The North Pole Challenge (Flea's Five Christmases, #1) (6 page)

             
“I want to get out,” Flea whispered.

             
“I know you’re upset with me and might never want to talk to me again, I understand that,” Mr. Strick said. “But I want you to know that I think you’re the most naturally gifted builder I’ve ever seen and that’s saying a
lot
. I also have something important I’d like to give to you.”

             
Flea still refused to face his teacher and after a long moment, Strick unlocked the door. Flea quickly opened it and jumped out of the truck but stopped when he heard Strick sigh.

             
“What could you
possibly
have to give to me?” Flea asked, his voice shaking with growing anger. The snow now fell heavier and the wind suddenly kicked up its blustery pace. Mr. Strick held out his hand and opened his palm to reveal a simple gold ring.

             
“Go ahead, take it,” he told Flea.

             
Flea had the strong urge to slap the ring from his teacher’s hand and march off, but there was a sincerity in Mr. Strick’s tone that he couldn’t ignore.
He’s a good liar, don’t trust him
, Flea reminded himself but he took the ring anyway. Although the ring shined brightly in his hand, Flea had the sense that it was very old.

             
“A ring? That’s really weird,” he told Strick. “What is it and how could it possibly be that important?”

             
Although the wind shrilled loudly, both of them could still hear the single word being yelled at them in the distance.

             
“You!”

             
Flea didn’t have to turn around to recognize the sound of Miss Mabel’s angry voice. The better question was exactly how much information she knew. A glance at Mr. Strick’s face showed his eyes wide and his lips turned down, so apparently he assumed the worst. When Strick spoke, he did so very quickly.

             
“Some strange guy at the television studio wanted me to give it to you as a thanks for your participation on the show. It looks pretty important so I’d make sure to be extra careful with it if I were you. Sorry I have to go, see you in school tomorrow.”

             
Strick didn’t even wait for Flea to close the door before stepping on the gas. The quick acceleration of the truck caused the door to slam shut. The tires fishtailed a bit in the snow-covered street but Strick kept control as he sped away. Obviously, he was more afraid of facing Miss Mabel than Flea was. When Flea turned around, he saw his foster mother moving quicker than he’d ever seen.

             
“You just
had
to go on that show, didn’t you?” she yelled, breaking her own rule about never causing a scene in public. Flea’s horrible day continued to get worse. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how Miss Mabel found out about the show already. After all, they didn’t have CTV
and
Flea had never seen her talk to the neighbors – or
anyone
for that matter.

             
“How did you find out?” Flea asked. If he was going to be in trouble, he might as well find out
how
he’d been caught.

             
“Uh uh, this isn’t the time for
you
to be asking
me
questions,” Miss Mabel yelled. She grabbed Flea by his ear – the split ear at that – and dragged him back into their apartment, yelling at him the entire time. “In one day, you’ve undone all the hard work I’ve done to make sure we stayed hidden.”

             
“Well
what
exactly are we hiding
from
?” Flea yelled back once they were inside. He broke free from her vice-like grip on his ear.

             
“Don’t you worry about that, that’s
my
business,” she said. Now that he could only hear the sound of her voice, Flea thought he recognized as much fear and concern from her as anger, though he knew Miss Mabel was unlikely to explain why. “Now that we’re probably being watched, it’s too dangerous to stay here much longer. Once the snowfall lets up, we’ll head farther south to safety.”

             
“But I don’t want to leave,” Flea argued weakly, unsure whether he really believed those words any longer. He expected Miss Mabel’s usual reaction but she answered with an eerie calmness that was more worrisome to Flea than her screaming.

             
“We
are
leaving and you have no one to blame but yourself,” she said. Miss Mabel headed toward her bedroom. “I’m going to start packing, I suggest you do the same.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Kidnapped!

One more day of school remained before winter break but Miss Mabel refused to let Flea go, which was just fine with him. The weather had gotten worse overnight – the snow falling heavier, the wind blowing harder – so Miss Mabel decided they wouldn’t leave yet. Still, her paranoia had not eased the slightest bit. She didn’t even accept Flea’s offer to shovel the walkway, a task that he normally hated and avoided at all costs.

              “It’s our turn to do it, though. The neighbors shoveled yesterday,” Flea said.

             
But Miss Mabel didn’t care, arguing that the neighbors would have to shovel
every
day once they left. As she scurried about packing up their few belongings, she continued to mutter that the weather would break soon and it couldn’t snow forever. However, one day of weather watching turned to two and two soon turned to three. Christmas Eve arrived and Flea had grown so bored with being stuck inside that he took every possible opportunity to peek out the curtains. Though the snow fell in sheets, Flea still thought he spotted several green-eyed snowmen staring in his direction, though he did not dare mention that to Miss Mabel.

             
“What did I tell you about keeping the curtains closed?” Miss Mabel yelled when she walked into the tiny living room. She hurried to shut them, overlapping the heavy fabric, ensuring that not a single beam of outside light invaded their apartment.

