Super (26 page)

“I can disappear him!” she said.

“What? Are you sure?”

“I make my clothes disappear with me whenever I do it, so if I touch him, I can make him disappear too,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. In fact, Daniel thought, it probably was.

She put her arms around Georgie, and both of them vanished.

“Daniel?” said Georgie’s worried voice. It had to be frightening when you could no longer see your own shoes.

“It’s okay, Georgie,” said Daniel. “Go with Rose. Hide and seek!”

Daniel turned to Mollie. “They’ve come for Herman. Maybe the Shades will leave us alone if they get him.”

“Oh, but they won’t get me. You, on the other hand …”

Daniel froze. He knew that voice. It was the whispery, throaty growl that had haunted his nightmares for months.

The glow of his flashlight seemed to weaken as the room was overtaken by the enormous shadow that had drifted in. It filled the space from floor to ceiling, a billowing undulating blackness far stronger than any mere Shade. At its center still pulsed the weak greenish glow of Plunkett’s ruined pendant, but one hand, clothed in shadow, held a ball of bright green fire. The ring burned like a hungry star in the Shroud’s void. The shadow threw back its head and laughed as Daniel heard the sound of glass breaking behind him.

“Come, my children,”
it shouted.
“Bow down before me once more! Bow before the Shroud!”

H
erman had the ring. He’d managed to keep hold of it even as Mollie knocked him through a window. With it, he was no longer bleeding power. Worse, Daniel could tell from the way the ring flared and burned that it was hungry for more. The green flames spread out before it, licking the air. It was happening all over again. The Shroud was reborn.

“What to do first?”
said the Shroud.
“Shall I gather up my Shades, my wayward children, or should I deal with the last of my foes?”

“You always sound like a bad comic book,” said Mollie, sticking her chin out in defiance, but she looked tired and afraid. She’d given her all in that last attack, and she was exhausted
now. Daniel could see it in her face. If there was to be another fight, it would be a short one.

The cracking of glass behind them gave way to shattering, and Daniel watched helplessly as a Shade forced its way inside the house. The shadow creature stretched itself toward Daniel, readying itself to pounce.

The Shroud laughed.
“Of course! I’ll let my Shades have a little fun with you first. Let one problem solve another. Eh, Daniel?”

Beneath the veil of shadow Daniel could see this Shade’s face. It was the little girl with ringlet hair he’d caught a glimpse of back in the cave, her child’s features made gruesome with loathing. Despite the monstrous appearance, there was something familiar about her. A blurry photograph on the edge of Daniel’s memory.

“No,” said Herman suddenly as the Shade turned its face toward him. “Not you!”

That was the old man’s voice, not the crackling whisper of the Shroud. He’d dropped part of his own shadowy disguise, and Herman’s own face was now visible beneath the folds of blackness. He recognized the little girl too.

“Eileen,” Herman whispered.

Eileen Stewart. In Gram’s scrapbook he’d seen a photograph, blurry with age, of the original orphans of St. Alban’s, standing outside the charred ruins of their orphanage home. Among those grimy faces had been young Herman Plunkett, looking so frightened. And standing next to him, her hands resting protectively on his shoulders, had been the
little girl with her hair done up in ringlets. Eileen Stewart, Daniel’s grandmother.

Daniel was only dimly aware of the sounds of chaos outside—the not-so-distant roar of a fire-engine siren, someone shouting even closer by—but inside here everything went as quiet as a breath. Gram was dead, but here was something left of her, a twisted Shade of the little girl she once had been at the exact instant Herman had stolen her away. Of all the countless faces of all the countless victims, this was the one Herman would have avoided. Of all of them, she might awaken something resembling guilt in the old man’s leathery heart. And she’d found him again.

The attack was sudden and savage. Gram had been a gentle soul right up to the day she’d passed away, but this thing that the Shroud had created was more animal than person. He’d said that the Shades were drawn to their former selves or to pieces of their long-gone lives. Gram’s Shade had come back to the house she’d been raised in, only to find it occupied by the object of all her pent-up hate, her escaped tormentor and her former master.

