Opal trudged back to her room, drew the curtain over the great window, and flung herself into bed.
Was I ever really loved? Will I ever be?
Sour thoughts danced through her head as she fell into a restless sleep.
In her dreams she saw Jupiter and Sugar coming toward her through an indigo mist. They wanted to comfort her but could not reach her. The mist had whipped itself up into a storm cloud that swirled above them. The winds pushed them apart. She could barely hear what they were trying to say.
“Child, we all feel lonesome at times,” Sugar shouted through her cupped hands. Jupiter steadied the old woman against the blustery winds.
“Pay no mind to it,” Jupiter said.
Then the Hoods interrupted their reunion. They were mounted on horses and riding in circles. They shot their pistols in the air and tossed torches onto the cottages. Everywhere she looked it seemed things were burning. Grigg’s Landing was being destroyed.
“Jupiter! Sugar!” Opal screamed. She lunged for the old man’s arm.
Opal woke up clinging to one of her bedposts. She was drenched in her own sweat, and for a moment she wasn’t sure where she was. Her necklace was on fire but completely black. She could see it swirling like ink stirred by an invisible finger.
When she felt stable, she let go of the bed.
Wait, what? How is this possible?
Opal had transmuted the wooden bedpost into pure silver. It shimmered like an icicle in the sun.
“Transmutation,” Jakob Prismore said. His voice arrived in her room before he did. The old man’s white beard jutted through a magical portal and the rest of him followed.
“Only the Agama stone has that power,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone able to manifest that magic. You are becoming more attuned to the full spectrum of your abilities.”
“The dream—my friends were in danger,” she said. She recited a line from Wormhold’s famous poem. “Indigo like a dream, the Azurite paints a future scene.”
“I sensed your distress, and the magic of the Agama Stone, and I came immediately. It’s true, things are getting worse in Grigg’s Landing—”
Opal didn’t wait for Jakob to finish is sentence. She created her own apportation portal and stepped right up to the Worthingtons’ back gate.
Opal knew from Surreptitious Scouting that many Wardens used cloaking crystals and crystal-beaded hiding cloaks. In addition, Wardens reported back regularly, never left without an approved scouting strategy, and they worked in teams of two.
Opal knew all these things from her studies. She knew she was violating every bit of what she’d learned. But she didn’t care about the rules. The lithomancy dream was too disturbing, and now her mind was fixed on making sure Jupiter and Sugar were okay.
Opal was about to try the gate when she heard a group of men. She dove for cover and watched as Tubbs Willis, a rotund troublemaker, lumbered past. He was followed by the Devil’s minions: Pitt and Percy Elkins.
I can’t believe this, thought Opal. I can’t shake these idiots.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the three no-goods sauntered up to the gate and let themselves in with a key. Opal was shocked and jealous at the same time. The whole time she had lived with the Worthingtons, she had never been given a key to the gates.
“You sure the boss wants you coming by this time of day, Percy?” Pitt asked.
“Shut up. If I need advice from you, I’ll signal with a snap of my fingers or a shot in your rear with my pistol. Now get your sorry hide inside,” Percy said, swinging the gate open.
If Opal could’ve cut them down with her glare, they’d have fallen dead on the spot.
Percy and Pitt slipped through the gate. Tubbs followed, strutting his okra. They walked up to the barn, just as Jupiter Johnson came around the corner.
Percy knocked Jupiter’s straw hat off while Pitt called him vile names. When Jupiter stooped over to get his hat, Tubbs kicked him hard in the rear. Jupiter fell to his knees.
“Hey, you big dingleberry! Leave that man alone,” Opal shouted.
Everyone turned to scan the tree line for the voice. Opal coiled back into her hiding place. Now what? she worried.
Tubbs Willis bounded toward the gate like a crazed hog. Percy and Pitt trailed. With only one option, Opal exploded from the bush and headed back through the woods toward the wall.
“I see her,” yelled Pitt.
“It’s that rummer girl who burned the house,” snarled Tubbs.
