Alchemist Academy: Book 2 (22 page)

I nodded.

He was on me in an instant. I didn’t see him cross the white space; he was just there. His huge hands pushed against my skull and I felt his thoughts enter mine. A stream of maps and pictures of his exact location pushed their way into my consciousness. I wanted him out of my head. I screamed and clawed at him and punched at his face.

“You are even prettier than the boy,” he said with a toothy smile, inches away from my face.

I screamed. It was all I could do as his mind melded with mine. I pushed him back, not with my arms or body, but with my mind. This place wasn’t real. I had to take control of my thoughts. I focused on a single point and let the pressure build, as if I was taking the deepest breath of my life. When I felt at capacity, I shot my thoughts directly at Blane.

He fell backward, off of me. I kept my mind screaming as I concentrated on him. He grabbed at his head and as I floated to my feet, he backpedaled.

“No! You have to keep your promise. You have to find me. I’ve seen your world now. They’re coming. There is another, and if they’re found, all will be lost.” He sounded sane, but full of fear.

I floated to Mark and picked him up off the floor. He felt weightless in my arms.

“You have to,” Blane insisted. “You know where I am. I am the only way you can get to the stone. We can protect the world.”

I hugged Mark and closed my eyes. We were leaving this place.

“No!” Blane screamed. “Come for me! Don’t leave me here!”

“Allie?” Jackie said. “Are you back?”

“Mark?” I slurred.

“He’s right here,” Mom answered.

My vision cleared from the blinding white and I focused on Jackie’s face, then my mom’s. Mark was sitting to my right, holding my hand and looking as weak as I felt.

“You saved me,” he said.

“We saved each other.”

He smiled. “All I did was be a punching bag.”

“Without you, I wouldn’t have had the will to fight him off.”

“What happened?” Mom asked.

I let go of Mark and rubbed my head. I felt the thoughts and images Blane had put in there. He’d wanted to put in more, all of it, probably, but I’d blocked him. Maybe it was dumb luck, but I’d found a way to stop him. “He showed me exactly where he is.”

My mom cheered and fist-pumped the air. Then she and Niles grabbed at each other in their excitement. I guessed that they assumed I would be telling them exactly where Blane was, but I didn’t like the idea of turning a person like that loose in the world. I looked over to Mark, and he stared at me with those knowing eyes.

After leaning forward and giving Mark a light kiss, I faced my mother. She was still gleeful and celebrating. I imagined she and Niles had been looking for this Blane guy for a long time. I wondered how many of her students she’d sent into that stone.

I shivered. The thought of my mom having her own academy while I was…. No, I had to push that thought down, lock it away. I was good at that, and before too long I would forget what I knew.

“Well,” Mom said after a moment, “we just have a few housekeeping things to do here and then we can get going.”

“We’re not just leaving this place here, are we?” I asked.

“No. I have a special plan.”

As we left room five, I hung back and got closer to Mark. I didn’t tell Mom or Niles what had happened, and I knew Mark didn’t want to say anything either. He ambled next to me and gave me another one of those looks, a hint of fear tainting the corners, telling me he didn’t like this. I didn’t either.

Blane had tried to enter our minds. He’d wanted to take over our bodies. He wanted to enter the world again using one of us as a host. If I hadn’t gone into the stone with Mark, I knew Blane would have taken my Mark from me. I clenched my fist at the thought, and Mark touched my hand.

Mom and Niles made their way to the statue, where Bridget and the other students had gathered a large supply of stones. It looked like several pallets. How long had Mark and I been in there?

Dave was sitting strapped to an office chair next to the pallets.

“That was crazy foolish, coming in after me,” Mark said. “But thanks. I almost lost it in there.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his temple.

“You could have told me you were a special,” I said, tilting my head, trying to see his eyes.

“I know, and I wanted to so many times. But we aren’t alone much, and when we are, I don’t really want to talk about alchemy, or even talk in general.”

