She heard footsteps crashing on the steel stairs above her and cringed. An orderly, wearing blue scrubs, ran down the stairs right above her, carrying a flashlight. He didn’t see her because she was curled up in a ball under the stairs.
She started down again. There was some activity since none of the elevators were working. She heard voices, eerily familiar voices. She thought she heard Rod. Tears tickled her eyes. She wanted more than anything to see him again. They were planning a life together, and she loved him thoroughly and without reservation. She’d never felt that way about anyone before. If Omar succeeded in his plans she might never see him; he might never know what happened to her.
Strangely, a few moments later, she heard a voice that sounded just like Professor Vincent Middleton. She almost smiled because he sounded grumpy, like he’d really been climbing stairs and didn’t like it. He was a sedentary professor, after all.
He was also a hero, and always would be to Michelle.
When Omar had dropped them from his helicopter into the ocean several miles from the island of Kauai, two weeks ago, Vincent couldn’t swim a stroke. He must have been much more panicked and scared than she was, but he managed to keep his head above water, for a while, until they saw the island in the distance. Then Vincent told her to swim to shore. To leave him.
He believed if she tried to save him they would both drown. Vincent didn’t grab onto her, or plead for her to save him in a blind panic, like she’d heard of people doing when they believed they would drown. He’d accepted the fact that he would die and elected to sacrifice himself so she would live.
At the time, Michelle hardly knew Vincent, she’d just met him that afternoon. He’d been so brave she was actually in awe. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Vincent was a short, pudgy, and middle aged professor. It didn’t matter. He was a brave, valiant man; a hero.
While she was swimming through the ocean, towing Vincent along that night, he told her stories to keep up her spirits through the exhausting ordeal. Michelle found that Vincent had been following rumors for years about the Dark Magician, Omar, who had such a wide following. Some people alleged that he was pure evil; others followed him blindly.
At Stanford University, where Vincent taught classes, he was affectionately called The Vampire Hunter by his students, because his hobby was debunking charlatans who proclaimed they had supernatural powers. His intellectual specialty was in the field of black magic performed by witches.
Omar was a male witch, a warlock, so Vincent was intrigued.
Vincent told Michelle he had come to Hawaii to see what all the fuss was about. Then he’d gone to one of Omar’s Wiccan ceremonies and became convinced that Omar really was an evil man. He also believed that Omar was one of the few people he’d discovered who actually did have powerful psychic power.
Vincent was usually skeptical, but believed, unlike many academic scientists, that there were people who possessed psychic abilities. He thought Omar had extraordinary talent. He also decided later that night that Michelle herself was a powerful witch.
Michelle shook herself and resumed down the stairs, sighing, wishing she did have supernatural powers and could whisk herself and Lucifer magically back to Hawaii.
The voices she’d heard were auditory phantoms, she decided. The hallucinations might be from missing her friends. Or maybe she was truly going mad because of the devastating events from the last twenty-four hours, and the drugs and medications she’d been given. Most certainly Omar was playing tricks with her mind. He’d probably be happy if she was stupid or mentally handicapped.
***
Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. Thinking up ways to defeat his enemies; the people who would try to steal Michelle away from him.
It was almost child’s play, keeping her friends from Michelle, but there were interesting options, Omar thought. He’d hurry up the stairs and beat them to Michelle’s room while they were still trying to release that weatherman, Mike, from the elevator.
He couldn’t underestimate them, though. How they managed to find her was a mystery. He knew Michelle didn’t have a tracking device on her since he had overseen his witches dressing Michelle in the wedding gown last night. She would have had a visible wound or a scar. So how they all gathered together, Heather and Mike from Hawaii, Rod from Japan, and Vincent from California, and then managed to get here so fast, was perplexing.
Omar knew Michelle had psychic abilities, but she wasn’t adept at using them. She couldn’t have called for help telepathically. He shook his head. He’d find out, sooner or later. It was a curiosity and he was a snoopy person when it came to mysteries. He just had to find out how they’d done it.
Meanwhile, he relished the fun part, defeating their efforts. He seldom had a challenge like this one. Humm. Accidents on the stairs were common, people fell all the time. There were many alternatives. Mexico was a hot place; he could make the stairwell burning hot. Or freezing cold. Or send scary hallucinations. Or drifting smoke so they were blinded and coughing and had to stop in defeat.
He savored most his ability to mentally ooze into the minds of people and find their weaknesses, the things that scared them most. Then he would present eerie visions of what they dreaded. He’d seen people bat like crazy at apparitions of flying hornets and bees, or run away from slathering rabid animals, or choke while drinking a glass of water and think they were drowning.
He could produce, and project, specific scary ghostly phantoms, but it took time and a one-on-one with the particular person he needed to terrorize. Those opportunities were not available now, so he’d have
