Mikko Lawrence

As they walked into the backyard, Carlos had called back to Mira’s house to update Frankie.  He told Frankie to hold tight, that they’d be home soon, with Lina.  From the amount of soothing Carlos had to do over the phone, Mikko guessed that Frankie was pissed Carlos wouldn’t tell him what happened.

Russell’s backyard was landscaped within an inch of its life.  Half of it was tiled over with pale natural stone in soft golds and browns.  The other half was tall decorative grasses, cacti, and other plants Mikko usually saw in the dessert.  They were set behind little brick dividers, circles and rectangles of dirt and stone filled with plants.

Just outside of the sliding glass door in the back of the house was a pergola covering a steel-and-glass patio table with eight matching steel chairs.  The pergola did a good job of blocking out the afternoon sun and they all came to stand under it, awkwardly surrounding the table. 

Russell stepped up next to the sliding glass door and tapped something that looked like a dark smudge against the coral.  Runes lit up beneath the smudge and then Mikko felt the static of magic in the air.

Russell moved to stand across the table from them.  Mikko was still holding Lina in his arms, but they were starting to fatigue, and his ribs ached from her weight.

“No one can hear us,” Russell said, looking between them all.  “Cards on the table.  I’ve worked with Timber and Carlos before, but I don’t really know who the rest of you are.  Trying to gather information on anyone in your house was difficult at best.”

“That’s because I’ve threatened everyone in this city within an inch of their life,” Carlos said coolly.  He had his arms crossed over his chest and was wearing a suit like he usually did.  This one was brown with a teal shirt and a navy tie.

Russell’s brow furrowed.  “Wha—” at a glare from Annie and remembering her stance on saying the word “what” again, he changed mid-sentence, “—why?”

I got to put you down, Mikko said to Lina.  She didn’t look at him, but she released his neck and waist, and he set her down.  He kept hold of her hand.  Annie reached for her other hand without looking at Lina.

“These are Amos’s kids,” Timber said.  It was probably the best explanation, especially if Russell worked with Amos.  They didn’t need to explain that Mira was the White Psychic or that Lina was her daughter.

“Amos’s kids,” he said, looking at Mikko, Annie, and Lina.

“Amongst other things,” Mikko muttered.  “Are you the guy who was trying to break into the house?  And who tried to pickpocket us?”

Russell’s face went impassive.  “Yes.”

Mikko pulled Russell’s wallet out of his pocket and tossed it over to him.  “You’ve got to be the worst lockpick, pickpocket, and kidnapper that’s ever existed.  For your trouble, we took all your money.”

To his credit, Russell didn’t complain, checking his wallet.  He folded it back up and put it in his pocket.  “Fair enough.”

Carlos laughed for the first time since they had arrived at Russell’s house.  His shoulders weren’t quite as tense as they had been.  “To be fair to Russell, he’s actually very good at his job.  He just made a mistake when he took a job trying to fuck with y’all.  His mess-ups these past few days are very out-of-character.”

“Yeah, can y’all explain what the fuck is going on?” Russel said.  His eyes were narrowed in annoyance, but his posture was mostly relaxed.

“You first,” Annie replied.  “Since nothing would be going on if you wasn’t here.”   Lina pulled her hand from Mikko’s to wrap her arms around Annie’s waist.  Annie pet her hair absently.

Mikko watched Russell.  He was clearly out of his element, but he didn’t seem to let it faze him.  There was definitely confusion, but there was none of the arrogance Mikko had come to associate with a lot of stronger magics.  He wasn’t trying to play it cool, like he knew everything, but he also wasn’t letting himself be cowed.  And he didn’t try to attack them when they’d come to get Lina.  He’d stood back and talked.  There was an air of danger to him, but he wasn’t threatening? 

“I was hired to retrieve a stolen necklace.  After I failed to break into your house, and I failed to take keys to the house from you in the mall, I was told to take the girl.  I—”

“Lina,” she interrupted him.  “My name is Lina.”

He nodded to Lina.  “Miss Lina.”

