by Sarah Jaune
Oliver shook his head. “I’m committed now. We win together or die trying, right?”
“Let’s hope not,” Ivy said grimly.
They slept through the night without hearing anything from outside of the cave. They did, however, make a point of not leaving before dawn. It was the wolf’s low barks that woke Eli and within fifteen minutes they were walking again.
“My whole body feels like several large people were stomping on me for hours,” Oliver complained as they marched along behind the wolf.
They made progress, but it was hampered by boggy crossings over what should have been a full river. Instead they were left with the stinking soup of decaying leaves, dead fish, and thick mud that not even Ivy could dry out.
Eli’s foot sank down into the gunk, up to his knee, and he was unbelievably thankful that Oliver had suggested that they remove their shoes before attempting to cross. He’d attempted to freeze the mud, but after one tumble onto a sharp, frozen shard of dirt, Oliver had given it up. It sucked to wade through the muck, but it wasn’t painful. Much. Occasionally Eli’s foot would hit a rock or a twig, and with waterlogged feet that he knew were already turning to wrinkled prunes, it didn’t feel fantastic.
“This smells so bad,” Ivy practically gagged by the halfway point.
“Your dad should be shot,” Oliver agreed. His face was pale, almost to the point of green. It smelled so bad that Eli wasn’t sure he would be able to smell anything ever again.
The wolf had jumped the river bed in a single bound and currently waited for them on the other bank. Annoyingly his fur was still pristinely white, without a single speck of mud to be found. Eli glanced down at his hands and truly regretted that he would have to eat with them later that day.
“I can’t even sense any clean water close by for us to clean up,” Ivy said bitterly. “It’s no wonder the wolves went crazy and the Sasquatch were in close to Redmond Township. Everything is going to be starved soon.”
Ten minutes later three teenagers, who greatly resembled disaster survivors, climbed up the bank on the other side of the river. The wolf rose and began to walk away.
Eli didn’t even care. He left his flushed cheek pressed to the cool, dying grass, and tried to catch his breath. He’d rarely worked so hard to move. It had been worse than walking through cement.
The wolf growled at him from five feet up the bank.
“Bite me,” Eli told the wolf.
“Maybe not the best suggestion,” Ivy remarked dryly as she pushed herself up to standing. She stared down at her feet. “I’m not going to be able to get my shoes on for a while.”
She was right about that. They progressed slowly to a crawl as they had to wade through sticker bushes with bare feet. Twenty minutes later, Eli called a halt and sat down to beat the mud and gunk off of his feet so he could force on his socks and shoes.
“I’m going to tell Dad all about this,” Oliver muttered as he beat at his own feet with his socks, trying to get the dirt to flake off. “Next time he wants to ground me, I’m going to tell him I walked through poop to save him.”
Ivy shook her head. “I don’t really think that’s going to get you out of trouble.”
“It won’t,” Oliver agreed. “But it will make me feel better.”
Nothing was going to make Eli feel any better. All he had was the word of a telepathic, magical wolf that they were headed in the right direction. Not only that, but he hadn’t seen any sign of tracks since they joined up with the wolf. The whole thing could be a trap.
The problem was that it didn’t feel like a trap. Something in Eli’s gut was urging him to trust the wolf and to keep on as they had been going.
The wolf froze and the three stopped behind him. It turned and stared at them as the sun beat down overhead. It huffed in frustration and then inclined its head again.
“What’s it saying?” Oliver asked them.
“I can’t hear anything,” Ivy admitted hesitantly.
“Me either,” Eli agreed. “What do you want us to—”
His words were cut off by the flying of fur and the thunderous roar of the ground. Eli and Ivy screamed as the world fell out beneath them and somewhere above them Oliver grunted in pain.
They tumbled down, smashed together between boulders and debris. Eli thrust out his hand and deflected a huge rock before it could smash into Ivy, but there wasn’t much more he could do. They hit the bottom of the pit with bone shattering force. It hurt so much that Eli had to force himself not to pass out. He rolled, groaning in pain, to see Ivy struggling towards him.
“What happened?” Eli croaked as he squinted through the flying dust. He reached for Ivy and took her hand as he did a survey of her. She was cut up badly, bruised, scratched, and a trickle of blood made its way down her cheek. Eli stared into her eyes and saw the pain from the fall, but nothing else. He cupped her cheek with his free hand and rested his forehead against hers. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” she said with a hitch. “You?”
He closed his eyes and nodded. When he opened them again, he pulled back enough to get a good look around them.
The sky above them was at least thirty feet up. There were broken tree roots spread out like spider webs all the way up. Oliver’s voice called out to them from above. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Eli hollered back. “What happened?”
“I think it’s a sinkhole,” Oliver yelled back. “The wolf knocked me clear before the ground gave way. It isn’t letting me get too close to the edge. I don’t know how we’re going to get you out.”
