Love Croakies by Sam Cheever (the kiss of deception read online .txt) 📕

We lay there, staring at the iridescent green figures hanging on the air in front of us. At first glance, they seemed to be a bunch of nonsense. Like somebody sneezed out a random mix of numbers, letters and symbols and they stuck to the wall.

I frowned at the thought. “Do you think this was a trick?”

Sebille crunched. “What do you mean?” she asked, a bright orange crumb shooting from her mouth and sticking to the wall of symbols.

I stretched my sock-covered toe toward the crumb and flicked it off, so it didn’t confuse us even more than we already were. “I mean, maybe this isn’t supposed to be legible. Maybe Grym and Archie just put us in here to punish us because they had to go read a hairy naked guy’s backside to find out what you and I promised in return for that artifact.”

She shrugged. “It’s what I’d do.”

“Yeah,” I said on a breath. “Me too.”

We lay there a long time, only the sound of mutual crunching breaking the silence. Then Sebille said. “What if they forget to get us out of here?”

“Grym wouldn’t forget us.”

“Not on purpose. But the ogres might capture them or something. What if they can’t come back for days? Or weeks?”

I frowned into the darkness. “How many bags of cheesy crunchies did you bring in here?”

“Just one. But I have one of Lea’s apples and a dozen cookies too.”

I sat up, leaning on my elbows. “You have cookies and you didn’t tell me?”

“You’d have eaten them all by now.”

I collapsed back onto the nothingness that formed the floor of the void. What could I say? She was right. “I’m thirsty.”

Silence met my statement, and horror filled me. “You didn’t bring any drinks, did you?”

“Why was it my job to think of everything?” she objected. “You could have brought drinks.”

“You said you’d get us snacks. I just assumed.”

“You know what they say about assuming, don’t you?”

I flapped a hand at her, annoyed.

We lay there a few more minutes, and another problem asserted itself. “I have to pee.”

Sebille’s only response was to scoot further away from me.

I sighed, squiggling uncomfortably. My bladder became more insistent by the moment. My foot bumped the artifact that was lying on the ground beneath the wall of figures.

The columns of nonsense words and numbers shimmied and changed as the artifact moved.

I blinked as one column of figures came into focus, and I was actually able to understand what it said. I sat up, using my finger as a pointer while I read. “Pascal Ormond, December 3rd, 2014, Warg spell. One use. Returned December 5th, 2014.”

An indecipherable jumble of numbers and words followed that information. I figured it was an address because it ended with the name of an alternate dimension. “They rent inter-dimensionally too?”

Sebille dropped her bag of crunchies as she sat up. “Makes sense. That portal they took us through probably feeds a bunch of pathways.” She glanced at me. “How’d you make that change?”

“I bumped the artifact with my toe.”

Sebille lay down on her belly and shimmied to the artifact, taking care to stay beneath the wall of shimmering symbols. She changed the orientation of the artifact slightly. “What did that do?”

I squinted but saw no change. “Nothing.”

She tried again and again, but nothing changed. All we had was Pascal the Warg.

Sebille flopped back down beside me. “Another dead end.”

“I really have to pee,” I whined. Sebille probably rolled her eyes, but I couldn’t see them rolling in the dark.

We lay there another few minutes. Then an idea occurred, and I slapped my head. “Of course!” I sat up and threw myself to my belly.

“What are you doing?” Sebille asked, sounding bored.

“I’m an artifact Keeper,” I declared, reaching for the artifact.

“Well, duh,” she responded in a dull voice.

“No. I mean, it won’t respond to you because you don’t have Keeper energy. I do.” I moved the artifact slightly and Sebille surged upright, her green eyes glowing in the cast-off light from the log. “Yes! Keep moving it. Slowly. It’s changing.”

Ten minutes of subtle turns and shifts of the artifact finally landed us on the information we needed.

I held the pointy end of the opener off the ground an inch and shifted it sideways a centimeter, stopping as Sebille gave a whoop of joy! “That’s it! There she is!”

I couldn’t let go of the artifact to read it. “Memorize it and read it to me, so I can memorize it too. We don’t want to go through this again to find it.”

Silence met my instruction. “Sebille?” Nothing. Dread started to dance along my spine in spiked heels. “Um, Sebille, my finger’s getting tired here.”

The sprite sighed. “We don’t need to memorize it. We’ve been there before.”

I hesitated another minute. “You’re sure?”

To my surprise, the sprite flopped onto her back again. “Unfortunately.”

Still, I was reluctant to let the artifact go. “Where is she? Where’s the princess?”

Sebille scrubbed a hand over her long, freckled face. Dread’s stilettos dug more deeply into my spine. “You’re freaking me out here, sprite.”

“Good. You should be freaked out. Princess Desiree listed her address in The Enchanted Forest.”

I swallowed. I hated that place. The last time we’d been there, I’d almost been eaten by a two-headed snake, killed by wraiths, burned alive in the clutches of a mad and powerful sorceress, and watched everyone I cared about nearly die.

Fun times.

“Okay. Well, that’s bad. But it can’t be as bad as last time, right?”

Sebille made a losing buzzer noise. “Wrong again for a thousand. It’s exactly as bad as last time. The Princess’s address is the black castle. We need to go back to Dacara’s castle again.”

Sizzling slug snot!

14

Shortcut to the Sorceress’s Lair

“But we didn’t see her the last time we were there,” I argued. Aside from a quick pee break, we’d been arguing about the sprite’s bad news since Archie sprang us from the void. “This has to be a mistake.”

Sebille stuffed the depleted bag of cheesie crunchies into the cabinet and