He turned back to the door and gave Chase a significant look, one that his friend had dubbed “Alex’s ‘Keep Me out of Jail, Buddy’ face.” Chase caught it and took an uncertain step forward. “Alex, don’t—”
Before he could think about what he was about to do, Alex opened the buckle on his belt and pulled the little prong forward. “McKenna!” came Tymer’s brusque voice, but Alex ignored him, not wanting to lose his nerve.
He jammed the pad of his thumb over the belt prong, hard enough for the metal to hit bone, gritting his teeth against the pain. With his other hand he opened the airlock door and stuck his hand inside, feeling the blood spurt out.
Tymer started shouting, but out of the corner of his eye Alex could see that Chase had stepped in front of the older agent, talking to him in low tones, one hand on his shoulder. Trusting his partner, Alex turned his gaze back to Ambrose, who had rolled over as soon as he heard the tinkle of the belt. Seeing what Alex was doing, Ambrose streaked across the cell and was suddenly in front of the airlock on his knees, his nose pressed against the crack. He gave a soft moan, his fingernails prying at the edges.
Alex blinked in surprise. He hadn’t expected that big of a reaction, but hadn’t Tymer said they fed Ambrose rarely? Was the shade starving? Or was it the difference between warm, live blood, and donated blood from a refrigerator? Either way, Alex needed to press his advantage.
“Who does Giselle work for?” he asked insistently, but Ambrose shook his head, wailing, “I can’t, I can’t . . .”
Alex let that go on for a second, hearing the voices near the entrance getting heated. Tymer was gonna stomp over there any second. “Then give me a name,” Alex ordered. “Another shade who might know.”
Ambrose lifted his head, and Alex saw that the shade’s face was mottled with need, his eyes bright red. The skin around his eyes seemed to have shrunken inward, veins popping. “Please . . .” he moaned. There was a decent-sized puddle of blood in the airlock, so Alex pulled off his cheap tie and drew his hand out, wrapping the tie around the wound—but not before a couple extra drops of blood hit the floor. Ambrose’s eyes were glued to them.
“A name,” Alex insisted.
A calculating glint flashed through those red eyes, and despite the “stimulation response,” Alex recognized it from dozens of other interviews with suspects: The shade had thought of someone he could throw under the bus. “Rosalind Frederick,” he blurted.
“City?”
“Cincinnati!”
Alex closed the little airlock door, and Ambrose opened his so hard that it ripped off in his hand. The shade thrust his whole face up against it, licking frantically at the blood, sticking his fingers in to swipe up every last drop.
“So, thanks for that,” Chase said sarcastically as they were escorted out by a grim-looking Agent Lanver. There must have been another set of monitors in a control room somewhere, or maybe she just didn’t like it when her boss was unhappy, but she was practically frog-marching them out the door. “I thought Tymer was gonna break my neck. Do you know how many laws you just broke?”
“Not that many,” Alex said mildly. “Congress hasn’t gotten around to writing shade laws yet, remember?”
Chase snorted. “That doesn’t mean his lawyers aren’t going to go apeshit over that little stunt.”
Alex shrugged, clutching his thumb with the tie wrapped around it. It was still bleeding a little, and he tried to remember when he’d had his last tetanus shot. “You were the one who told me to figure out a way to keep us alive in Chicago. Now we have new information—”
“You make it sound so simple,” Lanver broke in angrily. “We’ve spent ten months developing a system and a schedule with the subject, and all the security precautions and all the drills, and you just come in and drop a hand grenade and waltz off.”
“I rarely waltz,” Alex intoned. She glowered at him in response, and he sighed, stopping and turning all the way around to face her. They were right by the first entrance checkpoint, and a few people sent curious looks their way: a furious woman and a man with a bloody tie. “Look,” Alex said, as sincerely as he could, “I know I just caused you guys some problems, and I’m sorry about that. But look at it this way: I exploited a weakness that you now know about, and the only person who got hurt was me.”
