Winds of Change

by Christine Pope

  There didn’t seem to be anything I could do except stumble over to the sofa and sink down on it. I wanted to bury my head in my hands and cry, except I knew the whole place was under video surveillance, and I wasn’t going to give Dr. Richards or whoever else might be watching the feed the satisfaction of knowing they’d gotten to me.

  No, I sat there, eyes dry and burning, stomach knotted with an uncomfortable mixture of despair and dread. I’d tried my best, and it hadn’t worked.

  I had no idea what to do next.

  19

  Jake awoke to a dull throbbing in his head. His eyes opened, and he found himself staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling, smooth and painted a pale tan color. He shifted, thinking he could put his hands down on the bed where he lay — yes, that was definitely a bed — and push himself up to a sitting position.

  Unfortunately, the restraints that kept him strapped to the bed had a different idea.

  What the — ?

  “I’m sorry about those,” came an unfamiliar female voice. Jake turned his head and saw a woman in her early forties standing a foot or so away. She wore a white lab coat and had dark blonde hair cut into a smooth bob. “But because of your particular talent, we thought it best to keep you restrained for a bit.”

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked. His voice came out as a scratchy growl, forcing its way past a dry throat. At another time, he might have worried about sounding rude. Right then, with his fear for Addie compounding the numerous aches and pains in his body, he couldn’t have cared less.

  Ignoring his brusque tone, the woman smiled and said, “I’m Dr. Richards. I’m in charge of this program.”

  “Oh, you’re the sadist who kidnaps people and forces them to undergo your little ‘tests’?”

  Her smile slipped a little, and she replied in a brisk voice, “I’m sorry you view our work that way, Jake. I don’t know what Addie told you, but I can assure you that we don’t force anyone to do anything. All our guests are happy to assist us in our work.”

  There was a load of bull. However, he didn’t see the point in trying to convince the doctor that her view of the world — and her work — was just a little skewed. He had far more important things to expend his energy on.

  “Where is Addie?”

  “She’s here, and she’s safe,” the doctor said. “I can tell from your expression that you don’t believe me, but we don’t mean her — or you — any harm. It’s best for everyone involved that you’re here with us and participating in our studies. Really, it was only a matter of time before your talents got out of control, and you ended up hurting yourself or someone else.”

  Those words made Jake want to laugh out loud in derision, but he kept quiet. Obviously, Dr. Richards had no experience with someone like him, a warlock who’d known how to work with his magic almost from the time it awakened. The poor souls she had trapped here had come into their powers on their own, with no guidance, and so she’d wrongly assumed it must be like that for everyone with special talents.

  “I want to see Addie,” he said.

  “And you will,” the doctor told him. “For now, though, you need to rest. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine,” he said shortly. No way would he tell her about the headache that currently pounded behind his temples. The last thing he wanted was for her to try shoving some kind of weird meds down his throat. He could cope very well until the pain subsided on its own.

  “Hungry? Thirsty?”

  Of course he was thirsty. His throat felt like twenty-grit sandpaper. However, he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to admit such a weakness. Then again, while he could go quite a while without food, water was going to be a problem a lot sooner.

  “I’d like some water.”

  Something in her expression shifted. Was she pleased that he’d asked for something from her? Maybe it had been a mistake, but he couldn’t take the words back.

  Besides, he was thirsty.

  “Just a minute,” she said.

  The doctor left the room, presumably to fetch the water he’d requested. Jake couldn’t see much, thanks to being strapped down on the bed, but he caught a glimpse of the space beyond the bedroom where he lay, something that looked like the back of a couch, maybe a floor lamp placed in one corner. Even those few details told him that he’d probably been placed in a suite similar to the one Addie had described from her stay at the SED facility. He didn’t know whether he should be relieved by the relative comfort of his location — yes, he was strapped to the bed, but at least he wasn’t in a jail cell — or worried that they’d put him here because they intended to treat him as just another test subject.

  No way in hell would he allow that.

  Dr. Richards returned with a glass of ice water in one hand. The glass also contained a bendable straw, but even with the straw, Jake wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to drink anything without it dribbling down his chin.

  “I can undo your restraints,” she said. “But you need to promise me that you won’t try anything. If you do….” The words trailed off as she pulled a hypodermic from the pocket of her lab coat. “A second dose could have some serious side effects.”

  “I get it,” he said wearily. Right then, he felt so brain-fogged that he wasn’t sure whether he’d even be able to summon his gift to attack the doctor. Anyway, thanks to what Addie had told him about the facility, he knew there were hidden cameras all over the place, and that the door was secured with a biometric lock he wouldn’t be able to open. Even if he managed to overpower the doctor without getting zapped by that stupid hypodermic needle, he still wouldn’t get any farther than the living room before he came up against that locked door.

  Another tight-lipped smile. “I’m glad we understand one another.”

  She set the glass down on the bedside table and then efficiently undid the buckles of the restraints. As soon as she was finished, she stepped back, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether she trusted him to behave himself, despite his promises to the contrary.

