by R. L. King
The crowd was going crazy, and even Jason had a look of wide-eyed horror now. “What the hell—?”
Stone, however, looked unimpressed. “I wonder how long it will take the rest of our group to realize he wasn’t with us when we started?”
As if to punctuate his words, the “victim” got up, laughing, pulled out the “machete,” and darted off behind the barrier. The clown was slower to follow. He waved his remaining machete a few more times, then moved off after his victim.
“Hang back,” Stone muttered to the other two.
They did so, pretending to watch the magician for a moment, then used the crowd as a diversion while they slipped behind the clown’s secret exit.
By the time they got back there, neither the clown nor the victim were anywhere to be seen. “Damn,” Jason said under his breath, but then Stone touched his arm and pointed.
Barely visible in dark clothes and a dark stocking cap, a skinny boy around seventeen sat in a corner with his arms wrapped around his knees. A broom and dustpan were propped next to him. His eyes were closed, his face lit up in a rapture of pleasure.
“I think we’ve got our man,” Stone whispered, waving Jason forward.
It went just like they’d planned: Stone cast a spell that made the boy slump over, his head dropping onto his knees. Jason picked him up, supporting him as if helping a drunken friend. Verity pulled off his dark stocking cap and replaced it with a red and gold San Francisco 49ers one from her pocket. Together the three of them quickly headed for the emergency exit, dragging the boy with them. His eyes were open, but his head lolled alarmingly to one side.
Stationed outside the emergency exit was a burly man in a Fear Asylum T-shirt. He looked at them suspiciously when they came out, but Stone made a surreptitious hand movement that caused the boy to jerk in Jason’s grip and vomit violently on the ground.
“Too much excitement,” Jason said to the man as the teen continued heaving. “My cousin couldn’t take it. What a wuss,” he added with contempt.
The man stared in disgust at the splashes of vomit on his boots and waved them off. Jason doubted he even looked at their faces, let alone registered them. Once they were safely away, Stone and Verity remained with the kid while Jason ran off to retrieve Susanna and Lissy. It was nearly ten minutes before they came back; Verity was pacing around, growing more and more nervous, and even Stone was starting to look apprehensive by the time the three arrived.
“Sorry,” Jason said. “Susanna had to finish her cigarette.”
“Hey, you don’t waste a good smoke,” Susanna protested. “They make you put it out in here if they catch you.”
Lissy, meanwhile, was agitated again. It was obvious their efforts to grab an Evil-possessed individual were successful, because the closer Lissy got to the boy, the less responsive she became. She sat down on the ground as far away from him as she could get and began to rock back and forth.
“Bugger,” Stone muttered. Now they had two unresponsive people to deal with. He thought fast, then dug in his pocket and tossed the van keys to Jason. “Go get the van and bring it around to that side exit over there,” he said, pointing. “I think that will be much more unobtrusive than trying to drag them through the front gate.” Jason nodded and jogged off.
It seemed an eternity before Jason returned, but in actuality it was only about ten more minutes. They had a brief fright when a couple of leather-jacketed DMW gangers swaggered by, but Susanna’s concealment power appeared still to be working since the gangers passed less than ten feet away and didn’t react to them.
“Hurry up,” Jason said when he arrived, glancing back over his shoulder. “I’m parked illegally.” He grabbed the boy again, while Susanna and Verity helped Lissy up and hustled her out the exit. Stone hurried ahead of all of them, jumping into the driver’s seat while the others arranged their passengers, seating Lissy as far as they could manage away from the boy.
Stone drove off quickly, careful not to draw attention. He pulled out a paper from his pocket and consulted it, then took a right out of the little side street where Jason had parked.
“How far is it?” Verity asked. She kept casting nervous glances at the kid, as if she expected him to wake up any minute.
“Five minutes. Just sit tight—we’ll be there soon.”
Two more rights took them down a largely deserted commercial street lined with gas stations, small auto body and machine shops, and other similar light-industrial buildings. The gas station Lamar had told them about was right where it was supposed to be, and did in fact appear abandoned.
