The Yanti (40 page)

Ali took a step forward. “I cannot allow you to detonate that bomb.”

Her sister caught her eye. “You cannot stop me.”

Sheri pressed a switch on a black instrument attached to her sword-belt. There was a deafening noise. Behind Sheri and the bomb, Ali saw a rapid sequence of bright explosions. The fireballs erupted on both sides of the cave wall—simultaneously—and tore apart the tunnel. A geyser of dust blasted Ali’s face. It must have been harder on Sheri, since she was closer to the blasts. Yet her sister stood firm—in the center of the cave—as well as in the depths of her madness.

The cave had been blocked from the south side. And if Sheri pushed the next button, Ali realized, it would be blocked from the north side. Then Sheri would be all alone with her bomb, and no one would be able to stop her.

Energizing her field, Ali tried to fly forward.

Sheri countered with a slice of her sword.

The shiny weapon never left her hand. It touched only dust-choked air. But it sent forth an invisible
blade
of pure pain. Ali caught the phantom blow in her abdomen. It felt exactly as if she had been stabbed there. The agony was immense. Her sweatshirt was torn and a line of liquid red appeared. It was blood—she was bleeding from a wound inflicted by a weapon that had not touched her!

Only then did Ali recognize the fairy sword. It had belonged to her father.

Sheri reached for the next button on the black instrument. Reversing her field, Ali tried desperately to fly backward, away from her sister. Before she could move ten feet, the second sequence of bombs went off. The noise was deafening, the debris choking. It was only the magic left in her depleted field that kept her from being crushed beneath the stones. It humbled Ali to realize that just one swipe of Sheri’s sword had been enough to drain her entire reserve of power.

For a while, holding onto her bloody shirt, and the torn flesh beneath it, Ali let herself drift on autopilot. It was not long before she saw the light of the sun shining outside.

Finally, free of the confines of the cave, she was able to stop and rest on a rock that stood beside a pile of snow. The latter reddened as the blood from her cut flowed over the white ice. Physically exhausted, mentally devastated, Ali doubted she had the strength to heal herself.

O
nce more, Geea and Ra rode Drash back into battle, but this time, with less hope. Geea had been right about the new element of attack. In the sands south of Mt. Tutor, the tiny scabs emerging from the desert were somehow fusing together—first in pairs, then in quadruplets, and so on, until they formed one gigantic monster—that was made up of thousands of the brain-sucking creatures. How they were able to do this, no one knew, but Geea said it must have been part of Sheri’s long-term strategy.

“I told you she would never trust the dragons to remain loyal.”

“How can we stop them?” Ra asked.

Geea shrugged. “There must be a way.”

Presently, they were flying high above the woods south of Karolee, where the bulk of the dragons were meeting the onslaught of the new threat. What was remarkable to Ra was that even though the new scabs were a thousand times larger than the old ones, they behaved the same way as the originals.

To get airborne, they had to inflate themselves with air, and then whirl a mass of hanging tentacles to give themselves both direction and speed. Yet the spinning tentacles acted as their
main weapons, too—along with being the central part of their propulsion system.

Periodically, a tentacle would stop spinning and reach out a sticky claw—from beneath an inflated gelatin bulb—and grab whatever was in the vicinity. These tentacles were fast and hungry. From his vantage point in the sky, Ra watched in horror as fleeing fairies and elves and dwarves had their heads torn right off the top of their bodies.

The scabs had changed in one respect. They were no longer trying to create scaliis. They just wanted to feed, and besides gobbling down elemental heads, they went after the dragons with a vengeance, possibly because they offered the most meat. Or more likely, Geea had said, because they’d been programmed by the Shaktra to take them down.

“Doren knows she cannot strike Uleestar with the dragons protecting it,” Geea told Ra. “Even if she forces a million marked thralls or scaliis onto our capital, they’ll be beaten back. But these new scabs—let’s call them drones—could change all that.”

Even as they spoke, two drones began to rush toward Drash. Geea commanded the dragon to turn about, fly back to Uleestar. But the drones—once they had locked in on them—dropped their tentacles and set them spinning. Their speed was amazing. One minute the drones were a mile below, the next they shot past Drash at over two hundred kilometers an hour.

That was their goal, Ra saw, to get above them. Because once they had the superior altitude, they could drop down their tentacles and use them as weapons. Ra could not help but panic as twin drones closed in over their heads.

But Geea remained unconcerned. Rubbing her hands fiercely together, she let loose six powerful vooms. One drone ruptured like a blimp that had been struck by a cruise missile. But the other showed no signs of damage.

A two-foot-wide tentacle swung by their heads.

“Duck!” Geea ordered. Ra did not need the order. He practically glued himself onto the dragon’s back, as Drash dove toward the ground. The drone proved stubborn. Again, it positioned itself directly above them, but this time it went into simple free-fall—aimed directly at Drash’s back!

Geea took out her sword and stabbed up at the creature. The blade, of course, was no longer than a yard, but it did not seem to matter. A slice of blue light shot off the tip of it. In an instant the drone was sliced in two. What a noise! What a stink! The foul gases—as they left the drone behind—were nearly poisonous. Ra choked on them as he complained to Geea.

“You could have told me your sword could do that!” he said.

“I like to show off,” Geea said, patting Drash on the back. “Let’s get some more of these monsters. Before they get to your friends.”

Drash was fearless. He flew directly into the smoky fray.

Cindy and her traveling companions were resting in the seemingly endless cave when she
felt
rather than heard a roar. It came in two waves. Mr. Warner noticed it as well. “What was that?” he asked.

Mr. Havor sat up with a start, almost lost his dark glasses, quickly replaced them on the tip of his nose. “Could it have been an earthquake?”

