The Call (7 page)

M
ack and Stefan flew from Flagstaff to Los Angeles without incident. Mack had taken the trip before, but it was Stefan's first time on a plane. The idea that cars looked like toys from an airplane was new to him.

Mack spent his time brooding about the bizarre turn his life had taken.

Los Angeles International Airport was quite a bit bigger than the Flagstaff airport, and they got lost while
trying to track down a haunting cinnamon smell. It took them quite a while to locate the Cinnabon, where they tried out the new credit card and found that it worked.

It worked quite well.

So they found a luggage shop and bought two very nice carry-on bags, and then it was off to the Hudson News shop, where they proceeded to fill their new bags with boxes of See's Candy, bags of Cheez-Its, and plenty of sodas. In case they needed a change of clothing, each bought a souvenir T-shirt.

Mack's T-shirt read
THE OFFICE
. Stefan's read
LAPD
.

They packed these away. Mack also bought a book, and Stefan bought a magazine with lots of pictures and very few words.

Then they used their iPhones and credit card to sign onto the airport Wi-Fi and downloaded some tunes.

Even after all that, they had a lot of time to kill. The flight didn't leave until ten thirty at night.
So Mack used the time to go online and research the Nafia. He didn't find anything useful.

So he researched
Pale Queen
and came up with a song he'd never heard.

Finally he Googled
Vargran
. There were only a couple of references to a mythical language. But not so much as a word of that language.

No help. It was depressing. If Google didn't have an answer, how was Mack supposed to figure it out?

Finally, it was time to board the plane. They found their seats. Stefan got a window. Mack got a middle seat. The aisle seat was filled by a rather large woman who occupied a good portion of Mack's seat as well.

Mack's anxiety was growing second by second. The ocean—it was right there next to the Los Angeles airport. They would be flying over the ocean for fifteen hours.

Mack had several ways of dealing with his phobias. One was screaming and running away. He was very strongly tempted to do just that.

The other way was to try and talk his way through the fear, using reason and logic and a lot of babble to reassure himself.

“It's just water, there's nothing wrong with water.
Except it's salt water, but who cares about salt, right, that's not the problem, salt, who cares? It's deep that's the problem it's deep deep deep like miles and miles deep so deep that light doesn't even reach the bottom which is full of like glowing radioactive fish monsters of course if you sank that far down you'd already be dead which isn't really very reassuring, is it?”

“What?” Stefan asked.

“Ocean. I don't like ocean. I really, really, really don't like ocean. Because it's, like, so deep, you know? And you can't see what's in it even.”

Stefan said, “Huh. We're moving.”

“I know we're moving, I can feel the plane rolling, I'm not in a coma, I know we are moving and getting ready to take off and fly straight toward the ocean.”

“Probably we won't land in the ocean,” Stefan opined.

“Probably? Probably?
Probably
we won't land in the ocean?
Probably?
That's the word you want to use?”

The flight attendant chose that moment to begin the safety lecture. And what was Mack's least favorite part? The part about the life jacket under his seat. That was not helpful.

“Yeah, it'll be totally okay as long as I have a stupid yellow life jacket on and I'm blowing into the stupid tube and then I'll float around the big giant deep cold ocean and I won't drown right away which is great because that way the sharks will have plenty of time to find me and eat me little by little and bite off my foot and I'm screaming and then it bites my butt and then—”

Stefan said, “Sorry, man.”

“Sorry?” Mack shrilled, his eyes wild with panic. “Sorry about what?”

Stefan twisted in his seat and socked Mack in the jaw. It wasn't anywhere close to Stefan's strongest punch. In fact, it could be considered an almost friendly punch in the face.

Still, it snapped Mack's head around, stunned him, made his eyes go blurry, and stopped the endless flow of panicky words.

“Thanks,” the fat lady said. “He needed that.”

The plane was in the air before Mack recovered his faculties.

“Dude—you punched me!”

“You're under my wing, Mack. Can't have you freaking out.”

Mack felt his jaw. It still seemed to be attached. But the angle might be off just a bit.

Mack glanced out of Stefan's window. He saw the bright lights of Los Angeles. And he saw the ominous blackness where the land ended and the ocean began.

He closed his eyes tight and gripped the armrest.

How long he sat like that, frozen, he could not know. At some point he fell asleep. While asleep he continued to clutch the armrest.

He woke hungry to find that there was a meal—of sorts—on the fold-down table. Stefan was eating his.

“You've been moaning,” Stefan said.

“What was I moaning?”

“‘We're going to die,'” Stefan said, and chewed a piece of meat. “You kept moaning it in your sleep.”

“What happened to the lady who was sitting here?” Mack asked.

“She found another seat.”

Mack felt a little offended. But not much. The screen on the seat back in front of him showed a map with the plane superimposed. Los Angeles was far behind. Sydney, Australia, was much closer but still far ahead.

