The Key (15 page)

The Gudridan leaped.

It was impossible to imagine. It leaped as easily as a gymnast, that gigantic thing, and landed so hard the bridge rocked. It landed clear beyond Xiao and Jarrah, blocking their path.

The second Gudridan kicked aside a Fiat 500 like it was a football. The car rolled twice and hit the stone railing and came to a stop on its side. Traffic in both directions screeched and slammed. That second Gudridan now focused on Mack. It raised its giant feet and stomped. Stomped. Stomped again, each massive hammer blow causing the bridge to shake. It was trying to crush Mack; too angry to waste time grabbing him, it wanted to stomp Mack into strawberry jam.

Mack dodged and tripped over his own feet, which sent him plowing forward. A foot slammed beside him and struck a glancing blow against his shoulder. It was like being hit by a truck. Mack went flying into the road. Had traffic not already stopped, he'd have been run over, killed instantly.

Dazed and numb on his left side, Mack rolled to his feet, stumbled, and smashed face-first into a car's hood.

He made eye contact with the driver, a middle-aged man with an astonished and offended look on his face, just as the Gudridan made a grab for Mack.

Mack jerked back, and the claw bit into the car's sheet metal like it was Play-Doh.

Okay, time for some Vargran, Mack told himself, but his brain wasn't working too clearly now. He heard a scream. He saw Stefan, suddenly revealed in a beam of light, armed with nothing but his fists and swinging like a madman at a Gudridan's knee.

Get them all together, all but Dietmar, Mack's brain told him, and unite them in a Vargran curse. But oh, it is so much easier to think that than to do it while one of your crew is yelling and gurgling in the dark waters of the Seine, and your bodyguard has just been casually kicked aside to land like a rag doll, and a reckless Aussie has thrown her arms in a bear hug around a monster's leg, and a tiny goth girl is wiping the blood from her mouth, and a dragon in human form is crawling away across the concrete.

Things had gone very bad, very fast.

Stefan was up and racing to the Fiat, which still lay on its side. With brute force he yanked the car back onto its wheels and pulled open the twisted door while the car was still rocking.

Mack saw what he was up to. He also saw the first Gudridan take one giant step, reach down, and knock Stefan flat.

No time to think, Mack raced for the car, jumped over Stefan's horizontal form, and slid into the seat. The engine was still running! He twisted the wheel and stomped on the gas. Nothing!

Stupid gears!

Mack pushed down the clutch, rammed the car into gear, stomped on the gas, and
bam
—into the leg of the closest Gudridan.

The air bag exploded in his face, almost knocking him silly in its attempt to save him.

A roar of rage!

A bellow of pain!

Like ten lions together at feeding time when they really, really want some meat, the Gudridan's outrage shook every living thing within a mile. It was awful and awesome.

Mack's windshield was filled almost entirely by a single leg. A single leg now turning from pink to red.

To redder.

Mack jammed the car into reverse. Even in the midst of panic, a small part of his mind was thinking, Hey, I can drive as well as Stefan.

The car lurched back, sputtered, and stalled.

So maybe he wasn't a great driver, either.

He started the car again, put it in gear, and rammed the Gudridan.

Smash!

Back. And again.

Smash!

This time the Gudridan had sidestepped, but Mack twisted the wheel and caught it in the Achilles tendon. Or at the least the Gudridan equivalent.

The knee buckled.

“YAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!” the Gudridan roared.

The second Gudridan was bounding over to help its friend/companion/homey/colleague when shots rang out.

They always say that, don't they? “Shots rang out.” But shots don't actually “ring;” they explode.

Blam blam blam!

A man in the natty uniform of the gendarmes was calmly firing up at the second Gudridan's head even as the first tottered like a felled tree in a national forest.

It seemed to take forever for the first monster to fall, and all the while,
blam blam blam
continued, accompanied by stabs of bright orange.

Brave gendarme.

Unfortunately, bullets don't matter much to Gudridan.

As the first of the monsters hit the ground so hard that stopped cars jumped from the impact, the second Gudridan snatched up the policeman, opened its hideous jaws, and bit off the top half of his body.

For a terrible, frozen moment, Mack just stared.

It was the most awful thing he had ever seen. And it was somehow his fault.

Mack climbed out of the car.

The Gudridan, still standing, red fur even redder from its gruesome meal, almost smiled at him.

“
Gope-ma et stib-il belast!
” Mack snarled.

Sometimes terror kind of shuts off your brain.

Other times it focuses your thoughts.

Mack had just crossed the line into focused. Very focused.

The Gudridan's red fur began to turn black in patches. The monster noticed, held up an arm to examine it, and seemed almost to whimper.

Its fur faded from red to pink, but what mattered was the creeping black growth that spread over the monster, here, there, surrounding and then absorbing fur now gone white, seeming to eat it up.

Eating then into the skin beneath the fur.

The Gudridan hollered in incoherent terror, and Mack thought, Yeah. Yeah, that's what I can bring. I can bring rot and make you die, monster! I can do that.

It was like watching time-lapse videography of an orange being consumed by mold.

The creature's fur was gone, replaced by the creeping mold. Its arms withered. Its legs were pins. It fell facedown across several cars.

The other monster, the one Mack had smashed with the car, began backpedaling frantically.

It had never seen such a thing. It had never seen one of its kind brought down by a skinny, curly-haired child spouting an ancient, forgotten language.

