Age(s) of the Geek, 5/7 - Leverage / Supernatural crossover
.
Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 5: Leverage / Supernatural, part 1.
Summary: Alec's been having strange dreams for months; now a shadowy figure is stalking him. And when he starts investigating his own family history, things get even worse.
Genre: gen AU crossover.
Rating / Warnings: R for angst, non-graphic violence, and canonical character death.
Word count: 6,300 words.
Spoilers: pre-canon for Leverage, so no spoilers. Major spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Supernatural, and minor spoilers for season 7 of Buffy.
Author's notes: sincere thanks to cactus_cat for her beta assistance.
This is the fifth in my series of interconnected Leverage crossovers, all focusing on Alec Hardison and his encounters with fellow geeks from various TV shows. This story can be read independently, but it'll make far more sense if you read the previous chapters first:
Chapter 1 (Buffy crossover)
Chapter 2 (Veronica Mars crossover)
Chapter 3 (Doctor Who crossover)
Chapter 4 (Heroes crossover, first section)
***
Alec Hardison and Ash, 2006 - 2007
Alec had been having the weirdest dreams recently. They'd started in early spring, and were getting more frequent and vivid as the year wore on. His unconscious mind came up with some seriously nasty shit. What was with the staring yellow eyes, and the voice that kept droning on about demon armies and the cataclysmic battle to come?
Clearly he'd watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy too many times. Gollum's glowing eyes in the mines of Moria were kinda freaky, and that crazy little dude sure did talk to himself a whole lot. And it didn't take a psych degree to interpret Sauron as Satan and the orcs as his demonic army.
Even if they were Tolkien-inspired, the nightmares still scared the hell out of Alec. He often stayed up really late, putting off going to bed until he'd be too tired to dream, but it didn't seem to help. Soon he was also getting terrible headaches, which he figured was due to sleep deprivation.
Some of Alec's anxiety obviously stemmed from worry about his foster-mother's health. Nana had suffered two heart attacks since October, and the outlook wasn't good. He was paying for her treatment at the best hospital in Atlanta, and flew down to see her whenever he could.
On his visit at Christmas, she noticed the dark shadows under his eyes and asked what was troubling him. Typical Nana: even when she was so sick, she was still thinking of others. Without quite meaning to, Alec found himself telling her all about the dreams. When he described the yellow eyes and menacing voice, she gasped and started trembling.
Cursing himself for upsetting her, Alec apologized and got up to call the nurse. But Nana grabbed his hand in a surprisingly strong grip, telling him not to worry. Then she asked him to call her friend Louise, and get her to stop by the hospital later. Together, she said, the two of them would pray for Alec. He was touched by the offer, for sure, but he didn't really see how prayer could help.
***
Nana died in February, slipping away quietly in her sleep. Even though he'd had time to prepare himself, it hit Alec hard. Her funeral was a huge affair: the church was overflowing with Nana's relatives, her former foster-kids and their own families, and her many friends. It was a fitting send-off for a woman who'd given so much of herself to the neighborhood, the church, and to society's unwanted children.
After the funeral, Alec returned to Chicago, where he'd been living since running from the Feds in New York. The winter weather was as bleak as his mood. He'd loved Nana more than anyone else in his life; he felt lost without her.
And things were getting worse, not better. His nightmares were more frightening than ever, and being awake wasn't much of a respite. Whenever he left his apartment, Alec had this growing sense that he was being watched - like there was a dark presence, lurking just out of sight.
He didn't think he was just being paranoid. Although most crazy folks would say that, Alec could prove it. He'd tapped into the video feeds for the security camera outside his building's entrance, and the one outside the liquor store on the corner.
And when he accessed the footage from those nights when he'd felt he was being followed home? Sure enough, a shadowy shape could be seen tailing him down the street. But whenever Alec-on-the-screen turned around, the person melted away into the darkness.
Or maybe it was a person-shaped thing - Alec wasn't ruling anything out. He'd mentally run through all the supernatural creatures he'd learnt about over the years, but come up empty-handed. When he emailed his friend Willow for help, she replied saying that vampires occasionally stalked their victims for a while before attacking. It was atypical behavior, though, and usually indicated a personal connection with the target.
To his knowledge, Alec had never met a vampire. So why would one be stalking him? He'd invented that vampire-killing grenade for Buffy, sure, but that had been 6 years ago. Vampires might well believe in revenge being served cold, given that they could live for centuries...so maybe they'd been lulling him into a false sense of security. Or, more likely, some badass vampire only just found out that Alec had (indirectly) been responsible for killing many of his friends.
This might have been a reasonable explanation, but it was not a comforting one.
Unfortunately Willow couldn't come to Chicago to help him; she was going to be traveling around South America with Buffy for a few more months, training the local Slayers. So Alec decided to take matters into his own hands. He'd kept some prototypes of the vampire-killing device, so he made sure to carry one at all times.
Coming home from the grocery store two nights later, he felt that familiar unnerving presence. When he stopped and looked behind him, there was of course nobody there. Alec turned around again and kept strolling along casually, but that prickling feeling of being watched remained. As he walked, he pulled the grenade out of his jacket pocket and primed it. Then he tossed it over his right shoulder.
Alec instinctively shielded his eyes from the burst of bright light, then spun around hoping to see a telltale pile of dust on the sidewalk. But there was nothing and nobody there - just the dark deserted street. He heard a sinister laugh from the shadows, and a deep voice said, "Nice try, son, but I'll be back for you soon!" Then silence.
***
Alec pretty much avoided going outside for the next couple of months. His excuse was the harsh winter: he was still a Southern boy at heart, and he wasn't any fonder of Chicago's bitterly cold wind at age 23 than he had been at age 14.
But honestly, he was just too afraid to leave his apartment. If he'd pissed off his stalker by trying to kill him/it/whatever, then he'd rather not risk another encounter out in the open. And if there really was a vampire after him, it couldn't cross his threshold without an invitation.
Despite the sleep deprivation, nightmares, worsening headaches, and feeling under siege, Alec was weirdly able to work better than ever. Maybe it was all the extra caffeine he was consuming to stay awake, but he was getting a surprising amount done surprisingly fast these days. His already solid reputation had improved out of sight, and he was now one of the go-to guys for cyber-crime.
It actually wasn't too hard to achieve a hermit-like existence. Alec's building was well-heated, and his apartment was spacious and comfortable. He'd only just moved to Chicago a few months earlier, so he didn't have an offline social life to keep up. He could do most of his work from home, he had his groceries delivered, and he had all the local takeout places on speed dial. And between his fantastic home theater set-up and his super-fast broadband connection, Alec wouldn't be getting bored anytime soon.
Late one night in April, killing time online to avoid going to sleep, Alec got chatting with an interesting guy who'd joined one of his paranormal forums a while back. Like Alec, Ash had studied computer science at MIT. They hadn't crossed paths, though, because Ash had been kicked out for fighting the year before Alec started. The guy seemed oddly proud of being expelled; he even went by the handle 'DrBadass,' which Alec thought was hilarious.
Now Ash lived and worked at some roadside bar in the middle of nowhere. He seemed like a weird mix of backwoods hick and technical genius. He and Alec bonded over programming, hacking, gaming (they both had an abiding love of old-school games), and a belief in phenomena that went bump in the night.
Ash's focus was researching and tracking ghosts and other supernatural creatures. He didn't say much about his offline activities, but Alec got the clear impression that it wasn't a purely academic interest - Ash either fought such things or helped people that did. Alec briefly pondered this puzzle: Willow was to Buffy as Ash was to x? But he didn't ask, and Ash didn't tell.
