Riding the Veil

by Claudy Conn

  “He is the colonel, Colonel Thomas Bagger. Be careful around him,” Dog whispered as they followed.

  Two ACE agents in full gear stepped in front of them, dragging the girl kicking and screaming into the room.

  The colonel made a show of turning over the table and shoving it up against the wall before he turned to the terrified teen and snapped, “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I swear…”

  “You helped him to escape. You must know what his plans were?” the colonel pursued, and brought his hand up and across her face.

  She cried out as she fell backwards and the two agents bent and up-righted her before the colonel.

  The colonel didn’t ask anything as he slapped her repeatedly and until she nearly passed out. Then he bent and whispered in the teen’s ear.

  Jacie felt sick to her stomach watching this. She hated humans, but this one was no more than a child and helpless against these brutes. Her witch hearing allowed her to eavesdrop and she heard the colonel threaten the teen.

  “If you don’t tell me where he has gone off to, I will give you to my men. They will have their fun with you and then cut your face in such a way that no one will ever want to look at you again. Do you understand?”

  The girl was so traumatized that all she could do was cry.

  Jacie saw that the colonel meant to make good on his threat. She glanced at Dog, who fidgeted at her side, and suddenly could not stop herself. “Colonel…what do you want more? For your men to torture and discard this girl, or get the information you want?”

  The colonel stopped and stared at her before he took two strides and came to tower over her, his brown eyes burning. “What’s your name?”

  “Agent Jacie McGalie, sir,” she answered, staring right back at him.

  He continued to stare at her and then suddenly laughed. “Think you can get her to talk?”

  “Yes, Colonel Bagger, I do,” she said, wondering what the hell she was doing. “Just give her to me for a few moments.”

  The colonel eyed her. “Okay, rookie, show me what you can do. She is seventeen, and a runaway. She befriended, aided and abetted a Kur—a being our ancestors called a demigod. We were pursuing him at the time and she is the reason we lost him. I want to know all she knows about him and where he might be headed.”

  A demigod? Jacie immediately thought. Humans called them Kurs. “Right, you have honestly traumatized her. I need her to be able to sit quietly with me and calm down. Just handcuff her to me—she won’t go anywhere.” Jacie gave him a convincing smile.

  “Okay, little lady, this one is on you. You have ten minutes,” the colonel said, and took out a pair of serious looking cuffs.

  Jacie took them from him, attached it around her wrist and bent to do the same to the girl, who was now crying hysterically.

  “What is your name?” Jacie asked kindly.

  The girl didn’t answer and Jacie turned to everyone and snapped, “You can all leave now!” She watched them start to file out and called, “Dog…you stay with me.”

  Jacie patted the girl’s shoulder and felt sick to see the girl wince. She repeated gently, “What is your name? It will go better for you if you cooperate with me.”

  “Helen,” the girl spluttered, and stared up at Jacie. “I don’t know anything. Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

  “I am not going to hurt you. Can you get up and walk with me?”

  As an answer, the girl managed to first get to her knees and then stand.

  “Good, now, let’s walk out of this room and find a bench,” Jacie said softly.

  Dog was silent as he followed them, but Jacie could see he was upset and didn’t think they should have intervened on the girl’s part.

  It is okay, Dog. This will be okay, Jacie assured him telepathically.

  He didn’t respond and Jacie waited only until they were in the hallway. A bench reposed against one of the glass cubicles and Jacie led the girl there and saw her seated.

  She scanned the corridor for cameras and listening devices. There was a camera, no listening device. Good!

  “Okay, Helen, you need to tell me something that will matter to these guys. You need to take yourself out of this equation. Your supernatural is long gone. You bought him time and he is far more capable of defending himself than you are. Offering up your life for torture and death is not what he would want, and it won’t serve you or him. Got it?”

  She nodded her head. “I…he was my friend. I have been living on my own all year and he found me and helped me get by. How can I rat on him?”

