October 2025 #3
“I mean, we don’t have home movies of Kola being born, but we have him meeting the extended Kage family for the first time and everyone kissing and hugging him. His grandmother rocking him to sleep, riding around on Mr. Kage’s shoulders, his bike and the great ramp incident from third grade.”
I shook my head. “Your mother and I are still not over that, you understand.”
“It just needed to be longer,” Harper assured me.
The horror of a ramp from roof to garage, that was only the width of a tire, could still wake me up out of a dead sleep.
“Yes, dear,” I placated him.
His eyes narrowed. “Jake’s designs always work. You people just don’t have his vision.”
“Just go on,” I ordered him.
“It’s not really about Kola at all,” he said with a shrug. “It’s about them seeing that you and Mr. Kage are just like them.”
I was suddenly overwhelmed.
“And Kola and Finn, being together, getting married, raising kids, buying a house, is going to look the same as everyone else. I mean, when it comes right down to it, Kola and Finn are watching Netflix on Saturday night just like everyone else.”
“I love that,” I whispered.
He hugged me after that.
Of course, Finn’s parents went right back to thinking we were crazy people when Hannah started talking about her Samhain candles. The witch thing really didn’t sit well with Finn’s mother.
Now, a while ago, I explained to all of you about Sodalite, which is an organization that Aja, Dylan, and I are a part of.
Basically, we move women, and sometimes their children with them, out of dangerous situations.
We basically are told where to pick someone up and where to take them so they will be safe.
I don’t keep people in my home, I can’t because of Sam, not because he would ever say no, but he’s in law enforcement and it would be a mess.
This is why I solely do transport. But what’s happened, because of the presence of ICE agents now in Chicago, is that we could be stopped for any contrived reason, only to find out that Mrs. Smith and her child are missing and must be returned to wherever.
If identities were checked, in theory, a woman could be returned to her abuser.
The whole thing has an extra added component of danger now, and last Thursday night I found myself driving down Wacker at a good clip to try and outmaneuver agents that had seen us exit a building at nine at night and asked for ID.
I didn’t stop, instead got my charges in the car, a woman and her two little boys, and both Aja and Dylan soothed them. When the agents ran up to my van, three in all, I simply told them I had to go several times, and when the first one threatened to break my window, I pulled away from the curb.
“Okay, I think it’s fine,” Aja said from the passenger seat.
“It’s not fine,” Dylan informed her. “They’re following us. Do you not hear the siren and see the lights?”
“It could be a mistake,” I assured her as the SUV tried to come up alongside my minivan. I mean really, the optics were absurd.
“Please,” the woman said from the very back seat where she was clutching her children. “I can’t go back to him. He’ll kill me.”
I had no intention of letting that happen, but by the same token, I wasn’t completely sure what I was going to do.
When I saw the turn-off for Wacker, and then Lower Wacker, I knew I was in good shape. Lower Wacker was the way to go.
“Where are we?” the distraught woman asked. She and her boys had come in from Green Bay and were making their way west.
“In a black hole,” Dylan answered.
Once we lost them, which was easy—thankfully they weren’t from Chicago—I made my way up from the depths and continued toward Oak Lawn, which was where the drop-off was. It was so quiet in the car, that when the woman said thank you, I jolted a bit.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“It’s not you, it’s me,” I teased her, and it was good to hear her laugh even with all the cuts and bruises on her face.
Of course, because I’m not that lucky, on the way back to have breakfast, an unidentified SUV flashed lights at us and told us to pull over.
Because there was nothing on it, no markings, just like before, I didn’t stop.
Aja used my phone and called Sam, because we weren’t anywhere near anyplace we could ditch them.
“I just got home,” he grumbled, as he’d been working late. “Where are you?”
“Hi, Sam,” Aja greeted him. “How are you?”
I turned and looked at her, and Dylan smacked her in the arm from the back seat.
“Oww, what?”
“This is not time for pleasantries,” Dylan snarled at her. “We’re being chased.”
“What’d she say?” Sam asked.
I cleared my throat. “So someone, and I’m not sure who, chased us earlier, but we were near Wacker, and so I—”
“I’m sorry, what?”
