by Lisa Shearin
We had hoped we’d seen the last of him.
It sucked when hope got squashed flat.
I’d come in early this morning. Ian wasn’t here yet. I hurried toward the elevator. If I was lucky, I could catch him before he got here and caught sight of what was playing on every monitor in the bull pen. That is, if he hadn’t already seen—
The elevator doors opened.
It was Ian and two other agents. The agents barely waited for the doors to open all the way before they scrambled out.
I didn’t blame them.
One look at Ian told me he’d already seen the news.
Well, crap.
Barely controlled rage was rolling off my partner in waves. He had it under control because the creature he wanted to unleash it on was on every TV, not standing where Ian could get his hands on him. Most of SPI’s agents were psychically sensitive. In a contained environment such as an elevator, strong emotions would be magnified tenfold. If I hadn’t known what had set Ian off, I’d have wanted to get out of his way, too.
I caught my partner’s eye and jerked my head toward a nearby conference room. It was too early for meetings, so we’d have it all to ourselves. Very few people at SPI knew Ian’s history with that ghoul, and that was the way Ian wanted to keep it.
Ian went in first. I followed, and shut the door.
Ian spat his favorite four-letter word and looked around for something he could punch and not break. Finding nothing that met that requirement, he started pacing. The room was small, so all pacing did was add to his frustration.
“You wanna go down to the gym and work out on the big bag?” I asked. “We can find Yasha to hold for you, cause I’m sure not gonna do it. I like my ribs where they are.”
In response, Ian dropped into a chair and repeated the same cuss word, but with less emphasis and no looking for something to hit. That was a good sign.
“Want to talk about it?” I asked. “Using more than one word? Though if you need to put that one on repeat, go for it. I wouldn’t blame you a bit.”
Ian stared straight ahead. “The video’s everywhere. TV, online—”
I half shrugged. “Cannibalistic bank robbers made up like ghouls are ratings gold. Problem is they’re real ghouls.”
With that, I had Ian’s full, complete, and undivided attention. “Cannibalistic? That wasn’t on the news.”
“Thank God. It wasn’t caught on the surveillance cameras, but the NYPD and our agents got to see the aftermath in living color.” I paused and winced. “So to speak.”
One of the bank guards who had been on duty last night had been unfortunate enough to have walked in on the robbery. Ghouls did what ghouls do—they ate him. That hadn’t been caught on camera. I’d never be ready to actually watch ghouls eat a human.
“The ghouls didn’t enter or exit through any of the bank’s doors,” said Alain Moreau from the now-open conference room door. “That means there was a portal in the Gotham Bank & Trust Company.”
And our morning just kept getting better. A portal was a doorway to another world, dimension, or just another part of town. As SPI’s newest seer of portals, that meant I’d be paying the crime scene a visit. And Ian had become just as obsessed with hunting down and taking out the gang’s leader, who wasn’t actually a ghoul. We didn’t know what he was aside from being incredibly ancient, and able to shapeshift between forms and species at will. The last time he and Ian had crossed paths, Ian had barely escaped with his life. I knew he wanted nothing more than another shot as this thing—and the thing wanted another chance at Ian. I didn’t want them on the same side of the planet as each other.
Moreau knew Ian’s history with the ghoul, and he still wanted us to go.
“You want us to go to the bank,” I said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
Moreau nodded once. “The sooner, the better.”
When it rained, it poured.
• • •
The Gotham Bank & Trust Company looked like any other Midtown Manhattan financial institution—more like a fortress than a city building, and seemingly made from a block of granite. Though to a gang of ghouls with a portal at their beck and call, it might as well have been made out of Play-Doh.
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” I murmured, gazing around the marble lobby.
Ian was talking with the NYPD detective in charge of the investigation. They knew each other. Not from Ian’s time in the NYPD, but from the NYPD’s previous joint work with SPI.
Yes, mortal and supernatural law enforcement worked together—and both had been grateful for it on more than one occasion. That cooperation was under the radar as far as the majority of the NYPD was concerned; but just as SPI had human agents, the NYPD had supernaturals all the way up the ranks. The NYPD couldn’t openly acknowledge SPI’s existence, but when criminals and victims fell on both sides of the law enforcement spectrum, it helped that all the good guys traded information that helped bring down the former, and protect and defend the latter.
The detective in charge was also in the know regarding SPI, and knew that there were supernatural perps and robbery victims, so we’d be granted just as much access to the crime scene as mortal law enforcement. Officially, we were consultants, which covered a lot of ground in any organization or industry.
