Operation Blackout

by J. L. Middleton

  Orion crossed his arms and ended up hugging them closer to his chest. “If you knew all that, why did we even come here?” He was starting to feel as if Connor was purposely withholding information, though he didn’t know to what effect. Because he was artistically inclined, socially withdrawn, and managing a household, he tended to shy away from straight intellectual challenges; he found that he was generally too fatigued to attempt them, and he felt that his energy reserves were better kept for his daily tasks. Being Connor’s partner was exhausting enough, and the gauntlet of new information, techniques, and problems to be solved was starting to push him over the edge. This training was like college on steroids, only he was starting as a senior and not a freshman, and an inkling that he wasn’t up to the task was starting to eat away at him, further feeding into his anxieties.

  “To teach you some skills,” Connor quipped as he pocketed his phone. “Besides, it’s not like I knew it was going to be a dead end when I brought you here. Mr. Trainor might’ve known something and cracked the case wide open. We’re the first BSI agents to interview him.” He paused briefly, absorbing Orion’s posture, and then observed, “You’re acting sullen. You’re not picking up your sister’s personality, are you?” Not even waiting for a reply—which probably wouldn’t have come, despite how much Orion wanted to rebuke the agent for his teaching style—he continued, “At any rate, our next step is to regroup. I’ve got hard copies back in the room, so you can look over them and tell me what to do next.”

  While Cassie would’ve had a snappy retort about Connor’s mentorship skills, Orion could only nod passively as they departed. If he could survive his sister’s capricious moods, he could tolerate the agent’s feeble attempts at clever banter and rapport.

  - - -

  She finally exits the bar, her gloved hands wrapped tightly around his arm. He leans in to kiss her, as he has all night, and she pulls away coyly, telling him to wait just a bit longer as she caresses his face with her gloved hand. They pass through the acrid smell of cigarettes and duck into a darkened alleyway. She rests her hands on his shirt collar, which is dirty and in need of a wash by knowledgeable hands, and she inhales his woody cologne again. This time, she pushes through the sour cloud clinging to him, grips his collar tightly, and presses her lips firmly against his. His reaction is delayed by the expected pleasure of her touch, but panic quickly sets in as he feels something being drained out of him. She is certain that it is his life force or some intangible part of his soul, and she always imagined it to be his power. She is seizing back her power from him and letting it fill her core. Her revenge electrifies her skin, and she feels as if she can do anything. She feels alive!

  Lena started awake. She could still feel the pulsating of his energy beneath her skin, as if it were flowing through her veins now and not the demon’s. It was intoxicating, and it was almost as if she could understand the demon’s need to hunt men.

  She rolled out of bed abruptly, purposely landing hard on the floor in the pushup position to jolt her thoughts from the dream and reject its siren song. She remembered releasing his empty husk and watching it fall unnoticed to the pavement. She was sweaty, despite the night’s coolness, and she decided to put the dampness to use. She skipped the pushups, instead opting to pull herself up in the doorway where a metal bar hung, and she continued until her cold perspiration was replaced by heat and stickiness.

  Hunts were always difficult: Immersing oneself in a demon without losing one’s purpose was a challenge. Her senses worked by honing in on the demons and slipping into their minds slowly before an event so she could locate them easily and stop any crime from occurring. Sometimes, she was unlucky—she didn’t always piece the clues together in time—but even when she failed, she still saw the next kill through the demons’ eyes. Most of them were bloodthirsty killers who were little better than animals as they stalked their prey in small towns, cities, and other places where they could live undetected. She wished that they would congregate in a den instead of living individually; it would be expeditious to kill several demons at once, and she could potentially save many more lives if she didn’t have to hunt down each one separately.

  The demons’ methods of killing were strangely human. After tricking their prey into trusting them, they often resorted to mediocre means of disposal, such as strangling or stabbing their victims, and none seemed to know what to expect of Lena when she confronted them. Once cornered, all animals choose to fight back if given the chance, and demons were no exception. Some fled, hoping that their victims would provide a roadblock, but she single-mindedly chased the demons down like a hound and slew them. Others fought back using improvised weaponry—a knife, a discarded plank of wood, or even a length of pipe— but they rarely chose to use their infernal abilities.

  In fact, she had encountered only one individual who had, and she had been fortunate enough to corner him alone in his lair. He’d pitched a strange semifluid substance like melting snowballs at her, and it had sizzled without heat against everything it had touched, bubbling and hissing against corrugated walls and cheap floor tiles and gutting pitted surfaces. The viscous material had eaten through her jacket, which she’d quickly shrugged off before it had been able to burn her newly exposed skin. She’d taken cover behind a wall, shot the monster in the head with her gun, and watched as it had exploded, splashing the angry liquid everywhere. This demon matched the nightmares that haunted her: creatures who used a supernatural power, which was an unearthly magic that they could twist to their will.

