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We didn’t make it far before we couldn’t see anything in the dark. Taking shelter under a tree, I offered to stay up while he slept for a while. Jack made me promise to wake him in the middle of the night to switch, and then he was asleep in minutes.
For being a spoiled prince, he was doing pretty well out here. I had expected him to start complaining almost as soon as we started, but he hadn’t whined once. He wasn’t what I expected from royalty.
Of course, I hadn’t expected magic or demon foxes, either, so that didn’t mean much.
The night grew chilly. I paced around the tree a few times to keep warm and stay awake. Most of my body ached in some way, and I wished I could lay down and sleep the way Jack did. Even if I did, it wouldn’t take long for nightmares to ruin it.
Sara was killed yesterday. It had only been a day, but it felt like a lifetime. In a way, I was glad my view had been blocked by the fence for most of it. But the sound would echo in my head forever.
I’d planned to let Jack sleep all night, but I started coughing and accidentally woke him up.
His hand found my forehead and he frowned. “I’m sorry. I wish I could do more for you.”
“It’s not like I’ve never had a cold before.” I curled up on the ground with my back to him. The problem was, this wasn’t a cold, not if this was still the same thing that had sent me to Dr. Carl in the first place. Hopefully a little sleep would be enough to let me get by. If I kept getting worse, I’d be in real trouble. There wouldn’t be any convenient doctors around this time, not even an old woman who would feel bad for me.
Luck was on my side for once. I was so worn out I didn’t have any dreams. Sunlight woke me up hours later.
Jack was gone.
I bolted upright. “Jack?”
My imagination ran wild with all the terrible things that could have happened. The demon Sel mentioned might have eaten him. He could have abandoned me. Some other creature might have snatched him. Maybe he was never real to begin with.
“Jack!” I yelled, and then immediately coughed. Using the tree, I pulled myself upright. My head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds and was stuffed with bread. Sleep had not helped as much as I’d hoped.
“Coming!” he answered, voice distant.
It calmed me down though, and I slid back against the tree until I was on the ground again. While I waited, I tried to force my nose to work right.
I heard Jack before I saw him, his footsteps heavy in the underbrush. He came from behind me, plopping himself on the ground without a care in the world, his arms full of a ridged fruit.
“Do you know what these are?” he asked, holding one out to me. It was long, like a lemon, only a deep maroon color, and ridged along the sides. From the bottom, it looked like a star.
“Star fruit, I think.” They were pretty rare. I’d only had one a handful of times.
“So, they’re safe to eat?” he asked.
“They are now,” I decided, taking the one he offered me. I bit into it like an apple, even though I was pretty sure the peel wasn’t for eating. I was too hungry to care.
“You can’t just decide if it’s safe or not,” Jack muttered, eyes narrowed.
Since I didn’t fall over dead, he took a bite of his own. They were sweet and juicy, but the insides were white. Clear juice ran down my chin, and I wiped it on my sleeve.
Jack pulled out a handkerchief, but after the night we’d had it didn’t look much cleaner than my sleeve.
“So, I was thinking,” Jack started, dabbing at his mouth with his handkerchief. “If we climbed one of these trees, we might be able to see the direction of a town or something, so we can at least know which way to go.”
That was logical, and normally I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But I doubted my ability to climb anything right now without breaking my neck.
He saw the look on my face. “Did I say we? I meant me. I will climb a tree.”
“Do you even know how to climb?”
“Of course I know how to climb. Just because I’m a prince doesn’t mean I didn’t have a normal childhood.”
He said it as if I’d had a normal childhood, and I didn’t believe him either way. When you grew up with all the power and money you could ever want, never struggling for anything, you didn’t have a normal childhood.
We ate the rest of the star fruit he’d found, and then he picked a tree to climb.
The first few branches went fine. He pulled himself up with his arms and pushed with his feet, carefully not looking down. I was ready to be impressed, but then a branch cracked under him.
We both froze.
The branch gave way and he plummeted ten feet back to the ground.
“King’s beard, are you okay?” I hurried over to him.
He groaned. “That wasn’t fun.”
“I didn’t think it was,” I said. Had he hit his head? Was I going to have to deal with a loopy prince on top of everything else?
I offered a hand to help him up, and then he brushed himself off. “Alright, new plan. I’ll use magic to levitate up there.” His watch was back in his hand.
I stared at him. If that had been an option this whole time, why hadn’t he done it in the first place?
Before I could ask just what, exactly, was wrong with him, he lifted off the ground. I took a few startled steps back, and he rose above my head and kept going, pushing branches out of his way. Somehow, when the demon fox had ignored gravity last night, it hadn’t bothered me. It had been sort of a why not at this point kind of thing. But watching Jack float up like a steamcar without any machine helping him? That was unnatural.
He drifted back, landing without a sound, and pointed behind me. “I saw smoke coming from that way. Could be someone who lives out here. They’ll be able to tell us how to get to town.”
“You didn’t see a town?” I asked. I knew I wasn’t the greatest with geography, and I had almost no idea of what existed in the kingdom outside Gallen, but I was pretty sure a giant forest wasn’t anywhere near my city or his palace.
