by D. N. Hoxa
They’d spoken to Jushko, the pilot of the private plane, who Grover informed us was always drunk, and had about fifty illegal spell stones in his plane to keep it off the radar. It made you wonder if going anywhere with him was safe, but it was better than a car.
So we planned our escape.
The guys were going to leave. Eddie had no reason to hold them back. They came, we talked, and now they were off. He’d be happy about it, too.
Half an hour later, I’d ask to go to the bathroom. Depending on how many guards would be out there, I’d use my magic and my body to knock them unconscious, or fight them until I could escape. I had the way memorized by then and I knew where to go. I just hoped there wouldn’t be too many people waiting for me.
Ax and Grover were going to wait for me right outside the building, with a cab to take us to wherever Jushko and his plane was. After that we’d be gone. On air, the demons couldn’t reach us. And the ECU? I hoped those fifty illegal Pretters would do their jobs.
But as luck would have it, before the guys could ask to leave, Doug and Tammy came to see me with their bags in hand. Another session of trying to remove the dragon. It hurt me just to think about it at that point, but I resisted.
Ax and Grover decided to stay with us to watch, no matter that I kept telling them they should leave already. Time was wasting.
They stayed and stared as Doug and Tammy put things on my hand after they turned my arm to dead meat with their needles, and put seven spell stones in place to help them. I already knew that it wasn’t going to work, and just when I thought I was used to the pain, it hit me again like a fresh wave of terror, and almost knocked me down off the chair. Trying to hold off the tears resulted in my sweating like a pig. I could feel the fine coat layering my skin, but I held myself for the sake of Ax and Grover. They definitely didn’t need to see me crying. I just kept focus on what was going to happen once Doug and Tammy left. The will was there, though the reason we were doing this was completely lost on me still. When I first met Sienna, she’d been hiding in an alley behind a dumpster. The demon had found her, and was about to suck her dry. She was scared, lost, completely traumatized by the time we made it to my apartment. Her skin had been so pale, she’d looked completely white, her long, brown hair making an almost scary contrast. It made no sense that she was a leader when she’d claimed she knew nothing about the paranormal world on Earth. But if we were completely honest, none of us knew anything, either. We were just as clueless as everyone else about who we were, where we came from, or what we could really do. And I trusted Ax and Grover. If they thought Karim was really talking about Sienna, then that’s where we’d go.
Do you want to hear something miraculously miraculous?
The plan we made…it worked.
Ax and Grover left soon after Doug and Tammy were done with me, and after Elisa put a protection spell on them. Ax refused to even look me in the eyes, probably disturbed by what he’d seen, and I preferred it that way. I didn’t want to see his pity. So when I asked to go to the bathroom after Elisa was done spelling me, too, I actually took the time to clean my face and neck to get rid of all that sweat.
Three guards were in front of the door to our concrete basement room. My heart raced as I called for my magic, and made them one with the door behind them. I was going to make sure they wouldn’t start after me, when the door of the room opened, and Elisa came out.
“Go!” she whispered at me, then began to chant. It was her sleeping spell. I knew it very well by now, having been at the receiving end of it a few times.
My advantage was that everybody expected me to be locked inside the room, so I went through four more guards—two in the front room where I’d first met Eddie, and another two in front of the garage door that led inside the basement. I was pretty proud of myself for being able to navigate in the complete darkness, and hitting the wall with my face only three times. I was practically a pro at this now.
Once I blew the two guards against the garage door, I ran for it as fast as possible, until I realized that I needed a key to open it. Then, I had to search both guards, who weren’t exactly unconscious, though the attack had been sudden and unexpected. Sadly, I had to knee one of them in the face because he grabbed me by the wrist and tried to stand up—just when I found the keys in the inside pocket of his jacket. The excitement refused to fade and when I opened the garage door and saw the light outside, I felt completely invincible. God, I’d missed that feeling. After three days of being stuck inside, doing nothing but resting and trying not to be a pessimist, the sound of the city and the heavy smell of it were heaven to me. Locking my powers tightly inside my chest in case demons were around, I ran across the street without looking back. If there were other guards out there, my best bet would be to run, find the guys and get to the damned plane as fast as possible. I doubted Eddie could catch me in the air, no matter how good his men were.