  “Because it won’t matter to him. He is gone, you are here. Do what you have to do to survive. Soldiers retreat not because they are cowards, but because they want to live to fight a battle they can win.”

  Helen’s dark eyes stared at Jacie. “Tell them the name he told me to use for him was Wokuum. I hear things on the streets and when I heard they were closing in, I told him. He went north out of the city. He said to tell them if I had to that he was headed for Bear Mountain. That is all I know. I swear.”

  Jacie breathed a sigh of relief and walked the girl back down the hall to the interrogation room door. The colonel, with the same male agents, stood there waiting and the colonel stepped forward. Jacie told them what Helen had told her.

  “I don’t know how you got that out of her, but damn good work!” the colonel said, and before Jacie could smile, his Glock was out and he let off a shot that caught Helen between the eyes. She slumped to the floor, dragging Jacie’s arm by the wrist as Jacie’s mouth opened in shock and her heart burst in her chest with profound sadness.

  No emotion, Jacie. It is done, show no emotion! Dog telepathically cautioned.

  ~ Two ~

  A WEEK HAD GONE BY and Jacie was no closer to getting access to the Lower Planet than she had been when she first arrived.

  Dog had filled her in on nearly everything he knew, which wasn’t much, as the colonel’s team did not talk ‘shop’ on the job, and he had not yet been invited to socialize with them.

  Jacie had filled her spare time with getting some of the most necessary pieces of furniture and filling her fridge. She was always hungry, even now when she wasn’t using much magic.

  Her cell jingled Born in the USA, a favorite of her parents.

  She picked it up—it was the colonel. “Yes, sir?”

  “Get over here,” the colonel snapped. “Call Dog and both of you get over here.”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “We are going in,” the colonel said on a hard note.

  “Going in? Where, sir?” she asked, hoping this was the moment she would get into the Lower Planet. She had worked hard not to display how much she despised the colonel. She was, in fact, surprised that she had felt so much empathy for the teenager he had killed right before her eyes.

  She saw a human whose hatred of supernaturals had dissolved his humanity into boiling evil, and it dawned on her that humans like him could never be brought to the table for peace talks.

  Everything about the colonel repulsed her. In fact, although she had promised Apollo that she would refrain from killing humans whenever possible, she had vowed to herself to kill the colonel with her own hands when the time was right.

  In the past, she had not thought of herself (while training as a warrior) as particularly bloodthirsty, but the colonel brought out the worst in her. He was ruthless and his wicked streak bordered on madness. She rather thought he was what humans called a sociopath. He actually enjoyed hurting any poor supernatural he came across, and as he had with the teen, Helen, he didn’t limit his evil doings to supernaturals. Even his own kind, should they get in his way, were subject to his perverse and unethical machinations.

  All week Jacie had watched the colonel in action.

  Once, he just happened to bump into a man in a suit and turned on him, shoving him to the ground. His men called him, held him off, warning him that they didn’t want to draw any undo attention. That was one of Craw
ly’s steadfast rules.

  She had seen some passerbys stop and stare, one human called out a curse as the colonel’s men held him at bay. Jacie noted all this with interest. She had not thought humans cared enough to help one another.

  Well, promise or no promise, she vowed, one day soon, Apollo, this particular human sociopath was going to die.

  The Lower Planet’s Dank was rumored to be hell, even for the guards assigned to its barely habitable quarters. If they were finally going in, she might get enough of a lay of the land to form a rescue plan.

  Thomas seemed to be spitting nails as he yelled into the phone, “Did you hear me? We have trouble in the Dank. Our team has to go in and bring things under control. So get your fine ass over here.”

  He clicked off and Jacie breathed excitedly. Finally!

  She dialed Dog’s number and got a busy signal.

