We walked past the first sentry without a whisper of our presence. The man was dressed in camouflaged gear and was actively searching his target area. He had military-grade night-vision goggles and a sniper rifle. There were no insignia or grade on his uniform, but he wore a bracelet on his right hand that contained a single red stone that was reminiscent of the “magic-sniffers” used at Dunstan’s school a few weeks ago. If that’s what it was, it failed once again to recognize us.
Ethan pushed into my cavern, bringing Kieran and Peter with him. I brought up a representation of the area and was pleasantly surprised by the size and scope. There were close to a hundred men on this corner of the property and the number steadily increased as I pushed harder on the Fae Lord power. I hadn’t begun to stretch the limits when I had the entire valley mapped with the exception of one occlusion beginning at the base of a rocky canyon and out toward the center to a flat plateau.
“Daybreak has advantages,” Kieran murmured as he looked through the nearly real model. “Is the count accurate?”
“Near as I can tell,” I answered. “I can’t tell why I can’t see here, though.” The occlusion was a gray mist on my map. “These guys don’t really appear to be ‘weekend warriors’ to me.”
“Not to me, either, if by ‘weekend warrior’ you mean an amateur,” Kieran said, peering down at the closest man in the model, the one we just passed.
“Technically, it means a reservist in the military who has received proper training,” I answered, quietly even though I was controlling the shielding around us. I wanted the stealthy mood maintained. “Jimmy said Yaeger used the term in reference to the hobbyists he catered to, if you call the desire to kill people in a methodical way a hobby.”
“There are military headquarters here,” Peter said pointing to the tent near the house. “Why are so many quartered now? Are they sleeping?”
“Looks like it,” Ethan said, staring out into the darkness past me.
“We don’t know what’s going on here,” I said. “But I can’t see this as being good for anyone. I want to find out what this is.”
“I agree. Peter, what do you think?” Kieran asked. He didn’t want Peter pushed into doing something dangerous that he didn’t believe in.
“I think there is something seriously wrong here and it’s too close to home not to be aimed at us,” Peter said, looking dead at Kieran. “I think somebody other than Jimmy was watching the house and used him for cover. I think we need to try to warn Mike and Dad off the house before they can get there. Then we should find out what the hell is going on. This is illegal, though, so stealth is required.”
“Understood. No violence until it is committed on us and we will remain as non-lethal as possible,” Kieran said softly, pulling back into the real world fully. “And hidden as long as possible.” He grinned with childish glee, warming his hands together briskly. “Whaddya say, Ethan, care for a game of Hide-n-Seek among the mortals?”
“Could be fun,” Ethan said with a sparkle in his eyes. He was already fading from view on several planes. “We taking the gray mist then?”
“I think it best that we split up, yes,” Kieran said. “The four of us going into that situation is a mistake. One of us might expect the other to see something and take care of the same danger. It’s too easy to make mistakes when there are so many strong minds on intricate problems that need delicate handling. Ethan and I are less apt with people right now and more adept with fields. You and Seth are more adept with people. Sneaking into a militaristic encampment is more in your department, don’t you think?”
Peter snickered and said, “That’s not on my resume!”
“He means his curriculum vee-tai,” I said in an accent I couldn’t remember ever hearing and couldn’t begin to place. It got me a backhanded slap in the shoulder and a couple of consoling chuckles. I touched the sense of Mike and Richard through Gilán and got an instant response from both. Explaining what we saw, I gave them fifteen minutes to finish, gather together, get anything they needed out of the car, and move over to the Palace. They both wanted to come help, but they also knew they couldn’t really argue with me about it. The benefit of being the boss. Fae Lord didn’t hurt either.
Kieran and Ethan came into position at the edge of the dense area within minutes and managed to walk the perimeter unmolested and unnoticed while we waited for Mike’s all-clear. Peter and I watched the patterns in the sentries and in the movements of the men in tents further back, as well as those in Yaeger’s bunkhouses.
