Winds of Change

by Christine Pope

  Lenz didn’t wait to see Adara’s reaction. Although his brain was singing with disbelief at the sight of three people appearing out of thin air in a room that was more locked down than Fort Knox, he knew he didn’t have a moment to waste. Instead, he bolted from the office and ran for the elevator, pulling out his phone as he did so.

  “Intruders on Sub-level Five,” he barked into the phone. “Adara Grant’s suite.”

  At least he didn’t have to worry about the guards on duty asking any unnecessary questions. “On our way,” came the reply.

  He shoved his phone into his pocket, then decided that waiting for the elevator was foolish, considering he only had to descend three floors to reach his destination. Besides, the entrance to the stairwell was much closer.

  The metal stairs clanged under his hasty feet as he pounded down the stairway. In less than a minute, he’d emerged on Sub-level Five and was running toward the suite where Adara Grant was supposed to be sleeping. No sign of the guards yet, but Lenz wasn’t about to wait for them. He had no idea how someone could have gotten inside her rooms — the alarms should have sounded the second someone entered the facility without clearance — and yet he realized the time for figuring out exactly what had happened was later, after the rescue attempt had been foiled.

  Because he somehow knew that was exactly what was going on.

  Just the briefest pause to allow the biometric lock to scan his eye, and then he was inside, running toward the door of her bedroom, which stood open. From inside came a jumble of voices, both male and female.

  He reached for the light switch and flipped it on. Immediately, the lamp on the nightstand flared to life, showing him Adara, who’d climbed out of bed and now stood next to it, and the three strangers he’d glimpsed on the security feed. Two men, one woman. The men looked as though they could be related, both tall with dark hair and strongly marked features, although one of them was probably at least ten years older than the other. The woman was dark-haired as well, with brilliant green eyes that stared at him in shock as he came through the doorway, his service pistol already in his hand.

  Something about the woman and the younger of the two men felt oddly familiar, although Lenz couldn’t say why. He knew he’d never seen them before; while he didn’t have an eidetic memory, he never forgot a face, and he should have been able to put a name to them if he’d truly encountered them in the past.

  Another puzzle he’d have to put aside for later. Voice steady, he said, “I’ll have to ask you to step away from Ms. Grant.”

  The strange woman with the green eyes shook her head, even as the older man standing behind her stared at him with a frown, expression puzzled rather than worried. Odd reaction, but Lenz didn’t have time to worry about that at the moment.

  “No, we’re taking Adara with us.” The woman’s voice was firm, somewhat low-pitched. No real trace of an accent, making him think she had to be from somewhere in the West or Southwest. “And I’m afraid that’s not going to help you, Agent Lenz.”

  A flick of her finger, and his gun was torn from his grasp and landed on the bed.

  Impossible…unless you were dealing with someone who had the same kind of extraordinary abilities as Adara Grant or the rest of the facility’s test subjects.

  He lunged for the gun, but some sort of invisible force seemed to catch him, to propel him back against the wall, where he was pinned in place, unable to break free. Had the woman done it? He hadn’t seen her hands move. Not that it mattered so much, since he’d been rendered basically useless. Panic flared through him, accompanied by the same kind of helpless sensation he’d experienced the day the towers fell…the sort of reaction he’d worked very hard to make sure he never felt again.

  “Let’s go,” said the younger of the two men. At once, the green-eyed woman reached out for Adara’s hand, while the older man, the one who hadn’t said anything but still stared at Lenz as if he wasn’t sure he should believe the evidence of his eyes, took the hand of the other man.

  Adara’s gaze met Lenz’s for just a moment. Her face was pale, her expression one of utter relief.

  “Goodbye, Agent Lenz,” she said.

  And they all disappeared. No sound, no light, nothing to show how they’d managed such a feat. There one minute, gone the next.

  The invisible hand holding Randall Lenz against the wall seemed to disappear as well. He fell to the ground, knees cracking against the tile floor. A muttered curse escaped his lips, but he forced himself to his feet and stared down at his gun where it lay on the empty bed.

