My brother Jake lay unconscious on the cave floor, his favorite denim jacket torn in three places and his cell phone a cracked mess of plastic on the ground. If we actually survived this, he was going to be pissed.
“All right, look,” I said, giving the giant snarling insect monster my serious face. “I know I don’t look like much, but you should know I am fully capable of kicking your big buggy butt straight back to where it came from, not only for hurting my brother, but for whatever unholy reign of terror you’ve got planned here.”
The monster was nine feet tall, jet-black, and scaly, with hundreds of spindly legs, like a centipede on steroids. Savage mandibles gleamed in the light from the cave mouth, and I tightened my grip on my sword hilt. And because times of stress often led me to incredible feats of word vomit, I kept talking.
“I mean, let’s face it: guys like you don’t generally show up in our world without some kind of nasty plan for world domination, so I think it’s pretty safe to say you’re up to no good. So are you gonna go peacefully, or do I have to start shoving my boot up random orifices until we find the one that hurts the most?”
The centipede monster reared back, its legs fanning out, its mandibles opening—
And then it tilted its scaly head to the side as if regarding me in puzzlement. “You speak great volumes but say very little,” it said in a thin, whistling voice.
Which, okay, was fair. I’d always had a tendency to babble, particularly when I was in imminent danger of being devoured by the Godzilla of centipedes. Generally, the centipede didn’t take the time to inform me of it though.
“I do not wish any harm upon you,” it continued, deviating even further from the Evil Monster Intent on Taking Over the Earth speech. “Nor any human. I came here only wishing to be left alone, but your companion—” It swung its head toward Jake. “—attempted to steal one of my children, at which point I was forced to defend them. I have not seriously harmed him, only caused him to lose consciousness to neutralize him as a threat.”
“He tried to steal one of your kids?” That didn’t sound like Jake.
The centipede-thing tilted its head toward the other end of the cave, where I could just make out the glittering of a number of round, pearly, head-sized spheres. Eggs? They looked like the kind of pretty, decorative objects people would pay a lot of money for, bringing them much more firmly into the realm of things Jake would totally try to steal.
I sighed and slid my sword into its sheath. The magic triggered the instant I did, and sword and sheath shrank to being a decorative golden clasp on my belt. “I apologize for my companion’s rash actions,” I said, bowing my head slightly like we were supposed to do in these situations. “If you’d allow me to remove him from here, I swear to you that he’ll never come near you or your children again.”
The centipede bowed its head too, its pincers snapping and clicking together in a way that I tried not to be too creeped out by. “That would be acceptable. I thank you, Guardian.”
I blinked. “How’d you know I’m a Guardian?”
“Well, for one thing, the sword.”
“Ah.”
“But even had you come unarmed, I would have known. You wear your status like a cloak. It seeps from every ounce of your being, every word and action. Though you look a frail female thing, there is power in you.”
“Frail female thing,” I said in a flat voice and decided not to be offended. If the worst thing a giant centipede monster had to throw at me was sexism, I could probably count myself lucky. “Yeah, well, guess I’d better get Jake—err, my companion—out of your hair before he wakes up and starts trying to make off with your kids again.”
I started forward, hoping the centipede monster would move out of the way, but it stayed where it was, its black eyes glittering in the dimness.
“You have shown me respect and kindness, and so I shall do something for you in return. My species have a unique ability that appears only between laying our eggs and the birth of our children.”
“Oh, yeah? What kind of ability?”
“The ability to glimpse the future. It allows us to provide extra protection to our young when they are unable to protect themselves, for instance if a young human is attempting to steal one of them.”
“For instance,” I said dryly.
“Something lurks on the horizon, Guardian. An age of darkness and danger is coming to you and those like you.”
I frowned. “To the Guardians, you mean?”
“To all beings of your world.”
“What kind of danger?”
Its legs rippled, and it dropped down onto them and made its undulating way over to the row of eggs. Its last word hissed through the cave, seeming to echo louder and louder in my ears: “Extinction.”
I suddenly felt very, very tired. “Again?”
*
The second I’d dragged Jake out of the cave, I pulled out my phone and sent a quick message to Lettie at Guardians HQ. I’d hoped for some acknowledgement of the fact that I was actually following procedure for once and reporting a creature encounter right after it happened, but all I got in return was Lettie’s usual businesslike “Understood. Tagging team is on its way.”
