by J. R. Rain
“—let’s level the playing field a bit, shall we?”
Anthony was just puzzling over the meaning of “leveling the playing field” when the devil ripped free the arrow in Anthony’s shoulder. Anthony saw white, then red, and cried out as liquid warmth flowed down his bicep. That hurt far worse than he was prepared for. Maybe the silver had affected him. He didn’t know.
The devil did the same with the three remaining arrows, pulling each out in unison—and with reckless abandon. Perhaps even glee. The one that had hurt most of all—the one in his stomach—also provided him the greatest relief when removed. Anthony had cried out the loudest with that one, not caring if the werewolves next door heard him, especially since they were making a bigger racket.
With a clatter, the devil tossed aside the bloodied arrow, and stood tall over Anthony. If anything, the devil seemed disappointed there hadn’t been more arrows to pull free. Anthony felt his eyes on him. “You are already healing, boy. Good, good.”
Anthony felt it, too. He felt the wounds closing, felt his insides moving, stitching together, somehow. He also felt himself getting stronger, too.
“I guess you were wrong,” said Anthony, now that he had unclenched his teeth enough to talk.
“Wrong about what, boy?”
“The devil does help.”
The man before him opened his mouth to speak, but then, closed it again. Finally, he leaned down and stuck his handsome face just inches from Anthony. “You are a clever boy. But I want you to remember one thing if you make it out of here alive, which I doubt you will.”
Anthony wasn’t afraid. Heck, did the devil even know that Samantha Moon was his mom? He said, “What?”
The man with the glowing eyes—a man who was not a man—leaned down and whispered into Anthony’s ear. “I want you to remember who really helped you in your hour of greatest need.”
With that, the devil stepped back and snapped his fingers and two things happened at the same time—maybe even three or four:
The cuffs at his wrists and feet sprang open...
The devil and his three-headed dog disappeared...
And somewhere, Anthony heard a door creak open...
Chapter Twenty-six
“You two really aren’t supposed to be in here—” said Sherbet, then caught sight of my look—and Allison’s look, and even Tammy’s own scathing look of utter contempt that only a teenager could give. He threw up his hands. “Ah, geez, never mind. Welcome to the party.”
Searching for clues to my kidnapped son’s whereabouts hardly seemed like a party—but I knew the detective meant well. We were all at our wit’s end, and we literally had a ticking time bomb to contend with. A time bomb in the form of the setting sun.
My daughter summed up my thoughts nicely: “Worst. Party. Ever. Like I really want to be in this creep’s house.”
Allison, meanwhile, was frowning at the tablet, her face and big brown eyes aglow. As she scrolled through the subject headers, she said, “I’ve been waiting for a psychic hit on your son, Sam. Been waiting for it ever since we heard the bad news.” She continued scrolling through the many, many headers. “As you know, I have no control over my hits. Sometimes, they never come. It would be nice if a picture of the warehouse where they took your son—”
“Why did you say, ‘warehouse’?”
“Did I say, ‘warehouse’?”
“You did, yes.”
“Interesting. I didn’t mean to say, ‘warehouse.’ It just sort of slipped out.”
“Interesting doesn’t help find my son. It’s either a warehouse or it’s not—”
“Easy, Sam,” said Sherbet. “We’ll figure it out...”
I paced in a tight circle. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so, I shook them in front of me. Snapping at Allison did no good at all, and probably stopped up what psychic hits she was getting. “Sorry,” I said to no one in particular.
“It’s okay,” said Allison. “Anyway, we had been following your train of thoughts from out in the van... and the moment you pulled up the OneNote app, I got the hit I’d been waiting for.”
Except now, she looked as perplexed as I was sure I’d looked, when I had been scanning the myriad of headers. It was all I could do to not throw the couch against the far wall, which I could totally do.
