by Dan Jolley
Jackson stepped forward. “It would be my pleasure.” He turned to look at Lily and the others. “But that means offense will be your collective responsibility.” He pointed across the bay to the sinister haze of bats that clouded the silhouette of Alcatraz in the distance.
Kaz had put the apographon head back in his pack. His eyes flickered and went solid slate gray, and a cloud of rocks and gravel lifted off the ground and started orbiting protectively around him. Lily thought it looked like Saturn’s rings. Kaz said, “I’m ready.”
Brett’s eyes had gone deep blue-green, and he stared out across the water with a focus and a . . . Lily had to call it a hunger. She raised one hand and made half a dozen tiny whirlwinds dance around her palm. “I’d say we’re as ready as we’re going to get, Jackson.”
Jackson nodded. His eyes snapped from pale blue to brilliant, metallic gold in an instant, and a broad golden disk with upturned edges materialized in front of them. “I believe the railroad parlance is ‘all aboard.’”
No one spoke as the golden disk glided across the bay, hovering two feet above the wave tops. Brett hadn’t volunteered to conjure a camouflage curtain. Lily didn’t even know if he could anymore. Thorne was the one who did that, not Brett. But she guessed it didn’t matter. The ongoing shock waves were giving the residents of San Francisco a lot more to care about than four kids on a weird-looking shiny raft.
The rocky outline of Alcatraz grew larger and larger as they approached, and the dark haze visible from the shore resolved into what it actually was: the thousands of abyssal bats that had been flocking around the island for days now.
As Lily watched, a group of bats broke away from the island and winged their way toward the golden disk, shrieking and baring their loathsome fangs. “Who wants to take them out?” She was expecting Brett to cause waterspouts to spring up and drown the creatures or something, but instead green light flickered around Kaz’s gray eyes as he sent his cloud of rocks and gravel blasting toward the bats like the discharge of a gigantic shotgun.
Lily was pretty sure the flock never even knew what hit it. One second they were flying, and the next they had become a golden mist and a few tumbling tufts of gooey fur.
The rocks and gravel dipped into the water, washed themselves clean of abyssal bat gunk, and returned to orbit around Kaz again, below his well-earned look of self-satisfaction. Lily grinned at him with renewed respect.
“Well done, but there’s no time to celebrate,” Jackson said. With a nod of his head, he gestured behind them.
Lily turned to see what Jackson was referring to and saw that a much larger mass of bats had broken from the main swarm and were screaming toward them twice as fast as the last batch. But now Brett’s eyes shone with ocean-deep blues and greens, and columns of water rose up from the bay’s surface like . . .
Like the leviathan’s tentacles.
One after another, the watery appendages reached into the air to grasp at bats and drag them down. Brett’s lips drew back from his teeth in a snarl as the surface of the bay picked the sky clean. As the last of the ichor-covered flying marauders disappeared beneath the waves, Jackson’s golden disk rose from the water and deposited them on the Alcatraz dock.
With his ammunition stones still circling him, Kaz raised his eyes toward the island’s peak. “Lily? We might need you for this.”
Lily followed Kaz’s line of sight, and a cold ball of fear formed in the pit of her stomach. So far they had faced maybe a hundred abyssal bats, but thousands of them still shrieked and whirled through the air above and ahead of them. Maybe tens of thousands. All of them hovering between them and the breach.
Blocking them from rescuing Gabe.
The icy ball of fear flashed hot. Boiling hot.
“You might want to stand back,” Lily said.
Above them, the already overcast sky had begun to churn, and the clouds above Alcatraz turned sooty black. Lily raised her arms, her fingers splayed wide. The darkness overhead twisted. Became a slowly revolving cylinder of black, cyclonic power.
The abyssal bats didn’t seem to know what to do against such power. They wheeled and circled, confused.
A funnel cloud so huge that it looked like an upside-down mountain emerged directly above the center of the island. Silver-white lightning crackled out of Lily’s eyes—the boys yelped and jumped out of the way as bolts flashed out and scorched the dock—and with a prolonged scream that boomed like thunder, Lily clenched her hands into fists and brought her arms crashing down.
