She and Marion looked at each other and then through the side window. The stranger was gone and the road was as deserted as it had been ten minutes before, except now it looked scarier. Iris wondered if maybe it really was cursed.
"How about we get out of here?" Marion whispered, voicing Iris' own thoughts. "I have a feeling we shouldn't wait to find out what made that hellish sound."
Iris turned the key into ignition but the engine coughed a few times and then went silent. She tried again, with the same result. She looked outside through the windshield but it was impossible to see anything other than a sea of gray. She knew they'd hit the road rail but she couldn't tell how bad a shape the car was in. Marion, panic slowly starting to rise on her face again, rummaged her bag, desperately looking for her phone. She pulled it out, her fingers trembling like she was freezing. Then she looked at Iris, her face pale, her eyes filled with horror.
"No signal."
Connor bent backwards just as the fireball flew over him at lightning speed, leaving behind a trail of vapors as it came into contact with the cold raindrops. He straightened his back and immediately rotated his torso to the side to avoid another one.
"Had enough of my rusty skills, Brother?" Lorelai said smiling. She was standing fifteen feet away from him, arms wide open, ready to launch another set of deadly fire missiles.
"When I said we should train I didn't mean brag about our abilities, Lorelai."
"Oh, come on. What's the point of having superpowers if you can't use them?"
"That's just it. What if one day you won't be able to use them? How will you fare in a fight?"
They started walking towards each other until they met halfway.
"Not bad, huh?" Lorelai said, pointing in the direction of her fireballs.
Connor followed her eyes. Indeed, as soon as the vapor trail disappeared, the entire trajectory was visible and quite impressive, although he would never admit it out loud. Lorelai was right about her skills. She may not excel in close combat but she definitely could hold her own in a superpower match. For almost five hundred feet, all the trunks in the line of the balls had a burnt groove where the fire had cut into the wood like a laser piercing a piece of plastic. Some of the trees were barely grazed, some had a complete hole burnt right through the middle of their trunks. The last one, a tall oak tree, was lying on the ground, its whole trunk burnt to a crisp. The only thing left standing was a smoking three-foot stump covered in black ash. Around it, the ground was plastered with patches of burnt leaves, probably left from the pieces of burning wood dislodged from the trunk. Except they were too big and too regular in shape. A suspicion took form in his mind and he darted towards the spot to inspect them. In a second his sister was behind him.
"I don't think those are my doing," she said.
"They're not."
Lorelai bent forward to get a better look at the marks. "Are those—"
"Paw prints? Yeah, I think so."
"What do you think made them?"
"I don't know."
He looked around. The marks, round, deep, and regular, were more concentrated around the tree. From there, they dispersed in all directions into the woods.
"They're big," Lorelai said.
They were indeed. In the human world, the only animal whose feet or paws came close to that size was the elephant, but Connor doubted that they should consider it as a culprit. There were no elephants living in those woods. He pulled out his phone and took a picture of the marks, then dialed a number. On the second ring he heard Aeryn's voice, calm, steady, reassuring. In as few words as possible, he brought her up to speed with everything that he and Lorelai had discovered.
"I sent you a picture. Do you know of any creature that could have left those marks?" He tapped his index finger on the back of the phone as he waited for his grandmother's answer.
"No," Aeryn said and Connor sensed a note of concern in her voice. "But I'll see what I can find in the Book of the Past."
"Okay. We'll keep looking around. Let us know when you find something."
"Connor…"
"Yeah."
"Be careful."
"We will."
He hung up and started walking around, inspecting the marks. Lorelai, who had heard the conversation, did the same. There was something in their grandmother's voice that made Connor uneasy. She seemed scared and that was unsettling because the woman was never scared of anything. If the marks worried her, then there really was trouble ahead. Lost as he was in his thoughts, everything around him became distant, like in a dream. The colors mixed, the sounds faded away until the only clear thing that remained were the marks. And then a terrifying howl exploded like a bomb, shaking the ground underneath his feet. He heard the forest vibrate and hundreds of hearts stop beating. His blood dropped to his feet. He looked at Lorelai, frozen in place a few feet away from him. Her face was pale as a sheet while her eyes expressed the same thought as his. Damn it, we're all going to die.
4
Down the Rabbit Hole
The car was dead. That much was clear. Now the only two ways to get out of there were to either call for help or wait for someone to pass by and ask them for a ride to town, although chances for that last one were slim to none, considering how fond people were of Chestnut Road. Calling for help was now the only option, but for that they needed to find a spot where their phones could get a signal.
Despite Marion's incessant pleas against it, Iris opened the car door. A wave of cold drops rushed in, like a warning not to step outside or else, but before she even slipped her foot through the door a hellish bang exploded, like a plane hitting the ground, and Iris' hand jerked the car door shut as she joined Marion in a concert of screaming their hearts out. On top of the hood there was a massive figure, blurred by the pouring water, and it was hitting the windshield with the rage of a sledgehammer. It was an animal—that she could tell for sure—some sort of dog or wolf, judging from the howls it made, but it was bigger than any dog or wolf Iris had ever seen. Its blurry dark shape covered the entire windshield. The size of its paw when it hit the glass, spiderwebbing it more and more with each blow, could easily match that of bear, or an elephant. Two dark red spots were flaming where Iris assumed its eyes were supposed to be, and its entire body was streaked with orange lines, like a network of thick veins of sorts.
