“Meg!”
“Yeah, dummy. It’s me.”
“But how’d you get here?” Even as I say it, relief washes over me.
“The ring I gave you, the opal ring. It’s magical.”
“Magical?” At one time, this would have surprised me. Not now.
“My grandmother on the Murphy side was a witch. She’s the one who gave me the ring. She used to make me carry it when I was little. She told me, ‘If you get lost, Meggie girl, just put it on your finger.’ Its power is that it makes the person who gave it to you come wherever you are.”
“But you don’t have any powers? I was hoping maybe you could get me out of here, or at least make some light so I can escape. Some guy named Siegfried’s coming to kill me.”
“So you said.” I hear movement, like she’s rummaging in her purse. “I can’t get you out with magic, but I do have this.” Her face is illuminated by a tiny flashlight, the kind you attach to your keys. “Lucky I was holding my purse when you put on the ring.”
“Not so lucky. You’re stuck with me because I put on the ring when I was trapped.”
She shrugs. “It has some glitches, I guess. But we shouldn’t waste time talking about that. We need to find a way out. Where are we anyway?”
“Zalkenbourg. It’s in Europe, I guess. A witch tricked me into using my magic cloak to bring her here.”
“Sorry I asked.” She shines the flashlight. It’s barely enough of a glow to illuminate a foot of wall, but it does its job. The floor is dirt, the walls of concrete. Shiny black bugs scurry away. No door. Meg slides the light to the ceiling.
Jackpot.
A trapdoor. I rush over to it, but even when I stand on my toes, it’s too high, almost a foot above my head.
“Maybe if you get on my back, you could reach it,” I say.
“But how would you get out?”
“You could go get help.” Even as I say it, I know I’m lying. We’re in a country I can’t even spell, much less speak the language. But I know they’re not looking for Meg. She wasn’t the one who decided to risk her life for this stupid quest. She also wasn’t the one who let the witch use her cloak. So she shouldn’t get killed by Siegfried for my mistakes.
I crouch low so she can climb on my back. When she’s up, I shine the flashlight onto the trapdoor and walk, piggybacking her. She pushes it and, to my surprise, it gives.
“Can you make it?” I ask as something scurries across my foot.
She reaches up. “I think so. But wait a sec.”
“What?”
“Give me my ring back.”
If that doesn’t beat all. She’s leaving me here, to die in Europe, and she wants to make sure I don’t take her ring with me. But I say, “Sure. I guess it’s an heirloom, right?”
“It does come in handy sometimes.”
I tug it off my finger and hand it up to her. “Hurry. You’re getting heavy.”
She takes it, then straightens herself on my shoulders to reach the door. I try to hold the light steady, though my hand is shaking and my back aches. Finally, Meg pushes up the trapdoor. She looks out, and I feel air. Real outside air, filling my lungs. I breathe in deep.
“Middle of nowhere,” Meg says, looking out.
“Can you get up?” I turn off the flashlight, but there’s still some light from the full moon, peering out through tall pines.
“I think so.” She swings first one, then the other elbow onto the ground above, then pulls herself up. “Dirt. And pine needles. We’re outside.”
“At least you are.”
She steps on my shoulder.
“Ouch!” I say as her foot lands on my cheek.
“Sorry.” The foot comes back down onto my shoulder. Meg pushes herself out. “Made it. Now you.”
“Huh?”
She reaches down for me. “I’ll pull you out.”
I draw in a hard breath. I should have known Meg wouldn’t ditch me here. But when I reach up so she can pull me out, she starts to backslide into the hole. I let go. “Get farther back, maybe.”
The next time, I slip from her grip and onto the floor. A cockroach or beetle or some kind of Zalkenbourgian bug skitters across my hand. It’s huge, and it makes me think of Siegfried, coming here, maybe soon. Sieglinde had the cloak after all. She only had to find him and bring him back. If he gets here and sees Meg, she’ll be dead meat too.
I make a decision. “You should go.”
“And leave you here? I don’t think so.”
