Three Lost Kids & the Death of the Sugar Fairy, The (2 page)

We found our voices and screamed even more, still to no avail, but at least we could see. Bella had wandered off, so Lexie, TayTay and I ran from the scary skeleton and went looking for her. That meant running away from where the front door used to be, and running deeper into a house that looked like it stepped right out of a horror movie.

It smelled like mothballs and melted wax and everything had a coat of dust over it. Spider webs clung to the corners, and they didn
't look at all fake. Neither did the giant black spiders that crawled over them!

"
Where's Bella? I'm scared." Lexie clung to my hand, the sweat from nerves making the hold slippery.

"
I'm scared too, but we'll find her and get out of here. I promise." We were kind of used to magical stuff happening. I mean, we'd all been to our own magical worlds and met dragons and unicorns and fairies, but this didn't look like Lexie World, Bella World or Maddie World.

A winding staircase spiraled up to the second floor.
"Bella, are you upstairs?"

"
Maddie, where are you? Come up here! You're not going to believe this." Bella's voice carried down to the first floor.

I couldn
't believe she'd actually gone up there alone, but now we had no choice but to follow our overly brave and impulsive sister.

A
clickety-clack
of bones moving behind me sent me running up the stairs faster than I'd intended. I didn't need to see any more walking skeletons.

The stairs creaked as I pulled Lexie up them, with TayTay at my
side. I had horrible visions of one of the stairs breaking and a boney hand pulling me through the crack, but they all held up.

Once on the second floor, we walked down a hallway wallpapered with peeling roses
, and decorated with paintings of people long-dead whose eyes seemed to follow us. I shivered and pulled Lexie closer to me. Of the four doors, only one stood open, so we walked to that and heard Bella talking quietly to someone.

I rushed to the room and gasped when I looked in. Bella sat on the floor holding the hand of what looked like
... a Fairy. Her skin glistened like iced frosting and her wings glowed in a dull violet light.

Bella looked up
with tears in her eyes. "Maddie, she's dying. We have to help her."

We walked over and
stood at her bed, an old four-poster canopied type with a stepping stool for us to reach her. Up close, I could see how her face looked pale and her violet eyes looked faded, like the light was going out in her.

"
Who are you?" I reached for her hand, and her skin felt like rice paper. I worried it would tear if I held on too hard.

Her voice came out like a sad song.
"I'm the Sugar Fairy, the one who brings magic to Halloween and keeps the veil between the living and the dead open but intact."

"
Why are you dying? What happened?" Lexie stood on her tiptoes to see, and I scooted her onto the stepping stool.

"
Children no longer leave me sugar. All of my babies but one have died, and I'm too weak to retrieve her from her Sugar Flower. Without her, my line will end, and once I'm gone, Halloween will die with me." As she talked, her voice became softer and softer until we could almost not hear her.

I leaned in to listen harder.
"What can we do?"

"
Save the Sugar Baby. Bring her back to me with a petal from the flower she arrived in, and I can brew a potion that will give me back life."

I looked to my sisters. Bella nodded, of course. Lexie
's brown eyes widened in fear, but then she looked at the Fairy and nodded as well. I looked at TayTay and he licked the Fairy's hand and wagged his tail. We were all in.

"
Okay, we'll do it. Where's your baby? How do we get to her?" I had a feeling it wouldn't be as simple as walking to the corner market.

"
You must leave through the back door and travel through the Sugar Valley until you reach the center, where a great flower has blossomed. She will be inside. Rescue her and bring her back, please! But be warned, you will face many trials on this path. Watch out for the Sugar Bugs, which are starving from lack of food and will attack anything that smells sweet. Also, stay away from the Cavity Caves, because your nightmares can trap you in there forever. And if the Sugar Flower is being guarded, I fear all is lost." A single blue tear slid down her cheek, and her wings shook.

I patted her hand.
"Don't worry. We've done this kind of stuff before. We won't fail." I hated leaving her when she looked so fragile, but the only way we could help was to get her baby back.

W
e walked out of her room with our heads slumped in grief. If we didn't find the baby, she would die. Her baby would die and Halloween would end forever.

I couldn
't let that happen, especially not on my birthday.

Over rickety stairs and between furniture that looked like it could crawl, we ran through the house, out the back door, and into a night lit only by the full moon and a sky full of stars. As soon as the moonbeams hit us, we felt it.

Magic.

Bright light made of rainbow colors swirled around us, and TayTay howled louder than I'd ever heard him. Then he talked. "We should hurry. This could take awhile."

"
TayTay, you got your voice back!" I scooped him up in a hug and nearly swatted Bella with my sword, who scowled at me as a spark of fire shot from her fingertips.

I looked at all of us and realized two things
: one, we'd just become our Halloween costumes... like, for real; and two, we had our powers back that we got when we went to our own worlds.

"
This is going to be a lot easier now that we have magic on our side." I swung my sword around and practiced my lunges, the Fairy necklace at my neck glowing in recognition, since they shared the same magic stone.

Lexie
's beautiful angel wings fluttered at her back and lifted her off the ground a few feet. "Maddie! Bella! I can almost fly!"

TayTay moaned.
"I'm never letting you dress me in wings of any kind again! Dogs are not meant to fly."

I couldn
't help but laugh as his little bat wings fluttered from his shoulder blades and he rose from the ground. I flexed my wings, enjoying the feeling of having real Fairy magic again, and Bella, who looked part dragon, part girl, also hovered with her dragon wings.

