Read Guardians of Ga'Hoole 03 - The Rescue for Free Online

silent language that seemed to exist only in their heads. And yet Soren could not form the ideas in his head to tell them about Kludd, and they could not tell him about the danger.
    Metal! Beware Metal Beak! The words exploded inSoren’s head. It was the voice of his father but it seemed to have taken all his energy to do this. His father was dissolving before his eyes. His mother as well. The mists that had been their shapes were swirling, seeping away. Soren reached out with his talons to hold them. “Don’t go! Don’t go. Don’t leave me! Come back.”
    “What’s you yelling about, lad? Wake us all up, will you?” Soren was suddenly on the ground, and Poot was standing in front of him, blinking. How had he gotten on the ground? He had been in that tree a second ago but he had no memory of flying down from it. And there was no mist now. None at all.
    “I’m sorry, Poot. I flew up into that tree there. I thought I saw something.” Soren nodded.
    “No, you didn’t,” Poot said. “I woke a few minutes ago. You were standing right here on the mound. Perfectly alert—being a good lookout. Believe me, I would have had your tail feathers if you hadn’t been.”
    “I was right here?” Soren was incredulous.
    “Course you were, young’un,” Poot said and looked at him curiously as if he’d gone yoicks. “Right here you were. I would have noticed you up in the tree, believe me.”
    Had it just been a dream? Soren thought. But it felt so real. I heard Mum’s and Da’s voices in my head. It was real.
    “Time we be takin’ off.” Poot looked at the sky that wasturning a dusky purple. Pink clouds sliding against it. “Wind’s going our way,” Poot remarked, after studying the clouds for a minute. “We’ll catch a westerly and come in on a nice reach.” A reach was easy flying with the wind being not on the beak or on the tail feathers directly, but a little aft of the wing, giving a nice steady boost to their flight. The others were beginning to stir from their daytime slumbers.
    “Form up!” Poot commanded. It was to be a ground start, which was a bit harder than taking off from a branch. But they did it nonetheless. Soren and Martin were the last to rise in flight. They ascended in tight spiraling circles and were soon clear of the spirit woods.
    When Soren looked back, he saw the mist gathering again. Like silky scarves, it began to wind through the trees. He strained his eyes to find those two familiar shapes. Just one more glimpse, that’s all he wanted. One more glimpse. But the mist lay thick and shapeless over the white forest. Had Soren been able to see through it, however, he might have spotted a feather, just like one of his, but nearly transparent, drifting lazily down from the branch of a tree in the spirit woods.

CHAPTER FIVE
Bubo’s Forge
    S oren had been back for two days. But he had said nothing of his strange experience in the spirit woods to anyone, not even his closest friends, his friends in the “band”—Gylfie, Digger, Twilight, himself, and now, since her rescue, his sister, Eglantine. But every day when he fell to sleep he dreamed of the scrooms of his parents. Had it been a dream in the spirit woods as well, just a dream? And the words Metal Beak, those two words seemed to almost clang in his brain and send ominous quivers to his gizzard. The words took on a life of their own and grew more dreadful with each passing hour.
    “Something’s spooking you, Soren, I just know it,” Digger said as they were sitting in the library one evening after navigation practice.
    “No, nothing at all,” Soren said quickly. Soren had been reading a really good book, but he was distracted and had read the same sentence about five times. Leave it to Digger to pick up on the worries that haunted him day and night.
    “Nothing at all, Soren?” Digger blinked and looked at him closely. The fluffy white brow tufts that framed his deep yellow eyes waggled a bit.
    Soren looked back at