Midnight Magic, page 118
She vigorously shook her head. “You didn’t do anything. When Nate was sixteen, he was running an errand for Chaya in Sweetwater. He saw your dad through the window at Mabel’s and knocked on it to get Zeb’s attention. You looked up from your waffles and it happened.”
I thought back to those early morning study sessions at the diner. “That had to be true love, then, since I am sure I looked a hot mess.” I tried to joke, and it fell flat. I went on: “I think I broke his heart this morning. I’m not a shifter, I need it to be real, not some voodoo magic thing.”
She had moved over to the coffee pot and hit the start button. “I don’t remember making a choice to fall in love with Moses. And that’s real.” I didn’t have an answer to that, so we stood in pained silence while I gathered my thoughts.
The coffee pot was very efficient, and she soon poured us both a cup. My heart’s need to explain itself clashed head on with my desire to know more about shifters.
“Solstice could imprint on someone else, though? I mean, I hope her life isn’t ruined because of me.”
Arielle pulled some cream out of the fridge. “How do you take your coffee, oh be all and end all?”
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, “I stammered. “I’m scared and I’m overwhelmed, and I have never felt like this, but come on, I have known Nate Sands for three days.”
“Nothing prepares you for this, I know. If she’s what you are worried about, don’t be. Solstice can totally fall in love. She’s more miffed than heartbroken.”
Moses stuck his head around the corner. “Dr Clementine, we have you set up in the north boardroom. We are about to have a meeting in the main one.”
I handed Victor back to his mother. “He looks great. Thanks for the coffee.”
I hurried into the office, which was chock full of my dad’s things, and shut the door. I did not want the next time I saw Nate to be in a crowded room.
I wished I’d added sugar to my coffee. I didn’t know where to begin sifting through my dad’s research. I decided I should make a notation in Victor’s chart, assuming my dad had a filing system mundane enough that I could figure it out.
It took a moment, but I found the file drawer labelled O-P. I had just found Palangyo, Victor Douglas. I was removing it when another file caught my eye.
The label in my dad’s rickety handwriting read “Project Bridge”. Remembering my dad’s exhortation to tell Nate to check under the bridge, I took the file.
A series of receipts labeled “Ore - Robert Grampus” spilled out. Every month, going back years, a payment of gold ore had gone to my stepfather. Even worse was what looked like a daily printout, replete with small photos of my mom. “JJG at work, 8:15 a.m., eyes on target.” Each entry had initials next to it. This repeated every hour of every day.
Fuck their meeting. Dr Clementine needed answers.
I stormed down the hall, clutching the file folder. Dramatically flinging the door open, I demanded, “What the hell is Operation Bridge, and why is my mother being targeted?” There were people down each side of the table all with printouts in front of them. Nate sat at in front of a white board where an agenda was written in bright red letters.
The red-headed warrior of the day before glanced nervously at Moses. When he gave her a gesture to go ahead, she spoke to me. "I am Captain Ferguson. My team has kept eyes on your mother around the clock at your father’s request.”
“For years? And why does it seem like your team has twenty different people on it?”
“My team takes short shifts. If Joyce resides in the same house as Bob, she is safe. It has never failed yet.”
I rolled my eyes. “You must not have gotten a very good look at Bob. He’s hardly a sturdy specimen. He spends all of his time in the basement counting his money!” This led to an awkward questioning glance between them.
“It’s not in the house,” Red hurriedly assured the others.
“No, it’s in the bank. He watches his accounts online. Still, that doesn’t make him bodyguard material. Has anyone seen her today? Volchok’s tigers could have her for all you know.”
Red and the others shook their heads resolutely. “No, they couldn’t. As long as she lives in the same house as Bob, no shifters can get near enough her to touch her. That’s why he was recruited by Dr. Jasper.”
“The other Dr. Jasper,” one of the others quickly amended.
I helped myself to a chair and slumped into it. “Let me get this straight. My dad recruited Bob and pays him to be married to my mother.”
“The plan was to get them to live together, but Joyce wouldn’t live with a man she wasn’t married to with her daughter in the house, so we had to up the payments.”
The others all turned to look at Red. This clearly wasn't something I was supposed to know.
“He’s a bear, isn’t he? Nate told me you guys think they stink.” One of the men seated at the table looked mightily offended. The others were embarrassed.
Nate buried his face in his hands and mumbled something.
“What did you say? I only have your basic human hearing. Is my dad going to have to pay one of you to marry me, too?”
Nate looked at me. “In simple terms…” he began, but I didn’t let him finish.
I smacked the table with my hand. “Oh, by all means, let’s not be complicated!”
“Troll.”
“I thought you were trolling me. Now what is my stepfather?”
“No,” Nate didn’t appear to be kidding. “Bob is a troll. They smell so horrible that they make shifters physically ill. Anyone who lives with one is impossible for us to be around.”
The words I was about to say were, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. What’s next, unicorns?” The words that I actually said, with a comprehending whisper, were, “That’s why I had to live there while I was in college…”
Everyone around the table nodded.
“When are we going to get my dad?” I asked with a lump in my throat.
“Soon,” answered Moses.
