Lure Read online

  Chapter 15

  DAVID

  Cearo had disappeared amongst the stacks. How did she find anything in there? The rest of us made our way to the entrance, sticking to the wall so we wouldn’t get lost. I looked around expecting there to be something for us to carry, not that I could think of anything that we’d need to take. We didn’t have any of our stuff with us since we had assumed we’d be returning to camp when we set out on our original hike. When Cearo came to meet us, she handed a couple of violent looking knives to Eric and me.

  Logically, I knew weapons were a good idea, but it freaked me out a little to be carrying any. I kept reminding myself of what would happen if I let the crazy fairies take me again. Then again, that wasn’t all that helpful since the knife probably wouldn’t stand a chance against their superpowers. Better than nothing though, right?

  Cearo started crawling up the tunnel first, then Mom. I went to follow and looked back at Eric to make sure he was coming. He was staring at the books.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said barely loud enough to hear. I wasn’t sure I was even meant to. It sounded like it was just now hitting him that this was real and not one of the stories he was looking at.

  “Well, it is. Let’s get going so we can get home and make this the next bestseller.” I waited for him to turn away from the maze and take a few steps before I followed Cearo and Mom.

  After a couple minutes of climbing, I bumped into a pair of feet. Then a head bumped into me from behind.

  “Sorry, I forgot to tell you to stop,” Mom whispered from just ahead. Unable to see at all in the darkness, we were all piled up at the exit. “Cearo’s going to take a look outside first. I’ll tell you when to move again.” At that moment, light began to stream through the top of the tunnel as the tree lifted off the entrance.

  No one moved while Cearo looked around. She came back a few minutes later, just as we were starting to cramp up, and gave us the all clear. I received another one of her death glares as I scrambled noisily outside.

  Eric’s feet were barely out before the tree sank back down, making him jump in his hurry to get away. Cearo immediately pointed us in the right direction and set off without checking to see if we were following. I stayed a few yards behind her, while Mom and Eric took up the rear. I heard her whispering to him, asking if he was alright, but Eric only seemed capable of grunting in response. Yeah, definitely in shock. Took him long enough.

  When Mom decided she wasn’t going to get anymore out of him, she let him trail us like a zombie and came to join me.

  “You’re handling this well. Better than Eric,” she said on a sigh.

  “He’ll be okay. He’s just got to get his mind wrapped around it.”

  “I suppose. Did anything happen before I got there?”

  “Not really. She’s strange,” I said, gesturing ahead of us to Cearo, “but I’m guessing you already knew that.”

  Mom gave a huff of laughter. “That’s an understatement. But she’s the best ally we could’ve asked for, so no complaints.”

  “Not even about how she left you up in that tower?” Just because I trusted that Cearo knew what she was doing doesn’t mean I loved that decision. At the very least wouldn’t have taking Mom with us to begin with sped things up? “How’d you get out anyway?”

  “It’s a thrilling tale full of mystery and intrigue,” she teased. When I urged her to go on, she laughed and confessed, “Okay, not really. When the bodies of the guards were found, several more came pounding up the stairs, enough that the floors shook just enough to shake the key that last inch toward me. Once I was free of the chains I left the same way as the rest of you. I’m pretty sure one of the guards saw me fall through the window, but it was too late to catch me by then.”

  “Hopefully no one followed you.”

  “Don’t worry. Cearo’s been hiding from them for centuries. No one will find her hide-outs.”

  “Centuries…” I murmured. I watched her walking ahead of us. She’s tiny and had not one gray hair or wrinkle. She looked my age, maybe even younger if you didn’t see her face. It was her face that held the only clue to her actual age. The few times real emotion had flicked across her features, the depth of it would be unfathomable for anyone so young. But I couldn’t see it now, and so for a moment I didn’t believe that this girl could really be so old.

  “…asked her once how old she was,” I heard Mom saying. I realized she’d been responding to my quiet whisper while I’d been staring, and I snapped my attention back to her. “She said she didn’t know, that no one kept track back then.”

  “Wow, that must be a long time then.”

  “Yeah, it’s hard to imagine. Especially while she’s stumbling around like this,” Mom said, trying to suppress a smile.

  Cearo stumbling? No way, I thought. I watched her for a full minute. I was just about to argue that when sure enough, her gaze darted up for a moment and she didn’t see the root protruding from the ground in front of her. She tripped and landed as quietly as ever.

  “I always wondered how she can fall and still manage to do it silently,” Mom said with a smile, having lost the battle with her facial muscles.

  “She’s a mystery, that’s for sure,” I mused. I couldn’t help but smile a little too when the same thing happened again a couple minutes later. It did make her seem younger and less all-powerful. “Why does she keep doing that?”

  “I think she’s wishing she was up in the trees. This is the longest I’ve seen her on the ground and I don’t think she likes it.”

  I thought back to her following us to the Seelie castle, all the while jumping from tree to tree. She’d been graceful and nimble. That definitely wasn’t how I’d describe her right now. She belonged up in the trees, gliding through the branches, high above the ground.

  “Her eyes are yellow most of the time,” I said.

