By 11pm, Frank had figured out that there were actually 2 families involved in the bus fire. There had only been one phone number that Horst called, and that belonged to one Erich Gruber. Frank had wanted to send Tony, Angie and Leigh on this job, and keep Justin under wraps at the safe house. But Mr. Gruber and his wife Melissa only had 6 kids. Further searching had led to the home-schooling records that showed a second family, a single mom and two kids, team-teaching with the Grubers. Justin was the only other person besides Angie who was handy with a set of lock-picks. The houses couldn’t be too far from each other since the addresses were consecutive numbers on the same street; but they were out in a fairly rural area of the ‘burbs, and Frank didn’t want one team having to search both houses. And since Tony was elbow-deep in his rocket project.... “OK, who wants to team up with who?” Frank asked Justin, Angie, Karen and Leigh. Obviously Justin would be on one team, Angie on the other. Leigh looked at Karen. “Would you be too distracted...?” Leigh started to ask, glancing at Justin. “Either way works for me,” Karen answered. She’d never had much problem focusing on a job to the exclusion of everything else, even where Justin was concerned. There was a time for work and a time for everything else.

“Good. Karen will go with Justin, Leigh with Angie. That way I have an ‘entry’ person and a ‘researcher’ on each team,” Frank said. He’d mapped out the addresses, made sure everyone was wearing their comm units and weapons, and that each had either a MagLite or a hand-sun. Leigh and Angie took Frank’s car, and Justin and Karen took Karen’s. On the way, Leigh had Angie swing past the condo so she could pick up her mail. Most of it was junk, but there was a letter from a colleague in Germany, Professor Greta Fruehauf. Leigh opened the envelope excitedly. She’d written to Greta over a week ago, hoping that she might have some information regarding Norse burial practices and chants that would be helpful, considering the direction in which their research had quickly led them. The letter was in German, of course, and Leigh translated as she read it aloud to the others over her mike:

“My dearest Leigh,

How lovely to hear from you! How are you enjoying your sabbatical to America? Are you finding lots to keep you entertained? We miss you here, but such an old bird as myself knows that the fledglings must be allowed to explore the world.

Your questions about Norse burial practices and chants - I find it very intriguing. I recall a professor in my youth - he was a survivor of the camps, and very frail - giving a lecture about something called the Book of the Salamander. The book was supposedly a comprehensive collection of all of the Norse chants, but it was supposed lost in the eighth century, during the Viking Migration. It was sent by sea from Tollund to England, but the ship was sunk in a winter storm. According to this professor, the wreck must have been washed up on the northern coast of Germany, and the book salvaged. It reappeared in Bavaria, in the 17th century.

By a circuitous route, and after many dubious transactions, it came into the possession of the Bergermeister of Bamberg, Johann Junius. The story goes that Junius had long been fascinated by alchemy and the secrets of eternal life. He translated the Norse runes and began experimenting by setting fire to live cats and dogs. The story claims that eventually he succeeded in creating an unkillable cat.

However, Junius’ activities did not go unnoticed by his neighbors, and he was taken before the courts and accused of witchcraft. He was tortured with thumb screws and leg vises and the strappado, and of course, in the end he confessed everything. He was burned at the stake, and sang while the flames devoured him. Perhaps the witch-hunters of Bamberg killed him, and perhaps they did not. The story goes on that he was seen many weeks afterward in various towns in Bavaria, looking pale and strange.

Is that not a deliciously gruesome tale? All nonsense, of course, except perhaps for the book of runes and its translation. What a find that would be, eh? There have been various rumors of the recovery of the book and its translations, in particular by the Thule Society in the Great War. I cannot help but think that if the Nazis had such a thing, they would have used it to make their Fuerher immortal, no?

I shall ask about to see if anyone in the research community knows any more. There are rumors of an unpublished opera by Wagner. I know that Heidi Fiedler - you remember her, do you not? Such beautiful golden hair, and an angel’s voice - Heidi told me she was working on a very complex project for a rich American. Certainly she is the foremost Wagner expert at the University, perhaps in all of Germany. She would not tell me the details, but she was most excited about it. After I finish this, I shall ring her up and see if she will tell me more. If it is related to an unpublished Wagnerian opera, I’m quite certain she won’t be able to keep it to herself. It’s been a month and more since we spoke, so a visit is overdue.

Take good care of yourself, Liebchen - you were always my favorite student, and now my favorite colleague.

Greta Fruehauf”

Leigh refolded the letter and slid it back into the envelope. Karen couldn’t help being indelicate. “How much do you want to bet Fraulein Fiedler is missing?” she asked. It seemed like every time they had a concrete source of information like a book, it had disappeared. Karen was guessing that this woman had disappeared by now, too. And she felt awful that she was more concerned about the loss of the information they could have gotten from the poor woman than the fact that her life had possibly been ended far before her time, and probably not in a very pleasant way. The two cars had slowed to a crawl as they checked the mailboxes along the road for numbers. Up ahead, there were 2 boxes fastened rather precariously to a railing. The numbers matched the addresses they were looking for, and the car and Jeep turned up the only driveway anywhere near the boxes. The driveway led up to a garage that was attached to a small, worn-looking ranch. Next to and slightly behind the garage was a rickety-looking, aluminum storage shed. And on the other side of the driveway, just beyond the garage and shed, was an Airstream trailer with a large propane tank in what would otherwise have been its front yard. This had to be the place. From the outside, the place looked creepier to Karen than any place she’d ever been. Maybe because she knew that there should have been the toys of 8 kids lying around the yards, and instead the place felt and looked deserted and nothing was left of the kids but ashes. At least the teams wouldn’t have to split up too far.

Justin and Angie pulled the car and Jeep off the driveway and parked behind the trailer, where the vehicles would be hidden from the road. When they were sure that they weren’t being watched, the four circled the properties, Justin and Angie looking for the easiest points of entry, Karen and Leigh looking for any sign that the buildings had been warded with protection symbols, particularly near doors and windows. They noticed almost right away that the house was built on a cement slab. No basement or crawl space to search. Behind the house, they could see the remains of a large garden that filled the back of the yard. And there was a smaller plot near the back door, which Leigh could tell would be a nice little herb garden come spring when the stubble in it revived. A double set of clothes-lines ran down the length of the yard to the garden, stretched from the back of the garage. And just off the edge of the patio, there was a large barbeque/fire pit. The 4 peered into it. There was nothing in it now, but Karen could tell that it had been used many times, by the color and compaction of the dirt inside. The two woman didn’t see any marking on any of the buildings, but Angie quickly focused on the sliding glass door on the back of the house. “Sliders are the easiest things to break in through,” she muttered to herself, as if she were disappointed that people still had them installed. “Yeah, but the place was built probably in the late 60s or early 70s,” Justin told her. “Doorwalls were pretty standard.” The place was typical of a lot of the suburban construction of that era, at least around the Detroit area, and it seemed like age was as much a factor in the house’s ratty condition as neglect. Justin and Karen could already picture the floor plan of the house, which would have been chosen from only 3 or 4 offered by the builder; and they gave Angie and Leigh a quick run-down of what they could expect, while Angie lifted the door to disengage the simple locking mechanism.

“There are better ways to lock a slider than the hammer-lock at the handle, even something as easy as dropping a broom handle into the track,” Angie muttered to herself. But the Grubers and Johnsons either weren’t concerned with their safety or they didn’t care when they left the last time. Angie gave Justin a quick nod that she’d gotten the door open, and Justin motioned for Karen to follow him over to the trailer. Angie and Leigh would start on the house. “A quick once-over first,” Angie whispered to Leigh before they went in. “Then we can go back around for a more detailed search.” Leigh nodded. Over at the trailer, Justin was telling Karen the same thing as he picked the almost useless lock on the Airstream’s aluminum door. Inside the house, Leigh and Angie were surprised to find the place meticulously clean and tidy, considering the look of the exterior. The room they were in was the family room, but it looked like it doubled as the kids’ classroom. There was a framed picture of a Caucasian Jesus hanging on the wall, and a cross over the arch that led into the rest of the house. On another wall was a large map of the US, and there was an American flag standing in the corner. The two maneuvered past the eight small desks lined up in the center of the room, and moved on to the next room. The kitchen was neat and functional-looking, and the living room was plain, the front curtains drawn. The women might almost have expected to find the family safely asleep in their beds, if they hadn’t known better.

There was only one large bathroom, and across the hall from that was a mud room/utility room. A very well-used, economy-size washer and dryer dominated one corner of the room, and there were clean children’s clothes hanging to dry on a line stretched across the room. A large chest freezer took up another corner, and the furnace and water heater the third. Near the door, the wall had a series of pegs at different heights, with winter clothing in various sizes hanging from them and baskets of mittens, scarves and hats lined up underneath. At the end of the hallway, doors opened onto two bedrooms. One was obviously the children’s room. The walls were lined with bunk beds, two triples and a double that partially blocked the window. The other room had a king-size bed. Once Angie was satisfied that nothing was going to jump out and attack them, the two split up and began to thoroughly search the house. It didn’t take Justin and Karen nearly as long to do a quick canvas of the trailer. They could see most of it from where they stood in the doorway. The ‘front’ half, where the door was, functioned as kitchen, dining room and living room. Toward the back, there was a small bathroom sectioned off, and past that was the ‘bedroom,’ with two twin beds and a small closet in the corner. It wasn’t as tidy as Leigh and Angie found the house, but it certainly wasn’t dirty or overly messy, either.

Each pair started at the furthest point from where they entered and began a thorough search. It was obvious from the clothing in the bedroom of the trailer that two women lived there. But surprisingly, there was no sign of cosmetics in the bathroom. There was a bottle of generic baby lotion and a tube of generic toothpaste, and what looked like maybe homemade herbal shampoo and soap. But no make-up or fancy skin-care products or perfume. Instead of store-bought pictures or paintings, the walls were decorated with photos torn or cut from magazines, cheerful pictures of sunflowers and Nordic fjords tacked up to fill otherwise empty spaces. The only other decoration was a sun-catcher hanging in the window over the sink, in the shape of the curled lizard that Karen had seen warding Horst’s house. There wasn’t much room for excess possessions, but even so, it looked like the trailer served primarily as a bedroom for the women. There was a small but high-quality CD player on one counter, with a stack of CDs next to it. They were mostly religious and classical music, all of Wagner’s works, a fair dose of Beethoven, some Mozart. And there were a couple unlabeled, homemade CDs. On the other counter, there was a neat row of books. There were a couple well-used Bibles, and books on medicine and child-birth. And there were a couple books and some pamphlets about something called the Quiverfull Movement. In a drawer, they found a laptop. But looking around at the lack of flat places to set it, they decided it was more likely that the drawer was just a convenient, out-of-the-way place to store it, not a “hiding place.” On the ‘kitchen table’, there were a few envelopes addressed to Miranda Johnson, the woman Frank had said the one address belonged to, and others addressed to a Bethany Holmes. And among a handful of photos stuffed in a drawer, they found a Polaroid of a woman and man, with the hand-written note on the back “Josh and Miranda, 2002.” The two appeared to be wearing wedding rings in the photo. When they ran out of places to search, Justin and Karen bagged anything they thought might prove useful, like the photos, CDs, books, mail, and the laptop, and headed over to the house.

In the house, Angie found the clothing of a man and one woman in the master bedroom. She also found the gun safe in the back corner of the closet, locked with both the built-in combination lock and an additional padlock. Getting past the locks fairly quickly, inside she found 4 shotguns, a high-powered rifle, a half-dozen handguns in various calibers, and a mountain of ammo, carefully sorted by size. There was a very nice CD player on the dresser, with a stack of CDs. Angie looked through them. It was the same mix of music that Karen was finding in the trailer, including the homemade disks. In the kids’ room, Leigh was able to figure out that there were 6 boys and 2 girls sharing the room. Everywhere but in the bathroom, there were bright, sun-shiny pictures drawn by the children hanging on the walls. There were birds, flowers, butterflies...and a lizard curled into a circle, just like what Karen described seeing at Horst’s house. There were also the children’s drawings of what they both assumed was the combined family, stick people involved in various activities. All the people in these drawings were white. Each of the bedrooms had one of the lizard drawings prominently displayed in glass-less frames. And in the kitchen, there was a tile plaque hanging above the stove, with the lizard hand-painted on it. When Leigh inspected it more closely, she realized that it must be a fairly new addition to the decor. The Grubers kept an almost spotlessly clean house, but no one could ever completely wipe out every trace of grease-spatter near a stove. But the plaque had less grease build-up than the nearby cabinet doors. In the bathroom, Angie noticed, like Karen had in the trailer, a surprising lack of excess toiletries. There was a larger bottle of the same homemade shampoo and several bars of the homemade soap. Family-sized baby lotion and toothpaste. A man’s razor and a can of generic shaving cream. But not even a single lipstick or mascara. When Angie looked in the medicine cabinet, she called Leigh in. None of the bottles were labeled, and when Leigh checked them it appeared that the Grubers used only homemade herbal remedies. They reminded her of the medicines her mother used to make for most of the simple childhood illnesses she had--a honey and lemon cough syrup, a menthol cold rub, an aloe plant on the window sill for minor cuts and scrapes. That fit in with the tisanes she found in one kitchen cabinet--a birchbark mix for pain relief, a mixture that included anise for soothing a sore throat, and another with rose hips for easing cold symptoms.

Finally the two found themselves back in the family room. Now that they took the time to look, they noticed that there were marks on the carpet where stains had been cleaned up. Not surprising with that many kids living there. In fact, it was a bit comforting, considering how spotless the rest of the house appeared inside. There was a small combination TV/DVD player, and a neat stack of DVDs next to it, all very ‘Christian-themed.’ They had all of the Left Behind films and, on the bookshelves, the complete set of the Left Behind books, including the kids’ series. On one shelf there were neat stacks of construction paper, and trays of sharpened pencils, colored pencils and crayons. There were several Bibles on the shelves, all well-used. A medical book. And some books and other literature about something called the Quiverfull Movement. Flipping through the books that were used for the kids’ education, Leigh was appalled to find that they had a decidedly creationist, “intelligent design” bent to them. There was nothing about evolution in the science books; in fact, the science was practically “flat earth.” And there was an almost saccharin dose of religion in everything else as well, from the grammars to the math books to the penmanship papers. She had no problem with religion per se, but this was akin to brainwashing.

On one shelf, they found a framed photo of, they assumed, the family. It looked like it had been done at an inexpensive studio, or maybe one of those traveling studios that set up in department stores on weekends. There was one man, 3 women, and 8 children. All of them were fair and blonde with blue eyes, all very ‘Aryan.’ The women were clearly 3 different ages, one slightly older than the man, one about the same age, and one barely out of her teens. Angie recognized the dress that the oldest woman was wearing as one that she’d seen in the closet of the master bedroom. The man and all three women wore plain gold wedding bands. Suddenly Angie spun around toward the doorwall, pulling her gun. Before Leigh could even turn around herself, Angie was slipping the gun back into its holster. It was just Justin and Karen coming back over from the trailer. The two women showed the couple the photo and the two teams compared that photo to the Polaroid that Justin and Karen found. Miranda was definitely the middle woman. But there was no evidence of another man living with the group, even though Josh and Miranda had been together as recently as 2002. And it seemed that one of the women hadn’t been on the bus when it burned. The evidence had been of only a man, two women and 8 children on it. “Is there anywhere inside the house where a body could have been hidden?” Karen asked Leigh and Angie. “Not that I could tell,” Angie told her. “Then I’m going to check around the backyard for evidence of someone being buried out there,” Karen told them. That sparked ideas in both Leigh and Justin. “Hey, maybe we can tell something from the family’s ‘traffic patterns’ between the house and trailer,” Justin suggested. “I’m going to take a look.” Leigh realized that no one had really thought to check if there was anything Unknown still lingering around the house, or worse yet the fire pit. But Justin and Karen had already gone out carrying the hand-suns. Leigh checked the house first, but the only aura she felt was a faint one in the master bedroom. Either something very strong had been there once a long time ago, or, more likely, something not so strong had been there over a period of time and left when the family did.

Justin quickly noticed that there had been a lot of traffic between the house and the trailer, basically using the same ‘path’ that Justin and Karen had. Looking further, he found a fair amount of traffic between the house and the storage shed, and less between the shed and the trailer. He easily picked the padlock on the shed and found that it was simply storage. It looked like the family bought household items in bulk, maybe a month’s supply at a time. Everything was neatly stored on shelves or pallets, items like toilet paper, diapers, laundry detergent, paper towels and cleaning supplies. Justin closed the shed up and scanned around some more. It looked like the kids played in the back yard, but there wasn’t much by way of store-bought toys. There were a couple sleds, and a tire swing hanging from a tree branch, a few balls, and a rickety-looking slide that was probably older than any of the kids. He had been keeping an eye on Karen, and noticed that she’d made her way to the back of the yard near the garden. She was just kneeling down on the ground at the very back of the yard. Leigh had come out of the house, too, probably when he was busy closing up the shed. She’d paused near the fire pit, and then headied back toward the garden too. Leigh felt the same aura of the Unknown by the fire pit that she’d felt in the bedroom. But it was clear that the pit had been cleaned out after its last use, and that was at least 10 days ago.

Karen knew exactly was she was looking for when she went outside, and she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be close to the house. This was something she was used to doing, scanning the ground for signs that dirt had been disturbed. Of course, she usually didn’t have to do it in the dark, working by the light of a hand-sun. So she took her time, sweeping the beam back and forth in an approximately five-foot swath as she made her way back and forth across the yard. She’d gotten as far back as the front edge of the garden. She worked her way around the low fence that bordered the garden, hoping that the missing woman hadn’t been buried in it. That would make it harder for her to distinguish a grave from all the other worked dirt using just the light from the hand-sun. She was making her way along the back of the garden, in the space between the low fence and the much higher fence that marked the back of the property, when she spotted the sunken ground that she instantly recognized as an old burial site. What surprised her was the amount the ground had sunk. That usually happened over the course of years. But the photo Angie showed her with all three women in it looked recent. She moved carefully around the sunken area and immediately saw the more recently disturbed earth of a second grave. That one had some old brush thrown over it, as if to try to hide it. Karen pushed the brush back. The grave looked about two weeks old. Two burials. Was one the missing woman and the other Josh? Were there more?

Karen scooted around the edge of the second grave and continued searching until she was sure she’d covered the entire yard except for inside the garden. Then she went back to the more recent grave. She hung the lamp of the hand-sun from one of the short stakes of the garden fence, so that it shone over the disturbed dirt, and she began to feel for the edges of the grave, pushing more brush back out of her way. She gasped. No sooner had she touched the dirt, when a ghostly hand reached out of the ground and grabbed her wrist. Karen tensed, ready to pull back if the thing tried to pull her down. But as if it were doing a pull-up, the hand seemed to draw the upper half of a young woman’s ghostly form out of the grave. Karen recognized her from the family photo. This was the youngest of the three women, Bethany Holmes. But...most of the back of her head was missing. It looked like the exit wound of a point-blank gunshot. Karen had to swallow hard to keep herself from throwing up. She stared at the ground and breathed in deep the chill October air, then forced her lips into a smile she certainly didn’t feel, an old trick she’d learned from an anatomy prof. For some reason, the particular collection of muscles that tense to make a smile will also prevent the gag reflex from working. She hadn’t gotten a very restful sleep last night, and she was near the end of a very long day. This was not the best time to have to be looking at this kind of wound--as if there was ever a good time for it. When she felt like the urge to vomit had passed, she studied the young woman’s face, trying hard not to think of her death by focusing on finding the entrance wound. She knew that to anyone else, that would sound like an utterly nonsensical statement. But if it was a puzzle to solve, then for just a little while it was no longer a young woman dead far before her time.

Karen couldn’t find a gunshot wound, so it had to be inside her mouth. But she wasn’t going to look closely enough to make sure. While Karen was working this out, the girl was studying Karen, too. She met Karen’s eyes, and when she knew that Karen was truly seeing her, she mouthed the words “Avenge me.” “We’re already trying to do that,” Karen said aloud. Leigh and Justin both had gotten to about the center of the yard by now. Leigh could sense the same kind of lingering heat from an Unknown presence as she neared the garden. She paused, relaxing after the effort. Obviously whatever had been here was gone. But when Justin heard Karen talking to herself, he knew that something was happening back there right now, even though Karen was the only one he could see. He stepped over the garden fence and jogged straight across the garden to Karen. He got there, Leigh on his heels, just as Karen rocked backwards and landed on her butt. The ghost had stared into her eyes as if she were boring a hole to Karen’s brain when Karen answered her. When Bethany was sure that Karen meant what she’d said, she nodded once firmly and let go of Karen’s arm as she slid back into the earth. Karen had been so tense the whole time that she fell back as the woman faded from sight.

In the light harsh light of the hand-sun it was hard to tell, but it looked like Karen was even paler than before. She was breathing a little heavy, as if she’d been exerting herself, but the ground didn’t look disturbed to Justin and Leigh. “Are you OK?” Justin asked her, concern in his voice. Karen nodded, trying to collect her thoughts. “Was it something...?” Leigh started to ask. Karen understood what Leigh was asking before she even finished, and she looked up at Leigh and held up her hand to stop Leigh from doing something risky like trying to sense the Unknown right there. They didn’t need two people on their butts in the dirt right now. “The girl,” Karen told them. “The youngest one from the picture...Bethany. She wants us to avenge her. I told her we were trying to already.” Justin offered his hand to help Karen up, and she shook her head as she shifted onto her knees and crawled over to the other grave. “There’s another one here,” she told them, indicating the sunken area in front of her. She looked up and saw a look of alarm on Justin’s face. “No ghost in this one,” she reassured him. “It’s much older, more than a year, maybe as much as five, but definitely less than ten.” Karen paused a moment, thinking. “We need to figure out who’s in this one,” she told the two, “although I suspect it’s the guy Josh from the Polaroid.” She sent Justin to get her bag and the collapsible shovel from the Jeep, and some baggies and a tarp for the body and anything else they might find. Then she motioned for Leigh to come over and help. Leigh took some pictures of both graves, with Karen’s foot in the picture for a point of reference. When Justin brought the stuff Karen asked for, the women carefully scraped the sod off the top of the older grave and laid it aside, then took more pictures with a ruler overlay. Leigh noticed that there was a very convenient ‘time stamp’ of a sort in the grave--dandelion roots. A little research would tell them how long it took for the plant roots to get to their current size, which would give them a fairly close approximate date for the burial.

The two began to remove dirt, careful to preserve any roots they came across but faster than Karen would have done at a dig, considering that they were digging up a body in the middle of the night in the back yard of a family who’d recently died in an unexplained fire. She saved a few scoops of the dirt from above the body, a little from each ‘layer’ they removed, and Leigh took pictures of the progress at each ‘layer.’ It wasn’t a perfect exhumation, but they needed to do the best they could under their time constraints. They’d gotten down about 3 feet when Karen heard the scrape of metal on bone. They’d removed the last full root only a couple minutes before, and Leigh estimated that it had been growing for 3 to 5 years. It had been obvious from the size of the grave that whoever was in it was either a child or had been squeezed into the hole. Now they could see, as they swept away the last of the dirt, that it was a full-sized adult. There were shreds of what must have been a sheet, rope and clothing mingled with the bones, which had long since collapsed in a heap at the bottom of the hole. It looked like the body had been wrapped and tied in the sheet, then forced into a fetal position to fit into as small a hole as possible. Leigh took pictures, then the two began picking all the loose material out from among the bones. There was a plain gold wedding band on the ring finger of the left hand, and Karen noted that several of those finger bones were broken. Justin asked if they could have been defensive wounds, but with only the light of a couple hand-suns, Karen couldn’t tell if it was that or if they’d been broken on purpose during torture.

There was some change nestled along the edge of the pelvic bone. The bone told her that the body was of a male, but she’d have to study it later to determine size and age. The most recent of the coins was dated 2000, so it didn’t help them much. And several of the cervical vertebrae were damaged. Justin thought maybe the guy was killed with a blow to the neck with some sort of edged tool, like a shovel. But, again, without studying the damage to the bones, Karen couldn’t say exactly how the bones had been broken. Beyond the change and the ring, though, they found nothing that might help identify the body. Not enough of the clothing remained, as far as they could tell, to be much help, and there was no belt buckle or other jewelry that might be distinctive enough for an ID. When Leigh and Karen had collected everything else, Justin spread out the tarp for them to put the bones on it. It was as close as they had to a proper body bag. As Karen lifted each of the larger bones, she had Leigh take a picture, so in case there was any damage in transit, they’d have a record of how the bone looked when it came out of the ground. She did this with several of the smaller bones, like the fingers, toes and wrist bones, in her hand at one time, to save time. When the last bone was removed, Karen took samples of the underlying soil. Then the three moved everything to the patio, where Karen could keep an eye on it until they were ready to go.

In the house, Angie had continued collecting anything that might give them a lead on what had caused these people to kill themselves and their children, and how that linked to Horst. She gathered a pile of CDs, papers, DVDs, photos and drawings, and books. A couple of the books on the shelves were very plainly bound, with no writing on the outside. Angie thumbed through them. The stuff was written in a facile, pop-culture style that made it look like it was supposed to be a ‘hip’ textbook. As she read through a little of it, it turned out to be a catechism, talking about the purification of fire, purity, and how only by purifying yourself would you be a suitable vessel for perfection. Only the pure could be a part of the master race. Angie wasn’t much for book learning, and it was crap like this that proved her point. It assumed a complete lack of critical thinking on the part of the reader, like the writer wanted to make no effort in order to get complete endorsement of his ideas. The whole thing was preaching to the choir. But it was weird. As she was reading, it all sounded perfectly reasonable. She’d start at the beginning of a chapter, then stop to turn the page and realize that she’d been reading right along, going “uh huh, uh huh,” until the brief stop at the bottom of the page made her wonder what the hell she’d been reading.

Angie was startled out of her reading when she heard movement out on the patio. Justin, Leigh and Karen had just set a folded tarp and a couple large bags down out there. Justin kicked his boots against the foundation to knock the dirt off before stepping just inside the doorwall. “Karen found a couple graves back behind the garden,” he told Angie. “One still had the ghost of the youngest ‘wife’ in it. The other had an adult guy.” Angie stared at him for a second. How many other jobs in the world required you to believe it when a coworker said there was a ghost somewhere? She closed the book and described what she’d found. There was no sign of official identification of these people anywhere in the house. Not even birth certificates or Social Security cards for the kids. Since all births were registered on hospital computers since 1988 and babies were given Social Security numbers at birth, either the youngest of the kids was 18, which it wasn’t from the looks of the family photo, or the kids weren’t born in a hospital. “That would explain the child-birthing books we found,” Leigh said through the half-open doorwall. There were also no pay stubs or income tax records anywhere, no wallets or checkbooks, no deeds or mortgage paperwork for the properties. These people were about as far off the grid as was humanly possible these days. The only thing she hadn’t found yet was any cash, although that must have been how they were paying for everything.

When Angie pointed out the cleaned-up stain on the family room carpet, Karen asked if it could have been a blood stain. She described Bethany’s gunshot wound. But the team agreed that without searching the house with luminal and an ALS, they probably wouldn’t find anything like a blood stain, since it appeared the place had been scrubbed with bleach. Finally, the other three started ferrying stuff out to the cars, while Angie collected all the guns and ammo so that they weren’t left behind in an unlocked safe in an unoccupied house.

JUSTIN’S WAR JOURNAL
Entry 74 [---typed]

---Well, it’s still Saturday night but later. Everybody’s starting to wind down. Turns out it’s a good thing we upgraded some of the stuff here in the safe-house because just about the whole gang is spending the night here. Not that what Aiden brought in wouldn’t have got us by. I don’t think I realized before that he got it all done on a paramedic’s salary and schedule. I thought Fr. Damien or SAVE had hooked him up with the money to put the safe house together but he did it on his own dime. We should get him something for a special thank you. Maybe I could spruce up his truck or fix up a classic Harley so he can ride with Angie. Yeah, that’d be cool. Dang, my mind is wandering. That roofie stuff is still making me feel dopey.

Terry showed up with food not long after Frank and Leigh got back from our house with our stuff and Drew. I think that was around 7pm, maybe later. I might have put that in earlier but I’m not sure. I’ll leave it in here. I don’t feel like going back to check. I really can’t focus too good right now. Anyway, it didn’t take too long to bring Terry up to speed. We were talking about the case some and I asked Frank if he still had any buddies inside the FBI he could talk to and find out if anybody was making noise about “Agent Smith” busting into Horst’s house and taking me away. I about laughed myself sick when he said he figured he could call the REAL Agent Smith.

So Frank called his buddy and they had a talk. When he was done, Frank said that Agent Stevens chewed Agent Smith’s ass for a couple hours this afternoon, screaming about how he was screwing up Stevens’ case. Stevens didn’t seem to want to hear that Smith had an iron clad alibi: he’d been in the office all day with a whole bunch of other FBI agents and hours of security video to back him up. And the kicker was that the real Agent Smith is a black guy. And I don’t think the FBI offices have the most secure phones in the world and they know it. I guess Agent Smith had asked why Frank was calling him and Frank said, “I wanted to see just how corrupt somebody is,” and Smith said he shouldn’t say that over that line, or at all. Then they changed the subject, shot the bull for a couple more minutes and then hung up.

After Frank got off the phone and told us what they’d talked about, we kept trying to kick around ideas about the case. Seemed pretty clear that Stevens was hip deep in this but we just couldn’t nail down where exactly he was on the food chain. Is he the Unknown critter or just its monkey on a string? All I knew was that I was getting flat out frustrated with the whole thing and I said right then I was about ready to just take the whole lot of them out, one bullet to the head each, and just let them sort it out in the afterlife. But Karen’s right, I’d just end up in prison and it wouldn’t be any fun only getting to see her on visitor day. Talking about prison made me think about crimes. I know we’re trying to keep stuff like this out of sight of the normal authorities but my brain still wasn’t all in control of my mouth and I asked if we could get Horst on any charge for drugging me. No dice. Frank said the drug they used on me wasn’t “technically” an illegal substance. The chemical formula wasn’t the same as regular Rohypnol so it technically wasn’t covered by the controlled substances laws. Damn smart ass criminal types.

