by Dan Jolley
“I— The hunters . . .” Why were they all looking at him like that? “They were coming, and I thought— I had to—”
He was interrupted by a bone-jarring impact that shook the entire island. The null draak had slammed into the ground right behind the cluster of wounded cultists and, amid their abruptly-even-more-terrified screams, it began tossing them aside, their bodies crumpling like wet leaves. The null draak roared—even at that distance the force of it blew Gabe’s hair back—and charged straight for the ritual circle.
No.
It charged straight for Gabe.
“Why’s it coming after me?” he bellowed.
“Your connection to the Tablet!” Greta Jaeger answered. “It must sense the strongest trace of Arcadia on you! You have to get it into the circle!”
Time seemed to slow down as Gabe faced the eyeless, interdimensional behemoth. How are we supposed to get it inside the circle and keep it there? Better yet, how are we supposed to do that without it eating me? Gabe had no chance to think about it at that moment, though, because the null draak rushed straight through the circle without even slowing down, its mighty jaws stretched wide and coming straight for him.
Gabe shouted and took a running leap to the side—not enough to get away, but maybe enough to survive—and shouted even louder when a burst of wind carried him completely out of the null draak’s bite zone. The beast skidded to a stop, pitchfork-sized claws digging trenches in the dirt, and flailed as it turned its vast bulk for another charge.
Gabe got to his feet, his breathing ragged. “I know one way to get it to stay in the circle,” he said, grinning.
With the fingers of his mind he reached deep into the electrical grid of the island. More. The lights of skyscrapers on the mainland dimmed. MORE. His hands became furnaces of white-blue energy. He was hotter than any fire. He was more focused than a laser. But it wasn’t enough. He could pull in enough power to be a nuclear explosion. A sun! A SUPERNOVA—
Then Lily grabbed his shoulder.
“You can’t kill it!”
Gabe frowned at her, feeling a crippling disappointment as the power flowed back into the world around him. “What?”
She sighed in frustration. “We need it alive to exchange it for Brett, Gabe! You can’t just roast it!”
Gabe stared at her. He wanted to say, “Don’t be ridiculous! I wasn’t going to kill it!” But as Lily looked him straight in the eyes, he knew that she knew he was. And that he could.
Shame filled him. That was exactly what he’d intended to do: open himself up to the fire. Listen to the hissing voice. Heed its words. Burn . . . burn . . . burn . . . !
If anyone but Lily had tried to stop me, he wondered, what would I have done to them? He shuddered.
“Guys!” Kaz’s voice came from somewhere to their left. “Look out!” Gabe and Lily both turned in time to see the null draak come thundering toward them, and Lily carried them to safety on another gust of wind.
They landed right beside Kaz, Greta, and Jackson. Partly from self-preservation, but largely out of shame at his own lack of self-control, Gabe spoke up. “We’re gonna have to work together to get this thing where we need it without getting chomped. I’ll lure it back across the circle. Kaz, be ready to box it in. Throw up some walls but leave openings a person could get through. Lily, once it’s in place, I doubt even stone will hold it for long, so you’re going to have to get me to it really fast—and maybe to a part of it that’s not covered with teeth and claws? Jackson, you’ve got to juice us all up with as much power as you can. And Greta . . .”
Greta shook her head. “I’ve got my breath back now. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you aren’t interrupted by any beasties or hooded maniacs.” As if to emphasize this, the temperature abruptly dropped by forty degrees, and a violent storm of hailstones began smashing into the ground in a broad, circular array, isolating the five of them. The null draak roared, shook out its wings, and lowered its head as if it was about to charge. “Any of them try to get through this, it’ll knock their heads in.”
Gabe held out his hand. Without a word, Greta gave him the slim silver dagger.
Before he could change his mind, Gabe nodded and dashed away from the group, shouting and waving his arms at the null draak. “Hey! Hey, you bargain-basement dragon knockoff! You want me? Try and take me!”
Gabe didn’t think a creature as huge as the null draak was built for tight maneuvers, and its ungainly charges up to this point had borne that out. But as the creature’s immense head swung around at his words, its claws and all six of its wing tips dug into the ground, and it launched itself at Gabe like an Olympic sprinter out of the starting block. Gabe yelped and poured on more speed.
