Wood Sprites (51 page)

“Yes,
husepavua
.”

Yves turned away, not bothering to watch the male stagger to his feet and stumble out of the mansion. He walked down the hall to stop at the next painting and pointed to it. “Sell that.” He pointed to a small statue. “Pack that.” He turned and gazed at the twins. “It’s a shame they’re not true identical twins. I’ll have to be more careful with them. Take them down to the casting chamber and put them into a spell cage. I’m sure they would figure out how to escape anything mechanical.”

* * *

Louise tried to tell herself that the spell cage was a fascinating awesome thing. In almost any other instance, it would be. Being carried down into a maze of dimly lit caves, shackled to the floor, and locked inside one, however, was really, really scary.

“Right,” Jillian muttered after the elves had trooped back upstairs. “This is a sticky wicket.”

“Could be worse.” Louise knew it could be much worse. She had at least kept the elves from discovering what she had shoved into her socks as they snapped the manacle about her right ankle. By luck or that weird sense of knowing what was coming, she had pushed the Swiss army knife painfully deep into her shoe.

The electric lights went out, leaving only the gleam of the active spell encaging them. They sat at the center of the spell inscribed into the stone floor.

“I say.” Jillian used a thick British accent. Louise wasn’t sure who Jillian was channeling but she was glad that her twin wasn’t freaking because at the moment Louise was slipping toward totally losing it. “Let’s not give fate any more ideas.”

“Uh-huh,” Louise forced out as she fumbled in the deep shadows.

Light suddenly flared out from Jillian.

“What’s that?”

“Spell light. I made it.” Jillian held up a brightly gleaming orb.

“Awesome!” More heartfelt words were never uttered. Louise unfolded the various blades of the Swiss army knife, trying to figure out which she could use on the shackle. Luckily the thick iron cuffs were probably over a hundred years old and fashioned when tolerances were in the fractions of an inch, not microns. “We need to get out of here. Get the babies. And—”

“Burn the house down.”

“Yes. Somehow. I doubt they have a closet full of high explosives that we can use.”

“We can improvise. We’re good at that.”

“Yes, we are.” Louise breathed out relief as her manacle clicked open. She bent over the cuff on Jillian’s leg, glad that Jillian was embracing anger to keep out fear. Her twin was trembling from one or both of the emotions flooding her. When Jillian’s manacle unlocked, she threw the hunk of metal as far as the chain would allow. They hugged each other tight, just for a moment, trying to draw strength without weakening the other.

Jillian pulled away first and stood, hands on her hips, looking very much like Peter Pan. “So, what do you think? How do we take down this spell?”

The cage was a weird mix of things that they’d never seen and spells from the codex. It had the familiar design of concentric rings, the outer rings triggering first and cascading inward. The inner layer shimmered in the deep shadows of the cave, weaving like the mad vines around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The scrollwork seemed no more substantial than a hologram. When Louise reached out to tap it quickly—triggering a gasp of alarm from Jillian—the bars proved to be solid and cold as steel. They arched overhead, creating a sphere. Since the inner shell was tightly woven, they wouldn’t be able to reach the more vulnerable parts of the spell.

When Celine activated the cage, she hadn’t used a typical trigger word but a series of phonemes, much like those used in spell locks. Louise focused the light onto the spell engraved into the floor. The first ring contained elements from a lock. It was inscribed on an inlaid piece of marble that most likely hid the actual keywords that switched the cage on and off. If they had their tablets . . .

If wishes were fishes.

“Without magic, it will collapse,” Louise said. “Do you think we can burn all the magic in this area?”

“No,” Jillian said after glancing around them. “There’s too much magic here. The sunroom is a mud puddle compared to this. This is a lake. Look over there.”

Louise turned to see what Jillian was pointing at. The narrow beam of the spell light picked out details across the large room. The floor was several large slabs of marble fitted together to make one large block. A spell had been marked onto the floor with a combination of wax and metal filings. It was a massive spell with a Celtic-knot complexity of subroutines and processes. She could identify all the pieces, but how they worked together she couldn’t even guess.

“I’m drawing a blank on how to get out of here,” Jillian whimpered.