We do not see anything or anyone within the confines of the area from the borders, Ethan projected to me through the anchor. And the sentries seem to be avoiding even the sight of the area. They’re making hiding very easy.
That seems dangerous to me, I sent back. Maybe you should wait for us to help. I’m getting a bad feeling about this.
Now, mother, we’re big boys and we know when to call for help when we need it. He sounded like he meant it, but he was having some selective memory about their track record on that score.
I felt the four scratches that meant shifts into the Palace and into Mike’s apartment. A moment later there were two shifts out, rapidly followed by shifts in. They ferried stores in; I felt the difference in mass. Cool. Mike called. It felt like a tickle just behind my right eye, very light. I could pick up on it before the first word started, too. Very cool.
“All right, we were able to get about half the list,” he said. “We locked the car and left it. All four of us are in my apartment and we’re just going to sit around being tense about you lot until we hear from you. Just keep that in mind.”
“Wow, do you get feelings on your side of this like I do?” I asked him, sensing his worry and tension. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can, Mike.”
All right, guys, let’s go commit some crimes, I sent to all my brothers.
Chapter 12
“Come on, Jimmy,” I said softly. “Let’s go for a walk on the wild side. Coming, Peter?” Taking his grunt for a “yes,” I pushed a wave of ambiguous feelings in front of us, then cast another blanketing cloak low to the ground as we ran for the house in the center of the field. Adrenaline must have been working double-time in all of us because we weren’t even breathing hard when we skidded quietly into the brick foundation of the house.
Peter scanned the area for alarms while I raised up slowly to listen at the closest window. I couldn’t discern any voices but the house had at least two inhabitants. When I slowly sank back down to the ground, I saw Jimmy’s feet disappearing into a vent in the foundation wall under the house. Peter inched his way to the front slowly peeking around the shadows to see the front porch as I made my way to the back. Just as I came to the corner, the screen door slammed into the porch loudly.
“You’ll bring him back, won’t you?” an old man’s voice said weakly, still inside the house. “Please…”
A young man bounded down the steps, whirling around at the bottom to face the old man in the doorway. He glistened in the moonlight, his hair wet and dripping down his naked torso. Tan-lines showed at the waist and legs of his white shorts. Together with his wiry physique, it was obvious he lived an outdoor life but he wasn’t a soldier.
“Yes, most certainly, Pa-pa,” the young man said condescendingly. “Little Dieter will come back for you later tonight.” The statement was so layered in malice disguised as sugar that I felt my insulin levels dropping.
“Thank you,” breathed the old man, finally stepping fully onto the porch. “Please, God, let this go well tonight. Please let my Dieter come home to me tonight.”
The young man chuckled to himself and turned back to the road, walking quickly away, while the old man went back into the house, letting the screen door close behind him and continuing to pray quietly to himself as he moved further into the house. Jimmy glided in beside me just before the young man turned into the wilderness.
“That was Dieter,” he whispered in my ear. He was understandably confused by their sh
ort conversation, and he was a little dirty and musty from being under the house.
“Wait for Peter and follow me in,” I whispered to him, setting up a shield around the side of the house with the Stone. ‘Scurry’ is a good word: I scurried up the porch like a church mouse, slipping past the screen door without a squeak of a hinge. Creeping lightly down the hall, there were several collages of pictures on the wall, all of men in various poses over kills or impressive weapons. Several showed both men at various ages and there was an affection between them in their pictures together that made me think father and son. There was another son as well, a little older than Dieter and a little taller.
There was only one picture of a woman, so I assumed this was Dieter’s mother. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but I imagine there were several times in her life when she was very pretty. This was taken during one of those times and there was a strong resemblance. So if Papa was asking his son when his son would be returned to him, did that mean someone else was controlling Dieter or that Papa had lost his marbles? As I searched for Papa, I looked around the house, taking in the hints to the personalities living here.
