Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

  She shrugged. “It’s not like you’ve been alone. You have Director Friederling and the necrocognitive.”

  “Fritz’s wife,” I said.

  “Oh, shit,” Suzy said. “Sorry about that, Cèsar.” Last she’d seen me, I’d still been following Isobel around like a dumb puppy. I still was, for the record, but I’d been doing it back then too.

  I shrugged. “It’s fine.”

  “What about that woman kopis? Krista.”

  “What about her?”

  “Nothing.” Suzy looked satisfied. “Great. So we’re going to take down PRAY together.”

  My stomach did a weird backflip. “Yeah, guess we are.” If that was what Suzy wanted to do, then fine. I’d have learned the “Single Ladies” dance if that was what it took to keep Suzy around. “Only problem is that I’m heading to Washington D.C. in the morning.”

  “Even better. The movement’s going to have a much bigger presence on the East Coast, so I’ll be able to connect with some of my sources. All you’ve gotta do is stick my magic box into your carry-on and let me out in your hotel room as you arrive.”

  “Why wait? I’ll let you out on Fritz’s jet. He’s going to want to see you.”

  Suzy shot to her feet. “You’re not telling him.”

  “Huh? I’m not?”

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “I’m offering to help you. You, dumbass. Don’t tell Director Friederling—or, God forbid, Isobel Stonecrow—that I’m back in town. I’ll tie a rubber band around your microscopic balls until they fall off, and then I’ll fry them and sell them through a food truck.”

  “Why?” I asked. “We’ll be a more effective team with free flow of information.”

  “We aren’t a team. We’re partners.” Suzy jabbed me in the chest with two fingers. Hard. “Even if I’m not with the OPA anymore, you’re still my partner, and I’m here to help you. Got it?”

  “Yes,” I said obediently.

  Because there was absolutely no way that smuggling Suzy into the middle of OPA politics could ever go wrong.

  Chapter 7

  Flying on a private jet meant that I didn’t have to get intimate with the TSA. Nobody checked my suitcase when I got on board Fritz’s private jet—again—so nobody knew that I had a magical cube being held down by my sock rolls and underwear.

  I wasn’t thrilled to see Fritz’s valet hauling my luggage away after we touched down. “Where’s that going?”

  “Our penthouse.” Fritz slid sunglasses on as he descended the stairs from his jet. There was another limo waiting for us.

  “Our penthouse?”

  “We’ve rented it for use as office space,” he said.

  “Oh.” Here I’d been worrying that Fritz had finally given up waiting for me to move in with him willingly, but this was strictly professional. Right.

  We had a whole motorcade on our way to the hotel. Fritz was important and rich, but he was far from famous; there shouldn’t have been a need for this much security. “Why do we have a motorcade?” I asked, peering through the tinted window. “Why are there protesters packing the streets with—wait, are those Molotov cocktails?”

  “You didn’t read the debriefing I sent you last night,” Fritz said.

  “I was sleeping.” That was my first major lie of the day. In fact, I’d spent my night making sure Suzy drank enough water with her beer to avoid barfing all over her pocket dimension.

  “Tate Peterson’s taking a break from his tour to promote H.R. 2076. He’s in town, just in time for the president to sign the second version of the PRAY executive order. America is in an uproar again.”

  The last bit was redundant for him to say, since I could see the uproar outside our limo. There were bodies as far as the eye could see beginning from the moment we left the airport and all the way along our route, which we took inch by slow inch.

  If there were Molotov cocktails, they hadn’t been thrown at us yet. But there were a lot of very angry misspelled signs.

  “This must make you happy, right?” I asked. “All these people protesting against PRAY?”

  “Does it make you happy?” Fritz asked.

  To be honest, it scared the bejeesus out of me. That many furious people squeezed into one place was a recipe for disaster. At least our pissed-off rioters back home had elbowroom. “I thought that the East Coast skewed in favor of PRAY.”

  “It does. Most protesters aren’t against PRAY because it overreaches, but because it’s not doing more to kill preternaturals immediately,” Fritz said. “You are looking at the result of two factions fueled by staggering amounts of anger.”

