The corner of Steven’s mouth lifted in a half smile, his eyes never leaving the screen. “It’s not a phone. I’m just… changing a couple of things.” He paused, glanced over at her. “How are you feeling now?”
She took stock of herself, and realized she was absolutely fine. Better than fine, she felt great. Her heart was beating normally, her breathing was fine… come to think of it, she had more energy than she had had in a while. That feeling of wanting to hibernate that plagued her all winter, and the sleepy effects of whatever the doctor had given her, were gone.
“I feel great,” she said, and he nodded, turning back to his not-phone. “What did you do?”
“I told you, I’m just changing a couple of things.”
“What is that thing?” Deanna nodded toward the not-phone.
“Long story. Where do you live?”
Deanna told him her address and he said, “Got it.” He continued typing for a few minutes, then pulled another device out of his pocket. It was a little round black thing. She stared at it, wondering what it was, while he pushed a button and…
They were sitting on the couch in her living room.
“What the hell?” she said, looking around. She did not feel nearly as disoriented as she felt she should after experiencing such a sudden change. Had she not been holding on to the memory of being in the hospital, she would have thought they’d been on the couch the entire time they were having this discussion. It felt very natural.
“It’s just molecular changes and stuff….” Steven said vaguely, waving a hand slightly. She continued staring at him, so he added, “More magic.”
She nodded. That seemed obvious, at least. “I didn’t even notice we were moving or anything.”
“It was a relatively short distance. Longer distances cause a slight feeling of vertigo.”
She nodded again, amazed. “So…..how’d you do that?”
“Years of training,” he said shortly, successfully avoiding the question. “So, who are you, Deanna? Why can you see me?”
She shrugged, shaking her head. “I’m nobody. I’m a waitress… actually, I’m not even that anymore. I don’t know…” She thought for a bit. “I’ve always wanted magic to be real. I always hoped it was real. Could that be it?”
He stared at her. “Maybe,” he assented. “I don’t really see how, but the energy is definitely very reactive to belief. There’s got to be more than that, though.”
“The energy?”
“Magic,” he said. “I think we’re going to have to do some tests.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “Like, magic tests?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“How? What kind of tests?”
“Well, I’ve already scanned you with everything I’ve got and come up blank. I think I’m gonna have to bring you in,” Steven said casually, apparently not realizing how ominous this sounded to her.
“Bring me in WHERE?”
“To my… to my boss. I’ve never experienced anything like this before. We’re going to need some help figuring it out.”
“Your boss? Who’s your boss?”
Steven smiled. “He’s going to like you, actually. He likes when people ask questions.” He started tapping away on his not-phone again, saying, “I’m just briefing him now.”
“You said that thing wasn’t a phone.”
“It’s not,” he said, with that satisfied little half-smile again. “They’re ready for us.”
“Wait,” Deanna said, panicking. “I’m really not okay with going to some mysterious place where people are going to run tests on me.”
Steven nodded and shrugged a shoulder, while continuing to tap on his device. “I get that. But the thing is – “
Deanna felt a sudden feeling of vertigo.
“The thing is,” Steven continued, “you don’t really have a choice.”
The feeling of vertigo dissipated, and Deanna’s head felt clearer. However, something felt wrong. It took her a moment to realize they were no longer in her living room. She was sitting in exactly the same position she had been in on her couch, but the chair underneath her was a comparatively uncomfortable metallic affair. The room they were in was small, with dark grey walls, a dark grey carpet, and a dark grey ceiling; it was terribly gloomy, she thought. Steven, rather than sitting a few feet away on her couch, was now seated in a chair identical to her own, on the other side of a small table which was immediately next to her.
After taking a moment to assess her surroundings, Deanna felt a vague sense of anxiety that was almost immediately pushed aside by an overwhelming rush of pure rage. The sense of awe and wonder that Steven had awakened in her by showing her that magic was real dissipated in the face of her current situation. She found herself in a completely unfamiliar place, with no idea where she was or how far from home, and she had no control over when or even whether she could return home. She felt frightened and helpless, and feeling like that – like a victim – made her angry.
She stood and faced him with fire in her eyes. “You’re a complete bastard.”
Steven made the fatal mistake of uttering a chuckle; he actually said, “Ha!” It was a surprised reaction, but Deanna did not take it that way.
“You kidnapped me, you absolute prick,” she snarled.
Steven also stood up, looking down at her, and she noticed that his eyes were a colder, paler blue than she had previously thought.
“I brought you here to help you as much as anyone else,” he said quietly but icily. “I would advise you to watch your tone.”
“Would you? I guess it’s lucky for me I don’t take advice from kidnappers.”
“You’re being ridiculous. I did not kidnap you. We are facing a confusing situation – we are BOTH facing a confusing situation – and I brought you here so we can get to the bottom of it. I’m sorry if you feel inconvenienced, but you have to think of the greater good, here.”
“Inconvenienced? You just whisked me away from my home and anything that is familiar to me, to some dark, gloomy place I’ve never been, and I don’t even know where I am! That’s more than just an ‘inconvenience.’ You essentially just stole my freedom, and I have no idea what your intentions are.”