I think that about covers it to now. Frank’s got computer searches or bots or whatever running, looking for stuff. I’m thinking it’s a good thing we’ve got extra laptops after the Ghost in the Machine case. With all our brainy research types trying to track down all kinds of stuff, we may end up using them all at once. Some of the computers are showing the video feed from the security cameras we got set up around our house, the couple left at Leigh’s condo and out watching the barn. I think the guys set up a camera or two watching Horst’s house too but I’m not sure. Security here at the safe house is on its own monitors and sensors. Now, on top of being all fuzzy and cotton-mouthed from the drug working out of my system, I’m tired too. I’m wondering if I have to wake up for Leigh to do the Mental Shield in a couple hours. Oops, she says no, I don’t really have to be up but she did it already anyway. I didn’t know it was this late. No wonder I’m tired. That’s it for now. More later.

---Sunday, October 29th. It is way too friggin’ early in the morning. My head is clearer but my mouth is cotton city; like I slept with a towel in my mouth, but not nearly as tasty. The Gatorade is helping a lot. Anyway, Tony called about 8am. Said Aiden just sprung him from the hospital and he wanted a ride. As often as some of us need to be stuck in a hospital bed, I’m thinking we should outfit a full ER/ICU either here in the safe house or maybe at another location. Heck, we fixed the roof and the other structural damage on the butcher shop a while back so that’s a possible now too. I wonder just how many abandoned but more or less intact buildings we could get our hands on fairly cheap around the city? Anyway, I couldn’t just run out there and pick Tony up right then and I figured he could hop a cab to here in the time it would take one of us to drive over to get him, so I told him we were at his place. Like I said, even with the time it took him to walk to the house from wherever he had the cab drop him, he was here faster.

I wasn’t the only one getting phone calls that early but the call Terry got was bad. She was putting on her clothes while she was talking and was halfway to the door when she gave marching orders to whoever was on the other end. After she hung up she told us that the police were getting reports of “smokers” (burned up bodies) from all over the Detroit area, at least ten so far. She was supposed to be off for today but with something this big they called her in. Heck, they probably called in just about every detective, uniform and tech they had from the sounds of it. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one that guessed there would either be twelve total burned or a whole lot more. I was thinking that either Horst was able to find substitutes to finish his ritual or he was cleaning house and torching everybody. Terry promised she’d call later with an update.

Since we were already up, most everybody got back to work. That being most everybody except me. Let’s face it; I’m nothing but a slow down when it comes to the computer research end of this gig. I’m no dummy, but compared to the brain power of the rest of this crew, I may as well be a house plant. Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself because I’m doing nothing but checking the security camera feeds every once in a while and double checking the weapons and ammo. I swear, there are times it feels like my only function is to either fix or break things and neither one of those things needs doing so right now I feel about as useful as wheels on a whale. We talked a little bit about putting together something to give us a lot of water with a lot of pressure to fight the salamander. But just about every idea we came up with got shot down for one reason or another. Don’t ask me why. I thought Tony’s contact from the Vatican research trip had said the salamanders had the same weaknesses as fire, which to me means dousing it with water or taking away its oxygen in some other way. Maybe I’m getting that wrong? I’m getting confused now. More later.

---Later Sunday. News on the smokers is still spotty. The cops are keeping the media at a distance and mostly they’re just saying that some people burned to death in several places around town and the cops aren’t giving them any details. One thing field reports on the news are good for is crowd reaction shots. Frank is pretty sure he spotted at least one of Agent Stevens’s goons in the crowd at one of the crime scene reports. So, Stevens almost for sure has his fingers in this or is about to pretty soon. I wonder if Metro PD will fight them on the jurisdiction.

The computer searches from last night did find something on Horst and Olga. As far as current records go, Horst is a German citizen but he didn’t even exist until 1982 and pretty much the same for Olga. But a search with the facial recognition software on Frank’s computer found a match, in some photo archives from WWII. The pictures are dated 1943 and show a guy who looks just like Horst in an SS officer’s uniform and a woman who looks just like Olga in a similar uniform (An SS civilian aide? I didn’t think the SS had any female recruits.), and they both looked just about the same as they do now, maybe just a little younger. The only caption for the picture, other than the date, named the guy as Von Horst and gave no name for the woman. The pictures had aged before they were copied to digital and some of the detail had been lost but either it’s them or they both look exactly like their grandparents. Considering how much that turkey spouted about becoming immortal, my bet is on it being them. And if that’s right then they’ve aged maybe ten years physically in the last sixty some odd years.

The odds of Horst just being the grandson just got even narrower. Frank says that there’s no record of any children at all from this Von Horst guy and he is supposed to have died in a fire around the end of WWII. The body was burned pretty much to a cinder but it was identified as Von Horst.

Leigh suggested that maybe we should look into something I think she called the Thule Society. She says they were like the head occult research group for Hitler. Boy did that get some results. There’s even some nut bar out there that says that Hitler is some kind of demi-god who’s going to lead a bunch of super men from their base in some giant hollow in the middle of the earth and conquer the surface world and start a Fourth Reich. What the fuck, over? Sounds like this guy read a whole bunch of Conan the Barbarian while he was working his way through Mien Kampf and smoking heroin. That’s not saying the Thule Society thing isn’t necessarily a good lead. I’d have a sneaking suspicion that the Horst and Olga in that old picture could have very well been involved with that group. Considering that Horst has some kind of Unknown fire monster in his freaking basement, he may have been one of their better researchers or something.

Some more brainstorming got the idea that Horst and/or Olga might have been tracked as WWII war criminals. Some people think it’s just an urban myth, but from what I’ve heard, there really were Nazis that ran off to South America and the U.S. and other countries to hide out. Heck, didn’t they just find some old guy in Ohio or somewhere and ship his ass off to face charges? Anyway, more computer searches going on and we’re trying to check with Mosad (Frank made a call. He’s made some interesting contacts in his career.), and the Anti-Defamation League and the Wiesenthal Center. You never know, maybe we’ll actually get some hits.

Most of the info we’ve got so far on the “smokers” has come from conspiracy sites and chat rooms. The instant gratification of the internet and a wired society; ya gotta love it. A lot of the info looks like so much horse shit, but some of it’s got a bit of a ring of truth. The numbers are all over the place, from 6 to 12 and one as high as 23 victims. One report I’m thinking was more true than we want to know. They said that one of those burned was a guy who walked into the middle of his car dealership showroom, dumped a can of gas over his head and lit himself up. That almost has to be Pete. All of the reports were saying these were almost all suicides, which I guess they were more or less, and the others looked like one kind of accident or another. Car into concrete that exploded, possible gas leak that blew a house sky high, that kind of thing. Of course, the cops and the online folks didn’t have the inside info that we did. Out of the few descriptions we were able to get of the victims, just about every one sounded like guys from either the barn or Horst’s house. But it still isn’t enough to point us anywhere, yet. More later.

---Still Sunday, Oct. 29th, late afternoon. We’ve got a slight development, but not quite sure who this one points the finger at. Like I said before, we’ve had the security cams active and checking them out on and off all day. Around 3pm or so, a guy went strolling by me and Karen’s house. Didn’t look like any of the locals but he looked familiar. Baggy pants, hoody sweat shirt. Looked like one of the guys that was shadowing Jared when he had his meeting with Frank a while back. A little while later, the same guy went past the back of the house. We couldn’t get a look at his face because of the hood but it sure looked like the same guy. So there is definitely somebody watching our house. I’d like to get that mook in a room and see what he has to say but that wouldn’t work. All these government agents get training so they don’t give up information easy. Maybe I could soften him up and then Frank could get the info out of him? Phooey; that’s just wishful thinking. I don’t need Frank to tell me I’m looking to take out my frustrations on a convenient target.

Terry just called Frank. She said that this is worse than we think and she’d fill us in soon as she could. Frank said she sounded wrung out. About the time Frank hung up with Terry, Tony popped his head out of the basement and asked if any of us had heavy weapons training. I don’t think I could have been more surprised at any other question he could have asked, but then again, we’re talking about Tony here. Anyway, from what he said it sounded like he’s whipped together some kind of bazooka. He mentioned rockets, warheads and needing a loader. That crazy boy scares me sometimes. Glad he’s on our side.

We’re still spinning our wheels. Not even sure if Horst and Olga are still in the house or how solid the connection is between them and Stevens. Karen volunteered to go out of body to scout again but me and Frank both said no, and for pretty much the same reasons. It’s a good idea to scout but their guard monster nailed her once and now they know to have their guard up. If Karen goes out of body, we may never get her back. I think we’re stuck until we hear from Terry or some other lead pans out. All for now. More later.

On one of Tony’s trips up from his work bench, he explained to the others his color-coding system for the rockets he was making. He wanted to make sure that if anyone went downstairs, they would be careful. The couple rockets with the red tips were the really dangerous ones; they’d go BOOM. The few with the yellow tips were the dummies; they had a propellant load, but no explosive load. The ones with the blue tips were the fire extinguisher rockets, loaded with the same stuff that was in regular fire extinguishers. “Oh, by da way,” Tony asked, “anybody gotta bike helmet I could use? One wit’ a visor?” The rockets didn’t have a huge range, he explained, so he’d have to be relatively close to the target when he launched them. That, plus the fact that the launcher was essentially a bazooka, made him consider his own safety enough that he’d want to protect his head when he fired it. “I got three,” Angie offered. “What? For different days of the week?” Karen asked with a laugh. “No. One for me, one for Aiden, and a spare for anyone else I might give a lift to,” Angie answered. “I have one with a built-in comm unit,” Leigh offered. Justin offered his, too. Tony’d be able to have his pick. Karen would have offered hers, but she didn’t figure it would fit Tony, and she wore sun glasses when she rode, so she didn’t have a visor on hers. Justin had been expanding on his idea for a more powerful water sprayer when Tony came up, and now he went back to what he’d been saying. If something like a pumper truck or a power washer would be good, one that was disguised so that Otto wouldn’t recognize it as such would be even better.

“Like a Q-ship,” Tony said. Leigh and Frank got the reference right away, but Karen had no idea what Tony meant. Justin and Angie remembered hearing the term the moment Tony started to explain to Karen that it referred to armed military ships in World War II that were disguised as merchant ships. “Yeah! Exactly!” Justin agreed. He thought that maybe he could rig something up on a pickup truck in a day or two, he told the others. Or maybe he could modify a septic pumping truck to spray water instead of suction out a septic tank. That wouldn’t take as much time. “But there really isn’t room for doing that kind of thing here,” Karen said. “And how will you get your tools? We’re kind of stuck here at the moment.” Justin slumped back into the couch. Karen was right. He’d need to do it at the shop, but he didn’t want to put any of the guys in danger, and they’d all be a little too curious if he kicked them all out to work on it. “What about using a hydro-seeding truck?” Frank asked, looking up from his computer. It was already basically made for spraying out a slurry of grass seed and fertilizer mixed in water. Justin’s eyes widened for a second. That would be perfect. Other than cleaning it out, it wouldn’t even take any modification. But where would he get one of those? He thought for a minute. Maybe.... He thought he had a cousin in the ‘burbs who owned a lawn care business. Of course, he couldn’t have picked the guy out of a line-up. He was a cousin by marriage, last name of Harper. Justin wondered out loud how he’d persuade the guy to loan him the truck, and Karen suggested that it might not be that hard since it was October. It wasn’t like the guy would be doing too much seeding over the next few months. The others agreed. Well, if it turned out they’d need it, he’d have to call Marie to get the guy’s number. Marie had everybody’s number.

Karen and Leigh had been working on more research regarding the background of the symbols and rituals Horst had been using, especially any connection they might have to The Thule Society and the Nazis. But for the moment, they were waiting for the bots to start sending back info. So Karen decided to call her mom. They usually talked on Sundays, although it was getting harder and harder for Karen to talk to her mom. She was never sure if Edward was listening in–or if someone else might be–and every time they spoke, her mom sounded more ‘Stepford.’ It made Karen a little sick. She’d always been so close to her mom, but nothing she did seemed to work to save her mom from whatever Edward had planned for her. Considering all the other people they’d helped over the past year and a half, and all the other Evil they’d been able to put out of commission, her inability to help her mom especially, but also Marlene, nagged at Karen. Her successes just served to make her failures stand out more. Karen went out to the kitchen and dialed her mom’s number. “Hello?” she heard her mom’s voice ask. Shoot! That was right! She had left her personal cell phone at home when she’d gone out tracking Justin yesterday. And when Frank and Leigh had gone to get Drew, Frank made a point of taking Justin’s personal cell, the one that, like Karen’s and almost everyone else’s, had the tracking virus on it, back to the house too, so that no one would be able to track them to the safe house. So she was using one of the throw-aways, which her mom’s cell wouldn’t have recognized as her. “Hi, Mom! I just thought I’d call, since I haven’t talked to you since last week,” Karen said cheerfully. “Oh, hi, honey,” her mom replied. “Is...is everything alright?” “Yeah, Mom. Why?” Karen asked. “Oh, I don’t know. You just sounded a little....” Cathy said, letting the thought trail off. “How’s Justin?” “He’s fine,” Karen told her. “Oh. He’s home and OK?” Cathy asked. Now her mom was starting to really creep her out. Why was she asking about Justin like that? “Yeah, he’s fine, Mom. Why do you ask?” Karen prodded. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s nothing, really,” Cathy told her evasively.

“So, are you doing anything on Halloween?” Cathy asked, suddenly changing the subject. “Uh, I’m not sure yet, Mom” Karen answered. “I don’t really know if anything is going on or not yet.” “Oh, well I was thinking about having a party, and wondered if you and your friends would be able to come,” Cathy told her. “Uh, I don’t know,” Karen replied. “I’ll have to call around and find out if everyone else is free. What time will it be starting?” “Oh, I thought about 8 o’clock,” Cathy said. “Would we need to dress up?” Karen asked. “Well, I was thinking that costumes would be fun,” Cathy told her. “But I know that it’s short notice, so if anyone can’t get one in time, it wouldn’t be necessary.” “Lemme call everyone else, Mom, and I’ll give you a call back in a little bit. OK?” Karen asked. “Sure, honey,” her mom said. “I’ll talk to you later.” Karen closed the phone. What the hell was going on now? Karen went back into the main room, where the others were either busy on computers or playing video games. “My mom wants to have a Halloween party, and you’re all invited,” Karen said, a hint of despair in her voice. Frank hung his head and shook it slightly. Karen could tell he wasn’t pleased. “I told her I’d ask everyone and call her back,” Karen finished. “Hey! I already know what I’ll go as,” Justin said excitedly. “Captain America!” “Which one,” Angie asked. “You should go as Wonder Woman, Karen,” Leigh suggested. “Or, maybe the Invisible Girl from the Fantastic Four, since you can do the Sphere of Protection.” Frank could hardly believe that they were all seriously considering going, and discussing the relative merits of one super-hero costume over another.

“Uh, so we’re not going to do anything about the big bonfire?” Frank asked them, interrupting the flow of the conversation. “Instead we’re all going to goof off and go to a Halloween party thrown by Karen’s mom and Edward Harrington? Did it occur to you that it might be a trap?” Karen’s head drooped. Of course she had! But it wasn’t HIS mom who was acting all weird and asking strange questions about Justin, then suddenly trying to trap her by inviting them all to a party. “I didn’t tell her that we’d go!” Karen told him, her voice rising slightly. “I told her I’d call her back, so that I could ask you what we should do. If you don’t think we should go, just say so and I’ll call my mom and tell her...something.” The room got quiet as they all waited for Frank to say something. “I wonder,” Frank mused after sitting and thinking for a minute. “Is there some connection between Edward and Otto?” “Ya think maybe we’re going to be the sacrifices now?” Justin asked. “And that’s why we’re being lured there?” Angie added. “Or maybe it’s to keep us out of the way while Horst finishes his rituals,” Frank suggested. The flood gates opened and everyone began throwing out ideas about why Cathy was planning the party and who else would be there. Would Stevens be there to arrest them all? Would Horst be there? Was he ‘cleaning house’ by getting rid of anyone who knew too much? Was he getting rid of the weak links? Or was he just getting rid of everybody who knew him, picking up and leaving for somewhere else to start over? Would Karen’s mom be in danger if they didn’t go? Or if they did? Could they go to the party and still manage to break up the bonfire, if they left the party early? How did they know that the bonfire was even still ‘on’? Maybe pulling Justin out, plus all the smokers last night, meant that the bonfire was off? There was really no way to know.

“Maybe you should go,” Frank suggested to Karen. “And Justin, and maybe anyone else who wants to. I’ll stay out to be the cavalry.” “I’ll stay out too,” Leigh offered. “Maybe Angie could go as Scarlett O’Hara,” Justin suggested, “and she could stash some weapons under the hoop skirt.” “I am NOT wearing a hoop skirt,” Angie stated in no uncertain terms. “Besides,” Leigh said, laughing, “she’d have to kill you when you went up her skirt to get them.” “Hey!” Tony interrupted the others “Maybe I could go as a Space Marine. That’d gimme an excuse fer carryin’ weapons.” The others stared at him. “What’s a Space Marine?” Angie asked. Tony started to explain that they were characters from a war game called Warhammer 40K, then stopped. “Unless youse want me ta stay out as part of da calvary,” Tony said, looking to Frank. “It’s up to you,” Frank told him. “Wait,” Karen asked. “Why is everyone worried about taking weapons into my mom’s party?” She didn’t like Edward either, and she did suspect that Otto “Self-actualization” Horst and Edward “Life Coach” Harrington were connected somehow. But why did they all want to go in loaded for bear all the time? And if they all wanted to stay out as part of the cavalry so that they could have their weapons, was anyone going in to the party with her? “So, Angie,” Karen asked sounding tentative, “will you and Aiden go to the party, too?” “Sure,” Angie said. “He should be off-shift again by then.” Tony already had a pad of paper on the table, and was sketching out his Space Marine costume. So he was going in too.

Just then, they all heard a sound at the back door. Several guns were out and pointed carefully at the floor when Terry pushed the door open. She looked like she’d just been worked over good. She pushed the door shut and headed straight for the nearest easy chair, ignoring the guns being slipped back into holsters. After she’d plopped down into the chair, she looked like she regretted sitting down and might get back up. “Is there any beer here?” she asked. Half the people in the room got up and headed for the kitchen. They all came back, Tony with an open bottle that he handed to her. “There were 13...I think,” she moaned. “A total of 28 dead. But 13 separate incidents.” She paused and took a long pull from the bottle. “The worst one was the last one.” She set the bottle on the floor and dropped her face into her hands, her elbows on her knees as if her head was too heavy for her to hold up. The others waited quietly until she as ready to continue. After a minute she rubbed her face and went on. “Guy burned his house down, with his wife and three kids in it, tied up. It looked like he filled the house with gas and lit something with a lighter.” Terry paused again, working up the courage to continue. “One kid was almost completely intact, trussed up like a turkey, eyes burned out. I’ll never get that smell out of my nose and hair, never get the sight out of my brain,” she moaned. “I spent the entire day going from fire to fire to fire to fire. The first one started about 1am, the last about 3am...as far as I could tell. The guys from the arson squad are working on it, but it isn’t making any sense.”

Terry spoke in fits and starts, stopping to rub her temples or take a long drink of beer, one bottle followed by another, each replaced as soon as she emptied it by whichever of her friends got up the fastest. In most of the cases, there was definitely a body left, even if it was burned beyond recognition. There were several couples. A couple families. Tom was definitely among the dead. His truck had gone over an embankment and burst into flames. But the point of origin of the fire was the driver’s seat. The ME hadn’t confirmed the ID yet, but they were assuming it was him because it was in his truck and the body was wearing his dog tags. As Terry described Tom’s case, the others realized that his death most closely matched the death of the guy from DC who had failed to secure Leigh for the barn meeting. In both cases, it seemed that the body itself ignited while the man was in a moving vehicle. There was a definite differentiation between those who were clear suicides and those who weren’t. The majority seemed to have self-immolated in one fashion or another, but for the most part they weren’t burned to ash like the people on the bus. “But, remember,” Leigh said, “enough had remained of Horst’s body for it to be identified back in ‘43.” Maybe, the Envoys speculated, the ones that left a recognizable body, like Horst back in '43, were the ones who had been through the proper ritual and transcended. And maybe the ones who burned to ash, like the people in the bus, didn't transcend.

“Do you have the addresses of where all the incidents happened?” Justin asked Terry. “Maybe there's some kind of pattern.” Terry checked her notes and read off the addresses where each of the 13 separate incidents occurred, and Justin pinned a map to the wall and began marking each one. They were scattered all over the Metro area, and there was no pattern that any of the Envoys could make out. “What happens if you included the other, earlier incidents?” Frank wondered aloud. He gave Justin the coordinates of the bus fire and John Fellowes' 'accident', and Justin marked those as well. But it didn't create a pattern where none existed. “Do we know how many of the dead were in Horst's house, or if any were at the barn meeting?” Karen asked. Frank looked to Terry, and she started giving him the names, if she had them, or the best descriptions she had of the adult men that died in the incidents. Frank compared the names and descriptions to the information from the barn meeting and Horst's house. All of the men at Horst's house yesterday, except Justin, had burned to death last night. 7 of those men, including Tom, had also been at the barn meeting. And then there was Pete, who'd been at the barn, but not Horst's house. The witnesses who had seen Pete pour the gas over himself and light himself up had tried to put him out. They did get the fire out, but the damage had already been done. Pete only lived for a few minutes after they got to him.

“I just don't understand how anyone could do this,” Terry said. “Four of these guys took their families and stuff with them. One lit himself on fire with some sort of flammable gel, like Sterno, then embraced his wife and wouldn't—or couldn't—let her go. So she burned to death too, only slower than him.” “Could have been post-hypnotic suggestion,” Justin suggested. “The drugs you all inhaled would have made that easier,” Frank agreed. “But people can be convinced to do shit like that without hypnosis. Especially if they truly believe in what they're asked or told to do, and completely trust the person that tells them.” “Look at the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire,” Leigh agreed. “Well, it's not exactly the same,” Karen said, “since they were doing it as a protest rather than to achieve transcendence. But the way they were able to just sit and ignore the fact that they were burning to death....” Karen let the thought trail off. “It sounds like these men took Horst's speech about giving up everything a little too far,” Leigh said. “Too bad they tried to take it with them,” Karen added. “Not all of them did,” Terry clarified. “Some of the men had families that they didn't kill. In fact, some, if they hadn't happened at the same time as all of the others, we wouldn't have recognized as suicides at all. They looked like accidents. But some were very obviously suicides.” “Are the police treating them all as related?” Frank asked her. “No! They think they're all just isolated incidents,” Terry snorted. A grin slowly spread across Frank's face. “I'd give it 45 minutes, and you'll be getting a call from DHS,” he said to Terry. Terry didn't look pleased with the thought. Then her phone rang. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Right,” Terry grunted into the phone. She picked up her coat and started toward the back door, still listening to whoever was on the other end of the line. She stepped outside, and a moment later the others heard her car start up and drive away.

“Hmmm.” Frank tapped a couple keys on his computer. He was looking for the nearest cell towers that Terry's call might be bounced off. “Ah hah.” More key strokes, and he'd switched off one of the three towers that Stevens would need to track her. Oh, he was sure that Stevens would be trying. It's what he would have been doing, had Terry not been on their side. In fact.... He tapped a few more keys. That would really mess Stevens up. He'd just transferred Terry's signal to a different tower, so that her position would be disguised. About 20 minutes later, Terry called. “DHS has claimed jurisdiction over all these cases,” she told Frank. “I've been ordered to hand over my notes. So...what do you want to eat?” It was about dinner time. “What do you guys want to eat,” Frank asked the others. “Ooo, I'd love a Big Mac,” Karen said, “if Terry's going anywhere near a McDonalds.” “Oh, I was kind of thinking about pizza,” Justin said. Frank relayed both requests to Terry. Tony had gone back to the basement to work on his Halloween costume, so Frank hollered down the stairway, “Hey, Tony you want Coneys for dinner?” “Yeah!” Tony hollered back. Frank looked at Leigh and Angie. “I've got food here,” Leigh told him. She'd been puttering around in the kitchen on and off all afternoon. “Actually, a salad sounds good right now, even if it's from a fast food place,” Angie said. “I've got all the fixings in the kitchen already,” Leigh told her. “OK,” Frank said to Terry. “It sounds like a Big Mac, a pizza, and Coneys. And just surprise me, whatever you want to get.”

“Hey, do you think maybe Terry should use my credit card to pay for some of the food?” Justin asked. “No,” Frank told him. “For now it's probably better to keep you out of sight. But I wonder if your cards are still active?” Frank tapped a few keys, and checked on Justin's credit cards. They were still active, but they were flagged that DHS should be contacted it they were used. “Heh,” Frank laughed. “You're going on a tour of the Capitol Building in DC,” he told Justin. “Maybe I should see all the important buildings in DC,” Justin suggested. “Nope,” Frank replied. “It'll be more enigmatic if you only pop up in one place.” Then Terry called back. “By the way,” she told Frank, “when I was pulled off the cases, Stevens asked if I knew where you were.” “And?” Frank prompted when Terry paused. “I told him that I hadn't seen you lately, that you were working on something. I think I did a fine job of sounding suitably irritated by that. Then he asked if I knew how to get ahold of you. I gave him your old cell number.” Frank could hear the smirk in Terry's voice. “Anyway, see ya in a bit.” As Terry was talking, Frank checked to see if he could tell who was tracing her call. He was sure someone was, and he was also pretty sure it was Stevens.

Sure enough, there was a DHS trace running on her number. Frank used Stevens' own password, which Reg had been kind enough to capture for him, to override the trace request. Come to think of it, it might be interesting to know where Stevens was at that moment, Frank thought to himself. He used the number he had for Stevens to back-trace Stevens' GPS signal. “Well, that's interesting,” he told the others. “It looks like Stevens is down at DPD HQ.” Frank tapped into the DPD's internal security system and began scanning through the various cameras around HQ. He didn't see Stevens anywhere, but he did spot some DHS-types moving through the halls. And it looked like several had taken over desks in the main office area. In fact, a couple of them looked just like Stevens' two 'shadows', the guys who'd been with him when he stormed into Sheriff Lane's office last week to take over the Fellowes case. While Frank was working on that, and they were all waiting for Terry to get back with dinner, Karen called her mom back. She told her that she and Justin, Angie and Aiden, and Tony would be able to come to the party and that Tony was already working on his costume. Her mom sounded really pleased, even though a few of Karen's friends couldn't make it. Frank overheard Karen talking to her mom, and he remembered that Cathy had been asking some odd questions about Justin's health. No doubt Edward had prompted that, but how had he known about Justin's connection to the deaths last night? Obviously someone had called and tipped him off....

Frank pulled up Stevens' cell records and started checking the numbers who'd called him and those he'd called. There were some incoming calls from DC; and about 2 hours after Frank had dragged Justin out of Horst's house, Stevens had gotten a call from a Detroit number. That was just before the real Agent Smith had gotten the visit from Stevens. The number had to be Horst's. He checked and it did link to Horst's address. Now...who had Horst been calling lately? Frank expanded his search, pulling up the phone records for Horst's number. There was a call to Edward, several to Tom's number, a call to DC. That number was not one that Stevens had gotten calls from, but it was the same number that Leigh had gotten the call from when Fellowes tried to set up his 'date.' And that number had called Horst several times, too. He scanned back a little further, going back to a little before the bus fire that started this whole episode. That was when he noticed that there were several calls to and from another local number. The calls stopped just about the time of the bus fire. Frank did a search to get the name of the person the number was registered to, then brought up everything he could about the person and the address on the account. Finally, a link to the bus fire. There'd been no activity on the number for 10 days now, and the guy fit the profile of someone who'd be involved in this foolishness. He had a family, and, sure enough, his kids were registered as home-schooled. In fact, it appeared that they and another family home-schooled their kids together, and there were exactly 8 children.

Frank still had the perimeter camera views open in a corner of his monitor, and he saw Terry's car pull up behind the safe house. He hoped she hadn't been followed, but he trusted that if she'd seen a tail she'd have called him and not come back here. When she came in, she apologized for taking so long. “I had to make a little stop at Kinko's along the way,” she said with a grin. Justin had been sitting with Karen, in front of her laptop, when Terry mentioned making the copies of her notes. He got up and headed upstairs. “Did you know that Stevens has moved into DPD's HQ?” Frank asked her. She didn't know that, but she'd been a little too busy to be hanging out there today. “I haven't turned over my notes yet, so he's probably hovering around waiting for them,” she said. “But I wasn't given a deadline for that, so I'm taking my time.” Frank went back to Horst's phone records while Terry passed around the food bags and unpacked the Chinese she'd brought for her and Frank. When she went to let Justin know that his pizza was on the table, he held out a gun case. She could see the previous contents laying on the bed. “It's fire-proof,” he told her, “for the copies.” She nodded. Not a bad idea, considering what had happened last night. When the two went back downstairs, Frank called everyone over to his computer. “Check this out,” he said, nodding at the screen. “Horst's number made calls that link to many of the fire scenes from last night, as well as Edward's number, and this one in DC that Fellowes used to call Leigh,” Frank explained, in case not everyone saw the pattern.