Our only protection now were Elisa’s spells, and even they wouldn’t do us any good if we came face to face with the ECU. Ax and Grover waited for me at the corner of the street, and they shook their heads to tell me to stop running. I was attracting too much attention, but it was difficult to keep the adrenaline in check.
The sky was angry and it was about to rain, but I hoped that wasn’t going to stop the pilot from taking us to Iowa. He was the only chance we had at getting there and back in time, assuming Sienna even wanted to come back with us. What Ax and Grover told us about the couple in San Francisco, it was a wakeup call. Not everyone wanted to be part of this bloodbath. Not everyone wanted to fight for their freedom, and that was okay. As long as they stayed alive, everything else came second.
Jushko was waiting for us in Farmingdale, Long Island. It was the only airport that allowed him to land his illegal plane in the New York area. It was going to be cutting it close, to say the least, because the airport would have security cameras, and those were easily accessible by the ECU. Ax and Grover weren’t worried. They had a cab waiting for them just down the street. A stolen car would have gotten us there faster, but a yellow cab with a human driver wasn’t going to be as suspicious.
With no weapons, our magic blocked inside of us, and only Elisa’s spells to protect us, that feeling of being invincible faded pretty quickly and I felt pretty damn vulnerable. It was going to be a long ride, and my heart didn’t seem like it planned to stop galloping inside my chest anytime soon.
“If I suddenly fall unconscious, don’t freak out,” I told the guys, because the chances of that happening once we got on the plane were very good. I’d be able to relax and the dragon around my hand would take care of the rest.
“What they were doing to you back there…” Grover whispered, shaking his head. He was squeezed in the backseat between me and Ax, because sitting in the front could potentially distract the human cabdriver too much, and we needed to get to our destination as fast as possible.
“Hey, it’s fine. I agreed to it. Trust me, I can’t wait to see this thing off me.” I’d never again have to fear falling flat on my face at the most inappropriate times.
“But it can kill demons,” Grover said.
“It’s going to kill me, too, if I don’t get it off soon,” I said reluctantly. “Just don’t freak out if I pass out. I’ll be fine.” But the truth was, I didn’t know if I’d be fine. Like Trinity said, the dragon was going to take until there was nothing more left to give, and I had no idea just how much juice I had left in me.
***
Holy cow, the plane looked like it came straight out of the 80s. It used to be white once. Now it was yellow where it wasn’t rusty, and the inside was in really bad shape. Grover sat in the front with Jushko—a short, skinny man with salt and pepper hair, a cigarette burning between his lips, and an unbuttoned shirt that revealed much more than I’d have liked to see. His accent was awful—I barely understood a word he said, but I just followed Ax into the cabin, where there were seven seats in total, two of which were half broken, the leather torn
and yellowing. The red carpet didn’t even look like a carpet anymore, and it heavily smelled of cigarettes and spells in there. A very bad combination, my stomach noted.
But it was going to take us to our destination, and I didn’t even let myself worry that the seatbelt was broken. If the engines failed and we fell…
Well, we’d just have to not fall.
So far, we hadn’t been caught. I counted the seconds while Jushko turned the engine on and we were airborne. The airport was strangely quiet, the field to our right empty, and the two large, white warehouses to our left almost a drawing against the grey skies. Another eleven private jets were in the asphalt field, but none of them looked as miserable as Jushko’s. Maybe it would have been a better idea to steal one—holy cow, I was thinking too much about stealing!—but the spell stones Ax promised Jushko had in his were the reason why this was the way to go. I could smell the spells, the wet wood and the menthol, though I couldn’t see any Pretters around.
