The whole building seemed to shake. A loud crash echoed back from the way they’d come. The others looked at Nico, but she didn’t need their urgency to know time was running out.
“I’ve got an idea,” she told them.
“Whatever it is—” Karolina started.
“Hush,” Nico said. Holding out her staff, she focused on what she wanted. “Ordinary Door.”
Simple, straightforward, clear.
Nothing changed. The door looked the same, even down to the new shine on the locking mechanism where Karolina had tried to burn through it.
“What happened?” Molly asked. “Why didn’t it work?”
“It did,” Nico said. “It had to. When I cast a spell, I can feel it, and I felt it.”
“Look at the door, Nico,” Gert said, trying to twist the knob herself. “It’s still like the vault at Gringotts.”
Another crash came from along the hall. Nico felt like screaming. She stared at the door, wondering what was going on. Her spell had worked—she knew it had—and yet it looked as if nothing at all had changed.
She turned to the others. “It’s an illusion. Maybe that Abernathy guy is more powerful than we thought or maybe it’s tech, but the spell worked. It just doesn’t look it. Molly, try it again!”
Molly frowned, but she hauled back one small fist and smashed the door open. It tore halfway off its hinges and swung in, twisted, barely hanging on the frame. Sure enough, the door seemed entirely ordinary—thick but hollow Masonite. The lock had shattered, ordinary metal instead of Adamantium or Vibranium or whatever it had originally been made of. Someone shouted from inside the room and they looked up to see a young guy lunge for cover beside the bed. A moment later his head popped up. His curly brown hair had copper highlights the same color as his eyes, but his expression was almost comical.
“Carlos,” Nico said, confident they’d found him. “We’re with Zeke.”
“Zeke’s here?” Carlos asked hopefully, jumping up and striding toward them.
“I assume Tess is in the room across the wall,” Gert said.
“Me, too, but I don’t know for…Holy crap, is that a dinosaur?”
Nico stepped back to let him into the corridor. “Focus. You need to help my friends set Tess free. I left Zeke to deal with his mother and I’m starting to think that was a bad idea.”
She turned to run back the way they’d come, but stopped when she saw a little gray mouse racing along the corridor, darting along the baseboard as if terrified of something that would be coming along behind it. That was Nico’s thought, but something didn’t make sense. The mouse didn’t hesitate. It came right toward them.
Then it grew, morphing in an instant from mouse to five hundred pounds of Bengal tiger. With a roar, the tiger leaped for her throat. Nico froze, the Staff of One useless in her hand, knowing the tiger’s jaws would tear out her throat even as it clawed open her chest. Knowing she was dead.
Old Lace ducked past her and leaped at the tiger, coming up beneath it, jaws snapping shut on the tiger’s throat. Karolina wrapped her arms around Nico and twisted her out of the way as the tiger and the dinosaur crashed to the floor and careened against the wall, gnashing and snapping, clawing each other.
Karolina’s fingers danced with vivid laser light as she took aim, but she hesitated, afraid she would hit Old Lace.
“Don’t hesitate!” Carlos snapped. “She’ll kill you all otherwise!”
“She?” Nico asked. “How do you know it’s a—”
“It’s my mother!”
Gert shoved him aside. “Old Lace, get away from her. She’s a shape-shifter. You don’t know what else she can—”
The tiger became a silverback gorilla. Its eyes were cold and determined and it picked up Old Lace and hurled her against the opposite door—that impossible-to-open door.
Nico raised her staff, thinking of a spell, but Molly stepped up.
“Go help Zeke,” Molly said. “We’ve gotta get out of here. Old Lace and I will take gorilla-woman while the others get Tess’s door open.”
Nico didn’t hesitate. Molly was right. The Ordinary Door spell wouldn’t work again, so they’d have to find another way, and if Zeke died, they’d gone through all of this for nothing.
As the fight continued and the corridor lit up with Karolina’s rainbow, she raced back the way they’d come, watching for further attackers. The injured guards had crawled into a side room and cowered as she passed by. Then she turned the last corner and ran into the room where they’d left Zeke. Broken glass littered the floor. The entire wall of windows had been obliterated and the wind from outside whirled through the room.
Bleeding and furious, Kurdo-Zeke had gone down. As Nico rushed in, he struggled up to one knee and glanced around for his battle-ax. He reached for it, but Nico glanced around in confusion, wondering where his mother had gone. Then she glanced up at the shadows overhead and saw Kathryn Zheng hanging in midair, just beneath the vaulted ceiling.
“Back the hell off!” Nico shouted, holding up her staff. “Anchors Aweigh!”
As if she had massive iron weights on her legs, Zeke’s mother plummeted to the floor. Kathryn hit feetfirst, nearly fell over, then tried to rush at Zeke only to find that her feet would not move. The Nightwatch’s elemental was anchored to the floor.
“Zeke,” Nico said, rushing to him. “We’ve got Carlos but I think they need you to help open the door and get Tess—”
“Idiot girl!” Kathryn snarled. “How stupid are you? Or perhaps you’re just as corrupt as your wretched parents. The Nightwatch is here to repair the damage the Pride did to this city.”
Kurdogrim Zeke laughed, his voice a throaty rumble as he hefted his ax. Towering over Nico, he turned toward his mother. “I guess you think she really is stupid.”
“You dare wear the face of a Kurdogrim after you’ve betrayed them. You don’t understand the consequences of your betrayal, Ezekiel?” Kathryn sneered. “You know they will destroy you.”
Zeke glanced down at Nico. “You see what she is? Still a slave to the Kurdogrim.”
Ax in one hand, he grabbed his mother in the other. The wind raged into a cyclone inside the room, but he had his grip on her now. In spite of the weight of her feet, Kurdogrim Zeke turned and hurled his mother out through the shattered glass wall, right over the edge of the terrace and into open air, twenty-three stories up.
“Zeke, what did you do?” Nico cried, rushing toward the terrace, boots crunching broken glass.
“She’s an elemental! The wind’ll catch her,” he rumbled. Then he turned toward the corridor, heading for the room where Tess remained imprisoned.
Nico raised her staff. “Raise Anchor,” she said quietly. Evil or not, she wasn’t going to let her magic be the thing that caused Kathryn Zheng to fall to her death. The spell would release the extra weight on her.
Which meant she’d be back.
Even with the wind around her, Nico heard the popping noise behind her. As she turned, she remembered where she’d heard it before—down in that abandoned L.A. subway station where they’d rescued Allis from being murdered by the Pride’s leftover minions. The pop had accompanied the arrival of the Nightwatch’s teleporter, Carlos’s dad, Emilio.
As she turned, Nico nearly collided with him. The eyes of Emilio Ochoa were black with fury, unnatural and gleaming and so deep they seemed almost to draw her in. He drew his sword from the scabbard at his hip. Whatever Emilio might be, he was more than just a teleporter.
Nico raised the Staff of One, trying to decide if she should cast a spell to take away his sword or his ability to teleport. His eyes flickered with understanding.
“Witch,” he rasped. “Just like your mother.”
“St—” Nico began, thinking Stay Put. Such a spell would make him more vulnerable, that the others could take Emilio down.
He jabbed so swiftly that the sword punched through her chest before she could finish the spell’s first syllable. The breath bubbled from her
lips and she coughed once. Instinct had made her turn, just the tiniest bit, or he’d probably have run her through the heart.
But this is close enough, she thought. He’s killed me.
Emilio’s anger wavered. He drew his sword out and Nico collapsed to the glass-strewn floor, enduring a hundred tiny cuts that were nothing compared to the split in her chest.
The Staff of One felt warm in her hand. She gripped it tightly. “Bubble Wrap.”
Her thoughts were already fading to black. Finding the words for the spell would have been difficult, so all she could do was rely on what she felt. What she wanted out of her magic. In her mind, the pop of Emilio’s teleportation reminded her of the sound of Bubble Wrap, and nobody just got one pop out of a piece of Bubble Wrap. You twisted it, you stamped on it, you enjoyed every second of it. Pop, pop, poppoppop, poppop, pop, pop…
Emilio Ochoa, his sword wet with her blood, teleported across the room, then back, then again and again, vanishing and reappearing every second or two, so that he could barely shout at her, barely take a breath to rage at what she’d done to him before he vanished again and then reappeared out on the terrace or in the foyer outside Kathryn’s apartment or just inches away from Nico. Pop, pop, poppoppop, poppop, pop, pop…
Then he vanished. Or the darkness dragged Nico down into unconsciousness as her blood spilled out. Or both.
