Jack had never heard anyone actually use the word rue before, although he had read it plenty of times. It made him smile.
Kyle smiled, too, but not from anything either Tara or Jack had said. “And we have her,” he said, pointing toward a blue dot flying across the yellow sky toward them.
Cornelia.
Jack felt a rush of relief that the old bird was safe. Maybe, just maybe, she had found Lottie and could tell them where to go.
* * *
Cornelia was parched, and needed to drink from a plant before she could do more than croak. Kyle pinned the brooch to her ankle and looked after her while Tara and Jack took the opportunity to quickly sort through the oddments from the blue room. A lot could be discarded instantly, like the necklace that gave Tara a super-deep voice, or the glove with six fingers that magically created an actual sixth finger when Jack put it on. There was a glass rod that gave the holder owl’s eyes and the ability to see better in the dark when they were holding it. Tara slipped that into her pocket. Anything with even the slightest potential as a weapon against The Evil, Jack put into his embroidered sack. The trick would be remembering what did what.
Outside, the chittering and chattering of bugs was getting louder. Any second now, Jack bet, The Evil would tire of waiting and storm their shelter. He wasn’t in any hurry to meet the army, but if he had to, he wanted to do it on his terms.
Kyle came back with Cornelia, who hopped onto Jack’s shoulder and rubbed her feathered head against his cheek.
“Charlie,” she said.
“You’re talking about Lottie, aren’t you?” said Jack. “Charlotte. Grandma’s sister.”
Cornelia bobbed her head. “Charlie.”
“Did you find her?”
Cornelia tugged at Jack’s sleeve, pulling him to the window. She stretched out a wing and pointed to a faint shape visible on the horizon. Jack squinted. It looked like a tree, but surely it couldn’t be. A tree that far away would have to be enormous.
“So that’s where she is?” Jack asked Cornelia. “That’s where we have to go?”
Cornelia bobbed again.
“It’d be so much easier if we could fly,” said Kyle, peering out the window and swallowing nervously.
“If Jaide was here,” said Jack, “we might be able to. But she’s not, so we’ll have to run.”
“Last chance for a drink,” said Tara, with a menacing glare at the nearest plant. She had daubed her cheeks in mud and tied her hair back. With the sword in her hand she looked less like a suburban girl from Scarborough and more like a dangerous desert warrior, slaughterer of bugs. Hopefully The Evil would see her that way, too.
When they had taken their fill and checked they hadn’t left anything useful behind, they left the window and walked back into darkness, Jack relying on his natural sight and Tara holding the glass owl’s-eye rod. Kyle stood between them, one hand on each of their shoulders so he wouldn’t trip over anything or get lost. Cornelia clung to Jack’s shoulder, rocking gently from side to side.
The plan was to find another way out on the other side of the building, one that wasn’t blocked by the Evil Bug Army. That meant being quiet, but the plants weren’t having any of that. The first tree they came to shook and clattered its fleshy branches, even when Tara threatened it with decapitation if it wasn’t quiet. The next took up the rattling cry, and soon the whole jungle was astir, making a racket that could surely be heard from outside. Abandoning stealth, Tara and Jack broke into a run, with Kyle doing his best to keep up. The sound of him panting was loud in Jack’s ear, even over the jungle’s hue and cry.
Just when it seemed as though the building had no other side, a glimmer of light appeared ahead. Jack changed course for it, holding his bone-scimitar out in front of him in case anything leaped out at them. They reached the door unscathed and stepped out into a long, narrow space between buildings that might once have been a street, although one with no right angles or straight lines. It was now littered with bones and rubble from collapsing walls. The multiple suns cast complex shadows across their path. Cornelia took off to guide them.
Barely had they gone a hundred yards when Cornelia let out a loud squawk and practically flapped backward in midair.
“Avast! Avast!”
Jack had never entirely understood what that word meant, but from the way Cornelia was acting he guessed she was saying, “Stop! Turn back!”
