Chapter 43
Finlay
s we headed for the stadium for the third game, I felt better about thingsA then I had done in a week. What Amie’s father had told her yesterday had changed things. It made me look at our situation in a new light and it made me feel better and stronger. It wasn’t just me. We had talked to the team and told them everything we had learnt. They all walked with more spring in their step. We had a plan. Even if we had no clue what the third game was, we knew ways to earn points and valuable information on how to get out of tight spots. The steps up to our seats had never felt so easy to climb. We sat down and waited for everyone to take their seats and for the speaker to tell us what was going to happen. I was watching the crowd, searching out the now familiar places where packs of interest had their seats. Alpha James was watching Amie, trying to make it look like he wasn't. It was made difficult because of his seat having it’s back to where we sat. It irritated me. I knew he was her mate and as such he had a claim to her. But in my mind he had given up that claim the second he rejected her. I wouldn’t let him get my good mood down. Instead I leaned into Amie and plucked a leaf that had got stuck in her braid and showed it to her.
“A little soon to be wearing a laurel reef,” I told her. She looked at the leaf and then at me. She shook her head, but I could see how close she was to smiling.
“Don’t joke around, this is serious,” she scolded me, leaning closer.
“Fine, but just for now,” I agreed. I sat back up and looked in Alpha James' direction. He looked like he had swallowed a hornets nest. He
wasn’t even trying to hide his stares.
“What has got James looking like someone stabbed his foot?” Amie asked me.
“I don’t know, but I like the look on him,” I told her. This time she actually laughed.
“You are horrible,” she said. I just shrugged.
“Welcome to the third game,” the speaker said. Saving me from admitting I had intentionally made Alpha James jealous. “Today's game is again played individually by the packs. We have set up four identical games. Like with the first game, you will wait here until you are taken to the area where the test will be held. Those teams who have lost one or more teammates will have a disadvantage in this game. As this is your own doing, we won’t do anything to correct this. Our expectation of you will be just as high as for the other teams. The game today aims to test your logical and strategic thinking alongside your ability to adapt. As always, we wish you good luck.”
“Well, this sounds like fun,” Jake said. Amie smiled and nodded.
“I came prepared this time. I was bored senseless during our wait at the first game,” Ramses said, waving a deck of cards.
“If I wasn’t mated, I would have kissed you,” Sam told him. The look of horror on Ramses face made us all laugh. We made ourselves as comfortable as possible and started playing cards.
“We should have brought cards, that is genius.” I looked up to see Amie’s brother standing beside her with a friendly smile.
“What do you expect from my pack? We are all geniuses,” Amie told him. “Elder, you remember my Alpha. This is Gamma Sam, Jake and Ramses. Everyone, this is my brother Beta Elder,” she introduced everyone.
Everyone nodded towards her brother.
“I just came over to wish you luck and to tell you Becky would like to arrange a girls night with you. Whatever that means. It would make me happy if you gave her a call when you have time,” Beta Elder said to Amie.
“I would like that. I’ll call her. And good luck right back at you. I managed to lure all of dad’s wisdom from him yesterday.” Elder made a face.
“Betrayed by my own father, that cuts deep,” he said in an over dramatic voice. Amie giggled and I just enjoyed watching them together.
“I have to go, you never know when they are going to call on us. See you on the other side,” Beta Elder said. He raised his hand in a goodbye gesture and we all mirrored it back. I liked her brother, I always had. It irritated me as I wanted to see him as an enemy. But he didn’t seem to want to lure her back to her old pack and he made Amie happy.
Around lunch a basket arrived with sandwiches and water from my aunt.
We ate and then moved around a little to loosen up our muscles. Not long after, an official came to get us. We were transported to an area of the forest we hadn’t been to before. There was no sign of what the game was, or of an audience. Judging by how faint the smell was from other wolves, we were alone in this place and it had been quite some time since anyone else had been here.
“Please go through the door and stay on the wood floor until you have got your instructions,” the official told us. Indicating a door set into a hill. Sam walked through the door first and I let the others follow him and I went last.
We stood in a cave. The ceiling was sloping upward in a smooth tilt, clearly manmade. We stood in the area just inside the door where the floor was covered in wood. A step further ahead, the floor was the same natural stone as the rest of the cave. About fifteen feet in front of us there was a twelve feet high wall. The tilt of the roof made it impossible to see what was beyond it. To our right there was a door made of iron bars which led into a small room.
