Disclaimers in Chapter 1
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Santa Maria of the Desert parish was a quiet place, set in a bedroom community on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Like many parishes, its congregation had aged along with its priest. There were fewer and fewer young parishioners in the pews every year, except for the obligatory Easter Sunday Mass. There were still enough, though, that he should have had an assistant, had one been available.
Father James Grady thought it a good thing that he spoke fluent Spanish, and so could celebrate the Mass and hear confessions in both Spanish and English. When he had first come to Santa Maria, his parish had been mostly Irish with a sizable minority of Mexican-Americans. Now, it was about half and half.
An elderly lady came in to confess a list of "sins" that amounted to a laundry list of complaints against the drug-abusing grandson and his girlfriend with whom her health forced her to live because they were her only relatives. He listened patiently, for she needed that as much as she needed absolution. She left the confessional, unburdened of sins as well as frustration, and he heard a kneeler drop to the floor as she prepared to say the ten Hail Mary's that he had assigned as penance.
The confessional door opened and closed, and a tall, heavily built man came in. He knelt carefully, favoring sore joints.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been thirty-eight years since my last confession, and since then—I think I broke all the commandments, but I'd might as well start with the worst ones first. I murdered twenty-three people."
Father James' eyes widened. He had been a parish priest in Las Vegas long enough not to assume that everyone who came through the doors of his church with an Italian accent was necessarily a mobster—nor to be surprised when such a person did confess something Family-related, up to and including murder. But it was the first time a total stranger had knelt and confessed mass murder to him. He prayed for wisdom and replied, "Tell me more about this, my son."
"I was a sniper in Vietnam, and when I came home...well, that set me up to go into the Family business, if you know what I mean. I've done a lot of horrible things. Most of the people I shot were made men, but...not all of them were. The one I feel the worst about was that reporter. He had a wife and a little boy. The only wrong thing he did was get too close to a drug-smuggling operation. I don't even think he knew what he was into, but they couldn't buy him off. Then there was this whore...excuse me, father, prostitute, who turned state's evidence. Will God really forgive me for all that? I'd understand if He wouldn't."
"God forgives everyone who comes to him with a contrite heart," the priest replied. "Why are you coming forward now after all this time?"
"Because I'm a coward, Father. I just found out I have cancer. There's nothing they can do. I don't have much time to set things right, but I'm afraid to die with all this on my soul."
"My son, God understands. There's nothing you can confess that He hasn't heard before, and forgiven before. Trust in His grace, and go on with your confession."
"Yes, Father." The hit-man went on to detail a long, sordid life of crime and misery, both caused and suffered.
At the end of it, Father James said, "A wholehearted attempt to set things right demonstrates true contrition. Go to the police and confess to these murders. All of those people have relatives who are suffering because they don't know what happened to them, and they haven't had the chance to bury them. Tell the police where the bodies are buried."
"Father, I got a son somewhere. If Joey finds out I talked, he'll kill him. You know he will."
"This 'Joey' is responsible for his own soul. You need only tell the police that you took these people's lives, and where you buried them. Beyond that, you don't have to say anything. But you do have to give these families closure before we can go any further."
"Father, I can't risk that. Joey's gonna know. I can't protect my son because I don't know where he is. His mom flew the coop when she found out what I was, and I—well, I figured they were better off. I heard she died a few years ago, but nobody said anything about Pasquale. Joey'd be able to find him, though. If I wrote down all this stuff, could you get the information to the police somehow? Maybe Joey wouldn't learn how they found out where the bodies are, and Pasquale would be safe. I don't care what happens to me. If I need to go to prison for what I did in order to be forgiven, I'll confess to the bank job. They lock you up over money faster than they do over a person's life. I'll be dead before they manage to convict me of murder, anyway."
Father James considered the probability that the law would try to force him to break the sanctity of the confessional and reveal how he had come by the information. But that wasn't what was important. If it was God's will that he do his duty while jailed for contempt of court, then that was what would happen. "Yes, I can do that. Return with whatever you want me to give them as soon as you have it written."
"Thank you, Father."
