Chapter Twenty "Matter of Trust."
It was a calm and peaceful night outside of the Shining Light Foundation. Several of the Kandorians hovered around, Harry was talking to Vala. Kara and Karen were out with Alura and Lara on a girl's outing where they'd be gone for the next few days, with Lana and Raya tagging along. Lois drew the short straw, so she was on Clark duty.
Harry did not envy her in the slightest for being stuck with babysitting Clark, but at the moment he was walking outside with Vala. They made a loop around the outside of the Shining Light Foundation, as they made their way to the streets in front of it.
"Settling in for a new life is never an easy thing but the Kandorians are adapting, some better than others," Vala told Harry as she walked beside him before she turned around, almost in a paranoid fashion, as if there was someone watching her. When she determined that there was no one there, she faced him properly. "There's a schism of sorts within the ranks."
Harry raised an eyebrow and acted like this was news to him. "How so?"
Vala was only too happy to let him in on the fact. "Zod….well there's no easy way to put this, he's distrustful of you."
Harry knew this already but played along.
"Well, that's his opinion, isn't it?" Harry asked her, even his voice neutral.
"Do you know what happened to the tower?" Vala asked him. Harry had wondered when this question was going to be brought up. "We thought that it would help people and now it's gone."
"I did too, someone sabotaged it," Harry turned around, although there was a list of suspects who sabotaged the RAO tower, Harry could not very well throw out accusations until he had proof.
The wizard turned around for a second and heard the background sounds of crickets chirping and cars driving around him, it was a nice and peaceful night, something that many people might take for granted. The wizard walked her forward as they reached a nice shop that had a very homelike feeling to it.
"I hope that we find out who did it, some of us are considering it to be a declaration of war," Vala commented to him and Harry nodded as he reached forward to put a hand on hers.
"Someone wasn't thinking very clearly," Harry remarked, but again, he knew that Zod would flip if he found out the alterations he made to the tower before it was destroyed.
The towers toppled, with fire and brimstone, and the markings indicated that someone disassembled them magically. Which narrowed down his list of subjects to around three people and Harry took some time to tick them off in his mind.
The first was the illusive Rosalina Sinclair, someone who had slipped through the cracks after the initial sighting. Harry had almost forgotten her but he would never completely forget about the things that she did. She vanished off of the face of the planet but given that the Kandorians did attack her thinking she was Lily, this may have been an act of revenge.
That brought him to suspect number two, that being Lily herself. Lily was always a wild card in many situations and Harry wondered what his mother's intentions truly were. She was able to keep about three or four steps ahead of him.
Suspect number three was his double, another person who was slipping through his fingers with greasy precision.
Harry wondered what it was about his family members that caused them to be more slippery than an eel dipped in grease.
"The Kandorians are conducting their own investigations," Vala told him as she stared into his eyes. "I know you must be disheartened as well, given all the time and effort you made into improving the tower."
"Not to mention the money," Harry remarked as he spun around and saw her to the front door.
"Yes, there is that," Vala commented in a light tone of voice before she leaned forward and gave Harry a light kiss on the cheek. She looked at him with an adoring expression "Good night, Harry, see you later."
"Good night, Vala," Harry remarked as he turned around and decided to take his own trip down to the tower.
It had been closed for investigations and there was a fourth suspect that might have been involved in the tower explosion that Harry had not thought of. Checkmate, he would not be surprised if they had a magic user on their payroll. His woman on the inside hadn't been able to find anything that was damning against them.
Then again, Checkmate had their fingers in many pies. Harry knew that Waller knew a lot about what was going on but not everything. He hoped that Tess would be able to find out more for him and most importantly not get caught doing so. He did disable her tracking implements but that meant little in the grand scheme of things.
Vala entered her shop, thinking about the new life that she set up for herself. Several of the Kandorians were really struggling to get a grasp on the fact that they did not have the powers that were supposed to be granted to them under a yellow sun. In some ways, she understood their point of view but she thought that if she was able to live without them on Krypton, then she could just as easily live without them on Earth. Having powers didn't matter to her at all.
In the meantime, she would enjoy her life but no sooner did these thoughts manifest, then she felt a sense of unease run through her. Shivering slightly she peered around. It felt like there was someone else in the shop with her. This caused the hair on the back of her neck to stand up on end and the woman shivered again as she edged towards the source of the sound.
"Hello, who's there?" Vala asked but there was no response.