“Welcome Blue Mountain pack. You have just stepped into the third game, the dungeon. Your objective is to get all team members through the dungeon, preferably in one piece, and out through the door at the other end.
You may do this in any way you see fit. You have no time limitation. But, as in all dungeons, a sacrifice must be made. Only four of you can be allowed to work through the dungeon. The fifth must stay, as our guest, in the room to your right. You choose who stays. If you make it to the final door, you will have a chance to set your teammate free to join you in the final room. If you don’t manage to free them in the final room, they will be lost to your team for the rest of the remaining games. With that being said, good luck and I hope to see you on the other side. You can begin as soon as one of you is locked in the room.” We all looked at each other. We needed to leave a pack member behind? All my instincts screamed at me not to do it.
“I volunteer,” Ramses said. We all looked at him. “No, they need your brain,” he told Jake before he had a chance to say something.
“Are you sure?” I asked. Sam and Amie looked to hate the idea as much as I did.
“I’m sure. I know I can contribute, but I also know that the four of you are a strong team,” he told me.
“We won’t leave you behind, we will free you in the final room,” I promised him.
“I will be fucking pissed if you don’t” he told us as he walked into the small room and closed the door behind him. It locked and at the moment it did, a part of the wall to the left lit up. We all looked at it. It was symbols
that were shining like small lights.
“What is that?” Sam asked.
“Symbols, can they be a code?” Amie asked.
“I bet they are. You can see that most of them repeat. Oh, I wish I had a pen and some paper,” Jake said, sounding excited. We all looked around for more clues about what to do.
“There is a small fire in here to keep me warm. It has coal in it. Would that do, Jake?” Ramses asked.
“It would do just fine,” Jake agreed. He walked over to the door and Ramses gave him a handful of coal. Jake and Amie squatted down in front of the symbols, talking as they wrote on the floor.
“I don’t know man, this is taking a lot of time. What if we just climb over the wall?” Sam said. He walked towards the wall. There was an almost inaudible click and the air stirred.
“Get down!” I shouted. Everyone hit the floor without objections. A huge log with ropes tied to each end, swung down over the place where Sam lay flat on his stomach. Had he been standing, it would have hit him full force in the back of his neck. We all waited until it had stopped swinging. A hidden mechanism pulled it up and into the ceiling.
“Idiot!” Amie told Sam as we got back on our feet. “Do you know what Meadow would have done to me if we got back with your head smashed in?” she hissed. Then gave Sam a hug and walked back to where Jake was trying to decipher the symbols. Sam walked over to me, looking where he placed his feet.
“Not the smartest move I have made. Thanks man. She is right, Meadow would have been pissed,” he said, rubbing the back of his head.
“Let’s try and be patient and let the two of them figure this out,” I told him and looked at Amie and Jake.
“Good plan.”
“I think we got it,” Jake said.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“In the beginning of time, a man stood looking into the forest. A wolf came walking by and asked the man why he was standing there. ‘I am too scared to go into the forest,’ the man said. ‘It is full of your brothers and they will eat me if I walk into the forest.’ The wolf looked at the man. ‘I will carry you on my back, my brothers will not harm you if you ride me,’ the wolf said. ‘I will show you the forest.’ The man was surprised. ‘What would you ask of me for this favour?’ the man asked. ‘I would ask for you to do the same for me. I would like to see the world outside the forest, the world of men,’ the wolf replied. The man agreed and climbed up on the wolf’s back and they explored the forest together. When they had seen all the forest, the wolf brought the man to the place they had met years before.
They switched and the man carried the wolf all over the realm of man.
When they had seen everything the man brought the wolf back to their spot where the forest met the realm of man. But they both hesitated. They had spent years in each other’s company, grown closer to each other than to anyone else. Neither of them wanted to be apart. The goddess of the moon saw their pain and in her wisdom she made them one, both wolf and man, so they never needed to walk in fear or be alone,” Amie read.
“I have never heard that legend before,” Jake said. We all agreed with him.
“We have all heard the legend of how werewolves were created to protect the moon goddess, this was nothing like it. So what if it is a clue in disguise?” Amie suggested. I nodded.
