Michelle took a look around as she and Heather came out of the thick vegetation. She noticed, as they walked back to the Jeep, that there was a gate just underneath the puny, rusting guard rail that kept cars from crashing down into the sea.
She tapped Heather’s shoulder and pointed. The gate was right across the road from them.
Heather nodded and they hunched down so they wouldn’t be seen scooting across the road, keeping careful watch on Omar’s home.
Michelle, being tall, climbed over the guard rail easily and stepped carefully down to the gate. It was scary, looking down at the ocean from this height. One small misstep would send her to oblivion.
Heather was so small, she had a little difficulty getting over the guard rail, but soon she was at the gate with Michelle.
“This is the way they get down to the beach,” Michelle whispered.
Indeed, there was a steep wooden stairway zig-zagging down the side of the cliff that led to a beach below.
Michelle eyes widened. She recognized that beach. It was the same place where she had confronted Omar years ago. She could see where bonfires had been lit in the middle of the beach. The surf was crashing and she wondered now how she and Vincent had ever managed to swim safely through the huge waves without being crushed.
“The stairway even has a side rail to hold onto as you go down, so you won’t fall,” Heather whispered to Michelle.
The gate just showed the way. Anyone could use the stairs because there wasn’t any kind of lock to secure it.
They hurried back across the road to the Jeep.
As they got back inside, the guys were still making plans to destroy or render Omar’s helicopter inoperable.
“Anything we do is going to be noisy,” Rod said. “I brought along a hammer, and we could probably try bashing the rotor blades to bend them. That might work, but we’d be caught.”
“I have rope,” Mike said. He pulled his backpack up and showed them. “Maybe we could loop it around and around those blades.”
“We know Omar uses electrical energy for his powers,” Michelle said as she got back in the Jeep. ”Maybe we can find the fuse box and shut off all the power to the house.”
“Great idea,” Rod said. “But I haven’t seen any power lines around here. Omar probably uses a generator for electricity. I don’t know if we can damage it. Maybe we could turn it off, though.”
“We need to do recon first,” Vincent said. “Omar might have cars behind the house for a getaway, even if we do manage to trash the helicopter. Or, we could wait for the police. But they might not even come until tomorrow. It’s already getting dark.”
They agreed time was of the essence. They didn’t want to wait for what could be an uncomfortable all-nighter in the Jeep for the police to finally arrive. And the two children had been traumatized long enough. They needed to get home to Leilanie as quickly as possible to prevent more suffering and distress.
They decided to go in together as a group. If they separated and one of them was caught, Omar could use that person as a hostage.
Guy would stay in the Jeep as lookout. He would honk the horn three times if he thought they were in danger.
“Yeah,” Michelle whispered to Heather as they exited the Jeep and started toward Omar’s fortress. “This way we all get caught together.”
Heather giggled. They were all nervous as they silently slipped through dense greenery toward the house.
Lucifer wouldn’t be left behind. He clung to Michelle’s shirt with his tiny sharp claws. She plucked him off and cradled him with one arm.
Since it had stormed a short while ago, the plants they went through were soaked with water. Raindrops dripped from the trees above. Soon everyone had sopping shoes, and wet drenched hair. The air was so humid it seemed hard to breathe.
They slipped from tree to tree toward the mansion, crabbed over for stealth, Rod leading, with Michelle next, then Heather and Mike. Vincent brought up the rear.
Chapter 30
Omar roused.
There was a disturbance, first zipping across his skin, and then in the electrically charged air surrounding him.
Something was definitely wrong. A wave like shock passed through Omar, causing all the hair on his body to stand up at attention, like being hit by a freezing ocean wave.
This place should be safe, but it wasn’t any longer. Opposing forces were gathering.
Omar hurried into the main living room to check on the girls. They were still safely asleep on the couch.
He looked out the front windows. All seemed peaceful there. He rushed around checking the locks on all the doors and windows. The staff should have been more careful, he thought, when he found a door in the back that was unlocked. He frowned. Someone would be getting fired. He locked it, then changed his mind and left it open. It would be the only entrance anyone could use to get inside. He would have it guarded.
Omar hurried into the kitchen, over to a large, intricately carved, hanging bronze gong. He hit it sharply with a rubber padded mallet five times. The deep mellow sounds reverberated throughout the whole mansion. An emergency signal for all those on the premises to quickly gather in the library.
“What the hell was that?” Rod said as they made their way through the thick foliage toward Omar’s place.
Everyone stopped abruptly at the sound of the booming, resounding gong from inside the mansion. The vibrations penetrated through the walls. They even felt strong pulsations throughout their whole bodies.
They clustered together in a circle, anxiously looking around.
“Maybe they know we’re here,” Heather said ominously.
“A signal to warn us away?” Mike speculated.
They waited for a couple of minutes, not making a sound.
“Let’s keep going,” Rod said, and started forward again toward the mansion.
Then there was another sound. A quick warning bleep from the road. They turned and saw an all-terrain vehicle with County of Kauai Police painted on the side.
