Crystal Doors #2: Ocean Realm (No. 2) (5 page)

“Try doing it in a full anemonite costume,” Vic quipped.

“I thought you did a great job acting the part, Taz,” his cousin teased, using the nickname she had given him years ago. “You almost had me convinced that you were a real anemonite. And wearing disguises and staying in character is a lot harder than it seems.”

Tiaret absently swirled her hands through the warm water. “I found that the people of Elantya are as generous as they are wise.”

Pensive, Vic nodded. “And I learned that I’m really starting to think of everybody here as friends and family. If I ever have to escape from a bunch of bad guys, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be with.”

The Ven Sage raised his glass. “I give you learning. I give you family. And I give you a good night’s sleep.”

They all raised their glasses in the toast, drank, and set their glasses back down. With a satisfied sigh, Vic smiled at his cousin across the hot springs pool. “What could be better than this?”

Just then, a commotion came from Rubicas’s laboratory. Someone pounded on the door, called out, and rushed inside. The old sage had left the door unlatched, just in case other visitors came for Guise Night. Rubicas climbed out of the therapeutic water and wrapped a towel around himself. “I am coming. Who visits us so late on Guise Night?” He was distracted enough by the interruption that he forgot to use the traditional phrases for the holiday.

Before Vic and his friends could get out of the springs to join him, a neosage rushed down the stone stairs into the warm and steamy room. Vic recognized the curly-haired man from the Crystal Doors Center. “This is not a Guise Night visit, Ven Sage.” He used his hand to swab sweat from his forehead. “A small ship has just arrived in the harbor. Out in the ocean the captain found a castaway of some sort — a strange man in an even stranger boat. We felt it was important to come to you right away. No one can understand his unusual words.” Other footsteps came down the hall as two strong sailors assisted a bedraggled, sunburned man, who appeared so tired he could barely hold himself up. “Look what we found adrift on the sea.”

Gwen gasped. Vic could hardly believe his eyes. Both of them splashed out of the pool and raced forward. This wasn’t a trick of Guise Night, but the greatest surprise Vic could have imagined.

“Dad!” Vic cried. Dripping wet, he and Gwen threw their arms around the man.

Dr. Carlton Pierce squeezed the two as if he had just gotten a new burst of energy. “So I really made it to Elantya!”

5

FROM THE HOT SPRINGS, a geyser of questions erupted. In barely coherent mumbles, Gwen and Vic kept saying, “You’re here. I can’t believe it. You made it. You’re here!”

Their friends and even Rubicas looked confused. Vic turned to them, grinning excitedly. “This is my father. We left him back on Earth when we accidentally came through the crystal door.”

Gwen added, “The last time we saw him was when we opened that magical window on top of the laboratory tower and just barely got a message through.”

The sailors guided the exhausted man to one of the stone benches. Although he looked ready to collapse, he seemed too excited to let himself rest now that he was with Vic and Gwen. He was sunburned, with shadows beneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in days. His left knee was bruised and scabbed beneath a tear in his pant leg.

“What happened? How did you hurt yourself?” Gwen asked.

Dr. Pierce brushed at his knee. “I banged it up getting my boat in the water. It’s sore, but nothing serious.”

“How can you be certain he is not a shape-shifter?” Sharif asked warily. “My people have a saying: Familiar faces —”

“Do not be foolish.” Tiaret’s words cut him off. “Can you not see the Great Epic unfolding?”

Lyssandra seemed troubled, and then amazed. “Now I understand some of my recent dreams. I had nightmares of many things — of drowning, of underwater fire, of the island shaking, of fleeing from tongues of flame, of ravenous sharks, of indescribable sorrow, of a small sun being swallowed by a burning pit of light, of three-pointed spears red with blood. And yes, of a man you and Gwenya would greet with joy. It is the one dream I have had this month that I truly hoped would come to pass. But I am seldom certain of what my dreams mean. I did not want to raise your hopes.”

Despite his amazement, Vic felt somewhat betrayed. “You had a dream about my father coming to us, and you didn’t tell me?”

