Darkmouth (15 page)

F
inn's father remained poised, breathing angrily through flared nostrils, Desiccator held firmly at Steve's forehead. Finn's heart was pounding like it was trying to escape and, for the first time since he met her, Emmie appeared vulnerable and lost.

From the house, the alarm continued its urgent shriek.

“You have no choice, Hugo,” said Steve as calmly as he could muster. “Press that trigger and the Twelve will have you locked up by sunset. The boy too.”

The alarm rose in pitch, as if desperate for attention.

Hugo lowered the Desiccator and leaned in to Steve's ear. “Saved by the bell.” He dropped the weapon and moved away. Steve slumped to his knees, breathing hard.

Mr. Glad blocked Hugo's path. “Do you really want to let him go? After what Finn found?”

“I can deal with him later,” said Hugo, pushing him aside. “We have to sort this out first.”

Mr. Glad nodded and started to follow. Hugo paused and turned to him. “Not you, Glad,” he said. “This is for Legend Hunters only, you know that.”

Finn and Mr. Glad stood side by side for a moment. “It's not in my job description, is it, boy?” muttered Mr. Glad. “We mustn't get above ourselves.” Pulling his coat collar up around his neck, he trudged away in the direction of his shop.

Reaching the car, Hugo stopped and motioned to Finn to follow. “What are you still standing there for? Come on.”

Finn followed dutifully.

“She seemed all right, Dad,” he said as he sat in his seat. They watched Emmie approach her father, who waved away her offer of help and gingerly jogged back in the direction of his house.

“You couldn't have known,” Finn's father said, starting the engine.

“I let her into our house.”

“You did,” his dad answered, then looked at him, “but you also blew their cover. Take the credit when you can get it.”

Finn considered that and allowed it to lift his gloom just a little. “I suppose I did . . . ,” he started, but didn't get
to finish that thought because he was pressed back in his seat by the sudden acceleration of the vehicle.

A black van had screeched around the corner. It was the same vehicle that had shadowed them at the harbor and had been on their street. Emmie and her father sat in the front. Finn's father put his foot down and gave chase.

As they sped through Darkmouth, something else occurred to Finn.

“Dad?”

“Yes, Finn.”

“Are there really going to be live Legends at my Completion?”

His dad didn't answer, but instead sped up, engine noise filling the car, until he eventually glanced Finn's way.

“A vet, Finn? Seriously?”

T
he growl of the vehicles carried across the town, causing dogs to look up and cats to stop licking themselves. The people of Darkmouth were already busy ducking into doorways and off the streets. The weather forecast that morning had said it would be dry. It wasn't, so it was time to get out of the way.

In shops and cafés, the townspeople exchanged glances and tuts. In a hairdresser's on the main street, one woman, with her hair in curls pulled tighter than leather trousers on a sumo wrestler, dropped her magazine and looked out at the damp street. She watched the two black vehicles race by the window in a blast of spray and engine noise.

Drawing a sigh from deep within her lungs, she announced to the rest of the room: “This can't go on.”

There was a low chorus of approval from her fellow customers.

On the main street a gateway had appeared. The car
and van screamed to a halt on either side of it, just in time to see a Wolpertinger slide out. The Legend shook the fur on its head and the feathers on its back as the gateway gulped into oblivion.

Finn's mind was drowned in hurt and confusion and a new-found revulsion as Emmie sidled closer to him.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

Finn moved away. He just wanted to go home. Be on his own again. It had been easier that way, when there was no one to let him down.

“Emmie, stay back,” said Steve. “I'll deal with this.”

“You too, Finn,” ordered his father. “The lesson isn't for you this time.”

The Wolpertinger appeared to hesitate for a moment, then settled itself, deciding to turn and fight and enjoy the chance to snack on some human flesh.

But which human to fight? Finn saw it size up the Legend Hunters' near-identical armor, both shimmering against the background, the impenetrable black of their helmets giving no hint of what emotion lay beneath. Yet one fighting suit looked battleworn, scratched, gouged, bitten.

The other might well have been freshly made that morning.