***
For some reason, Ash seemed especially concerned with tracing a bunch of kids born around 1983; most of them had lost their mothers in house fires when they were infants. He and Alec discussed possible search algorithms, using both publicly-available data and confidential sources.
But Alec couldn't just treat this as an interesting research exercise, like he had with Mickey's quest for information about the Doctor. Although he hadn't told Ash yet, Alec wondered if he might fit the bill himself. He was born in 1983, and knew that his mother had died when he was very young (he wasn't sure exactly when or how). Alec had been placed in state care as a baby, and had gone through a number of foster homes before winding up with Nana in Atlanta.
Unfortunately the papers relating to his birth parents had been lost somewhere in the care system, and the records hadn't been computerized. So he'd never been able to find out anything else about his past. Alec didn't know his father's name, or if the man was alive or dead; he didn't even know if he had brothers and sisters out there somewhere.
As a little kid, he'd made up all kinds of things about his folks. His dad was a Navy SEAL, or an NBA star; his mom was a supermodel, or a soccer mom who made the world's best pecan pie. These daydreams had consoled him in some of the more horrible places he'd lived. Moving to Nana's had put a lot of his issues to rest, though. She'd given him a loving home, a sense of belonging, and enough foster-siblings that he'd never felt lonely.
In his early teens, Alec had tried investigating his background - and found squat. Eventually, he'd lost hope and lost interest. But he'd always kept his birth name, even though 'Alec' was such a dumb name (he consoled himself with the thought that Sir Alec Guinness was pretty awesome in Star Wars) and 'Hardison' hadn't done him any favors at school. If anyone was out there looking for him, Alec wanted to be easy to find...
Talking to Ash about this cohort of motherless kids had stirred up all that long-dormant curiosity. The last time Alec had tried looking for his relatives, he'd been much younger and far less skilled. He'd tried only the standard (legal) methods of searching available to him in Atlanta. Now he had access to Social Security records, Census data, electoral rolls and a whole lot of other sources - not to mention the handy fact that many newspapers now had online archives.
Alec grabbed a bag of gummy frogs, opened another bottle of soda, and went to work.
***
An hour later, Alec finally had some solid answers about his family. He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and tried to process what he'd just learnt.
The bad news was that his mother, Tina, had died in a fire when Alec was a baby (as it happened, she died on the day he reached 6 months). She'd only been 30 years old when she'd suffered that awful fate.
The authorities hadn't been able to conclusively determine what had caused the blaze at her small New Orleans apartment; they'd assumed that it was an electrical fault. The man who lived in the next apartment had won a bravery award for running into the burning nursery. Seeing that Tina was beyond help, he'd picked up her baby sons and carried them to safety.
And that was the really astonishing news - Alec had a twin brother! The proof was right there in the Times-Picayune births column: two boys, Alec and Mark, born on May 13th 1983 to Miss Tina Hardison at New Orleans Charity Hospital.
Alec wondered if Tina had named her babies after Star Wars stars (in which case, he should be grateful that one of them hadn't been called Harrison Hardison). It was nice to think that she might have been a geek, borrowing the names of two actors who portrayed Jedi. It made him feel closer to the mother he'd never known.
Tina had apparently been a single mom. There was no mention of a husband or boyfriend in the newspaper articles about the fire; her sons' father wasn't listed in the birth announcement or named on Alec's birth certificate either. So that was pretty much a dead end, unless Alec went down to Louisiana and tried to track down people who'd known his mom 25 years ago.
As Hardison was Tina's maiden name, Alec was easily able to locate her records - it turned out that she was originally from Texas. His maternal grandparents had lived in Houston, but they'd both passed away a few years after his mother's death. Tina had had two siblings; her younger sister had died in a car crash as a teenager, and her older brother had been killed while serving in Vietnam. It seemed that the Hardisons were plagued by tragedy...
Alec was disappointed to discover that he had no close relatives left on his mother's side. But it did answer a question that had long bothered him: why hadn't his extended family adopted him after his mother's death? It looked like Tina's folks had been too elderly and unwell to take care of one baby, let alone twins, and there was nobody else left.
So Alec and Mark had gone into the care system, and had been sent to different foster homes. Clearly they had been separated so early in their lives that they didn't even remember each other.
Alec couldn't find any further official record of a Mark Hardison; there was no indication of what had happened to him. If he was still alive, his name must have been changed by the family who took him in.
So Alec set out to find his brother using the only parameters he had: an African-American male, born the same day as Alec. If it turned out that Mark's adoptive parents had also changed his birthday, then he was screwed. But it was worth a shot.
After half an hour, in which Alec had worked on improving his best time for expert-level Minesweeper (he liked to return to the classics when he was tense), the search program had finished. Trawling through multiple federal, state and commercial databases, it had found several dozen possible matches.
Scrolling through the search results, Alec finally struck gold. Jake Talley was born in New Orleans on May 13th 1983, and adopted as a one-year-old by a family in Alabama. His adoptive father had passed away, but his adoptive mother and younger sister still lived down in Birmingham.
The DMV database provided definitive proof that Jake Talley was Alec's brother Mark. Looking at the photo on the screen gave Alec another shock: they weren't just twins, they were identical. It was the freakiest thing - not quite like looking into a mirror, but close enough. Jake had a mustache, shorter hair, and bigger muscles. He looked like a total badass, compared to Alec.
The DMV had Jake's address listed as an Army base in Texas. Five minutes later, Alec discovered that hacking the Pentagon was still worryingly easy, seven years after he'd first done it as a high school student. Seriously? With the rise of cyber-terrorism, and foreign governments seeking access to US secrets, computer security should have been more important than ever. And yet it seemed that the only requirement for heading the Department of Defense's IT team was the ability to type with more than two fingers...
***
Accessing the Army's personnel database, Alec soon found his twin's file. Jake had enlisted right out of high school, and had already survived a tour to Iraq. For the last 15 months, he'd been serving in Afghanistan; right now, he was in southern Kandahar. A little research told Alec that Kandahar province was the most dangerous area of one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. He hated to think of his brother being out there.
Jake's disciplinary record made for interesting reading. It seemed that there had been a change in his behavior in the last year or so. Previously, he'd occasionally been involved in brawls - while he didn't usually start them, he was pretty skilled at ending them. So his conduct hadn't been blemish-free, but he was otherwise considered a good soldier.
More recently, Jake had started fighting his comrades a lot more often, and winning by a huge margin. He'd knocked one soldier clear across the room, breaking his arm and shattering his collarbone. He'd punched someone else so hard that the man's jaw had needed wiring.
On the flip side, though, Alec's brother had been awarded a bravery medal! Six months ago, when a truck overturned while his unit was on patrol, he'd saved the driver by single-handedly lifting the vehicle off of him.
His C.O.'s mission reports also indicated that Jake was suddenly performing his everyday duties far better than before. He could run further and faster, and was shooting more accurately. And when a couple of encounters with insurgents had come down to hand-to-hand combat, he'd killed his opponents within seconds and without breaking a sweat.
While these extraordinary feats seemed to have tempered his commanders' attitude towards Jake, they were still concerned by his outbursts of excessive violence. As well as imposing punishment duties for the fights, the brass had referred him for anger management counseling. But according to the Army psychiatrist's notes, Jake had been evasive about what was going on; he said only that he felt angry all the time and was having creepy dreams.
Jake's medical record was also very interesting. He'd seemed to be in excellent health until last year, when he'd started complaining of awful migraines. He had seen the base medic several times, and had even undergone a brain scan at the Bagram AFB hospital, but nothing unusual had been found. He'd been given heavy duty painkillers, and sent back to his unit.
