Chapter Fourteen

Mokuba cringed at the arrival of the apartment's owner. "Um . . . we're sorry?" he ventured. "See, we were being watched by this kid, so we chased him, and he led us in here. . . ." He gestured at Gabriel.

The woman frowned at him. "You should know better than to enter a strange apartment, young man."

Gabriel shifted. "Well . . . you shouldn't leave your doors unlocked, Ma'am."

Marik had to smirk a bit. "He does have a point. But we're sorry anyway. We'll leave now."

"You're darn-tootin' right you're going to leave!" the woman ranted as she set her grocery bags on a table. "Especially if you don't want me calling the police on the lot of you!" Her eyes flashed. "Tourists are always coming here over Mardi Gras, thinking they can do any crazy thing they want! We're really not as uncivilized as the media wants to say we are! Breaking and entering isn't acceptable any time of the year, including at Mardi Gras!"

"Hey, I live here!" Gabriel cried indignantly. "I'm not a tourist!"

"Let's just go." Marik gently pushed on his shoulders, herding him towards the door. Mokuba scrambled ahead of them to get out.

The door slammed shut after them as soon as they were in the hall.

Gabriel heaved a sigh. "Oh boy."

"Well, it wouldn't have happened if you hadn't run from us," Marik remarked. "Now, to get back to what you were saying, why do you think your grandfather stole the missing crates? Was he after the insurance money he'd get for reporting them stolen?"

"No!" Gabriel exclaimed. "At least . . . I don't think so." His shoulders slumped. "Grandpa's rich. He wouldn't need the insurance money."

"What, then?" Marik prodded.

"I think he just wanted to mess things up for Dr. Raven," Gabriel said. "He doesn't like the guy and he's been trying to evict him."

"We know that much," Mokuba said. "Come on, don't you have anything more than this?"

Again Gabriel looked away. ". . . I play around his warehouse sometimes. It's fun hiding behind all the crates and watching people work, or slipping into the cracks between stacks of crates and pretending I'm hiding from some creepy enemy. And . . . I hear things. See them sometimes too. So, right around the time the last batch of crates went missing, I was there. I was just minding my own business and stuff, and then I heard these guys talking to Grandpa. . . ."

"Did you get them all?" Mr. Leichter asked.

"Yes, Sir," one dockworker replied. "But I really don't understand what this is all about. . . ."

"You've always been so honest, Mr. Leichter," a second dockworker added. "This isn't like you at all. You even instructed us to take some of the shipments from your other clients to try to make it look less suspicious."

"I can't have that madman getting hold of the contents of one of his crates," Mr. Leichter insisted. He actually sounded frightened. "I thought it was coming in the last two shipments, but it wasn't. Then I didn't know how to return any of those without letting the cat out of the bag. This time I know we have it!"

"But . . . if you don't even believe in voodoo, Sir, what does it really matter if . . ."

"My family believes in it!" Mr. Leichter interrupted. "And all it requires is the power of suggestion. You know the depth of the angry feelings between my family line and his. He doesn't just want that amulet for regular black magic; he wants to use it to destroy my family! I have to keep it from him no matter what."

"Surely he'll suspect. . . ."

"I'm sure he will. But I have a plan to handle that, too. He wants my family? I'll give him someone born into my family, whose fate no longer concerns me. Then I'll just have to make sure he only focuses his attention on that person and no one else."

"You mean . . ."

"My son, Démas." Mr. Leichter's voice was completely cold. "He turned his back on this family and its values. I keep my back turned to him."

"You're just going to throw him to the wolves, Sir?!"

"Yes. If it saves the rest of my family . . . the wolves can have him."

Mokuba gasped in horror and heartbreak as Gabriel finished his tale. "That's just awful!" he cried.

"You really should have stuck around and told us this yesterday," Marik said reprovingly. "It would have been valuable information to have had before anyone started getting hurt!"

"It's still valuable information now, for me."

Everyone jumped. Dr. Raven was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at them. He was flanked by the woman with wild hair and two strongmen.

Mokuba's eyes flashed. "You creep! You locked Seto in the freezer and tried to have him killed!" He tried to run forward, but Marik immediately grabbed him around the waist and pulled him back.

"The police want to talk to you about that," he said frostily.

"I don't intend to give them that opportunity," Dr. Raven replied. "Nor do I intend to let all of you go free to tell the others what you have just learned."

"What?!" Gabriel cried. "You should be happy! Now you know what happened to your stupid amulet! Why wouldn't you want us to tell everyone else?!"

