“Yes. I saw it. I’ll protect you. We need to find Allie, though.”
I noticed my mother’s head turning toward the two when she heard that name. People called her Allie, also. She turned her face back toward the tunnel. She, like the rest of us, concluded it was better to ignore Madison.
“But I didn’t know it would be so hard to find her,” the cheerleader continued.
“What,” Zach said. “Did you think you’d walk in, bat your eyelashes, throw some money around, and all the murderous cave monsters would bow down and do whatever you wanted? Stop your whining.”
Madison looked aghast and turned expectantly to Jacob. His mouth tightened into a straight line. He looked daggers at Zach and started to say something, but I spoke first.
“Zach, she’s just concerned about her sister, like you are about your dad and I am about Bobby. We can take a short break to rest, but let’s not bicker. It’s hard for all of us.”
Zach threw his hands up and sighed, but didn’t say anything. Madison huffed as she turned to find a spot near the wall, dusting a patch of floor so she could sit. Jacob looked at me, emotionless at first, but then his eyes met mine and he nodded before turning to go sit with Madison.
“Nicely handled,” Sam said, throwing her pack down and sitting next to it in the middle of the corridor. I guessed it was as good a place as any. I sat down next to her, cross-legged.
“Thanks,” I said. “There will be more of that. The stress is going to keep building the longer we go on. I hope we get to the point where we become more comfortable with being down here—” I looked at the surrounding darkness and fought the panic trying to take me “—and start acting like a team rather than several different individual groups. Our lives may depend on it.”
“You’re thinking of that team-building exercise we did in P.E., huh?”
“I guess I am,” I said. “There’s something to that stuff, you know. If we can act like a team, maybe things won’t be as bad.”
“Yeah.” Sam had a faraway look in her eyes. P.E. was not her favorite subject. She was a brain, a nerd. She did all right in the required physical education, but it wasn’t…academic enough for her.
Someone tapped my shoulder. I looked up to see Jacob standing there, sticks in his hands. Sam got up and went to Zach and Emily.
“Hey,” he said, trying to catch my eyes again, and failing as I focused on his mouth. Such a nice mouth. Behind him, Madison glared at me. “Great job defusing that little situation just now. I’m tired and my temper is short. If you hadn’t stepped in, I probably would have said some things…well, thanks for dealing with it.”
“Sure,” I said. How could someone so popular and so absolutely gorgeous be such a nice guy? And polite, too. It didn’t seem possible. “We’re all on edge. I don’t want us to fight. We have to be a team. If we’re splintered, we may not survive this.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Should I say anything? He was standing there looking at me and I was looking back at him. Heat started rising from my neck up through my face. My mind scrambled to think of something to say. Anything to say.
“I was wondering,” he finally said, and I’m pretty sure I exhaled loudly enough for him to hear. For everyone to hear. “If you’d show me a few things with the sticks like you offered. You know, if you have a minute and aren’t too tired. And if you want to.”
“I do,” I said, maybe a little too quickly and too loudly. As my words echoed in the tunnel, I felt everyone’s eyes shift to me. I really needed to modulate my volume in this tomb we were passing through.
I stood up, looked at my staff, then around us to see if there was anywhere to lean it. There wasn’t. He smiled at me and put his hand out to take it from me. I shrugged and smiled back. When he handed the sticks over, I took them, one in each hand, and stepped back a little from him.
“You’re a wrestler, so you know about center of gravity, balance, and generating power through body movement, especially the trunk.” He nodded at that. “Apply what you know to using the sticks.” I noticed others paying attention, too, some blatantly and others more slyly.
“I won’t bother with too many defensive maneuvers because a strong offense is probably better in this case. Those things don’t have any finesse at all. They just use brute force attacks.
“So, first, hold the sticks like this, with your grip a hand’s length or two from the end. Don’t hold them at the very end. Remember that they are an extension of you, like extra length added to your arm. You don’t have to grip them so tightly that you make your forearms ache. You don’t want your grip too loose, either, or they’ll come out of your hands when you strike. Find the balance, or you’ll either exhaust yourself or drop them. Supple wrists are the key.” I waggled the sticks in front of him to show him how to hold them.
“Don’t limit yourself to just swinging them like a baseball bat, either,” I continued. “There are eight angles of attack.” I rapidly struck an invisible opponent, straight down from the top, diagonally downward from right to left, horizontally from right to left, and so on. I struck quickly with the right stick and then mirrored the motions with the left stick. The whoosh of the weapons cutting the air seemed loud in the cavern. No one else spoke. “Remember that you can also use back-handed strikes, not just frontways.” I demonstrated.
“You are so fast,” he said, eyes wide. I began to feel flushed again.
“You don’t have to try to strike so fast that your form is compromised, but speed is a big part of using these weapons. They are relatively light, compared to a baseball bat.” I nodded toward Zach. “Or even a staff—” I motioned to my weapon in his hands, “—so speed makes up for not weighing as much. These are hardwood, though, so they’re resilient enough to really strike your target and do some damage without breaking. I think it’s kamagong wood.”
