by P. S. Power
“Well that set my father back a step. He'd been the main person arguing that only Mages should work here. I bet he's glad he lost that one now. He can be stuffy, and a pain, but he's not stupid or even unwilling to admit he's wrong, if you can prove your point hard enough.”
Finally full, Zack closed the box of donuts, saving them for later. He finished drinking his coffee, now cool enough to drink without stopping.
“All right, we can handle it. If not, we'll call you and complain about how inept we are.” Zack wished her the best in her meeting. These people, the Mages in her power structure, seemed to mean well, but they had a slight problem seeing that rules only worked as general guidelines. Try to make them fit everything and no one can ever follow them all, what with half the rules contradicting the others.
Kyle gave her another hug on the way out. When she'd gone, he turned to Zack and commented that he really wanted to sleep with her much more when he held this form than his other one. He found it funny though, that his odds were slightly better the other way around.
“She's a bit of an ageist though. Like you, always going on about how young I am. Like I haven't been having sex since I turned twelve... Yeah, I know, you're shocked. Do you know what they call an Alede that starts having sex at twelve? A late bloomer.” That last held hints of bitterness, not humor. Zack reminded him to keep his emotions locked down for now.
“Explore them at your leisure, but let yourself have time away from them first. Trying to examine emotions while they're hammering against your mind is difficult and possibly dangerous, though a lot less so for you now. It would take powerful drugs to strip your control away now. Maybe torture could do it, but hopefully that won't come up for either of us any time soon.” He clapped the young fellow on the shoulder.
They worked pretty steadily with very few issues all day long. Hilda brought them food and found herself amazed at Kyle, telling him that he didn't smell like Kaitlyn at all. Zack hugged her and then Kyle did. Reminding her that they never had that sex they'd talked about earlier.
“Right! How about today after work then. I don't think Troy will want to have sex with you today, or until you change back. He seems to only like girls. Though he hasn't asked me to have sex with him... Maybe I'm not his type?” She looked a little sad suddenly over that idea.
“Or, maybe it's the exact opposite. Maybe you're totally his type, so he gets shy around you? I mean, tall, blonde, big breasts, and foreign accent. A lot of guys are into that you know.” Kyle looked her over clinically. “Actually that wouldn't shock me at all. Still, have sex with me first, before asking him. It will save on trouble later, for me, that is.” He gave the larger woman a flirty look, which she didn't pick up at all, the cultural cues being too different.
After lunch Kyle manned the store while Zack went off to Lesser Shia. Hathe met him in the node room after he'd been there for only a few seconds, having waited for him outside the door. It must be important, he figured, as the other man could have had no real clue as to if he'd be showing up today or not. That could mean hours or days of standing there. Hopefully he was close to being on time, so that wouldn't be the case. For a government guy, Hathe wasn't too bad.
The administrator, or official, whatever his title, asked a lot of questions about the attack on the Moorplank Center. Did they have any leads? If so, did they think they would apprehend the perpetrators soon? Zack answered honestly, that he didn't know about such things. He found the way the questions were asked highly suspicious though. Hathe's Shadow told him that he merely wished to avoid the same kind of thing happening at his nexus though, proving Zack's suspicions wrong almost instantly. Which he appreciated, finding Hathe a likable man.
When Hathe left, a string of people started through, and a few pallets of goods mixed in for Ghurian. He had Kyle call the Import store so that they could pick up their goods quickly, which they were always good about doing, though Rikesh still covertly glared at him when it was his turn to do it. He noticed, not for the first time, how much harder groups of people were to move than the same weight in non-living goods. It felt like living things actually had a lot more mass than dead ones did, even though this mass remained unseen most of the time somehow. Maybe it had to do with energy? He didn't know. Maybe the personalities pressing on him did it. That made as much sense as anything, as far as he could tell.
It didn't hurt that he could take breaks if he got winded while moving freight, though he didn't have to often, yet it really helped to be able to take five minutes when things got tough. Nobody said anything on the occasions that he did.
After about three hours, a light day for Lesser Shia side work, things being a little disrupted due to the several-day shut down because of the Moorplank attack, he finished for the day. The people working the node assured him that things would pick up a lot now, when everyone realized they'd started back up again.
Having nothing left to do there, he headed home to Candles and More, where Kyle had a large tray of food, battered and fried vegetables mostly, waiting for him. So far he found Kyle a bit more considerate than Kaitlyn, which seemed really odd. They were, after all, the same person. Then he thought about it for a while and wondered if they really were?
Cosmetic differences aside, did men and women think differently? He hadn't noticed any differences when he'd become Maria, but that had only been for about eight hours. What if he just didn't have a large enough sample size? He needed to get Patty alone, away from everyone else for a while and really quiz her on these things.
