Witch and Wizard_ The Fire - James Patterson [50]
“What?” My voice sounds high and thin.
He chews his lip as if deciding something, and I almost shake him. “You need to work fast. My intel says Whit’s in serious trouble in the Shadowland. You don’t have much time to deal with The One if you want to save him.”
Chapter 52
Whit
TORCHES BOB, BLURRY in my peripheral vision. A bonfire belches into the bloodred twilight. Fire is all around us, licking at our skin and lighting our expressions of terror, and the stench of the gathering Lost Ones, of their rotting flesh and dark intentions, is truly unbearable.
The shrill intensity of their chants builds in tune with my racing heart.
My arms ache from the weight of my body, and I flinch away from the hands of death that reach for me. I’m strung up high on some massive wheel, an ancient torture device that keeps my arms and legs spread wide, my body exposed, so that these putrid creatures can spin me around, touch me, and be healed.
Below me, the stage is set for an ominous Holiday Feast, and the Resistance kids are bound on their circle of spits. Sasha shouts fight anthems mixed with obscenities at the Lost Ones in a never-ending babble of protest, and Emmet looks heartbreakingly sad but determined not to make a scene. If the Resistance is going down, it’s going down with honor, if he has anything to say about it. Most of the other kids are sobbing uncontrollably, but Janine is resigned, her strong face a mask.
She won’t meet my eyes.
Hands cover me, and the ancient wheel turns, spinning me left, then right, so I have to strain my neck to see anything. My heart longs to fight, to keep fighting until my last breath, but I’m so weak and dizzy and there are so many of them, rabid with need.
How can this be the end of everything? Some child of the Prophecy I’ve turned out to be.
The Lost Ones stamp the ground, growing impatient. The awful chanting reaches a fever pitch, the ravenous howls slicing into the evening, but the youngest child’s screams drown out all else as they drag him toward the pit to be roasted alive.
We’re done for.
Chapter 53
Wisty
WELL, I HAVE to hand it to Byron: I asked, and he delivered. I got exactly what I wanted — a cleaning position in the elite apartments of the palace compound. But somehow I’m not quite as happy scrubbing toilets as I thought I’d be.
The compound is a solid brick building, part fortress, part palace, and it takes me two days of entering through the heavily guarded gates, passing under the metal detectors, and waiting in the steel-sealed holding cell before a fellow worker loans me a key to go through the side entrance that leads straight to the elite complex.
The high-ceilinged, echoing corridors are exactly what you’d expect from the New Order, with clean linoleum floors and ultra-sanitary surfaces. The private apartments, on the other hand, are an entirely different story.
The upper echelons of our society may be a buttoned-up bunch, but they’re not always the most hygienic in their personal quarters — take it from one who knows. Be careful what you influence for, I guess.
But it all pays off in the end, because after scouring, sanitizing, and polishing my fifteenth toilet, I’m assigned the proverbial pot o’ gold: his personal lavatory.
I stand in the doorway for at least ten minutes, listening. This is my chance to find some weakness, some vulnerability, to riffle through The One’s most private, hidden items, but at first I can’t even move for fear of being caught.
The One’s apartment is shockingly spare, almost sterile. There’s hardly any furniture, and what’s here is a simple, sturdy black. The claustrophobic red paint vibrating on the wall is as crimson as a crime scene or an open wound. The only things of note are the mirrors: gold-framed, one on each wall. They’re presumably so His Baldness will always have a place to gaze adoringly at himself, but somehow they give a person the feeling that he’s looking out of them, watching, instead of looking in.
A narrow bed is the only item in the windowless bedroom. I reach out to it tentatively, as if