The Witch Hunter's Gauntlet (4 page)

It was kind of nice to think that her grandfather had been looking out for her ev
en though he died before she was even born. It did seem like an odd request though. Something else bothered her too.

“It took you fourteen years to build a school?” she asked.

“Sixteen, actually. Our Board of Regents has very exacting standards.”

“By all expenses, does that include books, food, and what about uniforms?” Harold asked.

“I’m not wearing a uniform,” Sam said as adamantly as possible. She crossed her arms and her legs to show just how adamant she was.

“We do not have uniforms. It is the belief of our founders that uniforms would stifle our student’
s creativity and individuality.” Vice Principal Hernandez cleared his throat. “Miller’s Grove Academy also proudly offers the highest security of any school in the nation. I don’t believe it was a coincidence that this incident happened today. It seems likely that someone is trying to prevent Samantha from getting to school.”

Harold and Helen shared a look. Sam knew exactly what they were thinking. Mr. Hernandez certainly knew how to push their buttons. If they thought this school was the only place she was going to be safe there was no way Sam was getting out of it. She was going to have to do something drastic.

She stuck out her bottom lip slightly and turned her big pleading eyes on Helen. It wasn’t hard to do. The tears that welled up on her lower eyelids were very real. Judging by the tears in her own eyes, Helen got the signal.

“Mr. Hernandez,” Helen began politely as she shuffled all the brochures and papers into a neat pile. “We would like to thank you for coming today, and for presenting Sam with this amazing opportunity. I’m sure you understand that a decision like this takes a little time. We have your number here somewhere, and we will give you a call soon with Sam’s decision.”

Harold took the cue from his wife and stood up to shake Mr. Hernandez’s hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Hernandez.”

But Vice Principal Hernandez didn’
t stand up to shake Harold’s hand.

“I understand that today has been particularly stressful and I wish we could have met under better circumstances, but there is one more matter we need to discuss,” he said sternly.

Harold pulled his hand back. His smile quickly faded from his face. “And what is that, Mr. Hernandez?”

Agents Sampson
and Rosenberg walked in from the living room and stood next to the table.

“Miller’s
Grove University also has one of the highest security vaults in the country. It would be the perfect place to keep the Lantern of the Blue Flame,” Vice Principal Hernandez said with a toothy smile.

Sam leapt out of her chair so fast it startled everyone at the table. Even Agent Sampson made a reflexive reach for his vest pocket before realizing that she wasn’t a threat. He earned himself some very nasty looks from Helen and Harold for that mistake.

“I don’t have your stupid lantern. I don’t even know what it is. If it means so much to you, you should go look for it. Leave me alone.”

“I think you should go now,” Harold said firmly.

“Sam has already assured us that she doesn’t know anything about the lantern,” Agent Rosenberg said, clearly trying to smooth over the situation.

“Miss Hathaway
, I apologize. Clearly I was given bad information,” Vice Principal Hernandez rose to his feet.

Sam turned away from the three strangers in her dining room. Who were they to come out of nowhere and accuse her of stealing things she had never even heard of? She was so angry her legs were shaking. Helen hugged her even tighter.

“Mr. Hernandez, we have your information. If Sam chooses to attend your school we will contact you.” His voice left no doubt that the conversation was over.

“Very well,” Vice Principal Hernandez said lifting his briefcase. “I hope you won’t hold my little mistake against the academy.”

“Good day,” Agent Sampson said as he followed Vice Principal Hernandez to the door.

“I hope to see you there, Sam,” Agent Rosenberg said sweetly. She gave Sam a cheerful little wave as she headed for the door. “Nice place you have here Mr. and Mrs. Robinson. Sorry for the hassle.”

“Thank you,” Helen said, more by reflex than anything else.

Harold closed the door behind them.

“Sam, I…” Helen began, but Sam was halfway to her room before she could finish.

Sam shut the door and locked it before throwing herself on the bed. She doubted quite highly if anyone she knew had ever had such a strange day. No one that was still alive anyway.

Without even knowing why, she burst into tears. She pulled in Mr. Hopscotch, her teddy bear that her father had made on the day she was born so that they would always be the same age, and she hugged him like she hadn’t hugged him in years.

Poor Mr. Hopscotch.
He only got this kind of attention when things went bad. She hugged him even tighter.

For some bizarre reason
, it is difficult to tell time while crying. Sam felt like she cried for over an hour, but it was likely far less than that, because she doubted Helen would wait that long before coming to check on her. When Sam finally ran out of tears she rolled out of bed and grabbed her Kleenex box while purposely avoiding looking up at her vanity mirror. It was weird how her body only let her cry for so long before her nose completely filled with snot. It was either a design flaw, or a safety feature to keep her from crying forever. Either way, it was unbelievably gross.

