“Neither do I,” Jeff said. “We haven’t done anything more with the girl’s body, for the moment, but we have had the other victims checked. The best the doctors can suggest is that all five of them were torn apart by a powerful animal of some kind, perhaps an oversized dog. They pulled animal hairs out of the blood; they just haven’t been able to match them to anything.”
Matt leaned forward. “So there was an animal!”
“It seems that way,” Jeff agreed. “We’ve managed to identify two of the victims, both known gang-bangers. The other two males and the girls remain unidentified so far, but we’re only just starting. No doubt something will surface to tell us who they were and what they were doing in that alleyway.”
He looked up, sharply. “Another odd datum,” he added. “The girl you shot was badly stained with blood from all five animal victims. We’ve had it checked against the others and it is definitely their blood. And she doesn't seem to have any animal hairs on her.”
Matt stared down at his hands. “So what the fuck happened?”
“We don’t know,” Jeff said. The Internal Affairs officer shook his head. “It’s turning into a horrible mess – and it will get worse once the media catches wind of it. We have to take action to show that we’re on top of the situation and we don't know what action to take.”
Matt scowled. The NYPD couldn't afford another scandal, not after a series of scandals involving police forces had plagued the nation. Coppers had shot innocent men, or arrested the wrong person, or been politically involved...the list went on and on. He had a nasty feeling that McLain was about to throw him under the bus in the hopes that it would distract attention from the NYPD itself.
“We tested your blood,” Jeff added. They’d taken a sample as soon as they’d suspected that Matt might have been under the influence. “No drugs, no alcohol, nothing that might have affected your judgement.” He didn't quite say that Matt might have been born with poor judgement, but the training should have taught him better. “We really don’t know what happened to you, or to her. The physical evidence is...somewhat murky.”
He frowned. “But we do know that you shot the girl, which means that we have to take action. For the moment, pending the outcome of an investigation, you will be suspended from duty and barred from talking to the media. In the event that they manage to identify you, we will take you into protective custody for your own safety. You don’t want the media trying and convicting you before we actually know what happened.”
Matt nodded. Under the circumstances, it was the best they could do. They had to suspend him until they knew what had actually happened, even if they believed his story. Besides, it would give him a chance to sleep and to try to come to terms with what had happened. There was no avoiding the fact that he’d put three slugs into a girl and killed her.
Jeff stood up. “We’d prefer it if you reviewed the instructions for suspended cops and followed them to the letter,” he said. “Don’t talk to the media, don’t try to run your own investigation and don’t leave the city. You may be expected to attend further interrogation sessions without warning.”
“Yeah,” Matt nodded. “I won’t leave the city.”
He caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror as Jeff escorted him out of the chamber and winced. Matt had never thought of himself as particularly handsome, but right now he looked haggard, as if he’d aged overnight. A good night’s sleep would cure the tiredness, yet it wouldn't do anything to mollify the guilt. The girl was dead and it was his fault and even though he’d acted in self-defence, or what he’d thought was self-defence, he’d still killed her.
The other officers in the station looked at him, and then looked away. Failure – and the attention of Internal Affairs – was contagious and they didn't want any of Matt’s troubles splattering over them. Matt knew exactly how they were feeling; Internal Affairs had a tendency to go on witch-hunts that did little more than threaten the careers of decent policemen. Jeff might appear to be an affable guy, but Matt knew that he – like all officers – was itching for the collar. Arresting a corrupt – or criminally negligent – policeman would go some way towards justifying Internal Affairs’ budget.
Jeff arranged for a car to drive Matt back to his apartment. Outside, it was still dark, with the full moon half-hidden under the clouds, but New York never slept. There were already a couple of reporters watching the police station, as if they expected something spectacular to appear right in front of him. Matt rolled his eyes; he’d seen enough reporters to know that they were just stringers, sent along to make sure all of the bases were covered. The really famous reporters were probably still in bed.
He’d never bothered to rent a proper apartment, which was probably why none of his girlfriends stayed with him for very long. Opening the door, he stumbled inside and crashed down on the sofa, closing his eyes tightly. He was just too keyed up to sleep with the bad coffee he’d drunk at the station. Eventually, he pulled himself to his feet and stumbled across to the laptop. Internal Affairs should have cancelled his access to the national police network of computers, but he knew logins from two of his comrades and those wouldn't have been changed. By now, the record of the incident in New York would have been entered into the system and linked to other cases. Matt felt his eyes widen as no less than three similar cases appeared in front of his eyes. Two of them involved fatalities, apparently caused by monstrous animals; the third claimed to have seen a young man become an animal. Separately, it was hard to take any such report seriously, but taking them all together...?
Matt sucked in a breath. What the hell was going on?
Chapter Two
Washington DC, USA
Day 2
“Something very weird is going on.”