Sam Kage could really get his voice to carry, even over a phone line, when he needed to.
“We were transporting others at the time and couldn’t stop,” I answered.
“Absolutely could not stop,” Aja seconded.
“There was no goddamn way,” Dylan agreed.
“And you lost whoever was chasing you underground but now find yourself chased by someone else?”
“That’s correct,” Aja praised him.
“I need you all to drive down to my office, now, and I will meet you there.”
“You know, the sound of these sirens really do sort of fade into the background after a bit, don’t they,” Aja observed.
“I think Aja was made for a life of crime,” Dylan commented. “Also, may I say, you have yet to run a red light, even with people chasing you. It’s impressive.”
“Thank you,” I said to Dylan, about to turn my head and smile at her but then thinking better of it.
“If you just got home, how are you going to meet us downtown?”
“Because I’m going with lights and sirens,” he growled at me. “And in the meantime, Ian and Eli are there at the office, so just get there, all right!”
“Sam, it’ll be okay,” I soothed him. “We—”
“I don’t think you remotely understand how crazy it is out here,” Sam barked at me. “You need to be more concerned about yourself and your friends!”
“Sam,” Aja said gently, “you know I understand risks more than—”
“I know you’ve had challenges I can’t begin to understand all your life,” Sam agreed.
“But at the moment, you’re placing yourself in even more danger.
And I know it’s for a great reason, but if you were being chased by real cops and not wannabe ones, you could be run off the road and everything else. ”
“Sam—”
“Your husband is going to have an aneurysm,” he told her.
“Perhaps we might not mention this to—oh!” Aja gasped.
“What oh? Why oh?”
“We got cut off,” Dylan explained to Sam, “but Jory took a turn down an alley and—holy shit, that guy’s not gonna move.”
“Take a left,” Aja ordered. “I know where we are.”
After nearly taking out several trash cans, I did as directed and took the turn, which put us in a parking lot shared by three different apartment buildings.
“Sam, you would be impressed with Jory’s driving.”
“No, I would not!”
“But really, in a minivan, outmaneuvering not one but two SUVs now, it’s pretty good,” Dylan assured me. “Keep it up.”
“Why aren’t any of you freaking out?” Sam nearly yelled.
“Well, we had a much closer call up in Parkridge that time,” Aja told him. “There were a lot of guys chasing us.”
“And we were all running,” Dylan chimed in. “And two of those guys had guns.”
“But everyone knows you can’t actually hit a moving target,” Aja said with conviction. “That only happens in the movies.”
There was silence.
“Did we lose him?” Dylan asked.
“No,” I whispered. “He’s thinking about what you just said.”
“Oh…crap,” Aja moaned, realization hitting her.
“You’ll be lucky if any of you ever leave the house alone again. Ever!”
“Sam, I know you worry, but really, nothing has ever—”
“No, no,” I rushed out. “Don’t do that. He has a hundred different scenarios in his head.”
“Cross this street and go into the parking structure,” Dylan told me. “There’s another way out, but not everyone knows.”
With now two unmarked SUVs following us, when I turned in, went up three floors fast, parked, and we all got down, I was really surprised when the two vehicles blew by us.
Sitting up, we looked around.
“That was a total movie maneuver,” Dylan gasped, “I can’t believe that actually worked.”
“Now get us out,” Aja suggested. “But fly casual.”
“Nice with the Star Wars quote,” Dylan said with a chuckle.
“I’m going to murder you all myself,” Sam yelled.
I had no doubt he would, but at the moment, I was slowly driving down to the side exit Dylan knew about.
Once we were back out on the street, I stayed with traffic and made it to the federal building.
I got us parked, and it was good to breathe, because now that we were standing on the sidewalk, I started shaking.
“You were great,” Aja soothed me, rubbing my back as I bent over.
At that moment, the two unmarked SUVs that had been chasing us pulled up at the same time that Ian and Eli came jogging toward us with some others I didn’t know.
One of the men reached for Dylan, and I straightened up and grabbed her, yanking her in tight against me.
“On your knees!” the guy yelled as Ian stepped between us.
