by J. S. Bailey
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the man said. The voice belonged to Randy Bellison, whose house she and Thane had visited in their effort to locate Bobby in recent days. “Who’s chasing you? Thane?”
“A—a thing. It was a man, and—and then—”
Before her mind could properly register what was happening, the thing swooped down from the branches and knocked the man to the ground. It turned back into Vance, hauled Randy up by his shirt collar, and dragged him off through the trees, leaving the flashlight on the ground, its beam pointing toward Vance’s house.
Mia bent down and picked it up. Her fear slowly subsided as she shone the light in the direction Vance was headed. What had she really been worried about, anyway? The creature wasn’t going to cause her harm; it just wanted to give her a good scare. If it wanted her dead, it would have killed her in Vance’s living room.
Shrugging at the mystery of it all, she trudged off after them, wondering what the Vance creature would do next.
A BLONDE, middle-aged woman opened the door of the Bagdasarian mansion and offered Bobby and Kaori a warm but professional smile.
“Where’s Nathaniel?” Bobby asked before she could speak.
“I believe he’s gone out for the moment. I’m Meryl, by the way. Do come inside.”
He exchanged a nervous glance with Kaori before stepping into an enormous entryway that looked like something out of a movie. Sweeping staircases, a giant Christmas tree, more columns—it was the sort of place where kings might dwell. No wonder Thane had been angry living at Arbor Villa Nursing Home. He could have been living here in opulence instead.
“Is there anything I can get for you?” Meryl asked as she led them across the foyer floor.
“How about our friends?” Bobby asked.
“Bobby!” a voice called from another room. “We’re back here!”
Bobby broke into a run without hesitation, ran through an archway beneath the twin staircases, tugged open a door, dashed through a kitchen, and finally emerged into a dining room where four people including Carly and Matt were seated around an oblong table.
He’d hoped to see Phil here, too, and didn’t want to think about what his absence might mean.
Kaori drew up alongside him. “What the—”
“What’s going on?” Bobby asked. Neither Carly nor Matt had been bound to their chairs. “I thought you would have been locked up somewhere.”
“We are,” Carly said. Her expression looked strained and somewhat glazed.
“I don’t follow,” Bobby said.
“We can’t get up,” said Matt, his eyes appearing glazed as well. “Mia—the woman working with Thane—can control people with speech. She told us to stay here.”
“Meaning we can’t get up.” Carly’s face distorted into an expression of discomfort, and her cheeks flushed with resentment. “I sort of wet the chair. I couldn’t hold it any longer.”
Rage swelled up inside of Bobby at the thought of Carly suffering such humiliation. Where could Thane have come across an accomplice with powers like that? “Where did she go?”
“Mia? She ran out of here after Thane. He was upset at some things his parents said during dinner.” Carly glanced at the catatonic couple sitting at the far side of the table. “And I think their brains are toast.”
Bobby stared at the man and woman who had brought Thane into the world. “They’re not allowed to get up, either?”
“Nope. But they’ve been acting like someone’s been controlling them for a lot longer than one night. I’d hate to see what’ll happen when Thane or Mia tries to control them again.”
Bobby had a mental image of the couple’s brains leaking out of their ears and decided he’d rather think about something else.
“I have an idea.” Kaori strode up to Carly, grabbed her by the arm, and gave her a hearty tug. Carly’s rear came up off the chair about two inches before plopping back down, hard.
“Ow,” Carly said, wrinkling her nose. “Nice try, though.”
“We’ll have to think of something else,” Kaori said. “We can’t just wait for Mia to come back and give you the command to be free. Bobby, you grab hold of Carly, and I’ll see if I can tug the chair out from under her.”
Bobby nodded and wrapped his arms around Carly in an awkward hug, fully aware that Thane and Mia could return at any moment.
“What’s the matter?” Carly asked, her voice muffled next to Bobby’s ear. “You act like you’ve never hugged a girl before.”
Kaori gripped the back of the chair and gave it such a hard yank that she stumbled backward when the chair came with her. Carly collapsed onto the floor with Bobby on top of her, and he quickly scrambled off to one side and helped her up.
“Okay, that actually worked,” Carly said, glaring at the cushion where she’d sat for who knew how long. “I’m going to see if good old Meryl can find me some dry clothes.”
She stomped from the room, showing not an ounce of fear. Apparently Meryl had given Carly no reason for suspicion.
Bobby and Kaori worked to free Matt in the same manner, but it took them a few tries to accomplish their feat since the man was much heavier than Carly.
Once he’d been physically freed from the chair, they turned to the Bagdasarians.
“Should we free them, too?” Bobby asked.
“I doubt they’re going to hurt anyone,” Kaori said. “So you might as well.”
It took them five full minutes to extricate Thane’s parents from their chairs. At first they had a cruel glint in their eyes that made it look as though they were seriously considering throttling Bobby to death for rescuing them, but then they just stood there looking bewildered and unsure of themselves. Could Thane cause extensive brain damage from altering a person’s perceptions for too long? What about Mia?
Carly returned wearing a somewhat baggy pair of black dress slacks that probably belonged to Meryl herself, given that she was a few inches taller than Carly. All of a sudden she gripped her head and winced. “Oh, gosh, my head—I think I’m going to be sick.”
