by Sharon Sala
When the meal ended, the man in the white robes entered the common area.
“It’s the Seraphim,” Randi whispered.
Jordan frowned. She didn’t know what that title meant, but she wasn’t going to ask. She knew he was in charge, and that was enough. Then, to her horror, he waved to two of the men and pointed at her. When the men started toward her, Jordan stood up.
“You’re not supposed to do that,” Randi hissed.
“They’re the ones breaking the law. Not me,” Jordan said.
The men obviously weren’t willing to lay hands on her again, but when they reached the table where she was standing, one of them spoke.
“The Seraphim wishes to speak with you. Come with us.”
Jordan circled the table and then walked with the men to the front of the room, and when the men stopped behind her, she turned and glared.
“Don’t stand behind me,” she said.
The Seraphim waved his hand, and the two men moved away as he turned his full attention to Jordan.
Jordan had all of her defenses up, including her psychic ones, and stared back at the man without flinching.
Finally, the Seraphim spoke.
“You broke all of the windows,” he said in a loud, booming voice.
“You put me in a building with poisonous snakes and rats,” Jordan said, and the loud, accusing voice with which she answered him rang out all the way to the back of the room.
“Woman! Do not shout at me,” he roared.
“There are no women here!” Jordan cried. “There are only children...and old men. You are the abomination my preacher spoke of in church. I do not honor you. I do not obey you.”
The Seraphim was pissed. He glared at Jud Bien from across the room, and when Jud started to get up, the man waved him away.
“You will be put to work mending clothes today,” he said. “Your food will be brought to you. You will not join us again until you have learned your manners.”
When Jordan rolled her eyes and then laughed, the shock of her insubordination was evident on his face.
“Now I’m a child who must learn manners, when moments ago you called me a woman? Make up your mind, old man.”
In that moment, Aaron Walters didn’t feel like the Seraphim. If he hadn’t been in front of all his people, he would have put his hands around her neck and squeezed until it snapped.
“Get her back to the dormitory. She will not be allowed into this common room again until she has learned to respect her elders.”
Jordan saw the rage in his eyes, but she stood her ground. At that point, all of the girls stood.
“You! Get in line with the others,” one man told her, and after she did, they were marched back to their residence.
As soon as they were inside, the man stepped out of the group and approached Jordan until he was so close she could smell the coffee he’d had for breakfast on his breath.
“I am Archangel Thomas. I am in charge of the Sprite residence. You heard the Seraphim. The girls will show you where the mending is. They will show you what to do. Your food will be brought to you at noon, and then your supper will be brought to you in the evening. Your progress with the mending will be judged at that time. It is in your best interests to obey,” he said.
Jordan eyed the tall, skinny man with as much hate as she had the snake just before she’d killed it.
“Get away from me,” she said softly.
Archangel Thomas blinked. He started to chastise her, then realized the gaze of every girl in the room was on him, so he turned to them instead.
“You heard me. Show her what needs to be done, then shun her. She has brought discord into this place of peace.”
“You perverts are the ones who brought me here,” Jordan said, then turned her back on him and walked away.
The men left, shutting the door and locking it behind them as they left.
Eight
The girls stood in silence, each looking for someone else to volunteer to show the new girl anything. They were partly in awe of her and partly afraid of her. She’d upset the status quo of a situation they’d felt hopeless to fight, but now that the seeds of discord had been sown, it remained to be seen if any of them would take root.
Randi stepped forward. “I’ll show her,” she said and hurried to catch up.
Jordan was standing in front of two large baskets full of clean clothing and one straight-backed folding chair.
“Is this it?” Jordan asked.
“Yes,” Randi said. “Thread, needles, extra buttons and some small embroidery scissors are in the top drawer of that little dresser. We don’t get regular-size scissors,” she added.
“Probably afraid someone would stab them,” Jordan muttered and opened the drawer. She saw the needles stuck in a small pincushion and the rest of the sewing notions in a jumble around it.
Randi continued her instructions. “You have to inspect each item of clothing carefully to find out what’s wrong with it, so look for torn seams or hems or missing buttons. If you don’t have any thread that matches, use the next best color.”
Jordan nodded, then carried the chair to the nearest window for better light, dragged the baskets over beside it, piled all of the mending into one basket and set the empty basket aside for the items that had already been repaired. She then pulled the drawer out of the dresser with all the sewing notions and carried it over to her makeshift workstation.
Randi panicked. “What are you doing? We’re not supposed to—”
“I moved where I can see better,” Jordan said. She threaded a needle with white thread, poked it back into the pincushion and picked up a shirt.
“How do you know to do all this?” Randi asked.
“My mother is a lawyer. She lives a very busy life. She taught me lots of ways to help myself when she wasn’t around to do it for me,” Jordan said. She began checking the shirt and found it was missing a button.
