Page 31 of Jacob Michaels is Dead

“Now,” She looked out over her property into the thickening darkness that was slowly making the stars and moon blink out, “where the hell are them boys at?”

Lucas felt like a livewire next to me, the way he was shifting and shimmying in the passenger seat of the car as it idled at the opening to the driveway. The drive from the wooded area where we had parked, a few miles from Lucas’ house on the shore of Lake Erie, to Oma’s house had felt…different. Although I’d made the drive dozens of times over the last few weeks, the drive felt longer this time. But also, shorter. Lucas had remained silent the entire time, and I had nothing to distract me from the sense of impending doom permeating every fiber of my being. I both wanted to find someone to help us, yet I didn’t want to see Oma. In my heart of hearts, I knew she wasn’t my grandmother. I knew she had done nothing but lie and deceive me for my entire life. The reasons were completely unknown to me, and I wasn’t sure I’d understand even if I had all of my memories back.

With the silence of Lucas making the ride tense, not wanting to see Oma, but also concerned about finding anyone who could help us with our problem, the ride felt both torturously slow and fretfully fast. As we sat at the end of the driveway, the car in Drive but my foot on the brake, I couldn’t help but feel that it was darker outside than usual. The darkness that surrounded us out on the old road that led to the lake and Oma’s house felt almost tangible. As if something was closing in around us, crushing down upon us.

Somewhere, in the furthest reaches of my brain, I knew that it wasn’t just my imagination that the darkness was thicker and blacker than usual for no reason. The man in the black hooded cloak was coming, and that was affecting everything in Point Worth. If we were right in our hypothesis about what was going on in our little hometown, that made a lot of sense. He was draining everything from the land, all of the magic that made it what it was. He was siphoning off everything that was good and pure—even any source of light that chased away bad things.

Eventually, as the night wore on, I imagined Point Worth would look like The Void in Stranger Things. Nothing but inky blackness surrounding us, leaving us able to only see houses and people—no detail or light to the world. Just stuff. Stuff that the man in the black hooded cloak would eventually wipe away, just like he had done in my dreams. Nothing could prepare a person for what I knew he had in mind for Point Worth—and probably, eventually, the world—but I knew what those plans were. My mind couldn’t even hold such an idea or wrap itself around an idea like that. Nothing but eternal dark and nothingness, with only him left. He would devour everything with his power, growing more and more hungry for power until he left the Earth nothing more than a black hole that no light escaped.

“What are we waiting on?” Lucas asked softly, his hand reaching for and squeezing my thigh once again. “Sitting here is just making this worse, babe.”

“I know,” I said, though my foot stayed on the brake pedal. “I’m just working myself up to doing this, ya’ know.”

“Rip the bandage off, Rob.” He patted my thigh. “It’ll be easier.”

I looked over at him. He smiled.

“Promise.” He reassured me. “And I’m here with you.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.” He leaned over and gave me a lingering kiss that never could have lasted long enough.

As Lucas pulled away, a smile on his face, I allowed myself a happy sigh, then I eased off of the brake and moved my foot to the gas. Inch by inch, we eased down the driveway, on our way to Oma’s house. As we drove along, Lucas kept his hand on my thigh for reassurance, squeezing the flesh there to remind me that I wasn’t alone. No matter what we found at Oma’s house, we would find it together. Even though Oma’s house was settled quite a way off of the road that led to the lake, we would have seen any flames if it had been on fire. A house as big as hers doesn’t burn without letting the whole county know, so I knew that the wolves had not come and played pyromaniacs. However, the fact that the house was not on fire concerned me. Had they shown up but hadn’t done anything to give it away? Were they lying in wait for us on Oma’s property somewhere?

The thought made me nearly slam on the brake and throw the car into reverse, but my mind told me that there was nowhere to hide. If they were at Oma’s, we might as well face the wolves, too. We’d eventually run into them somewhere. We couldn’t leave Point Worth—not as a pair—and I wouldn’t leave alone—and the darkness was closing in around us. There was no way we could luck out and not run into them before morning came. As we got to the far end of the driveway, Oma’s house came into view in the clearing. It was funny to me that not even a month before, I had been elated to see the old house. Now, it made my stomach flip-flop in my gut.

Oma was on the porch, sitting there, drinking a glass of tea like the world wasn’t burning down around her. That did nothing to make my gut feel better. Lucas gave my thigh another squeeze as I continued pulling up to the house, only stopping when I was within ten feet of it. I looked through the windshield at Oma, and she raised the glass in a salute and then took another sip, calm as you please. Of course, she had been waiting for us. Why should I have expected anything different?