by Bret Schulte
“Esteban is borrowing one of the Dean’s wanderwindows,” Natch said.
“What is a wanderwindow?”
“Turn to your left and smile.”
Lucas found himself staring at a cloud of shimmering silver gnats. He raised his hand and the gnats followed, vaguely taking the shape of an arm. As he waved, the cloud waved back. It even copied him making the Vulcan hand-signal thing.
“I see you,” Natch said slowly. He was clearly having a lot more fun with all of this, probably because he was miles away from the angry undead vampire wizard.
“Okay, that’s creepy, but right now we need to keep this doohickey away from Cervantes,” he waved the chip at the cloud of gnats.
“Do you have a piece of string?” Natch asked.
Quickly he explained his plan to Lucas, who in turn explained the plan to Tasha.
“That could work,” Tasha agreed, ripping a piece of string out of the hem of her costume.
“What about Sam?” Lucas asked simultaneously into the phone and to Tasha.
“The BEA has to be on their way right now.” Tasha actually began to laugh. “I mean, there is no way that they could have missed the flying car or the giant flaming bat.”
Lucas cracked a smile. “Good point.”
“They will save Sam and the others,” Tasha added. “We just need to buy them as much time as possible.”
“It sounds like a plan,” Lucas announced into the phone. “Call us back if you see anything.”
He hung up the phone and gunned the engine. The car shot out from its glassy hiding place. He stayed as high as possible, away from the tourists, as he snaked his way through the neon canyons of Las Vegas.
A flash of fire in the rearview mirror caught his attention.
“How’s our little surprise coming?”
“Finished,” Tasha said, holding the modified arrow out for him to see.
“Hold on,” he yelled as he pulled the car up and over a twenty-story parking garage.
The car’s mirrors were awash in red flame. Two gigantic burning hands were closing in around them. Lucas jammed the accelerator down as far as it would go. They were rocketing through the sky at speeds way beyond reckless, but they still weren’t fast enough.
The fingers tightened around the car, pressing on the sides and interlocking in front of the windshield. Lucas had to squat down in the driver’s seat to see through the tiny gap between the fingers. It didn’t help that he was driving three times faster than he would have liked away from the bright lights of The Strip into the dark unknown industrial side of Las Vegas.
“Lucas.” Tasha drew out his name in a long nervous whisper. She kept her bow taut and ready.
“Wait for it, wait for it,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
Lucas could barely see anything, but he could hear the telltale chugging sounds below that let him know that he was exactly where he wanted to be.
He squinted through the three-inch gap left in front of him. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
“There!” he yelled. But the arrow shot through the gap before he could even finish the word.
“Got it,” Tasha said triumphantly.
They lurched forward as the hands clasped around the car, forcibly stopping it in mid-air.
Lucas slid out of his seat, doing his best to crouch under the steering wheel, away from the flames. Electrical sparks of pain shot through his arms as he covered his head. There was no escape.
But just like that, the flames receded.
Lucas poked his head up to see the flames retract into Cervantes’ hands. The vampire hovered on his great flaming bat next to the car with a smug sneer of victory on his face.
“Hello, children,” he said in a silky voice.
“The great Cervantes, reduced to a sad little puppet,” Tasha shot back.
Lucas laughed drawing Cervantes’ venomous glare.
“That’s right, I am a puppet.” He brushed his hair back with his ring-laden left hand. “For now. But I am alive, or a near approximation, and if Master Nero’s plan succeeds, I will be reunited with the only thing worth living for.”
Cervantes held out his right hand.
“Give me the chip,” he said flatly. “Or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
“Yeah, slight snag there Fang Boy,” Tasha said. “We don’t have it.”
His smile mutated into a snarl, exposing more of his fangs.
“You see,” Tasha continued with a shrug. “Somehow it got tied to one of my arrows. The arrow I just fired into that freight train below us. Sorry.”
