EXHAUSTED (WHY DON’T you trying being a tornado, a comet, and a freaked-out free faller all in the same day?), I materialized a small tent and sleeping bag in the backyard of my former home.
I did not want to sleep inside the building where both my parents had been brutally slain. Nightmares—in IMAX 3-D with THX surround sound—would be guaranteed.
It took me a long time to drift off, even though I knew I needed the rest, especially if I wanted my parachute (or anything else) to work the next time I materialized one.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Mel.
Where had Number 1 taken her? Was she safe? Did she know that she shared her soul with Dana, my childhood friend?
That last question was so mind-numbingly metaphysical that I finally drifted off to sleep wrestling with it.
A sleep that didn’t last long.
The ground shook. My eyes popped open. Something enormous had just crash-landed in the backyard. Whatever it was, it had brought with it a darker kind of light than the golden aura of Mikaela and Xanthos. The walls of my tent were glowing under the influence of ultraviolet black-light radiation. My white socks and shoelaces looked like fluorescent ghosts.
I climbed out of my sleeping bag, yanked open the tent flaps, stumbled into the yard, and was face-to-face with my worst nightmare.
The six-and-a-half-foot-tall praying mantis monster stood in a hazy beam of black light. Make that a “preying” mantis, because the thing was rubbing its spiked forelegs together, eager for its next kill.
“Hello, Danny Boy,” it boomed in its deep voice. “The hero returns to his pathetic little hovel in Kansas. I appreciate the poetry of your choice. So many of your family members have died in this spot. It is right that you should die here, too.”
The foul beast sprang one giant leap forward on its massively muscled legs—covering fifteen feet in a single hop. Its grossly bulging, plum-colored body jiggled when it landed right in front of me.
“You silly little fool,” it hissed through its jagged, glass-shard teeth. Its breath reeked with the scent of maggot-riddled beef rotting in the sun. “Wasting precious time entertaining my boring, oversentimental cousin, Mikaela? Riding around with that ridiculous Pfeerdian freak, Xanthos?”
I couldn’t resist taunting the beast.
“You mean the Legions of the Light? The two golden oldies that terrify you?”
“I fear NOTHING!” The Prayer screeched, rearing back its tiny triangular head on its stalk of a neck. “I feed on fear. And you, Daniel, have much to be afraid of.”
“I am afraid.” I stepped back a foot or two, fanning the air in front of my face. “Of that rancid butcher shop you call your breath.”
“Foolish child. You should have spent this day seeking out a good hiding place on a distant planet, far removed from the gravitational pull of my ever-expanding black hole.”
“Are we talking about your mouth again?” I shot back. “Because you should really see an orthodontist about those broken-bottle teeth of yours. Maybe get yourself fitted for a retainer.”
The Prayer didn’t like me snapping on his crooked excuses for teeth.
I heard a gurgling, mucusy, wet sound. But instead of hocking a loogie at me, the thing shot a gelatinous glob of blue flame out of his wide-open pie hole.
I dodged the fireball and zipped to my right, making sure I had a tree between the fire-spewing wackaloon and me.
“You cannot hide!” The Prayer bellowed. “There is no planet, no dimension, no space or time where I cannot find you.”
The Prayer hopped forward and, grabbing a clump of branches with both its pincers, wrenched my tree—roots and all—right out of the ground.
Tossing the tree aside as if it were a twig, Number 1 glared down at me with its liquid-black bug eyes.
“Say good-bye to Terra Firma, Daniel. Your days as the Alien Hunter end here. They end now!”