Tirian didn’t want to make waves, but he had major reservations about these orders. Why did Prismore want him to track Luka Turner? What would happen when the Feratu had eaten their way through all the firehorses?
Time was running out.
16
Opal stood on a ledge in a dark cave screaming. Indigo light poured from her necklace and enveloped her in a luminescent fog. Disgusting bat-like creatures swarmed over a massive two-column dripstone structure that rose, monolithic, like a stone braid twisting into the unknown. Hundreds of horrifying eyes peered at her through the shadows and wailed through their fangs in a bizarre language.
She turned to run but was blocked by a witch stroking the head of a small red-eyed armadillo curled like a leathery ball in her bone-white arms. The dreadful varmint snapped its little teeth at her.
“You will need this,” the witch squealed. “You skinny little moke.”
In her hand was a long dagger and she slashed it at Opal. The ragged edge clawed across her arm. Blood began to flow. She backed away from the old woman. A clammy hand grabbed her by the arm and pulled. She tumbled right off the cave ledge into the mass dark.
“Wake up Opal, wake up!” A disembodied voice yelled.
Opal jerked awake. Bree had pulled her from her bed to the floor and was now scrambling on her hands and knees back into the kitchen. Opal was sprawled out in the middle of her room. Through her window she could see flames spreading in the canopy of maple trees that surrounded her family’s house. A riderless horse shot past the window.
“Don’t go out there Hud!” Bree hollered.
Opal could see Hud near the front door on one knee loading his hunting rifle.
“We have to get you two out the back! Now! I’ll hold them off,” Hud yelled back as he fired into the darkness.
One of the front windows shattered and a masked rider lobbed a torch through it. It rolled across the floor, and before Bree could reach it, it set the tablecloth on fire. Opal watched as the kitchen table and her blue dress withered in the flames.
“Come on Opal!”
Bree grabbed a handful of Opal’s nightgown and yanked her along. She stopped and a queer expression broke across her face as she looked down to Opal’s chest. Bree was in utter shock. Opal was wearing her secret gift from Kawa. She had gone to bed wearing it. The stone was alive, like a tiny soup pot full of color, boiling and flaming furiously.
“Where did you get that?” Bree grabbed for the necklace but Opal pulled away. “You shouldn’t have that. Take it off!”
“I…it was from the…a present.” Opal was in an angry panic. How could she explain that Kawa gave it to her? And why did it matter right now? Their house was being attacked. It was on fire. Hud was shooting at the raiders.
All Opal could do was scream, “WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
“Bald Knobbers! Masked raiders that don’t like black folks!” Bree shouted. “Get going girl.”
Opal crawled with Bree to the backdoor. Bree started loading her shotgun.
“Hud, who are they, what do they want?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. All I know is they’re about to get blown to hell,” Hud yelled over his shoulder.
One hooded raider was trying to break in through the back entrance. Bree stood up and fired. Her shotgun blasted the door open and knocked the Hood off the porch in one shot.
“GET UP!” she said. “We’re going. You have to run as hard as you can, past the barn. Get into the cornfields and keep going, all the way to the wall, you here me? Don’t cross over it though. Just follow it around to the Worthington’s. Find Jupiter. Hide there and we will come get you when this is over. You understand?”
Opal stood in a state of shock looking at Bree. She heard her words—she understood—but she couldn’t move.
“Opal! Do you hear me? Go now! Go!” Bree pushed Opal through the backdoor and onto the porch. A hooded rider galloped by. He was holding another torch, and by its light, Opal saw that the rider had horns sprouting from its head. A creature like her nightmare! Bree fired her gun and the demon fell to the ground. The horse broke away.
“Now go! Don’t turn back!” Bree pushed Opal off the porch and Opal ran as hard as she could toward the barn. It was a roaring inferno. Ladybug had found a way out and was running through the corn.
She heard Bree scream. Opal looked back. Hud was being pulled from the house by two of the hooded men. They began dragging him to the tree in the front yard. Two others were stringing a rope with a hangman’s noose. Bree ran toward the men, firing her gun. Opal screamed. Bree looked back at Opal.
