Liv’s foot pressed the gas pedal down to the floor, but the van refused to move.
The wraths in their cars and trucks and motorcycles were turning around, forming a large circle around the stalled-out van. A stucco apartment building sat in a wide lot on one side of the road, and on the other was a small building with “Sherman Oaks Burger Time” printed in faded red letters on a yellow roof. It looked abandoned, its lights off and its two patio tables empty in the daylight.
There was no one here to help them.
Liv turned to Cedric. His hair was wild from the wind, and his eyes were wide as they tracked the wraths that started to circle them.
“We’re surrounded,” Cedric said.
Liv turned around to see both Shannon and Peter staring out the windows at the wraths that circled nearer. They looked terrified, though Peter managed to keep the phone in his hand trained on the monsters outside so viewers could see.
“How are we doing, Peter?”
He turned to her, his face pale and stretched-looking, and in his eyes was pure panic. He didn’t move.
“Peter,” Liv prompted.
He jumped a bit, then looked at the screen shaking in his hands. “We’re almost at two thousand,” he whispered.
Liv half crawled out of her seat and grabbed the phone in his hands. “I’m Liv Phillips, and if you’re watching this, you just saw the video we posted about what happened to Los Angeles. What’s still happening, right now—”
Something large and heavy crashed into the front windshield. Liv and Cedric both jumped as cracks radiated outward from a small hole in the center of the window.
“Everyone close your windows!” Cedric yelled. “Lock the doors!”
“Say it with me, please!” Liv yelled into the screen. “Accept the magic, accept the magic . . .”
Two motorcyclists were circling the van now, exhaust pluming up in a ring of fumes. They were outnumbered, surrounded, and there was nowhere to go. The video wasn’t working.
They’d lost.
“Oh my God, their eyes. What’s wrong with their eyes?” Shannon asked, her voice high and sharp.
Liv followed Shannon’s gaze out the window to two wraths who were getting out of a car and making their way over to the van. One held a sword while the other carried what looked like a Taser. The taller one had thin lips stretched back to reveal a mouthful of too many teeth, while the short one’s mouth could almost pass as ordinary, if still terrifying. Both had pitch-black eyes that showed no whites at all.
“Their eyes always look like that,” Liv responded.
“That’s how you know they’re wraths,” Peter said, looking up from his typing.
Shannon shook her head, her own eyes still staring out the window. “Nuh-uh, I’ve never seen those before.”
Liv looked back at the wraths, and then jumped in her seat, squirming around to face the others.
“It’s working!”
They just stared at her.
“Shannon shouldn’t be able to see their eyes,” Liv said, excitement running her words together as she spoke. “Peter and I can because we’re scrolls, and you guys can because you’re Guardians, but Shannon’s just a human—”
“Just?” Shannon interrupted.
“—so the Earth’s quelling defenses protect her from seeing the wraths as monsters here . . . but if those defenses are breaking down . . .”
Peter’s eyes widened with understanding. He looked down at the phone. “People are typing it in the comments. Accept the magic.”
“Keep it going!” Liv said, throwing her hands up. She looked back out the window at the approaching wraths. They were only feet away now, but already they looked different, even to her eyes. The tall wrath looked even taller than he had a moment before, his head a fraction larger on his neck. His fingernails seemed longer, too, stretching out into claws . . . claws that swung out toward Shannon’s window and connected with a thump.
Shannon screamed. “Um, do they know they’re changing?”
The tall wrath punched the window again, and this time his fist left behind a small crack.
“We cannot stay in here,” Kat said. “There are too many of them, and if they break those windows—we cannot fight from these chairs.”
“We just have to wait it out,” Liv said. “It’s working—”
“Not fast enough,” Cedric said. He looked out through the cracked windshield at the monsters bearing down on them. “We should run for cover.”
“Cover?” Liv yelled. “Cover where?”
“There.” Kat pointed toward the run-down, abandoned burger shack.
“How are we going to get there?” Liv asked, just as three wraths on Cedric’s side of the van started pushing against it, rocking it up slightly.
“We’re at three thousand views and even more currently streaming!” Peter yelled. The van rocked again.
