Winds of Change

by Christine Pope

  I had to get out of there.

  3

  Jake knew an important conversation like this needed to happen face to face. After taking probably the world’s fastest shower and making sure his dog had gotten her breakfast and a perfunctory walk down the block so she could take care of business, he’d texted Connor.

  I need to come talk to you.

  Luckily, Connor hadn’t told him it was way too early for that sort of thing — seven o’clock had come and gone — but instead responded, Let me come to your house. Angela’s kind of got her hands full with the kids.

  Right. The twins had just finished first grade, but they were now out of school for the summer, and of course, Miranda was still too young for anything except a few hours of pre-K each day. And this was definitely not the kind of conversation he wanted to have with a bunch of little kids rampaging through the house.

  Sure, he texted back. Come on over. I’m going to tell Jeremy to come, too.

  It’s bad, isn’t it?

  Yes, Jake replied, but didn’t add anything else.

  On my way.

  They ended the convo there, but Jake didn’t put down the phone. Instead, he sent off another text — meeting w/Connor at my house in 15 — and then went to brew another batch of coffee. He had a feeling they would need it.

  His phone buzzed, and he glanced down as the coffee began to brew.

  Coming over.

  Jake allowed himself an inner sigh of relief. His brother could be annoying sometimes, but he also had very good instincts about when it was okay to give his sibling a hard time and when it wasn’t. It was pretty obvious that Jeremy had been able to tell immediately that something major must have gone down…if for no other reason than Jake wouldn’t have texted him so early in the morning over anything that wasn’t extremely urgent.

  About ten minutes later — ten minutes during which he had to force himself not to pace the floor in impatience, since he felt as if he needed to be doing something, even though he was damned if he knew what — there was a quick knock at the door, followed by Jeremy calling out, “Hey, I’m here!”

  “In the kitchen,” Jake replied. It made sense that his brother had been the first to arrive, since his place was closer than Connor’s house in Forest Highlands.

  Jeremy entered the room. His hair was damp-combed back from his face and even more scruff than usual covered his chin, making it obvious that he’d only done the bare minimum to get himself out the door. “Coffee?”

  “Help yourself.”

  A nod, and he went over to pour himself a cup. He didn’t say anything, as if he understood that whatever Jake wanted to discuss, it needed to wait until Connor got there.

  Jeremy had just taken his first sip of coffee when the doorbell rang. Since Jake knew the primus wouldn’t just let himself in the way his brother had, he hurried to the front door. As he’d expected, Connor stood there, a little more put together than Jeremy…probably because having three young children had gotten him in the habit of being up and ready for the day at an early hour.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Get some coffee, and then we can go in the family room so we can sit down and talk.”

  For a second, Connor didn’t say anything, only gave Jake a quick, piercing glance, as if wondering why their business couldn’t be handled informally in the kitchen, although he merely nodded without comment. Once again, the similarity between his gray-green eyes and Addie’s was so sharp, Jake could only be reminded of how she’d been stolen from him, the pain of her loss like a physical blow.

  This wasn’t supposed to be happening. About all he could do now was pray that Connor would think of some way to fix the situation.

  They went into the kitchen, where Jeremy nodded at Connor and waited as the other two men got their own mugs of coffee. All fortified with caffeine, they headed into the family room and sat down, Jeremy and Connor on the sofa, Jake perched on an arm of the chair next to the couch, since he knew he was too full of nervous energy to actually take a seat.

  “Lenz got Addie last night,” he said without preamble, and Jeremy blinked while Connor stared at him in shock.

  “He what?” the primus asked, tone incredulous. “I thought you said Riverton was safe.”

  “I thought it was,” Jake replied, once again inwardly berating himself for leaving Addie alone. He should have known they were taking too large a risk, even though they’d both believed bringing her to Flagstaff would have been far more dangerous.

  “How’d he find her?” Jeremy demanded. Something in his voice sounded almost offended, as if Randall Lenz had violated some agreed-upon law of nature by getting a jump on them all. “I mean, I scrubbed everything. All the traffic cams, all the security footage…gone. There was no way he could have tracked her to Wyoming.”

  If the universe was at all just, then there shouldn’t have been any way for Lenz to find her. But she’d been forced into an impossible situation and had clearly decided that her own safety wasn’t worth risking the livelihood of hundreds of people. Jake tightened his fingers on the knees of his jeans and said, “No…except she had to use her powers to save the casino. Obviously, Lenz was still keeping an eye out for any unusual weather activity, because he was on it within a few hours. Carson Archuleta — he’s the head of the local tribe — says he thinks she was taken sometime before midnight.”

  “She had to save the casino from what?” Connor asked.

  “Prairie fire,” Jake said briefly. No need to go into lengthy explanations — judging by the way the primus nodded, he understood right away.

  “So, Addie pretty much sent up a flare, and Lenz jumped on it,” Jeremy said. “Wasn’t anyone watching her?”

  “Archuleta had some guys guarding the house. They’re all nursing concussions this morning, sounds like.” Jake couldn’t help experiencing a stab of guilt at the injuries those men had suffered, even though he assumed they’d walked into the situation with their eyes open, had understood the risks they were taking. Still, he hated the idea of people getting hurt just because they were trying to do the right thing.

