Chapter 1
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S teele Romano slipped behind the trees and studied the massive property around him.
He’d left his SUV on the roadside that led to Terk’s castle, when that roadway had suddenly become impassable.
A thick impenetrable fog had him pulling off the road immediately, leaving his vehicle partially hidden in the trees.
Getting out and walking through the nearby woods— not coated in this weird fog—had been an instinct he couldn’t ignore.
He’d heard the call of Terk’s Beacon and had responded without giving himself a chance to question the urge.
He’d been traveling through Scotland at the time, just completing a private contract and needing some R&R.
So he turned his vehicle toward London, even as he’d tried to sort out what the Beacon’s call meant.
He couldn’t explain the impulse to follow the Beacon, the call that rang in his mind.
And yet it had been something almost ingrained deep in his soul and impossible to ignore.
He tried to convince himself that it was more out of curiosity than anything, but here he was, feeling both stupid for doing this but also unable to do otherwise.
In the far distance he saw the outline of what looked like a castle up ahead.
What the hell? But it was also surrounded by the same thick fog.
He laughed silently, sure his imagination was getting away from him.
Yet a second sharper glance at the castle discounted that.
Something was unworldly about the place…
But then his energy-working world was often the same. He lived with one foot in reality and one in the otherworldly, marrying the two together with a seamless confidence that took years to perfect.
He would have shaken his head, but the movement would have attracted attention.
He didn’t understand what was going on here but knew he wasn’t alone.
In fact, considering he’d followed the Beacon’s signal himself, there was a good chance others had too.
But what kind of people had come? Would come?
Was there a time limit on this thing? A shut-off valve?
Yet energy never disappeared. It only changed form, and, with something like the Beacon, what form would that take?
Had Terk really thought through the Beacon concept—fully?
Obviously it was a signal.
Obviously people would respond.
But what filters had Terk set up to keep out the unwanted?
He’d never known Terk to be anything but incredibly cautious and distant.
He wasn’t a personal friend, more of a professional acquaintance.
Yet Terk was the topmost energy-working expert to date.
However, Steele also had images in his head of machines taking over the world, like so many movies of the past. Then other images of machines being hacked and taken over by the evildoers in the world.
More movies about that too. He almost laughed at those thoughts, but really?
… Could that happen here? A machine turned rogue? A machine in the hands of a maniac?
In the distance he watched a delivery truck drive up the road, past his own SUV, and into the fog—as if they didn’t see it.
And maybe they didn’t.
Maybe that fog was only for those coming in response to the Beacon. If it were possible to separate out the different types of visitors…
Then maybe the fog that he could see, while the delivery driver didn’t appear to, was a serious point of distinction.
It was odd, Steele considered, standing still, studying the energy around him.
He felt no fear, uncertainty, or negativity in the air.
The atmosphere was neutral. How did that work?
If this was a pathway for those responders answering the Beacon, wouldn’t there be a warning in place for Terk and for the ones arriving?
Steele took in his surroundings again. It smelled like morning sun shining on pine trees, the ground covered in needles from last winter, mostly decomposed, giving the air an earthiness that was refreshing and very normal.
That alone made him leery.
He gave a silent laugh as nothing was normal about his life. Nothing was normal about the work he did nor the people he did it for.
That’s when it hit him,… about the oddness he sensed. He wasn’t alone.
His gaze drifted silently through the trees, the meadows, over the fence, and across what appeared to be a dip in the hills.
Somebody was out there, somebody silent, somebody watching. Had they also followed the Beacon’s signal? Did they know Terk? Maybe someone who didn’t know Terk had followed the signal anyway, but was being cautious about where they would end up.
Steele knew very few people strong enough to send out a signal like this, and yet the signature of that signal, which had started as Terk’s, wasn’t something he recognized now, as if it had morphed into something different, and that was intriguing—yet disturbing at the same time.
Steele preferred to know who and what he was dealing with, especially with something like this, where it obviously had been tweaked to hide its ownership.
Had someone in Terk’s orbit tried to take control of the Beacon?
Had it been modified after initiation? It felt as if its creator—Terk—had put some cloaking on it, yet not enough to limit its reach, but just enough to still hide its identity and its creator’s signature.