Papa was in the front room, praying still, in shock over something. It was time to find out why, so I looked a little more deeply at him and listened a little harder. He was a little on the nuts side of the psycho line. Problem is, I could see why, the memory of the violence played continuously in his mind in a familiar motif. Dieter did have an older brother, very much past tense. Yaeger’s memory was quite dramatically clear on what happened to Hans Yaeger eight nights ago as murky shadows danced around him in the night air.
It was a mad jumble of emotions as the old man felt Hans’ exultation at deflowering his first virgin while simultaneously feeling his own horror and disgust at watching his first son defile and rape a child! The proud claims from Hans that he would soon be a father were lost in the screams of the child and her parents. Yaeger, Sr., turned the final corner into irrevocable madness right after that, when Hans showed him the fertilized egg of his never-to-be-born offspring and claiming it to be his soon-to-be-born son.
I believe I have found the perpetrator of Jimmy’s family’s murders. I just had to figure out what the hell it was and where it was.
Kir’du’Ahn, Eth’anok’avel, I sent with power, linking in directly to their True Names. I needed to make certain they heard me. Something truly vile is coming your way. I added flashes of Yaeger’s memories of Hans’ sins along with his final end, his own evisceration at the hands of his baby brother, Dieter. It locked several blood magic rites into place.
Peter sidled up beside me, watching the old man around the doorframe as he rocked on the couch in addled fear. Kieran and Ethan centered their attention on Dieter as he entered the gray occlusion from the road.
We’ll watch him, Kieran sent back. Be careful, Little Brother, and be quick. They followed Dieter in a moment later from a different position. I could still sense their presence there but they were fuzzy, like they were shaking in an earthquake. They showed no distress and kept moving so I assumed it was the hiding spell that caused that effect.
Now I had to center myself to my task, though, and I was faced with a huge moral dilemma. Yaeger had considerable complicity in the murder of Jimmy’s family. More than just witnessing it, he was a provocateur in the series of events that quickly went beyond his control and developed into the situation that existed now. His agreements led to the training of paramilitary personnel on his property over the last three years during the off-peak periods of hunting seasons. His encouragement got Billy Walker and his father “called up.” His phone calls had told his private sources of my whereabouts for the last six months. The wards of my house confused them as they sought to find my home for longer than Kieran and Ethan had been around.
It was enough to make me hate this man. I wanted to kill him. As I stepped forward to go into the room, every fiber of my body vibrated against it and the Night dropped instantly into my left hand. A tongue the size of a twin bed flicked out suddenly, tasting the air and disappeared back into my imagination, then the room burst into another dimension for me. Overlayed on the walls and floor, new sigils appeared in a pale yellow and gray, painted in broad strokes. Nothing I recognized, but I was undereducated.
“Wait here. The room is warded,” I whispered to Peter, then sent the Stone’s power out over the floor of the room. The intent of the writing seemed to be in taking whatever magical power it found and changing it to light and fire. Any magical energy would set it off. It was very volatile. If I had tried anything on Yaeger, even from the hall, the ward would have set off and I wasn’t sure exactly how badly it would ignite. There were several firearms in the other rooms. There was no telling what could have been buried in some of those closets.
Faraday cages are a specialty of mine, so I encapsulated myself and moved gingerly and silently into the room. Holding the Night before me like a dowsing rod, I searched for the beginning of the ward while keeping an eye on the rocking Yaeger. It wasn’t that hard to find the old bloodstain at the front door. Pushing the tip of the rapier into the floorboards disrupted the faint trails, almost a vapor trail of ions in a magnetic chamber. Then I turned to face my dilemma.
Yaeger was an emotional wreck. He deserved to die, he really did. He deserved it as much as those five men at Dunstan’s that I flash-fried when I found out about the girls at the school. He deserved it as much as the Rat Bastard did. But as I stood in front of him watching what went on in his mind and seeing the torment that Dieter induced, I could do nothing.
