How Many Heroes

17- Ritual

Before I opened my eyes, I felt a shard of glass digging into my back.

"Ow!" I yelled.
"Sorry," Alyssa said. "We were in a hurry."

I was on my back, looking up at a million stars. Blades of grass and glass poked at my skin. A few yards ahead of me was a large hole in the side of a building, seeming like a portal to some demonic dimension. And then I remembered-

"The hospital!" I yelled in an oddly muffled voice. I reached up to my face and pulled a piece of plastic off of my face.

"It's the oxygen mask," Maria said. "You fainted while you were in there, and we figured it was because you weren't getting enough air."

I looked back at St. Monica's. From the side, I could see where the fire had made part of the building collapse. The part I could see through the broken window truly did look like hell. Flames swirled mercilessly over everything; even from where I sat I could feel the heat of it. In my heart, I knew it was over. There was nothing we could do. By morning, St. Monica's Hospital and Orphanage would be nothing more than a memory, a terrible, terrible memory.

"We lost," I whispered. I knew Maria and Alyssa could still hear me.

"This isn't over yet, " Maria said, her voice gentle but firm. "Get up. Our friends need our help."

She was right, but right now all I wanted to do was lie in grass and wallow in my failure. Still, I knew that if I didn't get up by myself, Maria would drag me to my feet. So I stood up and said, "Where do we go now? "

I heard a faint yell from the clearing in the front of the hospital, followed by a sound like soldiers marching out of time. "That way," Alyssa said, then ran toward the noise.

Maria and I followed, though not with her speed or relative ease. As soon as I saw what was happening, I froze in fear. Alyssa and Maria pulled me behind a bush.

"Are you crazy?" Maria sais. "You could get killed standing there like

that."

Killed. I kept forgetting that I could die here. For all my adrenaline, I still felt that I would wake up in my bed in a few moments.

I dared to raise my head slightly above the bush. It was like a movie out there. Two figures had been lifted upon a crowd of people dressed in black and electric green. The gang tossed them around , chanting a phrase I couldn't understand. My stomach dropped. The people being thrown around like dolls were Hathaway and Jesse. And one of them was unconscious.

"Oh my God," Maria said. She put her hand over her mouth.

"Where's Luke?" Alyssa asked.

I focused in on the scene. Behind the crowd, I could just make out two people fighting faster than my eyes could follow. One of them had long hair so blond it was almost white- Amy. Luke must've been the one dressed in a black.

"What's he doing?" Maria said, noticing Luke.

I glanced at Alyssa. She looked as confused as Maria was. I realized that I was the only person here who knew exactly what was going on.

I had to pick my words carefully. "He's fighting Amy. He has to because..." I hesitated. "If she goes down, so will the entire gang. Eventually."

Maria raised an eyebrow. I thought she would ask me how I knew all this, but instead she looked back and said, "How the hell is he fighting so fast?"

I shook my head. "We'll ask him later. What do we do now?"

Maria scrunched her eyes in concentration. "We're dressed almost the same as them, right? Just without the spray paint. We can go inside of their... mosh pit or whatever and try to grab onto Jesse and Hathaway."