Paladin Prophecy 2: Alliance (14 page)

Elise slugged him in the arm. Nick crouched around the thicket and snuck down to the water’s edge while the others watched the island shoreline a couple hundred yards away. Nick reached the last bit of cover before the beach and looked back for a signal; Will gave him the thumbs-up.

Nick slipped into the lake without a ripple. He put on flippers, mask, and snorkel and immediately used a dolphin kick to propel himself below the surface and out of sight. About fifty feet from shore, the tip of the snorkel appeared briefly, just long enough for Nick to take in a breath, then submerged again.

“Good gracious, look how far he’s gone already,” said Ajay, watching him closely. “He swims like a seal.”

“Toss him a fish and he’ll balance a ball on his nose,” said Elise.

“There’s someone on the shore,” said Brooke, peering through her binoculars.

Will trained his glasses over to where she was aimed.

A guard was walking along the rocky beach, heading directly for the section of beach where Nick was supposed to make land.

“What’s he doing?” asked Elise.

Will watched the guard stop near the water and take out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, looking around a little furtively as he lit one up.

“He’s sneaking a smoke,” said Will.

“Nice to know,” said Elise dryly. “Even the bad guys discourage smoking.”

The tip of Nick’s snorkel surfaced again, almost halfway to the island this time.

“He’s going to see him,” said Ajay, eyes wide with alarm. “We have to warn Nick!”

Will and Elise glanced at each other, thinking the same thing.

You want to try?
Will asked her silently.

Elise tilted her head to the side and replied,
Heck, if it works on my family’s golden retriever, I ought to be able to get through to Dolphin Boy.

She lowered her binoculars, closed her eyes, and concentrated.

Will trained his binoculars back on the lake. He saw Nick’s snorkel poke to the surface again about fifty yards offshore. It ducked under again briefly, then came up a moment later, in the same spot.

Elise opened her eyes and winked at Will.

“What’s happening?” asked Ajay.

“He’s treading water,” said Brooke. “Nick must’ve spotted him.”

“Why does that blasted guard have to smoke so slowly?” moaned Ajay. “Is he trying to catch cancer from a single cigarette?”

“Don’t worry, Nick can probably only tread water for about a month,” said Elise.

“Out of curiosity, Ajay, can you tell what brand he’s smoking?” asked Will.

Ajay opened his eyes wide and looked at the guard, without binoculars. “It’s filtered, but he’s already burned past the label. And he’s put the pack back in his pocket.”

“You can see that kind of detail?” asked Brooke, lowering her binoculars. “Without
these
?”

Ajay hemmed and hawed. “Well, you know, from this distance I just made an educated guess—”

“Yes, he can see that far and that well,” said Will. “You’re among friends, Ajay. We’re not going to tell anybody.”

“But I thought your big whoop was
remembering
everything you see,” said Elise.

“That’s correct,” said Ajay.

“Plus he can
see
everything,” said Will.

“Within reason,” said Ajay.

“How many fingers am I holding up behind my back?” asked Brooke.

“I can see things at a distance,” said Ajay. “I never said I could see
through
anything.”

“So, for instance, you can’t see our underwear right now,” said Elise, deadpan.

Ajay blushed and giggled, and then stifled his giggle with both hands and turned away.

Brooke gave Elise a low five.

Will looked at the guard through his glasses again. He put out the cigarette, sat on a rock, and unwrapped a candy bar.

“Great,” said Will. “Now he’s having a snack.”

“Snickers,” said Ajay. “To be precise.”

Can you nudge him?
Will heard Elise ask in his head.

Will didn’t think he could push a suggestion over that distance, but answered,
What the heck, time’s a-wasting. Worth a try.

He focused on the guard’s head, closed his eyes, and pushed a word picture at him: two other guards talking near the castle:
Is that idiot sneaking a smoke again? Somebody check down by the lake.

The picture took a while to reach the guard—over three seconds—but when Will raised his glasses again, he saw the man react like he’d just been caught shoplifting. He glanced back at the castle, hastily flicked his candy wrapper toward the water, and hustled back into the woods.

“He’s gone,” said Will.

