Energy sparked around the perimeter of the circle. The smoke from the brazier seemed to be drawn into a vortex and wheeled around us like a tornado, picking up speed and power with each passing second.

  Devon moved toward the brazier, the bowl still in her hands. She was still chanting and now, her words seemed to twist with Victoria’s, as if the sounds were forming a sonic knot in the air.

  Devon tipped the contents of the bowl—the blood and the herbs—into the brazier, and the smoke became a blood red color.

  Then the witches spoke a final word in unison and the world beyond the circle disappeared, to be replaced with a view of a sea beneath a high moon.

  We stood on a small hill in the center of a grassy island that was maybe a mile long and half a mile wide. We’d crossed thousands of miles and many time zones to this little spur of land in the middle of a huge sea. I had to hand it to the witches; their spell was amazingly accurate.

  “Wow,” Lucy said, looking up at the moon. “It’s night here.”

  “Probably six or seven hours ahead of Maine,” I said.

  My dad was peering into the distance. “I can’t see the island of Karak.”

  Tia pointed out to sea. “It is in that direction. The sealing spell hides it from us, but I can sense it. If we go in that direction, we will come upon it.”

  “At least the boats arrived safely,” Leon said.

  The two outboard motors lay at our feet. The boats themselves had slid a couple of yards down the grassy slope.

  I scanned the coastline, looking for a suitable place to launch the boats. The island didn’t have a beach, but I could see a rocky cove that seemed to offer easy access to the sea. “That seems like the best place to enter the water.”

  Turning to Lucy, I said, “Do you want to wait here, on this hill? Or somewhere else on the island?”

  She looked around and shrugged. “I’ll wait here, I guess.”

  “Great.” I turned to the others. “Let’s get these boats in the water.”

  “Alec,” Lucy said.

  I turned to face her. She looked worried. “You are gonna come back, right?”

  “Of course we are.”

  “And you don’t think this island is haunted, do you? The teleportation spell only works if there’s a burial ground or church, or something. And I don’t see the ruins of a chapel anywhere around here.”

  “Don’t let your imagination run away with you,” I told her. “There are probably graves on the island, or something like that. Don’t think about it.”

  “I’m a horror writer; I can’t help thinking about that kind of stuff.”

  “We’ll be back soon,” I assured her. “Until then, practice some sword moves.” I showed her a couple of thrusts and parries. “When we get back home, I’ll give you some proper lessons, okay?”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.” I took off down the hill, following the others.

  We got the boats to the cove and Leon and Michael got to work on the outboard motors, fixing one to the rear of each Zodiac.

  The sea was fairly calm. I could see waves reflecting the moonlight, but they didn’t look threatening and there was barely any wind to speak of. Only a gentle, warm breeze drifted over the island, slightly tanged with salt.

  I took off my jacket and placed it on a rock away from the water’s edge. It had served me well in the cold Maine winter we’d just left, but here, on this Mediterranean island, it felt stifling. The Blackwell sister’s lucky sweater was more than enough to keep me warm here.

  The others followed suit, and we were soon dressed more appropriately for the warmer climate.

  “Okay, the boats are ready to go,” Leon said, wiping sweat from his brow. “I guess Michael and I should pilot them, since we’ve done it before.”

  Michael, Tia, and Mallory got into one craft while Leon, my dad, and I climbed into the other. The engines started with a roar, the sound fracturing the silence of the night. With a small jolt, we started forward, the boat rolling over the waves as we left the island behind.

  I glanced back at the hill and saw the blue glow of Lucy’s sword cutting through the air as she practiced the moves I’d shown her.

  “Don’t worry about her, Alec,” Dad said. “She’ll be fine.”

  “She’d have been fine in Dearmont too. In fact, she’d have been just fine if she didn’t know about any of this stuff and the worst things she had to deal with came from her imagination.”

  “But the monsters are real. We can’t hide them from the rest of the world forever.”

  “Can’t we? The Society has been doing exactly that for the past few hundred years.”

  “The world is changing. The time for secrecy will soon be over.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Was he finally going to tell me the secret that he and Felicity were unwilling to share with me?

  As if realizing he was about to say too much, he shook his head and looked out to sea. “Nothing. Forget I said anything.”

  Frustration built up inside me and came out as a sigh. “Dad, this secrecy is getting old. You keep dropping cryptic clues about something and then clam up when I ask you about them. Is this about the prophecy that foretells the end of the world? Because I already know about that. Bud told me.”

  “The end of the world?” Leon said. “What prophecy?”

  My dad’s attention focused on me again. “What do you mean Bud told you? What did he tell you?”

  “There’s a prophecy that the Melandra Codex is going to be used to end the world. Since the Society believes that you have the codex, its members think you’re going to bring about some sort of apocalypse. Is that what your furtive hints are about? You didn’t want me to know about the prophecy because I have the codex and if I knew it was going to bring about the end of the world, I might stop using it? How would you get the artifact you need for the academy if I wasn’t willing to nullify the Archon Seal?”

  “No, that isn’t it at all.”

