Rebels of the Lamp, Book 1 (19 page)

One of the Path members threw down his cards in frustration and the others laughed. He had lost the game. He protested, but the others waved him off as they got up and collected their gear. One
of the goons slapped Parker’s face. He said something funny to his comrades and they laughed and staggered out of the atrium. Parker knew that the man they were leaving behind had lost the
game and gained a chore. It was his job to kill Parker, Theo, and Reese.

The remaining minion got unsteadily to his feet and carefully folded a map. It took him three tries to find his pocket. Then he weaved his way over to where the children were tied and unsheathed
a dagger from his belt.

Parker felt Theo squirming away beside him. Then the Path member pushed Theo’s head back and put his knife to Theo’s throat. Theo shut his eyes tight.

“MmmmmMMMmM,” said Reese through her gag. “MMmmmmmMMm.” She had something to say. The Path member ignored her and turned back to Theo, but Reese was insistent.

“MMMmmMMMMmMMMM!” she said.

Finally, the man with the dagger relented. He leaned over and pulled Reese’s gag down.

“Thank you!” said Reese. “That thing was driving me nuts.”

The Path member had a quizzical expression on his face as Reese swept his legs out from underneath him with one swift and powerful kick. The dagger flew out of the minion’s hand as he fell
and smacked his head hard on the marble floor.

Parker followed the path of the dagger as it went up and then came down. He managed to spread his legs just enough so that when the dagger landed tip-down, it clanged off the marble floor
instead of imbedding itself in Parker’s thigh or someplace even worse.

The Path member was out cold. Parker and Theo looked to Reese, amazed.

“Brazilian jujitsu,” she said with a shrug. “My mom made me take a class at the Y.”

PARKER, REESE, AND THEO FOUND
themselves walking down a desolate country road. It was a beautiful night. The stars were out, and there was a warm
breeze blowing. The only noise came from crickets. The whole thing would have been magical, really, if they were back in New Hampshire.

But they weren’t.

“Okay,” said Reese, shifting Professor Ellison’s bag on her arm. “So. We don’t have any money, none of us speaks the language, and we have no way to get home. All
true. All very real problems. I’m not saying they don’t exist. But still. How many American kids even get to come to Lithuania?”

Or Latvia, she thought. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure exactly where they were at the moment.

“And not just the tourist sites, either!”

Her attempt to lighten the mood was doomed from the start. They had been walking for hours, and the tension between Theo and Parker was ready to boil over. Parker planted himself in the middle
of the road and exploded at his cousin.

“What were you thinking?” he screamed. “Why would you tell them anything? They’re trying to enslave the whole human race. Do you really think you can trust them? I mean,
we all know that you aren’t exactly straight-A material, but are you really that stupid?”

“Parker...” Reese said.

“Yeah, well,” said Theo, “I was trying to save all of our lives.”

“You betrayed us! You handed the professor to the Path! And plus, also, now they have however-many lamps she had stashed away. Do you realize you might have doomed the whole
world?”

Theo stared into his cousin’s eyes for a moment. Then, without warning, he hurled himself at Parker and tackled him to the ground. Reese jumped back as the two boys wrestled in the middle
of the road.

“Me? Me? I’m the one that doomed the whole world? What about
you
?”

“Parker! Theo! Stop it!” Reese tried to break them up, but they ignored her.

“What
about
me?” said Parker.

“It’s your fault Fon-Rahm got captured!” Theo was on top of Parker, as angry as he had ever been in his life. “He warned you! He said to be careful, to plan it all out.
But
no
. That’s not good enough for Parker Quarry. Why listen to anybody else? There’s no fun in that! You have to make all the decisions. It always has to be about you! You
don’t care about anybody but yourself. It’s no wonder your own mother can’t stand to be around you!”

Everything came to a halt. Parker stopped fighting back and Theo climbed off him. Parker stayed on his back and looked at the moon.

“You’re right,” he said.

Theo shook his head and threw up his hands. “I’m sorry, Parker. About what I said about your mother. That was...I didn’t mean that.”

