by Jen Talty
“So, you’re who I felt was reaching out to me?” Chad leaned against a tree about five feet from Brett. He studied the man, looking for similarities. Brett was broader. Thick. Where Chad was taller and leaner. But Chad couldn’t deny their identical eyes or their similar mannerisms.
Mostly, he couldn’t deny the instant kinship he’d felt with Brett.
And Hunter.
“I found out that Russell Arnont, who is one of the four men who were killed, has traveled to South Korea five times in the last year. That seems excessive.”
“How did he get that much time off from the military?”
“That’s the kicker. He’s been in the reserves for the last five years until three months ago when he was asked by Scottie to be part of this mission.”
Chad frowned, looking back through his cave. He could barely see the reality plane, but Savanah let him know his current view was safe from Scottie knowing. Scottie was helping the medics load the bodies while Savanah looked as though she were in deep conversation with Chad.
“Scottie said he didn’t know about this team or their mission.”
“From what I can gather, Scottie thought this team was a backup to his.”
“That’s not what he says.” Chad felt a cool prickle across his skin. “I have to get back.”
Brett nodded. “I want to send Alexis, one of Savanah’s sisters. She’s a healer, and she’s feeling all sorts of pain, and we think it’s connected to the missing men.”
Chad shook his head. “I don’t think that is a good idea. I’ve got Scottie agreeing to keep this circle small.”
“I can put her up in a safe house in Seoul, that way she’s just a remote view away.”
Chad laughed. “Do you have any idea how odd that sounds?”
“No odder than the two of us hanging out in the space between where most psychics would be severed from their body, putting them in a straightjacket for the rest of their lives.”
“You’re a regular, fucking comedian.” Chad turned, running to his cave, his body snapping back to his mind.
“What did you find?” Savanah asked.
“Brett and something about being crazy.”
Chapter 4
“YOU NEED TO TELL me the truth about these missions.” Chad wouldn’t tolerate games anymore. If Scottie wouldn’t be truthful, then Chad would have to find a way to get Scottie off the mission.
Scottie rested his hands on his hips, looking over his shoulder. He shifted his weight back and forth. He didn’t rock, but the subtle change was noticeable. “I’m not at liberty to tell you.”
“Says who?”
In the background, the medics worked to cover the bodies, lifting them up on boards, carrying them back to the chopper. Chad couldn’t help but wonder what the government would tell their families on how they died, because it sure as hell wouldn’t be the truth. A cold, hard fact he’d learned to appreciate the hard way.
“General Mallard.”
“What does he have to do with all this?” Chad asked. He’d met Mallard a few times during his career as a SEAL. Mallard might as well have been born a high-ranking officer. He had no wife and no children. Chad remember distinctly the first time he’d crossed paths with the general right before graduation from the Naval Academy. The general had been walking the grounds, talking with a few professors. Everyone had been abuzz about his visit and that he’d been attending the ceremony. Chad had entered the gymnasium, heading toward the coaches’ office when he ran into Mallard.
They exchanged a few pleasantries, and both went about their business. Not four hours after graduation, and Chad was summoned to the Dean’s office, where General Mallard awaited him with an offer to join his top-secret team. Chad, who would be heading to SEAL training the following morning, graciously declined, but every once in a while, Mallard would make the offer, stating that he saw something special in Chad.
Now he knew what the General had meant by special.
“She needs to leave if I’m to tell you anything.” Scottie pointed to Savanah.
“Why?”
“I don’t trust her.”
Chad rubbed his temples. “Why’d you leave the psychic book if you don’t trust her?”
“To help you understand your gifts so we can get our men back. I’ve been trying to find a way to get her out of here,” Scottie said.
Finally, the man was being honest.
“I trust her more than I trust you right now, so she stays.” Chad also needed her to help him understand exactly what talents he had and how to use them.
“I don’t care how strong her gifts are, she led the northern operatives to these men. Good men, I might add. I don’t want her here at all. If it were up to me, I’d put her on that chopper and send her home right now, but Mallard, for whatever reason, thinks we need her.”
“Mallard’s a smart man then,” Chad said. “Which doesn’t add up to him not wanting me to know the truth about these missions.”
“He’s given me control in the field to do as I see fit.”
“You know what your problem is?” Savanah inched closer, her face only about a foot away from Scottie’s.
Chad should probably interrupt her, but he figured it would be too much fun to watch her put Scottie in his place.
She waved her finger in the air. “You’re a sexist asshole who doesn’t think a mere woman should be in the field, and you take issue with the Phoenix Agency.”
Scottie narrowed his eyes, taking a step back.
“This is why we’re standing here in a field of death?” Chad let out a long breath. “I accepted this damn psychic shit overnight. You’ll get used to working with a woman, who I might add, has more skills in her pinky than you have in your entire body. So, I’ll ask one last time. What’s the truth behind these missions?”
Scottie opened and closed his mouth three times. If he did it a fourth without saying anything, Chad might haul off and hit the guy.
