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  REUNION

  Copyright © 2022 by Christopher Farnsworth

  All rights reserved.

  979-8-9862375-0-3

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  REUNION is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Advance Praise for Reunion

  Quote

  Prologue

  All About Eric Weiss

  1. The Young Magician

  From the Wikipedia entry for Middleton:

  2. Where They Used to Live

  All About Carrie Keene

  3. The Girl Detective

  All About Alana Bright

  4. The Warrior Princess

  All About Daniel Sharp IV

  5. The Boy Genius

  6. I’ve Done My Part

  7. The Only Warrior Left

  8. The World Beneath the World

  9. Even Less Fun Now

  10. The Flawless Performance of Innumerable Lines of Code

  11. Like Time-Lapse Photography

  12. You Don’t Have to Go Home but You Can’t Stay Here

  13. This is Where She Gets It

  14. I Never Believed in Prophecies

  15. Normal People Stumble Along

  INTERLUDE: The Case of the Candy Cult

  16. That’s How Her Story Ought to Go

  17. Normal Is Whatever You Grow Up With

  18. Even Good Kids Have Their Limits

  INTERLUDE: The Menace of the Middleton Monster

  19. Alanis Morissette Irony or the Other Kind

  20. What You Want Is Not the Most Important Thing

  INTERLUDE: Trapped in the Goblin’s Lair

  21. The Slowest Person in the Room

  INTERLUDE: The Final Secret of Dr. Sax

  22. All Part of King Jeremy’s Land

  INTERLUDE: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

  23. You Breathed It In, All the Time

  INTERLUDE: What Happened

  24. Danny Sharp Doesn’t Believe in Ghosts

  25. Ice and Bottles of Zima

  26. You Were Right All Along

  27. A Lot of Sacrificing to Do Tonight

  28. You Walked Right into It

  29. How Magic Works

  30. Was This Your Master Plan

  31. This Time, I Swear, We Can Do It Right

  32. You’d Think He Would Know Better

  33. Fresh Blood on Its Hands

  34. Any One of a Thousand Different Men

  35. The End of the World over There

  36. These Are Not Ideal Conditions

  37. Lightning and Thunder, Demons and Angels

  38. Into the Jaws of the Dragon

  39. Unafraid at Sunset

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Works by Christopher Farnsworth

  REUNION

  By Christopher Farnsworth

  Bestselling Author of BLOOD OATH and THE PRESIDENT’S VAMPIRE

  A girl detective. A boy genius. A warrior princess. A young magician. Four young people with extraordinary gifts.

  For years, they solved mysteries, caught crooks, and slayed monsters. They were secret heroes, keeping an idyllic small town in the middle of America safe from the things that lurked in the dark.

  Then, the year of their high school graduation, the darkness came for them.

  During what the media called “New Year’s Evil,” a demonic force rose to turn their hometown into a literal Hell on Earth.

  They gathered to stop it. They fought. And they won.

  The rest of the world never discovered the truth behind the disaster. For 20 years, the four tried living like normal people.

  Now their past is coming back to haunt them.

  The darkness is gathering once more. They’re summoned back to their hometown to face it, along with everything else they left behind. Whether they want to or not, they’ll have to be heroes again.

  THE GIRL DETECTIVE

  Carrie Keene — born with an eidetic memory, Carrie has been fighting crime since grade school, graduating from stolen bikes to federal felonies. But when she finds the sign of a murderous cult at a crime scene, she knows that she has to return home and re-open the case that everyone else would just as soon forget.

  THE BOY GENIUS

  Danny Sharp — the insanely smart heir to a high-tech fortune, Danny spent his childhood building jetpacks and robots, catching mad scientists and industrial spies. After losing his start-up in a corporate takeover, Danny returns to face the same evil that killed his father, and now waits for him.

  THE WARRIOR PRINCESS

  Alana Bright — born to a refugee from a mystical world, Alana always knew she was different. She carried a magic sword and killed the monsters that came out at night, keeping the daylight world safe. Once the final battle was over, she was ready to be normal. Her days are spent with her daughter, and she’s happy. But an old evil won’t let her walk away — and she will have to pick up her sword again to protect the people she loves most.

  THE YOUNG MAGICIAN

  Eric Weiss — a misfit plagued by disturbing visions, Eric learned early that all the demons and horrors he saw were real. This generation’s Merlin, Eric lost his powers two decades ago and has been doing card tricks in Vegas ever since. When his abilities return, he knows that his nemesis is alive again, too. Only this time, he’s not sure he wants to sacrifice himself for the greater good.

  Together, they will have to finish what they started. Last time, they saved the world. This time, they’ll have to do something much harder.

