by Bill Hiatt
The only lucky thing that happened that afternoon was that Vanora, who must have expected to catch all of us off guard, hadn’t bothered with a plan B. She must have realized at some point where we were headed, but by the time she did, she couldn’t deploy enough security to stop us.
None of us had a key to Tal’s place, but Khalid, having lived on the street for a couple of years, could pick locks like a career criminal, so we got in with surprisingly little trouble.
However, there were security vans out front within three minutes of our arrival.
“I know our houses are all shielded against hostile magic, but what’s to prevent those thugs from breaking down the door and coming after us?” asked Lucas. Up close he looked more nervous than he had out on the street.
“Indoors cuts down their advantage,” Gordy pointed out. “They should be reluctant to come charging in knowing we could be standing on either side of the door waiting for them. Vanora can’t scan in here, so they have no idea what they’d be walking into.
“More important,” he continued, “they probably can’t. Because of Dark Me, Tal added a layer of protection again anyone trying to enter with evil intent. I don’t think any of them could get across the threshold.”
“Dark Me?” asked Lucas.
“Remember, Tal’s evil alter ego, the one that ended up becoming flesh and blood when one of our faerie buddies screwed up a spell?” asked Carlos. “I think Gordy told you about him.”
“Oh, yeah,” agreed Lucas. “It’s just hard to keep everything straight.”
“You haven’t had long to absorb it all,” said Gordy. “Anyway, we’re safe in here for the moment.”
“Unless they just firebomb us or something,” pointed out Khalid, sounding a little as if he had watched one too many action flicks this week.
“If Vanora had wanted us dead, I doubt her guys would be using tranquilizer guns,” replied Gordy. “Anyway, blowing up a house would be pretty conspicuous. Mind control only stretches so far. Just controlling her own security men, who, remember, started out as good guys—at least I think they did—would require enormous energy. She can’t possibly control everyone in town. I’m sure whatever she’s doing, she wants to keep it low-key.”
“Anyway,” added Carlos, “we won’t be staying here that long. We just need to find a way to contact one of our friends in another realm, and we’ll get out of here.”
“What about our parents?” I asked, suddenly realizing that now that Vanora seemed to have gone over to the dark side, she could conceivably use them as hostages.
“Tal’s are out of town, as you know,” said Gordy. “And Carlos had an interesting experience that tells me Vanora isn’t eager to go after our parents—at least, not right away.”
“Yeah,” agreed Carlos. “I didn’t get taken, because I was home, and my mom answered the door. The security guys invented some bogus reason for being there and then cut out really fast.
“If I had to guess, I’d say she’ll try to avoid going after our parents unless she has no choice. With any luck, we’ll have found a way to strike back before that happens.”
“I’m betting Vanora wasn’t expecting us to figure out what was up,” added Gordy. “If you hadn’t seen Dan being taken, and if Khalid hadn’t found Shar’s phone, she could have picked us off at her leisure. If any of us were still loose tomorrow and got concerned about the others being missing, we would probably have called her, and she would have found a way to trick us into coming to her.”
“Wouldn’t she have worried about someone like Tal sensing what was up?” I asked.
“Conveniently, Tal, Nurse Florence, Carla, and Alex all made a trip to Olympus early this afternoon,” said Carlos. “I ran into Tal right before he left. Shar was supposed to be with them, too, but for some reason he missed the trip. We think he’s the first one Vanora had picked up. The plan was clearly to eliminate anyone with magic and anyone who had a connection to Olympus first.”
That made about as much sense as anything in our crazy lives. Only people somehow connected to the former Greek gods could invoke them and travel to their plane of existence. Tal and Shar had both been related to the Olympians in previous lives, and Alex in this life was a descendant of Ares. However, one thing still didn’t add up.
“The Olympians are our friends,” I pointed out. “They can’t intervene in this world, but we know they watch. Surely they would have told the guys what was up as soon as they arrived on Olympus.”
