by James Riley
And then Damian entered the room in his human form, his entire body glowing an angry red. “No more messing around,” he shouted, his face furious in the glow of his magic. “I’m done taking it easy on you all. Tell me where the book is, now !”
- TWENTY-SIX -
ELLORA, FREEZE HIM!” FORT SHOUTED, readying his own spell.
Even as he said it, Ellora was already moving, and black light shot out toward Damian. But he blocked it by teleporting Jia right in front of him, and Ellora’s magic hit her instead, freezing Jia in mid-shout of surprise.
“I guess that’s a no!” Damian shouted, pushing Jia aside as the ground rose up around Ellora, locking her in place. “It’s getting really annoying, you having that necklace on, by the way.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not taking it—hey!” Ellora said as Rachel lifted the necklace up and over her head, then dropped it to the ground. “What are you doing?”
“Like it?” Damian and Rachel said at once, both using Damian’s voice. “Mind magic can be so useful. Like making people forget for a few minutes how to use their magic.”
“What?” Ellora said as yellow magic covered her head now. “No!” She struggled to free herself, but there was nothing she could do as the yellow light faded. “Give it back! Give me back my magic!”
“It’ll come back by the time I’m gone,” Damian said, turning to Fort. “What about you, Sierra’s friend? You want to try me too, like back at the school? Or are you smart enough to give up now, and tell me where the book is?”
“Trust me,” Fort said slowly. “No one’s ever accused me of being smart.” He held up his hands, glowing with green Summoning magic. “Let’s do this.”
Damian’s eyes widened. “Seriously? You’re joking. What, are you going to teleport me somewhere?”
“No,” Fort said with a shrug. “Just distract you.”
Damian raised an eyebrow, only for blue light to flood over him, sending him shakily to the ground. Jia quickly moved over him, shaking her head. “I’m sorry about this, Damian,” she said. “But you’re going to destroy London if you get that book, and you were always kind of a jerk, so I guess I don’t feel that bad about putting you to sleep.”
Damian struggled to get to his feet, only to fall back against the rubble he’d created a moment earlier. “Oh, right,” he said in a daze. “I canceled the Time girl’s spell when I made her forget it. Should have … thought of that.”
“You know what you should have thought of?” Rachel said, coming up at his side. “That no one takes over my mind!”
And then she punched him right in the gut.
“Ray, no!” Jia shouted as Damian doubled over in pain. “Don’t wake him back up!”
The blue light surrounding Damian went out like a snuffed candle, and he grinned up at them. “Thank you for that,” he said, then tossed Rachel across the room. She hit the wall hard and slid down to the floor, groaning.
“Ray!” Jia screamed, sending another spell at Damian, but this time, he saw it coming and waved it away, then sent the ground up around her legs, freezing her in place as well.
“That’s what I deserve for getting angry,” Damian continued. “Dr. Opps was always yelling at me about that. Said I made mistakes when I got angry.” He shrugged. “Guess he was right.”
The tomb lid came flying at him, and he raised a hand, splitting it in half. Both sides crashed into the ground with a huge noise.
“The stairs! Go!” Rachel shouted, leaning against the nearby wall as she freed both Jia and Ellora from their rock prisons. “Go now ! I’ll take care of him!”
“You?” Damian said, smiling smugly. “Seriously? You’re about to fall over.”
Someone grabbed Fort’s arm, yanking him backward. He turned to find Ellora pulling him toward the stairs, as ordered, and he ran as quickly as he could, knowing Rachel couldn’t distract Damian for long.
But as he practically leaped down the staircase into the darkness, barely keeping up with Ellora, he realized there wasn’t anyone behind him. Fort immediately slammed to a halt and reversed himself, sprinting back up to find Jia practically carrying Rachel as the other girl sent spell after spell at Damian.
None of them were having any effect whatsoever.
“Come on, Ray!” Jia shouted as they moved toward the stairs. “Follow your own advice!” She sent a Healing spell at Damian, but he brushed it off like a bug.
