Cold Spectrum

by Craig Schaefer

  “Not sure how much of our current situation could be described as lucky,” I said.

  “We took out my mom’s pack. Three Wolf King worshippers dead, and one on permanent ice—that’s not a bad day at the office. Plus, you know, uncovering that whole secret assassination-program thing.”

  “Which circles back to Douglas Bredford.”

  Everything circled back to Douglas Bredford.

  On our first mission as a team, we’d found Bredford drinking himself to death in a backwoods Michigan tap house. He might have died when someone put a bomb in his trailer, but he’d still been with us every step of the way since, leaving clues and backup plans that unfurled in our path. A trail of string guiding us through a maze of razor wire.

  Bredford had worked in black ops for the government, same as we had, years ago as part of a program called Cold Spectrum. We didn’t know what the program was, or what he did, only that his time in the shadows had left him a broken and bitter drunk. A man on the run, after forces in DC—possibly including Linder, our own boss—decided that he and his team had to be eliminated. We’d coerced Burton, the director of RedEye, into becoming an asset for us, and he’d recounted the story of the night he found Bredford lurking in his kitchen with a gun.

  “Let me tell you about the good fight, Burton,” Bredford had said. “Let me tell you who I am. I’m the soldier who fired the last shot, at the last battle, for the future of humanity. The war is over. Humanity lost.”

  “We unearthed RedEye,” Jessie said, “an NSA program that can spy on anyone’s phone, anytime? Taking that out counts as another win for the good guys.”

  “We . . . didn’t take it out. RedEye is still active. And spying on people. Right this minute.”

  Jessie gave me the side-eye. “Yeah, because we’re kinda using it right now. I’m counting this as an inevitable future victory. As soon as we track down the names on our list, we’re flying back to New York and putting it out of commission for good. Priorities, you know?”

  Burton Webb, RedEye’s inventor, had managed to hide two of Bredford’s teammates inside the labyrinthine surveillance system. Protecting them from being hunted and killed. And now he’d given us their names. Removing their cloak of invisibility came with a price tag, though: if we could find them, so could anybody else with high-level NSA access. Including the people who very much wanted to close the books on Cold Spectrum permanently.

  I tapped my earpiece. “April? Kevin? Everybody in place?”

  The dry, older voice of April Cassidy, tinged with an Irish brogue, echoed in my ear. “We’re on overwatch. I’m just running some last-minute background checks, but the trail is clear now that we know what to look for. After Cold Spectrum, Houston Coe reinvented himself as Houston Dalenta. He was a professional gambler before his recruitment, and it looks like he’s gone back to his old habits: traveling between Atlantic City and Las Vegas and a hundred small-town casinos in between, and holing up in Portland when he’s flush on cash. One companion, Luis Perez—not sure if he’s a roommate or a lover. They’re discreet. No visible ties to the government or the occult underground.”

  “How about our second survivor?” I asked.

  “She’s gone off the grid entirely. If she’s still alive, she’s deep underground—metaphorically, literally, or both. Give me time—I’m working on it.”

  “And I’m putting the finishing touches on a little surprise,” Kevin said, sounding pleased with himself. “A new piece of field gear to help you two out.”

  “Does it shoot people?” Jessie asked.

  “No,” he said. “I think that’s what your gun is for.”

  “I have a gun. I want two guns.”

  The GPS pinged. My stomach tightened as I pulled a left, tires rumbling into a parking lot outside a three-story apartment building in faded red brick. Jessie usually greeted stress with a wink and a joke. I swallowed mine, bottling it up for an explosion that never came.

  I swung into a spot and killed the ignition. And paused, just for a second, looking up at rows of windows shrouded behind black ironwork grates. Up on the third floor, a lace curtain ruffled. Someone peeking down at us. Jessie touched the back of my hand.

  “Harmony,” she said, “you good to go?”

  “Ready for anything. Ready to finally get some answers, anyway.”

  “How do you want to play it?”

  “Nice and easy,” I said, pushing open the car door and stepping out. “This guy’s been living in hiding for a decade, waiting for a bullet. We’ve got to be careful not to spook him.”

