After a good night's rest, Mr. Long brought Lizzie into the office, and helped her make a journal entry for her encounter with the Sorcerer. She told him everything, starting with Nick healing the rabbit, and he wrote it all down.
But when she told him about the sigils he stopped her. “You have the sigils?” he asked.
“Yes'r.” She reached into her pocket and showed them to him.
He took the sigils into his hand. At first he looked at the arcane symbols with disgust. But then he smiled. “Do you know what this means?”
Lizzie didn't.
“This is like a goldmine of spirits,” he said. “We'll be able to summon all the Fallen on this ring to us.”
“But I promised Nick,” Lizzie said, “that I'd never use the Spear on him.”
“You can't make promises like that Lizzie, I've told you. We must take all the Fugitive Spirits.”
“But dad, he saved Lori.”
He put the sigils down on his desk. “Okay. Tell me the rest of the story.”
When Lizzie finished, Mr. Long stared at the last page for a long time. Finally, he said, “It's true Nick saved Lori—I'll honor the promise you made to him. But you have to know that Lori would have never been in that situation if you hadn't talked to Nick in the first place.
“Now I'm not blaming you for what happened. You didn't know about the Fallen when you met Nick. But you must promise me you shall never, ever, speak to any of the Fugitive Spirits again. Okay?”
Lizzie nodded reluctantly.
“Following that rule now will be particularly important. At least two of the Fallen know where we live. Our house is protected, and yet somehow Lori was kidnapped. And we don't know what else the Fallen might try. You must understand.”
“Yes'r,” Lizzie answered. She didn't like the idea of using the Spear on Nick, because he turned out to be okay. But her dad was right. Things could get messy when you listened to the Fugitive Spirits. It had happened at Rocky Springs. It had happened at the Garner Mansion. And it had happened with Nick. From now on her motto would be: Use the Spear first and ask questions later.
“Well,” Mr. Long said, “it looks as if we're finished.” He picked up the pages he had written and put them into a binder. Along the spine it read: Lizzie Long, Spear Bearer.
Postlude - Hospital
Manuel sat in the waiting room by himself. He didn’t count the shrunken head that had been put in Gordon’s bag despite its repeated complaints of the “stink of runners and boxers.” Gordon was in surgery to have the splinter removed from his intestines. His mom was in a room under observation. When a nurse had come out to clean Manuel’s wounds and give him bandages, his mother had passed out. Now the doctors were running tests. Manuel knew that it was more than just being tired or the sight of blood. She was sick, and she’d been sick for some time now.
After rescuing Gordon from the Muddy Brown Bayou, they walked back to the car, and Manuel told Gordon about everything that had happened.
“Did you say a spear? They definitely said ‘spear’?” Gordon had interrupted.
“Yes,” Manuel said. “It was in a bag.”
Gordon shook his head. “The blasted Reaper’s,” he said. “Worse than demons, that lot.”
“So the little girl we saved was a...a Reaper?” Manuel asked. He didn’t understand what a Reaper was, but of course it didn’t sound good.
“Good night’s work, there, Sparky,” the shrunken head intoned. “Lost the sigils and rescued our mortal enemies.”
“So we shouldn’t have saved the girl?” Manuel asked.
“Of course we had to try to save the girl,” Gordon said immediately. “Just wish she wasn’t a blasted Reaper.”
Gordon also had been surprised by what the gnome had said. “He said she was his friend?” Gordon asked in an incredulous voice.
“Yes,” Manuel told him. “He made me promise not to try to get the sigils back.”
“Then we won’t,” Gordon said. “And it’s a good enough excuse not to face the Reapers. Besides, they likely won’t be trying to use the Sigils to take over the world.”
Sitting in the waiting room Manuel felt worried about his mother and Gordon, but he didn’t feel sad. He thought it was weird, too, because it seemed he should feel sad. They had lost their home. They had lost the Sigils. He had been attacked and almost killed. His mom was sick.
But Manuel had rescued Gordon. He’d helped defeat the Sorcerer and save two girls. He’d kept Raum from getting the sigils back. He didn’t feel defeated—he felt like a hero, and it seemed to him that that was what he was made for.
The End
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Sneak preview of
Abomination
Spear Bearer: Book Two
Chapter 1 — The Crown of Stars
“You have the first watch,” Mr. Long said. “I'll set my alarm for two a.m.”
Bathed in fluorescent lantern light, Lizzie sat in a lawn chair under the tent's awning. She looked up from the book she was reading. “It's been two days, Dad.”
“Use the pain glyph again,” he said. “Let it know we mean business.”
Lizzie pulled the string of pendants from her pocket and found the one marked Serakel, and then found the cruel looking red pendant. It had been almost three years since she had witnessed the sorcerer using the Glyph of Pain on Knecht Ruprecht, the gnome-like creature she called Nick. She had hated it then. She hated it still.
