It swallowed the volcano first, so that all that could be seen was a dull red glow.
It advanced up the causeway, disappearing the evil minions.
It reached the battlefront, obscuring good and evil alike and dampening and distorting the sounds of the fight.
It could totally have been just your average San Francisco fog. It could have, except for the fact that riding the fog like some kind of nightmare surfers were creatures, gigantic creatures, who seemed to have been formed of the very fog.
So, it was not exactly your average fog.
Mack pointed at this new abomination. “I think we better hope two more Magnifica show up, and fast.”
Twenty-three
Power is a funny thing. You think you want it. You think it’s great to be Spider-Man or the Flash or the Incredible Hulk or whatever. But power always has its drawbacks. Always.
In the case of the Magnificent Eight—wait, Ten—it was great to have the enlightened puissance that allowed them to use the magical Vargran language. But that meant they had to learn the Vargran language. And it meant they had to be careful in their use of enlightened puissance because that power had limits. It had to be used at just the right time, and only when necessary, because if they used it on one thing, they couldn’t use it on the next.
Now the Magnifica were turning to Mack, looking to him for guidance, waiting for him to give them some kind of direction. But you know what? Teachers didn’t exactly teach the use of extraordinary powers in school. Mack didn’t know how to make life-and-death decisions. He hadn’t read a book about it or anything.
“We don’t even know what to call those things,” Mack said, pointing at the fog riders. “If we can’t name them, we can’t control them.”
The fog, and the fog riders, had reached the bridge. There were still cars going by, but almost all the civilian pedestrians had gotten off the bridge. All except some handicapped boy in a wheelchair.
“Stefan! Get that kid off the bridge!” Mack yelled. “Wait! I mean, get him to safety, don’t throw him off the side.”
It was also best to be specific when dealing with Stefan.
Stefan ran to the wheelchair kid.
Beneath them the stone pier had now risen to the bottom of the bridge, and from the fog emerged a phalanx of Skirrit, who were the best climbers among the bad guys. They came swarming up the rough stone ramp.
At the same time the fog riders leaped onto the Marin side of the bridge and began to advance. They were built like humans but on a much larger scale. As they walked—it was more of a rolling swagger, really—they seemed to swirl in on themselves, as if they were slo-mo tornadoes made of dense steam. They had no facial features other than a suggestion of a brow, concavities where there might or might not have been eyes.
Mack shot a desperate look toward the San Francisco end of the bridge. The fog swirled up and over it, hiding the city and any illusion of safety from view.
Was that it? Did they have to flee? After all this, were they going to get their butts kicked in ten seconds, game over?
“No,” Mack said. And he clenched his fists.
“No what?” Jarrah asked.
“No, we’re not going to run,” Mack said.
“Never thought we would,” Jarrah said. She slapped Mack on the back.
“We’re probably going to get killed,” Mack said. “Sorry I got you all into this.”
“You did not get us into this,” Sylvie said. “It is fate, n’est-ce pas?”41
“We need a wind. A very big wind,” Mack said, thinking out loud. “That may get rid of those fog creatures.”
“It won’t stop the others!” Dietmar said shrilly.
“I know!” Mack cried.
Stefan came running out of the fog pushing the wheelchair. The boy in the wheelchair had dark hair, high cheekbones, cool blue eyes, very strong shoulders, and shriveled legs. He was maybe eleven. Or thirteen.
Or.
“Also,” Stefan panted as he ran up, “he says he’s supposed to be here.”
“You’re one of us?” Mack asked.
“My name is Ilya. Yes, I am one of you. At least, I said the words and was one minute in Moscow and then, poof, here!”
“Bad timing, Ilya; we’re about to get slaughtered,” Mack said.
“Eleven of us,” Dietmar said. “Maybe . . .”
Mack nodded. “We have to try. Now or never. Who knows the word for tornado or hurricane?”
