by Geof Johnson
By nine thirty, Jamie and Terry decided to wrap things up. She stood and faced Fred with a vague smile. “Thank you so much for letting us study here. It really means a lot to me to do well in this class, and I think I have a better chance now.”
“Why do you care about it?” Fred asked, “if it’s just a ruse?”
“Because. I just do.”
Fred waited for Terry to tell her more, but seeing that she wouldn’t, Fred asked about something else that had been on her mind. “When we had our meeting the other day at the Rivershire School, why were you so concerned about Sammi?”
“Because she seems like such a sweet little girl. I’d hate for anything bad to happen to her.”
“Well, she’s sweet all right.” Fred scratched her cheek with one red-lacquered fingernail and said, “Didn’t you say that you have a daughter? What’s her name?”
“Stacey.”
Again, Fred waited for Terry to say more, but she didn’t. “Uh…she’s four, isn’t she?”
Terry only nodded, so Fred said, “What’s she like?”
Still, nothing. She doesn’t want to talk about her, I guess. “Well, all right. I suppose you’ll contact us if you have anything new to tell us about Mr. Cage.”
“You’ll get a text from me that’ll say ‘let’s hang out.’ Then Jamie will get you and your friends together to meet Eric and me at the house we’re renting.”
“And that’s safe? No electronic bugs or anything?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you going to be okay walking back to your car in the dark?”
“I can handle myself,” Terry said. “I’ve had the training.”
“If it’s ever a problem, I’ve got something for that.” She tapped the fairy pendant that hung at her neck. “It’s a Stupefyin’ necklace. Twirl this at any attacker and they’ll be too confused to find their belly button.”
“I prefer martial arts. It’s more fun.” She thanked them again and left.
“Well,” Jamie said when the door closed behind Terry, “are you still jealous?”
“I guess not. I wonder why she doesn’t want to talk about her daughter.”
“It’s odd. I thought all young mothers loved to yak about their adorable kids.”
“Maybe she doesn’t have custody and she’s sensitive about that. Terry said her mom is looking after Stacey.”
“Maybe. Terry sure seems determined to pass this class. I don’t think she’s dumb. I just think she’s rusty and doesn’t remember how to study properly. Once I showed her what to focus on in her class notes and the textbook, she seemed like she was getting the hang of it.”
“I sure wouldn’t worry about it if it were me. Why bust your butt for a grade that doesn’t matter?”
“Who knows? Maybe it’s a personal thing.” Then Jamie gave her a sly smile and raised his eyebrows, and Fred knew what was coming. “Does that mean you’re ready for a goodnight kiss?” she said.
“Thought you’d never ask.” He put his arms around her waist as she put hers around his neck, and he pulled her close to him and pressed his lips to hers, gently at first, then with a slight touch of urgency.
She felt the tingle, that special magical sensation that she and Jamie shared. A feeling like no other. It filled her lips, pleasantly electric and warm, and spread into her mouth, through her head and neck and down into her body, until she had goose bumps on every square inch of her skin. Even her toes quivered. She could almost catch on fire right then, but it wouldn’t hurt.
After a long moment, he pulled back and took a deep breath. “That was a good one.”
“Are you saying some of them aren’t?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I was just teasing.” She bit one corner of her lip as their eyes met, her emerald greens on his glittering blues. “I don’t know why I would ever be jealous of Terry, or any other girl, for that matter.”
“You shouldn’t be. Nobody could ever kiss me like that. I don’t know how regular people stand it, just plain ordinary kissing. Seems bland to me.”
“Melanie and Bryce seem to enjoy it.”
“Rollie and Nova, too.”
“But not as much as we do,” she said with a confident nod.
“Nope. But maybe we should try one more, just to be sure.”
Chapter 8
Jamie sat on the edge of the bed in his dorm room and rolled his walking stick gently between his fingers. He loved the way it felt in his hands. Even though Uncle Charlie had carved symbols extensively up and down its length, it was smooth to the touch, silky and cool.