“And he’s a litterbug,” said Ajay.

A few moments later Nick’s snorkel peeked out of the water again. His head surfaced as he took a quick look and saw that the guard was gone. He went back under, and ten seconds later Nick crawled up on the beach. At first he lay flat to look around, but once he saw the cameras had rotated away from him, he scampered up the rocks to the edge of the tree line.

Will found Nick through the binoculars, signaling a thumbs-up back in their direction.

“He’s across,” said Will, looking at his watch. “Get ready to roll.”

Will stood up and waved his arms in an arc toward Nick. Nick waved back, then hustled through the woods toward the tree holding the security camera that was farthest to the left. He shimmied up the trunk to where it was hidden, staying behind the lens.

Will spotted him through the glasses again. “Nick’s in position. Hit it, Ajay.”

Ajay waddled down to the water’s edge under his heavy pack and shrugged it off near the waterline. He took out a heavy, compact black cube from the pack, about a foot square, set it on the sand, and yanked a rip cord that extended out of the cube’s center. A whoosh of air rushed into the cube and it began to rapidly expand and unfold. Within seconds the cube had re-formed into an entirely new shape: an oblong black rubber raft about six feet long and three feet wide.

Will, Brooke, and Elise took out and snapped together collapsible paddles. Will put together a second one from Nick’s pack, and then they all sprinted to the lake.

As soon as Nick saw them appear on the shore, he clamped one hand around the security camera and began to slow down its arc from right to left. Will noted the time on his watch. They had three minutes before the next camera would sweep over far enough to see them.

Wading in to his ankles, Ajay positioned the raft in water just deep enough for it to float. Ajay and the girls loaded in their packs, climbed aboard, and took their assigned spots. Will tossed Ajay the second paddle, shoved the raft into the lake, and jumped in. All four started paddling toward the island.

“Good job, Ajay,” whispered Will, sitting next to Brooke in the back.

“She’s holding together fantastically well, don’t you think?” said Ajay, smiling with pride.

“How did you make this?” asked Brooke.

“A latex mold I fashioned surreptitiously in the lab, patterned after the Zodiac rafts used by Navy Seals. I simply added a self-inflating friction intake valve for the bladder powered by pulling the rip cord—sorry, I don’t mean to bore you with the details.”

“No,” said Elise dryly. “Pray continue.”

“Anyway, I couldn’t be more tickled with the results—”

“Less talking,” said Will, “more paddling. Sound carries over water.”

“By the way, why is a boat a ‘she’? Why isn’t it an ‘it’?” whispered Brooke.

“Quite an interesting story, actually,” Ajay whispered back. “In ancient times, sailors named ships after various goddesses, an appeal for benevolence during perilous journeys—”

Elise scowled over her shoulder at Brooke: “You had to ask.”

“—and the custom continues to this day when captains name ships after wives or girlfriends; in fact, ships remain one of the only
gendered
inanimate objects in the English language, which is ironic since having a
real
woman on board is considered bad luck.”

At that moment the boat sprang a leak near the front, spouting water right in front of Brooke.

“So I guess that doubles down with two of us on board,” she said.

“Why don’t you fix it with your hatchet?” asked Elise.

“Very funny,” said Ajay. “As it happens, I have a patch kit here in my bag.”

Ajay knelt down to repair the leak and nearly tipped over into the lake.

“Take it easy, Ishmael,” said Elise, steadying him.

Will looked toward the shore. They had made it nearly two-thirds of the way across, and he could see Nick in the tree restraining the camera from swinging over far enough to spot them.

Will looked over at the next camera, on a tree twenty yards to the right of Nick, which had begun to slowly turn back toward them. With Ajay working on the patch and only three of them paddling, Will realized they’d now be caught in its sights before they made it to the beach.

“It’s going to see us, isn’t it?” said Brooke, watching Will’s eye line.

“Hold on a second,” said Will.

It was one thing to push a suggestion to someone across a lake, and quite another to affect an object physically over that kind of distance. He’d never tried anything close to this before. Will set down his paddle, focused on the second camera, narrowed his eyes, and concentrated ferociously, blanking everything else out of his mind the way Jericho had taught him.