Rachel shook her head and pulled out of Jia’s grasp, still looking dazed. “Let me do this,” she said, and squeezed Jia’s hand. “Please go, for me.”
“No!” Jia shouted, but Rachel pushed her away and moved to stand between Jia and Damian, blocking his path. Without another word, she reached out with her hands to both sides of the room, then pulled them back to her chest.
As she did, large sheets of stone pulled off the rocks and formed up around her like armor, covering every inch of her except for her face. Now sheathed in rock, and the stone itself helping her to stand, she took a step forward, then another, each one shaking the ground as Damian stared at her incredulously. “What’ve you got, Dragon Boy?” Rachel shouted, flexing in her armor. “Bring it!”
Damian rolled his eyes, then held out his hands toward her. Fire exploded from his fingers, the heat so intense that Fort yanked Jia partly down the stairs to avoid it.
Rachel, though, just covered her face with her arms and continued to push through the fire toward Damian. “You’ve got nothing !” she shouted, her voice shaking enough that Fort knew she couldn’t keep this up for long. “You’re just a petty jerk, and the only reason you’re even good at magic is because you were born a pathetic dragon. You didn’t earn any of it, it was all just handed to you!”
“You don’t know anything about me!” Damian roared, his fire dying out so suddenly that Rachel tipped forward, her momentum knocking her off balance without the force of the flames. As she fell, a wave of solid air sent Damian flying forward, and he drove a glowing red fist into the rock around Rachel’s stomach. As his hand touched the armor, the rock split in half, falling away to both sides as the force of his blow sent Rachel flying back toward the stairs.
“No!” Jia shouted, and managed to catch Rachel in her quickly elongated arms, almost falling herself from the other girl’s momentum. She gently passed Rachel to Fort, then turned to Damian with rage in her eyes. “Don’t you touch her again!”
“I didn’t want to hurt any of you, Jia!” Damian shouted at her. “All you had to do was give me the book and everything would have been fine. So don’t blame me for this. This is all on you!”
Jia growled, low and threatening, as blue light exploded from her body in every direction. Wings pushed out of her back just beneath her shoulders, and long claws grew from her fingernails. She fell to the ground on all fours as a spiny tail extended from her lower back, and armored scales pushed up out of her skin, then emerged in a wave over the rest of her body, covering her completely.
Fort’s mouth dropped open in shock at the sight as he slowly backed down the stairwell, Rachel in his arms. Just above, Jia roared loudly enough to send small rocks falling from the ceiling, now a dragon every inch as big as Damian had been.
“Are you trying to make fun of me?” Damian shouted, his eyes widening with pure rage. “Get out of that form!”
“I will, once I take you down,” Jia growled, and leaped at him.
As Damian morphed into his own dragon form, Ellora reached Fort’s side, and without a word, helped him carry Rachel farther down the stairs. Above them, the room rocked with each blow the dragons landed, feeling like it might collapse at any moment. Fort hated leaving Jia to face Damian by herself, but there wasn’t much he could do to help, especially not in a fight between two such massive creatures.
Damian screamed in pain then, and the shaking grew worse as Jia’s dragon head appeared in the stairwell. “Go! I’ve got this!” she roared, then pulled back as stone scraped against stone, and the light from above disappeared. She
must have slid the coffin back over the stairs.
“No!” Fort shouted, leaving Rachel with Ellora to run back up and bang his hands against the stone of the tomb. They couldn’t leave her behind, not against Damian! As powerful as she was, she didn’t stand a chance against an actual dragon. He started to open a portal back into the room, the green light of his spell illuminating the dark just slightly, but it was enough for Ellora to grab his hand and pull him around to look at her.
“She’s letting us get to the book, Fort!” Ellora said quickly, glowing an eerie green in his light. “Once we have it, we can use it on Damian and save her. It’s the only way to help her now!”
He gritted his teeth, not liking that at all, but he couldn’t argue with her point. Instead, he nodded and ran back down to where Ellora had left Rachel, lighting the way now with his Heal Minor Wounds spell. Every crash above them made his chest ache for his friend, but Ellora was right. If they could find the book of Spirit magic, that would stop Damian instantly.
