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“Quickly!” he shouted at them through the open window. “I don’t know what you’re doing playing around on that old boat, but you’ve got to get out of this weather now!”
No one argued. Most cars wouldn’t fit all of them at once, but Zebediah had room to spare. Tara let go of the glass rod so her owl eyes disappeared. The sword she kept. As they came down the gangplank, Jack glanced behind him, looking for any sign of The Evil. The dragon was completely gone; all the bugs had fallen into the water. But he had learned from hard experience not to assume anything until Grandma X said it was safe.
Kyle and Jack put Lottie in the middle of the back seat, between the two of them. As they wrapped the seat belt around her, Lottie chuckled.
“I can’t believe you’re still driving this old thing, David,” she said to Rodeo Dave. “Couldn’t you have found a more zippy Companion by now?”
He stared at her via the rearview mirror, brow deeply furrowed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do I know you?”
Lottie looked puzzled and hurt. Jack could almost see her thinking how much she must have changed. But he couldn’t explain without breaking their promise to Rodeo Dave: to let him forget his past as a Warden, and the loss of Lottie, long ago. But maybe that promise was invalid now that Lottie was back. Didn’t that make everything else irrelevant?
“Dave doesn’t have any memories of you because he asked Grandma to take them away,” Jack ended up saying. “It’s a long story. We’ll explain later.”
Dave frowned even harder. “I asked your grandmother to do what, now?”
Jaide slammed the door to distract him. Rough handling made the car grouchy, Dave said, although soaking wet passengers had had little effect in the past.
“That’s all of us,” she said, holding a damp and bedraggled Cornelia on her lap. “Let’s go. Where are you taking us?”
“Home, I guess,” he started to say. “Or perhaps Scarborough. It’s getting a bit too blowy out there even for me.”
++I will await you at Project Thunderclap,++ said Grandma X. ++Make haste.++
Jaide jumped. The spectral form of her grandmother had appeared in one of the side mirrors. She still looked very grim.
“Can you take us to the tent?” Jaide asked Dave. “There’s … uh … an emergency town meeting there, for the people who are left. I reckon Grandma will be there. But we might miss her unless we go quickly.”
“Right you are.” Dave shrugged off the matter of his missing memory as though he had already forgotten it. And maybe he had, Jaide thought. That was probably the key to making a deception like this work: not allowing people to know what they no longer knew.
Jack’s cell phone rang as the big car’s wheels spun in the mud and they accelerated away from the sea.
“Hello?”
“Oh, Jack, I’m so glad you’re safe!”
It was his mother. She was calling from somewhere very noisy. The helicopter — judging by the familiar whop-whop sound of spinning blades in the background.
“Everything’s okay,” he reassured her. “We’re all home now.”
“Don’t go home,” she said. “You have to get out of there, fast.”
“It’s just a storm, Mom.”
“We both know it’s much more than a storm. And I’m flying in it right now so I can see what’s going on better than you. Whatever that thing was that fell out of the sky, it just started coming out of the ocean, and it looks mean.”
Jack craned around to look behind him. Something big and black was crawling over the Omega and sending tentacles to the shore. It was dotted with thousands of tiny, glowing white eyes.
“Uh, that’s not good,” he said. “We’re going!”
“If you see Hector, tell him … just tell him to answer his rotten phone. I’ve been trying to call him for hours!”
Susan hung up and Jack suggested that everyone look behind them.
“Reminds me of that big storm the week you two arrived,” Rodeo Dave told the twins. “We were cleaning seaweed out of our gutters for a month. Good for the gardens.”
He seemed almost cheerful about the prospect, but his boot went down hard on the gas pedal.
The tent was lit up like a nightclub as Zebediah skidded around the corner from Main Street to River Road. Instead of parking, Rodeo Dave jumped the curb and drove through the school grounds, right up to the front entrance of the tent. Jack winced at the sound of the broad tires crunching the trellises, on which the class was being forced to grow sickly looking organic vegetables. Mr. Carver would be complaining about hooligans for weeks.