“It’s okay. I managed to keep these.” Louise pulled out the two metal-ink pens she’d tucked into her sock. They were designed to draw functional circuits for electronics but it worked just as well for magic. “We can do a force-strike spell.”

“Will it be strong enough?”

“We can ramp it up with a series of focusing rings.”

Jillian considered it and nodded, but added a warning. “There might be a rebound effect. It could be bad.”

“We could do a simple shield, like the ones that the
sekasha
use, to protect us.”

“I’ll do the shield!” Jillian cried and snatched one of the pens out of Louise’s hand. She crouched on the floor and carefully marked a circle just big enough for both of them to stand in. “You do remember force strike well enough?” she whispered. “Because I don’t think I do—not all of it.”

They both had drawn the
sekasha
protective spell countless times for their videos, both for the Wind Clan and the Fire Clan, and had discussed at length the differences in the tattoos and the information they’d found in the codex. Louise took a deep breath, looking down at the bare floor. If she screwed up, there wouldn’t be any way to fix the mistake.

“I can do this,” she said more to herself than to Jillian. “It’s a fairly simple spell. I just have to take my time and do it right.”

It was odd that she realized that the few times that they’d gone to church with their Grandma Mayer had sunk deep roots into her psychic. She wanted to believe in God because she wanted to believe he would hear her earnest prayer that she would actually draw the spell correctly. The consequences for failing were all too easy to imagine, and she was afraid that meant she would fail.

She clicked out the pen and knelt on the floor.
Dear God, please. Please.

* * *

She was just finishing when she realized someone was calling her name.

“Lou! Lou!”

She looked up to find one of the mice was standing beyond the edge of the cage, waving to get her attention. “What are you doing here? I told you to stay!”

“They’re loading all our stuff onto a truck. They’ve taken Tesla to the garage and put him in a giant box. We don’t know what to do! We can’t get him out. The Jawbreakers are watching over Tesla, and Chuck Norris is looking for Joy.”

Where the hell had Joy gone? Last Louise had seen, the baby dragon was in their bedroom. Joy had been trying to pack the cans of freeze-dried food and complaining that she was hungry.

“Oh! Oh! I bet she went to the kitchen. Did Chuck look there?”

“There are people in the kitchen!”

Louise felt a flare of panic at the idea of the babies trying to search the big gleaming kitchen. It was so brightly lit and sparsely decorated that a moving mouse would stand out. “Tell her to stay away from the kitchen. We’re almost out of this and we’ll . . . we’ll get the gossamer call. Joy will answer it.”

Behind her, Jillian hissed out a swear word. “Oh, I’m so stupid! I have the gossamer call! Joy can get us out of here.”

Jillian took the small whistle out of her shoe and blew it. Most of the sound it produced was inaudible to humans, but the lowest frequency notes echoed through the caves.

“Jilly!” Louise cried. She thought she heard something rustle in response to the sound but it was gone before she could identify it.

“Sorry! Sorry! I forgot that it isn’t totally ultrasonic.”

“What’s this?” Joy appeared beside Nikola with a big tub of ice cream that she could barely carry. Her face and both front paws were smeared with white cream and little blots of chocolate. Joy held the nearly empty container out for inspection. The label stated “Stracciatella Gelato.” It explained why the babies couldn’t find Joy; she’d been sealed in the massive walk-in freezer. It also confirmed that the monster call traveled on a magical wavelength beyond normal sound. “What is it? What is yummy cold stuff?”

Louise rubbed her face to stop the scream of frustration and anger from coming out. Joy was a baby and didn’t understand the danger they were in.

Jillian, though, didn’t muffle her scream. “It’s ice cream, you greedy little—”

Louise slapped her hand over her twin’s mouth. “Shhh, shhh, we don’t want anyone to hear!”

Jillian continued for another minute, muttering angrily against Louise’s hand.

Louise ignored her sister. “Joy, can you get us out of this spell?”

Joy eyed the gleaming cage of power. “Oooh. Nasty cage spell. No.”

Jillian mumbled, “Mm mm mmm mmm.”

Louise translated. “Can you at least try?”

“There is no try.” Joy pointed at the shimmering bars with a crème-covered paw.

Jillian growled with frustration and pulled Louise’s hand from her mouth. “I’m done with the shield. What about you?”