Steven’s tone softened slightly, though his facial expression remained hostile. “I didn’t mean to scare you. You will not be harmed while you are here. But we NEED to find out why all of the shielding that makes me undetectable to literally everyone else has no effect on you.”
“But….” Deanna trailed off, looking away for a moment. “I don’t want to be trapped like some kind of a lab rat.”
A new voice, behind her, said, “I assure you, young lady, you are neither trapped nor shall you be treated like any kind of a rat.”
She whirled around, surprised. A short, stocky man with grey hair and wire rimmed glasses stood behind her. Like Steven, he wore all black. She did not know when he had entered the room or how much of the conversation he had heard; she assumed he had arrived by the same magical means that Steven had used to bring her here. (This assumption would turn out to be correct.)
“Who are you?”
The man smiled convivially and offered his hand, which Deanna shook awkwardly as he introduced himself. “They call me General Larsen, around here, but you can call me Benjamin. Drisbane tells me you are completely immune to his shields and that is fascinating to me, absolutely fascinating. I really can’t tell you how intrigued I am by you.”
“Drisbane?” Deanna asked bemusedly.
“Me. Steven Drisbane,” Steven said, while Larsen said, “Oh, perhaps he didn’t introduce himself properly. The young man who brought you here is Ensign Steven Drisbane.” The general stopped speaking and peered around the room as if looking for something. “Are you here, Drisbane?”
“Oh, right,” Steven said, pulling out his phone-like device and tapping away at the screen. A moment or two later, the General’s gaze went directly to him for the first time and the older man smiled ag
ain.
“It’s good to see you, Ensign.”
“It’s good to be seen, sir.”
Deanna looked back and forth between the two men. “You really didn’t know he was there?” she asked Larsen.
“I’m afraid not, my dear. Your ability to see through the Wand’s shielding abilities truly is unique.”
“The Wand?”
“This,” Steven said, holding up his not-phone.
“Not exactly how one pictures a magic wand,” Deanna murmured. She blinked and shook her head, trying to clear away some of her confusion. “You’re an ensign?” she addressed Steven. “Like on Star Trek?”
He gave her that half smile again, an expression she was beginning to loathe. He looked so arrogant and smug. “More like in the Navy,” he said.
“You guys are in the Navy?”
“No,” Larsen answered smoothly. “Now tell me, my dear, what is your name?”
Though she was beginning to feel as if she had fallen down the rabbit hole, Deanna answered calmly and cordially. “I’m Deanna. Deanna Flanagan. May I ask why I am here, exactly?”
“Of course you may, Ms. Flanagan, and may I say that is a lovely name,” Larsen answered, his eyes twinkling. “Your ability to see through our shields is simply extraordinary, and we would like to run some tests to try and find the cause of your ability.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Nothing too invasive, I assure you. Mostly, we will just wave some devices at you and look at our computers.”
Deanna thought for a moment before posing her next question. “Without putting too fine a point on it, what’s in it for me? What if I just want to go home? Will you let me go?”
Larsen offered a wide, magnanimous smile. “My dear, I would imagine you are as eager to find the cause of your abilities as we are! Drisbane has shared with me that you have long believed in magic. Imagine if you have some access to it! Think of how much you can learn from us.”
Noting that he had quite artfully avoided answering her questions, Deanna tried another line of inquiry. “I don’t know what I can learn from you because I don’t know anything about you. What kind of a place is this? Who do you two work for? What do you do, exactly?”
“We’re the good guys,” Steven said quietly. She glanced at him and saw a kind of earnest pride shining through his eyes.
“Well said, Drisbane. Ms. Flanagan, there is no need to be afraid,” Larsen said in a gentle tone. “We are part of an organization exclusively dedicated to the study and use of magic. We use it to protect our great nation and generally improve the world at large. It is our mission to eliminate needless suffering of any kind, and we hope to do that through developing a greater understanding of and control over the energy you know as magic.”
“I often think of us as students,” Steven interjected.
“Precisely, Ensign. We are students of magic, students of the mysteries of the universe, and you, Ms. Flanagan, seem to be one of those mysteries.”
Deanna mulled this over for a moment. She had a strong suspicion that the men would not allow her to leave. A sense of unease and fear slithered around in her belly. However, she was definitely curious to learn more about magic. The range of emotions she was experiencing was vast and overwhelming.
“After… after you run these tests on me,” she stammered, “will you… will I be allowed to go home?”
“I give you my word, Ms. Flanagan, that we will not keep you here a moment longer than necessary.”
She nodded, though his statement made her feel no more at ease. She didn’t really feel like she had a choice, though, so she decided to make the best of it. The sooner they did whatever they needed to do, the sooner she could go home.
Looking up at the General, she said, “I guess…. I guess we should get started.”
Steven
Steven was frustrated.
For several hours, he, Larsen, Eric, and John had been scanning Deanna with every device in their arsenal. They examined every molecule of her being, and found no abnormalities. The energy signature she emitted was similarly unremarkable. Larsen had interviewed her endlessly, but could find no patterns or even unexplained series of coincidences in her life which he felt could lead to understanding her immunity to magical shields. Every attempt they made to figure out what made Deanna unique lead to the same conclusion: she was a normal, average human being.