“That’s not—argh!” She sighed loudly and stalked away. Alex thought she was heading back down to Tymer, but she went over to the security guard at the checkpoint, spoke to him for a second, and reached behind the counter.
“Watch out, man,” Chase murmured, his voice amused. “She’s probably getting a Taser to teach you a lesson.”
Alex didn’t think that was true, but he resumed walking toward the exit, a little quicker this time. Lanver called after them, and he turned. She jogged up and thrust out what seemed like a tiny bit of paper—a Band-Aid, Alex realized. He took it gratefully. “Thanks.” Ripping it open, he saw that it was hot pink, with tiny Hello Kittys printed on it. “Um, do you have anything a little manlier?”
“We absolutely do,” Lanver said pleasantly. With a little wave, she turned and waltzed off to the basement. Chase started laughing.
Chapter 3
Cincinnati, OH
Sunday night
By 1:00 a.m., Lindy had finished all the work that was supposed to last her the rest of the night shift, and a little of tomorrow night’s work. She swung her office chair in circles, bored. Again.
This is what I get for trying to mainstream, she thought. Most shades preferred to live “off the grid” with their own kind, at least as much as was possible these days. Lindy, however, was more motivated to stay hidden than most of her so-called peers, and by now she considered herself an expert at mainstreaming. She had an apartment, a car, even a goddamned cat, not to mention a high-paying night shift job as a translator.
The problem was, she was simply too good at the work. According to her job description, Lindy was supposed to spend about forty percent of her working hours translating phone calls for the financial brokers, usually to the Japanese market, and the rest translating textual communications: e-mails, memos, financial documents, and plenty of other written materials, from instructions to travel arrangements to the occasional filthy e-mail. Unfortunately, few of the brokers bothered with phone calls anymore, and the written stuff was easy to speed through. Lindy had a serious unfair advantage: centuries of practice at languages, not to mention enhanced reflexes and concentration.
She’d learned a long time ago that it was necessary to slow herself down, lest she raise the eyebrows of her coworkers. Being good at your work is fine, but being exceptional can become extremely bad for someone whose life’s mission is to blend in with humans. It was hard enough trying to hold down a human identity without raising eyebrows at your job, too. It was nearly impossible for shades to do so many simple human chores: pay taxes, own property, enter a hospital, go to the DMV, maintain a bank account. Although she could technically be out during the day, the sunlight hurt her skin, and ever since Ambrose had been captured the humans were more and more suspicious of people in ball caps and sunglasses.
Lindy stood up and paced for a bit, eyeing the desk of her officemate. Teresa worked the day shift, doing the same job. They’d shared an office for nearly five years, but had only met face to face a couple of times. The arrangement was a good way for the company to get away with giving them tiny offices, but Lindy didn’t mind sharing. Sometimes when she got bored she searched Teresa’s desk, telling herself she was looking for hints about how humans behaved. And it had provided some useful details for blending in better—Teresa had a framed picture of her cat, so Lindy brought in a framed picture of Marlowe. Teresa kept emergency tampons in her bottom drawer, so Lindy stashed away a few as well, although she hadn’t menstruated in centuries. Teresa always had a bunch of dirty Tupperware around that she’d forgotten to take home and wash, so one weekend Lindy had gone to the store, bought supplies for spaghetti, and laboriously smeared it o
ver a bunch of glass containers.
But she’d looked through Teresa’s things just the night before, and there was nothing of interest. Lindy found herself glancing at her bag, where she kept her personal laptop.
It’s stupid to keep fucking around on the Darknet, she reminded herself. You don’t know who could be watching.
Resolutely, she went back to her desktop, opened a browser window, and pulled up newspapers in several languages. You were never done learning a language, because they changed and evolved every day they were used. That was why Lindy loved them. She started with the Russian newspaper first, because that was the most recent of her languages and the one she most worried about keeping up with. Then she read through the Hong Kong paper, the Tokyo paper, and three separate papers from Europe before finally switching over to The Washington Post. The front-page headline screamed out at her.
