The Shadow City Page 6

  Keeeeeep stallllliiiiing!

  “Well, he might be in the bathroom, come to think of it . . . we were eating some hot wings, so you might want to give him a minute or two. . . .”

  Officer Dante’s voice went from chilly to arctic. “Where is this bathroom, exactly?”

  Gabe’s mind raced—What do I say? I can’t act any dumber than I already have been—but before he could say a word, he felt a wave of power rush through him, emanating from back inside the house. The apographon, I hope! Neither Dante nor Cook seemed to notice anything, though, which made Gabe feel even more sure they weren’t connected to the Eternal Dawn.

  “Hey! I just got here. Are these nice policepersons looking for me?”

  Gabe looked over his shoulder, and for a second almost panicked, because it was Kaz strolling up to the door from the dining room, tugging on his hoodie. Or was it?

  Cook did push the door open at that point. “Kazuo Smith?”

  “That’s me!” Kaz said, and winked at Gabe surreptitiously. “Wait, did my father send you guys after me? I told him I was fine!”

  Officer Dante shoved her notepad and pen back into her pocket and took Kaz by the arm. “You’re coming with us, young man.” She stabbed a glare at Gabe. “And then Officer Cook and I are going to come back and have a word with you. And your uncle.”

  “See ya!” Kaz chirped to Gabe as the cops led him down the steps. Gabe watched until the patrol car had driven away before he sprinted back to the dining room.

  The real Kaz stood there, grinning ear-to-ear. “Who says you can’t be in two places at once?”

  Gabe stared at Kaz. “That was . . . I . . . wow. Wow. That thing was convincing.”

  Brett nodded. “That’s how it’s supposed to work. When the person it’s copying isn’t dead or trapped in another dimension.”

  Kaz half-leaned, half-sat against the table. “I feel totally wiped out all of a sudden.”

  “I think that’s normal.” Brett peered into Kaz’s eyes like a doctor. “You should feel some fatigue, but your mind will still be sharp.” He chucked Kaz on the shoulder again. “Well. As sharp as it usually is, anyway.” Kaz stuck his tongue out at Brett.

  Jackson moved around to the other side of the table and curled his mouth as if he smelled something unpleasant. “Well, that was a very neat trick. Exactly how, Mr. Hernandez, did you activate the apographon so quickly and skillfully?”

  Brett’s teasing grin vanished. “How? By studying. Instead of standing around sulking all the time.”

  “Someone who has had all of three days to study spellwork should not have been able to accomplish what you did. Explain yourself,” Jackson demanded.

  “I bet it’s tough finding out that you’re not as smart as you thought, isn’t it, Ghost Boy?” Brett laughed. “Well, get over it. And get used to it.”

  Jackson folded his arms. “And now that I ponder it, how did those constables come to find us here? The protections of this house being what they are? Someone not possessed of any Art should not even have been able to see this place.”

  Lily stepped close to her brother. Gabe had seen the Hernandez twins do that countless times—if anything threatened either of them, no matter what it was, they closed ranks. Lily said, “Jackson, give it a rest. Yeah, it’s got magickal protection, but that doesn’t have any effect on cell phone signals. There are cell towers all over San Francisco, and Nob Hill is no exception. It’s probably a miracle they didn’t trace Kaz’s phone faster.”

  Jackson sneered. “Or perhaps someone damaged the wards with his reckless tinkering with powers he couldn’t possibly understand!”

  “Sounds like you’re the one having trouble understanding,” Brett said, raising his voice. “You think you know a thing about cell phones when you hadn’t even seen a lightbulb until three days ago? How’s the data coverage in the Umbra, anyway?” Brett glanced at Gabe. “Help me out here, will you?”

  “He’s right, Jackson,” Gabe said. “Technology and magick are different things. Just because the cops can trace a cell phone doesn’t mean the Dawn will be able to find us.”

  But Jackson didn’t back down. He folded his arms. “I demand that we check the wards again.”

  Brett rolled his eyes and looked like he was about to launch into Jackson all over again, when Lily stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Let’s just do it, hermano. It’s easier.”

  “Fine.” Brett sighed. “Do what you have to do.”

