Unturned- The Complete Series

by Rob Cornell

  “So while we wait for him to do his part, what do we do?”

  I started the engine and put the car in gear. “Hopefully Mom and Sly have figured out a way to destroy that thing. After that, the rest should come easy.”

  I twisted in my seat to look behind me while I backed up. I noticed Odi’s tense expression and kept my foot on the break.

  “What about Toft?” he asked. “If you destroy the cloak, you’ve got no reason to get him back. And they have no reason to let him live.”

  “Do you want him back?”

  “I need him. Pretty obvious. I doubt any other vampires are gonna want to adopt me.” He smiled, but it didn’t touch his sad eyes. “I’ll be orphaned for the third time in my life. How pathetic is that?”

  “Not going to happen,” I said. “We’ll get him back.”

  “Really?” This surprise in his voice broke my heart. What he said next broke it again. “Because if they kill him, you’re free of your oath.”

  “You think I’d abandon you like that?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  I opened my mouth to argue the point, but stopped myself. Whatever I said probably wouldn’t sound sincere to his ears. And if I looked deep enough inside of myself, could I deny a part of me wanted to let him go? Hadn’t I argued with Toft that the kid couldn’t handle his power enough and it was already too late to train him? With my oath undone, I could do the right thing. I could stop trying to make Odi the sorcerer he could never be.

  “We’ve got to get back to Sly’s,” I said.

  Odi drew back into the shadows. For all intents and purposes, I was alone again.

  The first words out of Sly’s mouth when we arrived were, “We can’t destroy it.”

  We were back in the kitchen, our makeshift command center. The smell of coffee hung so thick, if I closed my eyes I could imagine I stood in a Starbucks. Sly must have cranked up the heat. I went from chilly to sweaty in under a minute, and I could hear the ducts still breathing out more warm air. Add a little humidity, and we could have gone tropical.

  A laptop computer sat open on the table among a scattering of printouts. Mom was poring over a sheaf of papers and barely muttered a hello when we came in.

  “You’ve done all the research on the internet?” I asked.

  Mom threw down her papers. “It isn’t like I have my collection of books from our basement anymore, seeing as they were all burned up. And I can’t very well waltz into the DML.”

  DML stood for the Detroit Ministry Library—a massive collection of arcane tomes, many of which Mom and Dad had helped recover during their time as scholars. They had both spent a great amount of time in the DML. It had been like a second home.

  All their time there had given me enough slack as a teen to get into all sorts of trouble. But that’s a story for another time.

  “So that’s it, then? There is no way to destroy it?”

  Mom sighed and rubbed her temples. Then she looked up at Sly. They exchanged a weird look. They were trying to decide whether or not to tell me something.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you guys thinking?”

  Sly worked his lips together and looked away. Mom had the guts to look me in the eye, though.

  “We can’t destroy it, but I have an idea of where we can put it, somewhere nobody could ever get to it.”

  I leaned up against the counter and tucked my hands into my pockets. The heat still blew through the ducts. Sweat slicked the back of my neck. “Another hiding place? Doesn’t that leave us in the same situation?”

  “Not a hiding place,” Mom said. “A place no one could dare go, whether they knew the cloak was there or not.”

  That sweat on my neck spread down the length of my spine. My shirt stuck to my skin. “What kind of place are you talking about?”

  Sly blurted, “Hell.”

  I scrunched up my face. “Um, what?”

  “I told you that’s a simplification, Sylvester,” Mom chided him like a child.

  “Fine. Not the Hell. A hell.”

  Talk of hell could get confusing from the perspective of someone familiar with the paranormal. When the typical person mentions Hell, most think of the Christian version. Eternal damnation. Lucifer. Flames. Other cultures have similar takes. But the truth was, the mythical ‘Hell’ mortals were familiar with merely represented a larger truth. Demons came from all manner of alternate planes. Many of those planes were filled with creatures one could mistake for devils. A number of them even hosted undying flames. In fact, the flames were close to universal.

