by Adira August
Asher shook his head. “Chicago Symphony. He explained to Granda who you are, that you’re gay, not … you know.”
“Child molesters?” Cam supplied.
“Yeah.”
Hunter insisted on speaking to Caden Gamble personally, and Asher gave up his cell number. The old man didn’t apologize but didn’t object to the boy staying for lunch if it got him back to school.
Asher had wandered off into the alcove and was looking through the top drawer of a chest above which were mounted Cam’s medals. Cam was in the kitchen getting lunch stuff together, not talking. Hunt was trying to wrap his head around the kid calling one of the premier concert pianists in the world “Davey” and not thinking of the sex toys in the bottom drawers of the chest Asher stood in front of.
“Hey, are these like, you skiing and stuff?” Asher asked Cam, holding up a box of thumb drives.
“Some are.” But Cam wasn’t done with the previous topic. “So gay people are okay with your grandfather?”
“Not really, but”—Asher shrugged his thin shoulders—“Granda hates everybody, pretty much.”
Hunt transferred filled dishes from the island counter to the small dining table in front of the floor-to-ceiling A-frame window. “Does that include you?”
Asher closed the drawer and came over to the table where he set silverware next to plates, wanting to help. “He loves me but it hurts him, so he tries not to.”
Hunt put bottles of water next to each plate as Cam joined them carrying in a bowl of salady things to put on sandwiches, and half an apple pie.
“It hurts him because you look like your mom?” Hunt slid into a chair.
Asher shook his head, sitting across from Hunter. “Because I look like Donato. Except he says I have my mom’s eyes.”
Cam shoved a basket of rolls slightly toward the boy. “It’s every man for himself, go for it.”
They busied themselves constructing sandwiches, Asher bypassed the sliced roast turkey for Jarlsburg and added a handful of alfalfa sprouts and a few tomato slices. Hunter stuck to the lettuce. Cam took the rest of the sprouts.
“You’re going to help me?” Asher asked Hunt and took a huge bite of sandwich.
Hunter smiled to take any hint of rejection from his words. “I never talk work while I eat. Tell us about you.”
Asher shook his head, impatient. It seemed a common response from him. “Is explaining ‘toho’ work?”
Hunter reached for his water and unscrewed the lid. “You didn’t look it up?”
“It came when you did.”
“I see.” Hunt took a pull of his water.
Cam’s eyes moved from one to the other. It was like walking in on a conversation between two men, not a cop and a skinny orphan kid. As on the path, Cam felt he was missing most of the meaning.
He watched Hunter closely. Something was bothering him, hurting him. He’d shifted into pure objective mode, as he always did when a thing could cloud his judgment. And he was avoiding looking at Cam, who’d be able to tell.
But Cam had always known. When the pressure of the things locked away behind Hunter’s interior wall built up, he’d find a Dom and submit to the lash or belt until the wall cracked and he screamed his release. But no longer.
Hunter Dane had finally knelt for Camden Snow, the no limits, no safewords, extreme Dom. Cam methodically stripped him of every defense and made him feel so much more than pain until the wall crumbled.
But Hunt was also an intensely private person, and he had a right to choose what he reserved to himself and what he shared. So Cam concentrated on his food, listening, but giving the conversation space to them.
And Cam also needed a moment. He needed to deal with feeling like an asshole for being impatient with this kid whose life seemed crappy enough without one of the most privileged people on the planet making him responsible for the attitudes of an old man.
Aware and appreciative of Cam’s withdrawal and attentiveness, Hunter answered Asher’s question.
“Do you know what a kachina is?”
The boy shook his head.
“It’s a kind of spirit-person. To a Hopi, Toho is the mountain lion kachina, the greatest hunter. Protector.”
Asher frowned. “Is it like a ghost?”
“No. It’s a being that lives in the mountains and comes to help the people for part of the year. A kachina is also the dancer in a ceremony, who dresses as, and embodies the wuya—the specific being. Kachina are also small carved figures that represent them.”
Hunter caught Cam’s eye and looked him toward his own pocket. Cam fished out his phone.
“Sort of like angels, then,” Asher said. “They live in heaven, but sometimes they come to earth and people make statues and things of them.”
Cam handed Asher his phone. The boy swiped through image after image of kachinas and stopped to read something. “I never heard of any of this,” he said, looking at Hunt. “So the message is for you.”
“So it would seem.” Hunter finished his sandwich. “You want pie? It’s homemade.”
“No, that’s okay.” He handed the cell back to Cam. “Thanks. Can I ask you something sort of personal?”
“If you tell me how old you are, first,” Cam said, wondering what Asher might have seen in his chest of drawers.
“Fourteen. I know, I look like twelve.” Asher pushed his half-eaten sandwich away. “Is Hunter your guardian?”
“Do I look young enough to need one?”
“I mean like protector.”
Cam stood and started clearing the table. “Absolutely.”
Hunt and Cam exchanged a brief look so intense it made Asher feel embarrassed and sort of happy. He’d never seen people look at each other like that. He didn’t know they could.
“We take it in turns,” Hunter told Asher. “Now, tell me about your father’s visit while you help us clear up.”
