They could have discussed it in more detail but they heard pounding hooves and deep, manly shouts, and there was no way to know if they were good guys or bad guys. For that matter, how did they even know which side were the good guys?
So they ran. Twigs and thorns tore at Mack’s unprotected feet, but that was better than waiting around to get a sword stuck in him.
To Xiao, Mack said, “Can you carry the three of us?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I can probably scare off our pursuers.”
Sure enough, she transformed into her real self and slithered neatly through the trees. Within a few minutes Mack heard confused shouts of terror and the loud whinnying of scared horses. Xiao, in human form again, came back more slowly, leading two horses.
To keep the weight balanced equally on the horses, they put their largest person (Stefan) and their smallest person (Xiao) together on one horse while Mack and Boguslawa shared the other.
Which meant Boguslawa riding with her arms around Mack’s waist and her head resting on his shoulder while he desperately considered how he was going to get out of this mess.
At least Valin wasn’t with them, and with any luck at all, he would never see them.
They kept on through the woods with no real idea where they were going, and Mack was beginning to despair. “We have to get back to our own time. The Pale Queen is coming and we’re, like, four hundred years away from it. Besides, I don’t want to live in the seventeenth century. We have a job to do. We’re supposed to save the world—four hundred years from now!”
“I never even got any lentils,” Stefan said.
“There may be food in the saddlebags,” Xiao suggested.
So they looked. Some sort of jerky and . . . yes, lentils!
“That’s lentils?” Stefan asked, disappointed. “Huh.”
“Listen, Boguslawa, you have to marry Sean Patrick.” Mack really wished he had shoes while giving an impassioned speech from horseback. He half turned in the saddle so she could see his face. “The fate of the world depends on it. If you don’t marry Sean Patrick, all that is good and decent will die.”
“I am marry you, Meck. Sean Patrick he is baby crying and run away. Meck is brave like lion.”
“Wait. What if . . . What if it was Sean Patrick who was brave and I was a coward?”
Boguslawa shrugged. “I am daughter of Taras Bulba. I must marry brave man, not coward.”
Mack sighed. “We have to find Valin and Sean Patrick.”
Xiao shook her head. “If we find Sean Patrick, we will find Valin, too, I believe.”
And so they rode off toward the east, not realizing that was the wrong way. They really had no idea where they were going. But there was no one to ask directions of, and horses just do not come with a built-in navigation system.
Mack even tried the maps app on his phone. He knew it wouldn’t work, but it comforted him somehow to have this shiny object from the future as a reminder.
Then he saw that he’d had a call. And a voice mail. Both from the golem. Sadly the message could not be played because, well, pretty much every single thing that would make voice mail possible didn’t exist yet.
It worried him. But then, he had plenty of other things to worry about. The golem would have to manage on his own.
Eleven
MEANWHILE, 7,831 MILES (AND 400 YEARS) AWAY, IN SEDONA, ARIZONA
Camaro lay dying.
But she didn’t die.
Oh, she should have. The Skirrit lance had pierced her heart, and that is the kind of thing that causes death. But the bleeding had been slowed by the detached finger of the golem. It seemed to be nothing but mud; however, there’s a big difference between mud mud and mud that’s been fashioned into a golem and given magical life.
The golem’s magic stopped the bleeding. It knit torn veins and arteries back together. It fused flesh. It melded the strands of muscle.
When Grimluk shaped the golem, he did so with mud and twigs and one more ingredient: the magic of the Vargran tongue when spoken by one who possesses the enlightened puissance. It was that magic that kept the golem alive and functioning and basically immortal. And now a bit of the golem was working to heal Camaro Angianelli.
Ten minutes after being fatally stabbed, Camaro took off the oxygen mask the emergency medical technicians had put on her, and ripped the needle from her arm, and stood up and said, “I really do not like that redhead.”
Camaro wasn’t dead, but she was definitely worn out, so she went home and had a good night’s sleep.
