Wayfinders, p.17
Wayfinders, page 17
Chloe pinches her lips together. Nothing in the world could get her to answer that question.
Jade takes a few more steps and stops about twenty feet in front of Fable. Her long, dark bangs are pulled to one side of her face, and the snake tattoo on her neck is partly hidden by the collar of her black leather jacket. One corner of her mouth is still curled upward in a sickening grin.
Chloe goes to take a step forward and stops when more Basilisks enter the room: three men and two women decked out in ripped jeans and leather jackets. Some have steel-toed boots and others have chains that jangle on their hips. Engines continue to rumble as more vehicles—motorcycles, judging by the sound—drive into the back parking lot. And in the distance, police sirens continue to wail.
“Move,” Jade commands, her gaze latched on Chloe.
Chloe grips the lead line tighter and backs up closer to Fable instead.
Two more people walk into the room: a man with a round belly and a woman with dark hair tinted blue. They move in behind the other Basilisks and stand with their arms crossed. More than ten people are with Jade now, and Chloe can still hear engines rumbling as new vehicles pull into the parking lot.
The bikers step forward to get closer to Jade. Dar narrows his gaze, and Baxley puffs out his chest.
“You’re not taking him!” Chloe says, stretching her arms out to her sides to protect Fable.
Jade, her mouth still set in a devilish grin, winks at Chloe. “Who said anything about taking him?”
Dar steps in front of Chloe with his fists held out. “Yeh think yeh can—” Before he finishes, the man with the deep scar swings his baton, connecting with the dwarf’s head. Dar’s legs fold, and he drops to the ground and lies perfectly still.
“No!” Chloe says, reaching her free hand toward Dar.
Baxley moves in to help him, and a woman beside Jade unsheathes a thick knife, holding the point of it in the giant’s direction. She pivots the blade one way, and then another, as if advertising the type of damage it might do. Baxley backs away, glaring at the man who knocked Dar unconscious.
“This is going to happen,” Jade says, bouncing her gaze across Chloe’s group. “Living or dying—that’s your choice.”
Chloe shakes her head and holds the lead line tighter than ever. She hears the distant police sirens and realizes they aren’t getting closer, at least not yet.
“Last time I’ll ask,” Jade says, squinting at Chloe. She reaches into her jacket and produces an uneven stick with a green stone mounted to the end near her hand. But it isn’t a stick—it’s her wand.
Baxley goes to take a step forward, and the woman points the knife a little closer to him. Fable whinnies and the fairies dart to new spots. Chloe’s father glances around the room, likely searching for a possible exit.
Jade slowly extends her arm, pointing the tip of the wand in Chloe’s direction. “Out of the way.”
“Or what?” Chloe asks, fresh fear coursing through her body, warming her arms and chest.
Jade stops grinning and squints at Chloe. “Ut lyte kiliveive,” she utters in a deep, throaty voice—more sounds than words, at least to Chloe’s ear. An electric blue bolt shoots from her wand and connects with the tip of the unicorn’s horn, which is a few feet above Chloe. The bolt crackles and shakes, heat discharging from it, and Fable rears up, yanking the lead line out of Chloe’s hands. The unicorn whinnies and neighs, his hooves slicing at the air, and then lands back on the ground, the blue bolt from Jade’s wand still connected to his horn.
With a wave of panic, Chloe realizes something. The blue bolt isn’t connecting Jade’s wand to Fable’s horn—it’s the other way around.
Jade is stealing the unicorn’s magic.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Baxley lunges toward Jade, his arms stretched out in front of him and his hands ready to grab. Jade waves her free arm in his direction, and an invisible force throws the giant backward. He lands hard on his back about ten feet away and slides across the dusty floor. Then he goes to get up and can’t. It’s like another force is bearing down on him, preventing him from moving. The witch’s magic.
“no!” Chloe says, and the word, which she never meant to speak, is a deep guttural sound. She lunges at Jade the same way Baxley did, her arms reaching out and her fingers splayed. But when Jade waves an arm in her direction, Chloe falls backward, as if pushed in the chest, and lands hard on her hip, striking Fable’s front legs. She tries to get up and can’t as a great force, like the headwinds of a hurricane, pushes down on her.
