The Keeper Saga: Wynter's War, Charmed, and The One (The Boxed Set Book 2)

by K. R. Thompson

  “Sure,” she said, turning to give Adam a smile. “Thank you for driving her home, Adam.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I wanted to make sure she was safe,” he said with a nod.

  “Let me go in and grab my car keys. I’ll be right back.”

  “Go on in,” Adam told me as she left, “I’ll be by after school to check on you.”

  I love you, he added silently with a smile that lit up his eyes.

  The air warmed and popped around us. “I love you, too.”

  “I’ll be back soon,” my mother promised me as she appeared again. She rushed down the steps, pausing just long enough to give me a quick kiss on my forehead.

  “No problem, Mom. I’ll be fine. Drive safe,” I gave her a warm smile, so she would know there was nothing to fear, and then I went in the house, and watched them through the screen door until they drove away.

  I watched the tail lights disappear around the curve. Then, I felt as if someone was watching me.

  I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, something hidden near the edge of the trees.

  I will keep watch over you until he returns.

  As if he knew that I had heard him, Swift Foot stepped into view for only a second and gave me a small, barely perceptible nod, before vanishing back into the shadows. You have nothing to fear. I will stay close.

  “Okay,” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure that he would hear me. So wrapped up in worrying about guarding the book, I had forgotten about the Wolf, who I had accidentally transformed the night before. He looked a good bit different now. Dressed in a pair of jeans and a thick, blue coat, he looked more like Adam’s dad than an Indian warrior. Gone was the war paint, and his silky black hair was brushed and caught at the nape of his neck in a neat ponytail. He looked as if he belonged in this time now, though I knew looks were deceiving. In that short glimpse of him, I had caught the sadness that etched his face. He might very well be in this time, but his heart belonged somewhere else.

  “Too bad you aren’t a time machine, too,” I addressed my book bag as I shut the door and went up to my room. I slid the bag under my bed, and then sat down on my bed. I felt exhausted.

  I’ll sit here for just a minute, and then I’ll get the book out and look at it again, I thought. There has to be something in that book that I can use to help Swift Foot, I just haven’t found it yet.

  I looked at my pillow. If I could only lie on it for just a moment, and then I would feel rested enough to begin my search again. Then, I could help him.

  Chapter 7

  I STOOD IN a meadow. Fog blanketed the ground. Only the shapes of faraway trees were visible in the mist, with their long, bare branches reaching up toward a bleak, gray sky. I looked around me, searching for something, though I wasn’t sure what.

  My heart began beating faster as a small part of my brain registered the familiarity of this dream. This was my dreaded dream…my foretelling dream that had ended in a very real death. I willed myself to wake up, not wanting this vision to continue. But it didn’t end. I was trapped, being forced to bear witness of what was to come.

  Please let me out, I whispered. I don’t want to have this dream. I can’t lose Adam again.

  As if in answer to my plea, the fog dissipated in the place where I was standing, and then a soft breeze blew, clearing a small path in front of me that led toward the dark shapes of the trees.

  You must follow this path to discover the one you seek, a soft voice whispered. The voice that sounded strangely like my own.

  Without realizing that I had done it, I dropped down to the ground, transforming into my wolf. I snarled at the fog that rose up on either side of me like a thick, white wall before I began padding down the cleared trail that the breeze had left behind.

  The one you seek, my voice whispered…is the one who brings death.

  I felt the fur on my back stand up in a stiff ridge. I growled. The sound resonated, echoing and breaking the stillness.

  I was at the trees now and I suddenly recognized where I was.

  I stood in a Deadland—one I had never been in before.

  And I was not alone.

  “NIKKI, WAKE UP!”

  If only I could, I thought groggily. Then, someone had my shoulders and was shaking me so hard that my teeth chattered.

  “Wake up!” my mother repeated, urging me to open my eyes.

  “I’m up. I’m up,” I managed, finally focusing on her worried face that was mere inches from mine.

