Victims? As in plural?
I was too shocked to comment, and Abe was too pissed off not to. “What other victims?” he demanded. “I’d damned well know if there were more people in my city with their goddamn chests ripped out.”
“No, you wouldn’t, because we found them first. This is not your case, Captain.” Agent Frost leveled a glare at him. “There’s a lot you don’t know about your city. If I were you, I’d be thankful you don’t have to.”
“Hold on a minute,” Abe said. “If you think you’re going to accuse Gideon of—”
“We’re not accusing him. I said we’re questioning him.” She glanced at her partner, jerked her head, and Agent Ken Doll started for the cemetery gate, where a bunch of black sedans had just pulled up to disgorge streams of agent-looking people. “Mr. Black is not under suspicion,” she said, turning those green eyes on me again. “Yet.”
“Look, sister. Er … I mean, Agent,” I said when her stare morphed into drill bits. “I don’t know how the hell you know my name, but you’ve got the wrong guy. Whatever this is, I have nothing to do with it.”
“We’ll make that call after we question you,” she said. “We have reason to believe you’re associated with the other victims.”
Okay, now I was pissed. “Bullshit. Nobody I know is missing or had their chests ripped open,” I said. “Who are these other victims, anyway?”
“You don’t need to know that yet.” Agent Frost pulled a pair of handcuffs from her belt. “Now, are you going to cooperate? Or are you going to resist, and be arrested instead?”
Abe’s features twisted in fury. “You’re not taking him anywhere,” he said sharply. “Not without—”
“Abe.” I touched his arm, and he stopped mid-threat. On second thought, it was probably better if I cooperated. I wasn’t involved in this, and there was no way they had anything that said otherwise. Besides, if I went with them, I could find out what was going on — and maybe stop it before anyone else got brutally murdered. “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll answer their questions. Even though it’s a huge waste of time, because I don’t know shit.”
I looked at Frost as I spoke. She just sneered, but at least she put the cuffs away.
Abe was less than convinced. “You don’t have to do this, Gideon,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.” I managed a smile. “Don’t worry, okay? I promise I’ll be back.”
“You’d better be. Or I’ll come and get you, goddamn it.”
I nodded, gripped his shoulder briefly, and faced the agent. “Well?”
“Follow me, Mr. Black.”
She headed for the barricade, where Agent Plastic Smile waited like he’d known I would cooperate all along. More agents passed us, headed for the body. They’d probably tangle with Abe a while before he’d let them take anything out of his crime scene.
At least I knew they couldn’t hold me. And if they decided to pull some federal mumbo-jumbo crap about national security and their right to detain anyone for any reason — well, I had magic, and they didn’t. I could escape if I had to.
Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that. I was already on the run from a deadly worldwide cult, and I really didn’t need to add the NSA to my list of enemies.
I had enough problems staying ahead of Milus Dei.
CHAPTER 3
“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Mr. Black?”
Agent Gilmore, master of expressions, stood at the other end of the table in the stripped-down conference room doing his best impersonation of Concerned Human Being. We were waiting for Special Agent Frost, who was obviously in charge. And obviously not in so much of a hurry when it was my time being wasted. I’d been in this room for almost an hour, and Gilmore had just now deigned to remember my presence.
They’d brought me to a nondescript five-story office building near Central Park West. I didn’t know where the main offices of the NSA were in New York, but this place wasn’t it. The low-lit warren of empty desks they led me through on the way to this room had been thrown together recently, and the whole place was cluttered with boxes of files and loose papers that must’ve been pulled from a fire somewhere. Quite a few of the boxes showed damage ranging from singed to half-charred, and a faint burning smell permeated the air.
And in this room, besides the table and single chair for me to sit in so I’d feel intimidated when they loomed over me, was a collection of computer equipment in various stages of melted.
“Mr. Black?” Gilmore repeated. “Would you like—”
“I’m good, thanks.” I’d almost forgotten he was there, but now I leaned forward and folded my hands on the table. “So. You gonna tell me how you and your partner know who I am?” I said. “Because I’m pretty sure I didn’t introduce myself.”
Gilmore smiled indulgently. “That’s not something I’m prepared to discuss at this juncture,” he said.
“Uh-huh. Well, how about this?” I straightened in the chair and glared at him. “I’ll leave, and you get back to me at the juncture where you tell me what the hell’s going on.”
His plastic smile wrinkled a little. Before he could respond, the door to the room opened and Special Agent Frost strolled in like I hadn’t been waiting for far too long. She was carrying a thick folder, and she dropped it on the table in front of me. “The other victims,” she said. “I guarantee you’ll recognize them, Mr. Black.”
I made no move to touch it. Until this moment, I’d been convinced the whole thing was some kind of epic misunderstanding — but something in her tone suggested I could be wrong. I knew Taeral and Sadie were fine. Daoin was safe in Arcadia, and Grygg was…well, an eight-foot stone statue. Who was definitely not currently missing.
Only two more Others still stayed at the Castle, but I hadn’t seen Lo or Barney in a few days. Reun and the Duchenes were still in Louisiana, last I knew. I hadn’t talked to them recently, either.
