by Dan Jolley
Gabe tried to remember the way it had felt on the ferry. When his mind seemed to flow out of his skull and feel the water and the air and the rocks all around him. Except this time . . .
This time I’m going for fire, just like I did back in my bedroom.
The blazing brazier on the stage pulsed and throbbed like a heart. The power of the theater’s electric lights flowed through the wires as if they were veins and arteries. Small pinpoints of power jumped out at him from the cultists themselves, coming into focus as glowing, burning rectangles. Cell phones, Gabe realized. Freaking cell phones!
“We can do this, guys! We can do this, because we’ve done it before! Lily saved my life with air! Brett must have caused that massive wave on the ferry! I blasted the hunters with fire back at my house! We can do this!”
Voice shaking, Kaz wailed, “I haven’t done any of that! What am I supposed to do?”
Gabe’s eyes fell on the stone cairn on top of the altar the cultists had set up. “Those rocks! Kaz, do like Greta Jaeger said! Take control!”
One of the cultists, a huge, burly man holding a knife so big it qualified as a sword, rushed straight for Kaz and bellowed like a roaring bear. “We’ll cut you into confetti for this!”
Kaz shrieked and threw out his hands—
—and the rocks flew out of the cairn like bullets from a machine gun. They slammed into the huge cultist with resounding, crunching thumps, one to the kidneys, one square in the rib cage, and one straight into his ear. The cultist staggered, eyes unfocusing, and the last stone caught him solidly in the hip. That impact knocked him off balance and sent him hurtling from the stage. He crashed into the orchestra pit, the huge knife falling from limp hands, and groaned feebly.
A frightened, collective gasp echoed through the other cultists. As one, they took a step back, suddenly unsure.
Kaz looked at Gabe. His eyes had turned solid, stony gray, and a massive grin spread across his face. “Well, what do you know?”
Gabe whirled to Lily and Brett. “See? See? We can do this! We can take control!” He faced the hunters. Unlike the cultists, they didn’t act scared at all. Gabe filled his lungs with air, and when he let the words loose, they whooshed and crackled and roared like an inferno:
“I am bound to fire!”
Gabe’s vision became tinted in fiery orange, as if brilliant light was flowing from his eyes. He could almost feel the heat. Whatever the hunters saw made them back up a step. He lifted an arm, and slender bolts of lightning sprang from every electrical socket in the theater and converged on Gabe’s hand . . .
Which caught fire.
Gabe extended one finger toward the pack of hunters—“Shoo!”—and sprayed a cone of flame across the back of the stage. The hunters scattered, howling and yelping, leaving trails of smoke behind them as they fled.
Beside him, Lily’s eyes again turned gray white, and her voice howled through the theater like the coldest, most cutting winter wind: “I am bound to air!” A blast like a tornado picked up ten cultists and scattered them toward the back of the theater, each body flying through the air like a tossed rag doll. Gabe watched, wincing, as the cultists came to bone-cracking halts against walls, doors, and ornate support columns.
Brett’s words seemed to come from far away. Deep, distorted, as if spoken from the bottom of the ocean. “I am bound to water.” Gabe looked up at the ceiling, where the sprinkler system burst to life, filling the theater with water. Water that twisted and curved in midair. As Gabe watched, the water coalesced into rock-hard projectiles of ice that rained down on a dozen more cultists, bashing noses and jaws and slicing upraised hands until they battered the consciousness out of their targets. The cultists all went down in heaps.
But that still left at least fifteen cultists out there amid the seats, and every one of them produced some kind of weapon and charged toward the stage. Kaz shouted, “What do I do? I’m out of rocks!”
Gabe put a hand on Kaz’s shoulder. “Kaz. You’re bound to earth. What do you think this building is sitting on?”
Kaz gaped at him for a second. Then—whirling and growling through gritted teeth—Kaz raised both arms like a conductor demanding more volume from his orchestra.
His voice emanated from somewhere directly below them, enormous and raspy and impossibly deep, like the plates of the earth’s crust grinding together. “I. AM. BOUND. TO. EARTH!”
