Destined for Doon Read Online Free Page A

that Vee’s doing? Did she remember that my inner Goth girl couldn’t resist a boy in Chucks? Curiosity burned through me as I pointed to Duncan’s new shoes. “Did Vee tell you to buy those?”
    He shook his head. “Nay. She recommended something called a Nike, but I rather liked the look of these.”
    That Duncan had chosen Converse high-tops out of every other shoe in the universe incited girly flutters that rippled all the way to my toes. I started to say more, but he’d already opened his book. Not ready for him to shut me out just yet, I switched to the one topic he couldn’t ignore.
    “Does this count as the road?”

    He let the book drop slightly so that he could stare at me with puzzlement and the slightest bit of suspicion. “This is an airplane, as ye well know.”
    “Geez, I know where we are . . . but you said you’d tell me what was up with Vee once we were on the road. Which is now, right?”
    Duncan’s lips thinned and his dark eyes turned distant, as if recalling some troubling memory. After what felt like an eternity he said, “The northern borders are under attack. We think . . .” He took a deep breath and refocused on me. “It’s almost impossible to discern — like there’s an invisible barrier. The view beyond seems hazy, similar to how the bright sun distorts the horizon. But it’s easy to miss.”
    “Then how do you know for sure that something’s wrong?”
    “At first we didn’t. One of the outlying farms reported a herd of cattle gone missing. Then half their sheep. Once we determined the livestock had been in a secured paddock and couldna wander off, my brother and I accompanied Veronica to make a personal inspection of the disappearance. It was there we first noticed the flowers.”
    From his tone, I knew exactly what type of flowers he meant. When Vee and I first came to Doon, black petunias started to grow on the barren land surrounding the abandoned witches’ cottage. According to Doonian legends, they were the harbingers of evil — which proved to be true in our case. We’d unwittingly transported a cursed journal into Doon, making the kingdom vulnerable for the first time in centuries to an old hag with a revenge fixation.
    “Jamie threw a rock over the threshold and it immediately disappeared from sight, although we could hear it rolling through the underbrush. And then . . .”
    He shook his head back and forth, his face tightening. “Oneof the farmer’s hounds took off after the rock — before we could stop it. The dog charged passed the petunias and vanished. We could hear it running. All of a sudden, it began to yip, an’ the yips became shrieks — high, keening yelps that animals make when they’re in agony. . . . and then after a few minutes, it went silent.”
    Chills clenched my spine. I didn’t know which was creepier: the sounds of an animal being tortured by something unseen or the unnerving silence that followed. While Duncan shook off the memory, I reached under my seat for a blanket.
    After a moment, he continued, “Veronica and Fiona found a reference in the castle library to a similar occurrence when Doon was under siege. The witches cast a spell that encircled the kingdom like a snake. The villagers called it an Eldritch Limbus , which means ‘strange limbo.’ Everything in its path — villagers, animals, nature — decomposed instantly.”
    “You mean died?”
    “Nay. They rotted alive, from the outside in. But they didn’t die, they became enslaved to the witches in a suspended state of undeath.”
    Zombies! I’d had an irrational fear of them since Vee and I snuck into an R-rated movie when we were twelve — at my insistence, of course. We’d lasted all of three minutes. Just long enough to see some creature in a prom dress eat her date’s face off. In retrospect, it was one of my less-than-fabulous schemes.
    “So. You guys think this limbus thingy is happening again?”
    Duncan frowned. “We’re no’ sure. There are some