Billy: Messenger of Powers (50 page)

Through winter’s gate and water’s grave

Shall come the One, once lost, now found

Seen by the Son whose love abounds.

A sword, a spear, and armor strong

A shield to wear, and dagger long

To fell the Dark and bring the Light

To call the spark that ends the night.

And through it all, one twist of fate:

A child whose call will seem too late

But though the Dark seems once to win

The child will spark the light again.”

Billy looked below him. The sharks still waited, the sea still clearly hungered for him.

“Water’s grave,” Billy whispered. Then he looked at the Darksiders as they stepped confidently toward him. “You can’t have me,” he said.

“What?” said Mrs. Black, stopping for a moment in surprise.

“You can’t have me,” said Billy again. “I know what you want. You want to make me yours. But you can’t. Because I’m not yours.”

He looked down again. Gulped.

“You are!” shouted Mrs. Black, her voice almost hysterical with frenzied rage. “You’re ours because all things come to us in time. All things come to Death!” And on her ankle, what used to be Prince hissed angry agreement.

Billy just smiled. “Not me,” he said, surprised at the calm that he suddenly felt. “I’m not yours. I am the Messenger. I am not here to be your servant, but to destroy your world.” The words came as though from a great distance, like he was hearing someone else say them. But he felt their truth, even more so than he had before, when braving the touch of the zombies. “I am no one’s servant. I am the Messenger, and I answer only to the White King.”

“You…will…be…
mine
!” shouted Wolfen, and lunged at Billy.

But before he could take more than a single step, Billy smiled. The truth of what he had said coursed through him like a cool stream through a desert. He looked at Wolfen without fear. He gazed at Mrs. Black with sudden pity.

“I am not yours,” he whispered. And he knew it was true. He was Billy, the Messenger, servant of the White King, and ender of the world.

And with that thought in his mind, Billy jumped from the cliff.

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST

Billy discovered something very surprising in the next instant: falling to certain death, either by splattering oneself all over pointy rocks, or by drowning in raging surf, or by being eaten by ravenous sharks, is not as fun as it sounds.

He was totally sure—positive in fact—at the moment he had jumped from the cliff that it had been the right thing to do. But falling rapidly toward a three-way doom had done amazing things—bad things—to his self-confidence. He supposed that this was probably normal: anyone in his position probably would have self-confidence issues.

Or, at least, he
would
have supposed all this if he had been thinking about the subject somewhere else. Somewhere slightly safer. In a magical palace made entirely of pillows where everything was wrapped in a foot of three-ply toilet paper, for instance.

But Billy wasn’t falling to such a wonderful place. No, he was falling, falling, falling, to the raging sea below. He seemed to recall something about the fact that a person could be killed if jumping into water from too high. The surface tension—the power of the water’s surface holding itself together—could make the water feel like concrete.

Luckily, there was no real surface tension, because the ocean below was so very turbulent that the water felt only as hard as dropping headfirst onto a pile of cardboard boxes, instead of onto a garage floor. But it still hurt when Billy slammed into the water with a huge splash. The breath was knocked out of him, and he gasped in a lungful of water as he plummeted downward below the ocean’s surface.

He coughed and hacked, trying to resist the urge to inhale. He clawed at the water, pulling manically, trying to swim to the air above. But before he could do so, he realized he was not alone.

The sharks.

They were huge, with gaping jaws full of teeth like broken bottles, dark eyes, and a decidedly unhappy look on their faces. Worse, they were everywhere, thick gray bodies swimming powerfully all around Billy, eyes on the lookout for prey.

Billy tried to calm down, not an easy task when one finds oneself twenty feet underwater in a stormy sea surrounded by man-eating sharks just off the rocky coast of an island devoted entirely to dark magic. But he did succeed to some extent. His panicked thrashing went to a mere manic swimming, and he managed to stop the coughing attack that had threatened to drown him. He thought as he did so that he noticed two or three of the sharks notice
him
, but decided to concentrate on that later.

First things first, he thought. Air now, sharks later.

So Billy pulled himself upward as quickly as he could, his lungs burning from lack of oxygen, and only barely managed to break the surface before his body decided to inhale whether he wanted it to or not. He gasped a huge drought of air. It smelled of brine and salt, but to him it was sweeter than anything he’d ever smelled before.

Unfortunately, he had only a short moment to savor the experience before a wave crashed over his head, pushing him downward once more. He fought his way up again, coughing and spluttering, and did his best to look around.

That turned out to be a bad move. He would have preferred ignorance. He found himself now in the middle of a trio of twenty-foot-high rocks, which jutted out of the water like a witch’s teeth. The rocks funneled the surf toward Billy, and the pounding waves threatened to crush him at any moment against one of the rocks or against the cliff face at his back. It was stormy, too, a contained thunderhead seeming to hang directly above Billy, lightning flashing from it periodically with a crash and a boom.

