“We’re not going to die,” I said through my snuffles.
“I disagree with you, Miss Magic. In case you haven’t noticed, we seem to be buried alive,” he said, barely audible.
“I know, Owen, I know. But Jake is above us. He knows where we are. I’m sure he’s trying to dig us out right now.”
“That little guy?”
“Yes, Jake, my friend.”
“Sorry, honey, don’t mean to burst your bubble. But that kid couldn’t dig his way out of a wet paper bag. If you’re relying on him to save you, then you’re putting your faith in the wrong person.”
“I’ve never had much faith, but what faith I’ve had, I’ve always put in Jake. He’s never let me down.”
“First time for everything. Hell of a time to find out that the person you’ve put your faith in all these years is a weak, spineless coward of a boy, isn’t it?”
Owen had ragged on Jake before we went through the damned portal, but there’d always been a razzing quality to it, not outright meanness in his voice. What’s happening to him?
“You’re wrong. Jake may be small, but he’s not a coward. Why are you being like this? He’s the thing that stands between dying and living and you’re spending what could be your last breaths dissing him?”
“These are my last breaths,” he whispered. “I figured on that a long time ago. I’ve already cried and hollered and pounded and scratched. That’s why my voice is just about shot and my hands are sore and bloodied, I’m sure. No one came. We’re alone here.”
“No, Owen, you’re not alone. I’m here. I came. Don’t you see that? I came for you. That’s why I’m here. I wanted to be with you so much. My wanting brought me here, to you.” I cried fresh tears and put my head on his chest.
He said nothing. Did nothing.
“Don’t give up. Don’t give up hope. We’ll get out of this – this coffin – out of this whole place.”
His arm hooked around me, his hand stroked my hair.
We lay like that for quite a while. All I heard was the beating of Owen’s heart and the sound of our breath. I began to think that maybe Owen was right. Maybe Jake just wasn’t strong enough – didn’t have what it takes – to save us.
Just as I began to feel despair wash over me, I heard a scratching sound. It was faint at first, but then grew louder and louder.
“It’s Jake,” I said. “Jake’s coming for us.”
Owen didn’t say a word. That’s when I realized that he had stopped stroking my hair. I pressed my ear to his chest. I could still hear and feel his heart, but it was slow and faint.
Owen was dying.
I felt weak too. Each breath felt like it could be my last. But with everything I still had, I beat on our coffin roof – hard.
Jake!” I screamed.
“Emily! I’m coming, Em,” I heard him say in a muffled voice.
“Hurry, Jake. You’ve got to hurry,” I screamed.
“I’m coming for you,” he said. “Stop talking. You need to save your air.” His voice sounded labored and hard to hear over his scratching and digging.
I did as he said, for once, and lay back as still as I could. I tried my best to remain calm and focus on a single thought: Jake is coming for me.
In a few minutes, I heard him scratching on the wood roof of our coffin. Then he said, “Close your eyes, and cover your face.”
“Okay,” I said as loudly as my air-starved lungs would allow me. I covered Owen’s face with my hands and buried my head in his chest.
I heard Jake pounding and kicking on the wood, and soon felt splinters of wood rain down on my hands and over my back. He continued to kick, and then the noise stopped, and I felt Jake’s warm hands on my own.
“Come on,” he said. He pulled on my hands as he helped me up and out of what in a few more minutes would have been my true final resting place.
I knelt on the ground beside him and slumped into his waiting arms as I sobbed and gulped for breath at the same time. Even though it burned my chest and nose, I breathed in large gulps of the rotten air. Jake held me for a brief time then unwrapped himself from me.
“Owen,” he said. “Come on, help me lift him out of there.”
Jake’s hands were bloody and scraped from digging in the red dirt. Despite his obvious pain, he got down into the place where I had laid. I went to the other side, kneeling down on the gritty red dirt, unwilling to get back into that coffin for anything. I bent down and was able to grab Owen’s hands, and I pulled as Jake pushed. In a few seconds, we had Owen out of the coffin, his head limp and lolling around his neck, his arms and hands lifeless.
We laid him out, and I pressed my ear to his chest to listen for a heartbeat while Jake used his fingers to check for a pulse in Owen’s wrist. I couldn’t hear anything now, his chest silent and cold. I looked up to Jake, and he just shook his head.
Owen had been breathing just a few minutes before. I wasn’t going to let him go without a fight.
I began doing chest compressions, pushing down on his wide chest as hard as I could with my palms.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” I panted. “I’m saving his life.”
“But, Em, he’s been dead too long. You can’t bring him back.”
“No, he hasn’t,” I said. “He was alive when I first got in there. He was alive and talking to me just a few minutes before I heard you reach the coffin.” I stopped talking as I pinched his nose and blew with all the breath I had into his mouth, trying hard to expand his airless lungs. I did chest compressions alternated with mouth-to-mouth. After a couple of minutes, it felt like my arms would fall off. Jake must have seen that I was faltering – and that I wasn’t giving up – because he knelt across from me and started pushing down on Owen’s chest to give me a break.
“You’re on your own with the mouth-to-mouth,” he said.
My arms were thankful for the rest. It allowed me to gather more of that burning air in my lungs to pass on to Owen.
