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Authors: Bret Schulte

Tags: #Fantasy, #Young Adult

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BOOK: The Witch Hunter's Gauntlet
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The vault obliged with a torrent of molten lava accompanied by a green mist with a very angry face. Even though Sam knew she was watching a recording she felt the mist creature looking at her. She took an instinctive step backward sma
cking into something behind her--most likely a table, judging by the sounds of toppling and splashing soda cups behind her. Fake Sam, however, didn’t waver at all. As the lava approached she stood her ground, calmly removing her right glove to reveal a large gaudy ring, an opal set in silver. Fake Sam then produced a digital recorder from her pocket.

“Excelsior,” spoke a recorded man’s voice.

The ring turned a vivid purple. In an instant the lava and mist evaporated. The face looked very disappointed as it faded away.

“That ring is only worn by members of the ISG High Council,” Chief Constable Albion interjected. “Councilman Tobias Longfellow’s tomb was found defiled three months ago.”

“Eww.” So far everything Fake Sam had gone through was pretty impressive to Sam, but wearing a dead guy’s ring was beyond gross.

Sam figured “Excelsior” must have been the literal magic word that, along with the ring, disabled the vault’s traps because Fake Sam and Big Guy marched directly into the vault without any hesitation. The interior of the vault was no longer dark. A beautiful blue light flickered within. The light grew brighter until Fake Sam emerged carrying a gorgeous ancient Chinese lantern. Blue flames danced majestically inside the delicate lantern.

One of the guys from the magnet rushed up to Fake Sam with a small crate. As Fake Sam carefully lowered the lantern into the crate and closed the top a whooping noise caught Sam’s attention. A black cargo helicopter was approaching.

In a flash the scene disappeared, shrinking back into the elegant box in Chief Constable Albion’s hand
.

“I believe you know what happens from here,”
Albion said.

Sam shook her head. She had no idea whatsoever.

“That was quite the show Albion,” Agent Sampson said. “But what makes you believe that Samantha here was involved in any way?”

Albion
blew a long burst of frustration out his nose before he spoke. “We also found several hairs at the crime scene. We immediately scryed for their owner, which led us to her. There is no doubt that she is our thief.”

“According to the information provided by your superiors
, the thieves struck less than an hour ago,” Agent Sampson said matter-of-factly. “How could she have possibly traveled all the way from the Arctic to Illinois in that amount of time?”

“That is something I am very interested to find out. No doubt she had access to some form of transportation that the BEA has not seen fit to inform us about,”
Albion said with an angry sneer.

“Sam, were you in the
Arctic at anytime today?” Agent Rosenberg asked.

“What? No,” Sam said.
She could barely get to the mall on time for work; how was she supposed to get to the North Pole?

“Can anyone verify that?”

What a ridiculous question
, Sam thought.

“I got to work two and a half hours ago. You can check.” Sam raised her cuffed hands to point at the Cookie Emporium.

“Lies.”

“The Arctic to the Presley Mall in an hour?
That would be pretty impressive.” Agent Rosenberg pointed a finger at Albion. “How long did it take you to get here?”

Albion
just sneered in response.

Agent
Rosenberg turned to Colver. “I think we can remove those cuffs now.”

“She is still a prisoner.”

“She is a suspect,” Agent Rosenberg corrected. “And a pretty unlikely one at the moment.”

”We found her hair inside the vault. You cannot deny this. You know the Hathaways’ history of sneaking into places where they do not belong.”

“I also know that the Hathaways acquired a number of enemies over the years, within both the magical and non-magical communities. Does it not seem likely to you that someone is trying to use her family’s rather famous history to frame Samantha in order to cover their own crime?” Agent Sampson asked.

“Nonsense!”
Constable Albion shouted. A tiny dribble of saliva flew out of the corner of his mouth. “You just want the lantern for yourselves.”

“Your own superiors have agreed to let us take her into custody, for her own protection,” Agent Sampson said. “If you have a problem with that then I suggest you speak to them. I would hate for this situation to turn into an unfortunate incident. An unfortunate incident that some people might mistakenly believe was caused by an overzealous ISG agen
t who was transferring his pent-up jealousy of an old rival onto an innocent teenage girl.”

“Ridiculous,”
Albion spat.

Agent Sampson shrugged. “It doesn’t matter
, really. Orders are orders. And yours are to turn her over to us.”

“Oh, don’t forget to remove the handcuffs,” Agent Rosenberg added with a playful snap of her fingers.

Colver snapped his fingers and the blue energy around Sam’s wrists disappeared.

“Thanks,” Sam said to Agent Rosenberg. She rubbed her wrists happy to be free.

For a second Albion looked like he was ready for a fight. He looked at the two smug agents and then at his wide-eyed young partner. He sighed angrily.

