by Lori Bond
Will gave me a thoughtful look, and then he broke into one of his heartbreaking smiles. “Then it’s a good thing I’m sticking around for now.” A slight cloud passed over his face. “At least for now.”
“What does that mean?” I might resent that Will was my Sight’s crystal ball, but that didn’t mean I wanted to lose access to him.
Will looked away, a sure sign he had bad news. “Stormfield is not pleased with my performance here.”
“Ridiculous,” Cassie said before I could sputter out some incoherent denial. “You’ve been doing a fine job. I’ll have Patrick and Arthur speak to him on your behalf. I’m sure there’s some misunderstanding. Elaine’s fighting has shown marked improvement in the last few weeks.”
I flushed at the praise, slight though it had been, but Will seemed skeptical. He gave a polite thanks, and we got back to working on pulling visions out of the future.
One week later I Saw my parents for the first time.
13
WHERE I SEE MORE THAN I BARGAINED FOR
OF COURSE, WHEN I HAD A VISION OF MY PARENTS, I HADN’T BEEN trying to have one at all. I’d spent a full week working with Cassie while Will hung out with us in the same room. Cassie was right that Will’s presence made it easier to See. I had two more visions of him without even having to hold his hand. I also Saw Arthur talking to two other-worldly looking warriors. The next day we encountered some Fae in Central Park attempting to recapture an escaped Hell Hound. That was the day I finally used my trigger to call up a vision on command when I slapped my hand on a Fae. The future I saw showed us how to contain the beast.
So, although I was getting greater control over my powers, visions of my parents still eluded me. Yes, I’d been able to See Arthur, but he’d only been a few rooms away at the time. Proximity seemed to still be a factor. I needed Will and the person whose future I was trying to See to be nearby.
For his part, Will took on being my lucky charm with a lot more grace than I would have if the roles had been reversed. He rearranged his schedule, so he was always nearby in case I needed to summon a vision. He filled out his reports in the control room while I trained with Arthur and Patrick, and he worked in my room while I did online school or practiced coding with Ginny.
I would have resented needing to be so aware of someone else all the time, but Will just laughed when I complained to him on his own behalf.
“This isn’t exactly a burden,” he said. “I get to hang out with someone I like. I mean this is so much better than when I used to have to follow Stormfield around everywhere.” Will frowned. “Being Stormfield’s personal secretary is supposed to be an honor, but all I did was trail behind him and occasionally get sent on some trivial errand on his behalf.”
For half a second I wondered if evaluating me for clairvoyance had been one of those “trivial errands.” I didn’t interrupt though. It had been awhile since the real Will had shown up. Agent Redding seemed to have finally gone away again. The guy lounging on my sofa almost seemed like a normal guy, like a senior at my school, and not like a professional agent.
“Besides,” Will gave me a half smile that somehow managed to be one of the most tragic faces I’d ever seen. “It’s nice to be needed.” He picked his tablet back up and went back to reading. I wondered if he was reading another romance novel. Will had mentioned yesterday that they were his favorite kinds of books. He liked the happily-ever-afters.
I stared at Will, ignoring the chemistry tutorial playing on my computer. Will never talked about his family, never mentioned friends, or even other LANCE agents other than Stormfield. I realized asking him was pointless. Will was an expert at dodging questions. The only thing I’d gotten out of him in the last three weeks was that his mom had died when he was a baby, and LANCE had taken him out of foster care and stuck him in their Conservatory spy school when he was six.
For the first time, I stopped thinking entirely of myself and how I felt about things, and I tried to look at life from Will’s perspective. He had to be lonely, and I’d discovered that under that professional demeanor, Will had an affectionate nature. When he forgot to be Agent Redding, I could count on Will for things like comforting hugs. Now, I wondered if the hugs were for me or really for him.
I paused the chemistry video. I’d learn about isotopes some other time. I got up and crossed over to the sofa, hovering for a moment until Will glanced up. He gave me a funny look and scooted over so he didn’t take up the whole couch anymore. I sat down next to him, my body as stiff as if I’d turned into my desk chair.
