The Ebony Finches: A Transition Magic Thriller

by J. E. Hopkins

She gets pissed when she’s afraid. I go the other way, withdrawn and academic. Have done it since I was a little kid.

  A brief image flashed in his mind—a nine-year-old boy, standing beside his alcoholic mother’s bed, not understanding why she wouldn’t wake up. Would never wake up. Another memory seized his attention. One that offered useful guidance. He smiled.

  He turned and faced Stony. “Tharn.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m guessing you never read Watership Down.”

  Stony shook her head. “I’m not in the mood for one of your—”

  “It’s the anthropomorphic story about a small group of rabbits in the English countryside. They used tharn to describe being petrified by fear, like when they’d freeze in the headlights of an oncoming car.”

  “Spare me the parable.”

  “We’re both scared shitless by this, this—whatever this is. But let’s not sit in the middle of the road until it runs us down.”

  “You’re a real piece of work,” Stony said. “I tell you that we’re facing the end of the world and you give me a kid’s story about a bunch of stupid rabbits. How in the hell how have you kept a job?”

  She paused and John watched a range of expressions work their way across her face: anger transforming into iron-fisted resolve. “It’s not a bad story.”

  He nodded and glanced at this watch. “We’ll use the rest of the day to check out the birds and see as many kids in Transition as possible. Let’s make sure Shin and Natalie are the only cases in the area. We’ll also run by the library and make sure there are no naturally occurring black finches with red eyes.”

  “And if Shin’s story holds up?” Stony asked.

  “Starting tomorrow, we’ll split up. I want you to go back to DC and work with Akina to put together a task force that can run down every new lead that pops up. I’ll rent a car and stay here for another round of interviews with Natalie’s father and Shin’s parents. There’s something we’ve missed. We’ve got to know how this disease jumped from one family to the other.”

  Stony took a deep breath and blew it out. “Got it. How about Shin?”

  “We’ll visit him early tomorrow morning, before you leave for DC. You call the county schools and pull together a list of kids for us to visit while I brief Akina and get things rolling.”

  John got out of the car and leaned into the open door. “No sense trying to talk over each other. You stay put and I’ll walk the parking lot while I talk to Akina. Back in a few.”

  He stood, spotted a weathered picnic table perched on a knoll at the far side of the lot, and hurried in that direction. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he speed-dialed Akina’s personal number.

  She picked up on the second ring. “It’s Benoit.” He reached the table, dropped his cane onto the warped surface, and scooted onto the grey plank seat.

  “You never call, you never write,” Akina said. “How can you call yourself my friend?”

  “It’s been a day.”

  Akina’s light tone turned serious. “Judging by your tone, not a good one.”

  John filled her in on Natalie’s death and Shin’s revelation about using magic. “Shin’s probably not going to make it, Akina. We’ve got cases on two continents and the two kids here, along with the two who died in Switzerland, mean we’re dealing with some sort of deadly Transition-based disease.”

  “Two kids died in Switzerland?” Akina asked.

  “CDC Director Karpov didn’t contact you?”

  She answered his question with silence.

  “Shit. He called me earlier today,” John said. “We have an unknown number of cases and two deaths in Switzerland. Looks to be the same disease. Plus a Swiss tabloid has the story. They’re calling it the T-Plague. I’m sorry, boss. I thought you knew. Karpov should’ve contacted you first.”

  Akina’s silence persisted for several moments. “Not a surprise, really. Politics. He’s trying to take advantage of the power vacuum at the top of the DTS.”

  “You are the power at the top of the DTS,” John said. “There is no vacuum.”

  “Karpov is about to find that out.” Her voice rang like a hammer slamming against a bronze bell. “We’ll come back to the CDC in a minute. What are your recommendations?”

  He shared his plans to remain in New York while Stony returned to Washington.

  “Isn’t a CDC field agent due to arrive in Ticonderoga?” Akina asked.