  “That makes me so much happier. I love powder kegs.”

  “I know you do. That’s why I’ve made arrangements for us to meet with Tate Peterson while he’s in town,” Fritz said. “He’s the godson of Justice Mendez. When H.R. 2076 goes in front of the SCOTUS, Tate Peterson is going to have a voice on how Justice Mendez’s vote swings.”

  “That’s fucking convoluted,” I said. “And there’s no goddamn way Tate Peterson’s going to get Justice Mendez swinging against PRAY.” I hadn’t been able to escape the guy’s raving on the nightly news. He was always on about pure, God-loving life without preternaturals.

  “It’ll be easier than you think. Tate is only twenty years old and has a marijuana habit that would render most brain-dead. OPA staff have cleaned him up and dressed him like a show pony, but he’s still an easily swayed man-child.”

  “And he’s going to influence the deciding vote when PRAY hits the Supreme Court?” I asked. “A twenty-year-old stoner preaching against weed?”

  “Fills you with hope for the future, doesn’t it?”

  We pulled into the hotel’s below ground parking garage, and I watched over my shoulder as OPA agents pulled the barricade closed behind us.

  “Our first visit, however, is with Justice Gwara,” Fritz said. “She’ll be waiting for us at the penthouse.”

  Justice Gwara was a friend of Fritz’s. He had a surprising number of friends who were judges, actually. This particular Supreme Court justice had been appointed by the previous president and was predicted to resist PRAY. “I thought her vote was a shoe-in.”

  “It is. It will be.”

  “You sound real confident in how convincing you can be,” I said.

  “With good reason.” Fritz smoothed his hands over his hair. He’d sleeked it back like the biggest asshole ever. But goddamn, he was an asshole who looked put-together. “If you missed the debriefing, then you also missed my memo about what happened last night. There was another massive surge of magic.”

  I sat upright. “Like the one at Lenox’s house?”

  “Exactly like it, including the part where the suspect was ordered to be released by Gary Zettel. Guess where this one happened.”

  “Narnia,” I said.

  “Six blocks that way.” Fritz pointed at the wall.

  “A paranoid man would think the magic is following us.”

  “Is it paranoia if they’re out to get you? Regardless, we didn’t collect any useful information from the incident.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” I said. “What could they be trying to hide? Rage spells? Curses? Hexes?”

  “We may never know,” Fritz said.

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “I have other problems to keep myself busy.”

  We headed up the elevator to the penthouse. Everything in the hotel was a long-term rental, the kind of place that businesspeople would stay when an out-of-town job was gonna take weeks or months.

  I’d stayed in similar hotels. Nothing so nice. Nothing with such polite doormen or so few cigarette-smoke stains on the walls. The government didn’t pay rates that high for little people like me.

  We stepped out on the penthouse level. Fritz waited by the window. “Cameras,” he said.

  I glanced up at the corners of the halls. Indeed, there were cameras. “Yup.”

  He gave me a long-suffering look. “Cameras,
Hawke. I expect privacy while staying at this hotel.”

  Oh, right. He’d told me to bring some of my flash-dust just for this.

  I took a pinch out of my pocket and tossed it into the air. And I sneezed.

  From our end, nothing seemed to happen. If anyone were watching on the security camera end, they’d see a bright flash and then nothing. The cameras would have to be replaced entirely.

  That kind of magic would have been an impossible dream for me a couple of years earlier, but I’d been puttering a lot. I’d had a lot of free time ever since Suzy disappeared. I hadn’t realized exactly how much time I used to spend hauling her drunk ass safely from one bar to the next, and how much time she’d invested into teaching me how to shoot, and do magic.

  A life without Suzy had been a much less interesting life.

  Just wait until she saw the magic I’d learned to do since she’d been gone.

  Probably pat me on the head and congratulate me for learning to tie my shoes.

