The Xoe Meyers Trilogy (Xoe Meyers Young Adult Fantasy/Horror Series) (34 page)

I ran full out down the alleyway until I reached the back parking lot of the bar. I felt a prickling at the back of my neck. I whipped around and looked back down the alleyway. My dad was nowhere to be seen. I turned back around and was shocked to find dark brown eyes, just inches from my face.

I froze, heart thundering a million miles a minute. Then I realized that it was Nick standing in front of me. “You scared me!” I exclaimed.

He just stood there as a slow smile crept across his face.

Only then did it dawn on me that we hadn’t told Nick where we were going. I started to back up, but for every step I took back, he took one forward. “You’re one of them,” I accused.

His smile grew as he continued to walk forward.

I turned to run, and caught a glimpse of someone large behind me. Then there was only darkness.

I
could hear an engine humming, trying to lull me back to sleep, but there was a dull ache in my head that told me I needed to wake up. I opened my eyes, but couldn’t lift my head off the floor. I groggily looked around at my metal surroundings and realized I was in the back of a van. Wait, what was I doing in the back of a van?

Suddenly Nick’s face was once again in front of mine and it all came flooding back to me. The traitor! I tried to speak, but it felt like my mouth was full of cotton.

Nick’s face disappeared. A moment later I heard him speak. “She’s coming to.”

A woman’s voice responded, “What the hell is she? Her metabolism has eaten up enough tranqs to down three werewolves.”

Tranquilizers? This was bad, very bad. I began to struggle, but my limbs felt like they were made of rubber, and there was some type of restraint holding my hands behind my back. I managed to swing my leg enough to kick someone, then there were hands holding down my legs. I took a breath to try and scream, then there was a small zing of pain in my arm. My vision began to go dark. I blinked against it. I had to stay awake. Then I was out.

When I next awoke, I was in some sort of cell. The ground beneath me was cold, damp stone. I forced my eyes open only to find someone crouching over me. I swung my leg up as best I could in an attempt to kick whoever it was. My knee made contact, instead of my foot like I had intended, and the person fell away with a yelp.

“What gives?” a female voice demanded.

“Allison?” I questioned.

“Duh,” came a sarcastic reply. “Don’t try to kick me this time.”

She crouched back over me and put her hands under my arms to lift me into a seated position. She leaned me against the stone wall, then sat down in front of me. I felt a wash of heat and glanced to see a small propane heater in the corner of the room, near the door, which I couldn’t really think of as a door. It was made of shiny, new steel bars. There was some sort of lighting in the outer room, but the only extra lighting in the cell was the glow of the space heater.

I turned my gaze back to Allison, who was dressed in a dirty, long sleeve tee that had once been a pale blue, and torn jeans that had soaked up blood from some sort of wound or cut on her leg. It pained me somehow to see Allison this way. She always put so much effort into her clothing.

I looked at her bloody leg again. “What happened?”

Allison bit her lip and glanced at her leg. “I just woke up with it. Some kind of puncture wound, but not too deep.”

I forced my eyes up to focus in on her grime-smeared face to ask another question. “Where are we?”

“We don’t know. We just woke up here.”

I was about to ask who “we” was, but then I saw Lela. She was huddled in the far corner with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her head was hanging forward, causing her long dark hair to fall around her like a cape.

“Lela?” I questioned.

“Hi Xoe,” Lela whispered back, clearly freaked out.

I looked back to Allison. “What did they do to her?” I whispered, even though I knew Lela would hear.

Allison shook her head. “She’s claustrophobic. We think we’re underground.”

Come to think of it, there did seem to be a slight lack of air. Not enough to harm us, but still uncomfortable. There was a familiar sensation prickling at the back of my mind. The air felt heavy, like something was pressing down on me. Then it hit me where I had felt that feeling before. Lucy’s grandma’s funeral.

“We’re in the cemetery . . . under the cemetery.”

Allison’s honey brown eyes widened. “We’re where?”

I licked my lips nervously. “I um . . . I think we’re in a crypt.”

“Great, just great,” another voice said sarcastically.

Wait, I knew that voice. “Brian?” I questioned.

Brian crawled into my line of vision and sat in front of me. His gray hoodie was torn and his hair was mussed into a frizzy pouf, but other than that, he looked unharmed. “So we’re in a crypt huh?”