SHADES MURDER SEVEN MORE IN CHICAGOLAND CORNFIELD
“Fuck!” Lindy said out loud. She spoke seven languages, but this was still the most diverse curse word, and therefore her favorite. She skimmed through the story, faster than any human speed reader. The dead agents. The single survivor, who had been nearly disemboweled by some kind of short blade. Giselle.
“Hector,” she muttered under her breath. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Telling herself it was now necessary, she pulled out her personal computer and quickly flipped it open, Lindy had once drunk a world-class hacker, who’d set her up with an untraceable IP address and a little scrambler that supposedly kept her from being hacked. She remembered to turn it on despite her agitation. Her company claimed that they didn’t monitor their employees’ computer usage, that they trusted their own people. This, and the flexibility of their working hours, was one of the reasons Lindy had taken the position at this particular firm, instead of any of the other ones that had tried to throw money at her. Despite their promises, though, Lindy would much rather take precautions than chances.
She made her way into the Darknet and began going through the private message boards. There was no way to know how many shades there were in the world, or what percentage of them had access to the Darknet sites, but it was still the best way she knew of to gauge their opinions and moods as a group. Most of the shades—including a few she had once known personally—had posted in the last twenty-four hours to express benign concern about the murders. Nobody was reckless enough to openly speak against Hector, but they were confused: Hector himself was the one who’d adopted the stay-under-the-radar plan, figuring that if the new BPI couldn’t find a single other vampire after the famous “Subject A,” they would eventually decide to cut bait and go back to the way things were.
That strategy was meant to confuse the human authorities, and it was a decent plan, Lindy thought, even if it meant cutting loose that little worm, Ambrose. If the government actually got around to declaring him inhuman and torturing him, Hector would have to step in, but until then, silence was the best policy.
It was, in fact, Hector’s own policy. But now he had committed a whole series of splashy murders, and there were also a handful of shades on the message boards who were thrilled by the news that Hector had gone rogue. They saw the overt murders as a call to arms. Lindy knew this crowd: the ones who believed that shades were the dominant species, more evolved in every way, that they should get to do anything they wanted, blah blah blah. Lindy couldn’t argue with the fact that her people were physically superior to humans, but they were predators. They needed a large number of prey in order to survive, and as a long-term plan, trying to “overthrow” humanity was about as silly as it got.
Meanwhile, she noted, there was no sign of Hector himself on the message boards. He was probably staying silent on purpose, to keep their people even more off balance and afraid. He was that kind of leader.
Lindy wanted to scream. He was losing the shades’ trust, and undoing thousands of years worth of carefully maintained restraint. If he didn’t get things back under control, or at least explain why the Chicago killings were somehow justified, they stood to lose everything. There was nothing to fear from a single human, or half a dozen humans, even armed with guns. But six billion of them? That was an enemy even Hector did not want to make.
Lindy stood up and paced. Nothing you can do about it, she told herself, walking in tight circles between her desk and Teresa’s. You walked away, and it was the right decision. The only decision. Maybe this could be a good thing, down the road: If the BPI got more funding and resources, they could keep the shade population in check, restore the balance.
Yeah, right. They were all gonna die, the agents who went after Hector. But there was nothing she could do about it. Even if she called the BPI and warned them, what good would it do? What could she say?
But she had to do something.
Her computer chimed, the personal laptop, and Lindy frowned and circled the desk to check its screen. Had she set an alarm or something? The screensaver had come on, so she tapped the space bar to wake the computer up.
HELLO SIEGLIND.
She froze. The letters were enormous, taking up most of the now-black screen. Oh, God. Please be a virus, she thought. One of her old friends, maybe, trying to play a trick? The hope barely had time to bloom in her chest before it was extinguished.
TIME TO COME AND PLAY flashed across the screen, followed by I WILL SAVE ONE OF THEIR HEARTS FOR YOU.
Then the screen just erupted into a scrolling mess of COME AND PLAY.
