Van Bender and the Burning Emblems (The Van Bender Archives #1)
Page 10
“So,” she said, “with that spell, the more potent the brink the more your body would be rejuvenated. And the longer it would last.”
As we talked, she drew a line from the sticky note in each folder, up into the air. They all met at the same point, creating a square pyramid. The brink tinkled and glittered. It smelled like cinnamon again.
“And what color is the most powerful?” I thought of the “lip gloss” Mom always kept in her purse. It was a bright orange. “Yellow? Orange? Red?”
“White—so I’ve heard. I’ve never seen it. I don’t think anyone has. Yellow is the most potent stuff I’ve seen. Then red.”
“What makes some brink more potent than others?”
“You sure do have a lot of questions.”
“I’m trying to fill the void in my head.”
“It must be a very large void. The strength of the emotion affects the brink. The more intense the emotions, the more powerful the brink.”
“Where do the explosions come in? Nick said something about blowing the emotion up.”
She shrugged. “It’s pretty simple. To transform the concentrated emotion into brink, you blow it up.”
“If you blow it up, shouldn’t it be gone? Destroyed?”
“No, the emotion transforms.”
“And I assume,” I said, “that the bigger the explosion, the more powerful the brink.”
“Excellent deduction, Sherlock. There’s also something called ‘priority.’ If you generated the emotion, you have priority with any brink created with that emotion—it will be stronger for you than for other people.”
The pieces began to fall together in my head. Pretty amazing, given what I’d been through that night.
“So you think Nick plans to blow up the emotions I generated to make some extraordinarily powerful brink, then use it to try and take over the world.”
“Yes,” she said, “that pretty well sums up how you’ve made a mess of things.”
She drew a wide circle at the apex of the pyramid. When she finished, she scraped the excess brink back into the vial and put it away. She produced her lighter again.
I said, “So we’re going to save the day by going to Nick’s cabin and retrieving the emotion?”
“Couldn’t be simpler.”
She flicked the lighter and lit the circle. In a puff, the flame spread around the hoop. With a twist of her wrist, she lit the top of the pyramid, and the fire moved down the four lines to the folders. A rectangular sheet of green light shimmered into the space between the folders. Like the video calling spell and the teleportation door, it gave off a steady hum.
Careful not to touch any of the flames, Marti reached between the lines of fire, and touched the green light. It rippled like the surface of water, and she plunged her hand into it—into the physical space that should have been impossible to reach into because it was occupied by the folders and desk beneath the emblem. She moved her wrist around as if feeling inside a bag. Her face grew worried, but brightened, and she yanked her fisted hand upward and out so fast that she passed her hand and wrist through the flaming pyramid and the circle.
The flames died. The sheet of green light blinked out.
She exhaled hard and rubbed her hand. “That was close.”
“What do you mean?”
“If my hand was still in the portal when it closed, it would have chopped off my hand.”
I cringed. “Thank you for not losing your hand. It would have given me nightmares.”
She cocked her head to one side and lifted one corner of her mouth. “You’re going to have to get used to danger. The world of brink isn’t some sanitized, padded playground like the normal world.”
“Well, bring it on.” I nearly said—but thought better of it—that I was beginning to see why Mom might not want me to get to know other rock stars.
With a smile, she opened her hand, palm up. A large red stone, cut with sharp angles and many sides, glittered in the laptop light.
The diffuser.
She handed it to me. It felt heavier than expected, and surprisingly warm. It couldn’t have gotten that warm from the few seconds Marti had closed her hand around it.
“How do I work it?”
“You don’t. It works automatically. It will make it impossible for anyone within twelve feet of you to hold brink on their skin. So, if someone starts casting a spell near you, and you don’t know who they are or what their intentions are, go near them. That will make the brink slide off their hands. They won’t be able to draw an emblem.”
I admired the jewel, wondering how much it was worth. For something so big, with such a clear color, it could probable sell for millions.
“Time to go,” she said. “We’ll have to zip over to Nick’s cabin.”
I put it into my pocket. “Where is it? How will we get there?” With the painful memory of teleporting fresh in my body, I felt a little leery.
“Colorado. And like I said, we’ll just zip on over.”
“Zip? Is that a technical term?”
“You bet it is. How do you think we got here? A zip-door.”
“You mean teleportation.”
She gave me a look like I was an idiot. “No, we’re going to zip. What’s so hard about that?”
“So, zipping is teleporting?”
She rolled her eyes. “You teleport with telekinesis—with your mind. Not magic. Teleporting isn’t real.”
“And three hours ago I knew that magic wasn’t real.”
“Three hours ago you were ignorant. Now you’re just dumb.”
“There’s no other way to get to Colorado?”
“What?” she said. “Can’t you handle it?”
“Just because I hate pain doesn’t mean I can’t handle it.”
“Get used to it. It’s the fastest way to travel.” She stood and moved around the desk, toward the door.
