Part Two – from the diary of Angela Clemens
No one knows what they want to do when they are fresh out of high school, wide-eyed and wet behind the ears. They have a vague impression of their very near future: Dorm rooms, all-night cramming sessions, rowdy parties, quiet mornings-after in the library, meeting new people, maybe finding a best friend, maybe finding a soul mate.
I didn’t know what I wanted either. I had no idea what to choose. In the end, it didn’t matter. Fate chose for me. And fifteen years after that decision, I found myself kneeling next to one of my trainees to give him instruction.
“Remember what the dossier instructed?” I nodded my head at the sniper rifle the young man in front of me was staring down. He had one eye closed, but when I spoke, he opened it and straightened a little to settle both eyes on me. He was on his belly and elbows, so straightening wasn’t easy. He managed, though.
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s a member of a gang in a territory where a number of rogue werewolf victims have turned up cold.”
I nodded. “So what does that mean?”
He thought for a moment, glanced at the gun’s scope, then back at me. “We need more information.”
“Exactly,” I told him. “Just knee-cap him. We don’t want him dead; we need him alive.”
The kid, a twenty-two year old from Indiana, thought fast. “What makes you think I wasn’t going to wound him?” There was no malice in his tone, only sheer curiosity.
I smiled knowingly. I’d learned long, long ago to gauge such things.
“Right,” he said, swallowing hard and blushing a little. “Of course. You can tell.” Then he shrugged, which was also hard to do in his position. “Fine, you got me. I was aiming deadly.”
I gave his shoulder a reassuring pat and straightened, coming to my feet again. “Don’t let it rattle you. That’s why we’re here.”
The area was a marked training facility for the Vega warden clan. It was constructed out of seven underground racquetball courts, strung together with their adjoining walls knocked out. Support beams had replaced them, opening the area up to what felt like a virtual airfield underground.
Right now there were eight new members on that field, five of them running 3D simulations, including Mark. Mark was the sniper in training, and aptly named I might add. The other three were younger and still in basics.
I turned from Mark to a much younger recruit behind me, around three meters away. She was kneeling in front of a cast iron stove. The stove’s piping ran all the way up to the ceiling and disappeared in shadow. It was functional, but the stove was used for training purposes only.
The girl, an eleven-year-old named Annabelle, was struggling, and I could tell she was becoming impatient. I moved to join her, but was intercepted by Caleb, my training assistant. He simply blocked my path and caught my eye. “Gabriel just point blank asked me via text whether you were still here training. I’m pretty sure he thinks you’ve been here long enough.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him ‘no.’ That you’d left already.” He smiled a wry smile, shrugging.
I was admittedly proud of Caleb. Standing up to Gabriel, much less lying to him, was risky. I felt honored that Cal would do it for me. But I also felt worried. Caleb would catch hellfire if he was caught.
I ran a hand through my hair and nodded. “I’ll finish quickly and head out.” Just in case.
Caleb nodded, no doubt grateful.
I turned and knelt beside Annabelle as Caleb left me to return to supervising other trainees. I glanced at the stove to assess it. Once I had, I turned my attention back to her. She looked up at me with big eyes, waiting.
“It seems to be giving you a hard time,” I said gently.
She looked over at me, then quickly glanced away. Most young recruits behaved this way toward me, a product of my high ranking in the clan. A lot of them had even been treated to stories of my warden exploits.
No doubt Caleb’s doing. The son-of-a-bitch liked to brag way too much.
I glanced over my shoulder at the brown-haired man helping someone with a fighting stance. He looked up as if he felt my attention, and grinned at me. I shook my head and returned my attention to Annabelle.
“You know,” I started conversationally as I sat down cross-legged beside her to put her at ease. “It took me thirty-one tries to light my first fire.”
Annabelle blinked, clearly surprised. She turned wide eyes on me.
“No lie,” I assured her. It was true. Of course, my first fire hadn’t been during a training exercise, but during the middle of a rainstorm, and I was slowly freezing to death. Long story.
But Annabelle seemed to contemplate my confession a little, then sighed heavily. I noticed her once-full box of matches was almost empty. We always used matches in training rather than lighters just to make things more difficult, the way marathon runners trained at high altitudes.