“I’m the one who got into this mess. You shouldn’t pay for it.”
“But maybe I could—”
I don’t stand up. “Look, I’ve got a plan. When they get here, they’ll have the cloak, a magic cloak that transports you wherever you want to go. Now that I’ve got your flashlight, I’ll be able to see them. I’ll sneak up in the dark, turn on the light, and grab the cloak. So I’ll wish to be someplace impossible to guess, like the football stadium, and then I’ll be there. I’ll hide out a while. They’ll never find me.”
“Oookayy.” I can tell she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t get it about the cloak. “Look, I’ll find someone who speaks English, and I’ll bring them back for you.”
“Okay.” I think how unlikely this is, if the witch is working for the king. But I say, “You need to leave now. Please, Meg, don’t let me be responsible for you getting hurt.”
“I’ll find someone.”
“You’ve got a credit card in your purse, right? For emergencies? You can buy a ticket home. And then, you can tell my mother what happened to me, so she won’t wonder like with my dad.”
She draws in a breath. “Oh, Johnny.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’ll get back somehow.”
I think I hear a sniff. “I don’t know.”
“I do.” I make a decision. I look away from Meg’s moonlit face. Before I chicken out, I say, “Go away, Meg. They could be back any second, without warning. Just shut the door behind you so they won’t know you were here. I’m not talking anymore.”
I walk away, and a minute later, I hear the trapdoor thump closed.
I’m alone again, in the dark, and now it’s worse because Meg was here and now she isn’t. There’s nothing to do but think about dying. You don’t usually think about that. I mean, everyone knows they’re going to die eventually. But not any time soon. The most enormous bug so far walks across my hand. I don’t do anything. What does it matter?
Chapter 25
We shouldn’t have worried about Sieglinde catching us. She takes a long time, long enough for me to sit in the corner in the dark, thinking about all the things I’ve never done: I’ve never been on a sports team at school. I’ve never traveled to another country, not even Canada. I’ve never been in love.
I think of Meg in some dark, unknown countryside. All I know is, there were pine trees, lots of them. Lots of needles on the ground too, probably. Was she wearing shoes? Amazingly, I didn’t even notice. I hope she had on sneakers, but I bet she was wearing flip-flops. Sometimes, shoes can make the difference between life and death.
Why didn’t I loan Meg my shoes?
I don’t want Meg to die. I want her to tell my mother what happened, so my mother won’t spend the rest of her life looking for me.
She will anyway.
Then, I hear voices.
“Is dark in here,” a man’s voice says. “Did you bring a candle?”
“No.” Sieglinde’s voice. “He vill not be hard to find, though.”
“Ve could go back and get vun.”
“No! Do you not ever vant to finish this? I begin to think you lost him on purpose!”
“No, Mama, I did not. He—”
“Enough excuses!”
Their voices are getting closer. I’ve been standing in the corner, but now, I slide my shoes off and take one silent step closer. I still have Meg’s flashlight in my hand.
“Vere is he?” Siegfried’s voice is a whisper.
Just
then, I feel a piece of fabric against my leg. It’s soft, fuzzy, like velvet. The cloak!
Leaning away from the voices, I crouch and try to grab it.
“Here he is!” Sieglinde screams.
I tug at the cloak, but I can’t budge it. Someone’s holding the other side, or standing on it. Still, I don’t let go. It’s my only lifeline, my only hope.
An arm slides around my neck. It’s strong, and I know it must be Siegfried’s, though it’s slimmer than I thought it would be. Still, I don’t let go of the cloak. I think about what Sieglinde said about Siegfried losing me on purpose. Maybe if I struggle, he’ll let me go. I start to squirm, pulling the cloak.
The arm clamps more tightly around my throat.
“I must not let you get avay this time!” Siegfried whispers.
I have an idea. I relax, stop fighting, though I still grip the cloak’s tail in one hand. With the other, I hold up Meg’s flashlight.
When I stop struggling, Siegfried relaxes also.
“Vill you surrender?” he whispers.