  Jacie had heard just enough remarks from the other members of her unit about the Lower Planet’s extensive facilities, about the guards, the accessibility and the poor conditions. She knew what to expect and braced herself. She would have to show unconcern for the prisoners’ living conditions. She would have to steel herself for what she was about to witness.

  For no reason at all, silver laughing eyes glittered in her mind—Retaal.

  The accounts of great successes over the years were legendary on Devos. He was hailed a ‘great’ amongst the warriors training on Devos. His capture had been viewed with disbelief. Many of the supernaturals worried that this was the end of a peaceful takeover of Crawly’s ugly killing machine. The gossip amongst those on the training fields of Devos was that this would mean the rebels would have to take charge of the mission and a war would ensue. You know, a war would devastate all.

  She already knew that the Lower Planet was off limits in the general sense to all but the most elite of the ACE unit, which was one of the secret groups established by the mysterious billionaire. Jacie had also heard that even the President of the United States didn’t know of the secret group’s existence.

  She dialed Dog again and when he answered she quipped off, “Come on…the colonel called. We are going into the Lower Planet. Some kind of trouble our unit has to squash.”

  “Hot damn, can I howl now?” Dog was thrilled.

  She smiled to herself because he was a wolf shifter and when she first learned his name it had tickled her, and she had laughed out loud.

  He was older and had given her a wry look. “What’s so funny, kid?”

  She had simply smiled. When they became closer and she began to think of him in brotherly terms, she asked what his real name was.

  He had raised a brow and said, “Why…Dog, of course. What did ya think?”

  She smiled to herself, but immediately returned to the present as she heard him on the phone take in a long breath of air to tell her, “I’m already halfway there. Listen to me, kid. I believe we are going to see some ugly atrocities. You can’t show emotion. Got it?”

  “Got it, but…”

  “No worries, I’ve got your back. I’ll keep you in check.”

  “Right,” Jacie said, and put away her phone, set up her door so that she would know if anyone entered surreptitiously, and took the elevator.

  Jacie hurriedly made her way through the city in short shifts, to Crawly headquarters.

  She had dubbed this form of Fae locomotion as ‘leaping’. She would ‘leap’ into the pedestrians’ unnoticed. Shifting directly to headquarters was dangerous, although it could not be traced by humans. Only some supernaturals and Royal Fae could track the residue left behind when one shifted, but she didn’t want to just suddenly appear in front of a street camera and draw attention to herself.

  Dog had discovered, only the other day, that all of the most powerful supernaturals and otherworldly beings captured on the Northeast Coast were held in the prison known as the Lower Planet. Crawly evidently had another lesser establishment and prison in the UK.

  Excited, Jacie’s breath came in short spurts as she entered the building, heard Dog call her name at her back and waited for him as they entered the elevator. This was a real beginning.

  Once she had a look around the Lower Planet, she could place everything in her mind for a quick ‘get in and out’ escape plan.

  Also, and more importantly, she would perhaps find out how all these powerful beings were being immobilized in their cells. Humans once called them Greek/Roman Gods. They called themselves Cumas, evidently identifying their origins. In Gaelic it meant power, so she rather thought it fitting.

  Jacie had pondered over the puzzle of how a human could contain a Cuma such as Retaal, who was the product of two powerful ‘Gods’ aka/Cumas. Once captured, how did they keep him imprisoned?

  Although she seemed to have passed the colonel’s ‘mettle’ test, he had not told her any of the things she needed to know, and still kept both Dog and her at a ‘rookie’ distance.

  Unlike herself, Dog cared about humans in a general sense. Yet he had not given himself away when the teenager (Helen) was being beaten. He had told her afterwards that he had formed a plan to help her escape and had not expected the colonel to kill Helen on the spot. Dog was even more affected by the incident than she.

  She supposed it was because, as a shifter, he was a pack creature, who had a social, family order. Just the other day, when she was ranking on human behavior, he had said she was too hard on them.

  “They are mortals, kid,” he had told her once. “They have this short span of life where they have to live and get the most out of everything they do. Life for them isn’t that easy…less so for many.”

