The Dark Shadow of Spring (16 page)

“Maybe we should tell Dad and the town council,” Nina said. “This is a lot bigger than anything we’ve ever dealt with and Dad is the town warlock, after all, and we’re just kids and this is the Shadow Wraith, not some silly dragon we’re talking about, and the town council could deal with it like that council of mages did last time.”

“Maybe,” Ben said. “Maybe Nina’s right. This is way over our heads.”

“Everything is over your head,” Rafael quipped.

“Very funny,” Ben said, throwing a licorice stick at Rafael’s head.

Clark snatched the licorice stick from the air before Rafael even had time to raise his hand. “Don’t waste food,” the large boy said as he took a bite from the soft black candy.

“Will you gorping goons knock it off?” Daphne growled. “This is serious. The whole town is in danger. Hell, the whole world is in danger. We should at least warn them about what’s trying to get loose.”

“How many of them will believe us?” Alex asked. “What proof do we really have? One teacher missing? A bunch of dead birds? A hole in the ground in the side of the mountain?”

“The voice,” Ben said. “You heard the voice.”

“But who will believe me?” Alex asked.

“Dad believes you,” Nina said.

“And then what?” Alex asked. “Dad will lock me in a room or ship me out of town or who knows what.”

“You’d be safe from the Shadow Wraith at least,” Nina said.

“No, he wouldn’t,” Victoria said. “You’re forgetting the destiny the dragon named for Alex. Shan’Kal and Alex are destined for battle.”

“That dimwitted dragon might be wrong,” Daphne said.

“He’s not,” Alex said. “I can feel that he’s right.”

“Even if he is,” Rafael said, “that doesn’t mean that you need to do battle with it now. We’re still only kids.”

“Better now while it’s still mostly trapped in its prison than later when it’s loose,” Victoria said.

“Good point,” Ben sighed. “That’s an annoyingly good point.”

“Well then, so what do we do?” Clark asked, looking around the table.

Alex soon found all eyes on him again. He cleared his throat once more. “We study this book, learn what we can to help us defeat this Shan’Kal, and we wait. And we come up with a plan. And at some point, we’ll be able to tell Dad and the rest of the town what we know. And then…”

“And then what?” Daphne asked.

“And then the real nightmare starts,” Rafael muttered.

“And then we defeat Shan’Kal,” Alex said, trying to put as much optimism as possible into his voice. He hoped the others found it more convincing than he did. The silence that followed his words didn’t seem to have an air of optimism about it. They broke up and headed back to their homes shortly afterward. Alex hid the “borrowed” library book in the cellar beneath the floorboards of the stable before locking up the Guild House and walking across the yard to his home.

Later that night, stretched out in bed, Alex stared up at the stars through the window and wondered what sort of plan he and the Guild could come up with that would save his family and the town and the world from the Shadow Wraith. From Shan’Kal. The book had said that the name meant
Plague of Malice
in some ancient version of rune-tongue.

He stared up at the stars for a long time, fearing falling asleep. Knowing for certain who and what the voice belonged to made him even more afraid of hearing it again. He wondered if he would find himself in his astral body once more. He was curious and excited by the possibility of learning more about astral travel, but at the same time trepidatious, because he had seen at least one of the dangers that lurked in the astral realm. He was certain it was the same danger that was quietly stalking the town. Stalking him. That was a thought that could keep you awake all night.

Eventually he drifted off to sleep. It was a sleep filled with dreams. Dreams of battles between mages and a dark shadow-like force that engulfed the land, withering trees and grass and killing all creatures that crossed its path. In the dreams, the shadow sometimes seemed to take form, coalescing into the shape of something that looked like a dragon’s head. A dragon’s head with black teeth that drained the souls of those victims who were unlucky enough to be caught between them. Teeth through which a voice could be heard; a voice that shattered the air and struck people dead with its hearing. A voice that said “
I am coming
.”

Alex awoke as the sun crested the eastern horizon. Rubbing his face as much to dispel the images from his dreams as to wake himself up, he looked toward the window. A gasp of surprise and horror filled his lungs as he leapt from the bed and staggered back. Hundreds of small, strange insects covered the window. Regaining his composure, he slowly crept forward.