He shook his head. “No. Actually...I saw mountain peaks. I don’t know how, but I think, somehow, we ended up in the Spodale mountains.”
“Right. So, I know exactly where those are, but can you explain it to me anyway? How far away from home are we?” Jade, Malik, and Damon had to be worried out of their minds right now. They already had been, and for me to run off and not come back was about the worst thing I could do to them.
He crossed his arms and looked at the ground. “Pretty far. They’re a week’s journey away from the palace.”
My mouth dropped. Yesterday, he’d made it sound like we’d be lucky if he could even make it to the palace. How had he blasted us a week away in the wrong direction?
He rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how this happened. I shouldn’t even be capable of doing this, I don’t have this kind of training. I don’t know if it’s because I was panicking, or if something else interfered, or what.”
“If you figure out how it happened, can we get back the same way?” I wasn’t looking forward to a week of traveling with him, especially when I knew I was getting sick again.
“Maybe...I’d be willing to try if you are,” he said. “But it doesn’t make sense, such a big spell should have used up more of my magic.” He looked down at his watch, as if the thing had any answers.
If I let him, he’d stay there all day thinking like that. But since I didn’t want to spend more time out here than we had to, I started walking in the direction he’d pointed, dragging him along.
“Unless you really are Alex, and you somehow amplified the spell with your own magic, and we just got blown way off course...”
I nearly stopped walking. “I’m sorry, what? Who’s Alex?” Why would he think that was me?
Jack made a funny sound in the back of his throat. “I wasn’t going to say anything until I was sure. Dr. Carl said you were the fourth magician in the kingdom, which is only possible if you’re part of the royal family. Though I’m not sure how he uses magic...”
“Jack.”
“Right. Anyway, if you’re a magician too, and you’re part of the royal family, then you’d be Prince Alex, my twin. He was kidnapped when we were infants, and we never found him.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Me? A prince? What a joke.
Jack tore his arm out of my grip. “Oh, sure, most traumatic thing to ever happen to my family, go ahead and laugh about it.”
I forced myself to calm down. “Sorry. You have to admit, though, the idea of me as a prince is pretty funny.” Even after a night in the woods, Jack looked far more regal than I ever would.
“I don’t find it funny,” Jack stated. “If you’re my brother, that’s going to be huge. It...you don’t know what it would mean to my parents. To me.”
To them? What about to me? To find out that after all this time, after all the terrible things that happened to me, I actually had a family who wanted me? A family that I would never fit in with, because I could never be like Jack. I would never be prince material. A family I half feared because of what they did to people like me?
Besides, we didn’t know if I really was or not. “Dr. Carl is insane, remember? He was probably lying. Or he was wrong.” I was a street rat. I always had been, and I always would be. Pretending otherwise would only be painful for everyone involved.
“That’s why I didn’t want to say anything,” Jack muttered.
“Well, we can forget about that, at least.” I stalked ahead. Me, a prince. What a dumb idea.
We were quiet for several minutes, and Jack stayed behind me. I didn’t look back at him. There was some kind of tension between us, and I didn’t understand why.
“Would it really be so awful if you were a prince?” Jack asked quietly. “Most people would kill for the chance.”
“I don’t want to pretend to be something I’m not,” I stated. “I’d never fit in at a castle as anything other than a kitchen boy.” Even then, it wasn’t like I would know what I was doing.
“But you’d have food whenever you want it, a place to sleep at night, people to care about you—”
“I have people who care about me,” I cut in. Those people were probably terrified for me. They probably thought I jumped in the river and drowned or something.
Jack raised his hands. “I’m not saying you don’t.”
“This is a stupid conversation.” I walked a little faster. I wasn’t a prince, so there was no point trying to convince me I was.
Thankfully, Jack dropped it. We walked in silence until we found a cabin. It wasn’t a moment too soon; I wasn’t sure how much longer my strength would hold out. I’d barely been awake for an hour, but I was ready for a nap.
A dog flew out from behind a tree, barking at us. I yelped and stumbled back into Jack, knocking us both to the ground. The dog, a big, brown monster with large teeth, pounced on us. Claws shredded my arm, ruining the sleeve of my jacket and drawing blood. I kicked out, and the dog latched onto my boot. He tore it off and shook his head, tossing my boot into the bushes.
“What’d ya find there, boy?” an old gravelly voice asked.
The dog backed down, but its hackles were raised and teeth bared. A low growl rumbled in its chest.
A man walked into view, leaning on a tall walking stick. He wore old denim jeans factory workers usually wore, and thick flannel shirts. His gray beard looked like it could sand the edges of scrap metal, and his gun could definitely shoot a hole through some.
He looked as surprised to see us as we were to see him. “Kids?”
Jack peeked over my shoulder. “Um. Sorry to bother you, sir, but we were hoping you could help us?”
The man blinked. “What are a couple of kids doing here?”
“We got lost,” Jack said with a little laugh.
