A/N - I'm back. Sorry for the hiatus (we, in the Castle fandom, hate that word, don't we?) - work, moving, kid stuff - you all know the drill. Thanks to everyone that has followed and added to your favorites. I'm especially enjoying your comments. This story is so far off the wall from anything I've done previously, it's reassuring to read your positive comments. When it's complete, I will respond. Well, when it's complete and after I've updated Martha's Heart and The Courtship of Katherine Beckett. I do appreciate all of my readers who stick with me. Thanks for your patience.
Enjoy!
~GeekMom
The Possibility of Magic
Chapter 7
Skepticism: Thy Name is Beckett
"Beckett, put me on speaker," Montgomery said gruffly to his star detective. He stood and walked to the door, surveyed the bullpen and closed it. He sighed and returned to his desk. He closed his eyes as he sat and leaned back in his chair. The chair screeched in response. He had put a maintenance request in three times already to have the damn thing fixed. He shut his eyes for a moment while he waited for Beckett to comply. He wasn't as good with the mechanics as Castle, hell, he wasn't as good at anything as Castle, but he merely had to picture a well-lubricated pivot point. He opened his eyes, sat forward, and then leaned back. "Shit," he cursed as he sat forward again. There was no squeak, but there was no limitation either. The thing was well on its way to reclining and dumping his ass on the floor. "Damn it."
"Sir?" Beckett's concerned and filtered voice filled his closed-off, but fishbowl of an office.
"It's nothing, Beckett. Just chair problems. Esposito and Ryan are you there also?"
"Yes, sir," they answered together. Montgomery shook his head. If they didn't work so well together he'd have them reassigned. The unison thing was creepy.
Montgomery inhaled. He'd need a clear head to tackle the issue before them. Castle would be pissed, but the game had changed, so must the rules. "Good. Now that I have all three of you," the captain spoke in an eerily calm voice. "How the hell did you lose your civilian ride-along?" The question was no longer calm. Roy knew that something was going on at the source. He still couldn't believe what had happened. He'd sent them up there with Castle because if anyone alive besides Alexis could control him, it was Beckett. He'd never heard of the universe being so agreeable or desperate when he was contacted about Castle, but their offer was so tempting that he'd volunteered his friend. He had the feeling that he'd been had. He'd always known that his friend was special, even for one with abilities he stood out as especially gifted, but what was it about him that resulted in the present turn of events?
"Are you alone?" Montgomery asked.
"Yes, sir: we're in Castle's car."
Montgomery took a few seconds to compose himself. "Alexis is missing," he said and was answered by a cacophony of swears, oaths, some in Spanish by Esposito.
"Guys," Beckett yelled above the racket. "What happened, Sir?" she asked when her partners quieted.
"Martha called and said she hadn't come back from walking on the beach."
"Did she call the locals?" Espo asked.
"No, she…" He sighed again. He couldn't see a way around telling them about Castle's gifts. "No she hasn't contacted the police in the Hamptons because she has a pretty good idea of where Alexis has been taken and why."
"Sir?"
"She's there, Beckett."
"Dad!"
"Oh God, Alexis? What…but, why are you…how?" he stuttered, stunned by her presence. "Are you all right?"
"Daddy? I'm…okay, um…just scared," she said in the same small voice he recognized as the one he heard from his little girl when she woke him after a bad dream.
His heart clenched in his chest. He used all of his strength to twist until he saw the crushed, defeated form of the sheriff. "She's only sixteen! How in the hell can you do this?"
"I wasn't given a choice," he replied sadly.
"There's always a choice: you can choose to do good or you can choose to do evil," he yelled as he struggled against the invisible restraints.
"I had to get her back, she was all I had." The man dropped his head even more and began to retreat to the tunnel.
"Wait, what did you say? You told me that your sister was dead. It doesn't matter how powerful any of us are, we can't change that. Not one of us can bring her back."
"She's not…" He hesitated and peered around the room, his eyes resting briefly at the center. "She was taken," he whispered.
"Taken? What do you mean taken? Do you mean like these people? Who took her?" Castle desperately looked around the room also, his eyes zeroing in on his daughter. "Did you…trade all of these people for your sister?"
"Here," she repeated. "Why would she be…? Why would anyone even know to bring her here? We just got here a couple of hours ago ourselves." The creases on Beckett's frown deepened.
"There's no easy way to tell you this so that you won't think I'm nuts."
"I've heard some pretty crazy things today, sir. Try me," she said while looking at her partners.
