End of Days

by Max Turner

A shepherd or a scourge. A saint or a demon. The messiah would be one of these things. I couldn’t let him become an orphan.

  I rounded the corner with my uncle beside me. The air was thick with dust, the tunnel floor treacherous from all the fallen rocks. We scrambled to the entrance of Hyde’s cave. He was still there, but the rock had slipped farther and forced one of his shoulders to the ground. His knees were underneath him. The rock seemed to have settled. I had no idea how we would get him out.

  “Quickly, that rock over there,” my uncle shouted. “Help me move it.”

  A large chunk of stone had collapsed from the ceiling outside the chamber. It wasn’t in the way. I didn’t understand why we should bother with it. I heard more cracking above and the roof fell down a few more inches.

  “We’ll set it beside him to hold up the stone, then try to slide him out.”

  That made sense. I nodded, then put my hands under it to test its weight. I wouldn’t have been able to move it on my own, but with my uncle’s help, we slid it into place beside Hyde. A few seconds later Luna arrived.

  Hyde watched us. He was nearly pinned to the floor. Blood was dripping from his mouth and nose and ears. We were almost there. Then Luna took hold of my arm and yanked me backward. I wasn’t expecting it, so I stumbled, arms flailing. Our feet got tangled up and I hit the ground on my back. Air shot from my lungs. Luna landed right beside me, but I didn’t hear her. All sound was drowned out by a crack so loud, I’m sure it echoed right down to the earth’s core. Then the roof of the tunnel at the entrance to Hyde’s den plummeted to the floor.

  — CHAPTER 44

  BLOOD DEBT

  A cloud of dust shot past Luna and me. Tons of rock continued to fall. She took hold of my arm. She was shouting in my ear. The shock and noise had turned my eardrums into sirens. Nothing could get past their shrill ringing. But her thoughts were clear.

  Get moving!

  I stood, stunned. We’d come so close. I just assumed we’d get everyone out. That the story would have a happy ending. But that wasn’t going to happen. Now my uncle and Hyde were buried together under a mountain of stone.

  Luna started hauling me up the passage. I don’t want you to join them!

  I kept looking back over my shoulder through the hail of rock and dust and small stones, hoping I might see my uncle emerge, but it didn’t happen. There was nothing I could do. We stumbled awkwardly, side by side, while the earth shook and the caves collapsed. We didn’t stop until we reached the others. Then Ophelia took the lead. I carried Detective Baddon’s son. Luna helped Charlie. The ground lurched. The rock above us cracked. It was as if the world were falling apart.

  We hadn’t run far up when Charlie stopped. “Entwistle’s still up there,” he shouted.

  The tunnel roof lurched and fell. We barely got out of the way. I started to turn back, but Ophelia took hold of my arm and dragged me away. Her grip was iron. So was her voice: “I’m not losing you.”

  Eventually we reached a more stable section. The noise was far behind us. Then the tunnel roof began to slope downward, forcing us to crouch. We came to a fork. Ophelia reached up and touched the rock, then pointed to the right, where the ceiling hung even lower. She and the others dropped to their hands and knees. I had to do a crab walk with the boy balanced on my chest. I would have scraped my back raw if it hadn’t been for Mr. Entwistle’s body armor. Then the air grew fresher, and over our ragged breathing I could hear the babble of water. Not a trickle, but the Indian River. A few minutes later, we approached a cave dimly lit with morning light. Everyone stopped.

  “Where are we?” Luna asked.

  I’m not sure if anyone answered. I was squinting ahead, wondering where we would go. Ahead was daylight. And the river. A bulletproof aquatic car would have been handy.

  “I guess we’ll have to wait things out down here,” Ophelia said. She retreated to a darker corner. We all followed. I lay down and practically sank into the cold stone. Relief calmed every nerve. Then I felt a warm presence beside me—Luna.

  We made it.

  We had. But others hadn’t. Mr. Entwistle. My uncle. I wondered if there was some way we could dig them out. Heal them. But not Hyde. He was finished. A few days ago, this would have been cause for celebration. Music. Fireworks. Dancing in the streets. But his death seemed more like a tragedy now. Adam Baddon was a good man who loved his son. Now his boy was an orphan. Perhaps the orphan. The one who would control the future of our kind.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  Ophelia was sitting up against the cave wall, staring at me. At the boy in my arms. “We’re going to survive,” she said.

  Adam’s son stirred again. His breathing came in short gasps.

  “Do we even know his name?” Charlie asked.

  Luna shook her head. “He doesn’t sound so good.”

  I glanced at Ophelia. Her eyes were intense. Nervous.

  “Can you help him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Something in her voice was off.

  The words were barely out of her mouth when the boy stopped breathing.

  I looked around at everyone. “What do we do?”

  No one answered.

  I grabbed his wrist. I’d seen doctors do this on television. I searched for a pulse, but couldn’t find one, so I put my head on his chest. His heartbeat was weak. Irregular. It sped up to a frantic pace. Then it stopped.

  “Is he dead?” Charlie asked.

  I wasn’t sure.

