Ravenwild: Book 01 - Ravenwild (17 page)

They shook hands warmly, as did he and Thede. Jessica also shook hands and exchanged a few pleasantries.

In a few minutes Brandt opened the doors and each was soon standing in the same sort of looped rope affair that they had used to be transported up. This time, however, there were three of the ropes side-by-side.

Down they went, basically in free fall. “Don’t get sick now,” called out Hemlock. “You’ll fall.”

At the bottom when the doors opened, they could see right off that they were inside a huge fortress. They emerged into an immense hall with vaulted ceilings extending upwards about a hundred feet. Massive beams of what looked like white oak provided the structural support.

Humans, Elves, and Dwarves rushed hastily all about, each one looking like he or she was on a mission of great importance. All were fully armed, which struck both Blake and Jessica as odd considering they were within a fortress that was inside of the wall. But unlike the faces of gaiety that they had observed on the citizens in the park an hour or so before, who were certainly more proximate to the dangers just beyond it, the facial expressions of those they saw here right in front of them were grim. Many looked frightened.

Hemlock noticed the anxious faces as well, and Jessica thought she saw a flicker of surprise pass over his features.

“Stay close to me,” he said. “We proceed now to the Great Hall. There we will meet Rolan, King of Ravenwild, Prince Erik, and Stephanie.”

They crossed through the antechamber. They noticed that there were several transport chutes like the ones they had just used all around them in a broad circle. Elves, Dwarves, and Humans waited in small lines to enter, or exited sharply with business to which to attend. The three of them, in fact, were the only ones who did not appear to be hurrying. More than one worried looking face glanced at them in passing.

Arriving at the entryway to the Great Hall, Hemlock turned to face them. The guards gave little indication that they were even there. “Once again I apologize for what I have done. In a moment you will be with your child, and Erik, and the King and Queen of Ravenwild. Jessica, Blake, I humbly beg your forgiveness. I was wrong.”

“Well, what can you say about a guy who’s willing to admit when he’s wrong,” thought Jessica. “Maybe this will all work out fine.”

The expression on the face of the man that Blake and Jessica took to be Rolan told them that nothing was as it should be. No, it
was
wrong.
All
wrong.
Very badly
wrong.

Their worst fears were confirmed when the King spoke his first words, “Your daughter and my son have been captured by the Trolls. I have just learned of this. We are doing everything we can to determine their whereabouts and to rescue them as quickly as possible, alive and unhurt. My name is Rolan Andrew Fairman. I am King of Ravenwild. Every resource I have at my command I hereby dedicate to the cause.”

If Hemlock thought Jessica was going to give him a break by pulling that ‘weak woman’ fainting thing, he was sadly mistaken. She was instantly in his face with weapon drawn. It was a dagger, and she was going for his neck.

Before anyone could think, let alone react, she had him secured with the razor-sharp edge of the blade against his throat.

Her grip was iron. Her intent: lethal.

Chapter 9

Orie, Mark, and Ryan were in Mark’s room. Orie had decided that it would be best to put some space in between themselves and the Minotaur, so they had called Mr. Jones who had come and gotten them. Since Jordan had to do some afternoon chores for his dad, Mr. Jones dropped him off.

The first thing that Orie did when they got there was borrow Mark’s cell phone and call Jacqueline on Tanta Kendra’s. “Hey Jacq’,” said Orie. He made his tone light, cheery. “Everything all right?”

“Yuh,” she said, “We’re not there yet.”

“Okay. Look, I have to tell Mark and Ryan what’s going on. We gotta do what we gotta do. You know what I mean, right?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Good. As soon as we’ve done it, I’ll call you, and we’ll hang out.”

There was no answer.

“Jacq’?”

“I should be there with you.”

“Yes, you should.”

“I know ten times what those city boys know about being in the woods.”

“Yes you do. But if you went, and anything happened to you, I couldn’t live with myself. Besides, we may need to go to Ravenwild, or wherever it is that Mom and Dad really went, and I can’t count on that unless you are alive and healthy at Tanta Kendra’s.”

Silence.

“Okay.”

“Good, Jacq’. I’ll call you when we have it done.”

“Be careful, Orie.”

“I will. Thanks, Jacq’. I love you.”

“I love you.”

Each hung up.

“So Orie, wazzup?” asked Mark. “Where’s Ravenwild? Is that, like, in Massachusetts?”

Twenty minutes later, Mark and Ryan sat in front of Orie, stunned into silence. Ryan’s mouth literally hung open. “RyeRye, close your mouth,” said Orie.

“There is no flippin’ way,” said Mark. “You have to be making this all up.”

“I wish,” said Orie. “But it’s true, every word of it. And like I said, we need to get whatever this Hemlock guy left in the pumpkin … and, oh, yeah, you guys need to swear, and I mean swear, that none of this gets to anybody else. Nobody.”

“The
third
pumpkin,” howled Mark. “O-man. This is too crazy. You’re telling us that your mother and father jetted off to a parallel universe with some Dumbledore character to rescue Stephanie, who jetted off to be with this other parallel universe guy, and now might be trapped there.”

“Well, we don’t know if she’s trapped. Hemlock said she’s perfectly fine. He thought we should just chill and wait for her to come home.”

“Well, do you trust this guy or not?”

“No way,” said Orie.

“So this Minotaur thing, that we thought was some ‘Hallmark Moment’ singing message guy, really
was
a half-bull half-man creature-dude from this other parallel dimension that has come to put a hurt on you and the fam’?”

“Did you see him?” Orie asked. “He didn’t look like he was there to teach C.C.D. classes. And he went right for the pumpkin patch. And I swear it was like he was looking right at me and Jacqueline. It was nasty.”

