by W. J. May
A muscle twitched in Devon’s jaw.
“How about we leave my kids out of this.”
“Not even eight years old and they’ve already saved the world!”
“And we agreed to keep that private,” Devon snapped, glaring with open dislike.
Barnes pushed slowly to his feet, catching his breath.
“And I’ll respect that,” he said calmly. “But things are changing, Devon. I read about it every day. Powers like the ones we’re seeing now are too big to keep locked away in the shadows. It’s time to take those next few steps. And I want you to take them with me.”
He headed to the door without another word, pausing in the frame.
“Together...we can do great things.”
DEVON SAT ON A PARK bench, staring across the grass.
He’d been in the same place for the last two hours, watching the same father-daughter duo on the playground. The rest of the world continued turning, but the pair was immune. Lost in one of those perfect sunlit days... the kind they’d think back on for years to come.
His own thoughts were relatively scattered. There was a lot in competition, as it hadn’t been a quiet couple of days. But, strangely enough, he found himself circling back to that mobile of stars.
“Hey.” A voice sounded behind him as Julian walked up from the street, calling out across the grass. “Where were you?”
Devon glanced up in surprise, roused from his trance. “...what?”
“The Lansing debrief,” the psychic answered curiously. “I waited for twenty minutes, but you’re still not answering your phone.”
Shit.
“I’m sorry.” Devon ran a hand over his face. “I wasn’t...I forgot that was today.”
Julian hesitated, staring at him. “You were here?”
There was a nod, followed by a long moment of silence. Then the psychic sat down at his side. Together they watched the bustling playground, leaning back against the bench.
After several minutes of silence, Julian glanced to the side.
“Where are the kids?”
“With Beth,” Devon answered softly. “I wasn’t planning to come here. I was just jogging past when I saw this guy with his daughter, and I...just kind of stayed.”
Julian followed his eyes to the happy duo. Every so often, the man would pretend to collapse. The girl would shriek with laughter, like each time was the first.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“...why are you watching him?”
Devon took a deep breath. “I don’t know that either.”
There was a sideways glance, followed by a long pause.
“Dev, are you stalking this man—”
“I missed the first time Arie laughed—the sitter called and told me about it because I wasn’t home. I missed Rae’s first ultrasound, and Jamie’s first word. The kids had this whole astronomy unit, where they made these...these things I never knew about.”
Julian was quiet for a while, staring at the side of his face. “If you want to take some time off—”
“I don’t want to take time off. I want to finish that course in thirty-three seconds. I want to be here every second, playing with my son and daughter. But I can’t.” Devon lapsed into silence, staring at his hands. “I’m sorry about the debrief.”
“I could give a crap about the debrief.” Julian leaned forward, trying to coax a smile. “I’m more worried someone here is going to call the police.”
Devon chuckled in spite of himself. “This is weird?”
“Little bit.”
Nonetheless, they sat there for a while longer—watching an old woman who haunted the benches, feeding the birds. After a long time, Julian stretched out his legs with a sigh.
“I miss things with Lily, too,” he said softly. “There are toys in her room I’ve never seen before. I don’t know where she got them.”
There was a pause.
“She got them from Molly.”
“Yeah, that was my guess, too.”
Both men laughed softly before Julian pushed to his feet.
“This is the life,” he said frankly. “And you do it better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
Devon squinted up at him before accepting a helping hand.
“Just don’t forget your phone.”
Chapter 9
In a perfect world Devon would have ignored Barnes’ invitation and Carter’s pointed insistence forever, but he found himself driving to Guilder the next day, just like everyone else.
He pulled into the lot at the same time as Luke, waving as he lifted Benji from the car.
“Looks like you’ve got a stowaway.”
The child waved back excitedly as his father rolled his eyes.
“My dad’s in a field rotation today with the new recruits, so he couldn’t watch him. All the other people I’d usually call were already driving here.”
There was a blur of crimson hair, followed by a sharp impact.
...ow.
“You’re getting good at those tackles, buddy.” Devon laughed, unwrapping Benji’s arms from his legs and lifting him into the air. “Just wait until that speed kicks in.”
The boy nodded fervently.
“I’ve been training in the meantime,” he confided in a loud whisper. “Weighting down my pockets with batteries to build muscle tone and improve my core. It was Aria’s idea.”
...improve my core?
Devon shot a look at Luke, but the man just bowed his head with a sigh.
“There’s a chance Aria was messing with you,” Devon said practically, setting him back on the grass. “Like the time she tried to cut your hair to make you more aerodynamic.”
“No—she’s doing it!”
Of course she is.
There was a rumbling engine, and the group glanced over as Julian and Angel pulled into the lot—two coffees glued to their hands. In the backseat, Lily was happily drawing with her crayons.
“You let her play with those in the car?” Luke asked incredulously, flashing each one a smile as they stepped onto the lot. “In that car?”
Angel merely shrugged, while Julian extracted his daughter from the safety harness.
