The Witch Hunter's Gauntlet (25 page)

Lucas led them to the garage where he pulled the c
anvas off of Doc Frost’s candy apple red ’66 Mustang with a SALLY1 license plate.

“Ta da.”

“We’re stealing Doc Frost’s car?” Sam asked.

He held up a hand to stop any more questions while he scanned the garage.

“Yes!” He grabbed a set of keys hanging on a nail.

“Lucas,” Tasha began as Lucas climbed into the front seat. “This is all well and good. But we’ll never catch a helicopter with a car.”

“We will if we fly.”

He
started the engine.

“Oh, hey.
What do you suppose will happen if I put it in H?” Lucas asked as he pulled back on the stick shift.

A bright blue light appeared under the car as it lifted an inch or two off the ground.

“That’s amazing,” Tasha said. Sam remembered that Tasha didn’t take physics and so had never seen the hoverboard demonstration. Of course, it was still amazing to Sam and she had seen the demonstration.

“But I thought he was st
ill working on the Model T?”

“He probably is. But the Model T
wasn’t the first car. It was just the first mass produced car. The first car was the Model A.” Lucas grinned proudly.

“Smart thinking,” Tasha said
, rummaging through Doc Frost’s Christmas lawn ornaments. “But we’re going to need more than that if we’re going to go up against Cervantes.”

She yanked the sack righ
t out of the plastic Santa’s hand. “Let’s go shopping.”

They followed Tasha to the basement. They
tossed everything that could even remotely be a weapon into Santa’s sack.

“Fire or ice?”

Sam dropped the wind-generating gun she had used earlier into the sack and looked up at Lucas. He had the freeze ray in one hand and the heat ray in the other.

“Which do you prefer?” he asked.

She thought about it for a moment. She figured she was less likely to hurt herself or anyone else with the freeze ray.

“Ice.”

He handed her the blue ray gun.

Lucas pulled the plastic six-
shooters out of the gun belt of his costume, set them on a table, and slid the red ray gun into the holster on his right hip. Sam did the same, replacing her pirate pistol with the freeze ray.

“Hey
, maybe we could bring him.” Tasha said, pointing at the robot.

“No,” Sam and Lucas said together.

“Fine,” Tasha said annoyed. “Just a thought.”

She picked up the Perma
-glue gun and studied it for a moment before setting it aside. It was probably more trouble than it was worth.

“You know we’re all going to prison, right?” Tasha said.
“Even if we somehow pull this off and save the day, we’ll still probably go to jail for exposing a major secret like the hovercar. Not to mention all this other stuff.”

It seemed worth it to Sam. They would all pro
bably end up in prison if Nero took over the world, too. At least this way only the three of them would suffer, instead of the whole world.

She looked to see if Lucas agreed.

He was smiling.

“I’ve already figured that part out.” He picked up the Perma
-glue gun. “You two just keep loading up on the weaponry. I’m going to go make us a little disguise.”

He ran up the stairs.

“How do you disguise a flying car?” Tasha asked.

Sam shrugged.

“So, how are things between you two?” Tasha asked tossing a mechanical spider into the bag.

“I don’t know.”

Sam wasn’t sure if she should be mad at him or if he should be mad at her or if anyone should be mad at anyone.

“We should probably just focus on saving the world right now,” she said.

After they tossed everything that looked like a weapon, and several things that really didn’t, into the bag, they rushed up stairs.

Lucas stood in the garage proudly admiring his work.

“Wow,” Tasha said.

He turned around
, startled. Then he gestured to the car like those models on
The Price Is Right
. Sam and Tasha couldn’t help but laugh. Lucas had used the glue to attach all eight of Santa’s reindeer to the front of the car.

“I’ll drive,” Tasha volunteered.

“Yeah, no. Believe me, I have experience with this kind of thing,” Lucas said very confidently.

“Shotgun then,” Tasha yelled
, running for the passenger seat and taking her quiver off so she could sit in the car without crushing it.

Sam climbed into the back seat with the bag of weapons.

“Comfortable back there, Sam?” Lucas asked, sliding into the driver’s seat.

“I guess,” she said. The sack next to her was bulgy and awkward. Plus she had a terrible feeling that more than one of the items inside might blow up.

Once everyone was seated, Lucas turned to Tasha with a mischievous smile. “Ready, Robin?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“All right then. Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed.”

And with that they shot up into the night sky.

They flew for over an hour in relative silence except for the occasional navigational update.

It turned out that flying off to an epic battle in a far-off city was a lot harder than Superman made it look.

Fortunately they h
ad Lucas’ cell phone, which had access to MapQuest.

Sam tried to do anything but think about where they were going and what they were going to have to do, but once they had gotten out of the mountains and out over the boring desert
, there was very little to distract her.

“I actually kind of wish we could have brought some of the school’s security with us,” Sam said out loud for the first time.

“That would ruin the ‘surprise’ part of our surprise attack,” Tasha pointed out. “Turn right. Stick with this highway. It will take us all the way there.”

