“I don’t deserve that,” I tell him. “I’m a coward. I’m cursed.”
He notices my injuries and tears, and then sniffs Nine’s face before expanding into a horse.
“Whoa!” Nine jumps back. “What the hell are you?”
“Chimæra,” I whisper. “He’s a good guy. He’s Loric.”
Nine quickly pets BK’s muzzle and then presses a healing stone to my back. As it works through my system, I notice a menacing storm brewing over the mountain.
The sky suddenly rages with lightning and booming thunder, and I’m so grateful Six has returned that I stand, ignoring the remaining pain in my back. The clouds shift and stretch in a way I’ve never seen before, though, and the sky feels suddenly evil. This isn’t Six. She’s not back to help.
I watch the funnel cloud that I’ve only seen in my worst visions form.
Bernie Kosar rears backward as a perfectly spherical spaceship, milky white like a pearl, sweeps down through the tornado’s eye. The ship lands right in front of the mountain’s entrance, sending tremors through the ground. In the same way as I had seen in my visions, a door appears from out of nowhere on the ship’s side, simply melting away. The Mogadorian leader from my visions, he’s here.
Nine gasps. “Setrákus Ra. He’s here. This is it.”
I’m silent, frozen in fear. “So that’s his name,” I finally whisper.
“That was his name. For every day they tried to torture me and my Cêpan, I’m going to stab him with this.” The red pipe glows in Nine’s hand. Its ends expand with rotating blades. “I’m going to kill him. And you’re going to help me.”
Setrákus Ra walks towards the cave’s entrance but stops before going in, one massive silhouette, stark and spectral. Through the raging wind and torrential rain, he turns, lifting his gaze in our general direction. Even from as far away as I am, the faint glow of the three pendants is unmistakable around his thick neck.
Nine and I charge out of the trees with Bernie Kosar galloping behind, but it’s too late. Setrákus Ra has disappeared into the cave and the same bubbling blue force field that covered the prison cell doors appears over the entrance.
“No!” Nine yells. He slides to a stop and stabs the ground with his pipe.
With my dagger in my hand, I keep going. I hear Nine scream for me to stop, but all I can think about is killing Setrákus Ra, saving Sam and his dad and ending this war, right here, right now. When I hit the blue force field, everything goes black.
Chapter Thirty-Two
THUNDER ROLLS, FOLLOWED BY BRILLIANT STREAKS of lightning, and in their glare I see the clouds expand and drop. Rain falls in heavy sheets, and the armored Mogadorian looks down at me. He presses the cannon against my blue pendant and says something I can’t understand. My wound in my stomach has almost healed, and I hear Ella yell my name over the thunder.
If I’m going to die, then I need to release Ella first. One of us needs to live to tell the others. I cautiously lift my hands and envision the trunk separating, when a bolt of lightning cracks in the distance. Less than a second later, the bolt strikes the Mogadorian standing over me, and he turns to ash and is swept away in the wind.
I climb to my feet and see that I’ve opened the beech tree’s trunk halfway. I continue to separate the tree as I run towards it. “Ella? Are you okay?”
She spills out of the trunk and falls into my arms. “I couldn’t see you,” she says, squeezing me. “I thought I lost you.”
“Not yet,” I say, grabbing my Chest. “Come on.”
We turn to run, and see Crayton and Héctor coming towards us. Héctor’s been hurt, and his arm is over Crayton’s shoulders for support. The wind and rain are raging. Behind them, the first wave of Mogadorians and krauls are charging up the shore after them. When I see this, I break away a large limb from a dead tree and hurl it hard at the closest pack of krauls. It knocks down several, but they’re back up again in no time. A Mogadorian soldier throws a grenade that I intercept midair with my mind and send right back into his stomach. It explodes, throwing several Mogadorians and krauls to the ground in soggy bits of ash. I send tree after tree, rock after rock, knocking many to the ground, killing more.
“Help me!” Crayton yells.
I rush to take Héctor from him. He has a bite wound in his stomach and a bullet hole in his arm, and both are bleeding badly.
“Come on, everyone!” Crayton yells, pulling bullets from his coat pocket and quickly sliding them into his gun’s empty clip. “We have to get to the dam!”
I open my mouth to respond, but an enormous lightning bolt snaps over us. It spreads across the sky like the veins of the gods, leaving the distinct taste of metal in the air. A deafening clap of thunder reverberates off the mountains. The wind and rain cease, and the clouds rotate around and around in a massive maelstrom, until a dark, glowing eye forms, staring at us from high over the mountaintops. The Mogadorians are just as mesmerized as we are. The wind kicks up again, and the dark clouds and the thunder and lightning come with it, slow at first, but quickly gaining speed, heading our way. A perfect storm, beautiful at its cataclysmic heart, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. All any of us can do is watch the thick clouds rolling towards us with a deep growl.
“What’s happening?” I scream over the gale force winds.
“I don’t know!” Crayton replies. “We’re going to need to find some cover!”
But he doesn’t move, and neither does anyone else. Héctor seems to have forgotten all about the pain of his wounds as he watches, too.
