That was my job.
I raced into the horse barn. “Xanthos?” I called as I rushed over to his stall.
No answer.
“My brudda?” I shouted as I braced the bars of his cozy pen to see if he was sleeping.
It was empty.
But there was movement in the dark shadows at the far corner of the stall. Xanthos!
Nope.
“You miserable little brat,” brayed The Prayer as it crept out of the gloom. Its right pincer was gripping the same Opus 24/24 with the charred muzzle that he had used to murder my parents years ago.
“You’re the best that the Alpar Nokian Protectorship can find to go up against a being as mighty as ME? I possess all the dark powers and the Legions of the Light put their hope and trust in YOU?” It laughed mirthlessly. “You are a gutless coward, an infant crawling here and there, spending more than ten Earth years HIDING from the confrontation you’ve always known would be your last. Your weakness sickens me, Danny Boy. You are the same insignificant brat you were when you hid in that basement and used silly trickery to save your own life instead of bravely avenging your parents’ deaths! You were a coward then, and you are a coward now.”
I’d heard enough.
I stepped forward.
I was about to introduce the alien freak to the deadlier examples of my “silly trickery” when—BAM!
The thing swung its left arm out of the murky gloom.
And I saw its other weapon.
Mel.
Chapter 39
“DANIEL?” GASPED MEL. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you come for me?”
“Because,” said The Prayer, chuckling, “your so-called soul mate has been too busy running away from me and playing superhero with a pretty thing named Mikaela.”
“That’s not true,” I said, sounding way too defensive.
“”Why didn’t you rescue me, Daniel?” cried Mel, sounding a whole lot needier than she ever had before. Even her brilliant blue eyes looked weak and watery.
I remembered what Xanthos had communicated to me the day I first set eyes on Melody Judge: Her name is Mel, short for Melody, a name that suits her personality quite well, yah? She is like the song you hear in the morning and cannot get out of your head all day. Mel was an incredibly brave girl, normally, but being The Prayer’s prisoner had clearly traumatized her. Seeing her this way made me even angrier.
“Did that thing hurt you?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she choked out. “Help me, Daniel. Save me.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, hoping to crack through her thick veneer of fear. “If this creepazoid even looks at you the wrong way, I’ll braid his stupid dreadlocks together into ponytails so he looks like the Swiss Miss girl on a carton of pudding cups.”
Mel didn’t smile. The Prayer jostled her forward.
“Take your stinking paws off her, you dirty insect!” I yelled. “Leave Mel out of this.”
“With pleasure, Daniel. All you have to do is agree to my previous terms.”
“Daniel?” said Mel, her voice panicky, sounding like the opposite of her spunky self. “What’s Number 1 talking about?”
I tried to play it off. “Nothing.”
“NOTHING?” shrieked The Prayer. “It is EVERYTHING!”
The giant mantis stomped its feet like a long-legged three-year-old throwing a temper tantrum.
“Daniel?” Mel was whimpering, her body trembling.
I moved toward her.
“NO!” roared The Prayer, hopping between us. “You cannot touch her until you agree to my terms. You are Number One on my list, Danny Boy. Make the exchange now or I will withdraw my very generous offer!”
I had to get Mel safely away from this insane insectoid.
That was step one.
Step two would be kicking the big bug’s butt. Because if I didn’t, Melody Judge and every other human being currently inhabiting planet Earth would soon be sucked into a death spiral of oblivion, courtesy of Number 1’s fast-growing black hole.
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve got a deal. No more tricks. No more leaps across time or space. You can kill me, right after you set Mel free.”
Chapter 40
“EXCELLENT!” CHORTLED THE Prayer. “Kiss your girlfriend good-bye, Daniel. It is time for you to join your mother, your father, and all your young Alpar Nokian friends on the far side of life.”
Much to my surprise, The Prayer retreated two giant steps, giving Mel and me a little privacy to say our good-byes.
