Demon Accords 05.5: Executable Read online

“Alright. Get your gear on. It’s time to see what you can do.”

  We beat on each other for twenty minutes, neither talking, each focused on the other. After a particularly brutal exchange, we both pulled away, breathing hard, which was odd. Usually, the timer on the wall would let us know when each bout was over. Krav Maga is all about survival, about inflicting damage on a bigger, faster, stronger opponent. Constant pressure, always moving forward through your opponent, is one of the base principles. So when we pulled back as if by unspoken agreement, it was unusual.

  Levi studied me for a moment, then took off his headgear and grabbed a towel to wipe his face.

  “What’s up?” I asked him. I’ve known Levi since he arrived in town seven years earlier. He came in Rowan West one day, ate lunch, browsed the shop, and struck up a conversation with my aunt. He had travelled a lot—actually still did for his book business—and he was very familiar with Ireland and had been there recently. My aunt, desperate for news of her homeland, had talked about Eire with him for hours. He came back the next day for dinner, and the day after that. He’d been in my life ever since. I knew Levi was ex-military, but I didn’t know whose military he’d served in. His English was without accent and he was very much a student of the world. He spoke French, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and Farsi as well as a smattering of Chinese. The Krav Maga training had been his suggestion to my aunt; a channel for my youthful energy and frustration. I was his first student, the studio and classes had come several years after I had started to train.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, continuing to strip off his protective padding, effectively signaling that we were done.

  “You were edgy all through the class. Even the kids picked up on it. And your sparring seemed extra aggressive. What’s going on?”

  He paused, not answering, so I prodded some more. Sometimes with Levi, it takes a few good jabs to get under his guard. “You’ve had some kind of premonition, haven’t you?”

  Levi had been fascinated with my family’s particular skill set since his first day in Rowan West and his perusal of the New Age and occult paraphernalia in the shop. It took a few months, but he gradually built up the conversation about the supernatural world to the point where finally he asked outright if we were witches. By that time he’d earned enough of my aunt’s hoarded trust to warrant a small measure of the truth. But his fascination was personal; it seemed Levi had a bit of the Sight himself. He got powerful premonitions about things and people. Powerful in that they made him nauseous at times. But they were mostly vague, unfocused. Aunt Ash had tutored him a bit, which had helped, but ultimately, he just wasn’t strong enough to get more than a few feelings about events. He claimed it had been enough to save him on more than one occasion, several times in combat and several more times when he had strayed too close to the workings of organized crime while in pursuit of some rare and expensive book.

  Now he stared at me, eyes slightly unfocused, before sighing in frustration. “Yes,” he admitted.

  “And it’s about me, isn’t it?” I asked, following a hunch of my own.

  His slate gray eyes widened for a second before narrowing. “Yes, some.”

  “Does it involve a girl?” I asked.

  Now he looked really surprised, eyebrows shooting straight up. The answer was on his face.

  “New girl moved to town. She’s kinda my friend. Aunt Ash says we have to help her,” I explained.

  “Tell me,” he directed. I thought about it. Levi was pretty much family. He ate dinner with us at least once a week, he was the only male adult figure in my life, and he attended all of our Solstice and Equinox ceremonies. So I filled him in on the newcomers and Aunt Ash’s reading. When I finished, he stared at me for a few moments.

  “So what was your premonition?” I asked.

  He was still thinking things through, so his answer was a little slow in coming. “I keep seeing you fighting for your life. I can’t see your opponents, but I do get flashes of a girl with you. It’s not much, but it’s strong,” he said. “Now that you tell me your aunt’s reading, it just makes me more certain than ever.”

  “You’re worried you haven’t trained me enough,” I guessed.

  “No such thing as training enough. But I just worry. Even the best-trained person can slip at the wrong time or not see something coming. Lady Luck can be the biggest bitch, especially in combat,” he answered, pointing for me to proceed him into the back room.

  I stepped through just ahead of him, then felt him move. Jumping forward three paces, I spun and faced him just in time to see him rushing at me with one of the rubber training knives. Instinctively, my right hand covered my neck as I leaned back and kicked at his leading knee. It was enough to knock him off balance and gave me time to grab a metal folding chair sitting near the bathroom door. Rushing forward, I used the four legs of the chair to trap him against the built-in wooden equipment shelves, his knife hand trapped alongside his body. One metal leg was pressed against his throat, forcing him to use his remaining hand to hold the leg from further movement. He studied our positions for a second, then grinned and nodded.

  “Good response, but try to let others go first; don’t let them get behind you.”

  Chapter 7 – Declan

  A Chittenden County Sheriff’s cruiser was parked in next to my aunt’s Prius in the parking area behind the restaurant, when I got home thirty minutes later. I entered our living quarters through the back, hanging my bookbag on a free spot on the row of hooks in our entryway-slash-mudroom. The hook to the left of mine held a police issue gunbelt with about twenty pounds of stuff on it, including a Glock pistol.

