The Witch Hunter's Gauntlet (16 page)

Please be a laser or something
.

She pulled the trigger.

Instantly her hands went to her ears and the gun fell to the floor, emitting a skull-piercing high-pitched noise that overrode all of her other senses.

When she finally recovered enough to open her eyes
, she saw Lucas huddled in the corner with his hands over his ears as well. He had dropped his heat ray, just as she had dropped the gun she was holding. The robot’s steel claws were inches away from his face.

She had killed Lucas!

“Robot stop.”

The robot stopped instantly. Its heavy metal limbs swung lifelessly at its sides.

Doc Frost trotted down the basement stairs, a pair of brown slacks draped over one arm.

“Why didn’t you just push the off button?” he asked as he swept past Sam.

“Now why didn’t we think of that,” Lucas said, standing up.

“It’s a good thing you used the sonic disruptor or I never would have heard what was going on down here. Thi
s basement is practically soundproof. Good for working on experiments without arousing the neighbors. Not so good for meddling kids who like to pick fights with robots.” He tossed the pants to Lucas. “Come upstairs, Miss Hathaway. We’ll let the boy change in peace.”

Back up
stairs, Tasha and Zoey gave Sam extremely curious looks.

“So, what happened?” Zoey asked before taking a bite of her apple.

“Robot attack.”

“Oh.”

“Not that I don’t enjoy having all of you here eating my food and breaking my equipment, but I sincerely hope we are through with the excitement for today,” Doc Frost said, selecting an apple out of the basket on the counter.

“That depends on you,” Lucas said from the basement door. “Step away from them.”

Everyone in the kitchen was surprised by the forcefulness in his voice.

“Lucas
, what-“

But Lucas cut Zoey off. “Step away from them
, Freezerburn.”

Doc Frost let out a sad
, defeated sigh. “Lucas, listen-“

He stopped in mid sentence. Sam would have
, too, if she had been the one staring down the barrel of Lucas’ freeze ray.

“Lucas
, put down the ray gun,” Tasha urged, stepping between Lucas and Doc Frost.

“You don’t know what you’re doing
, Tasha,” Lucas said.

“No, you don’t know what you are doing,” Tasha said back adamantly.

Sam couldn’t believe this was happening. Being attacked by vampires and robots was one thing, but turning freeze rays on teachers was something else entirely.

Doc Frost stepped out from behind Tasha. He even put his hands up in the air.

“You’ve got me,” he said playfully.

“What is going on?” Zoey asked
, wide-eyed.

“Doc Frost is a super-villain,” Lucas said way more seriously than Sam could ever imagine anyone outside of a cartoon saying.

Zoey burst out laughing. “What?”

He pulled the FBI wanted poster out of his pocket with his free hand and unfolde
d it for everyone to read. “See?”

“That’s insane.”

“No. It’s quite true.” Doc Frost shook his head and smiled with a twinkle in his eye. “I was a super-villain, or at least I thought I was. That was my intention anyway. But I was young and foolish. I even made a costume. Can you believe that?”

H
e took a bite of his apple and walked into the living room.

“Well, come on. If I’m going to tell you my sad little story, we might as well be comfortable.”

Tasha followed Doc Frost into the living room. She looked back over her shoulder and gave a smile that told the others it was okay.

Zoey
and Sam looked at each other and then to Lucas. He had lowered the freeze ray.

Sam decided to trust Tasha. She might have lied about, or technically neglected to reveal, who she real
ly was, but Sam knew deep down that she had done it to protect her. And Sam knew a little about keeping secrets to protect people.

Lucas and
Zoey followed her into the living room.

It was clear that Doc Frost lived alone and had very few guests. There was nothing more than a recliner pointed at an old TV
set, a sofa used more for storage of half-read books and random papers than for sitting, and a wall-length bookcase haphazardly stuffed with books.

Tasha, Zoey, and Sam cleared off spots to sit on the couch. Doc Frost naturally sat in the recliner
, and Lucas leaned against the wall and pouted.

“I was twenty-three years old, working on my post-graduate studies at MIT, and I had made the discovery of
a lifetime.” Doc Frost had a faraway look in his eyes. “I had found a way to project an energy beam capable of altering the vibrations of atoms. All temperature, as we understand it, is really the result of vibrating atoms. The faster they vibrate the hotter they are; the slower they vibrate the colder they are. I had invented the first freeze ray, and the first heat ray. I was on top of the world.”

