As Dru got to her feet, Greyson pushed her behind him again. “When I say so, run for Hellbringer! Got it?”
A single set of heavy footsteps circled around the other side of the archway. A looming white figure strode into the beam of the headlights, his body covered in long spikes, his skull ringed with a crown of horns.
The white Horseman.
Greyson glanced his way, red eyes widening slightly, and the pale Horseman used the distraction as his moment to strike. With a single crunching blow, he sent Greyson tumbling across the sand, then went after Dru.
She scrambled back away from the pale Horseman. He swung at her, his sharp, skeletal arms slicing through the air around her.
She ducked and turned to run. Her foot caught the edge of the open scroll compartment, and she landed hard on her back.
The Horseman threw a lightning-fast blow at her. The long blades of his fingers pierced the stone on either side of her neck, pinning her in place.
He grinned a mouthful of glass needles.
Unable to move, Dru looked around desperately for help. Rane lay on the ground, the red Horseman’s flaming sword a mere inch from her throat.
Greyson lay at the feet of the white Horseman. With a muffled cough, he got to his hands and knees. Blood dripped into the sand beneath him.
The white Horseman’s glowing sapphire eyes glimmered with evident satisfaction. He raised his spiky arms to point one at Rane and the other at Dru, aiming.
Dru’s breath caught in her throat. She had seen how those shooting spikes had punched through the walls of her shop, and she had no illusions about what they would do to her. Rane’s iron body might blunt the worst of the blow, but Dru had no way to protect herself.
This was the end.
“Let them go.” Greyson’s words came out rough and raw.
All eyes turned to him.
Greyson bared his teeth. They shone in the flickering light of the flaming sword, sharper than any human teeth should have been. His eyes blazed with fiery intensity, and his short horns gleamed.
“Let them go!” Greyson ordered again.
The white Horseman ground out a single word: “Why?”
Greyson’s red eyes flicked to Dru’s, and for a moment, she could almost see the tortured decision being forged behind them. Then he looked up at the white Horseman again.
“Let them go. And in exchange . . . you get me.”
40
EVERYTHING IS WRONG
“Greyson!” His name tore from Dru’s lips before she could stop it. “No!”
His gaze left the white Horseman for a moment and cut across the darkness to meet hers. “If I don’t, they’ll kill you. Both of you.”
Dru fought to get more words out past the hard lump in her throat. “You’ll fulfill the prophecy. You can’t—”
“You have to stop me.”
At first, she didn’t understand what he meant. Stop him? How?
“You have to find a way. Whatever it takes.” His voice grew husky and harsh. “When the time comes, you can’t hesitate.”
Hot tears burned Dru’s eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
“Dru, you can do this. You’re strong enough. I know you.”
“No,” she whispered, slowly shaking her head side to side. Whatever faith he had in her, she didn’t share it. She couldn’t be that strong.
“You and Rane can pull this off. You can find a way to stop Doomsday.”
With the flaming sword at her throat, Rane didn’t speak a word. She just stared at Greyson, her expression transfixed with growing horror.
All this time, the only thing Dru had wanted was to save Greyson. But now, she’d lost the last shred of hope.
Everything was wrong.
Everything.
A terrible emptiness opened up inside her as she realized they were beaten. She tried not to accept it, tried to fight against it, but it was no use. They had run out of options. If she wanted to live, she would have to let him become the final Horseman.
And then she would have to destroy him. But she knew she couldn’t do it.
“This is the only way,” he said.
“No. Let me die.” She couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice. “Because if you become the last Horseman, the world will end. Do you understand? The world will end.”
“Not if you stop it.” He fixed her with his glowing red gaze, and it seemed to carry an impenetrable sadness. “Dru, if you die, my world ends.”
Too late, she saw how deeply he loved her. She reached toward him, though he was much too far away. She just wanted to touch him again, feel the heat from his body, cling to the strength within him. She had to tell him all of the things that she had pent up inside her, all of the things that she knew she’d never get a chance to say.