  They had maintained a silence in the elevator and then as they entered the corridor of the busy headquarters’ main floor. The colonel, with most of the team at his back, stepped forward and handed them specially designed automatic weapons. This weapon was capable of dispensing two kinds of bullets. When set for Cumas, it shot out bullets filled with Tricap, a rare herb that most Cumas were allergic to and rendered them momentarily incapacitated. If shot up with too much of the herb, the rumor was that it could kill a demigod. The other bullets were filled with silver to bring down shifters and werewolves.

  Jacie knew that most immortal witches had gone into hiding, and human studies had not found anything that could bring down an immortal witch. There was, however, an herb that could enable an immortal witch to hallucinate. It was known as Whitebane and only grew in the Highlands of Scotland. As of yet, she understood that humans had not yet discovered this.

  She had built up a tolerance over the years to this herb, but it could still, in quantity, cause her great discomfort.

  Apollo had insisted she take a pin drop of the dangerous white flower’s oil every other month.

  A shudder whipped through Jacie as the colonel put an arm around her waist and hugged her to him. “Well, rookie, you get to see action today.”

  She was seriously uncomfortable in his company, as he constantly had a habit of touching her when he could, taking her arm, moving in closer than was necessary, leaning in to breathe in her ear.

  Ugh. Another shudder swept through her. The horrible man creeped her out.

  Purposely, she tried to maintain a formality with him.

  She had tried to pretend she had no idea that he was flirting with her and remained reserved in his company.

  Once, he had even gone so far as to tell her they were all brothers and sisters, then patted her ass. Yeah, brothers and sisters—sure!

  No, she was going to have to find a way to keep him at a distance. Hopefully Beth would help in that regard. Beth was a ferocious team member and obviously the colonel’s ‘woman’. Jacie couldn’t believe he would have the time to chase after her with Beth forever on the ‘watch’.

  They followed the colonel to the far end of the corridor, where he opened a panel with a key to display a large elevator. They all filed in and when the door closed, he used his palm.

  Dog and Jacie exchanged a quick glance as the
elevator descended at a rapid speed. This was it, Jacie kept thinking. This was it.

  She felt magic in the air as the elevator stopped its descent and the doors opened. The magic was definitely not ‘earthly witch’, but that of a strong immortal witch’s power.

  At first, she had expressed her belief that the witches should never have given in to the creepy Crawly militia. Dog had been upset with her and told her everyone does what they have to do.

  He was, of course, correct. She was too judgmental. Now, she closed her eyes. This was it. Any moment now she would discover what kept the supernaturals in their prisons. Any moment now she would see Retaal.

  As angry and hurt as she had been by Retaal’s behavior, or lack thereof, she knew she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t help free Retaal. In fact, the thought of him being held captive and tortured was more than she could bear.

  Jacie took in a long dreg of air. Was this it? Would this be the moment that led them to the moment they actually freed Retaal and took him to safety? How many could they free at once? In fact, how many Cumas and supernaturals were being held in the Lower Planet?

  So many demigods had chosen to remain amongst the humans. They considered this world home. Why shouldn’t they? It had been home to them for thousands of years.

  Over the centuries, the Gods had often interacted romantically with humans, and that interaction had produced amazing humans, who the worst of the Crawly soldiers called half-breeds/Kurs.

  As they followed the colonel down a dimly lit corridor to a wide steel door and watched him yet again palm a black box, she saw that Dog had become agitated. His eyes were gold fury.

  “Your eyes,” she warned on a hushed note. “They are yellow and there is no saying what cameras they have on us.”

  His expression immediately changed. “Yeah.”

  The steel door opened with a clank, then slid into the wall like a pocket door. The colonel turned and looked at his team. “Ready? We have two escaped Cumas. One is full-blooded, so be on the alert and ready to shoot to bring them down.”