The Crimson Brand

by Brian Knight

  Morgan stood in the comfortable shadow of his camper’s awning and watched Turoc go, looking forward once again to a day alone to nurse his ego.

  Turoc, his partner. As close to a friend as he had in his business dealings. Turoc, the monster.

  Fifteen feet or more long, with a trunk as thick as a tree’s, a head shaped like a blunt arrowhead, gold slitted eyes, and curved horns above them.

  If Morgan had to guess what normal creature Turoc most reminded him of, he would have said a horned rattlesnake, like the ones common in the desert states. That was essentially what he was, a giant sidewinder, except that no normal sidewinder grew to fifteen feet in length and had arms, or spoke perfect English in a vaguely European accent. No other sidewinder in this world could do magic.

  Turoc left his sidewinder’s tracks across the road and paused at the other side. He pointed the magic wand he always held in the upper right of his four long, spindly arms toward a large boulder embedded in the hillside, and it rolled away, revealing a dark passageway. He dove into the darkness of the passage and the boulder rolled back into place.

  Morgan sighed and took his seat again.

  He liked Turoc … well, mostly liked him, but, as always, handled him best in small doses. His long familiarity with the monster had not led to true acceptance and probably never would.

  He hoped that when this was over it would be a very long time before they had to work together again.

  Chapter 14

  Into The Fire

  The rest of the week dragged on, as all school weeks leading up to a vacation will do, and Susan’s sour mood gradually improved from one day to the next. Katie maintained her distance from Penny at school, her father was still showing no signs of relenting in his grudge, but Ellen was beginning to warm up again. She made no reference to Penny’s odd habit of flying around on her bicycle and never responded to the offer they’d made her the week before, but at least she was speaking again.

  The name Morgan was never mentioned in Susan’s presence, and Morgan Duke didn’t show up at Sullivan’s again until that Thursday. Penny and Zoe arrived for lunch that day in time to see petite little Susan throwing the large man bodily through the front door and out onto the sidewalk.

  “That can’t be good for business,” Zoe whispered to Penny, once Susan was safely out of earshot. But Zoe was grinning broadly, obviously impressed with Susan’s newly displayed ferocity.

  “I don’t know,” Penny said. “People will probably be lined up around the block to see who she’ll throw out next.”

  As far as she knew though, there was no more excitement at Sullivan’s the rest of that day, or the next. Penny left the school grounds that Friday afternoon in higher spirits than she had known for weeks, and Zoe was, if anything, even more manic than she was at the start of the week.

  Their Spring Break seemed to be off to a peaceful start.

  When the peace finally shattered, it did so spectacularly.

  * * *

  They were thirty minutes into their Friday night movie, Susan’s choice this time and not one Penny would have picked, but more to her liking than most of Susan’s. Susan preferred romantic comedies and dramas, anything with lots of kissing and a happy ending. That night she was in an action-movie mood, much violence and many explosions.

  The phone rang, and she reluctantly paused in the middle of a ridiculously destructive car chase scene to answer it.

  “Hello?” The look of distracted irritation fell immediately from Susan’s face, and Penny was suddenly, intensely nervous. “Jenny, calm down! What…?”

  Susan stopped, her eyes going wide, frantic. Jenny had obviously told her what.

  “Okay,” she said after a short but painful silence. “Don’t go in. Just stay away. I’m on my way now.”

  Susan hung up and rushed toward the foyer, pausing to scoop up her handbag from the small table next to her recliner.

  “Susan, what happened?” Penny felt a bubble of fear growing in her gut, rising up into her heart.

  “There’s a fire,” she said, “downtown.”

  Penny jumped from the couch. “Your shop!”

  “Not yet,” Susan said. Her bag shook in her hand, and when she managed to find her keys, she dropped them. “But it’s spreading ….”

  She shook her head, unwilling, maybe unable to finish the thought.

  “I’ll go with you!” Penny ran past Susan to the front door to slip her shoes on.