  With a boost of magick from Jackson, Lily and Brett lit up the protective wards again so Gabe and Kaz could see them, too. Gabe didn’t think anything was out of place, but as they moved through the house, he had to admit to himself that he wouldn’t have been able to tell if it was. The wards were inscribed in the glyphs of water and air, and Gabe couldn’t make sense of any of them.

  “Satisfied?” Brett finally asked when they stopped in the foyer.

  Jackson’s eyes transitioned from gold back to their normal icy blue. “Not remotely.”

  A thorny silence descended. If either Jackson or Brett’s elements had been fire, Gabe was pretty sure the stares they fixed on each other would have set both of them ablaze. Gabe tried to think of something, anything, to say that might break the tension and get them all back on track. Fighting among themselves wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

  But before Gabe could speak, a pale tentacle as thick as a tree trunk smashed through a streetside window and splattered golden slime everywhere as it reached for him.

  6

  Gabe stood rooted to the floor as the tentacle drilled through the air toward him, and everything in his stomach turned to ice water. It seemed as if the tentacle was moving in slow motion, and every ripple of its slime-coated muscles stood out in excruciating detail.

  Gabe recognized it. It’s like the thing on the ceiling in Greta’s hospital room! Except this one was bigger. So much bigger.

  Time returned to normal between one heartbeat and the next, and Gabe grabbed the two people nearest him, Kaz and Lily, and hauled them out of the way just as the silvery glyphs around the window sprang to life and detonated with a sound like a clap of thunder. The tentacle dropped to the parquet floor, severed, and after a few violent flops finally came to rest.

  Before Gabe could even take a breath, the house shook so violently all five of them lurched and stumbled, and another tentacle shot through the already-shattered window. Nothing slowed this one down. Those glyphs were like the ones at my house! Single-use! “Get back!” Gabe screamed. “Get away from it!” The house shuddered again, and the air filled with the sound of breaking glass, followed immediately by more crashing explosions.

  Another tentacle clawed toward them from a parlor window, gliding over a severed one that now quivered on the floor. Gabe drew fire from the house’s main power line, threw out his right hand, and hit the approaching tentacle with a column of flame so hot its center burned white. The tentacle spasmed as its tissue charred and crumbled away, and finally its owner pulled the blackened stump back out of the window.

  Gabe whooped. “We can fight it! We can fight it!”

  Then a familiar howling cut through the house, and Gabe felt his entire body become a goose bump.

  Lily screamed, “Hunters!” as more windows exploded and another wave of thunderclaps from activated glyphs hammered Gabe’s eardrums. Tentacles wormed their way into the house from every side.

  Jackson snarled at the rest of them, glaring at Brett. “We wouldn’t have to fight if someone had been more careful with the house’s wards! The creatures of the Dawn should never have found us here!”

  Brett looked down his nose at the smaller boy, and when another massive tentacle whipped out of the kitchen, Brett raised one hand and clenched it into a fist. Water burst forth from the sink, wrapped around the tentacle, and crushed it like a transparent vise.

  Gabe grabbed Jackson by the shoulders. “We don’t have time to argue! We need to concentrate on not getting killed!” H
e faced the rest of the group. “Let’s get upstairs! The glyphs down here are done for, we’re gonna get overrun!”

  Brett nodded, and in the time it had taken Gabe to finish his last sentence, Lily had already started helping Kaz climb to the second floor. Brett, Jackson, and Gabe fell in right behind them.

  At the top of the first flight of stairs, a hunter burst through an unbroken window. Every bit as hideous as the others Gabe had seen, the skinless, eyeless, earless beast was a ferocious bundle of fangs, claws, and violence—and Gabe’s heart stood still as a water glyph sprang to life and froze the hunter solid with an earsplitting CRACK. The beast toppled from the windowsill to the hallway floor and shattered into thousands of sparkling golden shards, but before those shards had even come to rest, another hunter leaped through the same window. The creature wasn’t alone: Gabe heard six other water glyphs activate from bedrooms along the length of the hallway. They were closing in from all sides.

  Lily’s eyes flashed and sparkled silver, and a small tornado picked the hunter up and flung it all the way to the far end of the hall, where it struck the wall and gruesomely ruptured, splattering golden goo and broken bits of its body from floor to ceiling. But door after door sprang open as more hunters appeared, and the entire house shook again and shifted what felt like three feet to the left.

