Page 40 of Jacob Michaels is Trouble

Lucas and I were frozen in time, startled into a near-catatonic state as the darkness overtook the house, and the booming sound echoed off of the walls. As quickly as it sounded, the booming sound disappeared, and the echo of its existence stopped bouncing off of the walls. Lucas and I turned our heads to look at each other, our eyes not used to the darkness that was suddenly thrust upon us. The two of us knelt there together, listening, barely seeing, waiting for something to pop up out of the darkness, to clue us in on what had caused the sound and the lights to go out. There was nothing but the darkness and the silence, other than the sound of our own breathing, however. Slowly, I indicated to Lucas to get out of bed and put his pants on.

Quietly, and in unison, the two of us let go of each other and shifted to the edge of the bed, making as little noise as possible. My brain started to concoct reasons for the noise and the sudden extinguishing of all of the lights in the house. Maybe a transformer blew outside. There was no rain or storm of any kind to have caused problems, but it was totally possible that an equipment malfunction happened randomly. A flipped breaker was also possible, especially since Lucas had built the house himself—I had no idea if he did the electrical work himself—so that was added to the list.

It was also possible that a storm was starting to roll in that we had not noticed due to all of our fun and dramatic talking in the bedroom. A sudden rainstorm, accompanied by lightning and thunder, was not an oddity in upper Ohio in early Spring. More times than I had fingers to count, crazy, violent storms had popped up out of nowhere during Spring in our neck of the woods. It was not totally out of the question that we had Mother Nature to worry about more than anything else. The only problem was the twisting and turning in my gut, letting me know that whatever happened was not natural.

As though I could simply sense it, I knew something was very wrong, even though I had no evidence to support that feeling. With everything that had happened in my lifetime, though, I did not feel in that moment that I had to be rational. All things considered, I had every right to be as irrational and come up with as many crazy theories as I wanted. The first thing that came to mind was:

Magic.

Whether what had happened was a genuinely intentional act committed by a magical practitioner or some other type of act accompanied by magic was beyond me. I knew of no one—besides Oma and myself—who could cast magic in Point Worth, though my knowledge was limited. It wasn’t like I went to the monthly conventions to network or simply to make new friends in the community. I wasn’t even sure that those in the world who could do magic wanted others to know about it. Oma and I were pretty damned secretive about it, after all. As far as I knew, it was a pretty rare ability, so I was guessing that any convention I could have gone to would have been pretty lame and not worth the cost of admission. Of course, that thought only led to two other possibilities.

Black-hooded cloak.

Werewolves.

Lucas slid off of his side of the bed as I slid off of the other side, and together, we found our pants in the dark. Sliding into my jeans, I could see Lucas sliding into his boxers in my peripheral vision, though the darkness distorted things a bit. For all I knew, he was trying on a pair of yoga leggings. The thought, regardless of the seriousness of the situation, made me smile slightly, though I was still ill at ease.

“What was it?” Lucas whispered before looking around the bedroom floor in vain for something to put on over his boxers.

“I don’t know,” I whispered over my shoulder as I started to creep towards the bedroom door.

“Don’t go anywhere.” He hissed desperately. “We’ll go together.”

I paused and turned my head slightly to watch Lucas as he scrabbled around for a second, finally locating what he was looking for by the large window that looked out at Lake Erie. He stood from his stooped over position, triumphantly holding a pair of what looked like basketball shorts. Time and darkness seemed to press in on us as I waited quietly for him to slip them on. Lucas tied the drawstring in the shorts, giving me a proud look from across the room, the whites of his eyes and his teeth the only clearly visible features in the darkness of the bedroom. I shook my head nervously with a smile at him as he beamed back from his place next to the window.

“Now we can—”

The window shattered, shards of glass slicing through the air towards me as Lucas’ eyes grew wide in horror. I crouched quickly with a scream, my hand flying up out of instinct, as I focused my magic outward. A halo of barely visible blue light appeared, and every piece of glass that hit it turned to sand. The other shards of glass flew past me, not connecting with my vulnerable, exposed flesh. Before I could pull my magic back in or stand from my crouched position, two arms, several times more massive than a normal man’s—and much hairier—came through the window and encircled Lucas’ waist.

He barely had time to look at me in disbelief.

“Rob.” He gasped.

Then my boyfriend was yanked out of the window and into the night.

Roaring with rage and fear, I darted to the window, launched myself through it, and landed on the soft grass below. Werewolves are fast. By the time I had landed, corrected my footing, and raised my hand in preparation to send some fire towards the werewolf, he was nowhere in sight. Neither was Lucas. A scream to the left made me whip around, hand at the ready, searching desperately for some sign of my boyfriend. My stomach sunk when my eyes landed on the werewolf, Lucas over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes with flailing human appendages. I screamed angrily as the werewolf jumped into the back of a pickup truck at the side of the house.

Taking off at a full run, I thought about sending fireball after fireball towards the pickup and the werewolf who had Lucas wrapped up in his arms. However, I knew that there was no guarantee that Lucas would come away from the assault unharmed, so I lowered my arms to my side, pumping them as I ran as fast as I could towards the truck. The taillights lit up red, casting the surrounding yard in an ominous shade and it took off, werewolf and Lucas in the back. Screaming with rage, I ran faster, doing my best to catch up to them, to give myself a clear shot at Lucas’ captor. But a human is no match for a pickup truck. Dust and gravel flew out at me as the truck sped off and I was forced to slide to a stop, barely staying on my feet, so that I could watch the truck drive off into the night.

Two red, rapidly shrinking eyes taunted me as they flew off into the night.

My whole body shook as I looked up to the heavens and screamed with rage.