Demon Accords 05.5: Executable (2 page)

Mrs. Williams was looking through a
Burlington Free Press
, an empty bowl of oatmeal pushed to one side.  Aunt Ashling’s special cinnamon shaker caught my eye, tucked in among the salt, pepper, and regular table sugar dispensers.  That was interesting.

The girl, Sarah or Caeco or what have you, was polishing off a Woodsman special; three eggs, hash browns, four pieces of toast, bacon, and a short stack of pancakes.  It was my personal favorite, but it was a lot of food.  Wiping up the last of the egg yolk and maple syrup with a corner of toast, she made it look easy.  She was five-three, maybe five-four at best, and she’d just crammed in a two–thousand-calorie meal.

I dropped the keys on the edge of the table, but my aim was just a mite off.  The keys slipped toward the floor, and I automatically went to catch them.  Instead of metal, my hand encountered warm flesh.  I was holding the girl’s wrist, and she was holding the keys.  I let go like I had touched a wall outlet, the feeling of her flesh shocking to my own.

“Fast,” was all that I managed to say, obviously not referring to my wits.  My reflexes are pretty good, but she had beaten me to the catch by a country mile.  She regarded me for a moment before pocketing the keys and picking up her glass of chocolate milk.

“You play any sports?” I asked, making no progress in rebuilding my reputation for witty repartee.

She shook her head, adding, “Homeschooled.”

Which explained a whole bunch of things.  “Declan, could you get your aunt for us?  I think it’s time we settled our debt and headed on.  Lots to do today,” Mrs. Williams said.

I nodded and left the two to head back into the kitchen.  Time to get back to the stacks of dishes and away from the customers. 

“Aunt Ash, your new friends are asking for their bill,” I said.  My aunt was sipping a cup of tea and peering out the kitchen window at the big Rowan tree that gives our place its name.  She nodded and headed out, a gleam of curiosity in her eyes.

I finished the half-rack of clean dishes and was just starting a fresh batch when my aunt came back with a tray full of dirty dishes.  She set the whole thing down and then picked up the cinnamon shaker with a clean dish rag, crooking her finger at me to follow.

Safely tucked into her microscopic office, she used the towel to hold both ends of the shaker while she twisted it apart.  Hand carved from oak, the shaker was a little larger than a can of soda.  The top two-thirds held the cinnamon-sugar mixture and the bottom third held twenty-four miniature discs of wood, each cut from the same tree branch, the bark still on.  In fact, they had all come from a fresh-cut limb of the Rowan tree outside our dining room window.

Each disc had a separate figure carved into its face—a rune.

“We’ll draw five, we will. I’ll draw first, as I was first to meet the lasses, then you draw the next three, then I’ll pick last, got it?” she asked. 
This
was her area of expertise and she knew far more about it than I, so I would normally never question her, but I had a piece of information that she didn’t.

“Actually, I saw them coast into the parking lot when I was taking out the trash.  Not sure if that counts?”

“Did you lay eyes on the both of them then, or just the auto?”

Feeling my face flush, I nodded as I answered, “I saw them both.  Never saw the car before, so I was curious,” I added.  She studied me with bright blue eyes that matched my own, nodding after a moment.

“That changes it.  You draw one, I the next, then two for you and one last for me own.”

I closed my eyes and settled my mind, breathing in slowly through my nose and out through my mouth.  When I had wrestled my unruly brain into a modest semblance of calm, I reached my left hand into the container of rune cover discs.  As my fingers brushed the chips of wood, I pulled up the fresh memory of seeing the girl and her mother through the windshield of their car.  Seemingly of their own accord, my fingers found a tiny branch segment and picked it up.  I set it down on my aunt’s desktop before us and contemplated the rune scored into its surface.  It had an upside down mutated
F
on it, the twin horizontal lines jutting up at a diagonal rather than straight.

