Even so, the image was one that David barely recognized. His still-tousled hair was the only thing that anyone who knew him in Charlesville would have recognized, and he grinned at the officer in the mirror as he considered his hunting club’s reaction to seeing him like this.
The smile faded as he realized that he would probably never be able to go hunting with them again. It would be too easy to slip, to do something that would reveal him to be more than human while hunting, and he didn’t trust any of the men in the club enough to expect them to keep it quiet. Or to not panic, for that matter.
With a small sigh, David reached for a comb and the small bottle of hair gel sitting on the faux marble counter around the sink next to the full-length mirror.
A few minutes later had David’s hair taking the neat form of the FBI stereotype as well. He quickly adjusted the suit jacket to make sure there were no visible bulges for the two weapons.
A part of him said goodbye to his tousled hair, knowing that here and now, neatening it up meant more than just looking pretty. Today, it was an acceptance that he’d changed forever—and that there was no going back.
He’d barely finished his preparations when there was a knock at the door of the suite. “Yes?” he answered. The only person who should have been knocking on his door was his Commander.
“Inspector Braun is on his way over,” Michael told him through the door, and David nodded confirmation of his thought. “Are you ready?”
David looked at the door for a long moment before answering by opening it and stepping into the hall. Michael, wearing a very similar black suit, looked the junior agent up and down and then nodded.
“Presentable,” he said firmly, although there was no way he knew what had gone on in David’s mind as the junior Agent dressed. “Let’s go check out.”
#
Inspector Braun and their blue car awaited them at the front entrance. David slid into the back seat as Michael joined the Inspector in the front seat. David barely got his seat belt on before the Inspector floored the gas and the car shot out into traffic. David grabbed hold of the handle on the door and held his breath for a moment.
Despite the initial shock, Braun proved to be a good driver, whipping the car through intersections and lane changes with a practiced hand to deliver them to the chapel fifteen minutes early. A temporary barrier blocked entrance into the parking lot, and crisply dressed men checked IDs before allowing the car in.
Behind the barrier, David saw an old, old church. The entrance had clearly once held a gate, but it had been removed at one point for modern tarmac. The rest of the church grounds were surrounded by a short stone wall topped by a cast-iron fence.
The church itself was a four-story wonder of gothic architecture. Buttressed and “guarded” by gargoyles, it could have been taken from the cover of half a dozen different gothic romance books.
“O’Brien,” Braun said to the werewolf as they slowed to a halt in the parking lot, amongst a dozen other black government cars. “Watch your step. Rumor has it Riley is in town. Apparently, he knew Riesling back when they were both OSPI trainees.”
“Riley won’t be a problem,” Michael replied firmly. “His issues with Omicron are decades dead.”
David wondered who Riley was, and why his presence was a danger. One look at the sudden sharp edges on Michael’s aura suggested that knowing was a good idea but also that Michael wouldn’t be happy to answer.
“Some of his people aren’t so sure,” the Inspector warned. “Let’s go.”
The trio of Omicron men got out of the car, and David looked around at the church. The slowly growing crowd in the grass front yard of the church looked like it had been cut from a black-and-white movie, with every single member of it dressed in conservative suits. Very few colors other than pitch black and white seemed to be visible.
Glancing away from the crowd, David took a moment to step over next to Michael. “Who’s Riley?”
“You’ll find out,” Michael said grimly, his eyes on something behind David.
David turned and noticed that three young men had detached themselves from the crowd and were heading toward the black OSPI car. Without thinking, he flashed to Sight and saw that all three’s auras flashed with anger and arrogance, and were marked with the blue tinge he’d learned to recognize as Mages.
“Get behind me,” Michael ordered, and David obeyed, his inhuman senses noting that one physical detail distinguished these three young men from most of the suited men and woman around the chapel. All three of them had a large lapel pin, almost a brooch, in the form of a silver leaf.
“Michael O’Brien,” the leader, tall and slim with a long black braid stretching halfway down his back, said coldly. “We claim challenge under the code of the Hand.”
“This is not the place,” Michael told them, his voice equally cold. “This is a funeral, not a dueling ground.”
“No outsider should have been taught any form of the Flame,” the suited youth with the braid told Michael, and then moved.
Even David’s Sight didn’t give him enough time to warn Michael, but Michael clearly didn’t need it. Even as the youth moved, muttering words of magic to accelerate his attack, Michael shifted to meet him.
There was a blur of motion, fast enough that even David almost missed the blows, and the Elfin youth was on the floor, spitting blood. Not knowing what the hell was going on; David stepped forward, reaching for his knife. Michael waved him back, however, and David retreated, accepting his Commander’s wordless orders.
“Mordor take you, werewolf,” the Elfin snarled, springing back to his feet.
He’d barely made it up before Michael’s fist slammed into his chest, sending him stumbling back toward his friends, who had not interfered.
