Realm Keepers 01 - Realm Keepers

were wide open, and twin jets of lightning shot from them, surrounding her pillar. The lightning sprang to life around the rock, running around it in little currents like it was alive. The lightning died away as she blinked, but it stayed on the pillar, crackling in the air.
    “Nice,” she said with a satisfied little smile.
    I saw Miles. He was moving his hands in the air, and I saw a little ball of water hovering between them. It morphed and twisted in the air, following the movements of his hands. A wide grin was spreading across his face. “I got it!” he said excitedly. “Okay, now what do I do?”
    “Throw it at the pillar,” Greystone said. His voice was still calm, but I saw him cast a furtive glance at the approaching Shadow horde.
    “They’re getting closer,” Cara said in agitation behind me. She was right. I could hear their howls loud on the wind, and close enough to pick out individual voices.
    Miles pushed forward, and the ball of water flew away from him. When it touched his pillar, the whole thing changed instantly into a standing pillar of liquid water. Miles gave a little chuckle. “That was cool.”
    I turned to Tess. She was the only one who was left. She was standing in front of her pillar, looking at it nervously. She didn’t even glance up at the approaching horde.
    “Try, child,” Greystone said. His voice was gentle, but I heard the urgency beneath it.
    “I can’t,” Tess said. “I don’t know what to do.”
    I went to her side and put a calming hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Tess,” I told her. “There’s no pressure. Just try and think about the stone, and look for something in you that wants to reach out to it.”
    Tess looked away, her hair covering the one eye I could see. “I can’t.”
    “Look harder,” I said.
    “Come on, do it already!” yelled Blade right behind me. Tess flinched at the sound of his shout.
    “It’s okay, I can take’em,” Calvin said. He summoned up another little mini-tornado. It died almost immediately, and his face fell.
    I turned to them. “Guys, shut up for a second. Give her a minute.”
    “Sarah, we don’t have a minute,” Miles said. He was looking nervously at the creatures running toward us, and he flexed his muscles like he, too, was getting ready for a fight.
    I moved in closer, wrapping my arm around Tess’ shoulder and leaning down to look at the pillar with her.
    “I don’t know what to do,” she whimpered.
    “That’s okay,” I said, trying to make it sound like we were the only two people in the world. “Close your eyes.” She did. “Now I want you to look for something inside. Something that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s buried very, very deep.” I thought back to the stone circle. The pink stone, the one that had hit Tess, had been on a pillar with a silhouette of a human head, surrounded by circles. “It’s somewhere in your mind. Look hard, Tess.”
    She was silent for a moment. I looked nervously North. The creatures were a hundred yards away, and I heard the clattering of their weapons on shields as they charged. Cara stepped forward, her soldiers surrounding her and the others nervously. Only Greystone stood unmoving, looking at me.
    “I found it, but it hurts,” Tess mumbled.
    “I need you to grab it and pull it to the surface,” I said hastily. “I’m sorry it hurts, Tess, but we need you to use it right now.”
    “I don’t want to,” she said quietly.
    “We’ll do it together, okay?” The monsters were too close. We weren’t going to make it. How fast could the wall even come up, anyway?
    “Okay,” she said.
    “Here we go,” I said, my voice cracking. “One.”
    The monsters were fifty yards away.
    “Two.”
    Twenty-five.
    “Three.”
    I jumped as Tess screamed loud enough to tear her throat and her eyes shot open. They had gone completely white. There was a blast with no sound, and I was thrown forcefully away from her, rolling over and over on the ground and coming to rest at Cara’s feet.
    I looked up just as her pillar shattered into a thousand pieces, hovering in midair before her. Tess’ scream didn’t stop for a second, just grew louder and higher and more painful. Then the pillars erupted into columns of light, blasting up into the sky and beyond, glaringly harsh on my retinas. I closed my eyes to shield them from the shine. It was like staring directly into the sun, but about a hundred times worse. A whistling, roaring noise grew on the air as wind