“Heads up, guys,” Jerry Gilroy remarked, pausing in the act of lifting a slice of pizza from the tray and staring across the half-empty pizza parlor. “Guess who just walked in?” Beside him, Chet Morton’s eyes went wide and his semi-girlfriend Elena Rodrigues started to grin.

Frank and Joe Hardy and Tony Prito turned to look where their friends were staring and immediately realized what was up. A tall, blond, muscular guy was making his way to their booth. He looked rather tired, but he was grinning to beat the band. “Biff!” Joe blurted out in astonishment.

“What in the world are you doing here now?” Frank asked as the missing member of their gang plopped down beside Tony.

“Shove over,” Biff Hooper requested. “I’m about to fall off, here.”

“We’re shoved over as far as we can get, dude,” Tony told him, grabbing their friend’s shoulder and giving him a little shake. “Where were you at the holidays, man? Phil said you’d be home.”

“Oh, yeah.” Biff fidgeted a little. “Sorry about that, but I got an offer I couldn’t resist. My uncle took me skiing for Christmas. Sprang it on me so suddenly, I didn’t have time to email anyone. My parents were in on it, sent me new gear and everything, so how could I refuse?”

“Lucky dog. Have some pizza,” Jerry remarked, nudging the tray.

“I got into town last night, been trying to shake the jet-lag all morning,” Biff went on, taking a slice with a smile and nibbling at it. “Not having much luck, either. I’m only back for a couple days, but I couldn’t stand the thought of not being home for at least a while.” The husky boy shrugged a bit self-consciously. “I didn’t expect to get homesick at all. But I was, majorly. Must be something in the water here.”

“Know what you mean,” Frank muttered, half-smiling.

“Slim says the same-” Jerry began.

“Slim’s back?”

“Taking a year off. He- here he comes now, him and Q.”

“Q? Who’s Q?”

Jesse Martinez and Perry Robinson walked up to the table a minute later; Perry grinned as he shook hands with his old friend, then introduced Jesse. “We call him Q for quarterback, since he took Gold’s place on the team and got us the State championship,” the older youth explained. Jesse blushed.

“Hey, way to go. I’m Biff Hooper, they’ve probably told you all sorts of evil lies about me,” Biff said, offering his hand. Jesse shook it with a grin.

“Mainly they told me that whatever else I do, I mustn’t get into a fight with you or I’d be flattened. I don’t think that’ll be a problem, though,” he answered. “But tell me, please, did you really punch out Coach Barnes? And would you be willing to do it again?”

Laughter rose from the group and Biff’s eyes brightened. “I did and it was worth the month of detention I got for it,” he replied. “As for doing it again- well, I dunno. On the one hand, he can’t stick me in detention; but on the other, he could charge me with assault. Why, what’s he up to now?”

With that, the whole story of the state championship game came out. The game, the shooting, the investigation. How Gold and the Crabbs Gang had been arrested, and how the gang was now out and about and acting all hotshot about having been in jail. How Jesse had been greeted with cheers when he returned to school two weeks ago (this part made him blush again) and how the school had cheered again when the principal announced in the middle of the day that Coach Zeigler had regained consciousness.

“Man, I missed a lot. Phil told me some of it in an email, but he was pretty sketchy on the details. How’s Coach Z doing now?”

“He’s in physical therapy. Almost done, actually, we keep expecting to see him back in school any day now. That’s why Barnes is being such a...pick your insult of choice...he knows he’s only got a little longer to play king of the hill. He’s still making us do football every day,” Chet explained sourly.

“And criticizing everything that goes on in the gym, whether we’re doing it right or not,” Jerry agreed with a snort.

“Oh, man, is he ever. He was going around correcting everyone- he told me I shouldn’t get my shoulder in the tackle so much, just plow right into my opponent. Well, I have more sense than that,” Chet started. “But what the hell, I did it his way. And he yells, ‘No, no, what’re you doing? Put your shoulder into it!’ I pulled off my helmet and said, ‘I was doing it that way, you told me to stop, and now you’re telling me to do it that way again. I’m not taking another step till you make up your mind. It’s a shame,” he added, frowning, “that Cap Bailey had to go and leave the way he did last year. He was a good coach!”

“Good teacher, too,” Frank remarked, remembering the cheerful young man with a little sigh. Bailey had been the track coach as well as one of the science teachers. He hadn’t been much older than his students, but he’d won their respect despite his relative inexperience. After the Hardys and Chet had helped him find the skeleton of a prehistoric camel, however, he’d left Bayport and become a full-time archaeologist. No one had any idea where he was now.

“Yeah, but Barnes was part of the reason he left,” Joe remarked. “Bossing and bullying him all the time, since Cap was lower in seniority...” He grinned suddenly. “You know, the only person Barnes hasn’t been able to correct is Q.”

“Not that he hasn’t been trying,” the Puerto Rican boy grouched. “Stood there staring at me for half my class period while I threw to the guys. I thought he was trying to shake me up, he just stared and didn’t say a word.”

“I guess that means there’s nothing there for him to criticize,” Chet remarked.

Jesse nodded, then looked at Frank. “Isn’t it nice to know that even he can’t ‘improve’ on your teaching?” A mischievous grin suddenly crossed his face. “All that I know of passing, I owe to you, oh teacher of trajectory.”

Joe’s eyes went wide and a comically dismayed expression crossed his face. “Oh no. You’ve infected him with Melodramania,” he groaned, and their friends cracked up.

“Better than having you infect him with Pun-itis,” Frank retorted.

Biff, still chuckling, suddenly turned to Frank. “Hey, what’re you doing here anyway? Thought you’d be in Maine.”

“Uh-uh, I had enough of them,” Frank told him, and explained how the Unity fraternity jocks had driven him off. “As a matter of fact, classes up there have been suspended, pending an investigation by the National Board of Education. Bayport U lit a fire under ‘em and now Unity’s had to release student records. Seems the Board is pretty perturbed at what they’re seeing, which is the number of out of state and foreign student dropouts in first and second year. They’re going so far as to contact the students and ask them why they left.”

General acclaim went through the gang at this and Joe smiled at his brother. “Leave it to you guys to find trouble everywhere you go,” Biff said when the ruckus died down a bit. He was grinning too, and leaned back to thump his friend on the arm.

“Not everywhere. Not at the University, anyway.”

“People there know better than to make trouble with you around,” Slim offered.

“You like the U?” Biff asked.

“I like it okay,” Frank replied agreeably. “It took me a while to get used to how big it is- one of my classes has like two hundred people in it, so good luck getting the professor’s personal attention there- but it’s still pretty challenging.”

“Listen to him. Challenging,” Joe said mockingly. “I think he enjoys hour-long tests and ten-page reports- but he won’t do any of mine for me!”

Frank swatted his brother on the back of his blond head as their friends laughed. “I’m a grade ahead of you, brat, all your homework is old stuff to me. Boring, dull, no challenge.”

“Smartass.”

“Takes one to know one, brother.”

“I’ve missed this,” Biff remarked to no one in particular.

“It’s like I always say: when I hear the Hardys bickering, I know all’s right with the world,” Chet declaimed.

“Nice to know we’re a reliable barometer of world stability,” Joe remarked wryly to his brother.

“Indeed. It’s a comfort to think we’re not on a collision course with the sun yet.”

Elena, who had been silently amused through all the talk, shook her head and commented, “I don’t think ‘stable’ is quite what he had in mind.”

“No, not exactly. We don’t call him ‘lunatic’ for nothing,” Chet agreed, gesturing at Joe.

“Lunatic?” Biff regarded Joe quizzically. “Interesting, when’d you get that one? And what’d you do to earn it?”

“Q gave it to me. I still haven’t figured out why and no one will tell me,” Joe explained, mock-glaring around his circle of friends. “They all just say it suits me.”

“Yes, and they haven’t even seen you after you’ve been drinking ‘Jolt’ cola,” Frank muttered.

“Oh, please, keep him and ‘Jolt’ miles apart!” Jerry exclaimed, pretending to look horrified.

“Doing my absolute best, Jer. It helps that they don’t sell it in too many places around here.”

Tony glanced at his watch and nudged Biff. “I’m due to start work in about a minute and a half,” he said with a sigh. “Let me out so I don’t have to write myself up.”

Biff got up and moved aside with a teasing bow. “At least you don’t have far to drive.”

“How long are you going to be around?”

“Tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday.” Biff shrugged. “I’ll be flying back Monday in time for my Tuesday class. As long as there’s no delays, but in that case it’s not my fault anyway.”

“Let’s make sure our gang gets together before you go.”

“Skating? Sledding? Snowball fighting?” Jerry inquired.

“Sounds good to me,” Biff answered, sparking off more laughter. “No skiing, though. I nearly broke my neck our last day at the resort.”

“It’s a deal,” Tony replied, glancing at the others for confirmation. A general agreement went up and then the Italian youth gave a brief wave and headed for the back room.

“I should get home,” Joe said reluctantly. “It’s not a ten-page report due tomorrow, but five pages is bad enough.”

“Got that one myself,” Elena sighed. “Erswin is so repetitive. Every week, a five page report in exactly-so format.”

“I’m glad I don’t have her,” Chet agreed. “Miller’s bad enough, all that poetry all the time.”

After a few more moments of mild grumbling about their teachers, the party broke up and the young people headed for their homes, promising to call about their get-together on Friday after school.

“I bet they all call us to arrange everything this weekend,” Joe remarked to his brother as he steered their car from the Mall’s indoor parking garage into the street.

“They might. It’s a habit. But it’s an old habit. I won’t be surprised either way.” Frank’s voice was quiet; he was leaning back in the passenger seat with his eyes closed. “It’s good to see Biff again. Wonder why he didn’t tell anyone he was coming home?”

“Something is wrong,” Joe said flatly. “You know how he is. Details, details, details. So why didn’t he go into intensive detail about that skiing trip? And a last-minute one at that?”

“He did kinda breeze over that, didn’t he?” Frank mused. “Well, if he doesn’t rave about it this weekend, I’ll agree with you. He might just be too pepped at being home to talk much about it. And we did leave pretty soon after he got there. Might just not’ve had time.”

“I dunno. Did you see how much he was fidgeting when he talked about it? Wouldn’t look at anyone, either.”

Frank opened his eyes and looked over with a shake of his dark head. “I didn’t see that, I was looking at Jerry. Who was stealing Chet’s pepperoni.”

“Ah.”

Silence fell between the brothers and Joe stifled a yawn as he pulled into the driveway.

“Tired, kiddo?” Frank asked gently.

Joe nodded, shut off the car, then slumped back in the seat with a weary sigh. “Y’know, to hear us tell it, it’s been a pretty good month,” he murmured, running a hand over his face and rubbing his eyes. “Good things at school, good things about Unity, the Starmail prelim hearing coming up-”

“I dunno how good that one will turn out to be, but yeah, we do talk a good show.” Frank undid his seatbelt, but paused with his hand on the door-lever. “How’s your head?”

“Pounding,” Joe said without emphasis. “I’m going to try something, Frank. I’m going to try to sleep now and do my homework from about three or four a.m. onwards. Maybe that’ll help keep the dreams off.”

Frank nodded slowly. “Maybe that’ll work.”

All during the month of January, Joe had been plagued with nightmares. Hardly a night had passed when Frank didn’t wake to feel his brother’s quaking body slip into bed beside him. Each time he soothed Joe as well as he could, and usually he did manage to get his brother to calm down. Sometimes the younger boy would return to his own bed. But mostly he stayed put, because when he did go back to his own room, he often had another bad dream.

Some people might have gotten rather resentful of having their sleep interrupted every night for three weeks running. And Frank had been a bit tempted, especially after Joe claimed not to remember most of what terrified him so badly. But after hearing several of the dreams that Joe did remember, Frank had changed his mind and kicked out any thought of resentment. He just wished the dreams would stop, as much for Joe’s sake as for his own sleep. The younger Hardy was always tired these days, and had again grown quiet and rather withdrawn. The joking mood he’d exhibited today had been the first he’d indulged in for a week, and Frank had a feeling most of it was put on for their friends’ sakes.

“I’ll keep Aunt G off your back,” he promised as he opened the car door and got out.

“Thanks.” Joe hauled his backpack from the rear seat and trudged up to the house. Ten minutes later he was sound asleep on his bed, the blanket tucked around him. Frank sat at Joe’s desk for a while, doing math homework and keeping an eye on his brother. After an hour passed with no sign of Joe’s sleep being disturbed, Frank went to his own room to work on the rest of his assignments. It was too cluttered at Joe’s desk for Frank’s liking.

It was good to be back in school again, he thought as he worked through the criminal history assignment. He’d enjoyed the time away from school, it had been a good breather, but Joe was right; Frank had always enjoyed the challenges, the actual learning experience. And at Bayport U, he was enjoying the social aspects too. It was so much the opposite of Unity. Here people were friendly and cheerful and mostly courteous. They knew him, or at least knew of him, and didn’t treat him like some sort of freak. He didn’t get along with everyone, of course; that wouldn’t be possible, for every group had its share of jerks. But he had no more fear of being ganged up on and certainly didn’t get the feeling that he was shunned.

Best of all, he came home every day. Home to his aunt and his brother and the familiar old house. There was almost always a good home-cooked dinner and he slept in his own room. ‘Aunt G might not always be the easiest person to live with,’ he admitted to himself as he switched on his computer. ‘But at least she doesn’t leave nasty notes, or pull my room apart, or burn my stuff...’ Pushing the memories of Unity away, he got busy on his chemistry paper. Another advantage; here, he didn’t have to write everything by hand! He still wished his laptop had survived the destruction of his dorm room, but there had been nothing in the files there that hadn’t been on his home computer, with the exception of some class notes. And the emails to Joe and Callie, of course.

He was almost done- it was only a short paper, there was no minimum length so long as he got the basic theory right- when he thought he heard something from down the hall. He hit ‘save’, just in case, then pushed back his chair and hurried down to his brother’s room. “Joe,” he said softly, and then went to the younger teen’s side, sliding an arm around him.

Joe was sitting up, his arms wrapped around his knees and his face bowed into that scant shelter. He was shaking- not with fear this time, but with his efforts not to cry. When Frank sat down and held him, he leaned into the half-embrace. He didn’t say anything, just sniffed loudly, raised his head and rubbed at his cheeks with the back of his hand.

“Tell me,” Frank said softly, smoothing the tense shoulders under the Bayport High sweatshirt.

Joe sniffed again. “I wish I didn’t remember this one,” he murmured. “It was terrible...I was in a church, I was the only one there. And there was a- c-coffin at the front. It- felt like I was waiting for everyone else to get there, and I was just sitting, feeling uneasy and- and really uncomfortable. And then I saw a little piece of paper on the bench beside me and picked it up, and- I don’t remember everything it said, it was sort of out of focus, but Dad’s name was on it.” Joe stopped and caught his breath; Frank closed his eyes for a few seconds and swallowed a sliver of pain.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” the blond boy went on after a moment, his voice choked. “I started to panic. Dropped the paper and jumped up and- and I opened the coffin.” Tears trickled from his closed eyes. “It wasn’t a mistake. And then it was.”

“What do you mean?”

“It- it was him...Dad.” Joe stopped again, gasping a little. “But- but as I looked at him, he...he changed. He changed into- into s-someone else.”

“Coach Z?” Frank ventured, remembering how his brother had identified Coach Zeigler’s coma with their father’s.

Joe shook his head. “You,” he whispered.

“Me?!” Frank felt stunned.

Joe buried his face in Frank’s chest and shook with silent sobs.

“Oh, little brother...” The dark-haired boy squeezed his eyes shut again and pulled Joe closer, wrapping both arms around him. Of all the nightmares his brother had managed to remember when he woke, this one was undeniably the cruelest so far. Frank knew- too well- what it was like to have a nightmare like that.

After a few minutes Joe quieted down, taking deep breaths and gradually relaxing. His wet eyes opened and he looked up wearily at his older brother. “I guess sleeping in the daytime didn’t work any better than sleeping at night,” he ventured in a quivery, defeated voice.

Frank shook his head, feeling another pang of sympathy as he looked at his brother’s tired, wan face. Then he frowned, a thought occurring to him. “Come with me,” he ordered softly, nodding in the direction of his own room. “Come sleep in my room. I’ll be in there and if you start dreaming again, I can wake you up before it gets too bad.”

Joe’s eyes closed again and he nodded. “I’m going to get some aspirin or something,” he muttered, reluctantly letting go of Frank and pushing back the blanket. “My head’s even worse now than it was before.”

