Jeremy Chikalto and the Demon Trace (Book III of The Hazy Souls) (17 page)

Maren and Jeremy sat on a vine bench for a
time in silence. People milled about, finding ways to hoard oasis
juice in their caves.

“
The Dodgkin boys are
trying to get me to make some of the rooms near the oasis into
meadows. I think I will.”

Jeremy smiled and walked with her back to
their improved dwelling on the outskirts of the main cavern.
“You've given people hope, and you've made something dismal into
something lovely.” He kissed her hand. “But don't wander too far.
You and I both know the Maze isn't all flowers and warm
feelings.”

“Yeah,” she said, laying down on the moss.
“Right. Going to try to find Lyrna again?”

“Yup.”

The surface world had grown hotter still,
and the air smelled like smoke and burnt matter. Wild fires were
everywhere, and every building was in rubble or close to it. The
sun over the Donegall Estate had all but bleached out the colors of
the world. The trees, the hedges surrounding the property were no
more, and a sickness collected in the pit of Jeremy's stomach as he
considered his own castle and everything that once was in the
Farmoore Galaxy. Then Lyrna appeared beside him and interrupted his
reverie. She wove herself around his legs in a figure eight pattern
and purred loudly.

“Lyrna!” Jeremy scratched behind her ear.
“It's about time!” He kissed her fluffy cheek.

“Mew!” she began to purr.

He scooped her up.

“We're down here.” He made for the hot
spring. Lyrna pushed against his chest with her paws, sticking her
claws through his shirt. “No,” she said.

“We're all down there. Maren's down
there.”

“Talk here.”

“Why are the spirit
animals attacking people?” The sun and moon flew by again, then
again. Jeremy winced as the claws pushed in deeper. “Ow!
Hey
—
will you
attack our friends if you go into the Maze?”

Lyrna meowed sadly.

“Okay, tell me everything you know.”

Lyrna nodded and unravelled some truth.

Chapter 34

A Hard Truth

Jeremy closed his eyes and
meditated. Now he was above himself, looking down. One breath
lasted a long time. He looked at the tangled root wall. He was
looking at himself. Time doesn't matter;
But it's time,
a little voice said
to him in the back of his mind. Jeremy breathed in and slowly came
to.

Jeremy had taken a short
pit stop to an uninhabited corner of the root jungle. No torch
light touched this corner. His mind swarmed with all possible
directions and their consequences. What he'd learned from
Lyrna
—
he couldn't
bring himself to tell Maren
—
not yet.

Chapter 35

Shadow

Jeremy and Maren slept on their bed of moss,
their limbs entangled. There was a commotion outside their hut.
Maren shook Jeremy awake.

“Yeah? Oh.” He heard the noise.

Together, they parted the vine fringe that
was their door and walked outside. A dozen or so people were
gathered in the meeting area, talking in low voices.

Mateo was sitting on a bench, and jolted up
and shuffled over to Maren.

“What's up?” she asked.

“Some of the kids just came in from the
meadows. Said they heard a strange sound. Ren went to investigate.
I told him to wait, but these people don't understand the dangers
of this place.”

Maren drummed her fingers on her arm. “He
shouldn't have gone out, you're right.”

“Oh, Ms. Maren!” A young boy of seven years
ran to her and flapped his arms excitedly. “A noise like a growl,
like a big hiss, but a shadow too!”

“You did not see a shadow!” said the other
boy, yanking the other's sleeve.

“I did!”

“Well then how come I didn't see it?”

“Because you were running and I looked
back.”

“Okay,” said Maren. “And where was the
shadow?”

“It was by the door, on the wall, but there
wasn't anything to give it a shadow!”

The crowd started to panic a little. Wantoro
knew what to do.

“Everyone just calm down,” he boomed.
“You've seen what my son can do, he will protect us. Look, just
like in the forest on the surface, there are some wild animals down
here. But as long as we stay together, they won't even bother us.
Nobody should be out wandering alone, especially children. And we
should post a continuous watch. I'll take the first shift. Everyone
just go back in your shelters, and go back to sleep. When everyone
wakes up, we should all talk about more organization around here.”
Wantoro crossed his arms, and people began to walk back to their
huts. But then a howl came out of the root jungle, and ended in a
growl. The torches went out.