“So why didn’t you just sell them?” Lucas asked snidely. “You would have been rich.”

Doc Frost smiled a kind and patient smile.

“That was exactly my first thought too,” he said. “But my supervising professor, Dr. Heinrich Markham, stole all the credit for my work. He was going to sell my designs for millions and completely cut me out. I didn’t take it well.

“I destroyed every copy of my designs and took the two working prototypes. The school reported them stolen and suddenly I was a criminal. I went into hiding, cut off from my wife and baby daughter. All I had were my ray guns, which I couldn’t even sell. I was desperate, and I had read a lot of comic books in my youth, so I put together a costume and robbed a bank.”

Sam could see the pain in his eyes. Doc Frost was reliving what had to be the worst moments in his life. She wanted to tell him he could stop, but she knew how important it was to just let someone vent.

“The FBI arrested me two days later. The BEA covered up the entire event. It turns out a Cold War was brewing between the magical community and the scientific world and the last thing anyone needed was a madman in a flashy costume running around in public.”

“Magical community?”
Lucas asked in a small voice.

“You know, witches, wizards,
the whole deal.”

“So are we talking
Lord of the Rings-
style wizards,
Harry Potter
-style wizards,
Dungeon and Dragons-
style wizards, or what?” Lucas asked.

“Real-
life wizards,” Tasha said condescendingly.

Lucas crinkled his nose at her before turning to Doc Frost. “And they are at war with us?”

“Not exactly. And not with you,” Doc Frost said in a reassuring voice. “For thousands of years
homo sapiens
and
homo magi
, regular people and magical people, have coexisted on this planet. But we have not always gotten along. They played tricks on us, we threw rocks at them, but for the most part the two societies lived together peacefully. Every now and then something would spark a fight between the two groups, and for the most part the magic people had the most power, but the normal people outnumbered them.

“Eventually the magical society went into hiding and
the rest of the world forgot that magic was ever real, so everyone was happy. Until the Renaissance. With the dawn of modern science, we were finally catching up with them. A rogue band of wizards decided to stop our progress and a group of early scientists decided to fight back. When the dust settled, the good wizards and the good scientists made peace and agreed to maintain order while keeping everything secret from the rest of the world.”

“And you’re one of the good scientists maintaining order?” Sam asked.

Doc Frost pointed at Sam as if she had made a comment that reminded him of something. He got out of his chair and rummaged through his bookcase.

“The BEA offered me a choice. Fifty years in prison, or go to work for them.”

“And what is the BEA?” Lucas asked. The freeze ray hung at his side, all but forgotten.

“The Bureau of Extraordinary Affairs,” Tasha said brusquely. “
A secret branch of the League of Nations established in 1920 by a small group of adventurers and inventors to protect humanity from the dangers of the extreme fringes of science and the supernatural. Keep up.”

Lucas huffed and rolled his eyes.

Doc Frost produced a photo album from the bookcase. He flipped it open and handed it to Sam.

Sam studied the photo at the top of the page very carefully. Four men in their mid-twenties with wide
, toothy smiles stood posed on the deck of boat. They looked like college buddies on a fishing trip. Sam recognized one of them as a younger Doc Frost and another as her grandfather.

Sam tilted the album so Zoey and Tasha could see the photo. “That’s my grandfather, Samuel Hathaway
, Sr.”

Doc Frost pointed to the man standing behind her grandfather. “And that’s Simo
n McQueen, your other grandfather. This is quite possibly the only photo of Samuel and Simon where they are both actually smiling instead of trying to kill each other.”

Sam studied Simon’s face.
She had only heard his name mentioned once, and not fondly. He was tall and dark and broody. If they had been a boy band he would have been the bad boy of the group.

“What about this other guy?” Sam asked.

“That’s Julius Nero. Alexander’s father,” Doc Frost said, as if that was supposed to mean something to her.

Julius Nero seemed to be the nerd of the group. He was short and skinny and had the thickest glasses she had ever seen on someone under fifty.

Wait a minute. Nero?
Dean Futuro had mentioned the name Nero.

“Who is Julius Nero? And who’s Alexander?”

