Van Bender and the Burning Emblems (The Van Bender Archives #1) (9 page)

We hugged then stood back and apart, lifted our hands as if we held guitars, and played the air for several seconds. Then, in unison, we pretended to hold the guitars by the neck and smash them down onto the ground.

As usual, Mom grunted. “What a senseless waste of perfectly good air guitars.”

She always said that. I think she was jealous that I didn’t smash air guitars with her.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Dad.

“I came as fast as I could,” he said. “When I found out that you’d gotten hold of a Cask, I knew I needed to come.”

I frowned. It took a day to fly from D.C. to L.A. I’d only actually gotten the Cask about three hours before. If that.

“How did you get here so fast?”

He shrugged and smiled. “How was your first concert?”

I couldn’t help but grin. “It was awesome.”

“I always loved being on stage,” he said, shaking his head. “I loved the crowd and the lights and the energy. It must have been outstanding with ninety thousand people.”

“I could hardly see or hear them—”

“I know,” he said, his face still beaming. “The lights in your face and the buds in your ears. But you could feel it, couldn’t you? You could feel the energy of the crowd.”

“It was amazing,” I said.

“I’d hoped that everything would go just perfect for you. I really wanted to come.”

Agent Maynerd cleared this throat. “This is a very touching reunion, but I need to talk with the two of you.”

He motioned for my parents to follow him out of the room. At the door, he pointed from me to one of the chairs.

“Wait here. We won’t be long. We just need to clear up a few legal issues before we get moving. Don’t talk to anyone.”

“Why can’t I join you?” I said as my parents moved back toward the door.

Agent Maynerd leaned back into the room. “Because we’d prefer you didn’t know what we’re going to talk about.”

Usually adults just keep you in the dark and don’t tell you things, but made up excuses and lies about it. I’d always hated that, thinking I would prefer to have them level with me. Just tell me the truth. Well, as my parents left the room and the glass door shut behind them, I realized that I preferred the usual approach over this new blunt one. At least then I didn’t feel inferior. Just lied to.

Dad turned back to me as the other two left. He looked at them, indecision on his face, and came back to where I stood. He gave me a concerned look, leaned in close, and glanced back over his shoulder.

“Richie, listen. I can’t say much right now, but you’ve got to just play it cool. Do everything they ask you to do. As soon as I can, I’ll tell you everything. I’ll help you through this.”

The anger I’d been feeling at Mom threatened to return. “Why didn’t you tell me anything, before?”

He shook his head. “The history is complicated. I’ve been part of SOaP and Intersoc for longer than you’ve been alive. I’ll tell you everything as soon as I can. I’ve looked forward to this day. When your YouTube video hit it big, I knew this day would come. But your mom is right—it is dangerous. Right now you just need to keep it cool. Just do what I say, what SOaP says, and things will be perfect.”

Agent Maynerd popped his head back through the door. “Van Bender—you coming?”

Dad glanced at him. “One moment.”

Agent Maynerd narrowed his eyes. “No funny business, now, right?”

“Right. Be right there.”

Agent Maynerd nodded and disappeared out of the door. Before it shut all the way, he said to Mom, “I don’t think you can mind wipe him this time...”

I started to ask Dad what that meant, but he interrupted me.

“Just do what SOaP wants you to do. We’ll get out of here soon, then we can talk. Understand?”

I nodded, but my heart wasn’t in it.

As Dad left the room, I plopped down into one of the chairs and propped my feet up on another chair. I folded my arms, appreciating that my stomach had already started to settle down.

As I waited, I watched through the glass as SOaP workers went about their business. A dull buzz of conversation penetrated the glass. The wall of large monitors had turned back on, but the screens only displayed a SOaP logo bouncing off the edges of the screens.

What to think of all this? For one thing, I couldn’t forget that look on Sandra’s face when she saw Marti Walker in my room. Beyond that, I didn’t trust Agent Maynerd, and Mom clearly didn’t deserve my trust. Dad maybe did. He seemed willing to give me information now, but neither he nor Mom had told me about all of this before. Plus, two different people had said something about mind wiping. Had they wiped memories from my mind before?