For a fleeting moment, she wanted to believe there was some way to save him. Some way that she could outthink the Horsemen and stop this from happening.
The white Horseman held his hand over Greyson’s head, as if giving some sort of benediction.
But it was no blessing.
A heart-wrenching shout of sheer agony escaped from Greyson’s lips. Every muscle in his body stood taut, and he seemed to grow within his own skin, becoming physically bigger, less human, more menacing.
His skin changed, darkening like a burned-out coal. The arcane symbols of stylized scales glowed white-hot across his hands.
His head snapped back in pain, giving Dru a terrifyingly clear view of his teeth growing into fangs, his horns sprouting and curving away from his skull.
In a few agonizing moments, the searing transformation was complete.
He had become the black Horseman of the apocalypse.
The prophecy was complete.
Lightning flashed, and a crack of thunder boomed out across the desert, followed quickly by another, and immediately another. All around the archway, twisting bolts of lightning blasted down from the heavens, blistering the desert floor. The ceaseless crashing surrounded Dru, but she barely noticed.
The pale Horseman released her, having lost all interest in her, and marched toward the others. At the same time, the red Horseman abandoned Rane to join his brethren.
Immediately, Rane scrambled over to Dru and grabbed her with iron hands, pulling her to her feet.
The clouds above them lit with streaks of blood-red light. Blazing stars descended and punched holes in the cloud cover before finishing their journey in fiery streaks of light. All around them, craters blasted sand and rocks high into the air.
A hot wind blew across the land, carrying the stench of death.
“This is it!” Rane shouted over the noise. “It’s starting!”
But Dru didn’t answer. For her, everything had already ended.
41
SET THE WORLD ON FIRE
Dru stared in speechless horror at the vile creature that had once been Greyson. With looming horns, vicious fangs, and a rippling leathery skin as black as Hellbringer’s paint, he bore no resemblance to the man she had known and trusted.
He got to his feet and pulled off the tatters of his shirt, now split at the seams. His onyx-black chest shone in Hellbringer’s headlights.
The other Horsemen crowded in around him. The crystalline skeleton of the pale Horseman, with his long, insectlike arms. The snarling, snaggle-toothed red Horseman, with his swishing reptilian tail. And the jagged, snow-colored expanse of the white Horseman, his crown of horns towering over all of them.
They stood back-to-back, four pairs of glowing eyes staring out at the horizon in all four directions. Surveying the world they were about to destroy.
The desert beneath their feet trembled as falling stars pounded the horizon, throwing up clouds of black dust lit from within by the angry red fires of impact. Lightning flashed all around the archway, illuminating the night with an incessant flicker of blinding light from every direction.
From the direction of the mansion, three pairs of headlights streaked toward them through the
night, growing closer. In a minute, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would climb aboard their speed demons to spread destruction across the world. And Dru had no way to stop them.
Her gaze went to Hellbringer.
Hellbringer. If Greyson didn’t have it, he couldn’t ride. If she got Hellbringer safely away, would that be enough to stop the prophecy?
Or would Greyson—now the black Horseman—call it to do his bidding? There was only one way to find out.
“Get into the car!” Dru sprinted around the Four Horsemen and yanked the driver’s door open. As she got behind the wheel, Rane climbed in the other side.
Greyson hadn’t left the keys in the ignition. But it didn’t seem to matter. As if sensing her presence, Hellbringer rumbled to life of its own accord.
“Gah, I haven’t driven a stick shift since high school,” Dru realized out loud. “You?”
Rane’s dark iron face revealed nothing. “Dude, I don’t own a car.”
Dru gripped the wheel with both hands, willing the demon car to feel the intensity of her desperation. “Hellbringer, if you can hear me, we need to go. Now!”
But Hellbringer didn’t budge.
In the headlight beams, the ground ahead of them trembled. Small rocks danced on the sand, shaken by the shattering impact of the falling stars. The black Horseman turned his burning red gaze toward Dru.
