by Dan Jolley
Greta stopped the group at a corner and glanced up and down the street. “I’ll tell you the rest when we get somewhere safe.” She started off again, and Gabe and the others hurried after her. Gabe didn’t know where Greta was taking them. They were pretty far from his house and . . . And I don’t have a house to go to anymore, do I? The realization hit him like yet another punch to the gut.
Gabe stepped up his pace until he was walking alongside Greta Jaeger. “Okay, I get that the Dawn screwed up with my uncle, but . . .” He jabbed a finger back at Jackson Wright. “How did he get here?”
“Your uncle also had ancestors who were members of the Dawn. I don’t know how, but young Mr. Wright must be a blood relation to Steven. To some degree.”
Wait a minute. If relatives get swapped between here and that other place . . .
And if Ghost Boy knew he was related to Uncle Steve . . .
Gabe whirled to face Jackson. “That’s why you didn’t want us to go into the theater! Isn’t it? You wanted that sacrifice to happen! You knew you could come back here if the Dawn sent Uncle Steve to Arcadia! This was your plan the whole freaking time!”
Jackson Wright stared at Gabe coolly, his lips sealed.
The anger rose in Gabe again. “And that monster! Is that your fault, too?”
“It’s called a null draak, dear boy,” Jackson replied, so smug it made Gabe’s teeth grind. “I have to admit, that was a bit unexpected.”
Gabe had been walking backward, keeping up with Greta, but he suddenly wanted to do nothing more than punch Jackson’s unbearable face right out of his skull. Gabe had already balled up both fists when Greta grabbed his shoulder. “In here. Come on. Off the street, now, all of you!”
Gabe let Greta usher him through a glass door and into a small café. It looked like a classic coffee-and-doughnuts shop, with a half-dozen customers seated at small round tables and a pleasant-looking college-age girl behind the counter. “Why are we here?” Gabe peered at the college girl, half-expecting her to levitate one of the coffee machines. “Is this, like, some kind of hangout for people like us? Elementalists, or whatever?”
Greta said, “Are you kidding? I haven’t had a doughnut in nine years! Here, let’s all have a seat.” She led the group toward the table farthest from the door.
Halfway there, Gabe’s disbelief got the better of him, and he shook her arm off his shoulder. “You brought us here so you can have a snack? Are you crazy for real? We don’t have time for this.”
At the sound of Gabe’s raised voice, every customer’s head turned toward them, but there were no knowing looks, no sense of threat. It was just ordinary people in an ordinary café sipping ordinary coffee, and Gabe realized Greta’s words had been for the customers’ benefit, not his. As if to prove that point, she put her arm around his shoulders again and gently turned him toward the broad picture window facing the street.
“See?” Greta asked quietly.
Gabe glanced out through the window, and his throat slammed shut. Right outside, at the edge of the sidewalk, three big, doglike creatures scratched around, sucking in great gulps of air. Trying to find us. They were creatures of the Dawn: skinless, pointed faces devoid of any features but gaping, fang-filled mouths. But unlike the hunters, these monstrosities had enormous wings in place of their front legs. Wings shockingly similar to the ones that had sprouted from the null draak’s back.
Beside him, Kaz made a small, panicked sound, and the rebar he’d been holding clanged to the floor. Immediately he stooped and grabbed it up, looking embarrassed.
“Those are abyssal bats,” Greta murmured. “More agents of the Dawn. Now can we please take our seats? I suggest we stay here until they move on.”
Stunned, the group did as she asked, all crowding around one small table. They sat there, nervously making small talk, until the three nightmare creatures spread their wings and shot away into the sky. The downdraft knocked over a heavy trash can on the sidewalk, and Gabe heard the college girl say, “Somebody really ought to call animal control,” before she hurried out to set it back upright.
“Animal control?” Kaz said sort of hollowly. “How—what do, uh, what do regular people see when they look at things like that?”
Greta Jaeger gave a tiny shrug. “Something more or less equivalent. It depends on the person. Always something easily accepted and dismissed.”
“How did you know those things were out there?” Lily asked quietly.
