Elliot and the Last Underworld War (16 page)

Sometime last year Elliot had seen a cartoon about a kid who battled hundreds of alien invaders all by himself to save planet Earth. He had liked the movie, but that’s all it was, just a story a bunch of writers had made up. Right before poofing back to the woods to face Kovol, Elliot tried to think of even one true story where a kid does battle with someone a lot stronger and wins.

He didn’t know any. Not even one.

But he couldn’t worry about that with Kovol. Besides, Elliot liked the idea of being the first kid ever to win against such odds. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to tell everyone that he was the one who saved Earth. Maybe when he was a hundred years old and on his deathbed, he could gather his friends and family around him and say, “Did I ever tell you about the time I saved the world?” Yeah, that’d be cool. He was going to put that on his calendar for eighty-nine years from now.
If
he was still alive eighty-nine minutes from now, of course.

Elliot’s plan had been to poof in quietly and make the first attack on Kovol. And it would have been a fine plan, except he maybe did too good a job in picturing Kovol and poofed in right on top of the evil Demon’s head. Since Kovol was bald, Elliot slipped off his head and would have fallen all the way to the ground if he had not grabbed on to each of Kovol’s long, twisted horns.

Kovol yelled and swung his head, trying to get Elliot off. Elliot would have been very happy to get off, but he couldn’t let go with Kovol swinging him so hard. His body was flung around wildly in the air. Kovol got angrier and angrier, twisting his head as far to the right as he could. Elliot’s body flew all the way around Kovol’s head, and he accidentally kicked Kovol in the nose.

Kovol fell back in pain, and this time Elliot let go of the horns and scrambled free as fast as he could.

“So that’s how you want things to be,” Kovol muttered.

No. Actually, the way Elliot wanted things was for Kovol to never have woken up in the first place. Or if he did wake up, he’d have wanted Kovol not to have made such a big deal about Elliot’s taking his last hair. Maybe Elliot could have politely apologized for taking the hair, and then Kovol would’ve said, “That’s okay,” and they could’ve played a game of Limburger soccer instead of all this.

However, none of that was going to happen.

Kovol charged for Elliot, with his bruised nose snorting and his claws out. Elliot whispered to his magic, “Block him,” fully expecting a shield to come up between them. But instead, a pile of toy building blocks fell from nowhere above them, landing on Kovol like a perfectly square hailstorm. Kovol looked up to see what was happening, and the corner of a block landed straight in his eye.

“Ow, my eye!” Kovol yelped. “Why would you do that?”

Stubbornly, Elliot folded his arms. The blocks had been an accident, but this was supposed to be an ultimate battle to save the world, so he wouldn’t apologize.

“That’s right.” Elliot tried sounding as tough as he could. “And there’s more where that came from!”

Maybe that was true, maybe not. He wasn’t really clear on where any of this was coming from.

Kovol huffed and ran toward Elliot again. But Elliot was getting the feel of Pixie magic now. It wasn’t great magic for strength or power, but it was excellent if you were trying to trick someone.

So when Kovol started running, Elliot pictured old-fashioned roller skates on the bottom of the Demon’s feet. To make it funnier, he pictured girly ones. Even pinker than a Pixie dress and with glittery hearts covering every inch of them.

The skates appeared, and with his arms flailing around, Kovol rolled right past Elliot and crashed into the trunk of a wide oak tree. Even though he knew he shouldn’t, Elliot laughed. Besides, why not? Kovol’s anger couldn’t get any worse. He hoped.

If Kovol had been a Troll or even a Goblin, Elliot probably could have continued with magical jokes for the rest of the day. But Kovol couldn’t be tricked for long. And he definitely didn’t think the roller skates were nearly as funny as Elliot did. Once he kicked them off his feet, he turned and hurled back a ball of energy so fast that it threw Elliot into the air. Elliot landed with a hard thump on the ground.

Now it was Kovol’s turn to laugh. Only, unlike Elliot’s happy laugh over a funny joke, his was dark and mean and made Elliot think maybe he didn’t want to get back up again.

Still seated, Elliot tried throwing an energy ball of his own at Kovol, but it came out more like a gentle puff of air. Kovol swatted it out of the way like he would a bothersome fly.

