Read Witch & Wizard 04 - The Kiss Online
Authors: James Patterson
I’m not feeling so well myself. We buried Sasha yesterday, spent hours chipping at the cold ground to dig his grave, and here he is, lumbering toward us.
Feffer whines—a high, nervous plea.
The blood is gone from the bandanna Sasha wears tied around his head, and there’s no trace of the hole the arrow blazed through his chest.
“Hi, pup.” He holds out a hand, but the dog backs away from his touch with her tail between her legs.
“Whaddaya say we find us some Mountain boys to kill?” Margo suggests. She picks up a hefty rock with a sharp edge and tosses it up a few times.
Janine’s eyes flick to mine. It’s Margo’s voice, but tough or not, she was too scrawny to lift a rock like that, and she
never
would’ve been excited about killing someone.
I start to back away, and feel arms lock around my waist in an embrace.
I turn, and it’s just like in the dream.
Celia’s here, in these woods, not a floating head in the sky.
“I’ve missed you, Whit,” Celia says.
I guess it’s not like the dream, though, because this time, her cheeks are pink from the cold, and I can feel her arms solid around me.
Real.
For a moment I’m dizzy, and feel the tears freezing on my cheeks.
“Whit—” Janine says sharply, her tone more terrified than hurt.
When I look toward her voice, I see Margo’s smiling face transform as her eyes overflow with tiny white worms.
Dead and buried.
I jerk back in revulsion, but Celia’s grip on me tightens as she opens her sweet lips that I used to know so well… and a cloud of black insects erupts out of her mouth.
Bees.
I swat at the air, trying to dodge them like I’ve dodged so many Demons, but there are too many swarming around me. I drop to the ground, trying to cover my head from thestings as my ears pound with their furious hum.
Feffer is barking frantically now, Janine is screaming, and I’m gagging on the buzzing bodies, invisible fingers tightening around my throat.
“Enough!” a woman’s sharp voice warns.
The air clears, the buzz stops, and I squint up from my fetal position on the ground, wondering what to make of our savior. In the bright morning light, she seems to blend in with the Mountain. She wears a cloak of speckled white feathers, with a few in her silvery-blond hair. Piercing eyes look out with distaste at the figures around me.
But… they’ve changed. Sasha and Margo have been replaced by large men with dreadlocks and beards. Where Celia stood, a boulder of a man with a glass eye fixes the woman with his unsettling stare.
This seems to be magic unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
“We were sent to kill them,” the big man says gruffly. “By the King himself.”
“
I’ll
answer to the King,” the feathered woman replies. “As for Whit Allgood…” She turns to me. “I hear you’re a healer. Can you prove it?”
WE RIDE FOR HOURS, higher into the frigid air, until it seems that the Kingdom must be built on clouds.
“We were supposed to kill them, Izbella,” the man with a glass eye says to the feathered woman. He still looks gigantic and vicious as he glowers down from his fierce-looking warhorse.
“I said I would handle it, Larsht,” the woman says icily. Larsht scowls, but doesn’t say another word.
We creep along a narrow, treacherous ridge, bowing dangerously outward over the emptiness. When we round the corner along the cliff, a great Mountain Kingdom unfolds out of nowhere, its lands sprawling across the valley below.
The buildings are short and squat, nestled like teeth in the snow of the sloping hillside, and vast mountain lakes are as flat and peaceful as the cloudless sky. Something stirs in me—something like poetry—and Janine seems to feel it, too.
“It’s breathtaking,” she gasps, shading her eyes from the sun.
“Isn’t it, though?” asks Izbella, urging her horse onward.
Above the Kingdom’s gates, a banner with a white leopard streams, and inside, it’s not at all what I expected. There are no towering buildings here, or signs of busy commerce. But the squat structures of rock and wood are anything but crude, and the uneven rocky path of the journey has been replaced with smooth, paved streets.
“Much cleaner than your City, isn’t it?” Larsht says as we approach the modest castle that looms ahead. “No rats, no disease, no filth. The people here are cleansed by the King himself.”
“It’s a superior way to live,” Izbella agrees.