“What about the cops and the soldiers and the Coast Guard and all?” the new girl, Hillary, asked. Apparently she wasn’t totally clueless.
“They’re already lost,” Stefan said bluntly, avoiding huh-speak. “Gotta do what we gotta do.”
Mack nodded, accepting that, and secretly grateful that Stefan was the one to say it so he didn’t have to.
“Ti(ch) azor,” Xiao suggested.
“Okay, then all together, focused, all our power,” Mack said. “The spell will be, Exah-ma ti(ch) azor. Ilya, Hillary, and José, you’ve never done this before. So just focus all your thoughts, picture a hurricane, and repeat all together.”
“Exah-ma ti(ch) azor!”
Twenty-four
MEANWHILE, IN SEDONA
“You call this terrifying people?”
Risky had arrived without her usual fanfare, just walked up to the school. Or what was left of the school. Because Richard Gere Middle School42 was a very large heap of rubble.
Risky approved of the destruction. But she did not approve of the way people were standing around watching. She was quite frankly disturbed by the way someone had set up a hibachi and was cooking popcorn in a large kettle and selling it for a dollar fifty for a one-gallon Ziploc bagful.
“This is not terror,” Risky complained. “This is just destruction.”
The gole— er, Destroyer looked as sheepish as it is possible to look when you’re ten feet tall and incapable of facial expressions.
Risky stood with hands on hips and glared at him. “How many people have you killed or dismembered?”
“Urrrr,” the Destroyer mumbled.
“Do not stand there and tell me you haven’t killed or dismembered anyone,” Risky raged. She was shaking her finger in his face.
“Hey!” Camaro Angianelli arrived back from the popcorn stand. She set her popcorn down, cracked her knuckles, rolled her shoulders, stretched her Achilles tendon, and generally got ready for a fight. “You don’t yell at my boyfriend!”
“Your . . .” Risky was speechless for a moment. Then she laughed. It was one of those brittle, phony, forced laughs, not something that came from a deep well of inner mirth. Risky’s innards were mirthless. This was one of those insulting laughs. “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” That went on too long. “Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho. You think he’s your boyfriend?”
“I know what he is,” Camaro said. “He’s the golem who’s covering for Mack while he’s off saving the world.”
The crowd that had gathered to watch the destruction included a number of Mack’s friends—his friends were for some reason especially enthusiastic about the destruction of the school. Plus, Mack’s parents had both just pulled up, gotten out of their car with the thought of stopping this destruction, and then been seduced by the smell of popcorn.
All these people—Mack’s friends and parents—all said various versions of, “What are you talking about? Mack’s not off saving the world.”
Camaro sighed, did a facepalm,43 and pulled out her phone.
“Do none of you people ever go on the internet?” She began loading Mack’s latest YouTube video. Which happened to be the one where he appealed to any hidden Magnifica out there.
She held it up and said, “See? Mack. This”—she indicated the Destroyer—“is a golem who has been covering for Mack.”
“Nonsense,” Mack’s father said. “We would have noticed.”
“Well,” Mack’s mother said, making a worried face, “he has been acting strangely lately. Remember how he started dripp
ing mud when you turned on the sprinkler?”
“Also,” one of the kids said, “he never used to be able to change size.”
Meanwhile on the tinny little speakers of Camaro’s phone, Mack was saying something in a very weird language. It sounded like, “Fla-ma ik ag San Francisco!”
Risky just shook her head in disbelief. “Seriously? You people are too dumb to be free. You deserve to be dominated by a ruthless overlord who will crush your pitiful spirits and turn you into terrified slaves who worship her like the goddess she is.”
When everyone looked puzzled, she said, “Me. Me, duh. That’s who you’re going to worship. Me. But first . . .” She sighed. “I swear, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
She began to change then. Her lovely, pale, barely freckled skin turned a deep red. From her slender body thick limbs protruded, seeming almost to rip out of her, or to grow like some sped-up tumor.
