Van Bender and the Burning Emblems (The Van Bender Archives #1) (24 page)

Marti and I bolted down the hallway, but it was already too late. We couldn’t stop her from raising the cry.

“It’s no use,” Marti said, as our feet pounded on the marble floor. “We can’t get her in time.”

We rounded the corner and the woman sprinted down the hallway, at least a hundred feet ahead of us. Shaking my head, I halted. Marti stopped a few steps ahead, and turned back to me, hands on her hips. She looked mad and worried all at once.

“We need to capture Nick,” I said.

She nodded. “Then everyone will see what we were doing, that we weren’t in league with him.”

She started running again, and I followed. In less than a minute, we arrived at the training facility. But it wasn’t empty. The rest of the fundamentalist rappers were there.

Chapter 42: Traps

I shouldn’t have stopped to talk. I should have gotten straight to the butt-kicking.

-Louise Rhode

A pair of fundamentalist rappers stood in a ring three rows up from the door, dueling. An array of emblems surrounded them. Four others stood on the floor, leaning on the edge of the ring’s platform. One of them saw us and spoke while motioning at us. The words came only as a dull sound across the distance, but the other spectators turned their heads toward us.

“Crap!” Marti said.

She practically shoved me in the direction of the cabinets, to the right. She kept her voice low, and glanced at the rappers.

“Just act normal. They probably don’t know yet that their friend caught us in the Archive. We’ll get some brink and make like we’re going to practice in that far corner.”

From the cabinet I took a handful of blue brink vials, while Marti took off toward the far right corner. I hurried to catch up with her. She unscrewed the lid to her brink and dumped all its contents out into her palm.

Our path took us right past the fundamentalist rappers. Louise and a man dueled. Hovering brink surrounded them in broad strokes and tight geometric shapes. Both of them wore floral-patterned jackets that only went halfway down their torsos. From their arms dangled several vials of brink. Each hung by a thread. As we passed, Louise grabbed one of the vials, pulled it loose, and unscrewed the lid. Neither she nor her opponent noticed us.

But the spectators watched us with narrow eyes and scowls. All except for Brock. He met my gaze with both pleasure and worry, and a reluctant half-smile, as if he wanted to talk with me, but had been forbidden by Louise. I grinned at him.

Marti gave them a curt nod and strode on. They didn’t respond, but I swear I felt needles sticking into my back. She gestured at me to hurry up and walk by her side. I hastened to obey, and she leaned close to me.

“When we get to the corner, I’ll want you to draw Impermeable Barrier. It’s a spell that creates a wall they won’t be able to get past. That way, they can’t interrupt us. While you’re doing that, I’ll set the traps.”

I nodded. A dreadful feeling fell over me. We were putting ourselves into a corner we couldn’t escape. Our only way out was to catch Nick. Problem was—I didn’t know what I was doing, and so far nothing Marti had wanted to do had proven the exact right thing. If she knew what she was doing, I certainly hadn’t seen it.

But we’d already come too far to turn back now.

“That’s great,” I said. “Leave it up to the complete newbie to cast the defensive spells.”

“You’ll be fine,” she said, her voice calm and confident, as if she tried to capture evil entertainers and fought off fundamentalist rappers every day. For all I knew, maybe she did.

“Won’t the rappers know what we’re doing?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Maybe they’ll just think I’m teaching you how not to kill yourself.”

“Uh huh, maybe.”

By the time we reached the far corner, past all of the rings, we probably only had two minutes before Nick would zip in. Thirty feet of empty space extended from the wall to the first ring.

Marti went to the very corner. She put her purse down, began drawing complex curves with her purple brink, and gave me instructions.

“Pour an entire vial into your hand and draw a waist-high line parallel to the floor. Start at the side wall, and make it parallel to the back wall. Extend it out as far as you can. Then, use another two vials as you come back, making a wave that crosses back-and-forth over the waist-high line you just drew. It shouldn’t extend more than a foot above or below the line. Each wave should be about three feet long.”