She dug around for a replacement button and quickly sewed it in place. As soon as the other girls quit watching what she was doing, she proceeded to sew every buttonhole shut, as well, and then tossed it into the empty basket and kept working.
She didn’t know what the repercussions were going to be for what she was doing, but at this point she didn’t care.
When she came to a long white robe with an entire hem that had come undone, she guessed it belonged to the fat man and used bright red thread to fix it. And so the morning went, with Jordan quietly and persistently sabotaging every item in the basket.
When noon came, Archangel Thomas arrived with two others, one of whom set a tray of food on the table for her.
“I don’t trust you not to poison me or drug me, so I’m telling you now I won’t eat this. You may as well take it back,” Jordan said.
Archangel Thomas was startled, and it showed. “We would never harm a Sprite,” he said. “It’s not our way.”
“You’re all child molesters. My own father stabbed me in the neck with a needle and drugged me to get here. Your ways are an abomination,” Jordan said.
Thomas was taken aback as much by the emotionless tone in her voice as he was by her accusations.
“Our purpose is for good,” he said, lowering his voice to one of gentle persuasion. “The members of Fourth Dimension are all gifted. Our intention is to build a community of people all born with different levels of powers and gifts. We aren’t killers. We don’t traffic in humans.”
“Did you ask any of these girls if this is what they wanted to be when they grew up?” she asked, pointing at the girls.
Their silence bothered Thomas. “Take the Sprites to eat their meal,” he ordered, and they were escorted out by the two other men.
Jordan expected him to leave with them, but he didn’t, and when she found herself alone with him, she backed away and doubled up her fis
ts.
“What are you doing? You have no need to fear,” Thomas said.
“The better question is...why are you still here and what are you going to do to me?”
Thomas’s face flushed. “I am not going to hurt you. I just want to help you understand.”
“Oh, I understand plenty,” Jordan cried. “You are all liars. You are all crazy. You’re kidnappers. You are rapists. My mother is a lawyer, and she will never stop looking for me. If you kill me and burn my body to ashes, she will come for you, instead. And she won’t stop until every one of you is sitting on death row. And that’s what you need to understand. Get away from me. Get out. Get out! GET OUT!”
Thomas was still trying to come to terms with what she’d said when she started shouting, and when her last words came out in a scream, he bolted out of the dormitory just ahead of the tray of food she threw as he was locking the door behind him. It hit with a crash and a clatter. He could smell the spilled stew from where he was standing. He hurried back to the main house as fast as his legs would carry him. He needed to report this to the Seraphim.
* * *
After the run-in he’d had with the new Sprite this morning, Aaron Walters had gone straight to meditation. He knew his powers were less when he let anger interfere, and as the Seraphim, he needed to be clearheaded at all times. After a couple of hours in solitude, he got up to get ready for lunch. He was putting on his robes when there was a sudden knock at his study.
“Enter,” he called out, expecting his houseman, Archangel Robert, to be reminding him it was time to go to eat.
Robert opened the door. “Master, I am sorry to disturb you, but Archangel Thomas has a matter regarding the new Sprite that he wishes to discuss.”
Aaron frowned. “Send him in,” he said, and then took a deep breath to center himself as Thomas came in, his head down, his hands folded in a gesture of penitence and prayer.
“You may speak,” Aaron said.
Thomas looked up. “The new Sprite has refused to eat anything brought to her in fear that it has been poisoned or drugged. She said her father drugged her to get her here, and she doesn’t trust any of us. She threw the food at me as I was leaving, and it hit the door as I was locking it behind me. She said her mother was a lawyer and would never stop looking for her, and that if we killed her and burned her to ashes, then her mother would come after all of us, instead, and would not stop until we were all on death row.”
Then he stopped and took a deep, shaky breath.
The shock that ran through Aaron was real. In all this time, no one had ever put together what happened to their daughters. He knew because they were all on the national website for missing children. He needed to talk to Archangel Jud before he did anything else.
“Thank you, Archangel Thomas. You may go to lunch now, and don’t worry. Those are all just words of fear. She will settle, as all the others have.”
“Yes, Master,” Thomas said.
Aaron rang for his houseman. “Robert, summon Archangel Jud for me. I will speak with him now.”
“Yes, Master,” Robert said and got on the intercom, which sounded in every building except for the one where the Sprites were housed. “Archangel Jud, the Seraphim has summoned you. Report immediately.”
* * *
Jud had just walked into the dining hall when the call went out, and the moment he heard his name, he groaned.
What the hell has she done now?
He turned without comment and headed straight for the Master’s private quarters. When he knocked at the front door, Archangel Robert let him in.
“Follow me,” he said briefly and led him through the stately mansion to the study, only to find the door open, and the Seraphim waiting.
“Thank you, Archangel Robert. You may go to lunch. I will join you shortly... Oh, and please close the door on your way out.”
“Yes, Master,” Robert said.
Jud’s heart skipped a beat when the door went shut between them, but he stood as all others did who entered the Master’s quarters, with his head down and his hands in a gesture of prayer.
“Archangel Jud, please sit,” Aaron said.
Jud sat and then grabbed hold of his knees as the Seraphim took a seat on the other side of the desk.
“Your daughter has made a grave accusation. I need to verify the veracity of it to make sure it’s only fear talking, or if the real possibility exists. She claims her mother is a lawyer. Is this true?”
Jud nodded. “Yes, Master, that is true.”
“She also claims that her mother will never stop looking for her, which is what all of the Sprites assume, and that is fair. They are all on the National Registry for Missing Persons now. What I need to know is if there is any reason her mother would suspect you.”
“Absolutely not,” Jud said. “We have not been in touch for more than two years. I had not seen my daughter in all that time, either.”
But Aaron was picking up on something that shot through Jud’s mind when he asked that question, and pursued the line of questioning.
“Your daughter said you drugged her to get her here. Tell me how you got your daughter out of her home.”
Jud blanched. “That’s not how it started at all. I knew she was alone at home. I knocked and she let me in, elated to see me.”
“Did they have a home security system? Were you seen on camera?”
“I knew about that, so after a brief conversation, I invited her to spend the night with me in my hotel room and told her we would go do some fun things together before I took her back the next day. She was excited and said she needed to let her mother know. I told her it would be better if it came from me, and she agreed and ran upstairs to pack. I used to live there and knew where everything was. I easily disabled the security camera and erased the footage where I first appeared, then went upstairs to get her.”
Aaron frowned but kept listening. “And what did you find when you went into her room?”
“She was angry with me for walking in without knocking, but she got over it. She had everything packed, except her phone and the charger. She’d been sick all night, and her phone was on the bed. She asked me to put it and the charger in her bag, and then she went to get dressed. Instead, I hid it beneath a pillow and we left.”
“You are certain she did not call her mother on her own?” Aaron asked.
Jud tensed. “I did not witness it, but if she had and intended to take it with her, why then was it not in her bag?”
What Jud didn’t know, because he’d left before Jordan was old enough for a phone of her own, was that kids never put their phones away, that they were always in their hands or at the ready in a pocket.
And Aaron had raised his children before giving phones to kids was even a thing, so he didn’t see the hole in Jud’s explanation.
“Yes, yes. I see the logic in that,” Aaron said. “All right, then, and you’re certain she had no other opportunity to call her when she realized she wasn’t going to your hotel room?”
“Yes, Master, but I had to drug her to keep her from running, when I stopped to refuel.”
Again, Aaron saw the logic in the drugging at that point in the journey.
“Thank you for your honesty and for clearing up my concern,” Aaron said.
Jud bowed his head. “Yes, Master. Always.”
“Just so you know, she is refusing to eat and threw her tray of food at the door as Archangel Thomas was leaving. She now believes she will be poisoned or drugged, which is unfortunate, because she will have to eat and drink sometime.”
“She would not eat a bite of the food I offered her on the trip here until I bought unopened snacks and a case of unopened bottles of water. Only then did she eat and drink.”
“And that was after you drugged her, I assume?” Aaron asked.
Jud sighed. “Yes, Master.”
“So you have created our little monster.”
“Master, she was already enraged and threatening everything before I drugged her. She did not expect it, nor did she see it coming.”
Aaron’s viewpoint of the Sprite initiate shifted again.
“Was she always a troublesome child?”
“Not while I was there,” Jud said.
“And maybe your absence from her life is resented,” Aaron said.
“Yes, Master. I am sure it was.”
“Then part of your duties now will entail spending time with her at the dormitory while she is on lockdown. Find some food that is unopened and take it to her...water, as well. You will eat your meals with her in this way until she is ready to accept her place here.”
Jud groaned inwardly. That could very well be when hell freezes over.
“Let’s hope not,” Aaron said and smiled.
Jud blinked. Aaron had just read his thought. He’d forgotten one of the Master’s gifts was clairvoyance.
“I’m sorry, Master. Please forgive me for doubting,” Jud said.
Aaron waved him away. “Go get the food. Archangel Thomas will let you into the dormitory, and you will be locked in with her until the Sprites return.”
“Yes, Master,” Jud said and left in a hurry. Jordan wasn’t going to like this any better than he did, but an order was an order.
Nine
“It’s past noon. Are you up to stopping long enough to get something to eat before we head back to the airport?”
“Mexican?” Wyrick asked.
“Works for me,” Charlie said. “Pick one and give me driving directions.”
Wyrick opened her laptop again, her fingers flying over the keys, looking for restaurants with good ratings.
“Okay, I have the directions pulled up. Turn right at the next stoplight and we’ll go from there.”
“Where are we going?” Charlie asked.
“Cocina Madrigal. It has a five-star rating on their website and rave reviews.”