LOOKING OVER his arrangement of things in the cave, he hoped they looked like he’d tried to make it natural, and that to an investigator of Hunter Dane’s reputation, it would look staged. His text alert sounded. Minnie.
FRIEND TEXTED. MEETING
IN MAUDE’S IN EVRGRN.
PUBLIC. SAFE. WILL PUT HIM
OFF 2 TOMORROW
“FUCKFUCKFUCK!”
Texting furiously, he raced out of the cave.
SHE KNEW Max would object, so she muted her phone. He had his own things to do in the cave, and she was in a beat-up 4-by-4 registered to her cousin. Not a likely vehicle for a woman of her age. She was headed for a public place in daylight. Her biggest worry was finding a table during the lunch rush.
The “friend” had texted her about twenty minutes ago. She’d stayed off her cell since the letter because she knew there were scanners that could pick up her conversations. Her number. In fact, the only time she’d used it had been an hour ago, when Max texted her he was done. It had been so automatic to text back, to tell him to hurry home.
She screwed this up; she would take care of it. It wasn’t like she’d never met a scary man in a diner before, she thought ruefully. They were less than twenty-four hours from freedom. She’d tell this blackmailing s.o.b., whoever he was, that she had to go to her bank in Denver for that much cash. In the morning. She’d meet him after.
By morning, she and Max would be very far away.
Sandy Gulch Road made sweeping turns, rather than sharp switchbacks, so she caught sight of the white-haired man with the cane staring under the hood of his car from a half-mile away. It was enough time to consider and reject the little voice that said drive by, call the sheriff to help.
But she knew there were no homes or businesses along the road for at least another two miles and no cell service in this narrow part of the ravine. She would slow and ask—maybe just give him a lift to the rustic convenience store further on where he could call for help and get some coffee. It wouldn’t delay her more than a few minutes, and she’d left early.
She smiled. “No cell service along here. How about I drop you at the Gas Shack?”
“Well, I hate to trouble you, but…”—he opened the door and climbed awkwardly onto the seat beside her—“…I think we should take my car.”
He showed her the gun.
ASHER DIDN’T KNOW WHERE anything went, and there was a lot of people between the island and the counter. He did a good job wiping down the table, then perched on a stool to tell his story while Hunt and Cam finished up.
“So I was playing Fire Storm Battlesiege and I attacked this orc force to take Hill 941 and then I was standing in the doorway of the trailer. Donato was down by the car, like leaving. I was just me, like now, though, you know?”
Hunter nodded, snapping a lid on the salad stuff container. Cam took it from him to put into the fridge, listening, but giving nothing away.
“Anyway,” Asher went on, “He said ‘When Jason Furney is dead everyone will know you did it’. And he looked past me kinda, but the porch was barely big enough to open the door, only this cougar stepped in front of me. It was huge, like its shoulder was high as my chest. Donato’s nodding and I know he’s saying that it’s good somehow, it’s about Jason.”
“The cougar was about Jason?” Hunter asked.
Asher nodded. “It kinda leaned against me, all strong and stuff. Then I was killing the last orc and shutting the trapdoor in Hill 941. I had to get the vents closed ‘cause the vipers come in like as soon as you do that, so I played out that section.”
Hunter got a pad and pen from the utility drawer.
“This was last night?” Asher nodded. “Time?”
“Twenty fifty-six.”
Hunt looked up at him.
“The game clock is real time. Military, you know.”
“That’s when you came back?”
“Yeah.”
“Single player or-”
“IagoSon. That’s who I played with.”
“Any chance he’s local?”
A shrug. “His profile says ‘Cypress Citadel’.”
“Spell Jason’s last name.”
“F-U-R-N-E-Y. He lives off the old dirt road across from Mount Morrison. There’s like cliffs and caves and shit. He lives in there.”
Cam walked across the great room and got his laptop from the sofa table behind the nine-foot couch that faced the fireplace. He set up at the counter next to Asher, quickly bringing up a Google Earth map.
“Show me.”
Asher studied the screen and pointed to a section of rock in sharp relief over very black shadows. “Here. You go down over here and come from the side and there’s openings. Or they look like openings, but only one is.”
“Thanks,” Cam said and carried the laptop to the dining table.
“You said he lives there?” Hunter asked. The boy nodded, keeping one eye on Cam. “Is he a runaway?”
That got Asher’s attention. He laughed. “He’s an old guy, like Granda. He’s like a … whaddayacallit … a hermit.”
“I see. And how do you know his name?”
Asher cocked his head like a curious puppy. “Are you like me?”
Hunt skirted the question. “People lie, Asher. You know that.”
“He wouldn’t tell me his name. He said if there’s just two of us we know who we’re talking to. But it’s on his books. He has lots of books and they all have his name inside the covers.”
He shot a look at Cam and back at Hunt, lowering his voice. “Are you?”
“For me, it’s more like cop instinct.” The boy seemed to accept this. “Why will you be a suspect if something happens to him?”
“Probably because he has my old laptop. He wanted to see one, see the games. I charged it up and showed him how to open it. I was going to go today and get it.”
