Chosen: The Path of Heroes

Seven

The person was certainly not a teenage girl. He was dressed completely in black—a blazer, slacks, silk shirt, and fine shoes. Amazingly blue eyes held a twinkle of mischief, peering from a pale face. The Jones' porch light cast ample luminance over his mottled, yellowish skin; in normal medical terms, he might've been diagnosed with some form of jaundice. Oily, lank hair sprang from his head, black as the deepest reaches of space. It was pulled back into a tail, falling over his blazer collar.

The medium-build man tilted his head a bit, his slippery smile lingering as he watched Thomas Jones.

Mr. Jones' skin crawled. Something about the strange man did not sit right with him. He had the greatest urge to slam the door and look for something to use as a weapon for defense. "Can I...help you?"

"Yes, yes you can. I've come for the boy."

Thomas' eyes loomed wide with recognition, with knowing, and before he could think to do anything—slam the door, call out a warning, anything—the eerie fellow in black lifted a hand, fingers uncurling. In his palm rested a flat, circular, transparent crystal.

"Evaptra," the single word hissed from between the creepy man's lips, and the crystal activated.

A clear blue field shot from the discus, expanding to enclose the Jones' entire house, even overlapping the neighboring homes. The bubble stretched to the street. Thomas' movements halted abruptly, posing mid-step as he backed away from the stranger. A woman walking her dog froze, and the pug immobilized with a leg up and ready to pee on a tree trunk. A car driving by also froze, the still beams of its headlights slicing the night. A few fireflies hovered unmoving over the Jones' front yard. Tree branches and leaves ceased to sway in the breeze, perfectly still.

Everything within reach of the bubble had been frozen in time.

The sneaky-eyed man broadened his smile. Long fingers closed around the magical stone in his palm. He dropped the thing in a pocket of his blazer and moved around Thomas Jones, heading into the house.

[*]

Zuri instantly noticed the change. It was quite freaky the way his mother suddenly froze in the middle of pouring more lemonade, the pitcher held over her glass, pale yellow liquid making a still arc downward. Even the sound of pouring liquid had stopped. All sound ceased.

Zuri gasped and dropped his fork, only the utensil didn't fall and clatter to the plate. It hung in midair where the boy released it. Confused and puzzled, he looked from the fork to the fish tank across the dining room and saw that the bubbles produced by the filter had stopped on their way to the surface. The pair of pink convict Cichlids paused, suspended in the tank.

His eyes snapped back to Victoria.

"Mom?"

She remained inoperative, the faintest smile on her lips, arm extended, eyes on the lemonade she poured.

Zuri quickly stood. "Mom!"

A man in black with weird looking skin stepped through the wide archway into the dining room. He grinned at Zuri, and Zuri's heart leapt.

"Wh-who are you? Dad!" the boy called.

The angular fellow laughed. "Your old man—he's chilling out, like your pretty mommy." Sizzling eyes rolled to Victoria, who remained poised like a display window mannequin.

"What did you do? You're some kind of wizard too, aren't you?" Fear trembled through Zuri's voice, but he contained it and tried to remain calm. He stood behind his chair, gripping it tightly.