Holly Willow 01-Eye of Horlune

by Raven Snow

  “Well then, Ms. Stronger-and-Faster, let me teach you both how to not have to worry about being hurt. To protect yourselves. And the ones you love.”

  CHAPTER 10 - I’m Never Letting You Pick the Names Again

  Almost two months had passed since the night when the Havens had broken into her apartment.

  Holly had always enjoyed Megan’s company wherever they lived while they were fighting Valor. Still, there had always been a burning pain in the back of her mind, signifying a desire to have a family again.

  The last couple of months with Duncan and Gwen had quelled that burning pain and kept it from consuming her as it might have if it had been left unchecked. The four of them were a family driven by a single purpose.

  That purpose had led them here, to the regional headquarters of Valor Incorporated.

  Standing over a hundred stories tall , the headquarters was actual y an amalgamation of three identical interconnected skyscrapers. Holly and Gwen had struck gold on their last mission. They had raided an accounting firm that had been handling billions of dollars for Valor Incorporated. Duncan and Megan had then followed the money trail and discovered something valuable: A device that could locate the Eye of Horlune had been created by the Applied Sciences Division of Valor Incorporated, and it was being moved from here today.

  This was their last chance. If they could get ahold of this device, or better yet, destroy it, they could put a stop to Valor’s plans for good.

  Megan and Gwen walked into the busy main lobby, making a beeline for the front desk where two stern-looking older women were looking over their glasses at the computer screens in front of them.

  “We have a delivery for a Mr. Powers,” Gwen said in a singsong voice as she leaned over the front desk, gesturing to the boxes that she and Megan were carrying. “Says here that he’s on the 47th floor?” she giggled loudly before blowing a large bubble with the bubble gum that she was chewing.

  “And you are...?” One of the women wrinkled her brow and looked at her.

  “Brandi Brown!” Gwen tapped the purple name tag that was pinned to the front of her courier uniform. Gwen had dyed her long hair bright pink and applied a heavy amount of bright eye shadow that clashed horribly with

  her hot pink lip gloss. She poked a finger into Megan’s chest before she could respond. “And this is Jasmine Peaches.”

  “One moment.” The woman began lazily tapping away at the keyboard that was in front of her. After about a minute had passed she looked up again. “You have clearance,” she said and handed them two temporary passes that had their fake names printed on them.

  “Thanks, darling.” Gwen blew a kiss to the woman and skipped off with one of the boxes under her arm.

  Megan wirelessly disabled the camera in the elevator with her phone and then looked over at Gwen with one eyebrow raised.

  “I’m never letting you pick the names again.”

  “What’s wrong? You don’t like peaches?” Gwen laughed normal y this time.

  “No, darling,” Megan replied sarcastically. “And you’re enjoying this way too much.”

  “C’mon, give me a break,” she teased. “Fighting an evil megacorporation doesn’t leave me a lot of time to have fun.”

  “Do something normal. Write a blog, like me.”

  Gwen kissed her on the cheek as the elevator door dinged open.

  “Admit it; you love me because I’m weird.”

  Megan smiled back at her as they briskly walked out of the elevator and made their way down a bright corridor that was decorated with pictures of cats with motivational puns written under them.

  They had made their way past a poster that read “Work isn’t ruff for me, it’s purrfect,” before Gwen opened a door and they both ducked inside.

  They were inside an empty conference room where the security cameras had just been conveniently disabled a few seconds earlier.

  “C’mon, quickly,” Gwen urged Megan as she began to open the box that she had been carrying.

  Both girls extracted four thin, square slabs of wood from each of their boxes. Each square was about a foot in length. Gwen placed her four squares adjacent to each other, forming an even larger square. Megan followed suit and did the same.

  “Now the command word,” Megan whispered as she grabbed ahold of Gwen’s hand.

  “Rosam-hera,” both girls whispered.

