That’s how Alice got to Wonderland and it was a miracle the only bad thing to come out of it and into their reality was a weird ass children’s book.
She was near drained even with the potion’s help, Kostos was down, James and Nathan were missing, and all their potential leads were dead.
If James and Nathan weren’t here, they were either being held captive or dead.
And there wasn’t much out there that could hold James Morganson against his will, let alone when he had his psychic sidekick along.
She didn’t feel anything as she pulled out her reality slicing crystal.
More friends dead, more to make the Kings pay for once she found them.
More to drink away once this was all over.
If she survived.
“Wait,” Kostos crooked out of nowhere.
She didn’t even flinch, too numb for surprise, and glanced at him.
“Got to figure out where they came from,” Kostos said, still lying flat on his back in the grass. “We can follow them, but gotta do it fast.”
He rolled over, coughing.
“We’ve got no backup and practically no powers,” Zee said. “What do we do if we find them?”
“Fight.”
“Not drained like this. We regroup and we come back.”
“The trail will fade by then. I can track it, but it’s got to be fast.”
“You got any more of those powerup potions?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, pulling another flask from his belt under his untucked shirt. “Ladies first. And it’s going to hurt.”
“Promises, promises,” Zee said, taking the flask and downing a giant gulp before she could think about it.
Fire burned down her esophagus like liquified chili powder and she gagged as she fell to the ground, barely managing to keep the flask upright.
Kostos half lunged, half scooted forward and took the flask from her hand.
She nodded her thanks as she curled up into a ball and the fire spread.
It flowed down her extremities like burning wicks through them and sparked at the fingertips, finally dulling after seconds that lasted a lifetime, and she took a deep breath.
It was the Agency’s basic potion and not Kostos’ own version like the last one they took. She remembered the feel of it. It increased the natural magic, like getting an IV, but the unnatural growth was interpreted by the body as pain and it took a lot of effort to dull the effects.
Witches added everything from painkiller spells to extra ingredients to actually stop it from hurting in the first place to their own versions, but sometimes the basic stuff had to do.
Kostos was clenched up in pain as she pushed to her feet and he relaxed as she looked around.
The rip was still open. It was only a matter of time before someone wandered by. They weren’t that far from the parking lot.
“Do you know how to close that?” she asked. “It’s not a normal, opened by crystal portal.”
“If it’s not one of our portals, no,” he said.
“I do,” a voice behind made Zee jump and turn.
James stood not ten feet away, straightening his cuffs with pursed lips.
His shirt was ripped across the chest like someone took a swipe with a sword and his normally perfectly groomed hair stuck out every which way, but he looked fine besides that.
Zee pressed her hands over her face, rocking back on her heels before running forward and half jumping on James as she hugged him.
He squeezed her back. “It takes far more than an ambush to destroy me, Sarah,” he whispered into her hair.
“Thank god, I can’t have any more friends dying on me.”
She let him go and punched his arm.
“Sarah!” James yelped.
“Don’t scare me like that!” she said. “Nathan?”
“He is already on the other side of this hill, tracking where those attackers came from.”
She sighed. “What happened to you two?”
“We were ambushed and taken to some other pocket reality. Some sort of holding cell that disabled the reality crystals, similar to the Agency’s cells. Silly creatures did not dare search me, and well, it is very difficult to hold a man when he has more than one way to travel through realities.”
She grinned.
“Lead the way, ol’ blue eyes.”
He pointed at her. “No, do not start that as well.”
# # #
“Anything?” Zee asked after they’d been waiting in the next reality for Nathan to track the bad guys from there.
Nathan shook his head. “There’s something, but it just goes back to our reality.”
“Maybe that’s where they came from,” Kostos said.
“Hiding in plain sight? Right under the Agency’s nose?” Nathan nodded. “Could be.”
“I’ve got to get my samples into the Agency records anyway,” Zee said. “Something about this is really bugging me. I want to know who some of these were.”
James made a noise and she glanced at him. He shook his head, flicking his eyes towards Kostos.
“Kostos,” Zee said, “can you get us into the records, without being detected?”
“It’s my badge if we get caught,” he said.
“It’s our lives if we do,” Nathan said, pointing his finger between himself and James.
“Then we don’t get caught,” Zee said.
# # #
“Nathan, you okay with guard duty?” Zee asked as they crouched in the underbrush just outside the parking lot.
The Agency’s California headquarters was based just outside of San Diego, hidden on a military base. They got onto the base easily enough with magic and invisibility spells, but the Agency building would have some real security.
“Not really,” Nathan said. “I have a bad feeling.”
“Vision?” she whispered. Not because they were audible to the human’s prowling the base, because she didn’t want Kostos to know.
“No,” he said. “Those are harder in this reality. But it’s a feeling. And mine are usually right.”
