Of Witches and Wind (39 page)

“Still, good for your first negotiation,” Chase said without sarcasm. He was still being freakishly nice.

“But,” said Mia, “how will we get to shore?”

Chatty looked at me, rolled her eyes, and climbed up on the railing. Then, with a graceful dive, she slipped under the ocean's surface and came up seventy feet closer to the beach. Her strokes were so neat that from this far away you couldn't even tell she was wearing a pack.

“Looks like we're going for a swim.” I climbed up on the railing and held on to the nearest rope. “Everybody else go first.” I didn't trust Fael not to try something. Maybe he had been planning that the whole way. Maybe his pouting face was the same as his plotting face.

Ben, Mia, and Kenneth splashed into the ocean behind me.

Chase was thinking the same thing. “Please don't attack us when we leave the boat. It's already been kind of a long day.”

“We will sail to the Unseelie harbor,” said a knight. “We have been called back. Our king has come home, and he wishes us to return his boat as soon as possible.”

Nope. That was definitely Fael's pouting face. He knew he'd probably be grounded for joyriding in Daddy's boat.

“Awesome. Well, tell him hey for me.” The knight gave the Turn-leaf a look, like no one had ever told the Unseelie king hey. With a grin, Chase dove off.

“I won't forget this, Rory Landon,” the Unseelie prince said, like this was supposed to scare me.

“Good.” Maybe then he wouldn't mess with Chase again.

Then I jumped out of the boat. Luckily, it was only a twelve-foot drop.

The water was searingly cold, and the salt stung the slice on my left hand under the bandage. With the flotation spell in the pack, it was easy to stay above water. All I had to do was propel myself toward the beach, but I'd never swum so far in my life.

Chase waved both arms at me from the sand.
Yeah, I see you,
I thought, not sure why he was shouting. He couldn't expect me to hear him with all these waves crashing around me.

But the sea tugged at my jeans and sucked me backward. I glanced back at the Fey ship—Fael would figure out some sort of spell to stop me. But the Fey vessel was already gliding away.

So this was just an ordinary current—the Pacific Ocean kind? The kind that drowned people?

I swam even faster—
too
fast. I splashed so much I choked on the sea.

A hand closed over my wrist. Chatty, treading water. She widened her dark eyes pointedly, with a very small smile, as if to say,
Chill out, Rory. I've got you
. I copied her and treaded water, trying not to panic even when the current dragged us out farther and farther.

Then she wrapped one arm across my shoulders and towed me back—parallel to the beach. When I tried to help paddle us to shore, she slapped my arm and shook her head. It would have been humiliating if I hadn't been so tired. She wouldn't let me move until we could touch the sandy bottom. We stood up together, and Chatty stumbled forward, her breath hissing through gritted teeth.

I grabbed her shoulder, steadying her before she could fall over. “You okay? Did you cut your foot?”

She shook her head, eyes squeezed shut, clearly still in pain.

“Lean some weight on me, if it helps,” I said, helping her toward the beach.

It was nearly dark. I heard Chase before I saw him. “A rip current.”

Chatty and I splashed the rest of the way out of the water. I spotted the others.

Mia had apparently swallowed half of the ocean. Kneeling in the sand, she delicately spat it all back up.

Ben wrung out his T-shirt. “Right. Nobody had almost died in a while. We were starting to forget what that felt like.”

“That was my bad,” said Chase, as Chatty and I trudged up the beach toward them. “I knew we got off too easy. Fael must have stopped the ship right in front of the rip current.”

Chatty shook her head so violently that drops of water flicked off her dark hair and all over one side of my face. When she was sure everyone was looking at her, she pointed her thumb at her own chest.

“You think it was your fault? Because you jumped off the boat first?” I guessed.

“You guys, everybody survived—thanks to Chatty's excellent lifeguarding skills,” Ben said tiredly. “We're a team. Stop worrying about what was whose fault, and let's eat something.”

Ben decided not to pass through the
X
-marks-the-stop gate until morning. Chase and Kenneth told him that was stupid, but Ben held firm. He wasn't going to jeopardize the mission when we were so close. We were all tired. It was dark. The path up to the spring was rocky. We could all break legs, and—as Ben pointed out—he couldn't afford any more injured Companions.

“I'm injured.” I didn't really want to admit this, but if I didn't,
Kenneth would point out the giant no-longer-white bandage on my hand. “I cut myself in the mirror vault. You can send me back—”

“Can you still walk and fight?” Ben interrupted. I nodded. “Then you're staying. You're the reason we got here with two days to spare. You'll see it through to the end.”

I grinned, almost smug with happiness, and to hide it I slung off my pack and started searching for my sleeping bag. We set up camp as close to the giant crossed pines as possible. My eyes drooped as Mia and I searched the beach for firewood.

Chase broke out the Lunch Box of Plenty, and everybody teased Ben when he ordered what looked like weird purple mush in the dim light beside our pizza, chicken fingers, and hamburgers. “What can I say? I have a highly cultivated palate,” he said, snagging a fork from the lunch box. Then Ben put his arm around Mia's shoulders, and she kind of leaned in to him, smiling. Clearly, being held hostage by a fairy prince had helped their romance.

Chatty blew her whistle and motioned that she would take the first watch. Then she stomped up the beach, her feet hitting the ground so hard she threw up little fountains of sand with each step.