“Ya-hoo, reinforcements,” Vincent whispered with a big grin.
They watched in consternation, though, as the car went right up the driveway in front of Omar’s mansion and parked. Two officers climbed out and walked to the door. The older officer with grey hair banged the lion knocker several times.
Michel shook her head. “That’s not smart. They’ll hide the children.”
“It gives us time to trash the helicopter, though,” Mike said. “They’ll be preoccupied. They won’t suspect anyone outside performing a little sabotage,”
Since Guy was a pilot, he had told Mike how to disable the helicopter from inside with a few sharp blows from Mike’s hammer to vital instruments.
They saw the front door start to open.
They all swiftly crouched down in the bushes. From their angle, they couldn’t see who opened the door, but the two policemen went inside.
When Omar hit the gong, Samson was first to arrive in the library. Omar told him to carry the girls down to the subterranean basement. If the situation got critical there was an escape route: an underground tunnel that went beneath the house and under the road. It led to the stairway leading down to the beach. Omar, Samson, and the girls could stay there until the threat was gone, or he obliterated whatever was menacing them.
Then the groundskeeper, maid, chef, and two witches from Omar’s coven, all arrived in the library. Omar looked around dangerously, eyes slitted, and gave strict instructions to tell anyone who might come to investigate that he was not on the premises. He hadn’t been here in years.
Omar frowned seriously at each person in turn. Each one nodded back. They knew if they didn’t lie for him the consequences would be harsh and terrible.
By the time the two policemen knocked on the front door, Samson had picked up both sleeping girls. They were dead weight and hard to maneuver down into the dungeon-like space far below the house, but he managed the stairs into the basement without dropping the little tykes.
He put them both, still asleep, on an old moldy couch. He climbed back up the stairs, leaving the light on as he closed and locked the door behind him.
Omar had positioned himself at the top of the staircase on the second floor balcony, staring down at the door, when a witch from his Hawaiian coven opened it up for the police.
He could imagine the two officers drooling at the sight of one of the most beautiful women they’d probably ever seen. She was picked for just this reason from his Hawaiian coven, scantily dressed to cloud men’s minds. Since everyone dressed down in the tropics, her outfit wasn’t outrageous in any way, a tee shirt and shorts were everyday attire. But it was obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra and the woman was mightily endowed. Her short shorts didn’t leave much to the imagination either, skin tight, hugging her back cheeks. She was barefoot.
As she led them into the gorgeous and spacious front room, the two policemen stared up at the vaulted high ceiling, looking around the premises, sneaking peeks covertly at the witch, but they didn’t see Omar standing on the balcony, staring down at them. He laughed inside. They were amusingly predictable.
These two men were definitely not the threat he had felt, though. Something else was coming. He only felt that sizzling danger warning if it came from a person with magical abilities; someone intent on harming him personally.
Omar ticked off in his mind whom it could be, because few could actually harm him, even worldwide. The only two names he came up with not currently on the Asian continent were Alice Holcum, a woman with great power who used it now only to teach future witches, and Michelle Montgomery. He’d bet it was Michelle. How she got here was a mystery.
Omar watched as the older policeman started his interrogation by asking to see Omar Satinov. Following Omar’s instructions, the beautiful witch said he hadn’t been here in several years. She smiled bewitchingly.
When the cop asked about the helicopter parked beside the mansion, she just shook her head and said Omar sometimes left it there for years without ever using it. The cop said he would have to check the tail ID numbers on the helicopter to see who it was registered to.
Omar frowned. Now that could be a problem.
As the witch chatted with the police, Omar was sure they weren’t much of a menace. He scanned their bodies and noticed the older officer had a bad heart. He knew how to take advantage of weaknesses.
Omar concentrated hard, then gave a little squeeze with his hand, like he was squeezing the man’s actual beating organ. He clenched and unclenched without rhythm, causing frantic heart palpitations and then a muscle seizure.
The older, gray haired officer, clutched his chest and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He fell to the floor of the entrance hallway.
The younger policeman got on his knees beside his downed comrade and desperately began giving chest compressions. At the same time, he tried to use his radio to send the message, Officer Down, to the Kauai police. The message wouldn’t go through.
Omar saw what he was doing from the balcony above and zapped the guy’s cell phone and radio, using only a tiny bit of the electrical energy he had stored earlier that day from the storm.
‘Officer down’ always brought swift action. Today it wouldn’t.
The young officer kept trying his cell, and finally frantically looked up at the witch and yelled. “I need help!”
“Don’t you worry,” the beautiful witch, watching him placidly, said. “I’ll have our handyman help carry your partner to the car.”
“Can’t anyone fly that chopper? He needs medical attention right now.”
The witch was shaking her head with a sad expression. “No. You’ll have to drive him to Princeville to get help.”
The handyman was paged through the intercom and he hurried in and helped the policeman carry his partner back to the patrol vehicle.
With a bleep, the police vehicle backed up and left the premises as quickly as possible on the treacherous mountain road.
Although they had vowed to stay together, when they got through the thick greenery leading to the helicopter they also saw a large, all terrain Humvee, parked at the back of the mansion.
