James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-10-30 10:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | james hutchins, npc, radek jeppersen |
Wards and Research
Who: Radek, James & Sam Hutchins (NPC by Kate)
What: Comparing notes
When: 2010/2020 (before Samhain)
Where: Radek’s home/’pool house’
Warnings/Ratings Low, lots of Latin (hover for translations)
2010
The buildings were complete, the landscaping done, and all signs of the builders had been removed. The immortal walked around his small, walled estate, passing the pool and heading into the ‘pool house’. It was still only a rudimentary set up, he was waiting for equipment to arrive, but had been reluctant to order it all at once, given it might look odd being delivered to a residence. As he leaned against the wall, then paced across the spaces to check on dimensions, he remembered the advice his fellow immortal had given him, just before construction had begun. “Be sure to have in place the wards and protections, Radek, if you plan to keep your doors open to any and all who need your skills and ministrations.” He nodded to himself and made his way back to his study.
Radek looked up the shop, Curiosities, that Cassandra had told him about and contacted Sam, the proprietor. After a short telephone conversation Sam had said he would come out and check the place over. When he arrived Radek explained what preparation for protection of the property Cassandra had done, and what Radek required.
“So you see I can end up with all types of ‘patients’, some who might not want me to tell any stories, and while that isn’t so much an issue, I don’t want to have any… shall we say residual damage done, or left behind?” he explained as he indicated the separate building across the other side of the pool from the french doors where they were standing in the study.
“Yes, of course.” Sam Hutchins peered through the glass at the pool house. He was a man of fifty-five years, over six feet tall with a lot of salt and pepper hair, the hairline only just showing signs of receding. His eyes were dark brown and good-natured. He had an accent that was hard to place, a mash-up from living in California and Nevada for his adult life, but having spent his formative years in England. As he stood there looking out, the white witch was doing some mental calculations about the size of the building, comparing it to the supplies he brought. He tapped a finger on his mouth and nodded.
“It’s fine work you’re doing,” Sam said to Radek. “The work of a good heart. There’s not many who would help without asking questions, or charging an exorbitant price for it.” Leaning closer, Sam muttered, “My son ought to keep your number on speed-dial,” barely moving his mouth.
Behind him, Sam’s twenty-seven year old son James took a few slow, pacing steps. His arms were crossed, head down, a mop of longish hair covering his forehead. He was a lot like his father in build and coloring, but he didn’t have Sam’s natural extroversion. He was paying attention, hearing every word said, but keeping silent. The last part made his cheek twitch. He had met his dad at Curiosities after his class on automotive transmissions and transaxles and he still looked the part of a trade school student: faded shirt, ripped jeans, a pair of scuffed boots covering a repeating path on the nice floors of Radek’s house.
The immortal nodded slowly, giving James a look of understanding as he noted the young man’s body language. Centuries of teaching, giving lectures on subjects that were only being attended for status, or in the latest iteration of university degrees, ‘points’ toward a degree, had taught him how to assess whether a young person was enjoying the situation or enduring it. Sam’s son seemed to be here with little enthusiasm.
“I’m happy to treat all who need it,” he said to the two men. “Is there anything else I can tell you, that will help?” he continued. “I would like the ‘pool house’ to be particularly strengthened, but I also have some personal effects that might either help, or perhaps benefit from your attention?”
He indicated a door from the study that led into a large room next door, with only a bare parquetry floor across its expanse, the walls lined in cases that instead of carrying books as they did in the study, had doors, some of which were glass, and others were solid. Behind the glass doors were mainly blank walls, Radek’s collection still in storage. But in one of them were displayed some weapons, including a selection of daggers and a shamshir. The curved blade of the sword was polished, an inscription in Latin along the spine continued past the guard and onto the inlaid handle.
