“Take me outside,” he said. “In a way Master Joseph won’t notice.”
“Yesss.” The Chaos-ridden turned and led Call out of the dining room and down a series of turning passages. Call caught a glimpse of a huge room with a drain in the floor like a shower, and another room with shelf after shelf of glowing elementals trapped in jars. Call thought he even saw a room with shackles bolted to the walls.
Yikes.
The Chaos-ridden led him down a last corridor to a door that opened with the drawing of several rusty bolts. Beyond it was the side of the house and the massive overgrown lawn.
He’d made it.
Woods surrounded the stretch of grass, woods with unfamiliar trees. The air was cold, too, unseasonably cold for September. They must be up north. He headed toward the woods, hugging his arms around himself. He could worry about the chill later.
“Okay,” Call said to the Chaos-ridden who had followed him, footfalls disturbingly silent. “I am going to wait here. Go to my friends — a girl in a hat, a wolf, and a boy with a weird haircut — and tell them where to find me. I mean, not with words. They won’t understand you. But maybe you could point?”
The Chaos-ridden looked at him with his swirling eyes for a long moment. Call wondered if he should have described Tamara, Havoc, and Jasper a different way. Maybe the Chaos-ridden didn’t understand which haircuts were weird. Maybe they had bad taste.
“Yesss,” he said again. Although he did seem eerie, he also put Call’s worries to rest. The Chaos-ridden lumbered off toward the front of the mansion.
Call sat down on a nearby log, looking back toward the huge house. Despite all the lights he knew were on, it seemed entirely dark and lonely — abandoned. More air magic illusions. Call was going to have to be careful to look out for other things that weren’t really there.
He felt strange about leaving. It wasn’t that he wanted to stay — he didn’t like Master Joseph, he hated Alex, and Anastasia creeped him out — but he didn’t like the idea of going back to prison either. And while Tamara might want to keep him safe, he didn’t believe that was going to be easy.
The mage world wanted their revenge on Constantine and didn’t care what happened to Callum.
He felt like no one cared about Call, only Constantine.
He heard the rustling of footsteps coming toward him and amended that grim thought. Tamara cared. Havoc cared. Jasper sort of cared — or at least didn’t think of Call as Constantine.
And Alastair cared. Maybe he and his father could leave the country. After all, Alastair had never wanted Call to fall into the hands of the mages — for this very reason. He was probably prepared. And the antique sales in Europe had to be pretty special.
“Call!” Tamara said, running up to him. “You made it.”
Jasper looked at the Chaos-ridden and shivered. Havoc kept sniffing the air nervously. In the distance, there was a howl.
“He can help us some more,” Call said, pointing to the Chaos-ridden. “Take us to the nearest, biggest road.”
“Yesss,” said the Chaos-ridden. “Thisss waaay.”
Bracing himself for another long walk in the dark with his leg aching, Call pushed himself to his feet.
The five of them made their way by the moonlight as quickly as they could, Havoc scouting ahead and then doubling back. Call lagged behind. He wasn’t used to walking anymore. His only exercise for several months had been pacing his cell and heading to the interrogation room. His leg burned.
Luckily, the Chaos-ridden matched his stride to Call’s.
“They’re going to notice we’re gone,” Jasper said, with a pleading look at Call. “They’re going to come after us.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Call whispered back angrily. He hated that this had happened because of him and he was the one who was slowing them down.
“We won’t be easy to find,” Tamara said, with a glare at Jasper. “They don’t know which way we went. And I bet they don’t know we have a guide with us.”
Call appreciated her sticking up for him, but he still felt bad. His spirits lifted a moment later, though, when the ground dipped down toward the inky-black asphalt of a road wide enough to have two lanes.
Havoc barked once in excitement.
“Shhhh!” Call said, although he was excited, too.
They scrambled down the hill.
“Um,” Call told the Chaos-ridden. “I think you’re going to have to wait here, okay? We’ll come back and find you.”
The Chaos-ridden immediately stopped moving, standing as still as some horrific statue. Call wondered if someone would drive by and try to stick him in the back of their trunk, the way Alastair often did with statues he found by the sides of roads.
“If there are cars,” Jasper whispered as they hurried down the road, looking for a better-lighted place to try to catch a passing vehicle, “there must be a bridge, a way off this island …”
Call hadn’t thought of that, but the logic lifted some of the pressure off his chest. Maybe they were closer to freedom than he’d thought. If there was a bridge and they could hitch a ride over it, then they were practically already out of Master Joseph’s reach. He glanced up and down the road — seemingly deserted. They’d passed around a corner, so he could no longer see the Chaos-ridden.
Suddenly, lights swept toward them. Tamara gave a little gasp. It was a delivery van that read FLOWERS OF FAERIELAND in sickeningly sweet script along the side.
“A flower delivery van,” said Jasper, sounding relieved. It did seem pretty unsinister, considering what else was on this island.
Tamara darted out into the middle of the road, waving her hands. She could have made a much bigger beacon with fire magic, Call thought, but that would have terrified an ordinary person.
The van pulled to a screeching halt. A middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and a backward baseball cap stuck his head out the window. “What’s going on?”
“We’re lost,” Tamara said. She swept the newsboy cap off so her braids fell down, and batted her eyes innocently. With the pastel dress, she looked like someone who’d escaped an Easter egg hunt. “We rowed over to the island to look around, but our boat drifted away when we weren’t looking and the sun went down….” She sniffed. “Can you help us, mister?”
Call thought the mister was laying it on a little thick, but the guy seemed sold.
“Sure,” the man said, looking bewildered. “I guess. Um, hop on up, kids.”
As they approached, he threw out a ropy arm. There was a big black tattoo on his bicep that looked a little like an eye. It seemed weirdly familiar. “Whoa, whoa. What’s that?” He pointed at Havoc.
“It’s my dog,” said Call. “His name’s —”
“I don’t care what his name is,” said the guy. “He’s huge.”
“We really can’t leave him.” Tamara looked at the guy with huge eyes. “Please? He’s really tame.”
Which was how Call found himself, Jasper, and Havoc being loaded into the empty back of the truck, which had no seats, just windowless metal flooring and walls. Hugo (which was the guy’s name) brought Tamara up to sit beside him in the cab. She threw Call and Jasper an apologetic look as Hugo pulled the metal door down, locking them in.