“Good to have you back,” Mackenzie said. She didn’t hug him, but she did look genuinely glad to see him, and that was enough.
Sam was the one he had been the most worried about, given how they had left things. He had known Sketch would forgive him, but he wasn’t so sure about the sarcastic Jersey girl with the blue-streaked hair and the anime eyes. He turned to her now, and his worst fears seemed to be playing out. She stood in the doorway with her hands planted firmly on her hips and a scowl on her face.
“Where’s my T-shirt?” she demanded.
“I… what?” he stammered.
“When you leave on vacation, you’re supposed to bring back a T-shirt for everyone who didn’t get to go. It’s like a consolation prize. You know, ‘Sorry you guys had to stay here and summon nasty little imps to try to save the world while I was home sitting on my ass and eating tacos for a week and a half, but here’s a T-shirt to make it up to you.’”
“Oh,” Rush said, trying not to smile. “That T-shirt.”
“Yeah, that T-shirt,” Sam repeated. “If these scrubs don’t want to demand their T-shirt, that’s on them. Me? I want my T-shirt.”
“Um…” Rush said, stalling, but Sam just held out her hand, one eyebrow raised, both eyes twinkling, clearly waiting for him to do something about it.
“Right!” Rush declared. “I almost forgot. Your T-shirt. Of course. I packed it in this bag here. Hang on.”
Sam continued to stand with her arm outstretched, her hand grasping at the empty air, until he selected a T-shirt from his duffel bag and handed it over.
“Thank you,” she said, slinging it jauntily over one shoulder and closing the gap between them. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “I forgive you for leaving.” She sat down on one end of the couch, holding out her prize to examine it.
“Well?” she prompted, looking around at everyone’s grinning faces. “Are we going to bring this guy up to speed, or what? We have a world to save, people.”
“I want a T-shirt,” Sketch said hopefully, looking up at Rush.
“Oh you do, do you?” Rush replied, and without any warning he flopped down on the other end of the couch, dragging Sketch with him into the middle seat and rubbing his knuckles quickly but gently back and forth across the boy’s head.
Laughing, Mackenzie, Daniel, and Kaitlyn dragged the coffee table back where they could sit on it, and Mackenzie launched into the story, starting with everything Ammu had told them the morning Rush had left.
52
A Very Bad Idea
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ammu began, “our job today is to summon something much more closely aligned with evil—not in the interest of taming it, this much needs to be very clear from the beginning, but of destroying it.”
He stood in the observation room, surrounded once again by all six students of the ICIC. Rush’s return had infused the group with a new sense of energy and purpose, but seeing a living gargoyle on the tail of a civilian airplane had also impressed upon them just how serious their mission was. They watched Ammu attentively, understanding, as they had suspected, that they were about to proceed into much more dangerous territory.
“We will, of course, perform the summoning here, in the observation room, opening the portal on the other side of the glass. As an additional precaution, the weapon to be employed will be an automated turret. Staff Sergeant Miller will control the turret remotely, from here in this room with us, so that no one need be exposed to the creature.”
They could see for themselves that the contents of the white room had changed again. The table was gone, and now a gun stood on a tripod just to the left of the window, aimed at the middle of the room. Staff Sergeant Miller took Ammu’s words as a cue to demonstrate, and he used a remote to turn the turret to the left and then back to the right again, showing them how it moved.
“Nice,” Rush commented, but Miller only nodded in return.
“We are hoping, Rush,” Ammu continued, “that you will be able to control the creature well enough to place it directly in the turret’s line of fire.”
“I’ll sure try,” Rush promised. He knew the others had told Ammu about the workshop, and he knew they had had trouble working with the gryphon ever since. He understood their theory that he had been controlling it. He only hoped they were right.
“So then,” Ammu said, bending down to retrieve his book from his satchel and paging through it until he found what he was looking for, “this morning, I would like for you to summon this.”
Kaitlyn looked at the image and then glanced back at Ammu, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“It is not, by far, the most deadly thing in this book,” Ammu said, his words offering little reassurance, “but it is more closely aligned with the forces of destruction than anything you have yet summoned, as I suggested it would be.”
“It looks like a gargoyle, but it doesn’t look like the gargoyle that was on the plane,” Sam commented after taking a closer look for herself. “What’s up with that?”
The creature in Ammu’s image looked like it might be about knee-high on a full-grown man when sitting on its hind legs like a dog, as it did in the picture. If it extended itself to its full height, it might be able to reach a man’s chest.
It was dark gray and hairless, its body looking a bit like a pit bull’s, but with a face that belonged on a gothic building in a graphic novel. Its eyes were black as coals, it had no ears at all, it had two twisted horns protruding from its forehead, and its snout looked like a demented cross between a dog’s and a crocodile’s, full of four rows of razor-sharp teeth, two rows on the top and two on the bottom. As if that weren’t enough, bat-like wings extended out from its shoulders.
The gargoyle on the plane, on the other hand, had shared little in common with this image beyond its wings. That creature had been much lighter in color and twice as tall as a man, looking far more humanoid in both its posture and the shape of its skull, its vertebrae protruding cruelly from its spine, giving its back a ridged appearance, with a long, spiked tail extending behind it.
Its feet had been preposterously long, so that it stood upright by balancing forward on its toes, its heels sticking high up in the air and acting like a kind of second knee that bent the wrong way, giving its legs a ghastly, almost alien appearance. If Sam had had to place the two creatures on the same family tree, they wouldn’t even have been second cousins.