“Well, you’re right about the other stuff. Will you help me up, please? Theo?” Theo just glared at him. “Fine.” Parker pulled himself up from the road and checked
his hands for scrapes. “I should have listened to you and I should have listened to Fon-Rahm. I got cocky. I do that sometimes. I can’t do anything about any of that now except
apologize and admit I was wrong, and I do. I apologize. I admit I was wrong.”

Reese and Theo waited. It was the first time either of them had been on the end of a sincere apology from Parker.

“You’re right. It
is
my fault that Fon-Rahm was captured, and it’s going to be up to me, or, well, to us, to get him back.”

“And how exactly do you plan on doing that?” asked Theo.

“I’m open to ideas.”

Reese thought for a moment.

“We have the map we got off the Path,” she said. “We have the professor’s bag and all of her magic talismans. We have a dagger. We have maybe one or two hours before the
sun comes up.”

“Right,” Parker said. “What we need is some way to intercept the Path before they get to the mine in Belarus.”

“Come on, Parker. There’s no way we can do that,” said Theo.

Parker pointed down the road at a barely manned government roadblock. There was a swing-arm wooden traffic gate painted in fading orange and white. A uniformed guard was sleeping in a chair in
what could charitably be called a shack. Parked well behind it was a beaten-down old military truck with a canvas roof.

“It would be a lot easier if we had some kind of a vehicle,” Parker said.

“SOME GANGBANGERS TAUGHT ME HOW
to do this in LA,” Parker said as he crawled under the truck’s dashboard. After a solid four
minutes of bending wires with nothing to show for it besides bent wire, Parker came up again.

“Okay,” he said. “So I didn’t know any gangbangers in LA.”

Theo rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I kinda figured.”

They were being as quiet as they could be, but everything seemed to make noise. The door of the truck creaked. The seat groaned. Theo stood outside the truck, watching Parker and occasionally
glancing over to make sure the guard was still asleep in his shack. Theo might as well have relaxed. Nothing ever happened at this checkpoint, and the guard had gotten used to a six-hour nap every
night.

“Excuse me,” said Reese. Parker moved over so that she could slide under the steering wheel. After a few seconds of tinkering, the truck’s engine fired with an impatient
rumble.

Parker said, “Let me guess. You took a class at the Y.”

“Nope.” Reese grinned. “Saw it in a Jason Statham movie.”

Parker slid her over and got behind the wheel. He unfolded the map he stole from the Path. Their route was drawn in red pen, and their destination marked with an X.

“All right. So, here’s Belarus, and here’s us,” Parker said. “As far as I can tell, these lines in black are railroads. The Path are planning on taking a train to
the mine. If we can cut them off before they get on board, we can steal Fon-Rahm back. We’ll have to hurry.”

He shut his door. Reese looked for a seat belt, but there wasn’t one. She moved over to make room for Theo. Instead of getting into the truck, however, Theo started walking.

“Theo? Where are you going?” asked Parker.

“I’m going home.” Theo stopped and turned back to his cousin. “I’m sorry. This stuff is just...It’s too much for me.”

Parker said, “How are you going to get home? We don’t even know...”

“I’ll find a phone. Somebody will have a computer. I’ll go to the police. I’ll stop at a house. Somebody will help me.”

“We can’t let you go out there alone!” said Reese.

“Somebody has to save Fon-Rahm. It just can’t be me,” Theo said. “It’ll work out. I’ll be okay. Really. I’ll be okay.”

The two cousins looked at each other for a moment.

Theo said, “So, good luck, I guess. I’ll see you when you get back. I’ll save you some Thanksgiving turkey.”

“Yeah,” said Parker. “We’ll see you then.”

Parker put the big truck in gear, gave it some gas, and looped around the guard shack. He tore through the swing arm over the road, startling the guard awake. The guard ran after the truck,
screaming in Russian. Parker watched in his rearview mirror as Theo walked away from the roadblock.

“Good luck to you, too,” Parker said quietly. He knew he had lost the best friend he had.

REESE NAVIGATED WHILE PARKER DROVE.

“I think we’re okay,” she said, examining the map. “The problem is that this map is in Russian.”

“I’m sort of surprised you can’t read Russian,” said Parker.

