New Boy Page 4

rough, had a strangely lilting accent that was somehow familiar.

  “Wh…what do you mean?” Dylan asked, stuttering a little. He glanced over his shoulder, reassuring himself that the door was still there. It was, standing alone in a small clearing between trees. Through the empty doorframe he could see the school courtyard.

  “We knew you would start returning once the door was open, of course. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Look…I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know who you are and this isn’t my home,” Dylan said. Something about this strange person rubbed him the wrong way. The anger that had driven him through the door had vanished, leaving him slightly uneasy and wondering if he shouldn’t just go back. Clearly it wasn’t some kind of trick. He didn’t know how it was possible, but he had stepped through the door and into some strange place where people looked like trees.

  Maybe he really had been sucked into another dimension.

  All at once he realized something. He knew why the creature’s voice sounded familiar. He had heard voices like that all his life. Whenever everything else around him was quiet, he had heard the sounds of another place. Had he somehow stumbled into his imaginary world? For that’s all it ever was, according to the doctors they had taken him to see. Unable to cope with a severe case of sedatephobia—the fear of silence—his mind had created a pretend world full of sounds and voices for him to listen to. No one had ever been able to explain to him why, if the sounds he heard were supposed to be a coping method, they had never felt even remotely comforting to him.

  Perhaps it was because they weren’t made up at all, but were real sounds from a real world that he had somehow tuned into. Maybe it was like the way a radio had to be tuned to a particular station in order to hear it. Maybe Dylan didn’t have a phobia at all. Maybe his brain was just tuned to a different station than everyone else’s.

  The tree person titled its head and stared at him curiously. “I see. You don’t know what you are. You just stumbled upon the door and decided to step through, hmm? Brave lad. Or foolish.” It shrugged its boney shoulders, as if the distinction didn’t much matter. “Well, either way, you’d better come with me. The Queen will want to meet you. She’s been waiting a very long time for her children to come back to her.”

  Dylan took a step back toward the door. “Thanks for the…um…invitation, but I think it’s time I head back. Don’t want to miss fifth period.”

  He started to take another step, but creature jumped at him, moving so swiftly that he didn’t have time to react. It grabbed his forearm, digging its long, thin fingers into his skin.

  “It wasn’t an invitation,” it said harshly. Its fingernails pierced Dylan’s skin, sending sharp streaks of pain up his arm.

  All at once, Dylan felt lightheaded. He tried to pull away and made a desperate lunge toward the open doorway. But his legs didn’t seem to be working properly and his lunge turned into a lurch.

  The tree person released him with a mocking laugh and he fell to the ground. “Don’t worry, little brother. You’re home now. We’re going to take good care of you.”

  Dylan could feel the strength draining out of his body. He tried, and failed, to get back to his feet. There was something wrong with his eyes, too. When he looked up at his attacker, the creature seemed unusually bright, engulfed in a shimmering halo of light, while the trees at the edge of his vision were fuzzy and dark.

  “Who are you?” he gasped. It was hard to speak. His voice sounded hollow and faraway to his own ears.

  The tree person laughed pleasantly, as if the two of them were enjoying an inside joke. “Why, I’m Aodh, of course. The Master of Changelings.”

  Dylan managed to twist his head around to look desperately one last time toward the open doorway. Daphne was there, staring at him with a horrified look on her face. Then Aodh, Master of Changelings—whatever that meant—laughed again and the door slammed shut. Dylan blacked out.

  When he woke, Dylan’s first thought was that the bed in his new room was the most uncomfortable thing he had ever slept on. It felt like a cold slab of cement. His head ached and his left arm felt like it was on fire. It was hard to think, too. Like wading through mud, it took effort. Laying there on the stone-hard mattress, he forced himself to think.

  He wasn’t in his room at Connor and Vivian’s house. He hadn’t gone home. He had been at school. He remembered Algebra and lunch—his stomach gurgled loudly, reminding him that he hadn’t actually eaten anything. After lunch…What had happened? He had been angry. He had rushed out into the courtyard.

  The door.

  All at once, like a dam bursting, memory rushed back. He had gone through the door and that strange creature—Aodh—had attacked him.

