The Whitney Powers Paranormal Adventure 3 Book Bundle

by Jason Paul Rice

  “Light his ass up, Whit,” Trent suggested.

  Whitney couldn’t bring herself to kill a boy who seemed to be getting played by the kidnapper. They quickly closed in on Robbie. Whitney landed on the ground and collapsed.

  Trent ran after Robbie and Tara checked on Whitney.

  Tara said, “Are you alright? I’m so sorry I said all that shit. I was just jealous. You know I love you, right?”

  “Back up for a second,” Whitney told her.

  Tara put her hands up. “OK, I’m sorry. I’ll back up now.”

  Whitney felt the cascade of icy liquid pumping through her veins, quelling the fire. She started shrinking in size and her wings reverted to human arms, one of which was bleeding heavily. The reptilian skin disappeared and her tanned flesh returned.

  Tara ran back to help Whitney, who was writhing in pain on the ground. Whitney had received two grazing wounds on her bicep and wrist and had suffered a direct hit to the forearm. Her breathing and heartbeat were erratic. Colorful visions floated in front of her eyes.

  Trent ran back over with bloody right knuckles clutching the telepad. He slapped the round metal device on the ground and put one foot on it.

  He said, “Let’s go.” Trent realized his wife had been injured and rushed over to her. “Are you alright, baby?”

  Whitney’s eyes started to roll back into her head, when a series of gunshots erupted. Tara and Trent dragged Whitney over to the pad. Tara put her hand on the circle and Trent took Whitney’s hand and placed it on the object. Bullets whizzed by their heads and Trent put his palm down. Tara hastily slapped the red button.

  Silence. An ocean of calm.

  Then, without warning, Whitney felt a tremendous headache coming on, centered behind her eyes. She couldn’t feel her left arm as her eyes fluttered open. She looked down at her hand grasping the comatose Robbie’s forearm in the school in Dankstone.

  Finger by finger, Whitney slowly relinquished her grip on the boy’s arm. A surge of energy bounced around the inside of her chest cavity. Whitney waited for Trent and Tara. They both looked like bodies at an open casket viewing and weren’t breathing.

  Suddenly, Trent’s flesh changed from white to pale yellow to the golden honeymoon tan, which made Whitney smile. Tara’s face began to reclaim its original flesh color, which surged down over her entire body.

  Whitney ran over and hugged her husband. He pulled her in for a kiss and she momentarily forgot about the tremendous pain in her head and arm.

  He looked at her gushing wound with concern on his face. He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Tara opened the door to the room and a loud alarm went off. The three ran down the steps and made it outside the building.

  “Wait.” Whitney stopped.

  Trent asked, “Why?”

  “We can’t leave Robbie like this.”

  Tara said, “Yes. Yes, we can. We can get the hell out of here and tell the cops where his ass is. I’m not staying round here no more.”

  “I can’t explain it, but I know if we leave him here something bad is going to happen to him. I can just feel it.”

  Trent argued, “Who cares anyway? The little kid’s a prick.”

  Whitney winced in pain as she tried to keep pressure on the wound. “He’s a kid, which means he has…ow, ow, ow…he has parents. He’s being used by this maniac for personal enjoyment and it needs to stop. I’ll stay here with him if you two want to run for help.”

  Trent said, “Whitney, you’ve been shot in the arm.” Trent sprinted into the school.

  He emerged from the front door in less than a minute with several white cloths and towels. He ripped a few in smaller strips and started to address Whitney’s wounds. He tried to be delicate as Whitney grunted and groaned. He got most of the bleeding to slow if not stop.

  Trent looked down at her. “We can’t leave you here. I’ll stay.”

  “No. Me and Tara won’t be able to find our way out. I’m kind of delirious right now and she is terrible with directions, no offense.”

  Trent and Tara helped Whitney to her feet. Tara said, “None taken. Look, we gotta figure this out now and make a move.”

  Trent said, “Well, I don’t really know where I am going either, but are you sure you want to do this?”

