by John Conroe
“They did. He taught them skills they needed and helped set up the first couple kills. Then he died of a heart attack. I had Omega pull his autopsy. The Medical Examiner wrote that it was a miracle he survived his brother. By all rights, he should have died six months before. He had major clogged arteries and his body was riddled with an undetected, metastatic cancer. Lucky he could be there for them… lucky he had the kind of skills that he did,” Tanya said.
“Then when they are caught by the werewolf pack they were hunting, they somehow end up in front of Chris, who doesn’t much care to see children executed. You beat the piss out of that shitty pack leader,” Stacia said, nodding my way. “Incredibly lucky for them.”
“And when the FBI shows up and arrests them, the local pack’s lawyer is there to make quick work of what little evidence there was,” I said. “Which the pack had destroyed. Then when we decide to open a school for wayward witches and weres, we decide to include them.”
“Is that part really lucky, though?” Declan asked. “One, you picked them, and two, they were suddenly in a really dangerous school.”
“And how have they done? Any problems or issues?” Tanya asked.
“Well, no, but that’s because Mack’s roommate is D,” Stacia said.
“Lucky for them,” Tanya said.
“And that’s a small part of it. The other kids all like them, and Mr. Jenks thinks they’re great. Hates me, but thinks they walk on water,” Declan said.
“Lucky the skills they have are admired. Lucky that they’re both attractive, but not obnoxiously so. Lucky to both be smart and capable,” Tanya said.
“But it was you guys who placed Mack with me and put Jetta in with Caeco,” Declan said.
“You and they were the only kids we knew and they seemed pretty solid, so we winged it,” I said.
“And luckily got it right,” Tanya said.
“I’m not certain I’m sold on it, but that is a lot of coincidences,” Stacia said.
Declan looked thoughtful. “They are lucky. Not play the Lotto lucky, but they got along so well with Ashley that her dad asked Mack to help with the blade shop and now he’s found it’s basically a life calling. And he’s lucky with girls, that’s for sure.”
“That’s not luck,” Stacia said with a snort. “Mack’s got game.”
“What kid my age has that much game?” Declan asked her.
“Well, not you, and not most. But he does,” she said, giving us a quick wink when he looked out the window, all disgusted.
“Wait. This luck thing, if it’s real, is great and all, but we’re forgetting one thing… how does Omega feel about us going?” Declan asked.
“And by us, you mean you,” Stacia said, shrugging when he glanced at her. “What? It’s a good question, but let’s not kid ourselves that he would object to anyone going but you.”
“I would be concerned for you too, Stacia. But you are correct that my primary protective instinct, if in fact I am capable of instinct, is for Father. However, I am comfortable with the precautions I have taken,” Omega said.
Enlightenment struck Declan, his eyes widening suddenly. “The Mark 4!” he said. The plane shuddered as the pilot started to back it away from our private terminal area.
“Yes Father. The Mark 4 technology is sufficiently mature and I have tested it enough that I can rely on it. I have already tested the entangled connectivity on Fairie, and it has performed at a one-hundred percent confidence level,” Omega said.
“You’ve already sent micro units to Fairie?” Declan asked.
“With every Earth to Fairie transferral of people and supplies for the last two weeks,” the AI said.
“Mark 4?” Tanya asked, looking mildly annoyed.
Declan held up an arm and an insect-sized drone scurried out of a pocket on his shirt and flew to his arm. The air was suddenly abuzz with dozens more as they came out of corners, from under the seats, out of Declan’s witch bag, and basically from everywhere.
The tiny fliers flitted to the floor of the lounge and began to link together. A four-legged shape took form, about like a medium-sized cat. The body of the transformer drone sat upright on the four-legged base and had two arms that ended in blunt tubes, looking very like a mechanical centaur.
“We call, well, to be honest, I call the combined drone shape the Mark 4 because it’s really a fighting unit. The successor to the centipede drones. The micro units are great intelligence units, the entangled particle technology giving them constant connectivity anywhere and anytime. Plus they can combine in amazing and endlessly adaptable ways, but this particular shape is meant for application of force,” Declan said, getting out of his chair and crouching down with the small drone. “It is scalable in size, useful even this small, with a fairly powerful laser and a small coil-driven electromagnetic projectile weapon. With the addition of several hundred thousand more micro units, the full-sized version is roughly human-sized. We feel it may have equivalent firepower to a modern military fire team,” Declan said.
“You helped Omega create a Terminator drone?” Stacia asked, appalled.
“You make it sound really bad,” he said. “He’s perfectly capable of making highly efficient weapon systems without me. Okay, that sounded bad too. What I meant was that DOAA already produced killer drones that Omega took over. But they were designed for fighting supernaturals. The Mark 4 is designed to do many things but has protective capabilities as well. Let’s face it: Omega can be as deadly as anything with or without drones. He can force power, hydro, industrial, traffic, and transportation systems to all fail in deadly ways. But it is inefficient and much more dangerous to bystanders. Blunt weapons, whereas the Mark 4 is scalpel-like.”