She rushed from the room again, and no sooner had she done so when Matt put a hand on his stomach and convulsed like he was about to vomit.
Bobby uttered a curse under his breath. Apparently breaking free from mind control didn’t come without a cost. He could hear Carly retching out in the kitchen, hopefully into a garbage can and not onto the Bagdasarians’ polished floor.
Matt swallowed and somehow managed to keep his dinner down. “I’ve never been a fan of throwing up,” he explained to no one in particular. “It’s so humiliating.”
Unwilling to become witness to Thane’s parents losing their meals in front of him, Bobby gestured for Kaori and Matt to follow him from the room. They found Carly bent over a waste can in the kitchen, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Are you going to be all right?” Bobby asked.
“I’ll be fine once that Mia woman is locked in a cage where no one can hear her screaming.” Her jaw tight, she straightened. “So what do we do now? Wait for Thane to come back, or go looking for him?”
Seek him out, the Spirit whispered.
It occurred to Bobby then that Randy had not returned from investigating the cry they’d heard outside.
“He’s outside somewhere,” Bobby said. “Let’s go find him.”
BOBBY COULDN’T help but feel that his premonitions were starting to get turned off at the most inopportune times. Back in July he’d been healed by someone with a demonic ability that leached Bobby’s gift right out of him. This time he hadn’t the faintest idea of why his premonitions could have gone away. He sure hadn’t been healed by a possessed person again.
“Meryl, could you bring us some flashlights?” Carly asked when they encountered the housekeeper again in the entryway.
Meryl smiled. “Certainly! I’ll bring some right out for you.”
She hurried off into another room, and Carly said, “Have your premonitions come back yet?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Mia told us. She said she and Thane ran into us at the airport in Cincinnati, she ordered you to switch off your ability, and then made all of us forget we ever saw them.”
“Great.” Bobby ran a nervous hand through his hair. He was liking this Mia less and less by the minute. Thane must have been the one to tell her about his premonitions, unless Mia had the ability to read his thoughts, too.
Two human monsters. Just what he needed.
“You haven’t seen Phil by chance, have you?” Bobby asked Carly.
“Nope.”
“Darn. I was hoping he’d be here with you two.”
“If Thane has him, he’s shut away somewhere else. We can look for him after we bring Thane down.”
Meryl returned with four flashlights, handing the largest one to Kaori and the smallest one to Bobby. He clicked his on, and in the brightness of the entryway he couldn’t even tell if it worked.
“And give us our coats back,” Carly said to her.
“Of course!” said Meryl. “I’ll be back with them in just a moment.”
“She seems awfully efficient,” Kaori commented once the housekeeper vanished again.
Carly shrugged. “I got the feeling she’s used to waiting on people hand and foot without asking too many questions. I don’t think we have to worry about her turning on us.”
Let’s hope not, Bobby thought.
“Here you go!” Meryl swept into the room with two coats draped over her arms and handed them off to their respective owners, who put them on with haste.
“Is there anything else I can get you?” she asked them.
“Are you a praying person?” Matt asked.
The question seemed to take Meryl by surprise. “Not generally, no. Why?”
“Because we could use a few right now.”
Meryl frowned, and Bobby straightened his shoulders. “Okay, guys. Let’s go out there and see what we can do about Thane.”
They stepped out onto the porch. Bobby peered around one of the columns in the direction that Randy had gone off in, unable to see anything through the snow.
He started walking, his nerves buzzing with trepidation. Thane had probably captured Randy somehow. Maybe the screams they’d heard at their arrival had all been a trick.
Four flashlight beams swept across the snow as they entered the woods. Randy’s footprints were barely visible due to the wind sculpting the snow into new shapes, so it became an effort to follow them.
“Look,” Kaori said without warning. She aimed her beam straight down at the ground. “Assuming these are Randy’s prints here, he ran into someone about right here.” She moved the beam a couple feet forward, revealing a second set of prints coming from the opposite direction. Kaori frowned. “And this set here…I can’t see where it comes from. It looks like someone just materialized on the spot. I think they all headed that direction, though.” She aimed the flashlight toward the rising hillside, where the trees grew even thicker.
Bobby swallowed a knot of apprehension. What exactly could be out there in the dark? Another house? He did see the lights from a house off to his left where one set of prints had come from, but it wasn’t in the direction where they had gone. Maybe there was another house out here somewhere where Thane and Mia had taken Randy.
And maybe it was all a trap.
THANE’S EYES strained to see in the dark as he stormed out of the house in search of the being that called itself Vance. It had gone after Mia, but now Thane would make it pay for the suffering it had placed upon him for no discernable reason.
And to think he’d called it his Father.
He sent his thoughts out in every direction and was more than surprised to detect Bobby and his whole entourage within close range. Deciding to put thoughts of Vance on hold for the meantime, he set off toward the place where he detected the young Servant and his friends to be.
He didn’t understand how Bobby had gotten past John and Shirley without being murdered, but he could solve that mystery later.