“How am I going to do this?” Mack wondered aloud. “I'm not exactly a hero.”

“Huh,” Stefan agreed.

“Once we get to Australia, I'm turning around and going home.”

“Back over the ocean?”

“Good point,” Mack said miserably.

“I watched a movie,” Stefan said. “Put something on, it will distract you.”

So Mack watched several movies while clutching the armrests until his fingers were numb and his arms were aching. He also ate a little. The buttered roll was nice.

He slept a little more. And this time he didn't moan about dying. He moaned, but without prophecies of imminent doom.

He woke when Stefan yelled, “
Hey!
” in his ear.

“What? What? What?”

Mack instantly noticed that something was wrong. Everyone on his side of the plane was staring out of the windows, pointing, murmuring.

“Whoa,” Stefan said.

Mack didn't want to look out of the window
because if he did, he might see the black ocean, or at least a blackness where the ocean was. But he had to look. Everyone else was, and they didn't sound too happy about what they were seeing.

So Mack looked.

Just beyond the tip of the plane's wing was a small, sleek aircraft like nothing Mack had ever seen or imagined.

It wasn't a jet, that was clear. It had a bulbous front that looked like it was made out of black glass. The bulb was wreathed in what might be steel ivy—like vines, the kind that climb up your porch, but glinting metallically. The vines swept back, twisted into a sort of thick cable, and then swept up to grow around and over something that could arguably be an engine. The engine, if that's what it was, glowed all over with red light that burned bright as a small red sun at the back end.

Taken all together, there was something about the craft that suggested a poisonous plant with a swollen seed on one end and a radioactive root on the other.

The jumbo jet banked sharply left, veering away
from the much smaller pursuer. The floor tilted, the flight attendants yelled, “Seat belts, seat belts!” and one of them pitched over sideways to land in the laps of a couple with a child.

There were screams. There would be more.

Outside, the craft kept pace effortlessly.

The plane righted, steadied. Then, without warning, the floor fell away from Mack as the pilot sent them into a dive. Mack's stomach was in his throat. It was like the first big drop of a roller coaster. And for just a few seconds he was sure he was weightless.

At this point there was more screaming—some of it from Mack.

Meals went flying, drinks toppled, one of the overhead luggage bins popped open and spilled bags.

Outside, the red flower was still right on their wingtip.

As Mack stared in amazement and horror, the door of the pursuer opened, an oval of deep red light in the dark pod. And an inhuman figure appeared, framed there.

And then, despite the fact that both aircraft were flying faster than five hundred miles per hour and
were six miles up, the creature leaped.

It landed on the jet's wing, wobbled, then steadied itself.

And it grinned right directly at Mack.

A REALLY, REALLY LONG TIME AGO…

F
rom the high, crenellated walls of Castle Etruk, Grimluk could gaze down at the endless sea of green trees and fields and see the advance of the Pale Queen's forces. Wherever they went, they burned.

The endless forest was dotted with dozens of small villages. These her forces burned to the ground. They killed and ate the farm animals, killed and didn't eat
the men, and enslaved the women and children.

All across the many miles that Grimluk could see, there rose plumes of smoke. The enemy seemed to be advancing from every direction at once. Castle Etruk, which Grimluk had gotten to like over the last couple of weeks, was surrounded.

The town below the castle walls had emptied out. Just about everyone had fled. If Grimluk turned to the east, he could see the last of them disappearing into the forest, rushing from their homes as he had rushed from his. The rumor was that there was a gap in the enemy lines.

Gelidberry and the baby had gone, too. They'd had to move fast, so they took only one cow. And the spoon.

Gelidberry had tried to convince him to take it. “You'll need to eat to keep up your strength.”

“No, Gelidberry, I want our baby to inherit the family spoon someday. And if I die…”

Soldiers still lined the castle parapet. They were armed with swords and pikes and the occasional bow. But no one expected any of these weapons to stop the army that was coming their way.

Wick, Grimluk's acquaintance from the inn, was among them. He had been promoted to captain of pikes.

But all hope was invested in the Magnifica: the twelve.

Twelve people was not a lot when you actually saw them all together. It was a huge number in the abstract—the only number actually larger than eleven—but when Grimluk looked around him at the shivering, scared mess of young men and women, he was not impressed.

They were seven males and five females. Some were rich, as evidenced by their numerous teeth, their excellent clothing—two of the Magnifica had actual buttons—and their superior education.

The others were poor and wore coarse grain sacks with holes for arms and neck. Some were really poor and wore nothing but strategically placed tufts of grass attached with mud—uncomfortable at the best of times and rather disastrous in a heavy rain.

The wealthiest and best educated of the Magnifica was a woman named Miladew. Despite her station in life, she had befriended a guy named Bruise.