“Okay, your turn,” Jake said, and I bent down, pinched Owen’s nose, and blew a large puff of air into his lungs.
We spent a few more minutes alternating the chest pounding and lung filling. How many minutes can someone be dead before they’re brain damaged?
“Come on, Owen, don’t you dare die on me. That’ll really ruin my day!”
After a few more puffs of air, I felt a hand on my butt. I was getting ready to scream at Jake for trying to cop a feel while I was trying to save Owen’s life, but I soon realized it wasn’t Jake at all. My lips were planted on Owen’s, and at some point, it had gone from me resuscitating him to his lips taking control of mine. I felt his tongue dart into my mouth, and his soft but cold lips press gently against my own.
I had dreamed many times of having my first kiss with Owen, but I never dreamed it would be like this. His hand was still resting on my butt, sending a wave of heat up through me while the kiss was kindling a fire in my belly. For a few seconds, I forgot that we had landed in a world of nightmares and thorns and red dust. For a few blissful seconds, I forgot that we still didn’t know where Fanny was and that I wasn’t sure if I could even get us out of this place.
Owen’s lips left mine, but his hand still rested on my posterior when the spell was broken by Jake’s squeaky voice.
“Figures, Breen. She saves your life and all you can think about is copping a feel.”
“Hey, she was the one all over me with her mouth pressed against me!”
“Yeah, asshat, ’cause she was giving you mouth-to-mouth not making out with you!”
Jake was right of course. It was a piggish display. But it was a turn-on too. I saved his life. He was just showing me his gratitude, right?
“Whatever, Jake. The main thing is that Owen’s okay. You are okay, right?”
“What do you think,” he said as he held my gaze with his smoldering eyes.
I couldn’t help but twist my face into a smile.
“I can’t believe this! We don’t even know where Fanny is. She could be dead by now you know, Emily. What if she’s underground like Owen here was? What if she’s fallen into something even worse? You don’t care at all as long as you can tie tongues with Breen here.”
“Stop it, Jake. Being hysterical isn’t going to help anything. We’re going to find Fanny, right now. But use your prodigious brain to help me figure out why it is that you and I just dropped in here while Owen ended up six feet under, huh? Let’s think about where she could be before we all disappear again and end up someplace worse.”
Jake’s hands were balled into tight fists and rested on his hips. His lips were pulled into a thin line, his pupils large with anger. But his eyes soon softened as he thought on what I’d said.
“You’re right. We need to focus – remain calm – if we’re going to make it out of here alive. But the two of you have gotta stop playing tongue hockey in front of me or I’ll puke on you.”
“Jealous much?” Owen asked.
“So help me …” Jake said as he pulled his fist back and was ready to take a punch at Owen.
I held Jake back while Owen just stood his ground, smirking at Jake.
“Stop it,” I said to Jake. “What are you trying to prove? And you,” I said to Owen. “Stop egging him on. Look, this is awkward for all three of us. But we’re into some serious shit here. It doesn’t help anything to fight with each other. Jake, like you said, we have to stick together. Owen, no more making out or copping a feel. We have to focus on finding Fanny.”
The two stood scowling at each other while I tried to calm my own thoughts. As we stood there, I thought I saw a black wisplike thing floating through the air behind Owen’s head. It looked a bit like a twinkling, black dandelion puff. It zigged and zagged, and then was gone before I could point it out to Jake or Owen. Strange. I wonder what that was?
And something else was odd. Owen wasn’t surrounded by the bubble of light like Jake and I were. He had an extremely thin film of light around him, and it was wavering in and out. Maybe his aura hasn’t recovered from his near death. But there was no time to ponder auras and floating puffs. We had to figure out how the place worked before someone got killed.
“Owen, how did you end up in that coffin?” I asked.
“I don’t know. One minute, I’m following you into that portal. The next, I was tumbling through a dark void, then I felt like I was being squashed into nothing, then THUD! I landed here like I was puked out into the dust. I walked for a while in circles I guess.”
“Did you call out for us?” Jake asked.
“Yeah, I did. I called and I walked for what seemed like a long time. And I started getting … Okay, I’ll admit it, I was scared as hell that this was it, you know? I started to think how all alone I was. Kinda ironic, ’cause sometimes I get so sick of having people follow me around. Sometimes, I just wish I could be more like …”
“Like one of us?” Jake asked.
“Well, I don’t want to be like you – no offense.”
“None taken.”
“But have some space, you know? I was thinking that kind of stuff, how I’d finally got what I wanted all right – some alone – but it was hell. I began to think I must be dead and I’d gone to hell. Truly, completely, alone.”
“You imagined you were already dead,” I said.
“Yeah. And then, before I knew what was happening, everything went black and I was there,” Owen said as he pointed to the hole in the ground that we had pulled him out of.
“Emily, right before you disappeared from me and ended up in the coffin with Owen, what were you thinking about?”
“I was … sad. I felt like I was falling into that deep, dark place I used to be so close to …” I said. Just calling the memory up, I started to feel that way again.
“Don’t go there again!” Jake said. He took me by the shoulders and shook me lightly. “Stay with me, Em.”
