She had to keep her eyes on the prize. Home meant Hawaii. Home meant her friends and work and beautiful beaches, and sunsets to see from her balcony.
Eyes on the prize. She couldn’t think of how she would get out of the hospital, alone on the streets of an unknown city, wearing only a robe and hospital slippers, not knowing the language. It was too formidable. She had to take it one step at a time. And keep up the hope that she could escape Omar.
Michelle pulled herself up by the handrail with some effort. She cradled Lucifer’s against her and was able to steady herself by the handrail, shining the laser down the stairs.
She saw some dim lights from a few floors below, and then they were gone. She could hear doors open and close in the stairwell. It was totally black, but having Lucifer with her made her feel safer, more comfortable. He was chewing on her hair, which meant he’d been traumatized recently as well, so she murmured comforting words to the little cat as they descended.
There was a voice calling, “Lucifer, Lucifer. Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Please come back...”
Now she was having auditory delusions; what she heard was impossible. Omar was trying to trick her. She ducked under the stairs on a landing, hiding, waiting. He was so sneaky. He probably thought she would come out and investigate because Michelle knew that voice calling for Lucifer. It was her best friend, Heather.
She heard footsteps crashing on the steel stairs above her and cringed. An orderly, wearing blue scrubs, ran down the stairs right above her, carrying a flashlight. He didn’t see her because she was curled up in a ball under the stairs.
She started down again. There was some activity since none of the elevators were working. She heard voices, eerily familiar voices. She thought she heard Rod. Tears tickled her eyes. She wanted more than anything to see him again. They were planning a life together, and she loved him thoroughly and without reservation. She’d never felt that way about anyone before. If Omar succeeded in his plans she might never see him; he might never know what happened to her.
Strangely, a few moments later, she heard a voice that sounded just like Professor Vincent Middleton. She almost smiled because he sounded grumpy, like he’d really been climbing stairs and didn’t like it. He was a sedentary professor, after all.
He was also a hero, and always would be to Michelle.
When Omar had dropped them from his helicopter into the ocean several miles from the island of Kauai, two weeks ago, Vincent couldn’t swim a stroke. He must have been much more panicked and scared than she was, but he managed to keep his head above water, for a while, until they saw the island in the distance. Then Vincent told her to swim to shore. To leave him.
He believed if she tried to save him they would both drown. Vincent didn’t grab onto her, or plead for her to save him in a blind panic, like she’d heard of people doing when they believed they would drown. He’d accepted the fact that he would die and elected to sacrifice himself so she would live.
At the time, Michelle hardly knew Vincent, she’d just met him that afternoon. He’d been so brave she was actually in awe. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Vincent was a short, pudgy, and middle aged professor. It didn’t matter. He was a brave, valiant man; a hero.
While she was swimming through the ocean, towing Vincent along that night, he told her stories to keep up her spirits through the exhausting ordeal. Michelle found that Vincent had been following rumors for years about the Dark Magician, Omar, who had such a wide following. Some people alleged that he was pure evil; others followed him blindly.
At Stanford University, where Vincent taught classes, he was affectionately called The Vampire Hunter by his students, because his hobby was debunking charlatans who proclaimed they had supernatural powers. His intellectual specialty was in the field of black magic performed by witches.
Omar was a male witch, a warlock, so Vincent was intrigued.
Vincent told Michelle he had come to Hawaii to see what all the fuss was about. Then he’d gone to one of Omar’s Wiccan ceremonies and became convinced that Omar really was an evil man. He also believed that Omar was one of the few people he’d discovered who actually did have powerful psychic power.
Vincent was usually skeptical, but believed, unlike many academic scientists, that there were people who possessed psychic abilities. He thought Omar had extraordinary talent. He also decided later that night that Michelle herself was a powerful witch.
Michelle shook herself and resumed down the stairs, sighing, wishing she did have supernatural powers and could whisk herself and Lucifer magically back to Hawaii.
