by Lark Brennan
A bead of sweat ran down the back of his neck and under his t-shirt. Which version of the story would she buy?
Leaning back, Lex planted the heels of her boat shoes on the bench not two feet from his thigh. “I’ll know if you lie to me,” she said. “It’s one of my talents.”
Right. He’d become an expert liar in the last three years. “I discovered the secret of turning iron into gold?”
“Quit the games, Bodie. I saw your face when you watched that video. You saw something. I want to know what happened to my whales and Mark asked you to help me.”
Commanded him to help her. Every cell in his body wanted to take the leap, to tell someone who might get it about his current work in spite of the likelihood she’d laugh at him. “How open are you to unconventional theories?”
She smiled. “Very.”
He took a deep breath. She was Mark Durand’s sister and Durand had financed his research. “I invented a monitoring system that senses the strength and nature of a certain kind of natural energy.”
“I get the strength part but nature of the energy? What does that mean?”
“Energy can take all kinds of forms—kinetic, thermal, gravitational, sound, light, electromagnetic, and so forth. The energy my system measures is… well, more like psychic energy.” He waited for her to laugh. She didn’t.
“Psychic energy? Can you elaborate?”
“It’s energy that fuels consciousness, mind,” he hesitated. “Soul. I know it sounds far-fetched.”
“You’ve discussed this with my brother?”
“Durand Tech funded my research.”
She stood and his heart sank. It was what he expected but the disappointment still smarted.
“I need to move Silverbelle,” she said. “Where’s your mooring?”
“Port of that barge.” He pointed to the only other large vessel in the bay. “You can tie up to the barge and I’ll meet you there.”
“Good. I’d rather have this conversation where we won’t be overheard.”
“Nobody’s listening…”
Lex nodded behind him and he turned to find the Obeah woman waddling down the dock toward them.
“There’s no way she’d understand what Ph.Ds. at M.I.T didn’t.”
“No, but we need to move. Her magic isn’t anything you want to mess with,” Lex said. “But I’ll bet you already know that.”
Lex stepped up onto the dock, and stood directly in front of the Obeah woman. She slid off her sunglasses. Neither woman moved. Several seconds of this unearthly stare-down went by, then the Obeah turned and hurried back toward the beach.
Chapter Three
“Mess with me, will you?” Lex muttered as she strode toward her seaplane. After dealing with vicious Parisian socialites, no Obeah woman could scare her off. Lex had sensed her magic, and though it was potent for sure, it was far from truly sinister. Certainly nothing formidable enough to challenge the powers of a Durand.
Bodie was another matter entirely. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he was a revenant and somehow mixed up with Mark—although she didn’t dare breach the taboo subject of revenants with her brother. She pulled her ComDev from her pocket. “Call Mark.”
His line didn’t even ring before the call went into voicemail. Like the rest of the technology she used, her ComDev was far more advanced than any smart phone commercially available. It worked anywhere on the planet and probably in space for all she knew. Unfortunately, she still couldn’t get her brother to answer unless he wanted to.
Josh shooed the boys aside to let her pass.
“Thanks,” she said. “Would you push me off the dock?”
“No problem.”
He untied the lines from the rusted cleats and tossed them to her. She climbed into the plane and he pushed it away from the end of the dock. A musical note from her ComDev signaled a new text message. She glanced at the screen and saw a single character from her brother: ?
Eloquent as ever. At least she had his attention.
She typed, Who is Flynn? Really.
A moment later he responded. Genius.
Interesting, but didn’t begin to answer her question.
What does he know about the Durand?
Only public intel on family.
And yet Bodie had a ComDev like hers and operated on K-3s. And he was a revenant. Her fingers flew across the screen. Can I trust him?
No response appeared for several seconds. She shifted in the pilot’s seat, annoyed at not being able to talk to Mark. He sent her here, she deserved an explanation.
Then his message appeared.
You decide x
“Merde.” She should decide? Great. The sister of another man might read the final x as shorthand for kiss. She knew better. X was Mark’s shorthand for over-and-out, end of subject, finis. Decide herself, huh? For once she wished her telepathy worked with humans, not just animals. No, maybe not. Bodie’s big and bossy comment had stung, especially coming from a guy his size. The last thing she wanted was to know his private opinion of her.
The barge, which had appeared to be a rusty old piece of junk from across the bay, looked much less disreputable up close. The rust was reddish paint and the twisted fans on the roof were wind generators. Someone had put a great deal of creativity into camouflaging the vessel, but why? Fat Dog Island had no tourist industry to speak of and even private sailboats bypassed it for Union Island or the Tobago Cays.
The Talos IV glided to the far side of the barge and Bodie hurried to the bow to hook the mooring line. In a smooth motion he flipped the line over a cleat, bringing the boat to a stop. With the grace of a dancer he moved along the starboard deck securing lines and positioning bumpers to prevent the barge from damaging the lighter vessel.