  Dull blue fire erupted from both large wooden tiles, burning the wood but leaving not even a hint of smoke in the air. The fire dissipated and two figures appeared instantly in its place, accompanied by a faint scent of cinnamon.

  “Not bad for my first teleportation spell,” Holly whispered.

  CHAPTER 11 - Why Did You Come Back?

  The four of them briskly made their way in the direction of the office where the device was located. Holly and Duncan were wearing uniforms that matched Megan’s and Gwen’s; but she hoped that they wouldn’t have to test the plausibility of their “lost couriers” excuse.

  “At least you didn’t leave any body parts behind,” Gwen whispered back and glanced around a corner to make sure that her way was clear. She didn’t have her staff with her, but she had assured Holly that the magic was within her, not the fancy staff.

  “That could’ve happened?” Duncan frowned as he glared at his sister questioningly. Gwen simply chuckled softly and led them briskly down the hall again.

  Megan had found a secret passageway on the classified blueprints of the building. “What evil secret headquarters doesn’t have secret passages?” she had remarked.

  So they had managed to plot a lengthy, but hopefully hidden, route to the office where they hoped the device was waiting for them.

  “We’re here,” Megan whispered as she looked up from her tablet at the door in front of them. “This is the back door for the lab.” A worried look crossed her face.

  “What is it, Meg?” Gwen asked.

  “I have access to virtually every camera in the building. It’s how I’ve been making sure that we’re not being seen as we sneak around. Thank you, by the way.” She frowned at the closed, polished, steel door once more.

  “So...” Holly urged her to continue.

  “So,” Megan said, “that room is dark. Not literally, but there are no cameras at all in that room.”

  “I mean, that’s not too unusual,” Holly said. “They want to hide the device from—”

  “No.” Megan interrupted. “There’s no signal from the computers in there. Once the researchers enter that room, their phones go dark as well .

  Something’s in there. Something dangerous.”

  Gwen placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it tightly. “None of us is running, Meg. We'll face this together.”

  She looked over Megan’s shoulder and nodded to Duncan, who had his hand clasped on the handle of the door. He silently nodded back to her and opened it.

  One by one, they filed into the room, leaving the door free to swing shut silently. They found themselves standing at one end of a large, brightly lit room that looked like it had once been an office, but had been repurposed into a strange amalgamation of factory and laboratory.

  Beakers, syringes, and other laboratory equipment were strewn about the tables and floor. Some of them were broken, and shards glinted among the keys of a dusty keyboard that was connected to an obviously disused computer.

  “Where is everyone?” Holly whispered as they began to cautiously make their way through the ruins of the room.

  “The delivery was supposed to happen in an hour,” Megan replied. She was visibly worried again. “Do you think that they knew that we were coming?”

  “Just keep your eyes peeled.” Duncan muttered as he followed closely behind Holly.

  “Why...” A weak voice groaned from the far end of the room where a few desks were piled.

  Holly motioned for the others to be on their guard as she led them slowly around the wall of desks.

  Sitting before them, in a makeshift laboratory ch
air, was the slumped-over shape of a man. His pale white eyes looked straight into Holly’s as he spoke again.

  “Why...Why did you come back?”

  CHAPTER 12 - Wallace McGregor

  Holly and Duncan carefully gathered around the withered man slumped over in the chair before them. The flickering blue screen of the computer in front of the chair caught Megan’s eyes. She quickly moved over to it, pulled her laptop out of her messenger bag, and had it connected to the computer within seconds.

  “Who are you?” Holly whispered to the man. She felt that if she spoke too loudly, he might simply shatter like glass.

  He looked frail, and not only physically. He was a magic user like her, a warlock. However, his aura was extremely weak. Her eyes could barely make it out as she looked at him ethereally.

  He was dying.

  “Wallace McGregor...Don't you...Paul...they have it, Paul,” he muttered almost incoherently, his pale, unseeing eyes looking right at Holly.

  “The...device...”

