Winds of Change Page 21

“You’re making a big mistake,” I said desperately. “You need to listen to me — ”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, cutting me off without a blink. “Or at least, while at some point in the near future I would like to hear everything about your association with Jake Wilcox, now isn’t the time.”

  I wondered what interrogation methods he’d use to pry that information out of me. Nothing pleasant, I was sure.

  If the universe had been at all kind, that would’ve been the time for Connor and Angela to show up, swooping in to Jake’s and my rescue. Unfortunately, the universe wasn’t that friendly. Jake had mentioned that Connor didn’t have the ability that some primas did when it came to detecting interlopers in their territory, and it appeared that the rest of the Wilcoxes were asleep at the switch as well.

  Or maybe it didn’t matter what any of us did, because now Randall Lenz had a supercharged gift of luck in his arsenal, thwarting all our efforts. He wanted me back in his goddamn program, and it appeared he would have me…with the side bonus of bringing Jake along for the ride.

  Did he suspect that Jake possessed special abilities as well?

  I had the uneasy feeling I would find out soon enough.

  Two big men entered the room, coming in from the kitchen, where I assumed they’d entered through the back door. A nod from Lenz, and they went and picked up Jake’s unconscious form, carrying him off like a side of beef. I hated to see him like that, face slack, arms hanging limply at his sides, even though I did my best to tell myself he would be okay, that although it wasn’t fun to wake up from Randall Lenz’s knock-out drug, it was certainly survivable.

  “Come along,” he said. He hadn’t gestured with the tranquilizer gun; he didn’t need to.

  Hating myself for not possessing the requisite skills to take all of them out — or at least to put up some sort of bat signal to let Connor and Angela know we were in trouble — I followed the two men through the kitchen, Agent Lenz right at my heels. We headed out the back door and followed the path to the driveway, where a white van with the logo of a plumbing company painted on the side was parked.

  The two men opened the back doors and dumped Jake in the cargo area, then went up front to get in the driver and passenger seats. Agent Lenz and I climbed into the back seats and put on our safety belts. The whole time, he kept the gun trained on me, although the fight had pretty much gone out of me by that point. Calling down the lightning to strike a van that had both Jake and me inside was out of the question, and I didn’t have anything else in my arsenal of tricks that seemed like a viable option right then.

  Instead, I sat quietly in my seat and did my best to avoid making eye contact with Randall Lenz. The van didn’t have any windows in the rear seat area, so I couldn’t see what was going on in the world outside. About ten minutes after they’d backed out of the driveway of Jake’s house, we came to a stop.

  Lenz looked over at me, eyes cool, assessing, as if he was reading my expression to see whether I planned to make a break for it as soon as the doors opened. “We’re going to get out and walk over to an airplane,” he said. “Don’t try anything.”

  I nodded. Maybe if I’d been a real superhero instead of a witch who possessed only one dubious skill, then I could have figured out a way to incapacitate all three men, grab Jake and throw him over my shoulder, and get the hell out of there.

  Unfortunately, witches weren’t superheroes…or at least, this one sure as hell wasn’t. I waited while Lenz opened the door, and tried not to blink as bright sunshine flooded in. Just outside was a low building I guessed must be a hangar of some sort, and a bit beyond it was a sleek private jet, probably big enough to seat as many as twenty people, although I’d be the first to admit that what I knew about private jets could fit in a thimble.

  They’d parked the van so the bulk of the jet blocked it from the view of any casual observers, and the hangar did a pretty good job of hiding both vehicles. I didn’t know anything about the airport in Flagstaff, but I guessed it probably wasn’t all that large, and that there wasn’t much chance of anyone glancing our way to see the two burly men pick up a still-unconscious Jake from the back of the van and bundle him up a set of rolling stairs into the plane. At a nod from Agent Lenz, I followed, and climbed inside in enough time to see them lay Jake down across a bank of seats that looked more like a sofa than anything else. It was fancy in there, with a flat-screen TV mounted to one wall and thick carpet underfoot.