The Wolpertinger took a final look at each of them and appeared to make up its mind. It ran for a man cowering behind a lamppost.

Finn's father raised his Desiccator, but Steve stepped forward just as he squeezed the trigger, pushing the gun downward so that a chunk of asphalt was gouged from the road and left to roll in the bottom of a new crater.

“This one is mine,” said Steve, reaching behind his waist to yank forward a long chain topped with a small spiked ball. He swung the mace in an arc above his head and released it. The chain straightened and the weapon cut a graceful swathe toward its target. Glancing over its shoulder, the Wolpertinger changed direction at the last moment, pouncing into the air, pushing off a wall, and somersaulting away from danger.

The mace wrapped tightly around the lamppost, its spikes embedding into the wood a few centimeters above the head of the shrieking man hiding behind it.

Finn's father lifted his Desiccator again, sighing. “This is ridiculous.”

Steve stepped in front of the weapon's barrel. “I've waited my whole life for this chance.”

“And you still missed.”

Finn watched, only half-aware of what was happening
right in front of him.

“I didn't mean to hurt you, really,” Emmie said. “I hated lying to you.”

“You did a good job of looking like you were enjoying it,” Finn responded flatly, only to get a jolt as Emmie pushed past him.

“Dad!” she shouted.

The Wolpertinger had taken its chance to dart at Steve's back. Instead of jumping away, though, Steve reacted immediately, lifting his sword as he turned and charged directly at the oncoming Legend. The Wolpertinger held a collision course, leaping to attack at the precise moment that Steve lurched forward, smashing down visor-first on the road, his sword spilling to the ground ahead of him.

From his bound feet trailed a rope. Finn's father held the other end. Using his free hand, he pulled the trigger on the Desiccator. With a stifled w
hooop,
the Wolpertinger became a furry, feathery, and bony husk of its former self, bouncing off Steve's helmet on the way to the ground.

“Is that the sort of purity you were looking for, Steve?”

Finn dragged his feet back toward the car, the heat of his humiliation refusing to let in even a glimmer of joy from watching Emmie and her father humiliated in return. She had run forward to help her father, but
hesitated when it was clear he really didn't want her to.

Hugo came close and pulled out a knife. Steve flinched.

“Stay still, for crying out loud. You're worse than one of them,” said Hugo. From the armor at the base of Steve's neck, he prized a crystal fang. “Look what the nice bunny brought us.”

Hugo walked away, halting briefly to pick up the desiccated Wolpertinger and toss it into Steve's gloved hands. “Make sure to put all this in your report.”

He reached the car. Wearily, Finn pushed himself off the hood to follow his father.

“What about the second gateway, Hugo?” shouted Steve from the ground, where he was using his sword to free his legs. “Ask yourself what you're not seeing.”

Finn's father had already started the engine, drowning him out as he bounced the vehicle through the street's new crater.

Above Darkmouth, the drizzle eased and light began to push again into the day. The townspeople emerged onto the streets, catching a glimpse of this stranger in armor picking himself off the ground, a young girl by his side, the bent lamppost creaking above them, and the pothole in the street.

A short distance away, Sergeant Doyle sat in his small station with a half-drunk cup of coffee and took call after call asking what he was going to do about this ongoing problem.

“It's getting worse,” they complained.

“Why is Darkmouth the only place left where this is happening?” they moaned. “Isn't that family supposed to be solving the problem, not making it worse?”

“That useless boy . . . ,” they said.

“Hugo the Not So Great . . . ,” they said.

“I tell you,” they said. “That family needs those Legends or they're nothing. They
let
them attack us. Maybe it's time we attacked
them
to show them we won't take it anymore.” Sergeant Doyle tried to calm them, talk them down, assure them that he was on the case and would treat the matter with the greatest urgency. Then he took out a pen and writing paper and began to draft yet another letter requesting a transfer.

There must, he suggested, be a high-security prison for the most dangerous criminals that could do with his help.