I study this strange woman—so full of contradictions I don’t know what to make of her. She’s brought me here to save someone, but isn’t concerned with tortured children. She has obvious authority in this Kingdom, but defies her King to save people she disdains.
“If you have all this already…” I ask, “why do you want
us
?”
Izbella shifts uncomfortably in her saddle. “That’s something you’ll have to ask the King.” She clicks her tongue, and the white horse gallops ahead of us down the street.
Larsht leans toward us. “Because your kind of idiot can’t be trusted,” he sneers, his eyes menacing and his breath sour. “You’ve never been able to take care of yourselves. Don’t you know that children are made to work, not rule?”
I let out a shaky breath as we pass under the last row of banners before the castle, images of white cats flapping violently in the wind above us.
Let’s see what you’re made of, Whit Allgood.
FROM THE MOMENT I set foot inside the castle walls, I know it, deep in my bones:
Something is terribly wrong here.
The chamber is dimly lit, bitter cold, and stinks of death.
Guards stand posted, holding us at the doorway until the signal is given for us to enter, and so I can’t really tell what’s going on.
The windows are blacked out, and though there’s a fireplace, no coals warm the hearth. Shadowy shapes move across the room wearing masks, and they seem to be performing some dark ritual.
I crane my neck to peer in and suddenly understand why I’m there.
A kid lies on a table near the back of the room, naked to the waist. By his face, I’d guess he was about thirteen or fourteen. But the bones protrude from his frail body, and his twisted, underdeveloped legs make him appear smaller and younger. He writhes in pain.
The hooded figures hold scythes over him, I realize with dismay. The long, curved blades are gruesome, made for messy work, and I’m reminded of the mutilated children.
The gloved hands are lowering the blades.
Oh, god, oh, god.
“Don’t,” I bark, lunging forward into the room.
Right before Larsht’s giant hands yank me roughly back, I see my mistake: it isn’t limbs the scythes are for—it’s ice. Huge blocks of ice are mounted on a stand, and the hooded fingers are shaving it into long, frosty strips over the boy. Even his table is made of ice.
I don’t understand, though. Don’t they see? They’re just making it worse.
The kid coughs hard, the sound rattling in his chest, and he shudders as the ice water runs over him, melting as it touches his feverish skin.
The masks are to prevent the spreading of the infection. It’s so virulent, you can almost smell it on him.
“You won’t fix him that way,” I tell the icemen. “He needs the fever to help him heal. He needs the warmth to burn the sickness from the inside out.”
“He wants to make my boy filthy with fire!” Larsht says, shoving me into the wall.
“Can I just see him?” I ask. “I might be able to help.”
“We don’t want your poison.” Other soldiers join in the taunts. “Make the stranger clean!”
Two sentries step from the shadows with dirk and axe in hand, edging me backward, and I start to press against the wall like a cornered animal, my nerves raw.
This could get ugly, and after the bizarre episode with our dead friends, I have no idea what any of these Mountain magicians is capable of. I watch for sudden movements, for just one hand reaching for an axe….
“Let him come inside,” Izbella says in a low, even voice. It seems like she’s materialized out of thin air. As the soldiers clear a path, Izbella’s feathered cloak rustles as she leads me across the floor. Janine and Ross stay behind.
“Can you heal him?” asks a woman who can only be the boy’s mother, clasping my hands in her own. Her face is masked, but the desperation in her eyes reminds me of Mama May Neederman.
Can I heal him?
“I…” I think of Sasha, and how I couldn’t save him, how the magic wouldn’t come. I’m strong again, though. I can do this—I’ve done it before. “I think so.” I nod, looking up into the kid’s mother’s shining eyes.
“Don’t touch him!” Larsht is elbowing his way into the chamber again. “The King said the ice would mend him—that the cold would cleanse him!” the grizzled man protests stubbornly.
“And
have
his lungs cleared?” his wife cries. “I can feel him slipping away from us, Larsht.” She touches his arm, pleading. “Can’t you see the life going out of him?”
Larsht flings her hand away. “There’s only one person here who’s going to die today,” he barks. “And that’s Whitford Allgood.”