It could be any of them. And if these agents knew me, maybe they knew my friends.
Frost didn’t bother waiting for me to make a move. She reached over with an impatient huff and flipped the folder open.
And the bloodless, horror-frozen face of Orville Valentine stared up at me.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I gasped, pushing back so fast that I damn near knocked the chair over. I tried to say something else, but the only sound I could make was a kind of stammering click as my gut heaved and my throat tried desperately to close things off. No one hated that bastard more than me, but even I wouldn’t have wished this on him.
My ex-father had fared the same as the FBI guy, Redfield. Sprawled on a bare patch of frozen dirt, his ribcage wrenched open and his heart torn out. No trace of blood anywhere. He also had a patch of skin missing, from his right forearm. Only this time I knew what had been there.
The killer had cut off his tattoo. A dark blue ankh and sword, the symbol of Milus Dei.
I barely had time to process that thought before Agent Frost turned the photo over and revealed the next one. Hodge, ritualistically butchered and drained. Then Morris, the same. Beneath that was Mama Reba. Her chest was intact, but her throat had been slit wide open, and her skin was the same bloodless blue-white as the rest of the corpses.
Frost kept going, flipping through the now-dead faces of my past. All of them with slit throats, completely drained of blood. Brutal. Bodean. Jerilee. Every last Valentine, right down to Garth, who was maybe sixteen years old. And his mother, Vixie — who’d been visibly pregnant.
“Stop,” I groaned.
But Frost didn’t.
“Goddamn it, stop.” I stood and kicked the chair back. As of this moment, I was through sitting. “Obviously, I recognize them,” I practically snarled. “But how the fuck did you—”
I bit the words off as the last photo Frost revealed showed Orville and Reba’s silver Airstream and a few other caravan vehicles parked along a river. With a disturbingly familiar skyline in the background.
“They were in New York?” I could bar
ely speak. “How … when?”
“Our team found the bodies three days ago,” Agent Frost said.
“That’s impossible. The FBI arrested…”
I realized what I’d said just before the smug gleam surfaced in Frost’s eyes. “Yes, they were picked up in an FBI raid. That wasn’t exactly publicized, Mr. Black. But you knew, because you called in their location to Captain Abraham Strauss. And then he called the Bureau.”
Shit. I knew damned well Abe didn’t tell them I’d tipped him, and the implications of the only explanation left pissed me off. “You’re NSA. You have the NYPD phones tapped,” I said — and then something even worse dawned on me. “No, I called his cell. You bastards have Abe’s cell bugged?”
“Let’s just say Captain Strauss has been a person of interest since the incident with Chief Foley,” Frost said.
“Incident,” I shot back. “You mean when that crazy bastard tried to kill Abe and fifty or so other innocent people.”
“As for the Valentines,” Frost went on like I hadn’t said anything. “They were working for Redfield, as contractors. He arranged for their release. And they’d come to New York on assignment to capture you.”
That was when everything clicked into place. The missing skin on Redfield’s wrist — he must’ve had a Milus Dei tattoo. Last month Orville had said someone hired them to bring in the Duchenes, who I’d happened to be with in Louisiana at the time. They’d found me first and damn near killed me, but I managed to turn the tables on them.
And with everything Frost and Gilmore knew about me, the Valentines, even Abe and Foley … they had to be Milus Dei, too.
I was suddenly glad I’d passed on the coffee.
CHAPTER 4
Agent Gilmore must’ve read the realization on my face, because now there was a gun in his hand. And I doubted it fired regular bullets. “Mr. Black, please,” he said, all apologies and fake we’re-friends tones. “Don’t do anything stupid. We just want to talk.”
“Yeah? Well, pointing a gun at me doesn’t exactly suggest it’s going to be a pleasant conversation.” I looked from him to Frost, who was glaring icicles. “Tell me you’re not Milus Dei,” I said. “Try it, and see if I believe you.”
Frost folded her arms. “We work for the administrative division of an organization that oversees the safety and secrecy of—”
“You work for a cult that oversees the torture and murder of people who aren’t like you.” I raised a hand, and saw Gilmore’s finger twitch against the trigger. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “I am going to suggest that you let me walk out of here. Because if you know anything about me, you know I’m going to anyway. Whether you let me, or I make you.”
“Mr. Black, we brought you here to ask for your help.”
The words leaving Frost’s mouth were about the angriest, most reluctant and disgusted I’d ever heard.
I laughed in her face.
“My help?” I backed up a few steps, maintaining the standoff between my magic and Gilmore’s gun. “Listen, maybe you don’t have enough clearance or something to know what the rest of your people are doing, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to help you,” I said.
Frost’s challenging expression didn’t change. “We know exactly what’s been done,” she said. “To you, to your father and half-brother, your werewolf friend and her family. So many of your acquaintances have been detained as threats, Mr. Black, that I wonder how you can consider yourself innocent of anything.”
“Detained as threats. Is that what your PR department is calling it now?”
“Personally, I don’t give a damn what happened,” she said. “And for the record, asking you for help was not my idea.”
