The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

Sometimes terror kind of shuts off your brain.

Other times it focuses your thoughts.

Mack had just crossed the line into focused. Very focused.

The Gudridan’s red fur began to turn black in patches. The monster noticed, held up an arm to examine it, and seemed almost to whimper.

Its fur faded from red to pink, but what mattered was the creeping black growth that spread over the monster, here, there, surrounding and then absorbing fur now gone white, seeming to eat it up.

Eating then into the skin beneath the fur.

The Gudridan hollered in incoherent terror, and Mack thought, Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I can bring. I can bring rot and make you die, monster! I can do that.

It was like watching time-lapse videography of an orange being consumed by mold.

The creature’s fur was gone, replaced by the creeping mold. Its arms withered. Its legs were pins. It fell facedown across several cars.

The other monster, the one Mack had smashed with the car, began backpedaling frantically.

It had never seen such a thing. It had never seen one of its kind brought down by a skinny, curly-haired child spouting an ancient, forgotten language.

More gendarmes and regular cops were arriving in a festival of flashing blue lights and frantic sirens. More gunfire. The Paris night was a battlefield.

Mack ran to the rail and saw that Dietmar had swum to the far bank and was painfully hauling himself up onto the slick, wet stones.

“Everyone!” Mack yelled in a voice that was approximately one-millionth as strong as a bellowing Gudridan. “Come on!”

They formed up around him, Stefan limping and holding his side, Jarrah picking Gudridan fur out of her teeth, Sylvie and Xiao looking bruised and disheveled.

“Dietmar is across. We run for it and hope the cops think we’re just normal people running for our lives!”

Which is what they did.

And what the French police assumed as they fired steadily into the back of the retreating monster.

The battered kids joined a wet and slimy Dietmar and raced shivering and heartsick toward the entryway to the Paris sewers.

* * *

Twenty

* * *

MEANWHILE, BACK IN SEDONA

The golem climbed down from the wall.

He walked to his—Mack’s—desk and picked up his iPhone. Mack had told him not to bother him, that he should be a big boy and take care of himself.

But the golem was having a very bad feeling down in the muddy hole he’d dug out of himself that now functioned as a stomach.

He wrote a text to Mack.

* * *

I’m afraid. A girl named Risky was here. I think she will make me hurt people. Your golem.

* * *