“That’s why we need you watching our backs,” she said. “Please.”
He opened his mouth and James said, “Nathan, you are the best equipped to be on watch. You are staying here.”
Nathan snapped his mouth shut but didn’t look happy about it as he parked himself next to the door and vanished with a seamless spell.
Kostos placed his hand on the metal door and it vanished.
Zee and James followed him into the dark hall, neither so much as flinching as the door snapped back into existence, leaving them in near darkness, the only light a slight glow along the walls.
Zee cleared her throat and James said, “You may speak. I have us under a shield.”
“Same kind of shield the Kings got through?” Kostos asked.
“Better,” James clipped off with a tone so icy it could freeze off a dick. “Even so, nothing short of an Agency level spell breaker should have been able to breach that shield. These are no mere street criminals.”
“They have been using agents,” Zee said, keeping her voice low no matter what James said about his shield. “Maybe they got a spell at that level from one of them.”
“Where did you hear they’ve been using agents?” Kostos asked as he opened a door on the right.
“Everywhere,” Zee said. “It’s pretty common knowledge in criminal circles. Agents seem to know about it too.”
“Yeah, it’s not supposed to be out that a ton of agents have been caught working for them, or died fighting them.” Kostos turned on the lights and shut the door behind them.
The place looked the same as it had back when Zee had been an agent. Half the room taken up by a giant server, the air buzzing with the fans to keep it cool, and laptops and plain wooden tables in the other half.
Zee loaded the samples of magic in her bag into the computer and set it to searching. Considering the size of the database, it could take a min
ute or a day to find them all. It just depended how long it took to find each match.
Zee took a seat at the table farthest from the door with her back to the wall so she could see and had time to react if anyone showed up. The guys took either side of her and she mentally rolled her eyes.
“We each take a different database and run searches, print off anything that looks relevant?” Zee asked.
“Sounds good,” Kostos said.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” James said.
Kostos got them into the server and each of them started digging through files, looking for any mention of drugs, the Chaos Kings, or smuggling.
# # #
“What do we have then?” Zee asked after forever and a half, standing up and stretching before kneeling on the ground to spread out the pages they’d printed.
They’d switched to putting the pages on the floor after the first hour when they ran out of space at the table.
“What don’t we have?” Kostos asked.
“Well, I can see if there’s anything on the magical signatures yet,” Zee said, walking across the room to where she shoved the samples in.
One came back as Kostos and another as Rachel Montoya, the woman in his order, another was too garbled for the computer to read it for a match, and the rest were still being processed.
Zee walked back to the guys. “Only ones so far are you and your girlfriend’s.”
“We showed up first?” Kostos asked. “Both of us? That’s weird.”
“Program could’ve already had you loaded up for some reason.”
“Only if we were suspected of a crime.”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it past you.” Zee smiled.
“If you two are quite finished,” James said, getting up to look at the mass of papers.
“I have been attempting to maintain some semblance of order. This pile is the agents killed by the Chaos Kings.” He pointed then moved over to the next scramble of papers that sort of resembled a pile. “These are the tests performed on the dead and on suspected batches of the drug.” And to the next. “These are suspected Chaos King members and agents associated with them.” He got up and walked around the circle of papers to indicate the big pile on the other side. “These are the more miscellaneous items.”
“Okay,” Zee said, looking over at Kostos as she kneeled. “Hey you, want to get down here and look at all this with us? We should be able to put something together with all this.”
Kostos grunted and rubbed his forehead, but got up and joined them.
“Try to organize chronologically?” she asked. “I’m not sure what I’m looking for but…”
James nodded. “I concur. I believe seeing things as they have happened would be quite useful. There is a pattern to this madness. I can not quite place it yet, but there is something here.”
“I’ve been trying to keep my stuff at least in a sort of chronological order,” Zee said. “So at least there should be some bunches in order in these. When was the oldest one?”
“Over two years ago,” James said. “Those were the first killed.”
“First killed was the first sighting of the Chaos Kings?” Zee asked. “Or was the connection made later?”
“Later, I believe.”
# # #
They pieced together a long line of papers over the next hour, reading as they went to try to get a sense of how things progressed.
“So we had our first dead spring two years ago,” Zee said, pointing as she inched to the side on her knees. “Next agent gets killed over six months later. They pick up after that, but why such a long gap? And what made them connect that first agent to this all? I don’t remember seeing anything like that.”
“Nor do I,” James said.
“There wasn’t,” Kostos said. “I’ve been looking for that since the beginning. They just connected him to the deaths of the others later.”
“Okay, and when did the name Chaos Kings first come up?” Zee asked. “It wasn’t till, what, about a year ago?”
“Yes,” James said, walking down the line of papers to that point in time. “The name was first heard when an agent who was coerced into working with them said that was what they were referring to themselves as.”
