Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

“No one goes down,” Elena said tersely. “No one invites him in.”

Meredith shot her a keen glance. “Shinichi could have tunneled out like a mole by now. And he’s already been invited in.”

“My fault for not warning you all — but anyway, if it is Shinichi and he’s done anything to hurt Stefan he’s going to see me when I’m angry. The words Wings of Destruction just popped into my head and something inside me wants to say them.”

There was a chill in the room.

No one met Stefan, but in a moment they could all hear running footsteps. Stefan appeared at his door, burst through, and found himself confronted with a row of people all looking at him suspiciously.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded, staring at Misao, who was being held up between Meredith and Matt. “Misao—” Elena took two steps toward him — and wound herself around him, drawing him into a deep kiss. For a moment he resisted, but then, bit by bit, his opposition collapsed despite the roomful of observers.

When Elena finally let go, she just leaned against Stefan, breathing hard. The others were all crimson with embarrassment. Stefan, flushed as he was, held her tightly.

“I’m sorry,” Elena whispered. “But you’ve already ‘come home’ twice. First, it was Shinichi and we locked him in the root cellar. Then it was her.” She pointed, without looking, toward the cowering Misao. “I didn’t know how to make sure that Shinichi hadn’t escaped somehow—”

“And you’re sure now?”

“Oh, yes. I recognize you. You’re always ready to let me in.”

Matt realized that she was shaking and quickly stood up so she could sit, for at least a minute or two, in peace.

The peace lasted less than a minute.

“I want my star ball!” Misao cried. “I need to put Power in it or I’ll go on weakening — and then you’ll have murdered me.”

“Go on weakening? Is the liquid evaporating out of the star ball or something?”

Meredith asked. Matt was thinking about what he’d seen on his home block before the Ridgemont sheriffs had got him.

“You’ve gathered Power to put in it?” he asked mildly. “Power from yesterday, maybe?”

“Power from ever since you took it. But it isn’t joined with…me. With my star ball.

It’s mine, but not yet.”

“Like maybe some Power from making Cole Reece eat his guinea pig while it was alive? From making kids burn down their own houses?” Matt’s voice was gravelly.

“What does it matter?” Misao retorted sullenly. “It’s mine. They were my ideas, not yours. You can’t keep me away—”

“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?”