He nudged Jax with the Taser, steering him toward the teller windows. Jax understood what Terrance wanted and fastened the open cuff to the steel security grate.
“Nobody knows how to beat a lock better than a lock maker. The only problem is the alarms and the sensors and the pesky police.” Terrance nodded toward the ceiling. “And the cameras.”
Jax looked at the security cameras on the ceiling. He could see dim red lights, but he knew they weren’t working.
Terrance dismantled the lock on the steel door beyond the teller windows, and, cackling with self-satisfaction, disappeared, presumably to crack the vault. As soon as he was out of sight, Jax grabbed the security grate and shook it in frustration, ashamed of himself for being so afraid of the Taser that he cuffed himself wherever he was told to.
He was painfully aware that Evangeline would’ve reappeared a few minutes ago. Was she okay? Terrance didn’t seem to know anything about her. That was the only good thing in this situation at all. Terrance had wanted a way into Grunsday; he didn’t know he’d blundered into the business of Riley Pendare and his vassals. Jax forgot for the moment that he wasn’t one of those vassals and imagined Riley and the gang coming for him. He wished Terrance and his Taser could come face to face with Mr. Crandall and Deidre’s really big gun. That would wipe the grin off Terrance’s face.
Jax spent a few seconds picturing that scene, unlikely as it was, and when he saw movement outside the broken glass front of the building, his heart leaped with hope. Somehow, they’d tracked him here. They were going to bust in here, just like in the movies, and rescue him.
A figure slipped through the broken window. It was too small to be Riley or any of the Crandalls, and when the person pulled down the hood of his sweatshirt, Jax gasped out loud.
Thomas Donovan put a finger to his lips. Shhhh.
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JAX’S KNEES WOBBLED. His perception of the world as he knew it had taken another blow. Thomas Donovan. Here. On a Grunsday. Which meant . . .
From the back of the bank, Terrance cackled loudly, and then Jax heard the sound of a drill. Thomas pointed toward the open doorway and made a gun with his hand—sticking his forefinger straight out and his thumb up. He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
Jax wondered how to answer that. He copied the gesture and shook his head. Then he curled two joints of his forefinger to make a snub-nosed weapon, touched his own chest with it, and mimed a convulsion.
Thomas nodded and darted outside.
“Wait,” Jax whispered desperately. Had Thomas just stopped by to take a survey of bank robbers’ weapons?
Finally, to Jax’s relief, he reappeared. He entered the building and crept around the edge of the room. Terrance’s drill stopped, and Thomas hastened his steps. When he reached the corner of the room closest to the steel door, he sank down beneath an ornamental potted tree and disappeared from sight.
Movement in the bank entrance caught Jax’s attention, and somebody else walked in. This time it was a grown man with the same carroty shade of hair as Thomas. The man nodded a greeting at Jax, swung a baseball bat onto his shoulder, then looked back at the entrance and made a “come here” gesture.
Tegan darted in through the broken window. She spared Jax only a brief glance before pulling the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and taking position behind the man who must’ve been her father.
The senior Donovan faced the open steel door. He positioned the bat like a baseball player—even took a couple of practice swings—then called out loudly, “Terrance Hodd, are you havin’ a bank party without your good friend, Michael?”
At the word friend, Jax’s heart sank. The Donovans knew Terrance. They were probably his accomplices.
Terrance’s voice from the back room confirmed it. “How’d you find me, Michael?”
“Smelled you out. I figured you were planning to strike out on your own, but you forgot—I know which banks carry your locks. It was just a matter of findin’ the one that reeks of you casing it out.” Donovan looked at Jax. “Looks like you got yourself another way in and out of the eighth day. Were you thinkin’ of cuttin’ me out of my share?”
“Your share?” Terrance appeared. He looked at Jax, then at Donovan and Tegan standing beside him—as if marking everyone’s position—and held up a gun. Not a Taser. A small black revolver with a nasty, oversized hole in the barrel.
