“We’ll stop them. The halos will get the Scythe back,” Brilliance pipes in.
“Funny, funny halo! Funny girl! No powers for hoodies, no powers for halos.” Pandora does a twirl on the spot and starts to dance to imaginary music. “No balance. If hoodies have no powers, halos have no powers. Connected, connected. Can’t have one without the other. Nope! Both halos and hoodies go bye, bye, bye!” Pandora says and then lets out a long giggle.
I rub my eyes and face in frustration. “So we need to wait until the other hoodies and halos get back from the Reapless and tell them what happened. I’m sure they’ll send out an army to go get it back.”
Pandora’s fake giggle turns into roaring laughter and she doubles over. “Meatloaf-and-Corn, Meatloaf-and-Corn! You are the funniest one, laughy-laugh! Silly! They’re not coming back! Nope! Trapped! Trapped at the Reapless. Can’t come back without Scythe of Grim, silly, silly!”
Brilliance jumps forward. “What do you mean they can’t come back?”
“How does the little halo think they get there to the Reapless? Silly halo! No powers means trapped. Can’t come back.”
“So my parents are stuck forever at the Reapless?” Mal asks.
“All parents. All hoodies. All halos! Yep, yep, yep!”
For a moment the idea does sounds pretty good to be free of my nagging mom and dad, but unfortunately I still kind of love them. Not only that, but hearing the unicorns talk about the Queen Suzanne and that maybe my dad isn’t to blame for what happened has lit a fire inside of my chest.
If I can find out what really happened, my life will change forever. No more dirty looks, no more parents telling my friends to not be friends with me. That could all end. I’ve got to find out the truth.
“What are we going to do?” Mal asks.
“Hurry, hurry! Unicorns fast. They’ll be far away. Yes indeed-sy, far, far away! Won’t find them, trail lost, gone, gone.”
Brilliance rushes over to an unconscious hoodie and begins to shake him. “Get up! Please wake up!”
The unconscious hoodie flops back and forth as limp as an eel.
“No help, no help. They’re asleep. Sleeping for many days. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Unicorns running, run far, far away,” Pandora says and claps several times.
Mal and I look around for any other conscious hoodies around, but there aren’t any to be seen.
“Up to you, up to you. Find the unicorns. Find, find, find!”
Brilliance takes a familiar stance with her hands on her hips, and I can tell she is about to begin her Michaels speech again, but she catches my eye and stops short.
“I’ll go,” she says.
Mal gives her a “you’ve got to be crazy” look and shakes her head. “No way! You’ll get killed.”
“Mal, there isn’t any other way,” I say. “If we don’t go now and at least try … well, you know what could happen.”
Mal looks at me in horror. I can tell that tears are beginning to form in her eyes. She takes a long breath like she is about to plunge into an icy lake, and then she nods. “When I was in the dungeon, I overheard the unicorns talking. They were talking about heading back north toward a waterfall. From the way they were speaking, it seemed like it was far … really far.”
“Good, that’s a start,” I say and turn to Pandora. “You said you found them once before, right? You can lead us to them.”
Pandora’s face goes stark white, and she accidently pulls out a large clump of her own wispy hair. “No, oh no. Never. Never again, no, no. Pandora will never go find unicorns again, nope, never.” She then bolts from her spot and dashes around the corner of a building and disappears.
“Wow,” Brilliance mutters.
“Yeah, I know. You’d never think that a woman that old could move that fast,” I say.
“So how are we going to catch up with the unicorns?” Brilliance asks.
I look around the street for anything we could use. “We could use a car. I think I could drive it.”
“They won’t be using any roads. They’ll be going over rough terrain. A car would be useless,” Brilliance says.
I spin around and face Mal. “The Hound-ariot!”
Mal shakes her head. “There’s no way hounds could run for that long. They’d fall over dead before we got fifty miles … But I’ve got an idea.”
