The Witch: Book Two of The Sorceress Saga by Taliesin Govannon (top 10 novels of all time .txt) 📗

                “Cool your jets, Han.” Tiffany replied, pulling out her own joint. “It’s just that, well… nothing we found in there warrants a suicide order for base employees. We wouldn’t have needed to torture information out of them if they’d been captured… a palette of surface to air missiles says a lot on it’s own, thank you very much.”

                “What an ethically challenged magickal order is doing with a shipment of SAM’s is another question entirely.” Gaia kissed me and curled up next to me on my own sofa as I held my joint for her to hit. “Which is what Jack and Katsu are trying to figure out now, thanks to the lack of a kill switch on their server.” she exhaled.

                “See?” Tiffany said, exhaling. “They have a kill protocol on people, but not equipment? It just goes against every security protocol used by… well, anyone who knew how to fire a surface-to-air missile!”

                “That really doesn’t feel right.” Raina agreed. “I mean, what could they have known about or have been involved with there that humans would know about but wouldn’t be picked up on any computer… which includes the security camera server… that would make them dangerous for anyone else to capture them?”

                A thought popped into my head, and I said it without much thought. “Unless the people were what was valuable.”

                That stopped all other chatter in the room. “What?” finally asked Raina.

                “I mean, what if these people had been involved with something secret somewhere else?” I shrugged. “After it was over, their bosses needed to send them somewhere secure, someplace where they wouldn’t be noticed, to wait for… whatever they were going to do next.”

                “You're right." Tiffany said slowly. "If it was the people… some kind of team... that they wanted to keep secure, the stronghold we just hit would be a great place to do so. It's defended by the golems, who can blend into the surrounding jungle and thus not look like a heavily defended compound, it has great perimeter defenses… really, few groups short of a Sorceress and her crack tactical court members could have gotten inside.”

                “For someone flying beneath the radar,” Gaia added, “it’s pretty perfect.”

                “But we checked the Percisos et Elephantus," Raina insisted, "they're not a part of any known mass occult movements that would fit these precautions. The only reason we hit their place was that they had the crystal, and were unethical enough to not want to help the Sorceress willingly."

                “You just said it,” Tiffany replied, “known occult movements. They’re obviously a part of something we haven’t heard of yet.”

                “Unless we’re the subjects of whatever they’re doing.” Gaia said.

                That stopped all conversation again. I feel a group briefing coming on!

                                                                                                *                *                *

                “So you can see our thought process.” Tiffany said to the assembled group. “We may have stumbled onto one of the groups allied against us.”

                Almost everyone… Raina, Jack, Katsu, her older sister Hatsu, Vincent, Angelique, and Gaia… sat as Tiffany recounted our earlier conversation. The only people missing were the blue Fae sisters Darla, Cordelia, and Drucilla… who were back in their Twilight Fae homeland, researching the Fae records… and Trevor and Evelyn Hawkins, who were off on an intelligence-gathering mission of their own.

                Looking at Angelique’s reaction, it looks like we’ll be filling all of them in on our luck!

                “This kind of seeming ‘coincidence’ is actually quite common with Sorceresses.” Angelique said. “Even outside of my own experiences, the lore all agrees on this.” She looked at me with a kind smile. “We should grow to expect this, I suppose.”

                Her smile made me melt like it often did. I can’t believe that I wasted a year, being neurotic about my feelings for her! I thought. I mean, okay… I need to give myself a break because of the whole ‘paradigm-changing’ turn of events that my life has taken. But there is such respite, such joy in her embrace… it makes this sci-fi geek into a bloody awful poet!

                “So,” Vincent said next, “we know that  Percisos et Elephantus is involved in something hinkey, most likely having to do with our mysterious attacker. Jack, Katsu, this means you’re up.”

                “We already have a list of Percisos holdings and locations,” Jack said, “What we’ll do next is to figure out which locations are records areas, so we can hit there next.”

                “I’ll send an official request to them as an LPC… “ Katsu said, using our new abbreviation for ‘Legendary Paranormal Creature’, “… formally, just to cover our asses in the larger Occult community in case we have to go in by extra-legal means.”

                One thing that most fantasy writers got wrong about supernatural beings and creatures was the idea that they were organized into some kind of social structure or hierarchy. The truth was more mixed, with some groups being highly organized while others were scattered, chaotically, in a mixture of feral loners and independent groups all over the globe. While there was no single law or ‘code’ that they lived by, the supernatural inhabitants of the planet had certain… customs that were more common than not, one of which being asking for something before taking it. Ancient magickal beings tended to carry weight with some, thus our classifying some of us as ‘LPC’s’.

                I guess that includes me as well I thought. I’m not ancient, but my title… the Sorceress… is.

                “I wish we could question some of the people in the last stronghold we were at.” I said, sighing. “I’d even take one of the golems!”

                “Except that golems can’t talk.” Vincent said, shaking his head.

                Wait… what?!?

                “Wait… what?!?” I said out loud. “What do you mean, golems can’t talk?”

                “That’s part and parcel to golems.” Gaia said. “They fight like hell, and can’t spill your secrets if captured, since they can’t speak.”

                “These spoke.” I knew that they did,