Cave of Nightmares (39 page)

The
warg rounded on them for a second pass, looking quickly between the four of them before choosing its victim. It sprinted towards Hayden.

Of course.

Hayden didn’t even have time to consider using his prism. Everything was moving too fast. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Zane slam his hand against the ground in his conjury circle and scream, “HELP!”

F
or some bizarre reason, the only thought he had as the warg knocked him to the ground with crushing force was that Zane should know better than to use vague commands in summoning circles because they rarely worked, and that Master Reede would definitely be docking points from him because of it.

He heard
his ribs crack as he hit the ground and rolled, the warg pacing steadily towards him to finish him off. Hayden barely had the strength to roll onto his back, but when he did he saw what was sitting in the middle of Zane’s vanished summoning circle, looking like he just woke up from a nap.

It was Bonk.

“Bonk?” Hayden asked weakly, coughing and then wincing as pain shot through his chest. The warg was looming over him now, drool leaking from its mouth and onto his shirt as the little dragon took flight.

He’s too little, there’s no way he can fight this thing off.

The warg’s jaws opened and it leaned down to tear at Hayden’s face. He brought up his arms reflexively and cried out as sharp teeth pierced his skin.

“BONK!”
Tess’s voice this time, though he couldn’t see what was happening anymore. For all he knew, the dragon had curled up on the floor for another nap and Tess was trying to wake him up.

A ma
ssive shadow flew over the warg just as it was preparing to tear Hayden’s arms off. It looked vaguely familiar, and Hayden’s first delirious thought was,
Oh great! That monstrous dragon we thought we killed during the summer has come back to help eat me!

The
warg must have sensed something amiss, because it raised its head and looked up just as a pair of massive claws clamped around its middle and threw it across the room. Hayden was left staring up at an impossible sight in the semi-darkness, too tired and injured to sit up and consider it properly.

A twenty-foot dragon was flapping its wings
overhead, the wind buffeting Hayden as it turned to face the warg again. The room might be poorly lit, and the dragon might be nineteen-feet too big, but Hayden would recognize his familiar anywhere.

The
warg growled up at Bonk, who spit a fireball at it in response. The warg let out a wounded shriek as the smell of burning hair filled the cave, and Bonk pounced on it while it was still aflame, biting anything it could reach and shrieking impressively.

Tess hurried over to Hayden and was tearing
at his shirt to tourniquet his bleeding, punctured arms, looking like she was trying to block out the sounds of Bonk chewing noisily on the dead warg.

“What happened?” h
e asked, wincing again from the pain in his chest.

“It was—”

Hayden knew why Tess didn’t finish her sentence. The room was suddenly lit up like high noon, and more people were pouring into the open space from the path they’d come in on.

“We found them!” Ma
ster Kilgore gripped his Mastery Charm at the same time that Master Asher said, “What in the—”

Bonk was shrinking rapidly back to his normal size, and gave up his attempt to eat an entire
warg in favor of flying over to check on Hayden.

The source of the light became obvious when the Prism Master jogged over to him, his own clear prism glowing like the sun in his eyepiece, which was currently positioned on top of his head.

“Are you alright?” He dropped down to his knees beside Hayden, who had never seen the Prism Master’s face so white and scared before, though maybe it was just the halo effect of the prism.

“I think my ribs are broken…” he choked out, shaky with relief at being saved. “And my arms…”

He tried to hold them up to show where the blood soaked through Tess’s tourniquets, but Master Asher motioned them back down gently.

Three more figures in metallic red robes appeared out of nowhere, and even as stunned and injured as Hayden was, he took a moment to appreciate that all five Masters had come after them
, even Sark.

Master Reede
knelt down near him and began drawing on the ground, much faster than Zane had earlier. Hayden understood what he was summoning when the drawing vanished and a wooden stretcher appeared in its place.

“Watch the ribs,” Mas
ter Asher said to his colleague as the two of them stood at either end of Hayden and lifted him by the arms and legs, moving him as gently as possible onto the stretcher. He tried not to cry from the pain, or black-out.

Master Sark was doing the fastest disinfecting and bandaging on Tucker’s arm that Hayden had ever seen, and Willow and Kilgore were checking on Tess and
Zane. He wanted to thank his friend for miraculously summoning Bonk to them and saving his life, but Asher and Reede translocated him before he could get a word out.

It was still pouring down rain at Mizzenwald,
but Hayden was so relieved to be safe that he wouldn’t have cared if fireballs were falling from the sky at this point. Fortunately the Masters had translocated them near the main entrance, so they didn’t have to walk all the way from the usual site near the cliffs.

There were
an unusual number of people in the foyer and corridors, most of them gasping and pointing as the Masters carried him past.

I must look pathetic right now.

He supposed that word had gotten out that they were sent to the wrong place at some point…maybe one of the students responsible for translocating them went and told his friends and it snowballed from there.

“MOVE!”
Masters Asher and Reede barked at the same time, and the crowd parted as though someone had cast Repel on them.

They brought him to the infirmary, wher
e Mistress Razelle was (blessedly) already waiting for him. She gasped at the sight of him but set to work immediately, removing the strips of t-shirt that Tess had tied tightly around his forearms to stanch the bleeding.

“What do you need?” Asher asked
her, and the Mistress of Healing answered him without pausing or looking up, “Disinfect these cuts and puncture wounds while I work on the bones.”

She left the Prism Master to tend to his arms, which unfortunately involved a lot of bright pink liquid that foamed and
burned like fire being poured into his open wounds. He would have rolled around in agony if his chest didn’t hurt so badly every time he moved.

