Five Elements #1

by Dan Jolley

  As Gabe fumbled in his pocket, Jackson spoke up again. “You have a key to your uncle’s place of business? He trusts you that much?”

  “It’s not exactly his place of business.” Gabe popped the key in the lock. “It’s just where he keeps a bunch of books . . . and some weird chalk, I guess.”

  The door swung wide, and Jackson followed Gabe inside. It immediately felt strange to be there, in Uncle Steve’s untouched office, given everything else he and his friends had been through in the last twenty-four hours. At least none of the other professors has stopped us. If any of them were looking for Uncle Steve, Gabe wondered what kind of explanation he’d give for his uncle’s disappearance into a shadowy pocket dimension. Peering at the desk and the bookshelves and the worn fake-leather couch and the antique globe in the corner, Gabe could almost pretend nothing bad had happened. Almost.

  “Where should we look?” Jackson asked.

  “There’s really only one place.” Gabe sat down at his uncle’s desk. “It’s not like he could slip chalk in between the pages of a book, so it’s got to be in here.” He opened the center drawer and pushed on what looked like a knothole in the wood grain, and a false bottom popped up. Gabe grinned. “Ha! And he told me he never kept anything in here!”

  Gabe reached in and pulled out a cloth-wrapped object about the size of a deck of playing cards, tied with old, rough hemp twine. Gabe could feel the outline through the cloth of several sticks of what had to be the chalk, and was about to untie it to be sure, when a jovial, British-accented voice boomed out, “What’s that you’ve got there, Gabe?”

  Gabe almost dropped the chalk—he was afraid he’d almost swallowed his tongue, too—but managed to tuck it quickly into his jeans pocket. “Oh, hi, Professor Juniper. I’m, ah, just picking something up for my uncle.”

  In the doorway, looking an awful lot like Santa Claus in a tweed jacket, stood a gloriously bearded man in his seventies: Professor Abram Juniper. Hovering at his right was a tall, lanky young woman with an enormous mass of red curls exploding from her head. Professor Juniper’s teaching assistant, Mandy Carson. Gabe knew them both fairly well, since he’d been seated with them at one of Uncle Steve’s horrendously boring faculty dinners six weeks ago.

  Seems more like a lifetime ago.

  “And where is Steven?” Professor Juniper asked, tucking his hands into his pockets. “He missed his afternoon classes. We’ve been in a bit of a crunch, filling up his schedule with no notice.”

  “Oh . . .” Gabe tried to seem casual about it. Think fast! “He got really sick. Sorry. I, uh, I was supposed to call and tell somebody, and I guess I forgot to.”

  Professor Juniper’s face creased up in an expression of concern. He wandered into the office and slouched against one edge of the desk. “That’s terrible news! Is there anything we can do to help?”

  Mandy broke into a surprisingly pleasant smile. Her teeth were perfect, and suddenly she seemed tall and elegant rather than weird and gawky. “I could bring him some chicken soup,” she said. “Help him get back on his feet.” Her smile turned a tiny bit embarrassed. “I have to confess I’ve always had a little bit of a crush on him.”

  Gabe’s heart surged. Adults I know! Adults I can trust! People we can turn to for help!

  Unless they listened to his story and immediately shoved him into some place like Brookhaven.

  I’ve at least got to try. If they did believe him, Juniper and Mandy could get them to Alcatraz safely, and maybe they could figure out how to get some real help. Like, I don’t know, maybe army help! A few rocket launchers would take down a null draak, even if the soldiers didn’t know exactly what they were shooting at, right? Right?

  Then two things happened, at the exact same moment, that blew Gabe’s hope to tiny pieces. First, in a soft, warning tone, Jackson said, “Gabe . . .” Second, the door of the office closed and locked under Mandy Carson’s fingers. Gabe’s eyes went wide as he looked back at Professor Juniper, whose grand-fatherly expression had become a blunt, savage snarl.

  “You’re going to give me whatever you took from the desk,” Juniper said. “And then you’re going to take us to the rest of your little friends.”