  Jeremy passed a hand through his damp hair, making it stick out this way and that. At another time, Jake might have grinned at the goofy image his brother presented, but he couldn’t find anything particularly amusing about it at the moment. “That stinks.”

  Yes, it did. “Carson says they’re going to be okay,” Jake replied, and left it at that. It sounded as though Carson was on top of the situation, and none of them could do much to help out from a thousand miles away. “Now, though, we need to figure out how to get Addie back.”

  Connor began to frown, but Jeremy only shifted toward the edge of the couch cushion, leaning forward in eagerness as he pondered the problem. “Well, I know where the Special Enforcement Division facility is located — it’s near Davison Army Airfield just outside Alexandria, Virginia. But even though I’ve been poking around in their systems, I haven’t been able to get into their security cameras yet. So, I don’t have a very good idea of what’s going on inside.”

  Damn. Even though Jake knew with his brother, it was always a matter of when he’d be able to crack a system and not if, he didn’t want to think about hours and days passing with Addie in Randall Lenz’s clutches while Jeremy hammered at a system that had probably been set up by some of the best cybersecurity brains in the U.S. government.

  Unfortunately, they didn’t have any other options at the moment. “Well, keep hacking at it. We need to figure out exactly where she’s being held before we can get in there and take her away.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Connor put in, holding up his hands. “What, you think we’re going to stage some sort of commando raid on a government installation? We’re a bunch of witches and warlocks, Jake, not Seal Team Six or something.”

  “I know that,” Jake replied. “But I also know that we have a hell of a lot of special talents at our disposal.”

  The primus didn’t look particularly convince
d by that argument. “Maybe we do, but we’re still not exactly Special Forces. Besides, if we bring the fight to Lenz, we’re practically asking to be discovered for what we really are. Do you really want to risk exposing the truth about the witch clans to the federal government?”

  No, he didn’t. However, Jake told himself there had to be some way to rescue Addie without tipping their hand. Forcing his tone to remain level, he responded, “Do you want to take the risk of having Addie tell the truth about us? We don’t know what Lenz has planned for her. He could torture her to get that information. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  He had to stop himself there, because the mere thought of Addie being subjected to that kind of questioning made his blood want to turn to ice in his veins. But maybe Lenz wouldn’t go that far — at least, not at first. If nothing else, she was valuable to him because of the powers she possessed. As far as any of them knew, he had no idea she was anything except a regular human with some extraordinary gifts. There was no reason to believe he knew anything about the existence of the witch clans.

  Problem was, the longer Lenz had Addie in his custody, the greater the chance that he’d stumble across the truth. Unlike the other subjects being held in the facility outside Alexandria, she knew she wasn’t a freak or a genetic anomaly, but a member of a magically gifted family, only one out of thousands like her.

  They simply couldn’t risk that truth getting out.

  “Not at first,” Jeremy said. His tone was musing, as if he was working through possible scenarios as he spoke. “He likes to run his test subjects through their paces, see what they’re capable of. I have a feeling he’ll be occupied with that for a while. But he’ll also want to know about you, Jake — I was able to scrub a lot of data, but he saw you with his own eyes, saw you take Addie away from her house in Kanab, so he knows you’re connected to her somehow, even if he can’t figure out how or why, thanks to Connor and Angela wiping his memories. And I have a feeling he’s going to hit her pretty hard on that once he gets past some basic measurements of her abilities.”

  “Which is why we can’t just sit back and do nothing,” Jake said. A nightmarish vision of Addie hooked up to all sorts of machines while immobilized in a hospital bed passed through his mind, and he did his best to push it away. Why the hell was his cousin being so damn stubborn about the situation?

  “I didn’t say we would do nothing,” Connor protested. “I’m just saying that we can’t go off half-cocked. You think I’m okay with leaving my sister to get poked and prodded by the federal government?”

  The worry and outrage on Connor’s features was clear enough, so Jake didn’t see the point in continuing that particular argument. Some of the tension that had knotted his gut eased just the slightest bit as he realized Connor was on his side in this, even if they didn’t completely agree on how to accomplish their shared goal of getting Addie the hell away from Randall Lenz.

  “I know you’re not okay with it,” Jake said. “And I’m not talking about some kind of commando raid. For one thing, until we know exactly where she’s being held, there’s no point in making a rescue attempt. At the same time, it doesn’t hurt to start making plans.”

  “So, what do you propose?” Connor asked.

  For a moment or two, Jake didn’t respond, only sat on the arm of the chair and allowed his brain to churn as he considered one possibility after the other, only to reject all of them as too dangerous. While the Wilcox clan had members who possessed certain offensive capabilities, like throwing fireballs or his own telekinetic talent, he still didn’t know whether any of those supernatural gifts would be enough to ensure victory in a straight-up firefight with trained government agents.

  No, it seemed clear enough to him that whatever they did, it would be much more safely accomplished via stealth. Somehow, they needed to get in and out of the facility without anyone even knowing they’d been there at all.

  Too bad none of the Wilcoxes knew how to make themselves invisible. That would have been a handy talent, something they definitely could have used to work their way through this current predicament.