“But Donato came last night, you didn’t go to school today, and now you’re here.”
“You can go.”
“So I find the body?”
At the table, Cam became very still.
Asher blinked hard. “Just make sure he’s okay.”
“And if he’s not, how will I know you didn’t kill him?”
Asher turned a stricken face from Hunt to Cam and back. Then shook his head. He didn’t know.
July 19th, 1975
* * *
Colonel Orrin Cathcart Lynn hated being out of uniform when on duty. He’d adjusted to the strictures of running a top-secret facility—the unsung sister operation to Cheyenne Mountain at the other end of the country. Also under a mountain. Or, more precisely in this case, inside one.
He’d accepted the isolation of his job, the location prevented outside social contact, not that he had either time or permission for socializing. Such was his home for most of his life, a home built of men and duty wherever he was.
At this moment, his duty was to report for a special assignment. And he appreciated open air and sunlight and the palm trees that lined the campus. But he did resent the casual clothes he’d been ordered to wear that reflected the assignment he thought of as frivolous.
Decades in the Army had taught him that not all upper-level decisions were especially wise, not all programs particularly useful. But this one was simply moronic.
Report to the Science Anomalies Research Institute for validation or repudiation.
Those were his orders. The explanation came in person over drinks in his Sublevel 7 quarters. From a senator. A Democrat.
“It’s just preliminary, we haven’t decided to fund it yet. But the Russians are interested, so we’re taking a look.”
“I don’t understand what my assignment is, exactly.”
The Senator sat forward. “We need you to tell us if what they say is accurate or not. You’re the only one with the whole picture, and we can’t be sure what these subjects might come up with.”
“Subjects?”
“Psychics.”
The blue rental sedan stopped in front of a low, red-tile-roofed building. All the buildings on this campus looked the same—like a subdivision of Mexican haciendas. His aide did not come around and open his door. But Lieutenant Thomas did wait next to it, sweating lightly in the poplin jacket that covered his sidearm.
Colonel Lynn didn’t remark on the absurdity of insisting on his military anonymity while the lieutenant wore a jacket in mid-July in California. Nor did he know why Thomas had to be armed. Perhaps they expected one of the summer students to attack him with a bamboo bong.
THREE OTHER MIDDLE-AGED men, looking uncomfortable in civilian clothes with three more aides standing behind them, occupied one side of the conference table along with Colonel Lynn. Each of the seated men had an identical cardboard tube in front of him. Each man kept at least one hand on the tube at all times.
On the opposite side of the table, a plump, forty-ish housewife blinked nervously at them. In front of her sat a drawing pad and several pencils. The pad was blank.
A hippie-looking researcher in granny glasses—a professor of particle physics—took the cardboard tube from Colonel Lynn and spread the topographic map it contained on the table in front of the woman.
There were no identifying markings on the map. No latitude or longitude, no road names, no towns indicated. Nestled amongst squiggly gray contour lines sat a single red “X” inside a thin red circle.
The professor pushed his bangs off his forehead. They immediately flopped back. “All right, Rita. Whenever you’re ready.”
She stood up, leaned over the map and focused intently. She placed an index fingertip on the x.
“Park here,” she mumbled.
The Colonel cocked his head.
Rita raised hers and stared at the blank wall behind the seated men. Her eyes darted around as if following movement. Sna
tching up one of the pencils, she ignored the pad, writing directly on the map as she sank back into her chair.
Words and lines, scribbles and arrows, sketches of roads appeared. She worked quickly, furiously, pulling the sheet of paper to her, turning it, wrinkling it.
When she stopped, she raised her eyes to Lynn. “You live in this?” As if she couldn’t believe it. She slid the map to Lynn.
He picked it up. Lieutenant Thomas read over his shoulder. The Colonel’s stomach dropped into his loafers.
“Jesus, man, what the fuck are you doing!?”
The professor had his hands in the air.
Lieutenant Thomas’ Colt .45 was trained on Rita’s forehead.
1:15pm - Off-roading
* * *
They took Asher back to Morganfeld’s where he and Granda Caden lived in a small modular house at the edge of the property. Cam rode shotgun in Hunt’s black Bronco, twisted around with his seatbelt undone so he could talk to Asher.
“So was it a dream you had? Playing the game and then being with … you call him Donato?”
“Yeah, I do.” Asher wore his big mirrored sunglasses, looking out the window. “It wasn’t a dream. I was playing in my room. I guess you’d call it a vision, but that sounds stupid to me. Only I don’t have another word.”
“It sounded like you were saying while you were having the vision you were still playing the game, though.”
Asher nodded.
“But you didn’t know you were still playing? You only saw - wait - where’d you see him, anyway? At your house where you live now?”
“Where I grew up. In the trailer park.”
“I’m not trying to give you a hard time, man, but how do you play a game while you aren’t seeing the game and don’t even remember playing that part?”
Asher shook his head. “Dunno.” He looked at the rearview mirror, at Hunt, who glanced up for a second to let Asher know he was listening.
“If he’s dead”—his voice broke a little—“I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t. Ever.” He let his head fall back against his seat.
