by L. J. Smith
I need a glass of water. . . .
It took a tremendous effort to lift her head and open her eyes. But when she did, her brain cleared fast. She wasn’t in her bedroom. She was in a small, dark, smelly room; a room that was moving jerkily, bouncing her painfully up and down and from side to side. There was a rhythmic noise coming from just outside that she felt she should be able to recognize.
Below her cheek and under her fingers was the roughness of unpainted wood. The ceiling and walls were made of the same silvery, weathered boards.
What kind of room is small and made of wood and . . .
Not a room, she thought suddenly. A vehicle. Some kind of wooden cart.
As soon as she realized it, she knew what the rhythmic sound was.
Horses’ hooves.
No, it can’t be, she thought. It’s too bizarre. I am sick; I’m probably hallucinating.
But it felt incredibly real for a hallucination. It felt exactly as if she were in a wooden cart being drawn by horses. Over rough ground. Which explained all the jostling.
So what was going on? What was she doing here?
Where did I go to sleep?
All at once adrenaline surged through her—and with it a flash of memory. Sylvia. The incense . . .
Miles.
Miles is dead . . . no. He’s not. Sylvia said that, but she was lying. And then she said I’d never find out what happened to him. And then she drugged me with that smoke.
It gave Maggie a faint feeling of satisfaction to have put this much together. Even if everything else was completely confusing, she had a solid memory to hang on to.
“You woke up,” a voice said. “Finally. This kid says you’ve been asleep for a day and a half.”
Maggie pushed herself up by stages until she could see the speaker. It was a girl with untidy red hair, an angular, intense face, and flat, hard eyes. She seemed to be about Maggie’s age. Beside her was a younger girl, maybe nine or ten. She was very pretty, slight, with short blond hair under a red plaid baseball cap. She looked frightened.
“Who are you?” Maggie said indistinctly. Her tongue was thick—she was so thirsty. “Where am I? What’s going on?”
“Huh. You’ll find out,” the red-haired girl said.
Maggie looked around. There was a fourth girl in the cart, curled up in the corner with her eyes shut.
Maggie felt stupid and slow, but she tried to gather herself.
“What do you mean I’ve been asleep for a day and a half ?”
The red-haired girl shrugged. “That’s what she said. I wouldn’t know. They just picked me up a few hours ago. I almost made it out of this place, but they caught me.”
Maggie stared at her. There was a fresh bruise on one of the girl’s angular cheekbones and her lip was swollen.
“What—place?” she said slowly. When nobody answered, she went on, “Look. I’m Maggie Neely. I don’t know where this is or what I’m doing here, but the last thing I remember is a girl named Sylvia knocking me out. Sylvia Weald. Do you guys know her?”
The redhead just stared back with narrowed green eyes. The girl lying down didn’t stir, and the blond kid in the plaid cap cringed.
“Come on, somebody talk to me!”
“You really don’t know what’s going on?” the red-haired girl said.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking over and over!”
The girl eyed her a moment, then spoke with a kind of malicious pleasure. “You’ve been sold into slavery. You’re a slave now.”
Maggie laughed.
It was a short involuntary sound, and it hurt her aching head. The blond kid flinched again. Something in her expression made Maggie’s grin fade away.
She felt a cold ripple up her spine.
“Come on,” she said. “Give me a break. There aren’t slaves anymore!”
“There are here.” The redhead smiled again, nastily. “But I bet you don’t know where you are, either.”
“In Washington State—” Even as she said it, Maggie felt her stomach tighten.
“Wrong. Or right, but it doesn’t matter. Technically we may be in Washington, but where we really are is hell.”
Maggie was losing her self-control. “What are you talking about?”
“Take a look through that crack.”
There were lots of cracks in the cart; the pale light that filtered through them was the only illumination. Maggie knelt up and put her eye to a big one, blinking and squinting.