The force behind its massive paw hitting the windshield dislodged a few pieces of glass and propelled them towards Marion. The girl screamed as the shards pierced her porcelain skin. Thin streams of red mixed with tears began to flow towards her chin. She tried to cover her face but she only pushed the pieced deeper and so she just kept her hands in front of her face, crying desperately.
Iris thought with terror that in a few seconds the windshield would eventually give in and feed them to that hellish creature. She could feel waves of ice going up and down her spine and her head felt heavy, like she'd been hit by vertigo.
"Stop! Stop now!" she cried, more as a reflex than as a result to a deliberate, reasonable thought that the command would produce an appropriate response. And yet it did. The creature stopped growling and pounding at the broken windshield, and for a few seconds it remained still as a statue, towering on the hood of the car, staring at her. Iris could feel her heart beating in her stomach and tried to push back the bile rising in her throat.
"Go away," she yelled, keeping her eyes on the creature. It lowered its head, bringing it a few inched away from the windshield, like it was trying to see her better, and then tilted its head to the side. Its giant teeth were red, its jaws bloody. Crimson red saliva was dripping on the glass, leaving red dots that washed away with the rain. From up close, it was more terrifying than before. "Go away," she whispered. Fear had finally taken over and cut her vocal chords. Still, a whisper was enough. The beast pulled back and jumped off the hood, disappearing into the darkness of the forest. Marion was still screaming, her hands over her face, light red tears spilling between her small fingers. It was only when Ir
is shook her and kept repeating to her that the beast was gone that she finally brought her screams down to a series of sobs.
"It's okay, Marion. It's gone now," she said, not just to calm down her friend but also to stop her own heart from racing. She put her hands on Marion's shoulders. "It's gone."
Finally, Marion dropped her hands and opened her eyes, warily, as if she still doubted Iris' words. She looked terrible. Her eyes were swollen and her face was red, streaked with dark vertical lines where tears mixed with black eyeliner had rolled down to her chin. Three shimmering drops of fresh blood were about to fall from her forehead and her left cheek, where the shards had pierced her skin. When her eyes met Iris' she gave a sigh of relief and threw her arms around Iris' neck. They sat there like that for nearly a minute, hugging each other, their hearts pounding in tandem.
"What the hell was that?" Marion asked as Iris was trying to take out the glass shards out of her friend's face. Her voice was trembling but Iris wasn't sure if it was because of the pain or the fear.
"I don't know. But I don't think we should be here when it comes back. We might not get so lucky."
Iris knew that, despite the terror burning in her chest, she had to get out of the car to get a cell signal. With an ominous feeling of déjà vu and a heart beating at a thousand miles per hour, she looked around through the side window, almost expecting the beast to jump at her out of nowhere again. The forest was restless under the beating of the rain but there was no sign of the creature. Holding her breath, she glided her trembling fingers along the car door handle. But something stopped her.
"Oh good, you changed your mind," Marion said, relieved.
Iris looked at the road. Something wasn't right. They weren't in the same spot as before. She shifted her eyes ahead and, as soon as she did that, she realized why she felt that way. The creature must have pushed the car through the road rail and now they were literally on the edge of the thousand-foot deep precipice opening up into the Silver Hollow Valley. She could tell from the lining of the road rail that stopped right where the front wheels of the car should have been. With the slowest moves she was capable of, like a technician trying to disarm a bomb, she set the handbrake and loosened her seat belt without unlocking it. She had to see how close they really were to the edge and whether they could get out.
"What are you doing?" Marion asked, clearly unaware of the gravity of the situation yet. She was still shaken up from before but, in a way only she knew, she was dealing with it. She'd cleaned her face and hands and she was now disinfecting her wounds with a clean paper tissue and mouthwash spray.
"Don't move."
"What?"
"The car's on the edge of the cliff."
"What?!"
"We need to get out before it falls over. I want to see how close we are."
"Oh my God, we're going to die!" Marion's voice gradually rose to a high-pitched tone, a sign that she was getting alarmed again. Her perpetual enthusiasm had a strange way of turning into nearly hysterical panic in crisis situations. As a means of coping with it, Marion voiced every thought that crossed her mind at the time. "First that hellish creature nearly ate us alive, now this. This road really is cursed."
"No it's not," Iris said, trying to sound reassuring, although she was starting to believe that Marion and the townsfolk might actually be right. "I told you, there's no such thing as a curse. And we're not going to die."
"Oh, no. We are," Marion said as Iris pulled the inside handle of the car door. "We're going to die in the middle of nowhere and our bodies are going to be eaten by wolves from hell because no one's going to find us. You know why? Because no one's going to look for us here. They're going to look for us on River Road."