Jax’s mouth went dry. Terrance had a real gun after all.
“You never earned your share, Michael,” said Terrance. “I’m the one who knows how to break into vaults. All you and your kid ever did was get me in and out of this crazy world—”
“Not to mention teachin’ you about it in the first place,” Donovan murmured.
“—and as you can see, I’ve got somebody else to do that now.”
“Terry.” Donovan shook his head. “As a father, I don’t approve of kidnappin’ kids to rob banks. It’s one thing when they’re born to it.” He glanced at Tegan, who grinned and shrugged.
“Michael.” Terrance flashed his crazy grin, the one that made Jax shiver. “As a father, you should’ve known better than to bring your kid into this. Now I’m going to have to take him out, too.”
“But I never told you everything, Terry.” Donovan’s smile didn’t waver. “And you’re so dense, you never realized my kid . . . is twins.”
Thomas hurtled out of hiding and plowed into Terrance’s back. Terrance went down, firing the revolver as he fell. Jax ducked instinctively. The discharge echoed loudly, accompanied by breaking glass. The shot had gone wide.
Donovan swung the bat down on Terrance’s hand. The bank robber howled, and his handgun spun across the floor. Thomas fished the Taser out of Terrance’s back pocket, jumped up, and fired it. Terrance convulsed.
Tegan hollered at Jax, “Where’s the key?”
“In his shirt pocket!”
Donovan put his foot on Terrance’s neck, pinning him to the floor, the bat hovering just off his head. “Should’ve brought a seven-iron,” Donovan remarked cheerfully. Thomas found the handcuff key and tossed it to Tegan. Then he and his father hauled Terrance to his knees and dragged him into the back of the bank.
The moment Tegan unlocked the cuff, Jax grabbed her left arm and shoved her sleeve up. He got a glimpse of a tattooed crest with what looked like hunting dogs standing on their back legs before she yanked her arm away and glared at him. “You knew about me,” he hissed. “And never said anything.”
“You were an idiot,” she sneered. “Showing people your mark and using your magic openly. Tommy wanted to pound you.” She might have said more, but shouting from the back of the bank caught their attention. “C’mon,” she said, grabbing him by the arm. “They might need help.”
A short corridor led to the vault. Jax and Tegan arrived in time to see Terrance struggle to his knees, only to be brought down by another hit from the Taser. Jax felt sick, watching him flop around on the floor. “Gimme the cuffs,” said Thomas. His sister darted forward.
The elder Donovan knelt in front of the vault with a finger inserted into one of the drill holes. His face was pressed against the vault door, his eyes cast upwards with a look of concentration. “I think . . . Ah, there we go.” He jumped to his feet and swung the vault door open triumphantly. “And you thought I wasn’t payin’ attention, Terry.”
Terrance responded with a string of curse words. The twins had managed to cuff his hands behind his back, but he was still struggling. “Are you totally useless?” Thomas yelled at Jax. “Grab some electrical tape from his box and give us a hand!” Jax blinked stupidly for a moment, then fetched the tape and wrapped it around Terrance’s ankles while Tegan sat on his legs.
Donovan examined the door. “It’ll still lock when we’re done. That’s a bit of luck.”
“I’ll kill you,”
Terrance growled.
“Hush up, Terry, or Tommy’ll zap you again.” Donovan handed a garbage bag to Tegan. “Since we’re here . . .”
“Yeah, Dad.” Tegan darted into the vault and started filling the bag with bundles of cash from the bins and drawers.
Donovan picked up a fat wad of hundreds and slapped it against Jax’s chest. “Here you go, kid. Your share.”
“No thanks!” Jax exclaimed.
“Suit yourself.”
“You want Terrance in the vault?” asked Thomas.
“You can’t!” hollered Terrance. “I need one of you to get me out of this place!” Jax understood he didn’t mean the bank.
