Gathering Storm (13 page)

He closed the door. The
space had a half bath, a little dinette with two chairs, although
Storm seriously doubted Hal had ever entertained a guest. One
window facing the alley had iron bars. A low two-shelf book case
that was filled with books. Alarm clock. No TV. He was going to
have the company of the constant hum of the refrigerator. It was
white with a curved top, about as tall as his chest, and it looked
like it could qualify for display in the Smithsonian Americana
section.

There was an old porcelain
sink with a few black scars where chunks of the porcelain were
missing. The room seemed to be clean though. No dust. Bed was made.
He hoped the sheets hadn’t been slept on.
But beggars can’t be choosers.

Sitting on the side of the
single bed that wasn’t really long enough for him, he indulged in a
deep sigh while he studied the mock marble veins on the linoleum
floor tiles and remembered the picture of his beautiful girls
saying goodbye, thinking he’d be home in a little over an hour. He
looked at his watch and thought, “Right about now.”

His mind wandered to a
mental candid of his idea of a perfect day. He and Litha had bought
their vineyard and given the previous owners the two weeks they
requested to vacate. Since the newlyweds had nowhere in particular
to be, they reasoned that there might never be another time so
opportune for sightseeing Northern California.

The picture that came to
his mind was of a day driving the red convertible Aston Martin
south on the Pacific Coast Highway from Eureka. The top was down. A
cloudless sky met a cerulean blue sea on the western horizon and
the water shimmered with the magic of reflected
sunlight.

As he looked over at his
new wife, her loosely bound hair whipping behind her in the wind,
he was thinking that paradise could not hope to be as perfect as
that moment. As if reading his mind, she turned toward him and
laughed.

He could almost hear the
sound of that laugh bounce around the walls of the little studio
apartment. He saw a drop of something fall on his jeans.
Oh, shit no. Black Swan knights don’t leak. Not
unless they’re Elora.
At least not over
something as trivial as being temporarily misplaced.

Storm considered that he
didn’t have a lot of experience with sadness. He had parents who
loved him. He’d gotten what he wanted for Yule when he was a
kid.

From the moment Sol
recruited him, he’d been busy learning and drilling. Then
patrolling and fighting. He had a mission to occupy his drive and
his needs were taken care of so that he could focus on the
work.

The closest he’d ever come
to sadness was when Elora chose Rammel, but if what he was feeling
at the moment was sadness, then getting on that plane without Elora
would have to be categorized as a minor annoyance.

He told himself to pull it
tight and get ready to wait it out. He would be found. He knew that
Litha would
never
stop looking until he was back at home.

His fuck up of a
father-in-law would have to do something right for a change.
Storm’s mood lightened a little when he imagined what Litha would
be saying to the incubus when she found out. She’d put him through
seven levels of Hades.

Litha.

CHAPTER 10

A week had passed without
finding Storm. Both hope and enthusiasm were starting to wane.
Every day fewer searchers showed up to help.

Litha’s friend, the angel
Kellareal, was committed and pressed his crew to keep
looking.

As for Deliverance, over
the past eight hundred years, he’d made more fans than friends,
most of whom were human women and, therefore, not equipped to help
with the search.

There were hoards of
Elementals who owed him favors though. Nothing kept a significant
female from suspicion or curiosity like being preoccupied by her
own tryst with an incubus, which meant that Deliverance was always
in demand among philandering male Elementals.

The problem wasn’t that he
had lots of favors available to collect. The problem was in trying
to collect those favors. Many of the entities he could tap for a U.
O. Me couldn’t be found unless they wanted to be found.

Nonetheless, between
friends, fans, and favors, he’d produced a respectable search
party. The fact that there was nothing to show for their effort
really wasn’t because of lack of trying. Glen’s smart board had
turned into a chaotic mess with the numbers of searched quadrants
struck through.

Under his own authority
and initiative, Glen hung photos of Storm, enlarged to poster size,
around the conference room. He knew the Elementals who were
searching weren’t using sight to find him, but being human, it
seemed to him that a search and rescue war room ought to have
photos of the missing person. Maybe he also needed a visual
reminder to keep him from leaning toward despair, because he and
Ram were both starting to show some frazzle around the edges. They
had no way of calculating the odds of getting Storm back, but every
day that ended without finding him made it feel like the chances
were growing fainter.

Litha was a mess
emotionally and constantly berated herself for that. Her little
girl was being raised by other people while she searched. When her
mother was at home, Rosie was exposed to pure stress and that made
Litha feel even guiltier.

Rosie was three when Storm had disappeared.
She now appeared to be around six and a half.

Just the right age to be
learning to ride a bike.

She’d had that thought in
the middle of having dinner with her little girl and had burst into
tears.

“Don’t cry, Mama.”

“No. I won’t.” Litha shook
her head, smiled, and tried to compose herself quickly. “I’m not
going to cry. It’s just that your Daddy wanted to teach you to ride
a bike and I think you’re at the perfect age right now.”

Rosie looked back at her with an expression
of intelligence that was arresting. “Then I won’t learn to ride a
bike until he comes home.”

Litha was grateful for
that sentiment and feeling pensive. “Rosie. Do you remember your
daddy?”

She beamed in response and
nodded enthusiastically. “I know everything about him.”

Litha cocked her head. “What do you
mean?”

“I know everything from
when he was a little boy.”

“I don’t understand. You mean you’ve heard
stories about little boys?”

She giggled and shook her
head like her mother was being silly. “No. I remember.”