  She whooshed out a sigh of relief and sat on the bed.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She gave me an incredulous look—one that implied that I must be insane. “What’s wrong is that I woke up to a house full of fog. I thought it was smoke at first, and rushed up here to get you and Emily. Then I noticed it wasn’t smoke, and that it was seeping out from under your bedroom door. I come in here and your bed is surrounded with it, so thick that I can’t see the floor and you are making strange noises that sound like you are growling in your sleep. That’s what’s wrong.” She hopped off the bed and looked at the window, running her fingers along the bottom, as if checking to see if that was where the mysterious fog had come from.

  I looked around me. Small traces of white mist were quickly disappearing. I wasn’t sure if it was fog or the remnants of my wolf going back down into her shadows. I bit my lip nervously. This was definitely an unexpected turn of events. I wasn’t sure what to say or do now. I didn’t think this was the time to come clean and tell my mother of all of the secrets of the magic world—or the fact that the reason that I growled, was because I could turn into a wolf.

  “Maybe the fog came from here, I don’t know,” she announced, pecking at one spot on the window frame that looked completely solid to me.

  “Yep, it is an old house, after all,” I agreed, hoping that she would believe that the house had somehow let a huge blanket of fog in through a tiny, miniscule crack in an upstairs window.

  She frowned and looked at me. I was fairly sure that she wasn’t buying it and I couldn’t blame her. I wouldn’t have bought it, either. I gave her one of my widest grins, fairly sure that I was showing every tooth in my mouth.

  “So what were you dreaming?” she asked.

  “Um…” I wracked my brain for a quick answer, while keeping my fake grin plastered on. I can’t tell her I’m a wolf, she’ll never believe me. “I don’t remember, really,” I lied. “I think it was something to do with puppies.”

  “Puppies?”

  “Yeah, Ronnie was telling me a while back that her dog, Lilly, had a litter. I must have been dreaming about them.” I shrugged and tried to look as innocent as possible.

  “Hmm,” she answered, giving me a long, calculating look as if trying to decide whether to believe me or not.

  “I’m fine now, I promise.” This was not a lie. Now that I was safely out of my fog-filled dream, I felt perfectly safe.

  “All right,” she said, walking toward the bedroom door. Her hand rested on the knob. “If you need me, I’ll be up. I doubt I’ll sleep for a long while.”

  “I’m okay,” I promised again.

  She waited for just a second, and then as if she had made up her mind to believe me, she opened the door and left.

  “I’ll have to ask Anita if anything like that fog has happened around her house,” I heard her say to herself as she closed my door and started down the hallway to check on my little sister.

  “I hope Anita comes up with something believable,” I said, shaking my head.

  Leaning over the side of the bed, I reached for my book bag, which was still hidden in its safe place beneath me. I pulled it out and lugged it up on my lap, and then took out the book. I knew there wasn’t anything new in it that I hadn’t seen before, but I knew that I had to check, anyway.

  I flipped on the lamp on my nightstand and spent the next half hour flipping through the pages. I kept coming back to the description of the Spriteblood.

  Maybe
the one I saw in the Deadland is one of her sisters, I thought, as I stared into Wynter’s endless blue eyes. The drawing wasn’t exactly as I remembered Wynter, but then I figured that making an exact replica of her would be sort of hard to draw. Still, the person I had seen in my dream didn’t seem to match the woman in the book.

  “No, she wasn’t a Spriteblood,” I said quietly to myself. “She seems closer to being one of Adam’s people than a fairy. She would fit somehow into the tribe, I think.” I reached back into my bag and pulled out a sketchpad and a pencil, hoping that I would be able to capture the face of the woman so that I could show her to Adam. Maybe he would know who she was.

  “I’ll never get the eyes right,” I mumbled. No, I shook my head, the eye. She only had one. Something had destroyed the other, leaving a long scar that ran from her hairline to her jaw.

  I don’t know how long I spent sketching. The next thing I knew, dawn had come, and the first streaks of daybreak were coming through the window.