She moved forward towards the shadows and tried to get a good look at who was in the shop with her.
"You thought that you could get away with what you did to me."
A hand thrust itself forwards wrapping around Vala's mouth tightly before she could even scream. A syringe found its way into her shoulder causing her to collapse to the ground.
"The perfect little specimen," the man in the shadows whispered as he ran his hands through her hair before gripping it tightly and dragging her off.
She could be preserved and the proof that they all needed to prove that he was not a crackpot would be relieved to the world. There were aliens among us and they were taking over.
He would save the world.
"My sister is missing."
At these words Harry turned around to see the person who spoke them. He was mildly annoyed about being pulled away from his work at the Shining Light Foundation.
Faora stood right behind him, a frantic expression on her face, although there was a sense that she was trying to keep it together. Granted, she was not trying too hard but still the fact that she was trying was commendable.
"She was just with me, last night," Harry offered her and Faora's eyes flickered in irritation as she closed the distance between them with another step.
"She has coffee with me every morning, it's like clockwork, Vala's never late, never," Faora told him as panic flickered through her eyes. The woman who normally had nerves of steel was panicking.
Harry thought that there might be a problem. Twenty four hours had passed since he last saw her going into her shop. The wizard tried to remain calm, even though there was a sense that something was very wrong in the back of his mind.
"I'll see what I can do to track her, but it's going to take time," Harry remarked as he cued up the Shining Light Foundation computer.
"Wait, you can track us?" Faora asked, taking aback.
"Not now," Harry hissed through his teeth, evading the subject with a tact of a politician and having a glare in his eyes that Batman would find intimidating.
"I'm beginning to think that Zod's right about you…."
"I said not now!" Harry stated in a more forceful tone of voice as he tried to access the tracking component on the computer.
The fact of the matter was that more often then not Harry had to take certain steps that might be considered morally dubious to level the rather uneven playing field that he was on. To her credit, Faora remained quiet but there was a look of mistrust that flitted through her eyes.
"After everything that's happened, I wonder if you're cracking," Faora remarked but Harry chose not to say anything in response. "The Tower went down, your mother has slipped through the cracks, and you lost the Book of RAO."
"You mean, the Kandorians don't have it then," Harry commented in an oh so casual tone.
"No we don't!" Faora snapped as her body grew rigid. "Zod says that it could be used to destroy us."
"Zod says a lot of things," Harry commented, he was worried that he lost one of the Kandorians. "Did any of the other Kandorians go missing?"
"No, my sister is the first," Faora remarked.
The theory that was formulating in Harry's mind was not a happy one. He tapped through the tracking module on the Shining Light Foundation computers, bringing up more and more data as he shifted through it.
"Can you find her or not?" Faora asked him.
"Tracking spells are imprecise, there's something throwing it off," Harry commented but he heard a buzzing in his head.
'Harry, I ran into a situation,' Lois thought to him suddenly through the backdoor that he set up in her mind.
Harry kept his voice calm and even, despite the fact he was on the verge of coming mentally undone. 'What kind of situation, Lois?'
'There's this nutjob of a doctor, he's trying to get me expose that there are aliens out there,' Lois thought to him. She could not resist giving a shudder. 'He's got this charming Saw quality to him to…'
'Run, Lois, for the love of RAO run,' Harry told her over the link.
'His name is Bernard Chisholm,' Lois thought to him but there was a panicked yell before the link went dead.
Harry pulled out as Faora grabbed him from the shoulder for a second and slightly shook him.
"You look like you were on another plane," Faora stated, in confusion and dare he say it, a bit of sympathy.
"I was, one of my friends might have gotten kidnapped by the same screwball who took your sister," Harry remarked as he rose up to his feet. And if Lois got in trouble, Clark was about to get in trouble, which meant Harry had to bail both of them out.
This night was shaping up to be made of all kinds of suck.
"Does the name Bernard Chisholm ring any bells?" Harry asked Faora and Harry detected a slight note of recognition in her eyes.
There was a few second where Faora tried to gauge how much to tell Harry.
"Chisholm saw us borrowing bodies from the morgue," Faora remarked, figuring that since Harry knew, there was no reason in hiding what the Kandorians were trying to do. "We only used dead bodies for our experiments, we're not monsters."
Harry just grunted and offered for her to continue.
"He saw us," Faora continued and once again the wizard inclined his head with a slight nod, giving her the needed invitation to continue. "And he suffered a heart failure from the shock. There was no way by human means to revive him."