“I am coming.”
“No, you are not,” said Nate.
“Stop me,” I said with as much venom as I could muster.
“Clementine and I will be back shortly. Please continue the meeting.”
He rose, took my elbow, and summarily marched me out of the room.
“Do not think for one second that Zeb would ever forgive me if I put you in danger. Whether you care for me or not, that is simply not going to happen.”
“Of course, I care for you,” I hissed at him through clenched teeth. “This is a lot to spring on a person, Ignatius Sands.”
He chuckled. I wrapped my arms around his neck.
“I know you think it’s phony, but I truly do love you,” he whispered.
“I think I am definitely going to fall hopelessly in love with you, but you have to give me time to wrap my head around this.”
He kissed me. “I’ll wait.”
“Considering you think I smell so bad, it's funny how you can’t keep your hands off me,” I teased.
“You don’t smell bad now, “he answered.
“Wait, so how did you imprint on me if I smelled so terrible?”
“I wasn’t near you; it was through a window. Your dad had no idea that could even happen.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but I let him lead me into the room where I had been working.
“You see if there is anything in those files that could help us, and I’ll come back for you when it’s time.”
I could live with that. Picking up Victor’s file, I said, “I know you don’t want me to come, but it will be OK.”
He had shut the door behind him. I heard a heavy click. Nate had locked me in.
“Are you kidding me?” I pounded on the door, but it was stout wood and I got nowhere.
“You just blew me falling in love with you, asshole!”
I continued to yell at him for a few moments but got no response. I looked around the room. It was so packed with my dad’s stuff that it was hard to get an idea of what the room was like. His desk was shoved against a wall underneath a big, high window. I stacked a teetering pile of books on the desk and stood on them. The parking lot was emptying out of vehicles. I punched the window, but that only hurt my hand.
First step was to figure out how to get out of here. My stepstool of books wasn’t sturdy enough for me to stand on for long. I dramatically shoved the books off the desk. It took some finagling, but I pushed a file cabinet over, managed to topple it, and then slid it so that it sat solidly on top of the desk. The drawers slid open, and files and papers spilled out. I kicked them out of my way and climbed back up.
The window was bolted shut. A book seemed like an unlikely hammer, so I scrambled down and looked through things. Shuffling through the drawers of the desk, I found the basket of gold ore. It was softer than I had expected and wouldn’t break the glass. Feeling desperate, I yanked the drawer free and used it to smash the window. The glass splintered, but there was still a heavy-duty screen. I lay flat on the supine file cabinet and rustled around in the drawers, hoping to find some scissors. Nope. Trapped, I began to weep out of frustration, fear, and fury. With no choice but to wait for them to come back, I began to scoop the papers off
the floor and put them into piles. Anything that would keep me busy would do.
CHATPER NINETEEN - THE TURRETED TOWNCAR
I was in that weird undertow where your thoughts sort of swim around each other. Standing amidst my dad’s files, it hit me with sickening certainty. If Dr. Volchok were after my dad’s research, he would be trying to get those files. Even a genius like my dad can’t keep track of that much data in his head. But they hadn’t even tried to get to them.
My dad wasn’t the prize. My dad was the bait. I came fully awake. Pounding on the door, I yelled, “They want you guys! They know you will try to save him,” I shouted into what I knew was an empty building.
Nate didn’t answer his phone, which made sense. He might not have had pockets or even fingers at this point. I tried Al’s cell phone. Went straight to voicemail. I started to call Gordon and hung up when I tried to imagine how that conversation would go. There was only one person who could help me.
“I will come now,” Boris said.
There didn’t seem to be anything I could cut the screen with. Zeb has never run to handiwork, so it was unlikely he would have any sort of suitable tool in his desk. Frantically shuffling through the drawers, I found the jar with the teeth and claws.
I clutched my prize and climbed back up to the window. I found the biggest claw I could and, wire by wire, I was able to cut the screen. I was thankful for the shifters and their tributes. I was outside when Boris arrived.
We didn’t even say hello.
“We need a truck,” I said. He shook his head. “No, my, Clemka, we take my car.”
“But that’s silly. It’s a Town Car, and we need a truck.”
“Get in my car,” he stoutly insisted.
It was ridiculous, but my dad had told me to trust him, so I did.
“They are using my dad to lure the shifter warriors there.”
Boris nodded. This was not news to the stoic Russian.
I started to cry. “I don’t know how we will ever find them. Nate had his special forces locate them, but he didn’t tell me anything. He just left.” I aimed a hard kick at the glove box. This was becoming a habit.
Before my eyes, a metal grate rolled down over the windshield.
“What the he-”
“No kicking.” Boris thumped the glove box, and the armor rolled back up and off the windshield. Really, in the grand scheme of things, this was nothing compared to what I had experienced recently. If humans could become lions, why couldn’t Town Cars don armor?
“Did he give you a message for me?”
“No,” I began. “Wait, the rent will be late.”
Boris gave a nod and lowered the visor.
He began typing on a hidden keyboard.
“What are you doing?”
“I am finding the doctor. Is code.”
“What’s the code?”
“The rent is late.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Where the doctor is.”