“The rain warned me. The rain tells me many things, just as the wind may at some point begin talking to you, dear. The rain is protecting us now. We have to stay inside for a little while.”
Jackson Wright made a noise like pfff. “You elementalists. Always jabbering on. ‘The rain told me this,’ or ‘I saw this in the flames.’ So tiresome.”
Greta speared him with an icy stare. “You are hardly one to talk, young man.”
Jackson’s expression soured. He folded his arms across his chest, slumped in his seat, and fell silent. Gabe wished he could make the boy do that on command.
“Um . . .” Kaz sneaked a peek at the café’s menu, written by hand on a small chalkboard on the counter. “How long is ‘a little while’?”
Greta Jaeger’s stare quickly shifted into a warm smile. “Long enough to order a few things. I really haven’t had a doughnut in nine years.”
Between them, Gabe, Kaz, and Lily had enough money to buy doughnuts for everyone and coffee for Greta. Ghost Boy eyeballed the display case, looking exactly like someone who hadn’t eaten in over a hundred years.
Gabe’s own stomach growled. He wasn’t sure when he’d last had any food himself. Breakfast? It seemed as if a week had passed since then.
Despite getting his favorite, raspberry-jelly-filled, though, Gabe found himself only nibbling at it. He’d taken maybe a bite and a half before he let the doughnut plop back onto the small plate the college girl had served it on. Glancing around, he realized his friends weren’t in much better shape than he was. Kaz didn’t seem hungry, and though Lily had finished her doughnut, her leg bounced up and down with such nervous energy he was afraid she might crack the tile floor.
“Gabriel.”
Gabe looked up sharply at the sound of Jackson’s voice. “What?”
With such obvious reluctance that it made Gabe happy to hear it, Jackson asked, “Are you not going to finish yours?” Only crumbs remained of Jackson’s vanilla-cream-filled.
Gabe sighed. “You know what?” He shoved the partially eaten pastry at the younger boy. Younger looking, anyway. “Knock yourself out.”
Gabe hadn’t paid Jackson any attention when they’d first sat back down at the table with their doughnuts, but he did now. It was an odd kind of amusing to see the range of emotions on Jackson Wright’s face as he bit into the raspberry-jelly-filled doughnut. For a second, only a second, all that smug, snarky, infuriating crap Jackson constantly spewed just vanished, and he looked . . . like a little boy. A little boy discovering something new and wonderful. Jackson even smiled as he chewed and swallowed.
That tiny, pleasant moment evaporated when Jackson grabbed Kaz’s doughnut off his plate without asking.
“Hey!” Kaz tried to grab it back, but Jackson held it out of his reach. “That’s mine!”
“You weren’t eating it,” Jackson said, his words garbled, spoken around another bite.
“But I might have! Give it back!”
In response, Jackson swallowed the remainder of the raspberry and crammed the entirety of Kaz’s doughnut into his mouth. Kaz slumped back as Jackson dusted the powdered sugar off his hands.
Lily gave voice to Gabe’s thoughts as she stared at Jackson: “God, you are such a creep.”
“You endure a century without eating and see how polite you are.” Jackson continued his bid for popularity by grunting at Greta Jaeger, pointing at her coffee, and miming taking a sip.
She sighed. “If you must.”
Jackson took a big sip, swallowed, and gave them all
a grin that was neither childlike nor charming. “Thank you all,” he said, without a trace of sincerity. “You’re too kind.”
Gabe was about to say something decidedly unkind when he noticed Kaz had taken out his phone. Kaz’s finger flicked up and down as he scanned headline after headline. “I guess you were right about no one else being able to see this stuff,” he said in Greta’s direction. “There is nothing online about any of it. And I’m pretty sure a giant dragon thing roaring around the Bay Area would get some coverage.”
Greta took another sip, cautiously, as if to see if it had a bad taste now that Jackson had sampled it. Satisfied, she said, “That’s correct. Those of us bound to the elements see a different world. Hunters may look like nothing more than stray dogs to the unbound. Those abyssal bats, perhaps vultures or large hawks. It depends on what the observer expects to see.” She took another sip. “The Dawn members of this plane are unbound but wear glyphs that allow them to see things for what they truly are. The null draak is another Arcadian creature. Some believe that the null draaks were human once, but the corrupting influence of Arcadia overwhelmed them.”