Her cobalt eyes avoided his. “I did not know it was your father, Viccus. I had never seen him before.”

Dr. Pierce looked back and forth at the people speaking, his face full of confusion. “What language are you all speaking? I don’t understand it.”

The cousins turned to their companions and saw similar incomprehension there. Rubicas said, “Viccus and Gwenya, did you realize you have been speaking mostly in your own language since this man’s arrival?”

Apparently, only Vic and Gwen could understand Dr. Pierce. Vic grinned sheepishly. He concentrated on speaking Elantyan. “Lyssandra, we need your help for a moment.” Then to his father Vic said, “Sheesh, you’re gonna love this, Dad. Just let her touch your head for a couple minutes and see what happens.”

Lyssandra placed her fingertips at the center of Dr. Pierce’s forehead and prepared his mind to understand Elantyan. He was clearly too weary to do anything but sit still, and before long the coppery-haired girl stepped away, smiling. “There, that is better.”

Dr. Pierce heaved a long sigh. “Ah, quite an improvement.” He smiled his thanks at Lyssandra. “The guys aboard the ship that picked me up gave me dry clothing and a blanket. Of course, I couldn’t understand anything they said, but it was obvious they meant to help. Before I tell my story, may I please have something to drink?”

“You could probably use some greenstepe,” Gwen said. “It has healing properties.”

Vic brightened. “Lyssandra, what about the greenstepe in the vial the Pentumvirate gave you? Could we try that out?”

“An excellent idea, Viccus.” The girl lifted the tiny crystal vial on its xyridium chain from around her neck. She pulled out the small stopper and offered the vial to his father, who with a questioning look tilted it up and tapped the bottom lightly, as if to coax out a drop or two. Instead, fresh warm greenstepe gushed into his mouth in a steady stream, surprising him so much that he coughed and sprayed the liquid all over himself.

He shook his head in amazement. “I wasn’t expecting magic!” He laughed and took a good long drink, this time without spilling a drop, then returned the vial to Lyssandra with a nod of thanks. The greenstepe seemed to revive him somewhat, and he sat up straighter. Vic quickly made introductions all around.

“All of this is most intriguing,” Rubicas said. “How did you get to Elantya? Are you a Key? Did you open a crystal door yourself?”

Vic and Gwen both sat eagerly next to him on the stone bench. “He’s right, Dad. How did you get here?”

“Not that we’re complaining, Uncle Cap,” Gwen said, her voice catching with uncharacteristic emotion. “We’re just glad you got here.”

Sharif said, “Are you a sage?”

“Were you embroiled in a great battle?” Tiaret asked.

Vic’s father chuckled as the questions bubbled around him.

“Did you have assistance?” Rubicas said. “What spell did you use to open the door, Sage, ah, hmmm . . . What shall we call you?”

“Cap would be fine, or Carlton, or Arthur, or Pierce. Any of those will do.”

Rubicas’s eyebrows raised a notch. “Pierce. You have a sharp mind, and for many other reasons, I like this. I shall call you Sage Pierce.”

“Oh, I’m not a sage.”

“Of course you are, Uncle Cap,” Gwen said. “You’re a professor. You’re a museum curator. You have a PhD — probably the equivalent of three PhDs, by now.”

“Okay, enough with the introductions already.” Vic squirmed on the bench next to his father. “Tell us what happened!”

Summoning up the energy the greenstepe had given him, Dr. Pierce began his story. After his attempts to open a door between the worlds — which had mistakenly sent Vic and Gwen through without him — he had worked in vain for weeks with the crystal array in his home solarium, until he decided that he needed to return to “first principles.”

“Over the years your mothers both gave my brother and me a good inkling of where they had come from — and the type of danger they were in,” Dr. Pierce explained. “But we didn’t really understand as much as we should have. For a long time your mothers convinced us that the less we knew, the safer we were, so Rip and I never pushed.”

“We already figured out that our moms probably came from one of these crystal doors worlds,” Gwen said. “I wouldn’t have believed it before, but Vic and I have seen some pretty amazing things in our time here.”

