The Rising Read online

  “Hey! Hello already! Get me out of here! Crap on a cracker! Somebody help me!”

  He waited but no one came. He was all alone. But that didn’t stop him from screaming.

  “When I get out of this thing I’m gonna skin you alive and crush your bones! I’m gonna make you wish you were never born!”

  His threats fell on emptiness, and after a while he shut his eyes and did his best to coax the good dreams to return. Last time he’d dreamed of kissing and fondling Sharon Mitchell, the awesome cheerleader from Harrisburg High. She’d been hot when she was a full-blooded human, and even hotter as a demon. But of course she was dead and gone now, hacked to pieces by Will Hunter after she’d tried to tear his head off. What a waste. Rudy tried to conjure up another dream starring Sharon, but each time he did the same thing happened: she morphed into a corpse. He was a demon, but he wasn’t that depraved. But he kept his eyes closed just the same because he couldn’t bear to face the reality that he was like some pickle stuck in a jar. He floated for what seemed like an eternity and then sensed something and opened his eyes. Two Natalies were staring at him! He screamed. Then he had an idea. Natalie liked him okay, right? They were friends, sort of.

  “Natalie! It’s me, Rudy! Get me out of here!”

  The two Natalies continued to stare at him like he was a pig embryo in a jar of formaldehyde. Why was he seeing double? Maybe it was this contraption messing with his eyesight? But then he figured it out. It wasn’t two Natalies staring at him, it was Natalie and her twin sister, Emily, who’d been missing for months and who everyone had thought was dead. Turned out she was just spending some time as a special guest of the Dark Lord.

  “He looks so creepy,” said Emily, peering in at Rudy’s bizarre visage.

  “We shouldn’t even be in here,” said Natalie. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “Look at him. He’s trying to say something. He recognizes us!”

  “Well, he should, we went to school together in Harrisburg for years. But Em, uh, let me refresh your memory here. Rudy went to the dark side. He’s a demon now.”

  Sensitive to her sister’s history, Natalie said the word “demon” softly.

  Emily winced, and the memory of being held prisoner in those caves for what seemed like an eternity hit her like a slap in the face. She used to feel kind of sorry for Rudy, back in high school. She’d ignored him just like everybody else, but it used to make her stomach turn when she’d see him getting pushed around by Todd Karson and Sharon Mitchell and the rest of the popular crowd. But now all traces of mercy were instantly gone, replaced by unbridled malice.

  “Why is Will even keeping him alive? We should just smash this thing to bits, put the rat bastard out of his misery.”

  Natalie looked at her sister with concern. Ever since Will had rescued them, Emily had been basically bipolar. She was getting better; some days she was her old naughty adventurous self. But the rest of the time she swung back and forth between being little more than fear in a shell and so angry Natalie didn’t even recognize her.

  Inside the Demon Trapper, Rudy continued mouthing words.

  Emily stared at him. “Look,” she said, “he’s actually saying ‘help me’! You want me to help you, little guy? Well, how about this: How about I get a baseball bat and come and bash your squishy little ferret head into a pulp?”

  “Emily, don’t be gross,” said Natalie.

  Now Rudy was putting his hands together in supplication and making a sad face.

  “Oh my God! He’s . . . he’s praying to us!”

  “Will’s going to do everything he can for him, okay? He thinks he can put him back the way he was. Now let’s get out of here and back to practicing,” said Natalie.

  “Gladly.”

  As they left the laboratory, Rudy watched them go, alternating between wanting to hug them—I love you guys!—and thinking of ways to maim them with rusty gardening tools.

  On his way home after recovering the Power Rod, Will was rocketing along in the EVO. He’d been driving for hours and his eyelids felt like lead. He pulled into a rest stop, parking under a grove of tall pines, intending to get out for a minute or two and stretch his legs. But as soon as he turned the key and the deep rumbling of the engine shut down, he just closed his eyes, exhausted. He listened to the faint sound of the engine ticking. He heard his own breath. And then sleep overcame him and he dropped into darkness and began to dream.