At first she couldn’t see much. The cart was bouncing and it was hard to determine what she was looking at. All she knew was that there seemed to be no color. Everything was either phosphorescent white or dead black.
Gradually she realized that the white was an overcast sky, and the black was a mountain. A big mountain, close enough to smack her face against. It reared up haughtily against the sky, its lower reaches covered with trees that seemed ebony instead of green and swimming with mist. Its top was completely wreathed in clouds; there was no way to judge how high it was.
And beside it was another mountain just like it. Maggie shifted, trying to get a wider view. There were mountains everywhere, in an impenetrable ring surrounding her.
They were . . . scary.
Maggie knew mountains, and loved them, but these were different from any she’d ever seen. So cold, and with that haunted mist creeping everywhere. The place seemed to be full of ghosts, materializing and then disappearing with an almost audible wail.
It was like another world.
Maggie sat down hard, then slowly turned back to look at the redheaded girl. “Where is this?” she said, and her voice was almost a whisper.
To her surprise, the girl didn’t laugh maliciously again. Instead she looked away, with eyes that seemed to focus on some distant and terrible memory, and she spoke in almost a whisper herself. “It’s the most secret place in the Night World.”
Maggie felt as if the mist outside had reached down the back of her pajama top.
“The what ?”
“The Night World. It’s like an organization. For all of them, you know.” When Maggie just looked at her, she went on, “Them. The ones that aren’t human.”
This time what Maggie felt was a plunging in her stomach, and she honestly didn’t know if it was because she was locked up in here with a loony, or if some part of her already accepted what the loony was saying. Either way, she was scared sick, and she couldn’t say anything.
The girl with red hair flicked a glance at her, and the malicious pleasure came back. “The vampires,” she said distinctly, “and the shapeshifters and the witches—”
Oh, God, Maggie thought. Sylvia.
Sylvia is a witch.
She didn’t know how she knew and probably part of her didn’t believe it anyway, but the word was thundering around inside her like an avalanche, gathering evidence as it fell. The incense, those strange purple eyes, the way Miles fell for her so fast and hardly ever called the family after he met her, and changed his whole personality, just as if he’d been under a spell, bewitched and helpless, and, oh, Miles, why didn’t I guess. . . .
I’m not smart, but I’ve always been a good judge of character. How could I screw up when it counted?
“They don’t normally have places of their own,” the redheaded girl was going on; and the words were somehow finding their way to Maggie’s ears despite the chaos going on inside her. “Mostly they just live in our cities, pretending to be like us. But this valley is special; it’s been here in the Cascades for centuries and humans have never found it. It’s all surrounded by spells and fog—and those mountains. There’s a pass through them, big enough for carts, but only the Night People can see it. It’s called the Dark Kingdom.”
Oh, terrific, Maggie thought numbly. The name was strangely suited to what she’d seen outside. Yellow sunlight was almost impossible to imagine in this place. Those filmy wraiths of mist held it in a shimmering silvery-white spell.
“And you’re trying
to say that we’re all . . . slaves now? But how did you guys get here?”
When the redhead didn’t answer, she looked at the little blond girl.
The girl shifted her slight body, gulped. Finally she spoke in a husky little voice.
“I’m P.J. Penobscot. I was—it happened to me on Halloween. I was trick-or-treating.” She looked down at herself, and Maggie realized she was wearing a tan cable-knit sweater and a vest. “I was a golfer. And I was only supposed to go on my own block because the weather was getting bad. But my friend Aaron and I went across the street and this car stopped in front of me. . . .” She trailed off and swallowed hard.
Maggie reached over and squeezed her hand. “I bet you were a great golfer.”
P.J. smiled wanly. “Thanks.” Then her small face hardened and her eyes became distant. “Aaron got away, but this man grabbed me. I tried to hit him with my golf club, but he took it away. He looked at me and then he put me in the car. He was strong.”
