Shield of Innocence (Alternate Places Book 4)

by P. S. Power

  Then he ended up staying late, even though Lisa didn't have anything else for him to do for the day. She tried to send him home, but he shook his head.

  "Nope? I'll close tonight. You get out of here. Go and... I don't know what you do for fun. I was thinking about going to the beach or something soon. Maybe for a few days? Just to get away, and... I don't know." He felt silly, saying that out loud. Zack had been gone far more than there, after all. For tens of thousands of years, over the last real world year or so.

  The thing there was that he was always doing something in the void. It had a certain restful quality, but it wasn't actually fun.

  Instead of tisking at him, his work manager actually just nodded.

  "About time. Let me know when you're going to be gone and I can close down the travel from here. I still have to keep the doors open, being an embassy, but... Yeah. We should do that."

  Zack snorted.

  "Or just route them all through Something Wonderful for a few days? They need to be there to handle the place, but they have six employees there. On the other hand we can wait for Jen to get back from school and get her and Kate to handle this place? That's only about a week from now. Not that I know where to go. Maybe Australia?"

  That got a soft sound that was a bit like a hiccup. There was a very funny expression to go with it for some reason. Zack didn't need to talk to Lisa's shadow to understand what she was about to say. It was obvious, and nearly like he could read people or something suddenly.

  "You can go anywhere in any world, and pick... Australia?"

  "Maybe. It's a nice place from what I've seen. I know, most people would go to Lesser Shia, but... They still won't let me in. Or... I don't know, I could maybe go and visit people?" That sounded less restful.

  Lisa didn't seem bothered by him being boring, and just patted his shoulder.

  "Whatever you pick. Just let me know what we're doing. You get time off whenever you want it, after all. It's in the original charter."

  That was the document that everyone else at the mall had drawn up for him. The one where they'd named nine different women as his wife. Wives. Managers really, but different ideas permeated other cultures. Like the fact that to Merry, they were married for real. Claire kind of held to that as well.

  The rest were a bit more free form, thankfully.

  Lisa, at least, seemed to be pleased by the idea that she and Maryl might actually be able to get away at the same time Zack did. If they waited for Kate and Jennifer to get back first. It would take getting Gregory in, but he was the Ambassador for the mages still, so he could go and do his job.

  Not that she was counting on the idea. After all, Zack had never really taken a break before, so the idea just seemed alien now.

  Chapter thirteen

  The next days actually moved along in a fashion that seemed almost normal. No one showed up at times they weren't supposed to, and Zack was able to keep on top of everything for once. The store almost even ran itself after a while, with just a tiny bit of input from him. Daily sweeping and straightening, and manning the till a few times for the actual public.

  As in people coming in to buy candles. For the holidays.

  There were transfers, but with Troy away for eight hours a day handling Lesser Shia, Zack only had to put in his own regular shifts to keep that caught up. It meant, after a week of that kind of thing, that Zack realized he needed to actually go and do something for real. The only highlight was that Kate, Don and Jelly were coming back, because their finals were finished. Britney and Blain were going home to their mother's house, which meant an actual car trip for them.

  It would have been faster for him to simply open up a shortcut to their house, but their mother had already made plans. Plus, he wasn't certain she believed her kids knew him.

  Zack made a point, along with Chris, to be there to help them all move their things out of their dorm rooms. They were both obviously great guys that way. That, or easily manipulated. It took a very small amount of time, since carrying things a distance that amounted to fifteen feet or so just wasn't that hard to get done. It took each of them about half an hour to get everything handled, and then about an extra hour to help the twins move their things, which had to be stuffed into the SUV that their mother had gotten for the trip. It was new, and there was a regular human man driving it.

  One that clearly knew nothing about the Alede, or line walkers. He was an older fellow, seeming to be in his late fifties, and while it was clear that the man sitting in the red vehicle was banging the hot woman that had come with him to get her younger brother and sister, he was honestly kind of clueless about the whole thing. Kendra, the hot Succubus mom, kept touching him, sending pulses of lust into his arm and shoulder. It was pretty blatant mind control, but the man seemed into it.

  Zack, for his part, had to fight off glaring at him. Not because he was using the woman with him for sex. You didn't do that with Alede. They used you. In this case it was even close to being mind control, which could be considered sketchy, by her own kind. No, this was all about the man, who didn't seem to recognize him

  "Dr. Marsh." His voice wasn't thrilled, but then the man had drugged him, and been scary, in that he might have never let Zack out of the asylum. That wasn't the same as him having been bad the whole time. When a person comes to you and says that they can walk through holes in space, and see things that others didn't, like monsters and shadows that lived inside the human mind, it was kind of easy to assume mental illness was the cause. Even he could see it.

  That didn't mean he wanted to relive their happy time together.

  The man smiled and gave him a questioning look.

  "I... Sorry, do I know you?"

