Promethean Read online

  They were covered with trees, which a lot of the other places weren’t. In fact, most of the destinations he knew, having seen them were, but the rest was wide open, comparatively.

  It was less isolated than where Brenner lived, since there were houses all over the place. Ones that were visible as they drove. They didn't keep driving past them, either. Instead the man pulled off into a location that was surrounded by trees, with houses visible through them in all directions except for the side of the street itself. It was dark out still, though the sky had become light enough to show that the place they were stopping at was a very tidy, if small, house. It seemed to have one story and if there was a basement Liam couldn’t tell that fact from the outside.

  There was a very tiny yard, with well-trimmed grass in it, off to the right as they faced the place. The whole thing felt inviting though, as he got out of the car. He didn't have anything with him, so he probably wouldn’t be staying there for a very long time. Over the course of a few days his clothing wouldn’t smell bad or anything like that. Neither would his teeth or mouth. That was a thing for regular people.

  Mitchel waved for him to follow inside as he approached the door.

  “Like I said, it isn’t big. I do have a spare room. You can share with Tiffany?” There was a grin at the words. Right until Liam shook his head. Then that went away.

  At least until he explained.

  “I don’t sleep or need to rest, so that won’t be an issue. I can just sit somewhere.” He didn't know if the man would have books or a computer at all and even if he did, there was no reason for him to allow Liam to use such things. Once inside it was clear that he did though. There was a lot of electronic equipment in the small front space. For some reason, instead of a laptop, the man had a larger computer. One with a very large screen. The kind that you could use to watch movies while sitting far away from it.

  Without even needing to be asked for permission, Mitch waved at the thing.

  “You can use that, if you want. Don’t go on the deep web, at least without me. I have Tor and NordVPN hooked up if you need to do that. There are some direct boards that are run by different groups. Which, after I call some people, I need to make the rounds on. Hiding that someone murdered six FBI agents in their own offices and tried to make it seem like vampires did it, can’t be hidden. It shouldn’t be, I mean. It will look like we actually think it’s them if anyone tries. That’s human thinking. Hiding the facts in a case from the public.”

  Liam could understand that idea. Not that he knew what the deep web was, or the other things that the man had mentioned to him. For once, instead of holding his tongue, he simply asked about it.

  “I don’t know what those things are. Tor? Nord? Is it something I should know how to do?”

  That, those words, got a considered nod. Then the man moved to sit, stopped and ran to the other room instead, where there was a sound of a fridge opening.

  “Do you want a soda? I have Coke, Orange generic and Mt. Dew.”

  Liam shook his head, then walked through the same door that the other man had, since yelling back wasn’t an option.

  It meant the man jumped a bit when Liam walked up next to him at the open door and spoke softly.

  “No, thank you. Could I have some water?” Tap was fine for him, but a cold bottle came out from the box, as well as a green bottle of caffeinated sugar water. The one for him was tossed to him.

  Liam managed to catch it, with a bit of aid from his giant hands and more than a bit of luck and scrambling, rather than using real skill. No one had ever gone over how to catch things with him and for some reason he’d never tried to research the skill, either. It was clearly something that he needed to work on, if people were planning to hurl different objects in his general direction.

  Mitchel went wide eyed as the effort of bottle control was enacted.

  “Sorry there. Now, we should make those calls. Then I can show you how to use the deep web. It isn’t a good place, but it has its merits. The main one being that you can be invisible there, if you do it right.”

  Chapter five

  There were two clear levels to the work that Mitchel was showing Liam that morning. The first was, simply, staying in constant contact with the leadership of almost all the groups that weren’t strictly human. There were even two different human organizations on his calling list. The Satanists and the LGBTQ.

  When those calls were ended, the man turned to look at Liam and shrugged. It was an inelegant thing that spoke of negligence or lack of concern, or at least a desire to present himself that way. When Liam realized that he was getting all of that he nodded, ever so slightly.

  Which the man seemed to understand.

  “Technically the highest people in the Church of Satan have connections to the Luciferians. It’s complicated. The lower levels, well that’s just a religion. As for the others I called… My brother is gay and refuses not to tell his human boyfriend everything. That last part isn’t really loved by my people. Not the dating humans part of things either. A lot of groups don’t care about that. You just aren’t supposed to tell them everything. If I don’t give them enough crumbs, Ken will make sure they know anyway, so I try to control what they find out.”

  Liam didn't understand all of that. Interestingly, he knew what gay was, having researched that one before. Also what LGBTQ stood for. It was the part where Ken, obviously Mitch’s brother, was telling people everything, when he wasn’t supposed to.

  “Why?” Liam understood that he wasn’t being clear enough, when the other man rolled his eyes. There was no time to clarify though, before he spoke.

