I had never seen those homes, but Sam had said they looked similar to the rooms where we had stayed. Above ground, the tree roots were hidden in the walls. Underground, they were visible as they held the dirt walls together and provided the light and energy needed.

  The Ginete and the Whistle Pigs were also the technicians that had built the shields we needed to stun the Shrieks. After the last battle, we had left the shields with the Whistle Pigs. If we needed them again, they were available, but I didn’t see how they could help with Deadsweep’s mental virus.

  Only Pita came with us to the village. I still didn’t know the story why sometimes the villagers both respected the Ginete and were a little standoffish too. But I figured that’s why only one Ginete came with us.

  We were a motley crew strolling down the road. High above us, Lady circled along with two other pileated dragons. I couldn’t tell all of them apart except for Lady, probably because Lady was also Suzanne. I knew that once we got to town, the two dragons would keep watch while Suzanne came into town with us.

  Ruta and Beru walked behind us. Zeid was on my right, and Cahir having made it to the Castle the day before, now walked on my left. I loved dropping my hand into his fur and leaving it there while we walked.

  Cahir never indicated whether he liked my hand on him or not, but I assumed if he didn’t he wouldn’t hesitate to let me know. Besides, he seemed to enjoy the Priscillas riding on him. La likes to sit on Cahir’s head and hold on to his ear. Pris likes to fly ahead and come back to check on us. She has a hard time keeping still. Cil loves burying herself inside Cahir’s fur so that sometimes she isn’t visible at all. Except every once in a while the tip of her wing peeks out and catches the sun turning it into a petal of rainbows.

  Link, Aki, and Niko took turns walking in front and then in the back. It looked like a casual walk but watching how alert everyone was behaving gave it away. The four men from Kinver guarded the two sides and the back.

  Yes, it was a pleasant walk, but not for a minute did anyone think that we were safe. We had no idea what form Deadsweep took to infect. We didn’t know if it was one thing or many. We didn’t know if one of us was already infected. No wonder although we laughed and chatted, we weren’t relaxed.

  I hoped that the village would bring the answer to at least one question.

  Twenty-Four

  We did get one question answered. We found out what the aftermath of infection looked like. After seeing it, and discovering that it was the result of only three people, the terror of the Deadsweep began to sink in.

  The once quiet town of Dalry, with its well-tended lawns and gardens, was gone. Oh, it was still quiet. Very quiet. Nobody was out. Instead of neighbors chatting together or strolling the streets there was no one in sight. The way the town looked, it appeared no one had ventured out for a long time. All the windows and doors were closed, and I was sure that for the first time, they were locked.

  What had caused the fear was not readily apparent. Link turned on the communication channel between all of us, in case we would need it. Everyone gave him a thumbs up when he asked if we were all on. Lady landed beside Cahir and then turned into Suzanne. Forgetting the channel I spoke out loud, “What the zonk?”

  “Well said,” Suzanne answered, which caused a titter of laughter.

  The tavern’s sign was still squeaking as we headed there. As we got closer, we could hear voices, loud voices and breaking glass. In the Earth Realm, this might have been a normal sound coming from a tavern as people drank too much and started fighting. In Erda, no one drank too much, and before Abbadon began his campaign of destruction, no one fought either.

  The martial arts forms that Niko had been teaching us were used for physical conditioning in Erda, not for fighting. Niko had fallen in love with them as a youngster and studied with a master who had moved away years before. Now, we learned those forms to defend ourselves. As we heard more glass breaking, I was happy I had at least learned the basics.

  Niko had told us to split up on each side of the tavern door. One group would go in first, and the other group would cover them. It was possible that what was going on was all being done as a bit of fun. Not likely, but possible, and we didn’t want to stir up trouble if it was innocent.

  Just as Niko gave the signal to go in, the tavern door banged open, and a man flew out, landing on his back in the street. Two other men followed him with what looked like small tree trunks in their hands. It was obvious they were heading to the man on the street who already looked as if he had been beaten with something.

  Before we could stop what was happening, the Priscillas attacked the two men’s faces. Pris took the lead man and punched him in both eyes. Cil and La each took an eye of the other one.

  I was stunned. I didn’t know that the Priscillas were fighters. Although I should have realized, given how many times they had pulled my hair or berated me for my idiocy. Still, it was awesome to watch the two men drop, screaming.

  Suzanne had turned back into a dragon and landed on the men in the street. Her talons held two of them down, and she pinned the third under her wing.

  When I went to help, Zeid yelled, “Don’t touch them!”

  Beru pulled a fine net out of her pocket, which I had never seen before, and we all helped spread it over the men as Lady backed off of them.

  Niko had taken the first group into the tavern and reported that there was no one else in there, so we pulled the net tight and led the three men back in.

  We stared in shock. Inside, the tavern was destroyed. Everything was broken or shattered into tiny bits.