  Luna was right beside me.

  Do something!

  But she didn’t know what to do. Neither did I. I looked over at Ophelia. She hadn’t moved. Her face was a blank mask. I stared into her eyes. They were out of focus.

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond.

  “What do we do?”

  My voice brought her out of it. She looked at me. Her face was uncertain. Scared.

  “He’s just a boy,” I said.

  “He’s more than that,” Ophelia replied. “We’ll pay for this.”

  We’d already paid. Three lives had just been lost. And we had promised Hyde we’d look after his son. It was the price of our freedom.

  Ophelia handed me the knife. She’d had a bad feeling about it. No wonder. It had killed Mr. Entwistle. It had almost killed me.

  “It’s fitting that it would be you,” she said.

  I steadied my hands and pulled the blade across my open palm. I gasped and made a fist, then moved my hand until it was overtop of the boy’s mouth. Beads of scarlet blood dripped down inside.

  “Don’t touch him,” Ophelia warned. “If he bites you, or infects you, you’ll die.”

  After a few seconds, she put her hands over his heart and compressed his chest. She did this several times, then moved my hand away from his mouth and started pressing on his diaphragm.

  “You need to breathe into his mouth,” Luna said.

  I agreed. I’d seen CPR on TV before. That was always what they did—blew oxygen straight into the patient’s lungs.

  “Don’t go near his mouth,” Ophelia snapped.

  She continued to press down on his trunk, forcing the air out of his chest. Then she went back to compressing his heart. While she did this, I dribbled more of my blood into his mouth. While I watched and bled, his teeth lengthened. Then he tried to bite me. His movements were so sudden, Luna shrieked. I jerked my hand away. The boy was still unconscious. He’d done it in his sleep.

  Ophelia moved back. I kept my eyes on the boy. His breathing strengthened. His face started to change. His blond hair lengthened. His forehead stretched back. His ears sloped to two sharp points. He looked almost elflike. Tiny, with fine features. A few breaths later, he started to change back.

  “What is happening?”

  Ophelia shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Was he dead?” Luna asked. “Did he just die and come back?”

  I nodded. He had. Just like me. Like the messiah. A sai
nt or a scourge . . .

  Charlie stumbled over. He was still unsteady on his feet. “Your blood did that? Does this mean he feeds on vampires, like his father—like Hyde?”

  It appeared that way.

  My best friend was incredulous. “Why did you save him?”

  What could I say? For lots of reasons. Because he was an orphan, like me. Because I had failed to save his father, Adam. But mostly because Hyde was right, none of this was the boy’s fault. I put my hand near the side of his neck and felt his pulse with the back of my fingers. It was strong now. Steady.

  What does this mean? Luna asked me.

  I thought about it—what the boy might become if we weren’t careful.

  It means when he wakes up, we’d better be really, really nice to him.

  — CHAPTER 45

  IRON SPIKE ENTERPRISES–ONE MONTH LATER

  We stood in the room, the four of us, shoulder to shoulder, not speaking. Even Charlie was dumbstruck. It lasted about ten seconds. That might have been his personal best.

  “Sick!” he said. “Did you know about all of this?”

  Not exactly.

  Luna nudged me. Out loud, she reminded me.

  “No,” I said. “But I probably should have known it would be here. He had to keep this stuff someplace.”

  We were in Montreal, at Iron Spike Enterprises, my uncle’s business headquarters. The building was practically a skyscraper. Every floor had its hidden secrets, but this room was pay dirt.

  “So all of this is yours now?” Suki asked. She and Charlie were standing side by side, his arm over her shoulder, her arm around his waist. With each passing day she was more like the Suki of old. Confident. Bubbly. Fun. Spending time with Charlie had done her wonders. It might have been the one reason Dr. Abbott let her stay with us. Love cures all ills, as they say. It had done wonders for Charlie, too. I hadn’t seen him this happy since last summer.

  “Technically, the whole inheritance is in a trust,” I told Suki. “But we can use whatever we need.”

  I looked around the room. We’d been doing a tour with Ophelia, floor by floor, room by room. It had ended here, in a weapons depot. All of my uncle’s military equipment guns and grenades were here.

  “Do you know what all of this stuff does?” Luna was staring at a rack of weighted nets that looked like spiderwebs.

  Not all of it. Not yet.

  She nudged me again.

  I cleared my throat. “It looks like some kind of electrified netting.”

  I heard a quiet “Wow!” leak from Charlie’s mouth.

  If he thought this was impressive, the numbers in my uncle’s bank account would have floored him.

  Luna was playing with the charm on her necklace. She looked at me and winked. A rich vampire messiah. Do I know how to pick ’em, or what?

  I laughed. But I wasn’t rich yet. I’d get my inheritance when I turned eighteen. If I lived that long . . .

  Don’t be such a pessimist, she chided. You have some pretty good help here.

  Pretty and good, I thought.

  “Where did Ophelia go?” Suki asked. She was rubbing her neck. I half expected to see some teeth marks there, but both she and Charlie seemed to have agreed that it would be better to wait than risk infecting her now. Hyde was gone, but the danger of the Coven hadn’t passed.

