A Highland Sorcery Christmas

  Alexander shivered beneath the cold slide of water.

  The rain slanted into the long sinkhole in icicle shards, carrying the scent of wet monster from above.

  His clothes were drenched, fingers wrinkled with moisture, hair flattened, the wet ends dripping in his eyes.

  The beast above was busy, systematically scraping at the stone, bone grinding on rocky walls. Hope it broke its stupid claws.

  He tucked his neck in, burying his face from the clumps of wall falling on him, and clenched his numbing hands, fighting the twist of fear tugging his belly. What if the monster was able to widen the hole and get to him?

  Alexander pushed against the slippery walls. He just wanted out of here. He wanted his dad to come find him. The pointy indent of the rock pressed harder into his stomach, rasping along the lowest bone in his ribcage. Alexander sucked in a gasp and quit moving.

  His dangling feet swished in water below. Wha…?

  His feet were freezing, wet. He could barely feel them. He kicked his feet again, felt and heard the splash. They were definitely in a pool of water.

  Goosebumps rose at the back of his neck at what that meant.

  That guy was down there.

  Under water.

  He hadn’t heard from him for a while, had thought he’d passed out. It was too dark to see anything below.

  “Hey! Hey!” He kicked out again and stretched the toes of his shoeless foot, trying to feel the guy.

  Above him, the monster thrashed. The scraping noise increased.

  “Wake up!”

  Crap! This wasn’t happening. The guy, okay, probably his uncle, couldn’t even hear him. How long had the water been rising? His uncle was going to drown! And the water would keep coming.

  Clumps of rocky wall and muddy rainwater fell over him. He couldn’t let the guy drown. He had to do something, get down there now.

  Bracing his hands and feet along the wall, he tried to ease up, sucking in his stomach.

  It hurt. It hurt so bad.

  He twisted to break free, but he was wedged in tight between the stone, held in place because of a stupid outcrop of stone that happened to catch on his rib.

  But his uncle was drowning. The monster’s heavy exhalations picked up in tempo.

  Alexander pressed his hands harder against the cold wall and shifted up, less than an inch. His bone scraped and he twisted away more. The catch of pain reverberated through his body. He grit his teeth. His arms shook with the effort of holding his weight up and pushing his ribs off of that stupid stupid rock.

  He twisted enough that he had enough room to slide lower, somehow get his torso past the poking rock. At least his ribs were clear, barely, if not his skin. But the guy was under water. He couldn’t not do anything. Bracing, sucking in his stomach as hard as he could, he shifted away, twisting. The rock scraped and tore open his skin.

  Alexander sobbed out a breath and lowered some more, cutting himself some more as he lowered, ripping more of his skin like a knife through paper, angling up into the dragging neck of his T-shirt. He was almost free of the protrusion, low enough it was at his throat, no longer pressing into his skin.

  He stopped, panting. His arms shook now that they were the only thing holding him up. Even with the rain making the walls slippery, he could probably climb out of her if the monster wasn’t in his way.

  But he couldn’t leave the man anyway. Shakily, he edged his way downward, craning his head back away from the gouging finger of stone, sucked in a gasp when his legs, then hips entered the cold water. He lowered more until he ran into a body and dropped onto his uncle’s awkwardly bent legs, fitting himself into the circle of hunched shoulders, bumping past a head and hair floating, face angled downward. .

  The sinkhole was just a bit wider below the guy’s shoulders, yet it narrowed again beneath his hips where his uncle had come to rest. Alexander pretty much sat on his uncle’s lap, the waterline came up to his shoulders, though it was rising. He quickly lifted uncle’s head, fingers rubbing over a lump of roughened skin at his forehead.

  He pulled, trying to drag the shapeshifter’s face up out of the water. It was barely inches beneath the rising water.

  “Come on!” He pulled him by the shoulders to bring his entire body up. One shoulder lifted, but the other shoulder wasn’t budging, like it was tied onto something holding it down.

  Following along the arm with his hands, Alexander dipped his head under the water again to reach it. His uncle’s elbow was jammed between some kind of crack in the wall.

  He tugged. Not budging.

  He followed the arm to the fingers bobbing in the water. They were swollen, bloated from lack of blood flow.

  He lifted his head back out from beneath the freezing water.

  He couldn’t get the guy’s arm out on his own, couldn’t get his uncle’s face above the water.

  He probably already wasn’t breathing, was probably already dead. He was down here with a dead guy and a monster that wanted to eat his head off.

  A hard shiver shook him.

  No. He had to do something.

  The rain water wasn’t pooling the entire time they’d been down here. Only for the last little while.

  Alexander went under again, curling over as much as he could in the tight space and felt frantically beneath his uncle’s twisted limbs.

  It felt like the bottom of a lake, sediment moving around his fingers, large slices of the wall the ugly monster had been dropping over them.

  Lungs tightening from lack of air, Alexander dug through the hard debris, feeling mostly stone beneath, the narrowing of the hole which had initially stopped the shapeshifter from falling all the way through to the ocean. Or however far the sinkhole went. Maybe the rainwater had already hit the bottom and it would just keep rising.

  The sinkhole did open beyond this, he hoped, or had he only thought it did from what the twins had said.

  He dug faster, pushing rocky debris away. It had to be clogged up somewhere. It had to.

  Pulling up on a gasp, he almost choked down water. It was continuing to rise. Taking another long breath, he went back at it.

  He was so numb he could barely feel what he was doing, but he kept sweeping the sand, pulling at anything that moved. A large slice of stone shifted. Grabbing it with both hands, he pulled. It didn’t come free, perhaps was part of the wall. He wiggled it back and forth, wishing he could see if what he was doing even made a difference, and then it happened.

  He felt the gushing of water swirling past him, draining.

  Feeling around, he found the small hole, a sheared off piece of the wall still partway stuck in it. He wiggled it loose and finally got it all the way unstuck.

  He moved more rocks away, clearing the baseball sized hole and lifted his head back out of the water and grabbed his uncle’s head, holding his face up, keeping his fingers close to his mouth so he could feel the second the water was away.

  He’d been under a long time. He hoped he wasn’t too late.