The Ka threw me back toward the black path.

  I flipped through the air and landed on the path with a slight surge from the Shield lessening its impact. The Shield. It had worked. What …

  The Ka screamed one more time then dove into the sea, the water too heavy to make much of a splash. The mass of other Ka above it screeched as well and dove for the one who had just thrown me away.

  It was at that moment that I understood.

  I jumped to my feet and screamed.

  “NOOOOOOOO!”

  I wanted to jump in, to go after him. It was Dad, it had to be Dad. Hanging on to his last chunk of humanity, he'd escaped with the intent to end his life—knowing that it was the only way to prevent himself from participating in the demonic plan of the Stompers. I knew from my earlier visits that there was something about the waters of the Blackness—that they were deadly to the Shadow Ka. Dad had done the only thing he felt was left to him.

  That was why the Gifts had not worked. The inner workings of those special powers were something beyond comprehension—that they could know it was my dad, and not allow the Gifts to hurt him or hinder his good intent. The last half hour had once again awakened me to the incredible capacity of my almost ridiculous abilities.

  The swarm of Ka diving after Dad pulled up just short of the water, having just missed him before he sank below the surface. They continued their shrieks, and hovered as one, flying to and fro above where Dad had fallen. They would not so much as test the water with their claws, fully aware of its effect on them. I stood and stared, my face empty and drawn, and then sunk to my knees as my heart began to tell me that Dad had just sacrificed his life.

  I looked back and forth, straining to see through the chaos of the Ka for any sign of Dad resurfacing. I screamed for him, and the tears streamed down my face. Why, why did this have to happen to him? Why did they choose him out of all the people in the world?

  I knew the answer, of course. It was my fault. They did it to get to me—to make me surrender. But Dad would not let them succeed, and this was his only way. My chest heaved with an unexpected sob, and I let it all out.

  “DAD!” I yelled through the tears. “DAAAAAAAAD!”

  I slumped, put my hands on the ground, and hung my head. With no real concern, I glanced at my stopwatch.

  Five minutes.

  Who cares? I asked myself.

  Four minutes, fifty seconds.

  Dad cared—enough to sacrifice his life.

  Four minutes, forty seconds.

  I must go, I thought, or his selflessness would be a waste. I had to get out with the Red Disk.

  Four minutes, thirty seconds.

  Pulling myself together, I got up and ran to the Ripping.

  Just before I jumped through, I heard the wet bubbling of someone surfacing in the water, and I stopped dead. Daring to hope, I looked over.

  Dad was there, treading in silver water, fully healed. Fully healed. There was no trace of the beast he had been seconds before.

  “Jimmy!” he yelled, his voice wet with phlegm, barely audible over the sounds of the Ka screaming above him. “Jimmy! The water saved me somehow!”

  My jaw was probably hanging around my toes, and my heart had stopped completely.

  “I'm coming, son!” He pushed forward his hands and began the swim back.

  The Ka were not going to let him live. It was so unfair. It was such a cruel trick. Brought back from the dead in the last instant, beyond all reason or hope—all for naught. His former comrades, the ones he refused to join, were coming in for the kill.

  I looked down at the watch with dread. Three minutes. I sprung into action.

  I ran back the forty or fifty feet I had traveled, closer to the point to which Dad was swimming. As I ran, I called upon the Ice with a flurry of concentration. Bullets of Ice ripped through the air, swarming in from all directions, exploding Ka by Ka away from my Dad. It took every ounce of my effort, every detectable piece of will within me to keep them away.

  For every one I hit, three more dove for Dad. Some made contact before I blew them off with the Ice. His shoulders were getting bloody from the scratches. I continued my assault, yelling out loud, still running. Balls of Ice shot through the air with ferocity, blasting the Ka away from Dad and into a watery death. The water was not healing them like it had my dad, but I didn't have time to figure it out. The wailing sound of dying Ka began to drown out the screams of the ones still vying to destroy my dad.