“Never mind that,” Eli answered back as he rolled onto his hands and knees. Nothing felt broken, which was a minor miracle. Together, leaning on each other, he and Ivy made it to their feet.
“I don’t think we’re going to fall anymore,” Ivy said as she studied their surroundings, “but I think more dirt can come down on us.”
Eli nodded grimly. “Okay, I’m going to use my power to get you up to the top, then try to get myself up.”
“No,” Ivy protested immediately. “You might be hurt, Eli! What if it collapses around you?”
He fought off his frustration and fear and focused on the important thing. “You need to get out of here. You’re the one we need to fix this mess with the water. If all goes well, I will be out soon. If not, you and Oliver can work out some kind of rope to get me out.”
“Backpacks!” Ivy cried as she spun around. “I was wearing one.”
Eli had been as well. He turned and scanned the surrounding piles of dirt and rocks, but didn’t see anything. “That’s more than half of our food lost.”
Ivy let out a long breath. Her eyes were huge as she studied him. “I don’t want to go up without you.”
“I’ll be along soon after,” he lied evenly. He saw immediately that she saw through the lie, but her shoulders slumped in resignation. Right now this was their best shot. Eli hugged her and felt his wound protest at the contact, but he didn’t care. She hugged him back and held on. “Okay,” he said as he let go and took several steps back. “Try not to wiggle.”
“I won’t,” she promised as she held still.
Eli raised his hands and Ivy rose off the ground, up into the air, a foot per second so that half a minute later he had her over the lip of the hole. He couldn’t see where to set her, but Oliver’s call was enough to have him directing her towards the voice.
A moment later he heard, “I have her!” and Eli slumped down in relief. It hadn’t been difficult. She wasn’t that heavy, and it hadn’t been much magic, but he’d never used his telekinesis on a person like that, especially not one he cared so much about. Eli rubbed at the grime on his face and felt a bit of relief at the scrape of tiny pebbles on his skin.
He was still alive. He still had a chance, and his brother and Ivy were safe; or at least as safe as they could be.
“Are you ready, Eli?” Ivy called down urgently.
No.
“Yes,” he lied again
as he focused on the ground and pushed himself up. It wasn’t like flying. It wasn’t even like controlled floating. It was as though he was being shot into the air by a variable tornadic wind that couldn’t make up its mind. He barely stopped himself from smashing into the wall ten feet up, then lost concentration and nearly hit the ground again. Pebbles rained down around him as fear amped up in his blood, making the pounding in his ears roar louder than the call of his friends.
Eli focused on the ground and pushed again, willing himself to rise straight and true. It worked all the way until he was twenty-five feet up, then he lost momentum. Stuck, swaying, but not moving upwards, Eli turned his head around and tried to see anything that might help him. A large tree root poked out to his right and he grabbed for it.
Mercifully, it held as he clung to it and tried to find another root. There was another one, smaller this time, just above his head, but the moment his fingers tugged on it, it gave way and Eli swung down like a pendulum over the pit. He swore under his breath as he tried to spot something else.
A huge branch dropped down next to his head and stopped four inches from his face.
“Grab hold!” Oliver told him. “The wolf has it in his mouth.”
CHAPTER 17
THE NEXT ALPHA
It took more strength than Eli would have imagined to hold tight to the branch while the wolf pulled him to safety. His arms throbbed in a way that they hadn’t since his magic had come in the year before. He’d begun to take for granted just how easy a pull up was with nearly unlimited strength. His head broke the lip of the hole, and he saw the huge tree limb in the mouth of the wolf as he backed up slowly from the edge.
Eli didn’t let go until he was four feet from the drop, and only then did he crawl forward to Ivy and Oliver, who were waiting closer to the tree line. Eli flopped on the grass and stared up at the blue sky above them while his chest heaved and his whole body throbbed painfully in time with the rapid tattoo of his heart.
Ivy plopped down next to him and stared off towards the hole. Her whole body was coated in sand and mud. They’d already been filthy from wading through the defunct river, but now they were powdered in dust as well.
“Well, that was interesting,” Oliver offered.
Eli turned his head towards the wolf. “Thank you.”
It yipped gently and sat on its haunches.
His head thumped back down onto the grass. All he wanted to do was sleep for about a year, then take a shower. Sadly, they hadn’t found Pablo yet, and even if they found him, they still had another major problem.
“It’s a sinkhole,” Ivy said quietly. “If there had been water running under it, I probably would have sensed it, but because it’s dry…”
“It’s not your fault,” Oliver reminded her. “It was going to cave in anyway, right?”
Ivy nodded. “From what I know of sinkholes, yeah. It had water running down there at one point. It might have been that our combined weight was enough to drop it.”
“We don’t weigh that much,” Eli said, as she silently pointed to the wolf. “Right,” he grinned. The wolf was probably at least five-hundred pounds by itself.
“We should keep moving,” Oliver said as he held out a hand to pull them both to their feet. “The rest of this could be unstable as well.”
