by Lee French
They fled through the living room. Missy and Lisa both stood with their arms crossed, glaring at Justin, who crouched in front of them with one knee on the floor. He glanced at Kay and nodded. Kay stopped at the front door and slipped into his sneakers.
“We’ll try to be home before Mommy gets off work.” He kissed each little girl on the cheek and hugged them both at once.
Drew remembered his father making promises like that a long time ago. “Get out of here,” he told Kay.
Kay grunted his agreement and kept moving. He ducked out the front door and hurried through a cold November mid-morning to the stable to release Tariel. The small outbuilding had room for eight people to sleep comfortably, but Justin’s soulbound sprite took up the whole space on her own. Inside, Tariel, a large white horse with silver hooves and blue eyes, lay on a bed of evergreen branches. She lifted her head and whickered.
“We can’t take her,” Justin said as he jogged up, a baseball bat resting on his shoulder. “She’s a wanted horse in Portland. I haven’t been able to straighten that out yet.”
“Were you planning on walking?” Kay narrowed his eyes. “No, you wanted me to take us.”
Justin shrugged and jerked his square chin toward the house. “We could take the truck instead.”
Kay rolled his eyes. “Right, because that’s a much better choice.” He spun his power out, making fog billow out of the ground from his feet. Once the fog surrounded them, he forced it to believe it hovered over the wrong place. The fog obeyed his will, shifting itself and everything inside it briefly through an unknown alternate realm to land in his preferred location.
The fog cleared at his command, much of the power spent in its creation returning to him. He stood inside a bar in downtown Portland, one Drew knew as the site of Claire’s least courageous hour. The glass front door she’d burst through in a panic had been boarded over, at least.
Justin raised his brow at Kay. He nodded to Tariel as she stood.
“Oops.” Kay scowled. “I’m still getting the hang of this.”
Fortunately, Nine Cans had no patrons at this hour on a Sunday. Ki, a tall, muscular Native American man, paused in the task of sliding wine glasses into a rack to hang upside down from their bases to give the trio a glare from behind the polished cherry bar. “Are you here to remove the idiot from my basement?”
“What?” Justin stepped around Tariel. “Who’s down there?”
“Detective Avery decided to kill himself in the tunnels this morning. Considering the long faces among you, I assume something horrible happened yesterday. It may have had something to do with the Palace’s destruction?”
“Anything’s possible.” Justin leaned against the bar. “Could everyone feel that?”
“Yes. The ground shook, birds took flight, dogs howled. The news said it rained frogs in Cambodia, the ground at Normandy turned blood red for five minutes, and some unknown vines engulfed houses in Brazil. Or maybe Peru.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “Other things of the sort all over the world, all lasting about five minutes. Scientists are working on explaining it. Magnetic fields, ocean currents, climate change, that sort of sciencey stuff. I can’t wait to see what they say when the ghosts start popping up.”
“Are we concerned about Avery?” Kay asked.
“I’m concerned about how you intend to get that sprite out of my bar. She will not fit through the doors. But yes, I’d rather you recover Avery’s body than me. And deal with his ghost if necessary.”
“We’ll get Tariel out,” Justin said as he straightened. “After we find Avery.” He stepped past Kay and patted Drew’s shoulder. “Wait here.”
“Why?” Kay snapped. “So you can go get killed or tortured too? I’m the useful one, remember? You wait here.”
“How interesting,” Ki said, his eyebrows climbing. “Two Knights without swords wanting suicide by magic bug in one day. It’s practically an epee-demic.”
Justin glowered and shoved his way through the back door.
Kay smirked. “We have to give these Knights some credit for not losing their full-frontal, can-do attitude.”
“Don’t stay and talk to him,” Drew groaned. “And don’t try to pun with him either.”
Ki grinned. “I’m sure you bug him all the time with that kind of talk.”
“Just leave the room,” Drew said. “Right now.”
“I might drive him to drink.” Kay flipped Ki a jaunty salute and hurried into the back room. By the time Kay reached the trapdoor in the floor, Justin had already opened it and climbed down the ladder to the basement. Kay grabbed two flashlights from a stack near the door.
