Demons and Druids Read online

  I had changed myself into a hawk—one about as large as a lion.

  The vampires recoiled at the powerful gusts from my wings. Suddenly Vlad was bouncing up and down like a bee caught in a wind tunnel. His beady eyes blazed fury, though. “You’re making this more difficult than it has to be, Daniel.”

  Hawk and bat stared intently, sizing each other up, looking for an opening.

  I didn’t know if Vlad was a fan of Westerns, but the silence reminded me of the tension at the O.K. Corral just before the big gunfight erupts. All we needed was tumbleweed bouncing across the street between us and the scene would have been complete.

  Finally Vlad’s mouth opened in a snarl. “Daniel, you’ve made your last mistake. Now your friends will suffer before I—”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said.

  And then, I leaned forward, gave a swift peck with my beak—and ate him!

  Chapter 25

  YOU THINK you’re disgusted—how about me?

  I just ate a batwich.

  Alien Hunters must use whatever means necessary to catch their prey, though. And, after all, birds eat bats. Vlad had disappeared into my hooked beak in only a couple of gulps—snapped up like one of those “sliders,” the miniburgers they serve at White Castle—almost before I knew what I was doing. And that was that. He was gone.

  Have you ever been out running or riding a bike and accidentally eaten a bug? Well, this was that, times about a thousand. I had returned to my normal human shape a second later, and I was coughing and retching, my tongue sticking out. I wish I could say bats taste like chicken. They don’t, unless maybe you count raw chicken that’s been left out in the sun for a few centuries.

  At this point, I suddenly realized that everyone in the room was frozen, staring at me. The other vampires looked more than a little nervous at the way the dinner table had just been turned. And my friends just looked—grossed out. Okay, they also looked like they were holding in wild howls of laughter that would have filled the room and spilled out onto the street, but disgust was definitely their main sentiment.

  Joe kindly broke the silence: “Now, that was a lesson in biology you wouldn’t want to see on the Discovery Channel.”

  I knew Vampirus sapiens traveled in packs, led by an alpha male. It seemed clear that they’d been under Vlad’s alpha spell for a long, long time. Now that they were free again, I could see that they were flooded with feelings that they hadn’t experienced in decades, if not centuries. Fear, for example. And confusion. The minion holding Joe was making a face like he’d just wet his pants.

  I decided to take advantage of it. “Well?” I said threateningly. “Is anybody else interested in a little brain sucking? Or are we done here?”

  There was a mad rush for the windows, then a flurry of bodies and wings hurling themselves into the dark night. Only then did I collapse onto the floor and begin to shake like a leaf.

  “Daniel, you’ve got to stop bringing your work home with you,” Emma recommended.

  I sighed. “Believe me, I would if I could.” But with Vlad threatening my friends with instant death, I thought, he might as well have hung a sign around his neck that said BLUE PLATE SPECIAL.

  PART TWO

  YOU WON’T GUESS WHERE THIS IS HEADING…

  Chapter 26

  THREE HOURS LATER, I still couldn’t bring myself to sleep. I’d gotten up six, maybe seven times to brush my teeth and gargle with some full-strength, yellow Listerine mouthwash I’d found. Even that nasty stuff didn’t help.

  I was sitting on a sofa by myself, staring moodily into the empty fireplace. Fear and loathing were eating away at me, and let me tell you they were taking huge mouthfuls.

  More and more I was finding myself unable to use my powers when I’d wanted to or needed to. Sure, little things were working (mirror, check; explosive, check), and one superbig thing had worked—the hawk—but only after I’d failed on several other attempts.

  What was going on? Was this feeling ever going to stop? When?

  “When you let it.”

  I jumped, even though the voice was familiar. Well, more than familiar—it belonged to my father. My dad came strolling into the room from the hallway with his hands in his pockets like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was the first time I’d ever experienced my dad—or the ghost of him, or whatever he was—manifesting himself in full-body form without my help.