Which really should not be a person’s reaction to a text reading: “Giant centipede monster in cave at these coordinates.” But since Lettie’s whole job was taking in reports from Guardians on whatever dimension-crossing creatures we’d found creeping into the world, I figured shock wasn’t an emotion she did anymore. Giant centipede monster? Okay. Sentient mushrooms have infiltrated the farmer’s market? Sure. Those dark clouds rolling in are actually mist creatures trying to blot out the sun and destroy all life on Earth? Why not?
I had a moment of wondering if I should mention the centipede’s weird prediction to Lettie, but in the end, I decided against it. Whatever my scaly new friend might say about the clairvoyant powers of its species, the truth was that the end of the world was always being predicted somewhere by someone, and none of them had been right yet. It seemed pretty unlikely that a nine-foot centipede hiding out in a cave in Western Pennsylvania would turn out to be the true prophet of the end times.
Jake woke up when we were halfway to the edge of the woods. I’d been dragging him along behind me, and despite the fact that Guardian training kept me in pretty decent shape, it was still no easy task hauling my unconscious, not-so-little little brother across the forest floor. It was late September, but the weather still clung stubbornly to warmer temps, and I was definitely sweating under my T-shirt and light jacket. I kind of hoped Jake felt every rock from the dark depths of unconsciousness. And maybe he could, because one minute he was a 145 pound rag doll, and the next he was fighting his way out of my grasp and letting out an inventive string of curses.
“What happened?” he said after he’d run out of swear words. He sat on the leaf-strewn ground, one hand pressed to his head.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you tried to steal a giant bug monster’s eggs and it almost killed you?”
He winced and scrubbed his hand over his eyes as if to block out the memories. “Damn, those things were eggs? No wonder it was so ticked off.”
I shook my head and gave him my best older sister glare.
Jake Howard, sixteen years old to my seventeen, was currently wearing a tattered denim jacket, baggy T-shirt, and jeans. Like me, he had Mom’s dark-brown skin and Dad’s big, curved nose, but while my hair sprouted outward and upward in a voluminous pouf, his was cropped closer to his head in loose black curls. Where I was tall and long limbed, Jake was solid and compact, four inches shorter than me and about ten pounds heavier.
And while I had made a sacred vow to protect the world from whatever evil crept in from the fringes of the dark dimensions, he’d apparently made a vow to be as big a pain in my ass as possible.
“Okay, look,” I said, dropping down onto the dirt next to him. “I’m not Mom. I’m not going to give you a lecture. But this was pretty nuts, even for you. What’s going on with you lately?”
He glared at the ground. “Nothing.”
“Very convincing,” I said. “Come on, seriously. Talk to me.”
He scowled at the dirt for a few more seconds, then sighed. “It’s Guinevere.”
“Gwen? What about her?”
“I thought…”
“Yeah?”
There was a long pause, and then the words rushed out. “I thought she’d like it. One of those glowy globe things.”
“One of the eggs, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
I tried not to laugh, as that probably would not have been well-received by my grouchy, love-struck little brother. “Well,” I said, “that was a nice thought. And I bet she’d have really appreciated that. You know, until the egg hatched into a baby centipede monster and tried to eat her face.”
“I know. I know!” Jake slammed his fist into his thigh. “I get it, okay? I screwed up. I’m a loser, just like Mom and Dad are always saying.”
“They’ve never said that.”
“Maybe not, but I bet they’re thinking it. I mean, jeez, Alisha, you’re out there saving the freaking world, Aggie’s getting straight As at college, and what am I? Just some freakishly handsome loser with no girlfriend and no life.”
My lips twitched upward. “I was wondering how long it’d be before you mentioned how handsome you were.”
He managed a slight grin. “I can only hold it back for so long.”
“Look,” I said. “You know damn well that you’re an awesome guy. And while you might not have Gwen as your girlfriend, half the school is in love with you. It’s disgusting.”
This time, the grin was nearly full wattage. “It is disgusting, isn’t it?”
“Horribly, vilely disgusting.” I patted his shoulder and got to my feet. “Now, if you’re feeling better, can we get out of these woods and get back home? Mom’ll kill us if we’re late for dinner. Aggie’s girlfriend’s coming over, remember?”