I took hold of Mel’s shoulders with both my hands and sidled around so all Number 1 could see was my back.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “As soon as you’re safe, I’m going to bring that thing a whole galaxy of hurt.”
Mel didn’t smile. Or offer to fight Number 1 with me. She didn’t even try to talk me out of exchanging my life for hers.
Instead, she stared at me with vacant, ice-blue eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Did that thing drug you? Did it get inside your head?”
I thought about all the brainwashing and memory scrubbing I’ve done in my time as the Alien Hunter. Surely the Number 1 evil alien of the twenty-first century could do the same.
“Mel?” I said loudly, in case she’d gone deaf. “Are you in there? This is me. Daniel.”
Finally, she spoke. “I know who you are, Daniel.”
Her stone-cold blue eyes filled with red-hot rage. She was staring at me with nothing but dark, undiluted hatred.
I moved in to hug her, hoping that the warmth of my body would melt away whatever deep freeze of a trance Number 1 had zapped into the girl of my dreams.
That’s when the nightmare began.
Mel dropped down and lunged forward, locking her hands behind my knees and executing a perfect double-leg takedown. I hit the ground hard. But, fighting my body’s natural instinct to tense up when attacked, I didn’t let my knees lock. Instead, I went with her momentum, kept my knees bent, and rolled her forward over my head.
When I twisted over and sprang to my feet, Mel was already coming toward me at a run. She leaped up, raised her knee, then snapped her foot forward in a powerful front kick to my face.
I took the blow and landed flat on my back.
Mel pounced on my chest, pinning me down with her knees.
“Okay,” I gasped. “I think we need to have a serious talk.”
“Fine,” she said, linking her hands together, raising them over her head, and bringing her double fist down like a pile driver to my mouth. My mouth filled with blood and a couple of teeth went a little loose in my jaw. “Talk through that.”
“Enough,” I gurgled, holding up both my hands to beg for a momentary ceasefire—mostly because I didn’t want to hurt her (or lose any teeth).
Mel bounded up off my chest and laughed.
I sat up and spat out the blood.
“What did that thing do to you?” I asked. Was she an imposter? It didn’t seem like it—she even had the faint scar that I wasn’t able to heal, despite my best efforts.
Mel was grinning like a lunatic.
“Nothing compared to what we’re about to do to you,” she said. Then she gracefully twirled around and donkey-kicked me right between the eyes.
That’s when my whole world went dark.
Chapter 41
WHEN I WOKE UP, I was strapped to a stainless steel table with gutters running down its edges to a drain hole.
The Prayer was leaning over the table, hungrily rubbing its jagged forelegs together in anticipation of a feast. Its bulbous black eyes, glistening like oil-slicked basketballs, were maybe six inches away from my face. Its snakeskin snout twitched as its red dreadlocks dribbled down between its antennae to tickle my chest and neck.
I fought against my restraints but it was no use. I was trapped like a formaldehyded frog pinned to a block of wax.
I glanced to my left.
Mel was holding a pair of jumper cables.
“
Call it the Stockholm syndrome,” Number 1 boasted. “The kidnap victim now sides with her captor… ME! But, can you blame her, Danny Boy? You see, I showed Melody a little snippet of you and Dana sleeping under the stars in that worthless museum. I showed her how you were gawking at that stardust girl when she sashayed onto your train. Poor, poor little orphan boy Danny. You had no father to teach you about girls because I killed him before he could. So, allow me to school you: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!”
“Wait a second.…” I zeroed in on Mel. “You are Dana. Dana is you.…”
But she wasn’t listening.
She was clamping her jumper cables to my toes. One was the grounding cable. The other a hot-wire.
She flicked a switch and sent a sizzling electrical shock soaring through my neuromuscular system. The pain was excruciating.
And then it stopped. I nearly cried from relief.
Until Mel hit the switch for the second time.
My body spasmed. My fingers splayed out in agony. My back bucked and my head banged against the hard steel table.
