Desperately she swung her hand upward.
She roared in fury.
“Stib-ma albi kandar!”
A shudder, like another earthquake, went through her vast body. Mack could feel it.
“Don’t let go!” Mack cried. “Give it all you’ve got!”
The Twelve held hands and focused with all their power, willing the Vargran spell to work.
A second shudder, more severe than the first. And this time the Pale Queen’s roar carried a note of desperation.
Her hand swatted at them. It was like someone had dropped a building out of the sky, but they were shielded by being in a depression. Even so, the wind alone, and the kinetic force of the impact, knocked them down.
“Die!” Mack cried.
A third shudder . . . and when Mack looked up, he saw a light going out in that terrible eye.
The Pale Queen sagged downward.
And then, a terror none of them could have imagined. From her dimming pupil flew ghostly figures, wraiths. Most must have once been human, and they ranged from children to old men and women: the souls that the Pale Queen had taken over her long and awful life.
The wraiths flew like bats exiting a cave. And as they emerged from the Pale Queen’s shadow, they glittered in the sunlight and disappeared.
The Pale Queen fell forward like a giant tree and smashed her face into the Transamerica Pyramid. The impact tore all of the Magnifica loose. They flew through the air, spinning and screaming, and then smashed against the steep glass slope of the building.
The dragons raced to catch them. And they succeeded.
With supernatural speed, the dragons swept them up as they fell.
Until.
Standing atop an adjacent skyscraper stood a beautiful girl with piercing green eyes and flaming red hair.
From her outstretched hand came a jet of flame that passed inches from the eyes of Fabulous Dragon. He flinched and missed the final rescue.
And Dietmar fell.
He fell four hundred feet and smashed into a parked car.
Risky met Mack’s horrified gaze and laughed.
“Eleven, now,” Risky cried, and was gone. “Eleven!”
Thirty
The Pale Queen’s body lay sprawled across downtown San Francisco. Her torso was mostly squeezed between the buildings on either side of Montgomery Street. Her arms stretched up Columbus and down Washington Street.
It was going to be one heck of a mess to clean up. Mack thought he and the others might come back in a few days, if they survived, and help with that.
But right now they still had work to do.
The mayor of San Francisco was there as Dietmar’s body was being taken away.
“You saved the city,” the mayor said.
“We saved the world,” Jarrah said pointedly.