The Shade must have taken Herman by surprise, because he didn’t even fight back. He crumpled underneath her assault, dropping the Shroud disguise entirely as she wrapped herself around him, binding him again in her own shadow. All he could do was cower beneath her anger. She put her hand around his throat and leaned down until her face was barely inches from his own. But there she stopped, and as Daniel watched, she drew close to the cracked
pendant around Plunkett’s neck. With a finger all of shadow, she reached out to touch the soft green glow of the meteor stone, only to shy away at the last second.

“What’s she doing?” whispered Mollie.

“I don’t know,” answered Daniel. “She seems focused on Herman’s pendant … but why? It’s broken, it’s useless. Unless …”

The Shade that had once been Eileen Stewart turned to Daniel and whispered a single word.

“Free.”

Daniel nodded, understanding at last. “You lied,” he said.

“What?” asked Mollie.

“Not you,” said Daniel, limping over to where Herman lay on the floor. “You,” he said to Herman. “You lied. It’s all you ever do.”

“I didn’t lie! The ring can stop them!”

“But there’s another way,” said Daniel.

“Please,” said Herman, pulling the ring from his finger. “Take it. I can’t do it. Use the ring. You can trap them again.… I can’t. I can’t do it to her, not again.”

Herman was whimpering, great beads of sweat pouring down his face as he stared up into the dark eyes of the creature that had once been his only friend in the world. Or perhaps they were tears, but Daniel had trouble believing Herman Plunkett had tears left in him.

Daniel bent down and scooped up the ring. Gram’s Shade made no move to stop him, just as Daniel had known she wouldn’t. He understood now what she really wanted.

“You could’ve stopped the Shades at any time,” said Daniel. “But you don’t just want to stop them—you want to
control
them again. And for that you need the ring. You need it to be the Shroud again.”

“Please, Daniel!” begged Herman. “Use the ring!”

“I should’ve listened to them instead of you.”

“Daniel,” said Mollie, “what are you talking about? Those things will tear the town apart! Use the ring!”

“The Shades are angry children, Mollie. Hurt, angry children. They are throwing a temper tantrum because they don’t know what else to do. They tried to tell us, but we wouldn’t listen.”

Daniel reached down and wrapped his hands around Herman’s pendant.

“No!” the old man cried, trying to bat Daniel’s hand away, but Gram’s Shade held Herman down. The hate was gone from her face and she watched Daniel with impassive eyes.

“It’s the pendant,” Daniel said. “The pendant is broken but not destroyed. And they will never be free until it is.”

“NO!” shouted Herman.

The old man’s voice echoed in Daniel’s ears, and suddenly he was back at the quarry, in the grip of the Shroud. Back in the nightmare. Herman was reaching through the ring into Daniel’s mind again.

Daniel’s hand was aflame. He could smell the charring flesh, taste blood in his mouth where he chewed his lips in pain.

“Use it,”
commanded the Shroud.
“Use the ring. Steal the Shades’ power and you steal the Shades themselves. You can save us all.…”

The ring was consuming him—soon there would be nothing left. It was better to simply give in, make the hurt go away. He could sense the power outside him, waiting to be taken. He could see it in the figures standing in the landscape of his dream—Mollie, Rose, the Shades. Even Georgie. The Shroud was right: He could take it all for himself. He could stop fighting it at last.

He could save them all from themselves. Protect the world. He could be the hero.

He started to slip the ring onto his finger but was stopped by a smaller hand closing around his own. A small hand, a girl’s. A girl with her hair done up in ringlets. She smiled at him.

And then Daniel was back in the living room. He held the ring just inches from his finger. The Shade with his gram’s face watched him, frowning. Herman’s eyes grew wide with anger.

“No! I am the Shroud!”

The cord snapped easily as Daniel ripped the pendant from the old man’s neck. It came apart at the same place, the original break where Daniel had torn it from him nearly a year ago. Herman had tied it back together with an imperfect knot.

“Daniel,” said Herman, “you don’t know what you are doing!”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then please tell me!” cried Mollie. “Because I’m freaking out here!”

“The Shades led us into Herman’s cave because they wanted us to do something for them, Mollie. They can’t touch the pendant, so they wanted us to destroy it. It’s what they’ve wanted all along.”

Herman’s eyes narrowed into slits again, like a snake’s. “Do that, and you unleash chaos. There will be no going back—you understand? You will change Noble’s Green forever! You’ll change the world!”

“You can’t keep them prisoner, Herman. It’s not right.”

