“Maybe once we check in, you’ll be able to get some rest,” Zachariah suggested. “I know I plan to ask for some time off after this.” He glanced past Ashton to the woman beside him and gave her a brilliant, charming smile. She preened under his attention, and Ashton could hardly blame her; Zachariah’s smile was like looking into the sun: overly bright and magnificent. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “Do you mind switching seats with me so I can sit by my brother? I’d like to talk to him about something, but I don’t want to get in the flight attendant’s way.”
Ashton didn’t know anyone who would have been able to refuse under that megawatt smile. He certainly wouldn’t have, and the woman beside him was no exception. Within minutes, they’d done the seat shuffle, and Zachariah smiled at Ashton from his new seat beside him.
“Any particular reason why you’ve wrangled your way over here to bother me?” Ashton asked.
“Because you’re the only person on this plane that I sort of know, I’m bored, and I want to talk,” Zachariah said, as if it should have been obvious.
“I don’t know why you would want to talk,” Ashton commented. He smoothed a hand over the cover of his sketchbook and didn’t add what he wanted to add to the end of the statement—“to someone like me.”
“I’m just a naturally talkative person, okay?” Zachariah said. He settled into his seat more comfortably and tapped his fingertips rhythmically against the armrest.
“In this line of work?” Ashton raised an eyebrow. “That’s likely to get you killed. How’d you manage to keep your mouth shut enough to get recruited?”
Zachariah rolled his eyes but didn’t respond to Ashton’s comment. Which was a shame, because he would have loved to hear how he managed to combine a covert life with a mouth that seemed to be loose at both ends. “Anyway, if I’m going to be stuck on a plane with a guy who happens to work in the same business as me, I figure I’m going to talk to him while I’ve got the chance. You know how many people I’ve met in this business face to face?”
“At least one,” Ashton said, thinking of the man’s handler.
“You are seriously the first agent I’ve ever spent any real time with outside of Brandon,” Zachariah confirmed. “So, of course, I’m curious.” He ran a hand through his long hair before fishing a band out of his pocket. He started to pull his hair back into a ponytail as he continued. “Were you serious when you said this was the only thing you were good at? Because you seem to be pretty good at that.” He snapped the band into place and motioned to the sketchbook still on the tray table in front of Ashton.
Ashton didn’t even look at the sketchbook as he replied, “A person can’t live as an artist. They’d starve to death.”
“I don’t know, freelancers seem to do pretty well,” Zachariah said.
Ashton sighed and shook his head. “Yeah, I was serious when I said it was the only thing I was good at,” he said, trying to divert the conversation back to the topic at hand before Zachariah asked him a question that would make him want to hurt him. Like, say, asking who the woman he’d been sketching was. He wouldn’t have been able to answer; he had no idea.
“So how long have you been in it, then?” Zachariah asked. His eyes drifted over Ashton, as if he were trying to peg the man’s age. “A few years?”
“Since I was nineteen,” Ashton replied.
“And now you are…?”
“Twenty-nine.”
Zachariah looked at him with something akin to awe. “You’ve been in this for ten years? I’ve never known anyone who’s been in this business that long that’s still out in the field.”
Ashton shrugged. His fingers itched to get back to his drawing, but he wasn’t going to open his sketchbook again in front of Zachariah. “Like I said, it’s what I’m good at.” He ruffled the edge of the sketchbook’s pages and didn’t look at Zachariah. He knew what the next question would be, and he dreaded answering it, if only because he knew what the man’s reaction would be.
“So you’re a field agent,” Zachariah said. Ashton’s shoulders stiffened. “What level?”
“Level ten,” Ashton answered.
The Agency had dozens of field agents under its employ, everything from assassins to snipers to cleanup specialists and intelligence officers; there was literally an agent for everything. With so many agents—and every single one of them headstrong and as stubborn as mules—the Agency had felt the need to create a chain of authority in the field agents they had. So they’d created the field levels, with advancement obtainable after a certain number and type of assignments successfully completed. Ashton had reached level ten only the month before—the highest level a field agent could get before entering into the supervisory ranks, the very same ranks that would take him out of the field.