  “Up here,” Lenz said, nodding toward an unoccupied row of seats that faced a gleaming coffee table mounted to the floor.

  I opened my mouth to protest — I wanted to be next to Jake, even if I knew he wasn’t in any shape to offer any help at the moment — but then shut it when I realized that Agent Lenz certainly wasn’t going to appreciate such a request. Instead, I sat down at the far end of the sectional-style seat he’d indicated and buckled myself in.

  He did the same, and a few minutes later, we were nose up and heading eastward, away from the sun. How long did a flight to the East Coast take, anyway? I had no idea, since I’d never been on a plane in my life, or even planned a plane trip. Still, I guess it must be several hours at the very least, and grimaced inwardly. On top of my worry about Jake and what exactly Randall Lenz had planned for the two of us, I couldn’t think of anything more awkward than being stuck in a private jet with him for hours and hours.

  Now that he’d accomplished his goal of getting me back in his clutches, he didn’t seem too concerned about what I was doing. He sat down at the other end of the sectional-style seat I occupied, opened a laptop, and began typing quickly. The screen was angled in such a way that I couldn’t see what he was writing, and I doubted he would appreciate it if I leaned over and tried to take a look.

  Instead, I made myself settle against the back of the seat and force in a breath, doing my best to remain calm. Inwardly, I was annoyed with the seating setup, which had my back up against the window so I couldn’t see the landscape passing by far below us, but I wouldn’t give Randall Lenz the satisfaction of seeing me wriggle around in my seat like some antsy kid on a long road trip.

  I sat there, and wondered what the hell I was supposed to do next.

  Nearly five hours later, we landed at a small airfield that I assumed must be located close by the SED facility. Jake was still out cold; the two men who’d accompanied us — neither of whom had said a single word to me — carried him down the stairs to a waiting ambulance, which whisked him away as I watched in horror.

  “I thought you said he would be okay,” I said, rounding on Agent Lenz, who regarded me with cool blue eyes.

  “He’s fine,” he replied, unperturbed. “He’s being taken to the facility so the medical doctor on staff can take a look at him. Afterward, he’ll be placed in a suite similar to yours. Speaking of which, that’s where you’ll be going now.”

  Those reassurances failed to comfort me. But since it seemed better to cooperate for the moment — at least Jake and I were going to more or less the same place, which meant I’d have a better chance of busting him out later — I gave a small nod and then followed Lenz to a black Suburban parked a few yards away on the tarmac. The same man who’d flown the jet got behind the wheel, while once again Lenz and I rode in the back seat.

  At least I could see out the windows, although by that hour, the sun had nearly set and I was only able to make out what looked like a semi-industrial area dotted by warehouses and office parks. A few minutes later, we passed through a gate in a chain-link fence and followed a narrow road that led to the semi-familiar bulk of the building that housed the SED.

  No one was around; I didn’t know whether that was because of the hour or simply because Randall Lenz wanted to make sure there weren’t any observers as he led me out of the Suburban and inside the building to a bank of elevators. We rode down a number of floors, and emerged in a hallway that also looked familiar.

  “Here you are,” he said as he stopped in front of one of the doors and paused
to let the biometric locking mechanism scan his retina. “I’ll have some food sent to you shortly — you must be hungry.”

  Food was the last thing on my mind in that particular moment. My gaze slid past him to take in the blandly attractive interior of the suite where I’d stayed only a few short days earlier. Just seeing it once more was enough to make panic rise in me.

  I couldn’t get trapped in there again. I just couldn’t.

  Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed Randall Lenz by the arm, his muscles like granite under my desperate fingertips. “No, wait,” I gasped. “You have to listen to me!”

  A single jerk, and his arm slid from my grasp. “Ms. Grant, you are perfectly safe here,” he said. “None of this should be a surprise to you.”