-Sidhe Chronicles-
The desert around the Nevada base reminded Ironhide of Cybertron.
This, though, was an organic world. If you could somehow subtract the organic...ness of it all, the old mech mused, it would be a bit like his home.
He dug up a handful of the sands of not-quite home, and let the silica trickle through his digits.
Annabelle saw that, and toddled over, Evanon right behind her. "Castle?" she said hopefully.
"Haven't got the molds for it, sparkling," he said gruffly.
Annabelle, undeceived by his tone, was also unfazed. She climbed up into his "lap," and sat on a kneeplate, kicking her legs to keep them away from his black plating.
It was still early enough in the morning that the sun was not pouring merciless heat over them like molasses. But that part of the day was coming soon; there were clouds in the east, but they were too far away to provide shade.
Evanon tilted his head. "What is a castle?" he asked.
This boy, Ironhide realized, was as much a stranger here as any Cybertronian. Diarwen had carefully taught him a few English sentences, but his language skills were still sorely limited.
Annabelle rushed into a speech about princesses and knights, which somehow involved both Barbie and Ironhide, and Evanon knit his brows in puzzlement.
"Hey, you," Ironhide said, and offered her a palm. She stopped her story to scramble into it, and he lifted her to his shoulder. "A castle," Ironhide said to Evanon, "was made for defense. It's a great big house usually made out of stone."
"Oh," the boy said. "We hadn't those in the Underhill."
"Here, once the humans discovered how to use chemicals to throw a ball a long distance, they stopped building castles."
"You would have to throw it very hard to have any effect if the 'castle' were made of stone," the boy said, sitting down in Ironhide's shadow.
"Yeah. They use guns and gunpowder to do that."
"Those I have heard of. The Unseelie think them a dishonorable weapon, but they cannot stand against iron."
"Like Diarwen?"
"Yes. She is Seelie, though, and I was with the Unseelie."
Ironhide thought for a moment, watching a roadrunner a good distance away doing its roadrunner thing, even, he noted, in the absence of Wiley E. Coyote. "They a different species, or just on the other side of a political argument?"
"I do not know the words 'species' or 'political,'" Evanon said politely.
"Oh. Well, politics, that's basically a big argument about how to plan for the future. Anytime you got two humans in a room, they got at least three sets of politics there too. And a 'species' is any group of organics that can have babies together...whose babies can have babies together."
A hasty internet search of the word "mule" was responsible for the last phrase of this explanation. But Evanon knit his brows together, and said, carefully, "The Seelie and Unseelie are a single species, then. Are human men a different species than human women?"
"'S true they can have babies together, but I've heard the NEST guys say the women aren't a few times," Ironhide said truthfully. "The women, I've heard them say the men aren't the same species once or twice, too. I think you might get a better explanation from Diarwen than from me on that one. She's been around 'em longer, and understands 'em better."
"I see."
Ironhide didn't think so; the kid was radiating puzzlement. But Diarwen was the best one to help him sort it out. Optimus' 2iC wondered briefly about downloading Sidhe to better talk to the kid, and then remembered that there was no such thing as a download of Sidhe. Yet, anyway. He'd talk to Diarwen about making one...
"There are occasional Seelie with Unseelie fathers. Though...the warriors of the Seelie Court do not claim captor's rights...and Lady Morithel expressly forbids it to the warriors under her command. Prince Jaelin, though..."
Ironhide's engine let out a low rumbling growl, which he stifled before he scared Annabelle, or the much more perceptive Evanon. "Yeah, well, the 'Cons had their idea of 'captor's rights' too. That is, when they didn't think me or the Prime'd find out about it. Or worse yet, Jazz."
"The Seelie, too, saw captors' rights as a matter of honor, but they have no access to the Underhill."
Ironhide replied, "Huh. There wasn't much of anywhere Jazz or Mirage didn't have access to, not on Cybertron anyway, not if they were mad enough. Never frag off a scout bad enough to want you offlined."
Evanon nodded solemnly. He knew that to be wise advice, and had had the terms "frag" and "offlined" explained to him the previous day by Diarwen, thanks to Sideswipe's mouth. Though Sides was not entirely to blame; he had been unaware of Evanon's presence.
