“Shhh!” Alexandra said. “I don’t want the kids to hear.”
“Allie, listen to me. I love you, and I love our kids, but until the emperor has been overthrown…”
“Max! I think I heard something in the hallway.”
Milo and Emma glanced at each other before scurrying like mice into the darkened kitchen.
“Did you hear that?” Milo said..
“Dad said they weren’t citizens of this world,” Emma said. “Milo, he sounded terrified. And you know Dad. He isn’t scared of anything!”
“I know.” Milo was breathless. He kept looking around as if the answers lay scattered all over the kitchen’s dark counters. “And the emperor. He said that until the emperor has been overthrown—but what emperor?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “But I don’t think we should tell anyone about this. Maybe we should just forget about it altogether.”
“Forget about it? Emma, something is going on. We need to find out what it is!”
“No,” Emma said. “We don’t. I had this feeling when I was listening to them.” She wrung her hands over her stomach, like there was a nauseating ball of pain there. “It was like a whispery voice in my head, and it kept saying, hide, hide, hide.”
A sudden, cold anxiety crept over Milo. He wanted to be inside his bed with the covers pulled all the way up. But somehow he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep right until he figured this out. His mind was already in overdrive; a bad thing, since he had a tendency to become obsessed with puzzles and riddles until he figured them out.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he assured his sister. “But I’m not just going to forget it, either.”
“I know you won’t,” Emma said, chewing her lower lip. “Neither will I.”
Milo nodded for her to come along, and together they crept out of the kitchen.
Chapter 4
Two days later, Max left on another of his trips, and as usual Milo felt like he’d been deserted.
It was the last week of summer and he spent it practicing basketball alone, watching TV, and finishing the books on his summer reading list for school. Mostly, he spent it trying to ignore the dreadful anxiety gathering in the pit of his stomach. His father’s words kept playing in his head.
Until the emperor has been overthrown…Until the emperor has been overthrown…
The night his father returned—which also happened to be the night before the first day of school—he entered Milo’s room and sat on the edge of the bed. Milo put his book aside. It was the third installment in a fantasy series he’d been rereading, one in which the hero, a young boy like himself, discovers he has the ability to teleport to any location he pleases, including other countries and even planets. The series as a whole was called The Quantum Steps of Paul Placeholder. This installment was called A Leap to the Starship Neverchamber.
“Ah, yes,” his father said upon seeing the book. “One of my favorites. Paul’s mission to save the crew of the Neverchamber. Have you gotten to the part where he finds out how to do it?”
“He has to teleport down to the sealed and abandoned space station, Novaport Sierris. It’s incredible what he finds down there.”
“Yup. Weird stuff down in that space station. He learns an important lesson, too. You know”—his father tapped the book—“this boy reminds me of you, Milo. You may not possess superhuman abilities like he does, but you have an extraordinary mind.”
Milo looked down at the book and shrugged, a glum expression on his face.
He found himself avoiding his father’s gaze. Lately, he’d been feeling that there was a widening gap between them, one that grew with each passing day. Max put a hand on his son’s shoulder.
“What is it? You can tell me.”
“I just don’t get it,” Milo said. “Why can’t I take the year off and start high school when I’m fifteen, like everyone else?”
“Milo, listen to me. You’re just as smart and ready as any of those other—”
“It’s not about being smart, Dad. Look at me. I’m a shrimp. All the other kids are going to be bigger than me.”
“You’re not a shrimp. You’ll grow soon enough. The same thing happened to me. I grew like a Banto tree when I was your age.”
Milo’s eyes narrowed. “What’s a Banto tree?”
Max drew his lips into a thin line, something he did when he was worried. Then his face went back to normal and he gave Milo a disturbingly fake smile.
“Oh, just a tree I came across during one my trips in”—a pause—“in Asia.”
Milo sat up against the bed board. He had promised not to say anything else about it, but he couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer.
“Dad, what’s been going on lately? With you and Mom.”
“What do you mean?”
Milo sighed. “You know what I mean.”
“Oh, right. There’s no reason to worry.” He tapped the book against his open palm as if bored. “Here, I brought you something.”
He put the book aside, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out a small, silky bag that shimmered in the light. Milo leaned forward to get a closer look.
Max then pulled a crystal the size of a large piece of chalk out of the bag and held it up for Milo to see. It was a dull, greenish color but appeared to contain some sort of glittering essence, as if tiny stars had been trapped inside—millions of them. Green light washed over Max’s hand as the stars brightened.
“What is it?”
“This, my boy, is a beacon crystal. I bought it at a store called Rare Books and Other Peculiar Things. The man who sold it to me was a hundred and ten years old.”
“No way. That’s impossible.”
“No it isn’t.” He dropped the crystal into Milo’s palm. “Not if you eat a low-calorie diet and consume lots of vegetables, whole grains, and fish. Go ahead. Rub the crystal with your thumb.”
Milo did and the crystal brightened, throwing a lively green light everywhere.
“Whoa,” he said.