“True.” Donovan and Thomas dragged Terrance into the vault. “You’ll be stuck here till somebody rescues you. Course, nobody opens this vault on the eighth day. They’ll be here on Thursday, but you won’t be. They’ll repair it and lock it. I don’t expect anybody’ll be lookin’ in here on any day you’ll be present . . . although eventually they’re gonna wonder why the place stinks so bad . . .”
Terrance started cursing foully. Even after Donovan swung the vault door closed, they could hear him faintly through the drill holes.
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THE TWINS PUSHED Jax down the hall toward the front of the bank. “You can’t leave him there,” Jax protested, feeling nauseous. “To starve to death slowly.”
“What do you care?” Thomas said. “That gun was for you.”
“No worries.” Michael Donovan grinned. “Terrance doesn’t belong in the eighth day. He’ll pop back into his own time, easy enough. The eighth day will spit out any Normal at midnight, whether he’s handcuffed to one of us or not.”
“He doesn’t know anything about the eighth day except what we told him. And we lied a lot.” Tegan grinned proudly.
“Couldn’t have him shooting us in the back, thinking he didn’t need us,” her father explained. “Likewise, he never saw Tommy and Tegan together.”
Meanwhile, Jax had stumbled over his own feet. “What do you mean, that gun was for me?”
Tegan shrugged. “It would’ve been a lot of trouble to keep you prisoner till he wanted another piggy-back ride.”
The entire world pounded in time with Jax’s heart. If the Donovans hadn’t shown up tonight, his life expectancy would have been no more than the duration of Grunsday.
“He’ll transition back to his normal time at midnight,” Donovan said. “And minutes later, the police’ll be haulin’ him out of there.”
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll turn you in?” Jax asked.
Donovan laughed. “He don’t even know our real last name, and we don’t stay in one place for very long anyway. C’mon, let’s take you home. Terrance left us a ride, keys in the ignition.”
Show these people where the last remaining Pendragon lived? That seemed like a very bad idea. “I’m okay,” Jax said. “I’ll call someone to come get me on Thursday.”
The twins exchanged glances, and their father gave Jax a speculative look. “We’re driving your way,” he said. “Why would we leave you here?”
There didn’t seem to be a way to ditch them, especially after they’d saved his life. So he followed them out to the parking lot and named a town on the opposite side of the school district from where he really lived.
A dumpy-looking Toyota Tercel was parked beside Terrance’s van. Michael Donovan tossed a set of keys onto the hood before opening the van and waving everyone inside. Jax wondered why the Donovans were abandoning their car. Then it hit him. The car was stolen.
Donovan drove Terrance’s van into the street. “Steers like a dump truck,” he told Thomas, who was riding shotgun. “The A-Team meets Scooby-Doo.”
“Did you know Terrance had me?” Jax asked.
“We knew he must’ve found somebody to get him into the eighth day,” Donovan said. “He stood us up for a job last week and disappeared. We had to track him down.”
“You didn’t join one of his stupid websites, did you?” asked Tegan. “He’s been phishing for months and months online, but no Transitioner with an ounce of brains would fall for something that obvious.”
Jax sank down in his seat, feeling his cheeks burn. Tegan and Thomas exchanged grins, as if they knew he’d done exactly that and it was no more than they would’ve expected from him.
The mist continued through the night, beading up on the windshield. Donovan stopped for fuel, but not at a gas station. He siphoned gas out of cars at a bus depot. Then he stopped for “the other kind of fuel,” by which he meant ransacking a convenience store. The twins stuffed the pockets of their sweatshirts with candy and bags of chips. Donovan took a shopping basket and filled it with sodas, whistling happily. There didn’t seem to be any method to their looting, as if they weren’t thinking more than a few hours ahead. As far as Jax could tell, they treated the eighth-day world like it was their personal shopping mall—here solely for their own gain—just as Riley had warned him most Transitioners did. In spite of his disapproval, Jax was so parched from his ordeal that he beat down his conscience and helped himself to a single bottle of water. As he was walking out, he passed a display of pet food and paused.
