“I hold stuff back.”
That was one of the first things Lucio ever said to me, as I sat across the table from him in the cafeteria during the lunch break. I thought I knew what he meant when he said it.
I was so wrong.
Lucio McKinley showed up when I was in eighth grade. I didn’t notice him right away, and I’m not sure anyone else did either. He was one of those kids who’s quiet, not too smart and not too not-smart, doesn’t hang with any particular crowd. He had long straight dark hair and wore a lot of black, so you might have thought he was a Goth, except he didn’t have any tattoos or piercings or shirts with obscure band logos. He never looked anyone in the eye, volunteered for anything, or raised a hand in class.
In fact, like most everyone else at our school I might never have noticed him if it hadn’t been for Jase Cooley.
Jase Cooley was the semi-official school bully. Every school’s got one: the junior douchebag who has nothing going for him except a mean streak and a propensity to attract a following of smaller douchebags who will happily do his bidding. Somewhere over the spring break, “Cool J” had decided he liked me. O joyous day. I managed to avoid him during the weeks of freedom, but when school started up again encounters in classrooms and hallways were inevitable.
At first, they were just irritating, but as he realized I had zero interest in him his intent changed to the bully’s need to dominate. He posted innuendos on my social media that got him banned. He texted me things he probably thought were really hot, like photos of him shirtless; I thought he looked like Jabba the Hutt without the tail.
Finally, one day he and his gang of three got me barricaded into a corner in the school library, right there in the aisle between psychology and sports books. While his flunkies kept a lookout, he pressed up against me, leaving me no room to maneuver around him.
“Go out with me,” he said, shoving his ugly face close.
I turned mine aside. “There are around five hundred other girls in this school,” I told him, looking down at a shelf of Sigmund Freud titles. “You can find somebody else.”
“But I like you.” He pressed up closer. I tried not to gag.
Beyond gagging, I was getting anxious, like “I’m having a panic attack” anxious. It was late in the afternoon; I’d come into the library (little used these days) to research a paper on the Civil War. If I called out for help, would anyone hear me? If they heard…would they help? Or would the minions turn them away so the boss could get on with his business?
“C’mon, just give me a chance,” Jase said, as he lowered his face down to mine. “I’ve got big plans for May.”
I would normally have thought that was incredibly weird, but right then I was more focused on the fact that he seemed to be trying to kiss me. I’d only been kissed once before by a non-relative, not even a non-relative I thought was cute (a kid named Lionel, during a field trip last year), and it hadn’t been what I was expecting. No sparks had flown, or fireworks exploded. If anything, I just felt a vague unease. I’d avoided Lionel ever since.
But I really did not want to kiss Jase Cooley. Not here, not now, not ever. The thought of him made me ill on multiple levels. I tried to edge away, but he put an arm against the wall, blocking my exit. This was getting less acceptable by the second.
“Don’t make me beg,” he said, but the way he snarled the last word made “beg” sound more like “angry.”
My heart hammered for the wrong reasons. I felt like I might cry—
“Leave her alone.”
I couldn’t place the voice, but relief flooded through me. I managed to stand on tiptoes to look past Jase, and there stood Lucio McKinley. Jase’s pals stood behind Lucio, looking sheepish; whatever he’d said to them, it’d been effective.
Jase turned slowly to look back, releasing me in the process. “What did you say?”
Lucio turned his dark eyes on me. “You okay?”
“Barely,” I said, squeezing past Jase. He made a half-hearted attempt to grab me but missed. I moved well past Lucio and the minions, but stopped to look back.
Jase strode down the aisle, his big meaty paws already clenched into fists. Lucio just stood there, calm, poised. Jase reached him, pulled back an arm for a swing – and in that instant, Lucio just raised one arm, long and firm, palm up. Jase thudded to a stop against the hand, tried to press on past the hand, tried to pull Lucio’s arm away, but Lucio was immovable, a guardian statue.
Lucio called back over one shoulder, “He didn’t hurt you, did he, Allie?”