“It figures that the best way to travel would hurt.”
“I just need to do one thing, first,” she said.
She drew another emblem, one that looked like an eye with a pupil in the middle. Without pausing, she connected the eye to her forehead with a straight line, then drew a little spiral right above and between her eyes. She lit the eye. The flame spread down the line and onto her forehead.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” I said.
She shook her head as the entire emblem—from the eye in front of her, to the spiral on her forehead—flared bright red for a moment, then faded.
“What’s that all about?” I said.
“Third eye,” she said. “So I can see the spirit world and any traps Nick has set up.”
That sounded pretty awesome. I about asked to have her draw a third eye for me, but a stern expression from Marti told me not ask for it. We went out into the hallway, and she instructed me to go toward the far end while she drew the zip-door. She drew the same rectangular door shape, with the four lines extending from each corner. They seemed to be at a different angle than the previous ones she’d drawn, but I couldn’t remember for certain.
Once she’d drawn the shape, she beckoned me close.
“I thought the diffuser ruined spells,” I said.
“It only makes brink slide off skin. Once an emblem is drawn, the diffuser has no power over it.”
She beckoned me again and prepared her lighter. When I moved close, she took my hand in hers.
“You sure do hold my hand, a lot,” I said.
“That’s because you need a lot of hand-holding.”
She ignited the lighter and touched the flame to each spike. The fire spread around to the door, and the white sheet of light appeared in the doorway.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You didn’t talk with anyone. How do you know it’s safe to zip on over?”
She put Hello Kitty in her purse. “I don’t.”
“Okay, right. That makes perfect sense. What are we waiting for?”
“Look, it’s only risky if someone has moved a piece of stone or met
al to the location we’re zipping to. We can zip into any other kind of material, and it will only destroy the material.”
“What if that material is, say, something like a person?”
“Well... then things will get messy.”
“Ah... I must admit, I’m not sure I like the sound of that. You’re okay with this? Zipping into an unknown situation?”
She gave me a wicked grin. “I do it all the time.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
She yanked me forward, into the zip-door.
Chapter 22: Almost unstoppable
Times like that, I want to just kiss the boy.
-Marti Walker
The pain ended before I could scream, and I still wanted to scream when it had ended, but I didn’t because an all-consuming light distracted me.
I’d gone from a dimly-lit hallway to a blinding location. Plus, the zipping had torn my eyes apart and re-built them. My eyeballs needed a few moments to adjust. I covered them with my hands and tried not to move, but Marti pulled me to one side.
“If anyone from SOaP zips in, it’ll be to that spot.”
The sound of rushing water and wind in trees filled my ears. I blinked to try and adjust my eyes.
“We need to get going,” Marti said. “Too much time has passed, already.”
I nodded, keeping my arm up around my eyes, and looking at the ground as we proceeded. Pine needles covered the dirt, and we brushed past low bushes.
Marti said, “We made this zip site to maximize our safety. The lights keep animals out of the immediate area. They’re motion sensitive.”
As we moved away, the floodlights dimmed as they fell behind, and I could look up and around me. To our right, a narrow river rushed by. Evergreen trees grew on both banks and all around us—except for the narrow path we followed.
“Wouldn’t the lights attract a lot of attention?”
“We’re in an out-of-the-way place, sheltered by hills and trees. Not much light will escape that little grove. And besides, they’ll turn off.”
As if on cue, the lights died, plunging us into darkness.
I stopped.
“Come on,” she said, pulling on my arm.
“I can’t see a thing.”
“I can. Just follow me. We’ll be fine. We don’t have much time.”
She kept saying that—about the rush we were in—and I had to remind myself that despite everything I’d seen and experienced, only about twenty minutes had actually passed since the alarm had gone off at the SOaP facility.
I followed her, my eyes wide as I adjusted to the new darkness. We trudged in silence, holding hands. The ground sloped upward a little at first, but then more steeply. By the time we reached the top of the hill, I could see pretty well by the light that filtered down through the tree branches.
“Why Colorado?” I said.
She grunted. “Apparently John Denver convinced Nick that this is the best place on earth. He confines most of his magic usage to this area. Can you feel it, again?”
“Feel what?”
“The emotion you generated tonight.”
Now that she mentioned it, I could feel it. In my heart. Just like earlier, back in my dressing room. I could sense the emotion off somewhere in the distance.
“Why couldn’t I feel it before?”
“Distance. Now we’re back within range. The closer we get, the stronger you’ll feel it.”
We entered a clearing at the top of a hill. Below, perhaps a quarter mile on, moonlight glinted off the rooftop of a gigantic house, and shone silver on the pine trees around it.
“Tell me,” I said. “Why are you here? Why did you want to come get the emotion? It’s not your problem, after all.”
She looked intently at the house. “I’m SOaP. I want to foil the Sunbeams.”
“Somehow, I don’t believe that’s everything.”
