Into Focus (Focus Series Book 1) (6 page)

I had… two-thirds of a plan. I was watching
the building until I saw an initiate leave. Then I was going to
follow him or her (there were an awful lot of pretty women coming
and going, and apparently Focus didn’t discriminate) home, knock
them out, take their place, and gather whatever information I
could.

The fact was that I just didn’t know what was
going to happen. I was completely in the dark about what kind of
catastrophe was being planned, and unless I found out, I wasn’t
going to be able to do a damn thing to stop it. The responsibility
on my shoulders was severe, and it constantly pressed on me,
creeping up when I least expected it. Every so often, I felt a jolt
of fresh fear and apprehension as the enormity of the task and the
consequences of failing it was swept into my thoughts.

So. Take the place of an initiate, infiltrate
Focus, find out the evil plan, and then… stop it, I guessed. I
wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do to stop a wizard from doing
whatever he or she damn well pleased, but I wouldn’t be able to do
anything unless I learned what it was I was stopping.

Hell. Maybe I’d just call the police or ATF
and let them handle it.

Espionage was kind of my thing. I was good at
it. I was confident that I could get inside eventually, maybe get
onto a computer, copy whatever information I could find, and bail.
What came after that, though, left me with the copper taste of fear
in my mouth.

Or beak, actually.

I knew of three people who were definitely
initiates, or who had been a few weeks ago when my friend last
heard. I guess wizards felt pretty free to talk to people who
already knew about them. Hell, my friend had pulled a group photo
off of the guy’s Facebook page. Their names were even tagged.

God bless social media and the Information
Age.

So I watched and waited, staring at the
parking lot, waiting for one of my targets to appear.

***

She finally did after five o’clock that
evening. She came out of the building, wearing a pair of blue jeans
and a no-nonsense shirt, her short blond hair blowing faintly in
the wind. My literal bird’s eye view gave me an excellent close-up
of her face, which was…

Well.

She was lovely.

She had these bright eyes that seemed both
intelligent and kind, which is a rare enough combination. She
wasn’t exactly smiling, but she seemed to be in a good mood
nonetheless, and it showed in the way she walked, practically
bouncing to her car, a small, functional, and unadorned sedan. She
didn’t wear any jewelry, and didn’t look like the type who would do
so regularly anyway. She was young, around my age, somewhere in her
mid-twenties.

She really didn’t look like someone who was
planning to kill thousands, possibly millions of people.

But, I reminded myself, she was definitely
dangerous. Anyone who could make it into Focus, even as an
initiate, was able to wield terrible power. Though she may not be
able to nuke a city with her mind, she’d have no trouble burning
down a building, or pounding me into a slurry of unrecognizable
flesh and bone.

I did not want to turn into a puddle of
goo.

I didn’t know if I could trust her, and I
couldn’t take the risk anyway. So I stuck to the plan I had
made.

I flew from the power line to the silver SUV
I had parked off the road, near a small wooded area. Moving
quickly, I shifted back to human, then rearranged my features
significantly. I changed into the clothes I had prepared, shoving
my pants on and throwing the button down shirt over my shoulders. I
leapt into the car and started it as I buttoned the shirt
fully.

Then I turned my eyes toward the parking lot
in my rearview mirror.

I saw the girl pull out, signal left, and
drive past me at a leisurely pace.

I gathered my nerves together, ground my
teeth and followed Nora Tress, initiate of Focus, as she drove down
the road.

God, I hope this works.

Magic can’t fix everything. You can’t use it
to bring back the dead, or to turn back time. It’s a force of
nature, sure, but it has laws and limitations. I can cause a small
earthquake, for instance, but the bloodstains on my jacket would
prove impossible to remove by magic.

But that’s why I have bleach.

The men on the operating table were wounded
badly. Shrapnel had penetrated the shoulder of one of them, who was
still awake and groaning in pain. The other was unconscious, burns
across his chest, cuts marring the flesh, presumably from debris
during the blast.

I had helped carry them in from the Fire
entrance, a massive gateway in the south wing of the office
building. The mission had gone poorly, but I wasn’t allowed to know
the finer details of operations, not yet. I was only there to
learn, not to participate fully. That was reserved for full
members—secret societies have secrets even from themselves.

Despite the bloody scene before me, the
atmosphere was remarkably calm. Four Healers, members of the Air
faction, worked on the men quietly and carefully, with practiced
ease. One of them leaned over to the groaning man, and whispered
into his ear. As he did, a faint breeze swept through the room,
only perceptible by the sound and a slight stirring of my hair. The
man on the table stopped groaning, let out a contented sigh, and
slipped into unconsciousness.

The work continued quickly after that. One of
the Healers braced the shoulder while a second removed the
shrapnel. Together, they held their hands over the wound, and, as I
watched, the ragged hole knitted itself closed while a wind picked
up, stronger than the breeze that had aided the patient’s sedation.
I steadied myself against a gurney with one hand.

As the shrapnel wound was closing, the other
two Healers worked on the burned patient. More wind kicked up,
pulling my hair out of place and scattering blonde strands across
my face. I tucked it hurriedly behind my ears.

I need to remember to put it into a ponytail
next time. Or a braid. Or just cut it off.

The charred flesh visible on the man’s chest
began to heal, the gashes where the skin had split closing slowly.
His breathing, which had been rapid, slowed to a more normal pace.
A faint moan of relief rattled past his lips. I couldn’t imagine
the kind of pain he had been through.

