Assassin's Apprentice: Chapters 5-6

5.

The eighth richest man in the world opened the sliding glass door and shouted, “What are you two whispering about? It better not be about me.”

Their sunburned backs were to him, their shiny wet heads hunched together in conspiratorial buzzing.

When he got no response, Kit Carson IV stepped barefoot out onto the hot patio cement. “Ow! Jesus!” He quickly tiptoed over to his flip-flops and slipped them on with a relieved sigh. “Better tell me now,” he warned them. “You don’t want me to find out on my own.”

“We’re not whispering,” Margaret said. Then she mumbled something to David and he nodded vigorously.

Kit quickly walked around the edge of the swimming pool toward the patio table where they were seated. David scribbled on something, anxious to finish before Kit got to them. Kit started jogging, his flip-flops slapping wet cement.

“Okay, let me see what you’ve been doing,” he said, hovering behind them.

Both of them turned suddenly, holding up paperplate masks in front of their faces. Bloody fangs and eyes evilly slanted were colorfully crayoned.

“Aaarrgggh!” they growled in husky voices.

Kit jumped back in mock horror. “Good Lord, what are you supposed to be? Vampires?”

“Zombies, Daddy!” David said, staring through the eyeholes he’d scissored out. “We want to eat your brains.”

Margaret, Kit’s mother-in-law, lowered her scribbled mask and put on her glasses, small tortoise-shell ovals that made her look studious and no-nonsense, like an ambassador or judge. Actually, she was a judge, a juvenile court judge who was also a wealthy widow. “The kid’s obsessed with zombies.”