Winds of Change

by Christine Pope

  “Anyway,” Addie continued, once it became clear that Jake had remained silent because he wasn’t sure how to reply, “I guess I told myself that I could try to get some kind of revenge on him by leaving him to stew in his own juices…or I could try to be a better person and help him understand that he doesn’t have to continue on his present course.”

  Jake stared at her for a long moment. Right then, she looked extraordinarily beautiful, with the candlelight shimmering on her sleek brown hair and awakening golden gleams in her gray-green eyes, but he realized he didn’t love her because she was physically beautiful. He loved her because the beauty he saw in her face was reflected in her soul.

  “You’re an amazing person,” he said at length. “You’re a much better person than I am.”

  She let out a deprecating chuckle and shook her head. “Don’t sell yourself short, Jake. You’re pretty amazing yourself.”

  He wasn’t so sure about that. But one look at the warmth in Addie’s eyes, the beautiful curve of her lips as she smiled at him, was enough to let him know he shouldn’t waste his energy on protests. If she wanted to think he was amazing, fine. He’d just have to do whatever was necessary to make sure her belief in him wasn’t misplaced.

  They were nearly done with their meal. He reached for his glass of wine and swallowed the last of the zinfandel within, then removed the napkin from his lap and set it on the tabletop next to his plate. Addie seemed to understand his intention, because she finished her wine as well and pushed her chair away from the table.

  As soon as they were standing, he reached out and pulled her close, allowed himself to taste her glorious mouth. She responded at once, her body pressed against him, letting him know that she was all too ready to leave the discussion of Randall Lenz behind and focus on just the two of them.

  Moving together, they ascended the stairs and went into the master bedroom. No words, just their clothing discarded piece by piece so they could fall onto the bed and lose themselves in one another and the moment.

  And for the moment, it was enough.

  His phone rang, and Randall Lenz picked it up immediately. He’d gone to the family room in his home after consuming a cobbled-together dinner, figuring he’d watch some television while he waited for Dawson to get back to him, but he hadn’t been able to focus on much of anything. No, his thoughts had kept racing, circling back to those disjointed but vivid images — Connor and Angela Wilcox. Jake Wilcox. Adara Grant. A house that had seemed small but cozy and well-furnished. An Airbnb or other short-term rental?

  Possibly. As with everything else, it seemed that every detail he latched on to only generated more questions.

  Dawson’s voice came in his ear. “I hope it’s not too late, sir.”

  The display on his phone had told him it was a little after eleven. “Not at all,” he replied. “Thank you for working on this after hours.”

  A pause followed those words, as if she wasn’t quite sure how to handle the unexpected show of gratitude. Lenz realized he rarely praised Dawson to her face for her work, although her performance reviews were always glowing and he made sure that all her pay raises were at the top of the allowed scale.

  “Um…that’s no problem at all, sir,” she said. “I have some information for you on Connor and Angela Wilcox.”

  “So, they are married.”

  “Yes. Angela legally goes by McAllister-Wilcox. They’ve been married for nearly eight years.”

  That piece of information didn’t surprise him very much. Something about the way they interacted spoke of the sort of rapport that only evolved after a good deal of time together. “What else?”

  “They own residences in both Jerome, Arizona, and Flagstaff, Arizona. They — ”

  “Flagstaff,” Lenz said, his tone flat. Suddenly, his mind was assailed by more images — sweeping vistas of ponderosa forests surrounding his car as he sped along the interstate…a small bungalow-style house with its shutters painted dark red…Adara Grant and Jake Wilcox standing on the porch of a much larger Victorian home as they shared a prolonged kiss.

  All those scenes exploded into his brain at once, and he had to blink back a wave of dizziness. Why they were all so vivid, he didn’t know, except that he realized they must be images of what he’d experienced in the moments leading up to Adara’s attack with the lightning bolt. Was it the shock of that trauma which had caused him to lose his memories, or something else?

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  Dawson’s voice, clearly troubled, managed to penetrate the fog in his mind. He blinked, then said, “Yes, Dawson. It’s just — hearing about Flagstaff seemed to bring back some of my missing memories.”

  “That’s excellent, sir.” A pause, and she asked, “Was it in Flagstaff that you were attacked?”

  “Yes. Adara Grant did hit me with a lightning bolt. I blacked out immediately afterward, but some bits and pieces are starting to come through.” He thought then of the image of the young men taken from the security camera at a motel on the outskirts of Kanab, Utah. Those two men were also tall and dark-haired and well-built, seeming to indicate that they must be Wilcoxes as well. Was the whole family in on this?

  It certainly seemed that way at first glance.

  “Go on,” he said. “What else did you find?”

  “Connor and Angela Wilcox have a part-interest in a winery in the Verde Valley. The Wilcox family has been in the Flagstaff area since the late 1870s. Very prosperous. There are many of them in Flagstaff and northern Arizona in general, although I don’t have exact numbers at the moment.”

  “That’s all right,” he told her. At the moment, he didn’t think he needed the minutiae of all the various Wilcox family members. It was enough to know that there were a lot of them, and obviously they had the wherewithal to carry out any number of schemes.