I sighed and thought about the few times we had been alone. “You can tell me anything. Is there anything else you’re hiding from me? Do you have a wife?”

“Yeah, I’m seventeen and married. I have a mortgage and two kids back in Baker. Oh, and I’m bald. This is a rug.” He pointed to his hair.

I smiled. He pulled me to a stop and kept tugging my arm gently until I faced him. “I promise to not keep anything from you ever again.”

I hugged him. It felt better than words, and I really wanted a physical connection. His body flexed against me as he held me firm.

“Come on,” Mark said. “If I’m right, your mom has a brilliant plan for this place.”

She did, and soon we had gathered all the materials and had set the barrel next to the statue. It was a shame that such a beautiful thing had to be destroyed, but what had happened inside that globe couldn’t go on.

“You know, we could leave this place here, maybe even find a way to use it,” Leo said.

“Oh, please. Do you really want this sham of an academy to keep existing?” Jackie said.

Leo drew a breath. “Maybe there’s more here to find. Maybe there’s stuff hidden here. It just seems a waste to blow it to hell.”

“Really, Leo?” Jackie said. “You’re trying to stop the awesomeness of this bomb?”

Leo folded his arms and stared at the barrel.

“The reason for getting rid of this place,” Mom said, “is that Verity and Axiom most certainly put trackers on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were on their way here right now. They could snatch this place up, move it, disguise it, put new students down here and get this place back into production mode by the end of the week. No, it’s far safer to destroy it.”

Leo huffed but didn’t say anything more.

“Wait. What about the teachers you locked in that room?” I asked.

“I was hoping to leave them in there,” Jackie said.

“I’ve got another portal stone,” Mom said. “I can send them to one of the cages I have around the world for just this type of people.”

Then she jogged across the hub and pull the door of the teachers’ closet closed behind her. After a few minutes she returned.

“Okay. We all set?” she asked.

We were, and I was ready to leave this place.

Mark was holding a large roll of thin copper wire we had found. Two wires lay on the floor and fed into the packed barrel. He walked backwards to the elevator door, feeding the wire out of the spool. We had packed the elevator with every book and stone my mom wanted to save. Once we were all inside, including Dave in his rolling chair, I nodded to Bridget to push the detonator button.

Our only fear had been that the wire would break on our way up, but it unspooled like a kite in a mighty wind. Mark held the spool tight as it spun. Finally, the elevator doors opened and Mark walked out sideways, holding on to what was left of the spool of wire.

“I knew you’d take us here,” he said.

I smiled and looked up at my tree fort. I had spent many hours up there, hiding from Janet and Spencer, but mostly hiding from myself. I escaped into that small space and gotten lost in other worlds, imagining I might be part of something special. Now look at me. The whole world had become magical, and I had Mark and my mom to share it with.

“Is there a house anywhere close to this location?” Mom asked.

“Not too close. You think they’ll feel it?” I asked.

Mom laughed and kept following Mark. “With luck, they’ll just think it was an earthquake. Keep it going, Mark.”

He sped up and looked back at me with a big smile. Niles and Leo pushed the massive carts full of alchemy books and stones along the dirt path I knew so well. Angela struggled with Dave in the chair until Bridget helped her keep it straight.

This display would normally have been comical to me, but I could see the top of my house in the distance. This was the point where I used to start getting nervous, but now I felt different. Even though I was only a few hundred feet from it, it felt a thousand miles away. My life would be with my mother now, and Mark. I couldn’t wait to get started.

“That should be far enough,” Mom said.

Mark set the wires on the ground. Niles and Leo struggled to catch up with the heavy carts, but they made it.

Niles cut the copper wires and separated them from the spool.

“Bridget, I think you have the honors,” Mom said.

Bridget strutted to the wires and held one in each hand.

“I bet you can send a spark right down those wires using your ability. If you can get emotional enough?”

“I don’t think I’ll have a problem.”

I’d never seen Bridget so happy. She looked like a different person, holding the wires apart and looking at each of us. The wires shook in her hands as her gaze passed over us. “I just want to let you guys know….” She started to lose it and sucked in air through her nose.

