“The demons travel in flashes of lightning,” Mia said. “But their bolts come up from below. Right now, out there in the prairie, is a line of Wanderers. They are the dead the storm picks up. They walk like zombies just ahead of the downpour. It’s important to not get in their way. They can hurt you. Once when I was a tot, I got caught out in the rain. I balled up and pretended to be a rock. One bumped into me and picked me up and carried me. By the time the storm’s energy played out, I was miles from my home.”
“I’m not going to let the storm take you,” Ted said. “I may be a lot of things, but I’m handy in a pinch. Speaking of pinches…” He slipped a necklace he had made out of some bendy straws and silver duct tape over Mia’s head. “Inside is salt. You only have to pull this piece of duct tape off and you have salt. If you want to have it spray. Just put your mouth on one end and blow.”
Mia looked at Ted’s invention and said, “Teddy Bear, you’re a genius.”
“I know,” he said.
“What’s it like in that big brain of yours? I tried to mind-read you once but couldn’t get by all the math.”
Ted chuckled. “I think in code, or so my father says. He said when I was a little shaver, I lined up all the alphabet blocks and then vocalized the binary code for each letter. He thought I was slow. Instead of voicing A, I said 01000001. B was 01000010 and so on. It wasn’t until he related it to his friends at work did he find out I wasn’t slow at all but a genius.”
“I wonder how many kids were put on the small bus when they should have been attending Harvard?” Mia mused. “Our son Brian is smart. Varden is more athletic, but he’s talking early like Brian, so I think he is also like his father. Your genes are very strong. We also have an adopted teenaged son named Dieter. He’s from Nigeria, and he’s an Attrpeur-âme, a catcher of souls. We met him when he helped us out with a house that fell into a pocket dimension.”
“Pocket dimension?” Ted said. “But how?”
“I don’t know, you figured it out,” Mia said. “You’ve got a ways to go yet. Stay in school, Batman.”
“Sometimes I think I’m too smart for school. When I get this way, my father takes me to the university and proves I’m wrong. What college did you go to?”
“I didn’t. I gave up after trying to sit through lectures where ghosts were screaming at me while the prof was teaching. I don’t have any support at home with the exception of my godfathers, but they have lives of their own. I do, however, start to study secretly on the computer. No one knows but Jake.”
“Who’s Jake?”
“Oh boy,” Mia said. “The easy answer is to say he’s a ghost that resides in the PEEPs computer system.”
“Is that possible?” Ted questioned.
“It must be because he’s there. He also can manipulate other devices. He’s an asset to the group and one of Burt’s biggest pains in the behind. I’m the first, followed by Jake. Murphy used to be on the shit list, but he’s a kiss up.”
Murphy who had been listening from the shadows wanted to argue, but he didn’t want to be accused of eavesdropping. He was eavesdropping, but he didn’t want to be accused of doing so.
He wasn’t the only one who was listening. Cid sat on the top step of the flight to the third floor. Mike had his door open, and Glenda who was smoking, sitting on her window ledge before the storm hit was awake too.
“I know that you’re science based and you understand dimensions, but there are so many other magical realms that you’ll discover. You take it all in stride. That’s your superpower. Your brain and your acceptance of new ideas make you so valuable to the world.”
“Tell me about them,” Ted asked.
“I’ll start with the creatures I met first, the birdmen. The first birdman I met was called Angelo. At first, I mistook him for an angel. Here was this oversized, handsome Italian man who read minds as easily as we can form a thought. Evidently, when God saw that the angels could not be there for every child on earth - because the population grew so fast - he asked the birdmen to protect the children. Angelo Michaels is able to sprout wings from within his body. He has these beautiful moving tattoos on his back of feathers when the wings aren’t present. I developed them too. That was the first indication that I had wings. I wasn’t very happy, but that’s another story for another time,” Mia said. “The birdmen’s wings are massive. Birdmen can fly in a humanoid form, wings moving on their backs, or transform into birds, or they can jump dimensions. They wrap their wings around themselves and disappear. It’s amazing.”
“Seems like Angelo made quite an impression,” Ted observed.
“Angelo’s driven and will sacrifice humans to get what he wants. And what he wants is to save children. Murphy didn’t like him in the beginning. Murphy is an excellent judge of character. I felt differently in the beginning. You see, Angelo saved my life. He took me to a mountain aerie in the Italian Alps where a group of female birdwomen called Gray Ladies healed me when an aneurism burst in my head. They live longer than we do unless they