Allison was biting her lower lip; a sure sign she was in “psychic receiving mode.” Most people didn’t realize that biting their lower lip triggered an easier flow of psychic hits. It’s why so many people did it, and it actually worked. Allison didn’t bother looking up at me when she answered my unspoken telepathic concern, “I’m seeing letters and numbers, Sam. It’s a pattern I have to unlock.”
“And it has to do with his OneNote files?” I asked.
“It does. But this is gonna take me a minute or two.”
I had just decided I would spend that minute or two pulling all my hair out, when a vehicle came to a screeching halt outside.
Chapter Twenty-seven
In a blink, Anthony was up and out of his chair.
He dashed away from the scraping, clawing, growling that was coming from the nearby room—away from where he had heard the door open. He held his breath as he ran, and made sure his feet were quiet, too. Like the way Indians supposedly ran.
He found himself at the far end of the warehouse. Unfortunately, the light from the single bulb didn’t really reach this far. Still, there was enough of it to see there were no windows or doors on this end. Nothing higher up either, except for dirty rafters. Anthony was beginning to think that nothing was supposed to get out of here. Or in here, either.
It was looking more and more like the way out was where all the noise was coming from, where the men were turning into werewolves. At least, that’s what Anthony imagined they were doing. Why they were all in one room, he didn’t know. But it was like a locker room.
Maybe he couldn’t run... but he could hide, right?
Yes, he could hide.
That is, until he remembered that hiding from a pack of werewolves might be impossible. After all, Kingsley could smell a fart, like, a mile away. Anthony liked that about Kingsley.
As he considered his options—which really seemed too few, he felt—Anthony heard the sound of metal clanging. It sounded... yes, it sounded like a metal door opening and closing. And rattling, too. Like a cage door, maybe.
An engine started. Followed by the sound of a pneumatic lift being engaged. Anthony knew the sound. He’d walked past enough construction sites, heard them on TV, and seen them in his video games. It was the sound of a forklift... or maybe even something bigger.
Like a moth drawn to a flame—he’d heard that expression a few times—he felt himself drawn to the noise of the smoothly humming engine, an engine that vibrated the very floor beneath his feet. He saw the torture chair—as he had started to think of it—and the single light bulb above. Anthony crept around stacks of crates and boxes, down a row of racks that reached all the way up into the inky blackness. He crouched behind a dusty old machine of some sort. It smelled of dirt and old oil.
His instincts told him he was well-hidden, but he knew well-hidden meant nothing to a werewolf, especially a pack of them. A pack that was getting closer to transforming somewhere on the other side of that dusty light bulb.
Yes, they could sniff him out, but they still had to catch him, and Anthony could climb with the best of them. Better than the best of them, and this place was zigzagged with crossbeams and rafters and lofts.
The pneumatic engine stopped, and the sudden silence was unnerving. Anthony didn’t dare move or breathe from behind his box. Now, from above, he heard more creaking and rattling. Something was above. No, someone was above.
Whatever or whoever it was, Anthony didn’t know—but he could guess. After all, Anthony was 99% sure his math teacher wasn’t a werewolf. Or a vampire either.
It’s Mr. Matthews, he thought. He’s above me... watching.
A second or two later, al
l the lights in the warehouse turned on at once.
Chapter Twenty-eight
There were four of them. Monsters, that is.
Franklin was with three of the more cognizant of Lichtenstein’s creations, all of whom had been liberated from the very castle that Dracula now called home.
Another story, another time...
A half-dozen of the creatures had been adopted, as it were, by Kingsley, all of whom now lived on his property, many in his guest house out back, to be exact. Which might explain why Kingsley spent a lot of time at my place these days. Anyway, his six new houseguests were all hulking and some grotesquely misshapen. When Lichtenstein had assembled his monsters from stolen corpses, he did so with an eye toward usefulness, and not aesthetics. Now, they gardened for Kingsley, cooked for him, cleaned for him. One was adept at mechanical work, and kept all of Kingsley’s vehicles—five of them, to be exact—in superb working order. Perhaps most important, all were now bonded to Kingsley, perhaps not to the extent they had been with their original creator, a man who had been exiled far, far away from here. But they were bonded to Kingsley, nonetheless. I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that.