Someone deep in the Shanghai Tunnels growled in what sounded to Drew like frustrated pain. Apparently, Portland Detective John Avery, another Spirit Knight, still lived and struggled with the new denizens of the tunnels snaking under downtown Portland. Though neither Drew nor Kay liked Avery, both recognized the value of having a cop as an ally. Kay climbed down. Sulfurous fumes greeted him as soon as his head cleared the basement ceiling.
Above, Ki slammed the trapdoor shut, cutting off the overhead light.
Kay clicked on one flashlight and thumped the other into Justin’s chest so he wouldn’t drop it. He swept the small room with the light, finding puddles of bubbling yellow liquid scattered across the dusty earth floor.
“Don’t touch that,” Justin said as he turned on his own flashlight. “It’s acid strong enough to eat flesh.”
Thanks to Kay’s ghostly nature, he could heal Drew’s body of anything except sudden death. Justin had the same luxury because of Tariel. But pain still hurt. Healing still took time and energy.
“Technically,” Drew said inside Kay’s mind, “acid destroys the bindings between molecules, which is the mechanism involved in digestion, not eating.”
Kay chose to parrot this information for Justin as he checked the room for anything other than brick walls, acid puddles, and loose dirt.
“Whatever,” Justin said. “I don’t see anything here. Stay close and let’s not split up. These tunnels are a maze.”
“Or are they amazing?” Kay asked with a smirk.
“Don’t,” Justin snapped.
As much as Drew hated to agree with Justin, he did. “Yeah. None of that from you. One obnoxious magical being is enough.”
Kay heaved a long-suffering sigh.
Avery’s groans and grunts echoed through the brick and dirt tunnels as the pair picked their way around the random acid pools. They passed through the disused basements of other establishments, rooms as dirty and dusty as the bar’s. Every half minute or so, Avery made an unintelligible noise a little louder than the one before, letting them know they headed in the right direction.
Kay slowed as they moved closer to the node pulsing under west Portland. Ley lines, places where magic gathered into streams, thrummed strong down here. Both Kay and Drew knew the node would destroy them with its raw power if they tried to tap it. But the thick line bulging from the wall called out, begging for Kay to tap it and taste its raw, wild power. He gulped and resisted the urge.
“On the plus side,” Kay muttered, his voice trembling from the effort of restraining himself, “there are no ghosts down here. Isn’t that refreshing?”
Drew wanted control of his body back. He had no trouble keeping his hands away from the ley line. “I was thinking that’s something to worry about. Shouldn’t there be some? Magic all over the world got disrupted yesterday. Raining frogs and mild earthquakes don’t sound like apocalypse-level aftereffects.”
“Blech. Good point. Not seeing stragglers is probably a bad sign. Unless the ethereal stuff got scrambled instead of supercharged and needs a few days to settle. That’s always possible. Wouldn’t that be nice if the universe decided to give us a few days to rest before blowing up in our faces? Good thing we’re using that time to do nearly anything other than resting.”
“Ssh.” Justin paused at a fork in the tunnels, listening at one.
“How many peopl
e do you think died down here?” Drew asked.
“You’re the one who did the report on these tunnels in middle school,” Kay whispered. “Figure it out.”
“Shut up, Drew. I can’t tell which way to go.”
Kay glared at him. “Stuff it, Knight.”
Justin squinted at him. Then his eyes went wide. “Ants.”
Whirling, Kay saw the ants and shrieked. “Kill it! Kill it with fire! Nuke it from orbit!” He cringed away, pressing himself against the wall.
Two ants the size of large cats, each covered by a shiny blue exoskeleton, waved their antennae and clicked their mandibles. Justin lunged forward and swung his bat like a golf club. He thwacked the first ant, throwing it into the air. The ant slammed into the wall with a crack and fell to the ground in a puff of dust.
The second ant spit a stream of noxious acid at Justin. He jumped aside and hustled back to Kay.
“Drew, you’re supposed to be useful! That’s why you’re down here.”
Kay squeezed his eyes shut with a squeak.
“Give me control back,” Drew said.
“No! You gave it up. This is my body now!”
