Chapter 12: Spirit Walk

The following morning started with Ginny and I being interested observers as Sylvia Porter and Whit Levine, disguised to look like us, took off for Angel's Camp in Ginny's GTO.

First thing in the morning I had told Tony Herrera what I wanted in no uncertain terms

"I thought about this all night. I want these guys to know we know they're there, and that I want them gone. We need to show them that we have our own very good security, and that we can take care of ourselves."

I got a big grin in response. And nervous laughter from Sylvia and Evan.

"That's what we were going to propose for this morning, but we didn't think you'd buy it. Figures, the way you guys are always surprising us that you'd beat us to the punch with our own idea."

Along with the four of them and their four backups, the crew included Chet and Cyrus, a helicopter crew and a couple of drivers.

We got to ride in the helicopter, and watch from a good distance up and away as our two tails pulled out and began to follow the GTO. A few miles down the road two moving vans sandwiched them, and just as quickly a pair of Dodge Durangos slipped into position, front and rear, to get the FBI car boxed. They then forced them to a stop. Almost immediately Chet, Cyrus, Tony and Evan were in their faces with guns drawn asking for I.D.

With their FBI IDs in hand and the two men disarmed and out of their car, Tony spoke into his headset calling the all clear. We heard it on our own headsets, and that was our pilot's signal to bring us down.

I felt both pair of eyes tracking Ginny and I as we ran under the helicopter blades to their car. Tony handed me their licenses and I looked them over, but of course I already knew everything they could tel me about the two men.

"Special Agent Foster and Special Agent Shipley. You know who I am. You have been following me. As have four other agents."

I paused to give them a chance to comment, but I didn't expect them to, and they didn't.

"We believe we know why the FBI has me under observation. However well intentioned it might be, I have my own protection. Quite adequate protection, as you can see. We would like this ended immediately. Please pass that on to your superiors. If you are observed again, and be advised, you have been observed from the beginning, we will escalate our attitude and go public."

With that I turned with Ginny's hand in mine and walked over to the GTO. She let me drive, and we did a 180 in the middle of the road and headed back to the Obsidian Research facility.

It was a week later when we started. We jumped straight to the 'Eru Jehn School of Soul Diving', which was a large area on the upper floor of a warehouse owned by Master Lev in the seaport city of Sheye. The large room was divided into different areas with bookcases and shelves and even a hanging tapestry or two. The floors were bare polished wood, but there were thick, ornate rugs scattered here and there throughout the space.

Eru, Felicia and the two young girls, the twins Riah and Zaia were sitting on a large rug in the room's large central area. The West Coast to East Coast hop had brought us through to the early afternoon in Sheye. I sent a little trickle of thought to Eru the instant we popped in, so without looking up, Eru announced our arrival.

"Ah! Ladies, we have visitors! Please Greet Master McKesson and his wife Ginny."

Felicia rose, walked over to us and bowed.

"Have fun you guys!" She said. "I hope the girls don't wear you out!."

Felicia kissed us both on the cheek and bowed to Eru before walking away from us and out of sight behind a row of bookcases. In my mind I felt her touch the bracelet on her wrist and make the jump back to Meadow.

Eru had obviously coached the twins in advance, they looked at him, and I saw him give them a barely perceptible nod. They both rose and came to stand before us, bowing as Felicia had.

"You honor us Teacher!" They said in perfect synchronization. "We open our thoughts to you, that We may learn."

I decided it was the perfect time to mess with them, so Ginny and I pulled ourselves into our tight, lightly Light-connected merge.

"You do your Teacher honor, young ladies. Thank you for your greeting." We spoke in perfect synchronization.

Eru's raucous laughter seemed almost jarring to us, freshly arrived in this tranquil spot, but with the 'serious' stuff over we took off our shoes and sat beside him on the rug. Ginny leaned over and kissed his cheek. Eru looked at me, raising an eyebrow, as if he were waiting to see if I would match her action. This got the girls laughing. When the laughter passed and everyone was settled back in their spots across the rug from us, Eru spoke into our thoughts.