I cringed at his tone, then nodded in affirmation. “What are you doing here?”

Brian shrugged, an unpleasant, sour look on his face. “First I ran into you on the street, then, as soon as you walked away, some guy pulled me into an alley. The next thing I knew, I was waking up . . . in a crypt.”

Lela let out a small whimper. My limbs tingled as feeling returned to them. Unfortunately the feeling was returning to my head as well. I reached back and felt the tender lump that had erupted on my scalp.

Allison and Brian were both staring at me.

“Have either of you seen anyone since you woke up?” I asked.

Allison was first to answer. “Yeah, Nick. The little worm told us if we used any magic, they’d know. Apparently nobody bothered to tell him that I’m human, so he just assumed otherwise.” She scowled at the room in general and then added, “They don’t know what you are either, Xoe.”

“You’d think he would have just asked, back when we might have told him.”

Allison nodded. “Yeah, not the sharpest tool in the shed that one.”

“He did ask,” Lela interrupted from her corner. “I told him it was your choice if and when you wanted to tell him.”

I flashed back on Lela’s googly-eyed look for Nick. That she had kept my secret despite her feelings for him pushed Lela that last inch into my friend category. If we got out of this, I knew I could trust her.

I gave Lela a smile she didn’t see, then turned back to Allison. “I understand them not knowing my smell, but wouldn’t they know that you smell human?”

“Witches smell like humans, unless they’ve been doing a lot of magic.” Lela interjected softly.

Brian was absorbing our conversation with a look of confused wonder on his face. I spared him an apologetic smile, then turned to regard Lela again. “Did you recognize what any of them smelled like?”

“Nick is definitely a wolf,” Lela said sadly. “The other one I caught a whiff of had a smell I knew. Kind of like the smell right before it rains mixed with blood.”

“Like ozone maybe?” I asked. “That’s what Max said one of them smelled like.”

Lela gave a slight nod of her head in answer. “Dan smelled the same way after he summoned demons. He said it was from the magic.”

“Great, just great,” I replied. “So do we have any idea what they’re planning on doing with us?”

“Kill us, probably,” Lela mumbled.

Brian put his head in his hands, but didn’t say anything.

I wanted to argue, but Lela was right. All but one of the other abductees were yet to be found, and the one that was found was dead.

Allison glanced at the door, then back to me. “Can’t you blow it up or something?”

I raised my hand to pinch the bridge of my nose. I was getting a killer headache. “I don’t know how,” I groaned. “I’ve only blown up appliances, so I think it just has something to do with the electricity. Steel bars aren’t exactly combustable.”

“What about the space heater?” Lela asked, a little bit of the strength back in her voice.

I looked at the heater again. It wasn’t electric, but it
was
flammable. “You might just have something there.”

I stumbled to my feet and Allison stood to aide me. “How did you get over the tranquilizers so fast? It took over an hour for Lela to be able to move at all. I was on the ground for another two after that. Brian finally just started moving before they threw you in here.”

“Who threw me in?” I asked.

Allison shrugged. “Some big guy,” she answered. “I’d never seen him before.”

Brian lifted his head out of his hands and looked at me standing awkwardly near the door. “What are you going to do?”

I shook my head and glanced at the heater again. “I don’t know. Can one of you help me move the space heater closer to the bars?”

Allison left me leaning against the wall as she went to move the heater. It was a lot heavier than it looked, so she had to slowly drag it across the floor rather than lifting it. It made a horrible scraping sound its entire journey to the door.

At the noise, a tall man with icy blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white came around the corner into view through the barred door. He was also the largest man I had ever seen. When he spoke, his voice was a deep bass rumble. “What was that noise?” he asked with what sounded like a German accent.

“What noise?” I asked back.

“That scraping.”

“Oh,” I began, trying to think of an excuse. “We, um . . . we wanted to move the heater. We figured if we moved it in front of the door, less heat would escape. Where’s my dad?”

It took him a moment to adjust to my train of conversation. He was big, and none too bright.

Before he could answer, I asked, “What about the rest of my friends?”

“There are only you four,” he responded. He turned to walk away.

“Hold on,” I urged. “Why are we here?”

