L.O.S.T. Trilogy Box Set

by R. S. Collins

  Todd—I needed to find him. Closing in on three months and we hadn’t been able to get a clue where that monster had taken him, and now, that message.

  Light the fires. Nire comes!

  Rol tossed his sword from one large palm to the other and back. “Your concentration is lacking. Does sparring with girls put cotton in your head?”

  My blade gleamed in the sunlight and moisture rolled down my cheeks to my sweat-soaked T-shirt. I swiped my wet hair away from my face with the back of my injured hand, never taking my eyes off Rol. The air smelled of spring mixed with dust and the musky odor of all Todd’s magical creatures penned up near the training yards. Soft caws and bleeps and growls from the pens blended with the sounds of metal meeting metal, boots scuffling in the dirt, and the not so distant sound of commerce in L.O.S.T.

  At least that part of life went on like normal. I supposed that was worth something. It had to be, didn’t it?

  Gripping the hilt with both hands, I let out a loud grunt as I sliced my sword at the huge man. Rol easily parried, blocking my swing. Our swords clanged, the sound loud in the cool morning air. With a quick movement he used his weapon to rip mine from my hands and flung my blade to the ground.

  Before he had a chance to regain his stance, I slammed my boot into his thigh, driving the training master down to one knee. With a quick, practiced movement, I kicked his sword out of his hand and immediately caught my balance and prepared myself for hand-to-hand combat.

  Rol’s white teeth flashed against his dark skin as he gave me a quick grin of approval. “Your swordwork leaves much to be desired today,” he said as he pushed himself to his feet. “But your fighting reflexes are fair. If the red monster shows his face, you’ll give him a fine fight.”

  That did it. I didn’t want to play fight with swords. I wanted to punch somebody. Anybody. I raised my fists even though my left hand didn’t make a very good one. “Bring it on, Rol.”

  His bald head gleamed in the sunlight as he shook his head. “Enough for today. Your father needs your assistance with his Spellnet modifications.”

  “I’d rather slug you a good one,” I said through clenched teeth.

  At that the big guy laughed and turned away to retrieve his weapon. He didn’t need to say anything. Hitting Rol would require lightning-fast skills, and right now I wasn’t doing so hot.

  Maybe a good blast of magic at his ass would make me feel better.

  I bent over to grasp the hilt of my sword. As I straightened, I saw Jazz walking up the small rise toward the pond, on the other side of the training yards, no doubt headed off to help the Shadow witches she rescued back before Christmas. They had agreed to try to strengthen the wardings around L.O.S.T. with some sort of group spell.

  A moment of peace washed over me as I watched my girl. She was so beautiful with all that long, shiny black hair and her golden eyes. It was just over a couple of months ago that I had gone to Talamadden to bring her back from death’s haven. Even with all of our new worries, I couldn’t forget how much I cared about her.

  With Jazz, I could be anything, do anything. I could stand and fight the Erlking, even find Todd and rescue him, too. If only I had half a clue where to look for the twisted dwarf who kidnapped him while Jazz and I were off helping a bunch of harpy kids.

  A sudden mental image of the Erlking formed in my head. I could see the nasty red-furred piece of goat dung. I could feel him invading my mind, picking through my thoughts after I fought him in the Sacred Lands. Only the real, solid sight of Jazz and that good feeling I got when I saw her kept me from snarling out loud. Bubble of peace. Yeah. Float in the bubble of peace. I took a deep breath.

  My little bubble of peace burst quickly when I saw who Jazz was walking toward, and I scowled. Jazz was meeting up with one of the Dana’Kell, the leader of some kind of secretive sect of priests that had ties to the mystical Glastonbury Abbey. The Dana’Kell had been Shadows before Jazz killed my evil half-brother Alderon and set them free.

  I knew the Shadow witches had been through a lot, but some of them, like this jerk, I could do without, no matter how they promised to help us in the coming fight. My scowl deepened when Jazz smiled at the handsome con artist and he gave her a low bow. His red robe fluttered at the sleeves in a strong breeze that whipped up out of nowhere, and my sweaty shirt felt clammy against my skin.