I noticed that the burned skin was healing,
but was still mottled, warped, still plainly scar tissue. I kept it
to myself, intending to ask about it after the work was finished.
The best thing I could do to help was stay out of the way, and keep
quiet. This kind of job required far greater power and control than
I possessed.

“I think that about does it for this one,”
said one of the Healers, a tall, thin man named Jake. He looked
questioningly at the two working on the burn victim. “Do you need a
hand over there?”

“No, we’ve got it. Just about done.”

“What the hell were they doing?” asked a
woman working on the burned man. I never learned her name. Her brow
was furrowed in concentration. “Blowing up a building?”

“You know we aren’t supposed to know
details,” said Jake.

“They show up in my O.R., burned and
bleeding, I think I’m allowed to ask a few questions,” said Peter.
He wiped an alcohol swab around the shrapnel wound, cleaning the
skin as he checked for other injuries. “I know that we send Fire
agents into the field for dangerous work, but this is getting
ridiculous. We went four years without any injuries, and in the
last eight months, we’ve had two dozen. It’s only a matter of time
before one of these guys winds up dead.”

“They—“

“Don’t tell me they know the risks, Jake,”
snapped Sarah as she began to clean the soot off of the burned man
with a cloth. “It’s bad enough that we have to send agents to the
ass end of the world to stop tin pot dictators from killing half of
their own people, but these guys were coming from Manhattan. That’s
not the Third World. That’s here. What the hell are we doing
sending guys into the field here?”

“I don’t—“

“Peter, I get it. I know you don’t like it,”
Jake cut in. “You’re a Healer. It’s in your nature to stitch wounds
up, not make new ones. I’m the same way. But the fact is that some
people need to be stopped. And sometimes the only way to do that is
to hurt them so badly they can’t get back up.”

Peter’s lip curled in distaste. “I’m sorry. I
didn’t realize we were still living in the Stone Age.”

Sarah grunted in agreement. The woman across
from her looked unsure.

Jake heaved a sigh. “It is getting worse.
We’re sending out more and more Fire agents every week, and fewer
and fewer Spirit agents. I don’t know what we’re going to do in the
long run, but something has to change.”

Silence filled the room, stifling further
discussion. The Healers continued cleaning up the wounded agents
without speaking. After a few minutes, Jake looked up from his
work, and nodded at me.

“You can go. Gabriel will want to counsel
you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Everyone who had undergone the Bonding was
called sir or ma’am. As somewhere between initiate and full member
of Focus, I wasn’t addressed by any titles. Soon, however, I would
make my choice, and join one of the five factions.

I turned and walked out of the operating
room, heading down the hallway toward Gabriel’s office, in the
center of the building. Gabriel was the leader of Focus, though
that sounded more impressive than it actually was. The majority of
the decisions were made by the leaders of all five branches of
Focus—Jason Butler represented Fire, Connie Praeger spoke for
Water, Mark Dundry for Earth, Simon Merrick for Air, and Gabriel
headed the Spirit faction, which was responsible for diplomacy and
negotiation. As such, the head of the Spirit branch had served as
the Director of Focus for centuries. His job was mainly to
prioritize missions, and keep daily operations running as smoothly
as possible.

I smoothed back my shoulder-length hair
before I knocked on Gabriel’s door. Working with the Healers in the
Air faction had a certain appeal to it. I loved the idea of saving
lives with my magic, of using it for an undeniably good purpose,
but it was a bitch to keep your hair straight with all of that wind
blowing around.

“Come in,” Gabriel said when I knocked. I
opened the door, and sat down across from his desk.

His office was a collage of different
cultures. The walls were lined with Native American ceremonial
masks, Chinese pottery on little shelves, Indian statues depicting
Ganesh and Vishnu, and dozens of others I couldn’t name—history was
never my strong suit. Gabriel had spent a long career establishing
ties between cultures that were normally at odds using a
combination of standard negotiating tactics and magic.

The Spirit faction used the soul of the user
as the source of their magic. Because it essentially used humanity
itself as its source of power, Spirit magic was useful for
affecting the mind. Some of the more experienced members were
capable of outright mind control, but using it in such a way was
not allowed, except to directly prevent injury or death of an
innocent. Most of the time, it was used to open minds, not control
them. Gabriel, for instance, could use his magic to convince a card
carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan to reconsider his ingrained
bigotry, and marry an African-American man.

Yeah. Gabriel had scary levels of power.

But the man himself would never inspire fear.
He was a kind man, and had patiently mentored me from the time I
was ten and first coming to terms with my magic. Plus, he looked
like your favorite grandpa. Powder blue eyes sat above a rather
large nose, and his mouth was permanently fixed in a warm smile
with laugh lines on either side, like a happy set of parentheses.
Half of the times I saw him I expected him to greet me with a batch
of cookies, hurriedly handed to me while making me promise I
wouldn’t tell my mom.

“How was the operation?” he asked me, still
smiling.

“It went well. The Fire agents will be
fine.”

He shook his head. “I mean for you. Is it
something that you think you can do, long term?”

I was silent for a few moments as I
considered the question. At my level within Focus, I was eligible
to undergo the Bonding whenever I felt it was appropriate.
Currently I was observing each of the factions, a different one
every week, while I weighed my options. It was like an internship
that didn’t provide college credit. Or that I could put on a
resume, for that matter.