“It sounded more like explosions,” Cindy said. “Could Sheri Smith’s bomb have already gone off?”

Mr. Warner and Mr. Havor looked sadly amused.

“If a nuclear bomb went off anywhere in this mountain,” Ali’s father explained, “We would definitely know about it.”

“Or rather, we wouldn’t know anything at all,” Mr. Havor said.

Cindy grimaced. “We’d just be dead?”

Mr. Warner nodded. “But it takes expertise to detonate such devices. She’s a genius at software development, but she’s not a physicist. It’s not going to be that easy for her to set it off.”

Mr. Havor was less encouraging. “She wouldn’t have bought it if she didn’t know how to set it off. Trust me, she’s a master at everything she touches.”

“How did you get involved with her?” Mr. Warner asked.

Mr. Havor shrugged. “I had ideas for computer games and she had money. She understood my vision. Or at least I thought she did.”

“You were just wanting to play
end of the world
,” Cindy said. “She wanted the real thing?”

“Exactly,” he replied with a sigh.

Cindy had a bottle of water in her hand that was almost empty. But Terry hadn’t brought anything to drink. She couldn’t stand to see him hiking all this time uphill without taking a sip. She offered him her bottle. “Please take a little,” she said.

He stared at her with unblinking eyes. In the harsh shadows cast by their flashlights, they seemed to have lost their color. For the first time she noticed what looked like a birthmark on his forehead—a dark smudge between his eyebrows.

Terry did not answer Cindy.

Mr. Havor spoke up. “He can’t talk. It’s not his fault.”

“But he can hear, can’t he? He has to eat. He has to drink,” Cindy said.

“I’ve seen him go days without doing either,” Mr. Havor said.

Of course, the blind man was speaking figuratively when he spoke of “seeing.” Cindy understood that much. But what she
didn’t understand—and it filled her with dread—was that she’d finally figured out where she’d seen Terry before.

The first day they visited Toule, Ali had left her and Steve to check out Omega Overtures on her own. The two of them were resting in the park with Rose and Nira, when a blond teenage boy was suddenly struck by an SUV—not twenty yards from where they were sitting. At the time Rose said the guy’s name was Freddy Degear, and got all upset. Leaving Nira in their custody, she rushed off to tell Freddy’s mother what had happened to her son.

Only later they learned it was all a lie. There was no Rose—it was Sheri Smith in disguise. Plus there was no Freddy Degear, either, or at least, no one in town had heard of the name. Yet
someone
had died that afternoon, and had subsequently been taken to the local hospital. Indeed, Ali had gone to the morgue to check on the guy’s body, and even she had said he was beyond hope.

Yet here he was, sitting two feet away from Cindy.

“How long have you known Terry?” she asked Mr. Havor, trying to keep her voice steady.

“Just a couple of weeks. I know he acts kind of strange but . . .”

“How did you meet him?” Cindy interrupted.

Mr. Havor hesitated. “Sheri Smith introduced me to him. As a favor, she said, to help me get around. Why do you ask?”

Cindy waved the flashlight over the guy’s face.

No blinking. No pupil response. No nothing.

“Just wondering,” she whispered.

Somehow, after resting near the cold mountain peak for an hour, Ali managed to gather enough strength to expand her
field so that she was able to fly home. Once inside, she showered and then collapsed on her bed. For a long time she just lay there with her palms placed over her wound. The bleeding had stopped but the pain remained. Just as bad, her blood loss had drained away much of her magical powers.

Yet she was Ali Warner. Queen Geea. She had only begun to fight.

She tried reaching Nemi online, and was not surprised when he did not respond. She had ignored several of his earlier instructions; and he was not one to repeat himself. His silence probably meant,
Stop whining and think about what I told you
. Somehow, she had to coordinate her attack on Sheri with Geea’s attack on Doren. Nira—as well as Nemi—might have provided her with a clue as to when these events might coincide.

“Did she leave any instructions for me?”

“She said you would come for me at some point.”

“When? Why?”

“She didn’t say. Don’t you know?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Both Geea and Nemi had agreed her sister’s Achilles’ heel was Hector. But in her hurry to get Sheri, Ali had ignored the importance of Sheri’s obsession with Hector. Now Ali was willing to take any help she could get. However, she did not want to bring Hector into the picture until he could be useful. Also, she did not want to get him killed.

Plus, Sheri had sealed herself in tight with the bomb . . .

Or so it seemed on the surface. There were six other mountains on Earth—besides Pete’s Peak—that had caves that contained tunnels that led to Sheri and her bomb. Her sister must know she would figure that out.

So Sheri would still be waiting for another attack . . .

“Which mountain should I approach from?” Ali asked herself. In her weakened condition, the closest one sounded best. That would be Mt. Shasta, in California. Now that Ali thought about it, Sheri had probably had the bomb delivered there—rather than risk crossing state lines with her “slightly suspicious” cargo.

There was something else about Mt. Shasta that rang a bell with Ali. She couldn’t quite place the reason why, only that her mother had taken her there when she was young. Four or five—no older. What had they done on that trip? Ali couldn’t remember.

Ali gave Hector a call. “Are you almost ready?” she said.

“Have you figured out what I’m getting ready for?” he asked.

“It involves Mt. Shasta. But before I bring you there, I want to first check out the scene.”

“Then what? You’ll fly me there?”

“That’s a problem. I can’t hold anyone living while I’m flying.”

“Why not?”

“It has to do with fairy magic . . . it’s complicated. But I was wondering if I could tie you into some kind of harness . . . with a long rope attached. One that reaches outside my field.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I’m asking if you would let me drag you there.”

“Through the air?”

“Sure. You don’t want me to drag you on the ground.”

Hector paused. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve seen the way you fly. You’re as fast as a jet.”