Van Bender and the Burning Emblems (The Van Bender Archives #1) (13 page)

“Well... then things will get messy.”

“Ah... I must admit, I’m not sure I like the sound of that. You’re okay with this? Zipping into an unknown situation?”

She gave me a wicked grin. “I do it all the time.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

She yanked me forward, into the zip-door.

Chapter 22: Almost unstoppable

Times like that, I want to just kiss the boy.

-Marti Walker

The pain ended before I could scream, and I still wanted to scream when it had ended, but I didn’t because an all-consuming light distracted me.

I’d gone from a dimly-lit hallway to a blinding location. Plus, the zipping had torn my eyes apart and re-built them. My eyeballs needed a few moments to adjust. I covered them with my hands and tried not to move, but Marti pulled me to one side.

“If anyone from SOaP zips in, it’ll be to that spot.”

The sound of rushing water and wind in trees filled my ears. I blinked to try and adjust my eyes.

“We need to get going,” Marti said. “Too much time has passed, already.”

I nodded, keeping my arm up around my eyes, and looking at the ground as we proceeded. Pine needles covered the dirt, and we brushed past low bushes.

Marti said, “We made this zip site to maximize our safety. The lights keep animals out of the immediate area. They’re motion sensitive.”

As we moved away, the floodlights dimmed as they fell behind, and I could look up and around me. To our right, a narrow river rushed by. Evergreen trees grew on both banks and all around us—except for the narrow path we followed.

“Wouldn’t the lights attract a lot of attention?”

“We’re in an out-of-the-way place, sheltered by hills and trees. Not much light will escape that little grove. And besides, they’ll turn off.”

As if on cue, the lights died, plunging us into darkness.

I stopped.

“Come on,” she said, pulling on my arm.

“I can’t see a thing.”

“I can. Just follow me. We’ll be fine. We don’t have much time.”

She kept saying that—about the rush we were in—and I had to remind myself that despite everything I’d seen and experienced, only about twenty minutes had actually passed since the alarm had gone off at the SOaP facility.

I followed her, my eyes wide as I adjusted to the new darkness. We trudged in silence, holding hands. The ground sloped upward a little at first, but then more steeply. By the time we reached the top of the hill, I could see pretty well by the light that filtered down through the tree branches.

“Why Colorado?” I said.

She grunted. “Apparently John Denver convinced Nick that this is the best place on earth. He confines most of his magic usage to this area. Can you feel it, again?”

“Feel what?”

“The emotion you generated tonight.”

Now that she mentioned it, I
could
feel it. In my heart. Just like earlier, back in my dressing room. I could sense the emotion off somewhere in the distance.

“Why couldn’t I feel it before?”

“Distance. Now we’re back within range. The closer we get, the stronger you’ll feel it.”

We entered a clearing at the top of a hill. Below, perhaps a quarter mile on, moonlight glinted off the rooftop of a gigantic house, and shone silver on the pine trees around it.

“Tell me,” I said. “Why are you here? Why did you want to come get the emotion? It’s not your problem, after all.”

She looked intently at the house. “I’m SOaP. I want to foil the Sunbeams.”

“Somehow, I don’t believe that’s everything.”

She looked at me with tight lips. Her eyes glinted in the moonlight, and her blonde hair shone.

“I want to recover something called a ‘Tangle Rope.’ No one takes me seriously. No one but Agent Maynerd. Everyone thinks I’m just some dumb blonde country teenage star girl.”

“Well, you are,” I said. “Except for the dumb part.”

She spoke with sharpness. “That’s right. And I want to prove it. That’s why I came and brought you—to show them that I can do things just as difficult as them.” Still looking away from me, out at the valley below, she let out a big sigh. “When Grant Budly brought me to SOaP, do you know what they said?”

I shrugged. “Probably, ‘It’s not often you find a pretty girl who can sing and ride a horse.’“

That at least made her smile. The starlight lit her face just enough for me to see a glint in her eyes.

“As a matter of fact, Agent Maynerd said, ‘She’s just a kid. About all she’s good for is riding horses and singing, and she ain’t even that good at either of those.’”

