Mystics 3-Book Collection (21 page)

And then, as if they were in a movie in slow
motion, all the mystics in the town stopped what they were doing
and stared at them. Zoey looked to Tristan and Simon, and waited
for an attack. But instead, the mystics screamed, flailed their
arms in the air, and dashed for cover. It was as though the three
of them were a savage army or a nuclear bomb that was about to
fall. With ear piercing screams the mystics rushed into their homes
and shops, slammed their doors behind them and pulled the curtains
shut.

Soon the town was deserted except for a few
evil-looking mystics who hung back in the shadows.

“So much for the warm welcome I was hoping
for,” said Simon sarcastically.

Zoey looked around. “I thought you said this
place was supposed to be dangerous? By the looks of things, I’d say
that the mystics are more afraid of us than we are of them. What
gives?”

“I don’t know—but not all of them are
afraid.”

Tristan gestured towards the five, giant
humanoids with thick gray, leathery skin and bulging muscles who
had stood their ground. Their metal armor gleamed in the sun, and
they brandished axes, clubs, and sharp swords. Although they looked
ready to do battle, they simply stood still and watched.

“Trolls,” said Tristan. “The trolls of Troll
City. Man, they’re really
big
. I never thought they’d be
this big.”

“I don’t like the way they’re looking at
us,” said Simon in a small voice. “They look hungry. Don’t you
think they look hungry?”

“But why are they just standing there and
staring?” asked Zoey. “It’s like they’re waiting for
something.”

As if on cue, the ground trembled, and
twenty low-riding motorcycles came roaring into the town with a
thunderous rumble. They were green and glistened in the sun like
emeralds. Astride the motorcycles were small tattooed men dressed
in leather. They circled, and the gasoline fumes and heat made Zoey
cough. The motorcycles circled them one last time and then stopped.
They were surrounded.

“What is this? A munchkin invasion?” laughed
Simon. Zoey elbowed him in the ribs.

The bikers were small, but heavily muscled.
Their stone cold expressions meant business. Unlike Simon, Zoey
didn’t underestimate their size.

A man in a green top hat got off his
motorcycle. He was about four feet tall, and his orange hair stuck
out at odd angles from under his hat. He looked like the largest of
his crew. His long green leather coat billowed around him as he
stepped forward, and his black motorcycle boots made puffs of dust
as he walked. He looked to be about forty, but Zoey couldn’t really
tell how old he was because of all the tattoos of black runes on
his skin. He had ten skull-like earrings dangling from his large
ears, and a single ring, like a bull’s, in the middle of his nose.
He smiled with the stained yellow teeth of someone who had never
brushed his teeth.

“Well, well, well,” he said. His voice was
hoarse, and he sounded Irish. “What do we have here? Three little
sheep who have lost their way.”

His gang erupted in mad laughter, like wild
hyenas.

His smiled widened, but his golden brown
eyes were ice cold. “And what brings you here to our humble town,
little sheep.”

Cold sweat trickled down Zoey’s back. The
sound of the motorcycles and the smell of the gas had made her
dizzy. “We’re looking for someone. My—” she faltered, “—my
mother.”

“Your
mother
?” laughed the man. He
turned to his troops, and they all fell into laughter again.

Zoey didn’t like the way he had said
mother,
and she started to wish she hadn’t come.

“What’s his problem,” whispered Tristan,
looking at Zoey.

“Mommy issues,” suggested Simon in a low
voice so that only Zoey and Tristan could hear. “I’ve seen it on
TV—all the bad guys have mommy issues. Trust me.”

The man danced on the spot and clapped his
hands. “Your mother? You think your
mother
is here? In Troll
City? A female agent?”

“Well, I’m not sure if she’s an agent—”

“She’s not sure!” cried the man
hysterically. He took off his hat, raised it in the air, and then
bowed theatrically to his comrades. They applauded.

Zoey started to get angry. It was like being
in a bad sitcom with a
laugh now
sign.

“It’s not funny,” she said loudly, and then,
“Who are you, anyway? I’d like to speak to the person in
charge.”

She swallowed hard.

