Van Bender and the Burning Emblems (The Van Bender Archives #1) (12 page)

“This location,” she said, “is top secret. I don’t think EPIC even knows it for certain.”

“EPIC?”

“Enforcement of Protocols for Intersoc Control. The police of Intersoc. Beulah is one of them. I don’t think they even know where the Archive is.”

“Wow. That’s extreme. I assume your SOaP connections gave you the location?”

“Of course. Not only is the location secret, but only the Council is supposed to know the spell to get into the Archive. But SOaP intelligence managed to learn all of it from your dad.”

“My dad?”

“Your dad. He also gave us EPIC.”

None of this talk of my dad felt believable, but at this point what was I going to do, not believe it?

Finished drawing the spell, she screwed the lid onto her vial of brink, put the vial back in her purse, and took out her Hello Kitty lighter.

“Care to explain where my dad comes in?” I said.

“It’s his secret to tell. Plus we have to hurry. In just a minute EPIC will see we didn’t go to the Council, and come looking for us.”

I did some math, and figured that we’d left Beulah less than five minutes before. Ten minutes had passed since the alarm had gone off at SOaP.

“Well,” I said, “will you at least teach me more about brink?”

“That all depends,” she said, “on if you annoy me or not.”

“That’s going to be really hard. You’re so annoyable.”

“I do what I can.”

She lit the keyhole spell, and the flames burned blue for several seconds before a red flash of light near the door handle made me step back and close my eyes. When I opened them, the flames had died and ash floated to the floor. Burnt cinnamon filled my nose. I was getting to the point that I would have really enjoyed a cinnamon roll.

She placed her hand on the handle and gave me a serious look.

“Don’t touch anything. You understand?”

Not waiting for my answer, she pushed the door open, and we entered the Archive. It wasn’t at all what I expected.

Chapter 21: Marti tries to sacrifice her hand

I forget what it was like to be young and ignorant, like Richie. Being just young is way better.

-Marti Walker

I expected to find the Archive filled with all manner of mystical objects. Shelves and shelves of trinkets that sparkled or looked otherwise mysterious and enticing. Or, as the name suggested, I also expected to find a lot of really old books brimming with arcane knowledge. For some reason, I also imagined a tiny old woman serving as curator, snapping, “Don’t touch that!” if I so much as looked at something with interest.

But, instead, an old black computer chair sat behind a particle-board desk—the kind you buy on sale at an Office Max for fifty bucks. A laptop sat on the desk. Foot-high stacks of flat paper folders of every color rested on the desk, as if awaiting filing. A picture of a golf course at dawn hung on the unfinished drywall. It proffered the profound truth “Success—it takes doing things right.” A simple folding chair sat opposite the desk.

Marti sat in the chair behind the desk, placing her purse next to the computer. I stood at the door as it closed behind us.

“This is the Archive?” I said.

She nodded as she withdrew her phone from the purse and typed away on its screen.

“Doesn’t that get tedious? Always updating your status?”

She shrugged. “The fans like it. I like the fans. I keep them updated on what’s going on.”

“What are you telling them now?”

“Back home it’s about the time of night that I go to bed each day. So, I’m telling everyone goodnight. Then I won’t be posting anything until morning.”

She put the phone into her purse and began to clatter away on the laptop keys, her face intent on the screen. I sat in the chair opposite her.

“Tell me,” I said, “where do you learn the shapes for spells?”

“Emblems. They’re called emblems. People teach you.” Her fingers continued to move fast across the keyboard.

“Will any
emblem
do something?”

“No. Only certain emblems cast a spell, and you have to get the shape right, or the spell won’t work the way you want. It’ll misfire.”

She paused her typing, touched her lips with one hand, and mumbled something under her breath as she frowned at the screen.

“What happens if a spell misfires?”

She began typing again, hunching over the laptop and leaning in close to the screen.

“It’ll have an effect similar to what you wanted, but not quite right. Some pretty bizarre things can happen when spells misfire. I once saw someone’s feet and hands trade places on their body.”