The building trembled. Dust cascaded from the ceiling, mixing with the water from the sprinklers, as the floor beneath their feet bucked and shook. Gabe had never heard the noise a rock slide made before, but he felt sure it sounded very much like this.
A wall of stone burst up through the floor of the theater, right in front of the charging cultists. Gabe winced as he heard the sound of multiple faces crashing into the unforgiving rock. But Kaz wasn’t finished. He thrust out his hands and curled his fingers like claws, and the rock wall curved, surrounding the injured cult members in a cage of stone.
Panting, Kaz let his hands drop and sagged into Gabe. “Oh my God,” he breathed. “I want to do this all day, every day, for the rest of my life!”
But a voice cut through the cries and whimpers from the dismantled cultists: Primus, still speaking the alien words. Gabe shook his head, clearing it—in the middle of all the chaos, he’d honestly forgotten about Primus—and focused on her, just in time to see her raise a slim silver dagger, poised over Uncle Steve’s chest.
Ice-cold with terror, Gabe screamed, “Stop her stop her SOMEBODY STOP HER!”
He broke into a run, but Brett slid past him, riding an ice-slick trail across the stage. As he moved, Brett shucked off his backpack, shouted, “Catch!” and flung it to Kaz, who caught it with both hands. Without that extra weight, Brett zoomed toward the altar faster than an Olympic speed skater. Gabe tried to follow, Kaz and Lily right beside him, but the hunters came out of nowhere, four of them darting between Gabe and his uncle.
Lily shrieked, “Bad dogs!” and made a huge sweeping motion with her arms. A gale-force wind picked up the creatures and tumbled them through an open side door. The wind slammed the door shut behind them, and Kaz made a crushing motion with one hand; the foundation beneath the door buckled, crimping it shut. Gabe heard the hunters howling as they threw themselves against the door from the other side but couldn’t get through.
Gabe sprinted past Kaz and Lily. He saw Brett crash into the altar holding up Uncle Steve’s stretcher just as Primus screamed, “Netch shvee oetveer!” and plunged the silver dagger into his uncle’s chest.
Gabe gasped as if his own chest had been stabbed.
“NO!” Gabe drew back a hand and made a motion like throwing a punch, and a fireball the size of a cinder block streaked across the stage and struck Primus square in the stomach. The impact jerked the dagger out of Uncle Steve and knocked the woman away, leaving her shouting and frantically slapping flames out of her robes.
Gabe took one running step toward the altar before what felt like a ton of slimy bricks crashed into him. Lily hadn’t gotten rid of all the hunters after all. The fifth one had just knocked Gabe sprawling toward the stage’s edge. As the hunter stalked closer to him, Gabe shouted to Brett at the top of his lungs, “HELP MY UNCLE! PLEASE!”
Over the hunter’s skinless shoulder, Gabe could see Uncle Steve begin to convulse, and even as Brett tried to pull him off the altar, blood began to spread out of the wound. But it wasn’t normal bleeding. Instead of simply pooling onto the floor, the blood slid along the length of Uncle Steve’s body, enveloping him like a bizarre red cocoon.
“What—what is that?” Kaz asked in horror.
Gabe had no idea. It was as if the blood had a mind of its own.
Brett had been applying direct pressure to the wound, trying to stop the bleeding. But instead of slowing, the weird blood membrane flowed up over his hands, and then his wrists. Gabe watched his friend try to pull away from the blood, but it seemed to grip him fast. Whatever it was, Brett was just as stuck in it as
Uncle Steve.
From somewhere on the other side of the altar, Primus’s scream rang out: “A null sanguis! The ritual is corrupted! Run, Brethren! Run!”
Gabe knew the Latin words “null sanguis” translated roughly to “no blood.” What did that mean?
He didn’t have time to consider it because, with a shock, Gabe realized the blood membrane was the same thing he’d seen when he first touched the Emerald Tablet back in Uncle Steve’s office. After he’d passed out, in his dream he’d been chained to a stone slab and looking up at a film of blood.
Gabe got back onto his feet, blasted the hunter away from him with a burst of flame, and tried once more to reach his uncle. But by then it was too late. The blood membrane had almost completely enveloped Uncle Steve and Brett and begun to grow, expanding like a massive, grotesque balloon. Vaguely, Gabe was aware that many of the cultists who remained in the theater were bolting for the exits. Primus was gone, too.