Alec saw two possibilities here. Option A: his twin was faking the headaches to get sent home, and the Hulk-strength thing with the truck was just a fluke adrenaline surge. Option B, which unfortunately seemed more likely: something really weird was going on.
Now that Alec thought about it, his own headaches and dreams had started about the same time as Jake's. Could they be connected, with some strange psychic twin-fu, or was it a coincidence? After all, Alec was pretty sure he'd have noticed if he developed any superpowers.
Wanting to make contact with Jake immediately, Alec carefully composed a short message. He figured that the Army kept tabs on emails received by servicemen, so he wasn't going to detail the highly illegal methods he'd used to find his twin. He also didn't know if Jake was aware he was adopted.
So Alec just introduced himself, saying that his family history research had pointed him towards Jake being his long-lost brother. He attached a photo of himself, figuring that would get the guy's attention for sure.
The Army files showed that Jake's unit was out on a long-range mission in the mountains right now; he wasn't due back at base, where the soldiers had regular internet access, until mid-May. Alec could wait until then. But he placed a tag on Jake's record, which would alert him if anything changed. He couldn't shake this weird feeling of foreboding...
***
A few days later, Alec was sitting at his computer watching an old Star Trek episode. It was late afternoon, and he was vaguely thinking about ordering Chinese soon. Suddenly, his screen began to flicker; the show's audio went all staticky, like a detuned radio. Then the lights went out.
Within seconds, he was hit by the worst headache of his entire life - a terrible searing pressure, like his skull was going to split open. Blood began to gush from his nose. He felt like all the strength had been sapped from his body; he slid off his chair and onto the floor, clutching his forehead in agony.
A vision swam in front of his closed eyes: a man with yellow eyes, grinning wickedly and beckoning to him. The next moment, Alec had the strangest sensation all down his left side, as if a powerful force was pulling at him. He screamed as a second force started wrenching his body in the opposite direction. He feared that he was about to be ripped in half!
But just as Alec was praying for a quick death, the pain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
He lay sprawled on the floor, dizzy and gasping and trembling. Sitting up gingerly, Alec took stock of his situation. He was alone in the apartment, which was silent apart from the sounds coming from his computer. The room was dimly-lit because all the bulbs had blown. His face and chest were covered in blood, and he felt cold and clammy and nauseous.
Alec wondered if he should maybe call 911, or drive himself to the hospital. But whatever had happened seemed to be over, and how could he possibly explain it without sounding crazy? Really, he just wanted to sleep for days...
He slowly got to his feet, his head spinning, and stumbled to the bathroom. After washing his face, he glanced at the mirror and then did a double-take: he looked like something out of a horror movie, with bloodshot eyes, a greenish tinge to his skin, and a shirt splashed with red. He stripped off his clothes, staggered to bed, and passed out.
***
When Alec woke up again, the sun was rising - he'd slept for over 12 hours. He felt a lot better: he still had a headache, but it was a fraction of its previous strength. Afraid he'd fall over if he tried to shower, he ran a hot bath and sank into it with a grateful sigh.
Lifting his arms up to soap them, he noticed something very strange. There were five reddish blisters on his left forearm, like he'd been branded by the touch of someone's hand. The skin was burningly hot when he pressed his own fingertips to it, and sore. And on his right wrist there was a smaller set of five pinkish-white marks, like a person had dug their fingers into his arm and still hadn't let go. When he touched those spots, the skin was completely numb.
...well, fuck. That ruled out a brain hemorrhage, a seizure, or any other medical event Alec could think of. There had been nobody present in the room to leave those marks on his arms, and he hadn't done it to himself. He could only come up with one explanation, as bizarre as it sounded: two opposing supernatural forces had fought a tug-of-war over him.
Why, though? Alec knew people who battled the forces of darkness, but he'd never been on the frontlines himself. He was hardly a serious threat to anyone or anything evil. So who had been trying to drag him away? Maybe that yellow-eyed man he'd seen was also his shadowy stalker. And who had been protecting Alec from harm: did he have a guardian angel or something?
Dried and dressed, Alec fixed himself some breakfast then sat back down at his computer to seek some answers. He tried searching for other accounts of people being torn apart by invisible beings, but just found graphic tales of medieval punishments inflicted in the name of God. Nauseated, he pushed his bowl of cereal away.
Alec was in the middle of writing an email to Willow about his ordeal when an alert popped up - his brother's Army file had just been updated by a field commander in Afghanistan.
Jake had been reported missing.
Witnesses from his squad said he'd fallen asleep in their shared tent at about midnight. Due to head out at dawn, they'd all worn their uniforms and boots to bed. But by 4am, when one of them got up to visit the latrine, Jake had vanished.
Jake's squad had turned the camp upside down looking for him, but there was no trace. He hadn't taken his gun, body armor or helmet with him, and no soldier in his right mind would wander off-base in hostile territory without those essentials. It was a freezing, moonless night, but he'd also left behind his cold weather gear, his flashlight and his night vision goggles.
So it looked like Jake had gone crazy, and gone AWOL. The sentries hadn't seen him leave the camp, but the Army was assuming that he'd somehow slipped past them. But being so poorly equipped, in a remote and barren environment, he couldn't have gotten far in just a few hours. As the search teams hadn't found him (or his body) anywhere nearby, they were afraid that he might have been captured by the Taliban or other unfriendly locals.
Alec checked the time difference between Afghanistan and Illinois, on a hunch, and yes: late afternoon in Chicago was the middle of the night in Kandahar. It seemed highly likely that his brother had disappeared at about the same time that Alec had been attacked yesterday. Surely the timing couldn't be a coincidence...so had Jake been taken by the thing that had tried to grab Alec?
***
Two days passed with no further news of Jake. Alec, reading the Army's increasingly worried internal communications from the comfort of his Chicago apartment, barely slept. It was agonizing to think that he could have found his brother, only to lose him again almost immediately.
Meanwhile, there had been no more strange occurrences at Alec's end. When he ventured out for some much-needed fresh air, he hadn't sensed any watching presence. And he'd stopped dreaming of yellow eyes and prophetic voices, but what had replaced them was even worse. When he did manage to fall asleep, he had nightmares about terrible things happening to Jake mixed with vivid images of his mother's fiery death.
Alec needed to distract himself, and be with people who cared about him. He was between contracts anyway, so he packed his laptop and some clothes and caught the next flight down to Atlanta.
He had bought Nana's rented house for her two years earlier. It had been the first major purchase of his criminal career, funded by a big Wall Street job (Nana had assumed Alec was working at the financial firm, rather than defrauding it from the comfort of his couch, and he hadn't corrected her). His foster-sisters Sheena and Jessie now lived in the house, rent-free, and they were very happy to have him stay for a while.
When he'd come home for Nana's funeral, Sheena's daughter Becca had still been crawling; now, she'd started walking. Seeing the little girl toddle towards him made Alec laugh for the first time in days. He picked his niece up and hugged her close, feeling some of his tension drain away.
Alec caught up with the family news over a pitcher of iced tea made to Nana's old recipe (that was another thing he'd missed, living up north). Jessie was in her freshman year at a local college, studying to become an elementary school teacher. Sheena was a stay-at-home mom during the day; in the evenings, Jessie babysat Becca while Sheena worked at the neighborhood youth center. The staff there had really helped her when she'd been a messed-up teenager, Sheena said, so she wanted to pay it forward. Longer term, she was thinking of becoming a foster-mother herself.
Alec relaxed a little, sitting around the table with his sisters as Becca played happily on the floor. Their lives were wonderfully normal, after all the weirdness that Alec had experienced lately. The scene was so familiar and homey...he half-expected Nana to walk out of the kitchen, bringing them a plate of her chocolate-chip cookies and scolding Alec to "go cut the grass, already!" But she wouldn't, of course; she was gone.
