Secret Origins

by James Riley

  “Just let us GO!” Bethany shouted, putting all of her frustration and fear into her scream. “This isn’t right! We didn’t do anything!”

  One of the shadows seemed to separate from the rest, even darker than the others, which shouldn’t be possible. The new shadow stepped forward into the circle of light, but somehow didn’t disappear.

  And this shadow had red, glowing eyes.

  “Children aren’t allowed out after dark in Jupiter City,” said a grating, awful voice from somewhere within the darker shadow. “It’s not safe. Which means you’re breaking the laws, and so you must pay. That means you’re now mine.”

  The darker shadow reached out a hand toward Bethany, and just like that, everything disappeared into a light bright as the sun.

  CHAPTER 11

  It was like a star fell from the sky and exploded in front of their eyes. Owen shouted in shock and pain, as the light was so bright he could see it through his closed eyelids.

  A hand grabbed him from behind, clicked something on the waist of his pants, and shoved. Hard.

  He stumbled forward a few feet, right into the spot where the shadows had been, and then suddenly there was nothing beneath his feet except empty air. He shouted again, this time in terror as he fell into nothingness, completely blind.

  Wind whipped by his face as he frantically waved his arms, not even having the time to realize how stupid that was. But whatever it was on the waist of his pants yanked hard, and he slammed to a stop.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t touching the ground yet. Instead, he seemed to be hanging by his pants, slowly turning in a circle.

  “Um,” Owen said. “What just happened?”

  Above him, he heard Bethany scream as she fell just to the left of him, then groan as she jerked to a stop too. This was followed by what sounded like a quick gust of wind, and Owen heard something land lightly on the ground nearby.

  “I’m releasing you both,” said a deep male voice. “When I do, you need to run.”

  “We’re blind,” Owen pointed out, moving his hands in front of his face. Or at least he thought he was. “How are we supposed to run?”

  “Fast,” said the voice, and the thing on Owen’s waist clicked. Before Owen could even shout, he hit the ground, landing hard on his hands and feet. In spite of the sting, he still was shocked. The ground had only been a few feet below him? He’d come that close to hitting the street?

  He heard Bethany touch down, and then someone lifted him to his feet. “GO!” the man shouted, and pushed Owen forward.

  “But—” Bethany said, then went quiet as she got pushed too.

  “Now!” the man shouted. “There’s no time, they’re already regrouping!”

  Owen reached back to where he’d heard Bethany’s voice, grabbed out, and caught her arm. “Talk to him later,” he whispered. “We have to go.”

  She didn’t respond, but pushed her hand into his, and together they set out jogging as quickly as they dared, not able to see the ground in front of them.

  Somehow, miraculously, Owen made it a good thirty seconds before tripping and landing on his face. He unfortunately yanked Bethany down with him, and it took both of them a few seconds to regain their feet. By that point, Owen had no idea which way they were supposed to be running.

  “Can you see yet?” he asked her.

  “Does a big yellow circle count?” she said, sounding like she was facing a different direction.

  Owen blinked a few times, rubbing his eyes, but it didn’t help. Everything was completely dark except a yellow blotch in the middle of his vision. Hopefully that was from the blindness, and not because there were shadow monsters everywhere.

  Behind them they heard a small bang, and a moment later someone grabbed both of them around their torsos and picked them up. “Whoa,” the voice said, grunting from their weights. A few steps later they stopped, and the man dropped them both to the ground. “Okay, you’re too heavy. Plan B, then. Do what I say, and go where I lead you.”

  “Wait. Plan A was just carrying us?” Owen said, then yelped as the man jerked his hand forward, almost yanking him off his feet.

  “Up!” the man shouted. “Curb!” Owen jumped to make the curb and still almost knocked himself off balance, but managed to make it up onto the sidewalk. Then they were off again, running much faster than when it’d just been him and Bethany.

  “Left!” the man yelled, then, “Right!” At each turn, Owen barely kept his feet, but when he did stumble, the man’s grip kept him from hitting the ground.