The voices she’d heard were auditory phantoms, she decided. The hallucinations might be from missing her friends. Or maybe she was truly going mad because of the devastating events from the last twenty-four hours, and the drugs and medications she’d been given. Most certainly Omar was playing tricks with her mind. He’d probably be happy if she was stupid or mentally handicapped.
***
Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. Thinking up ways to defeat his enemies; the people who would try to steal Michelle away from him.
It was almost child’s play, keeping her friends from Michelle, but there were interesting options, Omar thought. He’d hurry up the stairs and beat them to Michelle’s room while they were still trying to release that weatherman, Mike, from the elevator.
He couldn’t underestimate them, though. How they managed to find her was a mystery. He knew Michelle didn’t have a tracking device on her since he had overseen his witches dressing Michelle in the wedding gown last night. She would have had a visible wound or a scar. So how they all gathered together, Heather and Mike from Hawaii, Rod from Japan, and Vincent from California, and then managed to get here so fast, was perplexing.
Omar knew Michelle had psychic abilities, but she wasn’t adept at using them. She couldn’t have called for help telepathically. He shook his head. He’d find out, sooner or later. It was a curiosity and he was a snoopy person when it came to mysteries. He just had to find out how they’d done it.
Meanwhile, he relished the fun part, defeating their efforts. He seldom had a challenge like this one. Humm. Accidents on the stairs were common, people fell all the time. There were many alternatives. Mexico was a hot place; he could make the stairwell burning hot. Or freezing cold. Or send scary hallucinations. Or drifting smoke so they were blinded and coughing and had to stop in defeat.
He savored most his ability to mentally ooze into the minds of people and find their weaknesses, the things that scared them most. Then he would present eerie visions of what they dreaded. He’d seen people bat like crazy at apparitions of flying hornets and bees, or run away from slathering rabid animals, or choke while drinking a glass of water and think they were drowning.
He could produce, and project, specific scary ghostly phantoms, but it took time and a one-on-one with the particular person he needed to terrorize. Those opportunities were not available now, so he’d have to do something generic that would affect Rod, Heather, Mike and Vincent equally.
He did the easiest thing he could think of. Since everything is made up of tiny energy particles, and he could manipulate energy, he placed his left hand on the guard-rail that went up the stairwell. Everyone held onto it when either going up or down. It gave them peace of mind, balance, and prevented falls.
He squeezed his hand, closed his eyes and concentrated, which started moving the steel molecules faster and faster, faster and faster, whipping them into a frenzy. Of course, the outcome of all the frantic movement generated lots of heat, almost as if the railing had been subjected to fire. And, indeed, he could see the effect of his psychic manipulation. The stairwell banister was changing color, becoming a glowing red. He snatched his hand away so he wouldn’t be burned.
He could see the color changing, gradually moving all the way up to the top of the building. It started out slowly, and then gained speed. The steel handrail was also becoming softer. Soon it would sag.
The banister was p
laced on the stairs to prevent people from falling off the steps to their death, down the middle of the stairwell.
Even knowing that he couldn’t touch the railing any more, Omar almost felt compelled to do so, since it was so dark. The candle that Julie reluctantly gave him didn’t produce a lot of light.
Omar was strong and agile. He started hurrying, taking two and three steps at a time, rushing to get to Michelle.
He heard a shout and a scream echoing from somewhere behind him and smiled.
Chapter 18
“Stop!” Vincent shouted. He was climbing laboriously behind the others, panting with exertion. He was the first to be startled by the sizzling heat from the bannister.
Heather turned around to see what Vincent was warning them about and her sleeve brushed the handrail. The material started to burn and she screamed.
Almost at the same time, Rod yelled, “Ouch! What the fuck?”
Mike, who was holding the rail shouted, “Damn,” when it burned his hand. He glanced at Heather as she screamed and started patting out the flames that were beginning to eat a hole in her blouse.