  Whitney tried to smile through the pain. “I have to do this. Hurry, before I bleed to death.” Whitney let out a fake chuckle and Trent leaned in for a kiss.

  Their lips met and she uttered, “I love you, now go.”

  “Love you too,” Trent said and walked up the hill with Tara following him.

  Whitney began to panic as she thought about her joke regarding bleeding to death. She didn’t want to look at the wound because she thought it might make her pass out. Just feeling all the blood in her right hand was making her uneasy. Her frantic thoughts shifted to whether she would die in Dankstone and end up in the Devil’s Waterway.

  Jetting visions of ultraviolet rainbows and blinking bright lights appeared in front of her eyes. Her breathing slowed to a snail’s pace and jagged sharp pains circled her left hand and forearm. She sat down on mother earth and then lay on her back.

  The silver lining of the gray clouds streaked off into the cerulean sky like lightning bolts. Whitney shook her head and tried to chase away the visions but her body was in shock. Her left arm started to spasm uncontrollably, her chest went cold and her mouth ran dry.

  Whitney really regretted her decision to stay back as she could swear death was slowly creeping in. She wondered why Trent and Tara had left her there to die. Were they sneaking off to have a relationship and was this how they planned to get rid of her? For some reason, these ludicrous ideas circulated through her head.

  A strong wind out of nowhere kicked up some of the brown dust around Whitney. She smiled, assuming the breeze was courtesy of Darominius’ wings. However, the steady sound of a rotating propeller filled her ears.

  Whitney sat up as a big chopper swooped in toward the school. She assumed this must be the police and wondered how Trent and Tara had made it out so fast. The large helicopter hovered next to the third floor, right outside Robbie’s room.

  A wrecking ball hanging from a linked chain dropped from the bottom of the aircraft and dangled back and forth. The fire started to build inside her chest again. Whitney couldn’t let this guy take Robbie and leave him in the coma for the rest of his life.

  The burning swelled and spread to every part of her body as she expanded. The boiling liquid inside her veins and arteries steamed like a kettle and awakened the dragon. Silver reptilian flesh formed over the back of her good hand. Smoke started to rise from her bandages covering her wounds. The white cloth turned to ashes and fluttered in the air before falling to the ground. Her arms transposed into V-shaped wings and her neck grew exponentially longer.

  The full-sized dragon trotted over to the side of the building with the helicopter. The heavy thuds of her feet continued and Whitney tried to rise into the air. Her right wing flailed away but the left one had gone dead and she tumbled to the ground.

  She got up and shook off the pain. The smaller propeller blades allowed the helicopter to get dangerously close to the edge of the building.

  Whitney raced over to the helicopter as the wrecking ball swung like a pendulum and crashed into the side of the brick building, sending pinkish-orange fragments in every direction. She neared the helicopter and used the heels of her feet like springs.

  The silver dragon leaped into the air.

  She opened her mouth as far as her jaw muscles would permit and summoned the fire within. A ball of flames started in her chest as the force started to build. The explosion erupted and sent a tidal wave of streaming flames up through her long neck and out of her mouth. The aircraft was immediately set ablaze and two men jumped off before the fluttering chopper crashed to the ground.

  Two more men appeared to be climbing out of the wreckage. One man’s clothes were on fire and he rolled around the grass to put him
self out.

  She tried to calm her mind and revert to human form. A chill circulated inside Whitney and an icy waterfall started at the top of her head and quickly ran down to her feet. She shrank drastically and transposed back into human form.

  One of the men from the helicopter struggled to get away, dragging his injured right leg. Despite being bereft of energy, Whitney jogged after the man. She picked up the pace as she closed in on the short man and drove her right shoulder into his back, sending him sprawling to the ground.

  The man ended up on his back and Whitney jumped on top of him. She pressed her shin over his chest to hold him down. She ripped off the black ski mask covering his face and memories started to flutter into her head. His round face and slanted nose caught her eye before she focused on the big ears.

  Remembrances of yesteryear flashed in front of her.

  Middle school.

