Cat's Choice (32 page)

Grace thought she had the risky job, hah! Poisonous snakes, restless natives, even more restless governments, you try getting a dig permit in Iraq, she wanted to say. She couldn’t even talk about that one because the dig had been way under the government radar, twelve weeks in native clothes and dying her red hair black, Ugh! Grace never saw her as a competent grown-up. When they were growing up, Grace was the one who proclaimed herself Addie’s protector, she was the one who took care of the bullies that tried to give her a hard time.
It must be because I’m still in school. When I get that PhD, maybe then she’ll change…not! She’ll still be running background checks on anyone that smiles at me when I’m fifty!

Grace was her best friend, and all teasing aside, her biggest fan; although, in the last few years she became more hardened and serious. It was because of the job; as a cop, she was always faced with the worst kinds of people. You had to be tough or people walked all over you. The problem was Grace took her job home with her. Sometimes when she called, it felt more like an interrogation than a conversation.

As she walked back and forth across the island, pushing her way through the thick brush, reminiscing about her family and how she got here, made the time go by more swiftly. She remembered when she lost her parents.
Mom was surprised with a late-in-life pregnancy in her mid-forties. I was starting high school, and Gracie was starting her senior year. Mom had gone into labor in the middle of the night so dad was rushing her to the hospital. Some asshole closed down the bars and then decided to drive home, shit-faced, forgot to turn on his headlights, and hit them head-on . It still upset her when she thought about it. She stopped walking for a minute to take a drink of water from the canteen.

It was so great of Granny and Grandpa Mac to come back to the farm to take care of them. Neither she nor Grace had wanted to farm and Grandpa…she could still hear him saying he was done with all that. So they’d sold most of the farmland to the neighbors and kept the homestead. Now Grandpa Mac was dead and Granny Mac was living in the local retirement community. Addie smiled thinking of her Granny Mac.
I should have brought her with me; she’s in better shape than me, doing her Wii every morning.

Her parent’s final gift, if you could call it that, was the fact that their life insurance paid off the farm, so they’d always have a home. They’d taken the settlement from the asshole’s insurance and put it away for education. Between the life insurance, the settlement, and the sale of the land, she and Grace didn’t need to worry about money for some time to come. Gracie had used her share to buy a condo on the lake, so she wouldn’t have to live in a crappy apartment in the city.
And here I am burning some of my share on what may be a fruitless endeavor.

She was on Whiskey Island wishing she had a shot of the good stuff and wondering why she’d spent so much of her life trying to prove the existence of an ancient people that only she believed in. Somehow , she didn’t think she’d find what she was looking for on this island either. Every time she set foot on an island, it was like she could feel if she was supposed to be there or not, and this place was not calling to her, but somewhere close was—she could feel it.

With her vacation half over, she was going to have to decide about where she was going to go, because tromping these empty islands was starting to frustrate her. She could practically hear her fellow students telling what they had done over the break. ‘
‘Oh’, I found this cool piece, and ‘Ah’, look at the find I’m getting credit for.’
And then there was Addie. She could say, ‘
Oh, look at my pants and the shoes I ruined with all the bird shit, but it was ancient bird shit, I’m sure.’

The remaining islands were larger; in four weeks, her permits were going to expire. It was time to pull out the big guns, or she was going to go down in history as the girl who found twenty tons of shit.
I’m spending way too much of my life thinking about bird crap, she thought with a chuckle.

Addie had a gift, one that she never told anyone about for fear they would laugh at her. Growing up, she had enough tormenting, she didn’t need to put a bulls-eye on her back and cry, ‘look at me, I can do some really freaky stuff.’ No one would have believed her anyway, except for her family, and they were all that mattered to her.

When Addie was a child, she found out that if she concentrated, she could find things. And she also discovered that she always knew when she spoke to people or found things if it was the truth, or correct, or real. She remembered being upset when she found out it wouldn’t work for finding missing kids—she cried off and on for days; until Gracie finally pried what was wrong out of her and set her straight about that not being her destiny. It still bothered her that she couldn’t use her gift that way. And she was still trying to work out all that she could do with it.

She had given her gift a name; it was a girl thing, she supposed—girls named almost everything.
Guys just named their cars and their penises, she thought, and laughed at the memory of her first serious boyfriend in college and his ‘Mr. Happy’. So she called her gift her truth-seek, simple, yet elegant, she smiled to herself. Her sister wanted to call it a Wonder Power , like on the old cartoon—she had stood firm.

Addie decided to try her
truth-seek
again; it got her to Lake Michigan and then to this group of islands. So far, though, it hadn’t allowed her to narrow her search, it was as though her skill was a separate part of herself, and it decided when she received knowledge and when she didn’t. Times like this it really pissed her off.

She sat down on the ground to meditate, wishing she’d brought some sage or incense to burn. This was the method her Granny Mac had taught her. When she used the sage or incense, she could connect to her power faster and with greater depth.