  “Do you like it, smartass?” one of the men yelled, snarling at Niko. “We did it. You think you have stopped us, but you haven’t. There are a lot of us. You can stop us three, but you can’t stop the army that is forming.”

  These men talking that way was so out of context of everything I knew about Erda that I couldn’t speak. But then no one else did either. What was there to say?

  Aki had left and returned with a man who we had met the last time we had been here. Although now he looked entirely different. His face was pale, and his clothes hung on him.

  “Ah, Mayor!” the younger man shouted. “You little coward. What’s your town going to do now, huh? What if there are more of us out there, just waiting to explode. What if you are one of them, and you don’t know yet?”

  Mayor Tom blanched and ran out of the room, which only caused the men to taunt him more. It didn’t matter that they were firmly bound up in a net. They had one thing on their minds. Make us all afraid. They were doing an outstanding job of it.

  Niko looked up as Pita entered the room with his brother Sam. They were carrying a container filled with hoses, and what looked like a tarp. Niko nodded at the Ginete and shooed the rest of the team out of the tavern.

  “Do you know what’s happening in there?” we all asked Professor Link.

  “The Ginete have prepared a gas that will put those men to sleep. Once it is all set up, they will come out here and wait until the gas disperses.

  Looking at our shocked faces, he added, “No, it won’t hurt them. We just need to get them to a safe place without any of us touching them, and the Ginete suggested this.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” I asked. Leave it to me to ask the question everyone was thinking.

  “We’ll make it stronger.”

  Pita, Sam, and Niko came out looking as terrible as the rest of us. These were people, not green globs and a metal robot.

  We all moved to the other side of the street just in case some of the gas leaked. Mayor Tom invited us to his house to wait, which most of us were happy to do, including me.

  Once the gas was gone, the Ginete, Niko, and Zeid slid a wagon under the soundly sleeping bundled men. They pulled the cart into a side street. Right before it disappeared underground, I saw the ring around the circle that the Whistle Pigs had developed. Those magic circles had saved us more than once. Now they were going to save us in a different way.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now we interview everyone, but first, since we don’t know how the infection spreads, we need to take precautions,” Aki said.

  “For me, too?” squeaked the Mayor.

  “Yes, for you, too,” Aki assured him.

  Who could blame him? His town was under attack by an unknown and unseen enemy. I was trying to keep a brave face, but from the moment I saw the men, I was terrified. Evil had come to Dalry.

  Twenty-Five

  We set ourselves up in the Mayor’s home. His wife asked if we were hungry, and although I knew everyone was, we all turned her down. We suspected that their food supplies were short due to the invasion of Deadsweep into their town, and we didn’t want to deplete them further. Later I thought that perhaps it was also because we thought the food might contain the infection. Anything was possible.

  We were all wearing something that looked like a spacesuit, but it wasn’t clumsy like the ones I remembered our astronauts using. They were comfortable and fit like our regular clothes. The Priscillas were the ones responsible for the material, but they wouldn’t say what it was or where they got it. I had a suspicion it was from the fairy community, and that meant we might never know. Fairies keep their secrets.

  The Whistle Pigs had fitted us up with one of their technology gadgets that we were to breathe through. Once again, they were coming to our rescue with their technical wizardry.

  “Shouldn’t we have had these on when we first came in?” I asked, smarty pants me thinking of something after the fact.

  I got the evil look I deserved from Pris. Well, actually from everyone. So I shut up and listened.

  It was hard to coax the villagers out of their homes, but the Mayor assured them that the men were gone and that we were there to stop any further infection.

  He was lying of course. We were there to stop any further infection, but we had no idea how to do it, or if it was already present in people. The hope was by asking about the three men we would get a clue as to where they had picked up the Deadsweep virus, as we were calling it. Of course, we were guessing again. Was it a virus? Or was it an injection of something?

  We questioned everyone. Although we tried to make it as pleasant as possible, the fact that we were wearing protective clothing and they weren’t didn’t help our public image. But most of the villagers understood we were trying to stop what was happening and gave us as much information as they knew, which wasn’t much.

  All three men were loved and respected in the community. One of the men had a wife, Letha, and two daughters. They were devastated. It felt as if one minute they had a loving father and husband and the next he was angry and throwing things.

  It was that man’s family that was the most helpful because they had an eye on him every day. One of his little girls mentioned that a few days before he had started getting mean, which wasn’t like him at all. It scared her. He would snap at her for simple things that he usually loved to do, like read her a book before bed. Once she heard her daughter mention her husband’s irritability, Letha said she noticed those things too. Tiny things, but not the way he usually acted. And, yes, it had been a few days before it got worse. Before he stormed out of the house and started terrorizing the town.

