by SM Reine
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
His hand shot out and clamped on my throat. He lifted me right off my goddamn feet like I was a chicken getting hauled to the chopping block.
Malcolm and Fritz were exchanging glances, as if trying to silently decide how to handle the situation, but I knew there was nothing they could do. I’d already seen how useful it was to shoot werewolves.
I struggled to speak. “Look, Cain—”
“We have Yvette!”
The words came from behind the werewolf. He turned without dropping me, and I struggled to breathe through the pressure, kicking uselessly at the roof.
Suzy was standing in the doorway, shotgun aimed.
“Say that again,” Cain growled.
“We’ve got Yvette and the ethereal artifact,” Suzy said, fearless in the face of the werewolf. “Drop Cèsar or you’ll never see either again.”
What the hell was she talking about? I tried to catch her eye, but she was ignoring me.
The werewolf sniffed the air. He must have been able to detect the smell of Yvette around Suzy, too, because he finally released me. I stumbled, gasping as air flooded my lungs.
“Bring both to me tomorrow at midnight,” Cain said. “You’ll find me on Sapphire Beach. If you don’t come, or if you don’t have Yvette and the artifact, then I will kill every last one of you.” There was something very matter-of-fact about the way he said that, like he was confident that killing us would be about as difficult as popping down to the corner store for aspirin.
“Fine,” Suzy said.
Cain stepped away from me, backing toward the edge of the roof.
He was leaving. I started to relax.
“I’ll need insurance, of course,” the werewolf said.
Then he broke into a run—too fast for me to realize what he was doing, much less stop him.
He wrapped both of his arms around Fritz’s body. And then both of them plunged off the side of the condo’s roof.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MALCOLM AND BELLAMY SEARCHED the sidewalk below the Dat-So-La-Lee Condominiums for purée of werewolf and OPA director.
Unsurprisingly, they didn’t find either.
I felt weird retrieving Fritz’s BlackBerry from where he had dropped it on the roof. I’d never seen him without it, so it seemed like a deeply personal possession. Like picking up someone else’s dirty underwear.
“Didn’t Fritz tell us not to touch his cell phone?” Suzy asked, meeting me at the stairs leading back to the penthouse. “Something about drastic consequences and hellfire?”
“I bet he was an only child,” I said.
“Is,” she said. I lifted my eyebrows at her in questioning. “He ‘is’ an only child, not ‘was.’ Being dragged off a rooftop by a werewolf doesn’t mean he’s instantly dead.”
I had a hard time imagining any other outcome to the situation.
We returned to the penthouse to find that it had been ransacked—probably by Cain while we were distracted by fighting David Nicholas’s guys. Nothing was missing, as far as I could tell, but our fancy furniture had been shredded and the floor had been scored deeply by werewolf claws.
I was still numb from watching Cain drag Fritz over the side of the roof, but not so numb that I couldn’t realize that we needed help. More help than one kopis and aspis dyad. Maybe whole squads of trained werewolf- and nightmare-hunter type help.
So I waited until Suzy retreated into her bedroom, then called Fritz’s boss.
Drastic consequences and hellfire? I’d like to see Fritz try to kill me for making a call on his phone while he was being held captive by Cain.
I’d never met any of Fritz’s superiors before. I wasn’t high enough in the OPA food chain to know that we had a database of witches, so I definitely wasn’t high enough to talk to upper-upper management, either. But his boss’s name was one of the only contacts in his cell phone: Vice President Lucrezia de Angelis.
Imagine my surprise when the woman that answered the phone had a thick Italian accent and didn’t seem to care about Fritz’s disappearance so much as the fact that I’d breached the levels of bureaucracy.
“Are you a moron?” Lucrezia asked.
I was pretty sure that it wasn’t in my best interests to answer that question.
“I apologize for calling you, but this is urgent,” I said in my very best I-am-a-good-employee voice.
“You have another supervisor that could have contacted me, don’t you?”