  Metal scrubbed leather as I jammed my sword into its sheath and strode toward the wooden fence of the training yard. I didn’t bother with the gate, just vaulted over the top rail and headed toward the high priest and Jazz as they spoke. She was around that guy way too much. She was my girlfriend, and I didn’t go to the land of the dead and back for nothing.

  Ah, who was I kidding. I’d have gone after her anyway, but she was still my girl.

  When I got close to them, Jazz shifted her attention to me, and for a moment she looked like I’d caught her doing something she shouldn’t have been. But then her features smoothed out to her perfect Queen of the Witches power-expression and I nearly growled.

  “What’s up?” I said in my best King of the Witches voice. In the mood I was in, I’d rather have punched the serene smile right off of the high priest’s face. Quinn, yeah, that’s what the jerk’s name was.

  Quinn bowed from his shoulders and his odd hazel eyes met mine. They seemed to change colors as I watched, rippling like water over a pond-green, silver, blue, then brown. Freaky.

  “A pleasure, Your Majesty.” Quinn straightened then turned his gaze to Jazz. “We were discussing the new trainees and how we might accelerate their learning,” he said before glancing back at me. “Beltane grows closer by the hour.”

  “The Circle girls.” I looked past Jazz to a small knoll near the pond where Sherise, who had spelled herself clean from sparring, was sitting with a bunch of hags and those two strange girls, Helden and the littler kid, Kella.

  They all had their heads bent close like they didn’t want anyone to hear what they had to say. I couldn’t see them right now, but I knew they each had a different colored stone on a chain around their necks. Small flat stones about as big as large marbles. I had carried Sherise’s stone while I was rescuing Jazz from death’s haven, and it had stopped an arrow and saved my life. Jazz said they were the girls’ birthstones. Each one had a special power, but I never could get Jazz to tell me exactly what powers the stones held. She kept saying she didn’t really know. That bugged me.

  “Yes. Well.” Jazz clasped her hands together and gave the high priest a quick nod. “I had better get back to the witch trainees.”

  As Jazz left, I fixed my glare on Quinn, but the freaky-eyed priest mumbled something about morning prayers and rituals, bowed, and turned away from me. He drifted off past the Circle girls, heading toward the temple and sacred gardens the Dana’Kell were building.

  Air rushed from my chest in a frustrated huff, and I rubbed the jagged scar on my right cheek. Control. Focus. Yeah, okay. Whatever.

  I wheeled and marched down the slope, and back toward the usual chaos of L.O.S.T.

  Moments of peace were rare in our Sanctuary, even more so now that the goat-blood message had stirred everybody up. If it wasn’t the hags snarking at the modern witches, then it was the klatchKoven trying to eat the Dana’Kell. I didn’t like the priests, either. They gave me the creeps. But the klatch witches almost seemed obsessed with getting near the guys. It was all I could do to keep them restrained.

  On other fronts, Acaw was supervising Shadow witches who needed to return to lesser-traveled realms. People who had been released from the Shadows when Alderon died had returned to their true witch, hag, or other forms. And most of them wanted to go “home,” wherever home might be, and face the Beltane battle there. Who could blame them? Lots of them thought they would die in a few weeks. They wanted at least a little time with the people and places they loved.

  Dame Corey was working with orphaned Shadow children, matching them with parents who had lost their own children. There were just so ma
ny of them, and now they were all scared. Thousands of Shadow witches from all kinds of places and times. We had to help them, had to get them calmed and settled-but everyone was frazzled. I felt left out.

  At least I could make a witch rescue with the aid of Dad’s Spellnet tracker program. He kept fine-tuning and enhancing it to pick up lesser traces of energy. We both thought if he could get it sensitive enough, we might be able to pick up the Erlking’s movements. I wiped my sweaty forehead on my arm and trudged over to the main buildings of the small township. The business office was in my dad’s house, next to that store I’d entered almost a year ago, when my life had changed forever. It seemed like years instead of months since the first time I’d met Jazz and she’d virtually kidnapped me and taken me onto the Path. It had been near summer solstice then, and we had almost come full circle since that time.

  When I reached the back of the house, I grasped the sides of a large wooden rain barrel and dunked my head into it to cool me off, inside and out. I whipped my head up and my hair flung out of my eyes.

