Winds of Change

by Christine Pope

  He wanted to believe this was all madness. He wanted to tell himself that witches and warlocks didn’t exist. The Daedalus Project had been created based on the theory that a certain subset of the population possessed special gifts and that those people were somehow able to tap into the hidden reserves of the human mind. Nothing there about witches or warlocks, or magic. Just harnessing the power of the portions of the brain that usually slept.

  Only…what if that power could more correctly be called magic?

  If that was the case, then everything Adara Grant had told him was the truth. But how could she prove such a thing?

  Lenz got up from his desk and left his office. Because it was late and the evening team was on duty, Dawson had already gone home for the night. Too bad, because he might have wanted her as a witness to what he intended to do next. Or maybe not; did he really want his assistant to know that her boss wasn’t quite what he seemed, was in fact a warlock?

  The word itself was absurd. He was a man of science, a government agent, not someone who sounded as though he should be draped in robes, dressed like something out of a Harry Potter novel.

  Down the six floors to the suite where Adara Grant was staying, and then a brief pause at the entrance to her rooms so he could push the intercom button on the security panel mounted next to the door. Before doing so, however, he entered the code that turned down the level of the recording devices in the living room section of her suite. He would still do his best to be circumspect when he spoke, but at least that way, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of his colleagues listening to a conversation that would most likely be problematic on a variety of levels. Turning them off altogether, unfortunately, was not an option, as doing so would send an alert to whomever was currently monitoring the surveillance devices.

  “Ms. Grant? I’d like to speak to you for a moment.”

  A long pause, but then her voice came through the speaker, sounding guarded. “About what?”

  “About what you told me earlier.”

  An uncomfortable few seconds passed, and she said, “Okay.”

  He found himself oddly relieved. Yes, he supposed he could have gone into her suite without asking her permission, but he guessed she would be more receptive when she had at least the illusion of being somewhat in control.

  The scanner assessed his retinal patterns, and the door opened to let him in. Adara sat on the sofa, a tray with several empty plates resting on the coffee table in front of her. As soon as the door shut, she rose from her seat and faced him, her arms crossed.

  Her expression was anything but welcoming, although he supposed he should have been expecting that. Not that it mattered; this wasn’t a social call.

  Now that the time had come, though, he found it harder than he’d thought to ask the question. Possibly, the challenging, angry light in Adara’s eyes was the reason. However, he certainly wasn’t going to back down now.

  “You told me something strange earlier,” he said, avoiding the word “warlock” and keeping his phrasing vague so the hidden cameras and microphones, even turned down as they were, couldn’t pick up anything incriminating. “You know how implausible it must have sounded.”

  Her shoulders lifted slightly. “I know it sounds crazy,” she replied. “But it doesn’t change the truth of the matter.”

  “I’m afraid I need more evidence than that.”

  “With your kind of talent, that’s not so easy.” A pause as she frowned, clearly pondering the problem — if it was a problem at all. He supposed it was entirely possible that she’d made up the entire story to sow doubt in his mind…although he was fairly certain that wasn’t the case. While he and Ms. Grant had been at odds nearly from the first moment they met, he didn’t believe she would be that duplicitous.

  But then she smiled and nodded to herself, as if she’d just thought of something.

  “I’ll need a candle,” she said, and he frowned at her, wondering if he’d heard her correctly.

  “A candle?”

  “Yes. A real one, not one of those battery-powered kinds.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled, the first genuine smile he’d seen from her. “Because it’s the easiest way to prove you’re really what I said you are.”

  20

  For the longest moment, I worried that Agent Lenz wasn’t going to go for it. After all — if the dubious expression on his face was any indication — he could have seen my request as a simple stalling tactic and nothing more. It wasn’t, though. I’d realized as he’d stared at me, challenging me to come up with some way to offer real proof for my claims, that the door-unlocking trick Jake had shown me wasn’t going to work here. It was one thing to move a few tumblers with your mind or your witchy powers or whatever you wanted to call them, and quite another to mess with a state-of-the-art biometric lock.

  But then I’d remembered how Jake and Connor had talked about getting Agent Lenz to conjure a flame, and I guessed that would do just as well. Jake had told me how witches and warlocks could summon fire, could light candles by doing nothing more than thinking about it. I hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to test that particular power, but I figured it couldn’t be too difficult.

  So, I asked Agent Lenz to get a candle, and although he gave me some side-eye, he said he’d see what he could do and disappeared, presumably in search of the candle in question. I wouldn’t let myself relax, even though I was glad to have him out of my presence, if only for a few moments. Although he hadn’t done anything threatening, my teeth seemed to set themselves on edge whenever he was around.

  While he was gone, I made myself sit back down on the sofa in the living room area of my suite and wait quietly for him to return, even though I wanted to pace back and forth to work off some of my nervous energy. This had to work. It wasn’t just my freedom on the line — it was Jake’s freedom, and the freedom of all the other test subjects currently being held at the facility. Anxiety knotted my gut, and I reached for the half-drunk glass of water that sat on the coffee table and managed a few large swallows. I didn’t know if it really helped all that much, but at least my mouth felt a little less dry.