Lina nodded against Annie’s stomach.

“Normally, kidnapping children isn’t really something I do.  However, I was told that this necklace was powerful, the magic inside of it volatile.  And that you probably stole it to sell it and Miss Lina could be in danger.  So, it was twofold—use her to force you to give me the necklace back, and protect her from potentially lethal, volatile magic.  I saw my chance when the werewolf was in the backyard with her.  I used a valerian and aconite mixture to knock them both out and took her with me.”

Carlos looked over at Mikko and Annie.  “Volatile magic?”

Mikko gave him a flat look.  “You think Mira be fucking with volatile magic?  No, that necklace was a family heirloom.  It was fucking smoky quartz.  It’s just used for grounding and clarity.  There are runes etched in the silver under the quartz that enhances it for magic users.”  Well, really, just neuropaths.  But he wasn’t going to be that specific.  “Were you the one who was watching us the past few days?” Mikko asked Russell.

He nodded.  “Apparently I never intersected with Carlos when he was around, otherwise I would have probably figured out sooner that I was in over my head.”

He wouldn’t have been there when Saorla set-up the wards, either.  Mikko had scared him off just before that.

“Well, the necklace ain’t even here,” Mikko said.

Russell looked at him sharply.  “What?”  Annie didn’t glare at him this time for saying what.

“I gave it back to the person who it actually belonged to.  And she’s currently in the mountains of Montana.  It’s not even in the state.”

Russell’s brow furrowed and his mouth moved wordlessly, repeating what Mikko said.  After a moment, he said, “She’s with living vampires?”

“Before you started this comedy of errors, maybe you shouldn’t have underestimated a few kids just cuz they was mostly human with a halfshifter,” Annie said.  “The house is warded by some strong fucking magic.  You tried to steal from some of the best thieves in Phoenix, and then got schooled by a pickpocketing physiopath with a petty streak.  And then you tried to take one of the most beloved children in this fucking city.”

“And apparently one of the most powerful people in your house,” Russell muttered.

Annie looked at Lina.  “What did you do to him?”

Lina reached out a hand to Mikko.  He took it and he saw what she’d seen.

She’d woken up confused and groggy in an unfamiliar bed.  Her head ached, but it wasn’t too bad.  The last thing she remembered was blowing bubbles.

The room was simple—just a bed with some pillows, a blanket, and a desk in one corner.  There were a couple bookshelves filled with books in English and Hebrew.  There was light coming in from a window at the head of the bed blocked off with white blinds.

Lina heard the quiet buzz of thoughts.  Mikko didn’t know a lot about mind reading, but he did know that everyone felt a little different.  The same way everyone’s voice was a little different. 

This buzz was gentle and introspective.  She reached for it and found someone in the middle of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  She could smell the peanut butter through the thoughts.  She could also feel the nag of something.  It was like a gentle tug of imbalance.  The feeling of having second thoughts.

Lina felt the thoughts grow, not louder, but heavier.  Like a pressure just above her eyes. 

The door to the room opened and Russell stepped in holding a plate with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of orange juice.

“Who are you?” she asked. 

Russell’s brow furrowed slightly.  He was surprised by how calm Lina was.  “I’m Russell,” he said.  His voice was quiet and gentle.  “Are you hungry?”

“No.  What am I doing here?”  She could tell, from the way he was at ease and the ambient noise in his head, that they were in his house.

“I was asked to keep you safe,” he said.  “To take you away from some bad magic that could hurt you.”

She could see, in his head, that while he believed what he was saying, his background thoughts gave more insight.  Russell had been told to take the girl at all costs.  He felt guilty that he had kidnapped her as ransom.

Instead of replying, Lina looked around.  To Russell, it looked like she was taking the room in.  In reality, she was listening to the ambient noise around her.  She could hear him, but she could also feel the little twinges of other people on the street.

She knew that her family would come for her.  There wasn’t a single doubt in her mind.

“Well—” Russell started.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she announced.  She got out of bed, pushing the sheets aside, and headed towards him.  He moved, as she knew he would, and she turned down a hallway.

