I REMEMBERED THE house being so much bigger.
Or maybe I had just been a whole lot smaller.
I had teleported without incident from Kentucky to what Number 1 once called my “pathetic little hovel in Kansas.” My first home on Earth. That is, before it was burned to ground by a murderous lunatic. The empty lot was too depressing to look at, so I recreated the place as I remembered it.
It was a simple two-story white clapboard farmhouse, where I had lived with my mom and dad more than a dozen years ago. It was no McMansion, that’s for sure. It had three bedrooms, upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, a wraparound porch, a detached garage, and a big basement. It was located in the middle of nowhere because “nowhere” is where Alien Hunters always need to live.
I walked around to the side of the house and studied the sheet of plywood nailed over what I remembered as the kitchen window. If you looked closely, you could see the scorch marks lining the perimeter of the plywood. This was where Number 1 had first exploded into my life with a wall-shaking detonation, taking my mother by surprise.
As I stood there, I heard her screams and sobs once again in my head.
And then my father’s voice. Wait, wait. Hold on. Lower the gun, my friend.
But The Prayer hadn’t lowered his weapon. Deafening, concussive blasts drowned out my father’s voice. Agonizing blasts from an Opus 24/24. When the shooting stopped, my father called out the last words he ever spoke to me in the real world: We love you, Daniel. Always.
And then nothing. Just the clanging echo of the Opus 24/24 hanging in the silence.
I moved around to the rear of the house. My backyard. The place where I built my first model of Khufu’s Great Pyramid out of sugar cubes instead of limestone blocks. I built it in HO scale (where 3.5 millimeters equals one real foot). I was only two-and-a-half years old at the time, but the pyramid was enormous and spectacular.
At least until it rained.
Now I saw the sloped cellar doors sitting like an aluminum wedge of cheese up against the house’s mildew-stained foundation. I knew I could pull up on the handles, squeak open the double doors, and descend a set of rickety wooden steps into the basement, the place where I first encountered The Prayer.
I remember I was trembling and pressing my small, vulnerable body up against an old water heater, petrified about what had just happened to my mom and dad, when a beam of violet-tinged light shone down the stairs into the basement. And then I saw it—a six-and-a-half-foot-tall praying mantis.
I sensed Number 1 was a shape-shifter, able to assume any guise he chose. I could do the same, although I wasn’t great at it just yet, being so young.
As I reminisced, there was something about that awful night that seemed more vivid, more enhanced than I had ever remembered it before. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.
But it was something seemingly insignificant that I had seen in the basement as I hid behind that old water heater. It was some small detail that could be hugely important now.
Relax your mind, Daniel, Xanthos’s thoughts reached out to me across the miles. You can see more clearly when you let the visions come to you.
There’s something here, I thought back. Something that will help me take down Number 1. I can sense it.
It will come to you if you let it. Just as a revelation suddenly came to me.
What?
After you left, I drifted off into a very deep, very meditative trance, mon.
And?
I remembered something from the time long ago: I was not your father’s only spiritual advisor, Daniel. The man, he loved to have a backup for everything he did; a Plan B to go with his Plan A.
Okay. So who was this “backup” spiritual advisor?
This he never did tell me. But, I remember, he called her “his angel.” She was your father’s backup for me!