I inhaled my grilled cheese in three and a half seconds and called the last watch. I got dibs because I'd been wandering a mirror vault while everyone else had been sleeping last night. Then, as Ben assigned watches to everyone else, I crawled into bed and fell asleep to Chase and Kenneth arguing about who got to order dessert from the Lunch Box of Plenty first.

I thought I would be too tired to dream, but I was wrong.

Mia's head looked perfect and delicate on the marble pedestal, her lashes casting long, spiky shadows over her cheeks. Her black hair shone in a smooth river, cascading down her neck and over the table. Her arm lay beside the pedestal—the side that should
have been attached to her shoulder was covered with white silk. Dread knotted in my chest.

I glanced back. His face white, his eyes huge, Chase was clutching a glass door with a single snowflake etched near the doorknob. He pointed at the table.

I turned. Mia's eyes cracked open, her lips curling.

Gasping, I sat up. There were the stars, piercing through the black sky in unfamiliar constellations, and there were the huge pines twisted around each other. There was Chase sleeping on my right.

Heart hammering, I wrestled myself free of my sleeping bag and walked down to the water. I sucked in big drafts of fresh ocean breeze and tried to wake up enough to think.

Beheading hadn't killed Mia. I shuddered all over again. Who would have guessed that a severed head staring at you could be way creepier than having it cut off in the first place?

In some Tales, you could get chopped up into little bits and brought back to life with magic. I must have read them, but I couldn't remember what they were.

Maybe that's why Mia hadn't freaked out when I told her. Maybe she already knew she would get that kind of Tale.

Smiling about it seemed excessive, though. That snowflake symbol etched into the door could only come from one place—the Glass Mountain. I didn't know how Chase, Mia, and I had gotten there, but considering how close we were to the spring, I sincerely hoped we would manage to get the Water of Life back to EAS
first
.

Just a few steps from the water, Chatty was throwing pebbles into the sea. Letting off steam, I guessed, but then I spotted elegant, short-haired heads bobbing in the waves, their tails curling up out of the water behind them, scales catching the moonlight.

Mermaids.

They didn't seem too disturbed by the fact that some girl was chucking pebbles at them. They just sang a few notes, and Chatty paused. Then she threw pebbles again: two stones, which skipped once. One stone, skipping four times. Four stones that skipped twice.

A mermaid sang a warbling note back.

“Oh. Are you talking with them?” I asked. Wherever Chatty was from, their chapter had to be right next to the water if they taught their Characters to speak Mermaid.

Seeing me, the mermaids dove under, their tails making great splashes.

“Whoops, sorry about that. I didn't think they would mind another Character—” But then I saw her face. The tears on her cheeks glinted as brightly as the mermaids' scales. “Whoa. What's wrong?”

But either she didn't want to tell me, or she couldn't figure out how to explain it, charades-style. She covered her face with her hands, one of them fisted around a dagger. I hadn't even known she carried one. I guessed she took guard duty very seriously.

I didn't know what was wrong, but the tears were kind of freaking me out. Maybe I had been hanging out with Chase too long. “It's okay. I'll help you.”

She hugged me swiftly then, pressing her wet face into my neck. I was missing something. It nagged at me as I hugged her back, but unfortunately, my mind had decided to shut down for the night.

“How about this?” I said. “I'll take the rest of your watch, and you can get some more sleep. That'll help, right? Everything feels better in the morning.”

Chatty wiped her eyes and smiled ruefully.

“Who had the next watch after you? Mia? Kenneth?” Chatty nodded. “Okay, I'll wake up Kenneth next. You go to bed.”

And she went.

I never even suspected that I should worry about that dagger.

What Chatty really was never even crossed my mind while I kept watch, pinching myself again to stay awake, or when I gave in to the sleepiness and woke Kenneth, or when I fell back into my sleeping bag, snoring practically as soon as I touched it.

Then I woke to Kenneth shouting, “No!” Chatty was crouching over Ben, the dagger's small blade pressed to the new kid's throat.

he sky behind them slowly brightened from indigo to a silvery sort of yellow.

When Ben gulped, staring up at Chatty, the knife's edge parted the skin on his neck. Blood sank into it a breath later—a short red line right below his Adam's apple. Chatty just moved the blade back a fraction and smiled, one eyebrow quirking up at him as if to say,
Ben, you big, clueless dummy
.

She wasn't going to really hurt him. She was just getting his attention.

But the prankster in Chatty definitely enjoyed watching him squirm, especially since he kept ignoring her for Mia—

Suddenly, I knew exactly what was happening—exactly what I hadn't been able to figure out a few hours before.

I reached into the front pocket of my pack. Chatty didn't seem to mind. She didn't even take her eyes off Ben.

“Wake up, Chase. Now,” I said.

Chase didn't bother to open his eyes. “What? Did Chatty draw on Kenneth's face with a permanent marker last night? Because I say we let her.”

“Idiot. She has a knife,” Kenneth said, shaken. Chase bolted upright.

My hand found the M3. “Lena! I need your help!”

She had to answer this time. I couldn't remember the exact wording of Chatty's Tale without her.

“Chatty, whatever it is,” Ben said nervously, “we can talk about it.” She scowled at him, reminding him she couldn't speak. “I mean, we'll help you. We'll get you what you need.”