“RUN, OPAL, RUN!”
Opal felt a surge of energy sweep through her. A burning sensation rose throughout her body. She reached down and pulled at her necklace. The stone was alive again and swirling fire-red. She could feel the heat of it, but when she grabbed it there was no pain—only a desire to destroy the whole lot of raiders circling her house.
She stepped forward, picked up a piece of firewood thick as her arm, and ran back to the house. Rage swelled in her body. She felt she had the power to kill them all. A masked man stepped in front of her with a gun.
“Where you going, little girl?” the horned Hood asked.
Opal skidded to a stop. An electric maroon-fire enveloped her body and crackled down the stick of firewood. The energy licked out at the Hood like tongues.
Had her attacker set her on fire? No! Something else!
She swung at the terrifying horned mask. A power like she had never felt coursed through her body. The firewood smashed the Hood in the head and the collision sounded like a crack of lightning. The man flew through the air, hit the wall of the burning house, and crumpled like a ragdoll.
His hood was on fire; the magic flames were alive. Like a horde of spiders, they crawled over him and melted the man’s face to the bone. His head became half skeleton and half devil-mask. It was the most horrific sight Opal had ever seen.
Opal turned in disgust and ran on. Hud was fighting back, trying to resist being pulled up into the tree. Bree ran up, firing at one of the raiders.
A Hood stepped from the shadows and fired a pistol at Bree. Then another shot, then another, and another. Bree turned from her assailant and stumbled back toward the barn. She saw her daughter. With her last bit of life, she reached out to Opal and mouthed the word run.
Bree collapsed in a heap. Opal screamed an animal-like scream at the madness. The electric fire crackled and sputtered, then disappeared. Opal wanted to go to Bree, but she felt all the strange power, all the magical energy, abandoning her.
The Hood was reloading his weapon. He started toward Opal.
17
From the limbs of a white oak, about three hundred yards away from the fighting, Opal’s reluctant guardian watched her flee into the cornfield. He had left her alone too long. The scene was total chaos. The raiders began mounting their horses to pursue the girl.
The Ranger raised a long recurve bow, his preferred weapon, and nocked an arrow. The tip of the arrow looked like polished glass. It glinted and began to vibrate as it filled with starlight. Two hooded riders raced into the cornfield. The arrow split the air, buried itself in the thigh of the first rider, and showered everything in green sparks. Another followed, nesting itself in the rider’s forearm. The wounded rider fell from his dappled mare and into the path of the other rider. The second horse spooked and skidded in the muddy field, trying to avoid the fallen man while its rider received his own gift of arrows. Both men were now disabled and delayed. They were no longer a threat to the child, at least not this night.
The Ranger, who stood almost six-and-a-half feet tall, swung down from the oak branches with his powerful arms. He pulled his woodland cloak off his dark, coffee-colored hair. He spun in a circle very carefully and quietly, making sure there was no other sign of trouble.
His fiercely handsome face was mostly tanned, but a strip of pale white near his hairline revealed how fond he was of concealing his identi
ty. His brow had an earnest furrow, and his eyes were like menacing blue coals that signaled a hidden savageness. The bravest and rowdiest of men would have been dissuaded from taking him on. He carried himself like a warrior.
He strapped his bow and quiver across his muscular chest and broad shoulders and took the reigns of his horse. Then he tied his hair back with a string of leather, showing off silver streaks that shot through his mane like bolts of lightning. He climbed onto his horse’s saddle and replaced his hood.
He trotted past the two downed men. One was regaining consciousness and he was glad. He always left at least one witness; it fanned the flames of his legend. The Ranger could hear more Hoods coming. A grin broke out across his gruff face as he rode straight for them. He would end their pursuit one way or another. The child had to escape; he would make sure she did.
