Within the vast burning circle, the five-pointed star lit the entire valley with an unearthly golden glow. At the center was a roiling pit of magic growing more powerful under Lucretia’s control. Along the edge of the circle, at each point of the star, a van full of crystals glowed a different scintillating color, powering her spell.
The van near Dru had been half mashed by Soulbreaker’s crash. The red demon car swerved erratically through the valley, still overwhelmed by the galena. Dru knew that wouldn’t last forever, and sooner or later the demon car would recover and come back after them again. Next to her, the demolished van glowed with an uneven light, since half its crystals lay in the grass. On the ground nearby, the vast golden star sparkled.
Dru mentally flipped through the advanced magical combinations she had learned from Lucretia’s spell book, trying to think of something that could help them. She had studied Lucretia’s notes closely enough to give her at least a glimpse into how the masterful sorceress did her thing. But Dru still didn’t know nearly enough to cast those kinds of spells without messing them up.
At that thought, she snapped her fingers. Right now, messing up a spell was exactly what she needed to do.
Squaring her shoulders, Dru turned to her friends. “Listen up, people. I know this looks bad. Really bad, actually. But we’ve been in tough spots before.” Maybe not this tough, she silently added. “It doesn’t matter how impossible things look. We are the only ones who can stop this. And we can stop it, if we all work together. If we all trust one another. I know among sorcerers, trust is an issue.”
She nodded once to Salem, who had told her as much many times before. He inclined his head, studying her from under the brim of his top hat.
“But all of us know what we’re doing,” Dru continued. “And we are going to win. If you trust me.”
All eyes were focused on her. She couldn’t mess this up. Everything was riding on this. Everything.
Dru cleared her throat. “Ember, are you up to teleporting?”
Ember, bloody and bruised, barely had the strength to sit up. She looked down at her shredded coat, and when she met Dru’s gaze again, the fear was plain in her eyes. Silently, she shook her head.
“Alligator.” Rane’s voice rang with grudging respect. “Real nasty one, too.”
“That’s okay. We can do this a different way,” Dru said, mentally adjusting the plan that was only half formed in her head. “Opal, check over Ember, try to stop her bleeding. See if she can walk. Rane, can you run?”
Rane, still in metal form, flexed her right leg, which was deeply gouged with claw marks. She grimaced in pain. “If I have to.”
“You may have to. Your job is simple. Get Opal and Ember as far away from the vans as possible. Carry them if you need to. A couple of minutes from now, when I get done with these vans, they will probably explode. Big boom. So everybody needs to get way back. Salem—”
He shot her a warning look.
She didn’t care. “Reassemble this van behind me. Get all the blue larimar crystals up out of the grass and back inside, fast as you can.”
He looked puzzled. “That will make Lucretia’s spell stronger.”
“Exactly. And then what you and I are going to do is reverse the order of these vans. Back and forth, across the circle, we’re going to swap them left and right.”
His eyebrows went up. “A counterspell?”
“Yeah. I need you to be ready to levitate this van the moment you see me coming back.”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
She pointed down the arc of the golden circle, toward the next van. “I’m going to go steal that van and bring it over here. When I do, I need you to levitate this van over into its place. The old switcheroo. Can you do that?”
He cracked his knuckles. “Don’t be insulting. Of course I can.”
“Good. Let’s move, people! Go!” She turned to Greyson. “Give me a ride?”
He smiled wryly. “Thought you’d never ask.” Just then, bright blue-white headlights washed over them. From a few hundred yards away, Soulbreaker charged at them, apparently recovered from the galena crystals. The speed demon closed in fast.
Greyson squeezed her hand. “I’ll buy you some time.”
As he started for Hellbringer, Dru caught him and planted a quick kiss on his lips. “Come back to me,” she whispered.
His glowing red eyes looked deeply into hers, holding a promise. Then he slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and Hellbringer charged into battle.
Dru glanced over her shoulder to make sure everyone else was moving, and then she took off running in the opposite direction, toward the other van. The ground shook underfoot as another shock wave rolled out from the glowing pit at the center of the circle. Dru stumbled, found her footing, and kept running.