Ashton wasn’t sure he was really ready to get out of the field yet. If he took that step, he suspected that he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
He chanced a glance at Zachariah and saw the man was definitely looking at him as if he’d just admitted to having once moved the moon singlehandedly. “A level ten?” Zachariah repeated. “I feel like I’m doing something bad just sitting here talking to you.”
Ashton snorted. “Being level ten isn’t that big of a deal,” he protested. “The pay isn’t any better than what you probably get, and the work isn’t any different. It’s just a status thing.”
“Only someone who was at a level ten would insist that it’s not a big deal,” Zachariah said. There was a note of teasing to his voice, which surprised Ashton and drew his eyes back to him.
“Well, what level are you, then, if ten is such a big deal?”
Zachariah suddenly looked embarrassed, and he shrugged and turned his eyes toward the window beside him. Ashton raised an eyebrow as he mumbled something he couldn’t make out. He leaned closer and lightly jabbed the man in the arm. “What was that? I couldn’t hear.”
“This assignment’s supposed to give me my level four,” Zachariah said, speaking up a bit so he could hear.
“A level four,” Ashton repeated. “That’s not all that bad. You haven’t been in that long compared to most level fours I’ve met. You’re doing way better than they are.”
There was a moment of silence between them, but for once, it wasn’t the type of uncomfortable quiet that bothered Ashton. He twirled his pencil again and started to open his sketchbook once more. He hesitated, his fingers resting against the edge of the page. Curiosity ate at his insides; it wasn’t a wholly unfamiliar feeling. Agents were required, it seemed, to have some natural level of curiosity to fulfill their jobs, and as a result, Ashton frequently found himself wrestling with a large dose of it during assignments that threatened to pull his attention from where it needed to be.
But this was the first real time he’d been eaten up with curiosity over a person while in the line of duty. And not only a person, and not a target, but a fellow agent.
Agents were largely disallowed from fraternizing with each other. Ashton had never been clear on exactly why that was. The few times he’d bothered to ask his handler about it, he’d gotten half-hearted answers and enough vagueness that he’d dropped the line of questioning in frustration. He wasn’t used to not having his questions answered; he posed them rarely enough as it was now. It was probably half the reason Ashton was considering peppering the man sitting beside him with stupid questions like he was some newbie and not a level ten field agent. He scowled and stuck his pencil into the spirals of his sketchbook then dropped his head back against the uncomfortable airplane seat.
“Something on your mind?” Zachariah asked.
Ashton almost said, “You,” but he caught himself just in time. He was more than reasonably sure that Zachariah wouldn’t take it in the way it was intended. Instead, he settled on, “Where are you based out of?”
Zachariah raised an eyebrow, as if he were surprised by Ashton’s question, and Ashton almost regretted even asking it. Almost. “When I’m active duty or not?” he as
ked in return.
“Either. Both. I don’t care,” Ashton said, as nonchalantly as he could.
“When I’m active, I’m based out of D.C.,” Zachariah answered. It was a common enough answer to that question, Ashton supposed. He guessed most agents were based out of Washington, D.C., just for convenience’s sake. “Otherwise, I live in a shithole apartment in Dallas, Texas.”
So Ashton had been right when he’d thought Zachariah’s accent had a distinct Texas twang to it. He shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable again, and said, “I’m out of D.C., too. Both when I’m on and off assignments.” He figured it was only fair that he offer up something about himself, too, since he was being nosy enough to pry into Zachariah’s life. Besides, the little they’d given each other wasn’t much of anything; in cities the sizes of Dallas and Washington, D.C., it would be difficult—if not impossible—to locate a single person among the teeming mases that covered both cities.
