Authors: Scott V. Duff
We stared at the mural for a moment, then Jimmy started down the corridor, leaving me to wonder once again if my imagination was running wild. I followed a moment later. He walked through the bottom floor of the apartment at a constant pace, stepping into each room and looking around. Each time I caught a glimpse of his face, he was smiling serenely.
The first floor looked like it integrated work and entertaining. The front portion consisted of two interconnected offices and a library. One of the offices connected to another that connected directly to the promenade and the other connected to a back hallway terminus that led to a series of apartments off of the Promenade that were marked for ambassadors and emissaries. The main area of the floor felt enormous simply due to the lack of interior walls with areas within the room being distinctive by the motif of the furniture and stonework in the floors and walls. And there were plants I couldn’t name everywhere. The great room could be restructured and resized for almost anything.
There were two conference-style rooms of different sizes and several bathrooms with a variety of amenities. The only full bath, though, was in the one guestroom on the bottom floor. The kitchen was huge, too big for one man or even a large family. There were two stairways up in the great room leading to the balconies that overlooked the center, sunken section. Neither of these was for the faint of heart as the steps were barely stepping stones and there were no rails to hold. These looked more decorative than functional, but Jimmy trotted up one set without even looking down once. As I watched him climb up the high wall, I figured if I could climb invisible stairs built one at a time by the Stone, I could try this, too. I inhaled and exhaled deeply then trotted up the steps just like Jimmy did.
At the top of the stairs, I instantly felt more at home simply because there was floor there. Even the color scheme of the floors and walls was warmer, with rosier browns and yellows and greens. Gilán’s blue still dominated everywhere, though, bordering and edging up to everything. Once again, Jimmy went to each room, looking around for a moment and moving to the next. He changed that pattern with the master bedroom when he started stripping his clothes off as he moved further toward the back of the room.
“Thank you for this, Seth,” he said as I followed him back. The room actually had an echo, it was so large. The decorative style was minimalist Spartan: a bed, a dresser and three doors. A bubbling pool of water sat in one corner near the bathroom. Jimmy headed for the door to his closet, his shirt in hand.
“We seem to have very different takes on this, Jimmy,” I said, shaking my head and watching him fight to kick off his shoes.
“Really? Still? And what would you do if I said I didn’t want this? That I wanted to go back home? To go back to school and graduate and end up at some dead-end job while trying to go to some tech school to get a better dead-end job, just to be laid-off in a coupla years. What would you do about that?” He pulled a shirt and slacks out of the closet that shimmered between black and blue with movement. Glancing into his closet, he had a number of such outfits. This must be his chosen “working clothes.” In a total lack of modesty, he dropped his pants and underwear in front of me and piled all his dirty clothes on top of his shoes and headed for the bathroom.
“You’re missing the point on that one, Jimmy. The way the magic works, you wouldn’t even be able to think about asking that question for real ,” I explained, following him and wondering where my modesty went. “I, frankly, would let you go, but that’s still not the point. Even Peter is missing that.”
“Well, let me ask this then, what was I tied to before?” Jimmy asked, looking around the bathroom and trying to discern the different aspects and how they worked.
“Nothing,” I answered.
“Not true,” he said, pulling the shower door open and looking in. “I was tied to my family, my people, and my world, just as you are. When they discarded me, I emigrated. Is there any soap?”
“In the alcove on the right. A little goes a very, very long way,” I said loudly over the water spray, hopping on the vanity, dangling my legs. “That’s a nice idea, Jimmy, but a gilded cage is still a cage.”
“Did you feel that way when you found Gilán?” he asked, then soaped up his head completely, quickly shoving it under the running water to rinse away the grunge of dust and blood.
“No, not at all,” I scoffed. “This place is wonderful! I mean, on top of the simply vast power and magic it gives me, the natural beauty and resources of this world are magnificent.”
“But it’s still a huge responsibility to you,” he said, scrubbing down his body. “You have already over a million Faery that depend on you for survival here. Are you saying that something in the magic of Gilán made you think that you wanted to keep it?”
“Well, no, it’s just… mine,” I said. Jimmy was making some sense. I was just having a hard time accepting it. “And I didn’t have to accept the Fae. I could have left them with their kind. That was a conscious decision, not the same thing.”
He came out of the shower in record time, drying himself off in a towel the size of a bed sheet. He looked at the vanity a little lost until I pointed out the stuff that acted as toothpaste and mouthwash, then where other grooming utensils were kept. We left the bathroom in less than ten minutes. Jimmy smelled much better.
He went to the third door, a set of doublewide doors in the center of the room opposite the bed. Swinging them open revealed a large workout area with a weightlifting section, a long, thin pool of swiftly moving water, a sparring ring of odd size, and what appeared to be a shooting range. Along the left wall from floor to ceiling were display cases of various shields and weapons. Not nearly as varied or visually appealing as my armory, this was still a formidable collection of weapons, and certainly, it was impressive. Shields took a third of the wall and ranged from simple round, “That kid’s shooting peas at me” type to full-body armor with magical protections included.
Jimmy walked straight into the room and directly to the middle of the weapons wall, taking it in from beginning to end in one long turn of the head. Sliding a glass panel open, he reached into a case of staves and pulled out what looked like a twenty inch long truncheon, roughly three quarters of an inch thick. It was made of a nearly white wood and had no marks on it, but it glowed with Gilán’s magic. Looking at it, I doubted that even the Day Sword would be able to chip at it as long as Gilán stood, it looked that powerful. Jimmy opened a drawer at the bottom of the case and removed a belted holster similar to the one that Gordon had when he wore his ax-haft thing. He strapped the holster around his waist and thigh, then snapped the truncheon into it.