  “Ken just always liked men. Unless you were asking why he tells them everything? In that case, well, he was always the black sheep. Mom and dad are both air elementals, like me. Kenny is Earth. Solid people really, but slow in their powers. Strong though. The thing is that everyone else seems to forget that a lot of the time. Ken can snap a ten-ton boulder in two just by looking at it. Except that it takes him about three hours to get it done. Give him a month and he can hollow out a cave underground and even shape it into a house that anyone would be proud to live in. Solid rock, with benches and beds build into it. The fire elementals can set you on fire inside thirty seconds. Water types can bring up a small flood in about ten minutes if the conditions are right and they’re close to a body of water. Air is the most fluid and fastest. Technically the weakest, in that making some strong breezes isn’t that good in a fight. We, air types, all have telepathy and can see at a distance though, which is really useful. That and influence people, part of the time. So Ken always felt like he didn't really fit. That’s bull of course. What he can do has lasting value. He makes a living as a stone carver.”

  The description was helpful, since it held a lot of information that Liam hadn’t really picked up from the one book he’d read on such people. That had been a fire type’s journal and mainly had been about her desire to date different people, instead of how various powers worked.

  Liam still shook his head, smiling a bit. People liked it when he smiled, at least if they didn’t naturally hate him. It was even better now that he had brown skin instead of bright yellow. People were far less suspicious of him. It probably would have been better still if his eyes matched. Brown was a nice and popular eye color. Brenner had suggested he get some contacts, in case he ever wanted to play dress up. That had been her actual words on the topic. Then she claimed to like his yellow eyes.

  To him it seemed useful in hiding himself from most people. A thing that she knew, without wanting to mention to him. She seemed embarrassed to mention that he was different from other people, most of the time. Or that it might be advantageous for him to blend in on command.

  His hands were big, as were his feet, but the truth was that he had the limbs of a very large man, not some kind of monster. Many people managed to totally ignore that part of things well enough, when he went outside. He looked funny, of course. Just not enough to mark him as bein
g inhuman.

  The man responded with a grin of his own.

  Liam spoke again though, his face and voice happy, if not loud. Lacking working vocal cords was a real problem that way. If he could fix any one thing about himself, that one would have been the second choice. The first being the part of him that made others hate and fear him.

  “I meant, why hide things from humans at all?”

  Mitchel nodded then, his face going somber.

  “That one… About half of people have no real problem with there being other types of people. When they find out about things, they just accept it and go on. The other half, the religious, the conservative for the most part, the unimaginative in particular… They almost always freak out when they find out too much. The studies we’ve run shows that telling people openly would lead to an all out war against us. Most of us aren’t bulletproof and can’t take on ten people at once. Even the vampires and werewolves struggle when they’re put up against more than two or three regular humans in a fight. The rest of us… Well, in a fist fight I’m no better off than anyone else. In a gun battle I’m pretty close to useless.”

  That fit with what Liam had heard and read about. The elves were good people, who were quick and had magical skills that really worked. They weren’t particularly great fighters though. No worse than a similarly sized human being, but no better either and regular people were huge compared to them. Liam was big compared to that type of being, and he was small, over all. Only five-four and thin. He weighed more than he looked like, being about one-eighty, instead of being under one-twenty as he appeared.

  Robert Mobley, the elf fellow was a head shorter than that and was large for his kind.

  Trolls, the real kind, were tough and hard to kill. They were many times stronger than almost everyone else as well. Liam thought that he was as powerful that way and probably faster, but the trick there was that Trolls were so primitive and simple that the humans could simply outthink them in short order. Clubs, even wielded by a powerful arm weren’t a match for explosives and tanks.

  So he nodded.

  “I understand, if that’s the case. So we have to hide these things from most of the humans. That… It would make sense for these attacks to be human then, if half of them would fight against us if they knew we existed. What was done was clever, which will put some groups out of suspicion for it. The people were too large to be elves, which clears them as well.” Mitchel hadn’t been telling people that directly on the phone.

  He took a deep, sudden breath and let it out gustily.

  “I know. That’s obvious. The thing there is that we really can’t assume anything here. What if this is the wolves striking back at Sondra and her vampires for defeating those others with you a few months ago? They aren’t normally the sort that will go in for big and complex plots, but they’re people, not stereotypes. It could even be other vampires or…” The man shrugged again, and turned to look directly at Liam.

  Before speaking he drank about half a green translucent bottle of Mt. Dew. Sighing at the end he closed his eyes.

  “It could also be your people. Oaks… He’s like you. Clever and intelligent on a level that no one suspected until he wanted them to know about it. It was in the original book that he was brilliant, but over time we’ve lost that idea for you prometheans. We were shown movies and television shows for a hundred years with a shambling gray creature that didn’t really do much, as far as mental skills went. We can’t underestimate that factor though. It probably isn’t him, or anyone like you, just based on numbers. There are only what, two dozen of you in all?”

  Liam tried shrugging then, not having confirmed that for himself.

  “Oaks thinks it’s seven, including me, at least that he can name. There might be more. Ones made by others. I heard that they were mainly attractive women? That still isn’t a large pool to work with. We should call him up and ask if he had anything to do with it. I’ve been avoiding him a bit, since he seems to be planning to use me as part of his army to take over the world. That’s the rumor from my mother, at least. It was their plan, when making me. I’m… A test model?” It was, in part, why he was so small, compared to Oaks.