  Which made the situation much more difficult. If he had been dealing with a few loners, that was one thing. A small group of people would have been easy enough to neutralize, if it came to that. But when it seemed that his foes were members of a prominent family, then all at once, his options had become far more limited.

  Still, he wasn’t about to stand idly by and allow the Wilcoxes to triumph. If nothing else, they’d infiltrated a government facility and taken one of his test subjects, thereby breaking a number of federal laws. Unfortunately, he couldn’t press his case in court, because doing so would only expose the Daedalus Project for what it was, and he couldn’t have that.

  “Give me the addresses of their two residences,” he said, and Dawson dutifully reeled them off as he typed the information into the notepad program on his phone.

  “What do you plan to do, sir?”

  The trepidation in his assistant’s voice was clear enough. It seemed obvious that she feared he was about to go tearing off to Arizona to confront the trespassers directly.

  As a matter of fact, that was precisely what he wanted to do. Strike hard and fast, and not give them time to prepare. But he realized that just because Connor and Angela Wilcox had been involved in Adara Grant’s rescue, that didn’t mean she would be staying with them. No, it seemed far more likely that she was with Jake Wilcox, a man who’d somehow managed to erase any evidence of his existence from the official record.

  Even as he frowned, however, Lenz realized he didn’t need to access any of Wilcox’s online data. He’d been there, parked on the street down a few doors from the big Victorian house that appeared to be his. Once, before Adara blasted him with her lightning, he’d known exactly where to find Jake Wilcox. Now his memories had begun to return, so Lenz knew the information had to be trapped in his brain somewhere, just waiting to be liberated.

  “I’m not sure yet what I intend to do,” he told Dawson. “Thank you for the information, though. At least now we know who was behind Adara Grant’s jailbreak.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied. “Is there anything else?”

  “No. It’s late — get some sleep.”

  He e
nded the call there and set the phone down on the coffee table in front of him. Without really seeing any of the images flashing across the screen, he stared at the television, his mind already ranging outward, far to the west, where the Wilcoxes lived.

  They thought they’d gotten away with it. For the moment, they had. But he knew how easily the tide could turn, and Randall Lenz wasn’t ready to admit defeat quite yet. His mind had been opened, and now he just needed that one particular memory to return to him. As soon as it did, he would be on his way.

  And soon after that, Adara Grant would be back with the rest of the test subjects, as she was meant to be.

  16

  I wanted to believe that our lovemaking of the night before had fixed everything between Jake and me, and yet I could still sense the tension in him, the words he wanted to say and held back because he didn’t want to get in an argument. In a way, I understood his baffled anger. After everything Randall Lenz had done, why was I allowing myself to even entertain the thought of helping him?

  Good question. I certainly wasn’t the crusader type, had spent a good chunk of my formative years doing whatever I could to blend into the woodwork and avoid attracting notice. And I also wasn’t naïve enough to think Agent Lenz would be so thrilled to hear that he was actually a warlock, he would immediately repent his evil ways and turn to a life of doing good.

  No, it was more that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life harboring a grudge. My mother had never spoken a bad word about Jackson Wilcox, even though one could have argued that he’d taken advantage of her, using his age and experience and wealth to seduce an inexperienced young woman. Actually, she’d always done what she could to paint their brief tryst in a romantic light. Maybe that was only because she didn’t want me thinking ill of my father — there had been many times when I’d tried to make her reach out to Jackson, arguing that I should at least get to meet him, if only once. She’d always shot me down, saying that it had been her decision to have me, and she wasn’t going to hold him responsible. That assertion had always seemed a little too noble to me, but now I thought I finally understood her motivations. She hadn’t wanted me to think that our lives were somehow lesser just because he hadn’t been a part of them. No matter how tough things were, she’d always believed they would get better.

  So, while I could see that Jake thought I was crazy for wanting to give Randall Lenz any kind of help, I knew deep down that I needed to do so because I didn’t want to turn my back on someone who might be floundering through the same sorts of problems I’d had to deal with. He didn’t know who or what he was, and he needed to be told.

  Also, I couldn’t stop thinking of all the other test subjects at the facility — Ethan and Natalie and Matthew and Lorna. They needed to be freed so they could also learn about their witch heritage, and it seemed to me the simplest way to accomplish that goal was to get Randall Lenz firmly on our side.

  Easier said than done, unfortunately.

  For the moment, I needed to do what I could to repair things between Jake and me. We sat at the dining room table, sharing a cup of coffee and a bagel, but we hadn’t said much except to exchange a few perfunctory remarks about the weather and the possibility of a grocery run, since he didn’t have all that much food in the house.

  I swallowed some French roast for courage and said, “You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

  At once, his dark eyes flared with shock…and possibly a twinge of guilt. “No, I don’t think you’re nuts.” A pause as he sat there with his hands wrapped around his coffee mug. They were strong, capable hands, browned by the sun — I’d noticed that most Wilcoxes looked as though they tanned easily — and I remembered how good it had felt the night before to have them caressing me, holding me close. “I guess I’m still just trying to figure out how you could be so willing to forgive Randall Lenz for what he’s done.”

