It Happened One Doomsday (27 page)

Rane shook her head. “What is? I don't get it.”

“That's where the Harbingers hid the apocalypse scroll.” Dru's finger stabbed down on the photo. “Right there, in plain sight. Well, maybe not exactly
plain
sight, considering all of the obfuscation spells hiding the mansion, but plain enough.”

Suddenly, the victorious poses of the seven Harbingers made sense. This wasn't just a portrait. These photos were probably taken right after they had succeeded where centuries of sorcerers had failed. They'd returned from the netherworld in possession of the scroll.

And they set the end of the world into motion.

Dru put her glasses on and reshelved her books. “We're going to need tools to dig that up. More crystals because I'm sure it's protected by spells. But my purse is totally full.”

“You don't have one of those traveling jewelry cases?”

“Who am I, Martha Stewart? No. But I have an idea.” Dru went up front and poked through the junk crammed under the cash register until she found a hardware kit, the kind that consisted of a plastic tray with assorted screws and nuts parceled into its small compartments. She dumped all of that into the trash, then loaded up the empty plastic case with her favorite crystals, one per compartment. “We'll need to be ready for anything when we get back to the mansion.”

“The mansion?” Rane followed her. “Whoa, hang on, cowgirl. You want to go
back
there? Where all the Horsemen are?”

“And where the
scroll
is.” Dru paused, crystals in hand. “Besides, I thought you were itching for a fight.”

“
Pssh
, yeah, I'll take them on. But we need some kind of leverage. Something big we can hit them with. Some mondo kind of magic.”

Rane went on, but Dru wasn't listening. Most of her truly powerful crystals were too big to fit in the plastic tray. She lined the crystals up on the edge of the counter, side by side, careful not to touch any two together that had opposing vibrations. The last thing she needed right now was a crystal accident.

The thought made her freeze to the spot.

Opposing vibrations.

A crystal explosion. She could make it happen. She had exactly the crystal to do it, though she'd kept it locked away in a lead box since she'd yanked it from the clutches of an ancient evil. “You want leverage to fight the Horsemen?” Dru said. “I'll give it to you.”

She marched to the corner of the room, where the wall safe installed by a previous tenant was hidden behind a framed photo of Ming the Merciless. Over his enormous, smooth forehead, someone had drawn a word balloon on a yellow sticky note that read, “Pathetic Earthlings! Who can save you now?”

Opal looked up from the book she was reading and followed Dru's gaze to Ming's forehead and back. “Oh, no. Tell me you're not breaking that thing out.”

“I have to,” Dru said firmly. Ignoring Opal's warning look, she took down Ming's picture and started working the combination dial on the safe.

Opal stood up. “For real? It's not bad enough we had to outsmart a two-thousand-year-old sorcerer's
ghost
to lock that thing away. What was his name again?”

“Decimus the Accursed,” Dru muttered.

“Decimus the
Accursed
,” Opal repeated. “Now why do you want to go and get that bad mojo out again and risk blowing up the city?”

Rane looked from Opal back to Dru and lifted her chin. “So who's this Decimus dude?”

“Sorcerer in ancient Rome. Not exactly a swell guy.” Dru got the safe open and pulled out the thick black rubber Hazmat-certified gloves she kept in there. “He built an impenetrable palace in Pompeii, surrounded by walls of magic warding spells.” With a grunt, Dru pulled out a crushingly heavy lead-lined box and set it down on a nearby end table, making it creak. “Decimus drew his evil power from infernal spells that scores of generations of sorcerers had placed on Mount Vesuvius. His enemies were so desperate to stop him that they wiped out the entire city to get him.”

“The entire city?” Rane said. “How?”

“With this.” Dru undid the latches on the box with a sound like gunshots going off, one by one. She lifted the lid, wrinkling her nose at the musty smell that left a sharp, metallic taste in the back of her throat.

Inside the box, sitting in a square nest of foam rubber, sat a fist-sized angular crystal formed of thousands of stacked hexagonal layers, each one paper-thin, as dark as the darkest tinted glass. Dru carefully reached in with her gloved hand and picked up the crystal. Its black angles glittered with menace. “It's called biotite. It's a little bit radioactive.”