Gordy hesitated for a minute. “I can think of two explanations for that. Maybe Vanora tricked Tal and the others somehow, so they thought they were going to Olympus but really ended up somewhere else. That’s bad, because it must be some place from which they can’t return on their own power. However, the other possibility is worse: they went to Olympus, but they found the rebels in control and are now their prisoners.”
I opened my mouth but couldn’t think of what to say. Olympus had been in trouble for months. Zeus, Hera, and Demeter had all disappeared, and Poseidon, Ares, and Pan had rebelled. Hecate also launched a revolt against Hades in the Underworld. While questing for the lyre of Orpheus, we had defeated Hecate and helped the Olympians overcome the others, though the remaining rebels were still at large. They could conceivably have won at some point.
Yeah, that would be a whole new level of bad, with no obvious way to get our friends back or help our Olympian allies.
“In other words, whichever theory is right, a large part of our group is trapped somewhere else,” said Lucas.
“And it isn’t necessarily going to be easy to rescue Stan, Shar, and Dan from Vanora, either,” pointed out Gordy. “Her place, Awen, is like a fortress, physically and magically. That means we have to get help from someone. Even if the Olympians haven’t been overthrown, we no longer have any way to reach them.”
“We can’t reach Gwynn ap Nudd, either,” I pointed out. “Only Nurse Florence, Vanora, and Tal have the ability to find him wherever he may be.”
Tal had befriended the king of the Welsh faeries some time ago. We could have depended on him to help us—if only we had any way of contacting him.
“That leaves the Order of the Ladies of the Lake,” said Gordy.
“But we don’t have any way to reach them, either!” I protested. “That’s something else only Tal, Nurse Florence, and Vanora can do, right?”
“You’re forgetting how I first got into your group,” said Lucas. “You weren’t there, but when I was dying from shadow poison, my great-grandmother called a sort of Lady of the Lake hotline number that Coventina, their leader, had given her a long time ago. The Order has a large bureaucracy in the human world—and those people can be reached without magic.”
“Do we know any of their numbers?” I asked.
Lucas pulled a card out of his wallet. “Bisavô gave me the hotline number.”
“New guy to the rescue!” said Carlos.
Unfortunately, having the phone number proved to be only a partial solution. The landline was dead, which we kind of expected. What we didn’t expect was none of our cell phones having a signal.
“What did Vanora do, blow up all the cell-phone towers?” asked Carlos. “Nobody but Tal has ever figured out how to get magic to work directly on technology, so she can’t be jamming us with magic.”
Gordy sighed loudly. “She’s had a surprising number of meetings with Stan in the last couple of weeks on the subject of adding some technological measures as a complement to our magical security. Perhaps he suggested cell-phone jamming for some reason. I’d bet she has equipment of some kind for it, regardless of how she got the idea in the first place.”
“So we’re safe for the moment, but we’re pinned down here, with no way to get any kind of effective help,” Lucas said, looking around nervously.
“Yeah, that pretty well sums it up,” admitted Gordy.
“That means our idea of striking fast, before Vanora decides to take our parents hostage, is now out the window,” I p
ointed out, “and—God, what about Eva?”
Yeah, I’d been having a bad day, to say the least, but I kicked myself for temporarily forgetting all about Eva O’Reilly, the girl I loved. What kind of a boyfriend would do that?
“She’s not really part of the group,” replied Gordy. “There’s no evidence Vanora is going after every single high school student in the city. What would be the point?”
“Eva was with us when we defeated Ceridwen on Halloween, with us part of the time on Olympus, with us in Elphame when we defeated Nicneven,” I recited glumly. “She also still has the bow of Artemis that Carla gave her. If I were Vanora, I’d certainly go after her.”
I didn’t mention that as my current girlfriend she had independent value to Vanora as a hostage. I could hardly bear even to think about that part.
“I don’t mean to sound callous,” said Gordy, “but there isn’t much we can do about Eva right now anyway. Even if she hasn’t been taken yet, we don’t have any way of warning her, let alone protecting her.”
