The Trap (The Magnificent 12 #2)(14)

“The wall! Look at it!”

Mack turned away from the advancing guards. The decorated wall wasn’t just pretty tile. Jarrah was right: nine brightly colored dragons cavorted down the hundred-foot length of it.

“Huh,” Stefan said, but he wasn’t appreciating the wall. He was noticing that some small shadows were creeping up behind the guards, even as the guards were edging closer.

“Back off, you quivering jelly bags of mucus!” one of the Tong Elves said. “They’re ours!”

It’s possible the guards understood them. But it’s more likely they were just startled to see that they were surrounded.

By elves in lederhosen.

That would startle most people.

“What?” Mack yelled into the phone. “Who is it? I’m kind of busy!”

“Hi, Mack! It’s me, your golem!”

“What?” Mack shrieked.

“I’m looking for the English paper. Do you know where you might have put it? It’s already late, and our teacher—”

“What? What?”

“The English paper—”

“I’m kind of busy right now!” Mack screamed. “It’s in my laptop. The folder marked ‘Useless Stuff.’”

“Thanks! Bye-bye, real Mack.”

The flashlights all swung around to highlight the new threat. Probably seventeen or eighteen—Mack wasn’t really concerned with counting—Tong Elves, each armed with a chubby billy club, formed a menacing semicircle.

“The walking human slime are ours,” the elf leader snarled. “So step aside in the name of the Pale Queen, you sock puppets stuffed with pig filth!”

One of the guards evidently understood this well enough. He translated for his comrades. Suddenly the guards—who had been pretty determined to catch Mack and his friends—found a whole different motivation.

The guards wore green uniforms with white belts that went around their waists and over their right shoulders. They had brass buttons and red epaulets, and the only weapons they had were their flashlights. Mack was pretty sure he was going to witness an elf-on-guard massacre.

But then one of the guards shouted an order. Moving as one, the guards holstered their flashlights, laid their hats carefully aside on the cobblestones, and adopted martial arts stances.

“Kee-yah!”

The guards leaped!

The Tong Elves rushed!

It was kung fu fists versus Tong Elf clubs.

“Cool. They should totally make a game of this,” Stefan said. Then, “Owww. My chest kind of hurts.”

“The nine dragons in Beijing,” Jarrah shouted, to be heard over the sounds of kicks and grunts and kung fu punches. “It wasn’t the hotel. It was this wall!”

“Yeah,” Mack agreed. “But when this fight’s over, we won’t be either place.”

Jarrah stared with amazing concentration, totally ignoring the fight that raged behind her.

“The Magnificent Twelve,” she said.

“Not yet we’re not,” Mack said.

“In Vargran. ‘The Magnificent Twelve’ in Vargran! I remember seeing this at Uluru. It was one of the keys to deciphering the whole alphabet.” And then, she said it. Aloud. In Vargran.

“Eb Magga Ull-tway.”

And then! Nothing!

“That didn’t work,” Jarrah said, sounding a bit surprised. “You try it, Mack.”

So Mack said, “Eb Magga Ull-tway!”

The wall, all one hundred by ten feet of it, tilted back and then slid straight down into the ground with a slight grinding noise.

A wide, dark staircase led into the earth.

“Oh, fine, it works for you.” Jarrah pouted. “Go or no go?”

Mack hesitated. If he kept going and didn’t get Stefan to a doctor immediately, Stefan might bleed to death.

Stefan had become a friend. That realization came as a shock to Mack. In the space of just a few days, really, Stefan had gone from bully to protector. Mack had realized that part, the bodyguard thing. But until this moment he hadn’t really noticed that he actually liked Stefan.

Stefan had been hurt protecting Mack. That had to count for a lot.

But the fate of the world might rest on this decision. And the single word trap was definitely bouncing around inside his head like a Ping-Pong ball with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Sure, Ping-Pong balls can have ADHD. Absolutely.

But this wasn’t the time for Mack to contemplate the problems of Ping-Pong balls. This was decision time.

Stefan was a friend. But he was a friend who would want Mack to save the world.

Mack tightened his supporting grip around Stefan. And he stepped across the threshold into an unimagined realm.





Chapter Ten



ABOUT NINETY YEARS AGO, MORE OR LESS . . .

After landing in America, Paddy Soon-to-be-Nine-Iron Trout had gone to the Toomany Society for some guidance and had learned that his best career option was crime.

The Toomany Society lady sent him to an address north of Wall Street, where all the best criminal organizations had offices. It was a place they called Five Points Hall.

Five Points Hall was a large, cavernous space built around a huge enclosed courtyard. In that courtyard were various booths, each with pamphlets and literature set out. Paddy walked wonderingly past the Wounded Chickens Gang booth with its promises of drinking, carousing, street fighting, and extortion; past the Black Hand booth, which focused more on exotic foods redolent of garlic and which offered a career in crime regardless of how fat you got; and the Kosher Nostra, where he stopped and spoke with their recruiter.