“No.” My throat was too dry to manage anything else. I cleared my throat, stifled a laugh when I saw Jase take a clumsy swing that failed to come anywhere near Lucio. Pretending to back off, Jase half-turned away, then charged Lucio, leading with his shoulder.
Lucio was amazing. He stepped aside, put out a foot, and when Jase went down Lucio was on him instantly, one knee digging painfully into Jase’s back. Jase huffed and squirmed, but couldn’t get up.
“Are we done here?” Lucio asked.
Jase winced once, then said, “Yeah, sure.”
Lucio let him up. The minions gave Lucio a wide berth as he approached me. “You should probably go,” he said.
I nodded, gathered up my books and stuffed them into my backpack before following Lucio out. Once we were outside the library, I said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Lucio walked away.
I stood for a few seconds, feeling useless and puzzled. Who saves someone from the school bully and then just takes off without a second thought?
Lucio McKinley, that’s who.
The next day, when I saw Lucio eating lunch alone (like always), I excused myself from my friend Jenna (who I had been eating with, like always) and went to sit across from Lucio. He barely looked up as my tray hit the table.
“So about yesterday...”
Lucio was gobbling pizza. He took his next bite without looking up at me. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just what I do.”
I punched my juice box with the straw and asked, “What you do?”
He nodded before adding, “I hold stuff back.”
“Oh. You mean like…feelings?”
Lucio shook his head, swallowed another bite of pizza, said, “No. I mean like…bad things like Cooley.”
“Bad things?”
He shrugged and nodded at the same time, kind of saying Yeah, Cooley’s a ‘thing,’ but don’t ask me how I know that.
We ate together every day after that.
Slowly, he started to relax around me, even meet my eyes from time to time. I found out his mom had been Italian, and he’d been named after her grandfather. That same grandfather had raised him after both parents had died in a car crash, and his grandmother had died ten years ago of pneumonia. His favorite kind of music was classical, favorite composer Prokofiev. He liked poetry, cats, and dark chocolate, not necessarily in that order.
My friend Jenna got mad at me for dumping her at lunch, so in an ongoing act of revenge porn she started eating with Jase Cooley. When Lucio saw that the first time, his face flushed with anger. “If you still talk to your friend, you should warn her away from him.”
“No point in that—the whole school knows about that dumbass already.”
“No, they don’t.”
Something about his tone—just the sheer force of it—made me look at my new friend closely. He was staring at Cooley, his thick brows knotting together.
“Lucio,” I asked softly, leaning forward so I could almost whisper, “do you know something about Jase Cooley that I don’t?”
For a few seconds Lucio ignored me, then he looked away and mumbled, “Forget about him.”
As much as Lucio revealed stuff to me, I think I revealed more to him. I told him stuff I’d never told anyone, not even Jenna (before she replaced me with the school bully, that is). He heard about how I’d never really felt like I fit in anywhere, how I was happiest being alone, how I didn’t have any idea what I’d do with my life after high school. He was a good listener; he’d nod, ask questions, but he never frowned or looked away, I never felt like he was judging me.
It didn’t take long for me to feel really close to Lucio, but weirdly enough—given that teens are supposed to have raging hormones—I wasn’t attracted to him, and I didn’t think he was to me. We felt more like siblings; we were both only children, and although I’d never wanted a brother, I could imagine that being around Lucio would’ve been like having one.
I was thankful to have Lucio as a new friend because things were getting weird at school. Not the usual kids engaging in weirdness, but weird like a horror movie. One of Cooley’s sidekicks, a skinny, dull-eyed boy named Jack Moss, started screaming for no reason in Chemistry one day and had to be carted off. There were rumors that a butchered dog had been found in the Principal’s office one morning.
And then there was the thing with the mirror.
I was late one day getting ready after P.E., alone in the girls’ bathroom, trying to get my hair to make some kind of sense when I heard a sort of whispering sound. I turned around to look, but nobody else was in there. When I looked into the mirror again, the light in the mirror had somehow dimmed, even though the overhead fluorescents hadn’t changed. Feeling the hairs on my arm rise, I saw the mirror slowly cloud over, as if fog was filling the room behind me. I had the sense that something was in that fog, something that would be reaching out, maybe even reaching through the mirror….