  Jake allowed himself an inner smile, even as he painfully pushed himself up to a sitting position. Every vertebra in his back felt as if it was cracking in succession as he straightened, and the pounding in his head intensified. Still, it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t reach for the glass of ice water Dr. Richards had brought him and take a long pull through the straw.

  The cold water pulsing down his throat tasted better than anything he’d ever drunk. He swallowed some more, feeling how it soothed the rawness of the muscles there. After draining half the glass, he put it down on the bedside table. His head still hurt, but he thought he might be starting to feel halfway human.

  All right, maybe a quarter.

  Dr. Richards had stood silently near the bed while he drank, waiting for him to finish. Jake looked down at himself, glad that he still wore the T-shirt and jeans he’d had on when he and Addie returned from their trip to Connor and Angela’s house, although someone had taken off his shoes.

  Since the doctor seemed to be waiting for him to speak, he said, “What now?”

  “For now, you rest,” she replied. “Someone will bring you your dinner in a short while. Tomorrow…tomorrow we’d like to start exploring your abilities.”

  A nice, polite way of saying that they planned to turn him into a lab rat. He fought back a scowl and said, “Not until I see Addie and know she’s safe.”

  One of Dr. Richards’ perfectly plucked eyebrows lifted. “I don’t think you realize that you’re not in a position to be making demands, Jake. However, I can understand that you’re concerned about her, so I’ll see if I can set up a teleconference for you sometime tomorrow morning.”

  A teleconference that they’d be recording and scrutinizing. However, he realized that pretty much any conversation he had with Addie would be surveilled, so that wasn’t reason enough to tell the doctor a teleconference wasn’t satisfactory. Jake wanted to be able to take Addie in his arms, hold her and tell her everything was going to be all right
— even if that particular reassurance might be an outright lie — but being able to see her and hear her voice was better than nothing.

  “Thanks,” he said, although he wasn’t really all that thankful for the minimal amount of largesse the doctor seemed willing to extend to him.

  Still, he knew he had to play along for now. He supposed he should have allowed the possibility of Agent Lenz somehow managing to track them back to Flagstaff, but how? The man’s memories had been erased, and Jeremy had destroyed all the documentation relating to Lenz’s pursuit of them from Kanab to Las Vegas and beyond. Hell, “Jake Wilcox” hardly existed anymore, thanks to the fake identity Jeremy had set up for him.

  And yet, all that hadn’t been enough. If he survived this, he sure as hell was going to ask Jeremy where his supposed countermeasures had failed them.

  In the meantime, Jake had to do his best to make his captors believe he was being cooperative. As soon as he and Addie didn’t turn up at Connor and Angela’s house for their planned assault on Agent Lenz, they’d know something had gone horribly wrong. He had to assume they’d figure out the situation quickly enough, but what then? Would they mount a rescue?

  Of course, they will, he told himself. They’re not going to leave Addie and me to rot here.

  The question was, how? If they brought Lucas along to ensure the rescue’s success, like they had when they broke Addie out the first time, then they’d only be able to rescue one of them at a time, since neither Connor nor Angela was quite strong enough to carry two people while teleporting. They could travel in the blink of an eye…but an eye blink might be all it took for Lenz’s people to realize a jailbreak was happening and to move the person left behind to a location Connor and Angela couldn’t reach.

  “Well, then,” Dr. Richards said, her tone brisk, as if she’d realized that he wasn’t going to offer any further protests.

  Because he’d been beaten.

  “I’ll see what I can do to get the teleconference set up,” she went on. “In the meantime, the bathroom is through that door, and there’s a TV in the living room with access to pretty much any show you’d want to watch. Just be careful standing up the first time — you may feel a little lightheaded.”

  “Then I might as well do it now,” he told her, then slowly swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Even that movement was enough to make his head start throbbing again, but he ignored the ache and pushed himself up to a standing position.

  The room wobbled around him. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to remain where he was until the spinning stopped. Dr. Richards looked up at him coolly, although something in her expression seemed a little tight. Maybe she didn’t care for the way he loomed over her, since she wasn’t overly tall.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Okay,” he replied. “I think I’ll go out to the living room.”

  After picking up his water glass, he slowly walked past her and out into the main area of the suite. As advertised, it had a large TV mounted to one wall, with a sofa, coffee table, and armchair placed in front of it. Off to one side was a dinette set with a round table and four chairs. The furniture was upholstered in soft shades of beige and gray, and the whole place looked like a hotel suite.

  Again, just about what Addie had described, although the theme of the prints on the walls appeared to be mountain scenes, rather than the beachscapes she’d mentioned.

  He sat on the couch, a little surprised at how comfortable it was, and put his water glass down on the coffee table, deliberately ignoring the coasters provided. Watching this, Dr. Richards wore a pained expression, but she didn’t call him out, only said, “It looks like you’re doing very well. Any dietary restrictions I should let the kitchen know about?”

  “No,” he replied, after briefly considering telling her he was vegan and gluten-free, just to be difficult. However, that sort of lie would only result in him getting a meal he really wouldn’t want to eat, and so he let it go.

  “Great. The food should be here shortly. Have a good evening.”

