Jaci Stone - Act 03

"Have you found the answer to your question?" I asked. I wasn't still wasn't sure about my former girlfriend or my daughter just yet.

"There's old magic here. Before your time, before mine, the time of the old ones."

"Of course it would be before Jaci's time," Petra scoffed. She took a step back when Joshua turned to glare at her.

"Do you know the name?" I asked.

"Cerberus," Joshua answered. "I've seen her work before, now I know what it smells like."

"Is the place warded?"

"Your daughters shattered it when you burned the door. You should destroy this place. It's an abomination to both you and to gaia."

"I'm going to look around, then we'll destroy it. For everything, there is a countermeasure. We need our countermeasures."

"Very well, ma'am." Joshua nodded and whooshed out of existence.

"Goddess." Petra let the air out. "You're just ordering Revengers around!"

"You knew that I was special, Petra. The power of our daughters should be proof enough. Grace, see what's portable and take it to Artemis. If there's anything big, maybe two or three of us can move it."

Petra walked over to one of the tables and picked up a random gadget. "What do you think this is?"

Grace took the gadget from Petra and examined it. She turned it on somehow, it started humming and a needle came out of the end. "This looks like a device to pull healer energy out for transfer to another person. I'll add 'forcefully' to that description." She pushed another button and a claw came out of the other end. "To hold the limb into place."

Petra gasped. "And this was here! Under our roof!"

Grace grabbed a handful of tools and whooshed out in a linear fold.

"Okay, how do we know that this man, Artemis, won't use this technology against us?"

"He knows that if he develops offensive technology, Zeus will eat him," I said.

"Zeus?" Aysun asked. "The Zeus?"

"You know, that's the same thing I asked when I met Hera."

Grace reappeared. She held out a phone with a picture on the screen to show Aysun. "Let's grab that table, don't forget to offset."

"Okay." They grabbed opposite ends of a table and vanished.

"You still haven't explained anything to me," Petra demanded.

"Some time ago, I found that I was the reborn, or embodiment, of the goddess Ceres," I explained.

I translocated my wand and held it in my hand. "A woman named Harriet brought this to me. It's a wand, my magic wand, from the time...well, a long time ago."

"So you're a reincarnation?" Petra asked. She believed what I was saying, not having any reason to think I was lying.

"You know, Petra? I haven't even thought of that particular word before. It's accurate. Actually, I've been reincarnated twice."

Grace and Aysun whooshed back into existence in front of us. "We've gotten the light and middling stuff. Artemis and Gemma still have some space for those consoles if you can help us break them loose."

It took us twenty minutes and then four trips to clear out everything. We were going to get the portal generator, but I was too afraid that it could be tracked.

Petra and Aysun stood aside as Grace and I melted it into slag. Petra and I talked about a meeting, but I told her I would have to take care of business at home first. I got a handshake from her and a hug from our daughter before Grace and I went back to Artemis' lab.

As promised, he had his 'thrall scanners' ready. I asked him if he could do anything with all the shit we had removed from the lab, and he said yes. I knew what was going to follow next, the eager explanation of how the things worked. I politely stopped him in his tracks, telling him that I wouldn't understand half of what he said anyway. He thought about that for a second and then told me he understood.

I joked that nobody could be as smart as he was, and he said that Gemma was twice as smart as he. I indicated Grace with my head and told him that he was preaching to the choir.

My cellphone started ringing with Janine's tone, and I answered it. She said that there had been some new developments and asked if I could come back to the condo, please, ma'am.

After getting Grace's attention to let her know I was going back to the condo, I said goodbye to Artemis and folded back. As soon as I appeared, Janine rushed me and pulled me into a hug.

She said all of the messages in the system had been faked; and someone had went through and deleted most of them, but left some behind so give the impression that they were incompetent.

I asked her if all the messages had been faked, why did I still feel that things were going to collapse?

Janine thought about that for a minute, then picked up her cellphone and told security to locate Francine Talbot and Marcie Hathaway.

Security didn't know. I couldn't fold to Francine or Marcie either, I was being blocked.

Grace, obviously sensing my distress, popped into existence in front of me. After a moment, she announced that she couldn't perform her fold either. She was being blocked by magic, the same remote viewing blocking spell I used to hide from her.

