Set Alight

Chapter 17

Hey, guys! I don't really know who's reading or how many (the stats are all messed up), but thank you! If you've gotten here, your patience is quite notable! It drags on quite a bit. But don't worry, this is where the action starts! Well, the explosion fighting type stuff. Anyway, let me know what you think; which parts need work and which ones are funny, so I know what to avoid. So, back to the story!

Still Ashton

The door stands closed and locked before us.

"I feel so..." Lindsey trails off behind me, searching for the right word. "Criminal."

"Emma would kill us," Jack agrees. He looks at me pointedly. "All of us."

I just flash a huge grin. With two days before Emma returns, we don't have enough time to be subtle. She'd catch us if we tried this with her at home. Jack keeps us all invisible by holding our hands.

We creep forward, Jack phasing us through the door. The office isn't too big; about the size of a normal bedroom, lined with bookshelves, a big oak desk at the end. That's the first thing on our minds. Jack is constantly scanning the room, searching for cameras. He nudges me when he finds two micro video cameras blinking two different corners of the room.

Now, something Danny found out on his twelfth year of being a ghost is invisibility can be spread through empty space. Danny explained several theories to us, but none of them made much sense. All we knew is he can put up a wall and freeze the image it's showing so you can do anything behind it and the person in front wouldn't know.

Jack can't do it very well. Well enough, however, for a six by six square with a roof, so I can effectively search through Emma's dad's desk. He can keep it up for around thirty seconds normally, but he "borrowed" a ghostly artifact called the Amplifier (Jack's grandpa's name for it) that enhances a ghost's ability tenfold.

I riffle through the papers on his desk, all business dealings I could care less about. I open some drawers and look through the contents consisting mostly of office supplies and finance records. There are seven drawers in the desk. Three of them open, four of them are locked.

I point to the lock, and Jack, concentrating on the wall, gives a pained face before splitting his focus and forcing his hand through the lock. He flips the tumblers up and the lock clicks, echoing loudly in small room. Jack can only mask sight, not sound.

The desk holds a lot of important business papers, but I, still rifling quickly, can't find anything relevant to Emma.

Jack looks ready to pop another lock, but Lindsey stops him and pulls bobby pins from her hair. She bends both of them, one into an L and the other pulling the two sides apart. She puts the former into the lock and sticks the latter into her mouth and rips off the rubber. Using it, she jiggles it around in the top half of the lock until the lock clicks. Jack and I give her a look of amazement.

She shrugs.

I look through the contents. I fight the urge to cheer when I find deliveries for medicine. Emma's medicine. From a certain Mr. Walker. I almost gasp. I simply gather the paper together in a messy stack and continue searching. A bottle of black liquid, which I grab. A book, How to Strengthen your IQ. Weird.

Lindsey picks the other two locks just as swiftly. The third has some kind of surveillance of several different people. One of them is Lindsey. I hand her it, and her eyes go wide as she begins reading it. The last one just has a locked box of dark black.

Jack nudges me. My five minutes of shield time are up. I quickly close the drawers quietly before grabbing the box. If we need to return it in two days, we will. Jack makes sure the desk looks the same before shrinking the size of the shield until it just barely covers all three of us and grabs us, turning us invisible just as the shield blinks out.