“That’s not something we want to hear . . . I hope someone gets to the bottom of this real soon,”
the woman muttered,
“because if it doesn’t stop, things are gonna go south faster than you can say ‘What on God’s green Earth . . . !’”
The hosts soon moved on to other local happenings. Aari turned down the volume. “That’s not good,” he said darkly.
“This crop disease or whatever it is that’s going around, has anything like this happened before?” Mariah asked.
“Well, yeah, but I don’t think it has ever spread this wide or, for that matter, this quickly.”
The traffic began to ease up at last. Jag stepped on the gas, relieved to be moving. They drove through the city, taking in the sights that zoomed by. It wasn’t long until they found their hotel and checked in. While Jag went to park the car in the basement, the others carried their bags to their rooms.
Once they’d freshened up, the five regrouped in the lobby and made their way back to the car. They piled in, Aari beside Jag once again and Kody in between the girls in the back. “I guess we’re going to that restaurant you found, huh?” Jag asked as he passed Kody the GPS to key in the restaurant’s address.
“No question,” Kody said.
As Jag put the car in reverse to back out of the parking slot, the sound of tires screeching filled the underground parking. Alarmed, the five turned to look through the rear window. A black cargo van was stopped right behind them, blocking their exit.
Jag heard Mariah breathe in sharply. “Oh my God, it’s the same van I—” Her sentence ended in a scream when her door was thrown open and a figure clad all in black yanked her roughly out of the car. She struggled violently against her assailant but a rag was quickly pressed to her mouth and nose and she passed out almost instantly.
At the same time, Tegan’s door was flung open, as was Aari’s. They were both pulled out of the vehicle by two more figures in dark clothes. Their cries for help were muffled by rags held up to their faces; they barely had any time to fight back. Jag watched in terror as they lost consciousness as well.
“Jag, what—
no!
” Kody yelped as he in turn was pulled from the car.
Jag moved to get out of the Jeep but stopped short when he saw an attacker headed to his side of the car. At first he thought of locking the door, but another idea came to mind. He braced himself, waiting until the assailant was close enough. From the build of the body, he could tell that the attacker was a beefed up man.
Jag hesitated, now unsure of himself and his plan. As the man reached for the door handle, the only thought Jag had was:
Here goes nothing. Come on, you jerk.
He lifted his feet and the moment his door was wrenched open and struck out at full force, catching the aggressor square on the stomach and throwing him back a good ten feet. Jag was out of the vehicle in an instant. He saw his friends’ limp forms being tossed through the rear door of the van like rag dolls. The girls were the last to be dumped in.
With a roar of outrage, he leapt toward the van. Before he could get close enough, he heard what sounded like the muted report of a gun and felt something hit his back. He lurched forward with his arms outstretched to break his fall but found that he was weakening rapidly. He fell onto the concrete floor as his vision began to blur. His muscles wouldn’t respond to his will and he found himself a helpless, limp mass on the ground.
A dark shape stepped in front of him. Heavy, rough hands grabbed him by the arms and dragged him up. Jag tried to do all he could to fight, but the most he managed was a weak twitch of his fingers.
He was shoved unceremoniously into the large vehicle, on top of his friends. The last thing he saw before blacking out was the back doors being slammed shut, blocking out any light from the outside.
Wake up, Jag.
You must wake up.
JAG!
J
ag groaned quietly as his eyes opened. He saw nothing but darkness. For a moment, he thought that he’d somehow lost his eyesight until his senses slowly started to function again. He could feel something wrapped around his head, covering his eyes. His arms were behind him and his wrists wrapped in some kind of binding.
Suddenly, whatever he was laying on rattled, bouncing him, and he let out another quiet complaint before realizing that he was swaying ever so slightly, as one would in a moving vehicle. Two male voices speaking softly to his right reached his ears. Jag could hardly make out what they were saying, but judged that the voices were coming from the driver and his passenger.
Slowly, he began to recall the final moments before he’d lost consciousness.
Oh, brilliant,
he thought bitterly.
Kidnapped.
He should have been scared, and rightly so, but he was irate, mainly at himself. Why had he dismissed Mariah’s concern when she pointed out the van earlier? Why hadn’t he reacted quicker to save the others from their attackers?