Abruptly, he decided to go visit Nana's grave. He really had to tell someone about Jake, but he couldn't possibly unload it all on his sisters. And confiding in Nana had always made him feel better.
So he drove his rental car out to the cemetery, and walked across the beautifully manicured lawns to Nana's final resting place. It was a gorgeous early summer's afternoon; he could feel the sun's heat soaking into his bones, after all the weeks he'd spent cooped up in his Chicago apartment.
Alec had paid for the elegant black marble headstone, but he hadn't seen it until now. The epitaph read 'Ruth Jane Maxwell, 1946-2007. A sister in Christ and a mother to us all'. While it was a very fitting tribute, seeing Nana's name carved in stone made her loss unbearably final.
Overcome by grief, exhaustion and fear, Alec collapsed onto the stone bench at the foot of her grave. His head in his hands, he began to cry for Nana, for his mother, for Jake...and for himself, left behind.
***
Alec didn't know how much time had passed, but at least he'd run out of tears. He was just staring at the ground, trying to collect himself so he could start telling Nana his story, when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
Louise, Nana's closest friend, was walking across the lawn towards him. Although he was frustrated by the interruption, Nana had raised him to be polite to his elders. So he stood up, kissed Louise's wrinkled cheek, and gestured for her to sit beside him.
Alec had known her for most of his life; she'd been a frequent visitor to Nana's house, and an honorary aunt to all the kids. Louise was getting old, her black hair long ago gone gray, but her brisk energy was undiminished.
Like Nana, Louise seemed to have some kind of mind-reading ability. She took one look at his face and said, "Alec, you look like death warmed over! Tell me - are you still dreaming about that yellow-eyed man?"
He blinked at her, puzzled, and Louise nodded.
"Ruth told me all about your nightmares before she died. She asked me to protect you."
Alec vaguely recalled that Nana and Louise had been planning to pray for the cessation of his dreams, last Christmas. "But how could you protect me from something that's inside my head?"
"Honey, I have to tell you something you'll find hard to believe," Louise replied. "The man with the yellow eyes is a demon, sent by Satan. He chose you for some reason, when you were a little baby, and that's why your momma died. There's been a shadow hanging over you ever since."
His mind reeling, Alec asked, "How do you know all this?"
"I'm part of a network of devout Christians, all across America, who believe that the Devil is plotting to bring on the Apocalypse. Ruth belonged too, of course. Our group became aware, last year, that a group of kids around your age were getting visitations from the yellow-eyed demon. He granted them unusual abilities, and he's been tempting them to do terrible things to gain even more power..."
If that was true, then a whole bunch of things suddenly made a lot more sense: Ash's determination to find the children born in 1983, Alec's nightmares and mysterious stalker, and Jake's super-strength.
"OK, so, a demon has been visiting me in my sleep," Alec said, "and the big battle he's been telling me about is the Apocalypse. I can accept that. But I don't have any special abilities!"
Louise raised her eyebrows. "Alec, you always were freakishly good with technology. But have you noticed recently that you've become even better than before?"
...oh, God. Now that Alec thought about it, the last time he could remember making a serious mistake was over a year ago; since then, he'd been bulletproof. Tasks that had once seemed impossible were now child's play. He'd been able to find massive security holes in every computer network he'd targeted, even the ones generally considered impenetrable.
These days he only had to think a command, or plot a route around a firewall, and it seemed to happen astoundingly fast. It was like his computer had become an extension of his brain.
Alec had figured, arrogantly, that it was just the natural honing of his already awesome skills. It was really disturbing to think that the improvement was demon-powered rather than caffeine-fueled.
Louise must have seen the dismay on his face, because she reached over and patted his hand.
"It's not your fault, child. Being targeted by a demon doesn't make a person wicked. You can still choose whether or not to give in to the temptation, and you've managed to resist. Ruth knew that you were different, and she loved you no matter what."
Somehow that was even harder to hear than all the rest of it. Missing Nana more than ever, Alec had to close his eyes for a moment.
"She had an ability of her own, you know," Louise continued casually, and Alec jerked his head around to gape at her. "A kind of empathy, I guess you could call it - she could sense people's emotions, and it was especially strong with you kids."
"I always thought she was psychic," Alec said weakly; it actually did explain a lot.
Then he took a deep breath, and told Louise everything that he'd been planning to tell Nana. He started with the worsening nightmares and the stalking, then moved on to discovering the existence of his twin brother. Louise was surprised to hear about Jake, which made Alec feel relieved - he would've hated to learn that Nana had kept that secret from him too.
When he described that terrifying feeling of being pulled apart by invisible forces, though, Louise's reaction was unexpected: she clapped her hands together and smiled.
"Thank God it worked! I'm sorry it was so painful, honey, but believe me...if the demon had taken you, it would have been far worse."
Alec was stunned. "Huh? What worked?"
"I'm a good Christian woman, but I also have another talent that I use from time to time - you might call it magic." Alec, whose friend Willow was a witch, had no problem with this concept. He nodded encouragingly, and Louise continued.
"When you told Ruth about the yellow-eyed man appearing in your dreams, she just knew the demon would try to take you away sooner or later. So she asked me to shield you. I cast a protective spell to anchor your body to the Earth, and prevent the demon carrying you off. It was real hard to hold onto you, though, because he's terribly powerful."
Alec showed her the blisters on his left arm, then rolled up his other sleeve to reveal the five pale patches. "So that was the demon, and this was you?"
Louise laid her fingertips over the numb spots on his right wrist; they fit perfectly. "Yes, that's right. But your Nana helped to give me the strength - she's watching over you from Heaven, Alec."
Alec glanced up at the clear blue sky; he wanted to believe it, so badly. It seemed easy to accept that aliens and vampires were real, without having seen them for himself, but this felt very different somehow.
He was reluctant to ask, but he had to know one last thing. "So what do you think happened to Jake?"
Louise sighed. "I'm sorry to say that a bunch of the other special kids my group's been monitoring have disappeared over recent months, same as Jake. They just vanished without trace, and haven't been seen since. We don't know for sure what the demon wants with them, but it can't be anything good. You might have to prepare yourself for bad news, honey."
***
Alec needed time and space to take in all this new information. He thanked Louise for her protection, and for telling him the truth. Hugging her felt strange - she was such a small and fragile woman, and yet she'd fought a demon and won.
As he drove home, Alec tried to lay out the facts in some kind of logical order. But his mind kept going back to his teenage years, when he'd envied Willow for her exciting vampire-enriched lifestyle. Supernatural stuff had seemed so cool, in theory. Now it turned out that a demon had been shaping his life since he was a baby, taking his mother from him and maybe his brother too.
Be careful what you wish for, Alec thought bitterly.
Not wanting to worry his family, Alec managed to compose himself by the time he got back to the house. He had an early supper with his sisters, then washed the dishes while Jessie put Becca to bed. Jessie claimed the living room so she could study for finals; Alec gladly escaped to the spare room, and let his game face drop.
He booted up his laptop and checked his email, but Willow hadn't replied yet (no surprise; she'd warned him that she would have limited internet access in Bolivia). After several days of minimal sleep, his breakdown at the cemetery, and Louise's shocking revelations, Alec was too worn out to do anything else. Even though it was only 8pm, he fell into bed.
He'd email Ash in the morning, Alec decided: come clean about being one of the 1983 kids, tell him about Jake, and ask for his help. Together they'd track Jake down, and maybe find the other missing people too. Alec wouldn't give up hope, not yet.
Sleep was approaching like a black wave. Alec closed his eyes, and let it take him.
