Five Elements #3 by Dan Jolley

Author:Dan Jolley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

10

Inside the pages of the Mirror Book, Gabe and his friends watched the portal nervously for some time before they were sure the spiders didn’t follow them into—well, wherever it was that they were.

Gabe’s eyelids felt like five-pound weights. He closed them and let them stay shut, but he did wince at the pain in his shoulder. His brain felt slow, as if his thoughts were stuck in hardening concrete. He gradually became aware of two different conversations going on, one to his left, one to his right.

To his left, Brett spoke in quiet tones to Mrs. Castellanos. “. . . kind of impressed you’re taking all this so well, Abuelita.”

Mrs. Castellanos made a sound halfway between a chuckle and a snort. “I’ve been trapped in a building overrun by giant spiders, nieto. I’m not going to be surprised by much.” Gabe heard a sound as if someone was shifting positions on the floor. “So you and Lily and your other friends . . . you are all, cómo se dice, ‘elementalists’?”

“Yeah. I’m water, Lily’s air, Kaz is earth, and Gabe is fire. Jackson’s magick.”

“Magick? Magick is an element?”

“Turns out, yeah.”

Gabe was propped against a rough, raw, stone wall and tried to shift to get more comfortable. When he did, the pain from his spider bite became blinding. A scent filled his nostrils, the damp smell of cold.

On his right, Kaz was talking to Lily. “So Thorne mentioned the red snake, only he called it the Crimson Serpent, and— Hey, Gabe, are you awake?”

Gabe groaned and opened his eyes. “I’m awake, I’m awake.”

He almost wished he’d left his eyes shut. A faint greenish haze lingered around the edges of his vision, and the effort it took to focus on his surroundings made the spider bite in his shoulder throb. Lily came and crouched next to him, and put the back of her hand on his forehead. “You’ve got a fever.”

“I’ll be fine.” Gabe hitched himself up a little farther on the wall but didn’t try to make his legs work. “Thanks to your grandmother.”

Mrs. Castellanos got up and knelt on Gabe’s other side. She pulled the collar of his shirt down to look at the bite. “Basic first aid,” she said. “Nothing to get excited about. Gabriel, you need a doctor.”

Gabe sighed and glanced around. He wanted to say “Great. Where’s the nearest hospital?”

They all sat in the irregularly shaped chamber Gabe had come to think of as the Mirror Cave, staring at thousands upon thousands of their own reflections in the shards of mirrors lining the walls and ceiling and ground as the cold lingered in his nose and permeated his clothing and hair. High up on one wall, the portal still showed part of the car wash, and as he watched, the shadow of a spider’s leg passed over it.

Are we ever going to be able to climb back out of this place?

Gabe blearily tried to focus on the source of the cave’s light, and just as blearily realized he couldn’t pinpoint it.

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