by Lucy Kelly
Chapter One
Sixteen years later…
Laura Solange Donahue looked up from her computer as the light in the corner of her screen blinked. With the click of a few keys the program she was working on closed and a gaming program came up in its place. Moments later her brother, Aaron, came into the room.
“Hey, Laura, it’s nearly seven. You coming up for dinner? Whatcha working on anyway?” he asked.
“I’m nearly done with ‘Trolls Revenge’, I just have to debug the last section of codes,” she said. She’d actually finished the new game a couple of weeks previous, but it was a great cover for what she was really doing.
As he watched her shut down from the screen with trolls and warriors fighting, he thought again what a beauty his baby sister had turned into. At thirty-two with sixteen years separating him from his sister, they hadn’t really grown up together, but they’d managed to stay close. He’d made a vow to protect her and he had no intention of breaking the vow anytime soon. He only wished he’d been there when the drunk driver had hit her and their mom. He would have found a way to save her from being paralyzed.
The two of them went over to the stairs. She rolled into the lift that would take her up to the ground floor of the house while Aaron walked beside her asking about her day. The basement had become Laura’s apartment. She’d been born with a rare disease and couldn’t go out in the sun. Even with all these burdens, she was a happy person.
Laura Donahue loved her brothers, she really did. Her mom had died two years ago when a blood clot had formed while she was on a fourteen-hour plane flight from Europe. She and her dad had taken a second honeymoon and by the time the plane was approaching the states, coming in for a landing, she had died peacefully in her sleep. Their dad had walked around like a hollowed out zombie for over a year, pouring himself into work to get through the grief. He and all of her brothers then became ten times more protective of her. She felt like a virtual prisoner. If she didn’t have her secret life to keep her occupied, she knew she’d have gone crazy years ago.
She had always been a reader, she got hooked early on such books as The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and went on to A Wrinkle in Time and Harry Potter and into Tolkein’s books. Now she read a lot of shifter and fantasy books and romances. She based her games on them, and since she still lived at home, she had put aside a nice chunk of change.
What her family didn’t know about was her other programming activities. She’d actually started several internet companies and one of them had sold for millions. Without anyone knowing, she’d started a corporation and ran the companies under that umbrella. She didn’t need to spend the money so all the profits were just sitting there. No dividends were paid out so she hadn’t incurred any personal income taxes. The corporation paid all of its corporate taxes under its own tax id number. That way the tax agencies didn’t know the company had been started and owned by a fourteen-year-old. Now at sixteen, she was a multi-millionaire and planning her escape. She wanted to live her life, not the life her family wanted for her.
It all started when she discovered shifters and magical people really existed. Her father’s work at the NSA had always fascinated her. The NSA, responsible for gathering and interpreting intelligence as well as breaking ciphers and codes, handles all intelligence and counter-intelligence gathered for the U.S. Basically, it was the largest collection of mathematicians and geeks on the planet. She had built a super computer by linking multiple gaming systems and developed her own intelligence gathering system. At first she had her software trolling through chat rooms to see what the trends were in gaming. She wanted to give her customers the best games and ones that would be the most popular.
After awhile she was also gathering information from VOIP, internet phone calls. As more and more people got smartphones and made video calls over the internet on their phones, the amount of data increased. That’s when she first stumbled onto real shifters. The shifters came first and then they led her to other magical creatures. After two years of gathering data she realized there was a war going on.
She wasn’t surprised, her brothers had all been fighting evil in the world nearly all their lives. So it made sense there could be evil magical people, like in Tolkien. Along with other humans who knew about the shifters and wanted to erase them from the earth.
She would be eighteen years old and an adult in two more years. So she had time to make her plans. In the meantime, she would use her time wisely and gather as much information as she could. When her father was home, she occasionally used his login and password to download information from the NSA computers. The NSA had copies of everyone’s phone records going back for years. So whenever she had a suspect, she tracked all their phone calls and if she could she put surveillance in place.
Her dad’s best friend, Matt, whom they called Uncle Matt, was now very senior in the FBI. When she needed legs or eyes, she dummied up a court order and had agents place listening devices and recorders in various places. Then she erased all trails leading to the action taken. She’d only done that six times since she discovered the war. There was too much chance of an agent talking about his assignment to his coworkers. She tried to use agents just before they were transferred to different offices so they wouldn’t ask questions on the ‘monitoring’ job they had set up. At a young age, she’d already understood the need for secrecy. She also knew her father would take her computers away if he knew what she was doing.
Once or twice hackers had tried to backtrack her in the system and she had shut down those operations. However, she had no intentions of being caught. She took her classes online and had already graduated high school and taken two years’ worth of college as well. But she wasn’t interested in getting a degree, she was interested in learning. She went out and found what she wanted to know.
