Alliance

  “But that’s to be expected, Will, after what you’ve been through—”

  “I know that, but it took my eyes off what really matters. What matters is going forward, finishing what we started. Finding out what’s behind everything that’s happened here. To us. To all of us.”

  “I agree with you,” she said, looking up at him, her eyes shining in the light.

  Believing in me, he thought.

  “Brooke, we just broke through on something,” he said. “A big new discovery that changes the whole picture and we’re going after it. All of us. We’re staying here over the summer and we want you to stay with us if you can figure out a way. We need your help.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes shining brightly in the pale light. “You really want me to? After the way I’ve treated you?”

  “Yes! Of course we do. I do. Want you to.”

  God, could she hear how awkward that was?

  “I’m so happy to hear you say that,” she said, and hugged him again. “I can’t promise it’s going to be easy, nothing ever is with my parents, but I’ll do the best I can to work it out.”

  “Good.”

  She held him at arm’s length for a moment, looking tense and serious. “They’re also not done trying to keep us apart.”

  “How?” asked Will.

  “Insisting that I transfer to another pod in the fall—”

  “You can’t let them do that.”

  “But this might work for us. If I agree to do that now, I can buy some time, come back to campus for a few weeks this summer. I can be pretty persuasive, too.”

  Tell me about it.

  She was about to kiss him again when from behind them came the crash of breaking glass. Will spun around and saw a window blow out a few stories up in the tall building behind them. A security alarm immediately sounded somewhere inside.

  “What the hell—” said Will.

  Instinctively, he pulled Brooke into the darkness against the ivy-covered hall behind them.

  The air around them grew hushed—Will realized that even the crickets in the area had suddenly gone dead quiet—and he sensed an unsettling presence disrupting the air somewhere near them in the night. Brooke was about to speak when Will put a finger to her lips.

  A shadow appeared, curling around the side of the building, distorted by the streetlamp. It kept growing until it looked impossibly tall and then stopped. It was the silhouette of a human figure, wrapped in a long coat or cloak. Its head swiveled slightly, almost mechanically, looking around, or maybe sniffing the air.

  I know who that is, thought Will. But it can’t be. It’s not possible.

  In the distance they heard at least two sirens approaching and the rumble of voices gathering nearby. Lights came on in windows to either side of where the crash had occurred and security lights around the base of the building lit up the elongated face of the glass and steel tower. Will realized they were looking at the medical center.

  Will leaned out slightly to chance a look. All he saw was a glimpse of light fabric flapping in its wake as the figure slipped quickly and silently away; when he stepped out to catch a better glimpse, it had disappeared into the night.

  “What the hell was that?” asked Brooke.

  “Do you know the people who’ve been watching you?” asked Will.

  “A team of three who work for my father. Professionals. You hardly even see them.”

  “For real?”

  “I told you, the ambassador does not mess around,” she said.

  “Could that have been one of them?”

  “Not a chance,” she said. “They get paid for not being noticed, but I’m sure I got out this time without their seeing me.”

  The commotion continued to grow nearby on the ground, attracting an even bigger crowd. Above them, security people appeared in the gaping hole in the face of the medical building, looking down.

  “We’d better get you out of here,” said Will.

  “We shouldn’t be seen together. Let’s talk back at the pod.”

  She started away, but Will caught her arm. “After that I don’t think you should be walking around by yourself right now.”

  “Don’t worry. Once they hear that alarm, my minders will be all over me,” she said, then lifted up a small black device. “Besides, I just paged them.”

  Brooke kissed him again, which nearly knocked him over, and then stole off toward the lights in the center of campus. Will headed straight for the medical center. He saw a lot of debris scattered below the hole above—glass, metal framing, even some rebar. An entire double window had blown out along with a sizeable chunk of wall on either side of it. A group of the Center’s Samoan security guards were already putting up a perimeter around the front entrance, ushering curious students to the other side of the barriers.

  Will spotted his friend Eloni among them, the biggest in the group and the squad’s senior officer. As he approached, Will exchanged a glance with him, asking if he could duck inside before they locked down the building. Eloni subtly waved him into the lobby.

  Inside, the tumult and confusion was even greater, with equal numbers of medical and security personnel rushing in and out. Will kept to the back of the room, slipped into the nearest stairwell, and dashed up to the fourth floor where the crash had come from.

  He’d never been on this level before; the door was secured with heavy-duty locks and thick wire-reinforced glass in the small slit window. He ducked down as more security brushed past inside, then watched them go into a room about halfway down the hallway.

  The room where the wall had exploded.

  Will ducked again as the Center’s headmaster, Stephen Rourke, came off an elevator in the hallway, flanked by Will’s genetics professor, Rulan Geist, and the school’s psychologist, Dr. Lillian Robbins. They headed for the same room, stopping in the doorway to survey the damage inside.

  A burly security guard burst through the door and headed down the stairs. Will just had time to duck back against the wall behind the door, then reached out and hooked the closing door with his foot.