"C'mon," Ironhide said, climbing to his peds, one hand around Annabelle to prevent her from falling. "Time we got back."
"Hide Hide Hide Hide!" the little girl screamed joyfully, as he airplaned her, sitting on his palm, to the ground, and transformed. He could now extrude a child's car seat at will, and so Evanon had no more to do than lift a laughing Annabelle into it, and fasten her safely inside.
Ironhide popped the driver's side door when he finished, and Evanon, who had been going to walk around to the passenger side, stopped dead in his tracks. "I may ride in this seat?"
"Yeah. You're about the age humans learn to drive at, so I thought I'd teach ya some stuff."
I must be as crazy as a miner on homebrew to do this.
The kid's fields were his reward, though. Bright as rainbows, and coruscating.
Of course, this was only the second day Evanon had been allowed to leave the medbay. Yesterday, he had met Ironhide, Chromia, Sideswipe, the Tiny Trine, and Barricade. Today he would meet more of the base population. They were a transitional set of acquaintances for the boy, but better that, Ironhide thought, than total isolation.
Yeah, the kid had a rough time ahead of him, the black mech thought. He started his "engine."
"Look. I drive myself, y'know that. But I was thinkin' that maybe you could learn how to point a car the way you want it to go from me. It's a good skill to have."
"You would do that for me?" the boy said, such awe and respect in his voice that Ironhide saved that clip immediately.
"Yep. You were an awful lot of help this morning when Annabelle needed help with her shoelaces, and I ain't forgot that."
"I was sometimes allowed to care for other changelings," the boy said.
"Well," the black mech said, "this's my way of sayin' thank you, I guess. Your seat belt on?"
He knew it wasn't, of course, but the boy fixed that immediately. "Okay," he said. "Put your hands on the wheel, straight across from one another." Nine-and-three, the humans called it, which was somehow better than ten-and-two, though Ironhide couldn't say why. They both added up to twelve, after all.
And so, erratically at first, they made their way back toward base. Evanon was sweating heavily by the time they got within sight of it. And Annabelle had mostly contributed, "Go faster!" to the conversation.
The clouds which had been far away early in the day were now lowering directly above their landscape. In the east, where they came from, their bottom edges trailed a brush of falling rain over the landscape; that rain was coming closer.
"This's what's called a dry wash or a 'wadi,'" Hide said, dropping a front wheel over its edge. "Pretty rough terrain, lotta boulders left by flash floods. You'll find my wheel bounces around a lot because o'that. Let's see if you can get me to that big cactus, just over by far the edge of the wadi."
Anyone who had lived a long time in the southwest would have told them that, in light of the clouds overhead, this was a very bad decision. But neither Evanon nor Ironhide had been in the desert long, and they had no source of outside advice.
"Very well," Evanon said. For somebody who hadn't sat behind the wheel of a car ever before in his life, Ironhide thought, the kid was doing pretty well. But the boy said, "What is a flash flood?" and Ironhide had to get back on the internet to answer that.
That distraction meant he wasn't paying the attention he perhaps should have been. Evanon was a careful driver, so far as Ironhide could judge. But Hide went where Evanon pointed him, his attention on the Wikipedia entry for "Flash flood," and put his weight on a front tire: whereupon the rotten chaparral which had provided a frail bridge between two largish boulders collapsed. His front wheel went down into the gap, splinters of chaparral showering down with it, and he broke a small, but important strut: diagonally opposite the one which had given him trouble for vorn, but no less important.
"Fraggit!" he said, once everyone had lurched to a stop. "Everybody okay?"
Annabelle answered, with delight, "Do it again, Hidey-hide!" But no one took her seriously.
"I too am 'okay," Evanon said. "These seat belts–I would not have been without them, I do not believe."
"Yeah. Well, let's see if I can get m'self outta this. Might need your help, Evanon." He paused, and Evanon might, were he a little more familiar with Cybertronian emotions, have heard a tinge of embarrassment in Ironhide's vocalizer. "There's a shovel in my bed."
