Thinking we had everything, I started to make my way out into the hall. But SJ didn’t follow. She was still desperately searching around the storage room.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“When Arian and his men captured us, they took the quill from the Century City Summit and Ashlyn’s locket. They took your Hole Tracker too.” She gestured to my wrist.
My eyebrows shot up as I discovered she was right. So much was happening that I hadn’t even noticed it was gone. Now that I did, I was even more ticked off at Nadia.
“They must know the worth of those items,” SJ continued. “I thought they would be in here with the rest of our things, but they are not.”
“They could be anywhere in this place,” Blue moaned. “Where do we even start looking?”
“Maybe we should split up—try to cover more ground,” Jason suggested.
“No,” I said firmly. “We’re stronger together. No matter what happens, we stay as a team.”
The others stared at me for a second. I didn’t blame them. After all the stunts I’d pulled I’d practically become the poster child for going it alone. But no more. I’d made my mistakes and had meant it when I said I was going to learn from them.
“She’s right,” Daniel said, looking as surprised as the others. “Our chances of getting out of here are a whole lot better as a group.”
“Then what should we do?” Jason asked.
“We’re not leaving without those items. If we don’t get them then we’ll have come all this way for nothing,” Blue said.
“Agreed,” I replied. “Plus, without them we’ll be stuck in Alderon. They’re our only means for breaking the In and Out Spell and escaping this kingdom.”
“Where should we start looking?”
“I think we should head toward the throne room,” I said. “I have a feeling that the curtained area next to Nadia’s throne leads to her royal study. I’ve had a vision about it and I’d put money that’s where she’s keeping our stuff.”
“What makes you think that?” SJ asked.
“You saw the big fuss she made about getting me here; the girl likes trophies. She probably has our things sitting on a shelf in her study right now like commemorative souvenirs.”
“It’s as good a guess as any,” Daniel replied.
“That’s the spirit,” I said. “Now let’s move, they’ll be coming for us soon.”
Wand in hand and friends by my side, we bolted up the stairs. We had to climb several flights to escape the forlorn underground prison. On our way up we ran into a few guards who’d felt the pea’s disturbance and were coming to check on us. They didn’t waylay my team for long. A few guards were no match for our combined skill.
The hallway at the top of the stairs was empty so we moved swiftly in the direction of the throne room, knowing that our safe passage could be compromised at any moment.
That moment took place right as we rounded the corner.
Aw, dang.
All it took was one guard to see us, sound an alarm, and throw the scene into chaos.
When he spotted us he placed his palm against something that looked like a half crystal ball lodged in the wall. In an instant its color went from translucent white to bright red. The light shot through the black glass walls like a streak of lightning and ignited the ceiling in the same shade. A low-pitched siren began to sound.
We made a break for it—taking out the guard then pushing aside a handful of others who entered the corridor.
A blur of black glass walls and life-size animal statues rushed past us as we moved forward. This evade-and-outrun approach could only last for so long. Guards began to pour in from everywhere. Before we were halfway to the throne room we got cut off. This left us with one violent, but arguably more fun option. Fight.
Spear.
I blocked the first man with a thrust of my spear and continued the momentum to jab the bottom of the staff into a second attacker’s abdomen. I quarter-turned and reversed the process—blocking a third guard and jabbing the first man.
My friends dealt with their own serving of antagonists.
SJ’s attack was two-fold. She fired portable potions at the attackers who got too close—stopping them in their paths by encasing them in either ice or slime. Then whenever she had a clean wide shot she cleared a path for us—releasing explosion potions to blast back attackers and create an opening for our group to forge ahead.
Daniel moved alongside SJ, defending her from attackers as she fired. He fought swiftly and with more skill than any of his opponents had been trained to handle. One after another he disarmed and knocked out guards in their way.
At the rear of our pack Jason and Blue protected us from guards who were coming up from behind. Him with his trusty axe and she with her equally trusty hunting knife and throwing knives, they worked in perfect synchronicity. Their dual-powered defense was so in tune that it looked like they were moving with one brain and one instinct.
A couple of throwing knives sank into a pair of attackers’ calves beside me. I glanced over at Blue as Jason shielded himself from two attackers with his axe’s shimmering force field. Their assault bounced off of it. He lowered the shield and thwacked his elbow into one guard’s temple while kicking the other in the spine. He lunged to finish them both while Blue slid underneath the sword of an attacker, rolled to her feet, and slashed at two more. She popped up and nailed one man with a right hook and thrust the other back with the heel of her hand—sending him staggering into a couple of soldiers right behind him.
As SJ’s explosion potions lit up my peripherals I noted that we were doing well. Despite the onslaught, we had managed to migrate through three more sections of the palace. I knew not to get cocky though. Like ants on a carcass, the number of guards kept multiplying, and it wouldn’t be long before they threatened to consume us completely. All we could do was keep fighting and hope we made it to the throne room before then.
And duck and turn and bam!
I flipped my staff and struck one attacker in the head then double jabbed him in the solar plexus. I swung around to block a second guard. With another flip and downward thrust I struck him high then quickly flipped the staff to strike him low.
