The Magnificent 12

by Michael Grant

  Then . . . Then Mack saw, and his heart stopped. For at last her eyes . . . He was seeing the Pale Queen, seeing her eyes, her eyes . . . and she could see him!

  The eyes were palest blue where they should have been white. The irises were like a snake’s eyes, vertical slits of silver. The pupil was a black fire, a coal edged with red, and it widened in terrible joy as it focused on the eleven of them.

  Mack could almost hear her thoughts.

  Only eleven! the Pale Queen thought. Only eleven!

  Followed by a wicked laugh.

  She rose, and the earth and sea split open to allow her. Higher and higher. Until six arms were clear, and a long insect-like body, white and streaked with yellow filth.

  She was huge. She was vast. Dinosaurs could have been her lapdogs.

  From out of the north two military jets came screaming toward her. They fired missiles.

  The missiles exploded in midair. The jets exploded next.

  More missiles, fired from jets unseen or from drones, and these, too, exploded, making insignificant red flowers in midair.

  Now, she opened wide her mouth. And here at last could be seen indelible colors, for within that gaping maw, behind those tarantula teeth, were the very fires of hell.

  There came a sound. But it was no single sound, it was layer upon layer of sound. It was made up of the screams of every poor, unlucky creature who had ever angered the Pale Queen.

  It was the sound of agony. It was the sound of terror. It was the sound of madness and the death of joy and the end of the world.

  The voice of the Pale Queen screamed, and for a thousand miles in every direction men and women and children heard it and knew that the end had come. They fell to their knees. They lost control of their bowels. They drove their cars off the road and dropped what they were holding and covered their ears in a desperate, pointless attempt to block that awful sound.

  There were some—the old, the sick, the easily frightened—who died from that sound alone. Or at least wished they could.

  Mack felt his insides turn to water. He, too, fell to his knees. The others, likewise, dropped, or fell on their backs, or curled up in a ball. The only one still upright was Ilya in his wheelchair.

  I was a fool, Mack thought. I was a stupid little fool to think I could fight that!

  At that moment he hated Grimluk for getting him into this. And he hated the enlightened puissance. He hated the whole world for conspiring somehow to put him here, now, against . . . against an evil so powerful that no one, no force, could possibly defeat her.

  “Huh,” Stefan said. “What are you doing here?”

  Mack’s lip was quivering, his throat was convulsing, his heart was hammering like it was trying to get the heck out of his chest, his arms were noodles, his legs were weak, but still, he was curious about what could possibly attract Stefan’s attention away from the Pale Queen.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” a voice said. “But it looks like I have really bad timing.”

  A vaguely familiar voice.

  Mack turned in disbelief. There could only be one explanation.

  The final Magnifica.

  Camaro Angianelli.

  Twenty-seven

  MEANWHILE, IN SEDONA

  Risky stared at the place where the girl—Mustang or Cabana or some such thing (Risky had never been good with names)—had been seconds before.

  “Unh-garo!” the Destroyer cried.

  It didn’t take Risky long to figure out what had happened. The girl—Camaro, yeah, that was her name—had spoken the Vargran words that would take her to Mack.

  Was Camaro one of the Twelve? What would that give Mack? Had more joined him?

  What if . . . Risky felt a thrill of fear. What if Camaro was the twelfth of the Twelve?

  That would be a real good news–bad news situation for Risky. After all, she wanted her mother to be stopped and either killed outright or imprisoned for another few millennia or perhaps forever. And if Camaro was one of the Twelve, maybe even the twelfth, well, that would mean that at least in theory the Magnificent Twelve could defeat the Pale Queen.

  In theory. It wouldn’t be easy. Not at all a foregone conclusion.

  On the other hand, if they could take down the Pale Queen, they could take Risky down as well.

  So, in a perfect world the Twelve would succeed but manage to lose half their number. Then Risky would be able to manage them. In fact she might even be able to use them. It might be nice to have a few spare Magnifica around to handle the smaller evils that Risky would need to get done.