“Get her, boys!” Percy squealed. He crashed through the woods yipping and yapping. His words were like a fiery whip over the heads of the other two.
Opal closed in on a part of the wall that appeared easy to scale. Her training kicked in. With two great leaps and a twist of her body, she was over.
Don’t follow me, she prayed.
Pitt was the first over, but Opal could see him hesitating. The dangers of the wilderness were notorious.
The little dictator scolded his crew. “If that rummer ain’t scared, why in the heck are you two? Get after her! NOW!”
She could hear Tubbs yelp as he was kicked off the wall. Opal raced on. She could lose them in the rift tunnels if she could find a hut. She scanned ahead and dread washed over her. She didn’t know where she was, and the gang was closing in.
Opal sprinted for a promising looking outcropping. The vine-covered bluff lead down into the fold of two steep ridges. As she approached, she realized it was another mistake.
Now Tubbs and Percy were above her, running along the ridge to the east. Pitt was on the ridge to the west. She had given them an advantage, and now she had no choice but to race forward.
I need to apport out of here, she thought.
Then the forest floor dropped away. Opal tried to stop, but she had too much momentum and skidded right over the lip of a giant sinkhole.
Luckily, she managed to grab a mass of vines as she fell. She held tight and slammed against the wall. Her feet swung up and found some footing. One foot, on a large boulder, gave way as she tried to push up. Opal glanced down to see it tumble and crash into the deep nothingness.
She pushed off the other rock and propelled herself back out of the pit. Opal scrambled over the edge on her stomach. She stopped crawling within a couple yards of Percy’s boots.
“You are one stupid girl, ain’t ya?” he said.
He kicked a cloud of dust in her face. Opal coughed it away. She wanted to run, but she was surrounded.
Opal could think of two options: climb backwards into the massive sinkhole, or fight off the bullies. She reached for the Agama Stone. She thought sapphire thoughts, but the stone had a different plan. It was glowing green.
No necklace. Protection! I need protection! It didn’t change its mind.
“Dang, we got her boys!” Tubbs crowed. He was sliding down a spill of shale.
“You’re trapped, rummer,” Percy chided.
He circled around the hole to her left. Tubbs went right. Percy walked head on. He stopped and stared at Opal. An evil grin curled along his face.
Then he began to hiss. The hissing was so otherworldly, however, that everyone froze in fear.
The soft, mossy ground surrounding the sinkhole began to vibrate. The cool cave air turned humid and blasted Opal. Goose pimples broke out across her arms.
A monster’s clawed foot erupted from below and tore into the side of the sinkhole. A tremendous dragon-like creature followed the foot and pulled itself from the hole.
Tubbs shrieked like a little girl.
Opal now had new choices: she could fight Percy’s gang, or she could fight the dragon.
Percy, no problem, she thought.
He was backing away from the dragon. Opal took advantage and tried one of Eltheon’s moves. She cartwheeled over and kicked Percy in the jaw, knocking him flat. She flipped to her feet and ran like a howler chasing a horse.
Opal knew the monster. It was, most undoubtedly, the creature from Professor Jack’s painting
. The one he called the Jeffercanus stegacertasaur—the gowrow.
The gowrow swung its head back and forth and snapped its jaws. The thing was the length of two horse-drawn carts. It had teeth like sheered ivory long as baseball bats. It roared its notorious goooowwwrooowww and began picking victims.
Everyone was screaming and that made its job a bit easier. It snapped within inches of Pitt’s hindquarters. Pitt scrambled to higher ground while the beast turned to chase Tubbs.
Opal blew past Tubbs, who was babbling and waddling as fast as he could into the forest. The emerald magic of elementalism trailed behind her. The trees and shrubbery seemed to rise up, bend, and weave together. They were growing over her like protective walls, hiding her trail.
She ran back to the wall, jumped over a fallen elm, and broke out over flat ground. That’s when the gowrow slid through a field of daisies to block her. Tubbs was pinned in the monster’s massive jaws. His arms thrashed wildly and then she heard his spine crack. His boots flew off his useless feet like leather missiles as the gowrow shook him between its teeth.