  I came to a stop, now in a direct line to Dad's swimming path. His arms were weary, his face droopy with exhaustion. I couldn't spare the energy to call to him, to encourage him. It took everything I had to keep the Ka away, obliterating them with my Gift of Ice.

  I could feel the seconds ticking away as I continued my barrage of frozen warfare. The point where we would never make it was fast approaching.

  The Ka did not quit—oblivious to fear, oblivious to death. They attacked in pairs now, trying anything to overcome my abilities. I held firm, and Dad swam with every last bit of effort he could find within his weakened body. He was only a few body lengths away.

  A Ka got through, ripping a six-inch gash across Dad's back. I blew the creature away, its scream dying out with a gurgling gasp as it sank into the sea. Another Ka ripped some hair from Dad's head before I dealt with it. It was growing more difficult—they would not be stopped.

  Closer he came. Only a few feet. I just needed to touch his hand and it would all be over. I considered jumping in, but couldn't take the risk. He was almost to me—only a couple of feet from my outstretched hand. The gash on his shoulder had already healed—the magic of the Blackness that I had almost forgotten about.

  The remaining Ka, sensing their last opportunity, gathered into one, just like I'd seen at the Storm World gateway, and swooped in with a vengeance. I gave up on the Ice and grabbed for Dad's hand. His fingers clasped into mine just as the mass of Ka exploded into us. Knowing his hands were wet, I took extra care as I gripped Dad's hand with every bit of strength I owned.

  The Shield expanded, and the diving Ka slammed into its invisible protection. A quick series of thumps announced their collision with it, and they rebounded away in all directions, yelling their piercing calls of furious rage. Most fell into the water, the few that remained giving up and flying away, defeated, back through the Ripping fifty feet away.

  Dad was exhausted. I grabbed his arms and pulled, pulling him out of the water and onto the marble path with almost no help. He was almost naked, and his skin was pale and sickly.

  “Son, I'm sorry I grabbed you … sorry I put you in danger … I wasn't thinking …” were the only things he had enough energy to say.

  “Dad, we don't have enough time—come on!”

  Calling upon every remaining spurt of adrenaline within me, I pulled Dad's arm up and around my neck, and screamed out loud with effort as I helped him to a standing position.

  “Try to walk, Dad—we're almost there, and then you can rest!”

  I felt him put weight onto his legs and feet, as much as he could, and we began the long walk back to the Ripping. My right arm was wrapped around Dad's back, and my left arm pushed on his chest to help him balance as we walked. I looked at the watch on my left wrist, right below my face.

  Twenty seconds.

  Like two drunken men in a three-legged race, we hurried as fast as we could down the path. My body hurt with the effort of supporting Dad, and begged me to give up.

  Fifteen seconds.

  Step by lumbering step we shuffled down the path, getting closer with each one.

  Ten seconds.

  Dad stumbled, the exhaustion too much. We fell to the ground with a thump, and I looked up in panic. The Ripping was still twenty feet away. There was just no way—it was impossible. We weren't going to make it! I looked down.

  Five seconds.

  Four.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  The sound of static electricity filled the air, and the Ripping began to close.

  I don't know if there was a measurable amount of time in which my brain processed several thoughts, but in the nanoseconds it took for the Rip to seal shut, I considered my options. Maybe I could shoot the Ice and somehow keep the Rip open for just a little longer. Maybe I could shoot Dad through it with a beam of the cold Second Gift, and hope it didn't cut him in half. Or, we could stay, and take our chances in the Blackness. But none of these were truly options—the risks were too high, the implications too dreadful. There was, really, only one choice.

  I called upon the Anything for the second time.

  With little time to be creative, I flung out the first coherent thought I could formulate. With every ounce of will inside of my heart, I ordered the Anything to reunite my family no matter what it took. To make it a solid invoking of the Gift, leaving no room for doubt, I imagined it happening in the first specific location that popped in my head.

  The stable where we had left the horses.

