by R. L. King
“Doc—” Verity began, looking uncomfortable.
“Enough, Verity. We’re going. Now. Kroyer, cover Lang and get moving. If we manage to get through this, we’ll come back and see to him properly, but right now you’re coming with us, and you’re going to help us deal with what we find. Got it?”
For a couple of seconds, it seemed as if Kroyer would argue. Then he sighed, nodded, and hauled himself to his feet. He bent and pulled Lang’s slicker hood down over his face. “I don’t know what you expect me to do,” he said sullenly.
“You’ll do what you have to do. You must have some offensive magic. For a man who claims to be a scholar, you’re fairly adept at breaking locks and setting fires. Now let’s—” He stopped, tensing, as all around him the magical energy changed. Suddenly, it felt more energized, more oppressive, as if an electrical field were pushing in on him from all sides. A low hum had begun, barely noticeable over the rain and the wind, but growing steadily louder.
“Doc? What is it?” Verity got up too, shooting him a questioning glance.
“Do you feel that?”
She paused a moment, then nodded grimly. “Yeah.”
“Kroyer?”
“I do.” The Ordo man’s tone was resigned now.
“What is it?” Dez demanded. “What’s going on? What do you feel?”
“Something’s changed,” Stone said. “I’m not sure what it means, but there’s no more time to wait. Let’s go. Stay close. I’ll lead, and Verity, you take the rear and keep an eye on everyone.”
“Got it.”
Stone had no trouble heading in the right direction this time—the closer they got to the center of the island and the abandoned campground, the stronger the oppressive feeling grew. He dropped back next to Kroyer and lowered his voice so Dez and Noah couldn’t hear. “What got Lang? Tell me what we’re facing.”
Kroyer shook his head. “I can’t. We barely saw it in the darkness. Like I said, those kids were in a circle in the middle of the campground, chanting. It sounded louder than it should have, almost as if their voices were magnified. They were already doing it when we got there.”
“Was the green column there at that point?”
“No. That didn’t come until later. I think that’s part of the second stage. But these…things started rising up out of the ground. Dark things. We couldn’t look straight at them.”
“What do you mean? Were they that horrific?”
“They were, but I don’t think that was all there was to it. I think it was part of their magic, concealing their true forms. They smelled like rotting fish.”
“What did they do? The things?”
“They headed off toward the other side of the camp, taking the students with them. When they got to the edge several of them got into a circle, wider than the one the students made in the middle.”
“Ringing them in?”
“Yes. And then they started chanting. The creatures.” He looked at Stone with haunted eyes. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life, Stone, and I’ve heard some bad things. I couldn’t even begin to describe it except that both Lang and I were suddenly gripped with an overwhelming sense of dread. We ran—we couldn’t help it.”
“And they chased you?”
“No.” He shuddered. “They didn’t chase us. One of them—popped up in front of us.”
“Popped up?” Stone quickly checked behind him, but Dez, a sniffling, shuffling Noah, and Verity were still following. “Do you mean it was invisible?”
“No!” Kroyer swallowed hard. “I mean it…came up out of the ground, like the ones back at the campsite. I thought I would go mad, Stone! It slashed at us—I barely leaped out of the way, but Lang…wasn’t so fortunate. His scream when that thing got him will haunt me for the rest of my days.”
“How did you get away from it?”
“I kept running. I’m not proud of it—I left Lang behind and ran like a craven coward.”
“And it didn’t chase you?”
“It did—for a while. It didn’t move fast, thank the gods. But just as I thought I couldn’t go any farther, the feeling of impending dread lifted. I dared to pause and look behind me, and there was no sign of it.” He swallowed again. “I was ashamed of myself for leaving Lang, so I gathered my courage and returned to where I’d left him. The creature was gone by then, so I tried to help him. That…was where you found us.”
Stone scanned again, looking for any unfamiliar auras or shadowy figures. The cold feeling crawling up his back had as much to do with fear as it did with the rain. “How much farther is it to the campground?”
“Not far. Just up ahead, I think.” He gripped Stone’s arm. “Have you got a plan? Because I’m not going to be much help, and neither are these mundanes.” He spoke the word with distaste. “I don’t know why you brought them along.”
“Shut up, Kroyer. You’ve made enough of a mess of this already.”
Ahead, it appeared that the trees were thinning. Stone switched to magical sight again and immediately the way ahead filled with the eerie, sickly green light. The low hum grew steadily louder now, and when he listened carefully, he heard the nearly subsonic drone of a deep, otherworldly chanting that made his skin crawl. He held up a hand and motioned for the others to draw up near him, moving to crouch behind the wide trunk of a pine tree.
“We’re almost to the camp,” he whispered.
“Is that where the monsters are?” Noah’s eyes were wide and frightened. “I don’t wanna go there.”
Stone didn’t want him to go there, either—neither him nor his mother—but leaving them here unprotected would be worse. “Verity—stay here with them a moment. I want to get a look at what we’re dealing with.”
When she threw him an angry, protesting glare, he raised his hand. “I’m not asking you to stay behind. I just want to take a look so we’ve got an idea what we’re facing. I don’t want to be caught by surprise, and I don’t want to leave them without someone I trust to look after them.” He nodded toward Kroyer and gave her a significant look: he didn’t trust the Ordo man not to cut and run at the first opportunity.
