I Am Number Four ll-1

by Pittacus Lore

  It leans forward and brings its left hand to the ground. A hand, complete with stubby short fingers with claws like a raptor, claws meant to rip apart anything they touch. It sniffs at me, and roars. An ear-splitting roar that would have pushed me backwards if I weren’t already against a tree. Its mouth opens, showing what must be fifty other teeth, each one every bit as sharp as the next. Its free hand thrusts away from its side and splits in half every tree that it strikes, ten, fifteen of them.

  No more running. No more fighting. Blood from the knife wound runs down my back; my hands and legs are both shaking. The dagger is still tucked into the waistband of my jeans, but what’s the point in grabbing it? What faith is there in a four-inch blade against a forty-foot beast? It would be the equivalent of a splinter. It’ll only make it angrier. My only hope is to bleed to death before I am killed and eaten.

  I close my eyes and accept death. My lights are off. I don’t want to see what is about to happen. I hear movement behind me. I open my eyes. One of the Mogadorians must be moving in for a closer look, I think at first, but I know immediately that I am wrong. There is something familiar about the loping gait, something I recognize in the sound of his breathing. And then he enters the clearing.

  Bernie Kosar.

  I smile, but the smile quickly fades. If I am doomed, there is no point in him dying too. No, Bernie Kosar. You can’t be here. You need to leave and you need to run like the wind, get as far away as you can. Pretend you’ve just finished our early-morning jog to school and that it’s time to return home.

  He looks at me as he walks up. I am here, he seems to say. I am here and I will stand with you.

  “No,” I say aloud.

  He stops long enough to give my hand a reassuring lick. He looks up at me with his big, brown eyes. Get away, John, I hear in my mind. Crawl if you have to crawl, but get away now. The blood loss has made me delusional. Bernie seems to be communicating with me. Is Bernie Kosar even here, or am I imagining that as well?

  He stands in front of me as though in protection. He begins to growl, low at first, but it grows to a growl every bit as ferocious as the beast’s own roar. The beast fixates on Bernie Kosar. A staredown. Bernie Kosar’s hair is raised down the center of his back, his tan ears pinned to his head. His loyalty, his bravery very nearly make me weep. He’s a hundred times smaller than the beast yet he stands tall, vowing to fight. One quick strike from the beast and all is done.

  I reach my hand out to Bernie Kosar. I wish I could stand and grab him and get away. His growls are so fierce that his whole body shakes, tremors coursing through him.

  And then something begins to happen.

  Bernie Kosar begins to grow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  AFTER ALL THIS TIME, ONLY NOW DO I UNDERSTAND. The morning runs when I would run too fast for him to keep pace. He would disappear into the woods, reappear seconds later in front of me. Six tried to tell me. Six took one look at him and she knew immediately. On those runs Bernie Kosar went into the woods to change himself, to turn himself into a bird. The way he would rush outside each morning, nose to the ground, patrolling the yard. Protecting me, and Henri. Looking for signs of the Mogadorians. The gecko in Florida. The gecko that used to watch from the wall while I ate breakfast. How long has he been with us? The Chimæra, the ones I watched being loaded into the rocket—did they make it to Earth after all?

  Bernie Kosar continues to grow. He tells me to run. I can communicate with him. No, that’s not all. I can communicate with all animals. Another Legacy. It started with the deer in Florida on the day that we left. The shudder that ran up my spine as it passed something along to me, some feeling. I attributed it to the sadness of our leaving, but I was wrong. Mark James’s dogs. The cows I passed on my morning runs. The same thing. I feel like such a fool to discover it only now. So blatantly obvious, right in front of my face. Another of Henri’s adages: Those things that are most obvious are the very things we’re most likely to overlook. But Henri knew. That is why he said no to Six when she tried to tell me.

  Bernie Kosar is done growing; his hair has fallen away, replaced by oblong scales. He looks like a dragon, but without the wings. His body is thick with muscle. Jagged teeth and claws, horns that curl like a ram’s. Thicker than the beast, but far shorter. Looking every bit as menacing. Two giants on opposite sides of the clearing, roaring at one another.