  In perhaps the oddest use of my Gifts thus far, I called upon the Anything to take us all to Baka.

  Baka the horse.

  It would be difficult for someone of my admittedly great but still limited brain to formulate the right words to describe what then happened. The very substance of time seemed to shift, and the world around me bent horribly. I could not move my head, but somehow I was aware of everything that happened around me, and even the occurrences of things thousands of miles away. Time and distance lost all meaning, and I could see everything.

  The closing of the Curtain stopped in its tracks and bubbled outward to provide enough room. Dad was beside me one instant, and then a flash of color—a streak of almost imperceptible movement—and he was gone, slicing through the air and out of the Blackness. A millisecond later, I exploded out of the Blackness as well, through the Ripping, and tore through the air at a blistering pace.

  But we were not flying. At least I felt no sense of passing air, I hit no ducks on the way, had no time to wave at passersby. I felt nothing—no sense of movement at all, no awareness of my surroundings on the way. Everything was a blur of chaos. We were not traveling—we were simply changing locations.

  Every color in the spectrum, every creature on Earth, every climate, every landscape, millions of people passed my vision in brief flashes, like someone running past an open window, seen through the corner of the eye. The world spun below us, as if some alien giant was twirling it on a green, warty finger. Instead of experiencing feelings of motion, it was like Japan was coming to me.

  Mom and Rusty, in similar fashion miles away, exploded out of a wayside motel in Japan, a gaping hole in the walls of the place temporarily obliterated to allow them passage, and then reforming as if it had never happened. Our minds and emotions were traumatized by the sudden weirdness of it all.

  I will never know what forces of nature or physics or magic were called upon to meet the demands of my new and formidable Gift. I will never know if it took minutes or hours. But my last memory of the journey was seeing the roof of the horse stable melt away, and then standing there, next to Dad, Mom, Rusty, and a dirty, hungry horse named Baka.

  I looked up and the roof was whole again, seemingly never touched.

  For a second, a wall of confusion kept any of us from moving. But then it melted away, and we all embraced. Dad, smelling like garbage and pasted with inky slime, was overcome with emotion, and I thought for sure he was going to puncture one of my lungs with his vice-like hug. He acted like if he ever let go, we might just vanish once and for all, with no more second chances.

  We were together again. Confused as heck, but together again.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the passing thought that the Anything could only be used two more times.

  But I didn't care.

  Later that night, we sat in a hotel room watching TV, witnessing the world fall into more chaos. The Shadow Ka were increasing their area of terror, expanding now to the smaller cities and rural neighborhoods. The small port town we huddled in seemed okay still, although the people refused to venture out from their homes. The days were growing darker as the frightful shadow of the skies increased. The nights were even worse—moonless and empty. And I missed Rayna and Miyoko terribly.

  When we returned to the hotel after our reunion, we'd found Joseph and Hood waiting for us, fretful and impatient. When the Shadow Ka version of my dad grabbed and pulled me into the Blackness, Hood had fallen to the wayside, forgotten in the confusion as the remnants of the chasing pack of Ka screamed their fury and left the area in a blizzard of black wings. Apparently they were not willing to get stuck in the Blackness again after waiting so long for the blocking I had invoked to finally end.

  In the blistering instant when Dad and I had torn through the Black Curtain at the last moment, Hood had seen a blur of color, and then the Ripping had closed. With a heavy feeling of regret that we had not made it, he'd used the Bender Ring to return to the hotel where Joseph, Mom, and Rusty were staying, only to find Joseph as confused as he was.

  But now we sat together again, our eyes glued to the increasing doom on the television. Only a couple of national news channels remained on the air—the rest having succumbed to the wave of coma-inducing Shadow Ka. The world was on the brink of some horrible thing that we did not fully understand.

  We had no idea what had happened to the agents of the Secret Service, but we'd seen no sign of them, and they had never come after the rest of my family. Luckily, Joseph had gotten the new rooms under his name, and it looked like he wasn't yet important enough to be hunted by the United States government.