“Never!” I shine the light in his eyes. This causes him, blinded, to loose his grip on me. But only for a second. I run at Sieglinde, who’s holding the other end of the cloak. I end up on my back with a high-heel on my chest.
“Stop! Ve haf decided ve do not vant to kill you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe vat you vill. But if you give us vat ve vant, ve vill let you go. If ve kill you, she vill only find some other stupid, lovesick boy to do her bidding. You must tell her that you haf seen the Frog Prince, that ve haf him.”
“What? Do you have him?”
“That does not matter. Tell her that he is in grave danger and that she must marry Prince Volfgang if she vants to see her brother ever again. That is vat you must do.”
“I can’t do that.”
I give the cloak a mighty tug. Siegfried’s grip is back on my throat. It tightens, and I feel myself passing out, maybe dying.
And then, all of a sudden, I’m bathed in light.
Chapter 26
I’m dead. That’s the only explanation. I’m dead and in heaven. The grass below me is soft and sweet smelling, not pine needles or dirt. The light is a full moon, peering through gently waving tree branches, and reflected off a babbling river. A girl leans over me, stroking my hair.
“Johnny!” She collapses against me, and I feel her tears on my cheek. “Johnny!”
She knows my name. “Are you an angel?” This could work.
“Hardly.”
And then, I see the girl’s short, not-very-angelic hair, and I realize it’s Meg. Meg saved me. I glance around, looking for Sieglinde and Siegfried, but they’re not here. I see the shape of a farmhouse and a silo in the distance.
“How’d I get here?”
“The ring, silly.”
“The ring?”
“If you give it to someone, and they put it on, it brings you to them. The giving is part of the magic.”
I remember my anger when Meg asked for the ring back. But she had known all along she could use it to save me.
“So where are we now?” I ask. My throat still hurts from where Siegfried choked me.
Meg thinks. “I can run a mile in about eight minutes. But I think I was running faster than usual today. So we’re probably about a mile and a half from where we were. We should get moving.”
I glance down at her feet. Bare. She’s holding her flip-flops in her hand. How did she run a mile in bare feet?
“We’d better start walking, but why don’t you put my shoes on?” I say, even though I have no idea how we’re going to get anywhere. We’re in a strange country, no passports, no maps. We don’t speak the language.
I begin to stand, but as I do, I feel something tugging.
“But then again,” I say, “maybe we don’t have to walk.”
Because what I feel tugging is the cloak. I must have had a good grip on it when Meg brought me here, to get it away from Sieglinde.
Quickly, I wrap the cloak around Meg and me. Almost as quickly, I hear voices, dogs barking, even horses’ hooves. They’re closing in. They’ve found us.
“I wish I was in the National Key Deer Refuge on Big Pine Key.”
And then, we are.
“What just happened?” Meg asks.
I blink in the light around me. It’s not moonlight anymore. We’re not in Zalkenbourg or even Europe. We’ve traveled halfway around the world like Mark Twain’s lie, and judging from the position of the sun in the sky, I’d guess it’s high noon in Florida.
“Magic.” I pull the cloak off my shoulders. “Victoriana gave me a magic cloak. I wished to be in the National Key Deer Refuge, and now, here we are.”
“Did you wish to be here?” Meg gestures downward.
Yes, downward. We’re up in a tree. A royal poinciana, by the looks of it, which is a good thing because it’s a big tree with lots of fluffy orange flowers to hide us, but a bad thing because we’re forty feet up. Something buzzes over my head. I look up and see that it’s actually a buzzard. It turns and starts to swoop again. I flail my arms. “Hey! We’re not dead!”
“Not yet.” Meg looks down. “How do we get back to the ground?”
“Wish again.” But then I think of something. Norina—Sieglinde—was around the corner when I talked to the fox. At the time, I assumed she couldn’t understand his words, so she wouldn’t know where I was going. That was before I knew Norina was a witch, though. What if she did understand the fox? “We should make sure we’re not being followed first.”
“Wait here, you mean? Up here?”
