Free Imperium (Caulborn) by Nicholas Olivo Page B

Glimpse kicked on. I saw a slender reed of a man snapping his hands out in front of him. Vines burst forth from his arms, entangling a beast on the other side of the room. The beast, a wolf almost as tall as me, roared in rage and struggled for a moment before slumping to the ground. The vine man effortlessly hoisted the wolf over his shoulder and extended his arm toward the skylight. Vines shot up, and they went up and out of the house. The Glimpse faded.
    “You all right?” Megan asked.
    I shook myself. “Sorry.” I relayed the Glimpse to Megan.
    She whistled. “What sort of creature can shoot vines from its hands?”
    I pulled a large plastic bag from the evidence kit and carefully slid the vine inside. Doc Ryan could analyze it, along with the silver fluid. “Could be fae. Dryads do stuff like that, but it’s unlikely since it was inside the house. I’m not sure what else could do it.” We spent a few more minutes going through the house. There were more splotches of the silver fluid and a few more vine fragments, but nothing more.
    We got back in the car and Megan started us home.
    “Do you mind if I ask you something?” she asked. I gestured for her to go ahead. “How does that Glimpse thing of yours work? Can you see anything? Is it always random? Can you pick what you want to see? Or who? Or when? Like, could you look back and see who shot JFK, or what happened to Jimmy Hoffa?”
    I tried not to laugh at that last one. “Okay, I’ll try to explain as best as I can. Each Glimpse is tied to a particular person, place or object that I’m looking at. It lets me see a moment in their past that was important or especially formative. I can’t consciously control when it happens, and I can’t control how long it lasts. Sometimes, I Glimpse twenty or thirty seconds worth of time, and other times, it could be twenty or thirty minutes.”
    The only time I can actually control a Glimpse is if I look back on my own life. I can choose to remember everything that happened at a particular point in time, and relive it in my mind. That’s how I got through school without ever studying; I’d just look at the pages in a book, and then Glimpse back during the tests. I kept that little secret to myself, though.
    Megan nodded. “I hope you don’t mind these questions, Vincent. These are new waters for me, and I want to understand as much as I can.”
    “Not at all. You’re very driven. Galahad says you could be Care Taker someday.”
    Megan nodded. “That’s what I’m shooting for. I can see a world where the paranormals don’t have to hide anymore, where aliens and vampires and everything in between can co-exist. It may sound naive, but it will happen someday, and I hope I can be the one to do it.”
    I wondered if Martin Buckham, the current Care Taker, ever had similar ambitions. He oversaw everything the Caulborn operatives did, and under him we definitely won more than we lost. All too often though, it seemed like our job was to stay one step ahead of the next paranormal crisis. “That’s a very ambitious goal, Megan,” I said.
    “That’s why I need to be out here,” Megan said. “I need to understand as much of the community as I can, see what’s back in the dark corners, and know how those beings see us. Many of the alien races we’ve encountered see us as a primitive race with a lot of potential; they see us like children. But I can see us becoming a power in the universe. In order for that to happen, all the peoples of the earth have to be united, and I have to understand how all the pieces fit together.” She blushed and her dimple popped out. “Sorry, that probably makes me sound stupid, doesn’t it?”
    “Not at all,” I said. “It’s a very lofty goal, but I’ve seen enough in the last five or six years to know that anything is possible.” It would probably take Megan her entire life to get the first steps of something like that in place, but if she could, and she was able to name