Angie Fox - ADS 03 - A Tale of Two Demon Slayers

Easy for him to say. The only thing he had to worry about was not getting crushed by my falling body.

My back, my hips, pretty much everything ached from the last two impacts.

The tree branch dug into the soles of my feet. I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t. Not while standing ten feet up. Instead, I looked to the blue sky. My stomach knotted. I couldn’t put this off forever.

Trust it. Trust yourself.

Believe it , I told myself as I jumped.

I dropped like a hot pan full of trouble. A second before the ground rushed up to smack me in the head, I was swooped up by a dive-bombing griffin with a pink dress tied to her back paw.

“Diana!” I grasped the coarse fur at her back and struggled to ride astride the wild flying griffin.

Ever confident in my grip, she surged higher, breaking out above the trees. Now this was the way to fly. The wind streaked against my face; my stomach lurched with each bob and dip. I was on the amusement-park ride of my life, but even more, I was immensely grateful not to be on my back again, staring up at the old oak tree.

After a gratuitous lap around the gardens (did I mention Diana likes to have fun?) we landed next to Rachmort, who didn’t seem to be disturbed at all by the griffin’s rescue.

Instead, he stood regarding his watch fob with great interest. “Morticharius keeps Twittering from Limbo. I think he’s bored,” he said, flipping the bronze instrument closed and returning it the pocket of his waistcoat.

Diana opened her beak and gave a piercing call, like an eagle.

“Hup, hup.” He held his hands up. “No need to apologize. In fact, I believe you are exactly what our Lizzie needs. Feel free to join us. Although no snacking on the tree nymphs.”

Diana let out a half bleat, half choke.

Rachmort tilted his head. “Yes, well you’d be surprised at what some griffins eat. Certain people too. Now,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “let’s get back to work, shall we?”

“Of course,” I said, wishing I had a ladder.

Think of it as exercise. Some people paid money to climb rock walls. This tree was free. Well, save for the cuts and scrapes on my hands.

Worry about it later. Or not. I had plenty of bigger things to worry about.

A few painful minutes later, I stood on the high branch again, contemplating my fate. Only, this time Diana stretched like a large cat below. She drew out one large back paw, then the other, before she straightened and looked at me expectantly.

She was like a large hairy cushion. Suddenly, jumping didn’t seem like a big risk after all.

I blew out a quick breath, thought about floating and stepped off.

It took me a second to realize Diana wasn’t coming to my rescue. Instead, I was floating to the ground, as though the air itself had thickened enough for me to glide gently to the earth.

“Look at this!” I exclaimed, shocked at the density of the air under my feet. It was solid and yet I could move through it. I just had to tell it what to do.

“Over there,” I said, trying to direct it and realizing I had to use my feet, as if it were some sort of spongy walking surface. Floating surface was more like it.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the mule. I was levitating!

And I didn’t even screw up the landing. Instead, I touched my toes to the ground, then the balls of my feet, all the way down to my heels. I stood in front of a beaming Zebediah Rachmort triumphant, invigorated and more than a little winded. I think I’d forgotten to breathe for a few minutes there.

“Look at me!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, yes!” he said, clapping his hands on my shoulders, as proud as I was. “You didn’t worry about falling and you did it!”

“Well sure.” I looked over at Diana, who had unfurled her massive wings and let out a squawk of triumph.

It was a lot easier to levitate when I had a griffin around to break the fall.

Rachmort stared at me until he had my full attention. “What you needed was the courage to fail.” His steely gaze bored into me like he was trying to force the knowledge into my head. “Embrace your fears. Only then can you move beyond them and find something new.”

He had me levitate for another hour. It was the most fun I’d had since…Well, I didn’t want to think about Dimitri when he was so far away, but let’s just say most of my spine-tingling memories had to do with him.

I was feeling utterly triumphant as I levitated down on one foot and did a small pirouette. My parents hadn’t sent me to twelve years of ballet class for nothing. “Do I get extra points for style?” I asked, giving a bow.

“There are no grades here,” he reminded me.

Darn. I’d always liked report-card day.

“Now,” he said, as if the best was yet to come, “you will walk and think.”

“Walk?” I’d just learned to levitate.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “And you will ponder that, among other things.”

It didn’t make sense. “I thought you were supposed to be teaching me.”

“I am showing you how to create what you need for yourself,” he said, in a classy version of Grandma’s “learn by experience” philosophy.

Well, I was tired of learning by trial and error. “I need real classroom, or at least under-the-tree, experience. You need to tell me what to do.”

“I just did,” he said, “and you levitated.” He walked me toward the front of the house, where the biker witches had set out giant tarps to make sun-dried snakeskins. Heaven knows how they’d found so many.

He ignored the witches turning the snakeskins with tongs, not to mention Heather-the-Hard-Hat Creely. The engineering witch was rigging up some sort of assembly line.

Rachmort cleared his throat. “Think of your preschool class, Lizzie. Did they learn better when you merely told them things or when you showed them and let them also make their own discoveries?”

Oh lordy. “Exactly what am I supposed to discover in the woods?”

He practically clapped his hands together in glee. “I don’t know!”

How fun—for him.

The tangled path lay in front of me, the trees rising tall on either side. “Fine, but I really think we should be doing something.”

“Oh yes—doing, running, leaping into the fray. Not unlike the Charge of the Light Brigade. I warned them about that too. Never confuse action with understanding,” he said.

Action was all I knew, I realized, as I started off through the cypress forest alone. From the minute Grandma had shown up at my front door with a bag full of Smuckers-jar magic and a demon on her tail, I’d been on the run. I hadn’t had the luxury to lounge around and wax philosophic, let alone understand anything.

Now that I did have the time, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it or how to find the answers I needed.

The banging of the witches soon gave way to the sounds of the forest.

I fiddled with the gold cord Rachmort had tied around my wrist. As if I was supposed to learn something from that.

My hand wandered down to my switch stars and I found myself counting them. Five. I always had five.

The loose earth and rocks crunched under my boots as I walked. I tried not to think of the biker witches tearing apart the front lawn or what Pirate and Flappy might be doing to the remains of my wardrobe. Instead, I focused on the swaying of the trees, the birds darting from branch to branch.

Before I knew it, I was almost at the ruins without having had any deep thoughts at all.

I looked up at the sky, which was a gorgeously deceptive shade of blue. As creepy as the swirling green sky had been, I almost wished it were back. Then I’d at least have a stark reminder of the evil that stalked me.

How could I be of any use to Dimitri when I had my own problems to solve? He needed to protect his family, rebuild his home. So far, I’d kept him from doing both of those things. If I knew anything about the Red Skulls, I’d be willing to bet their brand of magic had knocked the rebuilding effort back a few paces.