Janine asked me how folding would work if they were in a moving vehicle, or even a stopped vehicle. I had tried that early on and usually got a general location, like a tracking spell. I wasn't getting anything, not even a feeling from them. Grace added that any fold to a person was a risk, it was ninety-nine percent safer to fold to a known location.

My theory was that the two of them had simply gone to a private place to make love. That was something that they had been doing since Francine had gotten better. I really didn't mind it, plus it really wasn't my position to mind it. I was still married, even though Samantha was somewhere out yonder.

Finally, I realized that they probably didn't want to be found. If Marci had taken my car, she had done it on purpose. After an hour, I told Janine to give it up. Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow was the day.

***

Marci called me at five hours, asking me to meet her and Francine at Taylor-Wilcox. I told her that I would, adding that it would be faster if I had my Beemer. I heard her chuckle, then she reminded me that I had two of the coupes, one on the top of the condo parking garage. I also had three sets of guards and drivers at my beck and call.

I told her that I'd be there in two hours, and she hung up. There were just so many things wrong with that conversation, I didn't know which to choose as the worst. The best thing was that she had forgotten about linear folding and that was less of a minus. The bad news was that Taylor-Wilcox was a really bad place to meet. I would have to look around the place, with magic.

Janine came into my room as I was performing a true remote viewing. Marci and Francine were already there, along with...Miranda Olsen.

Neat.

Janine couldn't see what I was seeing, but she could tell something was wrong. I studied the scene closer, watching Miranda go off the rails about something. I couldn't 'hear' through the remote 'viewer' but I could read her lips just fine. She wanted to know where everybody was, why the nitrogenators were parked in the corner and chained together. Most of all she wanted to know where the tanks that Erin had constructed were located.

There were at least forty men wandering around the warehouse, some on the observation decks. All of them armed with either assault rifles or the magic-user-killing ray guns.

Another team was going through the offices, obviously finding everything in order except for the presence of staff. A trio of people were trying to 'scan' my Beemer, but not getting anywhere. I closed my viewer and fixed my gaze on Janine. "What happened to Taylor-Wilcox?"

"Boulder, Limited. All of the assets from Taylor-Wilcox were moved to Christian-Brooke."

"You told me..."

"What you needed to hear, Jaci. I read The Siefert Agreement, remember? That would have left you with nothing, not even Gravelton!"

Gravelton. Rocks, stones, boulders. Stones.

"So you did all this company finagling for me?" I asked.

Janine slid across the carpet until she was toe-to-toe with me. "I did that for all of us, ma'am. If that agreement was ever executed, I wanted you to keep your work. And I wanted to keep the four billion dollars worth of gold and metals under your land."

"Keeping food on the table, as it were," I joked.

"What does the situation look like there?"

"If my dad ever saw that situation...I think he would cry. Everything he ever passed by me, random musings on theoretical enemy positions? No, this situation is going to be hard to crack."

"Tell me. Please, ma'am."

"Janine, stop that shit until this crisis is over," I ordered.

"Yes, Jaci."

Goddess.

"We can help," Grace piped in.

"Grace, please announce your entry before your presence!"

"Okay. We can help."

"Grace, I'm asking you to stay out of it. Your brother could have been tortured in that very chamber!"

"That is why we need to help!" Grace countered.

"Grace, Jaci is right. If Miranda is The Villain, there won't be an auburn-haired person in this city, or anywhere else for that matter, safe from getting taken."

"We can still use cloaks or other measures," Grace pleaded. "Since you say the tactical situation is a mess, do those people have night-vision?"

"They had helmets, so probably. I see where you're going with this, but you'd be folding blind."

"Yeah, but it only takes one bird-dog," Grace pointed out. "Miranda already knows me, so you can take me along."

"I'd like a battle just as much," Janine mused.

"Well, it's an option. Thank you, Grace. Remind me to demote Bea to counting blades of grass if and when we get back."

"Shh."

I decided to take one of the guard sedans. Marci had specified me, but Miranda would expect me not to travel alone. Bea got to be the driver, selecting barbed spikes rather than a pistol. There was no need to ask if she had been practicing with them.

We arrived twenty minutes early. The sky said twilight, giving us a limited window. Grace's idea about using flares to blind the shooters was a good one. As it turned out, nobody needed to actually fold into the warehouse, the flares themselves could be 'dropped' into the warehouse via linear fold.