Cervantes growled in exasperation as he eyed the high-speed freight train bound for New Hampshire chugging away at over 300 miles per hour.
Please let this slow him down long enough for Samantha to get away, Lucas thought just as he felt the white-hot tingle of one of Cervantes’s sparks entering his forehead.
Chapter 23
Victory and Defeat
“Hello, casino patrons,” Nero’s voice seemed to come from every direction. “We are having a special on hostages on the main floor. These hostages can be saved for the low, low price of just one Witch Hunter’s Gauntlet. This is a one-time limited offer. So anyone who would like to keep their friends and favorite teacher from being harmed should hurry on down.”
Clearly Nero had found the casino’s intercom system. Wonderful.
But what Sam really needed to know was whether or not he was bluffing. He seemed to want Doc Frost and Zoey to work for him, so he probably wouldn’t hurt them. But what if he had captured someone else?
She had no idea what had happened to the others while she was hiding in the casino’s massive laundry room. Nero hadn’t bothered to check the dryers for her, but while he was searching he might have found Tasha and Lucas, or Zack, or just an innocent vacationer who hadn’t managed to evacuate in time.
She could be facing Nero, Cervantes, and Nero’s bodyguard with nothing more than a frozen metal glove.
A frozen metal glove with amazing magical powers!
Except it clearly didn’t have any interest in her. Nero had held the thing for three seconds and it tried to grab his arm; she had spent nearly half an hour huddled in an industrial-sized dryer with the glove and it hadn’t done anything except drip water on her.
Maybe the gauntlet didn’t think a girl who couldn’t even manage to bake idiot-proof fast food cookies was worthy of wielding fantastic power.
Or maybe it just didn’t work when frozen.
Sam kicked the dryer door open and crawled out. She figured she could thaw the glove in the dryer in a couple of minutes. The noise would probably give her away, though.
“Don’t even think about it,” Nero said over the intercom. “Just bring it out to the main floor.”
She stood frozen in place. How did he know what she was doing?
“This is a casino, Sam. There are cameras everywhere. I can see everything you do. You have three minutes to hand over the gauntlet.”
She couldn’t shake the feeling that she should be doing something extremely clever right now. Like in the movies. But she wasn’t feeling particularly clever at the moment.
“Get moving, Sam.”
She sneered at the nearest camera as she walked by.
“Almost there,” Nero boomed from above when she reached the double doors.
“Shut up.” She shoved the doors open.
Doc Frost and Zoey were still stuck in their floating cage in the middle of the room. Zoey saw Sam first and made motions for Sam to hide, but it was too late for that. Nero’s bodyguard had stepped in behind Sam, blocking her path to the door. Sam kept walking toward Zoey’s cage.
The sound of laughter caught her attention.
“You really should have left the building when you had the chance,” Nero said as he held the heat ray in one hand and the Lantern of the Blue Flame in the other. “But I am a nice guy and you are useless now. Give me the gauntlet and you can leave. Go. Get out of t
he way.”
“Really? Now, why don’t I believe you? Oh yeah, maybe because you sent vampire cheerleaders to kill me.”
Nero sighed dramatically. “Which would not have been necessary if you had simply let the whirlybot come to me. No doubt my message would have been a lot more useful than that silly riddle your father gave you.”
“Your message? Why would you get a message?“
And then it all finally made sense to her.
“Does your dad’s middle name start with an S?”
Nero smiled. He even lowered the heat ray, although he kept it tightly in his grip.
“Very good, Sam. Just as the whirlybot was programmed to find you if your parents were dead, it was programmed to go to my father, Alexander Sebastian Nero Sr., if you were also dead or otherwise unavailable. After my father’s death I became the next in line. All I needed to do was initiate an Alpha Level threat. It was really just a happy coincidence that I could frame you for the theft of the Lantern of Blue Flame and then use it to resurrect Cervantes. If Constable Albion had been even the slightest bit capable, you would have been taken away to a nice magical prison somewhere and I would have inherited the whirlybot message and the Witch Hunter’s Gauntlet. I sent the vampires because I figured a little mortal danger would give you the incentive to figure out your riddle.”