Twenty-One
I can almost touch the treetops as we soar just above the forest canopy. We’ve already had a handful of close calls. Several times an abnormally tall tree has nearly claimed us. Mal, Brilliance, and I are suspended on top of a pink polka-dotted blanket. Dozens of pigeons clasp the edges of the blanket, carrying us after the unicorns.
A tree branch smacks into us, and we twirl and flutter. Several pigeons are knocked back in a cloud of feathers and squawks. New pigeons dive in to take their spots.
“Again, why are we flying so low?” I yell over the whipping wind.
Brilliance brushes her long blonde hair out of her face. “We’ll lose the trail if we’re too high. The unicorns are hardly leaving a trail; they don’t want to be followed.”
I glance over at a struggling pigeon. Wings flapping madly to keep up with the others, it heaves to catch its breath. Not the type of sight that instills a lot of confidence in the plan.
“Mal, why didn’t you get some falcons or bald eagles to carry us? They’d be faster and we wouldn’t look so ridiculous,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “We live in the city, doofus! In case you hadn’t noticed, there aren’t a ton of falcons and bald eagles perched all over the place. Besides, I don’t speak falconese or eaglese very well.” She turns around and peers down at the forest floor.
“Hmph,” I grumble and fold my arms. I glance down at the pink-and-white polka-dotted blanket. “Well, at least we could have gotten a better blanket. You know, black or bloodred. Something that is a little more intimidating than the blanket you had in first grade.”
“I grabbed the biggest one I have. It’s a king size. I was more concerned about bringing other things than what blanket we rode on,” Mal calls out over her shoulder.
“But don’t you think that—”
“Oh, will you please shut up?” Brilliance yells.
The startled pigeons suddenly veer to the left and the three of us nearly topple off the blanket. My head collides with Brilliance’s skull ball boot draped over her shoulder.
Mal and Brilliance give me a nasty look. I point at Brilliance while rubbing my throbbing forehead. “She yelled.”
Both of them shake their heads and turn their attention back to the forest beneath us.
Before long, the sun reaches its peak and starts to descend off to our left. The pine and aspen tree shadows begin to stretch and yawn. Sleep begins a tug-of-war with my eyelids, and I struggle to keep them open. I’m nearly asleep when I feel a slug on the bottom of my foot. I look up and Brilliance has her finger up to her lips, beckoning me to come to the edge of the blanket.
I slide over next to her and she points ahead of us on the horizon. What looks like a shimmering white snake is slithering through a valley between two snowcapped mountains. It’s the unicorns.
“Wow, they’re moving fast,” I say.
Brilliance nods, and Mal scoots over to one side of the blanket. Mal clears her throat and makes a warbling sound. The pigeons turn their focus to her, and she begins to speak in pigeonish to them. I tilt my head forward trying to pick up a word here or there, but I only know a few swear words and “don’t poop on me” in their language. In case you were wondering, Mal didn’t say anything I could understand.
The pigeons pull up, and we slow down.
“What did you tell them?” I ask.
“To keep our distance,” Mal says. “We don’t want to be spotted.”
I nod. “Good idea.”
Mal lets out a long yawn. “I’m so tired. Will one of you take watch and make sure we don’t lose sight of them?”
“I’ll keep watch,” Brilliance sa
ys.
“Me too. I’m not tired,” I say.
Mal crinkles her nose at me, muttering something under her breath I can’t make out. She lies down on her back and drapes one arm over her eyes.
Brilliance pulls the skull boot off her shoulder and rubs where the straps had dug into her skin.
“Why did you bring that thing anyway?” I ask.
“Protection,” she says like I had just asked her the stupidest question ever.
I snort. “Protection? What are you going to do? Try and kick another unicorn with it?”
She glares at me. “I’m not going to kick them with it. I’ll kick things at them with it.”
“You really think you’re that accurate?” I ask incredulously.
She laughs. “Didn’t I just knock two of your rolls through the golden hoop the other day?”
I bite my lip. I had tried to forget about that.
“And those skulls were moving. You wouldn’t believe what I can do when they are standing still,” she says with a satisfied grin.
