3

NOTHING IS ALL RIGHT

Dru liked to believe in the fundamental rightness of the world around her. She earnestly looked for the good in all people, the bright side of every situation, even the questionable nutritional benefit of the bag of Spicy Queso Chee-Z Puffs that Opal had shared with her the day before. But every once in a while, something came at her that was just fundamentally wrong.

This was the worst of those times.

As the unspeakable phantom rushed toward her, Dru’s hand shot into her purse, searching for a crystal. Any crystal. Her fingers closed around the smooth curve of a polished sunstone. Immediately, her magical power flowed into it, propelled by the urgent desire to not let a horrendous apparition from beyond the grave devour her face.

The sunstone lit up the inside of her purse with a pure honey-gold brilliance. When she yanked the crystal out, it painted Salem’s drab lair with a blast of summery sunshine. The effect on the creature was instantaneous.

With an eardrum-scraping screech, the thing pulled back. The dark pits of its eyes hid behind its long arms, and it shrank back beyond the edge of the light. But it didn’t flee. With an eerie motion, the ghost glided back and forth along the edge of the light, like a predatory deep-sea creature penned in by aquarium glass.

Dru blinked at the oval sunstone-shaped spots that pulsed in her vision, trying to see past them to the horror that lurked in the darkness beyond. “Jeez Louise. Sure looks like a ghost to me.”

With a thunk-thunk of his cane, Salem stepped up beside her. As he gazed into the shadows, his dark-lined eyes narrowed. “What do you want me to say, it’s an adorable little puppy? No, it may look like a ghost. But it’s not behaving like one.”

At her other shoulder, Greyson hefted Salem’s throne-chair in both hands, like a weapon, ready to crush the thing if it came any closer. Seeing the chair held out like an extremely ornate Gothic baseball bat, Dru did a double-take.

So did Salem. He let out a heavy sigh. “Even you can’t possibly think that would work.”

Greyson’s red gaze ticked from Salem back to Dru. One eyebrow quirked up.

Dru shuffled her feet uncertainly. She had to admit that she had no idea how to fight this thing off. She had powered up the sunstone crystal partly on instinct, and partly by accident. In ancient times, people had believed that a sunstone’s radiance could cure lunacy, which they also believed was caused by the full moon. They were pretty much wrong on both accounts, but the sunny crystal did seem to hold the ghost back. For the moment, anyway.

The shadowy figure slipped around to the side, disappearing for a moment behind a row of Salem’s glass-fronted artifact cabinets. Dru moved to intercept it. She had to keep it from circling around behind them.

She caught a momentary glimpse of the thing’s non-face in the darkness. Pinpoints of light ignited in the depths of its eye sockets. But instead of coming after her again, it lifted its arms in a particularly sorcerer-like gesture. That gave Dru pause. Before she could figure out what it meant, the darkness around her suddenly came alive.

The shadows on all sides of her deepened and took on physical form, as if made of thick black oil. Tendrils of swirling darkness stretched toward her from every direction, churning in the air like tentacles.

Instantly, Greyson moved to defend her. “Get back!” He swung the heavy antique chair at the living darkness. It whooshed through the air once, then twice, as the black tentacles snaked out of the way.

On the third swing, Greyson made contact. With a sharp crack, the chair struck a mass of tentacles and shattered. The tentacles swiftly recoiled, driven back by the impact. Jagged chunks of dark painted wood, now sporting pale, raw wood edges, scattered across the floor. Greyson glanced at the purple velvet cushion he was left holding, and threw that, too.

A rare look of wide-eyed surprise passed over Salem’s features. “That chair was two centuries old!” As he spoke, a tangle of shadow tentacles rose up behind him.

“Look out!” Dru yelled.

Pivoting on the cane, Salem raised his free hand. White-hot sparks of magic crackled between his fingers as the shadows snaked toward Dru.

She retreated, holding up the glowing sunstone even higher, as if that would somehow make it brighter. But although the light kept the phantom itself at bay, it had no effect on the writhing tentacles of darkness.

A swirl of shadow slapped across her palm so hard that it felt like her small bones were broken. The sunstone flew out of her numb fingers, extinguished.

They were plunged into near darkness. The only light came from the burning candles in the circle.

