Free The Onyx Talisman by Brenda Pandos Page A

shifty little sidekick knew each other? Family perhaps? And no protectors around. Interesting.” He followed his statement by licking his teeth. “This is going to be fun.”
    Wooden or not, I wanted to grab the thing and chuck it at his heart anyway, knowing my aim would be aided by the talisman and could give us a few seconds to escape. But when I lunged for the pen, Dad pressed a red button and twisted his wrist. Red light beamed out and crisscrossed over Slide’s chest in a big X. In awe, Slide stared down at his jacket as charred marks magically appeared behind the path of light. A huge chunk of leather fell onto the pavement at his feet.
    Slide looked up, fury ripping through him. “Why you little—”
    But Dad sliced the light across his throat and Slide’s head lopped off his body onto the pavement with a thud. Slide looked at us from the ground and then over at his smoldering body; smoke poured out from his neck like a chimney. “Oh, crap.” In unison his detached head and body burst into flames and turned to dust.
    Dad continued to wave his magic wand around, into the sky and over the parking lot, making large swooping motions as he backed us toward the door.
    Another scream brought down a man’s body from the sky, which busted into a dust cloud upon contact with the asphalt before I could see if I recognized him—at least I thought it was a man. I gasped, but allowed Dad to kick open the door and lead me inside.
    I clung to Dad’s arm in shock. We’d survived. My eyes zeroed in on the ashes on the other side of the glass doors. Dad’s focus lingered behind us, probably checking the lobby to see if anyone saw. Hyper girls’ voices paired with nervous excitement was all that milled about. Somehow no one witnessed the carnage that had just happened outside. Together in relief, we watched the wind scatter the ashes away, wiping clean the evidence. Perfect timing as another pack of girls walked up from the parking lot ready to enter the lobby.
    “Are you okay?” Dad asked.
    I stared up into his hardened face. He’d been so tough the entire confrontation, but now that it was over, sheer terror looked back at me. I nodded my head, absolutely speechless. He took my hand to lead me into a corner, far away from prying eyes. We stared at one another some more in silence, riddled with shock.
    “How did you know?” we asked each other in unison.
    Dad splayed his hand on his forehead. “You know? How long—?”
    “How long have you known?”
    “Pretty much since your mom disappeared.” His shoulders fell and he bowed his head. “And you?”
    “Since this year.”
    “Was it that boy? The one who’d disappeared from school? Phil?”
    I couldn’t stop my eyes from wandering, looking everywhere but at the lines pressed in his face. “Yes.”
    “I knew it,” Dad said, then grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Why didn’t you listen to me?”
    I pulled away. “I did listen to you, but he hunted me down.” Do I tell him about the mountain lion? Do I tell him about Nicholas? Or Scarlett? Or the prediction?
    “They’re dangerous, Julia. Nothing to toy with. If it wasn’t for the fact he’d died in that fire, I would have moved us away. But now they definitely know that you know, which is the worst possible scenario. They hunt survivors down. That’s why I have to travel so much. To keep them away from you kids.”
    He sat me down on one of the two love seats against the wall.
    “Wait. You travel to protect us?”
    “If I’m on the move and keep my private life separate, they don’t have any information to blackmail me with. But now—”
    “But you’re a computer consultant.”
    “I do computer consulting, but for the government. For the ET unit. We investigate extraterrestrial activity.”
    “Like the X-Files ?”
    Dad laughed, which loosened him up a bit. “Something like that. But we can’t stay around here anymore. We have to leave first thing in the morning. They’re going to round