The Weapon Bearer's Son

by Steven F. Warnock

  His reflection in the small mirror showed that his normally dark blond hair was now as white as his wolf form’s fur or his eagle form’s feathers. His eyes were glowing gold, and his skin had taken on a similar sheen.

  “The bad attitude clearly indicates that you’re a MacDuff werewolf, but this clearly indicates you’re Marian’s son, too,” the voice said. “Nan colvatai unkalal purintu kolla mutiyuma?”

  “Yes, I can understand you.”

  “And how long have you been speaking Tamil?”

  “I can’t... Oh.”

  The voice chuckled.

  “I’ve always been able to understand other languages,” Mack explained to Athena who was looking very confused.

  “The Gift of Tongues works better and faster when you embrace your Grace... nephew.”

  “So, you are my Uncle Dick!”

  “Please stop calling me that!”

  “As I’ve said before: what should I call you?”

  “For now, ‘Uncle’ will do. I have to make some arrangements, but I think we can meet in person. Nephew, you need to be aware that our family has enemies. Powerful enemies.”

  “Then, why didn’t you stick around?”

  “Because of those enemies. Look, kid, you grew up safe and loved on the Double M among the family that your mother had chosen for you. My mere presence would have brought our enemies down on you before you were ready to face them. I’ve done the best I can to see that you and your foster family were provided for through the trust that Athena has been administering these last few years. By the way, Athena, you’ve done a wonderful job.”

  “Uh, thank you, uh, sir?”

  “I’ve sent a note to our common email account with an address. I’d like to see all three of you at that location by noon on Monday. In the meantime, lay low. My enemies could be watching you even now.”

  “What kind of enemies?” Mack demanded.

  Uncle’s voice was silent for several moments. Before Mack could ask again, Uncle spoke. “Another family like ours, sort of our opposite number, if you will. Their henchmen are Fae, some even bonded Wild Fae, but most are just mundanes. Fanatics, but still mundanes. I’ll tell you more Monday. Athena, I’m burning this connection. Delete the email account once you have the address. I’ll call your phone Monday with the directions for the approach.”

  The computer connection terminated. Athena immediately opened up a browser and found the mentioned email account. “My client, um, your uncle that is, and I share access to a free email account. It’s how we communicate. We save notes to one another in the drafts. No emails sent, no emails to trace.”

  “Geez, maybe your uncle works for the CIA or NSA?” KC quipped.

  “Or he’s read the same Brad Thor books I have,” Mack sighed.

  “Here’s the address. It’s a Starbucks down in Millsboro,” Athena reported.

  “Wanna head on down there tonight?” KC asked.

  “I kinda wish we had Busster,” Mack grumbled.

  Athena was confused. “What?”

  “It’s our skoolie, a big blue school bus converted into a motorhome. We live out of it,” KC explained.

  “A big blue school bus is hardly ‘laying low’,” Athena scoffed.

  “Maybe not, but Busster is mobile, armored, and has a lot of guns and ammo aboard,” Mack said, “but that’s neither here nor there.”

  “We’re not unprepared,” KC reminded him. Then, she froze as her eyes rolled up in her head. “Oh, boy. Yeah, we’d better gear up!”

  Chapter Seven

  Dover, Delaware

  Friday, May 3, 2019

  “ATHENA, GO UP TO YOUR room and pack an overnight bag. One pair of jeans, three tee-shirts, three pairs of underpants. If you have a sports bra, put it on. If you have an extra or two, pack them. Two pairs of socks. Put on socks and your most comfortable pair of running shoes. Basic toiletries. No makeup. Bring your gun, any extra magazines you have, and all the ammo you have for it. Go!”

  Athena responded automatically to Mack’s commands. Not until she had her favorite overnight bag packed and was collecting the two and a half boxes of 9mm ammo from her bedroom closet did she realize what she was doing. She dumped the boxes of bullets on top of her clothes in the bag before quickly changing out of her shorts into a pair of blue jeans. As she did so, she realized what Mack had done. He’d removed any potential for indecision by giving her clear, concise instructions. Now that she realized what was happening, Athena took a moment to raid the small safe hidden in the hope chest at the foot of her enormous king size bed. A couple of thick envelopes of cash landed in her bag on top of the bullets along with two passports: one American under her real name and the other Canadian under a fake name. The false passport had been a gift from the client, who she now knew was Mack’s long-lost uncle. His paranoia was beginning to seem ever more prudent than she’d realized.