‘From crying so hard,’ Frank thought, still shaken at the cruelty of the dream. ‘I’m glad he didn’t have that one at night.’ To his mind, nightmares were worse at night than during the day, because at night they were so much more credible. When you woke in the dark, disoriented, it was easy to believe that what had been so vivid in your mind was actually true.

Frank got up and went back to his own room; he sat down in the computer chair but didn’t start typing again. Several minutes later, Joe came in with a glass of water and a bottle of painkiller. Frank turned to watch as Joe gulped down several of the tablets and drained the glass of water. “Thanks,” the younger boy said softly, putting the glass down.

“You shoulda called me,” Frank said, leaning against the back of the chair and looking with undisguised concern at the weary youth.

“I’m surprised you’re not sick of this,” Joe mumbled, looking away.

“I am. Sick of seeing you miserable and exhausted and hurting,” Frank answered, rising and moving to the bed. “I wish I could just make ‘em all go away somehow. But since I can’t, I can at least not be a grouch when you need some understanding.” He ran his hand lightly over his brother’s head, tousling his hair slightly, then gently cupped the warm cheek. “Try to sleep again. I’ll be right here.”

Joe said nothing. He didn’t need to, the gratitude in his bloodshot eyes was more than enough. Then he lay down on the bed and was asleep again before ten minutes had passed.

Frank returned to his desk and sat staring at his computer for at least ten more minutes before he finally regained enough composure to start on his assignment again.

Joe Hardy woke abruptly, not certain what had caused him to shake off his sleep so suddenly. That didn’t usually happen when he and his brother weren’t working on a mystery.

Blinking at the unexpectedly strong light, he glanced around. He was in a room- Frank’s room, he realized after a second. Frank was sitting at the end of the bed, back to the wall as usual, one knee drawn up with a book resting against it. The computer was off, the overhead light was off, and the illumination was coming from the desk lamp. Joe gazed for a moment at his brother’s familiar figure; the light coming from the desk lamp threw light and shadows across Frank’s profile. It was a peculiar effect, almost like a halo. “What time is it?” he asked quietly.

Frank started and nearly dropped his book. “A little after eleven. When’d you wake up?”

“Just now.” Joe sat up, pushing back the blanket his brother had considerately placed over him. “Thanks,” he said, twitching the edge.

“No problem. Feel better? You didn’t wake up again, as far as I could tell.”

Joe shook his head. “I didn’t, and I feel a whole lot better. I think my stomach just woke me up,” he explained with a small smile. Eleven at night, and he’d lain down at- what, four? Seven hours of sleep, more than he’d had at one time the entire week. Maybe the last three weeks.

“She made stew again,” Frank informed him, putting down the book and stretching. “And she wanted to wake you up, but I wouldn’t let her. I didn’t go into too many details, though. She wasn’t being pushy, and I didn’t see the point.”

“She was not being pushy?” Joe repeated, not sure he’d heard right. At Frank’s nod and wry smile, he let out a soft whistle. “That’s...odd.”

“Not very pushy,” Frank amended. “Either that or I’m more stubborn than I used to be,” he added after a second’s reflection.

“That might be possible.” Joe pushed the blanket further away, shivered a bit, then scooted down to sit beside his brother, picking up the book as he did. “What’re you reading this time? Oh, this again? How many times have you read this anyway?”

“About seven. Dozen,” Frank replied, taking it back.

“I was about to say, seven by itself didn’t seem like nearly enough.” Joe smiled. “I had no idea that being kidnapped intrigued you so much- especially considering- ow.” He rubbed the top of his head, where ‘Kidnapped’, the book, had just landed. “I’m going to get you that in paperback version,” he decided. “In fact, I think from now on, all the books I get you are going to be paperbacks.”

“Paperbacks wear out a lot faster than hardbacks,” Frank returned. “So two or three years after you get me a book in paperback, you’ll have to get me a replacement for it. Might be difficult if they go out of print.”

“Hmm. Well I just can’t win, can I?” Joe mused. He wasn’t too surprised when his brother chuckled.

“Hey, if I were you, I’d hurry up and take my shower now,” Frank said suddenly. “You might have time before school, but then again you might not. And if you wait till after you eat, you might just get a complaint from you-know-who.”

“I doubt Voldemort has much concern with the shower,” Joe began. A second later he got whapped on the head again, this time with Frank’s knuckles, for his reference to the famous villain of the Harry Potter stories.

“Oh, nobody home,” the eighteen-year-old said slyly.

“Ordinarily, that remark would get you in large trouble,” Joe commented. “But I don’t want you yelling the house down when I pin you again, so it’ll wait a bit. A day or so.”

“Nice of you to give me a warning.”

“Well, you’ve been pretty nice to me lately, so, you know. Fair play and all.” Joe glanced away as he felt his cheeks grow warm, but grinned when Frank laughed again. Then he looked up, his smile fading somewhat. “Brother-”

“I know,” Frank told him with a suddenly gentle look.

Joe nodded distractedly, wishing there were proper words for the things he wanted to say. All the ordinary expressions of gratitude- and things that ran deeper than gratitude- all those words were so shallow, so meaningless. He couldn’t just say ‘thank you, I’m grateful, I owe you’ to his brother; it would be falling so far short of how he felt that it seemed worse than ridiculous. “We really need to overhaul this language,” he murmured, sighing.

“It does seem to be lacking a bit,” Frank agreed in one of his typical understatements.

Fortunately, there was another option for them. Joe touched the older boy’s arm and sent the pure feeling, uncluttered by words or images. And smiled a little as his brother looked surprised, then seemed to go into a sort of trance. “I forget sometimes,” Frank said, very slowly and very quietly, “how...intensely you feel things.”

‘Was that a rebuke?’ Joe wondered, the smile fading from his face.

“I’m not saying it’s bad, but it must be a hell of a mixed blessing,” the elder Hardy continued, regaining his usual alert expression and looking quite thoughtfully at Joe.

“That’s for sure,” the blond boy agreed, sighing. “That’s one reason- one of a lot of reasons- I’m glad you’re my brother. You sorta...your logicalness helps me damp it down a bit, mostly.” Then he wrinkled his nose. “Is that a word? Logicalness?”

“Close enough.” Frank looked a little amused, but the feelings he was putting out had much less to do with amusement and much more to do with affection. For a long moment the boys were both silent, enjoying the mind-touch. They had not used telepathy very much lately, for there had been little need for it. And little desire on Joe’s part. He’d had no wish to burden Frank with the state of his mind over the last twenty-odd days.

“It’s getting late,” Frank said softly, breaking the silence. The digital clock read 11:07.

“Oh, yeah. Shower, stew, homework...who knows, maybe I’ll even get more sleep before my alarm goes off,” Joe mused, sliding off the bed and stretching. “You going to sleep yet?”

“I’ll probably finish my book first.”

“If I know you, you’ll fall asleep sitting up with the book in your hand,” Joe teased. “Well, g’night sleep tight and all that stuff about bedbugs.”

Frank laughed and made a shooing gesture with the book. “Have fun with your report,” he joked in return as Joe was closing the door.

“How’re you doing?” Frank asked Joe the next afternoon when the younger Hardy got home from school. Joe had just dumped his books in his room and come down the hall to say hi.

“Tired, but not wiped out. And no headache, that makes a nice change,” Joe answered almost cheerfully.

“Hey, good. So you going to keep on with this business of sleeping days for a while, or are you going to bed at night this time?”

Joe leaned against the doorjamb and frowned. “I think I’d like to put a couple days between me and the bad-dream cycle,” he said after a minute or two. “I have a little feeling that I’ll relapse if I try to sleep tonight.”

“Sounds like your usual mix of logic and intuition,” Frank told him with a smile.

Joe smiled back. “It’s nice to have a routine,” he agreed. “Particularly a unique one.”

“Unique,” Frank repeated. “I’m not so sure that’s the word for you...lunatic.”

“Oh, cut it out!” Joe rolled his eyes, then pushed his hand through his wind-blown hair. “I am glad we don’t have football practice, I’d probably have to skip it if we did. Oh, they say Coach Z will be back in school on Monday!”

“Now that’s good news. Bet everyone cheered except Barnes.”

Joe nodded, malice dancing in his blue eyes. “He’s gradually becoming aware of how very unpopular he is. Someone- and this is one mystery I won’t try to solve- left a note... well, you couldn’t really call it a note,” he amended. “Took a piece of posterboard and spraypainted, ‘Barnes is the biggest asshole in the faculty: signed, Bayport High,’ on it. Taped it up on his office wall. He was, let me just say, raving mad.”

“I think I can see where he might not be terribly happy about it,” Frank agreed.

“Brother, one of these days you’re going to do an understatement like that and someone’s going to ask if you’re all there.” Joe canted his head, grinning. “No middle ground with you, either you’re indulging in Melodramania or you’ve got Understatementicity.”

Frank raised his eyebrows. “I just love these new vocabulary words of yours.”

“Why thank you,” his brother answered modestly, and clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle a yawn.

“Go take your nap, baby brother.”

“Just for that, I’m going to use your nice, neat, all-made-up bed,” Joe told him, and promptly carried out his threat by flopping down on Frank’s bed.

“I’ll try not to keep you awake with my typing.”

“Another paper?” Joe asked from his face-down-in-the-pillow position.

“How’d you ever guess?”

No answer. After a few minutes, Frank looked over his shoulder and smiled. Rising, he unfolded the blanket that he kept at the end of the bed and draped it over his sleeping brother.

Joe slept peacefully for several hours, only turning over two or three times and getting himself pretty thoroughly wrapped up in the blanket. Around six-thirty, Gertrude came up to announce dinner. To Frank’s surprise, she again didn’t make much fuss about Joe sleeping through the meal.

“As long as he’s getting his schoolwork done. He did clean up after himself very well last night, so I suppose I can’t complain, but it does seem very strange,” she remarked after she’d eaten some of the fried chicken, rice pilaf and creamed spinach.

Frank reassured her on the homework, but pointed out that one night was not enough to break the cycle of bad dreams. “He’ll probably be back on regular hours by sometime next week.” What he was thinking was that Joe was lucky; he’d be able to avoid the spinach when he came down for something to eat this evening. It might be better than the high school cafeteria’s, but that was no recommendation.

When he got back into his room, he noticed that Joe had turned again and was facing the wall. It was about half an hour later, while Frank was looking in on a chatroom, that he heard his brother mumble something. It sounded like ‘no’. Frank glanced back, and heard another, louder, “No...”

“Joe?”

“N-no...didn’t...mean to...” the boy muttered, and then seemed to calm down. Frank frowned and waited several minutes to see what would happen. When nothing did, he turned back to the computer. He had only typed a few sentences when Joe groaned softly.

“I didn’t- mean to!” Now Joe’s breathing was quickening. “Don’t...no, please, no! Don’t hurt me...Daddy, don’t hurt me!”

Frank shoved the chair back and hurried to the bed. “Joe, wake up. Wake up!” He shook the younger boy, got no response, shook him again. “C’mon, shake it off...you’re having a nightmare.”

“Please,” Joe whispered, and then he cried out as though in pain. “Don’t hurt me!” he whimpered, flinging his arms over his head and trying to curl up in a ball. The blanket wrapped around him prevented this and he thrashed about, trying to free himself.

“Joe. Calm down. You were dreaming-” Frank got his hands under Joe’s trembling body and carefully lifted him into a sitting position. “It was a dream,” he repeated, supporting the limp boy with one arm and gently smoothing the golden hair with the other hand.

Joe’s breath was still coming in gasps, but he opened his eyes and stared disbelievingly around him. “F-Frank?” he stammered after a moment. “What- what happened?”

“Well, I was going to ask you that. You had a nightmare,” the older boy said gently.

“I did? Oh, I did.” Joe slowly lifted a hand and rubbed fretfully at his forehead. “Wicked headache,” he mumbled.

Frank glanced over, saw the painkiller bottle on the bedtable where Joe had left it the day before, and handed it over. “I’ll get you some water,” he said, and went down the hall to the bathroom. He was surprised to discover that he felt just slightly unsteady on his feet. Filling a cup, he returned to his room. Joe took the tablets then slumped against the headboard, closing his eyes and looking more tired than he had when he’d lain down. Frank sat beside him and wished there was something he could do.

“Thanks for waking me up,” Joe said at last, opening his eyes.

Frank nodded. “You were pretty deep in it. What...?”

“Don’t remember,” Joe sighed.

“You were talking a bit.”

Joe looked surprised. “Yeah?”

“You said ‘no’ a couple times, and then ‘I didn’t mean to’...twice, I think-”

“I didn’t...mean to?” Joe considered that for a long moment.

“And then, don’t hurt me. ‘Daddy, don’t hurt me’.”

Joe’s lips slowly parted, but he said nothing.

“Sounds like...sounds like someone getting a beating. A kid, maybe,” Frank suggested.

“He’s...” Joe stopped, his eyes going unfocused. Silence hung heavy in the room as his eyes drifted shut. “He was frightened,” Joe murmured at last. “I was him, and he was scared, and...there was a man...angry about something...it was Dad. Not our Dad, his Dad. And...he was drunk, the father was drunk.” Joe blinked several times and took a deep breath. “Frank, that wasn’t really a dream.”

“No?”

“It was sending. And I’m pretty sure it was the kid who I kept hearing back in October. The telepath, the one who couldn’t hear me.”

Frank felt his eyes widen. “Oh...! I’d forgotten about that. Then...Joe, if you’ve what you’ve been picking up on all these nights is him- does that mean the father’s roughing him up every night? Sorta explains why it’s late at night, if the man’s going out at night and drinking and then coming home and hitting the kid,” he mused, frowning.

“Probably it does,” Joe said wearily. “And telepathy would also explain the headaches. Remember how we used to have ‘em, until we learned not to?”

“That’s right, we did get those a lot- you especially, ‘cause you were plowing through your shields instead of taking ‘em down. Mine were too strong to plow through.” Frank scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “But wouldn’t that mean this kid is very strong? And if he is, why can’t he hear you?”

“Not necessarily. The beatings he’s getting are probably the trauma that’s developing his ability,” Joe answered grimly. “But that doesn’t mean he’s particularly strong. My shields are usually up when I’m asleep,” he added in explanation. “But they’re not so strong that someone who’s being traumatized can’t- as you say, plow through them.”

Frank nodded slowly. “That makes sense. He was weaker before, when he wasn’t being hurt; now he is being hurt and his telepathy is stronger.”

“Yeah. Strong enough to get through to me, but not developed enough to actually communicate.” Joe scowled and sat up straight. “We need to find that kid, fast. I want this constant contact to stop- and I definitely don’t want him enduring abuse like that.”

Frank was about to answer when the phone rang. Rising, he went into the hall to answer it.

“That was Biff.”

“Biff? Oh, yeah, I forgot he was back in town.” Joe opened his eyes, feeling his head throb but trying to ignore it. “Oh, this weekend,” he remembered suddenly. “We were going to all get together.”

“Yeah.” Frank sat down on the bed again, looking anything but enthusiastic. “Do you feel up to it?”

Joe felt his eyes widen. “What, now?”

“No, no, tomorrow. The outdoor skating rink. About noon.”

“Oh.” Joe leaned back and closed his eyes again. It might help his mood to hang out with the gang and enjoy some skating. Probably a snowball fight too, if he knew his friends. But the way his sleeping schedule was going- “If I can sleep tonight, I’ll be up for it,” he answered slowly. “Only...I do want to find this kid.”

“Try that now,” Frank suggested. “His mind might still be open.” He frowned and absently flicked a strand of dark hair from his forehead.

“Frank, I hate to remind you,” Joe replied wearily, “but I just took headache relief”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, I stopped thinking for a minute there.” Frank looked a little abashed. “I wonder-”

“Probably not.”

“Huh?”

“I doubt you could reach him yourself,” Joe amplified, closing his eyes again. ‘C’mon, get to work,’ he ordered the medication silently.

“No fair peeking,” Frank told him, sounding amused.

“You’re still not thinking. I wasn’t peeking. I’m not sending. It’s a bit painful right now.” Joe tried to curb the edge of irritation in his voice, but was unsuccessful. “And anyway, I don’t peek. I do overhear you when you let things slip, same way you do with me, but that’s not peeking. It’s inadvertent.”

