The Rising Page 7

  “Is she alive . . .?” Her voice trailed off as she saw the rage behind Will’s eyes.

  “Barely.” Will shook his head, hardly looking at her, clearly in pain. “I almost had her. I was almost able to bring her out, Natalie, out of her coma. But he ruined everything.”

  “The Dark Lord?”

  “He’s got her.”

  “He took her body?” Natalie shuddered at the thought, recalling when the Dark Lord had kidnapped her, hauling her into a black hearse drawn by winged horses that flew into the sky, transporting her to a hellish nightmare prison in Mount St. Emory.

  “No, he didn’t get her body. But he’s . . . he’s got her mind, her will to live. And if it’s the last thing I ever do, I’m going to get it back.”

  Natalie made a move toward Will, but his body stiffened in response so she paused. He didn’t move away, though. He studied her instead.

  “You haven’t slept.”

  “I don’t need sleep. I need . . .” She wanted to say she needed him, needed him so badly she ached night and day.

  “You need to sleep. We all do.” But as if he’d heard what she hadn’t been able to say, Will took her into his arms and held her. She relaxed, melting into him, going so slack that he lifted her up, cradling her into his powerful arms. He carried her up to her room and gently laid her down on her bed.

  “I . . .” She wanted to say it, wanted to announce her love for him so badly, but the words caught in her throat—I love you. I love you. I love you.

  “I know,” he said, and then kissed her softly on the cheek, butterfly wings dancing on her skin.

  “Now sleep. Please. For me.”

  She would do anything for him. And so after one long last lingering look into his eyes, she closed hers and fell backward off a cliff into velvet black night. She was asleep in a matter of seconds. He had to pull away from her, and he would. But seeing her standing there, exhausted but obviously waiting up for him, had broken his heart. Will sat and stared at her for a moment. Sweetness and heartbreak. In repose—as when she was up and moving around, eyes alit—she was beautiful. He wondered if there was ever a moment when she wasn’t. He closed his eyes to be in that warm place with her for a few precious seconds, then rose and exited her room.

  In the laboratory Will first checked the surveillance cameras linked to April’s room. No one had come or gone except the private doctors and nurses he had on staff. Her vital signs were stable, but she hadn’t improved. Will prayed she would soon. In the meantime, he would turn all his efforts to locating the Dark Lord. He looked over at Rudy gesticulating madly from inside the Demon Trap. In seconds Will had a plan to find the Dark Lord, and it involved Rudy. Finding the cure for demonic infection was key.

  Turning from the monitors, he ignored Rudy’s frantic gestures and moved to the floor safe. Punching in a code, he opened the heavy steel door and extracted a case, which he lifted onto the workbench. He opened the case and pulled from within it a very special book. Or, rather, half a book. It was the book his stepfather had bequeathed to him, the book Will had waited until his thirteenth birthday to decode and decipher, the book that had at once terrified and emboldened him as he learned of his lineage and his destiny. He was, as he’d learned almost four years ago, an everto venator, or Demon Hunter. Since that fateful day when he’d opened the book and began to study it, he had killed over 666 demons. And now, after the Dark Lord’s latest abominable deed, he was eager to kill more on his way to finding and rescuing his mother. And after he had done that, after he brought April back to the land of the living, he would perform the coup de grâce. Father or no father, he would kill the Dark Lord himself. He would drive a stake through his heart without so much as shedding a tear.

  But before that glorious moment could happen, there was much work to be done.

