Chapter Three

Jackson

Jackson stood before a glass wall, his face in stone so as to not give a show to the security cameras trained on him, as he stared into the room that he was under restriction to not enter. 

Markus, his little brother, was in the room he stared into, eyes boring in through the thick pane of glass, where his brother’s small form was laying on a bed, in a medically-induced coma. As he had been for the past 40 years. This had been the technique the PCA had used to make sure they kept Jackson under their thumb. His brother was the carrot at the end of the stick, and once he finished his service to the PCA, he could finally be reunited with his kin, and start a life. And that life would be ten-thousand miles away away from this shithole. 

The life of his brother had been the condition in which Agent Jackson had signed the contract for his servitude to the PCA, promising that he would terminate paranormals worth a total of ‘200,000 points,’ the point system that the PCA used. The PCA was a government-funded covert agency whose mission (though they made no advertisement of it or produced no company slogan for it) was to wipe out the existence of paranormals on Earth. They received private funding and large donations from the one-percent who wanted special jobs commissioned to the PCA. Though generally, it was as easy as ‘spot a paranormal, kill it.’ Job done.

Jackson had gone numb to the lack of morality behind it all. He’d killed too many for his soul to be safe. All he wanted was to finish his contract, retrieve his little brother, who the PCA would awaken upon the completion of the contract, and get the hell out of dodge. 

He was down to just one more year of servitude. The PCA were going to attempt to stretch it two, he knew, though he also knew that they wouldn’t go further than that. If they didn’t give the few paranormal field agents they had their carrots, they would lose control of their agents quickly. Jackson would be a model for their ‘reward’ system.

The reason Jackson had been made the offer, and not terminated himself, came down to being the relative, who was now deceased, of a deputy special agent who was already within the PCA. An uncle he never really knew. It wasn’t random luck. He’d simply been dealt a better hand than other paranormals, and therefore got to live this half-life as a result.

After his servitude, Jackson’s lupine qualities would be, essentially, medically removed. His canines would be pulled from his skull so he could not change anyone. He would be given a very expensive injection that would nearly diminish the vis within him. He would begin to age, he wouldn’t be able to shift, he wouldn’t be able to detect vis. The list went on.

He’d be human.

And once I am, there will be no looking back.

Immediately, once he had formulated the thought, his mind flashed to a youthful face, doll-like in its structure and just as porecalian in its coloring, halod by white hair that would glow if it ever caught sunlight.

But it had not touched sunlight for the past twelve years.

Clio.

An acute type of devastation twisted within him whenever he thought of the boy, though he tried desperately to keep the fierce reality about Clio’s situation from the forefront of his mind. 

For if he thought about how one day, he would be released from the PCA, and leave the child he had found in that cottage at the edge of a meadow, the wooden structure sinking into itself, he always found himself hesitating about the goal he had devoted his life to. If he thought about Clio, his entire paradigm seemed to shift, the goals slipping away, and Clio became his entire world.

If he thought about leaving behind Clio, he would lose his mind, so he steered clear of the thought and dug an anchor to focus on what was truly important in his life: leaving.

He had been planning to visit Clio at the end of the day, but now he found himself changing his mind. His emotions were playing tricks on him. 

Tomorrow, he told himself.

But in his core, this decision internally equivilated itself as a decision to be kept from water for seven days for no reason at all. His wolf couldn’t make sense of his choice not to seek the boy out and spend time in his company.

And it scared him.

The act of leaving Clio wasn’t something his wolf could comprehend.

He couldn’t think it.

As Jackson wasn’t assigned any missions the following day, he made the trek to the building in which the PCA kept their prized children specimen, to visit Clio. Scanning his task-watch to allow himself entry to the “playroom,” as Clio called it, he spotted three children and their counselor, Miss Geneive, gathered around a white plastic table while Miss Geneive read allowed from a The Berenstain Bears book, despite all of the kids being a bit too old for the picture-book genre.

Their minder glared openly at his intrusion, though she didn’t protest upon his presence. She couldn’t. He outranked her. 

Normally, Jackson would lift that one, miniscule bone in his body that was prone to courtesy to make an appointment when he wanted to visit, though he hadn’t done so today. The simple act of postponing his visit to the next day had filled him with regret in the hours that had followed, and he had gotten up at the breath of dawn to come here, waiting impatiently for his schedule to match the kid’s so he could visit.

When pink eyes turned on him, happy and bright with delight, Jackson’s own sensation of gratification erupted, yet also did the realization of a simple fact he could never forget, and was never made lesser with time: Jackson was now in the room with a demon born from the swells of ancient times that even the most renowned doctors and scientists did not fully understand the majesty of. A creature whose natural habitat was hell, the creator of all paranormals. 

He was in the room with an incubus. Clio.

A creator. A being who meant everything.

Jackson shook his head to clear his severe thoughts and smiled back, regaining his normal, bastard composure and rolling his eyes at Miss Geneive’s obvious displeasure. “Twenty minutes, Genieve. Thirty tops. Forty-five, tops.”

Miss Geneive sighed and nodded to Clio, as though she had final authority on whether he could be released to spend time with Jackson or not, and then she returned back to the book, dismissing the gleeful Clio.

Clio looked every bit the epitome of a J.M. Barrie’s ‘lost boy’ in his white pajamas (the childrens’ ‘uniforms,’ he supposed), though Clio’s giddiness identified him more with Peter Pan. He bounced over to Jackson with his usual smile, as though he and Jackson were about to head off on some secret adventure. 

Guiding the kid out of the room, they ended up in an unused lounge area, complete with a broken vending machine, another plastic table, and a few chairs. Top of the line stuff the PCA had over here.

If only Clio knew that it was a prison.