Black Magic (31 page)

Walking Bear hauled off with the cane and walloped Chester on the side of the head. Chester’s eyes drooped shut and he dropped like a sack of rocks.

Dolly turned to face Lyle. The life force that swelled within her made her feel invincible. She marched toward the circle.

Through the fight, Lyle had continued his incantation, eyes closed and seemingly unaware. But when Dolly stepped into the candlelight, his eyes snapped open and he turned to face her.

“What the hell?” He waved a hand in her direction. “
Bakshokah gerza lop!
”

The candle flames expanded into a defensive wall of fire around the circle. Dolly recoiled from the heat.

“I can’t finish this if I’m wasting time with you,” he said. “I always have to do everything myself.”

He chanted a lengthy spell. The fire around the circle billowed and swayed until it rose up in a pillar. The pillar tip formed the head of a dragon with great pointed ears and a crocodilian snout. It spread its jaws and lunged. Dolly covered her face.

The fire dragon’s teeth snapped closed around Dolly’s shoulders and pulled her off the ground.

Chapter Seventy-Two

Outside the plant, the truck cab was eerily quiet. Andy dared hope that something good had finally happened. He rolled down the window an inch.

Near the fence, two enormous pythons held Vicente and a young woman in an intertwined death grip on the ground. One had already swallowed Vicente’s head. The other was up to Juliana’s calves. The alligators moved off into the scrub. There wasn’t a fleck of blue to be seen anywhere on the ground.

“I don’t know how,” Andy said. “But I think we won one.”

Autumn opened her door to the same scene of retreating reptiles. Above, the tower still sent out its swirling blue power bands. She stepped out of the cab and checked the twisted front bumper on the ground.

“Gators got the winch,” she said. “I am
so
doing a research paper on that. Plan B?”

Andy rolled down his window and looked up at the tower.

“Three tons of truck.”

“You can’t drive into that! Whatever that blue juice is will probably fry you!”

“I’ll jump out long before that. Climb out. I’ll need a running start on these rims.”

Autumn stifled a final protest and climbed down from the cab.
 

Andy wiped a section of the windshield clear. Back inside, he threw the truck into first and started a wide circle in the parking lot. Shredded rubber flapped around the rims as they sent up sparks from the pavement. As the truck headed back at the tower it was doing twenty. Fast enough for this much mass to crush the fence and cream the tower, but not too fast to do a Hollywood exit from a moving vehicle. He hoped. He popped the door open.

He straightened the wheel and gave the gas pedal one last stomp. He slipped the truck into neutral, held the wheel straight, and balanced in the open door. The truck sped toward the fence. He waited until his self-preservation instincts hit max and jumped.

His ankle collapsed when he hit the ground and he rolled away onto his shoulders. The truck flattened the fence like it wasn’t there. It smashed through the tower legs. The vehicle lit up bright neon blue. The tower legs sheared away. The blue swirl in the sky disappeared. The air sizzled as escaping energy vaporized the mist around the tower. The truck burst into a ball of flames and a red and black mushroom cloud rose up and engulfed the tower. The tower toppled over like a felled tree. It hit the ground in an explosion of cobalt sparks.

Andy lay on his back and watched in stunned amazement. As elation took its place, the ground rumbled so hard that he bounced off the asphalt. Cracks spread from the tower base across the parking lot. A sinkhole formed and sucked down the concrete platform and the burning truck. Blacktop crumbled in an expanding circle.
 

Andy’s heart thudded in his ears. He scrambled backward in a crab crawl as the earth beneath him tilted downward. The flaming truck disappeared into the infinite void. The tower followed, sliding into the pit like the tail of some great retreating leviathan. Andy’s palms slipped against the rain-slicked asphalt and he slid down the angled slab toward the darkness.

Chapter Seventy-Three

Walking Bear dashed after Dolly as the fire dragon yanked her into the air. He grabbed her around the waist, lifting off the ground after her. He squinted against the brilliant flames.