“Sounds painful.”

“Hilarious is more like it.”

“What else do I need to know when casting a spell?”

She shrugged as she typed away, probably at a thousand words a minute.

“Where you light the brink affects the results of the spell. You have to light it in the right spot, so it burns properly.”

“Your brink was a different color than Nick’s.”

“The potency of the brink will determine its color. The more potent the brink, the hotter the color.” Her face brightened and she sat up straighter. “Found it! The diffuser.”

She began to sift through the folders on the desk, mumbling under her breath. After a moment, she stood and started to pull folders out. First a red, then a green, a blue, and a yellow. She laid them out on top of the stacks of folders, in roughly the shape of a cross, so two corners of each folder touched two other folders and left an empty space in the middle. She opened them. Each contained a single square of a yellow sticky note.

“This Archive gets cooler and cooler every second,” I said.

She sighed as if she’d put up with my remarks her entire life, and withdrew some brink from her purse.

It reminded me of my line of questioning. “So, when you say
potent
, what does that mean in practical terms?”

She poured some brink into her hand, and gave me a flat look.

“The effects of some spells will be more pronounced with more potent brink. For example, what spells did Nick cast?”

“He cast a spell that made my body feel rejuvenated.”

In fact, the effect seemed to have remained—I still felt pretty good.

“So,” she said, “with that spell, the more potent the brink the more your body would be rejuvenated. And the longer it would last.”

As we talked, she drew a line from the sticky note in each folder, up into the air. They all met at the same point, creating a square pyramid. The brink tinkled and glittered. It smelled like cinnamon again.

“And what color is the most powerful?” I thought of the “lip gloss” Mom always kept in her purse. It was a bright orange. “Yellow? Orange? Red?”

“White—so I’ve heard. I’ve never seen it. I don’t think anyone has. Yellow is the most potent stuff I’ve seen. Then red.”

“What makes some brink more potent than others?”

“You sure do have a lot of questions.”

“I’m trying to fill the void in my head.”

“It must be a very large void. The strength of the emotion affects the brink. The more intense the emotions, the more powerful the brink.”

“Where do the explosions come in? Nick said something about blowing the emotion up.”

She shrugged. “It’s pretty simple. To transform the concentrated emotion into brink, you blow it up.”

“If you blow it up, shouldn’t it be gone? Destroyed?”

“No, the emotion transforms.”

“And I assume,” I said, “that the bigger the explosion, the more powerful the brink.”

“Excellent deduction, Sherlock. There’s also something called ‘priority.’ If you generated the emotion, you have priority with any brink created with that emotion—it will be stronger for you than for other people.”

The pieces began to fall together in my head. Pretty amazing, given what I’d been through that night.

“So you think Nick plans to blow up the emotions I generated to make some extraordinarily powerful brink, then use it to try and take over the world.”

“Yes,” she said, “that pretty well sums up how you’ve made a mess of things.”

She drew a wide circle at the apex of the pyramid. When she finished, she scraped the excess brink back into the vial and put it away. She produced her lighter again.

I said, “So we’re going to save the day by going to Nick’s cabin and retrieving the emotion?”

“Couldn’t be simpler.”

She flicked the lighter and lit the circle. In a puff, the flame spread around the hoop. With a twist of her wrist, she lit the top of the pyramid, and the fire moved down the four lines to the folders. A rectangular sheet of green light shimmered into the space between the folders. Like the video calling spell and the teleportation door, it gave off a steady hum.

Careful not to touch any of the flames, Marti reached between the lines of fire, and touched the green light. It rippled like the surface of water, and she plunged her hand into it—into the physical space that should have been impossible to reach into because it was occupied by the folders and desk beneath the emblem. She moved her wrist around as if feeling inside a bag. Her face grew worried, but brightened, and she yanked her fisted hand upward and out so fast that she passed her hand and wrist through the flaming pyramid and the circle.

The flames died. The sheet of green light blinked out.

