Free My Path to Magic by Irina Syromyatnikova Page B

up, the ruins looked rather chaotic.  The landscape was typical for the King's Island: rocks, rocks, and more rocks.  Not a speck of green, not even moss.  The walls of the ancient houses had settled and collapsed unevenly; in some places there was only debris lying in big heaps, while in others you could guess the contours of the first floor.  There were no steel plates, but we came across broken glass, thin and opaque, and once I spotted something resembling a weathered bone.  Everything else… did not look like people ever lived here.  The place lacked many small details, traces of human hands; it had almost returned to the silence of the primeval wilderness, became dissolved in time.
    I was overcome by a feeling of something unnatural, but I could not quite pin down its cause.  After a walk around the ruins, the strange feeling hadn't left me but rather increased in intensity, as if I had seen something odd but could not place when or where.  Drawn by the hard-to-explain concern, I entered the remnants of the ancient edifice and looked around: a mountain of rubble towered to the right, presumably the former top floors of the structure; to the left small stones ran down the stairs to the entrance of the basement.  Darkness glowered at me through the basement's doorway slit.  The silence was soft and promising.  At night it was probably quite ugly here; if anything happened, there would be nowhere to run.  I cautiously peered down and began actively disliking the place.
    The stones cracked behind my back—Pierre stepped into the ruins after me.
    "What, are you scared?" he snorted and pretended to push me into the basement.  My elbow in his stomach was quite real: some things you just don't play around with.  "What the..?  It was a joke!"
    "You're an idiot!"  I was furious.  "There's something... someone over there!  I feel it!"
    Uncle came close at the sound of our quarrel, looked down into the basement, and turned very gloomy: "Call Smith over here!  There is something otherworldly in there, but I can't make out what; I am only the sixth level."
    At Redstone, you couldn't get higher than a lab techie with the sixth level.  Why in hell did Uncle pick a fight with a combat magician then?
    Our overseer was unhappy that we distracted him from the unloading, but when he looked into the hole, he didn't just turn pale—he became downright green.
    "Get out of here immediately!"
    Pushing puzzled Pierre aside, I ran head over heels to the shore; when a dark magician orders you to take off, you obey quickly.  And cowardice has nothing to do with this.
    "Into the boat, into the boat!" Mr. Smith must have torn his lungs up screaming.  "Abandon equipment, leave now!"
    I got there first, charging up the slope in a record-breaking six minutes; Uncle was not far behind me, and Mr. Smith bravely walked last, almost backwards, though the day was bright, and the supernatural wasn't supposed to haunt us just yet.  What had we discovered there?
    "If we're lucky, that was Rustle ," Uncle growled, answering the unasked question. "If not…"
    It was difficult to imagine something worse than Rustle , except for a gang of ghouls : the latter could chase you even in the day time.  Had Pierre entered the basement, Rustle would have marked him and, perhaps, let him go the first time.  But after a few days the victim would have experienced an unbearable urge to come back and, preferably, not alone.  Children were particularly susceptible: there were times when the first victim of the monster's hug came back accompanied by ten to fifteen people—friends, acquaintances, parents.  In contrast to the predatory echo , Rustle was a mobile creature, which meant that it could try to catch us in the darkness.
    "Are we going back to the base camp?" Gerick inquired.
    "No!" Mr. Smith interrupted him.  "We'll go directly to the Trunk Bay."
    Surely, they suspected Rustle .  Moreover, quite active Rustle , because they didn't notice the