Chapter 41

  Jimothy

  It was dark on the Color Moon when Jimothy led them through the door. He had stopped thinking of the time of darkness as “night.” He liked the nighttime back on Earth. This wasn’t nighttime.

  He at once created a pool of light around them by making his cane shine and holding it up to push back the writhing shadows. A menacing hiss cut through the black night. A warning.

  Jim briefly considered taking them to see the window, the one of stained glass that he had put together not far away in the ruins. But no, not now. There were monsters out.

  “So,” said Eric, casual as ever, “where’s the lighthouse?” He said this while unsheathing the weird sword from his back and doing something to make it glow green. It hummed faintly.

  “Um…” The lighthouse was too far for its meager light to be seen. He understood again, for the hundredth time, what he needed to do and why. He needed to fill the top of that lighthouse with light. But not the light of Niri. He had already decided. He remembered deciding also that he wouldn’t bring anybody back with him. But looking at them now–Isaac and Eric and Elizabeth and Kate–he couldn’t make himself feel bad about it. He was glad they were here.

  Something growled out in the darkness. Closer, closer. The shadows moved at the corners of his light. Jimothy felt the crystal in his pocket. He had used up a lot of its light during his breakdown back in the city. It still had some. Enough, probably, to get them back to the lighthouse. He wouldn’t be able to put it up at the top afterwards if he used it all up now, but that was okay.

  “Hazel,” said Jim, “can you lead the way, boy?” Hazel took a quick break from growling back at the shadows, hackles raised, to bark at Jim and reposition himself. Jimothy understood that to be an affirmative. For an instant he understood the world as Hazel did–not with sight, nor even with smells like a normal dog, but in some other way. Hazel knew where everything was, even in the darkness. He had a sense of the lighthouse from here, although he could not simply whisk Jimothy away through this shadow. None of the angels could. Jimothy did not stop to wonder how Hazel had told him all of this.

  “He can lead us,” Jimothy told them. He took the crystal out of his pocket. “The darkness is full of monsters,” he said. “Be careful about your shadows. Um. It might be dangerous. They seem…bigger.” The churning darkness pressed in violently against his light. Glowing sets of eyes were watching, moving, circling. Some of them were larger than he had seen before, and they were certainly more numerous.

  “Well then,” said Elizabeth. “Isaac, can you do something with these?” She handed him her bundle of heavy clothes, but kept her umbrella. Isaac made the clothes disappear. Jimothy did not understand how he did that.

  And then Eric was putting on his headphones for some reason, starting to listen to music, which also confused Jimothy. Isaac was fastening that shiny black-visored helmet onto his suit, and now he was holding some kind of laser gun. Elizabeth was stretching as though she was about to start dancing. Kate, though still unsteady, was strapping on her bass and striking a few isolated notes for tuning. She frowned and squinted comically into nothing.

  “Ready?” said Isaac after a moment. His voice crackled from speakers on his suit.

  “Ready,” said Eric as he nodded his head to music only he could hear. The others agreed. Ready.

  So they went. For Jimothy, thinking back on this later, it was all a swirl of feelings, images, and small, distinct memories. He had been out of breath for a lot of it, he remembered. He had been panting, sweating, wishing he hadn’t just eaten so much food.

  They saw monsters: small inky-black goblins of darkness like the ones he’d seen when he first arrived, and bigger spidery creatures all horrible with their many legs and gleaming eyes, and huge shapes that make the ground shake when they stepped, and also crawling snake-shapes. Jimothy tried to ward them off with bright light, but the big ones stepped out from the shadows and approached anyway. Sometimes Jimothy focused the light on them, making it bright, bright, bright as the sun. They evaporated like smoke in this light, but the sudden darkness elsewhere let them close in on other sides. Eventually he just followed Hazel while creating as much light as he could so that his friends could clear the way. This was the most he could do, when he also had to focus on walking without falling, and carrying Kate on a bed of light like he had with Niri because she couldn’t really walk either.

  Isaac strode deliberately, step by step, shooting short bursts of purple lasers from the strange handgun he carried. He sometimes aimed at things without looking. The purple lasers cut right through the monsters, and they made a weird humming sound as they flashed in the darkness.

