The New Kid (23 page)

Natalie nodded.

“The Dark Lord is trying to get his hands on all three, to create the ultimate weapon. I know he has one power rod. I have another. I have to stop him from finding the third. Because if he found the third, and was somehow able to get his hands on mine, then he could use the Triad to get a hold of the key to a portal.”

“I’m guessing this portal isn’t to Disneyland.”

“I don’t think you really want to know the details.”

“I’ve come this far, go ahead and humor me,” said Natalie.

“The key, if there is such a thing, is supposed to open the portal to the Infinite Caves of Suffering Demons. That’s where all demons go when their earthly bodies have been destroyed.”

“So they’re not exactly happy campers.”

“Right. If they were to somehow be set free, given a pathway to re-enter earth. . . .”

“Then all of mankind would pretty much be doomed.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Will?”

“Yeah?”

“You were right. I didn’t want to know the details.”

“Just, if you see or hear anything about a rod, or a key, tell me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Natalie looked pale and Will frowned.

“Do you need a minute?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I’m as ready as I’m going to get. Let’s go.”

They kept moving through the mine shaft, silent again. They could hear the thunder and even though they were far from the entrance the cave still strobed with flashes from the lightning. Then the thunder stopped and they listened as rain began to pound the earth.

Concerned about getting caught down in the mine in a flash flood, they picked up the pace. Then Will stopped and shined his light at the roof of the cave they’d hiked into. The ceiling was covered with stalactites and water dripped down from a fissure, some kind of opening that was blocked by debris. The dripping was quickly becoming a steady stream—and then the debris was knocked free by the force of the water and the water came down as though a god above them had spilled a giant goblet. Will grabbed Natalie’s arm.

“Come on!” he yelled as he pulled her back the way they’d come.

They rounded a corner and were immediately swept off their feet by a wave of water as the entire tunnel flooded, water surging up the sides and swiftly washing them deeper into the bowels of the cave. They fought against the current but it was far too swift and powerful and as Natalie was pulled into a smaller tunnel, sucked away from Will, her head smacked into a rock and she sank beneath the water.

“Natalie!” shouted Will, his arms tearing into the water as he swam toward her. Then the flood abated as quickly as it had begun and Will was able to crawl to his dropped light and then to Natalie. She lay on her back and didn’t appear to be breathing. Will knelt and his lips were an inch from hers when she opened her eyes.

“Um, Will . . . ?”

“I thought you might need resuscitating.”

Natalie sat up rubbing her head, too dazed to feel embarrassed.

“Are you alright?” asked Will. “You hit your skull pretty good back there.”

“I’m fine. I’ll have a headache, but it’s no biggie.”

“I shouldn’t have let you come. I knew you’d get hurt.”

“Get over yourself. I said I’m okay. Let’s keep going.”

Natalie stood and for a few seconds her vision was blurred but it soon cleared and she smiled bravely. Shaking his head Will trained the light ahead of them and they forged onward.

They came to a small divide and as Will paused Natalie saw something out of the corner of her eye. It looked like the figure of a girl, flitting through the shadows.

“Will—over there.
Emily
.”

Will grabbed her arm. “Wait, Nat, we don’t know that’s her.”

“But what if it is?”

Natalie’s heart was racing as she yanked out of his grasp and ran after the shadow.

“Natalie, come back here!” shouted Will as he chased after her. She was going to get them killed.

He caught her at another junction. There were freshly dug tunnels everywhere, tunnels that crisscrossed the original mining tunnels.

“It’s like some big underground freeway interchange,” said Natalie.

“Many demons live and travel from place to place underground. It doesn’t take them long to dig a tunnel, I’ll tell you that,” said Will. Then he grabbed her arm again. “You can’t run off like that.”

“I thought I saw her. I thought I saw Emily.”

“We’ve got to stick together.”

“Fine. But she went this way,” said Natalie. She pulled him down another dark corridor and Will had no choice but to shine the light ahead so she wouldn’t just bang into a rock wall and break her nose.

