Derik's Bane

"They don't know about your luck," Derik whispered. "How can they not know?"

"Shit, Derik,I didn't know until a few days ago. But how are they going to make Arthur just appear? Even if they cloned him, somehow, he'd have to grow. He wouldn't just appear—"

"We can hear you, you know," one of them said. "I mean, you're only standing ten feet away."

"Aw, shut up," Derik said.

"Arthur—the dead king Arthur—can't just appear," Sara was reasoning out loud. "It doesn't make sense. Unless—"

"Doseda nosefta kerienba!"

"—unless they know some sort of magic spell," she finished, and sighed. "Magic. Gripes! I'm from California, and I still don't believe it. Oh, yuck! Look. They're splashing my blood all over the table. Gross! And I don't see a single biohazard sign, thank you very much."

"Uh,, if you don't need any more of her blood—"

"Yes, yes, you're free to go," one of them said, without looking up.

Derik and Sara looked at each other.

"Seriously?" Sara finally asked.

"Yes, yes. Go."

"Go as inleave? Or go as in wait quietly in the corner for you to come over and kill us with an axe?"

"This makesno sense," Derik said. "You tried to blow her brains out at the hospital, but now she can leave?"

"We just needed some blood to complete the spell," Surprisingly Reasonable Robed Guy explained. "It was the last thing. We've spent years collecting the other ingredients. And she /£ a foul sorceress. We didn't want to take any chances."

"Which, since she accidentally killed all the bad guys, wasn't the worst plan, I suppose," Derik said grudgingly.

Surprisingly Reasonable Robed Guy shrugged. "That was mostly Bob's plan."

"So we'releaving?" Sara blurted. "We can just go?"

No answer. The robed ones all took turns muttering chants and moving things around on the lab table. Sara pointed to the pentagram outlined in what looked like green chalk, which she had just noticed.

"I have to admit," Derik admitted, "I didn't really see this coming."

"What do we do?" Sara asked, gripping his hand. "Do we leave? We can't just leave. Can we?"

"I... guess not."

"We didn't travel all the way across the country so they could snatch a few cc's of my blood and then kick us out.We're the good guys.We're supposed to save the world fromthem!"

"Hey, Sara, I'm with you, okay? What do you suggest?" .

"We stop them from the spell they're working on!"

"I don't know if messing with them when they're in the middle of performing black magic is the best idea . .."

"True, but I don't think anything good can come from trying to raise the dead. It's, like, a philosophy of mine."

"Even if it is King Arthur who, you gotta admit, would be kind of cool to talk to. Okay.

You stay here. On second thought, you come with me. Maybe if they try to stab me, you can give them a brain-bleed or something." He gripped her hand, then loosened his grip when she yelped again, and started forward. "Hey! You guys! In the robes! Stop what you're doing!"

31

"Modesa noeka birienza doseda nosefta kerienba modesa noeka—"

"That's totally the opposite of stop what you're doing," Derik said, and Sara almost laughed. What a day. What a week! Nothing was turning out the way she had expected. Was that a good thing, or a bad thing?

A bubble, poison green and clear as glass, rose from the table, enveloping the chanters as it grew. With every spoken word, it got bigger. There was no pain when it enveloped her and Derik, and no smell. Suddenly, the world was green, and the bubble was still growing.

Derik rushed forward, tossing robed fellows like red checker pieces, and as she hurried to help him, the lab table fell over. The screams of the Chosen Ones almost drowned out the glass breaking.

The world was still clear green—it was like being trapped inside a mucous, bubble—but now an ominous humming had started. Sara clapped her hands over her ears—the sound was so low it made her teeth hurt—but the sound went on, and she realized it was going on inside her head.

"We did not finish! We did not finish!"

"Let me guess," she said, taking her hands down—what was the point? "That's bad."

"The moGhurn! The moGhurn!"

Derik was standing, brushing glass and blood off his T-shirt. "What the hell is a moGhurn? And where are all of you guys going?" " There was something in the bubble with them. It was so sudden . . . one minute there was breaking glass and pandemonium and yelling, and the next she felt so heavy she had trouble breathing. The air had gotten heavier, or—it sounded dumb, but—her spirit had gotten heavier. Something had appeared, had been conjured up out of blood and despair and desperate hope, something the sect was trying to run from, but they were all trapped in the green bubble together.

The moGhurn looked like a devil crossed with an elm tree. It had a face, of sorts, and eyes and arms, and was terrible, all terrible—she could think of nothing good to describe it. It swept up members of the sect in its—arms?—branches?— and dashed them to the ground, or pulled their limbs off like her mother used to pull the leg off a chicken, and for a funny thing, it made much the same sound, the sound of gristle tearing and parting from meat, and then she bent, and stared at the green floor, and worked hard on not throwing up.