  The worst thing would be if the Twelve prevailed against the Pale Queen and all of them survived. Risky could not hope to deal with that. Not the twelve twelves.

  Decision time. What to do?

  “Destroyer!” Risky said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did we not go over this? At the very least, Yes, mistress! Or goddess. Or princess. Your choice.”

  The Destroyer stared blankly at her.

  “Interesting,” Risky said under her breath. That was the problem. The Destroyer had no decision-making capability. She had noticed this before. If she gave him a choice, he’d be baffled. He would need very specific instructions.

  “Minions!” Risky shrieked in a voice so big it had to be heard all across Sedona and up into the hills. It reached all the dark hidey-holes where the Skirrit and Tong Elves had hidden after the dance.

  They came rushing from garages and sewers, from the closets of scared children and the reeking, indescribably filthy rooms of teenage boys. There was no great horde of them—her mother had allowed Risky to take only a handful of each, a dozen in all, but that was more than the tiny Sedona police force could deal with.

  “Minions!” Risky cried. “I order you to heed my words. I order you to obey!”

  “Yes, princess!”

  “Yes, goddess!”

  “Yes, mistress!” they cried, each making his own choice of preferred title. See, that was the problem, she thought, nodding. Well, live and learn.

  “Okay, first things first,” Risky shouted. “You will all address me as goddess!”

  The Tong Elves and Skirrit were good with that. They’d always been confused on just what to call the Pale Queen’s daughter and frankly they were happy to have the matter cleared up.

  “Yes, goddess!” they cried with audible relief.

  “You, too, Destroyer. You are to call me goddess!”

  “Yes, goddess,” the go— er, Destroyer said dutifully.

  “Now, all of you listen to me! I want this town emptied out! I order you to terrorize these humans! Make them quake and gibber and wet their pants with terror. And drive them from town! Drive them all away!”

  “Hey!” one police officer protested, because this didn’t sound like a nice thing to do.

  “Drive them all from this place!” Risky cried, and raised her arms triumphantly in the air. “Drive them all away in terror! Ah-ha-ha-ha!”

  And with that she disappeared, confident that when she returned there would not be a living soul left in Sedona, Arizona.

  Just one little thing. Risky was not a native English speaker. She had overlooked the fact that English can be a very tricky language. A language full of homonyms.

  Twenty-eight

  “Camaro?”

  “Mack?”

  “You?”

  “Here?”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “So, how’s everything in Sedona?”

  “Bad. Here?”

  “Worse.”

  Mack waved his hand toward the volcano where the world’s greatest monster was literally ripping her way up out of the earth.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Camaro said.

  “Huh,” Stefan said to Camaro.

  “Yo,” Camaro said back. They fist-bumped.

  HHHUUUURRRGGGGAAAAAAWWWWW!

  That last sound came from the Pale Queen. She was perfectly capable of speaki
ng, but there was no one around to tell her to use her words.

  She was a creature half insect, half human, eerily like the ant Mack had earlier had crawling across his eyeball, but with human hands and a mostly humanlike head, and well, okay, there was nothing about the Pale Queen that was really familiar.

  If nothing else, she existed on a scale that was simply impossible without great magic. The largest dinosaurs were cocker spaniels compared to her.

  The air force and navy were fully awake now, and missiles—small ones, big ones—were zooming in from all directions, from jets overhead, from submarines far out in the ocean, and they would hit her with unerring accuracy and she didn’t even notice. The pale plastic-like armor that covered her wasn’t even stained by the explosions.

  The naval destroyer that had come racing from the fleet far at sea was firing its deck guns and machine guns and missiles, and it may as well have been throwing spit wads.

  In fact, at least people notice spit wads. The Pale Queen didn’t even bother destroying the ship or the jets or the helicopters that swooped with crazy courage to fire machine guns straight at her face.