Louise eyed the spell nervously. It looked right. “Yes, let’s do this.” She waved at Nikola. “Get back. We’re going to try blasting our way out.”

Nikola scurried back into the shadows. Joy waddled away, carrying her tub of gelato. Jillian spoke the command word and then “oohhh” in surprise.

“What?”

“I can see it. It’s like . . . black glow . . . all around us.”

“Good.” Louise took a deep breath. She spoke the command word.

With a loud crack, the spell activated and arrowed force along the directional arrow drawn in the runes. It plowed through the glyphs of the cage spell, instantly reducing part of the floor into rubble. The sudden trench continued to plow forward, into the distant casting room. The cage vanished as if it had never existed, and they were plunged into darkness. Dust and pieces of the ceiling rained down around them, the
sekasha
shield protecting the twins.

“Whoo-hoo!” Jillian shouted and cancelled the shield.

They did the dance of joy, jumping up and down, screaming with excitement until Louise remembered that they might be heard.

“Shhh!” Louise smacked her twin.

“If they didn’t hear that, they’re not going to hear me!” Jillian cried. “And how did you hit me? I can’t see anything.”

“I could hear you!” Louise took the spell light out of her pocket and panned it across the room. First thing she spotted was the now empty gelato container lying abandoned on the ground. Then she spotlighted Joy licking her fingers. There was no sign of the little white mouse. “Where’s Nikola?”

Joy looked around and then shrugged.

“Nikola?” Louise called as Jillian picked up Joy, muttering darkly about the baby dragon’s eating habits.

Louise thought she heard a distant squeak. She caught hold of Jillian’s hand and headed toward the noise. How far could Nikola have gotten? She didn’t think a mouse could run so far in such a short time. Had he been hurt by the explosion? There didn’t seem to be any rubble in the direction of his voice, but had she really heard him? “Nikola?”

“Lou!” came the faint answer from the darkness.

“That way!” Jillian whispered.

Around a rough corner and down a narrow hallway and they entered another casting room. The light picked out the glyphs of a spell marked out on the marble in wax and iron. She didn’t recognize any of the components but something about it made her skin crawl.

“Nikola?” Louise whispered.

She jumped when the mouse robot suddenly scurried up her leg so Nikola could perch on her shoulder.

“Lou, something is inside the sphere.” Nikola huddled against her neck, a small, fearful ball of fur.

She panned the light upwards. A massive orb hung from a chain at the center of the spell. The bars were solid metal wrought into elaborate circles and glyphs. Four legs jutted out of the bottom where it would connect to runes on the floor, acting like jumper cables on a circuit board. While she didn’t recognize the spell, she could tell that the magic all focused inward to the four points, and thus funneled into the orb.

And there was something trapped inside.

The creature shifted with a quiet rustle. Louise gasped as the light shone on glossy black feathers. There was some kind of bird in the orb. A massive bird as the beam of light revealed dozens of long flight feathers, each broader than her hand. It was too big to be a turkey vulture or a bald eagle. Why would anyone lock a bird up in this dark, cold place? Was Yves experimenting on the poor thing? Did it even have food and water or was Yves letting it suffer since he planned to kill it anyhow?

“What kind of bird is it?” Jillian whispered.

“I don’t know.” Louise cautiously moved closer to the orb to get a better look. “The feathers remind me of a crow, but it’s too big. Maybe a condor. Maybe something from Elfhome.”

“Like a roc?”

“The elves haven’t verified that rocs exist—”

With a loud rustle of feathers, the wings shifted to reveal a boy’s face. He had short unruly black hair sticking out in all directions, thick dark eyebrows, surprisingly blue eyes, and a large hooked nose. For some reason, he looked familiar even though Louise was sure that she didn’t know him. He tilted his head this way and that, like a bird would, trying to peer past the glare of the spell light.

“That’s not a bird!” Jillian cried. “It’s a—It’s a—What the hell is it?”

“I don’t know,” Louise whispered.

The bird boy wasn’t wearing a shirt. While they couldn’t see how everything connected to his back, it was obvious that he had wings and not just a feathered cloak. He looked like a high school gymnast, lean but strongly built, all his shoulder and chest muscles sharply defined. His wings were raven black, shifting just like a nervous bird’s. He wore dark fabric pants but his feet were bare.