  Were the shadows chasing them? Or worse, the darker shadow with red eyes? Why couldn’t shadows make more noise so Owen could know for sure? For all he knew, they were two steps behind and reaching out. The thought made Owen move faster, which meant another stumble as his calf scraped against what felt like a fire hydrant.

  “Where are we going?” Bethany asked, sounding strangely calm given what was happening.

  “Back where you two belong,” the man said. “First to Dr. Apathy’s Lab, then through the portal. After that, we’re closing it down for good. I told your mother you’d end up here someday. I’m just sorry you picked the absolute worst time to visit.”

  Bethany tried to say something, but the man interrupted her. “There’s no time for questions. Wait until we’re safe. He’s coming.”

  “Who is?” Owen asked, struggling to keep up with the running while talking. “Red Eyes?”

  The man paused. “The Dark,” he said finally, jerking them down yet another street. “He holds power over the shadow creatures. Don’t let them touch you, they’ll take over your mind and fill you with hate, just like him. It’s all Mason Black’s fault, he rewrote all of this to be more edgy. I’m going to throw him in here himself, see how he likes it.”

  “Mason Black?” Owen asked. “Who’s that?”

  “Are you . . . Doc Twilight?” Bethany said quietly.

  The man went silent, and they all slowed to a stop. “We’re here,” the voice said. “Apathetic Industries.” Owen heard the man step forward and a door open. “Go in. I have to lock it down.”

  Owen stepped forward with his arms out, feeling for a wall. His hands smacked into something that felt like glass, and he maneuvered along it until he found a doorway, then stepped inside. The building’s lobby actually looked a bit lighter, which hopefully meant his eyesight was starting to return.

  “I think I can almost see now,” Bethany said, making Owen jump in surprise, since he hadn’t realized she’d beaten him in.

  And then they heard a new voice outside, this one low and grating and familiar. The voice of the red-eyed shadow from back on the roof. “You dare mock me with that costume?”

  “Get back!” the man who rescued them shouted. There was a loud bang from just inches in front of them, and suddenly everything was muffled. “Run, kids!” they heard from the other side of the glass door.

  “You will suffer for this,” shouted the other voice, and their rescuer began to shout in agony. The glass in front of them creaked like it was going to shatter. “You and anyone else who refuses to follow my laws!”

  “Run, Bethany!” their rescuer shouted again, and then everything went silent outside.

  Owen just stared blindly ahead, not sure what to do or say. And then, just like Doc Twilight had warned, Owen felt a kind of radiating fury from all around them. Even just being close to it, he felt himself growing angry.

  “The shadows,” he whispered. “They’re coming inside.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Bethany shivered to her very core in fear, but her eyesight was returning just enough to see which direction the glass doors were. She ran back to them and pushed on them hard, but the doors stayed locked. Doc Twilight must have done that when they arrived. “Owen, help me!” she shouted. “We can’t leave him out there!”

  “He saved us so we could get away, Bethany!” Owen said to her, his hands awkwardly grabbing for her arms but hitting her shoulders instead. Apparently he couldn�
��t see as well as she could yet. “We need to reach the portal before these shadows get us. Or worse, before they make their way into our world!”

  Bethany shook her head, not even caring that he couldn’t see it. “I’m not leaving him. Not again!”

  “We’ll come back, I promise!” Owen told her. “But we can’t do anything for him now. We need to get help. I swear we won’t leave him here. But if we get captured, then we’re not going to be rescuing anyone!”

  Bethany thrashed her way out of his grasp, then stopped, feeling the shadows’ anger as they slid beneath the door. No! She couldn’t just leave her father here, not after she’d been so close, right next to him. She hadn’t even said anything she’d meant to say when she finally found him. None of it!

  “We’ll come back,” Owen repeated, sounding a little irritated. “We will. No matter what.”