  “My gosh,” Mom said, “what's going to happen now?”

  “The whole world is in complete chaos!” Joseph said. “Jimmy, what's next?”

  “I don't know,” was my very insufficient reply. “I have no idea. Somehow we have to figure out a few things.”

  I told them everything I could remember, and showed them the Red Disk. About the cyclic riddle of how only Erifani Tup could show how to use the Disk, but you needed the Disk to find him. About how the Disk would then reveal the Dream Warden, and how he or she or it would then reveal the Fourth Gift.

  The final Gift. Farmer had said it would be far more powerful than the Anything, which seemed so impossible. But I knew he was telling the truth.

  Dad also told us his story of escape during that long, sleepless night.

  Lost in a world of madness inside his own brain, which he refused to discuss any further, he'd slowly but surely felt his transformation into one of the Ka. Sometime after his wings had finally formed, he began to wake from the darkness, ready to serve his new masters.

  But deep within, he held onto some semblance of himself, refusing to let the evil override him completely. Still on the fancy airplane where we'd last seen him, with the kind-of-human Raspy, they'd taken off to the skies, the old monster saying he wasn't taking any chances on recovering the Red Disk, and that they were going to retrieve it when we came back into the world up at the North Pole. Circling overhead, with an army of Shadow Ka surrounding them for support, they had waited. Hood had seen this but could do nothing.

  When Dad overheard Raspy and some other person discussing how the waters of the Blackness destroyed the Shadow Ka, he knew it was his only chance to prevent himself from succumbing fully one day, and serving the Stompers.

  So he'd reached down inside of himself and pulled everything good to the forefront, and in a furious burst of energy and will, he'd escaped, bursting through the airplane door, almost causing the thing to crash. He flew away with an army of Shadow Ka behind him. When he saw me standing there by the Ripping, his instincts took over and he grabbed my shirt to protect me from the Ka chasing him from behind, even though I would've been just fine because of the Gifts.

  The rest I had witnessed first hand. Why he survived while the other Ka that fell in the water did not, remained a mystery. But we figured it had something to do with the good that still held tight inside my dad, despite his turning into a Shadow Ka. Perhaps the silvery sea cleans away all that is evil, and the rest of the Ka had nothing left after the process. We didn't know the answer for sure, and right then we didn't care.

  After his story, there wasn't much talk. The next day would bring more troubles, more pain, more sorrow, more adventures, more confusion, more of everything that had come to define my life. But for the rest of that night, we tried our best to put it all aside, eat some decent food, and pretend like all was well. We were still on a high of having been reunited, but it was impossible to ignore what lay ahead.

  Approaching midnight, we were almost ready to give up our forced happiness. Having decided to be extra safe and all sleep in the same room, no matter how crowded, we allowed ourselves to get some sleep.

  That was when we heard the knock on the door.

  When Joseph opened it, and we saw the person standing there, all symptoms of weariness evaporated like a rattlesnake teardrop in a mid-summer desert.

  It was Tanaka.

  But that wasn't the most shocking part.

  It was what he held in his hands.

  The next morning, I was in a stable, talking to a horse.

  “Baka, old buddy,” I said, not in the least bit embarrassed to be speaking to my favorite animal in the world. “I have to admit, I'm scared to death. To make matters worse, I can't even remember the last time I wore a Braves hat.”

  I brushed his coat, knowing that horses liked that sort of thing. It was strange that I felt so bonded to the big brown fella, but then again, when you'd been to the brink of death and back with someone—be it human or horse—you sort of felt a connection.

  “You wouldn't believe who came trouncing into our hotel last night.”

  I paused, as if Baka might actually take a stab at guessing.

  “Time's up. It was Tanaka. We'd thought for sure he was fish food, but he showed up last night like nothing had ever happened. Wouldn't even tell us much, just kept whining that ‘he so tired, gathered all of them’ and some other nonsense.”