I kept plodding along, not really interested in joining Benedict and Yelena’s bickering. I supposed it kept them both distracted, but I couldn’t concentrate on much other than the battle. I was worried about my parents and Jenney—and Ruby, Ash and Hazel. All of them. Their faces kept flashing though my mind, quickly being replaced by my memories of the shadow and the ashen figures that appeared from it.
I shuddered, trying to direct my focus on the journey.
As we progressed, the land slowly started to become stranger. The trees remained a constant, but soon bizarre-looking plants appeared, and muddy bogs that burped and bubbled, making me think of quicksand. I side-stepped them carefully, warning the others to do the same.
“How much further to the mountains?” Yelena grumbled.
Some luck she’d have in the marines.
“As long as it takes?” Benedict retorted irritably. “I don’t know—Tejus didn’t exactly include measurements in this half-assed map.” He scrunched up the paper. It was pretty much redundant now anyway—none of the sentries had ventured this far into the forest. We’d just have to wait for the Hawk boys to come back and give us another vague ‘we’re almost there’ answer.
“This is pixi-wagon!” I turned around at the sound of Aisha’s voice. She was bent over a brightly colored purple flower.
“It’s what?” Benedict asked.
“Pixi-wagon,” Aisha replied dreamily. “My grandma used to grow this. She made perfume from it.”
“Is it helpful?” I asked.
The jinni frowned at me.
“No, it’s just nice. I haven’t seen it for years.” Suddenly she looked speculative, her fingers idly massaging the petal. “I had thought this mission was a babysitting job,” she mused, “but actually, perhaps there are jinn in this land. Our kind used to breed these flowers.”
“Glad to have you on board,” Benedict replied grumpily.
Aisha rolled her eyes. “I didn’t mean that—I just meant there’s hope.”
I was as annoyed as Benedict was at her admission that this was all a ruse to keep us away from harm, but I also took comfort from her words. If we could find the jinn or jinni who was behind the stones, then we would have a good chance of destroying the entity, or at least locking it up again for another eternity.
I picked up the pace. A few minutes later, the Hawk boys and Ridan came flying back down.
“This place is weird,” Sky remarked as soon as his feet hit the ground. “I mean, weirder than the rest of Nevertide… We need to be careful, the ground gets rockier and more unstable the closer we get to the mountain range.”
“Which is how far?” Benedict asked.
“Not that much further,” came Fly’s vague answer.
“Okay, but can you give us an actual estimate?” Benedict pressed. “Like, how many miles? One, fifteen, hundreds?”
The Hawk boys grinned, clearly amused by Benedict’s irritation. Field took pity on him, playfully punching Sky in the arm.
“It’s about twenty miles, give or take.”
Twenty miles?
“We can carry you kids, if you like,” Field replied, looking at our outraged expressions.
Aisha shook her head. “We don’t know for sure the jinn are in the mountains. We need to check the forest too—and the best way to do that is on foot. The trees are too dense to see anything clearly.”
“But we can’t see more than a few feet into the forest anyway,” I argued. “They could be a mile in that direction”—I pointed to our left—“and we’d never know about it!”
“Horatio and I would,” Aisha insisted, glancing at her husband, who was still eyeing the pixi-wagon with a frown. “We can sense our kind, but it’s more difficult if we’re shooting through the air. We need to take this slow—it’s the best chance we have of discovering them. I’ve got a feeling they’re not going to want to be found.”
“Okay.” Benedict sighed. “I guess we keep walking then.”
My shoulders slumped of their own accord. I was exhausted. The adrenaline surges over the past few days had been intense, and they had left me shattered.
“We’ll return in a short while,” Ridan replied. “You humans should eat something soon, though.”
The dragon was right. The only problem was the quality of the food. I knew that in my backpack there were sandwiches made by Jenney—even the thought of what might be contained between the lumpy bread made my stomach turn over.
“We’ll eat soon,” Benedict replied, clearly no more eager than I was to discover the strange delights of Jenney’s cooking.