  Elizabeth danced, kind of. Maybe it was her martial arts? Jim couldn’t tell. She whacked the shadow monsters with her closed umbrella, and they burst apart or flew through the air as though a wrecking ball in full swing had hit them rather than an umbrella swung by a teenage girl. She was amazing to watch, even though she sometimes stumbled and messed up. Once she fell, and because Jimothy was watching her, he fell too. A humongous shadow loomed up over her, and Jimothy made light inside of it before he knew what he was doing. The enemy burst apart into greasy darkness and left only the spiky orange shape Jimothy had created inside of it hanging in the air.

  Eric did something strange. He flickered around, here and there, and sometimes looked like he was in two places at once. He was moving in a rhythm. His green sword flashed, cleaving through shadow after confused shadow.

  The rhythm to which Eric moved matched the music that Kate made on her bass. It was a strange music; it made Jimothy’s light pulse in time to its subtle beat, which matched Eric’s stuttering movements, which matched the peculiar combative dance that Elizabeth was dancing. She messed up sometimes by missing a beat or squeaking the strings, which caused Elizabeth to stumble but did not hinder Eric.

  Jimothy had used most of the light of the crystal when Hazel, leading the way, barked. Ahead, Jimothy saw the light atop the lighthouse, a faint glow through the darkness. Not far away.

  “We’re close!” he shouted.

  “Good,” said the faintly distorted voice of Isaac nearby. “I’m out.” He threw his weapon down and took his helmet off. It disappeared in his hands. He looked exhausted. “Suit’s almost dead. How close?”

  “What?” said Jimothy.

  “How close are we?” Isaac asked. “Our DPS are almost out too, Jim.”

  DPS? “Um. Just another couple minutes, I think,” said Jimothy. The distraction of speaking caused him to trip over his own feet. Isaac was too late to catch him, but he helped Jim back up and put Jim’s arm around his shoulders. Jimothy’s fall had caused him to briefly lose the focus necessary to sustain the surrounding light. For a moment, it was dark. When he threw the light back around them, it was crawling with monsters.

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  “Let’s hurry,” said Isaac.

  And then, in an instant, something crushed the shadows all around them. All at once, the inky monsters flattened into nothing with a shuddering thump. Kate’s music faltered to a halt, and in the silence Jimothy heard a growl that shook the earth under his feet. Hazel returned with an answering growl, and the other angels joined in. Callie hissed; Frisby chirped.

  A paw stood on the path in front of Jimothy. It was as big as he was, gray as the dawn. Jimothy followed it up. Two shining eyes, far above, had replaced the glimpse of light from his lighthouse. Maugrim’s leg cast a shadow in Jim’s light, but no monsters dared to appear inside of it.

  You are running out of light, said the wolf.

  “Yeah,” said Jimothy, so softly that he didn’t think Maugrim could hear him.

  Eric stumbled up to Jimothy and Isaac, panting, covered in sweat, holding his side and grimacing. Elizabeth remained apart from them, her hands and umbrella covered in dripping darkness as she stared up defiantly at the wolf.

  Why have you not used the light I gave you? asked Maugrim. You could use it now.

  “N-no,” said Jimothy, trembling. “I won’t. I don’t think…”

  The head of Maugrim, so large that it could snap Jim up in a single bite, lowered down into the light, until it was only thirty feet in front of Jimothy. Those huge gray eyes were cold and terrible. Why not? With that light…

  He paused as Elizabeth limped onto the path in-between Jim and the great wolf. She supported herself partially on that yellow umbrella, but she looked up at Maugrim and said, “You leave him alone.” Her voice was tired and shaky. She looked so small and fragile there in front of the huge fangs.

  Here is light, said Maugrim. Why not her? In a single swift motion, the wolf stepped forward, knocked Elizabeth to the dust with a paw, and pinned her there. Elizabeth cried out softly as the breath was crushed from her lungs. She struggled feebly under his paw.

  With this one’s light, you could banish the darkness, said Maugrim. He raised the paw pinning Elizabeth, and Jimothy knew what Maugrim was about to do; he had seen it before.

  Jimothy put every speck of his light into what he did next. It was a simple idea: stop the paw. Stop Maugrim from killing Elizabeth. That was all that mattered.