"But the Kandorians found a way," Harry remarked in a chilling tone of voice, not liking where this was going at all. The wizard allowed a prominent sigh to escape his mouth.
Harry hated to put someone in danger but he knew that Lois had been captured and given that there was a stronger trace on her, he would be able to track her down. Chisholm was not the brightest person in the world and in fact he left a very distinct trail for Harry to follow.
"You will get Vala back, won't you?" Faora asked him and there was a pause as Harry stood there with his jaw set firmly before he offered her the response that she had been seeking.
"Yes, I'll get her back."
Harry now had a place to start. He wondered if any innocent humans had been caught in the crossfire in Chisholm's pursuit of them. The wizard knew that the chase was on.
He might not like what he found out but the chase was on. A smile crossed his face as he prepared himself for what he needed to do next.
The young Herald of Death dropped down from the edge of the building that Lois had been taken to. There was a really creepy vibe that caused him to shiver a little bit. The young wizard took a few seconds to get his head on straight and focus on the situation at hand. There was a time to be paranoid and a time for action and now was the time for action.
Harry peered through the open windows and kept an eye on Clark through the windows. He arrived there, likely to follow Lois. Clark might have gotten a scream of terror through the link that had been established.
Which meant that he went in there without a plan or bothering to wait for backup.
There was someone out here with him. Harry stood rigid, his arm turning around a slight bit as he coughed lightly. The Herald of Death knew that if he was caught out here, that could compromise his role of getting everyone out of here alive.
"It's going to be very tricky to get in here, isn't it?"
That voice was very familiar to his ears, almost like it was someone who he knew all of his life. Harry spun around and tried to attack the person in the shadows.
She blocked his hand, holding it in place. He tried to go for a kick but she blocked it. He tried to blast her with a stunning spell but she blocked it.
"We can do this all night, I know every move that you can do," the girl stated as her hood was draped over her face to obscure it from Harry's line of sight.
"Then maybe I should try for something unexpected," Harry remarked to her as he bowed his head.
He flipped over the top of the girl's head and grabbed her hood before pulling it down. He saw some red hair and piercing green eyes. She looked like a miniature version of Lily Potter, except for a few differences.
"Very good Harry, you can be taught," she remarked as she stepped back and slowly clapped for him. "My name is Alexandra Potter, I'm you….well with a few differences."
Harry's face contorted into a strained smile as he surveyed his doppleganger. "Yes, I can tell."
Alexandra inclined her head and watched Harry. The two of them kept their eyes locked on each other and neither was about to flinch for that would give up ground to the other.
"I've been trying to crack this facility but I've run into a snag," Alex remarked to Harry.
"Given all of the snags you've caused me, it's just as well," Harry informed her but she shrugged her shoulders.
"Be that as it may, I'm not the villain in this situation, that nutcase in there is," Alex stated as she peered towards the window. "He keeps Kandorians preserved to try and prove his crackpot theory. Or what he thinks are Kandorians."
"Normal humans," Harry breathed.
Alex turned towards him looking over her shoulder. "Quite. He's taken the crazy train to the land of confusion."
"Wonderful," Harry retorted towards her and the red haired green eyed witch swayed her hips from one side to the other before she locked eyes onto Harry's.
"I believe that's our way in."
Harry wondered if he was going to believe her but there were times where he had to trust someone even though he might live to regret doing so. This was a matter of trust and his trust was waning.
"I'll create a diversion, you rescue the captives," Alex whispered and once again, Harry wondered if he could trust her.
Of course, asking if he could trust her would be asking if he could trust himself.
Did Harry trust himself?
Well that was an interesting question to hash out and the answer might have turned out to be a rather prominent "no". The wizard twisted his head around and took a long and deep breath.
He edged inside and sure enough a diversion was caused.
Harry saw Vala on the tube, Lois handcuffed to the bench, and Clark on the floor, at the mercy of the modified Kryptonite the Kandorians created.
Chisholm meanwhile was looking like every B-Movie villain ever, his eyes flickering off from one side to another as his grin got wide and creepy as he surveyed the situation at hand.
"Just think how many live ones we have," he stated as he grabbed Clark around the scruff of the neck.
Harry saw another party guest, Zod, sulking around the corner. Everything was going to come crashing down and the chaos was just beginning.