She watched him work, admiring the play of muscle stretching the gray t-shirt across his broad back and shoulders. Everything about the man was blatantly physical, from his striking good looks to his athlete’s body. Not that any of that affected her. She was here for one reason—her brother had called Bodie a genius, and she desperately needed his help to find out what happened to her whales. But, damn, the package that genius came in was hard to ignore.
“Would you throw me a line?” she called to him as she floated up to the barge.
Five minutes later she stood on the deck inspecting black patches that looked suspiciously like small solar panels. “Why all the camo?” she asked.
He ignored her question. “What did you do to the Obeah woman?”
“Trade secret.”
He straightened, leaned against the wall of the cabin, and surveyed her skeptically. “What trade would that be, the wicked witch’s guild?”
“Very funny.”
“Why did she haul ass when you gave her the evil eye?”
Like she was going to explain that. “I’ll make you a deal. You give me a tour of your barge and I’ll tell you.”
“Nope.”
“Come on, Bodie. What’re you hiding? I’ve seen messy bachelor pads before.” She reached for the handle of the cabin door.
His hand shot out and caught her wrist before she could turn it.
The strength of his calloused grip on her arm sent a thrill of electricity through her and her senses went on high alert.
“I said no,” he growled. “Antagonizing strange men can get you in a lot of trouble.”
“Not a problem. After all I’m big and bossy.”
His hold on her relaxed and his thumb brushed the sensitive inside of her wrist. “I’m much bigger.”
And she was highly trained in hand-to-hand combat. Still, she’d never fought an opponent his size. Not that his tone suggested he was looking for a fight. On the contrary, and her traitorous body was totally on board. Her skin burned under his work roughened palm. This was no timid academic, nor was he one of the accommodating yacht-club set.
“Fine. You keep your secrets and I’ll keep mine. Shall we get down to business?”
“My data’s on the Ta
los.” With a sweep of his arm he gestured for her to precede him. “After you, princess.”
Princess, huh? He had no idea.
“The aft cabin is my office,” he followed her. “The data’s back there.” He ushered her into a surprisingly roomy space complete with some of the most sophisticated electronic equipment she’d ever seen. Three screens lined one wall, each displaying a colorful map of a section of the Caribbean.
“Don’t you worry about the humidity damaging your electronics?” she asked.
“No.”
For the first time, she noted the silence. No generator? The cool air indicated the presence of a highly efficient air-conditioner and the computers and screens required a substantial amount of electricity. “How many K-3s does it take to run all this?”
He picked up his ComDev and tapped in a code. A moment later a control panel unfolded from a mahogany cabinet. “Four large K-3s and a little invention of my own.” Pulling out a stool, he seated himself in front of the console. “You understand how the K-3s store solar, heat, and wind energy?”
She nodded.
“My booster multiplies the output. Handy when you have to be self-sufficient.”
She studied him with renewed interest. If it ever became economically feasible to mass produce Mark’s K-3 batteries, there were still practical application issues. Her seaplane was a revolutionary design hybrid that flew on electricity, but she still needed fuel to power take-offs and landings. If Bodie had a booster… the implications were staggering. “Does Mark know?”
His good humor vanished, replaced with a fierce scowl. “Your brother owns the patent and in exchange, I have all this.”
As much as she loved her brother, she wasn’t blind to his many faults. Greed, however, wasn’t one of them. He’d sent her to Bodie for a reason and that was the only issue she intended to deal with right now.
“Tell me what this energy of yours has to do with my missing whales,” she said.
“Ah, yes. The whales.” He began typing on the keyboard in front of him and the map on the center screen shifted and zoomed out.
Lex studied the oddly shaded map showing the Americas—North, South, Central, and the adjacent islands and land masses. Two points marked with gold stars, one in Colorado and the other in Brazil, shocked the air from her lungs. Her hands gripped the edge of the table to steady herself. The Navajo and Brazilian Sources. Did he know about the others? Who was this guy?
“Over the past ten years, I’ve studied a type of energy attached to earth but not of its physical properties—the psychic energy I told you about. I call it delphic energy.” With his attention riveted on the map, his voice assumed the cadence of a college lecturer. “It exists over all of the earth’s surface but is stronger in some places than in others, and there are certain places where the energy is very intense. Founts of psychic power.”
“The two stars on your map.”
“Yes. I’ve identified five for sure and suspect there are two more. The delphic energy at each of these power points has its own characteristics—like a fingerprint—but becomes more neutral the farther from a power point you are.” He glanced at her, she nodded and he went on. “The scientific community called the theory of delphic energy New Age crap and kicked my ass to the curb. Your brother offered me a grant and a relationship with Durand Tech to develop a scanner that senses and measures delphic energy.”
“You work for DT?”
“No, I’m a researcher and work for myself. Where my interests and Mark’s align, we share information. Durand Tech funded the development of the sensor and in turn provided me with specialized resources.”
Lex knew well the kind of resources Mark could offer him, the location of the stars on his map—what the Durand called the primary Sources—for example. But her brother said Bodie knew nothing about the Durand family aside from their public image, so she needed to be careful what she revealed. “And I assume Durand Tech gained access to the technology in return.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That was the deal.”