<We have not spoken of Spirit Masters during our lessons before this, but the legends we all learn as children tell us that even before the beginning of the ancient times the Spirit Masters came to Taluat and from out of the chaos they sheltered and taught the first of the Soul Divers and set them the task of serving as teacher, guide and spiritual healer to the people. Riah, what else do the legends tell us of the Spirit Masters?>

<The legends say that the Spirit Masters were made of ageless flesh, and could move objects with their minds.> Riah's thoughts were clear and clean and rang in my mind like a bell.

<What else do the legends say, Zaia?> Eru prompted.

<The legends say that the Spirit Masters walked between the worlds, and that one day, in the ancient times, they left our world and have never returned.> Zaia answered, her thoughts as clear and sweet as her sisters.

Eru gave me another of those slight nods, letting me know I had the floor.

"Come sit closer, join us in our circle." I spoke aloud. The three of them quickly scooted across the rug so that we were each only an arms length apart.

I held my empty hand out, palm up between us. Once everyone had their eyes focused on my hand I closed it, jumped a small, deep blue crystalline stone into my fist and opened my hand again. I saw both girl's eyes go wide.

"Take this Riah and hold it in your open palm as I am." She shyly reached out and took the stone.

Once she was holding it properly I closed my hand again and repeated the process, opening my palm again to show an identical stone now resting in my palm.

"Now you Zaia, please take this stone. And hold it in your open palm."

When my palm was again empty I closed my fist again and jumped the stone into it.

"Eru, if you would take your stone." When he had his stone I dropped my hand to my lap.

Everyone but Ginny and I now held a stone in their hands. Ginny knew what I wanted to happen next, so she put her open hand palm out between us, as I had done. She closed her hand and I jumped another stone into it from the bin of them I had prepared last night in the Hall on Obsidian. We were not close enough to a Light source for her to be able to do the jump herlsef. When she opened her hand to show her stone I saw all four sets of eyes go wide.

<While you have these stones, you are my students.> I thought to all of them.

I held out my own hand palm up once again. This time I jumped a clear crystalline stone directly into my open palm.

<While I have this stone, I am your teacher.> I thought, levitating my stone into the air.

<You are a Spirit Master?> The twins said simultaneously.

<Yes. And so perhaps shall you be, someday.> I answered.

<Can you walk among the worlds?> Zaia asked.

<Yes.> I answered. As I did, I jumped us to the meditation chamber on Obsidian. The girls immediately shrieked in excitement and spent several minutes running around, examining things before returning to the center of the chamber where we were waiting.

"I have met, as have Eru and Ginny, three living Spirit Masters. Their names were Kes, Aya and Beloth. Some day you will hear their story. It is the story of the end of the Spirit Masters, and how they sacrificed themselves to save all of the people of all of the worlds from a disaster. Those three great souls spent at least four thousand years, but probably much longer, waiting for a new Spirit Master to be born who would set them free."

"they had been waiting to be free, so that they could finish living and join their long lost brothers and sisters in the afterlife." Ginny told them. "But they remained among us for a while so that they could teach Dave."

<Now, open your minds to us!> I thought at them.

We jumped into our full Light-fueled fusion and dived into them. A quick body scan showed us that they were both perfectly healthy twelve year old girls.

Eru had said we would be surprised when we saw their minds, and he was right. Both of them were nearly bottomless pools of creativity and mental power. We pumped a large bundle of Light into all three of them.

<<Join your minds together. As tightly as you know how.>> We sent to them. We watched them slip quickly and efficiently into that high state we were familiar with, at the peak of what we ourselves could do without touching the Light.

<<Come Eru, Zaia, Riah, look into our mind.>> I/We sent them, washing them in another wave of Light.

We turned our senses inward and focused on that Light-sensitive place in our brains. We worked to strengthen it and expand it, as we had been doing every day. Today we had an audience that could at least sense what we were doing, if not see it as clearly as we did.

We pulled another wave of light into our own fusion, and slid out of it into that almost-fusion where we were no longer within the light, but in full contact with it.

<Join us.> We sent, reaching out to draw them into our merging. Their thoughts danced around and through our union of thought, trying to match us and slip within the bond. There was a single moment, less than an eye blink where I felt them join, and then it collapsed, as they reacted to the success and lost focus.

Three groans of frustration echoed through the chamber, and I could sense the exhaustion in all of them.

<Reform the circle.> I called, and the five of us were quickly sitting in position.

I jumped us back to the Rug in Eru's school room.

"That was a very good first day, but I know you are all tired, especially from the excellent effort there at the end."

"We found it there for just a moment, didn't we?" Riah asked.

"Yes, you did," I said. "and that is an important first step to touching the Light yourselves. Good work, all of you!"

Eru sent the girls down to get their ride home for the day, and we waited until they were gone.

"Eru, I imagine you are feeling right now as if you have gone from being the teacher to being at the bottom of the class in a new school."

"Yes, very much something like that. I find myself struggling to contain my frustration." He answered.

"That is why you will be joining Ginny and I every day for our second session." I said.

I jumped the bundle I had prepared for him into his hands.

"Put these on and meet us on Meadow." I said.

In our own bedroom on Meadow, we quickly changed into our running gear. We were there waiting for Eru when he jumped into Level One.

He held his arms out and looked down at himself, then at us.

"Is this apparel intended to be worn during some sort of ... physical activity?"

"Yes Eru, we've decided its time for you to stop being the old, slow fellow in the crowd, so we are going to get you into shape!"

I jumped us to the front doors of the tower on Obsidian, our usual starting point. I joined Ginny in our Light-touching merge and with both of us focusing ourselves on Eru's physical signature, I washed us quickly in Light.

"Let's run!" I said, and we were off.

We kept to Eru's pace, while I fed him enough Light to keep him from tiring.

<We are joined in our minds. Let your body do the running while your mind tries to join ours.> I thought to him.

We ran.

While Eru slid around and around the bubble of our joined minds, trying to feel a way to join us there, we concentrated on Eru's body. We worked on the Light signature that represented him, and sent wave after wave of encouragement to it, coaxing it to remember itself as being twenty five again.

After the run we cooled down in the meditation chamber. This time we meshed our thoughts with Eru's in our normal classroom manner and then boosted ourselves into the tighter mesh again and again, each time pulling Eru into it with us, and watching him struggle to find and maintain a place within it.

We quit before it got too late for Eru. He was keeping himself on East coast time for his classes in Shaye.

We got back to Meadow just in time for dinner. Team One and Team Two had been combined to work on Cloudburst. The high technology aquatic beings that had been found there were still more or less a mystery. Arden summed it up nicely.

"They are too deep down for casual surveillance, and only our sensor array's gravity detectors are able to give us much detail. The rare glimpses of anything near the surface we consider the equivalent of finding someone in the desert, or Antarctic on Earth. They are either explorers or adventurers, who do not linger long or machines, 'unmanned craft' so to speak mindlessly going about some scientific or other chore, oblivious to us."

"Have you been able to touch anything with your thoughts?" I asked.

"No luck there either." Fred added. "None of us have the power to reach that far unless its to a mind we've already contacted."

"Have any of you checked with Constantine?" I asked. "He may be aware of something we could use in the Hall of Gifts."

"Not yet, we have been under the impression he is really occupied with this new idea he had, so we haven't wanted to bother him." Alicia admitted.

"Nothing could be further from the truth, at least under normal circumstances." I said, following it with a thought to Con.

<Con, are you free for a moment.>

"Of course Dave. Greetings everyone!" Con said as he appeared beside us. "Oh! Is it dinner time? Am I too late?"

Constantine didn't need to eat, but he enjoyed the social aspects of it, and swore up and down that he would figure out the whole 'taste bud thing' eventually.

"Yes, you're in time, Con. But you are aware that nobody has seen or talked to you in almost five days aren't you?" Mike offered.

"Oh my! Has it been that long?" He said, he tilted his head in a way that I had come to recognize as Con's consulting some internal process. "I guess it has. My apologies! You will all forgive me when you see what I've been working on though. It is almost ready for unveiling. A couple of days more at most."

"We'll all be looking forward to seeing it. Arden, why don't you fill Con in on what you've been doing and what you need. I've got to go sit in on a meeting."

I stood and smiled at Ginny. "Shall we sweetie?"

I jumped us to our bedroom.

"Interesting place for a meeting. Especially since there was no meeting as far as I know."

"Sorry Blossom, but the tag I left in our fake FBI buddy Bob Scarpelli's mind just went off. He's on his way to meet his contact in 'The Brothers', as he thinks of them." I explained. "I thought we should sit in on that meeting."

We sat cross-legged on the floor, and our minds slid together into our just-touching the light merge. It no longer required any real effort to reach that state, and only that slightly unhappy feeling it left in our souls after prolonged periods of it kept us from staying in it.

I found 'FBI Bob' as I'd begun thinking of him - actually my own silent geeky homage to The Simpsons and Sideshow Bob, as he was pulling into the driveway of a very nice home in a gated community near Carmel, California. The front door opened as Bob was walking up the steps to it, and he was ushered inside by some sort of servant.

Bob was led to a room where he took a seat and waited.

Because we knew that Bob's trap had already been triggered, we slid lightly into his consciousness while we waited. This was familiar routine to him and required no thinking on his part.

Shortly Bob was joined by a middle-aged balding man with glasses, a buxom young blond woman wearing next to nothing hanging off his arm. He reminded me of that George character on Seinfeld. We slipped out of Bob's mind when we saw him reach for Bob's hand. Eru had told us that coercers often needed physical contact to touch the minds of their victims.

With the newcomer obviously focused on Bob, we slid, feather-light into his thoughts. We quickly spotted the trap that had been set in his mind as well. It was similar to the bundles of my consciousness I left in the thoughts of others, but very crude. Little more than a coiled spring waiting for contact. I modified it with a quick mental touch so that it would no longer respond to my mental contact at all.

Without the trap to worry about we slid deeper into this man's mind. His name was Dwayne Boyle. He and his twin brother Lyle were 'The Brothers'.

I almost broke our mental merge when I laughed out loud with my real voice, back in the bedroom on Meadow. The feeling of relief was that dramatic.

We were not facing some mysterious, world-wide organization of evil telepaths. We were facing two brothers who had been using their meager gifts to get laid and get rich, probably in that order.

For the Boyle brothers, Bob Scarpelli was the source of their greatest coup. They were extremely paranoid, and normally avoided contact with any kind of law enforcement types. Bob had sort of dropped into their laps. They'd just acquired a new playmate, and it happened to be someone Bob had been dating. When he came to visit one day, the brothers were waiting. 'Bunny', the new sex toy, had smiled at Bob and introduced him to her 'Uncle Lyle'. A handshake, and it was all over.

Bob had only been the stepping stone to their triumph. Three weeks later, Bob introduced Warren Zimmerman his boss and director of the regional office to his 'Uncle Lyle'. Another handshake later and they had two FBI agents! They had been using their FBI pawns to look for new sources of income, as well as investigating potential rival coercers.

There had been a few encounters, over the years, with others. They either agreed to move on and find some other part of the world to subjugate, or they became the Boyle brother's latest conquests.

As we had been gathering these details from Dwayne's mind, he had given up on his efforts to find any trace of tampering in Bob Scarpelli.

"Okay, you're clean." Dwayne said. "Lets go see Lyle and get that trap reset."

We rode along in Dwayne's mind now as he led Bob to a stairway leading down into a fully finished basement. Lyle Doyle came through a heavy steel door, closing it after him. In the brief couple of seconds when we could see into the room past him, using his brother's eyes, we saw the nude and bloody body of a young woman struggling against the restraints that held to the table.

