ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy

by Glynn Stewart

  As they made their way through the restaurant, he noted that each room had a brass nameplate with the name of one of the states on it. The Arkansas Room was at the very back of the club, where the cheap drywall gave away to concrete walls.

  “Here you go, sir,” she told him, stopping by the Arkansas door. “There’s a tablet inside to place your orders with. Your host knows the drill; he’s a long-standing member.”

  “Thank you, Tiffany,” David replied. With a smile and a nod to the girl, he stepped through the door into the private room.

  The interior was closer to what he’d been expecting from the private club, all dark wood panels and heavy curtains blocking out any natural light. The room and table were large enough for a meeting of eight or more, but only two chairs and places had been set at the table.

  “Please, Commander White, have a seat,” the man already sitting there told him in the same softly accented voice. “I took the liberties of ordering some appetizers; I understand that you had some trouble yesterday, and major regeneration is always hard on the system.”

  David slowly sat, making sure to keep his shoulder holster clear, just in case. A plate of wings, still steaming with heat, sat in front of his table.

  The man across the table would have passed for middle-aged at a passing glance, black-haired but with streaks of gray at his temples. Further study would have suggested that was too high, as his skin was far too smooth and young-looking for his age—but his green eyes looked far more ancient than anything else.

  This was a man, after all, who’d been born while the United States were the Thirteen Colonies.

  “Mr. Dresden,” he said quietly, “you’ll forgive me if I don’t trust food you have prepared.”

  Dresden chuckled, a surprisingly warm and velvety sound.

  “I am not, despite what you think, your enemy, Commander,” he replied. “I am also not your friend. You do have standing orders to exterminate my species; it’s a…minor impediment to positive relations.”

  “Given that the Familias decided to shoot up an ONSET operation and kill a number of people under my command barely two days ago, I’m relatively certain you’re my enemy, Mr. Dresden.”

  “I heard about that, yes,” he allowed. “You cut Tatiana Romanov’s face in two, Commander. If there was nothing else going on here, that alone would have endeared you to me.

  “The food is safe; I certainly haven’t touched it, and the staff here is fantastic,” he continued. “And what you must understand, or this entire conversation is a waste of both of our times, is that I had no involvement in the attack on your team two nights ago.

  “Indeed, ‘the Familias’ as you mean it was not involved in that attack,” Dresden finished flatly. “That was purely and entirely an operation of the Romanov Family.”

  “Really,” David said unbelievingly. “There is nothing in the history of your Familias for me to believe you suddenly have rogue operations.”

  “My grandfather controlled the Familias Noctus with an iron hand,” Dresden told him. “While he lived, none of the Family leaders would have defied him. But someone cut him to pieces.”

  The vampire sighed and shook his head.

  “What you seem to have missed, and I am frankly surprised that Omicron has not caught up to this, is that the Familias Noctus is currently in a state best described as…well, civil war. Petrov Romanov has decided that his allegiance was sworn to Marcus Dresden, not to some permanent organizational structure of the Familias Noctus.

  “While the Dresden Family feels that I, as Marcus’s heir, lead the Familias Noctus, Petrov Romanov believes that the Romanov Family is more powerful and, therefore, he should lead.”

  Dresden shrugged.

  “The rest of the Familias appear to have decided to let us fight it out, most likely with the intent of devouring whichever of us survives,” he concluded. “The Familias Noctus, as Omicron is used to dealing with it, does not currently exist, Commander. What you have are multiple factions maneuvering for advantage.”

  “And you’re telling me this why?” David asked slowly. It made sense of a lot of things—if nothing else, it explained why a gunrunner working for the vampires appeared to be have been killed by vampires. Omicron had been seeing the Familias’s actions through the lens of their history, but Marcus Dresden had led the vampire alliance for their entire known history. His death had changed everything.

  “Frankly, Commander, I’m looking for an edge to reclaim control of the Familias,” Dresden said calmly. “If I thought I could convince Omicron to negotiate in good faith, I’d offer my soldiers for the very cause you’re trying to recruit the Elfin for.”

  The kind of elite shock troops that had assaulted Talon Security would be a powerful ally in the struggle with the demon incursions, but the price was not something David would expect anyone in Omicron to consider.

  “We don’t negotiate with bloodsucking monsters,” David told him.

  “There are compromises that could be made, Commander. We do not need to kill to feed, after all.”

  “But you do kill,” the ONSET Commander pointed out. When they’d launched the raid where David had killed Marcus Dresden, they’d rescued a dozen prisoners kept locked up as cattle for the vampires—and retrieved half a dozen bodies.

  “We are sentenced to death for existing,” Dresden replied. “We have no incentive to find that compromise.”

  “Most people don’t need an incentive not to kill. Omicron could never trust your murderers and scum; what would be in it for you?”

  “I don’t want to see the world burn any more than you do. I like this world. You’ve got Learjets and Ferraris and Teslas. And you’ve got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs.” Dresden smiled, baring his fangs.

  “I’m also known to enjoy your presentation of vampires in fiction. How boring a world run by the Masters Beyond would become, presuming we somehow survived their conquest.