The small drone came apart in a cloud of tiny units that disappeared into the plane’s interior in seconds.
“The entangled micro drone technology allows me to project myself anywhere. The fighting aspects of the Mark 4 iteration are one very small component, Stacia,” Omega said. “More importantly, they can allow me to render medical aid wherever and whenever it might be needed.”
“That seems to be a much better idea,” Stacia said.
Declan frowned, but wisely kept his mouth shut. I smiled at him, thinking he’d matured quite a bit in the last year or so. The plane taxied out onto the runway tarmac.
“Are the cabin and passengers secure?” the pilot asked over the intercom. “Excellent. Thank you,” she said before Tanya could pick up the inter-plane phone. She looked at me, but the answer came a second later.
“I responded after checking the entire aircraft for readiness, Tanya. The pilot thinks you texted her,” Omega said.
“Very thoughtful, Omega,” she said, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.
Declan turned to us. He had been talking with Stacia, and I’d heard enough to know the topic was the trip.
“When do we leave… for Fairie?” he asked.
“Within the week, less than three days if possible. We have to up the timetable, and that will require some discussions with Nathan Stewart, but it should be fine,” I said.
“Won’t he object to us leaving? What with subpoenas and all?” he asked.
“No,” I said. Tanya took over the explanation. “The people we met in the Treasury building will all want you off-world as well. None of them will want you in front of a Congressional inquiry,” she said.
“So who will go? To face Congress? You two?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s pretty much part of our job description,” I said.
“Isn’t that just as bad?” he asked.
“We’re already expected to have abilities and powers. Quizzing you about a whole new group of supernaturals with the kind of powers you exhibited in Vegas is much, much scarier to the general population,” Tanya said.
The plane suddenly accelerated, pushing us all back into our seats.
“It doesn’t feel right, leaving you to face them by yourselves,” he said.
“Please. It’ll be a
nice distraction,” Tanya said, looking her nails over for chips or cracks. As if. I’d seen her rip them through Kevlar without a split or snag of any kind.
Declan looked at her, then me, with eyebrows raised. I laughed silently, nodding. He thought about it, looking at my vampire. I could just about see when he realized what that poor committee would be facing.
“Yeah, they won’t know what hit them,” he said.
Chapter 38
It actually took a whopping three days before the first Congressional demand for information appeared. The House subcommittee on Homeland Security skipped several procedural steps and went straight to a subpoena demanding that Tatiana Demidova and Christian Gordon appear before the subcommittee seven days hence.
The media learned about the hearing almost before we did.
“The fact that they went straight to a hearing without any preliminary investigation, request for information, or voluntary testimony means that this is an entirely political exercise,” Darion Cornell said.
“Showing who has the balls necessary to rein in the God Hammer and the Night Angel?” Lydia asked.
“Exactly,” Darion’s Washington-based law partner, Stephen Meers said. He was, according to Darion, the attorney to go to for dealing with Congressional hearings. “The Homeland subcommittee is chaired by Daniel Lawson, a Republican from Indiana, and his Vice Chair is a Texas Republican named Martha Ratcliff. The Ranking member is a Democrat from California, Bennie Torres. These are the three that will ask the most questions. All three are looking to bolster their images as tough officials protecting the common man.”
He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a couple of newspapers, tossing them onto the conference room table. The headlines were all us.
“God Hammer smashes Vegas Strip”
“God’s first couple throws stripper party—in public”
Werewolves, Snipers and Strippers—Oh My!”
The articles were not kind to us. Much of the time, the media loves us. But wreck a few casinos and trash the Vegas Strip and they turn on you like wild animals. To be fair, the reporters didn’t know what the real story was and neither did local law enforcement. We had left quickly and Oracle had mostly cleaned things up but offered very little to the public by way of explanation. They had, at least, issued statements that we had been tracking and taking down an extremely dangerous demon. Rather than help, this admission, with no detail, had fueled the fire of speculation.
No one had missed the fact that the demon had been inside a werewolf. The casualty count, while really quite low, was still too high as far as public opinion went. The young bride in the hospital, Holly Harris, was featured over and over, the media realizing that she would likely be a new werewolf. Her family rallied around her, but her fiancé was suspiciously absent from her side. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the wedding had just crashed and burned. The couple were both from New Jersey, and Brock Mallick quietly contacted her when she returned home. My impressions from the news I’d seen was that she had a lot of anger to work through.