“I am going to have a long talk with my superiors
, and if that lantern falls into the wrong hands in the meantime, the outcome will be on your head,” Albion said with grim certainty.

Deputy
Colver withdrew a silver pocket watch from his robes. “One minute left.”

“I’ll be seeing you again soon.”
Albion pointed an angry finger at Sam as he and Colver walked away towards the rear exit by the movie theater.

“What is happening
?” Sam asked.

“Wait a moment.” Agent
Rosenberg held up her hand to pause Sam.

A moment later Sam was struck by the sudden sounds of people moving and talking again. Everyone
was going about their business as if nothing had happened. A few people gave the agents curious looks, but no one seemed too surprised they were standing there.

“Time-stopper watches freeze
selected targets for ten to twenty minutes. Only members of the ISG Enforcement Squad get them,” Agent Sampson said before Sam could even ask. “And no, you can’t have one.”


Ow! What’s wrong with my eyes?” Courtney yelled somewhere behind Sam. “Hey! How did you get over there?”

Sam spun around to find Courtney marching straight at her, the shopping bag swinging from her clenched fist while she rubbed her eyes with her other hand.

“You can’t just walk away from me like that. I should let your boss know how you treat customers.” She flashed her evilest grin as she tossed her long, silky black hair over her shoulder.


You are still not a customer,” Sam replied dryly.

“Not now, that’s for sure. You know what? I think I’ll go tell your boss that right now,” Courtney’s eyes turned from Sam to the two agents standing next to her. “Uh, wait. Who are these people?”

Agent Sampson produced a badge from his pocket. “Agent Sampson, Agent Rosenberg, FBI.”

The badge was in fact an FBI badge. Or at least it looked like one to Sam. She wondered how many other badges he was carrying.

Courtney’s mouth fell open in pure rapture. “Are you under arrest?”

Sam looked at Agent Rosenberg
, who gave the faintest of shrugs and somehow managed to smile with just her eyes.

“Yep.
I’m heading to jail. Probably won’t see you for a while,” Sam said.

“Really?
What did you do?”

“I stole this lantern thing.
Turned out to be really important. I probably shouldn’t have done that,” Sam said as casually as she could muster.

“I knew you were a loser, but I never figured you were a t
hief too. You’re going to jail--that’s awesome!” Courtney was shaking with joy.

She whipped out her cell phone. “I am so going to tell everyone.”

Courtney dashed off with her cell phone glued to her ear.

“Okay, everyone she’s ever met will know I’m going to jail. Which is going to make me the most famous person in town in, like, ten minutes,” Sam said.

“Come on, we need to get you home. We already contacted your godparents and they are waiting for us,” Agent Rosenberg, said putting her hand on Sam’s shoulder.

Sam’s heart sank into her stomach. Hadn’t she ruined her godparents’ lives enough already? There had to be some way out of this.

“Wait, I don’t get off work for another three hours.”

“That’s all right, I’ll clear everything up with your boss,” Agent Sampson
, said waving his FBI badge.

Chapter 3
Slow Ride Down Memory Lane

 

 

During the seemingly endless car ride to Sam’s apartment her mind was racing with questions about her parents. She knew that her parents had lived very interesting lives before she was born. Her father had been an archaeologist and her moth
er had been an anthropologist. They had traveled the world together studying ancient cultures, digging up old pots, and hunting for mythical hidden treasures, some of which that had actual magical powers.

They had also saved the world on two separate occasions. In colle
ge her parents defeated a world-hungry sorceror named Cervantes. According to her mother, Sam’s parents might never have fallen in love if they hadn’t had to work together to defeat him. Sam was six when she first heard the story, and it always sounded like some sort of fantastic romantic fairy tale to her.

The second time they saved the world turned out to be far less romantic. Sam was nine at the time and her parents had toned
down their globetrotting lifestyle to do the whole family thing. One day her dad got the idea to donate some of her late grandfather’s artifacts to a museum, so they took a rare trip to Hathaway Manor in New Jersey, which was so full of the family’s discoveries and inventions it was practically a museum itself. But when they got there they discovered that someone had broken into the mansion. Her parents called the BEA and rushed into the house. Twenty minutes later, the entire house was destroyed in a flash of light. The BEA agents arrived some time later to find Sam sitting alone in the car staring at the hole in the ground that used to be her life.

The entire matter was classified top secret, but they assured her that her parents had somehow saved the lives of everyone on Earth, and then they swore her to secrecy about the BEA, her parents’ adventures, and everything she knew about magic, which was
pratically nothing anyway. The day she lost her parents was the first and last time she had met a BEA agent, until today.

Now this
Albion guy showed up from who-knows-where accusing Sam of stealing something she had never even heard of and claiming that her family was a bunch of thieves. She wasn’t about to let him get away with that.