  Any elegance Mandy might have shown disappeared with her smile, and she suddenly bore more resemblance to a scarecrow than to a normal human. Gabe sucked in a sharp, hissing breath as he caught sight of a tattoo on Mandy’s forearm. Its design was that of a rising sun, the same symbol he’d seen woven onto the cultists’ robes. They’re Eternal Dawn! “And both of you will wish you’d never been born,” she sneered.

  Gabe barely had to concentrate at all. He thrust out a hand, his index finger pointing toward the lock on the office door, and envisioned a narrow beam of fire flashing out and melting the lock right out of its bracket.

  Instead, lightning jumped out of every electrical socket in the room and blazed with blue-white brilliance around Gabe’s hand. Juniper and Mandy immediately threw themselves out of the way, and in the blink of an eye a cone of flame four feet across blasted from Gabe’s pointing finger and burned the entire door to dust.

  Gabe’s ears filled with deafening, staccato electric buzzing as every fire alarm in the building went off. Screams and running footsteps echoed up and down the corridor outside.

  Gabe yelled at Jackson, “Come on!” The two boys bolted past the dazed forms of Juniper and Mandy, sprinted out of the office, hung a sharp right, and headed for the door to the stairwell—where two hunters slammed the door off its hinges, their weight bearing it to the floor. It crashed down hard enough to shake the walls. One of the hunters took a great bounding leap and threw itself straight at Gabe, but his electric fury flashed again, and a bolt of blazing power slammed the hunter back into its companion, its skinless exterior charred and smoking. Gabe whirled, about to shout to Jackson to run for it, but Jackson was rooted in place, his eyes flaring a brilliant gold.

  Jackson made a lifting motion with one hand, and the door the hunters had torn down rose off the floor, wedged itself back into the doorway, and, golden light gleaming around its edge, sealed itself in place. Immediately a hunter crashed into it from the other side, but the door didn’t budge.

  “How long will that hold?” Gabe panted.

  “Not long enough! Let us make haste away!”

  As Gabe and Jackson tore down the hallway, Gabe risked one look over his shoulder. He saw Professor Juniper peeking out of Uncle Steve’s office, a cell phone pressed to one ear. Gabe kept running.

  “You know this building, Gabe, and I do not!” Jackson was breathing just as hard as Gabe was. “Which path should we take?”

  Gabe pointed. “Turn left up there! It’ll take us out the main entrance!”

  “Is that wise? Will not the Dawn be waiting for us in such an obvious place?”

  They took the corner and spilled into another long hallway, one side of which was lined with picture windows affording a top-notch view of the campus. At the end of the hall, Gabe knew, a set of double doors would open onto a large atrium, from which they could get outside. “It’s the closest way out!” Gabe bellowed. “Run faster!”

  From behind them, Gabe heard a shrill scream, followed by a man’s voice: “Lock your doors! There’re coyotes in the building!”

  Coyotes. Of course. Nobody would see the hunters for what they were.

  He and Jackson never reached the double doors. With a tremendous grating, crunching sound, the ceiling just above the doors collapsed, and three abyssal bats crashed down into the hallway. Gabe and Jackson skidded to a stop, and Gabe might have peed in his pants a tiny bit. The bats squirmed, orienting themselves, and started practically galloping toward them, using their back feet and the tips of their wings to propel themselves like a couple of skinless, nightmare-inducing racehorses.

  Gabe saw a brilliant flash of golden light in his peripheral vision. Jackson had just conjured a broad, gleaming golden disk, and as Gabe watched, Jackson thrust out his hands, sending the disk through one of
the picture windows and smashing all the glass out of the frame. The disk hovered there, right outside the window, perfectly flat. Jackson shouted, “Jump on!”

  Gabe didn’t need to be told twice. He leaped onto the disk, and under Jackson’s golden-eyed control, it glided away from the building and dropped them safely to the ground below.

  As his feet touched the campus’s manicured grass, Gabe tried to look in every direction at once. “Are they coming after us?”

  Jackson stared up at the window they’d broken. “Oh, most assuredly,” he said as the abyssal bats burst out after them, shrieking louder than the fire alarms.

