Chapter 6 #2
He glares for a minute, then growls and stalks over to retrieve his phone. “Could you book a meeting room… please?” His tone implies that it’s the very least I can do.
“Of course,” I say placidly, clicking into the meeting room calendars to find an available one.
If he wants a meeting room, he’s got a presentation of sorts in mind; an informal chat could be held here in our shared office.
I block out the room for the whole afternoon so he can take his time, and then I dash downstairs to the café in the building’s lobby to grab some snacks and sodas.
There’s coffee in the break room if anyone wants that.
When I get back, Gideon’s not alone. David and Elinor smile at me, but Mr. Grumpy scowls. “Where did you go?”
I hold up the paper bags full of pastries and cakes. “Supplies. Are Lily and Andrew coming?”
“I’m right here,” Andrew says, strolling in. “Hello, Sam. You’re looking well. Rather glowing, in fact. Have you been using the magic elixir known as the tears of your teammates?”
It would be so easy to dislike Andrew if he wasn’t so charming.
Ever since he found out about my old team’s reaction to me leaving, he’s been teasing me about it.
“Once again, if I find out you had anything to do with that, you will regret it,” I threaten.
“It’s bad enough I had to hear you and Alistair bickering like children again the other day. ”
“What’s this?” Elinor perches on the edge of Gideon’s desk. He shoves her off. She flips him the bird and comes to sit on the edge of my desk instead. “My idiot cousin and this idiot vampire were fighting?”
“Like men,” Andrew interjects. “Not children. Things almost got dangerous.”
Elinor raises a brow. I shake my head.
“It was like two toddlers having tantrums,” I tell her.
Lily comes in before Andrew can protest, and Gideon shoots up from his desk chair. “Finally! Come on. What room, Sam?”
I tell him, and he leads the way. This must be important—it’s barely been forty-five minutes since he came storming in, and he’s acting like we’ve kept him waiting for hours.
I’m not actually sure if he wants me at the meeting, but hey, I’m a member of this team, right? If he wants me to leave, he can say so.
To my face.
In front of everyone else.
That won’t be embarrassing.
Too late to second-guess. I take a seat at the table and wait while Gideon casts from his laptop to the TV on the wall.
“Okay,” he begins, pulling out a chair and sitting on the back, feet on the seat.
That’s a recipe for disaster, right? He’s going to fall.
If I was doing that, I would have fallen just trying to balance there.
I squint, trying to judge the distance between the chair and wall.
If he topples backward, is he going to fall relatively harmlessly to the floor, or smash into the wall and give himself a head injury?
I’ve done first aid courses, both human and community, so I try to remember what the best action would be in a situation like that.
“I’ve got seventeen cases that have been referred by investigators over the past week.
In all seventeen cases, the system logged greater than 95 percent similarity to other open cases across the world, flagged our team, and sent notification to the investigators.
They’ve all handed over their files—some more willingly than others.
” The way his eyes narrow tells me what he thinks of that, and I pity the investigators who thought they could keep anything from him.
“In every case, we have a missing couple, half human, half community. The community members seem to be randomly selected—we’ve got four demons, three incubi and two succubae, two hellhounds, two felids, two sorcerers, and two vampires.
Each couple has either no family or none in the immediate area.
Each couple disappeared from their home overnight, as far as can be determined.
None of their homes showed any signs of a struggle or forced entry.
In most cases, the disappearance was reported by a work colleague of one or other of the couple.
Three were reported by neighbors, and one by a cleaning service.
In all cases, the couple is expecting a child within the next four to six months. ”
“Uh-oh,” David murmurs.
“Some kind of breeding program?” I’ve never heard Andrew sound so grim.
“It looks like it. I’ve put out a global alert to see if there are any other cases that might not have been flagged by the system for whatever reason.”
Gideon brings up a world map that has seventeen (I assume—I don’t actually count them) red dots on it, and they start talking about locations, but I’m still stuck on “breeding program.”
“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m sorry to interrupt. Could you please explain for me what you meant by breeding program?”