  Will had to find or recreate the antidote for demon infection Edward had said Will’s grandfather had concocted. If he did, he could use it not only on Rudy, but potentially on hundreds or even thousands of others so infected, and take the Dark Lord’s army away from him. The only problem was, if Edward had known the formula, he had taken it with him to his grave. So Will prayed that the formula for the cure was to be found in the book. He had never seen it there before, but perhaps that was only because he did not know it existed and so was not looking for it. And thus, he began to search. He studied page after page, searching for hidden symbols, coded meanings. But there was nothing. The only mention of any kind of antidote to demonic infection suggested he look to “what lies beneath.” And Will knew only too well what lay beneath him. Hell. Hades. The Inferno. The caverns of the damned. He searched for the hidden formula for the cure for two days straight, pausing only to eat the sandwiches and chips that Natalie and Emily brought him. He had to find it. It was the key to his plan for defeating the Dark Lord. At the end of the second day, he was so frustrated that he slammed the book closed angrily, and his fingernail caught on the binding and caused a nasty cut. Though the pages were of cabretta leather, the inner cover board was lined with some sort of stiff parchment. He looked closely at the tiny drop of blood on the soft flesh beneath the tip of his fingernail. He sucked on his finger, and then stared at the cover board. The cover board parchment appeared to have been, like almost all books, attached and pressed using some sort of glue. What lies beneath.

  Using his magnifying loupe, Will illuminated and magnified the book’s cover board seams. With a pair of stainless steel surgical tweezers, he gently lifted an edge of the parchment. The magnification on the loupe wasn’t powerful enough, so he swung a microscope over and peered through the lens. He could see the miniscule crystals of the glue. On a hunch, he extracted a few tiny particles.

  Moving slowly and carefully, he dropped the particles into a Petri dish and mixed them with a neutral solution, then began a series of tests to determine their chemical composition. Once he had that in his computer, he cross-referenced it with the chemical composition of a variety of glues and other glue-like substances. He Googled a book binder and emailed the older woman, who lived in upstate New York, offering her an absurdly high cash advance in exchange for her expertise.

  She wrote back right away, saying she was eager to help him, and sent him a long list of types of glues and other adhesives used to bind ancient books. Will thanked the woman and entered the information into his mainframe. The most likely candidate, given the age of the ancient book, would be a glue made from the animal protein colloid, most likely from a horse. Bingo. The crystals from the binding matched. But there was something else within them as well, and Will’s heart began beating faster as he extracted the superfluous chemical compound formula and found it to be complex in nature.

  His senses told him that he had found the antidote, that his grandfather had left it within the binding of the book. He set about replicating the substance.

  As the cure was cooking, Will again examined the book’s binding. He had intended to re-glue it, but when he went to do so, he saw something underneath the lining. He gently began to peel it back and discovered a thin sheet of parchment tucked within. So his grandfather had hidden two secrets here! Will extracted the parchment and saw that it was, like the book itself, written in code, using symbols. He quickly discovered that the code system was the same as the one used in the book, so the message was easy to decipher. His father, or perhaps his grandfather or even his great-grandfather, had entered a series of numbers: 26–7, 68–114, 113–79, and so forth. It took Will a while, but he finally concluded that the first number in each pair corresponded to a page number and the second to the precise word on the page. When he put all the words together, however, they made no sense. So he tried the first letters of the words, but still came up with nothing that made any sense. Then he plugged in the last letters of the words, and from them constructed the following simple warning: Beware the Sword of Armageddon.

  Will’s spine felt icy cold. He remembered how the Dark Lord had appeared to him as he’d journeyed into his mot
her’s mind and had threatened him with a sword—a sword he’d called the Sword of Armageddon. What did he have to fear from this sword? And why had the warning been hidden in the binding of the book? There were no details on how to find the sword, or even how to use it. It must have been hidden for the same reason the formula for the demonic antidote was hidden in the chemical makeup of the binding: it would take someone with superior intelligence to find it. Someone like him. But what good did such a vague warning do him?

  He put the question aside to worry about later. He’d solved one problem already today—and now it was time to put his plan into action.

  Natalie and Emily were in the workout room, going at it with the bamboo staffs.

  “Ow!” yipped Natalie as Emily barked her shin.

  “That’s what you get for cheating,” said Emily.

  “There’s no such thing as cheating in stick fighting, Em. Will said so.”