The Envoys looked at one another. Finally, all the loose ends seemed to be getting tied together. “Angie, Leigh, Tony,” Frank said. “I want you to come with me to check out the house of the bus fire victims. Since they home-schooled, there might be a lot of useful information to be found there.” “I'd love to...” Justin started to say. Frank cut him off. “You have to stay out of sight...unless you want to turn into a crispy critter too.” Justin was obviously disappointed, and Karen was too. She wasn't much good at the B and E part, but she actually enjoyed the part about digging through someone's house looking for incriminating information. And she wasn't bad at it, either, since that was kind of what archaeology was all about—just much older houses usually. Tony straightened up and tossed what he'd been holding to Justin. Luckily Justin had quick reflexes. He caught the two grenades Tony had tossed. “Fire extinguisher,” Tony said, “since we're going to be in close quarters at Edward's house.” “It's not 'close quarters,'” Karen objected. “It's a huge house!” She had no idea why she was defending Edward's taste in houses, except that it seemed to reflect badly somehow on her mom. “That's relative, with Tony,” Frank told her. “When you're talking about grenades, it is kind of close quarters. And since Tony is used to blowing up much larger buildings than Edward's house....” Frank grinned, and Karen laughed and nodded. She wasn't happy with the idea that they were putting her mom in that kind of danger, but was the danger she was already in any better or worse? At least Tony was thinking ahead....

As soon as the six Envoys finished eating, Frank and Leigh went to Justin and Karen’s house to pick up Drew and a list of other things that the two either needed that night or didn’t want to risk leaving there if something happened to the house. Karen was afraid that Otto would take revenge against Justin for screwing up the ceremony by burning down their house...at the very least. A lot of the stuff in the house was easily replaced, certainly. But while there were also a lot of things in the house that she would be sad to lose, including the house they’d only been in a little over a year, there were a few things she would have a hard time doing without, like all the stuff on her laptop, including the mid-term exam she was supposed to hand out on Wednesday. And there was no way she was leaving Drew there alone. She couldn’t even bear the thought of losing him. So she and Justin wrote up a short list of stuff they needed Frank and Leigh to retrieve for them, only as much as would fit in a couple legal file boxes. Their computers, a couple changes of clothes, some of Drew’s food, and a few other odds and ends, like family pictures and their address book. They even made sure to note precisely where Frank and Leigh would find the items, so they wouldn’t have to be in there any longer than necessary.

Frank and Leigh didn’t see anyone loitering around Justin and Karen’s place when they were there. But that didn’t mean that someone wasn’t watching it, and them. So they made a good show of going in to search the place, carrying in a couple of empty file boxes, turning on all the lights in every room, checking all the drawers and closets in case someone could see in any of the windows. And when they were done, Drew was happy enough to crawl into Leigh’s jacket for the ride back to the safe house. The team had long ago begun updating the safe house with the things they wanted to make it more comfortable. So besides all having beds upstairs now instead of the Army surplus cots that were all Aiden could afford when he first outfitted the place, and comfortable chairs, and a full-sized refrigerator/freezer, Karen and Justin had made sure that there were food bowls and a litter box and litter, in case Drew needed them when he was there. And they all tried to keep the place well-stocked with food and drink for themselves, since they never really knew when they might end up there. Tony, of course, had also spruced the place up some, since it was his home whenever he was in town. And they’d all worked together to ‘harden’ the place against surveillance, wire it for security and online access, and fortify the basement, in case they ever needed to secure someone or something down there. They still had the old butcher shop, too, just in case; and by this time, they’d managed to get that put back together after the last fight with the ghul. So, in spite of descending on the place at the last minute, they were actually all as comfortable there as the circumstances would allow.

When Frank and Leigh got back, Drew made a bee-line for Karen and tried to burrow through her lap. Karen wasn’t sure if the cat actually knew what was going on, or he had sensed her fear when she left the house in a hurry that morning, or he could sense that she’d been hurt. Of course, maybe he was just looking for some comfort for himself after having had to spend the whole day alone. Justin was still feeling a little fuzzy from the drug he’d inhaled that morning, but he’d been wondering one thing ever since they’d started telling him and Terry what had happened. Now he asked Frank, who was the one person who might know, “So, do you know if Stevens has contacted the FBI looking for me yet?” It was around 8pm, and Frank hadn’t had time to do much beyond keeping his thoughts straight that evening yet. Drew gave Justin a dirty look when he sat down next to Karen and gently put his arm around her shoulders, careful to stay away from the burns on her back. Justin thought that maybe Drew was mad at him for dragging Karen into something that got her hurt. But Karen wasn’t sure if maybe drew just didn’t want to share her right then. He had been alone at home since a little past 9:30 that morning. But the dirty look didn’t dissuade Justin. “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever known,” he whispered into Karen’s ear. She didn’t think so. In fact, it was fear that drove her to call Frank and follow Justin and go inside twice to find him. But she was too tired to argue, and she just leaned into his embrace.

Frank pulled out his phone. The real Agent Smith was probably the one guy besides Stevens who would know if Stevens had called looking for Justin yet. “FBI, this is Smith,” the man on the other end of the line answered. “Hi, James. This is Frank Muelder,” Frank started. That was as far as he got. “I should’ve known,” Smith interrupted Frank. “I spent the last couple hours with some guy from Homeland Security chewing me up one side and down the other about some guy I picked up,” he said, irritation spilling from his voice. “An Agent Stevens?” Frank asked. “Yeah. So...you are the one responsible,” Smith answered. “So, what was he asking about?” Frank asked Smith. “He said I was out of my jurisdiction and had messed up his investigation. I told him that I was in the office all day, and I have witnesses and video to prove it,” Smith told him. “Since you aren’t calling to apologize, and you’ve never made a purely social call in your life, what do you want?” Smith asked Frank warily. “I was just calling to see how hip-deep in corruption someone is,” Frank told him. “I wouldn’t say that on this line,” Smith warned him. “In fact, I wouldn’t say that at all. So, you missing your old stomping grounds, now that you’ve gone and gotten a bunch of letters after your name? I hear you’re a ‘Doctor’ now,” Smith teased Frank. The two chatted amiably for a couple minutes about Frank’s new line of work. “At another time, I would’ve bought you a beer just to find out what you’re into now,” Smith told him. “You owe me one. Good luck with the crazies...I know you’ll fit right in,” he finished. “Thanks,” Frank said. “Listen, I’ve got a flying saucer I have to catch. I’ll talk to you later.” Frank closed his phone.

Frank told the others that Stevens had called looking for Justin. He still wasn’t sure what part Stevens had in all this though. Was he another minion of the Unknown creature behind it all? Was he the errand boy for some government higher-up who was the minion, or worse yet, the creature itself? He really needed to figure out how all this tied together. “Ya know,” Justin was saying, “I would be happy to take ‘em all down right now. Horst, Olga, even Stevens.” “But...then you’d be in jail,” Karen told him. “And I don’t want to only see you on ‘conjugal visit day.’” “And I’m guessing you wouldn’t like the nightly conjugal visits, either,” Angie said to Justin. “I can take care of myself,” Justin told her. “Yeah, but there’s some pretty big guys in prison,” Angie replied. “But he’s white,” Leigh said. Frank picked up the thought, “And if he’s white and in jail then they all know he actually did it. If you’re any other color, you might just be an innocent who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” “That’ll give him street cred,” Leigh finished. “What about them?” Justin asked, his head still fuzzy enough that he didn’t think to say who he was talking about. “Can’t you get a warrant for them drugging me?” Unfortunately, Frank explained, while the drug Justin was given was related to Rohypnol, it wasn’t illegal. The exact chemical sequence that made it wasn’t listed in the statutes. Obviously Horst knew that somehow, maybe from Stevens, and got as close as he could to Rohypnol without doing anything illegal.

The team started discussing the night’s sleeping arrangements while Frank booted up his computer. There were some things he wanted the computer working on tonight, so he needed to get the bots up and running. Frank heard Terry mention that she didn’t have to work in the morning, and he asked if she was going home then. “No,” Terry answered. “I’ll stay here with everyone else. It’ll be kind of like a...” “Like a sleep-over!” Karen laughed, finishing Terry’s thought. It was the only thing that made the idea of having to stay here rather than going home any more palatable for Karen. As the others talked about who was sleeping where, Justin made a comment about being glad that they’d all worked to get the place fixed up nicer. “No offense to Aiden,” he said, “but it was barely liveable before.” “Well, he did the best he could with what he had,” Angie said. “He wasn’t rolling in dough back when he set the place up.” Justin was flabbergasted for a minute. “Didn’t you know that Aiden paid for it himself?” Karen asked him. He didn’t. Now he felt awful about complaining about the place. “What’s his TV like,” he asked Angie. “Nice enough, considering he’s hardly ever there to watch it,” Angie replied. Justin wanted to get him something to make up for him having spent all his money back then to get the safe house set up. “That’s not really necessary,” Angie told him. “We both have enough money now, although he has less since he paid for med school out of his. If we wanted or needed anything, we’d have gotten it.”

“Why don’t you make a donation to Doctors Without Borders in Aiden’s name,” Leigh suggested. “That’s what I did for his birthday.” “Hey, yeah!” Justin said. “I’ve heard of them!” Leigh started to describe what the group did for Angie’s sake. “Great,” Angie moaned. “Don’t let Aiden hear about them or he’ll go running off to join up when he finishes his residency.” “He can’t do that,” Karen said. “Then who would save our butts?” She shifted slightly on the couch, her back uncomfortable from the pressure of her shirt against it. While Frank was working on the parameters for the searches he wanted to run, he pulled up the house’s security system and armed it. He checked the view from the surveillance cameras that Justin, Tony and Reg had set up around their ‘perimeter.’ A couple people wandered by, then a small group a short time later. But he recognized them all as frequent visitors to the neighborhood. He didn’t see anything that made him think that the safe house was being watched. When Justin realized what Frank was doing, he opened his own laptop. May as well check on their house and the condo, too. Frank also pulled up the feed from the cameras out at the barn, to see if recent events had sparked any activity out there. (He couldn’t help but snicker at his pun.) But there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary going on at any of those places either. They all couldn’t help but wonder when the other shoe was going to drop.

It was close to midnight, now, and Leigh and Karen were starting to fade. They’d both put a lot of energy that day into using their Arts, and though Justin had channeled some of his energy to them, they were both worn out. Justin reminded Leigh that she was going to do another Mental Shield as soon as she was able, to hopefully dispel anything that might be clinging to any of them after contact with Otto, Olga or the thing that attacked Karen. Leigh raised the Shield, then went upstairs to bed. Justin would have carried Karen upstairs, and he even offered. But although Aiden had knocked her burns from third degree to first, they still hurt; and Karen couldn’t think of a way that Justin could carry her without touching them, short of throwing her over his shoulder. And she really didn’t feel like letting him do that. Angie and Terry stayed up a while longer, going head to head on a couple video games. Terry was trying to wait for Frank, but he was totally absorbed in whatever he was doing on the computer. So when Angie finally stood to go upstairs around 1:30am, Terry got up and went to bed too. Frank wanted to know what Stevens was up to now, and he was hoping that he’d get early warning of any activity from that quarter. And now that he had a name for the human at the top of the chain that Justin was drawn into, he wanted to find out anything he could about Mr. Otto Horst and Ms. Olga Helmschmidt. He finally got all the search programs tweaked to his satisfaction about 2am and checked the security system one last time before heading to bed himself.

It was 1:30am when Tony opened his eyes and looked around without moving anything but his eyes. He wasn’t sure where he was, again, and if something bad was going on, he didn’t want to alert the monster. There was a dim light on, and he could see just enough to know that he was in a hospital gown. He slowly moved one arm, then the other, one leg, and then the other. OK, so all his parts seemed to be working. He raised his head and looked around. Hmmm.... It looked like ICU. Curtains mostly covered one wall, and through the small gap, he could see a nurse station. But no one seemed to be looking in his direction right then. Well...there was one way to bring an ICU nurse running.... Tony tugged on one of the wires taped to his chest. A New York second later, a nurse came running in. “Hey!” Tony tried. But she was ignoring him, checking all the monitors, and the wires leading from Tony to each one. “Hey, can I leave now?” he asked her as she reattached the lead he’d pulled off. “No. You’ve been in a coma,” she replied, not even looking at him. He looked around. No phone. He tried to sit up and look in the small drawer on the table next to his bed. He barely got a glimpse inside it, enough to see that his cell wasn’t in there, before she pushed him back down onto the bed. Well...she wasn’t half bad....

“So, why can’t I leave?” Tony asked her. “I feel fine.” “I’m calling your doctor,” she told him. “Besides, you can’t go anywhere with your butt hanging out of your gown.” “Hey! Chicks dig my butt!” Tony replied, slightly offended. “Do you?” he couldn’t help asking. “Uh, I’m the one who cleaned you up,” she said. Thinking that might cool Tony’s ardor. She was wrong. “Wanna do it again while I’m awake?” he proposed. “I’ll be sending someone in to check your vitals,” was all she said, as she turned to leave. A minute later, a male nurse came in pushing a small cart with various ‘doctor tools’ on it. As he started wrapping the cuff around Tony’s arm, Tony offered, “I’ll give ya twenny bucks ta use yer cell.” “I can’t do that,” the nurse replied. “Fity,” Tony tried. “Nope. It’s against the rules,” the nurse told him. He stuck a thermometer in Tony’s mouth, hoping to end the conversation. “Hey,” Tony said around the thermometer, “wha’ abou’ ‘a shance ‘a bush ‘a blunger ‘a blow ub a buildin’? Ebrybody wan’s ‘a ‘oo ‘at.” The nurse pulled the thermometer out of Tony’s mouth. “No deal. I’m not getting on the wrong side of your doctor,” he told Tony. “Can you at least roll me down ta a pay phone?” Tony asked plaintively. “Nope.” “I’ll give ya twenny bucks ta send in someone who’s bribe-able,” Tony tried one last time. The nurse didn’t say anything. He packed up his stuff and made a couple notes on Tony’s chart.

As the nurse pushed the cart back to the door, Aiden walked in. The nurse held the chart out to Aiden. “Good luck,” he said, then pushed the cart out the door. “Can I use your cell,” Tony started. “Nope,” Aiden answered, scanning through the chart. “Come on! Before da doctor comes in!” Tony whined. “I am the doctor,” Aiden told him. “Then lemme go,” Tony said. “Not ‘til you jump through all the hoops,” Aiden said. “Now, who’s the president?” “Uhhh, George....Washington?” Aiden wasn’t laughing. He started poking and prodding Tony, hoping to find some reason why Tony had been out so long. Finally he grabbed a couple small gauze squares, motioned for Tony to open his mouth, and grabbed Tony’s tongue and pulled it out. “Oww! ‘eyyy!” Tony complained. His tongue hurt like hell, but he couldn’t remember biting it. “You nearly bit through it,” Aiden told him with little sympathy. “So, what happened?” Aiden asked, letting go of the tongue. “Well, I wuz gonna go under da house, like Karen said ta. But I didn’ need ta. Karen must’a been smokin’ sumpin’. Dere weren’t no wards ‘er cheese grater ‘er nuttin’.” Aiden realized that he was missing some huge portion of the story, but he let Tony keep going. Obviously Tony had been going into someplace ‘out of body.’ “So I jus’ wen’ in. But dis giant fire t’ing met me in dere. Scared da hell outta me! It tried ta swing at me, but I wuz outta dere. Den I don’ remember nuttin’ else.”

“Angie brought you in,” Aiden told him. “You’d gone into convulsions. Frank got your heart restarted and glued your tongue together to stop the bleeding. Given the condition you were in when you came in, there’s no way I can let you go tonight. But who did you want to call?” Aiden asked him. “Well, I wuz gonna call Justin fer a ride,” Tony whined. “Hey, I’ll give ya twenny bucks to lemme out tonight,” he tried brightly. Aiden rolled his eyes. “I got the same reward money you did, remember?” he said to Tony. “I don’t have any med school loans, and I make ‘doctor money’ now.” “Fity bucks?” Tony asked. Aiden shook his head and left the room. A minute later he came back in with a syringe. “Roll onto your side,” he told Tony. Aiden popped the needle into the back of Tony’s hip. “Hey!” Tony shouted, as if it would make a difference. “Count backwards from one hundred,” Aiden told him, pulling the sheet back up as Tony rolled back onto his back. “A hunnert, niney-nine, niney-eight, niney-seb....” Tony was out. That’d keep him there and quiet for a few more hours, anyway.

Leigh was sleeping peacefully, for a change, when she realized that she felt hot. As hot as the desert. In fact, she was sweating profusely. She put her hand out to feel for the edge of the covers, but her hand touched a wall. She felt for the other side, and hit a wall there, too. In fact, no matter where she tried to stretch out her hands, there were walls on every side. It was dark, and still getting hotter. It didn’t make any sense, so Leigh closed her eyes and tried to think. She started to investigate the space she seemed to be trapped in. All the walls seemed to be covered in a satiny material. When she felt around above her head, she realized that her head was resting on a small pillow of the same material. She was in a coffin. The air was getting thick, and she could feel a tickle at the back of her throat. Though it was dark, she was sure that smoke was leaking into her space. She pulled the pillow out from under her head and ripped at the seams. She needed something to cover her nose and mouth, or the smoke inhalation would knock her out before she could think of a way out of her predicament. The air grew hotter and thicker, and Leigh could see the glow of light through the joints of her prison. Then the flames began to eat through the walls. And beyond...only more flames. She could almost feel the flames licking at her own flesh, when she woke with a start.

Frank wasn’t sure how long he’d been sleeping, when he realized that he felt cold. Cold and wet. He looked around and found himself in the midst of a thick fog. He looked down. He was dressed like normal, a suit and trench coat. In his hand was the ‘hand sun,’ and he flicked the switch. But the powerful light did nothing to penetrate the fog. He could see the droplets of water glisten in the beam, and could feel the cold, clammy air on the skin of his face and hands. His mind went immediately to the Weendigo they’d fought over a year ago. This place felt just like its cave had. Suddenly, his gut tightened. He felt like he should be looking for something, that he must find it. The sense of urgency overwhelmed him and he began scanning around himself with the flashlight, hoping to get some idea of where he was. He started walking, cautiously, through the thick fog. He stumbled and almost fell. When he put out his hand to catch himself, he grabbed onto a flat stone. He brought the light close to it. It was a tombstone, with his name on it. He must be in a graveyard. As he pondered that, he heard a scream, a woman’s voice that seemed very familiar. Terry! He straightened up and pulled his gun, and began to trot in the direction of the scream. He tripped again, and this time he fell, landing in a deep hole. As he struggled to get up, he felt someone else under him. It was Terry, and she was wrapped in flames, writhing in pain. He drew in a breath and...woke with a start.

He looked over to where Terry was sleeping, snoring softly in the twin bed next to his. He started to reach out to touch her, to make sure that this was real, but he felt cold and clammy and didn’t want to wake her. He checked his watch. 3:30am. He didn’t know how he could be so cold and still sweating, but his pajamas were soaked through. “How are you doing?” Frank heard Leigh’s voice whisper to him. So, he wasn’t the only one who had a bad dream that night. “Mind if I shower first?” Leigh asked him, still whispering. He sat and waved her toward the bathroom. At least she wouldn’t be using all the hot water, she thought to herself. She was still very warm and sweaty, and the cool water felt good. But she still thought she could smell smoke. She poked her head past the shower curtain, and it was gone. She toweled off, and put on fresh clothes, and thought she smelled it again. But when she sniffed her hair and clothes, she smelled nothing but the herbs of her shampoo and the smell of clean clothes. Frank smiled to himself as he waited for Leigh to come out of the bathroom. Terry was drooling slightly. She looked cute and vulnerable when she was sleeping. And she’d kill him if she heard him say that out loud. It was the only time she ever looked vulnerable. She tried really hard to look tough and capable and invulnerable any time she was awake.

Frank saw the bathroom door open, and he met Leigh as she was coming out. She was still toweling her long hair. Frank was only in the shower for a couple minutes. Long enough to warm up and wash off the sweat. When he came out, Leigh caught his eye and pointed to Angie’s empty bed. The two checked around the upstairs quietly, then padded down the stairs. They noticed the glow of the TV before they actually saw Angie, sitting in front of it with a video game controller in her hands, earphones over her head. Frank checked the security system while Leigh went towards Angie. She was still five feet away, directly behind Angie, when Angie paused the game, turned and looked at her. Leigh crossed her arms and stood there tapping her foot. Angie slipped one of the earphones off her ear. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping, young lady?” Leigh asked her, trying to suppress a grin. “My schedule is completely whacked from living with a medical resident,” Angie told her. Frank looked over at them; he wasn’t buying that. “What was your dream about?” he asked her. Angie hesitated, and Leigh sat down beside her. Leigh started, telling them her dream about being alive in a coffin that was being burned. Frank told his, about walking through a thick fog in a graveyard, and stumbling into an open grave in which Terry was being burned alive.

The two looked at Angie, who fiddled with the game controller. “Well...what was your dream?” Frank prompted her. She sighed. She wasn’t getting out of this. “I was giving an IED demo to a bunch of guys from the DPD. And they started snickering and giggling and pointing at me. And I looked down and I was naked.” “But why would they be laughing?” Leigh asked. “You’ve got a great body.” “I have no idea,” Angie told her. “But they were.” “Hey, I’m not giggling and snickering and pointing,” Frank said. “You’d better not,” Angie told him. “I could hurt you.” Frank grinned. “But I’m 24 feet away from you,” he told her. “I think I can make it,” Angie retorted. Frank’s grin couldn’t have gotten any bigger. “Maybe,” he said. “But I’ve got a taser.” The three started laughing, then quieted quickly when Leigh pointed toward the stairs, reminding them of the people that were still sleeping. Frank turned back to the computer. The bots were still working, so he checked all the security cameras again, at Justin and Karen’s and the condo, as well as around the safe house and the barn. Still nothing going on anywhere. Angie went back to her game, and Leigh started fiddling around with her laptop. About an hour later, Angie shut off the TV and stretched out on the couch, pulling an afghan down over herself.

Tony woke at 6:30am, when the male nurse came in and lifted his arm to wrap the BP cuff around it. He laid there patiently for a few minutes, until the nurse was done getting his vitals. Then Tony looked around and saw Aiden standing nearby checking his chart. “Can I go now?” Tony asked. Aiden sighed. “Yes,” he replied. Before he could set the chart down, Tony had started pulling the monitor leads off himself. The nurse tried stopping Tony by grabbing his wrist, but he just used his other hand. Finally, Aiden waved the nurse off, before the whole thing turned into a scene from a Three Stooges comedy. He sent the nurse to get Tony’s things and started carefully coiling up the wires that Tony was pulling off. Then Aiden handed him a clipboard with the discharge paperwork on it. The nurse brought Tony’s clothes in, and Tony immediately dug through the pile and pulled out his phone. There were no messages, so he set it aside until he’d dressed. When he was ready, Aiden made him sit in the wheelchair to be pushed out to the door. On the way through the lobby, Tony opened his phone and dialed Justin. “Yo! Justin! What’s shakin’?” Tony asked, standing up from the wheelchair just inside the front door. Justin rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock on his phone. 7am. “Dat asshole doctor a’ mine,” Tony said, looking around to make sure Aiden heard him, “wouldn’ let me out.”

“Why don’t you have him call Aiden.” Justin asked, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He felt Karen stir, and brushed the hair from her face as she rolled onto her side and pushed herself up. Her back was stinging, and all she wanted right then was one of those pain pills Aiden had prescribed her. “It wuz Aiden!” Tony proclaimed. “Listen, can you come get me?” he asked Justin. “Um, I can’t really go anywhere right now,” Justin told him. “I can explain later. We’re at your place. Can you just take a cab?” Tony checked his wallet. He had enough to get him from Receiving to the safe house. “Sure! See youse in a liddle bit!” Tony told Justin. They both hung up. But Justin wasn’t the only one getting a phone call early that Sunday morning. Terry’s cell had rung about the same time. Frank had heard both phones ring, and he got to the top of the stairs in time to see Terry go from sleepy to fully alert in 2 seconds flat. This couldn’t be good. “Unh-huh. Unh-huh. I’ll be there in...” Terry looked at her watch. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Don’t let anyone on the scene...except the CSIs. And keep the media out.” Terry closed her phone and started flinging on her clothes.

“What’s up?” Frank asked her. “Something happened last night,” she said, heading for the stairs carrying her shoes. “Bunch of ‘smokers’ all over town.” The others followed her down, everyone awake now except Angie. “I’m still getting numbers. But it’s at least ten so far. Must’ve been ‘let’s burn ourselves to death night’,” she grumbled as she tied her shoes and pulled on her coat. Frank turned off the alarm on the back door. “Can I come along?” he asked her as she walked toward the door. “No,” she said flatly. She saw Frank raise one eyebrow. “This is not a commitment issue,” she told him, cutting off any possible comment. “It’s a ‘keeping alive and in my job’ issue.” Frank shook his head. “I didn’t say anything. Go to work.” She turned toward the door, then stopped and set her stuff down. She walked back to Frank, grabbed his lapels, and pulled him down to plant a big, public kiss on his lips. “I’ll give you a full report later,” she said on her way back to the door. The kiss had the obvious sub-text of ‘I may have commitment issues, but I’m not ashamed to have people know I’m with you.’ “That’s a good trooper,” Frank said to her, laughing. “Detective!” she laughed over her shoulder. The door swung shut behind her, and Frank reactivated the alarm. Angie was still curled up on the couch, pretending to be asleep, but Frank heard a snicker from under the afghan. Leigh heard it too and looked over at Frank. Frank picked up a pillow from the nearest chair and threw it at Angie. “Hey!” she laughed, sitting up.

Fifteen minutes later, Frank and Leigh had settled back at their computers. Angie had the video game and TV back on, and Karen was sitting at the table still half asleep. Even on Sundays she didn’t get up this early. And after yesterday, she was still feeling wiped out, like the sleep hadn’t helped at all. Justin went to the kitchen and made some tea for her, then came back and sat next to her. “Guess we won’t be making it to Mass this morning,” he said. The perimeter alarms started sounding at the same time the back door slammed open against the wall. Angie, Frank and Justin had guns in their hands before they heard “Yo, everybody! What’s shakin’!” It was just Tony, making a grand entrance. They each slipped their guns back where they’d come from as Tony strode into the room. “So, what happened?” Angie asked him, pausing the game. “My asshole doctor wouldn’ lemme out,” Tony told her. “I wuz awake las’ night.” “Wait...Aiden was your doctor,” she said. “Ya know, he has to report to a Medical Review Board if he does anything wrong, like letting a coma patient out too soon.” “Whine, whine, whine,” Tony replied. Angie grinned. “He poked you in the ass, didn’t he?” she asked him. Tony didn’t say anything. “I would’ve too,” she told him. Frank had gotten up and gone over to Tony. “Open your mouth,” he said to Tony, a Mini MagLite in one hand. “Why?” Tony asked suspiciously. “I just wanna see how your tongue is,” Frank told him. “I’m the one who kept part of it from getting lost in Karen’s Jeep.” Tony opened wide and Frank shone the light in. “Hmm. Aiden did a nice job stitching it up. But then, I didn’t train as an ER doctor,” Frank said.

“Hey, Frank,” Justin said, “how long before that drug wears off? My mouth is still really dry.” Frank went into the kitchen and came back with a small cup of juice. “Here, drink this,” he said, handing it to Justin. Justin just looked at the glass suspiciously. He had a thing about taking a drink from anyone that he hadn’t watched being opened or mixed. “Fine,” Frank said, heading back to the kitchen. “How about a Gatorade?” He came back with an unopened bottle from the fridge and tossed it to Justin. Then, he went back into the kitchen and made a big show of pouring the juice down the sink, just to tweak Justin. The others started filling Tony in about what had happened after he passed out, and he told them what he’d seen when he went inside. Karen told him that her spirit had gotten attacked by the same thing, and it had given her physical body third degree burns. Justin got to the part about how Frank had gotten the real Agent Smith in trouble with Stevens, when Frank just laughed. “Oh, and James Smith...is black,” he said, and continued laughing. The others joined in, at the thought of the pie that would be all over Stevens face for missing that little detail.

The conversation turned to ideas for killing a Salamander, and Justin and Leigh joined in from the kitchen, where they’d gone to make something for breakfast. What they needed, Justin suggested, was something that they could use to shoot larger amounts of water at the thing, besides the fire extinguishers they already had. He’d been half-thinking of Super-Soakers, only with more pressure. Maybe like a power washer? Why not just rig up a couple fire extinguishers into a back-pack, with a spray hose, like a flame-thrower only the opposite, Tony suggested. “Why not just get a pumper truck like the fire department uses?” Frank asked them, rolling his eyes. “We could afford one,” Karen offered helpfully, knowing full well that it irritated Frank when people didn’t recognize when he was being sarcastic. He looked over at her like she was a complete idiot, and she started laughing. Frank cracked a smile. Karen was glad that in spite of everything that had happened yesterday, she still could find some humor in the whole situation. Then she got serious. “Actually...” she started. “What about a Coast Guard fire boat? You said you know someone in the Coast Guard, right, Angie?” she asked. “Yeah, but I don’t think I could get that big a favor,” Angie answered. “If we catch them on the estate,” Frank said, “that might work. But we have no idea if they’re even still there.”

“Well, what about using a helicopter to drop the water on them wherever we find them, like they use for forest fires?” Karen asked. “Do you happen to know any fire jumpers, Angie?” “Yeah, but they’re all out west,” Angie answered. “There’s not much call for that kind of thing in Michigan,” Frank said. “Finding the chopper might be a problem.” “Pretty much any chopper could be rigged for something like that, though,” Justin said from the kitchen. “Hey!” Tony started. “Whadabout a rocket strike on da house?” “We don’t wanna start it on fire,” Angie said. “We have no idea if the thing might actually feed off something like that,” Karen said. “And get stronger,” Leigh finished the thought. Tony rolled his eyes. “You didn’ lemme finish. An’ den drop da water on it.” “Before or after the cops get there? Frank asked. “A rocket strike isn’t exactly low-key.” “It is if we use an incendiary rocket,” Tony said. Frank thought for a second. “It would give us an excuse for dropping water on it....” Frank replied. “Oh my God. Somebody check my temperature. I just agreed with Tony on something.” Tony rolled his eyes. Frank went back to his computer. He’d been searching the conspiracy message boards for anything on the rash of ‘smokers.’ Surely that would be the first place news would turn up, even if not all of it was useful.