He stopped mid-motion and faced me again. “I’m not supposed to tell you.”

“What happened to my leg?” Allison quickly added.

The big man had the grace to look embarrassed. “I dropped you. There was a sharp piece of glass on the ground.”

Lela began to weep softly.

The big man pointed at her. “What’s wrong with that one?”

I couldn’t think of a reason not to tell him, and I wanted to keep him talking, so I answered honestly. “She’s claustrophobic.”

“Claude!” someone shouted from the outer room.

Claude winced, gave me a surprisingly sympathetic look, and walked away.

Back to the space heater idea. I motioned for Allison and Brian to stand back with Lela, then stumbled to sit several feet in front of the space heater. I stared into the glowing red panel, trying to grasp at my elusive powers, and felt . . . nothing.

I continued to focus, waiting for something to happen.

“What’s wrong?” Allison whispered.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t know how to do it.”

“Don’t you have to, you know, get angry?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I guess so, but I don’t have much anger right now. I’m leaning more toward scared out of my wits.”

“Think about something that makes you mad,” Allison urged.

“I’m trying,” I hissed.

“Try harder!” she shouted.

I whipped my head around to glare at her.

She put her hands up in surrender. “Sorry, just trying to make you mad.”

I pouted, realizing that she almost had me when I ruined it.

“Xoe?” Brian questioned, letting his fear trickle into his voice. “What are you trying to do?”

“Nothing,” I snapped without looking back at him.

“Can you believe Nick?” Allison interrupted. “He had us all fooled.”

“Yeah, the weasel,” I responded grumpily.

“He even gloated about it,” she went on. “Said he couldn’t believe how easily we let him in. That we were naïve and stupid to trust him like that.”

I sighed loudly, depressed. “We were.”

“So get mad about it,” Allison urged.

“I can be mad about my own failure, but it’s not something I’m going to lose my temper over.”

“What are you trying to do?” Brian shouted.

I spun around to regard his scared, angry face. “Nothing!” I snapped again.

“Oh, and he said one more thing,” Allison went on. “He told me that he could take you on with both hands tied behind his back.”

“Stop it Allison!” Brian yelled. “What are you guys trying to do?”

“SHUT . . UP!” I shouted.

That was the spark I needed. I felt a thrill of electricity zing through my body, and suddenly the space heater exploded. It exploded . . . a little too much. A whoosh of roiling fire surrounded me, then in an instant was gone.

I waited for the pain to hit, and felt . . . nothing. I looked down at my hands, sure that I had to be burned, but they were their normal smooth whiteness.

“That hurt,” Allison said from behind me.

Uh oh. I stood up, feeling numb, and rushed to the corner where my friends had taken shelter. I crouched in front of them to survey the damage.

“I’m so sorry!” I exclaimed when I saw them.

Allison’s eyes were wide with shock. She held her hands up to her face, but didn’t touch her skin. “Is it bad?”

“No, um, not too bad,” I answered. “You just look kinda . . . pink”

“I feel like I’m sunburned,” Brian added.

I heard shouting from the outer room. “Um guys,” I prompted, “we gotta go.”

Allison pushed against the wall to slowly get to her feet. I had to grab Lela’s hand and pull her up to get her moving.

“What do we do?” Lela shouted, only now snapping back to reality.

The shouting was getting closer.

Thinking quickly, I answered, “We’ve got to make way for Allison or Brian to get out. If we can’t all escape, they can tell the others where we are.”

With that I turned and ran to the cell door. The heater hadn’t actually done much damage, but it had broken the lock and latch, and one of the bottom hinges. The corner of the door scraped harshly against the stone floor as I pulled it open. The metal felt warm to the touch, but didn’t burn, either because it had cooled, or because I was a demon. At the moment, I didn’t really care.

I entered the larger stone room. It was almost as barren as our cell had been. A couch, mini-fridge, and another space heater were the only things in the empty space, plus another make-shift cell next to ours. Oh, and Claude. He had probably come to investigate the shouting and ended up too close to the blast. His large form was curled on the ground in agony, but it seemed like he’d live. I caught a single glimpse of his charred face, then extinguished my pang of guilt to turn my attention to the footsteps coming down a small stone staircase.