by Abby James
I headed down the slope and scooped up his boxer shorts. They were the only clothes left that weren’t shredded, luckily. I tried not to look at him as I approached, but I couldn’t help but notice the guy was hung.
I held out his boxers while I looked to the side of him. “You might want these.”
“Thanks,” he said, but his voice was flat.
“I think we can all agree this tournament sucks, and we’ve only just begun.” I didn’t know what else to say to him.
He didn’t reply so I risked a glance to see him sufficiently covered. His shoulders remained drooped and his eyes stayed on the forest floor.
“You must miss Alaska?”
He shrugged.
“I miss my home. I miss my friends. They were wissend. They have no idea where I am.”
“We’re going to come in last at this rate,” Mila yelled from the top of the embankment.
I rolled my eyes, which Harry caught as he’d finally lifted his from the forest floor.
“I miss my girlfriend,” Harry said.
That surprised me. “Why didn’t she come too?”
“She’s wissend.”
Wow, I so wasn’t expecting that.
“How did you manage to keep your ability secret?”
“I didn’t? Three years we’ve been dating.”
“I thought the Council of Factions were militant on keeping the supernatural world a secret.”
“How are they going to find out? Linda would never tell.”
I don’t know why I was so naive to think the supernatural world could keep their secret so perfectly.
“For Christ sake,” Mila yelled again.
“We better get back before she combusts,” I said.
Harry smirked and followed me back up to the top where everyone else waited.
No sooner had we reached the others then Juliet pointed down the embarkment. “Oh, look at that.”
We all turned in the direction she pointed. I saw nothing.
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure,” she walked off down the embarkment in the opposite direction.
I glanced at Emrol. He shrugged, so we followed her down.
“I don’t see anything,” I said.
“It’s a light,” Juliet said. “Through the trees. This has to be it. Didn’t it say a light to lead the way.”
“That seems too easy,” I said.
“It’s all we’ve got,” Honus said, moving past me to catch up with Juliet.
“What do you think?” I asked Emrol.
“I think it strange she is the only one seeing it.”
“Me too. Don’t you have super eyesight.”
“That’s what makes me wary.”
“Juliet,” I yelled. “I don’t think this is right.”
As though she was entranced, Juliet kept walking with no response.
We were weaving through the forest with no way of knowing where we’d come from. The foliage of the dense trees formed a blanket overhead keeping the sun out, which meant it was impossible to tell the compass points.
“Do you guys have any idea which way is home?” I asked.
“You don’t have to worry about that. When we complete the task or when time is up Darkwells will appear,” Emrol said.
At least that was one thing.
“We’d better catch up with Juliet and Honus,” Jona said.
He was right. What faculty wanted most out of this tournament was to see us working together and sticking by each other. We would hopefully gain points for keeping the group together even if we never completed our task for today.
The shriek from Juliet up ahead had us all running through the thicket to find her. The forest grew dense. The branches of the trees closed in until we were fighting our way through.
“This is impossible,” I said. No one answered me. I turned to find no one behind me. In front, Juliet screamed.
“Juliet,” I yelled.
This wasn’t real. Surely? How could the forest become so dense?
“Emrol.” There was nothing. Assholes, I thought they wanted us to stick together.
Continuing toward Juliet was the only thing I could think to do, but it became impossible. It seemed with every step I took forward the forest grew thicker, barring my way. I plunged through a dense growth of vine—where the hell had the vine come from—when I ran into the back of someone. We both screamed. Honus spun around to face me, eyes wide, gasping as much as me.
“Thank god,” he said. “I’ve lost everyone.”
“You and me both, and I would say that goes for everyone else. This isn’t real. It can’t be.”
“It feels real,” he said, swatting away a long thread of vine that dangled down between us from a tree branch.
“It can feel as real as our minds allow it,” I said.
Voice high, eyes wide, pupils dilated, Honus was freaked. “Man, this is crazy shit. I saw something up ahead. Where Juliet was. It was…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. The forest just closed in on me. I lost sight of her. But before I did, I swear I saw something large moving toward her. Like a spider or something. Huge, like meters high and bigger again wide.”
“Spider?” I wasn’t fond of spiders.
“I don’t know…” he shook his head again, going pale in the face. “It was horrific.”
The next scream made Honus yelp. “Oh shit. It’s bad.”
He bumped into me in his attempt to move away from the direction of Juliet’s scream. A heat seared down my arm where he’d touched me.
“We gotta get out of here.” His voice quivered.
“Wait, Honus. Just cool it. This is not real. It has to be an illusion.”
Honus grabbed a vine and yanked it toward me. “Grab hold of that. Go on, touch it. It’s bloody real.”
He looked over my shoulder, his eyes grew wide enough I thought they would pop from his eye sockets. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” he cried, his face screwing up like he was on the verge of tears.
I looked behind me and saw a wall of forest, nothing more. “What?”
“It’s there, it’s there.”
I grabbed his arm. “What is there?”
“The fucking spider,” he shouted at me.
He turned to run in the opposite direction but tripped over vine now wrapped around our feet.
“Let me go,” he screamed. “I gotta get out of here.”
God, he was flipping.
