by Jeff Hale
“I’ve been out of my mind with worry, Katelyn, we all have, don’t ever scare us like that again, I love you!”
“I love you too, Mom, but it’s okay, I’m fine, I don’t know when I’ll be able to come home, don’t know when it will be safe, but Rick’s taking good care of me, we’re staying with a friend of his. I’ll keep in touch though, okay? My cell phone was in my purse, but this is Rick’s, did the number come up on the caller ID?”
“He’d better be taking care of you,” Roslyn replied tersely. “And it didn’t come up on the ID, just said private call.”
“Oh, okay. Well, I’ll give you Rick’s cell phone number so you can reach me.” She rattled a number off to Roslyn, who wrote it down on the gamescore pad. “I have a feeling I might be here a while before we figure out this whole vampire thing.”
Darien stood and walked over to Roslyn, held his hand out for the phone.
“Just as long as you’re all right, sweetie, that’s all that matters. Here, just a sec, kiddo, someone else wants to talk to you.” She handed the phone to Darien.
“Are you all right?” There was anxiety in his voice, and I was afraid the fear for her safety might end up getting taken out on her.
“Yes, Darien, I am. I’m sure you heard my conversation with my mom, I’m fine, or at least, I’m going to be.” There was a frustrated edge to Katelyn’s voice and Darien heard it.
“I’m sorry, Kat, I’m sorry. I just don’t think you know how worried I was. I thought you were dead, that I had lost you.” His voice turned soft. “I can’t lose you.”
She sighed into the phone. “It’s okay, Darien, I’m fine.”
“No, it’s not okay! That boy you were with died, you could have died!” There was a catch in his voice. “I shouldn’t have let you leave, I shouldn’t have, you should have been here, then this would never have happened!”
“Ssh, Darien, calm down. It’s not your fault, okay?” Her tone was cajoling and I could tell she was trying to soothe him.
“I disagree,” a new, male voice in the background said, snorting after the comment.
“Darien, I gotta go, Aerick just got back, I can call you—”
“He’s there?” Darien’s question was asked in a harsh, suspicious tone.
“Yes, but—”
“Put him on the phone!”
“Why do you want to talk to him?”
“Just do it, Kat, please!” Darien commanded. He was being highhanded again. He would be lucky if she didn’t hang up on him.
“Fine.” There was irritation in her voice.
“What do you want, Darien?” the voice that I could only assume belonged to Aerick asked, full of disdain.
“Why the hell did you take her to Las Vegas?” Darien’s voice lost all notion of patience.
“Because it’s someplace I can do a better job of keeping her safe than you did.”
“Is that so? Where is she staying?”
“Is that any of your business?”
“Where?!”
Aerick was silent for several moments, then sighed. “A place called the Velvet Flame,” he told Darien, grudgingly.
“You shouldn’t have taken her,” Darien said, anger high in his voice. “She’s mine, not yours. You’ve stepped in the middle of something you don’t belong in!”
I heard Katelyn swear in the background.
“I’m not sure Katelyn thinks she’s yours, Darien,” Aerick said into the phone in a spiteful tone.
“Maybe not right now,” Darien answered roughly, “but one day she will. I swear, though, if you so much as lay a hand on her, I’ll…”
“You’ll… what?” Aerick asked, an undertone of threat in his voice.
“I’ll kill you,” Darien replied simply.
“Well, then, I guess it’s on if we ever meet face to face. Pistols at high noon,” Aerick said, half laughing.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means it’s already too late, wolf.” With that comment from Aerick, I heard the phone go dead.
There was an audible crunch as Darien crushed the phone in his hand, his eyes going almost black with rage. Roslyn winced as the pieces fell to the floor, giving Darien a look of strained patience. Darien turned on his heel and strode toward the stairs that led down into the family room, the door slamming behind him a few seconds later.
“I take it we’re going to Vegas?” Kris asked, picking game pieces up from the floor.
