“What the hell?” Jinx says. “Sailor? Why didn’t we find the Soul Gem?”
“I… I don’t know,” I say. “We must have missed it when we were running.”
“Well, what do the other gems say?” he asks.
I touch my chest, but regardless of which way I face, the gems remain cold under my fingers.
“They’re not telling me anything,” I say.
“It’s all been a wild goose chase?” Jinx says.
Rye glares at him, but before either of us can say anything, Ya-Ya gets in first.
“No. It hasn’t. We might have gone the long way around, but look.”
She’s pointing down at the ground and I move to her side, followed by the others. It’s almost buried by the underbrush, but I can just see it. A metal ring on a trapdoor. I feel my heart skip a beat. We’ve done it. We’ve found the trapdoor.
Rye pulls out a test tube and I’m already plucking a hair from my head as he pricks his finger on his knife. I hand him the hair and he gets it coated in my blood. We all get down on our knees and start pushing away the underbrush. It feels like it’s taking forever, but we get the trapdoor clear.
The howling is getting closer by the minute and I frantically search for a hole in the trapdoor.
“We’ll go and try to hold the pack off. You guys, find that hole and get this thing done,” Aziza says.
She bounds away followed by the others, leaving just Rye and me. It’s fast getting dark and the trapdoor still has patches of dirt all over it.
“It’s no use, Rye,” I say. “We’ll never find it in these conditions. We should go. We know where it is now and we can come back later, once the wolves are gone.”
He shakes his head.
“No way. The Boundless are on our tails too, and you know what happened last time they got too close to one of the gems. Just keep looking. Don’t give up.”
It’s hard to focus on the trapdoor when I can hear the howls behind me. The Boundless don’t seem like much of a threat compared to the wolves, but I know Rye is right. I almost died the last time they got too close to a gem.
I can hear the sounds of a fight from behind me and I know the wolf pack has reached the team. This is going to get ugly quickly if we don’t get this done. I swipe angrily at the patches of soil on the trapdoor, running my hands over it. Twice I think I’ve found the tiny hole, but each time, it turns out to be a pebble. Finally, the third time I feel something, when I’ve just about given up hope, I feel it. The slot.
I motion to Rye to give me the hair, which he does, and I slide it into the hole. The trapdoor clicks open and I see a brilliant flash of purple light. I blink, trying to get rid of the purple spots that now dance in front of my eyes.
“Guys, that’s not helping,” I hear Jinx shout, and I realize the light is drawing the wolves closer to us.
I can hear the fight getting closer as the wolves advance, pushing the team backwards. I reach into the trapdoor and grab the Soul Gem, gasping as I feel the now familiar pain as the gem embeds itself in my tattoo. The pain overwhelms me for a moment and then I am back to normal. The team is almost upon us and I scramble to my feet with Rye’s help.
“We can’t fight that many of them,” I shout when I see the sheer number of Lago Wolves that are advancing. “Open a portal, Rye. We have to jump through and close it quickly, leaving them behind.”
Rye nods and opens a portal.
“Guys, get through quickly. We can lose the wolves,” he shouts.
He grabs my arm and pulls me through and we’re back in the cabin. Jinx and Mel follow close behind us, then Aziza and Sunday.
“Where’s Ya-Ya?” I demand.
I take a step towards the portal, but Ya-Ya stumbles through before I reach it.
“I’m here. Close the damn thing,” she shouts.
A wolf’s head and front paw appear, the head snarling and growling, drool landing on the floor of the cabin. Rye ignores the wolf, closing the portal around it. It pulls its head back in the nick of time to avoid being decapitated, but its paw gets trapped and with a last unearthly shriek from the wolf, the portal closes and the paw lands on the ground.
Jinx looks at the paw and shakes his head.
“And they say rabbits’ feet are good luck. Whoever made that one up never faced a Lago Wolf.”
“I don’t know anyone who’s faced a Lago Wolf pack and not become one,” Aziza says.
Her face is deathly white and it’s only when I see her looking so shaken that I realize what a lucky escape we had.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: INFLUENCE OF WAR
I am humming to myself as I pull open the classroom door and go to step into the hallway. The humming dies in my throat when I see the utter chaos in front of me. There must be at least seventy students along the hallway and crowded around the lockers at the end of it. And every one of them is arguing with someone.
The noise is deafening; it’s so loud I want to put my hands over my ears or duck back into the classroom but I don’t do either. Instead, I just freeze, knowing this is a mess caused by War’s proximity. Normally, I see Nexus’s point about why the team have to come to school and act like normal teenagers, but right now, I’m questioning her logic.