“So the man and the wolf carrying each other on their backs,” I thought out loud.
“It may be telling us to do the same?” Jake asked.
“That would make sense as that would mean we couldn’t be five, it needs
to be even numbers,” Ramses said.
“Oh. That’s a good point,” Amie agreed.
“Hop up,” I told her and turned my back to her. She jumped up on my back with a giggle. “Ready to test this?” I asked her.
“Sure,” she agreed.
“Everyone be quiet. If you hear a click, let us know,” I told everyone. I slowly moved forward to the place Sam had been when the log had swung
down. Nothing happened and soon we reached the wall. Nothing was triggered.
“Sweet. Up you go, Jake,” Sam said. They joined us at the wall.
“How do we get over it?” Amie asked.
“Now we know it’s safe. I can get a running start and leap up. Just hold on,” I told her. I backed up, ran up to the wall and jumped up. I got a good grip on the top of the wall and could lift both me and Amie up. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but that was kind of hot,’ she mindlinked me. ‘Don’t tell me things like that in the middle of the game,’ I said. ‘Fine I won’t tell you.’ ‘I change my mind, I want to know what you think is hot,’ I said as I watched Sam take a running start and leap at the wall. He made it as well. ‘Ramses sit tight, we will get you out’ I mind linked our teammate we had left behind. ‘Alpha, there is a new line to the text,’ he linked back to all of us. We looked back and he was right, a new line of symbols had appeared. ‘Can you see my key and read it?’ Jake asked. ‘I can. Thank you for leaving it.’ Jake shrugged. ‘Hard to take the floor with you,’ he said, and we all chuckled. ‘It says: Looking forward can make you understand the present,’ Ramses told us.
“What does that mean?” I asked out loud.
“Look at the floor behind us,’ Jake said. I turned around, still with Amie on my back. What we had seen as a wall was really a ledge. We stood on a flat floor. There was a large floor surface with a grid in front of us. Each square was about two by two feet in size. In the middle of each was a symbol. The grid was four squares wide by nine squares long.
“I’m going to guess that bad things happen when you step on the wrong
square,” Sam said.
“Take my shoe off,” Jake told Sam.
“What?” Sam asked.
“Take my shoe off.”
“I heard you, I was more curious about why,” Sam added. Amie sighed, bent forward towards the leg Jake was holding up and pulled his shoe off.
We all had sturdy hiking boots on our feet.
“Toss it on a square in the first row,” Jake told her. Amie slammed the shoe down on a square in front of us. The sides of the cave came rushing
out over the floor and smashed into each other as they met in the middle.
Then retracted again. There was a stunned silence. ‘What the fuck was that noise?’ Ramses asked.
“What the actual fuck!” Sam shouted. “Are they crazy? We could have become flatbread if we stepped onto that floor,” he added. I bent down and picked up Jake’s shoe, it looked like it had survived the smashing okey. I
handed it to him.
“How do we solve this?” I asked.
“We need to look forward,” Amie told me. We all looked forward. On the other side of the floor, there was another wall. Not as high as the one we just climbed, but not far from it. I could just see a door set into a wall further into the dungeon.
“That door has symbols on it,’” Jake said. ‘“Yeah. But I can only see two rows, the floor has nine,” Amie said. She
and Jake looked at each other.
“Oh,” they both said.
“Oh?” I asked.
“Let me down, I need to sit on your shoulders,” Amie told me. I reluctantly let her down, worried it would trigger some new trap. But she got down without an issue. I hunkered down and she got onto my shoulders.
I steadied her as I got back up.
“I can see it!” she exclaimed.
“See what?” I asked.
“The bottom of the door. The angle was too steep before, we could just see the top part. But the door also has nine rows of symbols. The one in the bottom left corner is glowing,” she told us. Sam and I looked at each other.
“Bottom left corner it is,” he said and walked over to it and stepped on the square. Nothing happened. I joined him, it was a little cramped, but we
made it work.
“Is something happening?” I asked.
“Yes! The symbol second from the left on the second row is glowing,” she told us. Sam and me moved to that square and we continued to move over the floor after the directions of Amie and the door. ‘We made it across the floor’ I mind linked Ramses as we stood on the other side of the squares. As the wall was lower, I didn’t need a running start to climb it. Now I could see the door with the symbols on it. None of
them were glowing. To the left of the door there was what looked like a tunnel. ‘I can see new symbols,’ Ramses told us as Sam had joined us. “Step by step, everything has its own place. The whole will bring freedom, but what has been sacrificed will be lost,’ he read.