She fell from upright to sprawled-out and rose again on six insectoid legs. Mack wasn’t there to see it or he would have said, “Oh, yeah, that’s the firebolt-shooting thing from the causeway.”
“It’s called a Maradak, by the way,” Risky said, her voice unsurprisingly slurred by the fact that her mouth was dribbling liquid fire. “And it eats only one thing. Liver.”
There were cries of “Ewwww.”
Then Risky added, “Human liver.”
And then the terror started for real. There were screams and cries and fleeing. Mack’s parents raced back to their car and sped off—without their popcorn!
“You’re dying first,” Risky said, glaring at Camaro. “I thought I already had you killed once.”
“I’m not so easy to kill,” Camaro said.
Camaro should have run. Any normal person would have run. But Camaro was not one of those cowardly bullies; she was like Stefan: pretty darned brave, really.
So she put up her fists.
Risky put up her claws, teeth, bulging reptilian muscles, and eye protrusions that dripped fire and ice.
The Destroyer frowned.
Camaro knew she was about to die. She would need a miracle to get out of this jam.
The last miracle she’d seen was Mack moving the Eiffel Tower.
Risky roared, a sound that shook the earth and bruised the air.
And for some reason, in that moment of terror—yes, Camaro felt terror—the thing that came to mind was the last thing Mack had said in the last YouTube video.
“Fla-ma ik ag San Francisco!”
Twenty-five
Hurricanes are amazing things. Hurricanes can be killers, as can earthquakes. Neither is a joke, that’s for sure.
And suddenly the San Francisco Bay Area was getting hit with both at once. Because as incredible as it may seem, the power of the Magnificent Eleven, armed with the words of Vargran and the enlightened puissance, could bring on a hurricane. And at the same time the terrible evil power of the Pale Queen, causing solid rock to heave itself up out of the sea to form a bridge, was making the earth shift and groan and shudder and shake.
People were hurt that day.
People were hurt. And that is a terrible, terrible thing. If you feel like crying for the people who were hurt, well, good. Because we should cry for people who are hurt.
But Mack couldn’t stop the earthquake, and the hurricane was the only way he could think of to stop the attack of creatures who would have rampaged unchecked through the city and then the state and country and finally the world.
It was a necessary evil. But a necessary evil is still an evil.
The storm came on in a gray wall a thousand feet high. It made everything else seem small and weak and insignificant. It came on at 110 miles an hour.
“Hold on!” Mack cried.
“Grab the railing, get your heads down, and hold on!” Stefan cried, adding useful detail.
The storm did not touch the mile-long parade of fell creatures. They were protected by the Pale Queen’s invisible force field. But the storm had an odd effect anyway, because the vacuum created by the onrushing wind sucked hundreds of them out of the open end of the barrier, like sucking them through a straw.
Lepercons, Tong Elves, Skirrit, Bowands, and even mighty Gudridan were sucked out and thrown up into the air, and flew like flailing, bellowing cannonballs at the Golden Gate Bridge.
A Bowand hit the vertical cable directly above Mack’s head with such force that the creature was cut in two and both halves flew on.
Mack had a grip on the railing but the wind was so strong he felt his fingers slipping. Sylvie lost her grip and was rescued by a lightning-quick grab from Jarrah.
“This is insane!” José cried, and Mack only heard him because José was gripping the same two feet of railing.
Ilya’s wheelchair brake was no match for the storm and his chair began to slide. Stefan, leaning hard into the wind, practically horizontal, with his shoes slipping, grabbed the wheelchair and kept it from getting away.
All the while the Pale Queen’s creatures were battered against the support towers, the roadway, the railings, the cables. Many more were simply blown beneath the bridge to hit the water on the far side.
Then, in the midst of mayhem, the earth rolled. It was more than an earthquake. It was the earth as a heaving, bucking bull in a rodeo. The bridge shuddered and whipped. The entire roadway was like a writhing snake. Pieces of pavement broke loose, were snatched by the wind and hurled away. A car rolled over and slammed into the far side rail.
