by Matthew Cody
The Shade must have taken Herman by surprise, because he didn’t even fight back. He crumpled underneath her assault, dropping the Shroud disguise entirely as she wrapped herself around him, binding him again in her own shadow. All he could do was cower beneath her anger. She put her hand around his throat and leaned down until her face was barely inches from his own. But there she stopped, and as Daniel watched, she drew close to the cracked pendant around Plunkett’s neck. With a finger all of shadow, she reached out to touch the soft green glow of the meteor stone, only to shy away at the last second.
“What’s she doing?” whispered Mollie.
“I don’t know,” answered Daniel. “She seems focused on Herman’s pendant … but why? It’s broken, it’s useless. Unless …”
The Shade that had once been Eileen Stewart turned to Daniel and whispered a single word.
“Free.”
Daniel nodded, understanding at last. “You lied,” he said.
“What?” asked Mollie.
“Not you,” said Daniel, limping over to where Herman lay on the floor. “You,” he said to Herman. “You lied. It’s all you ever do.”
“I didn’t lie! The ring can stop them!”
“But there’s another way,” said Daniel.
“Please,” said Herman, pulling the ring from his finger. “Take it. I can’t do it. Use the ring. You can trap them again.… I can’t. I can’t do it to her, not again.”
Herman was whimpering, great beads of sweat pouring down his face as he stared up into the dark eyes of the creature that had once been his only friend in the world. Or perhaps they were tears, but Daniel had trouble believing Herman Plunkett had tears left in him.
Daniel bent down and scooped up the ring. Gram’s Shade made no move to stop him, just as Daniel had known she wouldn’t. He understood now what she really wanted.
“You could’ve stopped the Shades at any time,” said Daniel. “But you don’t just want to stop them—you want to control them again. And for that you need the ring. You need it to be the Shroud again.”
“Please, Daniel!” begged Herman. “Use the ring!”
“I should’ve listened to them instead of you.”
“Daniel,” said Mollie, “what are you talking about? Those things will tear the town apart! Use the ring!”
“The Shades are angry children, Mollie. Hurt, angry children. They are throwing a temper tantrum because they don’t know what else to do. They tried to tell us, but we wouldn’t listen.”
Daniel reached down and wrapped his hands around Herman’s pendant.
“No!” the old man cried, trying to bat Daniel’s hand away, but Gram’s Shade held Herman down. The hate was gone from her face and she watched Daniel with impassive eyes.
“It’s the pendant,” Daniel said. “The pendant is broken but not destroyed. And they will never be free until it is.”
“NO!” shouted Herman.
The old man’s voice echoed in Daniel’s ears, and suddenly he was back at the quarry, in the grip of the Shroud. Back in the nightmare. Herman was reaching through the ring into Daniel’s mind again.
Daniel’s hand was aflame. He could smell the charring flesh, taste blood in his mouth where he chewed his lips in pain.
“Use it,” commanded the Shroud. “Use the ring. Steal the Shades’ power and you steal the Shades themselves. You can save us all.…”
The ring was consuming him—soon there would be nothing left. It was better to simply give in, make the hurt go away. He could sense the power outside him, waiting to be taken. He could see it in the figures standing in the landscape of his dream—Mollie, Rose, the Shades. Even Georgie. The Shroud was right: He could take it all for himself. He could stop fighting it at last.
He could save them all from themselves. Protect the world. He could be the hero.
He started to slip the ring onto his finger but was stopped by a smaller hand closing around his own. A small hand, a girl’s. A girl with her hair done up in ringlets. She smiled at him.
And then Daniel was back in the living room. He held the ring just inches from his finger. The Shade with his gram’s face watched him, frowning. Herman’s eyes grew wide with anger.
“No! I am the Shroud!”
The cord snapped easily as Daniel ripped the pendant from the old man’s neck. It came apart at the same place, the original break where Daniel had torn it from him nearly a year ago. Herman had tied it back together with an imperfect knot.
“Daniel,” said Herman, “you don’t know what you are doing!”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then please tell me!” cried Mollie. “Because I’m freaking out here!”
“The Shades led us into Herman’s cave because they wanted us to do something for them, Mollie. They can’t touch the pendant, so they wanted us to destroy it. It’s what they’ve wanted all along.”
Herman’s eyes narrowed into slits again, like a snake’s. “Do that, and you unleash chaos. There will be no going back—you understand? You will change Noble’s Green forever! You’ll change the world!”
“You can’t keep them prisoner, Herman. It’s not right.”
“What about your gram?” he cried. “She’s gone, and there’s nothing for her Shade to go back to! At least my way there’s something left of her! My way she will be with us forever.”
Daniel looked at the old man. “My gram is dead. It’s time to lay her to rest.”
With that he walked over to the fireplace. He set the pendant down on the mantel and picked up a wrought-iron poker. Finally able to examine the pendant up close, he could see the network of tiny cracks that ran throughout it. It was already broken; it wouldn’t take much to shatter it. Even an ordinary thirteen-year-old boy could manage it.
For just an instant he hesitated. Herman was right about one thing: there would be no going back for any of them. But he thought about Eric and Rohan. About Louisa. Michael. He thought about Gram.