“Mallard gave team two to you. He wanted to try to pull out your gifts. He thought by hiring Phoenix to remote view them—”
“Wait a second,” Savanah interjected, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Phoenix wasn’t hired when Brett viewed that team. It was all part of a training exercise, but he sensed two other psychics. One of them was me.”
“The other was the North Koreans,” Scottie said, his stiff shoulders slightly relaxed. “One of the men on the team, Hunter Knight, reported he’d felt Brett’s presence, which was our part of the test, but he also felt someone else. We didn’t know at the time, Savanah had been kidnapped.” Scottie lowered his head. “There is the real reason I have a problem with you. For all I know, you could be working for the other side. I mean you led them straight to—”
“I wouldn’t finish that sentence if I were you,” Chad said, puffing out his chest. “We’re not going to start the blame game. Let’s focus on getting the two men who are still alive, back.”
Scottie nodded. “Team one, my team, was already across the border.”
“Why?” Chad asked.
“We had intel on a potential psychic threat, and we wanted to shut it down. The intel, however, sent us on a wild goose chase while the other team went missing.”
“You were used as a diversion,” Chad said, his mind churning over the ramifications of the botched missions. “But what I don’t get is team one is filled with psychics as well, correct?”
Scottie nodded. “We don’t know why, but the Koreans wanted team two.”
“I needed dossiers on every team member of both teams. Classified. Unclassified. Everything.” This was more than a leak and potential exchange of top-secret government information. Only he had no idea what it could be.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Scottie said.
“Don’t make me go over your head, because I will go directly to Mallard if I must,” Chad said, curling his fingers around Savanah’s biceps. “We keep everything between us three and Mallard.”
“I’ll agree
to that,” Scottie said, glancing over his shoulder. “I need to get those men back to the base for transport back to the States. I’ll be in touch.”
Chad nodded, tugging Savanah across the field.
“Do you think he’ll get you the files?” Savanah asked.
Chad had no idea. “Do you mind driving back? I want to hop on the chopper.”
“Not a problem.” She slipped behind the wheel of the Jeep, glancing in his direction with the corners of her mouth turning upward.
“What’s got you all giddy?”
“You.” She turned the key, and the metal vehicle rattled as the engine roared. “Welcome to the dark side.”
He let out a short laugh, rounding his shoulders, dropping his back. He closed his eyes and focused on the whooping sound of the blades cutting through the thick jungle air. An ice tunnel appeared, and he raced through it, the cold a harsh contrast against the humidity. He closed his mind to everything except the inside of the helicopter, hoping no one would detect him.
“Sir, he wants the files. All of them. Even the classified ones,” Scottie yelled into a microphone.
“I’ll get them to him,” General Mallard said.
Chad hadn’t expected to hear the other end of the conversation but didn’t question it.
“Sir, I’m going to restate my position about the Raven girl. We have no idea if the Koreans did anything to her or turned her while she was held captive.”
“I understand your concerns, but we need her training Chad.”
“I can train him.”
“Trust me on this,” Mallard said. “There is a greater purpose going on here, and she’s part of it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Satisfied that he could trust Scottie, Chad raced toward his tunnel. Just as his mind snapped with his body, a vision of Willow, the youngest of the Raven sisters, convulsing in pain on a bed smacked his mind before fracturing into a vision of Hunter being zapped with an electric current.
He blinked a few times, his vision murky, as if he were under water and looking through a dirty face mask. “Often, my visions or premonitions happen within hours of when I have them, but sometimes just seconds before. Why is that?”
“There are varying opinions about that, but no one knows why and often the visions don’t happen or happen differently than seen in the premonition. It’s one of the harder gifts to understand and impossible to control.”
“I don’t want to scare you, but right now, I see Alexis, and she’s in pain. Brett wants to send her, saying something about believing her pain is connected to Hunter’s. I told him no, but I had a vision of Hunter being tortured.” Slowly, the blurred jungle twirled back into focus.
“We should bring her here then. If she’s helping Hunter somehow, the closer she is to him, the less it will hurt her.”
His stomach pitched. He couldn’t imagine taking on that kind of pain for someone else, it was bad enough to endure it firsthand.
“Why can’t I just use the visions to remote view? I can’t get a lock on Hunter, or your sister for that matter.” The road widened as they got closer to the small town.
“You can’t always control the viewing. Sometimes you can’t make that connection to where you want to be and as far as the premonitions go, my sister tells me there is no rhyme or reason, but the stronger the bond, the stronger and more accurate the visions, but just because you see it, doesn’t mean it will happen.”
“What about remote viewing? Is it ever wrong?”
“They can be since we’re jumping from our reality into a concurrent reality, so our perception can be skewed. But more often than not, what we see is what really happened when we view.”
“Could someone fuck with our minds while we’re in view?”
She glanced in his direction as the Jeep hit a pothole, swerving to the right, large leaves rubbing against the side. “I guess so. Why do you ask?”
