Tertiary

By Courtney Keyes

What do you do when your brother thinks a crow is his grandfather? When you wake up a cat? When you find out that horrible old man is back in town?

Stacy, Michelle, and Cade have no apparent connection, but they seem destined to cross paths.

Cade doesn't believe in coincidences. He's going to search this from every angle until he sorts it all out.

Michelle can usually get herself out of any situation; she's usually the one that creates situations.

Lately, she's been having trouble remembering. Stacy is just furious. Her brother isn't just being a pain, these are disowning offenses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Courtney Keyes
• Release date: Jan 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370475278

Book preview

Tertiary

Courtney Keyes

Published by Courtney Keyes at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Courtney Keyes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Part I

John

The boy hunched over his desk like a diviner over his runes. His adoptive mother, peeking through the door she dared open only a crack, could see nothing but the tail feathers, black proud fingers reaching toward some unknown. She retreated silently to the kitchen, her face a mask of perplexed curiosity.

John! Stacy! Time to eat!

John ignored her call, for the moment intent on deciphering the crow’s frustrated pencil squiggles. Held awkwardly in a fist of toes, the pencil scraped yet more jibberish.

Keep at it, Grandpa, I think I can make out some of the letters now. I see an ‘I’ and a ‘W,’ but then I’m not sure about the next few. Is that the word eggs?

The bird puffed his feathers, threw down the pencil, and turned his back to John. Shrugging, the boy left him to answer his mother.

As he munched his sandwich and chips, both homemade, John surveyed his mother and sister proudly.

They don’t know it yet, he reflected to himself, but Grandpa and I are going to be famous millionaires and I can buy them fancy dresses and new phones and makeup and whatever else girls like. Ponies?

Stacy

Stacy ate her ham, salami, and pickle sandwich quickly, but timed it carefully to avoid drawing her mother’s attention. Between hurried bites, when she was taking just enough time to chew to avoid choking when she swallowed, she contrasted the three members of her little family. It was a game she liked to play even before she realized what it meant that she and John were adopted.

John was short for his age and stocky (a term she had read recently and latched onto because it sounded like stalky, which had two meanings of its own, though also half-made-up). He wore simple jeans and a t-shirt, and he had orangey hair and freckles. His hair and skin reminded Stacy of Anne from the Anne of Green Gables book, but John did not care for the comparison.

Their mother had dark black hair, as opposed to the color of black that just seems completely black until you compare it to the black of her mother’s hair. It had very sharp, tight curls that she wore cropped close to her beautifully shaped head. To Stacy, she was, in general, the ideal in every way. Her body shape was not too tall, not too short, not too plump, and not too lean. Most impressive of all, she managed this without being average or boring. Her skin was a deep, warm brown. Her shoulders, upper-back and upper arms were covered in black-colored tattoos, but not the dark black of her hair. Sometimes Stacy would stare at the intricate, unknowable designs until her mom noticed and told her she was making her uncomfortable, So stop. Other times, even if she could see them, Stacy forgot they were there like it is possible to forget someone is wearing glasses. They are just a part of that person and you would only notice them by their absence.

Stacy herself was getting to the stage where her body was about to start working out what to look like while growing into an adult. She was very tall for her age and her baby pudge was beginning to melt and shift in directions she was not sure about yet. She had read about puberty, which she felt should still be a few years off yet at only 10 years old, but she figured she would do her best to roll with it rather than be a weenie about it like half the characters in books. She had impossible straight hair that would not even stay up in a ponytail, but she still liked to keep it long, even if it meant spending most of gym class redoing her hair. It was a very dark brown, about two shades before the color that was not as black as her mom’s hair. She also had complimentary black eyes, and perpetually tan skin. She liked to play a game, though her mom called it dumb, of guessing where she was from. South America? Hawaii? Spain? Thailand? Singapore? Philippines? Her mom would roll her eyes and tell her that her birth certificate said she was born in the United States. There was no information about her biological family history.

She was not going to start in on any of that today, because she could tell John had an adventure for them.

Cade

Cade pulled up Sal’s pull-up and flushed the toilet while nudging the stool over to the sink for Sal to wash his hands. He grabbed the liquid soap away before the two-year-old had pumped the whole bottle into his hands.

They rejoined the girls in the living room to watch the rest of the Spongebob movie. His wife unpaused as soon as they sat down. He addressed her in hushed tones, wanting to talk to her without interrupting the kids or leaving the room, Dylan, hun, you know what happened at work today? They assigned a team to monitor and ultimately arrest Richard for drug manufacturing. They’re saying it’s some pretty hard stuff.

Dylan looked at him with what he knew was her thoughtful face, though she would be mistaken as annoyed by an onlooker.

What could he have gotten messed up in this time? When was the last time we’ve heard from him? I didn’t even know he was in town.

When was the last time we’ve heard from either of them? Cade pointed out. They’re both so...

Yeah, Dylan agreed with the indefinable irritation Cade felt. Then Sarah wiped her nose on Dylan’s blouse and she left with a sound of disgust to change.

He called after her, I asked to be included on the taskforce.

Good plan, she shouted back, and Samantha shushed them. He let it go this time; they were talking over her turn to pick the movie.

Michelle

Michelle woke up in an alley five blocks away, but she was not dumb. Just angry. Looking down at her body, she realized with surprising rapidity that she was also a cat. Instantaneous with that revelation, furious thoughts crowded her mind. F***. Why am I a cat? That b******. She let out a yowl of rage but cut it short at the sound of barking in one of the apartments above her. It sounded like a terrier and she was sure it could not reach her, but it was sobering to be yelled at by dog, so she got to business. She stomped out of the surprisingly well-lit and swept alley to the actual street, but her light cat paws made the aggressive foot work less satisfying. She found that if she released and retracted her claws rapidly it was a good substitute.

