The New Kid (33 page)

He remembered his original plan, which now seemed lame and unworkable, and he reached for the pocket on his jacket sleeve. Then he heard someone calling his name and knew exactly who it was.
Will. Will. Will.
The voice came from above and it burrowed so far into Will’s head he thought it would never come out. The attempt at infection had begun. Will had a choice to make.

 

Natalie watched as the Dark Lord held the pulsating Triad of Power. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the pit his sole heir had fallen into and mind-spoke to him, to his son, calling out his name, setting the infection in motion. Then he held his breath and listened to his heart—yes, even
he
had a heart, of a sort—pounding as the cathedral’s walls echoed with the chants of his disciples. “He will rise!” they shouted, again and again, as if their pleading would cause the prophecy to come true. The Dark Lord knew better. He knew no machinations by mere beings, mortal or otherwise, could guide the unpredictable hands of fate. Fate was in the boy’s hands now. If he died, then so be it. His body would be placed in the sarcophagus. But if he lived, then he
was
the key, and he and he alone could ascend to the throne. Together they would combine their regal
blood—the father’s blood on one throne, the son’s on the other—and the lock would open and the portal would explode and a new time on earth would begin.

“He will rise!” the demon mob shouted. “He will rise!”

The Dark Lord thought he saw movement and raised a mighty claw, silencing the bloodthirsty hordes. And then every single creature watching held its breath. There . . . rising up from the hole in the ground . . . the tip of a head . . . a boy’s head! It was Will, climbing out of the hole. He stood, his eyes closed, his breath labored. Blood trickled from his mouth and the crowd gasped. There was blood! The crowd began to chant with unbridled glee.

“Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!”

Then Will opened his eyes. Even demons can shed tears and thousands were shed in that moment because young Will’s eyes shone the telltale glistening black! He was infected! The cathedral erupted with a cheer so loud it could be heard for miles. Their prince had come!

As Natalie looked down at Will her stomach clenched into a knot. She was dead. Her sister was dead. They were going to die because their last hope had been turned inside out and offered up like some maniacal practical joke. The boy she thought she loved, their only hope of survival, had given himself over to evil. She put her arm around Emily’s shaking shoulders and pulled her sister’s face into her shoulder, away from the scene unfolding in front of them. There was no need for her sister to witness more. The battle had ended badly.
Sometimes you just lose, that’s all
, she thought. She tightened her fingers around the handle of the tri-blade sword. She was-n’t going to go down without a fight. But she was a realist and she knew how that fight was going to turn out.

“Take your place, my son!” shouted the Dark Lord, indicating the throne. The huge creature stepped over, ready to enter his own standing throne as his minions cheered their throats raw.

Will spoke up, his voice raspy.

“Yes, Father.”

Natalie’s pain was unbearable as she watched Will obediently walk over to the Dark Lord. Then father and son took their places in the standing thrones, the Dark Lord smiling proudly and still holding the Triad of Power. The thrones pulsed with crimson light and began to rotate and the lava clot rumbled, the portal to the underworld trembling, eager to be opened by the key, the prophecy! Will smiled at his father. The Dark Lord smiled back. All that he’d worked for had come true.

“Father?”

“Yes, my son?”

“May I hold it?”

The Dark Lord looked down at the Triad of Power in his clutches.

“There will be time for that later.”

“I . . . want to feel the power . . . please, father?”

As demons have tears, they have emotions, and as they have emotions, they are subject to the same vulnerabilities as mortals. Pride. Hubris. The Black Prince had an uneasy feeling but yet . . .
this was his son.
What harm could come from letting his own flesh and blood taste the energy of the holy Triad? The boy had chosen to be infected. He deserved a reward. But still the Dark Lord hesitated.

“Please, father?” Will asked again.

The Dark Lord looked at Will. He’d waited so long for Will to join him, for this moment to come! The boy held out his hands. And the Dark Lord couldn’t help himself. He extended the Triad of Power to his son.

