poke their heads out of their homes to see what was going on. But it wasn’t nearly enough. He’d been tasked with the job of scaring everyone all the way out of town. And so far he was getting more puzzled looks than terrified ones.

  So he tilted back his head and let go of a howl that sounded like, “Braaaaarrrrrgggg!” But really loud. Jet-engine loud. Rock-concert loud.

  More people opened their doors and stepped outside to see what was what.

  An idea popped into his head. If he were to snatch up one of those people and bite his head off, people would flee much better.

  While he was thinking about this, he picked up a Mustang convertible—it happened to be black—and used it to smash another car—a brown Mercedes, not that it matters.

  The noise was astonishing, and the Destroyer liked it, so he roared again, and the roaring and the car smashing brought the last few semideaf people from their homes.

  Some ducked right back inside and slammed their doors.

  Some began to make phone calls with shaky fingers.

  Others used their phones to make videos, because that’s just the way the world was nowadays.

  Only one man ran, shoeless and in his boxers, to hop into the car in his driveway and go tearing down the street in terror.

  This would not do. Risky would be very annoyed with him if he caused insufficient terror.

  He was going to have to . . . to . . . kill.

  But again, he distracted himself by breathing fire, all down the side of a moving van—Mayflower Transit—which turned to flames most gratifyingly.