Episode 39: Speculations and Supernatural Wars
- Crystal Crawford
- Apr 16
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 17
“A war?” Collin asked after a moment of shocked silence had settled on the room. “A war on what?”
Trenchcoat Man looked at him. “On other supernaturals? On non-magical people? On all of humanity? Anything I say at this point would only be a guess, but elementals are extremely powerful. If this group is collecting elementals—and it seems they are—we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming their intentions are anything less than devastation. Whatever is coming, we need to be prepared.”
“Easier said than done,” my dad chimed in, “when you have no idea what’s coming at you, where it’s coming from, or why.”
“Indeed,” Trenchcoat man said, “which is why uncovering that information must now be our primary objective.”
“Wait.” My anxiety ratcheted up to twelve. “I thought finding Emery and Chloe was our primary objective. That’s the whole reason I’m even doing any of this! Well, that, and preventing myself or anyone I care about from being the next target… but to do that I need to find Emery and Chloe.”
Trenchcoat Man gave me a sympathetic look. “My dear, you already are a target, remember? Why do you think we’ve been watching you so closely?” He tapped the third list on the chart, which I still couldn’t see well, though it seemed to have only one name on it. He waved me closer.
I stepped as close to the closet as I could, and sure enough, the Suspected Targets list had only one name on it—-mine.
It wasn’t exactly a surprise, but seeing it there in writing made it suddenly feel more real.
“You know Aubrey has been targeted?” Collin asked with a catch in his voice. “You aren’t just speculating?” He glanced at me.
Trenchcoat Man turned to him. “When you live in as strange a reality as we do, ninety-six percent of life is speculation.” He raised an eyebrow. “But that doesn’t mean we’re wrong.”
My dad, on the other side of me, seemed to sense that my stress levels were climbing. He reached for one of my hands, and my mom mirrored him, placing her hand on my arm.
“We’re in this together, Aubrey, okay?” My dad said. “The whole point of this is to protect you while finding your sister and Chloe. It’s the reason I asked Ar—uh, Marshall—to help.”
Mom smiled at me. “There is no better supernatural investigator than Marshall, although lately you’ve been giving him some strong competition.”
A small laugh escaped me. “Hardly.” Most of what I’d uncovered had been luck, or with a great deal of help. I looked at Trenchcoat Man. “Am I really their only target?”
“Almost certainly not,” he said. “We just don’t yet have names for any others. Given what we know currently, any gifteds with clairvoyance abilities or elemental abilities would be at risk.”
“Like Mr. Pierce,” I said, suddenly worried about him.
“Like him,” Trenchcoat Man said, “but we’ve got eyes on him, too, until we know more.”
“If they’re taking people with those powers,” Lockley asked, “why take Chloe? You said she didn’t have any known powers.”
Trenchcoat Man glanced at me. “Our best theory is still that Chloe was an attempt to bring Aubrey’s gifts into the open.”
“Why me, though?” I asked. “Why are my gifts—-my family’s gifts—such a big deal, so important that they’d take a whole other person just to lure me to use my magic? I mean, even back to my dad and my grandparents, these people or someone like them has been trying to uncover our abilities, trying to hurt us or take us or something. Why are they targeting us?”
Dad squeezed my hand. “Predictive gifts are rare, my love. If it’s clairvoyance or dream-walking or visions they’re after, as a means of hiding what they’re up to or predicting who might try to stop them, then our family has one of the strongest legacies. Our bloodline is well known for it in the supernatural community.”
I gaped at him, but he just shrugged.
“It’s true,” Trenchcoat Man added. “The gifting may skip a generation here or there, but the family through-line is strong. And those who have had giftings have been unilaterally talented. Famed, even, for what they could do.”
Well, that was unsettling.
“I can barely even do anything,” I muttered, looking down. “I can’t even control mine.”
Dad reached out and nudged my chin up so I was looking at him. “Aubrey, your sister is very, very powerful, if we’re correct about all her giftings. Whether you were powerful or not, you’d likely be targeted by default due to your relation to Emery, until they uncovered for sure what you could or couldn’t do. But—” He brushed my hair back from my face. “I suspect that you are just as powerful as Emery, maybe even more. You just haven’t figured out how to access it yet.”
I stared at him, a strange fluttering taking over my chest. It was probably just a dad saying reassuring dad things, but what if he was right? I’d spent my whole life basically just blending into the background, until I’d lost Emery. Then everyone had known my name—the name of the girl whose sister died—and I’d wished I could be invisible again.
But what if I was as powerful as Emery, once I figured my gifts out? Did I want to be that powerful?
Regardless of what I wanted, here I was. If there really was a war coming, and I had any ability to stop or influence it, I needed to figure out how to use my powers so I could.
And although I still wasn’t fond of the theory that I was the reason for my best friend’s kidnapping, I had to admit it was possible.
Which meant I had to make things right.
I looked up at Trenchcoat Man. “So our primary objective is to hunt down who’s doing this, find out whom they plan to attack, and stop the war before it launches… and our secondary objective is to rescue Emery and Chloe.”
He nodded. “Yes. We will do everything we can to save Emery and Chloe, and to protect you and any others who may be targeted, but if these people are out to start a war, we have to prevent that at all costs.”
Collin stepped close to me. “I hate that phrase, at all costs,” he said, glaring at Trenchoat Man. “All it means is you’re willing to throw your other promises out the window the moment they conflict with your primary agenda.”
Trenchcoat Man smirked. “Perhaps. But tell me honestly you wouldn’t do the same, if you found that your goals and mine were no longer in alliance?”
“I haven’t promised you anything,” Collin said.
“Nor have I asked you to,” Trenchcoat Man replied. “I am offering you our help with no obligation, insofar as our aid of you does not impede our larger purpose—of stopping a potential war and saving an unknown but potentially very large number of innocent lives.” He leveled a speculative gaze on Collin. “Is that so unreasonable?”
Collin frowned. “I suppose not.” He leaned close to me and muttered, “I just don’t trust this guy.”
“I heard that,” Trenchcoat Man said in a sing-songy tone, but his attention was already back on the larger group. “So, first things first… We need information. The most obvious place to start is figuring out why that elemental was on the beach, and why Emery led Aubrey there. Was she simply warning us of a coming war, or was there something more specific we were meant to discover? We should divide up and pursue whatever leads we have to figure out what’s going on here.” He turned to the cheer hawks. “Any updates?”
Jillian shrugged. “Nothing new. We’ve already looked into all the ones we had—everything but what Aubrey was handling.”
Trenchcoat Man’s gaze shifted to me. “Any leads you haven’t shared with us, Aubrey?”
I shook my head. “No. I wish there was, but other than what we found out today, everything’s been a dead end.”
Trenchoat Man looked at me. “Well, there is one lead from our end we still haven’t fully investigated.” He strode to his desk and rummaged through the piles of papers until he surfaced with a yellow legal pad. He turned it toward me, revealing another list of names with taped mini-photos next to them, with Suspected Supernaturals as the header. He tapped a photo halfway down the page. “Devin Munschauer.”
I looked more closely. “The guy from the ice cream shop.” I glanced up at my dad. “Collin and I never made it over to talk to him like we’d planned… and we definitely didn’t follow up yet on the fact that he might have magic.”
“Surely him having magic can’t be a coincidence,” Lockley said. “He has to be connected to this somehow.”
Trenchcoat Man raised a finger. “Suspected magic—it’s never been confirmed.”
Collin turned to me with an arched eyebrow. “Feel like getting some ice cream?”
***
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