She’d been pulled to this grouping of islands—screw methodical—she needed a solid direction now! Slowly, she felt her body slipping out of her awareness. She allowed her mind to float using the shape of her birthmark as a focal point. Of course, the strange mark everyone teased her about when she was younger had to tie into her powers.
Life could not be simple , she thought, though it was the birthmark that had started her off on this adventure, so it made a strange kind of sense . She concentrated on the colored swoops and lines she saw every morning in her mirror, and she allowed herself to float away.

After about fifteen minutes, she slowly pulled out a map of the area, opened it, and put rocks down to keep it from blowing away. Then she pulled her worry stone from around her neck—another little gift from her grandmother. The once flat stone that had a concave indentation with a small hole at the center, where the women in her family had rubbed it, passed down from mother to daughter, until her grandmother had passed it to her. She said that she never felt that her daughter had need of it, and so she kept it for her. It had belonged to so many generations that its origin wasn’t remembered.

Now she swung the stone from its leather string in a circular fashion. She kept her eyes closed and concentrated on the symbol, feeling for tugs and pulls from the stone. Finally, when she felt the tug, she let go. It landed on the whiptail of Hog Island, the hole in the stone resting near a small bay on the leeward side. She had a destination.

She was going to have to hustle to get there before dark; it would be too dangerous to make her way around these islands then. If she had to, she’d put up for the night on Garden Island, as she’d have to go around it to get to Hog Island from where she was. Part of her wondered why the truth-seek didn’t narrow her search earlier?
Oh well, time to ponder that later ; she needed to get going now. Within twenty minutes, she’d loaded her boat, topped off the gas tank in the outboard motor, and taken off.

Black Wolf Agency:

To Live and To Love

Prologue

“I can’t believe what I just saw,” said James, still in shock and overwhelmed. Granted, he was sitting in his apartment by himself talking to himself, and could possibly be dreaming, he hadn’t figure that out yet. He kept replaying the memory of what had just happened…

***

Just thirty minutes earlier, he was walking home from his accounting job; boring, yes, but still lucrative. He left work around sunset that day, thinking the whole time he needed to find some excitement in his life, something besides numbers. He was anxious to get home and have something to eat, so he took a short cut he normally avoided when he was walking that took him through a few small, less-used alleys that were rundown and smelled of garbage.

James was not a small man, at least for a geek, he tried to keep himself in shape, so he felt comfortable walking though the alleys. He could take care of himself; he, of course, had taken a class in Tae Kwan Do, James was sure if he ever had to use it, he could kick some ass. His hair was brown and short, kinda messy, but he liked it, it gave him an edge. His eyes were brown, they matched his hair. But the thing he liked the most was his height and build, he was built like a linebacker and tall. Well, when he kept in shape, these days he looked like a third string football player who ate too much take out. But he could kick ass.

He was about a block away from his apartment when he entered a dark alley. The alley gave him the creeps, but he knew crossing through it would save a lot of time, so he ignored his inner voice and kept going. It was the one time he should have listened, and he still wondered what would have happened had he not taken this path.

As he passed by some dumpsters, he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned and saw a pair of eyes as a creature lunged at him. His expensive training did not, however, kick in, instead he stood frozen in place wondering if he was going to be lunch.

‘What the hell?’
he thought, as his mind fought to think of something to do other than stand there. Then he heard a gunshot and watched it fall to the ground. James thought afterward that maybe he should have had some of those ninja reflexes working, because he never moved an inch, which was pretty stupid considering there was a freaking gunshot.

Frantically looking around him, he spotted his Aunt Yvonne at the other end of the alley, holding up a gun. He had to be hallucinating, oh my god, he had been bit by the crazy animal and was in shock and seeing shit. James pinched his arm and then winced and thought, well, shit, this is real .

Wait, his aunt was a lawyer, not a cop. Why would she be carrying around a gun? And what was she doing here in an alley? It was the last place he would have thought he would see his well-put together aunt. James suppressed his hysterical laughter that threatened to erupt he was going crazy.

He looked down at the creature again, and this time he was able to study it. It greatly resembled a thin, hairless dog with glassy bulged eyes, long protruding fangs and sharp claws. He stared at it in amazement for a moment. Then Yvonne ran over and began to shove it in a large knapsack.

“What the hell!” he repeated, this time out loud. Brilliant, James would think to himself later. Everything he could have said and that was what came out of his mouth.

“I’ll explain everything to you in a little while, but first we need to get out of here before someone comes. Follow me.” She hurried back to the entrance of the alley, throwing the bag into the trunk of her BMW. She jumped into the driver’s seat and waited.

It took a few seconds for James to make his body understand that his mind was telling him, ‘
GET OUT OF HERE
!’ He finally followed his aunt and got into her car.

She drove to his apartment and followed him in; he was still stunned by what he saw. He felt like a heavy weight was sitting on top of him. He paced around his living room thinking , ‘My aunt shot a fast-moving creature with pinpoint accuracy. What dimension am I living in?’