The rain had eased somewhat, but with the recent horrible weather the outlet mall was nearly deserted. I thought this was a good thing, given the way Felix looked. Essentially he was six-seven and nearly three hundred pounds of scorched skin, leather, and cotton. Even his face was darkened where the explosion had actually abraded his skin, embedding dirt and grit where it wouldn’t be scrubbed out for a while. His right eyebrow was singed almost completely off and he was limping, but only slightly. He was also wet, making him smell like something burned, and feeling a little moody.
Angela was giving me all kinds of looks. I could tell she was dying to know what had taken place in the coach with Speed. When I was sure Felix wouldn’t notice, I put my finger to my lips and nodded my head toward him. Angela gave me the stink eye again, but finally gave up. She would have to wait until Felix was out of earshot.
We entered the store looking like a couple of drowned rats. A clerk who was Felix’s polar opposite met us at the door. The man stood no more than five-six and had thin wispy gray hair and a stringy mustache. He wore Coke-bottle eyeglasses perched on his nose and couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred fifty pounds. He must have been nearsighted because he pounced on Angela and me the minute we walked in. Invading our personal space, he studied us intently, looking us up and down as we dripped water on the store carpet. He hadn’t seen Felix holding the door behind us. Yet.
“Can I help you?” he asked. There was an edge to his tone, and he probably thought since we were neither big nor tall we were probably there to shoplift or make trouble of some kind.
“I need new clothes,” a voice said.
When Felix stepped through the door from the gloom outside and the clerk could see him clearly, the poor man physically jumped. To say Felix towered over him was an insult to towers. It was like a Great Dane looking down at a Chihuahua.
“Eh … hah … yes … yessir,” the man stammered. “Your name is Stan…. I mean, my name is Stanley. What exactly are you looking for?”
“Everything,” Felix said.
“Uh, sure. We can do that. Do you know your size?” Stanley asked. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead even though it was chilly in the store.
“Five XL,” Felix said.
“All right,” Stanley said, “let’s start with shirts, shall we?”
Stanley led Felix to the back of the store while Angela and I waited near the front.
“Tell me everything,” she said as soon as Felix was out of earshot.
“There’s not much to tell. He locked Speed in the bathroom and then he made me leave. As far as I know, he’s still in there,” I said.
Angela bit her lower lip, which is what she does when she’s thinking hard and working her way up to a question she doesn’t necessarily want to ask. I had seen her mother, Malak, with the same tic a few hours earlier.
“Q, what do you think Speed was doing there?” Angela asked. “I thought we ditched him.”
I shrugged. Angela had a suspicious streak. She likely got it from her mom and it’s probably what makes Malak a great agent. You learn to suspect everything when you’re in charge of protecting people.
“I don’t know. He made up some story about wanting to spend time with me. Which is a total load. My guess is he wanted to find my mom and see if he could spoil her day. That’s what he loves to do more than anything.”
“Maybe. It’s just weird, him showing up out of the blue like that,” Angela said.
“I know. Boone said the same thing. But spending time trying to figure out Speed Paulsen is an exercise in humility,” I said.
Angela laughed. “I think you mean futility. And you did that on purpose.”
“I know.” I admit I enjoyed teasing her.
“Boone sure went medieval on him, though,” she said. “He doesn’t like him, that’s for sure.”
“Speed Paulsen has to pay people to like him. According to everyone we’ve met on this tour, Boone has been a roadie forever. They’ve probably clashed before. But that’s not surprising. My dad has managed to pretty much alienate everyone in the music business except his hired help.”
We spotted Felix in the back, shaking his head at a polka dot shirt Stanley was holding up for him. The shirt was roughly the size of a circus tent. I could feel my mind going into acceleration mode and reached into my cargo pants for a deck of cards. I had forgotten that a few hours earlier a now-dead terrorist had made me empty my pockets. My cards, my magic coins, all my stuff was in a plastic bag by the side of the road somewhere several miles back. For a moment, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Shuffling my cards and splitting and cutting the deck was how I calmed myself. It annoyed Angela and virtually everyone else, which usually made it that much more enjoyable for me.
Now all I could do was clench and unclench my fists. Angela didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t say anything about it.
“Okay, ever since right before we got nabbed by the terrorists and saw Boone do whatever it is he did, we haven’t had a chance to discuss it,” Angela said.