  They’ll have to save each other.

  In a story that’s like Stephen King rewriting Nancy Drew, REUNION is about what happens when the good guys grow up.

  Advance Praise for Reunion

  “I’m a longtime fan of Christopher Farnsworth’s brilliant thrillers. Now I’m equally enthralled by REUNION, an incandescent horror novel where ancient legend meets the American heartland, with characters so real and engaging, I felt like I’ve known them since childhood. Farnsworth’s new novel is dark fantasy at its finest.”

  — Elizabeth Hand, author of Hokuloa Road and Generation Loss

  * * *

  “Christopher Farnsworth combines myths old and new into a harrowing, gripping novel where the past and present of a small town's unlikely band of heroes collide, with the fate of the world — and their friendships — in the balance. Fans of Stranger Things, Yellowjackets, and well-told fantasy will love it.”

  — Gwenda Bond, New York Times bestselling author of Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds and Mr. And Mrs. Witch

  * * *

  “REUNION is a gleeful horror/thriller mashup, about a group of former child heroes vanquishing the foes they thought they'd conquered back in high school. If you're thinking REUNION sounds like a poignant parable for the travails of adulthood, you're not wrong — but it's also hilarious, shocking, and genuinely suspenseful. There is no limit to Christopher Farnsworth's imagination.”

  — Ben H. Winters, New York Times bestselling author of Underground Airlines and The Quiet Boy

  * * *

  “Like the Nicolas Cage of high-octane fiction, Christopher Farnsworth is a National Treasure — and REUNION is a classic slice of weird Americana, served like the best apple pie you ever tasted if it w
as laced with cyanide. You’ll scream, you’ll cry, and then you’ll go back to the home you left behind to face the darkness with your friends beside you. I wish I was reading it for the first time again myself.”

  — Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Violent Century and By Force Alone

  * * *

  “With heart-pounding action and sly dialogue, REUNION is a book you’ll be thinking about long after putting it down. I loved it!”

  — Brendan Reichs, New York Times bestselling author of Nemesis

  * * *

  “REUNION is the book I've waited for my whole life. When I was a kid, I inhaled all the adventures about young heroes — the Tom Swifts, the Nancy Drews, the kids who discover magic — and desperately wanted to know what happened to them when they grew up. Christopher Farnsworth gives us the answers in this banger of a book about four chosen ones who have to return home to take care of unfinished business. If it was just a witty, thrilling genre mashup, that would have been enough for me, but REUNION is more than that — it's also an affecting story about the pressures of being a child prodigy, the debts owed to family and friends, and the hard work of living the rest of your life. It's frickin’ brilliant.”

  — Daryl Gregory, award-winning author of Spoonbenders and Revelator

  To Randy,

  My companion on a thousand idiot adventures,

  old bean to my old man,

  my best friend.

  Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

  * * *

  Nobody that matters, that is.

  * * *

  — Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Prologue

  That Was Then

  * * *

  MIDDLETON. THEN.

  Danny was the last to arrive, as usual. He pulled up to Eric’s house in the new Beemer he bought to replace the ElectriCar.

  Eric went out to greet him in the driveway. He hadn’t been sure Danny would make it. Not because he thought Danny was scared — Danny didn’t get scared, not that Eric had ever seen. But he was the one still insisting there must be some kind of rational explanation, hanging onto his skepticism like it was a cross that might keep a vampire at bay.

  (That didn’t always work, though. Eric knew from experience.)

  So maybe Danny did get scared, after all.

  Now he was here, unloading stuff from the Beemer’s trunk as if there’d never been any doubt he’d show. Eric helped him carry the duffel bag inside. Eric’s mom was spending the holidays with her new boyfriend at a crystal healing retreat in Sedona (she’d told Eric it was her Christmas gift to herself).

  The girls were in the living room. Alana was wrapping her fists in long, leather cords, carefully fitting the iron spikes of her cestus over her knuckles. Carrie was strapping herself into a bulletproof vest, stolen from a locker at the station. They didn’t have any women’s sizes, so she looked like Eddie Murphy wearing his fat suit in The Nutty Professor.

  Eric dropped Danny’s bag on the floor.

  “Careful with that,” he snapped.

  “Sorry. What is it?” Eric said.

  Danny unzipped it and began assembling something out of the components inside, his movements quick and sure. “Dangerous,” he said. “I’d like to avoid anything exploding before we actually want it to explode.”

  Carrie stepped over to take a closer look. “Seriously, what is it?”

  Danny attached a pistol grip to a long barrel, then slapped in a battery pack.