They moved, but not quickly. Eli and Ivy hobbled at a snail’s pace back into the trees. They made so little progress that the wolf kept snarling at them in annoyance. They were bleeding, bruised, and Eli had a nagging suspicion than Ivy had broken her arm by the way she was favoring it. When he tried to bring it up, though, she blew him off. “It’s not broken,” she protested flatly. “It just hurts. A break throbs, this is just painful.”
Eli wasn’t sure he was buying that, but he didn’t press it. There wasn’t much they could do right now anyway. The sun was beginning to dip into the horizon, and they were another day in, and still hadn’t found Pablo.
They are coming for her.
Startled, Eli jumped and gazed at the wolf at the same exact moment as Ivy. Disconcertingly, the wolf had stopped in the path and had turned to face them without Eli even realizing it. “What?” Eli asked as the wolf stared at Ivy.
It didn’t explain but backed slowly off to their left, melting into the trees and somehow Eli knew they weren’t meant to follow this time.
“What did that mean?” Ivy asked at the same moment that Oliver blurted out, “What is wrong with you two?”
“The wolf said that—” then it sunk in and Eli moved next to Ivy.
She shook her head as they lost sight of the wolf. “He said that something is coming for me.”
“What do you think that—” Oliver didn’t get a chance to finish the question. They all heard the loud thump of a heavy foot falling onto the earth in front of them.
Eli gazed in wonder, and with trepidation, as the Sasquatch moved towards them with long, heavy strides. The last of the sun was gone now, but the moon had not yet risen, giving the world around them an eerie, muted glow. There were four of them, four big males that all had the same color of dark fur. But unlike the creatures they’d met in Yellowstone, these were thinner.
And they had spears.
That was a switch. Eli hadn’t seen Ghan with a weapon the entire time they’d been there.
As one, the spears came down and leveled themselves against Eli and Oliver. Eli shot Oliver a warning glance, then turned back to the biggest, who was clearly the alpha. “We are looking for our dad. He went missing a week ago. We don’t want to cause problems.”
Ivy cleared her throat. “You need my help, right? I want to help you if I can. We just need their dad back.”
Without warning, another Sasquatch shot from the trees and picked Ivy up.
“Hey!” Eli protested as another grabbed for him.
He had a split second to decide what to do with their limited options. He saw, clearly, that Ivy was being cradled, not hurt, and that single thing made his decision for him. He was picked up and thrown over a shoulder as the wind was knocked from him. “No magic,” he wheezed out to Oliver, who was being given the same treatment.
Oliver swore loudly, using words that would have set Maia off, but they were drowned out as they crashed through the woods.
Not even twenty minutes later, which would have taken them several hours to walk in their current sorry state, they arrived at the encampment of the Bigfoot.
This group was huge compared to the previous Yellowstone one. Eli only had a moment to glance around before he heard the scrape of wood, and he was dumped hard on his butt. Oliver followed a moment later.
“What the…”
The two teens spun and sprang to their feet at the sound of the deep voice. “Dad!” they cried out together as they flung themselves at Pablo, hugging him hard.
“What are you two doing here?” Pablo asked them.
It was only then that Eli panicked. He bolted for the cage door and had to stop himself from ripping it off as he saw one of the female Bigfoot lead Ivy into a sort of hut off to their left. She was walking, not being pushed. Ivy glanced once over her shoulder and waved him off. He forced himself to relax his fingers. Ivy could take care of herself.
“They said a water was coming,” Pablo said from behind them. “I saw them signing with each other over it.”
Eli glanced behind him at his dad, who was thinner than he had been two weeks before, but otherwise looked fit. “Why are you still here? You could have broken out of this. Mom is freaking out.”
Pablo ran a hand through his long hair, which was in need of a trim. “I have been trying to gain their trust, but they’ve had a lot of run-ins with men recently. I’d just about given up when they started talking about the water. I didn’t know what that meant, but I had seen just how deviated everything has become recently without water. The further back into these old forests that I went, the worse it got. I didn’t want to leave before I figured out how to help them.”
“We think Ivy�
�s dad did something,” Eli explained with a grimace as he slowly lowered himself to the ground of the large cage. He leaned back against the wooden bars and tried not to wince at all the injuries.
“What happened to you?” Pablo asked as he knelt before Eli and pushed his hair to the side. His finger brushed along Eli’s scalp which sang through his blood, shooting pain down his spine. “Daggers, Eli! You look like crap.”
Oliver sat down next to them. “He and Ivy fell into a sinkhole.”
Pablo’s mouth fell open. “What?”
“It’s a long story,” Eli said as everything he’d been through in the last week hit him. “Do you think Ivy will be okay?”
Pablo nodded. “They’ll want her help. They see us as dangerous, I think. I’m not sure, to be honest. They don’t try to communicate with me much.” He hesitated for a moment. “Eli, what’s wrong?”