I didn’t wait to find out. I grabbed my stuff and got out of there.
I couldn’t wait to see Lucio after school and tell him what had happened. We’d started hanging out after school at each other’s houses. My mom didn’t know what to make of Lucio, and I had to keep assuring her that we were “just friends.” Lucio’s grandfather also eyed me with suspicion, but there was something different about it; he’d scowl at me and then give Lucio these warning looks. I asked Lucio about it on my third trip to his house, and he just did one of his characteristic shrugs. “Grandpa’s a little wack.”
When I told Lucio what I’d experienced in the bathroom, he didn’t snicker or say “Wow.” Instead he frowned and said, “That’s not good.”
“Lucio, do you know what’s going on?”
“I…” He looked me right in the eye, with an expression I’d never seen. He was torn about something. But then he dropped his gaze and shrugged. “It’s weird, is all.”
One Wednesday, I ran into this girl Tisha near my locker. In the past, she’d occasionally hung out with Jenna and me, although I didn’t really like her much—if she’d been any more shallow, she’d be a single drop of water.
She was opening her locker, three away from mine, when she spotted me. She glanced around, leaned close and half-whispered, “Did you hear about the big party at Jase Cooley’s house this Friday?”
“No.”
She half-smiled and moved even closer. “His parents are off somewhere for a vacation, so he’s throwing this huge bash. Jenna’s helping him set it all up.”
When I looked a little dumbstruck, Tisha cocked one eyebrow. “That’s weird that you didn’t know. I thought you and Jenna were besties.”
I lied. “Sure, I knew. Guess I’ll see you there,” I said, before turning to walk away, numb.
As soon as I was away from Tisha, I pulled out my phone and texted Jenna. She answered right away, confirming that she’d been at Jase’s house all week helping “set up something SICK in the backyard. Oh, btw, your invited Fri night!!!!”
Two hours later, we were in Lucio’s room, with its full bookcases and something classical playing, trying to figure out some math equations. I’d waited until we were away from school to tell him. “Guess what I heard today? Jase Cooley’s throwing a big party on Friday, and Jenna’s been helping him set it up in the backyard.”
Lucio’s brow creased, and he took a few seconds before asking, “Do you know what this Friday is?”
I thought about it, but came up empty. “The day after tomorrow?”
“May Eve.”
“May what?”
“Beltane.”
My friend said that word with such intensity that I felt guilty for not knowing it. He must have seen my look and figured it out, because he added, “In the old pagan calendar there were two days of power, spaced exactly six months apart. One was Samhain—Halloween to us—and the other was Beltane. The celebration started when the sun went down on April 30th, and it was a night when all kinds of bad shit was in play.”
“Bad shit? Like…what?”
“Like the stuff you told me you saw in the bathroom mirror at school. And like…” Lucio trailed off, turning away.
I took a guess. “Like Jase Cooley?”
Lucio’s eyes fixed on me with fresh appreciation. “Yeah. Like Cooley.” He hesitated for a few seconds before getting up from where we were sitting. “C’mon. There’s something I think I need to show you.”
We left Lucio’s bedroom and walked down the hall to a closed door. I’d passed it plenty of times, mildly curious about what was behind it, but just figured it was a spare bedroom or storage or something.
Lucio opened the door and pushed it back. Beyond was an empty room with one curtained window. A closet was inset into one pale cream-colored wall. The floor was a neutral shade of carpet. The whole room was, in other words, completely unspectacular.
But Lucio had a little gleam in his eye, so I felt as if there was something I was supposed to see here. I looked again, but nothing.
He asked, “Empty, right?”
I nodded.
Lucio stepped into the room and then waited. “Close your eyes and walk forward.”
Feeling slightly silly, I did as instructed. I took two steps forward before Lucio’s hand stopped me. “Okay. You can open ’em now.”