  “We know light hurts them, right? I figured a burst of coherent light should be enough to scatter them completely, just like a real shadow. So I pulled apart one of the industrial lasers in the lab and mounted it to a — ”

  “Jesus Christ, Danny, are you saying you built a ray gun?” Carrie asked.

  He gave them his usual look, as if he was gazing down from the great height of his mountainous IQ. “No,” he said, insulted. “It’s a PEW. A Plasma Emitter Weapon. It pushes light through a series of ruby crystal diodes to exponentially increase the output of — ”

  He stopped when he saw the looks on their faces.

  “Fine. It’s a ray gun.”

  Eric looked at it, frowning. “What does it… do?”

  Danny hefted the device and pointed it at the ceiling. “Hopefully, burn those things into oblivion.”

  “No, I got that,” Eric said. “What does it do if it hits any people?”

  Danny shrugged. “Should carbonize skin and bone at about ninety feet.”

  “Jesus Christ, Danny,” Carrie said.

  Danny scowled at her. “Does that thing shoot Nerf darts?” he asked, pointing to the holster on her waist.

  Carrie put her hand on the butt of the gun. She had her father’s back-up weapon, a .44 Ruger Police Special. As far as he knew, it was locked away in his gun safe. But she saw him enter the combination when she was six years old. She remembered. Carrie didn’t forget anything. Ever.

  Now Carrie felt the gun, heavy and solid, weighing her down like an anchor. Even with everything that had happened so far, the gun was what made it all real. They were going to go out there tonight. They were going to fight. And they were probably going to die.

  But first, they were going to kill some things, and some of those things would be wearing the faces of people they knew. There would be blood, and pain, and no matter what else happened, they would be responsible for it. All of them.

  So instead of answering him, she asked, “Are we ready to go?”

  “Ready,” Alana said, her hand lightly on the hilt of her sword, which was strapped to her side. They’d never seen her in full battle gear before. For a moment, they were all struck dumb. In her armor, with her weapons, she looked magnificent. She practically shone with her own light.

  She put a heavy coat over it all, and they managed to stop staring.

  “Here,” Danny said. He took out little devices about the size of a deck of cards. Each one had a glass screen on the front. He showed them how to turn it on, and each screen lit up with rows of symbols.

  “Personal communicators,” he said. “They use cell-phone signals, but they have cameras and computers inside as well. We can send pictures or video or text to one another if we have to. We can use these to keep in touch.”

  Danny showed them how to tap each little symbol — the communicators had a touch-screen instead of a keypad — to make everything work.

  “Cool,” Eric said. “When does Sharp Industries release these to the public?”

  Danny made a face. “Never. My dad said nobody’s going to pay a thousand dollars for a cell phone. He hated the idea.”

  All of them caught the past tense. None of them knew what to say.

  Carrie broke the silence. “Well then,” she said. “I guess it’s time.”

  Eric snapped his fingers, and a brilliant ball of light exploded in the air. This was the big show now. He had to be perfect. There were no second chances. Not tonight.

  Danny hefted his not-a-ray-gun. Alana had her sword. Carrie put her coat on over her holster and the vest.

  They were as ready as they would ever be. There was no sense putting it off any longer. They opened the front door. For a moment, they paused and stood on the threshold.

  The boy genius, the girl detective, the young magician, and the warrior princess.

  The street was empty. The streetlights seemed to be clouded, muddled by some extra layer of darkness. The few remaining drifts of snow were dirty, almost black. A bitterly cold wind picked up, and they all shivered.

  The End waited out there for them. They could feel it.

  Despite everything they had been through, everything they’d already done in their lives, they were scared. None of them had to say it.

  Carrie took Danny’s hand, and he let her. Eric and Alana tried not to look, but for them, this was shockingly public behavior, as if they’d started kissing and tearing each other’s clothes off right there.

  For one wild moment, they all had th
e same idea. What if they went back inside? What if they pretended none of it was real? What would happen if they just stayed home?

  Then a car went past, filled with some of their classmates, all dressed for the Party Like It’s 1999 Dance. They had the stereo up and the windows down. They didn’t notice the murk filling the air. One of them threw a bottle out the window and it smashed against the curb, which everyone inside the car seemed to find hilarious. The driver stomped on the gas, and they barely missed a mailbox as they roared out of the neighborhood.

  It seemed even quieter once the car was gone.

  Eric couldn’t take the silence anymore. “Alana, I hear Mike Fuller is still looking for a date. You could be underneath him in a couple of hours if you want.”

  “At least I can get a date,” Alana said. “Your big Saturday night is a box of tissues and a bottle of lotion.”

  Carrie rolled her eyes, dropped Danny’s hand. “Hey. Will and Grace. Are we doing this or what?”