“I know it hurts,” Asher glanced up when Hayden hissed through his clenched teeth in pain. “Try and bear through it, it’ll get better soon.”

Easy for you to say.

Mistress Razelle was holding her Mastery Charm and staring down at him as though she could suddenly see right through his skin.

“Three broken ribs,” she said without preamble. “Well, you’re lucky it’s not anything worse.” She removed a short oak wand from her belt and lightly touched a spot on Hayden’s chest with the tip of it, still holding her Mastery Charm with her free hand.

“Mend,” she said quietly, and Hayden could almost feel the splintered bone in his chest knitting itself back together. She repeated the spell two more times over different parts of his torso until her oak wand was almost completely used up. His chest still hurt afterwards, but it was more of a dull ache than a sharp stab.

“It’ll be a few days before they’re fully mended, but you should be fine as long as you avoid injuring yourself further,” she informed him, before shooing Master Asher out of the way. “I’ll finish that.”

She made Hayden
drink three different elixirs that all had horribly-clashing flavors and left his mouth tasting like onions. Then she smeared a thick blue paste over his wounds and bandaged them expertly.

Tucker was brought in by Master Sark at some point, though Hayden only noticed when Razelle and Asher stepped away from him to turn their attention to his teammate, who wasn’t nearly as injured
as he had been.

Mistress Razelle complimented Master’s Sark’s first aid skills after peeling back the bandages long enough to check the wounds. Hayden wanted to ask about a dozen questions right now: where they were sent to, how the Masters found them, how Bonk had come to be twenty-feet long for no apparent reason…but one of the elixirs must have had an anesthetic affect because he felt drowsy and lethargic.

He opened his mouth and said something that sounded like, “Argh un…” before he fell asleep.

The elixir that put him to sleep must have been really good stuff, because Hayden woke up feeling like he’d been out for days, only to learn that it was still early in the morning, too early for breakfast even.

He stood up and moved his arms experimentally to see if it caused him any pain, but other than being a little sore he felt fine. There was a sleepy mastery-level student of Mistress
Razelle’s reading in a nearby chair, obviously finishing up the night shift in the infirmary. The girl looked up at Hayden’s movement and set her book aside.

“How are you feeling?” She came over to check his bandages and prod at his ribs with her index finger to see if he winced.

“Much better,” he admitted.

“Any soreness?”

He shrugged. “A little.”

“That’s not unusual. You should recover fully in another day or two.” She applied a fresh layer of paste to his arms and re-bandaged them. “Report back here immediately if you begin to feel worse, or if you develop a fever or rash.”

Hayden nodded, hoping it didn’t come to that. He already had more excitement than he cared for in his last week of school and didn’t need it compounded by medical complications.

“Alright, well
, you can go. Avoid heavy lifting and other forms of overexertion until you’ve been cleared for it.”

Yeah, because I do a lot of heavy lifting around here…

Hayden agreed to take it easy and left the infirmary, hopefully for the last time in a long while.

Since it hardly felt worth the effort of walking up six flights of stairs only to come back down for breakfast in a few minutes, he took a seat on one of the stone benches in the main courtyard and simply watched the sun rise. It was relaxing and peaceful by himself, and the sky was cloudless and warm.

That figures. Couldn’t have been nice out when we were being translocated to the Cave of Deadly Things That Want To Eat Me.

He sat like that until he could hear the sounds of other students moving around in the main foyer on their way to breakfast. Quite a lot of people gawked at him as he joined the throng headed down the corridor to the dining hall, but he was used to ignoring the stares of others by now.

Zane looked relieved to see him when he sat down, though he was just telling the others, “Sorry, the Masters told us not to talk about it until after we meet with them this morning.”

Mira frowned as though she’d been denied a real treat, and Tamon and Conner made them promise to tell them wher
e they’d been sent to instead of the scheduled arena later.

“We’re meeting with the Masters this morning?” Hayden turned to his friend after piling a dozen sausages onto his plate. Apparently almost getting his face ripped off by a
warg left him starving.

“Yeah, as soon as breakfast is finished.
They drafted some older students to proctor their first exams so they can meet with us,” Zane explained. “They said if you were still asleep that we shouldn’t wake you though.”

Hayden raised his eyebrows. “Why are we meeting with them?” A horrible thought dawned on him. “Don’t tell me they’re still going to
score
us.”

Zane
chuckled in dark appreciation. “It wouldn’t surprise me. But I think they just want to get us all in one room to tell them what the heck happened in that cave before they found us.”

“Ooh, you were in a cave?” Mira interjected brightly.
Zane winced at his slip-up.

Hayden ignored her. “Wait, you mean no one told them what happened yet? I was sure they would have cornered you or Tess right afterwards since you weren’t hurt.”

Zane shrugged. “They wanted to let us rest and collect our thoughts, I think.” He speared a biscuit with his fork and began nibbling around the edges. “With you and Tucker both hurt and me and Tess half-traumatized, everything was a bit chaotic. Besides, they had to hunt down the seventh-years who translocated us for whatever reason—punishment, probably.”

“They’re going to be punished for being surprised by the loudest thunderclap in the history of mankind?” Hayden thought that was slightly less than fair.

“Well, I expect the one or two who were too careless to put an audio-dampening spell on themselves before attempting a translocation during a thunderstorm will be,” Zane said diplomatically.

“Where do you think they’ll send them?” Mira asked curiously.

Hayden smirked. “I hear Mount Arawas is nice this time of year.”