  Zack shook his head and shrugged, wondering if it would be petty to grab the man and pull him through a shortcut and then abandon him in some far off land for a bit. The man had been a threat to him, for a time, after all, and it was far too easy to think that he still might be.

  Instead he noticed Kendra and Blain looking at him, both seeming a bit too interested.

  So he looked at Blain, being that he knew him best out of the three other people standing at the truck thing. Kendra hadn't even asked his name, or been given it, so they didn't really know each other yet.

  "He was one of the doctors at the institution I was held in. He always thought I was insane, but decided that if I could hide it that well, I might be fine on the outside."

  That got the man to look at him closely, his face questioning.

  "Zack? Hartley, wasn't it? Well! How are you! Are you a student here? You look good." The man actually seemed pleased to see that, his inner self almost giddy with the idea. He was genuinely pleased to see that Zack was apparently able to keep himself healthy, alive and even nicely dressed. Almost as much as it would have to find his own child doing the same, after having a hard time of things for a while.

  That made Zack feel slightly bad about considering leaving him with the Elth or Trollienkeine like he had been. Not that he actually would do it. After all, that would take time and effort on his part, and Dr. Marsh was, in the end, just a person from his past. A piece of it that he didn't really want to recall, all things considered.

  So he smiled, and faked seeming happy.

  "Nope. I'm here to get my cousin, Don. Um, Britney here is dating him?" That wasn't really true, though if he had the right idea, the girl had sort of officially called him as hers. That was mainly between the Alede however. She really liked him, which was rare, but not impossible for them. Kate was kind of his girlfriend too, but that was more about sex, if Zack had been told correctly.

  The blonde girl, who looked to be about eighteen, and could have modeled for any magazine in the world, without makeup, nodded.

  "Here he is now. Don! Come meet Zack's old Doctor friend." It was really hard for the Alede not to think of anyone capable of having sex as not being at least a potential buddy or pal, so it was natural to state things that way.

  What she wa
s really going for was indicating to the people walking up that they needed to hide everything about... Well, reality. Humans weren't generally let in on all the secret ideas and knowledge. Mainly because when they were, their ability to invent new things and be creative with others abilities and powers tended to lead to bad outcomes.

  Don was walking with Kate, each carrying half of a wooden box that was big enough to be heavier than anyone needed to take to college with them. It was full too, with half the things inside being nearly useless, if comforting to Britney.

  His cousin, who really was that, as it had turned out, looked enough like him to sell the role, naturally.

  Out of all of them, it was Kate who let her face go hard.

  "From the hospital?" She knew what that meant, even if he didn't talk about it much. That had been a strange and intense time for him. Mainly thanks to the zombie drugs they'd given him in an attempt to fix a thing that, as it turned out, wasn't a real problem.

  For nearly two years he'd been trapped in what amounted to a hellish nightmare. The world was strange enough, but having the shadows of the insane screaming at him non-stop, along with the other things that he saw all the time had been a bit much to ask of anyone really. It wasn't this gray haired man's fault, however. Not really. He'd been in charge of the whole mess, but nothing in his world would have allowed the man to understand what it was he'd done.

  Zack tried to seem pleasant, but Kate shook her head, and stared.

  "No... That isn't right. Kendra's friend just happens to be one of the people from your past? In a different part of the country? That doesn't make sense. What are you doing here?" She was staring at the Doctor, who seemed truly baffled by her odd behavior. Luckily he was used to that kind of thing.

  "I... Moved about a year ago, to take a new position not that far from here. Then I met Kendra the other day and she asked if I'd be willing to drive halfway across the country with her brother and sister." He spoke like it was all pretty natural, and just made sense.

  Even Zack could see that it really didn't. You might run into people from your past, of course. The universe seemed to nearly arrange that kind of thing from time to time, though there didn't always appear to be a reason behind it. That Dr. Marsh was there for Britney and Blain however meant something. Probably that the whole thing was a set up, or a trap.

  Zack grinned, seeing how very messed up the whole thing could be.

  On the one hand if he let Britney, in particular, go with the man, she was bound to be drawn into conversation about Hartley, the line walking super star that she loved in a very school girl and obsessed fan kind of way. Now there was no way that the man wouldn't understand who that was. If he thought that Zack was going around still claiming to walk through holes in space, that could mean trouble for him. At the very least being pulled in on a seventy-two hour watch to make sure he wasn't a danger to himself or others.

  On the other other hand, it could also be a real set up or trap, meant to capture or harm his friends. Almost anything Zack did to try and prevent that from taking place would look incredibly out of line however. The man, Marsh, would get that something was up, too. He might not be in the loop on what truly existed, but he wasn't stupid.

  Literally everything he could think of at the moment led to him being in trouble with someone, at least in potential. That he had enemies, well, it seemed hard to imagine Arch-demons setting up something that socially complex, but it wasn't outside of what they could do. If they had access to the future at all, and he didn't know they wouldn't have that kind of ability, it could have been in the works for a long time. Maybe before he was even born.