  “But”—he sighed—“you would never trust us. We could never trust you.”

  Dresden wasn’t wrong about the standing orders to exterminate vampires. Omicron regarded vampirism, the “Noctus virus”, as equivalent to rabies. A vaccine could prevent transformation, even after infection, but once transformed, the only remaining option was euthanasia.

  And given that vampires became fast, strong, and hungry after transformation, that euthanasia was generally delivered by high-velocity silver.

  David could see why the vampires wouldn’t be willing to trust Omicron.

  “If that’s a lost cause, why are we even talking? If this is a glorified suicide by cop, you could have picked somewhere less public,” he snapped at Dresden.

  “I doubt you’d find a fight with me as easy as you found my grandfather,” Caleb Dresden said harshly. “Right now, our respective backup teams are circling each other, trying to decide whether opening fire is going to wreck this fragile truce. My grandfather was not expecting you. I am—I know your skills, Commander. I know your speed, your strength, the power of the demon-forged blade you wield.”

  He smiled again.

  “You are a dangerous, dangerous man, but I am not the lord of the Familias Dresden because I cannot defend myself. I did not come here to fight you.”

  “Then why?”

  “I am not your enemy today,” he repeated. “And you are my enemy’s enemy. The Romanov Family understands the same problem I do: if we fight each other directly, the rest of the Familias will eat whoever survives alive.

  “So Petrov Romanov went looking for allies. And found them among the Elfin Lords. Their price was high and he paid it gladly.”

  “My god…” David whispered.

  “Everything you have seen so far, Petrov Romanov set into motion,” Dresden concluded. “He has spent little but money so far, though Tatiana’s death was unexpected. In exchange, his contact will feed locations of my strongholds and bases to the Elfin Warriors—and when the deal finally goes through, to ONSET as
well.

  “He will unleash the Familias’s enemies on my Family and win the war without firing a shot himself. I have no intention of being so easily destroyed, Commander White. We share a cause in the preservation of…parahumanity, shall we say?

  “It’s the term my scientists prefer for base humanities and us Mantled individuals as well,” he pointed out.

  “Omicron is not my friend, but you serve a purpose for me,” he continued. “A shield, a defense I will not lightly toss aside. I want you to complete your alliance. I want you to stand between me and the Masters Beyond.”

  “The Familias made this whole mess possible,” David pointed out. “You were supplying the Church of the Black Sun.”

  “My grandfather may have known their plans,” Dresden allowed. “Certainly, no one else did. We knew they planned to weaken ONSET. I don’t think even my grandfather knew how much damage they planned on doing—or that their plan would pull through a high-court demon and permanently weaken the Seal!”

  He produced a USB drive from inside his coat and slid it across the table.

  “Turnabout is always the most…satisfying form of fair play,” he purred. “That drive has the details and locations of eight strongholds of the Romanov Family. There’s a militia compound in the Cascades with helicopter-servicing capability. I believe, though I’ll freely admit I have no proof, that they coordinated the attack on the Conclave through that compound. You may find useful evidence there.”

  “And the rest?” David asked.

  “If you’re going to burn out some vampire nests, I’d rather they were my enemy’s, not mine,” Dresden told him with a smile. “Today, you are my enemy’s enemy, and I am more than willing to point you at him.”

  He rose and slid the tablet across the table.

  “The club’s staff will bring you whatever you want,” he said cheerfully. “Food, booze, that cute brunette without the dress. If we need to talk again, well, we both know I can find your number.”

  Chapter 27

  “Well?” O’Brien asked as David stepped into the SUV and sat heavily in the passenger seat.

  “It’s all recorded,” David replied. “But…he says the Familias is in a state of civil war and his faction wasn’t involved in the Conclave attack.”

  “That…makes a lot of sense,” the werewolf sighed. “He had three Elders running outer perimeter security, in case you were wondering. Against my better judgment, everyone went their separate ways without violence. Was it worth it?”

  “He gave me what he says is the location of eight strongholds of the Romanov Family of vampires, one of which was the staging ground for their attack on the Conclave.”

  O’Brien whistled.

  “And he knows we can’t not act on that. So we gut his opposition for him. Son of a bitch.”

  “My enemy’s enemy,” David quoted. “The Romanovs are working with someone inside the Elfin. I don’t know who stands to benefit from the alliance failing, though.”

  “There’s enough who oppose it for their own reasons,” O’Brien said grimly, “though I don’t know Conclave politics well enough to say which of them would consider it worth this much bloodshed.

  “You’re in charge of this whole mess,” he continued. “What’s your call?”

  “Is Justice Nabahe still in Seattle?” David asked. “One way or another, we need to check into the compound in the Cascades. We’ll need a warrant.”

  “Let’s have Charles run through them all,” O’Brien suggested. “If nothing else, we can pull satellite footage of the sites and see if they look questionable.”

  The younger man nodded.

  “That’ll help,” he agreed. “I don’t want to do Dresden’s dirty work for him, but…if the Romanovs want to fuck with ONSET, then I think it’s high time for us to fuck with them.”