She exhaled hard and rubbed her hand. “That was close.”

“What do you mean?”

“If my hand was still in the portal when it closed, it would have chopped off my hand.”

I cringed. “Thank you for not losing your hand. It would have given me nightmares.”

She cocked her head to one side and lifted one corner of her mouth. “You’re going to have to get used to danger. The world of brink isn’t some sanitized, padded playground like the normal world.”

“Well, bring it on.” I nearly said—but thought better of it—that I was beginning to see why Mom might not want me to get to know other rock stars.

With a smile, she opened her hand, palm up. A large red stone, cut with sharp angles and many sides, glittered in the laptop light.

The diffuser.

She handed it to me. It felt heavier than expected, and surprisingly warm. It couldn’t have gotten that warm from the few seconds Marti had closed her hand around it.

“How do I work it?”

“You don’t. It works automatically. It will make it impossible for anyone within twelve feet of you to hold brink on their skin. So, if someone starts casting a spell near you, and you don’t know who they are or what their intentions are, go near them. That will make the brink slide off their hands. They won’t be able to draw an emblem.”

I admired the jewel, wondering how much it was worth. For something so big, with such a clear color, it could probable sell for millions.

“Time to go,” she said. “We’ll have to zip over to Nick’s cabin.”

I put it into my pocket. “Where is it? How will we get there?” With the painful memory of teleporting fresh in my body, I felt a little leery.

“Colorado. And like I said, we’ll just zip on over.”

“Zip? Is that a technical term?”

“You bet it is. How do you think we got here? A zip-door.”

“You mean teleportation.”

She gave me a look like I was an idiot. “No, we’re going to
zip
. What’s so hard about that?”

“So, zipping is teleporting?”

She rolled her eyes. “You teleport with telekinesis—with your mind. Not magic. Teleporting isn’t real.”

“And three hours ago I knew that magic wasn’t real.”

“Three hours ago you were ignorant. Now you’re just dumb.”

“There’s no other way to get to Colorado?”

“What?” she said. “Can’t you handle it?”

“Just because I hate pain doesn’t mean I can’t handle it.”

“Get used to it. It’s the fastest way to travel.” She stood and moved around the desk, toward the door.

“It figures that the best way to travel would hurt.”

“I just need to do one thing, first,” she said.

She drew another emblem, one that looked like an eye with a pupil in the middle. Without pausing, she connected the eye to her forehead with a straight line, then drew a little spiral right above and between her eyes. She lit the eye. The flame spread down the line and onto her forehead.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I said.

She shook her head as the entire emblem—from the eye in front of her, to the spiral on her forehead—flared bright red for a moment, then faded.

“What’s that all about?” I said.

“Third eye,” she said. “So I can see the spirit world and any traps Nick has set up.”

That sounded pretty awesome. I about asked to have her draw a third eye for me, but a stern expression from Marti told me not ask for it. We went out into the hallway, and she instructed me to go toward the far end while she drew the zip-door. She drew the same rectangular door shape, with the four lines extending from each corner. They seemed to be at a different angle than the previous ones she’d drawn, but I couldn’t remember for certain.

Once she’d drawn the shape, she beckoned me close.

“I thought the diffuser ruined spells,” I said.

“It only makes brink slide off skin. Once an emblem is drawn, the diffuser has no power over it.”

She beckoned me again and prepared her lighter. When I moved close, she took my hand in hers.

“You sure do hold my hand, a lot,” I said.

“That’s because you need a lot of hand-holding.”

She ignited the lighter and touched the flame to each spike. The fire spread around to the door, and the white sheet of light appeared in the doorway.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You didn’t talk with anyone. How do you know it’s safe to zip on over?”

She put Hello Kitty in her purse. “I don’t.”

“Okay, right. That makes perfect sense. What are we waiting for?”

“Look, it’s only risky if someone has moved a piece of stone or metal to the location we’re zipping to. We can zip into any other kind of material, and it will only destroy the material.”

“What if that material is, say, something like a person?”