He inhaled deeply through his nostrils and admired the still-lingering smell of wood stain and oil that served as the finish. The color was a gorgeous golden brown, like Sugar, and images of the amazing horse circled the thicker end that formed the handle.
But what he liked most about it was what he could do with it.
He closed his eyes and gripped the slender staff firmly with both hands, then, instead of making a portal, he only thought about the necessary spell, and his mind instantly filled with countless glowing lines that stretched away from him into the unimaginable distance.
“Beautiful,” he murmured.
He was like a spider at the center of a colossal web, with threads formed in all dimensions. He could put a mental finger on each strand and feel its pulse, its individual song that hummed through it, that sang of its destination, its place in the universe, or multi-verse. Jamie didn’t know which it was.
When he first tried out the stick and experienced the immense connection of lines, he had been overwhelmed, but now, after hours of familiarity with it, he found that he could manipulate the glowing strands.
My map. He smiled to himself and found the lines that stretched to the planets he was most familiar with — Eddan’s world and the three moon world. Jamie could change the colors of the threads, assigning different hues to them as markers. The line to Eddan’s world was now bright green, and the three moon world was brilliant white. Jamie had read somewhere that the human eye could detect as many as ten million different colors. Even that won’t be enough. There are too many lines, too many worlds.
But that was a good thing, to him. Jamie could determine differences between the threads in ways beyond touch and vision. He had another sense, a gift from the magic stick, which enabled him to pick out any of them, all of them. There could be billions. He suddenly heard Carl Sagan’s voice in his head. Beel-yuns. I wish he were alive to see this. He’d be in Astrophysicists’ Heaven. The Super-Cosmos. Jamie gripped the stick tighter and sent his consciousness out into the vastness of the lines. Here’s to you Carl. I know you would appreciate this.
Jamie’s concentration was broken and the image vanished when he heard his door open and Bryce poked his head inside. “Dude,” he said, “you playin’ with your stick again?”
“Yeah. A little.”
“You ready to head over to the dining hall? I’m starving.”
“I suppose.” Jamie laid his stick on the bed and stood.
“Why don’t you make us a doorway to it? My legs are tired.”
“It’s not even two hundred yards from here.”
“Still, it’d be nice. Those sprints we ran at practice wore me out.”
“Me too.” Jamie joined him in the short corridor that connected their two rooms. “But we gotta walk anyway. Besides, where would I put the doorway? Too many people around. They’d notice.”
“We could get Fred and she could lead the way through it with her Stupefyin’ pendant, then no one would know.”
“Too complicated. It’s easier to walk.”
Bryce put his hand on the door that led out to the hall. “What’s the point of having magic if you can’t do stuff like that?”
“I ask myself that all the time. But we still gotta walk.”
* * *
Track practice ended late the next day, and it was nearly dark by the time Jamie and Bryce walked across campus back
to their dorm. The sky was made gloomier by the cold, misting rain that cloaked the air in a muffled stillness.
Jamie carried his athletic bag in one hand and used his other to pull his hood up over his head. “Man, this weather stinks.”
“It’s supposed to get worse,” Bryce said. “It’s going to turn into a steady rain that’s supposed to last for several days. Maybe even a week.” A musical tone sounded from Bryce’s athletic bag and he stopped and reached into one of the side pockets. “Hold on. Let’s see who this is.”
Bryce checked the display on his phone and said, “It’s a text from Fred. She wants to know why you aren’t answering your phone.”
“Left it in my room.”
“She said Terry texted her and wants to hang out.”
Jamie glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot. He and Bryce had the sidewalk all to themselves, the other students driven indoors by the rain. “Hang out, as in the big hang out?”
“All caps HANG OUT.”
“That’s supposed to be secret-agent subtle? All caps?”
“I guess that means right now. It must be important.”