Worst of all though was that Billy had been right about what he thought he saw below: the sharks
had
noticed him. He couldn’t see much, but he could make out several dark shapes in the water, gray forms that were larger than a man. They circled around him as Billy desperately tried to remain afloat, and more and more of the shapes joined the hunting party until Billy felt like he was in the eye of a hurricane made of sharks.

Soon, the huge bony fishes grew bolder, venturing closer and closer to Billy. Several gray-black fins broke the surface of the water nearby as the sharks played a nasty game of cat-and-mouse with him. Only he was a mouse without a hole, caught out in the open with nowhere to run.

Another wave crashed down on Billy, casting him under in a spray of surf and salt. When Billy came up again, he saw that the sharks had scattered for a moment. Apparently they didn’t like being on the surface in such turbulent weather. But soon they closed in again, circling him confidently.

One of the shark’s fins appeared nearby, slicing through the ocean like a razor blade. It was headed right toward Billy! Billy wanted to shriek in terror, but couldn’t. It was all he could do to get any air into his body, what with the constant pounding of the waves, and he couldn’t waste any of it, not even to scream.

The fin streaked toward him, then veered away at the last second, so close that Billy could actually feel the wake of the shark’s passage. Another fin emerged, and another, two more sharks now converging on him. This time, the sharks came even closer. Billy could feel the flicking of one of the shark’s tails on his leg as the two sea hunters swam by. The touch was slight, just a graze, but Billy could feel the naked power of the shark’s muscles.

Billy looked around wildly for some avenue of escape. He looked at the nearby rocks to see if he could climb onto one of them, but they had been polished to a sheen by the smoothing action of the surf. He glanced at the cliff face behind him, but could see no caves to hide in, no handholds to lock onto. He even looked skyward in the hopes of seeing the Unicorn, but saw only dark angry clouds.

He felt something at his side, and looked down to see that this time, one of the sharks had actually bumped its head into Billy’s side. It felt like he had been walloped with a rubber-coated jackhammer, though Billy knew that the shark was only playing with him, not trying to hurt him in any way.

At least, not yet, Billy thought.

But he also knew that the situation couldn’t last long. The sharks had gone from being unaware of his presence to circling him warily, to doing reconnaissance in order to find out if he posed any kind of threat. Billy was no threat, he knew, and he figured that the sharks probably knew it as well by now. So it was only a matter of moments before one of the sharks tried to get a free Billy sample before the full Billy feast began.

Indeed, as soon as he thought this, he saw another of those frightening fins cutting through the water, heading straight toward him. This one was coming faster than the others had, too, and Billy thought he could see the jaws gaping open wide, ready to take a chunk out of him.

I hope I give you heartburn, was all Billy could manage to think under the circumstances.

But the shark apparently wasn’t worried about gastrointestinal distress. It continued picking up speed, moving toward Billy faster and faster. The beast was huge, and it got huger looking as it came closer. Billy tried to flee, using sort of a frenzied doggy-paddle, but he knew it was hopeless. The shark must be coming at him at about thirty miles per hour. Billy was moving at a speed of maybe thirty
feet
per hour. There was no hope of outrunning the hungry predator.

He looked back. The shark was almost on top of him. Only twenty feet away now. And then ten, and then five. Billy closed his eyes, resigned to the end, just hoping that it wouldn’t hurt and that he would, in fact, give the shark not only heartburn, but preferably also some kind of explosive diarrhea.

But the end didn’t come. The expected bite didn’t happen. Billy cracked open an eye. The surf still pounded, the waves still rolled. But all the sharks were suddenly, mysteriously absent.

Billy wanted to shout and clap for a moment, but he quelled the urge. For one thing, he still needed his hands to swim in the deadly surf. For another, recent experience had taught him that if one bad thing had exited the scene, it was most likely because something worse was waiting in the wings.

And sure enough, Billy had done little more than notice the lack of Billy-eating sea-life when the water suddenly
disappeared
from under him. It was a strange sensation, water literally dropping away from below like some great plug had been pulled on the ocean’s bottom. A moment later, however, just as Billy began to fall downward, he felt the water rise up below him again. He heard a huge noise at the same time, something terrifying but somehow familiar, a sound like a cross between a saxophone and a river barge’s foghorn.

The rapidly rising water pummeled him to one side, hurling him into something rough. Whatever it was felt like thick braided ropes. Billy had an instant to notice that the ropes were suddenly all around him; that he was in the center of some kind of container that was over ten feet to a side.