Silence. Joe didn’t open his eyes, but he felt the gaze that was focused on him. He ought to feel bad for speaking so sharply, but between the painful headache and his offense at the ‘peeking’, he didn’t feel any remorse.

“Okay,” Frank said quietly. “So how’d you know I was musing over trying it myself?”

“Common sense!” Joe retorted crossly, opening his eyes and glaring at his brother. He was extremely peeved at the implication that there was no other way he could’ve known what Frank was thinking except to ‘peek’ into his thoughts. “It’s not like there’s that many other people who could contact him-”

“Common sense?” Frank snorted and shook his head. “Well, whatever. There’s no reason for me not to try it. I might get through. And you don’t have to be so sour about it. I think you’re overreacting.”

Joe knew perfectly well that he was overreacting. But he wasn’t about to admit it, particularly not now that Frank was accusing him of it. “Maybe you’re just being overly offensive,” he retorted, sitting up straight. He almost wished he hadn’t said it, though, as Frank gave him a look compounded of anger and hurt.

“I’m trying,” the older boy began, obviously trying to keep a lid on his own temper, “to figure out what’s going on and what we can do about it. If you don’t feel up to contacting this person, I thought I wouldn’t do any harm in trying it myself. Just because I can’t send as well as you doesn’t mean I’m no good as a telepath, you know.”

“I never said you were!” Joe snapped, exasperated. “I just said you probably wouldn’t be able to reach him, and then you got all nasty and started accusing me of peeking!”

Frank cast his eyes upward and scowled. “Fine, whatever. I’m going to try anyway.”

“Do whatever you want.” Incensed, Joe got up from the bed, ignoring the pain that screamed through his temples, and slowly walked out of the bedroom. He had to walk slowly; every step felt as though it might jar his head from his shoulders. He made it down the hall, reached his room, lay down, and was asleep again in a very few minutes.

“Hey.” It was not much more than a distant echo.

“Mmm?”

“Joe. Wake up.”

“Mm-mm.” Joe did not want to wake up. But there was a hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. He was surprised it didn’t make his headache worse. No, the headache was gone. “What?” he managed through his drowsiness.

“It’s nearly ten.”

“Mm. Night?”

“No, in the morning.”

Odd, that didn’t sound facetious. Joe pried an eye open; hazy light met his gaze and he blinked several times. Then he got the other one open and focused on- his brother, leaning over him. “Wha’s going on?”

“I just wanted to know if you were still skating-inclined,” Frank explained.

Joe slowly sat up and stared around his room. It was most definitely mid-morning. “I slept all night?” he muttered, puzzled.

“Yeah. I checked on you a couple times,” Frank told him, sitting down beside him. “You hardly stirred. How’s your head?”

“About normal, if you subtract the fog,” Joe admitted, rubbing his eyes. “Man, I’m hungry.”

“No surprise. No dinner.” The older boy smiled slightly, then gave him a querying look.

“What? Oh, right, skating. Yeah, that sounds like a cool idea, pardon the pun.” Something was nagging at him, though, and when he remembered what it was, he frowned. The argument. Frank saw it, of course, and touched his arm.

“I’m sorry- about what I said yesterday. I don’t really understand why you got so annoyed at me for teasing you about peeking, but I shouldn’t’ve insulted your common sense. I know you have it, and use it.”

Joe took a moment to sort that out. “Not as often as some, but yes,” he agreed. “As for the peeking, it just bugged the heck out of me that you thought- even jokingly- that I’d do that to you. I don’t like the idea of listening in on people’s thoughts without their knowledge, it’s really rude. And you didn’t sound like you were kidding when you implied there was no other way I could’ve known what you were thinking. I mean, we’ve always thought alike. Lots of times, anyway.”

“When did I do that?” Frank looked rather baffled.

“I said I hadn’t peeked and you said something like, ‘then how’d you know?’ Like you didn’t believe me.”

“Oh.” Frank rubbed the side of his head as though it was aching. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I did believe you, I was just wondering if it was intuition or logic. I didn’t expect you to say ‘common sense’. It struck me as sort of ironic, since you’ve been listening to mine with somewhat more respect lately.” He offered a smile. “Sorry.”

“S’okay. I didn’t need to be so rude about it,” Joe admitted, smiling a bit sheepishly in return. “I think I let the headache do too much of the talking.”

“I will admit, it’s hard to be polite when your head feels like it’s going to split open.”

“Speaking of that. Did you try to make contact? And is that why you keep rubbing your temple?”

“Yes, and yes.” Frank’s smile turned rueful. “And no, as you predicted, I didn’t reach him. Guess I need to pay more attention to my Teacher.”

Joe made a face of disappointment; he hadn’t expected Frank to make contact, but he had rather hoped he might be mistaken. “I wouldn’t’ve minded being wrong on that. Well, we’ll find him eventually. I just hope it’s soon.”

“I hope so too. Did you get any idea where he might be? The U.S., for example?”

Joe shook his head, then got up. “Weak as he sounded, he’s probably nearby. But that could be anywhere in New York- or on the East Coast, for that matter. I might just ask Akilana for some pointers tonight. But in the meantime, I want some breakfast.” He paused. “You did take something for the headache, didn’t you?”

Frank’s smile was affectionate, despite the discomfort he was in. “Yeah, I did. It should be kicking in any hour now,” he finished ruefully.

An hour and a half later, the Hardys met their friends at the Hidden Lake ice rink for their skating get-together. Many people had wondered why a skating rink had been built so close to a large lake; it seemed more than a little redundant. The proprietor had glibly explained that until the lake froze, the rink would be a reliable source of entertainment. He’d also pointed out that when the lake did freeze, it often was rough and bumpy ice. This lessened the pleasure of the skating experience. Furthermore, the rink was much less of a safety hazard, for there was no need for concern about the rink ice cracking and the skater ending up in deep, frigid water. Finally, there was a small convenience factor: if the rink was ever too crowded, the lake was there as an alternative- assuming the ice was thick enough.

The Hardys and their friends actually preferred to skate on the lake when they could, rough ice notwithstanding. It was larger, there were usually fewer people on it, and there were the two small rivers that fed into and drained off from the lake to skate on as well. They could follow one creek up to the bridge and check out the wintry woods or follow the other down to see if the rapids had frozen into ice sculptures yet. Several times the skating party had degenerated into a snowball fight; it certainly added a new and exciting dimension to both activities.

This time, though, they were ‘stuck’ (as Jerry put it) with the rink, since the lake wasn’t frozen thick enough to skate on safely. They made the most of it and ended up enjoying themselves very much. It was the first time the whole gang had been together since the summer. Even Phil and Tony managed to get away from their jobs and join the Hardys, the Mortons, Biff and Karen, Jerry and Monica, Elena, Jesse, Callie, Liz, and Slim. “Quite a crowd,” Frank remarked to his brother as they were tying their skates.

“Yeah, we keep expanding,” Joe agreed, looking around. “And pairing up. It used to be pretty much us six guys and Iola. And then Callie and Liz... We need another person to even it up though, we’re at fifteen.”

“Three more. Liz and Jesse and Slim don’t have partners.”

“Pair Slim with Liz, then we just need to find Q a date,” Joe joked. He finished tying his laces and took to the ice.

“I heard that,” Liz remarked to Frank as she paused at the side of the rink. Scooping up a handful of snow, she went after the younger Hardy, whose back was toward her. A minute later Joe was frantically trying to get the snow out from the back of his shirt and coat, and most of the gang were laughing at his efforts.

The afternoon seemed to pass in fast-forward. The day was clear and bright, the rink uncrowded. Banter flew, pranks were pulled, and everyone enjoyed themselves very much. When they grew chilled or hungry, there were tables inside the Nature Center to sit at and warm up with a cup of hot cider or cocoa. There were also some basic edibles; hot dogs, soup machines, donuts, candy bars, and refrigerators with soda, milk and water. Fortunately, there were also public restrooms. There was a gift shop too, but no one was particularly interested in that today.

When the sun began to drop toward the western horizon, the wind started to pick up and the cold intensified. Reluctantly, the teens called it a day and gathered in the Nature Center to put their shoes back on and warm up before walking back to the parking lot. Frank grinned when he saw Slim talking to Liz and thought that maybe Joe’s idea wasn’t as far-fetched as it had sounded earlier in the day. Then he stood up, skates in hand, and realized how very sore his ankles were. “I might just regret this tomorrow,” he said ruefully to no one in particular. After several hours of balancing on the thin blades, walking in sneakers felt quite peculiar.

His affliction seemed to be widespread; looking around, Frank saw that most of his friends were either rubbing their ankles or walking a bit unsteadily. Jesse was limping; he’d never put on skates before in his life and had borrowed an old pair of Jerry’s. The junior gave Frank a rather pained smile as the young detective came over. “Heat ‘em when you get home,” Frank advised. “It’ll help. And don’t try jumping for the next day or two, that hurts a lot.”

“Thanks for the warning. I don’t usually jump, not without a good reason, but I’ll make sure no reason’s good enough,” the Puerto Rican boy answered good-naturedly. Then he shivered. “I’m not used to this cold,” he said rather plaintively. “When does it get warm again?”

“Around the end of April. You’ve got about three months to go, I’m afraid,” Frank answered. Jesse groaned and tied his shoes.

“As long as we’re all here-”

The racket in the Nature Center quieted considerably and everyone turned to him. Joe, who was still sitting on the floor, winked at his brother.

“-Let’s save some phone calls and figure out what’s up for tomorrow,” Frank suggested, trying to ignore the peculiar feeling he was experiencing. He was suddenly acutely aware that Joe had been right about him being the leader of this bunch.

“Always the sensible one,” Phil joked. “What else was there again?”

“Anything but skiing,” Biff replied. He was still in his skates.

“I’m surprised we didn’t get our snowball fight in today.”

“We tried, some of us,” Joe said. He looked pointedly at Liz, who wrinkled her nose at him.

“Some of us might choose to spectate on the snowball fight,” Monica opined, and Elena agreed.

“There’s sledding,” Chet reminded everyone. “We could go to Croaker’s hill and sled, and if a snowball fight just happens to take place, the spectators can keep sledding while the participants, um, participate.”

Scattered chuckles greeted the remark, but everyone seemed agreeable. “Same time?” Frank looked at Phil and Tony.

“I’m off,” Phil said, “so anytime is good for me.”

“I’ve got the late shift tomorrow, so the same time would be fine for me. I might just leave a bit before this,” Tony agreed.

“All right with everyone?”

“Sure, time to sleep in,” Biff joked. Agreement rose from the group and then the chatter started up again as the teens began filing out of the building.

It happened when they were all in the parking lot, moving to their cars and tossing a few last quips back and forth. Something like a bright blast seemed to crackle inside Frank’s head and without even knowing what he was doing, he shouted something to his brother. Startled, Joe stopped in his tracks and turned. A second later, something streaked past him and slammed into the window of the boys’ car, shattering it. Joe leapt back, staggering a little and their friends gasped in shock.

“Are you all right?” Frank asked, suddenly feeling exhausted.

“What happened?”

“Joe!” That was from Iola.

“Good grief, your window-”

“Where’d that come from?”

“What was it? An iceball?”

The voices wavered around Frank and then the world seemed to steady itself. Joe was looking at him, wearing an expression both unnerved and puzzled.

“Hey, over there!” one of the girls shouted, and the boys both turned to see a dark shape charging into the woods. Almost en masse, the gang took off after the culprit, sore ankles notwithstanding. Several minutes later, a very surly young man was dragged back to the parking lot by the scruff of his coat. He was quickly identified as Bobby of the Crabbs Corner gang, and the missile he’d thrown was examined.

On initial observation the object looked like an iceball, but when the ice was brushed away, the center turned out to be a metal shot-put ball. “Stole it from school, did you?” Joe inquired, a grim note in his voice.

“Taking after your buddy Gold, huh?” Biff asked, folding his arms across his chest. Chet moved closer too, his usually cheerful face knotted in a scowl.

“What do you mean? I didn’t do anything!”

“Oh, sure, you just ran for fun.” Frank walked over and examined the area where the thug had been hiding. “You waited a while, didn’t you? Your footprints are all over the place. I think we’ll press charges; you won’t be out before the year’s up, this time. No plea bargaining.”

“Okay, okay, so I threw it,” the youth said nervously. “But it wasn’t my idea. And I didn’t mean to break the window.”

“Oh, I see,” Joe snorted. “You just meant to crack my skull open!”

The bully seemed to pale a little. “No! I was just tryin’ to scare you. And it was Gold’s idea-”

“Thought he wasn’t supposed to have any visitors,” Jesse said softly. The junior’s eyes were narrowed with anger. “Do you fools ever think for yourselves? And did it occur to you that doing his dirty work for him is a good way to get yourself caught on the same charges he’s in on?”

“I want to know why,” Frank said clearly, staring at the hood. Bobby fidgeted, said nothing.

“Start talking,” Tony snapped, but still the youth was silent.

Frank’s control snapped. His hand closed around the front of the older guy’s jacket and pulled it tight around his throat, jerking on the fabric until they were nearly nose to nose. “I said: why?” he hissed, glaring into Bobby’s suddenly wide eyes.

“He- he found out it was Joe who turned him in and he was pissed he d-didn’t manage to hit him with a bullet anyway,” Bobby gasped in a quick burst of words.

“And why you?”

“C-Cause I owe him.”

“Keep talking.”

“I- I owe him a thousand bucks and he said if I- if I put Joe in the hospital he’d call it even.”

An angry murmur rose from the teens surrounding the duo. Joe’s eyes were as hard and cold as ice as he moved a step forward. Tony, knowing his friend’s temper, laid a hand on his arm. “So much for just scaring me,” the blond sleuth growled.

“You do this,” Frank told the thug, his voice still eerily quiet. “You go back and tell your buddy Gold that just ‘cause he’s in prison doesn’t mean he can’t have charges added to his sentence. Lots of them. If he wants to add to his time in jail, he’s sure doing the right things. As for you-” Frank suddenly pulled the thug past him, releasing him at the last moment. Bobby never had a chance; he nearly ran right into Joe’s fist as the younger Hardy swung. The impact sent Bobby stumbling backward and he landed on his rear on the snowy ground.

“You’re already in a lot of debt,” the seventeen-year-old remarked, standing over the older youth as his friends backed up. “So, since we don’t feel like waiting a year or three... why don’t I take the cost of this broken window out of your hide?”

“Can I help?” Biff asked.

“Can we help?” Chet amended, looking eager. The other four boys muttered agreement.

Bobby looked up and shook his head. “I-I...I’ll go to the cops. I mean, I’ll turn myself in.”

Joe paused. Then he nodded slowly. “We’ll know about it if you don’t. We have friends on the force. If you haven’t been booked by tomorrow, some of us may come calling on you.”

The gang looked disappointed as the young hood scrambled to his feet, but they moved aside so that he could pass. A few moments later Bobby’s battered vehicle roared out of the parking lot, tires spinning as the car fishtailed in the residual snow.

“I think you gave ‘em a scare,” Joe remarked to his brother, shivering as he went up the stairs to his room. Driving home with a window wide open to the icy winter evening had been a new and unpleasant experience.

“Who, that asshole Bobby? I certainly intended to-”

“No, the gang.”

“The gang? Why?” Frank sounded somewhere between puzzled and amused.

“They’re not too used to seeing you get mad, certainly not mad enough to act like you did to Bobby.”

“Well...maybe not, but they’ve got to know I wouldn’t take it out on them.”

“’Course not, but it’s still unnerving for ‘em. I think that’s why no one complained about me letting the jerk go. No one really wanted to see what you would do if you lost your temper completely.” Joe went into his room and put his skates near the closet. A minute later Frank walked in, still carrying his own skates.

“You’re saying they were so worried that I’d hurt him that they were glad you let him go to the police?”

“Yep.” Joe sat down in his chair, pulled off his shoes, and sat cross-legged to rub his feet and ankles. “Cold,” he explained at Frank’s questioning look. “And sore.”

“But I was leaving that part up to you,” Frank protested mildly.

“Yeah, but after Chet and Biff volunteered to get in on it, they probably figured you’d want your chance, too.”

“Oh. Well, I guess I might’ve. I was a little surprised you let him go,” the older boy admitted after a minute, sitting at the foot of the bed. “But not particularly disappointed.”

“I kinda figured it would be better to get him into official trouble than to just beat him up and then risk him yelling assault,” Joe explained. “Besides, even if he doesn’t turn himself in, we’ve got a confession in front of a whole crowd of witnesses. Maybe not the most objective ones, but still hard to deny.”