  Lena lifted her body and twisted until her calves were secure between the bar and the lintel. She crossed her muscled arms over her chest and breathed deeply before she pulled her torso up, exercising her abs. This hunt felt different. Whenever she completed her connection with a demon, she was able to push its feelings to the back of her mind; she was only a spectator searching for clues. But this one—this woman—made her empathize, and yet she couldn’t glean as much information as she normally did at this stage. Lena must not be focusing hard enough. The “woman” was a demon who fed on men; she had witnessed this and felt the hunger herself. There was no justification for the murder of humans, no matter how it made “her” feel.

  She jumped down after unhooking her legs and went into the next room to tire herself out with the punching bag. She had dyed her hair jet-black like the demon’s, and she had bought and worn the same brands of makeup in an effort to generate clearer nocturnal visions. Despite knowing the entire murder—from the moment the demon confronted the victim to his helpless death at her hands—she had lacked the essential details to narrow her search properly. After listening to accents and examining the news station on the bar’s television, she’d determined that she was in New York City. Unfortunately, there had been several bars called Red Bull, a name that she’d managed to pull off a napkin, and searches had been further confused by the energy drink and a New York-based soccer team. But despite the difficulty of her search, she had managed to narrow down the demon’s hunting ground to a handful of bars and she raced the invisible countdown to the demon’s slaughter to stop her before it was committed. Now, she also had to contend with the insidious notion that she may not want to kill this demon.

  - - -

  Orion heaved a heavy sigh as he shifted his weight and stretched his shoulders. He leaned over a map of the city that was spread out over his kitchen table. The places where the bodies had been found had been marked in red, and the victims’ paths from the bar that they had left with the mystery woman had been traced in black. One of them had strolled a significant distance before he’d reached a sufficiently isolated alleyway, while the other two had been found less than a block away from their respective bars. He ran his hand through his rough curls, and they came to rest on the nape of his neck, which he began to massage to ease his frustration. He couldn’t see a pattern, despite Connor’s insistence that there would be one. He read over t
he reports repeatedly, looking for any additional clues he may have missed; they reminded him of the logic puzzles his mother would do on lazy Sundays when he’d been a child. She’d tried to interest him in them as well, but he’d preferred crossword puzzles and Connecting the Dots; the latter was ironic since he was failing to do so now.

  He looked up at the agent, who was likewise bent over the map; his jaw was set, and he wore an intense expression. He was scowling, which Orion had come to realize was his resting face, and his hands were stretched out on each side; one hand brushed against a cold, forgotten cup of coffee. He’d loosened his tie, which hung like a noose against his unbuttoned shirt, and his dark hair seemed to have relaxed as well, the gel loosening its hold on the unruly strands and allowing wisps to curl in the humidity. He was muttering to himself while tracing lines with his finger and staring intently at signs that only his expert eyes saw. Orion found himself wondering if the older man had ever been married; he had yet to mention a past relationship, and though his left hand was distinctively unmarked, he decided the real giveaway was Connor’s messy appearance. Orion was no neat freak himself, but maintaining a clean apartment made herding his sister a lot easier and generally improved his mood.

  He wondered how his precious sister was adapting to her new life. He’d been warned not to contact her until the media frenzy surrounding their parents’ deaths had subsided. While she was hidden from the limelight, he was easier to track down, and through him, the media could potentially locate her. He’d declined any interviews, regardless of the payday involved. This was due not only to his own social anxiety but also to the fact that he wasn’t emotionally ready to confront the repulsive truth about his parents’ double lives, and he’d decided to focus on saving his sister instead. For the first few weeks, he’d written his thoughts in a journal with the intent to share them with Cassie later. Even though she was at the age where she wanted to reject the values of their parents—in this case, it would be his—he thought the tragedy that had befallen them would instead bring her closer to him, so he waited patiently until he felt it was safe to contact her.

  Cassie had been placed in Pennsylvania with another professional couple, although this pair worked directly for the government; he forgot exactly how, but one worked for the local police department, and the other held some sort of administrative position with the DHS in Washington, D.C. He’d insisted that he had to approve of Cassie’s new caretakers, as he was technically her guardian now, and the couple had seemed nice when they’d met. Timothy and Charlene Vicker were older and apparently experienced parents, though their son had died in a car accident four years ago. The three of them discussed Cassie’s health and what Orion expected for her, and they seemed to be the parents the two siblings should have had. Unsurprisingly, Cassie expressed contempt toward the Vickers, but he suspected that she was secretly grateful for the chance at normalcy and a loving home.

  “So what now?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  The agent looked up at him. “We’re still looking,” he grunted.

  Orion sighed again. “I mean, we’ve been staring at the map for hours, and we haven’t made any progress. What’s the next step? I don’t see a pattern here,” he declared, his frustration evident. “You don’t have to do this every time, do you?”

  “No,” Connor acknowledged. “Most of the time, I’m not assigned to cold cases, and make no mistake: That’s what this is, even if we’ve got a corpse in the morgue. If I am, I usually have backup, like an analyst of some sort,” he said. He reiterated that this case was meant to teach Orion what field conditions could be like, but it was just as likely that he would be doing work similar to this when he was reassigned back to the home office on Plum Island as a new type of analyst. Orion wasn’t happy with this revelation, but he refrained from expressing it, aside from a dejected grimace. Connor went on to explain that he’d purposely chosen a slow, likely unsolvable case to allow Orion to learn the techniques in a comfortable environment—namely, his hometown. Orion abstained from informing him that New York City was decidedly an uncomfortable environment for him at the moment.