Doc Frost tilted back in his chair and tapped his forehead with his fingertips. “Of course! You probably never met Alexander Nero. He and your father used to be the best of friends. We all thought they were going to be the next generation. Carry on our work. But over time they grew apart. Your father was more the adventurer type and Alexander turned his attentions to business. He built a very successful pharmaceuticals corporation from his father’s genetics research.”

Sam hadn’t met many of her parents’ friends. She would have liked to have talked to him. He probably knew all sorts of crazy stories about her father that Harold and Helen didn’t know.
But Dean Futuro said that Alexander Nero was dead. That seemed to be a recurring theme in Sam’s life.

“Anyway, it was a real honor to work for your grandfather,” Do
c Frost said earnestly. “Even though we never did get the tesseract technology to work properly.”

“
Tesseracts? Really?” Zoey perked up. She was as excited as Sam would have been if Doc Frost had said that Sara Berlin was coming to town. “How close did you get?”

“Impossible to say.
But we managed to keep the universe from imploding, so that’s a good thing.”

“Uh, for the geek speak-
impaired, what is a tesseract?” Tasha asked.

Zoey
bounced up and down on the couch, so Doc Frost gestured for her to explain. “It’s a pocket in space and time. Imagine a box where the inside is larger than the outside, except there is no box. You could put the entire contents of your closet inside this pocket and then close it down to the size of a grain of sand and carry it around with you.”

“Awesome,” Lucas said.

“Awesome indeed,” Doc Frost said with a nod of his head. “But we could never find the right energy matrix to keep it from exploding. We blew up large chunks of the BEA’s secret research and development island working on Samuel’s project.”

“It is so cool that you worked with my grandfather.” Sam had so many questions for Doc Frost she didn’t know where to start.

“He was a great and brilliant man. It was a shame we never got it to work. ‘Hathaway’s Folly’ it was called. He took it hard. Practically gave up science all together.” Doc Frost shrugged. “Of course, he did switch to archaeology in his later years, but if he hadn’t then he never would have found the Lantern of the Blue Flame.”

“
The what of the what?” Lucas asked.

“Mystical lantern, lit by a dragon, brings people back to life,” Sam said.
It was nice to have an answer for once.

“Unfortunately,” Tasha said heavily. “Someone stole the lantern and resurrected Prince Cervantes.”

“Who is?” Lucas asked in great annoyance.

“A very powerful
wizard turned vampire that was destroyed by Sam’s mother and has now returned.”

L
ucas snapped his fingers. “And he is the one who sent the vampire cheerleaders after us.”

“Most likely
.”

“And you’re some sort of vampire hunter?” Lucas asked.

“Monster hunter.” Tasha corrected with pride.

“So you’re going to dust this Cervantes guy like you did the cheerleaders.”

“No,” Tasha said sharply.

“But isn’t that what you do?”
Lucas asked. “We could help.”

“This isn’t a movie,” Tasha said harshly. “I’m sure you think vampire hunting is all sorts of fun. We’ll just go charging in with wooden stakes and holy water and take him out.”

“You didn’t seem to have much difficulty with the pep squad,” he said defensively.

“First of all, I’ve
trained for this my whole life.” She crossed her arms and stared him down. “Second of all, Cervantes is not a normal vampire. He is a vampire prince.”

The room was silent for a few seconds.

“Yeah, uh, we don’t know the difference,” Zoey said.

Tasha smiled. But it was a small tense smile. “Okay.
Vampire 101. In order to become a vampire you have to be bitten by a vampire. But Cervantes didn’t do that. He was a very powerful wizard and was not willing to give up his powers.”

She noticed that everyone was staring at her in confusion. “Right, important point, magic comes from a person’s life force
, so magical people lose their powers when they become vampires. The only way to get them back is to bite another magical person, but the magic wears off quickly. That’s why magical children are taught by age six to conjure a ball of sunlight.”

“Wait, go back. How did Cervantes become a vampire if he wasn’t bitten by one?” Zoey asked while nervously chewing on her own hair.

Tasha bit her lower lip and stared at the floor.

“We don’t know for sure. He is only the third person to actually pull it off. We’re pretty sure it involves selling one’s own soul.”

“Who were the other two?” Lucas asked with squinty, interrogating eyes.

“The original vampire, whoever he or she was.” Her voice dropped to a rushed whisper.
“And Vlad the Impaler.”

Judging
from Lucas’s sudden gasp and overall shocked and excited expression, he somehow knew this Vlad guy.