  “The locator!” Duncan exclaimed as Holly began rummaging in her messenger bag for anything that she could use to heal the man.

  A nagging thought in the back of her mind told her that it was hopeless, but she pushed it aside.

  “Device...”

  “Where is the locator?” Duncan’s voice boomed as he urged the man to continue speaking.

  Holly pushed him aside just as Gwen came slinking back around the corner.

  “Everything is clear for now,” Gwen muttered as she looked pityingly at the man.

  For Holly, this was just another addition to the long list of reasons why Valor Incorporated had to be destroyed. What had they done to this man?

  She shakily tipped a cup of crushed leaves and water into his mouth. “Shh,”

  she said, trying to comfort the man as he shivered slightly. “Tel us about this locator, Wallace. We can stop the people who have it.”

  “Not a locator, Paul,” his voice was a little bit stronger now. His pale white eyes looked directly at Holly as he spoke again.

  Holly knew that he was mistaking her for this Paul person in his delusional state, and she wasn't about to shatter what could be his last moments. “Then what is it, Wallace?”

  “Fu...Fusion Obelisk.”

  Megan looked back at the other three with a confused look on her face. They all returned it, and Duncan shrugged his arms helplessly.

  “I’ve got all the data that they thought they had erased when they abandoned this place,” Megan whispered awkwardly as she put her laptop back into her bag. “If information about this obelisk is here, then I can decode it. That will take some time, though.”

  Wallace’s withered hand clasped Holly’s shoulder and spun her around with a strength that she had not expected him to possess.

  When he spoke this time, his voice was uncharacteristically y even and strong. “I’m sorry. I should have been braver. I couldn’t save you, Paulina.”

  His eyes then drifted closed and he fell back into the chair. As his body hit the back of the seat, he crumbled into a fine layer of dust that covered the chair

  “Paul...” Holly whispered as she looked back at the now empty chair.

  “Paulina! What do you know about my aunt?” She screamed at the empty chair.

  Holly was getting angry. Her magic made her strong, but it also made her more vulnerable to her emotions, especial y anger. Another lead had been sitting right under her nose, and she had been too stupid to figure it out.

  “Holly, we have to go,” Megan urged as tears began to stream down Holly’s face.

  “I’m not going anywhere until I find out what happened to my aunt!”

  Holly shoved away the tablet that Megan was brandishing in her face.

  There were half a dozen security guards coming up the stairwell two stories below them. Holly didn’t care; she wanted someone to hit, someone to take this endless anger out on. Let the guards come.

  Then Duncan’s face was just a few inches from her own. As she looked into his eyes, she realized that his anger matched hers.

  It was raining. Holly saw a young Duncan being pulled away by a young Gwen. Both of them were looking back at the silhouette of a huge SUV that a portly, unconscious man was being dragged into. As the car pulled away, the glint of the streetlight caught Duncan’s stormy grey eyes.

  The same anger that Holly was feeling right now shone from them.

  “We have to go, Holly,” he whispered as he took her hand and briskly followed behind his sister, who had already opened the door and was glancing around the corner.

  “All clear,” Gwen whispered.

  CHAPTER 13 - Talking to Yourself Is Never a Good Sign

  The ride back to the apartment was eerily silent.

  Megan had used a bit of quick hacking to cover their escape. She had caused an impromptu fire drill five minutes after they had left Wallace’s room. In the ensuing chaos they had managed to slip out of the building unnoticed.

  As they opened the door to their shared living room, Gwen sighed audibly.

  “Well , that was a waste of time,” she exclaimed, disappearing into the kitchen.

  “Not true,” Megan called back as she plopped herself down in front of her array of monitors and began to go to work. “I salvaged a lot of data from that evil office-lab thing. If Valor is up to anything, we’ll know soon.”

  “We also have that lead about this Fusion Obelisk,” Duncan said. “We need to research this thing. It sounds magical.”

