Free Taker by Patrick Wong Page A

inspection, the strain was evident on their faces.
    Nicole was just about to close her eyes when she heard a young girl singing several rows behind her. She looked in the direction of the voice and saw it was the girl who had brought her the sword earlier. She was still dressed in the same plain clothes.
    “Wondered when you were going to show up again,” Nicole whispered, more fondly than in her previous conversation with the girl. “No gifts of medieval weapons this time?”
    “You took it,” was her simple reply.
    “You’re right. I did,” Nicole said.
    The little girl smiled back and bowed before Nicole, and then she disappeared into a grassy meadow stretched out before a farmhouse in the distance.
    Comforted that she had pleased the vision, Nicole turned to watch Jason dozing softly next to her. She decided he was one of the good guys. While others around them had cowered in their seats and resigned simply to wait for whatever fate was to befall them, Jason had tried to save Jeanine. She remembered how he’d said he’d like to be a paramedic someday. How he’d visited his mom on the job and watched those fearless workers bring in people with terrible injuries. Nicole could definitely like a guy like that. He had exhibited a calm air with Jeanine that she hadn’t seen before. And for a moment, she had been a little jealous seeing Jason soothing Jeanine. She smiled and laughed to herself for a moment. Jealous?
    Just then, with the slow descent of the plane, the blanket slid off Nicole’s lap and fell softly to the floor, disturbing her stream of thought. She leaned forward to gather it up and nonchalantly peered into the gap between the seats in front of her. A boy was reading a glossy magazine that contained pages and pages about the theme park Adventure World — the architecture, the landscaping, the rides and the food. The boy kept turning the pages, looking only at the pictures and ignoring the text.
    Then Nicole’s heart froze as she saw a picture of a room with large stone walls lit only by torches.
    Stunned, a familiar feeling passed through her, and the noise of the plane dulled to a silence. She fell back almost limp in her seat. Her mind began to drift away as it had done before, and, almost immediately, a moldy stench hit her senses.
    As she opened her eyes, she was now in almost total darkness, surrounded by cold and damp stone walls. She couldn’t place the time she was in, but these were stone walls she had seen before back in the forest. Here she was, encased by them again in the dungeon.
    Then the sobbing began. Nicole knew that there was a presence behind her; she could feel her skin prickling at the closeness.
    She was standing in front of another girl.
    She turned and — to her surprise — found that the girl was laughing, not sobbing. She reached out her hand. Nicole caught a better look at her this time. Blond, petite, pretty. She was a little older than Nicole and looked a little like Jason’s friend, but she was wearing old, tattered rags.
    She couldn’t be here — could she? Not here in this room.
    “Hi,” Nicole murmured.
    “Hello.”
    As Nicole reached out to touch the girl’s hand, the girl stopped laughing, and then pulled back her hand before Nicole could clasp it.
    The girl laughed again, and Nicole suddenly realized that this was not happy laughter. It seemed hysterical, and it sent chills down Nicole’s spine.
    The fit of laughter stopped once more, and the girl moaned in an eerie, monotone voice, as if in a trance, “What you bring to others will be visited twofold on you.”
    “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
    In the blink of an eye, the girl appeared to Nicole’s left side and whispered, “Bring hope to others.” Then, no more than a second later, she had disappeared and reappeared at Nicole’s right side. The girl’s face had morphed into that of an angry woman, looming over Nicole and screaming in her ear, “Take hope away!”
    Nicole