Somehow, Dieter had tied the emotions of Hans and the Morgans together as one and force-fed it to the old man repeatedly for the last eight days. Yaeger’s only relief came when he was told to do something. He knew that Dieter wasn’t Dieter anymore, somehow.
“Please bring Dieter back to me,” he whispered hoarsely, looking up at me, his pale blue eyes meeting mine for the first time. I couldn’t tell if he actually knew I was there. “Please, he’s all I have left.” He wasn’t even a ghost of the man in the pictures.
I decided he wasn’t actually seeing me. Then I cut the spell that looped in his head loose. Falling back on the same logic that Peter had used with Jimmy, I blocked the content of the Morgan’s memories from him. The relief was immediately obvious—he relaxed into exhaustion, falling limply back into the couch. I waved Peter and Jimmy into the room.
“What happened?” Peter asked quietly as he came into the sparsely furnished room. He went to the front windows first, peeking out the sheer curtains at the front and far side. Jimmy went to the closer windows behind the couch and looked out, not speaking.
“I believe we found our blood mage,” I said distastefully. “The man that just left is this one’s son, Dieter, sort of.” Jimmy’s head snapped around then, surprised. “There’s something else controlling or influencing him. Did the same to his older brother, Hans. Committed all sorts of atrocities. It’s been tormenting him for a while with some tremendously nasty memories for the last week. I cut the puppeteer’s strings.”
“Please bring Dieter back to me,” Yaeger whispered, barely audibly.
I pushed Yaeger over into sleep, hoping I wasn’t making a mistake. Maybe I should take a more humane route. The man was insane in ways I couldn’t begin to understand. I had a better chance of understanding Ethan’s natural form than reforming Yaeger’s mind. Maybe I should put him out of his misery…
“We need to move,” Peter said, cracking the front door open and peeking out. “Forget about him for now.”
I nodded and he slipped out the front. Jimmy was right behind me as I followed Peter out the door, jumping lightly over the porch railing to the ground. The three of us ran crouched along the side of the house, stopping halfway. The command tent sat thirty feet straight ahead of us, a dark blotch in the moonlight. A sentry appeared on the left side, scanning the area. We held our breath as he panned over the house, looking straight through us, then past us, turning and com
pleting his circuit to the other side of the tent.
We ran again. We had between eight and ten seconds before the right side sentry would come around and walk this side. He was right on schedule at eight seconds, walking past us as we huddled nervously between the guy wires of the tent. Peter searched the surface of the canvas while Jimmy and I watched the sentry turn and come back toward us. I was tense and ready to attack the man if he showed the slightest awareness of us as he passed for the second time, relaxing only when he turned again around the corner, satisfied that nothing was amiss.
Peter slit the canvas with a pocketknife and peered through the small hole, then he yanked us inside. Instead of hiding us, he veiled us this time, disguising us in uniforms like the twelve men and women in the tent. No names or insignia adorned us and our faces were obscured. Jimmy and I followed Peter to an empty row of clamshell terminals and sat down, bringing them to life as we perused the room.
There were two rows of four computer terminals on each side of the aisle running down the middle of the tent. They took most of the back half of the tent. At the front was a large map of Madison County with parts of the neighboring counties on either side. Two older men leaned over a folding table staring down at another set of maps. The oldest man faced our direction and was scowling down at the table, obviously irritated. On the right, a man and a woman operated small radio equipment and were engrossed in whatever noise happened over the headphones they wore.
One man stood to the side, watching the two men, an aide I assumed, waiting for his next command. A sentry stood at the tent flap facing out. The remaining six men sat on the first row of computers, three to a side. We sat behind one set, slouching. Touching one of the computer user’s mind, I pulled a log-in and password out. I picked different men for Peter and Jimmy and all three of us were immersed in a military computer in seconds. Of course, all I could do was stare as satellite pictures blossomed onto the screen, mimicking the pictures that the guy in front of me saw. I began to see landmarks on the ground and I recognized the landscape suddenly, mostly from the terrain maps earlier today.
Sons (Book 2) Page 20