In the sudden blackness,
the children began to scream. Maren gasped and felt around her for
Jeremy. “Jeremy?” she called out. Her feet found the entryway back
into her cave and she waited there for a second. “Jeremy!”
He's gone out to find the beast.

Maren wandered down the root hall towards
the ladder to the oasis room. She reached the vine lattice and
scaled it quickly. The pool was just in front of her.

Another howl echoed around the root
jungle.

She heard Mateo and Wantoro shouting for her
at the bottom. She continued to run through the darkness, around
the oasis. She reached the door on the other side, groped around
for the handle, and flung it open. There was the meadow she just
grew, and she could feel the new moss under her toes in the
darkness. The beast howled again from behind the door on the other
end of the meadow room. Then the door swung open and a blue light
blinded her.

“Maren!” It was Jeremy. “What are you doing?
Are you insane?” He closed the door behind him, but something
caught it.

“Behind you!” she cried.

A massive brown paw had stopped the door,
and Jeremy brought his light down. The paw was clawing at the moss
at the base of the door.

“Don't hurt it!” yelled Maren.

Jeremy electrified his body and formed thick
blue plates of armor around himself. “Demon,” he said in a flat
voice, and a demon shimmered next to him, darkness bending around
it.

“Jeremy! I have to give it something.”

The beast nudged the door open and poked a
snout into the meadow room. It came into Jeremy's light, and had
the face of a lion, and the face of a bull coming from the lion's
cheek. Jeremy held his demon at bay while Maren ripped some moss
from off the stone floor. She crept towards the beast, and offered
the moss to the bull's mouth, and it snorted. The lion's face
licked its lips, and snatched the moss from Maren's hand, narrowly
missing her fingers. Jeremy's shield enveloped Maren in an
instant.

“That demon isn't necessary,” said Maren.
Jeremy reluctantly banished it.

The beast then sauntered into the room past
Jeremy's energy display and began rolling around in the moss. It
seemed to savor every caress of the moss on its back, and then
resumed snacking.

Jeremy and Maren started to walk back to the
oasis. They opened the door and found Wantoro, Mateo, and Tina on
the other side.

“Everything all right?” said Mateo between
breaths.

“The torches are back on,” said Tina.

“Yep. Take a look at that pussycat.” Jeremy
sighed, and turned back to see the beast, but it had gone away.

“Did you see it?” asked Tina, taking the
moment to dramatically grasp Jeremy's lapel. “I want some action,
I'm getting bored. But that was exciting, right?”

“So can I turn off the alarm bells?” asked
Wantoro, his eyes landing first on Jeremy, then on Maren.

“Yes,” said Maren. “The beast is tame. It
was just hungry for moss. I think it's an herbivore. Tell everyone
they can rest in peace.”

Mateo hesitated. “I don't like it coming so
close to the oasis, dear. Really think it was just after the
moss?”

“Yeah,” said Maren, looking back to where
the beast had disappeared. “I'll just make another room for it, try
to lead it away. But really, there's nothing to worry about.”

Wantoro and Mateo grumbled to one another in
some sort of parental understanding and then went back to the root
network.

“If it's okay, I'd like to come with,” said
Tina. “I think I must be like, an adrenaline junkie!”

“More like a Jeremy junkie,” mumbled Maren.
“Yeah sure, come along.”

Chapter 36

Red

“That'll do, ladies.” Jeremy lay on his back
in the third room that Maren had mossed. Somehow the light from the
torches brightened with the plants present. “Time to go back.” He
pointed to the door that they'd come from.

Maren slumped onto the moss. “Like a warm
day in June, isn't it?” She lay beside Jeremy.

Tina began to dance by herself, twirling
with her arms raised up.

Maren sat up on her elbows. “What was that?”
All around them the moss was trembling slightly. Then there was a
high-pitched sound coming from the moss, like a little whine.

