Chapter 1 – Taken
Peals of laughter, intermixed with the excited barking of a dog, shattered the calm of the quiet morning. With the grace (and noise level) of a pack of pachyderms, the stairs were taken two at a time as the manor’s two earliest risers decided to embrace the beginning of the day with a noisy game of tag. Clearly there would be no sleeping in this day. The slam of a door sounded from several stories below, the muted laughter eventually fading away until nothing remained.
An arm reluctantly emerged from within the warm cocoon of the comforter, fumbling clumsily towards the nightstand by the bedside. The lifeless hand flopped noisily along the small bureau, scattering change, books, and credit card receipts before finally settling on a hard plastic object. Slowly, the fingers felt along the remote. It was too skinny; wrong device. Continuing the search, the hand flopped to the next remote. Several comatose fingers felt the various buttons recessed into the device. With a grunt, the large flat panel video screen on the far wall was activated. An infomercial appeared. A loud, over-enthusiastic salesperson was praising the sheer genius of the creators of the latest kitchen gadget, one that could apparently enable the general populace to peel a hard-boiled egg just by smacking the handle of some cheap, plastic gizmo. God forbid you had the common sense to peel the egg like a normal person.
With a curse, the audio was silenced. Long having the layout of this remote memorized, the fingers slowly mapped out the buttons, searching for the bottom right corner. Ignoring the picture-in-picture option, the button directly above it was selected. The video instantly disappeared, replaced by a blank blue screen: no video source. The finger slowly hit the button three more times. The blue screen disappeared, replaced by a picture that was divided into four quadrants. Live streaming images from various locations around the manor filled the screen.
An eye, still heavy from sleep, grudgingly cracked open and scanned the images before him. Another button was pressed. The four images were then replaced by four other feeds. Another press. There, in zone 9, was the young boy, eagerly throwing a padded frisbee for his canine companion. The fabric disc zipped out of the frame while the Pembroke Welsh Corgi trailed close behind in hot pursuit.
“So where’s he at?”
“Mmmf. Garden.”
“He’s playing frisbee? In my garden??”
“Hey, I didn’t tell him to play in there.”
“If Peanut digs anything up in there, I’m going to hold you personally responsible.”
Yawing profusely, Steve propped himself up on an elbow, still watching the antics on the screen.
“Peanut hasn’t dug anything up since she was a puppy. Besides, didn’t I end up replacing that entire section of carnations for you?”
“Yes,” she admitted, “you did.”
The Prophecy Page 55