  He had no idea how he would ever begin to explain what had just happened.

  12

  The interior of a warmly elegant house materialized around me — high ceilings paneled in wood, amber-toned lights glowing against smoothly plastered walls. I blinked, and realized Jake was coming toward me, arms outstretched.

  That was all I needed. I fell into his embrace, wanting to feel the strength of those arms around me, the beating of his heart against my cheek. If it weren’t for Connor and Angela’s presence — and the presence of the other man, someone I didn’t know but guessed had to be another Wilcox warlock — I would have pressed my lips against Jake’s, would have tasted him over and over to reassure myself that it really was him and I wasn’t just having some kind of insanely vivid dream.

  As it was, I let him hold me for a moment. Then he let go and said, “Do you need to sit down?”

  Right then, that sounded like a good idea. Everything had happened so quickly — Angela waking me from a deep sleep, scrambling out of bed, being suddenly confronted by Randall Lenz — that my legs felt a little rubbery.

  I nodded, and Jake led me over to a dining room table and stepped aside as I lowered myself onto one of the chairs next to it. Belatedly, I realized there was another person in the room, a dark-haired woman who somehow managed to look elegant in a scoop-necked gray T-shirt and a pair of black yoga pants.

  “I’m Margot,” she said. Her gaze flicked toward the man who’d accompanied Angela and Connor on their rescue mission. “I’m your cousin Lucas’ wife.”

  “Hi,” I said shakily.

  Lucas stepped forward. “Hello, Addie. You doing okay?”

  I managed to nod.

  “How about something to drink?” Margot asked. “Tea? A glass of water?”

  Since it was the middle of the night, anything with caffeine didn’t sound like a very good idea. “Water would be great,” I told her.

  She nodded and left the room. Jake continued to stand next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently, letting me know he was close, that he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Well, that went pretty well, I think,” Angela said. Her hand stole into Connor’s, and he twined his fingers with hers as he sent an encouraging smile in my direction.

  “Definitely, since we got Addie back safe and sound.”

  Lucas frowned then. I’d only just met him, but I somehow got the feeling that he wasn’t the sort of person who frowned too often; his face had the friendly lines of someone who found much more to smile about in the world than frown.

  “You didn’t tell me about this Agent Lenz of yours,” he said, his tone faintly accusing.

  “Tell you what?” Connor replied. His brows drew together, as if he was trying to figure out exactly what his cousin had meant by that particular remark. “We told you he was dangerous.”

  “Oh, that.” Lucas waved a hand, as if having a gun pointed in his direction was nothing to be worried about. “No, I meant that you didn’t tell me he was a warlock.”

  “What?”

  The same startled syllable burst from all our lips. Margot, who’d just reentered the room, glass of water in hand, gave us all a quizzical look. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  I’d already felt off balance, despite sitting down, but Lucas’ crazy remark made me feel as if the entire planet had just tilted slightly on its axis. “Randall Lenz isn’t a warlock,” I said, my tone flat. “
Connor explained to me how we all get that tingle or itch or whatever you want to call it when we meet a witch or warlock for the first time, and I never felt anything like that when I met him.”

  “Neither did I,” Jake added. “I mean, we were only a few feet apart when I faced him on Addie’s front porch. Didn’t feel a damn thing.”

  Connor and Angela glanced at each other. Her shoulders lifted ever so slightly, and he reached up to push an over-long piece of hair back off his forehead. Both of them looked just about as flummoxed as I was feeling right then.

  “We didn’t feel anything, either,” Angela said. “I mean, yeah, he was lying unconscious on the floor, but that shouldn’t have made a difference…should it?”

  That last question was accompanied by an inquiring glance in Margot’s direction, as if she hoped the other woman might be able to provide some clarification on that particular point. Why she was asking Margot’s advice, I didn’t know. Simply because Margot was older and might be better equipped to provide some insight?