  A catacomb. Howls of agony bouncing off the stone walls. Moving faster now, through a tunnel, into a massive cavern. Cries of pain, mournful in nature. Bats, thousands of bats, frantic in flight. Down below, demons! Floating down closer to them now. They file past a body lying on a marble altar. They weep for the body, they genuflect before it. It is the body of the Dark Lord! He is not moving. He is dead!

  Will heard a noise and opened his eyes, hand already closing on his Power Rod. But it was just a brilliant white dove landing on the hood of the car. It looked around and then flew into the sky. Will smiled, relaxing again. Maybe the dove was a sign that the darkness had lifted, that a new dawn would soon begin. For the briefest of moments, he let himself imagine what his life might be like if things were different.

  And then . . . wham! The dove slammed into the hood of the car. Dead. Will’s fleshed crawled as he watched what happened next. Neck broken, eyes bleeding, the dove rose up, stared balefully at Will, and then flapped painfully, awkwardly, hideously away into the night.

  Will shook his head. His dream had just been wishful thinking. The Prince of Darkness was not dead. Not yet. That would be up to Will Hunter.

  Will pulled up to the massive wrought iron gates of the stone mansion he’d chosen for his new home and pressed the remote. The gates swung open. He entered and parked, looking up at the magnificent old mansion and admiring the choice he’d made. He loved the fact that the place had marble statues and animal topiaries, not to mention five turrets and an Olympian skylight. He’d found the house on eBay when he and Natalie and Emily—and Rudy in the Demon Trapper—were still on the road, fleeing from Harrisburg. They’d stayed at a succession of four-star hotels, decompressing. Thanks to the money from his ownership of the Demon Hunter game franchise, he’d been able to treat Natalie and Emily to days of luxury, buying them all the spa indulgences they wanted and insisting that they order anything they desired from room service. They needed time to recover, but also, Will needed them to stay calm and quiet while he thought about what his next moves would be. He’d vanquished the Dark Lord and blown his whole organization to smithereens. But demons were a hearty lot, and Will knew they would recover, reorganize, and attempt another attack on humanity. He just didn’t know how or when. And because he was a Demon Hunter, like his father and his father’s father before him, it was his mission to find out.

  His stately, palatial new home was called the London Mansion because it had been built by Leopold Anthony London, a shipping magnate. London had commissioned it and had it built in 1902, but he only lived there for three years—thirty-six months of unbridled debauchery—before he changed his wicked ways and moved out, bequeathing it to the Seattle Society for Moral Preservation, which converted the mansion to a home for “wayward” girls. London himself became a man of God the very day he moved out. It was not known whether any of the girls who lived there were pregnant as a result of London’s own seductions, but rumors abounded.

  Despite its sordid past, the six-thousand-square-foot mansion had three-foot-thick walls and was the perfect place to house Will’s well-equipped computer laboratory and weapons design facility. His earnings from Demon Hunter netted him hundreds of thousands of dollars per week, so money was never an issue, and he spent it freely on researching and developing the kinds of weapons needed to battle demons. Before he and the girls had moved in, he’d paid for the house to have extensive renovations, including the addition of a state-of-the-art system of rapidly deployable security shutters. Will had also installed remote-controlled pulse-blast laser cannons atop ea
ch of the five turrets. He hoped he would never have to use them, but it was always good to be prepared.

  At the main entrance, he pressed his thumb to the print-reader lock and the huge wooden doors swung open. Then he went in search of Natalie and Emily.

  He found them a few minutes later in another wing of the house, in the gaming room, stick fighting in their padding and protective headgear. Will had them using bamboo Kettukari staffs now, but once they mastered those he would switch out the sticks and give them something far more lethal. When they had first moved in, he had worked with them both, showing them the various Kendo moves and maneuvers. If they were going to stay with him, they needed to be able to defend themselves. He’d taught them that while power was good, speed was better. Speed was what counted, not the ability to clobber someone with all your might. Better a series of staccato hits than one haymaker. The twins had always been competitive growing up, it turned out, so giving them sticks and having them fight one another was a recipe for bruises. It also meant they’d been learning quickly, each of them pushed further by the other one’s progress.