“It’s on the right,” he said.

She knew that.

“You won’t be able to get out through there.”

She also knew that.

She went into the bathroom.  The walls were blue but everything else was white—the sink, the toilet, the tiles, the tub.  The toilet seat was closed.

She did use the bathroom, and then she washed her hands, all the while listening to the world around her, searching for something familiar.  She wiped her hands on white towels hanging from a ring by the sink and went back out.

She followed the hallway past the room she had been in, passing Russell still standing in the doorway, watching her with a look of incredulity, and walked into the living room.  The walls here were all an earth brown.  The furniture was black leather, couch and chairs centered around a glass coffee table on a brown shag rug.  A TV sat across from the couch.

The entire opposite wall from where she stood was just lines of shelving.  There were more books, in English, Hebrew, and some Arabic, but also there were items on display.  There was a menorah, some fancy silver candlesticks, a few fancy silver cups, what looked like an animal horn, and some knives and daggers on display that looked very pointy and sharp.

Lina settled on the couch and waited.  Russell walked into the living room, still holding the food.  His brow was furrowed, mouth scrunched in disoriented confusion.  He started to open his mouth to speak before closing it.  He opened it again and closed it.  Finally, after a moment or two of the same aborted attempts at speaking, he went back into the kitchen to put the sandwich and juice back.

Lina continued, listening to the faint static that filled the space between minds.  Russell moved with quiet, catlike steps, but she could hear the haze of confusion in his mind.  She could also hear that he genuinely meant her no harm.  Reaching into his mind was easy.  He didn’t have any sort of resistance to her.  In fact, he couldn’t even tell she was looking. 

She searched for memories to explain why she was here.  She brushed on a memory of a phone call.

“I hired you because you are, supposedly, the best.  How do you keep failing over and over again?”

Russell sneered into the phone but didn’t let it bleed into his voice.  “If you had allowed me to do more reconnaissance on them, instead of just throwing me at them, we would—”

“There is no time, Russell.  That necklace is dangerous, volatile magic.  They’re poor.  They likely want to sell it for fast cash to the highest bidder.  And the highest bidders include shadowmancers.  Look—there’s a child in that house.  Take her and ransom her back.  You’ll be protecting her from a potential explosion, and I’ll get what I need.”

Russell’s distaste at hearing that dripped down his throat like wax on a lit candle.  He cleared his throat to keep the thickness of the wax off his tongue.  “Isn’t that a bit of overkill?  I can—”

“Just do it,” the voice snapped and hung up.

Before Lina could listen to more, the static around her changed to a thrum of anxiety.  Racing thoughts that were all about her.

Mikko.

Russell walked back into the living room.  He opened his mouth to speak.  Are you sure you’re not hungry?

He never got the sentence out.  Lina dove back into his head, searching for the sparks she knew would get her what she wanted.  Her mom had tried to explain it as something to do with frontal robes and cereal and flower stems.  But she didn’t need to know what things in the brain were called to find what she was looking for.

She pressed as hard as she could against the sparks.  They tingled against her, like pins and needles when her feet fell asleep after sitting on them for too long.

Russell collapsed, and Lina bolted.  The front door was locked from the inside by a key.  She went over to where he lay on the ground.  He couldn’t even move to look at her as she dug through his pockets.  But she could hear the dull roar of fear that was filling his brain.

She pulled out the key from his pocket and was out of the door in a flash.  The tingling sparks faded, but it didn’t matter.  She was out.

The memory ended, and Mikko came back to himself.  Getting memories pushed into him always felt like they took as long as the memory lasted, but in reality, it only took a few seconds for Lina to give them memories.  He often thought of it like copy-and-paste on computers.  Sometimes there was a brief loading screen, but it was fast.

Russell had absolutely no mental blocks against a neuropath.  Not a single mental defense to stop a neuropath from getting inside his head and fucking with him.

“Fuck that guy,” Annie growled.

He knew what she was reacting to.  They’re poor.