***
Chapter 6
Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 5: Leverage / Supernatural, part 1.
Summary: Alec's been having strange dreams for months; now a shadowy figure is stalking him. And when he starts investigating his own family history, things get even worse.
Genre: gen AU crossover.
Rating / Warnings: R for angst, non-graphic violence, and canonical character death.
Word count: 6,300 words.
Spoilers: pre-canon for Leverage, so no spoilers. Major spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Supernatural, and minor spoilers for season 7 of Buffy.
Author's notes: sincere thanks to cactus_cat for her beta assistance.
This is the fifth in my series of interconnected Leverage crossovers, all focusing on Alec Hardison and his encounters with fellow geeks from various TV shows. This story can be read independently, but it'll make far more sense if you read the previous chapters first:
Chapter 1 (Buffy crossover)
Chapter 2 (Veronica Mars crossover)
Chapter 3 (Doctor Who crossover)
Chapter 4 (Heroes crossover, first section)
***
Alec Hardison and Ash, 2006 - 2007
Alec had been having the weirdest dreams recently. They'd started in early spring, and were getting more frequent and vivid as the year wore on. His unconscious mind came up with some seriously nasty shit. What was with the staring yellow eyes, and the voice that kept droning on about demon armies and the cataclysmic battle to come?
Clearly he'd watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy too many times. Gollum's glowing eyes in the mines of Moria were kinda freaky, and that crazy little dude sure did talk to himself a whole lot. And it didn't take a psych degree to interpret Sauron as Satan and the orcs as his demonic army.
Even if they were Tolkien-inspired, the nightmares still scared the hell out of Alec. He often stayed up really late, putting off going to bed until he'd be too tired to dream, but it didn't seem to help. Soon he was also getting terrible headaches, which he figured was due to sleep deprivation.
Some of Alec's anxiety obviously stemmed from worry about his foster-mother's health. Nana had suffered two heart attacks since October, and the outlook wasn't good. He was paying for her treatment at the best hospital in Atlanta, and flew down to see her whenever he could.
On his visit at Christmas, she noticed the dark shadows under his eyes and asked what was troubling him. Typical Nana: even when she was so sick, she was still thinking of others. Without quite meaning to, Alec found himself telling her all about the dreams. When he described the yellow eyes and menacing voice, she gasped and started trembling.
Cursing himself for upsetting her, Alec apologized and got up to call the nurse. But Nana grabbed his hand in a surprisingly strong grip, telling him not to worry. Then she asked him to call her friend Louise, and get her to stop by the hospital later. Together, she said, the two of them would pray for Alec. He was touched by the offer, for sure, but he didn't really see how prayer could help.
***
Nana died in February, slipping away quietly in her sleep. Even though he'd had time to prepare himself, it hit Alec hard. Her funeral was a huge affair: the church was overflowing with Nana's relatives, her former foster-kids and their own families, and her many friends. It was a fitting send-off for a woman who'd given so much of herself to the neighborhood, the church, and to society's unwanted children.
After the funeral, Alec returned to Chicago, where he'd been living since running from the Feds in New York. The winter weather was as bleak as his mood. He'd loved Nana more than anyone else in his life; he felt lost without her.
And things were getting worse, not better. His nightmares were more frightening than ever, and being awake wasn't much of a respite. Whenever he left his apartment, Alec had this growing sense that he was being watched - like there was a dark presence, lurking just out of sight.
He didn't think he was just being paranoid. Although most crazy folks would say that, Alec could prove it. He'd tapped into the video feeds for the security camera outside his building's entrance, and the one outside the liquor store on the corner.
And when he accessed the footage from those nights when he'd felt he was being followed home? Sure enough, a shadowy shape could be seen tailing him down the street. But whenever Alec-on-the-screen turned around, the person melted away into the darkness.
Or maybe it was a person-shaped thing - Alec wasn't ruling anything out. He'd mentally run through all the supernatural creatures he'd learnt about over the years, but come up empty-handed. When he emailed his friend Willow for help, she replied saying that vampires occasionally stalked their victims for a while before attacking. It was atypical behavior, though, and usually indicated a personal connection with the target.
To his knowledge, Alec had never met a vampire. So why would one be stalking him? He'd invented that vampire-killing grenade for Buffy, sure, but that had been 6 years ago. Vampires might well believe in revenge being served cold, given that they could live for centuries...so maybe they'd been lulling him into a false sense of security. Or, more likely, some badass vampire only just found out that Alec had (indirectly) been responsible for killing many of his friends.
This might have been a reasonable explanation, but it was not a comforting one.
Unfortunately Willow couldn't come to Chicago to help him; she was going to be traveling around South America with Buffy for a few more months, training the local Slayers. So Alec decided to take matters into his own hands. He'd kept some prototypes of the vampire-killing device, so he made sure to carry one at all times.
Coming home from the grocery store two nights later, he felt that familiar unnerving presence. When he stopped and looked behind him, there was of course nobody there. Alec turned around again and kept strolling along casually, but that prickling feeling of being watched remained. As he walked, he pulled the grenade out of his jacket pocket and primed it. Then he tossed it over his right shoulder.
Alec instinctively shielded his eyes from the burst of bright light, then spun around hoping to see a telltale pile of dust on the sidewalk. But there was nothing and nobody there - just the dark deserted street. He heard a sinister laugh from the shadows, and a deep voice said, "Nice try, son, but I'll be back for you soon!" Then silence.
***
Alec pretty much avoided going outside for the next couple of months. His excuse was the harsh winter: he was still a Southern boy at heart, and he wasn't any fonder of Chicago's bitterly cold wind at age 23 than he had been at age 14.
But honestly, he was just too afraid to leave his apartment. If he'd pissed off his stalker by trying to kill him/it/whatever, then he'd rather not risk another encounter out in the open. And if there really was a vampire after him, it couldn't cross his threshold without an invitation.
Despite the sleep deprivation, nightmares, worsening headaches, and feeling under siege, Alec was weirdly able to work better than ever. Maybe it was all the extra caffeine he was consuming to stay awake, but he was getting a surprising amount done surprisingly fast these days. His already solid reputation had improved out of sight, and he was now one of the go-to guys for cyber-crime.
It actually wasn't too hard to achieve a hermit-like existence. Alec's building was well-heated, and his apartment was spacious and comfortable. He'd only just moved to Chicago a few months earlier, so he didn't have an offline social life to keep up. He could do most of his work from home, he had his groceries delivered, and he had all the local takeout places on speed dial. And between his fantastic home theater set-up and his super-fast broadband connection, Alec wouldn't be getting bored anytime soon.
Late one night in April, killing time online to avoid going to sleep, Alec got chatting with an interesting guy who'd joined one of his paranormal forums a while back. Like Alec, Ash had studied computer science at MIT. They hadn't crossed paths, though, because Ash had been kicked out for fighting the year before Alec started. The guy seemed oddly proud of being expelled; he even went by the handle 'DrBadass,' which Alec thought was hilarious.
Now Ash lived and worked at some roadside bar in the middle of nowhere. He seemed like a weird mix of backwoods hick and technical genius. He and Alec bonded over programming, hacking, gaming (they both had an abiding love of old-school games), and a belief in phenomena that went bump in the night.
Ash's focus was researching and tracking ghosts and other supernatural creatures. He didn't say much about his offline activities, but Alec got the clear impression that it wasn't a purely academic interest - Ash either fought such things or helped people that did. Alec briefly pondered this puzzle: Willow was to Buffy as Ash was to x? But he didn't ask, and Ash didn't tell.
