Elliot and the Last Underworld War (10 page)

“Not as weird as you might think,” Elliot said. “I’ve got to go.”

“Still working on that secret paper-mache project?”

“Huh?”

Wendy smiled. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. Cami told us that you were working on a paper-mache doll of her and that you didn’t want anyone to bother you in your room.”

Elliot rolled his eyes. “That’s what she said I was doing?” Couldn’t she have picked something better? Like maybe he was lifting weights all morning or rescuing pets from burning houses? Then he sighed. A part of him wished Cami would have told Wendy the truth. It would have helped to talk to his sister about the Brownies and the Underworld war and about why there was a sinkhole on Main Street in the shape of his name. He was tired of keeping so many secrets from his family.

But it was not his secret to tell. The knowledge of the Underworld belonged to the creatures who lived there, not to him.

“Yeah, whatever Cami said, I have to go back and do that,” Elliot said. “I’ll be busy for a while, maybe a really long time.”

“Okay.” Wendy shrugged, then returned to watching the television.

Elliot ran back upstairs. As soon as he was out of sight, he closed his eyes, pictured the scene on Main Street, and poofed himself there.

Elliot might have thought about the shops and stores on Main Street, but he never could have pictured all the people running in the streets, pushing one another to get as far from the sinkholes as possible. He had tried to poof into a quiet part of the street, but when he got there it was obvious that nothing on this street was quiet today.

The sinkholes were in the middle of the road. From here, Elliot couldn’t see his name, but he knew that hundreds of feet below this very spot, Kovol was sending Elliot the message that he was angry. Well, duh. Did he think Elliot hadn’t figured that out yet?

“Excuse me,” a woman said, nearly running him over.

He moved for her, which put him in the way of a man who only looked down at Elliot long enough to tell him to go home before he also hurried away.

Elliot wanted to get to the Quack Shack, but it was a little farther up the road. Elliot hoped Reed had seen the sinkholes and gotten away before he came into work. Elliot pushed past people who were pushing past him even harder. At first he had tried getting through politely by saying things like “Excuse me,” or “Can I get by?” But now he just yelled “Move!” at anyone in his way.

“Elliot?”

He turned as Cami grabbed his arm. “I thought you were in the Underground,” she said.

“The Underworld,” he said. “I came back to check on my family.”

“Thank goodness. Reed needs help.”

“Reed? Where is he?”

For the first time ever, Elliot didn’t care that Cami took his hand while she led him forward through the crowd. She was good at dodging people, and in no time they had made it to the front door of the Quack Shack. Through the main window they saw Reed on the floor, unconscious.

Elliot pushed on the door, but it wouldn’t open.

“It’s stuck,” Cami said. “It jammed when the last sinkhole collapsed.”

“Reed!” Elliot pounded on the window to wake up his brother, but Reed didn’t move.

“We need to get some help.” Cami stepped forward in the crowd. “Excuse me, please—” But everyone passed her by, in their own hurry to leave Main Street.

While her head was turned, Elliot closed his eyes and pictured the door opening. He didn’t think “un-jam” was a word, but he couldn’t think of any other word to describe what he wanted the door to do. He whispered that to himself, then checked the door again. Something dark purple began oozing from the door near its handle. He leaned low and sniffed. It was sweet and fruity. On a guess, Elliot put a finger to the stuff and tasted it. Sure enough—grape jam! It was sort of gross, but the jam got into the lock and loosened the door enough for Elliot to inch it open.

“We’re in,” he called to Cami. “C’mon!”

She ran to help him with the door but then pulled her hand back. “Is that jam?”

“Don’t ask,” he said.

They rushed inside the Quack Shack and called again for help, but nobody answered. Reed was there alone, clearly because he was the only employee who thought the Quack Shack would be serving duck burgers while the entire city was collapsing.

Elliot dropped to his knees and shook his brother’s arm. “Reed!”

Cami pressed her fingers to the side of Reed’s neck to feel a pulse. “He’s alive,” she said. “But we’ve got to get him out of here.”

“Help me lift him up.” Elliot stood and tugged on Reed’s arms, pulling him into a sitting position, and then saw two giant footprints in the floor beneath where Reed had lain. Not
on
the floor, but
in
it, smashed into the tiles.

