by Dan Jolley
Lily said what Gabe was thinking: “What, that’s it?”
“That’s as far as he got,” Kaz said quietly. “I wonder what this ‘Dawn’ is?”
Brett leaned over to look at the screen. “And who’s Aria?”
Gabe’s head fairly spun. He felt crushed under a whole mountain of guilt, for one thing. All this constant moving from city to city—Uncle Steve had always told Gabe that this was for his own benefit, but Gabe had never believed it. But looking around at the wreckage of their house, it was impossible not to believe it. And it wasn’t just that.
“Aria’s my mom.” Gabe said.
“But, uh, isn’t she, you know . . . ,” Lily said carefully.
“Yeah.” Gabe cleared his throat. “She and my dad died in a car wreck when I was three.” What could Uncle Steve have possibly meant by “close to getting answers about Aria’s location”?
Kaz had pulled out his phone and started tapping. “Well, here’s something. That email address belongs to a hospital on the edge of the city. This Greta Jaeger person must work there.”
“And she obviously knows more about what’s going on than we do,” Lily said. “You guys thinking what I’m thinking?”
His eyes haunted, Brett said, “We need to go there.”
Gabe turned and leaned against the edge of the desk, his mind going in what felt like a million different directions at once. He only half-heard Lily when she started speculating about what Uncle Steve could have been involved with. “You guys, this isn’t, like, a regular burglary. Something crazy happened here. It must be connected to what happened on the ferry and with Ghost Boy,” she said, echoing his thoughts from a few minutes earlier.
Gabe wasn’t really listening. He was too consumed with the sudden thought that all this, everything bad that had happened, was one hundred percent his fault. He should have listened to his uncle. He shouldn’t have gone snooping around in the office. He shouldn’t have let Brett talk him into skipping school and going out to Alcatraz. I should have been here! I could have . . .
Could have done what?
He didn’t know, and that made him even more miserable. When the doorbell rang, its sound came as a welcome relief from all the shouting and screaming inside his head. “Let me go see who that is,” Gabe told his friends. “You guys figure out how to get to this hospital, okay?”
Lily nodded. Gabe left the office and half walked, half jumped down the stairs, but paused on the landing. Wait a minute. What if it was whoever did all this, coming back for him now? Not that somebody like that would ring a doorbell, but still . . . Except, then, what if it was a neighbor? How would he explain his house looking like an exploded mine field to Mrs. Binkowski from next door?
Through the leaded-glass window in the front door, he could see the familiar outline of police officers’ hats and felt a flood of relief. Somebody must have heard all this and called the cops after all! They can put out a missing person’s report! They can help us find Uncle Steve!
Gabe almost had his hand on the doorknob when an unwelcome voice spoke up behind him. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Gabe yelped and spun around to find Jackson Wright standing not ten feet away, watching him with a grave expression. Ghost Boy didn’t look as solid as he had in the depths of the prison, but to his relief Gabe couldn’t see through him to that horrible other place, either. “You followed us? Did you trash my house? Where’s my uncle? What’d you do with him?”
Jackson’s expression didn’t change at all. “Regretfully, you cannot help him.”
Gabe’s lips stretched back in a snarl. He wondered what would happen if you punched a ghost square in the nose. “Where is he?”
“As I said, you cannot help him. But I can help you.”
Gabe gritted out, “Oh yeah? How?”
“Well, to begin with, I advise you not to let in the local constabulary. They are not what they appear to be.”
Ghost Boy sounded so smug it made Gabe want to scream. “You know what I think? I think you can take your help and shove it.” He turned and grabbed the door handle.
“You mustn’t!” Jackson shrieked, his smug composure suddenly gone, and lunged for Gabe. But when his outstretched hand touched Gabe’s shoulder, it passed right through him, leaving Gabe with nothing but the sensation of cold air on his skin.
Gabe waved a hand at Ghost Boy as if shooing away a mosquito. “Get away from me!” It worked better than Gabe had expected: Jackson Wright evaporated, vanishing like a tiny puff of smoke. Grimly satisfied at that, Gabe opened the door and looked up at the two burly policemen standing there. According to the metal tags on their uniforms, their names were Duffy and Holmes.