The light drained away, leaving only the glowing galaxy of stars within. There were more now—billions more, probably. His father smiled at the crystal and then at him. “You can tell it’s charged by looking at the core. Right now, it’s at full capacity. It’ll stay like that for days unless you use it up.”
“Use it up? How?”
“By showing it to people. That crystal is special and only protects people with good hearts—at least that’s how the legend goes. If anyone with bad intent touches it, the power drains away and you have to charge it back up again.” Abruptly, his father got up. “Anyway, it’s bedtime. Good night, my boy. Love you.”
“Love you too, Dad.”
Before leaving, Max looked back at him and said, “Keep that crystal with you at all times and keep it charged. And don’t show it to anyone. I mean it.”
There had been a note of urgency in his voice.
“I will,” Milo said, nodding.
His father shut off the light and closed the door behind him. Milo sat alone in the dark with the crystal, his eyes filled with green light.
“What a weird family,” he said, turning the crystal in his hands and gazing at the galaxy of stars within. Something about those stars made him feel safe.
He fell asleep with the crystal gripped in one hand. His dreams that night were wild and strange.
Chapter 5
In the forest beyond Dearborn’s northwestern edge, a cloaked man walked among the trees, dragging something round and heavy inside a sack.
It was late at night and colder than it should have been this late in August. The leaves above him had stiffened and made a dry rustling sound against each other. The man walked with the solemn vigor of someone dragging a corpse out into the woods to be buried.
Inside the sack was a large, round object, as big as a beach ball but a thousand times heavier. The man grunted as he dragged the thing along. The heads of owls turned like silent screws to watch him pass. They hooted lo
w in their throats, adding a mournful quality to the night.
The man stopped, let go of the sack, and breathed a sigh of relief. He reached up and pulled back his hood, revealing a face that was old and wrinkled, yet in possession of an unnatural vigor, like a vampire eager to feed. His eyes were black marbles pressed into the clay of his face.
He had stepped into a clearing beneath an open patch of sky. A perfect spot, filled with the moon’s cold glare. He brought two fingers to his lips and blew a sharp whistle that cut through the night, too high-pitched for human ears to register. It shot past the whispering trees and over the city of Dearborn, New Jersey.
Another man, this one tall and thin and dressed all in black, his youthful skin as pale as marble, turned to see from which direction the whistle had come. He couldn’t see it, of course, but he had other senses that helped him pluck it from the air.
He was standing on the roof of an old warehouse in the southern part of town. A human woman cowered a few feet away, hands up by her face. She was crying. The man before her was unlike any person she had ever seen—and those horrible things sticking out of his back…
“Please,” she said. “Let me go. I won’t tell anyone what you did to me.”
She touched a small wound on her neck. The dried blood was black in the moonlight. The man narrowed one eye at her and smiled.
“Look at you,” he said, lips shining with her blood. “The promises you humans make when you’re afraid. Like I really believe you won’t go and tell the world about me.”
Behind him, a pair of gleaming wings unfolded. The feathers were blacker than the night sky and shone like oil. The man stretched the wings out to full length, each one twice the length a human arm.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “Tell everyone. Tell those tabloids of the paranormal you humans love so much. No one will ever believe you.” He inspected his fingernails. “It’s a shame. In this place”—he looked around as if the world were an empty stage—“someone like me would be famous.”
The woman covered her face and began to sob.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” the man said, stepping toward her.
She skittered backward, putting an arm around her neck for protection.
“Wish I could finish my midnight snack, don’t you?” His smirk turned into a weary frown. “But the Knight-Captain calls.”
The wind caressed his face, which was pale and elegant, the features hawkish. His jet-black hair, which came down to his shoulders, fluttered in the breeze and brushed against the stems of his wings. “Maybe we’ll do this again sometime. What is it they say in your world?” He made his right hand into the shape of a telephone and put it to his ear. “I’ll call you?”
“Please,” the woman said, pressing the wound on her neck. “Just go.”
The man tilted his head back and closed his eyes. His wings rose like a black curtain being lifted behind him.
Then he turned and sprinted toward the edge, his boots making a scraping sound as his body lifted off. For a while he soared like a black seagull, and then his wings began to take huge gulps of air that lifted him toward the sky.
“So long, sweetheart,” he called out, disappearing into the blackness. The woman fell to her knees and thanked God she was still alive.
The whistle reached all the way up to the scattered wisps of cloud above Dearborn.
Hidden in that cold expanse, a muscular, gray-skinned man wearing studded leather armor rode on the back of a giant hornet. A layer of frost covered his body and his bald head. Every time he moved, bits of it broke away and swam in the current. His black beard, braided across his chest, was practically white with the stuff.
It didn’t bother him. The only thing he felt, other than a mild ache in his thighs from riding, was the urge to swing the warhammer slung across his massive back. The weapon looked exactly as it sounded, a giant, two-faced hammer as heavy as a refrigerator, but with a spike on top for charging enemies in battle.
The hornet was making a buzzing noise that almost drowned out the Knight-Captain’s whistle. The gray-skinned man tapped the hornet’s head, right between its hubcap eyes.