  “No.” Susan met her by the front door and shook her head. “I would rather you stayed here.”

  She slipped past Penny and rushed outside, leaving the door wide open behind her.

  “But, Susan ….”

  “No, Penny. I don’t know how bad it is and I don’t want you to get hurt.” She paused at the door of her old Falcon. “I’ll call you when I can, okay?”

  Reluctantly, Penny nodded.

  Susan was inside the Falcon and racing away. Penny watched her until she dropped from view down the steep driveway, then looked toward town. She couldn’t see downtown Dogwood from her house, not even from her high attic windows, but she did see the faint, ominous orange glow in the distance. She knew if she could see it from that far away, it was bad.

  She had barely made it back inside when the mirror in her pocket began to vibrate. She dug it out and saw Zoe’s face staring up at her in panic. A second later Katie’s joined it.

  “Penny,” Zoe began, but Penny stopped her.

  “I already know about the fire,” she said. “Jenny told us.”

  “It’s bad,” Katie said. “It started at Homefries and it’s spreading.”

  Katie had confirmed Penny’s worst fear. Homefries was a favorite teen lunch spot in the same commercial building as Sullivan’s, the little restaurant separated from Susan’s shop only by an infrequently used accountant’s office.

  Penny tried to calm herself.

  “The fire station is only a few blocks away,” Penny said. “They’ll stop it in time.”

  Katie only shook her head. She seemed incapable of further speech.

  Zoe swallowed hard and spoke for her.

  “Someone broke into the fire station,” Zoe said. “Katie heard it on Michael’s scanner. They took an axe to the fire truck’s engine and most of the hoses.”

  “They did what?”

  Katie nodded. “And the sprinklers in that building aren’t working. Michael went down a manhole to the water main tunnel …. He thinks someone might have turned the water off before they started the fire.”

  A piercing siren screamed into life, making both the girls in the mirror jump.

  Penny felt suddenly dizzy, ready to faint, and realized she was hyperventilating. She closed her eyes and focused on slowing her breathing.

  “Penny?” Both of her friends said, sounding frantic.

  “Where are you right now,” Penny asked, opening her eyes again.

  “We’re at my house,” Zoe said. “In the back yard.”

  “I’m going down after Michael,” Katie said, and vanished from the mirror.

  Zoe looked alarmed.

  “Wait!” Penny called out, hoping to stop Katie before she made it too far away. “Grab her, Zoe!”

  She lost sight of Zoe’s face and the view from the mirror became a dizzying swirl of half-lit landscape and buildings. She heard Zoe calling after Katie.

  “Stay with her ... I’ll be there in a minute!” Penny shoved the mirror in her pocket and ran upstairs to her room. She found her wand in the drawer of her bedside table and ran to her wardrobe. Her red robe, worn only once before, was folded and hidden beneath her oldest and rattiest jeans in the bottom drawer. She’d found the robe, and the larger green one Zoe owned, while exploring the magic doorways in the Birdman’s house of mirrors. Those doorways had gone many places, a large room with a desk and walls crammed with shelves of books, a cavern lair lit with candles and decorated with long, flowing red curtains to cover the stone walls, a watery, shimmering mirror portal, and
a large closet with a selection of different colored robes. A few of the doorways had gone nowhere at all, simply opened into an empty, humming darkness.

  Penny had taken the robe, not because she thought it qualified as high fashion, but because it was a fair disguise, much better than being recognized as Susan’s little red-headed orphan if someone spotted her doing magic.

  She pulled it out and tucked it under her arm, then pausing only for a moment to visualize the doorway she needed, Penny touched her wand to the wardrobe door, then pulled it open and ran through ….

  * * *

  … And into the post office’s front lobby, the only downtown building that she knew would be unlocked to accommodate night drops but almost certainly would still be empty. The noise of the night’s catastrophe assaulted her like a blow to the head: the town siren, shouting from the streets outside, the sound of cars and trucks speeding people away from their homes near the fire, and the fire itself. It roared and crackled like something alive and hungry.