At present, only the gangly, long-limbed Franklin entered the home. The other three remained in the front yard, standing mostly still, awaiting orders. One of them had an ugly scar that wrapped entirely around his forehead. At some point in his life, he had received a new brain.
Franklin had rushed immediately to Kingsley, no doubt seeing the advanced stage of transitioning his master was in. Yes, he used words like ‘master’ and meant it, too. If Kingsley ever thought I was going to call him master, he had another thing coming. The least of which would be my foot up his hairy ass.
With the arrival of Franklin, Sherbet mumbled something about, “The more, the merrier,” as he’d long since kissed away the legality of this search warrant. Any evidence gathered here now was as good as tainted.
In no uncertain terms, Franklin let us know that Master Kingsley needed to leave now, but that he had brought three of his strongest brothers with him, to use as we saw fit. He’d said brothers, not me. And, yeah, I knew Kingsley felt a kinship with all the Lichtenstein monsters. Apparently, so did Tammy who, amazingly, hadn’t taken her eyes off one of them... a younger-looking monster who, if you removed the fact that he sported a face that appeared to have been sewn on by someone partially blind, did look kind of handsome. That is, if you didn’t mind a guy’s face being sewn on and all. Which, apparently, she didn’t.
Your brother is still missing, young lady, I thought to her, loud and clear.
She squeaked and turned all sorts of shades of red.
Worse, I think the young-looking monster just might have caught her eye in return.
Lord help us all.
Anyway, we were told that each of the Lichtenstein monsters had been armed with a silver dagger—and each knew exactly what to do with it. I knew that Franklin and his “brothers” were far stronger than Kingsley in his human form. How much stronger—if at all—they were to fully formed werewolves, I didn’t know.
“Found it!” said Allison triumphantly, just as Franklin had gotten Kingsley to the door. Although neither as tall nor thick as Kingsley, Franklin manhandled the hairy bastard easily enough.
She quickly explained that she had been seeing a series of letters and words, and soon realized they were the corresponding letters and words to a series of files within files. Once she’d found the first file, she moved on to the next letter and word, and so and so on until she had come across a single file called Mockingbird.
Kingsley had Franklin wait at the door as Allison read from the file, and what a sordid, terrible, horror-filled file it was. In it, Matthews described his continuous search among his students for children who displayed the “mark,” as he called it. To date, he’d found only one other student with it—and Matthews had been richly rewarded. Even better, he’d been granted access to the feeding. This was, apparently, a highlight to his life, watching an innocent child with the mark being rendered to pieces by the local pack of werewolves. Matthews hadn’t given names, but I was willing to bet he’d been describing the murder of the child who had gone missing three years prior.
“I understand,” said Allison, “but I don’t understand, either. What’s going on here?”
“Matthews is a scout,” said Kingsley. “A human who can see auras.”
Allison said, “But he’s a teacher...”
“Which gives him access to children and their auras. In particular...” He stopped talking, grimacing, hanging on to Franklin, who didn’t seem happy about any of this. Then again, Franklin didn’t seem happy even when he seemed happy.
“In particular what?” asked Allison.
But it was Tammy who stepped forward, Tammy who had access to everyone’s mind in the small house, including Kingsley’s. “In particular, children who display my family’s mark.”
“Children,” I added, “who have not yet found protection from the Alchemist and the Light Warriors.”
My own son fell somewhere between all of that. Without a guardian angel, he was already susceptible to attack. Without the light worker’s protection, he was vulnerable as well. His own great strength had made him seem beyond harm. I had taken it for granted. I should have been there to pick him up, every day, until I was certain he was safe or could take care of himself.
There was no time for blame. There was only finding my son... and finding him now.
“He mentions The Row in Carson,” said Allison, having scanned the notes.
“The Row is an industrial park in Carson,” said Sherbet. “Mostly, it’s a long street of warehouses.”