  #

  “Ai can’t be certain about any of them,” Charles told them from the video screen.

  There was something incongruous about talking to a dragon on video conferencing. It was well and truly dark outside as David gathered his two understrength ONSET teams in the conference center to go over the data that Dresden had provided.

  “I wasn’t expecting miracles, Charles,” David replied. “Just…probable cause. I wouldn’t give me a warrant based on what a vampire tells me.”

  Charles’s scaled face moved to occupy only half of the screen as the dragon manipulated the controls in front of him. The familiar image of downtown Manhattan filled it, with one building highlighted in red.

  “This is the location on his list Ai’m most certain of. It’s a downtown Manhattan office tower,” the dragon told them. “One we already had under surveillance. We believed there were Familias operations and supplies being routed through it, but it’s an eighty-story building with sixty-three tenants. We were never certain which one was involved.

  “According to the data Dresden provided, twelve of them were, with another fourteen unknowingly assisting via various transportation and cost-sharing contracts.”

  “That sounds like probable cause to me,” O’Brien pointed out.

  “Combined with what we already know, yes,” the dragon agreed. “Ai still would hesitate to seek a warrant on just Dresden’s data.”

  The screen showing Manhattan subdivided into eight, showing satellite images of each location.

  “Three of these locations were known to us,” Charles noted. “None with enough certainty for us to move on them, but we had surveillance in place at two.”

  “Can we forward this information to the teams responsible for those operations?” David asked. “It’s certainly not worthless.”

  “Ai can take care of it,” Charles confirmed. “The other five locations I am not so certain of. Half are in cities, so satellite surveillance isn’t worth much. One isn’t in the United States, a logistics facility near Winnipeg, Canada. We can forward that information on to the Canadian Mounted Paranormal Police and let them decide if they want to act on it.”

  “Assuming they have the resources,” David noted. “They always had fewer HTR teams than we did, and they’ve been backstopping us across the northern US since Ekhmez.”

  “Nobody wants vampires running loose,” O’Brien observed. “Flimsy as this is, it’s not like we can really not act on it.”

  “Surveillance and research is the appropriate action here,” David replied. “And we can do that for all of these sites but one.

  “The Conclave resumes the day after tomorrow. We have less than forty-eight hours to find evidence of who among them—and it has to be one of the Elfin Lords, I think—betrayed them to destroy this alliance.

  “With that evidence, I think we can save this whole agreement. Without it, we’re looking at either an unacceptable deal or stretching our organization thinner and thinner until it snaps.”

  He tapped the computer the USB drive was plugged into.

  “I need something I can walk into the room next door where Justice Nabahe is waiting and say that, yes, I have the intelligence to justify launching a strike on an armed compound whose occupants, regardless of whether or not they are vampire thralls, will fight back.”

  The room was silent for a long moment.

  “If we’re talking an armed militia compound, someone has to have been paying attention,” Stone pointed out after a moment. “The ATF keep an eye on those guys, if nothing else. Charles—have you looked for other records on this site?”

  “Give mae a moment,” the dragon said gruffly. “Ai have spiders running; they may have found something.”

  The room was silent. Any meeting of ONSET Thirteen still held the giant void of Pell’s death. There was no funeral scheduled yet, as ONSET’s administration team tried to track down the Agent’s family, and David’s team was still neck-deep in this mess.

  Once the mess with the Conclave was over, David was going to need to deal with that hole in his team, in both an emotional and practical sense. Right now, though…he was glad to have O’Brien and
his team.

  “Ai’ve got it,” Charles announced. “Yer Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been investigating the compound for arms smuggling for some years. A number of boxes of heavy weapons coming back from Iraq seem to have been mislabeled and delivered there, and the ATF has maintained intermittent surveillance.”

  “Anything useful?” David asked.

  Pictures filled the half of the screen Charles was showing them. The compound was a fortified parcel of land, at least half a mile on a side, surrounded by barbed wire. The pictures showed men in camouflage fatigues drilling, engaging in firearms practice, and tending a good-sized vegetable plot.

  “ATF believes they have large numbers of military-grade firearms, including heavy weapons illegal for civilian possession in Washington State,” Charles noted. “They haven’t moved on them because they don’t want to trigger a firefight. They believe the militia is dedicated, well trained, and will fight against any government movement on the compound.”

  “Great,” Dilsner muttered. “So we’re shooting no matter what.”

  “They do confirm that the compound has a helipad and helicopter refueling facilities,” Charles continued, “though… That’s interesting.”

  “What?” David asked.

  “They report seeing helicopters come and go, but there have never been any flight plans filed to the compound, and the militia definitely doesn’t own any. They’re not sure who the choppers belong to, but have never gotten close enough to grab identifying features.

  “Not least because the helicopters always arrive and leave during the night.”

  “That is interesting,” David agreed. It wasn’t much. One vampire’s biased testimony. A compound with a stockpile of illegal weapons. Transport in and out that could easily be carrying vampires. It was shaky to ask for a warrant and lethal sanction over.