The two pinpoints of light were all that broke the endless desolation of the desert. Smothered under a starless sky, the night tried to swallow the shining headlight beams as they approached.
The dead stretch of asphalt lay motionless except for the play of light across cracked pavement still warm from the vanished sun.
The thrumming sound of exhaust rose to a frenetic roar, like an army of mad devils pounding on the drums of war. In a blink, the black car roared past, piercing the night.
It left nothing behind but a rush of wind that stirred the dead sand, and a pounding thunder that echoed out into the emptiness behind the dwindling red glare of its taillights.
Inside Hellbringer, no one spoke.
Dru took the last few crystals out of her purse, and one by one, she slid them into the individual pockets of the plastic tool case with a soft click. Fitting each crystal into its own slot somehow felt like loading a bullet into a gun.
The green vivianite was too big to fit, so she left it in her purse, belatedly remembering that vivianite crystals slowly degrade with exposure to air. She wondered what had happened to the old oilcloth she had found it wrapped in. But it probably didn’t matter anymore.
She tried not to dwell on what could go wrong when they reached the archway. Everything could fall apart in so many ways. But the more she tried to think positive, like Rane suggested, the darker her thoughts became.
What if they couldn’t pry open the base of the archway?
What if there was no way to reseal the scroll?
What if the scroll wasn’t there at all?
With every new thought, her anxiety level rose, forming a bitter taste on her tongue. And yet, despite the nervous energy, she was exhausted. Every part of her body felt as heavy as solid rock. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten or slept.
She probably looked like hell, she realized, and Greyson wasn’t far behind her. His eyes glowed a steady red. The nubs of horns stubbornly poked up from his forehead. He could be on the verge of a transformation any minute.
But she didn’t have any potion left to give him. If Greyson’s horns suddenly sprouted and his fangs grew and his skin turned dark, there was nothing she could do to stop it. She just had to hope that they got to the mansion in time. Because as long as he was still part human, there was hope.
They rode together in deathly quiet until she couldn’t take the pressure of her own thoughts anymore.
“At least there’s no traffic,” she said finally.
Greyson looked at her for a moment as if she were completely insane, and then the corner of his mouth quirked up in a wry smile, a welcome glimpse of the old Greyson. “No. No traffic.”
“How much farther?”
“Almost there.” Greyson glanced over his right shoulder at the back seat.
Dru followed his gaze. Rane slouched deep in the seat, looking sound asleep, as she had for the last hour or so. But she had to be awake. Dru knew from unfortunate experience that when Rane was truly asleep, she snored like a rhinoceros.
Greyson, on the other hand, seemed convinced. He leaned a little closer to Dru. “You can do this. With the crystals. I know you can.”
She looked away. “Is it that obvious?”
“That you’re doubting yourself? Yeah.” They drove on for a while until Greyson added, “I’ve gotten to know you pretty well, Dru.”
That wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. “Sorry about that.”
His red eyes glinted with amusement. “You don’t give yourself enough credit. From what I’ve seen, you know what you’re doing. You’re the only one who can pull this off. Not Salem. Not even Rane. You.”
His vote of confidence brought a flush of heat to her cheeks. “I can’t do it alone.” She stared ahead at the endless blur of sand-dusted pavement racing toward them and disappearing beneath their headlights, as if Hellbringer was devouring the desert.
“They’re still out there, you know,” he said. “I can feel them. They’re not far.”
She wanted to ask who. But she knew who he meant. The Horsemen. “Any idea where they are?”
Greyson hesitated. “I can’t tell. I just know they’re coming.”
Dru nodded, thinking of how quickly the red Mustang had straightened itself out after every crash. How long would it take for it to put itself back together after its fiery plummet over the bridge?
“It could be days,” Greyson said, as if reading her thoughts. “Or they might already be back at full strength. I just don’t know.”
Dru glanced through the back window, but of course she could see nothing behind them. Outside, the night was as black as if the impending apocalypse had dropped a shroud over the world.
Greyson gave her a long look, studying her, but his expression was impossible to read.
Their eyes met, and she was reminded of the moment he had walked into her shop. Back then, her biggest worry had been ringing up enough sales in the cash register to pay the rent at the end of the month.
So much had happened since then. So much craziness. They’d been through hell together.
Maybe not literally hell. Not yet, anyway.
She felt that, in so many ways, he had helped her discover who she truly was. And no one had ever done that before.
“Dru,” he said softly. Then he hesitated.
She waited, wondering at the sudden intensity in the air between them.
He cleared his throat. “The truth is we don’t know how this is all going to go down.” He swallowed. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
She found herself hanging on his every word, breathless and somehow terrified. She tried to shake off the feeling. But she couldn’t.
“I don’t know when this happened. But things have changed. I’ve changed. Because of you.” He closed his eyes for a moment, blotting out their red glow. In the pale dashboard light, he looked entirely human again. Vulnerable, determined, real.
She wanted to reach out to him, but she thought better of it. Instead, she kept her hands firmly folded in her lap.
