Gathering Storm (29 page)

He pointed at the necklace in the window.
“That one. How much?”

The little woman pulled it
from the display and motioned for him to hold out his hand. She
draped the necklace over his hand and forearm and then turned over
the price tag so he could read it. The petite merchant smiled and
half-bowed as she watched Storm’s reaction to the feel of the cool
smooth stones on his skin. It was as if the piece wanted to attach
itself mystically. And he had to have it. Two thousand four hundred
fifty.

Storm laughed out loud. By the time they
added taxes it would come close to the extra he’d won at poker.
Easy come. Easy go.

“Hold it for me.” He handed it to her. “I’ll
be back in twenty minutes.”

He left the store smiling
and jogged back to the bar to get the money. Impulsive buys were so
out of character for Storm that the purchase of the necklace would
be a first for him, if he went through with it. But there
wasn’t
really
a
question in his mind. He was going to go through with
it.

That was the first time in
a long time that he didn’t feel like he was spinning wheels. He was
showing the Fates that he was so positive he was going home that he
was buying his wife a souvenir from another dimension. He was going
to buy that necklace and, by gods, he was going to see Litha wear
it. He could picture how it would look lying on that scrumptious
skin she inherited from the sex demon. In his fantasy, he could
imagine the green of the jade complementing her eyes so that they
looked like the green lava pools she said she would take him to
see.

So he tore through the bar, grabbed his
money from its hiding place, and jogged back to the jeweler. The
petite Asian woman smiled and bowed as she encased the necklace in
a black velvet box and fastened the clasp. She put it in in a gold
bag, tied a shuck string, and told him to be sure and come
again.

She’d been standing on the
other side of the street for a while. She watched him go into the
jewelry store and was waiting for him to come out. For all she knew
there were countless versions of Storm in similar realities to Loti
Dimension, but that was irrelevant. She didn’t need to play twenty
questions to know that the man inside that jewelry store was her
father. All the minutes and hours that she’d wished for that moment
that would put her family back together again. Then it was at hand
and all she could do was stand there trying to decide what she
would say to him.

Hi. I know you don’t recognize me, but I’m
the daughter who should be learning to roll over in her crib. How
are you?

Storm left enjoying the feel of the weight
in his hand and, for the first time since he had been lost, he felt
found. He was going home.

He lifted his head and
looked across the street. It felt like something was pulling his
attention, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. The sidewalks
were teeming with people hurrying back to offices after lunch.
Nothing special. No reason for that fine honed instinct of his to
engage, just a crowd of people awash in a riot of
diversity.

Then he did see something
out of the ordinary- one person, a girl, who wasn’t carried along
with the pedestrian current. She was standing perfectly still on
the other side of the street looking in his direction while the
pedestrian traffic parted around her. Maybe she wasn’t just looking
in his direction. Maybe she was looking at him. Watching.
Him.

He took a closer look. She
was taller than average, with a mass of black hair that was wavy
like Litha’s. She was definitely looking at him, looking with an
intensity that reminded him of the way people described him. It was
a girl who… who…

Storm stepped off the curb
without thinking about oncoming vehicles. An electric blue,
electric car honked and he narrowly avoided being hit. He held out
his hand and dodged cars to get across the street. When he got to
the other side, he was close enough to see Litha’s emerald green
eyes staring at him from a slightly younger, feminine version of
the face he shaved every day.

Rosie. Completely grown
up.

As she came toward him, looking teary-eyed,
he felt his own eyes burning and it was getting hard to breathe.
She walked straight into him. Just before she made contact with her
cheek to his chest, arms wound around his waist, he saw her bottom
lip tremble and her eyes spill over.

“Daddy.”

He hugged her to him. “I
missed it,” he whispered to the top of her hair and she heard him
even with all the crowd and lunch hour noise. She sensed every one
of his conflicting emotions: relief and happiness to be found,
disappointment and sadness that he missed her growing
up.

She hugged him tight,
clinging like she might lose him again if she let go. He hugged
back and rocked her just a little, remembering the last time he saw
her.

Found.

After a while he pulled
back so he could get a close look at her face. “Let me see you,” he
said. He reached up and pushed a lock of hair back while he studied
her features. “How old are you?”

Her expression said she
felt like a failure for not being able to give him a straight
answer to that and didn’t want to disappoint him.

"I don't know. Monq thinks
maybe twenty-three. He did tests on skin elasticity and bone
density. That’s his best guess.”

Storm smiled, his eyes
sweeping over her features again, drinking her in. “Looks good on
you.”

“There’s a gang of people
who might as well be wearing black arm bands,” she laughed.
“Everybody has been so scared you were lost forever and nobody
wanted to even think it or say it out loud. They’ll be dying to see
you.”

“They can wait. I need to see your mother
first.”

“I need something to tie you to me.”

“We’ll find something. I need to take care
of one thing before we leave anyhow.”

On the way to Halcyon, he told her about his
job at the bar.

When Storm didn’t get Hal,
he left a message saying, “It’s Storm. I’ve got to go. I’m leaving
the keys and the story I owe you. I wrote it out. And this phone.
Give the clothes to charity, I guess. I, ah, don’t know how I would
have gotten through this if… Just wanted to say thank you for
everything.” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Anyway. Thanks.
Oh. And, if four guys show up sometime asking for me…” He raised
his eyes to meet Rosie’s, “…just tell them I made it home and put
their drinks on my tab.”

Storm knew exactly which cupboard held the
duct tape. He hesitated before he put it on Rosie’s skin. “I don’t
want to hurt you, but I don’t want to get lost again either.”

She laughed. “I don’t care.”

