The Forgotten Locket (34 page)

I may have stopped Zo, but I hadn’t
contained
him.

“No!” I yelled. I couldn’t let him break free. I reached for the music, for the stillness of time that had answered my call in the past. But the river was weak—fragile and spent. I knew I couldn’t do it alone. “Dante, I need your help.”

Dante was at my side in an instant. He took my hand. Our fingers touched, gripped, held.

Still, I hesitated. Dante was wounded; more, he was linked to his other self, who was also wounded. If I lost either one of them, I would lose both. Could I honestly ask him to risk his past and his future to help me?

Dante met my eyes, and I didn’t have to say a word. “Tell me what you need,” he said quietly, “and it’s yours.”

Power thrummed through him, and I felt more than saw a shimmering arc of light flare into life around the two of us, linked by our joined hands, from head to foot. It seemed to burn the brightest over his heart.

“
I
am yours,” he said. “Always.”

I nodded, grateful for Dante’s strength and his unwavering belief in me. I concentrated, listening for the secret language of the music of time, drawing the notes I needed to me like filings to a magnet.

Contain. Imprison. Block.

As each word blended into the next, creating one unbroken sound, I could feel the music grow stronger around me. The roar in my ears sounded like a scream. I hoped it wasn’t mine.

The curtain surrounding Zo flickered. He was almost through.

It wasn’t enough. I needed more. We would need more in order to build a strong enough shell to stop Zo.

Remove. Erase. Eliminate.

I felt Dante gripping my hand tighter and tighter, but the feeling was a distant pressure buried beneath the endless stream of the river of time that flowed into him, through him, and onward into me.

Though I felt weak, I knew that Dante, as a Master of Time, could handle the raging influx of power I was channeling through him. The balance was perfect. Each of us relying on the other to provide support and strength. Each of us drawing power from the other, and both of us offering up the best of what we had.

I closed my eyes, focusing on finding the precise moment, the word that would resonate with enough power to stop Zo once and for all.

Finish.

The music responded with a sound like a lock clicking into place. I felt Dante spring the trap and heard the crash of the newly formed shell as it hit the ground.

The sound of Zo’s rage roared past me like a train.

I opened my eyes to see that the curtain of light was gone, replaced by a clear but solid wall that had arced up and over Zo, trapping him in a thick shell.

Zo glared at us, pacing the small footprint of his domed prison. His body shook with barely contained rage. He pressed his hands flat against the curved wall. Without breaking eye contact with us, he smashed his fist against the shimmering wall that separated us.

Dante and I both winced, but nothing happened.

I think Zo was as surprised as I was. He shook out his hand, looking from Dante to me with suspicion.

“What happened?” I asked. “Usually it hurts when he does that.”

Dante arched an eyebrow toward me. “Did you want to feel the pain?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not. Tell me what you did.”

“Nothing,” Dante said. “I was simply the catalyst for you. What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I echoed. “I just wanted to build another shell to stop Zo. Maybe . . .” I frowned in thought, feeling my way through a new idea. “When I created the shell at the apothecary shop, I did it by pulling some of the timelessness from the bank. That’s probably why Zo could hurt me. I was linked to the shell because I’m connected to the bank. But this time, we’re on the bank, so maybe this shell was built by using some of the time from the river.”

“And so it’s linked to the river, not to either one of us,” Dante finished.

“Are you all right?” Orlando asked, coming up next to us. Valerie clung to his arm and refused to let go.

I nodded. Exhaustion weighed me down. I leaned against Dante’s body for support. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me up. I could feel his muscles trembling with the strain, and I hoped what we had just done hadn’t aggravated his injury. Pressing my hand to his chest, I could feel his heart beat. Slow and steady, but, I feared, not as strong as before.

Zo tapped on the glass wall. “Abby? Dante? I just wanted to say thank you,” he called out. “By linking this to the river, you’ve given me the key to escape. After all, I also know how to make the river do what I want.”

And he opened his mouth, but not in laughter this time. In song.

Even though Zo didn’t have his freedom or his guitar, even though he was sick and dying, he still had his music. And he still knew how to use it.

The song rose in volume, a strong melody, but there was something off about it. A sharpness to the notes that rendered it just this side of discordant.

As Zo’s voice picked up the tempo of his song, he touched the interior wall and the shell bulged and flexed. He closed his eyes, clearly struggling to summon the power he had wielded so effortlessly in the past.

The music rumbled from deep inside his chest, rising in a tide of notes that spiraled up higher and higher, pushing against the inside of his prison. In some ways it was similar to the music I could hear running under the roar of the river, but in other ways, it was different. I had listened to the river’s music and asked for help; Zo demanded.

I saw a hairline crack appear along the surface of Zo’s shell, and I took a step back.

“Dante,” I warned quietly, pointing out the black thread against the silver.

“I see it,” he said.

“We can’t let him escape,” I said. The music pressed on me, a suffocating weight.

“I know.”

“What can we do? I don’t think I’m strong enough to build another shell.”

Dante took a deep breath, looking at the three of us standing before him, then he glanced at the river. The silver had turned to the gray of a corpse. A few of the threads that had peeled away were going dark, the blackness slowly eating away at what little light remained.

Dante touched his chest just once. I mimicked the motion and touched the locket next to my heart. “Dante—” I started, but he held up his hand.

Stepping toward the crack in the shell, he simply said, “Count for me.”

I felt tears well up in my eyes.