“My experience with him hasn’t been that great either.”

“Well, I caught him on a bad day. He’s normally nice enough. We’ve worked together on a few projects. I don’t blame him for half of what he said. But he was only saying what everyone else has been saying for all my life.” Her tone took on a mocking, snotty air. “‘She’s too tall to ride the barrels.’ ‘Too gangly.’ ‘She can’t carry a tune.’ ‘I’ve never met a blond with any brains.’ Crap like that.”

I couldn’t fathom what that would be like. Except for my parents keeping me locked away, people had only encouraged me, tried to build me up. During the cancer, all the doctors and nurses had done nothing but tell me I could do it. If I could overcome cancer, I could do anything.

And I believed them.

Right up until I hit it big and my mom turned me into a hermit.

Marti grunted and looked at me again. Her face turned away from the moonlight, into darkness.

“People seem to want to stop me from things. Like they’re jealous. They want to hold me back. But I know I can do anything, Richie. I can. Anything I can dream, I can do. Ain’t nothing that can stop me. Not anyone around me. None of them.”

She looked back over the trees and shook her head. I wished I could be as confident as her in the face of opposition. I suppose maybe with Kurt and Sandra by my side, I had that night, just by meeting Nick. But I was no where near as determined as Marti.

“Only me,” she said. “I’m the only one that can stop me—then only if I believe everyone else.” She shot me a sharp look. “And I don’t believe them. They’re all idiots.”

“I think you’re right.”

Her gaze stayed on me, long and hard as if she were trying to decide if I was sincere—which I was. Then she shook her head, and grunted.

“Step back, so I can get some brink ready.”

I moved back along the trail about fifteen feet. She took out her brink and poured some of the blue substance into her palm. I expected her to cast a spell, but instead she screwed the lid back on the vial and put it back in her purse. While in there, she grabbed Hello Kitty.

“We need to be ready for anything,” she said. “You need to obey me. Exactly. If I tell you to do something, you do it.”

“There’s no reason to be bossy.”

She gave me a long look with raised eyebrows. “Yes, there is. Stay back enough that your diffuser doesn’t mess things up.”

She led the way. I followed about fifteen feet back, which feels like a long way when you’re walking through a forest in the night. We went through the trees all the way up to—and over—the fence behind a cabin, and across the lawn.

As we reached the concrete patio and approached the house, she stepped into the first trap.

Chapter 23: Quadruple jeopardy

I only set traps to keep small mountain animals out of the house. No, really.

-Nick Savage

It happened so fast that I nearly jumped out of my underwear.

Which would have been
really
embarrassing.

Marti crouched low at the edge of a patio that stretched over to the house, and drew a rainbow shape that touched the ground on both sides. As she ducked forward under it, she drew a line straight overhead and in front of her, while reaching backward with the other hand and lighting the place where the rainbow met the straight line. The flames spread along the brink, and she darted forward, pushing the line of brink ahead of her, staying just a few inches ahead of the flame.

“Come on!” she said. “But stay back a dozen feet.”

I ducked under the burning brink, onto the patio.

And fire leaped up all around me.

I don’t know where it came from, but the flames licked at an invisible barrier around Marti and I. The half-circle she’d drawn, and the line perpendicular to it, had created a tunnel that fire couldn’t penetrate.

We continued crawling, me more than a dozen feet behind her. She drew the line ahead of us, so the tunnel pushed aside the flames. She reached the porch where the flames ended, stepped out of the tunnel, and stood up straight. As I emerged only a few seconds after her, the fire disappeared. The smell of burnt chemicals lingered.

I stood next to her, panting. She looked at me and shook her head.

“Relax, cowboy. That’s just the start.”

“A little warning would have been nice.”

“Nah, it’s fun to watch you panic.”

Over the next five minutes we sprung three more traps.

The first trap involved large blades shooting out of cracks in the walls and bouncing off my neck, head, and body. Before we walked into that one, Marti cast a spell that apparently made us cut-resistant, but did not prevent the terror of thinking for an instant I was going to die.