Sam snorted with awkward laughter.
“So I guess I should be grateful you decided to have me sent to jail instead of just killing me, and then attempted to kill me later?”
“Exactly.”
A horrible thought occurred to Sam. “You! You disguised yourself as me to rob the vault! Gross!”
She had suffered a lot lately, but being confused with a boy was more than she could take.
“Yes, well. That was humiliating for me too.”
He set the Lantern of the Blue Flame down on the floor and held out his now-empty hand.
“Just hand it over and everything will be fine.”
“Why don’t you tell her the whole story, Nero?” Doc Frost said from his cage.
“What, and give away my entire evil scheme?” Nero yelled in a perfect imitation of an over-the-top cartoon super-villain. “Never!”
Doc Frost continued. “My guess is you weren’t completely sure the message would come to you. After all, Samuel could have deleted the message to your father when he discovered he had been stealing Samuel’s father’s inventions.”
“I admit my father was less than perfect. All of you ordinary people are. That is why he spent four hundred and fifty million dollars on my development and training,” he said, examining his own hand. “I was tutored by the greatest teachers and masters around the world. My very DNA was perfected to make me stronger, faster, and smarter. I am the ultimate life-form on this planet. And I’m the only one who can save it.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Zoey said, making talking motions with her right hand. “Maybe your father should have spent another fifty million on your hair.”
Sam noticed that Zoey was very subtly pointing to the left with her other hand. She was pointing at the sack of weapons that was still lying behind the bank of slot machines three rows over. But with Commando Guy watching her, there was no way Sam could make a run for it.
“I had heard rumors that your father had invested large sums of money in genetics research. Genetic manipulation is a messy business; the slightest mistake can have horrifying results. I never would have imagined that he would risk tampering with his own son’s life,” Doc Frost said dryly. “Still, four hundred and fifty million dollars is mighty impressive. But then, your father was always good at making money. First by selling his father’s inventions, then by stealing ideas from his best friend’s dead father. It took years for Samuel to finally accept that Alexander had betrayed him. It is just a shame that Alexander never really took the time to understand what he was stealing. Maybe then he, Samuel, and Joanne would still be alive.”
Nero’s eyes narrowed. Sam was positive that Doc Frost had struck a nerve with that last comment.
Doc Frost turned to Sam. “Your grandfather was a brilliant scientist and a good man. But sometimes his scientific curiosity overrode his better judgment. One of his last inventions turned out to be infinitely more dangerous than he ever could have guessed. It was quite possibly the single most amazing scientific discovery since fire. But like fire, in the wrong hands it could cause untold damage. To his dying day, your grandfather worked to protect the world from what he viewed as the greatest folly in history. It was Alexander Nero Sr.’s attempt to access this technology that resulted in the destruction of Hathaway Manor. The whole incident was classified top secret by the BEA; that’s why no one has been able to tell you. I’m terribly sorry.”
Doc Frost’s eyes were filled with so much pain and remorse Sam could barely look at him without tearing up. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be to keep a secret like that from someone. Before she could tell him she wasn’t upset, Nero started laughing.
“Pathetic,” he said, shaking his head at Doc Frost. “Seriously, this is your great plan? Trying to get Samantha so mad that her anger will activate the Gauntlet.”
Sam looked at the gauntlet in her arms. It hadn’t changed at all, except that more of the ice had melted and dripped down her shirt.
“Not a bad plan,” Nero said, as if evaluating a young child’s artwork. “Except Samantha here isn’t a naturally angry person. She doesn’t have the fire of anger in her heart. Do you, Samantha? No. I’m sure if your parents had lived long enough to see the whiny weak mediocre mess you really are they would have entrusted the gauntlet to someone worthy.
