“What are you doing?” Leanora asked Joey, thinking he meant to hit Manchester with the crowbar. “Don’t use that. Use the wand!”
“I will, but we have to be smart about how we do it.”
“This is smart?” Shazad asked.
“This is genius.” Joey raised the crowbar high in the air. “I think,” he added. “Stay close.”
He brought the heavy metal bar down with all his might, shattering the tiny bottle that contained the Water of Life. A rush of liquid exploded from the point of impact as if a dam had burst, blasting Joey, Shazad, and Leanora all the way to the back of the theater. Fortunately, Joey remembered Redondo’s protective spell and had shielded the three of them inside an airtight bubble, shouting, “Encapsulato!” the second before they were washed away. When the wave settled, the bubble dissolved and the three of them stood up, knee-deep in water. Joey looked down at the wand in his hand. “I think I’m getting the hang of this.”
The water sloshed around inside the theater. Joey spotted Manchester in the third row. The force of the wave had thrown him into the seats. “This was all in that tiny bottle?” Shazad asked.
“Unbelievable, right?” Joey replied.
An ominous swell of water rose in the center of the flooded theater, defying the laws of physics. Glowing sapphire eyes materialized within the liquid mass, making it look like the head of a giant rising from the deep. A mouth opened up on the water giant’s face, and the water they were standing in rushed back to fill the void. Leanora faltered against the freshly created current but used the last row of theater seats to steady herself. “What is that?”
“Aqua de Vida,” Joey explained. “Also known as the Water of Life. We’d better get out of here.” He guided Leanora and Shazad out the theater doors and into the lobby. They moved quickly as the water shallowed out this far from the stage, but a second wave blasted the lobby doors off the hinges and washed them out into the street.
The water settled again. Joey and the others stood up, soaking wet. The shadow creatures of the Invisible Hand rushed them, reaching out with long arms and sharp fingers. Leanora and Shazad put up their hands to protect themselves, but Joey wasn’t fazed. “These guys never learn,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t worry. They can’t hurt you. They’re not even he—”
Joey was interrupted by one of the shadow creatures knocking him off his feet. He splashed down on wet pavement, shocked to the core.
“You were saying?” Shazad asked as more shadows rushed in. They swarmed Joey on the ground, trying to jerk the wand out of his hands. He rolled over, getting the wand underneath him and guarding it with his body. As Leanora and Shazad tried to pull the shadow creatures off Joey, he realized what was happening. Redondo was gone. The protections around his Off-Broadway realm were breaking down. The shadows were gaining strength. He had to take them out before they got stronger. Thinking about what got rid of shadows, Joey spun around with the wand, shouting, “Nova!”
A blinding light flashed out to fill the street. It was as if Joey were balancing a tiny star on the tip of the wand. The world went white for several seconds, and when it faded, everyone’s vision was hopelessly blurred. Leanora and Shazad were staggering about, rubbing their eyes. Joey was also seeing spots, but from what he was able to make out, they were alone. The shadows had all been vaporized.
“What was that you said?” Leanora asked Joey, blinking hard.
“Nova,” Joey repeated. “It’s the term for a sudden increase in the brightness of a star.”
“How do you know that?”
Joey blinked his eyes clear, grateful he had not called for a supernova. “Just a little something I learned in science class.”
“Does science class have an answer for that?” Shazad asked. A gurgling moan poured out of the theater. Water flowed like raging rapids beneath the marquee and rose to assume a ghostlike form. The Water of Life had followed them out into the street.
“Okay, maybe this wasn’t such a genius idea,” Joey admitted.
“I would have thought something called the Water of Life would be friendlier,” Leanora said.
“We got off on the wrong foot, me and this thing,” Joey replied. “This isn’t the first time I hit it with a crowbar.”
“Now you tell us.”
The ankle-deep water they were standing in grew deeper, and the current started up again. Soon they were submerged up to their necks. Joey tried in vain to swim away as the water carried him back toward the theater entrance where the water creature waited. His plan was backfiring. He had hoped to rile up the Water of Life and leave it to swallow Manchester—and maybe it had—but it clearly wasn’t content to stop there. It still had an ax to grind with him.