“What about your gram?” he cried. “She’s gone, and there’s nothing for her Shade to go back to! At least my way there’s something left of her! My way she will be with us forever.”

Daniel looked at the old man. “My gram is dead. It’s time to lay her to rest.”

With that he walked over to the fireplace. He set the pendant down on the mantel and picked up a wrought-iron poker. Finally able to examine the pendant up close, he could see the network of tiny cracks that ran throughout it. It was already broken; it wouldn’t take much to shatter it. Even an ordinary thirteen-year-old boy could manage it.

For just an instant he hesitated. Herman was right about one thing: there would be no going back for any of them. But he thought about Eric and Rohan. About Louisa. Michael. He thought about Gram.

He brought the heavy poker down on the pendant, and it shattered into a hundred tiny pieces. The weak greenish glow flickered for an instant, then died.

The girl with the ringlets let Herman fall to the floor and floated toward Daniel. For a moment it looked as if she was opening her mouth to say something; then she was gone. Vanished into nothing.

“C’mon,” said Daniel, grabbing Mollie by the arm. “I have to see this.”

“See what? Darn it, Daniel Corrigan, will you stop a minute and tell me what the heck is going on?”

Daniel just smiled and pulled her outside. There were Shades still out there, but they didn’t scare him now. Before his eyes they started to disappear, one by one, released from the hold that the Shroud’s pendant had had on them for seventy years or more. Some—the oldest ones, like Gram—vanished altogether. Others returned home.

He knelt down next to Rohan and Eric, who were stirring.

Eric’s eyes fluttered open. “Mol?” he said.

Mollie reached out and held on to Daniel for support. He didn’t comment on it.

“Eric,” she said. “Are you … I mean, you know me?”

“Stupid question,” he said. “Did we get him?”

“Yeah,” said Mollie. “I think so.”

Theo and Louisa appeared in the street. Theo shrank back as Shades darted past him.

“Where are they all going?” he asked.

“Back where they belong,” said Daniel.

“Daniel,” said Rohan, adjusting his glasses, “what did you do?”

“I freed them,” said Daniel. “I destroyed Herman’s pendant once and for all. And I set them all free. Truly free.”

Rohan watched as the last of the Shades vanished. He looked at Daniel, understanding dawning on his face.

“Then that means …”

“Yeah,” said Daniel. “I think so.”

Just then a window opened on the top floor of the Madison house a few doors down. Mr. Madison leaned out, dressed in pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt that did little to hide his middle-aged potbelly. As Daniel and his friends watched, he took a long, deep breath of night air and giggled.

“I remember!” he cried. “I can fly!”

With that he jumped from the window and flew. Not gracefully and not well, but he flew. A wobbly man in his pajamas was flying over Noble’s Green for the first time in forty-something years.

“Whoa,” said Mollie.

“Welcome to Noble’s Green,” said Daniel. “Welcome to the new world!”

J
aney Levine, age nineteen, was on her way home from the movies with her boyfriend when she suddenly remembered she had the power to move small objects with her mind. She’d accidentally dumped her bag of hard candies all over the floor of his car, so she spent the next twenty minutes picking them up one by one and putting them back in her bag—without ever actually touching them. Her boyfriend never even noticed. Alan Masterson, a fifty-year-old plumber, was out walking the dog when he remembered that he could breathe underwater. He leapt the neighbors’ fence and spent the rest of the night in their swimming pool.
He might’ve stayed there longer if it hadn’t been for his dog’s constant barking.

And Michael woke from the last of his night terrors to find Mollie and Eric waiting for him outside his window. Together the three of them flew to the top of Mount Noble and back again. And again. He won every race.

The blackout had changed everything. When the lights went out, Noble’s Green was the sleepy little village it had always been, but when they came back on, Noble’s Green was already the most famous town on earth.

Daniel had gambled big and he knew it. They’d always lived in fear of discovery. A small group of Supers, say five or six kids, would find themselves hunted and in danger if people ever learned what they could do. It had been imperative that they keep hidden from the rest of the world, and as Louisa had pointed out, that made them vulnerable. But a town full of Supers? Young, old, and everything in between? Police officers, fire chiefs, teachers, and plumbers? When the newspapers and Internet caught wind of that (which they did by sunrise), no government, no corporation, no military, no men in black suits anywhere would have the power to harm them. You couldn’t kidnap an entire town.