  Run, he tells me. I try to tell him that I can’t. I don’t know if he can understand me. You can, he says. You must.

  The beast swings. A hammer swing that starts in the clouds and pours down with brutality. Bernie Kosar blocks it with his horns and then charges before the beast can swing again. A colossal collision in the very center of the clearing. Bernie Kosar thrusts up, sinks his teeth into the beast’s side. The beast knocks him back.

  Both of them so quick that it defies all logic. Bleeding gashes already down the sides of each. I watch with my back against the tree. I try to help. But my telekinesis is still failing me. Blood still pours down my back. My limbs feel heavy, as though my blood has turned to lead. I can feel myself fading.

  The beast is still upright on two legs while Bernie Kosar must fight on four. The beast makes a charge. Bernie Kosar lowers his head and they smash into one another, crashing through the trees off to my right side. Somehow the beast ends up on top. It sinks its teeth deep in Bernie Kosar’s throat. It thrashes, trying to tear his throat out. Bernie Kosar twists under the beast’s bite but he can’t shake free. He tears at the beast’s hide with his paws but the beast doesn’t let go.

  Then a hand reaches out behind me, grabs my arm. I try to push it away but I’m incapable of doing even that. Bernie Kosar’s eyes are closed tightly. He is straining under the beast’s jaws, his throat constricted, unable to breathe.

  “No!” I yell.

  “Come on!” the voice yells behind me. “We need to get out of here.”

  “The dog,” I say, not comprehending whose voice it is. “The dog!”

  Bernie Kosar is being bitten and choked, about to die, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. I won’t be far behind. I would sacrifice my own life for his. I scream out. Bernie Kosar twists his head around and looks at me, his face scrunched tightly in pain and agony and the oncoming death he must feel.

  “We have to go!” the voice behind me yells, the hand pulling me up from off the forest floor.

  Bernie Kosar’s eyes stay fixed on mine. Go, he says to me. Get out of here, now, while you can. There isn’t much time.

  I somehow reach my feet. Dizzy, the world cast in a haze around me. Only Bernie Kosar’s eyes remain clear. Eyes that scream “Help!” even while his thoughts say otherwise.

  “We have to go!” the voice yells again. I don’t turn to face it, but I know whose it is. Mark James, no longer hiding in the school, trying to save me from this clash. His being here must mean that Sarah is okay, and for a brief moment I allow myself to be relieved, but then that relief vanishes as quickly as it came. In this exact moment only one thing matters. Bernie Kosar, on his side, looking at me with glassy eyes. He saved me. It’s my turn to save him.

  Mark reaches his hand across my chest, begins pulling me backwards, out of the clearing, away from the fight. I twist myself free. Bernie Kosar’s eyes slowly begin to close. He’s fading, I think. I won’t watch you die, I tell him. I’m willing to watch many things in this world but I’ll be damned if I’ll watch you die. There’s no response. The beast’s bite hardens. It can sense that death is near.

  I take one wobbly step and pull the dagger from the waistband of my jeans. I close my fingers tightly around it and it comes alive and starts glowing. I’ll never be able to hit the beast by throwing the dagger, and my Legacies have all but vanished. An easy decision. No choice but to charge.

  One deep, shaky breath. I rock my body backwards, everything tensing through the ache of exhaustion, not an inch anywhere on me that doesn’t feel some sort of pain.

  “No!” Mark yells
behind me.

  I lunge forward and sprint for the beast. The beast’s eyes are closed, jaws clamped tightly around Bernie Kosar’s throat so that the moonlight glows in the pools of blood around it. Thirty feet away. Then twenty. The beast’s eyes snap open at the exact moment I jump. Yellow eyes that twist in rage the second they focus upon me, sailing through the air towards them, dagger in both hands held high over my head as though in some heroic dream I never want to wake from. The beast lets go of Bernie Kosar’s throat and moves to bite, but surely it knows that it has sensed me too late. The blade of the dagger glows in anticipation, and I jam it deeply into the eye of the beast. A liquid ooze immediately bursts out. The beast lets out a blood-curdling scream so loud that it’s hard to imagine the dead being able to sleep through it.