He couldn’t run directly away from it. That would just make the null draak chase him toward the cellblock, not over the ritual circle. So Gabe sprinted to the left at an angle across the chalk edge of the circle. He ran through the center, his lungs feeling as if they were on the brink of bursting. As soon as he crossed the far border of the circle, the null draak’s breath hot and horrible on his back, he screamed, “NOW, KAZ!”
A new vibration shook the ground so hard that Gabe’s feet went out from under him, and he slid to a painful stop on his chin and belly. Rolling over, he saw that Kaz had raised a fifteen-foot-high ring of pillars around the perimeter of the ritual circle. The null draak was trapped within it. The stones had stopped its charge short, but the creature’s neck stretched over the barricade of columns, its jaws snapping at the air not two feet from the soles of Gabe’s shoes.
The distance between each pillar was just wide enough for Gabe to fit through. As the null draak slammed against the columns, cracks began to fracture across their rough surfaces.
“Get me in there!” Gabe bellowed, scrambling away from the null draak’s razor-sharp teeth. “Lily! Get me close to it, before it breaks loose!” Gabe couldn’t see Lily, but another forceful gust of wind lifted him off his feet, and he sailed through the gap between two of the quickly crumbling pillars. When Gabe’s feet touched the ground again, he was staring at the null draak’s flank, a broad expanse of gray. . . . What is this stuff? Hide? Scales? He couldn’t tell.
And he didn’t really care. Gabe plunged the dagger into the beast all the way up to its hilt.
Tiny though it was in comparison to the beast’s mass, the dagger must have hurt like crazy, because the null draak roared and thrashed and would have crushed Gabe to a pulpy mess against the inside of one of the walls—if someone hadn’t grabbed him by the neck and the shoulder and hauled him back out through one of the gaps.
“Holy crap,” Gabe panted. “Thanks, it almost—” He broke off when he found himself looking at Jackson Wright. “You—you just saved my life.”
“Do not mention it,” the smaller boy said. “But now I suggest we give this large fellow a bit of room, yes?”
The null draak thrashed again. All four stone walls split apart and crumbled, revealing that a blood cocoon—just like the one that had covered Uncle Steve and Brett back at the theater—was swiftly enveloping its body. It’s working! It’s working! Gabe looked around but couldn’t see anyone else. They must all be on the other side. He glanced at Jackson. Now’s my only chance.
“Thanks.” Gabe struggled to maintain his balance as another tremor shook the island. Jackson had just saved him. Saved all of them, really, with his magick.
“I owe you,” Gabe said, turning to the other boy. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“This is the only way to get my uncle back.”
Jackson’s eyes crinkled with confusion, then widened with alarm, but it was too late.
Gabe pushed Jackson into the cocoon.
Jackson screamed as the membrane flowed over his body, just as it had over Brett’s when he’d tried to help Uncle Steve.
But Greta Jaeger reached past Gabe and, with one definitive motion, yanked Jackson free, slicing the sheet of blood aw
ay with blades of water. The cocoon slid off him, sucking back into itself with an awful plop.
“What are you doing?” Greta shouted, inches away from Gabe’s face. “You’ll disrupt the ritual!” She thrust Jackson off to one side, one arm thrown across him protectively. In her other hand, the Emerald Tablet seemed to shudder. The air filled with strange, dissonant vibrations that Gabe didn’t remember from the Dawn ritual back at the theater. Something was going wrong.
“I have to get Uncle Steve back!” Gabe’s throat hurt with the force of the words. “That lying little jerk isn’t worth his life!”
The blood cocoon began to tremble and darken like a dying star.
“Gabe, you need Jackson to destroy Arcadia! It’s the only way any of us will ever be free. It’s the thing your parents most wanted for you. Not to spend your life in hiding like your father did. The element of magick—the missing element—it’s crucial. With Jackson, we can finally—”
Sschunk.
It happened in an instant. The long, knife-sharp claws of an abyssal bat burst through Greta’s chest, dark with her blood.