The funnel cloud slammed out of the sky like the fist of an angry god. Everywhere the abyssal bats flew, the funnels from the super-tornado followed, snatched them up, and whipped them about like the tiniest scraps of brittle autumn leaves.
Like the air, for a moment Lily was everywhere. She carried the rain that lashed across everyone on the docks. She was the bolts of lightning that arced out of a thunderhead to spear the dock in front of her. She was the gusts of wind that crashed like cannonballs into the leathery bodies of her enemies.
Finally Lily’s thunderous scream died away. The power, the fury of the cyclone whirled inside her, and she spoke in a voice she didn’t entirely recognize.
“What fools send winged creatures against air itself?”
The voice was all wrong. It wasn’t her. It was pure power. Pure, cold, sharp, merciless power.
Lily hoped it wasn’t really her.
Then, like the burst of a sudden gust of wind, the alien fury faded and left her. Without it, she collapsed to her knees, and the soot-black funnel cloud dissipated overhead.
She felt suddenly exhausted. She listed sideways, but Brett caught her.
“Lil! Are you okay?”
Gabe was trapped in another dimension. Their city was crumbling, and their world was about to be undone. But for the first time, Lily felt certain that she and her friends could fix all of it.
They would fix it. Because they had to.
“I will be,” she told Brett.
Kaz came to stand beside them, Jackson right behind him. Kaz said, “Okay, first off, Lily, that was freaking amazing. But second, I think if we’re going to get to the breach, we’d better do it now.”
Lily got to her feet. “Any more bats?”
Jackson’s eyes flickered a brief gold, and she realized he was smiling. It still looked so weird on his face. “I see not a single abyssal bat in the sky, my lady.”
Kaz chuckled. “No kidding. You cleaned house.”
Brett gave her a proud, respectful grin. “My sister the badass.”
Lily brushed herself off and led them off the dock. “Great. Then let’s do this.”
19
Gabe scanned the top of the Citadel’s towering bone wall as Uncle Steve brought them in for a landing, but there was no sign of the insect-like creatures from before. Even the carcasses his mom had squashed were gone.
As they’d flown across the bay, Gabe had thought, I can’t believe we have to go back to the Citadel. It felt like going back into the belly of the beast. But he guessed no place in Arcadia was truly safe—and Uncle Steve had the idea that if they could get to the breach, they might be able to figure out what was happening back in San Francisco. Gabe couldn’t argue. He hadn’t noticed the Arcadian side of the breach when he’d arrived in Alcatraz Citadel, but he hadn’t exactly been in the mood for sightseeing. It had to be there.
He had a fireball ready to go as they opened the enormous doors, but no guards waited inside for them, just as no bug monsters had peered out of gaps in the bone wall. Wonder if that’s because Mom’s with us? He glanced back at Aria, gliding behind them. The three of them moved silently down the long hallways to the gargantuan plunge of the Citadel’s hollow center. Still nothing confronted them . . . but he couldn’t help letting out a long, soft whistle at what he did see.
The cells were all empty. Every door had been mangled, twisted, and torn from its frame.
In a hushed voice, Gabe asked, “What do you think happene
d here?”
To his right, Uncle Steve stepped up to the railing and looked down, then far, far up. “I hesitate to guess. But it was nothing good. We can be sure of that much.”
Gabe had never before so intensely experienced the feeling of being watched. “Where did they all go?”
Uncle Steve shook his head, wordless. Gabe looked over his shoulder again at Aria. She’d fallen silent back at the library, when she’d first laid eyes on the Mirror Book. She hadn’t said a single word on the trek back here, and now she just stood, her hand lingering over a bit of twisted metal as she examined one of the ruined cell doors.
Gabe sighed. “Okay. Well. The breach has to be here somewhere.”
“If it’s where you say it is in our world, back on the real Alcatraz Island, it should be.”
The logic made sense, but Gabe could also somehow feel the breach’s presence nearby, just as he could back in San Francisco. Thinking of San Francisco made Gabe wish his friends were here. A wave of unexpected, acute homesickness made him want to curl up on the floor.