  The penthouse was so swanky that I didn’t have words to describe it. Lots of stuff that looked expensive. Boxy lamps, ultra-modern lines, huge windows. Computers had been set out but weren’t plugged in. We were going to have staff here soon, but at the moment, it was empty.

  Except for Justice Gwara.

  She draped herself in an archway, filmy cotton hanging from her pointed shoulders and tracing lines down the curve of her breasts. She was a woman with high cheekbones, a sloping forehead, and full lips that turned up into a totally unprofessional smile at the sight of my partner.

  “Fritz,” she purred, coiling her hand around his tie.

  “Really?” I asked, folding my arms and aiming a disapproving look at Fritz.

  He gave me an unembarrassed wink and let himself be pulled into the office.

  The door closed in my face.

  I threw my hands into the air. “Politics.”

  If you didn’t come prepared, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do while your boss was enjoying a booty call.

  Ask me how I know this.

  There was even less to do when I was in a hotel completely blocked in by protesters. I wandered to the end of the hall to peek through the curtains. There was no pavement even visible at this point.

  The hotel was close to Capitol Hill, which meant I had a great view of all those domes, spires, and fancy old buildings that I’d seen on so many TV shows. They were smaller than I’d expected. Or maybe the crush of bodies just made them look smaller.

  The clouds rolling in looked to be carrying snow in their guts, so maybe we’d get lucky and the angry rabble would go home.

  A powder keg, I had called it. Talk about understatements. There was no barrier separating the people holding “PRAY for salvation” signs and those with the president-with-Joker-face signs, so they were intermingling in a froth surfers always hoped for in Long Beach.

  There was a rhythmic thumping coming from the other side of the wall. Fritz must have been having a lively debate with Justice Gwara.

  “Excuse me,” I said, catching a bellhop passing down the hall. I spoke loudly to drown out the noise. “Has my luggage from the jet arrived yet?”

  “Not yet, sir,” the bellhop said.

  “There’s a duffel bag with a handkerchief tied to its handle. I need it. I’d be grateful if you could get it to me as soon as possible.” I tried to subtly slip him a ten-dollar bill, but the bellhop just looked at the money like it was a bus-sized leech.

  “Of course, sir,” he said, and he drifted away.

  My nose itched as he walked off. I rubbed it.

  The bellhop was a witch?

  No wonder I’d gotten the cold shoulder when trying to pull the old Fritz Friederling tip-a-roo. There was a witch working in the hotel, and he knew that the OPA was staying at that location, and he wasn’t happy about PRAY.

  I suddenly felt a lot more serious about guarding Fritz while he was in the semi-privacy of the penthouse. I positioned myself in front of the door and stuck a Bluetooth earpiece into position. “Agent Hawke reporting in,” I said.

  The hiss of static was brief. “You’re clocked in, Agent Hawke.”

  That one loud voice was soon replaced by ongoing babble from the OPA staff in the area. There were enough angry-sounding guys grunting at each other that I suspected I was on a Union line, too.

  It had become procedure for all agents to wear the earpieces, but the OPA usually got stuck on separate lines from the Union. The official position was because they wanted to keep confidential OPA proceedings safe from Union members with other security clearances. I was ninety-nine percent certain the Union was trying to keep us out of their business.

  There was still more chatter here than there was out west. I had to relax into it, listen to the flow of voices, try to differentiate the orders.

  Everyone sounded kind of freaked out. There was something about Molotov cocktails, so I hadn’t been imagining that. Someone was reporting on their use of pepper spray for crowd control. A couple of our cars had been stopped by demonstrator-made barriers.

  I put a hand to my ear. “Wait, repeat that. What about cars being stopped?”

  But the conversations had already moved on, and there was too much activity to address me. I tried pinging HQ about it, but the line was busy.

  What if one of the stopped cars was the one with my luggage? The one with Suzy’s anchor in it?

  The rhythmic thumping had stopped. Fritz and Justice Gwara must have been changing gears. Hopefully Fritz would be alert enough to prevent his own assassination, because I was now too paranoid to stick around.