Tony pulled out his phone and dialed Fr. Colin. The phone started ringing. “Hunh, he ain’ answerin’,” Tony commented. “Duh! He’s a Catholic priest and it’s Sunday morning,” Justin said, slapping Tony lightly on the arm. The call went to his voice mail. “Yo, Father! Hope ya got dis on vibrate under yer cassock! It’s Tony. Ya know the matter we wuz talkin’ about before? Well, I got summore questions for ya on da same matter. Call me!” It was almost noon before information began to trickle into the safe house. Just as Frank was getting results from the bot search on Otto and Olga that he’d started the night before, Angie turned on the noon news and found that the story about the ‘smokers’ was just starting to get air time. They all gathered around the TV. An earnest-looking female reporter was standing outside in a rain coat, in front of an obvious crime scene. She spent the next five minutes explaining to viewers that the police weren’t allowing any reporters into the crime scene and they weren’t releasing any information. But they had heard that someone had burned to death there. Frank studied the background, looking for ‘Men in Black.’ He didn’t see anyone that fit the stereotype, but he did spot some people inside the crime tape who weren’t wearing DPD jackets. He focused his attention on them, and just before the reporter signed off, Frank thought he recognized one of the people as a DHS ‘goon’ who’d been at the St. Clair County crime lab when Sheriff Lane had reclaimed the bus and remains. “So, Stevens may have someone on the scene already,” Frank mused.

When that segment of the news was over, Frank went back to his computer and suggested that Leigh and Karen log on to the safe house network too. He began pulling in the results of the search and parceling it out to Karen and Leigh to help scan through. Angie left the news on in the background, and they heard the weather report that said it was 52 and raining out. Too bad Terry ahd to be out in it. It seemed that Otto was a German national. But there were no records nor mention of him anywhere online prior to 1982. “Wonder if he was a victim like Edward?” Justin asked. Frank made a note to cross reference anything they found to cult activity that they’d already been researching. “Hey,” Tony asked, “can youse guys use yer facial recognition software and search World War 2 films and pictures? Justin said da guy kept talkin’ ‘bout bein’ immortal....” Frank started typing. He almost hated to admit that for once Tony had a really good idea. The second time in one day that he agreed with Tony. Something was seriously wrong. It didn’t take long for results from that search to pour in. The age of the film, and the older photo techniques and processing, made the files they were accessing blurry. That made it hard for the recognition software to get good clean hits. But one photo that got a hit gave them all chills.

The guy in the photo was younger than Otto, maybe in his mid-40s or early 50s, and in full SS uniform. But there was a definite family resemblance, enough to say that the man was either Otto’s father or, more likely, grandfather. Frank pulled up the caption. The man was Otto von Horst, and he was a ranking officer in the SS. With him in the picture was a striking blonde who looked a bit like Olga, also in an SS uniform, perhaps a secretary or aide. She was not credited in the caption. The photo was from Berlin, 1943. The team started throwing suggestions at Frank faster than he could process them, and he began to shut them out. He should check information on the Thule Society, Leigh suggested. They were the Nazi group studying the occult for Hitler. And, he should check links to Nazi war criminal hunters, too, Tony added. In fact, if he sent an email to the Mosad, Tony was betting that they could give the team some help. Or the Wiesenthal Center, too. Leigh started records from the Anti-Defamation League, that tracked war criminals in the US, and Karen started tracking down info on the Thule Society. “Maybe you should look at some of the aspects of the ritual the Speaker was doing in the basement,” Justin suggested to Karen and Leigh. “You know, the shower, steam and swim-thing, and the thirteen guys, and all that.” Karen and Leigh looked at one another and thought for a second. “I’m not sure that would get us anywhere,” Karen said. “It’s all really common ritual cleansing stuff,” Leigh added. “And since they seem to be taking elements from all over the place,” Karen continued. “I’m not sure that we could really narrow it down to any particular culture or ritual,” Leigh finished. The two were obviously on the same wave-length regarding the cultural aspects, or lack thereof, of what Otto had cobbled together. But Justin was a little disappointed that they didn’t find his idea useful. He was feeling a bit useless, since he didn’t know much about the occult or about anthropology research.

“Von Horst apparently died in a fire,” Frank told them, not looking up from his computer. “Or at least a body was identified as his. There were no records of him being married, and no records of any off-spring.” He started running the recognition software through photos of hate groups that sprang up in South America and South Africa in the years since the war. Then he checked back into the conspiracy chat rooms. They were abuzz with talk about last night’s deaths. Most reports claimed there were between 6 and 12 guys who burned themselves to death last night. Except for one report that claimed 23. One told of a guy who had supposedly walked into the parking lot of his car dealership, upended a gas can over himself, then lit himself up. The Envoys looked at one another. That had to be Pete, one of the guys Justin rode in the van with to the meeting at the barn. Tony was fidgeting. “‘amn, my ‘ongue hurth,” Tony whined. “What, in so much of a hurry to leave the hospital that you didn’t get any pain pills?” Angie and Frank asked him at the same time. Tony’s face fell. Obviously he wasn’t going to get any sympathy here. Karen finally offered him some of her pain pills. She knew that you weren’t supposed to give other people your prescriptions, but she felt bad seeing anyone in pain, and though her back stung, she figured she could get by with one or two fewer pills. Frank continued to tell them anything interesting that turned up online about the ‘smokers.’ According to the reports, there’d been a rash of suicides. It was hard to get an accurate count because while some, like Pete, were obvious, others weren’t. One might just have been a gas fire. In another, a guy ran his car into a concrete abutment and the car exploded. Justin looked through the few descriptions Frank could find, and it seemed that some of the men–and all were men–were guys that had been at the barn meeting, and others sounded like guys that were at the estate yesterday. But there wasn’t nearly enough information to know yet if everyone that had been involved had gone up in flames last night.

Tony was feeling a little better after taking a couple of Karen’s pain pills, and he now asked if the team knew if Otto and Olga were still at the estate. “Why don’t you go knock on the door and ask?” Frank suggested jokingly. Tony shook his head, then got up and went down to his work bench in the basement. Frank looked over at Angie, and Angie followed Tony to the basement. Frank would have liked to think that Tony had enough sense not to mix up explosives in the basement of the ‘safe’ house. But you never knew with Tony. But he was sure that if Angie recognized that he was making something truly dangerous, she’d either talk him out of it or get the rest of them out before the whole place went up. She was down there for quite a while before she figured out what Tony was making. At first, all she could tell was that it was a rocket of some sort, and a launcher. There was a propellant load in the base, but she couldn’t figure out what was in the tip. It wasn’t like any explosives she’d ever seen. That was when it finally dawned on her. It wasn’t an explosive at all. It was a fire extinguisher rocket! She went back upstairs and gave Frank an OK sign. Leigh was just describing something she’d come across in her research, about a guy named Miguel Surrano, who created a ‘religion’ called Esoteric Hitlerism. The basic premise was that Hitler had been taken to Shambala, where he’d come in contact with the Hyperborean gods and received their wisdom. The SS occupied a special place in its ideology. The whole thing sounded pretty wacky to all of them.

Frank and Justin had kept all the surveillance and security feeds on in the background of their computers all day. About 3pm, they both noticed someone in a dark hooded sweatshirt, with the hood pulled over his face, and baggy pants go past the front of Justin and Karen’s house. A short time later, the cameras on the back of the property caught him going by that side. There wasn’t a good shot of his face, but they all recognized the description as similar to one of the guys who’d been following Jared after Frank met with him at the diner shortly before he got ‘disappeared.’ But the guy didn’t seem to be doing anything other than watching the place. Until he did more, none of them wanted to risk going over there. Karen was glad that she and Justin made Frank go get Drew and their things, and she wondered how long it would be before they could go home again. About 4pm, Terry called Frank. “This is much worse than you think,” she told him grimly. “Or...maybe it’s as bad as you think. Anyway, I’ll call you later.” Frank was just hanging up when Tony came back upstairs. “Anyone else know how to handle heavy weapons?” he asked the others. “They wouldn’t let me fire ‘em,” Angie complained. “Only load. They said I didn’t have the body mass to fire ‘em.” Frank studied Tony for a second, trying to figure out why Tony was asking. “I got some dummies wit’ light loads,” Tony said in response to the unasked question. “I figured we could practice in da basement. I got some mattresses set up ta fire at.” Both Frank and Justin told Tony that they’d gotten the basic heavy weapon instruction that everyone in the service got, but neither had any real experience with them. “Um, is that safe?” Karen asked. “There are other people and buildings around.” “Sure!” Tony answered her. “Just don’t bug the neighbors,” Frank told him.

The team sat around the table, scanning through the stuff Frank was downloading and wondering what their next move should be. They were all thinking the same thing. Tony was right–they needed to know if Otto and Olga were still at the estate. “I think you ought to be the next one to go in there, Angie,” Frank suggested with the hint of a grin. “They already know me. I think they should get to know you, too. Besides, if we send Tony back in, something’s liable to explode. Maybe his head. But then we wouldn’t know if it was a sign of trouble or not. At least if you’re in there, if there’s an explosion, then we know for sure that the cavalry needs to ride in to help.” Angie grinned. “Maybe we should call Fr. Colin, an’ have him do it,” Tony suggested. “Do we even know if he’s in town?” Frank asked. No one had any idea. Karen looked a little pensive, and Justin had a feeling that whatever she was about to say, he wouldn’t like it much. “I...I don’t know if I should suggest this or not,” Karen started. “But...I guess I could go back in there...you know...out-of-body. We need to know if they’re still there.” She looked down at Drew, who was sprawled across her lap. “I appreciate the offer, Karen,” Frank said. “But they already know you, and you’ve been hurt once. Next time, they’ll be ready for you, if they’re still there. And we might not be able to get you back.” Karen was kind of relieved. She would have done it if they needed her to, but she was also afraid that they would, and afraid of what might happen to her in there if she did. They all looked at one another again, hoping that one of them would have a brilliant idea soon.

JUSTIN’S WAR JOURNAL
Entry 73 [---typed]

---It’s Oct. 28th, Saturday night, and I am still feeling a little on the fuzzy side. I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for this crew. I think they literally just pulled me out of the lion’s den. But that was what I was counting on. We actually picked up a little bit more info but my cover is burned. Good chance the Speaker may try to send his fire monster to get us now. Don’t know what we’re going to do after this.

Need to put down how come the crew had to rescue me. I went out for my run this morning, a little later than usual but not by too much. I was into it by a ways when I noticed that I’d been hearing the sound of a particular F-150 engine had been behind me way too long. I played dumb and kept going. Got to a corner and looked back to clear my blind spot before crossing, same as any city runner would. Made like I only just then noticed the truck as just another bit of traffic and waited for it to pass. It didn’t. It pulled up even with me, the passenger window rolled down and Tom leaned his face across and said to hop in. I tried to play it off but it kept sounding like if I didn’t jump to the bait then he was going to go fish another hole, which would have wrecked all this stupid undercover work. So I bit. I made some lame excuse about having to check in with the wife so she wouldn’t worry about me and Tom cracked wise. Not like I gave a rat’s ass whether that redneck dipshit thought I was on a short leash, as long as I could get a call to Karen. I made it real quick, like I just wanted to keep her off my back so I could do what I really wanted to do. I got Karen, not her voice mail thank God, and really quickly said that I was going out to have a beer with the guys and hung up on her. I figured Karen is the one person I could guarantee would know I wouldn’t usually be that short with her and I sure as hell wouldn’t be boozing it up that early in the day. Shit, it wasn’t even Noon yet but that grinning idiot Tom didn’t even think twice about it. He’s probably one of those dumb fuck’s who’s drunk by the end of lunch. I was double glad I got that message out to Karen about twenty seconds later. As soon as I climbed into the pickup Tom said I should turn the cell phone off. I didn’t have any problem with that because I knew that the locater chip would still work on the trickle charge and the crew could find me with that.

Tom said he thought I was the right kind of guy so he put his neck out for me. Said he was going to get me in on something special. I tried milking him for information but he just said to not ask too many questions and I’d learn what I needed to know soon enough. Then he put a CD in the player and said to listen to the music and just think about how it made me feel. Yeah, sounded more and more like a cult kinda thing to me. Weird thing was that the music sounded like some old German opera stuff. I might not have recognized it if I hadn’t watched that old Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will”; oh man, that movie still gives me the shudders. The music started making me feel something, and I don’t mean bored. It started getting in my head I guess, started making me feel like I just got a real good pep talk, kinda powerful and uplifted. It was like I barely even realized it was happening until it happened.

The next thing I knew we were pulling up to a house in one of the ritzy suburbs. I wasn’t sure where exactly we were but it was on the water and I figured definitely some place with the word “Pointe” in the name. Tom drove up the drive and parked so the truck couldn’t be seen from the road. There were a couple more vehicles there but none I recognized as belonging to anybody in particular. Mechanic and car-nut reflexes did the usual though. I remember the make and year of all of them and the license plates that I saw; and one older Ford was in real bad need of a paint job. What can I say? My brain was built in Motor City. But this house looked like something from freaking medieval Europe: big, lots of stone, very impressive and imposing looking. Which, other than the stone, also pretty much described the Teutonic she-beast that answered the door. Real tall, real pale, real blond and looked like she could handle herself in a fight. The look she gave us was like she just found something nasty stuck to the good rug.

Gargantua finally let us in after making sure we knew that she didn’t care whether we lived or died. She led us to a den that, again, looked like it was built to impress but I actually kind of liked it some. Lots of wood and lots of books and a nice big fireplace, and right there in the middle of it was the Speaker. Even he looked like he was posed to make a big impression, total ‘Lord of the Manor’ look, reading some book or another so intently that he supposedly wasn’t even aware that his guests had been ushered into his presence. Yeah, right Jacko, as if Tom would have dared come here without having an express invite. Not to mention Heidi the Uber maid had more than enough time to trot to the den and back to the front door in the time it took her to answer when Tom knocked. This joker was all about making himself look important. But that was all going on in the back of my mind. I don’t know if it’s how regular undercover cops do it, but I felt like there was one part of my mind that was working up front, playing the “aw shucks” eager young possible cultist part while the real me was behind a curtain, quietly taking notes and guarding my sanity with pictures of Karen.

Tom was lapping up the whole act like a fawning puppy who just knew that the other puppies must have just wandered off because Master just wouldn’t set them on fire. I wanted to grab him by the collar and scream “This is a cult! He’s a cult leader! Why can’t you see it?!? Run, soldier, run!” But up front, I just played along. I took the glass of Scotch on the rocks that he offered and smiled when he toasted. He started asking the questions about what would I do if I there wasn’t all this stuff weighing me down. We went back and forth through a couple of questions and answers and then he finally laid it out plain. He said that I would be able to do anything, as long as I was willing to pay the bill with everything I had right then. I couldn’t answer that question. There was no way in hell I could turn away from Karen and my friends and my family. But then he gave me the question I could answer. He asked me what I would be willing to do to get what I wanted. I told him “Whatever it takes.” and I meant it. Because that was what I was doing right there and then: whatever it takes to stop him. I wasn’t about to tell him that what I wanted and what he wanted were on the opposite side of each other.

The Speaker must have like what he heard because he shook my hand like a politician and said he thought I was ready. He handed me off to Tom and told him to take me down stairs so we could get ready. That made parts of me pucker. I thought that might have been a euphemism for taking me out back and putting a bullet in my head. I kept rolling with it because I figured if it came down to that I could take Tom and if bullets started flying, the Cavalry would come running. That’s part of what kept me able to smile in that bastard’s face, even with the thoughts in my head of eight kids burning to death while they smiled and sang. I kept thinking that I could put up with this crap as long as I could collect intelligence that would stop these maniacs and I knew that my crew was out there, ready to pull me out of the hot spot when the time came.

Tom led the way down to the basement. He was talking the whole way, like he couldn’t wait to tell me about this great thing. He was a true believer for sure. He said that we were going to get the chance to “transcend from this plane” or world, I don’t completely remember. When I asked if this was really for real, he had the biggest happy face you could ever imagine and he said this was “true transcendence” and we were going to live forever and be invulnerable. He also said there were only thirteen who were going to have that chance. I wonder if the number will help Karen and Leigh maybe narrow down what kind of ceremony we’re dealing with. I sure hope so.

The basement was set up like a health club. We started out in a locker room done all in white and Tom started stripping down without bothering with an explanation. He said we had to get clean and we were starting with the steam room. I bit back the “Oh boy, we’re going for a shfitz” comment that popped into my head. I think that’s the word. I learned it from a buddy of mine when we went and saw that movie where Ahnold played a Russian cop and they started out in a big old steam bath place. That buddy is Jewish and he said his grandpa used to talk about “going for a shfitz” which was basically him and all his buddies going to hang out and talk about guy stuff while having a steam. Anyway, I was betting that “shfitz” is a Yiddish word or something like that and this was not the time or place for that. Nope, don’t want to talk about your Jewish buddies while you’re trying to infiltrate the newest version of the freaking Nazis.

Anyway, I was able to get out of my clothes without letting Tom see that I was carrying weapons. I am so happy I switched to the Glock because I wouldn’t have been able to hide the .357 anywhere near as easy; probably not at all. I got the weapon and holster rig folded inside my top without him seeing, as far as I could tell. It took me a few minutes to notice that the opera music was playing down here too. Making sure to keep us all pumped up I guess. That’s where things start getting fuzzy a little. I remember going into the steam room. The steam was so thick I could barely see. I found a place to sit and it took a minute to get adjusted and realize there were others in there with us. I could see Tom to one side and I could just barely make out maybe two or three other guys just on the edge of my sight range. I’d just about bet there were thirteen of us in there. The last thing I remember thinking halfway clearly was that with that with the steam blocking vision and the music covering noise, I might be able to take out all twelve of those guys without anybody being the wiser. And then things got real mellow. I’ve got vague memories of eventually leaving the steam room and going swimming. I know there was a pool because I saw it when Frank walked me out of there but I can’t say that I really remember going swimming.

The next thing I knew, we were in a big padded room. I think it was mostly red and I know it was dark. We were sitting on benches in a circle, all of us wearing big fluffy terry cloth robes. The Speaker was there and he was talking with everybody. Another pep talk. Then he started talking to each guy one-on-one and he was getting them to eat right out of his hand. When he talked to a guy closer to me, I could hear some of what he was saying. It was like he knew every little fact and secret about each of the guys. I was thinking at first that maybe he was cold reading them like some con man but what he was doing was beyond that. It was like he either really could get inside their heads or he’d been spying on these guys pretty hard for a while. He knew just exactly what to say to get each guy wound up and on board for whatever he wanted. When he was done, each one of those guys had that eager puppy look. I almost didn’t realize it when he was almost to me. I don’t remember how long it took with the others but Tom was barely any work at all. He was already the Speaker’s lap dog so how hard could it be?

I was next and I realized I was kind of worried about how much this guy either already knew or how much he could dig out of my mind. I don’t remember seeing him move, but all of a sudden the Speaker was sitting next to me. He was leaning in toward me to talk and then the Cavalry busted in the door. It was actually Frank and Leigh, both of them wearing the black windbreakers, ball caps and shades that let them pass for Feds. I didn’t see any of that at first because when they opened the door, me and everybody else in that room was pretty much blinded by the regular lights. Except for the Speaker. He got right up in Frank’s face and very calmly demanded that he show a warrant or get out. Frank said that he was Agent Smith with the FBI and that they didn’t need a warrant to bring Mr. Kazotchek in for questioning. I acted dumb; well, at least I say it was acting. But really I was mainly feeling like my brain was packed in cotton and I was just reacting to what they were saying. I told the Speaker and Tom that I was sorry to cause them trouble. Like I said, I’m still a bit fuzzy but I’m pretty sure the Speaker said I had no idea how sorry and glared daggers at Tom. I didn’t want them knowing that I caught that part so I complained to “Agent Smith” that I couldn’t be held responsible for what my cousins do. Their own mom’s can’t keep control of them so how was I supposed to? That kind of thing. I was kind of running off at the mouth but at least I wasn’t letting anything slip. Frank said that the FBI strongly disapproved of people who commit hate crimes, that I wasn’t under arrest and I should come along quietly.

Frank asked the Speaker for some ID and that was when we finally found out who that SOB really is, or at least who he says he is. The name he gave was Otto Horst, this was his home and he wanted the three of us out, NOW. I asked if the Agents would let me get my pants on at least and that my clothes were in a locker room… somewhere. Horst was going to send Uber Maid, I think he called her Olga, to get my stuff but Frank said that an Agent needed to take possession of Mr. Kazotchek’s personal items. So Leigh went off with Olga while Frank and Horst marched me upstairs. We all met back up almost at the front door and in true hard cop form, Frank only let me put on my pants and shoes before he gave me a push toward the front door. Him and Leigh marched me down the drive, me griping the whole way about this not being my fault, and they shoved me right in the back seat of the waiting sedan.

It was later in the day than I thought and as soon as we were out of sight of the mansion I dug out my phone and called Karen. I had to tell her I was okay and I’d see her at home. I’m pretty sure I was still a little bit dopey at that point. Frank handed me a sub sandwich and it took me a minute to realize that I’d said I was hungry. I don’t know if I stared at the sandwich or ate it but the next thing I knew we were at the hospital and Frank had me on a gurney. I didn’t want the sandwich so much anymore when Frank came at me with the needle to take some blood. I guess I passed out for a minute there. I did NOT faint.

That’s was the thing that really told me they must have done something to me at that house. I’ve never passed out from taking blood or anything like that. Anyway, they got me back on my feet and out of there pretty quick. Frank said he just wanted to use his privileges to get a blood test done. We found out later that night I’d been dosed with something like Rohypnol, the date rape drug. Frank said the dose I got wasn’t real strong. Not enough to knock me out and make me lose my memory, just enough to make me REALLY suggestible. Which means it would be real good for brain washing. We figure it had to be in the steam, like aromatherapy.

I guess I totally missed it while I was obsessed with that sandwich, but Frank and Leigh told me we’d picked up a tail right after leaving Horst’s place. Frank was able to lose them before we headed for the hospital though. But since Horst and his monkeys were trying to keep an eye on us, there was no way we could go home right away. Heck, I was supposed to be in custody of the FBI right then anyway. So we all headed for the safe house. The rest of the crew were waiting for us when we got there, except for Tony. Something had happened while everybody was trying to investigate the house and they couldn’t’ get Tony to wake up. Aiden had him checked in at the hospital over night. I guess Frank decided we’d gone far enough without Terry and gave her a call. He asked her if she’d please pick up enough food for everybody, as long as it wasn’t anything German (She ended up bringing Mexican. Yum.), and said we’d hold on to what we had to say about what had happened at the house so we didn’t have to repeat everything.

It didn’t take long to bring Terry up to speed on what we hadn’t been telling her about the case so far and then we got to what happened today. Yeah, I guess lots of things happened while I was basically getting stoned with Horst’s chosen thirteen in the basement. Karen got the hint from my phone message of course and she was on our trail within minutes. She got Frank on the horn as soon as I hung up and was out the door while she was still talking with him. They stayed on the line while Frank used the tracker chip in my phone to guide her along behind Tom’s truck. She pulled along in front of the mansion only a couple minutes after we went in the door.

As soon as the rest of the crew joined up with her, Karen tried to go out of body to come find me. The first time out, she found the warding symbols all over the house and figured out that she could get in through the floor. She figured out that I wasn’t at risk right then and they hung back, hoping I was going to be able to get some information. But they put a time limit on it. That time limit was around 4pm. Tony tried to come looking for me first that time but something scared him bad when he went out of body. Karen went next and she said that she found a lot of the house defenses weren’t there anymore. She came in looking and found the defenses had been pulled in and were pretty much a solid vessel around one part of the house and the walls of that vessel were drawing strength out of her whenever she got close. Horst’s fucking pet monster, whatever it is, clawed her with pure heat when she was moving away. Before Aiden got to her she had five stripes of third degree burns down her back. Frank dressed them as best he could in the Jeep but she wouldn’t let them take her to the hospital until she was sure they got me out. Aiden was able to fix most of the damage when they got her to the hospital so they’re not nearly as bad now. I might not have known she was hurt if she hadn’t flinched when I went to put my arm around her back. I guess she didn’t want me feeling guilty that she got hurt trying to help me out or something. Well of course I felt bad, but I blamed Horst and his monster more than anything else. Yeah, German fuck is going to pay.

Karen drew copies of the symbols she’d seen all over the house so she and Leigh could puzzle them out to figure out what culture they were from. But it turned out they were from a whole mix. Their best guess was that whoever put up the ‘wards’ had basically cherry picked what they wanted from different cultures all over the world. The ones that kept repeating the most were symbols for ‘Strength’ and ‘Renewal’ and a stylized lizard with its head cocked to one side and its tail to the other. They said the way that was drawn most likely meant it was a salamander. Yeah, I was dumb enough to ask what little amphibious lizards had to do with this and that got a good laugh. Turns out this is a different kind of salamander. One of the priests Tony had been working with in Vatican City on his research project had got hold of him about these salamanders from legend. Don’t know if the salamanders are the ash black people shaped monsters or the lizard shaped bonfire that attacked Karen when she was in the spirit world. Either way is bad news from the sounds of it.

I told everybody what I could remember of what happened before they came and pulled my fat out of the fire. Frank picked up with what happened when him and Leigh headed for the house. Since Karen wouldn’t leave until they got me out, he said they’d just have to arrest him. When they asked who, he said Justin. But since they actually came up to the house looking to pick me up as a material witness they didn’t need a warrant. Olga wasn’t about to let them in the house. Told him there was nobody there by that name and all that. But Frank rattled her by telling her that if she didn’t cooperate he could always come back with a warrant and search the house from top to bottom. When she gave them what she thought was the final brush off, Frank asked if he could just take a look around the grounds to make sure the “dangerous Mr. Kazotchek” wasn’t hiding in the bushes and she said yes. Frank and Leigh got around back of the house and busted a basement window without making too much noise. Of course they didn’t know that the house is just this side of sound proof anyway. Anyway, the broken window was all they needed to get them in the door and make sure the residents were safe. And that’s how they ended up coming down to get me.

Frank said he’d sensed for the Unknown on Horst while they were getting me out. He said that Horst might not be a creature of the Unknown, but if he wasn’t then he was at least spending a whole lot of time being real friendly with one. I guess from talking about all the hard looks that Horst had been giving us Frank tried to sense any Unknown influence around us. He said that it was like everybody except Angie and Terry had this really strong sulfur smell sticking to us. Me and Karen were the strongest but the smell on him and Leigh wasn’t too far behind. More than one of us thought about the Hound that had been set on Harvey. At least we’d learned how to get rid of that. So Karen did a Mental Shield for all of us and either her or Leigh will do it again in the next twelve hours.

The kicker for the night is that Karen and I can’t go home tonight. We figured Horst has to have people watching the place. Frank said it wasn’t safe to go back there but he could pick up some stuff for us for the night as long as it could fit in a couple of file boxes. Because he was sure the FBI would need to search our house and remove evidence since “Agent Smith” was real thorough that way. So Frank went and picked up Drew kitty, some clothes, our laptops, the bags with our bounty hunting gear and whatever else he could think of at the time. So Karen and I are holed up in the safe house for tonight. Maybe for more than tonight. Who knows? We’ll make the best of it. Thank you God for my wonderful, intelligent and brave wife. And thank you for my good friends. We’re going to keep this fight going as long as we can. Amen. Later.

Karen’s hand was shaking as she started drawing everything she could about the floor plan of the basement, and where Justin was in it. She felt cold deep down in her bones, like she’d never warm up. But given the thing they seemed to be dealing with, she was NOT going to wish she were warmer. All she wanted right now was to get Justin out of there safe and sound. As she drew, she tried to describe to the others what she’d felt, how Justin looked, anything that might help them decide what to do next. When she’d finished with the floor plan, she started drawing out all the symbols she could remember from the warding. Maybe it would help them understand what was going on inside, what rituals might be occurring. At the very least, maybe she and Leigh could figure out how to break the warding, in case she or Tony had to go back in. A lizard figure–they all assumed it was a salamander–with its head canted clockwise and its tail counter-clockwise to form a circle, was the most prominent symbol she’d seen. There was also a lot of fire symbology, and spirals, which had a variety of meanings depending on which culture they were being used by.

The longer Karen and Leigh looked at what Karen had drawn, the more confused they got. There were symbols taken from a dozen or more different cultures, and no one tradition was any more represented than any other. And while many of the symbols occurred in more than one culture, they couldn’t find any way to group them to narrow their focus. It was like this was a made-up religion that had stolen bits and pieces from everywhere. But the most common themes were fire and power. Karen’s hands had stopped shaking by now, but she wasn’t looking a whole lot better. And Tony didn’t look too hot either. He’d had a rough time getting out of his body this time, and the sight of Karen’s disguise had really shaken him. Frank asked Karen what she wanted to do next. She couldn’t give him a solid answer. She was afraid for Justin, especially after seeing what had been done to the homeless guy. But Justin hadn’t looked like he was in any immediate danger when she saw him in the basement. While it didn’t look like he’d been “having a beer with the guys,” he also didn’t look like he was in any pain, either. And though he did look like he was under the effects of some sort of drug, she hadn’t encountered anything in the basement that seemed to be a threat to his safety. If he was getting some useful ‘intelligence’ in there, she was loath to drag him out and ruin his cover.