“Now there’s lost, and then there’s being dumb enough to get lost all the way out here. I’m a day’s ride away from anything.”
Of course he was.
“Yeah...we went the wrong way for a while?” Jack asked more than said.
This kid could not lie to save his life. Which was a shame, because our lives might actually depend on it right now.
“We lost control of our steamcar and crashed out here,” I said. “We got turned around and just started walking, but we didn’t know which way to go. We still don’t.”
He looked at me, took in my bleeding arm, my missing shoe, the general dirt and grime that never really went away. Then he looked at Jack, whose shirt was neatly tucked in, shoes properly tied, and he must have washed up at the stream while I slept because even his face didn’t look that dirty.
He put a hand on the dog’s head, and the growling stopped. “I don’t buy it for a second, but I ain’t about to let you bleed out. Come on.”
Jack fished in the bushes for my boot, which had a few new holes, and then he helped me up. We followed the stranger into his cabin, which screamed bad idea to me, but we were out of options. I was sick enough without letting my arm get infected.
The cabin had one room. An iron stovetop fireplace sat in one corner on a brick step. Pelts littered the floor like carpets, and antlers on the walls held up coats and other guns.
He told us to sit at the table, which only had one chair, while he fished out bandages from a chest at the foot of his bed. Jack pushed me into the chair.
The dog started sniffing around us. Jack knelt on the ground to pet him, and the beast dropped to the ground and rolled onto his back, paws flopping through the air.
The man snorted. “A little love and he eats out of the palm of your hand. Real intimidating, Killer.”
The dog’s ears perked up.
“Aw, you were just protecting your friend, weren’t you?” Jack said, rubbing his hands all over Killer’s belly. “You didn’t mean to hurt Ace, you were being a good boy, yes you were.”
I raised an eyebrow at Jack. He was too wrapped up with the dog to notice.
The man dropped bandages and a bottle on the table. “Jacket off.” He popped open the bottle, releasing the unmistakable scent of alcohol.
I shimmied out of my jacket, and he yanked my arm to start cleaning. There was nothing gentle about it, no warning before he wiped an alcohol-soaked rag over the bleeding wounds.
“So, Ace, want to tell me what you and your friend are really doing out here?” the man asked.
“No.” I hissed when he dabbed a few extra times over my arm.
“We really are lost,” Jack said. Killer’s head was now in his lap. “I can’t explain how we ended up all the way out here, but if you could point us in the direction of town, we’ll be out of your hair in no time.”
“It’s a day’s ride south of here,” the man stated. “But you’ll never make it before the monsters get ya.”
“Monsters?” we repeated.
He wrapped a clean white bandage around my arm. “Don’t know how else to describe them. I been lucky so far, they’ve left me and Killer alone. But they’re scaring off all the game.”
“Do you know how many there are?” Jack asked. He’d gone still on the floor, his face blank.
“I’ve seen at least two, but I haven’t been looking for ‘em.”
“No, don’t. They’re dangerous. Guns don’t work, unless you can shoot inside their mouth,” Jack said.
I glanced at him. So did the man wrapping my arm.
“You should head into town,” Jack went on. “It’ll be safer there.”
“If you know so much about ‘em, why don’t you get rid of ‘em?”
“I didn’t know there were any out here, and I’ve only fought one before. I only beat it because I got lucky.” Jack looked up at us. “Why are you out here in the middle of nowhere anyway?”
“Don’t like people,” the man retorted.
That was fair. A little extreme, I thought, but I could understand it.
“Well, if a demon comes after you, it’ll kill you. It’s only a matter of time,” Jack said.
“You just want a ride to town,” the man spat.
Jack’s intense glare lessened.
The man pulled the ends of the bandage tight and tied it off. “You’re not subtle, boy.”
“Will you take us?” Jack asked.
“Don’t want to,” the man said. He gathered the extra bandages and alcohol and carried them back to the chest.
“But you shouldn’t be out here anyway!” Jack jumped to his feet. Killer jumped up as well.
I rubbed my arm, content to let the two of them battle it out. A ride to town would be nice, that meant I could sleep, but I didn’t see how Jack could win an argument against this man.
“Neither should you.” The man slammed the chest closed.
“We’re trying to leave,” Jack argued. “We’ll walk if we have to. Would you be able to live with yourself if you just let us go? Just let whatever demons are out there come get us?”
“Boy.” The man stepped towards him, wagging his finger. He lowered his finger, mouth twisting in a frown. “Damn you.”
Jack grinned and pulled his shoulders back.
Did...did he just win? Against this angry old man?
“I need some stuff from town anyway,” he muttered. He pulled down an extra flannel shirt and tossed it at me, to replace my ruined jacket. “I’ll take you to town, but that’s it. I’m not doing any other favors for you.”
“That’s fine,” Jack agreed. “This is all we’ll ask of you.”
The man harumphed and started gathering things together.
Jack turned a beaming smile towards me.
I rolled my eyes, but I had to admit he’d done a pretty decent job. We knew how to get to town and we had a ride, however unwilling. Not bad at all.