“Honus,” I grabbed his arm while he thrashed around amongst the vine. “There’s nothing there.”
By the way he was howling and fighting off the vine I doubted he heard me. Under my palm, where my hand held his arm, it heated like a furnace. I let go lest I drew his ability and set his arm on fire like I had with Massus.
“Honus stop. We’re in an illusion.”
It was too late. In his panic Honus sent a bolt of fire into the vine entangling him. A rather measly bolt of fire, but it was enough to catch alight. Losing it on a major scale, Honus attacked the vine with more sparks of fire. Despite the vine being green, the fire took, crinkling the leaves to ash, then raced along the wood, catching quick to the thick interweave of yet more vine. I watched in horror as the fire built and spread creating a wall in front of us.
“Oh crap,” I mumbled. I grabbed Honus by the shirt and tried to yank him backward. “We have to get out of here.”
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” he jabbered, as the flames glowed across his face. The heat was already unbearable this close. “The spider’s getting close.”
Christ, who cared about the spider. The flames were what was real. “We have to go.”
“Oh god, I’m sorry,” he whimpered as I hitched my arm under his elbow, trying to get him to his feet. “Hate spiders. And now they’ve sent one after us.”
“Forget the spider, the fire is a greater threat.”
“What’re you talking about?” he blubbered. “Oh man, it’s right behind you.”
“Honus,
get to your bloody feet,” I growled. “Aren’t you watching.” I yelled up to the sky. “Do something.”
I was yelling at the assholes that created this mess by putting us here, but there was no miraculous escape. The forest remained and the fire blazed higher.
“Come on, Honus. Help me out here.”
The heat between the two of us where I touched him became intense, but being a fire elemental, Honus did not notice, and I knew from experience my hands would remain unharmed.
“No, look. It’s there,” he shouted, pointing over my shoulder. He burst into tears. “It’s coming.” He shuffled backward toward the fire.
“Honus, no!”
Where my hands gripped hold of his arm, a sudden burst of fire shot out and engulfed the vine to the side of us. I shrieked as the heat bathed my face.
Oh shit. That was me. “Honus, get your ass off the ground. We’re going to burn,” I screamed at him. “We’re going to fucking burn if you don’t move.” I was making it worse, setting half the forest alight.
“The spider,” was all Honus could blabber.
“It’s not there.” All I could do was scream at him as I felt my own fear consume me, seizing up my limbs and constricting my heart and lungs.
“Get the fuck up.” I yanked his arm, but he’d become a dead weight. And in my fast encroaching mania I sent of another bolt of fire into the surrounding forest until we were corralled by a wall of flames. My throat thickened and my vision blurbed. I bit my lip to stop the tears. At least one of us had to stay sane.
“This is not real. It’s not real,” I cried to myself.
Honus I couldn’t move, but I wouldn’t leave him. No way would I abandon him to burn. Not like my parents had. “Please, Honus, get up,” I cried.
Someone grabbed me around the waist, slipping my arm from Honus’s.
“No, he’s going to burn,” I cried.
I was spun, hands pressed firm into my cheeks, holding my head in place.
“Samara, stop.”
“We’re going to burn,” I cried, the tears finally winning through. I struggled to loosen from the grasp anchoring me in place. But the hold on my cheeks tightened.
“You won’t. I’ve got you.”
My vision, clouded by my fear, cleared to find Emrol’s beautiful eyes staring back at me. “It’s an illusion. There’s nothing there.”
“But…” I looked around to find the forest was how it was when we first entered.
Honus continued to wail on the ground beside us, screaming about a spider eating him.
“Do you feel alright now?” Emrol asked, staring intently into my eyes.
“Yeah, I do.” The last vestige of illusion disappeared. I was given the added juice of Emrol’s ability so that the forest vibrated with the vivid glow of living beauty.
He let me go and crouched in front of Honus, taking with him the wonder of his eyesight, and I felt like a pricked balloon fast losing air, falling deflated to the ground.
It took Emrol a while longer to bring Honus out of his nightmare. Poor Honus had to wade back from his terrifying spider illusion by himself because he did not have the ability to suck Emrol’s power of clear sight from him like I did. But with Emrol’s gentle coaxing he made it through. His face was a blotchy mess, with streaks of dirt following the line of his tears down his cheeks.
Farther ahead I spied Juliet, leaning up against a tree, head bowed. I hurried over to her and crouched down. I wanted to give her some comfort for she looked as wasted and emotionally drained as Honus, but after my nightmarish vision of setting fire to the forest and believing I’d hastened mine and Honus’s death, I was too scared to suck anyone else’s ability.
“Thank god you’re all right.”
She raised her head. “Just.” She palmed her face. Behind her hands, she said, “Christ, I feel a wreck.”
“They did us a beauty. Wankers, all of them. What a horrible thing to do, tapping into our fears like that.”
“How did they know?”
“It would be one of the high fae,” Emrol said as he joined us, along with the others, each of which looked as though they had been rung through the wringer. Emrol was the only one unaffected, but I guess as a fae he saw through the illusions. “Only a high fae would have the sort of power to affect all of you at once. And they are the only ones faculty would trust to place you in glamour safely without risking lives”
“Can fae sense a person’s fears?” I said.
