Authors: Adrian Howell
“Jesus Christ, kid!” cried the cop, wide-eyed. “What in God’s name are you?!”
“I ask myself the same question every day of my life,” I replied, reaching down to pick up the senior officer’s pistol with my left hand. “Now get down on your knees.”
Ed Regis got up, lightly brushed the dirt off of his shirt and gave me an embarrassed smile. “Thanks, Adrian.”
I nodded and mumbled, “Don’t mention it.”
I tossed my two pistols to Ed Regis and James, who took over for me, taking the handcuffs from the officers’ belts and cuffing their wrists behind their backs.
Our motorhome door opened, and Terry lightly hopped out.
“We’re not going to kill them,” I said to her. “Alia’s orders.”
“Yeah, I heard her too,” said Terry, rolling her eyes. “Why do you think I didn’t shoot them from the window?”
Alia stepped out from the motorhome too, looking shaken but relieved. She quickly put her arms around me, burying her face in my chest.
Gently patting her back, I joked, “For a moment there, Ali, I thought you were more afraid for the cops than you were for me.”
Releasing me, Alia silently shook her head and smiled.
The senior officer wasn’t wounded, just winded. I had carefully adjusted the intensity of my blast to ensure this, but Alia nevertheless insisted on checking to see if there were any physical injuries that she needed to work her healing power on. Once my sister was satisfied that the man was okay, Terry, Ed Regis and James marched both cops to the side of their squad car. Alia and I followed.
“Alright,” said Ed Regis, forcing them to sit on the ground, “how the hell did you recognize us?”
The men didn’t reply.
Since I had already used my telekinetic power on them once, there was little point in hiding it. I levitated a few pieces of gravel from the side of the road and flew them around the officers’ heads. It had the desired effect in that both cops looked terrified.
“Answer him,” I growled.
“You’re on our files,” mumbled the younger officer, his eyes fixed on the gravel orbiting his head.
“Physical descriptions?” asked Terry. “Mug shots?”
The young officer nodded silently.
“On a
police
file?” Ed Regis asked incredulously. “A regular police file?”
The officer nodded again, and Ed Regis swore loudly.
The young cop’s frightened eyes were still silently tracking the gravel zipping around his head, and I couldn’t resist saying to him, “You’re awfully quiet, aren’t you?”
Alia nudged my side.
“Addy, stop scaring him.”
James asked Terry, “If we’re not going to kill them, now what?”
The road was currently deserted, but there was no telling how long it would stay that way. We couldn’t be spotted here with two handcuffed police officers, and someone was bound to call them on their radio at any moment. What we really needed right now was a mind-writer to modify their memories of what they had just seen. Unfortunately, we had no such luxury.
“I guess we’ll have to let them go,” Terry said resignedly.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “And maybe in return they’ll be nice enough to let us go.”
Ed Regis looked at Terry and me, asking, “You want me to talk to them?”
Intimidation was a poor substitute for psionic mind control, but I figured that it might work coming from the mouth of our burly ex-Wolf. I let the gravel fall to the ground, saying, “Be my guest.”
Ed Regis looked down at the cops and said coolly, “Alright, now I’m going to give
you
a warning. This boy could have killed you both today, but he didn’t. Against our better judgment, we are going to let you live. So listen to me very carefully. There are powers in this world far beyond your understanding, and believe me, I’m not talking about us. I’m talking about the people who will silence you, and erase your families, if you ever speak about this to anyone. What happened here was a routine traffic stop, nothing more. Does that sound like something you gentlemen can handle?”
The officers looked at each other for a moment, and then nodded silently.
Ed Regis tossed them the keys to their handcuffs. “Then radio it in and be on your way. And don’t forget to destroy your car video.”
We got back into the motorhome and left.
Ed Regis drove, keeping us nicely over the speed limit. The rest of us gathered in the lounge space.
No one spoke for a few minutes. James was looking out the window, his mouth wired into a tight frown. Terry was staring down at the hook attached to her left stump. Alia was the only one smiling.
