Burnt Sugar (2 page)

“So we have proof, or so they know what happened to us when they come looking for the bodies?” I asked.

“Both.” Lock wasn't joking, and sadly, we all knew his answer was true. We'd come looking for a witch—I hadn't asked Lock what kind of witch—and it was clear from the cabin that she was not a good one. There's no conceivable reason why a good witch would have a gingerbread house.

If Ezra hadn't smelled it earlier—and if my nose weren't confirming it—I would think it was a fake. A house made up to look like a gingerbread house. But I could definitely smell it. The walls of the ridiculously adorable cabin were gingerbread. The mortar was clearly icing. Gumdrops the size of my head lined the pebbled walkway. I couldn't quite tell from where I stood, but I would have bet that all the detailing on the house, from windowsills to the scalloped edging, were edible candy. It was a gingerbread house, and gingerbread houses were only good for one thing. My stomach tightened.

Lock turned to say something to me and stopped, putting a hand on my shoulder to keep me still. I caught the flash of a small black insect.

“What is it? Is it a bee?”

He coaxed the bug onto his hand. By now I could tell it wasn't a bee, but some kind of beetle. It was all black except for a yellowish head with a big black spot in the middle—it looked like an eye.

“It's a carrion beetle,” Lock said, helping the bug onto a tree. “They like moist areas, rotten fruit …” he trailed off.

“And dead things, right?”

He sighed. “Yes, they particularly like dead things, usually animals. Plenty of those in a forest like this. Carrion beetles are a central part of the ecosystem, helping to break down animal carcasses. Not something I'd normally worry about.”

“Except we're by a gingerbread house,” Ezra said.

“Exactly.” Lock's face remained stoic, but I could tell he wasn't happy by the stiff way he was standing.

“Maybe it was attracted to the sugar?” Ezra offered, but no one was buying it.

“We need to get in there, don't we.” I said. “We can't just burn it down from here.”

Lock shook his head. “We don't know if anyone else is inside.” He didn't say children, but we all knew that's what he meant.

“At least we know someone's home.” Ezra pointed at the smoke trailing from the chimney. “It's a bit hot for a fire.”

I felt bile rise in my throat. “Never too hot for a cooking fire.” Someone was home, and someone was hungry.

Despite our desire to immediately run forth and storm the castle, we decided to proceed with caution. We knew someone was home, but we didn't know who or how many. Dolly could be alone, or she could have invited friends for dinner. And since human was probably on the menu, her friends probably wouldn't be human.

On top of that, gingerbread houses usually have defenses. We'd only encountered one before, and one was enough. There's a reason why they've fallen out of vogue over the centuries, and it's not because of Hansel and Gretel. It's not like people stumble upon a gingerbread house and think, “Killer witch inside! Run!” They think it's a gag, or something someone built to be clever. Because on the whole, people don't think witches are real. So they investigate. And if they go inside, they don't come back out to warn others.

No, the reason they've become unpopular is the cost, and I don't mean in dollars. Gingerbread houses draw power from the person they're connected to, like leeches on the soul. Kill the witch, kill the house, so the house does its level best to keep that from happening. But while they may draw heavily on their hosts, they don't rely on a single food source. One person would go too quickly. So the host becomes a lure to draw in more food. It's pretty clever in a terrible sort of way.

They also don't stay in the same place for very long if the witch is smart. A trap is more effective if no one knows it's there. Deep, dark forbidding forests are perfect locations, because if people go missing, well, people go missing in forests all the time. I asked another witch once how they moved gingerbread houses and she'd just shuddered and walked away. Not the best sign.

“She's lived here for some time,” Lock said. “The plants, the trees—the whole system has been discombobulated for a while. This kind of thing isn't good for them.”

“So we have an old gingerbread house that's probably developed some deep defenses and a possibly crazy man-eating witch on the inside,” Ezra said. “Great. Wonderful. Shouldn't be a problem.”

“Look on the bright side,” I told him, patting his arm. “There might be more than one witch.”

Lock put his arm around my shoulders. “We get the best jobs.”

