Kingdom Keepers VII (6 page)

“What was the answer?” Philby asks Willa in a whisper.

“Tomorrow.”

“Intriguing!”

Willa pushes through the metal barn doors just as the demons arrive, flying insanely fast despite their awkward posture. The demons crash into the door with a screeching thud; Philby makes sure it’s locked, but an ominous scratching sound echoes through the space, followed by the unmistakable noise of metal tearing.

“They’re ripping through the door with their bare hands,” Willa says.

At that moment, a bony finger punches through the metal, nearly poking Willa in the eye. She screams and falls back.

“Told you we didn’t want to conduct tests,” Professor Philby says.

Willa’s fall knocks some lumber loose into a tangle on the floor. Willa glances around. “If we were looking for tools—”

The hand tears through the metal skin of the door and scrabbles down, trying to unlock the doorknob.

“—we’ve come to the right place.”

A carved wooden sign on the wall reads:
THE MILL
. There are workbenches and suspended light fixtures, and every available square inch is dedicated to storage or tools. Willa realizes that they are in a workshop for fabricating objects from all kinds of materials—wood, metal, glass, plastic, everything.

Philby slips one of a dozen wood chisels from its leather sheath. He stabs it into the hand. There’s no reaction, no apparent pain. He stabs it again. And again. Some brown powder leaks out, like flakes of rust.

“That’s disgusting,” Willa says.

The hand tries to work the doorknob, but it’s broken; nothing is working properly. Fingers flutter every which way in a comical dance.

A different hand—the female’s—punches through the concrete wall and turns the knob. Philby attempts to stab it, but the hand moves too quickly: an instant later, the door is unlocked and open. The demons lurch inside.

“How do we kill them?” Willa shouts.

“That could be a problem,” Philby says, “since they’re already dead.”

The two Keepers run to the far end of the room, where a group of handmade bows strung with nylon hang from a hook. On the worktable is a quiver of arrows. But the arrowheads are plastic and therefore useless.

Philby launches a hammer end over end—and misses the demons by a good five feet.

“That was effective,” Willa says drily, taking hold of a bow and stringing an arrow.

“Are you any good with—?”

But Willa answers Philby’s question before he can finish asking it, driving an arrow into the chest of the male demon. He doesn’t flinch.

“With demons…you have to remove the curse,” Philby says. “We aren’t strong enough! ”

The male demon takes the near side of the workbenches; the female, the far side. They lumber steadily forward.

“Look at me,” the male says. His voice is distant, like the echo of claws scratching stone a very long time ago.

Willa shuts her eyes and unleashes a second arrow. Its plastic arrowhead nicks the male demon’s cheek, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Rust-brown sand leaks out like tears.

“We’re dead,” Philby says. His voice is desperate; he wants her to correct him.

Willa reloads another arrow.

The female demon springs from the floor, soars over the workbench, and lands on Willa, taking her down. Willa kicks out, throwing the demon off her.

“Cold!” Willa says. “She’s ice-cold!”

The demon reaches for Willa’s eyes, trying to open them. “Look at me!”

Squinting his eyes shut, Philby dives, knocks the female demon off Willa, and wrestles blindly to pin her. The demon is ten times more powerful than he is.

He dares to blink: the male demon is nearly upon him.

The barn doors at the far end slide open.

All four look at the door at once.

A young woman’s figure in silhouette fills the door.

“Charlie!” Willa shouts.

It’s Charlene Turner—the fifth member of the Kingdom Keepers. She has sandy blond hair, a gymnast’s body, and an angry look on her face.

Charlene calls out. “Off of them!”

Philby manages to push the female demon away, sending her reeling so that she catches the male demon at the knees. Willa and Philby scramble to stand up.

Charlene collapses an easel and breaks off one of its aluminum legs. “Hey!”

The female demon pivots. Charlene launches the metal leg like a spear. Lands it in the female’s eye socket. The demon goes down like a popped blowup toy.

“Eyes!” she calls out.

“Eyes!” Philby says. “Of course! I should have—”

Understanding now, Willa picks up the bow, takes careful aim, and looses an arrow. The arrow hits it mark. Plastic tip or not, it penetrates the demon’s soft eyeball. The male demon falls, raising a cloud of sawdust.

“I’ve missed you all so much,” Charlene says.

“Glad you didn’t miss
him
,” Philby says.

* * *

Amid the gray cloud, Finn sees Wayne leaving the room, seemingly untroubled by the fumes, the folder from the
Fantasia
box tucked under one arm.

Maybeck pulls a ninja kick on the first broom, snapping it in half.

The second broom aims its bucket at Maybeck. Finn abandons any thought of chasing after Wayne and jumps the broom from behind. Some of the bucket’s contents splash to the floor and ignite. Finn manages to wrestle the bucket away and douses the broom with its contents. The broom bursts into flame, runs, trips, and falls to lie cooking on the floor. The gas from the fire-suppression system puts the fire out an instant later, leaving only remnants, charcoal-black bits of wood.

Maybeck and Finn bury their faces in the crooks of their elbows to avoid the gas and flee the room. The lobby stands empty, its floor littered with archival records. The guard remains unmoving.

In the distance: emergency sirens.

Maybeck’s the first to say what Finn is thinking. “We gotta return. And fast.”

“Philby and Willa,” Finn says.

“Present!” It’s Philby’s voice. He, Willa, and Charlene are running down the hall.

“Char—lene!” Maybeck calls out, overly enthusiastic.