More gendarmes and regular cops were arriving in a festival of flashing blue lights and frantic sirens. More gunfire. The Paris night was a battlefield.

Mack ran to the rail and saw that Dietmar had swum to the far bank and was painfully hauling himself up onto the slick, wet stones.

“Everyone!” Mack yelled in a voice that was approximately one-millionth as strong as a bellowing Gudridan. “Come on!”

They formed up around him, Stefan limping and holding his side, Jarrah picking Gudridan fur out of her teeth, Sylvie and Xiao looking bruised and disheveled.

“Dietmar is across. We run for it and hope the cops think we're just normal people running for our lives!”

Which is what they did.

And what the French police assumed as they fired steadily into the back of the retreating monster.

The battered kids joined a wet and slimy Dietmar and raced shivering and heartsick toward the entryway to the Paris sewers.

T
he golem climbed down from the wall.

He walked to his—Mack's—desk and picked up his iPhone. Mack had told him not to bother him, that he should be a big boy and take care of himself.

But the golem was having a very bad feeling down in the muddy hole he'd dug out of himself that now functioned as a stomach.

He wrote a text to Mack.

I'm afraid. A girl named Risky was here. I think she will make me hurt people. Your golem.

He considered adding a smiley face. He often did that. But it felt wrong. So he typed: >:-(

And he hit Send.

The text went flying through the air, from Sedona to Paris. Where the cell phone signal failed to penetrate the deep, stony sewers.

T
he sewer tunnels are bigger than you think. Some of them are so big they could practically be Métro tunnels. Others are narrower, or crammed full of dripping metal pipes that run along the arched stone ceilings.

The parts of the sewers that are on the tour are safe and well lit. There are metal catwalks and railings. There are signs pointing toward the exits.

But that's just the part that's on the tour. There are miles and miles of sewer tunnels. (And beyond the sewer tunnels, connected to them here and there, are the tunnels no one wants to talk about. But we'll get to that later.)

The last sewer tour was long since done for the night and the entrance was bolted shut (there went 24 euros for unused tickets), but Sylvie twisted the numbers on a combination lock with practiced ease.

“This is a side entrance,” she said. “My grandfather is one of the engineers who maintain the tunnels used for tours. It is because of him that I knew of the perfect hiding place.”

They stepped inside and immediately noticed the aroma. Yes, let's go with the word
aroma
. It's much more genteel than
stink
.

“The light switch is on this wall.” There was the sound of Sylvie scrabbling at the brick and a loud snap, and light flooded the space. It was a tunnel, arched, made of limestone. There were pipes running along one wall, four or five of them in different sizes.

And the aroma.

“This way,” Sylvie said, and led them onto a steel catwalk. The catwalk took a hard right turn away from the pipes and into a place that smelled less but seemed older. Here the brick was weathered and crumbly.

“This area is not safe for tours,” Sylvie explained.

“Then why is it safe for us?” Dietmar wondered.

“It isn't. But it leads to our hiding place.”

The tunnel had begun to narrow. Already a tall man would not have been able to walk erect. They reached the end of the reassuring catwalk and had to step down onto damp, worn stones that formed a walkway beside the channel.

There was no question that in a hard rain the two feet of sludgy, smelly water running through the channel would swell to fill half this tunnel and become a raging white-brown river.

“Not much farther,” Sylvie said.

Only now there were no longer lights running down the roof of the chamber. It was getting darker, and ahead was absolute darkness.

“I should have picked up a flashlight!” Sylvie cried. “I was shaken up; I forgot.”

“Phones will do the trick,” Jarrah said. She whipped out her phone, pushed a button, and shone an amazingly dim and pitiful light at the darkness ahead.

The others all did the same so that it was six dim, pitiful lights combining to make one dim, pitiful light. But it was enough to let them place their feet carefully, one before the other.

“It's not that much farther,” Sylvie said.

But it was that much farther. Soon they lost sight of the lit part of the sewer. Now they were a tiny island of dim light shuffling along while they all tried really hard not to think about rats.

Because once you start thinking about rats, well, there's no unthinking it, is there?

Rats.

And in Mack's case, claustrophobia. Darkness in an underground space is one of the starting points for serious claustrophobia. After all, claustrophobia is a fear of small, enclosed spaces, which is to say, caskets, which is to say, being buried alive, which was not so very different from being twenty feet down in a musty sewer in the dark.

“Mmm-hhhh-nnn,” Mack moaned without realizing it.

What goes really badly with being buried alive?

Rats.

And something out there in the dark was making scritchy-scratchy little noises.

Scritchy.

“Mmmm-rrrr-nnnhhh!” Mack said more urgently.

Stefan clamped a hand over his mouth about a millisecond before Mack was going to let go with a moan that turned into a kind of trilling scream.

“Mmmph!” Mack said.

“Yeah,” Stefan answered.

In a matter of seconds Mack was going to start squirming and thrashing. If necessary, Stefan would punch him in the head and either stun him or knock him unconscious. Neither was a great choice from Mack's point of view.

“Here,” Sylvie said. They stopped, and in the sudden, profound quiet—the quiet of the grave, if I may—they could hear the sound of slow-moving sewer water and, ever more clearly, the sounds of rats.

Sylvie aimed her phone light at the wall. There was a slot. She stuck her hand in. And pulled on an iron lever within.

Suddenly bright light formed a tall rectangle.

“It's me, Sylvie,” she said into the light.