The black tendrils swarmed around the protective artifacts, trying to worm their way through its magic defenses. A horrible realization dawned on Dru.

“It’s not after us! It’s after the scroll!” Her heart hammered in her chest, and her knees nearly knocked together. But she knew what she had to do next. She had no choice.

She had to get the scroll first, before those tentacles did.

Fearing she was about to die, Dru dove for the ring of artifacts. She badly misjudged the distance and fell short, landing painfully. Her glasses flew off and skittered away across the floor, leaving her nearly blind.

Ignoring the teeth-aching pressure of the warding spell, she elbow-crawled forward, not daring to lift her head. Shadowy tendrils hissed back and forth, just inches above her skull.

Summoning up all of her courage, Dru reached one shaking hand toward the ring of artifacts, fearing it would be crushed by a grasping tentacle, or worse.

The humming vibration of the defensive spell started up again as she reached toward it. The sensation was not unlike sticking her hand outside a car window at highway speeds. Even though there was no wind, the air itself took on an invisible force, trying to push her away. The teeth-aching pressure came back, pressing painfully against her eardrums.

Currently, that magical pressure was the only thing keeping the dark tendrils at bay. But in the feeble light of the guttering candles, Dru could clearly see the swarming darkness inching down, like a tornado descending from storm clouds to wreak destruction.

She had to get to the scroll first. But no matter how hard she pushed, she couldn’t get her fingers past the creepy ring of artifacts. The invisible force was too strong for her to get through.

But the tentacles were stronger. Slowly but surely, they drilled downward. Now they were only inches from the scroll.

Despite the fact that she had lost her glasses and had only a few candles to see by, Dru was still close enough to spot a crystal among the artifacts. It was a forearm-sized amethyst crystal, dark purple at the blunt end, fading to a pale rose pink at its narrow tip. Amethyst was one of the most powerful protective crystals, especially against any kind of non-physical attack. Immediately, she dropped her hand to it, and felt it tingle her skin with its vibrations.

She didn’t necessarily have to reach the scroll, she realized. She just had to prevent the shadows from getting it. That meant she had to bolster the defenses of the circle. And that would require powering up the nine crystals Salem had placed around the circle. But was she powerful enough?

“Dru!” Greyson called from the darkness somewhere behind her.

Where was the ghost? It could be on them in an instant. “Stay back!” she shouted. “Protect Salem!”

Salem, meanwhile, thrust out his free hand, now crackling with jagged arcs bright enough to sear her retinas. A glimmer of magic suffused the air around him, silhouetting him in a luminous haze as he tried to force the tentacles back with waves of invisible force. The wash of his magic rustled Dru’s hair like a silent wind.

Clearly, it was a strain for Salem to operate at full strength. He pushed out harder with his incandescent hands, and his lips drew back from his teeth in a desperate snarl. The air around him shimmered like heat waves on a desert highway.

The floorboards hummed. Every small object nearby went airborne, as if blown away in a storm wind. Books flapped their pages, flipped over, and hurtled up into the air. Lampshades tilted and tumbled over Dru’s head like kites. The glass fronts of the display cases around her cracked, then shattered. Bits of broken glass sprayed overhead, glinting in the faint candlelight like distant stars.

Dru’s new blue-framed glasses came skittering across the scratched wooden floorboards toward her. She snatched them up and settled them on her nose.

As she did, the white plastic bag of Chinese takeout tumbled end over end, as if kicked. It came open, and Dru was instantly soaked head to foot in a particularly aromatic garlic chicken broth, along with chunks of lukewarm chicken, gobs of squiggly noodles, and chopped carrots the size of silver dollars. Tiny diced green scallions peppered the lenses of her glasses.

Gasping in surprise, she nearly lost her grip on the amethyst crystal. But she held on tight. Blotting out the chaos around her, Dru focused all of her attention on charging up the crystal. She willed it to become an extension of her body, her thoughts, her force of will. She pushed her magic into it, and it started to give off a cool gleam, like summer twilight.

As she charged up the amethyst, its protective energies flowed around the ring of artifacts, strengthening its defenses. For a moment, the thrill of success made Dru giddy. But it evaporated as she watched the black tentacles continue to corkscrew downward. Now they were barely an inch away from the scroll. Salem wasn’t slowing them down at all.