“D.C., huh?” Zachariah repeated with a musing tone to his words. “We could get together for drinks sometime. You know, when neither of us is on an assignment or anything.”
“Zachariah—”
“Call me Zach,” the man interrupted with a smile.
“Zach,” Ashton conceded. “You know that that’s not allowed. We’re not supposed to fraternize with other agents.” Not that Ashton didn’t want to. Because Heaven help him, he wanted to.
“I’m not asking you to have sex with me,” Zachariah said, and the way the words came out of his mouth—the tone, the inflection on the word “sex”—sent a little chill up Ashton’s spine. Oh yeah, Ashton was definitely not the only one who’d noticed the tug of attraction between them. “I’m just saying we should go out for a drink. You know, hang out.”
“That’s still considered fraternization,” Ashton pointed out, though an agreement to the other man’s suggestion itched at the tip of his tongue. “We’ll both get in serious trouble if we get caught.”
“Then we don’t get caught,” Zachariah said simply. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them, right?”
Ashton bit back a groan. “You really are trying to get me into trouble, aren’t you?”
Zachariah’s grin slid smoothly into the realm of “cheeky,” and he sat forward in his seat to snag Ashton’s sketchbook from his tray table. Ashton watched as he flipped it open to a blank page, and he scrawled his phone number and name across it in large, messy handwriting. “I excel at getting both myself and others into trouble,” he informed Ashton. “It’s one of the many things I’m good at, right alongside nearly every other aspect of my job.”
Ashton rolled his eyes and took the sketchbook back, folding it closed and returning the pencil to where it belonged. “I have this sneaking suspicion that you are going to get me fired.”
“Hey, if you get fired, I’ll be right there with you saying, ‘Hey, that was pretty fucking fun, wasn’t it?’”
* * *
Damon found Tobias waiting for him in the lobby as promised, reclining in one of the cushy chairs that filled the waiting area for the portion of the Agency’s business that served as a front—a private investment firm that catered to a very small, select clientele. Tobias still wore portions of his office suit, but he’d traded his jacket in for a longer coat that better hid his weapons and his dress shoes for boots; he’d also shucked his tie, though Damon could see part of it peeking out of his coat pocket. As he approached Tobias, he gave him a smile.
“Come on, lazy ass, out of the chair,” he encouraged with a chuckle. “You look too comfortable, and that makes me want to not go anywhere.”
“You can’t fault me for taking a little time to relax considering what we’re about to do,” Tobias replied.
“Oh, I most certainly can fault you for it,” Damon retorted. He waited until Tobias had dragged himself out of his chair then asked, “Whose car are we taking?”
“Mine,” Tobias offered. “I just finished scanning it for bugs.”
“Works for me,” he agreed. He’d been a little too lax in his own security lately anyway and hadn’t checked his own car for listening devices in over a week. He didn’t like discussing business in his vehicle, anyway.
Once they’d piled into Tobias’s car and were on their way to their destination, Damon said, “So you haven’t exactly told me where we’re headed.”
Tobias pointed to a bag on the floorboards at Damon’s feet. “File is in there,” he said. Damon leaned over to dig into the bag, tugging it loose and laying it across his lap, starting to browse through the papers inside.
“How accurate is this information?” Damon asked. He flipped over a page to check out the back and discovered it was blank.
“Pretty damn, according to Brandon,” Tobias said.
“I thought you didn’t trust Brandon.”
“I don’t trust Brandon,” Tobias acknowledged. “But I do trust him to give me accurate information, even if it involves walking into something that could get me killed.”
“What makes you think he wants to get you killed?” Damon asked, surprised at Tobias’s admission.
“What makes you think he doesn’t?” Tobias countered. “It’s not a secret that Brandon wants my job. Hell, it’s not a secret that he wants yours. He’s just not going to do anything that will directly tie our deaths to him, because then he won’t get either job.”