  He’d barely entered the room when Natalie saw him, dropped her staff, and rushed up to hug him. She wanted to kiss him, but instead she settled for him hugging her gently back and forming his lips into something vaguely resembling a smile. She cocked her head to the side like an inquisitive puppy.

  “So, did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “You know what! Did you find it? When you left, you said you had a good fix on it but didn’t know if you could find it, or if it would work.”

  Will was stone-faced.

  “I can’t read you,” said Natalie. Her eyes narrowed. “You did! Didn’t you?”

  “I . . . might have,” said Will.

  “Don’t tease me,” she said, trying to appear angry. But the truth was, she loved it when he teased her because he so rarely did. When he did, it was a sign that he was actually relaxed, right in the moment, really with her, instead of worrying about the fate of the human race. He smiled and she flushed with a wave of warmth. His smiles did that to her.

  “Yeah, I found it. And I’ve got work to do on it, so I’ve got to go into the lab.” His smile left as quickly as it had come.

  That’s Will, thought Natalie, all business, 24/7/365. Hot as fire one minute, cold as ice the next. But it was hard to blame him. He had a lot on his shoulders.

  “While you’re in there, would you mind putting Rudy—or whatever vile creature he’s become—out of his misery? He looks disgusting,” said Emily.

  The room went dead silent as Will fixed them both with a stare.

  “I thought I instructed you to stay out of the lab.”

  “Will, we’re sorry, it won’t happen again,” offered Natalie. Then she looked at her sister. “Isn’t that right, Em?”

  “Can you blame us for exploring?” Emily asked instead of agreeing. “What are we supposed to do, cooped up all day in this spooky castle? I mean, the swimming pool and Jacuzzi are great, and the bowling alley and theater . . . but you can only watch so many movies . . .”

  Natalie gave Emily a dirty look. How on earth could she be anything but totally 100 percent grateful to even be alive, let alone hanging out in a totally pimped-out, one-of-a-kind mansion?

  But Will understood. Emily was getting claustrophobic. Having been held prisoner in the guts of a volcano would do that to you.

  “I get it. You need to breathe. A caged bird sings a sad song and all that. Just let me clean up and we’ll all go out.”

  “Rudy, too?” asked Emily, kidding, but in a sarcastic way that made Will frown. He knew it couldn’t be easy living in a house with one of the things that had tormented her for so long, but she’d have to figure out how to deal with it.

  “Rudy’s not going anywhere until I can find a way to bring him back to our side. Now, how about you two get ready? Or are you going out like that?”

  They looked at each other, still in workout clothes and sweaty from stick practice. “Give us ten minutes,” said Natalie, and they went upstairs, veering off to their separate bedrooms and what Emily liked to call “waltz-in” closets.

  Will knew by now that with these two, ten minutes meant an hour, easy. He didn’t really have time to take Natalie and Emily anywhere, but it looked like maybe they were starting to come a bit unraveled so he justified the outing as damage control. While they were upstairs getting cleaned up and changing, he took the Power Rod into the lab. He peeled the retrieval patch off his neck, opened it up, and took out his loupe and micro tools and started tweaking. He didn’t mean to spend so much time on it right then, but he was so into it that an hour sped by in a blink and he had the patch synched up with the retrieval sleeve on the Power Rod with time to spare before Natalie and Emily finished getting ready. Time to test it. He went up the stairs and made his way to the roof.