We stood there and sweated for a minute longer, just staring at the creepy gingerbread house. Then we sat down to plan.

In the end, we decided I should approach the house alone. I looked the least threatening and I was the youngest—people don't put up their guard for young teenage girls the same way they would for the boys. It didn't matter that, out of the three of us, I was the most dangerous. The important thing was that I didn't
look
it.

Lock would stay in the woods for the moment and see what he could find out from the trees. Ezra had stripped down and gone fox to explore closer to the house. We were hoping that whatever defensive spells the house had wouldn't be triggered by an animal. It was risky, but we didn't have any other way to get information and we couldn't wait.

As I made my way through the clearing and over the cobblestones, I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist, rolling the sleeves up to hide the embroidery. Even if the witch inside couldn't read runes—which was unlikely—I wasn't about to give them a hint that I was anything besides human. Close up, the cabin seemed even more like one out of a fairy tale. The candy-glazed windows shone and after a quick sniff I realized the flowers were made out of pressed sugar. Even the water from the well carried a sweet smell. I was getting a sugar high just from breathing.

There was very little sound as I reached the door. If I hadn't felt the shiver up my spine telling me that something was terribly wrong, it would have been easy to believe that it was just an idyllic summer day in the woods.

I knocked on the door.

I think everyone has a certain idea of what kind of person lives in a gingerbread house. A gnarled old witch is the usual stereotype. Long crooked nose with warts, knotted hands, snaggleteeth, and gray hair—the typical crone we've grown to vilify. It's odd that, as a teenage girl, I'm perceived as innocuous and safe, while so many of our childhood villains are modeled after the crone. There's probably a lesson there.

The man who greeted me wasn't witchy in the least. It was a bit of a letdown, to be honest. He was abnormally tan, his teeth artificially white, and he was wearing one of those spandex bicycle getups you see on fitness nuts. Over that, he had on an apron that read
Kiss the Cook
.

I blinked at him, trying to process. He smiled a too-white smile and held up a blender pitcher half-full of green goo and a glass with the same. “Smoothie?”

I mumbled that I was lost and asked to use his phone, which was the cover story we'd decided to go with. He didn't seem to think it was weird that I was wandering alone in the woods, but invited me in, shoving a glass full of smoothie into my hand.

“Absolutely. There's no reception out here, so this happens occasionally. Still, me and the missus, we love the quiet.” He pulled me along gently by my arm, guiding me into one of the kitchen chairs. “Gives us time to get in touch with nature. Really align our chakras and all that good stuff. Are you into yoga? I'm telling you, it's the best thing I've ever done.” He nodded to the smoothie. “Lately I've been experimenting with juicing. Lots of nutrients, all things grown locally and without pesticides. You look parched. Take a sip. It's a new recipe and I'd love an opinion.” He bustled around as he talked, cleaning up the rinds and peels left over from his juicing experiment and piling them into a compost bucket.

“Lots of greens in this one—super good for your system.” He wiped the counter down with a wet cloth. I felt like he was going about two speeds faster than me. “So you just rest and I'll find the phone, okay?” He smiled again.

I have to admit, I was a little weirded out. The inside of the place looked like a regular cabin, and this guy wasn't at all what I was expecting. Who lives in a gingerbread house and then gets into juicing? And yoga?

Without thinking, I took a sip of smoothie as I looked around. It really had been quite hot outside, and I was thirsty. The juice hit my tongue. I could taste sweeter things like carrots and some sort of berry balancing out the bitterness of the greens. Was that parsley? There was a flavor I couldn't quite place. I stared into my glass and tried to figure out what it was. That's when it hit me. I had infiltrated a gingerbread house probably filled with flesh-eating witches and possibly other dangerous people and then I had drunk a mystery liquid that was handed to me by a stranger. I really hoped that the house had some sort of spell attached to it that made you lower your guard. That was much better than being incredibly naive about something, like the possibility that I had just voluntarily drunk poison. I was so busy staring into my cup wondering if I was going to die that I didn't hear the person who snuck up behind me and hit me over the head.