His path finally clear, Gabe lunged across the stage toward the altar, arms outstretched, ready to plunge them into the membrane. I’ll haul them both out myself! I can’t lose my uncle and Brett! I’ve got to help them, I’ve got to!
But he never reached the cocoon. Kaz grabbed him around the waist and hauled him backward.
Gabe shoved Kaz away. “What are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” Kaz demanded as Lily rushed over to join them. “They could both be dead in there! You want to die, too?”
Lily grabbed Kaz, her eyes wild. “Is Brett in there? Is Brett in there? We have to get him out! We have to!”
Kaz’s eyes flashed gray, and when he clamped his hands on Gabe’s and Lily’s upper arms, the sudden strength in his grip made them both gasp. Kaz’s voice was deeper and more, well, gravelly than Gabe had ever heard it. “Of course we’ll help them! But we can’t help if we’re dead! And we’re gonna be dead if we don’t get away from that!”
As Kaz dragged him and Lily away, Gabe blinked and looked past Kaz at the blood cocoon. He couldn’t see Uncle Steve or Brett at all now. The membrane swelled and swelled, until it was more than half the height of the massive theater—and off to one side, a tiny bubble-like protrusion appeared. It detached itself from the larger mass, hit the ground, and split open . . . to reveal a boy. A blood-and-goo-covered boy, but definitely a young human male.
Lily shouted, “Brett? Brett!”
Gabe’s heart almost broke at the relief he heard in Lily’s voice. Because, while he couldn’t tell who the boy was, he knew with complete certainty that it wasn’t Brett Hernandez. He thought that deep down maybe Lily knew it, too, but her grief and desperation were making her grasp at any possibility that her brother was safe.
Then something enormous pushed against the inside of the main mass. A roar erupted from it that shook the building all the way to its foundation . . . and a gargantuan, leathery wing burst through the red membrane, its clawed tip brushing the theater’s ceiling.
10
For a long, agonizing moment, all Gabe could do was stare.
Bit by bit, the horrendous sight started to make sense. The thing that had emerged from the membrane had no skin, he could tell that for sure, just sinewy muscle, like the hunters. And okay, that was definitely a head, because a mouth split the featureless muscle and bone, revealing teeth as long as a grown man’s arm. The mouth got worse: another, slightly smaller set of teeth was nestled just inside the first one.
A horrifying sense of déjà vu swept through Gabe. I’ve seen this thing before.
A second wing unfurled. Another set sprang free after the first one and another one after that, until six wings trembled and twitched in an undulating coordination that made Gabe’s stomach clench with recognition.
This is one of the creatures I saw flying around the towers in that horrible version of San Francisco! Did that mean . . . had he seen the place Primus was talking about? Had he gotten a glimpse of this “Arcadia,” where all these terrible things were coming from? And if this mammoth creature was from Arcadia, why was it here?
A shrill scream from off to his left finally made Gabe tear his eyes away from the monstrosity. He’d been so busy staring at it that he hadn’t registered how terrified the cultists were. They bolted in every direction, shrieking at the tops of their lungs. One of them bellowed, “It’s a null draak! Run for your lives!”
Run. Yes! Snap out of it, Gabe!
He spun, looking for Kaz and Lily, but almost lost his footing when the enormous creature—the “null draak”—slammed one clawed foot into the theater floor. It roared, louder than a freight train, a horrible sound that made Gabe’s insides quiver like jelly.
A hunter growled somewhere behind him. While Gabe had been distracted by the null draak, the hunters had broken through the door. But instead of coming after him and his friends, the hunters seemed to be focused on the massive creature.
With good reason, it turned out. The null draak casually stretched out one wing and swept up two of the hunters, flinging them against the far wall. They yelped in pain and limped away into the shadows.
This thing wasn’t messing around, but Gabe forced himself to focus on what had happened to Uncle Steve and Brett. They’d vanished as soon as the null draak appeared. Where are they? He searched the debris of the room and caught sight of the kid who’d popped out of the side of the cocoon just before the monster. If the boy came from wherever it was his uncle and Brett had gone, then maybe he’d know how to get them back.