I was totally thrown by the question. “Actually…” Since Fritz had reassigned Suzy and me to a new team handling special investigations, I was pretty sure that the former layers of middle management had become irrelevant. But I also wasn’t sure that Fritz’s superiors knew anything about that. “Sorry?”
“You’re not authorized to access this phone. You are not authorized to contact me. What have you looked at? Have you read emails, text messages, accessed databases…?”
I didn’t want to apologize again and sound like a broken record. I wasn’t even sure what I was apologizing for. I couldn’t think of any other way to handle Fritz’s disappearance. “I only called you.”
“Do you understand what this means?”
I was pretty sure I didn’t understand anything at this point. “No, ma’am.” Good time to pull out the honorifics, I think.
“Director Friederling is responsible for the information that can be accessed through his phone, which means he is now responsible for anything that you may know. It will be his duty to control you.”
“I don’t need to be controlled, ma’am,” I said. “I wouldn’t say anything even if I had seen it, which I definitely haven’t.”
I was pretty sure her moment of silence radiated skepticism.
“Tell me why you’ve called.”
I gave her an overview of our confrontation with David Nicholas and Cain. She already knew about the earlier raid on Craven’s. She also knew who Suzy and I were, so apparently Fritz was very chatty on his long phone meetings. Made it easy to catch her up on the case, though.
I wondered—not for the first time—how much the OPA knew about what Fritz was doing here. How much, if any, of our current operation was secret on this mission.
It would have been impossible to ask without spilling the beans, so I didn’t.
“What’s your plan after this?” Lucrezia asked, surprising me again.
I was supposed to have a plan now? “We’re going to recover Fritz. Director Friederling, that is.” At least, I hoped that we were going to recover Fritz, and not the scraps of Fritz that survived being a werewolf chew toy.
“Yes. You will recover Director Friederling,” she said, “and you’ll do it promptly. If he is not available to be responsible for your breach in security, then those loose ends will need to be tied up.”
“Loose ends?”
“You,” she said softly.
I sat down on one of the bar stools. Hard.
Was Fritz’s boss threatening me?
This call had gone from “awkward” to “shit-your-pants terrifying” in three seconds flat.
She went on. “The clock is ticking, Agent Hawke. We have procedures. You need to have Director Friederling contact me within thirty-six hours of his disappearance, which I will mark as occurring at five o’clock in the afternoon Pacific Standard Time. After that, we’ll be forced to assume that he’s been killed by the werewolf and can no longer be responsible for you. Do you understand?”
In thirty-six hours, she would arrange to have me killed.
“I think I understand,” I said, and I managed to keep calm when I said it.
“Excellent. Keep me apprised of progress via email. The BlackBerry is yours for the time being.” Did she actually sound amused by that?
And she hung up on me.
I stared at Fritz’s BlackBerry. Her name flashed on the screen and then disappeared.
Setting it down very carefully, I backed away like the t
hing might give me herpes. Unfortunately, what it had given me was actually much worse.
“Oh shit,” I whispered.
Malcolm entered the room. He was in full Union combat gear again, helmet and all. “What’s that you said?”
“Nothing.” Just freaking out over my boss’s boss’s death threats. No big deal. I watched Malcolm as he grabbed a few small flash bombs off the table and began loading his pockets. “Hey Malcolm?”
“Mmm?”
“Do you trust the Union?” I asked. “Or the OPA? The whole organization?”
The question seemed to puzzle him. “Trust them with what?”
“I mean—are we safe?” That didn’t seem to make sense either. I struggled to organize my thoughts. “Would the OPA kill us?”
“Sure,” Malcolm said.
Guess the response shouldn’t have shocked me at that point, but it did. I worked for a secret government organization. It was kind of shady, yeah, but it was still a government organization. They were still part of the law. There were definitely laws about not killing employees.
Probably more than a few labor regulations about that, too.