  15

  Brett crouched down on a broad, flat stone at the edge of the sea and dipped a finger beneath the surface. A shiver ran through his body at the contact. This is just water. So why’s it this color? The shiver intensified when the reason dawned on him: the water was filled with magick.

  Was that why the sky looked the way it did? He thought about the glass globe in the theater, with the swirling golden energy inside it. Is magick . . . gold? If so, that meant that Arcadia was saturated with it. The water. The sky. The dirt, the buildings, the roads . . . that was why his vision had changed, or seemed to change. He wasn’t looking through some sort of gold-hued filter.

  He was seeing magick everywhere.

  An entire world of magick. Brett stood and concentrated on the water lapping against the rocky shore at his feet. It only took the barest of effort, like the tiniest flick of the wrist, to make one of the waves freeze in place, twist like taffy, and flow backward. The terror of water that had consumed Brett for the last year fractured, dissolved, and melted away, replaced by . . .

  What am I feeling?

  It was a new sensation. Something he’d never experienced before. It took him a few moments to put a name to it.

  Power.

  Brett glanced around. He spotted an old, dented canteen lying nearby and carried it back to the water’s edge. With the smallest bit of exertion, he caused a stream of water the thickness of a pencil to rise up out of the sea and pour itself into the canteen, which thrummed in his hand.

  Brett lifted his eyes to . . . well, he couldn’t simply call it Alcatraz Island anymore, because recognizable though it was, the place had changed drastically. At least quadrupling in size, it was now much closer to shore, which made the towering walls—he figured they rose at least three hundred feet above the water—that much more imposing.

  “Citadel.” That was the right word. Alcatraz Citadel.

  The screams and moans of human voices emanating from the place still reached his ears. If Charlie’s in there . . . No. Not “if.” Charlie had to be in there. That must have been why Jackson Wright wanted to meet there in the first place. And now it was up to Brett to break his brother out. And take him home.

  Brett turned his attention to the surface of the water again. A broad disk, four feet across and with an upturned rim—like an upside-down Frisbee —froze solid and floated there, waiting for him. Brett took a careful step onto the disk, afraid that his feet would slip out from under him, but he didn’t have to worry. The ice gripped the soles of his shoes as firmly as if he were walking on dry concrete.

  “All right,” Brett said to no one. “Let’s raid a citadel.”

  The ice disk slid across the water’s surface smoothly, as if gliding along on a track. The gold-tinted wind rushed past Brett’s face, and slowly he lifted his arms, drinking in the exhilaration, the joy, the sheer impossibility of this. The water loved him. The water obeyed him. The water . . .

  It spoke to him.

  Not in actual words, but Brett heard its message just the same. Rise higher, it told him. Step out onto the top of that wall like a king ascending to a throne. Brett nodded. Yes. Yes, he needed to make an entrance here. An entrance fit for a king, because a king he was. He made a lifting motion with both arms, and the ice disk rose up from the sea’s surface on a column of golden water.

  Faster. The water’s voice sang in his ears. Higher.

  And it was easy. Riding atop his element, reveling in the magick that permeated it, Brett elevated and widened the column until it became a wave. No, not just a wave. A tsunami. But not like a tsunami that had ever been recorded on Earth. The water rose up, speeding faster and faster, until it became a mammoth wave of destruction that would have obliterated any city in the real world. Up, and up, and up Brett rose, the crown on the head of this monstrous wave, rushing toward the walls of Alacatraz Citadel.

  I’ll be meeting Charlie soon! He could barely imagine it now, though that was all he’d done since he’d first met Jackson Wright in his dreams. He had so much to tell Charlie. Brett hoped his brother would be impressed that he’d literally walked between worlds to find him . . . but that wasn’t the most important thing. What Brett had to do first, before everything else, was apologize.

  He knew it was his fault that the boat had capsized.

  That was why he had to get to Charlie. At all costs. At any cost.

  Below him, the leading edge of the wave smashed against the base of the Citadel’s soaring walls with a sound like a million cannons firing, but Brett’s ice disk carried him up and onto the top of the wall as gently and precisely as if it were an elevator. Brett glanced behind him as the impossible wave broke and fell back into the sea, and abruptly wished he hadn’t since that gave him a view all the way down to the rocky base of the island. Brett gulped and stepped quickly off the ice disk, onto the wall itself.