I looked at Allison; she looked at me. I said to her, “Does he say which warehouse?”
“No, Sam. I’m sorry.”
But I was already moving through the house and out into the waning light of day. We had, if anything, twenty minutes before full sunset.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Anthony shielded his eyes.
From his position behind the old machine, Anthony could barely believe what he was seeing: Hanging from a metal cage, and standing behind what appeared to be a sort of makeshift control panel, was none other than his eighth-grade algebra teacher, Mr. Matthews. The whole thing was suspended from a cable, supported by an indoor crane. Anthony nearly stepped out from behind his hiding place and asked his teacher what the hell was going on. That is, until Anthony saw the gleeful look in his math teacher’s eyes. Not just gleeful... but insane.
Anthony was pretty sure he had never seen such a look on anyone’s face, like ever. Maybe in the movies. But no one acted this insane, this wicked in real life, did they?
Anthony wasn’t sure what to make of that, or what to do with that information, other than never, ever enroll in another one of Mr. Matthews’ classes. Like ever again.
And what was the deal with the swinging cage, like a hundred feet above the floor? Anthony didn’t know exactly how high up the cage was, but it felt like a hundred feet; either way, it was way up there, near the ceiling and lights. Where Mr. Matthews would be safe from the werewolves, no doubt. Werewolves that were even now howling in the nearby room. For some reason, the words “staging room” popped into Anthony’s mind. Maybe that was what the room was called. Anthony didn’t know.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are, little Moon,” said the familiar voice of his math teacher. What wasn’t familiar, though, was the gleeful, high-pitch, sing-song quality to the voice.
There was, like, no way Anthony was coming out, and from where he hid behind the machine, he was certain his weirdo teacher couldn’t see him, either. No, the only thing that was gonna get Anthony moving was a pack of werewolves, and the longer they stayed behind that door, the better. Speaking of which, from his position, he thought he could see a row of offices in the far distance. At least, he saw some darkened windows. Was it a way out?
“I went to a lot of trouble to arrange for y
ou to be here, tonight. Oh, the planning, the preparations, the coordinating. The precautions. All in place, and all so that my hungry friends can feed. And all so that I could watch from above.
“You see, my friends you can forgive. They are just a pack of wild animals. At least, they will be in a few minutes. A minute and forty-eight seconds, to be exact. Anyway, it’s me who is the real monster here. Me, who coordinated all of this, including the renovation of this building. You could say it’s now werewolf-proof. Most important, it’s sound-proof.”
Anthony swallowed, shaking his head. Who knew that Mr. Matthews was such a sicko? He certainly didn’t. As far as he knew, his sister had never taken a course from Matthews. If she had, she would have undoubtedly dipped into his mind and seen what a freak he was.
“I always knew I was different,” Matthews was saying, sounding almost nostalgic. “I could always see the light around a body. I could always tell, for instance, if someone was sick, or had a disease, or were going to die. I could always tell when a person was particularly happy, too, or particularly saintly, for lack of a better word. Those people were always so bright, so beautiful. But, occasionally, I would come across those who did not give off an aura of any kind, those who seemed different, fiercer, wilder.
“It wouldn’t be long before I would come to understand that such people—such creatures—were werewolves. I ingratiated myself with them, became friends with them, and soon worked for them. After all, I also see others, too. Those who have a special mark, if you will. Those who sport the silver serpent. Like Angie Sanderson a few years ago, and like you now. Turns out the werewolves have quite a thing for the silver serpent, quite a hunger, if you will. From what I understand, those such as yourself and Angie, make the hulking beasts even stronger, more formidable, and give them extra life. Yes, life. Didn’t you know that? By consuming your blood, they can live longer. Unlike their vampiric friends—like your mother, for instance, and, yes, I know what she is—who are given immortality, werewolves have a set lifespan. Granted, the lifespan is far, far longer than most mortals, sometimes two or three times longer. But consuming one of the marked... oh, they can add dozens of years to their lives! Many, many dozens.”