  He let it land softly onto the toe of his shoe, holding it open a crack as he heard more people move by inside—Rourke muttering, “Find him!” to somebody—then wedged his body closer and grabbed the door with his hand. Will listened carefully until he heard silence, then moved into the inner corridor.

  This looked nothing like the rest of the medical center and more like a high-security prison. He noticed multiple security cameras overhead and he passed two other locked rooms with heavy metallic doors before he reached the open doorway.

  A small sliding panel on the wall beside the door had a name written on it: L OGILVY.

  Good God.

  A huge, heavily mechanized hospital bed filled the center of a large square room, surrounded by monitors, gauges, and instruments scattered around it on the floor. The warm night breeze pouring in through the gap fluttered papers around. Some powerful force had bent or broken the bed’s retractable sidebars. Four metallic shackles, attached high and low where a patient’s arms and legs would have rested, had been shattered as well.

  Cameras had been positioned in each corner, all focused on the bed. Will heard a helicopter approaching outside, and as the sweep of its eye-in-the-sky beam raked across the face of the building and into the room, he retreated back to the hall. He found himself leaning against the room’s door that stood open out into the corridor. It appeared, like the others he’d passed, to be made of solid steel. The side that had faced the room was gashed and heavily dented.

  Whatever had slammed through the window had tried to get out this way first.

  Will heard the elevator door at the end of the corridor open. He dashed away in the other direction, pushed through a door, and launched down a flight of stairs in a single leap to the landing, where he turned the corner and
jumped again to the next level. Pausing there, he called up his memory of the medical center’s structure and positioned himself on its grid, then located the building’s security center and plotted the best route to get there.

  Two stories down, through another door, down another corridor. When he encountered anyone, Will just put his head down and looked purposeful.

  RULE #62: IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO NOTICE YOU, ACT LIKE YOU BELONG THERE AND LOOK BUSY.

  The security center lay ahead on the right. Windows in the hallway looked in on the semicircular space, dominated by banks of monitors on a horseshoe-shaped desk. Two guards and Eloni gathered around them as another worked a nearby keyboard. Seeing Eloni, Will pushed through the door into the room almost without thinking because he knew what they were watching and he needed to see what was on that monitor.

  It was the recorded feed from the room he’d just left. Lights in the room were low, but the video was high-quality digital that revealed lots of detail. Will entered in time to see a tall raggedy figure with long scraggly hair rip the shackle off one of its wrists.

  Will felt like he’d been punched in the chest. That face. The way he set his shoulders.

  Lyle. Transformed. Taller, leaner, disheveled, but his body language and imperious bearing unmistakably Lyle-esque.

  With another yank, the figure pulled its other arm free from the remaining shackle, then moved off camera. A moment later he heard fierce pounding on the metallic door. Then in a blur of motion, the figure formerly known as Lyle Ogilvy reappeared, rushing headlong across the room. It lowered its shoulder like a fullback and crashed into the reinforced windows. The entire section exploded outward and the figure dropped out of sight.

  Eloni looked around and realized Will was standing there. He immediately took him by the arm and walked him out the door.

  “You can’t be in here, Will,” said Eloni urgently. “Not now. Forget you ever saw this.”

  “He never left,” said Will in disbelief. “Lyle was here this whole time? How could nobody tell us this?”

  Before Eloni could answer, they heard a mass of people heading their way from the lobby.

  “Get out the side door,” said Eloni. “Don’t tell anyone you were here.”

  “Not to worry.”

  Will split through the door behind him just as the crowd came into sight. He thought he saw Headmaster Rourke leading the way. With his thoughts and senses in an uproar, he hurried to a side exit and made sure no one saw him steal back outside.

  Almost completely dark now. Slipping on his hood, he walked quickly away from the building, and as soon as he was far enough away that no one would notice, he began to run.

  He glanced at his watch: 9:14 p.m.

  THE ALLIANCE REBORN

  “I know we haven’t talked about all this stuff for a while,” said Will, pacing around. “I needed some time to get my mind around what actually happened.”

  “No need to explain, Will,” said Ajay.

  The five roommates were gathered around the dining table in the pod, each with their tablet workbooks open. It was almost eleven o’clock by the time Will could gather them all together. He’d started by showing the photo of the Knights at their 1937 dinner to the girls and outlined for Brooke the deal they’d made with Nepsted: retrieve the key that would free him, in exchange for what he knew about the Knights and the Prophecy.

  “What makes you think the Knights are still active?” asked Brooke, looking uneasily at the others. “Didn’t we put them out of commission?”

  “That’s what we thought, too, until Ajay found this.” He pointed at the photograph. “But Mr. Hobbes is a Knight. And Mr. Hobbes is still out there.”

  “We only shut down the last twelve student Knights,” said Ajay glumly. “There’s no telling how many alumni members there might be.”

  “I think there is a way to know that,” said Will. “We know from school records they were active until the Center shut them down just before World War Two. They could have revived the Knights at any point after that, but what if they kept it going somehow, secretly, from when the club started in the 1920s until now?”