  “Speaking of Will,” said Emily. She pointed at the door, where Will was now standing. When Natalie turned to look, Emily tapped her on the shin again with the staff.

  Natalie laughed. “Hey! Cheater.”

  “No such thing as cheating,” said Emily. She was smiling.

  “You guys are looking good,” Will said.

  “One, we’re not guys,” said Emily, as she peeled off her pads and headgear. “And two, nobody can look good wearing this stuff.”

  “Break time?” asked Natalie.

  At first, every time Emily got hit it was a not-so-subtle reminder of the torment she’d endured while captive. She couldn’t wait to get the pads off and put down her weapon. But as she’d improved, she grew to appreciate feeling like she could defend herself if something came after her again, and tended to push herself even harder than Natalie did. Still, they’d been sparring for over an hour. A break sounded like a good idea.

  “Yeah. I’m getting something to eat,” she said. She looked at Natalie and then Will, and added, “I’ll eat slow,” before she left.

  Will hadn’t said anything but Natalie could tell he was happy about something. “What’s going on? You look like you just won the lottery.”

  “I found it,” he said. “At least, I think I did.”

  “Found what?”

  “The antidote, the cure my grandfather created. For demonic infection.”

  Natalie’s eyes lit up. “Will, that’s fantastic! Did you give it to Rudy?”

  “Not yet. I felt like sharing the good news with someone. And here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  They stood facing each other, awkward as seventh graders at their first dance, fearful to tread forward. Natalie thought she was going to crawl right out of her skin if she didn’t do something, so she sort of lurched forward and gave him a sisterly hug and a pat on the back.

  “Well, uh, congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  Will took her face in his hands. Natalie thought, This is it; this is the moment where he kisses me again! Will wanted to hold her longer, to linger close to her, to breathe in her smell, to touch his lips to hers, just for an instant. But he couldn’t. Not anymore. He’d almost forgotten. He released her.

  “You’re . . . swell. Just terrific. I . . . I gotta go. I’ll let you know how it goes with Rudy. Stay in until I tell you different, okay?”

  “Okay . . .”

  Natalie watched as he left the room and let out a sigh, confused. Again.

  • • •

  Will entered the laboratory. Had he really just told her she was “swell”? He felt like an idiot. But he had to restrain himself, he just had to. They could never be together in the way that they both wanted, and to act like that wasn’t true would just make it worse for both of them in the long run.

  Rudy was pressing his eyes up against the Plexiglas of the Demon Trapper and clawing it with his fingernails, looking wretched and frightening. He was imagining living outside again and yearned for freedom. When Will approached the trap, Rudy turned himself upside-down, his hair hanging down like a kid on a jungle gym. He attempted a smile, and once again, as he had done with the twins, he held his hands together in prayer. Will got it.

  “I hear you, little buddy, and this is your lucky day. You’re coming out.”

  Rudy blinked in disbelief. Had he read Will’s lips correctly? Did he just say Rudy was coming out? The thought made Rudy’s brain do cartwheels. He watched as Will lifted the Demon Trapper up and connected it to some sort of contraption with a tangle of tubes and wires attached to it. Then the colors inside the Demon Trapper changed from orange to blue to green, and then the liquid around him went clear and he could no longer keep his eyes open. And then . . . nothing.

  An indeterminate amount of time later, Rudy opened his eyes. They stung from the bright lights glaring down at him from the ceiling. He tried to rise but couldn’t because he was strapped down with metal bands on his ankles, knees, wrists, and elbows. This wasn’t what he had in mind when he asked to get out. He whipped his head around and saw Will standing with his back to him. He couldn’t help himself—he was a demonteen after all—and the rage exploded from within him.

  “Will Hunter, you scum! I’m going to kill you!”

  Rudy jerked against the metal bands, his body convulsing, frenzied. “I’m going to rip your face off! I’m going to tear you open and eat your heart!”

  Will turned around slowly, a syringe in his hand.

