March Forth (The Woodford Chronicles Book 1) (7 page)

She stood and faced him with fire in her eyes.  “You’re a complete bastard.”

Steven made the fatal mistake of uttering a chuckle; he actually said, “Ha!”  It was a surprised reaction, but Deanna did not take it that way.

“You kidnapped me, you absolute prick,” she snarled. 

Steven also stood up, looking down at her, and she noticed that his eyes were a colder, paler blue than she had previously thought.

“I brought you here to help you as much as anyone else,” he said quietly but icily.  “I would advise you to watch your tone.”

“Would you?  I guess it’s lucky for me I don’t take advice from kidnappers.”

“You’re being ridiculous.  I did not kidnap you.  We are facing a confusing situation – we are BOTH facing a confusing situation – and I brought you here so we can get to the bottom of it.  I’m sorry if you feel inconvenienced, but you have to think of the greater good, here.”

“Inconvenienced?  You just whisked me away from my home and anything that is familiar to me, to some dark, gloomy place I’ve never been, and I don’t even know where I am!  That’s more than just an ‘inconvenience.’  You essentially just stole my freedom, and I have no idea what your intentions are.”

Steven’s tone softened slightly, though his facial expression remained hostile.  “I didn’t mean to scare you.  You will not be harmed while you are here.  But we NEED to find out why all of the shielding that makes me undetectable to literally everyone else has no effect on you.”

“But….” Deanna trailed off, looking away for a moment.  “I don’t want to be trapped like some kind of a lab rat.”

A new voice, behind her, said, “I assure you, young lady, you are neither trapped nor shall you be treated like any kind of a rat.”

She whirled around, surprised.  A short, stocky man with grey hair and wire rimmed glasses stood behind her.  Like Steven, he wore all black.  She did not know when he had entered the room or how much of the conversation he had heard; she assumed he had arrived by the same magical means that Steven had used to bring her here.  (This assumption would turn out to be correct.)

“Who are you?”

The man smiled convivially and offered his hand, which Deanna shook awkwardly as he introduced himself. “They call me General Larsen, around here, but you can call me Benjamin.  Drisbane tells me you are completely immune to his shields and that is fascinating to me, absolutely fascinating.  I really can’t tell you how intrigued I am by you.”

“Drisbane?” Deanna asked bemusedly.

“Me.  Steven Drisbane,” Steven said, while Larsen said, “Oh, perhaps he didn’t introduce himself properly.  The young man who brought you here is Ensign Steven Drisbane.”  The general stopped speaking and peered around the room as if looking for something.  “Are you here, Drisbane?”

“Oh, right,” Steven said, pulling out his phone-like device and tapping away at the screen.  A moment or two later, the General’s gaze went directly to him for the first time and the older man smiled again.

“It’s good to see you, Ensign.”

“It’s good to be seen, sir.”

Deanna looked back and forth between the two men.  “You really didn’t know he was there?” she asked Larsen.

“I’m afraid not, my dear.  Your ability to see through the Wand’s shielding abilities truly is unique.”

“The Wand?”

“This,” Steven said, holding up his not-phone.

“Not exactly how one pictures a magic wand,” Deanna murmured.  She blinked and shook her head, trying to clear away some of her confusion.  “You’re an ensign?” she addressed Steven.  “Like on Star Trek?”

He gave her that half smile again, an expression she was beginning to loathe.  He looked so arrogant and smug.  “More like in the Navy,” he said.

“You guys are in the Navy?”

“No,” Larsen answered smoothly.  “Now tell me, my dear, what is your name?”

Though she was beginning to feel as if she had fallen down the rabbit hole, Deanna answered calmly and cordially.  “I’m Deanna.  Deanna Flanagan.  May I ask why I am here, exactly?”

“Of course you may, Ms. Flanagan, and may I say that is a lovely name,” Larsen answered, his eyes twinkling.  “Your ability to see through our shields is simply extraordinary, and we would like to run some tests to try and find the cause of your ability.”

“What kind of tests?”

“Nothing too invasive, I assure you.  Mostly, we will just wave some devices at you and look at our computers.”

Deanna thought for a moment before posing her next question.  “Without putting too fine a point on it, what’s in it for me?  What if I just want to go home? Will you let me go?”