They were on the final stretch now. The
cold slab of fear in Sam’s stomach was pressing on her chest from the inside.

Mom.
Dad. Zoey. Doc Frost. Mr. Hopscotch. Helen and Harold. Johnny Depp. The whole world.

She kept reminding herself of everyone she would be letting down i
f she didn’t do this.

“
Remember; when we get there, follow my lead. Don’t do anything stupid.” Tasha said this last part directly to Lucas.

“Hey. I know you’re the boss here. I’m just su
per-psyched to be a part of the team. I just hope we’re going to get there in time,” he said, stepping on the gas (or whatever flying cars ran on) a little harder.

“Look.”

Sam saw it up ahead, poking out of the endless black desert, a point of light reaching towards heaven. As they got closer, she could see a blanket of lights spread out around the bright beacon.

“That’s the light on top of the
Luxor pyramid. That’s our target,” Tasha told Lucas.

The city of
Las Vegas rapidly grew larger as they approached. Sam had always wanted to go there someday. Now she wanted nothing more than to pretend she had never heard of it.

Mom.
Dad. Zoey…

She closed her eyes and scolded herself for being such a coward.

Lucas took the car higher so it would be harder to see from the ground. Thankfully, not many people were looking up into the sky for a ’66 Mustang.

“There’s the Strip,” Tasha said
, pointing to Las Vegas’ main road.

F
rom here Sam could see the casinos clearly. The Luxor pyramid was black and shiny, with the Sphinx crouching nearby. The Statue of Liberty was on the next block, and down the road stood the Eiffel Tower.

Sam had never seen so many lights in her life. The street was so bright that the people on the ground probably had no idea that it was even night. One building had so many lights o
n one side that they formed a twenty-story television screen. The screen switched from some circus act to a giant smiling Sara Berlin. Apparently she was performing live at one of the casinos today. A tiny part of her brain hoped that they could actually save the world in time to catch the show. It would be a Halloween miracle.

“There’s the castle. Land us on that flat part of the roof over there.”

Sure enough, the Camelot Hotel and Casino was the spitting image of a fairy-tale castle. There were seven tall white towers, each capped with bright red and blue spires, and over the main entrance stood a mechanical statue of Merlin waving his wand over the crowd below. But from their vantage point in the sky she could see that, behind the fancy fake castle walls, there was a patch of normal roof with vents and pipes and all the practical stuff a building needed.

Sam could make out individual people on the ground now. Men in sui
ts and women in evening gowns stepped out of a limo next to a family of four piling out of their SUV. There was no helping it now; people were pointing up at them.

“Wave,” Tasha said. “Make it look like we are part of a show.”

Sam and Tasha waved to the now-cheering crowd below. Cameras were flashing everywhere.

“Ho
ho ho,” Lucas yelled over the side of the car.

Lucas swung the car around one of the towers and set it down gently on the roof a few feet away from a maintenance access door.

“Well, we’re here,” Lucas said with a quiver in his voice.

“I don’t see a helipad anywhere. That’s good. That means they had to land somewhere else and drive here,” Tasha said
, doing her best impression of an optimistic leader. “If we are really lucky, we may have actually beaten them here.”

“I suppose so,” Lucas said
, stepping out of the car. “Otherwise they are going to know we’re here, now.”

“How?
All that any of those people down there know is that Santa Claus just landed at the Camelot. Even if Nero hears about it, I don’t see why he’d immediately assume it was us,” Tasha said, as if saying it out loud would somehow make it true.

S
am handed Santa’s Bag o’ Superweapons to Lucas so she could climb out of the back seat.

Tasha put her hand on the door. “You two don’t need to do this. This is my job. I can-“

“We’ve been through this,” Lucas said sternly. “We’re all in this together.”

Tasha smiled.
“All right. But if you die, promise that you won’t come back as a ghost and haunt me.”

“Is that really an option?” Lucas
asked, a bit too excitedly.

“Just promise.”

“Promise.”

“Here we go,” Tasha said as she turned the knob.

Nothing happened.

Tasha sighed. “The door’s locked.”

“Well, there goes the world,” Lucas said, his shoulders slumped. “Everybody’s doomed because some diligent maintenance man did his job properly.”

“Just a second,” Tasha said with annoyance.

She pulled an arrow out of her quiver and jammed it in the doorframe above the lock. The door hissed and smoked and emitted a horrible burning chemical smell. Something black and bubbly oozed down the door.

“Acid arrow,” Tasha explained.

“Awesome.” Lucas applauded.

“Let’s go,” Tasha said as she pulled the door open.

As soon as Tasha stepped through the door, alarms went off throughout the entire building.

“W
hat’d you do, what’d you do?” Lucas yelled.

“That wasn’t me,” Tasha said calmly. “Tha
t’s a fire alarm. I think Nero is here.”

Sure enough
, Sam could hear the panicked screaming of the people below. She ran over to the edge of the building and saw hundreds of people running out of the casino. Huge plumes of familiar red flames erupted from the windows below. In the distance, fire trucks were already fighting their way through the traffic.

“The police and firemen will be here soon,” Sam told the others when she got back to the door.