When he opened his eyes again, the way he looked at her made her heart beat faster. Despite the fiery glow in his gaze, she could see the anguish and longing there. She could easily let herself get lost in it.
His voice came out husky. “Dru, I want you to know that I—”
Her phone rang. She jumped.
“Sorry. Hang on.” She bent and dug through her purse until she found her phone.
It was Nate.
From the back seat, Rane’s heavy hand fell on Dru’s shoulder. So much for pretending to be asleep.
“Don’t answer that,” Rane whispered in her ear, the words urgent.
Dru had the inexplicable sense that she had tiptoed up to the edge of something, right here, right now. A little voice inside her told her to put the phone away without answering it. But it kept ringing.
The phone was only getting one bar of reception. She might never get another chance to talk to Nate again, to say the final things that had to be said.
She had to answer.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she took the call. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?” Nate said. “I’m worried sick about you.”
Rane let go of her shoulder. In her peripheral vision, Dru saw Greyson and Rane exchange meaningful looks. But hearing Nate’s voice again completely overwhelmed her.
“I’m at the hospital,” he went on, the words tumbling out. “I came as soon as I got your message. Where are you? What happened to your shop? Opal said someone stole my Prius. Are you all right?”
Good old Opal. Trying to spin a cover story, even now. More than anything, Dru wanted to be back there with her, safe.
But instead, she was hurtling across the desert in a demon car, on a mission to stop Doomsday. “Listen, Nate, about everything that’s happened. You deserve to know the truth.”
Nate’s voice faded into robotic white noise and went silent.
“Nate
? You’re breaking up.” She pressed one finger into her other ear. As if that would help.
“Call . . . matter. Let’s . . . tomorrow.”
There might not even be a tomorrow, Dru thought. She had to say good-bye, and she had to do it now. She drew in a breath to speak.
“Dinner together,” he said, his voice suddenly back at full strength. “I booked a private table for us at Chez Monet. The back table, with all of the miniature red peonies, the ones you like.” Before Dru could process that and respond, he pressed on. “Look, I was wrong. I know that now. With everything going on around us, the meteor showers, the clouds, it puts everything in perspective. Life is too short, Dru. You deserve . . . I shouldn’t . . . you.” Whatever he said next dissolved into electronic noise.
Was he actually apologizing? Admitting he was wrong? Asking her to consider getting back together? She never would have expected that from him, and she had no idea how she felt about it, much less what she should say.
The phone warbled, chopping Nate’s voice into incomprehensible bits.
She was losing him as Hellbringer carried her farther out into the desert, toward the endless blackness beyond their headlights. She was speeding away from her home and Nate and everything in her life.
Before they had left, she was sure she was done with Nate. But now that she might never come back, suddenly she was overwhelmed by the fear of losing him.
She squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out the rest of the world, because this might be the last time she heard his voice.
“. . . work things out,” he said fuzzily. “Will you give me another chance?”
No, she thought. Yes . . . I don’t know.
A wave of emotions crashed over her. Hot tears burned at the corners of her eyes.
He said something else, and she strained to hear him, finger jammed tightly in her other ear.
“Nate?”
Nothing came back but static. She had no idea if he could still hear her at all. This was her last chance.
Part of her insisted that they were done, that she was better off without him.
But at the same time, he was such a fixture in her life, such a reassuring constant, that she couldn’t imagine going on without him. Without his steady presence keeping her down to earth, would she eventually end up as crazy as Salem? Or worse?
Could she salvage things with Nate? Should she? Or should she just let him go? The decision tortured her.
She thought of his boyish smile, his soft voice, his warm arms around her. And then the anger from him when he had so bluntly broken things off. Which one was the real Nate? Who would he be in her future?
Would there even be a future?
“Nate?”
A fragment of his voice broke through the static, saying her name.
She swallowed. “Nate, maybe we can try.” The words left her like a desperate message in a bottle, flung into stormy seas, where it was instantly swamped by the waves and sunk.
A long hiss of unbroken white noise unspooled in her ear, and then her phone beeped three times. She’d lost the signal for good.
As she stared at the useless phone, helpless and adrift, she realized she hadn’t promised anything, hadn’t decided one way or another. It left her feeling like she’d made the wrong choice, even though she hadn’t actually chosen anything at all.
Only then did she realize the stony silence that filled Hellbringer. Greyson stared straight ahead at the road, gripping the wheel. Despite the steady thrumming of the engine, he must have heard every word of that conversation.
“Greyson, I’m sorry, I couldn’t—”
“Forget it. You don’t have to explain anything to me.” His eyes burned a brilliant red, brighter than before.
An ache stabbed through her, the pain that came from trying to block out how she truly felt about Greyson, because admitting it now would tear her apart. “Greyson, listen to me. Everything has been so fast. Like you said, we don’t know what’s going to happen. To any of us. To the world.”
“Then let’s find out.” He yanked the shift lever into a lower gear, making Hellbringer growl in protest. “We’re here.”
He turned the wheel, and they left the highway, tires crunching on the dirt track that led to the end of the world.