“Something's not right,” said Maren.

Jeremy sighed and got up. “Never should've
let my guard down in Mantel's Maze.”

They covered their tracks and passed through
three uneventful rooms. As they reached the meadow room right
before the oasis, Maren broke into a light jog. She passed through
the door, circled around the oasis, and then went into the hole
that led to the root network. A second later she gasped and clawed
her way back up the root lattice. “Move! Move!”

“What?” Jeremy reached down for her and
pulled her up, and then he heard a scuttling noise from the
hole.

“There's a...!” Maren shook her head, and
started to whimper. “Oh God!”

Jeremy took a deep breath and then expanded
his energy to form a blue globe around Maren and Tina. “Okay,” he
said. “I'm going down. I'll keep this shield up, but don't move or
I might lose you.”

“What!” cried Tina. “What is it!” She yelled
at Maren, her voice taking on a new pitch. “Our parents are down
there!” Her eyes began to well up.

Jeremy hovered down the passageway into the
root network, and his pants caught on a white sticky piece of
cotton halfway down the lattice. A web. He heard scuttling in the
roots and a dripping sound, and hurried to the bottom, tearing his
pants on the web.

An enormous black spider-like creature
emerged ten feet away from behind a wall of roots. Its mandibles
were the size of machetes, and all around its face were great white
whiskers, shiny and thick like snakes. It skittered towards him on
hairy legs and spoke in a shrill voice: “True and just are His
judgments. Blood eternal will stain all the oceans. It flows!”

Jeremy looked above the spider, and a sac
was swinging from the ceiling high above, held up by a single
thread. The head of his father hung down, his eyes open, and blood
poured forth from his mouth.

“Dad!” Jeremy flew up to him, severing his
protective shield from Maren and Tina. He encased his captive
father in a blue aura and pulled at the silk binding him, but it
would not give. He blasted the thread hanging from the ceiling, but
it would not tear.

He looked down on the spider. “What have you
done?” He held his palm up and the spider bent its legs. Jeremy
sent a large blast at the spider's eight eyes, but it leapt back
into the roots and disappeared. “Tell me what you've done!” yelled
Jeremy. The spider was above him, scuttling up some vines towards a
dark patch on the ceiling.

Jeremy flew twenty feet up. He felt a slight
wind. There were four silken ropes coming towards him from all
directions, and he reflexively pushed his shield out, but the ropes
went right through. In the nick of time, he dropped altitude, and
the ropes intertwined in a bundle where he used to be. The ropes
were pulled taut, and giant spiders emerged from hollows in nearby
root pillars, shimmying down towards him on the ropes, hanging
upside down.

The webs were clearly impervious to his
powers, but maybe the bodies weren't. Jeremy flew back up the root
lattice to the oasis room. “Maren! Tina!” They were gone. He heard
a wet hissing right behind him, and he turned to see mandibles
poking through the entrance, chomping inches from his face. A
snake-whisker lunged at him, snapping taut. Now the legs of the
spider were coming through. Jeremy ducked to the side and dodged
the hairy, partitioned leg that was coming at him. He darted along
the side wall of the oasis room, as more legs came through. The
abdomen was too big.

When he was close to the
door on the other side, he held out both hands and fired a series
of small blasts towards the spider in a horizontal wave.
One of them will hit.
And sure enough it did, right on the left mandible, which
broke in half. The spider shrieked and lunged at Jeremy breaking
the stone wall apart and widening the entrance to the oasis. It
landed right in the pool, and sank to the bottom.

Jeremy opened the door and closed it behind
him. He was in a meadow room. It was empty. Then he noticed that
the moss ramped up a few feet towards the left corner.

“Maren, Tina,” he whispered. The moss in the
corner shook, and Maren and Tina stood up.

“It was pretty cozy in there,” said Tina,
making a kissy face at Maren. But there were tears in her eyes.

Maren ran to Jeremy, and looked at his face.
“Are you okay?”

There was a crash at the wooden door. Jeremy
braced his back against it.

“Run away,” said Jeremy, and there was
another crash against the door.

“No,” said Tina.