At that point, I concluded that Marti had never actually come close to dying. She didn’t understand her own mortality—else why would she walk right into these traps?

I, on the other hand, understood perfectly well that bodies can take injury and die. I’d known plenty of kids that died in the hospital or that had their bodies all mangled and twisted from accidents or disease.

So, after the blades, I moved forward with trepidation.

The next trap consisted of a clicking noise, the floor disappearing from beneath us, and a sudden drop. I almost wet my pants, because I swear I heard alligator jaws snapping in the dark pit below us.

Before we walked into that one, Marti had cast a spell that had no apparent effect until we began to fall. But after about ten feet of plunging, we levitated back up to the floor, and continued on.

At that point, I asked, “Can’t we avoid the traps?”

She gave me a maniacal grin. “We have to trigger them to get where we need to go. Exhilarating, isn’t it?”

“You’re insane.”

“Oh, relax. Everything is perfectly under control. We’re getting closer to the emotion, right?”

We were. I could feel the emotion nearer, ahead and to the left.

I stepped away as she drew another spell, then moved back close so she could light it. The variety of emblems I’d seen had already started to confuse me. I’d almost stopped paying attention to them.

“The diffuser seems more like an inconvenience than anything,” I said.

“It can be. Same with that other diffuser spell. It requires a handful of people to draw, but then it creates an entire area where spells can’t be used while the spell is in effect.
That
can be very annoying when you’re not expecting it.”

As we stepped through a door, Marti gave me an instant of warning by saying, “Try not to squeal.”

A ghostly shape emerged from the ceiling, giving off a soft white glow. It had a dozen arms, four heads on long necks, and gaping mouths full of teeth dripping with shiny white ooze. It floated down, wailing. Strips of cloth floated around it, like a hundred arms concealing its body and any legs it might have had.

It came directly at us. I froze in place and began to squeal. Like a little piggy. Marti clamped a hand over my mouth and looked away. I closed my eyes and stood there trembling. The specter’s wailing filled my ears for fifteen seconds.

When I opened my eyes, the light from the specter had disappeared. Except for the glow from the moon coming through a window, the hallway sat in darkness. I pulled my mouth away from Marti’s hands. She still had her eyes closed.

Miraculously, my heart not only still beat, but did so at a normal pace. She stepped away, her wide eyes darting back and forth, her mouth turned down in a tight-lipped frown.

“What
was
that?” I said.

“An illusion. It’s designed to kill you by giving you a heart attack. The spell I cast ensures that your heart continues to beat normally for five minutes. That’s why you’re still alive.”

The way she wrung her hands and had her shoulders slightly hunched made her look more shaken up than she’d been with the other traps. It didn’t inspire confidence. She pointed down the hall to the right. Her hand trembled.

“We have to split up, now.”

“Why, are we suddenly in a Scooby Doo episode?”

“I’m going this way to get the Tangle Rope. You go the other way, toward the emotion.”

“Brilliant idea, given that I have no way of defending myself against the traps.”

“There aren’t any more.”

“I don’t believe that for a nanosecond.”

“Our intelligence indicates that these four traps are all that Nick has in this portion of the house.”

“It’s still a terrible idea.”

“We don’t have time to stick together.”

“I don’t have time to get killed.”

She pointed down the hallway.

“Just follow the emotion. Meet back here in—” She stopped, yanked her phone out of her purse, and looked at the screen. “We don’t have much time. It’s been thirty-five minutes since the Sunbeams started attacking the Reservoir. We’ve got maybe five before they’re foiled and start zipping out. Nick will no doubt come here.” She gave me a serious look. “Five minutes. Back here.”

She turned and headed down the hallway, purse over her shoulder. At the hallway’s end, where light spilled through the window, she looked back, waved me on, and went through the door.

Swallowing hard, I turned toward my end of the hallway, and really hoped that the SOaP intelligence regarding traps proved accurate.

Just a hint—it didn’t.

Chapter 24: I manage to escape bliss

In most cases it’s best to stay with Richie. He always gets himself into trouble when he’s alone.