“Oh, it should be straight-forward enough,” Sam said, a reassuring wave of his hand not dismissing Radek, but letting him know that warding the pool house shouldn’t be any trouble. “Your things could do with a guardian ward. But for the pool house, we’ll start off with a cleansing ritual, then go around the perimeter and erect a barrier. It should ward off any negative energies that might want to intrude. The supernaturally-inclined are prone to picking up tails. Aren’t we, James?” He nodded across the room at his son. “We wouldn’t want them leaving anything behind.” Sam smiled at Radek. “Or for the traffic in and out of your home to draw the wrong kind of attention, so.” Sam put his hands together in a loose clasp, then he stopped and looked around, momentarily lost, wondering where he’d set down his bag when he walked into Radek’s house.
“We shouldn’t do a barrier,” James offered from the open door Radek had shown them, his voice lower than his father’s. “We might end up keeping out the ones who need help.” Of course his dad wouldn’t think about that. In his world, everybody worth helping could stroll across a salt line, if they needed to. He stepped into the empty room and walked along the row of display cases, stopping at the curved sword. There were words written on it in an antiquated font. He narrowed his eyes to read the Latin inscription.
Sam shook his head, a mild impatience on his features. He spotted their things beside the entrance and went to collect them.
Radek looked from Sam to the door and chose to follow James. He saw the young man standing in front of the sword he’d cleaned and replaced in the cabinet that morning, after his regular training session. He noted the angle of James’ head, and guessed he was reading the inscription. “That’s a good point you raised,” he said as he drew next to where James was standing. “Are you interested in Latin, or the sword?” he asked.
James cut a quick look at Radek. “Anything old. Sharp the edge… clean as the wind... slice away the enemies of immortality." He kept a steady expression while he digested that rough translation. It was a weapon to fight against the ‘enemies of immortality’. The only people he knew that took immortal heads were hunters, and they were usually gunning for the ones with fangs. If it was a defensive tool, maybe vampires were bigger into Asian swords than he realized.
Probably not.
He took a step back from the case and gave the rest of the sharp objects a broader study. The guy liked daggers. “I wonder how many doctors have weapon collections.” James looked at Radek with curiosity.
Radek scanned the items on display and shrugged lightly. “I don’t know, but the dagger can be both a weapon of death, and a tool for healing.” He opened the cabinet and took down one of the smaller. His voice was quiet, matter-of-fact, as he explained. “I have saved a man’s life with this one, cutting away the necrotic flesh of a festering bite, then heating the blade in the flames of an open fire to seal the open wound. There was nothing in the way of sutures, medical supplies, or antiseptics. Just the sharpness of the blade and the strength of the metal that enabled me to help another.” The blade lay across his palm, the handle held in the fingers of his other hand, turning the blade one way then the other to catch and reflect the light.
He looked at James for a moment. “It’s not the blade that is dangerous, but the hand that wields it.”
One corner of James’ mouth smiled as he refrained from mumbling, ‘No shit.’. He skipped past the notes on good versus evil and focused on what would be considered a rudimentary surgical tool, under just about any circumstances. A bite, an old dagger, fire, no antiseptic or bandages? What was he describing, a medieval werewolf raid on unsuspecting villagers? “No offense, but if that’s what you were operating with, I hope you’ve made some upgrades.” It was a lighthearted joke from the looks of it. He clapped a hand on Radek’s shoulder. “How old are you, anyway?” He backed towards the door to the study where he left the patriarch of the Hutchins family wandering about like he misplaced his reading glasses.
Sam had opened his bags to quadruple-check his stash. He was talented, a natural at earth magic, faith-minded and conservative with what he gave and took, good at reading people’s auras, and the kind of witch who dotted every I and crossed every T in a ritual. That didn’t mean he didn’t occasionally leave a critical ingredient on the counter. His son was more of an improv artist.
James picked up the bag for him. “I got it.”
Radek watched as the younger Hutchins backed out of the training room, about to answer the question of his age until James was distracted by his father. He was always willing to let questions of his age slide by, if possible, it made it easier in years to come.
“Yes, fortunately I can show you the upgrades when we’re in the ‘pool house’,” he offered instead, closing the door of the training room behind him as he joined them in the study again.
“Lead the way,” Sam said, gesturing ahead of himself with a friendly smile. He was tickled to have been asked on a house call from a new acquaintance. Curiosities was the culmination of his life’s work, but too much of anything could prove monotonous. House calls gave him the opportunity to stretch his legs. He also thought it important to bring James, to make sure he had as strong a network in the Las Vegas area as possible. The younger man had a wanderlust that made him nervous. If his son was hesitant to set down roots, then he’d plant some for him. “If I may ask, where are you from? These old ears haven’t been out of the country in quite some time.”