The man lowered his eyes. “
We
, my
little sheeplings, are leprechauns.”

There was a nasty edge to his voice, “We’re
the law around these parts—and
you
are trespassin’.”

He snapped his fingers. “Frisk them for
their DSM’s.”

Before they could react, ten evil-looking
leprechauns surrounded them and held large daggers to their
throats.

With a cold blade pressed against Zoey’s
skin, she stood still while a leprechaun with a black pirate-patch
over his eye searched her pockets and took her DSM. She winced at
his sour breath. How were they going to get back to the hive
now?

Tristan handed over his DSM calmly, with a
strange smile on his face.

“Hey! Stop that! That’s
mine
!”
screamed Simon as one of the leprechauns searched him and removed
his DSM. “Why don’t you pick on someone your
own
size?”

The leprechaun bared a mouth full of metal
teeth, and Simon jumped behind Tristan. “Well that rules out a
quick escape,” said Simon miserably. “What’s your master plan now,
Zoey?”

Zoey shrugged. “I don’t have one.”

She watched the leader pocket their DSM’s
inside his coat.

“We better come up with something fast,”
whispered Tristan.

Zoey looked at him. She didn’t
have
any kind of plan. She’d been impulsive, and in her foolishness
she’d endangered the lives of her friends. They were trapped—and it
was
her
fault.

“You should have never come here, little
sheeplings,” said the leprechaun leader.

“Why’s that?” said Zoey, feeling more and
more anxious.

The leprechaun leader measured her for a
moment, his expression unsympathetic.

“You’ll soon find out.” He snickered and
snapped his fingers. “Take them away.”

A
lthough they
kicked, screamed, and punched, Zoey and her friends were no match
for the leprechaun gang. They tied Zoey’s hands and feet and draped
her over the back seat of one of the motorcycles as if she were a
sack of potatoes. The motorcycle swayed and bounced as they
traveled, and she feared she was going to be sick. Her head hung
over the edge of the seat so that her face was inches from the back
wheel, and it sprayed sand and debris on her face and into her
mouth. Coughing and spitting, she looked for Tristan and Simon, but
she could only see big black wheels. She prayed they were okay.

She forced her sickness down and cursed
herself for being so foolish. This was her mess, and she alone
should be stuck in it, not Tristan and Simon. It was humiliating
enough to have been defeated by a gang of tattooed leprechauns—the
thought of something bad happening to Tristan made her insides
twist even more. She struggled against her bonds—she needed a
plan.

Suddenly the back end of the motorcycle
started to jerk up and down, and Zoey saw that they were going up a
large staircase. They passed through a large open archway. The bike
straightened, and they raced across gleaming marble floors.

The motorbike fishtailed to a stop, and Zoey
flew off the bike. She skidded on the hard marble floors and burned
the skin on the side of her face. She leaned on her elbows and
looked around.

They were in some sort of massive hotel
ballroom. Marble columns rose on either side, and light spilled
through beautiful stained glass windows. A majestic, golden throne
in the shape of a tall hat sat on a dais at the other end of the
chamber. And on either side of the dais were mountains of
treasure.

Piles of gold and silver coins, diamond
rings, necklaces, jeweled tiaras, diamond watches, gold
candlesticks, and even human-sized golden statues with rubies for
eyes twinkled from every corner of the large chamber. And in the
midst of the gleaming treasures were flat screen televisions,
laptops, cell phones, and tons of electronic devices that Zoey had
never seen before.

It was a robbers’ storage unit, cluttered
with their stolen prizes. An entire wall was stacked to the ceiling
with money that teetered dangerously. A leprechaun in a baseball
cap sat at the base of the wall of money and stuffed dollar bills
into an electric cash counting machine, like the ones she had seen
in gangster movies.

Zoey had never seen so much richness in all
of her life. It was like the treasure of Smaug, the dragon from
The Hobbit
.

But there was something else besides
treasure inside the chamber. A cast-iron cage, the size of a
garage, sat in the middle of the space. What the heck was it doing
there? Maroon stains speckled the floor beneath it, and some of the
bars had been scratched and bent as though something or someone had
tried desperately to get out. Zoey’s blood turned to ice. She hoped
they weren’t going to find out.