  “I don’t know, you are pretty spooky sometimes.”

  I checked my reflection in the car window. Black suit, white blouse, necktie the color of sea foam. A cold gust of wind washed over me, mussing my hair, and I pushed the unruly bangs back into place. Good to go. Jessie’s olive jacket tugged back as she got out, flashing her shoulder holster and the badge clipped to her belt.

  The halls were clean, lived-in, middle-class, with a wall of polished mailbox cubbyholes and a community-announcement corkboard by the front door. I paused, glancing over the tacked-up ads. Dog walking, babysitting, a new yoga center down the street. Not exactly a hotbed of intrigue. We got onto the shoe box–size elevator and hit the button for the third floor.

  “Linder left another voice mail, trying to get us to come in for a debriefing.” Jessie watched the doors rumble shut.

  “He knows we know something. He just doesn’t know what we know.”

  “Way I figure it,” she said, “in about five minutes, we’re gonna know everything. Then we’ve just gotta decide what to do about it.”

  Around a bend in the corridor was apartment 308. One of the neighbors was baking an apple pie; the sweet aroma drifted out, filling the narrow hallway. Jessie and I stood side by side. We shared a glance, she nodded, and I knocked.

  The man who opened the door was in his late forties, dressed in a turtleneck and shabby jeans, eyes wide behind tortoiseshell glasses. The apartment behind him was lived-in messy, with a scattering of magazines on the coffee table and a half-finished landscape on an artist’s easel by the window.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, with a look reserved for door-to-door salespeople. I showed him my credentials.

  “Special Agent Black and Special Agent Temple, FBI. Are you Houston Dalenta?”

  His head ducked like a turtle trying to squirm back into its shell, and his eyes went everywhere but on me.

  “N-no,” he stammered, “I’m Luis. Houston isn’t . . . he’s not home.”

  “Do you know where we can find him?”

  Luis swallowed hard. I’d interrogated murderers who looked less guilty. “He’s out. Shopping.”

  “Then you won’t mind if we wait for him,” Jessie said.

  She smoothly stepped around him and into the apartment. Projecting her quiet authority and taking over the room. I followed her in and shut the door behind me, standing like a wall between Luis and the only way out.

  “He . . . he might be a while,” Luis told her. “I mean, you shouldn’t waste your time. Just give me your card or something, and I’ll call you as soon as—”

  “Luis,” I said, my voice firm enough to shut him up, “we’re not here to arrest anyone, and whatever you’re trying to hide, trust me: we probably don’t care. We have reason to believe that your roommate is in serious danger, and we need to bring him into protective custody. Please, help us to help him.”

  His gaze dropped to the off-white carpet. He bit his bottom lip hard enough to turn it white.

  “I’m not supposed to get the cops involved. They’ll kill him if I do.”

  “We’re already involved,” I said, “and we’re not going anywhere. So your best course of action is to level with us. Where is he, Luis?”

  Luis paced the floor, shaking his head. He flailed a hand in strangled desperation.

  “Houston is . . . he makes his money playing cards, okay? And he . . . he’s got a system. The kind of sys
tem where he never loses.”

  “He cheats,” Jessie muttered.

  “I didn’t say that. I did not say that. Honestly, I don’t know how he does it. He just . . . when he needs cash, he goes to a casino, and he gets it. Simple. Except he got caught. The Diamondback, this place in Atlantic City. I told him the place is mobbed up, that he was pushing his luck.”

  “They caught him?” I asked.

  Luis’s head bobbed. “He got a message to me. He said they didn’t hurt him—much—but he couldn’t leave. I don’t know what they’re doing to him in there. Only that he’s safe so long as I don’t call the police and I keep my mouth shut.”

  Back when I’d been working a case in Vegas, before joining Jessie and her team, I’d heard rumors about the Strip. That every casino had somebody on the payroll who knew about the occult underground and kept a sharp eye out for anyone trying to augment their luck with magic. It’d make sense for Atlantic City to work the same way. And considering he’d spent time working for a covert government program, I highly doubted Houston Dalenta was any kind of mundane cheater.