“They want me to go to some freaky school
, Mr. Hopscotch,” Sam told the bear. He took the news with a smile. He always did.

If Vice Principal Hernandez was any indication of the type of people there, this was definitely not a school she wanted to go to. But her grandfather apparently thought she would. She wondered how her parents wou
ld feel about it. They had to have known about it, and she understood why they never told her; they were probably waiting until she was older. Still, someone should have maybe waited to ask her what she wanted.

Maybe I could get a refund
, Sam thought. Sam could use that money to pick her own college in a few years. She could also give some of it to Helen and Harold to help out, and maybe buy a car.

Her nose was finally empty
, so she set the Kleenex box back down on her bureau next to her parent’s picture. She had built a small memorial to her parents with a few items she collected before the rest of their stuff was put into storage. Her mother’s favorite music box and the mancala game they used to play every Sunday sat on one side across from four ornate snow globes of the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid, the Statue of Liberty, and the Eiffel Tower her father gave her when she was very young as promises of vacation spots they would visit one day.

She wound up the music box and watched as the tiny ballerina danced to the tune her mother had used to sing her to sleep as a child.

“Do you know what kind of kids go to private schools?” Sam asked Mr. Hopscotch.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, setting him down gentl
y on the bed. “Rich kids, supersmart kids, and troublemakers whose parents don’t want to deal with them anymore. Does that sound like a group of people you would like to hang out with?”

Mr. Hopscotch just kept smiling.

“Well, sure. You would. You get along with everyone. Everybody loves you.”

Sam kissed him on the forehead.

As she lifted her head she saw Sara Berlin smiling at her from her poster on the wall. Sam had to plumb the depths of the internet to find this particular poster of Sara Berlin from her very first concert, but it was worth it.

“You don’t even go to high school. You probably have a whole army of personal tutors. I don’t suppose you could spare one?” she asked the poster. “It would certainly help a lot.”

The poster did not answer back.

“Oh, sorry about that rich kids comment.”

Sara Berlin was a self-made millionaire. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher and her father was a baker. She didn’t have a family name to live up to. She got to make her own way in the world.

Sam had the Hathaway name hanging over her. How many people at Miller’s
Grove Academy would know that her parents saved the world, or that her grandfather was a brilliant scientist and adventurer? And how on Earth could anyone expect her to live up to a legacy like that?

No, she really didn’t need to go
to a school where everyone would know exactly how much she was letting the family name down. She was much better off at her current school where she was just another nobody. Her mind was made up.

She slowly opened the door. She half expected her godmother to be camped out in the hallway. Sam tiptoed towards the kitchen
, stepping carefully to avoid the tattling squeaky floorboard at the end of the hall.

“I’m just saying it is an amazing opportunity for her.”

“But only if she wants to go. We can’t make her go.”

Sam crept closer to hear the conversation better. Somebody was nervously tapping a foot on the floor.

“If Samuel and Joanne were here, they would want her to go.”

“We don’t know that
, Harold. We don’t what they would want at all,” Helen said, sadness lacing her words.

“I know. I know.”

A chair was pulled across the floor as someone either stood up or sat down.

“This may be one of the few links to her par
ents she has left.” Harold said. “Besides, it could really open doors for her. I don’t need to tell you that we haven’t exactly built much of a college fund. So unless we let her use up all of her inheritance, I don’t know how we’re going to pay for everything.”

Sam’s heart sank. Again she was reminded of how much trouble she had caused the Robinsons, how much she had taken from them while they had done nothing but give to her. It was bad enough that she had cost them their careers, but now she was causing money problems and almost getting arrested.

She was a delinquent. Her reign of destruction had to end. It was time to give something back.

Sam stepped into the kitchen. Helen and Harold startled at her presence. Helen looked l
ike she had been crying. She was about to say something when Sam took a deep breath and went for it.

“I want to go to Miller’s
Grove Academy.”

Baldorag
Castle was a gothic nightmare of slick black stone built deep inside the crevice of an otherwise completely uninteresting mountain in the heart of the Swiss Alps. The castle was built so deep into the mountain that it only received one hour of sunlight a day. It would take the most skillful mountaineer in the world to find and reach the castle.

Fortunately
Alexander Nero had a helicopter and a map.

Snow that had been untouched by humans for over a decade whipped through the air as the helicopter touched down on a rocky ledge near the castle.

“Everyone remember where we parked,” Nero quipped as he climbed out of the helicopter.

“Good one, sir,” Commander Carlson, Head of Ner
o Industries Security and Nero’s personal bodyguard, said as he gently removed the box containing the lantern from the helicopter.

“Thank you, Carlson.”

