Laura's Secret (2 page)

“Yes, son, we’re naming her Laura Solange Donahue after each of her grandmothers. She has a full head of hair that’s so blonde it’s almost white. And her lungs are as strong as David’s,” he said, naming his third son who was always talking at the top of his voice. No doubt from years of trying to be heard over his older brothers.

Aaron chuckled and after a few more words he hung up the phone. Hearing a sound, he looked up and saw his brother, Steven, in the doorway.

“The baby came? What’d they name him?” he asked. Like Aaron, he assumed they were getting another brother.

“Laura Solange,” said Aaron, watching his brother’s face and waiting for the name to penetrate.

“That’s a stupid name for a boy, wait…it’s a girl? We have a sister?”

“Yep, and it’s going to be our job to make sure nothing happens to her.” At sixteen and already nearly six feet tall, Aaron had discovered girls in a big way. He’d lost his virginity a few months back and repeated the experience as often as he could. But there was no way some grody boy was putting his sweaty hands on his sister!

“Dad said we should get some sleep. He said mom’s going to want to redo the nursery now that she has a girl.”

Both boys thought of the room off the master, a walk-in closet had been converted into a temporary nursery. Their dad was building an extension onto the house but it wasn’t done yet. He and his brother, Steven, each had their own room. David and Benji, the twins, were twelve and still shared. And Josh, who was eight and Evan who was six, shared another. With the extension, the house would go from five bedrooms to seven with a large family room underneath on the ground floor. The basement was currently the playroom for the kids of the house when they weren’t in the backyard or all over the neighborhood. They were planning to convert it into a game room with a pool table, big screen TV equipped with gaming systems, and a foosball table.

“We can’t have our sister living in a closet, even for a little while. It’s not right.”

“You know mom’s been reading all those decorating magazines?” Steven asked Aaron as he sat down on the end of the bed. “I remember one was of a little girl’s room. She was mooning over it before she put it away and went on to the other pictures. Let’s find it.”

The two of them got up and moved silently through the quiet house. Their brothers were still sleeping and they didn’t want them to wake up.

“Your room’s closer to mom and dad. So we’ll share until the new rooms are done and Laura can have yours, agreed?” said Aaron.

Steven gave his brother one long look. “Agreed.” The two of them had enjoyed the feeling of being grown up when they each got their own rooms a couple of years back when they had moved into this new house. But a sister was important, so they would sacrifice for a couple of months, for her.

It took them about half an hour to find the magazine Steven remembered and then another ten minutes to find the picture their mother had been dreaming over. Pouring over the picture of the pretty room done in pinks and yellows with flower accents, they compared it to the pale blue closet upstairs. At least they had a new crib and other furniture. “Dad was angry when the furniture arrived and it was that pale oak instead of the dark cherry they had ordered. But the oak will look better with these colors, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but we’re going to need a lot of help if we’re going to make my bedroom look like this before dad brings mom home from the hospital,” said Steven.

“I know, let’s call Uncle Matt. He’s in the FBI, he’s used to being woken up at all hours. And he’ll be willing to help,” answered Aaron.

With a plan in mind and too keyed up to go back to sleep, they decided to give Uncle Matt a little more sleep time by dressing and moving all the furniture out of Steve’s room first. It wasn’t hard, they were both big for their ages and had strong bodies from years of sports. The hard thing was staying quiet and not waking their younger brothers. They would want to help and would just get in the way.

“I bet Aunt Carrie would take the bros to IHop for breakfast if we asked her. Then we would be able to get more done,” said Steven as he helped his brother shift his mattress.

“Good idea, Steve, she always likes spending time with us.” Aunt Carrie and Uncle Matt didn’t have any kids of their own, but they’d always enjoyed spending time with what they called Doug and Luce’s menagerie.

In order to save space they put their two twin beds back together as bunk beds again. Mom and Dad had said they could have full sized beds when the extension was finished. For now though they were making do with their old beds and dressers. Steven didn’t think the baby would have hang up clothes so he left his closet alone. When they were done, his room was empty. Aaron got the spackle and the two of them got to work filling the holes left over from where his posters and pictures had hung on the walls.

Aaron was thinking about all the stuff they were going to need to buy, bedding, curtains, a rug for the floor and a few other things. With the closet being so small there hadn’t been room for a chair, but the magazine picture had a rocking chair too. He knew more than Steve how much all this stuff was probably going to cost. He’d been mowing lawns in the summers and shoveling snow in the winters for the last four years, saving for a car when he got his license. He was already planning to empty his savings as soon as the bank opened in the morning. Until then, they could at least put a coat of white primer over the current paint. Steven’s room was currently dark blue, so they both knew more than one coat of paint was going to be needed.

By six a.m. they’d done all they could with what was on hand at the house. The rest would have to wait until they could get to the stores. The hardware store was open early for contractors so they could get the paint and a lot of the other stuff first. The final touches would have to wait until after ten. Both boys were confident they’d have the room finished before their dad brought their mom and little Laura home.

Uncle Matt wasn’t too thrilled about being woken up at six in the morning but after Aaron explained the situation, and the fact that both boys had been up for over three hours already, he willingly went along with the plan. Waking his wife, they got up and made plans to help with the welcome home of Laura Donahue.

Everything went as planned. When their dad called around seven to check in, Aaron went ahead and told him what they were doing. Having dad in on the plan made sure their mom didn’t come home until they were ready for the big reveal. Listening to his eldest explain what he and he brother had cooked up and how much they had already accomplished, Doug Donahue nearly burst with love and pride in his family. He rubbed his chest with tears in his eyes as he hung up the phone.

