Gone.
More than gone, it was as though they had never been here. There should have been signs of the elephants at the very least.
Maybe I had taken the wrong path back. Maybe this realm messed with my abilities. I glanced around, but everything looked too perfectly the same for me to be wrong.
"Colin?" I whispered. "Luna?"
Nothing.
"Colin! Luna!"
Nothing.
I have had an odd and even dangerous life. Very little can scare me.
"Meow," I cried. I felt like a helpless kitten. I turned in circles. Where could they have gone? Why did they abandon me? "Meow, meow, meow..."
No.
Why was I panicking? I knew they hadn't simply forgotten me. There was magic involved, and that power didn't scare me, even though it was a different type of magic than I had known before.
That realization on its own bothered me. Even before I met Colin the Fae and Luna the Seer, I had known magic. Until now, I hadn't considered how Colin came from another realm, but his magic was mostly the same as the little that I knew.
I could not even feel the magic here. I could only perceive its effects. Everyone but me -- and maybe the elephants -- had seemed to be affected by the power. That couldn't be because we were not human. The chipmunks had seemed touched by the magic. Or at least they were gone with everyone else.
Where?
They hadn't walked away. I would have noticed that path. I had noticed where we had walked in or any other spot around --
Up?
I considered it as I looked up into that unchanging -- and obviously magical -- sky. I had gotten used to the never changing daylight until I started thinking about it. Unnatural was the least I could consider it.
Cursed came to mind with a sudden rush of worry. This place was cursed to eternal daylight. We had seen very little in native life except for plants. I had no time to consider what more it might mean because up appeared to be the right direction. I could feel magic in the air above me. Strong magic, moving like a wind into the direction we had been traveling.
I wouldn't have considered it so important, but I could feel a trace of fae magic, specifically Colin's power, like a thread through it.
I began jumping upward.
I am a Siamese. I did pretty well, despite fearing I was simply going to fall farther, the higher I jumped.
Then, when that didn't work, I climbed a tree to the highest branch that would hold me, and threw myself off with arms outstretched as though they were wings.
I flew.
It was all about attitude, and any Siamese can handle that, even without magic. I enjoyed it for about three minutes (I need a watch in this place).
It was at three minutes that I started considering the idea of landing. What if I saw my friends below me? Did I just drop out of the sky and hope for the best? Did I sweep down like a bird of prey and catch someone by the shoulder?
They couldn't be far now. I could hear Luna calling my name.
By the time I saw them, Luna had hold of one man and shook him like a rag doll. A man with a lot of power, too, although he looked too shocked to use any of it.
"You lost Neko!" Luna shouted and shook him some more. "Where is Neko! You had better find him, or I swear --"
The man --fae -- started to look annoyed.
"Luna, how do you land?" I shouted down at her.
She looked up. Then she released her prey, who stumbled backward.
"Neko!"
"I can't get down."
"How did you get up there?" Colin asked.
"I climbed a tree and jumped."
No one questioned that answer. There is a reason we get along so well.
Colin reached upward and I could feel tendrils of his magic carefully catching hold of me. He gently pulled me down and into Luna's arms. She cried and held me tight so that I could hardly breathe at first.
"Now," Colin said, looking at the other tree. "What is going on here? Why did you bring us here?"
"We naturally assumed you were part of the carnival," one of them said. "You showed up in one of the pickup spots, so we grabbed you to get in early."
"What made you think we were part of this carnival?" Colin asked, still confused.
"Quite honestly, it was the elephants."
"He has a point," Luna said.
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