by Matt Ryan
“No, Jin, that isn’t you,” Jackie said. “I’m your friend. Remember?”
“I know. I’m not going to hurt you.” He placed the stones back in the box, then went to her. He worked on untying her hands and feet, then moved to Mark as Jackie stumbled over to me. Her hands fumbled with the buckles, but she got me loose.
I staggered over to Jin’s grandpa and touched his neck, then listened for a heartbeat. “He’s dead.”
“I know,” Jin said as his voice cracked. “He went crazy. I didn’t have a choice.”
“Dude, you saved my life. You saved all our lives,” Jackie said.
“I’m all that’s left of my family,” Jin said as he wiped his face. “And I’m trapped here forever.”
The feeling hadn’t returned all the way to my legs, but I made the effort to get to Mark as he stumbled toward me. We met in the middle of the room and held each other. He kissed the side of my head and whispered in my ear. “We’ve got to get away. I won’t lose you.”
I nodded, and wanted nothing more than to leave it all behind and try to find some kind of normal life with Mark, but as long as my mother roamed this Earth and fed on the world’s alchemists, I couldn’t walk away. I saw what she did firsthand, and it terrified me. The image of her head coming through that space window haunted me, just as much as her loving face in the Egyptian restaurant.
We all staggered like drunks to the entrance of the cave. Jin hesitantly walked to the open doorway and extended his hand to the opening. A shimmer came across the air around his hand. He leaned against the shimmer and lowered his head. Then he started punching the invisible barrier, cursing.
Jackie brought her hands up to his shoulders and forced him to look her in the eye. “Jin, listen to me. We will find a way to get you out of here. I give you my word.”
I had no idea how we would do that, but I knew we still needed the canyon stone from him; we still had a monumental task in front of us. Yet our entire journey up until this point would’ve been a near impossible task without Jin’s help. I imagined we’d be in my mom’s hands by now, if not for him.
“This thing in me . . . it won’t come out,” Jin said. “But I deserve it for what I did. First my father, and now him.” He gestured back into the depths of the cave. “I killed them both.”
“That’s crazy talk. Quinn killed your dad,” I said.
“Quinn’s actions might have ended his life, but my inactions created the opportunity,” Jin said, shaking his head. “No. I’m stuck in here and I deserve it. But that means I can no longer help you on your journey, so it will be up to you to face Quinn. He has the Dragon stone, and it is needed to complete the breaker stone.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” Jackie said. “I can only imagine what he’s done to avoid Cathy for this many years.”
“It’s a testament to him for sure.” Jin nodded. “I know he will stop at nothing to create a philosopher’s stone, but there can only be one. He will have to kill Cathy first. He is trying to create a breaker stone for himself, and I know he is looking for us as hard as we will be looking for him.”
“Might not be hard at all then,” Jackie said more to herself than the group at large.
“Can we have the canyon stone?” I asked.
Jin jerked back, as if being shocked out of a deep thought. “Yes . . . of course.” He rushed back to his grandpa, and delicately moved his clothes around until he found the stone. The bluish stone seemed to have a glow to it, as he held it up above him. “Such a beautiful stone,” he observed.
“Yes, it is.” I extended my hand.
He hesitated, then dropped it into my hand. “I won’t live long here without it. I’m nothing more than a mortal who needs food, water, and shelter with that stone gone.”
“We’ll be back, I promise,” I said.
“Yeah, and you can have all the stuff we brought.” Jackie helped Mark take off the backpack and laid it at his feet.
“Thank you.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but held back.
“What about . . . ?” I tried to think of the old man at his dad’s mansion. “Zhuang? Maybe he can help.”
“Maybe,” Jin said with a thin bit of hope showing on his face. “You think you could get a message to him?”
“If not him, it will be us coming back,” I assured. “We won’t abandon you here.”
“I won’t hold you to it,” Jin said. “I can live a few days without water.”
“This sucks, man.” Jackie said what we were all thinking.
I hugged Jin, not really sure what to say. He had given up a lot for us, and I mentally added him to the list of people I would help after this was all over. The Hawaiian’s, the Egyptians, and now Jin. He hugged me tightly, and Jackie went in for a fist bump. Mark offered him a firm handshake.
We walked out of the cave and turned to see him standing at the doorway, hands pressed against the invisible force field.
We waved one last time, then left back down the trail and up the river.
“That sucked donkey balls,” Jackie said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “All the more reason to get this over with quickly.”
“So, I know a dude—a dark alchy. I think he might just be our in with finding Quinn. He’d love to hear from me, I’m sure of it. We just need to get a burner phone and get out of this area, so we can make contact. Crap, Jin’s got the cash.” She looked back.
I did not want to go back there again. “I say we just keep going. And I also think it’s time we contact the Mini’s. Traveling without portal stones is a nightmare.”
“Agreed,” Mark said. “Besides, the Mini’s are badass. They can help us.”
“It’s risky,” Jackie said. “They could be compromised.”
Chapter Eighteen
The journey back up the canyon was the purest form of misery I could think of, and Jackie would assuredly die at some point. Mark had offered to carry her as a joke, and I think she actually contemplated it.
