The Shadow City
Page 19
“Red snake!” Brett screamed. “Red snake!” He grabbed at the sides of his head. “That’s what I’ve been seeing! That’s the red snake!”
The serpent grew, doubling in size in the space of two seconds, and as it coiled on the ground below the breach, it took its tail in its mouth and doubled in size again. Ouroboros, Lily thought. A snake eating its own tail—a symbol of infinity. Brett screamed again, and Lily dashed to his side, Kaz and Jackson right behind her.
“Brett!” Lily grabbed her brother’s arm and dragged it away from his head. “Brett, what is this? What’s happening?”
The serpent kept growing and growing, pulsing on the ground beneath the breach. Gabe was still there, framed in the rip between worlds, shouting something, but she couldn’t hear him. Brett stared at the snake in purest horror. “Oh God . . . oh God, I remember now! I remember!” He turned to Lily, panic making his voice rise, and grabbed her shoulders. “He tricked us! Thorne! When he possessed me—Lily, it was his idea to add the ring to the ritual!”
Jackson pulled Brett around to face him. “What are you saying? What have we done?”
Brett made a strangled sound. “He never had the power to do this on his own! He needed us—we had to do it! And he tricked us!”
Lily backed away, wide eyes flitting between Brett and the ever-growing red serpent encircling the breach. The golden energy rippling around the breach’s edge darkened. Turned red. What was Brett saying? That their ritual—sacrificing Gabe and his family—had helped Thorne?
Brett crumpled to the ground. “I’m sorry!” he screamed. “I didn’t know—I didn’t know!”
An overwhelming sound filled the air, and Lily sensed it was coming from the serpent. It was a hiss, but it also sounded like the ringing of a bell. Lily felt the noise burrow deep into her brain, just like the strange language they’d spoken during the ritual.
The breach became a solid, pulsing ruby red and contracted to a tiny, eye-searing pinpoint of light—before it exploded in a red-gold flash that knocked Lily down as if she’d been hit by a car.
She didn’t lose consciousness. Not quite. Vivid red-gold spots floated in her vision, and she knew she’d scraped the skin from her knees and the heels of her hands from the rough, skidding impact. But she thought she must be dreaming. Dreaming or . . .
I’m dead. I’m dead, the explosion killed me.
She had to be either dreaming or dead, because Gabe was there, holding her in his lap, and when the ringing in her ears finally subsided, she heard him saying over and over, “Lily, come back. Lily. Please, please come back.”
It took a lot of effort to focus her eyes. “Gabe?”
He laughed. Half relief, half hysteria.
Suddenly very much awake and alert, Lily sprang to her feet and looked around.
The strange red serpent was gone, and so was the breach. Where it had hung in the air, Dr. Conway and Gabe’s mother stood. Kaz, Brett, and Jackson were there with them. Lily turned to Gabe, icy fear flooding her insides. She threw her arms around him, but she knew this was no happy reunion. Something was wrong. “Gabe . . . what happened? How are you . . . here?”
He pulled away, his green eyes a million years old, and pointed up. “Take a look.”
Lily craned her head back and gasped. Huge streaks of amber swirled through the blue and gray sky overhead. She turned around to stare across the bay at San Francisco. As she watched, the Transamerica building grew, twisted, and turned black, until it came to rest as an impossibly tall, malevolent corkscrew against the city’s skyline. Other buildings were going through the same strange metamorphosis. Then a flicker of motion pulled Lily’s gaze to the Golden Gate Bridge, where she saw a massive swarm of creatures even larger and stranger than abyssal bats. They beat their leathery wings, making their way over the bridge and toward the city. From the waters of the bay, a long, low roar rolled across the waves. It was a sound unlike anything she’d ever heard before, and it froze Lily to the bone.
“Thorne played us,” Gabe said quietly at her side. “He made us think his plan was to use the earthquakes and the blood cocoons, but we were his real plan all along. The ring he tricked us into using made all the difference.”
“What—I don’t understand,” Lily said. She couldn’t get her brain to process what her eyes were seeing.
“Thorne won,” Gabe said. “He finally merged San Francisco with Arcadia. Worse than that—he got us to do it for him.”
Lily’s throat refused to work. She stared out at the city. The city where she grew up. The city she no longer recognized.
The world as she knew it had just come to an end.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Tracy Jolley
DAN JOLLEY writes novels, comic books, children’s books, and video games, and doesn’t visit his mother as often as he should (according to his mother). His work includes the manga stories set in Erin Hunter’s Warriors and Seekers universes, the Transformers video games War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron, the Dark Horse Comics YA graphic novel series LARP! (with cowriter Shawn deLoache), and the Oculus Rift game Chronos. Dan lives somewhere in the hills of northwest Georgia with his very patient wife, Tracy, and four largely useless cats. You can bug him by visiting www.danjolley.com or by following him on Twitter @_DanJolley.
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BOOKS BY DAN JOLLEY
Five Elements
Book 1: The Emerald Tablet
CREDITS
Cover art by Sandara Tang
Title logo design by Jason Cook
Cover design by Michelle Taormina
COPYRIGHT
FIVE ELEMENTS #2: THE SHADOW CITY. Copyright © 2017 by Working Partners, Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960409
ISBN 978-0-06-241167-9 (trade bdg.)
EPub Edition © July 2017 ISBN 9780062411693
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FIRST EDITION
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