“Rich fuck,” Mikko muttered.  He looked at Carlos and Timber.  “She paralyzed him.”

Carlos and Timber nodded.  They had already suspected, as had Mikko.  The paralyze move was Mira’s favorite way to get out of a bad situation.  It made sense she would have taught her daughter, who had the same abilities.

Russell looked at Lina, a suspicious narrowing of his eyes.  The gears in his head were turning.  Lina met his eyes.

Finally, Russell’s shoulders fell.  “I was messing with the White Psychic’s family.  Wasn’t I?”

“Your employer really set you up for failure,” Carlos said without answering the question.

Russell ran his hand over his hair, knotting his fingers into it at the back.  “He really did.”  He took a breath and exhaled with a finality that indicated he had made a decision.  “I’m going to back out of the job.  Going to cut my contract with him altogether.  I don’t want to be involved with this.”

“Who is your employer?” Carlos asked.

Russell shook his head.  “If I gave away that information, I would lose a lot of clients.  My confidentiality would be called into question.”

Lina let go of Annie and Mikko and took the three steps to Carlos to touch his wrist.  Carlos shivered almost imperceptibly, the way most people unused to touching neuropaths did.  There was a pretty strict rule about touching people outside of their family, but Mikko let it slide.  So did Annie.

“Interesting,” Carlos murmured.

Russell’s face was impassive, but Mikko got the feeling that he had expected that.  Maybe even counted on it. 

“I apologize for the trouble I caused your family.  And also, I apologize for underestimating you,” Russell said, looking at Mikko and Annie.  He looked at Lina, who had moved back between them.  “And Miss Lina, I’m very sorry for taking you.  And also, for underestimating you.”

“I carry this house,” she said.

Annie smacked her shoulder lightly.  “Hush.”  It earned a scowl from Lina.

Russell chuckled.  “I don’t doubt it.”  He looked at Carlos and Timber.  “I would appreciate it if you maybe kept this from Amos.  I don’t think this would go well.”

“He would skin you alive,” Timber agreed. 

Russell glanced at Carlos who rolled his eyes.  “I won’t tell my brother-in-law what you did.  I would never hear the end of it.  And if Lina has judged that you’re sincere, then I have no reason to doubt you.”

“It will be the last time I make the mistake of not doing my due diligence.”

“Last time you underestimate a halfshifter and a bunch of humans,” Annie growled.

Russell nodded, looking appropriately chagrinned.

“Then, we’ll be on our way,” Carlos said before Annie could get anymore jabs in.  “Hopefully the next time we see each other will be under better circumstances.”

Russell agreed.

They left his backyard, and it wasn’t under they were in the car that Mikko said, “You already told Amos what he did.”

Carlos was back in the driver’s seat, Lina sat between Mikko and Annie in the backseat with Timber in the front.  He glanced back at Mikko, flashing teeth. “Well yeah.  Only way I could have gotten his address from Amos.  And it’ll do Russell good to get his ass handed to him.”  He reached back to hold his knuckles out to Lina.  She rapped hers against his.  “While I like Russell, I care more about Lina.”

“Love you, too, tío Carlos,” she grinned.

Carlos reached to his chest dramatically, as if grabbing at his heart.  “Ay, mija.  Me vas a matar.  Vámanos—let’s go get ice cream.  It’s been a long day.”

“Ice cream!” Lina shouted, pumping her fist.  Mikko had to move to avoid her punching him in the chin.

They wound up going to grab something to eat instead of just ice cream.  It was dinnertime and not a single one of them, besides Lina, had had anything to eat today.  Apparently, Annie had called Carlos right before he was to eat lunch.

Annie used Carlos’s cell phone to call the house and tell Genie and Frankie they were okay.  They were going to bring them some dinner home.  Carlos was paying, which meant that Annie, a shifter who would eat the equivalent of three full meals, wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the bank. 