The room went dark.
Gert felt the seconds ticking by in a rush. Old Lace and Molly had cornered the Nightwatch’s shape-shifter in the room where Carlos had been imprisoned. By his parents, she thought. The shape-shifter is his mother. Images of her own parents filled her head, loving people who’d given her a beautiful life until she’d found out they were murdering time-traveling cultists from the future. The thought made her want to punch Carlos’s mother in the face as hard as possible. The problem was that she was a giant squid at the moment, and a punch from Gert would mean nothing to her.
Tentacles slithered out from inside Carlos’s prison-room. Karolina used a laser blast to burn off a few inches of tentacle and the giant squid screamed—if that sound could be called a scream—and yanked its tentacles back into the room. Through the ruined doorway, Gert saw Old Lace wrapped in a tentacle, but the dinosaur wasn’t afraid. Gert would have felt it. Old Lace wasn’t afraid, she was just hungry and pissed off and she bit into that tentacle and tore a chunk of calamari right out of it.
“I liked you better as a tiger!” Molly shouted, and punched the squid in the face.
A hand grabbed hold of Gert’s wrist and she turned to see Carlos staring at her.
“Please,” he said. “Can we get my sister and get out of here?”
Gert nodded. “Working on it.”
Karolina kept trying to burn or blast through the door to the room where Tess Ochoa was locked up. The lock couldn’t be damaged and they’d already tried the frame and the knob. Now they were determined to go right through the wall next to the door.
“Stand back,” Karolina said. She took a deep breath to steel herself.
“I hate to state the obvious but—”
Carlos finished for her. “This isn’t working.”
Gert turned to him. “If you’ve got powers, now’s the time to use them.”
“I’m a shape-shifter like my mom,” he said. “Which means I’m useless for this.”
“Damn it,” Gert said, turning back toward the fight going on through the ruined door of the other room. “Molly, time for a knockout punch. We need you.”
“I’m trying!” Molly shouted back. “Jeez, I’m only one kid!”
Gert knew she was right. She racked her brain, trying to come up with some alternative way through the door of Tess’s high-class jail cell. Then Karolina faltered, her face flushed, and Gert knew this wasn’t working. They had to get the hell out of there, and Tess wouldn’t be coming with them.
Someone shouted and Gert turned to see Kurdo-Zeke thundering down the corridor toward them. He had to bend way over, but as foolish and terrifying as he looked, Gert let out a shout of triumph.
“Yes! Zeke, get over here and knock this door down.”
They all cleared the way as Zeke reached them. He glanced into the other room and the giant squid seemed to cry out as if in recognition, maybe asking him for help. The giant Zeke raised his Kurdogrim ax and swung it at the door. A dent appeared, and a scratch, but the cracking sound they heard was a stress fracture in the ax blade itself.
Zeke grumbled in frustration.
“The wall, man!” Carlos told Zeke. “Try going through the wall!”
Kurdogrim Zeke nodded heavily, knelt on the floor to get more leverage, and swung back his ax.
They heard a pop down the hall, turned and saw Carlos’s father appear from nowhere for an instant before he teleported away. A moment later the pop came from the other end of the hall, where he manifested and then vanished again.
“What’s he doing?” Karolina rasped.
“No idea,” Carlos replied.
His father appeared inside the room where Molly and Old Lace were fighting his shape-shifting wife. “Rosie?” the teleporter shouted. “Keep fighting. Don’t—”
Pop. He vanished again.
“Look,” Gert said, turning to Kurdo-Zeke. “This is nuts. Try the wall with your ax. If it doesn’t work, we’ve gotta—”
Pop. Emilio Ochoa appeared just beside his son. In a sliver of a moment, Gert saw the surprise in his face as he realized where he’d appeared, and then the fury as he glared at Carlos.
“Carlos,” the teleporter said. “You’re not going any—”
He didn’t get to finish the sentence, but he did manage to wrap his arms around Carlos before he blinked out of reality again. A few seconds later Gert heard another distant pop, down the hall and around the corner, but Carlos was gone.