Gabe didn’t give them a chance to speak. He just let all the words pour out in a flood: “Officers I’m really glad you’re here somebody totally ransacked our house and my uncle Steve was here but I think they took him because he has a prosthetic leg and I found the leg upstairs can you help me please you’ve gotta help me!”
While Gabe panted, Officer Holmes eyeballed the damage to the foyer and let out a low whistle. “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day. How’d this happen?”
Gabe shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Officer Duffy gave him a reassuring smile and pulled out a pad and pen. “All right, son, we’ll get this taken care of. First off, what’s your name?”
“Gabe. Gabe Conway. My uncle’s name is Steven Conway.”
“And can you tell when this happened?”
“This morning! Everything was okay when I left a couple of hours ago, but I just got back and found it like this!”
Officer Holmes also pulled out a pad and pen. Thunder rumbled in the charcoal-gray sky. “All right, Gabe, just bear with us. We’ve got to make sure we have all your personal information, and then we can take a look around. Now, you live here with your uncle?”
“Yes. Yes, sir.”
“Just the two of you?”
“That’s right.”
Both officers scribbled on their pads. “And how long have you lived in San Francisco?” Officer Duffy asked.
Gabe thought that was an odd question to ask, but he wasn’t about to act difficult when these guys were going to help him find Uncle Steve. “Only a year. We were about to move.”
“Oh? That’s helpful. Okay, now, is Steven Conway a blood relative of yours?”
“Huh? Uh . . . no. He adopted me after my parents died.”
Officer Holmes nodded. “Fascinating. Fascinating. All right, now, have you seen something that looks kind of like a stone tablet? Green in color? Or it might have been gold. Seen anything like that, Gabe?”
Gabe came within a hairbreadth of saying “You know about the Tablet?” For a fraction of a second his mind raced with the possibility that the police already knew all about this, about everything that had happened. And that meant they would know what to do!
But then his stomach went cold. Ghost Boy’s words rang in his ears: “They are not what they appear to be.”
“Why’re you asking about that?”
Officer Duffy’s eyes took on a hard gleam. When Gabe desperately looked to Officer Holmes, the man’s face was no friendlier.
“Why don’t we step inside and get out of the rain, Gabe? We can talk all about it.”
Ghost Boy was right!
Gabe took a step back and slammed the door as hard as he could, throwing the dead bolt the moment that the wood touched the frame. No sooner had he done that than the cops started pounding on the door: “Gabe! Open up, kid!”
“What’s going on?”
Gabe spun to see Lily, Brett, and Kaz at the bottom of the stairs, watching him with wide, frightened eyes. “These guys aren’t cops!” he hissed. “Run!”
“Run where?” Kaz demanded. “The back door’s caved in!”
“Back up, go back up!” Gabe gestured frantically. “Go go go!”
And go they did, though Lily shouted over her shoulder, “This is
crazy! We’re gonna be trapped up here!”
“You got a better idea?” Gabe shouted. “No? Then upstairs it is!”
Gabe rushed up the staircase after them, but just as his feet hit the landing, the front door exploded, spraying wooden shards and splinters all over the foyer. When the sawdust cleared, the two cops stepped inside and—Gabe’s flesh crawled as he saw it happen—a line of glyphs suddenly sprang to life in a semicircle on the floor around the doorway, gleaming first silver and then a brilliant gold. Officer Duffy had already taken a running step toward Gabe before Officer Holmes saw the glyphs and tried to haul him backward. But it was too late, and the glyphs . . .
. . . detonated. A tremendous explosion ripped through the foyer, throwing both cops back out the door as if they were rag dolls.
In that instant, once and for all, Gabe Conway became a believer in magick.
So that’s what Uncle Steve meant about the house being warded!
The explosion had carried Duffy and Holmes all the way across the street and slammed them into a parked car, but as Gabe watched, they both began to stir. Gabe was pretty sure the car had taken a lot more damage than they had.
“I can’t believe that just happened,” Kaz breathed at Gabe’s shoulder.