***
For some reason, Ash seemed especially concerned with tracing a bunch of kids born around 1983; most of them had lost their mothers in house fires when they were infants. He and Alec discussed possible search algorithms, using both publicly-available data and confidential sources.
But Alec couldn't just treat this as an interesting research exercise, like he had with Mickey's quest for information about the Doctor. Although he hadn't told Ash yet, Alec wondered if he might fit the bill himself. He was born in 1983, and knew that his mother had died when he was very young (he wasn't sure exactly when or how). Alec had been placed in state care as a baby, and had gone through a number of foster homes before winding up with Nana in Atlanta.
Unfortunately the papers relating to his birth parents had been lost somewhere in the care system, and the records hadn't been computerized. So he'd never been able to find out anything else about his past. Alec didn't know his father's name, or if the man was alive or dead; he didn't even know if he had brothers and sisters out there somewhere.
As a little kid, he'd made up all kinds of things about his folks. His dad was a Navy SEAL, or an NBA star; his mom was a supermodel, or a soccer mom who made the world's best pecan pie. These daydreams had consoled him in some of the more horrible places he'd lived. Moving to Nana's had put a lot of his issues to rest, though. She'd given him a loving home, a sense of belonging, and enough foster-siblings that he'd never felt lonely.
In his early teens, Alec had tried investigating his background - and found squat. Eventually, he'd lost hope and lost interest. But he'd always kept his birth name, even though 'Alec' was such a dumb name (he consoled himself with the thought that Sir Alec Guinness was pretty awesome in Star Wars) and 'Hardison' hadn't done him any favors at school. If anyone was out there looking for him, Alec wanted to be easy to find...
Talking to Ash about this cohort of motherless kids had stirred up all that long-dormant curiosity. The last time Alec had tried looking for his relatives, he'd been much younger and far less skilled. He'd tried only the standard (legal) methods of searching available to him in Atlanta. Now he had access to Social Security records, Census data, electoral rolls and a whole lot of other sources - not to mention the handy fact that many newspapers now had online archives.
Alec grabbed a bag of gummy frogs, opened another bottle of soda, and went to work.
***
An hour later, Alec finally had some solid answers about his family. He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and tried to process what he'd just learnt.
The bad news was that his mother, Tina, had died in a fire when Alec was a baby (as it happened, she died on the day he reached 6 months). She'd only been 30 years old when she'd suffered that awful fate.
The authorities hadn't been able to conclusively determine what had caused the blaze at her small New Orleans apartment; they'd assumed that it was an electrical fault. The man who lived in the next apartment had won a bravery award for running into the burning nursery. Seeing that Tina was beyond help, he'd picked up her baby sons and carried them to safety.
And that was the really astonishing news - Alec had a twin brother! The proof was right there in the Times-Picayune births column: two boys, Alec and Mark, born on May 13th 1983 to Miss Tina Hardison at New Orleans Charity Hospital.
Alec wondered if Tina had named her babies after Star Wars stars (in which case, he should be grateful that one of them hadn't been called Harrison Hardison). It was nice to think that she might have been a geek, borrowing the names of two actors who portrayed Jedi. It made him feel closer to the mother he'd never known.
Tina had apparently been a single mom. There was no mention of a husband or boyfriend in the newspaper articles about the fire; her sons' father wasn't listed in the birth announcement or named on Alec's birth certificate either. So that was pretty much a dead end, unless Alec went down to Louisiana and tried to track down people who'd known his mom 25 years ago.
As Hardison was Tina's maiden name, Alec was easily able to locate her records - it turned out that she was originally from Texas. His maternal grandparents had lived in Houston, but they'd both passed away a few years after his mother's death. Tina had had two siblings; her younger sister had died in a car crash as a teenager, and her older brother had been killed while serving in Vietnam. It seemed that the Hardisons were plagued by tragedy...
Alec was disappointed to discover that he had no close relatives left on his mother's side. But it did answer a question that had long bothered him: why hadn't his extended family adopted him after his mother's death? It looked like Tina's folks had been too elderly and unwell to take care of one baby, let alone twins, and there was nobody else left.
So Alec and Mark had gone into the care system, and had been sent to different foster homes. Clearly they had been separated so early in their lives that they didn't even remember each other.
Alec couldn't find any further official record of a Mark Hardison; there was no indication of what had happened to him. If he was still alive, his name must have been changed by the family who took him in.
So Alec set out to find his brother using the only parameters he had: an African-American male, born the same day as Alec. If it turned out that Mark's adoptive parents had also changed his birthday, then he was screwed. But it was worth a shot.
After half an hour, in which Alec had worked on improving his best time for expert-level Minesweeper (he liked to return to the classics when he was tense), the search program had finished. Trawling through multiple federal, state and commercial databases, it had found several dozen possible matches.
Scrolling through the search results, Alec finally struck gold. Jake Talley was born in New Orleans on May 13th 1983, and adopted as a one-year-old by a family in Alabama. His adoptive father had passed away, but his adoptive mother and younger sister still lived down in Birmingham.
The DMV database provided definitive proof that Jake Talley was Alec's brother Mark. Looking at the photo on the screen gave Alec another shock: they weren't just twins, they were identical. It was the freakiest thing - not quite like looking into a mirror, but close enough. Jake had a mustache, shorter hair, and bigger muscles. He looked like a total badass, compared to Alec.
The DMV had Jake's address listed as an Army base in Texas. Five minutes later, Alec discovered that hacking the Pentagon was still worryingly easy, seven years after he'd first done it as a high school student. Seriously? With the rise of cyber-terrorism, and foreign governments seeking access to US secrets, computer security should have been more important than ever. And yet it seemed that the only requirement for heading the Department of Defense's IT team was the ability to type with more than two fingers...
***
Accessing the Army's personnel database, Alec soon found his twin's file. Jake had enlisted right out of high school, and had already survived a tour to Iraq. For the last 15 months, he'd been serving in Afghanistan; right now, he was in southern Kandahar. A little research told Alec that Kandahar province was the most dangerous area of one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. He hated to think of his brother being out there.
Jake's disciplinary record made for interesting reading. It seemed that there had been a change in his behavior in the last year or so. Previously, he'd occasionally been involved in brawls - while he didn't usually start them, he was pretty skilled at ending them. So his conduct hadn't been blemish-free, but he was otherwise considered a good soldier.
More recently, Jake had started fighting his comrades a lot more often, and winning by a huge margin. He'd knocked one soldier clear across the room, breaking his arm and shattering his collarbone. He'd punched someone else so hard that the man's jaw had needed wiring.
On the flip side, though, Alec's brother had been awarded a bravery medal! Six months ago, when a truck overturned while his unit was on patrol, he'd saved the driver by single-handedly lifting the vehicle off of him.
His C.O.'s mission reports also indicated that Jake was suddenly performing his everyday duties far better than before. He could run further and faster, and was shooting more accurately. And when a couple of encounters with insurgents had come down to hand-to-hand combat, he'd killed his opponents within seconds and without breaking a sweat.
While these extraordinary feats seemed to have tempered his commanders' attitude towards Jake, they were still concerned by his outbursts of excessive violence. As well as imposing punishment duties for the fights, the brass had referred him for anger management counseling. But according to the Army psychiatrist's notes, Jake had been evasive about what was going on; he said only that he felt angry all the time and was having creepy dreams.
Jake's medical record was also very interesting. He'd seemed to be in excellent health until last year, when he'd started complaining of awful migraines. He had seen the base medic several times, and had even undergone a brain scan at the Bagram AFB hospital, but nothing unusual had been found. He'd been given heavy duty painkillers, and sent back to his unit.
