Vesiroth turned to his second-in-command and drummed his fingers on his knee.
“Oh well,” Duncan said, his mouth purple from the lollipop. “I tried.”
Vesiroth sprang from his seat, knocked the computer to the floor, and pulled the stunned bank manager over the desk by his tie.
“What are you doing?” Mr. Muhleman choked. “Guards! Guards!”
Two heavily armed guards burst into the room and were immediately confronted by the two Path members and, more importantly, the two Path members’ guns. The guards were forced to drop their own weapons and put their hands in the air.
“You really should have just shown him the vault,” Duncan told the terrified bank manager.
Vesiroth pulled the man along by his tie as he strode out of the office and into the bank’s clean, white lobby. Bank employees froze in their tracks. More guards appeared, but they backed off when they saw Mr. Muhleman desperately trying to keep up with a very scary-looking man with half a face and a look of grim determination that might as well have been a tattoo reading DON’T EVEN TRY IT.
The Path members held their guns on the cowering bank employees, and Vesiroth dragged the manager to the back room of the bank, where a steel door the size of a wall was the only thing in between the public and riches beyond comprehension.
“Open it,” said Vesiroth.
“You don’t understand!” Mr. Muhleman croaked, clutching at his own throat. “You cannot enter the vault no matter what you do. Even if I wanted to let you in I could not. There are measures and procedures to prevent this!”
Vesiroth swung the bank manager so that his face was pressed against the cold steel door.
“Open it.”
“Please,” the manager whimpered. “Please let me go. I can be of no help to you.”
Duncan shrugged. “I suppose I could persuade him to be more cooperative.” He manifested a glowing butterfly knife from out of nowhere and swung it open in a chilling display of dexterity.
Mr. Muhleman gasped. Vesiroth looked down at the man and then simply tossed him aside. He crashed into a wall and fell to the ground, moaning.
“I guess we go with plan B,” said Duncan.
Vesiroth had hoped to do things the easy way, but there was no avoiding what was sure to be a huge drain on his energy. Some things were worth a little sacrifice. He placed one hand on the vault door and one hand over the silver spike pendant that hung from his neck on a leather strap older than the Parthenon. He chanted a few words under his breath. The steel under his hand began to ripple, and then to soften. A weird groan came from the changing metal. Slowly but surely, the great door was melting.
“Coooooool,” said Duncan.
The door fell off its massive hinges and began to spread hissing across the floor, now just a thick puddle of molten metal. Duncan jumped out of the way before the liquid steel burned his shoes.
Vesiroth took his hand off his pendant and sagged where he stood. The magic had taken a lot out of him.
“Do you need a hand, boss?”
“No!” Vesiroth stood as straight as he was able to. He could not afford the appearance of weakness. He set his foot down in the rapidly cooling metal pooled on the floor. The soles of his shoes sizzled, but if he felt any pain, the wizard didn’t show it.
He entered the vault. With a wave of Vesiroth’s hand, the lasers that guarded the riches went dead. The video cameras drooped in their mounts. The vault was his.
The room was lined with locked metal drawers. Vesiroth chanted a spell to himself and the drawers sprang open all at once, spilling their contents over the vault’s floor in a riot of wealth. Vesiroth waded through the loot, ignoring the millions in stock certificates, cash, jewels, and gold bars at his feet until he sensed what he was after. He bent over, brushed away a blanket of thousand-dollar bills, and reached down to pluck a piece of old, dirty pounded brass off the vault’s floor. He held in his hand the first piece of the Elicuum Helm.
He tucked it into the pocket of his hated suit jacket and strolled out of the vault. Duncan was leaning against a wall, waiting for him.
“You get what you wanted, boss?”
“Yes.”
“The car’s running. The cops will be here any second.” He motioned to the Path guards to join them as he and Vesiroth marched to the bank’s front door.
On the way, Duncan stopped and stared at a woman with dark hair cowering behind her desk. “You don’t mind, do you?” He reached over and pulled another purple lollipop from a jar on her desktop. “I love these things.”
