No Quest For The Wicked

As I lay on the platform, fighting to breathe, something landed on the ground beside me. I was barely able to focus my eyes enough to see that it was a small wooden box lined in velvet.

Then everything went black.

Chapter Twenty

I woke gradually and reluctantly, at first aware only of being terribly uncomfortable, but too tired to do anything about it. Every bone, muscle, and joint in my body ached so badly that lying on a warm cloud probably would have hurt, but I was lying on something cold and hard. I thought I’d feel better if I could move to a more comfortable place, but the signals wouldn’t travel from my brain to my body. The most I could manage was a twitch or two. Maybe if I rested awhile longer, I could get up, I thought. Or, if I was really lucky, someone might come along and move me. At the moment, I didn’t much care who it was, so long as they moved me somewhere soft and warm and didn’t expect me to do anything for a long, long time.

At the same time, I felt an odd tingling resonating throughout my body. It was like I was lying next to the speaker towers at a rock concert, but I didn’t hear any noise. There was only a faint background buzz that might have been voices, or it could have been a really loud fluorescent light fixture.

Gradually, the buzz modulated until it made sense. It sounded like a name—my name. “Katie! Can you hear me?” the buzz said.

“Go away. It’s too early to get up,” I mumbled, trying to roll over and curl up into a ball.

Something stopped me, gripping my shoulder to keep me in place. It felt as cold and hard as the surface beneath me, not like any human hand. That was weird, I thought, weird enough that I needed to see what was going on.

Opening my eyes required more energy than I had, so I tried opening one eye and made it about halfway. Everything was blurry at first, but then my vision cleared and I saw a strange face looming over me. The strange face was familiar, and then my brain scrolled through a lot of events very rapidly, like it was fast-forwarding through a video, and I recognized the strange-yet-familiar face. “Sam?” I asked.

“Whew, I was starting to wonder if you’d come back to us, dollface,” the gargoyle said. He got an arm and a wing under my shoulders to help me sit up.

I saw then that I was on a railway platform. My brain finished fast-forwarding the recap of the past day, and I knew I was at Grand Central. “What happened?” I asked.

“I got here just after it happened, but it looks like you two destroyed the Eye. There seem to have been some aftereffects.”

I rubbed my temples, trying to ease the splitting headache. “I threw the brooch under the third rail,” I said. “There must have been an explosion.”

“Yeah, looks like there was a massive magical shock wave. Everyone on the platform was out cold.”

Everyone, he’d said. “Owen!” I blurted, frantically looking around. I saw a motionless form not too far from me and willed my aching body to crawl over to him.

“He’s okay, just knocked out like you were,” the gargoyle reassured me.

I searched for a pulse, unwilling to take his word for it. In this lighting, Owen looked really awful, his skin a sickly pale color where it wasn’t bruised, bloody, or covered in ten-o’clock shadow. His pulse was strong and steady, and his eyelids were already fluttering. “Owen!” I said, gripping one of his limp hands. “Come on, honey, wake up.”

Without opening his eyes, he asked, “Did we do it?”

“Sam says we did.”

“There’s a melted blob of gold with a cracked stone in it lying on the tracks,” Sam confirmed. “And it doesn’t have a trace of magic in it.”

“Good. It was just a crazy theory, but I’m glad it worked.” Owen struggled to sit up. I slid my arm around him, and we leaned against each other, both of us too tired to do more than that. I wondered if it would be too much to ask someone to send wheelchairs to take us to a car for the ride home. I wasn’t sure I could walk more than about three steps.

I closed my eyes and enjoyed not having anyone attacking me. Owen’s voice stopped me from falling asleep. “What’s that?” he asked.

I opened my eyes and noticed the small box that had been lying between us. “I think I remember seeing it fall right before I blacked out,” I said. “It must be that box we were waiting for.”

“Yeah, our people got here about a split second too late,” Sam confirmed. “But looks like you didn’t need it, after all.”

“Oh, thank God!” A harsh voice caught our attention, and I looked up to see a frightfully bedraggled Mimi climbing onto the end of the platform. “I thought I’d never get out of those tunnels.” She was limping, wearing one high-heeled shoe, the other nowhere in sight. Her skin was smudged with soot, her dress was torn into rags, and her hair looked like she’d stuck her finger in a light socket on a really windy day. “Now, where’s my brooch? It should be somewhere around here. I found my way out of the tunnels by aiming for it, but now I don’t seem to feel it anymore.”