 

From
A Concise Guide to the
Legend Hunter World, vol. 5,
chapter 23:
“The Council of
Twelve”

 

F
rom his perch on the hill, Gantrua observed the movement in the valley below as a convoy of Hogboons carried rock and soil from the chasm in the mountain that led to the vast network of Coronium mines. The only reward for their labor was the promise that they would not be burned out of their hovels. Not a great reward perhaps, but an effective motivation nonetheless.

The harvested rocks were being taken to great sorting fields, where every crumb would be picked over in search of crystals. Findings were meager. These were the remnants of the last-known deposits of Coronium, buried in the last place in this world where they could still be hooked onto the air to tear it open.

Gantrua had dispatched teams across the land to find more deposits, all without success. Only here did they find what they needed. Here, where the gateways led to a single village in the Promised World. And one target.

Under Gantrua's command, the Legends would eventually shred the fabric between worlds and tunnel their way through, boring a pathway between this place and the other side. An army would be waiting, woken from their slumber for this great moment.

Gantrua could smell victory. Or he would have if the overpowering stench of his Fomorian guards wasn't wafting up toward him.

Below him, Trom was taking some pleasure in hurling rocks into the cavalcades of Hogboons, sending them ducking and scattering. Cryf was rating his efforts.

“I still don't understand,” said Trom to Gantrua while heaving another stone at the lines as casually as if he were skimming pebbles on a lake. Hogboons shrieked and dived out of the way.

“Seven out of ten,” said Cryf.

“What do you not understand, fool?” asked Gantrua, indulging him.

“Why we're invading without an army.” Trom hauled up and threw another large rock.

Cryf grimaced. “Only a five out of ten there, my lumpen friend.”

Gantrua surveyed the scene as the light faded on
another day—hardly a dramatic fall in light, more a deepening of the usual darkness that pervaded even at the brightest of hours. He longed to be gone from this place.

“We have an army, you idiot.” Gantrua sighed. “It is as invisible to you as wisdom. As out of reach as intelligence. As hidden from you as . . .”

Trom flung another rock. Half a dozen Hogboons danced out of the way.

“Oh, an eight there, I would say,” observed Cryf.

Gantrua lifted a foot and pushed hard on Trom's shoulder, sending him into a violent tumble down the hill and straight into a line of Hogboons, who scattered and fell in all directions. Rock and dirt spilled among the hard stubble sprouting from the poisoned ground.

Cryf practically doubled over in laughter at the sight. Gantrua kicked him too.

Gantrua then retreated down the far side of the hill to his tent that lay away from the hubbub of the convoys and the roaring of the Fomorian guards. He pulled aside the canvas and squeezed his mighty bulk inside, toting his sword in behind him.

His eyes struggled in the glare of the low fires set up inside. He could feel the hatred rotting his heart, could sense its beating becoming slower and slower as if his
body was rebelling against being here. The end could not come soon enough.

“You must be patient, my friend,” said a weak voice from a far corner of the tent. “Try some meditation. Communicate with the ether rather than your anger. It will do you good.”

Gantrua's shoulders heaved with the depth of his breathing. He squinted at the hooded figure sitting cross-legged on the floor. “That may be your way,” he snarled. “It is not mine.”

The figure lifted his head a little, dim light catching the thin lips and the wrinkled skin of his chin. “And yet here we are. Still trapped in this world. And they still in theirs.”

Gantrua did not answer. The only sound was the drawing of the stale air into his lungs, like the low drone of a great organ.

“What's happening out there?” asked the hooded figure.

“The crystals are being gathered. We have almost exhausted the Coronium mines entirely, for only a handful of stones.”

“But is it enough to keep the gateways open?”

“Yes.”

The hooded figure shifted a little in his place, then settled back. “It is not about what we do here, Gantrua. It is about what happens in the Promised World. A great army sleeps there and we have delivered the power our agent needs to wake them. You will have your final push to victory.”

“And the child?” asked Gantrua.

“The child is only a threat to you if he survives. And he will not.”

Gantrua placed a hand on the hooded figure's shoulder and squeezed gently with just enough force that it could be taken either as affection or a threat. “You had better be right.”