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The helicopter was loud, like, horrible loud. So loud, that Mud couldn’t think of a single word loud enough to describe the loudness of the loud. It vibrated into her bones as one of the queen’s security guards strapped her in. The woman slipped headphones over Mud’s ears as the helicopter lurched for the sky, taking Mud’s stomach with it.
There were three other people in the body of the helicopter, Eli Younger was driving—or maybe piloting?—the helicopter and there were two others, but she could only see the back of their heads. The helo was twenty feet off the ground when Mud looked out and down to see half the school staring up at her, including Connie. This was gonna be really good for her rep or really bad. It depended on Connie, who spelled her name with a little heart over the ‘I’, though she really had no heart anywhere. She was mean as a snake. Not a rattlesnake, because they told you when they were going to strike. Connie was meaner. She smiled to your face and said bad stuff to your back. It took all Mud could do to not give Connie-without-a-heart to the Green Knight and his forest of vampire trees. Or the finger. The finger was frowned on by the school staff. A few feet from Connie, was Sydney Wilson, a pretty girl with glasses and light brown hair. Sydney was on Connie’s enemies list too. Sometimes Sydney sat at Mud’s table at lunch. They didn’t talk. Maybe Mud should talk to Sydney, which was a super weird thought while she was up in the air.
The helicopter paused—hovered—Mud guessed was the correct word, like hummingbirds but less agile and way more ugly. The female guard, whose name badge said Sarah, stood and opened the helicopter door. While they were in the air. Off the ground.
Longfellow flew in and landed in Mud’s lap in a flapping ungainly heap.
“Ow!” Mud yelled. “Watch the claws, you flying lizard. I got skin under these pants.”
It curled its claws away from her, blinked up at her, and raised its head on its long neck. It licked her. Tasted her, more like, if the inch-long fangs were an indication.
Mud glared at it. It opened its mouth for what might have been, “Meep.”
“Don’t look at me,” Mud said. “I don’t know where the queen is. We aren’t besties.” Same thing Mud had said to the safety officer. Not besties with the queen.
Sarah had closed the door and sat back, hooking herself into a seat and harness. She said, “You may not be besties, but you must know something. Longfellow came to you. It’s not like we can ask it where she is.”
Mud’s entire body went heavy at the words. She hated being the one who had to provide the information or answer the questions. She hated it in class, except biology class, where she aced it, and she hated it now.
But . . . The lizard still had its head up at eye level, holding her gaze with its shining red eyes. They had a lot of gold in them, and even traces of green. The lizard was magic, Mud knew that. And Mud was magic, she knew that too. Maybe there was a way of talking to the lizard without really talking to it, the way she did the trees and the Green Knight. Like, maybe, that ESP stuff. Extrasensory Perception. People in God’s Cloud of Glory Church, where she grew up, said ESP was hooey, but then, they burned witches and werewolves and any magical creature at the stake, and since Mud was magic in her own plant-woman way, there was some of ’em who would burn her too if they thought they could get away with it.
ESP was paranormal stuff of the brain, like telepathy or clairvoyance or being a seer like men in the Bible were. It was in the Bible, so, it couldn’t be all evil.
Mud released her bookbag and it tumbled to the floor. She raised her left hand and slowly—real slowly because Longfellow hissed at her—she reached for the mini-dragon’s head. She pulled on her gift. She pulled on the power hard even though that meant getting what she had come to refer to as her secondary magical reflexes. Leaves.
Green leaves poked out from her fingernails and began to unfurl, her chestnut-brown hair rustled as leaves grew from her scalp. Tickling and twitching and reaching for sunlight, just like real plants. Longfellow stared at her hand and the leaves growing from her fingers, his hisses abating.
Sarah was watching her with the kind of attention someone might if she had started growing another head. And one hand was on the gun at her hip.
Mud brushed Longfellow’s head with the leaves of one finger, pushing her magic out, toward the dragon. It blinked. Reared its head back, staring at the leaves rustling in the faint movement of the air in the helicopter.
Longfellow licked her leaves, tasting. It cocked its head and then wrapped its long neck around hers.
Pictures began to flow into Mud, red tinted, with bright golds and vibrant greens. It was the world if the world was all energy, all power, all . . . not matter. Matter was there, in the pics, but it also wasn’t there. It was just a quivering scene of glittery, shifting shapes.
In the middle of the shapes Jane Yellowrock, the queen, came into focus. She was in her half-lion, half-human form, half-naked, her clothes torn and ripped. She had no weapons except the claws on her hands and the big-cat fangs at her mouth.Her eyes glowed golden in a half-cat, half-human face. She was fighting. Bleeding. Wounded.
A long knife came at her, swinging fast. It cut along her middle, just above her waist. Power shot out, like green and gold light. And it was sucked away. The cut healed.
The queen opened her mouth and screamed. She was being attacked. But where? And by what?
“Where?” Mud asked. “Can you show me?”
The image opened out in her mind, as if Longfellow was flying away, showing her a wider view: a pool of water lay at the moss-covered bottom of a narrow cut, or canyon, in the mountains. Trees grew up from the little glen, or lay rotting in the mosses. The vertical rock canyon walls were covered in ferns and more mosses that would likely look like a rich pattern of greens and golds if she was seeing it with human eyes and not flying lizard eyes.
The queen’s tall slender figure stood in front of the pool, her image now fuzzy, her outlines blurred, which made no sense because everything else was clear and focused. People stood all around her. Maybe ten, three or so men, the others women. All were armed with knives. No.Athames. The blades were made of knapped quartz crystal. A man cut the queen. She screamed and bled, blood splattering into the circle, and onto the man who had cut her. The blood and power were sucked out and into the circle and into the blade.
Before the bleeding stopped, a woman cut the queen.
Witches. Blood witches.
They were taking the queen’s power. The queen should just run away, but . . . she was protecting the pool of water. And she was inside a net of power. Like areverse hedge—a witchworking, a magical prison cage.
Mud had no idea where the queen was. All this stuff meant nothing. She hated being useless even more than she hated being the one with answers.
She blinked back tears. Removed her hand from Longfellow’s head and said, “Ten blood witches are attacking the queen. She’s standing in half-form in front of a pool of water. There’s cliffs all around with moss and bracken and ferns growing on the walls. Trees, alive, dead, and some down and rotting.”