I followed her instructions. The rappers watched us with open curiosity, pointing and talking with each other. By the time I’d drawn the waist-high line, Louise and the man had finished their dueling. Their shapes hung in the air like some obnoxious abstract art, and they stood facing each other for several moments before Louise turned to the spectators, her face in a rage. She must have realized they hadn’t applauded her.

I turned my back on them to start drawing the wave. The rumble of their voices echoed through the warehouse. The brink slid from my hand as I moved it up and down, trying to make each wave three feet long and not more than a foot above or below the line. Really, the hardest part was making sure the wave intersected the line without smearing the line. I succeeded. Generally, anyway.

Halfway back toward the wall—perhaps thirty feet from the end of the line, I had to start using a third vial of brink. The tinkling sound had grown louder, and the smell of cinnamon—both fresh and burned—filled the air.

The burned scent came from Marti. She’d already lit a complex combination of yellow circles, lines, interlocking loops, and curves. One looked like a rainbow. They still burned. Now she worked on a spell ten feet out from the wall. It zigzagged in an arc from one wall to the other. As I finished my last wave, she finished her part of the line just a few feet to my left.

She poured more brink into her hand, and looked back out at my emblem. Her eyebrows moved together and her lips pursed.

“Can’t you draw in a straight line?”

I looked back the way I’d come. The “straight” line undulated back and forth and up and down all along its length. At least the waves looked pretty good.

“I can’t even draw a straight line on a piece of paper, let alone—”

“It’s close enough.”

She bent over to where her zigzagging line touched the wall and began to draw a line straight up the wall.

The fire consuming the complex emblem in the very corner died. Rather than turning to ashes, the emblem faded and disappeared. Half a dozen questions about the spells touched the edge of my tongue, but none came out, because a shout from behind us made me turn.

“What are you two doing?”

Louise had started to lead her group toward us.

Marti finished drawing the vertical line on the wall, and drew more zigzags in the air over her head.

“Ignore them,” she said.

“Should I light my spell?”

“Not yet, but get your lighter ready.”

Standing near where my emblem touched the wall, I merely pulled out the black lighter Nick had given me. I’d kept it in my pocket with the little metal square. And—to my horror—the Pez-dispensing multiplier. In the confusion back in the Archive, I’d forgotten to leave the multiplier behind.

“What are you doing?” Louise repeated.

The group stalked closer, coming around a distant boxing ring, so they walked in the space between the rings and the wall perpendicular to my spell. Their ridiculous costumes billowed out behind them.

Another of Marti’s traps, one with a rainbow above it, finished burning. It, too, faded to invisibility.

“Are they supposed to finish burning?” I asked Marti.

“The trap isn’t set until they finish burning.”

“Why don’t they turn to ashes?”

“They won’t until they’re triggered. Right now, you can’t see them.”

That seemed like a strange thing to say. “But you can?”

She nodded and pointed at her forehead. “Third eye.”

The eyeball spell she’d cast a few times.

She reached the other wall and began to draw another straight line down the wall. About halfway down, her brink ran out. She gritted her teeth and growled, opened her purse and put the empty vial inside as she pulled out another of yellow. How many did she have in there?

“You’re wasting Intersociety resources!” Louise said. “That’s way too much brink to practice with. Plus, you’re not in a ring!”

She and her group had come within fifty feet of my emblem. Brock walked among them, but didn’t make eye contact with me. Apparently Louise had him cowed. Marti’s third trap spell, with the interlocking loops, finished burning. It turned invisible. Marti finished drawing her line, and pulled out her Hello Kitty lighter.

“Go away,” she said to Louise. “I’m teaching him.”

Louise continued forward at an aggressive pace. “You’re not teaching him. That’s advanced spell work—nothing you would teach an apprentice.”

Marti lit the spell at the base, where a zigzag met the straight line at the wall. The flames raced up the wall and along the floor, and toward the wall I stood by.

We couldn’t have more than thirty or forty seconds before our five minutes ended. But I couldn’t be sure.