“Can’t it wait ’till after we shower and eat?”
“Your call, dude. I’ll go now if we have to.”
“All right, but let’s drop our bags off first.”
Jamie and his friends met in Fred’s dorm room and prepared to go meet Eric and Terry. Melanie turned her laptop so that Jamie could see the screen and said, “Here it is on satellite view.” She touched the display. “That little house right there. Can you get us to it?”
Jamie closed his eyes briefly while he oriented the location in his magic sense of space. “Where exactly should we come in? I can’t make a doorway inside the house until I get familiar with it firsthand, or make a peephole. That’s tedious, if I don’t get it right the first time.”
“Terry said go to the backyard. It’s screened by overgrown shrubs.”
Fred patted her hair and frowned. “We’ll have to walk through the rain.”
“Poor baby!” Nova poked out her lower lip. “Her pretty red curls might get wet.”
Fred scowled at her. “They won’t be pretty after that. I’ll look like Frizzy Miss Lizzy.”
“I’ll put us as close to the back door as I can,” Jamie said. “Melanie, text her and tell her we’re on our way.”
Jamie outlined a portal and pushed it open to reveal a dark, single-story house, with water dripping from an awning over a stoop. He and his friends went through the magic opening and onto the wet grass, and someone swung the back door wide. Jamie and the others rushed to it and stepped inside to a small, warm kitchen.
“That was fast.” Terry flipped on the overhead light.
“We took the express portal.” Rollie brushed the water from his short hair with one hand and looked around. “This is your place?”
“Fabulous, isn’t it?” Terry said. “Martha Stewart would be proud.”
The kitchen had old cabinets that had been painted yellow sometime in the last century and the linoleum on the floor was badly scuffed. The avocado-green appliances looked like they were purchased in 1970.
“Looks like typical off-campus housing, to me,” Bryce said. “The rest of the place like this?”
“All the rooms are dumpy, but I’ve been stuck in worse places while on assignment. At least the heat works, there’s hot water, and it’s furnished. Sort of. It’s all yard-sale style.”
She led them into the living room, where the curtains were drawn over the windows and a single table lamp was lit, over by the mismatched sofa and recliner. Something smelled vaguely of old dog, an odor Jamie was familiar with from his years of working at the veterinary clinic. Rollie seemed to notice it too, with a wrinkled nose and a frown.
Eric sat at what must’ve been the dining table, though it was barely recognizable, buried under stacks of electronic equipment, wires running everywhere like tangled spaghetti. He wore his business-like dark slacks and long sleeved white shirt, and black headphones covered his ears. He slipped them from his head when he saw them and he rose from his seat. “Glad you’re here,” he said without smiling.
“You listenin’ to some tunes, Agent Eric?” Nova snapped her fingers and waggled her head. “Some rap or some reggae? No, let me guess…you’re probably into golden oldies and Elvis. Right?”
He seemed unfazed by her ribbing. “I’m monitoring some phone traffic from Romania. Nothing exciting, though.”
“You speak Romanian?”
“A little. I’m working on it.”
Bryce eyed the equipment piled on the table. “What do you do if somebody comes over, like the landlord or friends or whatever? What do you tell them all this stuff is for?”
“Well, first of all, the landlord lives in Charlotte, and Terry and I don’t exactly do a lot of socializing while we’re on the job.”
“But what if somebody did come in, like a repairman?”
“I’d tell them I was a ham radio buff. I’ve used that line before.”
“What is ham radio?” Fred asked.
“It’s a hobby that involves spending lots of time listening to radio broadcasts and messages from around the country, and if you have a good antenna, other parts of the world. It used to be really popular, years ago. People still do it, though.”
“Ham radio.” Nova curled her lip. “Seems boring as homemade dirt.”
“Monitoring phone traffic is, too,” Terry said. “Puts me to sleep. I’d much rather check Internet communications. That’s what I mostly do when I’m not in class.”
