The Bewitched Box Set

by W. J. May

  “You just report to us anything strange that comes across your desk,” Adam said. “We will investigate it, along with the SFPD. But discretion will be of utmost importance. Only you and Detective Johnson here can know about it.”

  “That’s it, just he and I will know about this?”

  “Our boss, Sam Brown, he’ll know we’re working with the Justice Department, just not in what specific capacity,” Richard offered.

  Edward nodded, then smiled. “When do I start?”

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  Anthony Bianchi and Adam Swift parked the car across the street from Golden Gate Park and got out, walking across the street as the sun sank low along the San Francisco skyline. The wind was icy and it swirled around them as they walked quickly through the massive black iron front gates of the park and began quietly walking a hiking trail through the park.

  “So what are we looking for, exactly?” Agent Bianchi asked as they walked along the trail.

  “Shifters. They like to run here. The trees and darkness provide them enough light from the moon to run free. They’ve been spotted here and in the Sutro Forest.”

  Tony looked him quizzically. “Where’s the Sutro Forest?”

  “Here, in the city,” Adam replied.

  Tony raised his eyebrows. “There’s a forest in the middle of San Francisco?”

  “Yeah, it’s not that large, but it’s there,” Adam replied, chuckling.

  “Interesting.”

  “Shh!” Adam said, putting a hand up.

  Tony froze in his tracks. The night was now dark, illuminated by only a half moon, which caused even the shadows to have shadows. The trees and bushes along the park were eerily still, especially since it had just been windy.

  From the corner of his eye, Tony spotted something blur by him in the shadows. He took off in a sprint toward it, using his enhanced eyesight to track its movements. Adam was on his heels, huffing and wheezing as he ran.

  Tony crept up and saw it disappear behind a large redwood tree with nowhere else to go. He still couldn’t see exactly what it was, but its shape looked more of a human than animal. Once Adam caught up to him, he squinted into the darkness, then back up at Tony.

  “What? Did you see something?” Adam panted.

  Tony nodded, his eyesight and hearing fixated on the tree ahead of him, like a dog tracking its prey.

  “I don’t see nothin’,” Adam said.

  “Shh!”

  The creature darted out from behind the tree at unnatural speed and Tony gave chase, leaving Adam in his dust. Tony chased it all the way through the park, darting between bushes and tree stumps until it came to the park’s gates and sped through them. Tony pursued it into the street, almost getting hit by a car. Adam, to his credit, was trying his hardest to keep up.

  The creature darted behind a nearby two-story building. Tony ran up to the building and placed his back along the building’s edge. Adam showed up a minute later, and Tony put his fingers to his lips to silence him. Adam nodded.

  Tony inched along the building with his gun drawn and peered around the alley they believed the creature was trapped in. Not seeing it, Tony crept into the alley, keeping his back to the wall of the building. Adam followed, also with his service pistol drawn.

  A lone orange street light illuminated the alley. Adam was having trouble seeing, but Tony was not. He could clearly see that the only things in the alley were two dumpsters and four sacks of trash. At the end of the alley was a tall cyclone fence. Just as Tony was heading toward it with the intention of scaling it, the creature jumped down from the top of the building and landed on Adam, causing his gun to go skittering away down the alley.

  “ARGH!” Adam yelled.

  Tony turned around as the man had Adam flat on his back. He was throwing punches, to which Adam was unsuccessfully trying to block with the palms of his hands.

  Tony grabbed the man off with one hand, and as he looked into his face could see he had no whites at all to his eyes, and his fangs were out.

  “Bloodsucker!” Tony grabbed him by his lapels and threw him to the ground, and with speed quicker than should be humanly possible, sped over to the vampire. Before it could get up, Tony twisted its head with a sickening crack. The vampire lay dead, well, temporarily dead, on the ground.

  Adam got up, and was shaking as he brushed himself off. “How in the hell...?”

  Tony said, “Let’s go before it wakes up. Unless you want me to kill it.”