“Cool,” he said, spreading his hands and looking down at it. Then he looked at himself in the mirrored wall of the right side of the room. I hadn’t noticed that yet. He smirked at himself, some of that old cockiness returning. “I look good,” he said.
He thought about something for a second then turned to me again with his hands on his hips and said, “You know, I heard a song once. I think it was ‘Audioslave.’ The line went ‘If you’re free, you’ll never see the walls.’ Before I came to you, that’s all I had was walls, all around me, walls. Where are the walls here?”
Then he faded—He faded!—back to Earth to his family’s farm. I shifted back a second later, regretting the loss of contact with Gilán. And the fact that Messner was waiting for us.
“It’s about time!” he growled at us. “We’ve gotten everything we can get here.”
That did surprise me some. “I thought crime scene investigations took longer than a couple of hours,” I said.
“Normally they would,” Messner admitted. “Even in a house that’s been cleared out like this, but we couldn’t find any evidence on site, not one out of place fiber. Not unusual in a magical attack, though it is unusual for this type of physical remains to be left. We are left with deducing from the bodies and tracking information through the Morgan’s household and personal records, both of which have been bagged and tagged. We’ll start some of the preliminaries on the road back to Atlanta.”
That was a small lie, I saw his aura flicker as he brushed the truth over his words. “Why are you misleading us?” I asked him, watching his aura more closely now. He jumped a little, surprised that I’d caught him even though it was a small point in his mind.
“Misleading you? I don’t understand,” he said, confused.
“You said ‘we’ll start… on the road’, but you’re not going back to Atlanta, Agent Messner,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” he said as it dawned on him. “We’ll be setting up a field office here while the physical evidence will go to another laboratory that’s better equipped for more sensitive tests than we can do with the vans. We still need to find their vehicles and the rest of their belongings, which may be in transit to Mrs. Morgan’s sister or may have been dumped or stored nearby.”
He was still holding something back, but I didn’t call him on it again. I wanted to be done with this place and so did Jimmy. “All right, Agent. We’re going home, then,” I said.
“Please stay available, Mr. McClure,” Messner said. “We may have further questions for you.”
“I can’t make promises to that, Agent Messner,” I said, turning my back to him. “I have responsibilities elsewhere that I must attend to. We’ll be… out of the country this weekend through Thursday, at least. If we aren’t available directly, you can address any questions you have to our attorney’s office in New York. I believe Marshal Harris is intimately familiar with them.” I grinned at that multi-barbed jab at Messner and Harris. The injunctions and legal actions against Harris and the Justice department were still in motion. Harris would be smarting from his attacks on Kieran and me for months and I didn’t feel the slightest bit of remorse in that. We’d warned him repeatedly to back off.
“Where is everybody?” I asked, seeing four of our group gone along with my car.
“We sent them for supplies,” Kieran said. “If we’re going to spend the weekend and probably nights at the Palace, we’d need a few things.”
“Food, that kind of thing,” Ethan said. He’d gained quite an appetite since adopting his current form, even after initially claiming to need no sustenance.
“You’ve gotten a one-track mind, lately,” Peter remarked, looking at Ethan sideways through slitted eyes.
“Like yours isn’t?” he threw back, smirking. “At least mine doesn’t have an age limit.”
“Puberty isn’t much of an age limit,” Kieran said sarcastically, grinning at Peter as he said it. We laughed, more in shock that Kieran had said something so Peter-like than at the jest itself. “Whenever you’re ready, Peter.”
Peter raised his power, wrapping the five of us in portals and moving us somewhere I’ve never seen but was vaguely familiar. It was an odd sensation that I wasn’t expecting, but I got the distinct feeling that I could have stopped the process instantly and stayed where I was. I didn’t, but I could have. Interesting. We appeared out of nothing on the side of the road on a deserted highway at a T-intersection of a county road and a well-traveled dirt road. Somewhat gloomy, the three-quarter moon was fairly high in the sky, but not at its apex, and lit the corner well enough.
“This is the way to Yaeger’s,” Jimmy said softly.
“Yeah,” Peter confirmed, glancing at me then back at the dirt road. Kieran and Ethan were already searching the woods around us for watchers. I could feel them probing. “I had Dad drop me off here before they went into town, then hopped through a hole back to the farm. Agent Messner wasn’t being totally upfront with us, I think. There were a number of clues in the records that pointed to Mr. Yaeger and his businesses.”
“Enough to warrant at least a quick look around,” Kieran said as he adjusted what he was looking for in the woods.
“You didn’t tell them we were coming out here, did you?” I asked.
“Not a chance,” Peter said. “Dad would have insisted he come and so would Mike. Not a fight I want to have just yet.”
Shaking my head in mild disbelief, I sent my senses flying down the road. We’d have to go about a mile and a half before the first break in the woods and that was a slight one. Walking, we’d be a while. “Hold tight, everybody, I’m going to move us in a little faster than walking,” I said and gave them a moment to brace themselves. Then I called on the Stone and raised us up on a platform of energy, a pale brown on the astral so that they’d at least have some idea of what was happening. Slowly accelerating, I moved the platform up the road, invoking a chameleon spell as the county road disappeared behind the trees in the rising and falling of the small hills. I decelerated and stopped a hundred yards out from the first sign of human life out on the Yaeger property. I dissolved the platform and we slipped noiselessly into trees. Peter was the noisiest of us and even the elves would have been jealous of his silent movement through the woods. Jimmy was surprisingly good.
We walked past the first sentry without a whisper of our presence. The man was dressed in camouflaged gear and was actively searching his target area. He had military-grade night-vision goggles and a sniper rifle. There were no insignia or grade on his uniform, but he wore a bracelet on his right hand that contained a single red stone that was reminiscent of the “magic-sniffers” used at Dunstan’s school a few weeks ago. If that’s what it was, it failed once again to recognize us.