Witch & Wizard 04 - The Kiss (14 page)

“You Sasha’s guys?” I ask, nudging the bigger one’s toe.

He jolts awake. “Yeah. Um. Yes.” He blinks rapidly, trying to fight sleep. “We’re the Watch.”

“What are you watching?” Heath asks dryly, but the joke’s lost on this one.

I nudge the younger kid, whose shoulders are slumping against a streetlight. “Any new information about the missing children? Any leads?”

“What?” He squints up at me, blind as a mole under the light.

I roll my eyes. No wonder the citizens think the Watch is such a joke.

I sigh and take Heath’s hand, and we comb the streets for hours looking for a single clue that might help us figure out what happened that first night when Pearl was taken.

But there’s not a scrap of clothing, not a trace of a fingerprint, and with every dead end, my spirits plunge a little further.

“This is a waste of time!” I finally shout. “Whit was right. I should’ve gone up the Mountain with him. While he’s off actually
doing
something, I’m here just hanging out—”

“Don’t. Don’t regret staying here with me,” Heath pleads. “Listen. I think I have an idea.”

“What?” I step closer to him, studying his face, but he’s staring into a storefront window strangely, peering at our reflections: a boy with a face of sharp lines and a girl with a mess of red hair.

“What if we could
see
what happened?” Heath asks. “What if we could
re-create
the scene of the kidnapping that night?” I stare at him, puzzled, trying to figure out if he’s serious. “Then we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we?”

“No, but…” I furrow my brow. “I’ve never been able to do that. Have you?”

Heath turns to me earnestly. “No. But—what happened the other night… with us… that was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

“Me, neither…” I say honestly.

He holds up his palm. “So what if there’s
more
that we can do together? Don’t you want to find out?” His grin is all mischief, and like always, I can’t resist him.

“I do want.” I lay my hand against his, aligning our fingers. “I want to do everything with you.” My hand is shaking a little with anticipation. “And first, I want to find Pearl.”

“So…” he says, still gazing at me, “let’s think about her.” Then his lids fall shut, and I close mine, too. At first, I’m distracted by how our palms go sweaty; there’s such heat generated at the touch of our skin. But when I’m
finally
able to forget about Heath and think only of Pearl…
bang
.

There’s a surge between us so fierce that the energy almost knocks me down.

I cry out and almost let go, but Heath squeezes my hands, and as I grit my teeth against the intensity and the heat of the current, the colors around us blur, and the storefront window pulls out into a long tunnel that we seem to be careening down.

I squint down the tunnel and see fuzzy shapes of hulking men in dark clothes and hoods. Trucks in front of Dumpsters. Then kids, and more kids. It’s almost like I’m seeing the scene play out underwater. And then—

A giant of a man has Pearl Neederman by the throat.

I lunge forward in alarm, but a vortex of swirling, waterlike air seems to push me back. I can’t move. I can’t stop it.

Then Pearl’s head turns and she seems to look through the tunnel and see me.

There are tears in her eyes.

Chapter 39

Wisty

“HEATH! I THINK I know that place!”

It’s hazy, but I can just remember the smell of sickness in the Gutter that day, Whit running with me on his back as crowds pushed in on us. And the taste of blood…

I tear off toward that wretched place.

“Wisty, wait—” Heath yells, but I don’t stop.

“It’s not far!” I promise. We race across the City. Though I was barely conscious when I was last here, somehow my feet know the way beyond the boarded-up food carts, and I hang a right into the alley. Rats look up at us defiantly as we slow to a stop past the rows of giant garbage containers.

“I told you,” I say breathlessly. The setting looks just like in the vision.

Right down to the hooded men loading kids into trucks.

“Oh my god!” I gasp. “Heath!”

They may be different from the group that took Pearl, but they’re here—the vans, the men, the kids….
It’s really happening. Right now.

Heath protectively tries to pull me to a crouch next to the containers, but one of the men jerks his head toward us at the sound of our voices, and I know we’ve been spotted.

The villains make a break for it then. “They’re getting away!”