Louise and her gang stopped fifteen feet away from my spell. She stood with her hands on her hips and her eyebrows lifted. The others mimicked her indignant posture. They looked like a troupe of actors playing an angry mob.

“What’s going on?” Louise said.

“I already told you,” Marti said, walking toward me. “I’m teaching him how to protect himself from the crazies.” She looked at me, and pointed at the rappers.

“You little twit!” Louise said.

Marti reached me and started to speak, but a hundred yards across the room, someone shouted, “They’re here!”

The warehouse entrance had opened, and a handful of people stood just inside it. At the front of them stood the rapper who’d tackled me in the Archive.

They started to run toward us, and more people poured into the room behind them. Their cries came across the warehouse floor.

“Stop them!”

“They’re traitors!”

“They’re working with Savage!”

Their shouting transformed into an angry mess of echoes and accusations. Louise and her group continued toward us. Several of them had already started pouring brink into their hands.

Marti sucked air in through her clenched teeth. She looked at me.

“Light it!” she said.

Chapter 43: Party at Intersoc!

I can’t help it if people don’t believe me. They’d prefer to think that the truth is more complicated than I make it.

-Nick Savage

I flicked the lighter. Orange flame sprouted, and I touched it to the very end of the emblem, right against the cinderblock wall. The brink caught fire. Blue flames jetted along the straight line. The wave also caught, and the fire moved up and down along its length, trailing the straight line of fire.

As the fire extended, a shimmering film dropped below it to the floor and rose above it into the air—then disappeared. As Louise reached it, her movements slowed. One hand, tipping a vial of brink so it would pour into the other hand, began to move as if in slow motion. Her mouth moved at a crawling pace, and her hair, standing out from her head from how she’d been spinning around toward us, seemed to float in the air. The others all near her also collided with the barrier and began to move at a hundredth of their normal speed.

Marti turned toward the traps she’d cast. The last trap, with zigzags, had finished burning and disappeared. Worry covered her face, and she bit her lip.

“Let’s hope he gets here soon,” she said. “That won’t hold them very long.”

“What about the rest of them?”

A horde of people came across the room, between the rings. Their cries filled the chamber like a crowd booing the referees at a high school basketball game.

Marti pointed to the side, in the direction where my spell ended.

“They’ll come around the spell.”

“Why didn’t you have me cast the spell down that side, too?”

“We may need to get out, right?”

“I’m loving this more every second,” I said. “Our plan was awesome!”

She shook her head. “It’s the best we could do. Now we can only wait and see if Nick gets here before they reach us.”

A flash of purple light came from our left, between the wall and my barrier spell. A “pop” sounded over the shouts echoing throughout the expanse.

As the flash faded, Nick stood in its place, about thirty feet to our left, wearing all black.

I didn’t know exactly how Marti’s traps worked, but I knew one thing for sure—Nick wouldn’t trigger them standing off to the side. He needed to be right in them.

Marti looked at me, her jaw gaping, worry and fear in her eyes.

I understood why—and I felt exactly the same way.

We’d made a mistake. We’d assumed that Nick would teleport into the corner. For whatever reason—probably because he didn’t trust us—he’d completely blown our assumption out of the water.

Marti had placed the traps in the wrong place.

Or, at least, he’d zipped into the wrong spot.

Chapter 44: A life-and-death choice

I couldn’t decide if I should be flattered or offended. I still can’t.

-Marti Walker

With a glance, Nick took in the situation, then turned toward us, his face as solemn as a priest’s, but not nearly so kind. He sprinted forward. Since he ran behind my barrier, he moved with regular speed—far too fast for my taste.

“Throw me the multiplier!” he shouted, holding out his hands as if to catch a football.

I cringed and grabbed Marti’s arm. My voice cracked. “Any more brilliant ideas, captain?”

She yanked her arm away, pulled another vial of brink out of her purse, and began to pour it into her palm. She leaned in close, eyes intense, voice low.

“Try to shove him into a trap—but don’t go in, yourself.”