But then she heard them.
At first, she thought it was just the wind bringing in another storm. But the wind didn’t make noises like this. High-pitched shrieks, moans, and growls echoed from far away. A stone shifted nearby, and a faint sound like pebbles—or clicking claws—reached Rook’s ears. She whirled in that direction, but there was nothing there. Her heart pounded. The others were noticing the sounds too. The constables kept their knives ready, tensing every time the weeds rustled or a shadow seemed to move among the piles of stone.
Fox bounded up beside Rook, keeping as close to her as Jace. They were far enough away from the wall that he’d transformed back into his animal form, and he seemed much more at ease.
“Can we stop for a moment?” Dozana asked after they’d been walking and hacking at brush for about ten minutes.
“What’s wrong?” Hardwick asked, turning to look at her. His knife was stained dull green from cutting the plants.
Dozana tipped her head back, eyes closed, oily raindrops splashing her face. She held her hands out from her sides and breathed deeply.
“Are you all right?” Drift asked, clearly concerned. She had been hovering in the air to get a look at the path ahead of them, but now she floated back to the ground.
“Yes, Daughter, I’m fine,” Dozana assured her. The woman opened her eyes and smiled at Drift, a serene expression settling over her features. “In fact, I’m feeling better than I have in a long time.”
“Then why are we stopping?” Jace asked, an irritated line creasing his forehead.
“We’re not,” Hardwick said, turning away. “We’ll rest once we reach the lake. Let’s go.”
But Dozana didn’t move. “I’m afraid I have to refuse,” she said, her serene expression never wavering. “This is as far as you go, Captain Hardwick.”
Slowly, the captain turned around, fixing Dozana with a cold stare. “Excuse me?” he said.
Rook instinctively took a step back from the confrontation unfolding between the two of them. She pressed against Fox, and at the same time Drift edged toward her mother, a stiff breeze swirling around her.
“What are you playing at?” Jace demanded angrily. “The captain said—”
“I know what the captain said,” Dozana interrupted, and this time there was a crack in her too-calm voice. “I was standing right here when he said it. I’m not invisible. I’m not an object, or a ruined thing lying in this Wasteland.” Her lips twisted in a smile that chilled Rook. “Well, maybe I am a ruined thing, a broken woman. But even broken things have power.”
What did that mean? Rook wondered. A feeling of dread crept over her at the look that had come into Dozana’s eyes.
Suddenly, Garrett raised his knife and moved toward Dozana with a speed that made Rook gasp. The captain came in from the other side, both of them trying to flank her. Jace drew the pistol he carried.
“Stop!” Drift cried out, raising her hands. “Please, don’t hurt her!”
Dozana’s pupils dilated, turning her eyes to hard black jewels. Lightning split the sky at the same instant the air shimmered, and a pulse of energy rolled out from her in an arc. Rook felt it slice into her chest, stealing her breath. Then it was gone, leaving only a faint impression of heat around her heart.
Rook watched helplessly as the pulse of energy struck the captain and his men. Hardwick and Garrett stumbled. Their knives clattered to the ground. The pistol quivered in Jace’s grip, but then he too dropped his weapon, and all three men collapsed. They were still conscious, working their mouths to scream for help, but none of them could speak or get up.
“What are you doing to them?” Drift demanded, her eyes filled with fear.
“They’re being taught that carrying those toys doesn’t give them any real power or protection,” Dozana explained. Rook watched as the woman’s eyes faded back to their normal color. She stood over the men, staring down at them with a look of pity and disgust. “I am exposing how small they truly are, and I am reminding you three children how much greater you are in body, mind, and soul. Earlier, in the park, you resisted my power and almost fought it off. These men were laid low in one strike.”
A voice in the back of Rook’s mind screamed at her that they should run, flee the captain and his men and run from Dozana and the Wasteland. But she found she couldn’t make herself move. She just stared, horrified, at the men twitching on the ground.
“You planned this, didn’t you?” Rook said, her voice trembling. “You could have escaped from them any time you wanted.”
“Not any time,” Dozana corrected her. She bent down, collected the knives and guns and tossed them into the thorny underbrush. “Only here, beyond the red heartstone wall, where the animus flows like a raging river. It feeds me, makes me stronger than I have ever been. You see, the magic of the Wasteland is a strange, unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be harnessed by someone who knows how.”
Kneeling beside Hardwick, Dozana touched a vine coiling across the ground, careful not to prick her finger on its wicked thorns. At her touch, the vine stirred, slithering up and across the captain’s chest like rope. Hardwick’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t dare try to move for fear of being stabbed with the poisonous thorns.
As Rook watched, Dozana awoke more of the vines, cooing at them and coaxing them like a mother to a nervous child. One by one, they wrapped themselves around the constables, stretching, tightening, until all three men were securely bound. Dozana’s final touch: a ridge of black thorns encircled their exposed throats, the points just grazing—but not breaking—the tender skin of their necks.
