I closed my eyes and focused on an object. It couldn’t be too complicated. There wasn’t enough time.
With every ounce of my energy, I focused on a simple image: a stick.
I felt a tiny whoosh of energy leave my body, and when I opened my eyes, there, lying next to my tether, was a stick.
I crouched down, put my hand around it, and grabbed it. It was real!
I shoved the pointy end into the flames of the wall to my right and left it there until I saw a faint red glow at the end. When I took it out, the end was charred, and the tip glowed red. A tiny flame materialized.
And right then the first of the Wanderers appeared from around a bend.
I faced Cole and Max. “Sorry, guys.”
I lightly touched the hot poker to Max’s back. He screamed and ran forward. Cole looked at him with an amused smile on his lips, then I did the same thing to Cole’s back, angling it under the hem of his jacket. He lurched forward.
We ran this way for several long minutes, and eventually I didn’t have to prod them as much. They were sprinting. So fast that I had to work to keep up with them, and even then I was losing them around corners.
“Wait!” I called out; but they didn’t hear me, or they ignored me.
I dropped the stick, and it disappeared in a poof. My tether was pointing in the direction I should be going, but it wasn’t following where Max and Cole went.
I couldn’t lose them. Digging in my feet, I scrambled around turns and juts in the pathway, catching glimpses of Cole’s black leather jacket.
“Wait!” I screamed.
Finally, I turned a particularly acute corner and stopped dead in my tracks. There, in the center of a large chamber surrounded by the fire walls, was an ornate wooden table with a large bowl of fruit.
Bent over the bowl, shoving apples and bananas into their mouths, were Cole and Max.
“No!” I screamed, but it was too late. They’d both already swallowed.
Cole stood upright and looked at me for a split second, recognition of what he had done painted on his face.
“Nik.” The word was all he got out before he collapsed to the ground. Max followed moments later.
I heard noises coming from behind me. The Wanderers.
The only other exit from the chamber was on the opposite side. I couldn’t face the Wanderers by myself. I raced across, leaped over Cole, and hid in the exit behind the wall of fire.
I said a little prayer. Please pass us by. Please choose another way.
The wait seemed interminable. I convinced myself that too much time had passed. That the Wanderers had indeed taken a different route, one that led away from this chamber.
And then the first foot appeared in the entrance, followed by the face of the Wanderer who had been leading the pack. He eyed Cole and Max, lying there immobile on the ground, as if they were fresh meat.
One by one the wanderers filed in, and I got a look at just how many had been following us.
Twenty. At least.
They swarmed over the lifeless bodies of Cole and Max.
I ducked behind the wall out of sight.
What do I do? What do I do?
I couldn’t take them all on by myself. Max and Ashe could barely handle one at a time, and they were much stronger than I was. I looked down at my tether. Could the cattle prod approach work with them?
Again, no. Too many.
Confronting them would never work. I needed to get them away from Cole and Max, and then I could outrun them.
I needed a distraction. But what?
I thought back to everything I knew about Wanderers. They were missing their Surface hearts, but it wasn’t as if I could tell them I had twenty extras just around the corner. It had to be something that wouldn’t require a lot of thought on their part.
Then I remembered what Cole had told me. Wanderers could make a meal out of Everlivings, but they wouldn’t be able to resist the freshest energy from an actual human.
My tether was a manifestation of my energy. When I’d first come to the Everneath, my energy had spilled out all over. I could do that again.
I stepped into the chamber, closed my eyes … and focused on everything about Jack that I loved.
Every memory, every quirk of a smile, every wink of his eye, every embrace, every kiss. I jammed them into my head all at once. Every word he’d ever said to me, the first time he’d snuck into my bedroom, the way he’d held me and told me he loved me in his uncle’s ski cottage. Everything.
When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by a cloud of memories: pictures of Jack and me, movies of him under the tree at the cemetery, waiting for me at his locker, spotting me in the crowd from the bench at the football game.
His image was everywhere, swirling around me. It didn’t form the canyon in the Fiery Furnace that it had the first time I’d let it all out, probably because I had more control now, or because I didn’t have as much energy. But it was enough. Beyond the energy cloud I could see that every Wanderer was turned toward me, and only a split second passed before they lunged for me.
I turned and took off running.
I ran and ran, but my legs were aching. Pure adrenaline kept me going, but I was losing focus. I turned around to see how far ahead of them I was and ran smack into a dead end of fire.
Pain tore into my chest. I recoiled from the wall and again heard that sizzling noise. I’d reacted quickly enough that the burns wouldn’t be as severe as the last one, but I still had to pat out the tiny flames that had jumped onto my shirt. How far had I gone? Were Cole and Max dead? Would I ever find them again? Every turn I made was one turn farther away from them. But at least the Wanderers were following me and not feasting on them.
I backtracked and then turned down another corridor, and that’s when I saw something reaching up above the wall of fire on my left. It was a dark wall shooting high into the sky. Not made of flames or wind or water, but made of black stone.
I took every turn that led me to the left, and several seconds later I exited the maze and found myself standing on grass in front of the giant black stone wall. I glanced at my tether, but it pointed toward the wall. I looked to either side, trying to figure out which way to run, but maybe fifty yards away in each direction I saw dark figures swirling in the air.
Shades.
I bowed my head. A solid wall in front of me, Shades to the left and right, and a maze of fire behind me filled with Wanderers.
There was nowhere left to run.
I sank to the grass. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
NOW
The Everneath. The Ring of Fire.
I wasn’t about to run toward the Shades, so I turned around and faced what I knew was coming out of the maze.
