by R. L. King
“Dez, listen to me.” He gripped her arm, the one holding Noah. “We can do this. I know we can. We can hurt them. They’re not invulnerable. We drove them off just now and we can do it again. But…” He took a breath and considered his words. “Something bad is happening. Something very bad. Yes, it’s dangerous. We’re not safe. But if we don’t deal with what’s going on out there, no one will be safe. That thing will kill us and move on to the next victims, and it won’t stop. We’ve got a chance, but only if we can stop that ritual before that thing out there is fully formed. We’ve got to take it. Do you understand?”
She looked up over her son’s head and met his eyes. “Do you have children, Dr. Stone?” Her voice shook with emotion.
He nodded. “I have a son. He’s older, and I didn’t know him when he was a child, but yes.”
“Would you do anything for him? Would you die to protect him?”
“Of course,” he answered without hesitation. “Of course I would.”
“Do you understand what this is like? Do you have any idea?” She gestured around them. “If I thought I could save my son by running, by finding that man’s boat and getting the hell out of here, I’d do it in an instant. I don’t care about myself. I’ll fight until I can’t fight anymore. But…” Her voice caught, and she pulled Noah in closer. “But the thought that no matter what I do, no matter how tough I am or how brave I am, I can’t save him…I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Come on,” Kroyer called. “Stone, stop talking and let’s go. Leave the mundanes if they won’t come along.”
Stone strode over and got in the Ordo mage’s face, raising his hand and summoning dancing blue fire around it. “Kroyer, you’re going to shut up, or we’ll see how well you pass through the nearest tree. Have I made myself clear?”
Kroyer waved him off. “You don’t frighten me, Stone. You need me. Me, and her.” He pointed at Verity. “But not them. Leave them.”
“Well, it’s best that you’re not in charge of this expedition then, isn’t it? So far, you haven’t lived up to your claims. Do you want us to leave you to those things? Let them have you like they got Lang?”
The Ordo man paled. “No.”
“Then keep your mouth shut and do your part. Got it?”
“Fine. But let’s go. Every minute we blather on, that thing is coming.”
Stone turned away, pointedly ignoring him. He fished in his pocket and pulled out the bright orange flare gun and box of flares, offering them to Dez. “You take these. Not as good as a gun, but Verity and I don’t need them.”
Dez grimly shoved them in her own pocket. She looked up at Stone with an expression that was both serious and pleading. “Don’t let them hurt my son, Dr. Stone,” she whispered. “Please. If something happens to me, keep him safe. Promise me.”
Stone didn’t know if he could keep a promise like that, but that wasn’t what she wanted to hear right now. “I promise I’ll do my best.”
She held his gaze for a couple seconds as if gauging his sincerity, then nodded.
Moving with care, they set off again. Stone noticed everyone, even Verity, seemed reluctant to break out of the trees’ cover, even though it hadn’t protected them before. They crossed the muddy road and stopped the same place Stone did, around the corner of one of the cabins. The chant had grown louder still, and seemed to incorporate more voices than before. Stone held up a hand and crept forward until he reached the edge, then turned back to the group.
“All right,” he whispered. “We’ll have a good view of the circle soon. I think our best course is to go in with everything we have. We’ve got to disrupt that circle. Don’t worry about trying to hurt the creatures—I’m not sure they can be hurt, at least not permanently. But you’ll see a circle of what looks like twisting black vines around a wooden table. I think if we can break that circle, it will at least set them back. If they have to start over, we’ll have more time to come up with a better plan.”
He took a deep breath, not liking what he had to say next, and didn’t look at Dez when he said it. “Something else—as I said, they’re sacrificing the students to form the circle. Maybe that was intended to be part of the ritual all the time: the first group that summoned the heralds are in turn sacrificed to help power Phase Two. Maybe for the cultists, it was considered an honor. Anyway, at least two of them are gone already, leaving as many as five. I couldn’t see for sure. And if they’re using them for power, we can’t let them do that.”
Dez’s incredulous gaze settled on him. “Dr. Stone—are you suggesting we kill the students? A bunch of teenagers? You said before that—”
Stone bowed his head. “I know, Dez. I know what I said before. But I didn’t have all the facts then. I don’t like it any more than you do, but if I’m right—and I’m certain I am—do you see any alternative? Please tell me if you do—any of you—because this is the last thing I want to do.”
She didn’t answer. Her hand tightened on her shotgun, and her arm around Noah.
“You don’t have to do it,” he said gently. “You focus on keeping your son safe. But we—look out!”
The sharp stench of fish arose again, warning Stone barely an instant before three of the black creatures shimmered up from puddles surrounding them, not ten feet away. He barely got a shield up to protect them before they lashed out, slashing with their tentacles. Wherever they hit, the shield glowed bright. The things were strong.
Dez fired her shotgun wildly. The round hit the shield, its kinetic energy expended as more bright pinpricks lit up the barrier.
“Don’t shoot with the shield up!” Stone ordered.
“Up!” Verity yelled. “They’re coming out of puddles! Get on the roof!”
Stone didn’t think but only acted, reaching out with a levitation spell to engulf himself, Dez, and Noah, lifting them upward until they rested on the cabin’s roof. A second later, Verity and Kroyer joined them.
