Billy: Messenger of Powers (25 page)

“How long can this last?” asked Billy.

“As long as it takes,” said Vester, not taking his eyes off Fulgora. “Each time you do magic, it saps a little bit of strength out of you, so sooner or later you’re going to just collapse or fall dead asleep on the spot. The bigger the spell, the harder it is to sustain.”

“And how big are the spells they’re doing?” asked Billy.

“Medium,” said Vester. “Stuff that even I could do. This is just the warm-up.”

Sure enough, Napalm threw one last fireball at Fulgora, then switched tactics. His supply of flame depleted, he jumped to another podium of fire, quickly snatching up the bright living flame. But instead of using it, he instead hopped to another podium, then another and another, gathering up a large mass of flame each time, until almost half the fires in the arena were circling above him in an eerie orbit of light.

“What’s he doing?” asked Billy. “Why does he need all that fire?”

“He’s getting his ammo ready,” answered Vester distractedly. “It’s much harder to make your Element into more Element, so making the available fire bigger would take a lot out of him. He’s grabbing all he can for one huge blow.”

Sure enough, Napalm had stopped moving now. He raised his hands in the air, and the circling flames above him arced down in lacey lattices of fire, rimming his body with a deep orange and red aura.

Fulgora, meanwhile, had not been idle. She, too, had been moving as quickly as possible, gathering up flame of her own. Instead of it circling above her, as it had with Napalm, however, hers was flowing sinuously around her: a deadly serpent of auburn and gold. But Billy was dismayed to see that it seemed she had much less fire at her disposal than did Napalm.

Napalm, too, seemed to sense this, as his body language took on a taller, more victorious posture. He raised his arms again, and the flames that enveloped him rose and then arced in a solid bridge toward Fulgora. The Red Lady held up her arms for a moment, and the movement of Napalm’s fire began to slow.

“Wow,” breathed Vester.

“What? What’s happening?” Billy asked, vaguely aware that he was gripping the edges of his seat with sweaty palms and white knuckles.

“She’s trying to take control of his flame,” said Vester. “It’s terrifically tough to take control of an Element that’s under the influence of another Power. If she can do it, though, Napalm’s finished. He won’t have enough fire left over to put up any kind of serious challenge.”

But Fulgora, Billy could see, was weakening. Slowly Napalm’s fire crept toward her, at first an inch at a time, then a foot at a time, then moving quickly across the arena. Fulgora bent down, her body being forced into kneeling by the intensity of her energy as she fought the onrushing flame. At last, however, her concentration must have broken, for the bridge reached her. It rapidly encircled the Red Lady, a solid ring of fire that rose high enough it almost shielded her from view of the audience in Powers Stadium.

“What’s he doing? Is he nuts?” Vester murmured to himself. “That fire’s almost close enough for her to touch. If she
does
manage to touch it, she can steal it for sure, and then he’s got nothing.”

But the ring of fire was
not
close enough for Fulgora to touch. She reached for it, but could not quite manage to lay a finger into the swirling halo of flame around her.

Then, suddenly, the fire ring jumped higher. It thinned out as it grew, becoming almost transparent, but it went higher and higher, taller and taller. It began spinning more rapidly. Billy glanced at Napalm. The Red Power was clearly giving this all he had: rivulets of sweat were running down beneath his helmeted head, and his arms shook with the physical exertion of his mental attack.

Fulgora could now be seen quite clearly through the tall, thin wall of rapidly spinning fire that Napalm had cast around her. She was turning around on her confined podium, clearly unsure what to do. The fire cylinder sped its rotation, the revolutions it made going faster and faster, until it was a veritable tornado of fire. The water below Fulgora’s pedestal began to boil, water steaming upwards.

Billy couldn’t hear her, but he suddenly saw Fulgora lurch, apparently off balance. She crumpled to her knees, appearing to cough and choke.