“Radioactive?” Rane's eyes opened wide.

Opal gave her a look that said,
I told you so.

“Only a little teensy bit radioactive. Not even enough to require a federal permit or anything,” Dru said, hating the way it made her sound defensive. She had nothing to hide. “Look, there's no safe way to dispose of the biotite. And since this particular crystal has been charged with a huge amount of negative energy, I didn't want it falling into the wrong hands. It's not like I ever expected to actually use it myself. But this is an emergency.”

Rane's lips twitched into a frown. “So this is your plan? Nuke the Horsemen?”

“Let's call it plan B. If all else fails, we can use this.”

Opal, arms folded, slowly shook her head side to side. “Nothing good is gonna come out of this, I'm here to tell you. You'll be lucky if you don't blow yourselves up.”

“True. Not the world's neatest idea.” Dru swallowed and explained it to Rane. “Biotite, if it's charged up with enough power, can release destructive vibrations on a colossal scale. It literally reverses the bonds of magic, obliterating everything around it in a blast of total destruction. You want to talk about an uncontrolled chain reaction, this is it. Utter annihilation.” She held it out to Opal. “Here.”

Opal stood stock-still. “Don't think so, no.”

“Fine.” Dru put the biotite crystal back in the box and latched it shut. The sudden relief in the room was almost palpable. She stripped off her gloves. “We'll take this with us.”

Rane looked like she'd just come face-to-face with a very large and poisonous insect, but she grabbed the box anyway. “Whatever. Where's Greyson?”

Opal pointed toward the back door.

Rane headed that way but paused for a second in the doorway. Over her shoulder, she said, “Hey, when are you going to tell your dude what we did to his car?”

For a split second, Dru thought she was referring to Hellbringer. And then she remembered Nate's car. Smashed to pieces in the middle of the New Mexico desert.

Oops.

“I'll figure something out,” Dru said. But right now, there was no time to worry about that. If they were going to fight the Horsemen, she needed to do more research. She pulled down a stack of leather-bound tomes from a narrow space just below the yellowing ceiling tiles.

First
The Grimoire of Diabolical Consorts
. Then
The Cyclopedia of Fallen Angels
.

While she was at it, she grabbed a trio of thick matching folios. A hand-lettered card clipped to the top book's spine read, “Scioptic Whitchcraft and Calamituous Inscriptions Most Noxious.”

“Sure,” she decided aloud. “Why not.”

Staggering under the weight of the books, she headed up front, Opal following along. “Opal, do you remember those doomsday books we got from the Puritan Museum, the tall, smelly ones?”

But instead of answering, Opal stopped by the cash register and stared out the shop's front windows, a mystified look on her face.

As Dru opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, bright lights shone through the night-darkened windows, illuminating Opal's face. Outside, an engine roared, tires squealed, and Dru realized that the lights she was seeing were actually headlights. Aimed straight at them.

The next instant, the entire front of the shop imploded.

34

THE END OF EVERYTHING

The old white truck punched through the front of the shop like a giant metal fist, smashing everything in its path. Headlights blazing, it obliterated the front windows of the shop, then the shelves carefully stocked with glass jars of herbs, rare and delicate crystals, lovingly handcrafted good luck charms, and everything else Dru had accumulated over the years.

Gone. Every bit of it, in an instant. Crushed, smashed, tossed aside in a tidal wave of destruction before the white Bronco.

Bookshelves toppled and burst apart against its steel front bumper, one after another, falling like dominoes and flinging their contents into the air.

Opal stood frozen at the counter, directly in the onrushing path of destruction.

Dru had no time to plan, only to act. She dropped her books and sprang into motion, arms outstretched. Her legs churned, feeling as if they were stuck in mud. Even though Opal stood only a few strides away, it seemed like an endless stretch of distance. Dru couldn't cover it in time. She couldn't move fast enough.

The growing wave of wreckage, driven by the headlights and chrome grill of the Horseman's Bronco, rushed straight at them. The air filled with flying wreckage.

