Five Elements #1

by Dan Jolley

  Lily’s jaw fell open as Gabe reached her. “Is that Ghost Boy?”

  “What, now he’s real?” Kaz threw his hands up. “Okay, you know what, I quit. None of this makes any sense. I’m officially done with logic.”

  Watching Jackson keep the null draak distracted with the glowing orb, Gabe felt a wave of rage sweep over him, just as hot as the flames he’d used to keep the hunters at bay. He wasn’t sure exactly how, but one way or another, he knew Jackson had caused every bit of this disaster, and Gabe promised himself the prissy little dweeb would pay for it.

  Just not yet. First they had this mountainous, sword-toothed dragon to deal with.

  “Okay, let’s go let’s go let’s go!” Kaz practically hopped up and down. “All the hooded weirdos have cleared out! Let’s make tracks!”

  “You can’t!” Jackson shouted. He flung the golden orb away from him, and the null draak spun in place to go after it, gouging huge furrows in the stage and the theater floor as it did. Jackson came pounding up the aisle toward them. “You brought this creature here! You’re responsible for its disposal!”

  Gabe scowled. “We didn’t bring anything here! None of this is our fault!”

  “Perhaps not.” Jackson produced another gleaming golden orb and sent it rocketing down the length of the theater.

  What element is that supposed to be? What’s he doing?

  The null draak roared and batted at it with one enormous, black-clawed foot. Jackson went on: “But if you just run away and turn it loose, you’ll be the ones who let it destroy the city.”

  “What are we supposed to do to that thing?” Lily waved her hands. “I can make big winds! I don’t think that’s going to do much more than tick it off!”

  Kaz nodded. “Yeah. I put everything I had into socking it in the jaw with that boulder, and it just laughed.”

  Jackson’s eyes shimmered and turned an unsettling shade of gold. “You haven’t given it everything.” The null draak roared and spun toward them, but Jackson went on in the same calm, obnoxious tone. “Gabriel. Send a fireball at our bellicose friend.”

  The null draak’s wings were trembling less now, and extending farther and farther from its body. Gabe realized it was in the process of drying them off and limbering them up. And when it finished that, it could burst out of the theater and take flight. Gabe still wanted to run away. Run away; find some dry, warm, brightly lit corner to hunker down in; and try his level best to forget that any of this had ever happened. But looking at the null draak, and at the faces of his friends, something changed, deep down in Gabe’s most basic makeup. Who else in San Francisco knew what was going on? Who else could do what they could do?

  No one.

  Jackson’s right. This is up to us.

  Gabe reached for the power flowing all around him, wound up for another punch-like gesture, and unleashed a fireball.

  Just as he did, Jackson thrust out one of his own hands. A flash of golden light infused Gabe’s burst of flame, and the fireball split into six. All six fiery missiles streaked straight at the otherworldly beast, each targeting one of its six wings, and each one hammered home. The null draak screamed. Flames coated its wings, and it beat them frantically against each other, slamming and writhing until the fire went out.

  “What was that?” Gabe demanded. “What did you do?”

  “You’re welcome,” Jackson said smugly. “Now come on. Lily, isn’t it? Let’s see what we can accomplish.”

  Jackson’s golden light flashed again as Lily focused her power. What would have been a powerful wind became something like the eyewall of a hurricane, tangling the null draak’s wings and sending the creature crashing into the back wall. The stage collapsed under the monster’s weight. The draak screamed again.

  “Come on!” Jackson bellowed. “I witnessed what you did, Kaz, caging those Eternal Dawn vermin! Cage this monstrosity now! Pin it to the earth!”

  Breathing hard, his eyes gone stony gray again, Kaz gritted his teeth. Golden light sheathed massive pillars of stone as they erupted through the theater’s floor. The pillars shimmered and twisted and turned to metal, curving over the null draak’s body and tightening until they became bars as thick as the trunks of redwoods.

  Panting, Kaz almost collapsed, and only didn’t because he grabbed hold of Gabe. “Is that it?” Kaz sucked in great gulps of air. “Did we do it? Is it trapped?”

