Van Bender and the Burning Emblems (The Van Bender Archives #1)

by S. James Nelson

  At the thought, I realized I still couldn’t feel the emotion. Maybe Agent Maynerd had been right—maybe Nick had taken the emotion somewhere else.

  Another range of mountains, these ones much lower than the last, passed beneath us. The rain had ceased, but a film of water still covered my face. Much to my surprise, my clothes felt relatively dry, although a chill touched my skin and made me shiver.

  Feeling brave, I closed my eyes again, but opened my hand with the third eye on it. After seeing the massive horde of wind sprites around us—far more than I’d seen the last time I’d had my third eye open—I quickly clamped it shut, again, and opened my natural eyes. The less I saw in that world, the better, as far as I was concerned.

  “Okay,” Dad said. “I think we’re entering the Proving Ground. Keep your heart open. The emotion has to be somewhere near here.”

  I focused on that inner sense, wishing I could send it out like a feeler, searching for the emotion. But I had to wait for the sensation to come to me.

  Our movement changed from smooth and straight to winding and unpredictable. Believe you me, it was great on my stomach. We dipped and banked, curved and lifted, exploring ridges and ravines, searching for where Nick might have brought the emotion—if he had. With each movement, my stomach lurched and flipped, and I worked hard not to vomit. But my sickness got worse, and worse. Sweat began to gather on my forehead, and I wiped it away with the back of one hand.

  Still, I felt no emotion. Just an increasing sickness. I began to feel even more tired, like I do on an airplane about ten minutes after take-off. I really would’ve liked a nap.

  “Hey!” Marti said. She tightened her grip on my hand and shook my arm. “Don’t let go of my hand!”

  I almost responded, but the emotion came to me. It filled my heart like a camera flash in a small room—completely consuming everything for an instant, then disappearing.

  “I felt it! The emotion is close!”

  Marti cheered. My parents sighed. Their relief washed over me, as if the wind siphoned it away and shoved it past me.

  “I felt it for just a second,” I said. I pointed ahead and to the left. “That way.”

  “It’s gone?” Mom said. “You can’t feel it, anymore?”

  I shook my head. “I only felt it for a second. But it was unmistakable. It’s nearby.”

  “I knew it,” Dad said. “Agent Maynerd will have a cow.”

  “Mooooo!” I said.

  “Should we contact him?” Mom said. “Should we have him bring in his SOaP agents?”

  “I doubt there’s time. And besides, if we can get the emotion back without him knowing about it, or without him being involved, we can lay claim to it.”

  Nausea overcame me, and I dry-heaved. I doubled over, one arm across my stomach, the other hanging on to Marti’s hand only because she had a strong grip.

  “Oh, come on!” she said. “Puke behind you!”

  “There’s a building,” Dad said. “Just a small one, but maybe that’s the place. Have you felt the emotion again?”

  I shook my head, trying to breathe deep and not think about the motion sickness—but that only made it worse, even as the wind weakened against my face as we started to slow. The sound of spinning fireworks sounded as lines of red light appeared and shot out ahead of Dad. He was letting go of the tethers, releasing wind sprites. We lost altitude and turned at a sharp angle to the right. My knees wobbled. I couldn’t stand much longer.

  Which made no sense, because we were flying in the middle of the air. I shouldn’t have been standing, anyway. Magic. Go figure.

  “Are those people?” Mom said, her voice terrified.

  “Looks like it,” Dad said, his voice solemn.

  We passed over a tall concrete wall with coils of wire along the top. Our speed had decreased almost to nothing as we landed in a gravel courtyard lit by dozens of floodlights. A cinderblock building the size of a small house stood off to one side. Several army jeeps parked next to it. A guard tower stood above us, adjacent to the building. Off to the right, a cluster of people lay on the gravel, unmoving.

  They were soldiers in camouflage, lying in half a dozen neat rows of about six people. They had machine guns by their sides and stared blankly up into the slow rain, as if mesmerized by something I couldn’t see.