  Back downstairs Mack and KC had opened their duffels and begun gearing up. They’d left their usual tactical equipment back in Montana and were making use of their new Program-issued gear. The vests were actually better than what they normally used. Their old vests had been Level II rated, but the Program’s vests were Level IIIa rated and could carry Level IV rated chest plates, which had come with the vests. The soft armor could stop anything less powerful than a .44 Magnum, including bullets like the 5.7x28mm round used in the P90 that had been designed to pierce soft armor at close ranges. IIIa Armor could even stop a 12-gauge slug. The Level IV plate could stop anything less powerful than a .308. Hopefully, none of the bad guys would be packing heavy machine guns or small cannons.

  “Rifles or Vectors?” KC asked.

  Mack considered for a moment before answering, “Vectors. The rifles will be too unwieldy once we’re in the car.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Athena demanded as she padded down the stairs and dropped her bag on the kitchen table.

  “We’re danger close,” Mack said, “and we’re gonna make a run for it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My ‘spidey sense’ tingled,” KC replied.

  “The last time that happened we were attacked by a horde of genetically engineered dino-apes,” Mack added. “I’ll tell you the story later. For right now, what we need to do is check to see if the coast is clear. If it is, we’re piling into the 4Runner, and we’re taking off overland down the coast to the next nearest town.”

  “If the coast isn’t clear?”

  “Well, then we’ll have to fight our way out and hope the neighbors call 911 to get us some backup,” Mack chuckled. “I’d really rather spend the weekend explaining to the police that we’re your bodyguards and repelled an attempt to kidnap you.”

  “That’s... not a bad cover story,” Athena agreed.

  “You know how to use that little pop gun?” KC asked.

  “Yes, I do. The girlfriend who gave it to me made sure I had the right permits and training.” Athena was a little smug.

  “What happened to this girlfriend?”

  “I introduced her to one of my boyfriends. They’re happily married. I was Best Woman. I would have been Maid of Honor, but the coin came up heads.”

  “You’re weird. I like that,” KC grinned.

  Mack ignored their conversation and went to the front door. He opened it a crack and inhaled a deep breath. He repeated the maneuver at the back door. “You got any windows facing your next door neighbor?”

  “Upstairs, turn left, end of the hallway,” Athena instructed.

  Mack ran up the stairs, turning off lights as he went and looked out the window. He came back downstairs and went straight to the landline phone in the kitchen. He picked up the handset, listened for a moment, and grumbled a complaint as he placed it back in its cradle. Then, he pulled his cell phone out. “Anybody got signal?”

  “No,” KC reported.

  “Me either,” Athena agreed.

  “Athena, who’s your carrier?”

  “Um, AT&T. Why?”


  “Mack’s phone is on Verizon, and mine is on T-Mobile. That means somebody is using a broadband cell jammer.”

  “And the landline is dead as disco.”

  “That means the internet is down, too, because I’ve got it all bundled through cable. It’s the same with all my neighbors.”

  “They’re not gonna be any help. I saw a van stopped back at the next door neighbor’s house...” Mack rolled his neck. “Looks like some kind of strike team.”

  “Oh, man! I know that look,” KC complained. “You wanna use the party favors.”

  “Well, we didn’t have to pay for them ourselves.”

  “No, but we’ll have to pay to replace them.”

  “Excuse me! Party favors?” Athena demanded.

  “After our little run in with the dino-apes, the Program agents who came to our rescue and cleaned the mess up gave us a couple of their emergency field kits as a sort of bonus on top of the bounty money we were gonna be making,” KC explained.

  “Program emergency field kits are pretty, um, thorough,” Mack added. “We’ve got a couple of Claymore anti-personnel mines and about half a dozen grenades. I hope your homeowner’s insurance is paid up.”