Aunt Carrie had a friend that was a painter so she called her up and cajoled her into coming over to the house and helping with the floral mural for one wall in the room. By the time their dad pulled his car into the driveway a little after one that afternoon, the room was dry and all the furniture was loaded. Uncle Matt had ridden hard on the younger ‘helpers’ while Aunt Carrie had taken Aaron and Steven to the store to spend his car money on the extras needed to make his sister’s room perfect. A rug, a lamp, sheets, and bedding plus a crowd of stuffed animals and dolls later, her room looked like girly heaven.

Carrie gave herself a mental shake. She saw what these big strapping boys were doing and only hoped Laura didn’t turn into a tomboy. She didn’t think her brothers would like that. They obviously had already decided the type of sister they were going to have. All she knew was it was going to be a hoot watching that baby girl wrap them all around her tiny fingers.

The homecoming was all Aaron and Steve expected. Their mom cried when she saw what they had done. By now they had learned the difference between happy and sad tears. They all fussed over Laura, even Evan, who’d been superseded as the baby of the family, was happy to see her and spent almost an hour making faces as he tried to get her to smile.

Unbeknownst to the Donahue family, this one little girl was going to forever change their lives.

Chapter One

Sixteen years later…

Laura Solange Donahue looked up from her computer as the light in the corner of her screen blinked. With the click of a few keys the program she was working on closed and a gaming program came up in its place. Moments later her brother, Aaron, came into the room.

“Hey, Laura, it’s nearly seven. You coming up for dinner? Whatcha working on anyway?” he asked.

“I’m nearly done with ‘Trolls Revenge’, I just have to debug the last section of codes,” she said. She’d actually finished the new game a couple of weeks previous, but it was a great cover for what she was really doing.

As he watched her shut down from the screen with trolls and warriors fighting, he thought again what a beauty his baby sister had turned into. At thirty-two with sixteen years separating him from his sister, they hadn’t really grown up together, but they’d managed to stay close. He’d made a vow to protect her and he had no intention of breaking the vow anytime soon. He only wished he’d been there when the drunk driver had hit her and their mom. He would have found a way to save her from being paralyzed.

The two of them went over to the stairs. She rolled into the lift that would take her up to the ground floor of the house while Aaron walked beside her asking about her day. The basement had become Laura’s apartment. She’d been born with a rare disease and couldn’t go out in the sun. Even with all these burdens, she was a happy person.

Laura Donahue loved her brothers, she really did. Her mom had died two years ago when a blood clot had formed while she was on a fourteen-hour plane flight from Europe. She and her dad had taken a second honeymoon and by the time the plane was approaching the states, coming in for a landing, she had died peacefully in her sleep. Their dad had walked around like a hollowed out zombie for over a year, pouring himself into work to get through the grief. He and all of her brothers then became ten times more protective of her. She felt like a virtual prisoner. If she didn’t have her secret life to keep her occupied, she knew she’d have gone crazy years ago.

She had always been a reader, she got hooked early on such books as
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
and went on to
A Wrinkle in Time
and
Harry Potter
and into Tolkein’s books. Now she read a lot of shifter and fantasy books and romances. She based her games on them, and since she still lived at home, she had put aside a nice chunk of change.

What her family didn’t know about was her other programming activities. She’d actually started several internet companies and one of them had sold for millions. Without anyone knowing, she’d started a corporation and ran the companies under that umbrella. She didn’t need to spend the money so all the profits were just sitting there. No dividends were paid out so she hadn’t incurred any personal income taxes. The corporation paid all of its corporate taxes under its own tax id number. That way the tax agencies didn’t know the company had been started and owned by a fourteen-year-old. Now at sixteen, she was a multi-millionaire and planning her escape. She wanted to live
her
life, not the life her family wanted for her.

It all started when she discovered shifters and magical people really existed. Her father’s work at the NSA had always fascinated her. The NSA, responsible for gathering and interpreting intelligence as well as breaking ciphers and codes, handles all intelligence and counter-intelligence gathered for the U.S. Basically, it was the largest collection of mathematicians and geeks on the planet. She had built a super computer by linking multiple gaming systems and developed her own intelligence gathering system. At first she had her software trolling through chat rooms to see what the trends were in gaming. She wanted to give her customers the best games and ones that would be the most popular.

After awhile she was also gathering information from VOIP, internet phone calls. As more and more people got smartphones and made video calls over the internet on their phones, the amount of data increased. That’s when she first stumbled onto real shifters. The shifters came first and then they led her to other magical creatures. After two years of gathering data she realized there was a war going on.

She wasn’t surprised, her brothers had all been fighting evil in the world nearly all their lives. So it made sense there could be evil magical people, like in Tolkien. Along with other humans who knew about the shifters and wanted to erase them from the earth.

She would be eighteen years old and an adult in two more years. So she had time to make her plans. In the meantime, she would use her time wisely and gather as much information as she could. When her father was home, she occasionally used his login and password to download information from the NSA computers. The NSA had copies of everyone’s phone records going back for years. So whenever she had a suspect, she tracked all their phone calls and if she could she put surveillance in place.

Her dad’s best friend, Matt, whom they called Uncle Matt, was now very senior in the FBI. When she needed legs or eyes, she dummied up a court order and had agents place listening devices and recorders in various places. Then she erased all trails leading to the action taken. She’d only done that six times since she discovered the war. There was too much chance of an agent talking about his assignment to his coworkers. She tried to use agents just before they were transferred to different offices so they wouldn’t ask questions on the ‘monitoring’ job they had set up. At a young age, she'd already understood the need for secrecy. She also knew her father would take her computers away if he knew what she was doing.

Once or twice hackers had tried to backtrack her in the system and she had shut down those operations. However, she had
no
intentions of being caught. She took her classes online and had already graduated high school and taken two years' worth of college as well. But she wasn’t interested in getting a degree, she was interested in learning. She went out and found what she wanted to know.