The next morning she set out in search of “Mack,” but the golem could not be found. She went to his house, knocked on the door, and asked Mack’s father if he knew where Mack was.
“Hmmm,” Mack’s father said thoughtfully. “Is today his football practice?”
Today was not his football practice. Because Mack was not on the football team. So, obviously, neither was the golem.
Camaro didn’t want to upset the MacAvoy family, so she did not tell them of her suspicion that “Mack” was about to be made the unwitting slave of an evil demon goddess. For one thing, there was no way for her to explain it without sounding jealous of Risky.
Camaro was not jealous. Though it was true that Risky was stunningly beautiful while she, Camaro, was merely cute edging toward pretty, she was not jealous.
No way. Why would she be?
She thought all this through as she walked the streets of Sedona, occasionally yelling, “Mack! Mack!” Though she wished she could call out, “Golem!”
Camaro searched everywhere, all through the neighborhoods and all up and down 89A, which was the main road through town.
Finally, dusty, hot, thirsty, and discouraged, she became far more discouraged when she ran into a woman she knew outside the run-down, sleazy, disreputable Arpaio Motel at the farthest limits of the town. Camaro bought a bottle of water and recognized the manager.
“Hey, aren’t you Mrs. Lafrontiere?”
“That’s me, honey.” She was an older woman, if by “older,” you meant “in her forties.” She was drinking a cup of tea and gazing off toward the red limestone hills that surround Sedona.
“I’m looking for someone,” Camaro said. “One is a kind of monsterlike thing, and the other is a redhead.”
Mrs. Lafrontiere—who, like much of the population of Sedona, was also a clairvoyant spiritual healer as well as motel manager—nodded. She looked closely, suspiciously at Camaro. “I saw them. It was late last night. A frightening creature ten feet tall. And a girl with red hair. She had the most extraordinary green eyes, perfect pale skin, a wonderful body—”
“Yeah, that’s them,” Camaro interrupted. Frankly she’d heard enough about Risky’s looks.
“She was an incomparable beauty with—”
“She’s not that pretty,” Camaro snapped.
“Like an angel, she was.”
“Yeah, whatever. Where did they go?”
The woman pointed a heavily bejeweled hand toward the hills. “Up Schnebly Hill.” She shivered then, and met Camaro’s gaze. “Where else would a demon goddess and a golem go?”
Camaro pointedly ignored the reference to a golem. No one should know that, but Mrs. Lafrontiere was a clairvoyant after all. She looked up at the hill. It was quite red in the slanting rays of the sun. Many believed it was a place of special power, of mysticism, a nexus of supernatural manifestation.
It scared Camaro a bit. But worse yet, there was no way to walk that far. So sadly, reluctantly, she turned back toward town. In the end, she knew, the golem would return as the Destroyer.
“This isn’t going to end well,” Camaro said.
Twelve
Mack, too, was thinking, This isn’t going to end well. But due to the unfortunate fact that he’d been transported four hundred years into the past, he was thinking it a long time before Camaro thought the same thing.
Also, his feet were cold.
They stumbled finally on a village.
It was a primitive place, the village. The village was so primitive it didn’t even have a name. At the edge of the village was a sign announcing, “Welcome to” and then just a blank space.
But it was a friendly village just the same. They offered Mack and his little troop a meal of cholera water and eels. Mack traded them the lentils for a pair of shearling-lined boots33 sewn together with distressed-tendon string. He was glad of that, though Stefan was bitter over the lentils.
“We’re looking for a guy who looks kind of like me,” Mack said to the village elder.
The village elder thought about that for a minute, looked around, nodded thoughtfully, and pointed at Mack.
“No, not me. He looks like me.”
The village elder once again nodded thoughtfully, then stroked his chin and pointed at Mack.
This happened six more times before Mack realized that this village was so small that it couldn’t afford both a village elder and a village idiot and had therefore combined both jobs into one.34
Xiao and Stefan went out to look around the village in the vain hope that there had to be a store or a restaurant or something other than nine mud-and-wattle huts surrounded by trees. Mack stayed with Boguslawa and the village elder/idiot.
