80 Proof Hex_Deckland Cain 2

by D Michael Bartsch

  I looked at White. He spread his hands and smiled. “Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.”

  I set the round back on the table. “Who are you, people?” I asked.

  “Officially, I work for a division of Homeland Security, and my team an I are on loan to the FBI for a special investigation into the Highway Butcher, a serial killer that has been causing a ruckus across Northern California and Nevada.”

  “Unofficially?” I asked.

  White put the mag back in the Glock and racked the slide, dumping the mag again and palming the round from the table. Sliding it back in smoothly he slapped the magazine in the gun and held it out. Wallace took it and retreated to his corner.

  “Unofficially, I head a special task force dedicated to keeping this country safe from any threat of paranormal or supernatural origins. Our existence is classified to such a degree that almost no one who doesn’t report to me or my boss knows of our existence.”

  “The U.S. Government has a team of Hellion hunters?”

  White laughed. “Mr. Stearns, you can’t honestly believe that the United States Government would ever allow it’s only line of defense against the supernatural to be a group of Catholic ninjas?”

  He took a long sip of coffee. I’d hadn’t thought about governments having their own organizations to deal with Hellions and Warlocks. Three hundred years ago the Venatori had been the only game in town. The Pope had seen to that. As countries gained more power and Rome lost it, it would make sense that they would start to put together their own defenses. The Venatori couldn’t be everywhere.

  “I wouldn’t be so glib if you ever run into any of those Catholic ninjas,” I said. “They tend to be a little testy when they’re in a good mood. Trust me when I tell you, they’re never in a good mood.”

  “You seem to know a lot about the Venatori. As someone who works for a shadowy organization, I can tell you that they bring a whole new meaning to the term covert. How did you come by your knowledge?”

  I could have kicked myself for opening my dumb mouth. I had to be careful with how much I told him about the Venatori and my past with them. If he found out that I used to be one of them, he might decide that I was more valuable in a trade to them than whatever else he had planned for me.

  “You don’t stay alive as long as I have in this business without learning about them, and learning to stay the hell away from them at all costs.” Lie by omission baby. Easy as pie.

  “I want to believe you. I really do. I just can’t get past the feeling that you’re lying to me, Mr. Stearns.”

  “I’m a straight shooter,” I said, holding up my hands and crossing them across my chest.

  “I ran your prints yesterday. I’m a fairly good judge of character. I say this so you would know I wasn’t surprised to find out that your prints matched a series of unsolved homicides, B and E’s, and more suspected supernatural incidents than I cared to count. I’ve got over a dozen chewed up, shot up, or otherwise mangled bodies with your prints at the scene in San Francisco alone.”

  That sounded right to me. I’d gotten my hands pretty dirty when I’d been working for Balthazar. Andrej and I had been the ones not only creating the bodies but burying them as well.

  White continued. “What did surprise me was the fact that within an hour of running your prints I received a call from the President. He didn’t route the call through an aide or one of his secretaries. He called me on a secure line, himself. You know what he told me?”

  I shook my head, not liking where this was going. I felt my pulse double, and my stomach drop as my adrenaline dumped.

  “He told me that over the course of the previous half hour he’d received calls from three ranking members of the Congressional Oversight Committee and the Pope.”

  That wasn’t good. Not good at all.

  “Do you know how many people outside of the BUI know of its existence?”

  “BUI?” I asked.

  “Bureau of Unearthly Investigations. I am one of three heads of the Demonic Response Unit. We are the United States’ rapid response teams to any supernatural events. The men and women in this facility represent the White Team.”

  I laughed. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop myself. I barked an ugly laugh.

  “I’m sorry. The name of your shadowy government operation is the Demonic Response Unit? Little on the nose don’t you think? Also, the White Team? No way you are still getting away with that in today’s world. That’s gotta be like, a giant red flag trying to recruit people to your little squad here.”

  White didn’t look amused, but he also didn’t seem put off at all. I had a feeling he was used to getting shit for the name.

  “It was the 80s. I head Team White. Team Red and Team Blue are on mission in other parts of the country at this moment.”

  “Red, White, and Blue eh?”

  “Again, it was the 80s. However, the BUI has been around, in one form or another, almost as long as this great country has existed. We are the reason that this country’s greatest fear is Islamic Extremists and healthcare reform and not Elder Demons and the unrelenting horde of evil that they command.

  “Outside of the BUI, ranking members of the Congressional Oversight Committee and the President, no one is supposed to know we exist. We are a line item on a budget so long even the people who write the damn thing don’t even know we’re there. Yet, as soon as I tried to look into you, all of those people wanted to talk to me. You can imagine how that would be surprising to me. Especially since one of them was the Pope, who as far as I’m concerned, isn’t supposed to know I have ever or will ever grace God’s green earth.

  “I’m asking you right now, all cards on the table, who are you, Mr. Stearns?”

  This was a decent amount of info to try and process all at once, and for someone who spends a majority of his time trying to stay off the radar, I was understandably uncomfortable with the way things were going. It sounded like a bad movie. Demonic Response Units. Red, White, and Blue teams. It was ludicrous. Then again, how many people would think what I do for a living is unbelievable.

