The Key (2 page)

So when it had been pointed out to him that having made it by train from London to Edinburgh, Scotland, the best way to get from there to Loch Ness was by car, he'd gone along. To demonstrate that he was not a huge wimp.

How was that going? Like this:

“Gaaa-aah-ahh!” Dietmar commented.

BAM!

Rattle rattle rattle rattle
.

Thump!

The car hit the low curb guarding the center of the circle, bounced over the lumpy grass, swerved around some sort of monument, narrowly missed a pair of Mini Coopers—one red, one tan—and bounced out of the other side of the circle and onto the main road.

Mack, Xiao, and Dietmar all took the first breath they'd inhaled in several minutes.

Stefan said, “Is there a drive-through in this country? I'm starving.”

And Jarrah said, “I'm so hungry I could eat a horse and chase the jockey.”

Jarrah and Stefan: obviously they were not quite normal.

Having survived the traffic circle, the gang found a gas station that also had food. They bought prepackaged sandwiches and sodas. They topped the car off with gas. And that's when Mack noticed a van he had noticed earlier. There was nothing remarkable about the van—it was beige, which is the world's least noticeable color. But Mack was a kid who noticed things and he noticed that this van had a dent on one side. A small thing. But what were the odds that there were two tan vans with the same dent?

He had first noticed this van way back just outside Edinburgh, and now that Mack looked closer, it seemed the windshield was tinted. Which would be a perfectly normal thing where Mack was from—the Arizona desert, where the sun shone 360 out of 365 days—but was pretty strange here in Scotland, where the sun shone 5 days out of 365.

“That van has been following us,” Mack said as the five of them leaned against their car eating.

No one questioned him. They'd all learned that when Mack noticed something, he noticed it right.

So they leaned there and watched the van. Which maybe was watching them back.

“I'll go ask them what's up,” Stefan said.

“No,” Mack said, shaking his head. “Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe they're just going to the same place we are.”

“That is perhaps likely,” Dietmar said. “Loch Ness is very famous, and people will be coming from all over to see it.”

Dietmar spoke flawless English but his accent was strange at times, and Mack had to struggle to resist mocking him. As leader of the group, Mack had to behave in a very mature way. Mostly he did. But in his mind he was saying, “Zat iss peerheps likely,” in a snooty voice.

He didn't dislike Dietmar; Dietmar was fine. But it wasn't possible to like everyone equally. Dietmar was very smart and made sure everyone knew it. And he was better-looking than Mack—at least Mack thought so, since Dietmar had perfectly straight blond hair while Mack had boring curly brown hair. As a result of that, Mack was pretty sure Xiao thought Dietmar was fascinating.

Mack, however, found Xiao fascinating. So he didn't really want her to find Dietmar more fascinating than him. Mack wasn't exactly sure why he found Xiao so interesting. A year ago he would have barely noticed her if he'd met her. But lately he had looked with slightly more interest at girls. It wasn't a really focused attention just yet. But it was attention.

Possibly it was because he had seen Xiao in her true form. She was, after all, a dragon. Not a fire-breathing, leathery-winged type, but the less terrifying and more spiritual Chinese dragon, with a father and mother who didn't need to breathe fire to scare the pee out of Mack.

Xiao could turn effortlessly into her current form: a pretty girl. But she insisted the other shape, the somewhat large, turquoise, snakelike form was her true self.

“Dietmar,” Xiao said, “what do you think we should do?”

“Me?” Dietmar squeaked. Because he did that sometimes when Xiao talked to him. Squeak.

It was really annoying.

“Yes, Dietmar, I am asking your opinion,” Xiao said patiently.

“I think we should not confront them. We should merely watch and be prepared.”

“I agree,” Xiao said.

“I think Stefan should go knock on their window and ask them what's up,” Mack said. That was not what he had thought or said, oh, sixty seconds earlier, but it was what he thought now.

Stefan hesitated. He looked at Mack. Then he looked at Jarrah, who gave a brief nod.

The Aussie girl and Stefan had a special bond. It was the mystical bond that joined the kind of people who think it would be fun to strap rockets to bikes and fly over the Grand Canyon.

That's not some made-up example. That's from an actual conversation between Stefan and Jarrah.

Stefan swaggered over to the van and tapped on the window with his knuckles. Mack tensed. The van window rolled down.

Stefan talked to someone, leaned in to listen, then stepped away as the window rolled back up. He came back to report to Mack.

“It's a bunch of fairies.”

“Fairies?”

“Like with wings?”

“I think so,” Stefan said. “They say they have a proposition.”

“A proposition?” said Mack.

“That's what they said,” said Stefan.

“A van full of fairies,” Mack repeated.

Stefan nodded. “They want to talk to you in a safe place. Someplace neutral. That's what they said. They said there's a magical woods down the road.”

That left them all staring blankly at Stefan.

“What do they want?” Jarrah asked.

Stefan shrugged. “They want Magnum bars. Five white chocolate and one Mayan Mystica. They said they're for sale in the mini-mart here. They can't go in themselves. Because, you know, they're fairies.”

“We should buy them these ice-cream bars,” Dietmar said. “Then we should talk to them and see what they want.”

This was a problem for Mack because he agreed with Dietmar. But he didn't want to look like he was following Dietmar's lead. But there was no way around it: if a vanload of fairies wants to talk to you, you can't exactly blow them off.

So the Magnifica plus Stefan went in and bought the Magnum bars. Except for the Mayan Mystica because the store was out of that flavor. Stefan had to be sent back to the van to learn whether a dark chocolate would do. (Yes.)