There was a huge silver enclosed home generator machine standing in back of the house.
“I’ll trash the helicopter,” Mike said. He sprinted toward it, hunched over so he wouldn’t be seen, pulling the hammer out of his belt.
Rod pulled his keys out of his pocket. On the chain he had a short but very stout sheathed knife. “I’ll go slash the Humvee tires.
“I can shut down the generator,” Vincent said, moving toward the big machine with Generac Guardian printed in red letters on the side.
Michelle and Heather gazed at the men rushing to their self-assigned tasks.
“Let’s see if we can find a way in,” Michelle whispered. They hurried through thick bushes and across the pebbled path leading around the place. There was a side entrance. Heather reached for the doorknob and tried to turn it. “Locked.”
They sidled along, flattened close to the walls, because there were numerous windows above them, and went around the corner of the house. Now they were at the back of the mansion and saw several doors.
They stopped for a moment and watched as Mike climbed into the side door of the helicopter. Then they could see him from inside the big glass front windshield, busily smashing at things with the hammer.
Rod was slashing at the Humvee’s tires. They were thick treaded, so he was working hard to get through the tough rubber.
Vincent had opened the door to the generator and went inside. He pulled down on the big yellow lever.
Michelle hadn’t been aware that there was any noise, until the generator powered down. Then the slight and constant humming, which sounded like soft insect noises, stopped. The silence was profound.
Michelle and Heather continued sneaking along the back of the mansion. They tried three doors, but all were locked. The fourth knob turned easily in Michelle’s hand.
“We could just take a peek,” Michelle said, looking at Heather.
“No way!”
Michelle opened the door a crack, put her eye to it, and saw an enormous kitchen with modern chrome appliances.
“Wait. Let’s wait for the guys,” Heather said, grabbing Michelle’s arm.
They turned and saw that Mike was still inside the helicopter. Vincent had gone to help Rod hack at the Humvee tires.
“It should be okay,” Michelle whispered, opening the door and stepping inside the kitchen. “The police are here.”
The two tiny girls woke into darkness, both aware of the persistent question they heard distantly, but distinctly, inside their heads.
“Where are you?” It was repeated again and again, over and over.
“Shelly?” Ivory whispered, scared when she opened her eyes to total darkness.
“Yeah, I’m here. Where are you?”
“It’s so dark,” Ivory said. She stretched out her arms and felt Shelly right beside her. They were lying on some kind of big upholstered couch.
It was cool, dark, and smelled of dirt and mildew, like something putrid had rotted and decayed.
“I think we’re underground,” Shelly said sniffing at the air. “I remember father talking. I got so sleepy…”
“Petal is trying to find us. She keeps asking me where we are,” Ivory said.
“I hear her, too,” Shelly said.
Both girls instinctively used their usual magic trick to make the lights come on, but it didn’t work.
Finally Shelly clapped her hands and said, “Fire.”
A single fat candle burst into flame. It was sitting on a table in front of the big couch where they had been lying.
They looked around. The walls were of stone and appeared moist, growing slimy green mildew. The room was enormous.
They stood up. Turning around they saw steep wooden stairs going upward. The girls climbed to the top. Shelly reached up on tiptoes and tried to reach the doorknob, finally got hold of it with h
er fingertips. It wouldn’t turn.
“We’re locked in,” Shelly said. She kicked the door.
Ivory, behind her, started to cry. “This is a horrible place!” she said through her tears.
They went back down and saw only old discarded furniture, trunks, desks, and chairs.
As they peered around, Ivory saw a tiny pin prick of brightness on the left side of the room. She started toward the light.
They found an opening carved in the rock wall. The light was coming in through a large rounded stone tunnel. It was like looking through the wrong side of a telescope, the light was so far away.
The girls held hands and started toward the light at the end of the tunnel. They felt a strong need to get out of the nasty smelling room they were locked in.
As they went along, Petal, in Waikiki, was still persistently asking the question, Where are you?
Shelly and Ivory stood still for a minute to answer. Their communication was powerful, and they told their plight to Petal. About the kidnapping, father putting them to sleep, and then waking up locked in a dark underground room. They told Petal that they were okay, leaving the room down a tunnel. They said to tell Leilanie about what happened.
Their sister, Petal, on Oahu, got their psychic message. She was with Leilanie, in their hotel room in Waikiki, staying put until the threat to her and Leilanie was gone. She told her mother about where her two lost daughters were.
Leilanie screamed. She fell backward in a dead faint. Luckily, she’d been sitting on the bed.
“What did you tell mother?” The girls asked frantically from the tunnel. The psychic communication was strong and they could see Petal in that hotel room, like a gauzy hologram in front of their eyes, trying to wake Leilanie.
“I said you were moving down a tunnel toward the light,” Petal said.
“Try, Push, push, push,” Shelly said.
That worked. Leilanie was almost instantly awake. She started crying inconsolably, though, believing her two daughters were dead; moving toward the light to be with their maker.
Magical Legacy Page 20