“I am wanting to have nice house, many goats, and children,” Boguslawa said. “Must be paint and have two windows. Also deep poop hole in floor.”
“Look,” Mack snapped impatiently, “you and I are not engaged. For one thing, we’re twelve years old.”
“Is old, yes, for engagement,” Boguslawa said. “But must be engaged before can be married.”
“Listen to me,” Mack grated. His feet were warming up, but all that did was allow him to pay attention to the other stuff that was bothering him. “I am not your boyfriend!”
Boguslawa’s face fell. Tears filled her eyes. Her lower lip began to quiver. “You are not liking me?”
Mack rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. “That’s not it, Boguslawa. Look, I do like you. I like you a lot. You’re beautiful and . . . and, like, sweet and all. And really, if I wasn’t busy saving the world, and also twelve, I would totally marry you. But where I come from? You can’t get married until you’re old.”
“You mean fourteen?” Boguslawa asked, aghast.
Mack thought he had hit upon a good way to put an end to all thoughts of marriage. “Even older,” he said. “I mean, hey, of course if I could, I would totally be your boyfriend but—”
Boguslawa squealed in misplaced delight and threw her arms around Mack.
“Aha!” Valin cried.
Because, yes, he had followed Mack through the woods and all the way to the nameless village and had snuck quietly35 up and overheard the last of that conversation.
“Valin!” Mack cried. “It’s not what it looks like!”
Valin pushed his way into the hut. Unfortunately the hut wasn’t very well built and the whole thing sort of just fell over, so that now Mack and Boguslawa and the village elder/idiot were just sitting around a weak fire out in the open.
Mack saw, then, just how serious this was going to be. First, Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout was standing with his sword-cane in sword mode.
And second, there were some exceedingly large creatures with stabby razor-wire hands standing all around the village.
“I see you’ve noticed my Brembles,” Valin said. “Brembles! Seize him!”
Which was how Mack ended up stretched out in the sun later that day with ants stinging him to death.
See how that came full circle?
And now Mack gets stung to death.
Thirteen
From a distance—they were “shopping” at the village’s only store, Fleas, Dung, and Beyond—Xiao and Stefan saw Valin and Nine Iron and the Brembles take Mack away.
Stefan started to charge in recklessly, but Xiao put a restraining hand on his arm. (She wasn’t attracted to humans, being a dragon, but Stefan did have impressive biceps.)
“No,” Xiao said. “This may be an opportunity.”
“What?” Stefan scowled at her suspiciously. “He’s under my wing!”
“You will not prevail against the Brembles. I know this species. They are mentioned in some of my father’s books. Once, long ago, they troubled China and were driven off only by deploying vast armies. If you attack, you will die. And Mack along with you.”
Stefan hesitated. The whole “fear” thing was foreign to him. But he understood the part about not being able to save Mack anyway. His job wasn’t to act all brave, it was to actually keep Mack safe.
Boguslawa was also left behind by an angry, contemptuous Valin, who called her “a faithless strumpet.” Boguslawa spotted Xiao and Stefan and made her way toward them, weeping and wailing.
“Quickly, before that annoying girl gets here. We must find Sean Patrick. It is the only way to change the course of history and unite him with Boguslawa. I will fly!”
“What? You’re going to leave me with that girl?” Stefan was fearless, absolutely fearless. And yet he wasn’t sounding fearless.
“Just don’t let anything happen to her. The fate of the world may rest on it!” Xiao cried. Then, hesitating, she added in a whisper, “Don’t be brave. You must seem to be cowardly.”
“Why?”
“She admires courage. Do you want her to admire you?”
She slipped easily back into dragon form.
