Demons and Druids Page 13

  My arms, my chest, my legs, my back, ached. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I could survive for five. It was so hot that the ruined stones around us were glowing a dull red.

  In fact, the sky was glowing red, too.

  No. That wasn’t it exactly.

  It was morning. The sky was glowing because the sun was rising.

  And as the first rays hit the monument, something else happened.

  Look to the sky, look to the sky. Wasn’t that what Merlin had told me?

  Chapter 81

  FAR OVER MY HEAD, another sun had appeared, a hazy, red, shimmering orb hanging a thousand feet or so in the air. I’m not kidding you.

  It was so faint I could barely see it. But I could sure feel it. Even with Beta’s flames close enough to touch, this second sun felt hot enough to melt glass.

  The combination was too much for me by a couple hundred degrees. I collapsed onto my knees, gasping, staring upward, praying for somebody to come by selling umbrellas.

  “So. You’ve decided to accept your fate?” Beta trailed off for a second, then began again, speaking more softly now, in a sort of rustling growl. “Finally you understand that you can never win. I’m too powerful to be extinguished now. Too hot to… to…”

  Beta was silent for a moment, as if he was at a loss for words. His flames stopped closing in on me. I had a feeling he was looking up, too.

  Look to the sky, Beta. Look to the sky.

  “What… ?” But the word came out slowly, in a low drawl this time. He sounded detached, almost hypnotized by the ball above us.

  Was this Stonehenge’s secret? The circle of stones, heated by Beta’s fire, was reflecting the sun’s rays, projecting them directly above us. Even in its ruined state, it somehow acted like a giant lens, focusing the sun’s heat into a single intense point.

  And that heat was attracting Beta like a magnet.

  “The ssssun?” he hissed. “Thoussssands of yearssss. How did I not ssssee it before?”

  Beta’s flames seemed to be reaching for the second sun. In just seconds Beta had become a column above me, hundreds of feet tall, drifting up as steadily as if he was on an elevator.

  As Beta reached the transparent sphere overhead, he flowed into it, filling it with his flames. The hazy red ball became a burning white one. It really was like there were two suns in the sky, one just barely over the horizon, one blazing directly above me.

  Beta flickered and spoke haltingly. “Wasss it you who made ssssomething ssso…”

  As he struggled to finish the sentence, a sound came that was louder than any thunderclap I’d ever heard.

  Then Beta’s flames shot across the sky in a narrow line, straight toward the rising sun, the real sun. The fiery alien looked like a burning orange laser beam.

  A single word came to me. “Beautiful?”

  The sphere of heat overhead was suddenly empty again. The stones around me slowly cooled.

  I guess that meant Stonehenge had done its work. It had sent Beta into the one fire even he couldn’t handle: the sun. Beta was a pillar of flame, streaking across space, right into the heart of our solar system.

  I raised my hand in a painful salute.

  “Good riddance, Number 3. You’re officially off The List.”

  And then I fainted.

  Chapter 82

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in what seemed like centuries—and it sort of had been—I felt something cool and refreshing on my forehead.

  I opened my eyes.

  Sweet Dana was bent over me, wiping my brow with a damp cloth. As she saw me come to, she sighed. “Thank God, you’re tough. You had me worried sick, Daniel.”

  “Did Beta—” I began, and coughed. My throat felt like I’d eaten hot charcoal briquettes, several bags’ worth.

  “Don’t worry. It was all just a bad dream,” said Joe soothingly from behind me, and then he chuckled. “Nah, just kidding. You shot that freak right into the sun. Well done. You’re getting better and better, buddy. Did you catch my joke there—well done?”

  We all looked up. It was still early, and the sun was low in the sky. There was no trace of either Beta or the reddish hot spot that had led to his sudden departure from Earth.

  “You think he’ll survive up there?” said Dana after a while.

  I shook my head. “Beta’s hot, but the sun is hotter. I think it would be like trying to get a glass of water back after pouring it into the ocean.”

