forehead against the boards. I might have thought he was praying if he hadn’t been shuddering with gasps and sobs.
Something began to rain down from the ceiling, dropping through the steam and landing around Hammer. At first, I thought the roof was caving in, but the objects were small and the shower ended quickly.
Hammer looked around him as the fallen objects began to move, then he lifted his arms in helpless misery.
I realized what the falling objects were. Another kid had burned to death, and these were the gray worms created by the fire.
The worms scuttled across the uneven stone floor toward the far side of the cavern. I craned my neck and looked at the spot where they were heading.
There, I saw a second wheel lying on its side.
This one was not made of fire. It was simply a mass of wriggling worms in the shape of a wheel. It was much smaller than the burning wheel, and it was not surrounded by a silver ring. The worms crawled and wriggled in a clockwise direction, giving the impression that the wheel was slowly turning.
It was a child. The wheel of fire was using the bodies of the children of Hammer Bay to create a second wheel, one not held in place by a magical binding.
Hammer turned back to the burning wheel, pleading with it some more. The fiery eye did not react, did not seem angry. It just stared at him implacably.
There was no way those worms were ever, ever going to be turned back into human children.
Hammer kicked at a section of wood, flipping it over. Underneath was another silver hoop, very much like the one in his tower. He stepped into it.
My iron gate flared white hot. The world went dark.
I woke up slowly. I don’t know how long I had lain there on the stone steps, but I hadn’t soiled my shorts, and I wasn’t dying of thirst. It couldn’t have been longer than a couple hours, although it might have been only a few seconds. I jumped up and looked through the opening in the wall.
Hammer was out of the hoop, crawling across the rocky floor of the cavern toward the baby wheel. Gray worms clung to his clothes and hair as he laboriously scuttled from one jagged rock to the next. He moved dreamily, as though he was sleepwalking.
He reached the edge of a long slab beside the smaller wheel. Now that he was next to it, I had some sense of its scale. It was at least forty feet in diameter.
Hammer plucked the worms off of his clothes and hair and tossed them onto the wheel. Then he stood among the rocks and lifted his head as though taking a deep breath.
He was about to breathe fire onto the baby wheel. He was about to ignite it.
The Uzi was in my hand before I realized what I was doing. It didn’t matter anymore that I was too far away. I had to try something. I couldn’t let a living wheel of fire get loose on the world, and I had no other way to stop him.
I fired a short burst that chipped the rocks twenty feet short of where Hammer was. I adjusted my aim and tried again. This time I hit the small wheel itself, to no apparent effect.
I felt the monstrous wheel turn its attention to me. Waves of power washed over me. My iron gate burned and throbbed. I didn’t dare look at the predator. I didn’t have the guts.
A jet of fire erupted from Charles Hammer’s mouth and sprayed over the baby wheel.
I unloaded on him. Bullets spattered against the slab he was standing on, and miraculously, one struck his ankle.
His foot flopped inward like a broken chicken neck, and he fell hard, sliding down among the rocks. The jet of fire from his mouth roared upward toward the ceiling, igniting nothing.
Fires sputtered along the baby wheel, but they quickly died out. Hammer was going to have to try again. I saw him clutching at his throat.
I threw the empty gun away and sprinted down the steps. I had taken out Carol the receptionist by venting the flames as she was breathing them. Maybe I could do the same to Hammer, or maybe I could stab him with the letter opener in my pocket. Either way, I needed to be closer to him to do it.
I leaped down the steps at breakneck speed, ghost knife in hand, my bloody calf aching. If I fell, if I didn’t stop him in time, I’d be dead, and so would a lot of other people. I tried to avoid a fall.
At the bottom of the stairs I leapt across a fissure onto the wooden walkway. It broke underneath me. My foot slid down the side of a rock and jammed painfully between two stones. The broken plank flew upward and wedged itself against the inside of my thigh. Nothing was broken or sprained, but by the time I freed myself from the mess, Hammer had regained the lip of the slab. His ankle and throat looked completely healed.
He was fifty feet away, too far for me to throw the ghost knife. I’d failed.
He took a deep breath.
An idea came to me. If I could call the ghost knife toward me, maybe I could control it in other ways, too.
I looked down at the spell in my hand and imagined it going through Charles Hammer’s throat.
A jet of flame shot from Hammer’s mouth.
I glared at the tattered spell in my hand and willed it to move.
It shot from my palm and zipped across the cavern for Charles Hammer’s back.
Hammer turned his head back and forth, playing the fire over the baby wheel. Spurts of flame began to shoot up from the wriggling worms. Hammer turned far enough so that part of his face was visible, and I saw his