Taking a few steps forward, Steele stayed in the shadows, moving silently in the dark. Just then something crossed his peripheral vision, just a drift, like a piece of cloud separated from the mother cloud, wafting toward him ever-so-silently.
Yet… someone else’s energy. A probe, as if checking him out.
He lowered to a crouch, watching as something once again drifted in, then away.
He studied the area where he’d sensed the drift and found nothing animalistic about it.
The wisp was incredibly hard to separate from the landscape, but it appeared to be two-legged, not four-legged energy.
If four-legged, all was well, but, if two-legged, that usually meant trouble.
Steele defocused his gaze, opened his third eye, and looked around the area.
Opening his senses like this gave him almost a fractal version of the real elements in front of him.
Everything came with a distorted set of diamonds and triangles.
Still, it allowed him to sense and to further pinpoint in a much clearer way when something different was within range—and his range depended very much on everything else going on in his world.
If he was healthy, calm, and centered, that fractal image could end up being a whole lot more real than what he had expected.
He shifted his position. He didn’t feel like anything was behind him, but something triggered him to move. He flattened his back up against the trunk of a large tree to watch and to listen, his third-eye gaze still in fractal mode as he shifted from left to center to right.
Something disturbing was out here, and yet he couldn’t tell what.
A cackle of noise came in his ear, and he could almost hear words, but it was muted, clouded, as if he were close to the true frequency but not quite tuned in.
He closed his eyes and turned his antenna ever-so-slightly, trying to home in on the sound.
For a moment he thought he heard a voice, and then it shifted again.
Frowning, he continued to tune the knob around the frequency, adjusting to whatever he needed to hear it better, clearer, and he got a simple warning. A weird feeling on the inside. He wasn’t alone.
He dropped down, frowned, searching the area around him, looking for anything to confirm that weird sensation. He’d felt compelled to come here, yet a part of him remained conflicted about it. He now had an ominous premonition.
He was nobody of note, in his opinion. He was nobody gone awry either. Amid his confusing thoughts, he felt a calmness here, a sense to this that he didn’t understand either.
People in his world were generally not calm. Then again, most people didn’t know about the work he did, how well he did it. Only a few energy workers like him were out there, and they were equally suspicious of anybody else like them. Steele couldn’t blame them.
Too often, when something happened, people, normal people , wanted to deal with things that required people, energy-working people , to handle some things.
So Steele kept tuning to a different frequency, a different channel, so to speak, expecting chatter, people wanting to help—or people needing help.
Yet Steele found nothing on the ethers—no talking, nothing shimmering on the sound waves.
He hated that because something was going on here, something that he didn’t understand. And what he didn’t understand, he didn’t like.
*
Terk glanced at Calum, who was frowning beside him. Wade was on the other side of Terk, equally silent and concerned. The threesome stood at the tree line to the forest, hands on their hips, legs strong in a wide stance, as if standing against an enemy they could sense but not see.
“Someone is out there, but I’m not getting any signals as to who,” Calum muttered, his gaze searching the forest in front of them, his tone grim and frustrated. “Are we sure the Beacon is working?”
“Oh, it’s working,” Terk stated in a flat tone, “but I can’t be sure how effectively. I sense two people out there, maybe more.”
Wade just silently tilted his head.
Calum stiffened, then nodded. “This is exactly the shit we wanted to avoid by setting up the Beacon in the first place.”
Terk nodded. “And I would say it’s working,… just maybe not the way we thought it would.”
Calum shook his head. “Our work is… unusual. So we understand how hard it is to work in our field, amid the various abilities we all possess. Now we have added in an electronic system—that can’t work with our abilities—yet it seems to be adding more work for us, instead of saving us time. Not sure it’s worth it after all.”
“Maybe.” Yet Terk didn’t think so. “We created it from energy, and energy ,… well, we have a lot of different strains , for lack of a better description. Like any recipe, you throw a lot of ingredients together, and, if you’re lucky, potentially after many trials, you end up with something terrific. ”
“Maybe,” Calum muttered, “but this is hardly food, and it’s hardly something we have time to perfect.”
Wade had been silent this whole time, now finally speaking up. “The Beacon needs to follow our instructions or…”