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MAX

W e were too distracted, somehow believing we had room to laugh and to ridicule the Masque. Maybe we thought it would buy us time, throw him off his game. The hubris — the utter delusion of it all. How could we have thought that it was over, that the Quartz Spider himself would have forgotten about us?

Time stood still. The rain began to fall upward.

I raised a cautious hand toward Brendan Shum. “Whatever it is you’re planning, I kindly ask that you reconsider it. Please. For the sake of Dos Lunas. For the sake of the arcane underground.”

The hourglass continued to spin in its slow, erratic rhythm, its intricate edges catching the light, the quickening sand slipping from one vessel to the next. The Quartz Spider was taking a moment to ridicule us, too, taking his sweet time because he could afford it. He could control it, after all.

“Dos Lunas didn’t care when my baby brother died. The arcane underground didn’t even notice. And this has nothing to do with anybody else. If I complete the ritual successfully, no one will even notice. Things will stay the same as always.”

“You can’t say that and seriously believe it.” In my arms, Leon strained forward as he spoke, leaning in to make himself heard. But I could sense the fear in his voice, feel the hesitation in his muscles. “Your actions affect others, whether or not you realize it yourself. It was an accident, Brendan. Your brother, my mom? Both just accidents. You have to let it go before you hurt somebody else.”

I held completely still, forgetting to breathe. The Quartz Spider’s expression never shifted, never changed. He brought up his other hand, manipulating the hourglass without ever touching it.

“We’ve discussed this,” he said, his voice so clear now that the raindrops were no longer hitting the ground. “I bear no ill will toward anyone but myself. I’m only attempting to correct my own mistakes.”

Around us the twelve copies of Justice remained motionless. They showed us their teeth, mouths locked in pained grins. I wondered if he could hear all of this, whether he regretted wasting his time and resources on Leon and cornering him into a trap when he could have been directly pursuing the Quartz Spider all along.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew that Leon’s connection to the dragons held danger of a literally explosive nature. But I believed in his ability to keep them under control. Most of all, I believed in his kindness. Brendan Shum was just as dangerous. That was the main difference between them. Despite Leon’s destructive potential, he was kind. Brendan, on the other hand, was cold through and through.

“Again, I bear the two of you no ill will. I’m giving you a chance to leave this place. Let me finish my work. You have nothing to fear from me.”

He’d gotten it wrong once before. Wasn’t that what Leon said? A mistake with time magic grievous enough to kill his own brother. I didn’t know enough about chronomancy to understand what Brendan had planned. This highly charged hourglass, though, assembled from pieces individually imbued with powerful enchantments? The Quartz Spider was working magic on a grander scale.

And he’d mentioned a ritual, too.

“Max,” Leon whispered, his fingers digging into my arm. “It’s a circle. Justice and his mirror images. A circle with twelve points.”

A shiver ran up my spine. We were standing in the center of a ceremonial circle — one designed specifically to resemble a clock. Did Brendan know that Justice would split himself into twelve pieces? Were Leon and I supposed to be the clock’s hands? I didn’t want to find out.

“He needs to be in the middle,” Leon continued. “I can’t explain why, but you’ll just have to trust the bruho . We can’t let him reach the middle.”

“I trust you,” I told him, squeezing his shoulder tight, standing upright and nudging him to do the same. Justice was only the warmup. Brendan was the final bout.

Leon scanned the circle around us, all twelve copies of Justice. “Brendan is too focused on the ritual and maintaining the Masque in stasis to freeze us, too. We just have to keep him from the center, hurt him enough to make him stop.”

The Quartz Spider laughed softly. He reached one hand out, playing with the levitating rain, letting its droplets slip between his fingers. “I’m hearing plenty of whispering. Are you discussing your plans for the rest of the evening? I suggest a warm bath and a mug of hot cocoa. Far, far away from here.”

“We’re not leaving,” I shouted, my chest pushed forward, my head held high despite my own self-doubt. “And we’re not letting you finish your ritual.”

“Suit yourself.”

The Quartz Spider snapped his fingers. Leon cried out, clutched his head, and fell to his knees.

“What did you to do him?” I shouted, wanting to help Leon, wanting to hurt Brendan.

Remorseless, expressionless, Brendan answered. “Nothing that he didn’t do to himself.”

“Max,” Leon grunted, his fingers digging into his skull. “The seal. He broke the seal. Tiamat’s trying to get out.”

I held him in my arms, knowing there was nothing I could do to help, hating the truth of it. He bucked and writhed in my embrace, teeth clenched so hard his jaw might shatter.

“The others. Max, it hurts. All three of them. Make it stop.”