Malcolm seemed to realize the gravity of my question, and he drummed his fingers on the butt of the AK-47 thoughtfully.
“I come from the Union side of things. I went through basic training. I’ve seen Union HQ. I enlisted with my eyes wide open to every shitty thing the Union’s doing worldwide, and I get why they do it. You want to know if you can trust your bosses? You can’t.” He gave a helpless shrug. “We’re not here for the pension. We’re here to save the world from powers a lot bigger than us. Evil powers. Gods and monsters that can crush us with a glance. The only way you stay ahead in a place like this is to do evil right on back.”
“I signed the NDA,” I said, choking down a bitter mix of denial and fear. “I’ve done everything they asked.”
“Someone threaten you?”
I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone I’d talked to the vice president. “It’s been a rough week.”
“It’s only going to get rougher,” Malcolm said, knocking his knuckles against his helmet.
I gave him a wary look. “Are we going into a fight again?”
“I am. You’re out on this one. Lucky you! I’ll make sure to save a couple of daimarachnid heads for you.” At my look of surprise, he said, “We’re clearing out the rest of the spider nest at Silverton Mine—me and Bellamy and another Union unit. Gotta make it safe for excavation.”
“Going to retrieve the rest of the artifacts?”
Malcolm tapped his nose under the glass facial shield. “Don’t get too comfortable, mate. Once it’s empty, you and that gorgeous partner of yours are going to have to escort the necrocognitive to the site. There are bodies to interview, information to collect, werewolves to fuck with.”
How was Cain going to react once we possessed more of the artifacts from the mines? My guess was that it wouldn’t be good. I wasn’t even sure he’d let the OPA start an excavation. “Speaking of the werewolf…”
“I’ve got a magazine of silver rounds now,” Malcolm said. “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget you.”
He tossed another magazine to me. It looked like it would fit the Desert Eagle. I thumbed out the top round and rolled it between my fingers, getting oil smeared over my skin. It was made of brighter, shinier metal than my usual bullets. “Silver?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Don’t I get any special training on this one?”
“Nah. Werewolves are rare. You’ll never run into another one in your career.” Malcolm hefted his AK-47 and headed for the door. “I’ll give you one tip, though. You see Cain again, you point that thing between his eyes and don’t stop firing until he is fucking dead.”
Good tip.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ONCE THE SHOCK OF talking to Lucrezia wore off, practicality set in. The clock ticking down to death threats made me extremely eager to act, needless to say. I wanted to do something—anything—to save Fritz’s ass so that my ass could be saved, too.
I’m not too proud to admit that I was thinking pretty hard about ways to make Cain a happy camper.
But there was no way to appease him until the OPA returned the fragment of ethereal ruin. We also had to wait for Malcolm and the Union to destroy the daimarachnid nest, allowing us to recover Yvette’s body. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with the dead woman, exactly, but I couldn’t do anything without it.
So instead of acting, I slept. I slept really, really badly.
Years of darkness seemed to elapse before I woke up.
I didn’t feel like cleaning, but I spent the morning working on the penthouse anyway. Growing up with a huge family in a tiny house, you got used to cleaning whether or not you wanted to. Keeping on top of the mess had been the only way to keep our living room from looking like David Nicholas’s office, and old habits died hard.
I grabbed garbage bags from underneath the sink and started tossing everything Cain had broken into the trash. He’d been like a tornado. Nothing had survived untouched. Our brand new cookware? Crumpled like beer cans against a drunken frat boy’s forehead. The altar in the living room? Karate-chopped in half. The curtains? Looked like a wolf had sharpened his claws on them. Guess he probably had.
We’d only been out of there for a couple of minutes. Cain hadn’t had much time to wreck the place, and he’d still done it pretty thoroughly.
And he was bent on coming back for us if we didn’t give him the ethereal artifact and his dead friend Yvette.
On the bright side, if I could hide from Cain’s wrath for another—oh, twenty-eight hours or so, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting ripped apart by a man-eating werewolf. Vice President Lucrezia de Hardass would just shoot me in the back of the head.