He brought the heavy poker down on the pendant, and it shattered into a hundred tiny pieces. The weak greenish glow flickered for an instant, then died.
The girl with the ringlets let Herman fall to the floor and floated toward Daniel. For a moment it looked as if she was opening her mouth to say something; then she was gone. Vanished into nothing.
“C’mon,” said Daniel, grabbing Mollie by the arm. “I have to see this.”
“See what? Darn it, Daniel Corrigan, will you stop a minute and tell me what the heck is going on?”
Daniel just smiled and pulled her outside. There were Shades still out there, but they didn’t scare him now. Before his eyes they started to disappear, one by one, released from the hold that the Shroud’s pendant had had on them for seventy years or more. Some—the oldest ones, like Gram—vanished altogether. Others returned home.
He knelt down next to Rohan and Eric, who were stirring.
Eric’s eyes fluttered open. “Mol?” he said.
Mollie reached out and held on to Daniel for support. He didn’t comment on it.
“Eric,” she said. “Are you … I mean, you know me?”
“Stupid question,” he said. “Did we get him?”
“Yeah,” said Mollie. “I think so.”
Theo and Louisa appeared in the street. Theo shrank back as Shades darted past him.
“Where are they all going?” he asked.
“Back where they belong,” said Daniel.
“Daniel,” said Rohan, adjusting his glasses, “what did you do?”
“I freed them,” said Daniel. “I destroyed Herman’s pendant once and for all. And I set them all free. Truly free.”
Rohan watched as the last of the Shades vanished. He looked at Daniel, understanding dawning on his face.
“Then that means …”
“Yeah,” said Daniel. “I think so.”
Just then a window opened on the top floor of the Madison house a few doors down. Mr. Madison leaned out, dressed in pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt that did
little to hide his middle-aged potbelly. As Daniel and his friends watched, he took a long, deep breath of night air and giggled.
“I remember!” he cried. “I can fly!”
With that he jumped from the window and flew. Not gracefully and not well, but he flew. A wobbly man in his pajamas was flying over Noble’s Green for the first time in forty-something years.
“Whoa,” said Mollie.
“Welcome to Noble’s Green,” said Daniel. “Welcome to the new world!”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The New World
Janey Levine, age nineteen, was on her way home from the movies with her boyfriend when she suddenly remembered she had the power to move small objects with her mind. She’d accidentally dumped her bag of hard candies all over the floor of his car, so she spent the next twenty minutes picking them up one by one and putting them back in her bag—without ever actually touching them. Her boyfriend never even noticed. Alan Masterson, a fifty-year-old plumber, was out walking the dog when he remembered that he could breathe underwater. He leapt the neighbors’ fence and spent the rest of the night in their swimming pool. He might’ve stayed there longer if it hadn’t been for his dog’s constant barking.
And Michael woke from the last of his night terrors to find Mollie and Eric waiting for him outside his window. Together the three of them flew to the top of Mount Noble and back again. And again. He won every race.
The blackout had changed everything. When the lights went out, Noble’s Green was the sleepy little village it had always been, but when they came back on, Noble’s Green was already the most famous town on earth.
Daniel had gambled big and he knew it. They’d always lived in fear of discovery. A small group of Supers, say five or six kids, would find themselves hunted and in danger if people ever learned what they could do. It had been imperative that they keep hidden from the rest of the world, and as Louisa had pointed out, that made them vulnerable. But a town full of Supers? Young, old, and everything in between? Police officers, fire chiefs, teachers, and plumbers? When the newspapers and Internet caught wind of that (which they did by sunrise), no government, no corporation, no military, no men in black suits anywhere would have the power to harm them. You couldn’t kidnap an entire town.
At least that was Daniel’s hope.
And it wasn’t just Noble’s Green, though that had the highest concentration by far and was the ground zero of what would become known as the Blackout Event. After that night Supers appeared all over the globe, but each and every one of them could be traced back to that lonely little Pennsylvania town. All of them had spent a part of their childhood there. Noble’s Green became home to the world’s superheroes.
Of course the scientists showed up. Biologists, archaeologists, physicists—academics of every stripe came to Noble’s Green to study the phenomenon. Some of the Super townsfolk even volunteered for their tests, though very little actually came from it. The source of their powers, as well as how they worked, remained a mystery. Now that the Shades were gone, Theo and his father let the university continue its archaeological dig, but other than the very impressive cave paintings that Daniel already knew about, nothing interesting was discovered. Herman had been thorough in his own secret excavations, and every bit of meteor rock that could be found had been. The fragments that had once been his pendant now were no more remarkable than simple limestone. Daniel’s ring represented the sum total of all the Witch Fire meteorite rock that was left on earth.
For now.
“I’ve thought about dropping it into the bottom of Tangle Creek, but who’s to say it wouldn’t wash up again?”
Daniel was standing in the middle of the tree fort—the newly rebuilt and improved tree fort complete with a second floor connected by a climbing ladder—addressing the Supers. Standing in a circle watching him were Eric, Rohan, Mollie, Louisa, Rose, Michael, and Simon. Separate from the group, leaning on the rebuilt door, stood Theo.