“Go check the left side roll-up door,” Stone told Jason as he drove through the weed-choked parking lot up close to the building. “Lamar said it would be unlocked.”
Jason leaped out of the van and ran over to tug on the door. It was indeed unlocked. He pushed it up the rest of the way, then pulled it back down again once Stone had driven the van inside. “Everybody out,” Stone announced. “End of the line.”
Jason hustled the kid out. When they looked back at Susanna, she shook her head. “We’re gonna stay right here,” she said. “I think Lissy’ll be okay once she’s away from that boy.” She started to fumble in her bag for a cigarette again, glanced at Stone, grumbled something under her breath, and settled back in the seat with a resigned sigh.
“I don’t know how long this will take,” the mage told her. “It might be a bit of a wait.”
“That’s fine. We’ll just get us a little sleep. It’ll be nice for a change to sleep without worryin’ something’s comin’ after us.”
He nodded, grabbing his leather bag out of the front seat. “All right, then. With any luck, we’ll make this quick.”
Taking the lead, he motioned for Jason and Verity to follow him out of the garage area and into the gas station’s office. It was in the back of the building and didn’t have any windows. Stone fished in the bag and came up with a flashlight, which he switched on and put down on an old desk. “Set him down in the chair there,” he directed. “I’m hoping we can do this without ever having him wake up.”
“How?” Verity asked.
“We don’t need him. We need the thing inside him. And if he doesn’t wake up, then there won’t be any chance he’ll see us. Safer that way.” He opened the bag and started laying out items on the desk.
Jason set the skinny boy down in the chair, where he immediately tried to slump forward and fall. Stone tossed Jason some light rope, which he used to tie the boy’s hands behind him, more to keep him in the chair than to restrain him.
“So,” Verity said, “How are we gonna do this? Do you just want me to stare at him and concentrate really hard on trying to get the thing out of him?”
“Not yet,” Stone said, still fiddling with the various objects on the table. “First, I want to see if I can determine anything about the nature of the Evil so I can try to get my cage right. We won’t be able to contain this one since it’s so weak, I suspect, but any readings I can get will be invaluable.” Selecting something that looked like a short, black, wooden rod with a red crystal attached to one end, he moved closer to the boy.
“Is that a magic wand?” Jason asked, half-joking.
“Not exactly,” Stone sounded completely serious. “It’s more a focusing object, to help me ignore outside astral influences while homing in on the one I’m trying to study.”
“Of course it is,” Jason said to Verity. She nodded and grinned.
“Oh, be quiet, both of you.” It was hard to tell if he was irritated or amused. He dragged another chair over, sat down, and held the crystal up near the boy’s face. For a long time he neither moved nor spoke; he just did that weird unblinking-stare thing that Jason was learning to identify as ‘doing something magic’. The boy twitched a bit and seemed uncomfortable, shifting back and forth in the chair, but he didn’t wake. “You’re in there, you bastard, aren’t you?” Stone murmured. “I can feel you in there…”
“You can?” Jason whispered.<
br />
“Shh…” He moved the crystal again, this time touching it to the boy’s forehead. Again he remained there, his arm shaking a little but otherwise unmoving, for nearly five minutes. Then he pulled back and let his breath out.
“Did you get anything?” Verity leaned in as if trying to see whatever it was for herself.
Stone seemed to be gathering his thoughts. “I—did. But I’m not sure what I got, exactly. I’ve got the maddening feeling that it’s—familiar somehow, but I can’t figure out why or how. It’s fighting, though—it can’t move the boy’s body because he’s unconscious, but it’s trying. It’s afraid—I think it suspects what we have planned for it. Best that we make this quick—I doubt this is good for its host’s blood pressure.”
“Did you get enough to make the cage?” Jason asked.
