I Am Number Four

I take one wobbly step and pull the dagger from the waistband of my jeans. I close my fingers tightly around it and it comes alive and starts glowing. I’ll never be able to hit the beast by throwing the dagger, and my Legacies have all but vanished. An easy decision. No choice but to charge.

One deep, shaky breath. I rock my body backwards, everything tensing through the ache of exhaustion, not an inch anywhere on me that doesn’t feel some sort of pain.

“No!” Mark yells behind me.

I lunge forward and sprint for the beast. The beast’s eyes are closed, jaws clamped tightly around Bernie Kosar’s throat so that the moonlight glows in the pools of blood around it. Thirty feet away. Then twenty. The beast’s eyes snap open at the exact moment I jump. Yellow eyes that twist in rage the second they focus upon me, sailing through the air towards them, dagger in both hands held high over my head as though in some heroic dream I never want to wake from. The beast lets go of Bernie Kosar’s throat and moves to bite, but surely it knows that it has sensed me too late. The blade of the dagger glows in anticipation, and I jam it deeply into the eye of the beast. A liquid ooze immediately bursts out.

The beast lets out a blood-curdling scream so loud that it’s hard to imagine the dead being able to sleep through it.

I fall flat on my back. I lift my head and watch the beast totter over me. It tries in vain to pull the dagger from its eye, but its hands are too big and the dagger is too small. The Mogadorian weapons function in some way that I don’t think I’ll ever understand, because of the mystical gateways between the realms.

The dagger is no different, the black of the night rushing into the eye of the beast in a vortexlike fu

The beast falls silent as the last of the great black cloud enters its skull, and the dagger is sucked in with it. The beast’s arms fall limply to its sides. Its hands begin to shake. A violent shake that reverberates throughout the entirety of its massive body. When the convulsions end the beast hunches over and then falls to the ground with its back against the trees. Sitting, but yet still towering some twenty-five feet over me. Everything silent, hanging in anticipation of what is to come. A gun fires once, very close so that my ears ring for seconds afterward. The beast takes a great breath and holds it in as though in meditation, and suddenly its head explodes, raining down pieces of brain and flesh and skull over everything, all of which quickly turn to ash and dust.

The woods fall silent. I turn my head and look at Bernie Kosar, who still lies motionless on his side, his eyes closed. I can’t tell if he’s alive or not. As I look at him, he begins to change again, shrinking down to his normal size, while remaining lifeless. I hear the sound of crunching leaves and snapping twigs nearby.

It takes all the strength I have just to lift my head an inch off the ground. I open my eyes and peer up into the haze of night, expecting to see Mark James. But it’s not him standing over me. My breath catches in my throat. A looming figure, indistinct with the moon’s light hovering just over it. Then he takes one step forward, blotting out the moon, and my eyes widen in anticipation and dread.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

THE HAZY IMAGE SHARPENS. THROUGH THEexhaustion and pain and fear, a smile comes to my face, coupled with a sense of relief. Henri. He throws the shotgun into the bushes and drops to one knee beside me. He face is bloodied, his shirt and jeans in tatters, cuts down the length of both arms and on his neck, and beyond that I see that his eyes are fear-stricken from what he sees in mine.

“Is it over?” I ask.

“Shhh,” he says. “Tell me, have you been stabbed by one of their daggers?”

“My back,” I say.

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. He reaches into his pocket and removes one of the small round stones I watched him grab from the Loric Chest before we left the home-ec room. His hands are shaking.

“Open your mouth,” he says. He inserts one of the stones. “Keep it under your tongue. Don’t swallow it.” He hefts me up with his hands beneath my armpits. I get to my feet and he keeps an arm on me while I regain balance. He turns me around to look at the gash on my back. My face feels warm. A sort of rejuvenation blooms through me from the stone. My limbs still ache with exhaustion, but enough strength has returned so that I’m able to function.

“What is this?”

“Loric salt. It’ll slow and numb the dagger’s effects,” he says. “You’ll feel a burst of energy, but it won’t last long and we have to get back to the school as quickly as we can.”

The pebble is cold in my mouth, tastes nothing like salt—tastes like nothing at all, actually. I look down and take inventory, and then brush off with my hands the ashen residue left from the fallen beast.

“Is everyone okay?” I ask.

“Six has been badly hurt,” he says. “Sam is carrying her back to the truck as we speak; then he is going to drive to the school to pick us up. That’s why we have to get back there.”

“Have you seen Sarah?”

“No.”

“Mark James was just here,” I say, and look at him. “I thought you were him.”

“I didn’t see him.”

I look past Henri at the dog. “Bernie Kosar,” I say. He is still shrinking, the scales fading away—tan, black, and brown hair taking their place—returning to the form in which I have known him most recently: floppy ears, short legs, long body. A beagle with a cold wet nose always ready to run. “He just saved my life. You knew, didn’t you?”

“Of course I knew.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because he watched over you when I couldn’t.”

“But how is he here?”

“He was on the ship with us.”

And then I remember what I thought was a stuffed animal that used to play with me. It was really Bernie Kosar I was playing with, though back then his name was Hadley.

We walk to the dog together. I crouch down and run my hand along Bernie Kosar’s side.

“We have to hurry,” Henri says again.

Bernie Kosar isn’t moving. The woods are alive, swarming with shadows that can only mean one thing, but I don’t care. I move my head to the dog’s rib cage. Ever so faintly I hear theth-tump of his beating heart. Some glimmer of life is still left. He is covered in deep cuts and gashes, and blood seems to seep from everywhere. His front leg is twisted at an u

“What about the shotgun?” I ask.

“I’m out of ammo.”

We walk out of the clearing, taking our time. Bernie Kosar doesn’t move in my arms but I can feel that life hasn’t left him. Not yet. We exit the woods, leaving behind us the overhanging branches and bushes and the smell of wet and rotting leaves.

“Do you think you can run?” Henri asks.

“No,” I say. “But I’ll run anyway.”

Up ahead of us we hear a great commotion, several grunts followed by clanking of chains.

And then we hear a roar, not quite as sinister as the others, but loud enough so that we know it can only mean one thing: another beast.

“You’re kidding me,” Henri says.

Twigs snap behind us, coming from the woods. Henri and I both twist around, but the woods are too dense to see. I snap the light on in my left hand and sweep it through the trees to see. There must be seven or eight soldiers standing at the entrance of the woods, and when my light hits them they all draw their swords, which come alive, glowing their various colors the second they do.