In the panic she had been separated from Derik, but now the dead gaze of the moGhurn fell on her, and it moved toward her with the rapid, inhuman speed of a snake. She backed up as far as the bubble would let her and she saw ... ... she saw ...

She saw the sect killed, all of them, heaps of robes everywhere. She saw Derik, dead. She saw the moGhurn reach for her, and then the bubble burst in a feat of amazing and unlikely luck—and tie moGhurn, delighted to be free, forgot about her and moved out into the world.

The moGhurn killed everyone in the Boston area, from the oldest man in the Chelsea nursing home, to the infant girl who was born forty minutes ago. This took the demon about two and a half hours. In a day, it had finished with Massachusetts; in a week, the Eastern seaboard. The more it destroyed, the stronger it grew—no magical green bubble to keep it in check any longer— and in a month, North America was gone.

Except for her. Lucky, lucky Sara, spared by the moGhurn, who was distracted at exactly the right moment.

And in another thirty days, she was alone. She was alone in the world. She had not meant to, but everyone was dead all the same, and the moGhurn was still hungry ... this time, Morgan Le Fay had triumphed, and her reward was a dead world.

Sara blinked, and the bubble was back. There were still bad guys running around in robes— though quite a few of them were dead. Derik was punching the bubble, trying to get out. Everything was green.

She groped, saw what she wanted, leaped for it. An empty hypo amid the broken glass and blood. She pressed the plunger, then pulled it back. Right in the heart. Instant embolism. No more luck. MoGhurn stays put.Good-bye, cruel world. Oh, Derik, and you'll never know how brave I was.

Do embolisms hurt?

No time like the present to find out. She slammed the needle forward, gritting her teeth, and then—

"Ow!"

Derik's hand, protectively across her chest. Goddamn it! That spooky werewolf speed could be a real pain in the ass sometimes.

"Derik, you idiot!" she shouted. "I have to!"

He jerked the needle out of the back of his hand, then tossed it. "Like hell!" he shouted back. "Bad, bad, bad,bad plan. Bad Sara! No suicides today, please. If this fucking weird green circle thing ever breaks, you run like hell, Sara." He kissed her hard, then thrust her back. "Run!"

She wanted to scream after him but didn't have the breath—it had been knocked out of her by what she was seeing. Derik was running right for the moGhurn, knocking Chosen Ones out of the way like bowling pins.

"We're supposed to be scared of a mutated oak tree?" he shouted, then leaped for the demon, who caught him and shook him like a doll.

Shook him like adoll?

Her Derik?

Her Derik?

"Get your tree limbs off him!" she roared, stomping toward the demon. "You piece of shit! You overgrown nightmare from a Tim Burton movie! You leafy motherfucker!Let him go or I will kill you, I swear it, I swear it!"

She stomped through broken beakers, barely feeling the glass slice through her sneaker, her sock, her foot. "Right now! Not tomorrow now, not an hour from now,now, now!"

It towered over her, and Derik was dangling, limp, from its awful grip. She was afraid, but on top of the fear was anger—true, dark anger, that anyone, anything should treat her love like that. The moGhurn tossed Derik aside like an empty milk carton, and she saw red. Literally, saw red. It was reaching for her and she knew she was no match for it, knew it would kill her—but that was okay because it looked like Derik was dead, too, so who cared?—and she did the only thing she could as it bent toward her: She kicked it.

It screamed—horrid, awful, terrible noise— and staggered away from her. This was gratifying, if startling. It screamed, and screamed and shook, and knocked over Robed Ones, and ran around like an evil leafy tornado, and fell over, and twitched like it was being chopped down by a chainsaw, and then it shrank down into itself and disappeared.

Then the bubble popped, and she realized her foot hurt like hell, was, in fact, bleeding pretty good.

"Who cares?" she muttered, racing over to Derik, who was lying in the corner all crumpled and banged up. She skidded to her knees beside him, hesitated,I could ...I could ... Icould hurt him more by moving him and then turned him over. He came into her arms with a loose, boneless feel that scared her worse than the tree demon had.

"Derik," she said softly, and cried at his dear, battered face, the way his head was tipped too far back in her arms—broken neck at the axis for sure, maybe the atlas as well—and the blood, all the blood. His eyes were open, but he wasn't seeing her. She groped for a pulse, found nothing. Nothing. "Oh, Derik, you big 'dumb ass .. . you weren't supposed to die. Me, okay, and the rest of the world—a faint possibility. But not you. Never you." ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">