Damon nodded absently. Brandon’s tendencies to try to manipulate Tobias’s actions were something that would have to be dealt with later. Right now, he and Tobias were about to deal with something that could get them both killed—or worse—and he had to focus on that. Until Brandon made any moves that broke the rules, Damon couldn’t do anything about him anyway.
Instead, he focused on the upcoming fight that he and Tobias were about to engage in, a fight that involved things that humanity in general had no idea even existed.
Tonight’s target: a nest of vampires.
If Damon had told people that vampires actually existed, they’d have had two reactions to his revelation: they’d either laugh in his face or have him locked up in a mental institution. But outside of his job at the Agency as its director, Damon spent his time hunting down these supposed mythological beasts that preyed on humanity and putting them down for the good of the general population. It was an incredibly dangerous job that he’d stumbled into completely by accident fifteen years before; he’d been on his way home from work when he’d decided to stop off at a little bistro for something to eat. He’d walked into the small restaurant and thought he’d walked right into a robbery.
His mind had processed the scene with the rapid-fire snapshots that it typically operated in during assignments. No customer. A man behind the cash counter. A young woman struggling against him. The man’s face buried against the woman’s throat. The bright red blood running in rivulets down the woman’s right shoulder blade.
Damon had gone for his pistol, tucked away under his suit jacket, where he kept it securely in a shoulder holster. He’d only just managed to free it from its holster and started to yank it from underneath his suit jacket when the man lifted his head to look at him. He’d seen the man’s fangs, and his insides had felt like they’d immediately turned to water.
Then the man had dropped the woman onto the floor and bolted through the kitchen door, disappearing from sight.
Damon hadn’t hesitated to pursue him, not even stopping to check on the woman who lay on the tiled floor behind the cash register, her blood seeping underneath the cushioned gray mat that covered the floor. Judging by the wound in her neck, there hadn’t been anything he’d have been able to do for her, anyway. So he’d focused on trying to catch the man who’d killed her, seeking justice for her since she couldn’t do it herself.
Damon had bolted through the kitchen, dodging around the stainless steel counters and the island that stood in the middle of the floor near the stove, his pistol out and searching for the woman’s attacker. He reached the service door at the back of
the kitchen just as it slammed shut behind the man he was pursuing. He’d grabbed the handle and yanked, throwing the door open and ducking into the dark alleyway beyond.
The alley was empty, save for a few random trashcans and a smelly dumpster. Trash littered the pavement, stirred by a faint breeze, but that was the only movement. He’d lost the attacker.
Needless to say, after he’d returned to the woman’s body and called the police, he hadn’t described to the responding law enforcement officers all of the details of the woman’s death. He hadn’t mentioned how he’d seen the man biting the wound into the woman’s neck, because he knew if he’d told them that, they wouldn’t have believed a word of it.
That young woman’s death had haunted him to this day, and he’d spent the past fifteen years researching vampires and other creatures, hunting them, and experimenting with ways to kill them. Eventually, he’d had to enlist three men he trusted to help him with this task, men he didn’t think would consider him insane when he told them about it: Tobias Ismay, Henry Cage, and Brandon Hall. Since then, they’d all rotated in various pairings on their nightly hunts, though thanks to his animosity with Brandon, Tobias ended up paired with Damon more often than not. Not that he minded; it was reassuring to have someone he trusted at his side. It was better than doing this alone.
Damon tuned back in to the here and now, where he and his unofficial partner were about to face down with the same type of creatures that had gotten him into this mess to begin with.
“How many of them are supposed to be in the nest?” he asked, closing the folder and stuffing it back into Tobias’s bag.
“As far as I’ve seen, about twenty,” Tobias said. He took a few turns, steering the car deep into an area that was covered with old warehouses. “It’s a small nest, no alphas.”
Damon groaned inwardly at the terminology. He could have kicked his own ass for coming up with the descriptor for the humanoid vampires that had the ability to control the uglier, more animalistic ones under their charge. He wished he’d thought of something better to call that class of vampires.
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