“Your lightstick!” Marika answered his silent question. Jake’s penlight was shining on a crystal pitcher of flowers on the table. They had been blooming and green, but now they were blackened and covered in frost. The pitcher suddenly exploded and ice tinkled across the tabletop.
“It’s your lightstick,” Marika insisted. “The bat tree you put inside it! It came out of the Astromicon’s device.”
Jake remembered placing the battery in the bronze tray and sending it up into the machine—along with a shard of blue crystal, the same crystal that was known for its cooling ability. He’d thought the crystal had been consumed by the machine, but now he understood.
Red and green make yellow.
“The battery and the crystal fused into one!” The property of the crystal and the power of the battery had somehow joined together and created a freezing beam of light.
He started to lift his hand toward the beam to test it, but Marika grabbed his wrist. “No! Don’t!”
Jake lowered his arm. The darkness hid his blushing embarrassment. What a stupid thing to do! He could’ve frozen his fingers right off his hand. He kept the beam pointed ahead of him. Now they had a weapon—for at least as long as the battery’s power lasted. But who knew how long that would be?
“Stay behind me,” Jake told Marika and Pindor. “We have to get to that far door.”
He edged out into the room, sweeping his light right and left. As he neared the table, a scritch-scritch warned him. He danced back as another of the stingtails scuttled out from under a chair, tail high, dripping poison.
Jake fixed his light on it. Its scrabbling legs suddenly froze up, but its momentum kept its body sliding across the stone. The poison on the tip of its tail had become an icicle. Jake performed a Tae Kwon Do sweeping kick and sent it flying away.
Spinning, he searched all around with his flashlight.
If all five of Zahur’s scorpions had been set free, that left three more running around somewhere—or flying. The next attacks came from the rafters and the top of a cupboard. With a flurry of wings, the monsters dive-bombed from two different directions.
Jake couldn’t stop both.
He pointed his light at one and fought to keep his beam on it long enough to freeze it. The blur of wings stopped in mid beat, and it dropped like a heavy stone to the tabletop. Legs broke under it, but its body remained intact, a gruesome centerpiece.
Jake tried to swing the light around in time to freeze the other attacker, but as he turned, Pindor punched out with a fist and knocked the diving scorpion to the floor. It landed on its back, legs waving and claws clacking. As Pindor stumbled back, Jake lunged forward and used an ax kick to smash his heel through its belly.
“The door!” Jake said, and waved the others forward. There was still another stingtail out here.
Marika yanked it open. The room beyond looked like a small infirmary, with a cot, shelves of glass bottles, and a table with rolled bandages, scissors, and jars of thick pastes. The room smelled acrid from whatever medicines were used here.
Marika screamed.
Jake immediately saw why. It was the huntress, Livia, sprawled under a thin blanket on the bed. She looked as pale as a ghost. Her skin shone silvery, almost translucent in the feeble light from a tiny lamp at her bedside.
Atop her chest crouched the last of the scorpions. Its venomous tail arched high, ready to strike. Jake feared pointing the beam of his penlight at the creature. The scatter of the beam might freeze Livia, too.
“Get back,” Jake whispered, clicking off the flashlight. He slipped between his two friends and crouched low as he took three slow steps toward the bed. He had to get close.
With their arrival, the stingtail had gone as still as a statue, wary, sizing up the threat. The only thing that moved were its black eyes on tiny stalks. They swiveled all around.
Jake only needed one more step—but he was too late.
The tail whipped forward like the head of a striking rattlesnake. It plunged toward Livia’s thin neck. Jake thrust his arm forward and flicked the switch on the penlight. The tip of the flashlight was less than an inch from the spike as it stabbed into the woman’s neck.
Marika gasped as Jake held steady. The tail yanked out, dripping blood from its spike. The scorpion scuttled backward, trying to escape the icy touch of the beam. But Jake twisted his wrist and shone the beam into its stalky eyes, toward its head. The legs suddenly spasmed and convulsed. Claws tore holes in the blanket. Then with a final tremor it simply collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
Jake had turned its brain to ice.
With a shudder, Jake slapped the creature off the huntress. Marika ran up to him. Pindor crossed over, too, but not before stamping his heel through the stingtail, making sure it stayed dead.
“It stung her!” Marika moaned.
Jake thumbed off his penlight and leaned over the woman in the bed. Blood dripped down her neck, but nothing spurted. Jake inspected the wound. The stinger had hit nothing vital. With a bandage, it should heal.
“The venom will kill her in a matter of breaths,” Marika said.
Jake watched Livia’s chest rise and fall under the blanket. “Maybe not, Mari. I did the only thing I could. I froze the tip of the tail first. With luck the poison turned to ice and remained trapped in the stinger.”
Faint hope shone in Marika’s eyes. “We should know in the next few moments.”
They kept a silent vigil. Jake used the time to press a bundle of cloth gently against the hole in Livia’s neck, but already the blood had slowed its seeping. After a full three minutes, Marika’s eyes shone brighter as she glanced to Jake.
Livia’s chest continued to rise and fall, weakly, but no more so than before.
“I think she’s going to make it,” Marika said.
Ever practical, Pindor dampened her hope. “Maybe she wasn’t poisoned by the stingtail, but those shards of bloodstone are still in her.”
Confirming this, the huntress let out a low moan. One hand flew up and knocked the lamp off the bedside table. She was suddenly wild, frantic. Her eyelids fluttered open, but there was no sight. Only the whites of her eyes showed.
“We have to help her! But what do we do?” Marika searched the room, looking lost. “Where’s Magister Zahur? Or even my father and Magister Oswin?”
Jake shook his head. They’d seen no sign of any of the Magisters. “Maybe they haven’t gotten here yet?”
A touch of hysteria entered Marika’s voice. “Even if they’d walked, we should have seen them from the chariot.”