“No!” Kurdo-Zeke growled. He punched the wall. “It’s all going wrong!”
“The door!” Gert told him. “We can still get Tess!”
Zeke nodded. He brushed Karolina away from the door to Tess’s room and raised the ax, aiming for the wall beside the door.
The whole building shook. Or perhaps not the building but this floor. The walls of the corridor and the carpet beneath their feet trembled and then jerked upward hard enough that Gert stumbled into Karolina. From the room with the squid, she felt Old Lace’s sudden rush of fear. Molly cried out and then the floor bucked again.
Karolina groaned. “What was that? Did you all feel—?”
Gert grabbed the sides of her head. The whole building started to vibrate and she felt it in her skull, felt pressure like fingers trying to dig into her brain.
Where is she? a voice demanded inside her head. Where is she?
Zeke spun toward her, his eyes wide with almost childlike terror. “We need to go. All of us, now.”
“Your friends—” Karolina started.
“We’ll try again!” Kurdogrim Zeke barked, grabbing hold of Karolina. “But we’ve got to go, now! Abernathy’s coming, don’t you see? Abernathy’s coming!”
He shoved Karolina down the hall. She stumbled and fell, then picked herself up and started running back the way they’d all come.
Gert shouted for Molly and Old Lace. The squid reached for them as they fled Carlos’s prison-room. Molly slapped away one tentacle, but another managed to snag Old Lace before Zeke brought his Kurdogrim ax down and chopped it off. Old Lace chuffed her thanks, and then they were all fleeing down the hall as the squid screamed or cried behind them. As Gert looked back, she saw Rosie Ochoa transform into herself. For the first time, Gert saw her as a human being instead of a monster or an animal. The wounds she’d suffered as a squid were gone, but she stumbled and fell to her knees in the hall outside her daughter’s elegant prison cell, and she screamed after Zeke with as murderous a voice as Gert had ever heard.
Where is she?
Gert clamped the sides of her skull as she ran. The floor shook again.
“You asshole, Zeke, y
ou said Abernathy was a telekinetic. You said his telepathy was weak.”
“It usually is,” Zeke said, “but think of his powers like the Hulk’s muscles. The madder Abernathy gets—”
“The stronger he gets,” Gert replied. “Fantastic.”
Kurdo-Zeke stopped short ahead of her and Gert collided with his left thigh. Old Lace raced past them both, with Molly running behind her. They’d entered the room where Zeke had confronted his mother just minutes ago. Now the place was a ruin of broken glass and wrecked furniture. Gert moved around Kurdo-Zeke and was about to ask what had happened. Then she heard Karolina’s voice, heard the heartbreak in the single word she spoke.
“Nico?”
Sprawled on a carpet of shattered glass, Nico lay on the floor with blood pooling around her. She looked pale and still, except for the way the wind made a lock of hair flutter across her cheek.
“No,” Gert said.
Molly screamed for Nico and ran to kneel by her, picked her up as Gert told her to be careful. Old Lace sniffed at Nico as Karolina felt her wrist for a pulse.
“Is she—?”
Where is she? Abernathy roared inside their heads.
The building kept vibrating. Thousands of shards of glass jittered on the floor. Little ripples formed in the pool of blood beneath Nico.
“Kay,” Molly said, “is she dead?”
“She has a pulse,” Karolina said, turning to Gert. “But it’s fading.”
Gert froze, hating that Karolina was looking at her that way, as if she must be the one with the answers. All along she had thought she would make just as good a leader as Nico, maybe even better, but now they were all looking to her for leadership and she froze.
Kurdo-Zeke knelt beside Karolina and Molly while Gert and Old Lace looked on. He reached out his arms.
“Give her to me.”
“What?” Gert snapped.
Kurdo-Zeke looked at her with those enormous inhuman eyes—the eyes of a thing that had survived since the beginning of time, and yet was somehow young and afraid.
“You have to trust me,” the giant thing rumbled, this teenage boy in the body of an ugly, ancient god. “I’m gonna swap bodies right now, but I’m gonna take Nico with me.”
Runaways Page 16
