by Jamie Davis
“But we barely escaped Kane the last time. I don’t want anyone else to be hurt or die following my orders. I can’t take that again.”
“Cait died trying to do something she believed in. She followed you because you were the leader, but she really followed your cause. She died doing the right thing.”
Elaine paused searching for words to soothe her daughter’s wounded soul. Then she swallowed and went right on doing what she’d always done.
“So many people have died because of Kane. Most of them died for his greed and pride. You have given people something better to risk their lives for. You’ve given them hope for a better tomorrow, and for a better planet to spend it on. I’m so proud of you for that.”
“But you’ve never liked the things I’ve done since the shop was shut down. You made it clear I was doing the wrong thing. On several occasions.”
“And I was wrong.” Elaine surprised herself. “Wrong, Winnie. I see that now. Everything you did for the past year and a half, you did it to help me and others you care about. There is nothing wrong with doing what must be done to help others.”
“It’s never been enough, though. There’s always one more thing I have to do. I’m so tired of it all.”
“I know. But now, more than ever before, you have people who will stand behind and beside you. Especially me.”
Elaine smiled. Winnie almost looked like a mirror to her past.
“That’s better,” Elaine said.
“Why are you here?”
“Maybe it’s because I see you working towards something bigger than either of us. I’ve also been feeling better than I have in years, ever since I started helping with the twins. You know I haven’t been taking my medicine for a few weeks now?”
“I didn’t know that. Did we run out? I’m sure I can get Cricket or one of the others to find a supply. Your rheumatoid is crippling without it.”
“Maybe not,” Elaine said. “I’ve been able to help some of the others learn what the twins are doing. Some of what they’re doing with their flows … I think I can replicate some of it. My hands are too twisted for the most intricate work, but I can definitely handle much of it.”
“That’s wonderful, Mom! It’s been years since you’ve been able to do more than the simplest magic.”
“I agree. And it feels right, like I’m finally working in the right direction, if that makes any sense.”
Winnie reached out and took her mother’s gnarled hands.
She let her look, though Elaine was normally self-conscious about them. She enjoyed feeling her daughter’s gentle touch as she turned them over, pressing them between her warm palms.
“They look different. Have you noticed that your fingers have straightened some?”
“Maybe a little.” Elaine had thought it might be a result of her exercises.
“We should look into this. Maybe there are some healing properties to the twins’ magic. And if that’s true, perhaps that magic can heal the world.”
Winnie’s earlier sorrow was swapped by her sudden enthusiasm at possibly discovering something new. Her eyes seemed to get ten times brighter.
Elaine waited for Winnie’s wheels to finish turning. This was the inquisitive daughter she remembered. The one who always tried new things, and experimented with new ways to use her magic in and around the shop.
It was wonderful to see that sparkle back in her eyes.
“Winnie, I’ll show you some of what I’ve been working on with Jacob and Fiona. Those kids are remarkable. They don’t know what they can’t do, so they assume they can just do anything.” Elaine smiled, reached up to brush a stray stand of hair from Winnie’s face. “Reminds me of you when you were younger. You never took no for an answer, and if I told you that something couldn’t be done, you usually found a way to prove me wrong.”
“I can’t wait to get back to the Pike and see what you’ve learned and what they can do. I’ve been so preoccupied with planning.” Winnie took her mother’s hand and smiled at her. “I’m so glad we had some time to talk. It’s the first thing that’s felt normal in a long time.”
Elaine smiled and nodded. She started to pull her daughter into a hug, but Winnie stopped her.
“I have to know one thing more, Mom. Something Kane told me in his office. I’ve tried to find a way to bring it up, but the words don’t come.”
“Just ask me, Winnie.”
“Kane called me his daughter. I thought maybe he was trying to get into my head and stall me with another lie. But it isn’t a trick, is it?”
Elaine froze.
She’d wanted to tell Winnie about her father for so long.
But every time she considered it, Kane would crack down on chanters with another resolution from the Assembly, or say something awful about chanters in the news.
She’d never had the courage to tell Winnie that her father was a monster.
“I knew him a long time ago when he wasn’t as—driven as he is now. By the time I realized how twisted he really was, it was too late. I was already pregnant, even though I didn’t know it. Then he disappeared. I met Morgan’s father and it made sense to let you think that he was your father, too.”
Elaine paused, looked at her daughter, eyes pleading. “Do you hate me for not telling you?”
“I should. And I’m angry that I had to find out the way I did.” Winnie turned her eyes to the sunset.
Elaine gently took her arm and pulled her back around. “I did the best I could do with the little I knew. For years, I thought your father was dead. By the time he showed up on the national scene, as an assistant director at the Department of Magical Containment, you already thought of Morgan’s dad as your own. It was too late to go back. I never expected any of this to happen, or for you to directly confront Kane.”
“You should have found a way to tell me. I deserved better.”