In moments, the living shadows would be able to touch the scroll’s last remaining wax seal, the only thing holding off doomsday.

Frustration burned inside her. The amethyst crystal wasn’t enough. Dru was powerless to stop the tentacles. Even Salem couldn’t help.

And then Greyson was there at her side. He held out his hand, and she gladly took it.

Greyson was more than just the greatest guy she’d ever kissed. He was also an arcana rasa, a natural-born sorcerer who had never developed any spell-casting powers of his own. As a result, his body was like a furnace of magical strength that he himself couldn’t burn. But he could give it to her.

As she tightened her grip on his broad palm, she felt the familiar jolt of his magical power mingling with hers. For the briefest of moments, it felt like the two of them had become one. She could draw on his energy as well as her own, doubling her power. A tremendous rush came with it, and she gave in to the wild flow of power as she sent it shooting into the ring of artifacts.

She reached out to not only the amethyst but all nine of the crystals carefully arranged around the circle. All at once, they lit up, radiating different colors of light from where they were nestled among the various creepy artifacts. They flared red and blue like a fire engine, silvery white, bottle green, sunrise orange. A faint ringing sound pierced the air, growing louder and shriller as the crystals grew brighter.

Their combined light, pure white in the center of the circle, slowed the dark tentacles to a stop, and then gradually drove them back. No matter how much they writhed and thrashed, the crystals pushed them further away. Six inches away. A foot. A yard.

Despite the fact that Dru was terrified out of her mind, aching from head to toe, and dripping with soup, she found herself grinning ear to ear. They were doing it. Together, they were protecting the apocalypse scroll.

The tentacles pulled back, as if the hands that controlled them had been yanked away. They had already expended so much of their power that Salem had been able to sneak in from the side. With a blast of force, he flattened the tentacles into a writhing wall of solid darkness.

Though he leaned heavily on his cane, his other trembling arm was deeply engaged in powerful sorcery. His spidery fingers were nearly consumed in a crackling hot vortex of magic.

As he slowly crossed this clearing in his cluttered loft, closing in on the apparition, the wooden floor around him was swept clean of every speck of dust by the force of his spell. At the periphery, a massive whirlwind of debris roared around, orbiting him and the ghost.

Salem lifted his brilliant hand higher. His magic threw the shadowy creature against the brick wall and pinned it there. With its long bony arms splayed out to either side, the thing squirmed and struggled, unable to break free. Under the constant onslaught of Salem’s unrestrained power, the ghost shriveled to no more than a skeletal wisp of a thing, shrieking with an inhuman keening cry that chilled Dru’s blood. As she watched, the thing became thinner and thinner.

It dwindled until it was nothing more than a wrinkle of shadow, easily mistaken for a jagged crack in the wall. In moments, it would be completely destroyed.

Despite the fact that Salem was possibly the most obnoxious sorcerer Dru had ever had to deal with, it was impossible not to feel awe at the sheer magnitude of his power. When he completely cut loose like this, he was seemingly unstoppable. It was easy to see why Rane was so drawn to him.

But just when Dru was starting to think Salem had saved the day, his knees buckled. His trembling arm drooped, and the blinding light of his spell began to flicker and fade. Dru knew what was about to happen, but she was powerless to stop it.

The problem was that Salem didn’t do anything in moderation.

Even on the best of days, he had the tendency to overtax his own powers to the point where he ran himself into the ground. And right now was anything but the best of days. Being injured, he’d had little enough stamina to begin with. And now he looked like he was about to pass out.

Before his spell had completely done its work, it abruptly died away. The roar of magic dwindled to a whisper, and then nothing at all. Airborne debris clattered to the floor. Papers fluttered down out of the air like a flock of birds. Smaller objects pelted the room, like heavy raindrops, some of them breaking on impact.

The ghost, withered to no more than a jagged fissure of darkness, began to pulse and swell. As Dru watched, strength came surging back to the nearly destroyed creature. With a soul-chilling cry, it regained its humanoid form. Its long arms reached out, ghostly fingers grasping, as it broke loose from Salem’s spell.

Salem’s head lolled. As he toppled to the floor, unconscious, Dru came to the cold realization that there was no way to stop the ghost now. They were all as good as dead.