As his head cleared, he managed to catch part of the conversation between the men. “ . . . besides, you know how our client is. Once they’ve got what they wanted from these kids, they’ll be discarded quickly.”
“That’s not our problem,” rasped a deeper voice. “We get paid for delivery.”
Jag’s lethargy vanished at once. He tried to move his legs but could barely even lift his feet. While his mind was nearly able to function at its full capacity, his physical self was still trying to catch up. He could feel something to his right; presumably a body. He hoped it was one of the others.
A voice near him made him jump. “Hey, we got a wriggler here. What dosage did we use on them?”
One of the men whom Jag had heard earlier spoke up. “Enough to knock ’em out for a few hours. Even if they wake up, their hands are tied and they can’t see a thing. They’re a buncha kids, they’ll be too terrified to try anything.”
Wrong
, Jag wanted to hiss, but instead told himself to calm down and think. He was sure now that there were two men at the front of the vehicle, with another somewhere in the back, closer to Jag. The van made a sharp turn and then straightened out onto a rough road, rattling the passengers and making a rumble in the cabin.
The three men got caught up in a conversation about a cohort who’d disappeared with money he’d borrowed from them. Over the noise inside the cabin they argued loudly on how to track him down and what they would do when they found him.
Seizing his chance, Jag whispered hopefully to the body on his right. “Tegan? Mariah?”
No sound.
“Kody?”
Still nothing.
“Aari?”
A groggy voice whispered back, “Jag?”
Relief flooded him. “Aari. You okay?”
He could hear his friend’s voice in the din. “Maybe. Feeling weak.”
“I know.”
“Shoot—we were nabbed.”
“Yeah. Need to figure out how to get out of here.”
“Are we . . . are we in the van?”
“Yeah.”
Jag strained to hear Aari murmur. “There’s something against my back. It hurts.”
“Your hands. They’re tied back.”
“No, no . . . something hard. Feels like metal. It’s rattling under me.”
The wheels in Jag’s head slowly began to turn as his body started to respond. He had a suspicion that if the two men at the wheel were to his right that would mean that the back of the van was, hopefully, to his other side. He stretched his left leg little by little until he felt his shoe hit something flat and solid.
Doors
. He grinned to himself as a plan took shape in his mind. If they could force the abductors to stop the van, it just might give them a chance to rescue the others. “Try grabbing that metal thing under you,” he breathed to Aari.
“Why?”
Very quietly, Jag laid out his idea. In response, Aari told Jag that he was out of his mind but he would go along with it anyway.
Jag felt Aari’s shoulder butting into his as the other boy tried to grasp the object beneath him. “Got it.”
“Wait for my word.”
The vehicle stopped rattling as it made a turn onto a smoother road and accelerated, indicating that they were on a stretch of highway. Several minutes later, Jag felt the van slow down again. His weight shifted to one side and he realized they were turning onto an exit ramp.
Here we go
, he thought, preparing himself, then shouted, “Now!”
He quickly twisted around to position his feet toward the back doors. As he curled his legs toward his chest, he heard shouts as Aari lurched forward to stand up.
Jag uncoiled his legs and smashed the doors open. The sound of cars on the road and horns blaring filled the van. More shouts ensued, followed by a heavy clanking as Aari swung around and launched his prize—a wrench—toward the front of the vehicle. At least, Jag hoped it was the front of the vehicle. His answer came soon enough when he heard the windshield smash and felt the van swerve sharply as the driver wrestled for control.
“Damn!” someone bellowed. Horrified yells rang out before the vehicle leaned far over and crashed onto its side.
Jag was thrown brutally out of the open back doors. He hit the ground hard and tumbled a good distance. Two cries of pain, sounding as if they came from several yards away from him, followed shortly after he rolled to a stop. He groaned as he turned over onto his stomach and pushed himself up to his knees. “Guys?”
“Oy!” Aari yelled. “That was the stupidest idea ever, you idiot! I won’t be surprised if I’ve cracked a rib!”
Following the sound of his friend’s voice, Jag unsteadily made his way over to Aari. “Where are you?”