“Are you sure it was Emily?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Just that I saw
something
.” They took a few more steps and then they heard laughter.

“This way. It’s coming from down here,” said Will, and Natalie followed him.

They crouched down to pass through a long low catacomb leading to a large cavern that, they saw as they reached it, was filled with demonteens. They were lounging around, drinking and smoking. Some hung from the ceiling like bats. Others seemed to be awakening as they rose effortlessly up out of the dirt. They spoke in a terrifying throaty language not of this world. Will and Natalie didn’t recognize any of them from school. Jason, Todd, and Duncan were nowhere to be seen. Their laughter grew louder. It was the result of a little torture play unfolding as a young demon girl was having her neck pierced with studs. She clearly disliked the pain and the other demonteens thought her cries were amusing. Moving closer and seeing them more clearly now Natalie sucked in a fearful breath. Their eyes. One yellow, one green.

“It’s them,” she said to Will in a hoarse whisper. “They were . . . at the river the night . . . they’re the ones who took her, they took Emily!”

A couple of the demonteens, one with a silver Mohawk, worked up wads of phlegm and spit at the girl. Their spit missed the girl but hit the wall and where it landed it burned the rocks.
Great
, thought Will,
just what we need, toxic loogies
. But then the laughter stopped as the lot of them heard, and then turned and saw, Will and Natalie. They bared their teeth like vampires and some of them hissed like vipers.

“What have you done with her?” said Natalie. “What have you done with my sister?”

The demonteens hissed and spit some more and moved in unison toward Will and Natalie. Will tightened and stepped in front of Natalie.

“Stay behind me,” he said to her. Then he offered boldly, “I’m looking for Rage.”

The demonteens glared at him without saying a word. Then Mohawk spit directly at Will who used the sleeve of his coat to deflect the toxic missile. His coat smoldered.

“You’ve come to the right place.”

The voice echoed off the slick walls and bounced around the cave. Will turned and saw the silhouette of a creature perched in a catacomb opening just above them. It was Rage. Again Will had the feeling that he’d met this creature before. Perhaps in battle, perhaps only in a dream. But he was familiar.

The demonteens in the cave assembled, picking up an assortment of lethal-looking warrior weapons. A couple of them, including Silver Mohawk, hocked toxic spit onto the ground in front of Will.

Rage whirled on them. His eyes glowed red and his nostrils flared and he belched out a horrific roar.

“Leave him to me!”

The demonteens backed off and stood trembling, just itching to get in on the kill. As silent as a ghost Rage floated down and landed in front of Will and Natalie.

“You’re either very brave or very foolish. A little of both, I suspect,” he snarled. “Why have you come here? This is hallowed ground, not fit for the likes of you.”

Will’s blood began to heat up and he saw hints of red everywhere. His hatred of this creature was something he could taste. And yet he felt something else, too, something he couldn’t articulate. His anger rose and swelled within him.

“You know why I’m here, I’m looking for my father!”

At the mention of Will’s father, Rage seemed to fold into himself with pain, as though some invisible being had lanced him in his gut. But he recovered swiftly and when he opened his mouth a thousand black moths with glowing scarlet eyes poured out and swarmed around Will and Natalie. They backed up as Natalie shrieked and swatted at the moths, feeling like her heart was going to burst from fear. The demonteens laughed and howled and began spitting on the floor of the cave, over and over, encircling Will and Natalie with spittle so toxic it began to sear through the ground.

“You have come to meet your death!” shouted Rage, his head expanding. He pulled a small switchblade from the back pocket of his leather pants and the blade and handle both grew quickly; suddenly the demon was holding a shimmering sword. Will had anticipated the move and whipped his power rod out and activated his dual blades. Rage thrust his sword at Will, who deflected the blow, and as their respective weapons met in a spray of sparks it created a crashing sound like giant cymbals colliding. Rage moved with inhuman speed. He was on Will’s left, then suddenly in front of him, then abruptly on his right, moving like the otherworldly creature that he was.