“Our child isn’t as savage as yours,” he answered, throwing a wink at Benji. “They say children are a reflection of their parents...but we shouldn’t read too much into that.”
There was a chorus of laughter as the little group started heading across the grass.
It used to be a rare event that the PC would open its doors to whoever happened to be in the same time zone for agency meetings, but over the last few weeks they’d been happening more and more often. Thus far, most people had instinctively avoided them the same way they did case reports and medical assessments. But this one seemed to have attracted a bigger audience than most.
“Looks like Barnes has been busy,” Julian murmured, glancing over the field. More than a dozen people were making their way slowly across the grass, heading towards the Oratory.
“He came to my house the other day.” Devon fell into step beside him. “Had a lot of...big ideas, I guess you could say. Beth swung by just as it happened—she was ticked.”
The psychic chuckled, shifting Lily in his arms. “I’ll bet. What did you tell him?”
“I shut him down, if you must know.” Devon ruffled the girl’s hair with a smile. “Sniffed out his little dictatorial scheme. You would have been proud—it’s like I was channeling you.”
Julian raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “You mean...you made some sense?”
Angel glanced over with a grin. “That’s a big step—congrats, Dev!”
“I hate you both.”
They got to the Oratory a few seconds later, handing the children to a group of eager shifters who were already playing with a little boy with springy black curls and freckled mocha skin.
“Hey, Charlie!” Devon dropped into a crouch, flashing him a smile. “We haven’t seen you in a while—did your
mommy drop you off?”
The boy nodded happily, pointing across the room to where Alicia was chatting with some people by the PC tunnel doors. She’d had a son just a few months after Lily was born, naming him after an agent who’d died in the field several years before.
“—all of them,” Luke was muttering nearby, holding out his palm as Benji petulantly dropped a pile of batteries inside. “All of them, Benjamin. Is this why none of the clocks work at home?”
Julian and Devon shared a quick look, then wisely left them to it—making their way across the mats and bypassing the bulk of the crowd. The tunnels were just as full as they wandered down to the conference room—grabbing a pair of chairs and dragging them towards the far wall.
Carter was already setting things up, scanning through a stack of papers while Barnes sat quietly on the other side. Neither man looked at the other—a sign of rough sailing up ahead.
“Oh, this is going to be a delight,” Julian muttered, folding his arms across his chest.
Devon nodded silently, wishing he’d stayed at home.
The room filled quickly to capacity as the previous hour came to a close. The second the clock struck nine, the doors shut and Carter rose to his feet—starting the meeting.
“We’ll begin today with a few quick house-keeping announcements for those agents who are working on active cases.” He cleared his throat, reading off a list. “Riley and Banks—the results from the vial came back as a neurotoxin, so we’re upping the charges to attempted homicide. The teams heading to Germany, we’re postponing until we can gain visual confirmation of the targets from our man on the ground.” He scanned further down. “By special request, the suspect from the Lansing investigation was picked up in Munich this morning, so we’ll be officially closing the case as soon as his visa clears...”
The man continued talking, but Devon had frozen in his chair.
...Wait, what?!
“What is he talking about?” he demanded in a whisper, angling towards Julian. “By special request the guy’s been picked up already? You and I were going to do that ourselves!”
The psychic kept his eyes forward, raising his shoulders in a shrug. “Looks like it’s done already. That’s one thing off our plates.”
“Yeah, but that was our investigation,” Devon insisted, baffled as to why his friend wasn’t more upset. Inter-agency rivalries kept the inked world perpetually entertained, but that competitive spirit was alive and well within the PC as well. “Who would have—”
“In other news,” Carter said sharply, flashing a look over the top of his glasses, “working in conjunction with the Xavier Knights, our research and development team is close to announcing the completion of a state-of- the-art holding device for any and all mission assignments, as well as active personnel. I know some of you weren’t crazy about the idea...but after our system was hacked no fewer than five times in the last year, the decision was made to take such sensitive information off the mainframe and divide it into smaller components to prevent access.”
Luke shook his head slowly, a reluctant member of the research and development team. “So that instead of keeping the files on a computer system that can be hacked...they’re putting them on a tiny device that can be slipped into a pocket? Real brilliant idea, that is.”
The others glanced at him, the only ones sitting close enough to hear the quiet protest. They didn’t disagree, but in the spirit of that agency rivalry they decided to take the offensive instead.
“Why are you even here, traitor?” Devon asked under his breath. “I was under the impression that Council meetings, were for members of the Council.”
Julian nodded slowly, shooting him a dark look.
“Go back to your own kind.”
“And for the final thing on the agenda,” Carter concluded with a hint of irritation, “I believe that Mr. Barnes had something he wanted to say.”
The room quieted to attention as the man pushed to his feet. This was the real reason they’d shown up that day. Either out of support to Carter or genuine interest in what Barnes had to say.