“True.” Frank frowned. “I didn’t mean to unnerve anyone,” he commented. “And I wasn’t aware that I had- except for the jerk.”

“Yeah, but you weren’t looking at them at the time, you were looking at Bobby,” Joe explained. “I’ve heard you talk in that voice before, so it didn’t affect me.”

“I wondered about that, you looked a little shaken up.”

“Yeah, I was- but not because you were mad. I never even saw him at all. One second I was walking and the next you yelled stop...and then, bang, broken window. Startled me pretty badly.” Joe shrugged.

“Is that what I yelled? I don’t remember.” Frank sounded a little vague. “And I didn’t see him either.”

The younger boy looked over quickly. “But then...?”

“It was the weirdest feeling. In my head.” Frank touched his temple. “I can’t describe it, it was like something...flashed, or clicked, or both. And I yelled without even thinking. I just knew you had to stop right then, right there, or you were going to get- hurt. Or worse.

Joe felt his eyes widening. “That’s...weird,” he said slowly. “I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Maybe you picked up his intentions from his mind without even knowing it.”

“I don’t think so. It didn’t feel like sending at all. I’m not sure what it did feel like, except everything seemed all out of focus for a second or two. And I felt a little weak.”

“Weird,” Joe repeated, frowning. “You’re okay now, aren’t you?” he added anxiously.

“I feel fine now. Actually, I feel a little hungry. It’s...seven already? Time flies,” the older boy said with a smile, standing up. “I’m going to raid the fridge.”

“I’ll join you in a bit. I’m going to get in touch with our Teacher and see what she can tell me about finding a weak telepath.” ‘And maybe I’ll ask her about this weirdness, too!’ Joe thought to himself as Frank nodded and left the room. “Don’t eat everything in sight,” he called after his brother. “I’m going to want something for dinner, too.”

“Oh, if you insist,” Frank replied from the hallway, and then his footsteps went down the stairs.

Strange. Whatever this weird impulse of his had been, he didn’t seem to be taking it very seriously. Maybe it was a fluke- maybe he’d just seen something from the corner of his eye... Joe shook his head, his thoughts trailing off. Frank had as much as admitted he’d done something mentally- he just didn’t know what. Had his brother become so protective that he could now sense danger to Joe even before it materialized?

Joe’s frown deepened and he closed his eyes, sending his thoughts out to the woman who’d first helped him master this gift.

“That didn’t take long.” Frank looked up from his chicken-salad sandwich as Joe walked into the kitchen. “So?”

“Well.” Joe looked rather dreamy, as was usual after communicating with Akilana. “She gave me a suggestion or two. She’s not- not pleased. Said she hasn’t sensed any emerging talent, which is unusual. Most emergents broadcast on a pretty wide band. Like Auntie did. So she’s not sure just what that means. Anyway, she told me how I can sorta backtrack on him and try to see where he’s coming from. It’s not too different from checking on a person to see if they’re telepathic.”

“When did you- oh, Locke. I forgot.”

“Ryan, too.” Joe frowned as he opened the refrigerator.

“Ryan...speaking of him, did they ever identify that mystery person?”

“Yeah. It was Lenny, all right. I went by his uncle’s place a few times, looking for the kid. He was in school, so I guess he’s still going straight.” Joe pulled out some sandwich fixings of his own.

“That’s good to know.” Frank concentrated on his sandwich, not wanting to think about Lenny, the boy who’d been found in Lynch’s destroyed mansion- the body he’d mistaken for Joe. He really didn’t want to think about Ryan, Lenny’s younger brother. Never mind that Lenny had been a petty criminal and that he hadn’t kept Ryan from getting involved in various rackets; Ryan had been devastated by the death of his older brother. Frank found it too easy to sympathize with the kid, too easy to remember his own feelings from that terrible time, so he- guiltily- tried not to think about it at all.

The silence was broken when Gertrude walked in little while later. Frank had finished eating and Joe had nearly polished off his own sandwich when their aunt arrived home from visiting a nearby friend. She started in surprise at seeing them both and asked rather sharply where they’d been all day. She wasn’t terribly pleased when Frank told her they’d been at the skating rink; it seemed she’d had some chores in mind for them both.

“You’ll just have to take care of them tomorrow,” she concluded, shaking her head. “A lazier pair I never did see. Always running off and pleasing yourselves, never mind the work that needs doing around here-”

“What work are you referring to?” Frank asked coolly. In the back of his mind, he observed that he seldom called her ‘auntie’ anymore, nor even mentioned her name.

Gertrude didn’t exactly answer the question; she gave Frank a scathing look and muttered about how males never did seem to see when things needed doing; or perhaps it was just young people in general who overlooked the very obvious.

Joe, who had not said a word, got up from the table and cleared up after himself, then left the room. Frank decided to follow that good example before he had his temper tested again, and walked out with his aunt’s annoyed voice ringing in his ears. “Funny,” he said sourly as he paused in Joe’s doorway. “It sounded to me like she was just talking to hear herself talk.”

Joe looked up and shook his head. “I think she’s trying to tell us we’re neglecting her. Inventing chores for us to do around the house is a good way to keep us at home,” he answered. He was lying in his usual position on the bed, propped up on his elbows and facing the footboard.

Frank cast his eyes at the ceiling, but didn’t debate. He had a feeling his brother might just be correct. “I suppose it would be too much to ask for her to even consider admitting such a thing.”

“Naturally.” Joe shrugged and turned his attention back to what he was reading. A music catalogue, Frank saw.

“Wonder what the odds are of us getting to meet the gang on time tomorrow,” he muttered as he went down the hall to the bathroom. Chores or no chores, they’d need to get that car window fixed, which could take some time. Well, there was their father’s car, he supposed, pausing to pull a fresh towel from the linen closet. Since Joe was occupied, the shower was free for the using- as well as all the hot water in the tank.

When Frank got out of the shower, he found that Joe had moved down to his room and was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed. He was still looking over the catalogue- but when Frank walked in, the younger Hardy gave him a frown. “Stealing all the hot water, I hear.”

“Oh yeah, I walked off with it and hid it where you’ll never find it,” Frank agreed, amused. He sat down at his desk and scrubbed the towel over his wet hair.

“Of course I can find it- I just can’t get at it. You shoved it all down the drain,” Joe griped. “And even if I could, it’s all dirty now. You’re just so considerate.”

“That’s me, all right.” Frank tied his bathrobe a little more tightly, then turned on the computer. “I always try to make things easier for you. Now you have another fifteen minutes to read your thingy there before the water heats up again.”

Joe tried to stifle a laugh, but choked on it and coughed a few times. “Read my thingy, okay. It’s called a ‘catalogue’, Frank. And it won’t take me fifteen minutes to finish it, so I’ll probably fill in the remaining time by pestering you.”

“Go ahead. Pester me by telling me if there’s anything decent out, musically speaking.”

“That’s not pestering! That’s being helpful.”

Frank turned in his chair and tried to look as pleadingly innocent as his brother often managed to do. “I won’t tell anyone that you’re shirking your pest duties,” he offered.

Joe sighed gustily, flipped back to the beginning of the catalogue and began paging through it again. Frank, surprised but smugly pleased that the trick had worked, leaned on the back of the chair and listened with interest. By the time Joe reached the end of the booklet, Frank had written down several items of interest and nearly thirty minutes had passed.

“There, that’s my good deed for the day,” Joe said, tossing the catalogue down and getting to his feet. “And by the way, it had nothing to do with you trying to look pathetic.”

“Oh no?”

“Not in the slightest. That’s my look, I’m immune to it,” the younger boy explained with a grin as he hurried out of the room. Frank laughed softly as he heard the bathroom door close, then turned his attention to the computer.

The remainder of the evening passed quietly. Joe came back into Frank’s room after his shower and read over the older boy’s shoulder while Frank chatted with several internet friends. Frank didn’t particularly mind, since he wasn’t talking with Callie this evening. She’d left him an email note saying she was going to bed early.

After a while Joe went downstairs and returned with several chocolate chip cookies for both of them and a book for himself. The ‘net didn’t hold the fascination for him that it did for Frank. The next time Frank looked over, he shook his head to see his brother lying sound asleep on the still-made bed, the book half-open beside him. He got up from the chair, went over to the bed, and gently urged Joe under the covers, putting the book on the nightstand. “If you’re going to fall asleep, the least you ought to do is make sure you’re under the blankets,” he pointed out. Joe, predictably, ignored this and within minutes of covering up was sound asleep again. Frank returned to the computer and picked up the conversation he’d left off. It was another hour and a half before he decided he’d had enough and shut down for the night.

Joe was a little surprised to wake the next morning in his brother’s room. He was even more surprised when it occurred to him that he hadn’t had any bad dreams. At least, none that he could recall, and he certainly didn’t remember waking up. Even if he didn’t remember the dreams, it was hard to forget the waking up part, he thought sourly as he turned over. Then he realized he had the bed to himself, and frowned in puzzlement. Either Frank was already up and about or something a bit odd was going on. He hoped it was the former.

Getting up, Joe winced to find how sore his ankles and calves were. And he’d stretched, too, before he got on the ice yesterday! Still, it had been at least a year since he’d put his ice-skates on... Reaching his room, he double-took to discover his brother lying quietly in his, Joe’s, bed! “What is this, musical beds?” he inquired as Frank blinked sleepily up at him.

“Well, you were hogging mine, so...” Frank shrugged as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Sleep okay?”

“I think so. I didn’t wake up, anyway.” Joe yawned mightily, stretched, then turned to his closet. His ankles twinged and he winced. “You?”

“Yeah, pretty well. I turned your blanket down a bit, though. Too hot.” Frank got up and yelped. “Ow, that hurts.”

“Ankles?”

“Uh-huh. It’s a good thing,” Frank added, looking around the room, “that I didn’t have to get up during the night. Between your messy room and my achy legs, I might’ve broken my neck.”

“Complaints, complaints. Not everyone can be as tidy as you, bro. Why don’t you nag at me about something else for a while? Something I might actually consider doing?” Joe hauled on his clothes as he spoke.

“Oh, I dunno. I guess I’m waiting to see how many repetitions it takes for this one to register.”

“And what number are we up to now?”

“Something around five hundred and twenty-eight billion. I have it written down somewhere.”

“Hope really does spring eternal, doesn’t it?” Joe remarked, laughing. “Or is it stubbornness?”

“Probably both.” Frank wandered down the ‘path’ left among the piles in Joe’s room, out the door and returned a few minutes later, clothed. “We slept pretty late, it’s already ten-thirty.”

“That’s not late,” Joe disagreed as he combed his hair. “Eleven-thirty is late. Ten-thirty is just moderate.”

“And nine-thirty is early? So what’s eight-thirty?”

“Too early.”

“I shoulda heard that coming.”

“Sure should’ve.” Joe’s stomach growled. “Breakfast,” he announced, and squeezed past his brother into the hallway.

Breakfast was accomplished very quickly and the boys dug their sleds from the basement and hurried out of the house before their Aunt could inflict any of the ‘chores’ she had in mind on them. Today was it colder and there were fat gray clouds covering most of the sky, but the weather report called for no precipitation. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Frank said skeptically.

“You mean when you don’t see it.”

“You’re getting the first snowball, Joe.”

“Not if I get you first!” Joe grinned, then got into their broken-windowed car and drove to the closest service station. Frank followed in the other car with the sleds. After getting an estimated time and fee from the garage man, Joe hopped into the passenger seat and reported that it wouldn’t be as expensive as they’d feared.

The Hardys reached Croaker’s hill in good spirits. They turned out to be a bit early, but that was no problem. Half the gang had arrived already and even as they walked up the hill for the first run, several more of their friends appeared. Jesse Martinez was easy to pick out; he was the one who was limping the worst. Still, he greeted everyone cheerfully as he got to the top of Croaker’s Hill.

No one knew why the place was called Croaker’s Hill, though there were certain theories. One was that an old pirate, Captain Croaker (who’d lost most of his voice from having a Spaniard’s rapier lodge in his larynx during a duel) had once built a small stockade there. This was the more popular theory, involving- as it did- a whisper about treasure. Another was that one of the founding members of Bayport had made it a lookout for bad weather when the initial colony was established. This theory was plausible, but dull. The Hardys endured some good-natured ribbing about getting to the bottom of the ‘Croaker’ story once and for all, but declined to mess with the little mystery. “It would probably turn out to be something incredibly boring, like that it was named for the bullfrogs in the area that croaked all night and kept the settlers awake,” Joe quipped.

Unsolved legends aside, it was a perfect place for sledding, being a steep and long hill with no trees in the vicinity. Chet Morton, puffing up the slope for another run down, was heard to mutter that someone needed to install a ski-lift in the area. It was a comment on the muscles strained by skating that nearly everyone agreed with him immediately. In fact, it was due to that very aspect that the snowball fight started as soon as it did. It wasn’t that anyone was tired of spilling off the sleds or getting a little too wind-burned by the speed of their descent; there were just too many sore legs to tolerate all the tramping uphill.

“We probably should’ve sledded before we skated,” Jerry remarked to no one in particular.

“Well, then we’d still be aching in the legs and trying to skate on ‘em,” Tony pointed out, loosing a handful of snow at his friend. That was all it took; soon the snowballs were flying thick and fast, and more than a few handfuls of snow were stuffed down an opponent’s clothes.

After a while the snow settled and the gang began to brush themselves off, laughing and catching their breath. Elena, Karen and Monica had steered more or less clear, dropping a bit of snow on whoever was nearby and dodging any retaliation, but Liz, Callie and Iola had been on the throwing and receiving ends of several snowballs each. “It’s the sort of thing you have to expect with this crowd,” Iola told Elena, brushing snow out of her damp black hair.

“You have good aim,” Elena replied, sounding impressed.

“Callie has even better aim. Frank taught her how to throw,” Liz remarked, overhearing. Iola made a face, but before she could say anything, a snow-covered Joe Hardy was giving her a kiss.

“What’s this? Public affection? These young folks...” Perry Robinson said in a mock-scolding voice.

“Put an icicle in it,” Joe suggested, and kissed his girlfriend again.

“Brrr,” Monica murmured, hugging herself and looking rather plaintively at Jerry. “I’m cold and achy, I want to go home and curl up in a blanket with some cider.”

“I think that sounds fabulous,” Elena agreed. “Oh!”

“What?” Chet asked.

“I think it’s...” Elena held out her hands as a soft pattering sound began to be heard.

“Sleet,” Jerry said disgustedly, moving to Monica’s side. “Well, so much for no precipitation. Let’s get out of here before the roads turn into a total mess.”

“Good idea. Come on home with us?” Joe offered to Chet and Iola. “It’s closer.”

“You can come too,” he heard Frank murmur to Callie as the Mortons accepted the offer quickly. “We haven’t seen a lot of each other lately.”

“I’ve got a paper to finish,” Callie answered regretfully. Joe turned in time to see her rise up on her toes and give Frank a kiss. “I’ll call you later,” she promised. Frank sighed, but nodded as the group gathered up their individual sleds and hurried towards the road.

Joe turned back and his arm around Iola, listening to his friends talk as they all stamped through the snow to their cars. Biff, Tony and Phil were discussing a trip to Mr. Pizza, to share a lunch before Tony’s shift. Liz and Elena decided to go to the mall with them and indulge in the Beanery coffee shop and maybe the Cookie Factory. Slim had another two hours before he was due at his own job, and declared his intention of napping with a heating pad on his legs. Monica and Jerry seemed to have some plans of their own, judging from the way they were sticking close to each other. Joe smiled at the sight, then frowned. Jesse was stumbling a little. Frank, who was walking alongside him, caught his arm and steadied him for a moment. Then he glanced back at Joe, who nodded quickly.

“Why don’t you come home with us and thaw out a bit?”

“I w-would ap-preciate th-that,” the Puerto Rican boy stammered, and nearly fell again.

“Looks like you’re getting hypothermic, pal. Let’s get you into the car quick and get the heat on.”

When they reached the Hardys’ car, Frank and Joe took a closer look at the junior and decided he definitely was beginning to feel the effects of hypothermia. He was groggy, his lips were ashen and his coordination was suffering. A few minutes in the front seat with the heat on did him some good, and when they reached the Hardy home, they quickly got him inside. Half an hour later, a mug of steaming cocoa and a dose of electric blanket had restored the youth. “I have never felt so peculiar,” he admitted, looking a bit perplexed.

