Page 40 of Spring L.A.W.
And then there was Major Payne.
He strode in last, boots loud on the polished floor, jaw set. His presence hit the room like a dropped anvil. Everyone straightened, even the witches on the screens.
Katie took one look at him and decided that if she had been brave or crazy enough to enlist, he could protect her by catching bullets with his teeth. But it was enough that he had captured her on her run to nowhere and brought her here.
“Everyone’s here,” Joell said briskly. “Katie’s met the Gray. She’s been made. We have a narrow window to get ahead of this before it finds her, uses her, clones her, or worse, figures out how to bypass our protections entirely.”
Katie raised a tentative hand. “Question. What happens if it takes over my body and I don’t, like, notice?”
Major Payne answered without hesitation, voice low and grim: "Then you die."
Katie stared. “Cool. Really loving the team-building atmosphere here.”
Crystal smirked. Rayna gave Katie an encouraging thumbs-up. Brianna mouthed‘you’re fine’with absolutely zero convincing energy.
Joell flipped a remote and brought up an image on the screen: a blurred, shifting gray figure barely outlined against a crumbling city background.
“The Gray isn’t just a spirit, or a demon, or a fae anomaly,” Joell said. “We’re leaning toward it being some kind of parasitic shapeshifter. Maybe interdimensional, maybe extraterrestrial.”
“That tracks with what we’ve been digging up,” Rayna added. “It’s behaving like a scout. Testing boundaries, looking for weaknesses.”
“We?” Katie asked.
“Major Payne and I. What? You didn’t think we were just canoodling all this time, did you?”
“Well…” Katie decided to shut up while she still could.
Major Payne crossed his arms. The muscles in his forearms flexed like steel cables. “Army Intelligence’s ET Division has encountered anomalies similar to this. We called them Shadows. Adaptive, amorphous, predatory. In some cases, their behavior suggested there could be a hive structure, or at minimum, a shared intelligence network.”
Katie’s stomach dropped. “You mean there’s more than one?”
“Possibly,” Major Payne said. “Or it’s one entity, splintered across multiple fronts.”
Victoria piped up. “Or we’re only dealing with one fragment here, and it could still be calling for backup.”
Lioness tapped her tablet. “And if the backup shows up before Katie’s ready to shield herself…”
“Bye-bye, squishy human,” Victoria said from her monitor.
Katie threw her hands up. “Wow. Amazing. Peak optimism, everyone.”
Joell placed a finger under Katie’s chin and lifted her face. “You’re not squishy anymore. You broke the Roomba.”
Crystal leaned forward. “The key here is that the Gray chose you. Either because you’re vulnerable, or because you’reuseful.”
Katie blinked. “Define useful in this terrifying context.”
Brianna smiled gently. “You might be the key it needs to open a bigger door.”
Katie immediately wanted to launch herself into the sun.
Major Payne strolled to the opposite end of the long table, facing Joell, commanding everyone’s attention. “Bottom line: we have to harden Katie’s defenses, find the Gray’s weaknesses, and determine if this is a solo operation, or if we’re looking at a coordinated invasion.”
A heavy silence settled.
Lioness finally broke it. “So basically, train the civilian. Fortify the fortress. Hunt the Gray. In that order.”
Katie leaned her forehead onto the cool surface of the table. “I miss when my biggest problem was customers not tipping.”