“What could have done that?” Cami asked.

“Kovol,” Elliot breathed. “Kovol was here. On the surface.”

He quickly looked around them, then said to Cami, “I’ve got to try something that might feel weird to you. But you have to trust me, okay?”

She shrugged. “Okay. I trust you.”

He put one hand on Reed’s shoulder and took Cami’s hand again. “It’s better if you close your eyes,” he said.

Elliot next closed his own eyes and pictured his bedroom as clearly as he possibly could. And poofed them all home.

It was harder than he had imagined. Instead of keeping one person’s body parts together, now he had to do that for three people. And from the first second she had felt her gut being pulled away from the Quack Shack, Cami had started to do the girl-squeal thing. Even if poofing only lasts a single second, it can seem like hours if the girl next to you is squealing.

Then she stopped and they landed in Elliot’s room. Somewhere during the trip, Reed had lost his Quack Shack apron, but Elliot hadn’t worked very hard to keep track of that. All the important body parts seemed to have come back together and in their correct places.

“How did we get here?” Cami asked. “Did you do it?”

“I’m sort of new at magic, so I didn’t do it very well.” Elliot patted Reed’s cheek. “Wake up. Please.”

Slowly, Reed shook his head, then let out a long moan. His eyelids fluttered while he thought about waking up, and he raised a hand to his head.

“Ow,” he mumbled.

“Are you okay?” Elliot asked.

Reed opened one eye and then the other. “Where are we?”

“Home.”

“How did I get here?”

Cami began, “Elliot did some—”

“Really heavy lifting to get you here,” Elliot finished.

“I had this horrible dream,” Reed said. “I was in the Quack Shack, and this huge purple beast appeared. He asked if I was Penster. I said that I was Reed Penster and asked if he was hungry, because I figured even if he was a horrible beast, he’d probably order a lot of duck burgers. Then he roared and charged toward me. Then you appeared out of nowhere, Elliot, and dared the beast to come back and chase after you. He picked me up and threw me against the wall. The next thing I remember is waking up here.”

Beside Elliot, Cami’s mouth was hanging open almost to the floor. Elliot could only stare at Reed, relieved things hadn’t been worse. Kovol must have lost Harold, who was shapeshifted as Elliot, so he came looking for Elliot in Sprite’s Hollow. Luckily, Harold had arrived just in time to save Reed and got Kovol to chase after him again. But the chase could not last much longer. And Elliot could not let Kovol come back to the surface.

He quietly poofed the family’s broom into his own closet, then stood and said to Cami, “Wendy will help you take care of Reed. And tell her to get the twins home and make them stay here.”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“You know where.”

Then he grabbed the broom from his closet, walked into the hallway, and immediately poofed himself to the darkest part of the entire Underworld.

Harold the Shapeshifter had been given only one job that day, which was to turn into Elliot and lead Kovol on a chase anywhere away from Demon Territory. Elliot hoped Harold had led Kovol and all of his army far away by now. Because if Harold made any mistakes, poofing into Demon Territory wasn’t a good idea.

He was kidding himself, of course. It would
never
be a good idea to poof into Demon Territory.

But Elliot already had a plan in mind. If Kovol was there, he’d just put up a magical shield or something. The only problem with this plan was that he had no idea how to create a magical shield, and he was pretty sure Kovol wouldn’t give him any second chances to figure it out. So it wasn’t a perfect plan.

It had been a bit of a trick for Elliot to poof himself into Demon Territory, because he had a hard time picturing exactly where he wanted to go. The only places he remembered there were dark enough to make him want to poof anywhere else. Finally he decided to go to the area right outside Kovol’s cave. It was very dark there, but better there than inside the cave. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the creepiest place in the known universe, Elliot figured that spot was an easy 10. But it was way better than inside the cave, which was at least a 789.

Once he arrived, Elliot hunched down to the ground. He wasn’t sure exactly why he did that, but it seemed like a good idea. Everything was as eerily quiet as it had been four months ago when he had first entered Demon Territory.

Not far from him was a puddle of mud with a brown glow around it. Elliot recognized it as gripping mud. He’d been stuck in it twice and had kept Kovol trapped in some until the solar eclipse earlier that day.