Will allowed the energy of the Triad to pulse through his body and up into his mind. He locked eyes with the Dark Lord, his nemesis, his father, and pushed into the creature’s mind. He was in again and again he was inundated with horrific images of human pain and agony, souls leeched of their goodness and sullied with malice. Experiencing these torments was both painful and strangely euphoric, as
though the very natures of Will’s own soul were at war with one another. He knew that to survive he must quell the hatred and anger rising within him and call upon all the good and honorable and unspoiled thoughts and feelings he could muster. He remembered birthdays and Christmas mornings spent with Edward and his mother. He remembered Natalie’s gentle kiss. He grew stronger and as his own healthy loving thoughts collided with the Dark Lord’s thoughts of evil it created an explosion, a maelstrom of conflict. The pure and good thoughts Will had brought with him caused immeasurable pain in the Dark Lord’s mind. Never before had he endured such agony.

The Dark Lord roared and in a millisecond Will was out of the beast’s mind and back in his own. The realization that something was about to go horribly wrong dawned on the Dark Lord just as Will, still holding the Triad of Power, stepped out of his throne and with the Triad created a swirling lance of astonishingly pure power, the mightiest sword the world had ever seen, and with one powerful swipe whacked off the top of his father’s throne—with the Dark Lord’s head still in it. The cathedral erupted into chaos. The giant unlocking mechanism grounded to a halt.

Unbelievably, the Dark Lord’s body fought on. When Will turned the Dark Lord struck out, sightless, and caught Will with a blow hard enough to draw blood. The Dark Lord’s headless body careened into Will, a claw finding Will’s wound and sinking in. Will used his foot to kick the Dark Lord’s headless body backward and it toppled in the corner.

The cathedral exploded with even more chaos, the demons eager for revenge. Will used the Triad to cut a bloody swath through the dumbstruck horde of panicking demons that swarmed toward him. He sliced through Duncan, cutting him in half. He lanced Todd’s head clean through. He chopped Jason into quarters and did the same to Correl Shames. He cut down Mrs. Norrington and Sharon Mitchell. He was methodically toasting each and every one of them,
sending them down below to the Infinite Caves of Suffering Demons.

But then something Will hadn’t planned on happened. During the melee, the bloodbath that Will hoped would be the ending of all the demons in the cathedral, the Dark Lord’s body had risen and found its head. Instead of joining the fight, the wily Devil had picked up his head and placed it on Will’s throne, using the claw he’d dug into Will’s body to wipe Will’s own blood on his cheek, and then with his headless body stood in his own. By some perverted, wicked twist of fate the unlocking mechanism once again began to operate, the massive ring rotating slowly, the howls of the underworld seeping up, the dark souls below bursting at the seams.

Will had to move fast. He looked around for Rudy and when their eyes met Rudy came flying at him, fangs and claws bared. Whipping out the untested Demon Trapper, Will activated it, firing a blast that caught Rudy in mid-air and then sucked him into the trap where he went silent and frozen. If they made it out, maybe he’d have the time he needed to turn him back. If Will’s grandfather had been able to create an antidote, so could Will.

A demonteen screeched to his left and Will looked over to see Natalie shielding Emily with her body and using the tri-blade to flail away at demons like a true warrior princess. But her three attackers were closing in and she wouldn’t be able to hold them off for long.

“BEHOLD!” shouted Will, his voice ringing through the cave.

He held up the Triad of Power, the three power rods joined together. Hundreds of demons froze in shock, unsure what to do. Their prince held the Triad of Power. What would he do? Will knew exactly what he was going to do. He had a plan. He just hoped it worked.

“This portal to Hell? I have some bad news. I am hereby closing it. FOREVER!” While the stunned assembly watched, with all his might Will threw the Triad into the lava clot, into the portal to Hell. The ensuing explosion was reported as far north as Alaska and as far
south as Los Angeles; an earthquake, they said, one of the worst on record. The force of the impact of the Triad striking the portal to the underworld was such that it created not only a gigantic blast, but a tremendous implosion, a detonation so strong that the portal, instead of being blown open, was melded shut. A maelstrom of fire blew through the underworld, burning the souls below into extinction. Those who survived the initial gusts of fire fled, only to be swept up in a back draft and singed into nothing but smoke. And then the lava clot burst and the volcano erupted.