  The next room is our private kitchen, and a compact blonde woman wearing a deputy’s uniform was sitting at the kitchen table, polishing off a bowl of soup as I came in behind her. She swiveled slightly to glance at me as I slid past. “Hi Darci. Why aren’t you changed? Gotta go back out?” I asked.

  My aunt’s girlfriend nodded, short hair hardly moving as she slurped down the last of her soup.

  “A little shorthanded today, so I’m pulling an extra shift. At least it’ll be overtime, though,” she said. “How was Levi today?”

  “He seemed a bit intense tonight, at least when he was beating me up,” I said, absently rubbing my ribs where a baton had left its memory even through my padding.

  “Hmm. Maybe Ash should check up on him and see if he’s okay,” she wondered for a moment before getting to her feet and coming over to the sink. I was washing my hands.

  “Alrighty, gotta go kiddo,” she said, grabbing my chin and back of head in a no-nonsense grip so she could pull me down and plant a kiss on my cheek. I automatically scrunched away from her although I didn’t really mind the kiss. Just better to set my boundaries on parent surrogate displays of affection on general principals. I was already an outcast. If Darci or my aunt were spotted giving me a cheek or top-of-head kiss in public, I’d have to have a complete facial reconstruction and go into witness relocation. Oh wait, that wasn’t much different than how I lived now.

  Leaving her plate and cup on the table, the tough little deputy headed for the mudroom.

  “Hey, ya slob. I’m not your servant, ya know,” I yelled at her.

  She poked her head back in, her hands busy buckling on her gunbelt. “Really? Cause Ash said we got to work you like a slave till you move out,” she said with a grin.

  “I already did move out,” I replied.

  “The backyard doesn’t count, Hotshot,” she said, giving me a wave goodbye.

  I filled a bowl with the potato bacon soup I found on the stove, cut a big hunk of fresh Italian bread, and grabbed a cold Gatorade from the fridge.

  After a second bowl bit the dust, I picked up all the dishes, loaded them into the dishwasher, and picked up the kitchen. Darci was really good for my aunt, but she was kind of a slob.

  I figured my aunt was overseeing the dinner hour out front in the restaurant, so I grabbed a handful of oatmeal raisin cookies from the baker
y box on the counter and headed back outside to my lair.

  I didn’t have to go far, because just outside our back door was the end of a steel shipping container, although this one had a door embedded in it. Not just any door, but a compartment door from a Japanese car carrier ship, made of steel and complete with a heavy nautical latch.

  Inside the hatchway door, a soft light turned on as soon as my body heat was detected by a tiny motion sensor.

  The revealed interior was like no other container on Earth. Floored with bamboo and walled with barnwood, it was warm and inviting instead of cold and metallic. A row of small LED lights clicked on as I moved further into the space that was my room.

  The container had been left behind the restaurant when Aunt Ash and Mom had bought the property, and since it weighed the better part of nine thousand pounds, it had stayed right there while they got the business up and running.

  When I was thirteen, a local college professor had made a public plea for the donation of a container for a nationwide ecologically friendly home design contest that his class had wanted to enter. Aunt Ash had told him he could have it if he could move it. His budget for the contest was meager, and the final negotiations left the finished product as her property but with annual visits by each year’s class to study the third-place winner’s details. The rest of the year, it was my cool, teenage-guy pad.

  Part of what had made the container ideal was its placement on our property. One long wall faced south, and the class had installed high efficiency windows and sliding doors all along that side. That gave the entire living space a great view of the forest and the mountains that rose above it while collecting a boatload of passive solar heat. The original steel side was attached on giant hinges at the bottom and either lay flat as a deck or folded up during bad weather to protect the glass.

  Solar panels mounted on the roof pulled energy from the sun each day; the small trickle of power was stored in deep cycle batteries. Most of the lighting had been low-power twelve volt bulbs, but I had replaced them with the LEDs and installed the motion sensor welcome light myself. In addition to the lights, the batteries powered a set of speakers for my iPod, my laptop computer, and three strategically placed fans that cooled the space in the summer and recirculated warm air in the winter. The walls had been sprayed with a recycled insulation, then covered with old wood reclaimed from collapsed barns. I had a small bathroom with a tiny shower that could use solar-warmed water, or with the flip of a valve, an on-demand propane-powered water heater salvaged from a camping trailer. The container was roomy and cleverly designed to maximize space.

  The focal point of the long wall opposite the windows was a painting of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland. The artist had signed her name M. O’Carroll, the M standing for Maeve. My mother.

  The painting had its own pin lights directed on it, and I paused, as I usually did, to study it, wondering if I would ever get to visit Ireland. I completed my ritual by looking down at the framed photo on the end table below it.