  I shook my head. “Look, I’m just a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time here.”

  “The President ordered me to hand you over to the Venatori, who are on their way here right now. Relations with them have been quite strained with them after an incident with an Ogre tearing up an apartment in South San Francisco last year. An apartment that Mr. Rodriguez lived in. An apartment where your prints were found, along with an arsenal of weaponry and other items of the occult. The President sees giving you up to them as an easy win. They seem extremely motivated to get their hands on you.”

  Of course, they were.

  “Now, the only way that you stay in this country, sucking in free, is by telling me what I want to know. If I decide that you are enough of an asset, I can keep you here, out of their rather unkind hands. I can’t promise complete freedom, but I can tell you right now that I am the only thing standing between you and the Venatori.”

  I felt an itch between my shoulder blades. I could feel them watching me, coming around the corners, slinking out of the shadows. There was a rage there as well. White had come into my life and ruined it. This is what I got for trying to do the right thing. I should have just let the Wendigo eat that little girl. I should have left Al to get pulled apart by a pack of Harpies, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have helped Cat get away from Maccus. What did I care if she was turned into a Vampire? I was about to get sent back to the endless abyss.

  I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. I’d die before I ever went back.

  My mind started going to dark places, all of which involved going out in a blaze of glory. My best chance was to go for the old guy. He was closer to my size and the nearest goon to me. If I could get his gun, I could open up. Take a few of them with me and be dead by the time the Venatori showed up.

  It meant waking up in Hell to spend eternity getting tortured and who knows what else by Moloch, the Demo
n Lord I’d sold my soul to. That couldn’t be worse than the Void. It couldn’t be. Nothing could be.

  “Mr. Stearns.”

  I had to keep him talking until I could get a chance to get my hands on a gun. “What do you want to know?”

  I did my best to look and sound defeated. It wasn’t much of an act if I’m being honest.

  “For starters, I want to know what your connection is with this man.”

  He slid a photo across the desk. I reached out and held it up, recognizing the man in the picture, but not understanding why White had it.

  “Al?”

  Al had lost the white collar and black duds. He did have on an overcoat and looked like he was either in a warehouse or airport somewhere. He was surrounded by wooden crates. The photo had been taken with a telephoto lens. He’d been under surveillance.

  “He’s a priest. I saved his life a few days ago. A Rift opened up in a church. Carl and I went in to make sure nothing had come out of it. There were a few Harpies inside. I took them down and we found Alastair inside. He’d been investigating the Rifts. His bodyguard was killed by the Harpies.

  “I agreed to help him continue studying the Rifts. He was offering a chunk of cash I couldn’t refuse, and after the Harpies, I knew I needed money to skip town and get set up somewhere else.”

  White chuckled, shaking his head. “Why am I not surprised that you were involved in that bit of business with the Harpies. My team was quite surprised to find them taken care of well before they arrived.”

  I shrugged. “I was in the neighborhood.”

  White tapped the photo of Al. “I can assure you that the man in that photo is not a priest.”

  Opening up a folder dozens of other photos came across the table. I looked through them. I’d seen a lot of things in my day, and that was the only reason that I didn’t lose it at the sight of some of the stuff in those photos. That said, it was still hard to look at.

  Several of them showed circles, each of them filled with pentagrams and sigils drawn in a dark red that could only be blood. The worst of the images were taken from a hotel room. Everything was stained red. The body tied to the bed had been completely skinned from head to toe. The wall above the bed had a large red circle drawn on it and nailed to the wall inside the ring was a suit of skin. I scanned the sigils scrawled in the picture, but I didn’t need to know what they meant to know what I was looking at. “Blood magic.”

  White nodded. “Alastair McQuillen is on just about every watch list that exists. He is a leader in a cult known as the Heralds of the Terminus. Their claim to fame is trying to usher in the apocalypse. He’s guilty of murder, Blood Magic, and even the occasional Necromantic event, and you’ve been traipsing around town showing him the sights.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He leaned back, looking at me. He studied me, clearly trying to make a decision. After a moment he turned and looked at the two way mirror behind him. He waved his hand, gesturing to someone behind the glass. The door opened a minute later, and Cat walked through. She’d lost her club outfit and was wearing a black pantsuit. I must have had a dumb look on my face because White pounced.

  “You’ve already met Agent Petran. She’s been undercover, trying to infiltrate Maccus Dunn’s circle for some time. We aren’t sure the extent of his connection to the Heralds, but he and Alastair have been meeting regularly for the past six months. Alastair has been providing a steady stream of Hellion blood to Maccus and his pack. Our working theory at the moment is that Alastair is using the Hellion blood to control Maccus. Without a steady supply, he would regress back into a more instinctual creature, unable to think or reason. Vampires who’ve been Awakened are terrified of such a fate.”