On top of all of that, Marti Walker had proven far more injurious than I’d imagined anyone could be.

Nope, none of them seemed particularly worthy of my trust. Only Nick Savage really seemed to have told me anything useful, but everyone mistrusted him.

Which actually made me want to believe him. In movies and books, parents and teachers and other authority figures always seemed to mistrust the wrong people—who, in the end, wound up helping in some important way. That was probably how it was with Nick.

Despite it all, I felt hope. Mom had kept me locked up and in the dark for so long, that this glimmer of light gave me hope. Maybe—just maybe—if things went right, I could actually meet more rock stars. Maybe I could get used to fans. I could be a normal celebrity instead of a hermit.

The door opened, pulling me from my reverie, and in stepped Marti Walker.

Chapter 16: Saving me

I love it when Richie babbles.

-Marti Walker

I stood and stammered a greeting. It’s amazing how fast my brain shut down upon seeing her face and long blond hair. Because, you know, she’s a big country star. That’s what turned my brain off.

“Quit your yammering,” she said.

She strode over to the table, shaking her head, and sat in a chair along the long side of the table, back to the glass wall. She placed her green purse on the table, and pulled out her phone.

I sat across from her.

“What have they told you?” she said, not looking up as she thumbed the screen of her mobile.

I shook my head, and the motion seemed to get my brain going again. “What are you doing here?”

Her thumbs stopped moving over the phone, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, she frowned at the screen as she spoke.

“Saving you. What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Just sitting there, updating your status. Telling the world that you’re chillin’ with me.”

“Nope. I’m saving you.”

I looked around the room and outside the glass wall to try and spot an imminent danger. But I saw nothing. No monsters. Not even anyone casting a spell.

“Uh, from what are you saving me?”

She chuckled, lifted a corner of her mouth, and raised her eyebrows. I’d seen her make the same expression in a music video in which she brutally dumped her actor boyfriend.

It scared the willies out of me.

“From yourself.”

It actually felt more like she’d come to make a fool out of me. As if I needed help with that.

“And how are you saving me from myself?”

“I’m going to fill you in on a few details, so you can make better decisions.”

“I could use a few answers.”

“Then ask a few questions.” She placed her phone on the table and clasped her hands on the glass surface, as if she were about to interview me for a job.

I had so many questions I almost didn’t know where to start.

“Magic,” I said. “How long has it been around?”

She rolled her eyes. “That’s the best you could come up with? Centuries. Millennia.”

“How come nobody knows about it?”

“Plenty of people know about it. There’s an entire underground culture surrounding it. They all just keep it a secret in order to preserve their power. And it’s very cliquey.”

“SOaP is part of that culture?”

She shook her head. “Not really. It’s a top secret federal government agency. The real scene is Intersoc.”

“What’s that?”

Her phone vibrated against the glass. She raised her eyebrows and looked down at it. “Intersoc is like an exclusive secret club for rock stars that use magic. I work undercover there.”

“What do you do as a SOaP agent?”

“We work to keep magic a secret. Sub-groups of Intersoc want to make it public. One group, in particular, wants to use magic to take over the world. The Sunbeams.”

“Nick Savage said something about them. He was one of them, once, or something.”

“
One
of them? He’s the leader!”

Her phone vibrated again. She kept her head up, toward me, but looked at the screen on the table.

I said, “He said the Solar Flare is the leader.”

“He
is
the Solar Flare.”

I started. Nick had talked about the Solar Flare as if he were a separate person. Did Nick or SOaP have it wrong? Was Nick just trying to deceive me? Honestly, I wanted to believe him.

“Why are they called Sunbeams?” I said. “It’s a stupid name.”

“Because they want brink and magic out in the open, out in the daylight. In the sunbeams. For everyone to know about.”

“Why is that such a bad idea?”