I didn’t have to wait long. The herd of Wanderers appeared from the Ring of Fire. There was no escape. I shut my eyes, and before I knew it, they had piled on top of me as if I were the opposing quarterback in a football game.
I couldn’t tell which Wanderer was feeding, but I felt my energy leaving my body, as if I were in a giant vacuum that was sucking out everything that made me alive.
The hole I’d felt when just one Wanderer had fed on me was amplified throughout my entire body. A dark cloud appeared behind my eyelids, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I passed out. There were too many.
I heard them growling, groaning with satisfaction as if they were at a buffet. One of them, in the heat of the frenzy, started to gnaw at my shoulder. Another at my fingertips. When they drained me completely, would they finish me off?
Panicked voices reached my ears. Cole and Max … and someone else?
I couldn’t tell. Another moment and the pain stopped. Maybe they had reached a point where they had taken away all feeling whatsoever. The neurons no longer shot to my brain. I was left with only my mind, and one last thought.
It was over so quickly. I’d made it through the maze. I’d made it to the bull’s-eye. I was so close to Jack. So close. So close to seeing my brother again. And my dad.
But in a split second, I’d failed them all.
The darkness kept me reeling in a blackout haze for a long time. Or maybe it was only seconds. But when I opened my eyes, expecting some sort of afterlife, I caught a glimpse of that same tall black wall. The same flames from the maze.
The Wanderers were no longer on top of me.
A pungent odor hit my nose, like the smell of burned, decaying flesh, and I coughed and then dry heaved.
Once I’d stopped, I saw the blurry outline of a figure holding something with a flame on the end. It looked like a torch. He was waving it toward the ground, lighting things on fire, and then he would wave it in the air. I squeezed my eyes shut and then blinked a few more times. When I opened them, the image came into focus. A familiar face …
Ashe! Was it really him? I couldn’t believe it. He’d escaped the Siren. He must’ve found Cole and Max and somehow revived them. He had the torch in one hand and his sword, red with blood, in the other. There was another figure with a torch too. Max. He was on the other side of me. They were standing over bodies of Wanderers, bringing the lit end of their torches down to the bodies and then waving them toward something dark and swirling in the distance.
Right then I realized someone was stroking my face, and soon I became aware of other sensations. Especially the pain in my chest.
“Nik?”
I could see Cole’s face in the periphery of my vision. I opened my mouth to speak, but I didn’t have any energy to form the words.
“Hey,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you.”
He glanced toward Max and Ashe. “The Shades are closing in. I’m going to kick you to the Surface.” The Surface? I shook my head as violently as I could. It was still a weak effort. “Shh. It’s the only way. Max and Ashe can keep them at bay for now with the fire. But you have no energy. You have to go to the Surface to recover. And it’s almost night. You have to be there for Jack.”
I tried to get words to my mouth, but it wasn’t working. I tried to grab Cole’s hand, but my arms felt as if they were made of cement.
“It’s okay, Nik. We’re going to try to hide from the Shades overnight. We can go into the maze again. The Shades hate fire. They won’t follow. And then in the morning we’ll bring you back down and regroup.”
But Jack hadn’t appeared in my last dream. If he wasn’t appearing, no amount of me sleeping could help him. He was out of time. He’d been out of time for a while. Cole couldn’t kick me out. Here in the bull’s-eye, I knew time ran slower. This was where the Feed caverns were, where a hundred years only equaled six months on the Surface.
Now that we were here, we couldn’t go back to Surface time. We couldn’t go back in the maze.
I would lose Jack.
I used every last drop of energy I could muster to bring my teeth down to my lips to form an F sound. “Feed me.” The words were so soft, I couldn’t even hear them.
But Cole had been watching my lips. “What?”
I could tell from his confused expression that he knew what I’d said.
“Feed me,” I said again. Taking in a deep breath, I put the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth to form the next words. “Jack’s gone … from my dreams. No time.”
Realization dawned on Cole’s face. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
The blackness started to invade my eyesight, and I fought to stay conscious. “No giving up,” I said.
Cole looked up desperately at Ashe and Max, flanking us, lighting fires. They wouldn’t burn forever.
His eyes met mine again. “If we don’t go back into the maze, we’ll be surrounded by Shades.”
I could only nod.
He lifted my head even closer. “And that might be it. If we can’t hide in the maze, it could be our last stand.”
I blinked and nodded again.
It hit me what I was demanding of Cole. Here we were, about to face the Shades, and I was asking him to make himself weaker by feeding me. I was asking him to stay and fight instead of run for the relative safety of the maze.
He pressed his lips together, his face showing his resolve, then dipped his head down and put his lips on mine.
That same whoosh of energy that I’d felt when I’d kissed him in the Siren’s lair came rushing through me, or, more accurately, from him to me.
He moved his lips against mine, pulling me even closer to him, supporting all of my upper body with his arms.
A scene slipped into my mind. The view from a stage, with fans on the floor below, jumping and dancing, their hands in the air. Only one out of the sea of faces was clear. My face. I was near the back, moving to the music but not as animatedly as the fans around me. Cole watched me, only breaking my gaze to glance down at his guitar strings.
Euphoria overshadowed any other emotion; and I realized I was feeling what Cole was feeling on that night, and part of it was because I was watching him play. It was a rush for him.
Max started yelling and Cole pulled away, and again I was in the Everneath.
“Cole!” Max said. “We need to get back in the maze—” His voice cut off when he saw us and realized what had just happened.
“We’re not going back,” Cole said. The color had drained from his face, and his cheeks looked hollower. I wondered if he knew which memory he had just shared.