“I think so.” Stone had already moved off and had pulled a notebook and pen out of the leather bag. He opened the notebook, moved over by the flashlight, and started writing rapid-fire notes. “Just—see if you can evict it now,” he said to Verity without looking up. “I want to get this all down while it’s still fresh.”
Verity, looking thoroughly confused, cast a what do I do now? glance at Jason. When he shrugged, she moved closer to the boy and stared at him. She closed her eyes and screwed up her face—to Jason, it looked like she was either concentrating really hard, or trying to lay a particularly troublesome egg. After about thirty seconds she opened her eyes and let her breath out. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said.
“Um…maybe you have to tell it to get out,” Jason suggested. “When you did it before, I heard you yell ‘Get out!’” He glanced over at Stone for help, but the mage was still writing in his notebook, oblivious to their conversation.
“Guess it’s worth a try,” she said. Facing the boy again, she glared at him and yelled, “You! In there! Get out!” The boy shifted in the chair, but nothing else happened. “I feel stupid,” she complained.
“Al?” Jason called. “Little help here?”
Stone glanced up from his notebook. “What? Oh.” He thought a moment, then said, “Erm—you told me before that you ‘pushed’ with your mind. Try that.”
Verity rolled her eyes at him. “And I’m gonna maybe study magic with you? I can’t wait for my first lesson: ‘Okay—do magic!’”
Stone put the notebook away with a sigh and came over. “I can’t really explain it, since I don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Remember, this sort of thing isn’t the kind of magic I understand. It—” He stopped; his expression shifting from confusion to revelation to disgust. He put his hand to his face, shaking his head. “Honestly, I don’t know why you two bother to listen to me at all.”
“What are you talking about?” Jason demanded.
“This…isn’t…magic,” Stone said, spacing the words out for effect. “Verity’s ability to drive the Evil out of a host isn’t a magical ability. It’s a Forgotten one.”
“So?” Jason was still confused.
“I get it!” Verity almost yelled in her excitement. “It’s a Forgotten ability, so I can’t use it because you did something to block my connection with whatever was causing me to be crazy.”
Stone nodded, looking pleased. “Bright girl,” he said. “Brighter than me, at any rate. If you end up studying with me, I won’t be able to slack off at all if I want to stay ahead of you. But yes, exactly. It appears there’s some sort of connection between the energy that causes the mental problems and the Forgotten powers. Block one, you block the other one.”
“So, can you lift the block? Will that be safe?” Verity asked.
“Yes, and it should be, if what you tell me about it needing to ‘build up’ is accurate. This should only take a short time, and then we can put it back in place. But the first thing I’ll have to teach you when this is over, even if you decide to go elsewhere, is how to control the block—to place it and remove it yourself. That’s for later, though. Let’s get this sorted before the kid wakes up and I have to put him under again.”
Lifting Verity’s block took less than a minute. “Now that it’s established,” Stone told her, “it’s easier to manipulate. Once you learn to do it on your own, it will literally be like flipping a switch on and off.”
She nodded. “Okay. Should I just try the same thing again?”
“It’s a start. We might have to experiment a bit.”
“If I can even do it at all,” she muttered.
“I think you can. I have a theory—since you’re a potential mage, you should, even untrained, be able to have more control over a mentally-based power, even if you don’t consciously know how to do it yet.”
She looked dubious. “I hope you’re right…” she said. Turning, she faced the boy again and resumed her “laying an egg” expression of concentration. “I want you out of there!” she growled.
The boy shifted in his seat again. It was subtle, but it appeared that there was some kind of internal struggle going on with him. “Is it working?”
“Keep going,” Stone said, his voice even. He was watching the boy as closely as she was. “Try touching his forehead. Might help you focus.”
Verity looked like that wasn’t her first choice for something to do: the boy’s face was dotted with a nasty case of acne. But after a moment she reached out and tentatively put one finger in the middle of his forehead. “Out!” she ordered again.
The boy’s squirming grew more pronounced. He appeared to be fighting his way to consciousness—or something inside him was trying to fight its way out. So far, Stone’s spell was holding. “It’s not working,” Verity said under her breath, her voice thick with concentration.