They sat at a booth in a family friendly-ish sports bar.  Mikko and Annie sat with Lina between them on one side, Timber and Carlos on the other side.  It was loud, but since it was only a Thursday night, the shifters were okay with the volume.  Sensitive hearing made bars difficult sometimes.

“Can we call Mom when we get home?” Lina asked.  She was coloring on a sheet the hostess had given her.

“Of course,” Mikko said.  They had been playing a rousing game of phone tag with her for the past few days.

“Who was he working for?” Timber asked Carlos as their first round of appetizers—wings, spinach artichoke dip, and potato skins—was set down before them.

“Hm?” Carlos said, tearing his eyes away from the wings in front of him.

“Russell,” she clarified.

“Charlton Windsor.”  He reached for the closest drumstick and set to work.

“Atlantes’ deputy?” she asked, eyebrows high.

Carlos nodded.

“Who?” Mikko asked.

“Right hand of the head of the mage court,” Timber replied, setting a potato skin on a small plate in front of her.  “Don’t know much about him.  Pyromancer or something?”  She shrugged.

Carlos swallowed, mouth covered in sauce.  It was an odd look combined with the suit and pale shirt he wore, but Mikko had never seen him get his suit dirty.  “From what Lina showed me, Russell didn’t seem to think he posed a threat.”

“What do you think he wanted the necklace for?” Timber asked.

Mikko and Annie shrugged.  They had always maintained a lack of curiosity about things like this—magic and its politics—mostly out of self-preservation. 

They focused on the appetizers.  Mikko hadn’t really noticed he was hungry until he had started to eat.  He was shoving food into his mouth.

“If it gives Mira a boost, I have to imagine it’s powerful,” Carlos said, replacing his picked-clean bone with a new wing.

Mikko didn’t really know how powerful it was.  He only knew that it had belong to Mira’s grandmother.  That fact alone made it priceless in Mira’s eyes.  He had felt like shit for years for what he had done. 

Timber and Carlos continued to speculate while Annie glanced at Mikko and said, “That name has to be fake.”

She was talking about Russell.  Mikko snorted, taking another potato skin and slathering it with sour cream.

Dinner came and went.  Timber and Carlos’s chatter about the mage dissipated and they talked about other things.  Carlos asked Lina what she was doing in school.  Timber asked Annie about her hip and her plans.  Annie thanked Timber for teaching her that ankle lock.

As Mikko was cleaning up Lina’s fingers with a wet wipe from a particularly saucy hamburger, Carlos pulled out his phone.  It was lit up, vibrating. 

“Frankie?” Carlos answered.

Frankie was probably complaining about them taking too long and how he was hungry.

Carlos put his free hand down on the table, fingers splayed, eyes wide.  “What?  When?”

Annie and Timber straightened up, eyes wide.  Mikko even saw Lina tense.

He hated being the only plain human at the table sometimes.  One with a bum ear, too.

“We’ll be there soon, mijo.”  He hung up.  Timber was already moving out of the booth.

“What’s going on?” Mikko asked, taking the hint and getting up.

“There’s someone outside the house, trying to get in.  When the door shocked him, he started screaming.” 

Mikko swallowed, mouth going dry.

Carlos pulled out his wallet.  He was getting up just as the server was returning and he placed the cash in her hand.  “No change, thank you.”

The server sputtered but they were already moving.  Annie scooped up Lina as they shimmied out of the booth.

“Timber,” she said.

Timber was already meeting her to take Lina. 

Timber was probably the most capable of any of them.  She was a bounty hunter, and she was good at it.  The scars on her face were just a few of those on her body.  She had survived a lot.  She would be their best option to take care of Lina so that she wasn’t anywhere near the action.

“Come on, baby,” she said to Lina.  Lina transferred easily from Annie to Timber, while they were all moving.

They got outside and Annie looked at Mikko and Carlos.  “I’ll meet you at the house.”

Mikko and Carlos went to the car.

“How come you’re not going with her?” Mikko asked.

“Bears are strong, but we are not particularly fast,” Carlos replied, putting the car in gear.  “This car is faster.”

Mikko got to learn just how fast the car was.