by WL Flinn
I galloped to catch up to Penny and Kaylee. We got to one of the escape cars and I shifted. Kaylee followed my example and shifted too. At least this time we left the doors unlocked. I dove into the back and started throwing sweatshirts and sweats out at her. They would be way too big for her, but they were better than nothing.
Cal and three others came running up. “Load up!” Cal exclaimed. We got in and Penny laid across Kaylee’s lap. She really was the comforter-in-chief.
“Can you hear me now?”
“Yes, shifting seemed to fix it. I never shifted in there.”
“So, they don’t know you are a panther?” Cal looked into the rearview mirror at her.
She shook her head. “Unless they somehow knew before they took me, they haven’t seen me shift.”
“I wonder how they knew you were magical?”
She looked down at her feet instead of talking to me. “I was on the web. I didn’t say what I was, but I did say I was magical.”
“Hey, girl, that does not make it your fault. It means there are creeps out there. This isn’t your fault.”
“Hey Cal, I think we need to stock flip flops in the car too. And you have to restock the clothes.”
The other two team members exchanged five dollars. He looked at me in the mirror. “There was a pool going on whether or not you could keep your clothes on.”
One of the two, Gregory I think smiled. “You know for an old chick you sure like strutting around naked a lot.”
That even made Kaylee laugh. The one who lost the money, Ken? said, “Yeah, you would expect an old lady to be able to keep her clothes on. Sheesh, I gotta protect my eyes.”
“Hey, the girls gotta be free.” I smiled and pushed out my chest. Deep inside I was humiliated they had seen me, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Kaylee turned bright red and buried her face in Penny’s fur. I smiled at the two guys, grateful for their cutting up.
We pulled into the parking lot. I grabbed her hand. “Honey, welcome to our home away from home.”
“Hey Cal, I have an idea.” I ran up to him. We had already debriefed the group. The mission wen great. No one was seriously injured on our side, just a few cuts and bruises and zaps from energy balls. Kaylee was back and her parents were thrilled.
“What are you thinking?”
“I think we need to get our girls, the ones we rescued, together so they can talk about their experiences.”
“Talk? You mean like group therapy?” He seemed to strangle on the words. His face paled and he shifted from foot to foot. “Why would we want to do that?”
I gave him my best mom look. “Really? Why would a bunch of young women want to talk about being kidnapped with each other?”
He sighed and raised his eyes to the heavens. He may have mumbled something about pushy women. “Where would you want to do this?”
Smiling I held out my arms. “Here. People seem comfortable here. Do we have any social workers or anything like that?”
A pained look crossed his face. “Social workers? I’m a man. We don’t discuss feelings.” He stopped and looked at my face. “You aren’t going to go away about this are you?”
“Not really. These girls have been through a lot. They need each other. They need help. I know we sent our rape victims to therapy when I was at the State Attorney’s Office.”
“Don’t say that word.”
“What word?” I looked at him confused.
“Rape,” he said quietly. “I just can’t think about that.”
I looked at the big, tough leader of our group. He had been willing to help fix broken bones, hold dying teammates, but couldn’t face what happened to our girls. I touched his arm. “That’s exactly why they need our help. They need to know that we don’t see them as victims. They need to know we love them and what happened doesn’t change who they are in our lives. They can’t be damaged goods in our lives.”
“But, they—”
“Stop right there.” I held my finger up to his nose. “I don’t want to hear another word out of you on this subject. These girls deserved to be treated as the jewels they are, not as the damaged goods that some of you see them. Make sure everyone knows that.” I turned on my heel and stormed off. No one was going to treat these girls differently.
I stomped into the main room. Jim looked up at me. “You okay?”
“Just peachy. Can I use a computer and printer?”
He pointed me to a work station. “Have at it.”
In a couple of minutes, I was walking around with ugly flyers announcing a girls’ chat group which would meet every week. I would have to make an announcement on the web sometime too.
“Hey Jim,” I called. I jogged up to him. He looked at the flyers.
“Do we have a computer geek among us?”
He looked around at the people gathered. “No one here has any special skills that I know of except for George, but he still has a real job.”
“Okay. I will take care of it.” He shook his head and waved as he walked off. “You don’t mess with a woman on a mission,” he mumbled under his breath.
I got to the house and opened the door. “Hey Rusty, how would you like to earn my undying love?”
“I would rather earn your cold, hard cash.” He poked his head off the sofa. “Video games aren’t free you know.”
“Don’t I know it. I have the Visa bill to prove it.”
“So, what do you need, Mom?” He picked up his video controller and the action game started up again. It gave me the chills as the gunfire looked way too familiar.
“I need a Facebook and a regular bulletin board in a safe place for magical people to go.”
“I already have been thinking of that for SallyAnn and her friends. I thought of a way we can code users on Facebook so we are still using their platform, but with just a little tweak we end up with our own group no one else can see or join. It won’t be that hard to do if you want me to do it. The technology is so old no one will even think to look there.”
Shocked, I sat down on the sofa with him. “You already thought about this?”