  “Don’t do that!” I exclaimed.

  “Do what?” Dad said innocently enough. “Look, Daniel, you’ve had too many close calls recently.” I didn’t say anything—I didn’t know what to say—and he went on. “You’re working your way up The List. Things are getting much more dangerous. I’m here because you obviously need a little help.”

  “How?” I asked him. My father, my real father, had died in Kansas twelve years ago. The dad standing next to me could talk, he could comfort me, but to help fight—

  “You’re right,” he said, interrupting—no, answering my train of thought. “I can’t fight your battles. But I can still help. I’m going to help you help yourself. You’ve got tremendous power inside you, Daniel. Many times the power your mother and I had. I’m going to train you to be what I never was.”

  Before I even got in a “gee, thanks, Dad,” my father stuck his hand in my face and barked like a drill sergeant. So much for unconditional love and warm fuzzies.

  “This isn’t going to be a walk in the park, so don’t smile! In fact, don’t even think about smiling! This is going to be the most difficult hour of your life! And that’ll be nothing compared to the second hour! Now follow me!”

  I wanted to roll my eyes, but instead I dressed quickly and followed my father to the front door. And that’s when I gulped.

  Instead of the dingy, cluttered sidewalk of D’Arblay Street, a wide, rocky beach stretched out beyond the doorsill. Farther away was a darkness that somehow I just knew was the ocean.

  And here was the part that really got me: over the horizon, three purplish crescent moons hung in the sky.

  Chapter 27

  OVERALL, the whole place looked like something puked up by a mountain. And it was hot. Eating-five-alarm-chili-while-locked-in-a-sauna hot.

  The landscape before me was alien—and I mean that quite literally. I’d seen pictures of lava flows in Hawaii, black rock twisted into undulating formations that looked almost alive. What I was looking at was like that, crossed with a bunch of moshers at a punk concert. Spiky rocks jutted up everywhere, ten, twenty feet high. Every edge glistened in the moonlight.

  I turned to look behind me, but the door I’d just come through was gone. The whole building had vanished. There were only rocks as far as my eye could see.

  My father started running toward the shore in a curious zigzag, jumping and weaving like he was in a video game, until he was on the other side of the beach, standing on a spiny black ridge next to the water.

  His voice was faint. “Come over here! And, Daniel… stay on the path.”

  What path? I tried to visualize where he’d stepped. No dice.

  Oh well. Here goes nothing.

  I took a deep breath and made a running jump in what I hoped was the right direction. I landed near the top of one of the tall, jagged spires and balanced on one foot for a moment, trying to figure out where to jump next. But no sooner had my foot touched the rock than I felt the surface lurch sickeningly beneath me.

  When I looked down, I saw smoke. A second later, the smell of burning rubber reached my nose. The rock was so hot that the soles of my shoes were melting.

  Barely thinking, I jumped down to one of the lower rock humps. And then I got another surprise. This time, it was the ground that was moving.

  Beneath me, the four-foot-wide hump yawned open like a mouth to reveal a gaping pit with jagged glass walls. It was like a laundry chute direct to the underworld, and I was spread-eagled right over it. “Uh, Dad?”

  “I told you to stick to the path.”

  “This isn’t e
xactly fair!” I gasped, trying to keep myself above the ground somehow.

  “You think Phosphorius Beta will play fair? You think The Prayer will? None of them ever do. Look at what happened to me! Ambushed in my own house when your mom and I were cooking potpies.”

  I gathered all of my strength into my legs and hurled myself forward. The rocks below me snapped shut, the rough sides rubbing against one another sounding like bones being ground to powder.

  I landed on one of the jagged peaks but quickly felt myself slipping. My arms were still windmilling as my body tilted backward and my feet flew up in the air. In a second I would land in a pit of sharp, grinding stone and turn into filling for a nice English mincemeat pie.

