10. Chapter 10
Ben pulled me away from the men but they took several steps toward us.,
“You’re not going to kill someone over a maybe, are you?” I asked. This wasn’t even something that would happen in London, let alone on Dusk. Poverty really brought out the worst in people.
A guy with red hair behind the athamé thug snorted.
“There’s nothing we won’t do to get out of here,” the athamé thug said. “So I suggest you take us to this boat of yours and start making some magic happen.”
“You won’t all fit in my car,” I said.
“We aren’t taking your car. We’re taking mine.” Another thug with a long white streak down his hoodie jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Don’t worry, there’ll be room for all of us.”
***
“Room for all of us.” Adrian’s sarcastic tone filled the darkness of the car boot the thugs had jammed us into. It was larger than any car I’d ever had, but it still had me sandwiched between Ben and Adrian in more uncomfortable ways than one. “This is a joke.”
“What part of this is funny to you?” I asked, my cheek pressed against Ben’s neck. “We are literally being abducted.”
“I didn’t mean a funny joke; it’s just a joke.”
“Adrian, I don’t think you understand how much trouble we’re in here,” I said. “Those guys will gut us if we step out of line.”
Adrian had argued with them all the way to the car, and they had laughed at him, but I realised he had no idea what we were dealing with.
“They wouldn’t actually hurt us. This is Dusk!” he said.
“An apocalyptic Dusk,” I reminded him. “People get savage when their lives are on the line.”
“She’s right, Ade.” Ben’s voice was a little muffled by my hair. “We need to play this carefully.”
“The first chance you get, you need to give one of them bad luck,” I said. “The less they have going for them, the better.”
Ben had used to give me good luck regularly with his power, but the need for him to alternate good and bad luck to keep the balance had meant he hadn’t used his luck power in a while. Giving someone bad luck before the phoenix’s curses had meant some mild inconveniences, but at a time like this, it could have meant life or death for someone. So Ben hadn’t given anyone bad luck recently, but this felt like the perfect time to exercise it.
“Bad luck?” Adrian asked. “What are you talking about?”
My stomach lurched. I had completely forgotten that Ben hadn’t told any of his family about the power he possessed.
“Oh gods,” I whispered. “Ben, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. I meant to tell him soon, anyway.”
“Tell me what, Ben?” Adrian asked.
“I lied to you. I’ve got the power to give good and bad luck to people, and I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want anyone in the family to weaponise it for the feud,” Ben said. “Now you know.”
“You told her before you told me?” Adrian’s shout rose well above the hum of the engine. “Are you serious?”
“I didn’t know it was Maeve I was telling. This all happened at the dating agency,” Ben said.
Adrian scoffed. “All those physics tests I used to fail, and you didn’t give me any good luck to help with them?”
“I didn’t say that. You got plenty of good luck over the years. You just didn’t know it.”
Adrian fell silent, and I pressed a secret kiss to Ben’s neck. Of course he wouldn’t have let his brother go without any luck over the years. But the way Adrian expected him to opened my eyes to how jaded he really was. As annoying as that was, I could kinda understand why. This feud affected us all in different ways.
Ben rolled into me and me into Adrian as the car stopped and the noise of the engine died.
“Okay, game plan,” Ben muttered. “We do as they tell us until I find a moment to sneak one of them some bad luck.”
“Fancy giving us some good luck to get out of this?” Adrian sniffed.
“That was the second part of the plan, yeah. Bad luck to them, good luck to you, and maybe we’ll give ourselves the upper hand enough to get out of this. What do you think?”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Need a distraction?”
Maybe me unexpectedly turning into a mermaid and whacking them all over like bowling pins would help. It would certainly help my mood.
“No distractions.” Ben kissed the top of my head. “I don’t want you drawing attention to yourself and getting hurt. The hospital has enough patients right now.”
My thoughts travelled back to Dad. At least in his state he wouldn’t worry that someone might have stuffed me into a car boot with - count it - two Everharts. These days, anything was on the table.