  It could also have all be coincidence, or, he realized, something set up by one of the Tricksters. They had more than one of them around, though so far Rose and Riley hadn't been all that rough on them. There had been another around, that had gotten Don changed into a girl and gang raped, but even she wasn't a horrible person. Her actions, as hard as they were to understand, had been required to keep the universe together.

  In a creepy and horrible way.

  The thing there was that he was totally stuck. Zack knew that trusting Britney to hold her tongue might not work well on a two day road trip, for instance. Most people would just take what she'd said as being her being a bit playful, or going over some silly stories from the web. Dr. Marsh might not however, and the hold that Kendra had over him wasn't enough to get around the fact that the man was smart. More than bright enough to get the idea of things being different than he thought they would be.

  He was single, Zack knew, from his shadow, and while the man didn't seem to know about anything being set up involving him, he was starting to get suspicious. Mainly because Kendra was far too good looking for her to have been interested in him. He wasn't a fool, and knew that she was trading sex for the use of his vehicle and cash for the trip, but as long as he got laid each night, it seemed fair to him.

  Not that one man was going to be enough for her really. How that one was going to function he didn't know. Probably a lot of quickies at rest stops.

  It was Kate who just shrugged, and turned to the man.

  "This is a real coincidence then! Well, let's get you all loaded, and underway. Zack mentioned you. You're in the story he wrote. About the line walker? We're all in there. Britney can tell you about that? It's pretty much taken from when he used to see things, isn't that right?" She turned to him, so he nodded, even if the cover story might not hold. It also might not be enough, if there was some other kind of plan involved.

  A trap for his friends, or whatever might be coming.

  "Yeah. I saw a lot back then. It was... Kind of wild, to tell the truth. Anyway, I started to journal after I got out, and that turned into the stories. Then people decided they liked them. So, you know, minor fame. At least among the twenty-six people that read them." He laughed, and the Doctor smiled at him, warmly.

  "So you're a writer now?"

  He shook his head.

  "Not professionally. I just post some things online. I work in a candle shop, mainly. Which I need to get back to. We have a bit of a trip too, in order to catch the flight on time." He didn't know that the man would remember him as having moved to Vancouver, Washington, but if it came up, sounding reasonable about it made sense.

  After that they made trips back and forth to get the remaining gear the twins had senselessly crammed into their dorm rooms, and then let the four people drive off. The super twins, their hot sexy mother that looked far too young to be that, and a man that could destroy his entire world, if the wrong thing was said.

  As soon as they pulled out, Kate was on her cell phone.

  "Hiram? We need someone followed. It could be a set up. For Blain, Britney and their mother?" She went into the whole thing, and oddly enough, Hiram stone, Jen's uncle, and career criminal who'd moved into spying for the Nation of Walkers, had a car on them less than fifteen minutes later. Just following along behind them.

  Kate looked at Zack after she hung up.

  "We'll have a full protective detail on them. Now as long as Brit can stop from insisting that you're the for real Hartley, we'll be fine. Blain should be able to keep her reigned in. If not... Well, then I don't know what to do. What if he tries to put Zack away again? Or if this is meant to get him to do that to Britney?"

  Don patted her on the back, and then headed back to her dorm room with Chris, Kate and Zack. Jelly tagged along, her slightly round face seeming... Annoyed.

  "WTF? Right? I could set something like this up, using magic, but I can't think of a single reason to really do it. If anyone attacks, they'll have declared war on us, and everyone else, pretty much, will be on our side. If anyone tried to take or hold any of us, well that wouldn't work for long. One bend in space and we'd be free. I guess it could be about forcing one of us to give up our current life, but even at that... I mean, any of us could just go live someplace else now. Lesser Shia would even cover our rent, just to have us living there, I bet." She knew th
at actually, having talked to Kate, who had chatted with Troy about that very thing.

  It was open to any of them too, it seemed. No one had asked Zack of course, which was telling. For a moment he wondered if that was due to him not being well liked there. The administrator seemed to think he was okay, but they didn't let him into the market. Except during the attack.

  Recalling that there had been an incident in India got him to stop for a moment. He'd actually forgotten about that part of things. Mainly because it had happened so long ago, to his mind. He was able to bring up all the data on it, mainly thanks to that having been stored in his biological body. Crisp and clear, as if only a few weeks, or maybe a month, old. It also felt dusty and like a thing that he hadn't bothered to consider for so long that it was part of ancient history. Older in fact, to him, than the battles of ancient Rome.

  It was an attack on his own world, where he lived, involving aliens. Zack hadn't heard anything about it on television either. Oh, there had been reports of an attack, but not about what had done it, or who had fought the things off.

  Forcing a smile, he decided not to worry about it too much it was hard to know who was coming for them, or why, but he wasn't really in charge of that kind of thing. He had his own problems and issues to deal with. For one thing, while he thought that the angry arch-demon that had come for him was the gatekeeper, or would be, there was no way for him to understand yet how that could work.