  “How? Shooting it won’t kill it, just like breaking its neck won’t,” Adam said, his voice hoarse and shaky. He had a black eye and a trickle of blood running down his mouth. He wiped it away with his thumb. “That sucker hits hard.”

  Tony grinned at Adam and walked back over to the vampire. He twisted his head again with such force that it separated from the neck. Blood squirted out of the arteries and spilled in a fast moving puddle of black on the gray concrete. Tony held up the lone head by its hair and looked at Adam.

  Adam stood there with his mouth open. “That’s not possible,” he breathed.

  Tony tossed the head into the dumpster and wiped his hands on his pants. “Adam, we need to talk.”

  ∞∞∞

  The two BSI Agents were in the waiting room of San Francisco General’s emergency room, waiting for Adam to be seen by a doctor. He had an ice pack held against the back of his head.

  “I told you, I don’t need to see no doctor,” Adam said, wincing at the cut on his lip as he spoke.

  “Oh, but you do. I know the busted lip and black eye will heal, but I’m worried about that goose egg on the back of your head. That... thing was pounding you pretty hard.”

  “Thanks,” Adam muttered.

  Tony smiled. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

  “No. Look, we have to go dispose of that body in the alley. We can’t leave that there for SFPD.”

  Tony shook his head. “There won’t be a body. As we were leaving the alley, I saw the body turn to ash. There is only clothing left and a huge pile of ash both on the ground and in the dumpster. It’s like nature’s own disposal system.”

  Adam looked around to make sure nobody heard, then glared at Tony. “So you gonna tell me, first of all, how you’re so strong, and second, how you know so much about vampires? Your comment to Edward and Richard didn’t go unnoticed. You said you dealt with them in Seattle.”

  Tony took a deep breath. He was wondering how long he’d be able to keep this from Adam. When he was working for the FBI in Seattle, they didn’t work on supernatural cases, so aside from the occasional suspect chase, nobody could really tell Tony was more than human; special and powerful. He thought he owed it to Adam to explain what he was and how he had become that way. After all, if he was open-minded enough to believe in vampires and shapeshifters, hopefully he wouldn’t be too disbelieving of what he had to say.

  “How old would you say I am, Adam?”

  Adam’s eyebrows bunched together. “Well, that’s an odd question. What does it have to do with the fact that you’re as strong as Superman?”

  “Humor me,” Tony replied.

  “I don’t know. Thirty?”

  Tony smiled. “I’m seventy-five years old. I was born in Italy in 1871.”

  “That’s not possible. You’re not a vampire, are you?” He shrank back from Tony.

  “No, I’m simply called an Immortal. I belong to a very small, elite sect of people who police the supernatural. I think it’s great the United States government has decided to do the same, but you must know, we’ve been doing it a lot longer.”

  Adam shook his. “How hard did I hit my head?”

  Tony laughed. “I’m serious. We’re granted immortality by a group of sylphs who inhabit an island in the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “What in the hell is a sylph?”

  “It’s sort of a faerie, if you will. Almost like a sorceress. They have an elixir we take every five years to keep us from aging. Also with that comes one spec
ial power.”

  “Let me guess, yours is super-strength?” Adam said facetiously.

  Tony shook his head. “No, actually it’s not. The added strength and heightened senses, like hearing and eyesight, go with the immortality, but you haven’t seen super-strength until you’ve seen Jonathan Murphy in action.”

  Adam gasped. “The owner of the Murphy Architecture Building?”

  “Yes, the very same. He’s a very, very old Immortal, one of the first, I believe.”

  “Ya know, now that you say that, he did seem pretty strange.”

  Tony laughed. “He’s English. What can I say?”

  “That explains the strange accent. You can’t really notice it unless you pay close attention,” Adam said. “And I am a close-attention-paying kind of guy.”

  Tony chuckled and patted Adam on the back. “Yes, you are.”

  “So, if I’m to believe all this, I think I need more proof. It’s just so unbelievable to me.”

  Tony nodded and pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open. Adam watched curiously, then in horror as Tony pushed up his sleeve and sliced a two inch cut into the underside of his forearm. Blood trickled down the caramel colored skin of his arm.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” Adam gasped.

  “Just watch.”

  Adam stared at the cut and watched as it slowly began to knit itself together. After about 90 seconds, there was nothing there at all, not even a scar.

  He looked up at Tony and shook his head. “I need a cigarette.”

  PART II: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – 1963

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  Special Agent Christian Estes leaned back in his chair, drumming a pencil against his large oak desk. He was completely lost in his thoughts as he pondered the photos spread out on his desk. They just didn’t make sense, and to make matters worse, they’d arrived anonymously via U.S. mail with no return address.

  Christian couldn’t figure out why someone would mail the FBI a series of photographs depicting a dark-skinned woman stripping her clothes off and seemingly turning into a large cat. Clearly this was a joke; these photos had to have been doctored.

  Right?

  Christian had used a large, heavy magnifying glass to study the pictures closely. They seemed to be legit, but he would let the lab analyze them. New, cutting-edge technology was being developed, like detection of fingerprints, and he would utilize that technology to see if he could identify the sender of these strange, yet intriguing photos.

  “What’cha got there, Estes?”

  Christian looked up to see his boss, Al Cartwright, standing in his doorway. Al’s small stature did not match his large attitude. Al was the SAC of the FBI’s Chicago field office, and he never let anyone forget it. Been at the job almost twenty years, and was nearing retirement.

  “Hey, boss,” Christian said. “Just some pictures I got in the mail.”

  Al adjusted his skinny black tie and walked to Christian’s desk. He took some reading glasses from his shirt pocket and slid them on. As he peered down at them, he gasped when he saw the last two photos. “Where did you get these, you say?”

  “In the mail.”

  “Do you still have the envelope?” Al asked.

  Christian nodded and pulled it out from the top drawer of his desk, handing it to Al.

  Al flipped it over then back to the front. “No return address, of course.” Then he sniffed it.

  Christian was watching him curiously and raised an eyebrow. “Smell any evidence on there?”

  “No, smartass, I don’t.”

  Christian chuckled. “Okay well, what do you make of these then? I mean, what is this? A hoax?”

  Al removed his glasses and slid them back into his shirt pocket. He stared at him for a long minute before asking, “Christian, how old are you?”

  “Uh, just turned twenty-nine, boss.”

  “What made you want to become an FBI agent?” Al asked.

  Christian smiled. “Nothing specific, just always knew I wanted to be a cop, but my parents made me go to college. So I figured FBI would be a good way to keep them happy, and myself. Got myself a degree in Criminal Justice.”

  Al sat on the edge of Christian’s desk. He studied Christian’s wavy light brown hair and the wonder and excitement in his blue eyes. He remembered being so young and excited to be working in federal law enforcement and the thrill of it all. “You think you have an open mind, Chris?”

  Christian nodded. “Yes, I’d like to think so.”

  “We have an elite branch of the Bureau that nobody really knows about. It’s pretty hush-hush but if you’re interested, I can see if I can get you in.”

  Christian’s eyes lit up. “Really? What kind of work is it?”

  Al’s eyes slipped down to the photos on his desk, then looked back up at Christian. “Stuff like this.” He jabbed at the photo of the large cat with his stubby forefinger.

  “Are you saying these photos are real? Like this lady just stripped her clothes off in Lincoln Park and literally turned into this damn tiger or whatever this is?”

  Al squinted at the pictures. “That cat has spots. I’d say it’s probably a leopard.”

  “I don’t give a good god damn what it is! You believe this broad turned into this cat? Come on, Al, shoot straight with me here.”

  “What do you believe, Special Agent Estes?” Al’s tone and facial expressions were almost mocking.

