Slowly, the light came back to the forest floor. The creaking and groaning of trees waiting to cause pain diminished, until it disappeared altogether.

  I’d helped about twenty trees. It was enough. The joy at being freed from an anger that wasn’t theirs spread like a wildfire would, making the leaves reach toward the light. A bird twittered somewhere off in the distance.

  “Well that’s pretty brave,” Starren said.

  I beamed at her. “Thank you.”

  “No. The bird, dummy. To come back here already.”

  “Oh.”

  She slid her sword back into its sheath. “Leave it to my sister to fix an angry forest.”

  “Hey. That should sound like more of a compliment. Like, ‘wow, my sister fixed an angry forest. I wonder how many lives she’s saved?’”

  “Nice work, Trish,” Carver said. “How did you learn to do that?”

  That was a great question. With no answer. “They told me they were in pain, I just tried to help.”

  A vine stroked my check where the monster had sliced it open. It had healed, but the skin was still sensitive and the touch tickled.

  That made me think about the other slices, which made me look down at my clothes. I stuck a hand all the way through my shirt. “Seriously? Now I have to go tromping around Faerie with my skin hanging out?”

  Carver raised his eyebrows incredulously. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

  Starren looked me over. “She has strange priorities sometimes. You get used to it.”

  I glared at her for a second. The trees around us writhed.

  “Sorry, sorry, I’m not really mad.”

  Whoever had done this was terrible. Trees and plants in general were very peaceful. This had been intentional. An act of war.

  “Someone caused this. Someone came through here and turned these trees crazy.” I started walking in the same direction we’d been desperately running for our lives thirty minutes ago.

  Starren caught up and grabbed me. “Someone with your ability?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t see that much. I just know that they went through and did the opposite of what I just did until the shadow monster appeared and started killing things.”

  “Forest spirit,” Carver corrected.

  I flapped my hand at him. “Yeah, yeah, forest spirit. I think it thought it was protecting the trees, but I’m not sure why.”

  “Great,” Starren grumped. “And I thought one of you was bad enough.”

  We walked a couple steps.

  “Anyone got anything to eat?”

  * * *

  * * *

  The rest of the day went by uneventfully. Which was nice, for once. The forest we walked through felt wary, but had none of the anger of the trees earlier.

  Thankfully. All that emotion stuff was exhausting.

  And I didn’t want to think about how my emotions affected the plants, because that meant I needed to get better at controlling them. Bottling them up. I needed to figure out how to be more like Star.

  And I’d thought she was so cold when I met her. To be fair to myself, she had been cold. But now I knew why. It was just easier that way. So much easier, if you didn’t care.

  Then I saw Nina’s face, grinning at me with a tray of cookies, and I knew. I could never not care again. Not caring was terrible.

  “We’re getting close,” Starren said.

  My head snapped up. Finally!

  But… what?

  There wasn’t anything around us that looked like a mine of any kind. The forest went on around us, just like it had since we’d left Carver’s.

  “Don’t ogres live in smelly holes in the mountains or something? How is this…” I gestured around us. “A mine?”

  “Humans dig into mountains because it’s easier,” Starren said. “Ogres don’t care much about easy.”

  That wasn’t intimidating at all.

  “Okay. We should probably have been talking about what to expect those last however many miles.”

  “Death,” Starren said grimly. “Just expect death. If it isn’t death, then I’ll consider us lucky.”

  “How optimistic,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Then maybe we should be coming up with another plan,” Carver said. “What about going back to following Nara’s path? That plan was much safer.”

  “Can we get them to come above ground somehow?” I nodded toward the trees. “Then we’d have some help.”

  “We can try.” More optimism from Starren. But really, what could be worse than the monster we’d just encountered? I shivered, the fear from the trees back near the spirit resonating through my brain.

  “Ferid will send others after you,” Carver said. “He isn’t going to come up here himself. That’s not a great plan, it announces our presence with no helpful results.”

  “I don’t know that he won’t come,” Starren answered. “He likes to take care of things himself. We didn’t leave things in a good place the last time we saw each other.”

  “After you stole his ore?”

  She winced. “And maybe a jewel or two.”

  I groaned. “We’re doomed.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  I straightened. “We’ve been doomed before. I’m sure we’ll live through this to be doomed again, until the final time when we don’t survive our doom.”

  “Easy for you to say.” Starren shrugged. “What? I’m serious. You come back from the dead.”

  Carver squinted at me. “Back from the dead?”

  That showed how much Starren trusted him, to speak in front of him like that. Starren didn’t make mistakes. It was annoying.

  “How about I ask to meet him first, and if he says no, we try something different? How does he feel about Quintin?” I asked.

  “Hates him.” Starren’s voice had gone monotone, like it always did when our father was mentioned.

  “Figures. I haven’t met anyone that doesn’t. I guess I won’t mention who I am then, just that I need his help with something.”

  Starren snorted. “He’s as likely to eat you as help you.”