Alec saw two possibilities here. Option A: his twin was faking the headaches to get sent home, and the Hulk-strength thing with the truck was just a fluke adrenaline surge. Option B, which unfortunately seemed more likely: something really weird was going on.
Now that Alec thought about it, his own headaches and dreams had started about the same time as Jake's. Could they be connected, with some strange psychic twin-fu, or was it a coincidence? After all, Alec was pretty sure he'd have noticed if he developed any superpowers.
Wanting to make contact with Jake immediately, Alec carefully composed a short message. He figured that the Army kept tabs on emails received by servicemen, so he wasn't going to detail the highly illegal methods he'd used to find his twin. He also didn't know if Jake was aware he was adopted.
So Alec just introduced himself, saying that his family history research had pointed him towards Jake being his long-lost brother. He attached a photo of himself, figuring that would get the guy's attention for sure.
The Army files showed that Jake's unit was out on a long-range mission in the mountains right now; he wasn't due back at base, where the soldiers had regular internet access, until mid-May. Alec could wait until then. But he placed a tag on Jake's record, which would alert him if anything changed. He couldn't shake this weird feeling of foreboding...
***
A few days later, Alec was sitting at his computer watching an old Star Trek episode. It was late afternoon, and he was vaguely thinking about ordering Chinese soon. Suddenly, his screen began to flicker; the show's audio went all staticky, like a detuned radio. Then the lights went out.
Within seconds, he was hit by the worst headache of his entire life - a terrible searing pressure, like his skull was going to split open. Blood began to gush from his nose. He felt like all the strength had been sapped from his body; he slid off his chair and onto the floor, clutching his forehead in agony.
A vision swam in front of his closed eyes: a man with yellow eyes, grinning wickedly and beckoning to him. The next moment, Alec had the strangest sensation all down his left side, as if a powerful force was pulling at him. He screamed as a second force started wrenching his body in the opposite direction. He feared that he was about to be ripped in half!
But just as Alec was praying for a quick death, the pain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
He lay sprawled on the floor, dizzy and gasping and trembling. Sitting up gingerly, Alec took stock of his situation. He was alone in the apartment, which was silent apart from the sounds coming from his computer. The room was dimly-lit because all the bulbs had blown. His face and chest were covered in blood, and he felt cold and clammy and nauseous.
Alec wondered if he should maybe call 911, or drive himself to the hospital. But whatever had happened seemed to be over, and how could he possibly explain it without sounding crazy? Really, he just wanted to sleep for days...
He slowly got to his feet, his head spinning, and stumbled to the bathroom. After washing his face, he glanced at the mirror and then did a double-take: he looked like something out of a horror movie, with bloodshot eyes, a greenish tinge to his skin, and a shirt splashed with red. He stripped off his clothes, staggered to bed, and passed out.
***
When Alec woke up again, the sun was rising - he'd slept for over 12 hours. He felt a lot better: he still had a headache, but it was a fraction of its previous strength. Afraid he'd fall over if he tried to shower, he ran a hot bath and sank into it with a grateful sigh.
Lifting his arms up to soap them, he noticed something very strange. There were five reddish blisters on his left forearm, like he'd been branded by the touch of someone's hand. The skin was burningly hot when he pressed his own fingertips to it, and sore. And on his right wrist there was a smaller set of five pinkish-white marks, like a person had dug their fingers into his arm and still hadn't let go. When he touched those spots, the skin was completely numb.
...well, fuck. That ruled out a brain hemorrhage, a seizure, or any other medical event Alec could think of. There had been nobody present in the room to leave those marks on his arms, and he hadn't done it to himself. He could only come up with one explanation, as bizarre as it sounded: two opposing supernatural forces had fought a tug-of-war over him.
Why, though? Alec knew people who battled the forces of darkness, but he'd never been on the frontlines himself. He was hardly a serious threat to anyone or anything evil. So who had been trying to drag him away? Maybe that yellow-eyed man he'd seen was also his shadowy stalker. And who had been protecting Alec from harm: did he have a guardian angel or something?
Dried and dressed, Alec fixed himself some breakfast then sat back down at his computer to seek some answers. He tried searching for other accounts of people being torn apart by invisible beings, but just found graphic tales of medieval punishments inflicted in the name of God. Nauseated, he pushed his bowl of cereal away.
Alec was in the middle of writing an email to Willow about his ordeal when an alert popped up - his brother's Army file had just been updated by a field commander in Afghanistan.
Jake had been reported missing.
Witnesses from his squad said he'd fallen asleep in their shared tent at about midnight. Due to head out at dawn, they'd all worn their uniforms and boots to bed. But by 4am, when one of them got up to visit the latrine, Jake had vanished.
Jake's squad had turned the camp upside down looking for him, but there was no trace. He hadn't taken his gun, body armor or helmet with him, and no soldier in his right mind would wander off-base in hostile territory without those essentials. It was a freezing, moonless night, but he'd also left behind his cold weather gear, his flashlight and his night vision goggles.
So it looked like Jake had gone crazy, and gone AWOL. The sentries hadn't seen him leave the camp, but the Army was assuming that he'd somehow slipped past them. But being so poorly equipped, in a remote and barren environment, he couldn't have gotten far in just a few hours. As the search teams hadn't found him (or his body) anywhere nearby, they were afraid that he might have been captured by the Taliban or other unfriendly locals.
Alec checked the time difference between Afghanistan and Illinois, on a hunch, and yes: late afternoon in Chicago was the middle of the night in Kandahar. It seemed highly likely that his brother had disappeared at about the same time that Alec had been attacked yesterday. Surely the timing couldn't be a coincidence...so had Jake been taken by the thing that had tried to grab Alec?
***
Two days passed with no further news of Jake. Alec, reading the Army's increasingly worried internal communications from the comfort of his Chicago apartment, barely slept. It was agonizing to think that he could have found his brother, only to lose him again almost immediately.
Meanwhile, there had been no more strange occurrences at Alec's end. When he ventured out for some much-needed fresh air, he hadn't sensed any watching presence. And he'd stopped dreaming of yellow eyes and prophetic voices, but what had replaced them was even worse. When he did manage to fall asleep, he had nightmares about terrible things happening to Jake mixed with vivid images of his mother's fiery death.
Alec needed to distract himself, and be with people who cared about him. He was between contracts anyway, so he packed his laptop and some clothes and caught the next flight down to Atlanta.
He had bought Nana's rented house for her two years earlier. It had been the first major purchase of his criminal career, funded by a big Wall Street job (Nana had assumed Alec was working at the financial firm, rather than defrauding it from the comfort of his couch, and he hadn't corrected her). His foster-sisters Sheena and Jessie now lived in the house, rent-free, and they were very happy to have him stay for a while.
When he'd come home for Nana's funeral, Sheena's daughter Becca had still been crawling; now, she'd started walking. Seeing the little girl toddle towards him made Alec laugh for the first time in days. He picked his niece up and hugged her close, feeling some of his tension drain away.
Alec caught up with the family news over a pitcher of iced tea made to Nana's old recipe (that was another thing he'd missed, living up north). Jessie was in her freshman year at a local college, studying to become an elementary school teacher. Sheena was a stay-at-home mom during the day; in the evenings, Jessie babysat Becca while Sheena worked at the neighborhood youth center. The staff there had really helped her when she'd been a messed-up teenager, Sheena said, so she wanted to pay it forward. Longer term, she was thinking of becoming a foster-mother herself.
Alec relaxed a little, sitting around the table with his sisters as Becca played happily on the floor. Their lives were wonderfully normal, after all the weirdness that Alec had experienced lately. The scene was so familiar and homey...he half-expected Nana to walk out of the kitchen, bringing them a plate of her chocolate-chip cookies and scolding Alec to "go cut the grass, already!" But she wouldn't, of course; she was gone.
