“Wow. Can he be killed at all?”
“Why are you telling this boy our secrets?” demanded Oakenayl. “He’s the enemy. He’s of the sun.”
Evangelyne stiffened with anger and turned on the oak boy. “Because, Oakenayl, son of Ghillie Dhu, this boy stood with us in battle. He risked his life for us.”
The wood spirit made a disgusted noise and turned half away.
“And,” said Halflight, buzzing over to land on his shoulder, “because the Witch of the World has clearly put her mark on him. I can see it in his aura. She speaks to him in his dreams. And in one of those dreams, Evangelyne revealed her true name. How are those things the signs of an enemy?”
Oakenayl glanced at her, and Milo could see the doubt in his eyes.
In the ensuing silence, Milo asked, “The Heart of Darkness . . . what does it look like? I mean . . . is it a small black jewel?”
They stared at him, mouths opened.
“Cut like a diamond with a bunch of facets?”
They gaped.
He held his fingers two inches apart. “About this big?”
Oakenayl moved like lightning and grabbed him by the front of the shirt. Mook rose and cocked a rocky fist. Even Halflight seemed to glow brighter, as if ready to blast him.
Evangelyne was the only one who spoke. Her voice was low and threatening and far more wolflike than ever.
“How do you know what the Heart looks like?”
Despite the scowls and obvious threats around him, Milo managed to paste on a smile.
“Because I’ve seen it,” he said. “I know where it is.”
I saw it when I was inside the Huntsman’s head,” explained Milo once Oakenayl released his grip. “I saw some of his memories, remember? I saw him take the Heart from the pyramid.”
At first none of them could speak; then they all tried to speak at the same time. Oakenayl yelled, Evangelyne demanded details, Halflight tried to mitigate, and Mook banged his fists together and yelled, “Mook.”
When he could finally get a word in sideways, Milo told them what happened. About being attacked by the Huntsman, about being dead—or near enough—for a few seconds. About floating above his own corpse. About falling into the mind of the Huntsman and seeing his memories and those of the hive.
He told them every detail he could remember, though he admitted that this was far from having lived it. “He has a little pouch on a strap across his chest. That’s where he keeps the thing he stole.”
Evangelyne turned sharply to Oakenayl. “See? I told you he had it. Back in the clearing, before the grenade, that’s what he meant. He touched a pouch like he had something of great value there. The Heart is in there. I’m sure of it.”
“It is,” confirmed Milo. “And you heard what he said, right? About what he plans to do with the Heart?”
“I did not,” said Halflight. “There was too much going on.”
“I didn’t hear him say anything,” Oakenayl agreed. “I think I was out of it by then.”
“I was pretty dazed,” said Evangelyne. “So much of it is a blur.”
“Well, I remember every word that freak said,” Milo told them. “And, believe me, we have to get that stone back from him.”
“‘We’?” asked Evangelyne. “Why do you care if my friends and I recover the Heart of Darkness?”
“Because this war just got bigger than us and them, or even my people and the Nightsiders. This war just got bigger than everything else ever.”
Oakenayl leaned forward, a frown of concern chipped into his features. “How?”
“Because,” said Milo, “the Swarm know about you. They know you’re supernatural. They know you can do magic.”
“So what? They’ve known that for years.”
Milo shook his head. “Not really. They fought you guys, but they didn’t know what they were fighting. Remember, I saw their memories, too. The Swarm’s. When they came to Earth, they fought everyone. We’re all from here.” He pointed to the ground beneath them. “From Earth. But then two things happened.”
“What?” asked Evangelyne.
“First, they created the Huntsman. They already knew about evil. As a concept, I mean. They’re not evil—they’re more like a virus. They destroy, but it’s not personal. They encountered evil on different worlds.”
“Evil exists everywhere,” said Halflight. “So what?”
“Their science can’t grow. It’s . . . I’m not sure how to explain it. . . . It’s kind of hit a wall. Their minds can’t grow anymore. They’re stuck. Maybe it’s because they’re insects, but they can’t become more powerful than they already are. And it takes them thousands of years to go from one world to another.”
“Space is big,” said Oakenayl. “So?”
“So, they went looking for evil and they found this guy who was totally whacked out. A serial killer. A psycho. They found a really, seriously evil guy and they made him one of them.”
“The Huntsman,” murmured Evangelyne.
“The Huntsman. They used their science to bond with him. With his mind. They made him part of the Swarm so they could understand what power comes from evil. Does that make sense?”
“Too much sense,” said Halflight, and she shivered at the thought.
“It gets worse. When they bonded with him, some of him went into the Swarm. They became like him more than they wanted. Understand, this guy is a total freakjob.”
“That doesn’t give them the secret of magic,” said Evangelyne.
“No, but it made them aware of it. The guy they made into the Huntsman . . . he believed in magic. He really did. He thought what he was doing—all those killings he did—would somehow transform him into something else. Into someone who could do magic.”
“That’s happened before,” said Evangelyne. “Even among us there are tales of madmen and madwomen who think that the pathway to power is through destruction.”