  Nick had subdued them and placed them there.

  “Are they dead?” Marti asked, a look of horror on her face.

  Dad opened his hand. With a sound like a thousand spinning fireworks, the strings turned bright red and shot out away in every direction in front of him. They zipped and churned around each other—but only for an instant. Then they disappeared, faded, leaving my vision blurred with burned images.

  I almost said something about being glad to be back on the ground, again, but my knees buckled, and I felt the emotion again, ahead of me, not far into the building. The burst lasted only a moment, a single heartbeat. Even though we’d landed, the sickness remained, and I was just so nauseated that I couldn’t stand. The feeling would linger for several minutes, or longer. I fell to the side, releasing Marti’s hand and catching myself so my head didn’t hit the ground.

  Mom came to me. Dad and Marti rushed to the soldiers. The third eye on my hand had disappeared.

  “Are you okay?” Mom said.

  “I felt it again,” I said.

  I looked up at her, trying to ignore how the world spun. That’s one of the strange effects of motion sickness. Even after you stop moving, you still feel like you are, like everything is tilting from side to side and you’re on a carnival ride.

  “This is the right place,” I said. “The emotion is just inside that building.”

  “They’re alive!” Marti shouted as she stood over one of the soldiers. “Just stunned.”

  Dad froze, as if unable to decide to help the soldiers or respond to my declaration about the emotion.

  Turns out he didn’t have to decide.

  “Of course they’re alive.”

  My eyes turned to the man’s voice—it was not Dad’s. It had far too much country drawl to it.

  Nick stood in a doorway to the building, pouring yellow brink into one hand.

  “Why would I kill them? I’m not evil. I just want to make some powerful brink. Isn’t that what I’ve told you all along, Richie?”

  Dad leaped toward Nick, who began to draw an emblem.

  Chapter 54: Arguing with a lunatic

  Of course Richie had to bring his parents. Times like that you regret not being more honest.

  -Nick Savage

  Dad ran toward Nick, yanking a vial from the sleeve of his jacket. He opened it and poured brink into has hands.

  By then, Nick had used yellow brink to draw an arrow, with a circle halfway up the shaft. He lit it. The brink ignited faster than anything else I’d seen that night.

  I could only imagine what an arrow-shaped emblem did.

  A gust of wind pushed Dad back. He stumbled away, flailing. He had his fists closed, so his brink didn’t smear in the air as he fell to the ground. Mom rushed to his side. Marti stayed where she stood, on the far side of the soldiers. I stayed on all fours, trying not to puke again.

  Yep, I was super useful.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Nick said, still standing in the doorway. “I’ve set the bomb’s timer. We’ve only got ten minutes before it goes off.”

  Mom helped Dad stand. “You’re an idiot,” she said to Nick. “You can’t defeat all of us.”

  Nick grinned. “A duel will risk the lives of these soldiers. If you want to keep them from dying, we need to cast a protective spell over them.”

  “As if you had any intention on saving them,” Dad said. He stood by Mom. They had their backs toward me.

  Nick grinned. “Of course I do. It would’ve been easier to kill them instead of line them up nicely on the ground. Don’t you think?”

  It made sense, but maybe I still just didn’t want to believe that Nick was as bad as every
one thought. He didn’t seem to want to hurt people.

  “We can’t let you detonate the bomb,” Dad said.

  He lifted his arms out to the sides. At least ten vials of brink dangled from strings along the back of his arms. He kept one fist clenched around some brink, and gripped a lighter in the other.

  Mom stood with him. She, too, wore a jacket with vials, and had one fist balled. She held her pink lighter in her other hand.

  Nick chuckled. “The bomb will go off whether you like it or not. You can’t stop that. But no one has to die—if you’ll just cooperate. Or, if you want, I can beat you in a duel. Again.”

  He lifted his arms wide, and I realized that he, too, wore one of the funny short jackets, with half a dozen vials of brink dangling from strings along the back of each arm.