  “Hi Rudy, what’s up?”

  Rudy froze, his body stiffening, his eyes glued to the syringe. Still, he kept talking. “You ruined everything, Will! And we’re going to make you pay!”

  Again Rudy struggled violently against his bonds. His wrists and ankles were wracked with pain, but it only made his body surge with even more anger. His eyes flashed black. “We’re going to kill you! You son of a bitch!”

  “Don’t you mean, son of somebody else, Rudy?”

  Rudy snarled, then hissed, then spit at Will, who deftly ducked out of the way.

  “Do that again and I’ll staple your mouth shut, got it?” Will said calmly.

  Rudy thought about that and slowly nodded his agreement. Again he eyed the syringe. “What . . . what is that?”

  “This, my friend, is your salvation. This is the cure for what ails you.”

  “Nothing ails me!” Rudy screamed.

  “We both know that’s not true. We both know you’re infected, you’re a demon, and you need help. You may not know that you need help, you may not feel like you do, but believe me, you do.”

  Rudy began breathing as rapidly and as deeply as he could, inhaling the good air, polluting it with vile thoughts, and then forcing it out, a demon mantra technique. He was building up anger and venom because he was planning to unleash a burst of energy, which would enable him to break free and crush Will’s skull with his bare hands. Will was more than just his captor, he was the ultimate traitor, the son who had turned on his father and betrayed the entire demon race. Will must be killed, and Rudy planned on snuffing him out like the flame on a candle. Poof! Gone. Slain. And Rudy would take Will’s slack body and present it to the Dark Lord as a gift! He could hear the accolades now.

  “This might hurt,” Will said. “You might feel a pinch. Well, actually, most likely more than a pinch. Who knows what this might do? I mean, it could be like shooting holy water right into your veins.”

  “WHAT IS IT?” screamed Rudy as the tip of the needle pierced his flesh and sank into his vein.

  “A formula created by my grandfather. It kept my father—”

  “Your father is the Devil!” screamed Rudy.

  Will forced himself to smile sadly at Rudy.

  “My real father was Edward, and this medicine kept him clean and sober, if you will, for many years. I’m hoping it works on you. It should purge you, Rudy. It should counteract the toxins running through your body, polluting your thoughts, your feelings, your soul.”

  Rudy writhed and shrieked and looked down at his arm as he felt the drug m
oving from the syringe into his body. It stung, but the sensation wasn’t overwhelming. He wondered what it would feel like to be human again. He closed his eyes as the drug made him feel . . . weird.

  Will was at his computer, updating his online game, Demon Hunter, while he monitored Rudy’s vital signs. He was inputting his recent hunting activity, integrating it into the ongoing “gaming” experience that only he knew was real, not just a video game. As he checked in on the real-time online game, he noticed something strange happening. A new player with a green fox avatar had entered the game arena. “Jade16” was blasting through the game and racking up kills with astonishing speed and skill. Will had never before encountered anyone who could navigate the perilous landscape of Demon Hunter with such apparent ease.

  “Will?”

  Rudy was awake. Will went over and looked down at him. He looked normal.

  “I’m right here, Rudy.”

  “What h-h-happened?” Rudy asked. His voice was shaky, the bravado he’d displayed previously a thing of the past.

  “I gave you a drug.”

  Rudy blinked and craned his head up so he could look around the room. “Where am I?”

  Will ignored the question. “How do you feel, Rudy?”

  “Like . . . like I just woke up from the worst friggin’ nightmare ever. You wouldn’t believe the freaky dreams I’ve had, man! They’d blow you away!”

  “How do you feel . . . about me, Rudy?”

  “You? Man, you know how I feel about you, Will! You’re the coolest dude I’ve ever met in my whole life!”

  Will allowed himself a slight smile. Rudy looked down at his hands. “My wrists hurt. So do my ankles.” He wiggled his fingers and moved his feet. “And I am starving! Man, I am so craving a cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake right now.”