"Because your grandfather is a hard sell," Dr. Raven said. "I've given him several warnings by now and he hasn't paid any attention. Nor was he willing to break when you went to see him this morning and asked him straight out about the amulet. He will never reveal if he has it or where he has it. By now I have no choice but to . . . force his hand." He started to sneer. "If I do something truly devastating and irreversible, he may finally wise up and realize that I won't stop until I have the amulet."

A cold chill took hold of Marik's heart. He let go of Mokuba, pushing the boy behind him. "Get out of here!" he ordered. "You and Gabriel. Go get help!"

Mokuba's eyes widened. "What?! No way am I just going to leave you, Marik!"

Gabriel was already desperately running down the hall, trying other doorknobs. "Help!" he yelled, rattling a locked one. "There's a creep out here trying to kidnap us!"

"Go with him!" Marik barked. "Now!" He pushed Mokuba in that direction and then turned back to face Dr. Raven. "If you want a hostage, you're just going to have to settle for me."

Dr. Raven snarled. "Get the boy!" he roared at his men. "We have to have someone Mr. Leichter truly does care about for this to have the proper effect!"

The thugs tore past him and up the stairs.

Desperately praying this would work, Marik launched himself at both of them while they still had more stairs to climb. He slammed into them and they all fell back, crashing down the stairs to the bottom.

"MARIK!" Mokuba screamed.

Gabriel ran over, snatching Mokuba's wrist. "Come on!" He pulled Mokuba into another unlocked apartment. "We'll go out through the balcony and get help!"

Blinking back tears, Mokuba finally went in with him. Gabriel seemed to be the main target here. He couldn't let Gabriel be taken. He would just have to pray that they could save Marik too.

In the stairwell, Dr. Raven snarled as Marik started to dazedly push himself up from the even more dazed thugs' bodies. In an instant he swung his staff, cracking Marik over the head with it. The boy groaned, slumping back across the heavies.

"Such a loyal friend, aren't you, Marik Ishtar," Dr. Raven hissed, pulling the unconscious Egyptian up by the back of his lavender shirt. "Well, let's give you a chance to prove that you truly have the greatest love of all."

"What are you going to do, Doctor?" the woman giggled. "He wasn't the one we wanted."

"I know, Amelia." Dr. Raven slung Marik over his shoulder. "But I can use him as bait to draw everyone else out. And even if I can't ensnare Gabriel, I'm sure Démas will come. No matter how much his father claims he doesn't care, he may change his tune after his youngest son is scattered across the bay."

xxxx

Seto leaned back, rubbing his eyes in utter exhaustion. After hours, he had finally finished the examination of all of Mr. Leichter's employees. He had opted not to look at only the dockworkers, but also everyone employed at the hotel and as a servant in the manor. And all he had to show for it was that every one of them appeared to be completely loyal. If they had stolen the crates, it looked to Seto that it must have been with Mr. Leichter's permission.

His phone rang and he jumped a mile. Most messages from the others had been coming through via text, since then everyone could be contacted at once. Somehow, a phone call left him with a sinking feeling. Something was wrong.

He took it out and briefly glanced at it enough to see that it was Mokuba calling before he answered. "Mokuba, what's going on?" he demanded.

"Seto!" Mokuba sounded frantic and in tears. "Dr. Raven has Marik!"

"What?!" Seto nearly leaped off the couch before remembering he was still holding his laptop. "How did that happen?!"

He listened while Mokuba stumbled through the story, finishing with, "Gabriel and I hid and we saw Dr. Raven put Marik in a van and take off! We've been following as well as we can, and I think they're heading for the docks!"

"The docks?" Seto's eyes narrowed. "Maybe they're going to Mr. Leichter's warehouse."

"I don't know, but I think he's going to kill Marik, Seto!" Mokuba cried. "He said he was going to do something irreversible to try to make Mr. Leichter give him back the amulet!"

Seto set the laptop aside and got up. "Then we don't have any time to lose. I'll call the police and get everyone together. You be careful! Don't put yourself into any more danger unless you have no choice. Otherwise, wait for us to get there before acting!"

"I'll try," Mokuba quavered. "But come soon, Seto. Please!"

"I'll come as fast as I can. Keep me informed, little brother." Quickly Seto disconnected the call and sent out a text to everyone else. Upset replies immediately began to come through, but he couldn't stop to look at them right then. Instead, he dialed the police. To his relief, they believed him and promised to send some officers to find the boys. But though they advised him not to come himself, he hung up and ran for the door. Staying behind was one thing he refused to do.

xxxx

Ishizu turned several shades of pale as the text came through on her phone. "Rishid!" she exclaimed, her normally calm nature failing her.

Rishid was looking at the same message on his phone. "Marik," he said in horror.

"Kaiba thinks he's being taken to the docks," Ishizu said. "We'll have to go there right now!"