Montgomery was silent for a moment. Beckett checked her signal strength just as he spoke. "Castle has certain…authority there."
"No, no I was just supposed to get you."
"Me? How did…? Then, how did my daughter get here?"
"That wasn't me," the sheriff defended.
"Then who?" Castle looked as if he would rip those responsible a new one.
"I…I don't know." The man sighed. "There are Aggregates here and someone that will ensure that they cooperate. I guess that's your daughter for you. Do yourself a favor and just do what they say." He looked forlornly at the twenty-eight captives, people held against their wills in his jurisdiction. It went against everything he had ever stood for, except his devotion to his sister. "I have to go," he finished. "I've already said…"
"No! God, please. Let her go. Please Sheriff Heat, Derrick. Please, she's just a kid."
"I…I can't. I'm sorry," he said as he backed away from the dome. He turned and ran into the tunnel.
Castle continued to wriggle within his constraints, to try to find a weakness or a chink in the armor. He struggled to turn his head and body so he could see all of the dome. His eyes kept going back to the frail visage of his daughter. She was and always would hold his focus and his concern. 'If he could see her, she'd be okay,' he irrationally reasoned. He reluctantly dragged his eyes away and caught a glimpse of a group of people kneeling in a circle. They wore hooded robes. He could have almost laughed at the unimaginativeness of the scene, as if it were from some cheesy horror movie. A steadily brightening blue glowing light emanated from the center of their circle, but he couldn't see its source. The group was surrounded by another circle of six-foot tall white pyramidal candles. Tall skinny pyramids of wax and flame.
He felt himself being lowered to the last vacant intersection he'd spied when the sheriff delivered him. He recognized that whatever the scheme was, it would probably be complete with him as the final part, locked into place. He closed his eyes and pushed the panic and fear that was rising like bile, threatening to drag him under and drown him and concentrated.
He concentrated on his breathing first, only to snap his eyes open at the sound of a scream from the tunnel. Castle willed himself not to imagine what could have invoked the horrific sound. He closed his eyes again and calmed his breathing and then his heartbeat. He felt his strength and power settle itself back down into that part where the universe resided. He grimly smiled then he went to work on the candles.
"What kind of authority?"
Their captain was quiet again and then he sighed. "Okay, just listen with an open mind. Castle has certain abilities."
"Sir?"
Ryan frowned and tentatively asked, "Can he move things?"
A light of dawning recognition hit Esposito straight between the eyes. "Yeah, can he…say, write with a pen when he's not even in the room?"
Beckett glared at her partners. They were taking the joke on her too far.
"Yes, I'm sure he could," Montgomery confessed.
"Oh my God!" Beckett exclaimed. "Is Castle behind this? Sir, I don't think joking about Alexis being kidnapped is funny."
"Joking? Beckett, I wasn't joking. Why do you…?"
"Both of these purported detectives turned comedians said that they saw a pen writing on a piece of paper, the note that Castle left, on its own. Ha, ha, very funny: all of you. Now, can we stop trying to punk me and find Castle and the missing people?"
"Kate, we're not…" Esposito began along with Ryan who said "Please, Beckett…" in harmony. They looked hard at each other and Esposito shook his head and sighed. Ryan shrugged. He opened his mouth to continue and so did Ryan, but Espo held his hand up to his partner. Ryan snapped his mouth closed and nodded.
"Kate, we're not joking or trying to punk you. Some freaky-ass shit is going down here and it involves those missing people, Castle and now Alexis." He paused to take a breath.
"Yeah," Ryan jumped in, "We would never joke about Alexis: you know that."
Beckett looked back and forth from the seemingly innocent to the overtly suppliant faces of her partners. Her internal dialogue was in constant argument with the arguments presented externally. There was no way that Castle made the pen move, if indeed the pen moved at all. She was still leaning toward the theory that this was all an elaborate practical joke. She had no evidence that Alexis was involved at all, just Montgomery's claims. Castle could have easily bought both their partners, the sheriff and Montgomery off to insure he pulled off the ultimate prank on her. She shook her head. "I'm not falling for it," she declared. "I've been the victim of too many pranks at the hands of evil genius Cas…" She suddenly grabbed her thigh, remembering the key ostensibly coalescing in her pocket. She had convinced herself that he must have given it to her after arriving at the hotel; she simply forgot or that she was too distracted by the case and their developing relationship, the stress of the past few days or anything else where she could place the cause. 'The key seemed to appear out of thin air,' she mused. It was what her grandfather would have said when pulling a sleight of hand trick. 'Trick,' she repeated silently.
