Chapter Forty
Thijmen darted across the lawn at full speed, his mind racing at what he had just seen inside the mansion. What had he seen inside the mansion? It made no sense. His friends had vanished into thin air, destroyed by a rainbow. In all his life, rainbows had been beautiful, nature’s announcement that the storm was over, that all was well. Now, they were harbingers of doom. How was such a thing possible?
He crossed the barrier of bushes into the jungle line and skidded to a stop. He turned and looked back at the mansion, saw a beam of multi-colored light erupt through the roof and bring the entry way collapsing down in a loud crash. What power had been unleashed by the white-haired man? And then he saw a silhouette stumbling across the lawn, ambling in no definitive direction, moaning in pain and weeping. Nereika. He took a step back toward the lawn and felt a hand grip his bicep. He turned and looked into Willem’s face.
“Look, its Nereika,” Thijmen said, nodding his head toward their old friend.
“I know,” Willem said.
“We can save her, now.”
Just then the air shattered in a small flash from one of the windows along the side of the building, a black disk spinning through the air before landing, a blade thrust into the grass of the lawn. A few heartbeats later, the younger white man crawled quickly through the window and dropped to the balcony, vaulting over the railing onto the lawn below.
The two men exchanged glances, and then Willem looked past his friend at Nereika, who had made her way to the middle of the lawn and collapsed to her knees, her red robe losing its ghostly shimmer with each moment that went by.
“We can’t be sure,” Willem said.
The pair watched as the stranger from the beach crossed the lawn toward Nereika, the man in a wary crouch, as if he expected Nereika to turn on him. Thijmen looked again at Willem.
“This might be our only chance, he’s alone.”
Willem shook his head. “No. We can’t risk it. We don’t know what he’s capable of. You saw what the white-haired man did.”
Through the jungle they heard the footfalls of the last of their party, scattered through the underbrush, running in panic.
“We should go, now,” Willem said.
Thijmen took one last look at his long lost friend, felt a pang of loss all over again, turned into the jungle and ran for the village with his friend.