Stefan delivered the ice cream to the fairies.

Spent at Shell station: 11.15 GBP.
⁴

They waited for several minutes while, Mack assumed, the fairies ate. Then the van pulled out smoothly, and with a lurching of grinding gears, a crushed trash can, and a scream of terror from a mother pushing a stroller, Mack and his crew followed.

They drove for about a mile before pulling up in sight of Urquhart Castle, an ancient ruin that perched picturesquely beside Loch Ness. The van slowed to a stop in a place where there quite clearly were no woods.

The van waited and Mack and the Magnifica waited until several cars passed by. Then, when the coast was clear, the van drove straight into a stand of trees that had absolutely not been there ten seconds earlier.

M
ack didn't know much about trees. Unfortunately, Dietmar did.

“These are holly and rowan. Superstitious folk believe they have magical properties.”

“Well, since this forest wasn't here until, like, just now, I guess maybe they're right,” Mack said.

Even though the day was weakly sunny, it was dark in the woods. The van rolled to a smooth stop on a bed of fallen leaves. The car rolled into a bush, sending birds squawking away in terror. The car jerked hard a few times. Then it emitted a disgruntled farting sound and finally stopped.

The window of the van rolled down again, and out flew things sparkly and golden: the ice-cream bar wrappers.

The door opened. The fairies did not step out; they flew, six of them in all.

Having by this time been in close contact with insectoid Skirrit, treasonous Tong Elves, and disgusting Lepercons, not to mention several horrifying monsters that Risky had morphed into, Mack was ready for just about anything. So it surprised him that the fairies looked almost exactly the way he expected fairies to look.

Three were male, three were female, and all had toned little bodies clad in earthy colors. They had double wings, like dragonflies, that made a buzzing sound (again, like dragonflies) as they flew. They were all roughly the same size, each maybe half a kid in height. Or at least half a Mack. Maybe a third of a Stefan.

The surprise was not in their look: these were definitely garden-variety, standard-issue fairies. The surprise came when they opened their mouths.

“I'm Frank. This is my crew: Joey, Connie, Pete, Ellen, and Julia.”

“These are not proper fairy names,” Dietmar observed.

Frank squinted. “What are you, the fairy police? Our names are whatever we say they are.”

But Dietmar wasn't having it. “A fairy should be named after a flower or a tree, or something in the natural world.”

“And a kid should learn to keep his mouth shut,” Frank snapped. And with that, he drew what had at first looked like a small sword hanging at his side. It turned out to be a droopy sort of wand.

“You like flowers? Be one,” Frank said. He waved his wand and said, “
E-ma exel strel (click)haka!
”

“That's Vargran!” Jarrah said.

And Dietmar probably would have agreed except for the fact that his body had turned green and very thin. Tubular, one might even say. His arms flattened into graceful leaves. And his head formed first a tight, green bulb and then exploded outward as the petals of a magnificent-looking sunflower.

From the seedpod at the center, Dietmar's two eyes stared in shock. Frank did not seem to have bothered to give him a mouth.

Mack was torn between terror—understandable—and a feeling of glee—also understandable but not really admirable.

Xiao's eyes narrowed, and already blue scales were covering her body as she—

“Uh-uh-uh!” Frank warned, shaking his finger. “That would be a bad move, dragon girl. Your kind signed a treaty a long time ago. This is western dragon territory.”

Reluctantly Xiao melted back to purely human form.

“Now, can we talk business?” Frank asked.

“You have to change Dietmar back to normal,” Mack demanded, somewhat forcefully, almost as though he meant it.

“When we're done talking business.”

“Okay, what business?”

Frank shot a coy look at his crew, who fluttered slightly, then settled toward the ground. The instant their bare toes touched the lush grass, their wings rolled up. Like rolling up a window shade. Just rolled up.
Whap
.

“We hear you're looking for someone,” Frank said.

They were, in fact, looking for the Key. The Key to Vargran spells and curses. So far they'd found bits and pieces of Vargran, but now, as they neared the fateful confrontation to save the world from the Pale Queen, they needed more. A lot more. And the Key was … um … the key.

That's right: the Key was the key.

The Key had two parts. The first had been given to them by Nott, Norse goddess of night. And if you believed Nott (and seriously, how could you not believe a mythical Norse goddess?), the second and final part of the Key had been buried with one William Blisterthöng MacGuffin.

“Maybe,” Mack said cautiously.

“No maybe about it, kid. You've been asking around about someone no one has seen in a long time. We have good sources.”

Mack glanced at his companions. Jarrah shrugged.

And Mack's iPhone chimed with the tone it used to signal a message.

Mack ignored it, but it was an edgy sort of ignoring, like he was forcing himself to ignore it, which just made everyone uncomfortable, and finally Frank said, “Oh, just go ahead and get it.”

With an abashed smile, Mack pulled out his phone.

“Well? What is it?” Xiao asked impatiently.

Mack sighed. “It's my golem. He's refusing to shower in the boys' locker room.”

“Lotta dudes are bashful about that,” Stefan said, and no one thought he was talking about himself because Stefan was incapable of bashfulness.

“It's not about being shy,” Mack said with a sigh. “He's made out of mud. That much water …”

“Kind of busy here,” Frank interrupted impatiently. “Anyway, it's best not to coddle golems. They just get needy.”

“I'll just take a minute to …” His words faded out as he thumbed in a response:

You have got to handle these things yourself. You have got to be a big boy now.

“Sorry,” Mack said of the interruption. “You were saying?”