The gentle shaking broke my trance and brought me back just in time.
“What? Jake, what’s going on?”
“It’s starting to make sense now.”
“It is? You care to share?” Owen asked.
“Sure. Owen, you were thinking about being dead. Poof, you’re planted in a coffin. Emily, you saw his gravestone, you think he’s already dead, and then it brings back – memories – bad thoughts about death, and you were thinking you wanted to die then, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“Then this place – whatever it is – made the thought come true. You got planted too.”
“Are you saying what we wish for comes true?” Owen asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “That can’t be right, can it, Jake? ’Cause back before we found Owen, remember I was trying to conjure up some chairs, and I couldn’t make it happen. And I sure as heck wasn’t thinking bad stuff.”
“That’s right. Maybe it only grants us the bad stuff. Like if we think about things that are negative, that’s what happens.”
“A world of nightmares,” Owen said.
“Exactly,” Jake said.
All three of us stood in silence for a few minutes, letting it all sink in. Then it dawned on me that if our nightmares come true, what kind of nightmare might Fanny be in at that moment.
Jake must have had the same thought as me because he looked at me with a wild and worried look, his face ashen.
“Fanny,” we both said at the same time.
We were about to find out what nightmares lived inside Fanny’s typically happy brain.
8
I gathered Jake and Owen in a circle, and the three of us held hands. Jake and Owen grimaced at having to touch each other, but I thumped Jake on the head and gave Owen my best glare, and they grudgingly held hands. I told them to concentrate on finding Fanny, but try as hard as they could not to think any nightmarish thoughts.
“Don’t think about the worst that could have happened to her. We’re not sure what the rules of this place are. We don’t know yet if thinking about negative stuff happening to her will maybe make it happen, okay? Just try to think positive.”
I instructed them how to breathe and relax and let go of their thoughts. For two guys who’d never meditated before, I thought they were doing a pretty decent job. Having each of them holding one of my hands calmed me and made me feel more powerful. We can do this.
I tried to fill my mind only with thoughts of Fanny, of being with Fanny, of finding Fanny. I used my Madame Wong training, and every time a thought came in that was the slightest bit fearful or scared, I sent it away like a little bird with wings, flying out of my mind and back to the aether.
After many breaths in and out, I began to lose the sensation of my feet to the ground. And not long after that I began to lose the sensation of my hands holding Owen’s and Jake’s. It made me start to panic. What if I’ve lost them? Maybe we were still touching. I didn’t know, but I couldn’t feel it if we were.
Then came that awful spinning and falling, the wrenching and pulling. Just when I felt like my body would surely be ripped apart, there came a thud, and all the air was knocked out of me. I landed once more on the hard surface of the world of nightmares.
I sucked in a deep breath, trying to fill my lungs back up with air, and immediately regretted it. The foul air of the red, dusty world burned your insides if you got too much of it at one time. It tasted like metal in my mouth. I wanted to rinse to get rid of the awful taste, only there wasn’t any water, and I couldn’t conjure any.
I looked around me. Jake and Owen had made it through with me. They were still standing on either side of me. Thank the Goddess I didn’t lose them. Jake and Owen were both holding their sides and had looks on their faces like they’d tasted something foul. I knew they had done the same thing I had – got too much rancid air all at once.
We stood close together and took in our new surroundings. We hadn’t landed in a graveyard. We weren’t standing among the nast
y briars.
No, we found ourselves standing on dusty ground, all right, but it was in the middle of an arena. The center was an oval of dirt floor, surrounded by row after row of seats, all of them filled with people yelling and cheering. There were thousands of people in the stands, up so high that those at the top were small dots. They were dressed in colorful tunics and robes, their heads adorned with vibrantly colored headdresses and hats of various shapes and sizes.
It was as if we were in a Roman coliseum. And all around the edge of the dirt center were gates with metal bars. A large, burly guard stood by each gate. I counted five gates in all. One gate, at the far end, had already been opened. And about thirty feet away from us lay an extremely large corpse of what appeared to be some kind of beast.
The usually thick air of that place was even thicker in the arena and harder to breathe because of all the dust. The crowd’s noise was earsplitting, but even over the din of the noisy patrons, you could hear the sound of beasts growling low, others screeching.
“What is this place?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know, but stay close,” I replied.
My eyes roamed the arena as I tried to take in my surroundings. There, in the middle of the arena floor. There was something laying there. Is that a small person? If it was a person, it was a small and immobile person. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a girl with long, dark, curly hair wearing jeans and Nikes. A girl that had been my best friend since pre-school. A girl that wasn’t moving at all.
Standing next to her was another girl. This girl was also dressed in jeans but was sporting Uggs, a fashionable sweater, and a hoodie with a fur collar. Her blonde hair was almost red because it had been coated with the ever-present red dust, but I’d know that girl anywhere. I’d known her since I was in first grade. I’d known her since she started the trend of everyone calling me Freak Girl.
Standing next to the heap that was my Fanny was Greta, wielding a rusty broadsword and looking positively maniacal.
And Fanny didn’t move.
The Akasha Chronicles Trilogy Boxed Set: The Complete Emily Adams Series Page 33