  What could the Jersey Mob do with a captive magician? All kinds of ideas came to mind, none of them pretty. Whatever the situation, Houston wasn’t coming home on his own. Not without our help.

  A chorus of slamming doors jarred me from my thoughts. I moved to the window and pulled the curtain back, looking down at the street below. Three black sedans had pulled up to the curb at once. Doors swinging open, men in dark suits and glasses boiling out like ants from a kicked hive. And a woman in scarlet, pointing and barking orders, her hair done in a perfect blonde bob. I recognized her in an instant. My heart kicked against my rib cage.

  Nadine.

  TWO

  “We have to leave. Now.” I nodded at Luis. “We’ve gotta get him out of here.”

  Jessie stood beside me at the window. “Damn right. Looks like somebody followed the same trail we did. You up for a rematch?”

  Nadine was what we called an incarnate: a demon powerful enough to create her own body out of raw willpower instead of hijacking a human skin. Enough willpower to punch through walls if she felt like it, plus an arsenal of twisted magic. And we had recent history together.

  We’d faced off in a nightclub in downtown Chicago. A hostage situation, engineered to draw us into the line of fire. We had embarrassed Nadine’s kid, an infernal bounty hunter, and it turned out Nadine had a thing for carrying a grudge. Nobody in Vigilant Lock’s history had ever been able to kill an incarnate, but Jessie and I came damn close—until Nadine got her claws into me and taught me what a succubus is capable of.

  I still woke up in the middle of the night. Aching. Thirsty, no matter how much water I drank. Feeling like I had ants all over my skin. I didn’t tell Jessie that. It was getting worse. I didn’t tell her that, either.

  “With nothing but our sidearms?” I asked Jessie. “And the Bast Club was a free-fire zone—this building is full of civilians, and these walls don’t look too thick. We start shooting, innocent people are going to get hurt.”

  “Shooting?” Luis’s eyes grew wider behind his glasses. “Wait, what’s going on? Who’s shooting?”

  Another car arrived on the scene. A cherry-red Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows screeched up to the curb, almost hitting one of Nadine’s gunmen. He jumped clear at the last second, arms flailing.

  “Wait a second.” I crouched low, staying to one side, and opened the window a few inches so I could hear what was going on. A gust of crisp wind blew across my cheeks and fluttered the magazines on the coffee table.

  A pair of suits hustled out of the front seats, the wind catching the tail of one man’s jacket and baring a chrome pistol in a holster. He opened the back door of the SUV like a chauffeur and stood at attention as the passenger gracefully stepped out.

  “Don’t look now,” Jessie murmured, “but I think Portland just got weirder.”

  The woman was tall, slender, draped in a tailored trench coat of snow-white leather. Her hair, scarlet, braided, and worn in a French twist. And Nadine looked all kinds of unhappy.

  “No,” she snapped, marching toward her. “No, no, no! You can’t be here. Leave.”

  The new arrival responded with faint amusement, her voice a low Scottish burr. I leaned closer to the open window, straining to hear.

  “I think you have that backward, Nadine. Oregon is part of the Court of Jade Tears. My prince’s territory. You’re here without permission. Very naughty of you.”

  Nadine stuck her finger in the woman’s face. “The pit with you, Caitlin! Unlike you, you filthy-handed commoner, I’m a noblewoman. I have the rights of travel and hospitality.”

  The name struck a chord. Fontaine, another bounty hunter, had given us a heads-up: for reasons unknown, two demonic courts had put a temporary no-kill order on our heads. Whatever they were scheming about, Fontaine reasoned, it was something they thought only Jessie and I—their sworn enemies—could get done.

  “You’re useful,” he’d told me, “just don’t know what you’re useful for. Caitlin and Royce are formidable on their own; on the rare occasion when they team up, well . . . something big is in the wings.”

  “You do possess those rights,” Caitlin said agreeably, “for now. Your little friends here, though—they don’t. So you should make them get back in their cars and drive east, all the way home. Immediately.”