“You’re not used to this weather, so you’re more susceptible to the cold,” Joe reminded him, and proceeded to list the symptoms of hypothermia. “Problem is, people suffering from it don’t generally realize it. They’re too confused.” He glanced at Frank, who nodded gravely. Both of them had been dangerously hypothermic at various points and had learned how to fight past the fog and recognize the danger. But most people wouldn’t get that sort of opportunity.

“Confused, that was it.” Jesse leaned back against the wall of Joe’s bedroom and took another sip of cocoa. “I wasn’t even sure what I was confused about. Something was wrong, and that was about all I could tell.” He looked over at Frank, who was sitting in his brother’s desk chair. “Thanks. I don’t think I would’ve been able to drive very well.”

“Probably not,” Frank agreed with a nod and a smile.

Chet had moved a few piles of random things to make a place to sit on the floor near the foot of the bed, almost at Frank’s feet. He leaned up against the side of the bed and sighed. “What’re you doing?” his sister asked from the head of the bed, where she was sitting with Joe’s arm around her.

“I’m enjoying the electric blanket,” Chet explained. “Why didn’t anyone give me one for Christmas?”

The other four laughed. “You’ve got to put these things on your list for Santa,” Frank teased, swatting playfully at his friend. “Otherwise, he won’t know.”

“D’you ever clean up?” Iola asked Joe, looking around his room with some trepidation. “I’ve never seen it quite like this before.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” the blond boy muttered, running a hand through his still-damp hair. “He’s already nagged me about it some- how many times was it, Frank?”

“Five hundred and twenty-eight billion,” his brother answered, deadpan.

“My goodness, I guess I don’t stand a chance,” Iola concluded. “But really...”

“Maybe volume will get you somewhere?” Chet suggested.

“No, no, we don’t want much volume. We don’t want to, ah, disturb anyone,” Frank said hastily.

“I wonder where she is, anyway.”

Jesse looked from one Hardy to the other, perplexed.

“Our aunt,” Joe said without elaborating.

“She’s, um...she’s strict,” Frank added.

“Undertatementicity,” Joe mumbled, and silence fell for a moment. “Let’s just say we don’t all get along too well and leave it at that,” he offered eventually.

Jesse nodded, looking only slightly more enlightened. Then he frowned. “You know, I think I’m going to have to impose on you guys again,” he said uncertainly. “My car is still parked near the sledding hill.”

“I’ll take you over when we go,” Chet offered.

“Thanks,” the younger boy said gratefully. A smile crossed his face as he looked around the room again. “Y’know, Lunatic, my little brother’s room is messier than this. He hasn’t got a path at all.”

“Ha!” Joe exclaimed, pounding a fist against the mattress. “There, you see, I’m not the messiest person in Bayport after all!”

“That’s really hard to believe,” Chet said dubiously.

“You just had to go and tell him that! Now he’s never going to clean it up,” Frank remonstrated.

“That’s almost scary,” was Iola’s remark.

“Well, it is a pretty close race,” Jesse conceded with a grin. “But Tomas does have you beat,” he finished, looking at Joe.

“Q! You’re not supposed to encourage him!” Frank protested.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going for the title,” Joe chuckled. “Tomas can have it. I’ll be content to be in second place.”

“Couldn’t you try for, like, tenth?” Iola inquired, prying a sock out from the space between the bed and the wall.

“And here I thought the dryer ate this one,” Joe marveled, taking it and tossing it towards his dresser. “Okay, so maybe it is time to clean up. But not right this moment,” he finished, looking from Iola to Jesse to Frank and then down at Chet. “Not with guests here. That would be so rude.”

They all laughed again and the talk wandered to other things. The sleet pattered on the roof and windows and the wind blew briskly around the eaves, but the warmth of the hot cocoa and the electric blanket kept the chill at bay. After a while Frank got up from the chair and joined them on the bed, saying that his feet were cold. No sooner was he settled between Iola and Jesse than Chet hopped up and took a seat at the foot of the bed. “My rear’s cold,” was his explanation.

“I didn’t know we could get five people in one bed,” Joe mused, leaning on the headboard and cuddling Iola, who was looking decidedly drowsy.

“On,” Frank corrected him sardonically.

Joe tried not to blush as the other two boys snickered. “Get your minds out of the gutter.”

“I’ll second that,” Iola agreed, and jumped violently as the telephone rang. She wasn’t alone; all four of the boys started as well. Joe looked over at Frank, who wasn’t budging. Then he sighed, let go of Iola, whispered, “Pound on him a little,” in her ear and went to answer it.

The caller turned out to be Aunt Gertrude, who informed Joe that she’d be staying the night at Mrs. Thompson’s house. “I am not going to risk driving on the roads,” she explained. Joe spared a moment to check his tongue; his immediate impulse was to ask if she was considering driving on the sidewalk, or perhaps in the trees, but this didn’t seem like a wise thing to inquire. “It’s just too slick, I went out the front door and my feet nearly went right out from under me,” the elderly woman continued. “Besides, Janey Thompson is alone tonight and is feeling a bit poorly. I guess you boys got tired of sledding?”

“Not exactly. We got a bit cold and then we started getting the sleet. Decided to come home while the roads were still driveable. Chet and Iola Morton and Jesse Martinez are with us; Jesse was getting hypothermia and Chet’s car’s heater isn’t working right, so we wanted everyone to warm up before they tried to get home,” Joe explained, frowning. “If it’s as bad as that, they might end up staying the night.”

“I hope there’s enough for you all to eat,” Gertrude said dubiously.

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Joe assured her, thinking of the large quantity of food in the refrigerator. Maybe this would be a good way of reducing some of the leftovers.

“Well, there’s always things in the freezer to defrost,” his aunt agreed. “At this rate, I probably won’t be home until midday tomorrow. I’ve yet to see a snowplow or a salt truck.”

“Same here. Well, as long as we all stay warm, no big deal,” Joe answered easily. After a few more minutes of talk, he said goodbye and returned to his room. Here he discovered that Iola had more than fulfilled his request by getting Chet and Jesse to help her chastise Frank for being so lazy. He joined in enthusiastically and there was a general ruckus for about ten minutes. When the dust finally started to settle, no one really needed the electric blanket to keep warm with any more.

“You traitor,” Chet remarked casually to Jesse after everyone had calmed down somewhat. “You were supposed to help us punish him, not the other way ‘round.”

“I just think four against one isn’t fair,” the younger boy explained.

Frank, who was still being sat upon by his brother and panting from getting his feet tickled by Iola, agreed heartily with this assessment. “You’re my- one true friend, Q. Will you get up, you hippo-rear?” he added to his brother.

“Hippo-rear?” Joe and Iola said in unison. “I have to take exception to that,” Iola went on. “His rear is nothing like a hippo’s.”

“Just as- heavy- as one. Joe, please! I can’t- get my breath.”

Joe promptly got up and re-seated himself at the head of the bed, shoving his brother’s legs out of the way. “Better?”

“Vastly, thank you.” Frank took a long breath, then propped himself up on his elbows and shook his head.

“Exhilarating, wasn’t it?” Chet asked brightly.

“I don’t think that’s the word I want.”

“Maybe you’ve learned a little lesson about being lazy?” Joe suggested.

“I’ve learned a little lesson about traitorous friends and- well, I already knew it about you, you lout.” Frank shoved at Joe’s leg with his foot. “You guys are awful.”

Jesse looked a little bothered, but Chet chortled, poking the young sleuth on the shoulder. “I’ll remind you of that next time we go camping and you tell me ghost stories,” he told Frank, who grinned. “You’re just as awful as we are- worse, ‘cause you’re supposed to be our good example.”

“A thankless task.”

“Aw, have we neglected to thank you lately?” Iola asked sympathetically.

“Yes. I am so taken for granted.”

“Well, let’s start making amends right away. Frank, thank you for coming home so we can take you for granted and torment you and poke fun at you and be generally awful to you.” Iola started laughing. “Q, you should see your face.”

Joe glanced over at the younger boy and chuckled. “Don’t pay attention to him when he gripes. For that matter, that goes for all of us. If we’re ever really ticked off about something, we say so seriously.” He indicated Frank, who was trying to get a glimpse of Jesse’s uncertain expression. “You can bet he’s sitting here thinking up revenge on all of- ack! See!” the seventeen-year-old ended as he was abruptly caught in a headlock.

“I see,” Jesse agreed solemnly.

“These two, they fight all the time, but it’s just pretend,” Chet said placidly, watching the new outburst without interfering. “They really do like each other pretty well. Though you’d think Frank would’ve figured out by now that Joe can pin him real easy.”

“Don’t fall off the bed,” Iola warned.

“You kidding? That’s my secret weapon,” Joe answered a moment later, having finally freed himself without falling off the bed. “Always gives me the upper hand.”

“Like you need it,” Frank retorted. He slumped back on the bed with a little groan and stared up at the ceiling. “Okay, I’m officially beat.”

“I’m officially hungry,” Chet hinted.

“Plenty in the kitchen, help yourself,” Joe panted, trying to push his wild hair out of his eyes. “By the way, it was Aunt G that called,” he added, patting Frank’s leg. “She’s spending the night with Mrs. Thompson, the roads are too slick for her to drive on them.”

“If gets too bad, we might suggest you three stick around tonight,” Frank mused, lifting his head and then letting it drop again. “Especially since it gets dark so fast.”

“And since Q’s car is in the opposite direction from where we all need to go,” Chet agreed seriously. “I’ll take you up on the fridge now, maybe on the rest of it later. See what happens.” With that he got up, managing to get off the bed without stepping on anyone, and went downstairs.

“I’m hungry too,” Iola observed, kissed Joe and followed her brother.

“Not a bad idea, at that.” Joe patted his brother’s leg again. “Maybe if you eat something, you won’t be officially beat, hm?”

“Mmm, but first I got to get allllll the way downstairs...”

“You’re very lazy today, bro,” Joe observed with a grin.

“I went to bed later than you.”

“Well, yes, I suppose you did. I guess you think that qualifies you for special services.” Joe got up, stretched, added, “We’ll see what the waiter’s union has to say,” and went downstairs as well.

“What did that mean?” Jesse asked curiously after Joe had left the room.

“That means he’s going to bring me something up to eat,” Frank answered cheerfully, linking his hands behind his head and turning to look at the junior. “He’s like that. He does really nice things for people, but the way he talks about it, you don’t think he is going to do anything. I take advantage of him sometimes, but he does the same thing to me, so it all evens out.”

“Oh.” Jesse seemed to be digesting that.

“You okay with all this racket? You looked a little unsure for a while there.”

“I guess it’s just different for me,” the younger boy answered slowly, color coming into his face. “I- my brothers and I, we- we just don’t...I mean, I guess I can’t tell when you’re all joking and when you aren’t, yet. Not easily.”

“Not used to the rough and tumble? It’s a society sort of thing,” Frank explained slowly, picking his words with care. “We’re all very, very good friends. But we don’t advertise it much. For us, there’s a sort of level of understanding; we know, just from habit, that the insults are more affection than anything else. And this,” he added with a grin, kicking his heel against the rumpled blanket, “this was affection, too. They’ve already told me they missed me while I was gone; this is another way of telling me.”

“Not the nicest way,” Jesse ventured, lowering his voice. Frank shrugged.

“They weren’t hurting me- they never would, not on purpose. And if they did by accident, they’d feel terrible.”

“But....”

“You still don’t like the odds, huh?” Frank smiled. “Truth is, Jesse, I kinda let ‘em get away with it. I’m a black-belt in martial arts, and they know perfectly well I could throw ‘em across the room if I wanted to.” Actually, since he had neglected to practice lately, he’d probably slipped a bit. Frank made a mental note to start working on his exercises again, then turned his attention back to his friend, who was blushing.

“Oh! You shoulda told me that! I really thought- I dunno what I thought. You Americans are a little weird. Nice,” Jesse added quickly, “but weird.”

Frank sat up and turned to lean his back against the wall. He rested his socked feet on the electric blanket, enjoying the warmth as he tried to think how to explain it. “The thing is, we all understand each other really well,” he said earnestly, thinking that Joe would be a lot better at explaining this than he. “If they had really gone too far, they would’ve known, just by the sound of my voice- and they would’ve stopped at once. There’s a lot of trust wrapped up in all this silliness. The only one who really gets carried away is Biff, just ‘cause he’s so strong. So we’re more cautious when he’s around. Tony’s kinda like you, he knows what it all means, but he stays a bit more on the edge of it. He’d rather be direct with his feelings- and we respect that. If that’s what you prefer, it’ll be fine with us.”

“What’s wrong with being direct?”

“Nothing wrong with it, but it’s a little more private a sort of thing, don’t you think? I mean, if you don’t care who hears, that’s great, but we do care who hears. We’ve all gotten mocked at one time or another for being too...well, too friendly with a friend. And it’s a matter of courtesy, too. You don’t go showing excessive emotion to your girlfriend in public; same with your other friends.”

Jesse shook his head. “I guess it makes sense. I’m just not used to seeing a fight as anything but a fight.”

“But it wasn’t a fight,” Joe said from the doorway. He was holding a mug in each hand, with a spoon sticking out at the top of each. “It wasn’t at all, it was more a matter of excess energy and good feeling than anything else.” He dropped onto the bed and handed Frank one of the mugs of chicken vegetable soup, keeping the other for himself.

“Thanks.”

“No prob. I got the micro first because the other two are having a hard time making up their minds. You want anything, Q?”

“Not right now, thanks. I’m not very hungry yet.”

Joe nodded and started on his soup. “It’s funny, the people we don’t like, we’re polite to- well, maybe not polite,” he amended at Frank’s snort. “But we don’t expend the energy on them that we do on our friends. We might seem awfully shallow and argumentative and even unkind to each other, but you have to know someone incredibly well and be very comfortable with them to indulge in the nonsense we do. You have to lower your defenses and trust ‘em completely.”

“That’s the point I was trying to make,” Frank murmured, giving his brother a smile.

“What, trust that they don’t mean it?”

“No, trust that when they say, oh...”

“Clean your room before someone gets lost in it, you pig,” Frank supplied.

“That- good example- that they’re actually saying- you going to translate?”

Frank laughed. “In this case, it translates to: Brother, I’m afraid you’re going to break your neck if you happen to get up at night. So, for my peace of mind, would you at least consider widening your path a bit?”

Joe nodded. “I’ll think about it. Which means- I may not get to it tonight, but you’ve got a point and it will get tended to, soon.”

Jesse seemed to consider his reply to this for a while. “I see what you mean, and I guess it does make sense. It’s just more complicated than I’m used to. You’ve all been very nice to me, and it’s all had me wondering- not just what was going on, but whether things were going to change. If anyone was going to start being- saying stuff to me that I wasn’t sure how to take.”

“Being mean to you, in other words.” Joe ate a spoonful of soup, then looked at his brother. “Biff,” he said cryptically.

“Yeah, Biff- he’s a good guy,” Frank explained to Jesse. “But he does go overboard with the antics sometimes. We really had to put some pressure on him before he got the idea that Tony didn’t care for all the teasing and hijinks. But once he realized how uncomfortable he was making Tony, he cut it out. So maybe it won’t be too big a problem.”

“Especially since he’s going back to Montana tomorrow for the rest of the school year,” Joe pointed out. “Assuming his plane leaves, that is. Anyway, Q, don’t worry too much about it, okay? If you don’t tease our gang, they won’t tease you.”

Jesse nodded and the three boys were silent, listening to the sleet batter the roof.

“I think you definitely better stick around tonight,” Joe said after a while. “It sounds like it’s getting worse out there.”

The world was a sheet of ice.

Frank turned from his window, his eyes dazzled by the glitter of sunlight off frozen water. The brilliance of the outdoors made the interior of the house seem dark, almost hazy. Blinking, he finished making his bed, moving quietly so as not to disturb Jesse Martinez. Not that Jesse seemed likely to be disturbed; he was lying quite comfortably in the sleeping bag that had been spread on the air mattress on Frank’s floor.

The ice storm had continued through the night; around six-thirty the previous evening, the Morton siblings and Jesse had called their homes to reassure their folks that they were safe in the Hardy residence. Now the storm was over, but it would probably be a while before the roads were driveable. Every branch and twig glittered, every power line was coated, the roofs and cars and streets looked as if they’d been glazed. In a sense, they had been.