  Heart pounding, Dylan opened his eyes. He saw bars. He was lying on the ground inside some kind of jail cell. It was small and stank of sweat and things he didn’t want to think about. Beyond the bars was a stone corridor. A torch flickered in a holder on the wall, casting an eerie light that danced in his vision.

  “I’ve been teleported into the Lord of the Rings,” he muttered to himself.

  “You’re awake,” said a plaintive voice.

  Startled, Dylan scrambled into a sitting position and instantly wished he hadn’t. The headache hammered on the inside of his skull and his vision swum. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a few deep breaths until his head stopped spinning.

  When he dared to open his eyes again, he saw a figure crouching just outside his cell, covered by a thick black cloak. A small hand pushed back the hood and Dylan found himself looking at a skinny boy who was maybe ten or eleven years old. The boy’s thin pale face was framed by a mess of scraggly black hair. He looked unkempt and malnourished.

  “You’ve been asleep for hours,” the boy whined.

  Dylan carefully arranged his limbs into a more comfortable position, moving slowly so as not to set the world spinning again. “Where am I?” he asked. “And if you say Mordor, I’m going back to sleep.”

  “The dungeon,” the boy said simply, ignoring the Tolkien reference. “I snuck down here to see if you were awake. I thought maybe you were dead.”

  The boy sounded annoyed, although Dylan couldn’t tell if that was because he had taken so long to wake up or because he wasn’t dead after all. “Sorry to disappoint you,” he muttered.

  “Oh, I’m not disappointed.” The boy grinned. It was the most unpleasant grin Dylan had ever seen. Like a rat watching something else struggle in the mousetrap. “I’m glad you’re alive. It will be fun.”

  “What will be fun?” Dylan asked as he held his left arm up to the light. Five raw holes marked were Aodh’s fingernails had pierced his skin. They must have been coated in some kind of poison. That would explain why he had passed out and why his head felt so awful now.

  Ignoring his question, the boy said, “I thought maybe you were my twin, but you don’t look like me.”

  “Why would I be your twin?” Dylan asked.

  “You look a little like Goban. Maybe you’re his twin,” the boy continued.

  “Look, I’m nobody’s twin, okay? I’m an only child,” he said, beginning to feel irritated by this strange little kid. It was true, as far as he knew. He couldn’t remember much about his parents, but he was pretty sure he would have remembered if he had had a twin brother before they had abandoned him.

  “No one’s ever met their twin before. I wanted to be the first,” said the boy. He didn’t seem to care much what Dylan said.

  Somewhere out of sight a door opened. There was a brief burst of many voices talking at once and then the door slammed, shutting them in gloomy silence once again.

  “Shh!” the boy hissed needlessly. “Don’t tell them I was here!” His voice was urgent now and all traces of the ratty grin were gone. He was desperate, afraid.

  “I won’t,” Dylan assured him. He might not like the boy very much, but he was the closest thing Dylan had to a friend at the moment and besides...Dylan h
ad seen that particular brand of fear on kids’ faces before. Someone had hurt the boy. Hurt him bad.

  The boy pulled the hood back over his face and scuttled down the hall, away from the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Dylan half expected Aodh, but neither of the faces that peered in at him next belonged to the Master of Changelings. Instead, he found himself staring at two gruff looking men. They seemed unusually short for adults and each had a long thick beard that reached almost to the floor. The word “dwarf” popped into Dylan’s mind and wouldn’t go away. Maybe he had read one too many fantasy novels. The men were dressed in matching purple and black uniforms and had large axes strapped to their backs. Some kind of guards, he guessed.

  “Don’t see what all the fuss is about,” grunted one of the dwarf guards. “Just another kid. Not like they’re in short supply around here.”

  The other hushed him. “Just open the door and get him out. Her Majesty’s waiting.”

  A queen? Someone had been telling him about a queen. In the cafeteria, Daphne had said that the queen of the fairies was a junior at Seelie High and Aislin had made some weird prophecy about her getting ugly. Somehow he doubted that the queen these guards were talking about now was some teenage girl—ugly or otherwise.

  With another grunt, the first dwarf pulled a ring of keys from his belt and fitted one into the lock on the cell door. As the door swung open,