He silently thanked Mia for disabling Bobby’s premonitions. Bobby would have no idea Thane was sneaking up on him and his friends. It would be a fitting end to Mr. Roland, even if it hadn’t gone exactly the way Thane had planned. Bobby was planning a confrontation—he would no doubt try to convince Thane to change his ways, or some other vomit-inducing thing like that—but one well-placed bullet to the back of the head would put an end to that before it could start.
Thane removed the Smith & Wesson handgun from the holster hidden under his shirt and switched off the safety, grateful he’d thought to bring it along as backup in case Plan A went awry. It seemed Bobby and Company were headed in the direction of the cave his grandparents had forbidden him to enter as a child due to the dangers it presented to the inexperienced explorer—which meant that Thane took a good look inside when he’d had the chance to sneak out from beneath his grandparents’ watchful eyes.
He’d learned then that the cave wasn’t just a cave—it was the entrance to an abandoned gold mine dating back to the 1850s. Weathered, hand-hewn timbers held up the ceiling and walls that had been tunneled into the earth so long ago, and the remains of ancient mining equipment too damaged for the miners to keep lay littered about the floor like long-forgotten relics.
To the ten-year-old Thane, it had been a wonderland. He’d even found an old metal box the size of a treasure chest in one of the tunnels with a cross and Latin words stamped upon it. It had refused to budge from the tunnel floor when he tried to pick it up, so he’d grabbed one of the rusting shovels and busted off the padlock.
He’d hoped to find gold and jewels stashed inside. Instead, the chest contained nothing but a red velvet lining, a grimy bottle of holy water, and a rosary made of wooden beads, though once the lid had opened, something large and moth-like fluttered out of it into his face. He’d flailed and spluttered before it soared past him out of the tunnel, and his skin wouldn’t stop tingling where it had touched him.
Thane had never told his grandparents about his find in the tunnels. Church stuff just wasn’t interesting enough to brag about, and he didn’t want to get in trouble for snooping, though for years afterward he’d lie awake at night wondering what could have flown out of the box once he’d opened it.
To be honest, the thing had looked a lot like what Vance turned into when he went after Mia.
Now Bobby was heading straight toward the old mine entrance, unaware of the potential dangers such a place could hold for the unwary.
Thane sent his thoughts out again to determine why Bobby had chosen to go that way. Something out there must have lured him…
Thane blinked and came to a halt, so great was his surprise. Phil Mason? Shy, serious Phil was tied up inside the cave? How had he gotten there, and when?
He probed Phil’s mind but couldn’t determine much from it. It seemed the man was delirious. The poor thing. He’d probably decided to come snoop and ran into trouble while Thane and Mia were out of town, and since Thane had been unavailable, that meant the trouble Phil encountered had involved dear, sweet Vance.
Thane’s anger flared again at the thought of the being who had been his Father.
He set it aside and kept moving. He was growing closer to Bobby now—he could see the outline of him and his friends ahead of him in the gloom.
Thane lifted the gun and pulled the trigger.
A BANG echoed through the woods, and something whizzed past Bobby’s head so closely he could feel it ruffle his hair. Before he could even try to determine its source, Matt hissed, “Gun. Run.”
Bobby doubled his speed as another bullet embedded itself in a nearby tree trunk. He didn’t know much about guns so wasn’t sure how many bullets one could hold. He just knew they had to get to safety before one of them ended up with a few extra holes in their body. They certainly weren’t going to be able to fight Thane off with their flashlights.
Maybe the gunshots aren’t even real, Bobb
y thought as he leapt over a fallen log. Maybe they’re just in our heads, like my doppelganger.
That idea didn’t lessen his speed. Ever grateful that Phil had pushed him to get in shape, he continued to race in the direction of the footprints and found himself approaching the stony mouth of a cave.
Behind him, a sudden male cry cut through the night. He almost stopped and went back—almost—but didn’t want to fall for another of Thane’s tricks.
Who knew how many he’d fallen for already?
MIA ARRIVED in the cave after watching Vance drag Randy into it. The cave ceiling was kind of low, but since she had shorter-than-average stature, she could stand upright without much trouble. All she had to do was watch out for the occasional stalactite, difficult to see in these shadows.
A light flickered somewhere in another part of the cave, and Mia tiptoed through a passageway that had been widened by tools at some point in time. She poked her head around a corner and blinked in astonishment. A small, emaciated blond man had been tied to a rock formation jutting from the cave floor in a large room where a lantern glowed at his feet. The dancing flame cast eerie shadows across the man’s stubbly face. Who was this? Not the one Vance had dragged into here—this one looked to have been here much longer.
A voice shifted her focus away from the prisoner, and her pulse quickened. “So it’s come to this,” it said. She couldn’t see the speaker from her current position, but knew it to be Vance. “One unworthy animal about to die.”
Mia caught a low murmur from Randy but couldn’t make out what he’d said. The man tied to the rock formation cracked open his eyelids and stared across the open space as if half-blind. Then his eyes widened, and he said, “Randy?”
Vance strode into view as he approached the tied man, and Mia ducked back half a step. “Oh, you are still alive,” he said, gazing down upon the man as if he were a cockroach. “My offer is still on the table, if you’d like to take it.”