by John Conroe
“Hmm, interesting choice. Eoh or yew. The symbol of strength, it denotes defense. A fine idea, Declan.”
“She’s a fighter Aunt Ash… a warrior.”
“I see. Makes sense,” she said with a smirk that made me almost as nervous as Caeco’s comment had.
Caeco studied the rune before looking up at me, her expression questioning. “I am already strong,” she said.
“This will make your strikes and blows truer, even more focused. We all have good days and bad days for our skills, times when we’re in the zone and times when we’re not. You will be in the zone more of the time,” I told her.
“What if we don’t believe?” Dr. Jensen asked suddenly.
“I believe. That’s what counts. The abstract idea of luck or chance is what I influence with these symbols. It’s subtle, like my aunt says.”
The older woman studied me for a moment, then straightened abruptly. “We have to go, Caeco.”
Her daughter nodded and picked up the coats and sweatshirts. At the entry, I held the door for them, but Dr. Jensen took two steps out and stopped dead. Caeco’s reaction was faster; she skipped sideways, clearing six feet in a quick bound. I turned fully into the doorway and spotted the reason for their reactions. Outside, leaning against their Buick, was a tall, black man in a dark suit, his arms and ankles crossed, his eyebrows raised at Caeco’s speed, but with no other reaction.
“Dr. Jensen? Caeco? I’m Mike West, from Oracle.”
Chapter 16 - West
Following the tracker on the boy’s car was easy work. In fact, the damn iPad even suggested turns and directions in a female voice like the GPS in his wife’s minivan. It gave him lots of time to think about what he had learned from Machete, who was still wrapped tight in duct tape and awaiting the retrieval team that Mike had called in.
He was lucky that Machete was young and inexperienced in interrogation. Despite his Juice-induced tolerance for pain, the AIR agent was ill-equipped for the mental chess that a trained interrogator could put him through. Mike had excelled at that part of his training.
He had learned that the girl and her mother were being actively sought by AIR and that Machete had been under orders to observe her but had jumped the gun and attempted a capture. The reason that the orders were for observation only were now clear: the girl was formidable, likely a product of AIR labs somewhere. The boy who was helping her was still something of a mystery, but Mike’s intuition was screaming at him not to ignore the kid.
The results were multiple conversations with his superiors at Oracle and his current plan of action.
The soft, familiar female voice that spoke to so many iPhone users around the world led him to a small restaurant on the outskirts of town, partway up the side of the valley. The place looked tidy and neat, with a respectable number of cars parked near the front, but no Toyota Land Cruiser in sight. Driving around the back of the building, he found the Toyota as well as a Prius and a silver Buick Regal. He studied the situation for a moment before parking his car and approaching the Buick. A quick glance inside showed a car that looked like someone was either ready to live out of it or on a long distance trip with it. Clothes and shoes were jumbled in the backseat, and several fast food bags crumpled on the floor indicated a diet of convenience for the car’s owners. He was studying the car when voices coming from the building’s rear entry caught his ear.
A moment later, a thin, brown-haired woman came out the back door, pulling up short when she saw him. The girl who came behind her moved in a blur, jumping sideways like a cat, instantly giving her a better tactical position. The black-haired boy who owned the Toyota moved to the girl’s side, his blue eyes locked on Mike. Before the situation could devolve further, Mike spoke.
“Dr. Jensen? Caeco? I’m Mike West, from Oracle.”
Everyone froze and, knowing his time was short, he continued his pre-thought-out speech, oddly nervous under the hard eyes of the girl and her boyfriend. He held up his credentials and spoke quickly but evenly.
“I’m guessing you’ve heard of Oracle, and I hope you know that we would like nothing more than an opportunity to help you out of your problem with your previous employers. I’ve spoken to my boss, Nathan Stewart, and we have a team on the way to provide you and your daughter with protection from AIR.”
“I know of Oracle, Mr. West, and what I know is that you can’t protect us from AIR, plus I don’t feel inclined to believe your words. AIR already has an agent on the ground here.”
“Yes, he’s in my trunk, thanks to your daughter’s skills. I have people arriving within the next two hours to take him. We have a plan, and if you’ll give me a moment of your time, I can lay it all out for you.”
The girl moved forward slightly, speaking as she went. “I don’t believe him, Mother.” West brought the Taser in his right hand out from under his left armpit but kept it pointed at the ground. The boyfriend smiled a hard smile at the sight of it and stepped forward. Mike pointed the Taser in his direction.
“He’s telling the truth, at least as far as he knows it. I think ye should hear him out,” an attractive woman said in a thick Irish accent from behind Dr. Jensen. “Declan, leave off his Taser… they just make you all jittery, dear. Worse than sugar.”
The boy frowned, then met the curious glance of the girl who was the root cause of all this. He shrugged. “Darci, my aunt’s partner, gets mad every time I drain hers,” he said to Caeco.
“That’s because yer always doing it just before she’s due on patrol, dear,” the pretty woman said. “Now let’s go back inside and have some tea. Come along, Mr. West. Let’s hear this brilliant plan.”