Larsen offered a wide, magnanimous smile.  “My dear, I would imagine you are as eager to find the cause of your abilities as we are!  Drisbane has shared with me that you have long believed in magic.  Imagine if you have some access to it!  Think of how much you can learn from us.”

Noting that he had quite artfully avoided answering her questions, Deanna tried another line of inquiry.  “I don’t know what I can learn from you because I don’t know anything about you.  What kind of a place is this?  Who do you two work for?  What do you do, exactly?”

“We’re the good guys,” Steven said quietly.  She glanced at him and saw a kind of earnest pride shining through his eyes.

“Well said, Drisbane.  Ms. Flanagan, there is no need to be afraid,” Larsen said in a gentle tone.  “We are part of an organization exclusively dedicated to the study and use of magic.  We use it to protect our great nation and generally improve the world at large.  It is our mission to eliminate needless suffering of any kind, and we hope to do that through developing a greater understanding of and control over the energy you know as magic.”

“I often think of us as students,” Steven interjected.

“Precisely, Ensign.  We are students of magic, students of the mysteries of the universe, and you, Ms. Flanagan, seem to be one of those mysteries.”

Deanna mulled this over for a moment.  She had a strong suspicion that the men would not allow her to leave.  A sense of unease and fear slithered around in her belly.  However, she was definitely curious to learn more about magic.  The range of emotions she was experiencing was vast and overwhelming.

“After… after you run these tests on me,” she stammered, “will you… will I be allowed to go home?”

“I give you my word, Ms. Flanagan, that we will not keep you here a moment longer than necessary.”

She nodded, though his statement made her feel no more at ease.  She didn’t really feel like she had a choice, though, so she decided to make the best of it.  The sooner they did whatever they needed to do, the sooner she could go home.

Looking up at the General, she said, “I guess…. I guess we should get started.”

Steven

              Steven was frustrated.

              For several hours, he, Larsen, Eric, and John had been scanning Deanna with every device in their arsenal.  They examined every molecule of her being, and found no abnormalities. The energy signature she emitted was similarly unremarkable.  Larsen had interviewed her endlessly, but could find no patterns or even unexplained series of coincidences in her life which he felt could lead to understanding her immunity to magical shields.  Every attempt they made to figure out what made Deanna unique lead to the same conclusion: she was a normal, average human being.

              Steven was tired, hungry, and generally frustrated by the lack of progress they had made.  Every second he spent unsuccessfully trying to solve the puzzle of Deanna was a second he could be spending tracking Carver.  The fact that his search for Carver had also been so far unsuccessful made today’s lack of progress that much more vexing; Steven was beginning to feel as if nothing were working for him.

              He stood, pushing his chair back, and everyone looked at him.  “General,” he addressed Larsen, “May I have a word with you?”

              “Of course, Drisbane,” Larsen replied, sounding tired.  “I could use a break, anyway.  Let’s go grab a cup of coffee.”

              The two men left the room as Eric and John decided to re-scan Deanna’s energy output.  Steven was glad to leave, rather than repeat the same exercises in futility they had engaged in all day.

              “So what’s on your mind?” the General asked as they strolled down the hall.

              “Well, sir… I’m just so damn frustrated,” Steven blurted.  “I haven’t found Carver, and now I ran into this woman who is totally immune to our magical shields, and we don’t know why.  I feel like we need to know why, but I don’t know how to find out.  The whole thing is taking time away from my mission, which, again, has yielded no real results.  I’m starting to feel like a dog chasing its own tail.”

              “I understand, Drisbane.  I’ve had similar feelings, myself, regarding Carver.” Larsen paused as they entered a small kitchenette, where he smelled the coffee in the pot on the burner, made a face, and dumped it.  As he set about brewing a new pot, he continued, “I am actually wondering if Ms. Flanagan is a new lead.”

              Steven paused.  “I’m confused.”

              “I think it’s safe to say we all are, at the moment.”

              “I mean… what do
you
mean?  How could she be a new lead?”

              “Well,” the General mused, “you found her while on the search for Carver. In the same town where Carver’s energy signature has been appearing on an intermittent but recurring basis for over a year now.  Perhaps there is some connection.  Perhaps there is even something unusual about the place itself.  As you know, coincidence is rarely just coincidence.  It generally means something bigger.”

              Steven thought about it for a moment, then shook his head.  “I just don’t see it.  I don’t understand how an out-of-work waitress could lead us to Carver.”