An ice potion erupted a few feet away—encasing four men in a block of frost. Three knives thrown in perfect sequence took out a trio of archers trying to get a shot at us. Daniel kicked an attacker so hard that it sounded like the man’s bones shattered when he hit the wall. Jason slammed the side of his axe into one man’s head, jutted the handle upward to nail him in the jaw, then blasted three more men back with his energy shield.
In spite of our best efforts, the number of guards kept increasing. As we continued forward, the intersecting hallways allowed them to converge from all angles. The combination of these factors was slowly drawing us away from one another so that we were fending for ourselves rather than fighting as a unit.
At that moment, the five of us were spread out in a large intersection with a grand staircase that led up to other floors. Too many guards to count were streaming down and heading straight for us. I glanced at my friends. Our time was up.
“SJ!” I called.
She looked over.
“Now!” I pointed at the staircase.
She understood what I was saying, as did the others. We all worked to clear her a shot. Daniel forcefully knocked back three guards who were closing in on them. Blue fired so many throwing knives in such quick succession it looked like she had four arms. Jason slashed and smacked anyone who tried to get too close to any of them.
Unseen by the others, a guard escaped their assault and rushed at SJ from the right.
Shield.
Like I had with Goldilocks, I flung my shield like a discus. Just as the guard raised his broadsword to bring it down on SJ, the hard metal rammed into his head and knocked him out.
SJ was clear to take the shot. She snatched out the indigo-colored portable potion that would either save us or bury us, p
ulled back on her slingshot, and fired.
The potion smashed into the staircase among the twenty or so guards that had been rushing down it. When the orb impacted, it felt like the world seizured. Five powerful shockwaves slowly rippled through the palace. A giant crack formed on the staircase amidst a cloud of indigo smoke. The fissure widened as the pulses continued, ripping the area apart and swallowing countless guards into its depths as it expanded.
Portions of wall came crashing to the floor. Sections of ceiling imploded. Every person in the vicinity was knocked off his or her feet and thrust to the ground by the magnitude of the earthquake’s energy.
Like the others, I rolled over and covered my head, shielding myself from the black glass that rained down.
When the pulses stopped, my head still rang. Thankfully I had been knocked about so many times during this adventure that my recovery was getting faster. I jumped to my feet and dashed amongst the shattered glass, bronze, and stone to retrieve my wand—still in its shield form.
If you counted the guards that had been coming down the stairs, we’d previously had about forty men to worry about. With many having fallen through the chasm in the floor and others downed from being hit by debris, only a third remained. But they were already starting to get to their feet.
I grasped my shield with one hand and extended the other to a nearby SJ to help her up. Blue, Jason, and Daniel quickly joined us and we made a run for it.
It was a decent head start, but the guards were not far behind. And soon enough we were cut off by a fresh insurgence that came from the hallways ahead. Between the two factions there was no way to sugarcoat it. The odds were not in our favor.
Once again we were pushed apart—the circle of our defenses forced to widen in order to evade being overwhelmed.
One of SJ’s ice potions exploded on my left, encasing two guards. Jason swung his axe at an opponent and Blue came around back and punched that same attacker in the head. A slime potion erupted on my right and trapped four guards where they stood. Daniel rushed past SJ and clashed his sword with one man before breaking the guy’s jaw with a thrust of his elbow.
My friends were moving with as much speed and strength as before, but there was a definite change in tension. Our confidence and purpose was overshadowed by desperation. We were outnumbered and losing control. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before we were just losing in general.
Shield.
I blocked a sword at my left and began to pivot to block another on my right, but didn’t get around in time. I was slashed on my upper arm.
Spear.
I blocked high and low, and side to side, then back and forth, and—
Awgh!
While I’d been parrying my attacker’s sword he’d swung around his other arm and nailed me in the head with a right hook.
I tumbled back from the force of the punch. He came at me. I raised my spear just in time to avoid the strike. Our weapons collided. I jutted out my leg and kicked him in the shin. He was thrown off balance. I leapt up and hammered his face with my fist. Then I spun around to back-kick a second attacker and smash a third one in the skull with my staff.
Geez, how many guys was that?
It feels like I’ve been fighting for . . .
Yikes!
I ducked to avoid another hook punch.
Shield.
Block. Thrust. Block.
Sword.
Parry. Strike. Strike. Parry.
Spear.
Swing. Thrust. Block. Thrust. Jolt.
Awgh!
I’d been punched in the face again by one of the guards. This time was worse. His hand had been covered in a metallic gauntlet. It left me with a pretty substantial cut on my cheek.
I staggered a few feet and tripped over some fallen debris. I backed up against one of the life-size animal statues that lined the hallway. This one was a dragon—a fairly big and kind of familiar-looking dragon.
Light streamed in from a gaping hole in the ceiling that had been created by SJ’s earthquake potion. The gleam reflected off the bronze statue. The way it hit the metal creature, it kind of reminded me of . . .
Oh no.
