Authors: Alex Flinn
Cloaked (12 page)
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.
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 Victoriana 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.”
“Help me? How?”
“Well, I already did help you once, didn’t I? You’d be dead if I hadn’t shown up.”
That’s true. Suddenly, it seems like a good idea, having Meg along, not being alone.
“It would be cool to have an adventure,” Meg says.
“Tell you what,” I say, knowing that by saying it, I’m agreeing to take her with me. “Next time we get in trouble, we’ll throw the cloak around us and wish like crazy to be in New York.”
She grins. “Deal.”
“Only we have to wish to be someplace specific. Otherwise, we’ll end up in the middle of Fifth Avenue or something.”
“We could wish to be in a theater seat.”
“An
unoccupied
theater seat,” I amend.
“Or, better yet, the top of the Empire State Building.”
I picture myself, clutching the spire like King Kong in the movie. “The observation deck of the Empire State Building.”
“Agreed,” Meg says, “but for now, we should wish to be on the ground, under this tree.”
“Exactly under it, no tricks.”
So I wrap the cloak around both of us, and we wish.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence, and nothing too much.’” I say this to Meg as we trudge down the path to the ranger station. I’d thought about wishing us there, but if Sieglinde heard me talking to Todd, she might be waiting. Besides, it’s a nice day, and I should get the lay of the land, maybe even look for the frog. Of course, in miles of unkempt brush, it will be hard to find him.
“I was wondering when the shoes were going to come in,” Meg says. “I couldn’t believe you’d have a quote without shoes.”
“All the good quotes have shoes,” I assure her. “And Emerson was right. Shoes are important.” I glance at the old Nikes I brought for the trip, then at Meg’s flip-flops. “Yours aren’t so good.”
“‘I still have my feet on the ground,’” she says. “‘I just wear better shoes.’ Oprah Winfrey said that.” But she grimaces. “I
am
getting a blister. Maybe we can pop back home sometime and get my sneakers.”
“Can you manage for now?”
“Yeah. I think I should give you this, though.” She holds out the opal ring. “In case we get separated again.”
So I take it, and we trudge closer to the ranger station. There’s tall grass on all sides of us, and the mangrove odor gets stronger as the path becomes more sand than dirt. The bright heat radiates up, stinging my eyes. I want to fish my sunglasses out of my backpack, but I know Meg has none, so I squint in solidarity. Every few minutes, a large bird blocks the sun, and for an instant, there’s relief before the beating heat returns. There are no clouds.
“Can we sit a minute?” Meg asks after a while.
We amble toward a tree stump and squeeze onto opposite sides of it. While Meg examines her blisters, I watch the sky. It’s the same bright blue as home, but the birds are different. Here, each bird is at least as big as a cat—spoonbills, ibises, herons of different colors, white, pink, blue, and gray, but with the same angular wings and long necks. They remind me of swans. I promised to help the swans find their sister. Right now, I can’t even help myself.
“Do you have a picture of the frog?” Meg asks.
“Sure.” I unzip my backpack and shuffle through it, but the first photo I find isn’t the frog. It’s one of the prince.
“Who’s that?” Meg says.
“That’s the prince, before he was a frog.”
She reaches for the photo. “Wow, he’s hot.”
“You think? He has that birthmark thing on his forehead.” But I can see he’s good-looking, with an athletic build, probably from playing some princely sport like polo.
“I’d kiss him back into princedom anytime,” Meg says.
I find the picture of the frog and stick it on top of the prince photo real quick, before Meg can drool anymore. “Yeah, well, this is what you’re looking for anyway. A frog. Not a guy.”
“Got it.” She examines the picture, then switches it with the other one. “Mind if I keep this one in my backpack for a while? He is soooo hot.”
I shake my head. “Fine. If you like goofy playboys.”
“Guess I do—just like you like rich, drunk princesses.” She tucks the photo into her purse. And then the sun is, once again, clouded by a giant shape. I glance up.
A turkey vulture. I point it out.
Then a rare breeze tickles my nose, bringing with it an odor.
“Do you smell that?” I ask Meg.
She nods. “Mangroves. They smell like an open cesspool, but they’re pretty.”
I shake my head. “Not mangroves. Something’s dead, something big.”
Something makes me stand up and follow the smell off the path and through the grass, even though it slaps my face and scratches my arms. For long moments, it’s lost in the sweeter aroma of the ocean, and I wonder if I’m wrong, if it’s mangroves after all. I hope so because the stench I smelled was bigger than a possum or a squirrel could make. What I smelled could have been human.
But just as I’m about to chalk it up to mangroves, I smell it again. I push through the tall grass, holding my breath against the stink. Then I see it.
I exhale in relief. I go back to Meg.
“It’s just a deer,” I say. Because now that I know what it is, I realize what I’d been worried about. I was afraid it was the prince.
“Who would kill a deer in a deer refuge?” Meg asks. “That’s just wrong.”
Good point. We decide to tell the ranger—if we ever find him.
Going through the razor-sharp grass has left me with stinging cuts on my arms and legs. Meg reaches for my backpack. “Got anything useful in there, like sunglasses or socks or a first-aid kit?”
I nod sheepishly. “I didn’t want to wear the glasses, since you didn’t have any.”
“How about this?” she says, pulling out the glasses. “I’ll wear them, but I’ll do something about your cuts.”
When Meg says that, I remember the swan. She held it, and he got better. Did Meg heal him, somehow? Does she have witch skills after all? But she pulls out the first-aid kit, swabs the cuts with Neosporin, then covers them with Band-Aids. They feel a little better, but not healed. Okay, I’m just crazy. Meg puts a Band-Aid on her own blister too.
Soon, we see people, hikers and beachgoers. Then, we reach the ranger station.