“Well yeah, Mom. You guys need a way to communicate. The computer is the easiest way unless someone has magicked some communicators into creation.”
I laughed and shook my head no. He got up and walked over to his computer. His was the biggest and most powerful of the three of ours. I knew he liked playing on it. So, I was always willing to buy him extras for it.
He sat down in front of the keyboard. He turned on Facebook and it opened to his page. Nothing looked any different. He sighed heavily.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Here, you try it.” He got out of the seat and let me log in. When the opening page came up the page was purple. A line showed up in the middle. “If you have had the Sickness and can read this, welcome to Facebook for Magicals. Click here.” I pushed the button and my normal friends showed up, but I also had friend suggestions I knew were magical people.
I turned in my seat and gave Rusty a big hug. “This is awesome! Exactly what I was looking for! Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome, Ma. I wanted to do something to help out.” He left the words out about him not being magical, but I could hear the longing in his voice.
“You know, not everyone who gets the Sickness gets magical powers.”
He didn’t respond. He started typing away and created a page for the Houdini Community Center.
“Harry Houdini Community Center?” I asked.
“Well, you can’t name it after the BlackHats. That would just be inviting trouble. We can’t call it the Center for Magicals for the same reason. I didn’t want to use Gandalf or Merlin or Dumbledore. So, I ended up with Houdini. It is just a working name. The real magicals can come up with their own name.”
My eyes teared up. “I have never been more proud of you than I am now.”
We got down to work. Well, Rusty created what I told him. We invited all the
girls we rescued to the weekly get togethers.
“You need basketball.” Rusty interrupted his own typing. “Basketball always brings in teens. We are drawn like moths to flames. All this other stuff is for chicks. The guys gotta have equal time. Is there a parking lot?” I nodded. “Perfect, then we can play hoops.”
“Hmmm. Maybe we need to make a wish list. So you want a couple of hoops and some balls. We are in Florida, so we need soccer balls too.”
A few days later, I had Rusty and SallyAnn help me bring in all the supplies I could rustle up. I had gone to a couple of yard sales and picked up some backboards and some basketballs that were still in pretty good shape. I also found some of those colored vests you throw on one team so you could tell one team from the other.
“What the hell is all this?” Cal came stomping up to me. He looked at the overstuffed duffel bags. Rusty was wheeling a basketball goal.
“This is the start of the Harry Houdini Community Center.” I pointed to the bags. “We offer young magicals a place to go for basketball and soccer and to just hang out.”
“But this is where we meet, not some teenagers,” he blustered. He tried to step into my path and I walked around him. “We don’t need kids here getting in our way.”
I pointed to a spot for the kids to put the bags down and go get the rest. A guy saw Rusty wheeling the portable goal in and came over to give him a hand. “This is cool. We could use this.” He grabbed the end and helped Rusty take it a good spot in the parking lot.
I turned to Cal. “Have you seen the news?” I looked him in the eye. I may only be five-foot-five, but I stood toe-to-toe with his six-foot-three frame. “These kids have got nowhere safe to go. They have to worry about people attacking them over what they are. Over something they have no control over. Heck, they have to worry if they are going to get thrown out of their homes because they developed magic. Are you going to deny them this?” I took a deep breath and made sure he was looking at me. “I dare you to say no.”
He stood frozen. His nostrils were flared in anger and his hands began to glow. “Who are you to presume you have any say here?”
“I’m a mom. Yes, I am going to presume that I have a say here. I am the lady, the mother, the chick, that cares that each and every one of these kids knows what it is like to have a safe place. Now stick that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Cal grabbed my arm. His hands were hot from the flames. Part of my brain wondered if he could set my shirt on fire. “This is my base, for my people. This is not a community center for rug rats. We don’t have time for this crap.”
Someone blew a whistle and we both turned. Rusty and five other guys were playing a game of three on three. Rusty took aim and shot the ball. A guy I knew had telekinetic powers guided the ball into the hoop. “Nothing but net,” the guy yelled.
All the guys started laughing and clapping each other on the back. The ball was in-bounded and a wind elemental blew a pass away from a player’s outstretched hands. “Hey, that’s cheating!”
“If he can do that, I can do this,” another player said. The player with the ball was suddenly standing on a patch of ice and he went down hard. All the players brought out their best tricks. A crowd gathered and cheered for their favorite team. I even saw a few bets being placed.
I turned back to Cal with a smile. “That is why we need this. We need to be a family. That is what has been missing in all this.” Laughter and hoots came from the game. I looked up at Cal pleadingly. Maybe I needed this more than I realized.
He watched the game deteriorate into a magical free-for-all. I prayed Rusty would keep his head down, but so far he was laughing and holding his own.
Cal looked back at me. “This is a great way to bring meaning to magical practice. We can drill and have contests. This has promise.” He stood and stared at the guys. “We can work with this,” he mused.
It wasn’t what I was envisioning, but it was a start.
“We also need self-defense training for everyone.” I looked at Rusty and realized even as a non-magical, his connection to me might cause problem.
“Agreed. Set up the classes. Talk to Jim about it.”