  They were nothing to her.

  They didn’t even exist as far as she was concerned.

  They could have all just slept in.

  What the Pale Queen did notice was twelve kids standing on the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Her terrible eyes were on them. Mack felt her gaze like a beam of fire and ice. He felt chilled to his core and shivered like you do when you have a really bad fever. Uncontrolled shivering.

  But at the same time it felt as if his skin was burning. He had to look to convince himself it wasn’t turning as crispy as rotisserie chicken.

  Run, a voice in Mack’s head said. Just run. Run far away.

  He glanced left and right and saw fear in every eye. Well, except for Stefan. But all of them felt that fear, felt that temptation, felt that urge to turn and run away.

  Fear is normal. Everyone has fear. (Okay, except Stefan.) Everyone wants to survive. Everyone wants evil to be someone else’s problem. Don’t they? Don’t you? Don’t I?

  Most people live their lives and never have to come right up close with evil. Those people are lucky.

  But some people can’t escape it; some people are just standing there on a bridge when evil comes looking for them, and they could run. They could turn away and try to save themselves.

  That’s what most people do.

  But fortunately for all of us, some people don’t.

  Some people stand their ground no matter how much their insides turn liquid and their muscles turn weak and their chests feel weighted down so they can hardly breathe.

  We call those people brave.

  On that day, at that time, facing an inconceivable evil and armed with only a few words and the strength inside them, the Magnificent Twelve did not run away.

  The Pale Queen saw that resolve. And she felt fear, too.

  Not that it stopped her. I mean, she’d been looking forward to this for three thousand years.

  She began to move, and her speed was shocking. She was no ponderous, shuffling, slow-moving monster. Her six hands/legs churned the stone pier and the water on either side, and she moved!

  “Hold hands,” Mack ordered.

  “What words?” Dietmar asked. For once he was letting Mack take the lead.

  “We want this to end,” Jarrah said. “We don’t want someone else to deal with this in some distant future.”

  “End it,” Sylvie agreed.

  “Stib-ma albi kandar,” Xiao whispered. “Kill the Pale Queen.”

  The Pale Queen was a whole lot bigger than an express train and was moving as fast as one. She would hit them and snap the cables like threads and bring them all crashing down to their deaths.

  “Everyone got that?” Mack asked.

  “No problem,” José said.

  “This is so bogus,” Hillary complained. But she repeated the words quietly to herself, ensuring she had them right.

  “Five seconds,” Stefan said.

  “Yep,” Mack said tersely.

  Then he felt it. Like someone had hooked them all up to a power line. It was a vast and amazing thing. He had felt inklings of it before, but here, now, at last: they were the Magnificent Twelve, and the power that flowed through them and united them was like the power of exploding suns.

  “Four,” Stefan said

  “Three.”

  “Two.”

  “Now!” Mack cried.

  And with one voice, staring through tear-streaked eyes at the Pale Queen, focusing all their power on her, they shouted,

  “Stib-ma albi kandar!”

  Twenty-nine

  At the last possible second the Pale Queen leaped. It was an astounding thing to see. She simply leaped over the Golden Gate Bridge. It was like a hundred 747s roaring just inches overhead.

  The wind of her wake flattened the Magnificent Twelve.

  “We missed!” Dietmar cried.

  The Pale Queen plunged into the water of the bay, sending up a massive waterspout, swamping a container ship that had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  For two long minutes she was hidden from view.

  “Maybe we got her after all,” Jarrah said.

  But Mack didn’t think so. And then they saw the water churn between Alcatraz and San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

  “She will attack the city,” Dietmar said. “She’s afraid of us so she attacks in a different direction.”

  And then, she began to rise from the water. Hand over hand, dragging her vast bulk up out of the sea. Heading straight into the heart of the city.

  There she would kill and maim. She would crush and eat. She would destroy.

  “We failed,” Mack said. “We lose. The world loses. She wins. After all we’ve gone through. She wins.”