  I sat up finally. My head felt like it might have a big lump on the back, but I couldn’t rub it. My hands and wrists were swollen and raw and already blistering.

  “We’re lucky Stonehenge was still in good working order,” Dana said, and looked around.

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “Even with half the stones missing, it was enough. Payback. Four thousand years in the making. Worth the wait.”

  “Three cheers for the ancient Brits,” said Emma, eyeing Joe like she was daring him to mention the druids.

  “By the way,” said Willy, nodding at the fields beyond the monument, “what are we gonna do about them?”

  Around the trucks still parked on the grass, Beta’s minions, hundreds of them, were tossing and turning, and looked to be in some real pain. Quite a few were just sitting, holding their knees, rocking back and forth.

  “I think they’ll be all right eventually. They’ll just have to get used to living their own lives again,” I said.

  Dana smiled at me. “Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself, Daniel. You saved the world, again. Or at least England. Now, didn’t I remember someone saying something about a vacation?”

  She pulled me to my feet, and the five of us walked slowly back to the rental van, still parked in the visitor center lot where my father had left it. As we piled in, I looked back. Salisbury Plain was streaked with tire tracks. The ancient stones were scorched and blackened, and in the middle of them was a huge crater.

  When the English Heritage people got here in a few hours, they wouldn’t be too happy. Which was a shame, in a way, since Stonehenge had finally completed its task.

  It had saved England.

  EPILOGUE

  ANYONE FOR CHOCOLATE CROISSANTS?

  Chapter 83

  WHOEVER SAYS that the English Channel is too bloody freezing cold should go up against a Cyndarian like Beta sometime. After the battle at Stonehenge, I couldn’t get enough of the cold. Ice cream, air-conditioning—and now an invigorating swim.

  It’s twenty-one miles from England to France, and the best swimmers in the world can do it in about seven hours. At the rate we were going, we would do it in less than two.

  We were cheating, a little: I’d made wet suits to keep us a bit warmer and help us float. But, hey, it’s not like we were trying to break any official world records. This was strictly off-the-books stuff. Like everything I do.

  I was feeling quite a bit better. My mother had taken good care of me, and my burns were mostly healed. Yep, that fast.

  Still, I didn’t think I’d be doing much baking for a while.

  “I don’t really get it,” said Joe between breaths. “Even if Stonehenge was built to be some kind of thermal lens, like you say, how did it shoot Beta into space?”

  “I’m not sure it did,” I said, turning on my side. “He almost sounded like he wanted to go. Like once he felt the sun’s heat, he couldn’t help it. A moth to a flame, or something like that. What do I know about thermonuclear physics?”

  Joe shrugged, which made him sink, and whatever he said next came out as bubbles.

  “All right, I’ve got a better question,” said Dana, changing the subject. “What part of our vacation are you guys looking forward to the most?”

  “No question. Lunch on the Champs-Elysées!” said Willy. “The French do their meals right. A little pâté, a baguette, some fantastic cheese, and those folks never seem to get fat.”

  “The best pastries in the world,” said Emma. “I could go for a chocolate croissant.”

  “I can’t wait t
o get there,” said Willy. “I know… last one to France foots the bill!” On that note he launched himself into an energetic freestyle. As if they could already smell the food, Emma and Joe took off after him.

  Dana, floating lazily on her back, smiled at me. “You know, Daniel, that fight the other night gave you an incredible tan. In Hollywood they’d shell out big bucks to anyone who looks as good as you do.”

  I cocked my head at her. “You think?”

  Dana’s eyes twinkled. She flipped over again and dove underwater with the grace of a dolphin, kicking hard to catch up with the others before she came to the surface again.

  “No, not really, Daniel,” she called back to me. “If anything, you look like you should be headed to the nearest burn ward.” She laughed—a sound that was better than music, even Mozart.

  It was like a kind of magic.

  A kind of magic that even Merlin couldn’t touch in a million time-warped years.

  And neither would any other alien, ever.

  I swear.

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