The Gift

“What?” Wisty spits out in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“He’s behind this!” I hiss.

“Whit, you don’t know that. Last time we saw him, he saved us!”

“Correction: last time we saw him, he flushed us down the toilet.”

“But maybe he can help -”

“Wisty, we don’t have time to play guessing games. Okay?”

The howling is uncomfortably near, and I press Wisty hard against the wall of the overpass so we’re as flat and as far out of sight as possible. “Listen to me. We’re going to turn ourselves into birds. That’s our only hope. I can’t do it alone, but we can probably do it to -”

And that is as much as I get out of my mouth before the wall where we are hiding falls away. Wisty and I collapse with it, and everything goes mostly dark.

Chapter 76

Whit

NEVER IN OUR ENDLESS days of fighting in the Overworld have Wisty and I accidentally fallen through a portal. I mean, usually they come and go, and when you get in, sometimes it’s like being sucked into an F5 tornado. And you can’t always be entirely sure where you’ll end up.

But this time, I know exactly where we are the second we get through the passageway. I know it from the cold. As if it’s coming from my own bones. In the Shadowland, you feel the chill deep inside you even before you feel it on your skin. That’s just one of the place’s many charms.

The next thing I notice is that we’ve returned to our regular teenage bodies. Maybe it’s hard for a spell to hold through different dimensions?

In this dimension, all we can see is gray, all we can feel is the glass-hard ground, all we can hear for a few minutes is our own breathing.

“God, I’m soooo cold,” Wisty says when she realizes where we are. “This is taking me right back to my death- row stint in The One’s cheery little snow globe at the BNW.”

“Better cold than getting dismembered by Lost Ones,” I say, looking around for any sign of the foul creatures.

“Oh, you can’t fool me for a second, Whitford Allgood,” Wisty says. “You’re happy to be here.” There she goes, reading my mind again. And, yeah, in case you’re wondering, I have already been thinking about Celia, and if she’s close by.

No. I’m not thinking about her… I’m feeling her.

She’s near. There’s a scent that gives me a strange kind of buzz, and a magnetic sort of pull that begins somewhere in my solar plexus. I start breathing faster and take a few steps in the direction where I feel her drawing me to her.

“You swear you didn’t mean for us to end up here, Whit?” Wisty asks. “Be honest.”

I don’t answer her, because just then I hear a voice. The voice I dream of day and night. Not specific words, but the music and rhythm of it, drifting from the fog like the sounds of harps and wind chimes.

“Celia?” I call out, turning in every direction. There it is again. I can find it. I know I can get to her if I move fast enough and follow my instincts…

But part of the Shadowland’s being an utterly featureless, cold, gray wasteland includes not having a whole lot of useful landmarks-and so, after just a few paces in the direction of the sound, a hand clutches my arm hard enough to crush bone. I whirl around, ready to fight a Lost One to the death, if that’s even possible.

“Whitford Allgood!” It’s Wisty, and her eyes are bulging with alarm. “You were just about to run off without me! What in God’s name are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that Celia can help us. She helped us before.” I remind her of our first big prison break ages ago. But Wisty rolls her eyes and looks at me like an annoyed parent.

“Whit, can you just focus on us for a second and forget about your totally dead girlfriend?” Not too long ago, I would have yelled at her for a comment like that. “And, like, maybe how we’re going to get out of here without becoming Lost Ones ourselves?”

And, right then, as if to put an exclamation point on her sentence, we hear something horrific coming through the fog behind us. It’s different than the pathetic moan of Lost Ones. This time, it’s the unmistakable sound of murderous hunger.

Byron’s creepy animals!

“They’re Curves?” shouts Wisty.

“And they’ve found our portal!”

Chapter 77

Whit

SPRINTING THROUGH THE SHADOWLAND is like skiing downhill with your eyes closed. Pure terror. Our hungry and relentless pursuers might be equally screwed by how easy it is to get lost in this formless landscape, but we’re doubly doomed by their sense of smell, which I have no doubt can slice right through fog. Which means…

My sister and I are about to be torn apart and devoured on the cold ground of the Shadowland.

A low moaning cuts through the mist a stone’s throw ahead. For a second I’m confused and think that somehow we’ve gone in a circle and the weird creatures are in front of us now, ready to pounce and start devouring.

But I’m wrong.

“Lost Ones!” yells Wisty.

And then there they are-their ragged shadows, the glinting light of their eye slits. And there are so many of them-dozens of the ghouls converging on us.

“This way,” I tell Wisty. “As soon as we see the yellows of their eyes, we’re going to the left- hard left.”

“I just hope it doesn’t put us right back into the mouths of those other killers!”

“Me, too. Left, then right. Stay on my back.”

The Lost Ones are looming up and fanning out as we get close, but we’re not yet close enough. “Not yet, not yet, not yet,” I tell Wisty.

And I brace myself for their cold. Fifteen yards, ten yards, five yards-there it is! The cold hits us like a ton of ice.

“Now!” I yell, and wheel left, my hand holding Wisty’s behind me. She’s got to keep up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven-“Back right!”

And then, behind us, the moaning suddenly meets the howling and it’s as if there’s a battle royal going on between all the mummies and werewolves ever conceived.

“It worked!” I yell. “So far anyway. Keep watching for them-everywhere.”

And then more happens in the next five seconds than has happened in any other moment of my life, or probably anyone else’s.