  “Well what is it then? I already know about the prophecy and here I am, willing to use the Melandra Codex to get Ariadne’s Thread.”

  “This isn’t about the Thread, or what I want for the academy,” he insisted.

  “So what is it about, Dad?”

  He folded his arms and stopped talking.

  “Really? You’re going to go silent?”

  He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, seemingly resolving some sort of inner struggle into a decision. “All right, I’ll tell you. You know about the prophecy now, anyway, so the thing I feared the most has already occurred.”

  I frowned, confused. “You feared me finding out about the prophecy?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yes. One day, and it will probably be quite soon, you will be backed into a corner where the only chance to save yourself—and more importantly in your case, to save others—will be to use the full power of the Melandra Codex. You will have to cast the Melandra Configuration in its entirety. I thought that if you were aware of the prophecy, you’d hesitate. You might not cast the spell when you need to. All would be lost.”

  I thought about what he’d just said and tried to process it. In the end, the only thing I could say was, “What?”

  “A time will come when you have to cast the spell, Alec. And when that time arrives, you must not be distracted by a prophecy that says you will end the world as we know it. You must put all that aside and act.”

  “I have no intention of ending the world,” I said.

  He threw up his hands in a helpless gesture. “And this is what I was afraid of.”

  “You’re afraid of me not wanting to end the world?”

  “No, I’m afraid of you not casting the spell when the time is right. The prophecy says the Melandra Configuration must end the world to save it from a great darkness.”

  “End the world to save it?”

  “Yes.”

  You know that doesn’t make sense, right?”

  “Prophecies rarely do.”

  “They’re also wrong a lot of the time.”

  “Not this one. What this one foretells will happen.”

  “The Melandra Configuration will end the world.”

  “Yes.”

  “Or the world will be destroyed by a great darkness.”

  “Yes.”

  “There has to be another option.”

  “There isn’t.”

  I wasn’t sure what to else to say. Why would I cast a spell that would end the world? The answer was simple: I wouldn’t. But, according to the prophecy, if the Melandra Configuration didn’t end the world, then it would be destroyed by a great darkness, anyway.

  So, basically, if the prophecy was right, we were screwed.

  “What does this have to do with the academy?” I said.

  “The academy?”

  “Yeah, what’s all this other-world stuff you’ve got planned for the students?”

  “They have to learn to survive in the other realms and fight the creatures that dwell in them.”

  “Because you think this world is going to go kaput, so you’re looking for a new place to live?”

  “No, it isn’t that. The prophecy says that after the Melandra Configuration is cast and the world is saved from the great darkness, a terrible sickness will ravage the world.”

  “Oh, wow, this just gets better and better,” Leon said.

  “The sickness will be cured, but in doing so, the barrier between realms will be torn open and the creatures from those realms will be free to come into this world.”

  “I suppose you’re going to blame me for that, too,” I said. “After all, I’m apparently going to end the world, so why not tear down the barriers too?”

  “Listen closely to me,” my father said, leaning across the boat toward me. “When the time comes to use the spell, you must do so without hesitation. That’s going to be difficult, now that you know about the prophecy.”

  “I already told you, I’m not going to end the world.”

  “This is why I didn’t want to tell you about the prophecy; you’re stubborn. You don’t know what circumstances are going to arise that necessitate casting the spell. You need to be flexible in your thinking, not closed-minded.”

  “Look, I’ll do what I think is right when the time comes but, to be honest, this prophecy sounds like a load of baloney.”

  “Fine,” he said. “If that’s what you want to think, then that’s just as good as you not knowing about the prophecy at all. In fact, it’s probably better. You won’t think about the consequences when you have to cast the spell to save the world.”

  “Don’t you mean end the world?”

  “End the world to save it.”

  I rolled my eyes at the prophetic double-speak. “Yeah, whatever.”

  The Zodiac stopped suddenly, as if it had hit something.

  “What the hell?” Leon gunned the engine and propelled us forward. The boat stopped, as if hitting an invisible wall.

  I saw Tia lean over the hull of the other boat and reach out a hand. Then she reached out her other hand and moved them around in the air, like a mime pretending to press against an invisible sheet of glass.

  “We have found it,” she said. “This is the sealing spell that has been placed around the island.”

  “You need to remove it, Alec,” my dad said.

  I moved to the front of the Zodiac and reached over the side of the hull, as Tia was doing. My hands contacted something that felt solid. Its invisible surface tingled beneath my fingers, as if a current of energy was traveling through it.

  “Once I’ve brought down the wards,” I said, “we have to kill whatever’s inside. We can’t let it out into the world.”

  I looked at my dad and Leon. They nodded solemnly.

  In the other boat, Tia, Mallory, and Michael did the same.

  Keeping my hands in the invisible, pulsing wall, I concentrated on the part of the Melandra Codex that would remove the spell that the Vatican had cast hundreds of years ago.

  A spell designed to keep something monstrous imprisoned inside.

  Chapter 20

  As I concentrated on the magical symbols in my mind, I felt energy rise within me and then travel along my arms to my fingertips, where the power of the Melandra Configuration met the Vatican spell that pulsed through the invisible wall.

