Chapter 11

Before I could begin asking questions, Destouches attitude changed and a sly supercilious smile followed by a smirk appeared on his handsome face, leading me to believe that he was one of those overeducated people who are scornful of others not in their clique or social group. I had seen enough of this from visits to various other colleges and universities while in college myself. I had also concluded from this that many of them were nothing more than idiots or lowlifes.

“He’s an ass,” Allen said on seeing the same thing.

“Why have you invaded my room?” he demanded with a French accent.

“We didn’t invade your room. We simply walked in and awaited your return, Henri,” I told him.

“How do you know my name?” he demanded next, before his eyes fell on the book Allen was holding up.

“How did you get that?” he asked in shock.

“Your friends didn’t need it anymore, so we brought it with us. It’s not something they should be studying and neither should you,” I told him, as I was tired of the stalling.

“Tell me your name,” I demanded, as the truth spell had had plenty of time to work on him.

“No!” he finally managed to utter, after a minute plus, as the sweat poured down his brow and into his eyes.

“TELL ... ME ... YOUR ... NAME!” I demanded again speaking very distinctly. Henri’s entire body shook with the effort he exerted to keep from answering the question.

“Henri ... Pierre ... Destouches,” he finally answered in a panting breath after several more minutes.

“Where were you born?” was my next question, and it too required several minutes and more sweat to receive an answer.

“Paris, France,” he finally answered. The interrogation continued for several more simple questions so the truth spell could penetrate into his mind and persona.

“Why are you here in Boston?” I demanded, finally getting to what I wanted to know.

“We were sent here to secure the FBI building from the likes of you,” he told us with only a slight delay.

“The ‘we’ being you and the other two men?” I asked to be sure.

“Yes.”

“Are there any others with you?” I followed that with.

“No.”

“Who do you work for in the government?” I asked next.

“We work for Assistant Director Stone,” he answered.

“What is Assistant Director Stone’s position?” followed that.

“He is the head of the Paranormal Detection Branch,” he replied after a short time, and more sweating. This made me suspect that it wasn’t the whole truth and was just a cover story.

“Why are you, a citizen of France and the European Union, here working for the American government and the FBI?” I demanded next, changing tactics.

“I was sent here by my superiors to assist the American government in their suppression of Supernaturals or Paranormals, as you call them,” he told us, that supercilious smile and smirk of his returning as he said this. Again this caused me to doubt that he was telling us the truth, but that instead he was parroting something that he had been hypnotized or brain washed to answer by those he worked for.

“Labhairt na fhirrinne!” I shouted in Gaelic, as I traced the glyph for the truth spell again. (Speak the truth!). Destouches turned very pale on hearing this.

“Why are you working for the American government and the FBI?” I demanded again. Destouches sat there for several minutes following that. The sweat just poured off of him, and his jaws were locked so tight that his jaw muscles were visible, showing how much pressure he was exerting to keep from speaking. After a time he nearly collapsed, even under the partial freeze spell, and dropped his head before saying anything.

“I work for the Equal Rights for Humans Party. Their purpose is to rid the world of those with extra powers, namely the Paranormals. Some of us are tolerated because we help them rid the world of the others,” he said and fell silent.

“Is e’ sin an fhirinne?” I demanded in Gaelic. (Is that the truth?)

“Sean fhirinne a tha agam,” he replied in a tired voice. (I’m telling the truth.)

“Is Director Stone a member of this organization?” Allen demanded in a harsh voice.

“Yes,” came after a number of seconds and more sweating.

“So now we know who the enemy is,” Allen said after Destouches had finished.

“Yes, but most of them are in Europe and beyond our reach. However, Director Stone is not beyond our reach. We need to interrogate the others before we do anything else,” I told him, as I returned Destouches’ freeze spell to a full body one.

The two men in the first room were as plain vanilla as Smith and Jones. They were Americans, and worked for the government as Magic users, but their Talents were very weak. Both of them together being weaker than Destouches. Allen and I were amazed that the government would have them on the payroll.

“Maybe the government hired them just to keep an eye on them,” Allen suggested after we had checked their level of Talent.

“Possibly,” I agreed, but wanted to learn why they’d had the book of Black Magic in their room. After changing the freeze spell on the first man, the one who I had labeled Smith, by lowering it to his shoulders, he quickly became aware of us.

“What did you do to us?” he asked in a frightened voice, looking over at the other man, who by default was Jones. I cast the truth spell on him before answering.

“It was just a simple freeze spell. It wouldn’t harm either of you,” I told him before moving to the questions.

“Why did the two of you have that book of Black Magic in here?” I demanded.

“Destouches, the Frenchman, lent it to us, but it’s all in Gaelic with some notes in the margins in what we decided was French, but we don’t read either language,” he told us.

“You don’t speak or read Gaelic?” I asked in shock.

“Not much. At the school, we learned the spells by rote. The instructors were very harsh if you mispronounced the words or got them in the wrong order,” Smith told us.

“That’s because if you change the spell by mispronouncing the words or change the order of the words in the spell, you will wind up with something different than you intended,” I told him, before adding, “With your level of Talent, you couldn’t screw up too badly. The spell just wouldn’t work. For others though, the consequences could be very ... unpleasant.”

Having learned what I wanted to know, I changed his freeze spell back to a full body one, and turned to the second man, Jones. He was as vanilla as Smith had been and didn’t know any more than he did. I returned him to a full body freeze spell after a few minutes.