Next to him, Uncle Steve leaned back out over the railing and looked down at the floor of the well. “It’s not down there.” He raised his head. “I thought I felt something strange last time we were here, and now that I’m looking for it . . .” He pointed skyward, to the top of the hollow tower of the Citadel’s center spire.
Gabe tried to follow his uncle’s example, and reached out with his elemental senses, the same way he did when he was looking for invisible fire runes. I do feel something from up there! Way, way up there.
He glanced at the stone steps that corkscrewed up into the hazy distance.
He gave his uncle a pained expression. “That’s a lot of stairs. How many, do you think? Thousands? Millions? We’re going to have to climb an infinite number of stairs.”
Uncle Steve conjured up a grin. “Not quite infinite. We’ll feel the breach, the closer we get to it. And as for the stairs, I think you’re forgetting”—his eyes flickered silver-white, and he rose a couple of feet off the floor, currents of air lifting his hair around his head—“the benefits of being an elementalist.”
Gabe matched his uncle’s grin. He turned to Aria. “Hey, Mom? Can you help us look for the breach?”
Aria pivoted where she stood. Gabe was almost positive that she didn’t actually move her feet to do it. A dreamy expression occupied her face, and it took her two or three seconds to focus on Gabe, but when she finally did, she said, “Oh, yes. Of course. Lead the way.”
They fell into a pattern. Taking the terraces three at a time, Uncle Steve used the air to levitate them, and when they touched down they made a circuit of the balcony, all of their elemental senses on high alert for the energy emanating from the breach.
Gabe knew, just knew, that some horrendous, clawed, tentacular insect monster was going to jump out at them at any second. He kept imagining that he heard breathing, or the sound of some grotesque armored limb clicking against the cold stone floor. Every shadow cast by the gold-flickering globes mounted to the walls could be something waiting to ambush them.
Gabe made himself feel a little better by summoning his own illumination: a hovering orb of fire the size of a baseball that floated above his outstretched right palm. But that only led to a different kind of anxiety, since his connection to the fire was so much stronger and . . . well, easier here than on Earth. He worried that if he lost his concentration, the fire orb might explode and set them all aflame. It was impossible not to think of the fire elemental he’d fought in the Library of Mirrors. That had been the incarnation of the inferno that lived inside him. Gabe shuddered when he remembered its endless hunger to rage, and destroy, and burn.
Almost better to just look around in the half-dark.
Almost.
They had just touched down on the . . . Gabe realized he’d lost count of how many levels they had climbed. Fifty? Sixty? He couldn’t see the base of the spire at all anymore, and he didn’t want to think about what would happen if something distracted Uncle Steve in the middle of a levitation. He thought about suggesting they switch to the stairs . . . but then he noticed his mother standing perfectly still, an odd look on her face.
That was really saying something, considering how odd she usually looked. She had her face tilted up and her head cocked to one side. As if she’d heard something, or seen something in the distance.
Gabe said, “You okay, Mom?”
Then an impact like a battering ram hit him squarely in the back and knocked him sliding across the floor.
Gabe slipped over the edge of the balcony and fell.
He screamed as he plunged. His mind raced, desperately spinning in a frenzy of possibilities: Maybe I can blast myself to safety. Maybe I can melt the floor. Maybe I can fly like the Human Torch does. Maybe I—
Gabe’s right arm suddenly felt as if it was about to be ripped off his body, and his thoughts stopped short. He had just slammed into the railing of a balcony below, and he scrambled madly to get a grip on it, his breathing short and sharp and sliding past panic into hysteria.
From somewhere far above he heard Uncle Steve’s voice, distant and small. “Gabe? Gabe!”
Groaning, Gabe slid between the bars of the railing and sprawled onto the balcony floor, wheezing and marveling at how much his arm and his shoulder and his ribs hurt. If that had happened on Earth, it would have torn my arm off. He could still feel his arm, but try as he might—and he tried really, really hard—he couldn’t move it.
