Winds of Change

by Christine Pope

  “Even if she’s with Lenz?”

  “Even then,” Connor said. “Lenz is no match for Angela and me working together. You know that. For now, it’s better to just get the hell out of here.”

  Jake stood his ground, irresolute. What they were saying made sense, and yet every fiber of his being protested leaving Addie behind.

  As they stood there, the floor shook under their feet, and then again…and again. Abruptly, the lights in the room blinked and went dead. Angela gasped in alarm, but almost immediately, dim orange emergency fixtures turned on from opposite corners near the ceiling, illuminating their pale, worried faces.

  Connor gave a wild glance around the room. “What the hell?”

  Incongruously, Jake’s lips curved in a smile. He had no idea where the thought had come from, but as soon as it passed through his mind, he knew it to be nothing more than the truth.

  “It’s Addie,” he said, his smile broadening into a grin. “She warned Lenz she would bring down the thunder. Well, now she has.”

  “She knocked out the power?” Connor asked. His expression was incredulous…but then, he’d never really seen Addie in action.

  “Hitting them where it hurts,” Jake said. “We need to go find her.”

  “Well, if she brought a storm, she’s got to be up there somewhere, right?” Angela pointed toward the ceiling.

  “I think so,” he replied. “She told me she couldn’t use her gift when she was so far below ground, so she has to be outside the facility somewhere.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Connor said. He wore a grim expression, as if steeling himself for whatever confrontation might await them out in the wind and the weather. Extending a hand to Jake, he added, “Let’s go.”

  Jake stepped toward his cousin, let Connor grasp him firmly by both hands. No words, only a swirl of darkness, and they were gone.

  22

  As Randall Lenz had promised, no one had tried to stop us from walking out the front door of the facility. I’d kept my head down and tried to look cowed, like a prisoner being escorted from one jail cell to another. As far as I could tell, the guards on duty had bought the act. Probably, they couldn’t wrap their heads around the possibility that the man in charge of the whole place had decided to turn traitor.

  Honestly, I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept, too. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, kept thinking that this had to be an elaborate ruse on his part, some kind of subtle psychological torture designed to see how far he could lead me along a high wire before he pushed me off.

  Or at least, that was what I thought, right up until the moment when we stopped fifty yards or so from the enclosure that surrounded the SED facility’s dedicated power plant. Lights picked out the outline of the blocky buildings inside the chain-link fence, but I couldn’t see any sign of movement.

  “Go ahead,” he murmured. “This is a dead spot in the surveillance camera coverage. No one’s going to know we were here.”

  Those words reassured me somewhat. Then again, I didn’t know whether being reassured was my best bet right then. I needed to be upset in order to bring the storms and the lightning buried within them.

  No, you don’t, I reminded myself. You control the weather. It doesn’t control you.

  Breathe.

  The night was warm and humid, and mostly clear. But a few clouds hugged the coastline, not so very far away, and I reached out to them. They swirled at my mind’s touch, flowing toward the facility and the spot where Randall Lenz and I stood. The wind picked up, turning chilly, awakening goosebumps on my exposed arms. With the wind came the scent of rain, and inside the clouds I’d called, lightning pulsed and grew.

  And stabbed downward in a thick jagged bolt, striking the largest building inside the enclosure. The lights that outlined its silhouette flickered, then held.

  “Again,” Lenz murmured, paying no attention to the wave of rain that had accompanied the cloud, dampening his short-cropped hair and shining wetly on the shoulders of his dark suit.

  Let go, I thought, and lightning flared again, crackling through the night, searing my nostrils with the sharp scent of ozone. This time, the bolt struck the ground next to the building, sending the lights flickering once again.

  But they didn’t go out, and I held back a curse. Goddamn — Lenz hadn’t been lying when he’d said the place had been built to withstand hurricanes and tornadoes.

  Despite that, I doubted it would be able to hold up to Hurricane Adara.

  A third bolt, bigger and brighter than the previous two, shattered the heavens. Even though I’d known it was coming, I winced as it hit the building dead center. The ground under my feet shook, and I staggered backward.

  The night went black, the only light the uneasy pulsing of the unspent energy within the clouds I’d summoned. A few seconds later, emergency lights turned on inside the enclosure and in the main building as well, their pale orange looking wan and tired in the black night.

  “That did it,” Lenz said. “Quick — we need to get inside.”

  I turned to follow him…only to see a trio of dark figures materialize from nowhere and stand directly between us and the entrance to the facility.

  Alarm sang along all my nerve endings — until I realized those figures were Connor and Angela and Jake. He seemed to recognize me in almost the same moment, and he ran toward us.

  Not to embrace me, as I’d thought, but to deliver a roundhouse punch to Randall Lenz’s jaw. The blow knocked the agent backward onto the wet grass, and he stared up in shock at Jake even as he pushed against the ground to maneuver himself into an upright position.

  “Jake!” I cried, then grabbed him by the arm as he advanced on Lenz, clearly ready to deliver however many punches were required to knock the man out cold. “Stop it!”

  His jaw clenched. “I’m only giving him a little of his own back.”

