Talk about ballsy, I thought.
Doctor Blood had ripped a group of minotaurs in half by way of his strange, dark magic. He could’ve easily done the same to Octavius.
Or so I thought.
Octavius apparently didn’t give two shits about that. He was as stoic and silently confident as always. Which was why he’d been our leader at the NOD, why he should’ve been heading BEAST entirely.
Doctor Blood mumbled something I couldn’t hear and he snapped his finger loudly.
Then with a feeling of being dipped in icy water my tensed body relaxed. I gasped for breath as if I really had just climbed out of a freezing lake. Something else, too. Searing pain.
I looked down. Oh, what the hell? A sharp point eased out of my palm. It was the Fang and it was shiny with my blood.
Had it been inside of me? Was that how Doctor Blood had been control?
My head emptied. The world spun all around me. I was sure I was going to pass out or at least vomit.
No time. Can’t, I told myself.
That seemed to work.
The Fang floated through the air, toward Doctor Blood’s outstretched hand.
Then—
As his fingers were about to grip it, he turned in a blur, whipping his arm in Octavius’s direction, which, in turn, whipped the Fang right toward the old monster-master.
Octavius expected it. He crossed his wrists in front of his face, a shimmering blue shield sprang forth from the ground.
The Fang stabbed the shield. A jagged yellow light fractured the magic, but it held. Octavius hadn’t changed his demeanor. He wasn’t struggling, wasn’t gritting his teeth while he cast the spell.
“Oh, snap,” Zack whispered. “Look at that.”
The pain coursing through me was almost too much, but I knew I couldn’t wait around on my knees while Octavius dueled Doctor Blood. Mostly because I knew Doctor Blood, as strong as he may be, had the advantage simply by the rows and rows of hungry monsters who had pledged their fealty to him. Also, the rabid vamps.
Which were my first problem. If I was going to make a move for Doctor Blood, I’d have to get past them.
Currently, I was weaponless and my body felt like it had fallen asleep. All pins and needles.
“Clever, old man,” Doctor Blood said.
“I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.” Octavius smirked.
“You are certainly stronger than our last meeting, Octavius. When you ran,” Doctor Blood said. He turned to me, looked. “Did you tell young Abraham that? That you ran away while I destroyed his father’s mind, body, and soul?”
Octavius, for the first time, frowned. A longing sadness in his eyes.
“No!” Doctor Blood laughed. “No, you didn’t! That’s right, Abraham, the monster-master that took you under his wing was the reason your father died.”
This stunned me. Octavius had ran away? There wasn’t anything in the report about that. It said he fought Doctor Blood. But the way Octavius looked right now…I wasn’t sure.
Why would he lie?
Then, as if to answer my question, Doctor Blood said, “Because he is a coward, Abraham. He is frightened. Just like he is frightened right now. Oh, don’t let that calm look on his face fool you. He is as scared as anyone. And rightfully so. Sometimes, I even scare myself.”
“I believe that,” Zack mumbled. “Especially when he looks in the mirror.”
Maddie hissed for him to be quiet.
I couldn’t say or do anything. I was frozen. Again, but this time not by magic. This news of Octavius’s part in my father’s death shook me to my very core.
“Enough!” Octavius shouted. His voice jittered. Anger. Pure anger.
“Enough, he says, enough!” Doctor Blood laughed.
I was so sick of that laugh. I wanted to tear his vocal cords out so he could never laugh again.
And sure, my father was gone. Sure, Octavius might’ve ran away. But Doctor Blood was the one who killed him.
The past was the past.
If we wanted a future, we had to fight.
So I stood up. The hissing of the crowd stilled. The cameras trained on me. A collection of fifty-foot-tall Abraham Crowleys standing all around the stadium.
I certainly didn’t feel like I was fifty feet, that was for sure.
The rest of the weapons were just out of my reach. If I could get at least Zack’s ax, I had a chance of getting out of here alive.