He could see the insects more closely now. They were about an inch long with hard black bodies and dark red wings. He had never seen anything like them in the valley before. As he came closer still to the window, he could see past the insects swarming the glass to the town outside. There were insects everywhere. Thousands and thousands of them. Flying through the air, covering the sidewalk and the street, clinging to windows and street lamps and houses and cars and swarming the few people who were on the sidewalk.
Plague of Malice indeed
, Alex thought to himself as he tapped the windowpane, watching the insects scatter and regroup around the point where his finger met the glass. What danger did this particular plague mean to the town, he wondered?

Then he heard Nina scream.

Chapter 14: The Shadow’s Plague

Nina’s scream brought Alex dashing through the door and down the hall to her room. He crashed through the door to find her sitting up in bed, hands clutched to her chest, staring at the insect-covered window at the edge of her room. Alex went to Nina’s side, placing himself between the window and the bed. Taking her hand in his, he looked her in the eyes.

“It’s okay,” Alex said. “They can’t get in through the glass.”

“Sorry,” Nina said, recovering quickly and putting on a brave face. “I woke up and they were all over the window and I panicked.”

“Same thing happened to me,” Alex said reassuringly.

“What are they?” Nina asked, climbing out of bed in her PJs and grabbing a robe from the back of a nearby chair. As she slipped on the robe and belted it, Alex walked slowly over to the window and examined more closely the hundreds of insects swarming over the glass pane.

“I don’t know,” Alex said as Nina stepped up beside him. “I’ve never seen bugs like this before.”

“Do you think they have something to do with the Shadow Wraith?” Nina asked. Alex was proud of her for asking the question that he was too afraid to voice aloud himself.

“I wish they didn’t, but I’m sure they do,” Alex said, peering through the window past the insects to the street below. “The better question is, why insects? Why these insects? What are they and what do they mean?”

“Look,” Nina said, pointing toward the street below and beyond the window. “It’s Mom and Dad.” Alex followed the direction of her finger, noticing that she kept it well clear of the windowpane where the insects crawled over top of each other, looking for a way through the glass.

Alex watched as his parents walked down the front sidewalk and into the middle of the street. The rest of the street was empty. The two people Alex had seen earlier had obviously fled indoors. His parents each held a six-foot carved wooden staff in their hands. Alex was as surprised to see his mother holding the staff, as he was to see his parents in the street in the middle of a swarm of malignant insects.

While he had often seen his father take his staff from the rack on the wall in the kitchen when he was heading out on difficult magical business as the town warlock, Alex had never seen his mother so much as look at the second staff on the wall. It wasn’t until now that he even realized the staff belong to her. These were no mere well-carved walking sticks — these were deeply enchanted magical staves, capable of magnifying the magical power that a mage could draw from the land and concentrate with their willpower.

As Alex and Nina watched and held their breath, their parents strode to the center of the street. Looking briefly at each other, they turned and stood with their backs together, each facing along one length of the street. In unison, they struck their staffs on the ground and then brought them up in a complex series of synchronized twists and turns, spinning them through their hands like the whirling branches of a deranged tree.

Alex could see that they were each speaking words of rune-tongue while they performed the motions with the staves. As they continued to chant and the staves continued to whir through the air, a light began to pulse around them both. It became a sphere of light, tinged blue on his father’s side and a deep crimson on his mother’s. Alex also noticed that the insects had all stopped moving. Alex’s parents continued to chant, the staves becoming a blur of motion as the sphere of light surrounding them began to expand and rise above their heads. Alex watched as the sphere of light started to rotate and pulse as it rose above the ground. It was now about ten feet in diameter and twenty feet above the rooftops along the street.

As the pulse of the giant sphere of swirling red and blue light began to increase in tempo, the insects on the windowpane began to tremble and shake, vibrating along the glass pane. Suddenly the insects were gone, sucked from the window and pulled toward the ball of light above the street. All of the insects were flying toward the light. Masses of the creatures swarmed as a group, trying to escape the pull of the light, but inevitably dragged into it like leaves drawn into a whirlpool in a swiftly moving stream.