PART TWO
Along the creek, tiny darters in a wide school drifted by lazily. The clear water broke over mossy copper rock, and its leaping was like silver minnows hurdling little fences in the waterway. The air was cool and moist, and a single dragonfly with a turquoise body spun in circles over the water, two-winged, now four. Fish broke the stream at odd places, and when they popped I’d see them out of the corner of my eye, but at full glance they were gone—just the circle of their breaking remained, pulsing out in ever-growing expansions, making steady ringlets.
The sun hung late day, cornered in the southwest, and the creek turned toward it as if drawn by its light. Cicadas in the greens stuttered like they were winding a reel of rusty fence wire. A young coon dog barked a few times, and the dragonfly returned like a drunken pilgrim, stumbling its way back up stream. It seemed lost but content to keep awhirl.
At first, I thought the sound of the stream was constant, but it isn’t. It rushes, burbles, and sloshes in a steady disharmony. It seems the most pleasant sound one can hear. Like a mother whispering, It’s okay, child. Like a lover breathing softly in your ear.
— Cornelius Rambrey, “A Journal of Travels into the Veilian Nexus called Arcania”
The Snawfus Appears
18
Grigg’s Landing was a river town. To the north lay the White River—the most heavily traveled waterway in the region. To the east, the Buffalo River cut up through the Leatherwoods in the South to join the White River. To the south and west, unexplored wilderness remained. A menacing tract of land encircled this entire intersection of hills, water, and wilderness. It was called Devil’s Alley and it was home to a mysterious boundary wall.
People lived on one side of the wall. On the other side, people tended the other way—they disappeared, they changed, and they went crazy. Sometimes they died, or at least that was the assumption, because no one went looking for proof.
The wall was an ancient construction. Thick bricks of stratified rock went up eight, nine, sometimes ten feet high, depending on what stretch you surveyed. The story was that the first Ozark Mountain settlers made the walls to keep out supernatural monsters that terrorized them.
Its course had no logic. The wall was like a wild serpent that snaked through ravines and up and over countless ridges. In places it died off, then picked up in another mysterious location. This was never questioned. It was just accepted as a divine survey line, one that it was best to respect.
An hour after the attack, Opal was trotting along Devil’s Alley, one hand skimming the bricks of the wall as a guide, the other clutching her necklace. She was exhausted from running. She was confused, scared, and in shock. All she knew to do was follow Bree’s plan. Get to the Worthington Estate and find Jupiter Johnson, Bree’s friend and fellow servant.
A fog filled the woods. The moonlight filtered down in silver streaks. She walked on. She stumbled. When she wanted to give up, the stone woke up. She could hear it as if it were singing a faint melody. She didn’t hear the song with her ears; it seemed to vibrate in her spirit, like the stone played the strings of her heart.
The Hoods have found me!
In the shadows ahead, she saw a cloaked figure, which explained the ominous minor key she heard. The ghostly figure floated over the rolling fog, through the ferns, toward Opal.
“Kill her!” the thing said. “Yessssss, take it!”
A skeletal hand snapped its ivory fingers. They clicked like fingernails tapping on teeth.
“The sssssstone!” the voice hissed in a sweet slither.
As it came faster, the necklace bubbled with magic. Opal recognized the creature from old ghost stories. It was a wraith—a wandering spirit. Fear welled up inside her and she began to run as fast as possible along the wall.
The apparition screeched toward her. The wall disappeared. Opal stopped and desperately grabbed at the air trying to find it. The wall was intact, but broken in. A small hole was there. It was a tunnel through the wall. Moonlight beamed through from the other side, illuminating a possible escape.
Behind her, the wraith was coming fast. Opal scrambled in. The wraith screeched wildly. Opal pulled herself through the tunnel arm over arm. She barely fit, but in no time, she dumped herself out the other end.
The wraith peered into the tunnel. Its black cowl was empty as a dead man’s eyes, but when it saw Opal, it went into a rage. The skeletal creature clawed the tunnel furiously, tearing at the stone, screaming unearthly wails, trying desperately to seize a part of Opal.