  “There will be a lot of dead ends,” the agent assured him. “Even with the BSI’s considerable resources, we can’t always track down an Other on the first try. If they aren’t out there exposing themselves, it could take years. Our techniques are improving, though. A few years ago, I’d probably have to wait for this to all arrive by mail or fax instead of a handy-dandy download.” He grinned with typical snarkiness. “Or I could’ve brought it with me, but you know how airlines overcharge for luggage these days.” He looked down at the map and studied it for a moment, brushing his hand across its surface. His fingers hesitated, and then he pointed at a small, hole-in-the-wall bar in a part of town that Orion knew to avoid, especially after dark. “I think we should visit here tonight. Have ourselves a little stakeout.”

  Orion moved so that he could see the map from the agent’s angle, but he didn’t see any pattern that might connect to the rest of the murders. “Why?”

  “Because these are her hunting grounds, so to speak, and we’ll get a feel of it and maybe where to head next.” His half-cocked grin widened. “And because you also need to learn to function on little sleep and being stuck for hours on end with someone you can’t stand,” he quipped. “Besides, it’ll do you some good to get out once in a while and have some fun.”

  Orion groaned. “I thought stakeouts were conducted with advanced planning,” he said, pointedly meaning the need to have adequate sleep. It was still early evening, but the bars in the city tended to never close. He’d managed to be invited to a few in his first year of college, but disgusted by the clouds of smoke and the obnoxious behavior of the other patrons, he hadn’t been back since. Besides, he couldn’t be responsible for his sister if he was drunk, and it was easier to be constantly available for her just in case than to try to live his own life.

  The agent nodded. “That’s the idea, but we don’t always have that luxury. Besides, it’ll be like a night on the town. We’ll get in a few drinks and see if we can pick up that special someone. Hell, we might even get lucky.” He winked cheekily.

  - - -

  The bitter flood of adrenaline hit her veins the moment Jody saw him. She had been strolling casually toward her hunting grounds to waste another night lying in wait, when he crossed the street in front of her. The tall man straddled the boundary of forty, but the lines in his face aged him by decades, and his soldierly bearing revealed the cause to those who’d also experienced life in the service. His dark brown hair was just a quarter inch too long, and his strong jaw was masked by stubble, which he rubbed with irritation and undoubtedly felt the need to shave, even though no regulation required him to anymore. He wore jeans and a tattered shirt and moved through the dangerous neighborhood with unconcerned ease. Despite all of her careful investigation—the nights spent stalking him silently from the bar to his residence and the mornings when she observed him stumbling between work and infuriating visits to the local veteran’s office—she could not guess why he had chosen this bar as his haunt.

  It didn’t matter to her anyway. In all likelihood, the crime-infested neighborhood reminded him of his glory days and placed him into the element in which he was most comfortable. He sauntered with confidence, but not the same that she exuded; his was that of an alpha who dared anyone to challenge his dominance. She knew instinctually that he could put down men like dogs and force women to submit to his will. He belonged in the perpetual war of violent streets, not the civility of the modern First World.

  Her hatred for him had been honed into a weapon in the weeks since she’d first spotted him in the bar. She had only observed him from a distance and had seen how well he’d treated those around him and how he’d blended into both civilization and gangland with ease. When she had seen enough, she’d decided that this target had to be the next animal she
crushed.

  He entered the bar, and she was only minutes behind him. Her entrance was unremarkable, and she sat down alone and bided her time until the moment was right. A combination of sweet innocence and coquettish naughtiness, she was all smiles when she sashayed up to him. She caressed his shirt coyly with her gloved hands, deflecting his comment about their oddity with a quip about eccentricity and secret fetishes. Even though her skin crawled with revulsion, the fabrics between them protected her from harm, and she suppressed any non-seductive expressions. Finally, after enough teasing and a staunch affirmation that any act between them did not require an exchange of currency, she convinced him to follow her back to her apartment. She hooked her satin-covered arm around his while her free hand traced lines into his shirt, and she carefully ensured that only her breath touched his ear.

  - - -

  Lena knew that it was the demon as soon as she walked into the room. She saw the evil of its aura surround her like a dark cocoon concealing a full monster soon ready to emerge from its chrysalis. Unlike the demons who had preceded her, the woman was almost unremarkable; yes, she exuded innocence in an adorable way, but she also lacked the marked deformations: the snaggletooth, monobrow, unnaturally long fingers, or other signs that Lena had gleaned from folklore, old wives tales, and esoteric texts. She was small—almost like a malnourished child—and it struck a chord of sympathy in Lena’s hardened heart. The demon sat alone at the bar, and Lena had half a mind to sit next to her and strike up a conversation. She already knew her target intimately, so maybe she could persuade her to cease her lethal activities through simple dialogue rather than violent confrontation. Considering how harmless the child-demon appeared, it was possible that this would be her first murder, and Lena could set her on a path away from wickedness.