Dru barely noticed. Her vision narrowed down to a single focus: saving Opal.

She wrapped her arms around Opal, tackling her just as the avalanche of wreckage crashed down around them. The truck drove through the space where Opal had stood a half second before. Some unseen part of the truck caught Dru's foot as it went by, twisting her in midair.

Then the weight of broken shelves and falling debris buried her in darkness.

For a few agonizing moments, Dru didn't know whether she was dead or alive, which way was up or down, or if she was trapped in some kind of horribly vivid nightmare. But the pain of dozens of sharp objects digging into her body was all too real.

She struggled to move, but she was pinned beneath crushing weight, pressed against the soft mass of Opal, whose tightly curled hair tickled her nose with the scent of knock-off Chanel.

“Are you okay?” Dru said, but she couldn't hear herself over the jagged roar of things falling and breaking. Dust choked the air, and the pressure on her back made it nearly impossible to breathe.

“Opal?”

No response.

Dru got one arm free and shook Opal, carefully at first, then with frightened urgency. “
Opal!
Wake up!”

Terrible thoughts swirled around her mind, but at a distance, as if they couldn't make any impression on her. The destruction around her was too vast, too total, to comprehend. It floated on the surface of her consciousness like oil on water, unable to mix.

The Horsemen were here. Her shop was gone. She was trapped. Opal could be dead.

None of it registered.

A scream built up inside some numb part of her, but it felt as if it belonged to someone else. She clamped down on it. She had to fight, even if she had no chance of winning.

She had to fight
right now
.

She twisted beneath the rubble until she worked her legs loose. After a couple of false starts, she pulled them in underneath her and pushed for all she was worth.

The weight on her back resisted at first, then started to budge. A crack of flickering light shone in from beside her, brightening as she forced the gap wider. The light fell across Opal's motionless form, her face turned sharply away, blood running across her cheek.

Seeing Opal lying there, so still, sent a brutal rush of adrenaline coursing through Dru's veins. She heaved with all her strength, lifting up against what she realized was a toppled bookshelf. Her whole body trembled with the effort.

“Dru!” Greyson called to her. “Dru!”

“Here!” she grunted.

A moment later, two strong hands clamped on the edge of the bookshelf and lifted it, freeing her.

She looked up into Greyson's stubbled face, smudged with dust, red eyes wild. He pulled her from the rubble. “Dru!” he shouted. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

Her glasses had been knocked loose, and she pushed them back up her nose. “Never mind me. It's Opal.”

Greyson's jaw set in a grim line, and he shoved the bookshelf away, letting it topple to the side with a crash.

Dru felt Opal's warm neck for a pulse, but her hands shook so badly she couldn't tell anything.

Greyson knelt beside her and took over. “She's breathing. We've got to get her out of here.” As he got his arms beneath Opal and lifted her free of the rubble, Dru turned to look in shock at all that remained of The Crystal Connection.

The lights overhead flickered with a spastic crackle of electricity. The white Bronco had come to a stop in the center of her shop, surrounded on three sides by heaps of wreckage. Behind, its path was swept almost completely clean, from the gaping empty front windows all the way to the cash register, where the truck had finally stopped.

The driver's door creaked open, thumping against a broken wooden cabinet. Out of the driver's seat stepped a hulking white creature, shiny and colorless as newly cleaned teeth. He loomed over the still-rumbling truck, his massive head turning left and right until his glowing sapphire-blue eyes focused on Greyson.

Jagged horns jutted out from every part of the thing's gnarled body, from his tree-trunk legs up to his colossal shoulders. More horns ringed the top of his head, each one curving out and up to a deadly point, the circle of horns forming an infernal crown.

The hellish creature extended a single clawed finger at Greyson. He opened a mouth lined with knife-sharp canines, releasing a string of ropey drool as he spoke two words in a voice like fracturing rock.

“
Join. Us.
”

Dru turned immediately to Greyson, and the unwavering determination in his eyes blew away any doubts she had about him. He wasn't about to complete the set and become the fourth Horseman, bringing about the end of the world.