Knowing my sister’s visceral dislike of hurting people, even our worst enemies, I suspected that she was basking in her personal victory of having prevented unnecessary bloodshed. And she certainly had the right, since things could have turned out very differently today. I had no desire for a fifth gunshot wound, so when that young cop drew down on me, it took every ounce of my wits not to shoot him dead right there. But the cop didn’t owe me any favors. It was mostly Alia’s voice in my head that had stayed my hand.
Eventually, James turned his head from the window and said to me, “I’m sorry I didn’t help you back there, Adrian.”
I smiled and shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. There was nothing you could’ve done. Besides, I was the one who fell for the cheap trick. I’m just glad no one got killed today.”
“I never guessed those cops would recognize you, though,” said James, shaking his head in disbelief. “To think the Angels would stoop so low as to register us with the police…”
“Randal must be pretty desperate,” I said mildly.
Not even the Wolves’ psionic database had information about the color of my eyes after my operation, so there was no question about who was responsible for passing our physical descriptions to the police. Those two cops might have only recognized Ed Regis and me, but it was a sure bet that all of us, Alia included, were now wanted by the law for some false reason or another. The world had suddenly become a much more dangerous place for us.
Ed Regis called from up front, “Hey, Terry, what do you reckon are their chances of keeping silent?”
Terry looked up from her hook. “Fifty-fifty, tops.”
“I was thinking about the same,” said Ed Regis. “We’re going to have to ditch this vehicle at the next town. Maybe sooner.”
“Yeah, thanks to Half-head here,” said Terry, narrowing her eyes at me.
I grinned back at her, countering, “You could’ve ignored Alia and killed them if you wanted to, Five-fingers. Do not blame me for your exceptionally rare acts of mercy.”
“I’m talking about losing control of the steering!” said Terry, hitting me in the arm hard enough to guarantee mild bruising. “That’s what caused this mess, you idiot!”
“Hey, go easy on him, Terry,” said Ed Regis. “I think we just dodged a real bullet back there. Imagine if we had been stopped in the city.”
“I’d rather not,” said Terry.
“At least we know the police are on the lookout for us, so we can be more careful next time.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that Half-head lost us our home,” said Terry, hitting me again, though not very hard.
James said jokingly, “Well, this life of total luxury couldn’t last forever.”
I glanced at my sister sitting next to me. She was still grinning from ear to ear.
“Please don’t hurt them, Addy!” I mimicked sarcastically. “Is that going to be your standard attitude every time someone pulls a gun on me?”
Wiping the grin from her mouth, Alia gave me a sheepish look and mumbled, “Sorry.”
I ruffled her hair. “You’re even worse than Cindy, you know that?”
I fully agreed with Terry and Ed Regis that the cops were unlikely to keep their mouths shut. Perhaps we should have killed them when we had the chance, but I was still glad that Alia had stopped us. For all the terrible things we often hear and say about the police, these were the people who have sworn their lives to protecting the innocent. They were heroes in ways we could never be. Sparing them helped me feel just a little more normal.
And normal is so hard to come by sometimes.
Chapter 2: The Cautious Approach
Within an hour, we had reached the outer limits of the last town we had to pass before moving on to Mrs. Harding’s Wood-claw Guardians. But our plans had changed. We couldn’t afford to be spotted by the police in a lumbering motorhome, no matter how bulletproof.
The problem was that there was no way to properly hide or dispose of a vehicle this large. We needed to get it done quickly and move on. Thus, after swapping our license plates with spares that we carried for just this sort of occasion, Ed Regis drove us to a recreational campsite where we ditched our motorhome in plain sight.
“I’d give it a week, tops,” said Ed Regis as we packed up our things. “Someone’s bound to notice it’s been abandoned and call the police.”
We were taking just the bare essentials: money, pistols, spare clothes and basic camping equipment. Not that we had much more to begin with, but downsizing is never comfortable.
James gave the table a light pat, saying, “I think I’m actually going to miss this cozy little jail.”
“Unfortunately, it’s going to get a lot cozier,” warned Ed Regis as he slid our last legally safe pair of license plates into his backpack.