After dinner she spent time playing board games with her brothers and her dad. After a couple of hours Aaron and Steve left, they had their own places now. David and Benji were overseas, each of them on different ships with different SEAL teams. Josh had gone into the Marines after college and was currently out of the country. Evan was in law school, he had decided to follow Uncle Matt into the FBI. But when he was on school break, he still stayed at his apartment. Most of the time it was just her and her father. When her mother had died, her father almost sold the house. Laura convinced him not to, it would have been very hard for her to move and he had finally given in to her pleas. Now she was making her plans to move without her family. She had just purchased the property she needed to make all her dreams come true.
*****
Marshall Connor was not a happy man. His shifter clan owned around two thousand acres north of Yellowstone in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, except for one twenty acre piece near the middle of their holdings. West of their clan holdings they owned another nineteen hundred acres of Montana mountain range, which held the Big Sky Resort. That’s where all the humans should be, skiing and snowboarding in the winter and golfing and horseback riding in the summer. Not here in the middle of our land!
Old man Pritchard had finally died. The clan was prepared to buy the land, after all, who else would want twenty acres in the middle of nowhere. Well obviously someone had, because Pritchard had sold the land over two years ago! The new owners had let him remain there—rent free and even paid the old man’s doctor bills. This really worried Marshall the most. He entered the clan’s meeting room and after nodding to the others in the room, set up the video conference with Alexander Marasov, clan Alpha for all North American shifters.
“Bob, we never had a chance. I just found out Pritchard actually sold the property about two years ago,” he explained.
“How did that happened without our finding out about it?” he asked with a deep growl. Things were not going according to plan. The alpha didn’t like it when things didn’t go according to his plans.
“It was put into a trust, the transfer of ownership came when the trust was dissolved at the old man
’s death. The trustee is a corporation. We’re trying to find out who the principals are but it will take time. We don’t even know if they’re incorporated in Montana. Right now all we can do is keep up surveillance and see who turns up.”
“Do you think The Society is trying to infiltrate us?” asked the alpha, speaking of the secret society of humans wanting to wipe shifters off the planet.
“I don’t think The Society would be dumb enough to plop themselves down in the middle of shifter territory. They operate mostly in the cities. If it’s an enemy, the Illuminati or the Shayatin are more likely. Which would be bad enough.”
Everyone in the room and on the conference call thought about what was said. Mara, the white wolf shifter and priestess of the wolf clan spoke up.
“I will perform a casting ritual and see what I can find out that way. Until we know for sure who has the property and what plans they may have, our hands are tied. We can’t risk harming an innocent. I wonder if he had any relatives,” she said.
Marshall gave her a penetrating look until she dropped her eyes. She didn’t want to challenge her alpha. He also didn’t want her thinking she could just order him around.
“We will do as you suggest. This meeting is at an end for now. Let’s reconvene when we have more information,” said Alexander, they discussed other options before finally signing off.
“Okay, do your ritual. I look forward to hearing the result,” said Marshall. He stalked out of the room. He was frustrated. He thought it would be easy to pick up this last piece of land and solidify their holdings.
*****
Over a thousand miles away, Laura’s special program picked up the references to Pritchard and Montana and recorded the video conference call. Most people thought VOIP, voice over internet protocol, was secure when in reality it wasn’t, unless you had the right software, which she did. Years ago, she had worked on securing her own VOIP calls when she found out from her parents how unsecure they were. So with her own knowledge on how to secure VOIP, she knew how to track and record others. She would review it and many others later…
Chapter Two
Five Years Later…
It took nearly five years, the shifters had put up a great many roadblocks to slow down the construction. She had expected the resistance; all she had discovered about them told her they wouldn’t appreciate having an unknown in the middle of their land. She hadn’t been in a position to reassure them then. All she could do was keep the bulk of the project open. The problem was, in keeping it open to their scrutiny, she had also opened it up to their interference. So she worked possible interference into her timeline and adjusted her plans. Laura was now twenty-one and her smart house had been ready for her to move in since November. She waited out the winter because she didn’t want to try driving those twisty roads in the snow. Now the spring had come, and she couldn’t wait to pack up and move.
First step, she would have to distract her family. Her brothers were easy to get out of town, she was able to engineer their tours of duty and work assignments easily. Her father was harder. He hadn’t taken a vacation since her mom had died. She’d booked him on a cruise six months previous and with Evan’s last minute assignment he was talking about canceling it. She wasn’t having that!
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dad. I’m twenty-one. I can take care of myself for one weekend. Evan will be back by Tuesday at the latest. Lizbeth comes over to do my therapy once a day so I’ll have company. Take your vacation, please. You’re going to make me feel guilty if you don’t,” she argued.
“Alright, honey. I’ll go. But I want you to check in with me every day that you’re home alone,” he stated.
“No, I’m not going to be treated like some teenager you’re afraid will have wild parties while you are gone. You’re going to go on vacation and have the time of your life. You’re not to think or worry about home while you’re gone!”
“Okay, okay,” he laughed, holding his hands out in a stop gesture. “You win, just remember that no matter how grown up you get, you’ll always be my baby.”