When we finally got back to the motel, we were worn out, sweaty, and feeling down. Taking quick showers gave us a bit of normalcy, but we had to put back on our sweaty clothes, so the euphoria didn’t last long.
We couldn’t just sit around the hotel, wasting more time, so we made our way to the front desk and hoped to somehow get a ride to the nearest town.
“Sorry, next bus isn’t coming until tomorrow,” the front desk clerk said.
“I’m not waiting until tomorrow.” I put my hands on my hips.
“I can give you guys a ride to Williams,” a man spoke up from behind us. “Heading there now.”
“Oh, thank you so much,” I said.
Mark seemed a little suspicious, but what other choice did we have?
We left with the man and found out his name was Russ; an oversized man, with a kind smile and pain in his eyes. Mark sat in the front seat, while Jackie and I took the back of the Honda Civic. Russ had refused to take any money, but after twenty minutes of driving, we were paying in another way. The man liked to talk. Boy, did he like to talk. And only about how bad his life had been, for the most part.
“So, then my third wife took the dog. That was my dog. I bought it for my fiftieth birthday. A small Boston terrier. I loved that thing,” Russ said.
I listened to him for most of the time, giving an occasional, “Oh, really?”
His blathering suited me just fine. I didn’t really want to talk, and listening to Russ was soothing in a way. Mark engaged with him a bit more, but it was mostly so we didn’t have to.
Although, the long drive down the flat desert road could have been better.
The cloth backseats felt sticky, as if somebody had spilled soda and not cleaned it up properly. The floors had wrappers and leftover water bottles, cans, and snack wrappers, but none of that seemed to bother Russ, as he continued to go on about his third wife. He seemed much more upset about the dog than the kids.
“What about you, miss?” I could feel him looking at me thr
ough the rearview mirror. “You have any kids? I know you seem too young to have kids, but you never know these days.”
I looked away from the landscape passing by and gave a polite smile. “No, I don’t have any kids.”
“Yet,” Mark added with a smile as he glanced back at me.
I rolled my eyes and he chuckled.
“Oh, these two,” Jackie spoke up for the first time. “I doubt they’ll ever get that far. I don’t think I’ve even seen them kiss.”
I started to get ruffled about her claim, but realized she was right. We never had time to ourselves. In fact, my romantic relationship with Mark was almost non-existent. And I guess it’d stay that way, until we figured out how to save the world.
“Young love,” Russ opined. “There are few things in the world as precious and valuable as young love. Although, it won’t be long before your heart is crushed and destroyed—stomped on. The world gets you so down, you wonder if you can ever move on.”
“So, I take it you’re an optimist then?” Mark asked.
Russ laughed and tapped on the steering wheel. “I did look forward to the future, at one point. But I’m too old to think the future is going to be bright. In my experience, life is all about trudging through the trenches, with the occasional ray of sunshine. We all spend our lives going through the darkness, waiting for that light to hit you once again. So, in a way, I am an optimist, as I am searching for that light.”
Russ caught me with eye contact again. “What about you? What are your parents like? You can tell a lot about a person by what their parents are like.”
“My dad was a soldier. My mom . . . well, I guess you could say she’s in management.”
“Management? My mother was a pharmaceutical manager with Force and Orbit, first woman in the county to get her license. What’s your mother like?”
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about my mother with some man I barely knew. But Russ had shared his life with us, and he was giving us a free ride, so I figured I could return the kindness.
“She’s been gone for most of my life. Not really sure. I don’t see her much,” I replied.
“Oh, yes,” Russ said. “My mother was never around either. When I was twelve, she ran away with a man to Nebraska. I’ll never forget my father reading the note for the first time. She’d left it on the dining room table. Although my own divorce court dealings and dog theft were bad, that was still the worst night of my life. Something about my mother abandoning me . . . hard to get over.”
“Yeah,” I breathed, slumping in the seat. Russ seemed to have gotten the clue I didn’t want to talk about it anymore, as he went on to talk about the different geodes he’d found around the desert. Little round rocks that he split open and the insides had crystals.
“You’d never know from these ugly brown stones that something so beautiful could be on the inside,” he said.
It felt weird to know this man had no idea about the world of alchemy around him. The war was raging right under his nose, and he hadn’t a clue.
Russ was quiet for a while, and nobody said anything. The silence was almost worse than the constant banter. After ten minutes, I wanted somebody to say something. The tension was building and I wasn’t really sure why.
“Did you ever reconcile with your mother? Did you ever talk to her about it?” I asked.
Russ glanced at me in his mirror, then rubbed his chin. “No, I never got the chance. She died from a nasty fall while hiking in Nebraska. The man she was with at the time had taken a life insurance policy on her. Anyone with a brain knows what happened and why, but there was no evidence. My mother had willingly signed the life insurance documents, and probably had no idea she was signing her life away.”
His words hit me in the heart, and I grasped at my chest. Not only had the man lured her away from her family, but then he killed her for money.
“Wow, that’s messed up,” Jackie said. “Sorry, man.”
