Witch and Wizard - James Patterson [20]
The days passed—and there were tests, tests, TESTS. Medical tests, physical-strength tests, intelligence tests, “normality” tests, patriotism tests, more medical tests.
One particular night, when I was barely awake and suffering absolutely horrendous hunger pains, they grabbed Whit from our cell and took him away.
“You can’t!” I screamed. “It’s not his time yet! I’ve been counting! It’s not time! He’s not eighteen!”
But the next thing I knew, the Matron was dragging me out of the room too, then pushing me down a long hall to a lone window.
She pointed outside, to a cement courtyard below. She was singsonging under her foul breath, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Whit… happy death day to you.”
My blood froze and my heart nearly stopped beating. In the courtyard was an old-fashioned gallows.
She continued into the second verse: “How dead are you now? How dead are you now?” and then broke into a hideous donkey bray.
A few seconds later, a troop of guards pushed Whit ahead of them out into the courtyard. His hands and feet were in cuffs, which made him stumble-walk.
I tried to swallow but couldn’t as I watched a guard put a black hood over Whit’s head.
“No!” I shouted, pounding my fists against the glass. “No!” I pounded again, and blinked, and then suddenly…
I was falling.
Chapter 33
Wisty
THUNK! GASPING AND BLINKING, I looked around the claustrophobic jail cell, adrenaline already zapping my brain awake.
I saw Whit blinking in sleepy surprise. Then he sat up and stared hard at me. At that moment I realized my butt and back were aching, and it all came together.
I had been floating in my sleep. The nightmare about the gallows had woken me up, and I had woken… in midair.
Unfortunately, my bony little butt was not designed for crashing into a hard floor from a height of, oh, maybe four feet?
“Uh, Wisty,” Whit said, “you were floating. Up in the air.”
I just looked at him, so, so happy that he was alive, and here, not hanged.
Still shaken from the horrible dream, I felt cold sweat drying on the back of my neck. I looked above me as if I might see the wires and pulleys that had made it possible for me to float. There was nothing.
“Floating,” repeated Whit, sounding amazed, “in your sleep. And they think we don’t have any special powers in here.”
I wanted to deny it, but here I was, with a sore backside, and I had definitely felt myself dropping through the air. I got to my feet, standing in the space I’d been, um, floating in.
Experimentally, I waved my useless drumstick around. Nothing happened.
“My sister, the witch.” Whit laughed. “Why can’t you conjure up a double cheeseburger or something useful? A jumbo ice-cream sundae? A stun gun?”
I sighed and went to sit next to him on the mattress. “You’re laughing, Whit, but… this whole witch-and-wizard thing. The flames. The glowing. The gavel-stopping. Now the floating. I think we really are… magic.”
It felt like I was saying, “I guess I really am a supermodel.”
“That’s right, Detective Allgood,” Whit said. “And now we have to figure out how to focus our inner sorcerers to get us out of this dump.”
“Okay,” I said, tapping my drumstick gently on the floor. It was only a stupid drumstick, but I’d found that I felt better with it in my hand—maybe it helped me think, or something spirity like that.
“I could flame out and set the Matron on fire,” I suggested. “If I could figure out how to do it on purpose.”
“Great. And then we’ll have a burned-up giantess on our hands, plus a bunch of angry guards,” said Whit.
“Right. Maybe I could float out the air shaft,” I said, looking at the tiny, dark window above my head, then picturing myself dropping down it, many floors to the bottom, and getting pulverized by the turbine below.
“Maybe we can snap our