But given the warding on the place, something was hiding out in that house, and she wasn’t sure that she’d be able to get back in there a second time. If she did go back in, she was positive that the attempt would leave her useless for anything else. Frank checked his watch. It was about 11:30am, and Justin had been in there only about an hour and a half so far. Tony said he’d be willing to try going back in to check on Justin, but the team decided to wait a while and see if anything changed or if Justin came out on his own. If he hadn’t by 4pm, they’d go in and check on him again then. Then Frank suggested that, in the meantime, Karen and Tony ‘power nap’ over in the Jeep, so they’d be in better shape later. And if Leigh didn’t mind watching over them, he and Angie would do the general ‘stake out’ stuff from his car. They all put on their comm units, and Karen and Tony climbed into the back of the Jeep. As Leigh was settling into the driver’s seat, Karen warned Tony with the hint of a grin, “Don’t get any ideas. Just because we’re sleeping next to one another in the back of the car, that doesn’t mean we’ve ‘slept together.’” She heard the others laughing in her ear buds, but Tony looked at her very seriously and said, “You’re married. I’d neva do dat wid a married woman.” Karen smiled. Tony might be a pain in the butt sometimes, and he might put on the crude New Yorker act, but underneath he really was a nice guy, a GOOD guy. The two turned off their comm units and Karen handed Tony one of the Army blankets from behind the seat, then pulled one over herself and fell asleep.

Justin had no idea how long he’d been sitting there in the steam room. He didn’t see anyone else come in, and he didn’t hear anything that sounded like a signal of any kind. But there was just a general sense of movement in the room, and they all got up from the benches at about the same time and shuffled out the door, like those flocks of birds or schools of fish that dart and weave as a unit without any apparent leader. He shuffled along with the rest, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Tom doing the same. Good. It wouldn’t have felt right to have to leave the group and go back for him. And he wasn’t sure that he would have had the energy, or maybe it was the motivation, to do that either. As they moved through another doorway, Justin saw spread out in front of him an Olympic-sized swimming pool. There was the barest pause in the movement, during which they all dropped their towels, then everyone started jumping into the pool. Now Justin could see that there were exactly 13 of them, all men. He looked for a clear spot and did a long, shallow dive into one of the marked lap lanes. DAMN The water was COLD But it was oddly refreshing after the long sit in the steam room. And it quickly focused his thoughts on his swimming. He was gliding smoothly through the water now, easily lapping the other guys who were swimming laps. From somewhere on the other side of the pool, he could hear splashing and laughing. A few of the guys were rough-housing over there. Justin kept going, doing a flip-turn when he got to one end and surfacing nearly a third of the way back across the pool, his arms already pushing him into the next stroke. That was how people got hurt, goofing around like that in the water. He liked this better, cutting through the water in a clean, almost surgical way, using all his muscles, his brain so focused on the movements that thought disappeared.

Then, after about 20 or 30 minutes, as if they’d all once again been pinged by some unknown internal radar, they moved to the edges of the pool and hopped or climbed out. They all went over and picked up fluffy, warm terrycloth robes that were laying there waiting for them, and moved as a group to a dark, soft, warm room with padded benches laid out in a circle. They shuffled around the circle and sat down. The light was quite dim, and Justin could just barely hear the music playing in the background. He was looking around idly, Tom beside him, when he became gradually aware that the light was getting brighter in the center of the circle. He turned his head and realized that the Speaker was standing there, wearing a crimson robe the color of flame. He hadn’t even heard or seen him come in. “Today you will embark upon a new life,” the Speaker began. “Your past, with all of its limits and restrictions, obligations and impediments, is behind you. Eternity can be yours if you only grasp it. But you cannot have any doubt. Doubt will condemn you to eternal suffering.” Justin lost track of time once again as the Speaker continued, his voice both compelling and sonorous, lulling Justin into a trance in the womb-like space.

Karen and Tony had been sleeping for about an hour, and Tony had begun snoring, his head lolled over against the side of the Jeep. Leigh was trying to come up with ways of quieting him down when she noticed Karen twitch a little. She thought that Tony’s snoring had woken Karen, or she would have if Karen hadn’t begun to whimper. When the twitching and moaning continued for another couple of minutes, Leigh began to get concerned. They were parked fairly close to the place where some Unknown creature had made its lair. And Karen had gone in there, or rather her spirit had. Was the thing trying to do something to her now? Leigh put up a Mental Shield, hoping that if the creature was causing Karen’s dream, the Shield would get it to leave her alone. Tears were rolling down Karen’s face, and the twitching and whimpering continued in spite of the Shield. So whatever the dream was about, it wasn’t the touch of the Unknown causing it. Leigh slid the seat back as far as she could, then reached around it and laid her hand gently on Karen’s shoulder. She didn’t want to wake Karen; she’d expended a lot of energy trying to find Justin earlier. But Leigh knew that when she had bad dreams, just knowing that someone else was there for her could quiet them. She murmured quietly and soothingly to Karen, letting her know that, whatever horror she was facing, she wasn’t going to have to face it alone.

But that WAS the horror Karen was facing. She’d woken there in the Jeep, alone. Completely and utterly alone. She looked around for someone, anyone. But she knew in her heart with absolute certainty that she was alone. Edward had taken her mom from her, and now Justin was gone too, and she would be always and forever alone. There was nothing left for her but the ache of loneliness and the Void. She tried to cry out, to make some sound that would bring someone to her, but no sound came out. She tried to move, to go in search of another living person, but her body failed her. All that was left was to sit there, alone, until the end.

“Ya know, that’s why I’ve always hated stake-outs,” Angie said to Frank. “Because they’re REALLY boring....” Frank looked over at her and rolled his eyes, then went back to watching what he could see of the house and grounds. “So.... What ARE we watching for?” Angie asked him. “We’ll know it when we see it,” he told her, not taking his eyes off the estate. Angie started to fidget. Frank glanced over at her. “No, I don’t have to ‘go,’” she told him, rolling her eyes this time. There had been a whole lot of nothing going on up until then; and the rest of the afternoon seemed to hold the promise of more of the same. There wasn’t much movement around the house beyond the occasional squirrel, and even less inside the house. In fact, it almost looked unoccupied. But someone had brought Justin’s phone here, and Karen was certain that she’d seen Justin and a bunch of other people in the basement. And no one went to the trouble of putting warding like Karen had seen on an abandoned house.

The Speaker had continued for about an hour, and every head in the room nodded and murmured agreement with everything he said by now. But none of them could have said they’d actually seen him move when he sat down beside one of the men, whom he called Tommy. The circle was close enough that the Speaker hadn’t actually needed to move far, but big enough that there was space between each man and the ones to either side of him. They hadn’t consciously tried to space themselves so neatly; it had simply happened in the same way that they’d all risen from the steam room benches at the same time and climbed from the pool as a group. The Speaker sat knee-to-knee with Tommy, and he seemed to know him well, to know his innermost desires in the same way he’d known the weaknesses of some of the men at the meeting in the barn. He asked Tommy probing questions about how he felt, what he thought, his thoughts about the future and what he’d do to get what he wanted. Each question increased Tommy’s level of excitement until the Speaker had worked Tommy into a lather. And each question and answer elicited murmured responses from the other men, and knowing nods.

Tommy was seated directly across the circle from Justin. When the Speaker was done with Tommy, he moved on to another man and asked the same sorts of questions. And then on to another. Justin couldn’t tell if there was any particular order in which the Speaker was choosing his next.... Victim wasn’t really the word Justin was looking for, but his brain was still a little foggy. After the Speaker finished with each man, the guy looked and sounded not like a victim but like Tom had, like a Lab ready to do his master’s bidding, totally on-board for whatever came next. The conversations centered around the idea that everything worth gaining had a cost, whether it was leaving behind your job, your obligations, your frail and often betraying flesh, your wife and kids. You had to leave behind all the things of this world and move on to grasp eternity. And after you had that, you could go back to get all those other things you wanted. But there had to be pain to gain, and you had to be willing to stay the course. Whatever was going on, Justin didn’t think it was ‘cold-reading.’ It was way beyond that. The Speaker had an uncanny handle on what moved each man. For one it was his car. For another the chance to travel the world. He’d clearly done his research on each man, and Justin was beginning to wonder just what the Speaker knew about him.

As Justin glanced around the room, his eyes always ending up back on the Speaker, he began to pick out a few details about the space they were in. The walls were covered in folds of thick fabric, like curtains. In fact, looking around, he couldn’t quite remember exactly where he’d come into the room, and he couldn’t see a door or opening in the curtains at all. For all he knew, they were in the center of an enormous room, the fabric the only thing that separated them from an ocean of space. When he glanced up, he noticed that the ceiling was draped with a dark-colored fabric too. Though the light was brighter now than when they’d first come in, he couldn’t see any light fixtures at all. Most of the light was focused at the center of the room, but when he tried to look at the ceiling above the center, the light was too bright for his eyes. The light had come up so slowly that he hadn’t even registered the change in brightness until he saw the Speaker standing there. The Speaker had moved on to another man now, and Justin realized that he had no idea how long he’d been there, or how long the Speaker was spending with each man. The conversations seemed to go on forever, each very much like the one before. But somehow that didn’t bother Justin like it normally would have. He wasn’t at all nervous or jittery. And he caught himself nodding in agreement, murmuring along with the others as the Speaker’s current partner was drawn carefully into the fold.

It was about 3:30pm, and Karen was still whimpering like her heart was breaking. It broke Leigh’s heart just to hear it, and she wished there was more she could do to comfort Karen. Tony, on the other hand, was still snoring almost loud enough to wake the dead. There hadn’t been much chatter over the comm units in all that time. Leigh hadn’t wanted to risk waking the sleepers, so she’d been pretty quiet herself. Most of what she heard was Angie’s occasional complaints of boredom. “Damn I’d swear that thing hasn’t moved in, like, 20 minutes,” Angie exclaimed. “What are you talking about?” Frank asked her. “This fly on the window ” she replied. “I’ve been watching it. And it hasn’t moved in a really long time ” Leigh could hear the sigh. That must have been Frank. He seemed to sigh a lot when he was with the rest of the team. “Listen,” he said to Angie. “Why don’t you go get us something to eat? I seem to remember seeing some stores a couple blocks over.” Leigh could heard Angie’s voice perk up. “Sure What should I get?” she asked. “Anything that’ll give you a 20-minute break,” Frank answered. “Great Keep an eye on my fly,” Angie said as she rolled out of the car. Since she’d heard the conversation, Leigh wasn’t startled when Angie knocked on the window behind her. Leigh rolled the window down and Angie asked what she wanted to eat. It was hard to say for sure since even Angie didn’t know where she was going yet, so Leigh told her to try for something as fresh as possible, heavy on the veggies.

Karen wasn’t sure exactly when she woke up. She was cold, colder than when she’d fallen asleep. Even the tears on her cheeks and eyelashes felt as cold as ice. She remembered hearing voices at some point, as she clawed her way up from the depths, struggling to make contact with another living person. And she slowly realized that the weight on her one shoulder was someone’s hand resting lightly on it. Where was she? There was a sound like a buzz-saw nearby, but she couldn’t remember anything like that when she’d fallen asleep. Her dream, if it was a dream, was still vivid in her mind, and she sniffled back the tears as she opened her eyes and pushed herself upright. The buzz-saw sound turned into a series of snorts and coughs as her movement woke Tony. But even the closeness of him and Leigh didn’t take away the almost suffocating weight of loneliness that was pressing down on her chest. While the sleep seemed to have helped, it took all her strength to take in a deep breath and say, “Is he OK?” But she already knew the answer. The fact that the three of them were still there in the Jeep, parked down the street from that estate, told her that Justin hadn’t come out yet. “I need to go in there,” she told Leigh. She struggled to sit up and pull off the blanket. “I need to go in and make sure he’s still alive ” Whatever Karen had been dreaming, Leigh could see that it had frightened her badly.

Tony wasn’t sure what was going on, but he rubbed his eyes and told Karen he’d go in. If he remembered right, he had offered to make the next trip in to check on Justin. So it must be 4 o’clock and time to go. Karen grabbed his wrist, and he turned to see her staring at him square in the face. “Remember–there’s something at the wall, something to keep you out, and it hurt like hell going through it both ways,” Karen told him. “Brace yourself for it. And you can’t go though the warding on the house. You have to go down into the ground, below the basement, then come up inside, like in a U-shape,” she said, drawing it with her finger. “It’s really weird going through the dirt, too. You’ll move slower than normal, and there’s bugs and worms and stuff. I think I even scared a mole.” She hesitated. She wasn’t sure what else to tell him, and she thought hard to make sure she didn’t forget anything. Tony nodded, and Leigh flicked on her mike to tell Frank that Tony was going to go check on Justin. Tony settled back into his seat. As he shut his eyes, Leigh saw Karen fingering the crucifix through her shirt. “So, does that go with you when you go out-of-body?” Leigh whispered to Karen over the seat, nodding at the hand on her chest. Karen shrugged. “I’ve never checked. I never really thought about it. I suppose if I pictured it there.... But I’m pretty sure the physical one stays with my body, hopefully protecting it somehow while I’m gone.”

The two watched Tony’s body slump as his spirit slipped free of it, and Leigh’s eyes widened. “Did you remind him to make himself look like your disguise?” she asked Karen. Karen’s eyes widened now, too. “No. I...I’m not sure if there was even anything there to notice, but...” She didn’t have the chance to finish the thought. Tony hadn’t been gone more than a couple seconds when all of a sudden his body began convulsing. Karen grabbed the corner of the blanket covering him, and tried to work the end into his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue off. Leigh was leaning between the two front seats, trying to hold him and keep him from pounding his head against the roll bar. “Frank ” she hollered, triggering the throat mike. “It’s Tony ” The two women tried hard to restrain Tony, and Leigh raised a Sphere, hoping that whatever was causing this would be blocked out. Frank pulled open the passenger door and leaned over the seat, his first aid kit in one hand. As the Sphere went up, Tony went rigid. Frank grabbed Tony’s wrist and checked his pulse, then held Tony’s eyes open one at a time, checking the pupil response with his Mini MagLite. When he was sure Tony wasn’t going to go back into convulsions, he pulled out the cuff to check Tony’s BP. “It appears to be an extreme fear reaction,” Frank told them. “I’m going to give him a sedative,” he said, digging through the kit for a needle and syringe. He pushed up one of Tony’s sleeves and jabbed the needle in. “And then,” he continued, tugging the blanket from Tony’s mouth, “I’ll sew up his tongue.” The women could see the trail of spit and blood spill from the corner of Tony’s mouth as the blanket came out. The corner that had been in his mouth was soaked with blood. Karen hadn’t gotten it in quite in time, but it had prevented the damage from being any worse.

Tony’s body finally began to relax, and Leigh let Karen out of the back seat so that Frank could get back there to work on Tony’s tongue. Karen climbed into the passenger seat and held the flashlight above Tony’s face, carefully not watching what Frank was doing, while Leigh helped with getting what Frank needed from the kit. As Leigh was letting Frank out of the back seat when he’d finished, Karen turned and sat back in the passenger seat. “I...I have to go in there. I have to know....” she told them. Before they could say anything to stop her, Karen slipped out of her body, and flew her spirit, disguised again like the burnt homeless guy, toward the stone wall, ready for the shock of hitting the invisible force field behind it. When she moved onto the estate without having to push through it, she was so startled that she stopped moving for a second. Something had changed and she had a feeling it wasn’t for the better. She raced forward toward the house, and was again shocked when she realized that the warding that had surrounded the house only 4 hours ago had disappeared. She flew around to the spot on the river side of the house where she’d come up after finding Justin, and she dropped into the ground then moved forward through the basement wall. But Justin and the other people were no longer there either.

Frantic by now with worry for Justin’s safety, Karen began searching the basement for any sign of him. It didn’t take her long to figure out where he must be. She almost flew headlong into a wall of red-hot iron that seemed to completely enclose a section of the basement. She checked above it and below it, but there was no way in. She circled it again, and then again, hoping to find something that would let her get a glimpse inside, let her know if Justin was still OK. But every time she drew close to it, she could feel it sucking the energy from her soul. She...they would have to find some other way to get Justin out. She made a mental note of where the edges were, and where the whole vessel–that was the only word she could think of to describe it–was in relation to the outside walls. Then she left the basement and came up from the ground outside the house. She turned and had started back toward her body when her back exploded in pain. Something had slapped her from behind like a cat hitting a mouse with its paw, raking its claws down her back. She ‘thought’ herself back toward her body as fast as her spirit could move. As she flew, she looked back over her shoulder, never slowing, to see what had struck her. It was a creature of fire, the many formless tongues of flame coalescing into a vaguely lizard-like shape, its claw outstretched as if to take another swing at her.

In an instant, she slipped back into her body, and her nose was stung with the acrid smell of burning human flesh–her burning flesh. Frank had just turned to go back to his car, when a scream of pain escaped Karen’s lips. Her back arched and she leaned forward away from the seat, shoving her fist into her mouth to muffle the next scream. Angie had just been jogging back up the street, a bag of Blimpie sandwiches in her hand. She raced to Frank’s car and dropped the bag inside before sprinting over to the Jeep. Karen pressed her forehead into the dash as Frank lifted the back of her coat and shirt. On her back, running from her shoulder blades, under her bra strap, and ending just above her waist were five closely parallel lines of already blistered flesh, third degree burns. But there was no sign of damage to her clothes at all. Leigh held up Karen’s coat and shirt and unfastened her bra, while Frank pulled out a needle and syringe. Karen barely felt the jab as Frank drove the needle into a vein in her forearm, the pain from the burn and her fear for Justin blocking out everything else. A minute later, she felt the shot of morphine flow over her brain, washing away the pain, but not the fear. Frank was spraying a topical antiseptic on the burns, but Karen hardly noticed. “Angie, I want you to take these two,” Frank nodded at Karen, then at Tony’s limp form in the back seat, “to see Aiden, please,” he said as he taped a large dressing over Karen’s burns.

“What the hell happened? ” Angie asked. “I leave for 20 minutes, and I miss all the excitement ” Before Frank could say anything, Karen grabbed his jacket and croaked, “No You can’t leave him in there Whatever was going on is getting worse ” Her face was pale, and Frank could feel her hand shaking as she pulled on his jacket. But the look in her eyes told him that she wasn’t going anywhere until she knew that Justin was safe. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “I guess we’ll just have to arrest him.” “Who? The guy who did this?” Angie asked looking at Karen’s bandaged back. “No, Justin,” Frank answered, grinning. It took Angie a second to work out what he was saying. Then she grinned too. Of course. They had no grounds for a warrant on whoever owned the house. But if they only wanted Justin, the owner would pretty much have to hand him over or risk giving them a reason for getting a warrant. “Angie, you stay with these two,” Frank told her. “And get them to Aiden as soon as she’ll let you.” Frank glanced over at Karen. The disappointment was evident on Angie’s face; she wanted to be in on the ‘bust.’ “I can’t take you,” Frank said to Angie. “If anything goes wrong, you could lose your job or worse.” “Yeah, well, you aren’t going in alone,” Angie said, puffing herself up like an angry cat. “I’ll be taking Leigh,” he told her. “What if someone recognizes her?” Angie asked, still hoping to go instead. “I’ll just make sure they’re paying more attention to me,” Frank replied. Angie shrank back to her normal, still formidable self. “Here, take these,” she said to Leigh, holding out her DPD jacket and dark ‘cop’ sunglasses. “It’s not much of a disguise, but....” Angie shrugged. “Be careful,” Karen moaned. “The creature...it was a lizard...made of fire.” “And call if you need help,” Angie added, as Leigh followed Frank toward the gate.

Frank held out his hand and grasped the handle on the smaller pedestrian gate beside the driveway. Angie laughed. After all of Tony’s elaborate plans for getting inside, it was as simple as that. She wished Tony was awake, so she could tease him about it. As he walked up the driveway followed by Leigh, Frank made careful note of the 8 vehicles lining the curving drive. Most of them were trucks, and all had Michigan plates. Up ahead, he could see several garage doors on the end of the house, all closed. He wondered if any of them held a vehicle with a DC plate. He climbed the marble stairs and checked around the doors. No bell. But there was a large knocker hanging on one door of the pair. He lifted and dropped it several times, then waited. As he stood there, he looked at the front side of the house. All the windows that he could see appeared to be covered with heavy drapes on the inside. No wonder they couldn’t make out any movement inside. After a minute, Frank tried the doorknob. Locked. He knocked again, more forcefully this time. Another minute passed, during which both Frank and Leigh studied any decorations they could see on the house, looking for anything that might have occult significance. Again, nothing.

Frank was about to pound on the door, ‘cop-style,’ when the door swung open just a crack. The woman he saw peaking through the narrow opening had to be over 6 foot, blonde, with significant...pneumatics. “Ja?” she said, looking Frank up and down. “FBI, ma’am,I'm Agent Smith” Frank said, holding up an old fake ID badge. “Do you have a warrant?” she asked, in a heavy German accent. Boy, was she the suspicious one. “We just need to speak with you, ma’am,” Frank replied. “Mind if we come inside?” The woman opened the door just enough for her to get through, and slipped out, holding the door almost shut behind her. “Is there someone by the name of Justin Kazotchek here?” Frank asked her. “No one by that name lives here,” she answered. “We know he doesn’t live here,” Frank replied. “We have it on good authority that he arrived here this morning in that truck,” he said, pointing vaguely at the last truck in the line on the driveway. “I’ll see if anyone by that name is here,” the woman said, backing into the house. Before she could shut the door firmly behind herself, Frank could see a marble entryway beyond the door. It was austere looking, but had a certain old-world elegance. “Stay here,” Frank told Leigh. The woman who answered the door looked strong, but he had a feeling that Leigh could handle her alone if she needed to. He was going around the back to make sure that she wasn’t hustling anyone out another door or window while they waited on the porch.

There were fairly large windows all the way around the house, all covered tightly with heavy curtains or shades. On the back of the house, facing the lake, was a large veranda, enclosed to make a Florida room for the winter. But the French doors that led to it from the house were also tightly closed. That was interesting, since most people didn’t keep all their drapes shut all day. It wasn’t terribly cold out that day, but the air near the house felt noticeably warmer than the air just a few steps further away. Normally, the breeze off the lake would have been more obvious, but as Frank studied the house, he could feel it only on his back. There was a large, well-groomed lawn leading down to the rocky ‘beach,’ and a small dock thrust out into the lake from the shore. On the veranda, there was nice-looking wrought-iron garden furniture. A description of the scene would have sounded welcoming, but it looked empty and uninviting to Frank. It took about 10 minutes for Frank to make the full circuit of the house, and he’d seen no sign that anyone was trying to leave undetected.

Frank was just straightening his jacket as he stepped back onto the porch, when the front door opened again. “There is no one here by that name,” the blonde woman told him. “You must have gotten bad information.” She started to shut the door and Frank put his hand out. “Excuse me, ma’am. One more thing. Can I have your name for my report?” he asked her. She hesitated. “I do not believe that I am required to provide that information,” she told him. “Actually,” Frank said, stopping her again, “you do. Legal code requires that you provide proof of identity when asked by law enforcement officials.” “Olga Helmschmidt,” she told him. She once again started to back away from the door to close it. “Ma’am?” Frank said, stopping again. “I don’t mean to be offensive, but you don’t sound like you’ve lived here long. Do you happen to have your passport or other identification?” “One moment,” she said, her eyes growing ever icier. She stepped back and closed the door. After 5 minutes, Frank was about to check the back again when the woman returned to the door holding a German passport. She handed it to him without a word. Frank glanced through it. She’d been traveling a lot recently, to South America, and to Canada before that. “Miss Helmschmidt,” Frank said after a minute. “I’m going to ask you again, since I’d hate to see you deported. But it is illegal to harbor someone who’s wanted for questioning by the authorities. I just want you to make absolutely sure that Mr. Kazotchek is not on the premises.”

The woman’s eyes could have caused the next ice age as she told Frank, “If I were to see or hear from this person, could I have your card to call you? I assure you that he is not here. And I cannot disturb the owner. He is in a meeting.” “Of course, ma’am,” Frank said, slipping a business card out of his pocket. “I just want to make sure you’re safe here, since Mr. Kazotchek could be dangerous.” A sly smile flitted across her features. “If I find out anything, I will call you right away,” she told Frank. “Thank you,” Frank replied. “This is a lovely home. How long have you lived here?” he asked, trying the ‘friendly interest’ angle. “I’ve been visiting here on and off for several years,” the woman answered, no less coldly than before. “It’s a big place,” Frank said, glancing around. “Would you mind if we took a look around the grounds, just to make sure Mr. Kazotchek isn’t lurking around the house waiting for us to leave?” “As you wish,” the woman answered. “Thank you, again,” Frank said, turning to go down the front steps. Leigh turned and followed him, the woman watching them both head off across the lawn. They were no sooner out of sight of the door, when they heard the door click shut.

Justin had no idea how long he’d been there. The Speaker had been talking to each man, criss-crossing the circle in no order that Justin could discern. He and Tom were the only two left, and the Speaker sat down next to Tom next. Tom was like an eager puppy. He needed no prompting from the Speaker; he was IN. But the Speaker continued questioning him anyway, taking as much time as he had with the others. Outside, Karen’s back felt like it was on fire. The morphine was still dulling her senses, but the endorphins that had flooded her system when she’d been attacked were beginning to wear off. Angie could see that Karen was hurting. “Can I take you to the hospital, now,” Angie asked her. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. Frank will get him out.” She said it with a certainty that Karen just couldn’t grasp. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Frank to do everything he could. She wouldn’t have called him first if she hadn’t believed that he would. But Angie hadn’t had her dream, and whatever was going on in there.... It might already be too late. Karen wasn’t leaving until she knew for sure. Frank had left a tube of an analgesic cream, in case she needed it. “Could you just put some of that cream on,” Karen asked Angie through clenched teeth. Angie could see the tears rolling down Karen’s cheeks, but the woman was tougher than she looked. Angie shook her head and grabbed the tube, then carefully lifted Karen’s shirt.

Frank had seen several small basement windows around the foundation. He led Leigh around to the back of the house, to one of the basement windows that wasn’t near any first-floor windows. He slipped off his jacket, and wrapped part of it around his MagLite. Leigh wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. Neither one of them would fit through that window. Frank saw the question on her face. “It’ll get us in without having to go through it,” he told her, then he smacked the window hard with the wrapped flashlight. There was a muffled tinkle of broken glass, and Frank worked to clear away all the remaining pieces that stuck around the edges of the frame. Then he shook out his jacket and put it back on, and strode purposefully around to the front. This time he pounded urgently on the door. When the woman opened it again, she looked a little surprised that Frank and Leigh were still there. Frank took immediate advantage of that surprise. “Ma’am, one of your windows is broken out. I’m afraid I’ll have to check the house.” The woman was gobsmacked, and nothing came out her mouth, though she was clearly trying to find the words. Her English had simply escaped her. Frank and Leigh had no problem pushing past her into the foyer. From there it was part following the clues Karen had been able to give him and part working his way through a maze, but he was able to find the stairs to the basement. The woman followed about a room behind them, helplessly trying to get their attention to stop them.

Frank and Leigh moved quickly, to get ahead of Miss Helmschmidt. Downstairs there was a big lounge and game room. Beyond that, they came to a locker room, showers, a steam room, and a pool. It was all pretty impressive. Finally they came to a locked, heavy, wood-paneled door. This was just about the area where Karen had encountered the red-hot iron wall. “Well, how careless,” Frank whispered to Leigh, as he knelt to pick the lock. “Someone seems to have left this door unlocked.” He stood and turned the knob. The Speaker had just finished with Tom, and had turned in his seat to face Justin. “Tom seems to have a great deal of faith in you,” the Speaker started. Just then the room was flooded with light as Frank swung the door open. Inside he could see 13 guys in white robes and one, sitting next to Justin, in flame red robes. The white robes didn’t move, other than covering their eyes with their hands or arms. The Speaker stood and stepped forward to block Frank’s way. “Do you have a warrant?” he demanded. “I don’t need one,” Frank replied. “I’m not arresting Mr. Kazotchek. I just need to take him in for questioning. It seems some of his relatives have been involved in terrorist activities.” Justin turned and looked up at the Speaker. “I’m sorry,” he moaned to the Speaker. Then he faced Tom. “I’m really sorry.” “You have no idea how sorry you’re going to be,” the Speaker hissed at Justin.

Frank stepped up to the Speaker. “Excuse me,” Frank said. “I’m going to need your name too.” The man was livid. Outside the door, beyond Leigh’s form, Frank could see Olga. She was motioning to the Speaker that she’d tried to stop Frank. Then she stood still, her arms folded under those prodigious bosoms, looking like an ice maiden. “Otto Horst,” the Speaker told Frank, his mouth barely moving. “Is this your home?” Frank asked him. “These are my premises,” he replied coldly. Otto looked down at Justin and ice filled Justin’s veins. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong,” Justin protested. “I can’t choose my family.” Otto looked at Tom next, and Justin, Frank and Leigh could all tell that Otto was clearly even less happy with Tom. The Speaker stepped toward Justin and Justin couldn’t help but flinch as the Speaker put out his hand. He cupped it under Justin’s elbow and helped him up, then almost pushed him toward Frank. “Can I have my clothes and stuff?” Justin moaned, more concerned about the gun wrapped in them than about the clothes themselves. “I will have them brought to the door,” Otto stated. Frank saw the look on Justin’s face, and knew Justin rarely went anywhere without a piece. “I’m afraid one of us has to claim Mr. Kazotchek’s things personally,” Frank told the Speaker. Glaciers could have covered miles in the icy pause. The Speaker nodded at Olga at the same time that Frank nodded at Leigh.

Olga led Leigh back to the locker room and put her hand out to open Justin’s locker. But before she could reach for the neat pile inside, Leigh stepped forward to pick it up. Olga just stepped back and let her, clearly angry but following her master’s lead. Then she turned and led Leigh silently back to the front door. Otto brushed past Frank and Justin and escorted them to the front door. The entire way, Justin kept protesting that he had nothing to do with what his cousins did. “Even their own mother can’t keep track of them,” Justin complained. Frank walked between Justin and the Speaker, his hand firmly on Justin’s arm. It was apparent that Justin had been drugged with something. He was babbling more than usual, and his speech was slightly slurred unless he concentrated on what he was saying. When he finished trying to persuade the Speaker that he was still worthy of whatever the Speaker had planned for him, Justin began protesting to Frank that he didn’t know anything about what his cousins were involved with. All he worried about was controlling himself and his wife, not all the rest of his family. They weren’t his responsibility. Olga and Leigh were at the door when Frank got there. As they walked up, Olga opened the door, more than ready to usher them out. “Wait Can’t I put on my clothes first?” Justin complained. “I can’t go out in just a robe ” Frank gave Justin a curt nod, and Leigh handed him his pants and set his jogging shoes on the floor in front of him. As Justin slipped on his pants, Frank got the distinct impression that Otto and Olga were memorizing them all. Frank cautiously tried to sense if they were Unknown. He felt the heat and knew that if Otto wasn’t a creature of the Unknown, then he definitely had close ties to one, and he was pissed. Frank had the feeling that Otto was the type to hold a grudge to the final trump, and he was not a happy camper right now.