“Wait here,” Jaide told Kyle, Tara, Rodeo Dave, Cornelia, and Lottie. “We’ll be quick.”
Jack scrambled out after her. “Is this where Dad is?”
“Everyone’s here,” she said, running through the entrance. A lone guard, sheltering himself from the storm, waved them through. “This way, I think.”
Jack gaped at the Warden assembly. There must have been a hundred of them, and the lodestone in the center of the room held so much energy it was shining like molten gold. If everyone put their heads together, they could repel The Evil easily.
“The appearance of The Evil is most unfortunate,” boomed Aleksandr over the crowd, as though responding to Jack’s thought. “We can defeat the incursion or we can continue with our plan. We can’t do both.”
The twins looked around for their grandmother, and saw her on the fringe, ushering them toward her. When Jack was within reach she hugged him quickly and fiercely, but then let go to concentrate on what the other Wardens were saying.
“The threat is here and now,” said one. “Deal with it and try Thunderclap another day.”
“But The Evil will be ready,” protested another. “This is our one and only chance.”
“There’s no point succeeding if The Evil is over here now,” agonized a third.
“We have the means of containing it,” said Grandma X in a firm voice that carried clear across the crowd. “Continue with the Project. Leave the rest to me.”
Aleksandr straightened and puffed out his chest, as though he was about to argue with her.
“Do as she says,” said a glowing figure who appeared right next to him and swept a cool gaze around the room. Lottie. “If you stand around arguing with the Warden of Last Resort, then you deserve what’s coming for you.”
A shocked murmur spread through the crowd, and Jack felt a twinge of something lost and forgotten at the back of his brain. Lottie was confirming what he and Jaide had suspected, that Grandma X was the Warden of Last Resort, but was there something else he should be thinking right now? Something about what that role meant?
“Very well, Charlotte,” said Aleksandr, deciding in the moment not to argue with the ghost of the woman he had abandoned to the Evil Dimension more than forty years ago. He didn’t look happy about it, though. This was supposed to be his moment. “We will finish what we started. The megastorm is prepared. All we must do now is unleash it.”
The lightning wielders rebuilt their spiral, with Stefano at the center, and the sense of power building resumed. Lottie’s spectral form vanished, and Grandma X guided the twins back toward the exit.
“What did Lottie mean?” asked Jaide. “What are you going to do?”
“You mustn’t concern yourself with that,” she said in a firm voice, putting one hand on each of their shoulders. “Go with David. Rennie has prepared a sanctuary on the Rourke Estate — a bubble of safety where the people of Portland have been evacuated. Go there and wait with him. The megastorm will take some time to reach its full effect. You must stay out of harm’s way until it’s over.”
“And you’ll come join us afterward? With Dad?” asked Jack. His sense that something bad was going to happen was rising.
“I will do everything in my power.”
Both twins noticed that Grandma X, as she so often did, had avoided answering the question.
“Now go,” she said, “and tell the guar
ds to do their best. The tent must not be breached.”
There was no disobeying that tone. The twins found their legs moving almost of their own volition, out of the heart of the tent and to the exit, where a gaggle of guards had formed to stare out at the stormy world.
Dark shapes were swarming over the school, difficult to make out but moving steadily and greedily toward the oval.
“We’ve got to hold it back,” Jaide said to Jack. “If she thinks we’re leaving, she’s crazy. How are your Gifts?”
Jack tested them. They responded, but were still weak.
“So are mine,” she confessed. “What are we going to do? There’s so much of it.”
“There sure is … and you know what? That’s its greatest weakness.” Jack felt a germ of an idea wriggling excitedly, wanting to be brought out into the light. “It’s huge and everywhere, but it’s only one thing. It’s just it. One mind, one intelligence. It can be distracted, all at once.”
Jaide stared at him excitedly. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That we can use ourselves as bait and draw it away from the others?”
“Exactly! Good thinking, little brother.”