“It is one of the many forms of evil,” said the sprite.
“The problem is, the Swarm didn’t know about magic before. They were hoping for more power, to use evil to jump to the next level. But now they know that there’s something else out there. Something a whole lot more powerful than good or evil, something maybe more powerful than science.”
“Magic,” whispered Evangelyne. “Goddess of shadows . . .”
“Magic,” said Milo. “That’s what the Huntsman has been searching for. He went hunting and found the Heart of Darkness. Now the Swarm wants to figure out how it works. How its magic works.”
“It will take them a thousand years to understand even the first secrets of the Heart,” said Halflight.
“So what? They have a thousand years. They’ve been out there for millions of years. They’ve been stuck for a million years. Now they have the Heart of Darkness. They want to use it to do three things.”
Evangelyne looked frightened to ask her question. “What?”
“They want to figure out how to use magic,” said Milo.
They nodded with grave solemnity.
“I think,” continued Milo, “they want to use the Heart to open the doorways to the worlds of shadow.”
They stared at him in abject horror.
“And,” said Milo softly, “they want to conquer the whole universe. All of it. Everywhere. Every dimension. Every world, even your shadow worlds. All of time and space. That’s what the Bugs want to do.”
Four sets of eyes stared at him with equal measures of horror and fear.
Milo imagined the same emotions were there in his own eyes. He sure as heck felt that way.
At the same time, though, he felt different. Something was happening inside of him, and he wished he had time to stop and think about it. The process had started when he found the pyramid; he knew that much. That was the point at which the world, as he knew it, began to shift, to lose the sharpness around the edges. To become somehow less real. Or . . . to become real in a way he didn’t yet understand.
The process o
f change had accelerated during the fight with the Stinger.
Milo had fought an alien mutant monster. He’d done that.
He’d survived it, too.
Then the rock boy had killed the Stinger, and any chance the world had to go back to something he recognized was shot to pieces. From there it all had a dreamlike quality, and for someone like him, someone who lived as much in dreams as he did in the real world, that was jarring.
Throwing the grenades had blasted big holes in the world too.
Being inside the Huntsman’s head.
Seeing Evangelyne become a werewolf.
Then Milo himself defying the Huntsman. Making his stand, which is what the witch had said he needed to do. That was an action Milo still couldn’t understand. If anyone else had done that, even Shark, Milo would have said it was what a hero would do. A noble sacrifice and all that stuff.
Except this wasn’t Shark or Barnaby. They were dead or lost.
This wasn’t his mom.
For a moment, Milo’s heart felt ready to crack as he wondered where she was. There was no camp to go back to; nor was it safe to go to the ruins and wait for her. He didn’t know what to do about contacting her.
What would she have thought about what he’d done? Risking his life? Prepared to throw it away to try to save the lives of people he didn’t even know. To save the lives of monsters.
What would Mom make of that?
What did he make of it? Who was he? Certainly not a character from one of his books. Not a Bilbo or a Caspian or anyone he’d ever read about.
This was him. Milo Silk.
So . . . what did his actions make him?
He certainly didn’t consider himself to be in any way heroic. He’d simply done the only thing that he could have done in that moment, even though he could have died. If Mook hadn’t saved him, he would have died.
Throwing that grenade had saved Evangelyne, and maybe all of the orphans.
It still didn’t feel heroic, though.
He wondered if that was the thing about heroes. Did any hero ever feel like he or she was a hero in the moment? Was taking action that much more important than being the hero who is expected to act?
That was a puzzle he didn’t have time to sort out right then.
What mattered was the Huntsman.
They all sat there, staring at one another and into the middle distance. No one said a word.
Until Milo Silk had a very bad idea.
Look,” he said, laying his palms flat on the table, “I’m pretty sure I messed up the Huntsman’s ship, right?”
Oakenayl gave a grudging nod. “You damaged two of the landing legs.”
“Is there any way to find out if he fixed it yet? ’Cause if not, then maybe the Huntsman’s still here.”
“Oh, he is here,” said Halflight.
“How do you know?”
“The bats told me,” she said. “How else?”
Milo didn’t have anything in his brain that was an appropriate answer to that, so he left it there. Bats. Right.
“If he’s still here,” he continued, “then the Heart of Darkness is still here. Still on Earth. That gives us a chance.”
“How?” asked Oakenayl. “He has a hundred Stingers and countless Bug shocktroopers. We could never hope to take it by force. After all . . . we tried that and failed.”
He cut a sharp look at Evangelyne, who colored again.
“Hey,” said Milo, “you tried, right?”
“Tried and failed,” Oakenayl repeated. He shot the wolf girl a withering look. “I didn’t like your plan from the start.”
“Oakenayl . . . ,” murmured Evangelyne.
“Why don’t you lay off her?” asked Milo sternly. “At least she had a plan, didn’t she? And you guys did some serious damage, right? You took out a whole bunch of Stingers and shocktroopers. And none of you actually died, so stop whining.”
The oak boy looked absolutely furious, but Halflight turned away to hide a smile and Mook made a sound that might have been a chuckle.
