Chapter 10: I Really Hope There’s No Zombies

After we finished eating the pie, Rufus put me in a spare bedroom upstairs. Yvette had sneaked away through the grate in the sitting room.

Black curtains embossed with a sinister floral design hung in the arched, thick paned windows. The canopy bed and dresser were hulking and equally dark, with ornately carved patterns of wailing faces. A demon print loveseat stood off to the side.

Everywhere looked like an ideal hiding place for zombies or ghouls. I was relieved one hadn’t popped out anywhere yet, although Yvette said that Rufus managed to successfully banish them to their undead planes of existence.

“No way. I’m not spending the night with the creepy screaming people on the furniture.”

“I need you out of the way,” he explained with a grin, “until I can set the spell to send you back. Don’t worry, those aren’t real people I trapped in the furniture or anything like that.”

Great, give me something else to worry about. “But what about the portal you used to grab the pendant?” I asked.

The grin vanished. “What about it?”

“Can’t you just do that again? Except opposite?” I knew that it was probably a long shot, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

Rufus gave an exaggerated sigh that rivaled even the ones I gave Addison on my moodiest days. “For someone who lives with a magic-user, you are a bonehead when it comes to levels of sorcery.”

“I’m just asking!”

He rubbed his forehead as if rubbing away his annoyance. “They are two completely distinct types of spells. The one that you interfered with was designed to transport objects, not people.”

“Then why did I get dragged along?”

“Because the pendant was re-set to return to me,” he said. “The magic was amplified. I also never imagined you’d try to stop me from getting my own pendant back.”

I shrugged. “I was only doing what Addison told me to do.”

Rufus glowered. “Why would he have told you to stop me from getting it?”

“I don’t know. I think he just wanted it to stay at our house until he could come home and do it himself.”

He stared. For a moment, I wondered if he was trying to read my mind or if there was something on my face.

“Come home from where?”

Oops. I blinked. “Huh?”

“You told me Addison was sick.”

“He is,” I said.

“Then where is he? Be honest with me. I’ll know if you aren’t.”

He probably would, now that I was right here in front of him instead of through the Chimbrelis.

“He’s at the hospital,” I sighed. “He had a heart attack this morning.”

Rufus’s mouth hung open for a moment. He had the same look of flustered surprise as when I’d answered the Chimbrelis.

“Gods,” he said. “Isn’t that an unpleasant turn of events.”

I crossed my arms. “Yeah, it is. I need to get home, before he discovers I’m missing. Don’t you care about that?”

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His face turned stormy. “Do not presume that I don’t care about your predicament. I’m sorry about Addison. But you fail to understand the type of magic involved to send you back. It takes lots of preparation, and I need to conserve my energy for the situation in the laboratory.”

“When do you think the laboratory thing is going to be fixed?”

“Are you serious?” he asked. “It’s not the type of thing I can put a time frame on.”

“What’s going on down there, anyway?”

“I’m not explaining it to the likes of you,” he said.

Sudden anger welled up inside my stomach. Average people who thought they were better than everybody else were barely tolerable. It was even worse when magic-users were like that, and all because they were born with some stupid genetic thing that gave them special powers.

“Why, because I’m not a magic-user, I don’t deserve to know? Or I wouldn’t understand?” I said, growing bolder by the second. Maybe if I drove him crazy enough, he’d send me back sooner. Eating dinner had given me a second wind. “Being here with you is really inconvenient.”

Rufus’s eyes did the scary blue glowy thing. I cringed, expecting lightning bolts to fly from his fingertips and fry me from the inside out.

“Go to bed!” he shouted, and slammed the door shut.

“I’m not just some dumb kid, you know!” I shouted back.

“Perhaps not,” he said through the door, “but until you prove yourself otherwise, you will stay put.”

I heard a click. I twisted the door knob but it was stuck.

“Hey, unlock the door!” I screamed, kicking it so hard the wood shivered.

“No,” he said. “If you break my door, you will pay for a new one, and then I will make you stand barefoot in a bucket of stinging ants.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” I gasped. “Addison would kill you.”

“Addison isn’t here to bail you out of this,” Rufus said. “And he wouldn’t be very happy if he knew you were trying to vandalize my property.”

“He wouldn’t like that you’re keeping me hostage inside your house.”

“It’s for your own safety,” Rufus said. “Settle down and go to sleep, or I will make you.”

I cursed and paced the room. What if he meant to keep me in here until he got the laboratory thing settled? What was happening down there? There was more going on than what Yvette had explained, and it seemed dangerous.

What if he got killed in the process? That purple lightning leveled him once already that I’d seen. Gods forbid Rufus ended up dead while I was shut up inside a spare bedroom an entire continent and ocean away from Addison.

I pulled back the curtains, pressed my forehead on the window glass, and peered outside. It was too dark to see anything, so I had no idea what was down there or how far of a drop it would be to the ground.

There was no point in jumping out a window if I was just going to break a leg or end up impaled on a spiky wrought iron fence. Devising an escape would have to wait until morning.

After I checked under the bed, behind the shower curtain inside the attached bathroom (more dark florals), and inside the closet for Rufus’s undead minions (which were empty except for dust bunnies under the bed frame, and some dark robes in the closet), I crawled under the covers to worry some more.

At least the bed linens were beautiful; sumptuous crimson silk, embroidered with deadly black-ash flowers and matching overstuffed pillows.

A loud clang startled me. I scurried to the side of the bed where the noise had come from and came face to face with Yvette. Around her neck was a black satin cord with a key.

“I’ve solved your ‘locked-inside’ problem,” she said.

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