At the front of the house, beside the door, a flight of stairs ascends to the second level. I begin walking up them. The third step groans under my foot.
“Hello?” a voice yells from the top of the stairs.
I freeze, holding my breath.
“Frank, is that you?”
I stay silent. I hear somebody stand from a chair, the creak of footsteps on a hardwood floor approaching. A man appears at the top of the stairs. Dark shaggy hair, sideburns, an unshaven face. Not as big as the man who left earlier, but not exactly small either.
“Who the hell are you?” he asks.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I say.
He screws his face up into a scowl, vanishes and reappears five seconds later holding a wooden baseball bat in his hand.
“How did you get in here?” he asks.
“I would put the bat down if I were you.”
“How did you get in here?”
“I am faster than you are and I am far stronger.”
“Like hell you are.”
“I’m looking for a friend of mine. He came here this morning. I want to know where he is.”
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know who you are talking about.”
“You’re one of them!” he screams. He holds the bat as a baseball player would, both white-knuckled hands at the thin base poised to swing. There is genuine fear in his eyes. His jaw is tightly clenched. “You’re one of them! Why don’t you just leave us alone already!?”
“I am not one of them. I’ve come for my friend. Tell me where he is.”
“Your friend is one of them!”
“No he isn’t.”
“So you know who I’m talking about?”
“Yes.”
He takes a step down.
“I’m warning you,” I say. “Drop the bat and tell me where he is.”
My hands are shaking from the uncertainty of the situation, from the fact that he has a bat in his hands while I have nothing but my own abilities. I’m unnerved by the fear in his eyes. He takes another step down. There are only six stairs between us.
“I’m going to take your head off. That’ll send your friends a message.”
“They aren’t my friends. And I assure you, you’d be doing them a favor if you hurt me.”
“Let’s see then,” he says.
He comes racing down the stairs. There is nothing I can do but react. He swings the bat. I duck and it hits the wall with a thud, leaving a large splintered hole in the wood panel. I come up after him and lift him in the air, one hand gripping his throat, the other in his armpit, carrying him back up the stairs. He flails, landing kicks to my legs and groin. The bat drops from his hands. It bounces hollowly down the stairs and I hear one of the windows break behind me.
The second floor is a wide-open loft. It is dark. The walls are covered with issues of They Walk Among Us, and where the issues end, alien paraphernalia takes up the rest—but unlike Sam’s, the posters are actual photographs taken over the years, blown up and grainy so that it is hard to make them out, mostly white blips on black backdrops. A rubber alien dummy with a noose around its neck sits in the corner. Somebody has added a Mexican sombrero to its head. Glow-in-the-dark stars are stuck to the ceiling. They seem out of place, more like something belonging in a ten-year-old girl’s room.
I throw the man to the ground. He scoots away from me and stands up. When he does I put all my power into the pit of my stomach and direct it towards him with a hard forward-thrusting motion, and he goes flying backwards and crashes into the wall.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“I’ll never tell you. He’s one of you.”
“I’m not who you think I am.”
“You guys will never succeed! Just leave Earth alone!”
I lift my hand and choke him. I can feel the flexed tendons beneath my hand even though I am not touching him. He can’t breathe and his face turns red. I let go.
“I’ll ask again.”
“No.”
I choke him once more, but this time when his face turns red I squeeze tighter. When I let go he begins to cry and I feel bad for him, for what I’ve done to him. But he knows where Henri is, has done something to him, and my sympathy ends almost as soon as it began.
After he catches his breath, and between sobs, he says, “He’s downstairs.”
“Where? I didn’t see him.”
“In the basement. The door is behind the Steelers banner in the living room.”
I dial my phone number from the telephone atop the middle desk. Sam doesn’t answer. Then I pull the phone from the wall and break it in half.
“Give me your cell phone,” I say.
“I don’t have one.”
I walk to the dummy and remove the noose from around its neck.
“Come on, man,” he pleads.
“Shut up. You’ve kidnapped my friend. You’re holding him against his will. You’re lucky all I’m doing is tying you up.”
I pull his arms behind him and tie the rope tightly around them, then tie him to one of the chairs. I don’t think that it will hold him for very long. Then I duct-tape his mouth shut so that he can’t yell and I sweep down the stairs and rip the Steelers banner from the wall, revealing a black door that is locked. I unlock it as I did the other. A set of wooden stairs leads down to total darkness.
The smell of mildew reaches my nose. I flip the light switch on and begin walking down, slowly, terrified at what I might find. The rafters are littered with cobwebs. I reach the bottom and immediately feel the presence of somebody else, somebody there with me. I stiffen, take a deep breath, and then turn.