“Oh, we’re gonna die,” Shannon moaned. “We’re gonna die talking about YouTube views.”
Merek reached over the seat and put a hand on her shoulder. “No,” he said. “We’re not.” He looked up, his eyes meeting Cedric’s. After a moment, they both nodded.
“Take this, then follow me,” Cedric said, handing Liv a silver knife and turning away. One moment he was in the passenger seat, and the next he’d opened his window again and pulled himself out quickly in one fluid movement. First his head disappeared upward, then his body, then his feet, snaking past the window and landing with a thud on the roof.
A wrath lunged forward to the open passenger-side window, thrusting one arm inward toward Liv. She pushed herself backward from the hand—much larger than a human hand, and much grayer, too—and screamed. The clawed hand still reached outward, scrabbling at her neck, and then it fell abruptly down—into the passenger seat. The wrath at the window screamed, pulling back his arm—or what was left of it. Black blood spurted from where the creature’s elbow used to be as Cedric wrenched his sword back again.
“I’m gonna throw up,” Shannon said, her eyes frozen in horror on the grayish half arm resting on the van’s seat.
Liv heard two more thuds moving across the top of the van, then saw Cedric land gracefully on the ground outside of her window. For a moment, the back of his head was just inches from hers. Then, he propelled himself forward, sword out, toward the group of wraths huddled outside.
Following Cedric’s lead, Kat swung herself out of her own window, and Rafe and Merek did the same. Soon they were all outside the driver’s side of the van, fighting back the growing number of wraths.
Another wrath reached in through the passenger-side window, scrambling for Liv. She pushed herself back through the door, calling out to Peter and Shannon, “Come on! We have to make a run for it!”
They pulled themselves out behind Liv, Peter keeping his phone trained on the action in front of him. Cedric and the others had pushed the wraths back enough to create a small space just outside the van. It was big enough for Liv, Shannon, and Peter to stand in, but there was no room for them to move anywhere else. The sound of sword-on-sword fighting—one that had become all too familiar to Liv—rang out.
“We’ll push them back to get you to that building,” Cedric said, motioning toward the burger shack in between sword thrusts. “Take cover there.”
Liv nodded. She reached for the knife in her boot and held it outward like Merek had showed her, but she still felt unarmed in the face of the wrath horde. Cedric and Kat fought on one side of her, and Merek and Rafe on the other. Liv kept her back to Shannon and Peter as they crept slowly away from the van and toward the abandoned building, the fight unfolding in a tight circle around them.
Rafe fought like Kat, both of them moving with quick, precise movements to block blows coming their way. Cedric was a little wilder, swinging out to hold off as many wraths as possible. They were all fighting on the defensive. Liv looked over the shoulders of the wraths—who seemed to grow taller every second—to see the burger shack looking impossibly far away. Something hard bumped into her shoulder, and she looked behind to see it was a horn—an actual horn—connected to the head of a stumbling wrath. Sickeningly, he still had the hair of a man, growing up around the horn. Liv slashed out with her knife, just nicking the wrath’s shoulder. It turned to her and growled, its teeth seeming to elongate before Liv’s very eyes.
Then the wrath was screaming. It dropped to the ground, and Liv saw Merek standing behind it, his sword covered in black blood. Merek just had time to look up at Liv before another wrath came up from behind and brought its own blade down on his right shoulder.
Merek yelled out; his eyes rolled back into his head, and his knees buckled. Before Liv could react, Shannon pushed past her, catching Merek before he fell. He leaned on Shannon’s shoulder, backing away from the wrath just before Cedric whirled around to slice low into the creature’s knees, knocking it to the ground.
Merek was still conscious, one hand tight on the blood stemming from his shoulder, as Shannon started moving him closer to the building.
“He needs help!” she screamed. But there was no one to help Merek. There was no one to help any of them.
“There’s . . . too many . . . ,” Rafe panted.
“Get to the building,” Cedric yelled back. “Just get them there!”
They moved just an inch at a time, but eventually their circle reached the big picture window of Burger Time, next to a padlocked front door. Liv pushed her back up against a faded paper menu taped to the glass and took in the scene. Merek was on the ground now in front of the window, one hand over his shoulder to stop the flow of blood. And there was a lot of blood. Shannon dropped to her knees by him, bunching up the bottom of his shirt to put over the wound, while Peter leaned against the window, shoulder to shoulder with Liv.