If being Maria would change how he acted, that could help or hurt his ability to set his trap in motion. Not that he had the specifics down yet. It felt like everything took too long to arrange, as far as the plan went. He had so much to learn first. For instance, could Demons identify each other on sight? He thought it likely, but didn't know for sure, and that could undo everything right there if he messed things up. When he started, he'd have to make everything come together fast, as he didn't think he could fool Demons for very long. For one thing, he couldn't speak their language at all and couldn't simply get a book on tape language course from the library for it. He knew this, because he'd checked. Just in case.
The phone rang in the back, Kyle ran to get it, then called out from Lisa's office.
“Hey, Zack, a pick up in the Norway Nexus? Have you been there before?”
“Yeah. A few times, that shouldn't be a problem. Do you know how to transfer the funds for payment? I've never done it myself, Lisa always handles that....”
Kyle went back to the phone for a bit, when he hung up he told Zack that Lisa had worked with him, with Kaitlyn, on it for a few days. It really didn't take much to make the arrangements with the Central Bank. You just called and confirmed that the funds had been deposited in the right account.
“There are five of them, and at least one speaks English. Last name Frost. They just want to come here, one way. That should be the last one of the day. They didn't know which node they'd be at, since they don't have an Embassy there, but they said they'd stand together, so that you could tell where to go. Does that help at all?” Kyle looked concerned, his Shadow desperately hoping he hadn't messed this up somehow.
“Should work, let's see.”
It took a few minutes, because he had to check each node individually, looking through it until he found a node that had five decently large blond men standing in a semicircle.
“Got it! I'll just start transferring them now. Shouldn't take more than a minute.” He stepped into the other node room, making some of the men jump a little. Their leader shook his hand affably, his Shadow going on about some deal they had arranged that would make them wealthy, once they had him.
Every nerve in his body flashed suddenly when he realized that they meant to kidnap him. He almost stepped back through the line, but realized that their plan included him going back to Underwood. Maybe they could finally take someone in for questioning, he wondered. It would be worth the risk, if he could manag
e it.
He locked down all of his emotions as tightly as he could, not letting anything surface from his Shadow level. This made the men uneasy, of course, given the situation they chalked it up to nerves, and their own fear of failure, he saw.
He took the first man, the leader, back with him, asking him if he wanted anything to eat, possibly a frozen yogurt, since they had some of the best in the world not a hundred feet away from them.
“It won't be a problem to have some brought over in a minute or two when the other four in your group have been transferred. You really should try it.” Frozen YoGurt always had a shift change at five or so, depending on when it got dark, and that hadn't changed since Claire stopped needing to feed on blood every day. She didn't have a desperate need to feed any more, she'd told him a few weeks before, but that didn't mean she liked standing around for hours on end handling petty disputes every few weeks and praying a real customer would come in just to break up her day.
“Maybe we'll go and get some when we're all here. That sounds good.” The large man said with a thick, but understandable, accent.
“Yes. Remember though, we like to give full service here at all times, so anything you need can be delivered instantly, as soon as the rest of your party arrives. I'll go get them now.” He spoke a little loudly, hoping that someone would take the hint.
He took his time bringing them all over, asking each one if they required anything, food or drink, when they arrived, then heading out for the next one.
“Only one more left! I'll have him right over, in about five seconds. Hang on.” He told the room using what he hoped was an affable tone.
The second he arrived with the last member of their group the room's temperature plummeted, waves of cold coming from each of the men, causing a fine mist of snow like fog to form in the room around them. He hit two of the men with Wu-Li's empty force technique, sending them dancing away from him as the energy circulated like electricity through their bodies. He knew, since Dan had used it on him several times in practice, that it didn't hurt at all, it just made you need to move. You couldn't control it at all, so you danced away from the other person, sometimes violently.
A blur entered the room and two of the men went down. Hard. Their heads hit the ground with sickening thunk noises. A few seconds later Kyle came in with a chair and rather brutally attacked the leader of the group, the only one still standing steadily.
The leader grabbed the chair from the boy, only to find himself struck in the groin hard with a tennis shoe. Not letting up at all, Kyle grabbed the chair and suddenly jumped backwards, unbalancing the larger man so that he staggered forward. Letting go of it again, he struck, his open fingers gouging at the man's eyes.
The big man screamed and clutched his face, dropping the chair completely. While he did this the boy hit his right knee with three very precise, fast roundhouse kicks, the second one making a thick popping sound and the third knocking the bigger man off of his feet.
“Leave them alive! We need to question them! Restraints, we need to bind them. In the store itself though, it's freezing in here.” That last seemed an understatement to Zack, his teeth chattering violently, even though no more than twenty seconds could have passed since the fight started.
The blur had turned out to be Drake, the younger Vampire that usually worked nights. He dragged his two out into the store, unconscious, and leaving smears of blood on the floor, which quickly froze. When he came back moments later, he had a roll of duct tape, which he tapped saying, “It holds the universe together. It should be enough for these bozos.”
