Wyverns of Mass Destruction

Shawn I, part 1

Chapter One

Agent Shawn G. Harris

4:57 AM, November 14th, 2014

Denver, Colorado

Shawn Harris dreamed he was fifteen again. His baby sister sat beside him on the back steps. Together, they watched clouds dance above the Adirondacks.

"Make me a butterfly," she piped.

Shawn pulled a candle stub from his pocket and lit it with a touch. Orange tounges licked his fingers, twisting together into the shape of a burning butterfly. It flew down towards the creek, still connected to its fuel source and Shawn's fingers by a leash of sparks.

"I'll get it!" Little Katrina giggled as she chased after the butterfly. Chubby brown legs flew in and out of the deep grass. Abandoned toys littered the lawn, and Shawn wondered if he should grab her. Their parents had left him in charge. But he found he was laughing along with her, even though a grown man should know better than to laugh at magic. The familliar maples and beeches, the unique cracks in the brick patio—all told him he was home and safe.

Katrina aged as she ran from him; from a girl of five to a grinning teenager to a grown woman. Her arm stretched closer to the flickering apparition. Sparks drifted down, igniting dry grass.

He remembered what she was.

Shawn lunged to his feet and sprinted after her. "Don't touch it! You don't have magic!"

Katrina's fist closed around the butterfly. She smiled as her skin blistered. Flames ballooned outward from her hand, morphing into a giant, winged shape. Talons of fire wrapped around her waist.

Shawn's stiff legs pumped faster. The air thickened in his lungs. Dry trees blazed as the creature surged into the reddining sunset, his sister vanishing in its grasp. "Katrina!"

And then his eyes opened. Darkness. Pushing back the urge to summon fire, Shawn flipped over and turned on the bedside light. Breathe in. Breathe out.

He lay in a lumpy bed at a hotel just outside Denver. On the far side of a thin plaster wall, his boss, Catherine Fairfax, was snoring heavily. Considering the lastest round of CIA budget cuts, he was lucky they hadn't wound up sharing a room.

"It means nothing," he whispered. All pyromancers had innate clairvoyance, but it didn't come in dreams. She's still alive. There's still hope. Trying to calm himself, he reached for the Universal Vision. Show me the moment when humanity learns we exist.

A scenario played before his eyes: a man in a dirty basement, speaking loudly in a Slavic language, his arm transforming into a fin before a live webcam. Faces all over the world peered, transfixed, at computer screens. Smoke filled the air as rioters kicked and battered the cowering shapeshifter. The mob spread, spread . . . and then the vision started to fade, its probability dwindling to zero. Someone in Indigo, guided by another pyromancer, would have remotely disabled the man's computer. A ground team would soon arrest the dolphin-shifter. All was well.

Alarms sounded at six AM in both rooms. By the time Catherine made it to the lobby, where Shawn was forcing down the complementary coffee, it was eight.

"Stop tapping your foot," she said as they joined the check-out line. "I feel like a time bomb's about to go off."

Who'd be dumb enough to rig a bomb with an audible timer? he thought, years of field experience flashing through his head. But tourists were watching him, and Catherine could be touchy about jokes. He held back the B-word.

Catherine Fairfax was short, a typical trait of hydromancer, and white, which wasn't. She wore expensive pantsuits, curled, cropped hair, and carefully-chosen makeup that helped her look much younger than sixty-two. Shawn, despite his magic, was an old-looking forty-four. Stress had worn permanent grooves in his forehead. His face was pointed and thin, and his hair had gone grey at his temples. His shirts, though neat and clean, had all been bought on sale. It didn't take a trained spy to note them as an odd pair.

"They better hurry," he muttered as the manager went back to print out their recipt.

"Really, Sonia?" Catherine muttered into her Bluetooth. "They served the Merlot cold?"

Shawn excused himself to get their car. Seven minutes passed as he sat parked before the main doors, engine running, infuriating a large family packing camping gear in their van. Take it up with my boss, he thought as the mother honked at him. Catherine stumbled over a stack of folding chairs as she exited, nearly dropping her luggage. Shawn stepped on the gas before her seatbelt was even on.

"If you crash the rental, you're paying the deductible," she said.

Breathe in. Breathe out. His knuckles were white on the wheel. "My apologies, Director Fairfax. The Universal Vision is on the strong side today." He turned the car left, onto the highway. Seventy miles per hour. Stick to it.

The director's piercing blue eyes flickered over him. "Your sister's survived for two years in their clutches. She'll last another few weeks."

Shawn thought of their meeting with the President and the Secretary of Defense. If he couldn't convince Greyhart to volunteer, obliterating the fortress with a drone strike was still on the table. With Katrina still inside. What if the enemy Descendants brought in an aeromancer to read her mind? She'd said she was immune to that now, but—

"Agent!" Catherine yelled. A car honked as it swerved to avoid them. Shawn cursed, yanking the wheel back to the right. He'd drifted halfway across a lane.

"Sorry!" he gasped. "We don't drive much in the city." He hoped Anais had never told Cathrine how he drove upstate every month to check on the family property.

He relaxed as they rose higher into the Rockies, and even rolled down the windows to breathe the crisp fall air. Oranges and yellows dotted the treetops. The mountains are on fire. If he'd been traveling for pleasure, he'd have brought his bow and set out for deer. If I was traveling for pleasure, my family would be with me.

He mentioned the bow hunting to the director, who laughed. "Reminds me of a case," she said. "This boy in my daughter's high school turned into a stag. I told him, be careful. Not only is there the Seal to worry about, it's deer season. He rolls his eyes at me. My daughter never liked him, but I thought I'd be charitable and knock some sense into that thick Issirian skull. Waste of effort. On the day after deer season ends, he's out humping does and—" She clapped her hands. "—boom, hit by a car. Driver climbs out of the wreck to see a dead kid. Wound up in jail for manslaughter. Shame."

Shame about the jail time, or the dead kid? "How's your friend Umara feel when you tell those stories about her people?"

"Well, she's hardly Issirian," Catherine said. "She's a woman of the world."

Suspicion of Issirians ran deep in Indigo, even in its infamously progressive director. Shawn had paid lip service to it until he'd learned how unacceptably foreign having an Iraqi mother and brown skin made him.