<We have to stop these men!> Ginny thought. <That woman needs our help!>

<Of course we do. Activate your armor. Full protection!> I thought in response.

With our legion armor on, we both activated the special mode which added hand and head shielding to the suits. Still joined, we jumped into that basement room. I sent a thought to Bob Scarpelli's brain and he was instantly asleep.

When I tried to do the same to Dwayne Boyle he was able to resist, momentarily, but finally he too collapsed in a help on the floor, sound asleep.

"Hello Lyle." I said out loud.

"Who are you? How did you get in here?" He demanded.

"We are what you and your brother have always feared." Ginny said. "People with more power than you."

We dived into the mind of Lyle Boyle, and it was not the strength of his gift that was almost our undoing, it was the utterly evil foulness of it. What we found there sent us reeling for a second, and Lyle attacked.

Our suits protected us in a way I don't think Con ever imagined when he designed them. Lyle Boyle reached out to make physical contact with me, to coerce my mind, and all he could touch was the implacable, impenetrable Legion armor that I had always been so proud to wear.

<Sorry Lyle. I'm afraid that won't work on us, even if you could get past our armor.> I said in his mind. Prepared now for the filth we found there, we re-entered his mind. He struggled to maintain control of his own thoughts, and he was much, much stronger than his brother in his ability to protect himself, but in the end we forced his body to betray him, and told it to lock itself rigid and unmoving as we scoured his mind. We could go no further in dealing with his evil existence until we knew everything he knew about his and his brother's victims.

<NO!!!> His thoughts screamed, as he revealed his final secret. He too had learned to tap the telekinetic gift. Suddenly a coat rack near the stairs came flying across the room, striking Ginny in the back. Of course the Legion armor prevented her from any harm.

I lifted him off the floor with my own gift, pinning his rigid body against the ceiling.

<<GIVE US YOUR MEMORIES!>> we said together as we merged now into our full contact fusion.

Whether it was anger, outrage or adrenaline, we did something we never had before, and simply reached in and ripped out every thought and experience Lyle Boyle had ever had.

Even though we had commanded his body to absolute rigidity, Lyle Boyle's body shuddered when we did this, and then died.

<Oh Dave!> Ginny thought, as we dropped back into a lower level of joining. Our own actions had shocked us, as we had not anticipated the results of our act upon him.

With the more serious threat of Lyle dealt with, we turned to Dwayne, and awoke him from his sleep. He saw his brother's limp and lifeless body where it lay across the room instantly.

"I always knew someone would come some day." He said, as he began to cry. "What we could do seemed to crude and ugly to be a true gift."

We let him walk over and kneel next to his brother's body.

"I always knew that somewhere there had to be people who had the true gifts and did not use them to feed their own perversions. I knew someday they would find us and kill us for the evil we had done to our victims."

We could read what was coming in his thoughts, but we let it happen anyway. During his short tearful speech, and without the fierce resistance his brother had been able to put up, we had read all his memories and thoughts.

"I have been preparing for this day all my life." He said, and as he did he pulled two razor sharp knives from his sleeves and spun, throwing them at us, and with the deadly accuracy of someone who had indeed spent his entire life training, the blades struck each of us in the throat.

<We know.> I thought to him as the blades bounced off our armor. I caught them in midair with my thoughts as they bounced. His eyes went wide when he saw them floating there.

He did not move when I sent them flashing back at him. He seemed to accept them into himself, and he released a heavy sigh as he died, collapsing onto the floor.

The poor girl in the next room was merely a shell, a programmed bundle of reactions that had allowed Lyle Boyle to find the sick satisfaction he needed, even after the poor girl's mind had fled.

We let her find the peace she deserved at last.

When we woke him up, Special Agent Bob Scarpelli was cooperative, especially when we removed the crude controls that Lyle Boyle had placed within his mind.