Bemused by her casual disregard for the tension of the moment, West found himself ushered into a warm combination living room and kitchen that was decorated in rich earth tones. A rustic wood plank table centered the room, set squarely on a green and black wool rug. Plants grew in profusion, the furniture looked comfortable and rustic, and there were candles everywhere. A salt pillar occupied one end table, and there were multiple natural crystals hanging in the windows to catch the sunlight and spray multi-colored dots around the room. Celtic designs were everywhere: painted, carven, woven, and sculpted into a large portion of the decorations. A big Vermont Castings woodstove took up one corner, kindling and chunks of wood stacked nearby and ready for the cold autumn nights.
Within moments, he was seated across from the girl, her mother, and the boy, a cup of tea between his hands.
This is not at all what I expected, he thought. Gathering his words, he looked up at his audience and began to speak.
Chapter 17–Declan
The agent man was pretty smooth, looking mostly comfortable and confident as he sat across from us. He seemed slightly unsettled by my aunt, but that’s to be expected. Ashling O’Carroll can be a force of nature when necessary, and I shudder to think what she and my mother must have been like together.
“Dr. Jensen, I fully understand your concerns regarding AIR’s reach and the danger they represent. If we simply tried a Witness Protection type plan, it would likely fail. What we would rather do is continue your identities here, in Castlebury, and redirect their attention elsewhere.”
“Mr. West, the fact that the local agent can no longer check in with Central Command will alert them faster than if we called them and gave directions,” Caeco’s mom replied.
“Yes, if in fact he couldn’t check in. But he has been and he’s already reported that the Sarah Williams he was sent to observe is not, in fact, Caeco Jensen.”
“How is that possible when he’s in your trunk?” she asked.
“Because I’ve been observing and studying Agent Machete for two months. I know his habits and methods, I have recordings of his voice, and I was there when he received his operational codes for this month. Oracle has spent decades watching AIR and learning their ways, and if you know anything about us, you know we have unusual methods of obtaining information.”
“What do you mean by
that, Agent West?” my aunt asked.
He gave her a crooked smile, as if he was uncertain how to explain, but Dr. Jensen spoke before he could. “They work much like you do, Ashling. Their people have abilities of all kinds that could loosely be described as psychic.”
“Is that right, Mr. West? Do you have a touch of the Sight, do ya?”
He glanced around at the candles, crystals, salt pillars, and Celtic crosses. “Would I be right in guessing you’re no stranger to such things, Ms. O’Carroll?”
Caeco snorted at that, but Aunt Ash just smiled and nodded. “Let’s just say we have open minds, Mr. West.”
“Oracle stands for Occult Research Alternative Combat League. It was founded by Nathan Stewart to provide our nation with options. Director Stewart had been assigned to investigate rumors of things that went bump in the night, supernatural things that the nation’s leaders were taking much more seriously after World War II. Hitler had spent enormous resources tracking down supernatural legends and rumors, and when the Allied Command saw the things he had uncovered, they began their own research. Luckily for all of us, they chose Nathan. The result is a true government organization that answers to the president and employs people with skills outside the ordinary.”
“What would your own skill be, Agent West?” Aunt Ash asked.
“We don’t have a word for it, but it operates like a sort of super intuition. Like I knew Caeco was important the moment I saw her, but I also knew your nephew there was unusual, just as I believe you to be. I excel at tracking down people and things that turn out to be extremely valuable. But tell me, Ms. O’Carroll, am I right about you and your boy here?”
She studied him for a moment and I knew as soon as she pursed her lips that she was going to trust him. I personally didn’t—trust him that is—but my aunt’s sense of these things is literally supernatural.
“Do you still have your trusty Taser, Agent West?” she asked. He simply nodded, his eyebrows slightly raised.
“Good. Then would ye be kind enough to shoot me nephew here with it?”
His eyebrows shot to the top of their range and his eyes looked uncertain. He glanced my way, but I was just smiling. I do love Tasers. Both Jensen women were looking at him questioningly, like his credibility was on the line. He finally agreed, although you could just about see the second thoughts run across his face. Slowly, he pulled the M26 from his shoulder holster and aimed it my way. “You sure?” he asked.
I smiled and flexed my fingers at him in a gesture that most of the movie watching world knows as bring it on.
A twitch of his finger, and the needles shot out with the crisp crack of compressed gas. One hit my left shoulder, the other my sternum. I’m not going to lie… it’s a damned rush getting Tased, at least for me. Darci’s usually stays locked in her patrol car, as the temptation is just too damned great for me.
Agent West frowned at the apparent lack of results, glancing down at the readout on the back of the gun. “It’s dead! It just had a full charge!”
“That’s ‘cause me nephew just sucked it dry like a fat kid with a chocolate milkshake,” Aunt Ash explained. “Show him, Declan, before ya start bouncing off the ceiling.”
How to describe it? Chock full of energy… zinging with charge? None of those phrases cover it.