Opal was now in territory every person in Grigg’s Landing feared—the wilderness beyond Devil’s Alley. She didn’t know what to do but she was sure of one thing: she would be dead before dawn.
19
The Ranger was having trouble finding Opal Summerfield, until he heard the wraith shrieking. The entire population of the Ozark Mountains would have run the other way, but he kicked his horse into a gallop and rode toward it.
Within minutes he was firing his crystal-tipped arrows. Green sparks exploded along the wall. The creature seemed obsessed with one section of the wall and ignored his attack. The Ranger hit the wraith dead center and it imploded in a swirl of black smoke.
The girl had breached the boundary. He didn’t know how that was possible, but it was obvious when he rode up to the hole in the wall. She was lost in very dangerous territory.
He dismounted and tied his horse to a nearby tree.
“Don’t worry old friend—that should be the last of them. You’ll be okay till I get back,” he said to the horse, who seemed a bit worried about being left alone.
As he walked toward the wall, a lightning bolt of pain shot through his chest. He ripped back his leather armor and pulled away his shirt. A coin-sized circle of light radiated from underneath his skin. It grew more brilliant as he got closer to the wall, giving the appearance that his heart was literally on fire.
The light peaked and then died away when he touched the wall. The coin under his skin pulsed red several more times then disappeared. He covered himself back up as the pain subsided.
In a blink of an eye, he was on the other side.
20
I’m in serious trouble, Opal thought.
She was at least a mile past the wall and had no idea where she was going. She heard a horse, and then movement coming from the direction of the wall. A few minutes later, she sensed someone close. It seemed the Hoods had found her. She squeezed into the thickest patch of cover she could and scrambled into the shadows. Pulling her knees to her chest, she tried to will herself invisible.
After what seemed an eternity, she heard a voice, but it was not what she expected.
“I know you’re here! Come out,” he said.
The stranger tried to sooth Opal’s terror.
“Don’t worry. I’m here to help.”
Opal scurried deeper into the forest and balled up under a chinquapin tree. She pushed against its web of roots and covered herself with the thick, leathery fronds of a Christmas fern that fanned out around the tree. She slowed her breathing and tried to stop her trembling.
I’m going to stay alive!
“I kno
w you are here. I’m not leaving until I find you,” the shadowy figure whispered.
Opal quietly searched the ground for a weapon: a rock, a stick—something for protection. Her hand skimmed over a litter of nuts from the tree. Her other hand found a good-sized river stone—one too big to skip, large enough to knock a man to the ground.
The man came closer.
“If we stay any longer we’ll both be in danger. We have to move to a safer place.”
At that moment, the stranger was so close that he disturbed the fern that covered Opal. A flash of her house burning and Bree screaming flooded her memory. She felt the necklace against her chest become warmer. It began to glow orange. It was telling her she was in danger. She didn’t know how a stone could do that, but the message was clear to Opal.
She threw a handful of chinquapin nuts to the left. The man turned toward the noise, and Opal brought the river rock down from the right. Opal’s blow landed at the base of his neck and he slumped to the ground.
In no time, she was standing over the young black man. He was at least six feet tall and lean, with wiry muscles. His hair was cut so close to his chocolate brown head that he looked bald. He rubbed his neck for a long moment, then his thin lips curled into a smile that spread across his very good-looking face.
At first she thought it was Carl Butler, the sawmill owner’s son, who Mattie constantly swooned over. This boy was better looking though and dressed in leather armor with runic designs carved into its plates. His cloak glittered like glass; it seemed translucent. Opal was taken aback, the boy was no one she knew, and thankfully, he was not a Hood. Although he was clearly a stranger, he had a familiar and intriguing aura.
His eyes, she thought. He could be my brother.
Taking advantage of Opal’s hesitation, the young man attacked. He moved quick, using his legs to trip Opal backward. In a flash he reversed the situation and pinned Opal flat to the cold dirt.
Opal Summerfield and The Battle of Fallmoon Gap Page 5