“Jag? Aari? What happened?”
The feeble call came from Kody, who sounded like he was getting closer to the pair. The boys froze when they heard a screech of tires close by. A man shouted, “Hit the deck!” before the three were tackled to the ground. At that instant a volley of gunshots rang out.
The boys stayed down. Jag felt someone pull his blindfold off. When his eyes adjusted to the twilight, his gaze focused on the newcomer who was removing Aari’s and Kody’s blindfolds. His blood turned to ice and he scooted away, his wrists still bound behind him. “
You
.”
The man glanced at him. When Aari and Kody at last got a chance to see who the stranger was, they stumbled on their knees toward Jag.
“You
did
follow us!” Aari snarled. “Mariah was right!”
Two more shots flew over them. They ducked, but kept their distance from the man. The man held his hands up where he lay on the grass. “Look, I’m not here to hurt you! You have to believe me!”
“You attacked us!”
Bullets hit the stranger’s red Mustang, which was positioned between them and the crashed van. “They’re shooting wide,” the man said. “They want the three of you alive.”
Jag ducked again, then a stinging realization hit him: The girls were not with them. He looked around frantically, then peeked past the side of the Mustang in time to see one kidnapper flagging down a car, then pulling a woman out of the dark blue vehicle. The other black-clad men were throwing two smaller bodies into the trunk.
Jag leapt up and ran toward them. “Tegan! Mariah!”
He couldn’t get close enough. Two strong arms wrapped around him and carried him back behind the red muscle car. “What are you doing?” Jag screamed.
The man held Jag down and shouted at Kody and Aari to remain on the ground.
Jag pulled away and pushed himself up in time to see the blue vehicle speeding off. The woman whose car had been hijacked lay still on the road. Jag hoped she hadn’t been shot.
Aari and Kody slowly went to stand beside Jag. They watched in subdued shock as the car grew smaller and smaller in the distance, taking with it the girls. Though the abductors’ bullets had completely missed them, two voids grew in the boys’ hearts, bleeding agony.
Jag, hands still tied behind him, rested against the Mustang. His voice, usually husky and calming, was quiet and broken. “We need to call the cops.”
“No.”
The boys slowly turned to glare at the tall stranger. “What do you mean?” Aari seethed. “Our friends have been taken. And you—you’ve been tailing us for
days
.”
“I have a good reason,” the man said quietly.
Kody bristled. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The man rolled his shoulders back. He raised his right fist over his heart and bowed his head. Then, he lifted his chin and his hazel eyes bore through the trio’s. The boys stared back. That gesture—it felt like a memory inching its way out of the shadows.
“The reason you cannot go to the authorities,” the man said, “is because it is beyond their power. They are not equipped for the darkness that’s been cast. What was foretold in the prophecy can only be ended by those appointed by the prophecy. The five of you know that.”
Jag, Aari and Kody nearly collapsed to the ground. “You—you’re a Sentry,” Kody gasped.
The man said nothing. He pulled out a switchblade from his back pocket and moved to cut the boys free of their bindings. They rubbed their wrists, grateful to be free, but Jag was still antagonistic. “If you’re a Sentry, why didn’t you try to save Tegan and Mariah?” he demanded.
“There’s no time to explain right now. People must have already alerted the cops after witnessing your crazy stunt in the van.” The man inspected his car and groaned when he took in the bullet holes and one flat tire. “We need to get out of here. I’ll fill you in as we go, you have my word.”
When he saw the boys hesitating, he sighed impatiently. “I have someone following the girls, someone skilled and capable who will do everything possible to get your friends back. Just, please, we have to leave. Right now.”
The boys glanced at one another. Jag, tight-lipped, was the first to walk toward the car. He pointed at the busted tire. “You can’t drive on this!”
“We don’t have a choice. We’re going to go after your friends, but we need to get to a safe spot nearby first to replace the tire.”
Jag reluctantly got into the passenger seat as Aari and Kody piled into the back from the driver’s side. The man hopped behind the wheel and, as he started the engine, Jag looked over to where he’d last seen his friends being thrown into the trunk of the car.