  In any case, there were a whole bunch of places a person could call Hell. But spelling the word with a capital H did not jive with reality. That would be like calling all the states in the US Michigan. I imagine many of those states would take issue with that generalization.

  I looked at Mom as if she’d snuffed a tank of helium while I was gone. “You want to stick the cloak in hell?”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous—”

  “It sounds impossible.”

  She held up a hand. “Just listen to me.” She grabbed that stack of papers she’d been studying and held them out to me. I stared at them as if they might take on a life of their own and shred me with paper cuts.

  “Fine,” Mom snapped and slapped the papers back onto the table. “I found a ritual that could open a portal to a hell dimension. We open the portal, toss the cloak in, close it up, and we’re done.”

  “You want to open a window into hell? You’re out of your fucking mind. You can go in—”

  “Of course not. That’s the point.”

  “—and who knows what could come out?”

  “There are logistics we would need to work out, but—”

  “Logistics? Logistics?” I had swallowed enough crap ideas to last me a lifetime. I would not go for this one. “Two words, and then I don’t want to talk about it again. No. Way.”

  Mom pounded the table hard enough to make the laptop jump. Sly snatched the computer up, closed it, and tucked it under his arm.

  I noticed Odi had slunk out of the kitchen at some point and was nowhere in sight.

  “Damn it, Sebastian. You said yourself if we hide the cloak somewhere else, nothing changes. They’ll still come after me for the location.”

  “That’s why you aren’t going to be the one to hide it,” I said. “I am.”

  She shook her head. “Then they’ll get to you eventually. Torture you. Make you tell them.”

  “No they won’t.”

  Mom shot to her feet. She came at me, grabbed me by the shoulders, and gave me a quick shake. “You are a thirty-two-year-old sorcerer. Your father was six times your age. I’m nearly five times. If sorcerers as experienced and powerful as us couldn’t resist their efforts, what in the heavens makes you think you can?”

  Ah, crap.

  She was right. She could have said it a little more politely, but she was right. I had nothing on them. And if these Ministry goons got a hold of me, I wouldn’t stand a chance. They would break me. Then they would kill me.

  My whole body sagged as I accepted the truth. “How complicated is the ritual?”

  “Not very, frighteningly enough. Sly is going to take me shopping so I can pick up what I need. In the meantime, you need to get the cloak and bring it back here.”

  My stomach fluttered as if I suffered stage fright. It all came to this. “Okay. Where is it?”

  “In our basement.”

  I drew my head back. “Say what? The house was destroyed. And I know Goulet picked through the wreckage because he had Dad’s pocket watch. If it was there, they would have found it.”

  Mom rolled her eyes at me. “It isn’t just sitting around. I hid it in a bubble. A sort of parallel existence pulled around it like a blanket.”

  My surprise must have been obvious. “I know,” she said. “It’s not my typical work. And not something I could do on my own. Your father and I both worked it out.”

  “So the cloak is st
ill down there among the wreckage, but in this bubble.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I need to what? Pop the bubble?”

  She turned her hand from side to side. “Sort of, I suppose.”

  “Easy peasy. Just tell me what I need to do.”

  She frowned. “That’s the catch.”

  I groaned. “Why does there always have to be a catch?”

  “You’ll need help. I would come with you, but I think it’s better if I get this ritual going so you can come directly here and toss it through the portal.”

  Oh, boy. I knew what was coming, and I already felt queasy.

  “Markus could do it,” she said. “Probably more easily than I could, for that matter.”

  “You want me to grab this thing with the help of a stranger?”

  The dry heat had me sweating enough to stink. I could even feel sweat running down the insides of my thighs. I had put myself in nice fresh clothes, free of plaster dust and tears, and now I felt like I had to change again already. I wanted to shout at Sly for cranking up the thermostat so fucking high.

