Witch & Wizard by James Patterson, Gabrielle Charbonnet Page B

yellow eyes, seemed to
see
me.
    And then I did something even more stupid: I stopped and screamed.
    Whit immediately scooped me up and raced after Sasha. I couldn’t stop myself from yelling, and the boys seemed to know it. They didn’t even try to shush me. I guess they knew the game was up—either Sasha would guide us to the portal in time or he wouldn’t.
    And then we’d find out exactly what it was the Lost Ones did to people.

Wisty
    “OKAY,” SASHA SAID, stopping suddenly. “Brace yourselves.”
    My heart leaped. Bracing, I could handle. Getting mauled by soul-eating shadow creatures, not so much.
    But where was the portal? All I saw was more fog. Was the portal here? Where?
    Just then Feffer—who was, sweet dog, running tail guard several yards behind us—whimpered piteously.
    “Feffer!” I stopped my own whimpering and yelled as the dog, unable to control herself, raced past toward a patch of fog that, I suddenly noticed, seemed to be rotating like a sideways whirlpool. She was bleeding. Badly. It looked as if something had gashed her left side with a garden rake. And the fright in her eyes—she looked more like a terrified puppy than a former New Order hellhound.
    But before I could even think to reach out to comfort her, she was past me and leaping into the swirling vapor. And she was gone.
    “That’s our portal,” said Sasha. “You two next. And be careful,” he said. “Freeland can be pretty wild.”
    Wild, I could also handle—I’d have happily signed up for a deep-jungle camping trip with a pack of hungry jaguars. Anything but this nightmare scene. But I couldn’t joke about it to Sasha. For one thing, my teeth were chattering too hard to talk.
    We were suddenly confronted with a cold so intense it burned—and it was coming from
in front
of us.
    One of the Lost Ones had somehow gotten in between us and the portal.
    Maybe if pain, hatred, and suffering were mixed in equal parts, somehow given shape, and dipped in black paint, you’d come close to what we saw now. Although there was something disturbingly, hauntingly human about its shadow-filled face. There was no skin, just sort of a flickering, shadowy surface where you would expect to see a forehead, cheeks, nose… and then there were the eyes. No pupils. Just slits, yellow-orange, flickering like torches you’d see on the walls of hell.
    I wanted nothing more than to scream, but I was now officially paralyzed by the frozen air and my terror.
    I squinted my eyes against the cold and watched helplessly as other Lost Ones moved in around us. We were surrounded.
    Then—and I don’t know where he got the strength or courage—Sasha stepped toward the one directly in front of the portal, ignoring its clicking finger-claws and looking into its deathly yellow eyes.
    “You got us,” he said. “But you’ll want me to explain this to you.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “It’s a map. With it, I can show you where to find a portal—not like this one, which won’t work for your kind—that can take you out of the Shadowland. A way back home.”
    Somehow the horrible creature seemed to understand and appreciate what Sasha was saying.
    And then, with a masterful flourish, Sasha crumpled the paper and threw it to the ground, causing the creature to leap after it with an earsplitting shriek of anger.
    And then Sasha fairly tackled Whit and me into the portal, and the three of us plunged through, Byron Hateful Suck-up Weasel clinging to my pants leg with all four paws, the insufferable little creep.
    There was an electric, tingly feeling that got stronger and stronger until my body began to shake like I was being tossed around in the back of a horse-drawn cart barreling down a cobblestone road at fifty miles an hour.
    And then, suddenly, we were through—and
outside,
it seemed. The initial sensation was of wind—and it felt amazing, as if it were the first fresh air that had touched my skin in years.
    I