“Quiet, Bugbrain.”
The buzzing stopped as the hornet stilled its wings. The man and the hornet began to fall, and now, with that infernal buzzing gone, the man could hear the whistle as clearly as he could hear himself screaming in anger.
“Not that quiet, you stupid bug! Keep flying!”
The man held on with his legs as the buzzing resumed and the insect took flight again. He reached back and pulled the warhammer out of its harness.
In the distance, he saw—with eyes that could see in very low light—an airplane filled with people.
“There,” he said, pointing. “Head toward it.”
The hornet altered its course and flew toward the plane, which looked like a gray metal dove in the distance. They could see the words AirAtlantic printed on its side. It was a passenger flight full of men, women, and children.
“Good,” the man said, smiling and readying the warhammer. “Get closer. Near the wing.”
The hornet responded to the man’s words without hesitation, as if it had been thinking the same thing. It approached the airplane from behind. The man relished the delicious heat from the plane’s propellers.
He held on tight. When he was just below the airplane’s left wing, he pulled the warhammer back and braced himself. Then he took a deep breath and swung.
The propeller burst in a spray of metal, fire, and smoke. A loud bang shook the sky. With only one jet, the plane couldn’t keep itself afloat. It dipped and wavered before veering downward toward the city, leaving a plume of black smoke in its wake.
“Humans,” he said, spitting into the wind. His eyebrows, normally black, were white and spiky with frost, giving him the look of an ice devil. “They go about their lives like we don’t exist. If they looked closer, they’d see the truth, that they are not the only monsters in the world.”
The plane disappeared into a cloud. A few seconds later, it smashed into the city with a loud boom. The man slid the warhammer back into its harness and tapped the hornet between its domed eyes.
“We had our fun. Let’s go see the captain.”
Chapter 6
Knight-Captain Querrigan stopped whistling, closed his eyes, and waited. The heat from a standing torch he had lit earlier filled his hood and warmed his face. This was taking too long.
“You’re late, Lieutenant Coscoros,” he said in a gruff whisper.
The man with the black wings dropped into the clearing. He rose, wrapped in his own feathers, his face orange and sharp in the torchlight. He was grinning.
“Knight-Captain,” Coscoros said, opening his wings and fluttering them before folding them back. His forehead gleamed with a layer of frost from having flown so high up.
Nearby in the darkness, leaves crunched and twigs snapped—the sounds of a many-legged creature walking across underbrush. The hornet and the man with the warhammer emerged from the trees.
“Basher,” Querrigan said. “And—is that a hornet? Not very subtle, but I’m impressed. The Knight-Marshal told me you had learned a new form. Still, not very subtle.”
The hornet nodded. Moonlight glinted off its large, glassy eyes.
“Apologies, Knight-Captain,” Basher said. “Bugbrain and I decided flying would be faster, even if it did mean getting seen by humans.”
“That plane that fell over the city,” Querrigan said. “That was you?”
“Yes, sir. You said to create a diversion, so I did.”
Coscoros smirked and fluttered his wings. “In the only way you know how; by making a horrid scene.”
Basher gave a single nod.
Querrigan turned toward the large sack he had dragged into the forest. Meanwhile, the hornet lifted its head as if listening for something. Its body began to shake, accompanied by a strong breeze as its wings were sucked into its shell. Over the next three seconds, the shell transformed into
what looked like bulky, dark-red armor made of metal plates.
A scorpion the color of dried blood stood where the hornet had been. Massive lobster claws and a tail with a curved stinger rose around its midsection. Steam lifted off its shell.
“So much for subtlety,” Coscoros said.
The scorpion responded by stabbing the air between them with its stinger.
“This mission,” Querrigan said, “will be difficult, and you will each have to use your talents to the fullest. We have, however, acquired new information”—Querrigan smiled and his tongue darted in and out of his mouth like a snake’s—“and it will make all the difference.”
He reached down and picked up the sack he had carried into the forest, then motioned for the scorpion to come forward. It crept along, resembling an alien machine as it slid through the darkness.
“Our low mages have detected magic in the human world, here in the state of New Jersey, in the country known as the United States of America.”
“Magic,” Basher said. “What sort? High? Low? Acolyte?”
“An Acolyte healing spell. Our scouts got lucky and locked onto the emission signature before it could fade. We’ve only glimpsed a few images. Now all we need is their exact location.”
With a grunt, Querrigan lifted a globe from the sack—it was as black as death in this light, with a luster that could drive a man insane—and placed it into a groove on the scorpion’s back. The others gathered around.
“They live somewhere in this town, a family of four considered normal by the majority of American standards. They are anything but normal, however.”
His eyes reflected bits of blue light as the globe began to shine.
Coscoros crossed his arms. “In order to use an Acolyte spell, the caster must have been trained in Astros at some point. Hiding out on Earth—that makes them refugees, probably from the war.”
“They might be former generals,” Basher added. “We bring ’em in, the reward money will make us rich.”
Querrigan shushed them and bent over the globe in order to see the images unraveling in its core.
Savant (The Luminether Series) Page 3