“Hey, there!” Charlene’s blue eyes sparkle at the sight of Maybeck.

The five Keepers hurry out of the building, running to the terrace. Behind them, four demons gather at the door.

“Those guys are nothing to mess with,” Philby says. “Take my word for it.”

“Ready?” Finn asks.

Wordlessly, they take each other by the hand. Routine.

Finn pushes the button.

C
ONTEMPLATING THE AFTERMATH
of the destruction caused to the temple grounds by the earthquake, Tia Dalma identifies a series of sinkholes where the earth has caved in to reveal dark pits, some of which expose a section of the labyrinthine tunnels that claimed her colleagues. The air from these holes smells of dust and decay. Rats with blind oversize eyes flee to the surface, darting out over the unfamiliar terrain. At the sight of these vermin, Tia Dalma’s eyes narrow; she moves to a patch of smooth ground, collects sticks and debris, and then sits, cross-legged, clearing a space before her. With the sticks, she builds a small teepee enclosing a pile of brown leaves in the center. She holds another stick upright and begins spinning it between her palms down into a tuft of dried moss that she has placed on a log before her. She hums a mystic’s melody, her eyes clamped shut, patiently working the stick.

A puff of smoke. She stokes the ignited tinder with a whisper, blows the burning moss off the log and into her teepee construction. The leaves catch fire. Soon, the stack is burning. She feeds the teepee more twigs.

Eyes squinted, Tia Dalma continues to hum. She adds a steady, repetitive stream of strangely accented French words, a chant, a looping incantation. It sounds vaguely religious—something a priest might murmur from the altar.

The leaves of nearby mangrove trees stir in a wind centered on Tia Dalma and her flickering, flashing fire. The mangroves’ lower branches are supported by aerial roots, connecting limb to earth. Soon, the limbs appear to swell and bulge, as if they have swallowed something too large for consumption.

As the lumps that are swelling the tree limbs collide, the roots break free from the ground. The surface of the bare brown wood becomes scaly. Some lumps begin as ovals, then form into diamond shapes. Neither roots nor runners, the lumps now reveal themselves to be the heads of six-foot-long pythons, draped languidly from every branch. They fall to the ground and slide silently toward Tia Dalma, stopping short at the fire. The snakes seethe and coil, intertwining in an unruly mass.

Slowly, the witch doctor lifts her arm and points at the rents in the earth. The snakes separate, moving in pairs and groups of three, sliding away from the fire like the spokes of a wheel. They slither over the edges of the holes and disappear. They are Tia Dalma’s antennae, each a scout on a search-and-rescue mission.

The fire flickers and dims; the swirling wind calms. But the crouched figure remains unmoving and silent, her eyes closed, her head hanging down slightly. To the uninitiated, she might appear to be asleep, but such an assessment would prove a grave mistake. She is far from asleep; to the contrary, she is unusually attuned to her environs; she knows the location of every creature down to the smallest insect. She can hear the plants breathing, the giant stones of the temple still cracking in the aftermath of their heavy falls. Were you to approach uninvited, those steps would be your last.

An hour passes. Two. Or perhaps it is but a matter of minutes, for the fire still glows. What begins as a rumble quickly grows. The massive temple stones quiver like terrified children.

First come the bats, escaping from the holes amid the fallen stones in a fluttering veil of black. Next are moths, rats, and mice, swarming up in desperation as an ungodly sound chases them to the surface. Spiders, centipedes, roaches, and every creeping, crawling thing move like a slurry from the pits, fleeing for their tiny insignificant lives from the enemy: the source of that horrid sound.

Tia Dalma’s eyes flicker open. She uncurls her body from its corpselike posture and turns her head to see the pythons she has summoned now streaming from the depths. She hears what no other could, their hissing voices announcing in a unified chorus, “He comes!”

Indeed, the triangular tip of a black wing rises like a tattered sail from one of the many holes. The enormousness of the protrusion gives an inkling of the size of the Beast below.
Like the twisted, gnarled roots of the surrounding trees, Chernabog’s claws emerge. A mixture of veins, skin, and muscle depleted of nourishment, the four bent and bony appendages belie the power lurking within. Despite being trapped for three years in the temple underground, living a brutal existence devoid of light, sound, and souls, this creature is not to be forgotten. Nor ignored.
³

A high-pitched voice pierces the air. A woman’s voice. A witch’s. The Evil Queen clambers from the same hole. Her robe is tattered and crusted with mud, her once gorgeous face as pale as the pink skin of a newborn mouse. She is in disarray, starved to half her former size, her lips blistered and bubbling with insect bites and disease, for she has fed on the very creatures that have just fled. Her voice is more that of a trapped animal than a woman. “Beware!” she calls to Tia Dalma. “He is of foul and perverse spirit, for the three years he has spent in this dungeon. Ripe with distemper and ill-will, a sorry soul of misery and malice.” The Evil Queen speaks in an ancient tongue. Beleaguered by three years in the tombs with nothing but a distempered bat god for company she has succumbed. Gone is the action figure; hello malevolent soul fueled by hatred, bent on revenge. Tia Dalma flinches. The Evil Queen’s blood has turned to venom.

“Our lord is more powerful than ever before. A god among those that live below, brother of Hades, lord of the dark.”

Horns appear. A pair of angry yellow eyes. A massive bull’s head.

Tia Dalma folds forward in submission, her arms outstretched in meek homage. If she possessed a human heart, it would be beating out of her chest. She offers but three small words before the Beast’s growl thunders through the jungle and rises into the sky: “Welcome, my lord.”