Behind her, tires clawed at the dirt and metal crushed against metal with a sickening whump. She glanced back long enough to see Hellbringer pushing Soulbreaker sideways. The red speed demon’s engine bawled as it tried to wrench itself free.
Ahead of her, a few hundred yards away, the windshield of the next van glowed with bright yellow light. Just her luck, she had to pick the sulfur van. As bad as it would smell, the furnace of energy inside it would be even worse. She pulled the black tourmaline crystal out of her pocket and squeezed it in her palm, willing her magical energy to flow into it. It responded with a warm glow that seeped out between her fingers. Hopefully, its aura would be enough to protect her against the radiating magic of the charged sulfur crystals.
Another tremor hit, bouncing Dru off her feet. She fell face-first into dirt and half-dead grass. Spitting out the foul taste, she scrambled to her feet and kept running. She was almost there.
One big worry nagged at the back of Dru’s mind. All of Lucretia’s spells depended on layering multiple effects one on top of another. There was something about this massive spell that seemed incomplete, but she couldn’t put her finger on what, exactly. What was she missing?
Breathing hard, she finally reached the van. This close, the glow from the crystals in the back shone out through every crack in the van as if a yellow floodlight had been turned on back there. The air stank like rotten eggs. She could feel the heat as soon as she touched the door handle. At least there was a metal partition behind the seats to help shield her from the crystals.
Sticking the tourmaline back in her pocket, she took a deep breath and yanked the door open. An oven-hot blast of foul air rolled over her as she climbed into the scorching vinyl seat and reached for the ignition keys.
They weren’t there.
Fighting off panic, Dru looked behind the sun visor, in the cup holders, and in the glove box. Nothing. Finally, she had to admit there were no keys in the van.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” She pounded her fists uselessly on the steering wheel.
Another tremor shook the earth, worse than the last. Outside, a jagged shelf of rock fractured and thrust upward, crashing up under the passenger side of the van. A moment of vertigo washed over Dru as the van tilted to the left, farther and farther.
“Oh, no, no, no!” Dru scrambled toward the rising passenger side, clinging to the seats as the van toppled onto its left side with a crunch of metal. The short door in the metal partition behind the seats clanged open. Fumes spewed from the hot, churning sulfur crystals, making her head spin. She blinked to clear her eyes, struggling to stay conscious.
As the earthquake continued, she fought to get the heavy passenger door open, opening it up over her head like a hatch. Gasping, she dragged herself out onto the warm, slick sheet metal of the van. Out here, at least, the air was cool and clear. But lying on its side like this, the van was clearly going nowhere.
Could Salem levitate it from this distance? She scanned the valley until she found him standing well clear of the circle, under the tallest rocky outcropping that loomed over the valley. “Salem!” she shouted, waving her arms overhead, but he didn’t seem to notice her.
From this distance, she could clearly see the shock waves of the earthquake traveling outward like ripples on the surface of a pond. At the far end of the valley, Rane’s body shimmered in the blood-red moonlight. She carried Ember toward the mouth of the valley and pulled Opal along, half dragging her as the ground shook beneath them.
With a deep, crackling roar that struck fear into Dru’s heart, a rocky outcropping broke loose from the canyon wall above. It leaned outward, trailing dust and smaller fragments of rock behind it, then plummeted down the steep slope. It broke apart as it tumbled, gouging other rocks and dirt out of the valley wall, triggering a massive rockslide. Dru watched helplessly as the barrage of rocks and dust swept down at Salem.
A metallic warning shout rang out across the valley, and Rane sprinted toward him, legs pumping. The ground heaved and split beneath her feet. She vaulted over rocks and fissures, streaking toward Salem. But even from this distance, Dru could see she wouldn’t reach him in time.
He had already turned to face the rockslide. With his hands shoved skyward, he parted the rockslide with a cone of invisible force. Spinning rocks bounced away from him, leaving comet-like trails of dirt flying behind them. For a moment, it looked like Salem would be able to turn the tide. But in the end, the rockslide was simply too vast.