The task was going to be getting Marci and Francine out of the line of fire. Under thrall or not, they could be treated somewhere else. To pull them out, two of my children would have to expose themselves to the firefight. Grace knew who could do that, so that problem was solved.

My job was to be the distraction. Miranda was to be my sole target, trying to negotiate first and roasting later. Grace and Janine were of the 'roasting first' plan while Bea remained silent. My biggest concern was the Revengers, because I hadn't heard a peep from any of them. Were they staying on the sidelines because this was a matter for me to take care of? I didn't know, but their appearance or lack thereof was a variable that could throw my plan off.

The smaller doors opened at our approach, and I told Bea to pull inside. In true showdown style, Miranda was standing alone, Marci and Francine standing off to the side. When the four of us exited the vehicle, I heard the swishing sound of nylon rubbing against nylon on both sides of us.

I went to the front of the car and leaned against the front end. "Quite the show of force you have going on here, Doctor Olsen. Who knew a scientist would need a private army?"

"You have your own army."

"True," I nodded. "What's the game here, Miranda?"

"At first I wanted Taylor-Wilcox back. Then I found out about The Siefert Agreement, which would let me have the whole thing. Brookstone Pointe, all of it."

"You don't really want a bunch of beauty parlors and restaurants," I countered. "You want the big stuff," I countered.

"You're right, I only want the big stuff. But since the two are intermingled for now, I have to take the part, not the parcel. Francine will run the parlors and restaurants, and I'll take over the science and technology part." Miranda pulled out a gun and pointed at me. "Sign it over, peacefully, and we can avoid all the infighting that would take place otherwise."

"Peacefully. At the barrel of a gun?" I chuckled. "Stay where you are, Bea. This is my show, remember?"

"What's she going to do?" Miranda laughed. "There are seven guns pointed at you and your little crew."

"There are two guns aimed at each of your little guards," I said. "Let's start with the ones around us."

My goddess, they were good. I heard six splats, then the sounds of the shots. I didn't have to look, I knew they were missing their heads and half their torsos. I was rather surprised when Bea told me the whole team was sniper-rated, just to keep up with the boss.

"How did you?" Miranda shifted her arm so the gun was pointed at Francine, and pulled the trigger.

Not even Grace could drop a dilation wave that fast. I did feel her, and she had Marcie through a linear fold before Francine's body hit the ground. Then the melee broke out.

I was rushing Miranda when the lights went out. Erin had done her part in disabling the lights and the backups. As soon as I hit Miranda in the torso with my shoulder, magnesium rain started falling in front of the other guys with guns in the warehouse. I backed off and punched Miranda in the face, hard. Her head rebounded off the dirt floor, effectively knocking her out.

Standing up, I let out a sigh. I had not counted on Miranda's willingness to kill Francine in cold blood. Never in a thousand thousand years had I anticipated that. I looked at her body, immortality would not heal her brain. Bea started throwing her spikes at the temporarily blinded guards, and all I could do was stand there and look at Francine.

Janine grabbed my shoulders and tried pushing me down out of the lines of fire. I totally lost it then. My dilation wave was much stronger than Grace's. I used it as a ripple, hitting guards and pushing them over as I went. I saw Starr and Pete coming in from the other end, they were trying to sheath their bloody swords as I approached. I wouldn't say anything, holding back could cause more problems than it was worth.

Starr put her hand on my shoulder. "Settle down, Jaci. We got the rest of them."

I fell to my knees and sobbed. "She killed Frannie."

"Jaci, if there was ever a time to judge, it is now," Pete said. "You have that authority."

"Not right now, Pete. There is a difference between justice and vengeance."

They gave me another minute, then hauled me to my feet. "Let's go," Pete said.

Miranda had gained consciousness and had been cuffed by Bea. "Prison is not good enough for her. We are her peers, we can be her jury."

"Juries are supposed to be impartial, Bea," I warned.

"Cold-blooded murder? We all saw her kill Francine!"

"Why did you do it, Miranda?" I asked. "Without Francine or Marci, there is no Siefert Agreement."

"To the victor go the spoils," Miranda snickered.

All at once, portals started opening around us, eight in all, one right behind Miranda. I tried to pull her out, and was pulled in instead. I felt something strike me, a ball of fire starting at my shoulder and moving down my insides. Joshua grabbed my hand. I started to slip again, and I could feel Joshua still pulling...