“They won’t be able to put that magical fire out. We’re on our own for now.” Tasha nocked an arrow in her bow and led the way into the casino.

The emergency lighting had kicked in and mixed with the glow of the magical flames to bath
e everything in a wavy red light. It turned out that they had snuck into the hotel part of the casino. They found themselves sneaking down hallway after identical hallway of numbered doors.

After ten
minutes of running down random hallways, Tasha stopped dead in her tracks. Lucas would have crashed into her if he hadn’t grabbed a nearby doorframe at the last minute.

“You’re up
, Video Game Boy,” Tasha said. “Which way?”

Lucas looked up and down the long hallway. “I have no idea. I wasn’t in this part of the casino. We need to get to the main floor.”

“Fine. This way to the stairs,” Tasha said, pointing at a sign with a picture of a staircase next to an arrow.

As they ran down the stairs from the thirtieth floor to the twenty-ninth
, Sam felt extremely thankful that they were going down. There was no way she would survive running up all these stairs. The world would be doomed.

They didn’t see a single person as they ran down the stairs. The casino had to be mostly evacuated by now
, and if Tasha was right, the firefighters were going to be busy outside fighting the magically reproducing flames. They were completely alone.

It
didn’t help that Lucas was quietly humming the
Mission: Impossible
theme song behind her.

He finally stopped when they reached the main casino floor. Along with the ro
ws and rows of slot machines, black jack tables, and roulette wheels were several tapestries and suits of armor to give the place a medieval feel. In the center of the room stood a fifteen-foot replica of Excalibur stuck in a giant anvil.

Nero
was already there.

He wasn’t alone. A big military looking guy had Zack in an arm lock. A few feet away stood a very bored Cervantes and
floating next to him was a cage made of red magical energy. Doc Frost and Zoey were unhappy but unharmed in the cage.

Sam, Tasha, and Lucas slowly and quietly crawled their way closer to the giant sword
, weaving their way through the rows of slot machines and occasionally stopping to take a peek at the situation.

“
Okay, Carlson. Break his arm,” Nero said to the big guy.

“Go ahead,” Zack said calmly. “I already showed you the vault. I don’t know what else you want.”

“The gauntlet was not in the vault,” Nero said angrily. “It has something to do with this sword.”

“I can’t help you,” Zack said.

“Leave him alone,” Doc Frost demanded.

“Okay, here is how t
hings are going to go down,” Nero announced. “Mr. McQueen is going to show us where the gauntlet is hidden and then Dr. Frost and Miss Dalal are going to come back to my lab and build me a fleet of hovertanks. And do you know why all of these things are going to happen?”

No one responded.

“This is going to happen, because if any of you refuse to do what I ask, then my friend Cervantes over there
is going to kill you and then I will bring you back as a zombie and you will do anything I ask anyway. But that is messy and I’d rather not waste the time.”

“You’re a very disturbed young man,” Doc Frost said.

“Come on, Dr. Frost, you especially must appreciate this situation,” Nero began. “There is a war coming. You know it and I know it. That is why Dean Futuro is funding your hover research. But I respect you more than he does, which is why I am offering you, and you too Miss Dalal, a chance to join the winning side.”

“No offense
, kid,” Doc Frost said. “But up until an hour ago I didn’t even know who you were. You really think you can wage war on magic and science at the same time?”

“No,” Nero
said with great relish. “I intend to let them fight it out and then pick up the pieces.”

H
e gently set the Lantern of the Blue Flame down on the floor so he could tap the sword. It sounded solid to Sam. She was only a couple rows away now.

“You’re up
, teddy.”

He pulled the bear out of his pocket and held it near the sword. It instantly began to shake and beep in his hand.

“Interesting.”

Nero
examined the bear. He pulled on a seam, ripping the bear’s belly open. Hidden inside the fluffy stuffing was a black box similar to a garage-door opener.

Lucas clamped his hand over Sam’s mouth to keep her from screaming out. They were only a couple aisles away now and any noise would have given them away.

“Of course,” Nero said. “Dr. Hathaway figured out how to make a tesseract after all. Where better to hide something than nowhere?”

He pushed the button.

And then things got really weird.

A
bright pale blue floating dot appeared in front of the giant sword. The dot hung there in midair doing nothing until Nero reached out for it. The dot unfolded into a larger glowing orb that swallowed his arm. Everything beyond his elbow simply disappeared. But apparently this did not freak Nero out.

“This is bad,” Tasha whispered. “Are you ready?”

“Ready?” Lucas whispered back while releasing his grip on Sam. “Ready for what? Do we have a plan?”

“No time for a plan. There are three of us and three of them, which one
do you want?”

“Betwe
en the commando guy, the undead wizard, and not-Jerry? Hmm, let me think,” Lucas whispered back sarcastically.

The look he received from Tasha would have made Darth Vader shake in his
shiny black boots.

“No time,” she repeated
.

Tasha rolled
across the aisle, putting some distance between herself and Sam and Lucas. She popped up and fired an arrow at Nero’s back.