Witch & Wizard 01 - Witch & Wizard by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson [Patterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780316072205
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-12-13T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 57

Wisty

“OKAY,” SASHA SAID, stopping suddenly. “Brace yourselves.”

My heart leaped. Bracing, I could handle. Getting mauled by soul-eating shadow creatures, not so much.

But where was the portal? All I saw was more fog. Was the portal here? Where?

Just then Feffer—who was, sweet dog, running tail guard several yards behind us—whimpered piteously.

“Feffer!” I stopped my own whimpering and yelled as the dog, unable to control herself, raced past toward a patch of fog that, I suddenly noticed, seemed to be rotating like a sideways whirlpool. She was bleeding. Badly. It looked as if something had gashed her left side with a garden rake. And the fright in her eyes—she looked more like a terrified puppy than a former New Order hellhound.

But before I could even think to reach out to comfort her, she was past me and leaping into the swirling vapor. And she was gone.

“That’s our portal,” said Sasha. “You two next. And be careful,” he said. “Freeland can be pretty wild.”

Wild, I could also handle—I’d have happily signed up for a deep-jungle camping trip with a pack of hungry jaguars. Anything but this nightmare scene. But I couldn’t joke about it to Sasha. For one thing, my teeth were chattering too hard to talk.

We were suddenly confronted with a cold so intense it burned—and it was coming from in front of us.

One of the Lost Ones had somehow gotten in between us and the portal.

Maybe if pain, hatred, and suffering were mixed in equal parts, somehow given shape, and dipped in black paint, you’d come close to what we saw now. Although there was something disturbingly, hauntingly human about its shadow-filled face. There was no skin, just sort of a flickering, shadowy surface where you would expect to see a forehead, cheeks, nose… and then there were the eyes. No pupils. Just slits, yellow-orange, flickering like torches you’d see on the walls of hell.

I wanted nothing more than to scream, but I was now officially paralyzed by the frozen air and my terror.

I squinted my eyes against the cold and watched helplessly as other Lost Ones moved in around us. We were surrounded.

Then—and I don’t know where he got the strength or courage—Sasha stepped toward the one directly in front of the portal, ignoring its clicking finger-claws and looking into its deathly yellow eyes.

“You got us,” he said. “But you’ll want me to explain this to you.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “It’s a map. With it, I can show you where to find a portal—not like this one, which won’t work for your kind—that can take you out of the Shadowland. A way back home.”

Somehow the horrible creature seemed to understand and appreciate what Sasha was saying.

And then, with a masterful flourish, Sasha crumpled the paper and threw it to the ground, causing the creature to leap after it with an earsplitting shriek of anger.

And then Sasha fairly tackled Whit and me into the portal, and the three of us

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