  THE MAN WHO ANSWERED the door was distracted and annoyed. The cable had just gone down right in the middle of family movie night. The slender, androgynous person standing in the doorway was a bit of a surprise. Short for a man but tall for a woman, the green-haired figure with the boyishly short haircut barely reached the burly homeowner’s shoulder. The form fitting outfit suggested that this was a woman, not a man... not unless “he” was transitioning to female. Confused already, the homeowner opened his mouth to ask the “woman” what she wanted.

  A punch to the throat by the surprisingly strong woman silenced the homeowner’s question. As he stumbled back, the green-haired woman dressed in leather and spandex pulled a suppressed Ruger SR22 pistol from the holster on her belt. Unlike in the movies and on TV, the .22 caliber pistol wasn’t completely silent, but compared to a 9mm or a .45 it came pretty close. At nearly contact distance, the .22 Long Rifle round was quite deadly, especially with precise placement. The green-haired woman shot the homeowner twice in the heart and once in the head as he fell.

  “Babe? What’s going on?”

  The homeowner’s husband came out of the den to see the green-haired woman standing over his husband’s rapidly cooling body. He inhaled to scream, but the green-haired woman put three small yet lethal holes in his chest and forehead. Before the man’s body collapsed to the floor, she was standing in the doorway of the den. Three girls ranging in age from four to twelve stared back at the green-haired woman in terror.

  Behind the green-haired woman, men also dressed in black leather and spandex entered the house and began moving from room to room. The green-haired woman smiled as she contemplated the children. The girls mistook the smile for benevolence and relaxed slightly. The green-haired woman shot each girl rapidly in the forehead. Then, she calmly ejected the empty clip from her gun and replaced it with a full one from a carrier on her belt. With a round already in the chamber, she didn’t bother to rack the slide. She just fired two more rounds into each child’s chest to ensure they were dead.

  One of the men joined her in the den. “House is clear.”

  The green-haired woman frowned. “The Tuatha De?”

  “No sign.”

  She moved from the den to the hallway where she found a side table that had some mail laying on top of it. Bills. The green-haired woman picked one envelope up and looked at the address. She sighed heavily. “What was that address again, Spark?”

  “Uh, 598 South Bay Drive?” the man replied.

  The green-haired woman held up the envelope to his face. “And what does this say?”

  “Uh, five-nine...uh...seven South Bay Drive...”

  “We stopped one house too early, Spark.”

  “I swear, Alpha, the mailbox says ‘598’.”

  The green-haired woman, Alpha, pulled her gun and shot Spark in the chest until the slide locked back. Spark stumbled back, tripped over the body of the homeowner’s husband and fell on his butt.

  “Ow!”

  The armor woven into their outfits was roughly the equivalent to Type IIa Kevlar, which meant that it easily kept the handful of .22s from puncturing Spark’s vital organs, but it certainly felt like he’d just been used as a heavy bag by a professional boxer.

  “Spark, you’re a leshy. You’re supposed to be able to See through illusions,” Alpha snarled.

  Spark struggled back to his feet. “Yeah, leshies can See through illusions but only Fae illusions, Alpha. If this was some kind of elemental warding or Celestial trick, I wouldn’t have been able to see it.”

  Alpha ejected the spent magazine from her Ruger. “Get the rest of the team together.”

  “Don’t go shooting me anymore,” Spark growled.

  Alpha was suddenly in front of him, her eyes gone all black, and the tip of her favorite stiletto just barely piercing the skin at the point of Spark’s chin. “Next time you fail me,” she whispered, “I’ll fucking cut your head off. Do I make myself understood?”

  Spark nodded as much as the burning steel poking him in the chin would allow.

  “Say. It.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, Tranchilo Alpha.”

  “Don’t forget your place again, Frateto.”

  “No, Tranchilo. I won’t.”

  ALPHA AND HER TEAM proceeded to the next house on foot. It wasn’t far, and walking was significantly more stealthy than cranking up the van again. Besides herself, the lone Tranchilo or Cutter, Alpha had seven Soldatoy or soldiers in her team. The leshy, Spark, was their Pliajha Frato or elder sibling, which made him her second-in-command even though she no longer had confidence in him. However, the Malhumila Frateco had a strict code of conduct concerning the chain of command, and that meant that now that she’d disciplined Spark, she had to continue to use him as her second. Demoting him out of his place meant killing him, which a Cutter could do, but that would not endear her to his Fratoy or “siblings”. Therefore, when she decided to split the team up, she had to place Spark in command of one of the elements.