  I closed my eyes and willed more nullifying energy to flow from me into the magical seal. The wall seemed to pulse more rapidly, as if it was fighting back.

  Unwilling to let it beat me, I intensified the magical symbols from the Melandra Codex in my imagination until they burned with a black flame.

  The wall came down. One second, it was there beneath my fingers and the next, it was gone.

  I opened my eyes. Karak Island was now visible.

  It looked impressive, even though most of the buildings were in a ruinous state. About a mile away from our current position, the remains of a small port, that had once consisted of jetties and docks, had crumbled onto the shoreline.

  Beyond that, a ruined city circled a rocky slope and at the top, elevated above everything else on the island, sat Blackstone Citadel.

  It looked like a castle from a fairy tale, with high towers and crenellated walls that shone in the moonlight. It was easy to imagine knights roaming those battlements in days gone by. I wondered if anything roamed them now, and what might be waiting for us in the north tower.

  Without having to be told to proceed cautiously, Michael and Leon guided the boats slowly forward toward the old port.

  I scanned the ruined city, looking for signs of movement, but the only living things I could see were plants. The streets were overgrown with grass and weeds, and vines had almost completely taken over the buildings. The vines had made an assault on the lower reaches of the citadel but seemed unwilling to climb to the dizzying heights of the upper walls and towers.

  We reached the port. Michael and Leon cut the engines and the Zodiacs drifted silently between upright posts that jutted out of the sea, once the foundations of the harbor but now a rotting relic of a long dead past.

  The Zodiacs ran aground on a sandy beach and we clambered off them and onto the island. After pulling the boats away from the water’s edge, we stood on the sand, glowing swords and battle-axe in hand, and gathered in a circle.

  In the glow of the enchanted weapons and the moonlight, every face looked grim.

  “Let’s get this done as quickly as we can,” I said. “We’ll move through the city as directly as we can to the citadel. Once we’re there, we go straight to the north tower and recover Ariadne’s Thread. If anything tries to stop us, we put it down.

  Everyone nodded in agreement.

  “Wait, Alec, there is one more thing,” Tia said. She handed her sword to Mallory and clapped her hands together, producing a green, glowing ball. She pressed it into my chest, and I felt a sudden rush of energy. I wasn’t sure how much energy I’d used to dispel the Vatican’s sealing wards but hopefully now, I wouldn’t be affected by the expenditure.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But what about you? Are you drawing this energy from yourself?”

  She nodded. “And it makes my magic weaker for a while. That is why I have brought the sword. I will fight regardless.” She took the weapon back from Mallory.

  I admired her fighting spirit, but was disappointed to learn that her magic was weakened. That meant we couldn’t rely on her sorcery when in the big fight.

  If there even is a big fight, I reminded myself. The creature that the Templars had unwittingly released hundreds of years ago might not even be here any longer. This entire mission could conceivably consist of simply getting to the tower, retrieving Ariadne’s Thread from within the Archon Seal, and sailing away from the island unscathed.

  Yeah, right. I might be wearing a lucky sweater, but I’d never be that lucky.

  I looked at the others and said, “Let’s do it.”

  We moved away from the beach and into the ruined city. The Flagstones that had once formed the streets were cracked and dislodged, and long, wild grass had taken advantage of that fact and had rooted itself into every available gap.

  The buildings we passed mainly consisted of two-story dwellings, but any other features were obscured by the thick tangles of vines that had run rampant over them.

  None of us spoke, as if doing so might attract the attention of something hiding within the ruins, even though the place seemed devoid of life, other than the plants.

  The citadel was still some distance away, rising above the city, its walls and towers dotted with slitted windows that resembled a myriad of eyes looking down on us dispassionately.

  “This place is creepy,” Mallory whispered.

  “I don’t care if it’s creepy, as long as it isn’t inhabited,” my dad said.

  We proceeded along the streets, getting slowly closer to Blackstone Citadel. Our footfalls on the overgrown flagstones sounded unnaturally loud in the otherwise quiet night.

  “Wait!” Leon said.

  We stopped.

  “I heard something,” he said. “Over there.” He pointed at a side street that ran into the darkness.

  I tightened my grip on the handle of my sword. A tight tension descended on us as we listened to the night.

  Then I heard something that sounded like clawed feet scurrying over the flagstones.

  “Is it rats?” my dad asked.

  I shook my head. “It’s something much bigger than rats.”

  I still couldn’t see anything in the direction the sound was coming from.

  Then the scurrying sound stopped and was replaced by a scrabbling that sounded like animals running through dense undergrowth.

  “They’re climbing the vines!” I said. “They’re coming over the roofs.” I looked up in time to see a mass of dark shapes leap from the tops of the buildings. As they descended toward us, silhouetted against the moon, their appearance was difficult to see. They were humanoid, and appeared to be human size, but I couldn’t see anything else clearly in the darkness.

  One of them tried to land on me. I pointed my sword at its belly, running it through before it touched me.

 

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