James watched the back of his father’s head, the shoulders that stooped a little more than they used to. A chiropractor would say that Sam spent too much time on a stool, leaning over his work. Hefting the portmanteau, he worked through his memory of what the compartments contained. Thought about how he could redirect Sam into trying it a different way. Sometimes that was easier said than done, when the source of the advice was James.
Radek led the way through the french doors out onto the pool deck, and indicated the path to the pool house. “My home town is Prague, in Czech Republic,” he answered conversationally as they walked past the pool. There was no poolside furniture, another item that was on the ‘to do’ list that Radek had been preparing and adding to as things struck him. “I studied there, then was able to study medicine at Oxford University. That allowed me to learn of the works of Oxfam, and I served time with their teams, mainly in Burkina Faso and Burundi, where emergency medicine was sometimes, shall we say, rudimentary at best.” He turned and gave James a smile as he spoke, an explanation of the earlier description he’d given of the use of a dagger. “Some years in the military hospitals in various locations gave me a great appreciation of what can be achieved with little, and of the indomitability of the human condition, should the spirit be strong.”
They reached the doors of the pool house. Radek unlocked and slid back the large paneled glass doors that opened the room to the pool, then crossed and opened another door which concealed the true purpose of the building, his surgical area.
James raised his eyebrows at that. “Congrats.” From the looks of things, Radek was achieving with a lot now. Sam caught the look on his face and nudged him in the bicep. James ignored his dad and walked in ahead of Radek, setting down the bag and taking out the supplies he knew would be needed to conduct a ritual cleansing of the surgery area before they attempted to weave a protective network in the space. Because it was Sam’s bag, they would be working with mostly plant- and animal-based ingredients. There were dried plants to be burned in batches while they smudged the area, working clockwise around the interior of the building. Afterwards, they would conduct a ritual with Sam speaking his protective intentions into the space.
The younger magic user found his father’s notebook, read over the ritual verses, and turned to a fresh page. He took a pen from the bag, clicked it, and leaned over a table. The tip of his ink pen scratched quickly as he wrote his own version, one designed to continually purge negative energies from the space, instead of erecting a barrier that might be hard for some to cross.
Remaining at the door while his son set up, Sam heaved a deep breath and looked at Radek. “My son is allergic to anything that sounds like traditional wisdom,” he said quietly. “He’s a good man. Gifted. With a ‘strong spirit’,” he added, using Radek’s phrasing with a smile. “But he saw more than I’d like at a young age. It’s left him with little patience for inspirational words, no matter how kindly given.”
While his father wasn’t paying attention, James palmed a bottle of liquid out of the bag and tucked it in his pocket, just in case his father didn't give his advice any credence.
Radek listened to Sam while watching James writing. “It’s strong spirits that help find new ways,” he offered, “and if given the freedom to explore, the security of safe haven should things not quite work out at first, can help us unearth improvements that might otherwise remain hidden.” Radek was speaking from his many centuries of work on finding the source of ‘power’ of his own kind, and if it could be generated in others. He’d experimented on the dead, never yet having found the answer he sought, but instead managing to discover many other things that helped him when it came to treating the living, especially those who were only maintaining a very tiny, tenuous grip on the spark of life. His ‘safe haven’ in so many of the experiments he’d carried out had been his own immortality, and he’d had the help of others with equal keenness in recovery and surgical techniques who’d become entrusted with the knowledge of his ability to ‘miraculously heal’.
“And at times it’s the anchor in the known that ensures a return, should the exploration lead us down a path that proves incompatible,” he finished, his mind having wandered to some of the results that had been only able to be classified as ‘incompatible with life’. "Ita notitiam ignotorum veritatem inquirendam exaudi notis et ignotis non sistit in uno quaerere."