There were eight guards steadily coming toward me.
I glanced around.
Jason and Blue were fighting back-to-back with a group of attackers the size of my own. Daniel was almost out of options—about to be cornered against a large bear statue directly to his right. And SJ . . . SJ had been pushed to the ground!
I wanted to go to her. I wanted to go to the others as well. But I was in no more a position to help them than they were to help me. We were trapped. We were all trapped and I didn’t know how we were going to escape this time.
Wait, where is that shadow coming from?
An enormous, oddly shaped shadow spilled across the floor. My eyes darted to the ceiling.
What in the . . .
I hit the floor and covered my face. Glass didn’t just rain this time; it poured. Five seconds later a large thud, which sounded like an earthquake in its own right, impacted the ground beside me. I slowly picked myself off the ground and looked up.
The gaping hole in the ceiling had been replaced by an entire lack of ceiling.
A weighty snort against my face drew my attention.
Crouching before me was a dragon, panting heavily. He had created the great hole in the ceiling when he’d forcefully crashed through it. It was the same dragon that had been chasing my friends and me across the realm over the last few weeks. And I knew this time there would be no outrunning him.
I stood rapidly and instinctively tried to back up, but was stopped by the dragon statue behind me. I was cornered with nowhere to go.
Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hot place.
I gazed over the state of the massive hall.
Statues had been tipped over, glass covered the floor, and dozens of people were on the ground. They’d all been taken down by the crash. So far, I was the only one who’d managed to regain my senses and get back up.
Lucky me. I get to be super aware of what’s going on when this thing eats me.
That’s when I noticed something. The silver-scaled dragon was blinking at me curiously. He’d extended his neck so that his face was barely two feet from my own, but he didn’t look like he wanted to eat me or set me on fire. He just stared at me like he was waiting for something.
The first time I’d gotten near this dragon was when I was flying through the sky over Book’s capital. At the time I had been splitting my focus between maneuvering my Pegasus and working my lacrosse sword. The second time I’d seen him had been in the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest when we were evading Arian, his men, and their cannonball launchers. Finally, the last time the dragon came near us was yesterday at Fairy Godmother Headquarters. When the creature had been inbound for the building, I’d only gotten a quick glance at him through the Godmothers’ shimmering hologram screen.
This was the first time I was close enough to get a good look at the dragon. Between that and being pressed up against the bronze dragon statue, I realized something.
This live dragon bore a striking resemblance to that stone dragon statue we’d come across in the Capitol Building—the one that guarded the passageway to Arian’s bunker.
It was uncanny. Not only was the face identical, the dragon’s approximate length and height were the same too.
There were only two notable differences between the dragons. One, that dragon had been composed of gray rock whereas this one had glistening silver scales on the outside and flesh and blood on the inside. Two, the eyes were wrong. The pair on the statue at the Capitol Building had been pure black stone. This live dragon’s eyes were a rich shade of glowing gold that felt weirdly familiar.
“Crisa, remember the dragon.”
The phrase the woman in my dreams had been communicating came to the forefront of my mind.
“It has something to do with the first time you touched him,” the woman
had said. “When the time comes and you face Nadia, remembering him will be the only thing that can save you.”
But I’d never touched this dragon. The only dragon I’d technically ever touched was . . .
I gasped.
The dragon statue at the Capitol Building.
I stared into this dragon’s eyes and a ludicrous idea popped into my head. It was so crazy that I hesitated before allowing myself to fully process it. Those eyes . . .
What was it about them? It was like I had seen them before. And not just on this dragon, but following me everywhere like a dream or a ghost or . . . a memory.
That’s when it hit me.
A flash of recollections crashed down like a tidal wave.
The seagull that had attacked Mauvrey the night of the ball in Adelaide Castle, the rock monster in the Therewolves’ lair that had saved me from the troupe’s evil director, the killer tree outside the Forbidden Forest that assaulted Arian’s men, even those vine blossoms growing outside our bedroom at Lady Agnue’s with their bright, glistening stamen. They all had exhibited some form of these golden, glowing eyes.
But what did that mean? What was the connection? In retrospect, all those creatures had appeared when I’d needed them to, as if by command. And in the minutes before they’d sprung up I’d just been . . .
I glanced down to where my hand rested on the face of the bronze dragon statue.
I’d been touching them.
The understanding came at me like a slap in the face as I recalled touching the dragon statue in the Capitol Building, the vines on our balcony, the stone seagull in Adelaide Castle, the rocky interior of the Therewolves’ lair, and the tree I’d hidden behind when Arian was chasing me through the forest.
The sudden appearance of those creatures had not been mere coincidence. The same went for other occasions in years past when unexplained magical creatures crossed my path. They hadn’t been coming to life on their own; I had been giving it to them.
Prior to touching those objects I’d sometimes experienced one of those weird hand-burning episodes that I recently learned were cases of Magic Build-Up—the phenomenon that occurred when power built up inside me until it erupted. This explained why the episodes stopped so suddenly each time. I had been releasing the excess magic into whatever I’d been touching.
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