“Feoh reversed. Slavery or bondage,” Aunt Ashling intoned.  She reached into the wooden shaker bottom and pulled another rune.  It looked like a poorly drawn, lower-case
p
, with the vertical line extending up too high.  It was backward as well.

“The Thorn, also reversed.  Danger,” she said before giving me a nod.

I pulled out an
R
with sharply drawn angular lines.  It was right side up.

“Rad—a journey,” she said with a sharp nod to herself. 

My next rune looked like an hourglass that was missing its top line and turned on its side like a
C.
“Peor—female, hidden change.”

Aunt Ashling’s final draw was a simple line, an
I.

“Is, also called Ice.  Treachery,” she said, her tone dropping into instructor mode.  I already knew this, but I nodded anyway, waiting for her to pull her reading together.

“These two are on the run… fleeing captivity.  True danger stalks them.  The girl has a secret, or maybe she
is
the secret.  Hard to know. They’ve journeyed far,” she said, still studying the five runes lined up in front of us.

“The car’s plates were from Colorado, and there wasn’t a whole lot in it,” I noted.

She turned her head abruptly, auburn tresses swinging around her face as she locked her gaze onto mine.

“Make no mistake, Declan me lad, these ladies are not fleeing some abusive husband or father.  There is something uncanny about them, something more than a wee bit off,” she warned.

“I touched the girl’s wrist, Aunt Ash, by accident.  I hadn’t wiped off my hand and still had Cen drawn on it.  I got the weirdest flash from her, real short and sharp.  It wasn’t the sort of thing I’ve ever gotten off a person, more like the feel of tech.”

She cocked her head to one side, eyebrows up in question.

“I can’t really explain it.  Kinda like a computer or smartphone, but not.  I don’t know… just weird.”

She looked worried.  “Declan, the girl’s to start at your school tomorrow.  I think you should keep an eye on her and maybe, if she needs it, help her out,” she said, sounding a bit uncertain.

“Help her out?  With what?  How much help? And just who are you and what have you done with my aunt?” I asked, blown away by the direction she was taking.

She smiled a thin, pressed-lip kind of smile.  “I know I’ve hounded ye to keep your head down and all.  But when we’re called to help, then help we must!”

Despite her constant preaching about flying under the radar, I knew my aunt had used her own gifts to help innocents from time to time.  It was how she had met her partner, Darci.  She had found a lost boy twelve years ago who would most likely have died of exposure to harsh Vermont weather. His searchers had been looking in all the wrong areas.  Since then, she had helped a number of other times, working through Darci and her fellow deputies.  A couple of missing college kids on a hike, a child kidnapped by her estranged father, and one runaway all owed their safety to my aunt, who had avoided any and all recognition of her contributions. 

But she had been very steadfast in hiding me and my talents. I’ve never been allowed to use my true abilities, so really, what’s the point in having them?  Now, if I was being directed to help, she was getting more from this reading than she was telling me.

“Declan, me lad, as cliché as it sounds I feel something coming… and it feels like a storm,” she said, looking up from the five rounds of wood.

Readings were her thing and she was very good at them, but storms, at least certain storms, were
my
thing and in that respect of my Craft, I had no equal
.

Twenty-six-hundred miles and three time zones to the

southwest, Felix Martinez glanced at the clock in the lower left of his computer monitor and noted the late hour.  These rush jobs always seemed to turn into all-nighters.  He finished filling in the data fields for the California DMV license form, then saved the page.  After waiting a long moment for the website to update, he noted with satisfaction that an official California driver’s license was now entered in the name he had been given to work with.

Setting up false identification was a constantly evolving business.  Some parts involved identity theft, some bribing low-paid government workers for their access codes, some involved researching names and social securities of people dead for decades, and lastly, there was always a little fiction writing to give a decent backstory.