At least, it would if the first spell was not something useless.
They’d only made it a few yards farther down when red light filled the stairwell from above as the tomb went crashing off into a wall. Damian’s dragon head snaked down into the stairwell, his shoulders too wide to fit. “I’m getting so tired of all this!” he roared, morphing back into his human form as they watched. “Why won’t you just give up already?”
Fort growled in frustration but didn’t stop moving down the steps. More than anything, he wanted to turn around and fight the dragon, using magic, his fists, whatever he could. But instead, he pushed forward, moving as fast as he and Ellora could go with Rachel between them, probably even too quick for as little as they could see.
And then a fireball exploded past them, lighting the way as it struck the stairs a little ways down. “Don’t make me hit you with these!” Damian shouted as the flames singed Fort’s clothing but didn’t cause much damage.
Even through the danger, part of Fort knew Damian could just use Mind magic on them and immediately put an end to all this. The fact that he hadn’t meant he’d rather torture them with fireballs than get the book.
How could Sierra ever have been friends with someone like that?
“Keep moving,” Ellora whispered, then groaned in pain as a second fireball passed by her shoulder, burning her.
“Whoops, they’re getting closer!” Damian said, sending a third fireball down. “Probably because of how narrow it is in here. You might want to hand over the book before it gets even hotter down there!”
Fort turned to respond but found another fireball heading straight for him. He cursed and dodged as best he could, but in doing so, he missed the next step and dropped Rachel. His momentum sent him tumbling down the stone stairs as Ellora shouted his name behind him.
Each step he hit was another new lesson in pain, and Fort could have almost cried in relief as he reached the bottom, skidding to a halt on a dirt floor not too far from the stairwell. But if the book of Spirit magic was here, at least he could finish this and save his friends.
And then he looked up, and any hope he might have had disappeared.
From the light of Damian’s magic above, he could just make out the small, completely empty room in front of him. No book of magic, no tomb of King Arthur, nothing.
Above him, Damian began to laugh as he reached the end of the stairs. “Oh no, you’ve found a dead end!” he said, his laughter growing. “Aw. That’s so sad. You’ve run out of places to run.” His hands began to glow red again, fireballs appearing in each one. “No more distractions, no more friends, just your last chance to hand over the book. If not, whatever happens is on you.”
- TWENTY-SEVEN -
FORT SLOWLY PUSHED TO HIS feet, facing the wall. In spite of the boy’s threats, Fort actually felt more fear for what was to come than for himself. Images of Buckingham Palace on fire and stolen spirits from London’s population passed through his head, along with the tsunami caused by the invading army he’d seen in the war to come.
And all of that would happen if he couldn’t stop the dragon here and now.
But how? Fort only had two spells: Heal Minor Wounds and Teleport. Well, and one instance left of a Restore Dimensional Portal spell, but that wasn’t going to do much, not here—
And then something caught his eye on the wall before him, reflecting the light from Damian’s fireballs. Words, barely visible in the darkness, carved in the shape of an arch, just like the one that had led into the tomb.
Only this time, he actually recognized three of these words: “gen,” “urre’otre,” and “platrexe.”
The spell words to reopen a dimensional portal.
Maybe the stairs led somewhere after all.
But that didn’t matter if he couldn’t slow Damian down. There had to be something he could do, even with his limited spells. Send him … oh. Oh! It was dangerous, and would definitely make the dragon even angrier than he was now, but it still might work.
“I’m not going to fight you,” Fort said, raising his hands in surrender as he turned to face Damian, hoping his arms would block the other boy’s view of the wall.
Damian snorted. “More lies? You know all I have to do is read your mind, and …” He trailed off as he looked past Fort at the wall. “Oh, forget it. I see what you’re trying to hide. What’s this?”
“No, don’t, please !” Fort shouted, reaching out to grab Damian’s arm, but the dragon just knocked his hand away, moving past him to the wall as if he didn’t even consider Fort a threat. Which was fair.