             
“Why are you so worried? There’s nothing out there but snow,” Flea said, conveniently leaving out the part about the strange snowmen.

             
“Snow is what I’m afraid of,” Miss Mabel said. “Now finish packing what’s on the table so we can escape when the snow stops.” Flea looked at the coffee table, which held nothing but their sad little Christmas tree, its pathetic branches bent. As if reading Flea’s mind, Miss Mabel added, “I’m sorry but we don’t have time for Christmas this year.”

             
“How will Santa know to come here if we don’t have a tree set up?” Flea asked.

             
Miss Mabel snorted. “You don’t have to worry about
that
.”

             
Still, Miss Mabel didn’t force the issue when Flea left the tree. After all, it was the last of their possessions left in the apartment that wasn’t packed in one of the boxes piled near the front door.

When it became obvious that the snow wasn’t going to stop, Miss Mabel sent Flea to bed early in case they had to wake up and leave in the middle of the night. But once inside his room, Flea could not even
think
about going to sleep just yet, not if this would be the last night spent in this apartment. Besides, Christmas Eve was always the toughest night of the year for him to drift off to sleep. He cracked the heavy curtains in his bedroom and stared out at the white, nighttime world.

             
Now that he’d had several days to think about what happened with Mr. Strick and
The Great Build-Off
, Flea had cooled down to the point that he no longer hated his shop teacher. He never would’ve been able to fully trust Strick again but he had already forgiven and wished he could tell him so. But since he and Miss Mabel would soon be leaving, Flea knew his final interaction with his favorite teacher was the moment Strick had given him the strange ring.

             
The ring,
Flea thought,
I totally forgot about the ring
.

             
The last few days, he’d been so busy packing, bickering with Miss Mabel and being bored that he hadn’t given his ‘parting gift’ a second thought. He reached into his pocket and found the shiny ring still there. Flea knew better than to turn his lights on and draw the ire of Miss Mabel so he studied the ring using the small amount of light that filtered through his window. The gold ring was very plain but there was something inexplicably elegant about it. Though it was too big for his tiny hands, Flea slipped it onto his finger.

Instantly, Flea yawned. The hours he’d spent sitting awake in his room finally caught up with him and his eyelids grew heavy. He lay down in bed and glanced at his digital alarm clock, its numbers switching to 11:59 – just one minute before it was officially Christmas. But Flea could not keep his eyes open any longer, not even when he felt the gold ring constrict tightly on his finger. Even with his eyes closed, Flea saw a golden glow from his hand and then a bright light in his room. He tried to fight impending unconsciousness but knew that was a losing battle.

              “Are we sure about this?” a voice whispered nearby.

             
Although Flea only heard one voice, he sensed the presence of more than one person in the tight confines of his bedroom. Flea was frightened but still couldn’t summon the energy to force open his eyelids. The last thing he thought before drifting off was whether these were the intruders that Miss Mabel had been worried about for so long…

-         -          -        -         -         -         -         -         -         -         -         -         -         -       -

             
As Flea’s mind slowly began to awaken, he no longer heard any strange voices and wondered if he had simply dreamed it. He already passed out one time this week and worried that it had happened again. But he felt so comfortable lying in his bed at the moment that he forced the thought of being sick out of his mind. He considered drifting back to sleep when he heard someone shuffling in his room.

             
“Miss Mabel? Do we have to go now?” he asked groggily. Enough light permeated Flea’s eyelids for him to know that it was bright inside his room. “Is it Christmas morning now?”

             
“Sorry, there’s still a
lot
of time before Christmas,” said the same strange voice Flea thought he’d heard earlier.

             
Flea’s eyes snapped open and he sat up quickly, feeling momentarily dizzy from the sudden movement. He immediately realized that this wasn’t his own bedroom. The walls were painted bright red and green and there was far too much natural light shining, something he rarely saw in any of the apartments he’d ever lived in. The bed he sat on was far bigger and softer than his own, though it was the only piece of furniture –
and
the only object for that matter – in the big, empty room. But while Flea had felt the presence of several people in his apartment bedroom, there was only one person here now. That person stood near a large window, through which Flea saw the snow still falling heavily.

             
“It’s about time you woke up, I thought I was going to have to wait forever. I’m really busy here, you know, I don’t have time for this.”

             
When the mystery person stepped forward, Flea saw that the young man was short, not much more than an inch or two taller than Flea himself. He also took notice to the young man’s strange outfit – a combination of all black clothing and a strange red Christmas hat that hung low over his ears. But the face below that hat was the most striking part about him. For years, Flea’s classmates had referred to him as strange looking (with the meaner kids calling him ‘just plain ugly’) due to his unusually sharp features. But the guy standing in front of him had the exact same kind of features, with only slight differences. Upon closer inspection, it was tough for Flea to tell exactly how
young
this person really was, as he carried himself with an air of importance that suggested someone much older. Either way, the young man had obviously kidnapped Flea and appeared angry.