  As if in answer, the null draak unleashed its loudest roar yet and flexed its grotesque, skinless muscles against its earth-born prison. The bars creaked . . . groaned . . . began to bend . . . and as Kaz cried out, they snapped, leaving only ragged, metallic stumps protruding from the ruined floor.

  Jackson let out a series of curse words that Gabe had never heard before. “All right, clearly it’s too strong. We have to run for it. And that probably won’t do any good, because now that we’ve angered it, it will surely track us down. Oh well, I suppose San Francisco had a good run.”

  As if on cue, half of the theater’s ceiling buckled and collapsed. Waves of pounding rain hammered down on the null draak, and a column of water descended from the ceiling. No, not a column. The liquid cylinder twisted and became something more like a corkscrew, easily ten feet across at its narrowest point.

  Lily clutched Gabe’s arm. Even the null draak seemed taken off guard by the spiraling, watery tower.

  In hushed tones Kaz said, “But Brett was the one who could do water stuff. If he’s gone, then who . . . ?”

  The tower touched down on the stage, spraying water all over the theater, and a figure stepped out of it onto the splintered floor. A figure with long, gray hair and wearing hospital scrubs. Gabe recognized her instantly. “It’s Greta Jaeger!” he gasped.

  Jackson rolled his eyes. “Oh, splendid.”

  Greta spread her arms wide, fingers splayed, and the towering column sprouted dozens of smaller coils. Every one of them moved as if with a mind of its own, but every one of them went after the null draak. Some harassed it, knocking it off balance, pulling at its wings; others took a more straightforward approach and slammed into it like watery battering rams. At the same time, Greta Jaeger glanced at Gabe and his friends, then turned her face up to the pounding rain. Streams of rainwater began to clump together around her, growing more and more solid and coalescing into glistening masses of pure water. It was amazing—like some kind of movie special effect come to life right in front of them. As the shapes developed, Gabe realized what she was doing.

  “Wait—that one looks like me!” Lily pointed. “And that’s you, Kaz! And Gabe, and even Ghost Boy here. We’re all over the place!”

  She wasn’t exaggerating. As Greta’s whips of water kept beating the null draak, the rain had manifested dozens and dozens of mirror images of Gabe and his friends. The null draak lunged forward and brought its teeth together on one of the images of Gabe, snapping it in half, so that several gallons of water splashed onto the floor. The creature reared back, tossing its head in one direction and then another.

  “She’s got it confused,” Gabe whispered. “Does this mean it won’t come after us now?”

  With another ear-splitting roar, the null draak’s patience appeared to run out. Extending its multiple sets of wings, it took advantage of the enormous hole in the ceiling and leaped up in the air. Gabe, along with everyone else in the theater, was knocked off his feet by the unearthly downdraft as the null draak rose up through the ceiling and winged away.

  Kaz had covered his head with his arms. Muffled, his face still pressed to the floor, he asked, “Is it over?”

  Lily helped Gabe to his feet. “Of course it’s not over,” she gritted out. She whirled on Jackson. “Where’s my brother?”

  11

  Brett’s first hazy thought when he regained consciousness was, What’s wrong with the sky?

  He was lying on his back on a surface made of . . . a bunch of small, round, hard things? Cautiously he sat up. Yep. Cobblestones. Where are there cobblestones?

  The
fog in his brain cleared enough for him to take in his surroundings with something like objectivity. He sat in a small courtyard bounded on three sides by brick buildings. Except the bricks weren’t the right color. Instead of red, or gray, or any other color he’d ever seen, they looked more like . . . honey? Definitely some shade of yellow that bricks weren’t supposed to be.

  Also, the sky was all kinds of wrong. Skies are blue! Or gray, or maybe white if it’s about to snow. They definitely were not freaking orange, and they didn’t have weird bloodred streaks torn in them. Brett had seen this kind of sky only once before—on Alcatraz as he’d looked through the outline of Jackson into that messed-up version of San Francisco.