“These people are wanted and—”
“We all have our badges out, because I know you ICE guys get confused and arrest federal marshals sometimes.”
Fucking Ian. He had to go and bait the bad guys.
“You’re interfering with—”
“Oh fuck off,” Eli snapped, which was so wildly unlike him, I stared. “I’m so sick of you pricks being here I could puke.”
Ian’s face, as he looked at Eli, was the best thing I’d seen in a while. He was both surprised and amused.
“If you don’t stand down—”
“Back off,” Ian ordered him. “You’re ICE, and I know that because you’re all wearing masks, you won’t show your faces, and you have no badge to show me.”
“Also, there are remnants of glitter on you,” Eli pointed out. “That’s like herpes, man. That shit is never coming out.”
Another guy tried to take hold of Aja, and one of the marshals, a woman, shoved him back so hard he almost stumbled.
“Do not touch her,” she warned, and her tone brooked no protest.
“They didn’t stop for us,” the guy complained to Ian.
“You have an unmarked vehicle. Why would they? You could have been anyone. How would they know?”
“We—”
“And now that we’ve determined that you’re not CPD, and the only thing they’re guilty of is running some red lights, I—”
“I didn’t run any red lights,” I assured Ian.
“Really?” Eli asked me.
I nodded.
He did a slow pan to the ICE agents. “Get off our lawn.”
“There’s no lawn here,” one of the other guys said.
The guy in front groaned, but suddenly Ian’s smile was both evil and big.
“You should run before our boss gets here, because you know how he feels about you guys. There was a press conference where he said he would support CPD and the FBI in taking down dangerous fugitives wanted for violent offenses but stands with the city of Chicago in the protection of all our citizens.”
“Yeah, but immigrants are—”
“Please don’t make me give you a lesson about Native Americans and who is and isn’t actually an immigrant. I’m tired, it’s late, so just walk away.”
“We—”
“Nothing’s going to change here,” Eli told him. “Whatever you think is going to happen is not. So go before I send someone upstairs for the glitter gun.”
“We have rainbow,” the marshal, Lopez, I remembered, told them.
There was more posturing, and one of the agents ordered Lopez to show him her ID.
She scoffed, one of the men took a step forward, and that was it. Ian put him on the ground so fast that no one even reacted for a moment.
“You have threatened a federal agent and will be taken into custody.”
“Wait,” the first man said, just as we all heard squealing tires to the side of us, lights flashing, and suddenly there was Sam, striding toward us, breathing fire.
“Get the fuck away from my building now!” he roared, and that was it.
The man on the ground scrambled away, because Ian allowed that, and the others basically turned tail and ran.
Sam had been clear about what the marshals would and would not do when he stood with the governor and the mayor and the superintendent of police.
The marshals were about community inclusion and protection of all, nothing else.
“Thank you,” I said to Ian and Eli and everyone else as Sam reached us.
Both Aja and Dylan echoed my words.
Grabbing me, Sam hugged me tight, kissed my forehead, and then held me out to arm’s length, checking for any injury. Next was Aja, and finally Dylan. He then directed Ian to go upstairs and write up a quick report of the incident, as well as Eli.
“I’m so tired of all this,” Eli told his boss.
“We can only stay true to our purpose and protect everyone we can while still doing our jobs,” Sam told him. “And thwart the forces of evil at every opportunity.”
He thanked all his people, we all shook hands, and then the three of us were alone with Sam, who was breathing in through his nose.
“In our defense—” Aja began.
“I know. You’re doing good deeds, but we will ratify how you do what you do starting now.”
“Yes,” I agreed, smiling at him.
“Don’t smile at me. We’re all going to my house now to talk. Chris and Dane are meeting us there.”
Aja gasped.
Dylan’s color washed right out of her face.
“Oh, Sam,” I said softly, patting his bicep. “Do we think that’s really necessary for—”
“I do,” he said, and his voice was hard and flat. “I truly do.”
Clearly, I was not going to soothe him out of his mood. It was going to be a long night.
That’s it, all. Have a lovely rest of October. I’ll tell you all about Halloween in November. I hope your lives are gentle and uneventful until we chat again.