As he made his way down the hall, Frank frowned briefly; he hoped there hadn’t been- and would continue not to be- any power outages. He paused and glanced into Joe’s room as he approached the stairs, and stared in surprise at what he saw. Joe was already up and about- shocking, it was only nine in the morning. He was wearing warm old clothes, his headphones were firmly over his ears, and he was cleaning up his room! Frank pushed the door open a bit wider; the movement caught Joe’s eye and he turned. Pulling his headphones down, he remarked innocently, “You look awfully surprised about something.”

“Two somethings. You’re up, and you’re cleaning!” his brother grinned. “And I’m wondering if it’s going to take five hundred and twenty-eight billion repetitions each time to light a fire under you.”

“Probably, yeah,” Joe answered, smiling impishly.

“I guess I better get started then, huh?” The boys shared a quiet chuckle. “Sleep okay?” Frank asked after a moment, tilting his head questioningly. A lock of dark hair fell across his forehead and he pushed it away. Then he caught the comb Joe tossed him.

“You look like a haystack. And yeah, I slept all right. I didn’t wake up, as far as I can remember. How’d it go with you? Q doesn’t snore, does he?”

“No snoring, no bad dreams, no sleepwalking or talking.” Frank pulled the comb through his hair, wincing as the teeth caught on a particularly stubborn tangle. “Not a bad roommate at all.”

“How long do you think it’s going to take him to get used to our, uh, attitudes?”

“Been thinking about that too, huh? I dunno. Ow! Damn knots...”

“You need to get it cut, brother. It’s longer than mine now.” Joe came over to the door and leaned a shoulder against the wall. “I hope Jesse does decide it’s worth it to integrate with us,” he mused, his use of the boy’s name showing how serious he was.

“Yeah, but it wouldn’t be worth it, for him or for us, if all we did was make him uncomfortable.” Frank paused, his hand still in the air. “It’s the culture shock, you know. He said the people he grew up with didn’t act this way.”

Joe nodded. “It was the same for Tony. That’s one reason Tony likes you and I better than Chet and Iola.”

“He told you this?”

“Yep. He said even when we’re badmouthing each other, he can see that it’s all just kidding around.” Joe took his comb back and regarded his brother for a moment. “It’s not that way with Iola and Chet- you know some of their insults at each other are genuine. He says it shows through in their eyes, that they mean it almost as often as not.” The seventeen-year-old shrugged slightly. “We don’t.”

Frank considered that, nodding slowly. Iola and Chet were not very close, certainly nowhere near as close as he and Joe. Sometimes Iola’s spirited ways annoyed Chet; sometimes Chet’s condescending attitude ticked his sister off. “I wonder when we did- I mean we, the gang, not you and I- we have sorta drifted into the realm of insults hiding affection,” he mused aloud. “The smaller the group, the fewer the insults-”

“Unless Biff’s involved. He seems to have this thing about being macho these days,” Joe pointed out. “But yeah, we’ve added a few folks lately, so I guess the antics have taken a bit of a jump. ‘Specially when you mix guys and girls.”

Frank nodded, started to answer- and then a noise behind him caught his attention. He turned quickly and looked down the hall. The door to their parents’ room had just opened and for a heart-stopping moment he almost thought-

Iola, fully dressed but looking very sleepy, wandered down the hall towards them. “Good morning,” she murmured.

Frank drew in a breath and looked at Joe. His brother had gone pale, but he summoned a smile, replied, “Sleep well?” and kissed his girlfriend on the cheek.

“I would’ve, if Chet didn’t snore so much.” Iola wrinkled her nose, then covered a yawn.

“I was just going to get some breakfast. Anyone else coming down?” Frank inquired. Joe pulled off his headphones, went to shut the stereo off and joined Frank and Iola as they went down the stairs.

An hour later, Jesse and Chet had joined them and partaken of breakfast. Today that meant cereal, toast and fruit, since none of the teens felt much like cooking. It was just as well that they didn’t, since was not a great deal to cook; one egg, no bacon and two rather sad-looking sausages. “Funny, all the stuff in there is lunches and dinners. Dunno why I didn’t notice that before,” Joe mused, closing the refrigerator with a sigh. “And I was all set to talk someone into making pancakes,” he added, looking at Chet.

“We might’ve managed some French toast, but it wouldn’t be very tasty with only one egg in the batter,” Chet replied. “Oh well. We’ll make up for it at lunch.”

“You’re still going to be here at lunch?” Frank inquired, winking at Jesse, who smiled.

“Frank, given the sheets of ice coating the great outdoors, we might well be here at breakfast time tomorrow,” Chet pointed out placidly. “Now, if some kind souls would help me chip the car out from under all that ice, we might be able to depart sooner. If the transportation department cooperates.”

Chuckling, the boys agreed to help out. “Although we do have our own vehicle to chip out,” Joe reminded him. “Shoulda put it in the garage,” he added ruefully to Frank, who grimaced in agreement.

It took nearly two and a half hours to get the cars more or less cleaned off; the ice was almost a quarter of an inch thick and even with the window heaters on, a lot of chipping was involved. And it was cold, bitterly cold with strong winds; the young people kept having to duck inside and warm up for a while before heading out to chip more ice.

“I keep worrying that I’ll crack a window,” Jesse said mournfully as they hurried inside for another warm-up. “So I’m going very slowly.”

“We all are. Q, would you be very upset if we left your car where it is until things warmed up a bit?” Chet asked, puffing and shivering from the cold and effort.

“Not a bit,” the Puerto Rican agreed. “It’s too cold and too much ice to try and get it today!”

The Hardys exchanged relieved glances, but said nothing. Neither of them were too gung-ho about the thought themselves, and were glad Chet had spoken up. After they got the last of the ice off Chet’s car, the group went back inside and shed their heavy clothing. Hungry from the prolonged exercise, they all devoured a hot lunch. Iola called home again and spoke with Mrs. Morton, then Jesse took a turn at the phone to reassure his mother.

It was while they were watching a movie that the salt truck finally rumbled down Elm street, leaving melting ice in its wake. “Better wait a while for it to finish melting,” Frank advised, so the group finished the movie before going out to see if it was safe to drive home yet.

“We should be fine. Ma said they went by the highway this morning,” Iola assured her brother, who looked a bit dubious yet.

“And if you just leave me at the top of Carlton, I’ll only have a block to go,” Jesse added.

“Okay.”

“Call us when you get home, just so we know nothing happened,” Joe ordered, looking from Chet to Iola to Jesse. The three promised faithfully and soon Chet’s old car was rattling and wheezing away from the stone house.

“Suppose Auntie will want us to come get her?” Frank wondered as he extracted the DVD from the player.

“Probably not, that’d mean leaving her car behind.” Joe stretched, then said, “Ow.”

“Feeling the ache already?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Here, sit down.”

Joe did as he was bidden, plunking down on the sofa beside his brother; Frank turned him so he was facing the wall and rubbed briskly at Joe’s shoulders and upper back. The younger boy flinched in pain a few times, but admitted he felt a great deal better when Frank was done. “All right, your turn.”

“You’re getting better at this,” Frank commented a few minutes later as Joe’s strong hands worked the knots out of the older boy’s back. “Ouch! Not quite so hard, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t think I was putting any more effort into it than you did,” Joe murmured. “Just tell me if the door opens, you know who wouldn’t approve of this.”

Frank snorted softly but had to agree. Their aunt would doubtless scold them if she could see them now. “Thanks, that helped a lot,” he said quietly, flexing his shoulders experimentally. Then he turned around, smiled, and gave his brother an apparently unexpected hug, judging from the surprised look on Joe’s face.

“What’s that for?” the blond boy asked, returning the hug rather more gently than usual. “Not that I’m griping or anything, just curious.”

“Just...because.” Frank sighed suddenly. The house was so silent now, with their friends gone and the movie over. “Hey, you ever finish your cleaning?”

“Nope. I guess I ought to follow through.” Joe disengaged but kept his arm around Frank, who appreciated the gesture. “She really startled me,” he murmured suddenly. “I thought...for a second...”

“I thought so too.” Frank sighed again and felt the arm across his shoulders tighten. The sight of their parents’ bedroom door opening- just as if they could expect Fenton and Laura to come out and walk down to breakfast- had jolted the youth rather badly. For just a moment, he’d had a wild, impossible hope- hope that had crumbled at the sight of Iola Morton.

Silence lay heavy over the warm, bright, but silent house. Frank let his eyes close, blotting out his sight and sharpening his other senses. The softness of the cushions under him, the warm closeness of his brother and the sound of his breathing; even the steady beat of the pulse in his wrist. And- a car pulling into the driveway.

Frank opened his eyes, got quickly to his feet, grabbed Joe’s wrist and pulled him towards the stairs. When Gertrude entered the house and came up to see what they were into, Joe had replaced his headphones and was busily cleaning out his closet. Frank, sitting on the unmade bed, was placidly reading his book. “It’s about time,” the elderly woman sniffed.

“He can’t hear you, you know,” Frank told her, looking up briefly.

“Eh? Oh. No, I suppose not. I see you all descended on the food like a swarm of locusts,” Gertrude said briskly. “We’ll have to make a grocery trip.”

“Tomorrow. I bet anything the lines at the supermarket are half a mile long right now. And we didn’t defrost anything, so there’s still more than enough for dinner,” Frank answered.

His aunt nodded. Joe caught the motion and glanced over. Then he pulled off his headset and rock music poured out of the earphones. “Hi. How’s Mrs. Thompson?”

“She’s feeling better. Had a bit of a cold, but she’s over the worst of it. It’s high time you cleaned up this room and I’ll be very surprised if you don’t need a special trash pickup when you’re done.”

Joe just shook his head, smiling wryly at the exaggeration. Frank kept his mouth shut and tried to return his attention to his book. Gertrude didn’t easily take the hint and stood talking for a few minutes more; she finally went downstairs after suggesting that the boys clean out the basement tomorrow.

“Clean out the basement? Tomorrow? What, is school cancelled?” Joe wondered when the hallway was empty again.

“It might be. Check the weather,” Frank suggested. Joe obeyed and put his headphones back on.

“No, sunny tomorrow. And warmer,” he reported after a while. Frank nodded and started reading again.

The afternoon passed quietly into evening. Jesse and Iola both called to let the Hardys know that they’d gotten home safely. Joe finished cleaning his room, nudging Frank off the bed and into the desk chair at one point so he could change the sheets of the bed. Frank finished his book and returned it to his room. He hopped online for a while, but desisted when he found nothing really interesting going on. Joe wandered down a little later, looking a bit bored, and the two dug out some old video games that they hadn’t indulged in for a while. Both of them were very rusty and groaned at their poor scores.

“Look at that, not even ten thousand. And to think I got up over a hundred thousand a couple years ago!” Joe lamented.

“You’re doing better than I am. I’d forgotten how limited these old joysticks are,” Frank answered, scowling at the screen in concentration.

“Yeah, but can you imagine doing this with a mouse?”

“Ah, no. That would be very difficult.”

They were both just beginning to improve their scores when their aunt called them for dinner. She had thawed some salmon steaks and served them with a spicy rice concoction that both boys were very fond of. Instead of the usual salad there was broccoli in cheese sauce, not quite as welcome as the rice, but much better than lima beans or creamed spinach.

After dinner and clean-up, Frank checked over his homework to make sure he hadn’t missed any assignments, then inquired somewhat warily if Joe had done his homework yet. “All except the English,” was the surprising reply. Joe usually left all his subjects until the absolute last minute. “I did it after I finished cleaning, while you were online.”

“What’s the English?”

“Oh, you know, Frank, the language we’re talking?” Joe laughed and fended off Frank’s weapon of choice, a wooden coat hanger. “It’s another of Erswin’s stupid tedious reports,” he explained more seriously. “Five pages on anything of interest in geography. I’m going to write how much I’d rather be in Florida.”

“I wouldn’t, not with the flooding they’re having down there.”

“Well...point. Okay, Hawaii, then.”

“Trust you to want to see a volcano erupt. Again.”

“Frank, stop raining on my parade!” Joe answered exasperatedly as the dark-haired boy sat down on the bed. “I’m talking about somewhere warm!”

“Bermuda.”

“Bermuda, so I can solve the Triangle mystery?”

“Sure. As long as you don’t vanish into thin air.”

“Nah, that’d be boring. I wouldn’t get to tell anyone about it.” Joe sat down at his desk. Paper rustled as he opened to a fresh page in his notebook and started writing. “Actually, this’ll be an easy one. As many places as we’ve been, I’ll have plenty to write about without having to do much research,” he commented after a moment.

“A useful side effect of mystery solving.” Frank lay down on the bed and frowned at the ceiling, wondering why he felt so peculiar. Sort of empty and lost and lonely. Not as badly as he had several months ago- or even several weeks ago- but it was still an unwelcome sensation. He said nothing, not wanting to distract Joe from his assignment.

“Have you just been laying here this whole time?”

“Huh?” Frank opened his eyes and blinked up at his brother’s face. Joe was standing beside the bed, looking a little amused. “Did I fall asleep?”

“Couldn’t tell you, I wasn’t looking. I finished my paper and did all the correcting before it dawned on me how quiet you were being. What’s the matter? You don’t look too happy.”

Frank rubbed his eyes, shivered, and sat up. “I don’t know. A touch of the blues, I guess. What time- nine already? I think I did fall asleep. Dang, but it’s gotten cold,” he added, shivering again. “I’m going to take a shower and crawl in bed.”

“Sounds like a nice warm plan,” Joe agreed, leaning over to click on his electric blanket. You- agh!” He swayed suddenly and dropped to his knees on the carpet.

“Joe?” Frank looked over sharply, wondering if Joe had been shocked by the blanket controls. “What-?”

“Ohhh...” the boy gasped, clutching at his head. Then he cried out again and doubled over as if in agony, now holding his stomach. Frightened, Frank slid off the bed and landed beside his brother. Seeing nothing obviously wrong, he took Joe by the shoulders and gently lifted him upright.

“Joe! C’mon, brother, open your eyes... look at me...” No response but labored breathing. Joe’s face was ghastly white, his head sagging, his eyes shut. His face suddenly twisted as though he were in awful pain and he half-raised one hand as if to fend off a strike. A moan tore from his lips and he jerked as though someone had hit or kicked him hard.

Horrified and no little confused, Frank wondered if his brother had somehow been poisoned. But he wasn’t acting poisoned; he was behaving as if someone was attacking him! It must be the unknown telepath at work, but why would the telepath attack Joe? Unless it was someone going for the telepath and it was affecting Joe...the way Joe had gotten the backlash when their father had been attacked by Locke. ‘That must be it. The guy must needing help- but first things first.’ Frank wrapped his arms around his half-conscious brother and pressed his powerful shields into Joe’s mind, guarding the young Teacher from the telepathic assault. “Joe?” he asked softly, fearfully. For a moment Joe’s labored breathing was his only answer, but finally the blue eyes slitted open.

“Frank?” His brother’s voice was weak and shaken.

“Joe, what’s happening? Is it the telepath-”

“I can- hear him. He’s in awful pain, his father’s beating him. He- he thinks his father’s going to kill him this time! Frank, we’ve got to help him, we’ve got to!”

“Easy, take it easy, Joe. We will. But where is he?” the older boy asked urgently.

“I- I can guide you- he’s nearby. In Bayport. East Side.”

“It figures,” Frank said grimly, pulling both of them to their feet. Joe swayed and clutched at his arm. “How’re we going to manage this if I’ve got to keep my shields on you just to keep you conscious?”

For answer, he felt Joe’s own steel shields slowly lifting into place. Joe seldom used them, but Frank suddenly felt very grateful that his brother had these defenses- he clearly needed them! “I- I think it’ll be enough.” Joe still sounded rather shaky, but he let go of Frank and started for the door. Frank grabbed up the car keys from the desk and hurried out of the room.

It took them several minutes to get on their way; Joe was slow and clumsy from distraction. Finally Frank steered him out to the car and they got in. The dark-haired Hardy had a sudden, intense feeling of deja vu as he started the engine and drove where his brother told him. ‘Dad,’ he thought, gritting his teeth. ‘But this is different.’ He cast a quick glance at Joe, whose eyes were closed and whose expression, even in the dark, looked strained. ‘Dad was knocked out. This one, whoever he is, is still broadcasting his feelings to Joe.’

Frank pulled his attention back to the situation at hand, carefully stifling his worries and speculations in favor of getting wherever they were going in one piece. The drive to the East Side was a short one, but once they were in the general area it became obvious that the salt trucks had not been nearly so busy in this area of town. He had to slow way down and even so he felt the car fishtail every so often.