“Your father is no longer of this earth!” he shouted.

“You’re lying!” shouted Will, fearing the worst and hoping his words would somehow ring true, that Rage
was
lying, that his father wasn’t dead but alive and captive. He had to be!

Will saw a demonteen moving to his left and did a backward somersault, landing between the demonteen and Natalie seconds before the beast lunged at her. Will rewarded the creep with a whirligig slice-and-dice move and the attacker howled as he watched himself being cut into four pieces. Will’s body thrummed with pleasure at the kill.

“I said he’s mine!” bellowed Rage as the other demonteens stopped spitting and retreated and the cave went silent.

“There. That’s better. Now,” he said to Will, “will you kindly oblige me?”

“Oblige you how?”

What Will hadn’t noticed was that the circle of toxic spittle the demonteens had laid down was now complete and had eaten through the floor of the cave. At that precise moment the floor gave way and Will and Natalie dropped through it. Rage smiled as he gazed down after them, watching them fall.

“Thank you so much,” he laughed, then jumped into the hole after them.

W
ill and Natalie were lying in a crumpled heap. Water dripped down from stalactites hanging above them. The air was thin with silence; all they could hear was each other’s labored breathing.

Natalie opened her eyes and blinked. Maybe this was just a bad dream. A really, really bad dream. But she knew better. The cave they were in was honeycombed with tunnel entrances and a half-dozen burning torches were sunk in the ground in no discernable pattern, their flames licking upward. She heard a loud THUMP and saw the shadow of a figure landing in a nearby catacomb. Dark figures began dropping into nearly all of them. The dream was getting worse.

Will had rolled over at the sound of the first figure dropping and now was crouched next to her.

“Natalie, any broken bones?”

“I don’t think so.” Her knees and elbows and ankles hurt like hell from the fall though.

Will helped her to her feet and then looked down at his empty hand. Crippling panic gripped him like an iron glove. Where was his power rod? There! In the corner, glowing. Will held out the palm of his hand and the power rod flew up and slapped into it.
Good boy
,
thought Will. Red and yellow and green eyes glowed from all the surrounding tunnel entrances. Except for one. In one there lurked the whites of human eyes. A torch burned nearby, sending flickering slivers of light that illuminated the human’s face. Will knew he’d probably sustained a head injury in the fall and was seeing things—because slumped against the wall of the tunnel opening was the very man he’d been searching for all these years. Edward.

“Dad?”

The human figure who appeared to be Edward just shook his head back and forth slowly. Will took two steps toward him and he put up a hand. Will stopped. Then the human figure spoke in a child’s whisper.

“I did the best I could.”

“Dad . . . Edward! Let me come closer! I have to know this is you!”

But again the human figure held up a hand, waving Will off in no uncertain terms. He appeared to be sobbing silently and his voice, when he spoke, was raw with emotion.

“But I failed. At the end of the day I simply . . . failed. I couldn’t protect you, and now this is happening.”

“Silence!” Another voice rang out in the cavern. The voice of Rage. But where was it coming from? Will looked around but could-n’t see him. He was no doubt hiding in a shadow, ready to pounce in a surprise attack.

The human figure resembling Edward tore at his own face with his fingernails and cried out in agony.

“I failed you!”

“Dad, don’t!” yelled Will.

The tunnel entrance where Edward appeared to be suddenly dimmed as the torch illuminating it was blown out by a gust of wind. And then it flared back to life and went out again, over and over, creating a strobe effect. And then Will thought he saw
two
figures in the tunnel entrance: Edward and another, larger figure. It
looked like they were grappling, like some hideous two-headed beast. The other figure had to be Rage and he was going to hurt Will’s father.

“Dad!” shouted Will as he lunged toward them. But the move left Natalie unprotected and all at once the demonteens who’d dropped down swarmed into the cave, swirling around her and brandishing weapons. Will’s protective instincts went into overdrive. He backpedaled and launched a furious counter-attack, leaping and kicking and wielding his power rod, firing away with fireballs.