“We have to get in there,” he said, motioning to the empty diner behind them.
Liv looked around for something to break the window with . . . anything . . . but all she had was her knife. She banged the butt of it against the window, but barely even made a dent.
The wraths closed in, swinging and fighting all the way, until Liv could no longer see through them to the street beyond. The only things keeping her from the angry horde of quickly transforming monsters were the blades of Cedric, Kat, and Rafe, all of whom looked exhausted as they thrust back against blow after blow. Liv banged against the window again. It flexed a little under the weight of her fist, but it didn’t break.
She closed her eyes, again repeating the lines she’d hoped would fix the world. “Accept the magic. Accept the magic. Accept the magic.” She could barely hear her own voice over the sounds of fighting. But she tried to push every ounce of energy, of belief, that she could behind those words. When she opened her eyes again, she saw Cedric was being pushed back, closer and closer to her.
Then she saw the gun.
Cedric must have seen it, too, and known what it was, because he faltered in his step as the barrel of the gun pushed through the ranks of wraths. An arm followed it, then shoulders. And then a face, and Liv’s mouth stopped working. Her lungs stopped working. Everything stopped working.
Joe held the gun firmly, a calm but determined expression on his face. Other than the black of his eyes, he still looked mostly human. Liv wondered briefly if he’d transform fully like the Caelum wraths. Could she handle seeing that? Could she even handle seeing this?
It didn’t immediately occur to her that Joe would shoot her—it went against every single idea and memory of him that she had—even when he leveled the gun at her.
It just wouldn’t make sense.
But the gun was there, and so was Joe, and so was she.
“Not yet,” a voice said beside Joe. Liv looked up to see Malquin sidle up beside Joe, his white hair blowing around his face in the breeze. “We need at least one of them alive.”
Malquin looked between Liv and Peter, and she knew what he meant—he needed three scrolls to keep opening big portals and make the world even crazier than it already was. She moved instinctively toward Peter to protect him, and he did the same for her.
“Not going to happen,” Cedric said, stepping in between Liv and Malquin.
But Malquin just narrowed his eyes and gestured to two wraths at his side, and they both lunged to Cedric, swords out. He blocked one blow and then the next, as the wraths pushed him farther and farther from where Liv stood.
The gun was just a few feet away now.
“Joe,” Liv said, “please.” She kept looking at him and him alone. Even though she wanted to tear her eyes away from his alien gaze, and that face that she both knew and did not know, she kept staring on.
“Accept the magic. Accept the magic. Accept the magic.”
“What are you mumbling?” Malquin asked.
Liv kept saying the words, again and again. They were the only real weapon she had. Even if the knife in her hands were any match for the gun, she knew she couldn’t use it—not on Joe. The only shot she had was to use the power she’d apparently been born with—the magic curled up in the marking on her back.
“Accept the magic. Accept the magic. Please—”
“You know what? I don’t actually care.” Malquin turned to Joe. “Shoot her. Take the boy.”
Joe nodded, almost imperceptibly, and his fingers moved against the trigger. The gun was just inches away now. Liv wanted to shut her eyes, but she couldn’t. Her hand found Peter’s, and they clutched at his fingers. But she stared in Joe’s all-black eyes, forcing herself not to look away, not to flinch as he shot—
He faltered.
To Liv, it seemed to happen in slow-motion. In one half second, Joe blinked. Then blinked again. His hand slid just a fraction of an inch, then another. He blinked a third time.
“Do it!” Malquin yelled.
But Joe didn’t nod. Instead, he shook his head, as if trying to clear it of a troublesome thought. He looked at Liv, narrowing his eyes. The hand holding the gun dropped even farther.
“Liv?” he asked, blinking. “What am I . . . where . . . ?”
Liv could vaguely tell the sounds of fighting around her were fading, but she couldn’t piece together yet what that meant. All she saw was Joe’s astonished face, the whites of his blinking eyes, and the sky, slowly turning blue, behind him.