My temper flares at this death warrant, but right now there’s a child suffering, and it doesn’t matter which side of the enemy line he’s on.
“Step aside.” Izbella’s voice is sharp and unyielding this time. “Leave us,” the feathered woman commands Larsht.
He glowers over her, but some of the fight seems to go out of him as he watches his crippled son wheeze and tremble on the table.
“If you would see your son live, let this boy do his work.”
IZBELLA’S WORDS IGNITE the buzz of power within me. Somehow I know now: I was meant to be here, at this moment, on this forsaken Mountain. I was meant to save this boy.
On Izbella’s command, the guards retreat from the claustrophobic chamber, and the dark cloaks shuffle out of my way, melting into the shadows.
I move closer to the table, where a dim glow from the single flickering bulb makes the ice shimmer. The block glows with a cold light as if lit from within, but the boy’s life light is almost extinguished.
“What’s his name?” I ask gently.
“Njar,” Larsht answers, his harsh voice finally softening. “His name is Njar.”
I stare at the crippled, emaciated form before me. “Njar,” I repeat, the syllable feeling awkward on my tongue.
Healer’s hands
, I remind myself as I place my palms on his chest.
Don’t fail me now.
Some of the soldiers shift forward again, grunting their displeasure, but Izbella holds them back, and I keep my attention focused in one place only.
There’s a pulse beneath my fingers, faint and quick as a bird’s, but it’s there. This guy wants to fight.
Like Wisty during the Blood Plague, when she almost didn’t make it….
“This isn’t your time, Njar,” I whisper softly, like I did to my sister that day.
His skin is damp with sweat and chilled to the bone, but as the M starts to move through my fingertips, the warm surge of it leaves red spots on his chest, and I know my own brand of medicine is working through him.
I close my eyes, keeping my hands steady on his chest, and concentrate on reaching in and seeking out. I feel myself, my power rushing through the veins, toward his lungs, like a healing serum doing its work.
I seek out the blackness and the death, and root out the pain. I consume it all.
“Come back to us, Njar,” I whisper, feeling my hands lift strangely as his body warms and strengthens. “Come back to all these people who love you.”
I shudder as I feel the fever leaving him, snaking away in retreat.
When I open my eyes, Njar is floating above the table, as high as my shoulder blades. He starts to tremble from his ankles all the way up to his neck, and as the movement spreads, he’s…
changing
.
His muscles start to fill out. His breathing starts to steady. And color floods his cheeks.
There’s something else, too. It’s this light that seems to be emanating from his pores, making the whole room glow with healing energy.
I finally let out a breath. He’s saved.
Family members blink up at the boy suspended before them, and when they remove their hospital masks, I see that tears are flowing freely down their cheeks.
A few of Njar’s relatives lay their cloaks over the block of ice, and I grip his shoulders and slowly lower him back to the table.
Njar opens his eyes and smiles like he’s just awoken from a sweet dream.
“You came back,” his mother says, weeping.
Njar looks at her, his lucid eyes shining. “I came back for the people I love,” he says with gratitude, and turns to me. “Like you said.”
Color is returning to his face and he’s shed the smell of death like an old robe. Everyone is hugging—Njar, and his relatives, and even Larsht.
“You’ve saved my nephew and the King’s grandson,” the feathered woman announces. “You’ve rid us of this terrible illness and scoured death from this Kingdom. We are greatly in your debt.”
I don’t even have a moment to relish the triumph before the chamber’s huge wooden doors fly open on their hinges, and soldiers flood the room.
“HEY,” I CALL UP from the sidewalk.
Heath grins as he opens his front door. “Hey,” he shouts down to me. “I’d invite you up to the porch, but…” He looks around at the piles of ash and burnt cinders where the porch used to be, and we both laugh.
“I guess we ran a little hotheaded on that one, huh?” I ask, blushing, and Heath nods.
“I just wanted to say—” We blurt it out at the same time, in the same awkward, rushed tone. This triggers another fit of laughter, of course. But laughing’s okay. Laughing is good.