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asked if he saw anything that caused him to veer.
    “To tell you the truth, I remember very little about that night. I told the cops that when they arrested me. The trauma must have caused me to block it out.”
    Cindy asked if Lucy and he were able to get back together.
    “We tried, I wanted to try, but she had lost so much skin in the fire. She had to keep having operations. The scarring was severe. She thought she was hideous.”
    Too hideous to be loved, Ali thought sadly.
    Steve and Cindy got Hector to talk about the night of the power plant explosion.
    “I snuck off to be alone with Lucy. For some reason, the gate leading to the plant was open, and we went inside to walk around. But we didn’t touch anything, or break into the turbine area. The plant blew at the other end of the facility—closer to where the gas burned that heated the water and drove the turbines. Lucy and I were shielded by the control room and a storage area. Or I should say, I was shielded. That’s not to say I didn’t feel the impact. When the plant blew, the ceiling ruptured above me and the walls collapsed. There was fire and smoke everywhere. I was lucky to get out alive.”
    What about Lucy, they asked.
    “Just before it blew, she said she had to go to the bathroom, and went looking for one. That was the last I saw of her.”
    A small but fascinating fact struck Ali as she neared the endof their interview with the contractor. It was Hector’s reaction when Sheri Smith’s name was brought up. All he said was,
“I try to stay away from that woman.”
But Ali saw the fear on his face that Cindy had failed to note. It was deep, inexplicable. What had Sheri Smith done to him to make him so scared of her? It made Ali wonder. He reacted in the opposite manner when Nira’s name was brought up.
    “She does have a sweetness to her. Most people around town don’t see that. They just think she is a mental case.”
    Those were Hector’s last words—for the night—because Cindy ran out of gas. Ali was not given a chance to
thoroughly
probe the subject that mattered most to her—Steve and Cindy’s capture and torture at the hands of Sheri Smith. However, she did manage to retrieve chunks of the dialogue they had with the woman. The latter was interesting, to say the least.
    But as Hector and Sheri Smith’s faces faded from her inner vision, Ali realized the noise she was hearing in her bedroom was no longer Cindy’s mumbled rendition of various conversations, but her loud snoring. Not for an instant did Ali consider waking her. If anyone deserved her rest, it was her old pal.
    Leaning over on the bed, Ali kissed her on the forehead, letting an ounce of fairy magic enter her friend’s brain, knowing that Cindy would have the sweetest dreams she had ever had. Then Ali turned and walked into the living room.
    Two surprises awaited her.
    Nira was sitting up on the couch, her eyes wide open.
    The phone was ringing. Ali quickly picked it up.
    It was Mr. Jason Warner. Her father.

CHAPTER

3
    A li had not spoken to her father in four days—a half a day more than the time she had spent in the elemental kingdom. Their last talk had been just before she had entered a cave high on the side of Pete’s Peak, with Farble and Paddy—her troll and leprechaun companions. At that point, Ali had called her dad on her cell and told him she was already bored with summer vacation. She was watching too much TV, too many DVDs, and just all around goofing off. But it was lies, all lies . . .
    The truth of the matter was, at the time, she had been using the last drop of fairy magic at her disposal to blast open a hole in the cave that held the seven doors—the doors that led to seven separate dimensions. She was also using fire stones that she had stolen from the queen of the dark fairies—Radrine—to help with the excavation. Farble was helping her as well, trying to break into the cave. The troll could lift one-ton boulders without breaking a