With a long wave of her arm, Jade casts the same spell on Adrina, Chloe’s father, and the fairies, all of whom drop to the floor like dying birds. Then she turns her full attention back to the unicorn. The blue bolt crackles and snaps as the magic streams through the air like a thick, electrical current. The light is almost blinding, and the emerald at the end of Jade’s wand begins to glow.
The sirens louden, which means the police are close. What does it matter though? Once Jade has Fable’s magic, she’ll be unstoppable.
Fable thrashes around, stirring up clouds of sawdust and banging his hindquarters against the wall beside her. He plants his front hooves on the ground and throws his rear legs upward, as if trying to buck off a rider. When his hooves land, he tries to charge forward, but Jade’s magic prevents him.
“let him go!” Chloe says, surprised to get the words out. She manages to rise to her knees despite the hold that the magic has on her. She tries to reach out—to grab the wand and rip it from Jade’s grasp—but her arm won’t move. It feels like it’s pinned to the air.
Jade flicks her wrist, and white sparks burst from the tip of the unicorn’s horn while the blue bolt turns ruby red. Fable’s front legs give out, and he drops to his chest and rolls onto his side, his limp legs lying across the floor.
Chloe tries to holler no! but this time her voice catches in her throat. She attempts to reach for the wand again and can’t. Jade’s magic pushes against her body, her brain, her chest. Baxley, Adrina, and her father are equally powerless, and Dar is still on the ground, unconscious from the blow he took from Axton.
“Ut lyte kiliveive!” Jade says, snapping the wand again.
A bright orange hue fills the room as the bolt changes color. Fable, still lying on his side, paws weakly at the air, as if trying to fight or flee. Chloe’s thoughts jump to Kody again—the time when he’d lain equally helpless in his stable, his front leg set in a plaster cast. A time when Chloe finally stopped believing he could be saved.
She pushes forward a few inches, feeling the grimace on her face tighten and her fingers curl in the air. The wand, which is just out of her reach, the emerald glowing more brightly, might as well be a million miles away.
Fable bucks, punching his back hooves through the wall behind him. His eyes partly close, and his nostrils stop flaring. Chloe doesn’t have to see the stillness in his chest to know that his heart is barely beating. It seems that having his magic stolen will kill him.
Chloe’s father leans forward, trying to get to the witch, and Chloe is stunned by his bravery. Retreating is his normal instinct, but things are different now. He revived a dying mermaid, and he jumped a Winnebago over a rising drawbridge. It’s almost impossible to believe, but what about their adventure isn’t?
Sirens, louder still, but not loud enough. The green emerald near Jade’s hand glows brighter as the wand draws in more magic, and Fable lies on the floor as perfectly still as Kody did.
Jade cackles like a cartoon witch. Areas of her skin turn a soft green: along her forehead, and to one side of her chin. Her eyes continue to glow, and the crimson bolt continues to sizzle and crack. The Basilisks stand around, anxiously watching.
Chloe feels the last of her hope drain away. Maybe Jade will kill her once she’s finished with Fable. Maybe she’ll kill everyone who isn’t a Basilisk.
Dar, conscious again, suddenly rises beside Jade, his red beard covered in sawdust and his helmet light cracked. Instead of lunging for the wand, which Chloe expected, he raises a hand above his head. He’s holding a six-inch tube emitting a bright, clear light. A sun stick. When he throws it at the floor, Chloe knows to shut her eyes.
Shouts and screams erupt all around. Chloe looks to find almost everyone bumping into the walls and one another, completely blinded by the explosion of light. Baxley is crouched over, rubbing his eyes, and Chloe’s father keeps touching the space around him. Dar and Chloe might be the only ones who aren’t affected.
Fable springs to his unsteady feet, slamming his hindquarters against Baxley and knocking him over. The electric bolt that once emitted from his horn is gone, and the wand is lying near the witch’s feet. Chloe takes a few steps and kicks the wand into a pile of wood scraps as Jade stands there, rubbing her eyes.