He freed Annabelle of her carseat, and the little girl began to tell him (and herself) a story about Barbie and Ironhide, which she illustrated with action figures.
Fifteen minutes of Evanon's hard labor later, Ironhide's wheel was still well and truly stuck, dangling from an overstretched cable that fed through a damaged strut. And the sky had darkened from a cheery blue to a hot, close grayish-ecru, which blocked the sun but not its infrared radiation. Ironhide's cab began to heat. He cooled the interior for Annabelle, which raised his own operating temperature.
He didn't think to monitor the CB traffic, or he'd have heard about the flash floods in the up-lying areas from the base.
Evanon, meanwhile, had not given up. He was carefully excavating a hole for a boulder too large for him to move. When he got it wide enough, he thought, he would undercut the boulder, and it would roll forward–
A roar, muted, rumbling, impinged upon the boy's consciousness. He stood up from his task, and found that the clouds had gotten grayer and heavier in the east, with thick trails of darkness sweeping down from them.
He had been raised underground. He didn't know rain when he saw it.
Therefore he bent back to his work, but the rumbling grew louder. A few shovelfuls later, he stood, and saw what looked like a tiny, moving line of darkness perhaps a half-mile away. As it came closer, he realized that this was water, or at least fluid: but why was it dark brown? And what were those sticks and things doing poking out of it?
Ironhide popped his driver's side door. "Get in, Evanon," he said, urgently. "The rain's been fallin' up in the mountains, and since there's no plants to drink it an' no soft soil to absorb it, it's all comin' straight for us. Annabelle, back in your seat, please."
Evanon placed the shovel carefully back in Ironhide's bed, and did as he was bid; Annabelle obeyed the tone of Ironhide's voice where she might have argued with the command itself. Their seat restraints snapped tight around them, which startled Evanon considerably.
Ironhide rocked when the first six inches hit his tires. This was less water than a moving slurry of mud and small sticks, and it made taticky-tatick noises above its sibilant rush by his tires.
Ironhide by that time had pinged base and explained his situation, and his companions'. Sideswipe had been on the desk, and had received his call unemotionally, but now the frontliner said, "Ratchet, Prime, Killstrike and his boys, and Chromia are all on their way. You'll stay on the line with me, 'Hide. Prime's called for a CH-53 from Nellis. What's goin' on out there?"
At that moment, Chromia threw a helmet to Diarwen, who had abandoned a quarter-full shopping cart in mid-aisle, and transformed before they peeled out of the PX parking lot, Chromia's tires squealing until she abruptly went off-road. Prime transformed from root to alt and raised an impressive rooster tail of dust on his way cross-country to the wash; Killstrike's team angled in from the area of the base they'd been working on.
Ironhide said to Evanon, as the water rose to nine inches, "You get out and take Annabelle with you!"
And Evanon, who had more experience with rushing water than the Cybertronian, said politely, "The sides of the wadi are too steep to climb, the water is rushing too fast, and I will not leave you." Ironhide's fuel pump warmed slightly at this pronouncement.
Three minutes later, Will and Sarah Lennox were picked up at their quarters by Ratchet and told to strap themselves in tightly because he wasn't wasting any time on his way to their daughter. They held hands as the desert sped by his windows.
Sarah felt as if unimportant organs had been jostled loose from her body, and left somewhere on the way; she was hollow inside. Will stared intensely through the medic's windshield, stiff as a board.
Ratchet attempted twice to initiate conversation, but got no response either time; he added "too worried to respond politely" to his file of "Noted Human Behaviors," and didn't make a third attempt.
Chromia hit a wash so hard that Diarwen clutched at the handlebars. "Sorry!" she shouted, but Chromia did not slacken speed, in fact increased it.
Prime skidded to a halt first, coming to rest at an angle to the wash and transforming, running a few steps to get rid of the last of his kinetic energy. By that time, the water had risen halfway up Hide's door panels, and was carrying debris considerably larger than the small sticks and dirt the lower level of water had borne to him.