  He couldn’t quite get his eyes to focus properly. That’s how it felt, anyway. From the courtyard to the buildings, right down to individual bricks, it was as if nothing had any hard, defined edges. Things just sort of . . . faded. I must have hit my head when I landed. He felt his skull but didn’t find any telltale knots or bumps or cuts. Okay, then why does everything look like I’m dreaming? And it wasn’t just the bizarre, persistent blur that kept throwing him. Even beyond the bricks, the colors were all wrong. Objects seemed deeper, richer. It’s like I’m in an oil painting.

  Brett got to his feet, and that involved yet another thing he couldn’t explain. He popped up to a standing position with almost no effort, as if his body had suddenly decided to weigh less than it usually did. It made him think of the footage he’d seen of astronauts bouncing around on the moon’s surface.

  A dread-filled voice from behind him made Brett spin around. “Oh no. Oh no. What are you doing here?”

  Standing there in the courtyard, not ten feet away, was Gabe’s uncle, Steven Conway. Brett took a second to come up with something to say, and in that second several gears ticked over in his head, one of which was the very clear memory of Dr. Conway’s mangled, ruined prosthetic leg lying on the floor of his office. Brett’s eyes darted down to Dr. Conway’s ankle, the one that normally revealed a flash of metal between the hem of his pants and the top of his shoe, and saw what appeared to be normal, healthy skin.

  No WAY.

  “Dr. Conway, did you—is that—did you grow your leg back?”

  Steven Conway looked down. He lifted his leg and wiggled his foot around. His voice definitely held a note of wonder as he said, “Well . . . how about that?”

  More than elemental magick or hooded cultists or blood cocoons, the sight of Dr. Conway’s flesh-and-blood leg made Brett’s brain want to turn inside out. “How is that possible?”

  “Never mind.” Dr. Conway took Brett’s arm and started leading him out of the courtyard. “Come on, we need to move. It’s not safe here.”

  “But—”

  “Later.”

  All the questions Brett had jumbled up in his brain and wedged themselves into a logjam. Unable to pick one, any one to ask, Brett just kept his mouth shut and let Dr. Conway haul him by the arm. The memory of fighting off the hunters in the theater with his friends danced behind his eyes. It didn’t seem real. None of this seemed real.

  When they reached the street, the scene became even stranger. Oh my God . . . the horses!

  Dozens of them lay across the cobblestones, every one of them dead. Most of them still had some sort of tackle buckled onto them, and a couple were still fastened to carts, which had overturned when the horses fell. Those poor animals! What happened to them?

  The city where they stood looked sort of like San Francisco, but . . . somehow off. It took several seconds for Brett to realize what was wrong. Or, not wrong exactly, but absent. There was nothing modern. No streetlights, no satellite dishes. No electronic billboards. It was like standing inside the world’s biggest museum, all of it dedicated to the turn of the twentieth century. Gas-burning lampposts dotted the cracked sidewalks. Every street was paved with the same old-fashioned cobblestones.

  What had happened here? At least half the buildings looked as if they’d been hit with bombs. Roofs had caved in, storefronts had crumbled, and great, ragged crevasses ran through the streets.

  “What hit this place?”

  “I’ll explain when we get to safety.”

  Brett frowned. “But it doesn’t look like anybody’s here. What are we trying to get away from?”

  As he said those words, a series of shadows streaked across the street, and Dr. Conway jerked his head up to stare straight overhead. Brett followed, and saw a swarm of . . . somethings. They were too high up, and their edges too blurry, for him to tell what they were as they swooped and twisted above him and Dr. Conway. Once again Brett felt a rough hand grab his arm. “In here. Now.”

  He let Dr. Conway drag him into one of the less-destroyed buildings along the edge of the street. They waited, barely breathing. The shadows darted and flitted across the ground outside for six or seven long moments. When they finally left, Brett gulped in some air and looked around.

  “Holy cow,” he whispered. “Is this a candy shop?”

  Dr. Conway let go of Brett and gave the place a once-over. “Used to be, yes, I suppose.”

  Brass-and-leather stools were lined up in front of a marble counter, on top of which sat big glass cases. A few of the cases still had candy in them, just sitting there in big heaps, waiting to be fished out with the pair of shiny tongs that hung behind the counter. Brett peered at one of the piles. The candy was sort of amber colored—Is everything in this place some shade of yellow?—and oblong, maybe an inch and a half in length. It also sported a healthy coating of dust.