A public bus took us from the campsite into the town’s commercial center, and a rent-a-car shop there accepted Ed Regis’s forged identification as readily as the police had. Terry and James quickly swapped out the license plates on our new stolen car: a dark blue four-door sports sedan. Alia watched this silently but with Cindy’s disapproving frown.
We then stopped by a supermarket to buy some road food for the journey ahead. Most of the stuff we had in our motorhome needed a kitchen to prepare, so we had left it behind. My days as the camp cook were officially over.
James suggested we buy some hats and sunglasses to help disguise us, but Ed Regis pointed out that there wasn’t enough sun these days to justify that, and we would stand out more than we already did if we dressed like secret agents.
“We’ll just have to stay alert,” said Ed Regis.
A little before noon, we managed to leave the town without incident.
Ed Regis drove with James riding shotgun, while Terry, Alia and I shared the back seat. Terry had wanted to sit up front, but Ed Regis insisted that Terry, with her bright red hair and prosthetic hand, would be too conspicuous.
“This car is tiny,” I complained, rolling down my door window. Our bags were packed in the trunk so we weren’t particularly cramped, but after months in a motorhome, it felt like a coffin. “I would have preferred a van or at least an SUV.”
“Yeah, but our pursuit would be expecting that,” explained Ed Regis. “This car blends in better, and it has a better ride too.”
Ed Regis had disabled the car’s navigation system so that we couldn’t be tracked by satellite. Though Terry was still our best fighter, the ex-Wolf had years of training and experience in military, security, and anti-psionic operations. We trusted him to keep us safe.
We were still headed for Wood-claw, but no longer in a straight line. Instead, Ed Regis took us on a one-week roundabout tour far and wide from our target city, making sure at every step that we weren’t being followed. It was tedious but we all agreed that the precaution was necessary. We had already uprooted Mrs. Harding’s faction once. We weren’t going to be responsible for them having to move again.
But days of long-distance travel in a sports sedan were decidedly uncomfortable. We couldn’t stand up or stretch easily and there was no entertainment aside from the radio, which we mostly used to check for possible news about fleeing kidnappers. I felt especially sorry for my sister, trapped between Terry and me all day long, but not sorry enough to trade places with her.
Nights were no better. Despite the danger of being spotted by psionic finders, we stopped every evening so that our driver could sleep. Ed Regis had an extra set of forged documents which he planned to use if we got pulled over by the police again, but that wouldn’t work if he wasn’t the one at the wheel. We used our tent when we could, and slept in the car when we couldn’t, but Alia and I were always left in the car regardless.
“The more metal shielding the better,” insisted Terry.
“It’s bad enough that we’re being drained all the time,” I grumbled. “We should at least be able to stretch out at night.”
“Tough luck for you,” was Terry’s unsympathetic reply.
Since losing our armor-plated motorhome and constantly-in-motion lifestyle, in order to keep our psionic presence to a minimum, Alia and I were each wearing a steel ring on our fingers all day and all night. This was basically the same trick Catherine Divine employed to help keep her power hidden from members of her own faction. Queen Divine did it with a silver chain that once held the amethyst pendant I wore.
Draining did more than mask psionic powers, though, especially for me, since I still couldn’t balance my power half as well as I wanted. Wearing the metal ring made me constantly drowsy and prone to motion sickness, hence my attachment to the window seat. I envied Alia: Aside from her inability to speak telepathically, Alia’s draining hardly showed on her. Though I had much better power balance than when I first turned psionic, I doubted I would ever be as good as my sister.
Terry, James and I were in charge of the night watch, staying awake in shifts while Ed Regis slept. Alia was exempt, but she always kept me company, sitting beside me in the back seat of the car and making sure I didn’t fall asleep on the job.
“You can take it off for a while, Addy,” Alia whispered to me one night when everyone else was asleep in the tent. “I won’t tell.”
“No,” I said. “Terry’s right. It’s too dangerous.”
Only a proper hider could conceal psionic powers completely, but draining was a pretty good substitute, especially against long-range finders. We were camping in open country, and removing my ring when we weren’t even in motion wasn’t prudent to say the least.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Alia asked worriedly. She had caught me yawning more than once already.