“If I had it to do over, of course I would do it differently. Better,” Elaine said. “But right now all I can say is I’m sorry.”
Before Winnie could answer, a voice from the house interrupted.
“Dinner!” Danny yelled into the garage. “You two should eat.”
“Be right there.” Winnie looked at Elaine. “We should eat, then rest. We’re leaving for the Pike before sunrise.”
“Lead the way,” Elaine said.
Despite the awkward moment, it felt right to say those words to Winnie.
Elaine was behind her now, in a way she’d never been.
This young woman had taken on the world and won every hard fight so far.
She was worthy of being followed.
CHAPTER 3
Maria DeSantos raised her glass before taking a sip.
“Here’s to being out from under that bastard Kane’s thumb,” she said. “I swear Artos, you have no idea what it was like working for a monster like that every day for a decade.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my dear. I knew or suspected who and what he was capable of the entire time. That’s why I trained you for the job.”
“You should have let me put a bullet in his brain years ago.”
“We would have created a martyr. Then someone else would have claimed his cause and adopted his secrets. I couldn’t risk an unknown person discovering what Kane knew and using that knowledge against us.”
“You know best, I suppose.” Maria sat in a comfortable leather-bound chair. “Unfortunately, there’s no way to know what he’s up to now. We’re moving blind.”
“Which is why we must work quickly to expose him: undermine his authority as soon as possible.”
“You have a plan for that, too, I’m sure.”
“Nothing that has my full confidence.” Artos sighed. “Nils Kane has stayed a step ahead of us, despite the information you managed to slip to me. He knows we’ll do something to expose him. I want to move quickly to discredit him but—”
“You’re afraid we’ll release something that he’ll be ready to counter. He has people ever
ywhere in the media. If we put out a random video somewhere, or leak some of what we have to sources in the news, he’ll assert his control to either discredit or crush it.”
“Exactly,” Artos said.
“I don’t suppose your Winnie Durham can work some sort of magical solution, so that the information appears everywhere at once?”
“Magic like that would take more power that any one individual has ever possessed. Not even Winnie could ever hope to do something like that.”
“That sword has power. Can’t that be used in some way?” Maria asked.
“It’s a powerful talisman, but even I don’t know its full powers or purpose. I thought Winnie was supposed to return it to the Fae, and that they would take it from there. But apparently the Fae have other plans.”
“I could assemble a strike team and raid the State Media’s central broadcast headquarters. We’d have a limited window, but we could use the nation’s emergency broadcast systems to distribute the video evidence all at once.”
“I imagine that Kane would expect something like that,” Artos said. “You might be able to fight your way in, but you’d never get yourself or your team back out again. It would be suicide. Your face is plastered in every police station around the country right now. You’re public enemy number two, right behind Winnie.”
“You’re right.” Maria sipped her bourbon and considered the problem.
Artos was a devious character, but he didn’t hold a candle to what she was capable of. He was too old school. Set in his ways.
It was time to start over.
“Maybe we’re going about this in the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?” Artos asked. “If we don’t expose Kane quickly he’ll surely counterattack with everything he’s got. We have to discredit him.”
“Let’s start over. Look at this from a fresh perspective.”
“I’m listening,” Artos said.
Maria stood, went to the bar, and poured herself some more bourbon. She sipped, organizing the problem in her mind.
“We have video proof that Kane is a powerful chanter.”
“Agreed … ” Artos said.
“We have him admitting his deception in his own words.” Maria paced, ticking off points. “We need to show Kane doing the very thing he’s blamed chanters of over and over; expose him as the hypocrite he is. We need to show how his actions hurt everyone—not just chanters, but everyone.”
“Go on … ”
“I think I know what we can do, but it’s going to be expensive. We can’t trust that this will go viral on its own. We have to push it ourselves. And that won’t be cheap.”
“With the right message, I can get Winnie to lean on the other bosses, get them to pitch in.”
“This is the right message,” Maria said, smiling. “The one that will change everything.”
“Then let’s get to work.” It had been a while, but Artos finally smiled. “Tell me what you need and I’ll gather the resources for you.”
Maria smirked, knowing exactly how much Kane was going to hate this.
———
Nils Kane slapped a palm on his desk.
The Red Leg security captain and the senior chief inspector jumped in their chairs.
“How can the woman just slip through your fingers like that?” Kane let his fury wash over them. “You not only let Winnie Durham escape the building with illegal video surveillance footage from within my office and a very valuable artifact from my personal collection, but you failed to find out that my secretary was plotting against me.”
“Sir,” the security captain said, “I assure you, I’ve gone back over every aspect of Maria DeSantos’s background and security checks over the last ten years since she started working for you. There are no red flags. It’s like she decided to stage this coup at the last minute.”
“Except she didn’t stage this at the last minute, did she, Captain? She had security teams of her own in place within the building’s forces. That doesn’t happen overnight. How did they pass your security oversight?”