Emrol didn’t respond, instead he looked around us. “We need to keep moving.”
He was avoiding my question. Faithful to his kind, I would say he was reluctant to reveal fae secrets. The answer had to be yes. I guess it was fine, after all I kept my own secret.
I rose. “And the next move is?”
Emrol turned back to me, “we have to prove ourselves. It’s the only way through this. We need to keep moving. We need to face whatever they throw at us and work as a team, once we prove ourselves then the clues will come.”
Mila came up beside Emrol, burying her head into his side. She looked terrible, and I didn’t have the heart to feel angry at her. She likely had some vision of her hair falling out, her breasts shrinking to smarties and her body turning to dough. Emrol absentmindedly wrapped am arm around her shoulder and allowed her to creep into his embrace. A small part of me jumped in glee to see Mila trembling and her eyes bloodshot, even so I would’ve done what I could to pull her out of her nightmare vision.
I felt a tug of warmth toward Emrol for the care he was giving her. If it was Luca allowing Mila to snuggle up close, I would’ve seen red, but I didn’t lust after Emrol like I did Luca, which was good because it kept my emotions clear to appreciate the comfort he gave her, which he had given to all of us.
This was likely what faculty hoped to install in us, those feelings of camaraderie and trust. After our scary visions I felt I could trust Emrol.
Honus came up beside me and slung an arm over my shoulder, sending a low sizzle along the join of our bodies. “Thanks, Samara. You weren’t going to abandon me. I guess it’s no secret now that I hate spiders. But what were you freaking over. Fire?”
I ducked my head. “Yeah.”
“Sorry I wasn’t much help. I was a blubbering mess over that spider. Freaky how you were stuck with a fire elemental in that shit mess and you hate fire.”
“Freaky,” I repeated, wanting to move on from the conversation. “Maybe it’s time we got going.” I moved out from under Honus’s arm, leaving his hot touch behind.
Mila stayed glued to Emrol’s side as he led us forward. Everyone else fell in behind, each silently recovering from their own private traumas.
We’d made it a few feet, when the ground beneath me disappeared. I plummeted before I could even squeak the shock.
23
I landed hard on my side, the pain jarring right up to my teeth.
“Samara? Oh my god. Are you all right?” came Juliet’s voice.
“Great, now we have an invalid. I suppose she expects us to rescue her,” Mila said.
“If you fell in I wouldn’t rescue you,” Juliet said.
“I can see her,” both Emrol and Harry said in unison cutting over the top of the slinging match.
“If only we had a healer,” Honus said.
Bits of dirt and debris rained down from above as Emrol crouched close to the hole. “Does anything feel broken?”
I stretched out, rolling from one side to the other, wincing when I rolled onto the side I had landed on. “No, I don’t think so. A few bruises, but I’m going to be okay.”
“Thank god, that’s one thing we don’t need to worry about,” Juliet said.
Harry’s face came into view. “It’s not that far down. I could jump in.”
“That would be awesome. Then we can lose two of our team,” Mila said.
“I think I could bring Samara out.”
Mila snorted. “You ever heard of bear traps? As the name implies, they were made to
trap bears.”
Harry turned his back on Mila, then launched himself into the hole landing close to me. I had to curl my feet up so he didn’t land on top of them.
“Just great,” Mila said, slapping her hands to her thighs.
“You didn’t have to do this, Harry,” I said. “I’m sure we could’ve figured something out.”
He shrugged, “it’s my turn to help you.”
I’m sure my smile looked wane. “I don’t feel I really helped you, but I love the sentiment. What’s your plan?”
“I reckon I’m strong enough to get us both out. I’ll have to change as that is when I feel my strength the most, then you can climb on and we leap out.”
“I may be too heavy.”
He gave me a cheeky smile. “You’re tiny. I probably won’t even notice you.”
He offered me his hand. I looked at my small hand disappear into his huge mitt. Maybe he had a point. And as a bear he was massive. It might work.
I accepted his offer to help me up, and found myself driving up to my feet on my own. The pumping goodness that was shifter energy zoomed in through our touch, up my veins, then channeled down to where it was needed. The ache in my side softened to a dull throb, easily dismissed. Wow, shifter juice wasn’t half bad.
“You don’t look like the fall did you any harm,” Harry said in response to my sudden surge to my feet.
“Lucky,” I said and dropped his hand.
A ball of light shone down from above, too bright and focused to be the sun. Both Harry and I shielded our eyes and turned away.
“Hey, can you turn the light down,” Harry growled.
“Oh, sorry. I’m not so good at regulating things,” Jona said.
“Do you conjure that, Jona,” I said.
He gave a short laugh, “yeah, I did. It just came to mind. Not bad, huh?”
“It’s brilliant,” I said.
“And we really have time for this,” Mila said.
“Oh wow, look at that.” It was Honus.
I stared at my feet, seeing what it was that had caught the attention of everyone from above. A diagram. A detailed three dimensional diagram. Harry and I stood in the middle of the diagram that covered the entirety of the hole, which turned out to be considerable.