The Power (The Magnificent 12 4)

Mack shrugged. “Grimluk said something about an orange bridge, then he said it was more of a rust red. And he mentioned a golden gate. That would have to be the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.”

“So first the Golden Temple, and then the Golden Gate,” Sylvie said. “If only we could be sure that our futures were so golden.”

Sylvie didn’t know it yet, but she was right to harbor such doubts. She was in a quandary, Sylvie was. Valin was her half brother. And Mack, well, she had come to care about Mack. Of course Mack was blithely unaware that she had a tendre23 for him, or that however much she despised what Valin was doing, she still had to hope he would not be hurt.

“Will any of us survive?” Sylvie asked herself quietly. “Will loyalty or love mean anything in the end? Is it true, as Sartre said, that life begins on the other side of despair?”

Yep, she was philosophical, Sylvie was. She watched Mack slithering away atop Xiao’s rippling turquoise back and felt momentarily abandoned. Jarrah was feeling much the same, gazing after Stefan.

The two girls’ hands touched, and they offered each other a silent, reassuring squeeze.

Riding off with the wind in his face and Stefan’s knees in his back, Mack heard his phone ring. He didn’t answer it for fear he would drop it, and how was he going to replace a phone in the middle of all this?

He made a mental note to check for messages as soon as he landed, but he forgot, and so he did not receive Camaro’s worried voice mail.

Thus was Richard Gere Middle School24 doomed.

Six

MEANWHILE, 7,831 MILES AWAY, IN SEDONA, ARIZONA

“He’s not answering,” Camaro said, staring at the phone like she might smash it.

The golem was continuing to dance, but he was dancing on the floor, which was a good thing. “Maybe Mack’s dancing.”

(Mack was not dancing, as you know perfectly well. He was riding a dragon toward the Golden Temple of Amritsar.)

Camaro’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “There’s something very wrong here tonight. The question is: What do we do about it?”

“Leave a message?” the golem suggested, which was a pretty sensible suggestion. It surprised Camaro: the golem was not always25 sensible.

“Mack, it’s Camaro. Something very weird is going on here. There’s a bunch of creepy short dudes and a bunch of locust-looking people, too. Call me.”

She hung up the call, gave the phone back to the golem, and thought. Camaro might be a bit of a thug but she was not stupid. In fact she had good grades and had a particular knack for math and science. She could think when she needed to.

And she could observe, too. At this particular moment she was observing the fact that all the stocky little dudes and the buggy creatures were watching the golem.

So. They were there for the golem. This was about him, and, Camaro intuited, about that red-haired girl the golem had told her about. She was the one who’d almost caused the golem to kill Camaro.

Uncool.

Camaro searched the room for the redhead, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t the kind of girl you easily overlooked.

“So these are just minions,” Camaro muttered, and nodded knowingly. Minions were like underbullies. There might be a lot of them, but if old James Bond movies, Bruce Willis movies, and Star Wars movies had taught her anything, it was that minions are easily disposed of.

She sidled up to Tony Pooch, who flinched at her approach. “Bully emergency. Keep it quiet. Spread the word.”

She did the same with Ed Lafrontiere, the disgraced Twilight fans’ bully, who was now hoping for a new assignment. And Matthew Morgan, who dealt with nerds and dorks.

Within seconds the word had gone out to all twelve official bullies—and Disgraced Ed. They gathered around Camaro and the golem.

“Listen up,” Camaro said. “I am declaring this an official bully emergency. You are all bound by the oath you took to work together whenever there’s a threat to our thing.”

“Is it this guy? Mack?” the skater/punk bully demanded, jerking a thumb at the golem, who was at that moment pulling a small twig out of his nose.

“No, the gol— I mean, Mack, is cool. He’s on our side. In fact, he’s the one in danger.”

“In danger?” Popular Mean Girls bully Jennifer Schwarz asked. “Why should we care?”