“Oh, man, is that tonight?” He searched his wrist for the watch he wasn’t wearing. “What time is it?”
“Almost five now.”
“Crap.”
We hustled through the trees and managed to skid in through the front door of our little white house just as Mom was setting the table. She looked up when we entered the dining room, and she was smiling—probably in deference to Aggie’s girlfriend, who didn’t yet know this woman was capable of Old Testament levels of wrath—but I could see the rage simmering in her eyes.
“Just in time,” Mom said. She arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow at us. “Just.”
Mom was beautiful, with smooth dark skin, big brown eyes, and high cheekbones. Her hair was buzzed close to her head, both for style and so it didn’t get into whatever she was painting. She wore her silver hoop earrings, a silky patterned shawl, and her favorite black dress with chunky heels. Fun but formal and showing off that whole innate sense of style that had absolutely not passed on to me.
Evidence: while Mom looked ready for the runway, I was wearing scuffed sneakers, jeans, a black Return of the Jedi T-shirt, and my favorite worn brown jacket. I far preferred them to any fancier duds, but it did sometimes make me wonder how sure we were that Mom and I were actually related.
“Sorry we’re late,” I said. “We lost track of time.”
“Almost late,” Jake said, apparently not sensing his extreme danger in saying this. “It’s five twenty-nine. We’ve got a whole minute to spare.”
Mom gave us a sweet smile laced with poison. “Of course. A minute is more than enough time for you to get cleaned up, changed, and back down here in time for dinner, isn’t it?”
Yep, she was pissed.
“And Alisha, what have I said about bringing that to the table?”
Out of sheer habit, I’d deactivated the magic of the sword clip the second I got into the house, and thus sword and sheath were now both eminently visible hanging from my belt. “Whoops.”
“Put it away.” She threw a meaningful glance toward the living room, where I could hear laughter and voices—Dad, Aggie, and Aggie’s girlfriend, I assumed. “And Jake, take off that torn-up old jacket and put on something fit for company. We’ll talk about this later.”
Jake and I exchanged wincing glances, but in the end, there was nothing for us to do but obey our mother. Sometimes, no matter how old you were or how many dimension-hopping hell-beasts you’d booted off the planet, that was all you could do.
*
Our older sister, Agnes, despite having been my first instructor in the ages-old art of sarcasm, was also one of the nicest people in existence, fully ready to do anything for the people around her. As such, she tended to attract two kinds of people—jerks who wanted to take advantage of her, and other poor souls who were as tragically, helplessly nice as she was.
Thankfully, Mabel seemed to be one of the latter. She was plump, half-Pakistani, and absolutely adorable, with a cute, upturned nose and freckles. And for all that she was having dinner with her girlfriend’s weird family, she was smiling and laughing and managing to make charming small talk like a pro. And not once had she dropped her fork or spilled gravy all over the place, which I definitely would’ve done in her position.
“So,” Mom said in the honeyed voice she reserved for company, “you two met in art class, then?”
“We got paired together for portrait drawing,” Mabel said with a grin at Aggie.
Aggie returned the grin with interest. “Yeah, at which point we discovered that we both have old-lady names. It was the first thing we bonded over.”
Dad let out a guffaw and choked on his potatoes, while Mom’s smile went frigid.
“Agnes was your great grandmother’s name, as you well know. Your father and I decided to honor her memory by giving you her name.”
“Hey, don’t drag me into this,” Dad said, using his napkin to wipe some potatoes out of his sandy mustache. “I wanted to name her Sarah Jane.”
Mom rolled her eyes. “Honestly, Barry, wanting to name your daughter after some character in a bad sci-fi show.”
Dad and I both bristled, as the word “bad” should never tread within a hundred yards of Doctor Who.
“Now, listen,” Dad began, but Aggie, with her usual flair for peacekeeping, cut in before he could continue.
“Mom, you know I love my name. Great Grandma Agnes was a great lady, and I love that I get to carry on her spirit with my name.” She reached over to cover Mabel’s hand with her own. “Anyway, if you hadn’t named me Agnes, Mabel and I might never have gotten together, so that just makes me love it even more.”
The two of them shared a sappy—but adorable—smile, and the tension at the table evaporated.
“Well,” Mom said, and her smile actually seemed genuine this time, “more potatoes, anyone?”