Gabe hitched himself a foot or two away from the edge and was about to get to his feet . . . when an enormous, terrible weight came down on his left foot, pinning it to the floor like a bug to an entomologist’s display board. Gabe wrenched around, trying to get a look at what had trapped him even as he tried to struggle free.
Two blue eyes—two human eyes—the size of saucepans stared back at him, set over a wide, grinning mouth filled with familiar backward-curving fangs. The rest of the creature’s body was coiled behind it, a mammoth mass of shadowy muscle and sinew.
“No.” Gabe could barely get the word out. “You died. You fell! I saw you fall. You died.”
Just as before, the creature didn’t speak with its mouth. Its words seared directly into Gabe’s mind. “You saw what I wanted you to see, little elementalist. You think you understand this place? You think you understand death? You do not. But I shall teach you.”
Gabe raised a hand, and red-orange flames sprang to life around it, but the creature’s voice immediately boomed out inside Gabe’s skull. “No. You will use none of your power. You will not resist me in any way. Not this time.” The creature stepped forward. One of its claws raked down Gabe’s thigh, leaving a painful ribbon of blood behind it. “This time I am ready for you.”
The air stirred around them. No—the air stirred, whistling and then roaring, and Uncle Steve stepped over the railing behind the monster. “Thought you would’ve learned from last time,” he said, and his silver-white eyes crackled with electricity as a hurricane blast lifted the creature’s body off the floor.
“Learn I did!” the creature bellowed.
Gabe gasped as he watched the creature’s limbs stretch, stretch and sink enormous claws into the stone and metal of the balcony, anchoring it in place. The vile blue eyes narrowed as they focused on Uncle Steve.
“You will stop that nonsense at once,” it said, and Gabe made a tiny, hopeless sound as Uncle Steve dropped his arms to his sides, his eyes fading to normal. Gabe could tell the creature was now looking deep into Uncle Steve’s mind. The wind died away as if it had never been there at all. The creature dropped back to all fours. “Come here, little man. Little master of the air.”
Gabe could see that Uncle Steve didn’t want to do it, but slowly, agonizingly, he put one foot in front of the other, dragging himself forward until he stood right in front of the creature. Casually, as if swatting a fly, it reached out with one colossal forelimb and knocked Uncle Steve to the floor, face-first. G
abe cried out as a small pool of blood began to form underneath his uncle’s head.
The creature swung its huge, inhuman head back to Gabe, and long ropes of its saliva fell across Gabe’s legs. “Now that that distraction is out of the way, I promised you in our last encounter, Gabriel, that I would take my time with you. But look where that got me.” It picked Gabe up off the floor by his neck. Gabe struggled to breathe, but the telepathic monstrosity wouldn’t let him move his arms. “I believe now that the best course of action will be to end your life without further delay.”
Its fang-filled, gaping mouth opened even wider. It pulled Gabe closer, turning him to position his head directly beneath its slime-covered fangs.
A strange calm overcame him. I’m with my family. I’m not alone. He knew there were worse ways to die.
Gabe closed his eyes.
And a voice said calmly, “Get away from my son.”
Abruptly Gabe could move again. The creature dropped him, and he scuttled away from it on his hands and his heels. The creature’s blue eyes had widened in—Gabe couldn’t believe it—fear.
“No,” it said. “You mustn’t. Begone from here.”
Aria glided toward it, passing right by Uncle Steve. All of her terrifying focus was on the creature. As Gabe stared, Aria’s skin turned completely translucent, and her eyes grew even larger, and her snarl revealed every one of her long, pointed teeth, and she screamed, “GET AWAY FROM MY SON!”
The creature detonated.
That was the only way Gabe could describe it.
The force of Aria’s words struck it, and it exploded like some kind of demented firework. One second there was a revolting creature the size of a bus, and the next there was a cloud of golden mist, shot through with tiny, swirling black motes. A few seconds more and there was nothing at all.
Gabe stayed sprawled on the floor, looking up at his astonishing, impossible mother, until Uncle Steve groaned and rolled over onto his back.
Aria watched Gabe impassively. She had gone back to what passed for normal. For the hundredth time, Gabe wondered what exactly his mom had become. He wanted to hug her and run in terror at the same time.