I woke up feeling nauseated, dizzy, and really, really stupid. I'd let myself get coshed over the head like an amateur. I laid there blinking and staring at the ceiling and trying to not vomit.

“She awake yet?” Ezra asked.

“I think I saw her move. Hey, wake up, cupcake.”

After my eyes adjusted I took a good look around. We were in a sort of root cellar. A long low ceiling held rows of wooden birdcages just like the one I was in. It looked like roots had grown out of the ceiling and braided themselves into cages. I counted thirty. About half of them were full, though no one was talking besides my friends, and a few of the cage occupants were so still that I was really hoping that they were sleeping. By the looks of things, we were the oldest.

I turned my head slowly and caught sight of Ezra and Lock, both in their own cages suspended from the ceiling. Lock had dried blood on his temple and his T-shirt had smears of dirt on it. If Ezra had suffered any damage, he'd healed it already. Unfortunately, he'd clearly been a fox when he was caught, because he was sitting buck naked in his cage.

“What happened to you guys?” I croaked.

“I wasn't expecting the attack vines,” Ezra said with a shrug. He didn't glare at Lock or anything, but I could tell Lock took offense to his statement anyway.

“They're not native to Maine! How was I supposed to know? I told you guys the plant life was weird around here.”

“Hold on there, hoss. No use getting worked up,” I said. “What happened to you, anyway?”

“I got jumped in the woods. The trees tried to warn me, but they were a little slow.”

I examined the back of my head gently with my fingers before slowly sitting up. So far, so good. “Ok—bare minimum, we're looking at two people,” I said, continuing my scan of the room.

The walls of the cellar held shelves full of jars of pickled veggies, sauces and jams, and what looked like pickled pigs' feet. At least, I hoped it was pig. The floor was hard-packed dirt, but several patches looked like they had been disturbed recently, like someone was tilling for a garden. As I stared, a voice to my left said, “That's where they bury the bones.” A dirt-smudged little face appeared in the cage next to mine. Thin, delicate fingers wrapped around the wooden bars.

“How many?” I asked.

The kid gave me a half-shrug. “Dunno.”

“From the smell of decay, I'd say more than you'd like to count,” Ezra whispered. I think he was trying to be discreet, but we all heard it. Someone I couldn't see sobbed off in a corner cage.

“Are we still in the gingerbread house?” The root cellar was cavernous, looking far too large for the cabin we'd entered.

“I think it's bigger on the inside,” Lock said. “The wood they used on these cages is still alive, and very sick. It doesn't seem like it would be difficult for us to get out, though.”

“That's what worries me,” I said. “Ezra, were you a fox when they put you in here?”

“When the vines grabbed me, yes.” He grimaced. “I panicked and changed back when I ended up in the cage. There's a chance they still think I'm a fox. No one's been down here since.”

Lock ran his hands over his cage, a sickened look on his face. “I don't think they would have caged you if they thought you were just a fox.”

“Let's assume they know,” I said. “So they're aware of his were status, yet they put him in a cage he could easily slip out of.”

“You think there's a secondary system,” Ezra said, warily eying his own enclosure.

“Hey kid,” I said, turning back to the cage next to mine. “What's your name?”

“Julian.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes with dirty fingers.

“Nice to meet you, Julian. I'm Ava. That's Lock and Ezra. We're looking to get everyone out of here. You seem like you might have some information to help us.”

By the tilt of his head, I could tell he wasn't too sure of our chances. “Like what?”

“Has anyone escaped before?” Lock wiped the sweat off his face with the hem of his shirt. He wasn't the only one sweating. It was like a sauna in here. That's when I realized they'd taken both of our jackets. Damn. I had no supplies. Which meant no electrolyte pills or anything. Which meant I had to limit my use of fire if possible, because I had no way to replenish my system. Grand.

Julian shook his head.

“What about out of their cage?” I asked. “Have you seen anyone get out of one of these cages?” I was having a hard time imagining that every single person here was simply willing to sit and wait for death. But as I watched, no one was attempting to get through the bars or anything. I mean, we were in wooden birdcages, not Fort Knox. Why wasn't anyone trying?