It was time to start asking some questions.

“So is anyone going to tell me why that, uh, warlock I guess, was so angry with me?”

“They prefer wizard. Or sorcerer,” Agent Rosenberg answered from the passenger seat. “And
Albion is always angry. He’s a fossil from the old days. The poor guy really should retire.”

Agent Sampson cleared his throat in a serious manner. “Chief Constable Albion is a great man and
was one of the International Sorcerers Guild’s best field agents in his day. He banished the strangling fungus back to Monster Island, and he cleared all the ghost pirates out of Hong Kong.”

“That’s interesting, and a little frightening,” Sam said. “But why is he coming after me?”

“The Lantern of the Blue Flame.”

“But what is it?” Sam asked.

The agents exchanged a brief unreadable look before Agent Sampson returned his attention to the road.


It’s a very dangerous magical object that had been missing for two thousand years, long enough that most people believed that it never existed in the first place. But a tenacious few kept obsessively searching for it, including Albion. It was the Holy Grail of lost artifacts--except, of course, for the actual Holy Grail. But in 1974 your grandfather, Dr. Samuel Hathaway Sr., found it hidden in a secret chamber in the tomb of Emperor Qin, the first emperor of China.”

Agent
Rosenberg twisted in her seat so she could look directly at Sam.

“Now
, Sam, we want you to know that you will not get in any trouble for this. Do you know where the Lantern of the Blue Flame is?” she asked sincerely.

Sam couldn’t believe it. In less than ten minutes these people had gone from defending her to accusing her.

“What? I have never stolen anything in my life.” This was a lie and she knew it. But she also didn’t figure that swiping Mary Johnson’s pink-haired Bratz doll when she was seven really counted in this situation.

“We are not accusing you of stealing. After all, the lantern was loaned to the ISG by your grandfather as a
gesture of goodwill, so technically it still belongs to your family,” Agent Rosenberg said.

“But it is an immensely powerful magical object,” Agent Sampson added. “It is important that it be turned over to the BEA for protection.”

“I don’t have it,” Sam said in her fiercest tone. “But if I did, what could it do?”

The agents shared a look.

“If you don’t have it, then you don’t need to worry about that,” Agent Rosenberg said.

“Uh huh.”
Sam was starting to get the picture. They were friendly with her as long as they thought she had something they wanted, but they weren’t willing to explain what that something really was. She was going to have to try a different strategy. “So if I had stolen this lantern what would have happened to me?”

“You’d be on your way to an ISG maximum security prison right now. And you would remain there until you turned over the lantern,” Agent Sampson said bluntly.

“But I don’t have it.”

“Then you’d be there for a long time,” Agent Sampson said darkly.

“Why is everyone so sure I stole this thing anyway?” It didn’t make any sense to her. Clearly these people knew nothing about her. If they did they would know that she was way too uncoordinated to be a baker, let alone a safecracker.

“The hairs they found inside the vault,” Agent Rosenberg explained. Sam noticed that Agent Rosenberg was studying her closely, trying to gauge her reaction. “They scryed them, sort of a magical DNA test, and found out they were yours.”

“How is that possible?” Sam asked.

“That is something we are going to find out,” Agent Rosenberg said. “Our best guess is that someone is trying to frame you. After all, the Hathaway name is enough to get you convicted by half of the magical community. Your grandfather embarrassed them by finding the Lantern of the Blue Flame and your parents embarrassed them by saving them from Prince Cervantes. Honestly
, this couldn’t have happened at a worse time.”

“Why is that
?”

Agent
Rosenberg looked to Agent Sampson for permission. He shrugged, which she took as approval. “Relations with the Sorcerer’s Guild have been strained more than usual lately.”

“How come?”

“Hard to say exactly. They’ve always been nervous about science. They don’t understand it, and people tend to fear what they don’t understand,” Agent Sampson said. “They have tried to slow us down before. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Dark Ages. This could lead to another war.”

“That isn’t going to happen,” Agent Rosenberg said
, shaking her head. “Nobody wants that. Right now all we have to worry about is finding and returning the Lantern of the Blue Flame.”

Sam realized that despite how nice they were being to her she was still a suspect to them; in fact according to Agent Rosenberg she was the primary suspect. It was even possible that all of that war talk was just their way of trying to scare her into turning over the stolen lantern. She wondered how her life could have gotten so complicated in less than an hour. It wasn’t fair at all.

Sam was so deep in thought that she was startled when the car stopped outside her apartment building.

“We’re here.”

Sam followed Agent Sampson up the steps to her apartment on the third floor. Agent Rosenberg followed behind her, pinning her in just in case she decided to make a run for it. Agent Sampson only managed to knock on the door once before Sam’s godmother tore it open.