  “Unbelievable!” Jackson spat. “The beast with the tentacles has taken the house off its foundation!”

  “Keep going up the stairs!” Gabe shouted. “We might be able to get out through a window!”

  That was what Gabe and Jackson had done when they’d encountered the Eternal Dawn at Uncle Steve’s university building. Jackson—much as Gabe disliked him, distrusted him, and found him unbearably irritating—had saved both their lives by conjuring a solid disk of golden magick for them to ride down to the ground. No reason he can’t do that again!

  Kaz spoke up. “Yeah, but how do we keep these things from following us?”

  A hunter rammed through a bedroom door, sprang off the opposite wall, and launched itself toward Lily and Kaz. Gabe felt his eyes flare with heat as he held up one hand, fingers splayed, and conjured a solid wall of flame directly in front of the hunter. The beast struck the wall and roared as it ignited—but even though Lily and Kaz both flinched, all that reached them was a shower of fine ash.

  Panting, Gabe slumped against a wall.

  Lily, who was supporting a visibly weak Kaz, said, “I don’t know how long we can keep this up.”

  Gabe nodded. “Kaz, can you bring up some sort of barrier? Block them in?”

  “If I do, it’ll wreck what’s left of the house.”

  Jackson put a hand on Kaz’s shoulder, his eyes solid glimmering gold. “Argent Court is lost, Kazuo. Do what you must.” From the site of Jackson’s touch, golden energy washed over and through Kaz, and his own eyes turned solid slate gray. Jackson was using his magick to boost Kaz’s earth power. He’d done that for all of them in the past. To Gabe, it felt kind of like being hooked up to a battery. No . . . more like being hooked up to a power plant.

  Kaz raised both his hands, and with a violent rumble a broad slab of bedrock erupted through the floor between them and the advancing hunters. Where the hallway had been, now they could see only a rough sheet of stone.

  Kaz’s eyes turned brown again as he slumped against Lily. “Wow, that was a lot harder than it should have been. Having a magick doppelganger running around really takes it out of you.”

  “Keep going up!” Brett said.

  Gabe and Lily grabbed Kaz to support him as they climbed two more flights of stairs, until they stood in the fourth-floor hallway. “Okay,” Gabe called out, “try to find a window with no hunters or tentacles. Jackson, you ready to get us out of here?”

  Jackson opened his mouth to speak, but any words he might have said were lost as the sound of splintering, shattering wood and stone filled the air around them. Tentacles burst through windows, through doors, straight through walls, and then the entire roof of the house ripped free from its joists and disappeared, leaving the five of them gaping upward, exposed to the cloud-clotted sky.

  Except . . . it wasn’t the sky they were looking at.

  Something hung there, above the house, and as they watched, its color rippled and changed from gray to putrid, oozing gold.

  It is like the thing from Greta’s room!

  It seemed to have the same camouflaging abilities of the monster at the hospital, but it was much bigger. Gabe craned his head back, and back, and back, as he took in the sheer immensity of it. It took his brain a few long moments to process what his eyes were seeing.

  The body of the oblong, bloated creature suspended in the sky overhead was easily the size of a blimp. A grotesque gelatinous hood covered its upper half, and the lower half was made up of broad, banded segments like an insect’s exoskeleton. Protruding from the seam that ran along its perimeter, a mass of tentacles hung down. Two dozen. Three dozen.

  At one end of the nauseating, unnatural body, eight gleaming golden orbs swiveled and twitched, and Gabe almost vomited. Oh God. Those are eyes!

  Howls from the hunters reached them from the lower floors, and Gabe risked a look away from the sprawling, repulsive creature. When it tore away the roof, several interior walls had also crumbled, along with parts of the floors. Now Gabe stood ten feet away from a pit that plunged through the middle of the house. Edging forward, he could see all the way down to the ground floor.

  Into the dining room!

  All of Uncle Steve’s and Greta’s research was there, lying unprotected on the table—alongside the Emerald Tablet. Gabe forced his vocal cords to work. “The research! The Tablet! It’s all still down there!”