  I looked down at the pad in front of me. The picture of the woman who stared back at me sent chills down my spine.

  The sketch showed her as she had been in my dream. A young, Indian woman with beautiful long, black hair that fell over her shoulders and down her back. An odd amulet was tied at her neck—a squarish gemstone was fixed in the center between strands of bone beads.

  I had drawn her as she turned toward me in that last second before I had awakened. Moonlight played on the right side of her face. The left side hid in shadow, but wasn’t so veiled to hide her milky-white, ruined eye. The woman stared back at me from the page, as if she were as alive as I, and I remembered the words in my dream.

  This is the one you seek…the one who brings death.

  “I DON’T KNOW her,” Adam said, shaking his head. Then, he stopped and pointed, “But I think you’ve found our thief.”

  “Thief? What are you talking about?” I asked, snatching back my sketch to look for stolen goods.

  “This morning I was out with the guys for a run. Ed suddenly stopped and turned as pale as a ghost. ‘There’s something wrong with Hannah,’ he says, and bolts back towards the Res…”

  “Wait, wait…” I held up a hand. “You’re telling me that Ed knew something was wrong with Hannah?” I grinned. I never would have figured the exotic, beautiful Hannah as being destined for the serious, practical-minded Ed. They were polar opposites.

  “Yeah,” Adam said dryly. “Ed isn’t thrilled about it so far. Can I continue now?”

  “Sure,” I nodded, unable to keep a straight face.

  Adam rolled his eyes. “So we follow Ed straight to the edge of the Res and into the gift shop near the parking lot. Hannah went in there to open up the shop for the day and found it broken into.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  “No, just mad. Whoever had broken in, knocked out the glass on the door and had come on in. They hadn’t bothered anything in the gift shop section. What they took…” Adam paused to point at the paper in my hands, “…was a very old amulet from one of the display cases in the museum section—a several centuries old necklace. That is the stolen necklace.”

  “No way,” I said, gawking at my sketch. “So this woman is the one you need to be looking for?”

  “Yeah, it seems so. Do you mind if I take that and show my dad when he comes back? It might give them something to go on. They dusted for prints and couldn’t find anything and we haven’t been able to track anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Sure,” I said, handing over the paper.

  “Now, if you could just have a vision and draw us a sketch of what is causing the Deadlands to spread, that would be great,” he grinned.

  “I wish it worked that way.”

  “It would be nice, that’s for sure. They’ve nearly doubled in size over the last week and we have no idea why. Every living animal is running from them and coming closer to town, which is causing wrecks on the road and all sorts of problems.”

  I had been out of the loop for a few days. Playing sick had gotten me to the weekend, safely away from school. In return, I didn’t know anything about nature taking to the town for safety. I’d been home for days guarding the book, and I’d only caught glimpses of the wolves guarding the border of the forest around my house. Today was my first day out, and I had chosen the Res, not the town, to visit.

  “Dad might still be at the gift shop, do you want to come with me?” Adam asked.

  I nodded and grabbed my jacket and we stepped outside. Swift Foot appeared immediately, as if he had waited for the exact second that the front door closed.

  “Hi,” I said, offering him a bright smile.

  He nodded in response to my greeting and walked toward us. He opened his mouth to say something, but whatever it was left as a shocked expression painted his face and his golden eyes landed on the sketch in Adam’s hands.

  His words finally came, though I was certain that they weren’t the ones that he had meant to say at first. “Where did you find that? May I see it?”

  “I drew it from a dream,” I said as Adam handed him the picture.

  The tremors in Swift Foot’s hands were barely noticeable, but were there all the same. “A dream?” he repeated in an odd tone of voice. “Why would she haunt your dreams?”

  “Do you know her?” Adam asked.

  “Yes.”

  We waited for him to continue, but he was so absorbed in the picture of the young woman that it seemed he had completely forgotten we were there.

  “Who is she?” Adam prodded in a quiet voice. “We think she is the one we’re searching for.”

