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Author's Chapter Notes:
back in the black
“So, what kind of ship do you want to get?” Justin asked his friends as they neared Pines Lodge.

After that eerie fortunetelling machine, they had walked on in contemplative silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Yet it was also hard not to think about all that money they just made from selling a dangerous artifact from a haunted house, to the shop that wasn’t there yesterday, so they finally found themselves deferring their individual reveries to start discussing plans, now that Justin brought it up. After all, rather than a dire search for direction up the coast, it looked as if they were back at the helm of their own destiny.

“I don’t know,” Max admitted, “but I think we should try to do something about the Albatross first. I think we owe Roger that much.”

“It’s his plane,” Justin pointed out, visibly put out by such talk with fresh credits in hand, “not ours.”

“He did bring us down safely,” Max reminded him.

“He’s the reason we were up there in the first place. Him and Roxy…”

“Or we could’ve gone down with the Excelsior,” Shades piped up, having said next to nothing since they left Obscura Antiques, “with no one to save them from Erix’s revenge.”

“You’re the one who found it,” Max told him, “and we did agree to split all treasure three ways, so I guess it’s up to you to decide what to do with your share…”

“Damn skippy!” Justin muttered as they approached the inn. Though he suspected he would end up spending part of his share on it, even if he didn’t quite match Max or Shades’ contributions. Just couldn’t bring himself to do less with Max around. “And I’d kinda like to enjoy it for five minutes before we start spending it all.”

Inside, they found Roger sulking at a corner table, barely poking his fork at Moira’s fine cooking.

“So, where were you guys all day?” the pilot asked. Somehow he doubted there were that many places to shop around in Pickford, even in its best days. Having tired of moping around the inn all day, he spent the better part of the afternoon attending to his Albatross as best he could with his gimped leg. Every minute trying his damnedest not to picture himself placing a For Sale sign or, more likely, selling her off piece by piece for scrap.

“Taking a tour of the Castle,” Shades replied, his sheer nonchalance earning him a fumbled mug when those words finally caught up with Moira.

“You didn’t…” she gasped.

“We most certainly did,” Max declared, “and that’s not all.”

“We saved a little girl who had gone in there on a dare,” Shades explained, “and we kinda ended up breaking Veronica Rigby’s power over the place while we were at it.”

“Sister Clarice and Sheriff Duhan are probably done searching the house by now,” Max added.

“And here’s the best part!” Justin started emptying his pockets of both money and jewels. “We’re back in business!”

Roger’s face lit up as Moira’s turned white taking it all in.

“Back in the black!” Shades crowed, “and we can surely sell the rest of it up the coast.”

“With that much money…” the innkeeper speculated, “you might actually get someone up there to take a look at that flying machine of yours.”

“Hot damn!” the pilot laughed, possibly for the first time since they crash-landed at Camp Stilton, “Let’s perc some joe!”

Moira’s perplexed expression ground him to a sheepish halt.

“That is to say,” he reiterated, “um, you got any coffee?”

“Oh. But where did you sell any of it?” she stammered, as she was quite sure none of them had even a fraction of that money to their name when they first stumbled into town. “I doubt there’s even that much money left in the town treasury…”

“Well, we sold it at this basement shop over near the harbor,” Max answered.

“I think I may have shopped there before,” Justin elaborated, “though back then the shop was somewhere in Centralict…”

He trailed off as he realized the implications of what he just said.

For his part, Shades just shrugged.

“That can’t be right…” Moira murmured. “There’s been no store down there in five, six years…”

Shades realized now that he had been so preoccupied with visions of desert highways and road signs, the thought never crossed his mind to look back and see if the store was still there as he walked away, as he originally meant to. From the looks on his friends’ faces, he suspected that neither of them did, either. Just another thing that left him wondering at the time of it all.

Even so, he felt that such a dangerous artifact was probably safer with that fellow than with most stores. After all he’d seen along the way, he now found he couldn’t help but wonder what ever happened to the first amulet they sold off…

About that time, Bandit appeared at the top of the stairs and started ambling down the steps into the lobby, and Max looked up at his feline friend. This was the first time, besides the Woods, when the big cat was still too injured to even try, that he had not followed him into trouble. Decided it must be a measure of how exhausted the poor panther was after that weeklong ordeal.

“You’re supposed to be resting…” Max said, matching Bandit’s quizzical head tilt. “Yeah, I’m glad to see you, too.”

As Bandit came down the steps, Shades headed toward them. Light as he felt at the antique store, it was starting to feel as if his body was turning to lead, his mind growing hazy. As if he had pushed himself too far, in some way couldn’t fully wrap his head around.

Whatever he did back there, he now understood that it was not a power to be used on a whim, rather a desperation move, assuming he could even figure out how to do it again.

“Hey! Where’re you goin’?” Justin called out. “The party’s just getting started!”

“Sorry, guys, I think I overdid it in there,” he told them, starting up the steps, one foot, then the other. “I believe I’m gonna call it a day.”

“I’ll bring you up some dinner, then,” Max assured him. “Sleep well.”

So, as Shades went to get some well-earned rest, his companions celebrated, discussing plans to make their next move up the coast, Albatross and all.