  “That must be hoar hound,” Dr. Conway said from right behind him. “Common treat for kids of this time. You wouldn’t like it. Even without the, ah, ‘dust jacket.’”

  Brett brushed aside what he thought had been an attempt at humor. “What do you mean, ‘of this time’? Where are we?”

  Dr. Conway beckoned Brett farther back into the shop, away from the street. “We’re in a place called Arcadia. In 1906, the Eternal Dawn attempted a ritual meant to bring more magick to our world, but they botched it. Instead of achieving what they wanted, they created this: a place sort of right behind Earth where magick is concentrated. That creation of Arcadia also caused the ’06 earthquake, which all these ruins reflect.” Dr. Conway pointed to one of the dead horses outside. “Time doesn’t work the same way here as it does in our world. The real world. Some things are stuck, some aren’t. That’s why those horses don’t look as if they’ve been dead more than a day or so.”

  “Huh?” This place caused the Great San Francisco Earthquake? Time is different here? If Dr. Conway told him that up and down had switched places, Brett would have to believe him, because right now he couldn’t tell one from the other.

  “Maybe it’s easiest to think of it as a kind of pocket dimension. A place that looks like part of our world but has completely different rules.”

  “So . . .” Brett gestured around him. “This is like another San Francisco?”

  Dr. Conway shook his head emphatically, and Brett got the impression the man was only keeping hold of his composure by the tips of his fingers. “This is not San Francisco. It isn’t even the same reality. This is something much darker. A shadow city.”

  “You’re saying—” Brett’s heart sped up. Could it be possible? Had Jackson told him the truth after all? “We’re not in the real world anymore?”

  “No. This is a place where magick was concentrated, and now it’s . . . festered. For better than a hundred years.”

  But Brett had stopped listening after Dr. Conway said no. His heart leaped. He was precisely where he wanted to be! The place he’d been trying to get to for a very long time.

  Dr. Conway went to the front of the store and cautiously peered outside. “Okay, I think they’re gone. We need to get moving again.” He beckoned to Brett. “I might know where we can go.”

  Brett joined him, fighting to keep from bursting out in giggles. He was no longer on Earth. He was right where he wanted to be. Jackson had been telling th
e truth: there were other worlds. This must be where Charlie is!

  As they walked, and as Brett’s brain slowly grew accustomed to Arcadia’s saturated colors and dreamlike shapes, Dr. Conway softly cleared his throat. “I need you to walk me through how you got here, Brett.”

  Brett squinched up his face. “Well, let’s see. That creepy chick they were calling Primus had just stabbed you with a wicked-looking dagger, and I was trying to get the wound to quit bleeding—”

  “No. I mean, start at the beginning. When did the rules of the world start to change for you?”

  “Okay. Uh . . .” Brett took a deep breath. He didn’t see how he’d be able to fill Uncle Steve in without making himself look pretty bad, but he figured he owed him some kind of explanation, what with having set into motion the series of events that got them sent to a shadow dimension. “I guess I’ll go ahead and apologize in advance, but, uh . . . it started when I took the map out of your office.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

  Dr. Conway grasped Brett’s shoulder and gently forced him to make eye contact. The look on the man’s face told Brett what it’d feel like to be one of Dr. Conway’s unprepared students. “You’d better tell me everything, Brett.”

  Brett told Dr. Conway a lot. He told him about the map and the tunnels and the Friendship Chamber and the Tablet.

  But he didn’t tell him everything. He didn’t tell him about Jackson, and he definitely didn’t tell him about Charlie. Brett’s agreement with Jackson had gotten all fouled up, but he wasn’t going to risk breaking his promises now. Not after everything he’d been through to see his brother.

  Though he left out some details, the story was still a lengthy one. Brett wasn’t sure how long they picked their way through the shattered, burned, collapsed wreckage of 1906-era not–San Francisco, but it felt as if he’d been talking for more than an hour before he finished his tale. Dr. Conway hadn’t said much during the story, only asked a question here and there. But every time Brett glanced over at him, the tension in his face had screwed his features tighter and tighter.