Something popped and sizzled. The blue glow in the center of the circle disappeared. The fire dragon and the flames around the inscribed circle vanished. Walking Bear dropped back to the ground, Dolly hugged in his protective arms. She looked dazed, but incredibly, unburned.

Lyle gave his hands, no longer cloaked in the cerulean magic aura, an incredulous stare.

“No, no, no, NO!” he roared. “This cannot be happening!”

The earth rumbled and the entire plant shook back and forth. Sections of the ceiling fell in a series of overlapping crashes. Overstressed metal beams moaned a chorus of warnings. The concrete floor shattered into a sea of expanding cracks.

Lyle pointed at Dolly and Walking Bear.

“You’ll all pay for this. This is not over!
Patenda excovchel.
”

As the floor of the plant within the circle crumbled and fell into darkness, Lyle vanished. The candle holders tumbled into the void.

Walking Bear wrapped a big arm around Dolly’s shoulder and hurried her to the exit door. The expanding sinkhole followed them at each step. As they reached the doorway, the unconscious bodies of Chester and Denny rolled into the blackness.

“Wait!” cried Shane. He lay on the floor, his arms dragging his body toward the door. A stain of urine trailed back between his useless legs. The eyes that stared out from his face of charred flesh no longer glowed. “Don’t leave me here.”

Walking Bear looked down with contempt, Dolly with compassion. She knelt, grabbed the doorway with one hand and reached out with the other. She leaned forward and Shane grabbed her wrist.

The ground collapsed out from under him. Shane hung over the void, fingers locked on Dolly’s wrist, his nails drawing blood. She teetered in the doorway and leaned toward the abyss.

Shane managed a toothy, evil grin from his mangled face and laughed. “Bitch.”

Walking Bear drew his knife and with one great stroke severed the tendons in Shane’s arm. Shane’s hand flew open and he plummeted into the dark, screaming.

Walking Bear grabbed Dolly around the waist and pulled her to her feet. They ran through the parking lot as the ground caved in behind them.

Rough asphalt scraped Andy’s palms as he fell into the sinkhole. He jerked to a stop and his collar choked him. Autumn had caught him by the back of his shirt. She pulled him back to the edge. They turned and scrambled for the exit road.

Behind them the sinkhole grew. The Apex plant creaked and groaned and then collapsed into the growing hole, as if the earth decided to ingest all that was evil. Andy and Autumn were halfway up the access road before they felt safe enough to stop. By then the hole had devoured even the edges of the parking lot. On the far side, the hole had taken the tip of the Everglades, and water poured in over the edge in a waterfall. The rain had stopped. The wind was gone.

Andy scanned what was left of the parking lot.

“My mother? Walking Bear?”

“I saw them walk into the plant,” Autumn said, voice filled with sadness. “Just before the tower came down.”

Andy was about to call out when Walking Bear loomed out of the scrub. He had his arm around Dolly’s shoulder.

“Mom!” Andy rushed to her side. Walking Bear released her but she did not move. Andy hugged her. She did not respond. “You’re all right?”

“Where am I?” Dolly said.

Andy’s relief at her survival waned, replaced by the familiar dread of her incoherence. He looked up from her shoulder to Walking Bear.

“In the plant,” Walking Bear said. “There was a…she went through a lot. Give her a few moments.”

“Lyle?” Autumn asked.

“Escaped before the collapse,” Walking Bear said. “Sometimes justice is not fully served.”

The water rushing into the sinkhole had a soothing, cleansing sound to it. The eastern horizon fired up a promising pink ribbon.

“Let’s see if we can roll your truck onto its tires and get back into town,” Andy said. “Otherwise it’s a long walk.”

Chapter Seventy-Four

That was as close as Lyle wanted to cut it. He could actually feel the ground collapse under him as his teleportation spell extricated him from the sinking Apex plant. How could so much have gone wrong, so many lines of defense breached? He’d be leaving this fly-speck town a few presents before he departed. They had earned it.

