It was three weeks into my license suspension, and I was going absolutely stir-crazy.
Members of the Licensor Board at the Bureau of Criminal Identification had expressed serious reservations about my involvement in the Joshua Blakely/Weston Blakely matter, and had pulled my license while they reviewed the facts... held a hearing... held another hearing... reviewed the facts... I was allowed to do paperwork on completed casework and send out billings for work already done, but that only kept me occupied at the office for about four days, even typing as poorly as I do. I had puttered around the office for an additional two days until Amy, the common receptionist for five one-person offices including mine, threatened to break my leg to keep me home.
With Beth in school every day, I had plenty of time to myself. Every shelf was wiped down, every piece of furniture moved to vacuum behind. The flowerbeds were mulched, the windows washed. It was November, and the grass was settled in for its winter hibernation, so there was no lawn to mow, but I had fertilized and peat-mossed and edge-trimmed. I had lunch with the Gordell sisters next door every day. I caught up on my reading. I browsed eBay, looking for nothing in particular and finding it. I napped out of sheer boredom and woke restless.
The naps turned out to be a good thing. Ever since the weekend I had spent in Calder's Corner protecting Weston Blakely from his psychotic brother, Beth's night terrors had been getting worse. The night spent apart from me, staying with the Gordell sisters, had been the start of a downward spiral. She screamed longer, thrashed harder, and had started babbling nonsense syllables as I held her and tried to keep her from getting bruises that she wouldn't remember getting by morning. She always woke up sparkling and unconcerned, refreshed for a new day while I breathed in a pot of coffee.
Tuesday night started no differently. I was deep in a dreamless sleep when I heard her starting to scream in the next bedroom at 2:45am. I slid into my slippers, tied the waistband of my gym pants, and shuffled into her room.
Her bedclothes were already knotted around her, and she had managed to tip over the lamp on the nightstand, despite it being a good eighteen inches from the bed.
I edged onto the mattress and wrapped myself around her, trying to keep her arms from flying wildly without making her claustrophobic, which often made her struggle harder. I pressed my cheek against the back of her head and rocked her, making sh-sh noises ineffectualy in her ear.
Tears streamed down her face from her frantic, unfocused eyes. She babbled in between her screams like an old lady in a charismatic Christian church, spewing nonsense glossolalia while writhing on the floor.
This was becoming so habitual with me that parts of my brain could shut back down into a semblance of sleep while I rocked her, blocking out all but her fiercest screams.
Five minutes later, that part of my brain kick-started itself awake.
She was still gibbering and crying, and I had to mentally rewind to see what it was that had sparked my alertness.
It was a combination of syllables that had come out of her crying to form a word:
"Saksanthiel."
It was random chance, I told myself. The "thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters" effect. If I listened to her night terrors long enough, I'd hear her say things that sounded like the names of the twelve apostles, the Founding Fathers, and the original Beach Boys. It didn't mean anything.
Over the next twenty minutes, I heard it three more times: "Saksanthiel."
By a little after 3:30, the worst of it was past, and she was settled into my arms, her tears dried on her cheeks, murmuring fitfully and twitching.
I gently slid myself out from beneath her and tucked her back in. I righted the lamp and left the room, leaving her door half ajar.
I didn't go back to my bedroom. Under the sink, among the cleaning supplies, was a rarely-touched half-bottle of Jack Daniels. I fished it out and poured myself a half-inch in the plastic cup that had come with one of Beth's kid's meals at Red Lobster.
I sat in the easy chair with the cup. That chair was angled directly at the TV screen, and I could see the silhouette of the chair against the nightlight in the kitchen. I was invisible in the chair's shadow.
I tasted the Jack Daniels. I hadn't added any ice, so it was almost the temperature of my mouth already as I swished it around, killing swarms of bacteria that had thought they were safe until my morning gargle.
The telephone sat by the arm of the easy chair.
I took a mouthful just large enough to swallow, blinked as it hit the empty bottom of my stomach, and picked up the phone. I dialed a toll-free number that I hadn't dialed in over eight years but which I still knew by heart.
I dialed the Ministry.
** ** **
"The Ministry" had no official name. It was funded by seventeen or more innocuous line items spread out across as many disparate federal spending bills as possible. The name had caught on when the department was first organized right after World War II; the organizer and first director had been on loan from the British government, where they already had a similar hush-hush division for the investigation of paranormal menaces.
The current director was known only as "the Director." No one under him had high enough clearance to check his file for his real name. The Ministry's standards for "need to know" made the conventional intelligence community look like a bunch old ladies gossiping around the Bridge table. The Director, though, had top-down access to all files. He could easily look in my records and know what my birth name was. I also knew that that was something he'd never tell me.
** ** **
On the other end of the phone, a bored-sounding woman simply answered, "Central Processing."
"Priority call," I said. "Field Op...
Ex-Field Op Radiant, need to see the Director in conference stat."
"One moment," she said, still sounding disinterested. I only caught the slightest tenth-of-a-second hesitation which was the sound of her jaw dropping. I could guarantee she'd never had an ex-operative call her before. I'd bet she'd never even heard of it happening. When you retired from the Ministry, you never looked back. I hadn't wanted to.
Saksanthiel.
After a two-minute wait, she came back on the line.
"Appointment confirmed," she said. "Tomorrow, 10:30am local time. Should we make travel arrangements?"
"No," I said. "I'll cover it."
"Thank you for calling," she said, and the line went dead.
I hung up the phone and drained the rest of the little cup of Jack Daniels.
Then I called the airline for a plane ticket.