According to the box in her hands, Annabelle had three tries left to get the fire going. The discarded burned-up match sticks lay in mocking evidence all around her.
“Okay,” she said, and a touch of her confidence and strength was returning, giving me a hint of the reason she’d been chosen to join as a warden in the first place. “So what the hell am I doing wrong?”
Straight-forward language was the norm for Vega clan members, and probably for most wardens in general despite age. The crap they had to deal with as wardens, and the crap they’d most likely dealt with that had led them to being wardens in the first place was just too intense for anything but down to earth behavior, and that included speech.
I studied the fire. I’d noticed what was wrong with it at first glance of course, but I didn’t want her reminded of that and I wasn’t going to make it easy for her. No one learned that way. Instead I asked, “Well, what steps did you take?”
She pursed her lips, then responded. “All of them. I loosely crumpled the paper – using the monopoly money and game pads from those board games over there because it was all I had.” She gestured to the props I’d left for her to utilize to her best abilities.
I nodded. “Go on.”
“Then on top of that, I tore up the boards themselves, making sure the edges were thin enough to catch fire easily. I put them on top of the paper as kindling.”
I nodded again.
She went on. “Then I grabbed the cinnamon scented pinecones from that centerpiece and put them on top for thicker kindling.” She looked at me as if checking to see if she’d done good so far. But I kept my face impassive. So she went on with a little less confidence. “I decided to leave off anything big until I’d made sure the fire caught.”
I waited a moment, then asked, “So, did the fire light?”
“It always lights, but then it goes out! And I’m blowing really gently!”
“Why do you think it might be going out, then?”
“I have no stupid idea.”
I smiled patiently. “Let’s remember our chemistry for a second. What does fire need to continue to burn?”
She shrugged, but she knew better by now than to assume there wasn’t a good reason I was asking her something. There was always a good reason. “Fuel and oxygen,” she replied.
I stared at her. Then I looked down at the cast iron stove. Underneath the paper she’d crinkled – and singed with her unsuccessful attempts – was a thick pile of ash from previous fires.
Annabelle looked from me to the stove, trying to pick out what I was staring at. A beat passed before her entire body straightened, and her cheeks flushed pink. “Oh! Crap!” She laughed at herself. “I forgot to clean out the ash first.”
“And what does that mean?” I asked, bringing her home.
“If I try to start a fire on top of a bunch of ash, no air can flow beneath the flame, and the fire will suffocate and go out.”
I grinned. “Nice,” I told her, winking. “Now you’ve got three tries left, but something tells me you’ll only need one.”
She beamed at me. “Damn straight,” she muttered, biting her lip and turning her fierce concentration on the fire. I stood and left her to her work, scanning the other trainees.
There were a number of reasons people could find themselves in a warden clan, training to become a police officer of the supernatural world. Sometimes you just happened to see something. Sometimes you were brought in by someone else. But most of the time, it was because that supernatural world took something from you. And usually that something was your entire life.
That was the case with Annabelle, whose parents had been taken from her by the supernatural powers that be at the age of eight. She’d been rescued on the verge of death and raised by the Vega clan ever since.
Watching Annabelle struggle was hard sometimes. I knew that she was capable of amazing things. The kid had a knock-out IQ and a knack for puzzles, but there were road blocks in her head – walls she’d thrown up to protect herself. From what she’d seen. From what she knew.
It reminded me of things. And I didn’t need any reminders.
With a last quick scan to make sure everyone was on track with their lessons, I glanced over my shoulder at Caleb, who was still standing to the side, waiting to take over if I needed him to. I nodded at him. He nodded back, grinned that rakish grin again that he was so good at, and strode forward to take my place at center field.
I left the training grounds with a grim determination settling over me. There were only two things that could bring me out of the mood I was quite suddenly in: Beer and bullets. Beer was out of the question; I had to go to my own training after this, and I needed to be stone-cold sober for that.
So I headed to the warden shooting range, pulling my gun from its holster at my back as I strode through the exit. “I’ll be next door!” I shouted over my shoulder.
It was a split second before Caleb replied, a little too smugly for my tastes, “I know!”