“Great Powers,” said Vester. “He’s suffocating her.” And instantly Billy understood. Just like a firestorm in a huge forest fire, the flame ring that Napalm had created was sucking all the oxygen from the area in which Fulgora stood. And that didn’t only mean that Fulgora could not breath: it also meant that the meager flame she had managed to wreathe herself with was dying out, deprived of the air it, too, needed to survive. To make matters worse, the steam rising from the boiling water below the Red Lady was now thick and wet. The flames around her flickered, puffing up wreathes of steam as they slowly waned. She touched them with one shaking hand, clearly trying to add her power to them, to keep them alive so she could continue the fight. But she couldn’t do it. The flames wavered, spat several desperate sparks around her, then flickered out in dismal defeat.

“No, no, no,” Vester was whispering. He clutched at Billy’s arm. Billy could only imagine what his friend was going through right now. How would
he
feel, if it was Blythe down there, in the middle of that deadly cylinder? He shuddered at the thought.

“It’s okay,” he said to Vester. He knew it must sound lame to the older man: Billy wasn’t even a Determined Power. He didn’t know what he was talking about. But he still had to try to give some comfort. “I’m sure she can.…”

But before he could finish the thought, the crowd gasped as Fulgora, with one last effort, fell to the podium, her arms and legs hanging limply over the sides. Billy could see the beasts in the water below—who were apparently impervious to the great heat that was all around them—lunge upward to snap at her dangling limbs. They looked like huge, grotesque eels, their gaping jaws lined with razor teeth. Their mouths snapped shut with audible clicks, missing the unconscious Fulgora’s fingers and toes by scant centimeters.

“Let it be! It’s over!” shouted someone from the crowd of onlookers. “She’s done, you’ve won the Challenge, Napalm!” The rest of the crowd quickly took up the cry, pleading with the armored warrior below to show mercy. Napalm showed no inclination to do so, however. His heavy, muscled arms raised even higher, their trembling matched only by the Red Power’s apparent determination to not only win the Challenge, but destroy his rival.

Billy looked at his friend, expecting Vester to join in the shouts. But clearly the young fireman was clinging desperately to hope. “She’s not gone, she’s not gone, she can’t be. She’s not gone.” It sounded almost like a chant, a prayer that if Vester said enough times would turn out to be true. Billy felt tears springing unbidden from his eyes. Somewhat they were for the lovely lady below them, who was being crushed so unmercifully below the angry power of Napalm’s fire. But mostly they were for Vester, his new friend who already felt like he was as close to Billy as anyone outside his own family had ever been.

He touched Vester’s shoulder, feebly patting it. He felt like he was patting a dog, knew it wasn’t helping anything, but couldn’t help but continue. It was something, at least, and he couldn’t stand to do nothing. He wished he could help Fulgora more directly, but this gesture to his friend was all he knew how to do.

Then, abruptly, a gasp went through the crowd. Billy felt rather than saw Vester tense, and he quickly turned his attention back to the arena.

Fulgora was rising
. She stood slowly, clearly crippled by pain and lack of breath, but just as clearly determined that this Challenge not yet come to an end.

The Red Lady reached out her gauntleted hand, grasping for the fire that had drawn so close. Napalm, seeing this, rapidly moved his hands. The loop of fire drew away from Fulgora, but at the same time increased the speed of its turning, sucking the air out of the circle now so fast that the air could be heard rushing from the top of the cyclone.

Fulgora faltered again, and it seemed to Billy that this time it
must
end; that this time it
had
to be over. Next to him, Vester was rocking back and forth in his seat, now almost rising up, now hunching far down, his body clearly incapable of expressing the depth of the fireman’s emotions.

Then, with one last great gasp, Fulgora stood. She tottered to the end of her podium, almost falling into the writhing water below. She stopped herself, though, blinking rapidly, her head shaking as though she was trying to wake from a particularly vivid nightmare.

Then, she jumped.

“No!” shouted Vester, lunging to his feet.

Billy saw at once that Fulgora was not going to make it to the nearest pedestal; that her jump was going to fall dreadfully short of the safety of that marble podium. Her doom was certain, and a great wave of pained noises racked the arena as the onlookers suffered with her in anticipation of the end.

