Violet's Story

Chapter 4

Four

I wake up to find dim light trying to force its way through the dusty window. My stomach aches. My arms are numb. Nate stretches his tied-up legs and groans. He sits up, pushing his floppy hair out of his eyes.

“Why am I so hungry?” I ask. “It’s barely morning.”

From a shadowed corner, Zell laughs. “Morning’s come and gone, sweetheart.”

“What?”

He moves toward me. “Sorry, had to hit you with another stunner.” He starts untying my rubbery arms. “The plan took a little longer than expected to put into place.” Heat prickles down my arms as blood rushes to my fingertips. I clench and unclench my hands, and the prickling intensifies.

Zell hauls me to my feet. “Time to start the show.” He holds my hands together and reties my wrists in front of me. “I’m not sure why I’m even bothering with this; I know you’re useless without your magic and weapons.”

Not true. “Are we taking the paths?” I ask, thinking that perhaps Nate and I can break away from Zell and end up somewhere else.

“Don’t be an i***t. Drake’s human.”

“And so am I,” Nate adds.

Zell laughs and shakes his head. How does he know Nate survived a journey through the faerie paths? “Besides, we don’t have to travel anywhere,” Zell says. “We’re right where we need to be.”

He cuts the rope around Nate’s ankles and pulls him off the floor just as Drake enters the room. Drake rubs his oversized hands together and exposes his teeth in an ugly grin. “Let’s get this party started.”

He yanks Nate away from Zell and pushes him out the door, then reaches for my arm and forces me out after him. I trip on a step, regain my balance, and look around. My heart thumps out a faster rhythm. I recognize our location, though I’ve only been here once before. We’re at the edge of the Creepy Hollow forest. The trees come to an end a few paces away, and beyond that is a flat, grassy patch. And beyond that—a sheer drop that ends so far below it’s impossible to make out the bottom.

I wish I didn’t know that right now.

Zell and Drake steer us out of the trees. On the other side of the ravine, I see the sun disappearing in a blaze of orange and pink. But something on this side catches my attention. A contraption of some sort, built right on the edge. A wooden beam runs parallel to the ground and juts out over the ravine. It almost looks like one of those hangman diagrams I’ve seen children drawing in their notebooks when I’ve been on the occasional school assignment.

Oh no. No no no no no.

“You can’t do this,” I shout, digging my heels into the ground.

“You don’t even know what we have planned,” Zell says, forcing me to keep moving.

“You’re going to hang Nate from that thing and dangle him over the gorge!”

“W-what?” Nate stammers.

“You forgot about the part where we let the rope drop a little further every few minutes, just to hear him scream,” Zell says.

We reach the contraption. Zell pushes me down onto the grass. Drake pulls a lever and the wooden beam swings around so that it’s above us. Rings of metal along the top of the beam guide a rope that ends in a hook.

“So, um, you’re not actually going to let me die, are you?” Nate says, his voice wavering slightly. “I mean, you believe that my mother cares about me, and you’re just trying to scare her into showing up, right?”

“Well, if she doesn’t show, then we have no further use for you,” Drake says. “So I guess we’ll let you drop all the way then.”

I kick Zell’s legs as hard as I can. He falls with a cry, and I scramble to my feet. I run at Drake, leap onto his back, and loop my arms over his head. I yank my rope as tightly as I can against his throat.

“Run!” I scream at Nate. “Run, you id—Argh!” A searing pain burns across my left shoulder, and I tumble off Drake. Zell’s face is suddenly right above mine. He grabs the front of my shirt and pulls me closer, his hands still sparking with the magic he just threw at me.

“I should stun you, stupid girl, but as punishment for that little act of rebellion, I think you should be awake to hear your friend scream.”

“Toss her off the cliff,” Drake gasps, his hand at his bruised neck. “What the hell do we need her for?”

Zell drops me back onto the ground. My shoulder screams. “To find the other guardian, remember? If this doesn’t work out.”

“Fine.” Drake takes hold of the hook and pulls the rope toward Nate.

Nate looks at me. “Why didn’t you run?” I whisper fiercely.

Confusion mingles with the fear in his eyes. “Did you really think I’d leave you here?”

A strange warmth blooms within my chest. It’s unfamiliar, this feeling, and I want to examine it closer. But the hook is now attached to the rope around Nate’s wrists. Drake’s hands move to the handle on the side of the contraption. He starts winding. The rope across the top of the beam grows taut, pulling Nate clear off the ground. His face twists in pain. With a flick of the lever, he’s dangling over the ravine.

“Whoa!” Nate looks down, blinks, then raises his gaze to the starry sky. “Not cool. Definitely not cool.”

“This is insane!” I shout at Drake. “How is this woman supposed to know you’re dangling her son off some arbitrary cliff?”

Drake gives me a small smile. “She’ll know.”

I bite down on my knuckles to keep myself from screaming obscenities at Drake. Do something! I silently yell at myself instead. Save him, dammit, it’s what you’re trained to do!

A fork of lightning splits the sky. I look up to see a dark cloud that I’m sure wasn’t there moments ago. Zell turns his gaze upward. I can’t tell if he’s causing the storm, but he seems like the kind of twisted guy who’d manipulate the weather just to add to the drama of the whole situation.