“Okay,” she said with some reluctance. “But don’t be gone long, Doc. I mean it.”
“I promise. Ten minutes, max.”
“Wait,” Dez said, pulling Noah closer. “You’re leaving?”
“Recon. Get your shotgun out and shoot anything that moves and isn’t me. I’m not kidding.”
Her jaw tightened. “Even the kids?”
“Even the kids, unless they seem completely sane. I doubt they will. Your call. Back soon.”
Without giving any of them additional time to argue, he wreathed himself in a disregarding spell and headed toward the campground. He had no idea whether the spell would work on the creatures, or if they’d be so involved in their ritual that they’d no longer notice intruders, but it couldn’t hurt.
His heart pounded harder as he approached the tree line. Up ahead through the rain he spotted the graying wooden wall of a building, with an overgrown, sodden dirt road running behind it. As he crept forward and looked both ways, he saw two more small buildings to either side—probably cabins.
The droning chant grew louder. Although he couldn’t make out individual words, or even tell if it was in the same language as the one Dez hard recorded in the classroom back in Treadley, it seemed to seep into his soul, filling him with even more dread than before. Some part of him—perhaps a larger part than he’d care to admit—wanted to turn and run back to the others, to take Kroyer and Lang’s boat and get them all the hell out of here before those things finished their summoning. Perhaps it wouldn’t be as bad as they’d thought. Perhaps the mages who’d written their reference material had exaggerated. People did that in the old days, didn’t they? Their understanding for the world around them was flawed and incomplete, resulting in fears that would make modern-day people laugh knowingly from their warm, safe homes.
Stop it. You’ve got to end this
, or nobody will.
He paused a moment to augment his mental defenses; the droning quieted somewhat—at least the part in his head did. The physical chant was as loud as ever. He crept forward, using levitation to move over the muddy, puddle-strewn road so he didn’t announce his presence by splashing, and stopped at the edge of the wooden building. He wished he had a map of the abandoned campground, but given that they hadn’t even known they were coming here until they arrived, that wasn’t going to happen.
Still moving silently, mindful of the ten minutes he told Verity he’d be gone and worried that if he exceeded that she’d come after him, he moved around the building until he reached its front edge, then peered around it with magical sight active.
“Bloody hell…” he whispered.
From where he stood now, he could see that Dez had been wrong with one of her details: the cluster of camp buildings wasn’t in the center of the island, but closer to the far edge. He took in the scene in a quick glance: the central gathering area where the students had probably done their own ritual, and beyond that another group of rotting buildings—larger ones this time, probably a club house and dining hall. None of these captured his attention, though: that was reserved for the ring of dark figures in a circle at the edge of the campground, in an area bordering the gray, rocky beach.
Stone thrust his hand in his pocket. His hand landed on the flare gun, which he’d stuck there after Verity had discovered them, but he shoved it aside and wrestled out a small pair of binoculars. He had to get back to the others, but first he wanted to get a better look at the scene.
Crouching behind one of the buildings, he lifted the binocs and pointed them at the scene ahead. As soon as he brought them into focus, his whole body went colder than it already was. “No…” he whispered.
Kroyer had been right: whatever the dark creatures were, he couldn’t get a good look at them. Everything about them was wrong: their shape, the way they moved, their nightmarish, inhuman chant. He couldn’t even clearly count them, because they seemed to meld together. At the moment, they were fully focused on whatever they were doing.
The students were there too, and they were what had prompted Stone’s horror. The creatures had dragged an old table from one of the buildings—or compelled the students to do it—and placed it in the center of a circle consisting of crude items they must have gathered from the area: branches, driftwood, even what might have been the corpses of small animals. Several of the students—Stone couldn’t identify them individually at this distance—stood at the edge of the circle, dressed in the clothes they must have worn at Maple Ridge: T-shirts, sweat pants, robes. Shivering but otherwise unmoving, they watched what was happening inside the circle in the same detached, uncaring way someone might watch traffic going by on a road.
On the table lay another of the students. Before Stone could do anything other than continue to watch, the creatures raised armlike appendages to the sky. Their chant grew louder and more intense, to the point where it felt as if it would tear Stone’s head apart.
On the table, the figure writhed and twisted as if trying to escape from an unseen attacker, and then with sudden, unexpected intensity something erupted from its midsection: a riot of questing, reaching tentacles, as dark and unsettling as the creatures standing around the table. Stone, shocked, nearly bobbled the binoculars. As he tightened his grip and focused in again, the tentacles enveloped the figure, devouring it and growing larger until nothing else remained. Then the things flowed over the edge of the table and sank into the ground beneath it, then immediately emerged, thinner now, all around the circle. They reached out to each other, winding together with a similar series of undulating tentacles already there, until they themselves had augmented a narrow circle joining the creatures together. They looked like a ring of writhing vines, only shadowy black instead of green.