“Well, technically, I guess, you don’t read Russian, you read Cyrillic. It’s an alphabet that dates back to...” Reese knew she was giving Parker more information than he
needed, so she stopped. “Anyway, I can’t read it.”

Parker grinned. “I knew I could find something you couldn’t do if I hung out with you long enough.”

Reese found herself blushing. The transmission made a horrible grinding sound as Parker shifted gears.

“Parker? Is something wrong with the truck?”

“It’s not the truck. Fon-Rahm’s spell is wearing off. Pretty soon I won’t remember how to drive.”

Reese was able to find the train yard, and Parker managed to drive there. They idled on a hill, looking down at the tracks, and they watched as men walked around the back end
of an idling freight train.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” asked Parker, absently playing with the dagger he had taken off the goon in the museum.

“They circled it on the map.”

“I don’t see them. Do you see them?”

“No, but the train’s still here. Maybe they just haven’t shown up yet.” Reese put her feet on the dashboard, trying to get comfortable. Then she put them down again.
“I don’t know why you and Theo have to argue all the time,” she said. “I would kill to have a cousin or a sister, somebody that has to hang out with me. I feel like I
don’t have anything in common with any of the girls at school. I guess maybe I’m not the easiest person to be friends with.”

Parker seemed genuinely surprised. “Really? I think you’re great. You’re smart, you’re cool. You’re happy all the time. You’re always excited by things.
You’re up for adventure.”

Reese smiled to herself.

“If I was a girl, I would
absolutely
want to be your friend,” said Parker.

Reese’s face fell.

“There!” Parker sat up. Three Path members were climbing out of a Mercedes sedan. One of them carried Fon-Rahm’s lamp. They all had guns.

“How are we supposed to get it back?” asked Reese.

Parker groped around the truck, never taking his eyes off the lamp. He came up with a dull green hat that he plopped on Reese’s head and a ratty scarf that he wrapped around his own
face.

“I’m going to drive down there and park right next to their car. You’re going to sneak up next to the guy with the lamp and brain him with this.” Parker pulled a massive
wrench out from underneath the seat and put it next it to Reese.

“This,” Reese said, “is a terrible plan.”

“There are only three of them, and you know karate!”

“They have guns, Parker.”

“We’ll be out of there before they even know what happened! Just hit the guy and grab the lamp. I’ll have the truck running right next to you.”

Reese picked up the wrench. It was so heavy she could barely lift it.

Parker said, “Okay. I’m just going to creep down there real slow. They’ll think we’re army guys looking for something on the train. Are you ready?”

“No. I’m not doing this.”

“Well, do you have any other ideas?” “Yeah, my idea is we
don’t
do your plan.”

Parker moved around in his seat and accidentally hit the gearshift. The truck lurched forward and started to roll toward the train tracks.

“Uh-oh,” he said, grinding the gears.

“Parker, stop the truck!”

“I’m trying! I don’t know how to drive!”

The truck shot down the hill. The Path members dove out of the way right before Parker creamed the truck directly into the Mercedes. When they looked up from the crash, Parker and Reese found
themselves once again surrounded by men with guns.

“I told you this was a terrible plan,” said Reese.

One of the Path members ordered the others to board the train with the lamp. As they ran off, the leader grabbed Professor Ellison’s bag from Reese and pushed Reese and
Parker against a wall.

“Parker, I’m scared,” said Reese. She was trembling.

The Path member checked his rifle.

Parker was in shock. Everything had gone so wrong, so fast. “This was all supposed to be fun. I just assumed it would all work out. I’m so sorry I dragged you into this, Reese. I
really thought we could pull it off.”

Parker wished that Fon-Rahm was there to save them, but he wasn’t.

Reese took Parker’s hand.

“Good-bye, Parker.”

The Path member raised his rifle and took aim.

JUST AS THE PATH MEMBER
pulled his trigger, the barrel of his gun bent upward, as if being pulled by an invisible force. The minion looked at it,
bewildered. It was a good gun. Very reliable. The barrel had never turned to rubber before.

He heard a voice say, “Hey, moron,” and he turned around just in time for Theo to crack him in the face with the giant wrench from the truck.

“That’s my cousin,” Theo said.

Reese was pretty happy to see him. “Theo! How did you...”