  “Spark, I want you to take Grin and Whisper and stage by the back door.”

  The Fratoy Alpha named were a sprite and a pixie respectively. Both could pass for human at a glance, of course, but the sprite’s eyes were all black, and he had streaks of blue and green in his hair. Likewise, Whisper, the pixie had pointed ears and even his eyes tilted up to points on the ends, but his most distinctive trait was his size. Whisper was all of four-foot-ten in his bare feet and as youthful looking as a teenager even though he was thirty-seven.

  “Graves, you take Stretch and Sunny and stage at the front door.”

  Graves was an orc who’d pulled his tusks as a child in order to pass for human. Typical of orc kind, Graves was big, heavyset man with features that hinted more at Neanderthal ancestry than Cro-Magnon, but his brutish looks belied a cunning, agile mind. The orc was Spark’s Korpa, his second-in-command, and Alpha placing him in charge of an element of the team was as much an honor as it was proper protocol.

  Stretch was a ljosalf, a Nordic “light elf,” one of the common Sidhe who typically lived under the rule of the immortal Ard Sidhe or their mortal kin, the Aes Sidhe. Light elves and their kin, the dark elves, got their names from their coloration. Light elves were fair, golden haired, and beautiful. Dark elves were dark, ebon haired, and equally beautiful. Sunny, short for “Johnny Sunshine,” was a dark elf.

  “Guess that leaves me with you, eh, boss?” British Bob spoke up.

  “Correct, frateto,” Alpha confirmed. “You and I will stage on the far side of the house, covering the garage.”

  The dwergar with the Cockney accent was the least likely of the group to pass for human. Norse myths and, by extension, J.R.R. Tolkien’s take on “Dwarves” had been inspired by the dwe
rgar. Though shorter than humans, dwergar were taller than their mythical counterparts, growing as high as five-foot-four. Their proportions, though, were different. Dwergar were broader than humans, averaging two and a half feet wide at the shoulder, looking for all the world like somebody had taken a six-foot-six-inch tall weightlifter and squashed him down to five feet tall. Dwergar were massively strong and resilient, which was probably why Alpha had chosen British Bob as her partner.

  Alpha herself was Aes Sidhe, a mortal high elf, and probably the most powerful, deadly, and dangerous person on the team. Her strength was in her superhuman speed and physical coordination. Paired with the brute power British Bob represented, the pair made a balanced team.

  “Ye wantin’ me to open the garage?” the dwergar asked.

  While everyone else in Spark’s cadre of soldiers were armed with light weapons like submachine guns, British Bob had come heavy with an Atchisson AA-12 auto shotgun and a five-pound sledgehammer for a sidearm. The dwergar held up a black box.

  “I mean with this RF scanner. Not that I couldn’t just, you know, tear the doors off, but I thought clonin’ the door opener’s signal would be quicker an’ quieter.”

  Alpha genuinely smiled. “Bob, you’re fantastic. Spark, Graves, when you hear the garage open, you go in. Got it?”

  “Roger that, Tranchilo,” Spark grunted.

  “Crystal,” Graves confirmed.

  “Go!”

  At Alpha’s order, the team split, each element heading for its assigned position. British Bob had his RF scanner already searching for the radio frequency that operated the garage door opener of the target house. When they reached their objective, Alpha took a knee at the corner of the house. Bob stood behind her, still working with the scanner.

  “Bob, there’s already a door open,” Alpha said just as Bob’s scanner hit the correct frequency and the other garage door began to rise up.

  At the sound of the garage door opening, Graves nodded to Stretch who’d already picked both the lock and the deadbolt on the back door. Stretch turned the knob and threw the door open, pushing his way into the kitchen. At nearly the same instant, Spark was giving the same nod to Grin. The sprite wasn’t the expert lock picker that Stretch was, but he was just as strong as any mundane human of his size and conditioning. Grin slammed his boot into the door with enough force to shatter the flimsy frame and send the front door slamming back on its hinges. Still in motion, Grin strode through the door into the little foyer at the foot of the stairs.