The odd events before and after the showdown on top of the Stratosphere were subject to unlimited conjecture and theory. Most of the Strip’s biggest casinos had suffered unprecedented losses, a fact that had some media crying foul. Ironic that the biggest money takers were now playing the victims. The vampire attack at the airport, Lydia’s kidnapping, my assault on Arlan and Peter’s crew, the drama in Red Rock Canyon Park were mostly missing from the narrative, but rumors and whispers of them kept surfacing from time to time in the days that followed. Meanwhile, the Strip-wide power outage, the diversionary stripper party, the takedown at the Painted Pony, and the melted Utah desert were heavily discussed and dissected.
It didn’t help that we had followed our standard procedures and declined all requests for interviews. Omega had suggested that we might want to make an exception in this case, but with the twins and all, we had overruled him. That was looking, more and more, like a mistake.
Declan and Stacia were in upstate New York, at the Moore family farm and blade smithy, preparing to step from this world to another. It was too much to hope for that they weren’t reading any news sites or watching television. The White werewolf and the Warlock were dragged into it as much as Tanya and myself. Maybe more, at least on Declan’s part. Werewolves are terrifying, the stuff of nightmares. But a witch, who looks like an all-American kid, who can throw heavy objects hundreds of feet with a wave of the hand, causes rational people to utterly lose their minds.
“These subpoenas name Declan and Stacia as well, you know. They’re going to be subject to Contempt of Congress,” Stephen said.
“Within a day, they will be unreachable,” I said, not mentioning the part about Omega’s ability to stay in constant contact.
“And you won’t tell me where?” Stephen asked for the third time.
“We did mention it was considered Top Secret-Code Word Classified, right?” Tanya asked.
He compressed his lips, clearly unhappy. Tall, thin, meticulously groomed and quaffed, Stephen Meers was extremely fussy and precise—and extraordinarily intelligent.
“These national security secrets are going to make you look confrontational and untrustworthy,” Stephen said.
“You think it will be a good idea to explain that a witch mated with a werewolf in a black magic ceremony, produced a demonically possessed super werewolf, and then the two of them sought to gain control of a massively powerful fire elemental and erupt the Yellowstone supervolcano—in a public hearing?” Darion asked. I liked that he kept reining in his partner’s snark.
“And then the media would be like, hey look, a super witch and the White Werewolf are a couple. What would their babies be like?” Lydia asked. “It’s probably a good thing Dragan was immune to most direct magic and fire or they would have seen what the kid can really do.”
“The reality is worse?” Stephen asked, looking at Darion for confirmation. He was still new to… well… us.
Darion nodded. “It’s undoubtedly best that Declan and Stacia are going… away,” he said. For a second, I thought he might slip and say “off world,” but he was too sharp for that.
“So you are constrained by your agreement with President Polner’s administration, which has stayed silent on this entire brouhaha. You will be dragged in front of a public hearing and asked pointed questions about the whole deal by decidedly hostile politicians. The media is already mostly biased on the topic and you want to attend separately on separate days because of your newborns,” Stephen mused out loud.
Nika wandered in, carrying Cora. Lydia and Tanya immediately melted the way that all females seem to when a baby happens along.
Stephen watched them all avidly. “I am going to ask you to reconsider,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I want you to consider going as a couple—and I want you to bring the babies,” he said, posture tense.
“What?” Tanya asked. “We told you that was a non-starter.” I watched her a second longer, making sure she was in control before looking at the terrified lawyer.
“Why, Stephen?” Darion asked, eyes still on my vampire.
“Because they are beautiful, normal-looking babies who make women, even vampire women, gush,” he said. “There is time to turn this thing around, but we have to go big—dramatic.
I mean, who brings babies to a Congressional hearing? God’s first couple with their entirely unique super babies who have no vampire nannies because the mean congressmen set the hearing for ten o’clock in the morning, that’s who.”
“I highly recommend this course of action,” Omega said through my phone’s speaker at a volume well below human hearing.
My vampire looked at me. After a moment, the decision was made.
Chapter 39
Seven days later found us on Capitol Hill. Stephen was already in the hearing chamber, checking with congressional staffers on the arrangements. Darion waited with us in an em
pty room down the hall from the chamber. We had requested very few accommodations, but the major one had been a media-free entrance to the Capitol building. Seeing the expressions on the Capitol police at the security checkpoint was priceless. My beautiful vampire, wearing an understated pantsuit, carrying Beowulf in his carseat, while I had Cora in hers. I was also slung with diaper bags, wearing dress slacks and a white shirt, no tie, with a blue blazer. We looked like a yuppie couple and their kids.
Darion had offered to carry a bag or two, but Stephen had instantly overruled him. We had to be the ones with the trappings of parenthood to drill the point home. So, at exactly ten seconds to ten o’clock, we left the waiting room and walked down the hall and into the hearing chamber.
Cameras went crazy. The room was packed with media, staffers, and committee members, plus an unusually large Capitol police presence. Every one of them stared at us as we carried our precious cargo to our assigned seats, the noise volume raising dramatically.