Justin reached out for his t-shirt and Frank grabbed him by the elbow and directed him toward the door. He really didn’t want to stick around a whole lot longer. Leigh fell in on Justin’s other side, and Justin kept arguing the entire way down the driveway. Angie saw them coming and had the engine running before the three got to Frank’s car. She’d already called the ER at Receiving, to warn them that she would be bringing in a couple people, one unconscious, and to convince them that Dr. Carter should really be there when they come in. Karen dropped her head into her hands when she saw Justin come out the gate, tears of pain being replaced by tears of relief. This time she didn’t argue when Angie said they were going to the hospital. As Frank guided Justin into the back seat, he could see that Justin’s protestations weren’t entirely an act. The guy was a bit loopy. He was going to have to draw some blood and get it tested, to find out what Justin was on. Leigh hoped that whatever it was, time and a Sphere would help, because she’d already done a Shield that day, and couldn’t do another until later that night. As soon as he was sitting in the car, Justin dug through his clothes and pulled out his phone. He managed to get it turned on, and voice-commanded it to dial Karen’s cell. “Justin?” Karen asked, her voice cracking slightly from the pain of her burns. “Hi, Hon ” Justin said cheerfully. “I’m OK Are you OK?” Whatever drug-induced stupor he’d appeared to be in when she saw him earlier was still affecting him. It was clear from his voice and the way he spoke. Justin was normally not that ditzy. “I’m OK,” Karen lied. She didn’t want to scare him while he was still doped up. “Good I’ll see you in a little bit ” Justin told her. The two hung up.

“I’m hungry,” Justin told Frank and Leigh. “Can we stop someplace?” “Here, have this,” Frank told him, handing over the seat one of the sandwiches Angie had bought and dropped in the car. He was a little sorry he hadn’t gotten a chance to have a bite or two himself. But he had bigger problems to worry about. They’d picked up a tail as soon as he’d pulled away from the curb, an Audi, it looked like. He made a couple quick turns, popped into a driveway, and then doubled back, and he was pretty sure he lost them. So he continued on to the hospital. Angie had already gotten Karen and Tony there at about 4:30pm. Aiden set his team on Tony, then took a look at Karen’s back himself. He let out a low whistle, then she felt him put his hands to either side of the burns. “Looks like a mild burn,” Aiden said a little louder than necessary, for the benefit of the other doctor working ER that evening. And now it did feel a little better to Karen, too. But it still hurt like hell. “I’ll write you a prescription for the pain,” Aiden told her. “And for some salve for it. You can go home. But don’t sleep on your back,” he warned her. “As IF ” she thought to herself. But she couldn’t very well complain about the teasing. She wasn’t the first one to end up in the ER and get teased about it. “So, what did this, anyway?” Aiden asked her quietly. “It was...a...um...” Karen said. She didn’t have a quick snapshot of the thing handy, and she didn’t want to be describing the thing in public, not even to another Envoy. That was another good way to get herself locked up. “Right,” Aiden said. “You can tell me about it when I get off shift.” He smiled and handed her a scrub-top, to replace the shirt he’d cut open, and left to let her get dressed.

In the next cubicle, Tony didn’t seem to be responding to anything the ER team tried. All his vitals looked fine, but he just wouldn’t wake up. Aiden admitted him, and hoped he’d be out of the hospital before he went off shift again. When Frank, Leigh and Justin got to the ER, Frank flashed his medical ID and took Justin to a cubicle. Justin was still carrying the half-eaten sandwich. “Too bad this doesn’t have any mayo,” Justin complained. Frank pointed to the table, and Justin hopped up on it. Frank wrapped a rubber tube around Justin’s upper arm, handed him a small rubber ball and said, “Here, squeeze this.” Justin took one look at the needle Frank was unwrapping and said, “I don’t feel so hungry anymore.” He set the sandwich down next to him. Frank slid the needle in and tugged the rubber tube loose. Before he’d even gotten a full vial, Justin was wavering, and Frank eased him down onto the table before he toppled off. “I’ll have to remember that, next time I want to shut you up,” Frank said to Justin’s unconscious form. He chucked the sandwich into the trash can, swung Justin legs up onto the table so he was lying flat, and took the vial out to label it and get it to the lab.

By the time Frank got back into the cubicle, Justin’s color had come back, and Frank helped him to sit up. Now that they weren’t standing around in the Unknown’s entryway, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to let Justin finished getting dressed. He found Leigh, who had thought to bring in the rest of Justin’s clothes with her, and he took the clothes to Justin. Aiden had just escorted Karen out to the waiting room, and gave Angie a quick kiss before trotting off to help another patient. Frank suggested that they all meet somewhere, but not Justin and Karen’s place. They agreed that the safe house would be the best place, and Angie drove Karen over there while Frank and Leigh waited for Justin to come out. A short time later, around 6pm, the five were sitting around the table, Karen and Justin with their chairs so close together you’d have thought that they were sharing one. But when Justin went to put his arm around Karen, she flinched, arching her back away from his arm. “Did I do something wrong?” Justin asked her plaintively. “No. I....my back is sore,” Karen told him. “Can I rub it for you?” Justin asked, trying hard to be helpful. Karen unconsciously flinched again. “No No, it’s fine....” she told him. She turned slightly, so that she could lean against his arm without pressing her back against him or the chairs, and put her head on his shoulder.

Before they started talking, Frank called Terry. He had a feeling that it was about time he brought her into this. He also asked her to bring dinner with her, anything but German food. Terry had a feeling it was a joke she’d understand better after she got there. While they waited for her, Frank got a call with the results of Justin’s tox-screen. It showed a mild euphoric related to Rohypnol. It wasn’t as strong as the date-rape versions usually were. It was just enough, though, to make Justin extremely suggestible. Justin described what he’d been doing in the house, and Frank figured that the drug had been delivered in the steam room, vaporized in the steam itself. Pretty effective, actually. Terry got there about an hour later, around 7pm, bearing Mexican food, which was about as far from German as she could come up with. As they ate, they told Terry about everything they’d been trying to keep from her so far and everything that had happened in the last 24 hours. Justin must have gotten up 4 times for more water. The food wasn’t especially spicy, but his mouth was extremely dry, one of the side-effects of the drug. He was having trouble focusing, too, like he had a sudden case of ADD. So it helped that they had to go over everything again for Terry.

When they got to the end, Frank told them all that when he’d sensed the Unknown on Otto, he didn’t feel like the same thing they’d encountered in the corn field. But he was a ‘kissing cousin,’ “just not as wide and deep,” Frank said, “if that makes any sense.” They each had their own way of describing how the Unknown felt to them when they were able to sense it. But although the exact words they might use were different, they all had no problem interpreting and understanding when one of them tried to describe it. Frank told them that he’d gotten the impression that Otto wasn’t a creature of the Unknown himself; but he’d spent enough time in contact with the Unknown to have picked up the stink of it. Justin was still fuzzy, but he couldn’t remember feeling that on the Speaker back at the barn, and none of the others that had tried to sense it had felt that either back then. Then it occurred to Frank that all of them had been tracking this thing for a couple weeks now. He tried to sense if any of them had picked up any trace of it. The others saw him wrinkle his nose. The stink of sulfur was heaviest on Karen and Justin, but he could smell it on himself and Leigh as well. Angie and Terry didn’t seem to have picked up anything at all.

Leigh asked if Karen would be OK for doing a Mental Shield on everyone. The way that Otto and Olga had been focused on her, Frank and Justin at the house, she was afraid that Otto might have done something to them, like put a ‘hound’ on them. Karen knew from experience that if they’d been tagged, it would take at least two Shields, done 12 hours apart, to get the hound off their trail. Unfortunately, that also signaled the person who sent the hound that it had been driven off. So they weren’t going to have a ton of time now to deal with this guy if they wanted to continue living here in Detroit. And Karen really didn’t want to have to go on the run like Harvey had. She closed her eyes and raised the Shield. God, she was tired. All she really wanted now was to go home to bed. “You aren’t going back there tonight,” Frank told her. “He knows where you live. Besides, they think the FBI has Justin. It won’t look right if we just drop him off on his doorstep.” Karen’s heart sank. She loved her new house, they’re new house. She didn’t want it burnt down by some Unknown-corrupted lunatic. “Oh my God ” Karen exclaimed. “Drew I can’t leave him there if it isn’t safe ” Frank just smiled. “I can take care of that. Surely Justin has information hidden in his house, information that the FBI would find helpful in their case against his hate-crime-committing relatives. Make a list of what you need tonight....”

It was about 9:30am, Saturday, Oct. 28, when Leigh, Frank, Angie and Tony headed back toward Detroit. They’d been out at the barn since Friday evening, so Tony pulled out his cell to make sure he hadn’t gotten any important calls while his phone had been off. It was one of those fancy jobs that allowed him to check his email too, and he was surprised to find an email from Fr. Benedetto. Fr. Benedetto was one of the priests who had been helping him in Rome, and he’d seemed disappointed that he wasn’t able to help Tony find what he’d been looking for in his research there. Tony wondered if he’d found something new or was just writing to chat. He began to read through the message, then suddenly asked Frank if he could do a computer search for any recently dead people who had been related to either Terry Kaczinski or the people on the bus. People who might also have burned to death. Frank told him that since they didn’t even know who the people on the bus were yet, that would be a little hard. But he opened his laptop and began a search for people who had died in the last couple weeks, and began setting up a sorting program that would look for connections to Kaczinski.

Angie stared at Tony for a minute, and when he didn’t start explaining on his own, she asked what was going on. Frank glanced back over his shoulder and agreed that it was a good question, and said that since Tony seemed to be giving him orders now, he’d kind of like to know why. Tony told them he’d gotten more information from Fr. Benedetto, about Salamanders. Angie wanted to know what little amphibious lizards had to do with their current problem. Tony said he wasn’t talking about lizards. He told them he’d read them the email he’d gotten, but they’d have to forgive him for it being slow, because he’d be translating from Italian as he went. “Fr. Benedetto had a naggin’ feelin’ dat he once heard’a sumpin’ dat fit what I wuz lookin’ for, but he didn’ wanna say nuttin’ ‘til he could find da right references–ya know, so he wouldn’ give me any false hope. He started lookin’ on his own, wit da occult uses of fire, and he found da same t’ings I did. But he also found some udder int’restin’ ideas, ‘bout how burnin’ someone alive would condemn da guy’s soul ta eternal torment, but also dat wit da right rituals and prayers, da soul would instead ‘be purified in readiness for its eternal reward.’ Eventually, Fr. Benedetto found an extremely obscure reference ta a creature called a Salamander. ”

Tony continued. “Salamanders are t’ings made’a human souls who’ve been burned alive after ‘certain unspecified rituals.’ Dey’re bein’s’a smoke, spirit an’ flame, ‘who can inhabit our world by manifestin’ demselves trew da elements’a fire’–smoke, heat, flame and ash. Dey’re said ta be immortal bein’s, nee’der angel nor demon, nee’der livin’ nor dead. Dey appear as dey were in life, but wit’out hair, dere skin as grey as ash, and dere features oddly smooth. Instead’a eyes dey got empty black holes, or flames accordin’ ta one account. Dere presence is signaled by da smell’a heat, like sumpin’ scorchin’ but not fire. Like when ya leave da iron on, or da smell it’d make when ya try ta iron sumpin’ wit it. Dey can become immaterial smoke at will, allowin’ dem entry ta nearly any space. Dere weakness is prob’ly water, or maybe cold, if da temp’ature were low enough. Fortunately dey ain’t suppos’ta bear ill will toward da livin’, an’ instead ‘may visit dose dey loved in life.’ But dere touch is suppos’ta burn at will, hotter den a furnace; so it prob’ly wouldn’ go too well for da loved one. Dey’re also said to be subjec’ ta ‘base desires and profane sexual cravings,’ an’ yet are ‘oddly unable ta fully experience da emotions dey knew when dey were human. Dere is some indication dat da Salamander is an incomplete form’a sumpin’ more powerful, but Fr. Benedetto hasn’t been able ta uncover more details yet. What he found wuz in material da Vatican recovered after WWII, and dere wuz some evidence dat da Nazis were particularly interested in Salamanders and dere creation.” Tony stopped and closed up his phone. “Dat wuz all he said,” he told them. They all sat quietly for a minute, realizing that they might finally have a good solid lead for what they were dealing with. They were all a little startled when Frank’s cell phone rang.

Justin put off his run a little while so he could spend some quality time with Karen that morning. He’d been pretty grumpy lately, and he didn’t want her to think that it was anything she’d done. He knew well enough by now that she had a tendency to blame herself for every little thing that went wrong, even when it wasn’t her fault. Which was usually the case. He knew she was working hard on that, but he also knew that he wasn’t making it easy for her by trying to keep all the ugly stuff he was dealing with to himself. So it was after 9am when he finally shut the door and jogged down the front walk. He tried not to always run the same route, but because they were so close to Belle Isle, he usually ended up out there eventually. He was getting close to the bridge when he finally realized that there was a car following him. He didn’t usually pay much attention to the traffic unless he was crossing a street, so it had taken him a while to notice that one particular vehicle seemed to be pacing him. As he neared a corner, he glanced back, as if he were trying to rate the number and speed of the oncoming traffic. It wasn’t actually a car following him, it was a big black pick-up. When he got to the corner, he jogged in place, watching the cars with more attention than he normally gave them. The pick-up, a shiny new Ford F-10, rolled up in the near lane, slowing as if to make a turn. But instead it stopped right in front of him.

Justin had been jogging in place while he waited for the traffic to clear, and now he subtly altered his balance to be ready for a fight. He was startled when the window went down and Tom leaned over the passenger seat. “Hey, Justin Get in ” Tom said through the open window. It wasn’t quite an order, more like a friendly offer for a lift from a friend. But it shook him that Tom knew where to find him on a Saturday morning. “Uh, I’m supposed to head home when I’m done,” Justin said, waiting to see what kind of a response he’d get. “What? Really short leash?” Tom replied, raising an eyebrow. Justin tensed slightly. He wasn’t going to get out of this. He used the tension to let Tom think it was a response to his jab. He stopped jogging and pulled out his cell, panting slightly. “Hi, Justin,” Karen answered, a hint of worry in her voice. She’d been putting the finishing touches on her mid-term exams, and had been surprised to see Justin’s cell number pop up on the caller ID box when the phone rang. He never called when he was out for his run. “Hey, Karen I’m going out to have a beer with the guys. Catch up with you tonight ” Before she could say a word, she heard the connection cut off. Her stomach flip-flopped.

As Justin climbed into the truck, Tom suggested that he might want to turn his phone off. Justin could tell that he’d better do what Tom ‘suggested’ if he wanted to get any more out of him. He switched it off. “I’ve got a feeling about you Justin,” Tom said as Justin was shoving the phone back into its holster. “And I think you have the right stuff. So much that I’ve stuck my neck out here to get you in on a special opportunity.” “Uh, what do you want?” Justin asked him. “Just come with me and don’t ask too many questions,” Tom told him, smiling, as he shifted the truck into gear. “There’ll be time for questions,” he finished. “Um, can I ask one last one?” Justin asked. “Sure,” Tom said. “Do I have to ride in the back of the van again?” Justin asked him. Tom grinned. “Do you see a van?” he asked in reply. He teased Justin a little about maybe not having the right stuff after all, and Justin told him that he didn’t really get sick. It was more a control issue. He hated not driving himself. Tom seemed to like that, and asked Justin if he minded listening to something while they drove. Justin told him that he liked most types of music, so that’d be OK. But if it was an Amway pitch.... Tom slid a CD into the player and told him to just listen.

Justin was a little surprised at the music that poured out of the speakers and began to wrap itself around him. It sounded like Wagner, but nothing he’d ever heard before. It was darker, but more stirring, more bombastic. It was very emotional. He and Tom were the only two in the truck, and it didn’t seem like Tom was planning to pick up anyone else. Justin hoped he hadn’t just gotten himself in over his head. “Is this German opera?” he asked Tom, to make conversation. “Yeah, Wagner,” Tom answered. “Cool,” Justin replied. “Just listen to the music and think about how it makes you feel,” Tom recommended. Justin settled back into his seat. “It is really good,” he told Tom. Tom just smiled and kept driving. Justin couldn’t tell for sure if Tom was actually trying to drive evasively, since he had no idea where they were going. But they seemed to be heading basically north, and keeping to surface streets. The music was drifting a little, and Justin’s mind began to drift with it. His mind began to run what seemed like scenes from movies behind his lightly closed eyes. He was feeling warm, uplifted, powerful. It was a feeling of purity, of being very, very good and right. He felt like he was on the cusp of becoming all that he might be, more than he could ever have imagined being. With a little jolt, he realized that the truck had stopped moving.

Justin had no sooner hung up on Karen than she dialed Frank’s number. It just wasn’t like Justin to hang up like that. And she was damn sure that he wasn’t going out for “beer with the guys.” She knew he never drank that early in the morning. Karen heard the connection open, and before Frank could say anything she told him “Something’s wrong with Justin.” “Maybe you two should talk about that yourselves,” Frank suggested. Karen didn’t laugh. “He just called, and all he said was ‘I’m going out to have a beer with the guys. Catch up with you tonight.’ He was out for his run...and he never drinks this early in the morning,” Karen told him. “We need to find him, but I...I can’t do it alone.” Frank was pretty sure that was the first time he’d ever heard Karen ask for help without someone else prompting her. Whether Justin was really in any trouble or not, she certainly believed he was. He opened another window on the laptop and scanned for the GPS tracker in Justin’s cell phone. Even if the phone was off, he should still be able to pick up the signal. The little dot identifying the position of the unit popped quickly onto the map on the screen. Luckily it was moving. So he hadn’t been forced to leave the phone behind. “They’re headed north up Jefferson right now,” he told Karen. “We’ve just left Shelby, so you’ll have to be his back-up until we get back. I can track Justin and direct you.” “OK,” Karen said grimly.

Frank could hear her pounding up the stairs. A minute later, he heard what he assumed was Karen getting her gun from the safe. That was good. He’d heard the tension and fear in her voice, but she still had her wits about her. More pounding as she ran back down the stairs, rustling as she put on her coat, then the slam of the door. A moment later he heard a car start up. Frank kept one eye on the computer and one eye on his own position. If Justin was heading up here, then there was no point in them rushing back down to Detroit. He didn’t bother giving Karen every turn Justin’s phone took. He just kept her roughly parallel to it. It soon became apparent that they weren’t heading for Shelby, and he directed Leigh east to I-94. That’d be the fastest way to intersect Justin’s path. Every once in a while, Frank asked Karen to describe her surroundings, just so he could tell that she was still on the phone. Mostly she was just listening intently for his next direction, but that made it hard for him to tell if she was still there. It sounded like they’d gotten to a residential section of St. Clair Shores near the river when the dot slowed, made one final turn, then stopped. He gave Karen the street name, and told Leigh to step on it.

With a jolt, Justin realized that the truck had stopped. He started when he felt a hand on his shoulder, Tom’s hand. “Come on. There’s someone I want you to meet,” Tom said to him. Justin had absolutely no idea where they were or how long he’d been drifting like that. “Man, I feel like I just hit the tie-breaking home run with the bases loaded,” he told Tom. Tom grinned. There was a light in his eyes, an excitement, that was the most emotion Justin had ever seen Tom express. He stretched his back as he undid the seat belt, and looked around as he got out of the truck. They were parked on a long curved driveway behind several other vehicles, mostly trucks. Behind him, Justin could just catch a glimpse of a large wrought-iron gate at the end of the driveway. Ahead was an amazingly expensive-looking house, and beyond that he could see the lake. Tom smiled and slapped him lightly on the top of his shoulder as he came around the truck, then started toward the front door. Justin followed behind, straightening his clothes. Looking up at the Georgian columns rising up from the top of the wide marble steps, Justin felt self-conscious of the fact that he was in his sweaty running clothes. The door was a huge wooden double door with fancy metal knockers. He didn’t know a whole lot about home-building, but everything looked like it had been built of the highest quality materials.

Tom knocked, and both men stood and fussed nervously with their clothes while they waited. After a minute or two, one door swung inwards. The woman standing in the opening was easily 6'2" tall, with braided blonde hair, curves in all the right places, and clothing just well-fitting enough that Justin could see that she was well-muscled too. She looked like the embodiment of a Valkyrie. Her eyes were the blue-green of glacial ice as she looked Justin up and down then clearly dismissed him. She looked at Tom and raised one eyebrow. “Are you sure this is the one you want?” she asked him in a heavy German accent. Tom glanced over at Justin then elbowed him. Justin stopped gawking at the blonde and straightened up as if his CO had just walked up behind the woman. “I think he’s got the right stuff,” Tom answered her. “Very well. Then it will be on your head,” she replied. She made an almost militarily crisp 180 and led them into the marble entryway. With just a glance over her shoulder, she got Tom to shut the door behind himself and continued on deeper into the house. As they left the entryway, Justin stepped into a dangerously deep pile carpeting that muffled all sound. They turned a couple corners, then the woman stopped in front of a more normal-sized set of wood doors. She pushed them open and led the men into a two-stored study.

Shelves of books lined the room, stopping only at the doorway and to either side of a hearth with a fireplace large enough to roast a small cow whole. There were wing-backed chairs here and there in small groupings, and tables small and large, and the room was both opulent and cluttered at the same time. Justin glanced up expecting to see a tinned ceiling, or maybe a mural, and found a glass cupola topping the high ceiling. When he looked back down, he realized that the man he knew only as “The Speaker” was standing there looking down at a book. Justin hadn’t even noticed him as they entered the room, and he’d made no move himself until the woman had left, shutting the doors behind her. The Speaker turned, closing the book, and looked into Justin’s eyes like he was looking into his soul. Justin immediately felt uncomfortable at the invasiveness of the Speaker’s stare. A moment later, the man flashed a thousand-watt smile at Justin, set the book on a table and held out his hand. Justin took the proffered hand and glanced over at Tom to see him looking at the Speaker with a look that one usually finds on a Lab, a look that exclaimed “No matter what you do, I worship you.”

Karen almost wasn’t conscious of the fact that she was praying the whole time she drove. Each time Frank gave her directions or asked a question, she was startled out of her reverie, shocked back into awareness of where she was and what she was doing. “Dear God, please protect him. I’m doing all I can, but right now You’re the only One who can keep him safe.” Her lips moved slightly as she prayed silently, tears running down her face. She slowed as she turned onto the street Frank had given her, and rolled up it looking at the address numbers. Beyond a large wrought-iron gate bracketed by stone posts, she glimpsed several vehicles lined along the winding driveway. Any place this large had to have a big garage, too, like Reg’s had been. And people that lived in places like this might have one pick-up truck, but not several. This had to be the place. She told Frank the numbers that were on one of the stone posts and continued rolling past, glancing down as if she were checking directions, in case anyone was watching her. It was only then that she realized that the crucifix had grown warm against her chest. Frank did a property search on the address and found that it belonged to New Light Enterprises Corp., a “self-actualization company,” whatever the hell that meant. He wondered vaguely if the company had any relationship with Edward or his company.

After another long, soul-searching look into Justin’s eyes, the Speaker went to a small dry bar and poured an amber liquid from a crystal decanter into 3 ‘rocks’ glasses, then handed one to Tom and another to Justin. He picked up his own, raised it up and took a sip, watching Tom and Justin over the rim of the glass. “Are we drinking to anything?” Justin asked before raising his own. “To a future without limits,” the Speaker answered. Justin lifted his glass and took a sip with a little trepidation, but found that the glass held a really fine Scotch. “Have a seat,” the Speaker said, motioning to a grouping of three chairs. “If you had no limits, Justin, what do you think you could accomplish?” he asked. “If you weren’t limited by time, by the constraints of society, the obligations of people?” Justin looked down and watched as his hands swirled the Scotch in the glass. “I dunno. Clean up the city, so that people could go out without being in fear, so that people would want to come there?” The Speaker pressed him. “I don’t mean just generalities. What would you do specifically?” “Uh, get rid of the drug dealers and criminals and gang bangers who scare people away?” He wasn’t sure exactly where this conversation was going, so each answer came out more like a question, as if he was looking for approval from the Speaker.

“What if I told you that you could have everything? But the price would be what you have now,” the Speaker asked. “What do you mean by ‘everything’?” Justin asked him. “The things that are holding you back and dragging you down now–job, family, wife,” the Speaker replied. “So I wouldn’t have to work?” Justin asked as if that were one of his greatest wishes. The Speaker just smiled. “What would you be willing to do to get what you want?” he asked Justin. “Whatever it takes,” Justin answered firmly. He wasn’t sure if it was something he said, the way he said it, or something the Speaker saw in his eyes, but the Speaker stood now, smiled and said, “I think you’re ready for this opportunity. Tom, why don’t you take Justin downstairs, get him ready, start the preparations.” Tom stood and grinned from ear to ear, looking to Justin an awful lot like a Lab whose owner had just thrown him a bone. “Yes, sir!” he answered excitedly. Justin stood too, and the Speaker smiled at the two men as Tom led Justin out of the study. As they walked down the hallway, Justin asked, “So, what now?” Tom said, “We’re going to get the opportunity to transcend this plane, to be more than anybody can ever dream. Only thirteen get this opportunity!” He glanced over at Justin as they turned into a stairway, to make sure he grasped the importance of what he’d said. Justin was still a little doubtful. “We’re not just talking purple Kool-Aid, are we?” he asked Tom. Tom started down the stairs. “No. This is true transcendence, leaving behind all the limitations...and living forever!” Another glance over at Justin. “Unkillable. Unstoppable.” The grin went ear to ear again, and Justin tried his best to mimic it, as if he were really as excited about this as Tom was.

As they went, Justin tried to keep track of the turns, the number of doors they passed, the type of flooring and wall coverings. He had a feeling he might need to find his own way back out, and wanted to be prepared. When they got to the bottom of the stairs, it looked to Justin like that level was as maze-like as the one they’d just come from. But as they began to move away from the stairs, Justin got the impression that the basement was also as big as the floor above. Tom led him to a nicely equipped locker room, with a white tiled floor and white enameled lockers, opened a locker and began to strip. He caught the look of an unasked question on Justin’s face and said, “We gotta get clean. First a shower, then steam, then a good soak.” Justin grinned as Tom handed him a very plush towel. “Sauna? Great!” Justin exclaimed. He began to undress very methodically, slipping his phone into one of his shoes, folding each piece of clothing neatly as he pulled it off. When he pulled the ‘hoodie’ over his head, he grabbed the gun and holster from the small of his back at the same time, keeping it firmly wrapped in the bottom of the hoodie. As he made each fold, he maneuvered the gun so that it was carefully concealed in the center of the hoodie when he laid it on top of his shoes. And he hoped that it hadn’t been noticed and would still be there when he went to leave.

As the two got ready to shower, Justin noticed that the same music Tom had played in the truck was playing very softly in the background of each room they went through, loud enough to hear it if you thought to listen, but quiet enough to be unnoticed otherwise. Justin could see that Tom was truly excited about this pending transformation, this improvement. Every move, every look showed his barely contained exuberance. As they hung their towels on bars at the back of the showers, Tom handed Justin a rough-looking washcloth and a small bottle of thick liquid. “Scrub down head to toe,” Tom said, “and I do mean everything.” He turned on his showerhead and squeezed some of the liquid onto the cloth, and proceeded to do just as he’d advised Justin. Justin mimicked his every move. The liquid was a very harsh soap, and as Justin began scrubbing, he wondered how much skin he’d have left when he was done. The water was quite hot, and Justin’s skin began to tingle all over, like he’d just rubbed on Ben-Gay. Tom was scrubbing his whole body like a surgeon washes before surgery, and watching to make sure Justin was doing the same, even pointing out spots that Justin missed. “I don’t think I’ve been this clean since delivery day,” Justin joked. “Well, except for maybe after that spill at the diesel dump. We had to be decontaminated....” Justin let the thought trail off when Tom gave him a look that said that he should be applying his mind to something other than idle chatter.

Karen drove up and down the street several times, stopping as if she were checking addresses against a sheet of directions, and occasionally putting her phone against her ear as if she were trying to get better directions than she had. A large stone wall ran across the front of the property, hiding everything inside from view except for what she could see through the gate. As she drove, she looked for the cross-walls that marked the edges of the property, and anything else she could think of that might be useful to know if they had to get inside some other way than the gate. She could see that there were a couple of cameras tied to motion sensors mounted along the wall and at the gate, and she hoped that she was out of their range. She’d been there about a half hour by now, and she was getting nervous. “Frank, where the hell are you?” she asked anxiously. She hadn’t expected it to take them so long to get there. Frank told her that they were almost there and asked her what she’d been able to find out so far. Almost nothing, in her opinion, and she told him so. What he hadn’t told her yet was that shortly after the signal had stopped moving, it had disappeared completely. Wherever Justin was, it was hardened just like the barn had been. Frank asked what she could see of the inside, and she told him, “Almost nothing without going in myself; and I’m not doing that until there’s someone here to watch the rest of me.” Since they both had their phones on ‘speaker,’ Tony asked if maybe there was ‘someone else’ there who could go look inside for her. She did see and talk to ghosts, right? Well, yeah, if they wanted to be seen....