  Cool water flowed down my face and neck to my shirt as my thoughts wandered. Best we could figure, Todd had been kidnapped almost exactly five months ago. I missed him, and I was angry at everyone because no one was helping me figure out where he could be. The consensus among all those who’d had experience with the Erlking was that Jazz and I couldn’t mount a rescue to save Todd from his fate or stop the Erlking in his mission to release Nire. According to the oldeFolke, Jazz and I had no choice but to wait for the Erlking to come to us.

  Of course when we did wait, we got goat-blood messages of doom splashed on our houses, and then the oldeFolke wanted to say we weren’t doing enough.

  Whatever.

  Light the fires. Nire comes!

  Yeah, right. Whether or not the Erlking could really free Nire…well, like I said, I didn’t want to go there.

  Grasping the edge of the rain barrel, I gave a frustrated shout and slammed my boot into the side of it. My silver and gold power flowed over my skin with my anger and wood splintered beneath the force of my kick. Water gushed over my boots and for a moment I just watched it, but didn’t really see it.

  How could I just hang around L.O.S.T. when Todd was in the clutches of a shapeshifting child-murderer?

  Waiting for the evil jerk to come to me, playing defense instead of offense, well, that wasn’t my style. I did everything I could think of to search for clues to find my brother. Reading scrolls, traveling the Path over and over again, visiting Sanctuaries, not to mention talking to oldeFolke-even though they’d rather bite my head off than be helpful. Nothing seemed to matter but finding him.

  As the last of the water rushed out of the barrel, I thought of Jazz. She mattered to me. But Jazz had been so busy lately. Those girls with the stones took up a lot of her time. And the Dana’Kell. And everything else.

  I stepped away from the rain barrel and circled one of my fingers in the air. Every piece of wood flew back into place, down to the last splinter, and the barrel looked like it had never been busted. A puddle was all that remained and the water was quickly seeping into the dry earth.

  With a sigh of disgust I marched into the back of the house. My boots sloshed as I stomped into the kitchen. Acaw was standing on a stool and kneading dough on one of the countertops. The warm smell of fresh baked bread made my stomach growl. His crow-brother was perched on his shoulder and gave a loud squawk as I shut the door behind me.

  The elf glared at me—I swear that look was permanently etched on his lined face—and he looked pointedly at my boots. I glanced down and saw that I’d just tracked mud onto the tile.

  “Whatever,” I muttered as I zapped the dirt from the floor and my boots with my magic, and dried them, too. “You’re as bad as Jazz.”

  I strode into the cool interior of the rustic-looking house that could have been a cabin in the forest. The dark wood ceiling was open-beamed and the furniture just as dark and chunky. Dad had a big-screen TV surrounded by shelves and shelves of history books. He’d been a history professor before all of this happened, in our other life. He was still fanatical about the subject, but now he’d turned his interests to absorbing the history of each and every Sanctuary on the Path.

  “Bren.” Dad’s voice came from the upstairs loft where the office was now located. “Need you up here, buddy.”

  “All right, all right.” I took the wooden stairs two at a time, my sword hitting my thigh with every step. It still felt weird having my sword sheathed on my left side. I reached the high-tech center where Dad had designed the computer monitoring program for witches in trouble. Todd and Dad had set up the system to track energies at points in time connected to the Path. When a witch was in distress, Spellnet picked up the flare of electrical energy. It was a special golden flare that nothing could produce except for a witch in trouble—and this one was really big. And lighter. Silver instead of gold?

  I brushed that thought aside. It had to be the monitor. More of a white gold. Only Nire’s sons had silver energy.

  Dad pointed to the screen. “This is a tough one.”

  “So?” I imagined myself climbing on my new Harley and riding onto the Path to save whatever witch might need me.

  “The kid’s in New York City, near the 1965 Sanctuary,” Dad said, turning his concerned gaze on me. “At the top of one of the skyscrapers.”

  Great. So much for the Harley. I had just picked it up on a trip to the modern world for supplies, and I hadn’t learned to fly it yet.

  I rubbed my hand over my face. “If it’s high-up work, I’ll have to wake a slither and take it to the Big Apple.”