  “No!” I held on to Jake’s arm with both hands, grinding my feet into the muddy turf. “You don’t understand! He’s helping us!”

  “What?” Connor said, looking from me and Jake over to Lenz, who by that point had managed to climb to his feet. Even in the unsteady illumination from the emergency lights on the power plant, the angry-looking splotch on his jaw where Jake had punched him was growing darker and darker. “What do you mean, he’s helping us?”

  “Whatever he told you, it’s a trick,” Jake growled. Under my desperate fingers, his arm felt like a rock, unyielding, merciless.

  Lenz approached us then. Ignoring the darkening bruise on his jaw, he said, “No trick. I’m not crazy enough to let someone destroy millions of dollars’ worth of government property just to prove a point.”

  “We have to go,” I said. “Knocking out the power made them put emergency measures in place. All the test subjects are being gathered in one room so they can bus them out of here to another secure facility. We’ve got to go get them now, or we’ll lose our chance.”

  Jake shook his head, eyes still shooting daggers at Lenz, but Connor frowned as he faced the man. “Is this true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you helping her?”

  Lenz’s cool gaze flicked to me for a second before returning to Connor. “Because I’m not just helping her. I’m helping us. Witches and warlocks.”

  Angela stared at him, eyes wide. “She told you?”

  “Yes…and after a few demonstrations, I actually believed her.” Randall Lenz paused, his mouth tightening. “But we don’t have a lot of time. I need to get down to the multipurpose unit to direct the evacuation, or we’ll lose our chance.”

  “No worries,” Connor said. “I’d offer to take you there directly, but since I don’t know where I’m going, my power can’t help.”

  “Interesting limitation,” Lenz observed.

  “But we’ve got some backup if you need any surveillance directed elsewhere,” Connor added, apparently deciding to ignore the other man’s remark.

  Randall
Lenz didn’t appear to miss the significance of that offer. “Your hacker?”

  “Yes,” Connor said, then tilted his head toward Jake. “His brother.”

  Jake’s mouth was a flat, angry line. It was obvious enough to me — and probably everyone else there — that he didn’t much like the idea of having to treat Randall Lenz as an ally. While I understood how Jake felt, I knew we didn’t have much choice. Without Lenz’s assistance, we’d have a hell of a time getting all those people safely away from the facility.

  But Jake didn’t waste time with any more accusations or attacks. His eyes narrowed, but he sounded calm enough as he said, “Just tell me what Jeremy needs to do.”

  “He’s in the system?”

  “Yes, he has access.”

  “Tell him to grab the feed from the multipurpose unit starting now. The test subjects should already have started gathering there. If he can get enough footage to create a five-minute loop, we can use that to replace the live feed. That way, no one will be able to see us interacting with the group. And if he can shut down all the cameras in the corridors, that will provide additional cover. Ten minutes should do it.”

  A nod as Jake absorbed those instructions. Then he reached into the pocket of his jeans, only to pause, scowling. “Your people took my phone.”

  Of course, they did. My new iPhone was still safely at Jake’s house, since I’d set down my purse on the kitchen counter as we came in. Probably it was silly to be relieved by that realization, except I would have hated the thought of Lenz’s team confiscating the thing when I’d only had it for a couple of weeks.

  Connor pulled out his phone and handed it over. “Use mine.”

  Jake took it and began entering a rapid-fire text, then sent it off. A few seconds later, a faint bing from the phone appeared to indicate that Jeremy had replied. I was sort of surprised he’d be so quick to respond, but I realized it wasn’t all that late back in Arizona, and Jeremy probably had been camped on his phone anyway, what with everything that had been happening.

  “He’s on it,” Jake said. “Now what?”

  “Now we go,” Lenz replied. He didn’t wait to see whether any of us were following him, only turned and began walking swiftly toward the building — not toward the entrance he and I had used earlier, but one at the rear, where it backed up to open land.

  Naturally, we all went with him, sticking close. It wasn’t full dark, because even though the SED campus didn’t have any close neighbors, enough ambient light from Alexandria’s suburbs made its way there to keep the night from being pitch black.

  Jake’s hand stole into mine. “You okay?” he murmured as he jogged along at my side.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “I can’t believe we’re trusting this guy.”

  Unspoken was the intimation that he couldn’t figure out why I’d allowed myself to believe Lenz would truly want to help us. While I could understand why Jake felt that way, I knew it would be impossible to explain everything that had happened in the past half hour, not when we were hurrying along in the near dark, doing our best to get under cover before someone came out to investigate the outage at the power plant.

  “It’s okay,” I assured him. “He wants the same thing we do.”

  My comment only elicited a raised eyebrow. However, by that point, we’d reached the rear entrance to the building, clearly a service access point, since it had only a plain metal door and no biometric lock, just a keypad.

  To my relief, Lenz entered the code without hesitation, and soon enough, we were all inside, the door shut firmly behind us. At once, he began to walk quickly down the narrow corridor where we found ourselves — also dimly lit by the emergency lights — only to stop at another door.

  “The elevators are shut down,” he said. “These stairs should be safe enough, since the security team will be using the main stairwell closer to the test subjects’ quarters. We’ll come in from behind.” A pause as he scanned all of us, eyes narrowing slightly. “Are any of your powers good in a fight?”