“What did we see?” I asked.
Angela punched me in the shoulder. “You know very well what we saw. The traffic jam where he covered all that ground in seconds. And in the coach, just now with your dad, he was up at the front, then he was all the way in the back and I never saw him move.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at my empty hands. I mimicked fanning a deck of cards open in my right hand. It didn’t help. “There’s more. At the house Boone popped out of thin air right behind one of the shooters outside. Croc moved like a greyhound on steroids while we stood watch on the overpass. Croc knew Bethany and your mom were in that seafood truck. Just now he jumped up and down on the dining room table like a jackrabbit. And …” I stopped. It sounded crazy. And I was starting to get hyped up. I tried to take deep breaths so I wouldn’t talk so fast.
“Don’t forget the cemetery, and then when we got to the house Croc was already there, across all that water! And what did Boone mean when he said they killed the last vampire one hundred years ago? There’s no such thing as vampires.”
“Millions of teenage girls would disagree with you,” I said with a chuckle.
“Q!” Angela was getting agitated and it was hard to blame her. Her mom was who knew where, doing who knew what. Malak was most likely surrounded by very dangerous people.
“What can I say? He disappears and reappears out of thin air. I’ve studied magic since I was little. I have no clue how he does it. It’s got to be an illusion. The only other possibility is that it’s not magic, and he can travel through time and space.” There. I said it.
Angela is more practical than I am. “How is that possible? It defies the laws of physics and … everything,” Angela said, looking at me like I was from outer space.
“True. But he did it. In the coach and during the traffic jam. We both saw it and we can’t both be hallucinating. And when Croc went after Speed, it looked to me for a second like Croc got … younger. He’s old and smelly and sleeps all the time. Then the next thing you know he’s bouncing around like an alpha wolf trying to bite Speed’s head off or something.”
Angela crossed her arms. This was a new posture for her. I fake-shuffled the invisible deck again. Angela pretended not to notice. I was going to have to go to the gas station or somewhere and see if I could find a deck of cards.
“When we get back on the coach we’re going to confront him,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “Maybe we should just wait and observe.”
“Wait for what? Do you really think Felix and the other SOS members don’t know about Boone and his mysterious power? And besides, you had the perfect chance to interrogate him in the coach just now and you didn’t. We’re wasting time.”
“Are you forgetting the Speed-Paulsen-being-there part? What was I supposed to do, ask Boone a bunch of questions and risk Speed hearing? I don’t see how this is my fault. I told you I saw him appear right outside the house minutes before the raid. He looked right at me. Knowing me like he does, he realizes I’m not going to keep that to myself. So he knows you’re also aware of everything I saw. Besides, he warned us we were going to see him do weird stuff, remember?”
Angela sighed and uncrossed her arms. “I guess you’re right. But it’s just so frustrating not knowing what’s going on.”
The difference between me and Angela is that she likes to know every detail of what’s happening every single second. I don’t mind being left in the dark. It requires less thinking. But right then, a part of me was dying to know how Boone pulled off his magic trick. I closed my eyes and tried to zip away—or whatever it was Boone did. I opened my eyes. No luck. I was still standing in the same place.
“What did you just do?” Angela asked me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You just tried to disappear like Boone, didn’t you?”
“No,” I lied, because I had so totally tried that very thing. It was amazing that Angela and I were still getting to know each other, but she already knew me so well.
Trying to get her attention off of me, I looked past her toward the rear of the store and the dressing rooms. It worked. She looked over her shoulder to see Stanley, the tiny haberdasher, pacing nervously in front of the dressing rooms. Felix was apparently trying on clothes.
“As I was saying, let’s watch and observe,” I said. “He’s been in the music business a long time. He had to leave a trail. Maybe we can find out more about him on the Internet or something. To me it just doesn’t feel like the right time. I say we ask around for more info first.”
“And how are we going to get more info?”
I shrugged and did a pretend one-handed cut of the nonexistent deck of cards.
Angela nodded toward the rear of the store, where Felix was coming out of the dressing room in a whole new outfit. He pushed a big pile of burned clothes into Stanley’s outstretched hands. The poor clerk looked like someone had handed him a bag of cow manure.
Felix reached back into the dressing room and removed a bunch more shirts and pants before heading toward the register. As Angela and I followed him, she said, “I think I know who would be a good place to start for some information.”