I was simply brimming with power. Our family-room-slash-kitchen is mostly wood, with a bit of wrought iron here and there. Like the hanging pot rack over the butcher block island and the black iron floor lamp by the couch. There’s also a great big metal rod driven into the wooden floor with a candle lamp hanging from it. What you can’t see is the ground wire that leads from the bottom of the spike, which protrudes into the basement. The ground wire runs out of the house and into the packed earth next to the foundation. It’s there for a reason, a reason that I demonstrated by reaching my right hand near the rod and arcing every bit of power into one fat snap of blue lightning. It left a char mark on the metal.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Tasers aren’t all that powerful. They run around 50,000 volts. A really good snap of static electricity on a cold, dry winter’s day can hit 30,000 volts. They don’t even run at a high amperage, which is the real number, the rate of flow that the electricity moves at. Tasers work by pulsing electricity in a manner that disrupts the natural electrical flow of the nervous system. But if you take what power they do have and up the amperage to max and dump it in one massive jolt, well, let’s just say it’ll leave spots in front of your eyes and a mark on iron.
Agent West looked from the black spot to his bone-dry Taser to me. “Damn, boy, that’s unexpected,” he said, shaking his head.
“What’s up, Ash?” a voice asked from the doorway, pitched low and quiet. Darci was standing there, in uniform, an ultra-short pump shotgun held professionally in both hands. Danger Will Robinson; when Darci’s voice gets like that, it’s about to get real. I moved in front of Caeco and her mom, watching my defacto step-aunt’s eyes. She noted my movements without response, most of her attention on West.
“Deputy, I’m Agent Mike West with Oracle.”
“Never heard of it. Why do you have a Taser connected to my step-nephew?” she asked.
“Because his aunt asked me to Taser him,” Mr. West responded. A glance at my aunt caught her nodding slightly to herself. She could have answered before West, but she let him handle it as a test of sorts. Which apparently, he passed.
“Darci, Mr. West is an agent of the federal government. His division is tied into the supernatural. He’s offered to help Dr. Jensen and her daughter Caeco, who are in a wee bit more trouble then I guessed.”
“They’re the ones you told me about?” Darci asked, now looking directly at Aunt Ash. I knew she was watching with her peripheral vision, and I’ve seen Darci shoot three clay pigeons thrown at the same time. Hopefully, nobody would do anything stupid.
“We’re right here,” Dr. Jensen said, annoyed, but she quieted when Caeco laid her hand on her mother’s arm. I’d already seen the girl move faster than anyone I knew, but evidently, she had decided jumping Darci was a real bad idea. My opinion of the girl moved up another notch, which put me in danger of running out of notches.
“Yes, dear. There is a group that hides within the US government but answers to no one. They are Machiavellian to the extreme and consider Caeco to be their property. I think they underestimated her badly, though. We were helping them when Mr. West showed up and offered a higher level of protection.”
Darci considered for a moment, then breathed out slightly. She lowered the shotgun, glanced at me and the blackened spike.
“If you’re gonna hang around Declan, you’ll have to learn not to Taser him. He’s like a crack addict with the damn things.”
West looked my way and I gave him grin and a shrug. What can I say? Admitting your addiction is the first step, right?
“Who’s Tasing Declan? I thought we all agreed that was just enabling his habit,” a male voice said behind Darci, who moved aside to let Levi through.
“The outside is clear, although there’s a guy wrapped in duct tape in the trunk of the rental car,” Levi told Darci. Levi looked relaxed but his right hand was on his hip, not far from the .40 M&P pistol that was almost always holstered in a Crossbreed Supertuck inside the waistband of his jeans. I asked Levi once why he always carried it in boring Castlebury, Vermont and he’d answered, “You’d be surprised what some people will do for a book.”
Aunt Ash raised her eyebrows at both of them.
“We arrived at the same time. Me ‘cause my shift was over and him cause he’s just freaky that way. When we saw the cars out back, we got a little concerned,” Darci explained.
“Declan didn’t show up for training. I got worried,” Levi said, studying Caeco, Dr. Jensen, and Agent West.
“Training?” Caeco asked, looking at me.
“Krav Maga,” I answered.
“Oooh. I love Krav!” she said. Levi just raised his eyebrows at the exchange.<
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“Young man, how were you able to do that?” Dr. Jensen asked, her eyes still on the wires and barbs sticking out of my shirt.
“My elements are mainly Earth and Fire. Electricity seems to fit somewhere between both. So, I just sorta channel it where I want it to go,” I replied.
“Elements?” Dr. Jensen asked.
“There are many different schools of what you would call magic or witchcraft, ye know. Most believe there are four or sometimes as many as six elements of power. Earth, Fire, Water, and Air be the ones our Craft adheres to. Earth is opposite Air, Water opposite Fire. Most practitioners have an affinity for one. Rare individuals are like to have two. Never two opposites. If you’re being attuned to Air, then you can’t be attuned to Earth, ye see. Likewise Water and Fire,” Aunt Ash explained.
“You said mainly Earth and Fire?” Caeco said, looking my way.
“He did, didn’t he now,” Aunt Ash said with a mildly exasperated tone in her voice. “As I’ve said, Declan is an exception in many ways. He has some small ability with Air, which should be impossible. He is really strong with Earth and Fire. Me own talents fall into the realm of Air, which includes Devination.”