  She recollected being in the lunchroom and Danny Bundy approaching her. The other students had gathered around as Danny asked Whitney to the Spring Dance. Whitney had assumed the proposal was a set up to embarrass her so she said no. Danny had ran away and never talked to her again.

  “You’re Danny Bundy.”

  The man spoke through the obvious pain. “No, I’m not. I’m Lance Lemure, I stopped using that name a long time ago. I swear I don’t know who you are other than a high-profile investigator.”

  His arm twitched uncontrollably and kept slapping Whitney on the hip. The man turned his face from side to side, attempting to hide his features until Whitney grabbed him by the floppy earlobes. With his face still, she confirmed that this was the boy she had rejected.

  “You son of a bitch. You did all this because I turned you down for a school dance?” She slid her shin up to his throat and pressed down.

  The man broke down and started bawling. He spoke in short spurts through the crying. “You bitch. You ruined me. For all women. I lost all my confidence. After you cruelly rejected me. I would have been doing you a favor. Weird Whitney. You were Weird Whitney. I picked. I picked the only girl that was sure to say yes. But, but, but you didn’t.”

  “You pathetic little boy. You’ve been harboring this weird resentment all these years.” Whitney contemplated punching Danny in the face with her good hand.

  He said, “No. I had completely forgotten about you until you suddenly made your way into the headlines by taking down organized crime in Pennsburgh and then that lovely bit with exposing the politicians. I snapped and had to get you and your wonder boy out of the way for my big heist.”

  She decided to forgo hitting the pathetic mess of a man. Whitney scanned the area. Two of Danny’s partners tried to hobble away but she knew they wouldn’t get very far at the speed they were traveling. Another man in a suit lay face down in the grass only feet away from the narrow creek.

  Whitney wanted to know when her friends were going to get back. She asked the kidnapper, “How did that work out for you?”

  He answered through the sniffling, “I won’t answer any more questions without my lawyer. Everything I just said was off the record too. You never Mirandized me, stupid.”

  Whitney chuckled. “I heard what I needed to. Besides, you are caught red-handed for at least human trafficking of a boy in a coma. I don’t need the world to know that I broke your heart and apparently threw you into a life of crime. I had no idea I had that effect on boys back then.”

  Whitney stood up and a wave of wooziness rushed into her head. She almost fell over but retained her balance and took a few steps over to a walnut tree. She laid her palm on the trunk to steady her head as pain radiated from the bullet lodged in her forearm.

  Her left arm hung dead as she awkwardly chased down more of the kidnapper’s men. She kicked one man’s foot behind his other leg, sending him down into the mud near the creek. The other man wearing a black suit and red tie tried to hobble up a little hill.

  She closed in on him and grabbed him by the collar of his white t-shirt. She yanked the man back and tossed him to the ground. The perp wasn’t very big but Whitney felt a surge of energy as she took a knee to wait for her friends to hopefully return.

  The euphoria in her head quickly shifted to a muzzy state and Whitney collapsed face first into the wild green blades, crushing the chlorophyll and releasing a grassy odor. She could swear Trent was speaking to her and asking if she was alright.

  Whitney couldn’t answer. The words never made it from her head to her throat to her lips as darkness reigned supreme in her vision.

  Screams of sirens started to beat on her ears in a steady drumming. Whitney assumed she was hallucinating as death conspired with itself to finish her off. She thought about God and her mother. She wondered if her mother had been right about religion all along. She tried to open her eyelids and only darkness prevailed.

  Whitney felt her body hovering above the ground and then moving at a tremendous speed. She assumed this was the trip to the afterlife that she had never believed in. Whitney became tired. She wanted to give up. Everything was almost over.

  She tried to take solace in the fact that she had saved her husband and one of her best friends from that maniacal man. Whitney thought about her family and realized her mother had been right. She regretted not having any children. She had finally found the perfect man, but it had turned out to be too late.

  She tried to shift her thoughts to the good times and remember the family fun she had experienced over the years. Brilliant colors started to smear the memories until they were completely blurred out. Visions of lightning bolts careening through a purple valley disappeared and only a bright white light remained.