And that’s when Vesiroth froze.
“Nadja?” the wizard asked. “Could it be you?”
Vesiroth’s eyes were locked on the woman. Duncan didn’t understand what was happening. Vesiroth seemed confused and he looked as if he were in a trance. “Boss? Are you okay?”
Vesiroth paid no attention to his second-in-command. He threw the desk aside, leaving the petrified woman exposed.
“Nadja, my wife, I thought that you were lost to me forever. How can this be? I…” Vesiroth leaned in to touch the woman’s face, but the moment his finger brushed her cheek, the hallucination was over. This was not Nadja. This was just some woman who worked in a bank. Nadja was long dead. But for a moment it had seemed…
There was rage in Vesiroth’s eyes. The wizard began to tremble. He pulled the brass third of the Elicuum Helm from his jacket and held it against his head. Tentacles made of black air began to reach out from the Helm, searching with jerks and starts for negative energy it could feed on.
“Oooooooookay,” Duncan said. “Well, if anybody here wants to live, they should get out of the bank. Like, immediately.”
No one had to be told twice. The bank employees joined the guards, the Path members, Duncan, and Mr. Muhleman in a mad dash out the front door.
The dark energy from the broken Helm had nowhere to go. Finally, the black tentacles lashed out at the walls and the ceiling of the bank itself. Vesiroth stood at the center of a furious tempest as the feelers ripped gaping holes in the plaster and stone. The building shook. Pieces of the structure started raining down on the mad wizard.
Duncan watched from outside as the building violently imploded, falling in on itself in a heap of dust and brick. No one could survive that, he thought. Not even a wizard of Vesiroth’s power.
And then, there he was. Vesiroth walked out of the ruins and into the sunshine, brushing dirt off of his ruined suit. His anger had abated but he was clearly spent. As sirens wailed in the distance, Duncan pushed him into a waiting Mercedes limousine and told the Path driver to step on it.
Duncan was deep in thought as they sped down the highway. Vesiroth was getting more powerful by the day. Pretty soon he wouldn’t need the Path, and he wouldn’t need him either. Duncan would have to start looking for something to use as an insurance policy for when that day finally came.
13
THE FLUORESCENT-PINK GOLF BALL rolled across the Astroturf bridge, squeaked past the swinging blades of the windmill, went through the lighthouse, dropped down a level, and headed straight for the cup. Then it stopped, about two inches short. The grumbling in Parker’s stomach got louder.
“So close!” Parker’s dad doubled over in mock pain. “Oh man, I thought you had that for sure! A little more zing and it would have gone in!”
Parker hoisted his putter. “Maybe next time.”
Tramerville Fun Center was in the town next to Cahill. Along with the mini-golf course there was a go-kart track, a set of batting cages, a huge arcade, and enough junk food to make everyone in China sick for a month. It was the kind of sensory-overloading circus divorced dads took their kids to when they spent the weekend together. Parker had been to places like this for parties, but it had never been just him and his dad. He hadn’t actually been alone with his father since the night before J.T. left for prison, and even then they’d just gone to IHOP. The Fun Center was his dad trying way too hard, and it made Parker a little nervous.
> He could tell his dad was nervous, too. On the drive over J.T. spent most of his time talking about two things. First, how difficult it was for ex-cons to find work in this environment (“Did you know sixty percent of ex-convicts don’t ever return to the work force?”) and second about the potential upside of helping people convert their apartments into condos (“It’s like three hundred bucks a pop, just to file a little paperwork, and I’d be helping people out”). There was also a sidebar about the sorry state of the Dodgers (“All the hitting in the world won’t help if you only have one starting pitcher!”).
“All right, kid, move over and let your old man take a whack at this.” J.T. wore a self-serving grin as he gave his son a pat on the back. “You know, I played on the golf team in high school. My coach told me I had the talent to go pro.”