  Gabe couldn’t tell if the blimp-like monstrosity overhead understood him, or if it had simply paused to catch its breath after demolishing the top floor of the house, but now it sent five mammoth tentacles surging at them with renewed energy.

  No. Not at them. At Gabe.

  But he already knew the tentacles were susceptible to fire, and though Argent Court’s wiring had just been shredded along with most of the rest of the house, the tentacle creature had made a tactical mistake. By tearing the roof away, it had given Gabe a direct line of sight to the electrical transformer fixed to a pole down the street.

  “Guys,” Gabe breathed. “You might want to back up.”

  Crackling, blue-white energy arced out of the transformer, wreathed Gabe’s body, and became roaring red-orange-white fire. He thrust his right hand upward, fingers spread, and lances of flame stabbed out from each finger, ripping and charring the blimp-creature’s limbs. Its shell turned a brilliant yellow where the flames hit, the heat rippling away and deepening into waves of burgundy.

  A bizarre sound quavered out from the monster. Like whale song . . . Except it made Gabe feel dirty. Contaminated. He wasn’t sure if the creature was in pain or just furious.

  “Get down there!” Gabe barked. “We’ve got to get the research and the Tablet!”

  “We can’t just leave you up here!” Kaz waved an arm weakly at the hovering creature. “You can’t hold it off forever!”

  Gabe took a deep breath and prepared to draw power again. “It wants me! So let me keep it busy! You’ll have your hands full with hunters, anyway! Now go!”

  He threw both arms in the air. A river of blinding electricity flared out of the nearby transformer, and this time Gabe didn’t absorb it. His eyes ablaze with such heat that his friends had to turn their faces away, Gabe took the controlled lightning and bent it upward, and where the energy passed by his hands, it became fire.

  Bloodred fire, which he sent crackling straight into the creature’s underbelly, where it carved a trench across the entire length of its body.

  The creature screamed, and its tentacles withdrew back into its jellylike carapace with a wet, sucking sound that Gabe was sure he’d hear in his nightmares.

  Gabe staggered. He turned and found Kaz, Lily, Brett, and Jackson all s
till standing there, gaping at him. “Okay, fine, we’ll go together,” he gasped. “Now let’s move!”

  Jackson created one of his golden disks of magick, and the five of them sank down through the ruins of Argent Court to the dining room.

  “Kaz, gather everything up,” Gabe said.

  Kaz’s hands were shaking as he collected Uncle Steve’s and Greta’s research into a big, messy pile. “Uh, Lily? Would you grab the Tablet, please?”

  Lily nodded, but as she took a step toward the magickal book, two hunters burst through a weakened section of wall right in front of her. Gabe saw her eyes flash silver, and she caught one of the hunters in a whirlwind that slammed it into the ceiling with bone-crunching force. But the other hunter grabbed the Emerald Tablet in its jaws and bounded back the way it had come, out of sight.

  “No!” Jackson shouted. “We must not lose the Tablet! We must not!”

  From far above them, the blimp-creature’s whale-song cry penetrated all the way to Gabe’s bones. An ooze-covered tentacle exploded through a pile of rubble, knocking Gabe flat.

  Brett sliced through the tentacle with an icicle sharpened into a blade like a broadsword, but this left the full weight of the appendage to crush Gabe as it landed on him.

  His ears rang. The tentacle lay like a fallen tree on top of him. He couldn’t breathe.

  Brett’s voice at his ear said, “Come on, buddy, let’s get you out of here,” but those words sounded as if they were coming from the end of a very, very long tunnel.

  The floor trembled underneath him. Brett staggered away, eyes going blue-green. What’s happening?

  His eyesight dimmed as he saw Jackson put a hand on Lily’s shoulder, and her eyes flash into a silver so intense it left spots in his vision. Then the rest of Argent Court disappeared into a full-fledged tornado.

  7

  Lily’s air power surged through her like a hurricane.

  Enhanced by Jackson’s pure magick, what would have been a stiff wind turned into a vortex of incredible power. The ruins of walls and furniture and monstrous Arcadian creatures churned around her like water circling a drain. But in the eye of the storm where she stood, all was quiet.