Gabe spun to find all three of his friends there with him, staring out at the quickly recovering cops. “What are you doing down here? I told you to go upstairs!”
“Yeah, that was a great plan,” Brett said, showing a tiny bit of his old spark. “Pin ourselves down with no escape route. Besides, you just blew up the cops.”
As if in response to Brett, Officers Duffy and Holmes heaved themselves up off the street. Holmes put two fingers in his mouth and produced the loudest, shrillest whistle Gabe had ever heard, and two creatures straight out of Gabe’s wildest nightmares leaped from a patch of shadows across the street and charged straight for the ruined front door.
The creatures were vaguely canine, but skinless, just like the severed leg they’d found upstairs, and huge, like small horses. But worst of all, they didn’t have faces. Gabe stared in horror. The things had mouths, huge and gaping wide and filled with gigantic fangs and giant black tongues that lolled out, dripping horrible saliva. But the mouths were the heads’ only feature; they had no noses, no eyes, not even any ears.
Gabe took in all this in the space of two hammering heartbeats before he roared, “Get upstairs GET UPSTAIRS NOW!” He would have physically dragged his friends back up to the second floor, but he didn’t have to, because they’d all seen the same thing he had and were already sprinting up the stairs. Gabe followed, running as fast as he could.
Behind them, the skinless nightmares burst into the house. One of the creatures sprinted up the wall. The other one ran along the ceiling, just as if it were on solid ground.
Gabe tore after his friends, and all four of them rushed into Gabe’s room. Gabe slammed the door and locked it, and said, “Help me!” as he started pushing the chest of drawers. Brett and Lily both came to his aid, and they slid the heavy piece of furniture in front of the door.
Snarls reached them from outside, so deep and thick they sounded more like massive diesel engines than animals. Gabe backed away, joining his friends in a knot in the middle of the floor, as two sets of daggerlike claws pierced the bedroom door and ripped it off its hinges.
Lily and Kaz both screamed, but Gabe shouted, “The bed! Turn the bed over and get behind it!” It was the only thing he could think of to do, but it must have sounded like a decent plan to Brett, at least. Brett ran to the king-size bed and he and Gabe, working together, flipped it onto its side so that its legs pointed toward the door. All four of them got behind it and wedged themselves into a corner.
With a huge bang!, the eyeless, skinless terrors slammed the chest of drawers out of the way. Before Gabe could take a breath, they began tearing the bed apart. Great wads of mattress stuffing filled the air as the monstrosities tore through it in their frenzy to reach Gabe and his friends. Their awful weight crushed Gabe backward against the wall and pinned him painfully against Kaz, who let out an awful sound somewhere between a scream and a sob.
“Hunters!” That was Officer Duffy, his voice coming from the hallway outside the room. “We need them alive!”
“Well,” Officer Holmes amended. “Some of them.”
7
Thanks to the storm’s crazy lightning, Brett saw every detail of the massive claws that ripped through the box springs right in front of his nose. When the monsters finally got through the bed and dug into his guts, Brett was sure he’d be able to see that, too. Awesome.
Despite the mortal danger, Brett couldn’t help thinking that this was all his fault. He pushed the thought away. His Friend had told him he’d have to suffer to see Charlie again. But any amount of suffering was worth it.
It had to be less than Charlie had suffered.
The creatures—“hunters,” the fake police had called them—growled and roared ravenously as they tore at the bedding, but an immense peal of thunder masked the sound.
One of the hunters jammed its muzzle into the hole it had just ripped open, horrible teeth snapping as the stench of sulfur blasted Brett’s face.
“Keep the green-eyed boy alive,” he heard Duffy say. “And the girl. Kill the other two.”
Brett couldn’t believe this was actually happening. It was like something out of a movie. A really gory movie his grandmother definitely would not approve of him watching.
He did his best not to think about how those savage teeth would feel as they tore into his flesh. He and Kaz and Lily all dug their fingers into the frame of the box springs, desperate to hold it in place. Brett didn’t think they could keep the hunters off them for more than a few seconds, but those seconds were precious. If they want to kill me, I’ll go down swinging! And as long as I’m breathing, I won’t let them touch my sister!