Rane reached him, arms outstretched, just as the rocks thundered down around them, engulfing them in a cloud of dust.
Dru watched, frozen to the spot, hands covering her mouth, unable to breathe. Her heart thudded in her chest as she counted out the passing seconds. There was no sign of Rane or Salem.
Numb, Dru couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. She could only stare, transfixed, as the dust settled around the fallen boulders and the last few rocks tumbled away.
There was no other movement.
They were gone.
Dru gasped, suddenly feeling as if she couldn’t pull air into her lungs fast enough. She wanted to run to help, wanted to hide, but there was no way to do either. As another shock wave rattled the van, she crawled to the edge and dropped to the ground. Despite the heat from the van full of crystals, she felt cold to the core. The world started to spin around her.
Rane . . . Salem . . .
She forced thoughts of them aside. She had to focus on stopping Lucretia’s spell. The sixth seal of the apocalypse scroll promised a globe-rending earthquake. It was only going to get worse from here. Every second counted.
On the ground near the van’s upturned wheels lay the copper cable that circled the valley, forming the glowing circle that connected the crystals. Functionally, it wasn’t all that different from the smaller circles Dru wove out of individual strands of copper wire. The difference was mainly one of scale.
At the center of it all, Lucretia stood silhouetted against the brilliant shimmers of light emanating from the hole in the earth. She raised her arms overhead, and the glow became brighter. She was trying to destroy the world, and she was succeeding.
Dru studied the glowing copper cable at her feet. If she could inject her own energy into the spell and disrupt Lucretia’s efforts, her interference might be enough to distract the other sorceress and cause her spell to fail. It was a long shot, considering that Lucretia outclassed her by decades of experience. The chances of Dru knocking her that far off-balance were slim.
Worse, jumping into the middle of this spell would probably mean Dru’s destruction. She just wasn’t equipped to handle that kind of monstrously powerful magic.
But what choice did she have?
Blood-red moonlight spilled across the valley. The very earth moved, threatening to break apart soon. Stars fell all around, filling the air with deadly thunder. Headlights lashed across the dead grass as Soulbreaker bashed Hellbringer and Greyson, again and again. As for Rane and Salem . . . She couldn’t bear to look at the still-settling rubble.
This was it. The only other plan she had was now blown to pieces. This was the only chance she had left. She had to make it count.
Dru knelt, squeezed her eyes shut, and grasped the cable with both hands. Instantly, the magic force of the circle roared through her. It felt like getting pounded by a hurricane of energy. The spell was hundreds of times more powerful than anything she had ever experienced, and it took all of her strength just to keep her thoughts from scattering in the currents of magic. The random chaos of the spell pulled her in every direction at once, threatening to rip her apart.
At first, Dru tried to force her own energy into the circle, in a desperate attempt to disrupt Lucretia’s strength, but she could immediately tell it wouldn’t work. Lucretia had been planning this spell for too long and had too much power racing through it already. Dru couldn’t change the spell’s course directly. But she did glimpse a way to dismantle it from the inside.
As she fought her way through the torrents of magic, Dru began to sense a pattern. It wasn’t random chaos that assaulted her but magic of a more fractal nature. The complex spell was actually woven from deceptively simple concepts, the way a beautiful crystal was formed from a single chemical structure. The simplicity of it all was stunning. Despite everything, Dru couldn’t help but be moved by the elegant symmetry of the heart of Lucretia’s spell.
Once she saw the pattern at its center, Dru felt her consciousness soar freely through the spell. She was inside it now, and she could sense its complex invisible energies swirling around her. At its heart, Lucretia spun layers upon layers onto the spell, adding to its destructive force, making it grow ever greater.
To break the spell, Dru would have to physically move Lucretia away from the center so that she could no longer keep building the spell. If Dru could somehow get Lucretia outside the circle, perhaps with Hellbringer’s help, the entire spell would fail. And the world would be saved.