A flash bang echoed in the air and blinded Chisholm. This allowed Lois to free herself from the handcuffs, and display that she did have powers, in time to punt the man into the wall as hard as she could.
Harry edged over and saw the tanks. Vala was about frozen like an icicle but he managed to unscrew the valve to release her from her containment. The wizard wait until he could safely break her free the rest of the way without plunging her body into shock.
She was panting and barely there. Harry slowly defrosted her. It was a controlled process with magic, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, her feet her dragging beneath him. The Kryptonian blinked, she had been through an ordeal.
"Here, there's someone who can help you, get back to the Shining Light Foundation," Harry remarked as he pressed the Portkey into her hand and Vala, without another word, mostly because she was in too much shock to say one, flashed away.
Clark got to his feet but so did Chisholm who was more durable than he appeared on the surface. Not to mention he had a gun. He fired it towards Clark.
Before Harry or Clark could react, Zod jumped out of the shadows and took the bullet for Clark. It was a moment that surprised all, as he sacrificed his own health for Clark. The bullet pierced Zod's chest and caused a nasty wound.
The Kandorian fell to the ground, the blood pouring out of his chest and Harry stepped forward before he started to scan Zod. Clark struggled to stand up and looked from Zod to Harry and was about to open his mouth but Harry shook his head.
"Clark leave him, he's gone, all gone," Harry told him and Chisholm was about ready to attack once again.
Several of his surgical tools impaled him in the chest and pinned him against the wall. A blur shot out of nowhere and an energy scythe cracked him across the chest.
His time was long done.
Harry edged over to the back of his lab, he needed to make sure there was no other prisoners that he needed to free. He combed over the lab with a fine tooth comb to try and find that there was no stone left unturned.
Whilst Harry was gone, Clark kneeled beside Zod. There was only a slight amount of light flickering through his eyes. He could barely hold his head up, blood spilled from his mouth, pouring from him. There was an instant where he tried to lift his head up but he collapsed back down to the ground.
"Zod, hang on, we'll….get some help," Clark offered him in a calm tone of voice even though there was a certain amout of shakiness appearing through this tone.
"I guess….Jor-El was wrong," Zod managed as his stomach was wounded from that human blowing a hole through him.
It was quite an irony, all of the battles he had and of all things, it was a human that put the final nail in his coffin. His fingers became even number as he tried to lift his head up but he collapsed back down.
Breath was hard to exert for his body. Zod's eyes closed and his breath became extremely ragged. He tried to turn his head back around.
Clark watched, a frantic burst of inspiration flowed through his body. He would not dare try it but he had been running out of options.
He grabbed one of the pieces of Kryptonite. It burned in his hand but pain was not something that he worry about. He screwed his eyes shut and felt it burning into his hand.
"Clark wait!"
Clark ignored that yell and stabbed the Kryptonite into his forearm.
The blood splashed onto the gaping hole in Zod's stomach. There was a long pause, before a flash of light erupted around them all. Everything changed for Zod as he felt his skin healing, his genetic structure changing.
Zod's eyes flashed for a second before he sank into a deep sleep. He was still breathing.
Harry's eyes widened. He wondered about the consequences of what Clark just did.
"So you saved his life," Harry remarked to Clark, his voice was cool and crisp as he offered this inquiry.
"Yes, I saved his life," Clark offered him, wondering what he did wrong now.
Actually in his mind, he did not do anything wrong. He did everything right involving Zod. Sure the man was capable of some bad things and did some bad things on Krypton but there was an instant where he saw a look of something in his eyes.
Vulnerability was something that flickered through Zod's eyes. That was something that Clark never thought that he would experience coming from the almighty Major Zod, the future General Zod. He was calling out for help, for someone to save him.
His help.
"So you saved his life?" Harry asked him once again.
"I believe we already established that," Clark remarked to Harry and there was a moment where Harry looked at him. The look was long, cold, and unsettling. It stirred up some unfortunate questions within Clark's mind. He said nothing at least not at first. Then the glare continued to burn a hole through Clark and it caused him to go on the defensive. "What did I do wrong now?"
There was a long pause before Harry looked up into the sky and his sigh could resound for miles.
"Well, I did tell you that Zod was all gone, didn't I?"
"Yes, but you saw what happened, I saved him," Clark offered him and Harry turned around and watched the sky.
There was a moment where Clark felt a chill in the air. It was not something that he enjoyed feeling at all.