              “Maybe it’s a line of questioning we need to start, and we’ll see where it leads,” Larsen replied.  “What’s that expression?  You don’t have to be able to see the top of the staircase to take the first step?  Something like that.  Point is, we won’t know the answers until we start asking the questions, so let’s start asking the woman if she knows David Carver.”

Steven shrugged and nodded his assent, then poured himself a cup of freshly brewed coffee.  “I suppose you’re right, sir.”

Moments later, the two men re-entered the little lab where Deanna sat between Eric and John, each on their computers.  The two techs spoke to each other (and, in Eric’s case, sometimes to himself) as if she were an inanimate object, unable to hear them.

“She’s definitely not emanating anything special,” John said.  “Just as dull as dull can be.”

Deanna stared blankly at him. Very purposefully blankly.

“I’m gonna try the atomic phase scan again,” Eric murmured.  “We could be missing some anomaly on the atomic level.”

“We’ve already run it twice, numbnuts,” John snapped.  “Nothing.”

“Gentlemen,” Larsen interrupted.  “Perhaps you should take a short break, grab a cup of coffee and regroup.  I would like the opportunity to speak with Ms. Flanagan.”

“Fine by me.  This is boring,” John said, and the two men left the room.  Deanna stared quietly and expectantly at the General from her chair.

“Ms. Flanagan,” he began.  “Have you ever met a man by the name of David Carver?”

She furrowed her brow for a moment.  “Not that I know of.”

“A fair point, perhaps you encountered him without catching his name.  Here,” Larsen tapped on his Wand and pulled up a picture of Carver, the same one he had shown Steven during their first meeting.  It showed Carver a couple of years before his desertion, looking happy, healthy, and quite sane.

Deanna studied the picture for a second, then shook her head and shrugged.

“He’d be older now,” Steven interjected.  “Try to picture him about twenty years older than he is there.”

She stared at the picture again, looking no less confused.  “I’m sorry, I don’t know that person.  Should I?”

Larsen stared penetratingly at her for several long seconds.  “I’m not sure.  I have a bit of a hypothesis that somehow, you two are connected.”

“Does he see through your magic shields, too?”

“Not exactly.”  Larsen did not offer further explanation.

“We don’t know what he looks like, exactly, now.  He may have changed a lot since that picture was taken,” Steven offered.  “He’s been going through a rough time for the better part of two decades, now.  His eyes, I can tell you, look different.”

Deanna’s brow furrowed as she studied the picture.  “Different how?”

Steven pictured Carver as he had looked all those years earlier, on his motorcycle.  “Darker.  Scarier.  Kind of … haunted.”

She narrowed her eyes, looking as if she were trying to remember something.  Steven and Larsen stayed quiet, giving her time to think.  After a moment, she muttered, “It couldn’t be.”

“What?” Steven nearly barked at her.  “It couldn’t be what?”

“There was this homeless guy in Woodford last summer.  We called him the Rasta Man because he had this one long, filthy dreadlock.  He was really, really thin, and he looked really frail.  Much smaller than the guy in the picture, and dirtier.  And he had these crazy, dark eyes.  They looked haunted, like you said.  They were kind of frightening.”

“Where is he now?” Larsen asked, doing a much better job than Steven had at keeping his voice calm and level.

“I don’t know, he kind of disappeared when it got colder.  I assumed he found someplace to stay, because of winter.  He just wandered around in the summer.  I don’t know where he slept.”

Steven decided to stay quiet and let Larsen do the questioning; the General had a special talent for putting people at ease and figuring out the truth behind their words.

“Tell me more about him,” he began.  “Did you speak with this Rasta Man?”

“Kind of,” Deanna responded.  “He was very difficult to understand.  He sort of just jabbered random syllables, not real words.  He would throw in sentence fragments here and there, but often it made no sense.”

“Tell me some of the things he said that made no sense.”

“Well, he would bum cigarettes off me sometimes.  He would kind of talk, some of those times.  Other times he’d just point at my cigarette.  Like I said, his words were mostly gibberish.  The couple of things I recall were totally random, like when he said he never ate a day in his life.  Actually, I was just recently remembering the last time I saw him.  He said more that day than I had ever heard out of him.  He said he had had a brand new motorcycle once, but he wasn’t sure where he left it. ‘Maybe Ohio,’ he said.”