Stone switched quickly to magical sight, and almost wished he hadn’t. The green shaft of light was definitely stronger now, but that wasn’t the worst thing he saw. The students’ auras were faint and flickering, but the creatures had auras too—auras of such discordant, chaotic hues that Stone flinched away from them, his brain and his eyes rejecting them. Colors like that didn’t exist on Earth, or anywhere else where sanity mattered. He felt something in his mind begin to slip, and quickly dropped magical sight—but not before he saw something that chilled him even more than the tentacle things devouring the defenseless student.
Out beyond the tableau on the shore, the gray and unquiet water of the lake was just barely visible. But even from where he was, Stone could see that it was even rougher than it had been before, with waves rivaling what one might normally see in a stormy ocean.
Above those tossing waves, as if emerging from them, something was beginning to shimmer.
He only saw it for a second before he had to look away, but in that second the sight seared itself into his brain: something huge and impossibly alien rising above the waves, taking slow and inexorable form. It was still nearly transparent, the cloud-choked gray sky visible through its strange lines and angles, but as those tentacles—the things that used to be one of Emerson High’s unfortunate campers—joined its fellow on the wet ground, it took on more coherence.
Dear gods…they’re sacrificing the students to bring it over. Their deaths are giving it power.
For a second, Stone nearly broke from his cover and dashed over there, ready to bring down all the wrath his Calanarian power could muster, until those horrible, inhuman creatures lay dead on the beach and that enormous…thing out beyond it had sunk back into the depths where it had come from. He didn’t think of his promise to Verity, or what might become of Dez and Noah, or anything else. This thing had to be stopped, and there was no time to waste.
What stopped him was a scream—not from ahead of him, but from behind, back where he’d left the others—followed by the deafening report of a shotgun blast.
28
Stone spun and took off running, back toward where he’d left Verity and the others, covering the distance in long strides. He’d barely made it back to the road, splashing through the mud, when another shrieking scream sounded.
“Verity!” he yelled. “Where are you?”
“Doc! Hurry!” A flash of magic lit up the area beyond the trees, an eerie effect against the dark trunks, and then another flash as the shotgun spoke again.
Stone burst through the trees in time to see two of the black, tentacled creatures converging on his friends. Verity stood in front, grimly throwing spells in two directions, while Dez had her shotgun out and was doing her best to ventilate the one closest to them. Noah huddled behind her, terrified, not even raising his baseball bat. On the other side of Verity, Kroyer looked nearly as scared as Dez did. Magical energy flowered around his hands, but he wasn’t throwing it.
The creatures didn’t run or walk, but seemed to flow over the ground, covering it without disturbing the carpet of leaves and needles. As they moved, their edges shifted and fell in and out of focus, giving them the effect of moving in front of a strobe light. Their faces weren’t faces at all: as nearly as Stone could tell, they didn’t have eyes, but only large, gaping mouths from which more hungry, clawed tentacles waved. Their shiny black skin glistened with fishlike scales, and Kroger had been correct on another fact: the air around them stank with the stench of rotting sea life.
Stone leaped in front of the group, opening the conduit between their own world and Calanar, pulling in power until it sang through his body. He pointed one hand at one creature and the other at the second, directing the pure, potent magical energy at what passed for the creatures’ torsos. “Get away from them!” he yelled, like a martial artist focusing his energy through his voice.
The spells hit the creatures and flung them backward. As each one hit a tree, its body twisted and changed shape, with more sinuous black tentacles extending outward to wrap around the trunks, and then they flowed back down toward the rain-soaked ground and sank in. In less than
five seconds, no trace of them remained.
Dez, puffing and terrified, slumped back against another tree, but reloaded her shotgun and kept it aimed into the space in front of them. Noah buried his face in her side and held on as if he expected her to follow the creatures into the ground.
Verity hurried over to Stone. “They just…showed up. Like from the ground. The same way they disappeared.” She darted her gaze around, fearful but not terrified, remaining watchful.
“Did you find them?” Kroyer asked. He too was pale and looked out of breath.
“Are they over there?” Verity demanded. “Did something happen?”
“We’ve got to move,” Stone said. “I found them. There are more of them over there, and they’ve already started the ritual.” He leaned in closer to her and turned away from Dez and Noah, lowering his voice to a whisper. “They’re sacrificing the students. Turning them into some kind of energy that’s augmenting the circle, one by one. At least two are already dead. And something is forming off the coast. Something big.”
“That’s it,” Kroyer said, his voice bright with fear and making no effort to quiet it. “That’s what they’re trying to summon. The thing that doesn’t have a name, the thing from the legend. Oh, gods, we’re too late.”
“We’re not too late!” Stone hoped he was right. “Come on—let’s go. We’ve got to make a stand, stop those things before they kill anyone else.”
Dez didn’t move. She still had one arm wrapped around Noah, while she held her shotgun with the other. “I can’t do this…” she breathed. “Those things…those…things…”
“You’ve got to.” Stone stood in front of her. “You can’t stay here. It’s not safe. You saw what happened.”
“It’s not safe anywhere!”
Surprisingly, she wasn’t going to pieces; her eyes were steady, and her hand on the shotgun didn’t waver. But something about her demeanor told Stone he’d better do something fast or he’d lose her.