“I should have done something. She should have been my first call,” I said, willing myself not to start crying. Given the fact that I had died at age nine and come back to life in a sixteen-year-old body, acting my age was sometimes a challenge, but never more so than now.
Gordy patted me on the shoulder. “I guess you started calling people in the order you thought they could help rescue Dan. It probably didn’t even occur to you that all of us were in danger.”
“It should have, though,” I said. “It should have as soon as I knew Vanora had somehow become evil. And why would she want just me and Dan, and nobody else?”
“You were calling constantly as you ran,” pointed out Carlos. “What more could you have done?”
“Let’s leave the past in the past and see what we can do now,” insisted Gordy. In the absence of people who had led us in different situations—Tal, Stan, and Shar—Gordy seemed to flow naturally into the leadership position.
“Lucas, are you sure you don’t have magic?” Gordy asked. “I know you’re…what again? Part xana and part encantado, right?”
“Yeah,” replied Lucas, “but as far as I know, my ancestry just gave me speed and little glimpses of the really immediate future. Handy combination today, since it kept me from getting captured. I can also feel magic around me, but that’s it. I haven’t had any luck manipulating it.”
“Any way to call your great-grandmother?” asked Gordy.
Now it was Lucas’s turn to sigh. “No psychic way. She has a cell phone, but that only works when she’s in the human world. She’s in the Encante right now—I already checked.”
“Does she…watch over you?”
“She came to Madisonville to warn me of danger, and I get the feeling she watches sometimes, but you guys made her feel secure enough I’m sure she doesn’t watch all the time.”
“Our own efficiency as protectors will be our doom,” commented Carlos under his breath.
“Wait!” said Gordy. Then he looked over at Lucas. “Alex told me that when he, Tal, and Khalid were helping you run from the shadows on your way down here, you revived a broken psychic connection with Alex.”
“Yeah,” replied Lucas, “I did, but all I was doing was grabbing onto a small piece of a link Tal had created—and I was right next to Alex, touching him, in fact. Not any great feat of power there.”
“Still,” said Gordy, “even if you can only manipulate preexisting magic, and that only a little, that might be enough.”
“To do what?” asked Lucas skeptically.
“Your great-grandmother opens portals between here and the Encante, right?”
“Of course, but—”
“Always the same spot?” cut in Gordy.
“Somewhere in the ocean, I think. I don’t really know,” said Lucas, obviously puzzled.
“Can you feel her portals?” Gordy continued, focused on some goal the rest of us hadn’t figured out yet.
“And see them,” replied Lucas.
“Could you feel where one had been and maybe reopen it?” Now everybody could see where Gordy was going, and Lucas didn’t like it one little bit.
“There’s a big difference between plugging into a psychic network that just went down and reopening a door between two worlds…isn’t there?” asked Lucas.
Sadly, with all our magic experts probably prisoners on Olympus at this point, none of us could even begin to answer this question.
“There’s another problem, too,” said Lucas slowly. It was a little harder to see with his dark skin, but I was pretty sure he was blushing. “I…I don’t really know how to swim. To be honest, I’m kind of afraid of the water, at least when it’s too deep to stand up in.”
I could tell Gordy didn’t know how to react. Not knowing Lucas very well, he may have thought Lucas was joking. I was pretty sure Lucas wasn’t, and thankfully Gordy stifled the laugh that had probably been his first impulse.
“Lucas, we’ve all changed a lot in the last few months. There was a time when I was a terrible student. Now, I’m actually pretty good—with a little magical help. Stan used to be a nerd, but now he can hold his own in a fight. Actually, except for Shar, who was always pretty good, all of us have improved our combat skills a lot. Khalid used to live on the street—”
“Yeah, I did!” interrupted Khalid. He had been watching the security men out the window with intense concentration, but he looked in our direction when he heard his name mentioned.
“Yes,” continued Gordy, “and now he’s one of the top students in his class, even though he missed out on like three years of school. Jimmie missed out on what amounted to seven, you know, being dead and all, but he caught up.