  Bethany rubbed her hand against her cheek, surprised to find it wet. “Yes, we will,” she said, shaking her head, then sighing. “Let’s go.” And with that, she took off toward the back wall, where the elevators were.

  She hit the button as soon as she arrived, and the doors opened with a ding. She threw Owen inside, as he was still facing the wrong direction, then jumped in herself, hitting the button for the top floor. Her vision seemed to be returning enough to make out the buttons, but outside the elevator everything was still dark. . . .

  Except it wasn’t. It was a wave of shadows, crashing toward them.

  “Close-close-close-close-close,” Bethany repeated, banging on the close-door button.

  “That thing never works,” Owen said, facing the back of the elevator.

  “It better!” Bethany shouted as the shadows grew closer. The wave of monsters crashed down at them as the elevator doors closed, just in time to keep the creatures at bay.

  The elevator started rising just as quickly as it’d fallen before, and for a moment Bethany thought they might be safe. After all, there was no way the shadows could move so quickly.

  “Did you feel it?” she asked Owen quietly. “What are those things?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re definitely cranky,” Owen said, waving his hand in front of his face. “Hey, I can kind of see!”

  “Good,” Bethany said as she watched the floors climb higher. “ ’Cause we’re just about there. At least we left those things behind.” But right when the doors opened at the top, shadow tendrils began to seep in from the floor.

  “Time to go!” she shouted, pulling Owen out the door as the floor of the elevator broke apart, revealing shadows covering the cables and elevator shaft.

  They ran back through the laboratory vault door, while the shadows climbed onto the floor and began gliding after them. Bethany shoved the lab door closed, then locked it, but that wouldn’t hold them for long.

  “How do we keep them on this side of the portal?” Owen shouted.

  “We can’t turn off the machine,” Bethany said. “If we do, we won’t be getting out either.”

  “The chains!” he yelled as the shadows began to seep under and around the door on all sides. “In the basement, the ones that covered the manhole. Maybe the chains can keep anything from coming through?”

  “Shadows, or my dad,” Bethany said, shaking her head. Owen started to say something, but she stopped him. “We’ll figure it out. Let’s just get through this.”

  The door went flying off its hinges as a wave of shadows crashed in. Bethany turned and sprinted toward the portal, Owen right behind her, but she stopped just before it, jumped to the side, and slapped the button on Dr. Apathy’s death robot.

  “FOOLS!” the robot said, powering up as Bethany shoved Owen through the portal. “What madness is this? Creatures formed of hatred, invading my laboratory?! You will pay!”

  The robot strode out into the lab, and Bethany watched for just a moment as the shadows turned to address this new threat. The robot’s buzz-saw hands sliced down into the creatures, but just as had happened back in the apartment building, the shadows split apart around the buzz saws, then reformed right after.

  “Stay solid, you fools!” the robot shouted. “Dr. Apathy would crush you like the wretches you are!”

  The shadows began to form up around the robot, and Bethany swallowed hard. They’d have the death machine down in moments, and she had to go.

  She ran to the portal, then dove through it, flying up out of the manhole . . . only to stop in midair. Her flailing hands caught the edge of the manhole on the nonfictional side as something dragged her back down, and she held on as tightly as she could. “Help!” she shouted at Owen, who was gathering the chains. “They’re pulling me back!”

  Owen looked down at her in shock, even as the shadows reached up through the portal, latching on to Bethany’s fingers. “I’ll be right back!” he said, then disappeared out of her sight.

  “What?” she shouted, feeling the rage of the shadow creatures fill her mind. “Where are you going?!”

  One by one, the shadows slowly pulled at her fingers, and all she wanted to do was attack them, fight them, pull them apart. She felt her vision begin to turn black, but she didn’t care. She wanted revenge on these things, to show them that she wasn’t afraid of them, that she wasn’t afraid of the Dark, and she’d tear them to pieces—

  “Duck!” Owen shouted, and Bethany begrudgingly shoved herself as far against the floor of the lab as she could. She felt something fall past her head, and then . . . nothing happened.