Kay squealed as Justin wrapped a fist in the front of Drew’s sweatshirt. He yanked Kay close and growled into his face. “Give Drew control back, or I’ll shove your head in front of that ant until it burns your brain.”
Whimpering, Kay dove into his corner again. Drew sucked in a breath and flinched from Justin’s angry gaze. “It’s me. He gave up. It’s all good. Let go, please.”
Justin let go and pointed his bat at the ant. “Do something.” The first ant rejoined the second with a smear of dust and two scrapes on its back.
Drew gritted his teeth and stuck his hand into the thick ley line surging along the wall. White-hot power flooded into his body, threatening to scorch him. Instead of letting go like he knew he should, he pointed at the ants and let it flow through. Silver-white mist streamed from his fingers in a forceful jet, knocking both ants back.
Justin hefted his baseball bat, holding it like a sword. “Fog? You’re shooting them with fog?”
“Screw him,” Kay slurred inside Drew’s head. He sounded drunk.
Anger surged. Drew didn’t need Justin to tell him how to do this. He didn’t want Justin here. He had no use for Justin at all, except as a reminder of things he wanted to forget. “You did this to me four days ago! Am I supposed to be an expert in killing magical creatures already?”
“Dammit, how many times do we have to go through this? I’ve apologized. Several times. There’s nothing more I can do about it. I didn’t even do this to you! A Phasm did this to you.”
“You’re the weak-willed idiot who let him do it,” Drew snapped. The misty stream from his hand took on a pink tinge.
“Whoa.” Kay giggled. “Yes! This is incredible! So. Much. Power.”
“You let everything go to hell. She’s dead because you let Caius—” Sharp pain in his face cut off his thoughts as cleanly as his words, and he lost track of everything. He blinked as his vision cleared and realized he lay on the ground.
Justin crouched over him, face taut with concern. “Sorry.” He shone his flashlight in Drew’s eyes, making him flinch. “It looked and sounded like you were losing it. I may have hit you harder than necessary to make you stop.”
Drew rubbed his cheek and winced. At least a black eye would heal before it looked bad enough for anyone to notice. “The ants?”
“As far as I can tell, your fog jet turned into molten lava and blasted them to bits.”
“That was amazing.” Kay sighed with bloated contentment. “Do it again.”
“That’s redundant,” Drew said, still gathering his scattered wits. “Lava is already molten. It’s part of the definition.”
Justin patted his shoulder and sighed. “I want her back too.” He offered Drew a hand to help him up. “Dealing with monsters is fine, but destroying the world won’t solve anything.”
As Drew sat up with assistance and adjusted his glasses, he saw why Justin said that. Glowing, pulsing lava coated the tunnel floor and walls and belched smoke. The tunnel heated with every passing second.
He’d done that. Either it lurked inside him or the ley line had some issues. Maybe both.
He blushed. Control. He needed control. Lots of control. Claire— No, she couldn’t have helped him with that, except by having patience. “I, um, can probably make it cool faster so we can walk over it to leave.”
“How about doing that now so whatever’s above us doesn’t catch fire?”
“Yeah.” Without touching the ley line, he stood and filled the tunnel with frigid fog. This use of Kay’s power came naturally.
“I’m pretty sure we need to go this way.” Justin patted Drew’s shoulder and nudged him toward the left fork.
Stumbling along in Justin’s wake, Drew rubbed his face. For maybe one second before Justin hit him, he’d contemplated turning his power on Justin to make him pay. As much as he wished Justin had been the one to die instead of Claire, he recoiled in horror from the idea of killing anyone. Even the idiot who did this to him.
Avery’s intermittent sounds of misery grew louder and more frequent. Justin picked up his pace and Drew jogged to keep up with him. By the time they found the room where Avery battled a horde of the blue ants, Drew had to wheeze to catch his breath. Claire had been right about him needing to take up running.
Justin stopped a few feet from the open doorway, not even puffing. Drew caught a glimpse past his broad-shouldered bulk into the raging, writhing mass of energy that formed a ley node big enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Inside it, surrounded by at least three dozen oversized ants and standing in a wide puddle of acid up to his ankles, Avery held a pistol by the barrel and bared his teeth in a feral snarl. His trenchcoat, ragged and covered in holes, flapped at his legs as he twisted to avoid a jet of acid. Both his shirt and pants had matching small holes.