Gabe stood there, frozen in disbelief.
The abyssal bat hurtled away, shrieking, yanked away from Greta Jaeger’s back by the hurricane force of one of Lily’s winds. Soaked with blood, Greta dropped to her knees. Gabe stepped forward and caught her, knelt and cradled her in his lap, pain and guilt crushing his heart.
She came to stop me. She ended the hailstorm to stop me.
A tiny, distant part of him was aware that the blood cocoon had finished enveloping the null draak, and that the giant creature had begun to shrink, and that the island lurched beneath them as it did. But he didn’t care. He only held Greta.
“I didn’t mean—” he said, before a sob cut him off. “I didn’t.”
Weakly, she raised a finger and shushed him. “Just remember.” Talking seemed to hurt her. “You need Jackson.”
Gabe raised his head to see Jackson slowly backing away from them, an unreadable expression on his pale face. He didn’t look like a boy at all just then. If anything, he seemed more like a tiny, tired old man.
Behind them, Lily screamed, “Brett!”
Gabe looked over his shoulder. The cocoon had shrunk down to human size, and as he watched, Brett struggled out of the middle of the enormous, empty membrane. Lily ran forward and threw her arms around her brother, laughing and crying at the same time. And after a second, Kaz joined in for an awkward group hug.
But Gabe had no chance to share in the joy. Still cradling Greta, he shouted, “Guys! Guys, over there!”
At the head of the steep road leading up from the docks, the Eternal Dawn forces had marshaled. The battered cultists stood behind the surviving hunters, while abyssal bats perched all around them in trees and on rooftops. Every one of them stared at Gabe and his friends with murder in their eyes.
Primus, back on her feet, stood front and center, a long, elegant finger pointed at them like a hunter’s claw. “Hand over the Tablet right now or your suffering will know no end!”
“I guess it’s time for round two.” Kaz clenched his fists. “Jackson, you ready with some more oomph?”
Jackson drew a breath, about to speak, but Brett’s voice cut across everyone else’s. It sounded as if it echoed around the entire island. “No need to worry, guys.” Brett’s eyes turned a deep blue-green, filled with unfathomable, glimmering power. He made a beckoning gesture. “I got this.”
Something in the air changed.
Gabe couldn’t tell why his breath caught in his throat. It could have been that all the oxygen around them had just radically shifted somehow. It could have been because of the grief that threatened to choke him as he held Greta Jaeger in his arms.
Or it could have been the shock of seeing a towering, city-destroying wave rise up out of the ocean, curl over the docks and the service road, and crash down on the assembled masses of the Eternal Dawn. It swept every trace of the cultists, the hunters, and the abyssal bats up in its savage, churning waters and dragged them all down the slope and into the bay.
As if they had never been there at all.
It was Brett’s turn to be stared at. But only for about three seconds, before Lily rushed to Greta’s side, gaping at her terrible wound. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital!” Lily held Greta’s hand. “I think I can do it! I can lift you up, get you across the bay!”
Greta shook her head. “They . . . couldn’t have saved me . . . even if this had happened in the emergency room.” She tried for a weak smile and almost made it. “I don’t have long. Listen. It will take all five of you to do what . . . has to be done.”
Gabe wiped the tears from his cheeks. “To destroy Arcadia.”
Greta nodded toward the ritual circle. Gabe looked and saw, hanging in the air at the circle’s center, a tiny vertical crack of golden light. “The ritual was disrupted,” she whispered. “The walls between Arcadia and our world have been breached. That is the power you five possess. You can bridge the two worlds . . . or destroy Arcadia . . . permanently.”
Gabe didn’t know what to say. He looked up from Greta and saw Jackson Wright staring at him, his eyes glowing with a mix of hatred and fear. Gabe felt another stab of shame. I guess I can’t blame him.
“They will . . . come after you.” Greta’s eyes slid closed. “They will use you . . . to merge the worlds . . . unless you stop them.” Her eyes fluttered back open, and the force of her stare almost made Gabe recoil. “Together.”
Greta Jaeger went limp.