“You know, we—the Vorans I mean—tried to preserve our forests and medicinal plant species with magic just like this,” Dozana said, gazing down at Hardwick as she spoke. “They’d almost all been destroyed in the wars, and we needed to save as many of our natural resources as we could. So we poured raw animus into them, and they thrived for a time, growing and bending themselves to our will, but the side effect was that they lost every one of their healing properties. Eventually, they withered and died. The animus was too strong for them. There have only ever been two types of vessels capable of safely holding and distributing animus. One of these is the crystals grown in the gardens of Cherith, the same crystals we brought to every corner of Talhaven.” She glanced up and met Rook’s eyes. “And then there are the Vorans themselves.”
Next to Rook, Fox’s body trembled. Protective shadows sprang to life on either side of him.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Dozana told the men casually, as if they were discussing the weather. “The children don’t need to see that. No, I thought it was more important to make you helpless, as helpless as you made me during all those months I spent a prisoner, doing your leader’s bidding. Maybe you’ll be able to free yourselves once my power wears off. Maybe you’ll be able to keep the thorns from digging into your flesh and poisoning your blood. You might even be able to escape before the monsters of the Wasteland come upon you. There’s always hope.”
Rook cringed as Dozana stood up and turned to her, Drift, and Fox. “Time to go,” she said briskly, dusting her hands on her skirt as if wiping off something unpleasant. “We are very close to the heart of the Wasteland, where our real work can begin.”
DOZANA INSTRUCTED DRIFT TO TAKE the lead and hover a few feet in the air to guide their diminished group down the twisting, broken streets toward the lake. For a long time, none of them spoke. Rook couldn’t get the image of Captain Hardwick and his men out of her head, their frozen, fearful stares as the vines enveloped them.
She had no love for the Regaran constables—they’d kidnapped her and her friends and forced them into danger—but that didn’t mean she wanted to see them helpless, left for the monsters of the Wasteland to devour.
It was Dozana who had tricked them all, lured them to this place so she could escap
e the constables. But what was she after now? Had anything she’d told them been the truth?
Rook glanced over her shoulder at the woman, who was walking at the back of their group to keep them all in sight. Her face gave away nothing. Fox trotted next to Rook with the two shadows he’d created keeping watch. It was the best protective formation they could make to keep each other safe.
The only thing Rook could contribute was to have her chalk ready in her hand in case she had the opportunity to create a door for the three of them to escape through.
But after that display with the constables, Rook’s hope of being able to break free from Dozana was slowly slipping away. She had never seen magic so powerful or used so cruelly. Jace and Garrett had been many things, but they were never cruel to her. The captain was a hard man, but he had never seemed to enjoy keeping them prisoner. He’d been doing what he thought he had to do to save the city.
Rook pushed those thoughts out of her mind. She wasn’t going to end up like the constables, and she wasn’t about to let anything happen to Fox and Drift either. She needed to come up with a plan.
She sneaked another glance at Dozana and found the woman’s attention largely on their surroundings. The farther into the Wasteland they traveled, the more Rook had the sense they were being watched, or stalked, or both. She couldn’t see anything following them, but she felt something…a presence, as disturbing as a breath at the back of her neck.
It looked like Fox sensed it too. Every so often, he hunkered his body down and growled, his ears pressed flat against his head. He looked as if he wanted to attack everything in every direction, but like Rook, he couldn’t get a fix on where the danger was coming from.
Ahead of them, Drift came back down and held up a hand for the others to stop. “What is it?” Dozana asked impatiently. “We can’t afford to stay out in the open like this.”
“You’d better look at this,” Drift said in a flat voice. Rook recognized that tone. It was the one Drift used when she was trying not to let on how scared she was.
Dozana moved to the front of the group while Fox and his shadows formed a semicircle around them. Rook followed Dozana to Drift’s side. She was bending over a dense bush that seemed entirely made of thorns and covered with a white, stringy substance that reminded her of dandelion fluff.
Then she got closer and realized that the substance wasn’t part of the plant.
It was a spider’s web.
Rook stared at the dense, silky strands in disbelief and tried very hard not to think about the size of the spider that must have spun them. They engulfed the bush, but that was only one small corner of the web. The rest of it unfurled across the path in front of them, covering at least two city blocks.
“What do we do?” Drift asked, keeping her voice low. “We can’t go through it.” To demonstrate why, she touched one of the silken strands with her fingertip and then tried to pull it away. The strands stuck to her fingers like glue, and she had to yank her hand away to free it, leaving behind a sticky white residue.
“Don’t do that again,” Dozana commanded in a tense voice. The vibration from Drift’s touch traveled through the web, similar to the disturbance an insect would make when caught. Was the spider nearby? Rook wondered. Would it feel that tiny movement from Drift’s touch?
“We’ll have to go around it,” Dozana said, gesturing to a path that led southeast, away from the web, but also away from the lake and the floating forest.
“That means we probably won’t make it to the lake before nightfall,” Rook said, pointing at the sky, which was already darkening in the aftermath of the storm, the red twilight slowly deepening to black, with hints of green edging the clouds.
“I was afraid of that,” Dozana said. “We’ll have to make camp in the ruins. Keep an eye out for something we can use as a shelter.”
They turned onto their new course. Rook kept glancing at the web as they walked. Fox and his shadows did the same.