“Pixie magic,” Elliot whispered. It wasn’t about strength. It was about trickery. He had the idea to make it rain actual cats and dogs, but Kovol struck at him first, creating a sinkhole exactly where Elliot was sitting. With nothing but air suddenly beneath him, Elliot fell. He tumbled head over heels into a hole that looked bottomless. Finally he found the magic to grab on to a dangling tree root, and then he began the long climb back to the surface. Kovol stood at the top of the sinkhole with his smelly armpits raised again. He was gathering more lightning between his clawlike hands.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Elliot closed his eyes to picture the edge of the sinkhole becoming a sheet of thick ice. Kovol slipped on the ice that magically formed and landed on his large Demon backside, then slid over the edge and right past Elliot into the sinkhole.

“Gotcha!” Elliot called. Then he poofed back to the surface and brushed his hands together. Carefully he peered over the edge, curious about how far into the hole Kovol had fallen.

But Kovol wasn’t down there. Which means he had—

“No, I’ve got
you
!” From behind, Kovol grabbed Elliot around the waist and lifted him into the air.

Elliot put his hands over Kovol’s and tried to pry himself free, but Kovol was a lot stronger than Elliot, even with the Pixie magic.

“I’ll take your magic before eating you,” Kovol said. “You’ll taste better that way.”

“I’ll taste terrible!” Elliot said. “I haven’t had a bath for three days!” He couldn’t let Kovol take his magic. For that matter, he really didn’t want to be eaten either.

Elliot squirmed, but it was useless. He tried to pull together enough magic to get away from Kovol, but he was being squished too tightly for the magic to work properly. Elliot felt a little frustrated by that. If he had invented magic, he would have made it so you could use it even when you were squished. Or maybe
especially
when you were squished.

Kovol pulled him back over solid ground. Elliot knew for a fact that it was solid, because Kovol dropped him on it. He tried rolling away so that he could gather some magic to defend himself, but Kovol immediately put a foot on Elliot’s chest. That made it hard to do magic, which was a problem. It was even harder to breathe, which was a much bigger problem.

Standing over him now, Kovol started moving his arms, almost as if he were pulling an invisible rope out of Elliot’s body. Elliot felt the magic being dragged out of him, and he held on to it with all of his strength. But strength was not one of the gifts of Pixie magic, so all Elliot had was his own determination not to let Kovol take this magic. It would only make Kovol more powerful, and it would leave Elliot completely defenseless.

Elliot swatted at the Demon’s foot with his hands, but it didn’t do any good and only tired him out faster. He closed his eyes, searching for enough magic left inside him to fight back. Anything. But as hard as he searched, he found nothing at all. If he couldn’t figure out something soon, the last Underworld war would be over in the next few minutes.

Just when Elliot thought he could hold on no longer, he heard a voice somewhere in the woods behind him. “Let go of our brother!”

“No!” Elliot cried in the loudest voice he had (which at that point was little more than a whisper). That was either Kyle or Cole, one of his younger twin brothers.

A fat stream of water shot through the air, hitting Kovol squarely in the back. It knocked him off balance, and Elliot rolled out from under his foot.

Elliot sat up on his elbows. Kyle and Cole were nearby with a kinked hose they had somehow dragged all this way into the woods. Behind them were Wendy, Reed, Cami, and, for some reason, Tubs.

“What are you doing here?” Elliot asked

“I told them about you,” Cami said. “I told them everything. Maybe you can’t tell your secrets, but I can.”

Elliot scrambled to his feet and ran over to them.

“King, huh?” Reed said, his mouth in a half smile. “How funny is that?”

“This isn’t a joke,” Elliot said. “You have to run away from here.”

“And miss all this fun?” one of the twins said. They released another spurt of water at Kovol, knocking him back down.

“We came to help you fight,” Wendy said. “When Mom and Dad are at work, they tell us to take care of each other. Well, that’s what we’re doing.”

“They meant to be sure we all eat dinner and get our homework done,” Elliot said. “Not help fight Underworld wars!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tubs said. “Duck.”

Elliot ducked down, and Tubs lobbed a rock at Kovol, clonking him on the forehead and knocking him down again.

“Now’s your chance,” Cami said. “We got that ugly beast distracted. Now use some magic to finish him off.”

“I’m not sure I have any magic left,” Elliot said. “If I do, it’ll take a while to charge up again.” He took a deep breath. “Besides, we’ll just be fighting him all day unless I can finish making that potion.”

“I brought it,” Cami said, holding up the bottle of turnip juice.