A Hero at the End of the World (31 page)

“Welp, Abrams has finally gone off his rocker,” Archie said loudly.

Sophie glared at Archie. “He’s not—Oliver, stop it, you’re really freaking us out.”

In response, Oliver held his arms out at his sides. He remained utterly silent as a half dozen crow sentries landed on them, each one the size of a cat; they fluttered their wings, and then Oliver was lifting off the ground, his feet dangling inches from the floor.

Sophie put her head in her hands. “Oh my god.”

“Woden can’t help us anymore,” Oliver replied, his voice grave. “In these walls—ow!” He flinched, and one sentry took off. He hung in the air, lopsided. “Blimey, their talons are sharp. I think I’m bleeding. All right, let’s settle back down, lads.”

The sentries eased down until Oliver’s feet were once again flat on the floor.

“What,” Sophie asked slowly, “was that?”

“There’s fifty agents behind us with assault rifles,” Ewan snapped. “We really don’t have time for whatever this is.”

Oliver pulled a blanket off what turned out of to be a tall, toppling stack of newspapers. He picked a copy of
The Hedge
.
Bird man blows up Old Bailey in act of terror, challenges slayer to final battle
, the headline read. Next to it was a split photo: one of the former domed tower of the Old Bailey, now a crumbling spire with smoke rising out of it, and the other of a sneering Oliver with the mask over his face.

“I think they’re trying to stop me before this final battle,” he said, “whatever that is.”

“They want to kill you,” said Ewan.

They all jumped when the door to the stairs flew open. From the doorway peered a series of agents. Their assault rifles were pointed straight ahead—at not only Oliver, but the whole lot of them.

“Oliver Abrams,” Kaur, only one of two without a helmet, began.

“
Thissum wordum ne sealdede gethafunge
,” Oliver shouted.

Kaur and the other agents in the doorway flew back, and the door slammed shut, glowing faintly blue. Something crashed into it on the other side, but it didn’t break open.

Sophie’s head whipped around. “Oliver, where’s the Baahl?” she pleaded.

“I don’t know,” Oliver said.

Ewan imagined a row of armed agents going all the way down the stairwell, with Yates and Kaur in the lead, growing increasingly angrier and angrier as they realized that Ewan wasn’t convincing Oliver to turn himself in. If the Oliver in this universe was going to destroy London, he realized with a chill down his spine, they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him, too, if they thought that he was conspiring with his enemy.

The ward over the door flickered.

“Where’s the Baahl?” Ewan repeated.

Oliver gestured vaguely. “I think I saw it over there somewhere.”

A muffled yell came from the other side of the door: “Get the warden.” Kaur was no doubt sending the order to one of his agents several stories below.

Without the Baahl, they were trapped like fish in a barrel. The only other way out was through the glass windows and the space beneath the bell, but Ewan didn’t think now was a great time to test whether or not Archie was right about Zaubernegativum giving him the ability to fly.

With a sudden rush of terror, Ewan realized that Oliver didn’t care an iota about what might happen to them. “Have you lost your bloody mind?” he demanded.

Oliver’s shoulders sagged. “I’m so tired. You don’t know what it’s like, being me.”

Maybe it was having narrowly escaped werewolves, sea monsters, and dragons; or maybe it was spending the past few weeks in a secluded corner of the North Sea, worried the police would show up any moment and not quite sure what to do with himself in the meantime; or maybe it was hearing Oliver’s woeful, self-pitying tone... but something inside Ewan broke.

He shoved Oliver as hard as he could, getting a sick pleasure at watching him stumble back and nearly topple backwards over the stack of newspapers. Several fell to the floor; Oliver’s face was on the front of page of nearly all of them.

“Oi, what was that for?” Oliver demanded.

“I’m sick of your whinging,” Ewan said bitterly. “Oh, it’s so hard to be the great, heroic Oliver Abrams. We destroyed the universe, and now we’re all going to die. Everything that’s happened has been your fault.”

“
My
fault?” Oliver sneered. “Why, did I somehow
make
you join a cult, and then
make
you steal from someone who’s
clearly
evil?”

“I’d just like to point out,” Archie said, “that just because we have a supreme leader and demand you devote your mind, body, and soul to our cause, Zaubernegativum is not a cult.”

Oliver stared at him. A vein throbbed in his temple.