When, from around the next corner, a vast rolling wave of bugs appeared, sweeping down the street like a slow-motion flood of water, that interpretation was dramatically confirmed.
++We see you, troubletwister!++ cried The Evil. ++We see you!++
“Go back,” Jack said to Tara and Kyle, pushing them behind him. “It’s me it wants. I’ll hold it off while you escape.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Tara, holding the sword in front of her with both hands. “You can’t take it on alone.”
“Yes, I can. I have all this stuff.” He jiggled his embroidered sack. “And I have this.”
He poked his toe into the nearest shadow, and felt the familiar all-over tingling sensation of becoming Shadow Jack. The world went flat and dark, and Tara and Kyle seemed to tower over him like giants. They spun around, looking for him. He swept along the shadow, crossed over into another one, then popped up ten feet away.
“See?” he said. “I’ll be okay. Now, go! Stay inside and I’ll catch up with you later.”
Kyle pulled at Tara’s arm. “He’s right. And we don’t have time to argue.”
Tara looked up at the approaching swarm and nodded. Together, they ran back inside, out of danger.
Jack squared up to face the swarm and narrowed his eyes.
++Yes,++ said The Evil. ++Stay with us, Jackaran Kresimir Shield. We have watched you for so long. We have always known that you would join us. You have always been the one!++
He didn’t waste his breath replying. He put his hand inside the embroidered sack and felt around for a small ceramic dog that he and Tara had found in the junk from the blue room. Bringing it out into the light, he breathed on it and set it down on the ground. The Evil rose up and around Jack, insects crawling and merging into shapes too hideous to describe, while the pressure on Jack’s mind rose up, too, threatening to subsume him completely.
With a chipper bark, the pottery dog sprang into motion and ran in a cheerful, brainless circle. Jack vanished into the shadow and The Evil crashed down, right where he had been standing. The dog yapped and yapped, but as it was a Warden artifact, The Evil couldn’t take it over. The Evil’s roar of frustration followed Jack as he fled to the other side of the street, where he popped up again and waved his bone-scimitar over his head.
“You missed me. Over here!”
The grotesque mass of The Evil swept around to face him. It was made of many small, quick-moving parts, but as a whole it was slow and lumbering.
++Do not run from us,++ The Evil hissed into his mind, stopping his legs so he couldn’t move. ++It is most unnecessary.++
Jack didn’t need his legs to flee through the shadows, and he did so again before the insects could come down on him en masse.
In another spot, legs working again, his questing fingers found another object in the sack. This one was a lump of milky crystal that, when activated, froze everything around it for a minute. He and Tara had discovered its power by accident, and had spent an uncomfortable and terrifying sixty seconds unable to draw breath before the effect had worn off. Jack waited until The Evil found him again before throwing the crystal into the thickest part of the swarm. Then he vanished again, aiming for a shadowed patch closer to the entrance to the building into which Tara and Kyle had fled.
The steady splat of insects dropping to the ground greeted him when he returned. The Evil’s wrathful scream filled his ears. A mental fist hit him hard, and this time it wasn’t his legs that were affected. His vision snuffed out, and with that went his ability to see what was attacking him, or where he was going. He cou
ld only vanish back into the shadows and hope for the best.
He emerged, blinking away the darkness, right in the middle of the billowing swarm.
++We have you now!++
Before he lost all control of his body, Jack threw a handful of blue room items into the air and vanished once more. Behind him, streamers of smoke, showers of duplicate coins, and ghostly, dancing shapes that might have been people dressed in monks’ robes kept The Evil swarm momentarily occupied.
Figuring that he had confused The Evil as much as he would be able to, and at sufficient risk to his own life, Jack retreated through the shadows to the entranceway and vanished inside. Darkness led him swiftly to the far side, where Tara and Kyle were anxiously waiting.
They jumped when he appeared beside them, and Cornelia took off. Ahead was nothing but empty desert.
“Okay,” said Jack breathlessly. “Let’s go.”