Nero couldn’t think of anyone else with whom he would rather have traveled to the Arctic, robbed a magical vault, and fought off a fire-breathing gargoyle statue come to life. Nero was still a little annoyed that Commander Carlson got all the fun of fighting the gargoyle, but it had been necessary to maintain his disguise as the weak and frail Samantha Hathaway.

He comforted himself with the thought that his plan was nearing completion. It had taken three years and a sizable portion of his late father’s fortune to learn the location and password of the Vault of the Blue Flame from a very corrupt and indebted member of the ISG and then obtain the correct ring on the
black market from a rather unpleasant hunchback. Not to mention the two years it had taken to develop his goggles--which not only corrected for light refraction enabling him to see magically invisible objects, but were also equipped with infrared, X-ray, microscopic, and a half-dozen other forms of vision. He figured he could make a second fortune selling them out of the backs of comic books.

On a personal vanity note there was
also the matter of his hair--which, to is mother’s great concern, had turned completely white by his fourteenth birthday. Still, it was a small price to pay to complete his father’s work and regain the family honor.

T
hanks to Constable Albion’s recent failure to arrest Samantha Hathaway, he was forced to switch to Plan B. Plan B was a brilliant plan, as all of Nero’s plans were, but it was slower than Plan A.

Ah well
, he thought to himself. If taking over the world was easy, someone else would have done it by now.

Nero
shook his head in disbelief. Two mountain peaks away, people were skiing and drinking hot chocolate in cute little lodges, completely unaware of this grand old castle and the historic battle that was fought within. As they entered the great crack in the mountain, Nero rolled the dial on his trusty goggles to night vision mode. Everything went ghostly green.

“Sir, I would strongly prefer it if we brought along some of the men,” Carlson s
aid anxiously as followed Nero into the darkness.

“We have the lantern,” Nero
said reassuringly.

The sound of their
boots crunching over the pebble-strewn ground filled the narrow space between the castle walls and the mountain. Two of the castle’s four towers had caved in untold years ago. A third was leaning against the mountain wall, ready to crumble at any moment. No one had even bothered to close the front gate when the castle was abandoned for the last time.

A thick layer of ice coated every s
urface inside the castle. Nero signaled to Carlson to step around the remains of a long wooden dinner table that had cracked in half under the strain of its icy cocoon.

Something fluttered in the corner of
Nero’s goggles-- a moving shadow that vanished around a corner.

“Sir,” Carlson said sternly. With the box in his hands he was ill prepared for a fight.

“Do not drop the box,” Nero ordered as he stepped into the Great Hall.

The Great Hall had seen better days. The west wall had collapsed under the weight of one of the crumbled towers. Broken bits of furniture lay in heaps under an in
ch of ice and debris. But Nero was more interested in the ceiling, mostly because it was moving. Hundreds of bats clung to the ceiling. They appeared as a massive wriggling green blanket in his goggles.

Squeeee
.

A cloud
of startled bats dove on Nero and Commander Carlson.

“Open the box,” Nero
yelled as he covered his head with his hands.

The light from the box
bathed the entire room in a bright glow. It was so bright he had to rip his goggles off, which was not a smart thing to do in a room full of angry bats. Cowering from the bats’ attack, Nero yanked his right glove off and lifted the Lantern of the Blue Flame out of the box.

“
Necro Retondo,” he yelled.

Tendrils of
blue fire whipped out of the lantern and writhed across the floor until they rose into the air as a small blue tornado of flames. Bits of dust ascended from the ice into the swirling vortex. Soon the dust particles began to take shape. As the blue flames spun faster and faster Nero could make out the vague shape of a man inside the tornado. Fortunately, the flames seemed to scare the bats away.

With one final burst of light
, the flames retreated into the lantern, leaving behind the figure of a man with his right hand stretched out as if he was holding something up in the air to study it.

“-shall die!” the man yelled in a feral rage.

He clutched at the air a few times, trying to grasp whatever it was he had been holding. A low guttural growl of confusion and anger escaped his throat as he frantically scanned the room. The light from the lantern revealed the man to be in his early twenties. He had long bright red hair and handsome features. He was also naked.

His rage-filled
eyes fixed on Nero and Commander Carlson. His lips curled back to reveal long white fangs.

“Who are you?” he demanded in a kingly fashion.

“I am Alexander Sebastian Nero Jr., your new master,” Nero said, getting to his feet and brushing the ice off his expensive thermal pants.

The man laughed, long and deep, like a man who hadn’t laughed in years.

“Normally I throw the small ones back. But today…” the man said with a toothy grin.

“Sit,” Nero
commanded.

The man sat down on the icy floor. His head whipped around
, stunned by his own actions. His muscles strained as he struggled to stand back up but could not. He growled some more.

Nero
smiled politely. “I think you can call off your little friends now, if you please.”