James immersed himself in the ritual he was writing while the other men talked, his elbows on the table, lean shoulders making a shadow over the pen and paper. He tuned most of it out. He always knew when Sam was talking about him. It was preferable to talking at him, but it irritated him. It reminded him of being a boy at his father’s retreats, the way adults spoke over the heads of their offspring, thinking they couldn’t hear it. He hadn’t been Sam’s boy in a decade and he wasn’t subject to his house rules, but when it came to magic, the two were locked in some unspoken competition with ever-narrowing rules that Sam set up and James didn’t follow. The further he strayed, the tighter they got.
His ears picked up on the switch in language. "Pater enim Latine loqui." James looked up, the pen turning between nimble fingers. He smiled at Radek. "Qui cogitate mala spirituum est in porta... Est autem differentia inter anchorum. In pila et torquum. Quod est a bono ut dicam."
Sam rolled his eyes at being outmaneuvered. “Alright,” he grumbled, “You’ve made your point. Come on, let’s not waste any more of Radek’s time.”
The elder of the Hutchins family went to see what James had written, putting on his readers and mumbling aloud as he read it, seeing that James had kept much of Sam’s original elements, both wording and materials, but wanted to charge the spell to behave a bit differently. It would be a semi-permeable barrier. James stayed shoulder-to-shoulder with him while he critiqued it, holding still with that bottle burning a hole in his pocket. He tried to keep his eyes on the notebook instead of his dad. “Oh, I see what you’ve got in mind.” Sam nodded, agreeing with some enthusiasm that it could do the trick. “We’ll get right to work,” he told Radek. Sam picked up a bundle of herbs and a lighter and prepared to ignite them. “Jay, we’ll start in the north corner,” he murmured. “And then…”
As the two magic users began to work, with Sam taking point, the tension in James’ posture eased and it was easier to see the resemblance in them.
Radek was a little bemused and impressed all at once, and withdrew to give the two men the space. As he walked slowly around the newly landscaped pool he wondered what his own father would have been like, if he'd had the chance to know what his son had become.
2020
Some of the solid doors on the display cabinets in the training room were hidden behind the three large magnetic whiteboards, and one electronic that were lined up side by side with one another. The lights in the glass-fronted cabinets were on, along with the overhead lights as the immortal stood in front of the electronic board, writing, then moving back to check on one of the magnetic boards before nodding and returning to complete what he was writing.
Radek was comfortable with computers, but found he preferred to be able to view a large puzzle displayed all at once like this to help him start to fit pieces together. The magnetic boards were where the many random pieces of information on events, dates, times, locations, moon phases, weather and anything else he seemed potentially relevant were placed, and shuffled, and rearranged, the electronic allowed him to then created another piece that fitted and print it out to then be included in the greater scheme of things.
The magnetic boards were covered in a combination of pictures, newspaper clippings, pictures of redacted reports, and the handwritten notes Radek had made when in conversation with different people he'd come across. This conglomeration of pieces were crisscrossed with thin ribbons of different colours, binding it into a pattern that was at the moment still abstract to the uninitiated, but more meaningful to those who might understand that the world was more than the basic few dimensions most who walked from one day to the next without question would ever want to know.
"Sakra, musím si dát kávu!" He made his way to the kitchen to make a fresh pot, the rattle of the beans landing in the grinder a familiar and centering sound.
James parked and walked up to the house with a confused look on his face. He stood at the front door, finger hovering over the bell, and finally moved to ring it. While he waited, he took a few slow steps backward and looked at the expansive front of Radek’s house. The landscaping might have changed in ten years, but he had the feeling he had been there before.
He held onto the strap of his bag, a messenger style he preferred over his father’s old portmanteau. James’ hair was longer and pushed straight back, his shoulders broader, his truck in more frequent use than his motorcycle, and there were a few more lines on his face at thirty-seven, but the serious pair of brown eyes was the same. He looked back towards the street and a memory surfaced of coming to this house with his father.
For whatever reason, it made him smile at the symmetry of things. He’d fixed Radek’s car, watched him get stabbed in a parking lot, briefly spoken to him during a meeting at the Blindeye diner, and it never hit him, until now, that they met before.