“Hellbringer, you have to help us.” She put one palm flat on the warm dashboard. How could she convince the speed demon to listen to her instead of the Horsemen?
“Go!” Rane said, grabbing her arm. “We’re sitting ducks here!”
Dru awkwardly shifted into gear and pressed down the gas pedal, but Hellbringer wouldn’t move. It still waited for its master.
She remembered its desire to run free, its fear of imprisonment. She had to use that to her advantage. “Do you want to stay here, where you were locked up for decades? Do you want to remain a prisoner of those who enslaved you? Or do you want to go?” She leaned closer to the steering wheel. “Mi juras, Infernotoris. I swear to you, I can set you free. But you have to take us far away from here. As far as you can. Now.”
Before she could say more, Hellbringer’s engine revved, and they launched forward with neck-snapping acceleration. It was all Dru could do to hang onto the steering wheel and turn them around in a wide circle until they headed back down the dirt road toward the highway.
And directly toward the three oncoming speed demons.
“What do we do?” Rane said. “We can’t outrun them.”
“Even in this car?”
Rane gave her a worried look. “D, I love you, but you can’t drive like he could.”
It stung, the fact that Rane already referred to Greyson in the past tense. But Dru pushed the pain aside. It wouldn’t take long for the other speed demons to catch them.
“Hey, we’ve still got this Mount Vesuvius thing,” Rane said, picking up the metal box of biotite from the floor. “Let’s blow them up like Pompeii.” She shook the box.
“Don’t do that!”
“Can you make it go boom?”
“Yes,” Dru realized out loud. In that moment, she knew what they had to do. She spun the wheel again, swinging Hellbringer around and heading back toward the archway.
Rane stared at her, mouth gaping open in shock. “The hell are you doing, D? You can’t take us back there!”
In answer, Dru pointed to her purse on the floor at Rane’s feet. “There’s a big green crystal in there. It’s vivianite. Grab it for me.”
Obligingly, Rane dug through Dru’s purse. “Jeez, you’ve got like everything in here.” She held up a mashed granola bar, now flattened and bent in half. “Is this even food?”
“Here. Just give me—” Dru reached for her purse.
Rane yanked it away, her eyes going wide. “Wait. You’re going to open up the causeway? Can you even do that on your own?”
“I think so. Now that I know how. At least, I have to try. I can’t let Greyson get behind the wheel of this car. If he does, it’s over. Everything’s over. And he will chase us . . .” Dru choked down a sudden sob and swiped brimming tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “He’s a Horseman now, and that means he won’t stop pursuing us. Ever.”
“Yeah, but maybe—”
“He will catch us, sooner or later. There is nowhere in this world that we can go to escape him. So we have to leave this world.” Dru fought to keep Hellbringer pointed in the right direction. She had no idea how Greyson had done it so effortlessly. “This is a one-way trip. Once we go through the archway, and I charge up that biotite, bad things are going to happen. Really bad.”
Rane’s eyes shone in the reflected glare of the headlights behind them. “You’re going to blow up the Horsemen?”
“Not them, exactly. Biotite reverses the bonds of magic, destroying any enchantment. I don’t know what it would do to the Horsemen, if it would work or not. But I know what it’ll do to the causeway,” Dru said with finality. “Total destruction. If we lure them out onto the causeway and destroy it, we can send the Four Horsemen straight back to hell.”
As they hurtled toward the portal, the wild look in Rane’s eyes transformed into steely resolution.
“We’re going to make it,” Rane said as she pulled the vivianite crystal out of Dru’s purse. “You and me, D. Together to the end.”
As they raced toward the archway, Dru swallowed down the hard lump in her throat and held out her hand. Unlike Rane, she didn’t have any hope left. But she had to try.
Rane placed the green crystal in her palm, its heavy weight cold against her skin. It started to glow.
42
NEVER COMING BACK
The archway flared with blinding white light.