The same thing had happened at Perdition Cemetery. Doctor Blood had chained us up, though, and I was able to get out thanks to a very timely werewolf sneeze that greased up the shackles enough for me to wiggle free.
I realized if I didn’t act soon, if I didn’t just go for it, it would be too late.
So I went for it.
26
An Explosion of Soul
Doctor Blood spun around, his dark suit coat a blur, and brandished not the sword in my direction but the Boogeyman’s staff.
An explosion of dark light erupted forth from that orb. Sent right our way. Was he a soul-slayer? They were all but extinct. There was no way—
Inside of the orb atop the Boogeyman’s staff was the souls of his countless victims. Souls are a powerful thing. In the wrong hands one can cause a lot of chaos and destruction with soul power. Doctor Blood’s hands were the wrongest. And if he was a soul-slayer…possessing a power far greater than any the world had seen in a long, long time…well, that would really suck.
But, as it turned out, not even he could harness the immense power of all those lost souls.
The world exploded.
White hot heat scorched the earth. I was launched into the air, soaring for what felt like a long, long time.
Then—
I hit the ground. All the breath rushed out of my lungs. I gasped, clawed at my throat without much luck. Slowly, the ringing in my ears subsided and I heard the strangled cries of injured monsters. The confused shouts. The screaming.
A heavy smoke hung in the air.
I got up on my knees. They felt like broken glass within my burned skin. My jeans were torn. My shirt was ragged and covered in soot.
“Maddie? Zack?” I called out.
A fit of coughing to my right. Someone slapping someone else on the back.
The smoke began to clear, to rise high toward the moonlight and the Rodanian Mountains behind me.
I saw the destruction and the words I’d been about to speak evaporated on my tongue, like morning fog in the sunlight.
The eastern side of the coliseum had been blown away. The monsters that had been sitting up there in the stands were all but dust.
Fire sizzled and danced around the edges of the stone. Inky black smoke twirled toward the starlight. We had been lucky in the blast, I saw. Well, if you wanted to call being launched through the arena lucky.
No more spectators sat watching the large screens because the screens were black, their connections shorted out. Maybe the crowd finally realized this wasn’t a form of entertainment any longer. It only took an explosion and a pile of dead bodies to let them in on the secret.
There were several vampires that weren’t so lucky. Their charred remains lying there and there and over there. Blackened wings. Hands with missing fingers. A leg.
Marena Psydin’s bathtub on wheels had tipped over. A dark spot spread around her in the dirt. She flopped and writhed like a fish…out of water.
As I looked at her, I saw her blueish skin turn red. She was choking on the air. Then she stopped flopping. She was dead. Nothing I could do for her. Oh well.
Through the hole, the platform we’d been launched from looked like a puzzle piece. Where its other half was, I didn’t know. It, like almost everything else, was probably evaporated in the blast.
What wasn’t evaporated, though, were my friends.
Maddie and Zack were pretty beaten up. Zack’s forehead spilled blood from a Harry Potter cut. Maddie’s teeth were lined with red. Their hair was covered in black soot. Their clo
thes about as ripped and torn as mine were. But they were alive, and that was all that mattered. I’d never been happier to see them.
Slowly, they rose to their feet on shaky legs, Maddie leaning on Zack for support again.
From them, my eyes scanned farther. More bodies. More broken and twisted vampires. The golem, who was one of Saber Corporation’s executives, had been reduced to shattered clay. The others, besides the corpse of Marena Psydin, I didn’t see.
Then my eyes stopped on something. A twisted figure. The remains of an old man. And my heart flipped over in my chest. My body, despite all the heat and smoke around me, chilled.
It was Octavius.
He looked dead.
Deader than dead.
I took a step forward. My leg almost gave out on me. The pain in my knees was unbearable, but then I took another step and it got better. Got further away from my mind.
“Octavius!” I tried shouting. My voice was a hoarse whisper. “Octavius!” Better this time. “Octav—”
“Abe!” Zack shouted. “Look out!”