  “Yeah, she’s closest to air. She only grudgingly uses the others. I don’t understand her problem with earth. It’s so comforting.” A flower grew big and bright next to us, and she gazed down at the ground like it was her one true love.

  I chuckled. “You don’t get it because it’s your element. I felt weird in that tunnel we used to get out too.”

  Mom scoffed at me. “That was nothing.”

  Still chuckling, I said, “I haven’t seen her eyes go blue yet.”

  “I’ve only seen her use water a handful of times. Usually she seems in awe of it. She treats it like it’s the most precious thing in the world.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “No, not really. Usually your elements feel like friends, not holy beings.”

  Our conversation tapered off for a while as I thought about this. These elements seemed to be like people to them, another entity living inside you. It sounded beyond strange to me. I would’ve thought it would feel wrong, like someone was encroaching on your space, but they formed bonds with them instead. I couldn’t help but wonder why that hadn’t been the case for Cearo with earth and fire. Maybe there wasn’t enough room for them once air was added to the mix. And I was even more curious about what had happened with water to make Cearo revere it.

  The forest grew dark around us. I have to say it got a little creepy then, but I tried to block out the sounds of things scuttling and crawling just out of sight by talking with Mom about all the stuff we missed about home. Eric joined us after a while, having gotten bored with the dazed, zombie life. I had just decided that I was never going to leave home again without cookies to appease potential kidnappers and a taser in case the cookies failed, when all of a sudden Cearo dropped out of the sky, landing inches from us. I hadn’t even realized she’d gone into the trees.

  She looked angrily at each of us before settling on Mom. “Be on guard.”

  Mom immediately took a defensive stance and looked around for the trouble. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing at the moment.” She waited to see if Mom would respond, and right as Mom started to, she
cut her off. Her voice terse, she said, “but that could change in the next moment. You are getting loud. You will begin to attract things soon, if you have not already. Be on guard.” With that, she turned away and resumed the march through the darkness.

  Shit. You probably could’ve heard us from back in the human world. What if the Seelie had picked up our trail again? The three of us peered around, trying to see their faces in the darkness. When they didn’t come crashing through the trees to get us, we caught up to Cearo silently.

  “Stay together. I’m going to go try to make peace,” Mom whispered before jogging ahead to join Cearo. I couldn’t tell if they were talking too quietly for the words to drift back to us or if Mom just decided staying quiet would be more appreciated. Either way, I felt like any sound I made was obtrusive, so I practically tip-toed behind them.

  I was still trying to pick out the shapes of fairies in the dark when a cluster of familiar looking flowers caught my eye. Even in the faint, nearly nonexistent light I could tell these were the same kind of flower as the one Mom took a picture of back in Yosemite. They still managed to shine their bright colors like little suns despite the darkness. I was a little sad to leave them behind. They were only flowers, but they felt like a tether to our world, to home.

  A crack, like a twig snapping, sounded from up above just as a flying squirrel went gliding over my head onto a branch just ahead. Evidently some animals made it over to this side of the gate too. I was grinning as I watched the cute rodent munching on a seed. I was just about to wish it better luck here than we were having when it was snatched away. It happened so quickly I didn’t even get a glimpse of the predator. Eyes wide and mouth gaping, I picked up the pace to get away from whatever it was. Hopefully that predator was content with a diet of squirrels, but I didn’t want to be around to tempt it.

  As I got closer to Mom and Cearo, bits of their conversation drifted back to me.

  “…care if they trust you?” Mom whispered. Cearo’s response was so soft that I didn’t catch any of it. “I just think it would help…. I don’t even know how you got to…this.” She gestured to take in Cearo’s general existence. She glanced at Cearo expectantly as if she was waiting for Cearo to reveal a big secret. Cearo bristled and stayed silent. She must have sensed my presence then as she turned her head slightly to look back at me from the corner of her eye. Her expression held nothing in it, which made the meaning of her question take longer to register in my mind.

  “Where is the other one?” she asked. Mom’s head whipped around and I realized Cearo had been referring to Eric. I looked back, expecting him to be a few feet behind me where I left him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “I told you to stay together,” Mom whisper-shouted at me.

  “He was right here,” I pointed to the place I left him, not five yards away. “I only stepped away a minute ago.”

  We all went back to the spot and searched for some sign of where he may have gone, but it was so dark that it was hard to make out anything. It was as if he’d just vanished into the night. We split up. There were only three possible directions he could’ve gone, since we knew he hadn’t passed us. I made sure to make my path extremely obvious in case they needed to follow me.

  I was glad I did, because I found Eric not a minute later crouching by a bush. I was going to hit him hard if he had made us freak out like that just to do his business. I was about to say so when I heard him talking. It sounded like he was comforting something.

  “Hey, you’re a good boy, yeah. We’ll find your master. Good boy,” Eric was saying. I moved closer to him and peered over his shoulder. There was a little, shaggy, black puppy curled up in the bush, whimpering and looking up at us with its big, adorable, deploring eyes. Its tail gave a few light thumps when Eric scratched its head. It let out a howl when it spotted me.

  “How did a puppy get here?” I wondered aloud.

  Eric gave a little start, noticing me for the first time. “I don’t know, but we have to take him with us. He can’t survive out here.”