“Go!” Crayton finally yells, and then he spins around and fires on the Mogadorians to cover us as we run over a slight hill and then down into a valley. I see the dam on my right, which connects two lower mountains. It’s too far away to realistically believe we’ll reach it. Héctor’s face has turned white and he’s fading fast, and I start looking for a place to rest so I can heal him. Crayton’s gun falls silent. I look behind me fearing the worst, but he’s merely out of ammo. He chucks the gun over his shoulder and catches up to us.
“We’re not going to make it to the dam!” He yells. “Run to the lake!”
The rain starts up again as the four of us change direction. Bullets zip into our grassy footprints and ricochet off boulders. The clouds shift over us with a roar. A second later it’s as if we’ve gone under a bridge: the rain just stops. I look over my shoulder and see that just a few paces back, the rain still falls heavy and hard. The wind picks up significantly, and suddenly the Mogadorians behind us are stuck in the worst rainstorm I’ve ever seen. They completely disappear in a blur.
Our shoes slip over the sand on the shore, and Ella and Crayton dive into the water headfirst.
“I can’t do it, Marina,” Héctor says, stopping before his feet reach the water.
I drop my Chest and grab his arm and say, “I can fix you, Héctor. You can make it.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference. I don’t know how to swim.”
“I’m Marina of the sea, Héctor. Remember?” I allow the iciness to spread from my fingertips to the bullet hole in his arm. I watch it turn from black and gray and red to a tan patch of wrinkled skin. I quickly concentrate on the bite wound on his stomach beneath his shirt, and Héctor suddenly stands up straight with energy. I look into his eyes. “As the Queen of the sea, I will swim with you.”
“But you have that,” Héctor says, pointing at the Chest.
“You’ll have to hold it then,” I say, dropping it into his arms.
We jog into the water until our feet no longer touch the lake floor, and then I wrap my right arm around Héctor’s chest and paddle with my left. Héctor hugs the Chest to his stomach, and he floats on his back, his head just above water. Ella and Crayton tread water in the middle of the lake, and I pull Héctor towards them.
The clouds overhead dissipate, shrinking into a hundred wispy lines of gray in the sky. The advancing Mogadorians are no longer a blur in a rainstorm, and the moment they can see they charge at the lake with dozens of krauls yipping in front of them.
A tiny black speck falls from above as the last cloud disappears, and the closer the speck gets, the more it appears to be a human.
Wearing a large blue pendant around her neck, she lands on the shore, rippling the sand. It’s a strikingly beautiful girl with raven-colored hair; and the second I see her I know she’s the one I’ve been dreaming of, the one I painted on the cave’s wall.
“She’s one of us!” I shout.
The girl looks around, we make eye contact, and then she vanishes a moment later. I’m shocked, crushed, believing I must have imagined her.
“Where’d she go?” Ella asks.
The moment I realize Ella saw her, too, that I hadn’t imagined her, I watch as the two nearest krauls are somehow yanked backwards in the air. They’re hovering, yipping and snarling at something behind them, and then they slam into each other until they fall limp. One kraul goes sailing into the legs of two soldiers, and the other is swung in the air, connecting with other krauls and soldiers.
“Invisibility. She has the Legacy of invisibility.” Crayton breathes.
She’s invisible? I’m amazed and jealous at the same time, but most of all I’m grateful. Every kraul that touches the water is yanked backwards by an unseen hand and slammed into the hard sand or a Mogadorian soldier. A dropped cannon rises from the grass and starts firing in all directions. Kraul after kraul is destroyed. Dozens of Mogadorians burst into clouds of ash.
Cannon blasts come from the other side of the lake, and I spin to see twenty or more Mogadorians wading in up to their waists. Rays of light hit the water all around us, creating enough steam that I can barely see Héctor in front of me.
“Ella?” I shout.
“Over here!” she yells from my left.
“Take Héctor.”
She wraps her arm around Héctor’s chest. “Why?”
“Because I’m not going to stay out here while that girl fights all by herself. This is my war, too.”
Before anyone can stop me, I sink below the surface and the water instantly tickles my lungs. I swim deeper until the green-blue color of the lake becomes gray. I see the hulking body of Olivia below me; she’s lying lifeless on the lake floor, clouds of blood billowing from the hundreds of bite wounds on her back.
I head towards the opposite shore and after a minute I can see the legs of the Mogadorians. I swim next to the one farthest on the left. I plant my feet in the muddy bottom and launch myself out of the water. The Mogadorian doesn’t have enough time to react as I toss him towards the middle of the lake with my mind. I float his cannon into my hands, shoot him, and never let go of the trigger. The Mogadorians along the lake burst into ash, and when I’ve killed them all, I aim towards the hundreds near the vehicles.
There’s movement in the water behind me and I’m too slow; a kraul jumps and sinks its teeth into my side. The pain is immediate and horrible, as if someone was holding a hot branding iron to my ribs. The beast whips me headfirst into the water and then against the sand of the shore. I catch my breath and scream as it arcs me back over and into the water again. I’m sure this is how I will die, but suddenly the kraul’s mouth widens and releases me. I fall onto my stomach on the shore and watch as the kraul’s mouth continues to widen until I hear bones snapping. The raven-haired girl materializes before my eyes, her hands on the beast’s quivering lips. She looks back at me before yanking the jaws completely vertical, killing the kraul.