“So this leads to Avalon,” Damian said, reading the words, running his fingers over them. He glanced back at Fort. “Sorry, I know you don’t know enough magic to have figured that out. It says that these are instructions, and they invite those with great skill to travel to the dimension of the Avalonians and present themselves to the queen.” He paused, then ran his hands over the last few words and laughed. “And it says no humans ! Amazing.”
No humans? Hopefully that was just Damian misleading him. Either way, it wasn’t something Fort could worry about right now. “So you’re going to open it?” he asked, taking a step backward.
“Oh, so that’s your genius plan?” Damian said. “I open the portal for you, and then you somehow get past me to find the book?” He snorted. “Nice try. Even if I did open the portal, there’s no way you’d ever get past me.”
Fort sighed deeply. “You caught me,” he said. “Does it help if I promise not to do that?” He took another step back toward the stairs. The room wasn’t that big, but there should be just enough space for—
Damian’s eyes glowed yellow, and Fort felt the dragon in his mind again, though this time, he seemed to be reading it instead of taking him over like he had Rachel. “Teleportation?” the other boy said finally, the yellow glow disappearing. “That’s your big plan, to teleport me somewhere? Anywhere you send me, I can just bring myself right back, Fitzgerald. So please, explain your big plan to me. I can’t wait to hear it all.”
Fort took one last step backward, his heel now running into the bottom stair. A quick look behind him showed that Rachel and Ellora were just far enough away for this to work. Then he smiled. “I mean, it’s not much of a plan. And really, I’m actually doing you a favor.”
“A favor?” Damian asked, raising an eyebrow. “How is that, exactly?”
“I’m giving you some new perspective,” Fort said. “You know, from orbit.”
And with that, he opened a teleportation circle directly between him and Damian, one that led to the moon.
Instantly, the vacuum of space sucked Damian straight into the portal, giving him no time at all to react. Fort did regret that part, since he wished he could have seen the look on the boy’s face. Still, he didn’t exactly have time to worry about it, since he, Ellora, and Rachel were now being rapidly pulled toward the other side of the portal as well, along with small rocks, dust, and anything else not nailed down.
>
“Fort?” Ellora shouted in surprise. “What did you do?”
“Don’t worry!” he shouted back as the vacuum dragged him across the floor. “I’ve got this!”
Just before his foot entered the portal, he quickly slammed it shut, and all the debris heading for it now tumbled down around him as the room went completely dark again.
Fort used his Healing magic to create a light, then pushed to his feet and ran back to where Ellora was bracing herself on the bottom of the staircase, holding Rachel as best she could. “Sorry about that,” he said, helping her carry Rachel the rest of the way to the empty room at the bottom of the stairs. “It was the only thing I could think of.”
“Where’d you send him?” Ellora asked. “Oh, wait, my magic’s back now that he’s gone. I can check.” Her eyes went black, and she gasped. “The moon?!”
“I figured it’d be a surprise, if nothing else,” Fort said, blushing in the dim light. “He should be fine: If Rachel could make her own air, he can too. But it might give us a few seconds to get her up.”
“We might not even have that,” Ellora said, but Fort was already using his Heal Minor Wounds spell on Rachel.
Her eyelids flickered, and she looked up at him drowsily, then cringed. “I don’t think your spell is doing much.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” he said. “Just get ready with a lightning spell, will you?”
She looked at him strangely, then nodded. “Okay, but—”
Damian reappeared in the middle of the room in a green burst of light, shivering wildly, with his hair askew. “Fitzgerald!” he roared, almost as loud as his dragon voice. “You could have killed me!”
“Now!” Fort shouted, and Rachel unleashed her lightning straight at the dragon boy. Far too distracted to stop it, Damian went flying back against the nearby wall as the bolt hit him, taking him down like a Taser. He shuddered a few times, then went quiet, still breathing but unconscious.
“Oh,” Rachel said. “I see.” She pushed to her feet but almost fell over as she did. “Where’s Jia?”