Kaz made a choking sound. “That giant six-winged freak show used to be a man?”
Greta continued calmly. “Or a woman. Yes. No one knows for sure, but there’s a theory that they were once members of the Dawn with no talent for magick. It’s quite rare, you know: the ability to practice the Art.”
Kaz’s face had gone pale. “That’s . . . that’s horrible.”
Greta nodded. “Becoming a null draak is a terrible fate, but not the worst one. For people like us—elementalists, as young Mr. Wright correctly said—far worse can happen.”
Gabe waited for Greta to go on, but she just turned and stared out at the rain, her mind somewhere far away.
Apparently unconcerned with Greta Jaeger’s thoughts, Jackson turned brazenly to Lily. “I don’t suppose I could borrow another nickel or two? Those pastry concoctions were not half-bad, as it turns out, but now I fancy trying one of those”—he squinted at the menu—“Icy Mocha Blast items.”
Lily narrowed her coal-black eyes at him. “Will it get you to shut up and leave us alone for a minute?” Jackson just held out his hand. Lily groaned and put a five-dollar bill in it.
While Jackson waited at the counter to get the college girl’s attention, Gabe leaned over to Greta and spoke softly. “What about him? Is he like us?”
Greta shook out of her rain-focused haze. “Yes. And no. At first glance I would have said that he was another elementalist, but seeing what he did at the theater . . .” She frowned. “He seems to wield pure magick. I’ve never encountered that before. I didn’t even know it was possible.” She gestured for Gabe, Lily, and Kaz to lean in, and again spoke just loudly enough for them to hear her. “Magick was the glue that bound together the terrestrial elements at the moment of creation. Judging by what I observed, I believe young Mr. Wright’s abilities are able to amplify your own terrestrial powers.”
Gabe turned that over in his head. “Amplify them by how much?”
Greta shrugged. “Impossible to say as yet.”
Lily cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Dr. Jaeger, could we— I, uh . . . I still don’t understand exactly what happened back there. I mean, I get that the Dawn wanted to exchange Gabe’s uncle for this Founder guy, but why did that null draak thing show up?”
“A null draak is forced into our world when someone not belonging to one of the original bloodlines enters Arcadia. Someone like that is called a null sanguis. In this case, your brother Brett. The creatures must still have some small connection to humanity. And so they provide the counterbalance to the person entering Arcadia.”
Gabe ran his hands through his hair. He wanted to pull it all out. “How do you know all this?”
“I’ve seen it happen once before.” Greta’s eyes clouded. “On the worst day of my life.”
Gabe waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. Those words just hung there, awkward in the silence. Oh my God. Is that the day—did she really—did Greta Jaeger really kill my parents? Was Jackson telling the truth about that? Gabe bit down hard on the thought. For one thing, he knew Jackson was a big fat liar. For another . . . right now Greta Jaeger was the only link he had to what was going on. He couldn’t afford to alienate her.
“Hang on, hang on a minute.” Gabe squinted at the ceiling. “If the null draak is here, that means Brett’s in Arcadia?” Greta nodded solemnly. Gabe went on: “But I’ve seen Arcadia. Right after I unlocked the Tablet, I saw a vision of it. It looks like . . . well, it looks sort of like hell.”
Greta’s eyebrows twitched. “I’m sure there are some trapped there who would agree with you.”
“Trapped?” Lily’s voice rose. “No. Brett can’t be trapped there! We’re getting him back.”
“Him and Uncle Steve both,” Gabe said, maybe a touch defensively.
“Right.” Kaz fixed his eyes on Greta Jaeger. “But how?”
Greta spread her hands. “It’s all about Balance. To get someone out, you need to send something equivalent in. If you want them back, then we know our first order of business.”
“And what’s that?” Gabe demanded.
One corner of Greta Jaeger’s mouth twitched upward. “We have to catch a dragon.”