When their wrists were locked together to
his satisfaction, he picked up the bag that held the necklace and
its case and wound a length of tape around that, too.

“What’s that?” she asked.

He grinned. “Present for my wife.”

“Shhhh.,” she said
smiling. “Not so loud. I’m sure that’ll break some Council rule of
another to transport goods across dimensional lines.”

“I’m in a mood for
rule-breaking.”

“Yes, sir.”

When Hal opened up that
evening, he wasn’t surprised to find a phone, a set of keys, and a
letter. He was surprised to find a little over three hundred
dollars that hadn’t been mentioned on the phone message. The bar
and apartment were both locked up tight with the keys left inside.
He wasn’t entirely surprised, but couldn’t wait to sit down and
read the letter.

Three nights later four guys came in right
before closing. They stopped just inside the door, looked around,
and their eyes came to rest on Hal behind the bar. They were all
late twenties or early thirties with a physical presence that
reminded Hal of Storm. He wasn’t at all surprised when they walked
up and asked for his former employee.

Hall said nothing. He went about silently
setting out five shot glasses, one at a time. Then he reached up
high for the top shelf Scotch. He filled each one of the glasses,
set the bottle on the bar, and said, “He told me to offer you a
drink and say he made it home.”

The four glanced at each other and at Hal.
Each took a glass, then Brandeskin said, “There’s no place like
home.”

The other four grinned and
clinked glasses, repeating, “No place like home.” Then they drank
to the salute. And to their extra-dimensional Black Swan
brother.

CHAPTER 22

After neutralizing all
elevator operations in the building, Fennimore and Angel had sealed
the entrance to S3 at the east end stairwell. Their plan was to
make their way to the other end of the floor and repeat destruction
of the opposite passage at the west end stairs, once they were
safely above at S2. Then they were planning to double back and blow
the central stair unit from above.

When Z Team heard the
explosion on Sublevel 3, they raced toward it assuming that it was
related to the cause of alarm. Either they hadn’t heard Elora’s
warning that charges were going to be set or they forgot. They
encountered no resistance between the Hub central stairwell and S1
so they proceeded to Sublevel 2.

At the west end of S3
Angel and Fennimore were preparing to be out of the way when the
popper hit the stairs, which they would do from the other side of
the landing above after climbing to the next level. So occupied,
they were never seen by Z team who had just arrived on S2 and vice
versa.

In a comedy of coincidence
that had the Fates laughing their asses off, another group of alien
visitors dropped in without calling first and appeared in the
central hallway of S1 at the same time. It seemed that, on the
other side of the Atlantic, the French vampire contingent was
running low on vaccine. Thinking the kids could handle what should
have been a simple ten minute errand on their own, they sent the
four teen immortals to pick up a fresh supply for their night’s
work.

The vamps had just popped
into the Central hallway of S2 as Z Team reached that level. On
first look, naturally they assumed the boys were trainees who were
in the wrong place. The fact that the four teens showed no sign of
either hostility or fear, in the face of Z Team on alert with
weapons drawn and aimed, certainly supported that
conclusion.

Torn lowered his weapon.
“You lads were told to get to cover and stay out of the way. You
could have been killed. Are you gettin’ that?”

Javier just shrugged and
grinned. That was when Z Team was clued in that they were
definitely not looking at trainees who’d lost their way.

One look at those
exquisite long sharp fangs, so beautifully white they could have
been veneered, and Glyphs pulled the stake out of his boot. He
hadn’t thought he’d encounter vampire when he got dressed for the
day, but old habits die hard.

He lunged for Javier, who
was not expecting an attack and made no move to get out of the way,
which meant he ended up with a stake sticking out of his chest.
Again.

Javier looked down at the
stake and then scowled at Glyphs, saying, “Pas ça encore! Qu'est ce
qui ne va pas avec ces gens la!”

The veteran hunters of Z
Team were so shocked to get that reaction from a vampire that they
froze in uncertainty, until Glyphs leaned into Gunnar and asked,
“What did he say?”

Pierre, having overheard
the question since he was two feet away answered. “He said, ‘Not
this again! What is wrong with you people?’”

The humans watched in
stunned silence as Javier pulled the stake from his chest, threw it
aside and proceeded to pet the hole in his shantung shirt like it
might somehow repair itself. Having recovered from the initial
novelty of a vamp not being fazed by a staking, the knights of Z
Team switched to Plan B and started to raise the weapons. Since the
immortals were no longer trusting of the new humans they hadn’t
encountered before, they disarmed them in an invisible flurry that
left the hunters wondering what had happened.

Pierre said, “These people
are too dangerous to clothing to be allowed to roam free. Look at
them. They are ruffians with no understanding of fashion, much less
haute couture. They should be confined.”

“Agreed. What should we do with them?”

“There’s a thing on the
lowest place. A cage.”

Each of the four vampire
took charge of one member of Z Company who were, of course, no
match for the strength of pure vampire immortals. Five minutes
later, the Zed Knights found themselves deposited within the chain
link enclosure that had been Blackie’s kennel once upon an
unpleasant time. Because the kennel was six feet tall, none of them
could stand up straight. Since no lock was handy, one of the
vampire just bent the gate latch so that it couldn’t be opened, at
least not by humans.

The vampire popped
straight from S3 into Monq’s lab where the stores were
kept.

“No one is here.”

“Should we leave a note?”

“Jean-Etienne told us to
get vaccine, not write letters.”

“Yes. You are right.”

They took enough vaccine to last a month and
popped out just before detonation of the west end stairs sent a
rumble through the building.

Throughout Jefferson Unit,
everyone, friend or foe, went statue still when the intercom came
on loud and clear.