  I was hardly paying attention. My focus was on Cat. She wasn’t just some dumb kid, she was a hunter, like me. Like Elena. I shook my head, feeling a surge of guilt well up in my chest at the thought of comparing her to Elena. My wife was dead. I’d killed her, and the thought of how much Cat reminded me of her wasn’t helping anyone, least of all me.

  “You said that you were helping him find Rifts. What did he say he wanted with the information?”

  I shook my head, snapping out of the fog. I did my best to refocus on the conversation. “He said that he was in the States tracking a series of Rifts that he didn’t seem to think were random, or if they were, he said he’d developed a formula to track them. He could narrow it down to a square mile or so, sometimes a larger area. He was trying to study them and refine his formula to be more accurate. Least that’s what he said.”

  White drained his second cup of coffee, mulling the information. “Where do you come in? If he has the formula, how do you help?”

  The question that I’d been dreading, well one of them anyway. I needed to be careful about how I answered it. I didn’t know how these people felt about the Unforgiven. I know where the Venatori stood on the subject, but White seemed open to talking and hopefully, negotiating.

  “I have abilities, magical abilities. One of them is sensing the presence of magic. Rifts are a hole in the universe caused by a build-up of magical energy. They are pretty much like a beacon to me. If I get close enough to feel one, I can track it down fairly easily.”

  White seemed to perk up at the mention of that. I didn’t like the look in his eyes, like he’d just found a new toy that he couldn’t wait to play with.

  “You can sense magic? Not just it’s general presence, but you can detect both proximity and intensity?”

  “Yea.” I didn’t elaborate on the topic, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to bring up how I got the ability.

  “Fascinating. I could see how that would be useful. How many Rifts have you helped Alastair track down?”

  “One. We are supposed to look for another one tonight. After that, there’s one more tomorrow. I’m supposed to get paid and skip town after that.” I felt it best to leave out the part where someone else had offered to pay me a hundred grand to whack Al. Now that I knew he wasn’t a priest, but actually a deadly Necromancer, I felt pretty good about agreeing to blowing his brains out.

  White looked at Cat. She looked back at him, and they seemed to be communicating. I knew it wasn’t anything magical, but they were sharing some thought.

  “Cat has heard that something significant is supposed to happen tomorrow. Maccus has been referring to the end. Whatever it is they are involved in, it seems to be happening tomorrow night.”

  “You think it involves the Rift?” I asked.

  “It would seem like too much of coincidence to not be involved. However, with you being on the inside, this could provide a unique advantage.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. He was starting to describe something that felt suspiciously like me becoming bait.

  “Do you know the general area that Alastair believes the Rift will open up?”

  I shook my head. “No. He does the driving. I’m just along for the ride until we find the Rift, then I make sure that nothing comes out of it and eats anyone.”

  “Damn. Still, we could track your location. If we keep the team a couple blocks out, we could set up an ambush for him. I would prefer to have more time to set up beforehand, but we can always track you to the Rifts location and then take Alastair from there.”

  I knew it. “So you want me to be bait?”

  He nodded. “More or less. We need to know where you are at so we can bring Alastair in. He’s responsible for dozens of deaths and has summoned up Demonic powers on more occasions than we even know of. This could be our best shot we’ve ever had at either bringing him in or putting him down for good. To be honest, I don’t much care which option we choose. I’ll leave that up to Mr. Wallace.”

  I looked back at Wallace. He looked pretty happy at the possibility of going out on an op, and I didn’t like Al’s chances of getting out of there alive. Wallace looked like he didn’t mind a good murdering. Sucks for Al. I wondered if I could wait for Wallace to whack Al and then I could still
get the money from Prufrock. Of course, after the technicality I’d caught him on in our last agreement, he would be all over that. I needed to be the one to pull the trigger, or I still owed him a favor.

  “And what happens to me in all of this?” I asked.

  “You get the opportunity to help stop a dangerous criminal. One who has murdered, cursed, and spelled his way across four continents that we know of.”

  “And after that?”

  White showed his wolfish smile, teeth damn near gleaming.

  “Well, after that. I’m sure we can work out some sort of arrangement that we can both find agreeable.”

  25

  It took another hour to find something that we could both find agreeable. I told them I would help them bring in Alastair. If I already had the money that I was supposed to get paid, I got to keep it. Once it was confirmed that Al was either in custody or dead, I walked. Carl and I could slip off into the night, never to see or hear from Mr. White and his band of merry men ever again. I didn’t bring up the part where I was going to kill Al regardless. It was a delicate situation if ever there was one.

  A more naive man than myself would have felt pretty damn happy about the deal I’d worked out. I hadn’t lived as long as I had by believing anything that anyone told me, ever. I didn’t expect White to hold up his end of the bargain. That meant as soon as Carl, and I got out of the warehouse, we needed to work up our own backup plan. Well, I needed to work up a backup plan and make sure Carl shut the hell up and did what I told him.

  I got out of the interrogation room, shaking hands with White before Cat walked me down the hall. She hadn’t said anything to me the entire time. In fact, other than White, not a single person had said a word to me. He ran a tight ship apparently.

  “So, not a damsel in distress after all,” I said. “Pretty convincing act you got going on here.”