His friends, in fact, had barely moved, and David watched in surprise as the young attacker suddenly stopped in mid-motion, completely frozen. A fourth man, dressed identically to the first three Elfin men, had joined the gathering. He was older than the youths, though David judged him only five or so years older than his own thirty-one, with short-cropped black hair and piercing blue eyes. Unlike the younger Elfin, he openly wore a weapon—a yard-long sword, the hilt carved with some kind of hieroglyphs, strapped to his left hip.
“You should control your pups better, Riley,” Michael said quietly. Given the attacker’s impossibly frozen posture, he was not someone David wanted to be on the wrong side of.
“He will be punished,” Riley said calmly, and his eyes held the frozen youths. “Ryan, Jason. Take Rico back to the car and wait for me. I will be along when the funeral is over.”
At no point did the man raise his voice, but as he finished, he released Rico and the youth collapsed to the ground. Without the slightest murmur of dissent, the other two youths obeyed immediately, picking their fallen comrade up and half-supported, half-carried him away.
“Agent David White,” Michael said, gesturing David forward, “be known to the Elfin Lord Jamie Riley, former OSPI Inspector.”
The two titles explained a lot to David as he stepped forward to extend his hand. Not many Mages left Omicron, and those who left to pursue other careers were often ostracized. This man didn’t seem to care about that tradition, but then, he was an Elfin Lord. That elite group was known for both their magical strength and their secular power over the Elfin Conclave.
“Agent White,” Riley greeted him, shaking his hand and giving David a slight nod of the head. “I regret that your first meeting with my people was in such circumstances. Funerals are somber enough without the interference of young fools.”
“Fools are fools, regardless of the place,” Michael interjected. “Come on. We all have a reason to be here, and Riley’s idiots are not it.”
Lord Riley acknowledged Michael’s comment with a sharp nod but gestured for the three Omicron men to wait. “I had other reasons beyond restraining my ‘pups’’ determination to defend the secrets of the Flame of Andúril to meet you, Commander O’Br
ien,” he said quietly, and offered a manila envelope to the werewolf.
“What is this?” Michael asked, taking the envelope.
“We have had our own investigations into the affairs that…terminated at Father Carderone,” Riley said simply, gesturing for the Agents to precede him into the church. “The memory stick in that envelope contains the sum of our investigations,” he concluded. “I hope it proves of some assistance.”
#
The side chapel of the church was crowded almost to its full capacity. A smaller room than the main sanctuary, the chapel was still two thirds of the size of Carderone’s church in Alexandria. Arched ceilings hung above them, and niches well above the height of a man held statues of the saints.
The two ONSET agents took seats at the back of the chapel, allowing the OSPI officers who’d known Riesling better to file into the front. A small cluster of men and a single woman that David now recognized as Elfin took up the back right-hand side of the chapel, gathered around Lord Riley, and the group of neatly clad men and women with hollow eyes David guessed to be the houngans filled the remaining space.
David sat in silence, watching the Catholic priest, who looked uncomfortably similar to the man who’d killed Riesling, take his place at the front of the room and clear his throat for silence.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the priest greeted them. “We are here to remember an officer and a brother. We are here to remember a brave man who died in the line of his duty, to serve and protect the innocents around him.
“We are here to remember Inspector Second Class Damien Riesling.”
Chapter 14
“Welcome back to HQ, Agent White, Commander O’Brien,” the gate guard at the Campus greeted David and Michael after scanning their IDs. The east gate of the ONSET Headquarters was one of three gaps into the concrete wall, and several ominous metal hatches studded the wall nearby, suggesting that attempting to force entry was a bad idea.
Having confirmed their IDs, the guard entered a code into a keypad, and the steel bar that served as a barrier slid back into the wall, where massive steel gates stood ready to cut the Campus off from the outside world.
The government car that the two had picked up at the Colorado Springs airport slid through the gap in the concrete wall, and the bar smoothly slid back into place behind them, locking out the world that knew nothing of the Campus’s existence.
“Do we really need this kind of security?” David asked as Michael maneuvered the car into the car pool. To his eyes, it almost looked ridiculous. No one had built a fortress like this since the Second World War, to his knowledge.
“We haven’t yet,” Michael admitted. “But we lost a local base—like the one in Louisiana—last year in Texas. We were using it for coordination between the forces we’d sent against the incursion, and a group of demons took it out in a surprise attack. A good third of our casualties in that campaign were due to losing command and control at a critical moment.”
“I thought all of our facilities were completely secret,” David said. So far as he could tell, everything Omicron was buried under about ten different layers of secrecy and deception. It wasn’t something he was comfortable with, and he still wasn’t sure he fully agreed with it, but he did understand it.
“They are,” his Commander confirmed. “Unless you’re a supernatural. Then you generally know where OSPI operates from, and you can work out where the nearest ONSET base is with a little bit of watching and triangulating. So we secure, our facilities against the worst.” He shrugged. “I helped write the defense specifications for the Campus. We had four worst-case scenarios: an attack by conventional modern forces, infiltration, supernatural assault with the resources of a full Familias, or a dragon. The Campus was designed to resist all four. “
“At once?” David suggested as they got out of the car and collected their bags from the trunk. The defenses around the base were insane. Michael had helped design them? He knew that the werewolf was older than he looked and had been with Omicron a long time, but every so often, he got a hint that suggested that his Commander was a lot more than just another team leader.