The water was still trickling through the slightly battered percolator sitting on the stove top when the front door bell sounded. Radek pushed his glasses up his nose and reached for another cup to add to the tray he'd prepared before heading to answer the front door.
He'd contacted James to ask him more details on the events he'd outlined previously at the diner and invited him to visit, to take a look at what Radek had pulled together so far. He'd only just started into the files the young FBI agent had provided, but already there was an interesting array of information about events from the sources at the university library, the various newspaper archives, and his own hunting through sites on the internet. But those had all needed a good dose of salt and he again had been amazed at what some people will try and make of events that are without explanation in the everyday world.
A quick glance through the stained glass panel surrounds of the ancient door confirmed it was the man he'd been expecting, and the large brass handle turned, allowing the heavy, but well-balanced door to swing open.
"James, so good of you to come, please, enter, would you like some coffee? I've just brewed a fresh pot of an extremely good roast I have bought from a wonderful supplier in…" The immortal stopped, peered at James over his glasses a little more closely, the recognition slowly dawning in his eyes in the more familiar surroundings.
"Of course! This explains it!" he exclaimed, pulling the door wider with no small amount of excitement. "How did I not know, you are James, son of Sam!" He pushed his glasses back up his nose and smiled. "Suscipit etiam patriae, amicis."
"Gratias ago." James smiled and stepped across the threshold of Radek’s front entry. If memory served, he’d been in a less than stellar mood on his last visit, but he couldn’t remember why. “I’ll try to have less attitude this time,” James said and offered his hand to Radek in greeting.
He had a look around the room, which had undergone some revisions since the last time he was there, in the natural way of people to accumulate things. Or maybe they’d been packed up last time. He remembered a couple of empty cabinets in another part of the house, a sword with a strange inscription. Something about immortality, which took on a whole new meaning after he watched Radek’s stomach stitch itself back together.
“Uh, coffee would be great,” James said, remembering Radek had been in the middle of a question.
“Good, good, come through, I have just set it out, we can take it to the training room, where I have been working,” he said, closing the door behind James then leading him off into the kitchen, collecting the tray and carrying it through the dining room, across the hall and through the study and into the training room. The whole time he was reciting some of the items he’d discovered, “and I’m still to go through all the reports from the archives of the FBI. The young special agent has them down in Searchlight, so I go down there and sort through, take photos of what looks relevant and come back. I have still many to go through.”
In the training room, against the far wall, Radek had two tables, each holding boxes of files and photos, news cuttings and articles, one table was the sorted, the other were partly sorted and still to be finished. The whiteboards were against the closed cabinets on the left at the far end of the room, leaving room still for Radek to continue his training each morning.
He placed the tray on a clear space on the table, picked up the percolator pot and turned to James. “Do you need milk, or sugar with your coffee?”
James had come through the house slower than Radek, long-legged but patient, getting a feel for the place. The study was familiar to him, but the training room was enough to stop him in the doorway, eyes taking in the wealth of papers on the display boards, the electronic board with notes, box after box containing the paper trail of Clark County’s long, bizarre history. He gave a low whistle and lifted the strap of his bag over his head. “Looks like you’ve been busy.” The magic user set his things on the floor by the table and did a three-sixty. Radek’s immersion into research was night and day from James’ typical surroundings: if it wasn’t an auto shop that smelled of motor oil, it was old books with yellow pages, dust motes, papers with the unidentified stains and wax marks, crushed remnants of long-dead plants, odd divination tools and charged objects, all the vestiges of other witches’ rituals.
“Black is fine,” he said, pulling his eyes away from a spot on a map that he knew well, only long enough to answer Radek’s question. He wandered up to the clippings, arms crossed, and studied a black and white photo with a sigil painted on a rock. His shoulders twitched with a chuckle. “I see they found that.”
Every piece of crockery and cutlery in Radek's home was handmade, from the finest bone china and porcelain in the dining room cabinets to the everyday sets he used all the time. Cups thrown on a wheel some centuries earlier had not survived the ravages of use over time, so he had developed an eclectic collection of mugs and cups, none of which had seen the insides of a chain store, but had been crafted by hands, some skilled, some gathering experience in their chosen art. The cup he handed James was from one of the more skilled artisans, the smooth, reflective glaze a testament to an excellent firing. The cup he himself sipped from displayed a splattering of dark spots in the light blue glaze, looking almost like pale blue sky with reverse stars scattered across it.