I sniff and fold my arms. Okay, so she got me on that one.
She continues to grin at me smugly. I’m very much tempted to make a rude gesture, but at the last second I change the finger I was going to use and point at Brilliance. “One thing I’ve been meaning to ask you. How did you figure out my roll?”
“Figure out your roll?”
“Yeah. How were you able to strike it so easily? The three halos before you didn’t even come close.”
Brilliance leans back onto her elbows while crossing her legs. “So you want to know how I was able to figure out your roll?” she asks with a smirk.
I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t mind chucking her off the blanket right this very second. “Yes, that’s what I asked you.”
“Now do you mean your roll or Vladimir Mikhail’s roll?” she asks and winks at me.
My mouth drops open and a spluttering sound dribbles across my lips. “But … but … how?”
“Night, what’s my last name?”
I sigh. Here we go again. “Michaels, and you Michaels are amazing and—”
“Do you know where my family was originally stationed a few centuries ago?” she asks.
I shake my head. “How would I know that?”
“We were stationed in Moscow, Russia,” she says, craning her head toward me like that should mean something.
I crinkle up my brow. “So?”
She shakes her head. “Do you know how you say Michaels in Russian?”
“Michaelinski?” I ask with a shrug.
“Mikhail,” she says and smiles even wider than before. “You were rolling my great-great-uncle Vladimir Mikhail’s roll.”
It must be my imagination, but I swear I can hear a chipmunk and golden retriever laughing in unison.
“At first, I thought you had made a mistake, but then when you kept on rolling it, I figured out that you must have picked it up somehow. So I knew what to look for and when you rolled it to me—”
“Wham-o,” I interject.
“Yep. Wham-o,” she says with a nod.
“After that, you told all your teammates how to strike it?” I ask.
“Actually no. It takes a lot of practice to be able to connect with that roll,” she says.
“So what did you whisper in that halo’s ear?”
“Nothing, I just told her to act like I was telling her something important. I guessed you would freak out and think I had told her some ‘trick’ to striking your roll and come unglued … Which you did,” she says and then starts to hum some halo choir song.
“You know what, I am actually quite tired. I’m going to go lie down for a bit,” I say and scoot over to the far corner of the blanket. “Wake me up in an hour, will you?”
Brilliance nods. I shove a clump of blanket in-between my teeth and have to use all my restraint to not scream.
I’m not able to fall asleep, and after an hour, Brilliance calls me over. I take her place keeping an eye on the unicorns.
We follow a few miles behind them for another couple of hours, when off in the distance I see what looks like smoke or fog clouding above the trees. I wake Mal and get Brilliance’s attention.
“Is it a forest fire?” I ask, pointing to the fog.
She squints and shields her eyes from the sun. “Maybe.”
“It’s not a forest fire,” Brilliance says. “It’s a waterfall.”
Brilliance sits up on her knees and peers toward the mist, cupping her hands around her eyes. “There’s a meadow just south of the waterfall. We’ll have the pigeons drop us off there, and we’ll hike the rest of the way. No reason to announce to the unicorns that we’re here,” she says.
We reach the edge of the meadow, and the pigeons begin their descent. We’re dropping fast.
“Hey, Mal!” I call out.
“Not now, I’m thinking.”
“But, Mal, it’s really, really important!”
“Everything is always really, really important with you.”
“No seriously, it’s really, really, really important. Should we be dropping this fa—” The earth smacks into us and we three trampoline off the blanket and skip across the meadow floor. Thankfully I fall into an obliging clump of reeds and a soft mound of mud.
I push myself to my feet and spit mud from my mouth. I’ve got it caked all over my face and the front of my shirt. I look around and see a boulder sticking out of the ground like a dull tooth only a few feet from me. I take a deep breath. “Wow, that was lucky.”
I trot over to Mal and help her to her feet. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I think so,” she says, rubbing her knees.
Brilliance is already to her feet and scouting around to make sure the coast is clear. She jogs over to Mal and me. She looks me up and down. “What happened to you?”