But then the gasps of pain turned to gasps of astonishment as everyone, including Billy, realized that Fulgora had not been trying to make it to the next pedestal in the first place.

She had been trying to make it to Napalm’s circle of fire.

Billy didn’t know what was happening, or what the Red Lady could be thinking. Even if she managed to touch Napalm’s fire and wrest control of it from him, she would still fall inevitably to her doom in the watery sea of death below.

And sure enough, Fulgora was falling. But she stretched as far as she could as she dropped. Reaching forward, apparently pulling herself by force of will.

One finger. One single, solitary finger. It touched Napalm’s ring of fire, and suddenly Fulgora was no more.

There was a flash of light, a glare so bright that the sun itself would have been embarrassed to be compared to it. Billy blinked his eyes, blinded for a moment, looking away to save his eyesight.

And when he managed to look back, he—along with a hundred thousand others—gasped in awe.

Fulgora was still falling. But slowly. Because she had sprouted wings.

“Great Powers,” Vester whispered again.

The wings flapped once, and as they did, Fulgora changed. Her armor elongated, becoming great red scales, overlapping and tight as brass bullet casings. Napalm’s ring of fire disappeared, being pulled into Fulgora’s changing form.

She grew, and her armored face metamorphosed into something animalistic and fierce, with gleaming red eyes above a ridge of stony spires that ran the length of a long, sinuous snout. Her body elongated, a tail sprouting from her hindquarters. The wings pounded, taking on a deep red hue, carrying her instantly above the range of the sea monsters below.

Her form solidified, hardening to something like burnished metal. It was a shape Billy knew. A shape he had seen before.

Fulgora had become a dragon. Not a blue one, not like the one he had seen with Mrs. Russet, the dragon Billy’s history teacher had called Serba. No, this was a gleaming red dragon.

Someone in the audience screamed as the dragon that was Fulgora beat its wings again, ascending to a new height so that it could look down upon Powers Stadium. The dragon screamed, and the roar permeated Billy’s body, making his heart stutter in his chest, his eardrums almost bursting in his head.

He could see that Napalm had fallen to his knees atop his podium. The challenger’s fire spent, the remaining pyres nothing but cold piles of charred coal, the armored man cowered, utterly powerless under the terrifying gaze of the red dragon.

Napalm screamed as Fulgora licked her lips. The dragon opened its mouth, and a gout of fire spewed forth, a white-hot blaze that scorched Billy from hundreds of feet away. The tip of the fire undulated forward like a long tongue, licking at the quivering shape of Napalm.

Billy, like almost everyone else in the stadium, was on his feet. He glanced at Vester. The fireman appeared stunned, his face utterly drained of blood.

“No one has ever become a dragon before,” he murmured in a dazed voice. “At least, no one who’s ever become human again.”

The dragon opened its mouth once more, and Billy was sure this was it: the dragon was sure to broil Napalm in his own armor.

A ferocious roar came again, that terrifying sound even worse this time. And with it, the dragon spoke, its voice still recognizably Fulgora’s, but with a deep and alien timbre that chilled Billy’s insides.

“Do…you…YIELD?!” screamed the red dragon.

“Yes!” shouted Napalm, his voice cracking with hysteria and terror. “Yes, yes, by the Elements, I swear it, I swear it!”

The dragon folded its wings and swooped down at Napalm, who screamed and covered his eyes. But instead of eating the challenger, as Billy half-expected her to do, Fulgora stopped at the last second. She beat her powerful wings once, hard, and the blast of hot wind she generated blew Napalm right off his podium. Up over the water he sailed, flying limply through the air and crashing into the first row of seats beyond the water. Billy could hear the crunch of Napalm’s impact, and knew that it was made all the more painful since all the Powers who appeared to be seated there were really Projections, so Napalm smashed into a row of plastic seats rather than comparatively soft laps.

The challenger lay groaning and moaning in a limp pile of armor and bruised bones as Fulgora roared triumphantly overhead. The baleful red eyes of the dragon looked around the stadium, as though seeking anyone else who might issue a Challenge.