Karen tried to sense if there was any Unknown presence around. Ever since Jane, she’d tried hard not to talk to ghosts unless she had to. They had a tendency to ‘stick’ to her once they knew she could see them. But she’d be willing to let it happen if the ghost could help her find Justin, she thought to herself. She had no idea.... The rush of heat that usually signaled the Unknown flowed over her, stronger than she expected. She glanced up and down the street. There was one guy up the street, he looked like a homeless person. But it was hard to tell sometimes.... Some ghosts could appear as solid as any regular person. She rolled her car up closer to the stooped figure and rolled down the window. “Excuse me, sir,” she called out the window. “I was wondering if you could help me?” The figure turned toward her and lifted it’s head, and Karen choked on a scream. Where there should have been a face, there was only a charred skull, scraps of burnt skin hanging loosely from it, it’s jaw moving uselessly as it tried to talk to her with it’s blackened stump of a tongue. She floored the gas pedal, and raced to the corner. She was breathing heavily as she screeched to a halt at the Stop sign, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. She looked around for cops or other traffic, then, seeing none, made a tight u-turn and rolled back toward where the figure had been. But it was gone.

She slumped slightly with relief as she continued up the street to the gated estate where Justin was. But when she glanced up at the rear view mirror, the creature was sitting in her back seat! She bit off another scream, stomped the brakes, threw the Jeep into park before she’d even come to a full stop, and leapt from the car. She ran to the sidewalk, then backed away from the Jeep, staring at it the whole time. She could barely breathe from the stink that filled her nostrils, clouding her brain, the smell of burning human flesh. Nothing flew out after her, and when she’d gotten about 20 feet away she stopped and watched for any movement inside it at all. Still nothing. Until she felt something touch her shoulder. She spun around, and clamped her hand over her mouth when she came face-to-face with the...the thing. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t work. This was her own fault, she knew. She’d wanted so badly to find Justin that she went against her better judgement and risked talking to...to it. It reached out and put what was left of its hands on her shoulders, and it’s jaw opened, showing her again that blackened stump of tongue. She heard in her head, “Avenge me.” Then the thing crumbled to ashes in front of her eyes, and the dust blew away on the late October wind.

After about a half hour of scrubbing, just when Justin thought that one more rub would start sloughing off skin, Tom turned off his shower and Justin did the same. As they wrapped the towels around their hips, Tom started down another hallway talking about how incredible this was going to be, how amazing, how free, how pure, how perfect. It was a good thing that Justin hadn’t wanted to actually carry on a conversation, because he wouldn’t have been able to get in a word edgewise. Eventually, Tom stopped for a breath, and Justin asked, “What do I have to do? I don’t want to screw this up.” “Just follow my lead,” Tom answered as they got to their next stop, the steam room. Justin followed Tom inside, and his vision was instantly blocked by the steam that filled the room. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. A moment later, his pores opened up and sweat started rolling down him. He could sense that there were other people in the room, but in the fog, he couldn’t get any feel for how many. Tom touched his elbow and pointed toward a couple open spots on the bench that lined the wall. Justin whispered, “Are we supposed to say ‘Hello’?” “Just relax and listen to the music,” Tom answered quietly. The two sat, and Justin mimicked Tom as he leaned back against the wet wall, closed his eyes and breathed in deeply the warm, humid, almost solid air. Now, once again, in the background above the occasional sniffle or cough and the quiet ‘plip plip’ of the condensed steam dripping off the ceiling onto the wet tile floor, Justin could hear the same music.

Karen was shaken. She stood there a minute, her hand still clamped over her mouth to slow her breathing and keep her from puking right there on the sidewalk. No way anyone would notice that on this Saturday afternoon in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. Shit! She spun around a couple times, expecting the thing to pop up behind her again. Then she cautiously approached her Jeep, expecting to see the thing sitting inside. She circled it, peering inside the windows, which quickly steamed up from her warm breath. She walked up one side, going about 10 feet past, then spun quickly, trying to surprise it for a change. When it wasn’t there, she paused for a minute, her arms wrapped tightly around her middle. Then she sidled up to the other side of the car, peering in the windows, edging along the curb, then walking away as if she didn’t care if it suddenly popped back into her car. She spun around again, knowing that it would be there the first time she let down her guard. And she began the whole process again, certain that she could catch the thing in the act.

Frank asked Leigh to go slowly as they turned the last corner. They hadn’t heard anything from Karen since Tony had suggested she find a ghost to go in and look for Justin. Just the engine revving, the brakes screeching a couple times, a door slamming, and a couple of cut-off screams. Now she wasn’t answering, although the phone connection hadn’t been dropped. He was concerned, but he wasn’t rushing into an unknown situation, especially when it could be an ambush. Up ahead, they saw Karen circle the car, peering in the windows, and pace up and down the sidewalk. She seemed to be completely focused on the Jeep, and didn’t even notice them turn the corner. Frank watched as she circled the car again, and he had Leigh park the car a few houses down from Karen’s. He walked up the sidewalk toward her, but she was still so focused on her car that she jumped when he came up behind her and said, “That’s a good way to get yourself locked up.” Her eyes widened and her body went rigid as she stared at him. Only her hands were moving, slowly rolling into fists then opening against her thighs. That was her greatest fear, and it took that kind of a slap in the face to get her focus back where it belonged, on getting Justin out safely.

Karen closed her eyes and put on her ‘game face.’ She opened the door of the Jeep to get her phone, and almost threw up from the smell of burning flesh that filled the car. The she turned and followed Frank back to his car. She described to the others everything she’d been able to find out about the estate so far, and told them about the...’homeless guy’...who’d turned to ash. When Tony heard that, he told her about the Salamander creature that Fr. Benedetto had told him about. It sounded like one of those things must have killed the homeless guy. If that thing had Justin.... Tony suggested shooting out the cameras then going over the wall to get in. Frank asked if he knew what was on the other side of the wall. He didn’t. Did he know how fast someone would respond to the cameras going out? No. Probably faster than 17 minutes, Frank surmised. Well, what about setting a charge on the main gate and going in fast, Tony asked. Frank wondered aloud how long it would take for the cops to get there. Tony got quiet again. “Whadabout I make a small hole in da wall?” Tony tried. “Yeah,” Karen agreed. “We could go in quietly....” “What about the motion sensors?” Frank countered. “Looks like they’ve got the wall pretty well covered.” “Whadif we came in from above, rappel in from a chopper or sumpin?” Tony suggested. “Hey, that’s great!” Frank agreed. “How many here have been trained to do that?” They all looked at one another and the car got quiet again.

“Why not just get Jackie Chan’s hydrofoil and drive it up onto the lawn,” Frank asked jokingly, to tease Tony about his decidedly un-subtle ideas. “Um, I do know a couple guys in the Coast Guard,” Angie offered. “I could probably get a small boat....” “You know a’ladda guys,” Tony teased her. Frank pulled up the Google Earth view of the estate. It looked like the house was in the center of the property, he told the others; maybe 100 yards from the gate to the house, and another 100 yards from the house to the shore. It was going to be pretty hard to approach the place without being spotted. “Whadif we use a trow-away phone ta call in a terrorist tret at dis address and let da SWAT team open da place up?” Tony asked. “And when they figure out we did it?” Frank replied. “We can’t rescue Justin if we’re in jail,” Karen said softly. “We need more information about the layout and where Justin is,” Frank explained. “We don’t even know if he’s in danger or not.” “I can go in...you know...out of body,” Karen said. “I didn’t want to go without someone else here, to watch me.” Frank closed his eyes to try to sense if there was anything ‘watching’ them. He let out his breath fast, as if he’d been punched in the chest, when he felt the blast of heat. “Yeah,” Karen told him, “that’s why.”

“I wonder...” she said, thinking aloud. “I wonder if I can disguise my spirit, to look like that...that ghost thing I saw?” She’d never thought about it before. But then, she’d never really considered what her soul looked like, either. “The way I understand it,” Leigh told her, “a person’s astral self looks the way the person pictures herself. I don’t see why you couldn’t picture yourself that way.” “But how would she know?” Angie asked. “Not like there’s mirrors there.” Leigh and Karen both looked at Tony. “Would you go over with me?” Karen asked him. “Then you could tell me if it worked, and I’d know before I try to go inside.” “Sure,” Tony agreed. The two settled back into their seats, and Karen closed her eyes and pictured the thing that stood before her on the sidewalk a short time ago. She shuddered, then slipped out of her body. Tony was already ‘there’ when she got there, but the second he saw her, he screamed and disappeared. She’d warned him what the thing looked like, but she guessed that it wasn’t enough to prepare him for the sight of it. At least that meant she must have done a good job with the disguise.

In the steam room, Justin was adjusting to the thick air. It was kind of nice. There were various scents in the steam, like that aromatherapy stuff. He was starting to feel good, kind of floaty, like smoke. He was rising higher and higher into the air, riding on the magic carpet of the music that wafted out of speakers that must have been hidden somewhere in the small room. Hmmm, if he weren’t so comfortable right then, he would have looked around to see where they were. But that would have been too much trouble. He glanced over at Tom. Tom’s eyes were shut, and he had a dreamy look on his face, as if he were imagining all the things he’d do when this was over. He looked...blissful. Justin wondered if he looked like that too. He certainly felt like it. He felt like all the bad stuff in his body was oozing out his pores, leaving him pure and clean.

Karen thought about going over the stone wall and into the house where Justin was. She was keeping her eyes open for creatures that might be there to protect the place, but couldn’t see any. So she was startled when she got to the wall and felt the shock of pain like her whole body being pushed through a cheese grater. Her sight went black for a second as she pushed through the pain, and if she’d been in her physical body, she imagined that she’d have hit the ground when she popped out on the other side of the wall. It took her a second to realize that that must be what a Sphere of Protection felt like to something Unknown. All of a sudden her vision blurred again, and she wondered if her body would cry too, when her spirit cried over ‘here.’ That must be what it was like for Aiden and (Oh God!) for Fr. Andrew, when she’d done Spheres near them. My God! How could she have hurt him like that?! Why hadn’t he told her? She felt awful. And she felt like she somehow deserved to go through that pain herself, for the pain she must have put Fr. Andrew through. Then she pushed all that to the back of her mind. The only thing she could think about now was finding Justin. She had to find him before anything bad happened to him, and she only had a limited amount of time to do it in. She didn’t have time to waste.

Karen flew toward the house, and pulled up short when she saw the warding. She’d never seen anything like it before, but ‘warding’ was the only thing she could think it might be. There were glowing symbols all over the house, protecting every wall, door and window, even the roof. She could feel the power of the symbols keeping her out, and wondered how she could find Justin if she couldn’t get in. Then she couldn’t help but smile to herself. She got as good a look as she could at where she was in relation to the exterior of the house (the living bushes and trees in the landscaping helped her more than the placement of the walls and windows), then she thought herself straight down into the ground. It was much harder to see and move through the dirt than she had expected. Inanimate objects were extremely porous to the spirit, which was what made them so hard to see in the astral, and impossible to manipulate. But dirt, she was starting to realize, was organic. For all the ease she had working with it in her body, it felt thick and sticky to her spirit. She forced herself further and further down, passing through worms and grubs and roots, even startling a mole, until the warding disappeared. When she felt like she was far enough below it, she thought herself forward, under the house. Watching carefully for more of the symbols, she thought herself back up, and popped through into the open space of the house. Hunh, she’d have to remember that if she was ever having anything warded again.

After the thickness of the dirt, the interior walls of the house seemed even harder to see. She looked up and found the warding covering the ceiling above her, and she realized that she must be in the house’s basement. The house itself had been warded, but they’d forgotten to take the basement space into account when it was done. She wouldn’t be able to get into the house, but maybe the layout of the basement could help her. And hopefully it would be enough to let her find Justin. She began working her way through the basement, starting at one outside ‘dirt’ wall and moving until she hit the one opposite. She moved carefully but quickly until she found a space where a number of living beings seemed to be gathered in a group. She couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing, but she knew Justin when she saw him. She got close and studied his face. He had a dreamy look, kind of like people she’d seen who were stoned. She wanted so badly to grab him and shake him and yell “Get out of here!” But she knew it would do her no good. So she settled for a light brush of his cheek as she moved on to figure out exactly where he was in relation to the outside walls of the house. To do that, she went directly to the nearest ‘dirt’ wall, went out of the basement and through the dirt until she felt like she was outside the warding. Then she went straight up, and studied her surroundings to figure out where she was. When she felt like she’d be able to sketch the whole thing out for the others, she flew back to the car, pushing through the ‘cheese grater’ as hard and fast as she could.

Karen’s body gasped and stiffened as her spirit, tense with the pain, slipped back into it. She began shivering, and she felt someone wrap a blanket around her. She heard Leigh say something about her scaring the bejeezus out of Tony, and she struggled to make her mouth work, asking for a pencil and paper. Back in the basement, Justin smiled and shook his head. He wasn’t sure where the feeling had come from, but all of a sudden, as he sat there enjoying the warmth of the steam wrapping around him, he felt his soul touched by the purest love he’d ever felt. It was just like the love he felt for Karen. He sighed. If he hadn’t been so warm and floaty, he might have made the effort to open his eyes and see what caused it. Instead he just let himself float away on that feeling.

JUSTIN’S WAR JOURNAL
Entry 72

---Due to circumstances beyond our control, Justin’s War Journal will not be presented at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience. In its place, for your enjoyment we present these stirring selections from German Opera.

---“Hi, this is Justin and this is my voice mail. Please leave a message and I’ll try to get right back to you. Bye.”

JUSTIN’S WAR JOURNAL
Entry 71 [---typed]

---Oct. 21st, Saturday, almost afternoon. The crew is in the house and I’m in the garage. There’s too much chance I might overhear something that could compromise the big night, so I came out here. Didn’t mean for everybody to end up over here; it just happened that way. I’ve got plenty of stuff out here to work on to keep me busy and I’ve got my laptop, the entertainment system and some DVDs. I usually pop in something to keep me entertained while I’m working but I think I’ll use the time for some more “Angry White Boys Club reference” movies. It only takes a small twist in perspective to look at things from their point of view. There are some movies I am just never going to be able to watch again after this is all over.

Tony called when he got back in town, about ten this morning. Kind of invited himself over for breakfast. More like lunch since he said he’d pick up Coney dogs and beer on his way over. Considering he was talking Italian when he first called, I guess he’s gotta still be on Rome time. He said he didn’t find anything in the Libraries that quite fit with the case we’re working on. On the plus side, that at least tells us this Thing probably isn’t a demon. Doesn’t narrow the field too much but it’s still something.

Reg isn’t here; he had to leave last night. The way I hear it his sister called, sounded hysterical. She didn’t completely make sense but it sounded like she said that she had seen her husband. All the evidence they’ve found out there pretty much says he did it. The cops believe it so why shouldn’t she? Yeah, that would probably freak out anybody who’d gone through what she has. Reg jumped on a plane soon as he could.

Leigh showed up not long after Tony did. With all the sourdough bread she was toting along with her, she must not have been up pretty darn early; probably nightmares again. Don’t think they’re like Frank’s dreams yet. That girl has got some hardcore nervous energy going on or something. I mean, who makes their own ketchup? It’s good and all, I mean real good, but come on. Great bread though.

I don’t know who but somebody called Frank and Terry and Angie to come by and get bread too. I hung out for a while once everybody got here. Tony was telling us about his research trip and then got kinda serious. He said he had a bad feeling that I was going to die if I kept “associating” with Tom’s group. I told him that I’m not associating with the redneck asswipes, I’m infiltrating their ranks. (Yep, Double O Wrench Monkey, that’s me.) And I knew the possibility of death was on the table from the get go. But if I’ve got to die to keep a bunch more kids from getting burned to death, then that’s what’s got to be. I mean, I don’t WANT to die. Shit, that’s never a soldier’s goal; it’s just accepted that sometimes it’s a side effect of the job. Course, after I said it, I wished I hadn’t because it upset Karen. Again. Damn it.

She doesn’t need to hear that shit. I know she’s holding stuff in as much as I am but she keeps trying to make me feel better. All this garbage rolling around in my head is giving me an almost constant low grade headache and I know I’m being crabby but I can’t help it. The only time I feel better is with Karen and I’m making her life miserable. She keeps reaching out to me to help and I keep on holding back. I wish there’d been some other way to do this. Good thing nobody’s out here right now. What could I say? That I’m sobbing like a baby because I’m practicing to be a son-of-a-bitch redneck bastard? That I can’t let her totally inside the walls I’ve been building inside because I feel like they’re garbage has made me dirty inside and I want to keep her clean? Man, I understand why cops don’t keep their guys deep undercover for too long. Trying to be a person that you’re not will completely fuck your head up. One thing that keeps me going is that I plan to really make it up to her when this case is over. Please God, at least let me make it through this so I can make this right. I love her. I don’t want to be the cause of her pain. Damn, I can barely see the screen. More later.

---Oh man I feel better. I haven’t been on a haunted hayride since Marie was old enough to go by herself. I didn’t want to go when everybody started suggesting it. Mostly I always remembered getting hay in places hay doesn’t need to be and I didn’t feel like doing that again. But Karen felt like going with the rest of the crew so we did. We spent the better part of the day doing silly Halloween stuff and I feel better for it. And nothing happened. I married a smart lady. Now I’m going to shove all the bad things into the closet in my head for a while, crawl into bed with her and feel like a man for a while. More later.

---Oct. 25th, Wednesday. Other than the garbage research movies I’ve been watching, it’s been more or less quiet. Personal note: NEVER voluntarily watch “Casualties of War” ever again. I understand it’s something that really happened and somebody felt it was a story that needed to be told. I get that. But on another level, I can’t help but think the Angry White Boys Club would be cheering and whooping it up during this movie. Like I said before, I don’t like getting my head in that point of view, but I’d just about bet those fucked up rednecks would see this as almost an instructional video. Sick fuckers. I can’t wait til this case is over.

I know the rest of the crew is out there doing stuff I don’t know about and I’m fine with keeping it that way. The less I know the less chance I can let it slip or somebody can get it out of me. About the only things the guys have been keeping me up on are Agent Stevens and the watch list. Pretty much every single case Stevens has ever been assigned to has been a career builder type case. His teams always have the best of the best and he always comes out smelling like roses. He’s too perfect and somebody should have noticed. As for the watch list: I think Reg is making some peoples’ lives interesting. If there’s a big wig in the auto industry then there’s a good chance their name is on that list now. I wonder how that’s all going to shake out. Have to wait and see.

About the only other thing is that Agent Stevens got a pretty good job reference. As far as the information available goes, Stevens got a recommendation from a guy by the name of George Foresman. He’s the Secretary for Preparedness or something like that. He’s got a reputation for being one of those “man behind the man” guys. He was appointed by Bush in 2005. I could be wrong but I think I just might have caught something hinky here. Foresman was appointed to DHS in 2005 but Stevens’ initials are on watch list flags going back to 2001? How did that happen? Guess I’ll leave that to smarter brains to figure out. I’ve got cars to fix and roses to buy. Hope Karen likes them. Six more days til D-Day. More later.

---Oct. 27th, Friday, evening. Odd phone call from Frank to Karen. She hung up and then called Tony. Sounded like she was telling Tony that killing people just because they’re in the way wasn’t a good idea and something about not giving paranoid types reason to be paranoid. Just a weird ass conversation. I wonder if it would have made any more sense if I’d heard both sides? Man, there are days I understand why “may you live an interesting life” is a Chinese curse. But I put the phone call out of my head. Cuddling with Karen and watching a movie just for fun was making me feel human; like a man. I didn’t want to queer that by asking questions. She makes me a better person. Hope I live through this crap so I can prove it to her. Four more days to D-Day. Later.

Once Frank was back from getting Jared safely on his way, he tackled the other projects he had on his plate. The two men had left Friday morning, and they’d traded off the driving straight through to Toronto. When Jared had gotten through security, Frank turned around and drove straight back to Detroit, with only a brief stop to grab some fast food and use a restroom. When he got back about 6pm that evening, he first finished creating the false American ID for Leigh. He’d already made up false IDs for everyone when he was working on one for Jared. But it had occurred to Leigh that she should have an American one too, just in case, and she mentioned it to Frank while the others finished saying goodbye to Jared. After he finished the ID, he called to meet Angie and Reg to get the surveillance cameras set up around the main yard of the property where the meetings of the Angry White Men’s club were held. He wanted a clear idea of how often people were at the place, who and how many came and went, how sensitive their motion sensors were, anything that would give him an edge when he went in to rig the place. Reg had offered to help with that, and had gotten as far as assembling a box full of equipment for the job. He’d even included the ‘spy drones,’ so Angie could fly them around and get an up-close look at the buildings from above. But just before Frank called, Reg got a hysterical call from his sister. He wasn’t entirely sure if he heard her right, because she was jumping around a lot and not always making sense, but it sounded like she said she thought she saw her missing husband. He let Frank know that he’d have to beg off helping, then called Leigh as he threw his things into his bag, to let her know that he’d be on his way to ‘Frisco as soon as he could get flight clearance. All Leigh wanted was for him to call her as soon as he could, to let her know that he’d gotten there alright and what was going on with Claire and the girls. He promised he would. He dropped the box of equipment at Angie and Aiden’s place on his way to City Airport.

The camera set-up went smoothly, though Angie was disappointed that she couldn’t “play...um...fly recon” with the drones. It wasn’t that Frank didn’t trust her to fly them in the dark. It was that, being dark, she might not be able to spot trouble like motion sensors or low branches until she ran into them, which might leave tell-tale signs that they’d been there, or worse yet, bring the Angry White Men running. And they weren’t entirely silent, either. Neighbors might not pay attention to a .22 firing in the afternoon, but they’d probably notice someone flying an RC plane in the pitch black. On the up-side, that got her home that much faster. Aiden had to go back on-shift at 7am tomorrow morning, and she didn’t want to waste the little bit of time they had left before he disappeared for another 4 days. Frank went home and practically collapsed into bed. He’d been pushing hard for the past few days, to help Jared ‘disappear,’ and he was exhausted. He wasn’t even awake enough when his head hit the pillow to worry that he might have nightmares....

Frank opened his eyes and saw a waxing moon hovering just beyond his reach through the claw-like branches of the trees ahead of him. He could smell wood smoke in the air, and felt the chill of sweat drying on his skin, as if he’d been running hard. He paused, trying to get his bearings. There was something else in the air besides the smell of burning wood. It was like a hum too low-pitched to hear, but he could feel it in his bones. A sense of excitement, expectation. He started walking again, in the same direction he must have already been going. He couldn’t see how far they stretched, but he could sense that he was surrounded by trees. Ahead, he could just make out the glow of a flickering light. As he got closer, he could see figures silhouetted against a good-sized bonfire. They had the rough shape of men, dancing around the leaping flames. He got closer and could feel...no, hear the throbbing of a chant. He searched the lighted area for the source of the sound, so musical, so powerful that he felt drawn toward it. There was a man standing alone on the far side of the fire. At least, Frank thought it was a man. The flames made it hard to focus on his form, but he knew that figure was where the sound came from. He crept closer, felt pulled by the chant to join in the dance. The men, for now he was close enough to know for sure that they were, held flasks in their hands. They waved the flasks as they danced, splashing the liquid inside onto themselves and the others around them. He moved into the light and joined the dance, felt the splash of the liquid on his skin. The smell of the liquid began to drown out the smell of the smoke...kerosene. He felt a prickle of fear which only stoked his excitement. The intensity of the chant increased, though the volume never changed; and as it reached its peak, the men began to throw themselves into the fire. Frank felt himself irresistibly drawn to do the same....

He woke with a start. He looked around and found himself in his own bed, in his own room. His heart was still beating hard, as if he’d only just sat down after dancing, and he could still smell the odors of the kerosene and wood smoke. Only now did he realize that his phone was ringing. That must have been what woke him. He glanced at the clock. 9:30am. Was it Saturday? It must have been or Terry would have come to find him by now. He flipped open the phone. “‘Bout time,” Terry said. “I was wondering if you wanted to do something today.” Terry paused for a second, waiting for a response. Frank was still collecting his thoughts, so when he didn’t answer, Terry continued, “I’m avoiding my laundry. But I’m sure you’ve got something going on....” This time Frank replied, sarcastically, “Yes, with my busy work schedule....” Terry grinned. That wasn’t what she was talking about and he knew it. “Wanna hit a haunted house...or three or four?” “Sure,” Frank said, “I could use a little comic relief.” “Haunted houses are comic relief?” Terry replied. “Well, I suppose considering what you do for fun....” The two bantered back and forth about their shared ‘hobby’ for a few more minutes, until Terry was sure that Frank really was OK. She knew he wouldn’t talk about it over the phone, but she could tell that her call must have woken him from a dream. She was glad once again that she didn’t have his nightmares. “So, pick me up when you’re ready...if you’re OK,” she said. “I’m OK,” Frank replied. “At least, nothing has sucked my soul out like marrow from a bone...yet.” “Well, that’s good,” Terry laughed. Frank told her he’d be by to pick her up about 11am. That’d give him a little time to record his dream....

Tony had spent the past three days deep in the Vatican Library hoping to find something that would help the team defeat whatever was causing people to be burned to ashes back in Michigan. Eighteen hours a day with the same eight guys. He hadn’t gotten to know anyone that well so quickly since the Army. If it weren’t for his visits to various piazzas around Rome, his chance to get out and spend a little time drinking beer and wooing beautiful Italian women, he’d have felt almost like he’d become a monk himself. The deacons and young priests that Fr. Colin had gotten to help him were all nice enough, and they tried their best to help Tony as well as they could. But after 3 solid days of research, the only things Tony could say for sure was that nothing seemed to fit what they were dealing with at home, and it was practically impossible to get the smell of musty old books out of his nose even after blowing it for five minutes straight. His head was stuffed full of strange and amazing facts about demons; but no matter how he mentally juggled the information, he couldn’t get the pieces to fall into place. Late Friday night, practically Saturday morning, as Tony sauntered in from his evening excursion around the city, he asked Fr. Colin, who was having a nightcap in the hotel bar, if he knew of anything else, anything not demonic that might fit the pattern, some new direction for his research. Fr. Colin couldn’t think of anything. And without knowing what he was looking for, it would be impossible to find anything by chance alone in the Library, he told Tony. Tony might never come back out, if he tried to search that way. Since Tony had hit a dead end, and Fr. Colin was finished with the business he had in Rome, the two agreed to take a short nap, then pack up and head back to the airport for the soonest flight they could get home.

Leigh had spent the last few nights on Aiden and Angie’s couch. She was still having nightmares, and though none was as bad as the rape one, she didn’t want to risk having a dream like that again when she was home alone. Until this job was over, she was going to sleep on the couch of whichever of her friends would let her. That was perfectly fine with Angie. Every morning when she and Aiden finally rolled out of bed, there had been fresh bread or pastries or some other fresh-baked delicacy for breakfast, courtesy of Leigh. Angie hadn’t eaten that well since Aiden had started his residency. In fact, she was amazed that they even had whatever Leigh needed for her baking in the kitchen at all. Between Leigh’s natural tendency to be an early riser and her being shocked awake by the climax of her nightmares, she was usually up well before them, unwilling to go back to sleep and looking for something to fill her time. Saturday morning, Oct. 21, was no different. Reg had called her the night before to say that he was going back to check on Claire. He’d been staying at a hotel while he was in town, and though they went out to the clubs a couple times, they’d come to an unspoken agreement that they would be taking their relationship a little more slowly than before.

That was fine with Leigh. She was afraid of what might happen to one or the other of them if things continued the way they had been before. She was mostly afraid for Reg’s safety. It was bad enough that her husband had been seduced by a succubus and killed, then came back for her. But now, every time she and Reg had gotten too close, Reg had gotten hurt soon afterwards. They’d been cuffed together for Leigh’s protection up in the UP, and she’d ended up beating Reg senseless. They’d had sex for the first time, and Reg got his head bashed in by a baseball bat-wielding zombified neighbor. Then she’d joined Reg and Raimon on what became their last night in Cancun and their plane disappeared on their way back to San Francisco. They still didn’t know what had happened to Raimon! So when Leigh woke from another nightmare early Saturday morning, she took out her anxiety on a batch of biscuit dough first, then went to work on the bread dough she’d started the day before. The biscuits were ready just in time for Aiden to have a few before he heading back to Receiving at 6:30am for his next shift. But by the time the bread was finished, Angie still hadn’t rolled out of bed, and Leigh was at a loss for what to do next. It was almost 11am, so surely Justin and Karen would be up. Maybe they’d like some fresh-baked bread....

Justin and Karen were both used to getting up in the morning for work, so though they slept in on the weekends, they were still up relatively early. Karen had been trying hard to not wake Justin if she was up first lately, but that wasn’t often. He’d been getting up earlier than usual since the ‘vet’s meeting,’ and he’d been out of sorts no matter how long he slept, because he wasn’t sleeping well in the first place. Their current ‘case’ was really messing with Justin’s mind, and Karen sorely wished that there was something she could do to make it better. But beyond letting him know that she would always be there for him, no matter what, she wasn’t sure what else to do. He was burdened by the awful stuff he had to listen to and watch and pretend to agree with at the meeting, and he wanted badly to protect her from it. He’d locked it all up in the back of his mind, saving it up to use when he went back there at Halloween, and he refused to let Karen see even the slightest hint of the person, the less-than-a-man, that he had to be there. But when he tried to sleep, it all spilled over into his dreams; and sometimes he had to get up or risk waking Karen. Every morning it was like he wasn’t running on all cylinders, and it took him longer than usual to feel up to facing the world.