“And how did we all do that? With the help of our friends—and so will you. Carlos, you could go with him into the ocean, right, and keep him safe? You’re the best swimmer I know. Then when we have time later on, you can teach him to swim himself.”
“I’m happy to do all of that, Gordy,” replied Carlos. “In case you’ve forgotten, though, we’re all trapped in this house.”
“I know,” said Gordy. “Maybe with a distraction—”
We all jumped at the sound of a key in the front door.
“Khalid, you were supposed to be watching!” chided Gordy. Khalid looked out again immediately, but he didn’t have a great view of the front porch from his window.
All of us who had swords drew them, Khalid reached for his bow, and Lucas looked braced for some capoeira takedown.
The door swung open, and Tal teetered in uncertainly.
That’s what we thought at first, anyway. That distinctive fire-and-musical design on his dragon armor was clearly visible, and we could all see White Hilt, his sword, hanging at his side.
Yet this wasn’t the Tal we had been in school with today. He was…shorter, less mature looking.
“What’s…what’s happening?” he said in a voice higher than Tal’s as he looked fearfully at our weapons. “Who are you guys?”
Then it hit me. I had been dead then, but I still watched Tal and Dan, so I should have realized sooner.
This wasn’t our Tal but twelve-year-old Tal—Tal before the battles with gods, before the magic, before the awakening spell that brought out all his past-life memories.
Our Tal could have saved us. This Tal, whoever—or whatever—he was, needed us to save him.
He stood, staring at us, pale and shaking. We stared back, utterly without a clue.
Chapter 2: Peter Pan Syndrome (Gordy)
“It’s all right, Tal,” I said, knowing perfectly well it wasn’t. The last thing we needed, though, was a hysterical kid on our hands.
“Who are you guys?” he asked, eyes darting back and forth between us. We really needed Dan or Stan, whom he would probably recognize despite their being four years older than he remembered. At the age Tal was now, he hardly knew me or Carlos, and he hadn’t yet met Lucas or Khalid. Jimmie he would only remember as a friend who had died year
s earlier.
“Tal, I’m Gordy Hayes, remember? I think you also know Carlos Reyes. This is Lucas Santos, Khalid, and…Rhys Stevens. I think you know his cousin Dan.” Rhys was the fake identity the Order had created for Jimmie after he returned to life. I didn’t want to risk having to explain to Tal who Jimmie really was, at least not at this point.
Tal looked at most of us suspiciously, though he seemed a little more comfortable with Jimmie. “You look kind of like Dan,” he conceded, “but he never mentioned a cousin. Where are you from?”
“Wales,” said Jimmie quickly.
“Where’s my mom?” Tal asked, his eyes betraying his suspicion of us.
“She had to leave unexpectedly,” I replied. “She let us in to wait for you.”
“But why would you want to wait for me, Gordy? We hardly know each other. And…and you don’t really look like Gordy. You’re…older.”
He had me there. We had to get Tal to trust us, but anything we told him now that was even remotely true was going to sound crazy to him.
Khalid, only a year younger than Tal now, stepped forward and offered his hand.
“I’m Khalid,” he said with a big smile. “I’m from Egypt, and I’m staying with the Sassanis.” Tal shook hands with him, but even Khalid’s natural charm didn’t seem to thaw him out. I couldn’t really blame Tal; he came home to a houseful of strangers, who had no obvious reason for being there.
“Want to show me your room?” asked Khalid. “I bet you’ve got all kinds of cool stuff up there.”
“Maybe some other time,” said Tal, smiling very slightly. “I’ve got to get ready for a soccer game. It’s the game for the league championship, and my school’s playing…well, Rhys, you’d know, being Dan’s cousin and all. Who are we playing today?”
A test! Even at age twelve, Tal was craftier than I remembered him. Then again, I didn’t really know him then.
“Saint Deiniol Middle School” said Jimmie without hesitation. Tal relaxed just a bit, so that must have been the right answer, though how Jimmie could have known which school Tal thought he was playing today was beyond me.