  “Yeah. Whenever he finally gets here, he can accompany me for the interviews. Since this involves Transition, I’m not ready to simply turn the investigation over to them.”

  “I’ll approve pulling together a top priority team,” Akina said. “But it needs to be cross-agency.”

  “You mean with the CDC?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not unless—”

  “They have better access to disease research than we do, John, and they are better equipped to handle contagions. I’ll get top CDC people to work in pairs with our own agents, all reporting to directly to you. And only you. That way you’ll be able to cover the medical and magical ground with less risk of missing something. Karpov’s pipeline to the president will run through me.”

  “No disrespect, Director, but do you have the juice to make that happen?”

  “You worry about the investigation. I’ll clear a path through the bureaucracy.” John could almost hear a smile in Akina’s voice. “I know for a fact that our esteemed CDC Director isn’t in the good graces of the president. And that was before he tried to cut me out of the loop on this case. No worries, I can handle him.”

  It never pays to piss off the formidable Ms. Akina Pearl.

  “So, you agree to lead a cross-functional team?” Akina asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I need to keep the DTS data geeks. If there’s any hint of something similar to this in our archives, I want to know about it.”

  “Done.”

  “Good,” John said. “We’ll need enough agents to chase down new outbreaks, conduct interviews, do follow-up. I’ll make Stony the incident coordinator, so the agents report to her.”

  “I’ll pull four top people from within the DTS and match them with four from the CDC,” Akina said. “Yell when you need more.”

  “That works. Look for Stony by early tomorrow evening. Set a meeting with the team for six-thirty.”

  The remainder of the day was a brutal slog. Stony and John visited Shin’s home and encountered two chittering finches with feathers the color of coal and a demon’s ruby eyes. John took a picture of the birds with his phone camera and made a note to have them taken to a CDC lab for examination. A quick web search confirmed that finches came in shades of brown—or yellow, in the case of the American Goldfinch—but not black, and not with red eyes.

  Working with school district administrators, Stony had constructed a list of twenty-eight kids in the county who were in Transition. They knocked on the door of the twenty-eighth child’s home at eight that evening and met a charming young girl. She, like all the others on the list, was healthy, energetic, and had fluorescent lavender eyes.

  They picked up a second rental car, had a late dinner at the diner, where they were now on a first-name basis with the grill cook, and returned to the hotel.

  At midnight John got a call from Akina. “You remember the tabloid that broke the T-Plague story?”

  “Sure. Inquirer or something like that. I can check my notes.”

  “The Truth, not The Inquirer. They published a page two story this morning saying that kids with T-Plague can do magic, no uniqueness required.”

  John’s heart skipped a beat. “What? I thought Karpov had gone to the Swiss government to shut that story down.”

  “Karpov apparently ran into trouble convincing the Swiss.”

  “So? Why didn’t he get help from the Department of State?”

  “Because he’s a duplicitous, turf-driven son of a
bitch. He kept trying on his own and didn’t give up until late today, when he called the president.”

  “He didn’t call you?”

  Akina’s laugh had no humor in it. “I still haven’t heard from him. I got a call from the president a little over an hour ago.”

  “Karpov is killing us,” John said. “You’ve got to bring him to heel, Director.”

  “The president has signed an executive order that gives me all the authority I need to manage this crisis. We’re free to move forward as we discussed earlier.”

  John struggled to keep his anger under control.

  Focus on the problem.

  “What do we know about The Truth?”

  “It’s a rag, Dish. They routinely publish stories about women who have babies with Martian men.”

  “Circulation?”

  “About half a million. A chuck of that is in the US, with sales to convenience stores and a couple of the smaller supermarket chains.”

  “That sounds like a lot for a rag.”

  “What can I say? Martian babies are popular.”

  “Shit.”

  “It gets worse. Just before the president contacted me, the head of our press office sent me an urgent text. The AP must have picked up the tabloid story. They’ve asked the DTS for a comment.”