  She crossed her arms and frowned slightly. “I don’t know for sure,” she said after a long pause. “That is, what the ‘tingle’ simply means is our own witch natures recognizing the spark, the magic, in another person. It’s something inherent in each of us, which means it probably doesn’t matter if the warlock in question is conscious or not. What’s very odd is that none of you felt it, but Lucas somehow did.”

  Her tone had remained carefully neutral, but I could tell that Lucas didn’t look too thrilled by the insinuation buried somewhere in her statement. “What,” he said, “you think I’m imagining things?”

  “That’s not what I said,” she responded, her tone still cool, calm. “I wasn’t there, but I can imagine that it must have been a fairly tense scene. Don’t you think it’s possible you experienced a twinge of nervousness or doubt that might have felt like the tingle you feel when you meet a strange witch or warlock, but was actually something completely different?”

  He was silent for a moment, considering her question, hands shoved in the pockets of his khakis. For the first time, I realized Lucas was wearing Dockers and a dark blue polo shirt, and looked as though he should have been out on the golf course or something, rather than assisting in a midnight raid on a secret government facility.

  At length, he shrugged and said, “Maybe. I mean, anything is possible. But it didn’t feel that way.”

  Connor’s eyes widened, as though he’d been struck by a sudden thought. “And then there’s what Genoveva told me.”

  “Genoveva Castillo?” Margot asked, and Connor nodded.

  “Yeah, when I talked to her a couple of days ago, she told me about how Randall Lenz came to see her at her house in Santa Fe. She mentioned how she felt a bit of a twinge when she met him, but she brushed it off because it was very slight and nothing to be concerned about. Still, when you add her experience to what Lucas is telling us now….”

  The words trailed off, and we all were silent for a moment as we stared at one another, grappling with the idea of Randall Lenz possibly being a warlock. The notion seemed completely ludicrous to me. All right, the man was scary as hell in a variety of ways, but I’d never seen him show the slightest sign of possessing any sort of magical powers.

  “It’s crazy,” I said then, wondering even as I spoke whether I might be protesting a bit too much. Still, there didn’t seem to be anything to do except continue, so I went on, “How could it be possible that neither Jake nor I — or Connor or Angela — could sense anything special about him, but Genoveva and Lucas somehow did? What could have changed between then and now?”

  Again, we all lapsed into silence…until Jake’s fingers clenched on my shoulder. I looked up at him, startled, and watched his eyes widen as some sort of idea seemed to suggest itself to him.

  When he spoke, his voice was almost hushed. “You struck him with lightning.”

  I stared at him, not sure what he was hinting at.

  Then Angela’s eyes widened and she said, “Oh, my God.” As all our gazes fixed on her, she added, “It makes sense, in a horrible kind of way. What if Agent Lenz was basically a nunca — a witch or warlock who barely has any powers,” she explained quickly as I gave her a blank look. Maybe someday I’d be up to speed on all the ins and outs of the witch world, but at the moment, I was just feeling fried. I managed to nod, and she went on, “Then Addie zaps him with lightning, and his magical gifts wake up. That would explain why none of us felt anything special about him…yes, he’d been zapped by the time we encountered him, but his powers might not have really started to grow yet. However, by the time Genoveva met him — and Lucas met him — they’d have woken up enough to be detectable.”

  In a way, what Angela was saying made a horrible kind of sense. Or at least, it made as much sense as any of the rest of this craziness. I still knew so little of this strange new world, and so I honestly had no idea whether it was possible to have your powers sleep until something came along to give them the nudge they needed. Judging by the shocked silence around me, I had a feeling none of the others were quite sure, either.

  “Well, let’s agree on that as a theory for now,” Margot said in that brisk way of hers. “It’s plausible, if nothing else. But if we accept the idea of Randall Lenz being a warlock, what do we do next?”

  “Nothing,” I said, my tone flat. Everyone stared at me, and I drew a breath and made myself go on. “Look, I get that you’re doing what you can to find orphaned witches and warlocks and return them to their clans, but you can’t include Agent Lenz in that same group. For one thing, this is all only a theory. Something else entirely could be going on. And second, the man’s life has been devoted to tracking down people with special powers and turning them into guinea pigs. You think he’s going to be thrilled to find out he’s actually been one of the lab animals all along?”

  For a long moment, no one said anything. Then Jake shifted slightly so he stood next to me, rather than behind. His eyes met mine, and I found myself wishing desperately, fervently, that we could be alone together. After all, I’d been jolted out of a deep sleep by the sudden arrival of Angela and Connor and Lucas Wilcox, and I was still doing my best to come to terms with the sudden change in my status. All I wanted was to crawl into Jake’s arms and stay there for about a hundred years.

  “We don’t have to make a decision about anything tonight,” he said. His gaze moved from me to the rest of the people gathered in the dining room. “Addie’s exhausted, and I want to take her home. We can hash all this out tomorrow.”

  “You’re right,” Angela said. I got the feeling that she’d cut in before anyone else could speak so she could lend her support to Jake. Maybe she’d seen the same thing in my face that he had. Whatever the reason, I was very glad of her unexpected support. “It’s almost midnight — let’s all meet at Jake’s place tomorrow to discuss this further. If that’s okay with you,” she tacked on quickly, as if realizing that maybe she shouldn’t have volunteered his house as the location for their meeting.

  “That’s fine,” he replied. “Eleven o’clock?”

  Margot’s mouth pursed. Possibly, she was thinking about protesting that we should meet earlier than that, given the gravity of the situation, but a sideways glance from Lucas was enough to keep her from commenting.

  “Eleven is great,” Connor said. “That’ll give the rest of us time to scrounge up babysitters. And probably you should have Jeremy there, too.”

  “And Laurel,” Jake added. “I know she wasn’t part of the rescue effort, but she’s a member of the Trident team, so she should be included.”

  “Sure.” My brother — I wondered if someday it wouldn’t feel strange to think of him that way — looked around at everyone. “I know this is something we didn’t even imagine could happen. But the important thing is that Addie is safe.”

  For now, I thought, although I didn’t voice those words aloud. Yes, my brother and sister-in-law had called on their incredible magical gifts to effe
ct my rescue, but would it be enough? I’d come to think of Randall Lenz as a force of nature, something inexorable as the tide. How could we ever stop him?

  Somehow, I managed to shove those worries aside as I got up from my chair and gave Connor and Angela a quick hug, then murmured a thank-you to Lucas as well, even though I wasn’t quite sure what his part in the whole rescue operation had been. A quick goodbye to Margot, and then Jake was guiding me out the front door and into the cool night air.

  A bright moon, nearly full, hung overhead. However, I didn’t have time for much more than a quick glimpse before Jake opened the passenger door of a white Wrangler parked in the driveway and helped me in.

  Right. He’d sold the Gladiator because he thought it was too conspicuous. A pang of guilt went through me, even though I knew he would only wave it off if I made a comment about the vehicle. Instead, I sat quietly in the passenger seat as I waited for him to come around to the driver side and slide into his own seat.

  As he began to back down the long, curved driveway, he said, “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Just a little shell-shocked, I guess.”

  “That’s understandable. But we’ll be home soon.”

  Home. Had that been a slip of the tongue, or had Jake already acknowledged to himself that our dream of settling in Riverton had been merely that — a dream, a fantasy that couldn’t possibly come true? I didn’t know, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask right then. The day had been a long and crazy one, and I only wanted to fall asleep in his arms and sort out everything else once I wasn’t so damn tired.

  Lucas and Margot’s house was about ten minutes away from Jake’s, so it wasn’t too long before he pulled into the driveway of the big Victorian and then into the detached garage. Soon enough, we were inside, with an ecstatic Taffy dancing around my feet, her tail wagging like crazy.