“So now what do we do?”

“We gear up and get the thing.”

“Orie, that thing will tear us to pieces if it catches us. And how do we know there’s only one? Or maybe things even worse. Maybe they’re all over the place now.”

“You’re right. But we still need to go there. But first we need to get a ride to the mall. Can we talk your dad into it?”

Twenty minutes later Mr. Jones dropped them off at the mall. An hour after that they walked out in full camouflage and wearing headset walkie-talkies. Each had also purchased a small flashlight. Their plan was to approach the pumpkin patch from several different directions, using the headset walkie-talkies to call each other immediately if there was any sign of the Minotaur or any other dangers. Orie repeated the need to be “woods quiet.” His biggest concern was that the “city kids” would give them away by being too loud.

They entered the woods after sundown. Luck appeared to be smiling upon them, because by midnight they were sitting in Mark’s room examining the thing that Orie had harvested from the third pumpkin from the right-hand end of Ron’s pumpkin patch. The only difficulty they had was, whenever Orie inspected the pumpkin, it seemed perfectly intact. There was no hole, no seam, nor any other defect that led him to suspect that this pumpkin was any different than the other dozens scattered about the patch. Finally, he had given up trying to get it out and taken the whole pumpkin. It made the going a little slower, but whenever he cut it open and removed the rectangular box in Mark’s room, he and Ryan gained a whole new level of respect for their friend, as well as the realization that they were now inextricably involved in the adventure of a lifetime.

“What is it?” asked Mark.

“It looks like a TV remote,” said Ryan.

“We have to get out of here,” said Orie. “We have to get out of here now.

Right now. We have to steal a car and drive away. We have to pick Jacqueline up and drive to a random place and lay low for a while. Disappear. Make a plan.”

“Why do we have to do that?” asked Ryan.

“Because now we have it, and old Hemlock is going to come looking for it, or one of his extraterrestrial buddies. And we don’t want to be on this guy’s bad side. Trust me, this guy is in control of some major weirdness. I have a feeling he could mess us up big-time. Where can we steal a car?”

“Orie, we can’t steal a car,” said Mark. “What are we going to say if we get caught? That we
had
to because we’re getting chased by a creature from another planet, where your sister is being held hostage? I’m sorry, but the judge isn’t going to buy it.”

“I don’t mean steal it. I mean kinda borrow it for a spell.”

“Well, what about your Dad or Mom’s car, genius?” asked Ryan. “It’s not like they’re going to be needing them for a while.”

“Yes, but that would mean going to our house,” said Orie. “One word:
Minotaur
!
Hello
!”

“I say we walk right up there and drive off in your dad’s truck,” said Mark. “He can’t do anything if all of us are there. It’s probably some interplanetary law that you can’t harm non-combatants.”

“Mark, don’t be ridiculous. If this is like Orie says, that would be a braindead thing to do.”

And so the discussion went, back and forth, for several minutes.

It was decided that they would steal Dad’s truck under the cover of darkness. It was two-thirty. They could walk to Orie’s from Mark’s in a half hour, which left at least two or three hours before the sun came up.

They would leapfrog down the driveway until the final bend, where only Orie would sneak the last two hundred feet while Mark and Ryan kept him posted on possible danger with the walkie-talkie headsets. If anything went wrong, they would scatter to prevent the Minotaur from catching them all.

So, around three, down the driveway they snuck. As it happened, it was a great night to be sneaking, because there was thick cloud cover, and it was completely dark.

They were finally gathered at the last bend, beyond which Orie would be in plain sight of anyone or anything that happened to be skulking around the house. With no lights on, when he peeked around for a quick look, he saw that he couldn’t see the house much; it was a vague silhouette. And he couldn’t see his father’s truck at all.

“I hope it’s still there,” he thought, then, “Of course it’s there. Where else would it be?”

He found he was sweating under his camos something terrible. Regardless, he knew he had to do this. Hemlock would be back, or one of his interplanetary henchmen, and they needed to be far away for a while until he could figure out what the TV remote-thing was. Orie firmly believed that it was vitally important, or Hemlock wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of hiding it so well, inside of a pumpkin as though it were part of the pumpkin itself. And if it was that important, Orie and Jacqueline controlling it gave them some sort of power over him. Sure, he might be just a regular guy doing everything he could to save his race from extinction, but he had lied. “Lie once and you’re a liar,” his father often said in one of his canned lectures on values. Hence, the man, or wizard, or whatever he was, was a liar, and, “You can’t trust a liar.” At least that was the punch line to the lecture he had so often heard, and if he was up to no good, better they had something he might want, something they might be able to bargain with.

He eased away from the other two boys, feeling his way along slowly. He found that it was easy as pie being “woods quiet” in the driveway, as long as he avoided stepping on any sticks. Pretty soon he was almost to the truck when his headset crackled, “Orie. Get out of there! Get out of there! A light came on in the house. Orie, do you copy? Orie, come back!”

But he couldn’t chance answering them. He was too close to the house. He made the last ten feet in a silent mad dash and in seconds was opening the truck door as quietly as possible. He was standing directly under the deck where his dad always parked. What he could not see was the gigantic creature watching him from less than ten feet away.

Slowly, gently, he eased the door open and slid, snakelike, into the front seat. To his horror, the key was not in the ignition! Impossible. His dad always left the key in the ignition. He began to panic. He decided he had better exit the truck pronto. Then he would bolt for it.

“Get away!” his mind screamed, “Get away!” But when he went to open the door, it struck something. It was his worst thought. What the door had struck was the Minotaur itself.

He scooted across the seat to try and dash from the opposite side, but before he could accomplish that, the Minotaur was standing there.