The Power (The Magnificent 12 4)

aid.

“Are those flying snakes?” Camaro asked.

“So we get a second chance,” Mack said.

The dragons reached the bridge just as the Pale Queen smashed three seafood restaurants and seven souvenir stands on Fisherman’s Wharf.

The dragons swarmed around the bridge, looking a little like giant, colorful kites.

The dragon in charge—an unusually multicolored, gilt-tipped, sneering-mouthed creature the size of a train—floated effortlessly in the air near the Magnifica.

“This is Jihao Long,” Xiao said. “The name means, basically, Fabulous Dragon.” She shrugged. “It’s San Francisco.”

“Where shall we take you?” Jihao Long asked.

“We’re almost drained of enlightened puissance,” Mack said. “We won’t get a third try. This one has to be it. So we can’t miss.”

He looked at the others, and one by one they nodded. His decision. They would do whatever he decided. Even Valin. Even Dietmar.

“Put us right on top of her. Put us right on her head.”

It took four dragons to carry them all. Xiao morphed back to her true self. Stefan lifted Ilya and his wheelchair as if they weighed nothing, and he and Jarrah and Ilya rode one of the great beasts.

Mack ended up with Dietmar and Sylvie, which was right, somehow. Annoying Dietmar and pretty, philosophical Sylvie.

They soared into the air and raced across the bay. Higher and higher until they could plainly see the Pale Queen. She was leaving a trail of devastation like nothing San Francisco had seen since the great earthquake of 1906, which pretty much destroyed the city.

The Pale Queen was done with Fisherman’s Wharf and was on her way to the skyscrapers of downtown.

Intent on destruction, she did not look back toward the bridge. Or up at the sky. And she did not have eyes in the back of her head.

The dragons slowed and swooped down on her like fighter planes. They pulled up just above the top of her head, above what looked like a curved field of terrifyingly brittle hairs, each as thick as a telephone pole and ten times as long.

All together, the Magnificent Twelve jumped!

And at that exact moment the Pale Queen must have sensed something because she looked sharply up, and instead of falling toward a forest of hair, they were falling straight down toward that terrible eye.

It was the left eye—just so we have things straight here. The other eye was just as terrible.

“Ahhhhh!” Mack cried.

And the others made similar remarks.

They landed in a heap—actually two heaps—on the Pale Queen’s cheek, just beneath her eye. And when Mack stood up, he was staring into an eye the size of a hot-air balloon.

The pupil, that black pit filled with cursed souls, rotated down, down, down to see them.

It adjusted, trying to find a focus point, obviously not quite sure what it was looking at.

“Grab hands!” Mack cried.

This time there was no surge of power. There was power, but oh, it was so much weaker. Too weak.

“Give it all you’ve got!” Mack shouted desperately. “For everyone you love! For the whole human race! Now!”

The pupil had focused.

It focused and then, suddenly, it widened out in sheer terror. Because she knew then what was happening. She knew who they were.