Rishid most certainly didn't disagree. He ran for their rented vehicle, only pausing long enough to open the door for Ishizu before hurrying around to the driver's side and climbing in.

Ishizu leaped in on the passenger side and pulled the door shut, her blue eyes filled with fear and terror. "This man must be either evil or insane," she exclaimed. "He's been terrorizing all of us just to get that amulet from Mr. Leichter!"

Rishid started the engine and roared away from the curb.

"And Mr. Leichter is so determined to keep it away from him, but why?" Ishizu continued. "Why would he allow so many lives to be placed on the line just for that?"

"Perhaps it's for his family," Rishid said. "He's terrified of his family being hurt with the amulet."

"But Lector is his family too!" Ishizu cried.

Rishid's eyes flickered. He felt an odd kinship with Lector, when he thought about it. They had both had loving homes in their childhoods. But when Mrs. Ishtar had died, Mr. Ishtar had allowed his true feelings for Rishid to show. It wasn't exactly the same situation, but Rishid could relate to that feeling of thinking there was a home and security and then finding out that there wasn't. For both he and Lector, they had been disowned.

. . . But at least it was also true that they still had families in spite of the rejection. And he was most certainly not going to allow Dr. Raven to murder his brother.

He stepped harder on the gas pedal.

xxxx

Marik groaned as consciousness slowly began to return. He was laying on something hard and unpleasant, and as he started to push himself up, he found that it was obviously a room in a warehouse—most likely the warehouse.

"Hello?" he rasped.

No one answered. As he rubbed the back of his head and looked around, it was obvious that he was alone. The door across from him was closed and no doubt locked, and there was a dirty window not too far above him, but he doubted that was open either.

He stumbled to his feet and over to the window. It only took a brief moment of struggling with it to confirm that it was indeed locked. He growled, hitting the wooden frame in frustration before turning away. Hopefully the boys had escaped. . . .

He slowly crossed the room to the door and rattled the knob. It, of course, was also locked. He didn't have anything on him that he could use to pick the lock, either.

In frustration he went back and sat down near the window. It was unlikely that he was going to be left in here for very long; Dr. Raven had threatened apparent death to force Mr. Leichter's hand about the amulet. And judging from how dark it was in the room, he had been unconscious long enough for night to start coming on.

. . . Did he hear something ticking?

An adrenaline rush sent him to his feet. He had to get out of here. The only thing he could think of was to take off his lavender shirt, wrap it around his fist, and break the glass out of the window. He started to pull the shirt off over his head.

Knocking on the window startled him and he stopped mid-pull, whirling to look. Mokuba was on the other side of the glass, looking both frantic and relieved. "Marik!"

Marik pulled his shirt back down and hurried over to the window. "Mokuba?! You shouldn't be here!" he exclaimed.

"I wasn't going to leave you in here!" Mokuba retorted. "Everyone else is coming too."

"Where's Gabriel?!" Marik demanded.

"The police came to take him home," Mokuba said. "We told them about you and other officers are being sent here to help! I sneaked away so I wouldn't get taken back to the hotel."

That worried Marik, especially because of the discovery he had just made. "Mokuba, I think there's a bomb in here," he urgently told his friend.

"There is! And I think it might be connected to the window! There's a wire all the way around it and then it goes up on the roof over this room!"

Marik suddenly felt sick. If he had punched out the window . . .

"I'm going to try to get in and get you out," Mokuba declared. "The bomb could go off any second!"

Marik immediately snapped to. "Mokuba, you can't come in here!" he cried in horror. "What if the bomb goes off before you get me out?! And what about Dr. Raven and his men?!"

"They're not here!" Mokuba insisted. "I saw them leave. They must know the bomb's going to go off soon and they don't want to be around when it does!" He jumped down from the crate he was standing on under the window. "I'm going to get you out, Marik. I promise! And I'll be okay too."

"You'd better be," Marik said, fear for his young friend passing through his eyes.

xxxx

The Big Five's vehicle was just pulling up at the warehouse as Mokuba ran inside.

"Mokuba!" Lector burst out in alarm. He started to get out of the car. "When I called Mr. Kaiba, he said he'd told Mokuba not to act on his own unless the situation was desperate!"

Overhearing, Mokuba looked over his shoulder. "It is desperate, Lector!" he called back. "Marik's trapped in there and there's a bomb!" He vanished through the doorway.

Nesbitt gritted his teeth. "The warehouse. It just had to be a warehouse. With a bomb. And it has to be those kids in there. Again."

Gansley laid a hand on his shoulder. "This time, you didn't put them in there," he said. "And we're going to get them out."

Yugi was horrified too. "This is really bad," he exclaimed as they all followed Lector out of the car. Lector was already running towards the warehouse.

"It is," Atem said grimly.