“Ready for some fun?” Drake shouts above the wind that gusts through the ravine. He releases the contraption’s handle, and, with a yelp of fright, Nate drops like a stone.

“Stop!” I scream with such force that it feels like everything inside me hurts. Drake grabs the spinning handle, and Nate jerks to a halt, crying out in pain.

At the tips of my fingers, which are stretched desperately toward Nate, I see the tiniest sparkle vanishing. I lower my hands and check that the metal band is still attached to my arm. It is. But that was definitely magic sparkling at my fingertips.

Maybe the band doesn’t actually block magic. Maybe it just makes magic really difficult to use.

Okay. I have a feeling this is going to hurt. A lot.

Nate cries out again before I can decide what magic to try and force out of myself. I look up, but Drake hasn’t dropped Nate again. We have a new problem: Nate’s hands are slipping out of the rope.

And then I notice something else: a solitary figure standing on the other side of the ravine. But there’s no time to hang around and find out if it really is Nate’s mother.

“Violet!” Nate’s hands slide a little further through the rope.

I grit my teeth and dig my fingers into the dirt, drawing strength from the earth. My wrist burns. And burns. And burns. I can almost smell the sizzling flesh beneath the metal on my wrist. With a roar of pain and anger, I throw everything I can muster at Zell. The ball of purple sparks hits him in the stomach, and he flies backward into Drake. Drake loses hold of the handle—but it doesn’t matter because Nate is already falling.

The magic has torn through the ropes at my wrists, an added bonus I hadn’t anticipated. I push myself to my feet, run for the edge of the cliff, and leap into Nate’s flailing arms. Now we’re both plummeting through the air, and Nate is screaming in my ear, and I’m trying desperately to get my stylus out of my boot.

What the hell was I thinking? I can’t even open a doorway in the air when I’m stationary. How do I expect to do it when the air is moving past me at a zillion miles an hour? But there’s nothing like the idea of impending death to motivate me.

I maneuver our falling bodies so I’m underneath Nate. If a doorway opens, we need to fall into it, not past it. I write the words in the air rushing up behind my back.

Nothing.

Come on. Focus.

“We’re gonna die!” Nate screeches.

“Shut up!” I yell, but the wind snatches the words away the moment they leave my mouth. I can barely feel my fingers past the agony in my wrist, but I have to do this.

I try again. And again. I close my eyes and imagine the words as I write them.

And suddenly we’re surrounded by black emptiness. No motion. No nothing.

Yes! I did it! And we managed to escape Drake and Zell.

We start falling out of the blackness.

No, wait, that wasn’t my destination. No! Drake and Zell are not my destination!

But that’s exactly where the paths deposit us—on the grass beside the wooden contraption.

“What the hell?” Nate gasps.

I jump up, grab his hand—reddened and scratched from the rope—and run for the tiny cabin. I hear Zell shouting behind us. Crap! Has he recovered already? I scribble words onto the cabin door and plunge into the darkness with Nate.

There’s a snicker behind me, and I know Zell made it through before the doorway closed. I stop my mind before it can go anywhere.

Don’t think.

Don’t choose a destination.

Zell is so close; if I exit now will he be able to follow us through? I don’t know. I thought you had to have contact with someone to travel together through the paths, but the fact that I can still hear him …

I clamp my uninjured hand over Nate’s mouth. Perhaps, if we’re quiet enough, Zell will think we exited and he missed it. Nate’s breath is hot against my hand, and his lips are as soft as I imagined them to be from the window seat of his bedroom. That strange warmth returns to my chest. It radiates down to my stomach and along my arms, like the sunlight of spring awakening a frozen land.

This is weird.

I remove my hand from Nate’s mouth, sure that he’s got the message by now.

“I know you’re there,” Zell calls softly. “How about we play a little game?” I bite my lip. I won’t be tricked into anything. “Nathaniel’s mother disappeared, and I have a feeling she won’t be back. So I think it’s time to move on to plan B.” His voice shifts around us as he speaks. Is he moving? Or is this some strange quality of the paths? “So the game goes like this, Violet,” Zell continues, and I shiver at the way he whispers my name. “You agree to tell me where I can locate a certain faerie guardian, and I agree not to kill young Nathaniel. If you decide not to tell me, then you get to watch him die.”

Great game.

“Now. The guardian I need is one with a special talent. A talent for finding people. Anyone. Anywhere. Have you heard of this guardian?”

I squeeze Nate’s arm so hard I probably stop the supply of blood to his fingers.

“You know who I’m talking about,” Zell says, his voice sounding closer and then further away. “And when I get my hands on you I will tear the answer from your mind.”

Well, you’ll have to catch me first.

I pick my destination. We drop out of the darkness and into the shopping mall, right in front of the elevator, just like I planned. It’s open—thank you thank you thank you—and empty. Of course it’s empty, it’s night time. I rush into the elevator, never letting go of Nate’s hand, and hit the first button I see.

Zell appears.

“Close, dammit, close!” I shout at the mechanical doors. Through the slowly narrowing gap, I see Zell raise his hand. The doors meet and the entire elevator shudders under the power of Zell’s spell. I raise my stylus to the mirror beside me, clench my teeth to keep from crying out in agony, and scribble once more. We run into the opening darkness.

“Draven Avenue,” I blurt out desperately.