It happens too fast for us to join forces, but as Heath and I move to attack, our separate strengths are undeniable.

I see the electric lines above and clench my hands into fists, pulling the power into my body as the severed lines go haywire. Then, when I’m absolutely brimming with M, I fling it out through my fingers. A shower of sparks rains down over the hulking men.

Just like the fireworks on the night they took her.

The kidnappers yell and cover their heads, and as they scatter, Heath goes into Demon mode. He whips forward, a ferocious force of speed and pain zeroing in on each hulking, hooded target in turn.

While I’m trying to get to the kids in the back of one van, I hear a screech of tires and whip around as the second van starts to peel away.

“Wisty, stop them!” Heath yells as the van whips down the alley, its back doors swinging on their hinges. Before I have a split second to come up with a plan, the van swerves to avoid the live wire I left still sparking in the street.

“
No!
” I scream as the van smashes head-on into the side of a building, and the sound… well, that explosion will echo in my dreams forever.

I start sprinting toward the flames, wailing.
If there were any children in there…

“Wisty! Come back!” Heath yells above the roar. “Get away! That van didn’t have any kids in it!”

I sink down to the pavement, collapsing with relief.

“Move back!” Heath cries. I look up and leap away just before another explosion pounds my ears. Trembling, I stagger back toward the first van.

Now only one man remains, and without laying a finger on him, Heath brings the man to his knees on the filthy ground in front of us.

“Where are you taking the captives?” I demand breathlessly, tearing off the captor’s hood.

Underneath, the man is balding, with wind-whipped cheeks and hatred in his eyes. He doesn’t say a word.

“What do you want with these children?
Who is your leader?!
” I try again, but the man scowls at us and spits at my feet.

At that, Heath narrows his eyes. A sheet of ice slowly starts to grow from the ground beneath the man’s knees. The ice eats its way upward, over knees and fingers, slowly covering his body. When the frost starts to choke at his neck, the man groans.

“Heath—” I cut in. I’m getting uncomfortable with where this is going. “That’s enough.”

“If we let him go, he’ll tell his leader,” Heath says confidently. When I don’t say anything, he looks up at me. “Wisty, do you want to be able to save more kids or not?”

I bite my lip and nod.
That’s the only thing that matters.

“You’re not—” the man whispers through chattering teeth.

“What’s that you say?” Heath leans in, and I want to look away; I just want this to be over.

“You’re not… supposed to… use… magic,” the kidnapper chokes out.

Heath shrugs, and with a flick of his wrist, the man’s whole head becomes encased in ice, his eyes frozen open in their judgmental stare.

“So I’ve heard,” Heath mutters.

Chapter 40

Whit

SASHA IS REALLY GONE.

It doesn’t feel real. Even after hours of chipping away at the hard ground to dig his grave. Even after I watched the soil slowly cover his face as Janine talked about his life, and listened to Ross cry until his throat was raw, I can’t process it.

He was my age. He was my friend.

And he’s dead.

We sit next to the fresh mound, the snow soaking into our clothes.

“What are we doing here?” I whisper, my heart breaking with hopelessness. “We should go home.”

“No.” Ross wipes his eyes and straps on his pack. “We can’t give up. We have to keep going. It’s what Sasha would do, and I’m not going to let him down.”

So with our friend dead and our spirits shattered, we trudge on for hours through the sleet and the snow. We don’t speak, and the quiet of the forest somehow feels both mournful and peaceful at the same time.

By the time the first stars spot the twilight sky, my legs can barely carry me forward. I start looking for a place to make camp, grateful for an end to this awful day.

Janine stops, but she has a strange expression on her face. “Do you hear that?” she asks.

“It sounds like laughter,” Ross says.

I tilt my head, listening hard. What I hear makes me tremble.
It can’t be.
I look at my companions. “It sounds like—kids.”

We race through the trees toward the noises of children playing, and hope starts to creep back into my heart.

But when we peer over the ridge at the valley below, my excitement withers.

It’s worse than I’d imagined.

“What are they
doing
to that kid?” Ross gasps.