  “Marti,” Dad said, “you cast the protective spell over these soldiers.”

  Marti still hadn’t moved from where she stood near the soldiers, although she had prepared some brink. Her purse sat on the ground nearby.

  “You’re sure?” she said. “That will protect them?”

  Dad nodded. “In theory, yes.”

  Marti moved to the edge of the men, and began to draw an arc in the air.

  Dad shifted his stance—a slight motion, just a minor change as the weight moved to the balls of his feet, but in it I sensed a preparation to spring. Mom, who stood on his left side, moved her fisted right hand just a little toward him, so that it touched his extended left hand. It was a small gesture, a touch of support and readiness.

  They’d done this before. Whatever was about to happen, they’d done this before. Maybe many times.

  “Don’t you reckon,” Nick said, cocking his head to one side, “that we’d all be better off if we didn’t fight over the brink. Think about it. You don’t need it all. I don’t need it all.”

  “You don’t need any of it,” Dad said.

  “It’ll be more powerful than anything we can imagine.” He pointed back into the building. “It sits right on top of the nuke—it’ll be at the exact point of explosion, and has the multiplier applied to it. Imagine its power. Nothing like this has ever been created.”

  Dad paused. The weight shifted back off the balls of his feet. I wished I could see his face. Was he considering the offer?

  Marti finished drawing her arc over the end row of soldiers, and began to draw a second arc over the second row. Could a spell really protect against a nuclear bomb going off fifty feet away?

  Although my stomach still churned, I almost felt good enough to stand. I blinked and realized that it had started to rain, again.

  In my heart, the emotion surged again. And this time it stayed, burning bright.

  “Think about it,” Nick said. “We can all just share the brink, then be on our way.”

  Mom’s face tilted up toward Dad’s. “Don’t be stupid, David.”

  He looked at her. Light spilled from the floodlights atop the building, turning them into dark shapes against the glow.

  Dad’s head shifted. It was the slightest nod, almost imperceptible. I don’t know that anyone else would have seen it—I’d watched my parents all my life, dealing with their little private communications when they tag-teamed me in an argument, or in the hospital when they discussed some treatment or possible outcome to my cancer. It was just a slight nod, almost a not-nod, just a chance movement of his head.

  But I’d seen it before. I knew what it meant.

  They sprung forward, and began to draw in the air.

  Chapter 55: A duel for the ages

  Becoming a competent dueler takes an astute mind, years of hard work, and a fair amount of luck. Without the last, more than one aspiring dueler has blown himself up.

  -David Van Bender

  My parents moved like dancers with ribbons that hung in the air and stretched longer each moment. Mom drew with a dark purple brink, and Dad with a red. The smell of cinnamon filled the air. The tinkle of chimes almost covered the sound of moving feet.

  Nick took a step out from the doorway and drew emblems with both hands and yellow brink. He moved like a swordsman practicing forms. His face tightened in concentration, and his eyes never stayed in a single place for an instant. He looked from his own shapes, to my parents’, and back again. He turned and rotated, moved forward and backward. Through it all, he held a lighter in each hand, pinched between his fingers.

  In a matter of seconds, the emblems became so complex, so intertwined, that it looked like chaos. The shapes became unreadable. They seemed to combine and merge, become a mass of light hanging in the darkness.

  Could I do anything? Could I draw shapes to disrupt the entire duel? Then we could just physically overpower Nick.

  I staggered to my feet, resolved to help.

  Marti continued to draw the arches over the soldiers.

  “I feel useless,” I said.

  She glanced up and shook her head. “Don’t do anything!”

  “Can’t I draw random shapes that make Nick’s spells fail?”

  “No!” She stood up straight, stopping her drawing. “Don’t! Your parents’ spells react with his. They depend on them to take effect.”

  The complexity of the dueling boggled my mind. My parents began to light the emblems—Nick only a moment behind. In their intricate dance, their arms flicked out, back toward some shape they’d already drawn, touching the brink with flame. The shape would ignite, and the flame would travel along its curve, or up around a sharp corner of tinkling light. Raindrops hissed and evaporated as they hit the lines of fire.