“Got it,” he said. “Strike fast, but not so fast that I’m wild.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Did you notice how I moved with them, how I generated power?”
His eyes dropped to the floor. Was he…embarrassed? How absolutely adorable. “You swiveled your hips,” he said. Was he blushing? Oh my God. I wanted to kiss him so badly, but with our audience, that would never happen. I had to face it, even without an audience, it wouldn’t.
“Right,” I said. It even came out like my face wasn’t on fire and I didn’t have a thousand butterflies swirling around in my stomach. “All your power comes from the hips, from your trunk.” I thought of his abs—one of the main reasons I watched the boys’ water polo matches—and had to push the thought to the back of my mind or I wouldn’t be able to think at all.
“Could you show me again, a little more slowly?” he asked. He still wasn’t meeting my eyes, but this time it was because he wasn’t trying to.
I performed a few strikes, more slowly than before. “Make sure you’re balanced. There are specific stances for fighting and using the sticks, but do what is comfortable and feels in balance for you.” As I delivered a few strikes with each stick, I exaggerated my hip rotation to show him clearly where the power came from. His eyes fixed on my hips, and my belly turned over. The fire that was boiling beneath the skin of my face flared hotter than the sun. I started to sweat.
I stopped. If he stared at me any longer, I was pretty sure I’d burst into flames. “Keep the wrists supple and let the sticks flow with your body’s movement. So, you got it?”
“I think so,” he said, finally looking up so our eyes met for a split second. I started to slip into those dark eyes and had to look away.
We swapped weapons. As we did so, I saw Sam’s wry smile and Madison’s intensified glare.
“Try it out,” I said.
He did. With a few minor corrections, he was swinging the sticks more smoothly in no time.
“You look great,” I said, wincing inwardly at my wording. I pushed on. “It looks like you’re more comfortable with them already.”
> “I am,” he said, flashing his killer smile. “Thank you so much, Dani. This might just save my life.”
“I hope so,” I said. “I’ll show you some combinations later, if we get the chance.”
“Sounds great.” He put both sticks in one hand took a half step toward me, looking like he was going to hug me. Then his eyes darted toward Madison and the others and he sighed. Just a little. “Thanks. I’ll practice as we walk.”
He turned and walked back toward Madison, who was already whispering at him. I caught a “treating her like she’s important” before they turned toward the wall and the sound was lost to me.
So much for being able to sit and rest. Still, I felt energized. I faced my mother and couldn’t hide the smile on my face. Hers matched mine for a second, but then her expression dropped into one of worried concern. Yeah, I couldn’t forget that Bobby was out there and we needed to go get him back. There was no time for me to awkwardly flirt with the most perfect guy who’d ever existed.
“Let’s get going,” I said, turning toward the blackness ahead. I had almost forgotten for a moment how tense things were, how dark and scary and dangerous they were. Almost.
Chapter 14
Not even half an hour later, three more shadowling found us. This time, we were a little more organized. Between Rick’s sword, my mom’s gun, and the rest of us attacking in two groups, we made short work of the trio.
As I spun to generate force to crack the skull of the last of the creatures, I noticed a shape in the far side of the cavern. The chamber we’d fought in was wider than the corridor we had been passing through, a hollowed out area probably twenty feet from wall to wall. On one edge of the room, there were several cave formations, broken pillars and a configuration that looked like a hand fan. Crouching on top of one of the stalagmites was one of the shadowling.
It was different than the others, though I couldn’t tell at first what made it so. Was it taller, heavier, shaped differently? I couldn’t really place the variance. Its color was slightly different in the glow of my headlamp, maybe a little lighter, or maybe with some color in it. Anyway, it looked right at me, then dropped to the floor and scrambled away, quickly disappearing out of the beam of my light.
“Did anyone else see that shadowling sitting on the broken pillar over there?” I said, pointing with my staff to where it had been.
No one had. It started me wondering if I had imagined the whole thing.
“Dani,” Emily said. “There’s something I’ve been wondering about.”
“What is it, Em?”
“Well, we’re not being all that quiet. I mean, we talk and stomp around, we yell when we get attacked, and the gun—”she looked toward my mother “—well, we’re making an awful racket.”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t like it. It’ll draw attention to us. I don’t see what we can do, though. When we get attacked, we have to fight. The gun is the most powerful weapon we have.”
“I know,’ she said. “That’s not really what I was talking about. What I’ve been wondering about is even with all this noise, even with having killed some of the monsters, why are they attacking only three or four at a time? Do you think there are only a few of them? If so, how did they defeat and capture more than a dozen armed security guards? It just seems strange to me.”
“To me, too, Em. I don’t know the reason. That makes me uncomfortable. I can understand creatures trying to take us and eat us, but this, it makes no sense.”
“Maybe they’re trying to herd us?” Sam said, coming around my left side. “Maybe they’re directing us somewhere where they can take us all out.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If there are more of them, why not just attack us with everything they’ve got? Doing it in small groups only allows us to kill some of them.”
“Maybe they want us alive,” Sam said.