  After hearing that, we went back to the friends of the other two men and heard basically the same story. It wasn’t an overnight explosion into anger. It was a progression. They didn’t have a context in which to put the irritability, so they ignored it. People in Erda were not easily irritated. At least they weren’t before.

  By the time we had questioned everyone, we were exhausted. And we knew we had to interview everyone again. However, we had to figure out how to interview for the appearance of irritability without suggesting it.

  The other thing we were looking for was rifts within relationships. But once again we were worried about causing something by suggesting that it might be present. If we suggested they were irritable wouldn’t that start a rift? And if that was what let the infection in, wouldn’t we be the ones that caused it?

  It was so tricky we decided not to do any more of that kind of questioning that day. Lady had flown back to the Castle and arranged a delivery of food for Dalry so we left the village, saying we would be back with more information as soon as possible.

  Before we left, we asked a few more straightforward questions. Were the three men friends? Did they hang out together? Had they gone anywhere together different than anyone else in the village had?

  We couldn’t give them a timeline. We didn’t know if the infection set in and waited, or immediately started acting. The answers we got from the villagers were, “Yes, they were friends, but then who wasn’t?” The villagers weren’t kidding. They were all friends. To the question “Did they go somewhere together?” no one knew the answer. So we asked them to ask around and report back to the Mayor, and he would follow up on the information.

  “You mean to be like a detective they have in Earth?” he asked me.

  “How do you know about detectives?” I asked.

  “Suzanne would tell us stories sometimes about things that went on there. Being a detective seemed pointless before. What was there to detect? Now I see how it could be valuable.”

  I high-fived him. He had perked up in the past few hours and seemed genuinely interested in finding the information that we needed.

  However, before we left, I overheard Niko speaking with Mayor Tom, warning him that he needed to be on the lookout for unusual behavior in others, including with himself. Niko handed the Mayor a device that would connect him immediately with our team.

  “You have to tell us right away, Tom,” Niko said. We might not be able to stop it, but for sure we could keep you from harming others until we can get rid of the infection.

  Mayor Tom returned to being pale. He slumped and mumbled that he understood. Who could blame him? No matter how you looked at it, this infection was horrendous. I could see how the name Deadsweep was appropriate. It caused the death of the person everyone knew. I hoped it didn’t cause actual death.

  But it did. By the time we arrived underground, where the Whistle Pigs were keeping the men, one of them was dead.

  Twenty-Six

  No sooner had we all descended via the circles into the Whistle Pigs underground rooms did we hear crying. Loud crying. No one met us in the transportation room, so after taking off our suits and air filters, we made our way down the hall to where the sound was coming from. We found Teddy with Pita and his brother standing in the hallway. The Ginete were the ones who were crying. Huge tears were running down their faces. Their bright golden eyes were dark and swollen.

  Teddy was doing his best to comfort them, but it didn’t seem to be working.

  “What’s going on?” Niko asked, pulling Teddy away from the Ginete while the rest of us stood by looking helpless.

  Teddy lowered his voice and said, “One of the men died.”

  “What! How?” Niko whispered back, but it sounded like yelling anyway.

  “We took the net off of them once we got down here and put them into a room by themselves. They were still asleep from the gas, so we thought we had time to put them into separate rooms, which we were still getting ready for them.

  “We were only gone a minute or two, but when we got back the two men that had been beating on the first man, woke up and attacked him again.”

  “With what? Surely you didn’t leave them with weapons.”

  “Of course not,” Teddy humphed. “It’s worse than that. They used their hands, their heads, their teeth ….”

  “Their teeth?” I said, horrified.

  Teddy nodded. “It’s more horrible than you can imagine.”

  I didn’t think that could be true since I was imagining a gruesome death, but I decided to not see for myself.

  “We have put the remaining two men into separate rooms. They seem calm for now. Maybe the killing let off some of the poison in their system.”

  “Or maybe Deadsweep just needs time to recharge,” Aki said. She had been standing by quietly listening to what was going on, although, like me, she had grown pale.

  The Ginete had calmed a bit and were no longer sobbing, but they still looked miserable. I had never seen the Ginete helpless like that.

  “Why were the Ginete so upset?” I asked.

  “They think it’s their fault that the gas didn’t keep the men asleep longer,” Teddy answered.

  Leif and Sarah appeared and put their arms around the Ginete and walked them away. I knew they couldn’t be in better hands. They would help them understand it wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one knew how this infection was going to work.

  There was only one person at fault. Abbadon. The creator of monsters, a monster himself.

  *******

  We were all directed by the Whistle Pigs to head to our rooms and to take a shower using some special soap that they had put there for us. Who knew if that would do anything. We were entirely in the dark about what Deadsweep was and how it spread. But I did enjoy the feeling of the hot water rushing across my body. I tried to imagine it washing away the memories of what we saw in the village and the horror of what Teddy had described.