“None of this would’ve happened if you’d just let me kill Duff Slan. You ruined my life,” Ewan shouted, shaking with fury.

Oliver’s jaw worked. “You seemed to be doing a brilliant job at ruining it yourself, if you ask me.”

“Killing Slan was my destiny,” Ewan said, clenching his hands into fists. “It was what I was born to do. But I was
five minutes late
—”

“You were late because you were scared,” Oliver bellowed. “We both know you were never going to go through with it. I was doing what you couldn’t.”

It was a tangible pain, like a punch to the gut. “Bollocks,” Ewan snapped. “You did it because you couldn’t stand the idea of sharing the spotlight. You have to be the best at everything. You have to be the hero.”

“I was always more of a hero than you.”

“Name one way you were.”

“I’m brave, handsome, clever, likeable, in touch with my feelings,” Oliver replied, ticking the items off his fingers, “overall a good person, and my parents are dead.”

“None of those things is true,” Ewan said.

“Well, he
is
handsome,” Sophie said. When they both turned to glare at her, she cleared her throat. “Oliver, how does your parents being dead have anything to do with you being a better hero?”

Oliver rolled his eyes. “All heroes have dead parents,” he said as though they were morons.

“Well,
my
parents didn’t even care when I fled London,” Ewan crowed, half-boasting, half-ashamed. “So there.”

An odd look crossed Oliver’s face. “Is that a joke? They’ve done everything to try to get you back. After we told them that you’d fled the city, they began cold-calling police in other counties. They’ve been harassing your MP. They’ve even done interviews in the papers, begging you to come home.”

“Oh,” Ewan said stupidly. Had they missed him as much as he missed them?

But then Oliver ruined it by saying, “A real hero doesn’t do it because he wants to impress his parents. He does the right thing
because
it’s the right thing to do.”

“Or she,” Sophie pointed out.

“Or she.”

“I didn’t want to do it to make my parents love me,” Ewan shot back. He ran a hand through his hair, exasperated, because after all that, how could Oliver think—

“I wanted to do it because it was my destiny. It was who I was. My entire life was leading up to that one moment. When you killed Duff Slan, you killed
me
, too.”

Oliver’s face changed slowly. “What?” he said, in what looked like utter shock.

“What do you mean, what?” Ewan snapped.

“I—”

A detonation rocked the tower, cutting Oliver off. The ward over the door dropped.

Chapter 31

E
wan’s brain was still processing what was going on when agents began filing into the belfry, their weapons pointed directly at the four of them. The runes on their body armor glittered brightly.

“On the floor,” they were yelling, “get on the floor.”

“Duck,” Oliver said so casually that Ewan asked, “What?”

“
Duck
,” Oliver repeated, more urgently this time.

Instinctively, Ewan dropped to the floor, covering his head with his arms.

As if summoned, sentries began falling from the ceiling, their wings and talons outstretched, like a black, feathered cloud. A horrible cacophony filled the air: sharp pings as bullets hit the sentries’ metal bodies, cries of pain as the sentries’ claws tore through the SMCA agents’ armor, and terrified-sounding spells as some of the agents panicked.

Ewan crawled forward as the birds darted overhead. A foot hit him in the middle, knocking the wind out of him; he was still seeing stars when the same foot tripped over his body, and the person it belonged to fell to the floor with a loud bang. When Ewan could see again, he saw a sentry pecking at a hole in the agent’s helmet. He tasted sick in the back of his throat.

“Oliver,” Ewan heard Sophie say urgently as he finally crept behind what might have been a cloth-covered armchair, “I’m serious now: can you bring the Baahl here?”

Oliver didn’t answer right away. Ewan looked over at him sharply.

Finally, with a determined look crossing his face, Oliver reached out a hand—and yanked it back just as the fallen body of a sentry landed in his lap.

“I can’t, they might intercept it,” he told her, gently placing the deactivated sentry on the floor. “I left it by the quarter bell on the far side.”

“Then put a shield around it,” Archie hissed. He was half-hidden under a desk.

“Shields won’t stop someone from plucking it out of the air,” Oliver snapped.

“Wait here,” said Sophie, steeling her expression.

She disappeared around the pile of furniture that she had been crouching behind. Somewhere nearby, an agent screamed, and a high-pitched series of rings pierced the air as a bell was riddled with bullets. Ewan flinched.

