Extraordinary (26 page)

"Sadie, help her," Blaze commanded.

Without ever seeing her, I knew what Sadie was doing. My emotions leveled out, my silent screams no longer needed to be heard. The pain was still there but my desire to announce it had vanished. Tristan pulled a knife from his pocket and launched into a full-on attack to liberate me.

The briar continued to grow, writhing its way up my leg. My knee and thigh were now captive, pulsing in agony as the plant’s sharp teeth tore holes in my skin. Tristan assaulted the persistent vine with great fervor but the vine’s determination was unrelenting. I fought to remain calm and conscious. My hands bled from my own failed attempts to free myself.

Sadie emerged from behind Blaze. Without a hint of panic, she stared down at my captor. With a soft wave of her hand the vine stopped its progress. Not wasting any time, Tristan charged through the wicked shrubbery and freed my leg enough to pull me to safety. The two of us toppled helplessly, rolling out of the brush and into the openness.

Our tumble stopped and a vision exploded. I saw an ambush. Katerina’s burly bodyguards scooped Sadie up because she never saw them coming. Before Blaze realized the situation, three men restrained him. The vision’s perspective changed to show Tristan’s capture, and then mine. A loud scream ended my trance.

A large group of guards had crept up behind Sadie and Blaze. I clamored toward the door desperate to save them. Just as my useless vision predicted, my brother and sister never saw it coming.

Blaze kicked both feet into the door, slamming it shut.

“No!” I shrieked.

My battered fingers clawed at the thick metal door with as much hysteria as the rest of me felt. My hands bled even more. From within the castle walls, the sound of Sadie’s fading screams echoed off the stone corridors as they hauled my family away from me.

Tristan, who had been feverishly slicing through the remaining tangled vine around my ankle, tossed me over his shoulder. Despite my squirming, he carted me away from the castle at a record-breaking speed.

“What are you doing?” I screamed. “We can’t leave them!”

Tristan ran without a word until we were deep within the surrounding forest. He released his grip and the second my feet touched the ground pain and anger overcame me.

“What is your problem?” I screamed. “That was my brother and sister we just abandoned back there.”

“Blaze closed the door for a reason, Alex.”

“But we just left them.”

“If we had gone in they would have captured us too,” he said. “We can’t help them if we are all imprisoned.”

“But we just left them. Without the potion, they will grow weaker by the hour until...” my voice cracked and I knew I could say no more.

“Alex, look at you,” he said, reaching for my hands. “Your hands are torn to shreds and your leg looks like it was in a bear trap.”

Staring down at my bloody hands, I waited for the healing to begin. The throbbing of my injuries was nothing compared to the pain of watching my brother and sister be taken prisoner. One by one, my cuts bound themselves. Before the blood had time to dry, my wounds healed.

“See!” I announced. “I’m fine.”

I hadn’t possessed much faith in our mission when we first set out and now it had become nonexistent. Tristan was relentlessly encouraging, but my confidence was faltering to the point where no amount
of reassuring words would help.

But that didn’t stop him from trying. Somehow that in itself was slightly uplifting.

“Katerina won’t harm them, she needs you for her scheme to work.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You are the key. Your family’s powers rest on you. That’s why you seem to have more power than Sadie or Blaze. Their abilities are their own but you control the source of your family’s magic.”

“I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this. Katerina can have it. I just want my life back!”

I collapsed onto the dewy ground. The dreaded hole began to reopen inside of my soul. The familiar emptiness after the death of my mother had reappeared, draining what little optimism I had. This week had been such a blur that I never stopped to notice its miraculous repair. Now that it had returned, I could say with great certainty that it had been patched and it was all thanks to Sadie and Blaze.

Despite not knowing of Sadie and Blaze’s existence, a part of me had somehow felt their absence. The missing piece was never a flaw in my design but rather a broken connection that could only be fixed by my brother and sister.

I wish Katerina had taken me too.

“I thought I had a handle on my visions,” I said. “Why was there such a late delivery? I barely had time to see anything before it happened.”

“I told you, Katerina knows your powers. She knew we would come eventually. She was probably just toying with you.”  

“We were stupid to think we could defeat her. Our only weapons against her were our powers, but if she can control them then we have nothing.”

“We just have to be smarter than her,” he said. “She can only control your powers if she expects them. She has flaws, we just have to find them and use them against her.”

Tristan’s voice flowed with a soothing assurance. I almost believed him. This time not even his words or stares could shake the crushing emptiness devouring my insides.

“This was a mistake. We are losing and we have barely gotten started.”

It was obvious that I was being dramatic but I couldn’t have cared less. Tristan’s expression revealed that, despite my overreaction, he knew I was right even if he would never admit it. We took a risk to save our lives but instead managed to grab a shovel to help dig our own graves. I felt trampled, but if my defeatist attitude brought Tristan down with me, Sadie and Blaze had no chance.

If I could tone down my fears perhaps I could turn up the positive attitude for all our sake.

More importantly, if I did not emerge from this fiasco as one hell of a person, someone somewhere got something wrong.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Watching them being taken away and not being able to help just brought all of my fears to the surface. I had pushed my anxieties way down this morning but they came rushing back.”

“That is understandable. I know this is hard for you and I was just trying to be encouraging. I suppose that isn’t what you need.”

“No, that is exactly what I need,” I said with an actual smile. “All we have now is me, you, and positive thinking. If we lose anything else I may have a stroke.”