But it wouldn’t be easy. It would require an actual, physical, one-on-one confrontation with Lucretia. Fighting wasn’t Dru’s strong point. But she would do whatever she had to, even if it meant dragging the woman outside the circle by her long red hair.
Dru gritted her teeth and forced her fingers to release the copper cable. Slowly, she opened her eyes and rose to her feet. The earth heaved in waves from the quake, but now that she was attuned to it, she knew how to move with it. The ground dropped away, and as she stepped forward, it rose to meet her again. She now knew the elaborate rhythms of the spell. She could see it all laid out in her mind’s eye, chaotic on the outside, graceful on the inside.
Eyes locked on Lucretia, Dru strode toward her, ready to fight. She had seen this spell from the inside. She had seen the worst that Lucretia could do, and she had found a way to pierce through it. Now, it was time to take the fight to her. Dru would end this, here and now.
As if sensing her approach, Lucretia turned to face her. Even from this distance, Dru could see the pinpoints of bright light that were her eyes. The older sorceress held her hands clasped before her, seeming to study Dru.
With a simple motion, Lucretia opened her hands, palms up, to reveal the chunky green crystal she held. It glowed with a pale unearthly light, like sunshine through an antique green glass bottle.
Dru hesitated, trying to discern the exact kind of crystal Lucretia held. Crystals were sometimes difficult to identify even up close. But there was only one crystal that made that particular alien light.
Vivianite.
With that green crystal, Lucretia could open a portal to the netherworld. But why would she do that right now?
Lucretia’s words came back to haunt her: “Oh, baby, I’m not going to die here. I’m not going to burn with the rest of the world. I’m going to come out the other side.”
She was planning to escape into the netherworld. Lucretia intended to leave the world behind to crumble to dust while she alone survived.
And it looked like she could do it, too. Lucretia had built her earthquake spell to critical mass, and now she intended to let it continue on without her, powered by the energy of millions of tons of radioactive trinitite beneath their feet. If she got away, there would be no way to stop the spell from destroying the entire world.
All of the confidence Dru had felt a moment ago evaporated. She threw caution aside and charged, fully aware that it could be a fatal mistake. But she had no choice. She had to get that vivianite crystal out of Lucretia’s hands before the other sorceress escaped.
But before Dru got even halfway there, a burst of green glowing light signaled that Lucretia was already casting the portal spell. The open pit at her feet rippled, as if underwater. A high-pitched keening sound sliced through the air, starting just outside the range of human hearing and shuddering down to a bone-shaking low. With a flash of colorless energy and a howling hot wind, the hole in the ground pierced the boundary between worlds and opened itself to the netherworld. The light emanating up from the hole became a twisting whirlwind that reached high into the sky, surrounded by spirals of ethereal energy.
“No!” Dru shouted, but it was already too late.
As if called, Soulbreaker streaked across the valley toward the blinding white portal, door opening as it approached. With a triumphant glance back at Dru, Lucretia slipped behind the wheel and slammed the door. The red speed demon’s back tires spewed dirt as it accelerated toward the light.
Dru could only stare as Soulbreaker vanished into the light, carrying Lucretia into the netherworld. All around, rocks, dirt, and sickly trees broke loose, sucked into the vortex before it vanished, leaving behind the crumbling pit at the center of the earthquake spell.
Dru staggered to a halt, stunned, as the edges of the hole collapsed inward. The spell’s insatiable hunger was eerily beautiful to watch, this ultimate force of destruction that consumed everything around it. It grew larger by the moment, devouring the valley floor.
The earth itself was beginning to disintegrate, and soon the entire valley—and everyone in it—would be annihilated by the earthquake spell. From there, the rate would only accelerate until the entire world was broken into pieces. Dru’s brain, on autopilot, did the math and arrived at a figure of just under twenty-four hours until total worldwide destruction.
She sank to her knees on the shaking ground, all of her energy spent. Tears flowed freely down her face. Despite everything, she had failed. In the end, Lucretia had managed to cast the spell she had spent half a century preparing for, the spell to bring about doomsday at last. And there was nothing Dru could do to stop it now.