Alex and Nina stared in amazement as hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of insects were siphoned from along the street and all over town, up into the rapidly pulsing sphere of light above their parents’ heads. After what seemed like minutes, the rivers of insects flooding through the air slowed to a trickle and then stopped.

As the final insect crossed the barrier of light into the sphere, Alex’s parents suddenly and simultaneously stopped the motion of their staves, raising them into the air to jab at the giant sphere of light above them. They shouted something as they raised their staves, and Alex knew it to be a word in rune-tongue, but it was one he did not recognize. The tips of their staves touched and the sphere of light collapsed inward upon itself, rapidly decreasing in size until it was no larger than a grapefruit. But as it became smaller, it also became brighter, glowing like a miniature red-blue sun as it became the size of an acorn. Then his parents slammed their staves down to the pavement in unison and the tiny ball of light winked out of existence with a final brilliant burst of illumination.

Alex let his long-held breath out and heard his sister do the same as they observed their parents look around the sky and then turn to each other in the middle of the street. He watched in dumbstruck awe as the serious looks etched into both his parent’s faces slowly dissolved into wide, beaming smiles. Alex’s father placed his arm around his mother’s back and she placed hers around her husband’s neck and they exchanged a brief, but intense kiss. Holding hands like two teenage kids coming home from a mid-summer dance, they walked back toward the house. Their parents looked up at where Alex and Nina clung to the windowsill in astonishment. They both waved their staves and laughed as they stepped up onto the porch, disappearing from view under the awning.

Alex and Nina raced downstairs, not even bothering to grab slippers, and skidded into the kitchen just as Alex’s father and mother replaced their staves in the rack on the wall.

“That was single most amazing thing I’ve even seen!” Alex said, panting more from wonder than the run down the stairs. Alex’s parents were always hinting at having had a wide number of strange and dangerous adventures in their youth, but he had always assumed they were exaggerating for effect. Now he realized they were more likely being circumspect to keep from putting ideas in the heads of their overly adventurous children.

“Seriously, Mom,” Nina said, “Why didn’t you tell us you could do things like that?”

“It’s nothing special,” Alex’s mother said with a grin. “Just something your father and I picked up on a trip to China once.”

“Your mother has always been entirely too modest,” his father said. “She’s a better mage than I’ll ever be.”

“Nonsense,” his mother said. “But sweet of you to say. I’m actually a bit rusty. How about pancakes for breakfast? An enchanting like that always leaves me starving.” His mother grabbed her apron from the wall and tied it around her waist.

“Good idea,” Alex’s father said. “I’ll make some eggs and sausage, as well.”

“Lucky for the town you both knew what to do,” Alex said.

“Yes,” his father said, his voice suddenly serious as he took a rack of eggs from the magically chilled icebox. “I’ve never seen insects like those before. And never heard of a swarm of any insects striking the town or the valley.”

“Could be a freak occurrence caused by the magical attraction of the valley,” his mother said.

“First the dead birds and now the insects,” Nina said. “I wonder what’s next?”

“What’s next is the two of you get dressed and ready for school,” his mother said. “Breakfast will be on the table by the time you come down.”

As Alex headed upstairs, his father raised his penetrating eyes in his direction. “Quick question before you go,” his father said.

“Sure, Dad,” Alex said, swallowing slightly as he saw the intensity of his father’s stare.

“You two wouldn’t happen to know anything about a missing book from the library, would you?” his father asked.

Alex’s heart seemed to stop and he could hear Nina holding her breath beside him. “A book?” Alex said, straining to keep his voice steady and noncommittal.

“A book on Spirit Magic,” his father continued, his eyes like probing flames seeking truth.

Alex felt an inward sigh of relief flood through him. “I don’t know anything about a book on Spirit Magic being missing from the library,” Alex said. That wasn’t strictly true, he realized. He had known it was missing from the restricted room. Which is why he didn’t know where it was. “I don’t know where it could be if Mrs. Yaaba doesn’t know where it is.” That was completely truthful. “What’s the book about? Beside Spirit Magic?” Maybe his father could tell him more about the missing book than he already knew. The real question was why his father was looking for it in the first place. Alex assumed it was because his father had the same suspicions as he did about the strange events befalling the town.