“But if you could have just found him, why didn’t you tell Nate where he was?”
“Finding and getting out, not the same.” He didn’t look up from the keyboard.
I gave up and looked around the car. I had never been inside of it. I was examining a row of minute switches along the gearshift when the car suddenly speeded up, and with Boris’s hands nowhere near it, the turn signal came on.
Boris looked over his shoulder, as if he weren’t in fact driving the car, and reached into the back seat. I screamed and frantically grabbed the steering wheel. This left my compatriot puzzled. “You are doing, what?” he asked, exasperated.
“Oh, I don’t know, keeping us from ending up dead in a ditch,” I snapped.
Boris turned around and looked outside the windshield. “I see no ditches.”
The car changed lanes without Boris having a hand anywhere near the steering wheel.
“So, werewolves are a thing, my dad is James Bond, and now cars drive themselves,” I said with the quiet clarity of someone realizing that they are, in fact, insane.
Boris looked at me with genuine concern. “You are confused.”
“Truer words have never been spoken, my friend,” I answered.
The odometer suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree. A flashing number one appeared and then began to grow smaller.
“Are we almost there?”
“Da, yes, we are.”
“OK, perhaps we need to make a plan,” I said as the absurdity of the situation hit me. One portly man and one white-haired veterinarian in a pimped-out Town Car, going to face an army of tiger shifters.
Boris gave me an affectionate smile, the kind you give your cousin who isn’t very smart and doesn’t really get anyone’s jokes. He held up three fingers. As he watched the flashing number on the odometer grow smaller, he counted down, “Three, two, one.” As he said 'one', the back seat of the Town Car flipped over.
Where there had been pale, soft leather dented by the backsides of wealthy old people, there was now an armory. Boris leaned back and handed me what looked like a machine gun. It bore a long ammunition belt that contained hundreds of red feather-tipped darts. “Are these tranquilizers? Tigers are endangered. I'm not killing tigers.”
He nodded. “For you, the tranquilizers.” I noticed that the very large gun he lifted himself was clearly loaded with bullets.
“You don’t pace the floor all night in hard-soled slippers. You are working on guns after I go to bed!”
He nodded at the arsenal in the back seat with a sort of humble shrug. “Guns, yes, many guns.”
We were yet to discuss anything close to a plan. “So, we will park the car, then sneak in… and then what?” I asked.
The number one on the odometer was now nothing but a speck. The armor dropped over the windshield and the windows. I felt myself rise off my seat. I had been lifted into what was a turret. There was a slot perfectly sized for the end of my tranquilizer gun, and I could pivot in circles and shoot at 360 degrees.
Boris typed a code into a keypad above the driver’s window, and a new window slid down. This one had a perfectly sized hole to take the muzzle of his gun. He was wasting no time shooting at the large numbers of uniformed men running towards the car.
It took me a minute to figure out what the crazy ping! noises were. My little turret was being shot at, yet it was somehow bulletproof. I still winced every time I heard the noise, but the barrier seemed to hold.
“You shoot tigers,” Boris growled.
The Town Car plowed right through a guard station, and as we drove by, Boris managed to hit the two human guards. They both fell to their knees almost at once.
The car was gaining speed as we careened around a bend in the lane, and I shrieked at what met my horrified eyes.
There must have been dozens of snare traps set. As Nate’s forces had come through the area, many of them had been captured and now hung suspended in nets. I saw Moses dangling helplessly, unable to shift and no help at all against the tigers.
A shadow moving in the bushes caught my eye even as the car careened past. Rome had stayed in his human form. I realized why when I saw him reach out and cut the net surrounding Moses.
Moses landed lightly and immediately fought off the tiger that was bearing down upon Rome. It occurred to me that Rome was taking an incredible risk with his vulnerability. He would be stronger and faster in his cat form, but then he wouldn't be able to release his comrades.
The lone building had one door with a ramp. The driveway was lined with cages. There was no doubting the plans Dr. Volchok had for Nate and his colony. He was ready to capture them all.
Not all of Nate’s fighters had been taken, though. It was an all-out melee. I could see tigers, lions, and bears in a fight to the death.
I was astonished at the army of tigers. There were dozens of them. I was setting my sights on a very large tiger that had a lion pinned to the ground when a dark-maned lion appeared out of nowhere. It savaged the striped cat with a lethal paw. Only when the tiger was thrown off its victim did I realize that it had been fighting a lioness.
Because I was shooting tranquilizers and not bullets, I was not as afraid of friendly fire as I would have been otherwise. I was glad that Nate’s colony did not have any tigers. It made figuring out who was who a little easier.
I was thinking that perhaps this wasn’t the most ridiculous idea ever when, with a loud clang, Boris dropped out of the car. He was contained in some sort of metal capsule that was curled up like an armadillo. When his capsule reached the entryway, I saw him leap up and run towards the door with his gun drawn.
I tried to slow my breathing and concentrate. I needed to make it possible for Boris to get my dad. This meant that anyone who looked like they would try to stop him had a date with a red feather. As I knocked out every tiger I could see, the Town Car did a rapid turn and began to circle the small, windowless building.