  Will scanned the neighborhood for buttinskis and then flung the Power Rod skyward. It shot up like a bullet into the clouds and then held and hovered at two thousand feet. He waited a full minute, breathing in the clean damp northwest air. He had chosen this place in no small part because of the amazing, nearly 360-degree view. He could see Lake Union and snowy Mount Rainier shining in the distance. He loved this part of the country, and not just because the people were smart and polite and made awesome coffee. Somehow the evergreens, the water, and the mountains all worked together to make him feel welcome. He wasn’t sure he would ever be able to live a normal life, but if he could, this is where he’d want to live it. For a few brief seconds he allowed his mind to venture into the daydreams where he and Natalie hung out and snowboarded up at Whistler and went to movies and made out like normal teenagers. But he knew better. He nixed the daydream, shaking it off, then tapped the code on the retrieval patch. In a manner of seconds, his trusty Power Rod came screaming down out of the sky and slapped into his waiting palm. That felt good, thought Will. Then he sent the Power Rod skyward once again, for safekeeping. He thought about the other two crystal rods that had been blown out of the volcano. They could be anywhere. Will would, of course, do everything he could to find them. But he had other matters to attend to first. For one thing, he had sent his mother April away before the battle in the volcano, to keep her safe in case he didn’t make it, and now he had to find her and bring her back. Satisfied the Power Rod was back in working order, he went back inside and down to the first floor where Natalie and Emily were waiting for him.

  In the weeks since he’d rescued her from the hell of being a captive of the Dark Lord and his legions of demons, Emily had come a very long way. At first he was certain she’d be frightened and withdrawn for months. But she turned out to be incredibly resilient. Most days, she was able to function more or less normally. Sure, she still had brain-bending nightmares, but they were becoming less frequent, and with each healing night’s sleep her frisky independent side grew stronger. She was still fragile, still carrying the pain and trauma from her experience, but she was, just like her twin sister, strong and independent. She was quite a match for Natalie, and the two of them—well, they were a pair to be reckoned with.

  Just then, though, they looked like any two teenage girls ready to go out for the night. Natalie smiled when she saw him, and he couldn’t help smiling back. It felt good. Maybe they weren’t the only ones who needed a night off.

  Chapter Three: A Night on the Town

  Instead of ripping around town in the kickass Mitsubishi EVO, Will drove the stately prowler, his BMW 750Li. With 400+ horsepower and dual nitro boosters, it had plenty of muscle if they needed it, not to mention double bulletproof glass, and front, side, and rear armor. Just because he was taking the night off didn’t mean he could leave himself unprepared for an attack. So as they cruised down from the hill and around the city, Will had a unique feeling. It would no doubt pass, but for the time being he actually felt somewhat safe.

  They drove past the Experience, the beautifully bizarre Frank Gehry–designed building
that housed the Experience Music Project as well as the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. They ate dinner in a private dining room at El Gaucho. Though they were just teenagers, everywhere they went they were treated like royalty. Natalie and Emily were convinced that the way people treated them was due to Will’s nearly immeasurable wealth. But Will knew better. It was all in how you carried yourself, what your eyes told people. And when people saw the quiet power in Will Hunter’s eyes, they knew he meant business and treated him as such.

  After dinner, they went over to the Seattle Center. Natalie and Emily had told him about how when they were kids their family used to drive down from Harrisburg to spend the day at the Center, riding the Wild Mouse and eating cotton candy and playing the arcade games. Will looked up at the towering Space Needle and decided to take the girls up for a spectacular view of the Emerald City.

  On the observation deck of the Needle, Will, Natalie, and Emily gazed out at the vast sea of city lights sparkling in the crystal clear night air. A vigorous gust of wind buffeted them, and Natalie leaned against Will for support and warmth. He ached for her when she got this close. He put his arm around her as she moved in tight, tucking her head into his neck.

  Seeing the way Natalie and Will were standing, Emily smiled to herself, happy that her sister had finally found someone she really cared about. There had been a lot of time to talk the last few weeks, and Natalie had told her all about Will’s arrival in Harrisburg and the way they’d gotten together. And she knew they hadn’t had much time alone since they’d escaped the volcano. Deciding to give them some space, she circled around the deck, enjoying the feel of the breezy night wind on her face and neck. For the first few moments she loved being up there, outside. But then the fear began to gnaw. For all she knew, demons could come swooping down on her at any second. She shuddered and held herself against the wind. The memories of being held captive by them still dogged her. She knew she had to train her mind to forget, but it was hard. How do you forget weeks of unrelenting torment?