Caitlyn Lyle scowled down at the computer screen and rubbed her eyes tiredly, cursing her former boss under her breath. The FBI was not above playing politics and Caitlyn had ended up taking most of the blame for matters that had been discussed well above a lowly Special Agent’s level. She had warned them that something was badly wrong with a pair of Arab-Americans who had links to Hamas, but nothing had been done until it had nearly been too late. Her boss – her former boss – had dispatched her to the Data Study Centre as punishment for being right when her superiors had been wrong. The only thing that had stopped him putting her in front of a board of inquiry had been the certain knowledge that the truth would have come out.
Bloody politicians, she thought sourly, as she clicked the mouse and brought up the next report. They pile on the red tape and political correctness and then start wondering why we can't do our jobs.
The Data Study Centre had grown out of the slow realisation that number-crunching and data-analysis could actually produce results. There were certain factors that pointed to the existence of crime, or terrorism, and careful study could often lead the FBI’s investigators to the perpetrators before they could get away with their crimes, or blow themselves up in the name of religion. Caitlyn’s current supervisor had uncovered a murderous doctor through cross-referencing files from a dozen different hospitals, all of which had suffered the same kind of mysterious death. A travelling serial killer could be detected by looking at reports from police departments in three or four states.
It wasn’t unknown for the crazies to come out when there was a full moon, but the files made it sound as if all hell had broken loose. There were reports of attacks all over the nation, all seemingly carried out by giant wolves; the media, in their typical style, were already talking about werewolves. Caitlyn had worked in the FBI long enough to know that the reported crimes were only a fraction of the whole. She knew that there was a good chance that there were any number of unreported crimes out there. What the hell was going on?
She would have suspected a serial killer, but there were two points mitigating against that theory. First, there were simply too many cases for a single man – or even a small group of men – to produce in a single night. Second, the damage inflicted
on the victims was staggeringly horrific. Caitlyn had read the reports from the doctors who had performed the autopsy and they’d agreed that the dead had all been attacked by wild animals. They hadn't been able to suggest any way in which a human could have produced one of the dead bodies, let alone all of them.
The media’s talking heads were suggesting, in their typically self-involved manner, that the whole affair might be a publicity stunt for one of the vampire or werewolf movies that was supposed to be coming out later in the year. Looking down at the reports, Caitlyn found that concept unbelievable. People had died! God knew that so-called reality television lived by detecting and exploiting human gullibility, but they wouldn't kill upwards of ninety people just for some damn publicity. If the reports weren't so unbelievable, even the stupidest talking head would have refused to believe the fake attack theory for a second.
Caitlyn shook her head and looked down at the report from New York again. It was unique in one respect; the wolf-like creature – she had to remind herself not to think of them as werewolves – had been shot, and apparently killed. But when the police had found the body, they’d found a young girl – not a giant wolf. It was easy to understand why the NYPD suspected that the officer had been engaged in professional misconduct, but looking at the overall picture Caitlyn could see that he’d been far from alone in shooting at the wolves. He’d just been the only one to actually kill the creature.
And the body they’d found had belonged to a human girl.
“Damn it,” Caitlyn said, with some feeling. Her instincts told her that the cop hadn’t faked anything, or come up with an insane story to justify his mistake. There were just too many similar cases all over the USA. “What the hell is going on?”
Thoughtfully, she tapped through the files, looking for the autopsy report on the dead girl. Annoyingly, one hadn't been carried out, something that puzzled her until she found the notation that there was no dispute over the cause of death. But, the report went on to say, there were no shortage of oddities about her body. She’d been covered in blood from everyone else who’d died at the crime scene.
Printing out a copy of the report, she stood up and headed for the elevator. Her superiors might not have realised just how bad the whole situation had become, already, which meant that she would have a chance to tell them. And, if she was lucky, wind up in charge of the task force assembled to deal with the crisis, whatever it was. It could be her chance to return to proper duties.
And she was sick of the Data Study Centre.
***
“The reports are thoroughly bizarre,” she said, ten minutes later. Mark Tomlinson, the Deputy Director of the FBI, had agreed to see her as soon as she arrived at his office, which suggested that someone high up was taking the whole affair very seriously. “All of them, for want of a better term, involve werewolves.”
“I hope you’re not going to put that in your report,” Tomlinson said. He smiled, but it didn't quite touch his eyes. “It won’t be easy to convince anyone to take it seriously if you put that word into an official FBI report.”
Caitlyn opened the folder she’d been carrying and produced a set of pictures. “Gwen Crichton,” she said. “Sixteen years old; born and bred on a ranch in Texas – died yesterday, after being attacked by what witnesses describe as a large black dog. The doctors all agree that nothing human could have inflicted such injuries so quickly.”
She tapped the second photograph. “Rupert Summers; fifty-seven years old, manager at a local grocery store in Chicago. Killed in his own store by a giant wolf; this time, we have the whole attack on CCTV. The beast crashes through the glass door and attacks him, ripping out his throat before he can escape.”