Gabe didn’t bother trying to hide his sobs as he laid her down on the ground.
For a few moments, Gabe wasn’t sure how long, they stood around her in a circle. Gabe kept staring at her body. He couldn’t believe she was really gone.
No one said anything as Kaz’s eyes turned stony gray. They backed away from Greta’s body and watched as the ground opened up and gently pulled her down.
Gabe was the first to speak. “Make sure she’s deep, Kaz.”
Kaz nodded. “Taken care of.”
Lily stared at the hair-thin golden fracture still hanging in the air. A crack in the world. “What’re we going to do about that?”
“I will tell you what you cannot do,” Jackson said, in an unusually not-so-smart-ass tone. “You cannot simply hang about and moon over it. Greta was correct. The Eternal Dawn will sense this breach’s presence, and they will return here to try to exploit it.”
Lily shot back, “But then we have to stay here! We have to stop them!”
Jackson shook his head and pointed at the Emerald Tablet, which rested in Kaz’s stubby-fingered clutch. “They shan’t be able to do much without that. Which means it is in our best interests to get the Tablet as far away from here as possible.”
“Why do you care so much?” Gabe was physically and emotionally exhausted, and didn’t bother trying to keep the anger out of his voice. Deep down, he knew it was anger at himself. “You’re just in this for yourself, aren’t you?”
“I spent over a century trying to get back to this world.” The sneer made its way into Jackson’s voice again. “I am not about to allow it to be destroyed. And like it or not, the five of us are strongest when we work together.” He pointed a thumb at his own chest. “Thanks to me, lest you’ve forgotten.”
Lily broke the silent tension hanging between Gabe and Jackson. “But where are we going to go?”
Kaz joined in. “If the Dawn’s coming after us, the last place we should be is with our families. It’d just put a great big target on them.”
Brett, Lily, and Kaz still had families here to worry about. Gabe did not. That was something he and Ghost Boy had in common.
“We’ll have to think of something to tell our parents,” Brett said. “I mean, it won’t hold for long, but still. We gotta tell them something. And I guess we can go back to the tunnels under the city. We know our way around down there. We’ve still got the map, and we can sneak out and get food and supplies.”
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Kaz sighed. “Just what I always wanted. To live in the sewer. I bet we’ll all catch tuberculosis. Or malaria. Or hantavirus.”
Gabe stared at the ground, thinking. “We can stay in the tunnels. While we’re there we’ve got to figure out how to seal that breach and destroy Arcadia for good. Then we’ll come back here and fix things. We’ve got to do at least that much. I’ve got to. I owe it to Greta.” He glanced up and saw Jackson giving him the mother of all accusatory stares. No one but Greta and Jackson knew that Gabe had disrupted the ritual by trying to force Jackson back to Arcadia. That breach was Gabe’s fault and Gabe’s alone. He wondered how long Ghost Boy would keep that bit of information to himself. “And I owe it to my parents.”
“Oh, destroy an evil shadow dimension—is that all?” Kaz muttered. “Awesome. Should be lots of fun trying to get back here, considering how fast the government’s going to lock this place down.”
Lily nodded in agreement. “Yeah. Weird shining crack in the world that won’t go away? It’s not like the National Park Service is going to just add that to Alcatraz’s list of attractions.”
Brett cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to destroy Arcadia, Gabe.”
Gabe’s eyebrows shot up. “Huh? Why not?”
“Look, I’ve got a lot to tell you guys. Somewhere else, sometime later, when we’re not fleeing the scene of the world’s weirdest case of vandalism and . . . y’know. Mourning a loss.” Brett reached out and put a hand on Gabe’s arm. “Gabe, listen, this is gonna be kind of a shock. But I met your mom over there. Your uncle Steve’s with her now. She’s still alive, man. And that breach might be your only shot at getting her back.”
All the blood drained from of Gabe’s face, and for a second he couldn’t breathe. Brett and Kaz grabbed his arms to help him stay on his feet. Of all the things that had happened to him since everything began—the rituals, the magick, the monsters, the alternate dimensions—his mom was alive and in Arcadia?