I shake my head, unable to look away. The scene below is grotesque. The boy is slashing at his own legs again and again with a stick, and its thorns leave screaming red stripes where they hit. His thighs are a mess of blood and welts.

And what’s worse: there’s a mob of children of all ages leaning in toward the spectacle. They’re
cheering him on
. Every slash provokes another roar of applause.

The camp is small, but there are hundreds of kids milling around the space, waiting for direction. When the torturous performance is over, one of the burly sentries sounds a deafening bell.

The kids immediately take off at a trot, like they’re racing, only there’re no markers and no finish. They just circle the small yard over and over, hiking their knobby knees up with dogged concentration. They jump over the kids who are lying on the ground—the ones who aren’t moving—or sometimes they step on them instead.

As they run, I can see most of the other kids aren’t in much better shape than the whipped boy. They’re thin and poorly clothed, and their cheeks are hollowed, their eyes sunken with exhaustion. Some are missing fingers, others toes. I spot one little girl with a dirty rag wrapped around the stump where her hand should be, and I feel bile rise up in my throat.

“Pearl,” I croak, lurching up from behind the ridge.

“No,” Janine hisses, tugging at my arm. “They’ll see us! It’s not her, Whit—it’s not Pearl.”

I know she’s right. This girl’s hair is too light, and her legs are too long. Her face is too old to be Pearl Marie Neederman.

But it
could’ve
been. These monsters could’ve done the same to Pearl. Tortured her. Maimed her.
If she’s here…
Who knows what they’ve done.

“We have to break into the camp,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady.

“Now?” Ross’s eyes are as wide as saucers. I know he’s thinking of how Sasha died, but the kid is brave, and he nods.

Janine, on the other hand, isn’t having it. “No. We scout it out tomorrow,” she says. “It’s almost dark.”

“It would be so easy to bust them out of there right now,” I point out. “There’s no fence, and they only have a few guards—”

“We don’t know what they have.
Something
made the kids do those things. Something made that boy…” She shakes her head. “Tomorrow,” she says firmly. “We’re not going in there at night without knowing what we’re walking into. It’s suicide.”

Chapter 41

Whit

I CLENCH MY JAW as we set up camp on the rocky platform. Wolves howl in the distance, and the wind whistles against the rock. I’m trying to keep my teeth from chattering with cold, or grinding in anger and frustration.

Tomorrow.
I settle back into my crude bed, sighing, and promising once again:
If Pearl’s inside that house of horrors, tomorrow we’ll bust her out.

“You’re shivering,” Janine says, putting a hand on my cheek.

I hold her smooth, gentle fingers to my face. “My clothes are still damp from the river,” I answer, not mentioning the thoughts that are really chilling me to the bone. “It’d be kind of unreasonable for me to expect to be warm at this point.”

Janine shakes her head. “Not unreasonable, really.” I notice she’s got her sleeping bag balled up in her arms. “I was thinking Ross and Feffer have the right idea.” She points over at our sleeping friend, his arms wrapped around the dog. “Shared body heat,” Janine explains, and her wry smile is the first thing that has truly made me feel warm since we started up this Mountain.

“That’s better,” I say, once she’s curled up beside me. I breathe her in, a sweet smell of pine and dirt all her own, and the night feels a little less dark. For a long time we lie quietly, listening to the screech of bats and the rustle of leaves.

“It wasn’t just for the warmth,” Janine finally says, her voice muffled by my chest. “I just… I didn’t want to be alone tonight, you know? I see his face every time I shut my eyes.”

“I know. Me, too.”
All their faces. Their eyes, most of all.
I see Sasha’s eyes as the life went out of him, Wisty’s eyes brimming as I turned away from her, and the dead eyes of the girl with the missing hand.

“How do we ever sleep again?” Janine asks hopelessly. “I mean, how do we get past this?”

The moonlight catches in her eyes, making them glisten with life, and suddenly I can’t help it—I’m not thinking about the sadness, or the tragedy, or the cold anymore. I’m thinking about the heat in the spot where our legs press against one another. I’m thinking about the outline of her body under the blanket, about how smooth her skin must feel….