Tomlinson held up a hand. “I understand what you mean,” he said. He had been a Special Agent himself, once upon a time, but he’d been in upper-level management for years. “But if you are trying to convince me that something...supernatural is going on...”
“I don’t know what to suggest,” Caitlyn admitted. The FBI didn't really investigate the paranormal, at least outside television shows such as The X-Files. “Attacks by wild animals are not uncommon, but there are simply too many of them in a single night not to draw our attention. And then there was the girl who was shot.”
She produced a third photograph and passed it to her supervisor. “I think that something very weird is going on,” she added. “We need to investigate.”
Tomlinson studied the photo thoughtfully. “And is there a more...mundane theory for public consumption than werewolves?”
Caitlyn had given the matter some thought. “There are...chemicals that simulate fury in animals,” she said. The FBI had lost several agents to dogs who had been fed drugs that drove them into homicidal rage. “Someone could have doped several creatures with one of them and then let them out to cause havoc...”
“Which doesn't explain everything,” Tomlinson said. He rubbed his forehead. “And yet, if the media discovers that we’re looking at werewolves...”
“They’re already talking about werewolves,” Caitlyn reminded him, quietly. “It isn't going to go away if we bury our heads in the sand. This could be nothing, or it could be another 9/11 plot.”
Tomlinson scowled. Fifteen years had passed since 9/11, but the memory of just how badly the FBI – and the CIA, along with every other intelligence and counter-terrorism service – had let the country down still rankled. Three thousand Americans would have survived if the data had been looked at properly, without inter-agency fighting and political correctness getting in the way.
“Right,” he said, finally. “How do you propose we proceed?”
Caitlyn smiled. “The incident in New York is the one that stands out,” she said. “I suggest that we investigate it carefully, starting with an autopsy for the girl who was shot. Several other reports say that people fired at the wild animals, but this was the only one that produced a body. Either there was something in the air, or something very weird happened last night.”
“It wouldn't be the first time some cop on duty made a tragic mistake,” Tomlinson pointed out. He tapped the table thoughtfully. “Very well, Agent Lyle; you’re officially in charge of figuring out what the hell is going on. I’ll speak to the Director and put together a task force, under your command. If worst comes to worst, we can always brand it another exercise in fostering communications between departments.”
“Thank you, sir,” Caitlyn said. It was what she wanted, after all, even though she knew that her career would not survive a second failure. Tomlinson would have grounds for claiming that he had allowed her some rope to hang herself, if the entire affair proved to be nothing more than a waste of time. “With your permission, I will leave for New York immediately. The body can be transferred from the morgue to the FBI building in the city and dissected. We need to know what happened to her, and why.”
“Good luck,” Tomlinson said. He wrote out a travel pass, allowing her to draw a vehicle from the motor pool or board a plane on the FBI’s dime, and then nodded. “Find out what the hell is going on.”
***
The new world was...eerie.
Golem walked down a street, hidden behind a concealing glamour, slowly taking in his surroundings. A human would have had real problems accepting what he was seeing, let alone comprehending it, but Golem was very far from human. Seemingly impossible sights – carriages moving with neither horses nor magic, or flickering squares displaying images of people or places – were nothing more than another piece of data on just what had happened since mana had faded from the world. Clearly, the human race had found another way to bend nature to its will.
The population looked healthy and happy, perhaps healthier than the population had been, back before Golem had been buried to wait for the mana to return. They wore clothes made from materials Golem couldn't recognise, some of them so thin and patchy that he’d taken the women for sorceresses, women so powerful that none would dare to molest them. But there was barely enough man
a in the air to support the concealing glamour hiding his true nature, let alone a full-fledged sorceress. The immodest clothes, he realised slowly, were their standard form of dress. This society was happy and confident in a way that his old society had never been, even before the Thirteen.
There were towering buildings, reaching up so high that they seemed to brush against the sky, so tall that Golem found it hard to imagine how they’d been built without magic. They might not have been floating in the air, but they were remarkable, far larger than any mundane structure he’d seen in the old world. Strange metal objects flew through the air, big enough to be dragons, if all the dragons hadn't died out during the war with the Thirteen. Golem couldn't even begin to understand how they flew – there wasn’t enough mana in the air to support a child, let alone something the size of a dragon – but the puzzle wasn't important. It was just another piece of data for him to contemplate while continuing his mission.
He found it hard to understand the various shops he was looking at, even when he tried to draw comparisons between the new shops and the ones he recalled from before his slumber. Some seemed to sell potions, or drugs; others seemed to see objects that meant nothing to him, although they seemed very important to the scurrying humans all around him. It was almost a relief when he found the bookshop and walked inside, looking around for the historical section. He needed to know what had happened in the thousands of years he’d been sleeping under the ocean.
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