"He was black, he was going to die, there was no saving him about it," Harry remarked as he looked into the sky.
He wondered what Clark did now and the floodgates were opened for some nasty storms. The wizard debated on whether to let him in on the next bit of news that he learned from the Lifeline reading. That was something that was far worse than the first bit of news.
"Zod was black," Harry remarked coldly and crisply. "And now….and now he's gold."
There was a second where Harry looked up and wondered if Clark fully grasped what he did.
"Do you remember Doomsday, who went gold, and the hell you went through against him?" Harry asked Clark. "Do you remember what happened, how you nearly died?"
There was really no nearly about it, Clark was for all intents and purposes dead. He was somehow brought back to life due to a technicality but he was never the same again. After the battle with Doomsday he hovered in limbo. It was more complicated than that but that was the general idea of the matter.
"So you're trying to say I blundered again," Clark said as he threw his hands up in a defensive manner.
Harry truthfully was not in the mood to deal with Clark and his issues right now. Not after the last few weeks that he had been having. He bit his tongue and mentally counted to twenty before he spun around. The icy green eyed glare of Harry Potter could cut through the hearts of many men and Clark as someone who was experiencing what it was like to be on the business end of that one straight away.
"I'm not saying anything like that," Harry whispered to him in a deadly and quite crisp tone of voice. There was a certain iciness to what Harry was saying that unsettled Clark.
He kept himself rather calm, or calmer than he should be. It would have been far less unsettling if Harry had shouted until Clark's ears bled. His expression flickered between very much annoyed to cheerfully indifferent. Then they locked onto Clark with a cold blazing fury.
"Maybe Zod will come to appreciate the fact that he was on the edge of death and not become the monster that he was," Harry offered.
Clark cut him off. "I thought that you were…."
"Let me finish, please," Harry stated in a tense tone of voice. "Maybe Zod will come to terms with what happened and that will allow him to be a far better person than that monster who became part of the end of Krypton."
Harry wondered but he was not going to pass judgment on anything until it happened. There was just a part of him where he wondered if Clark opened the Pandora's box to end all Pandora's boxes by giving Zod his powers.
Could the end begin with this seemingly selfless act?"
Harry stepped forward with a calm expression on his face and did not say another word to Clark about the matter. He took it as his cue to leave. Harry did not bother to call him back because there needed to be some kind of damage control exercised with everything that happened. The wizard spun his head around.
There was a box that was on his office desk in the Shining Light Foundation. It reminded him that his double slipped off into the night yet again. Exactly what she was up to, well that was something that Harry still had yet to figure out.
He reached forward without another thought and touched the box. The box blinked to light above him and it rose with a holographic image of his sister, with her red hair and green eyes.
"I'm sure you're wondering what the meaning of me leaving you this package is," Alex told him with a moment's pause. Harry perked his ears up to listen. "There are some dangerous people out there; Checkmate is only the tip of the iceberg. The Kandorians are divided, which could end up working into your favor or could end up blowing up in your face. I don't know what's going to happen myself but it should be fun to figure out, shouldn't it?"
Harry did not say anything, although there was a certain amount of frustration flickering through his eyes. He kept his face calm.
"I have something that you have been searching for, now that the heat must be off of you, it will be safe for you to possess it," Alex concluded with a smile on her face.
The hologram faded and Harry took the box in his hand. There was something about this box that made him wonder if he was holding a ticking time bomb. The same question echoed in his mind and he held the box, before he opened it up.
He pulled it out, it was silver. He knew what it was immediately.
Harry now had to put every single bit of security in the building on it for if it ever fell into the wrong hands, it would mean the end for them all.
'I have it,' Harry projected to Kara and Karen through the bond link and there was no need to explain what "it" was.
The fact that the blood of Clark was used to revive Zod actually worked out more to Harry's favor than he let on to the Kryptonian. The fact of the matter is, the fact that Clark's blood now empowered Zod meant that other elements were at play that made things a bit more manageable.
Harry smiled at this thought, everything went according to plan, at least for the most part. Although there were still a lot of things that went wrong, so perhaps he was being very much premature about everything but still he tried to remain optimistic.
Zod's face flickered as he rested and favored his stomach area. The Kandorian heard footsteps and his eyes perked up before he watched the approaching figure.
"You wanted to see me."
Clark came face to face with Zod.