Steven was tired, hungry, and generally frustrated by the lack of progress they had made. Every second he spent unsuccessfully trying to solve the puzzle of Deanna was a second he could be spending tracking Carver. The fact that his search for Carver had also been so far unsuccessful made today’s lack of progress that much more vexing; Steven was beginning to feel as if nothing were working for him.
He stood, pushing his chair back, and everyone looked at him. “General,” he addressed Larsen, “May I have a word with you?”
“Of course, Drisbane,” Larsen replied, sounding tired. “I could use a break, anyway. Let’s go grab a cup of coffee.”
The two men left the room as Eric and John decided to re-scan Deanna’s energy output. Steven was glad to leave, rather than repeat the same exercises in futility they had engaged in all day.
“So what’s on your mind?” the General asked as they strolled down the hall.
“Well, sir… I’m just so damn frustrated,” Steven blurted. “I haven’t found Carver, and now I ran into this woman who is totally immune to our magical shields, and we don’t know why. I feel like we need to know why, but I don’t know how to find out. The whole thing is taking time away from my mission, which, again, has yielded no real results. I’m starting to feel like a dog chasing its own tail.”
“I understand, Drisbane. I’ve had similar feelings, myself, regarding Carver.” Larsen paused as they entered a small kitchenette, where he smelled the coffee in the pot on the burner, made a face, and dumped it. As he set about brewing a new pot, he continued, “I am actually wondering if Ms. Flanagan is a new lead.”
Steven paused. “I’m confused.”
“I think it’s safe to say we all are, at the moment.”
“I mean… what do you mean? How could she be a new lead?”
“Well,” the General mused, “you found her while on the search for Carver. In the same town where Carver’s energy signature has been appearing on an intermittent but recurring basis for over a year now. Perhaps there is some connection. Perhaps there is even something unusual about the place itself. As you know, coincidence is rarely just coincidence. It generally means something bigger.”
Steven thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “I just don’t see it. I don’t understand how an out-of-work waitress could lead us to Carver.”
“Maybe it’s a line of questioning we need to start, and we’ll see where it leads,” Larsen replied. “What’s that expression? You don’t have to be able to see the top of the staircase to take the first step? Something like that. Point is, we won’t know the answers until we start asking the questions, so let’s start asking the woman if she knows David Carver.”
Steven shrugged and nodded his assent, then poured himself a cup of freshly brewed coffee. “I suppose you’re right, sir.”
Moments later, the two men re-entered the little lab where Deanna sat between Eric and John, each on their computers. The two techs spoke to each other (and, in Eric’s case, sometimes to himself) as if she were an inanimate object, unable to hear them.
“She’s definitely not emanating anything special,” John said. “Just as dull as dull can be.”
Deanna stared blankly at him. Very purposefully blankly.
“I’m gonna try the atomic phase scan again,” Eric murmured. “We could be missing some anomaly on the atomic level.”
“We’ve already run it twice, numbnuts,” John snapped. “Nothing.”
“Gentlemen,” Larsen interrupted. “Perhaps you should take a short break, grab a cup of coffee and regroup. I would like the opportunit
y to speak with Ms. Flanagan.”
“Fine by me. This is boring,” John said, and the two men left the room. Deanna stared quietly and expectantly at the General from her chair.
“Ms. Flanagan,” he began. “Have you ever met a man by the name of David Carver?”
She furrowed her brow for a moment. “Not that I know of.”
“A fair point, perhaps you encountered him without catching his name. Here,” Larsen tapped on his Wand and pulled up a picture of Carver, the same one he had shown Steven during their first meeting. It showed Carver a couple of years before his desertion, looking happy, healthy, and quite sane.
Deanna studied the picture for a second, then shook her head and shrugged.
“He’d be older now,” Steven interjected. “Try to picture him about twenty years older than he is there.”
She stared at the picture again, looking no less confused. “I’m sorry, I don’t know that person. Should I?”
Larsen stared penetratingly at her for several long seconds. “I’m not sure. I have a bit of a hypothesis that somehow, you two are connected.”
“Does he see through your magic shields, too?”
“Not exactly.” Larsen did not offer further explanation.
“We don’t know what he looks like, exactly, now. He may have changed a lot since that picture was taken,” Steven offered. “He’s been going through a rough time for the better part of two decades, now. His eyes, I can tell you, look different.”
Deanna’s brow furrowed as she studied the picture. “Different how?”
Steven pictured Carver as he had looked all those years earlier, on his motorcycle. “Darker. Scarier. Kind of … haunted.”
She narrowed her eyes, looking as if she were trying to remember something. Steven and Larsen stayed quiet, giving her time to think. After a moment, she muttered, “It couldn’t be.”
“What?” Steven nearly barked at her. “It couldn’t be what?”
“There was this homeless guy in Woodford last summer. We called him the Rasta Man because he had this one long, filthy dreadlock. He was really, really thin, and he looked really frail. Much smaller than the guy in the picture, and dirtier. And he had these crazy, dark eyes. They looked haunted, like you said. They were kind of frightening.”
March Forth (The Woodford Chronicles Book 1) Page 6