Litha frowned. “You
remember what exactly, darling?”

“I
remember
from when Daddy was a
little boy.”

Litha felt her heart speed
up, but tried to keep her voice calm.

“Rosie. Tell me a story
from when Daddy was a little boy.”

“Okay. When Daddy was a little boy, his
favorite thing to do was to go to work with his daddy.”

“What did they do at work?”

“They looked at the rows where the grapes
were planted. They looked at the big barrels. Stuff like that.”

Litha knew that to be true
because Storm had told her how much he loved going to the vineyard
where his father worked.

“What else do you know
about?”

“I know
everything
about you, too,
Mama.”

Litha’s breath gushed out in a laugh or a
sob. She wasn’t sure which. As if it wasn’t already unusual enough
to have a little girl who was aging six months a day and
transporting anywhere she pleased with a thought.

“Oh my.” More tears slid down Litha’s face
as she made a mental list of things she wouldn’t want her child to
know about her. Nothing said ‘lack of privacy’ like someone who had
your memories.

“It’s alright, Mama. Until Daddy gets back
we have Auntie Elora and Grandy and the seven monkeys.”

“Rosie! Don’t call them
that! It’s disrespectful. They’re
monks
.”

“I know. But they don’t
mind. They laugh when I say it.”

“And don’t talk to me about Grandy.”

“He’s sorry, Mama. He
really is. He didn’t mean to lose Daddy and he’s sad all the time
that you’re mad at him.”

“Good.”

Rosie pressed her lips
together and looked at her mother with condemnation. In a moment of
turning the tables that was almost weirder than the rest of
it.

“
You can just stop looking
at me like that because I’m not taking it back.”

Rosie raised her little eyebrows and
perfectly mimicked that head jiggle mannerism that Deliverance had
passed on to Litha. And now Rosie, too. Apparently.

“And we have Glen.” Rosie had the oddest
little smile on her face, like she had a secret.

Glen finished another
twelve hour shift almost too exhausted to think. He’d been running
Jefferson Unit from the conference room. He was afraid that, if he
stepped away, one of the searchers would return with news and he
wouldn’t be there. During his shift, he ate his meals there, slept
there, and had Barrock stand watch when he needed a toilet break.
The stress of the constant barrage of emotion was scraping him
raw.

He was furious with
Deliverance and worried like hell about Storm. Every time someone
or some thing popped into the conference room, his hope spiked like
a jack-in-the-box and then crashed when it turned out to be nothing
but a no-go report.

Of all the times for Sol to
take a vacation. Of all the times for Storm to get lost.
When
he
was in
charge feeling like the furthest thing from a boy
wonder.

In one of the few quiet
moments, Glen summoned Monq to talk about the mishap and was
shocked that he came.

“I’ve been thinking that
you need to come up with a way to be certain this doesn’t happen
again. Ever.”

“By ‘this’, you mean the
displacement of Sir Storm?”

Glen glared at him, with too little energy
left in emotional reserve to be polite.

“Yes. That’s what I mean.
And for now, until Sol gets back and makes a final decision, we
need to classify this accident as Top Secret. If it gets around
that you can get lost when piggybacking the passes, how many
employees or associates are going to volunteer for that ride in the
future?”
“I see what you mean. Reluctance could ensue.”

“You have a gift for
understatement, Dr. Monq. I want you to come up with something that
will prevent a repeat.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“And keep me up on the progress.”

Monq nodded and left. He
could see that Glen was on the verge of collapse and didn’t think
it would be a good time to protest more work. But the truth was
that he was busy overseeing the outfitting of the entire A/C system
for emergency delivery of the Equalizer in the event the facility
should be breached by extra-dimensional assassins.

Every floor was being
equipped with a yellow emergency button behind a glass case that
would release the chemical into the air and set off an alarm. Since
Monq’s to-do list was perpetually long and growing, he had to make
choices. At the moment, implementing the security measure was his
top priority.

CHAPTER 11

Stagsnare Dimension

Archer was aware that
Number Seventeen had volunteered for reeducation and Rothesay was
giddy about putting the successful candidate through his process,
which would turn an average man into an assassin without
conscience, who would react to any order without question or delay.
Rothesay used a combination of hypnosis, drugs, sleep deprivation,
and drill.

By the time Number
Seventeen left in the transport, the person he had been was gone as
if he’d never existed. It was a premature death. His body was still
walking around, but his point of view had been shoved aside and
replaced by the most potent sociopathy, carefully calculated to be
just the right stuff for a stone cold killer.

The ruthless travesty of the whole thing
made Archer ask himself for the thousandth time if it wouldn’t be
better to be decent people who were oppressed than to be the
oppressors who came to power by murder and held that power with a
soulless philosophy.

Jaik, his lead lab
assistant, was talking. It pulled Archer out of the dark
introspection.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“I said, ‘What are you
doing with those mice? What’s that you’re injecting them
with?’”

“Oh. It’s just a little
hobby project. Nothing I’m ready to divulge. I want to get a little
further along with it. If it works out, it may be a
paper.”

That satisfied Jaik, who
turned away with a head nod, and went back to his own
work.

Rothesay had increased the
number scheduled for the third attempt from twelve to twenty. So
Number Seventeen arrived in Loti Dimension with a biolocator
programmed with twenty life signatures, each matching one of the
proposed members of the second mission, and orders to kill. The
third assassination team’s departure would initiate shortly after
his return with a report of one hundred percent success. Nothing
less would do.