"They aren't around, are they?" Zod asked Clark and Clark nodded in response after taking a second to make sure that no one showed up. "Good, it's me and you, man to man, without any of your minders sticking their noses in. This is none of their business."
Clark did not say anything; his expression remained stoic and unblinking. There was nothing for him to say now.
"So I have you to thank for my miraculous recovery," Zod commented in a light tone of voice to Clark, raising an eyebrow towards him. The Last Son of Krypton's eyes widened and he nodded. "So how did you know?"
"Know what?" Clark asked Zod in a careful tone of voice, trying not to betray what he was thinking.
"How did you know that your blood was going to heal me?" Zod asked him as Clark turned his head towards him before he offered a clear answer.
"I didn't."
Zod nodded, that was a fair statement, honest, something that a huge part of him respected. He kept his gaze pointed towards Clark. The wind blew around them as the two of the stood face to face. Time ticked by on the clock before Zod spoke up with his answer.
"So it was a gamble," Zod concluded as he inclined his head. "Although one that paid off."
Clark shifted his gaze towards Zod. "How are you feeling?"
Zod admitted this next part. "A bit sore, not all of us are men made of steel after all."
He rubbed his side for emphasis and Clark, nodded in response.
"What are the Kandorians up to?" Clark asked before he could help himself and Zod raised an eyebrow. He looked to be considering what Clark was saying before he responded.
"We are trying to figure out how to best live a life amongst the humans but it has been difficult, has it not?"
There was an expression that never faltered from Zod's gaze and he extended his hand forward to tap Clark carefully on the shoulder.
"I do wonder what the intentions of a certain mutual contact of us is," Zod commented in a light tone of voice, trying to sway Clark's mind towards a certain direction. "Harry Potter."
"He said that you were going to die," Clark offered, choosing his next few words.
"Yes, he says a lot of things and many of our brothers and sisters are beginning to blindly follow him," Zod remarked as he eyed Clark. "He is the type of person who would have a tower built and then have it destroyed to cause the Kandorians to be divided. Divide and conquer, he would have been amongst the greatest chessmasters in the world."
"Harry would never…"
Zod placed up a hand and prevented Clark from speaking further.
"Do not think of what we might or might have not done, given how circumstances pushed us. There are a lot of times where you think you might have been pushed in a certain direction. It is not set in stone what we might do if we feel desperate times call for it.
Zod's expression drilled into Clark's face.
"You better get back, your watchdogs will not approve of our meeting," Zod remarked to Clark. "Even if they will never truthfully know the perils of what we must go through. You and are I cut from the same cloth, Kal-El, don't forget that."
Clark wondered if he should feel insulted at that but nodded.
"So I suspect that we will meet again," Clark offered and Zod's head nodded stiffly.
"You will be right if we meet again," Zod answered crisply as he spun around to look over the edge of the building into Metropolis below.
It was so beautiful yet it was so fragile. Clark left and Zod stood on the ledge of the building, looking down at the people below.
The sights, the sounds, the smells, all amplified a thousand fold, thanks to the gift that Kal-El gave him. There was a few seconds where a heart beat drummed in the back of Zod's head and he placed his feet on the ledge, looking out into the city below.
'He's given me so much, pity I'll have to take everything,' Zod thought to himself as he stepped off of the ledge, the moment of truth at hand.
Zod remained airborne, shooting through the skies of Metropolis. He tested the new gifts that had been given him through the blood of the son of Jor-El. It moved him like a cork, faster than a speeding bullet. He was more powerful that any force on Earth and he was powerful enough to take him down, to crush any within his feet.
Soon he would give the Kandorians their birthright, once their desperation had heightened and they depended upon him above all else. After Harry Potter failed to keep his promise to help the Kandorians, Zod would be a savior like he always destined to be. A brand new age of Krypton would begin beneath his feet. The towers were only a small set back to a grander cause and he propelled himself forward through the sky, testing out his new powers.
They would serve him rather well.
Planning was the strong suit of Lily Evans, even if she knew that the best laid plans of mice and men often tended to go awry. This was no less true for a witch, even if she micro-managed several things to the detail. Ever since she was a little girl, there were certain things that intrigued her, even if in her quest for power, there were things that were extremely difficult for her to come up with.
The witch blinked as she moved through the headquarters of Checkmate, well one of their many bases. The Castle was a location that Lily had not been able to completely breech as of yet. There was someone who locked her out and she wanted to know who that was.