“This is a great plan!” Shazad shouted, swimming alongside him. “I’m so glad you came to our rescue!”
Joey couldn’t blame him for being upset. So far Joey had succeeded only in trading one form of danger for another. The water creature expanded its form into that of a wide, hungry mouth, but before it could swallow Joey, Leanora, and Shazad, everything changed. The clouds lifted and the temperature climbed. The world shook off its gloom and Joey’s feet found the pavement once again as the water shallowed out. He could have kissed the city street as it solidified beneath him. Redondo’s phantom realm had collapsed just in time. They were back in New York—the real New York. The Majestic Theatre splashed down its rightful place with a booming thud, and torrents of water spilled out everywhere. Cars screeched to a halt and spun out in the street. Pedestrians made sounds of confusion and alarm, cursing the sudden deluge and the damage done to their outfits.
“Guurgh?” croaked a bubbling puddle near Joey’s feet. He looked down and saw a pair of glowing blue eyes swirling in confusion. “Are you all right?” Joey asked the puddle. The eyeballs rounded on him, heavy with suspicion. Joey put his hands up. “Look, I’m sorry. Really. No hard feelings? I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just… I just didn’t know what else to do.” The luminous eyes narrowed, still unsure. Shazad took hold of a signpost, just in case the water creature tried to suck them in again. Leanora did the same. Joey looked around for something he could latch on to as a precaution when he heard the sound of running water. The spillage in the street was draining into the sewers. “Hey, you hear that?” Joey asked. He put a hand to his ear. “Listen! You’re free. You don’t have to go back in the bottle. You can go anywhere. What do you say? Bygones?”
The sentient puddle pondered Joey’s words briefly before gliding toward the street. After that the water was gone. Every last drop. Even the liquid that had saturated Joey’s clothes and hair had vanished, leaving him completely dry. Leanora and Shazad were dry as well.
Joey stood up and ran a free hand through his hair. “I’m glad that worked.”
“You let it go to the sewer?” asked Shazad. “Was that wise?”
Joey shook his head. “I don’t think I could have stopped it if I tried.”
“You guys…,” Leanora said, pointing. Manchester had stumbled into the lobby, hat in hand. He looked like he had been through the wringer, and he was angrier than Joey had ever seen him.
Joey brought the wand up like a gunslinger drawing his weapon. “Quixote!” Manchester spun around like a psychotic ballerina, slamming hard into the lobby wall. Disoriented, he bounced back and fell, but he wasn’t giving up. A moment later he was up again. The fight wasn’t over.
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Shazad told Joey.
He shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t know what to do.”
“He’s going to keep coming,” Leanora told Joey. “If you want to stop him, I think you’re going to have to stop him for good.”
“You mean kill him? I can’t do that.”
“Before he kills you,” Leanora warned. “Before he kills all of us!”
Joey looked down at the wand in his hand. He knew he could make the wand into a lethal weapon if he wanted to. He had practically done so already wi
th the bees. But using the wand specifically to kill… like a gun… that was different somehow. He just couldn’t cross that line.
“You better do something,” Shazad said, backing away from the theater. “I don’t want to end up in that hat again. It was like being stuck in a black hole.”
Joey looked at Leanora as an idea clicked in his brain. “Leanora! Do you still have that doorknob?”
She clutched at her bag from the outside, feeling around for it. “Right here!”
Thank goodness, Joey thought. “Come on, then! Follow me!” He took off down the street, and Leanora and Shazad ran after him.
“Where are we going?” Leanora called out.
“We need a door,” Joey said, checking the buildings as they passed them. Halfway down the street he found what he was looking for, a shop with a standard doorknob on its entrance. “Here!” he shouted.
