AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Kingsley stops a few paces off to the left, ears quirking. Looks like he’s getting more than I am.
“What’s up?” I ask.
He looks at me, then stares to the side, then back at me, then in the same direction. This is canine for ‘I hear something over there.’ My ears are pretty sharp, too… so I step over to where he is.
I hear it now, too. It’s a sound, but kinda difficult to describe. It’s more of apresencethan a tone. Like, Ifeelit more than hear it. Reminds me of being a little kid at home and Dad left the television set on in the living room at two in the morning. You know the TV is on even though it’s silent and there’s nothing on the screen. It’s just something a person canfeel. The sensation isn’t too different from being in the room with a ghost.
Whatever is out here in the woods has quite a bit more energy than my father’s old-as-hell television. It’s right at the edge of being consciously audible… like a cell phone ringing on vibrate two rooms away.
Curiosity gets the better of me. I start walking in the direction the sound seems to be coming from. About fifty yards of hiking later, the vibration has morphed into a high-pitched hum. It’s still out of the range of normal human hearing, but definitely more noticeable as an audible sound rather than a sensation of not being alone.
Kingsley shifts into human form again. “It’s that damn noise. Too painful to stay shifted. My ears were about to start bleeding.”
“Eek. What do you think is making it?”
“Good question, but it sounds like it’s coming from maybe thirty feet away.” He points.
I follow his pointing finger at a clearing the same approximate size as the one around Carson’s cabin. The ground here’s been leveled and cleaned as if in preparation for someone building a little house. No sign of any people, structures, or anything there. There isn’t even a dirt road leading away from it. If anyone’s going to build a getaway cabin here, they’d need a helicopter to reach it.
“This is so strange,” I whisper to no one in particular.
Kingsley nods. “Yeah. The sound is damn near unbearable this close.”
“Something in that clearing has got to be making it.” I step out of the tree line, intent on finding the source. My intuition tells me it’s important, and likely related to Carson and Gemma’s disappearance.
An odd—and none too comfortable—pulse washes over my brain like someone shot me in the face with a microwave cannon. At the same instant, a huge ghostly disc manifests in the clearing. It’s almost as big as the entire clearing, round, dome on top. Seems to be standing on three metallic legs. My brain nearly processes the bizarre sight of a flying saucer before an explosion of white light fills my senses... along with a jolt throughout my body like I’ve been shot with a dozen tasers at once.
I’d yell ‘ouch,’ but I’m pretty sure I’m losing consciousness.
Chapter Eighteen
Holing Up
Tammy stumbled, nearly throwing Annie off to the side.
The girl flopped forward and held on tight like a motorcycle racer. People didn’t make a habit of riding cats like horses for a reason, after all. It probably also had something to do with not wanting to be ripped to pieces. Not to mention, a feline’s gait wasn’t well-suited to carrying passengers. Still, Annie held on. The poor kid had to be exhausted, too, having to put as much effort into holding on that Tammy put into running.
As spent as her muscles were already, it would be impossible to make it to the portal even if they had flat, open ground to cover. The woods ahead contained hundreds of giant roots in a tangled network. It took them almost eight hours—or so it felt—of combined hiking and climbing to find Annie. In no possible way could Tammysprintthe same distance nonstop while scaling the huge roots.
And flying was out. No way she could she risk anyone falling off, even if Allison had some sort of levitation magic. Sometimes, magic didn’t work—or not in time, especially if they were under attack.
Either way, they didn’t have much time left. Soon, her body would reach its limit and she’d collapse. Buzzing faerie wings behind them hadn’t gotten much quieter. She’d managed to gain a little distance earlier, but the more tired she became, the closer the evil little monsters got. It wasn’t so much the winged fairies she feared, so much as the trailing monsters behind: the root fiends, twisted wolf-like creatures, blood-sucking foxes, and bigger horrors.
Allison’s continuous ‘anti-aircraft’ fire had fallen to a regular rhythm of one spell every few seconds. Whenever a high-pitched scream followed the starter-pistolsnapof a tiny lightning bolt, it meant she hit something. Unfortunately, Allison was trying to raise the level of the ocean by squirting it with a water gun. For every dark faerie she shot down, a hundred more waited behind it.
Meanwhile, they saw Annie the same way the USA saw the first atom bomb: instant victory. Dark faeries also had very little respect for life, even their own. They would not so casually let them escape with their secret weapon.
Tammy slowed her stride, trying to save some energy. Rather than make it to the portal out of here which still lay a great distance off, she began looking for a cave or rock formation or anywhere to possibly bottleneck the dark faeries and put up a last stand. If they got surrounded, they’d be doomed. Likely, they were doomed already, but she wouldn’t make it easy on them.
“Why are you slowing down?” yelled Allison in her squeaky faerie-sized voice.
“We’re not gonna make it,” grumbled Tammy. She hated the sound of her own voice in panther form, like someone played a recording of her slowed down with the pitch tuned deeper… it almost sounded like one of those disguised voices from an interview where the person wants their identity concealed. “Looking for a good place to fight.”
“Why?” blurted Allison. “Fight? Are you nuts?”
“She’s been running like crazy for a long time,” said Maple. “She’s exhausted.”
“The portal is too far away. I’m gonna pass out. I can’t keep running.” She jumped a ‘small’ root, only four feet high.