Parker knew that his dad was doing his best to regain his trust. One round of miniature golf wasn’t going to solve anything, but you had to start somewhere. J.T. had already sat Parker and his mom down for a conversation about how this time things were going to be different. Of course he was innocent of everything he was charged with and prison was a nightmare, but his time inside had really driven home how much his family really meant to him. Everybody cried and hugged, but to Parker it sounded an awful lot like the speech J.T. had given them when he was first arrested. Parker wanted to be optimistic, but experience had taught him to take anything his dad said with a grain of salt.
J.T. lined up his putt. “Okay. If I make this, I pick where we get lunch. If I miss it, it’s your decision. What do you say?”
“Sounds good, Dad.”
“I mean it. I’m not going to tank this shot to let you win. And you should know that I’ve been craving beef tongue ever since I got out.”
“Eeewwwww!”
“And liver, too. Do you think there’s someplace around here that has both?”
“Just take the shot, Dad.”
J.T. made a comically broad show of addressing his neon-yellow ball. Most mornings he joined Parker and Theo at the breakfast table, wearing a suit, scarfing down Cheerios, and running out the door chasing job interviews. Parker’s computer time had to be limited while his father followed up on résumés and figured out his route for the next day. The job search sure seemed legit.
Still, Parker had his doubts. His mom had said his dad made a deal to get out of prison early. In exchange for what, exactly? It wasn’t like J.T. had finally admitted he was guilty. And why now? It was good that his dad was cooperating, sure, but why not two years ago, when it might have really made a difference?
Parker desperately wanted to trust his father. He needed his dad to be telling the truth. Parker wondered if this was how the people living in that retirement home had felt when J.T. told them that the police and the federal investigators were just making a mistake, that their money was safely invested and they had nothing to worry about.
“Fore!” J.T. sent his ball rolling. It sped across the bridge and nailed the windmill vane with a solid smack. It wasn’t even close.
“I was robbed! The whole course is rigged!” J.T. clutched his heart and fell to the ground in mock disbelief. Parker jogged over to give his dad a hand up.
“So I was thinking tacos,” Parker said. “Lots and lots of tacos.”
They turned in their putters and headed out, the arcade sounds fading to nothing when the door closed behind them. Parker felt like they were leaving some kind of alternate reality and heading back to the real world. He kicked at a rock as they walked through the parking lot.
“Hey, what’s the deal with your math teacher?” J.T. asked. “Mr. Rommy, right? I can’t place that accent. Where’d he come from?”
“Belgium.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“That’s what I heard. I don’t really know him all that well.”
“Really? It seems like you two are pretty tight.”
Parker shrugged.
“Your mother thinks he’s the second coming. I don’t know. Something about him feels off to me. He doesn’t seem like the math-teacher type. Maybe he’s hiding some big dark secret.” J.T. furrowed his brow in a show of over-the-top suspicion. “Maybe he’s a communist spy.”
Parker forced himself to laugh at the joke. “I guess he is kind of mysterious, but I think that’s part of what makes him such a good teacher. I mean, he got me to care about math. That sure seems like a miracle.”
“Can’t argue with that. I’ll tell you one thing, though. You have to keep your eyes open. You can’t trust just anybody. I’m living proof of that. I’ve been locked up in a cell for two years for something I didn’t even do. You know what my real crime was? I trusted the wrong people. My business partner lied to me, my accountant showed me cooked books, the cops said if I cooperated it would all go away, my lawyer said it would never even go to trial. Next time I’ll do everything myself. Not that I’m going to get arrested again, just, you know, in general. I’m not getting railroaded anymore.” He winked sagely at his son. They were two men of the world. “Just keep your eyes open, okay, buddy? People aren’t always what they seem.”
Parker just nodded. It was the kind of advice Fon-Rahm would have given him.
Reese and Fon-Rahm were already driving to see the place when Reese began having second thoughts about the whole thing. “I don’t think this is going to work,” she said. “Nobody’s going to believe you’re my father.”