  I fall flat on my back. I lift my head and watch the beast totter over me. It tries in vain to pull the dagger from its eye, but its hands are too big and the dagger is too small. The Mogadorian weapons function in some way that I don’t think I’ll ever understand, because of the mystical gateways between the realms. The dagger is no different, the black of the night rushing into the eye of the beast in a vortexlike funnel cloud, a tornado of death.

  The beast falls silent as the last of the great black cloud enters its skull, and the dagger is sucked in with it. The beast’s arms fall limply to its sides. Its hands begin to shake. A violent shake that reverberates throughout the entirety of its massive body. When the convulsions end the beast hunches over and then falls to the ground with its back against the trees. Sitting, but yet still towering some twenty-five feet over me. Everything silent, hanging in anticipation of what is to come. A gun fires once, very close so that my ears ring for seconds afterward. The beast takes a great breath and holds it in as though in meditation, and suddenly its head explodes, raining down pieces of brain and flesh and skull over everything, all of which quickly turn to ash and dust.

  The woods fall silent. I turn my head and look at Bernie Kosar, who still lies motionless on his side, his eyes closed. I can’t tell if he’s alive or not. As I look at him, he begins to change again, shrinking down to his normal size, while remaining lifeless. I hear the sound of crunching leaves and snapping twigs nearby.

  It takes all the strength I have just to lift my head an inch off the ground. I open my eyes and peer up into the haze of night, expecting to see Mark James. But it’s not him standing over me. My breath catches in my throat. A looming figure, indistinct with the moon’s light hovering just over it. Then he takes one step forward, blotting out the moon, and my eyes widen in anticipation and dread.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE HAZY IMAGE SHARPENS. THROUGH THE exhaustion and pain and fear, a smile comes to my face, coupled with a sense of relief. Henri. He throws the shotgun into the bushes and drops to one knee beside me. He face is bloodied, his shirt and jeans in tatters, cuts down the length of both arms and on his neck, and beyond that I see that his eyes are fear-stricken from what he sees in mine.

  “Is it over?” I ask.

  “Shhh,” he says. “Tell me, have you been stabbed by one of their daggers?”

  “My back,” I say.

  He closes his eyes and shakes his head. He reaches into his pocket and removes one of the small round stones I watched him grab from the Loric Chest before we left the home-ec room. His hands are shaking.

  “Open your mouth,” he says. He inserts one of the stones. “Keep it under your tongue. Don’t swallow it.” He hefts me up with his hands beneath my armpits. I get to my feet and he keeps an arm on me while I regain balance. He turns me around to look at the gash on my back. My face feels warm. A sort of rejuvenation blooms through me from the stone. My limbs still ache with exhaustion, but enough strength has returned so that I’m able to function.

  “What is this?”

  “Loric salt. It’ll slow and numb the dagger’s effects,” he says. “You’ll feel a burst of energy, but it won’t last long and we have to get back to the school as quickly as we can.”

  The pebble is cold in my mouth, tastes nothing like salt—tastes like nothing at all, actually. I look down and take inventory, and then brush off with my hands the ashen residue left from the fallen beast.

  “Is everyone okay?” I ask.

  “Six has been badly hurt,” he says. “Sam is carrying her back to the truck as we speak; then he is going to drive to the school to pick us up. That’s why we have to get back there.”

  “Have you seen Sarah?”

  “No.”

  “Mark James was just here,” I say, and look at him. “I thought you were him.”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  I look past Henri at the dog. “Bernie Kosar,” I say. He is still shrinking, the scales fading away—tan, black, and brown hair taking their place—returning to the form in which I have known him most recently: floppy ears, short legs, long body. A beagle with a cold wet nose always ready to run. “He just saved my life. You knew, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I knew.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because he watched over you when I couldn’t.”

  “But how is he here?”

  “He was on the ship with us.”