I was about five steps away from the monster-master when I heard laughing behind me.
“No!” Zack yelled. To my right, he disappeared from my peripheral vision. I spun around to see him charging the Wraith.
But, with a flick of his wrist, Zack didn’t make it within fifteen feet of Doctor Blood. He was flung backward as if hit by a speeding truck. Crashed to the dirt, skipped across broken stone and fractured bodies, then came to a halt at Maddie’s shoes.
He was lucky.
Doctor Blood was hurt. He wasn’t impervious to explosions, which had been my strategy at Perdition Cemetery a few months ago. I had activated the bomb-ball and meant to blow him to smithereens. Even if the explosion took me with him.
But he’d escaped with his dark magic. I don’t know how, but I knew I couldn’t let it happen again.
If he was as weak as he looked, maybe he wouldn’t be able to.
Had he been at full strength I was pretty sure Zack would be in pieces. Dead. Like the minotaurs.
Zack moaned. Said something along the lines of: “That hurt like a bitch.”
I positioned myself in front of Octavius. Tried standing up straight. My broken body wouldn’t let me without much pain.
“Move away from the monster-master, boy,” Doctor Blood said to me.
He lost most of his sense of humor in the explosion. Along with part of his face.
I shook my head. “If you want to get to him, you’ll have to go through me.”
Doctor Blood smiled. It was a menacing smile. If there was any humor in it I couldn’t tell. His jagged shark teeth looked hungry. His beady black eyes were full of hatred.
“I’ll deal with you in a moment,” Doctor Blood said. “You’ll get your turn. Oh, yes. Just like your idiotic father. He thought he was brave like you do and look where it got him, young Abraham. Look where he’s at.”
I clenched my hands into weak fists. All I needed to do was buy some time. Wait until Octavius was better, until he’d get up and kick Doctor Blood’s ass with his monster-master magic.
But another voice inside of my head was telling me that wasn’t going to happen.
I would have to take matters into my own hands. And I’d have to do it fast.
But how?
Doctor Blood stepped closer to me. He moved jerkily. In pain.
He was getting closer so he could use his Wraith magic to rip me apart. Maybe that was why he hadn’t killed Zack. Maybe he was saving it for me.
“Move now, young Abraham, and I promise I will make your death as painless as possible,” Doctor Blood said.
That was when I saw it. What I needed.
To my left, under a pile of rubble and stone and vampire parts, was a pulsing black orb. The orb that had once sat on top of the Boogeyman’s staff. The souls swirled around inside of it like midnight fog lit by moonlight. The source of the explosion had remained in tact during the explosion.
The souls were now calling to me. Somehow. Someway.
I had no experience in soul-slaying, and it wasn’t my intention to try to tame them. My intention was to create another explosion, hope that it didn’t kill us, hope that it killed Doctor Blood instead.
I didn’t let my gaze linger on the orb. Didn’t want to show my cards. I looked to Maddie and Zack.
Zack was probably the closest to it. He was just coming back to total awareness. I could see it in his eyes.
It was our eyes that had done it.
I glanced from him to the orb, and that was all that needed to be done. Best friends have a way of talking without words. For the most part, that way hardly worked between Zack and I. I’d say we finish each other’s…
To which he’d reply with: “Sandwiches. Man, I’m hungry.” Without skipping a beat.
This time, though, with that mutual look of destruction and understanding in our eyes, he understood. We finished each other’s sentences. Not sandwiches.
Zack struck out for the orb. He moved so fast that by the time Doctor Blood had noticed, it was already in Zack’s hands.
Of course, things, by the nature of the universe, do not always go as planned.
Zack’s hands were not meant to hold the orb of souls, less so than Doctor Blood’s were. A sizzling filled the air and the glass burnt away flesh from his palms. He bounced the ball in his hands, saying, “Ah! Ah! Shit!” reminding me of a game I used to play when I was young called Hot Potato.