“Any idea how we’re going to find Sienna’s farm?” I didn’t know much about farms, but I doubted her dad’s was the only one in Iowa. And I couldn’t stand Ax staring at me through the corner of his eye any longer, so I decided the silence needed to go.
“Fallon said it was a dairy farm in Newton. I found a couple that fit the description,” Ax said. Finally, the engine roared to life. It made the entire plane vibrate. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole thing was about to fall apart any second now. Looking out the small, dirty window, I almost hoped somebody would come to stop us. I’d never been afraid of flying before, but Jushko’s plane was about to gift me a brand new phobia.
“What if it takes us too long? Will he wait?” My voice vibrated together with the plane. The ugly, metal thing groaned loudly, then moved forward. Since the seatbelt was broken, I almost fell forward onto the dirty carpet.
“Yeah. Mathias paid him enough for three rides.” Ax sounded just as scared as I was.
“Be honest with me, what are the chances of this plane crashing down before we get to Iowa?”
Ax didn’t respond. Remember when I said that I was going to relax once we were airborne?
No fucking way. I was never more awake than in those three hours it took us to get to our destination.
***
Touching the ground with my feet again had me in tears. I was this close to swearing off planes for good, but then I remembered that I’d have to get back in that thing if I had any hopes of attending the Luminis Carnival.
Jushko landed the plane in an open field. The overgrown grass reached my hips, but he didn’t seem to mind. As soon as we got off, he made himself comfortable in one of the cabin seats, lit a new cigarette—the butt of the last one ended up on the poor carpet—and took out his phone. He didn’t look at us, not once. The strangest guy I’d ever seen.
We had a good old fashioned map with us, because phones were too risky out there in the open. Ax was positive that we’d landed in between the two biggest dairy farms in Newton, Iowa. I wasn’t. We couldn’t see anything and it was already getting dark.
Luckily, both farms were east. At first, I was scared shitless to be in a place with nowhere to hide if something happened, but after twenty minutes, I was convinced that nobody was going to come for us. The sound of birds chirping and insects buzzing was all we heard. By the time we got to the first farm, I regretted not having taken a bottle of water. My throat was dry, my muscles screaming, and my mind a web of bad thoughts.
Pushing them away was hard. The wooden fence surrounding the four buildings of the farm was two meters high. It took us a while to find a hole in it to check the inside. We could hear the noise—a lot of people talking and laughing carelessly, but when we did find a hole in the fence, we realized there were twenty-one people in there, sitting under a massive willow tree. They’d put two big tables next to each other, and they were drinking beer and eating snacks while they watched the old TV at the end of the tables.
We stayed perfectly silent while analyzing each one of their faces, but pretty soon, we were convinced that Sienna was not in their midst.
Hope dimmed in my chest as we moved on to the next farm—another fifteen minutes’ walk. If we’d gotten on that stupid plane for nothing, I was going to kick Ax’s ass until he passed out.
When we made it to the second farm, it was pitch black outside, not the moon or a star in sight. It was eerily quiet in there, a different world from the first farm. The only light came from the house behind the metal fence, which we could cross without trouble, if we were sure that nobody would be waiting with a gun on the other side. A shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of person was going to give our story a very bad ending.
“They’re humans,” Grover said when he saw us hesitate. “What could go wrong?”
Oh, no. Not that question. Everything always went wrong when somebody said that, but in the end, we had no choice but to climb the fence and jump on the other side together with Grover because nobody was coming out the buildings.
The house was at least twenty feet away from us, a massive thing made of wood. The two barns were across from it, and the land behind it stretched so far, we couldn’t see where the fence ended.
“So we’re just going to go over there and knock?” That didn’t sound like a very good idea.
“Unless you want to call out her name from here,” Ax said with a shrug. That was definitely a worse idea. So knocking it was.
Dogs barked in the distance, making me very edgy. I hadn’t passed out in so long, my body almost craved the rest. I’d gotten used to losing consciousness. Go figure.