“
Sophie
,” Oliver whisper-shouted after her.

Two agents collapsed right on the other side of Archie’s hiding place, and, looking even paler than usual, he locked eyes with Ewan. “I’m too good-looking to die,” he moaned.

“Sometimes I worry about what goes through your head,” Ewan said.

“Ewan,” Oliver said, looking frantic, “Ewan, if we die, I want you to know—I never meant to hurt you.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ewan replied.

Oliver scowled. “Come on now, do you really want to go to the grave hating me?”

A screeching crack suddenly whipped through the air. The windows on the east side of the belfry shattered, and chunks crashed to the floor. Shards went flying through the room. Ewan, the closest to the windows, cried out as bits of glass sliced open his hands, arms, and scalp. His flesh stinging, he crawled away from the debris, balancing on the edge of his palms.

He pushed his glasses back up from where they had slid down his nose, and, when he could see again, he found himself staring at a yellow eye peering through the now-open window.

“D-dragon,” he exclaimed, sliding backwards. Glass dug into his skin.

“Mr. Buttons,” Oliver yelled.

Frozen in terror, Ewan watched as the dragon stuck its head inside the tower. It blinked curiously, looking down at the scene; its double eyelids were the same greenish brown as the rest of its scales.

Then it winked at him.

“Oh,” said Ewan, relaxing. “That’s not Mr. Buttons, that’s Louise.”

“Mummy!” Archie gasped.

“Louise?” Oliver looked up at her in dismay. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Without warning, Louise reeled back, howling. The agents were shooting at her from the other side of the room. Her great, curved claws pulled out what remained of the iron window frame as she backed outside; the roof shuddered, and Ewan curled in on himself, putting his arms over his head to protect himself in case the whole tower came tumbling down.

Archie cried out, “No!”

Glass crunched. Ewan glanced sideways and just had time to yank his hand away from the crush of a black-clad foot. His eyes travelled up the leg until he was staring up at the sweaty, uncovered face of an agent.

It was Yates, and he was pointing his gun dead between Ewan’s eyes. He had deep, raw scratches down his cheeks and forehead from where the sentries’ claws had got to him.

“Oh, uh, hi, there,” Ewan said weakly. “Look, I can explain everything...”

“Abrams, it’s time to come out,” Yates called. He pressed the muzzle of his gun against Ewan’s temple. The floor was littered with deactivated and shredded sentries, Ewan noticed, trying to keep himself from vomiting with fear. “We have your mate Mao.”

At first, nothing happened. Then two pairs of hands appeared in the air as both Oliver and Archie slowly stood. They were immediately encircled by agents; one pushed a terrified-looking Archie back as another pushed Oliver forward.

Yates roughly pulled Ewan up by the back of his neck and dragged him back until they were nearly at Big Ben.

“We trusted you,” he growled.

Unexpectedly, the chain around Ewan’s neck pulled tightly. For a moment he thought Yates intended to choke him with it, and his breath constricted. Then, with a final yank, the chain snapped apart, and Ewan felt something inside of him give, as if a part of him had been yanked away.

Yates had taken his totem.

Ewan gagged. His hands went up to his neck, but all he felt was skin and the fabric of his hoodie—no leather.

While he was reeling, Yates shoved Ewan with enough force that he stumbled forward and bumped into Oliver.

“How long have you been collaborating with him?” Yates demanded.

“I haven’t been,” Ewan said shakily. “We were just chatting.”

Kaur stepped into Ewan’s field of vision. His face was impassive. “We heard everything. Most of it didn’t make sense,” he added, “something about a ball and destroying the universe... but what we took away from it is that you’re still chums.”

“Not exactly,” mumbled Oliver.

“Nope,” Ewan said.

“After all that Abrams has put us through,” Yates seethed, “burning down half the city, killing the mayor,
ruining the Olympics
.”

Oliver cringed. “That
is
evil. Sorry about that. Would you believe me if I said that the person who did that was a very different Oliver Abrams?”

“I had tickets to lacrosse!” Yates yelled.

He swung his gun up, aiming it at Oliver’s chest. Ewan’s breath caught in his throat. Around him, the belfry fell utterly silent; even Louise, who had been licking at the wounds on her arm since tearing away the window, seemed to notice something was wrong, and her wings fluttered as she slowly lumbered back toward the hole in the wall.