Boguslawa freaked out. Stefan had gotten used to seeing Xiao suddenly revealed as a Chinese dragon, but it was all new to Boguslawa. Stefan was about to tell her it was no big deal, but Xiao was right: Boguslawa seemed to have a thing for strong, fearless men. And Stefan knew what he looked like: he was a very good-looking guy. If you liked the tall, blond, icy blue eyes, chiseled features, rippling muscles type of guy.36
It was time for some acting. But pretending to be afraid did not come naturally to Stefan since he’d never really been afraid. However: he’d been with Mack during at least a dozen phobia meltdowns.
“Oh!” Stefan cried. “Oh that’s like scary! Ah. Ah. That creeps me out when she does that.”
“It was disturbing, but . . . ,” Boguslawa said.
“Uh. Uh uh uh uh!” cried Stefan, getting into it a little bit. “Gagagagagagaga!”
“She is gone away, so no more gagagagaga, yes?”
“I have dragon phobia,” Stefan said, having now exhausted his sound effects. “It’s . . . kind of rare.”
Boguslawa rolled her eyes. “You are having big muscles not big heart like a lion.”
“Yeah,” Stefan said, feeling a bit of shame even though it was all an act. He sighed. “Let’s keep riding, huh?”
And they did keep riding.
There was no way they could possibly realize that at that very moment Mack was being pinned down by Brembles.
And no way to know that Mack would panic and waste his enlightened puissance on disappearing some creepy beetles.
And no way to know that Valin was—at that very moment—guiding deadly red ants into a jar that he would forthwith dump on Mack’s face.
Fourteen
Which brings us back to:
“Let me go!” Mack cried. He pulled at the chulks, but no, he wasn’t pulling his way out of this one. The Brembles had him. Valin had him.
And the ants had him.
A second ant stung.
A third.
And now the stinging signal went out through all the ants.
Mack was about to die a most terrible death.
Really.
A fourth and fifth sting made Mack yell and thrash wildly. But now there was no more counting; the stings came fast and furious, a wave of them, pain upon pain, and already Mack felt himself swelling up, felt his airway constrict, felt his heart hammering way too fast, felt . . .
. . . felt death itself approaching, extending its bony claw to snuff the life from him.
“Hug! Ligean dó dul!”
Which obviously is Irish for, “Hey, let him go!”
&
nbsp; Mack could barely see—that one ant was still right on his eyeball, and he was dying, after all—but across the field came Sean Patrick MacAvoy. He was armed with a sword and went charging straight at Valin.
Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout raised his cane-sword, preparing to stab Sean Patrick through the heart. Of course this was happening slowly, so unless Sean Patrick stopped to take a short nap, he wasn’t in too much danger from the Nafia assassin.
But the Brembles were a different story entirely. All four of the massive, terrifying, evil (soon to be extinct) creatures drew themselves up, ready for a fight. This meant pulling their chulks from the ground, which in turn freed Mack, who was gasping for breath, swelling up, thinking seriously about vomiting, and starting to wonder why the whole world was spinning around and around and around.
The Brembles made an interesting sound. It went like this: KIIIIIILLLLLL!
The funny thing is that Brembles don’t know any actual words, so it’s totally coincidental that their wordless, incoherent, oddly high-pitched shriek sounds like a drawn-out version of the word kill.
Then again, even though they don’t know the word kill, that’s obviously what they mean when they shriek that way and begin bounding like nightmare hyenas brandishing their chulks and the surrounding tangle of thorns and baring their six rows of teeth.37
Sean Patrick stopped running then because . . . well, because he was about to be killed, that’s why. His face was pale as a ghost. Mack was pretty bleary but he thought he might be seeing knees actually knocking together.
“Noooooooo!” Valin cried. “Brembles! To me!”
The Brembles didn’t seem to hear; they were about three big bounces away from hitting Sean Patrick like a freight train full of pain.
“Subze-ma Brembles!”
Valin had used Vargran meaning “Freeze, Brembles!” And sure enough, the Brembles stopped cold. Like statues. Frozen in midslaver.
“You can’t kill him! He may still be my great-great-great-great-great-great—”
Mack detected a note of impatience from the Brembles despite the fact that they were frozen.
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