Jeremiah!” squealed Eliza, rushing over.
“Yes!” Jonah exclaimed, pumping his fist and joining her.
Jeremiah was squinting up at the lights and sweat was beading on his forehead, but he was there. And alive!
“He can’t see us,” Jonah said. “We’re still in the hidden realm, remember?”
A red glowing strand ran around his head. It was thick enough to cover his mouth.
“What is that around his face?” asked Hai Ling.
Jonah knew. He’d seen it before, years ago. It was the same type of band that the fallen angels had used to hold the nephilim captive.
“It’s something the fallen angels put on him,” Jonah answered. “Maybe he was talking too much . . .”
He quickly pulled an arrow off his back and held it close to Jeremiah’s mouth.
“Wait a minute! Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Hai Ling asked.
“Just please be careful, Jonah,” pleaded Eliza.
He rolled his eyes at them both and ran the tip of the arrow along the glowing tendrils until, with a small burst of smoke and light, they fell from Jeremiah’s mouth.
Jeremiah looked up, blinking.
“Hey,” he said slowly. “I can talk . . . I can actually talk again!”
“I think we should let him see that we’re here,” Eliza said, smiling. Jonah and Hai Ling nodded, and they bowed their heads and left the hidden realm.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
They appeared instantly in front of Jeremiah.
His mouth dropped open, and he looked at them in disbelief.
“First time I’ve ever seen you speechless, little bro,” Jonah said, grinning. Eliza began to cry, hugging his neck tightly, while Jonah and Hai Ling worked on untying him from the metal pipe.
“You came!” Jeremiah finally said, pulling his arms out of the cords and hugging Eliza, and then Jonah, tightly. Then he gave a big hug to Hai Ling too. “I can’t believe you’re actually here! I can’t believe you found me!”
“I was trying to find Mom when I went back to the warehouse,” Jeremiah told them sheepishly. “I was snooping around there, and then the next thing I know, these two big guys grabbed me out on the street and threw me into their car. I tried to fight them, but it was no use.”
Jonah smiled, thinking of his brother trying to fight two huge Russian bodyguards. He was sure he had given it his best shot.
“Did you try to use your angelic power?” Eliza asked. “The belt of truth? Or at least just disappear into the hidden realm?”
“Well, I was so scared, I didn’t really think about that until they took me to this room,” he answered. “I wouldn’t have been able to leave the car anyway, even if I was invisible to them. They threw a hood or something over my head, and I couldn’t see. When they took it off, I was here. And for some reason, I couldn’t talk.”
“The fallen angels slapped some kind of binding on your mouth,” Jonah said. He looked at Eliza. “I guess they knew about his power.”
She thought for a second, nodding slowly. “If they stopped him from talking, they would be able to keep him from speaking truth and using the belt. Brilliant.”
“Maybe we can take that mouth covering back with us to use when we need to,” said Jonah, laughing.
Eliza rolled her eyes. “Jonah, be serious. We need to get upstairs, and then get off this evil boat before someone notices us. But with you, Frederick, and Andre, and your angelic strength, we should have a pretty good chance.”
Hai Ling smirked. “As long as we aren’t stopped by any flying bad guys.”
“Well, whatever we do, we need to hurry,” Jonah said. He could hear Frederick and Andre down the hallway, calling out to them to hurry up. The guards behind the doors were banging louder and louder.
They quickly made their way into the hallway. Andre and Frederick were still holding the doors closed, but they looked relieved to see the group sneaking down the hallway.
Jonah called out instructions as they approached the stairwell. “When I say go, we’re going to make a run for it,” he said. “You guys get ready, okay?”
Jonah stopped suddenly, motioning for everyone behind him to be quiet.
Someone was walking down the steps.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
He felt a sickness in his stomach grow, and the temperature in the hallway suddenly dropped. He turned to look at Eliza. Her face was pale with fear.
“I don’t like this . . . ,” she whispered. The others seemed just as rattled.
A man entered the hallway and stood, adjusting the cuff links on his shirt and straightening his tuxedo jacket. He was right in between Jonah’s group and Frederick and Andre. Finally, the man looked up, straight into Jonah’s eyes, a wide grin on his face.
“I don’t see how they wear these things,” he said. “But I guess that’s the cost of doing business, right?”
He laughed, the only sound in the hallway, except for the two guards still trying to escape the rooms they were trapped in. But as Andre and Frederick turned to see who was in the hallway, they let their grip go, and the doors flung open. The man turned to look at the guards.
