If you’d like to start reading from the beginning, check out A Grave Mistake: Chapter 1

When something of value is lost, we stop what we’re doing to look for it. It makes sense then, that if magic is taken, the caretakers would stop at nothing to find it again.

CHAPTER 7 – EVAN WAGNER
Day 3, 10:36 am

After he’d left Stacey’s house, Evan realized he couldn’t go home. The only place he could think to go was his brother, Daniel’s. He showed up on his doorstep after 1 am after wandering aimlessly for hours. He hadn’t told Daniel why he was there. He just came in and asked if he could crash on the couch.

That had been last night. Now, Evan and Daniel were sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast.

“Are you going to tell me yet, why you’re here?” Daniel asked, taking a sip from his coffee cup.

Evan slowly crunched his cereal, debating how much he should tell his brother. Finally, he opted to just show him and slowly reached across the kitchen, stretching his arm out to 5 times it’s normal length. He picked up the coffee pot, retracted his arm, and refilled his cup.

“Would you like some more?” he asked, looking at Daniel and holding up the coffee pot.

Daniel just stared back at him his eyes opened wide in shock.

Evan smiled and shook his head. “No? Okay.” He the repeated the motion and set the coffee pot back on the burner of the machine. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “something weird is happening to me.”

“Clearly,” Daniel said.

“And now some guys are after me,” he said. “They came to my house and tried to throw me a van. I need a place I could lay low for a while so I can figure out what’s going on.”

“What if you lead them straight to us?” Daniel asked, frowning.

“I don’t think I did. I ditched my car before I got here and came the rest of the way on foot. I cut across yards and parks and backtracked a lot. Besides, if they knew I was here, they’d have come in already.”

Daniel looked at him skeptically, but didn’t comment. They continued eating breakfast in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

* * *

An hour later, Evan was down in the basement using the guest shower when he heard a loud bang upstairs. Footsteps thudded across the ceiling above him and he heard Daniel shouting. Then something muffled his voice. Evan sprang out of the shower, grabbing the pile of clothes he tossed on the floor before his shower. By the time he raced up the stairs it was silent save for the drips of water dripping of him onto the floor.

One of the bookshelves was tipped over, it’s contents strewn across the floor along with a lamp lying broken in pieces. The front door was wide open and through it, Evan saw the same two men from last night throw Daniel into the back of the van bound and gagged. One of the men slammed the back doors. As the men hurried on either side of the van to climb into the front seats, Evan scrambled into his clothes as he hobbled outside and just managed to step up onto the back bumper as it started pulling out of the driveway. He stretched out his hands to pull himself up onto the roof of the van and then lay as flat as he could, which was flatter than most humans could lie, and wrapped his fingers around the rails of the roof rack on either side of him.

The whole time they were driving he kept wondering who these people were and where they were taking Daniel. Finally, they pulled into the parking lot of his doctor’s office and stopped. The garage door into the underground parking opened and as the van started to descend the ramp, he silently slid down the back and jumped off the bumper just as it entered the underground garage. He slipped behind a concrete barrier and hid as the garage door closed. That’s when he remembered, he’d had a doctor’s appointment the day all of this started. What had they done to him?

Chapter 8 coming soon 🙂