“You okay?” Will asked.
“Are you?”
“Sure?” Will had no idea what I was asking, which was fair, since I didn’t know myself. I tried to figure out how to ask if he was happy here, if things were okay. Instead, I glanced down at his tablet.
“The Desperate Duke’s Broken Heart?” I asked instead. “Book one of the Wallflower Brides Series? You read historical fiction?”
Will shrugged. “I read all kinds of romance novels. It has over eight-hundred five-star reviews. I figured that many readers can’t be wrong. And look.” He brought up his web browser so I could see the page about the series. “There are fourteen more novels in this series. If I like this one, I’ll be set for like two weeks. Arthur gave me an account. He said I can buy as many books as I want, no budget at all. This is even better than a library pass. I’ve already downloaded a hundred and sixty-two books since I got here.” He said the last bit at a whisper with a glance around the room like someone might be listening. Arthur may have said Will could buy unlimited books, but Will clearly didn’t want to test him on that offer.
I grinned back. Will’s excitement was contagious. “No wonder you like this better than working for Stormfield. You have way more time to read.”
Will’s smile faded, and I could have kicked myself for bringing up LANCE.
“I always work for Stormfield.” Will looked down at his tablet though he didn’t seem to see the webpage. “Don’t forget that.” He looked back up and took my hand. A vision, the same one with Will tied to a chair, tried to appear, but I forced it from my mind like Cassie had taught me to do. “Elaine, you can’t forget I’m with LANCE.”
I nodded, but I didn’t get up from the sofa. We sat there on it in silence for a few minutes, both of us leaning back against one of the couch arms. There wasn’t a ton of room so I was crammed up against Will. He still held my hand. After a while it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to lean my head on his shoulder. Will let go of my hand and put his arm around my shoulders drawing me in a little closer. A minute later his free hand tapped on his tablet, and I realized he’d gone back to reading his book, to running after the happy ever after, even if it was at the end of a novel and not real life.
I closed my eyes, and I tried to visualize a happy ever after for Will. I tried to visualize one for me. They didn’t have to be the same. Will wouldn’t always need to be within twenty feet for me to have a vision without a trigger. Cassie had loads of visions without Patrick around. My Sight would get stronger, and we wouldn’t need to spend so much time together. But maybe we would want to.
I held onto that thought for a moment, and then I thought about my parents. All the usual homesickness I’d been trying to bury away welled up again. I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to blubber all over Will’s shoulder. He wouldn’t mind—he seemed to take stuff like that in stride—but crying would embarrass me.
I kept my eyes tight shut and tried to picture my parents at home in our house. Dad would be at his desk balancing books or whatever, and Mom would be cutting out letters for her scrapbooks. At least I tried to imagine that. I’d seen them doing those activities like a hundred thousand times. Instead, Dad looked like he had the one time they’d contacted me at Keep Tower. He sat in front of a computer like usual, but he still had his hipster Santa look. The desk was wrong too. It wasn’t L-shaped like at home. It was a big desk he was sharing with Mom. Mom didn’t have a singl
e scrapbooking thing in sight. Instead, her half of the desk had at least six monitors. Code scrolled down the screens except for the monitor with some sort of tracking map. Her side of the room looked more like Ginny’s office than my mom’s scrapbooking paradise.
Mom wasn’t paying attention to her screens though. She stood staring out the room’s window, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. Since my mom had hated coffee in the past, part of me wondered if she’d taken on a new persona—if the mom I’d known had been an act, and now she had a new role. I walked over to stare out the window too. The house was in a suburban neighborhood somewhere different. We’d lived in the suburbs in North Texas. Cacti were not normal landscaping at our old house.
About that moment, I realized that I was in a vision, not reliving a weird version of a memory. I opened my eyes, but the scene didn’t change.
“Will?” I called, but there wasn’t an answer. Will wasn’t in the room with me. I was somewhere in the future, and I had left Will behind with my body.