  But even invisibility on its own wouldn’t be enough. They still had to infiltrate a building that had state-of-the-art security in place, the kind of facility where probably every door was guarded with the sort of measures even Jeremy would have a hard time hacking, especially if it was something that needed to be done on the fly. His brother was insanely talented, but he needed to do things at his own pace. There was no way to be certain he could even hack something fast enough for it to make a difference.

  No, what they really needed was a way to drop in and get out before anyone in charge even realized they’d been there. Which sounded downright impossible.

  Except….

  Despite the tension that knotted his shoulders, Jake grinned suddenly. Both Connor and Jeremy stared at him, their expressions seeming to show that they both thought he’d taken leave of his senses.

  “Want to let us in on the joke?” Connor inquired, his tone sour.

  “No joke,” Jake replied. “It’s just that I think I figured out how to get into that facility and steal Addie right out from under their noses.”

  Jeremy crossed his arms and leaned against the back of the sofa. One eyebrow lifted, but otherwise, he didn’t appear terribly convinced that his brother’s solution might be practicable. “How?”

  Honestly, Jake didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of the solution right away. When the primus and his prima wife worked together, they could accomplish feats that no ordinary witch or warlock could ever manage on their own. “Connor and Angela will teleport in with me and grab her.”

  “We’ll what?” Connor said, looking startled.

  “You teleported when you were fighting Joaquin Escobar, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yeah, but we knew where we were going.”

  Jake tilted his head slightly to acknowledge that slight impediment, but he also knew it wasn’t an insurmountable one…especially with Jeremy on the case. “Which is why we need Jeremy to get into the facility’s surveillance system. Once we’re in, we’ll know exactly where to go. Then it should be pretty simple, right?”

  “I don’t know about ‘simple,’” Connor said. The words came out slowly, as if he was analyzing each one before he allowed it to escape his lips. Clearly, he wasn’t particularly thrilled with the idea.

  On the other hand, he hadn’t said no, either.

  “But doable?” Jake persisted.

  A long pause. Connor scratched the stubble on his chin, eyes narrowed. At last, he shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, if Angela and I have a good visual for where we’re going, we can get in and get out pretty quickly. Even if they caught a glimpse of us on their security cameras, I doubt they’d be able to react fast enough to prevent us from getting away.”

  “If I’m in the system, I can shut down the cameras in Addie’s room,” Jeremy said then. His dark eyes had a glint in them that told Jake he was even more motivated to hack the security system now than he’d been a few minutes earlier. “They won’t be able to see anything.”

  “Do you know how long it’ll take you to get into their system?”

  Jeremy ruffled the hair at the back of his neck, eyes narrowed. “Not sure. I mean, I’ve been messing around with it a bit, but getting in wasn’t my top priority. I was focused on making sure there was absolutely no electronic trail Lenz could follow in order to locate Addie. But since she went ahead and gave up her position, there’s not much point in me working on that anymore. Still, it’s hard to say for sure. Maybe a day…maybe two.”

  Which was two days more than Jake was willing to wait. However, he knew his own impatience wouldn’t make a bit of difference when it came to hacking the facility’s security system. Jeremy would get in when he got in, and not a moment sooner.

  “Okay,” Jake said. “Do your best. And Connor — will Angela be all right with this?”

  He’d forced himself to ask the question, just because h
e knew that no matter how strong his cousin and his wife were, they’d still be taking a huge risk. They couldn’t think about just Addie, but also their children and the two clans who relied on them for guidance. Maybe Angela would decide that it simply wasn’t worth putting themselves in jeopardy for just one person when so many lives could be impacted if something went wrong.

  “I’ll have to talk to her, of course,” Connor replied. “But I have a feeling she’ll be on board. She’s not the type of person to sit back if a member of her clan is in danger.”

  While Jake wouldn’t allow himself to be completely relieved — after all, Connor was just offering an opinion, and didn’t know for sure how Angela would react to the situation — he couldn’t help but experience a slight easing of the tension in his body. After all, if the primus was willing to go along with this plan, then that was half the battle right there.

  “Thanks,” Jake said…all he said, but he had a feeling that Connor understood.

  Jeremy let out a breath and got up from the couch. “Well, looks like I need to get to work. I’ll have Laurel keep an eye on the scanning algorithms so I can focus on hacking the SED’s security systems. She’s definitely up for that — although I kind of hope we won’t locate any more ‘orphans’ until this mess with Addie is handled. We’ve got enough on our plate as it is.”

  While Jake tended to agree with his brother on that point, he knew they wouldn’t ignore another possible clan-less witch or warlock if one happened to pop up on their radar. Still, sufficient to the day and all that.

  “We’ll just see how it goes,” he said easily. “But yeah, I’d prefer not to split our focus if possible.”

  Connor rose from the sofa as well. “I’ll go talk to Angela. Keep me posted if anything changes.”

  Jake nodded, and walked his brother and cousin to the door, with Jeremy promising once again to get to work as soon as he returned to their HQ across the street from Wheeler Park. Once the two men were gone, though, Jake leaned against the wall and let out a breath.