Leanora used her firestone necklace to charge up her fist with magical energy. This time she had no trouble powering up and knocking the doorknob off the door. A clean karate-chop motion severed the handle, and the next thing Joey knew, she had the gold-and-ruby doorknob out of her bag. She pressed it into place on the door and turned the knob, checking the connection. The ruby lit up, signifying the magical bond was secure and the door was ready for action. “Where are we going?” Leanora asked Joey, stepping aside to let him do the honors.
“How does this work?” Joey asked.
“You have to visualize where you want to go. Picture it in your mind, clear as you can.”
Joey grimaced. “What if I’ve never seen the place before?”
“It doesn’t matter. You just have to focus.”
“He’s coming,” Shazad said, pointing down the street. Manchester had staggered out of the theater. “He sees us.”
“Okay,” Joey said, reaching tentatively for the doorknob. You can do this. He closed his eyes and turned the knob. The door opened inward on what looked to be a dark basement storage area.
“Is this it?” Leanora asked. “Is this what you wanted?”
“I don’t know,” Joey said, venturing inside. “I think so.” Everything was dark and quiet. Leanora and Shazad followed Joey in.
“What is this place?” Shazad asked, not yet closing the door behind them.
Joey was about to say he hoped it was the basement of Exemplar Academy, when Janelle came around the corner with a flashlight. She and Joey bumped into each other, and they both sprang back, shouting out in surprise.
“This is the place,” Joey said afterward, relieved.
“Joey?” Janelle asked. She was patting her chest, still getting over the shock of running into him. “You scared me to death! What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” Joey had no idea how to explain his sudden appearance and no time to waste trying. “What are you doing here this late?”
“I’m keeping an eye on my project,” Janelle said defensively. “I couldn’t just leave it. Not after what happened today. What if someone stumbled across it at random? Where did you come from?”
“Are you here by yourself?” Joey asked.
Janelle nodded. “I told my parents I was pulling an all-nighter in my lab.”
“You can do that?”
“I do it all the time. What’s going on here?” Janelle looked past Joey, Leanora, and Shazad, mystified by their sudden appearance. Her mouth fell open when she glimpsed the portal behind them. “Is that the street out there? In the basement?!!”
“I should get the door,” Leanora said, going back to retrieve the magic doorknob.
“No!” Joey put a hand up. “We want him to follow us.”
“We do?” Shazad asked.
“What are you talking about?” asked Janelle. “What is this? Who are they?” she added, gesturing to Leanora and Shazad.
“Shazad, Leanora… meet Janelle,” Joey said quickly. “She’s a genius. Janelle, this is Leanora and Shazad. They’re…” He was going to say “magicians” but went another way at the last second. “They’re my friends. I don’t expect you to understand this, and I’m sorry I can’t explain—at all—but I need to see your project. Now. And you need to get out of here five minutes ago.”
Janelle looked at Joey like he was out of his mind. “Are you kidding? I’m not going anywhere.”
“Please,” Joey begged. “You have to trust me. It’s not safe here.”
“You want to talk about safe? I’ve got this whole basement sealed off. You know what’s going to happen to you if you open that door?” She pointed across the basement, past assorted heat and air-conditioning equipment to a door on the opposite wall marked STORAGE. Joey went straight to it. “Don’t bother. It’s locked,” said Janelle.
Joey turned toward her, eyes full of hope. “It’s still in there?” he asked, pointing at the door.
“For a few more minutes,” Janelle said, checking her phone. “Assuming my calculations are correct. You can’t go in there. Look, I had to hook myself up to a safety line just to take a peek.”
Everyone looked and saw a line of cable lashed around the base of a hot water heater. “What are you going to do?” Leanora asked Joey. “What’s behind that door?”
“Why do you have a magic wand?” Janelle asked Joey. He pocketed the wand as soon as she mentioned it, but it hardly mattered. It wasn’t as if he would be able to keep it a secret much longer. Janelle glanced back at the door that Joey and the others had used to enter the basement and flinched. “Who’s that?”
“Just get ready to grab that lifeline—all of you,” Joey said, eyeing the door. Manchester was coming through it. He collected Leanora’s golden doorknob on the way in and nudged the door shut with his foot.