When James commented Radek looked across at the photo as he returned the pot to the tray. "You know that?" he asked as he handed James the cup, peering at James across the tops of his glasses before pushing them back up and looking down at the photo.
“Yeah. That’s one of mine.” James pushed up his t-shirt sleeve and showed him an older tattoo on the outside of his arm, up near the shoulder. The ink had faded from black to dark gray, time and exposure to the sun having worn at it, but the markings were the same. It was also engraved on a pendant that he’d given to Celeste. “It’s protective. That rock,” he gestured to the photo, “That’s outside Gypsum Cave, about fifteen miles outside of Las Vegas, over by Nellis Air Force Base. About a quarter mile east of that, there’s an active mine. Gypsum, anhydrite, and uranium,” James raised his eyebrows, “which the bureau of land management says isn’t viable, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.”
He lowered his sleeve and took the cup of coffee from Radek.
“This was about twelve years ago. Me and Sam kept hearing people talk about activity around that area, from the cave all the way up to the mine. Kids would go caving with cans of spray paint and come back with these wild stories about what they heard and saw. Animals were turning up dead around the entrance. The airmen were complaining about their instrument systems when they flew into Nellis from the northeast side. Some of the miners got sick. I went out there a couple times, didn’t see anything, but the whole area was,” he searched for the right word, “charged, like something had been there. Maybe not a physical thing you can touch, but a presence, or energy from somewhere else. I think they told people the miners hit a pocket of toxic gas.” James shook his head. “I put those up.”
Radek’s head nodded as he listened intently, and as James talked he headed to the electronic whiteboard and pressed a button. The surface started to scroll to the left and a new surface appeared, this one holding a large map of Clark County, with an inset of the southern part of the state of Nevada, both with markings. The map already had some markings on it including where Radek had found petroglyphs with unusual engravings, locations where he’d confirmed through two or more sources an unexplained event or evidence of inexplicable goings on, but nothing to the north of the city, where the base was located.
He gestured to James to come over as he picked up a marker pen from the tray at the base of the screen, waving it in a circle above the area on the map of the county showing Nellis Air Force Base. “Can you add in where this cave is? Maybe mark where you placed the protections if you can recall?” His head tilted back a little as he studied the map area more closely, looking for landmarks that may help.
“Yeah.” James passed the coffee into his left hand and took the pen. He found his way back to Lake Mead Boulevard, traced northeast along an access road, and put an X over Gypsum Cave, another by the Gypsum Cave Mine and the Schumaker Gypsum Mine. Each mark identified an access point into the bedrock. When he was done, he handed the pen back to Radek and backed away from the map, eyeing the other locations Radek had identified. The ones he recognized, he swept past. The ones he didn’t, he made a mental note of.
He drank some of the hot coffee. “Any closer to solving the mystery?” James set the cup on the table. “I guess we ought to figure it out before pink clouds start forming over the Stratosphere towers.”
Radek shook his head after taking a sip from his coffee and replacing it on the tray as he started pointing out locations in connection with the timeline.
"So as you can see there is no real correlation between events and times, or even locations," he said at the finish of his extended monologue. He replaced the marker pen he'd been using as a pointer into the tray of the electronic whiteboard and folded his arms across his chest, shaking his head and staring at the boards. "Other than the most of them are happening in the area of the Clark County," he added, correcting his statement. He looked across at the boxes of files he was still to sort through and shrugged. "I have still to finish with all these, plus the ones from the FBI, so maybe there will be something come from those that can shed the light," he sighed, picking up his coffee and taking another mouthful.