  “I’ve got telekinesis,” Jake said shortly, and left it there. Since it seemed that Randall Lenz’s memories had returned to him, he should have remembered well enough the way Jake had aimed a few well-placed flowerpots at his head.

  Was that a slight wince I detected, as if the recollection pained him? Maybe; Lenz nodded and said, “Right. Anything else?”

  “We’ve got a whole lot of ‘anything else,’” Angela told him. “It won’t be a problem.”

  For a second or two, he watched her narrowly. Maybe he was sizing up her slim frame and wondering if her words were pure bravado, or whether there was a whole lot more to her and Connor than met the eye. But apparently, he decided to go with it, because he inclined his head slightly and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  We all entered the stairwell and hurried down flight after flight of stairs. Although we moved quickly, I couldn’t help feeling the pressure of time, wondering if we were going to be fast enough. It felt like forever since I’d used my power to direct those lightning bolts at the power plant, but I knew only about five minutes or so had passed.

  Still, a lot could happen in five minutes.

  I also hated the thought of all the hidden cameras embedded in the walls and ceiling. Yes, Jeremy was probably handling all that — and honestly, with how dim the corridor was, thanks to the emergency lights that barely illuminated our way, I doubted anyone watching the surveillance feed could make out many details — but still, I felt horribly exposed as we all jogged along after Randall Lenz, following him to the multipurpose unit.

  An awful thought slipped into my mind. What if Jake was right? What if this was all an elaborate act on Randall Lenz’s part to deliver some new and highly valuable test subjects to Dr. Richards and her team?

  I told myself that was ridiculous. While I could understand why Jake would want to think the worst of Agent Lenz, he hadn’t been there when Lenz first learned he possessed powers he’d never dreamed of. He hadn’t seen the understanding come alive in his face, the realization that everything he’d believed about himself was a lie.

  Distrust was understandable in this case…but also very misplaced.

  Or so I tried to tell myself.

  I didn’t have time for any more disturbing thoughts, however, because we emerged from the access corridor we’d been using and into the open space I recognized as the reception area outside the multipurpose unit.

  Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones there. Three guards stood just outside the doors, which were open, allowing me to see inside. With the lighting as bad as it was, I couldn’t be completely sure, but it looked as though the entire group had been gathered there. They stood in the middle of the space, murmuring to one another in confusion…understandable, I supposed, considering they’d all been roused from their beds and made to assemble in one place.

  Then my heart sank, because I thought I recognized Dr. Richards standing inside, with Dr. Woodrow and another man I didn’t know but who was probably Dr. Keegan huddled in conversation. From the way Randall Lenz paused briefly before resuming his stride, I guessed that he spotted them, too, but then he continued toward the guards as if he had nothing on his mind beyond the safety of the program’s test subjects.

  “Is everyone inside?” he asked briskly as he approached the security guard closest to us, a hard-faced man with a square jaw and his light brown hair in a bristly buzz cut.

  “Yes, sir,” the guard replied. “The doctors are with them. Do you know what happened to the power?”

  “Not yet. The tech team is assessing. We need to move the test subjects now. Is the van ready?”

  “Yes, sir.” The man’s gaze flicked past Lenz to settle on the rest of our little group, waiting uncertainly near the entrance to the service hallway. “Who are these people?”

  “Consultants,” he said briefly.

  “Consultants…during an emergency?”

  To my surprise, Angela stepped forward and smiled brightly
at the guard. “Yes, we’re emergency consultants,” she said. “And this is definitely an emergency.”

  I couldn’t even detect exactly what she did — maybe lifted her hand just a fraction of an inch in a small, dismissive gesture — but the next second, the security guard slumped to the ground, snoring slightly.

  His companions startled, no doubt shocked by one of their own keeling over out of the blue like that. However, their training seemed to kick in then, because their expressions grew guarded, and they both began to reach for their guns.

  Jake lifted a hand, and one of the guards’ service pistols flew out of its holster and landed in his outstretched fingers. At the same time, the other guard let out a yelp of pain and dropped his own gun, which appeared to be glowing from within, as if it had become super-heated in the span of a few seconds.

  Before either of them could call out the alarm, Connor and Angela both did the same hand-waving thing she’d done on her own to the first guard, and they dropped to the ground next to him in a dead faint.

  Lenz stared at the prima and primus in amazement.

  “I told you it wouldn’t be a problem,” Angela said, still smiling.

  He shook his head and looked as though he was about to reply, but then Dr. Richards approached, brows drawn together as she stared down at the comatose security guards and then at Agent Lenz. Her gaze traveled to Angela, then me and Jake, and finally to Connor.

  “Agent Lenz, do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Not really,” he said. To my surprise, he was smiling. “Even if I did, I doubt you would believe me.”

  Jake and I moved forward, even as Connor went to stand by his wife. Dr. Richards’ frown only deepened as she appeared to take in our presence. “What are these two doing out of their rooms? The guards went to fetch them to evacuate them with the others, but they weren’t there — ”

  “Because they were with me,” Randall Lenz cut in.