“It is,” Stone murmured. “I can feel—something—trying to fight you. Keep going.”
Verity leaned forward, putting her hands on each side of the boy’s head. “Leave…him…alone!” she yelled in frustration.
Without any warning, the boy lunged forward. Jason hadn’t tied his hands tightly, since all he was trying to do was keep him upright in the chair. Nobody had noticed that while they were all focused on his face, he had apparently been busy working his hands loose from the bindings. Flinging his arms forward, he locked his hands around Verity’s neck and the two of them overbalanced and went over backward with a crash.
Jason moved almost instantly, leaping forward and grabbing the kid’s arms to loosen his grip on his sister. The kid, though skinny, fought with the strength of a madman, his eyes blazing with hatred. “You—can’t—stop us!” he spat out through gritted teeth.
Stone was only a little slower than Jason, moving in to grab the boy’s other arm. Together they managed to pull him off Verity, who skittered away, puffing and scared. They struggled with him as he flung his body back and forth, apparently heedless to any damage he was doing to it. His only obvious motivations were to escape and to injure as many of his captors as he could before he did it.
“Do something!” Jason yelled to Stone. “Unless you want me to clock him one!”
Verity, however, had gotten back to her feet. She regarded the kid with a mixture of anger and disgust. “Get out of there, damn you!” she yelled. “I’m sick of screwing around with you!” She closed her eyes and pushed.
Just as suddenly as he had lunged from the chair, the boy went limp in Stone’s and Jason’s arms, his head slumping forward. At the same time, a dimly glowing ball of energy shot up out of him, hovering above his body for a few seconds. Like the one before, this one made a few quick and desperate darts around, hovering in front of each of its captors in turn, and then exploded in what looked like a feeble and silent white firework.
Verity let her breath out. “I…I did it,” she said, like she hardly believed it herself.
“That you did,” Stone said, puffing. Together with Jason he hustled the unconscious boy back into the chair. He checked to make sure he still had a pulse and was breathing, then turned back to Verity. “Nicely done. I was even able to get a couple of reading
s—though I didn’t expect him to go after us like that.”
Jason was looking at Verity with concern. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” He shot a nasty glance at the boy, tempted to give him a good swift kick or two for his trouble.
She felt at her neck, then shook her head. “No, just scared me. He didn’t get a very good grip. That was pretty freaky.”
Stone nodded. “But the important question is—do you know what you did now? Do you think you can duplicate it at will?”
“I’m—not sure,” she said slowly. “But I think maybe I can. I did what you said—just pushed with my mind. But it seems like it takes some kind of scary thing to make it work right. Like I need to be afraid it’s going to hurt me or somebody else.”
“Hmm. Well, that’s better than nothing, I guess. It will have to do for now.” He motioned toward the boy. “Come on—let’s get him back to the van. We need to take him back where we got him.”
“Why can’t we just leave him here?” Jason asked. He wasn’t feeling too much like making life easy for this kid.
“Safer to take him back. I don’t think he’ll remember any of this—he’ll probably think he just passed out from drinking too much beer, or fell asleep. But we can’t give him too many reasons to question that—like waking up in a location he has no knowledge of. That could bring up awkward complications.”
“Okay, whatever.” Jason got the kid under his arms and hoisted him up, then hung back as Verity left the room first and headed toward the van. “Hey, Al?”
“Yes?”
“Did you really have any idea that her being a mage would make this any easier?”
“Of course not.” He raised an eyebrow. “She might be bright, but she’s still seventeen. I’ve got a few years of deviousness on her yet.”
Jason grinned as he resumed dragging the boy out of the room.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
After collecting Lissy (who was asleep, still clutching her glow stick) and Susanna (who guiltily scrabbled around trying to put out her cigarette before she got caught), they managed to drop the sleeping boy off in a shadowy corner near the side of the haunted house without incident. Of course, a little concealing magic didn’t hurt, either.