As soon as they heard the clicking sound signaling the release of the door lock, the car moved a few inches forward then stopped. Instinctively, the girls grabbed hold of the side doors and each other. Iris thought with terror that in a few seconds they would fall over the edge. Marion was right. They were going to die. All because of her and her stupid fear of water.
And then it happened. The car creaked, like a dying animal releasing its last breath, and then its back lifted off the ground as the edge of the precipice crumbled like dry clay under the weight of the hood. Marion started crying again, as she clutched her hands into the sides of her seat. Iris felt a scream dying in her throat.
"Stay still," she managed to say, more to herself, struggling to unscramble the maelstrom of thoughts invading her mind. They should try to slip in the back and get out but she was too scared to move a finger. Even a gust of wind would have been enough to break their balance and send them over the cliff.
For a few moments they hung there, rocking back and forth a few times, each time a bit deeper into the void in front of them, and then the edge finally gave in and the car slowly tilted toward the gaping chasm below.
Iris closed her eyes and thought of how ironic her fate was. Her parents had died in a car accident and now she would follow them in almost the same way. The only difference was that their car had fallen into the river while she would crumble on the bottom of Silver Hollow Valley. Paralyzed with fear, she waited for the end.
Except it wasn't coming. They weren't falling. She opened her eyes, incredulous and confused. They were hanging parallel to the steep cliff. The rocky bottom of the valley looked dark and menacing on the other side of the cracked windshield. And yet, something was holding the car in place, preventing them from plunging to their deaths.
Marion had stopped crying and was staring at Iris with the same perplexed look in her eyes that Iris suspected she herself had.
"The back of the car must have gotten caught in a piece of road rail," Iris said. It was the only rational explanation.
Almost afraid that if she moved even one inch the metal would give in and send them crashing against the bottom of the valley, Iris slowly turned her head to look back but, as soon as she saw the reason they were still alive, she realized she'd been wrong. It wasn't something that was holding the car in place—it was someone. Noticing the shocked look on Iris' face, Marion followed her gaze and, when she saw what Iris was seeing, their thoughts fell in tune and materialized simultaneously into one single word.
"Connor?"
When the car moved, Marion started screaming again. Iris was almost grateful that the seatbelt was locked tight, otherwise she feared her chest might explode. Her stomach ached and she swallowed repeatedly to keep from throwing up. When she looked back, Lorelai was at her brother's side, struggling to pull them up. The car creaked as the metal rubbed against the rocky edge of the valley. Slowly, the menacing image of certain doom at the bottom of the precipice became a blur, as the raindrops crashed against the windshield again. The pressure of the seatbelt loosened, and when Lorelai opened the car door, Iris felt that she could breathe again. She tried to speak but her brain was still having trouble processing what had just happened.
"How… How did you…" Marion had managed to scramble out of the car and was now staring at Connor, who was on the ground, leaning against one of the back tires of the car, his arms limp to his sides.
"You're welcome," Lorelai said to no one in particular and went to her brother. "Are you okay?"
He winced. "I think I dislocated both my shoulders."
Iris thought that she should rush to him and help him somehow but her body refused to move. She just stood there, shifting her gaze from Connor to Lorelai and back, trying to understand what was happening. Her best friend and his sister had just lifted a car like it was a sack of potatoes and were now acting like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"Stay here. I'll get the car," Lorelai said and disappeared. Iris looked at the blurry spot half a mile down the road, struggling to make sense of what she was seeing. Marion pointed in Lorelai's direction, trying to say something but she was clearly too shocked to speak. Under different circumstances, Iris would have found that amusing. It was not often that one got the chance to see her frien
d speechless. However, now she understood Marion's reaction because it reflected exactly what she felt. And she felt like she was going crazy.
When Lorelai returned with Connor's SUV a few minutes later, they all helped him get on the passenger seat. Pain distorted his face every time he moved his arms and Iris was afraid that he would faint before they got to the hospital. His sister went back to the wrecked car.
"What are you doing?" Iris asked.
"Fixing your mess." Lorelai lifted the front of the car and slid it towards the road just enough for it to face the broken rail. Then she went to the back and pushed it a little so the right front wheel would stand just on the edge of the precipice. Iris and Marion were staring at the girl, their mouths wide open. Lorelai took a few steps back and looked at the wrecked car.
"It'll do," she said, then she got behind the wheel of the SUV.
Iris and Marion climbed in the back, and the car started moving before they even got to close the doors. For a while, no one said a word. Iris had so many questions but she wasn't sure how to start. How come one of her best friends and his sister had extraordinary strength and super speed? They all knew each other since kindergarten, so how come she'd never noticed it? And how come they arrived just in time to save her and Marion? What were they doing in the woods on that weather?
Marion eventually broke the silence. "Okay, what just happened?"
"I think we just saved your lives," Lorelai replied. The car felt like it was gliding over the wet surface of the road and Lorelai didn't seem to have any trouble keeping it steady, despite the blurry windshield and the speed, which, Iris suspected, was high above the legal limit.
The Fountain of Truth (Tales of the Dark Fae Book 1) Page 5