Hide bore a dozen dents before Chromia slid to a halt in pouring rain and transformed as Diarwen jumped off, just ahead of Ratchet, Will, and Sarah. Killstrike, Burnout, and the tractor-alt gestalt stopped a bit north of them, but Diarwen shouted above the noise of the river, that muted, thunderous roaring, "Hi! Tell them to get back! The bank is undercut!"
Quickshot wasn't quite fast enough. The sandy bank broke like peanut brittle, and his front wheels dropped into the water. Jackknife transformed, and pulled his brother from water so brown and filled with sludge that it was like a river of chocolate pudding thickened with pretzel sticks.
Out in the stream, a downed tree hit Ironhide in the tailgate with a "Thoooom!" and inflicted several long scratches on his side as it was pushed past him by the inexorable water. Its level was now above his bed. He had sealed the passenger compartment, and all his electrical components, some minutes previously.
Behind him, the wall of water became a little deeper where it met the resistance he offered. He was neither quite parallel to nor quite at ninety degrees from the flood; a standing wave formed upstream of him, and the level rose above his tailgate there.
But only there. His bed flooded, which actually served to weight him; for the first time since the water had risen above his wheel wells, he felt as If he might not be swept helplessly downstream, to tumble in the raging waters.
Ironhide rumbled, "Wonder if I've got enough air in here for the two of you if I have to seal up all the way."
Evanon cast a quick, measuring glance around him, and answered from a lifetime's experience of living underground. "I do not know your time units. And it will be longer if Annabelle does not cry."
"'M not a baby," Annabelle said stoutly.
"No, you aren't," Ironhide said, knowing as he did that if this urgent point were not acknowledged it would be repeated. "More than a quarter of a day? A 'day' is the time from sunrise to sunrise. A flash flood don't usually last more'n a joor, a quarter of a day."
"Less than that," Evanon said. "Divide the quarter-day into three parts. We have enough air for two of them."
Not enough air, then, or too much time. And the water didn't seem to be dropping. Ironhide hoped he wouldn't be completely submerged—so far, so good.
Optimus attempted to wade out to his foster-father. But the flash flood had grown in depth, speed, and strength since Evanon refused to try to ford it. It was now too much even for the Prime; he lost his balance twice before he came back to shore, badly dented along one side.
Two more uprooted trees struck Ironhide, who visibly shuddered with each impact. One left a dent in the door opposite Annabelle.
Diarwen looked at Will and Sarah, then away. She could not bear to watch, and she would not describe their expressions, even to herself.
And Chromia…Optimus held one of her servos, but the other flexed and flexed. "I can't get to him," she said.
"No, I know. If I could not, neither can you, not even in your jet-ski alt. But help is on the way."
Jazz, Mikaela, and Chip arrived. "Jeez," Chip said.
Diarwen said to Optimus, "Could the tractors pull him out of the river?"
"No," he replied. "He is injured. Another strut. It will not hold."
She thought for a moment. "When the CH-53 gets here, I can fast-rope to Hide and get hooks set."
"With you sitting on his hood?"
"I do not see why not!" After all, while airborne, she wouldn't be shut up into a metal box miles above the ground.
Jazz said, in a very careful tone of voice, "Actually, th' chopper's comin'."
Sarah Lennox said in a very shaky voice, "Oh."
The bots had heard it first: even for them, the thup-thup of the chopper was barely audible over the river. A rope snaked down, and Diarwen sprang for it. Quickly, before she could realize she had signed up to go flying.
She would later be very glad that Bobby Epps had had a hand in planning emergency services for the base. Because of Bobby's involvement, the crew of the CH-53 knew exactly what to do, knew exactly what she had to do (although, being human and Army, as well as new to NEST, they did waste three minutes arguing with her about being allowed to share the fun until Lennox snapped at them all to shut up and get to work). She geared up, and dropped back down to Ironhide, three-tenths of a second she was going to remember as long as she lived. With Evanon's help, she placed heavy hooks around his door posts.
She was winched back up into the helo as the chains thrummed tight.
But while Ironhide was free of the hole his wheel had dropped into, thanks to Evanon, the weight of the water in his bed was more than the chopper could lift. He began to stand on his rear wheels, understood what the problem was, and popped his tailgate.