But she tried not to think about it. The job had to be done. And they couldn't wait forever as this Serakel spirit took it's time coming to their summoning.
“I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit Serakel, to appear and to show thyself visibly before this pentagram,” Lizzie said solemnly. “By thy name and sign do I call you forth, and by the Grim Glyph of Pain do I send despair and torture till thee present thyself.”
She crossed the two pendants and held them tight together for a good half-minute.
“Dad, I was wondering, what if the spirit has already been gathered? How long do we wait?”
Mr. Long lifted up his baseball cap and scratched his head. “I don't know. Remember, it took almost a full day for the first one to make it here. They don't all travel at the same speed. Some are probably farther away than others.” He unzipped the tent and stepped inside.
Lizzie heard a rustling sound in the woods. She picked up the ancient Spear of Longinus, its haft broken short, and went to the edge of the pentagram they had made. With the power of the Spear she looked into the darkness, seeing everything with supernatural clarity—every green leaf, every twig, every dry brown pine needle on the ground. Some twenty yards away an opossum was scrounging through dead leaves and fallen branches.
“What is it?” her father called out from the tent.
“Nothing. Just a possum.”
“Okay. Well, I'm going to get some shuteye. Goodnight.”
Lizzie climbed back into her chair, her legs curled up underneath her. She started to read again, and waited for her turn to rest.
“The Mother Earth was made for those,
Who care the least to love Her.
They poison rivers, pollute the air,
Consuming all that grows.”
The song came to Lizzie through the fog of sleep. And with it came the smell of flowers. The voice sounded pleasant and kind and made her feel both peaceful and sad. She had had dreams like that before, where an emotion was simply a part of the landscape and had little to do with what was happening.
“They live in greedy desperation,
Hunting, chopping, burning.
Their wanting never ceasing—
Laying low everything under the sun.
“And now I fear,
My time draws near,
They aim to harvest me!”
Lizzie struggled to open her eyes. Beyond the edge of the pentagram a live oak tree stood,
its trunk thick, its branches long and tortuous. It hadn't been there before.
“Do you hear me, child?” came the voice from the direction of the tree.
“Yes,” Lizzie answered.
“Oh Creature of Mud, we have no quarrel between us. Come to me. Let me care for you. You'll want for nothing the rest of your days, and I'll give you the knowledge of the ages.”
Lizzie began to stand up, and smiled to think she was sleepwalking. She had never done that before. The Spear began to roll off her lap, and so she took it in her hand. Now the old live oak glowed green.
Lizzie smiled again. It was one of the Fallen. Funny—she should be scared—but she actually felt happy and relaxed. She walked toward the oak, her feet not even lifting off the ground, her eyelids drooping.
The oak transformed. A tall slender woman stood before her holding a silver hair brush. She wore a dress of brilliant autumn leaves. “Come, child, let me brush your hair,” she said.
Lizzie had never seen such beauty. Her angular face flawless, her emerald eyes bright, her nut-brown hair reaching down to her bare feet. A crown of stars orbited about her head. The woman invited her closer with outstretched arms.
Beep beep beep, Mr. Long's alarm sounded. Lizzie looked back toward the tent. What was it he always said about the Fallen?
“Please, just a few more steps,” the woman said. “You can live forever in the warmth of my embrace.”
But as the woman motioned her forward, Lizzie noticed she had claws instead of fingernails. There was tension in the woman's voice. She remembered how her dad had told her the Fallen could cast a spell on you. Lizzie shook her head to shake out the grogginess.
“Lizzie,” her dad yelled from behind her.
The spell broke and Lizzie awoke. Without hesitation she lifted the Spear and pointed it at the woman.
“You don't know what you do,” the spirit said. “A forest will die. I am all that stands between the trees and the filth belching from out of your factories.”
Lizzie was thirteen now. She wouldn't make the mistakes she had made when she was eleven. She had learned to ignore her curiosity. She had learned not to listen. “Damnari inter manes,” she said.
The woman raised her arms and a whirlwind formed and spun toward Lizzie. But the darkness of the Spear closed around Serakel and she was gone.
The whirlwind died at Lizzie's feet, a swirl of leaves and dust.
Energy is equal to the mass times the speed of light squared.
—Derived from Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity
Chapter 2 — The Foster Home
“Obey our rules—no yelling, no loud music, only one visitor at a time, and lights out at ten—and you won't have any problems from Mr. Snead or me,” the large woman said in a belabored voice as she walked up the stairs. She turned to the tall skinny boy walking behind her carrying a beat-up suitcase and she added in a stern voice, “Do you understand, Manuel?”
Manuel nodded. “Yes, Mrs. Snead,” he replied.
She smiled and softened her tone. “You can call me Mama Snead.”
Manuel nodded, but he wasn't about to call her Mama. He already had a mother.
“You're going to be sharing a room with Jason,” she said. Then she stopped and added in a low voice, “We're all full. It's the last bed. I wouldn't put you in there otherwise.”