“He was a professional slave trader,” the red-haired girl said. “Both the guys I’ve seen are pros. That’s why they looked at her face—they take pretty slaves when they can get them.”
Maggie stared at her, then turned to P.J. “And then what?”
“They put something over my face—I was still fighting and yelling and everything—and then I went to sleep for a while. I woke up in this warehouse place.” She breathed once and looked at her thin wrists. “I was chained to a bed and I was all alone. I was alone for a while. And then, maybe it was the next day, they brought in her.” She nodded at the girl sleeping in the corner.
Maggie looked at the still form. It didn’t move except when the cart shook it. “Is she all right?”
“She’s sick. They left her there for a long time, maybe four days, but she never really woke up. I think she’s getting worse.” P.J.’s voice was quiet and detached. “They came in to give us food, but that was all. And then yesterday they brought you in.”
Maggie blinked. “To the warehouse.”
P.J. nodded solemnly. “You were asleep, too. But I don’t know what happened after that. They put the cloth over my face again. When I woke up I was in a van.”
“They use those for transport on the other side,” the red-haired girl said. “To get up to the pass. Then they switch to a cart. The people in this valley have never seen a car.”
“So you mean I slept through all that?” Maggie asked P.J.
P.J. nodded again, and the redhead said, “They probably gave you more of the drug. They try to keep everybody too doped up to fight.”
Maggie was chewing her lip. Something had occurred to her. Maybe Sylvia hadn’t gone climbing with Miles at all. “So, P.J., you never saw any other slaves besides that girl? You didn’t see a boy?” She fished in her jacket pocket and pulled out the photo of Miles. “A boy who looked like this?”
P.J. looked at the photograph gravely, then shook her head. “I never saw him before. He looks like you.”
“He’s my brother, Miles. He disappeared on Halloween, too. I thought maybe . . .” Maggie shook her head, then held the photograph toward the red-haired girl.
“Never seen him before,” the girl said shortly.
Maggie looked at her. For somebody who liked to talk about scary things, she didn’t say much that was helpful. “And what about you? How’d you get here?”
The girl snorted. “I told you. I was getting out of the valley.” Her face tightened. “And I almost made it through the pass, but they caught me and stuck me in here. I should have made them kill me instead.”
“Whoa,” Maggie said. She glanced at P.J., meaning that they shouldn’t frighten her unnecessarily. “It can’t be that bad.”
To her surprise, the girl didn’t sneer or get mad. “It’s worse,” she said, almost whispering again. “Just leave it alone. You’ll find out.”
Maggie felt the hair at the back of her neck stir. “What are you saying?”
The girl turned, her green eyes burning darkly. “The Night People have to eat,” she said. “They can eat normal things, food and water. But the vampires have to drink blood and the shapeshifters have to eat flesh. Is that clear enough for you?”
Maggie sat frozen. She wasn’t worried about scaring P.J. anymore. She was too scared herself.
“We’re slave labor for them, but we’re also a food supply. A food supply that lasts a long time, through lots of feedings,” the girl said brusquely.
Maggie ducked her head and clenched her fists. “Well, then, obviously we’ve got to escape,” she said through her teeth.
The redhead gave a laugh so bitter that Maggie felt a chill down her spine.
She looked at P.J. “Do you want to escape?”
“Leave her alone!” the redhead snapped. “You don’t understand what you’re talking about. We’re only humans; they’re Night People. There’s nothing we can do against them, nothing!”
“But—”
“Do you know what the Night People do to slaves who try to escape?”
And then the red-haired girl turned her back on Maggie. She did it with a lithe twist that left Maggie startled.
Did I hurt her feelings? Maggie thought stupidly.
The redhead glanced back over her shoulder, at the same time reaching around to grasp the bottom of her shirt in back.
Her expression was unreadable, but suddenly Maggie was nervous.
“What are you doing?”
The red-haired girl gave a strange little smile and pulled the shirt up, exposing her back.
Somebody had been playing tic-tac-toe there.