Epilogue:

"Sir. Wake up!" A slap to my face. "Sir, wake up!" Who was that?

"Sir!"

Great. Sir. I was in hell.

Another slap to my face, and my eyes shot open. "Joshua? What the fuck!"

Joshua?

"Sir, I'm glad you woke up. I couldn't hold onto you much longer."

"Joshua, you call me 'sir' one more time, I'm going to kick your ass." What was wrong with my voice?

"Sir, when you're able to stand, please don't try kicking my ass."

"Johan!" I felt a head on my torso, long hair in my face. "I'm so glad you made it!"

"Petra?"

"We were hoping that you'd come out of it," Petra pulled back off my chest and put her nose to mine. "I'm glad you made it this time. I couldn't live without you, Johan."

"Who's Johan?" I asked. Who's got my voice?

"That's a long story," Petra said. "Can you stand?"

"Harriet did this, didn't she? She looped me again!" My voice was deeper, manly. Fuck, she did loop me.

"Johan, stand up," Petra ordered. She stood and pulled on my arm, and pulled hair instead.

"Ow!"

"Baby. Stand up!"

I sat up first. I felt heavy. I looked at my arms. Hair! I had fucking hair on my arms!

"Johan," Petra stomped her foot. "We have to go!"

"My name is Jaci Stone! What did you do to me?"

Petra knelt down to look me in the eye. "Jaci Stone is dead. Johan Birch is who you are. Now stand the FUCK UP and let's get out of here."

My legs were wobbly when I finally reached my feet. Joshua was on one side of me and Petra on the other, keeping me stable. I was heavy, heavy everywhere. My arms were hairy, I was a fucking bear. What had they done to me?

"We're almost there," Joshua said. "We have to get him to the other side before the portal closes or we will burn his skin off again."

Again?

We crossed something and onto a sunlit prairie. I heard the zipping sound of a portal closing behind us. "Petra? What happened to me? I'm a fucking bear!"

"Your name is Johan Birch. You are Johan now. We had to let Jaci die for the sake of your children, Johan. Do you remember?"

"I was falling into a portal, Joshua was pulling me out."

"Sir, I pulled your soul out of your body," Joshua said. "You were dead, getting ready to cross over. I couldn't let you die, sir."

"Why? Why this body?" I demanded.

"This is the only part of your DNA that we could use," Petra said. "Your body was almost completely magic, from your eye color to the tips of your painted toes. We tried to save Jaci, using her cells, but it didn't work. Your cells were so energetic, we couldn't use them. So, we had to reach back, we gathered cells from the one part of your body that you didn't modify: Your sinus hairs. This is the body of the man who would have been Jason Stonebrook, but you are Johan Birch now."

"Where are we?"

"I'd better go," Joshua said. "I need to check on the others."

"Can you walk on your own now?" Petra asked after Joshua made his exit.

"Yeah. What happened? Where are we?"

"Plenty of time to get answers to those questions," Petra started walking across the grass.

I pondered my body for a moment. I was a fucking bear. Hair, thick hair, was all over my body. I actually felt a lot like Travis had looked. I was taller, one ninety-plus tall and ninety kilos. And hairy and naked. I jogged up to Petra and she snagged my hand. "I can't feel you," I said.

"Jaci, we reached back, way back, to make this body. Jason Stonebrook, the boy who you were, didn't have magic, something modified you. We had to make you talent-negative, otherwise the magic would have killed you."

"You made this body?" I asked in disbelief. "How? Why?"

"I had help, all have sworn to keep your secret," Petra cryptically answered. "It was agreed that you had to stay among us...otherwise The Meddler would just send you back to where you started your journey."

"You're talking about Harriet. The Meddler?"

"Yes, she's talking about me," Harriet said from behind us. "It's not supposed to happen like this."

"Maybe it was," I stopped walking to turn and face her. "Merlin said that fiddling with time was a sure way to get your fingers cut off."

"Well, you can't mess with Johan now," Petra snapped. "One of the benefits."

"This is a big mistake," Harriet popped out of existence loud enough to make my ears ring.

"Am I mortal now?" I asked.

"Johan, we honestly don't know," Petra shrugged. "You've died...like three times this last year."