She watched the horror as, with a chomp and a gulp, Tubbs Willis was swallowed completely. The monster licked its snout and headed toward Opal. She screamed and ran right at the beast. She slid through its legs, under its belly, righted herself, and kept moving.
By the time Opal closed in on the wall, Pitt and Percy Elkins were doing the same. They ran parallel to Opal about eighty yards away.
The gowrow was doing a lot better than any of them. It seemed its snack of Tubbs Willis had given it a boost of energy. It was moving faster and faster. Opal saw Percy grab his brother’s collar and pull himself into the lead. Pitt yelled for help, but Percy just kept running. She prayed that Pitt’s yelling would draw the beast in the direction of the brothers, but instead it broke toward her.
Opal ran toward Devil’s Alley. Without warning, her vision augmented and she saw the Veil break open and expose something unusual. The expanse beyond the wall shimmered like heat rising from some great desert. She could see the full reality of that land and how it undulated like a sheet of fabric rippling in the wind. The world she occupied was miswoven with the other. It was a tear in a river of energy—two dimensions twisted and broken like frayed rope, clashing with each other for the same space. Opal suddenly perceived how to make all paths forward straight.
This flare of insight happened at the exact moment that she fell, face first, into a deep ravine.
She tumbled, head over feet, down the embankment and slid into a muddy creek bed at the bottom. A goop of mud, sand, and water covered her face and filled one ear, but it didn’t block the roar of the gowrow. The beast was not deterred by the depth of the ravine. It scrambled along the ridge looking for Opal, and when it saw her it lunged forward, half-leaping, half-sliding down the hillside, tearing out rocks and trees as it went.
Opal rolled over onto her back and was trying to crabwalk her way behind a cluster of fallen tree limbs when she saw something she couldn’t believe: The gowrow had a dragon-sized black onyx tracking collar buckled around its neck.
Oh no! It can’t be!
The monster was hunting Opal because of Amina’s enchantments.
Opal felt defeated. She was hurt and trapped. There seemed no way out. This is how she would go out, a dead and disgraced nobody who had done nothing. She would never be a hero like her mother.
Was it true after all? That happy endings are lies we tell ourselves to make it through the sad little tragedies of our wasted efforts? She would be a name in the roll of doomed trainees, nothing special.
She had just started to let down her guard. She was just beginning to hope that something special might happen, something transformative that would turn the broken pieces of her past into a mosaic that had both beauty and meaning. She longed for evidence that glory could actually exist in the lives of young, inconsequential black girls from the back hills of the Ozark Mountains—she longed to be that evidence.
She had dared to believe she might matter. Now she was about to become a big lizard’s afternoon snack. She berated herself. Pathetic, Opal. Everything they thought about you was true. There is nothing to you but misplaced hope.
Opal was losing consciousness. She reached up to her head and felt warm, sticky blood. The Jeffercanus approached her more carefully now, banging its tusk through the trees and shrubs, clearing a path straight to Opal.
Opal became woozier as she watched the gowrow come closer. In the sky, she saw what looked like Kawa circling the area. Suddenly, the beautiful snawfus was at her side, its muzzle nudging her in the neck.
With her remaining strength, Opal grabbed one antler of the beautiful stag and swung up on its back. She dug her hands into his hide, and with a great leap, the two were in the air sailing away from the monster.
The gowrow roared in complaint. Opal was so weak all she could do was bury her head into the animal’s fur and watch the ivory blossoms and blue magic spill out behind them.
81
The moon was like a wedge of dried pear hanging low in the trees. Amina levitated over the boggy ground and floated forward. The three wraiths shrieked and circled her in wide sweeps. At the edge of the marsh shone a light the color of stained teeth. It swelled and flickered through the thick fog. It emanated from the oculus of a timbered shack bermed with mossy sod and overgrown with reeds.
As Amina approached, the front door creaked open to greet her. The humid fingers of a foul steam stretched out into the night, enveloping Amina and the wraiths. Amina gagged in disgust. The wraiths screamed in agony as the steam melted them away. They shriveled and curled like paper blackening on a fire. In seconds, they had evaporated from sight.