“To the center,” Stone said. The cabin’s roof had a shallow peak—if Verity was right about the puddles, none could form up here. The view was better, too: he didn’t have more than a couple of seconds to check the ritual scene again, but it appeared the creatures had wrestled another of the students onto the table. It looked like a blond girl—probably Allie Gaines. For the moment, though, they seemed to have stopped their progress. Perhaps they had preparations to make between each sacrifice, or perhaps they were waiting for the outcome of the battle.
“Stay sharp!” Stone called to the others. “I don’t know if they can climb, but—”
Noah shrieked, pointing. “The monsters!”
Apparently, the things had no trouble climbing. As they’d done when they’d hit the tree before, they had transformed themselves into nothing but clumps of tentacles, slithering over the roof edge and reforming their almost-humanoid bodies once they reached the top.
“Back to back!” Stone yelled. “Keep Noah in the middle.”
To Kroyer’s credit, he didn’t waste energy arguing this time. As Dez shoved her son behind her, the Ordo mage moved in and took his place facing away from her, while Stone and Verity made up the other two sides of a square.
The creatures surged forward, forming a triangle around them. They struck all at once, surging forward with their clawed tentacles extended outward.
Stone didn’t bother with a shield yet, but instead summoned more Calanarian energy and aimed it at the nearest creature, narrowing it into a tight beam pointed at the thing’s center mass. He had no idea if the creatures could be killed, but perhaps they could be disrupted. Anything they could do to slow down the ritual was to their advantage.
The spell hit the creature and took it to pieces, sending ragged swatches of black shadowy material and waving tentacles flying in every direction. Behind him, he sensed rather than saw Verity’s and Kroyer’s magic, and Dez’s shotgun spoke once again, deafening at such close quarters. Yes—perhaps they could hurt them after all!
His elation lasted only a
couple of seconds, though. The black swatches flew out, but they didn’t vanish as he’d hoped. Instead, as they reached the edge of the roof, their progress halted and then reversed, flying back to reform once again into the familiar, unsettling form.
“Doc—it’s not working!” Verity sounded scared but in control. “We can’t hurt them!”
“What do we do?” Dez yelled. Behind her, Noah’s shrill voice rose in a scream.
There was something about these things that brought on more terror than they should. Even looking at them sent tendrils of fear digging into the deepest reaches of Stone’s mind, and he was better trained than any of his companions to deal with such things. They couldn’t hold out like this too much longer. He clamped down his mental defenses and avoided looking directly at the creature. Think—there’s got to be something—
From behind him, another scream—not Noah this time, and absolutely not sane. Stone spun, raising the shield around their little group, in time to see Kroyer break formation and dash off toward the edge of the roof.
“Kroyer! Stop!” he boomed, but he could already see it was too late. A quick glance at the man’s aura revealed the billowing mess of full-blown panic, bright red and fragmented.
One of the creatures immediately took off after him, catching up to him as he reached the roof edge and prepared to leap off. With a shriek of triumph that was more psychic than physical, the thing flowed around Kroyer, encircling him with its seeking tentacles, punching them through him, writhing and weaving as they tore his body apart. What was left of him, as well as the creature, disappeared over the edge of the roof.
Stone couldn’t wait any longer. He didn’t know if his only viable plan was a good one, a bad one, or a disastrous one, but if they remained here on the roof they would inevitably get picked off just as Kroyer had. Not even his mind, with all his training, could withstand this kind of onslaught forever.
“Verity!” he barked. “They can climb, but I don’t think they can jump! Put a shield around all of you and levitate. Hold it as long as you can!”
“What are you going to do?” she demanded, glaring at him.
“I’ve got to stop them!”
“Doc, no! You can’t—”
“No argument, Verity! It’s the only way—you know that! Keep them safe and I’ll be back.”
Her glare hardened, but then she gritted her teeth and swiped her hand across her face in a gesture encompassing anger, frustration, and grief. “Okay. I got ’em. Go!”
He waited for only a second, long enough to see the bright glow of a shield erupt around the three of them—no spare energy left to make it invisible—and then they lifted off the ground. The two remaining creatures on the roof leaped upward, but as Stone had predicted they couldn’t jump high enough to reach.
Raising his own shield and knowing he didn’t have long, he ran toward the opposite edge and jumped, his levitation spell catching him as he took to the air. It wouldn’t get him there fast, but it didn’t need to—the ritual wasn’t far away. He chanced a quick glance toward the water: the thing growing out there was visible to the naked eye now, without magical sight. It was still transparent, but it was there.
And it was bigger.
Grimly, he floated forward until he was less than twenty feet away from the ritual. The creatures had noticed him now; their weird, eyeless faces turned upward toward him, but their chant, ever louder, didn’t waver.
From where he floated, Stone had a better view of the scene below. He’d been right: the current would-be sacrifice on the table was Allie Gaines, shivering in a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt and gray sweatpants. Although she wasn’t tied or otherwise fastened to the table, she made no attempt to move. Her aura was strange—muddy and indistinct, with the same otherworldly shifting Stone had spotted around the creatures.
