The Shaktra Read online

  “You’re asking us to swallow a hell of a lot right now,” Steve said.

  “No pun intended,” Cindy added.

  “You’ve both seen the dark fairies in action. You’ve both heard Paddy describe how no one likes them. Let me ask you something: If what Paddy says is true, then why did Lord Vak use the Yanti to bring them into our world?”

  Steve frowned. “I don’t know.”

  Cindy was puzzled. “I had wondered about that. I didn’t know why Vak would have anything to do with them. It seemed . . . out of character for him.”

  Ali nodded. “The answer is that he did not bring the dark fairies here. They came here on their own, through the red door. They did not use the Yanti to come here. That’s another reason why I know the doors lead to other realms. That is why I’m sure I can use one of them—the fourth one, the green door—to enter the elemental kingdom.”

  “How do you know the fourth door is the right one?” Cindy asked.

  “I just know,” Ali said.

  “Do you remember this?” Steve asked. The question was not a casual one. Both of Ali’s friends were intensely curious about what she recalled of her life as a fairy. The truth was, she recalled a ton of nothing—a million pieces of a puzzle that was light-years away from being fitted together. Many of her memories were hard to separate from her normal dreams, although she wondered if she spent most of the night dreaming about her past life as a queen. The biggest problem was that she had no one to turn to who could check the accuracy of her memories.

  If only I could talk to Nemi!

  “I think so,” she said quietly.

  “You’re not sure?” Steve said.

  Ali shook her head. “I cannot wait around to be sure of anything.”

  Steve went on. “Like you said, the red door and the yellow door were open. The rest were locked tight. How do you plan on opening the green door?”

  “I have ideas,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk about them, not now, and I’m sorry I have to give that type of answer. I trust you guys with my life, but I have a feeling that it would be a mistake to talk about certain things.”

  “Why can’t we go with you?” Steve asked. “Don’t tell me it’s too dangerous.”

  “You would slow me down. When I go, and it will be soon, I have to go at night. Farble cannot travel in the daytime, not without a lot of hassle. I want to hike all the way from where we started—the last time—to the cave in one night.”

  “That’s physically impossible,” Steve said.

  “Not for Farble, he’s strong. Not for Paddy, he doesn’t tire easily. And to be frank, since I regained some of my old powers I can run up that mountain if I have to.”

  “We can still go. It will just take longer is all,” Steve said.

  “I don’t want to have to worry about you. It’ll divide my attention.

  Steve looked offended. “We helped you pretty good the last time.”

  “The last time we were not planning on entering another dimension,” Ali said.

  “I think she’s right,” Cindy said to Steve. “I don’t say that because I’m a coward—even though we all know I am. We can help Ali more by figuring out what’s going on in Toule.”

  “I agree,” Ali said. “I’ll go with you this afternoon, at least for a few hours.”

  Steve took a moment to grasp what she was saying. “Are you thinking of going up the mountain tonight?”

  “It’s possible,” Ali said. “It depends what we find in Toule. Let’s talk about that. I’ve never heard of Omega Overtures. You guys act like it’s famous.”

  “If you play video games it is,” Steve said. “Their products have great visuals and complex plots. The stories always deal with the end of the world. Their biggest seller is Omega Overlord. Cindy’s played it with me. It starts after a major nuclear war, a century from now. It’s all about the remnants of humanity struggling for survival.”

  “The game is totally addicting,” Cindy said.

  “Sounds lovely,” Ali said. “I remember something else about Toule. Wasn’t it the site of a major catastrophe twenty years ago?”

  “Thirteen years ago,” Steve said. “An electric power plant blew up, killed over a hundred people, pretty much burned the city to the ground.”

  “What caused the explosion?” Ali asked.

  “When I saw Karl was writing to someone in Toule, I looked up the town online and read about it. To this day, the reason for the explosion remains a mystery.”

  “How large a company is Omega Overtures?” Ali asked.

  “They have three hundred employees,” Steve said. “But don’t let that fool you. Like other successful software companies, they make a lot of money on a few products. The markup on those games is high, and Omega has the four best sellers in the country this year. They’re raking in billions.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Cindy said.

  “Nope,” Steve said.

  “But any company that size . . .” Ali began.

  Steve was insistent. “I’ve studied their profit-and-loss statements. That company is medium-sized and it’s worth five billion dollars. It’s almost as if . . .” He didn’t finish.

  “They have magic?” Ali suggested.

  Steve nodded. “They know how to package and sell the end of the world.” He stopped and stared at her for a moment, then reached over and touched her head. When he withdrew his hand, there was blood on it. “What’s this?” he demanded.

  Ali forced a smile. “I fell and hit my head. It’s nothing.”

  Yeah, she had hit it in the barbershop when the wizard had blasted her.

  It was odd, she thought, how the old man’s eyes had not been entirely human.