He stepped in, grabbing one of the men that Zack held pinned against the wall. Throwing him to the floor and taping his hands and feet together rapidly with a lot of tape. Then he did the same to the second one.
Kyle stood in a combat stance of some kind that Zack didn't recognize. His personal martial arts skills being pretty much what Dan had shown him, which wasn't really enough yet to do what the boy had done. Certainly not as well.
Drake taped the leader's hands behind his back, uncovering his face, which showed that his right eye had been destroyed. Zack didn't bother looking too closely. He held his revulsion in check, needing a clear head.
“Who are you working for and why did you do this?” He asked one of the unharmed men, who surprised him by simply answering and doing so honestly, according to his Shadow self.
“We knew it wrong....” he said in broken English.
“Our people poor, we find great deal that make us many, much gold and money. We need for that, you. We cannot hire you for it, we too poor, so we plan to take you and make deal, then let you go. We use girl or woman here so you do what we say, we take them too. Two days work, we let all go. Honest.”
Zack was amazed that he actually meant it. Even the leader thought that that had been the actual plan.
“It never occurred to any of you to maybe... I don't know, put in a call and see if I'd help for free? Or a small percentage of the take or something? Gah! Am I so looked down upon that no one ever thinks to just talk to me about things? At this point we only charge people money to keep the amount of traffic down! I don't need more money. Why wouldn't I help you? I help people all the time.”
He railed at them for a minute as they sat in shock.
“We think not... No one help for free.” The unharmed man in front of him started crying.
“Now we fail and people die. No money, no food. You send people to kill babies now maybe. Wives. Kill us not them, they do nothing! They not know! Please,” he begged, meaning every word.
“Kyle, do you think you can heal them, using that technique you came up with?” Zack sat down with a thump on one of the benches they had put in for people to sit on while they waited their turn to travel. Fairly comfortable, he noticed.
Kyle went to work and had them all healed, even the leader's eye, within ten minutes.
“Here's what were going to do. You're going to take a message back to your people. Whoever ordered this will present themselves at the node, the same one you came in through, for pickup in three days time. If they don't show up, then your people are cut off. I won't work with you ever again and I won't take work from anyone that does work with you. That would be hard on all your people, but this kind of thing can't go unpunished. So the person that came up with this idea, and whoever ordered it, needs to be there. Then we'll discuss what's to be done. Don't fail in this. I don't want to make things worse for you, since you seem to be pretty desperate as it is. This is the only chance I can or will give you...”
He asked Drake to cut them loose, one at a time in case they decided to try and attack again and shoved them through the line with little ceremony.
Drake, smiling at him, shook his head.
“You know, Vampires would have killed them and had their heads thrown back through the Node as a warning to the others. Are you sure that letting them go is the best plan?”
Sitting again, Zack remained silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice held a sadness that the other two had never heard in it before.
“They did the wrong thing, but really, was their reason for doing it wrong? They messed up, but should we punish the underlings that followed the orders and let the bosses go? Should I let women and children and innocent men suffer and go hungry when I can simply give them a hand instead?” He waved his right hand in the air, to stop arguments he realized weren't actually coming from the other two, but from inside himself.
“Yes, it's a horrible idea to let them go free, without punishment. Others may feel that it's all right to try and kidnap me or take people hostage in the future if we're not hard on people now. But... I really don't want to live in a world where everything is always like that. If no one tries to change how things are done, then they won't change, ever.”
Kyle shrugged slightly with one shoulder an awkward move that looked out of place on the boy.
“Hey, I'm not knocking it. These weren't hardened killers, just
some guys that did something dumb. They didn't even bring any weapons. I mean, making the room cold... not exactly what you want to bring to a fight with a guy known to blow people's hands off. They didn't even consider the fact that all Alede are trained to fight from the time they can walk and we practice regularly all our lives. If they'd tried to grab Lisa I bet they'd have found some surprises as well, if she'd been here. She's a full Mage or whatever the title is. They didn't even research enough to know that the Vampires here might step in and do something.”
Zack nodded, remembering the man Lisa had puking his guts out during the Lesser Shia attack.
Drake stood for a few seconds more, as if waiting for something, then said he needed to report back to Claire, asap.
“She won't be happy about this. I'll let you deal with that fallout though. She likes you way better than she likes me.” Grinning, he left.
Kyle headed to the front, and Zack, still dazed by the stupidity of some people, walked after him, shaking his head.
Libby walked in, crying. He ran to her asking what was wrong and holding her as she sobbed. Her Shadow self cried too, saying it was bad, that her grandmother was hurt that she needed to go to her or she'd die. She needed Zack.
“My Grandma, Klodjie, not Patterson, she's hurt and may not live. I don't know if I can help, but I should be there...” She sobbed again, harder now, clutching him.
“I can't ask, you shouldn't take me... but...”
“Where is she? Transylvania?” he asked, trying to recall what she had said.
Shaking her head she sniffed loudly.