  I really should have listened to my mom better when she’d been trying to teach me this stuff. “I still don’t get that. I thought ogres were intelligent.”

  “They are. That doesn’t mean they won’t eat you. Aren’t there humans that eat each other? I saw it on TV. Unless that was one of the fake shows?”

  “Not fake.” When she’d first moved in she’d thought all TV was human history. That had taken some interesting explaining and a lot of behind the scenes videos to finally change. I still had to clarify for her sometimes.

  “Well then, I’m not sure why you expected any less from ogres.”

  Good point. Basically I’d never really thought about it. And though it didn’t change my determination to do anything to get Dan and Nina back, it did put a damper on my enthusiasm. “Point me in the right direction.”

  She did. Literally, she just pointed, right at a boulder I hadn’t even noticed.

  “That rock?”

  It didn’t look like anything but your average boulder, just like the seventy-two others we’d passed today. Mossy stuff, check. Cracks and stuff, check. “Are you sure? How do I move it?”

  Carver stepped forward and felt around for a second. “It’s here somewhere.”

  “Wait, you mean you’ve been here?” I glared at Starren. “She brought you here when she came to steal ore from the ogres?”

  Carver stared at me, then looked at Starren, his hand flapping around on the rock. “Yes?”

  “Star! You try to leave me behind all the time, and I can come back from the dead, but then you take Carver with you on some stupid death mission?”

  She shrugged.

  “To be fair, she did suggest I stay behind. But I had maps of the tunnels that she needed, so I got to come along.” He beamed at her. “That’s when we officially became a couple.”

  I crossed my arms. “How romantic.”

  A latch clicked. “Ha!” Carver fist pumped the air. In a very weird way, like he was trying to imitate something he’d read.

  The stone began to lift. It tilted backward, until it looked like it should tumble over, but didn’t. Beneath where it had been, a tunnel went down, curling off underground until I couldn’t see where it went. It had been carved out of the rock, smoothly cut, with the same type of lighting as at the Fae Distribution Center.

  Starren smirked at Trish’s face. “Ogres are very mechanically minded.”

  “I guess so.”

  We all waited. I wasn’t sure what the other two were expecting, but I figured a watchogre of some type would be coming to figure out what was going on.

  Nothing.

  Impatient, Starren grabbed a small stone and chucked it down the tunnel. It didn’t make a sound. Nothing to even start the echo I would have thought would follow.

  We all tensed, hands on weapons.

  Still nothing.

  “I guess they trust their door,” Carver said.

  “I guess so.” Starren let go of her sword and blew out a breath. “And I guess that means we’re going in.”

  Without waiting to see if Carver or I had anything to say about that, she took off down the tunnel.

  “Seriously?” I asked Carver.

  He shrugged. “It’s Starren.”

  I snorted in a pretty fair imitation of her snorts. “And that’s all that needs to be said.”

  I moved to the edge of the tunnel where the stairs started winding down. Just looking, I probably wouldn’t have been able to guess that it was underground. Too bad I already knew.

  There were some very bad things about not being able to die. Being trapped underground seemed like it ranked pretty high on that list. I hadn’t given it any thought before, but now…

  Now it was too late. My sister had been dumb enough to go down. And I’d be dead before I let her do something like this without me.

  Chapter 12

  Somehow the fact that this wasn’t some drippy, creepy cavern out of the movies almost made it worse. At least in the movies, you knew what to expect. ‘Don’t go in there,’ made a lot of sense when you were watching someone do something stupid on screen.

  Yeah. If someone were watching us right now, that’s probably what they’d be saying.

  The steps were perfectly even. The wall, perfectly sculpted. Maybe these ogres were Egyptians or something. Seriously, how did they make it look like this?

  Catching up with Starren had been easy. She wouldn’t admit it if I asked but now that we were this far, I was pretty sure she was glad we were along.

  I wasn’t sure I was.

  Yeah, the whole not letting my sister die alone thing was important. But the thick dread creeping through me felt pretty important at the moment too.

  Neither of the other two spoke, at all, leading me to believe we were in the same boat. Or cave, as it were.

  We continued down for some time. The only indication that we were still descending being the stairs, and the air temperature. Somehow the walls stayed exactly the same. Weren’t there supposed to be layers or something?

  In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Nina’s advice. Which had me thinking about Nina, which wasn’t good at the moment. My emotions were all out of whack.

  Tears pricked my eyes. I would not cry in front of Starren and Carver. It wouldn’t happen, I wouldn’t let it.

  I’d been saying that a lot lately, like I had any control.

  The thought made the stupid tears worse. I swiped them away. Now was not the time for a breakdown.

  There. The end of the stairs. Something different to think about.

  And at the bottom of the stairs, the tunnel veered off in two directions. Something to think about way too much.

  Starren stopped, staring ahead. Not looking down either tunnel, just staring.

  I moved past her and looked down the left tunnel. Nothing looked any different than the tunnel we’d been following. The right tunnel proved to be the same.

  “Now what?” I whispered.