  Christian raked a hand through his hair and blew out a breath, leaning back in his chair as if to get some distance from the offending pictures. “Honestly, I don’t know. The pictures look real enough, it’s just that...”

  “It’s incomprehensible that this could actually happen,” Al finished for him.

  Christian nodded. “Yes.”

  “Son, these pictures are real. That is a shapeshifter. The Justice Department has a branch of agents who handle these things. You interested?”

  Christian’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you screwing with me?”

  Al laughed. “No, I’m not. You want in?”

  Christian nodded. “Oh, hell yes I want in. When do I start?”

  ∞∞∞

  The fourteen-week course had been both grueling and informative. Sent away to a remote town in Georgia for training, he’d been practically sequestered for the entire fourteen weeks on a large former military base, converted for training of all federal law enforcement, including his... special branch.

  His mind was both on fire and numb at the same time. His body was now more fit than it had ever been, and his nerves – shot. So much information was fed to him during his training that by the time it was done, he wasn’t sure if he was excited or terrified to get back in the field and actually start learning how to both deal with and detain these creatures that roamed the cities and towns of Illinois.

  Hell, the whole country, for that matter – according to his instructors.

  Not much was known about the shapeshifters and vampires, but what they did know was that both species were essentially immortal, meaning they didn’t age, were not susceptible to disease, and could heal quickly. It did not, however, mean that they couldn’t die. The shifters were especially vulnerable to death in their animal forms, as a lot of times they were caught off-guard, distracted by things around them.

  “The easiest way to kill one is to shoot it, either with a gun, an arrow, whatever, then once its down, stab it in the heart or cut its head off,” Annette said to Christian as they sat in a parked car.

  The pair was assigned to watch the house of an alleged local vampire clan, and they’d been parked about an hour in the dark across from a large mansion that sat on the edge of a lake. The mansion was surrounded by a black wrought iron fence. Occasionally, Dobermans could be seen roaming the property. Two small windows high on the third floor were lit up, and aside from the flickering of decorative outside lights, no other activity was happening in the house that they could see.

  “And how do
you know so much about how to kill them?” Christian asked, sliding a piece of gum from its wrapper and folding it neatly into his mouth while fixing Annette with an intense stare.

  Annette watched the gum slip into Christian’s mouth past his full lips and perfect teeth and realized he had asked her something. She smiled at him, her light brown eyes flashing with embarrassment.

  He grinned at her. “How do you know so much about these things?” He pointed at the mansion.

  “Well, I transferred from the L.A. field office. I had my fair share of run-ins with vamps and shifters.”

  Christian studied her pretty pale elfin face that was peppered with freckles, and wondered if her curly red hair was as soft as it looked. “You’re awfully young to not only be an agent, but to have already been in long enough to have earned a transfer.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not as young as I look. Besides,” she said, plucking the pack of gum from his shirt pocket and helping herself to a piece, “I was done with California. I had a friend there who was from Chicago and she told me all about it, so I decided to transfer here, see if I liked it or not.”

  “Well, do you?”

  She flipped the gum into her mouth and shook her head. “Ya know, it’s too early to tell. I think I need to experience more of the nightlife, see some shows, that sort of thing.”

  He nodded. “I also hear you’re the first female BSI agent. Not very common to have broads as agents, let alone in this division.” He turned his head to look at the mansion once again, lifting a set of heavy black binoculars to his eyes to make sure they didn’t miss anybody coming or going.

  Annette didn’t want to, but she took a little peek into Christian’s mind. She didn’t care about where he came from or how much money he made, she was more curious to see if he had a problem with a female partner. His mind seemed to be on the house at the time though, but she really didn’t get the feeling that he would treat a female colleague in a derogatory manner or that he held any deep-seated chauvinistic views.

  “Yeah, well I aced all the tests and beat out most of the guys in both physical tests and speed at the academy, so it’s not like they could refuse me. Besides, I make good bait, don’t I?”