“Just a few minutes. That way, if someone’s chasing us, they might not see us up here, but we could see them.”
As Meg thinks about this, a swarm of blue butterflies rises up from some red flowers and flies across our noses. “Okay. It’s really pretty up here.” Her brown eyes scan the horizon of bright sky and emerald wilderness. “Besides, we can talk.”
“Talk?” Suddenly, the sun seems too hot for sitting. “Talk about what?”
The buzzard makes another loop. I make a grab for Meg.
“Ohhh, I don’t know.” Meg shifts closer on the branch we’re now sharing. “Maybe you can tell me why you lied about where you were going.”
This is what I was afraid of. I search for a good excuse.
Found one. “I couldn’t tell you. Princess Victoriana swore me to secrecy.” But now that the secret’s out, I tell Meg about the Frog Prince, Victoriana looking for her brother, the magic earbuds, the fox, and the golden bird. “She’s worried about the press.”
“And you thought I, your best friend, would sell you out to Inside Edition?”
Okay, not such a good excuse after all.
“Of course not. But I just told her I wouldn’t tell anyone. Besides, I knew you wouldn’t approve.”
“Why wouldn’t I approve?”
Because, of course, I didn’t tell her the whole story. Meg doesn’t know the part about Princess Victoriana saying she’d marry me if I found her brother.
“Because you don’t like Victoriana.” Which is true also.
Meg shrugs. “Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know. She offered me money. And the adventure, I guess.”
“You enjoy being chased by witches?”
“Until last week, I didn’t know there were witches, or enchanted foxes or talking swans. You never told me that your grandmother was a witch,” I add pointedly. “Today, I was in another country. Okay, I was only there an hour and I was trapped in a dungeon, but still. Every day I work in the hotel, and I see people from all over. Some of them are from boring places, and they travel around selling rope or bowling balls. But at least they’ve been to those places. I never go anywhere but school, the hotel, and if I’m lucky, the beach.”
“I go to those places too.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been to New York at least. I’ve never been farther than Disney World. So when Vic
toriana made me this offer, I figured it would be an opportunity to see things I’d never seen before—which is just about everything.”
A hot breeze ripples across the branches. I decide to look around. Below is a canopy of green with blue stretching out in the distance. I inhale the fishy odor of mangroves. The branches shake, almost like a child shivering. I look down, afraid of falling.
Below, I see a deer, nosing through the underbrush. I’ve never seen a deer before, except in the zoo. This one is smaller than those deer, about the size of a Labrador. “Look.”
Meg nods. “It’s a Key deer. They’re an endangered species.”
The deer raises her head, maybe sensing us, and sniffs the air. Then she turns and, without further dawdling, disappears into the underbrush. I sigh. “At least, I saw that one.”
We sit, silent, the comfortable way only good friends can sit. Meg’s breathing and mine and the rustling of leaves below us all blend into one song. Other than that, there’s silence. I can see the Overseas Highway in the distance, but I can’t hear the cars. Only air and birds and Meg, leaning close to rest her arm against mine.
Finally, Meg says, “We could go to New York, you know. We could go wherever you want, Europe, anywhere. We wouldn’t even need a passport with that cloak.”
I don’t know if she’s trying to be sympathetic or if she wants to keep me away from my mission of finding the frog, away from Victoriana. Either way, I shake my head. “I should probably get back to work. I don’t think Sieglinde and Siegfried are here. Maybe they have to use commercial airlines to get back. That would explain why Sieglinde tricked me into using the cloak to get to Zalkenbourg.”
“My witch grandmother couldn’t travel magically. She didn’t even have a broom.”
Good to know. “So maybe I have a day or two before they catch up with me. I’ll take you back with the cloak, but then, I need to get started.”
Meg’s lips twitch. “You want to dump me off at the hotel?”
“Sure. What else? You’ve got work and stuff.”
“I guess.” She looks up, squinting in the sunlight. “I was just thinking maybe I could help you. This summer’s been pretty boring for me too.”