“Scottie worries you were manipulated somehow by the Koreans when they held you captive.”
“I suppose they could have, but I was very aware of everything that was going on. I had to keep a sharp focus because I was communicating with so many different people in ways I never knew were possible.”
“Maybe they helped you with that.”
“Maybe we need to discuss the Collective Order sooner than I thought.”
“Let me read about it first,” he said. “For now, I’m going to try to get a lock on where our missing soldiers are.”
For the duration of the car ride back to the cabin, Chad tried to get a location on Hunter, but got nothing except what he believed was some sort of psychic barrier.
By the time Savanah pulled onto the dirt road leading to the cabin, he’d given up trying.
For now.
“I need to do a security check before we go inside.”
“Doing it now,” she glanced in his direction.
Her eyes glazed over with a milky white film.
He jerked his head back. “My eyes do that?”
“So far, no, but I just learned to do it myself while being held captive. It kept the Koreans away from me.”
“Fucking freaky.”
“I know.” She smiled. “The cabin is clear.”
Once inside, he made a beeline for the kitchen and some coffee. A shot of caffeine would do him a world of good. He pulled down a tin can of fruit, holding it up.
“Yeah, I’ll have one,” Savanah said.
He tossed it to her, taking down another one for himself.
Savanah sat down at the folding table, opening the laptop. Her ability to adjust to her surroundings, as a civilian, astounded him. He’d always admired her strength and God, was she smart. Smarter than anyone he knew.
She also had this light breeziness about her that made most people at ease.
“There’s a message from the General,” she said.
“That was fast,” he said, pouring water into the pot. “Go ahead. Open it and start reading.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep. I’m going to read some of that book.”
“I can tell you most of what is in there,” she said, twisting her hair with her fingers, before tossing it over her shoulders.
“Divide and conquer.”
She nodded, taking the laptop off the table and making her way to the bedroom.
While he waited for the water to boil, he snagged the book off the table and started reading where he’d left off.
There are a few variations of what the Collective Order was back then, and what it will be in the future. Folklore has a tendency to take on a mind of its own, creating an exaggeration for the sake of a good yarn. In this book, I’m focusing on the one that seems the least far-fetched, though even I, a psychic who has the gift of sight, meaning I can see the future, understand why so many are skeptical.
Because many believed psychics to be witches and back then, some psychics practiced witchcraft, it became important for psychics to blend in, hiding their gifts in fear of being burned at the stake. Families separated. Communities folded, as everyone scattered, trying not to stand out.
In a small town on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, a group of psychics called themselves the Collective Order. Psychics from all over the land would travel day and night to meet with them, to learn more about their history and gifts. It became a movement, and that terrified those who didn’t understand. Psychics were being murdered daily, and the Collective order feared for their lives. They, too, separated.
Demitri, the founding father, sent his family to different places, based on his daughter, Helena’s premonition. He wrote a letter about the Collective Order and buried it deep in the ground. This letter was unearthed five decades ago, though much of it was too damaged to read. That said, many scholars have tried to translate based on their knowledge of the language at the time. Here is one such translation:
My daughter told me of a vision she had today of a mass slaughtering of our kind. They call us witches. There is no such
creature. We are flesh and blood like everyone else, only we have a sensitivity to the world around us.
My daughter saw my murder and that of my wife and two youngest sons. When I asked her what her fate had been, she told me she was to run away, changing her name to Claire Wellington. That she would give birth to a baby girl and name her Claire. This would go on throughout time until one of her descendants gives birth to four boys. She told me she saw the boys gathering at a table with four sisters, reuniting this small community and enhancing gifts so powerful, people will seek them out not to harm them, but to help them.
This is a world I want to be a part of.
But I cannot let my wife and boys die.
I will not. I will cast them into safe places. I hope this does not change my daughter’s vision for herself or the future of The Collective Order.
On the next page, I show you the original letter we found, so you can see that over half of it is damaged, and we really don’t know if this interpretation is correct. We do know that some psychics have authenticated the translation, but, hey, even this psychic has her doubts.
The water in the pot came to a boil, and he poured it into two tin mugs. He was both fascinated by the concept and mortified that he would even consider there was any validity to the tale. Believing he could see future events was one thing, but the rest of this was pure shit.
He mindlessly stirred the instant coffee grinds into the boiling water and flipped the page.
We all have heard of the great witch hunts up in New England, but there is one little known travesty in a small town called Witma, Maryland. It is believed over one hundred witches were captured and murdered over the course of two days. I’ve exhausted all my resources trying to get names of the victims but have found none.
However, what I did find, was a trail of Claire Wellingtons who have given birth to daughters in the area during the eighteen hundreds, but the trail goes cold there.
He tucked the book under his armpit, lifting both mugs, and headed for the bedroom. He set a cup down on the metal table next to the bed, which actually looked comfortable. And clean.