“I believe we can forget these two. They are more of a threat to themselves than to us,” Allen said as I finished.

“Destouches is another matter. What should we do with him?” he asked.

“There isn’t a lot that we can do with any of them,” I told him, as I considered what action to take and soon had an idea.

“The most that we can do is to inconvenience the FBI and the government. Therefore, I propose to change their freeze spells to ones that will expire in three days. Additionally, I will ward both rooms with wards that are also timed to expire in three days. Let the FBI worry about how it happened,” I told him, before another thought occurred to me.

“We’ll drive by the FBI building, so I can cancel their wards around the building. They’ll probably never realize that they are gone, but the Wizards will notice when they return there,” I told him.

“Where will we be staying for the next three days?” Allen asked.

“We’ll spend the next three days in our room at the Residence Inn. These people will be here for those three days, and we can arrange for somewhere else to stay during that time. With their level of Talent, we will only need to stay about five miles away from them, and they will never be able to sense our Magic signatures,” I assured him.

I changed the spells on the men, and the wards around the rooms before leaving. I also changed the code on the electronic door locks before we left to add another complication to the situation. We took the same elevator back to the ground floor and exited the hotel through the employee’s entrance. Our car was waiting at the school parking lot, and I lowered the ward and removed the obfuscation spell on it. It was a short drive back to the Residence Inn, and I canceled the wards around the FBI building as we drove by it.

Sunday night we slept very well in our hotel room, as Monday would be a busy day. We awoke at around 8:30 on Monday morning, had a quick breakfast, and got on the internet after drawing the area of exclusion on a large map of the Boston area that Allen had. The area was actually an ellipse and not a circle, as it had two centers. One was the FBI building, and the other one was the Embassy Suites, as these were the two places where the Wizards could be expected to work from. If they went mobile to work from other places, we would need to leave the Boston area for elsewhere.

On the Internet, we began looking for places to rent that were outside of the area covered by the ellipse, which included Chelsea and Southie. While this left quite a large area of the city and its surrounding communities, it was mostly areas that neither of us was familiar with, since Boston covers such a huge area. That morning we started our search with areas in the south of Boston beginning with the Brookline area, and moving progressively further north and west with the Newton, Watertown, Cambridge, and Belmont areas, to as far north at the Winchester area. All of these areas had numerous houses and apartments for rent, but the rents for most of them were sky-high.

“We will soon run out of money if we rent any of these places for long, especially without a job to add to our savings, and stealing is not an option,” Allen told me in a positive voice late on Monday afternoon.

“We also can’t stay here at the hotel much longer. Once those Wizards are freed, they are really going to start looking for us. I’m sure the FBI and the rest of the government will be furious with us for screwing with their Magic users. Perhaps we should consider finding a place to move to that is out of both Boston and Massachusetts,” I suggested.

“You are probably right, but we did need to deal with those Wizards. The question is where to move to?” he asked with a deep sigh.

“Someplace cheap or cheaper, obviously, which leaves out most of the big cities along the East coast, and probably the large inland cities too, like Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, Houston, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Atlanta along with all of Florida, as they are all going to be expensive,” I told him.

“What does that leave us with?” he asked.

“Basically, it leaves us with someplace rural probably in the south or mid-west,” I told him.

“Do you know any places like that?” he asked after a short pause.

“I know a number of places like that. The problem being that the ones that I am familiar with are where other Magic users live, and we don’t want to involve them in this,” I told him.

“I also know a number of places where we went on vacation while I was growing up, but they aren’t places where we could stay for long, as we visited a lot of National and State Parks and other recreation areas. Most of them are expensive to stay at for any length of time,” I added.

“Could we get recommendations from any of your family and friends on places where we could rent a place to stay until things cool down?” he asked me.

“Yes, we could probably get several recommendations. The thing is that we will need a vehicle to travel to them. Renting one is out, as the FBI could trace it to us. We may be able to borrow one, if we ask nicely and pay to rent it,” I told him with a chuckle.

“You are presuming that we will transfer to see your friends or relatives. I have a perfectly good vehicle. It’s a recent model and has fairly low mileage. We could drive to their locations, and wouldn’t need to borrow or rent a vehicle,” he told me with a smile.

“Ah ... you’re right! I almost always travel by transferring, though I do have a driver’s license and can drive a car. What about places to stay while we are traveling though? They almost always want you to pay by credit card,” I reminded him.

“We’ll stay at cheap motels. We learned at the FBI school that they often will take cash for a one night stay, so they don’t have to report it on their income tax,” he told me with a smile. We agreed then to transfer tomorrow to see my relatives and friends for recommendations. We could then transfer back to where we left the car in Boston to travel to the location that we chose.

We went out to dinner that night, as we were tired of what was available at the hotel, and we had run out of the groceries that we had brought with us. Later that night after a shower together, there was love and then sex. Both were long, slow and passionate, lasting for a considerable time each as we thoroughly enjoyed each other. The climax at the end was fantastic, and lit up the room.

Monday at the FBI building, across the street from their hotel room, was not a good experience for many of those working there. AIC Drum was already upset at 10:00 that morning that the Wizards hadn’t reported for work yet.

“Call those damn lazy Wizards, and tell them to get their asses over here. They aren’t here on vacation. They need to help us find that bastard Parks,” he told his assistant in an upset voice. The assistant called the hotel and spent a number of minutes on the phone talking to those at the hotel. Eventually, she hung up and turned to her boss.