The poem he spoke was gentle and rhythmic, a soothing balm that ran counterpoint to Zo’s driving song.

Zo opened his eyes; when he saw Dante standing outside the shell, his song shifted in intensity.

I counted out loud, trying to match the numbers with my heartbeat, even though I could feel my body and my breath racing. Orlando and Valerie stood beside me, and their voices joined mine in a chorus of counting.

Dante’s voice remained slow and steady, but it sounded deeper, resonating with power. The poem seemed to take on weight, a shape and substance.

The flat light of the bank flickered, the pressure around us turning thick. The air crackled with the power that had been unleashed, humming with the power still to come.

The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck lifted as though lightning was about to strike. Still, I counted. One number after the next. After the next. I held Valerie’s hand, and she still held Orlando’s. I felt stronger knowing my friends were with me.

I fixed my eyes on Dante, listening to his words, his voice, with everything I had inside me. My body thrummed with the power of his poetry.

Still, I counted.

Zo clenched his jaw, struggling with the effort of forcing his song to bend the world to his will. He ground out the notes between his teeth, spitting them at Dante. But it wasn’t enough.

The crack in the shell slowly reversed direction, filling in and smoothing over. The bulging wall stopped breathing and grew strong and straight.

Dante’s words continued in an unending flow. The rhythms and rhymes created images in my mind: the winding path of a labyrinth, a spiral shell, stars scattered in constellations across a night sky, a half-sun, half-moon circle, an hourglass spilling sand with a sound like crackling flames.

I frowned. Something was wrong. The shell around Zo seemed smaller than it had been before, as though the space inside had been compressed. Zo’s eyes were closed; he hadn’t noticed the change.

Zo continued to sing, his voice as sweet as an angel’s hymn, though the words he offered up were dark and dangerous. Promises of pain. Threats to bind, to bend, to break.

The shell of time shuddered. As I watched, it grew even more compact, ratcheting tighter and tighter in response to Zo’s music.

My numbers turned to ash in my mouth and blew away as I exhaled a low moan. The bubble around Zo was about to burst—not outward, to release, but inward, to crush.

“Dante!” I called out, and I ran forward, grabbing his arm and pulling him away just as a horrible tearing sound came from inside the shell.

The ground beneath Zo’s prison cracked open between his feet. A shimmering black light flowed into the confined space like water in a glass.

I gasped. A section of the river had broken free of the main flow and was seeping up through the bank, surrounding Zo’s feet in a corrupted and poisoned puddle of time.

Zo’s music suddenly stopped and he opened his eyes, looking around wildly. “What have you done?” he shouted. The walls had collapsed in on him so much that he had to hunch over, his back pressed against the curved dome. “Let me out!”

“I’m sorry,” Dante said, shaking his head. “It’s too late.”

The gurgling river sloshed over the tops of Zo’s boots.

Dante and I watched in horror as the outline of his boots softened and melted in the rising river, disappearing into a blackened emptiness.

“You built this, Dante.” Zo pounded on the wall but nothing happened. “You break it.”

“I can’t,” Dante said.

He turned frantic eyes to me. “Abby. You have to help me. You owe me.”

The lingering touch of Zo’s mind inside mine urged me to obey. The compulsion was still there, but Zo wasn’t strong enough anymore to enforce it. I remembered the words to Dante’s poem, the one that had restored my memories, and as I filled my mind with his words and his voice, the final drop of Zo’s darkness vanished. Zo’s hold on me was gone. “The shell is part of the river,” I said. “We can’t break it without breaking the river. It’ll destroy everything.”

“It’s destroying me!” Zo shouted. The water level had crept past his ankles, rising up his legs, threatening his knees. Everywhere the river touched, Zo was being washed away. Erased. Unraveled.

He looked to Valerie, but she merely looked back, her face expressionless.

“Orlando—” Zo choked. “We were friends, once. Brothers-in-arms. We were the Sons of Italy. We were going to change the world. Remember how you agreed to follow me? You swore you would obey me.” He banged his fist against the shell. “I order you to help me. Get me out of here. I promise, I won’t hurt you. Any of you.”

Orlando began shaking his head before Zo had even finished. “I know what your promises are worth.”

Zo backed up as far as he could inside the shell, but it had shrunk so much in size that there was nowhere for him to go. He braced his good hand against the curved wall next to his head and lifted his foot above the level of the sludge, but when he raised his knee, his leg ended abruptly midcalf. There was nothing there. No blood, no wound. Just an emptiness intent on slowly devouring him.

His prison would become his tomb. And we all knew it. Especially Zo.

The rising water came faster and faster, a black hole of nothingness.

Knees, thighs, hips. Half of Zo was gone, buried in the water that he couldn’t avoid, couldn’t touch, couldn’t escape.

Zo howled, his eyes wild and raw. His hand slipped off the wall, splashing into the water and disappearing in an instant. He looked down in stunned disbelief. His two broken fingers were gone, along with the rest of his hand. His arm ended abruptly at the elbow.

Then the panic that had burned in his eyes turned to anger and loathing. His mouth twisted into a snarl, his lips pulling back over his teeth. His face darkened.

“Go to hell,” he growled. “All of you.”

And then, in one swift motion, he dunked the rest of his body into the water.

A wave of black corruption closed over his head, swallowing him completely.

When the trapped river had reached the top of the shell, the shell bulged under the pressure, bending but not breaking. Then, with a sound like a pulled plug, the river water drained away down through the bank until it had vanished.

A deep silence settled over the bank.