  “I know you have it.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  The headache hit as she was walking home from the market with the meat she had bought for Farble. Since Steve had interrupted her original shopping expedition, she’d had to go back to the store. The pressure started between her eyes, spread across her forehead, moved around the side, and then to the spot where her neck and skull joined. The headaches came often these days, and they were painful, lasting two or three hours. This one had nothing to do with her struggle with the wizard in the barbershop.

  The headaches had started a week after she had returned from the top of the mountain. Although she was not positive what caused them, she suspected they were a result of her fairy power running through her human body. Her nervous system was used to ten volts—now it was living with a thousand.

  At first she had thought wearing the Yanti was causing the headaches, but taking it off did not help. She had the Yanti on now, under her red sweatshirt. Steve and Cindy liked to look at it, but she was always reluctant to let them hold it. Actually, she never let them touch it without her hand on it. She was not sure what she was afraid of. They wouldn’t steal it, of course. Perhaps she feared that it might overload them somehow.

  No, the Yanti could not be blamed for her pain. She simply had too much fairy juice in her head, and there was no off switch. She was a walking atomic reactor. The power felt like a magnetic field, an invisible dome that surrounded her on all sides. But she never felt possessed by the power, or anything silly like that. At the same time, she did not feel she had complete control over it. She was not entirely sure what she could and could not do.

  Yet she had a measure of control over the elements. There appeared to be six of them—not the usual four or five the ancients spoke of. Earth, water, fire, air, space, and time. She knew exactly what she could do with the earth. She was the wrong girl to get in a rock fight with. A boulder weighing two hundred pounds was like a pebble to her—she could throw it a hundred yards. Water was also easy. There wasn’t a river current or an ocean wave that could move her an inch. In the last month she had learned the art of boiling a whole bathtub in a matter of seconds. She could also make it freeze. She just had to will it to happen, focus, and it happened.

  Fire could
not burn her. And she could take even a small flame, say from a match, in her magnetic grasp and expand it a hundred fold. The ability frightened her. She was not sure what limits there were to it.

  When it came to air, she could cause a mighty wind to arise within seconds. And because words were carried on the air, she could tell when someone was lying or telling the truth, no matter how crafty they were.

  Yet she could not cause the wind to lift her body into the air.

  Here she was supposed to be queen of the fairies and she could not fly.

  Space? How could anyone control that? It was not a thing, nor was time for that matter, and she certainly had no grasp over the latter. But she believed there was more to space than met the eye. It was invisible, it could not be touched or tasted or smelled. But occasionally she heard music, faintly, deep inside—flutes and bells, stringed instruments, and exquisite soulful horns—and she wondered if she was hearing the music of inner space. Whatever, it was a blessing. When the music came, even if she had a raging headache, or was anxious about her mother, everything was suddenly all right. At such times she would lie in bed with her eyes closed, drift on the currents of the supernatural melodies, and forget all her problems. She could listen to them forever. . . .

  Too bad she couldn’t hear the music while carrying ten pounds of beef.

  Somehow Ali made it home. Farble was still in the basement, looking sad, but he cheered up when he saw the steaks she had bought. He patted her back and gave her a hug, and she left him to enjoy his meal. But there was no sign of Paddy, and that worried her.

  There was something else that helped when it came to her headaches: stardust, or at least her version of the stuff. When they had hiked up the mountain, Paddy had brought up the topic and it had gotten her thinking. Along with Cindy, she had drilled Paddy about it.

  “What can you do with fairy stardust?”

  “Many things, Missy. Fly for one.”

  “Have you ever flown using the stuff?”

  “Leprechauns can’t fly. Only fairies fly, and only if they have enough stardust.”

  “How does it run out? On fairies, I mean.”

  “Don’t know, it just does. Disappears quick when they are up in the air.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “Fairies.”

  “No. Where do they get it?”

  “Don’t know, never asked them.”

  “Is it made from gold?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Paddy had not wanted to say, for whatever reason, but she had known it was related to gold, and when she had returned home, she had begun to experiment with pieces of her mother’s jewelry. Her knowledge of chemistry was dismal. On the other hand, what she was attempting to do was more of an alchemic process than a scientific one. At first she did not know where to begin, but sitting with the gold over time, the inspiration came.

  She realized she had to dissolve it first, before anything else, and was pleasantly surprised to discover a dozen different techniques of doing so on the Internet. The method she chose required hydrochloric acid and nitric acid, along with baking soda and ammonia. Fortunately, she was able to order the supplies right off the Internet. It was amazing the stuff that could be purchased on the Web, and a little frightening. Except for having to do the operation outside because of the obnoxious fumes the chemicals gave off, the entire process was no harder than baking a cake.

  Two days after starting her experiments, she had a beaker full of dissolved gold.

  She felt inspired to expose it to sunlight, and she left it outside for close to a week, but nothing happened, other than some of the solution evaporated. The missing step hit her out of the blue. The gold solution could not just sit in the sun, the light had to first be channeled through her hands. She recalled vague images of herself sitting outside in the elemental realm—under a green sun—making the stardust. She also remembered that when she swallowed the stuff—as a fairy—she got stronger.