Although Manuel was only in eighth grade, he knew about Jason—the kid with the worst reputation at Hale High. He'd heard about all the fights he'd been in; the way that he'd broke one guy's arm, another guy's jaw, and about a dozen more noses. Although Jason wasn't nearly the biggest kid in the Tulsa public schools, he was undoubtedly the meanest.
“If you can just make it through May, he turns eighteen then, and then he'll be out of the system,” Mrs. Snead continued in her quiet voice.
“I don't think I'll be here through May,” Manuel said. “This is just temporary.” His mom was going through a bad spell...that's what she had said. The MS had gotten so bad she couldn't get around without a motorized wheelchair. She couldn't work anymore; she couldn't take care of him.
“I don't need you take care of me mom,” he'd told her. “I can take care of both of us.”
But she had shaken her head. She would go to a nursing home where they could take care of her full-time.
Social Services had insisted that Manuel go to a foster home. Gordon had offered to let him live with him in his trailer, but when Manuel told the caseworker about Gordon's offer, she'd asked, “Gordon who?” and Manuel realized that he didn't know Gordon's last name. Actually, he'd always thought Gordon was his last name, not his first name. Stumped, and not holding out much hope that Social Services would approve of a biker who lived in a trailer park without any apparent means of income, he’d given up.
Mrs. Snead lumbered ahead of him down the hallway and knocked at a door at the end of the hall. “Jason?” she yelled through the door.
No answer.
“Jason?” she said, cracking the door open.
“What do you want?”
Mrs. Snead opened the door and walked in. “This is Manuel. Be nice to him. Okay?”
Jason looked up from his magazine and stared at her as he might look at decaying road kill. His scalp was shaved, leaving it pink and shiny.
“Give him any trouble, and you'll be out of here. Understand, Jason?”
Jason looked back down at his magazine.
Manuel put his bag on the bed. He could hear the floor groaning as Mrs. Snead walked away back down the hall.
“Can't believe they put a fricking spic in here with me.”
Manuel turned around. Jason was rolling the magazine up in his hand like he was getting ready to use it to swat a fly. “Go downstairs and tell Mama Fat-Ass you want a different room.”
Manuel sighed and turned back to open his suitcase. As if today hadn't been bad enough, now he had to deal with this.
“Don't turn your back on me, pretty boy,” Jason said.
Manuel ignored him. It didn't matter if Jason called him names. Jason was nothing. Who cared what Jason thought? What was 'spic' anyway? A word, that's all. It bothered him more to be called 'pretty boy' because he knew it was true. He looked like, well...an angel. A white-winged, halo-headed, solicitous-smiling, angel.
“I'll teach you to be dissing me.” Jason got to his feet and the floor creaked. “I'm going to mess you up.”
Manuel could hear Jason coming across the room toward him—he could hear his footsteps, he could hear his breathing. Would he seriously be planning to attack him in the room? Didn't he care about getting kicked out?
Jason didn't care. He swung a roundhouse punch toward one of Manuel's kidneys.
But Manuel felt Jason behind him, heard the sound of his fist as it went through the air. In a blur of motion, he twisted away around the punch and with a slight push knocked the unbalanced Jason onto the bed. This all happened in the flash of an instant.
Manuel reached down to the now astonished Jason and shoved a sock into his open mouth. He didn't want to fight him—that would only serve to get him kicked out of the home, which would only distress his mother more. His only choice involved magic.
The door stood open. Gordon, the magician, had taught him about matter. Matter is energy solidified. Energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Matter is an illusion created with large amounts of energy. Everything is energy. Matter is an illusion.
With a flick of Manuel's hand the door swung shut. The light switch flipped off. With the lights off he might manage to avoid a fight.
Gordon had taught him the art of changing one's appearance—simply create a suggestion and let the audience fill in the details; the darker it was, the more details would be left to the audience. Using a deep voice that he caused to echo in a most sinister way, he said, “You don't know with whom you are dealing.”
From his forehead he pushed out two little bumps. That's all they were, really, but they suggested horns. A
nd he was able to get the light from a street lamp to shine from his eyes; it wasn't much, but it suggested his eyes glowing.
It was enough. Jason screamed, though muted from the sock in his mouth. He jumped from the bed, scrambled along the floor to the door, fumbled with the doorknob frantically before getting it open, and then ran down the hall.
Manuel walked to the light switch and turned the light back on. You would have thought Jason had just seen the Devil himself. Could be that's what he thought he saw. All the better. One thing for certain—Jason wouldn't be giving him any more trouble.
END OF SNEAK PREVIEW OF ABOMINATION
Other books by this author to be found at major online book sellers:
Mimic: A Spear Bearer Short
Superhuman: A Spear Bearer Short (Summer 2014)
Abomination: Spear Bearer Book 2
Bowels of Hell: Spear Bearer Book 3 (Summer 2014)
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