“We’ve all been reading the news,” he began in a soft voice. “We all know what it’s like out there. The world isn’t the same as it was when this agency started. It isn’t the same as it was ten years ago, or even five. Things are deteriorating at a faster and faster rate—and we need to rise to the occasion. When these people push...we need to push even harder back.”
He pressed a button, and a sudden slew of headlines illuminated on the wall.
“This catastrophe happening in Kampala is a prime example. An Okello-based terror group has seized control of the capital and is amassing more and more casualties every day. The UN sent a taskforce, but they’ve been completely ineffective thus far.”
He came to a pause, staring out across the room.
“I want us to send in a larger team—a long-term team—to do what the UN can’t. To remove Okello and help instate a Tusiime splinter group to regain stability in the region.”
A ripple of conversation washed over the agents as they turned to each other in quiet deliberation. Most looked highly dubious. Others were staring at Carter in surprise. Perhaps the greatest impact was on a team of shifters already familiar with the region—ones that had been fighting there for peace long before Barnes discovered the problem from the safety of his chair.
“Tusiime?” Andy repeated thoughtfully, searching his memory. The wolf wasn’t known for his patience, nor was he impressed with this bureaucratic take on the situation now. “Isn’t he just a later version of the shock troops that started this mess in the first place?”
Barnes shook his head, speaking with certainty. “They’ve adopted a new doctrine. I believe it has promise.”
The others glanced at each other, while Andy leaned back in his chair.
“Oh...you believe that, do you?” He cocked his head with the trace of a smile. “I’m sure the Ugandan people will be reassured.”
Barnes visibly stiffened from across the room, and things might have progressed further if Rob Fletcher hadn’t leaned casually forward—squeezing his partner’s arm.
“If the UN already sent troops, how long could you expect ours to stay undercover?” Alicia asked in confusion. As the agency’s chief medical officer, she wasn’t often involved in discussions concerning active missions. That being said, she’d cleaned up enough of the aftermath to have a vested interest in such things now. “Especially if you want them to stay there long-term.”
“She’s right,” Andy piped up again, cheerfully ignoring the shifter at his side. “It’s hard enough slipping in and out of these situations under the best of circumstances—”
“I don’t believe they’d be able to keep their identity a secret,” Barnes allowed. “Nor do I believe they’d be able to keep secret the nature of their work. In order for this to be successful, I believe several people within the UN would need to be notified of their assignment.”
There was a beat of silence. Then a shockwave swept over the room.
“Notified?” a telepath called out in astonishment. “You want us notify the United Nations before dropping into enemy territory? You want us to tell them why we’ve come?”
“It’s more than that,” Julian said softly, his voice somehow carrying from the back of the room. “He wants to tell them how we’ll make it happen. He wants to tell them what we are.”
And that was the end of the meeting.
At the psychic’s soft words, any semblance of order promptly dissolved and the room was in an uproar once again. People were shouting over each other, trying to be heard. Others were simply staring at the speaker in shock, unable to believe his proposition could possibly be real.
Barnes did his best to control them—holding up his hands and trying to temper things back down—but it was no use. It wasn’t until Carter pushed to his feet that the room fell silent.
“We seem to have some quick tempers this morning,” he murmured, eyes twinkli
ng as they rested on Julian sitting in the back. “Cliff...I think it’s best to discuss this at a later date.”
Barnes stared at him for a moment, then restacked his papers with a smile.
“As tens of thousands die in the meantime,” he said lightly.
It was an unusual way to end an official gathering, but it was beyond the point of salvage. In a burst of conversation the agents pushed to their feet and swarmed back towards the Oratory like a cloud of angry bees—electrified that someone had stepped too close to the hive.
Devon pushed to his feet with the rest of them, glancing once more towards the front of the room. As if he could feel him staring, Barnes lifted his head and the two shared a suspended look.
Then the door swung shut between them.
WITH HIS CHILDREN STILL enjoying a long visit with their grandmother, Devon drove in slow circles around the city under the guise of making his way back home.
Hours crawled by at a snail’s pace, but he came no closer to stopping. Every time he reached his exit, he drove the car straight past. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get the meeting out of his head. And not just the explosive ending, but those pieces at the beginning as well.
Why create a tiny device to store all our most sensitive information? Did we learn nothing from Simon Kerrigan’s attempts to brainwash the entire planet?
Round and round he drove, tilting around the curved streets.
And what the hell happened to MY assignment?!
He spun the steering wheel, barely missing a pedestrian as he came to the most infuriating news of all. The mysterious request that had taken the mission away from him.
Stolen right out from beneath me, and Julian didn’t even care!
He fumed in silence, replaying the psychic’s dismissive words.
That’s one thing off our plates, he snorted in derision. As if that changes anything. I swear, if I didn’t know better I’d think he was the one who—
The car screeched to a stop.
Julian Decker...I’m going to kill you.
DEVON HAD A KEY TO his best friend’s house, but he didn’t use the door. He leapt the first story and climbed straight through the bedroom window.