  Liam was strong, on a level that was rare and notable. Oaks was probably close to unstoppable that way. It made him manageable, after a fashion. Then, what didn’t fit was that Oaks had gotten Mary to be a good parent to him. Not that it took too much effort, of course. She was a good person, so he was treated kindly and even with love by her. They still called each other every other day or so. More accurately, he called her. She wasn’t strictly supposed to have his number, since that could be used to find him, which the government didn’t want to happen, even if the charges of grave robbery and buying corpses had been dropped against her already.

  She did have it, as well as Brenner’s address.

  Really, he should have been able to go home, except that people inside the government had been dragging their feet, on the Child Protective Services side of things. Liam had been told, correctly, that he simply couldn’t walk into a courtroom and explain things. That meant he was a seven-month-old who, on paper, had been kept inside a single home for the first five months of his life, being fed nuts and berries, instead of baby formulae and mothers’ milk.

  That fact, which was true, those being his favorite kinds of foods, was almost the entire argument that Mary had neglected him. That she’d spent almost all of her time with him, instructing him constantly wasn’t allowed into anything that the social workers were allowed to see. To make it worse, the FBI couldn’t let one of that sort visit him, since he was too big and well-spoken for his age.

  Mary’s lawyer had filed papers on that, which might work, he knew. The trick would be to force the FBI to take him into court, or to give him back. Since they couldn’t do it, there was no reason he wouldn’t be returned home, instead of being left with Brenner. She wasn’t evil or anything, as far as he could tell. The issue there, for him, was only that Tiffany wasn’t his mother. Even if the red-haired woman looked a bit like Mary, in a lot of ways. They were similar in size and color, though Mary, or Leslie Stein as the courts knew her, was about five years older and not quit as thin. He missed her, almost every day.

  Mitch, clearly thinking about something that had him glancing away, avoiding direct eye contact, finally cleared his throat. It sounded fake, even if it was being done skillfully.

  “I’ll need to find the numbers for that. I think I can track that down. In order to get with Oaks? Now, let me instruct you in the magic of how to get on the deep web. It’s compartmentalized, making it harder for people to track what’s there. You need a direct link to find a web-page, making it impossible to do by accident. Most of the time people use it to pass secret information or illegal data. Kiddy porn and drug trafficking. We, our alternate community, have several web locations where information is shared. Anyone can get on it, if they know how. The first thing is realizing that you have to be safe.”

  That was done by using a VPN as well as a special browser. Mitchel didn't just show him what icons to click on the screen, either. He went over how to get the things for himself, in case it came up in the future that he needed such skills. He tried to memorize all of it, including the addresses of the places they were going to.

  Mitchel didn’t mince his words nearly as much in writing with the common people as he had on the phone with the various leaders.

  “People need to understand. Especially about how this is probably a set up. The vampires catch a lot of flak with some of the groups. Mainly because they earn it. They do love to get political and lay complex plans, after all. In this case… Well, like I said, we can’t assume anything.”

  The interesting portion, for Liam, was that Mitchel, now that he was putting things up for everyone, covered the attack on Liam by Simpson and the local police in great detail. The rest was there as well, though Liam’s full name was used, several times.

  Before the man was done writing it up, Liam patte
d him on the shoulder.

  “The cops probably didn’t mean anything by it. My nature can push people. I don’t get why Simpson acted that way toward me. Not without moving closer first. He just drove up and then came for me. Then… He didn't really do anything that would injure me. I was shot, but not by him at all, even though he has to know that hitting me with a stick or pipe wouldn’t actually do more than mildly annoy me.” It took work, but Liam got louder on the single emphasized word to make his point. That, when he’d tried hard enough, came out louder than anything he’d ever managed. It was tiny and buzzing, but nearly real. Like a normal voice might be.

  Which had the other man adding all of what he said to his article. The thing truly was one of those as well. The format was correct and everything. The only difference of note was that there were actual facts in it, and the whole thing was about five thousand words long.

  Which meant that it was copied and put up in multiple locations, as an official statement, instead of just being written out over and over again, each time.

  After eight iterations of that same basic concept, with Liam memorizing the name of each place it was put so he could find them later, Mitchel yawned.

  “Sorry. I need to get some sleep, if possible. You can use the computer. If you need to get on the deep web… Well, remember what I showed you? Do it all every time. Getting lazy means being traced. If anyone calls, I’ll get it. Tiff should be here, eventually. That could be a few hours. If you leave, lock the door after you? That means waking me back up when you get back, so try not to do that. Not for six hours or so at least.” He grinned about his words, as if the idea that he needed that much rest was funny.

  It was, instead, fairly normal, from everything Liam had read. There were a few types of beings that didn't do that at all. Sleep away a good part of the day. The rest were either like humans that way, and slept eight or more hours a day, or were like the vampires, who died while the sun was up, unless they were very strong. Even then they couldn’t walk outside until true dark, for the most part.