“Don’t touch the railing,” Vincent admonished. Then he whispered, “Omar’s starting an attack.”
“Wait a minute,” Rod said. When everyone stopped, he said. “I need to call Sammy; find out where he parked the car. Make plans to get Michelle out of here when we find her.”
He used his cell. “Hi Sammy. There must be other exits besides the front door to the clinic. This place is huge. If we find Michelle we’ll have to devise an exit plan.”
The others could only hear Rod’s side of the conversation, but they understood that Sammy had parked on a side street. He said there was an Emergency entrance for trauma patients on the other side of the hospital. Only the fertility clinic was in electrical black-out. The other parts of the hospital were lit up.
“Wait for us there, by the Emergency entrance. We’ll try to get Michelle out that way,” Rod said.
As they resumed the climb, Vincent said, “They serve meals to the patients, so they must have a kitchen, and maybe even a laundry room. There’s probably a service bay too, where the hospital gets their supplies delivered. We’ll have to sneak through the ‘employee only’ areas if we find Michelle, and hustle her out of here fast. Maybe it’s a good thing the lights are out. We can always say we’re lost, if we get caught.”
“We need to avoid Omar at all costs,” Heather said. “Too bad we don’t have a map of this place.”
“Maybe we should split up,” Mike suggested. “I could go to the top floor right now, try to steal Michelle’s eggs. They’re usually stored in some kind of glass and metal container, and they’re labeled with the patient’s name. I saw some examples when I researched on line about how the eggs are frozen and stored. They might die if I remove them from the cooling unit, but at least Omar won’t have control of them.”
Rod nodded. “I think she’d rather have them die than let Omar use them.”
“I agree,” Heather said. “Michelle sure wouldn’t want Omar and his witches, to raise her...ah...biological babies.”
“I’ll hurry on ahead,” Mike said, and started running up the stairs.
“Call me if you run into any problems,” Rod shouted.
“Sure thing,” floated back from Mike, who was already up to the next landing.
***
Lucifer had been chewing on Michelle’s hair. Then he bit her ear hard, and started a low growl.
“Ouch, Luce,” Michelle said. “That hurt!”
In the next second, the cat bite was like nothing compared to the pain in her hand. Somehow the stair rail had become like molten hot lava.
Lucifer was now making a sound that wasn’t a growl anymore; it had gone up several octaves, and decibels, so that he was howling right in her ear. That hurt too, but Michelle realized the cat was warning her. She felt her heart do an alarmed summersault. She had to hide. Omar was coming.
She stumbled down the stairs as fast as she could, careful not to get near the burning hot railing, and reached the next floor. The door said Eight.
She quickly opened the door and slipped inside a hallway. She found herself on a patient floor just like the one her room was on. There were hospital rooms and a nursing station. She noticed that the elevator doors were open. When she peeked inside she couldn’t see anything except yawning blackness. Man, that’s a potential lethal hazard, she thought. She knew she should warn someone, but didn’t want to get caught, roaming around the hospital.
Michelle put her ear to the stairwell door. Someone was running up the stairs, past this floor. She was sure it was Omar. How she knew it? Well, it was one of her abilities. It was like a wave of cold darkness passing.
“You’re such a good kitty, Luce,” Michelle said, petting him, knowing the cat had saved her with his warning yowl. But Omar would be back searching for her soon. She had to get to the lobby and outside, where she might find help.
Hoping Omar was intent on getting to the floor where her room was located, hoping he wouldn’t look back behind him as he climbed, she crept to the doorway and tentatively started down again.
She could feel the stairs vibrating, both from Omar running up behind her, and there were people coming up from down below. Dim lights were moving up the stairs. She could hear some swear words, cursing, when someone touched the stair rail. She almost smiled, and again had a feeling that the murmurs and voice tones were familiar. She wondered why they were whispering.
