The Key (20 page)

The four massive concrete pylons that held the Eiffel Tower were ripping from the ground, lifting!

Down below, Paddy Nine Iron fell onto his back as the ground before him ripped open. Valin raced to grab onto the lowest handhold, but something, maybe Paddy's helpless cry, turned him back.

He glared hatred up at Mack.

“You've grown strong, Mack!” Risky said in a snarl. “Now you will pay the price!”

She typed into her phone.

A text message that read, “Be the Destroyer!”

“If I hit Send, Mack, there will be no stopping the death and horror.”

Mack noticed Stefan standing beside him, waiting, an expectant look on his face. He had no doubt what Stefan had in mind.

To both Risky and Stefan, Mack said, “Go for it.”

Risky's face distorted into a lion's open mouth, filled with teeth. She roared her anger.

Stefan took three quick, running steps, leaped, and hit her feetfirst, very Jackie Chan.

Risky windmilled backward off the railing.

Mack ran to see, and she fell, facing upward, her hair a storm of red, laughing cruelly up at him. She held out the phone and he saw her thumb move.

Risky did not hit the ground. She had more tricks than that. Instead she slowed, and as she slowed she began to change shape.

Have you ever seen a sailboat suddenly flash out its sails all at once? It's very impressive. The wind will come up and the sailors will unfurl the sails and the wind will—
whoosh
—snap those sails open.

That's what Risky did with her vast, leathery wings.

Which slowed her fall.

As did the long, barbed tail that stretched out from the base of her spine.

Her legs twisted forward, and toes became ripping, tearing talons.

Her arms were smaller, but there, too, fingers became talons.

She kept her eyes on Mack—malevolent, furious green eyes—but the rest of her face stretched forward, elongating into a long snout. A lizard's snout.

No.

“A dragon,” Xiao said. “A western dragon!”

“What's happening with you, Mack?” Camaro demanded.

The golem ran for the exit, desperate suddenly to get out of the school and away from the kids.

“I will become the Destroyer!” the golem cried, anguished.

“Hey!” Camaro said. “If anyone's becoming the destroyer, it's me!”

But Camaro had never seen what was coming now, never imagined it in her worst nightmare. The golem was changing. He was growing—not like he had when he was going to be a big boy, but taller, broader, more muscular, harder.

His five Mack fingers had melted into two on each hand. These were engorged, swelling, turning the color of dried blood.

Twin fangs, like the teeth of an ancient saber-toothed tiger, grew from his mouth, while twin upthrust tusks pushed through the sides of his mouth.

“Stop me!” the golem pleaded.

The leathery wings slowed Risky's fall, and with a little twist Risky turned over and swept easily around the tower at the height of the second floor.

Below, Paddy and Valin were pushing panicked onlookers aside and forcing their way to the stairs.

But the Eiffel Tower continued to rip its way free of the earth.

Still in his loud voice, Mack cried, “The world is in danger! Everything you've seen on YouTube is true! Well … not everything. Just the stuff involving us!”

Risky took a long, slow turn out over the heads of the onlookers and came straight at the Magnifica.

“Beware!” Xiao cried. “She may be able to breathe fire!”

“True that!” Risky shouted gleefully. “And the first thing I fry is you, little annoying dragon person!”

“We need Vargran!” Jarrah cried.

“No!” Dietmar said. “We must stick to our plan!”

“We are going to move this tower!” Mack cried.

“Say what now?” the panicked onlookers cried in various accents of Gallic disbelief.

A jet of flame erupted from Risky's fanged mouth. But she was a little inexperienced when it came to breathing fire, and the blast of searing napalm shot by overhead. The flames were so intense that the gray-brown paint caught fire. The iron straps bent and twisted from the heat.

Risky swooped away, preparing to make another pass.

“We have to focus!” Jarrah cried. “All our power together!”

“She's coming back around!” Charlie yelled. “Man, I never thought I could hate a girl that pretty, but I think I've got it down now!”

“Here she comes!”

“Stop me!” the golem pleaded.

And then Camaro spoke the words that were a sort of magic at Richard Gere Middle School.
³⁸
The words were: “Bully emergency!”

She could yell when she wanted to, Camaro. Her voice carried. And throughout the school, all the bullies—the emo bully, the trendy bully, the goth bully, the nerd bully, the geek bully, and the rest—jumped from their seats and came at a run.

They pelted through slammed-open doors.

They leaped through windows (ground floor only).

They dropped whatever they were doing, and whoever they were about to do it to, and came in a rush.

They saw then what the golem had become—a towering monster of mud with terrifying teeth and lobster claws and feet like a T. rex—and …

They ran away.

It's not that every bully is a coward; that would be overstating the case. It's just that they were much, much better at being tough to people who couldn't fight back. A nine-foot-tall killing machine was not really their specialty.

“Cowards!” Camaro roared at them.

She stood helpless, arms at her sides, muscles flexed, as the golem marched back to the school and stabbed his terrible lobster hands straight through the bricks of the science lab and emitted a heart-stopping bellow of rage and violence.

“Rrrraawwwrrrr!”

Risky aimed carefully this time. She came in slow, flaring her wings to keep her speed down.

“Fry, Magnifica, fry!” she said.

Flame—a wall of it—blew toward the Magnificent Seven (plus Stefan).