“I can’t,” I gasped, terrified, furious. “What can I do?”

Nothing. I already knew. I wanted to hurt Brendan for what he’d said and done. I hated that he was right, too. Leon had willingly accepted each of the dragons into his body, sealed the pact within his skin.

Leon stopped trembling. Maybe the hurting had stopped. His head was hunched between his shoulders, tucked close to his chest. He said something too soft for me to hear.

“Is everything okay?” I asked, rubbing circles down his back.

“Get away from me,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“But — ”

He shoved me away with a strength that far surpassed his lean frame. I stumbled back in shock, and then in awe, watching as blue fire exploded from his body, blazing like every inch of him was alight. Leon screamed, his face raised to the heavens. Tiamat’s fire wasn’t burning him, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t searing him on the inside.

“Tell me what I can do.” I hadn’t said it loud enough for anyone but myself to hear, the despair clotting my voice. Penetrate. Obfuscate. Dissipate. Illuminate. What could I possibly do to help Leon now?

“Emanate!”

I heard the word in my head, not from Leon’s lips. In this state, he no longer needed to speak to command the dragons. Was he even in control anymore?

The ground beneath me trembled, splintered, cracked. Jagged spires of rock thrust upward precisely at my location. My heart quavered — not fire, not water, but earth.

This was Bahamut’s doing. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. An enormous hand reached out of the broken asphalt, the ends of each lamppost-thick finger tipped with wicked talons. This was the grasping claw of a dragon, but almost certainly not to scale. Small mercies. The hand wrapped around me, sharp rock snagging at my clothing, ripping into my leather jacket.

The dragon’s hand squeezed. I screamed, locked in the crushing embrace of an ancient dragon. A mere fraction of Bahamut’s power, but concentrated on the fragility of the human body — I could imagine it, hear my bones breaking, my muscles tearing.

“Leon,” I shouted, the agony shooting through my body. I writhed, flailed, shredding the skin of my hands as I struggled in vain. “Please. You can’t let them take over.”

Magic swirled in Leon’s eyes, azure and green and yellow as the dragons battled for dominance.

I slammed my palms against the talons, wriggling in their grasp. My hands looked so small. Sweat and rainwater dripped down the back of my neck. The human body wasn’t designed to take this amount of pressure. Any longer and Bahamut would crush me into paste. And all the while, Brendan Shum took his sweet time approaching, lips moving as he muttered the words of his ritual, fingers weaving the right magic.

“Don’t kill him,” Leon wailed. “This isn’t what I wanted.”

He was still in there. I just had to get him out before I died in the attempt. And then the rock hand crumbled away, the fingers shattering into rubble. I fell to the ground winded, bones aching, skin scraped, my blood mingling with rainwater.

The rainwater. It wasn’t falling upward anymore. Now the raindrops swirled around Leon, slowly at first, gaining speed. Clever boy. In order to save me, he’d allowed a different dragon to take over. Bakunawa this time. But how long could Leon keep this up?

The rainwater spun and spun in a ring around Leon’s position, gathering into threads, gouts, until he’d built a rushing, opaque wave. With a shout he thrust his hand forward, directing the flow toward Brendan Shum. The wave slammed with the force of a cannonball, a log jam, a ballista fired at full speed.

The Quartz Spider’s scream cut short as he flew off his feet, thrown outside the circle. I chuckled, then spat out a mouthful of blood and water. How soon I’d forgotten that at least one of Leon’s dragons wasn’t as obsessed with destruction as the others. Bakunawa was the closest thing we had to a good guy.

“You can’t stop me,” Brendan snarled, swiping water away from his face, forcing his way back into the circle. “I’ve worked too long and too hard for this. Things must go back to the way they once were.”

“That’s not how this works,” Leon said, his words coming out through gritted teeth. He was winning, taking over the dragons, or at least gaining the upper hand. “I don’t know the first thing about chronomancy, but there are some things that magic can’t fix.”

“He’s right,” I shouted, picking myself up from the asphalt, wobbling as I rose to my feet. “Even necromancers know better. If death magic can’t bring him back, what good can time magic do?”

And its consequences were somehow even more dire.

Steam hissed wherever the wave of water struck the Quartz Spider. He continued walking unhindered, Bakunawa’s manipulated water changing into vapor, remembering what it once was, rendered harmless by time magic.

“I’m so close now,” Brendan said, resuming the weaving of the spell web between his fingers, the tumbling of the hourglass. “Why can’t you understand that? Let me wind the clock back. No harm done. Take us all back to the day before he died.”