It felt like somebody was watching us. My flesh was up in goosebumps and my stomach rolled, both with hunger and with uncertainty. We were walking into unknown territory, and every step we took could lead us closer to our deaths. Maybe the ECU already found Sienna. Maybe they were waiting for us right there.
When Ax stopped walking and waved for us to do the same, my heart leaped. I strained my ears and looked around for a sign that somebody was there, but other than the animal sounds, I had nothing.
“What is it?” I whispered, calling my magic to forward. I might have needed to use it earlier than I thought.
“Someone’s there,” Ax said, confirming my suspicion. I’d felt eyes on me, all right. He pointed toward the two barns. Neither of them had any light. I’d have much preferred the house, but who ever listened to me?
“Let’s go,” I said reluctantly, knowing that we weren’t going to achieve anything if we didn’t get going right away. Whoever was out there, finding out sooner rather than later could be our only advantage. The guys followed me, as silently as they could. The freshly mowed grass made it easier to walk. The ground was perfectly straight. I took note of my surroundings, of the places I could hide, if things got messy and running was our only option.
But then…
“You made it.”
The voice came from whoever was hiding in the shadow of the first barn. Every hair on my body stood to attention. My magic almost left my skin, feeling threatened by the alarms raised in my head. It was a woman’s voice, one I didn’t recognize.
“Sienna?” Grover asked, and I wanted to slap him for making our location known. Maybe whoever she was—it certainly didn’t sound like Sienna to me—hadn’t seen us with clarity yet.
“Hi, Grover. I’ve been waiting for you.”
I’ll be damned…
I looked at Ax, who was just as confused as I was. Could this really be Sienna?
“Come out into the light,” I called, my voice a pathetic whisper, but I was trying hard not to lose it before I saw the face behind that voice.
A second later, a dark figure walked toward the house, and stopped right in the middle of it and the barns. Compared to the large buildings, she looked so small. So fragile. We couldn’t see her face because of the shawl she’d wrapped her head with, but she definitely looked about Sienna’s size.
“It’s her,”
Grover said, and shot forward.
“Grover!” I hissed, but it was too late. He was already going to her, and if we didn’t follow, we might not make it to him in time if something happened and this woman attacked.
Heart in my throat, I walked fast beside Ax, my fingers outstretched, my magic ready to create a tornado around my body to shield me from whatever was coming my way.
But the closer we got, the better we could see.
The hooded figure really looked like Sienna. It had her pale skin and her dark, long hair. Her light eyes and her lips shaped into a perfect, cherry colored bow. I could hardly believe my own eyes, but I couldn’t keep them on her for too long at once, because we were out in the open, in the dark, and I needed to make sure nobody was coming for us at all times.
“We’re sorry to come here uninvited like this, but we have something we need to talk to you about,” Grover said, not a hint of fear in his voice. He was fully convinced already.
Sienna smiled. If this was some kind of a magic trick, it was a damn good one. She looked exactly like she had the last time I saw her.
“Follow me,” she said, and turned around, but didn’t walk to the house, or the barns. She continued to go between them, to the other side where the dogs were barking.
“Come on, guys! What are you waiting for?” said Grover cheerfully as he jogged after her without a second thought.
“If something happens, the barns would offer us decent protection,” I whispered to Ax.
“They’re closest to the fences, too,” he said with a nod.
“This is not how I remember her.” I watched Sienna walking, her shoulders straight, her head high, and she took us all the way to the end of the house before turning to it, and to a small door to the side of it.
“Me, neither. What could have changed?” Ax wondered out loud.
I had no answer. Sienna had been crying most of the time the first few days she was with us. Then, at Mathias’s house, she’d spent a lot of time alone in the room, thinking. Coming to terms with what she’d learned. We never really got to interact, but she’d seemed fine when we left with Oscar. Perfectly fine, and not at all like the woman leading us inside the small door. I had to crouch to get to the other side, and Ax and Grover had to walk in sideways.