  Whitney looked back and forth in two directions. One end had the glaring bright spotlight and the other was a calm darkness. Her neck muscles stretched as her head bounced from side to side trying to decide which path to travel. An ivory hand emerged from the brightness followed by a soothing voice.

  “Come to the light. We will take away all the pain. We promise.”

  A dark open hand, big enough for Whitney to sit in came from the black cloud.

  A deep voice bellowed, “Come with us. We’ll help you get revenge on your cheating husband and horrible friend.

  Whitney had nearly forgotten about those thoughts. She didn’t care anymore. “Which path is easier?” she whispered.

  Both hands simultaneously reached out for Whitney. The giant hands wrestled with each other and jostled for position. The hands tugged at Whitney, trying to pull her to the light or dark side.

  14

  Whitney sat on her hospital bed and tried to eat her bland turkey, cold mashed potatoes and coagulated gravy.

  Trent, who was sitting in the chair next to the bed, said, “He goes by the names of Terrence Derby or Lance Lemure now and he was planning to steal some of the most famous paintings from museums around the world. They planned on killing at least fifty-six guards if necessary.”

  Whitney could still feel the anesthesia long after the successful surgery. “I can’t believe he left town right after I had rejected him in the eighth grade. He’s even creepier than Dankstone.”

  Trent said, “You turning into that dragon and getting us out of that video game world early caused him to try to scramble back and get one of his biggest money makers, Robbie. He has sold “rides” inside Robbie for upwards of three hundred thousand dollars. Several people died in the process that he is going to have to answer for.”

  “What a sicko. He kidnapped a kid in a coma to let other people infest his body for money. Human nature gets worse with each adventure we’ve encountered.” She scratched her nose which still felt numb.

  Trent said, “And the early escape caused him to not even have a chance to execute the grand heist. That was planned to go down tomorrow and we found all the plans in his residence near the Capitol. I talked to Barret about this and he said the Bureau has been on him for a while but they didn’t think he would strike for a few years. He says hi, by the way.”

  Whitne
y smiled. She liked Barret and planned to make him one of their first employees at the Merrick-Powers Agency. “I’m just glad I got a chance to be strong for you and could save you and Tara. I got to be the big tough person for once. Maybe someday we’ll get to take the rest of our honeymoon.”

  Trent smiled. “I had no doubt you would come through. I didn’t think you would do it by shifting into a dragon, but I had all the faith in the world in you.”

  Whitney stretched her sore body. “It’s just about shifting water. Did they get Robbie out of there?”

  Trent replied, “Yep. He’s somewhere in this hospital too. Some weird stuff started to happen when we were leaving that school. Branches snapping off trees and flying at some of the cops. It was pretty crazy.”

  “I had read so much about that place and wanted to visit it when I was a teen, but nothing prepared me for that creepy vibe as soon as I set foot across the land line.” Whitney never wanted to go back.

  Trent said, “Well, I couldn’t be prouder of you. They said that wound should heal up in no time at all. Actually, the doctor said it should be about a month, but that’s like no time at all. You’re lucky too. They said if the bullet was a quarter inch in a different direction, it would have hit a vein and you probably would have bled to death. You’re blessed.”

  A heavyset nurse with a welcoming smile entered the room. The brunette lady adjusted her glasses and checked the writing on the dry erase board. She wrote a few notes on a clipboard.

  She turned to Whitney and pointed at her white tray of food. “Are you done with that?”

  “I’ll keep this orange drink here, but you can take the rest.” Whitney grabbed the small white carton and the nurse leaned in and scooped up the tray and empty straw wrapper next to it.

  The nurse asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “Alright. The painkillers are helping a lot.” Whitney let out an audible yawn and realized she needed to brush her teeth.

  The young lady said, “That’s what they are for. That answers my next question then. I still can’t believe a pregnant woman like you was out there dodging gunshots. Or at least trying to dodge them. The nurses have been calling you Jane Bond. We think you should write a book or a screenplay about it.”