“Meredith, keep me away from her. I’ve known that kid Cole since he was born.
I’ll always have nightmares…”
Misao perked up like a wilting plant getting water. “Have nightmares, have nightmares,” she whispered.
There was a silence. Then Meredith said, carefully and expressionlessly, as if she were thinking of the stave, “You’re a nasty little thing, aren’t you? Is that your food? Bad memories, nightmares, fear of the future?”
Misao was plainly stumped. She couldn’t see the catch. It was like asking a regular hungry teenager “How about some pizza and a Coke? Is that what you want?” Misao couldn’t even see that her appetites were wrong, so she couldn’t lie.
“You were right before,” Stefan said forcefully. “We have your star ball. The only way to make us give it back would be to do something for us. We’re supposed to be able to control you anyway because we have it—”
“Old-ways thinking. Obsolete,” Misao growled.
There was a dead silence. Matt felt his stomach plummet.
They had been betting on “old-ways thinking” all along. To get Shinichi’s star ball by making Misao tell them where it was. Their ultimate goal had been to control Shinichi using his star ball.
“You don’t understand,” Misao said, pitifully and yet angrily at the same time. “My brother will help me fill my star ball again. But what we did in this town — it was an order, not just for fun.”
“Could’a fooled me,” Elena murmured, but Stefan’s head jerked up and he said, “An order? From who?”
“I…don’t…know!” Misao screamed. “Shinichi gets the orders. Then he tells me what to do. But whoever it is should be happy by now. The town is almost destroyed. He ought to give me some help here!” She glared at the group, and they stared back.
Without knowing that he was going to say it, Matt said, “Let’s put her in the root cellar with Shinichi. I’ve got this feeling that we might all be sleeping in the storage room tonight.”
“Sleeping in the storage room with every wall covered in Post-it Note amulets,” added Meredith grimly. “If we have enough. I got another packet, but it doesn’t go very far when you’re trying to cover a room.”
“Okay,” Elena said. “Who’s got Shinichi’s key?”
Matt raised his hand. “In my—”
“Don’t tell me!” exclaimed Elena. “I’ve got hers. We can’t lose them. Stefan and I are one team; you guys are the other.”
They half-led and half-supported Misao out of Stefan’s room and down the stairs.
Misao didn’t try to run away from them, to struggle, or to speak to them. This only made Matt more suspicious of her. He saw Stefan and Elena glance toward each other and knew they were feeling the same way.
But what else was there to do with her? There was no other way, humanely, or even inhumanely, to restrain her for days. They had her star ball, and according to books that was supposed to allow them to control her, but she was right, it seemed to be an obsolete notion, because it didn’t work. They’d tried with Stefan and Meredith holding her tightly, while Matt got the star ball from where he’d been keeping it in a shoebox on the upper shelf above the clothes in his closet.
He and Elena had tried to get Misao to do things while holding the almost empty sphere: to make Misao tell where her brother’s star ball was, and so on. But it simply didn’t work.
“Maybe when there’s so little Power in it, it doesn’t apply,” Elena said finally. But that was small comfort at best.
As they took Misao to the kitchen, Matt thought that it had been a stupid plan of the kitsune: imitating Stefan twice. Doing it the second time, when the humans were on guard, that was stupid. Misao didn’t seem as stupid as that.
Matt had a bad feeling.
Elena had a very bad feeling about what they were doing. As she looked around at the faces of the others, she saw that they did too. But nobody had come up with a better plan. They couldn’t kill Misao. They weren’t murderers who could kill a sickly, passive girl in cold blood.
She figured that Shinichi must have very keen hearing, and had already heard them walking on the creaking kitchen floorboards. And she had to assume that he knew — by mindbond, or just logic, or whatever — that Misao was right above him.
There was nothing to lose by shouting, through the closed door, “Shinichi, we’ve got your sister here! If you want her back you’ll stay quiet and not make us throw her down the stairs.”
There was silence from the root cellar. Elena chose to think of it as submissive silence. At least Shinichi wasn’t yelling threats.
“Okay,” Elena whispered. She’d taken a position directly behind Misao. “When I count to three, we push as hard as we can.”
“Wait!” Matt said in a miserable whisper-shout. “You said we wouldn’t throw her down the stairs.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Elena said grimly. “You think he doesn’t have some surprise for us?”
“But—”
“Leave it, Matt,” said Meredith quietly. She had the stave ready in her left hand and with her right was ready to push on the panel for opening the door. “Everybody ready?”
Everyone nodded. Elena felt sorry for Matt and Stefan, who were the most honest and sensitive of all of them.
“One,” she whispered softly, “two, three.”
On three Meredith hit the concealed wall switch. And then things began to happen in very slow motion.
By “two” Elena had already begun to shove Misao toward the door. On “three” the others joined her.
But the door seemed to take forever to open. And before the ending of forever, everything went wrong.
The greenery around Misao’s head spread twigs in all directions. One strand shot out and snagged Elena around the wrist. She heard a yell of outrage from Matt and knew that another strand had gotten him.
“Push!” Meredith shouted and then Elena saw the stave coming at her. Meredith whisked with the stave through the greenery connected to Misao. The vine that had been cutting into Elena’s wrist fell to the floor.
Any remaining misgivings about throwing Misao down the stairs vanished. Elena joined in the crowd trying to push her through the opening. But there was something wrong in the basement. For one thing, they were shoving Misao into pitchdarkness…and movement.
The basement was full of — something. Some things.
Elena looked down at her ankle and was horrified to see a gigantic maggot that seemed to have crawled out of the root cellar. Or at least a maggot was the first thing she could think of to compare it to — maybe it was a headless slug. It was translucent and black and about a foot long, but far too fat for her to have put a hand around it. It seemed to have two ways of moving, one by the familiar hunchand-straighten method and the other by simply sticking to other maggots, which were exploding up over Elena’s head like a hideous fountain.
Elena looked up and wished she hadn’t.
There was a cobra waving over them, out of the root cellar and into the kitchen. It was a cobra made of black translucent maggots stuck together, and every so often one would fall off and land among the group and there would be a cry.
If Bonnie had been with them, she would have screamed until the wineglasses in the cupboards shattered, Elena thought wildly. Meredith was trying to attack the cobra with the stave and reach into her jeans pocket for Post-it Notes at the same time.
“I’ll get the notes,” Elena gasped, and wriggled her hand into Meredith’s pocket.
Her fingers closed on a small sheaf of cards and she tugged it out triumphantly.
Just then the first glistening fat maggot fell on her bare skin. She wanted to scream with pain as its little feet or teeth or suckers — whatever kept it attached to her — burned and stung. She pulled a thin card from the sheaf, which was not a Post-it Note but the same amulet on a small rather flimsy note card, and slapped it on the maggot-like thing.