“There,” Joe said suddenly, pointing at a dilapidated house on the corner of the block. It was darker than the other houses, and the car sitting on the street in front of it was about one step ahead of the junkyard. Frank pulled in to the curb; Joe struggled out of the car and stumbled up the icy walk. Frank followed quickly and they both slithered a few times before reaching the door. Joe’s breathing had quickened and Frank heard him groan softly as they skidded to a halt outside the front door. “Hurry,” the blond boy said hoarsely. “He’s in bad shape.”

Frank nodded and tried the door. To his astonishment, it opened easily and he ran in. As he did, a short, heavily-muscled man whirled around, then steadied himself against a battered sofa. He was holding a heavy leather belt in his big hand, doubled over. A weak moan broke the tense silence, but Frank couldn’t see who had uttered it.

“Who th’ hell’re you?” the man growled, taking an unsteady step forward. “Whatcha doin’ in m’house?”

“Drunk,” Joe murmured. He moved past Frank and went around to the far side of the sofa- then gasped and dropped out of sight. Frank edged around to the end of the sofa to look, and felt a surge of anger and horror at the sight the met his eyes. A half-naked boy of fourteen or fifteen lay curled in a fetal position, his arms wrapped loosely around his head and his thin, bare body streaked with welts. He whimpered as Joe gently touched his hand.

“Who we are is none of your business, and what we’re doing is taking-”

“Stuart,” Joe’s thought reached him.

“-Taking Stuart away from you before you kill him,” Frank finished coldly.

The man was silent, blinking. He appeared to be about fifty, dressed in ragged jeans, a torn red tee-shirt and sneakers that were falling apart. His thin, greasy black hair was liberally sprinkled with gray and his features were puffy and red- the effects of heavy drinking. He had probably been quite powerful, his arms and shoulders were still well developed and his legs were thick, but he had a considerable beer-belly. “Kill him?” he repeated at last.

“Looks like you were getting a good start on it,” Frank snapped, moving to his brother’s side and looking down at the boy. Stuart had lowered his bruised arms and was staring at Joe with wide black eyes. He was also shivering with cold or fear or shock- probably all three. His dark hair was long and tangled, his face pinched and his ribs stuck out. His bare arms were thin, too- probably didn’t get nearly enough to eat, the young sleuth concluded.

“Who...?” the boy whispered. “How-?”

“Later,” Joe told him. “Can you get up and walk a little way? Our car’s outside.”

“You’ll need a coat,” Frank was adding when movement caught his eye. The boy’s father lunged at them, bellowing in his rage, the belt lifted high over his head. Knowing Joe’s usually swift reflexes were dulled from his mental exertion, Frank sprang up and met the enraged man’s charge easily. Two quick kicks and a punch later, the man was sprawled on the floor, the belt falling from his limp hand.

“Stuart,” Joe said softly from behind him. Frank turned; the battered boy was sitting up, his hand clutching Joe’s arm, staring at his father. Then he looked up at Frank incredulously. “Stuart, we need to get out of here. Is there anything you want to take with you? Clothes? Other stuff?”

“Clothes...yeah.” Stuart struggled to his feet; Joe steadied him, glanced at the man on the floor and then traded a glance with Frank, who nodded. Frank would keep an eye on the man while Joe and Stuart got the boy’s things.

While he waited for Joe and Stuart to collect the boy’s things, Frank took the opportunity to look around. It wasn’t quite as bad as the slum he’d stayed in during the summer while trying to find Pearson and Locke, but it wasn’t far from it, either. The furniture all looked third-hand at best, the walls were battered and stained, the ceiling had cracks running from wall to wall and the carpet was nothing less than filthy. Frank could see into the kitchen through the doorway, but decided not to check it out; he felt, rather cynically, that he’d as soon not test his nausea levels by seeing how revolting a food-preparation room could get.

The man at his feet hadn’t so much as twitched by the time Joe and the boy Stuart came back into the room. Stuart was moving slowly, but had put on a clean sweatshirt and carried a small backpack. He paused to stare at his father, then jumped as Joe touched his arm and hurried towards the door. Frank was a little surprised at how trusting the boy seemed, but the sending was probably the explanation for that. He moved away from the man, pausing long enough to pick up the belt and carry it along. Stuart got a thin denim jacket from a closet near the door and the trio of teens departed in grim silence.

Once they got into the car- the Hardys in the front seat and Stuart lying in the back seat- all was very quiet while Frank concentrated on getting them home. In the back of his mind, he was beginning to wonder what they’d gotten themselves into. Getting the boy away from his abuser was all very well, but they’d have a lot to explain and arrange. ‘Child Protection Services,’ he thought. ‘And there’s the Foster Care Agency, if Stuart doesn’t have anyone else to look out for him. It’ll probably take him a while to get placed, though. Might have to keep him at our house until someone can take him in.’

“I heard that,” Joe sent softly. The younger Hardy’s mental touch was still stressed, but calmer than before. “Why don’t we worry about that tomorrow?”

“You and I are going to be in school tomorrow,” Frank pointed out the same way. “Till the afternoon, anyway. Well, maybe Aunt G can be talked into helping out with this. It’s definitely her kind of cause.”

Joe agreed silently. Whatever else they might say about their aunt, they knew she had no tolerance for any sort of abuse. She wouldn’t hesitate to throw her formidable capacity for taking charge into helping anyone so brutalized. “His room was the only clean part of the whole damn house,” he remarked a moment later. Frank glanced over; his brother’s eyes were closed and his forehead knotted.

“You all right?”

“I’m better. I’ll be better yet when he calms down a little. He’s terrified.”

“Talk to him,” Frank suggested. “So he doesn’t think we’re kidnapping him.”

“Good idea.” Joe sat up, turned partway around in his seat, and said softly, “So what’s your last name?”

“R-Ryder. With a y, not an i,” the boy answered.

“And that was your father?”

“Y-yes. Who- who are you? Why...what’s going on? How’d you know my name, how’d you know anything?”

“Easy,” Joe said softly. “I’m Joe. Our chauffeur is my brother Frank, and we found you because you’ve been yelling for help for quite a while.”

“I...what? Yelling?”

“In your mind,” Joe explained.

“Then- then I- ow.”

“Don’t sit up so fast,” Joe warned, apparently a moment too late.

“I wasn’t dreaming? Someone really was hearing me?”

“That was me, yes. I didn’t think you heard me trying to answer.”

“I kept getting stuck,” the boy answered miserably. “I’d call out and I’d hear someone saying something, and then it would repeat and repeat- like a stuck record. And I- I thought I was dreaming anyway. I mean, I’ve heard about people reading minds and stuff, but I always thought that was impossible!”

“We used to think that ourselves,” Joe agreed. “Till this past summer. There aren’t too many people who can do it, but we two can, and you can, and two other people we know about. Our aunt is one of them.” He paused, then evidently decided not to talk about Akilana yet. “Anyway, I can teach you how to do it a little better. Later. For tonight, we’ll just go home, introduce you to our aunt, and then get some rest. We have to be in school tomorrow-”

“You guys are in school?” Stuart sounded flatteringly disbelieving.

“I’m a senior,” Joe explained, amused.

“And I’m in my first year at Bayport U,” Frank spoke up, thinking it was high time he said something.

“Oh. I’m fifteen, I’m a sophomore at Trinly,” Stuart replied, sounding shy. “I’m not doing too good, though.”

“Your father would be responsible for some of that, I’d say,” Frank muttered.

“Yeah. Pop- when he’s sober he’s okay, but he’s not sober much anymore.” The resignation in the boy’s voice was frightening.

“Well.” Joe took a deep breath. “I’m honestly not completely sure what we can do about this. But we’ll worry about it tomorrow, after school. Do you think we should go to the hospital?” he added doubtfully to Frank.

“We could, but-”

“No!”

Startled, the Hardys were silent a moment. “Why not?” Frank asked eventually.

“I don’t need a hospital. A-and anyway, I don’t have any way to pay for it. And they’d ask questions...”

“They would ask questions,” Joe agreed slowly, exchanging a glance with Frank. “But that might not be a bad thing. They might be able to get you into a care program right away.”

“Do you have any relatives?” Frank asked, suddenly remembering this aspect.

“Just Pop. Mom died a couple years ago. We took her to the hospital and she died,” Stuart explained softly.

That explained his fear of hospitalization. “But you might have a broken bone or something,” the dark-haired boy pointed out. “Or something wrong with you inside...”

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like it. I’ve had bones broken before,” the boy explained casually. “He was mainly hitting my back and arms- I was just afraid he wasn’t going to stop this time. He- it was what he was saying that made me think that, not really the beating. He said he’d had enough of putting up with me and it was time he stopped.”

Silence fell again. “Let’s just take him home,” Joe sent after a minute. “We can check him over and if he does need treatment, we can take him in. There are going to be a lot of questions, and he obviously won’t have insurance.”

Frank nodded slightly and continued towards High and Elm. Joe was right. It was late; there would be a long wait in the emergency room and an awkward situation once they did get processed. And there was no guarantee that the hospital could provide the boy with shelter anyway; they’d probably end up taking him home eventually. Might as well save time and trouble and just go home.

“Where in the world have you-?” Gertrude’s cross remark broke off in mid-word as she got a look at the thin, wan figure that Joe was supporting into the house. “Who is this? What have you two been up to now?” she demanded, hastening forward and helping Stuart to the sofa. “Oh my goodness, how dreadful,” she murmured, staring at the boy’s bruised face. “Whoever did this to you?”

Stuart just stared at her with big, unnerved eyes. Gertrude turned to the boys, who were peeling off their jackets. Frank set Stuart’s backpack on the floor beside the sofa and replied, “It’s pretty complicated. Auntie, this is Stuart Ryder. Stuart, our aunt Gertrude. He was in East Side and-”

“Did you run into a gang of hoodlums? Gracious, you should know better than to be in that rough part of the city,” Gertrude scolded, shaking her head.

“I- I live there. W-with my father. He was the one who-”

“Your father?” Gertrude’s brown eyes bulged. “Your own father did this to you? Oh! Call the police!” she demanded, swinging back to her nephews.

“That would require certain explanations,” Joe told her tiredly. He sank down on the sofa and pressed his hands against his temples briefly, trying to strengthen his shields. It didn’t help much. “Calm down,” he added quietly to the bewildered Stuart. “You’re safe here.”

Gertrude frowned. “So you’re one of ‘those’ too, are you?”

Joe was about to snap at her when Frank intervened, moving to the sofa and putting a calming hand on his brother’s shoulder. Joe bit his tongue and let Frank handle the situation. “One of ‘us’, you mean. Stuart’s ability has been sparked by the treatment he’s been getting from his father. He needed help and he happened to reach Joe. So we went to get him out of there.”

Gertrude softened slightly and nodded. “I see. I can’t say I approve of all this mind contact,” she told Stuart, who just gazed at her, “but since it was really your father’s fault, I suppose I can’t blame you. You couldn’t help it. And it did at least get you away from him.”

Joe tensed and felt his brother’s hand tighten on his shoulder. Frank was right, this wasn’t the time for a blowup, but he wanted so badly to... Scowling, he stood up from the sofa and looked at the boy. “Why don’t we go on upstairs and take care of those welts?” he suggested. Stuart turned to look up at him, nodded, and slowly got up.

“While you’re doing that, I’ll fix some soup.” Gertrude hurried into the kitchen and the light flicked on. Joe guided Stuart towards the stairs; Frank followed, carrying the boy’s backpack.

The next half hour seemed to flicker by. The Hardys, long accustomed to injuries both serious and superficial, looked Stuart over carefully and decided he wasn’t badly hurt. Stuart asked wistfully if he might take a shower and Joe agreed at once; it hadn’t been so noticeable in the car, but there was a distinctly unpleasant odor hanging around the young teen. It seemed to consist mainly of old beer, old cigarettes and rotting food. It was the odor of the house where they’d found the kid, he realized after a moment’s thought.

Stuart washed very quickly; he was out of the bathroom in ten minutes and Joe gave him an old, too-small pair of pajamas and a rather worn robe. The boy’s long black hair was still tangled but no longer greasy, and his thin face, though bruised, was actually not unattractive.

“Thank you,” Stuart said shyly as he sat hesitantly on the edge of Joe’s bed. Joe was sitting at the foot, near Frank, who was in the desk chair. “I feel a lot better.” The black eyes focused on Joe, studying him. Then he looked at Frank. “You’re really brothers?”

Both the Hardy boys smiled. “Yeah. No one ever thinks so, though.” Joe forbore to mention that he resembled Laura while Frank resembled Fenton. It had been something he usually said to the myriad people who remarked that they didn’t look much alike, but since July, he’d stopped saying it.

“Is...” Stuart hesitated and twisted his fingers together. “Is your aunt...um-”

“She’s usually like that, yes. We don’t exactly get along with her too well, but she’s our legal guardian, so we have to deal with her. And she with us,” Frank explained. “She’s resisted the idea of telepathy ever since she learned there really is such a thing. And she’s always been rather-”

“Sharp-tongued,” Joe interjected.

“You’re not too bad at that yourself, Joe.”

“Yeah, but usually for better reasons,” the blond boy grumbled. “Anyway, I doubt you’ll need to get used to it,” he added to Stuart. “Like we said, we can take you to the Protection Services people tomorrow and they can place you with a good family- hopefully pretty quickly. We don’t qualify,” he added, seeing the look of disappointment that came over the boy’s face. “In fact, I’m kinda lucky not to be in foster care myself-”

“Over my dead body,” Frank muttered, his eyes narrowing in a frown.

Joe shot his brother a brief, affectionate glance, then looked back at Stuart as the boy asked, “But what about- I mean, you said you could teach me?”

“Oh, I can still teach you,” Joe assured him. “Just because you won’t be living here doesn’t mean you can’t come by every week or so for a telepathy lesson. Perfectly natural, no one would think twice about it. But we do have to be sort of careful about it,” he added, deciding this was a good time for the first lesson. He had just finished explaining why telepaths went to great lengths to avoid telling non-telepaths about the ability when Gertrude pushed the door open.

“Joe, stop filling his head with that!” the elderly woman snapped.

“He needs to know it,” Joe retorted. “You don’t want other people finding out about it, do you?” It was more statement than question.

“I should say not-”

“And you don’t want him inadvertently picking up other people’s thoughts or sending his own out,” Joe pressed.

“Well, no,” the woman answered stiffly.

“Same logic applies here as when I was teaching you,” the seventeen-year-old concluded. “And it’ll apply to anyone else I teach, if there ever is anyone else.”

Gertrude made a sour face. “Come and have some soup,” she said briskly to Stuart. “And did you take care of all those injuries?” she added as she shepherded the lad towards the stairs.

“Yes, ma’am,” Joe heard the boy say meekly, and then he got up and shut the door.

“It’s not his ‘fault’?” he muttered bitterly, plunking back down on his bed. Frank nodded, casting his eyes at the ceiling.

“It’s not his fault he’s telepathic ‘cause his father beat it into him,” the dark-haired boy muttered. “Well, guess what, it’s not our ‘fault’, either. You didn’t ask to get locked in a trailer ‘til your mind turned telepathic- and I sure didn’t ask to go nuts worrying about you.”

Joe frowned at the memory, then sighed. “Y’know, that memory doesn’t bother me like it used to,” he remarked.

Frank nodded. “Time...distance...worse things to deal with,” he murmured bleakly.

“You still feeling in the dumps?” Joe asked rhetorically.

“I’m a little unhappy with Callie,” his brother admitted. “She said she’d call, but she never did. I asked her to come over with Iola and Chet and Q, and she turned me down, saying she had a paper to work on- but she was still there for the sledding. I guess it was important to her to get together with the gang, but not quite as important to spend a little time with me,” he finished bitterly.

Joe frowned more deeply, bothered. Frank and Callie had occasionally had arguments and rough times, just like any other couple, but it wasn’t like Callie Shaw to take her boyfriend for granted, or even to forget to call him. She was very reliable in this regard. In fact, Joe mused, the girl was very reliable in many regards. She was a good person; she just got too competitive sometimes, arguing at the drop of a hat and making a tempest in a teapot. And sometimes she got too possessive of Frank. In fact, considering how possessive she could get, it was rather shocking to think of her taking Frank for granted.

“Well,” he said slowly after a short interval of silence, “maybe something’s up? It’s not at all like her to forget to call you. Or- hey, maybe the storm played havoc with the phone lines.”