Abruptly, he decided to go visit Nana's grave. He really had to tell someone about Jake, but he couldn't possibly unload it all on his sisters. And confiding in Nana had always made him feel better.
So he drove his rental car out to the cemetery, and walked across the beautifully manicured lawns to Nana's final resting place. It was a gorgeous early summer's afternoon; he could feel the sun's heat soaking into his bones, after all the weeks he'd spent cooped up in his Chicago apartment.
Alec had paid for the elegant black marble headstone, but he hadn't seen it until now. The epitaph read 'Ruth Jane Maxwell, 1946-2007. A sister in Christ and a mother to us all'. While it was a very fitting tribute, seeing Nana's name carved in stone made her loss unbearably final.
Overcome by grief, exhaustion and fear, Alec collapsed onto the stone bench at the foot of her grave. His head in his hands, he began to cry for Nana, for his mother, for Jake...and for himself, left behind.
***
Alec didn't know how much time had passed, but at least he'd run out of tears. He was just staring at the ground, trying to collect himself so he could start telling Nana his story, when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
Louise, Nana's closest friend, was walking across the lawn towards him. Although he was frustrated by the interruption, Nana had raised him to be polite to his elders. So he stood up, kissed Louise's wrinkled cheek, and gestured for her to sit beside him.
Alec had known her for most of his life; she'd been a frequent visitor to Nana's house, and an honorary aunt to all the kids. Louise was getting old, her black hair long ago gone gray, but her brisk energy was undiminished.
Like Nana, Louise seemed to have some kind of mind-reading ability. She took one look at his face and said, "Alec, you look like death warmed over! Tell me - are you still dreaming about that yellow-eyed man?"
He blinked at her, puzzled, and Louise nodded.
"Ruth told me all about your nightmares before she died. She asked me to protect you."
Alec vaguely recalled that Nana and Louise had been planning to pray for the cessation of his dreams, last Christmas. "But how could you protect me from something that's inside my head?"
"Honey, I have to tell you something you'll find hard to believe," Louise replied. "The man with the yellow eyes is a demon, sent by Satan. He chose you for some reason, when you were a little baby, and that's why your momma died. There's been a shadow hanging over you ever since."
His mind reeling, Alec asked, "How do you know all this?"
"I'm part of a network of devout Christians, all across America, who believe that the Devil is plotting to bring on the Apocalypse. Ruth belonged too, of course. Our group became aware, last year, that a group of kids around your age were getting visitations from the yellow-eyed demon. He granted them unusual abilities, and he's been tempting them to do terrible things to gain even more power..."
If that was true, then a whole bunch of things suddenly made a lot more sense: Ash's determination to find the children born in 1983, Alec's nightmares and mysterious stalker, and Jake's super-strength.
"OK, so, a demon has been visiting me in my sleep," Alec said, "and the big battle he's been telling me about is the Apocalypse. I can accept that. But I don't have any special abilities!"
Louise raised her eyebrows. "Alec, you always were freakishly good with technology. But have you noticed recently that you've become even better than before?"
...oh, God. Now that Alec thought about it, the last time he could remember making a serious mistake was over a year ago; since then, he'd been bulletproof. Tasks that had once seemed impossible were now child's play. He'd been able to find massive security holes in every computer network he'd targeted, even the ones generally considered impenetrable.
These days he only had to think a command, or plot a route around a firewall, and it seemed to happen astoundingly fast. It was like his computer had become an extension of his brain.
Alec had figured, arrogantly, that it was just the natural honing of his already awesome skills. It was really disturbing to think that the improvement was demon-powered rather than caffeine-fueled.
Louise must have seen the dismay on his face, because she reached over and patted his hand.
"It's not your fault, child. Being targeted by a demon doesn't make a person wicked. You can still choose whether or not to give in to the temptation, and you've managed to resist. Ruth knew that you were different, and she loved you no matter what."
Somehow that was even harder to hear than all the rest of it. Missing Nana more than ever, Alec had to close his eyes for a moment.
"She had an ability of her own, you know," Louise continued casually, and Alec jerked his head around to gape at her. "A kind of empathy, I guess you could call it - she could sense people's emotions, and it was especially strong with you kids."
"I always thought she was psychic," Alec said weakly; it actually did explain a lot.
Then he took a deep breath, and told Louise everything that he'd been planning to tell Nana. He started with the worsening nightmares and the stalking, then moved on to discovering the existence of his twin brother. Louise was surprised to hear about Jake, which made Alec feel relieved - he would've hated to learn that Nana had kept that secret from him too.
When he described that terrifying feeling of being pulled apart by invisible forces, though, Louise's reaction was unexpected: she clapped her hands together and smiled.
"Thank God it worked! I'm sorry it was so painful, honey, but believe me...if the demon had taken you, it would have been far worse."
Alec was stunned. "Huh? What worked?"
"I'm a good Christian woman, but I also have another talent that I use from time to time - you might call it magic." Alec, whose friend Willow was a witch, had no problem with this concept. He nodded encouragingly, and Louise continued.
"When you told Ruth about the yellow-eyed man appearing in your dreams, she just knew the demon would try to take you away sooner or later. So she asked me to shield you. I cast a protective spell to anchor your body to the Earth, and prevent the demon carrying you off. It was real hard to hold onto you, though, because he's terribly powerful."
Alec showed her the blisters on his left arm, then rolled up his other sleeve to reveal the five pale patches. "So that was the demon, and this was you?"
Louise laid her fingertips over the numb spots on his right wrist; they fit perfectly. "Yes, that's right. But your Nana helped to give me the strength - she's watching over you from Heaven, Alec."
Alec glanced up at the clear blue sky; he wanted to believe it, so badly. It seemed easy to accept that aliens and vampires were real, without having seen them for himself, but this felt very different somehow.
He was reluctant to ask, but he had to know one last thing. "So what do you think happened to Jake?"
Louise sighed. "I'm sorry to say that a bunch of the other special kids my group's been monitoring have disappeared over recent months, same as Jake. They just vanished without trace, and haven't been seen since. We don't know for sure what the demon wants with them, but it can't be anything good. You might have to prepare yourself for bad news, honey."
***
Alec needed time and space to take in all this new information. He thanked Louise for her protection, and for telling him the truth. Hugging her felt strange - she was such a small and fragile woman, and yet she'd fought a demon and won.
As he drove home, Alec tried to lay out the facts in some kind of logical order. But his mind kept going back to his teenage years, when he'd envied Willow for her exciting vampire-enriched lifestyle. Supernatural stuff had seemed so cool, in theory. Now it turned out that a demon had been shaping his life since he was a baby, taking his mother from him and maybe his brother too.
Be careful what you wish for, Alec thought bitterly.
Not wanting to worry his family, Alec managed to compose himself by the time he got back to the house. He had an early supper with his sisters, then washed the dishes while Jessie put Becca to bed. Jessie claimed the living room so she could study for finals; Alec gladly escaped to the spare room, and let his game face drop.
He booted up his laptop and checked his email, but Willow hadn't replied yet (no surprise; she'd warned him that she would have limited internet access in Bolivia). After several days of minimal sleep, his breakdown at the cemetery, and Louise's shocking revelations, Alec was too worn out to do anything else. Even though it was only 8pm, he fell into bed.
He'd email Ash in the morning, Alec decided: come clean about being one of the 1983 kids, tell him about Jake, and ask for his help. Together they'd track Jake down, and maybe find the other missing people too. Alec wouldn't give up hope, not yet.
Sleep was approaching like a black wave. Alec closed his eyes, and let it take him.
***
Chapter 6