planes. Kendra wished she had asked him for a concoction to help her relax.
Elise reclined behind Kendra, listening to music on a pair of noise-canceling headphones. She had new red streaks in her hair and wore heavier makeup than when she had helped Warren guard Seth and Kendra back in December. Eyes closed, she softly tapped her fingers against her thighs to the beat.
At the front of the cabin, Mara gazed out the window. A tall, athletic woman with dramatic cheekbones, Mara hadn't been talkative even before the Lost Mesa preserve fell and her mother was killed. Since greeting them at the airport in Perth, the Native American seemed quieter than ever.
Vincent, the only member of the party Kendra had not met previously, sat across from Mara. A small man of Filipino descent, he smiled a lot and had a faint accent. Grandpa had explained that Vincent had been included on the mission because of his familiarity with the Obsidian Waste preserve.
Although she could not see him, Kendra knew that Seth was up in the cockpit with Aaron Stone, the same man who had piloted their helicopter when they went to Wyrmroost. Had that really been only three months ago? It felt like a lifetime.
She wished Warren were here with them. It felt wrong to go adventuring without him. He had been with her at the inverted tower at Fablehaven, as well as Lost Mesa and Wyrmroost. But now he was part of the reason this expedition was so urgent. At Wyrmroost, Warren had been trapped inside a magical chamber. The entrance to the room looked like a regular knapsack, but inside the unassuming mouth of the bag a series of rungs led down into a spacious storeroom heaped with junk and provisions. After Gavin had revealed himself as Navarog, he had destroyed the knapsack, stranding Warren inside the storage room along with a small hermit troll named Bubda.
The room had been well stocked with food and water, but any supply was finite, and now, after three months, Grandpa and the others had estimated that Warren would be nearly out of rations. Without prompt intervention, starvation would claim him.
Not long after Kendra had returned to Fablehaven from Wyrmroost, Coulter Dixon had embarked on a campaign to discover how the Translocator functioned. The adventure at Wyrmroost had provided them with the key to the vault at Obsidian Waste, but obtaining the Translocator would be much more useful if they knew how it exerted power over space. Otherwise, it might end up like the Chronometer, a powerful artifact that they had little idea how to operate.
After exploiting his best contacts and hunches, the veteran relic hunter had returned with no new information. Kendra had never seen Coulter looking so old and defeated. Others kept searching for operational guidelines, but a couple of weeks ago, it was Vanessa who finally reported success. She had been mentally traveling out of Fablehaven into the sleeping minds of people she had bitten in the past. Her primary focus had been trying to figure out where Kendra's parents had been taken, but while working with one of her contacts inside the Society of the Evening Star, the narcoblix had uncovered long-guarded information about operating the Translocator. Once Coulter had verified that the intelligence seemed authentic, the Knights had started planning this mission, in the hope that the Translocator could help them rescue Warren and gain a new advantage over the Society.
Kendra also quietly hoped that an artifact as powerful as the Translocator might help in the search for her mother and father. Maria and Scott Sorenson had known nothing about disguised magical creatures existing in the real world. And yet, despite their lack of involvement in the affairs surrounding Fablehaven, contrary to all precedent, they had been abducted. Stranger still, there had been no contact from the Society about terms for their release. After Wyrmroost, the Sphinx and the Society had seemed to disappear.
Kendra tried not to dwell on her parents. The thought of them made her ache. Scott and Maria both still believed she was dead. They had held a funeral and buried a duplicate Kendra and then had been abducted before the record could be set straight. A miserable emptiness overcame Kendra whenever she remembered that her parents believed their daughter to be dead and buried. All of that futile grief! Now that her parents were prisoners, would they ever learn the truth?
To make matters worse, her parents had been taken through no fault of