And just then, the Eiffel Tower tore free of the earth.

It was like a very badly maintained elevator. It shot up with such sudden acceleration that a dozen iron struts snapped and whirled like deadly whips in the air.

The flame went shooting past, beneath the airborne legs of the tower, which now rose, rose, slowing but still going up.

Some of the Parisians below allowed themselves a small sniff of surprise, and some even said, “
Mais c'est bizarre, ça
.” Which means, “That's a little odd.”

Mack and his friends felt the sudden jolt of the freed tower in their legs. Their knees buckled, but they still held hands, they still kept alive the flow of
enlightened puissance
.

One way or the other, they had accomplished their goal of warning the world. Because one way or the other, they would be relocating the Eiffel Tower in a way that would be absolutely impossible to deny.

Ever.

By anyone.

And then all of it would become clear to the whole world. The Magnificent Twelve would be supported wherever they went.

If they lived that long.

The tower rose. It was impossible of course. The Eiffel Tower weighs 10,000 tons. A large car weighs less than two tons. So that's about 5,000 SUVs' worth of tower.

And yet … it rose!

Risky came around again, and this time she did not try a flying approach. She landed, head downward, on the upper third of the tower. Her talons grabbed the steels beams easily. The impact of her weight sent a shudder down to the feet of the Magnifica.

“This time I won't miss!” Risky said.

Foot over hand, she came down, closer and closer, as the tower rose higher. The Magnificent Seven held hands and kept their focus but now they were seconds from death and if they died the spell would break and the tower would fall. That would certainly make their point: that all of this was real, terribly real.

But it would also mean dropping more than a hundred stories of steel onto major thoroughfares, hotels and offices and apartments. The death toll would be disastrous.

“What do we do?” Rodrigo cried. His hand was firm, but the tall, aristocratic boy was sweating.

“Excellent question,” Charlie said, snarky, but not running away, either.

So far, Mack was pleased with these two. He wouldn't mind getting to know them better.

Pity they all would be eight overcooked marshmallows at any moment.

Mack looked up and saw Risky, huge, glowering, liquid fire dribbling from her cruel reptilian mouth.

Xiao looked up, too, and said, “I am a dragon of China! If you threaten or harm me, you'll break the ancient treaty!”

“Yeah,” Risky said sarcastically, her voice not at all changed by becoming a dragon. “That's a huge worry for me: your stupid little treaty.”

“Maybe you should worry,” Xiao said with amazing calm. “Maybe you should worry a lot.”

Something about the confidence in her voice made Mack look around, like maybe there was a source of this almost absurd confidence.

And there was.

Three in fact.

They rose from behind the sparkling white dome of the church of Sacré-Coeur. They were like nothing that had been seen in the world since the earliest days of Paris, when it was only a handful of squalid thatched huts, a few bark fishing boats, filthy goats, and a small bistro.

Dragons!

“Did you call them?” Mack asked Xiao.

“No one calls a dragon, a dragon calls you,” Xiao said. “They sense the presence of an interloper—a treaty breaker.”

Risky had done a good job of turning herself into one of them. She was definitely quite dragonesque. But perhaps she had never seen the real thing, or at least didn't remember what they were like.

Because Risky was the dragon equivalent of, say, a machine gun. While the real ones, the ancient ones who had risen to defend their treaty, they were more like tanks.

Their wings were wider than city blocks.

As they flew, the downdraft alone was knocking cars and buses this way and that. Pedestrians were thrown against walls and down to the ground.

Just from the wind off their wings.

“Huh,” Stefan said. It was an admiring “huh.”

“Huh,” Risky said. Hers was not an admiring “huh.” You can get a lot of different emotions across with just a “huh.” And Risky's version was conveying some very real apprehension.

The dragons' speed was startling.

“You've broken the ancient treaty, Ereskigal,” Xiao said. “They are required to punish you or risk war with the dragons of the east.”

“Pfff,” Risky said. “Nobody punishes me!”

She was brave. Give credit where it is due: she was brave. For another three seconds.

But there is just something about three massive, leathery, fire-breathing monsters the size of the largest bombers coming at you at eighty miles an hour that shakes your resolve.

“All right! All right!” Risky cried. Swiftly her scales and sinews, her talons and barbed tail, melted away to become her usual form again.

The dragons saw and swerved at the last minute. They blew past with such tornadic force that the tower itself spun twice before stabilizing.

Two of the dragons headed straight back in the direction of Sacré-Coeur, and Risky breathed a sigh of relief.

Standing on the railing again, she said, “Fine: I'll do it in a less dramatic fashion!”

She leveled her clenched fist at Mack. She spoke words that might have been Vargran, but might also have been some still more ancient—and more evil—language.

Mack stopped breathing. He wanted desperately to clutch his throat, but if he broke contact with the others …

And yet how long … face turning red … choking …

“Tough choice, eh, little Mack?” Risky taunted. “Hold on to the spell and die choking, or break it and die when the tower falls. Either one is good for me.”

And that's when the third dragon swept by. Its wing tip grazed Risky. She wobbled. She cursed. She made a very angry, frustrated face.

And she fell backward into the air.

The tower was a hundred feet off the ground. Which meant the railing itself was about five hundred feet up in the air, round numbers.

Risky fell, but she glared hatred up at Mack. “The golem will kill everyone you loooooove!” she wailed.