  “No, listen!” I said to him, my voice shrill in my ears. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “I assure you, I do,” he replied. “You are distraught. You need to go in and sit down, and collect yourself.”

  “I’m not distraught!” I shot back. “You — you’re wrong about all of this! Wrong about the people you’ve trapped here, wrong about me…wrong about yourself!”

  That last comment made him lift an eyebrow. “And what exactly am I wrong about, Ms. Grant?”

  “You think we’re all freaks that you can poke and prod and use as you like, but this whole time, you’ve been just the same as the rest of us!”

  A frown pulled at his brows for just a moment, but then his expression relaxed slightly, and I thought I detected a faint lift at the corner of his thin lips. “Oh, no…I don’t have any special powers. I’m just an ordinary man.”

  I’d known he would probably respond that way, so his words didn’t deter me. Besides, I’d already set myself on this course, and now I needed to finish what I’d started. Maybe this wasn’t the confrontation we’d envisioned when Jake and I cooked up our plan to go directly to Randall Lenz and tell him who and what he truly was, but I’d do my best to convince him of the truth.

  “No, you’re not,” I said. I tried to speak calmly, because I could tell he thought I was on the brink of hysteria. The only way to get through to him was to be as cold and measured as he was. “It took us a while to figure it out, because your gift is a more subtle one. But you’re a warlock, just like I’m a witch. That’s where our powers come from. We were born to long lines of witches and warlocks, and carry those powers in our blood.”

  For the longest moment, he stared at me, expression so blank that I couldn’t begin to guess what might be going through his mind. Then he laughed, a derisive chuckle that might as well have been fingernails down a chalkboard. “‘Witches’?” he repeated, his lip curling. “‘Warlocks’? That’s your story?”

  “It’s not a story,” I said. “It’s the truth.”

  His jaw tightened. “The government doesn’t fund research on witches and warlocks, Ms. Grant.”

  “That’s because none of you know what you’re really dealing with,” I told him. “You think our powers are something that can be measured and quantified, but they can’t, not really.” He didn’t respond, only continued to stare down at me with eyes that were like chips of glacier ice. His expression was positively forbidding, but since he remained silent, I took that as license to go on. “Did you ever figure out why everyone’s powers first emerged at around the same time? Everyone in your program told you they were around ten or eleven, right?”

  Not even a blink. “Dr. Richards and her team have theorized that the connection is hormonal in nature. Since we don’t have any test subjects that age, we have yet to prove that theory.”

  Maybe it was hormonal…I hadn’t asked Jake about that, and I figured there was a good chance he didn’t know, either. I supposed it made sense — children’s bodies started waking up around then, preparing for their shift into puberty, and so I thought it entirely possible that another shift occurred at the same time, rousing the strange abilities that had come to them from their witch and warlock parents.

  “That’s when all witches and warlocks have their powers start to show,” I said. “The same way it’s been happening for hundreds or even thousands of years. And the reason why everyone in your program here was either adopted or brought up in the foster care system is that one of their biological parents was either a witch or a warlock, and for whatever reason, they decided they weren’t in a position to raise a child on their own. That’s why no one here — not Ethan or Natalie or Matthew or anyone else — knows anything about their witch blood. They were left to fend on their own.”

  Those words seemed to strike a nerve; for the first time, I saw a flicker in Randall Lenz’s cold eyes. What that flicker precisely meant, I wasn’t sure, but did I dare hope that I might be getting through to him?

  All hope died with his next words, though.

  “That’s quite a fairy tale you’ve spun for yourself, Ms. Grant,” he said. “I suppose I can understand why you would want to believe you’re connected to a greater world of witches and warlocks, rather than believe you’re simply someone whose genetic makeup isn’t quite the same as everyone else’s.”

  “It’s not a fairy tale,” I retorted.

  “Of course not.” One brow lifted slightly as he added, “So, of your parents, who was the one with the witch blood? Your mother, or Jackson Wilcox?”