The null draak’s gargantuan, sightless head swung away from him, and Gabe darted toward the mystery boy. He already knew it wasn’t Brett, but through the blood and membranous goo, it looked like . . . Jackson? But he wasn’t translucent and glowing anymore. Now he just looked like a regular, flesh-and-blood, blond-haired dork.
As he ran, Gabe scooped up the blood-stained dagger Primus had used on Uncle Steve. Three hunters stood between him and the kid. They were focused on the null draak, but they got more interested as Gabe got closer. The beasts’ fangs dripped with some hideous, unspeakable liquid as they stalked toward him.
But already the electricity thrumming along the cables inside the theater’s walls seemed to call out to Gabe. Beckoned to him. He had only to will it to come to him and he knew it would.
A half-circle-shaped wall of blinding fire surged up between him and the canine monsters, and the hunters yelped and scattered backward, unable to get through the barrier of pure, destructive energy.
So this is what real power feels like. A smile spread across Gabe’s face. If anyone had been there to see it, he or she might have said that it was not a nice smile at all.
“Gabe!” That was Lily’s voice, somewhere over to his right. He craned his neck and tried to spot her, but the flame-wall was too bright to see past. “Gabe, behind you!”
Gabe heard the click-click-click of hunters’ claws on the hardwood floor behind him. I thought the null draak had taken care of those two! Gabe swung the fiery wall around to block them, except that left him unprotected from the first three. He snarled, trying to extend the wall, but the edges frayed and fizzled. Apparently his mad fire skills had a limit. That sense of power he’d found so delicious left him in a heartbeat, replaced with the certainty that he was about to get torn to shreds.
“Guys! I could use some help here!”
“We’re trying to get to you!” That was Kaz. “There’s kind of a giant dragon in the way is the thing!”
He was about to swing the flame-wall toward the first three hunters again when the null draak let out a bone-shaking roar. The massive beast whipped its eyeless head toward the hunters. Zeroing in on the cluster of three, it took a great breath and breathed a cloud of something onto them. Acid? It must have been acid, because the three hunters dissolved into a foul-smelling, soupy mass, along with the floor underneath them and part of the wall nearby.
Holy freaking crap, it’s on our side!
The eyeless face swung toward him. Drew in another breath.
> Or not.
Gabe had no idea whether his fiery wall could protect him from whatever kind of super-disintegrator murder acid the null draak was about to spew at him, and he had no intention of finding out. He was about to throw himself completely off the stage when Kaz’s voice rang out again, this time from the back of the theater.
“Hey! Dragon-breath! Over here!”
The null draak was still turning toward Kaz when a chunk of rock the size of a sofa slammed straight into the side of its muzzle. The impact would have propelled the rock all the way through an average house, would have crushed a full-size SUV beyond recognition, and would definitely have turned a human into a puff of red mist.
But the boulder bounced off the null draak’s head. It was hard to tell, since the thing didn’t have any eyes, but Gabe thought it looked really, really annoyed.
“Gabe!” Lily shouted this time, from right next to the exit doors. “Come on! Run!”
But what about Uncle Steve and Brett? Gabe knew the answer. He just didn’t want to admit it to himself. His uncle and his friend were gone, and for now he had to concentrate on not getting dissolved by a giant acid dragon. Gabe leaped off the stage and hustled up the aisle toward his friends.
Out of the corner of his eye, Gabe saw Jackson Wright finally get to his feet, still up on the stage near the multiwinged monster. Jackson wiped blood and goo out of his eyes, raised his hands, and—Gabe blinked—created a shining, spinning orb of golden light about the size of a beach ball.
Even in the midst of all the fear and adrenaline and oversize skinless monsters, this surprised Gabe enough to make him stumble.
The orb spun and crackled in the air in front of Jackson Wright, and instantly every bit of the null draak’s attention clamped down on it.
Like a cat with a ball of yarn.
“A null draak in the middle of San Francisco.” Jackson sounded every bit as condescending and insufferable as he had the last time they’d spoken. “Well, you’ve really done it now. He’ll make 1906 look like a picnic in the park.”