Villain's Lair Read Online Free PDF Page B

fool? Was he risking life and limb for a sneaky, creepy, dirty, double-crossing cheater?
    But Damien Black was moving again. Moving and talking. “My alarm went off. Somebody came up the chute. No one would dare enter unless they knew what I had.”
    â€œWhat
do
you have, Mr. Black?”
    â€œYes, Mr. Black. What are we looking for?”
    â€œA lizard!” Damien shouted. “A lizard and anyone he’s with!” He glared at them. “And if you insist on knowing more, I’ll have to kill you.”
    â€œOooh,” they both said, taking a step back. Then Pablo’s face twitched nervously as he asked, “But…after you have what you want, can we have the lizard?”
    Damien’s eyes pinched into devilish slits, but then he thought better of telling the brothers the truth. In other words, he decided to lie. “Yes,” he said. “But not until after I have retrieved the item he stole from me.”
    Now, the alarm to which Damien Black had referred was not a clangy alarm like one might find at a firehouse.
    Or a buzzy alarm like one might hear when entering a secured area.
    Or even a honky alarm that one might hear if a power plant were about to explode.
    No, this was a tinkly alarm. A tinkly-winklyalarm. The sort of alarm one might find on, say, the collar of a cat.
    It was, in short, a bell.
    A single tinkly-winkly bell.
    When Dave and Sticky had entered the house, that single tinkly-winkly bell had been activated, and the sound had tinkly-winkled along echoing tubes throughout the entire house.
    But was it an intruder? Or merely another bat, setting off the alarm? This was something Damien Black did not know. Once inside the next room, however, Damien got his answer.
    An intruder was afoot!
    You see, Damien Black may not have believed in modern technology, but he made full use of dusting powder. Flour, actually. He kept a fine sprinkling of it on the floor by the catapult doorway, and there, before his devilish eye-slits, were footprints.
    Sneaky sneaker footprints.

    Size, oh, maybe ten.
    â€œTo the dungeon!” he shouted, then whooshed back through the oversized intersection, past Rosie and the heaping pile of thistly, thorny weeds (and intruders), and down the hallway.
    â€œTo the dungeon!” Sticky cried the moment the villain and the two Bandito Brothers were gone.
    Dave stood and shook off the weeds.
    He sneaky-peeked down the hallway where Damien Black had gone.
    Then off they went.
    To the dungeon!

Chapter 8
THE DUNGEON
    The hard part wasn’t following Damien Black and the Bandito Brothers. The hard part was not being seen.
    â€œToo bad we don’t have the Invisibility ingot, eh,
señor?”
Sticky whispered as they ducked back for the third time. “This would be eeeeeasysneezy.”
    â€œBut we don’t, all right? Now shh!”
    â€œBut when we get it, all you do is click it into the wristband, and
poof
, we’re gone.”
    â€œWe? You’ll disappear, too?”
    â€œIf I’m holding on to you,
hombre.”
Sticky gave a little gecko snicker. “And believe me, I will be!”
    The thought of this kept Dave going. Invisibiliity would be cooler than cool. It would be, in Stickynese,
asombroso.
    And flying. He just
had
to get his hands on that flying ingot. No more trudging up seven flights to get to the apartment. No more riding his bike or fixing flat tires—he’d just turn invisible and fly everywhere!
    But then he remembered: the powers only worked one at a time.
    Aw, who cared? He’d figure something out. The point was, he’d be able to
fly.
    â€œYou didn’t lose the powerband, did you?” Sticky was asking.
    Dave held back while Damien and the Brothers went through a tall, narrow door down the hallway. “Are you kidding?” He could feel it on his arm, heavy and warm. Perhaps it had been a wristband to a powerful Aztec warrior, but on Dave it was an armband.