“I know, Daddy. I love you.”
“I love you too, kiddo.”
Laura almost cried because she knew it would be a long time until she saw her father again. She held back the tears because she knew this was the only way her father and brothers would ever see her as fully grown up. She only planned to keep her whereabouts secret for a little over six months because she wanted her family there for her birthday in November, it was mid-April now. There were a few snowstorms in the mountains still, but nothing she couldn’t handle.
At the same time as her ‘smart’ house was being built, Laura had also bought and commissioned a mid-sized recreational vehicle to be modified for her use. She would have room for all the stuff she was taking with her from her ‘bat cave’ in her father’s basement and a place for her to stay during the day. The severe reaction she had had to sunlight for her entire life was one more burden but she was used to working around her limitations. In order to cover her tracks, she was planning to stay in campgrounds instead of hotels. The first mod she had them make to the motor home, was removing all the windows. Then she had them lower all the counters and surfaces so she could get to them easily from her chair.
The only thing she knew she would have a problem with was filling the gas tank and hooking up the water and power. She hadn’t had time to practice. Whenever she drove her current vehicle, her dad or one of her brothers was nearly always with her and they pumped the gas. She figured if need be, she’d hire another camper to help her hook up each day. She’d have to be careful not to become exposed to the sunlight.
Two more days and she would be leaving her home. She caught her breath on a sob. She would see them all again—eventually.
*****
Marshall Connor looked out at the beautiful spring day. It had been a long winter. The Sky Lodge had made a lot of money for the clan and now that spring was here, they were making necessary repairs and preparing for the summer rush of tourists. For the last several years they had tried to delay the building project on the Pritchard property but weren’t able to stop it, only delay it. They’d gotten word through those clan members on the work crew when the building was completed at the end of Fall. And now, the owner was finally expected to move in sometime during the month.
He made arrangements for members of the clan to be on lookout day and night.
*****
Laura saw her father off on Thursday afternoon for his vacation. She had her therapist come Friday morning and it didn’t take much to convince her to skip Saturday and come Sunday evening. Friday evening the charity she arranged to give her car to came and took it away. She bundled herself up and when the movers came on Saturday morning, she led them downstairs and oversaw them packing her up. She had stayed up late the night before carefully dismantling her computer set-up. Late Saturday, her modified recreational vehicle/camper had been delivered and by the time the sun set on Saturday, it was loaded and the movers were gone. She paid them in cash and they had arrived in their personal vehicles. Her dad’s property was big enough she wasn’t worried about nosy neighbors.
The whole time her house was being built, she had been slowly pulling cash out of her regular bank accounts. She usually pulled out the cash and then went shopping, carefully spending only a portion of what she’d pulled out. She couldn’t go out during the day but she’d insisted, at an early age, to go out at night. After more than five years, by the time she was ready to leave, she had about fifty thousand dollars in cash, enough for any emergency. While she could easily have had her bank deliver the entire amount in cash, after all she was a major depositor. She didn’t want her traveling money to be easily traceable. This way had taken longer but the anonymity was well worth it.
And because she wasn’t stupid and she was her father’s daughter, she also had three nine-millimeter Glock handguns hidden throughout her vehicle for quick easy access. She wasn’t without protection.
&
nbsp; She had created a long video message to her family and set it on a time delay. Her father and brothers would all get it on Sunday around noon, before Lizbeth was scheduled to come back. She figured it would take her two to three weeks to get to Montana, which was the longest she’d ever gone without her almost daily therapy. She also hadn’t made arrangements for a new therapist once she got to Montana. She knew it was one way her family would be able to track her so she wanted to be careful there. There was a shifter currently in school studying to be a physical therapist for sports related injuries. She knew they planned to get a job near the Sky Resort west of where her house was. She hoped she would be able to hire them away for the visits she knew she would need.
Bundling her long platinum blonde hair up into a wool cap she set the alarm, locked up her father’s house, and using the specially designed lift, got into her new vehicle. Ten minutes later, after making sure she knew where everything was, she drove away into the night.
Chapter Three
At twelve thirty on Sunday afternoon, Uncle Matt used his old friend’s alarm codes to get into his house. He found Laura’s cell phone buzzing on the kitchen counter.
Picking it up he saw she had a call from her father coming in and the phone registered other missed calls. “Hello, this is Matt. She really did it, I’m going through the house now.” He opened the door to the basement and started down. “The basement still has furniture but all of her clothes and equipment are gone,” he said after opening her closet and a few drawers.
“I’m taking the next flight home,” growled her father.
“Look, Doug, I didn’t get the email that you all got, did she say she was disappearing for good?” he asked, feeling bad for his best friend.
“No, she said she’d contact us after she got settled. Why didn’t she tell me she wanted to move out? I would have helped her. I never tried to hold her back. Why did she do it this way? What did we do that was so wrong? We have only ever tried to protect her.”