As they all ran towards the warehouse, a horrific explosion resounded from the back of the building, lighting up the night sky.

"Oh my gosh!" Yugi screamed.

"There must be multiple bombs!" Nesbitt realized. He tore past Lector into the building. "They're probably going to go off at intervals that could be anywhere from several seconds to several minutes!"

"Nesbitt!" Lector yelled.

Gansley hung back from entering, realizing he would likely be more of a hindrance than a help now that things had suddenly escalated and he couldn't run fast. "This is a personal redemption for him," he told Lector. "He feels badly for what he did to them when we took over Kaiba's augmented reality game. He wants to make amends."

"I realize that, but I don't want him to get caught in the blast!" Lector shot back. He ran to catch up to his friend.

It was after he went through that the entrance began to collapse, shaken free by the force of the bomb. Everyone else jumped back.

"What the heck?!" Crump panicked.

"Now we can't get inside with them!" Yugi said in horror. "Is there even another way out?!"

"The windows," Atem said. He was staying calm despite being badly shaken by the situation. "And there should be doors on the side and back."

Johnson stared up at the building. "We'll just have to pray they find them."

Gansley gripped his cane, his knuckles chalk-white. He hadn't planned to enter, but he had thought the others would be able to. Now, Lector and Nesbitt were on their own. He prayed too.

xxxx

Inside the warehouse, unaware of the trouble outside, Mokuba was frantically running up and down the halls. "Marik!" he screamed. "Where are you?!" He stayed to the left, trying to visualize the approximate area where he had seen Marik through the window. He should really be almost there by now. . . .

Finally a door rattled. "I'm in here!"

Mokuba ran over, throwing himself against the door. It didn't budge. He looked around, at last spotting a crowbar abandoned on the floor. "Okay, I'm going to try to pull the knob off or something," he called. "Stand back."

He wrapped the crowbar around the knob, pulling with all his might. It strained, but didn't give. Not about to give up, Mokuba put one foot on the door for leverage and strained harder. Come on! . . .

At last, miraculously, the knob popped off, flying over Mokuba's head.

"Alright!" Mokuba kicked the door in. "Come on, Marik! Let's go!"

"You don't have to tell me twice," Marik exclaimed. "When that explosion went off, I was afraid we were both done for!"

The building rocked as a second explosion went off on the other side. By now most of the warehouse was in flames, including the room where Marik had been. Nesbitt, who was just catching up to them now, looked around in horror. "Go on ahead of me!" he ordered them both.

They took off running, Nesbitt close behind. But it wasn't long and Marik stumbled, dizzy from the movement. It was too much physical exertion after taking such a harsh blow from Dr. Raven's staff. He fell back, holding a hand to his head.

Mokuba whirled in alarm. "Marik!"

"Keep going," Marik said through gritted teeth. "I'll catch up."

"I'm not going to leave without you!" Mokuba insisted.

"I'll make sure he gets out," Nesbitt said. He went over to Marik. "You keep going. Lector's in here too; he'll help you find the way out."

Mokuba bit his lip. He didn't want to agree, but there really wasn't any time to argue. "Okay. . . ." He turned, running ahead again. He coughed, his eyes watering from the increasing smoke.

"Mokuba!" There was Lector now. "We have to go!"

"I know," Mokuba gasped.

Lector grabbed Mokuba's wrist, running for the nearest exit. But the boy was small and couldn't run as fast as Lector could. He tripped, crashing to his knees. At the same moment, another explosion rumbled practically at their feet. Without a word, Lector took Mokuba in his arms and desperately ran for the door, at the same time praying that Nesbitt and Marik would escape as well.

"We're not going to make it!" Mokuba screamed hopelessly.

"We're going to make it," Lector insisted.

At last they made it to the side door. Lector didn't slow down, instead throwing himself at it with full force. It splintered and opened. He tore outside, still clutching Mokuba.

They were still too close to the warehouse when the final explosion roared through whatever was left of the building. It was deafening and blew Lector completely off his feet, forcibly turning him about in mid-air before sending him crashing to the ground, the terrified boy still in his arms. But he could no longer hear or feel or sense anything else now. One weak groan escaped his lips and he was still. Mokuba too had fallen limp.

A shadow fell over them after a moment. "Well, what have we here?" Dr. Portman said smoothly. She bent down, pressing her fingers to Lector's throat. "Still alive, after all that? Aren't you the unconquerable one."

She took a hypodermic needle out of her purse. "I think it's time for some direct interference from me. Let's just see what kind of events can be set in motion by introducing this little factor." She injected the unknown substance into Lector's arm and leaned back. In a moment his skin paled and she again reached to check his pulse. "Perfect."

She stood, vanishing into the shadows.