Tires screeched, and Tristan and Simon
crashed onto the floor next to her.

Tristan rolled over to Zoey, his eyes wide.
“You okay? Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?”

Zoey sat up painfully.

“No,” she lied, “just my pride. This really
sucks—I’m sorry I dragged you guys into this.”

Tristan gave her a small smile. “Nah, I love
a good adventure. Besides, we’re going to get out of here, I
promise.”

“When we do, remind me to
never
get a
motorbike,” grumbled Simon. He had a nasty bruise on the side of
his left temple. “I’ll never look at a scooter the same way
again.”

Tristan whistled. “Wow, look at all the gold
and diamonds—there must be millions of dollars’ worth of stuff in
here.”

“More like billions,” grumbled Simon.

Zoey looked around. “They look like thieves.
Something tells me that they didn’t work for any of it. What do you
think they’re going to do to us?”

“I don’t know,” said Tristan, “If we could
get our DSM’s back, we could probably make it out of here in one
piece.”

“Is that—is that a
bird
cage?” said
Simon looking worried.

But before they could find out, the rest of
the leprechauns and their bikes exploded into the chamber with a
thunderous roar. They killed their engines, and the leprechaun
leader leapt off his bike and made his way towards the dais. He sat
in the golden throne.

“Put them in the cage,” he said.

Six large leprechauns with punk hairstyles
pulled out large blades and strolled towards Zoey.

“We’re not poultry,” said Simon pretending
to look offended.

“We—” he motioned to himself and the others
with his head, and then spoke very slowly, “are
tee—na—gers
.
And teenagers don’t belong in cages—unless you’re planning on
eating us? You’re not planning on eating us, right? Besides, aren’t
you like
supposed
to slide down rainbows or something?”

“In the cage,” said a bald and tattooed
leprechaun to Simon.

“Don’t make me say it again,” he snarled
through blackened teeth. He poked the tip of his blade into Simon’s
neck, “or I’ll skin you alive, and then feed you to my pets in the
swamp.”

“Pets?” said Simon. “Those things back there
in the swamps are
your
pets? Are you serious?”

“In the cage!” yelled the leprechaun.

“Okay, I’m going.” Simon lifted his shackled
hands in surrender and walked into the cage.

Tristan eyed Zoey with concern—she wasn’t
moving.

Zoey stared at the cage. It looked like
death to her. She couldn’t move.

The bald leprechaun held his blade to her
eye. “In, or I’ll blind you,
Red
.”

“NO!” Zoey stepped back and kicked the
leprechaun with a satisfying crunch.

But then she was hit from behind by
something hard. White light exploded in her vision. She was dragged
across the floor and thrown inside the cage. She heard the loud
bang as the cage’s door closed, and then the tick of a lock.

“Zoey, are you okay?” Tristan kneeled beside
her and cradled her hand.

Zoey blinked and looked up. “I think
so.”

With some effort she grabbed the iron bars
and pulled herself up. “I guess this is what it feels like to be in
jail.”

“Jail?” laughed the leprechaun leader.

He leaned forward in his chair and smiled
maliciously. “No, no, no, my little sheeplings—this is much
worse
than jail. This is
The Cage—
and you three are
on trial.”

Zoey, Simon, and Tristan looked at each
other in shocked silence.

On trial,
thought Zoey.
What the
heck is this place?

But then something occurred to her—if this
was indeed a trial, then they could argue their case. There was
still a chance they could get out of here. She only hoped it didn’t
ruin their chances to find her mother.

Two grumpy-looking leprechauns stood on
either side of their seated leader. She recognized one as the guy
she had kicked. He didn’t appear to be in pain at all, and she
wished she had kicked him harder.

The leprechaun leader raised his arms.

“I think it’s time for some introductions.
I
am Rusty McFearsome,” said the leprechaun proudly, “the
ruler of Troll City, and leader of this magnificent gang.”

“Magnificent, my eye,” whispered Simon.
“More like magnificent
moron
.”