“Well, well, well… isn’t this cozy?” Manchester said, strutting around like he owned the place. “Who’s this, now?” he asked, noticing Janelle. “More new friends? Joey, I had no idea you were so popular. You’re going to be missed. Who knew?”
Joey took the wand back out and held it in front of his body, ready to snap it in two. “Don’t take another step.”
The threat did nothing to dent Manchester’s confidence. “Why not?” he asked, lazily tossing and catching Leanora’s doorknob in one hand like a baseball. “You’re not going to break that wand.”
“Stay back!” Joey ordered, bending the wand almost to the breaking point. He could practically hear the strain in the wood as it reached the upper limits of its endurance. Manchester stopped advancing. “You don’t know what I’m going to do,” Joey said. “I’m not like you. I’m not even like them,” he added, nodding toward Leanora and Shazad. “I didn’t get into this because I had to have this wand. I didn’t want to change the world, remember? I didn’t want to fight bad guys and go through life with a target on my back. I just wanted Redondo to teach me magic.”
Manchester smiled as if Joey should have known better. “That was your mistake, not mine. I told you, magic isn’t for everybody. I warned you it was dangerous, but you wouldn’t listen, would you? It didn’t have to be like this. If you had only done as you were told, you wouldn’t be in this position, but that’s not the case. You are in this position, Joey. You put yourself here. There’s only one way out, and I promise you, breaking that wand in half isn’t it.”
“It’s one way out,” Joey said. “Giving the wand to you is another. But I’ve got to tell you, I’m not loving that idea, either.”
“I’m not having this conversation with you.” Manchester sneered. “Give me the wand now, or so help me, I’ll—”
“What? Kill me? You’re going to do that anyway.”
“I was going to say I’ll kill them.” Manchester took off his hat and held a hand over the opening, ready to pull out something truly terrible and throw it at Leanora, Shazad, and Janelle. Joey looked over at them. They were huddled together, the line of cable at their feet. Janelle looked especially confused and frightened. “It’s your choice,” Manchester said. “What’s it going to be?”
Joey cursed under his breath and relaxed his grip on the wand. “All right. I’m not going to break it.” He held the wand up with one hand. “I choose door number three.”
Manchester squinted. “What?”
Joey whirled around and aimed the wand at the door behind him, shouting:
“OPEN SESAME!”
With that, the closet that had once housed Janelle’s supercollider project opened. Inside, hovering in midair, was a black hole the size of a dinner plate and absolutely nothing else. The black hole’s gravitational pull had sucked everything that had once lined the closet into the void, and now that the door was open, it went to work on the rest of the basement. As the door flew open, Joey dove for the lifeline and let the wand go.
“What the—NO!” shouted Manchester as the wand flew back into the closet and disappeared into the abyss. He lurched after it, immediately realizing that he had made a fatal mistake. As the black hole pulled Manchester toward the closet, Joey caught the end of the cable and held on tight. Leanora, Shazad, and Janelle were all closer to the wall, holding fast to the same line. It was like being caught in the Water of Life’s current, only stronger. Joey prayed that Janelle’s calculations had been correct and the black hole would soon be gone. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. He tried climbing up the cable hand over hand, but he didn’t get very far. The gravitational forces at work behind him were too strong.
“YOU!” Manchester bellowed at Joey, bracing himself in the closet door. “You… You threw it away!” he sputtered. “How…? I don’t believe… You ruined everything!”
“Believe it!” Joey shouted back. “You want the wand so bad? Go get it!”
“You worthless piece of—” Manchester cut himself off mid-insult as his hand slipped on the doorframe. He nearly fell back into the closet (and beyond). Still clutching his top hat tight in his fist, he growled and leaped forward, latching on to Joey with his free hand.
“AHH!” Joey cried out as Manchester grabbed hold of his wounded ankle. He slipped all the way back to the end of the line, pain shooting up through his leg.
Order of the Majestic Page 24