Brett turned his head and was about to say “Hold on! Don’t let go!” when he noticed that Gabe wasn’t holding on at all.
Instead, Gabe had shrunk back into the corner as far as his body would allow and was making small, vague gestures with his hands, as if to ward off something. “Stop,” Gabe murmured. “Stop. Stop! Get away!”
“Gabe!” Brett shrieked. “What are you doing? Help us!” But it was as if Gabe couldn’t hear him, and Brett almost came up off the floor as the hunters finally tore the bed away from them. Both creatures dropped into a crouch, teeth bared and dripping, ready to bite and crush. The impostor cops stood just behind them, awful grins on their faces. The kind of grin you get when you’re about to eat something you’ve been looking forward to for a long time.
Brett shuddered when he realized the hunters were waiting for a command.
Officer Duffy nudged Officer Holmes with an elbow. “This is the best part, don’t you think?”
“Stop,” Gabe said, a little louder.
Officer Holmes’s grin threatened to break his face in half. “After what that one’s uncle did to my prize alpha? This is payback.”
At the top of his lungs Gabe screamed, “STOP!” The ensuing flash was so bright that, for just a second, Brett thought the house had been struck by lightning.
The overhead bulbs and the lamp on Gabe’s nightstand all exploded, the glass pulverizing into the finest dust, and fat blue arcs of electricity jumped out of the sockets and danced around Gabe’s hands. Lily and Kaz both shrieked and scrambled away from him, but Brett stayed where he was, staring. The blue-white energy swirled and churned and in the blink of an eye turned red-orange. The red-orange of flames. An inferno like a tiny sun crackled and spun in place between Gabe’s hands. Its fiery glow was reflected in Gabe’s eyes. Gabe rose to his feet, drew in a great breath, and bellowed in a voice like the roaring of a forest fire.
“GET AWAY FROM US!”
A cone of flame blasted across the room, too blindingly bright to look at, too hot to do anything about but turn and shrink away.
When Brett felt the heat f
ading, he chanced a look at what was left of Gabe’s bedroom. A massive V-shaped scorch mark marred the floor, the vertex of its angle pointing straight at Gabe. The bed itself was nothing more than a few blackened, smoldering splinters crumpled against the far wall. The hunters writhed on the ground, bodies smoking, yelping and mewling in pain. Brett watched as they righted themselves, bolted straight toward a window, and crashed through it, out into the storm.
Brett wasn’t sure what had happened to the cops.
A huge gust of wind blew what felt like a solid sheet of water in through the ruined window, and some remote part of Brett’s mind registered that as a good thing, since flames were dancing across the ceiling. No matter how badly it had been damaged, Brett didn’t think Gabe or his uncle would want their house burned down.
“Whuh . . . what happened?”
That was Gabe. Staggering, almost unconscious from the looks of it. Brett scrambled up and steadied his friend.
“A better question,” Kaz said, pointing out into the hall, “would be: ‘Why don’t we get out of here?’”
Brett followed Kaz’s pointing finger. Holmes and Duffy lay on the floor of the hall, skin blackened, clothes in shreds . . . but both still alive, twitching and groaning in pain.
“Come on, help Gabe,” Lily said. “Let’s get away from this place.”
With a cautious Kaz leading the way, and Brett and Lily supporting a still-woozy Gabe, the four of them stepped past the semiconscious cops and sprinted down the stairs.
Brett was the last one into the cable car. He had to brace himself as the car lurched into motion.
Long, rolling, crackling crashes assaulted the city, punctuated by wall-shaking booms, and sheets of rain battered the windows. He checked the time. It was two-thirty in the afternoon but might as well have been eleven o’clock at night, judging by how dark it was. Streetlights did little to penetrate the gloom.
They’d run flat out for ten blocks once they got out of Gabe’s house, only slowing once they got to a busier street. That was when Brett realized how soaked he was. The rain was completely nuts—the kind of downpour you can’t imagine lasting for more than a couple of minutes.