Fable wobbles around, trying to get his bearings, and then knocks over a few bikers as he charges past them. He lowers his head and almost loses his balance while trotting into the next room.
“wait!” Chloe shouts. She chases after the unicorn, bumping into people in her way, and follows him out of the building. Fable races past the vehicles in the lot—motorcycles, mostly—and then plunges into the woods across the street.
Chloe bolts in the same direction, aware that police cars are now pulling into the parking lot. As she plunges into the forest, twigs pull her hair and poke her skin. “Fable!” she shouts, struggling to find enough breath. “Wait!”
Brakes squeal in the parking lot behind her, and an officer with a deep voice hollers at someone to get down and stop moving! Are they talking to Baxley? Or maybe—
She instinctively ducks as something explodes behind her. Fable, startled by the same noise, jolts to one side of the path he’s making, banging against a tree. Pieces of metal clank against something that might be concrete, and all Chloe can imagine are fiery bits of a vehicle raining down in the parking lot. Did Jade just blow up a police car using her magic?
She shakes her head, refusing to believe it. If Jade is that powerful, there’s no telling what else she can do.
Another explosion rocks the world, and more chunks of metal land all around. People are yelling, and someone hollers in pain.
no, Chloe thinks. this can’t be—
She’s suddenly airborne, her arms and legs stretched out in opposite ways. She must have tripped over a log or snagged her foot on a fallen branch. Just when it seems like she might start flying—like her strange, dreamlike experience might manifest in new ways—she lands hard on her chest and has the wind pushed out of her.
Stars shoot across her vision, and the pain is immense. Her breath returns with a loud, inward gasp. Then she exhales, tasting her own blood and wondering what part of her insides are injured.
Another explosion goes off, and Chloe finds the strength to lift her gaze. Her heart feels like it might stop when she sees the stretch of the empty forest in front of her. Fable is gone.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chloe stares forward, her palms pressed against the earth. Fable is gone, and she’ll never find him.
“No,” she says below her breath. She gets one knee beneath her, and then another, but she’s too tired to stand up. All the running, all the fighting, all the fear—these things have finally caught up to her.
She stares at the dirt, listening to the commotion in the parking lot, which might be a hundred yards behind her. Cars rumble, tires squeal, and doors slam shut. The police officers are yelling, “stop! get down! don’t move!” and Chloe hopes the person being apprehended is one of the bikers.
Someone charges up behind her, crunching through the underbrush, and Chloe clenches her muscles, certain that it’s Jade or one of the Basilisks. But after a few seconds, her father drops down to his knees beside her. “You okay?” he asks, fighting to catch his breath.
Chloe nods. “You?”
He grunts, which Chloe takes as a yes, and then holds his face toward the treetops and forces air into his chest. “You’re bleeding,” he says.
Chloe looks down at the scrapes and scratches. None of them seem very deep. “I’m good.”
“Are you—” her father starts.
“I’m good,” she says, more forcefully than before, and it’s the lie of the century. Her head is throbbing and her muscles ache.
Sirens wail as more police cars turn into the parking lot. Chloe’s deep enough into the woods that she can’t see the flashing lights. She sits up with her legs beneath her, thinking of how far Fable must be by now. “It’s over,” she says.
“We did all we could.” It hurts Chloe that he doesn’t argue with what she said. “We did . . . everything possible.”
He’s right. They drove the Winnebago a hundred miles. They jumped a rising drawbridge, bashed through buildings, and outsmarted the police. It wasn’t enough to save the fairy-tale creatures.
Her thoughts of Fable move to Kody, and she pictures her old horse. She sees him jumping a three-foot upright, his legs curled beneath him, his body clearing the top rail. She hears the thump of his hooves upon his landing and feels the saddle tremble. Over the years, they jumped hundreds of times without being hurt. And then the event at the Shiawassee Fairgrounds happened.
She blinks, as if the memories are images in her eyes that she can wipe away. Then she tells herself that the past doesn’t matter—not with Fable being gone and the other fairy-tale creatures on the run.