COME AND PLAY.
COME AND PLAY.
COME AND PLAY.
COME AND PLAY.
Chapter 4
Lindy slammed the laptop closed and darted to the air-conditioning vent beneath her small window. She ripped the vent off its cheap old screws, uncovering the high-powered magnet she’d hidden there during her first week on the job. Lindy yanked the magnet off the metal and brought it over to the phone and computers, running it over the sides of all of them. When she was satisfied that the electronics were scrambled beyond repair, she replaced the magnet and rushed to the coat tree for her jacket. She touched her front pocket to make sure the slim wallet was in there and raced for the door without another glance at the little office.
The corridor outside her door, which had seemed perfectly normal only a moment ago, suddenly felt dark and threatening. It would be just like him to send the message and then ambush her as she ran. An obvious move, but Hector was rarely subtle. Lindy hesitated in the doorway, sniffing the air. Sure enough, someone had splashed vinegar around the room, an old shade trick for disguising scent from each another. That sealed it—she wasn’t alone. Hector’s people were here, waiting for her.
Something . . . happened . . . inside Lindy’s nervous system, and it took her a moment to recognize the stirrings of fear. Lindy was often a little skittish around humans, concerned about giving herself away, but it had been so long since she’d felt real, tangible fear that she shivered from it. She was stronger than most of Hector’s people, but he knew exactly how powerful she was, and he wouldn’t send just one. Three, at least, she thought.
She wasn’t sure what to do. Make a run for it, or hole up in her office? They were expecting her to run, which made holing up sound pretty appealing. But she knew Hector’s playbook as well as he knew hers: He knew she wouldn’t want any innocents harmed. Right now, this was between shades, but if she didn’t come out, his people would start killing humans.
She edged through the office door, her eyes scanning the cubicles ahead. She tensed as something moved on a desk—but no, that desk was directly below a vent; it was just some papers shifting. She felt so exposed, which was undoubtedly exactly what Hector wanted. His people were always well armed; she longed for weapons. If she only had her daggers, or even a fucking crossbow. But no, she’d gotten complacent, gotten mainstream. It was too inconvenient to carry medieval weapons in the modern world, but now she felt like an idiot.
She crept forward, slowly, listening as hard as she could.
There was a loud voice coming from Sanji’s office down the hall; that was normal. The furnace, the quiet hum of the lights, a toilet flushing on the floor above her—there. Lindy whirled around and caught the shade who was pelting toward her at full speed, knives extended. He’d let his excitement get to him, had leapt before his comrades were in place. She slid in between his outstretched hands and grabbed his neck, using his own momentum to flip him over her own head and all the way to the ground, smashing his neck on the carpeting. That felt good. She left him crumpled on the floor—he’d heal in time to get out of here before sunrise, if his friends didn’t collect him first—picked up his knives, and hurried down the hall. She automatically started toward the stairwell door, then stopped. They would be expecting that. Of course they would expect her to take the stairs. Lindy stepped back and retreated into the elevator instead. They wouldn’t cut the cables—Hector’s message said come and play; he wanted her alive—and even if they came in through the ceiling trapdoor they’d have to come one at a time, which was to her advantage.
Still, she was nearly vibrating with tension during the elevator ride, imagining them lining up in the lobby to burst on top of her as the elevator doors opened. She knew intellectually it wasn’t possible—shades were damned fast, but only in short bursts; they weren’t made to race down forty flights of stairs faster than an elevator. She held both of the knives behind her back in one hand, just to get her past the security guard. Assuming he was still alive. When the doors began to slide open she sprang out—and ran straight into a human man in a suit.
They collided hard, her forehead bumping his chin, her free hand smacking against something hard at his waist. A gun? Was he somehow working for Hector, too? Lindy reared back, faster than a human could, but the man reached out and grabbed her shoulders, steadying her. He was fast, for a human. “Ms. Frederick? Are you all right?” he asked.
Nightshades Page 4