Then the orb fell from his grip. Fell away from me, exactly where it didn’t need to go.
But—
Maddie was there. She read the situation and dove for the falling artifact, grabbed it firmly, screamed as it ate away her own flesh, and tossed it to me.
Doctor Blood smirked in slow motion. He wasn’t scared. Only amused.
I caught the orb. There was no pain in my hands. No burning. No sizzling.
Holy shit, I was thinking. How?
And when I caught it, I did something that seemed as normal and automatic as breathing.
I twisted the glass and freed those trapped within as easily as if it were the cap on a bottle of Coca-Cola.
With another explosion of light, souls poured from the open ball. They swarmed all around, spun like a ghastly tornado.
I could feel their anger. Their power.
But they didn’t go for me. They didn’t go for Octavius, or Zack or Maddie.
My tongue was moving, saying words I didn’t know I knew. Speaking spells and wisdom that shouldn’t have come from me.
And the souls went for Doctor Blood, as if I was in control of them.
Wispy hands reached out from the spinning mass of souls and gripped Doctor Blood’s arms, dragged him, fought over him. His limbs stretched. One finger found the inside of his mouth, pulled, making him look like a fish on a hook.
Doctor Blood screamed in agony.
In terrible pain.
I could do nothing but watch. Stunned. Wondering if I had done this, if I really had control over these souls.
There was just no way.
But—here I was.
“You haven’t seen the last of me, Crowley!” Doctor Blood managed over his screaming fits. “I will make you pay!”
It was about as clichéd a phrase a villain could use, but, honestly, it fit him. He was a clichéd villain if there ever was one.
Before the souls could completely tear him apart, he vanished.
Blink and you missed him.
There was nothing I could do. I knew that then. I still know that now. The most important thing at that moment wasn’t getting my revenge. No. It was getting my friends to safety, getting Octavius proper medical attention. Getting far, far away from the Rodanian Mountains.
I dropped the orb. The glass, no longer full, shattered on a piece of stone.
The souls hovered for a long moment, a large translucent body. No face. No eyes. But it seemed like they were looking at me. I spoke more words. An ancient lan
guage, and then the souls, like Doctor Blood, were gone.
Freed.
I turned back to Octavius. Dropped on my knees. He was breathing. But he was in bad shape.
I placed my hand on his and his eyes fluttered open. “Just like your father,” he muttered before he closed them again.
What did that mean? Was my father a soul-slayer?
There was so much I didn’t understand. How? How could I have done that and not died or even had my hands burned?
Maddie and Zack hobbled over to me. “What the heck was that?” Zack asked me. “How could you hold that thing?” He raised his hands, showed me his palms. The flesh looked like overcooked bacon.
“I-I don’t know,” I said. I needed an answer, but it would have to wait. “We have to get Octavius out of here. We have to get him—”
A new voice spoke from my left, back toward the blown open hole of the arena. “To the egg pit,” it said.
It was Fizzler. He was flanked by Gizzler and Slayer.
“Come, come,” Fizzler said.
He crossed over to us, his face distorted in pain and anguish as he navigated the chaos, the bodies. He bent down and scooped Octavius up.
With a lightning-crack, we all disappeared.
27
Standing Up
I hadn’t even noticed the feeling of my guts turning to water or the way it felt like my body was folding in on itself.
We reappeared in the egg pit. The smell was as noxious as ever, but I hardly noticed that, either.
Octavius, still cradled in Fizzler’s arms, was moved to a deep crater full of the bubbling slime. Fizzler slowly dipped the monster-master in until all that was visible was Octavius’s sharp nose.
“He will be fine,” Fizzler said. “He just needs to rest.”
“Thank you,” I managed, trying to sound strong. Like usual, my voice betrayed me. Too much had happened, too much I didn’t understand. I was glad to be alive, yes, and I was even more glad my friends were alive, but I’d been strong for so long. I deserved a break once and a while, yeah?
The Monster Games Page 18