“Yes, well let’s just say, I got my revenge. It’s amazing how people’s memories fade after a decade or two. They don’t remember that young boy whose mama they killed.” He shook his head, eyes gazing in the distance.
My mouth hung open. With his implication that he’d killed this man, it felt exactly like the story between my mom and the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone lured her away from everything she loved with promises, and once it had her, it used her and would eventually kill her.
The car fell silent again, and it seemed like we’d shared way too much for passing strangers in the desert. That was life though. Sometimes, you give a piece of yourself to another person to do what they liked with it. It hit me then that I’d judged Russ too harshly in the beginning. He might be a fat slob of a man, but he had a history. We all had a history. In a way, we were very similar.
Entering the small town of Williams, Russ pulled into a parking lot. We got out of the car, as did Russ. Mark and Jackie shook hands with him, while I went in for a hug.
“Sorry about your mom,” I said.
“Just make sure you make time to reconcile with your mom. If she’s breathing, there’s time.” Russ nodded his farewell and got back into his Honda Civic. Before he drove away, he made sure we were okay, and even offered to give us some money, but we declined.
I knew I’d never see Russ again, but he’d left a mark. Sometimes, people just flashed in your life and were gone in an instant.
“Well, that got awkward,” Jackie muttered.
“Bet they might have some burner phones.” Mark pointed to a gas station.
We walked over to it and in a matter of minutes, we purchased a cell phone and walked to the side of the gas station, looking to make sure nobody was spying on us.
“Sure she can’t trace us here?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but we can’t go on without Carly anymore. I think it’s worth the risk at this point,” Jackie reasoned. “Carly has her burner phone for a moment like this. I just hope the bitch kept it charged.” She opened the flip phone, the little screen lighting up. “I would get stones ready, just in case.”
Mark and I selected stones, as Jackie dialed the number. This would be the moment . . . the highest risk of being found.
“Hello?” Jackie said.
Chapter Nineteen
“Carly, slow down,” Jackie said, pressing the phone against her ear.
Something was wrong, but I couldn’t hear the other half of the conversation.
“We’re at Williams, we can meet you at the train station. You said you went there as a kid, so you should know it,” Jackie reminded her. “Okay, see you in five.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Quinn’s got Kylie,” Jackie said. “And Wes and David.”
“When you say got, do you mean captured, or like, they’re dead?” I asked.
“No, he kidnapped them. Somehow, he knew where our hiding spot was. He’s using them as leverage against us. He wants the breaker stone parts.”
“But we’re trying to break her stone,” Mark said. “Why wouldn’t he just sit back and let us do the dirty work for him?”
“I guess he believes Allie would never injure her mother; that Cathy will take the stone. Then there will be no chance of anyone doing anything to her.”
Truth was, I had been searching for another way. And I had an idea that could remove the stone. It was a long shot, one that probably wouldn’t work.
After a five-minute jog, we reached what looked like an abandoned train station. Weeds were growing around the tracks. There were a few tattered signs, but overall, it looked like it hadn’t been an active train station in years.
We hopped the fence and got closer to the tracks. I couldn’t wait to see Bridget and Carly again. The first time had been all too brief. I couldn’t quite explain it, but with us together, I knew we could accomplish anything.
“What if this is a trap?” Mark asked.
“No way, she knew the code word and everything,” Jackie sa
id.
“When the master of manipulation stones is involved, don’t you think there’s a chance he’s gotten to Carly and Bridget as well? We should at least prepare for it.”
“You’re right. We should prepare. I don’t know what I was thinking. Okay, you get over there.” Jackie gestured for me to hide behind the ticket booth.
I ran over and huddled enough to be hidden, but still have a good line of sight around the station. To my right was Mark, and across the way was Jackie, hiding behind a concrete wall.
“One minute,” she called out.
Everything in my brain told me it would be Quinn jumping to our location.
“Get ready,” Jackie said as she glanced at her phone.
The air near the tracks distorted, like a heatwave ripple, and then two lovely women popped into existence. Carly and Bridget looked around, stones at the ready. They were probably anticipating a trap as well. I stepped out from the ticket booth, waving my hand to them. They spotted me and visibly relaxed, stowing their stones.
I took two steps forward, when I saw another shimmer of air behind them. It all happened too fast. I couldn’t do a thing about it. Quinn, the twins, and another man popped into existence, directly behind Bridget and Carly.
I screamed. They were both mid-turn when Quinn hit them with a stone that created a bright light and an explosion. Carly and Bridget fell to the ground and looked unconscious.
Quinn wiped the sweat from his brow. He looked as if he’d exerted himself a great deal. Pacing behind the motionless bodies of Bridget and Carly, he blew out a breath. “You’re not an easy find. It’s because of that damned Lotus stone, isn’t it?”
I ducked behind the ticket booth again, trying to protect myself, while peering around the corner. Quinn had stopped pacing and stood there with his arms crossed, a smug smile spreading over his face. He wasn’t even trying to hide from us.
The other guy and the twins, however, didn’t look quite as comfortable. They were crouched down, stones in hand, looking ready to attack at a moment’s notice. The twins made things tricky. Their powers amplified each other. And some stones—powerful stones—only twins could make.