The Sickness continued to ravage America. More than 800,000 people had died. Since many states had been locked down for nearly a year, people were getting tired of everything. It was being called Pandemic Fatigue. We were lucky here in Florida. We weren’t locked down too hard. We could still go to the community center. We could go out for exercise. The schools had even opened up partially. It made it easier for Ashe and me to get hired for our PI jobs.
Ashe had her feet up on the desk. “We have another wife not trusting her husband.” She flipped to the next message. “We have a husband not trusting his wife.”
I snorted. “Do they happen to be married to each other?”
She laughed but double checked to make the names and addresses didn’t match. “We’re good so far.” She took a deep breath. “But there is something that I was thinking. I think we need to be doing more.”
“You mean more than finding where John is dipping his wick?” I ran my hand through my hair. “I know what you mean. This just seems so meaningless.”
“So, what do you think we need to do? I just feel kind of lost and useless.”
I sat there with my mug of coffee. “I am sure finding Mrs. Shay’s dog, Fluffy, is important. But I feel like we are just meant for more.” The steam from the coffee curled up. “Can we reinvent ourselves now?”
Ashe looked at me. “Really? I think we have been reinvented without our choice due to the Sickness. Now we have to take advantage of it. I say we go back to doing what we do best.”
“Eating chocolate?”
“Okay, what we do second best,” Ashe amended. “Let’s get back to the streets and helping our people.”
“How are we going to support ourselves?” I asked. “I do have two kids to support and a mortgage.”
“We will still have to take some cases that are mundane, but the majority of them need to be to help people.”
So, we got into our gear for the evening. I wore my sweats and cheap sneakers in case I needed to shift. Ashe, of course, looked great in a pair of running shorts and tank top.
“How come you get to keep your clothes?” I whined.
Ashe flipped her long hair over her shoulder. “Because I am special.”
We laughed and had Penny get into the car. She jumped up in the back seat.
It seemed the city had changed in the past few months. There were now people holding signs up at some of the street corners. “Magic needs to be imprisoned,” “Go home,” and other sayings.
“I have seen things on Facebook, but I hadn’t realized it was getting this bad,” I said.
We walked down the street side-by-side. Two twenty-something males dressed in the combat fatigues stood with assault rifles across their chests. They had a badge on their shoulder that showed the American flag and a DNA strand on it. One of them touched the brim of his cap. “Ladies.”
Ashe looked him up down. “What’s with the costume? Is it Halloween and I missed it?”
“Oh no, ma’am,” he stammered. “We are here to protect the peace.”
Ashe and I looked around. There was the normal crowd of college kids and drinkers at the bars on the beach, but we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“So, what peace are you protecting?” I asked him. I knew he would answer Ashe faster. That danged tank top worked every time.
He stared at her chest. “Ma’am we’re here to protect lovely women like you from those heathens who have had the Sickness. We can’t have them exposing our city to their unholy ways.” He leaned down conspiratorially. “We hear they eat children.”
I fanned myself with my hand. “I do declare,” I said in my best impression of Scarlett O’Hara.
Assuming I was urging him on, the guy said, “These people don’t know nothing about God. They worship the devil and sacrifice children. We can’t have
them in our city. It isn’t natural.”
I grabbed him up by the cajones and he inhaled sharply. “Listen fella, the people that got the Sickness are just that, people. They didn’t ask for it. They didn’t plan on it. They may have even lost their job because of jerks like you. So why don’t you show me something about the love of God and get the flip off my street.” I gave the “boys” an extra hard squeeze. The kid gulped.
“You’re one of them?” he sneered. “You should be shot where you stand.”
“I could just twist your balls off right now if you like. That is not how you speak to a lady.”
For good measure Ashe flashed him her long fangs. “Get off our street.” The jerk’s face paled at the sight of her fangs. “Boo.”
I unhanded the guy’s crotch and the two guys took off running. “Well that was fun.” Ashe laughed.
“I think we need to define our territory. An area where magicals know they are safe. How does a gang even decide what its territory is going to be?”
I had let myself do a partial shift in case I needed to do a full shift in a hurry. So, I heard Penny pipe up. The beach. I want the beach in our territory.
As we walked down the strip, we saw Jim and Cal coming our way. I waved. “Fancy meeting you here.”
The guys came up. “Hey ladies,” Jim said tipping an imaginary hat. “Nice to see you out. What are you doing?”
Ashe and I looked at each other. Neither one of us one to fess up to looking for magical trouble. “Just looking for a place to get a drink on a lovely night,” Ashe said quickly.
Cal looked at us skeptically. “Just out here late at night, thinking about a drink?”
“Yep, that’s us. Always looking for the perfect Kahlua and cream,” I said nudging him. I made sure my arms were nice and clear with no fuzz.
Jim grabbed Ashe by the arm. He flashed her a smile that showed all his perfect, white teeth and even the dimple on his left cheek. “You are in luck. There is a great little place not far from here.” He pointed down the road and guided us toward a small cafe with outdoor seating. Of course, everything had outdoor seating since the Sickness, indoor seating was limited capacity.