  “That would mean they’ve graduated twelve Knights a year for almost eighty-five years,” said Ajay, doing the math.

  “Dude, that’s like over two hundred dudes,” said Nick, his face in a knot.

  “One thousand and twenty,” said Ajay.

  “Way over,” said Nick.

  “And they aren’t necessarily all dudes,” said Brooke.

  “And by now most of them could have attained positions of power in every sector of society,” Ajay said. “A network of power, wealth, and influence, united in pursuing their own secret agenda.”

  The entire group stayed quiet for a moment, waiting for Brooke’s reaction. She didn’t respond, her eyes downcast, her face hard to read.

  “Give Ajay all the credit for persisting and getting to the truth behind that,” said Will.

  Looking at his friends’ faces, Will wondered why he’d even worried about what they’d say; they were the four people he trusted most in the world. He did, however, feel completely paranoid about looking at Brooke for longer than a second while Elise had her eyes on him, remembering, I don’t have to imagine that she can read my thoughts. SHE CAN ACTUALLY READ MY THOUGHTS.

  But so far Elise didn’t seem to be picking up any of the wobbly, conflicted feelings thrashing around inside him while in both their presence. They didn’t even seem overly aware of each other; both, well, all four of them really, were so focused on him.

  “There’s more to talk about,” said Will. “The other breaking news is that Lyle Ogilvy’s been on campus this whole time—”

  “Get out of this town!” said Ajay.

  “For real,” said Will. “The school and the cops had him cooped up in some kind of secret medical lockdown unit in the medical center, and now he’s on the loose—”

  “That’s who we saw?” asked Brooke, her eyes opening wide.

  Will nodded grimly.

  “Wait, you saw Lyle?” asked Elise.

  “A glimpse of him,” said Will. “Near the medical center. He went out through the windows. From his room on the fourth floor.”

  Brooke drew back, wrapped her arms around herself, turning pale. “There goes six months of therapy,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” said Nick, putting an arm around her shoulder. “We’re not letting that bubonic meatbag anywhere near you.”

  “There’ve been many rumors about Lyle floating around, Will,” said Ajay, looking around the table. “So this is why he wasn’t in the hoosegow with the rest of his hooligans.”

  “Dude, I’d heard Lyle had pretty much turned into a zucchini,” said Nick.

  “From what I saw happen to him last year, that wouldn’t surprise me,” said Will. “The wendigo zombified him—not an exact medical term, but I don’t know how else to put it.”

  “So how does a ‘zombie zucchini’ survive a four-story drop?” asked Elise dryly.

  “Good question,” said Will. “I snuck in and saw a security video of him making the jump. Lyle didn’t exactly … seem like himself.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Nick.

  “He wakes from a seven-month coma,” said Will, “and Lyle’s first move is to smash through reinforced glass, jump fifty feet to the ground, and head out for a jog.”

  “Sounds like you,” said Elise as she elbowed Nick.

  “Yeah, practically my morning routine,” said Nick.

  “He seems even less human than before,” said Will. “For instance, he got taller. By a lot.”

  “Okay, that’s unusual,” said Nick.

  “So what should we do about it?” asked Ajay.

  “Look, the cops are going to be all over this,” said Elise, glancing at Brooke. “I don’t think an
y of us have too much to worry about.”

  “But don’t forget Lyle had abilities, too,” said Will. “He can influence minds, attack people psychically. His powers were stronger than all of ours before he got whacked. And there’s no telling what they’ve been jacked up into by what he’s gone through since then.”

  Will made a mental note to ask Coach Jericho, What happens to surviving victims of a wendigo?

  “If you’re deliberately trying to freak me out,” said Brooke, wrapping her arms around her drawn-up knees, “brilliant job.”

  “That’s not what I’m trying to do—”

  “You keep forgetting, Will,” she continued, “I don’t have any abilities like you all do. None I can use against the creep who kidnapped me, anyway.”

  “No sweat, Brooksie, we got your back,” said Nick kind of tenderly, putting an arm around her.

  That’s what I should have said, thought Will, kicking himself. And done.

  Then Nick spoiled it by lifting Brooke from her chair with one hand, popping a biceps, and saying, “Check those guns at the door.”

  Brooke swatted him away. As Nick put her back down, Will got up from the table and paced around.

  “I think Elise is right,” said Will. “We let the police and the school handle Lyle. Maybe that gives us the cover we need to work our own investigation. And our first order of business is getting back down into those tunnels to find the key to Nepsted’s cage.”

  “Dude, let’s go tonight, right now!” said Nick, jumping up and pounding on the table. “What’s stopping us?”

  “You mean, aside from how stupid and suicidal that would be?” asked Elise.

  “This will require extensive preparations, Will,” said Ajay. “We need equipment, resources, and most importantly an excellent plan.”

  “Working on it,” said Will.

  “I like it!” said Nick, pointing at Will and hitting the table.

  “Where do we start?” asked Elise.

  “The tunnels under the island,” said Will, glancing at Brooke as well.

  “The island in Lake Waukoma?” asked Brooke, a little shocked.