  “‘When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it—always.’” It was Ilya, the Russian boy in the wheelchair, who spoke.

  Sylvie put a hand on his shoulder and looked at Mack. “Gandhi said that.”

  “Actually, it is a fake quote made up by a smart person who knew the internet would believe it was Gandhi,” Dietmar said, “but it is an encouraging sentiment.”

  “Did the smart person ever meet the Pale Queen?” Jarrah asked sarcastically.

  “She’s attacking the city,” Xiao said. “So help is on the way.”

  “What help?” Mack asked in despair. “She’ll destroy the city in minutes. We can’t even get there in time. What help is coming? Cops? The army?”

  “More like the air force,” Xiao said.

  Mack looked at her and followed the direction of her gaze.

  Buildings had risen from deep places beneath the city, from under the narrow, clogged streets of Chinatown. Buildings that had seemed dull and solid unfolded like pieces of origami, revealing an incredible network of underground halls and chambers.

  The hidden realm of the dragons.

  And now they rose slithering and sliding into the air. Dozens of them in all the colors of the rainbow. The dragons Mack had seen in China were huge, and so were these, but they were tiny compared to the Pale Queen.

  “As you know, Mack, we have a treaty with the Western dragons,” Xiao said. “Neither they nor we may fly freely in the other’s territory. Unless one of our cities is threatened.”

  “One of your cities?”

  “Beneath the streets of San Francisco are many amazing, unusual things you might never imagine,” Xiao said.

  “And quite a few right up on the streets of San Francisco,” Valin said. Then shrugged. “I mean, that’s what I hear.”

  “You went to them,” Mack said to Xiao, recalling her brief absence earlier.

  “They cannot fight the Pale Queen. But they can get us close to her,” Xiao s
aid.

  “Are those flying snakes?” Camaro asked.

  “So we get a second chance,” Mack said.

  The dragons reached the bridge just as the Pale Queen smashed three seafood restaurants and seven souvenir stands on Fisherman’s Wharf.

  The dragons swarmed around the bridge, looking a little like giant, colorful kites.

  The dragon in charge—an unusually multicolored, gilt-tipped, sneering-mouthed creature the size of a train—floated effortlessly in the air near the Magnifica.

  “This is Jihao Long,” Xiao said. “The name means, basically, Fabulous Dragon.” She shrugged. “It’s San Francisco.”

  “Where shall we take you?” Jihao Long asked.

  “We’re almost drained of enlightened puissance,” Mack said. “We won’t get a third try. This one has to be it. So we can’t miss.”

  He looked at the others, and one by one they nodded. His decision. They would do whatever he decided. Even Valin. Even Dietmar.

  “Put us right on top of her. Put us right on her head.”

  It took four dragons to carry them all. Xiao morphed back to her true self. Stefan lifted Ilya and his wheelchair as if they weighed nothing, and he and Jarrah and Ilya rode one of the great beasts.

  Mack ended up with Dietmar and Sylvie, which was right, somehow. Annoying Dietmar and pretty, philosophical Sylvie.

  They soared into the air and raced across the bay. Higher and higher until they could plainly see the Pale Queen. She was leaving a trail of devastation like nothing San Francisco had seen since the great earthquake of 1906, which pretty much destroyed the city.

  The Pale Queen was done with Fisherman’s Wharf and was on her way to the skyscrapers of downtown.

  Intent on destruction, she did not look back toward the bridge. Or up at the sky. And she did not have eyes in the back of her head.

  The dragons slowed and swooped down on her like fighter planes. They pulled up just above the top of her head, above what looked like a curved field of terrifyingly brittle hairs, each as thick as a telephone pole and ten times as long.

  All together, the Magnificent Twelve jumped!

  And at that exact moment the Pale Queen must have sensed something because she looked sharply up, and instead of falling toward a forest of hair, they were falling straight down toward that terrible eye.