"Captain, are you implying that Castle is…" she paused and inhaled, steeling herself against her own internal arguments. "Are you saying that he is…that he is…God…that he is mm… magic?"
Montgomery chuckled even in the face of the dire situation. "Magic? No, Beckett. No, he's not magic. Matter of fact, he'd be the first to explain that it's not magic, but…how does he say it? He says it's a manipulation of nature and physics."
"You've known about this? Before now?"
Montgomery was silent. He had decided to out Castle purely because of the situation. His friend couldn't be angry with him for trying to locate his daughter. Roy knew Castle would do anything for Alexis, even come clean. It did not mean he needed to come clean himself. "Yes," he answered simply. First rule if you're ever interrogated is to answer the question: do not elaborate.
Beckett, however, was a master interrogator. "How?"
Montgomery was not prepared for the follow-up and fumbled before answering. "It's not really important now," he dismissed. "The important thing is finding Alexis and Castle."
"Sir, if Castle is magic or whatever," she exasperatedly said. "Why can't he just wave his wand and avada kedavra them or something?"
"It's not Harry Potter, Beckett. Look, Castle is smart and strong, but he isn't invincible and probably needs whatever help you can give him. You just need to know what you might be up against."
"Whoa, sir," Ryan interjected. "Is there more than one…is there someone else who can do mag…I mean the physics stuff like Castle?"
"Yes, detective; I think that's who you'll be fighting, but you've got the universe on your side. You've got this."
Beckett shook her head. The whole story was too fantastical to believe. She frowned. 'Would it be fantastic or fantastical?' she asked herself. She unexpectedly remembered a couple of their cases from the fall. A witness, Albert Moreno said that the victim, Vivien Marchand, an alleged psychic, begged him to let the universe sort things out and then he said it did. Penny Marchand, the victim's daughter, who also said that she sometimes shared her mother's gifts, claimed that she had a dream in which a man named Alexander would be important in Beckett's life. Castle, who's given middle name was Alexander, had also wormed his way back onto her squad after his summer away at the Hamptons with Gina by offering that it was a sign that they had crossed paths again. 'A sign from the universe,' he said with conviction, 'telling us we need to solve this case together. You don't want to let the universe down, do you?' He truly believed the universe would and could help, so did Montgomery, apparently.
He opened his eyes to the shrieks of the robed people. He had successfully tipped the candles along with their molten wax and exposed flame over onto them. He felt the invisible restraints loosen briefly and heard soft moans as captives began to collapse out of their trance-like state and crumble to the floor.
The grip around him tightened further causing a whine to escape his own lips as he felt the oxygen forced from his lungs. He silently pled with the Aggregate to help in his fight. His vision began to swim as all the strength drained from his body.
"Daddy," Alexis' anguished call pierced through the haze taking over his senses.
She looked at her partners in silence after Montgomery ended the call, contemplating everything that had been said and that they experienced over the past day. She could count on Ryan to be open and willing to believe any theory that Castle spewed on any given day or case. Since he'd started helping with cases, he offered vampires, time traveling killers, kidnapping aliens and dozens more of implausible and capricious explanations of events and crimes. She expected Esposito to be practical. Like her, he was more about hard evidence, not fanciful theories of fairies and magic dust, but he was on the other side of this one. She shook her head: they were all on the same side. The side trying to solve the mystery, if they weren't, they were doomed.
'I respect the universe. You don't want to let the universe down, do you?' His words echoed in her ears, repeatedly. She closed her eyes and pictured his face as he said them. He truly believed his words, it wasn't just a ploy to get her to accept him back on the team as she thought at the time.
She remained skeptical of the cause; she had to believe in the evidence. It had been seared onto her DNA because of years of being a cop. Castle believed in the possibility of magic, but it frightened her. Nonetheless, she put the car in gear and headed toward the lake. Whatever was happening, whatever the cause, it was taking place there.
A/N2 - I too, am standing in solidarity with my fellow fan fiction authors against the vicious trend in anonymous reviewers.
Dear Authors.
Please delete all negative anonymous troll reviews. If we all simply delete them, their bile won't there to be read along with and detract from helpful reviews. Please ignore them as the silly, pathetic, and lonely little creatures that they are. Please help them crawl back under their anonymous rock until they've evolved enough to walk out and gain a name. If and when that happens we will all be happy to have civilized discussions of our work.
Dear Trolls,
Don't even bother. You will no longer get free reign to terrorize and spew your vile. Find another playground.