“The easy part of that is that the tunnel will lead us to the outside but we will lose Ramses,” Jake said.
“We won’t be doing that,’” I told them. They all agreed.
“Step by step,” Sam hummed. “Oh baby, gone get to you girl,” he continued. “Great, now I will have that on my mind for weeks.”
“What if we need to press the symbols in the order they lit up?” Jake asked.
“That would fit the clue. ‘Everything has its own place’,” I said.
“Does anyone remember the order?” Amie asked. There was silence.
“Great.” We took a moment to think and started to talk about how we had
moved.
“Are we confident?” I asked.
“No, but I don’t think we will have a sudden epiphany either, so we need to go with it,” Sam said. I hesitated. My instinct told me I should push the symbols. But I was carrying Amie on my shoulders. If a trap was set off, we would both be caught in it. ‘Just do it, Finn. We will be okay,’ Amie mindlinked me. I took a deep breath and stepped up to the door. I pressed the nine symbols in the order we had agreed on. Then I jumped back. The symbols lit up, but nothing else happened.
“I think you need to use the handle, like any other door,” Amie pointed out. I sighed and tried the handle. The door opened. Nothing exploded, nothing shot out or slammed down. Behind the door was stairs leading down.
“Down we go,” Jake said. I mindlinked Ramses and told him what was happening. We walked down the stairs and ended up in a small square room. On the opposite wall was a door with the classic green ‘Exit’ sign above it. The room’s walls were decorated in symbols and there were two benches, one on each side wall. ‘There is a new line; Exit is the way out,’ Ramses told us.
“It can’t be that simple,” I said.
“No, it can’t. The speaker said we would have a chance to set Ramses free. Not that it would be automatic,” Amie agreed. We looked around to see if we could see another exit sign or something like it. We found nothing.
“This reminds me of the symbols at the beginning,” Jake said, pointing at
a couple of symbols.
“They do look like them,” Amie agreed.
“Okay, I might be wrong. But are we supposed to spell ‘exit’ with the symbols on the walls?” Sam asked. We all looked at him.
“You are a genius!” I told him.
“Ramses, describe the symbol for ‘E’,’ I mindlinked him. ‘Eh, it’s a circle with a squiggly thing going from the centre of the circle down to the right,’ he told us. Jake and Sam took the left wall and Amie and I took the right.
“Found it!” Amie said, reaching up almost to the ceiling to point at it.
“Has anyone found another one?” I asked. No one had. One by one we found the symbols and then we pressed them in the correct order. There was a klick and we all dived for the floor. I tried to get down in a way that didn’t hurt Amie. The click was from a secret door opening on the right wall. ‘Alpha, a door has opened in the cell wall,’ Ramses told me. ‘Go through it. I think it will lead you to us,’ I said. It didn’t take long for Ramses to join us.
“So we just walk outside now?” Sam asked.
“I guess so,” I said and opened the door marked exit. We stepped out into the forest and a horn sounded.
“Congratulations, Blue Mountain pack. You have completed the third game. Your time was one hour and forty two minutes. All of your team made it out. Please follow the official and he will show you to the rest of your pack,” the speaker said. I gave Amie a hug and the others a pat on the back. We had done it again and without anyone losing a limb or turning into a pancake. We joined the rest of the pack. The spectators were sitting in large movie theatres looking at a screen. The screen was divided in four, each part showing an identical dungeon.
“You did great,” Willie told us as we sat down.
“Had me scared senseless half of the time,” my aunt said. But she gave us a smile as she made sure we had food and water. We looked on the screen and saw a team trying to put in the correct symbols on the door. The symbols lit up like they had done for us. But when they grabbed the handle
to twist it, ten inch spikes shot out of the handle and pierced his hand. I jerked out of instinct and the palm of my hand started to itch. I scratched at it until Amie took it in her hand. ‘I would pay good money to watch your brother carry his Beta on his back through the dungeon,’ she mindlinked me. The water I was drinking spurted out my nose as I tried to cough and laugh at the same time. ‘Are you trying to kill me, Red?’ I asked. She just giggled.