"
It doesn't look like any of us can fly very high. And I'll warn you, the wings and back muscles get tired quick." I knew this from my time in Maddie World. Flying could be painful if you didn't do it a lot.

Lexie lit our path with rainbow magic from her hands, courtesy of our time in Lexie World, and Bella kept a
fireball floating over us to help keep us warm, and it added to the light as well.

Trees
towered over us looking like creepy monsters in the dark, and the four of us huddled together to keep up our bravery.

I looked all around.
"Are we even going the right way?"

Bella pointed forward.
"Yes, that way. I know it is."

Lexie shook her head.
"I think we need to find a path. That would make the most sense."

They bickered, TayTay howled in frustration
, and I just wanted to lock myself in my bedroom, but I didn't
have
a bedroom in this crazy Halloween world. I just had two sisters who couldn't get along, and vague instructions from a dying Sugar Fairy on how to save her, her baby, and the whole holiday. I sighed as loudly as I could, but nobody listened to me, or even asked if I was okay. It was my birthday, after all.

"
Come on." I charged forward. "We just need to start walking. We can't stand here arguing all night."

TayTay stayed with me
, and Lexie and Bella caught up with me soon enough.

Bella put her fists on her hips and frowned as we walked.
"You can't decide this all by yourself, Maddie. Nobody said you were in charge."

"
I'm the oldest, and it's
my
birthday. That makes me in charge. If you want to go somewhere else, then go. I'm not stopping you." Mom and Dad would be seriously mad if I we all separated while in the Sugar World, but I didn't care. They seemed so far away, and my sisters seemed way too close.

TayTay nudged me.
"We have to stay together, and I expect we'll not survive this if you three don't learn to work together better. Now think, what can we do to figure out our way."

Lexie
's eyes lit up and I knew she had an idea. She was the best at figuring out puzzles. "The Sugar Fairy glowed, right? So it makes sense that her baby can glow too. Well, what if Bella climbs a tree and looks for something glowing? Then we'll know which direction to go in."

Yup, she was a genius.

"Great idea, but last time Bella climbed a tree in a strange world, she was kidnapped by a Dragon." I turned to Bella. "It's up to you."

She nodded.
"I'm doing it. I'm not scared."

Of course she wasn
't. Sometimes I thought she needed a little
more
fear to make her less crazy. Then again,
I
probably needed
less
fear.

With trees everywhere, finding one to climb wasn
't hard, and Bella's Dragon form actually made it easier for her. She shimmied up it in no time and used her enhanced Dragon sight to survey the land. "I see something! Over there."

I hollered up to her
, "Bella, we can't see where 'over there' is, so you'll have to show us when you come down."

She jumped from pretty high up and I screamed, but then saw that she used her wings to hover herself down.

"That was cool, but you could have gotten hurt," I reminded her.

She grinned, the dimple in her cheek deepening.
"But I didn't, did I?"

Oh, Bella.

She ran ahead, hooting and hollering into the night. "Come on, it's this way, just past the pond. We'll get there in no time, and be home to eat our candy before Mom and Dad even notice we're gone."

That would only be true if time ran different here. In our last adventures, even though we spent days in our magical worlds, almost no time had passed at home. Hopefully the same was true for this place, otherwise Mom and Dad ha
d probably already called every police station in the country to find us.

Bella screamed
, and it wasn't an I'm-having-so-much-fun-I-must-share-it-with-the-world scream.

I nearly swallowed my tongue in fear.
"Bella, what's wrong?" I half ran, half flew to catch up to her.

"
Maddie, help! Something's attacking me."

Fireballs erupted from her hands, but I couldn
't see anything around her, until I got closer. Hundreds of tennis ball-sized bugs bounced in the air and launched themselves at her. They were white and had sharp teeth that made me think of the pictures I'd seen of those flesh eating fish.

"
Use your fire. Burn them!" I got my sword and used it to swipe at them, but the blade didn't seem to hurt them at all. "They're Sugar Bugs. They must smell the sugar in our systems from all that candy we ate."

Lexie splashed rainbow light everywhere
, like dumping out paint from a can. "I'm never eating candy, ever again."

Something bit the back of my leg and I screamed as it sucked out
my blood like a giant mosquito. Lexie screamed next, and started crying. Even TayTay whined painfully as they latched onto him, but they soon pulled off his fur, spitting out the blood they'd taken. He didn't eat sugar, so they didn't like his blood. Still, my dog was bleeding.

Tears welled up in my eyes
. What should I do?

Bella cried.
"Maddie, this hurts so much. There are too many of them."

I thought as hard as I could.
"They're hungry. She said they're dying, right? Starving for sugar? Throw out all your candy from your plastic pumpkins. Maybe that will help."

We scattered our candy and they scrambled to it, but
they consumed it so fast that we couldn't even recover before they latched back onto us again. The bites burned and itched and I felt the blood seeping out.

Blood. It wanted our blood. And we were right next to a pond.
"I know it hurts, and it's hard to move, but we have to get them to the pond. Follow me."

Moving hurt. Every step made me feel like my limbs would fall off as the little bloodsuckers clung to my exposed skin. I made it to
the pond, not very big, and hopefully small enough for what I needed to do.

I waved my sisters in.
"Walk into the pond and let your sores bleed into it."

I went first, and used my sword to add an extra cut to make the water sweet with our sugary blood. One by one the bugs fell off of us and sucked up the water that had started turning pink. I brushed the others off, while my sisters did the same.

"Okay," I said. "Now run!"

We jumped out of the water and ran as fast as we could, without any thought to where we were going.

Until we ran straight into a cave.

Cavity Cave.