The Shadow Morpher-Book 2

Chapter 3

Okay, and here is the third chapter! :) Can my loyal readers still please comment so I can find out who you are? And sorry if you have commented and I haven't yet dedicated it to you. Only two parts are out so far, so I hope you understand. :) Picture on the side of Kayla on the side.

Chapter 3

          They all fell out of a shadow along the base of the Eiffel Tower. Troy stumbled, almost losing his grip on Dahlia. The light of a street lamp fell on her and Troy saw her pale face. Beads of sweat covered her forehead.

         “We did it!” Troy exclaimed. “We’re in Paris!”

          Kayla nodded. She looked more tired than Troy had ever seen her. She also looked older, as if her immortality wasn’t working well.

        Cedric let go of Troy and said, “We’re in Paris, but where does Sapphire live? In an apartment? A house? In the streets?”

        Kayla frowned. “I gave Dahlia a pendant that would lead her to Sapphire. She probably has it now, but where, I have no idea.”

        Troy checked his watch. There were only twenty-five minutes left. He shifted his grip on Dahlia to check her pockets. Luna closed her silver eyes. Cedric gathered part of Dahlia’s dead weight so that Troy could hunt for the pendant.

        “This is stupid,” Kayla said. “Where does she usually keep stuff that she values, Troy?”

        “Around her neck,” Troy and Luna said in unison.

        Kayla fumbled around Dahlia’s neck and found the pendant, still hanging from its fine silver chain. She hastily unclasped it.

        “How does it work?” Cedric asked.

        Kayla tapped the pendant with her staff and lifted it up so that it fell in the light of the moon. She closed her eyes.

        “Find Sapphire,” she intoned.

        The pendant rose in a ‘S’ shape and floated off through the streets.

        “Does that answer your question, Cedric?” Kayla asked. “And we’ll have to run or we’ll never catch up with the pendant.”

        “I don’t suppose you mean away,” said Cedric, hopefully.

        Troy sprinted off after the pendant, still carrying Dahlia, with Kayla and Luna in hot pursuit. All of them were going at top speed.

        “I was afraid of that,” Cedric mumbled and he tore after them.

        As they followed the pendant through the streets of Paris, Kayla suddenly paled. In all his time with her, Troy had never once seen her quail in fear.

       “Oh no, we aren’t going there,” she said.

       “Where?” Troy asked.

       “There,” Luna said, pointing to a set of staircases going downwards, descending below the streets like a subway tunnel.

       “What’s down there?” Troy asked. “The subway?”

       Luna and Cedric laughed despite the seriousness of the situation. Kayla scowled at Troy but before she could scold him, Cedric spoke.

       “The Catacombs of Paris,” he answered as they ran down the stairs.

       “Is that where they keep cat combs?” Troy asked.

       His ignorance earned him a glare from Kayla. Obviously, she regarded him as either ignorant and stupid, or annoying and exasperating.

       “The Catacombs are a maze of bones,” Kayla replied.

       Troy frowned. “Like human bones?”

       “Yeah,” Cedric said.

       “Where did they come from?” Troy questioned as he followed Luna through an iron gate which separated a different area of the Catacombs from another.

       “Cemeteries,” Kayla answered. “The graveyards were getting overcrowded; tombs were more often mounds of dirt with bones sticking out of them than actual tombstones. The rubbish was overflowing everywhere and there were truly rats as big as dogs.”

       “Ew,” Troy said.

       “Precisely,” Kayla said. “Then they realized that the overflowing graveyards had something to do with the diseases and some workers moved all the bones down into the Catacombs.”

       They had reached the first room of bones when Kayla finished her tale. Troy shuddered visibly, but tried not to drop Dahlia. Her weight pressed on his exhausted arms.

       Unfortunately, there were no lights in the corridor at all which meant that they couldn’t see the pendant and were unable to follow it.

       “Use your aura, Troy, and make some fire,” Luna suggested.

       “I’ll carry Dahlia,” Cedric volunteered.

       Troy was reluctant to let Cedric carry Dahlia, but all the same, he shifted Dahlia’s weight to Cedric’s arms. He used his aura to ignite a fireball, a ball of flames so bright that it lit all the darkened shadows of the corridor.

       “That way,” Luna said, spying the pendant at the end of the corridor.

       They followed the pendant deeper into the Catacombs. They travelled for about fifteen minutes, running as fast as they could. The tunnels grew more and more narrow, until Cedric and Kayla had to run sideways, carrying Dahlia between them.

        Troy struggled with his claustrophobia and to keep up. Unable to keep his mind off the fact that they were probably lost, he asked a question.

       “What’s with the patterns?” he asked.

       The walls of bones were decorated in connect-the-dot shapes, diagonals, stripes and patterns using the bones.

       Kayla shrugged. “Maybe someone who wanted to honour the dead? I don’t really know.”

       The empty eye sockets in the skulls seemed to stare at Troy as they ran past. Finally, he rounded yet another corner and ran smack into  wall of bones. Before he could turn, Luna ran into him and Cedric and Kayla stumbled into Luna.

       “Dead end!” Troy groaned. “The pendant’s gone wonky, I think. It’s banging against a skull on the wall like a hammer or something!”

       Kayla frowned. “What does the wall look like?”

       Troy lifted his hand of flames. “A bunch of bones pointing horizontally to  the skull which is on the left-hand side of the wall.”

       “Try twisting the skull,” Kayla suggested.

       “Twisting the skull?” Troy asked, finding the idea quite repulsive.

       “Try it,” Kayla said.

        Troy turned to stare at Kayla in astonishment. What she was asking of him was quite repulsive. He frowned at her as best he could.

       “Troy, we don’t have time to argue,” Kayla snapped. “Look at your watch! We have less than ten minutes left. Try it!”

       Absolutely disgusted, Troy twisted the skull. To his surprise, it turned quite easily and the camouflaged door swung open. Troy stumbled inside.

       In the split second that Troy was inside, he saw two people, a guy and a girl, sitting around a campfire on a blanket. Then the boy rippled and vanished in the darkness.