He rematerialized in the rear of the Magic Shop in the center of the runic circle. He had to collect his talismans and get out of here. He rushed for the back door and bounced off the edge of the circle.

“What the hell?”

Gold coins glowed at the compass points of the circle. The coins he’d given those stupid kids. The amplifiers. All in one place? Oh, shit…

Ricky stood at the wrought-iron lectern, the thick yellowed spell book opened before him. A single red candle burned at his side. His right arm hung in a makeshift sling.

“I knew you would come back,” Ricky said. “Too many toys to leave behind.”

“Impudent mortal bastard,” Lyle raged. “You don’t have the power.”

“I do,” Ricky said. He pointed at the book. “A binding enchantment. It keeps you in there with the rest of us out here. For the length of your immortality.”

“You can’t do this,” Lyle said. “You are just a useful tool. You are bound to me!”

“Some ties are stronger.”

“I’ll get out of this,” Lyle said. “And the first thing I’ll do is hunt you, your family and your friends down. You will die so slowly.”

“Someone will need to know the reversing spell,” Ricky said. “And it will be gone.”

Ricky picked the open book up by the edge of its cover with his good hand. He suspended the dry, brittle pages over the red candle’s flame. Fire leapt across the small gap and the book went ablaze.

“You stupid child! Centuries of incantations are in there. Do you know what you are doing?”

Lyle flashed back to a thousand years ago, to the night his master died at his hands. The last words his master said were, “Do you know what you are doing?”

“One break in this circle,” Lyle said with panicked desperation, “one movement of a coin, and I’ll work my way free. You can’t keep this undisturbed forever.”

“I can’t,” Ricky said. “But we can.”

Chapter Seventy-Five

One year later.

The crowd at the new marina exceeded all expectations. Anglers from both coasts were ready for the opening of the Lake Anamassee Recreation Area. The deluge of rain from Hurricane Rita had been more than enough to fill the sinkhole that consumed the closed Apex plant. Now on the anniversary of the freak storm, Citrus Glade was ready to reap one of the benefits. Tourism tasted sweeter than anything Apex ever churned out.

Mayor Flora Diaz looked sharp in a coral linen dress and high heels. She carried an enormous pair of scissors she had borrowed from the mayor of Miami-Dade. A foot-wide red ribbon stretched across the spanking-new boat ramp. A flotilla of boats sat on trailers waiting for that ribbon to part and so begin the day’s catch-and-release contest. Word had spread that Lake Anamassee was going to be south Florida’s prime fishing destination. A dozen dignitaries sat on folding chairs in the shade of a white canopy. A few local heroes were there as well.

The mayor stopped first at Felix Arroyo. He’d taken up an end chair to give him room to extend his right leg. The “Shelter Savior” walked with a cane now, but he walked, which was more than the doctors hoped for a year ago. Flora smiled and bent to shake his hand.

“Where’s the family?” she said.

Felix pointed to the edge of the lot.

“Fleecing the tourists,” Felix said.

Carlina, Angela and Ricky were working a table that sported an
Arroyo Groves
banner along the edge. They were doing a brisk business in citrus and preserves. Ricky looked over and waved.

“Ricky looks completely recovered,” Flora said.

“You should see him working the trees,” Felix said, beaming. “And remember, he’s
Ricardo
now. And touchy about it.”

Autumn came up behind Flora and hugged her shoulder. “Big day, Madam Mayor.”

“You are sure we have some fish in there, right? We don’t need a bunch of fishermen returning empty handed.”

“It’s brimming with fish,” Autumn said. “Spring was a riot as nature filled this new niche. We’re lucky they aren’t climbing up the ramp to escape the overcrowding.”

“Are you sure you’ll be happy managing the lake?” Flora said. “It won’t be as thrilling as it matures and stabilizes.”

“I’ve found that I have a little swamp cypress in me.” Autumn said. “Time to put down some roots.”

“Speaking of which, where is your fiancé? Andy oversaw the construction here. He told me he’d be here for the opening.”