  “I’m thinking,” she whispered back. Somehow she made even her whisper sound angry. I needed to start practicing this stuff.

  After all this, I was only going to care about the people I could protect. No more. I couldn’t give up caring completely, Nina had accidentally seen to that with all her stupid kindness and stuff, but I couldn’t just leave my heart out here waiting to get pummeled.

  Nina. Dan. Starren. Jaden. Cray. No way I could leave Jaime off this list. And if Jaime and Jaden were on there, Rebecca and Lucy had to be too, even if I didn’t like Lucy. Jaime would be devastated if something happened to her mom or sister.

  Wren should be on the list. And maybe Rosie.

  Ugh. Why was this list getting so long? But that was it. I was never adding anyone else. If Starren left me here thinking about this crap much longer, I was just going to pick a direction and go with it.

  “Left,” Carver said.

  “What?” Starren came out of her thought coma. “Last time we came through here, we were moving too fast to pay any attention to directions. How do you know that?”

  “I was going back through the maps in my head. We want to go left.”

  “Just like that?” I pointed at my own head.

  “Ugh,” Starren said. “It’s always just like that with him.” She left us standing there and started down the left tunnel.

  At least one of us knew Carver well enough to be confident he knew what he was talking about.

  More shiny tunnel. We walked until we came to a section that veered off in four directions. Carver pointed right instantly. Was he some kind of genius or something? Maybe this was part of his ability, which I hadn’t asked the details about but probably should know. So many abilities out there, and I had barely scratched the surface, meeting fae. Yeah, it could stay that way.

  We hadn’t made it far down the next tunnel when something made the hairs on my neck stand up. I spun around to see two giant creatures with some kind of pointy staves behind us, not even moving like they were waiting for us to notice them.

  Starren didn’t even need me to say anything. She felt my tension or something, because she spun around to face them also.

  The butterflies in my stomach began batting around.

  Ogres were even more huge than I’d expected. Tall, yes, I’d guessed that part, but I could probably lie sideways across their chests and not touch both sides.

  Maybe it was the armor. Yeah, had to be. They weren’t that big under the armor. A dull grey that should have been ugly, but somehow wasn’t. If that stuff was made out of the same ore Starren had stolen for her sword, there was no way we were getting through it.

  Full face masks on their helmets. Full armor down their legs. The only skin showing was on their arms, covering huge muscles.

  Well shoot.

  “Uh, hi,” I said brilliantly.

  No answer. Bright eyes shown from the helmets that hid the rest of their faces.

  Starren moved up in front of me. “We’re here to see Ferid.”

  No answer.

  Starren backed up, slightly, herding me and Carver down the tunnel.

  A grinding sound behind us made me flip around. The wall had lifted, and two more ogre moved into position, trapping us. Shoot, shoot, this was why I hated being underground.

  The guards took a step in unison, keeping pace with us.

  No plants. No help. Just the regenerating. And all of Starren’s training she’d attempted to beat into me. Even with that, this would hardly be a fair fight. I’d seen Starren do some crazy things, but four ogres? That seemed like a bit too much to hope for.

  “Just take us to Ferid,” Carver said.

  “Why should we bother Ferid with you?” one of the ogre asked, his voice smooth and deep. Carver spoke first in English, and the ogre answered in English. “Everyone knows the consequences of entering Hiath Homed. Our path is clear.”

  “How’d you know about us anyway?” It didn’t come out as sassy as I’d have liked. Not nearly as sassy as I’d intended. But it would have to do, since internally I was about to flip out.

  “The tunnel was created in such a way that it brings all sounds straight to the guard chamber. We’ve known of your presence since one of you threw a rock down our tunnel, littering our home ground.”

  Littering their home ground? As in, they cared that there was a rock out of place? Oops. Wait, these were ogres right? That didn’t follow. It was the mermaids all over again. That had been quite the learning experience.

  The ogres in the direction we’d come from tipped their spear things at us, moving forward without giving any orders. The ones in the direction we’d been trying to go started backing up, keeping us in their sights.

  “Where are you taking us?” Carver asked. He sounded so calm. How did he sound that calm? I’d been a bunch of almost die situations, and this one was bugging me the worst. Other than when Nina had been involved, of course.

  I’d come to rely on the plants far too much. And there weren’t any plants down here.

  “To the kitchens.”

  “Oh, that’s okay, I’m not hungry.” Which was weird. I was always hungry. Apparently terror took even my appetite.

  “That’s good. You won’t be the one eating.”

  Crap. Double crap.

  I squeezed my eyes closed as I stumbled along. Would they be able to chop me up? I didn’t know how that worked since thankfully I’d never been in that situation before.

  Time for a new tactic.

  “Do you know who you have here?” I planted myself.

  The ogres just kept walking.

  When I got poked I glared and jumped back out of reach.

  “I asked you a question!”

  “It doesn’t matter. You all taste the same.”

  Well that was insulting. I pointed at Starren. “Your boss has a bone to pick with her.” Oops. Poor choice of words. “That’s Starren. He hates her.”

 

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