Steven felt his knee start twitching involuntarily from the excitement he felt.  The comment about the motorcycle made him believe that Deanna’s Rasta Man truly was Carver.  This was the closest he’d gotten to accomplishing his mission in months. This was much better than finding a cast-off black sock in the street. This woman had actually seen Carver, spoken with him; she might provide the clue that would bring Steven to Carver.

“When was that?  The last time y

ou saw him?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level.

“Last August, I think?”

“Let’s back up,” Larsen instructed.  “When was the first time you saw him?”

“Well,” Deanna mused.  “I noticed him around for a few months before he ever spoke to me.  He would often wander around on Main Street, or just squat in the middle of the sidewalk, talking to himself.  He was rather off-putting.  Most people gave him a wide berth.  I know I did, to start.”

“And when was that, when you first noticed him around?”

“Spring?  Maybe March or April of last year?”

“You said it took him a few months to talk to you.  So he approached you in roughly May?”

“Yeah, around then.  He wanted a cigarette.  He made that clear by pointing at the one I was smoking.  I didn’t understand a word he said, that day.  He scared me a bit.”

Steven stood quietly and observed as Larsen continued questioning Deanna for the better part of an hour.  She had no hard evidence indicating that the Rasta Man was actually Carver, but it was the best lead they’d had in a long time, and they wanted to know every detail of her encounters with him.

Eric and John returned to the room while they spoke, and observed the conversation.  Eric took on the task of reviewing all of the readings they had which had sent Steven to Woodford to begin with.

Once Deanna had explained each minor conversation she had had with the Rasta Man at least three times over, there was silence in the room for several long minutes.

Finally, Steven asked Eric, “Anything she said help interpret our readings?”

“The timeline adds up.  His energy signatures were in that area at the end of last summer, and have been there sporadically ever since.”

There was another moment of silence as all four men considered possibilities.  Deanna finally interrupted the silence by stammering, “Does this…did it….does this help?  Are we done?  Can I go home?”

Larsen glanced at her and said, “Not just yet, my dear.  But we have made some considerable progress, I think.  Let’s all get some rest and reconvene here in a few hours.  Drisbane, show Ms. Flanagan to the guest quarters.”

Steven nodded and gestured toward the hallway, so Deanna stood and followed him.  They walked down the hallway in silence as he mulled over the idea of the legendary, once-brilliant Carver living as a homeless, crazy wanderer.

“Can I ask you a question?” Deanna asked, jarring him from his reverie.  He nodded.

“Why is this David Carver guy so important to you people?”  She drew to halt and stared at him with her wide, green eyes, awaiting a response.  He was momentarily taken aback.  She had become, in his mind, a subject; someone to be questioned, tested.  He was not expecting such a question from her.

“Ah.  Well,” he began clumsily.  “That’s sort of … classified.”

“How, precisely, can something be ‘sort of’ classified?”

“It’s classified.  You just caught me off guard,” he admitted.

“It would seem that I’ve been helpful to some kind of search you have going for this man.  Doesn’t that put me in a position to know what I’ve helped with?”

“Ah…” Steven faltered.  He couldn’t think of an answer that would satisfy her and make her stop asking questions.  However, he was unwilling to tell her the truth without first discussing it with the General.  “I think you should ask General Larsen these kind of questions.  It would be his decision how much you should know.”

“I see,” Deanna said softly.  She looked up at him for a moment, then continued, “I asked you because I think your General Larsen is a little too good at being evasive.”

Steven didn’t know what to say, so he turned and continued walking down the hall.  He reached a door that looked exactly like all the other doors, and swung it open, gesturing for Deanna to enter.

“These will be your quarters,” he said, expressionlessly.  “The bathroom is over there.  We’ve already filled the cabinets with toiletries, pajamas, and a change of clothes.  I will be back to get you in the morning.  If you need anything else, you can let me know then.”

“Back to ‘get’ me?” Deanna narrowed her eyes.  “Couldn’t I just meet you in the testing room?”

He hesitated for a split second before saying, “It’s too easy to get lost, here.  Good night.”

Then he shut the door before she could ask any more questions.  He was a bit out of practice at dealing with civilians, and it was getting too difficult to avoid answering her.  He would have to consult with the General to find out how to respond to her.