“What are you doing?” whispered Brooke.

Lost in concentration, unable to answer, Will felt the fingers of his intention rush out across the water toward the second camera, and this time his mind’s eye traveled with them. All of a sudden he was “seeing” the camera from midair, right next to that tree. He “wrapped” his fingers around the armature that attached it to the tree, applied resistance, then felt the camera’s motor protest as its arc slowed to a crawl.

“Paddle,” grunted Will, teeth clenched, sweat dripping down his forehead and neck. “Hurry.”

Ajay finished patching the leak and picked up his paddle, and the others dug away at the water, coordinating their stroke to Brooke’s whispered count. Will “held” the camera for as long as he could, letting it go just as the hull of the boat scraped bottom on the rocky beach.

They all jumped out and dragged the raft toward the tree line. Nick hopped down from the tree and ran to help them. They yanked it out of sight and dove for cover just as both cameras swung around to their side of the beach.

They waited until the cameras swiveled back the other way, then worked to conceal the raft with loose branches. Will felt a rush of light-headedness and slumped to his knees, heaving for breath after his double exertion. Brooke saw him go down and knelt beside him, concerned.

“Your heart rate’s sky-high,” Brooke whispered, taking his hand. “And your pulse is erratic. Are you all right?”

Will nodded, still unable to speak.

“Take a deep breath,” she said quietly.

Will took in a full breath and felt his heart decelerate out of the red zone. He felt instantly calmer. “How did you know my heart rate before checking my pulse?”

Brooke thought about it a moment. “I don’t know. I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

Will shook his head.

She took his hand again. “It’s slowing now. But you were up near two hundred a minute before, and your blood pressure was sky-high. What did you do to yourself on the raft?”

Will didn’t want to answer—Brooke had never seen him use his telekinetic ability, and they’d never talked about it—but before he could answer, Elise cleared her throat, drawing their attention. She and the others were crouched behind them, watching and waiting. Brooke withdrew her hand. Will avoided meeting Elise’s eye.

“Do you think their control center noticed those two cameras slow down?” asked Ajay, glancing nervously toward the castle.

“They probably would have reacted by now,” said Will, climbing back to his feet. “But let’s make sure.”

“Dudes, it was the coolest thing,” said Nick, putting his clothes back on over his suit. “I’m hauling butt, right, way under water, when all of a sudden I just
know
I gotta stop. So I surface and sure enough there’s this guard dude smoking on a rock. I totally had a precondition about him.”

Elise and Will glanced at each other and had to suppress a smile.

“Precognition,” said Ajay. “Not precondition.
Stupid
is a precondition, which you also have.”

“Dude,” said Nick. “You need a checkup from the neck up.”

Everyone shouldered their bags and followed Will into the woods. He found a simple footpath, little more than a deer trail that led toward the castle. No one spoke, and Will used hand signals from in front to direct them. The woods thinned out about a hundred yards on and Will took his bearings off the rear, guiding them toward the wooden structure over the hatch.

The whole stretch of open area behind the house was empty. They heard no sounds coming from the castle and few lights were on. When Haxley was away, Will figured the staff probably retired to their wing by early evening. When the rear door came into view, he signaled, everyone dropped to a crouch, and he scanned the windows with binoculars.

Under a bright hanging lamp, Lemuel Clegg sat at the kitchen table, hunched over paperwork, his back to the window. Will saw no one else inside or out.

“Hunker down here for a minute,” said Will. “I’m going to go check out the graveyard.”

Ajay handed him a small pen. “That should do the job nicely.”

Will made a dash to the left, away from the house, circling back through the woods. Turning up the speed and relying on his memory of its location to guide him, the old graveyard soon came into view.

He hopped the fence around the 1938 plane crash memorial and took out the pen Ajay had given him. Removing the cap, he revealed the lens of a hidden digital camera. Will focused it on the list of names engraved on the base and snapped four pictures, a tiny LED flash illuminating the letters. He wasn’t able to read all twelve names in the gathering darkness, but in the momentary flash his eye caught the one he’d been hoping to find. Will pocketed the pen and retraced his path back to where his friends were hiding.