I did—and my breath caught in my throat.
The room was completely different. For one thing it was dark, no window. The light came from computer screens—three of them—atop a desk that curved around two walls of the room. The screens all seemed to show people doing things, as if seen by security camera: on one screen, I saw one of Jase Cooley’s buds, Johnny Gonzalez, in a kitchen eating a sandwich; another showed Jack Moss, the kid that had gone crazy, wearing pajamas and sitting in some sort of institutional-looking room, staring slack-jawed at a TV mounted high in one corner. I got the impression that he was drugged to the gills.
Jase Cooley was on the last screen. He was in what I imagined must have been his bedroom, playing a violent video game on a console.
Beyond the monitors were low cases full of books, one big freestanding cabinet like you’d keep guns in, and scraps of paper with scribbled notes. “Lucio, what is this? And how did you do it?”
“Allie,” Lucio said, sounding as serious as I’d ever heard him, “you trust me, right?”
“You know I do.”
“Because what I’m going to tell you…well, you’ll probably think at first that it’s crazy, but it’s not. It’s all real, and it’s all happening now.”
“Okay.”
Lucio gestured at a desk chair. “Why don’t you sit there.”
I did. Lucio sat in another chair, rolled up closer to me, and said, “Before humans were even a gleam in evolution’s eye, the world had other masters. Today, we’d call them monsters. They didn’t look much like humans. They were huge and very powerful, which is why they’re called the Great Old Ones. The earth belonged to them for millions of years, until something happened and they fell into this sort of hibernation.”
Lucio paused, looking at me. I wanted to say, “Is this a story you’re writing?” or “Isn’t it a little late for April Fools?” but he’d never been a practical joker. He was dead serious, so I said, “Hibernation…so…they’re still here?”
“Some of them are. Others just left and went to parallel dimensions. But here’s the thing: the ones who are still here will reawaken. And when they do, it’ll be adios for all of us.”
“Lucio, how do you know all this?”
He drew himself up straight, with pride. “Because I’m part of a group dedicated to making sure they don’t succeed. My mom and dad did it—in fact, they died doing it.”
“They didn’t die in a car crash?”
“No. They died fighting a group of people who were dedicated to calling the Great Old Ones.”
If Lucio were telling the truth—and all I could say for certain was that he believed all this—I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to wake up monsters who were going to kill us all. But then I thought about people who were obsessed with stuff like the Rapture, or even zombie movies, and I realized there were people who would welcome the end of the world. People like…
“Jase Cooley,” I blurted out, looking up at Lucio to see if I was right.
He smiled, nodding. “Yes. We found out a while back that sometimes bullies are more than just bullies. Their pathetic need for power and control can make them seek out alliances with forces who they think can give them what they want. They don’t even realize that their own death is usually included in the deal.”
“You came to our school because of Jase Cooley, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Yes. He got hooked up with some of the Great Old Ones’ followers last year.”
“So, this party…”
Lucio turned and glanced at the array of screens. “It’s got to be a ritual to call them. Beltane would be the best day of the year to hold one. My guess is that he’s going to try an invocation, create a portal between dimensions for the Great Old Ones to cross through, and then try to make a deal with them to let him live.”
“I don’t get it: if you know Jase Cooley is going to try this awful thing, why not just get rid of him now?”
“We protect the human race—all of it, even the bad ones. Besides, we’ve got other ways of working. See Cooley there?”
I followed Lucio’s gaze to the image of Cooley in his room playing the wild first-person-shooter game. “Yeah, but…how are we seeing this?”
Lucio waved a hand across the bank of monitors. “We’ve managed to combine technology with some old magic. We have a spell, not a camera, in Cooley’s room. In fact, that game he’s playing is imbued with spells. It’s keeping him distracted. If it works the way it’s supposed to, he’ll forget all about the preparations he’d need to make to enact a major invocation in two days.”
Something was wrong; something pinged off the back of my brain. I thought back to the last couple of days, finally remembered the conversation with Tisha: “Jenna’s helping him set it all up.”
