that curved and turned with sickening complexity, he had Josh slow almost to a crawl. He rolled down his window and peered out into a thick forest that came right up to the edge of the road. They had actually driven past the unmarked path before Flamel spotted it. “Stop. Go back. Turn here.”
Josh looked at his sister as he eased the car onto the rough, unpaved and rutted track. Her hands were folded in her lap, but he could see that her knuckles were white with tension. Her nails, which had been neat and perfect only a few hours previously, were now rough and chewed, a sure sign of her stress. He reached over and squeezed her hand; she squeezed tightly in return. As with so much of the communication between them, there was no need for words. With their parents away so much, Sophie and Josh had learned from a very early age that they could only really depend on themselves. Moving from school to school, neighborhood to neighborhood, they often found it difficult to make and keep friends, but they knew that whatever happened, they would always have each other.
On either side of the overgrown path, trees rose high into the heavens and the undergrowth was surprisingly thick: wild brambles and thorn bushes scraped at the side of the car, while furze, gorse, and stinging nettles, wrapped through with poison ivy, completed the impenetrable hedge.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sophie murmured. “It’s just not natural.” And then she stopped, realizing what she’d just said. She swiveled around in the seat to look at Flamel. “It’s
not
natural, is it?”
He shook his head, suddenly looking old and tired. There were dark rings under his eyes, and the wrinkles on his forehead and around his mouth seemed deeper. “Welcome to our world,” he whispered.
“There’s something moving through the undergrowth,” Josh announced loudly. “Something big…I mean really big.” After everything he’d seen and experienced so far today, his imagination started working overtime. “It’s keeping pace with the car.”
“So long as we stay on the track, we shall be fine,” Flamel said evenly.
Sophie peered into the dark forest floor. For a moment she saw nothing, then she realized that what she’d first taken for a patch of shadow was, in fact, a creature. It moved, and sunlight dappled its hairy hide. She caught a glimpse of a flat face, a pug nose and huge curling tusks.
“It’s a pig—a boar,” she corrected herself. And then she spotted three more, flanking the right-hand side of the car.
“They’re on my side too,” Josh said. Four of the hulking beasts were moving through the bushes to his left. He glanced in the rearview mirror. “And behind us.”
Sophie, Scatty and Nicholas turned in their seats to stare through the rear window at the two enormous boars that had slipped through the undergrowth and were trotting along on the path behind them. Sophie suddenly realized just how big the creatures were—each one was easily the size of a pony. They were hugely muscled across the shoulders, and the tusks jutting up from their lower jaws were enormous, starting out as thick as her wrist before tapering to needle-sharp points.
“I didn’t think there were any wild boars in America,” Josh said, “and certainly not in Mill Valley, California.”
“There are wild boars and pigs all over the Americas,” Flamel said absently. “They were first brought over by the Spanish in the sixteenth century.”
Josh shifted gears, eased off the accelerator and allowed the car to move forward at a crawl. The road had come to a dead end. The barrier of bushes, thorns and trees now stretched across the path. “End of the road,” he announced, putting the car into park and setting the emergency brake. He looked left and right. The boars had also stopped moving, and he could see them, four to a side, watching. In the rearview mirror, he could see that the two larger boars had stopped too. They were boxed in.
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