Free The Watchtower by Lee Carroll Page A

hedge. His skin was the color of old paper, his beard snow-white. He wore blue trousers, a white shirt, red suspenders, and a red cap. He was the spitting image of a garden gnome.
    “Garet James?” he asked in a surprisingly deep voice for such a little person.
    “Monsieur Lutin?”
    “C’est moi.” He patted his chest. Then he crooked one gnarled finger and gestured for me to follow him into the tunnel.
    I looked behind me to see if the angry gardener was still patrolling the hedges. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how pissed off he’d be by an adult crawling into the hedges, but then, I reflected as I started crawling, that was probably the least of my problems.
    *   *   *
    I saw immediately that the gardener had been right about the threat to corneas. I was so busy fending off stray shrubbery branches that I lost sight of Monsieur Lutin’s blue-clad derrière … and when I looked up, it was gone. But where could he have gone? I hadn’t passed any intersecting tunnels.
    I got my answer two minutes later when I fell into a hole. I dropped about four feet onto a stone ledge next to Monsieur Lutin, who was sitting cross-legged and chuckling.
    “Thanks for the heads-up,” I said in English.
    “De rien.” He tipped his red cap at me, then, switching to English (as most Parisians did when they heard my French), he pointed to something behind me. “You will be more comfortable walking the rest of the way, Mademoiselle.”
    I got up, brushing the dirt from my capris, and looked behind me. The inside of the hill was hollow. A narrow pathway, hewn into the stone-paved walls, circled down into darkness. It was impossible to tell how far down it went, and the outer edge had no railing.
    “It’s better if you take the inside,” Monsieur Lutin said, touching my elbow. “I know the path. You might want to have your own light, though.”
    He snapped his fingers and a small flame leaped from his thumb. Oberon had taught me this trick back in New York, but after the High Bridge Tower fire, my hands had been bandaged for weeks and then … well, I’d been afraid to try it again. The scars still on my hands reminded me too painfully of what it felt like to be burned.
    “Go ahead,” he urged. “Best to get back on the pony, as you Americans say.”
    Embarrassed to look like a coward in front of a three-foot-tall man, I touched my fingers together, recalling Oberon’s instructions: Concentrate on the heat your aura produces.… When you can feel a spark, snap your fingers together .… I could almost hear Oberon’s voice in my head, which was not an altogether welcome sensation. After all, in his quest to get the box first, Oberon had paralyzed me and left me to die—well, Will said he thought Oberon probably knew that Will would get to me first. Still, I hadn’t thought kindly of the King of Fairies since. The fire trick was useful though. When I could see a pale blue glow limning the tips of my fingers, I snapped them together. A small flame leaped from my hand and I held my thumb up to keep it steady.
    “Good,” Monsieur Lutin said succinctly. “Let’s go!”
    “Where are we going?” I asked as we started down the curving path, which was the mirror image of the spiral path I’d climbed outside the hill. I noticed that the walls were roughly paved with broken stones that looked as if they’d been salvaged from Roman and medieval ruins. There were fragments of inscriptions in Latin, shards of stained glass, bits of broken crockery, and stone gargoyle heads—a hodgepodge mosaic.
    “My colleague tells me you wish to contact the boat people. Well, you can’t go to them empty-handed—they’re quite formal about such things—so we are going to the gardens to collect a little bouquet for you to bring with you. They love flowers, but you have to be careful not to bring them just any sort of flower.”
    “They sound sort of snobbish.”
    Monsieur Lutin shrugged, which made his trousers hitch up.