Michael barked a laugh and shook his head. “No, though we probably could. The defenses against a dragon attack are quite distinct from the security to stop an infiltration or the heavy weapons to stop a ground assault.”
“How do you stop a dragon?” David finally asked as the pair left the underground car pool, heading for ONSET Nine’s dormitory. From what he’d seen of Charles, he wasn’t sure how it would be possible. The dragon was fast and maneuverable on the ground, and formidably armored. In the air, where it had evolved to fight…the thought was scary.
“We retrofitted W80 warheads from decommissioned cruise missiles onto Patriot interceptor missiles,” Michael replied, his voice suddenly quiet. “And if you don’t know what that means, you don’t want to.”
For a long moment David, who could guess what a W80 warhead was, sat in silence, as he began to realize just how powerful the organization he worked for was. Scary as the thought of fighting a dragon in the air had been a moment before, the thought that ONSET could requisition nuclear warheads for its own defense was…much worse.
#
The pair of officers returned to ONSET Nine’s dormitory in subdued spirits. In the main room of the dormitory, they came upon Ix and Bourque playing a game of chess. Both wore the unmarked black bodysuit that formed the core of the ONSET uniform and combat gear, but without the rest of the harness that was slung over it for combat.
“You should go change into your blacks,” Michael told David as they headed toward the stairs and their respective rooms. “We don’t live in battle harness while on inactive, but the bodysuit is our best armor so we keep it on. You can throw clothes over it if you head off campus,” the team Commander added.
“I can leave the base while we’re on active reserve?” David queried.
Michael nodded. “We keep a tight training schedule this week, but outside of that, your time is your own. You can’t go further than the Springs, and you’ll have to be in body armor and carry a pager with a GPS beacon with you, but you only have to be here for your scheduled training. That won’t be until morning,” the Commander observed. “It’s pretty late.”
David returned the nod, and the two men split ways toward their own quarters. The cop slowly shed the civilian clothes he’d worn for the trip back from the funeral, and carefully pulled on the smooth black fabric of his bodysuit.
That done, he tossed the civvies in his laundry hamper and then carefully hung up the expensive suit Michael had got him. A quick check of the clothes he had with him revealed that only about half of them would fit over the bodysuit, so he settled for throwing a hooded sweater over the bodysuit as he glanced around the apartment.
It was quiet and empty, spacious as it was, and he was about to start a game of solitaire on the computer for a lack of anything better to do when he heard a knock on his door.
“Who is it?” he asked, wondering who would be knocking on his door at—he checked the clock—almost eight thirty in the evening.
“It’s Kate,” the team’s younger Mage replied. “Can I come in?”
David gave his apartment a quick glance-over, but he really hadn’t lived in it for long enough to create any sort of mess. He was glad to hear Kate’s voice but also curious as to why she was knocking on his door.
“Come in,” he told her.
The young woman opened the door and stepped in. She wore the same black bodysuit as he did, with an unzipped blue fleece sweater open over it, showing the circled silver star hanging on her frankly outlined chest.
He gestured Kate to the couch and pulled the chair over from the office into the living room. Setting it next to the couch, he sat down and looked over at the Mage.
“Good to see you, Kate,” he said honestly. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to check up on you,” she told him with a soft smile. “The first mission can be pretty r
ough.”
David smiled back at her. He appreciated the concern. He was sure most of the rest of the team shared it, but Kate was certainly the least threatening and most comforting of the group.
“Thank you,” he said softly. “It’s hard,” he admitted. Hard was an understatement. Even though he’d mostly accepted that he’d done what had to be done, and even allowed himself a small sense of satisfaction at the realization that Carderone’s killings were stopped, it still didn’t take away the horror of seeing the priest’s eyes when he closed his.
“I was raised Catholic,” he continued. “Being in that church brought back a lot of memories. None of them really bad, but they’re all going to be associated with Carderone now, whether I like it or not.”
“Don’t let one man’s evil destroy your faith,” Kate told him earnestly, her fingers touching the star hanging from her neck. “We have to have faith in something to do our jobs.”
“I have faith in myself and in the law,” David told her quietly. It had been a long time since he’d believed in the faith of his childhood. The oath he’d sworn as an officer defined what faith he had. It was a faith in men, not in unseen divinity.
“Remember to have faith in us as well,” Kate murmured, her gaze holding his for a long moment. Something in her eyes made him uncomfortable, even as her presence reassured him, and he looked away.
“Killing is a part of our job,” he said quietly. He’d known that from the beginning. ONSET was, after all, basically a group of tactical assault teams—a supernatural SWAT for the entire nation. Somehow, that knowledge had never really sunk in until he’d had to do it.
“Not always,” Kate objected. “And not directly. Our job is to protect people. Killing is an ugly corollary to that sometimes, but what happens when people abuse supernatural powers is ugly.”
ONSET: To Serve and Protect Page 13
