Ambrosia-book1-ch.1

Chapter 1

~ Day Two ~

Emma crouched in the cold, distracted from the wonders of being in the Dream Kingdom by her own stench. “I stink,” she thought. “I think I smell worse than I have ever smelled before. I smell like old rotten onions.” Despite the cool air, flies buzzed annoyingly over the brushy undergrowth where Emma and her tall, dark companion, Ian, had taken cover. He smelled like a wet dog. She shivered and hugged her shoulders. Out of habit, she brought her fingertips up to her mouth to nibble, but luckily glanced down at them first. “Look at my nails!” she thought, “Ew, they’re all black underneath. What I wouldn’t give to just wash my hands in warm soapy water.” She smiled in spite of herself and closed her eyes. “And a bath! A nice, hot bath.” The wind picked up just then, and Emma shivered. She tucked her nose into the front of her jacket. Her voice muffled by the fabric she said aloud, “this sucks.”

“Quiet,” Ian hissed through clenched teeth. Her guide in this new strange world was in his mid-twenties, handsome, and had all the charm and personality of hemorrhoid – a pain in the butt who was quick to irritate. Dressed in black leather and fur, like some reject from a renaissance fair, he was hunched over, starring hawk-eyed through the dense yet leafless branches of the bushes off into the distance.

She popped her nose out of her jacket and whispered back, “I don’t even know what I’m doing here! I don’t know who you’re fighting or how or why! All I know is that I am sick of smelling like a hamburger!”

“Then shut up and stop thinking,” Ian said, not looking at her.

“Jerk,” she thought, and decided to chew her nails regardless.

To pass the time, she took stock of her situation, from the ground up. “My toes are frozen, my socks haven’t been changed for days, my shoes are muddy, I’m wearing the only pair of jeans I have here and the knees are stained and if I knew I was going to end up in another world, I’d have worn my good jeans and not these stupid old ones. I’m not even going to think about my underwear!”

To her right, she heard a twig snap. She gasped and looked at Ian, who had not moved.

“Squirrel,” he said.

Emma though, “whatever Mr. I’m-so-cool. So you can hear the difference between a squirrel rustling through the branches, and those nasty whatever-they-ares.” She shivered, remembering her encounter back home in the dead of night with the dark beasts, all claws and teeth and bones held together by swaths of leathery skin. She felt a chill pass over her, and the fact that she was very far from home hit her as it had a few times since she’d arrived in this world Ian called Ambrosia. It was a sickening, scary sadness that formed a lump in her throat. And it made her reach for the silky chain she wore around her neck. She tugged it out from beneath her shirt so she could clutch the single teardrop-shaped pearl her father had given her as a good luck charm years before. She did it almost unconsciously, in the same way she threw the necklace over her head every morning without even thinking about it. She rolled the pearl between her fingertips; it was just a silly old piece of costume jewelry he’d picked up somewhere. At least that is what she’d thought.

“What are you doing with that?” Ian broke the silence and slapped Emma’s hand over the pearl. “Put that away! Even just agitating it could alert evil forces to the fact that we’re here.”

“Sorry,” she said, trying to seem unconcerned, but she hastened to tuck the necklace back under her shirt, laying it against her skin as Ian had told her to. Apparently she was the necklace’s Possessor, whatever that meant. According to Ian, it was only safe when it was touching her. It didn’t feel like anything special, though. It didn’t look magical. “But for some reason, Ian seems to think it’s some sort of icon. Something that’s going to help heal this muddy, cold, leafless land. How? Why me? And where the hell did my dad get a magical necklace?”

“There.” Ian’s whisper was tense.

Emma looked up. There was movement, and even she could see it was something bigger than a squirrel that was coming out of the enchanted forest known as the Visionary. “What is it? Is it one of the demons? What am I suppose to do?”

Beside her, Ian said, “hold on.” He had both hands on the fur-lined edge of his hood and pulled it up, completely covering his face.

“No wait,” Emma said in a panic, but her companion had already begun his transformation. “We don’t even know what it is!”

She looked away from the black, melting form of Ian, back out towards the Visionary. Something very familiar stepped from the trees, and her heart sank. “Oh no! What the? Ian, no! Wait!” She turned back to see a huge black stallion standing where Ian had been. The horse tossed its head, ready to crash through the brush.

“No! Can’t you see?” Emma said, standing up and feeling the pins and needles in her legs from crouching in one position for too long. “Wait!”

But the horse hesitated just for one moment, and Emma knew that if she didn’t climb onto his back, she’d have no chance of stopping him. So she entangled her fingers into his mane and threw her leg over his broad side. Before she could even settle herself, he pounded forward towards the thief.