  Dad nodded. “It’ll be dangerous, son.”

  Yeah, even more great. Once I reached the location, I’d have to drop the magical cloak from around the giant two-hearted slither and me before I could save the kid. I’d have to make the rescue a fast one. Wouldn’t that just freak people out, to see a mammoth dragon perched on top of a skyscraper?

  The printer hummed as it spit out a page with the exact location of the witch in distress. I snatched it from the tray, folded it and stuck it into the back pocket of my jeans. I said, “Later,” over my shoulder as I jogged down the stairs.

  “You’ll need Acaw and Rol on this one,” Dad yelled after me, but I shrugged him off. I could handle this on my own.

  I grabbed a couple of thick slices of Acaw’s homemade bread and wolfed them down as I hurried through the kitchen and out to the holding pens. Acaw and his crow-brother weren’t around to see me swipe a cherry tart, either. I crammed it into my mouth after the bread and wiped the crumbs from my face with the back of my hand.

  When I reached the paddock, I paused for a moment to look down another footpath, toward the glen where Jazz and I liked to hang out alone. Harold, Todd’s enormous, red two-hearted slither, peeked its head from its cave near the glen entrance, snorted, and gave a loud roar that echoed up the footpath, into the paddock, and through the holding pens. The monster stud slither had been obnoxiously agitated since Todd’s kidnapping. We’d had to keep him separate from the breeding herds in that lonely old cave, and being lonely didn’t make Harold any happier.

  I gave Harold a nod, then went for Firestorm, my blue slither, and he sleepily opened his eyes as I woke him in his day-lair. “Time to rumble.”

  He gave a low growling sound as I rubbed the big oaf’s nose, about as close to a purr as a magical reptile could get. Firestorm crawled out of his pseudo-cave, and while he was still crouched on his haunches, I grabbed a hold of one of the ridges on his neck and swung myself up and onto his back, in front of his giant wings.

  I gave him a firm pat. “To the Path, big guy.” We’d never named any of the beasts because Acaw had explained they named themselves and would be highly offended to be called something they didn’t choose themselves. Firestorm, now, that was a cool name. And Rol’s slither called itself Rock, and Acaw’s slither was Ironblood. Then we had Harold. Why Todd’s massive red selected that name, I
would likely never know.

  Ground trembled beneath my slither as he trotted toward the invisible ribbon of the Path that passed right behind the great hall and the store full of stuff hags and other oldeFolke used in their potions. I still hadn’t gotten used to a lot of the creepy things they needed for their magic.

  When we came around the corner of one of the livestock buildings, I saw Rol atop his huge yellow slither, and Acaw on his gold one. His crow-brother was perched on Ironblood’s head and he gave me a loud caw that sounded like a reprimand.

  “What are you doing here?” I glared from Rol to Acaw. “I can handle this one on my own.”

  Rol merely shrugged his powerful shoulders. “It would not be wise to attempt this rescue alone, Your Majesty.”

  Acaw grunted.

  What good was being King of the Witches if I couldn’t get my training master and elf assistant to listen to and obey me?

  I scowled again as I pressed my knees to my slither’s sides. He moved to the Path, instinctively knowing what I wanted him to do. We’d done plenty of rescues together and these giant lizards were smarter than your average magical beast.

  When the slither reached the Path, I used my sword tip to slice an entrance, and my magic made it wide enough for the beast and I to enter. We backed up so that Rol and Acaw could enter on their mounts and I quickly sealed the Path behind us.

  The three of us started trotting along the weird moving floor of the Path, toward the Sanctuary of 1965. New York City was a ways from the actual Sanctuary, a place of peace in New York where witches could practice their magic without fear of persecution. It was a tough time to choose to make a haven, a time when the nation was going through civil unrest and so many changes. But Dad had pointed out that people in the ‘60s were pretty tolerant of witchcraft and magic. Hippies were the original New-Agers, after all.

  As the slithers practically flew down the Path, I noticed repairs that needed to be made—gaps in the energy that held the Path together. I sighed and shook my head. The whole time Jazz was, uh, well, dead, Todd and I did stuff like maintaining the Path together. Now, without Todd, I just couldn’t seem to keep up.