  I braced myself for some effect. Wind or fire or thick air. Anything as the spells wrought their power.

  But only a noise came. It rose around us, a low drone, like the distant rumble of a semi truck. The air trembled as the noise grew louder.

  “Why isn’t anything happening?” I asked. I moved toward Marti, unable to stop watching my parents and Nick in their deadly ballet.

  “With so many emblems in such a small space,” Marti said, “none of them will take effect until the last has been drawn.”

  Nick and Dad moved closer together, their feet kicking up the gravel. In her motions, Mom stepped backward and spun, drawing a long, purple arc. As she did, her eyes met mine for an instant, and in them I saw many things.

  Concentration. Love. For me and for Dad. Fear of losing.

  She rotated her body away. Her gaze passed on. She lit another emblem. The three of them moved slower, now, careful not to pass an arm or hand through a shape that already dangled in the air.

  Each time they lit another emblem, the rumbling grew louder, like another subwoofer turned on somewhere nearby. The noise rattled in my chest. It drowned out all other sound. In reaction to the noise, pebbles of gravel hopped around on the ground. Steam from the rain hitting the fire made the air misty.

  Dad and Nick danced around each other, drawing shapes in the air, careful not to bump into each other or to let their shapes cross paths with the others’.

  I stood frozen, unable to help. Useless in this fight.

  Yet it was my fault that all of this was going on. Because I hadn’t trusted my parents.

  I had to do something. Maybe I could go inside. I could try to stop the bomb. Or remove the multiplier. Or the emotion.

  I started to the right, between the soldiers and the building. I would skirt around them, sneak past the duel and into the building.

  How much time was left before the bomb went off? Eight minutes? Seven? I couldn’t be sure.

  Everything stopped.

  I stood on the far side of the soldiers, looking over them, past Marti, who had started an arc around the last row of soldiers. My parents’ and Nick’s shapes filled the air just past the soldiers, in front of the doorway. The three of them stood still in the midst of the hanging emblems of fire and brink, with rain hissing around them and a mist fogging the air.

  Marti stopped drawing her emblem, and turned to look at the duel.

  My parent
s’ and Nick’s heads turned every which way as they scoured the emblems, as if checking them one last time. Those already lit continued to burn, and fire spread through others. Most were connected with trails of brink, which burned slowly, but once the flames connected with a new emblem, the emblem lit at regular speed. Each one that burned brought more of the rumble. I felt like we stood at the epicenter of an earthquake. The intense smell of burnt cinnamon made my head light.

  Most of the emblems burned. Only a handful didn’t. In a few seconds, they would all catch fire.

  A choking sob escaped from Mom’s lips. Dad’s face contorted in frustration, and he gritted his teeth against a scream. Nick’s face—already lit with red fire and brink—began to glow with a wide grin.

  “I win!” Nick said, barely audible over the rumbling. He laughed, his eyes glittering red, yellow, and purple. “Again!”

  Mom began to cry. She continued to stand in one place, her back straight, arms by her side, but her body shook. Dad turned his head to Marti and I.

  “We’ve failed,” he shouted over the rumble. “But you have to stop him. Don’t let him take that brink.”

  More emblems burned. The trembling all around us intensified. How could I stop Nick? What was about to happen to my parents?

  “If you can’t,” Marti said, “how could I?”

  “You can’t stop me!” Nick said.

  Like my parents, he still didn’t move. He couldn’t without disrupting his spells.

  Maybe I could still disrupt them by scribbling in the air. I didn’t know what would happen if I did, but maybe it wouldn’t be any worse than what would happen if the spells culminated.

  I reached into my pocket for the vial and started to run back around the soldiers. Why was Marti just standing there? Why hadn’t she started to do anything?

  “Richie,” Dad shouted over the noise, “don’t do it. You can’t stop it, now. It’s too late. Just save yourself. You have to trust me. If—”