  My eyes flared wide with shock, and inwardly I cursed myself for reacting in such an obvious way. But the damage was done.

  “Yes,” Lenz said, “I was able to do a bit more digging recently. It wasn’t so difficult to piece together, once I realized that your mother spent a few days in Flagstaff twenty-five years ago. That was where she met Jackson Wilcox, wasn’t it?”

  I could try to deny it, could tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about. Unfortunately, Randall Lenz would ignore my protests. He already had the data in hand. How he’d guessed, I didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter so much.

  What mattered was what he would do with that knowledge.

  “Yes,” I said, and left it at that. He might have been able to dig up the truth, but that didn’t mean I intended to volunteer all the details of my mother’s fling with the Wilcox primus.

  “I assume you believe Jackson Wilcox was a warlock,” Lenz went on. “His son does appear to possess some remarkable talents. I’d like to have him in the program here, along with his wife.”

  Good luck with that, I thought. I still didn’t truly understand the limits of my brother’s powers — especially when he was working with Angela — but I’d seen enough to guess that Randall Lenz would find himself in a world of hurt if he ever tried to confront them directly.

  “Why is it so hard for you to believe our gifts might be magical?” I asked then. “Is it any crazier than thinking some weird twist of genetics is responsible for all this? What about your own talent?”

  The corners of his mouth quirked slightly. “Yes, this ‘talent’ you apparently think I possess. What exactly is it? Because I can assure you that I’ve never experienced anything that might lead me to believe I have gifts remotely like yours, or those of anyone else in the program.”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said. “Like I said, yours is a subtle talent. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t know it even existed.”

  “Then enlighten me.”

  “It’s luck,” I told him, then hurried on, knowing how crazy that must have sounded. “Having things work out easily for you, having things go right even when maybe they shouldn’t. Up until recently, it probably would have been even more subtle, just because we think that getting struck by lightning woke it up, made it a lot more powerful than it had been before that point.”

  Through this recitation, he stood there, unmoving, appearing to absorb what I’d said. His expression never changed, though, and so I had no idea what he thought of such an explanation.

  But then he smiled, a cold, wintry smile that never reached his eyes. “At least you admit now that you used your power to attack me.”
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  “I didn’t have any other choice,” I said. “I didn’t want to.”

  “Very noble of you. And so your bolt of lightning somehow awakened a gift that up until that moment had been quite weak, and suddenly made me prone to good luck. If that’s the case, I suppose I should go buy a lottery ticket.”

  Anger boiled in me at his flip tone, but I only shot him a sunny smile and said, “Maybe you should. I think you might be surprised.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” he replied. “In the meantime, you can remain here. I have other matters to attend to.”

  “Like Jake?” I asked, doing my best to keep the worry from my voice. As much as I tried to tell myself that he would be fine, that I’d survived getting dosed with that same tranquilizer and come out of it with not much more than a headache, I still hated to think of him waking up alone in a room somewhere else in this facility, not knowing where he was or what had happened to me.

  “Dr. Richards’ team is taking care of your friend,” Lenz said, not really answering my question. “As for the rest…well, that’s something else I’ll have to take into consideration. Go on.”

  He inclined his head toward the suite where he wanted me to stay. I hated the idea of going in there, since doing so felt like an admission of defeat. Unfortunately, I knew I didn’t have much choice. Even if I dug in my heels, he’d probably just pick me up and carry me inside. After feeling the hard, taut muscle in his arms, I knew he was fully capable of such a feat.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I said desperately, but he only shook his head.

  “I don’t think so. Have a good evening, Ms. Grant.”

  Any further protests would only serve to irritate him that much more. Right then, I thought it was probably better to accept my losses and try to regroup later.

  “I doubt it,” I said tartly, but I went inside the suite anyway.

  Of course, Randall Lenz didn’t respond. He closed the door, leaving me alone in the place I’d desperately hoped I would never have to see again.