Huntress, Black Dawn, Witchlight by L.J. Smith

Author:L.J. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Published: 2009-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

“No, we’re not!” Maggie said. She kicked the heavy cover off and jumped up, grabbing Cady’s arm. “Come on!”

“Where?” Jeanne said.

“The castle,” Maggie said. “But we’ve got to stick together.” She grabbed P.J.’s arm with her other hand.

“The castle?”

Maggie pinned Jeanne with a look. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. They’ll be expecting us to try to find the pass, right? They’ll find us if we stay here. The only place they won’t expect us to go is the castle.”

“You,” Jeanne said, “are completely crazy—”

“Come on!”

“But you just might be right.” Jeanne grabbed Cady from the other side as Maggie started for the door.

“You stay right behind us,” Maggie hissed at P.J.

The landscape in front of her looked different than it had last night. The mist formed a silver net over the trees, and although there was no sun, the clouds had a cool pearly glow.

It was beautiful. Still alien, still disquieting, but beautiful.

And in the valley below was a castle.

Maggie stopped involuntarily as she caught sight of it. It rose out of the mist like an island, black and shiny and solid. With towers at the edges. And a wall around it with a sawtoothed top, just like the castles in pictures.

It looks so real, Maggie thought stupidly.

“Don’t stand there! What are you waiting for?” Jeanne snapped, dragging at Cady.

Maggie tore her eyes away and made her legs work. They headed at a good pace straight for the thickest trees below the shack.

“If it’s dogs, we should try to find a stream or something, right?” she said to Jeanne. “To cut off our scent.”

“I know a stream,” Jeanne said, speaking in short bursts as they made their way through dew-wet ferns and saxifrages. “I lived out here a while the first time I escaped. When I was looking for the pass. But they’re not just dogs.”

Maggie helped Cady scramble over the tentaclelike roots of a hemlock tree. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means they’re shapeshifters, like Bern and Gavin. So they don’t just track us by scent. They also feel our life energy.”

Maggie thought about Bern turning his face this way and that, saying, “Do you sense anything?” And Gavin saying, “No. I can’t feel them at all.”

“Great,” Maggie muttered. She glanced back and saw P.J. following doggedly, her face taut with concentration.

It was a strange sort of chase. Maggie and her group were trying to keep as quiet as possible, which was made easier by the dampness of the rainforest around them. Although there were four of them moving at once, the only sound from close up was the soft pant of quick breathing and the occasional short gasp of direction from Jeanne.

They slipped and plunged and stumbled between the huge dark trunks that stood like columns in the mist. Cedar boughs drooped from above, making it twilight where Maggie was trying to pick her way around moss-covered logs. There was a cool green smell like incense everywhere.

But however still the world was around them, there was always the sound of the hounds baying in the distance.

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