  “Akina, we can’t let that story get—”

  “I talked with the CEO of the AP and got her to agree to put a seventy-two hour hold on the story or anything related.”

  “Seventy-two hours isn’t enough,” John said. “We have to kill this.”

  “It gives us enough time for the president to invoke 10-210, which he’s agreed to do.”

  Two years earlier, the DTS had uncovered a rogue Chinese program to use Transition magic for Sino-political supremacy. John and Stony had annihilated the threat, but not before the Chinese had destroyed the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. The leaders of a shaken US government hammered out an amendment, paragraph 10-210, of the Homeland Security Act, that granted the president extraordinary powers to contain Transition-based threats to US security. One of those powers was the authority to impose an embargo on the media as he deemed necessary.

  John’s relief was tempered by his belief that 10-210 was a direct threat to the republic. “Okay. And how can we get the Swiss to throw a blanket over The Truth?”

  “That’s messier. The Swiss government is a confederation, run by a body called the Federal Council. There are seven members who share power equally, with no strong executive.”

  “Okay, but they do have a law similar to 10-210, right?”

  “Yeah, but it takes five of the seven council members to agree before it can be invoked.”

  “Jesus.”

  “At my request, the president has reached out to the current ‘first among equals’ on the Council. I haven’t heard back yet; the sun is just coming up over there.”

  “That helps,” John said. “But we’re still fucked. Someone, somewhere, is going to read The Truth’s story and take it to the Internet. It’s only a matter of time before it goes viral. If it hasn’t already.”

  “Which is why you and Stony need to move fast,” Akina said. “Who knows, maybe the president will take the Internet down.”

  “Shin died half an hour ago.” PJ sounded tired and defeated. It was a little after seven in the morning; John and Stony were standing in The Rolling Acres Motel parking lot, finalizing their plans for the next couple of days.

  John blocked the phone with his palm and shared the news with Stony. She nodded and turned away.

  “Thanks for letting us know,” John said. “Please give our condolences to Shin’s parents. This has been a very tough week. How are you holding up?”

  “I’ve been better,” PJ said.

  “I need to spend more time with Natalie and Shin’s parents. I know the timing’s tough, but we can’t afford to wait. We’ve got to assume we’re dealing with an outbreak that isn’t going to stop with two kids.”

  “Jesus, don’t I know it.” PJ hung up without another word.

  15

  Pecos, Texas

  GT was pouring milk on a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios for his usual school day breakfast when Asshole stomped through the front door of the house and into the kitchen. He was carrying a six pack of Lone Star Beer and a plastic bag half-filled with groceries.

  “Want an orange cupcake to go with your cereal?” Robert Lee set the beer on the counter next to the stove and dumped the bag’s contents in a pile next to it—three packs of Twinkies, two double packs of orange cupcakes, and a tin of snuff. Last out of the bag was a folded newspaper, which slid off the edge of the counter and onto the floor.

  “Shit.” He bent, retrieved the paper, and tossed it on the table.

  GT wanted a cupcake in the worst way.

  Don’t take candy from strangers or assholes.

  “No thanks.”

  “Better get it now, before your mama gets up,” Robert Lee said. He wiped the sweat from a can of beer, opened it and a package of Twinkies, and sat in the seat opposite GT.

  GT shook his head. Asshole was right about one thing: His mother would never let him have junk food for breakfast.

  He glanced at the clock hanging above the sink. Eight-fifteen. Since Asshole had moved in, his mother had been sleeping late and probably wouldn’t get up until nine or ten. Based on the racket that came from the bedroom most nights, he could guess why she was tired. His face burned at the thought.

  “How are the eyes?” Asshole was staring at him with a smirk and tapping the folded paper with his index finger. The hair on the back of GT’s neck stiffened. He felt like a desert pocket mouse quivering in a hawk’s shadow.

  “Fine.”

