Witch and Wizard - James Patterson [51]
Chapter 83
Wisty
THERE’S A GOOD REASON our worst nightmares are so often about falling. That deer-in-the-headlights awareness that something really, really bad’s coming, but not being able to do anything about it, is probably the world’s best (or should I say worst?) recipe for ultimate, deluxe, supersize terror.
I plunged headlong into the spinning, blurring darkness, bouncing off one dusty metal wall and then another, flailing in order to catch something—anything—to slow my descent.
But there was nothing. Just the wind blowing harder and harder as I fell faster and faster.
And faster.
And still there was no sign of the bottom. Although, in this pitch-dark shaft, I probably wouldn’t even see it coming.
“STOP!” I squealed mindlessly. Think fast, Wisty. I was a witch. A witch could use magic. Magic could stop a falling object. Whit stopped a gavel in midair. Why couldn’t I stop something as small and light as a mouse?
I gestured with my paws, I flicked my tail like a wand, I wished and raged the way I had in the past when I’d gone invisible or burst into flames… but nothing worked. I felt about as magical as a tomato. A tomato dropping from the roof of a very tall building.
About to go splat!
I have to say, the old cliché about your life flashing before your very eyes is dead-on. I saw it all: Wisty, the feisty but loving daughter. Wisty, the high school truant. Wisty, the bad, scary witch. Wisty, the Liberator. Wisty, the Roadkill. Or something that was about to look a lot like it anyway.
Then it hit me. Literally stopped my panicked breath. Not the force of a hard surface. Instead, I was clobbered by a rank smell that was about a hundred times worse than Whit’s gym bag.
And I was falling right toward it.
A dim light began to fill the tube below me, and in an instant I saw where my free fall would come to an end: in the prison garbage pile.
Luckily, a mesh screen was fastened across the opening to the shaft. I hit it at what felt like sixty miles an hour. It’s a good thing the wire had some give to it, or I’m sure I would have been flattened on the spot. If the screen had been tighter or any thinner, it might have passed through me like an apple corer.
As it was, the thing worked like an overstretched trampoline and sent me rebounding back up into the vent before my final smackdown.
The force of the impact knocked the wind out of me, and I was instantly sure I’d broken some ribs and my left foreleg. Judging from how my head was throbbing and the fact that I couldn’t see straight, I probably had a concussion too.
Shaken, injured, disoriented, but alive, I forced myself to scan my surroundings. I’d made a serious dent in the screen, and the rusty old clasps that held the thing in place had nearly bent straight.
Then I recoiled at the sound of some squeaky chattering below me. I choked back my vertigo—I’m so bad about heights I usually turn around and face upward on down escalators—then rolled over and peered through the screen.
It wasn’t technically a trash pit but an open-topped steel container, filled with torn bedding, soiled inmate uniforms, and revolting scraps from the prison kitchen. And—wait—it was full of eyes staring right at me!
Rats. Dozens of them. Filthy-furred, greasy-tailed, evil-looking.
I’m not especially squeamish about them normally. My science teacher even had one in the classroom last year. But these weren’t nice white pet-store rats like Mr. Nicolo’s. And I wasn’t a human girl here. I was a mouse—aka prey.
Come on, magic. Come on. A spell to let me climb or fly? A spell to let me banish rats to oblivion? A spell to turn me into a large cat? A spell to make this all into a dream I could wake up from?
But my mind, my energy, my spirit, were stone-cold frozen. All I could manage was to stare back