“There’s no excuse for the lapse, sir. I can only tell you that we’ve been unable to find any evidence that would’ve flagged any of these individuals beforehand.”
Kane paused, letting the men squirm before fixing his gaze on the inspector.
“And you … you’re supposed to be the one person who can lock down this capital so that no one gets in or out without your say-so. And yet Durham and her entire band left as though it was nothing, with all of the traitors marching behind her.”
“It seems, sir, that they compromised the internal systems to escape the building. Knowledge of our search patterns and resources probably let them slip past any dragnet we put in place to catch them.”
“Maybe they’re still inside the city, sir,” the security captain suggested. “If they never left then that could explain why we haven’t caught them.”
“We know they got out of the city,” the inspector said, countering his colleague’s suggestion. “My team has video of Durham and several others leaving a train in Baltimore just after midnight the day after the raid.”
“Were you able to follow up on the Baltimore lead, inspector?”
“We didn’t know about it immediately, sir,” the chief inspector replied. “It took us 48 hours to hack into the Baltimore field office after we discovered Victor Holmes’s part in all of this. It seems that officer Morgan Bennett was part of the ploy to infiltrate the capital as well. She created a lockout program from her workstation in Baltimore that foiled the facial recognition programs. By the time we managed to run them, all the evidence and trace of their passage was too cold for a follow-up.”
“So we have nothing to show for the enemy’s assault on our headquarters.” Kane said. “Nothing at all?”
“We know they have the video footage you told us about,” the chief inspector continued. “And we’ve implemented an ongoing search on the Internet to purge viral sharing of anything with your face or name. We’ve also contacted producers and publishers in all the major outlets to be on the lookout for anonymous submissions, and to pull them from rotation should they appear.”
“So you’re confident there’s no way for them to release this footage in the normal media or Internet channels.”
“That’s correct, sir. It’s all locked down.”
CHAPTER 4
Winnie sat eating breakfast with Danny, listening intently to the conversations all around her. They were back at the Pike, the entire team still reveling in last week’s success. Two of Garraldi’s security team members—a man and a woman—sat one table over, oblivious to Winnie.
“I’m telling you, the boss knew all along what was going to happen,” said the man. “That’s why she had the backup security team in place.”
“Then why didn’t she tell us about the trap if she knew all along?” the woman countered. “She could’ve told us there was a backup.”
“Then she would have exposed her forces on the inside,” the man insisted.
“It was a closer call then we needed. We almost got caught, and then where would we be? In those camps with everyone else, or worse.”
“Well I’d rather be on the boss’s side than against her. I’m telling you, there’s more to her than meets the eye.”
“You’re sweet on her,” said the woman. “She’s a cute girl and so you’ll follow her like a dog.”
“What’s your excuse? You’re still here. And I’ve heard you telling everyone how you’d follow her through Hell and back.”
“That’s because I judge her based on ability, grit, and determination. Winnie gets the job done and respects all of us enough to let us do our jobs, too. That’s why. Come on; we’re finished here. It’s time to work. Garraldi will have our hides if the weapons locker goes unchecked this morning.”
The woman picked up her tray and the man joined her, both of them taking their trays to the kitchen. Winnie watched them go.
She shook
her head and Danny laughed.
“Don’t get upset, Win. They’d do anything you asked. That’s a good thing.”
“It makes me uncomfortable. Everyone is relying on me to know what to do next, believing that I’ll just manage to keep us all safe. I wonder what they’d say if I told them I’ve been making it all up as I go along.”
“They’d probably be impressed with your instincts,” Danny said. “Seriously, Winnie, accept the accolades. You’re this team’s leader and we need to believe in you. For this to work, you need to believe in you, too.”
“We don’t have time for that. We have to take Kane down. I’ve been waiting for Artos to send me word on his big plan to discredit Kane. But it’s been five days since the raid and I haven’t heard a thing.”
“Patience, Winnie. He’s never let us down before. He’ll be in touch soon.”
Garraldi and Tris entered the large garage bay they used as a cafeteria and meeting room.
“Hey, guys,” Winnie said. “Have you already eaten?”
“We ate earlier,” Tris said. “We came to tell you that someone just passed the park’s outer gates. She knew the passcode, but the guard didn’t recognize her.”
“Is she headed this way?” Danny asked. “Should we be worried?”
Garraldi shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s probably a messenger.”
Winnie pushed her empty plate back and stood from the table. “Let’s go and see our visitor. It will be nice to have a new face to look at.”
Danny jumped up to join her and they both headed toward the exit. Garraldi and Tris fell in behind them. Garraldi motioned for a few of his security members to follow.
By the time Winnie and the others were standing in the lot outside the park’s maintenance building, she had a full security detail around her.
A blue sports car circled the lot on the far side then pulled up to the group waiting outside the building. The windows were tinted so Winnie couldn’t make out the driver’s face until the door opened.