  When he’d awakened the day before with the creepy eyes, he’d wanted to run into his mother’s bedroom and show them to her. See if she thought he was in Transition, even if his eyes were the wrong color. He’d turned away at the closed door when he heard the rhythmic creaking of the bed.

  He’d gone back to the bathroom and finished getting ready for school. He was sitting at the kitchen table eating his cereal when Asshole had wandered in, wearing only his boxers. He was the hairiest man GT had ever seen, but the hair was as white as a rabbit’s belly.

  Robert Lee had done a double take, hooted like an idiot, and yelled for GT’s mother to come take a look. She’d freaked and wanted to take GT to the emergency room, but Asshole had complained about how much a visit would cost. The jerk had convinced her to wait and see what happened. That had been okay with GT, since he hated doctors. Doctors meant needles. At least his mom hadn’t made him go to school.

  “Turns out, you aren’t the only kid in Transition with the freaky-deaky eyes.” Asshole looked down at the paper.

  “Let me see!” GT reached across the table.

  Asshole slapped his palm onto the paper, pinning it. “Nope. There’s some other stuff in here you got no business seeing.”

  “I’ve seen boobs before.”

  “Good for you. One of these days you’ll find out that touching them is way better than looking at them. I’m not giving you the paper.”

  “Which one is it?”

  “The Truth. What difference does that make?”

  GT had once used his allowance to buy a copy of The Truth at the local bodega. Boobs were plastered on every page. Plus, it had lots of stories about famous people having sex and cheating on each other.

  Mom’ll be pissed if she finds out I’ve seen it. I’ll get grounded for sure.

  “What’s it say about my eyes?”

  “That you can do magic and that it doesn’t have to be unique.”

  “Bullshit,” GT said. “The Truth also says there are aliens.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  GT felt the hawk circling overhead again. He shivered.

  Wells picked up the salt shaker from the table and tucked the newspaper under his arm.

  What’s with the salt shaker?
>
  “Let’s go to your computer. But be quiet. If you wake your mother, I’ll beat the shit out of you.”

  “I’ll dictate, you type,” Wells said, nodding GT toward the chair in front of the computer. Wells had pushed the door closed as soon as they’d entered the bedroom and shut the blind on the one window. The only light came from the computer monitor. “Bring up the TW website.”

  GT sat down, launched the browser, and keyed in the URL for TransitionWeb. “Now what?” His hushed voice quivered with fear.

  Wells stood behind him, out of sight. “Find the words for the Transition ritual and put them on the screen.”

  GT shook his head. “I’m not—”

  A sharp smack on the right side of his head stung his ear, bringing tears to his eyes. “Do it.”

  GT wiped his cheeks dry and shook his head. “Fuck you.” He was no longer trying to be quiet. “I’m not doing Transition magic, no matter—”

  “Quiet, you little shit,” Wells hissed. “You’re going to help me change the world. If you don’t, your precious mother won’t live to see the end of the day.”

  GT sat in stunned silence. His brain shut down. All he could think about was holding back the vomit that threatened to shove its way up his throat.

  “Go find the words and put them on the screen. Last time I’m going to tell you.”

  After a moment’s further hesitation, GT clicked a link on TW’s home page. The Transition ritual popped onto the display.

  Wells reached from behind GT and sat the salt shaker beside the keyboard. He brushed his lips against GT’s still-burning ear, like an obscene kiss. “First, we’re going to do a test. If that works, we’ll move on to bigger things. Understand me?”

  GT nodded.

  “Change the salt shaker into a one-ounce lump of gold.”

  The butterfly tickle of Asshole’s lips disappeared. A calloused hand wrapped GT’s neck in a firm embrace.

  “Now.”

  GT stared at the screen with tear-filled eyes. The words to the ritual were blurred and seemed to be wriggling, like they were trying to get away from his gaze. He wiped his cheeks for a second time, took a deep breath, and began: