Promise: Caulborn #2 by Nicholas Olivo Page A

piece of paper, and a bright light shone down upon it. “This is the soil you brought in last night. Mrs. Rita worked on it all night long; you just missed her.”
    “Did she find anything?”
    Doc’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, yeah.” He switched off the light. “Watch this.” He gestured to the monitor. “Gearstripper just finished modifying some of our microscopic imaging equipment; now it’s got a lens that rivals the friggin’ Hubble telescope.” The screen shimmered and focused a few times as the magnification increased again and again. Onscreen, the tiny specks of dirt suddenly seemed like boulders from the Grand Canyon. A few moments later, the surface of the dirt began to bulge like something was moving beneath it. Then a sickly white worm wriggled onto the dirt. The thing was so tiny that I couldn’t see it on the soil sample just a few feet from me. On the monitor, it looked like a rancid garden hose. “This little critter can’t stand sunlight,” Doc said as he switched the UV lamp back on and the worm scrambled back beneath the soil.
    “What are they?” Megan asked.
    “Not sure yet. Never seen anything like it before. Best Mrs. Rita and I have been able to tell, they eat bones. Well, my guess is that they’ll eat any organic matter with a high concentration of calcium, but there were some bone shards in that sample you brought in and these things went to town on them. I’ve got some calls out to the guys in Dublin, but nothing’s come back yet.” The head Caulborn office was in Dublin, and it was incredibly rare for the team over there not to have heard of something. Of course, when they hadn’t, it usually meant that something was incredibly bad. “Mrs. Rita did note that they have a faint magical aura to them. She thinks they might have been conjured.”
    “Okay, so I’ve got a guy who attacks corpses and conjures worms onto their bones.” I shook my head. “Jesus, this is just out there, Doc. Even for us.”
    He nodded. “You kids find the craziest shit, that’s for damned sure. I’ll keep you posted on what we hear from Dublin. Friggin’ time zones make doing business with them a real pain in the ass sometimes.” He took a drag on his cig and let the smoke out through his nostrils. “I’ll let you know when I hear something. Megan, you sit tight for a bit.”
    As Doc went back to his work, I went up to my office and thumbed through a folder that’d been left on my desk. It was a set of notes from Mrs. Rita describing what she and Doc Ryan had learned so far about the worms.
    I let my eyes run down the pages and turned them over without really reading them. This was how I’d gotten through school; I’d look at all the pages in my textbooks and then Glimpse them when it came time for tests. That done, I tried to actually read a couple of pages, but my mind kept drifting back to the Keepers. I pulled out Laras’s card and rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. Could they help with my promise to Megan?
    “You all right, Vincent?”
    I jumped in my chair and banged into my desk. The Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader action figures carefully perched atop my monitor tumbled onto my keyboard. I spun to see Megan standing in the doorway, a hand over her mouth as if to stifle a giggle. A narrow bandage stretched across her forehead. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
    “All good,” I said, rubbing my face. “You done already? That was fast.”
    She cocked her head and looked at me. “It’s been close to two hours since we got back, Vincent.”
    I glanced at my Timex. So it had. “Time flies,” I said. “You okay?”
    “Just fine,” she replied.
    “Good to hear.” In truth, she had no idea how relieved I was to hear her say that. I genuinely was glad that she was all right. Megan’s a great person and I’d come to admire and respect her quite a bit over the last few months. But there was another part of me that constantly lived in fear