Jamie waved one hand. “That’s all really fascinating, but can we get on with whatever you brought us here for? Bryce and I still haven’t showered or eaten dinner.”
Terry reached over to the laptop, which was set up at one end of the table with a large monitor beside it, and pressed a key. “We just got some surveillance photos from an agent who was staking out an airport that Cage uses sometimes.”
“Is it near one of his strongholds?” Bryce asked.
“No. We’ve lost two field agents trying to do that. This one is in Bulgaria, outside of Haskova. He uses that when he wants to drive the rest of the way to Greece or Albania, or even Turkey.”
“How did your agent know he was going to be there?” Rollie asked.
“He didn’t know for sure. We just knew Cage was going somewhere soon, so we staked out about a half dozen of his favorite landing spots, and we got lucky. The agent had a good camera with a telescopic lens.”
She pressed a key and an image appeared on the monitor. It showed a twin-engine airplane landing on a concrete runway; three black SUVs waited on the grass nearby. Terry pressed again and a new picture appeared, with the plane stopped on the ground and over a half a dozen burly men in black suits converging on it. The next image showed Phillip Cage emerging from the open hatch, wearing a dark jacket, which was unbuttoned and blowing open in the wind.
Terry quickly advanced through the next few photos, which showed Cage being escorted by a phalanx of men to one of the waiting vehicles.
“Can you go back and zoom in on that pic where he’s getting out of the plane?” Jamie said. “It looks like the best shot of his face.”
Terry did, and the man they were looking at appeared almost exactly like the one they’d seen in the older photo on Sunday — a fit, shorthaired guy with an average appearance.
“Wait.” Bryce pointed at the screen. “What’s that around his waist, right there where his coat is blowing open?”
Terry zoomed in closer, and just above the top of his pants was a wide, black belt.
“Can you get a little tighter?” Bryce pointed again. “On that thing he’s wearing?”
She pressed again and the screen filled with the image of the belt. Though slightly pixelated, they could see that it was ringed with finger-sized pockets full of slender things that glinted in the strong sunlight, like glass.
Rollie grinned. “It’s a Commander
Hawk Action Belt! I had one of those.”
“Me too,” Bryce said. “I used to keep all kinds of stuff in mine, like matches and fishing line and whatever.”
“What the heck is he doing with one?”
Jamie peered closely at the image. “It’s not exactly like the Commander Hawk belt. It looks like he’s got test tubes or something in them.”
“I bet that’s where he keeps his potions,” Fred said.
“I bet you’re right.” Eric nodded. “That way, he’d have them handy at a moment’s notice.”
Melanie gestured at the screen. “Look at his left hand. He’s got rings on every finger.”
“And he’s wearing at least two bracelets,” Nova said. “Those could be counter charms to his potions. I wish we could see his other hand. Bet he’s got rings on it, too. I guess his witch doesn’t know how to combine spells into one object.”
Eric fingered his chin and peered at the image on the monitor. “If those are magic potions in that belt, do you suppose each one is different?”
“Probably.” Fred face was tight as she viewed the picture.
“That would make sense,” Terry said. “It would give him maximum flexibility. He wouldn’t have to decide which one to use until the last second.”
“Too bad there aren’t any women in these photos,” Jamie said. “Then we might know what his witch looks like.”
“He’s rarely been photographed with any women,” Eric said, “except for a couple of Russian models, and we’ve checked them out. We’re certain they’re not spies, and we’re fairly sure they’re not witches either.”
“Wait.” Nova held up both hands. “Are you saying that Russian models aren’t superspy danger bitches?”
“There are a few who are spies, but we know who they are, and those aren’t the ones he dates.”
“Dang.” Nova lowered one eyebrow. “That’ll make me think twice next time I pick up a fashion magazine.”
“Nova,” Melanie said, “have you ever picked up a fashion magazine?”
“I think so, once, at the doctor’s office.”