Amina stepped into the shack.
“That was unnecessary, crone. They were here to guard our doings,” she scolded.
“Uninvited—and now gone,” a withered female voice said from the dark corner.
The witch skittered from the corner to the hearth fire. She stirred a brew bubbling like boiled mud, then disappeared, only to reappear in another corner holding a black as soot armadillo. She stroked it as if it were a pet cat.
“Well, it is your house, old hag,” groaned Amina.
With a sweep of her arm, her staff appeared. Its tip produced a purple swath of light in the room.
“Ah, good. You conjure dark magic so easily now. So naturally, it responds. You make this old woman proud,” the crone said.
“What I’ve mastered is my own doing. You’ve had very little to teach for a long time,” Amina scowled.
“Once an apprentice, always so. Your victories only strengthen me,” she said. “Your failures—those are your own.”
“You cling to false pride. Your magic was useless last time,” Amina said.
“It was you and your bloodlust that doomed that attempt. Not my spellwork,” she chided.
“Where you have failed, I will succeed,” hissed Amina.
The old crone began cackling uncontrollably.
“Yes, yes, y’all always say that, and some say much more. All of it foolish talk. Do you have a speech prepared, young’un? How you’re the supreme conjurer now? I figured from our first meeting that you’d be one for such nonsense,” snickered the crone.
“Don’t mock me, woman,” Amina snapped.
The old conjurer vanished in a sweep of her tattered cloak. Nos of the Feratu stood in her place.
“Don’t mock me,” Nos laughed. His great needled teeth clicked like metal combs and flung venom here and there as his head bobbed in great unholy guffaws. “How about I eat you? A Feratu needs all the magic it can get!”
“Enough,” said Amina.
Nos swirled away and Gemaea the Conjurer reappeared, hunched and scratching her charred pet’s armored hide with her overgrown nails. She giggled and sputtered incantations.
She moved closer to Amina’s light. Her eyes were dark tunnels, black as cast-iron skillets.
“Enough you say,” she nagged. “Have you
truly had enough, little apprentice? Or will you use the blade to kill me too?”
“What blade, witch?”
“This one, of course,” hissed the conjurer.
She swept her boney hand along a rotting table near the fire. It was covered in her dark-magic apothecary. In the wake of this grand gesture, a gnarled and jagged dagger appeared out of nowhere. It was unadorned and cut from one long piece of lusterous black stone woven with streaks of silver-grey minerals.
“It is the ultimate weapon for your grand conspiracy, dear apprentice,” croaked the crone. “Something even the Great Amina cannot yet conjure—forged from a freshly-fallen star, hammered sharp on the same while still fiery-hot.” The old crone turned to Amina with a toothless grin and purred. “It is perfect. The oldest of Veilian magic.”
Amina grabbed the dagger and sunk it so deep into the crone’s stomach that her hand was partially buried in the purple of her guts.
“Thank you, dear teacher,” Amina said lovingly. She twisted the blade deeper.
The crone was momentarily stunned, but she slowly began her cackling again, this time more tenuous.
“It ends as you always thought it would,” she wheezed.
The old conjurer fell off the blade into a dead heap. She lay twisted up, leaking blueberry-colored blood through the slats of the floor. The boggy earth drank it greedily. Her black pet flashed its beady red eyes at Amina, curled into an armored ball, and rolled away into the deeper shadows of the shack.
Amina wiped the gunk from the dagger. She stepped out into the moonlight and admired her new blade. Her trinity of wraiths materialized in ecstatic shrieks.
“A starstone blade. Beautiful,” she said. “How perfectly the end begins!”
82
Opal woke in the healing ward to find she had become a celebrity.
Nurses buzzed by giving her winks and waves. Her bed was surrounded in adornments of flowers, ribbons, and scrolled notes. Eltheon sat beside her bed devouring a pan of sorghum cakes a young family had left.
Opal Summerfield and The Battle of Fallmoon Gap Page 23