  About fifteen minutes passed before Randall Lenz’s voice came through the speaker unit next to the door. “I have the candle,” he said.

  “Come in,” I replied, glad I sounded so steady.

  He entered the room. In one hand he held a jar candle in a soft pink shade. It looked so incongruous against his severe black suit that I wanted to laugh.

  Expression somewhat pained, he said, “Candles are in short supply in a facility like this. However, I was able to locate this one on one of the admins’ desks. Against regulations, but it doesn’t look as though she ever lit it.” A very small shrug, and he went over to the dinette set and put it down on the table there. “I don’t have a lighter, however.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. I got up from the sofa and walked over to the table, then paused a few feet away from it. “You won’t need one. You see, you’re going to light this candle with your mind.”

  Lenz stared at me as if I’d just told him he was going to strap on a pair of wings and jump off the roof of the building. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s something all witches and warlocks can do,” I explained. “We all have this small talent — this, and being able to unlock doors…well, as long as they have regular locks, I guess. All you have to do is focus on the candle and will it to light.”

  His arms crossed. “What does lighting candles and unlocking doors have to with supposedly being lucky…or, for that matter, summoning storms?”

  “Nothing!” I flared at him, then made myself take a breath. While he had a knack for plucking my last nerve, this definitely wasn’t the time or place to lose my temper. And, on the surface, I thought I understood what he was asking. It didn’t seem to make much sense that witches and warlocks had all these disparate talents, and yet they still shared those two small gifts in common. Maybe it was a quirk of evolution and nothing more
. I didn’t know, because I was still new to all this and was woefully short of any in-depth knowledge of the witch world and the laws that governed it. “I mean,” I went on in more measured tones, “I honestly can’t tell you why all witches and warlocks can light a candle just by thinking about it. All I know is that it works. Just try, okay?”

  A long pause. He watched me with those icy eyes of his, and I swallowed nervously. What if he told me this was ridiculous and walked out? I couldn’t make him do anything, after all, not buried hundreds of feet below ground in a place where my weather talents couldn’t help me a single bit.

  Then again….

  I couldn’t summon a storm, but I could do the one thing I was asking him to do.

  “Like this,” I said, and looked over at the pink candle. Even unlit, it had a fresh, bright scent. Pink grapefruit, maybe.

  The wick flared to life as I gazed at it, a small steady flame surrounding the virgin unburned cord. Randall Lenz took a step backward, then paused, eyes narrowing.

  “How did you do that?” he demanded.

  “I’m a witch,” I said simply. Strange how easy it was to utter those three words, when only a few weeks earlier, I hadn’t even thought witches were real. But being a witch was just part of me, like the color of my eyes or the way I couldn’t fall asleep unless I lay on my side. “Just like you’re a warlock, Agent Lenz. Try it.”

  He glanced at the candle and then back at me, his posture oddly irresolute. In all my dealings with him, I’d never seen him look hesitant, and yet that was how he seemed to me in that moment. Unsure of himself, wondering if he was about to take a deep dive into a place from which he could never return.

  Well, I knew what it felt like to fall into that particular rabbit hole…but I also knew I’d never want to go back to who I was before, to the world I’d lived in before. Everything had changed, and for the better. That didn’t mean I wasn’t still mourning the loss of my mother, and yet I wouldn’t allow her loss to taint the very real sense of wonder I held within me, now that I knew magic was real.

  “It’s all right,” I said, hoping to encourage him.

  “No, it’s not. It’s one thing for you to have done this….” He stopped there, and his gaze flickered up to an indeterminate point in the ceiling before returning to me.

  For a second or two, I couldn’t figure out what he was hinting at. Then I remembered that the entire suite was under video surveillance. He’d said it was “one thing for me to have done this.” By that comment, I assumed he meant that whoever was watching the video would only have seen someone they’d already known had special powers use one they hadn’t seen before, and while unusual, it might not rouse too many suspicions. If he did the same thing, however, he’d have a hell of a lot of explaining to do.

  I supposed I should have realized they’d catch my little performance with the candle on camera. There wasn’t anything I could do about that, unfortunately, but I understood his reticence. The last thing he probably wanted was for his own people to realize he had a little something more going on in his brain than he’d previously revealed.

  Then he inclined his head ever so slightly in the direction of the bedroom. Again, I had to puzzle out his meaning, but a second later, it hit me. Yes, the bedroom had its own hidden cameras…but the bathroom didn’t.

  I nodded but didn’t say anything, only bent down and blew out the candle, then picked it up and headed toward the bathroom. Lenz followed close behind, and once we were inside, he shut the door behind us even as he flicked on the light fixture mounted on the wall above the mirror.

  Being with him in such close quarters wasn’t exactly comfortable, but I told myself it was in a good cause. Still without speaking — just in case there were hidden microphones, even if they’d shown their test subjects the barest consideration by not having cameras in such a private place — I pointed at the candle. Agent Lenz stared at it for a moment, and then his jaw tightened.