I nodded, still staring down the hallway. “Pack quickly, I have a feeling he’ll be in a bit of a hurry.”
____________________
As it was, we didn’t fly out of Richland until the next morning. There had been a brief discussion about whether or not Kris and Roslyn would come with us; Roslyn won, with Kris backing her up.
It was amusing, to say the least, to watch Lochlan finally give in to the two women, although I knew it was his love for Roslyn that gave her the extra edge. I couldn’t fault her reasoning though; she wanted to see Katelyn for herself, and she argued that she, and Kris, would be safer where the rest of us were.
So Lochlan left the rest of his group, those hybrids we knew were outside but hadn’t actually seen, to guard the house, and the six of us flew out in Lochlan’s private plane; regular airport flights were still mostly grounded.
We touched down at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas some two hours later. Matt and Lochlan had spent a good portion of the trip in the plane’s private office, but the door opened and they appeared shortly after the wheels hit the runway.
Lochlan was now wearing a long sleeved black dress jacket and a black hat that looked like a cross between a bowler hat and a fedora. A pair of designer sunglasses rested on the bridge of his nose. Matt was dressed the way he had started, with the hood of his long sleeved hoodie pulled up and his own sunglasses in place.
Heat blasted us the moment we stepped off the plane. It was Las Vegas, and it was June; we couldn’t expect much different. The airport wasn’t very busy and there was a heavy military presence to keep things under control. We had landed not far from the Strip which, just a few days earlier, had been a small war zone, even though things looked pretty settled now.
We headed through security, where we had to state our business in Las Vegas. They had new scanners in place, ones that detected supernatural creatures, and I wondered how the government had come up with such devices so quickly. Of course, the scanner sounded an alarm when two shifters and two rakshasa tried to pass through them, and we were hustled away, at gunpoint, to a small office in the security area with the acronym MAGE on the door, Kris and Roslyn along with us.
There were three people in the office: one man on guard; another at a small table housing a variety of kits and equipment; and a woman seated at a small desk with a high end computer in front of her, all relatively young. They pinged off my senses as something not quite normal, but they weren’t shifters, and they certainly weren’t undead.
“Please excuse the cramped conditions, the airport only saw fit to give us this small office and your group is the largest group of AEs we’ve had come through here at one time. My name is Agent Forsythe,” the woman said, her voice neutrally pleasant.
She gave us a bland smile, her green eyes alert as she looked us over, ready for possible threat. Her brown hair was shoulder length, pulled back at the nape of her neck, and she was dressed in armored casual; Kevlar vest over no nonsense blouse. The two men were geared about the same, as though they were taking no chances with anything that came into the room. They all carried weapons in shoulder holsters.
“AEs?” Lochlan asked, leaning against the doorjamb and trying to let his presence fill the room. Darien did the same, on the other side, and between the two of them, the air was thick with Alpha aura. The two other men in the room fidgeted for the briefest second, then seemed to shake it off, Agent Forsythe giving Lochlan and Darien both measuring looks before smiling sardonically.
“You might as well quit posturing, i
t will gain you nothing,” she told them, tilting her head to one side. She moved her gaze to Roslyn and Kris, who were sitting in the only two chairs in the room. Matt and I had taken up spots, respectively, on either side of Lochlan and Darien. “You two are both human, and yet you come to travel with an interesting collection of men. May I ask your relationships to the AEs?”
Lochlan cleared his throat, reminding Agent Forsythe that she hadn’t answered his question.
“Aetheric Entities. It sounds much less threatening than supernaturals, Mr.—” she looked through the IDs that had been given to her by security, “Roberts? Although I’m sure that can’t be your real name?”
He stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Lochlan Shaughnessy.”
Agent Forsythe typed quickly, entering some information into the computer, gave the screen a considering look before returning her gaze to Lochlan. “It says here that you’re dead, Mr. Shaughnessy, car accident, eighteen years ago.”
He gave her a cold smile. “Well, technically I still am, but tha’ might ‘ave been a wee fib.”