James had toured the artifacts of Radek’s research with his arms crossed, tossing in observations when he had them. It didn’t differ much from what they established at the Blindeye: at least one-hundred-fifty years of recorded activity, going back to the gold rush, flare-ups with no recognizable pattern. The difference was the amount of material Radek had assembled in one place instead of it being scattershot across police and FBI files, university and media archives, journals in private collections, and stories handed down over generations. “Some of what’s been happening seems to be native to the area,” he said, pointing to a piece of land in Sloan Canyon that had been considered a place of power for a long time. “Some of it looks imported. Things came to the area because of what was here. Like vampires, or this.” He pointed to an account of creatures coming out of the Homestake mine. “This has witchcraft written all over it.”
James turned away from the board. “If we can’t figure out the correlation, we can start looking for frequency, see if it’s happening more often or getting worse.” He leaned against the table, then rubbed his eyes, reconsidering. “I dunno. The more influx into the area, the more likely things are to pop off, no matter what kind of energy spikes we’re dealing with. There’s been a lot of influx, just in the last year or two, and not all of it’s bad.”
Radek nodded his agreement and sighed softly. “All these events, so many, and yet nothing like a pattern,” he mused, one arm folded across his body, hand cupping the elbow of the other, that forefinger and thumb supporting his chin as he stared again at the timeline. “Maybe that is the thing that is what we find,” he suggested, a frown of concentration forming on his face as he paced the length of the timeline to come to a stop in front of the large map. “Maybe there is nothing about the timings of these things, maybe it is just that it’s all here, in this one county area,” he continued, his free hand now indicating Clark County with a circular wave across the area. “My friend in the FBI, he has indicated that there is no such activity of this magnitude or volume anywhere else in this country.” He shrugged his shoulders lightly as he added, “it’s why he sent me this local agent’s name and contact and asked her to assist me. It is the location that is the anomaly, and given it’s not appearing to be linked to any ley lines or other sources of energy, there must be something else to have happened, or to be the cause, or reason for all this.” This time he looked at the timeline, and all the events that were now recorded along the boards.
James raised his eyebrows. “I’m looking forward to the part where we stumble across a convenient book of ancient prophecies,” he said, pushing away from the table. “It’s too bad Phanuel’s bridges are burned, but if they weren’t, she wouldn’t be here. I doubt the Emissary’s going to clue us in, if she knows.” He finished his cup of coffee, swallowing and setting it on the tray. “I think it’s fair to say people are drawn to it. If it turns out it’s by design, you have to wonder whether it’s doing something to us, or we’re doing something for it.” He didn’t have anything else useful to add, so he found himself sliding his hands into the pockets of his jeans.
Radek noted with interest the comment about Phanuel, having been wanting to speak with her for many weeks and not being able to get in touch with her. "Do you have contact with her?" he asked, then quickly clarified, "Phanuel, that is. I have another matter I have wanted to consult with her about for some weeks, but I have no way to contact her. And that reminds me, the other matter of why I wanted to see you and your father, I would like for you to… reinforce, or perhaps strengthen the protection you have originally done. This Emissary is one I do not want to have decide to visit my home, and Derek has told me of some of her abilities such as walking through walls." Radek gave an involuntary shudder at the mention of her, and recalling the pieces of the dagger he had secured in the pool house.
James nodded. “Phanuel just got her first cell phone,” he said. “Whether she knows how to use it is another thing. Celeste was helping her figure it out in the shop. I’ll give you the number.” He looked in the vague direction of the pool house, where he and Sam put up wards last time, and thought about the next request. “I can do some wards, similar to what I have at the shop. Fair warning, they need to be a lot stronger than what Sam put up last time. But if she wants to talk to you bad enough, she'll probably wait until you leave the house. I think the best defense is to not have anything on your conscience for her to exploit.”
“Not to have anything on one’s conscience. Is that even possible in this day?” Radek asked with a wry smile. “I would appreciate the protections on the estate, and I have recently upgraded my security system, not that it will be of much help against such a being, but at least it will protect from any of her… acolytes, or disciples, or whatever they are,” he added.
The protections on his own house hadn’t been strong enough to completely prevent intrusion, but James had made some adjustments in that time. Nothing was foolproof, but he could make it hard as hell to get into the estate. What happened when Radek left the place was another problem. The bag he’d brought had everything James needed. It was a big piece of property and taking care of it would require some time, so it was best to get going on it. He picked up the bag. “Alright. Let’s get started.”