  So Jimothy created a plane of light–flat, blue, parallel to the ground, and directly through the middle of Maugrim’s leg. It met a powerful resistance, and Jimothy used up all his light. If he’d had Niri’s light on his person, he would have used that. It was barely enough.

  Maugrim howled as darkness blinked into being around them, all illumination sucked away. His howl was a cry of agony. It vanished with Maugrim away into the blackness. For a second, all that was visible was the plane of blue light above them. Then that too vanished.

  Jimothy blinked, but saw only darkness. Confusion, cold, a sudden headache. An arm around his shoulders kept him upright. Then, light. Not his own light, but light from a flashlight, weakly illuminating a small area.

  Elizabeth sat in front of them on the path, spluttering softly, entirely covered in something dark and viscous. Eric crouched next to her, which meant it was Isaac keeping Jim up, and Isaac providing the dim light.

  “Liz!” said Eric. “You ok?”

  Elizabeth took a long moment to make sure before nodding. She wiped and wiped at the black stuff covering her, trying to get it out of her hair, her face, her eyes. “Ink,” she said softly. She sounded like she might be crying. “Ink.”

  Beyond her, like a fallen log across the path to the lighthouse, lay Maugrim’s leg, severed just above the knee joint, much of the pale fur stained black.

  “Guys,” said Isaac. “I’m almost out of battery. We need to move.”

  Eric helped Elizabeth to her feet. She looked like some new version of one of the shadow monsters they had just been fighting. “I can walk,” said Elizabeth, though she kept her feet unsteadily when Eric let her go. “Get Kate.”

  Kate was fast asleep, sprawled in the dust behind Jim where he’d dropped her after using all his light.

  And so, with Elizabeth leading the way, helped by Callie, and with Isaac supporting Jimothy, and with Eric carrying Kate with the help of Hazel, they at last arrived at the lighthouse.

  And that had been about an hour ago. Everyone had been tired, but no one had wanted to sleep right away, except for Kate, who didn’t want to wake up. The shadows had beaten Eric up and cut one of his arms. He made a joke about matching Jacob that no one had the energy to ask about. Something had caused Elizabeth to limp, and she said she’d have bruises from Maugrim’s treatment, but she was otherwise fine. She was the first to use the shower, and she was in there a long time. Isaac seemed fine, though his suit had lost all battery. He climbed out of it in shorts and a t-shirt.

  They were all sweaty and tired. They ascended to the floor of the lighthouse with the guest bedrooms and lounge area. They bathed in the two guest baths, they borrowed Jim’s spare clothes, and they decided to talk about everything in the morning. What to do next. Eric said he wanted to go check on Heidi. Isaac said he wanted to finish ARKO. Elizabeth didn’t say.

  And now Jimothy sat on the edge of his bed in green flannel pajamas, unable to sleep, holding a box containing the soul of a mysterious and beautiful stranger. He didn’t know what to do with it. And he couldn’t sleep. And it wasn’t just because of his headache.

  He stood, put the box on his bedside stand, and padded out of his room to the lounge area. He smiled when he saw what was there.

  They had originally laid Kate on the couch and then Isaac, Eric, and Elizabeth had taken three of the five small guest rooms. But now they were all there, huddled on the floor in a mass of pillows and blankets beside the couch that Kate had apparently rolled out of. Isaac’s teeth were still blue. Elizabeth still had ink on her. They were all asleep, and their angels were there with them: Callie curled up beside Elizabeth, Frisby Wiser on top of Eric’s back, Navi the butterfly resting on Kate’s knee. Only Charlie was awake. He was an owl now, and his head swiveled to watch Jimothy as he went to his bedroom, pulled up some blankets from the bed, and returned to the lounge. Jimothy wrapped himself up in blankets and lay down on the floor right by Elizabeth’s feet and Isaac’s head. Hazel appeared as he was getting comfortable, inviting Jimothy to use him as a pillow. Jimothy knew better than that; this pillow would run away in the night.

  They had left the light on. So had Jimothy, every night that he had been here, on the Color Moon, alone. But now, with a tiny flicker of color, Jimothy clicked off the light switch on the other side of the room, leaving him in the warm darkness, where all he could see was the faint glow of the lighthouse outside the window, and all he could hear was the soft breathing of his friends. It never even occurred to him to wonder whether they were real.