They all look at me.
“What don’t you understand?” Gideon asks impatiently. “It’s a program to breed babies.”
“Yes, I got that, thanks,” I tell him with only a hint of sarcasm. “What I’m not clear on is to what end? Is this a baby factory to provide children to couples who want to adopt? Or for child slavery?”
“It could be either,” Lily says. “It’s hard to know at this stage. But it’s not really likely.”
“There would be no need to take the father as well if that was the case,” David explains. “They’d actually add to the risk factor for the kidnappers. And the babies wouldn’t all have a human parent.”
“Okay.” That makes sense. “So the end game is likely to be… what?” The churning feeling in my gut is a pretty big indicator that I already have an inkling.
“Genetic modification,” Gideon says, and the words are as heavy as boulders.
Sometimes I hate being right.
“So,” I start, trying to get my head around it, “this is likely humans trying to… what? Give humans greater abilities?” It sounds like a bad movie.
And I don’t know a lot about genetic modification, but I’m not sure if it’s possible.
When a member of the community and a human procreate (it is possible, though even more difficult than for the community in general, and they already have a low fertility rate), the baby is never human.
The other species always breeds true—and I don’t just mean that the child inherits those traits.
There is no human genetic matter at all.
All the research I’ve read seems to indicate that it’s a result of magic—that since community population is so much lower than human, it’s magic’s way of ensuring the other species aren’t bred out of existence.
Elinor shrugs. “It’s possible. That happened about eighty years ago, so it’s probably due to happen again. But more often, we find it’s a group within the community.”
My jaw drops. “ Why? ”
“Humans aren’t the only ones with dreams of world domination,” Andrew says.
“There are factions within the community that claim humans shouldn’t be permitted to overrun the physical plane this way.
That they should be held to the same laws and standards as the rest of us—the way they are when they get to the spiritual plane. ”
I try to connect that to genetic modification. “Oh. It’s numbers. They want to increase community fertility.”
“Which doesn’t sound terrible, right? That’s why they have a solid support base, even if it’s small.
But the reason humans have greater fertility is because they have shorter lives.
It makes sense that if your lifespan is ten to fifteen times shorter than other species, it should be ten to fifteen times easier for you to conceive than them. ”
“True. Okay.” I grab one of the small notepads from the center of the table and begin mapping it out for myself.
“So when humans initially got delusions of grandeur all those years ago, they outnumbered the community and were basically slaughtering everyone. Right? Then magic stepped in to prevent that and wiped the human memory of other high-intelligence species. But if there hadn’t been more of humanity than everyone else put together, things would have gone differently.
I mean, the community has, overall, greater strength and speed, can see in the dark, has claws, fangs, teleportation, the ability to mesmerize…
and sorcery. Humans have the ability to get pregnant faster and more frequently.
It’s not like now, either—the only weapons they would have had were, what, sticks, stones, and knives?
When was the first sword invented? Never mind.
” I make a note to look it up, though, just out of curiosity. “This faction—”
“And magic,” David interrupts.
I blink, thrown off my train of thought. “What? You mean sorcery. I said that.” One of the first things I learned after joining CSG was the difference between magic—the existential stuff that oversees everything—and sorcery, which is inner power wielded by sorcerers.
“No, I mean, humans had their rudimentary weapons, the ability to procreate faster, and magic.”
My jaw drops.
A moment later, Lily says, “Sam? Are you okay?”
“Humans had magic ?” It comes out all raspy, so I clear my throat.
“Have,” David corrects. “Not inner power like what I have, or like the glamor magic the other species use to disguise themselves. But all humans have the ability to manipulate existential magic.”
“Really?” I breathe. “So I could… use magic? Why has nobody mentioned this before? Wait, does this mean the Wiccans are right?”
He shrugs. “They don’t use it as fully as they could because they’ve tied it up in religion, but basically yes. Humans need spells and instruments to do anything substantial—crystals, herbs, that kind of thing—but the basic ability is there.”