13
Brett tried his best to get a close look at the strange woman’s face without obviously staring at her. He didn’t want the . . . the dinosaur thing to come back out. It helped that she wasn’t really paying any attention to him. All her concentration was focused on Dr. Conway. And yeah, now he could see it. The shape of the nose, the spacing of the eyes. This crazy lady could totally be Gabe’s mom.
The knowledge made his heart pound. He knew Gabe’s parents had died. And if his mother was here . . .
Dead isn’t gone. That’s what Jackson had told him.
He was on the right track!
Dr. Conway said, “Aria . . .” but the woman turned away from him and started opening and closing cabinets as if searching for something. Brett had no idea what she could be looking for. All the cabinets and drawers appeared to be empty.
“It’s so nice to have company!” She kept going, her hands fluttering as she moved around the kitchen. “Perhaps I shall bake a cake for the occasion!”
Dr. Conway sidled over to Brett, never taking his eyes off Aria. “I always thought this might have happened,” he said softly. “We tried to destroy Arcadia nine years ago, but we botched it. Our Art is delicate and must be carefully balanced. There was some variable that we missed or got wrong. A null draak appeared, and it was total chaos. Henry—Gabe’s dad, my best friend—died fighting it. I lost my leg. Greta was never the same, and we never found Aria’s body. It was a disaster. But I believed there was a chance she’d be alive here.”
Brett pulled himself out of the hurricane of thoughts swirling in his head enough to ask, “What’s a null draak?”
Dr. Conway still didn’t stop watching Aria, who’d begun humming a bizarre, off-key melody to herself as she puttered around the empty kitchen. “A creature. A huge, monstrous, destructive creature.” He went on to describe how a null draak appeared in place of anyone who entered Arcadia but was not a blood relative of someone on the other side.
“I have ancestors who were members of the Eternal Dawn,” Dr. Conway continued. “So one of them must have been exchanged for me. That’s a pretty horrifying thought. The fact that a null draak appeared nine years ago was good evidence that Aria might have been sent here when our ritual went sour. And since you don’t have a blood connection to anyone here, there’s probably a null draak rampaging through San Francisco as we speak.”
“Hang on. How do you know I’m not related to anybody in this place?” My brother is here. Isn’t he? Brett nearly said that out loud but managed to keep it to himself.
“I know because everyone who came to Arcadia when it was created, everyone who got trapped here, was a member of the Eternal Dawn. And
in addition to being crazy, they also weren’t very . . . diverse.”
Brett couldn’t help it. He rolled his eyes. “Bunch of stuck-up gringos, is what you’re saying?”
“White as milk, all of them, yes.”
“I still don’t get why you tried so hard to destroy this place.”
Finally Dr. Conway dragged his eyes away from Aria, who was completely absorbed in whisking imaginary flour into fictitious sugar. He gave Brett a look that combined skepticism with genuine bafflement. “Because magick corrupts people. And Arcadia is made almost entirely out of magick.” As if to provide an example, he gestured with one thumb toward Aria and lowered his voice. “I think that’s why she’s acting the way she is. It might have gotten to her. I’m hoping it hasn’t, though.”
Dr. Conway hadn’t seen Aria’s face change earlier. Oh, I think it’s gotten to her, all right.
“But, listen, Brett, we tried to get rid of Arcadia so that Gabe would never have to hide from the Dawn the way the rest of his family has since 1906. His bloodline is particularly special to the cult, and they’d do anything to capture him. Plus, if the Dawn had its way, they’d actually merge Arcadia with our world, and if they did that, it would be—”
Brett tried to finish the sentence in his head. Awesome? Fantastic to be reunited with people you’ve lost? Incredible to be part of a place with this much power?
Instead, Dr. Conway said, “Catastrophic. I don’t even know how many people would die. Maybe all of us. And that’s why Greta Jaeger and Gabe’s parents and I tried to do our own ritual. Tried to bring it all down. And it should have worked! We had all four elements represented! But something still went wrong. And what happened, happened . . . to Gabe’s parents, and me, and poor Greta. She didn’t even try to deny it when everything got blamed on her, which of course everyone took as an admission of guilt. It was only a good lawyer who got her into the asylum instead of prison. She’s gotten better over the years, but she was a mess for a long time. Both of us were.”