  Swift Foot looked up then, but his eyes held a faraway look, as if his body was with us, but his mind was reliving memories from another time and place. “Her name was Crow Woman. I knew her well once a very long time ago, and I thought her long dead.” He paused for a second, and then turned his attention completely on Adam. “If she still lives, it is because her thirst for revenge has not been sated as I am still living. Even in my time, her magic was strong. If she lives, be warned that her magic will be stronger than anything you have ever seen in your lifetime.”

  “Well, that’s uplifting,” I mumbled.

  “We haven’t been able to track her. Nearly everything that lives has a scent, yet she doesn’t. Is it possible she isn’t alive?” Adam asked.

  I groaned. A zombie bent on revenge wasn’t something that I wanted to learn about, especially one who starred in my worst nightmare.

  “I do not know.” Swift Foot shrugged. “With Crow Woman, anything is possible. You would do best to search for scents of a bear or a crow. Those are the forms she prefers.”

  Adam nodded thoughtfully. “Any ideas where she would be now?”

  “When I first searched for her, the dead places in the forest would appear anytime she had been near.”

  Adam looked at me and smiled. “And here I was wishing earlier that you could sketch what was making the Deadlands spread. You’d already drawn the answer.”

  “I’M NOT PICKING up anything. Crow, bear, or otherwise,” I said, testing the air with my nose. We had handed my sketch to Adam’s dad, told him everything we knew, and then left to look for any scent that Crow Woman might have left behind.

  “No, there aren’t any animal scents around, other than our wolves from earlier. But there is…something.” Adam walked slowly around the building, tracking something only he could sense.

  I took in another experimental breath of air. Other than the faint whiff of something that smelled stale and old, I wasn’t getting anything that someone had been there.

  “She was here,” Adam said, affirmatively. He pointed back into the woods. “It’s hard to scent, but there is a trace of her, it’s fading fast, though.”

  “I’m glad you have a good nose. I don’t smell anything other than a hint of something that reminds me of something gone rotten in a refrigerator.” I crinkled up my nose.

  Adam laughed. “Well, that’s the scent I�
��m referring to. You have to remember that she’s been dead for quite a while. It’s a very faint odor that I’m picking up, so she’s done a good job of hiding it. Death isn’t a scent easily hidden.”

  “So now what do we do?”

  “We follow her.”

  “I will come with you,” Swift Foot said. He had accompanied us to the gift shop, but had stayed silent until this point. His eyes said that he had been busy remembering another life and another time. “I had searched for her a long time. There is a matter that I need to settle, if she still lives.”

  “Okay then,” Adam said with a nod. “Let’s get ready to roll.”

  “Um…would you like me to?” I asked Swift Foot as I patted the book in my book bag. Even though I hadn’t said the words, he immediately understood that I was offering to give his magic back to him. “Just in case we find her and you want to meet her as a wolf and not a human?”

  Swift Foot offered me a small smile. “No, I prefer to stand human, thank you.”

  “All right,” I said, tightening the straps on my bag before I shifted to my own wolf.

  We began our trek through the forest slowly. The light scent of decay was fading with each step we took. Several moments later, it disappeared completely and was replaced with a strong, coppery scent of fresh blood.

  This isn’t going to be good, Adam warned me. Stay back with Swift Foot while I check it out.

  I whined and sat down on my haunches, letting him know that I was doing what he asked, even though I wasn’t happy about it. Please be careful, I thought, even though I knew he wouldn’t hear me. Picking up on my unease, Swift Foot knelt beside me and waited as we watched Adam disappear into the grove of trees ahead of us.

  “He is a strong warrior,” Swift Foot said in a soft voice, “Much like his ancestors. He will return unharmed, do not worry.”

  I whined again and was rewarded with a reassuring, light pat on my shoulder.

  “He reminds me much of someone I knew long ago,” Swift Foot mused, staring toward the grove of pines where Adam had disappeared.