“Mom?” I asked, but she didn’t turn or acknowledge me. Of course not. I wasn’t there. I was only Seeing a possible event.
Mom turned away from the window and looked back at Dad. “Any luck?”
Dad looked up and shook his head. “They’ve hidden their paper trails a lot better this time around. I’ll need proprietary numbers to go much farther.” He pointed to the dozens of spreadsheet tabs open on his computer and the printouts of financial documents on his side of the desk. He leaned back in his chair and ran a hand down his beard. “They’re moving money in and out of so many accounts and corporations we’d need to take down half the publicly traded companies on every major exchange to make even a dent in their cash flow. I’m not sure how well the world economy would handle that.”
Mom looked like she wanted to throw her coffee at the wall, but instead she sat it carefully on the window sill. “We have to do something.”
Dad stood up and hugged Mom. “We will. But LANCE has been fighting this for over a hundred years. They’ve attacked Elaine’s father continuously for almost a dozen. I don’t think well-placed financial disruptions will be enough. We tried that twelve years ago, and you remember what happened.”
Mom sighed. “I know. But if we destroy the Illuminati, we could come out of hiding.”
I choked on the imaginary air of my vision. Mom and Dad were trying to hack the Illuminati? Again? Had they not learned anything?
“I’ve made some incursions into the Dreki mainframe,” Mom said, “but I can’t do enough from there to destabilize them. We need to cut the funding.”
“Is that safe?” Dad pulled back to study Mom’s face. He looked concerned.
Mom shrugged. “I was careful.”
A beeping sound came from one of Mom’s monitors. Both ran over.
“Incoming,” said Mom.
“Is it one of Arthur’s?” Dad sounded hopeful, but his face had lost most of its color.
Mom shook her head. “We need to get out of here.” They scrambled for laptops, unplugging and shoving as many devices and external hard drives as they could reach into bags. “Forty-five seconds,” Mom yelled, and they ran from the room.
Not moving from my spot, I stared at the monitor. I had no idea what an incoming AGM-114 Hellfire might be, but it didn’t sound good. I repeated the name over and over, figuring it might be important.
A blinding white light threw me out of the vision.
I was laying flat on my back on the couch. Will hovered over me.
“Percival,” he yelled again, a note of panic in his voice. I stared at him, surprised. I’d never seen Will panic. “Where is Cassie? Why aren’t the Keeps here yet?”
“I’m okay,” I said, but Will didn’t hear me. He was yelling at Percival again.
Arthur and Cassie ran into the room. I tried to sit up, but Arthur pushed me back down. “Easy,” he said.
Cassie was trying to calm an agitated Will. Apparently, I’d been so deep in the vision, I hadn’t responded at all, and at some point I seemed to stop breathing. I guessed that happened when the incoming Hellfire whatever thing hit my parents’ house.
“Hellfire,” I said. I pushed Arthur’s concerned arms away and shoved myself into a sitting position. “An AG, some letter, and a bunch of numbers Hellfire something was incoming to their house.”
“That’s a missile,” said Patrick from the doorway. Ginny pushed past him into the room.
“I’m aware of that,” snapped Arthur. His eyes never left my face. “Where was the missile headed, Princess? Here?”
I shook my head. “No. I finally Saw my parents.”
Ginny gasped, and Arthur’s eyes narrowed. He swung away from me to Ginny. “Did you find them yet?”
Ginny’s hand shook as she pulled up a mid-air screen. “No. There’s been no sign of Tori anywhere. She’s got a distinct style I should have been able to trace if she’d been in any of the normal targets. The only sign I’ve seen is that night she hacked in here.”
“She hacked in to talk to me,” I said.
Ginny and Arthur nodded.
“But I don’t think Mom’s been doing much hacking. Dad seemed to be working off public information, and the only place Mom mentioned poking around was the Dreki mainframe.”
Arthur swore, and Patrick ran from the room. Ginny and Arthur pulled up screen after screen and yelled orders at Percival. My room became an impromptu command center.
“We have to find them,” Arthur muttered.