It was madness. It was death and destruction.
Mack raised his head and squeezed an eye open and saw that now even the Pale Queen’s magic had weakened. The barrier that had protected her creatures was broken in places, and the monster army was sucked out of numerous holes, landing in the churning sea and drowning.
But the storm hurt good as well as evil. The police SWAT team was nowhere to be seen. The helicopters were crumpled wrecks. The Coast Guard ship was crunched against the northern bridge pier.
The wind began to die down. The earthquake’s force lessened. Mack shot a frightened look toward the city. Most of the wind had blown straight through the Golden Gate but had only struck a sideways blow at the city. Still, Mack could see broken windows in the tall buildings of downtown—broken windows and dead monsters sliding down the slanted face of the Transamerica Pyramid. Like bugs that had hit a car windshield, they had left smeary trails of guts.
The bridge still stood, but snapped cables hung down, and the road surface was a cracked, pitted mess. Dead or dying creatures stuck in the cables like grotesque parodies of birds sitting on power lines.
The Magnificent Eleven pulled themselves together. They twisted their windblown clothing back into place. They patted their hair down. They squished the flesh of their faces back into shape.
Down below, Mack saw that the Coast Guard ship had survived. It was bent in the middle, but it had survived. And the SWAT team and marines had managed to climb onto the vertical face of the stone pier before the winds hit. The wind had pinned them against it, and that had saved their lives.
But they looked shaken up. Well, everyone was shaken up.
“I think we did it,” Rodrigo said.
“We shall see,” Sylvie said doubtfully.
“O.M. GEEE!” Hillary said. “Is this what it’s like hanging around with you people?”
Dietmar and Xiao were closest to Mack. They exchanged skeptical glances.
It was Stefan who said, “Better look at that.”
They all followed the direction of Stefan’s gaze. And they saw then that they had not won a victory, just a temporary reprieve.
The volcano had ceased to belch smoke and ash and lava. Now it was splitting open at the top, like a flower opening to the sun. It split in vast sections, like the sections of an orange.44 The newly calmed sea rippled like someone shaking out a sheet to put on a bed. The sound of rock splitting and boulders rolling and dirt cascading came to their ears.
And from
that volcano, from the underground world where she had been imprisoned for three thousand years, she rose.
The Pale Queen was come at last.
And all hope died.
Twenty-six
The Pale Queen was like a fashionista in that she could wear anything. Anything at all. Only instead of a dress or a nice pair of slacks, she could do the same with her very body, her shape. The form she took.
Her powers were unlike anything the world had seen before.
A single hand rose from the volcano as the newly made, still steaming-hot mountain split apart. A single hand so big it was plainly visible from the bridge, miles away.
That hand had five fingers, each deathly white, each ending in a wickedly curved fingernail of some glittering metal. It might have been silver. It might have been titanium. It might have been some alloy forged in the deep bowels of the earth. One thing we know: those nails could sink into solid rock and rip it like a hunk of cheese.45
Behind that hand came an arm. An arm wreathed in a bracelet made of bones that seemed to have been dipped in that same silvery metal. The flesh of that arm was as pale as a sheet of paper, but more translucent. Within the flesh one could see the pumping arteries carrying blue blood, blood that would turn black if it were ever spilled.46
The arm rose like a tower, like a living skyscraper, straight up from that volcano and then! A second hand, a second arm, now squeezing out of the volcano.
A third! And it was too much for the mound of cooling, hissing lava. The volcano simply fell apart, rolled in massive chunks to splash into the sea.
And yet another arm, and then, something that was no arm.
A head, with skin so white, so pale that the bone could be seen clearly, as if someone had taken a skull and stretched skin as sheer as a white stocking across it.
The hair atop that skull was long and brittle, as if it was not hair but flexible quills. The hair spilled out over the ruins of the volcano and hung in the sea, causing the water to boil.