That’s when I knew the girl torturing me wasn’t Mel.
Melody Judge could never be that cruel to any living creature.
Clearly, this torture was going on inside my head, though the burns on my wrists from straining against the straps felt pretty real.
The Mel thing flicked the switch again, cutting off the electricity that had fried who knows how many of my brain’s synapses—right when I needed my full mental powers. If this torture was a mind game, the only way to fight back would be to imagine the pain away.
But before I could, the Mel thing flipped the switch again.
“No,” I begged through numb lips as my body convulsed on the table. “Stop. Please.”
The Prayer mocked my pleading. “S-s-top! P-p-p-lease! Ha!”
So did the thing that wasn’t really Mel. “What a wuss!”
Then she cranked up the voltage.
I knew the pain searing every fiber of my being wasn’t real but it seemed a whole lot worse than real.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Mel!” I screamed hysterically. “Whoever you are. Stop. Please!”
All I heard in response to my plea was uncontrollable laughter.
From The Prayer and his newest disciple: my soul mate Mel.
Chapter 42
WRITHING IN AGONY on that cold stainless steel table, my girlfriend’s merry giggles torturing me mentally as the electricity shattered me physically, I have never, ever felt so broken.
The twisted avatar of Mel was killing me with pain.
I was a total disgrace. Weak. Unable to defend myself, let alone a whole planet. Worst of all, I had dishonored my parents’ missions on Earth and their memories by letting their killer escape justice for so long. And now that the horrid creature had me in its clutches. I had no hope of avenging them.
On the humiliation scale of one to ten, I was somewhere near thirty.
This was worse than that dream I sometimes have of showing up naked at school. A school where all the teachers are nuns.
Worse than finally summoning up the courage to call up a cute girl to ask her out and hearing nothing but laughter in reply.
For the first time ever, I wished I was dead.
I was done. Whatever mind games The Prayer was playing with me, they were working brilliantly.
I was ready to call it quits.
I was about to beg the horrid insect to slice through my neck with a quick snap of its saw-toothed claws, hoping the instant I became “the late Daniel X,” the pain, shame, and embarrassment would stop.
And then, in a blink of an eye, the pain went away.
Had my fervent wish come true? Was I dead?
No.
I was still lying on the cold steel table. The Prayer was still hovering over me.
Mel was gone.
“OUT!” The Prayer screeched triumphantly.
“Wha-a-a?” I mumbled.
“Out! Go! Run away, Danny Boy.”
I raised one arm and then the other. The straps binding me to the surgical table had been removed. I was able to sit up. I swiveled around to face the beast.
“Why didn’t you finish this?” I spat out weakly.
“Finish it? No, no, no. This cannot end so easily, Danny Boy. You are being released so I may have the sublime pleasure of hunting you down yet again.” Its scaly snout twitched rapidly. “Catch, torture, and release, Daniel. Catch, torture, and release. I so look forward to doing all of this again! You are the last of my targets. The top name on my list. We must allow your exquisite pain and my delicious pleasure to go on and on and on. We cannot end our splendid story so soon, can we? Where’s the sport in that?”
The Prayer rocked back its head, rolled it around on its stick of a neck, and laughed fiendishly.
“Go!” it commanded. “Do what your dead daddy told you to do. Go find your ‘backup.’ And, when you find it, bring it back to me!”
The beast exhaled a blast of putrid sewer gas at me. The reeking stench made me grimace and recoil.
I so wanted to fight back.
To take down The Prayer, right then and there.
I was through playing games. I was also done with self-pity and wishing I were dead. Now I had a different kind of death wish: for this giant, gangly, murdering monster to finally pay the price for what it had done to my family; for what it had just done to me on its torture table.
But I couldn’t.
It was like I was drugged again. That misty blast of green puke gas from Number 1’s quivering schnozzle must’ve been some kind of nerve gas or knockout powder.