Hellbringer streaked through the portal like a black arrow fired into the writhing chaos of the netherworld skies. Engine roaring, tires spinning, it soared in a long arc over the black stone ruins and landed hard on the cobblestone road, kicking up sparks.
Rubber shrieked across the wet stones as the long car skewed at an angle, leaning into the skid. Then it straightened out and hurtled down the road toward the glowing line of the causeway.
Immediately behind them, the other three speed demons jumped out of the fading light, one after another: red Mustang, white Bronco, and silver Ferrari. They shot over the shattered foundation of the black fortress and landed on the wet path, skidding. Their headlights pierced the night like the flashing eyes of a pack of hunting animals. Engines growling, they chased after Hellbringer.
Dru gripped the steering wheel so tightly that her fingers prickled. The road had taken so long to travel on foot, and now it flashed past them in the blink of an eye.
Ahead, the causeway led away over the roiling cloud sea. Beneath the fiery madness of the sky, the road stretched razor-straight out to the far horizon, its black stones lit by the ruddy glow of the ancient enchantment that bound them together.
Dru planned to annihilate that enchantment with the biotite crystal. Destroy the magic, obliterate the causeway, and send the Horsemen plunging into the abyss. That was the plan.
If she could power up the biotite crystal on her own without Greyson.
A big if.
She’d managed to open the archway on her own, but this was different. Powering up the biotite would require infusing it with her own magical energy, and she didn’t know how much she had left.
Over the roar of the engine, Rane said, “Dude, if you nuke the causeway, what happens to us? Won’t we go down too?”
“Not if we’re fast enough.” Hellbringer hit the lip of the causeway with a metallic bang that jolted up through Dru’s feet. “We need to get off the other end before they do. Off the causeway, onto that black rock island with the cave.”
Dru struggled to keep the steering wheel centered on the bumpy road. The causeway had no guardrails. Nothing but the sheer edge separated them from the cloud-filled abyss on either side.
Behind them,
headlights burned brighter as the other speed demons closed in. The red Mustang and the white Bronco came up side by side, only inches between them, entirely filling the width of the causeway.
Dru pushed the gas pedal to the floor. Without any landmarks to gauge distance, it felt as if they were standing still but for the roar of the engine and the drilling whine of the bridge beneath their tires.
She risked a glance down at the speedometer, shocked to see it steadily climbing past one hundred miles per hour.
Then 120.
Then 130. The white needle kept rising.
But even as Hellbringer’s engine howled up in pitch, the headlights behind them grew steadily closer, burning in the rearview mirror.
Squinting into the glare, Dru saw a dark figure climb out of the Mustang’s passenger window.
It was the black Horseman, horns standing out in sharp profile against the glowing sky. He scrambled onto the Mustang’s roof, clinging to the metal in the hurricane-force wind.
“Please, no,” Dru breathed.
He grinned a mouthful of fangs that glowed red in Hellbringer’s taillights, then bent into a crouch and leaped off the Mustang’s hood, arms outstretched. He sailed toward Hellbringer, claws reaching out to grab.
Dru stomped on the gas pedal, but it was already on the floor. She hoped for a miracle, a surge of speed that would widen the gap between the cars, wide enough to make him miss and leave him tumbling down the road face-first.
But although Hellbringer had already buried the speedometer needle at 150 miles an hour, they still weren’t going fast enough. The black Horseman caught the edge of Hellbringer’s tall back wing. In one smooth motion, he swung beneath it, feetfirst, and landed atop the trunk.
The twin impacts of his cloven hooves reverberated through the car, making Hellbringer sway. For a panicked moment, Dru feared they would swerve over the edge.
“Take the wheel!” Dru said, hunching in the seat.
“What?” For once, Rane sounded shocked. “Dude, I can’t drive this thing!”
“Just keep us from going over the edge!” Dru bent closer to the steering wheel. “Hellbringer, keep us on the road.”
It Happened One Doomsday Page 25