  “Your spell books might have something about that, Holly,” Megan said as she looked over to where Holly was standing.

  Holly was gazing out of the open window, looking out at the distant cars that were passing on the moonlit highway. She had heard what Megan had said; her reply, however, had stopped in her throat.

  “Yeah...” Holly replied as tears welled up in her eyes again, threatening to break loose. “I need some air, guys.”

  She hastily hurried out of the room, angling her head downwards so they would not see that she was on the verge of tears. She brushed past Duncan roughly and escaped out into the empty hallway that stretched out in both directions.

  Holly immediately turned right and quickly walked off down the corridor. She had no idea where her legs were taking her, but she needed to get out into the night air as quickly as possible. She slipped into an unused maintenance stairwell and made her way down three flights of stairs before finally pushing open a large, metal exit door at the bottom.

  The cold fall air greeted her lungs as she stepped out into the night and took a long, deep breath. She stood in a slightly overgrown indoor

  garden that was encircled by a walkway with access to various apartments.

  Holly slowly strolled between the mixture of flowers and wild grass that grew unevenly in the long stone flowerpots.

  “Calm down, Holly,” she muttered to herself as her head began to clear.

  “Talking to yourself is never a good sign.”

  Holly spun around to see Duncan calmly walking towards her, a playful smile stretching across his face.

  “Now why would one of the strongest girls that I know be out here talking to herself?”

  “I’m not feeling very strong right now.” She smiled weakly at him as he stopped a few inches away from her.

  She would never have admitted feeling weak to anyone. Seeming strong was half of being strong—her aunt had taught her that. But things were different when it came to Duncan.

  Holly didn’t know what exactly it was about him, whether it was his djinn powers or simply that he looked as if he understood everything a person was going through. Gwen’s words echoed in the back of her head: Yes, it makes everyone want to be his friend, and yes, it makes everyone trust him... Was that all that was going on here? Was he simply playing with her mind, trying to calm her down using magic?

  Was it wrong that she didn’t want to know the answer?

  Duncan gazed into her eyes and gave her a
somber look that exuded understanding and trust. Then, without saying a word, he wrapped both of his arms around her and pulled her into a deep embrace.

  Holly cried into his arms for what felt like hours. She cried away her inability to save Wallace McGregor. She cried away the fact that they had done nothing to stop Valor’s plan. She cried away the pain of failing her aunt one more time.

  When she final y raised her head off of Duncan’s chest, there was a large, wet splotch over the front of his shirt.

  “Sorry about your shirt.” Holly laughed softly as she stifled a loud sniffle.

  “We'll find your aunt, Holly,” Duncan replied clearly, ignoring her comment about his shirt. “I promise.”

  She gazed into his eyes and saw the image of the same unconscious man being dragged away into the black SUV.

  “We’ll find your father, too,” Holly blurted out in a hasty whisper before she could help herself. She blushed as a look of realization dawned on Duncan’s face.

  “So you figured it out?”

  “The man on the rainy night.” Holly looked down at the cracked pavement that they were standing on. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have seen it.”

  Duncan laughed softly as he ran his hand through her hair. Holly hadn’t even noticed that he was still holding her.

  “One of the curses of being a djinn, I’m afraid. Nothing is ever truly locked away in my mind.”

  Holly opened her mouth to apologize once more, but he raised his hand to cut her off.

  “You’re one person that I don’t mind sharing my mind with, Holly Willow.”

  As the last sound of her name dripped out from between his lips, Holly felt her knees go numb, then her arms, and finally her head. Her entire body felt frozen as she gazed into his eyes. Then he blinked, and the entire world went dark.

  CHAPTER 14 - I Have to Protect You

  The deep, guttural scream of a man in pain jolted Holly out of her sleep.

  She groggily looked around the dark room before sliding out of bed and into her fluffy blue slippers.

  “Paulie... What’s going on?” she muttered drowsily as she made her way towards her bedroom door.