First, return to the scene of the crime, she instructed herself. She, not being dumb, easily found her way back to the apartment-turned-lab. She had managed to track it down as a human without the advantage of having been there. F****** Richard. I’m going to wring his neck. Or claw out his eyeballs. Something.

As she neared the building, she worried that the cat version of Michelle would be unable to knock or turn the doorknob. Luckily, she found the door was left slightly ajar and she slid in without opening it any further. She sashayed right up to the device in the tiles she remembered standing on earlier. She pounced up and down a few times, but nothing happened.

In frustration, she began to groom herself, her rough tongue sticking on the long tan colored hair beneath her chin. She thought that it might be called a ruff and gave up on that area for her more accessible legs and tail. It occurred to her to get a look at her face, so she hopped up on the table with all of Richards’s shiny glass and metal instruments. She wove among them until she found the reflective surface that displayed, for her amusement, the wide set (but at least not snub-nosed) face of an unidentifiable breed of cat. She curled her luxurious tail around her paws and sat very upright. At least I’m still cute, she noted.

Suddenly, she stretched and it felt good to be so limber. Thinking to make the best of being a cat while waiting for Richard to return, she leapt nimbly from counter to counter to ground to counter. Finally, she found a patch of light streaming into a hidden spot behind one workstation and curled up for a nap. It would be good to be well rested for later when she tortured Richard into restoring her humanity.

Stacy

John, John, John, John, John, pestered Stacy good naturedly, Tell me where we’re going! They were only a bit off their regular school path, but she had never been in the area.

John laughed, shook his head and waved for her to catch up. She had lagged behind even as she was bugging him – she had seen a bookstore and was inching by it, hinting by her posture that she would like to go in, and ravaging the display window titles with her eyes, collecting them. She had heard of a few, but most were completely new to her: I, Robot; She Had Some Horses; Vilette; Full Cicada Moon; The House on Mango Street; To Kill a Mockingbird; The House of the Scorpion; The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language; Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood; Siddhartha. She wanted to stop and write them down to add to her many book lists.

She reluctantly moved on and followed her brother to an apartment building. It was identical to several others on the same street. Except the others had people occasionally go in or out and the windows on this one were all either boarded up or covered from the inside with dark, heavy-looking curtains. The front door was open a small bit, and John went in without seeming to think about it. Stacy was shocked for a moment, but she knew John. He must have been here before. Maybe this is where he’s been going the past few months when he would say he didn’t want to play? Stacy was excited that maybe now she could join John on his adventures, again. He was a few years older, and Stacy was worried that he may have outgrown playing with his little sister. She slipped in behind him, leaving the door open like in Narnia.

John? She whispered into the large gloom. She expected to feel the slight choking of dust-clogged air, but the apparently abandoned building was well ventilated. John flicked a light switch and revealed an enormous lab – it took up the entire first floor of the apartment building. John was grinning widely at her awed expression. It seemed to her as though he were showing off something of his own.

John, how’d you find this place? Will we get in trouble for being here? She was edging along the wall.

John shrugged and Stacy knew everything was fine. She set about to explore, prowling and peering but touching nothing. There were freezers with samples of somethings and beakers and Bunsen burners and huge orbs of colorful gas and weird metal contraptions and so much that Stacy could not take it all in. She stayed well back, but close enough to see everything.

Then, she saw John. He was leaning in close to the glass orb filled with gas of a violent purple. He was reaching out to touch it. She did not understand; this was so unlike the careful, meticulous John she knew...She began to call out his name, to stop him, and, as he turned to look at her, his elbow caught a beaker-holder. It tipped and knocked against some glass object that shattered too fast for Stacy to identify what it was, causing a chain reaction of crashes. Stacy crouched and covered her face with her arms to protect against sharp debris as object after object burst.

Cade

Cade and the other officers arrived at the apartment building mid-afternoon. He was told to stay back as they cleared the complex lab setup on the main floor and proceeded to the upper floors in search of their target. It was clear they resented his presence, and Cade understood. This was not one of his specialty areas, and the town of Holden, New Mexico was not big enough for them to have an exciting drug bust every week. Many of them had moved out here from the larger Kane for that reason. He did his best to ignore the occasional glares and insinuations that he was constantly underfoot. A brief glance of the lab, even without their more extensive narcotics division experience, told Cade that it was not used for drug manufacturing. He pondered this as they traversed the six other, completely boring, floors.

The team lead announced, All clear, of the seventh (and last) floor just as a series of sharp crashes could be heard below.

Last up, Cade was the first down and saw the final piece of equipment crash and shatter the large orb. He saw two terrified kids before he was grappling for his life against tooth, claw, and fur. A large tan cat was upon him, its back leg tearing at his jugular as it wrapped itself around his head to simultaneously smother him and attempt to chew his left ear off. Before the cat had managed to sever any major arteries, another officer was able to pull it from his face. The cat wriggled free of Martinez’s grasp, however, and next lunged for the young girl. Cade was about to clamber, bleeding, to her defense, but the cat seemed to be at rest from its murderous rage.

Holding his neck, Cade took a moment to glance the kids over for injuries. The girl had her face buried in the cat as they comforted one another, but the boy was looking around at the destruction, almost proudly. He turned to meet his gaze, and Cade got his first good look at a face he had never expected to see again. Cade turned away quickly and watched out of the corner of his eye as Martinez eased the beast-cat out of the girl’s grasp. Her too, he confirmed.

Michelle

Michelle dug