Man, this is not my week.
I fantasized about taking a vacation while I tossed stuff out. The OPA wasn’t too liberal about vacation time, but I’d bet that Fritz would be feeling generous after I came up with an impossible rescue plan and dragged him from the literal jaws of death.
Maybe I could head up to Canada. It had been a long time since I got somewhere all pretty and forested.
Nah, forests sounded too hospitable for a werewolf. Maybe the Caribbean.
Yeah. I couldn’t imagine a werewolf in the Caribbean. Or nightmares, for that matter.
When I turned around, I was surprised to find that Suzy’s bedroom door was open a crack. Enough for Suzy’s eye to peek through. “Would you come inside?” she asked, blinking at me through the open sliver of doorway. “I need to talk with you.”
I almost agreed reflexively, but then my brain caught up with her request.
Suzy was inviting me into her bedroom.
Last time she’d shared her personal space with me, she’d been running around in a t-shirt and panties and a sneaky smile. It was a weird fucking thing to do to a guy like me. Didn’t really know how to deal with it. “I should probably keep cleaning. Look for evidence Cain might have left behind. Or something like that.”
Suzy shut her eyes and bumped her forehead gently against the doorframe. “Please?”
I was helpless against that word coming from a woman. Please. She could have followed it up with a request for felony murder on her behalf and I would have given it serious consideration.
I took a step toward the door. Stopped myself.
Bad idea. Bad idea. Think, Cèsar.
“Maybe just for a minute,” I said.
You fucking asshole.
But she smiled, and I couldn’t go back on my word now that I’d said it.
I stepped into Suzy’s bedroom.
The world distorted around me as I crossed the threshold. My stomach flipped. And my sinuses inflamed like I had a cat allergy and had just plummeted into a pit of kittens.
Muffling my sneezes into my arm, I studied Suzy’s temporary bedroom through watering eyes. We’d only been there for a few days
and she had already been casting spells all over the place. There was a reason that she was a level seven witch and I was only a three: I brewed awesome strength potions; she distorted reality.
The other bedrooms in the penthouse were maybe a hundred and fifty square feet. Hers was at least four hundred now, and that was just the entryway. She had somehow added an inner hallway that led off into a separate kitchen and bathroom area. Another closed door probably led to a bedroom.
In her sitting room, she had magicked the walls to a pleasant blue color with a smattering of firefly-like stars hovering near the ceiling. The floors looked like bamboo mats. She’d even enchanted a freaking water fixture that dribbled down one wall into a stone basin bigger than most bathtubs.
“Take off your shoes,” Suzy said, shuffling over to her couch and curling up on it. I kicked off my sneakers.
I hadn’t gotten a good look at her through the door. Now I saw that she wasn’t in playful “let’s fuck with Cèsar’s tiny brain” mode, but “fuck, every inch of my body hurts” mode, and I felt selfishly relieved. Suzy had an icepack pressed against one side of her face. Her body was consumed by sweatpants and a sweater at least two sizes too big for her. She wore slippers with smiley faces on the toes that bore a strange resemblance to Cat.
Apprehension melted away. “Are your bruises getting worse?”
She shifted her ice pack to conceal them. “Just took them a while to develop. You don’t look much better.”
“Well, I did get to wrestle with an overgrown mutt while you were casting the TARDIS enchantment on your bedroom.” I peeked into her bathroom. She’d practically given herself an Olympic-sized swimming pool. “Damn, Suzy.”
“I got sick of having to share with the necrocog,” she muttered.
Hey, at least it was keeping the peace. I would have drawn a chalk line down the center of the penthouse, chainsawed down that line, and given a separate half to each of the women at this point. Whatever it took to make the air stop freezing me into an ice sculpture every time they hung out in the same room.
“We’re going to need a plan to recover Fritz,” I said, pacing back and forth across her magical bamboo flooring.