But it must matter, at least to her, because her thoughts bounce back to Kody. The cast on his broken leg. The dull, dying look in his eyes. The day Chloe found his stall empty.
In the distance, a few officers are shouting.
“You should have told me,” she says, surprised by her voice. That fateful day in her barn isn’t something she allows herself to think about.
Her father lowers his eyebrows and casts his gaze in her direction. “Huh?” It sounds more like a grunt than something he meant to say.
“You should have told me,” she repeats, more firmly this time. “About Kody.”
Her father’s eyes widen, and he seems to understand. Being part of a family means being able to speak with important parts of sentences missing. “I didn’t . . .” His words fall into the void where unspoken sentiments go.
“I should have known,” Chloe says, still daring to speak the words, but too timid now to look in her father’s direction. “He was my horse.”
Her father falls silent—the kind of dead silent when there aren’t any words to speak. Chloe hears a bird call, the leaves rustle, the commotion in the parking lot. The world goes on even as it’s falling apart. “I’m sorry,” he says at last. “Your mother and I . . . we thought it would help.”
It matters to hear it, but not enough to make what happened any less painful. She stays quiet, a prompt for her father to continue explaining.
“Your mother cried,” he says, his voice softer than a moment ago. “For weeks.”
Heat rushes into Chloe’s cheeks—the kind of heat that comes with feeling loved. Her mother cried? And for Kody?
“That’s probably hard to believe,” he adds.
He’s right, the idea is startling. Her mother doesn’t cry. She kicks and punches and perseveres. Chloe is the one who cries, and her father is the one who’s afraid of everything.
“The doctors came when you were at school.” He pauses, looking for the right words, and up ahead in the forest, a large bird takes flight, shaking the branches. “It was painless, Chloe. I saw him close his eyes. And then . . .” He deposits the rest of what he might say into that void filled with words that are too difficult to speak.
“He what?” Chloe asks, daring to hear the rest of it.
This time, his words are quick and precise: “He stopped hurting.”
She blinks away a tear. “He stopped hurting” is another way to say that Kody died.
“I’m sorry,” her father says. “You’re right—we should have told you.”
Chloe blinks away the wetness in her eyes and stares straight ahead at the last place she saw Fable. “Riding him . . . it felt like flying.”
“Watching you ride felt the same way.”
Another tear forms, and this time, Chloe can’t stop it. It streaks down her cheek, and then the salty taste gets in her mouth. “It was my fault,” she says.
“What are you—” her father starts.
“I pulled back on the reins,” she says, wiping the wetness off her cheek with the ball of her hand.
“You can’t—”
“I didn’t see the distance!” she says, explaining it a different way, and feeling angry at herself, her father, the world.
“It happens, Chloe. All the time.”
She imagines the moment like it transpired yesterday. Kody’s rhythmic pace, the three-bar obstacle, her feet pressing down in the stirrups. Chloe pulled back on the reins—just a little, but that’s always too much. Kody clipped the top rail and then landed awkwardly, his leg bending at a horrible angle. As he collapsed, Chloe went airborne and crashed painfully on her back. That didn’t matter, though. What mattered was the way Kody didn’t get up.
She tries to bury the memory the way she always does. But this time, she can’t.
“I want him back,” she says, wiping away another tear with the back of her hand. “I . . . I miss him.”
Her chest shudders hard, and as another tear falls, she makes no attempt to stop it. Her father puts an arm around her, and for Chloe, the dam holding back a thousand tears finally breaks. She cries for everything that’s missing. Kody, her friends, her riding barn, and Stacey. The long drives in the Winnebago and the togetherness of her family. Nothing’s okay, no matter how much she wants to believe it.
She lowers her head to one side, thankful for the way her father’s shoulder catches it. It’s good to have him close—to be the child and him the parent. Chloe is almost sure he feels the same way.
“I love you,” he says. The words have a weight that Chloe isn’t used to, and they immediately sink into her heart. He loves her the same way that she loves him: forever.