  Go ahead, I mouthed. Not that he hadn’t known what I wanted him to do. But I had to hope the extra encouragement would be enough for him to take the necessary mental leap.

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers, as if he wanted to make sure he couldn’t affect the candle in any way except with his thoughts. The straight dark brows pulled together, and his eyes shut for the briefest moment.

  And the candle came to life again, the flame bright and steady. A hiss of breath escaped his lips.

  “That’s not possible,” he whispered. His eyes fastened on me, hard, glinting…suspicious. “Did you do that?”

  “No,” I said, annoyed that he’d even think I would pull such a maneuver. Then again, Connor had said Randall Lenz might suspect me of trying to trick him into believing he had powers similar to mine. Lowering my voice, I added, “Can they hear us in here?”

  He shook his head, but at the same time, he reached over and turned on the bathroom’s exhaust fan. It hummed away, making a good white noise generator. “There isn’t any surveillance equipment in the bathroom,” he told me, confirming what I had already guessed. “However, the microphones in the bedroom are sensitive enough that they might pick up our conversation. Hence, that.” He pointed up at the plastic grate that covered the fan.

  “Good,” I said. “Anyway, no, I didn’t light that candle. You did that all on your own.”

  His lips pressed together, and then he asked, “It’s not a trick?”

  I reflected that it must not be a lot of fun going through life distrusting everything and everyone around you. “No trick,” I replied. “Do it again.”

  Without answering, he bent and blew out the candle. A long pause — I had a feeling he was testing me, waiting to concentrate on lighting the thing to see if I would intervene — and then the wick glowed with flame once more. This time, he appeared more convinced that he’d actually managed to do the impossible, because he reached up, as if to run an astounded hand through his hair. Then he stopped at the last moment, probably telling himself he shouldn’t betray that kind of weakness to an audience, especially an audience that consisted of one of his test subjects.

  In a way, I wished he had ruffled his hair. Doing so would have made him seem more human.

  But I told myself it was enough that he hadn’t protested this time, hadn’t accused me of making the candle’s wick glow with sudden flame. Grinning, I said, “Yer a wizard, Harry.”

  To my surprise, Lenz didn’t ask me what the hell I was talking about. No, he only smiled slightly and said in ironic tones, “You don’t look much like Hagrid.”

  “Thank God for that.” I hesitated, then said, “So…you believe me now?”

  A very long pause. For the first time, I noticed the lines around his eyes, the faintest traces of gray at his temples. He appeared tired to me then, shoulders slumped, mouth turned down at the corners. “It looks like I’ll have to.”

  Well, at least we wouldn’t have to waste more precious time arguing over whether or not he was a warlock. Through everything else that had been going on, I’d never forgotten about Jake, languishing elsewhere in the facility. Yes, it was nighttime, and I guessed that Dr. Richards and her team wouldn’t start in with the experiments until the following day, but we still needed to get him out of there as fast as we could.

  Actually, I realized as my gaze shifted from Agent Lenz to the room beyond the one where we stood, we needed to get all of them out of there.

  To my surprise, Lenz seemed to guess the direction my thoughts were running, because his tone turned wry as he went on, “You have the look of a woman plotting a jail break.”

  Supposedly, his talent was luck, but right then, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was the teeniest bit psychic as well. Or maybe part of his gift involved instincts that were far more developed than those of most people. “Was I that obvious?” I asked, trying to smile.

  A lifted eyebrow was his only answer. “Whatever you’re thinking,” he said, “it won’t be easy. As you know, all of the test subjects’
suites are monitored 24/7. I might have the authority to move them from one place in the facility to another, but even I don’t have free rein to do whatever I like. If I start shuttling them out of the building, people are going to start asking questions, even if Dr. Richards and her team might not be on duty at the moment.”

  “Well, we’ll have to come up with some sort of a diversion,” I replied. I stopped there and gave him a considering look. He’d spoken simply, without any accusation in his voice, no hint at any subtext, but I had to wonder whether I could really trust him. “You’re not going to give me a speech about how all these test subjects are vital to Homeland Security and it’s treason for me to even be thinking about getting them out of here?”

  Several uncomfortable seconds passed as he stood there, gaze fixed not on me, but on something that seemed to be located far beyond the walls of the underground facility where we stood. The set of his shoulders and neck was so tense, he looked as if he would snap in two if I reached out and touched him.

  Not that I had any intention of doing so.

  When he spoke, his voice was quiet enough that I had to strain to hear him over the hum of the ceiling fan. “How many witches and warlocks are there?”

  The question felt as though it had come straight out of left field, but I still thought I had a notion as to why he’d asked it. “I don’t know,” I said, which was only the truth. “But Jake told me there are hundreds of Wilcoxes, and there are witch families in almost every state in the Union — and also around the world. You do the math.”

  “Tens of thousands.”

  “Probably.”

  He went silent again, although a muscle in his cheek worked, as though he clenched his jaw while he processed that information. “If all those witches and warlocks have managed to keep their identities hidden for this long, then I wouldn’t be doing them a very great service by exposing them, would I? Especially since I seem to be one of them as well.”