There, in the corner of the basement, sits Henri.
“Henri!”
He is squinting from the light, his eyes adjusting. A length of duct tape is across his mouth. His hands are bound behind him, his ankles tied to the legs of the chair in which he is sitting. His hair is tousled, and down the right side of his face is a line of dried blood that looks almost black. The sight of it fills me with rage.
I rush over to him and rip the piece of tape from his mouth. He takes a deep breath.
“Thank God,” he says. His voice is weak. “You were right, John. It was foolish to come here. I’m sorry. I should have listened.”
“Shh,” I say.
I bend down and begin untying his ankles. He smells like urine.
“I was ambushed.”
“How many are there?” I ask.
“Three.”
“I’ve tied one of them up upstairs,” I say.
I free his ankles. He stretches his legs out and sighs with relief.
“I’ve been in this damn chair all day.”
I begin working his hands free.
“How in the hell did you get here?” he asks.
“Sam and I came together. We drove down.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“I had no other way.”
“What did you drive?”
“His father’s old truck.”
Henri is silent a minute while he ponders what that means.
“He doesn’t know anything,” I say. “I told him aliens are a hobby of yours, nothing more.”
He nods. “Well, I’m happy you made it. Where is he now?”
“Trailing one of them. I don’t know where they went.”
The creak of a floorboard comes from above us. I stand, Henri’s hands only halfway untied.
“Did you hear that?” I whisper.
We both watch the door with our breaths held. A foot steps onto the top stair, and then a second, and all at once the large man I passed earlier, the one Sam was trailing, comes into view.
“The party’s over, fellas,” he says. He is holding a gun aimed at my face. “Now, step away.”
I hold my hands up in front of me and take a step back. I think of using my powers to pull the gun away, but what if I somehow cause it to fire by accident? I’m not confident in my abilities just yet. It’s too risky.
“They told us you might be coming. That you would look like humans. That you were the real enemy,” the man says.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“They’re delusional,” Henri says. “They think we’re the enemy.”
“Shut up!” the man screams.
He takes three steps towards me. Then he moves the gun from me and fixes it straight on Henri.
“One false move by you and he gets it. You understand?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Now, catch this,” he says. He pulls down a roll of duct tape from the shelf beside him and throws it towards me. As it moves through the air, I stop it, suspended about eight feet off the ground, halfway between us. I start spinning it very quickly. The man stares at it, confused.
“What the…”
While he’s distracted, I move my arm towards him with a throwing motion. The roll of tape flies back and slams him in the nose. Blood starts gushing, and as he reaches for it he drops the gun, which hits the ground and goes off. I point my hand towards the bullet and I make it stop, and behind me I hear Henri laugh. I move the bullet so that it hangs in front of the man’s face.
“Hey, fat boy,” I say.
He opens his eyes and sees the bullet in the air in front of his face.
“You’re gonna need to bring more.”
I let the bullet fall to the ground at his feet. He turns to run, but I bring him back across the room and slam him against a large support pole. It knocks him out and he slumps to the floor. I grab the tape and tie him to the pole. After I’m sure he’s secured, I turn to Henri and finish freeing him.
“John, I think that’s the best surprise I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” he says in a whisper, such relief in his voice that I think tears might come next.
I smile proudly. “Thanks. It showed at dinner.”
“Sorry I missed it.”
“I told them you were tied up.”
He smiles.
“Thank God the Legacy came,” he says, and I realize that the stress of my Legacies forming—or the fear of them not forming—took a far greater toll on Henri than I imagined.
“So what happened to you?” I ask.
“I knocked on the door. All three of them were home. When I walked in one of them clubbed me in the back of the head. Then I woke up in this chair.” He shakes his head and says a long string of words in Loric that I know are curses. I finish untying him and he stands and stretches his legs.
“We need to get out of here,” he says.
“We have to find Sam.”
And then we hear him.
“John. You down there?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
EVERYTHING SLOWS. I SEE A SECOND PERSON at the top of the stairs. Sam yelps in surprise and I turn to him, silence filling my ears with the discordant hum that comes with slow motion. The man behind him gives him a hard shove that causes his feet to leave the ground, and, when he hits, it will be at the bottom of the stairs, where the concrete floor awaits. I watch him sail through the air, flailing his arms with a look of terror on his anguished face. Without giving it a single thought, my instinct takes over and I lift my hands at the very last second and catch him, his head a mere two inches above the basement floor. I set him down gently.