Will grabbed Natalie by the arm just as the Devil was refitting his badly scarred head back upon his massive body. He was blown upward by a blast of hot steam and lava and the walls around them erupted with similar geysers of lava and water, creating an instant steam bath. A dense mixture of ash and gas was filling the cathedral, pressurizing it as the demons wailed with grief. Natalie pulled back, stiff with fear, unable to trust Will.

“Natalie, come on!”

“You . . . your eyes. . . .”

Will blinked and let go of her arm to quickly pull off the black contact lenses. Then he spit out the gelatin fake blood caplet.

“It’s me, Natalie, it’s Will.”

Natalie flushed with relief and hugged him tight. He let himself hold on to her for a moment, then pulled her and Emily toward the sarcophagus.

“Get in here!” He pushed them and the Demon Trapper in, climbed in himself, and then pulled the heavy lid over them, shielding them from the earth’s wrath as the massive cavern filled with erupting lava and boiling water and mud and debris. Will kept an arm around Natalie, who squeezed her eyes shut, held Emily’s hand, and tried not to think about her last trip in a flying coffin as they rode the eruption up and up through the volcano’s opening, shooting upward like a rocket. Bombs and blocks of magma traveling at ballistic trajectories ripped past them.

People observing the Plinian eruption of Mount St. Emory saw the usual things they expected: the eruption column rising out of the volcano’s convective thrust region, the huge plume billowing out and up into the umbrella region, the clouds of smoke and ash drifting quickly with the prevailing winds. And then came a whopper of a fireworks display, not only smoke and ash but blasts of red hot lava spearing into the sky like spikes thrust up by Satan himself. Those observing would not be able to identify the Triad of Power as it blasted up and out of the cone and split, the three pieces soaring off into three totally disparate regions. Nor would they be able to identify, even upon studying video of the eruption, the rectangular-shaped object that came blasting up and sailed all the way out to Lake George where it landed smack in the middle, creating a massive geyser.

An airtight compartment, even one bearing great weight, will often float, providing the air trapped inside provides sufficient buoyancy. And float the sarcophagus did, sealed as it was by the incendiary blast. It floated until the winds from the north pulled at the currents and the marble coffin tipped over and a corner hit land. That’s when Will used his boltdriver, still safe in a pocket, to blow the lid off the thing so the three of them—four if you counted Rudy in the Demon Trapper—were able to stumble out into shallow water, gasping for air and rejoicing that they had somehow done the impossible and cheated the Devil.

Natalie looked at Will, at the unique blue of his eyes.

“I thought . . . I thought you’d. . . .” She couldn’t finish.

“I know. It was just a disguise. Contacts and a stupid fake blood pill from Halloween when I was a kid.”

They began laughing and laughed so loud and long that even Emily could’t help smiling. It was incredibly cathartic, releasing the tension, letting the strain and stress float out of their minds and bodies. No drug or libation could ever rival the feeling of emerging from such an ordeal to find they were still alive. Every cell in their body
was in full celebration mode. It was one kick-ass feeling. The last thought that Natalie had when the eruption had started was that she was sorry she would never be able to kiss Will again. Now she wasn’t about to waste any time. She wrapped her arms around him and their lips met.

“Thank you,” she said, when she finally pulled away. “For helping me find Emily and getting us out of there. And, you know, saving the world.”

“You were incredible,” Emily added softly.

It made Natalie’s heart ache, how quiet Emily had become from her experiences. But her sister was alive, away from those terrible creatures who had kidnapped her. She had her life back. She wasn’t going to be able to forget what had happened anytime soon, but she could learn to live with it. She had to. They would learn to live with it together.

Will just nodded, and blushed from the praise. He was, after all, just a kid. Not an ordinary kid of course, because a kid who was half mortal and half demon could never by any stretch of the imagination be considered normal. But maybe normal was overrated.

Exhausted, they lay on the grassy slope by the side of the lake and watched as the sun slid slowly down out of the sky and the eruption of Mount St. Emory waned. It made for one heck of a sunset and lying there holding Natalie’s hand Will felt more alive than he ever had in his whole life. When the stars came out they gathered up the few belongings they had left, including the Demon Trap with Rudy ensnared inside, and walked down into Harrisburg.