  “He isn’t a stranger,” Mom said while I wriggled in discomfort.” He’s my…my very good friend. I thought you had decided to trust him.”

  “Not with the cloak, the whole fucking reason we’re so screwed in the first place. You’ll have to do it. You can conjure up the portal once we have it.”

  “I told you, I have things I need to gather first.”

  “Well, gather them now while the cloak is still hidden. Then we can head over there.”

  She touched my face and smiled sadly. His hand felt cool against my cheek despite the overwhelming heat. “You aren’t strong enough. I won’t be able to carry you enough to make it work. Markus has more power. You’ll need him, not me.”

  Again she hit me with my lack of ability. I had never felt like such a weakling in my life. Not even when I was all but drained of my magical juice while fighting off the vampire infection before I got the brand, though I had more power now, brand or no brand.

  But that power couldn’t keep me from feeling helpless.

  I hated it.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Should we try first?”

  “The longer we wait, the more time they have to find us, hurt us. All of us.” She waved a hand around her to indicate Sly and Odi, who had crept back into the kitchen at some point, standing in the archway to the hall behind him. The kid looked smaller to me. Younger. A lot less undead, and a whole lot more unprepared.

  “We really don’t have a choice, do we?”

  “He will help us,” Mom said. “He will.”

  Trust had become such a sticking point for me. Who could blame me, though? Still, if I kept refusing help because of my own hang-up, we couldn’t find our way out of this mess, couldn’t finally put the danger behind us.

  “All right. Call him and have him meet me at the house.”

  She nodded and hurried to the table where she had left her cell phone and snatched it up as if trying to put the call in before I changed my mind.

  “We still have a few hours of dark left,” Odi said. “Am I coming with?”

  “For sure.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  I arrived before Markus, which kind of sounded like an omen or something. That was the kind of bullshit swirling through my head at the moment. Negativity and paranoia. My gut twisted and twisted again while I waited. If it kept up, I might cough up a wad of flesh that only kind of resembled my stomach.

  I stood at the edge of what used to be my house. Most of it had caved into the basement. Partial walls and blackened beams remained in some parts. I could use my imagination to reconstruct some of it. Other sections I couldn’t recognize enough to fill in the blanks. As a whole, though, it looked entirely alien to me.

  The smell of charred wood and wet sod dominated the air this close to the remains. Enough October rain had soaked the lawn and the broken innards of the house to give the ruins a sunken and saggy appearance.

  Through some of the debris that had collapsed into the basement, I could make out wet flaps of parchment and leather bindings glistening with moisture. I saw one end of a giant bone that looked like a dinosaur femur. I had once wielded that bone as a weapon against another hunter out to collect on my head. I still didn’t know what animal it had really come from. I made a mental note to ask Mom about it, but with all that was going on, I doubted I’d remember.

  I sensed someone watching me. I hadn’t heard Markus pull up, and I didn’t think it was Odi crouched in the shadows close to the neighbor’s house to my left. I turned my gaze to my other neighbor’s house that belonged to a widow named Mrs. Sokalski, but who Dad had christened Mrs. Snoopis because of her propensity to pry into our lives. She was determined to discover what kind of secret life we led, though most of her guesses didn’t come close. Meth dealers was one of my faves. I had often entertained myself imagining how she would react if she learned the truth.

  I used to resent her unwanted attention. Nowadays, I mostly felt sorry for her.

  Sure enough, she peered at me through the curtains hung across her picture window. Her eyes glimmered.

  Finally, Markus’s SUV pulled to the curb and parked behind the Caddy.

  It had started to drizzle. My scalp prickled as the cold rain dampened my hair.

  Markus came out of his car wearing a flowing robe with wide sleeves and trim with runes embroidered onto them. The robe flowed down to his ankles. The sleeves covered his hands. The robe had a wide hood, but it hung down his back.

  “Nice getup,” I said as he approached.