The man squinted in disapproval
, but he couldn’t stop himself. He waved his right hand and a hundred glittering specks of red light flew from his fingers, streaking into the mass of flapping wings. A second later the floor was littered with hundreds of little dead bat bodies.

“I see. You possess the Lantern of the Blue Flame,” the man said, staring at the lantern. “So, apparently I died.”

“Yes.”

He took a long breathe.
”How long?”

“Almost twenty years,” Nero
answered.

The man’s eyes widened. “
Elizabeth?”

“If you behave I might tell you a
bout her sometime.”

“I see.” The man no
dded curtly. His fingers flexed with an aching desire to strangle Nero, but his eyes never wavered from the lantern. It had a power over him that he could never break.

“I ha
ve a job for you,” Nero said.

“You hold the lantern,” he said
, gesturing to the icy floor on which he sat. “I have no choice.”

“Oh, I think you will like this job. It involves destroying those who once opposed you and eliminating the daughter of your kil
ler,” Nero said.

A twisted smile crept across the man’s face.

“But you will have to work by my time table,” Nero said. “And you will need some clothes.”

“I agree to your conditions.”

“Good,” Nero said, extending his hand. “Then rise, Cervantes; we’re on a tight schedule. I have to get ready for school.”

Nero had to admit that Miller’s Grove, California was a brilliant hiding place for a school for extraordinarily talented weirdos. Anyone passing through would think this was just another random mountain town built from the American Small Town Starter Kit. Throw up a Wal-Mart over there, a one-story mall over here, maybe a McDonald’s or two, add a bowling alley or skating rink for good measure, and top it off with a pinch of small town charm.

The school itself was built on the edge of town. It was surrounded by a thick forest. A single road
connected the school to the town. The words “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER” were written above the main gate in steel lettering.

As Nero
stepped out of the rented minivan in the school’s giant parking lot, he caught a glimpse of himself in the door’s mirror. He ran his hand through his recently dyed hair and sighed. It had been a simple trick to hack into Miller’s Grove Academy’s student registry and find a freshman to impersonate. The real student had recently left the country when his mother was unexpectedly offered a high-paying job at a Nero Industries facility in Japan.

“The things
we do to save the world,” Nero said to himself as he watched the flock of students meander towards the auditorium.

“What was that, sir?” Commander Carlson asked from inside the van.

“Nothing. This could take a little longer than I originally thought,” Nero said.

“We’ll be ready at a moment
’s notice, sir.”

“I’m sure you will,” Nero
said as he closed the van door.

“Have fun
at school, sir,” Carson called from the driver’s-side window.

Without turning around to give Commander Carlson the satisfaction
, Nero rolled his eyes to himself and kept walking toward the large blue domed auditorium next to the administrative building. The ultra-modern auditorium was constructed of thousands of hexagonal sound-amplifying panels, making it look like a giant blue beehive. In contrast the administrative building, Merriweather Hall, housing the faculty offices, meeting rooms, and official entrance to the academy, was built to resemble a 16
th
-Century Renaissance-style mansion. There was even ivy growing up the walls and curled around the white columns already.

Students were frantically rechecking thei
r information packets, so Nero did the same, even though he knew that all the students were suppose to meet at the auditorium for orientation. He did his best to shuffle along and look confused and anxious like the students around him. It seemed Plan B was going to take more patience than he had originally thought, but it was still preferable to Plan C.

Three guards stood watch over the passing students. Each wore
a dark blue campus security uniform and carried a state-of-the-art Nero Industries electro-static stun gun. They were very handy weapons capable of temporarily stunning a person from fifty yards away. Nero guessed the guards were all college students picking up extra cash or credit.

As the crowd fu
nneled into the auditorium, it was forced to part around a lone tall black marble statue of a smiling elderly man in a graduation-style mortarboard and gown who held the world in his outstretched right hand. Upon closer examination, he appeared to be squeezing the world. The craftsmanship was really very exquisite. Nero didn’t need to read the plaque below to know that this was a statue of Dr. Alistair Futuro, one of the titans of the secret scientific world. Nero decided that he might have to steal the statue later if he had the time.

As one
, the crowd of students suddenly stopped in their tracks. People were staring and pointing at a helicopter that came swooping over the school buildings. It hovered momentarily over the crowd, and someone inside waved, causing the collected students to cheer.  Then the helicopter moved on and settled on the helipad behind Merriweather Hall.

Pangs
of annoyance shot through Nero. It should be him in that helicopter looking down on the rabble. But it was important for him to pretend to be just another part of the herd. So he’d play along, for now.

The crowd surged towards th
e auditorium doors again. Nero flashed his fake ID at the security guard and went inside. He picked a seat near the middle where he could keep an eye on everyone. The auditorium was nearly full when he saw Samantha Hathaway enter.