39
THE DUST OF TIME
Hellbringer rolled to a stop at the end of the dirt trail, its headlights illuminating the graceful curve of the Harbingers’ archway. Greyson turned the ignition off. In the abrupt silence that followed, Dru could still hear the ghostly echoes of the speed demon’s engine.
They got out, and the squeak and thump of the shutting car doors echoed out across the cool desert night. Apprehensive, Dru looked around in a complete circle, but the starless night revealed nothing. Not even the white curves of the mansion that she knew lay just up the hill, like a giant, sun-bleached skull watching them from the darkness.
Only the archway stood out against the inky night.
Their shoes crunched on loose rocks as Dru led them through the pool of light to the base of the archway. Bending down low, she brushed and blew away the layer of accumulated sand until she found the carved symbols she’d seen in the photo.
Herein lies the end and the beginning.
“I didn’t see these symbols when we were here before. But I did notice this.” She pointed out a rectangular stone laid at the top of the ramp. Hellbringer’s headlight beams elongated the shadow of her pointing finger until it looked like a slashing sword. “This one block in particular looks different. See the gaps around it? They’re wider than the rest. There’s something under this.”
Rane folded her arms. “So you think the Harbingers just happened to leave the most dangerous artifact in the universe sitting out here in the desert?”
“They didn’t leave it unprotected. You can be sure of that. The wards on it are probably astronomical. That’s why I brought these.” Dru opened her new plastic case of crystals and pulled out her round-cornered rectangle of ulexite.
Taking a deep breath, she pressed the crystal to her forehead.
But to her surprise, hardly anything registered. Multicolored magical residue drifted up from beneath the stone, visible around the edges of the stone block. But it was barely there. Nothing was left but a mere whisper of the power that must have once protected the apocalypse scroll. As if the Harbingers’ warding spells had just gone up in smoke. Vanished.
But how?
“Something’s wrong. This thing should be locked up like Fort Knox.” A bad feeling gripped Dru as she wedged her fingertips into the gap between stone blocks. “We need to pry this out. Quickly.”
Greyson headed back to Hellbringer and returned with a tire iron.
Rane took it from him, tightened her fist around it, and transformed herself into shining black steel. Then she handed it back. “Ready?”
Together, they pried up the stone block. With a scrape of rock, Rane pushed it aside, revealing a hidden compartment beneath.
Inside, nestled on a drift of fine sand, lay a sinister black cylinder, open at one end, the other end enclosed by a crownlike cap with twelve wicked spikes.
Under the glare of Hellbringer’s headlights, the cylinder sparkled. Fine etchings covered its length, depicting massive armies clashing with hordes of terrifying creatures, mountains toppling into boiling oceans, falling stars shooting past a blazing sun whose rays set fire to the lands. And throughout it all, panicked crowds raised their entreating arms to the heavens as they died.
A gust of wind rustled past Dru. It picked up the dust from the scroll’s resting place and blew it out in a cloud that twisted in the air like grasping claws.
Heart beating faster, Dru reached into the small compartment.
Despite the fine etchings that covered the container’s surface, it felt smooth and curiously light to the touch, as if the passage of ages had worn away its very existence to almost nothing. As she lifted it out, the wind whistled a mournful note over the open end.
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Dru peered inside, turning the mouth of the cylinder into the headlight beams.
It was empty.
She stared into it, uncomprehending.
Wordlessly, she looked at Rane and Greyson, and she could see her own shock mirrored in their faces.
“Son of a bitch,” Rane spat. “Someone else got here first.”
Dru shook the empty container, as if she could somehow dislodge the missing scroll. “I don’t understand. If someone has the scroll, then why is Doomsday still happening? Why haven’t they stopped it?”
“Maybe they don’t know how.” Greyson frowned. “Or maybe they want it to happen. These evil sorcerers, these Harbingers, do you know for a fact that they’re all dead?”
Slowly, Dru shook her head no. “You don’t think, after all these years . . . ?”
His red eyes scanned the darkness, burning like hot coals. “Wait. Did you hear that?”
Only then did Dru hear footsteps pounding through the darkness. The bright beams of Hellbringer’s headlights were broken by the unmistakable reptilian silhouette of the red Horseman. It charged toward them, and a blade of hungry red-orange flames erupted from its claws.
As Greyson pushed Dru behind him, Rane charged directly at the Horseman with a furious yell, fists raised.
The Horseman screeched, jaws open wide, and swung his flaming sword.
It passed harmlessly over Rane’s head as she dropped and slid through the sand, feetfirst, and knocked the Horseman’s scaly legs out from beneath him.
Dru fumbled with her plastic case of crystals, trying to find some galena. But she’d used it all up fighting the Mustang.
She didn’t see the pale Horseman until he was almost upon her. He scuttled up over the top of the archway, his glasslike, skeletal body nearly invisible against the dark sky. He leaped down headfirst, long, sharp fingers outstretched to impale her.
Greyson was faster. He pulled Dru out of the way, his strong arms holding her tight, his wide shoulders absorbing the impact as they hit the ground together and rolled. Where she had just been, the pale Horseman’s claws cracked into the stone, splitting it.
It Happened One Doomsday Page 24