I’ve heard that cats purr, Evangeline had said.
“Hey, Thomas,” Jax called. “Is there such a thing as a Grunsday cat?”
“What’s Grunsday?” Thomas asked.
“That’s what I call the eighth day.”
“You want a cat for the eighth day?”
“I want to know if there is such a thing,” Jax said.
“An eighth-day cat or dog is a rare commodity.” Michael Donovan eyed him with interest over the shelves. “Expensive to acquire, but I’ll bet I could find one.”
“Bound to be the pet of some Kin.” Tegan added her two cents around a mouthful of cheese doodles. “They get nasty when you steal from ’em.”
“I didn’t ask you to steal one. I only asked—” Jax grunted in exasperation. “I’ll wait in the car.”
The best way to avoid talking to the Donovans was to pretend to fall asleep, and to Jax’s surprise, he really did doze off. Thomas had to shake him awake when they neared their destination.
“Which way, Jax?” Michael Donovan asked.
“Straight ahead.” Jax kept an eye out for likely-looking housing communities. In the seat next to him, Tegan was sound asleep, her head lolling on her shoulder and her hair fallen across her face. “Left at the next light,” he said.
In the rearview mirror, he saw Donovan frown. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
Thomas and his father exchanged glances, but Donovan made the turn. Jax continued to direct them, solely by the quality of the houses, and finally said, “Stop here.”
“Which house?” Donovan brought the van to a gentle stop and looked over his shoulder with a smile that was way too innocent for Jax’s liking.
“I’d rather you stop here.” Jax made a show of looking ashamed. “I live with someone who’d kill me if he knew I was dumb enough to get myself kidnapped by a bank robber.”
“I can understand that.” Donovan’s smile widened into a grin.
Jax opened the door. “I’m grateful, sir. You saved my life. Uh, see you at school, Thomas.”
Thomas eyed him over the back of his seat with a smile that eerily echoed his father’s. “Bye, Jax.”
Jax glanced across the van at Tegan. She was still asleep. He hopped out of the vehicle and walked down the street. When he realized Donovan wasn’t going to pull away, he looked back and waved, then sauntered between two of the houses. As soon as he was out of sight, he crouched and waited. After a few seconds, he heard the van reverse and turn around, and when the sound of its engine could no longer be heard, he sank to the ground in relief.
First thing he did was find a bike to steal.
He
tried not to compare himself to Terrance or the Donovans. Instead, he remembered what Riley had told him: I’m not a thief, but I have stolen when I needed to. When he finally found a house with an unlocked garage door and a bike inside, Jax wondered when Riley Pendare had suddenly become a model of acceptable morality.
He was only eight or nine miles from home, and with any luck he could make it back before his scheduled lesson with Melinda. No one would ever know he’d been gone.
Except Evangeline.
Mounting the stolen bike, Jax tried to figure out what he was going to tell her.
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EVANGELINE LOOKED AROUND IN HORROR.
She was standing under the nighttime sky in a wet mist, alone and vulnerable. How could she have been so careless? The first thing her parents had taught her, even before she’d been able to speak in complete sentences, was the dire importance of being in a secure location at midnight.
Evangeline bolted for the house, only to find the back door locked. For a second she panicked and looked for a rock to break the glass. Before she found one, however, reason caught up with her. Breaking the window would frighten Mrs. Unger. There was another way in. Years ago, she had stolen and hidden a key to the front door for just such an emergency.
It took her a couple of minutes to remember the right window and even longer to tease the key out of the crack between the stucco wall of the house and the underside of the windowsill. Her fingers had been smaller then. While she worked at it, she cast angry glances next door, where Jax’s bike was locked up in its usual spot. Jax had left her outside and hadn’t come back for her.
The Eighth Day Page 12