I asked Lucio, “Have you been watching that video of Cooley all week?”
“Yeah. Why?”
The video image that was supposed to be Cooley showed mostly of the back of his head as he followed the action in the videogame. It looked like his big shoulders, his light brown, short hair, but it could have been someone else. “You’re sure that’s him?”
Lucio blinked in surprise. “Why?”
“Because Jenna told me they’ve been working in his backyard all week.”
Lucio frowned and looked back to the monitor. He started to reach out a hand, but stopped when the image of Jase Cooley stopped playing the game, dropping his hands. He turned his head, slowly, until he was looking right at us.
Except it wasn’t Jase Cooley. In fact, it wasn’t anything human. Where a face should have been was a bumpy, slimy, grayish mass, with dozens of eyes inset. No mouth, no nose, no ears…just lots and lots of eyes, all looking right at us. It raised its arms, except they weren’t arms any more—they were pseudopods, semi-translucent and growing longer as they came towards us—
They pushed through the screen.
Lucio and I both cried out and danced back as the lengthening appendages shot into space between us. I stumbled over my chair, but sidestepped a third pseudopod that appeared out of the screen. Lucio was yelling something in a language I couldn’t identify, leaping from side to side to avoid the things reaching for him. He finally dove under them for the screen, got a hand behind it, and tore out a power cord. The screen went dead, and in that instant the pseudopods vanished. We looked at each other wide-eyed and panting for a few seconds before Lucio asked, “Do you believe me now?”
After our heartbeats returned to calmer rates, Lucio picked his chair back up, plopped down into it, and started thinking. “Damn,” he muttered, “they’ve been ahead of us all along…that thing was a shoggoth. It’s like the foot soldier for the Old Ones. The fact that it was able to come at us like that means that forces are building.” At that point he turned to me. “Has your friend sent you any pictures of what they’ve been working on?”
“No, but I’ll bet I can get her to do it.”
Five minutes later, we were examining a photo of a raised platform in the middle of a backyard of dying, withered plants. On the platform was a big folding table draped with a gray cloth. The sides of the platform and the cloth had drawings of tentacle-headed horrors crudely scrawled on them. Jenna said she was going to climb on it at midnight and they had a whole little scene they’d rehearsed together that was “super dramatic!!!!”
“It’s an altar,” Lucio said, after looking at the photo. “Exactly what I figured. They’re going to try to sacrifice your friend on it.”
“What?” I might have had a falling out with Jenna, but I didn’t want her to die, especially not as an offering to something with calamari for a head.
Lucio explained. “It takes a lot to open the way for a Great Old One. They’d have to offer a human sacrifice.”
I thought back to that day in the library, when Jase had said something about “big plans for May,” and I shivered as I realized that I might have been that sacrifice.
I asked, “So what do we do now?”
“You don’t do anything, except go home, avoid Cooley, and stay away from that party. I prepare.”
“How?”
He got up and crossed to the tall cabinet against the wall. He opened it, reached in, and drew out the biggest book I’d ever seen—it must have weighed as much as a bowling ball. It was obviously old, bound in leather with metal clasps, and it had all kinds of more recent pages shoved into it. Lucio dropped it onto the desk with a thud. “I study this. It’s all the knowledge my parents had, and their parents before them, and so on. Every generation adds to it as we learn things.”
I joined him and ran my fingers over the binding, which was embossed with all kinds of geometrical shapes. “Wow. It’s beautiful.”
He nodded and then looked up at me. “Allie, I need to get to work. I think I can still stop this, but only if I’m prepared.”
“Do you have to do this alone? Can’t anyone help?”
“I’ll have help. My grandfather…well, I should tell you that he’s not really my grandfather. He’s an Elder. They’re like good versions of the Great Old Ones, and they help us to hold them back. My real grandfather died before I was born.”
“Oh.” It made about as much sense as anything else I’d heard today.
Lucio walked me back to his room, where I gathered up my stuff to go. Before I left, he said, “Allie, stay away from the party on Friday, okay?”
