The Call (The Magnificent 12 1)

twelve, each filled with the enlightened puissance, all twelve united as one, shall stop the Dread Foe.”

“‘Shall?’” Grimluk echoed hopefully.

“I meant, ‘may,’” Drupe corrected.

“Darn,” Grimluk said.

Drupe walked a few steps away from them, right to the wall’s edge. She stared out at the forest. “Not tonight, but the next night that comes will bring with it the Dread Foe. If we fail…then all the wonder of our lives, our happy way of life, the luxury and magnificence, the endless pleasure of our freedom, will be doomed. And all the world will serve the Dr—”

She stopped and clenched her fist and shook it at the ever-approaching smoke.

“No, I will say her name!” Drupe cried in a mix of defiance and fear. “As the final battle approaches, I will speak her name. She comes! She comes! The Pale Queen!”

Fifteen

It was hard to tell how big it was, the monster on the wing. Maybe not much bigger than a man.

But it was no man.

In the strobe from the jet’s wing light, Mack saw a thing covered with sleek, short, copper-colored fur.

The wing monster had two short, stubby legs ending in oversized feet that could almost be human. But its major weight was in the upper body, where it had massive, muscled, broad shoulders supporting a pair of thick arms. The arms ended in a forest of tentacles. Imagine that the arms were trees—because that’s just about how thick they were—and now imagine that those trees had been yanked up out of the ground so that the roots were dangling and waving, all intertwined. These roots, these tentacles were in varying lengths from a few inches to a few feet.

The wing monster had its stumpy feet planted uncertainly on the aluminum surface, but the arms and the tentacles gripped the wing’s leading edge quite securely.

But as bad as the tentacles were—and Mack was definitely not happy about them—the creature’s head was far worse. Some dark, inexplicable bit of twisted DNA had decided to reverse the usual location of eyes and mouth. The eyes—globular, small, startlingly white, with no sign of a pupil—were below the mouth. The mouth was filled with an interesting array of teeth. They looked broken, as if the creature had started out with a solid wall of big, bright, shiny teeth and then had broken them randomly with a ball-peen hammer, leaving jagged crenellations.

When it stared at Mack with its white jelly eyes and grinned its broken grin, Mack had no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that it was coming for him.

“Whoa,” Stefan said. “Gnarly.”

The flight attendants were telling everyone to stay calm. But they didn’t look too calm themselves. Anyone could see that the creature was walking its way down the wing toward the plane.

“It’s coming to kill me,” Mack said, sounding far more calm than he felt.

“You’re under my wing,” Stefan said. But he sounded a little doubtful to Mack.

“It can’t get in, can it?” Mack cried in a shrill, whinnying sort of tone that was definitely not heroic.

“The door can’t be opened from the outside,” a flight attendant cried, sounding just like Mack had sounded. “Probably.”

“I hate probably,” Mack said. He tried to think of a way out, of a way to fight the monster, or alternately a way to hide. “The bathroom!”

“Yo, I have to go, too,” Stefan said, “but we got bigger problems.”

“I mean we can hide in there.”

Stefan did not argue. Click, click, and their seat belts fell away. They launched themselves out of their seats and pelted toward the bathroom.

“Sit down!” the flight attendant shouted. “The captain has illuminated the seat belt sign!”

The airplane bathroom was small, but they fit if Mack stood on the toilet. Stefan leaned his back against the door. Mack saw his own reflection in the mirror: he looked scared. Then he noticed how scared Stefan looked, and he got even more scared because Stefan wasn’t scared of anything, and if he was scared, Mack knew he himself had better be terrified.

Suddenly from outside the bathroom there were screams.

There was a loud sound and an incredible whoosh that popped Mack’s ears. The bathroom door flew open, and the two of them spilled out into the aisle.

The inside of the jet was a madhouse. Paper napkins, peanut bags, plastic cups, purses, magazines and newspapers, and great big hardcover books were flying around as if a tornado had formed inside the plane.