  She smiled brightly and went over to the door, pausing briefly to have it scan her right eye so she could exit the suite. Then she headed out, and the door closed behind her with a soft click that sounded all too final.

  At once, he got up from the sofa and went over to the door. It was a long shot, but…

  …witches and wizards did have a facility with locked doors.

  He paused six inches away from the biometric scanner and let it scan his right eye, at the same time visualizing the door opening.

  Nothing happened.

  Well, shit.

  Another try, with the same result. Abandoning the scanner, Jake put his fingers on the door handle, willing it to press down at his touch.

  Again, nothing.

  Apparently, that particular witchy gift only worked on regular door locks with tumblers. Maybe if Jeremy had been here, his own talent would have allowed him to circumvent the biometric lock. Or maybe not; his power worked wonders on anything that had a microprocessor, but even he might have met his match in this particular security setup.

  Deflated, Jake went back to the sofa and sat down again. He hated the thought of sitting on his ass when Addie was being held somewhere else in this same facility, but unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot he could do about it. Impotent rage boiled within him, and his thoughts began to circle to a dark place.

  What if they couldn’t get out of there? What if Connor and Angela and Jeremy couldn’t come up with a plan that didn’t involve risking their lives as well? Yes, Connor had said that the Wilcoxes took care of their own, but in the end, the primus and his prima wife were a hell of a lot more important than Jake and Addie, since they had the members of two entire clans depending on them. They might decide in the end that it wasn’t a gamble worth taking.

  They won’t do that. They won’t.

  Jake just wished his inner voice was a little more confident.

  Randall Lenz sat in his office, brooding over everything Adara Grant had just told him. It was late and he should have gone home, and yet he’d realized he didn’t want to sit in that empty house and listen to the silence there. Much better to be here in the office, where, although he was alone, he had only to walk down the hall to be in a room with analysts and other agents, a place where the quiet buzz of activity served to reassure him that everything was humming along like the well-oiled machine he’d built the Daedalus Project to be.

  But even though he sat in familiar surroundings, in a place he’d designed to be soothing and allow him to think clearly, his thoughts were anything but clear at the moment. He wanted to laugh at what Adara had said, wanted to tell himself that she’d obviously been grasping at straws, doing her best to hand him the sort of story she thought might help to extricate herself from her current situation.

  Your talent is luck, she’d said.

  Ridiculous.

  Only…was it?

  If asked, he would never have come out and said that he was a lucky person. He’d never won the lottery, never had fame or fortune dropped in his lap. He would have pointed out the loss of his father when he was barely twenty years old. How could anyone believe that having a parent die in such a horrific and tragic way was anything but an example of the very worst luck of all?

  But then he realized that his own luck most likely only protected him, not necessarily those around him. Lenz had actually had plans to meet his father for lunch at the World Trade Center that fateful day in September, but he’d woken up that morning with a scratchy throat and had called his father’s secretary to pass on the news and to let him know they’d have to reschedule. Less than fifteen minutes after he’d hung up, the plane had hit the North Tower.

  Odd how he hadn’t even thought about that incident for years. For a while, he’d wrestled with his own form of survivor’s guilt, even though he’d done his best to rationalize his way through the situation, telling himself that even if he hadn’t cancel
ed the lunch date, the tower would have collapsed hours before he was supposed to meet his father there.

  His luck at work, making sure he wouldn’t go near the place even though he might not have been terribly at risk?

  Maybe.

  There were far more instances than that, however…like the way he got his first posting at Homeland Security, thanks to the sub-director of the Sciences Division being an old college friend of his father’s. Again, it could have been simply serendipity or coincidence — or the plain fact that Princeton grads tended to stick together, and Leo Schumacher had wanted to do what he could to help the son of a man who’d lost his life in a national tragedy.

  Or how Lenz had achieved his current position as director of the Daedalus Project when the previous director was found to be embezzling funds and quickly dismissed. Yes, he’d been next in line for the job, but no one had thought he would achieve the position so soon. His former boss was a man only ten years older, someone who should have remained as director for years and years…until he bought a cabin in Vermont to go along with his beach house in Florida, and investigators discovered exactly how much of the project’s budget had been funneled into his personal accounts following his appointment to the position.

  Lenz rubbed his forehead and frowned. None of this was solid enough evidence to hold up in a court of law, and yet his instincts were telling him that the pattern really couldn’t be ignored. One incident meant nothing. Two…much the same. But when he sorted through his personal history and thought of all the instances when he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time if circumstances hadn’t conspired to prevent him from doing so, and when he mentally calculated all the times his career had gotten an unexpected boost through matters that were none if his doing, it became much more difficult for him to try to deny this was all natural and nothing more.

  And then there was the matter of him being conveniently already in southern Colorado when Dawson unearthed the information that sent him to find Adara Grant in Wyoming. Yes, some might argue that if his talent was really that strong, it would have guided him directly to Riverton, but he wasn’t so sure about that. The timing allowed him to go and collect her when she was safely asleep, rather than trying to pluck her from her job as a bar server at the local casino. At any rate, the operation had been seamless. His luck had still held.