  That was it. If my father wasn’t going to play fair, neither was I.

  Chapter 28

  IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE I aimed a mental bolt downward in a straight line, and felt carbon fibers wrap themselves around one another, traveling faster than thought.

  Now I was holding a flexible rod, sixteen feet long, Olympic-standard size and weight for pole vaulting. And while I was still in midair, I spun around and stuck it in the crevice between two chomping rock pits, using my momentum and the pole’s pliancy to carry me up and over another of the tall rock formations.

  At the peak of my arc, I dropped the pole and threw my hands up, grasping at something that till that moment had existed only in my head: a makeshift parasail. It wasn’t exactly elegant, but the rough, thin strands of rope attached to the corners of a square canvas sheet would get the job done.

  I couldn’t help letting out a whoop of excitement as I glided over the entire bizarre-o landscape and landed lightly beside my father.

  And people thought skateboarding was an extreme sport?

  “Well, how was that, Dad?”

  “Hmph.” I could see he was trying to contain a smile. “I brought you here to teach you to pay attention to your surroundings. Creativity is your strength, but it isn’t everything. You can’t imagine your way out of every situation.” He paused a moment, looking me right in the eye. “Take it from me.”

  “Well, speaking of surroundings, what is this place?”

  “Cyndaris,” Dad replied. “Beta’s home planet.”

  “But I thought—”

  “That it was too hot to support life? That’s mostly true. We’re at Cyndaris’s North Pole, the coldest place on the entire planet. A few miles in any direction, and you would burn up faster than a firecracker on the Fourth of July.”

  The triple moons hung low over the “ocean” (which I realized now couldn’t be water, not in this heat), tinting it violet. The List had mentioned that some of Beta’s people were cultured, even poetic, and, minus the whole burning-everything-in-sight side of things, I could see where they might draw some of their artistic inspiration. I had to admit the view was amazing.

  “What’s with the rocks?”

  “Carbon-based life never evolved here. These rocks are living organisms. Carnivorous ones. Think of them as Cyndarian flytraps. They generate heat to attract fire-based life. Then swallow it whole.”

  The perfect setting for Dad’s boot camp.

  Chapter 29

  AN HOUR LATER, every muscle in my body was aching. Even my teeth hurt.

  Training with Dad sure wasn’t like watching The Karate Kid. This was the furthest thing from martial arts training, or learning to turn myself into a mosquito or an elephant or learning to whip up a stun gun right in front of a nasty alien beastie. Instead, this training consisted of paddling out to a rock in a dinghy (through some kind of toxic liquid that can actually exist in these temperatures), carrying the dinghy to the other side of the beach, and then starting all over again.

  I’d done close to thirty runs back and forth over the deadly beach, balancing the dinghy with my hands and head as I tried to figure out a safe path among the hungry stone jaws. I have to say, I was getting pretty darn good at it. Only problem was, I was getting tired. It was hard to think. I wouldn’t be able to create another vaulting pole. I doubted I could create a drinking straw.

  Then, on my thirty-second trip back to the water, I fell. There was no rock within reach. I watched helplessly as the boat toppled out of my grasp and was chewed to pieces by one of the waiting mouths below. Meanwhile, I was about to be impaled by a stone hotter than a stovetop. I gritted my teeth and tightened my chest as much as I could in preparation for impact.

  And then something happened that had happened to me only once before.

  Time stopped.

  Chapter 30

  MY BODY WAS FROZEN about six inches away from a searing hot, pointy rock. The crunching sounds that had become nearly constant were silenced, as was the lapping of the waves on the shore.

  “Well, watching you work so hard has been great fun,” my father said, leaning closer to me. “But I guess we should really come to the point of tonight’s lesson.”

  Not a minute too soon, I wanted to say, but my lips couldn’t move. Neither could my head, so I could just barely see Dad in my peripheral vision. Couldn’t we have skipped the basic training and just gotten to the point?