I brush some of the mud off my face and shirt. “I’m okay. I hit some reeds and landed in some mud.”
A smile creeps across Brilliance’s face. “Uh … that wasn’t mud.”
My eyes widen. “What?”
“Let’s just say you have a bear to thank for your soft landing.”
I splutter and spit with all my might. I run over and dunk my head in a pool of water nearby and wash my mouth out and face off.
Brilliance and Mal are watching me with suppressed smiles.
“It isn’t funny,” I grumble.
Brilliance lets out a stifled giggle, and Mal clamps her hands over her mouth to not laugh. I roll my eyes.
“Come on. Let’s go,” I say.
I take off toward the waterfall, and my two giggling compatriots chase after me. As we sneak from tree to tree, the rumble of the waterfall grows in intensity. The sun dips behind the towering mountain just west of us.
“We’ve got to find out where the unicorn hideout is before it gets too dark.” I say over my shoulder. “The last thing we want is to spend the night in the forest not knowing where they are, and then happen upon them in the middle of the night.”
I scurry forward and dip behind a collapsed pine tree. Mal and Brilliance sidle up next to me. I peer through a grove of aspen trees and can make out the base of the waterfall. The roar of the water dashing itself off the jagged rocks is deafening.
Brilliance signals for us to follow her, and she starts to creep around the dead tree trunk. As she is about to take a step into the open, something flashes in the corner of my eye. I grab Brilliance by the back of the shirt and yank her down. Her backside hits the ground hard, and she lets out a yelp. I clasp my hand to her mouth while shaking my head for her to be quiet.
I peek my head just above our hiding place. Two unicorns are striding through the trees only thirty yards ahead of us. They’re marching toward the base of the waterfall.
I motion to Mal and Brilliance to stay put, and I creep after the unicorns. I follow a safe distance behind, ducking behind trees and rocks. They reach the churning river just below the crashing falls. They stop and swivel their heads in
every direction scanning the forest. I drop to my stomach.
The unicorns reach down and push aside a boulder. One of them pulls out something that was hidden underneath. There’s a gnashing and scraping sound like rusty metal plates sliding against each other. Platforms the size of manhole covers pop out of the river. The unicorns hop from one to the next, like frogs jumping from lily pad to lily pad. An arch has pushed itself up right in the heart of the falls, a doorway through the curtain of water. The unicorns walk through the arch and disappear behind the waterfall.
There’s another screeching metallic sound, and the platforms drop back into the churning river.
I turn back to tell Mal and Brilliance about my discovery and then lead them back to the spot where I watched the unicorns climb through the falls.
“Okay, so we know where they are and how to get in, but what are we going to do when we get in there? We don’t know what’s behind there, we don’t know how many unicorns there are, and we don’t know where they’ve taken the Scythe,” Mal says, wringing her hands together.
“We’ve got to at least try,” Brilliance says. “We’ve come too far to not try. If my dad was here he—”
“I agree with both of you,” I say quickly, hoping to cut short another story about Lightcrest. “We’ve got to at least try to get the Scythe back. But we can’t just walk through the front door without a plan.”
“So, what’s the plan?” Brilliance asks, and both she and Mal look at me expectantly.
Fantastic … I was hoping that one of them had a plan. “Uh … Mal, what do you have in that backpack of yours?”
Mal lays the contents neatly onto the ground. She points to each item. “I brought the ice spray, the voice receiver—”
“What does that do?” Brilliance asks.
My memory immediately conjures up her pet guinea pig Titacus-Rex. “It allows you to speak through someone or something else. You put the band around the neck and you put the earpiece into your ear. It’s kind of like one of those shorty walkie-talkies. You hear what the animal or person hears and you can use their vocal chords.”
Brilliance screws up her face. “That’s kind of creepy.”
Mal points to three slender foot-long cylinders. “I just finished these last week. I call them hound retriever tubes.”
Death's Academy Page 13