  That’s why she wanted to make it in the first place. . . .

  The first time she tried to gather the sunlight to flow through her hands, she felt foolish. Sunlight was akin to fire, but it was not an element per se. She almost felt as if she needed to ask someone’s permission before she tried it. But in the end she just did it, and was delighted when the sunlight responded to her magnetic field. Using her hands as a giant lens and concentrating hard on the sun, she actually saw the light waves bend and focus on her gold solution. Within seconds the glass began to bubble furiously. When all the liquid had vanished, she was left with a fluffy white powder that looked strangely familiar.

  Yet she did not swallow it. Instinctively, she knew there was another step to perform. The stardust had to be exposed to concentrated starlight, the same way she had exposed it to concentrated sunlight. Duh! That was where the name came from! That very night, under the clear band of the Milky Way, she zapped it with her hands and watched as the white powder turned a light shade of blue. When she put a few grams in her mouth, and let it dissolve, she felt her power increase manifold. It was only after she ingested the stardust that she was able to gain such breathtaking control of the elements.

  The stardust helped with her headaches but it did not get rid of them. Because she had a limited supply of gold, she had only a few ounces of the magical dust, and she hated to squander it simply to dull her pain. She feared she might need lots of it if and when she squared off against her enemies in the elemental kingdom.

  She did not feel guilty destroying her mother’s jewelry.

  Her mom would have been the first person to tell her to go ahead.

  Yet this headache was particularly severe when she got home, and she ended up swallowing a few grams of the stardust, along with two Tylenol. After a brief nap, she felt somewhat better.

  She was sitting on the edge of her bed when Cindy called to say that the bus for Toule was at one o’clock, and that she had better hurry over to the station. Ali told her she would be there.

  In the middle of getting dressed, Ali called and tried to talk to Ted Wilson about the old man at the barbershop, but his wife said he was out of town. Seemed he was looking for a new job.

  It was only as she was leaving the house that she realized she should speak to the head of Omega Overtures alone, without Steve and Cindy present. The e-mails Steve had found bothered her. Clearly the woman behind the company had secrets she was keeping.

  But could she be the Shaktra? It seemed highly unlikely. That creature had to be in the elemental kingdom, where it was causing endless grief.

  On the other hand, was she so sure of her facts?

  Lord Vak might have asked her that question . . .

  “Geea, what is wrong with you? The Shaktra came from the human kingdom!”

  Ali ran back in the house and grabbed her entire supply of stardust—just in case.

  CHAPTER

  5

  To Steve, Ali was not so much a queen as a princess—although, unfortunately, he never felt he deserved to play the part of the prince. Not that he saw himself in the role of the frog, either, it was just that his feelings for her were not something that he could talk about. Especially to her.

  It didn’t matter. He knew she knew how he felt, and that was enough. He loved her and she loved him. Their love simply sprang from different regions of the heart.

  Sitting in the middle section of the bus, beside Cindy, on the road to Toule, Steve watched as Ali appeared to nap on the backseat, her long strands of red hair touching the floor. Her eyes were closed but he did not think she was truly asleep. He did wonder if she was in pain, though. He had never seen her lie down in the middle of the day before.

  Cindy said she had caught Ali taking a number of naps in the last month. And here Ali said she could dash all the way up the mountain without stopping. To Steve, since they had returned from their big adventure on Pete’s Peak, Ali appeared far more powerful and far more delicate. It was almost as if her fairy powers were burning her
up.

  “She’ll be all right,” Cindy said, noticing his gaze.

  “Do you think?” Steve replied quietly, not wanting Ali to overhear them.

  Cindy set aside her magazine, glanced at Ali. “She just gets headaches is all.”

  “She told you that?” Ali had never said anything about it to him.

  “No. But I’ve seen her buying Tylenol. I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

  “I hope you’re right. She doesn’t look in any shape to run up a mountain.”

  “I think she’s anxious to go while her father’s gone.”

  “How long is he gone for?”

  “A week.”

  Steve considered. “There might be another reason. Did you know it’s a full moon tonight?”

  “Do you think she needs a full moon to use the Yanti?”

  “Who knows? She never talks about it. The whole subject is a mystery to me. That’s why I was trying to get her to talk about it at the house. Did you notice how she changed the subject?”

  “Sure. But I don’t think she was trying to be rude.”

  “She went from the Yanti to those colored doors.”

  Cindy frowned. “That was weird. She said we went there twice. That we died the first time. Do you believe that?”

  “Of course not. Then again, maybe I should. Ali changed when we were in that cave. She changed big time.”

  “I remember. It was like she was glowing.”

  “She still glows,” Steve said.

  Cindy nodded. “I think she has the power all the time now. Not just when it’s an emergency.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “No.”

  Steve nodded. “That’s what gets me—there’s so much she doesn’t want to talk about. I don’t understand why. Doesn’t she trust us?”