And on the floor in front of them, resting on a flat rock the size of a dinner plate, was the ring. Everyone kept their distance from it, even, or perhaps especially, Daniel.
“So that’s why I settled on the sledgehammer,” said Daniel, gesturing with the heavy mallet in his hands. “I’m sure it’s perfectly safe to get close enough to destroy it, and you won’t have to actually touch it.”
“We don’t want to destroy it,” said Rohan.
“I’m sorry … what?”
Rohan took a step forward and pushed his glasses farther up on his nose as he studied the ring.
“Everyone knows how you feel about this,” he said. “Your … relationship to this ring. And everyone agrees that it’s dangerous—”
“It’s the most dangerous thing on the planet!” said Daniel.
“Maybe,” said Rohan. “Or maybe Noble’s Green is.”
“Wait a minute!” said Daniel. “What are you talking about?”
Eric placed his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “We knew this would be hard for you, which is why we already met in private. We talked it over, the Supers with … superpowers.”
Daniel scanned the faces of his friends.
“So you had a secret meeting and decided what?” asked Daniel. “I mean other than to go absolutely crazy?”
“For the record, I didn’t get a vote,” offered Theo.
“Hear us out,” said Rohan. “For years there was only a small group of Supers, a manageable group. But now, as of last count, there are two hundred and three people in the entire world who possess superpowers, and most of them live right here. Now, it appears that many of them have faded in strength over the years, along with many of their stolen memories. So you are looking at the most powerful Supers standing right here—”
“And Georgie!” said Rose. “He’s stronger than Eric! I saw it!”
“Only sometimes,” said Daniel. “Hopefully it stays that way for a while.”
Georgie’s super-strength that he’d displayed in the battle with the Shroud hadn’t returned since, but Daniel knew it was only a matter of time. He was big brother to a powerhouse toddler.
“And Clay,” said Simon. “Forgetting about him was the only good part of being Shroud food.”
“And Clay,” agreed Rohan. “Bud too—although not as obviously powerful, he’s still potent.”
“I’ll say!” said Simon, waving his hand in front of his nose.
Mollie punched him in the arm. “Let him talk.”
“The point is,” continued Rohan, “that most of the adults and teenagers out there with powers are weaker than us, but we still don’t know what they are going to do with those powers.”
“I heard Janey Levine is shopping around a reality TV show,” said Simon. Mollie glared at him, but he threw up his hands in protest. “Seriously! No joke. Just contributing useful information to the discussion like a useful Super should!”
Daniel took a deep breath. It hadn’t taken long to get sick of Simon all over again.
“So you guys want to keep this ring around as a … weapon?” asked Daniel. “Your own personal contingency plan?”
“No,” said Eric. “We want you to keep it. And don’t think of it as a weapon. Think of it as insurance.”
“Yeah,” said Louisa. “We trust you to make the right choice. Only you.”
Daniel wanted to argue the logic of this, but the truth was that he’d had some of the same thoughts. It was why he’d kept the ring in the first place. Why he hadn’t told anyone about it, and why the very idea of keeping it now made him sick to his stomach. It was all too familiar.
“Things didn’t turn out so well last time,” he said.
“That was because Herman manipulated you,” said Rohan. “He used his powers to influence you. But his power’s gone. With his pendant destroyed, he’s just an old man. He can’t hurt us anymore.”
Daniel wasn’t convinced. Herman would always be dangerous, powers or no. Daniel had learned that the hard way, and it was a lesson he wouldn’t forget.
“Take it,” said Eric. “Hide it. Keep it safe. Hopefully you’ll never have to use it.”
There was still one person who hadn’t spoken.
“Michael,” said Daniel. “Do you agree with these guys?”
Michael looked around the room. He’d changed since getting his powers back. He smiled more, he was friendly and warm, but there was still something slightly haunted in his eyes. He’d been through too much to come out of it unscathed.
“I want it smashed into a thousand pieces and buried in every corner of the earth,” said Michael. “I want that thing gone and I don’t want to talk about it ever again. Not ever.
“But,” he continued, with a look at Mollie, “being Supers means we decide things together, and we trust each other. So I trust my friends, and I trust you, Daniel. After all, you brought us all back. You’re the hero, man. Your choice.”
Daniel nodded. “My choice.”
Then suddenly, and without further discussion, Daniel lifted the sledgehammer with both hands and with a yell brought it down on the ring. The black meteorite exploded in a puff of black dust and green light. A flash, then nothing but bits of broken, harmless rock.
No one said anything until Daniel spoke up.
“You guys put all the faith in the world in me,” he said. “But I don’t deserve it. Not if I keep this thing around. If I did that, I’d be keeping hope alive in Herman’s withered old heart, and he wouldn’t stop, not ever, until he became the Shroud again. You’re my best friends in the world, and this is how I’ll protect you.”
His friends just watched him, expressionless. All but one.
“Good call, Daniel,” said Theo, smiling. “Good call.”
Daniel nodded at the new kid. “No more Shrouds,” he said. “Never again.”