My eyelids felt like they were tethered to dumbbells.
I toppled back on the table. All I could do was close my eyes and sleep.
A very deep and dreamless sleep.
Chapter 43
I FINALLY WOKE UP. Totally frustrated and beyond confused.
Because I was in a bed. A hospital bed.
The same hospital bed I had woken up in before. I recognized the blue knit blanket.
A nurse dressed in scrubs with a stethoscope draped around her neck leaned into my field of vision.
“I’m Nurse O’Hara,” she said with a smile. “It’s so good to see your beautiful blue eyes, Daniel.”
It was her again.
“Where am I?”
“The hospital. Intensive care.”
I tried to sit up.
“Now, now. You mustn’t push yourself, Danny Boy.”
Danny Boy. This time, I knew for sure where “Nurse O’Hara” picked up that little pet name. The Prayer. This was probably the start of my next torture round in the twisted “catch, torture, and release” hunting game.
“Saints be praised!” crowed the way-too-Irish nurse. “You’re alive.”
I shook my head in disbelief and smirked. “This is the part where the three doctors come in, right?”
Nurse O’Hara looked momentarily puzzled by that.
“Yep,” I said, as three white coats strode into the room. “Right on cue.”
“Good morning, Daniel,” chirped the handsome guy with perfect hair who looked like he’d just waltzed off the set of that TV show The Doctors.
“We heard the good news,” said the one who looked like Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
“It’s a miracle,” said Nurse O’Hara, wiping a fake tear from her rosy cheek. The second time through, she was definitely overplaying it. Going borderline Soap Opera on me.
I knew this whole scene was another move in The Prayer’s Olympic-sized mind games. This was the ultimate torture: taking me out of commission while the forces of darkness’s solar-system-sucking black hole grew and grew like a giant zit on the tip of the Milky Way’s nose. Number 1 was buying time for Terra Firma to reach its event horizon—that point of no return.
“So,” I said, “I guess I had a motorcycle accident?”
“That’s right,” said Dr. Gupta. “It’s a very encour
aging sign that you remember what happened, Daniel.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. I’ve been in another coma, huh?”
“Another?” asked one more familiar-looking doctor.
“What was I gone for this time? Eighteen months? Two years? Or did I totally Rip Van Winkle it this time and now it’s like twenty years in the future and earthlings are buzzing around with jetpacks on their backs?”
All three doctors and the nurse were gawking at me like I was insane.
“You know the funny thing about comas?” I said. “No matter how many you guys tell me I’ve had or how long I’ve been conked out, I never seem to age at all.”
“Daniel,” said the Dr. Gupta look-alike. “You need to rest.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I said, looking up to the ceiling, figuring Number 1 was somewhere watching this daytime drama unfold.
I tossed off my hospital blanket and yanked aside the sheets.
“You’re not to leave that bed, young man,” scolded Nurse O’Hara.
“Or what? You guys will haul in another set of jumper cables and a couple of car batteries? Or maybe this time, since the hospital bed is adjustable, you’ll just tilt it back and waterboard me.”
Nurse O’Hara turned to the handsome dude. “Dr. Fabricius? Do something!”
The doc reached into the deep hip pocket of his lab coat.
Before he could extract another syringe filled with blackout serum, I sprang out of the bed, spun around, and landed a roundhouse kick to the handsome man’s breadbasket. He clutched his stomach, dropped to his knees, and tried to remember how to breathe.
I went for Dr. Gupta next.
He was coming at me with a wickedly sharp needle. I swung up my arm and locked my hand around his wrist, catching him in midthrust.
Then, twisting his wrist until I heard it pop, I brought that needle down hard and gave the good doctor a taste of his own medicine—right in the thigh. Dr. Gupta’s eyes rolled back in their sockets as he drifted off to happy comaland.
Unfortunately, while I was administering my treatment to Dr. Gupta, I felt a needle jab in my butt.