Her phone vibrated a third time, and it seemed she ran out of self-will not to pick it up. She snatched it from the glass surface and pounded on the screen with her thumbs.

“Your phone is sure jumpy,” I said.

She frowned and shook her head. “There’s this guy online. Always harassing me. Always talking trash. Whenever he shows up and starts talking smack about me, I and my fans jump all over him.”

“Who is he?”

She shrugged. “No idea. He goes by a bunch of different names. He creates Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to defame me. He’s pretty brutal.”

“Why don’t you ignore him? Wouldn’t he go away if you ignored him?”

“I can’t let people say things like that about me.”

“Is he the only one who says bad things about you?”

She raised her eyebrows at me. “No. But he’s the worst. People can dislike my music. That’s fine. There are a handful of critics like that. But this guy goes out of his way to attack me. I can’t let him do that. Other people might listen to him.”

During the month when I’d had my iPad, I’d ignored the haters. It just seemed like the best way to handle it. Some people were just that way.

She hammered away on the screen. I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and took a few deep breaths. My stomach had about settled down all the way.

“I still can’t believe,” she said, “that you gave Nick Savage that emotion.”

I kept my eyes closed. “How would I know any better?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Enough time passed that I opened my eyes. She sat there, staring at me, her face thoughtful, thumbs poised over the screen of her phone. She’d propped her feet up on another chair and turned half-way away.

“You may have a point,” she said.

“That’s the first sane thing anyone has said to me in hours.” Maybe Marti Walker wasn’t such a lunatic, after all.

“This is pretty interesting,” she said.

“What is?”

She waved a hand around. “This. You being here. With me.”

“Why is it so interesting?”

“Because I’m having an intelligent conversation with a monkey.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Because we’re kids. Do you know the last time kids were part of SOaP or Intersoc?”

“Oh, right, I learned that in history. The Civil War, right? 1865, or something?”

She smirked. “Since never. It wasn’t much different for me, you know. How I learned about brink.”

“Nick Savage taught you?”

“Not Nick. Not a Sunbeam, either—which is rare these days. Mostly the Sunbeams get people before SOaP or Intersoc gets up the brains to find a new recruit. It was a pretty high-ranking member of SOaP. Grant Budly.”

I made a surprised sound. Grant Budly had become a pretty big country star only a few years before Marti. He sang a lot of songs about trucks and tractors, but also had a few about rednecks on the Internet or taking over Facebook. Pretty amusing, really. I liked the lyrics, even if the twang still unnerved me. Since his rise, only Marti had really given him any competition in the country area.

“How did he tell you?”

She turned her head to look out the window. A handful of men and women walked by outside. The activity out in the room hadn’t changed much. A bunch of people still sat at desks. The one closest to us actually had kicked his feet up on the desk, and laughed at a Phineas and Ferb cartoon on his monitor.

Marti continued. “About eighteen months ago at an awards ceremony, I was sitting all alone. My parents were off at a rodeo. He saw me sitting there, glum. Sulking. Invited me to sit at his table. Afterward, he showed me brink. Thought it might cheer me up.” She shook her head and grunted. “It sure did.”

“He’s a SOaP agent?”

She swung her feet down from the chair and gave me a serious look.

“The best agent out there. He probably saved my life. Gave me purpose and direction during a dark time in my life. I owe about everything to him.”

Her confession surprised me. I started to respond, but a blaring alarm filled the room, and I nearly pooped my pants.

Chapter 17: A not-so-simple choice

I didn’t normally press the boundaries of my SOaP privileges. But the prospect of being alone with Richie has always pushed me to do stupid things.

-Marti Walker

It wasn’t like any other alarm I’d ever heard. Not a blaring horn or bell that repeats over and over. Not a smoke detector at home, with alien beeping that seems unnecessarily loud until you stop to think that someday that alarm might have to wake you up.

No, this alarm was not like any of those.

It was a woman’s calm voice, coming from the speakers in the ceiling.

“Your attention, please, the Reservoir is in danger. Complete world annihilation may be imminent. Please remain calm.”