“You see, the Witch Hunter’s Gauntlet was designed to be worn by heroes, people with strong wills, purity of heart, and clarity of purpose. The more focused the wearer, the stronger the magic. It won’t even spark for someone like you. It demands someone worthy; someone who understands power and has the strength of will necessary to feed it and control it. Someone like me.”
He took a step forward, his hand still outstretched. She clutched the glove even tighter. Her arms ached from the effort.
“See,” he said, taking another step.
It was true, she could feel it, the glove wanted to leap out of her hands.
“Just run, Sam!” Zoey yelled from her cage.
Nero sighed and rolled his eyes at Zoey. “We’ve done all that already. Please pay attention.”
Nero slipped his goggles down over his eyes.
“Sam, we both know I can take that from you at any time. The world is in trouble, Sam, more trouble than you can possibly imagine; it is time for a new hero. So I am asking you nicely to just hand it over.”
Sam could feel the gauntlet pulling away from her. For a second she swore she saw a spark of light dancing deep within one of the gauntlet’s sapphire flowers, but when she looked closer, it was gone. The gauntlet was waking up, she was sure of it.
It just didn’t make sense. Aside from herself, Sam figured Nero was the least heroic person in the room.
“Heroes don’t start wars,” she said.
“Maybe not, but they do win them,” Nero said proudly. His expression quickly turned grave. Sam thought she actually saw fear wash across his face. “And war is coming, with or without me. A war unlike any other in the history of the world.”
He pointed an accusing finger at Doc Frost.
“Why do you think they’re designing hovertanks, or plasma cannons, or invisibility suits, or magic-detecting satellites? For fun? For the sheer scientific thrill of it all? For education?”
He shook his head and laughed.
“Open your eyes, Sammy. They’re preparing for war. The magical community knows that we are only a generation away from surpassing them. They’ve been happy to live separately from us primitive savages for centuries, comforted by their own superiority. But now that we are on the verge of becoming their equals, they are forced to decide between being overrun by us inferior brutes with our filthy
clanking machines or striking first while they still have the advantage.”
“No one wants a war!” Doc Frost yelled. His eyes were bloodshot with worry and anger.
“Oh, we both know that’s not true,” Nero said in a silky-smooth voice. “But don’t worry, my way we win with a minimum number of casualties, and the millions that do sadly perish will be reanimated by the Lantern of the Blue Flame as a cheap and obedient workforce.”
Sam had never heard anything so horrible in her life.
“You can’t do that!”
“Uh, yeah, pretty sure I can,” Nero said with a proudly cocked eyebrow and a gleam in his eye.
“If you want to be a hero so badly why don’t you try to stop the war?” she asked, hoping to somehow reason with him.
“Oh, the symmetry of it all,” Nero said. “My father asked your mother the very same question once. Imagine it, with war on the horizon, the nearly assured destruction of our way of life, and Joanne Hathaway was the first person in hundreds of years to wear the Witch Hunter’s Gauntlet, a weapon that finally put us on an even playing field with the most powerful of wizards, and what did she do with it? She used it once to destroy Cervantes and then hid it away just to make those terrified old warlocks happy. To keep the peace.”
He practically spat out those last four words.
“And then when my father went looking for weapons to even the odds, your parents killed him. To keep the peace.”
He took another step forward. It was unmistakable this time; five of the gemstones facing Nero were clearly glowing.
A sixth gemstone, a golf ball-sized ruby, lit up.
A devilish smile spread across Nero’s face.
“See, I told you it was drawn to power and those who know how to use it.”
Before Sam could process what was happening, Nero lunged forward, tore the gauntlet from her arms, and shoved her through the air. She flew ten feet before slamming into the marble floor.
Sam sat up gasping for air. Her ribs hurt and her arms were on fire from having frozen metal viciously dragged across them. But none of her physical pains compared with the numb hollow sensation of failure she felt looking up at Nero’s triumphant smile.