  “What—” she started to yell, only to have the shadows all around her abruptly disappear and her rage faded away. The shadows pulling on her bottom half also vanished, and she quickly dragged herself up through the manhole. “What did you do?”

  Owen grabbed her arms, helping to pull her up. “I have no idea! I just grabbed the utility belt from the woman’s costume up here, banged it on the ground a few times, then threw it down the hole.”

  Bethany almost choked. “What if there’d been explosives in it?”

  Owen grunted as her feet passed through the manhole, then dropped her on the floor so he could push the manhole cover closed once more. “No one would keep real bombs in a utility belt. That’s too dangerous. I just figured it was smoke grenades and hopefully some flash-bangs, like Doc Twilight used on the roof. Looks like I was right!”

  Bethany dropped on top of the now-closed manhole cover, breathing hard as her heart beat way too fast. She’d been so angry! “I guess so,” she said, “but now we don’t have those to use when we go back.”

  Owen shrugged. “It won’t matter. I’ve got some ideas that should help us. But can you roll out of the way or something? I want to get these chains back on before anything comes through.”

  Her eyes widened. “Whoops!” She quickly moved away as Owen went to work tying the chains back onto the manhole cover. “There,” Owen said, clicking the chains back into the lock. “We should be okay now.”

  He stood up, admiring his work, then leaped back in surprise as the manhole cover jumped a half-inch in the air like it’d been hit by a bulldozer.

  The chains held, though, and the manhole cover didn’t come loose enough for anything to get through. Bethany crept forward to investigate, just to make sure, then jumped a bit too when the manhole cover rose again with an enormous bang, followed by a series of hits, over and over.

  “They don’t seem happy,” Owen said. “Maybe next time we go in, we think things through first?”

  “Fine,” she said, not having the energy to argue. “What do we do? How do we defeat these things?”

  “We don’t go back alone, first of all,” Owen told her. “We’re going to need help. Maybe recruit a few friends. That’s what superheroes do best after all . . . they team up. And if we’re going to beat this Dark guy and rescue, um, Doc Twilight, then we’re going to need all the friends we can get.”

  “Who, the Avengers?” Bethany said.

  “Oh no,” Owen told her. “I was thinking someone with a bit more magic.”

>   And despite the situation, despite everything, Bethany couldn’t help smiling.

  CHAPTER 13

  The library felt lonelier than it used to. Bethany ran her hands along the books, just to say hello to old friends. At the time, giving up on finding her father seemed like the best thing to do for everyone, but she just felt so . . . lost without books.

  Still, if she hadn’t stopped, she’d never have noticed the man parked outside her home every night and so wouldn’t have actually found her father. Which brought up a lot more questions, granted. Her mother must have known, but for how long? And why not tell Bethany, even if her dad couldn’t contact her for fear of putting her in danger somehow?

  “I’ll get the lights,” Owen said, interrupting her thoughts as he moved behind the counter.

  “Call your mom,” Bethany told him, picking up her phone.

  Owen paused. “I don’t think she can get the lights from there? And then she’d know we were here, and—”

  Bethany rolled her eyes. “Tell her you’re staying at my house tonight. I’ll tell my mom I’m staying at yours. That way we won’t be missed if we don’t come back—”

  Owen swallowed hard. “Ever?”

  “In a few hours,” Bethany said, glaring at him.

  Owen nodded and went into his mom’s office, the lights clicking on a moment later. Bethany waited to make sure he wasn’t coming right back, then dialed her mom.

  “Hey, Beth,” her mother said when she picked up. “How are things at Owen’s?”

  Bethany tried to speak, but for a moment nothing came out. Just tell her everything. She already has to know that Dad is alive and well, and watching over us. Find out the truth from her!

  But if she did say all of that, there was no way her mother would let her go back to Jupiter City to rescue her father. More likely, her mom would lock her in her room without even a school book to jump into for the next ten years.