That stopped me cold. “I don’t know. Even if they did, why not overwhelm us with shadowling and capture us that way? We only have one gun, and they can’t be too afraid of that. They took on that whole armed security force. I guess we’ll just have to continue on and see what happens. If there’s some kind of strategy, I can’t see it.”
We had all been pretty lucky. No one had any injuries. At least, they didn’t as far as I could tell. We’d outnumbered the groups that had attacked us, so we were able to evade them while others struck at them. I wasn’t sure how long that would last, but I was glad no one had been injured yet.
We picked up our packs and moved on. Sam diligently marked each intersection with chalk so we would be able to get out when we were done. It occurred to me that the shadowling might be intelligent enough to know what the chalk was for and wipe it off, but I didn’t mention it to anyone. There wasn’t really anything we could do about it if that were the case, except maybe try to scratch the stone. But that would be time-consuming and could be obscured, too.
My breathing had stabilized, though it stayed faster than it would be if I was at home, on the surface. Not trapped in the dark underground with vicious monsters. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Funny how closing my eyes made me feel more comfortable when darkness was the thing that freaked me out most. The cold air of the cave was refreshing, though a little stale. It was cool enough to seem brisk but not enough to burn as I breathed it in.
Tyler’s incessant humming, singing, and sound effects were actually a help as we went along. It gave me something familiar to latch onto, something that spoke of the surface and sunlight and the absence of crazed homicidal monsters. As I swung my headlamp from side to side, scanning the corridor in front of me, I even found myself humming along at times.
The cave was not what I had expected. At times, the tunnels we passed through were relatively flat—though they all seemed to slant downward at least a little—and we could walk as we had in the mine somewhere above, upright and two side-by-side. At other times, we had to wriggle through narrow spaces, climb over rock formations, or hunch to get through an area.
All around, there were fantastical shapes that, if I wasn’t so nervous about being attacked, I could probably recognize as looking like familiar structures or objects. It all got old within the first hour anyway. There were only so many types of configurations formed in a growing cave, and once you’ve seen them a few times, they just don’t hold the wonder they did at first.
Less than half an hour after the last attack, the creatures found us again. This time, there were six of them. The tunnel we were in was not wide. In fact, it narrowed between our position and where the shadowling were. Tactically, it was a horrible place for them to attack us, but they did it anyway.
There was only room for two of us to fight up front. Rick and I took the front-line positions and waited for the dark shapes to come to us. In the bottleneck, the two of us probably could take on three times their number; only one or two could come at us at a time.
I was a little concerned. I had trained with the staff for years, so I knew how to use it in a small space when necessary. It was just a matter of using front-to-back motions instead of wide swings. I wasn’t sure about Rick, though.
He had proven to be pretty good with those swords of his. I even saw him use both at the same time, the longer katana in his right hand and the smaller wakizashi in his left, during the last fight. Still, I wasn’t sure he had the skill to keep from cutting me by accident. I hugged the left wall of the tunnel while fighting, allowing him as much room on my right as I could.
I hadn’t needed to do that. I wondered if he had any formal training. The way he shifted his stance to slash and lunge forward rather than with circular motions to the side actually impressed me. He was not only skilled with those weapons, he was smart, too.
As we fought, my mother stepped up occasionally and shot between us. The first time she did it, it scared the living daylights out of me. The second time, it just irritated me because of my ringing ears. In no time, we had taken the six creatures down. As the last one
fell, I saw a shape, just on the edge of my lamplight. It was that same shadowling—I’d bet on it—standing off to the side, watching. Its eyes met mine, and then it calmly stepped back, out of the light, and disappeared.
“Was that another one?” Mom said. “Over there?” She pointed the gun at where the creature had been.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s the same one I spotted earlier. It just observes. I’m not sure what to make of it.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of spy,” Tyler said from behind me. “Maybe it’s going to watch and then report back to the mother ship or something.”
“Do you think they’re aliens?” Madison asked, the first thing she’d said in at least an hour. “Are they taking people away to put them on their ships and do experiments on them?”
“I’m sure they’re not, Maddie,” Jacob said, directing a stern look at his friend. “Why would aliens come and then hide in caves?”
“Then what are they?” she said. “No one has answered that question for me yet. What are these things, and why did they take my sister?”
That stopped all discussion. Honestly, for an airhead, she had nailed the question we all wanted answered. The problem was, it didn’t seem like anyone could answer it. We stood around for a full minute, everyone looking at everyone else. Then, almost as if someone had given us a cue, we stepped over the bodies of the newly killed shadowling and continued down the uneven corridor as it narrowed and then widened enough so that three people could walk side-by-side.
“You’re really good with those,” I said to Rick as we began walking. “You didn’t have any formal training at all?”
He eyed me and a little smirk grew on his face. “No formal training. Just a lot of samurai and kung fu movies and countless battles with dastardly imaginary villains to save the princess.”
“It’s nice to know there are some good, old fashioned heroes around,” I said. “Or samurai. Or ninjas. Or whatever.”
“I seem to have noticed another one near also,” he said, tilting his head toward Jacob and raising his eyebrows. My scalp got hot and, in another second, my face did likewise.
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