shirtless, his skin dotted with dried blood and the bandages he’d hastily drawn on himself in the belfry.
“Adrian!” Nova yelled through the chasm. He could barely see her in the gathering dark. “What are you doing?”
“I have an idea,” he yelled back, pulling out Nova’s pen, the one with the hidden blow-dart chamber. He opened it up and pulled the single dart from the chamber, sloshing with familiar thick green liquid. His mouth ran dry.
“No, it won’t work!” yelled Nova. “Don’t waste it!”
Ignoring her, Adrian grabbed a massive leather-bound tome from the shrine and spread it out on the floor. Pressing the pen against the pages, he started to draw.
Phobia’s voice boomed through the cathedral. “I’m impressed.” Adrian’s gaze traveled up the length of the shadows, into the emptiness beneath Phobia’s hood, which now brushed the ceiling beams so far above them. “Your courage is remarkable, for such insignificant creatures. But you know what they say about courage. One cannot—”
“—be brave who has no fear, yakkity-yak,” said Adrian, remembering how Winston Pratt had once mocked Phobia’s favorite saying. “But do you know what they say about fear?”
The hood fluttered around Phobia’s obscured face.
Adrian pressed his hand into the book and pulled his drawing from the brittle pages. A narrow rod, the length of his forearm, with a flat cross at one end. It glowed like a lit ember in the darkness.
His hand started to shake.
“Adrian,” Nova croaked. “Is that a firebrand?”
Adrian ignored her, facing off against the shadows. “One cannot be afraid,” he said, “when they have nothing left to lose.”
His gut lurched, even as he angled the brand toward himself.
“Adrian!” Nova yelled, her voice hitched with panic. “Adrian!”
He braced himself and, before he could talk himself out of it, thrust the heated iron against the immunity tattoo on his chest. A cry of pain ripped out of him. Almost immediately, the sickening aroma of burnt flesh filled the sanctuary.
When he pulled the brand away, a deep red X had destroyed the tattoo.
He dropped the firebrand with a shudder. He felt suddenly dizzy with pain, white spots creeping into his vision, but adrenaline and will kept him standing.
Closing his fist around the dart full of Agent N, he searched the depths of Phobia’s hood. The phantom who had haunted his childhood dreams. The nightmare who had stolen his mother from him.
The monster he had created.
Phobia hissed, sounding almost worried for a moment, before his low cackle shook the sanctuary again. “Don’t be a fool. More than any prodigy I have ever crossed, you fear being powerless. You would never—”
Adrian set his jaw and drove the needle into his own thigh.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
ADRIAN SANK TO one knee, knowing there was nothing else he could do. Either this worked, or he’d just given up everything on a whim. On a chance. He didn’t even know if it was a good chance.
That, and his chest was burning and he thought he might pass out from pain and blood loss, and the shadows of Phobia’s cloak were still engulfing him, still closing in around him and his friends, still swallowing them whole.
When the effects of Agent N began, he was almost too weak to notice them. The sensation was reminiscent of being in the quarantine with Max, before he’d discovered the Vitality Charm and given himself the tattoo. It was like a spark extinguishing inside him. A chill sweeping through his body. A slow draining-away of strength, concentrated in his hands. The fingers that had sketched so many amazing things in his nearly seventeen years.
The fingers that had sketched Phobia himself.
They tingled and grew cold, until he almost couldn’t feel them at all.
He heard a rattling cough. “No,” Phobia whispered. “This isn’t … you can’t…”
He wailed as he began to fade away. His cloak vanished like fog on a breeze, a cloud of ash billowing across the sanctuary floor. The cloak, the skeletal fingers, the shadowed hood, and, last, the scythe—a curl of candle smoke wisping into the air, before it, too, was gone.
Adrian held his breath. He counted to ten.
Phobia did not come back.
Adrian slumped forward. Warmth was returning to his fingers, but it didn’t come with the sensation of power he’d known all his life. He knew beyond doubt that he could draw a hundred flowers or a thousand weapons or a million dinosaurs, and none of them would ever come to life again.
And everything he’d ever made before … would it all be gone? All the work he’d done rebuilding the mayor’s