  “I’m not sure it’s exactly forgiveness,” I responded.

  “What, then?”

  Good question. I had to dig deep inside myself for the answer, because it wasn’t something that was immediately obvious to me. “More like…moving on,” I said after a moment. “I could hate him and do whatever I could to make his life miserable, but what does revenge serve in the end? Hate never got anyone anywhere. I want to go on with my life…my life with you,” I added, just in case Jake hadn’t gotten the point. “But part of that life is making sure that the people I met in the SED facility get a chance to live their lives as well. Two of them — Ethan and Natalie — are obviously in love with each other, but they can’t do anything about it because they’re stuck being lab rats for Lenz and the doctors and scientists he has on staff. If we can get him on our side, then we can maybe have him help us get all of them out of there.”

  “So…he’s a means to an end,” Jake observed. His eyes were still slightly narrowed, but I could tell from the way he tilted his head to one side that he was seriously considering what I’d just said.

  “That’s kind of a harsh way to look at it, but yeah.” I reached over and wrapped my fingers around his, was gratified to see that he immediately gave them a squeeze and didn’t try to ignore me or pull away. Obviously, he didn’t like this friction between the two of us any more than I did. “Like Connor said yesterday, Trident is about finding witches and warlocks who don’t know who they are and helping them to connect with their clans and their gifts. We can’t walk away from all those people and pretend they don’t exist.”

  For a moment, Jake didn’t say anything, only sat there with his fingers entwined in mine as he appeared to consider my words. “No,” he said at last. “I guess we can’t. So, do you have a plan?”

  I really didn’t. Even though I supposed we could infiltrate the SED facility again, I wasn’t sure whether that was the best idea. For one thing, the only place in the facility I knew well enough to help Angela and Connor teleport to was the big “multipurpose unit” where the gang all gathered. Even if I put aside the very real constraint of the place being under video surveillance at all times, it would take too much valuable time to get fourteen people teleported away, since Jake had told me that both the prima and the primus could only take one person at a time.

  No, it seemed the best way to handle this was to approach Agent Lenz, convince him of his inborn powers, and then have him come up with a plan to get all the test subjects out of there. How he’d manage that, I didn’t know, but presumably he would have some insights to offer, since the program was his baby and he’d know of any weaknesses in its setup that could be exploited.

  “I guess I thought that maybe we could approach Randall Lenz at his home,” I said. “Jeremy knows where it is, right?”

  “Yes, and he has photos of the interior from a real estate listing, so it wouldn’t be too hard for Connor and Angela to get you and me in there.” Jake hesitated, worry clear in every line of his face. “But I hate to think of you taking that kind of risk. He’s already proven that he’s kind of hasty about pulling a gun, which means there’s a very real possibility that he’d do the same thing if we confronted him in his own house.”

  Right. I supposed I should have thought of that. Then again, if we went there in the middle of the night, while he was asleep — I assumed even Randall Lenz had to sleep sometime — then he wouldn’t have much opportunity to whip out his service pistol.

  Well, unless he slept with the gun under his pillow.

  “I know,” I said, trying my best to push that disturbing mental image away. “But I still think it’s the better option, just because there are way too many cameras and other people at the facility. If we went while he was sleeping or something, we’d get the drop on him. And it wouldn’t even have to be all that late, thanks to the time difference between here and Virginia.”

  Jake lifted his free hand to scratch at the stubble on his chin. While I liked him a little scruffy, he’d let it go for days at that point, and I wondered if it would be totally out of line to ask him to shave.

  T
hen I wanted to shake my head at myself. Considering all the things we were up against, a bit of stubble should have been way down my list of priorities.

  “Maybe,” he allowed, although I could tell he didn’t want to seem much more approving than that. “I still think we could be letting ourselves in for a world of hurt.”

  “We could be doing that by sitting here and doing nothing,” I pointed out, and he gave me a reluctant smile.

  “I know. I just wish I knew what he was up to — every minute we’re sitting here, I keep waiting for the hammer to drop.”

  I knew the feeling. I also hated not knowing what was going on back in Virginia, whether Randall Lenz had figured out where we’d gone and the only reason why we hadn’t been nabbed yet was because he was still coordinating teams of paratroopers to swoop down on us, or whether he simply had no leads and was currently frustrated, stymied.

  While I would have preferred the latter, I knew I couldn’t take anything for granted.

  “Which is why it would be better for us to go on the attack,” I said. “I mean, not a real attack, but meet him on his home ground.”

  “If Connor and Angela go for it.”

  His expression was dubious, and I could see why. It was one thing for them to take the risk of going into the SED facility to rescue me, and quite another to pop into Randall Lenz’s house so I could try to convince him that he really was a warlock.

  If he was. Lucas had seemed pretty convinced, though, and while I obviously didn’t know the man well — or hardly at all — I still could tell he wasn’t the type to go around telling casual lies. He said he’d felt something, which meant he probably had. And apparently Genoveva Castillo had experienced much the same thing. My brief meeting with her was also enough to convince me she wasn’t the type given to wild fancies or whimsical impressions. If she’d felt something, then she had.