  I had to think about it. Mom and Cearo wouldn’t like it but, “yeah, we can’t let the crazy fairies get their hands on him. Or any of the other monsters for that matter.”

  We started coaxing the puppy to follow us. Just as we turned to head back to the others, four sets of glowing red eyes appeared on all sides. The bodies of four enormous, black dogs followed. Their lips curled back into snarls, revealing sharp canines that were sure to never let go if they managed to get hold of us. They stalked closer and I grabbed hold of the knife Cearo had given me. Looks like it’ll come in handy after all. The blade flashed only weakly in the sparse moonlight, but it was enough to elicit more snarls. One came from the puppy. How did that sound come out of a little puppy? I turned back to it. Right before my eyes it grew and transformed into another of the giant dogs. When its transformation finished, its eyes focused on me and it lunged.

  The other dogs took that as their cue and charged at us. First instinct was to hunch over and hopefully let them jump over us while we dove for any empty space we could see. Three of the dogs collided with each other over where Eric and I had been standing moments ago. The remaining two tackled us before it could even be called a chase.

  The dog landed on my back, pushing me to the ground on my stomach. I tried to swing my knife back at it, but I was not in a good position. I figured I had a second before its jaws locked onto my neck when another knife came whizzing over my head and the dog’s weight fell off my back.

  Cearo was there, sprinting toward me, her own knives in her hands, ready to throw. I was on my knees by the time she got there. She hauled me the rest of the way to my feet and pulled me along as we ran away from the dogs.

  “Eric — ” I managed to stammer out.

  “Willa has him.”

  We were full-on sprinting, crashing a rough path through the foliage and still two of the dogs were chasing us. They were gaining on us with every step, and I prayed that we’d find a way out of this fast. Cearo was going full-speed ahead, looking up again but thankfully, not tripping over anything this time. I didn’t know what she hoped to find though, because we definitely didn’t have time to climb a tree.

  One of the dogs caught up to me. I felt his teeth grasp my ankle. I went down hard, the breath whooshing out of my lungs as I hit the ground with a solid thump. The dog reared up to bite at a more lethal spot, but Cearo was there with a knife aimed straight at its heart. The body landed on top of me, pinning me in place.

  The other dog had almost reached us when it got its ankle caught in a root that was jutting up from the ground. Cearo used the time to pull me out, but before I could run again, she motioned to a nearby tree. There were enough knots in it that it would make for easy climbing under normal conditions, but I wasn’t sure with my ankle bleeding. Still, I climbed. Putting weight on my ankle hurt like hell, but I could handle it. With Cearo helping to pull me up, we made it far enough that the dogs wouldn’t be able to reach us.

  As soon as we were both sitting on a branch a good fifteen feet higher than the nearest snapping jaws, the dog broke loose of the root. It only took me a second of panic before I realized that was no accident. Cearo had been manipulating it into acting as a rope. She released her power over it as soon as we were safe. The root went limp and slithered back into the ground. The dog ran over to our tree and went on snarling and barking, but its jumps were useless. It couldn’t reach us up here.

  I watched Cearo’s eyes switch back from green to yellow as we both caught our breath. When I was no longer huffing and puffing, I took a look at my ankle. It was still bleeding, but it didn’t look that bad. The dog’s bite had been shallow and hadn’t lasted long.

  “Wrap it,” Cearo said. “The hounds will be attracted to the smell of your blood.”

  Figuring as much, I ripped off a piece of my shirt to use as a bandage. I wrapped it tight so that no more blood seeped out of there, but then I noticed the rest of my shirt. I was covered in bloo
d. It couldn’t have been mine though. I probably had some scrapes that had gone unnoticed, but I was sure there was nothing that could’ve done this.

  “It is from the hound that fell on you,” Cearo said, noticing my alarm. “It smells terrible.” She wrinkled her nose and turned away. I took a sniff and immediately regretted it. She was right. It was the worst smell in the world. It was like sulfur and smoke and rot. I took my shirt off and held it out. Part of me knew I shouldn’t abandon my clothes and what little protection they provided against the environment. A little is better than nothing and who knew if I would need it. But, oh, the stench.

  “Throw it back the way we came,” Cearo said.

  “Are you sure? What if the weather turns bad?”

  “We will find you something else. Nothing will get rid of that scent.”

  I launched it as far as I could and like a trained pet, the remaining dog ran after it. Glad to have him gone even a small distance, I felt a little safer.

  “How are we going to find my mom and Eric?” I asked.

  Cearo studied the area like she knew every square inch, which she probably did. “I have another hide-out near here. We will go there in the morning when the hounds have gone. I will find Willa then.”

  I looked toward the dog, which was in the process of attacking my shirt. “Do you think they’re okay?” I knew now that Mom had grown up in this world, but I was still terrified for her and Eric. Our failed defense against Boden and his crew was the first time I’d seen her try to fight. I didn’t know how well she’d hold up against the dogs, especially with Eric to protect.

  “She is well-trained. I am confident in her chances.”

  Knowing that there was nothing I could do right now with that beast down there, I once again put my faith in Cearo’s words and waited for sunrise.