  Penny could now appreciate the depth of Katie’s fear for her brother; only that could have driven her to follow him into that danger.

  She stuffed the folded robe beneath her shirt and hastily tucked it in, shoved her wand down her sock and under the leg of her pants, then ran out into the night to find Zoe and Katie. She hoped that everyone out on the town that night was too distracted to notice her. If anyone told Susan they’d seen her there, Penny would have a hard time explaining how she’d gotten to town so quickly.

  She ran past the sheriff’s office and courthouse, past the open bay door of Dogwood’s small fire department. Three men struggled with a length of canvas hose, hoisting its coiled bulk into the back of a pickup.

  “Girl!” One of them shouted in her direction. “Go home! It’s not safe out here!”

  He turned away without waiting for her to respond and leapt into the truck bed. The other two climbed into the cab, and a moment later they sped toward Main Street. Penny waited until they were out of sight and continued.

  She spotted Zoe on the next block, running toward her, then turning the corner in the same direction the firemen had gone. Somehow she ran faster, shouting Zoe’s name between ragged breaths. She squinted her eyes against the bright, dancing firelight ahead. Flames licked at the night sky. It looked as if a piece of the sun had fallen and landed in Dogwood.

  “Zoe!” Penny was nearly breathless, but Zoe heard at last and, reluctantly it seemed, abandoned her pursuit of Katie and ran to meet Penny.

  “She got away,” Zoe panted, doubling over, then falling to her knees. “I couldn’t catch her.”

  “It’s okay,” Penny said, even though the words felt false. She leaned heavily on Zoe for a moment, who was still almost as tall on her knees as Penny was on her feet, and steadied herself. “If we can’t stop her … we can at least try to help her.”

  “I don’t have my wand,” Zoe nearly cried in frustration. “I left it at home! I’m so stupid!”

  “It’s okay,” Penny said again, and again it felt like a lie. “I’ll go after her … you go home and get your wand.”

  Zoe nodded sharply and scrambled to her feet, nearly knocking Penny over in her rush.

  “Zoe!”

  Zoe spun around in midstride and nearly fell over again, frantic with worry. “What?”

  “Get your bike and your robe too,” Penny said. “Just in case.”

  Zoe nodded once, and dashed off for home.

  Penny watched her for a moment, then scanned the streets. She found what she was looking for at the curb ten feet away. She checked in both directions, made sure no one was watching. She could see and hear people gathering blocks away, flooding from their houses to watch the unfolding disaster, but the block Penny stood on was deserted. She pulled the wand from beneath her pant leg and pointed it at the iron storm grate. For a moment it resisted, then the rusted iron squealed against the concrete and broke free. She dropped it next to the opening, checked the street around her one last time, and slid inside, into the dark underground.

  * * *

  Penny had heard about underground tunnels in San Francisco at school a few years earlier and had been briefly interested in them. The rumors about an abandoned underground military base and a colony of aliens supposedly right beneath the city had captured her imagination, but the truth turned out to be a great deal less fantastic. There were service tunnels for utility workers; gas, water, and sewer lines; and floodwater channels.

  She supposed that even tiny little Dogwood must have something similar, if on a much smaller scale.

  The tunnel was narrow, dark, smelly. Weak light shone down from the opening, and she used it to put on her robe, pulling the hood down as low over her face as she could and still see where she was walking.

  Sounds echoed to her, splashing footfalls, grunts of effort, and a shouted expletive, a word she had never heard Michael use before. She walked as fast as she dared in the direction of his voice, keeping her free hand stretched out before her like a blind girl and her wand ready at her side.

  Too much time seemed to pass while Penny stumbled through the darkness. The only indication she had that she was making progress was the increasing volume of the activity on the streets above. She knew she wasn’t under Main Street—she still hadn’t found the intersecting tunnel that would lead her there—but she was closer to the action. Then a distant, weak light ahead alerted her to another’s presence.