The lines were cut into the flesh of her back, the scars shiny pink and only half healed. In the squares were x’s and o’s, raggedy-looking and brighter red because for the most part they’d been burned in. A few looked cut, like the strategic position in the middle which would have been taken first. Somebody had won, three diagonal Xs, and had run a burn-line through the winning marks.
Maggie gasped. She kept on gasping. She started to hyperventilate, and then she started to faint.
The world seemed to recede from her, narrowing down to a one-dimensional point of light. But there wasn’t room to actually fall over. As she slumped backward, she hit the wall of the cart. The world wobbled and came back, shiny at the edges.
“Oh, God,” Maggie said. “Oh, God. They did this to you? How could they do that?”
“This is nothing,” the girl said. “They did it when I escaped the first time. And now I escaped again—and I got caught again. This time they’ll do something worse.” She let go of her top and it slid down to cover her back again.
Maggie tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. Before she knew she was moving, she found herself grabbing the girl’s arms from behind.
“What’s your name?”
“Who ca—”
“What’s your name?”
The red-haired girl gave her a peculiar look over her shoulder. Then her arms lifted slightly under Maggie’s hands as she shrugged.
“Jeanne.”
“Jeanne. It’s got to stop,” Maggie said. “We can’t let them do things like that to people. And we’ve got to get away. If they’re already going to punish you for escaping, what difference does it make if you try it again now? Don’t you think?”
Maggie liked the way that sounded, calm and competent and logical. The swift decision for action didn’t blot out the memory of what she’d just seen, but it made the whole situation more bearable. She’d witnessed an injustice and she was going to do something about it. That simple. Something so wicked had to be fixed, now.
She started to cry.
Jeanne turned around, gave her a long, assessing look. P.J. was crying, too, very quietly.
Maggie found her tears running out. They weren’t doing any good. When she stopped, Jeanne was still watching her with narrowed eyes.
“So you’re going to take on the whole Night World alone,” she said.
Maggie wiped her cheeks with
her hands. “No, just the ones here.”
Jeanne stared at her another moment, then straightened abruptly. “Okay,” she said, so suddenly that Maggie was startled. “Let’s do it. If we can figure out a way.”
Maggie looked toward the back of the cart. “What about those doors?”
“Locked and chained on the outside. It’s no good kicking them.”
From nowhere, an image came into Maggie’s mind. Herself and Miles in a rowboat on Lake Chelan with their grandfather. Deliberately rocking it while their grandfather yelled and fumed.
“What if we all throw our weight from one side to the other? If we could turn the cart over, maybe the doors would pop open. You know how armored cars always seem to do that. Or maybe it would smash one of the walls enough that we could get out.”
“And maybe we’d go falling straight down a ravine,” Jeanne said acidly. “It’s a long way down to the valley, and this road is narrow.” But there was a certain unwilling respect in her eyes. “I guess we could try it when we get to a meadow,” she said slowly. “I know a place. I’m not saying it would work; it probably won’t. But . . .”
“We have to try,” Maggie said. She was looking straight at Jeanne. For a moment there was something between them—a flash of understanding and agreement. A bond.
“Once we got out, we’d have to run,” Jeanne said, still slowly. “They’re sitting up there.” She pointed to the ceiling at the front of the cart, above Maggie’s head. “This thing is like a stagecoach, okay? There’s a seat up there, and the two guys are on it. Professional slave traders are tough. They’re not going to want us to get away.”
“They might get smashed up when we roll over,” Maggie said.
Jeanne shook her head sharply. “Night People are strong. It takes a lot more than that to kill them. We’d have to just take off and head for the forest as fast as we could. Our only chance is to get lost in the trees—and hope they can’t track us.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. She looked at P.J. “Do you think you could do that? Just run and keep running?”
P.J. gulped twice, sank her teeth into her top lip, and nodded. She twisted her baseball cap around so the visor faced the back.