She entered some more information into the computer. “I have that fixed for you now. Is your original date of birth still May 14, 1961?” The look she directed at him suggested he had better tell the truth.
Lochlan glanced at Roslyn, who pinned him with her own stare, then cleared his throat. “May 14, 1815.”
I heard a small intake of breath from Roslyn. Agent Forsythe heard it as well and raised eyebrows at Roslyn. She glanced down at her small pile of IDs, entered something else into the computer, then looked from Roslyn to Lochlan.
“I take it you were unaware that your former husband is a vampire, Mrs. Newall?” Agent Forsythe asked.
Roslyn sighed. “Until yesterday, I thought he was dead, so no I was not aware.”
“Well, technically he still is, so his still being ‘alive’,” Agent Forsythe made little air quotes around the word, “doesn’t invalidate your marriage to the late Gary Newall, although,” and she poked at the keyboard, “it does say that your late husband died of a ‘large animal attack’ in your home?” She looked from Darien to me. “In light of the changes this last week, we can have that investigated more thoroughly if you want.”
Roslyn stared hard at the other woman. “I was in the process of separating from my husband. He forcibly entered my home, assaulted both myself and my daughter, and threatened my daughter’s friend.” She indicated Kris. “If that ‘animal’ hadn’t let itself in and killed him, I am certain that my late husband would have not only done some unspeakable things to my daughter, but that he probably would have killed her, myself, and Kris. As far as I am concerned, that creature that ended his life needs a medal.”
Agent Forsythe let her eyes travel across all of us again, rested them on Roslyn one more time, then entered data into her computer again. “Justifiable homicide in defense of others,” she muttered under her breath. She tapped the keys a bit longer, then her eyes came up and her glance swept Matt, Darien and myself. “Mr. Carmichael isn’t anywhere in MAGE’s records. However you two, Mr. Torre and Mr. Lancaster, you both are, and you both look awfully damned young for your ages. Looks like the two of you follow the ‘tradition’,” her fingers hooked in the air again, “of naming the firstborn son after the father like a lot of long lived supernaturals do. I can access public records for Mr. Carmichael but they only show two dates of birth, in 1948 and in 1971, and no deaths.”
I’d asked Darien a long time ago, when it had become apparent that how old I looked wasn’t keeping up with my actual age, what shifters, and vampires for that matter, did to allay suspicion. He’d told me that some made a habit of regular name changes, but a good many others just falsified births and deaths and ‘carried the first name down the family line’. Others just found ways to alter their records, change a few numbers around. He had done both of the last.
“That sounds about right,” Darien replied flatly.
Agent Forsythe just smiled brightly, hit a few more keys, then closed out the screen. “Alright, here’s how this works. Myself, Agent Wirth, Agent Streck,” she indicated the two men in turn, first the one guarding, then the one at the table, “are part of an organization called Mind and Aetheric Government Enforcers. This organization has been around for a long time, and we keep track of and police AEs to the best of our ability. We, ourselves, are AEs, sorcerers.”
I heard Darien groan, and Lochlan mutter under his breath.
“Well, I see a couple of you are familiar with what we are.” Agent Forsythe chuckled lightly. “Due to the awakening of the general population to the existence of AEs, we have been asked to register all AEs, just as a precautionary measure. Previously, we only really worried about sorcerers since the vampires and shifters tend to police their own. Oh, as you know we’ve gone after your kind before,” she admitted, giving both Matt and Darien speculative looks, “when your own authorities couldn’t seem to get the job done, but for the most part we stayed out of it. However, the human government wants all of us accounted for and our database is the most comprehensive.”
I didn’t like the sound of where this was heading. “So what, exactly, does this registration entail?” I asked suspiciously. “It’s not like we’re mutants or anything.”