  “She went to check on Vincent,” Luna said.

  Vincent was the detective’s son. He was still in a coma. We’d moved him to the second floor of the building. My uncle had a full medical lab there, so he was wired up to an IV and a slew of machines that monitored his heart rate, blood sugar, and oxygen levels. The situation was stable, at least medically, but the rest was a bit messy. Issues surrounded the inheritance of his father’s house and belongings, including the contents of the storage shed we’d broken into—the place where we’d found the wolfsbane. And Vincent still had family. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Eventually they would have to be informed about his condition, but we thought it best to keep him hidden until we had a better understanding of whether he would be a danger to them. Or to us. He was in for some bad news when he awoke, and we all dreaded having to tell him. Ophelia was particularly troubled.

  “Why the long face, Romeo?” Charlie asked. He’d wandered over to a rack that housed a number of impressive-looking assault rifles, and something that might have belonged on the top of a tank.

  Why the long face? I didn’t want to answer this question. We’d just done a tour of my uncle’s garage. He had a collection of street racers and a number of motorcycles. And older prototypes of the rocket car that was now our main form of transportation. But I hadn’t seen what I’d hoped to find—some construction equipment.

  As soon as this thought passed through my head, I felt Luna close herself off. It kept me from hearing her thoughts. Our abilities were evolving. We could still communicate without speaking, but over the last month we’d learned to control what the other could hear. Whatever she was thinking now, she wanted to keep to herself. I understood. She thought I was in denial. They all did. Even Ophelia. I told myself that staying hopeful was better than grieving, but I’m not sure I really had a choice. My heart was just being stubborn. It couldn’t accept that Mr. Entwistle and my uncle were really gone. They were vampires. All we needed to do was move a few million tons of rock from a very public provincial park, then give them some of the blood my uncle had pilfered from the Underground. There was enough to fill a swimming pool.

  Charlie must have sensed what was on my mind. He looked away. Like the others, he expected me to be sad and thought it was odd that I wasn’t, but I still wanted my happy ending.

  “Is the body armor ready?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Not yet. A few more weeks.”

  “I thought Entwistle’s stash was impressive, but this is the mother lode.”

  I had to agree. In the days before we came here, the five of us had toured Mr. Entwistle’s safe houses in Peterborough. He’d kept extensive files, which included a contact that made specialized military equipment. We’d ordered suits for everyone. We also found blueprints for an Abrams tank he’d customized. But it was located in a hidden garage we hadn’t yet discovered.

  “You never answered my question,” Charlie said. “Why the long face?”

  I had a lot on my mind.

  Luna smiled and slipped her hand into mine.

  “Just thinking,” I said.

  “Thinking or worrying?”

  “A bit of both.”

  Charlie surveyed the room. There was enough equipment here to outfit the Rebel Alliance. “How are we going to learn how to use all this stuff?”

  “There’s a shooting range on the third floor,” Suki said. “You guys were in the gym when we found it. We could practice there.”

  I couldn’t believe it. A shooting range. Charlie and I had missed that part of the tour. The exercise equipment in my uncle’s fitness room was so impressive, we’d stayed behind to try it out when the girls went ahead. This place was like a spy school. The only things missing were the students.

  Luna laughed. Not anymore.

  “What is it with you two?” Charlie asked. “Always laughing to yourselves like that.”

  Luna raised her hands as if it were nothing. I didn’t know what to say.

  “All right, keep your secrets.” Charlie wandered over to the far wall. A piece of equipment that might have fallen from space was hanging from the ceiling. “What is this thing? Some kind of photon torpedo?”

  It looked more like a futuristic coffin to me, but I had no idea. “The equipment lists and operation manuals are all in the library,” I said.

  We’d hit that earlier in the tour. I was anxious to get back. I had noticed among the shelves some notebooks that might have been journals. If my uncle kept a log like my father, it might have some information about the Coven of the Dragon. It was time to find out how much trouble we were in.

  “Well, let’s go,” said Suki. “This
place freaks me out. I’m afraid to breathe too hard. Something might blow up.” She cozied up beside Charlie and took hold of his hand.

  “Where to?” Charlie asked. “There’s a home theater on the fourth floor. I wonder what’s playing.”

  “I was leaning toward a swim,” she answered. “Ophelia says there’s a pool on the roof beside a penthouse apartment.”

  “I think we should go back to the library,” I said. “Check the catalogs and see what all this stuff does.”

  Charlie looked at me in disbelief. “Zack, it will take weeks to read through all that.”

  “Yeah, so we’d better get started.”

  As soon as I said this, my mind drifted back to the safe house where Charlie and I had been caught by the police. Where we’d found the letter with the prophecies, and the handwritten notes—that the End of Days was coming and that knowledge was our best defense.

  Charlie looked at me. He seemed to know what I was thinking. He glanced around the room, then pulled a canister from a crate beside him. It was a thermite bomb. A smile creased his face.

  “Knowledge is your best defense, huh? Well, not anymore.”