While he had the sight up, he swept his gaze across the other students. They stood in a line inside the circle, likewise shivering, likewise with auras that seemed to drift and break as if trying to detach from their owners. He recognized them from their pictures in Dez’s files: Joe Buchanan. Steve Hull. Andre Duran. And there, on the end, the small, huddled figure of Brittany Lyons. That must mean Clay Horton and Jazmin Wynn had already become part of that writhing mass of tendrils surrounding the circle.
He’d been too late to save them.
No time to think of that now. He couldn’t save them, true, but there were five more left he still could save. Maybe. But he had to act fast, if he was going to—
Hang on—
Was Brittany Lyons looking at him?
She was! While her three companions stared blankly forward at the center of the circle, Brittany had tilted her head back, her gaze scanning the skies until they locked on his. Her aura crackled with red, but unlike the others’, it didn’t look fragmented or diffuse.
Dez had said the other students had taken her along against her will. Had she even participated in the first ritual, to summon these creatures? If she had, had she done it willingly, or under duress?
And if he and Verity had managed to get through to her, to block these things’ influence on her enough that she still retained her mind, could they perhaps do the same to the others?
Maybe they weren’t lost after all.
But first he had to do something about stopping this ritual.
He gathered energy, mindful of the creatures’ attention on him. It didn’t matter—he couldn’t focus on them now. He had to—
Two things happened simultaneously, shattering his concentration.
Something shimmered into the air next to him, taking form in the raindrops. It looked like one of the creatures, but not quite, as if it were rendered in some kind of surreal pointillist painting that darkened individual raindrops in a distorted approximation of its form. It slashed out at him with a pixelated claw, ripping a slash down his arm before he could get his shield up.
Behind him, another scream rose, wild and terrified: “Dooooccc!”
And then the sound of a heavy weight crashing through something.
29
Stone’s arm lit up with pain, but that only stoked his rage at these things and their mad plans. “Verity!” he screamed, lashing out with more Calanarian energy at the fragmented being in the raindrops. Another shriek echoed in his mind, the rotten-fish stench replaced by the ozone smell of lightning. The creature disappeared, and once again there were only raindrops.
Stone spun, pushing the levitation spell as hard as he could to get back to where he’d left his friends. As he drew close, he saw with horror that the building’s roof had caved in, and Verity and the others no longer floated above it.
No—
It had to be—another of the things had tried the raindrop trick, popping in next to them. If she’d lost her concentration and dropped either the shield or the levitation spell—
“Verity!” He plummeted down through the hole, terrified at what he might see.
It was bad—he knew that instantly. Verity lay on one side of the open space, her body crumpled and covered with sodden, rotten bits of the broken roof. On the other side, farthest from Stone, Dez lay stunned against the wall, conscious but barely aware of her surroundings. Her shotgun hung in her nerveless hand, and Noah huddled behind her, his eyes big, round, and terrified.
One of the creatures, as solid as it got and no longer pixelated, moved in its strange, strobe-jerky motion toward them, raising its tentacles.
Stone lifted his hands to summon a spell, but before he could get it off, something slammed into him from behind, knocking him to the floor and slashing at his back. He landed hard, stunned, struggling to get his shield up before the creature shredded his heavy jacket and reached his unprotected flesh. The stench at this range was overpowering, and he fought to get his mental defenses back up so he could focus. He couldn’t let that thing get to Dez, to Noah—
To Verity.
He was too late. He lashed out with magical energy, blowing the creature on him to pieces
again, but in doing that he’d had to take his attention off the one on Dez. As he flung himself back up to his knees, it surged forward, looming over the two huddled figures. He couldn’t get another spell off in time.
“You leave my mom alone!”
The voice was high, shaky, and nearly hysterical with fear, but also loud and angry. As the black creature loomed over Dez and Stone strove to form a spell past the static in his head, Noah Griffith rose up from behind his mother, holding not the baseball bat he’d been clutching like a talisman since they’d arrived on the island, but something small and bright orange.
The flare gun! He must have pulled it from his mother’s pocket!
He pointed it at the creature, squeezed his eyes shut, and fired.
Stone didn’t know what to expect—probably nothing. There was no way the tiny weapon could be effective when his magic had barely slowed the thing down. He gritted his teeth and waited for the inevitable scream as the monster’s claws ripped the boy to pieces.
The flare hit the creature dead-on in the head—and exploded.
The creature reared back, its high, keening shriek almost entirely psychic, hitting Stone like knives slicing through his brain. He winced and staggered backward, clutching his head, but forced himself to keep watching.
The effect was astonishing and nearly instant. The flare had lodged itself in the creature’s head and burned outward, devouring its shadow form from the top down. A normal, physical creature’s screams would have been cut off when its head was destroyed, but in this case they kept going, growing louder and louder inside Stone’s head until he had no choice but to fling himself down and clamp his eyes shut.
And then, abruptly, it cut off.
Panting, his arm bleeding and alight with pain, Stone raised his head.
The other creature, the one that had attacked him, had vanished as well. The cabin was silent except for the sounds of their rasping breaths and Noah’s sobs as he threw himself over his mother.
“Doc…?”
