Prisoner of Glass
Authors: Mark Jeffrey
Five: The Order of the Black Dove
PRISONER OF GLASS
By Mark Jeffrey
@markjeffrey
http://markjeffrey.net
© 2014 Mark Jeffrey.
All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Mark Jeffrey
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States by Mark Jeffrey
Follow Mark Jeffrey on Twitter:
@markjeffrey
More information:
http://markjeffrey.net
First Edition
Also by Mark Jeffrey:
Max Quick: The Pocket and the Pendant (Harper Collins, 2011)
Max Quick: The Two Travelers (2012)
Max Quick: The Bane of the Bondsman (2013)
Armand Ptolemy and the Golden Aleph (2011)
Age of Aether (2012)
Bitcoin Explained Simply: An Easy Guide To The Basics That Anyone Can Understand (2014)
This book is dedicated to Theo, our Persian cat.
Theo likes to watch as I write.
Sometimes, he crawls up on my arm.
He sits there, purring, demanding that I pay attention to him.
Oh, he’s doing it now.
Pretty soon I won’t be able to alklkjh;[]fdsaiuw;;slkhlkjlkha;ih a;lkh kujlgkjakjfh1515151515151
ONE: DEPARATURE
“OOOH,
that
one,” said LAX TSA Agent Fenton Samuels, eying the line of travelers.
“Let’s do it to her.”
“Wow, yeah.
Will you
look
at those things?
Wherever she goes, they arrive like a half hour before she does.”
Fenton’s co-worker, Agent Danny Trenton snickered like an adolescent, mesmerized by the woman’s not-insignificant assets.
They were deciding who they were going to pull out of the line for extra screening.
They had a quota to meet, after all.
Might as well make the best of it.
“No, wait,” Samuels whispered excitedly, tugging Danny’s sleeve.
“Not her.
That
one.
Check out the tall one.”
Danny turned his gaze, not expecting to see much that interested him.
But then his eyes landed on an almost freakishly slender and tall woman.
She was easily six foot five, possibly even more.
She looked Nordic: with high, sharp cheekbones, and moon-blue eyes, big as saucers, glancing this way and that from beneath a bob of straight, black hair.
It framed her face with Betty Page bangs, and curled around the sides of her head.
She swept into line, her unbuttoned long coat twirling behind her like a cape, everything about her
just so
.
“Oh, wait.
That’s weird.”
“What?”
“I think she’s missing a pinky.”
Danny squinted.
As if on cue, the woman raised her hand to brush an errant strand from her eyes.
It was true.
“Oooh.
Yeah.
That
is
weird.
A nine-fingered Nina.”
“Still puts the B in Boom for me,” Samuels judged.
“And she’s rich.”
“Yeah.
You can tell,” Danny agreed.
The woman was non-plussed; she was not troubled by anything.
“She has bitchy resting face.
Richy-bitchy face.”
Danny squished his face into a snarl.
She pissed off the diminutive Danny by simply existing.
This woman was the kind of person who just slide-glided through life: some arrogant, elegant, overly-tall faery without a worry in the world.
Well
.
He was going to fix that.
DOCTOR ELSPETH LUNE
was
worried, however.
Very worried.
She just didn’t let it show.
Her clinical and practiced exterior was a mask.
She projected serenity in the emergency room — as well as the real world.
Her husband, Oscar Cyrus, had been missing for a week now.
He had gone to the Arizona desert for business — and had never returned.
Elspeth was on her way there now to meet with the Nogales police — who seemed to be exactly zero help and know exactly nothing.
In fact, they were rather nonchalant about the whole thing, actually, which really pissed her off.
They had their hands full, they said, what with the Mexican gangs infesting many of the border towns.
It was a war there, a real war with bullets and bodies: a missing person was small potatoes.
Here, fill out these forms, we’ll email you when we have something.
There’s also an app you can download that will —
Bullshit!
She was going there in person to raise the noise level, to intimidate them.
She was good at that.
Oh, she didn’t have to scream.
Should could just
loom
.
Everyone noticed her immediately.
By virtue of her height, her simple presence was always turned up to eleven.
She couldn’t help that.
So she might as well use it.
The TSA line at LAX was intolerable as usual.
Bored and twitching, she was about to call her mother for the third time that evening when she noticed something very odd.
A man in a suit was browsing the newspaper rack.
There was nothing odd about that, of course.