  A woman with deep brown hair and bright blue eyes stared at the camera from inside the hood of a dark green cloak. Her face wasn’t classically beautiful like her auburn-haired sister, who stood beside to her in the next framed photo over, but rather, she was striking and exuded a kind of confident power. That wasn’t just the emotional impression of an orphaned son who never really knew his mother. Virtually every design class that had toured the container since it had been built had commented on the photo, and usually the painting, as well. My mother and Aunt Ash had fled Ireland a little more than eighteen years ago, losing themselves in the vastness of America, bringing little more than some clothes, a small but valuable collection of family heirloom jewelry, and a tiny life growing inside my mother.

  Evening ritual completed, I settled in at the tiny desk that folds down from the wall to start my homework. But this night, for some reason, I kept glancing at my mother’s photo, thinking of her flight from danger and what appeared to be a similar flight by the girl I had just met. Mom’s hadn’t ended well for her. Despite only knowing her a day, I hoped Sarah Caeco Williams didn’t share a similar fate.

  A knock sounded at the door.

  “Come on in,” I said, knowing who it likely was.

  My aunt poked her head through the doorway. ‘I dinna catch you at your supper, so I thought I’d pop out for a visit.”

  “Hi Aunt Ash. How’s the dinner crowd?”

  “Gann,” she said, which meant scarce in Gaelic. “But it is a Monday night.”

  Her Monday sounded like Munday. I love my aunt’s accent just as I love to obsess over all things Irish.

  “Aw, it might be possible to visit someday kiddo,” she said, picking up on my wistfulness. My aunt’s ability to read people in general is phenomenal. Her ability to read her own family is almost always dead accurate.

  “But tell me, how did school go today? Did ya see that new girl?”

  “Yeah. Like, all day long. Helped her find her locker. Saw her in Calc and English. She sat at my table at lunch, and she was in my gym class.”

  She looked at me for a moment, waiting, then made a rolling motion with her hand, telling me to keep going.

  “She’s different. Talks like a teacher most of the time, but then sometimes not.”

  “Is she a smarty then, is she?”

  “Oh yeah. She took a Calc quiz without a calculator and got almost a perfect score. But it’s more like she doesn’t understand a lot of common phrases, at least kid phrases. And sometimes, she sounds like Darci’s cop friends… a little. It’s weird. I called her name today and she didn’t respond, but when I used her middle name, Caeco, she snapped right around. And in gym, she was a big surprise. She had to borrow gym clothes from the coach. Came out looking like an Olympic athlete. Who is that sprinter you like to follow so much? The one from the U.K.?”

  “Jess Ennis?”

  “Yeah, she looks like her, all ripped. And can she jump! Holy shi… shoot. She jumped higher than Micah today. Slammed Trey right in the face.”

  My aunt was watching me carefully. Her head tilted slightly to one side. “How did she join your table?”

  “I waved her over. She wasn’t going to find anyplace very easily,” I answered.

  “And did she get on with your friends?”

  “Yeah, especially by the end of the day. Jonah was there when she bitch-smacked Trey, and we only lost by two points, so he thought it was the best gym class this year. Rory and Candace seem to be alright with her, too.”

  “I’ve done another reading on her and came up more of the same. She’s in trouble, both her and her mum. Like the trouble me and your own mum were in.”

  “She’s pregnant?” I asked.

  “No, ye daft boy! She’s got bad people after her, uncanny people. And…” She took a deep breath. “We’re to help her. Clear as crystal. I’ve only ever seen its like when I did a reading just before your mum and me had our spot of trouble. I dinnot pay as much attention to that reading as I should have. I won’t be repeating errors. So do what you can for her, if ya can.”

  “Aunt Ash, Levi was worried about me today. Said he’d had visions of me fighting alongside a girl, but he couldn’t see my enemies.”

  “Well, that’s to be considered then, isn’t it? Levi has a lot of experience, survived a lot of things. And by things, I mean the kind of thing and experience that we might encounter… uncanny things.”

  “You’ve always said that Levi only has a touch of Sight and no real Power—how has he survived?”

  “By being a step ahead. What is that Krav stuff yer always going on about? Disrupt their thoughts, keep them off balance, damage them? Is that it? Well, Levi is bloody brilliant at that stuff. He listens to his instincts, he pays attention to everything around him, and he always, always prepares. Weapons, distractions, defenses, escape routes, alternate routes, disguises, and the like.”

  “You make him sound like a master spy,” I observed.

  “Well, me boy
, he travels the world seeking valuable documents that people will go to great lengths to get their grubby hands on with no support but his own. Maybe he should be teaching the master spies, eh?”

  “When you say it like that, you might be right.”

  “Now, back to the girl. Are ye like to see her tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. I think she’ll sit with us at lunch.”

  “And she’s not so hard on the eyes, now is she?” she asked with a knowing smile.

  “She’s kinda cute,” I admitted. Let’s be honest—she was more than cute, but I wasn’t going to confess to that.

  “Hmmpf! I’ll leave ya to your work then,” she said, her smile broader than before. Damn witches. She kissed the top of my head then headed out, stopping to adjust my mother’s photo as she went. I waited till the door clanged shut, then tweaked the photo back my way so I could look over my shoulder and see it. Kinda like she was watching me do my homework.