Wood Sprites

Should she choose a different target for each spell? A series of hits with slightly different vectors might create a large collapse. She sat back and tugged at her hair with both hands. She was overthinking it, wasn’t she? She didn’t have time to debate choices.

She quickly taped blank paper between the spells and took out a metal ink pen. She desperately hoped that she was as clever as she thought she was. This was so going to suck if the spell didn’t work like she wanted it to. She would need to use all four magic generators, but that much power would quickly char the paper. She would have one shot to bring down the cave ceiling.

Maybe she should just do one spell at a time—

“Lou!” Nikola’s voice came out of a brown mouse that crouched by her foot. “A truck just pulled into the parking lot.”

“What?” She jerked up the pen to keep from misdrawing the timing circle.

“A box truck. It’s backing up to the gift shop.”

Her heart started to hammer into overdrive. “Stay calm. You can do this.”

“Can you?”

“Yes! I can!” Louise really hoped that she wasn’t lying now.

“What should I do?”

“I need to concentrate. Please don’t talk to me.”

She quickly finished drawing the ramping section and shifted the plastic up onto the railing. There was a distant crashing noise in the direction of the gift shop — glass shattering. She connected the magic generators as fast as she could and then said the trigger word.

Nothing happened.

“Oh no!” she cried. “Why isn’t it working?”

“Lou! Lou! They’re coming! It’s Yves and twenty of the people from the mansion and a dozen people we don’t know! Oh no, another truck just pulled up!”

She gripped her hair with both hands. What was wrong? The spell hadn’t powered up at all. It meant power wasn’t getting from the generators to the timing ring. . She cried as she spotted the point where she hadn’t drawn in the full line.

“I can’t stop them, Lou!” Nikola cried.

“There’s one of the damn Wood Sprites!” Yves shouted as a wave of elves ran toward her, the sounds of their boots thundering in the tight space.

Louise drew in the missing trace and shouted the trigger word.

The world roared into darkness. She sensed tons of broken rock dropping down all around her, and she dodged to the side. Rubble thundered down beside her, tearing the bag from her grip and knocking her down. Whimpering with fear, she scrambled on all fours, not even sure in which direction she was blindly heading. She hit some kind of shallow hollow in the wall and tucked herself into it.

After the deafening roar of falling rock, the silence afterwards was strange and unreal. It was like she had accidently muted the universe. She huddled in her tiny shelter, panting in the dusty air. Was it over? Had it worked? Was the hallway completely blocked? She was too scared to even move.

Somewhere nearby, there was a deep male grunt and then the scrape of boot on rock.

Louise pressed her hands to her mouth. Crow Boy had metal fighting spars on his crowlike feet, so it wasn’t him. An elf was on her side of the rockslide! What if there was more than one? What should she do? What could she do?

Most of her things had been in her backpack. She groped in the darkness, trying to find it. The floor of the cave was covered with a confusion of pebbles and larger stones.

There was another boot scrape. Louder. Closer.

She froze, fingers deep in the mix of sand and rocks. Even if she found the bag, what could she do? What spell would get her out of this mess? She didn’t have a box for invisibility, nor would it matter in this utter darkness.

A small light flared in the dark. The elf stood only six or seven feet from her, a small flashlight in his hand. Louise didn’t dare move, lest her motion betray her. From her low, protected hollow in the wall, Louise could see that the male wore high boots, tailored canvas slacks, and a wool pea coat. A sword and a pistol hung from his hips as though he were a soldier from hundreds of years out of the past. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew that it was Yves.

The male slowly examined the cave around him. Thick dust hazed the beam of the flashlight as it swept over the broken wall that was the rockslide. Surely he was wondering the same thing Louise was. What had happened to the other elves? Were they trapped under the rubble or were they safely on the other side? Were they digging through even now? Was there a way through? How thick was the blockage? A few feet or several yards? They had been nearly fifty feet from the gift shop.

The light swung around and pointed down the hall. The floor was strewn with random boulders and a carpet of rubble but was otherwise clear. Something gleamed, reflecting the light, and it caught Yves’ attention. He knelt down and picked it up.