But this man was bald, and his entire head was covered in white paint.
Written over the top of this paint were hieroglyphics, as if his body were the inside of an Egyptian tomb.
The writing covered even his eyelids, such that when he blinked, a complete text was formed.
His hands were the same way.
When Elspeth looked at him, startled by his incongruous appearance, he seemed to feel it.
He glanced up, and his eyes sizzled her soul.
Then he smiled ever so slightly — and made a beeline right for her.
What the hell?
He nodded at the giant glass window of the airport.
A plane was just leaving the gate, taxiing out to the runway.
It was small against the expanse of sky filled with a setting sun and clouds: an orange flame on cotton candy.
“That plane will not fly.”
“Excuse me?” Elspeth said, taken aback.
Little man.
Little weird annoying man who painted himself for attention.
Oooh look at me!
I’m interesting!
She didn’t have time for this.
But the man continued: “Here’s a kiss from the Dolphin Queen:
Heavier-than-air flying machines cannot fly.
They never could.
The plane will crash and people will die.”
Ice sucked the warmth from her heart at that.
Crash?
Die?
Saving lives was her thing.
She didn’t want to hear about people dying, and she would do anything to prevent it.
“What did you say?” Elspeth exhaled the sentence, not realizing she had been holding her breath.
“The plane will not lift.
It cannot.”
She could see the hieroglyphs covering him more intimately now.
The makeup and paint job were exquisite, exact, precise.
He looked like he was made of marble, and little black glyphs of india ink were etched with molecule-thin precision upon him.
“It never could,” he added to no one in particular.
The man turned then and meandered off, whistling tunelessly.
Feeling suddenly vulnerable, and realizing this man may have just threatened to blow up a plane, Elspeth made her way to the front of the TSA line.
She pushed and excused-me’d.
Whenever someone turned around with an annoyed face and found themselves staring into her chest, their surprised gaze immediately jerked up to her eyes — and their expression changed immediately to deference.
She ignored them and reached the front.
“Excuse me,” she said to Agent Danny Trenton.
“Hi.
Yes.
Hello, sir.
Listen.
Something weird just happened.
See that guy over there?”
She pointed.
He hadn’t gone far, and was now looking at more newspapers.
“The one painted all white with the writing all over his head?
He just came up to me and said something about a flight exploding and killing people.”
Agent Trenton stared wordlessly, confused.
It was
her
!
This wasn’t at all what he had expected.
In fact, this sort of ruined his whole plan.
She
wasn’t supposed to approach
him!
Finally, he asked, “Did he say which plane, ma’am?”
“Yes.
The San Francisco flight right there, the one just leaving the gate.”
She pointed a long, manicured yet bony finger at the runway.
Dear God, the plane was already out there —!
It would take off soon.
Agent Trenton glanced around.
“Which man, did you say ma’am?”
“That guy, the one right there,
there
.
In the suit, with all the weird stuff on his —”
But now he wasn’t there.
“He was right there.
Did you see him?”
“No, ma’am, I did not.
Listen.
Could you come with me?”
“Yes — yes of course.
Certainly.”
Agent Trenton led Elspeth off to the side where the TSA extra screening booths were.
Trenton whistled to Samuels, who joined them presently.
“Now ma’am … you say this man threatened to blow up the plane.
Is that correct?
You know that’s a serious accusation, and that even joking about something like that is a crime punishable by —”
“Yes!
Yes, of course I know that,” Elspeth said.
“Listen.
I think this guy was serious.”
She saw the painted man’s cold gaze in her mind’s eye.
He was something more than crazy.
No.
He was sane, determined, sure of himself.
He had a raw, primitive presence.
He had reminded Elspeth of a shaman or something, and it wasn’t just the face paint.
“I think he’s done something to that San Francisco flight.
I think you ought to check it out.”
“Okay, Ma’am.
We will.
Let us do our job.
Can you wait right here?”
“Well I’ve got my own flight to catch.
I’m going to Arizona.
I have some time but —”
“This will only take a moment.”
She nodded.
Samuels and Trenton left the vicinity.
She saw one of them get on a walkie while the other made a phone call.
Nervously, she glanced at the tarmac.
The San Francisco flight was just starting down the runway —!
“WHAT DO you think?” Danny asked Samuels.
Neither of them had really done anything about Elspeth’s warning.
They had just pretended to talk into the phone and the walkie.