After a moment of frozen inaction, Justin slammed his bat into an ant’s body. Denting the carapace and getting its attention, he leaped back to avoid the ant’s wrath and took another swing. His bat connected and sent the ant flying at the wall. It hit and fell to the ground, shaking its head and wiggling its antennae.
Drew gulped. He hadn’t expected to need to exert control over that power already. From Kay’s lazy snorts inside his head, he doubted Kay wanted to control it, let alone having the fortitude to do it. Not that it mattered. He couldn’t handle the volume of power in that node without immolating himself. When he had more experience, he might consider trying. For now, no lava.
Half the ant horde turned away from Avery to chase Justin. The remaining ants, instead of continuing to spit acid, swarmed over Avery.
Faced with an incoming rush of super-ants, Drew blanked on what to do.
“Wow,” Kay slurred with a hiccup. “We’re screwed.”
Chapter 4
Claire
As abruptly as it began, Claire’s dizzying journey ended with her dumped into the middle of a pile of silver dragons. Each, like Leeloo, was about the size of a small cat. They huddled together in a hollow on a blanket of damp orange and red leaves with boughs of a short, leaning fir tree stretched overhead to protect them from the weather.
Nearby, water burbled in a small stream. Gray clouds covered the sky without holding the threat of rain. Though the air had to be chilly, Claire couldn’t feel it. As soon as she noticed that, she also realized she smelled nothing.
The dragons roused, shifting and mantling their wings at each other.
“Feel funny,” a dragon said.
“Not-cold.”
“Icky dream.”
“Belly sad.”
One dragon in the center of the group jumped to his feet, his head punching through Claire’s insubstantial arm. “Claire!”
More than anything, Claire wanted to touch her sprite. Her heart, or whatever she had now, longed for contact with Enion. He hadn’t been with her long
, but they’d gone through plenty in that short time.
“No, Enion. Claire gone.”
“Claire!” Enion shouted at the sky. He raced to Claire’s locket, stepping on other dragons to get there, and turned in a circle on the spot.
Claire wanted to cry. Her poor sprite. “I’m here, Enion. I’m here!” She covered her face and kept pushing her hands until they raked through her hair and settled on the back of her neck. “See me,” she begged. “I’m here. Just see me. I’ll take that for a start. I don’t think it’s asking a lot.” She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw, willing the world to bend to her wishes.
All the dragons chirped in surprised unison and scattered. Claire snapped her eyes open and found two dozen dragons staring at her.
“Claire!” Enion jumped up and down through her chest. “Claire! Claire! Claire!”
Claire’s eyes burned. She saw herself as a silvery-white shape made of mist, her hair and skirt fluttering in an otherworldly breeze. The locket face blazed gold with red undertones, like it had before she died. “You can see me.”
“Hear you!” Enion ran through her arm and back to her locket, swirling her mist with his passage. He bounced in a circle, wings and tail jerking with excitement.
One dragon swiped a claw through Claire and examined it. Another belched a spark of flame at her to no effect. A third beat its wings to create its own breeze, also with no effect.
“Touch?” Enion danced from side to side, unable to stand still.
“No. I’m a ghost.”
Enion drooped, crushing her heart with a vise. His wings closed, his tail went still, his head hung. “Claire gone.”
Another dragon approached and patted Enion on the back. “Flight here. Family here. Ghost here?”
“Yeah.” She shifted to sit on the edge of the hollow so she could see Enion and the rest of his flight. “I’m here. Maybe I can be solid. Ten minutes ago, I didn’t know I could leave my demesne. Five minutes ago, I didn’t know I could make myself be seen. So who knows what I can figure out in another ten or fifteen minutes or days, right?”
She wanted to hold her little dragon so much. Even more than that, she wanted to climb onto his back when he switched to his large size and fly over Portland with him. Hugging his neck would be great. If only she could be tangible instead of this mist crap.