I’d like to think he knew I wouldn’t be able to do that, that he just felt obligated to say it. I told him I would, but I think we both knew that was a lie.
Lucio went back to the room with the monitors. As I made my way to the front door, I encountered his “grandfather” in the living room, and I couldn’t stifle another shiver. The way he looked at me…for a second, I thought I could see something incredibly old and alien there, something that didn’t think like me at all, but was ultimately benevolent.
I didn’t like imagining a non-benevolent version of that.
Lucio didn’t show up at school on Thursday or Friday, but Jase Cooley did. He strutted through the hallways like a king, with his two remaining minions and Jenna trailing behind him. At one point, he caught my eye and winked at me. I thought I might vomit.
The worst part was not being able to tell anyone, even Jenna, who thought this was all just fun and games. Who’d believe any of this? If I hadn’t seen gelatinous arms reaching through a computer monitor for me, I might have thought Lucio was just—well, very peculiar. But I had seen that, and it meant that I’d learned very abruptly that the world wasn’t what I thought it was. It was really a place where bullies friended ancient monsters to destroy the world.
Fortunately, it was also a place where heroes like Lucio McKinley held them back.
On Friday morning, I woke up to two texts. The one from Jenna said, “Your coming tonight, right??!!!”
The one from Lucio read, “I got this. You’re staying home tonight, right?”
The school felt strange that day, like the way air felt before a storm moved in, or how spring made your nose tickle.
I didn’t see Lucio or Jase. Jenna was there, but I avoided her.
That night at 9 p.m., I left my home. I’d told my mom I was going to a party at Jenna’s. She said it was okay.
Cooley lived maybe four blocks from me. By the time I’d walked half the distance, I could already hear the music and the sound of voices. I knew his neighbors must love that. I also knew he thought his neighbors would be dead by Saturday.
There must’ve been a hundred kids at the party. They spilled out of the backyard onto the front lawn and the sidewalks. As I pushed my way through, they were in groups talking, dancing, drinking, smoking, flirting. A few said “hi.” Most didn’t notice me.
In the back, a deejay bobbed behind a table that held a laptop, a turntable, and huge speakers. More tables were set up with sodas and cups and potato chips.
Then there was the altar. It squatted in the middle of the backyard. Cooley had put up sawhorse barriers around it and stationed his two flunkies there to act as security. They scowled, trying to look tough. I wondered if they had the slightest idea what was about to go down.
I didn’t see Jase, Jenna, or Lucio. I tried to blend into the crowd, to engage in meaningless chatter with friends while I sipped flat soda from a plastic cup and tried not to think about anything.
Time passed too slowly. I thought I might explode from nerves.
Finally, 11:45 arrived. The music stopped. The chatter died down as everyone waited to see what was going on.
Jase and Jenna came out of the house. Jenna was dressed in some white robe that left one shoulder bare. She was also obviously drunk, barely able to stay upright, giggling, as she let Cooley lead her through the party.
Cooley also had on a robe, but his was green and covered with symbols. Unlike the cheap altar cloth, the robe was hand embroidered and looked rich, authentically old.
He held Jenna by one hand and carried a large bag in the other. The crowd applauded as he led Jenna through their midst, past the guards and the sawhorses, up onto the altar.
As she lay down on it, I almost ran forward. I wanted to tell her to wake up, get off there before it was too late, but I knew it would just get me hauled out of the party. I forced myself to stay quiet and watch as Cooley took up position at one end of the altar, above Jenna’s head, and opened the bag to withdraw a book, not as old or as big as the one Lucio had, but nevertheless impressive.
He opened the book to a marked passage, held up one arm for silence, and began reading in some language that sounded like he was speaking in tongues.
Some of the kids around me whispered in perplexity; others applauded, thinking this was some party skit. But a few others, who weren’t already drunk or stoned or too preoccupied with looking cool, could sense a change in the very air, an oppressive feeling of forces in motion. Cooley felt it, as he paused once and looked up, expectantly, before resuming his reading with more speed.