“I’m aware of that,” Ginny said in a clipped voice. “I’m tracing from known Dreki IPs now.”
Cassie had pulled me to the side and handed me a sketch book and pencils. “Start drawing. Anything you can remember that can help us pinpoint a location.”
I stared at her. Helplessness seemed to roll through me. “I was inside a house. That doesn’t have a lot of geographical markers.”
“Try.”
I sat down to sketch. Will came and stood behind me, probably trying to get out of the way. Screens had filled every free bit of space in my room as Arthur and Ginny ran programs and then discarded screens.
“Is LANCE going to be a problem for us?” Arthur suddenly called out from the other side of the room. “They still have warrants out for Tori and Raul, and the orders don’t require them to be taken alive.”
“No, sir,” Will said, answering Arthur’s question. He dropped his phone on the floor and kicked it under the couch. “I seem to have lost my phone.”
Arthur gave Will a long look before nodding his head. “Good man.” He turned back to his screens.
I didn’t stop sketching the cactus looking plant I’d seen from my parents’ window, but I did glance up at Will for a nanosecond. “I thought you worked for Stormfield.”
Will sat his hand on my shoulder, and it was as if the memory of the vision strengthened. I noticed that the spines on the cactus were golden. I wrote that down.
“I still work for Stormfield,” he said. “I’ll be filing a report about all this. It’s just terrible luck it all happened while I was in another part of the Rook, and I only heard about it after the fact.”
I rested my cheek on his hand for a moment. “Thank you, Will.”
Cassie came back over and looked at my drawing. “They’re in California or the Baja in Mexico,” she called over to Arthur and Ginny.
“Did you See them too?” I asked.
Cassie pointed at my cactus. “That’s a Golden Snake Cactus. They’re rare, but you can find them around San Diego and Southern California and parts of the Baja Peninsula.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I told you before. You have to use details to figure out where and when a vision is taking place. Plants make good markers. Once we get better control of your visions, you and I will start an exhaustive study of botany.”
“Yay?” I said.
“Gotcha,” said Ginny. She looked up from her latest screen. “Cassie’s right. I found her. The sho
rt version is that they’re here.” She expanded one screen, so it took up most of the room. There was a map of San Diego with a small dot pinpointed on a suburb on the coast.
“I assume there’s no keeping you here?” Arthur said to me.
“Not on your life.” I had already started for the door, passing through the screens as if they weren’t there.
“What about you?” Arthur asked Will.
“Where she goes I go,” Will said. “This isn’t a training flight around the city.”
Arthur sighed. “Of course not.” He followed both of us out of the room at a run. “Let’s get suited up.”
14
WHERE I LEARN THAT FAMILY IS MORE THAN GENETICS
PATRICK MET US IN THE ARMORY. HE’D CHANGED INTO HIS DEFENDER outfit—a brown leather jacket with a silver “D” on the back and brown leather pants with black military boots. When we ran into the room, Patrick was just pulling his silver mask over his head. I didn’t look twice at him once we’d moved into the throne room since I was too busy staring at the knights housed there. I’d been here this morning for training, and the room had looked normal with the three suits of armor in their respective niches. Now there were four.
The new knight stood in the previously empty niche next to mine. It looked almost identical to mine except it was taller, the same height as Pendragon. At least it didn’t have Pendragon’s silly purple cape. I looked for the knight’s name, but there wasn’t one.
Arthur saw where I was looking. “I haven’t gotten the nameplate up yet,” he said. “This one is Galahad.” He waved at Will. “Go on, and suit up. Let’s see if Percival got the measurements right.”
Will stared at Arthur for a moment. His mouth moved, but he couldn’t seem to get words out.
“You made Will his own armor?” I asked for him.
Arthur didn’t look thrilled, but he nodded. “Even I could anticipate the day would come when your crystal ball would need to come out with us. Besides, he’ll be less sulky if he can keep an eye on you. He takes your protection almost as seriously as me.” Arthur gave Will a smile, probably the first one I’d ever seen him make in Will’s direction.