  “I know this ability to manipulate time is something we went over quite awhile ago, you and I. But it’s only now that you’re grown up that some of the potential that your mother and I saw in you is finally being unlocked. So there are a few things you should know.”

  He stood up taller, his voice becoming more military again. “Number one: bringing new things into the world is not an ability you should take lightly. But being able to go back and change things is an even greater burden.” He sighed. “I was never too good at it. None of the family was. So frankly we don’t know much about what effect it might have on the universe as a whole. All we know is that it puts a tremendous strain on your body and mind. So be careful, and don’t abuse the power, Daniel.

  “Number two: time travel. It’s not an easy power to use. Believe me, I’ve tried. When The Prayer went after your mother…” His voice trailed off for a moment, and I was almost glad I couldn’t see his expression. “Short story is, time travel seems to be connected to emotion. It can be triggered only when you are feeling something, and feeling it very strongly.”

  That must be how I did it before, in the van.

  “Number three: powerful events can create ‘stress points’ in time. What I mean is, they pretty much punch a hole right in the time stream. It’s always been said that a powerful enough Alien Hunter can not only find these holes, but can actually travel between them. I believe that you can, Daniel. You just need to figure out how.”

  He sighed again. “Daniel, you carried yourself well tonight. I’d say you’re at least one percent—okay, okay, maybe one and a quarter percent—of the way to being a truly effective Alien Hunter.”

  Fantastic. I really wished I could groan. And then something struck me. If time is stopped, how come—

  My father answered before I’d even finished the thought. “How come I’m not frozen? How should I know? This is your dream.”

  Dream?

  As if on cue, time started again. I felt the air pop in my ears, and a split second later I felt an object hit my sternum with the force of a red-hot sledgehammer.

  Chapter 31

  EVEN THOUGH it was “just a dream,” I took off the entire next day. Facing blazing fireballs and ferocious brain suckers was enough work for twenty-four hours.

  Strangely, the burn mark on my chest from that fiery eyeball looked even worse now—the red marks sorta looked like a face howling with laughter—and I wondered if the training session hadn’t been real. In another dimension.

  I treated my friends to a matinee performance at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. It’s a giant circular arena with a thatched roof, and it’s where Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed. If you get to London, or if you live in London, you have to check it out.

  The play was The Tempest, about a magician called Prospero who lives with his daughter on an island. What reall
y got me was, at the end Prospero gives up his powers, throwing his spell book into the sea. In a lot of ways, I majorly envied the guy.

  But then: What would my life be like if I just gave up the mission? The List?

  I don’t think I could exist without it.

  By the way, this is exactly what my little break from hunting Beta felt like—a single page in a book.

  Chapter 32

  A LITTLE TIME OFF was good, and it had been very necessary. But this was where I really felt at home: stalking my prey.

  The last glimmers of the setting sun glinted off one of the cracked fifth-floor windows in the dingy apartment building, dazzling me a little. I was hiding on the opposite roof, watching The Cockney Fireman (as Joe had started calling him).

  At six fifty-two, I saw the guy emerge from the front door of his building. He glanced furtively around the cul-de-sac through his aviator sunglasses, spat some foul goo onto the street, and strode off purposefully with a strange lopsided gait. He was headed to the main road. And I had someone already waiting for him.

  “He just passed me,” said Willy in my head. “I’m sticking to The Cockney Fireman like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth. If he’s meeting with Beta, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “All right. Divide and conquer. But, Willy, be extra careful,” I said. Willy would tail the creep wherever he was headed, giving me the chance to search his apartment.

  I immediately scrambled across the tiled roofs surrounding the alley until I was on top of The Fireman’s building. Then I dropped down onto the top level of the fire escape. It was slick and rickety, and I made my way carefully, then down the rusted ladder to the third floor.

  Behind a filthy window, the apartment was full of shadows. I created a thin crowbar and jimmied the window open, trying not to make a sound.