“So why are you here instead of in fancy digs on the beach in Malibu?” She glanced around the cabin. “Not that this set-up isn’t sweet, but Fat Dog doesn’t impress me as a hot spot for a guy like you.”
“No shit.”
“So why are you here?”
He scowled at her. “You really want to know?”
She nodded.
“Three years ago someone tipped off a government agency that my work could be useful to America’s interests. Government agents broke into my condo and seized my computers for national security purposes. When I tried to stop them, things got rough.”
For the first time since she’d met him, Bodie seemed truly dangerous. His outrage was palpable and she guessed the roughness was the reason he was now a revenant. “You’re hiding out?”
“Fat Dog is my version of the witness protection plan.”
Lex searched for a compassionate response that wouldn’t sound condescending. “Guess it beats North Dakota, right?”
“You want to know why Durand sent you to me?”
“That was the point of all this.”
“Just before I got to Fat Dog, I identified another form of metaphysical energy. Where delphic energy is neither positive nor negative, this other energy—what I call orphic energy—can be positive, negative, or neutral.”
“How does it relate to the delphic?”
“Okay let’s compare it to…” He thought for a moment. “To the internet. There’s a worldwide web that creates a pathway or system for communication and connection which in itself is neither good nor bad. That would be like the way delphic provides a metaphysical connection between all consciousness in living beings.”
“Okay.”
“Then there’s all the content on the internet which could be compared to orphic. Some of it is good.”
“Like pictures of puppies and kittens?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her and she shrugged.
“Some of it is clearly bad—hate websites, violent porn, predator sites. There’s neutral activity like nature webcams, and also a lot of noise—email, social media.”
“But the web content is created by people.”
“Yes, and people—specifically their emotions and actions—have an effect on whether the orphic is positive or negative. Let me show you something.”
Fingers clicking on the keyboard, he zoomed the map in on a section on the Caribbean and Atlantic. “For the past two years, I’ve concentrated on this area.” He reached for the mouse and highlighted a triangle from Bermuda to Jamaica to Barbados and back to Bermuda.
“The Bermuda Triangle?”
“Close enough.” The colors shifted until they bore no relation to a typical map. “This is the energy grid of the Puerto Rico Trench from three months ago.” He drew the cursor down the center of the Trench where the shading varied from pale blue to midnight.
The land masses, she noted, varied from blue to green to yellow with pockets of pale orange on Hispaniola.
“Normally land masses would be greens and browns, the darker blue would mean deeper water, lighter blue shallow,” she said. “I know this part of the Caribbean and there’s no correlation between topography and coloration.”
“Right. The color indicates what we’ll call for simplicity the temperature of the orphic energy. The shade indicates the intensity. The palest blue represents the coldest, least intense. The dark blue, the coldest, most intense.”
“Let me guess. You classified the energy by moving around the color-wheel.”
His grin, boyish and unexpected, tripped her pulse.
“Bingo. The green is warmer than the blue, yellow warmer than green and so forth. The orphic energy was more difficult to recognize and measure than the delphic because it can shift and morph in a particular location, unlike the delphic which is consistent and stable in any given location. The oceans are almost always blue with no change at all. The shifts happen on inhabited land m
asses.”
“What makes the orphic change?”
“Lots of factors. Mass violence can do that. War. There’s a lot of yellow and orange orphic in the Middle East right now.”
“What does this have to do with my whales?”
“Look at this.”
He called up an image on the left hand monitor which duplicated the coordinates of the original map of the Puerto Rico Trench.
“This was recorded five days ago,” he said.
“The day the whales disappeared.”
“Yeah.”
Aside from subtle variations on the islands, the colors remained basically the same. The pointer landed on a blood red spot that hadn’t been on the previous map.
“The spot of red corresponds to the coordinates where your whales disappeared.”
The blanks filled themselves in. “Mark knew you’d discovered a hot spot of energy in the ocean so when I told him about the whales, he made the connection.”
“Yeah.” He leaned back from the console, rested his back against the mahogany cabinet and gazed at the screen. “Other red and orange spots have popped up now and then over the past year but this is the first time it seems connected to an incident.”
Her hands trembled. “Temperature is a metaphor for the characteristic of the orphic energy, isn’t it—cold temperature is good, hot temperature bad?”
“Yeah.”
“So are you telling me my whales disappeared into a pocket of evil?”
He nodded. “That’s what it looks like to me.”
She shuddered, the horror of what might have happened to the whales wrenching her heart. Negative energy wasn’t a new concept to her, but her experience had always involved human depravity or dark majik. “What is it? Where did it come from?”
He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s what I’ve been working on. You don’t have a problem with this theory?”
“Why should I?”
He stared at her, the eerie gaze searching for something. Proof of her sincerity?
“Are you willing to help me?” she asked.
“The red spot only lasted for a few hours before it faded. Within two days, there was no trace it had existed at all.”