Evangelyne, however, looked embarrassed and angry. “I don’t need you to defend me, boy.”
“I’m not, girl,” said Milo sharply. “I’m trying to tell you an idea I have that might get the Heart back and save—let me count—I don’t know . . . everybody.”
That shut everyone up.
For one full second.
Then they were all jabbering for him to tell them his plan.
When he could stick a word in edgewise, he did.
They gaped at him.
Evangelyne looked horrified.
Oakenayl said he was nuts, that it would never work.
Halflight looked deeply uncertain and very scared.
Only Mook showed no expression because his face was incapable of it. However, he pounded a stony fist on the table so hard the candles jumped and threw wild shadows around the cave.
“Mook!” he cried.
Milo sat back. He was sweating because he was scared out of his mind by the plan he’d just outlined. His heart was hammering and his breath was coming as fast as if he’d run a mile uphill. But Milo managed to force a smile onto his face.
“Mook,” he said.
There was no time to talk it through. Night was passing, and Halflight’s bat spies said that the red ship was nearly operational.
“We need to go now,” said Milo, and he realized that he was pitching his voice to sound like an adult, a grown-up soldier. It was no different from what Evangelyne always did.
It turned out that the cave in which they hid was near the bayou. Milo didn’t ask how there could be a rocky cave in an area that was so marshy. He figured the word “magic” was going to be part of any explanation, so he left it for later.
They emerged from between the tangled roots of an old cypress tree, and when Milo turned back to look for the door, there was none to be seen.
Cool.
The night was lit by starlight, and when they passed under the canopy of overlapping tree limbs, Halflight popped small fireworks in the air to light their way.
This is a dream, thought Milo.
No, child of the sun, this is the world.
It was the voice of the witch, and when Milo tried to get her to say more, there was nothing else. Even those words seemed to come from farther away than before, as if she was somehow fading back into his dream life.
Would have been pretty freaking useful for you to hang around longer, he thought. Just saying.
All he heard in his head—or thought he heard—was a faint whisper that might have been the echo of an echo of a laugh.
Their path took them half a mile from the camp where Milo had lived for the last several months. Even now, hours later, fires burned sluggishly, painting the curling towers of smoke in shades of Halloween orange and brick red. Milo slowed to a stop and stood for a moment, feeling the weight of all that he’d lost. The others, realizing he wasn’t following, stopped too. Halflight buzzed over and landed her hummingbird on Milo’s left shoulder. Evangelyne touched his right arm.
“I hung around your camp all day yesterday,” she said, “watching to see if you really had stolen the Heart. And I followed your hike into the woods. I saw you with your friends. I . . . I’m sorry that you lost them.”
Milo wiped tears from his eyes and said nothing.
“Was your mother there too?” asked the wolf girl.
Milo cleared his throat and explained about the patrol.
“Then there’s still a chance that she’s safe,” said Halflight.
“Yeah. I guess. But how am I going to find her?”
No one had an answer for that.
“We have to go,” said Evangelyne. He was happy she didn’t call him “boy” again. He was already feeling very young and lost.
They moved quickly through the woods for another half hour before Milo realized that it was just Evangelyne and Halflight traveling with him.
“Hey—where’s Mook and Oakenayl?”
/> “They transitioned from their constructs,” said the sprite.
“They whatted from their whats?”
“I told you before,” said Evangelyne. “Their bodies are only for convenience. They make new ones when they need them. The stones and wood they used back in the cave have been dropped, and they’ll make new bodies when they need them. As long as some part of their constructs remain in contact with the earth, they can make a new body.”
“That is right there between very cool and freak me out.”
He caught a hint of a smile.
They hurried on.
There was a whispery sound in the air, and suddenly they were surrounded by a flock of bats fluttering in hysterical directions. Evangelyne and Halflight paused as if listening.
“Oh no!” gasped the little sprite.
“What’s wrong?” Milo asked.
“The Huntsman’s ship is powering up,” she said. “He is about to take off. We can’t let him take the Heart to the Swarm. All will be lost!”
There was no further conversation needed. They ran. Evangelyne moved like the night wind—silent and without effort, never tripping over a shadowy root, never walking into a darkened branch.
Milo, less so.
Eventually, he stopped trying to run next to her and fell into line behind her. Even then he tripped and collided a few times, but far less often. Halflight buzzed ahead, her hummingbird tireless and clearly able to navigate at high speeds in the dark.
For a while the task of running was enough to fill Milo’s whole attention, but every once in a while he realized what he was running toward and who he was running with. At those times he was far more likely to run into a tree or fall flat on his face.
This is nuts, he thought. This is totally off the chain. Running with a werewolf to fight an alien and save the world. Yeah. Like I ever saw this coming. Jeez.
Then Evangelyne suddenly stopped, and before Milo could go smashing through the night, she grabbed his sleeve and pulled him down behind a bush.
“We’re here,” she whispered.
They slid onto their bellies and wormed their way forward under the shrubs. Beyond the branches, past the overlapping leaves, there was a faint glow. Milo gently parted the foliage and peered out.