Dr. Pierce hung his head. “You’ll probably blame me for not preparing you two ahead of time. But Fyera and Kyara felt it was safest for you kids to know nothing until the time was right, which” — he hastened to add before they could interrupt — “they believed would be on your fifteenth birthdays.”

He put an arm around Gwen. “After your parents died, Gwen, Kyara and I knew it wasn’t an accident. Kyara figured it wouldn’t be long before Azric came after the rest of us. Vic, your mom believed she could lead Azric away from you kids and keep your existence a secret. She told me to urge you to keep your medallions with you at all times.”

“Still have them,” Gwen said, fingering her strange, small pendant, identical to her cousin’s. Since using the medallion to ignite the cannon’s fuse during the kraken attack, Vic had also begun wearing his on a leather cord around his neck.

“But . . . why?” Vic asked.

“When you were ten years old, Kyara wrote a detailed letter and sealed it away. She told me that if anything ever happened, I was to read the letter thoroughly and then burn it. After she disappeared and I realized she wasn’t coming back, I dug out the letter and read it. Her words told me so much that I hadn’t known about your mothers, about the two of you, even about me and my brother. She quoted some lines from a poem in the letter. I never much believed in prophecies . . . until now.”

“What did the letter say?” Gwen asked, her heart swelling, with the hope that she was about to receive the answers to all the mysteries that surrounded her family.

In the letter, Vic’s mother had explained that she and Fyera came from a world called Z’lyss, but were descended from Elantyans. She told how she and Fyera had “broken the seal” to the crystal door leading to Earth, but that such a feat had drained them of their powers for five years. They were helpless when they walked out of the jungles in the Yucatan, where they found the brothers, Cap and Rip. Seeing the twin men, Kyara and Fyera had known instantly that the brothers were their destiny.

“So, years later, that strange incident at Ocean Kingdoms Amusement Park convinced me that Azric was on to us after all, and I had to do something to keep you two safe.”

“And somehow you managed to send us here to Elantya. Sheesh, were we surprised!”

“But I meant to come with you. I guess I messed something up and got stranded. I never could figure out my mistake, so I went back to first principles and reviewed the letter in my mind. In it Kyara had said that if we were ever in danger, to remember where she came from. I’d been combining my own science with everything she had told me about crystal doors, trying to use logic and physics and mathematics. I thought she wanted me to create a new crystal door.”

“As far as I know, each world only has one crystal door, and all crystal doors lead to Elantya,” Rubicas said.

“Huh.” Dr Pierce looked bemused. “ I realized that I was doing it all wrong. I wasn’t remembering where she came from.”

Gwen understood. “You mean when they first came out of the jungle?”

“Yup. I knew that’s where I had to go: the Yucatan, where Rip and I had excavated an archeological site. I figured the crystal door that she and Fyera had come through to get to Earth must still be there, if only I could find it.

“So I packed up my crystals and left the house in the care of our neighbor, Dr. Alami — you know, the one whose pool you two used to swim in late at night when you were supposed to be asleep? Next day, I flew to the Yucatan, where I bought a top-notch speedboat. I found a purple one — Kyara’s favorite color — and thought it was a good omen. I stocked it with a couple of weeks’ worth of fuel, water, and food supplies. Even bought some warm-water scuba gear.

“First I started in the river outlet near where Rip and I had our archeological dig. I launched the boat myself —” He rubbed his injured knee, as if suddenly remembering his scrapes and bruises. “I arranged the crystals, prisms, mirrors, and scaffolding in the speedboat as best I could. I searched every waterway — streams, rivers, ponds, mud puddles — to no success. All I got was sunburned. A few times, I put on my wetsuit, fins, mask, and scuba tank, and dove, but I didn’t find anything under the water, either. I tried praying, tried making up rhymes. Nothing happened.

“Next, I explored the coast until I came to the Maya ruins at Tulum. I was out past the breakers, so I stopped the boat across from the cove where your mothers had married Rip and me. Did you know Tulum was a walled city on a cliff, and at one point it was probably only accessible by sea? It was considered a magical and sacred place.