She looked at me with tight lips. Her eyes glinted in the moonlight, and her blonde hair shone.
“I want to recover something called a ‘Tangle Rope.’ No one takes me seriously. No one but Agent Maynerd. Everyone thinks I’m just some dumb blonde country teenage star girl.”
“Well, you are,” I said. “Except for the dumb part.”
She spoke with sharpness. “That’s right. And I want to prove it. That’s why I came and brought you—to show them that I can do things just as difficult as them.” Still looking away from me, out at the valley below, she let out a big sigh. “When Grant Budly brought me to SOaP, do you know what they said?”
I shrugged. “Probably, ‘It’s not often you find a pretty girl who can sing and ride a horse.’“
That at least made her smile. The starlight lit her face just enough for me to see a glint in her eyes.
“As a matter of fact, Agent Maynerd said, ‘She’s just a kid. About all she’s good for is riding horses and singing, and she ain’t even that good at either of those.’”
“My experience with him hasn’t been that great either.”
“Well, I caught him on a bad day. He’s normally nice enough. We’ve worked together on a few projects. I don’t blame him for half of what he said. But he was only saying what everyone else has been saying for all my life.” Her tone took on a mocking, snotty air. “‘She’s too tall to ride the barrels.’ ‘Too gangly.’ ‘She can’t carry a tune.’ ‘I’ve never met a blond with any brains.’ Crap like that.”
I couldn’t fathom what that would be like. Except for my parents keeping me locked away, people had only encouraged me, tried to build me up. During the cancer, all the doctors and nurses had done nothing but tell me I could do it. If I could overcome cancer, I could do anything.
And I believed them.
Right up until I hit it big and my mom turned me into a hermit.
Marti grunted and looked at me again. Her face turned away from the moonlight, into darkness.
“People seem to want to stop me from things. Like they’re jealous. They want to hold me back. But I know I can do anything, Richie. I can. Anything I can dream, I can do. Ain’t nothing that can stop me. Not anyone around me. None of them.”
She looked back over the trees and shook her head. I wished I could be as confident as her in the face of opposition. I suppose maybe with Kurt and Sandra by my side, I had that night, just by meeting Nick. But I was no where near as determined as Marti.
“Only me,” she said. “I’m the only one that can stop me—then only if I believe everyone else.” She shot me a sharp look. “And I don’t believe them. They’re all idiots.”
“I think you’re right.”
Her gaze stayed on me, long and hard as if she were trying to decide if I was sincere—which I was. Then she shook her head, and grunted.
“Step back, so I can get some brink ready.”
I moved back along the trail about fifteen feet. She took out her brink and poured some of the blue substance into her palm. I expected her to cast a spell, but instead she screwed the lid back on the vial and put it back in her purse. While in there, she grabbed Hello Kitty.
“We need to be ready for anything,” she said. “You need to obey me. Exactly. If I tell you to do something, you do it.”
“There’s no reason to be bossy.”
She gave me a long look with raised eyebrows. “Yes, there is. Stay back enough that your diffuser doesn’t mess things up.”
She led the way. I followed about fifteen feet back, which feels like a long way when you’re walking through a forest in the night. We went through the trees all the way up to—and over—the fence behind a cabin, and across the lawn.
As we reached the concrete patio and approached the house, she stepped into the first trap.
Chapter 23: Quadruple jeopardy
I only set traps to keep small mountain animals out of the house. No, really.
-Nick Savage
It happened so fast that I nearly jumped out of my underwear.
Which would have been really embarrassing.
“Come on!” she said. “But stay back a dozen feet.”
I ducked under the burning brink, onto the patio.
And fire leaped up all around me.
I don’t know where it came from, but the flames licked at an invisible barrier around Marti and I. The half-circle she’d drawn, and the line perpendicular to it, had created a tunnel that fire couldn’t penetrate.
We continued crawling, me more than a dozen feet behind her. She drew the line ahead of us, so the tunnel pushed aside the flames. She reached the porch where the flames ended, stepped out of the tunnel, and stood up straight. As I emerged only a few seconds after her, the fire disappeared. The smell of burnt chemicals lingered.
I stood next to her, panting. She looked at me and shook her head.
“Relax, cowboy. That’s just the start.”
“A little warning would have been nice.”
“Nah, it’s fun to watch you panic.”
Over the next five minutes we sprung three more traps.
The first trap involved large blades shooting out of cracks in the walls and bouncing off my neck, head, and body. Before we walked into that one, Marti cast a spell that apparently made us cut-resistant, but did not prevent the terror of thinking for an instant I was going to die.
At that point, I concluded that Marti had never actually come close to dying. She didn’t understand her own mortality—else why would she walk right into these traps?
I, on the other hand, understood perfectly well that bodies can take injury and die. I’d known plenty of kids that died in the hospital or that had their bodies all mangled and twisted from accidents or disease.
So, after the blades, I moved forward with trepidation.