“It’s okay, Bridget,” I said.

“No.” She collected herself. “I treated you like a grade-A bitch for no reason. I knew you had problems with the deaths of your parents. I knew I could break you down.”

“Bridget,” I said.

“No, let me finish. We grew up together, we even had sleepovers when we were younger, but something happened to me. Something terrible. It broke me, shattered me.” Tears rolled down her face.

I knew the something that had happened, but she had no idea that I knew because Mark had used a time stone to change things. I glanced at Mark and saw the agony on his face.

Bridget closed her eyes and stamped her feet on the ground. Then she opened her teary eyes and gazed into mine. “All I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry, Allie. I’m sorry for being a bitch all those years.”

Now she was getting to me and I felt tears filling my eyes. I walked over and hugged her. She hugged me back, and I heard the sound of electricity zapping.

I looked over my shoulder to see the wires touching. “Did it work—” was all I got out before the explosion.

The ground shook and a stack of books rattled off the cart. I steadied myself and gazed in the direction of my treehouse. After a few seconds the ground stopped shaking, but the boom echoed around the surrounding hills. A dust cloud billowed upward and the tree house all but disappeared in it.

“Oh no,” I said as I watched the tree tilt. I thought it might hold and I’d have a crooked house to visit, but then the whole tree crashed to the ground.

“Shame. That was a nice treehouse,” Mark said.

I stared at the treehouse, which now lay shattered on the ground. Something about seeing all that wrecked wood scattered across the forest floor told me I was never coming back to Summerford.

“Gwen’s going to pick us up at your house, Allie. You think your stepmom will let us crash at her place for a bit?” Mom asked.

“Does she have a choice?”

“We could use a few stones, if you think it’s a problem.”

“No, I want to talk with her anyway.” I looked at Bridget and knew what I had to do. “Are you going to talk to your mom, Bridget?”

“Yeah, right. I’ll send her an email or something. If I tried to explain all the crap that just happened, she’d probably lock me in the basement for the rest of my life.” She laughed.

“Okay, then, next stop is my house.” I sighed.

Niles and Leo pushed their carts ahead. Many of the books jiggled around and some of them fell onto the dirt path. Bridget and Angela got a handle on Dave and pushed him along. Jackie grazed the bushes with her hands and plucked a few leaves off the low-hanging branch of an oak tree.

“Been a while, huh?” Leo said, smiling as he picked a book up off the ground and placed it back on the pile. I hadn’t noticed how good-looking he was. Maybe it was because of my constant fear of the Blues attacking, or maybe the natural light brought out the best in him.

My spirit soared at seeing him free, at thinking of all those kids free of the grasp of Verity.

“I’m going to go ahead and give Janet a fair warning we’re coming her way. Smooth things out,” my mom said.

The notion that anyone could smooth things out with Janet bordered on delusional. I had been dreading the first moments of getting back to her. Maybe the shock of seeing my mom alive would lessen her reaction. I didn’t know if she’d be ecstatic, or angry, or disgusted by my return. It didn’t matter much; I knew what I had to say to Janet, something I should have been saying to her for a long time.

“Hey, Mark, think you could take over cart duties?” Niles asked, and jogged ahead to catch up to Mom.

“Sure,” Mark said, and stepped in to push the cart.

“Wait!” I called after my mom. “My house is the one with the red roof and the white vinyl fence.”

“I know which house it is,” she called back, then disappeared around a manzanitas bush.

“You know these people?” Leo asked Jackie as Brett took over pushing the cart.

“Yeah, she’s a little crazy, but I like her,” Jackie said. “Besides, she’s Allie’s mom. Good genetics.”

Leo didn’t say much else about the new members of the team, but he asked a bunch of questions about where Jackie had been and what she had been doing. Angela stayed near me and kept giving me glances as if she had something to say. I couldn’t blame her. If I’d been pushing Dave, I might have a few words to say as well.