Bruise was poor and ignorant, but he was a capable hunter, as evidenced by the fact that he had a loincloth of black-and-white skunk pelt and fabulous shoes made of the boiled-down skulls of wild boars (complete with tusks).

The boar shoes made a clatter when Bruise walked on the stone parapet, and they were evidently painful, because Bruise cried out softly with each step. The skunk garment had a distinct aroma, but while it could not be described as pleasant, it was far better than the stench that rose from within the castle walls, where butchers tossed hog and cow innards straight onto piles of human poo for the delight of the many, many (many) flies. The butchers would no doubt have tossed leftover food onto the pile as well, but the first leftover would not be developed for many centuries.

“How could the earth be flat and have four corners?” Miladew was saying to Bruise. “Everyone knows the earth has six corners with a giant nail in one of those corners that keeps us attached to the vast bald head of Theramin. Poor Bruise, we really must work on your education.”

Bruise nodded and looked sheepish.

The witch Drupe joined them atop the wall. She gazed out at the smoke rising from the forest.

The Magnifica formed a circle around her. She had been their teacher over the long, dread-filled weeks as they struggled to master the Vargran tongue. But no one got very close. Drupe's elephant leg had been replaced by the leg of a giant bird she called an ostrich. The leg was unusually long, and it was feared that Drupe could topple over at any moment.

“Each of you has learned a portion of the Vargran tongue,” Drupe said. “Each of you has the
enlightened puissance
. Thus, each of you possesses power that acts by means of Vargran. The power to cause spears to appear and hurl themselves. The power to cause a cold so terrible that hardened soldiers will freeze. The power to move with the speed of a gazelle. The…” She noticed many puzzled looks. “It's an animal. Like a deer. But faster.”

“Ah,” the Magnifica murmured.

“The point is that each of you has magical powers to bring to the approaching—it means ‘getting closer'—battle.”

A guy everyone called Hungry Hode—his name
was Hode, and he had once mentioned he'd like more than one meal per day—interrupted. “But, Drupe, will we really be able to stop the Dread Foe?”

Drupe looked at him with a mixture of pity and contempt. “With the powers of the Vargran tongue, you will be able to fight the Tong Elves, the Weramin, the Skirrit, the Bowands, the Gudridan—all the many, many (many) fell creatures of the Dread Foe. You may even be able to contest with the princess. But your separate powers will be nothing to the Pale Queen herself.”

“Then—” Hungry Hode started to say. But Drupe was on a roll.

“The Dread Foe has all of those powers and more. She can become any creature. She can shrink as small as an ant and swell to a size impossible for your limited minds to comprehend.”

Grimluk tried to imagine how big that could be. Horses were big. Cows were big. Did Drupe mean something even bigger? He decided not to ask.

“She can breathe fire!” Drupe cried. “She can cast spells that send mighty stone walls tumbling into dust. She has potions and magic powders. She can command
the evil beasts of the forest: snakes, boars, ticks, worms, unicorns, and giant beaver rats.”

Grimluk glanced around at his fellow Magnifica. They looked as scared as he felt. None of them knew what Weramin or beaver rats were, but Drupe seemed to think they were very bad indeed.

“Then how?” Grimluk asked, his voice shaky. “How will we defeat the P—I mean, the Dread Foe?”

Drupe stuck out one crooked hand and grabbed him hard by the shoulder. She looked into his eyes. But because Drupe had only the one eye, she chose to stare at just one of Grimluk's eyes. The left one. Not that it matters.

“I don't know,” Drupe said.

“Um…what?” Grimluk said.

“What does she mean, she doesn't know?” Bruise asked Miladew.

“I know that there is a way,” Drupe said. “I know that if the twelve of you can find a way to unite all of your power, all of your courage, into one mighty thrust, you have enough, just barely enough, of the
enlightened puissance
to overcome the P—I mean, the Dread Foe.”

She released her hold on Grimluk's shoulder and
hung her head. “It is in the prophecies of the Most Ancient Ones. It is why we have placed all our hopes in you. The twelve of twelve, each filled with the
enlightened puissance
, all twelve united as one, shall stop the Dread Foe.”

“‘Shall?'” Grimluk echoed hopefully.

“I meant, ‘may,'” Drupe corrected.

“Darn,” Grimluk said.

Drupe walked a few steps away from them, right to the wall's edge. She stared out at the forest. “Not tonight, but the next night that comes will bring with it the Dread Foe. If we fail…then all the wonder of our lives, our happy way of life, the luxury and magnificence, the endless pleasure of our freedom, will be doomed. And all the world will serve the Dr—”

She stopped and clenched her fist and shook it at the ever-approaching smoke.

“No, I will say her name!” Drupe cried in a mix of defiance and fear. “As the final battle approaches, I will speak her name. She comes! She comes! The Pale Queen!”