The reference was not lost on the Agents. The one guarding actually cracked a half smile. But it was Agent Forsythe who answered me. “This is not a comic book, Mr. Carmichael, this is real life. The difference is that only other AEs, specifically MAGE agents, will be able to track you down. Humans are no longer the most powerful race on this planet, in truth, they never were, but this act of registering gives them some illusion of comfort. As for what it entails? That’s simple. An implantation, magically, of a tracking device; a binding oath from you that you will not remove it; and a little irremovable sticker on your ID that declares what kind of AE you are. Of course, the last is just for human use, a concession we had to make.”
“An’ if we refuse?” Lochlan straightened so that he was no longer leaning against the door frame.
Agent Forsythe’s expression returned to cold neutrality. “Then you don’t leave this room.” She gave Agent Wirth a nod and he unholstered his weapon, training it on them. “Don’t for a minute think that there are ordinary bullets in these weapons. Special, hollow ammunition, filled with various liquid metals, intended to kill, or at least slow you down. Neither vampires nor shifters are completely invulnerable. And what the weapons fail to do, our own powers will compensate quite well for. Any more questions?”
We had no choice, at least nothing viable at the moment that any of us could see, so we submitted to their tagging and registration. Once Agent Forsythe updated all our information so that it read correctly, at least in their files, Agent Streck magically implanted a small homing device in each of us except the two human women, so that they could find us if they ever needed to. It wasn’t something that any of us was happy with, but it was something that Darien and I, at the least, had somewhat expected.
Once we had been tagged and our IDs marked with our supernatural type, we were free to leave with only further minor hassle. There was a small group of picketers from the Movement for Purity who were standing near the security area with signs that sported sayings such as: Humans for Human Rights, Cleanse the Unpure, Close the Freakshow, and God Gave Humans the Earth, Let’s Take it Back. Barricades and strategically posted military kept them from doing any more than shaking their signs at us and yelling obscenities and threats.
There was a limousine waiting for us outside at passenger pickup. Lochlan must have called ahead right before the plane landed. I didn’t know if he had connections in Las Vegas or not. As it was, I knew that Darien and I were being rude in our own way. Protocol dictated that we should seek out and announce our presence to the local pack leader. There was one here, a large pack; I had felt the push of their territorial claim when we had stepped off the plane and had seen the markings only visible to shifters that indicated th
e way to their den.
But Darien’s desire to see Katelyn was throwing protocol out the window, especially with the delay from MAGE. He knew better, especially being the son of a Council Elder, but he didn’t care. I hoped it wouldn’t piss some people off at us that we didn’t want pissed off.
When Lochlan told the driver where we wanted to go, the man didn’t need directions. Apparently the place in question was well known. He did apologize for the state the city was in, especially the Strip. It didn’t take long for us to hit the main street leading out from the airport and a few minutes later the driver turned left onto Tropicana Avenue. We could already see some minor destruction even at this point; some buildings with broken windows, graffiti that looked new, garbage and debris where it seemed there shouldn’t be.
Eventually we hit the Strip, taking a right onto it. It was moderately busy, despite the shape of some of the businesses, people taking their chances. More broken windows, holes in walls, a large chunk of the New York New York’s rollercoaster missing. One of the M’s outside the M&M store was broken in half.
As we traveled down the Strip, it seemed that none of the casinos or hotels had escaped. Workers, both human and supernatural, were busy with repair work, fixing windows and walls, parking lots and fountains, roofs and various sculptures and art. And through it all, the parking lots and garages still had cars in them, as it seemed it would take more than a cataclysmic world changing event to keep some people from gambling.
As we took a right into the parking lot of a swanky looking club nestled in between some buildings, I looked out to my left at the Treasure Island. I could see what looked like two pirate ships, one on either side of the main walkway, sitting in large pools. I wasn’t sure if one of them was supposed to be half sunk or not. Four huge hulking humanoid creatures with midnight blue, rocky textured skin, fae of some sort I assumed, were busy hauling the toppled mast out of the water as we went past. Richland had fared far better than Las Vegas had, with minimum damage to the area.