  Nadine lifted her chin, trying to get eye to eye with the taller woman. Bristling.

  “And if I don’t?”

  Caitlin opened her coat and flung it back like a gunslinger from an old Western. I expected to see a six-shooter on her hip. Instead, she bared a coiled bullwhip with a long brass handle.

  “If you don’t,” Caitlin replied, “then I’m within my rights to dispense discipline as I deem appropriate.”

  Nadine took a step back. Her hand fluttered behind her. A few of her men caught the hint, running, skirting the side of the apartment building. Others made for the cars, looking more afraid of Caitlin than they were of their own boss. I wasn’t entirely convinced they were leaving, though.

  “Your prince will hear about this,” Nadine snapped.

  Caitlin smiled and nodded. “Yes. He will. From me.”

  The second Nadine turned her back, Caitlin raised her head and looked directly at me. Spotting me up in the third-floor window, her gaze drawn to mine like a laser. She mouthed a single word, one I couldn’t miss: Go.

  “That is some damn fine advice,” Jessie said, on the move and headed for the door. “Luis, this place have a back way out?”

  “There’s . . . there’s a second stairwell, yeah. Can someone tell me what’s going on? Please?”

  I drew my Glock 23, holding the matte-black pistol in a tight two-handed grip, following Jessie.

  “Stay behind us,” I told him, “stay quiet, and keep your head down. Things are about to get a little scary, but we’ll get you out safe, I promise.”

  “About to get scary?” he said.

  “Shh.”

  The hallway was clear. We hustled fast, making our way around another bend, headed for a back stairwell near a battered trash-chute door. We took the stairs single file, Jessie on point, rounding the tight bends with our ears perked. Just as we reached the second-floor landing, the door burst open and a blur hit me from the right, throwing my back against the railing. He had eyes like broken and runny egg yolks, and he bared rotting, yellowed teeth as he grappled my wrists, fighting for my gun. He wasn’t alone. His buddy jumped Jessie, the two of them rolling, Luis jumping out of the way as they landed hard on the concrete steps.

  My attacker—a cambion, his human veins pulsing with demon blood—hissed at me as he threw his body weight against mine and tried to force me over the railing. My gun hand bent backward inch by inch, wrist trapped in his iron grip. His breath, hot and rancid like chicken left out to rot on a hot summer day, washed over my face. He was focused on my Glock. Apparently he hadn’t been briefed properly.<
br />
  I’m good with a gun, but I don’t need one.

  I gave my other hand a sharp twist, breaking his hold, and clamped my hand to his forehead. Then I spat the words of a banishing charm, an exorcism in bastard Latin intended to drive demonic intruders from a host’s body. Against a cambion, it only does one thing: hurt. He shrieked as his blood boiled. He yanked away from me, my fingertips leaving black scorch marks on his twisted face. That bought me the second I needed to grab his forearm, turn my body, and execute an aikido throw. The cambion rolled up, off his feet, over my shoulder, and over the edge.

  He plummeted to the bottom of the stairwell, hitting the railing on the small of his back. His spine snapped against the black iron with a sickening crunch.

  Jessie’s opponent was screaming, too—as best he could with her teeth in his throat, biting in deep while she shook her head like a terrier with a chew toy. She’d dropped her gun so she could get one of his arms in both her hands, breaking it like a twig and leaving naked, bloody bone jutting out from his tattered sleeve. One final clench of her jaw ended his struggles with a wet crack. The cambion fell still. She snatched up her gun, stood, and spat a gob of scarlet tissue onto the floor at her feet.

  Luis’s shoulders hit the wall. He looked between us, petrified.

  “What . . . what are you?”

  “We’re from the government,” I told him, “and we’re here to help.”

  Jessie wiped the back of her hand across her bloody lips, leaving a ruddy smear along her cheek. She led the way—and jumped back as gunfire erupted from below, bullets pinging off ironwork and concrete. I leaned over the railing and snapped off a couple of quick shots, then took cover.