The chopper leapt into the air, there was a noise like the giant from "Jack in the Beanstalk" reaching the very bottom of his fifty-two gallon Slurpee, and some very interesting eddies formed as Ironhide was pulled free of the river. Wheeljack saved the video clip; hydraulics was, to him, a new study.
Sarah Lennox was caught and held up by her husband as she went limp and wobbly against him, though Will's own knees were none too steady. Chromia too was held tightly against Prime's side; Optimus' anxious optics were on the CH-53.
Streaming water, Hide was put down as gently as a baby's kiss at a safe distance from the edge of the freshet, now slackened visibly from its greatest depth.
His front wheel gave just as Ironhide popped his doors, and Diarwen, the Lennoxes, Parker, and Ratchet all rushed him.
Evanon nodded to Diarwen, and went to Hide's back seat, picking up Barbie and Ironhide's smaller self to return to Annabelle, who was clinging to her mother's shoulder and weeping, but turned to grab her preciouses, and handed Ironhide to Will before latching on to each parent with an arm, and renewing her sobs.
Diarwen went to the boy, and took him by a shoulder. "You are uninjured?" she said.
He bowed his head. "Yes, my lady."
"I think, Evanon," she said thoughtfully, "that if you return her dolls to Annabelle after such a fright as that, I shall indeed take you into my service."
Optimus, Ratchet, and Killstrike were carefully picking Ironhide up, to place him inside Optimus' trailer for the ride back to base. But the black mech called, "Sorry, Diarwen, too late! He's comin' to live with Chromia and me."
And the sun coming up behind the boy's eyes told the Sidhe all she needed to know about that. She nodded, her eyes still on Evanon's. "I shall cede my claim. Morithel, I think, would understand."
Ironhide settled inside his trailer, with Ratchet and Chromia in attendance, Optimus transformed, and popped his doors; both his doors. If Evanon was to be his foster-brother, he wanted to know the boy as well.
And Diarwen, of course, was welcome always in his cab. The caravan formed up, and returned to base.
They pulled up to medbay to find Joe Treadwell bristling at its entrance. "That Unseelie kid is out and about without shackles and a guard? I protest!"
Ironhide, being moved into medbay, said flatly, "He was with me the entire time, Assistant Director, and when he had the chance to cause trouble, he didn't take it. In fact, he helped me with Annabelle, when she needed somethin' my servos ain't made for. You gotta problem with that?"
Treadwell spun on Lennox. "You allowed your daughter out with that …"
"Assistant Director," Lennox said, his voice and his eyes both steel, "that will do."
Said daughter was clinging to her father with both arms and both legs, wide blue eyes on Treadwell. A thumb stole into her mouth.
Sara wanted to giggle; when Will became Commanding Officer she…responded. (Chromia cocked an eyebrow at her, and grinned. Great, Sara thought. The whole base knows? Well, yes, if they thought about it, and cared. But Chromia didn't gossip. And, Sara thought, it took one to know one.)
Optimus said only, "Should Evanon deliberately cause injury or harm to any person, human, Sidhe, or Cybertronian, on this base, we will deal with it, Director. That will include calling in your agency if I feel it is necessary. Should it become so, you will know immediately."
"With respect, Prime, Colonel Lennox, that won't do. Any Unseelie, anywhere, is a danger to all the humans around him." Treadwell's gaze fell on Diarwen. "Or her."
Before Diarwen had time to take offense, Optimus said firmly, "Mr. Treadwell, that is beyond enough. Diarwen has proven her allegiance to us many times over. And as Ironhide and Chromia have now claimed Evanon as kin, his supervision is also not your concern."
Treadwell, to whom Chromia had lent an audial a time or two, gave her a martyred look, and crossed his arms. "I see. I hope I'm wrong, Prime. But you cannot now say I didn't freakin' warn you."
"No," Prime said. "We can't say that."
Ratchet clapped a servo on Killstrike's shoulder, and together, they pushed the gurney bearing Ironhide into sick bay, Chromia and Evanon following.
End Chapter 4