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She looked down at her feet, and the twins realized that she was standing alone for a very important reason. Everyone else was outside the wards. She alone was inside.
“Grandma,” said Jaide, “you’ve got to get out of there. The Evil is coming.”
And indeed it was. It boiled up over Portland, a dragon in shape and intent, flapping its mighty wings and baring its teeth, flying at all speed to where Grandma X stood on a lonely hilltop with an excellent view of the town.
“I can’t leave, Jaide. I am the Warden of Portland. If I take one more step, the wards will fail and The Evil will escape into the world.”
“But you can’t stay there,” said Jack. “It’ll kill you!”
“No, it won’t.” Grandma X smiled.
“That remains to be seen,” said Lottie. “This is what it means to be the Warden of Last Resort — to take this chance, if required to. When everything else has failed.”
“Is it, Mother?” asked Hector. The twins were surprised to see tears running down his cheeks. “Is there no other way?”
“This is how it must be, dear boy,” she said. “Not least because everything Aleksandr said is true. I made decisions today that put the world in danger. This is how I will make amends. Let me put everything right … if I can.”
The twins looked to Aleksandr, hoping he would find a way to talk her out of it. He looked at Alfred, who shook his head.
“I don’t understand,” whispered Kyle to Jack. “Is she going to kill The Evil or not?”
“She can’t do that,” said Tara, “because that would destroy everyone’s powers. Who would want that?”
Grandma X smiled at them. “It’s good that you are here, children. We have fought for so long to save the people of the world. You are witnesses to all we have done, for good and evil. You must understand what we sacrifice. You will remember.”
Her moonstone ring flashed once. Kyle and Tara stiffened and their eyes opened wide. They blinked, but only with an effort, and they couldn’t look away.
Grandma X turned to face the dragon.
“No!” the twins cried. They would have run to her but for their mother’s hands holding them back.
The dragon grew large and furious before the assembled Wardens. Although they knew it couldn’t get through the invisible barrier the wards created to keep it out of the world, it was still difficult to stand unmoving during its approach. Long years of hard training — or perhaps it was a sense of recognition, many Wardens now thought, given everything Grandma X had just told them — prompted their Gifts to stir. Tendrils of smoke and flame curled out of thin air. Patches of grass bloomed suddenly from solid concrete. The daylight turned orange, then green, then returned to its former listless gray. A chill wind swept through the gathering, whistling mournfully.
“We like to say that The Evil is so evil we don’t have a word for it.” Grandma X stood firm before the dragon, even as it rose up above her, mouth and clawed feet opening to engulf her. “That’s not entirely true. We may not have a word, but we do have something much more powerful. We have …”
The Evil struck her with all its force. She disappeared under the sheer weight of the dragon, and Jaide cried out in horror. The vast mass of The Evil crashed into the wards, too, spreading out as though against an invisible glass wall. Jack turned away, unable to bear the sight of all the squashed bugs. The air was suddenly full of the smell of them.
++We have you now,++ gloated The Evil. ++We have you at last, Warden of Portland. You will thwart us no more! We have … We have …++
Its voice changed, becoming higher pitched.
++We have … we have … a name?++ it said, only it didn’t sound like an it anymore. The voice sounded exactly like Grandma X’s.
The mass of dead bugs parted and she stepped through the invisible wall, into clear air. Her eyes shone a bright, lifeless white. The Wardens backed away from her. The wards shivered. She took five steps and stopped. She didn’t seem to see anyone or anything around her. She looked down at her hands and shook her head.
The wards collapsed, prompting a flood of dead bugs that reached almost as far as the heels of Grandma X’s cowboy boots. Nothing living stirred in that terrible mass. The dragon was dead.
++We are …++ she said. ++I am …++
The whiteness in her eyes swirled furiously, spinning in ever-tightening circles. Her hands clenched and unclenched into fists, leaving tiny half-moons in her palms where her fingernails dug in. Strange forces swirled around her, twisting her hair into strange streamers and whorls.
“Lara Mae,” said Lottie. “Come back to us.”
Grandma X jerked as though struck. Her eyes closed, then opened.
The whiteness was gone.
“Thank you, Charlotte,” she said in her normal voice.
Then she collapsed.
The twins pulled away from their mother and were instantly at her side.
“Will she be all right?” Jaide asked. The old woman was unconscious but breathing. Jaide touched her neck where she had seen her mother do it the other day, and felt a rapid but steady pulse.
“What happened to her?” asked Jack.
Rodeo Dave knelt down beside them, with Lottie still in his arms.
“She became The Evil,” Lottie said. “But not the usual way. Instead of being taken over by it, she took it over. I bet it wasn’t expecting that.”
“That is what she meant about needing extraordinary willpower.” Alfred had joined them and was manipulating one of Grandma X’s hands as though testing to see if the joints still worked. “The Evil is still here, but it’s part of her now, bound up with her, under the name she surrendered until she needed it again.”
“So it’s not The Evil anymore?” said Jaide. “It’s
… Lara Mae?”
“It’s still The Evil,” said Lottie, “but it’s Lara Mae as well. Names have power. They are bound together now. It can never escape.”
“What will she be like when she wakes up?” asked Jack. “She will wake up, won’t she? Will she be herself?”
“Time will tell,” said Lottie, mopping her sister’s brow. It was hot. “Time will tell.”
Susan forced her way into the huddle.
“Until then, I think it’s best we get her to a hospital,” she said. Behind the crowd, the rotors of the helicopter were already starting to turn. “Jack, Jaide, you can fly with me, if you want. You, too,” she said to Alfred, “in case something weird happens on the way. Hector, go with David and make sure Tara and Kyle are okay. The rest of you” — Susan looked around at the gathered Wardens — “you can start cleaning up some of this mess.”
For once, the twins were grateful for their mother’s bossy tone, and it seemed Aleksandr and the others were, too. As Susan and Alfred carefully lifted the old woman off the ground and placed her on a collapsible stretcher, a babble of voices rose up around them. The shocked silence was over. The questioning had begun.
“Lara Mae,” said Jaide. “I never would’ve guessed that.”
“She said her middle name was Prudence, once,” said Jack. “It sounds right.”
“My middle name is Patience,” said Lottie with a wry smile. “Our mother named us well, don’t you think?”
The old woman looked so small in Rodeo Dave’s arms, so frail. Jaide was moved to hug her, experiencing a sudden sense of kinship that she hadn’t felt before. This woman was her great-aunt, her grandma’s twin sister. She had been gone for a long time, and now she was home. Whatever else happened, that was an amazing, wonderful thing.
“Jack, Jaide, are you coming or not?”
Jack tugged at his sister. This was their chance to finally ride with their mother in the helicopter, something they had wanted forever.
Jaide wasn’t ready.
“You go,” she told him, letting go of Lottie but finding the old woman’s hand and feeling it grip hers tightly. “I’ll stay here and make sure Dad’s okay.”