My skin crawled. Brendan’s grief knew no bounds. How long had it been since his brother had died? How selfish was it of me to think of Leon above all things else? If the Quartz Spider brought the world back to a time before Leon and I met, where would that leave us? I wouldn’t remember having ever met him, everything we’d shared together. The pang of loss gripped hard around my heart, somehow hurting more than Bahamut’s stony grasp.

But the consequences of Brendan’s ritual could be farther reaching. Just how far would the spell go? And his mastery of chronomancy was clearly imperfect, the magic improvised from what he’d pieced together himself in place of proper training, the components cobbled together from disparate parts. All the time anomalies he’d manifested had been so destructive, potentially more so if Leon and I had never intervened. This enchanted hourglass, a clock formed by the twelve mirrors of the Masque’s image — the Quartz Spider could rupture time itself, unravel the fabric of reality.

And even then, even knowing all this, my heart ruled above all my other instincts. I rushed Leon headfirst, trusting the impact of my shoulder against his torso to confuse and disorient both him and the dragons, buy me enough time to bring him out of Brendan’s circle of madness. I threw him over my shoulder and ran with all my might. Tiamat could burn me. Bakunawa could drown me, and Bahamut could flay the skin from my flesh. Leon would always come first.

His fingers dug like talons into my back, nails biting through the leather of my jacket. I knew it was him fighting, straining every muscle in his body to contain the power of the dragons. Good effort. That was all we needed, just long enough for me to race past the circle of Masques. And when we did —

“You saved me,” Leon whispered in my ear.

“I haven’t yet,” I whispered back. “You have to save yourself.”

His voice softer, weaker, Leon replied. “I know.”

I set him on the asphalt, not quite far enough outside the circle, but we’d given Brendan enough leeway. We still had to stop the ritual.

“Penetrate,” I muttered, producing twin slivers of crystal, already exhausted and bloodied. I had to make this count.

I might not have understood the specifics of Brendan Shum’s ritual, but even a novice in magic would sense the undeniable surge of power radiating from his ceremonial circle. There he stood at its center, the hourglass between his fingers brighter than the moon, a rotating jewel. We had one chance to stop this. We had to make it count.

Taking careful aim, I recalled afternoons of lazy target practice in back alleys with Guillotina, her refining her skill with her buzzsaws, me with my crystals. I called on my many rounds of darts with Johnny Slivers, seemingly trivial at the time, never knowing our games would one day serve some greater purpose. My daggers shrieked through the air, each directed at one of Brendan’s hands. He never saw them coming. It didn’t matter that they wouldn’t maim him. All we needed was a distraction, a way to disrupt his ritual.

And a way to make an opening for Leon and his dragons. Brendan’s chanting and arcane gestures came to a soaring head, the hourglass glowing brighter than ever. His final anomaly was upon us, this deliberate act of time distortion, a ripple in reality. Leon extended both his hands.

“Emanate.”

Clever boy. The Quartz Spider was finally doing us a favor. If there was one thing Leon so badly wanted to erase, it was his pact with the dragons. They came surging forth from his fingers, an overlapping twist of three dragons, one formed of fire, another of water, the last of earth.

Tiamat, Bakunawa, and Bahamut screeched and roared as they penetrated the ritual circle, flooding it with their draconic might. Leon stumbled as their tails emerged from his skin, one by one, each dragon finally ejected from his body, exorcised through pure force of will.

Hungering, the dragons swirled within the circle, eager to wreak havoc. Brendan kept his chant up even as his gaze followed the three dragons with wide-eyed terror. They scented the blood on his hands, sensed the power pouring from the hourglass.

The bright white of time magic merged with the Quartz Spider’s spirit, a growing orb of blinding power. The dragons descended, all three at once. Brendan Shum screamed. Glass shattered. Torrents of fire, water, and sand spiraled into the sky. A clap of thunder, a roar of dragons, and at last, silence. Even the rain had stopped.

“It’s over,” I breathed, holding Leon in my arms, letting him lean against my touch. “It’s over now.”

“They’re gone, Max,” he said, smiling. Leon coughed, then let out a peal of delirious laughter. “No more fucking dragons. I’m free. I’m finally free.”

I pressed a kiss on the crown of his head, tasting rainwater and sweat. I laughed into his curls, the damp tangles of his hair, the knot in my chest untangling at last. If no one in Dos Lunas noticed the extravagant display of light and sound, it would be a miracle. But this wasn’t our problem anymore.

The Masques would be here soon enough, and for once I was glad for the concept of paranormal police. Someone needed to clean up this mess. Someone needed to pick up the unconscious, snoring lump that was Justice, the Masque who loved his mirrors so much.

And someone needed to do something about the teenage boy who’d replaced Brendan Shum in the center of the circle.