“You do not think we look related?” When he turned to Reese, his facial features softened and shifted until he looked more like her.
“Change it back! Change it back! Oh my God, that’s the creepiest thing I have ever seen. I’ll never be able to get that image out of my head.”
Fon-Rahm let his face return to normal. “It would not be difficult to mold your face to resemble mine.”
“No!” Reese flipped down the visor and stared in the mirror to make sure everything was the same. “Let’s just go with what we’ve got.”
They parked the tan Camry and walked to meet the manager in front of the building.
“I shall take it,” said Fon-Rahm.
“Oh!” said the building manager, a fit woman in her mid-forties wearing head-to-toe Lululemon yoga gear. “Are you, um, sure you don’t want to see the inside of the apartment first?”
Reese shut her eyes tight. She had made the genie swear to let her do the talking. He promised. “My dad’s just kidding,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”
With Mrs. Pitt asking questions, it was time for the genie to have a place of his own. Of course, Fon-Rahm couldn’t be depended on to do it himself. His communication skills were improving but he was still conversationally erratic. He had spent the last three thousand years sealed in a metal tube, and before that the only people he knew had spoken a language that was now dead. Parker was busy with his dad and Theo was off doing who knows what with Professor Ellison. That meant that it was up to Reese to get things done.
She had searched online for an apartment that would keep him between Theo’s house and the school, not so close that students would walk by it, but still close enough that he could get to Parker if he needed to. The perfect location turned out to be near Cahill University, which was convenient because the landlords would be used to dealing with immature college students and therefore more likely to overlook the idiosyncrasies that came with being an age-old genie.
Or at least that was the idea.
The building manager nodded knowingly. “My dad used to embarrass me with silly jokes, too. Come on, let me show you around.” She unlocked the door, looking back at Reese and smiling. Reese didn’t get it.
“It’s just that the two of you look so much alike, sweetie,” the manager said as she opened the door. “Here’s the two-bedroom.”
Reese and Fon-Rahm entered after her. The apartment was bright and clean, with worn brown carpet and fresh paint in the living room. It was simple and efficient.
“The light in here is good, and there are
new fixtures in the kitchen. The refrigerator and the stove are less than two years old. Do you do much cooking?”
“I do not eat,” said Fon-Rahm. Reese elbowed him in the stomach. “I mean, I do not eat at home. Very often. I do not eat at home very often.” He looked to Reese for validation and got a weak shrug in return.
“Let me guess. Divorced, right?” The manager smiled at Fon-Rahm.
“Separated, actually,” Reese pitched in. “They’re working it out.” She wanted to nip this little flirtation in the bud. Things were complicated enough.
“Okay,” said the manager with just a hint of disappointment. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you the bedrooms.”
The tour through the rest of the apartment was just a formality. Considering that the first of the Jinn didn’t need much more than a place to store himself when he wasn’t teaching or saving mankind or doing Parker’s bidding, the unit was more than adequate.
Later, after the manager had filed the papers and Reese had gone home, Fon-Rahm conjured himself up a complete set of furniture, including a TV, a microwave, and a bed. He filled the cupboards with food he would never eat and the closets with clothes he would never wear. He wished mediocre art onto the walls and, using the Merritts’ home as a guide, placed a badly made quilt on his new futon couch. All the stuff would fade back into the Nexus within a day or two, but Fon-Rahm could always replace it with a wave of his hand.
When it was perfect, he sat in a chair at his kitchen table and waited. He was on his own in a new world.
Theo had spent four hours a day for the last three days in Professor Ellison’s library, fuming the whole time. Back in the barn he had decided to keep the professor’s secret. Then she’d sandbagged him by telling everybody about the attack on the house herself, and, just to make it worse, she’d called him a “good boy” for following orders. A good boy! What was he, some kind of pet? He had to fight off the temptation to let loose a magic fire to burn all of Professor Ellison’s precious books to ashes.
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