The Trap (The Magnificent 12 2)

Because that’s the kind of thing you notice.

Risky’s lovely face was close to his. “You were about to say, ‘I’ll bet you are,’” Risky said, still very pleasant—aside from the choking-hair thing. “I hate that joke.”

Nine Iron managed to grunt in a way that might have been “Sorry.”

The hair snake withdrew, and Nine Iron sucked fetid oxygen.

“You’re here to meet my mother,” Risky said.

Nine Iron nodded and croaked the words “Pale Queen” through his crushed windpipe.

“Follow me. But watch the jokes: Mom has, like, no sense of humor.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Do you ever find yourself in a place you never thought you’d be? A place that doesn’t seem to make any sense within the narrative of your life? And you get this kind of queasy, “whoa, life is kind of weird and unpredictable” feeling? And you start wondering if this is the start of some long spiral into complete strangeness? Even madness?

You might expect Mack to have gotten that feeling when he was chased out of his school by Skirrit, or when he was down inside of Uluru, or maybe when he was being chased around the Donghuamen Night Market by elves on bikes.

But for some reason the weirdness struck him now.

He was sitting at a square wooden table that was partly covered with a white cloth. Him, Jarrah, Stefan, and Xiao. On the table were cups filled with painfully hot chocolate and plates displaying the remains of their ravaged meal.

A few feet away was the breakfast buffet table, loaded down with bread and cold cuts and cheese and yogurt and some gravel-looking granola, and canned pineapple.

There was a wire bowl that had contained chubby little donuts—they’d all been eaten, leaving behind a light crust of sugar crystals on all four mouths.

They were still working on bread and butter and lingonberry jam, eating like people whose last meal had been scorpions on a stick.

It was the dining room of a hotel in Detmold, Germany. Not exactly the weirdest place Mack had been recently. In fact, it was so very close to normal that it seemed especially strange.

Sometimes all-out weird feels less weird than something just slightly off center.

Anyway, they were having breakfast, cautiously sipping hot chocolate, incautiously slathering butter onto bread, and asking each other politely to pass the jam.

Detmold was a pleasant little town with a lot of buildings in the Gothic timber-framed look you’ve seen in every movie about Martin Luther or Joan of Arc. (And surely you’ve seen a few of those.)

Basically you imagine taking some Lincoln Logs, making a sort of loose framework for a three- or four-story building. Then you imagine using white Play-Doh to fill in all the rectangles and triangles between the logs. Slap on a high, peaked roof covered in depressing gray tiles, stick in some windows with lots of tiny frames, and you have the idea.

Now, since this is modern Germany, not Detmold the way it was back in, oh, let’s say the fourteenth century (when people were dying from the plague and eating rats and anxiously awaiting the invention of the shower), you have to picture some shiny Mercedeses and Audis parked here and there. And some more modern buildings. In fact, mostly more modern buildings, but why confuse things?

For Mack’s purposes, the important thing about Detmold was that the Detmoldians made a decent cup of cocoa.

After they finished their breakfast and Mack had paid with the special Magnificent 12 credit card, he took out his phone, punched up the map, and said, “I think it’s that way,” and pointed.

The “it” in question was the

Externsteine. The Egge Rocks, as Grimluk had called them.

They began to walk. It was several miles away, but the air wasn’t cold, and the sun was shrouded behind thin clouds and just barely above the horizon anyway, so it was pleasant enough walking weather. Besides, none of them could read German, so the bus stops they passed were indecipherable.

Soon after leaving the town, however, they found themselves walking into fog. Very thick fog, in fact. It didn’t seem that sticking to the road would be too hard, but it was a bit nerve-racking because cars continued to pass by. It seemed to Mack that walking on the shoulder of the road in close to zero visibility was an excellent way to get run over by a Volkswagen.

But there wasn’t much they could do about it. And after a while of practically feeling their way through the fog, Mack realized they hadn’t seen a car for some time.

“Ow!” Jarrah yelled.

Mack could barely make her out even though she was just a few feet away. “What’s the matter?”