“Who’s out here?” one of them shouted angrily. “Who’s been holding the door?”
When they saw the man in the tuxedo standing there, watching them with a derisive smile on his face, they stood straight up.
“Stuck in a closet, are we, gentlemen?” the man said. “Doesn’t appear to be anyone out here except us, does it?”
Frederick and Andre walked toward them, still in the hidden realm and invisible to the guards. They were going to try to sneak around the man.
“Why don’t you two go ahead and pop back into reality, huh, little quarterlings?” he said, still fidgeting with his cuff link. He held his hands out, motioning to the hall. “This is reality, after all, no?” He chuckled again, and Jonah couldn’t tell whether he believed that himself or not.
Frederick and Andre looked shocked by his words, realizing he could see them. They glanced at each other, and then silently they both entered the physical world again. They popped into view, and the guards gasped. The man turned back to the other group.
“Nice to see you again, Jonah,” he said, moving close to him. He turned to Eliza. “And you too, dear Eliza. What’s the matter? You’re looking a little pale. Oh well . . . I guess it’s not every day you get to be in the presence of someone like me.”
The guards looked confused as the man seemed to be talking to invisible people. “Are you all right, Mr. Prince?”
“Why don’t you come back into reality too, friends?”
Jonah sighed and nodded to the others, and they popped back into the physical world too.
“Oh, man . . . ,” one of the guards said.
Jonah mustered every ounce of courage he had just to speak. “Mr. Prince? Seriously? You can’t hide behind that person, whoever you are pretending to be on the outside. We know who you really are.”
Mr. Prince smiled at Jonah, taking delight in his words. “Well, I should hope so, Jonah. I’ve known you practically your entire life.”
Jonah bristled. “You don’t know me at all.”
“Good one, there,” Mr. Prince said, pointing at him. “But I know what you were doing while your brother and sister were lost by themselves here in New York. You were showing off on the basketball court, trying to impress all the girls in your school, and forgetting about them. You were taking it easy back in Peacefield.”
Eliza glanced at Jonah, and he could sense an invisible wave of her doubt crash over him. He wanted to protest, but instead, he was weighed down by his own crushing feelings.
He’s right. I ran away from my family. I ran away from everyone in my life.
“At any rate,” the man said, checking his watch, “I have some important people to attend to. But I’d like to continue this conversation later. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
He snapped his fingers, and a horde of fallen angels came from the stairwell. Moving quickly, while the quarterlings were still in a daze from their encounter with the Evil One himself, the Fallen grabbed the kids, shoved them to the ground, and pulled their hands behind their backs.
Something felt hot on Jonah’s wrists. “Owww!”
He tugged at them but couldn’t budge. Even fighting with his angelic strength didn’t have any effect. His arms were secured behind his back.
Jonah’s face was pressing into the carpet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Eliza’s shoe, squirming and thrashing around.
“Eliza!” he shouted. “Jeremiah! You guys all right?”
The fallen angel on top of him yanked him up.
“Now, don’t think we don’t know about your other little gift,” the fallen one growled. He grabbed Jonah’s hip and spun him around, and another red, glowing webbing encircled Jonah’s waist. “Wouldn’t want you to get any ideas with that fancy angelblade of yours.”
All of them were up and on their feet, the quarterlings with their arms bound behind their backs. Jeremiah’s mouth was covered again. Eliza’s head was even surrounded with a red headband of the same material.
They even know about her helmet of salvation, Jonah thought. He wondered how her practice with it had been going. He’d seen it in action only once, last year at school, and while she was good at using it, it had been a work in progress.
The guards corralled them and forced them into the holding room. Abaddon watched for a few seconds, enjoying the show, but then turned and bounded up the steps. Jonah assumed he was heading to the top deck to enact whatever awful plan he had for some of the world’s most important guests. He shuddered to think what he could do if he could control the world’s leaders.
Then he remembered—President Kinston was supposed to be there too. This was just getting worse and worse.
The guards and the fallen angels threw them all back in the room. The guards secured the quarterlings to chairs all around the room with ordinary rope and duct tape, and the Fallen wrapped special webbing around them in the hidden realm to keep them from using their gifts. They’d even wrapped up Jonah’s, Frederick’s, and Hai Ling’s feet so that they couldn’t use their sandals of speed.
“This ought to take care of you until he gets back,” the fallen one securing Jonah’s feet growled. “Without your special gifts, you’re helpless.”