I winced as the boot opened and light spilled inside. A hand reached in, and grabbed the collar of my dress, dragging me out of the car. I staggered to keep myself upright, but a sharp shake knocked me to my knees.
“Hey!” Ben rolled out of the car, but two of the thugs grabbed him and dragged him to his feet. “Don’t you dare hurt her.”
“She’s safe with me. Relax.” The white stripe thug standing over me pressed the flat blade of an athamé to my cheek, the orange crystal in the hilt glinting too close to my eye. “You’ve just got to concentrate on this plan of yours.”
“Maeve!” Allison’s shriek made my blood run cold, and I peered between the legs of our captors to see Kira, Allison, and Bronwyn hurrying toward us from the scuba centre.
“No, no!” I held a hand out to them. “Run!”
Without Bronwyn’s amulet, we couldn’t even attempt the plan. But White Stripe dragged me to my feet and pressed the athamé to my throat.
“Nobody’s moving or we’re going to have some blood on our hands,” he said. “Come along now, ladies. Haven’t you heard we’re all getting off the island?”
Bark rippled across Allison’s face, her eyes glowing green. Was it just me or was she way more pissed in the face of danger lately? Kira hovered a foot above the ground, her shoulders clenched and knees bent as if preparing to shoot toward us.
“Yeah, all right, we’ll do what you want,” Ben said, grabbing the wrist of one guy who held him to ease up the pressure on his collar.
A telltale dull glow underneath his thumb had me averting my gaze. He had just given the guy some well-deserved bad juju.
At knife-point, I unlocked the boathouse, and we all piled into the speedboat. White Stripe kept the tip of the athamé pressed to my thigh as I drove the speedboat out of the boathouse and across the water.
“You’re all monsters,” Kira said as we zipped across the sea. “If we had found out this worked, we would have gotten you all out, anyway!”
“Everyone’s dropping from this sickness. Who says you’d have got us out in time?” Cracked Tooth guy had his own athamé pointed at Adrian, who sat across from him. “If you can get us out now, we’re getting out.”
I swallowed hard, jerking forward a little as we hit a large wave before ploughing on. I had wanted to get Dad out of here as soon as possible. If he was outside the barrier, maybe the illness would leave him? If we had to take these idiots all the way to the mainland, would we even have fuel to get back and tell everyone we had found a way out? That was if this even worked.
As we approached the barrier, I killed the engine, and Ben and I used the oars to get us as close to it as possible.
I craned my neck to get a better look at the barrier. After Chief Mallory had warned everyone not to go near it, I hadn’t felt the compulsion to get up close and personal with the barrier. This close, it had an ever darker purple sheen that swirled like oil in water. It emitted a low hum, perhaps from the magic required to keep it in place.
“Don’t keep us waiting,” the redhead said, gesturing to the barrier. “Let’s go.”
“Bronwyn.” Allison reached a hand out to her friend as Bronwyn stood, wobbling a little. “You don’t have to-.“
“We said we would try this, so let’s,” Bronwyn said.
She wobbled her way over to the edge of the boat and grabbed hold of Adrian’s shoulder to steady herself. Bronwyn looped her amulet from around her neck and held it out toward the barrier in her gloved hand. She really had come prepared.
The amulet glowed and jittered in her hand, and then, like a magnet to a fridge door, it shot toward the barrier and stuck to it. Around the edge of the amulet, a pool of light grew larger and larger until it reached the size of a round doorway. I craned my neck to peer through it, my eyes widening. Through the hole in the barrier, the sea lapped back and forth in its true colour, and the sky...had it always been so blue and I had just forgotten?
“Yes, boys!” White Stripe stood up, raising both arms in triumph. “We’re home free!”
The group of thugs whooped and cheered, and Cracked Tooth sheathed his athamé to stand on the bow of the boat. The speedboat dipped forward under his weight, springing back up again as he dove headfirst through the gap in the barrier. But as he barrelled into it, his expression a picture of long-awaited freedom, he disintegrated into a pile of dust.