  She paused under the glimmer from another street grate and dug beneath her robe for her mirror.

  “Kat,” she whispered, and was rewarded when Katie’s face, all silhouette and shadow, moved into view.

  “Penny?” She whispered. “Where are you?”

  “Not far,” Penny said, and began walking. “Stay still for just a second and I’ll be there.”

  Katie didn’t respond, only looked away from her mirror, peering into the darkness.

  Penny didn’t wait for her to respond but shoved the mirror into her pocket and hurried toward the distant glow.

  She followed it around a corner, the intersecting tunnel she’d been searching for. She saw an open manhole ahead, bright orange light dancing down the slime-covered iron rungs of a short ladder, and just past that, waiting impatiently at the next turn, stood Katie.

  Penny sprinted to her, almost banging her head on a low-hanging drainpipe.

  “What are you doing here?” Katie was almost frantic with fear.

  “Kat, we have to get out of here. Michael knows what he’s doing.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Katie snapped, continuing around the corner and leaving Penny to rush after her.

  There was another light now, dim and further down the tunnel, but steady and white. Electric light.

  Penny grabbed Katie by the arm and yanked her back.

  Katie turned, her eyes blazing in the filtered firelight.

  Penny put a finger to her lips and whispered. “Fine, we’ll stay just in case, but don’t let him see us.”

  “Who’s there?” Michael shouted from his end of the tunnel, swinging the beam of his flashlight toward them. Penny dragged Katie back behind the last bend in the tunnel before it fell over the spot where they had been standing. A moment later the light vanished, and they heard him grunting with exertion. A high-pitched squeal, the grinding of metal on metal, sounded, and they crept around the corner again to see what he was doing.

  Michael had set his flashlight down, angled so that it shone on him and the large handwheel he struggled to turn.

  Someone had shut off the water to the burning building. The same someone who had sabotaged the fire truck. The same someone who had set the fire.

  They watched him struggle with the massive valve-wheel, turning it a little at a time. The pipe next to them rattled briefly as water rushed through it.

  Then Michael stopped, leaning against the wheel to catch his breath.

  Something rose up from the darkness behind him, one arm held up high.

  �
�Michael, look out!” Katie shrieked and started toward him, Penny at her heels.

  Michael turned in their direction, reaching for his flashlight, then cried out in pain and collapsed to the ground, silent and still.

  “No!” Katie shrieked and stopped.

  The thing behind Michael cast aside its weapon, picked up the dropped flashlight and reached for Michael’s holstered pistol.

  Not a thing, but a man.

  A flash of blue light pulsed in the dark corridor, momentarily lighting the startled face sheathed by lank and greasy hair.

  Katie’s spell missed him, soaring past his shoulder and blasting a chunk of concrete from the tunnel wall behind him.

  The man flinched, dropped the flashlight, and turned to run.

  There was a second flash of brightest blue and a thin arc of lightning spanned the length of the tunnel, hitting the man between his shoulders. Blue energy played around his body, sparked and sizzled in his hair, and he fell face down in the muck.

  Seconds later, they were at Michael’s side.

  “Is he …?” Penny couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.

  Michael lay collapsed on the valve-wheel, his arms dangling, blood running down his scalp and cheek.

  Katie placed her head gently against his back, her ear pressed to the cloth of his filthy uniform shirt, and listened. A moment later she sighed in relief.

  “He’s okay. He’s breathing.” She stood, then advanced slowly on the spot where Michael’s attacker lay. “Try to wake Michael … I’ll cover him.”

  Penny prodded and shook Michael, careful not to dislodge him from his precarious perch, and at last he began to stir.

  Katie rushed to him, but Penny shook her head and motioned her away. Katie nodded and stepped behind Penny and out of sight.

  Penny tugged her hood down over her face and stepped back, ready to retreat, but she was too slow.