“Really.” Okay, I didn’t want to throw a spell at her anymore. Now I wanted to punch her smug face. Not the least because they apparently knew a hell of a lot more about me than my name, and that was a very bad sign. “I get it now,” I said. “You’re crazy. And I’m leaving.”
“Mr. Black, please.” Agent Gilmore raised his hands, and then slowly placed the gun on the table. “Bringing you in was my idea,” he said. “I realize your relationship with our organization didn’t exactly begin on the best of terms—”
“Being kidnapped and tortured is not a relationship.”
“—but I’d hoped, with your record, you might at least consider a temporary truce,” he finished.
I raised an eyebrow. “My record?”
“Of helping innocent victims.”
“Innocent,” I said. “You’re calling the Valentines innocent. Or maybe you mean this Redfield guy, who apparently sicced them on me. Again.”
Gilmore cleared his throat awkwardly. “Maybe they weren’t entirely innocent,” he said. “But this killer — it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen, and we have absolutely no leads. Clearly our members are being targeted. And we’re not all bad people, Mr. Black.” He sent a stern glance at Frost, and then added, “Some of us have families, too.”
Christ. Out of all the crazy things that’d happened to me since I found out I wasn’t human, this might have been the craziest. Milus Dei, the enemy I’d been fighting from the beginning, was asking me to help stop someone who was killing them.
And despite my visceral dislike of Special Agent Frost, I was actually considering it.
I let out a sigh and moved further away from Frost and her death glare. “What, exactly, do you want from me?”
“Well. We understand you have … certain abilities,” Gilmore said.
“Yeah, I’ve got a few. Which ones are you interested in?”
“We’ve had Agent Redfield’s body brought here for autopsy.” He frowned slightly, and Frost somehow managed to look more disgusted. “We’d like you to ask him who killed him.”
Of course they did. It was the one thing I was planning to do anyway — I just hadn’t planned on having an audience. If the NSA had taken custody of the body, this was probably the only way I’d get any information about the killer. Unfortunately, it also meant they’d get the same information, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like the way Milus Dei handled this problem.
But I didn’t have to tell them everything.
“Okay,” I finally said. “I do this for you, and I walk away. Right?”
Frost bristled. “You’re not officially charged with anything at this time,” she said through her teeth.
“What my partner means is, yes. You’re free to go at any point.” Agent Gilmore resurrected his plastic smile. “Anything you disclose from here on is officially off the record,” he said. “Do we have an agreement, Mr. Black?”
I had a feeling that no matter what I disclosed, or failed to, Agent Frost would look for a way to create an official charge. Her hatred was starting to feel personal. But I still had the advantage, and I was more than willing to magic my way out of here if it came to that.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go talk to the dead guy.”
CHAPTER 5
It wasn’t just temporary offices. These guys had set up a temporary morgue.
The big, open area they led me to in the basement was set up almost as professionally as the medical examiners’ facility at the hospital. Autopsy tables, industrial sinks, steel utility shelves filled with tools and equipment. I assumed the body bag on the nearest table contained what was left of Redfield. The only thing missing from the not-so-makeshift morgue was the body boxes.
But it looked like they had cold storage covered anyway. To the left, a faint mist drifted beneath thick, wide plastic strips that blocked off another room. The constant hum of refrigeration equipment came from behind the plastic curtain.
Agent Frost circled the table with the body and stopped on the other side to smolder at me some more. “You don’t honestly believe you can communicate with dead people, do you?” she said.
“Calla,” Gilmore said quietly. “Can you at least try to be civil?”
“Keep your mouth shut, Junior Agent Gilmore.” She looked at me
again. “Well?”
I almost said you’re right, I can’t, and walked out right then. But even though I knew she was baiting the hell out of me, some part of me rose to the challenge. Maybe the part that wanted to wipe that sarcastic sneer off her face. “Tell you what,” I said. “Ask me something I couldn’t possibly know about him, and I’ll find out.”
“By asking the dead man.”
“Yeah.” I met her gaze as calmly as I could. “But make it a short question, because I’m not going to keep this up for long.”
I wouldn’t mention the reason. I had to do this the old-fashioned, painful way, so I could control what they heard — and last time I told one of the bad guys that talking to the dead hurt, he took advantage of the opportunity by singing Henry the Eighth in my head. Really, really loud. This time I wasn’t even taking a chance on letting any of them know that.
The longer I talked to this guy, the more damage I’d do to myself.
“Fine.” Frost pulled her phone out and tapped through screens. “Get his birthday and badge number, and I’ll think about believing you.”
“Gee, thanks.” I stepped to the table, facing her across the body bag. “Listen, don’t do me any favors,” I said. “Because I damned well don’t want to do any for you.”
Her eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth, then reconsidered and closed it.
I decided to ignore Agent Frost and focus on the task at hand. Since I wasn’t going to project this one with a glamour, I’d make it easier on myself and go for direct contact. Which meant I had to unzip the body bag.
As I did that, Agent Gilmore moved up next to me and stared at the exposed corpse. Redfield looked downright gruesome in the harsh basement lighting. “How does this … er, death speaking work?” he said. “Is it literal? What I mean is, will he actually talk?”
City of Secrets (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 5) Page 2
