Seize the Night

assumed she meant nothing more than that animals, like us, are subject to the fear and suffering of this world. Now I know there were deeper and more complex layers of meaning in her words.
    I reached toward the tin, intending to test its weight, because I wanted to be certain that it was filled with treats for Orson's triumphant return. My hand began to shake so badly that I left the box untouched.
    I folded my hands, one over the other, on the desk. Staring down at the hard white points of my knuckles, I realized that I had assumed the very pose in which I'd first seen Lilly Wing when Bobby and I returned from Wyvern.
    Orson. Jimmy. Aaron. Anson. Like the barbed points on a razor-wire fence, their names spiraled through my mind. The lost boys.
    I felt an obligation to all of them, a fierce sense of duty, which wasn't entirely explicable—except that in spite of my good fortune in parents and in spite of the riches of friendship that I enjoyed, I was the ultimate lost boy, myself, and to some extent would be lost until the day I passed out of my darkness in this world into whatever light waits beyond.
    Impatience abraded my nerves. In conventional searches for lost hikers, for small aircraft downed in mountainous terrain, and for boats at sea, search parties break from dusk to dawn. We were limited, instead, to the dark hours, not merely by my XP but by our need to gather our forces and to act in utmost secrecy. I wondered whether the members of conventional search parties checked their watches every two minutes, chewed their lips, and went slightly screwy with frustration while waiting for first light. My watch crystal was etched with tracks, my lip was shaggy with shredded skin, and I was half nuts by 12:45.
    Shortly before one o'clock, as I was diligently ridding myself of the second half of my sanity, the doorbell rang.
    With the Glock in hand, I went downstairs. Through one of the stained-glass sidelights, I saw Bobby on the front porch. He was turned half away from the door, staring back toward the street, as though looking for a police surveillance team in one of the parked cars or for a school of anchovies in a passing vehicle.
    As he stepped inside and I closed the door behind him, I said, “Bitchin' shirt.” He was wearing a red and gray volcanic-beach scene with blue ferns, which looked totally cool over a long-sleeve black pullover.
    “Made by Iolani,” I said. “Coconut-husk buttons, 1955.”
    Instead of commenting on my erudition with even as little as a roll of the eyes, he headed for the kitchen, saying, “I saw Charlie Dai again.”
    The kitchen was brightened only by the ashen face of the day pressed to the window blinds, by the digital clocks on the ovens, and by two fat candles on the table.
    “Another kid is gone,” Bobby said.
    I felt a tremor in my hands once more, and I put the Glock on the kitchen table. “Who, when?”
    Snatching a Mountain Dew from the refrigerator, where the standard light had been replaced with a lower-wattage, pink-tinted bulb, Bobby said, “Wendy Dulcinea.”
    “Oh,” I said, and wanted to say more but couldn't speak.
    Wendy's mother, Mary, is six years older than I am, when I was thirteen, my parents paid her to give me piano lessons, and I had a devastating crush on her. At that time, I was functioning under the delusion that I would one day play rock-'n'-roll piano as well as Jerry Lee Lewis, be a keyboard-banging maniac who could make those ivories smoke. Eventually my parents and Mary concluded and persuaded me that the likelihood of my becoming a competent pianist was immeasurably less than the likelihood of me levitating and flying like a bird.
    “Wendy's seven.” Bobby said. “Mary was taking her to school. Backed the car out of the driveway. Then realized she'd forgotten something in the house, went in to get it. When she came back two minutes later, the car was gone. With Wendy.”
    “No one saw anything?”
    Bobby chugged the Mountain Dew, enough sugar to induce in him a diabetic coma, enough caffeine to keep a long-haul trucker awake through a five-hundred-mile run. He was legally wiring himself for the ordeal ahead.
    “No one saw or heard anything,” he confirmed. “Neighborhood of the blind and deaf. Sometimes I think there's something going around more contagious than your mom's bug. We've got an epidemic of the shut-up hunker-down-see-hear-smell-speak-no-evil influenza. Anyway, the cops found Mary's car abandoned in the service lane