  The elevator to the lobby seemed eerily quiet as it descended. I could hear every gear whirring, the slide of air in the shaft, the chime as we passed each floor. And then the lobby was even quieter, in a way—no sounds of machinery or chiming, just the muffled shouts of protesters outside the big windows.

  I tapped the bell on the desk. “Hello? Anyone here?”

  Nobody came out. What superb fucking service.

  Down to the basement it was.

  The doors slid open to reveal the same chilly parking garage I’d just left with Fritz. To my relief, there were three black SUVs parked just inside the barricade. Those were Union vehicles. That meant they probably had my luggage.

  “Hey! Guys!” I jogged over.

  A guy stepped out from behind one of the SUVs, hands lifted to either side of his head. He was dressed as a low-ranking kopis.

  “Run,” he said.

  And then his head vanished in a roar of gunfire and a mist of blood.

  I took cover on the other side of the SUV. “Fuck!” My voice rang out and echoed throughout the parking garage. Too loud.

  The armed assailant rushed around the vehicle at me.

  It was the bellhop. He was carrying an assault rifle.

  I rolled over the next SUV’s hood

  . Bellhop’s gun chattered and bullets punched into the metal behind my shoulder. I hit the ground on the other side hard and ran for the nearest door—for the passage out to the sidewalk.

  But he was there.

  Bellhop was fucking fast.

  “Whoa there,” I said, lifting my hands in a gesture of surrender, just like the kopis had before getting blown away. Now that I was on this end of the SUVs, I could see the other Union drivers on the ground too. All of them dead.

  “Are you OPA?” Bellhop asked. “Are you supporting PRAY?”

  My hands slipped down. My mouth worked as I tried to decide which answer would let me escape with my life. “Listen to me, sir—”

  “Shut it,” he said. “On your knees.”

  Getting on my knees seemed like a really bad idea. If I put my sensitive bits down lower—say, getting my head below chest level—it was going to be a lot easier for this asshole to take those sensitive bits off with a spray of buckshot.

  I didn’t move.

  “Let’s talk,” I said.

  “Are you OPA?” he demanded again.

&nb
sp; When I didn’t reply, he stepped forward. Jerked my jacket open. Grabbed my ID.

  I’d brought my FBI badge. It was fake, but it looked real because it was made by the same vendors. I technically wasn’t supposed to be carrying it now that the OPA was public, but I’d forgotten my OPA badge at home. Wasn’t used to being legitimate yet.

  Bellhop tossed the badge to the ground. He aimed his gun at my head again. “Do you support PRAY?”

  Success, FBI meant I wasn’t insta-dead.

  That still left another question to answer correctly.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  I kinda laughed at that. I had expected a guy with a gun to have talking points because nobody shot people over the unknown opinions. “Me too, dude. It’s too big to wrap my mind around right now.”

  “I’m a witch,” he said. “My name’s Lawrence.”

  “Hey Lawrence, I’m Cèsar,” I said.

  “This isn’t me. This isn’t what I do. Three weeks ago I was just a bellhop with a lot of pentacle jewelry, you know?” As he started to talk, the gun started swaying more. The muzzle swung across my face and then across the cars and then back. “Now I have to report myself, register for this thing, fill out paperwork when I want to fly…”

  “It’s a pain in the ass,” I said.

  “President Abbey is going to put us in death camps,” Lawrence said.

  I hadn’t read H.R. 2076 yet, but Fritz would have mentioned if that was in there. “That wouldn’t be American, now would it?”

  “No. No it would not.” He let out a ragged sob, wiping the sweat off his forehead with one hand. The gun wavered again. “Do you know anyone from the press, Cèsar?”

  My eyes went wide. “No?” God, I hoped that was the right answer.

  “Can you call them after? Can you make sure this airs?”

  “Are you trying to make a statement, Lawrence?” I asked.

  “It’s not my statement,” he said.

  The gun dropped, muzzle lowering to the ground.

  I wasn’t going to wait and see if Lawrence wanted to try shooting me again. I lurched toward him, gracelessly grabbed the gun from his hands, and hurled it over the SUV.