Where was Lucio? This was going down now. Whatever he had prepared, he’d better set it in motion pretty quick.
Cooley kept reading. At 11:55, he shifted the book to his left hand, used his right to reach down into the bag, and came up with a huge, very sharp-looking knife. This wasn’t some kitchen knife, even one of the big ones; it had a carved hilt, and the blade looked thick and well-used.
He lifted it over Jenna.
She giggled.
He kept reading.
Above him, the air began to glow. I thought I could see dozens of eyes taking shape there.
Cooley saw it, too. He raised the knife higher.
A voice, impossibly loud, boomed out from the crowd of onlookers, a voice speaking in that same strange, rolling tongue that Cooley was using.
Lucio!
Cooley stopped reading as he looked for the source of the shout, but immediately returned to the book as his minions moved forward. The crowd parted like the Red Sea and there stood Lucio, alone, one arm raised in the same way that he’d held Cooley back in the library.
Lucio was glimmering. Not glowing with the sort of sickly green that was swirling in the air overhead, but with a shimmery gold that sparked at the edges. He wore his usual black jeans and t-shirt, but there were symbols etched onto his face, and he wore a pendant that was so bright it hurt to look at it.
He strode forward confidently as the two flunkies ran at him—and bounced back as if he was surrounded by a shield. They fell to the grass and he walked by them.
It was 11:59.
He walked up to the altar, where Cooley was still reading, but Cooley’s attention was divided now and he stumbled on the words. He glanced at his watch, saw the time, and tossed the book aside carelessly so he could grip the knife in both hands. Overhead, something was taking shape, something the size of a trailer truck, studded with eyes and those groping, jelly-like arms. People were screaming, running, pushing each other to get away.
No one paid attention to Jase Cooley as he raised the knife over my friend.
One person noticed: Lucio. Still shouting in that weird language, he leapt up to the platform and caught Cooley’s knife hand as it came down. They struggled for a few seconds.
A snake-like arm wrapped around Cooley’s throat. He forgot the knife; Lucio caught it as it fell. Without wasting a second, he used the blade to hack at the thing strangling Cooley.
He was trying to save his enemy.
Lucio severed the arm just as several wrapped around him. One had his wrist, two had his legs. He was pulled up, struggling and squirming.
I screamed and rushed forward, acting on pure instinct. I couldn’t just stand by silently and watch Lucio die. I jumped up on the platform, reaching up—
But Lucio was already too far. I could hear him still shouting as he was pulled higher and higher, into the glowing green mass of eyes and arms.
Then it all winked out. In an eyeblink, it was all gone—the swirling cloud, the charge in the air…and my friend.
I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but I knew that whatever it was, Cooley had failed. He stood there gaping upward, his mouth hanging open. I shoved him, and he fell backward, landing on his ass on the ground. I jumped down next to him and said, “If I ever see you again, you’ll regret it.”
From the look on his face, I knew he believed it.
I guess neither of us quite realized I was crying as I said it.
I went home after that. But I didn’t sleep that night.
In the morning, I went to Lucio’s house. His “grandfather” met me at the door.
“Do you know what happened last night?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Did you make it stop?”
“Yes,” he said, in a voice that buzzed inhumanly at the end of syllables. “But I couldn’t save Lucio.”
I asked to see the special room, the one I now realized was guarded by magic to hide it. When I went in, all the monitors were dark…but the book he’d shown me was still there, the one that he’d said held all the knowledge.
I picked it up and turned to the Elder. “May I take this?”
He understood what I was really asking. “It is a very heavy responsibility.”
“Will you help me as you did Lucio?”
“Yes.”
I’d like to think that Lucio is still alive, carrying on his fight on the other side of that glowing green cloud. He still had the knife, after all, and I think the pendant he wore gave him more powers. Maybe, after I’ve studied the book long enough, I’ll be able to find him, to save him as he saved all of us.
In the meantime, I’ll be here.
I’ll be the one guarding against the darkness and the Old Ones that want our world. I’ll be the one holding back.