“Who?” Kostos asked.
“Charles Guard,” Zee read off the transcript of his interrogation. “Nothing extraordinary about him. I got his CV online and he was a computer scientist in the human world, only two years out of grad school. I’m assuming he did something with computers for the Agency.”
“Assuming?” James asked.
“Yeah. I couldn’t find any of his records in the system.”
“No way,” Kostos said, jumping back to his laptop and typing furiously. “He’s got to have a Parata work history somewhere.”
“I do this for a living,” Zee said. “He doesn’t. I can’t even figure out what happened to him after this interrogation. He or the Kings wiped it. Maybe that’s what they used him for, was to wipe stuff, and after he was caught, they pulled in someone else.”
Kostos’ eyes flew over the screen. “No…” He said something in Serbian. “Look at this.”
Zee and James hurried over and she skimmed the article title over his shoulder.
“It’s an article he wrote in college for the school paper. I don’t get it.”
“Yeah, an article he wrote on using the internet to subvert propaganda by spreading your version of the truth. I remember reading this exact same article here in Parata five years ago.”
James shot him a look as Zee rolled her eyes. “He has a photographic memory.”
“Eidetic,” Kostos said. “I couldn’t place his name until I saw this a moment ago, but this was in the Parata paper too. He said something about tweaking it for the magical audience in the article’s introduction, but other than small differences, this is the article I read.”
“So?” Zee asked.
“So, it’s missing. There is no record of this article in the Parata records. This is normal human internet because the search for that man in the Parata servers turned up nothing except that memo.”
“He has been erased,” James said. “Nearly impossible in this day and age.”
“You’ve done it,” Kostos said.
“Yes, and it took extraordinary lengths to do so,” James said, forehead creasing. “Sarah, choose another name from the dead.”
She grabbed one of the people with the black mark they used to indicate dead from a few months ago. “Wendy Hollinger. Killed by a Chaos Candy overdose in February.”
Kostos and James both typed furiously, eyes jerking over their screens as Zee walked behind them.
Both had searches on multiple databases in the Parata servers and were searching the internet while those went.
Zee jumped on her computer and searched the net too, finding the usual smattering of info on all people with that name.
“Obituary,” James said after a moment. “In a Wisconsin paper. She was twenty-five and died in a car crash according to this.”
“Not unusual for the Agency to make up a story when one of ours dies by magical means,” Zee said.
“Yes, however, there is usually a corresponding obituary in the Parata papers. There is none for this woman. She does have a history coming up on the server, however, there is no record of her death.”
“I have the same thing,” Kostos said. “She became a witch at twenty, her and her order all became teachers at the University after graduating. They met and formed a bonded order while in a teaching program in the real world, so that explains it. Give me a second to look up her order.”
His fingers flew and he paused after a moment and Zee got up to look over his shoulder as folders with the names associated popped up.
“She was the fire. The water died first year in an accident on a trip to an alternate reality.”
“I remember that,” Zee said. “They lost like twenty kids on that trip. It was a huge scandal.”
“Yeah,
and I don’t think Wendy got over it. She’d brought a lawsuit against the Agency for wrongful death, claiming they’d been careless taking students into a war zone. It’d been tied up in court before she died.”
“Anyone else in the lawsuit?” Zee asked.
“Yes,” James said. “I have it right here.” He pointed to the screen.
Zee ran back around the desk to the piles of papers. “I’m going to start reading off names of the dead. You tell me if any of them are on the lawsuit.”
Zee ran through only half the names and they already had three other hits.
“And we all know Corbin Madison,” Zee said, holding up his folder. “I voted for him for President in the last election.”
“He died in the human world,” Kostos said. “Magical showdown when his girlfriend’s husband came home and found them in bed. Him and the wife were killed and then the husband committed suicide when he saw what he did.”
“That’s the story,” Zee said. “I’ve got his whole life, resume, and how he died. Everything on the up and up, the guy that killed him and the woman they fought over dead. The coroner’s reports on all three confirming it.”
She stared at them.
“So why did his name come up in our search?” James asked quietly.
She stood up, nodding.
“Guys, I’m thinking we need to move it on out of here,” Zee said. “We take all this with us and finish going through it in a safer location. James?”
He nodded. “I believe my home would be the most secure, yes.”
She was actually thinking the inn, but he may not have wanted an agent to know about that.
Especially with what they were piecing together.
“You can’t think…” Kostos whispered. “No.”
“We’ve got a bunch of dead people, and the first few we looked into were doing something the Agency didn’t like, ran against the president in the last election, or were giving people ideas,” Zee said. “Two’s a coincidence. Three’s a pattern. We need to get out of here, with all this as evidence.”
“You can’t be suggesting t-”
“No,” Zee said, “I’m saying it. The Kings aren’t killing people or making them disappear. The Agency is.”
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