Frank’s expression lightened. “I didn’t think of that. You may be right, I remember hoping that no one had lost power,” he replied in a much more relaxed voice.

Joe forbore to mention that they hadn’t had any trouble calling the Mortons or Martinez’s. The Shaws might be on another circuit. Weirder things had happened. “Getting back to Stuart,” he remarked. “What say we report to the police before his father gets out a charge of kidnapping?”

“A good idea,” Frank agreed, sitting up straighter- he’d been leaning against the back of the chair. “Only one problem: how do we explain the fact that we just swooped down and took him away? How’d we know he needed help?”

Joe frowned again, this time in concentration. “What were we doing in East Side...” A long silence fell. After a while, the blond boy sighed. “This really makes me feel bad, you know? Bad enough having to make up a story to explain it, without not being able to think of one.”

“I think your grammar needs some help, Joe, but I know what you’re getting at. I don’t like lying either, but...I guess we should be glad we can’t think of anything.”

“Glad?”

“The alternative would be that we’ve gotten so used to lying that it comes easily,” Frank explained wryly.

“Oh.” Joe nodded and scratched his chin. “Hmmmmm. Ryan,” he said suddenly. “We were talking about Ryan yesterday. He’s in East Side. We decided to check up on him, make sure he was still going straight. Got turned around in the dark, trying to watch out for ice patches instead of concentrating on our directions. Pulled over to look at a map and heard a racket coming from Stuart’s house. And, being detectives, checked it out. Just the sort of thing we always land in.”

Frank’s dark eyes opened wider and a smile slowly crossed his face. “Very good,” he murmured. “Very, very good. Exactly the sort of thing we’d do... I wonder,” he mused. “I wonder if Ryan’s uncle would be willing to take Stuart in? Maybe it’d be company for both boys.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Joe answered, feeling pleased at the compliment. “But it’d probably be better to go through official channels. I imagine there’d be a stink if we tried to deliberately put a fifteen-year-old in a home on the East Side- even if he came from there in the first place. At least, not right off. If we find it’s taking too long, we can look into that, and they might agree just to get one more case settled.”

“You’re a cynic,” Frank murmured.

“Part-time cynic. I believe it has something to do with the fact of who’s my legal guardian at the moment,” Joe replied grimly.

“Yyyeeeaahh.” Frank drew the word out bitterly. Neither of the teens had seen anything wrong with trying to get Frank declared Joe’s legal guardian, even if he was just a year and a half older. But the state had disagreed and Gertrude had been named instead.

“I wonder if they’ll reconsider when you turn nineteen?” Joe wondered aloud, wistfully.

“Not very likely. At least you don’t have very long to wait till it’s ineffective.”

“Six more months- well, five and a bit.” Joe looked at his brother suddenly. “And you’ve only got a week till you get old and gray-”

“Whoa, there, I thought you were being the elder this year,” Frank laughed. “You can’t call me old if you’re older!”

“Oh, I forgot about that.” Joe grimaced.

“They say the memory is the first thing to go with you ancient folks,” Frank needled, and laughed again as Joe sent the pillow sailing at him. “All right, enough of that. You’ve got to be careful of your poor, tired old bones-”

Joe sprang up and a playful wrestling match was just about to get off to a flying start when Gertrude pushed the door open. “Auntie, you always insist that people knock on your door. Would it be too much to ask for you to knock on ours before you come in?” the blond boy asked impatiently.

Gertrude ignored him. “I’m putting Stuart on the sofa for tonight. If he needs to stay longer with us, we may need to improvise a bit. Maybe one of you could take over your parents’ old room. I don’t think it would work to have any of you boys doubling up, and it would be silly to do that anyway when space is going to waste in there.”

That took a moment to get through, but when it did, Joe flushed with anger.

“It would have to be Stuart,” Frank said softly, but his jaw was tight. “I won’t sleep in there.”

“I don’t want to sleep in there, either,” Joe agreed grimly. “And I don’t appreciate that ‘silly’ remark. We have good reasons for not wanting to use that room.”

“Joe, it’s a room,” Gertrude snapped. “That’s all. And it is pure silliness not to make use of it-”

“If you feel that way, you use it!” Joe flared. “I won’t sleep in there!”

“That might have some downsides,” Frank pointed out mentally. “At least when she’s downstairs we don’t have to worry about waking her up at night.”

“It’s too big for me,” the elderly woman was saying with exaggerated patience. “You boys have much more in your rooms than I do in mine. And it is a waste of space. You’ve been keeping it as a shrine to your parents’ memories and it’s time you realized that they aren’t going to use it anymore. You ought to have figured it out by now,” she added to Joe. “Considering.”

Joe felt the blood leave his face. Without a word, he pushed past his aunt. A bare minute later he was out the front door, zipping his jacket against the icy night wind and trying to keep his tears inside of him.

“Joe!” Frank called after his brother as the younger boy fled the room, but there was no response, aloud or telepathically. “You-” he growled, turning on his aunt. Why was it that when he most wanted to swear, none of the cusswords he knew seemed bad enough to use? “You did that on purpose!”

“Of course I did it on purpose! You can’t live in the past, Frank-”

“I’m not talking about that!” Frank shouted, his control cracking. “You hurt him, on purpose! You deliberately implied that he was keeping a shrine in there because he’s feeling guilty for what happened to Mom! And I told you, he’s not responsible for it!”

Gertrude looked a little surprised, but mostly grim. “He is,” she contradicted flatly.

Frank was on his feet, his hand raised, before he realized what he was about to do. “By your way of looking at it, you’re as responsible as he is,” he gritted out, forcing his hand to drop. “Because you didn’t tell her to buckle up, either, before she walked out of the house.”

“Don’t you try that on me, Franklin Hardy!” the woman shrieked. “He was with her, I was not!”

“Don’t call me that,” was Frank’s first response. “And it makes no difference if you were there or not. Just like it makes no difference that Mom was perfectly capable of buckling her own seatbelt. You should’ve warned her. You should’ve known she was distracted and reminded her. After all, no one in this house does anything right but you...according to you!”

Gertrude’s eyes bulged in anger and something that seemed to resemble astonishment. “How can you possibly draw any sort of-”

“I’m doing what you’re doing! I’m being exactly as reasonable and logical about this as you are!” Frank yelled at her. “From the way you talk, you might just as well say Joe was in the truck that slammed them off the road! Why?” he asked suddenly, something snapping together in his mind. “You never liked Mom- did you decide Joe’d make a good replacement for your scorn, since Mom isn’t around to direct it at anymore?”

“Scorn! You want scorn, you talk to your brother! Assuming he is your brother.”

“What?! What the fuck is that supposed to mean!?”

“Your brother! Rude, lazy, spiteful-”

“He learned the arts of rudeness and spite from a master,” Frank snapped. “You! And if you want proof, you just take apart some of your words to him-”

“He has nothing but scorn for me, is it such a surprise that I’d return it?”

“It’s the other way around. He didn’t stop caring about you until you refused to quit treating him like garbage!” Frank caught his breath, tried to reassemble some of his customary self-control. “To hell with all that.” The young man glared at the old woman. “You tell me what you meant by that remark about ‘assuming he is your brother’.” Not that he needed the clarification- but no, she couldn’t really mean that, could she? Surely she’d just spat it out in anger...

“I wouldn’t’ve put it past your mother!” Gertrude shrilled. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised- he looks nothing like your father, nothing, only like your mother. Lucky for him, and luckier for her!”

A tempest of fury screamed through Frank Hardy’s soul. “You wouldn’t put it past her? Yeah, that’d hold up real well in court,” he managed through gritted teeth. “Real convenient for you that she’s not here to refute it. Coward!” he snarled, his control shattering completely. “Spiteful, rude bitch of a coward! You couldn’t say a word about it while she was alive, but now she’s gone and you can stab her in the back as brutally as you want. Well, go on. Believe in your lies and poison yourself with bitterness and hate and cruelty. But don’t you ever dare to tell me you care about me again! You don’t. You’re not capable of it, no more than any other slime that crawls out from under a dead log!”

“I do care about you-”

Frank stepped forward and slapped his aunt hard across the face. The move shocked him almost as deeply as it shocked her. “You don’t! No one who cared even an atom about me would say the things you’ve said about my mother and my brother!” he hollered.

Silence fell across the room, a taut and uneasy silence. The combatants stared at each other, both waiting for the next move. Frank searched inside of himself for something that would convey the depth of his rage, and finally he spoke in a cold, quiet voice.

“As of tonight, I am no blood with you.”

“You’re blood kin with me whether you like it or not. Unless you want to deny your father,” Gertrude retorted, fire in her eyes. “At least I can truthfully deny your brother-”

“So that’s it. You don’t want him for a nephew. So you decided he’s illegitimate and that settles the situation very nicely, to your liking,” Frank said in the same cold voice. “And how exactly is that different from me deciding that the real reason Grandpa never liked you was because Grandma passed someone else’s bastard off as his?”

The old woman’s jaw dropped.

“Sure does explain why you and Dad were so different. Certainly explains why Grandpa was so rough on you, the cuckoo in his nest. Explains why he never said much about Grandma, too. She betrayed him, but people just didn’t talk about bastards in those days- did they?”

Gertrude sputtered, but managed nothing coherent.

“If you’re so dead set that Mom screwed around-” ‘Ow,’ the boy thought; ‘that’s rude. Sorry, Mom.’ “I bet it was because you really were trying to deflect your anger at your own mother onto her. Because you sure weren’t allowed to direct anything at your own parents- not without getting a whipping for it.”

“Not a word you’ve said is true!”

“Maybe, maybe not. I’m free to believe it, though. Just like you’re free to believe that Mom had an affair, that Joe’s only my half-brother, and that he was in some way at fault for the crash. I may not be able to change your mind, but there’s no way on earth you can change mine, either. The difference is, you want me to respect you. While I- I don’t give a shit whether you respect me or not. You’ve convinced me tonight that your respect is nothing that any decent human being needs. Nor should want to have.” Frank stepped forward and his aunt shrank back. He ignored the cringe and walked past her into the hall. “I’m going to find my brother. Half or whole, he’s my brother, and worth five hundred of you.”

“Joe! Joe...where are you, kiddo?”

Joe Hardy, shivering at the foot of a tree in Willow Woods, closed his eyes at the familiar mental call. He’d stormed out of the house some time back, startling the young telepath Stuart in the process, but once he’d gotten outside he had not been too sure where to go. It was nearly eleven-thirty, cold, windy and icy. Finally he’d made his way into the forest, knowing the trees would provide some cover. There was a drawback to that, of course; the full moon was out, but the shadows under the wood made it hard to see. He’d thought that he might be able to make a little fire, but the sheathing of ice on the wood had spoiled that notion.

“I’m...here, in the woods,” he answered the mind-call wearily, wiping his cold hand across his cheeks. A few minutes later, cracking and crunching noises heralded the approach of his older brother. Frank crouched beside him and took his hands, rubbing some warmth back into them.

“It’s just as well you left when you did,” the elder Hardy said after a little bit. Joe felt him shiver as a gust of wind roared past. “Things got pretty ferocious. I gave her hell.” Silence again; Joe could think of nothing to say. And he didn’t really want to know what else had happened after he left. “I know you don’t want to go back,” Frank said at last, “but I think it’d be better than trying to camp out tonight.”

A noise somewhere between a sob and a laugh wrenched from Joe’s throat. “P-probably,” he agreed. The next one definitely was a sob, and suddenly he was crying hard, clutching at the ice-covered trunk of the nearby tree for support. He felt his brother’s arm encircle him, but didn’t let go of the tree. He could hear Frank saying something, but the wind and his own violent emotions prevented him from hearing. Finally he spent himself and simply crouched, shuddering with cold and exhaustion.

“C’mon,” Frank said softly in his ear. “We need to get you home, little brother. You’re cold.”

“Why did she say it?” Joe whispered, letting his brother hoist him to his feet. “She- she still thinks...and she wants me to think it, too! Why?”

“As far as I can figure it, you’re Mom’s...replacement,” Frank said bleakly as they walked through the windy woods. “You know they never really got along very well, and now she can’t vent any venom at Mom, so...” He paused and sighed, his breath puffing into the icy air. “I hit her,” he confessed quietly. Joe stopped in his tracks.

“You what?”

“I slapped her spiteful face.”

Joe had no idea how to respond, so he said nothing. At Frank’s gentle tug, he started walking again. “At least you didn’t punch her,” he said finally. “I’ve been tempted myself...”

“Yeah, but being tempted and actually doing it-” Frank sounded rather ashamed of himself. “I don’t regret anything I said, but I do wish I hadn’t done that. It wasn’t right.”

Joe had to agree. Hitting an old woman was not right, no matter how bitchy, rude and hateful she was being. But he couldn’t find it in him to feel very sorry about it. On the contrary, the fact that his brother had gone so far as to do such a thing made him feel a deep and shameful joy. It was an indication of how much his brother cared about him, and how Gertrude’s cruelty had affected Frank. It was rare indeed for Frank to lose control to that extent. “Well, it may not have been right, but I think it was deserved,” he answered at last. “Oh. We never called the police about Stuart,” he recalled suddenly.

“I forgot all about it,” Frank agreed. “Poor kid. Not the best introduction we could’ve given him to our house.”

“No.” Joe grimaced and hurried his pace as they approached their home. “Hm. He must have some version of shields, he’s not in contact with me anymore,” he added quietly as they went up the driveway.

The reason for that turned out to be a simple one. Entering the living room, the Hardys saw that the boy had fallen asleep on the couch. “Nearly midnight,” Frank sent with a mental groan. “Let’s call in our report to the police and go to bed.”

“On the upstairs extension,” Joe agreed silently, shedding his coat.

Frank did so; while he was on the phone, Joe took a very fast shower, more for the sake of warming up than of cleaning up. When he got back to his room, his brother was again lying on the bed, clad in his nightclothes and frowning at the ceiling. “Well, it started as a pretty decent day,” he remarked sourly as Joe got into his own pajamas and sat down with a tired sigh.

“Yeah...”

“How’s your head?”

Joe put his hand on his temple with a frown. “Okay, now, but I hope I don’t have to go through something like that every time someone starts reaching out,” he answered grimly. “It was extremely unenjoyable, felt exactly as if someone was beating the crap out of me.”

“Unlikely it’ll happen again,” Frank pointed out, turning to look at him. “I doubt that most telepaths get it beaten into them the way Stuart has.”

“I sure hope not.” Joe paused and let his hand fall to the warm blanket. “What’d the police have to say?”

Frank rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “Thanked me for making the report and told me that Mr. Zachary Ryder was taken in about an hour ago. For shooting off a rifle.”

Joe’s eyes widened. “That mad, huh?”

“Desk officer said Ryder claimed he was celebrating.”

“Celebrating?” Joe repeated incredulously. Frank nodded.

“Sorta fits in with what Stuart said about his dad earlier. Deciding he wasn’t going to ‘put up’ with him anymore. I get a feeling Ryder just wanted him gone, one way or another, and couldn’t think of any better way to get rid of him than to kill him. It’s the sort of thing that sounds reasonable when you’re drunk and stoned.”

“Stoned too? On?”

“A mix of things,” Frank replied. “Explains why his reactions were so weird. Makes me wonder...”

“Makes me wonder, too. Like if he’s telepathic himself and is trying to wipe it out by zoning his mind out. Or if he thinks he’s schizophrenic, maybe.”

Frank smiled grimly. “Gee, you read my mind,” he said, and both the boys smiled briefly at the joke. Then Joe’s expression grew serious and he touched his brother’s arm.

“Still down?”

“I’m mainly mad. At her.”

“I hope you get to sleep,” Joe murmured. He knew from experience how hard it was to sleep when you were angry.

“Oh, I will.” Frank paused to yawn. “Sooner or later.” Sitting up, he gave his brother’s hair a brief tousle, then put his arm around Joe’s shoulders. “Speaking of sleeping. You have any difficulty, you know where to find me.”

“I sure do,” Joe agreed, smiling. “Unless you’ve taken to sleeping in the bathtub lately.” Frank tried to cover his grin by rolling his eyes, but it didn’t work.

“Have I ever mentioned-?”

“Yes, frequently, and I’m not the only one.” Joe gave his brother’s hand a squeeze and then moved aside so Frank could scoot off the bed.

“Just checking, you nut.” The dark-haired boy stood up. “Night, bro.”

“Good night.”

End of part 6