Both of them woke shortly after 9am that Saturday morning, Justin from the dreams, Karen from Justin’s tossing and turning. She tried rubbing his back as he laid there debating whether to try to stay in bed any longer, but he was just as tense when he got up to go jogging as he’d been when he woke. He hoped a run in the crisp morning air would help. Karen was fixing some toast when he got back, and he waved off her offer of juice as he trudged upstairs for a shower. The run hadn’t been helping, so he’d cut it short. It was a little before 10 when he came back downstairs, and he was about to poke around in the ‘fridge when his phone rang. “Buongiorno, Justin!” That was about all Justin understood of the stream of Italian that poured into his ear. “Tony. Tony! Are you still in Italy?” Justin asked, interrupting him. The Italian stopped and there was a pause before Tony replied in his own brand of New York English, “Sorry. Nah, I’m back in town.” “So, you want breakfast again?” Justin asked sarcastically. He should’ve known better, but he was still half asleep in spite of the run. “Yeah! Whatta ya makin’?” Tony answered. Justin closed his eyes and rubbed his hand over the damp stubble of his hair. “Whatever you bring,” he told Tony. “Right! How many Coneys you want? Peroni OK?” Tony didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll be dere in a little bit.”

Tony and Fr. Colin’s flight had gotten into Toronto about 5am, and they’d driven straight back to Detroit. It was about 9:45 when Tony dropped Fr. Colin off at St. Lad’s, where he usually stayed when he was in town. Tony was wide awake, since it was about 4pm Rome-time to his body and he’d slept well on the flight back. He was starving; the in-flight breakfast just before they got to Toronto had been barely enough to hold him this long. Plus, he wanted to know if anything new had happened while he was gone. So he’d called Justin for both. Too bad he’d been speaking only Italian for the past few days. He didn’t even realize that was what he was speaking to Justin until Justin stopped him. Justin sounded a little grumpy, but nothing beer and Coneys wouldn’t help, the way Tony figured it. And there was this great little deli that actually carried several imported beers, so he could even get Peroni on the way over there. It was about 11am when he knocked on Justin and Karen’s back door. Justin answered the door and waved him in with a grunt. “Mornin’ ta youse, too,” Tony said as he handed off one of the bags of food to Karen. He set the 6-packs of beer on the kitchen table and, opening a bottle, handed it to Justin before opening another for himself. “Isn’t it a little early for beer?” Justin asked him. “Nah,” Tony said, looking at his watch. “It’s already 6pm!” “That’s Rome time, you mook,” Justin groaned. Tony ignored Justin and began rummaging around in the Coney bags, telling the two what he’d gotten. He knew perfectly well that it was still morning Detroit-time. That was why he’d gotten some ‘breakfast dogs,’ too. Everything plus bacon strips. Mmm, mmm.

The two men took their beers and the bags of Coneys to the family room, and Justin flipped on the TV. He had no intention of drinking the beer that early, though he kept carrying it around to make Tony happy; but Coneys and cartoons were just the thing for a lazy Saturday morning. Too bad cartoons weren’t what they used to be. No more Bugs Bunny. Cartoons now seemed to be half-hour commercials for toys, with the commercial breaks filled with ads from the stores that sold them. Disgusted, Justin finally got up and popped in a DVD of classic Bugs Bunny cartoons. Karen had just put the rest of the beer into the small ‘fridge in the family room, and she was about to dig out a Coney dog when she heard the phone ringing. It was Leigh. “I just took some fresh bread out of the oven,” she told Karen, “and I wondered if you and Justin would like some.” Karen let out a sigh of relief. “We’d love some, Leigh” she answered. “And Tony’s here, too,” she added. “He brought Coneys and beer,” she said, as if that would explain everything to Leigh. “Hey, ‘Z’at Leigh?” Tony called out from the other room. “Tell her dere’s plen’y’a Coneys!” Karen held the phone out from her ear so Leigh could hear what he’d said. “They’re watching cartoons,” Karen told her with another sigh. “I’d love some bread...and some company.” Leigh told her that she’d be over as soon as she stopped by the condo to water her plants. She left a note for Angie under the edge of a towel-covered loaf of the still-cooling bread, saying that she was going over to Justin and Karen’s.

When Leigh went into the condo, she noticed the difference right away. Besides stopping in for clean clothes and things, and to water the plants, she hadn’t been in there much in the past week. Now, the place seemed emptier to her than before. There was a definite chill in the air, and an absence. Nothing that made her think “Unknown,” but it was cold and lonely, and she realized that she didn’t feel Diva there either. She left as soon as the plants were tended to, and got to Justin and Karen’s a little before noon. As soon as Tony heard Leigh come in, he hollered out to offer her beer and Coneys. As she sliced the bread, she told Karen about the empty feeling at the condo and Karen suggested that maybe Diva had left permanently to go with Jared. He could certainly use the comfort right now, even if he never knew where it came from. And who knew? Maybe Diva might be using another of her lives to come back and keep him real company, too. Both the guys took a couple slices of the bread as soon as it was brought into the family room, Tony commenting on how it went perfectly with “cena...ah, I mean dinner.” Justin grumbled that Tony was “still on Rome-time,” and Leigh looked down to see that his watch was literally still set to Rome’s time. She loosened it and slipped it off his wrist, then reset it to the correct local time of a few minutes to noon. When she slipped it back on his wrist, Tony took her hand and kissed the back of it lightly, saying “Grazie, signora,” with a grin and a wink.

Leigh had also brought some fresh butter that she’d gotten at the co-op, and she set that out as Tony opened a beer for her. Leigh tasted it and shrugged. It was alright, but she wondered why Tony was drinking beer when there was perfectly good...well, OK anyway...water to drink. This led to a discussion of the difference between America’s idea of bottled water and Europe’s, where bottled water pretty much implied real mineral water, and where it’s drunk for one’s health, not just because it’s fashionable. She also brought some homemade tomato ketchup, if anyone wanted any, she told them. And she had mushroom ketchup and walnut ketchup at home if they were interested, too. The other three were a little surprised at the idea of other types of ketchup, though it made sense after Leigh explained the history of the sauce Americans knew as ketchup. It was just one of those weird things she’d learned about because of her interest in traditional cooking methods. They were all sitting around, eating Coneys and watching cartoons, when there was a knock at the back door. It was Angie. She found Leigh’s note, and didn’t feel like just sitting around the apartment alone. She was a little upset that there were no Coneys left, but there was fresh bread and butter, and Peroni in the ‘fridge.

That reminded Leigh that she should call Frank and Terry, too. She’d made enough bread for everyone, and she wanted them to get it before it got stale. Frank was a little surprised that Leigh was calling him that morning, and he wasn’t sure what to expect when he answered. So he was even more surprised that it was simply an offer of fresh, homemade bread. Since he had just picked up Terry, he told Leigh he’d get the bread from her later. She told him that she was at Justin and Karen’s, and that Tony was back in town and Reg was gone, and that Angie was over at Justin and Karen’s too. Frank told her with a laugh that she shouldn’t do anything that he wouldn’t, and the two hung up. Frank looked over at Terry. Five of them were together in one place. That couldn’t be good. A moment later, Terry’s phone rang. It was Leigh, asking if she wanted some fresh, homemade bread. Terry told her to just put it with Frank’s loaf and they’d get them both at the same time. Then Terry asked the question that she could tell was on Frank’s mind–what were they up to? Leigh told her that they were just hanging out relaxing. Tony’d gotten back into town and had gone to Justin and Karen’s for a late breakfast of Coneys and beer. When she’d called Karen, Karen was a little desperate for female company to counteract Justin and Tony ‘being guys’ together, so she’d come over with the bread. She’d left a note for Angie, since Aiden had gone back on-shift that morning, and Angie had just joined them too.

The last of the cartoons on the disk had just ended, and Angie was dying to hear what Tony had learned at the Vatican, so she asked him. Tony told her that he thought they weren’t supposed to talk about it in front of Justin. Karen told him that was only if it was about spying on the barn and backing Justin up at the meetings. “Oh, well, in dat case,” Tony said, “basically, I didn’ find shit.” No existing demon fit with what the team was dealing with, he explained. But now his lungs felt like the mattress in that commercial, where it’s doubled in weight from the accumulation of dust mites. And he wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a picture of Dan Brown stuck to the front of a dartboard in one of the offices. Leigh was still trying to talk to Terry and listen to Tony, too, and she asked if that meant he didn’t find anything related to Norse demons either. There was some of the mythology, and speculation about how demons fit into the mythology, but nothing useful to their case. So either they were dealing with an undiscovered type of demon, or it wasn’t a demon. “Oh, yeah,” Tony added, “da Pope says ‘Hi.’ He might be a good German, but he ‘preciates a good clam sauce on his linguine.”

Terry had waited while Leigh was talking to Tony, and now she told Leigh that she and Frank were going to a haunted house up in Swartz Creek that afternoon, and maybe a couple others, too. Tony asked who Leigh was talking to, and when she told him, Tony shouted to Terry, “Hey, can youse guys pick up more Coney dogs on yer way over, if yer comin’? Angie didn’ get any.” Terry asked Leigh to hold on for a second, and she put her phone on ‘mute.’ She knew the critical mass of Envoys at Justin and Karen’s house made Frank nervous. If something was going to happen, he’d want to be there, even if he couldn’t prevent it. She asked if he wanted to stop by there and hear what Tony had learned. Frank stared at her. “If this is MY ‘hobby,’” he asked her, “what is it for you?” Terry thought for a second. “A way to spend time with you,” she answered. Frank smirked. “OK, yeah, it sounded lame to me, too,” Terry said in response to the look. She turned the phone back on and told Leigh that they’d be stopping by shortly, to pick up the bread.

The cartoons were over, and Justin was still feeling out of sorts. When Leigh got off the phone, she mentioned that Frank and Terry were stopping by for their bread and then going to a haunted house or two that afternoon. Angie and Tony had gone over to the entertainment center to find another DVD to put on. Neither one said a word about the box of tapes and DVDs half-hidden in the corner behind it, though they both glanced over at Karen, who pursed her lips and shook her head. They could see that it was full of Justin’s ‘research,’ movies with racist or misogynistic themes, and ‘recruiting’ DVDs sent to him by white supremacist groups who’d gotten his name at the gun show. All of them knew that Justin hated what he had to do to infiltrate Tom’s group, and that he was embarrassed to even have those tapes in the house, no matter how necessary they were to his building a good cover. Tony was about to pick one up, and Angie poked him and shook her head. Justin saw this, and he stood and told them all that he was going out to work on the cars. Leigh asked if he’d take a look at Marcus. Justin grunted that he’d do it only if she’d call it by its proper name. “I never ‘named’ my dick,” he grumbled, “and I’m not calling cars by names either.” Leigh’s jaw dropped, Karen turned bright red, and Angie started laughing and said “Whoa! Too much information, man!” Tony looked at Justin like he’d sprouted a second head. “What? Not even in da Army?” he asked Justin incredulously. Angie and Tony started joking about the propensity that those in the military had for ‘naming’ inanimate objects...and other things. Justin just stood there looking grim. He turned and went to open the back door to go out just as Frank raised his hand to knock on it.

Terry was carrying a bag of Coney dogs, and Justin stepped back to let them in, then led them to the family room. Frank wasn’t sure he wanted to know what Tony and Angie were laughing about, and no one offered to say. Angie practically pounced on the Coney bag, then passed it to Tony and Justin when she’d taken out three and gone for another beer. “So, Tony,” Frank asked, still standing with his coat on, “what kind of demon is it?” “It ain’t,” Tony replied. Frank turned and looked at Terry, who was looking into the bag Leigh had handed her. “Well, THAT was worth the trip,” Frank said to her. “I think it was,” she told him. “I got fresh bread, homemade ketchup, AND beer.” She took a swig of the Peroni in her other hand and smiled at him. “But I still don’ tink Justin oughta go ta dem meetin’s again or he’ll die,” Tony continued. “Udder guys who went to ‘em died, so....” Frank looked at Tony. “Bad argument. Maybe we should all quit driving, too, since people who drive have died in car accidents.” Frank shook his head. He didn’t say a word about the dream he’d had last night, the one that was the answer to his question, ‘What was going to happen at the meeting Justin would be going to on Halloween.’ Terry looked at the others and asked if they wanted to go on the haunted hay ride with her and Frank. It would be starting at 3pm. Frank opened his mouth to say something, then stopped and just hung his head. Great. Now, instead of five of them being in one place far away from him and Terry, all seven of them would be in the same place, out in the open, surrounded by mundanes....

Justin stiffened and set down the Coney dog he was about to bite into. “I hate hay rides,” he grunted. “Well, you can’t work on the cars, or you could die,” Frank told him with mock seriousness. “That’s what Tony says, anyway, if you use the same logic as he is about the meetings.” Justin’s face got grim, and Karen could see the muscles in his jaw tensing. “I knew that going in,” Justin told them blackly. “And it’s something I’m willing to accept.” Karen wanted to scream “BUT I’M NOT!” But she just bit her lip and bent to clean up the empty Coney wrappers and used napkins, trying hard to keep the tears from welling up. It was ‘that time of month,’ and she knew that just about anything would have set her off anyway. But why did they have to talk about THIS. It was bad enough that Justin was grumpy all the time, thinking about the last meeting, dreading the one at Halloween, forcing himself to watch those stupid movies, doubting himself and his own goodness, blocking her out, not letting her help him through it. Karen ripped the bag she was trying to stuff the garbage into, then stormed out to the kitchen to shove the whole arm-full into the garbage can, hanging her head so her hair would hide her tears. Tony, Angie and Leigh thought that all of them going on a hay ride would be a ton of fun. They kept bugging Justin, asking what he had to do that was better and why he didn’t like hay rides--trying to get his mind off the subject of the meetings and on to something totally frivolous.

Karen came back in a minute later, ‘smiling,’ and told them that a haunted hay ride sounded like it might be fun. Justin complained that he always ended up with hay in places where it shouldn’t be, and that none of the others had had a younger sister who thought it was great fun to make sure the hay got to those places. Karen squatted down next to Justin’s chair and looked up at him, rubbing his arm. She was smiling, but he could still see a couple tear-tracks that she’d missed wiping off and the slight redness of her eyelids. “Don’t worry–I’ll protect you!” she said, laughing. He slumped a little. He couldn’t deny her anything. “OK...haunted hay ride it is.” Digging through their closets, Justin and Karen were able to find enough warm clothes for Angie, Leigh and Tony. When Tony started to strap back on his holster, Justin stopped him. “You can’t seriously be planning to take a gun to a hay ride,” Leigh said. “I take it everywhere,” Tony replied. “Don’ you?” “Great. Tony’s going to shoot some kid who’s jumping out from behind a tree in a ghost costume,” Frank groaned. “There’s going to be too many kids there, Tony,” Karen chided him. “I’m not taking one....” “Neither am I,” Leigh agreed. Frank, Terry and Angie didn’t say anything. They were law enforcement and were authorized to carry weapons at all times. But they also had the training to know when and where it was appropriate to use them–and when and where it wasn’t. Tony finally agreed to leave his in the lock-box in Justin’s truck, where Justin would be leaving his too. And none of them even felt a hint of the Unknown at the hay ride or any of the haunted houses they went to that afternoon and evening.

The next week was relatively quiet. They all stayed far away from the barn, and went about their normal business. While Frank waited for the surveillance cameras to give him some idea of a pattern for the schedule of ‘visitors’ to the barn and house, he also continued looking for evidence of Stevens’ ‘fingerprints’ on other cases, and kept an eye on the watch lists. He was using the back-doors that Reg so thoughtfully provided him, and trying to be discreet. But about once a day Frank would find that one of the back-doors would disappear. Good thing Reg created a lot of them. Reg was also busy tempting fate. They’d all gone through the watch lists, and found out who was and wasn’t on them. Gary and Fr. Colin weren’t on the lists at all. CJ, Terry and Anne (she was a surprise) were on the ‘person of interest’ list. And Reg had been downgraded to POI again, too. Aiden, Frank, Tony, Angie, Leigh, Karen and Justin were on the ‘detain and question’ list. The amusing thing, which told them that Reg was still at work on the case even though he was in CA, was that there were a large number of people from the auto industry ‘newly added’ to the ‘detain and question’ list. All the additions were backdated to Oct., 2001, and all had the initials MJS. They included people from all aspects of the industry, but many of them were important enough to make a big stink about it. Even the Chairman of Toyota was now on the list as a ‘suspected terrorist–do not allow into the country.’

Frank found out that Stevens had been on a string of high-profile cases, with teams made up of the ‘best of the best,’ ever since he’d taken his current position. He’d been recommended for it by none other than the First Under Secretary for the Preparedness Directorate, George W. Foresman. Foresman had been appointed to the position by Bush in Oct., 2005, and had been in a similar position reporting to the governor of Virginia prior to that. The man had a history of being one of the ‘voices behind the throne.’ Frank also had the team meet secretly at Kat’s condo, to search for anything that might help either the team or Jared. They managed to find a number of memory sticks stashed around the place, most so heavily encrypted that it would take them a while to open the files. But one was only lightly encrypted and when they opened it, they realized why. The only thing on it was a file with the numbers of off-shore accounts. At the top of the page it said, “For Jared–I knew you wouldn’t plan ahead for yourself, you idiot.” Kat had always been looking out for him. It made Karen laugh and cry at the same time. She’d had a feeling that Kat had made sure Jared would have something if anything ever happened to her.

By Friday, Oct. 27, Frank thought he’d found a pattern of sorts at the barn. Someone came by once a day. Never the same person, and none of them had been at the meeting with Justin. And never at the same time two days in a row. It was about the frequency of someone coming to feed a pet or water plants for a vacationing friend. And once someone had been there for the day, no one else came around until the next day. That would give Frank plenty of time to do what he needed to. Frank contacted all the others except Justin. Justin had skills that Frank would have liked to tap on this ‘mission,’ but Justin himself had asked to be kept out of that part of the job. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t be forced to divulge. Frank could understand that, and respected the fact that Justin could admit that he couldn’t lie. Frank explained what he wanted to do. He wanted Angie with him for sure, to open the lock on the door and help with rigging the place. Tony volunteered to stay outside as a hidden guard/lookout/sniper. Aiden didn’t have to go back on-shift again until Sunday, he told them, but he was more useful as a medic than a spy anyway. If they needed him, he’d be a phone call away. Karen admitted that she felt like she’d only get in the way. She wasn’t sneaky, she couldn’t shoot very well, and she didn’t have any skills that might come in handy, like lock-picking or using high-tech surveillance equipment or knowing something about setting traps. Besides, she still had classes to teach that afternoon, so she’d just continue with her usual Friday routine unless Frank wanted her there for some reason. Leigh wanted to help but she wasn’t sure what else she could add to the team, either. “You drive pretty well, right?” Frank asked her. She did. And Frank wanted someone who could get them out of there in a hurry if they had to all high-tail it back lugging their equipment. So Leigh would be the get-away driver.

Karen and Aiden went back to their days, and the other 3 stuck around with Frank, prepping for the ‘mission.’ They’d head up to the property as soon as Frank knew the daily visitor had left. That would give them the maximum amount of time to do the job. The guy came into view on the cameras about 1pm, and the team headed out to the car. As soon as Frank saw the guy leave again, they hit the road. About halfway there, Frank directed Leigh to pull into the K-Mart up ahead. He ran in alone, and came out a few minutes later with a kite and a ball of string. “To take out a motion sensor,” was all he said. They had studied the place as well as they could over the past couple weeks, and it had appeared that the motion sensors were about all there was for security around the place. But the Angry White Men had managed to get pretty good coverage, and Frank hadn’t been able to find any gaps in the system. The other 3 understood that he planned to run the kite into a sensor to cover it and give him and Angie a way in. None of them were sure just what would happen once the sensor was taken out. At the corner of the dirt road and the main road into Shelby, Leigh pulled over. She got out to ‘check if something was caught under the car,’ and Tony slipped out into the brush beside the road. He had a ‘gilly suit’ with him, and a sniper rifle, and when he was out Leigh got back in and drove on. They all flipped on their comm units, and they could hear the rasp of Tony’s camo against the tree he was climbing. Leigh parked the car where they’d sat during the last meeting, and Frank and Angie gathered their things. As they were about to move closer to the barn, Frank turned and told Leigh with the hint of a grin, “If Tony shoots me, run him over.”

Frank and Angie angled around to the side of the barn where the small ‘pedestrian’ door was. Frank put the kite together, then moved as far out into the clearing as he could without tripping the sensor he was trying to take out. Luckily there was just enough of a breeze that afternoon to lift the kite above the range of the sensors. He maneuvered the kite carefully, and at just the right spot, he dove it sharply into the eaves, getting the string tangled so that the kite completely covered the lense of the sensor. Angie checked her watch–3:30pm. The two moved in, staying low and close together. When they got to the door, Frank tried the handle. It was locked. He stepped aside and motioned Angie forward. She knelt down in front of the door and pulled out her picks, But something was telling her that trouble was coming, and she was trying too hard to work the lock. As she wiggled the pick forward, she felt a sudden minute shift that immediately told her she’d done something wrong. She pulled the tool out and found that the very tip had snapped off and was stuck in the lock. The only sound she made was a hiss of anger. She held the pick up to show Frank, and he asked quietly if she could still pop the lock. “Is there another door?” she asked sarcastically. They all knew that the only other door was the big roll-up that directly faced the house, and they were already committed to this one since there were multiple sensors covering the end of the barn with the roll-up door. Before she could try again, she was going to have to get the tip out.

Without another word, Angie refocused on the lock. It took her a few minutes of poking and jiggling a couple of the smaller picks to get the tip out. But she’d no sooner started over on opening it than she heard Leigh in her ear. “There’s an SUV coming from town at a high rate of speed.” Leigh had been alternately watching Frank and Angie’s progress and scanning the road, and spotted the SUV when it was still a few minutes out. Tony shifted his position to watch the car. “Three men in the front,” he reported. There was a pause, then “Baby Bear to Papa Bear. Should I shoot out the tires?” Frank sighed and shook his head. Who decided to give Tony a comm unit? “No,” Frank told him. He and Angie moved straight back out the way they came, then hid themselves in the woods to watch what happened. As the SUV went by, Tony took note of the license plate number. The car flew up to the barn and slid to a stop in a cloud of gravel dust. 7 men piled out, all in jeans, t-shirts and jackets, and all carrying shotguns. A couple of them had shaved heads, and none of the Envoys recognized any of them from the gun show or the photos taken after the last meeting. The driver directed four of the guys to check the perimeter. Frank and Angie hunkered down tight. Then the driver and the other two circled the barn to the sensor that had been triggered, where they found the kite tangled around it. The driver pointed toward the house, and one of the other two headed over there, swearing the whole way in. He came back out a minute later with a ladder, and set it against the side of the barn and began clearing away the kite. That was done about the same time the patrol came back to the barn. It seemed they’d found nothing out of the ordinary. The driver pointed at three of the men, who immediately took up standard military patrol positions. The other four got back into the SUV and headed back toward Shelby.

As they watched the 3 guards start a patrol around the perimeter of the yard, Angie whispered to Frank, “I’m sorry I screwed up.” “But you did get the pick out, right?” Frank whispered back. Angie nodded. The guards seemed alert, but not paranoid as they circled the yard. Angie pointed at her watch. She’d checked when they pulled in, and their response time had been exactly 17 minutes. The property was about 10 minutes from town. So either there was a delay in the signal reaching them, or it took them seven minutes to gather the response team, or they came from somewhere beyond the town. The Envoys waited, slightly tense, and watched the guards circle again and again. After about an hour, around 5pm, Angie whispered, “I gotta pee.” Frank turned his head and looked at her. “I know what you’re gonna say. It was just a comment,” Angie said. Frank rolled his eyes. “I thought I told you to go before we left,” he said. “I did,” Angie replied. “That’s it. No more coffee before we go on B and Es,” Frank told her with a grin. They all heard the click of one of the throat mikes, and then Tony’s voice, “Mama Bear, mute yer mike. Thanks. Baby Bear out.”

It was 9pm, and well past dark, when the SUV rolled back into the yard. The Envoys watched two men hop out of the car, and the three who’d been there climbed in. A moment later, the SUV rolled away, and the two men began their patrol. Angie motioned to Frank asking if they should leave. Obviously these guys were going to be here a while, and they really didn’t need to stay there on the ground watching them to know exactly what they were going to be doing. Frank motioned that they should start moving back toward the car. When they got back there, they found that Leigh had made some instant coffee for them in the little DC coffee pot that Frank kept in the car for stake-outs. “Well, that was fun,” Frank commented as he sipped the hot coffee. “At least we learned something about their response time,” Leigh replied. “So, what next, boss?” Angie as Frank. “If we shoot bot’ da guards at da same time...” Tony suggested. Frank hung his head. “Oh, and they’ll never notice the dead guards outside the barn. That would never tip them off,” Frank said. “We wouldn’ jus’ leave ‘em dere,” Tony told them. “We can hide ‘em in da woods....” Frank rubbed his forehead and flipped open his phone. Karen was a teacher and, while she might have other problems, she was pretty good at explaining things to people, especially dense people like college students....

Karen was surprised to hear her phone ring at 9:30 that evening, and as she leaned over to the end table to get it, she hoped that it wasn’t one of their friends calling to say that something had gone horribly wrong with the ‘barn storming.’ “Hello?” She answered the phone and her gut tightened when she heard the tone of Frank’s voice. “Karen? Can you call Tony and explain to him why shooting people just because they’re in the way is a bad idea? I’m getting a headache.” Karen almost laughed with relief. “Sure,” she told him. She hung up, then dialed Tony. “Yeah, Leonetti,” Tony answered before looking at the caller ID. “Hey, Karen. Whadda ya want? I’m kinda busy.” “Tony, Frank asked me to talk to you,” Karen told him. “I’m not sure what’s going on, but...it’s probably not a great idea to kill people just because they’re in the way.” “It was only a suggestion,” Tony replied. “It’s the next logical step.” Karen kind of wished that she had some idea of what was going on out there, because the thought that logic might somehow dictate killing people who were in the way was giving her a headache now, too. “Um, maybe,” she told Tony. “But these guys are already paranoid types. I think that dead bodies turning up that they didn’t kill themselves might make things worse.” “Maybe,” Tony agreed. “Listen, I gotta go.” Tony hung up. Justin looked over at Karen and opened his mouth to ask what that was about, then thought better of it. “You don’t want to know, and I’m not really sure myself,” Karen told him, then snuggled back under his arm and against his side.

It was about 2am, Saturday morning when the SUV returned. This time, one man got out and the other two got in before the car drove away again. So, they were concerned enough to watch the place, but they weren’t going to waste manpower unnecessarily. Leigh and Angie took turns dozing off. They weren’t sure what Tony was doing out there, but they hoped he didn’t fall asleep and fall out of the tree he was in. Frank spent the next few hours poring over a sketch Justin had made of the layout of the interior of the barn. The big roll-up door was on the short end that faced the house. At the other short end, there was a loft over the pedestrian door, which had double doors like an airlock. All along the long back wall (if you were standing outside facing the front of the house), the inside was sectioned off into rooms, like they’d enclosed what had once been a row of stalls. The way he figured it, he’d need to work on the short side right next to the pedestrian door for Plan B. It was the only place where he might be able to set up a fiber-optic camera that could see most of the interior without being too noticeable. He’d have loved to set it up in the loft; but he had no way of getting up there to work on the wall. As the sky began to lighten, Frank told the others what he was planning. The Angry White Men had too short a response time for them to try blocking a sensor again. Besides which, having a sensor tripped a second time in less than 24 hours would not be helpful. So he was going to slow-crawl in alone, to avoid setting off the sensors; drill a tiny hole right at ground-level and insert a fiber-optic camera; and bury a transmitter so they could receive the images remotely.

The SUV returned for the last time about 7:15am, to pick up the remaining guard. The team waited for a half hour, scanning in every direction to make sure that no one else was watching the place. Then Frank put on a ‘gilly suit,’ slipped the few tools he’d need into his pockets, and made his way to the edge of the yard. From there, he got on his belly and began the arduous task of crawling out to the barn. He had plenty of time to study the ground, and realized that it wasn’t just cleared, it had been burned clean. He could also tell that it was going to cause him some trouble when he buried the transmitter, because it had been compressed to hardpan over years of use. By 8:30, Frank was concentrating on drilling a tiny hole in the side of the barn. Now he learned something else new. The barn had blocked signals in and out because it was essentially a giant Faraday cage. From the inside and outside, it looked like any other old barn, with weathered wood siding. But as he drilled, he found that the walls were made of several distinct parts. On the outside was wood siding, which covered a layer of steel sheeting. This was hung on the original wood framing, which created a roughly 2-inch gap. Then he hit another layer of steel sheeting before cutting through a final layer of wood on the inside of the barn. At some point, somebody had totally stripped this barn down to its frame, then re-covered it with steel before disguising it again with the original siding.

After cleaning up all the tiny corkscrews of wood and steel from the hole, he slipped the camera in, then fiddled with the transmitter. He checked the micro-receiver he’d brought along, then fiddled some more. He couldn’t see anything with the camera, but he wasn’t getting static either. So there must not have been any lights on inside the barn, and what he was getting was the pitch black of the inside. When he was pretty sure he had a good signal, he started chipping through the hardpan. He got a small hole started, then used the same auger he had used on the barn to drill out a hole in the ground. When the transmitter was buried, he had to re-pack the dirt around it so that it looked and felt like all the rest of the ground. When he was finally done, he laid back down on his belly and slowly crawled back out. It was almost 9:30am by the time he got back to the car, cold and stiff from all the time spent lying on the ground. “Well, that was exciting,” he said almost cheerfully, as he rubbed his knees and elbows while Leigh poured him some fresh coffee. “You have a weird definition of exciting,” Angie said, not even looking up from the laptop perched on her knees. “But, I got a signal! Oh...wait...are you sure...” Angie hesitated. “It’s all black...but...I’m not getting any static.” She wasn’t sure whether to be glad that Frank had made it in and out without setting off the sensors, or disappointed that the camera wasn’t working. “Of course it’s black,” Frank told her. “Because the lights are out,” Tony piped in from his perch somewhere in the woods. Angie would have smacked herself on the forehead, but she was busy balancing the laptop. “Oh, you can come in now, Tony,” Frank told him, almost as an afterthought. A few minutes later, Tony startled them by popping up out of the brush beside the car. He slipped out of his ‘gilly suit’ and put it and the rifle in the trunk. Angie handed him a cup of coffee as Leigh pulled out onto the road and headed for home.