So they were taken entirely by surprise when the dogs leaped out at them.
Their only warning was the sound of harsh breathing and claws scraping stone. Then, from behind a cracked wall, two mastiff hounds charged into their path. They growled and snarled, foam threads dripping from their mouths.
They were enormous—bigger even than Fox—with matted fur and thick white tusks protruding from their mouths. In the center of their foreheads, a third eye stared down malevolently.
“Get back!” Drift screamed, and a blast of wind enveloped the group. The breath whooshed from Rook’s lungs as the force of it slammed into her from behind, making her stumble. She looked up to see a hovering Drift in the middle of a mini tornado. Leaves and dirt swirled in a vortex around her friend, but she wasn’t using the wind to fly. She was channeling it forward, pushing against the hounds so they couldn’t attack the group.
And it was working. The hounds, one black and one chocolate brown, skittered backward over the stones. Teeth bared, they snarled and snapped at the air, scrambling to regain their footing, but the wind was too strong.
Rook had never seen Drift use her power like this. She couldn’t possibly keep it up for long. It would sap her energy. She was going to collapse as surely as if Dozana had drained her magic. Unless…maybe the power of the inner Wasteland had also given Drift’s magic a boost, the same way it had for Dozana.
Beside her, Fox exploded into action, sending not two, not three, but four shadows darting toward the mastiffs. Drift eased up on the tornado so the magical foxes could leap through, the wind pulling at their bodies, fraying them like smoke until they burst out the other side, re-formed, and surrounded the hounds.
Then Drift fell out of the air, hitting the ground not five feet away. Even with the magical boost, she’d used too much of her strength at once. Now she had only foxes made of shadow to protect her.
“No!” Rook cried. “Dozana, help me!” She ran to Drift, grabbing her beneath the armpits and hauling her to her feet. Drift swayed and leaned heavily on Rook.
“So dizzy,” she mumbled.
Dozana put her body in front of them, temporarily blocking Rook’s view of the standoff between the hounds and the shadow foxes. All she could hear were growls, barking, and high-pitched yips.
“Run!” Dozana shouted at them. “Around the web the other way! Now!”
That was all Rook needed to hear. She tugged on Drift’s arm. “Let’s go! Fox, come on!”
They ran, but they were so slow—a tripping, fumbling group that clambered over stone and shifting wood piles, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the mastiffs as possible. Rook had to strain to hold Drift upright, and Fox kept turning in circles to look behind them.
Suddenly the thunderous barking of the giant mastiffs turned to whimpers, and a loud thud echoed down the street. The shadow foxes reappeared beside Fox, all four of them. Rook threw a glance over her shoulder to find Dozana standing over the two mastiffs. They had crumpled to the ground and lay on their sides, unconscious just like the constables, but there was something different about them.
The hounds were smaller, Rook realized. The magic of the Wasteland had made them grow to monstrous proportions, but Dozana’s power had shrunken them back to their normal size. Did that mean they would stay as normal dogs when they woke up?
Another thought occurred to her then, along with a surge of hope.
Dozana was at least thirty yards away from them, and she was distracted dealing with the hounds.
This was their chance to escape.
“Drift, is your head any clearer?” Rook asked, out of breath. “We need to run faster. If we can get a little farther away, we can hide and—”
Just then, Drift caught her shin on an exposed board and fell, crying out in pain. “You and Fox go,” she commanded, clutching her shin. “I’ll say we split up. Find somewhere to hide, draw the qu
ickest door you’ve ever drawn, and take Fox through it!”
“Not a chance!” Rook yelled. She leaned down and grabbed Drift’s arm. Fox got on her other side, boosting her up with his body, yipping and barking all the while. It was the fox equivalent of telling them to hurry.
“You’re both…so…stubborn!” Drift said angrily as Rook hauled her up. They took off again, but this time Drift was limping, and they were moving even slower than before. Rook glanced down and noticed a dark stain spreading over Drift’s pants leg.
“You’re bleeding!” she cried in dismay. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“That’s why I told you to leave me!” Drift snapped.
Still bickering, they rounded a corner, and all of them stopped dead.
The thick white spiderweb stretched across the path in front of them, blocking the way. It was at least ten feet tall and twenty feet wide.
And in the center of the web was a huge brown mass as big as both of the mastiff hounds together.
Eight hairy legs, each one the length of a broom handle, spread out from its body. Rook counted the same number of shiny black eyes staring her down as she stared back, too terrified to move, to scream, or even to turn and run.
But the spider could move, and it did.
Directly toward them.
THE SPIDER INCHED ITS WAY gracefully down the web, taking its time, as if it was sizing them up as it approached. Probably trying to see how much of a threat they posed.
Or maybe it was just planning its dinner, Rook thought.
“We have to get out of here,” Drift whispered. One hand was locked on Rook’s arm in a bruising grip, her other hand buried in Fox’s thick fur. “Go. Very. Slowly.”
Rook began to inch her way back the way they’d come, Drift shuffling step by step with her. The shadow foxes spread out around them, forming a wall between the girls and the giant spider.
The Door to the Lost Page 13
