made it seem like it was a thousand o’clock already.
He stopped again, because the wolves (he was pretty sure now it was wolves) were making a lot of noise. Brendan, who could talk to animals (and who couldn’t be convinced that didn’t mean all the little fuzzy creatures loved him) said that wolves howled either before or after a hunt, and usually at twilight or when the moon was full. Brendan was a dork, but he was a nice dork, and he’d come to Oakhurst about the same time Seth had, and he’d tutored Seth on his English Comp for the last two years, so Seth knew a lot about wolves by now.
Whatever was howling out here tonight, it wasn’t wolves.
He stood for what seemed like far too long, listening, as the chorus of wolf (not-wolf) howls crescendoed and died away. The silence seemed to echo afterward. And in it, faintly . . .
He heard the sound of engines. What the—Were the local rednecks doing some kind of creepy night-hunting? Or was someone missing, so they sent out the sheriff’s department with bloodhounds?
Seth didn’t wait to hear more. He took off for the boxcar at a lope, just hoping he remembered the ground well enough and there was nothing that would trip him. If the ground was smooth he was sure he could reach the boxcar before the drivers of the vehicles saw him—he was on the Oakhurst Track Team; he had both speed and stamina. For now, he’d just hope they weren’t heading right this way. He’d get to the boxcar, duck inside, hide out for an hour or two . . .
But a few seconds later he had to admit that the crawling feeling between his shoulder blades wasn’t fear, but magic, and the sound of the engines was louder. And there was something very wrong with the sound.
He remembered his first day at Oakhurst, the first time he ever saw Doctor Ambrosius, when Old Doc A. told him the world was filled with good witches and bad witches, just like The Wizard of Oz, and back then Seth had figured Doc A. had been playing too much D&D in his spare time.
Later Seth had decided the Doc was speaking from personal experience.
That the Doc wasn’t training all of them out of pure unselfishness, but because someday they might need to fight the evil magicians. And Seth hadn’t wanted to be drafted to fight in somebody else’s war the way his grampa had. As the months passed, he’d kept his eyes open, put a few things together, and figured out that Doctor Ambrosius’s war wasn’t something that was going to happen “someday.” It was something going on right now, and the people involved—at least the ones on the Other Side—didn’t have any intention of letting anybody just sit on the sidelines.
Oakhurst should have been safe. But Seth didn’t think it was. He thought one of the enemies Doctor Ambrosius knew about had found it and gotten inside, secretly. He thought that whoever it was, they were making sure that when Doctor Ambrosius decided it was time to take on Emperor Palpatine and the Sith Lords, there weren’t going to be any Jedi Knights left.
His breath rasped in his throat as he ran; the night air was dry enough to burn. The motor noises were louder now. Not just one engine, but too many to count. They were coming closer, but he still didn’t see any sign of headlights, and that was just crazy. There weren’t any roads along here—he was heading on a straight “crow flies” path from Oakhurst to Radial, and both the county road and the railway line were south of here (at least until the tracks swung north onto the Oakhurst campus)—but the engine sounds were to the north of him. When he’d just been learning his magic, Seth had trained with maps of the area. There wasn’t anything to the north except miles of open range. Rocky open range. Even if whoever was out here was driving off-road vehicles and trusting to night-sight gear instead of headlights to show them where to go, they had a better than even chance of busting an axle.
Except they weren’t using night-sight gear. Seth knew that. The magic he could feel was strong enough to make his skin crawl. He could see the boxcar up ahead, a dark shadow against the sky.
Almost there. Almost safe. He put on a final burst of speed.
And suddenly the boxcar was lit