His laughter warmed my wrecked heart. Tristan had done more for me than he would ever realize.

Well, tell him!

Tristan joined me on the damp ground as leaves fell from the trees above us.  He reached over, plucking one from my hair.

Mom used the “You’ll understand when you’re older” line when things did not go according to my plan. I thought she was nuts.

She lived here, she might have been.

With every year that passed I learned new things that proved my original ideas were often misguided. In the middle of a forest in a mystical realm that hovered around, within, or nowhere close to Earth as my newly discovered siblings were being held prisoner by a pissed off witch, I had learned several more new things.

Yeah, that life is a crapshoot.

The past few days had shown me that I had control over absolutely nothing. I could organize my time into as many neat, color-coded, well-thought-out compartments as I wanted, but the universe always had other plans. No matter how fast I tried to run or how creative my hiding place was this life found me anyway…then full-on linebacker tackled me to the ground.

Yet, here I sat. Through it all I was still breathing and mostly functional. I was scared to death for Sadie and Blaze but somehow I was finding my faith again. They were two of the strongest, most capable people I had ever had the pleasure of meeting. Knowing them they were probably more worried about me than I was about them.

Tristan tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. Our eyes met. In the midst of the madness, I had fallen in love. I could have kicked myself for thinking life was something I could do alone. Sitting with Tristan, and the hundreds of butterflies that now lived in my belly, I was grateful for his presence.

“Thank you for being here,” I said.

“No problem. I didn’t have much else going on anyway.”

“Look who found a sense of humor,” I said, getting in a playful dig of my own.

His fingers intertwined with mine. My nerve-endings came alive, shooting up my arms like a private fireworks show. I had to fight to stay present and not drift off into Tristan Land where the sun was always shining, smiles were involuntary, hearts were filled to the brim with love and happiness, and I was unable to think of anything but him.

“So, what do we do now?” I asked.

“We get back up and try again.”

“How are we supposed to do that exactly?” I asked. “We’re a few men down.”

“Maybe I can be of some assistance,” came an unknown voice.

****

Chapter Twenty-One

Murmurs and the whistle of a teakettle startled me into consciousness.

The last thing I remembered was sitting in the forest with Tristan. Now my feet were hanging off of a tiny bed surrounded by tiny walls in, what I predicted to be, a tiny house.

The smell of freshly baked bread and honey tickled my nose and taunted my rumbling belly. In the doorway appeared a short, childlike person. He was slightly hunched over making it easy to observe that his head was almost entirely bald. His big ears and warm smile were so endearing that I almost forgot that he was a stranger.

But he isn’t a stranger!

“It’s you! I know you!” I shouted. “Tristan!”

Panic ran deeper each time I shouted his name. I kicked the covers, desperate to be free. Without the composure needed to intelligently untwist the sheets, I only managed to further entrap myself.

Both of my feet tingled with an intense numbness from dangling off the end of a bed that was two feet shorter than I was. I leapt up with escape being my lone concern. My head banged into the ceiling just as the sheet wrapped around my legs sabotaged any and all balance or coordination. After what seemed like an eternity in slow motion, I crumpled to the floor.

Luckily, my face and elbows broke my fall.

“Are you okay?” Tristan said in-between hysterical laughs.

“He’s with her!” I yelled. “He works with Katerina!”

I was either embarrassed or extremely angry, either way my emotions were volatile.

I slid toward the wall on my throbbing, red elbows. The aged logs structuring the walls of this funhouse were the best, and first, place I could find to use as a prop for my battered body and spirit. Kicking my legs, I struggled to free myself from the sheet that was still holding me hostage.

“Is this alive too?” I shouted. “Why does this keep happening to me?”

Tristan squatted next to me attempting to once again liberate me from the confines of the presumably evil bed linens.  Because he was unruffled, removing the sheet proved to be a simple task for him. He, of course, could not resist finding a certain amount of humor in my predicament. His amusement evaporated the second he saw my bloody elbows.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked. “He was at my house with Katerina. Are we being held hostage?”

Tristan found his funny bone again, which further infuriated me.

“I’m glad I provide you with such hilarious entertainment!” I scowled.

“You bumped your head in the woods,” he said. “When Arwen surprised us, you jumped up so fast you hit your head on a tree limb. He offered us shelter.”

Could I be more accident-prone these days?

“Arwen? You were at my house. In all the chaos I forgot but I did see you didn’t I? Why would you help us?”

“Um, hello,” Arwen said with a shy wave. “I was there but I mean you no harm.”

Confusion had set in. I was drowning in questions I could not answer. I twisted to survey the damage to my elbows; they were already healed. The pounding in my head, however, remained persistent.

“It’s safe, don’t worry,” Tristan said, obviously recognizing the perplexed state I was in.

“The bump on my head says otherwise,” I said. “I’m sick of injuries. I haven’t been hurt this much in my whole life.”

Tristan pulled me to my feet and tucked his arm around me. We moved in unison into the all-inclusive kitchen/living room/dining room area. I felt like I had entered a dollhouse—a dollhouse that smelled of sweet bread. Every piece of furniture, the sink, the stove, the fireplace, down to the wood carved figurines adorning the mantelpiece, were all miniaturized.

I had originally misread Arwen’s hunch as being a result of his cramped living quarters but, upon further inspection, the house could not take the blame. I predicted that if Arwen were to stand upright he would still have enough room to move about freely or even jump up and down should the need arise.