Free Out of Reach by Jocelyn Stover Page A

happen, right? Determined to keep an
extra close watch on Gwen these next few weeks, I lock the
apartment and head off to work.
     
    * * *
     
    Turning off the bike’s engine I dismount
effortlessly and stow my helmet. Carefully opening the saddlebag, I
remove the small package stashed inside. The brown paper bag is
reminiscent of when children carried sack lunches to school instead
of the brightly colored plastic boxes they tote around these days.
Caught up with the morning shift entering Preston-Ward, my parcel
looks no more sinister than the coffee cups and bags of baked goods
carried by the other employees. Firmly gripping my prize I take the
entryway steps two at a time, not stopping or pausing for anything
until I’m safely locked behind my office door.
    Setting the sack down on the top of my desk,
I slide my bookshelf away from the wall, exposing the frayed carpet
beneath. Pulling up the corner reveals the lockbox I’ve hidden
underneath. Quietly I remove the lockbox, placing it next to the
Sylph sphere in the brown paper sack on my desk. In the last two
hundred years, Z and I have only come across two such spheres. The
one in the brown sack has been in a wall-safe at my apartment for
the last couple of years, nicely spelled to repel humans and keep
it hidden from sight. Z has the other. He’ll be by later today to
collect this one and prep them both for transport in a few
weeks.
    The angels did us a great disservice when
they scattered the spheres to the four winds. I choose to believe
it was done to prevent a single man from obtaining too much power
by stumbling onto a convenient pile of Sylph spheres. Halim
believes it was done to give the Wanderers time to develop and
understand our powers. Whatever the reason, it took us the better
part of our first 500 years to track the bulk of them down. No one
knows the exact number of Sylph in existence, but finding the
spheres is rare nowadays. Z located the two spheres in our
possession several years ago.
    He had dragged me to a geological
collector’s convention in Dallas. I forget exactly what they called
the event. Basically it was a large event center filled with
collectors showing off their rocks. The two Sylph spheres had
actually been in the same collection. The guy, with an enormous
display of naturally formed mineral spheres, wasn’t aware of what
he had.
    To the human eye, Sylph spheres look no
different from any other rock, but enough of a connection remains
between us and the Sylph that we can actually feel their essence
inside of the stone.
    Utilizing the power of suggestion, Zafir
bought the two gems off the guy. It became apparent while he was
wrapping up Z’s purchases exactly why he’d never figured out what
he had: The man always wore gloves when handling his collection in
order to keep the surfaces of the spheres clean and free of
fingerprints.
    Without even opening the paper bag, I drop
the sphere in the lock box and return it to its resting place under
the bookshelf. Grabbing a lab coat off the door hook, I head out to
start my workday.
     
    * * *
     
    Between thoughts of Gwen I manage to get
little work done this morning. Christine drops by my bench twice to
jest about my mediocre process.
    “Get up on the wrong side of the bed?”
    Laughing, I feign an ashamed expression and
promise to pick up the pace after lunch. This is not my day; my
brain is too cluttered. I make a mental note to plant a thought in
Christine’s mind that I’ve gotten more work done this afternoon,
breaking the cardinal rule of minimal interference for the
umpteenth time this week.
    Tossing my pen on the table I make a
stealthy escape and wander down to Gwen’s lab, checking in on her
for the third time already today. I take the long way there,
stopping off at the vending machines to pick up a Coke so I have an
alibi in case I accidentally run into Gwen. As I’m counting out my
change, I overhear two co-workers talking.
    “Did you hear about Mr. Johnson?”
    “The