A loud noise in the outer office caught his ear.  It was quickly followed by another thud. 
Felix grabbed the 9mm semi-automatic that clung to a powerful magnet under his desk and moved to the doorway of his office.  Opening the door, he looked into the reception area of what was ostensibly a tax preparation and bookkeeping business.  A thirty-something-year-old woman was standing at the reception counter, smiling at him.  Dressed in jeans and a light-colored blouse, she appeared attractive and pleasant, but something about her didn’t seem right.  Felix stepped through into the outer office, automatically looking to the left where his assistant, Manny, should have been.  At the same time, he tucked the gun behind his right leg, hiding it from the woman’s view. 

Manny wasn’t at his desk, but after shifting stance slightly, Felix suddenly spotted a brown
, shoe-clad foot on the floor behind the chair and desk.  Alarmed, he started to move, but a steel band closed about his right wrist and squeezed hard enough to break bone.

Confused and in enormous pain, Felix felt his arm hauled over his head, pulling him up on his toes.  At the same time
, he became aware of a huge, looming presence at his side.  The person holding him plucked the gun from his powerless hand and swung his body to face the woman.

Still smiling pleasantly, she nodded at him as if they were meeting for lunch.
  “Hi, Felix.  I’m Miseri, and my associate is Clay.  We have questions for you regarding some recent clients,” she said.

Barely able to speak through the pain in his arm and wrist, Felix still managed to bring up the most important information he had.

“I never meet my clients.  I only do pieces of their overall identification package, not the whole thing.  I doubt I can help you,” he said, his mind racing through everything he could do to survive this.

“Oh, I’m certain you can help us.  I only need a few bits of information,” she said sweetly, pulling a long, thin dagger from behind her back. “In fact, I’m certain you’re going to be more help than you realize,” she finished.

An hour and seven minutes later, the woman who called herself Miseri left the small, one-story building on the outskirts of Phoenix, her huge companion at her back. The sun was starting its climb and promised to provide a full day of legendary Arizona heat.

Walking unhurriedly toward a silver Honda Accord, she spoke over her shoulder.  “Clay, I will meet you later
, after I check in.  Be a dear and clean that up back there.”

The silent giant nodded and moved back into the building, pulling several small, rectangular black objects from his messenger bag as he did.

Miseri continued her nonchalant stroll but stopped suddenly when she detected movement at the mouth of an alley.  It was only a cat, a kitten really, ginger-colored and very thin.  The tiny creature stared up at the woman, shaking in hunger.  It mewed, but the cry was almost silent.

“Oh little hunter!  You’ve fallen on hard times,” the woman said, squatting down to rub the kitten’s head.  The tiny predator butted her other hand with his head, then licked a small red spot from the back of her hand.  “Thank you
, little one!  I must have missed that drop.  It spatters so, but then, I imagine you know that already.”

The woman came to a decision, scooping up the cat and continuing on her way.  “You will come with me.  But what to call you?”

The kitten didn’t struggle but instead began to knead the shoulder he was pressed against, his sharp claws easily penetrating the woman’s blouse.

“Oh, that’s it!  You will be Talon,” she said, keyfobbing her car door.  Climbing into the late model Honda, the woman deposited the small feline on the seat next to her, then carefully buckled her seatbelt before driving away.

Behind her, the small building she had just left suddenly blossomed into a near-silent ball of harsh white light, the thermite and white phosphorus incendiaries hot enough to melt brick and bone, but she barely noticed.  Instead, she was dialing a number on her smartphone.

“Central,  this is Miseri.  The name is Williams.  First names are Rachel and Sarah. The source had little further information.”

“
Confirmed, Agent Misericord.  You and Agent Claymore are to await further orders.”

“Just let me know when you get a hit,” she replied.

“
In the last five seconds, we’ve already gotten seventy-seven returns from those names, and the search is still running.  We will filter and advise. Clear?”

“Clear
, Central, but under no circumstances should your watchers approach the target.  That cat has serious claws,” she said, hanging up the phone.  “That gives us plenty of time to get you some food, Talon.”

The tiny
orange cat purred and settled on the car seat, its half-lidded eyes watching its new human protector.  The car continued away from the fiercely burning building as sirens rose in volume across the sprawling city.