“Oh, Sammy,” Helen said
, wrapping her arms around her. Helen Robinson was barely an inch taller than Sam. She was very skinny, always wore her hair up in a frazzled unkempt bun. Helen was an anthropologist like Sam’s mom, they had been college friends, but once she took guardianship of Sam she settled down to give Sam a normal life. There was very little for an anthropologist to do in Illinois, so she had become a secretary for a local temp agency.

“Are you alr
ight, princess?” Harold asked when Sam finally untangled herself from Helen. Harold Robinson was a civil engineer specializing in bridge construction. Since Presley, Illinois already had all the bridges it needed, Harold took a job as a teacher at the local community college.

“I’m fine, I guess.” Sam said. She kept waiting for the day when Harold realized she was too old to be called ‘
princess’. 

Harold awkwardly shook each of the agents’ hands in turn. “Thank you for bringing her home, uh, officers.”

“Yes,” Helen said squeezing Sam’s hand. “Thank heavens you got to her before the GSI.”

“ISG,” Agent Rosenberg corrected. “And we didn’t.
But they’ve agreed to let her go for now.”

Helen instantly wrapped a protective arm around Sam’s shoulders.
“For now? What can we do to keep her safe?”

“I believe I have a solution for that,” said a mysterious new voice from the kitchen. The voice belonged to a man in a drab brown suit.

The man handed Sam a brochure with the words MILLER’S GROVE ACADEMY emblazoned above a picturesque private school.

Harold spoke up. “Sam, this is Vice Principal
Luis Hernandez. He’s been waiting for you.”


It is a great pleasure to meet you Miss Hathaway,” he said, shaking her free hand. “I understand you’ve had quite a day. I come bearing good news. You have been accepted into Miller’s Grove Academy for the Exceptionally Gifted and Talented.”

Sam and the Robinson
s sat on one side of the kitchen table and Vice Principal Luis Hernandez sat on the other.

“Miller’s Grove Academy rests on the eastern shore of Lake Laverne across from Futuro University, in beautiful Miller’s Grove, California. The university, founded forty-three years ago by Dean Alistair Futuro, has produced many of the world’s foremost scientists, scholars, and business leaders. The university will share many of its facilities and faculty with Miller’s
Grove Academy. And Miller’s Grove students will be given priority consideration for university enrollment.” Vice Principal Hernandez handed Harold another brochure.

“It is the goal of Miller’s
Grove Academy to provide a learning environment that fosters the development of a wide range of uniquely gifted and talented students.”

“Gifted and talented how?”
Sam asked. She knew for certain that she didn’t fit into either of those groups.

“All of our students are the best of the be
st in their particular fields. In some cases that includes special skills that might otherwise be ignored or overlooked by other schools,” the Vice Principal answered vaguely.

“Special skills like what? Reciting all the state capitols in fifty seconds?
Tap dancing? Magic?” Sam asked. She had no intention of going anywhere near any magical people.

Agent
Rosenberg burst into laughter in the living room.

“Uh, no.
Dean Futuro takes a very dim view of the magical community. Besides, they have their own schools,” Vice Principal Hernandez said, sweeping the idea away with his right hand. “No, we have recruited students with particularly high aptitudes in all subjects from math and science, art and dance, to ancient Mayan rituals and what I believe are referred to as ‘extreme’ level sports. I even recently interviewed an interesting young man who won the Gameco National Video Game Championship.”

“So how did I get put on this list?” Sam asked.

“Sam,” Helen cut in. “You are one of the most talented young women I have ever met. And you deserve the best education available.”

Sam squirmed the way she did anytime someone complimented her.

“Actually you’ve been on the list since before you were even born,” Vice Principal Hernandez said with a gleam of fanlike devotion in his eyes. “Your grandfather was one of the school’s founders. All of your expenses will be covered. The main stipulation in his will was that the school be completed in time for his first grandchild to attend.”

He kept talking, but Sam tuned him
out. She couldn’t help it. This school was starting to sound like the one the X-Men went to. She had no doubt Miller’s Grove would be full of mutants, just not the cool Hugh Jackman kind.

Vice Principal Hern
andez was excitedly pointing at something on the map of the school. Sam figured she had better start paying attention again.

“As you can see
, one of the residence halls was named in his honor.”

Sam found the building on the map. Hathaway Hall was one of four identical dorms. All four were linked together by a dining hall in the middle.

“So, this is where I would be living?” Sam asked. She brushed the letters of her name with her index finger.

“No, I’m afraid not. Hathaway Hall
and McQueen Hall are both boys’ dorms. The girls’ buildings are Cooper Hall and Rosalyn Hall,” Vice Principal Hernandez said pointing them out.

BOOK: The Witch Hunter's Gauntlet
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