  “From what your mother told me, we’ll need a fair amount of magic. This enchanted robe will help a great deal.”

  He still looked stupid to me.

  “I hope you don’t mind getting it dirty,” I said. “Because we have to go down there.”

  I pointed down into the crater around where my Dad’s work area used to be. I could see his old work bench and a crushed bookcase that had separated his area from the rest of the basement. Mom had said that was where she and Dad had planted the bubble. Apparently, it didn’t have an exact location, but the incantation she had taught me would pull it to us as long as we stood close enough.

  “I wouldn’t worry about me,” he said. “You’re the one dressed as if we’re on a date.”

  I looked down at my clothes. I wore my new pea coat and some relaxed fit jeans. My trusty boots had survived the cave in at Toft’s. And while I had a black button down shirt under my coat, he couldn’t see it. “I dress a little nicer than this on dates.”

  He shrugged and moved to the edge of the ruins, lined up to where I had pointed. “Down here?”

  “If we can get close to the work bench, we should be good.”

  Problem was, a pair of rafters crisscrossed and leaned into the space with a bunch of wet drywall crumbled into the bottom V of the rafters, not giving us much room to get down there. We might have been able to stand on the wreckage and still have enough proximity to draw the bubble to us and open it, though.

  I couldn’t see any other way, short of lifting out the debris with magic, and I didn’t want to waste energy doing that like I had at Toft’s, because the way Mom explained things, I would need every ounce of my power to open the bubble.

  Markus, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any such concerns. He pulled a full-on Yoda and lifted the beams and most of the broken drywall without much thought or care, simply holding out his hands and maneuvering them as if holding a miniature version of the stuff he manipulated.

  As he dropped the stuff onto the driveway, I glance back at Mrs. Snoopis’s picture window. The curtains were closed, but they ruffled as if very recently disturbed. If she’d seen Markus’s handiwork, what would she do? Call the police? The local news? Or hide under her bed and try convincing herself she had hallucinated the whole thing?

  She had already witnessed a bunch of vamps burn down the house with flamethrowers—though sh
e probably hadn’t realized they were vampires—so how much worse could some flying rafters and crumpled pieces of wall be to witness?

  Best not to think about it and get this shit done.

  Once Markus had a space open by Dad’s workbench, he turned to me and gestured to the basement. “Youth before experience.”

  I glanced between the basement and him. Hesitated. We go down there. We get the cloak. What then?

  “It’s starting to rain steadily,” Markus said. “Let’s not dally.”

  I had barely noticed, but the drizzle had grown to a steady patter against my head and shoulders. I looked up at the night sky. The moon peered down through a gap the rain clouds. Its light made the rain drops sparkle like falling diamonds. Each drop felt like ice against my cheeks and forehead. I could feel my hair getting weighed down. Some of my pomade, softened by the rain, released its scent as if I had just put it on fresh. It smelled like a barber shop.

  I blinked away the rain getting in my eyes and moved my gaze back to Markus. His robe had begun to sag like the branches of a willow tree. “Well?”

  I nodded.

  The climb down was the very definition of precarious. The pieces of the house and the random flotsam of tattered books and broken artifacts kept slipping out from under my feet. The rain on it all made things even worse. But we both made it down into the clearing without breaking our necks.

  Down in it, the remains smelled like old ash and left a burnt taste in my mouth after each breath.

  I dug into my coat pocket and brought out Mom’s wedding ring. She and Dad had made the ring into a key which would unlock the bubble once we channeled enough magic into it. With the ring, the incantation itself was simple. A few words in an archaic language the mortal historians had no idea existed. They required a ticklish roll of the tongue, but were otherwise easy enough to speak.

  I held the ring out in the palm of my hand.

  Markus clasped my hand, pinning the ring between our grasps. I felt the row of small emeralds press against my skin with a touch of pain.

  Markus asked, “Are you ready?”

  I nodded.

  “Then let’s give it all we’ve got.”