  The first thing that struck him was the material under his feet: it wasn’t concrete, or even stone. Instead, it seemed like the wall had been built from bones. He tried to identify what kinds of bones he was looking at. They seemed to come from a wide variety of creatures, all stuck together with some kind of gray, cement-like . . . something.

  He knelt and touched it. “What is this stuff?”

  As if in response, a skittering noise reached his ears. Brett straightened up in a hurry. A dozen insect-like creatures, each of them the size of a raccoon, scurried out of nooks in the wall and clicked their way down the side. It made him a little queasy, just looking at them. Each one combined the least pleasant aspects of army ants and centipedes. Brett eased over to the wall’s rim and peered down. Dozens more of the creatures swarmed over the wall, as if emerging from a kicked anthill, and it took him a second to realize they were checking for damage. His enormous, city-destroying wave hadn’t done much to the wall, but it had cracked it in a few places. And when the bug creatures found such a crack, they opened their mandibles wide and sprayed a vile gray slime into it.

  That’s what the wall is made of? Bones stuck together with bug snot?

  But wait. Does that mean this whole place is . . .

  . . . a hive?

  Brett heard a clicking, skittering sound to his left, and had just enough time to turn his head before one of the insectile creatures sprayed him head to toe with the gray ooze.

  He jumped to his feet and staggered backward, coughing and gagging, trying not to vomit. The creature didn’t move. Just watched. Brett understood why as the ooze began to harden around him. No no no no!

  Brett pulled the water out of his canteen and split it into multiple shimmering tentacles. He narrowed the tip of each of these into a blade, then sent them sliding along his skin, peeling and prying, until the gray ooze came loose and slapped to the ground in front of him like a molted shell.

  The insectoid didn’t seem to like that. It reared halfway up and shrieked.

  Creature after skittering creature crawled up over the edge of the wall and headed for Brett, mandibles clacking. He turned and ran, and for the first time took a good look around him. The top of the gargantuan wall was incredibly broad; the walls must have been fifty feet thick at least. But then he realized that these weren’t walls like those of a castle, as he’d been expecting. There was no courtyard on the other side of the wall. In fact, now that he was up here, Brett saw that what he stood on was more like a desert butt
e than a wall. Alcatraz Citadel itself was an immense block of black stone with no clear entrance, looming like a giant monument at the center of its platform of insects and bones. As Brett sprinted away from the insectoids clockwise around the Citadel, he realized how desperately, fatally limited his options were: an impenetrable black-stone edifice on one side and a three-hundred-foot drop into the bay on his other.

  More and more creatures came clacking out of other nooks in the top of the wall. He slung water from the canteen at them, freezing the spray in midair and turning it into a series of lethal spikes. The insectoids were not very well armored, and the ice spikes punched through their exoskeletons, dropping them in their tracks.

  But that only took care of about six of them. Brett couldn’t tell how many were chasing him now, but it had to be . . . what, fifty? A hundred? Arcadia’s strange gravity let him run in long, distance-eating bounds; but the Citadel was so huge, and the wall went on for so long, that soon his thighs and calves began to burn, and he knew he couldn’t keep up that pace forever.

  Except, if he slowed, they’d catch him.

  And I’ll become a part of the wall.

  The ground beneath his feet vibrated, and Brett’s heart sank when he realized the source: still more insects. Right below him, inside the wall. Skittering up from the dark. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

  Brett choked back a panicked sob.

  But then, ahead, he finally noticed some kind of irregularity in the smooth black stone of the Citadel. Yes! A door! Brett pushed his aching muscles to their breaking point.

  It wasn’t just any door. What Brett saw when he drew closer was a pair of doors as tall as the tree he’d climbed at his aunt and uncle’s house every summer. A pair of doors that would put any bank vault to shame. Can I even open those? They look like they weigh a ton each! But he had no choice. Putting on one last burst of speed, Brett dashed to the doors, threw his weight against one, and almost whooped with joy when it swung open easily, its unimaginable weight perfectly balanced on unseen hinges.