One of the people from below started pounding up the stairs, coming fast, and Michelle, who had reached the seventh floor landing, slipped under the stairs and crouched there in a little ball. She looked up through the stairs as the guy went by. He looked just like Heather’s boyfriend, Mike. The same shaggy black hair, handsome face and athletic build. That’s impossible, she decided, as she shakily straightened up and started down again.
As she descended, the voices from below became more and more clear, echoing in the stairwell. Quiet whispers that she recognized. She knelt and looked through the opening between the steel stairs at the people coming up from below.
She saw Rod, first, leading the way. Heather was right behind him and the professor, Vincent Middleton, was further behind. She stood up. They were apparitions, put there by Omar to confuse her. She could probably walk right through them and they would disappear into thin air, because they weren’t real.
Michelle was so intent, peering at the hallucinations coming up the stairs, that she didn’t become scared when Lucifer started his low growl. She was thinking that apparitions were insubstantial. Like holograms. They would waver in and out of focus. Mostly, you could see through them, like putting on 3D glasses in a movie.
These visions, though, seemed substantial, like real flesh and bones, although it was so dark on the stairs that she really couldn’t trust her eyesight.
Lucifer was snarling now. Getting loud. His little claws dug into her shoulder and it was painful. She almost smiled at the thought that the tiny cat could see the visions she was having. That, too, was impossible Michelle thought, as she unhooked his claws.
Also strange, if she was merely having visions, was that she could hear individual footsteps coming up the stairs. Ghosts, visions, apparitions, hallucinations; they didn’t make any noise when they moved.
Michelle let out a yelp when she felt a strong arm suddenly clamp around her waist, pulling her backwards. A hand covered her mouth, so she couldn’t make another sound. It was pulling her away from the sight she longed was real. She wanted to keep watching, seeing her beloved friends, but she was being pulled forcefully backward.
She felt a sharp whack at the back of her neck. Then all went black.
***
Mike ran to the top floor, to the door that said Twelve, and went inside a large room. The whole floor seemed to be empty, and he reasoned that the staff had left for the night. He was using the flashlight app on his phone and quickly noticed that there were man
y storage rooms, a janitor’s room, and one that looked like a break room for the staff, with a snack and a coffee machine when he peeked inside. When he got to the last room in a long hallway, he hit pay dirt.
This one held medical supplies. He went further inside, past desks and long benches where the lab workers performed their duties. There were lots of microscopes and other medical stuff he didn’t recognize. He finally found a locked glass case that held prescription medications. Beside it was a locked refrigeration unit. It was clicking and buzzing. Probably because the electricity was off and the motor was trying to turn itself on again. The temperature inside must be getting too high.
Shit, shit, shit, he mumbled to himself. This must be the storage unit for the live patient embryos and eggs. Michelle’s eggs had to be in there somewhere.
He could just unplug the machine, he thought, when he saw where the cord went to an electrical outlet. When the electricity went on again everything inside the refrigerator would die. In all probability, no one would notice until it was too late.
Both Rod and Heather thought Michelle would rather her eggs die than let Omar have use of them. But perhaps there were women who would be heartbroken if their potential babies were destroyed. Also, in vitro fertilization is enormously expensive. These eggs and embryos might be a last chance for childless couples who desperately wanted a baby.
Mike started riffling through the nearest desks, yanking drawers open. On his third try he found a hunk of keys on a chain. There were so many he sighed when he examined them. No labels. He might be here all night, trying different keys.
He knelt down in front of the refrigeration unit and started trying each key in the lock. It was a mechanical, mindless chore and he allowed his mind to drift. Mike was smiling as he remembered the first time he’d seen Heather, in that hospital room after she’d been struck by lightning.
He didn’t know if he really believed that Omar caused the strike that almost killed her, but Michelle, Rod, and even professor Middleton, seemed to think so, and they had all been there as witnesses that night.
Witchy Woman - Book 2 - The Necromancer Page 14