  And then I remember what I thought was a stuffed animal that used to play with me. It was really Bernie Kosar I was playing with, though back then his name was Hadley.

  We walk to the dog together. I crouch down and run my hand along Bernie Kosar’s side.

  “We have to hurry,” Henri says again.

  Bernie Kosar isn’t moving. The woods are alive, swarming with shadows that can only mean one thing, but I don’t care. I move my head to the dog’s rib cage. Ever so faintly I hear the th-tump of his beating heart. Some glimmer of life is still left. He is covered in deep cuts and gashes, and blood seems to seep from everywhere. His front leg is twisted at an unnatural angle, broken. But he is still alive. I lift him as gently as I can, cradling him like a child in my arms. Henri helps me up, then reaches into his pocket, grabs another salt pebble, and plops it into his own mouth. It makes me wonder if he was talking about himself when he said there was little time. Both of us are unsteady. And then something catches my eye in Henri’s thigh. A wound glowing navy blue through the gathering blood around it. He’s also been stabbed by a soldier’s knife. I wonder if the salt pebble is the only reason he’s now standing, as it is for me.

  “What about the shotgun?” I ask.

  “I’m out of ammo.”

  We walk out of the clearing, taking our time. Bernie Kosar doesn’t move in my arms but I can feel that life hasn’t left him. Not yet. We exit the woods, leaving behind us the overhanging branches and bushes and the smell of wet and rotting leaves.

  “Do you think you can run?” Henri asks.

  “No,” I say. “But I’ll run anyway.”

  Up ahead of us we hear a great commotion, several grunts followed by clanking of chains.

  And then we hear a roar, not quite as sinister as the others, but loud enough so that we know it can only mean one thing: another beast.

  “You’re kidding me,” Henri says.

  Twigs snap behind us, coming from the woods. Henri and I both twist around, but the woods are too dense to see. I snap the light on in my left hand and sweep it through the trees to see. There must be seven or eight soldiers standing at the entrance of the woods, and when my light hits them they all draw their swords, which come alive, glowing their various colors the second they do.

  “No!” Henri yells. “Don’t use your Legacies; it’ll weaken you.”

  But it’s too late. I snap the light off. Vertigo and weakness return, then the pain. I hold my breath and wait for the soldiers to come charging at us. But they don’t. There follows no sound aside from the obvious struggle happening straight ahead of us. Then an uproar of yells behind us. I turn to look. The glowing swords begin swaggering forward from forty feet away. A confident laugh comes from one of the soldiers. Nine of them armed and full of
strength versus three of us broken and battered and armed with nothing more than our valor. The beast one way, the soldiers the other. That is the choice that we now face.

  Henri seems unfazed. He removes two more pebbles from his pocket and hands one to me.

  “The last two,” he says, his voice shaky as though it requires a great effort just to speak.

  I plop the new pebble into my mouth and bury it beneath my tongue despite a small bit of the first still remaining. Renewed strength rushes through me.

  “What do you think?” he asks me.

  We are surrounded. Henri and Bernie Kosar and I are the only three left. Six badly hurt and carried away by Sam. Mark just here but now nowhere to be found. And that leaves Sarah, who I pray is tucked away safely in the school that lies a tenth of a mile ahead of us. I take a deep breath and I accept the inevitable.

  “I don’t think it matters, Henri,” I say, and look at him. “But the school is ahead of us, and that is where Sam will be shortly.”

  What he does next catches me off guard: he smiles. He reaches his hand out and gives my shoulder a squeeze. His eyes are tired and red but in them I see relief, a sense of serenity as though he knows it’s all about to end.

  “We’ve done all we could. And what’s done is done. But I’m damn proud of you,” he says. “You did amazing today. I always knew you would. There was never a doubt in my mind.”

  I drop my head. I don’t want him to see me cry. I squeeze the dog. For the first time since I grabbed him he shows a slight sign of life, lifting his head just enough so that he can lick the side of my face. He passes one word to me and one word only, as if that is all his strength will allow. Courage, he says.