There was something else that bothered Lily as she shifted through the government base. Checkmate was outsourcing their work to someone; there was this mysterious assassin who had been tasked with taking care of the Harry Potter problem once and for all. She tried to find out more regarding who had been hired to do the deed.
Waller was a woman that was a difficult one to maneuver against. Certainly Lily wiped her memory but she was tenacious enough to bounce back from that. If Waller had not been Lily's enemy, she might have admired her just a tiny bit more than she did to begin with.
Respect your enemy and you would never underestimate them. Lily Evans did respect her enemies, all of them, even though they tended not to respect her.
A creaking could be heard and Lily grew rigid.
Someone else was sneaking around in these parts on this night. That was extremely interesting, as Lily wondered who could be sneaking around in this area. She edged herself towards her target, there was a momentary thump against the side of the wall.
Lily came face to face with one Tess Mercer. Both of them stood before each other. There was that moment in time where neither said a word to the other. Their eyes were locked onto each other, burning through each other. Both females looked at each other intensely.
Neither spoke one word, even though there was the indication that they should.
"What are you doing here?" Tess asked but Lily grabbed her arm before she could step forward.
"I'm sure Waller's little stooge would want to make sure everyone knows that I'm here," Lily remarked in a crisp and cool tone of voice. "And I'm sure that….I'm sure that you're itching to get some revenge after the last time we met."
Tess remembered that, her eyes flashed with a fury that could not be matched. Lily stared back at her, eyes locked together and their minds were racing. Both of them did not say a word to the other despite the fact that there was a chance that they should.
"Or maybe you're not as loyal to the cause as you claim to be," Lily whispered to Tess in her ear, which caused the other redhead to take a step back.
"What's your stake in this?" Tess wondered, not backing down from Lily.
Lily replied with a smug smirk, one that did not leave her lips. She countered her expression. "What's yours?"
It was a game that they could go back and forth on all night long but there was more than one person who joined the party.
"I don't think either of us should be seen here," Lily whispered to her.
"What are you after?" Tess asked as she grabbed Lily preventing her from attacking.
Lily could have hexed this woman for getting in her face. Thankfully her temper managed to keep in check.
"Answers," Lily offered in a crisp voice.
"Could you be a bit more specific?" Tess fired back and Lily's eyes locked onto her.
"Not to you," Lily stated but there was a pause before they were on the business ends of weapons and a group of armed individuals stepped forward.
"Do you really think that you could get away with this easily?"
Lily assumed that they were speaking to her, because they were looking at her. She opened her mouth but they shook their heads.
"Checkmate is all about loyalty and you did not exert the proper amount of loyalty for our cause, Miss Mercer," one of the guards stated in a stiff tone of voice as he stared down Tess. He stepped forward and gazed directly into her eyes. "Come along quietly and we may make this easy on you."
Tess could hardly believe that, making things easier on her, as if. She stepped forward but she was grabbed by the hands and forced off against the side of the wall.
'How do I work this damn thing?' Tess thought to herself as she tried to break through the bond link. 'Harry, Harry, are you there?'
Tess knew that there was one way out of Checkmate and that was in a box. Her limbs twitched and shook as Tess was pushed into the wall. She struggled against the tight grip but the Checkmate agents also grabbed Lily.
"Wait I didn't…." Lily started and they were quick, they had the bracelet strapped on her wrist.
"We developed those for Potter, but you'll do just nicely," the goon stated with a twisted grin spreading through his face.
Lily tried to flick her wand at him but the bracelet prevented her from utilizing magic.
"So, you're going to kill me, well that's nice," Lily remarked, practically baiting them into doing something that they might regret later.
The Checkmate goon's face twisted into a smile as they chained Lily and Tess together, with a miniature explosion device in between the two of them.
"Seriously?" Lily asked as she looked at the entire set up.
"I hate to agree, but I do," Tess stated as she wondered why this link to Harry wasn't working at all.
"Sometimes the best methods are those that are tried and tested," the Checkmate goon stated as he watched Lily Evans and Tess Mercer handcuffed together, set for the explosive charge to go off in less than an hour.
Neither woman was happy about the situation.
"You can even run, if you try to tamper with the cuffs, it will below you to smithereens."
Lily did not want to tempt that nor did Tess. The fact of the matter was since the bracelet prevented Lily from performing magic, they were pretty much tamper proof.
Yes, they could not have been a worst situation if they tried.
To Be Continued in the Next Chapter "Act of Faith."