Page 64 of Silver Linings

How the hell had Maplehurst managed to follow them to the standing stones? Ben didn’t think he and Sidney had been doing anything in particular to cover their tracks, but still, you’d have thought they would at least have heard the other men’s footsteps.

She pulled her fingers from his and crossed her arms. “This place has nothing to do with you.”

Victor smiled. It wasn’t a very pleasant smile, and probably very different from the one he deployed at town halls and shareholders’ meetings. “On the contrary. I think it has a great deal to do with me. You see, your mayor has given me free rein to cut in this forest as I like…in exchange for a very generous stipend.”

That weasel. Ben wondered if Sidney had been too trusting when dealing with the guy, but somehow he didn’t think so. She’d been working to get the town on board with making sure Northwest Pacific was chased from this forest once and for all, but it sounded as if she hadn’t moved fast enough.

“I don’t care what agreement you two had,” she retorted, her eyes glittering gray as cut steel in the light from the glowing plants all around them. “Whatever it was, it’s illegal, and we’ll make sure to see you in court.”

“Oh, I know you will,” Maplehurst said. He didn’t look too worried…and the reason for that confidence became clear enough as he continued. “You see, while the courts can be effective, they also take time. And time, I fear, is the one thing you don’t have.” He inclined his head toward the foreman who stood on his right. “Curt, you and Lenny make sure these two don’t interfere.”

Maplehurst’s lackeys immediately began to march toward the spot where Ben and Sidney stood. The men’s mouths were set, and it sure looked as if they weren’t the type to care much about appeals to their better natures.

Well, they were in for a surprise.

He went on the attack, lunging for the man Maplehurst had called Curt. Just as the guy began to take a swing at him, Ben dropped to the ground and slammed his flashlight into the other man’s knee as hard as he could.

At once, Curt toppled over, groaning and swearing. Sidney, obviously heartened by the way Ben had refused to capitulate, swung her pack off her shoulders and smashed it right into the other guy — Lenny’s — jaw.

He also went down like a sack of potatoes. The two of them looked big and tough enough, but it was obvious they didn’t know much about fighting dirty. Most likely, they really were just loggers in Maplehurst’s employ, and he’d only brought them along because he didn’t have any better alternatives.

“Enough,” he said, his voice loud enough to cut across the moans of his two henchmen. “I didn’t intend for things to go this far, but if that’s what you want — ”

And he pulled a gleaming chrome pistol out from underneath his jacket.

Suddenly, Sidney went very still. She shot a frightened glance at Ben, and he gave a small shake of his head.

The circle of stones was mysterious and magical…but it wasn’t worth both of them giving up their lives to defend it.

“What do you even want with that thing?” Sidney asked. Her voice cracked a little as she asked the question, and Ben could practically hear her heart pounding from where he knelt in the luminous moss. “As far as I can tell, it’s just a bunch of rocks.”

Maplehurst smiled thinly. “You know it’s much more than that. But I admire your efforts to protect it.” He looked over at Ben. “Get up.”

Without replying, Ben scrambled to his feet. Lenny and Curt also forced themselves off the ground and limped over to their master, shooting baleful glances at their assailants the whole time.

Well, they’d been pretty easy to take down, but he still didn’t think he’d want to meet either of them in a dark alley any time soon.

“My surveyors found this glade a few months ago,” Maplehurst went on, his tone now almost conversational. “We like to work at night, you see, so there are fewer people around to take note of what we’re doing. Extensive testing proved that these plants and these stones have no earthly analogues. We’re not sure where they came from, but we know they’re not from here.”

Ben had already suspected as much. Under different circumstances, he might have been glad to have his theories corroborated. Now, though, he could only wish that Maplehurst’s employees had discovered the clearing during a different phase of the moon, like maybe a nice gibbous or something. If that had been the case, then they wouldn’t have seen anything out of the ordinary.

“We don’t know anything about the plants and where they came from,” Sidney replied. “Ben was just helping me search for my mother and grandmother.”

“A nice story,” Maplehurst told her. “But law enforcement officials have already combed through these woods, and your friend here isn’t a member of the police or the FBI. He’s just a washed-up archaeologist who peddles conspiracy theory videos on YouTube.”

Talk about getting it wrong. While he might have deployed a whiteboard and some red thread from time to time, Ben had never used those tools to talk about government cover-ups or fake moon landings or whatever, only to help illustrate some of the connections between the various unexplained phenomena he and other cryptozoologists had been researching.

“I don’t ask friends for their credentials when they’re offering to help,” she shot back, matching Maplehurst stare for stare.

That woman had some serious cojones.

Or maybe she was so angry that she just didn’t care anymore.

“Maybe you don’t,” the man replied. “And maybe you really are looking for your lost relatives. Between you and me, though, if they’ve been gone this long, then they’re worm food by now.”

Sidney’s hands knotted into fists at her sides, but she didn’t move. In fact, was that the slightest gleam of triumph in her eyes?

For a moment, Ben couldn’t figure out why she would look that way when Maplehurst had just said something so dismissively awful about her relatives.

---