Every camera on every door leading into and out of Gotham Bank & Trust was in perfect working order. None had shown the ghouls entering or leaving the building, which was baffling the heck out of the NYPD—at least those who weren’t clued in. Those who were had to be some of the most frustrated people on the planet. They knew the supernatural world existed, but they couldn’t tell anyone about it, and they had to find a way to solve cases in a way that kept the woo-woo to a minimum.
We knew monsters existed. Lucky us. Portals also existed, and people who could open and close them were very popular with the criminal classes. I couldn’t open or close them, but I could see them.
It was a new ability for me, and it’d turned out to be a good thing. If I hadn’t been able to see portals, Earth would have become Hell on Earth by now, as in overrun by the population of Hell. I didn’t know how I’d picked up my new talent, but I suspected I really didn’t want to know, considering it could have been a combination of a momentary mind link with an ancient, megalomaniacal, psychotic Russian dragon/crime lord and a power surge from touching a clutch of magical diamonds activated by the most powerful ley line on the East Coast. I’d taken a wallop of power that night that could have activated a dormant ability. Seeing portals ranked right up there with being a seer, making me even more of a target of supernatural bad guys.
It’d only been a couple of hours since the robbery and murder, so if a portal had been opened here I would be able to sense it, if not actually see the magical leftovers. While the portal could be anywhere in the building, it made more sense for it to be closer to where the ghouls would have been doing most of their work.
The safe deposit box vault.
The area outside of Gotham Bank & Trust’s vault looked like a C-level office suite at a Fortune 100 company. I’d never been in one of those before, but I imagined this is what one would look like—if it had been armor-plated. There was a pair of fire doors that had to be three inches thick at the head of the short stairway leading down to the vault area. They were standing open.
Gotham Bank & Trust would want their most valued customers to feel the love while waiting for their personal banker to bring their protected preciouses out to them. There were four small offices on either side of the posh sitting area—with doors that locked from the inside, where clients could commune with their valuables in private.
The inside of the vault was pristine. The ghouls had removed the five boxes that they’d wanted to rob, lined them up on a small, steel table bolted to the floor in the center of the vault, opened them, and scooped out the contents.<
br />
Ian and I weren’t the first SPI agents on-site. Two mages from SPI’s evidence collection department were intent on the five empty boxes. Well, a mage and his top apprentice. Kirby was a nice kid and absurdly talented. He glanced up and gave me a quick nod instead of the big grin and high five I was greeted with in the halls at headquarters. Orson Rogerson was our top forensic mage and was notorious for not breaking a smile and expecting the same from his apprentices. Orson was the best, and he was tough but fair.
Ian and I remained just outside the vault. Orson didn’t have to say a word; we knew better than to step one foot onto his crime scene. And yes, until Orson declared it otherwise, it was his.
The vault had been sealed, five safe deposit boxes lined up on the steel table in the center, standing open, contents gone. I glanced at the boxes again, then squatted just outside the vault door so I could see them at table level. Not just neat, perfectly aligned, like they wanted us to give them Brownie points for being tidy robbers. That or they were totally OCD.
The last time we’d come across a locked door, there had been a dead body inside and we’d ended up dealing with high-ranking demons and a portal to Hell. Yeah, capital “H,” home to fire, brimstone, and torment. This time I smelled no brimstone, which meant no direct connection to Hell, though I was sure the bank guard during his final minutes would have disagreed.
Dead was bad enough. Dead because he’d been eaten alive was as bad as it got.
I jerked my mind away from that image and firmly back to solving this case and finding the things that’d done the killing. “So I’m confused,” I said to Ian.
“How so?”
“They got in and out without setting off any alarms, stole what they’d come for, but left the boxes sitting out. They weren’t rushed, so they could just as easily have put the boxes back. Until one of the owners came to check on their stuff, they wouldn’t even know they’d been robbed. Instead they went out of their way to be obvious.”
“We have the latest in security technology as well as level 12 wards,” said a voice from behind us.
A man wearing what I’d learned from being around Rake was a very expensive suit stood by the vault door regarding us with barely disguised animosity. Whether it was aimed at the apparently worthless level 12 wards or at me for pointing out that they were worthless, I didn’t know.
“No one,” he continued, “mage or mundane, should have been able to gain unauthorized access to this building, let alone this vault. I’m Richard Carlton Winthrop, vice president of customer relations.” He made no move to shake either my or Ian’s hand, instead giving us both a quick glance, up and down, and not appearing to be particularly impressed with what he saw. “I’d been informed by Lieutenant Vane that they would be bringing in special consultants.”
He looked as though he’d steeled himself for an inquisition, though that might have been more from having a robbery and murder happen on his watch. If he wasn’t just being paranoid, it was a good thing we were talking to him before he wasn’t vice president anymore. Considering that many of the bank’s clients were long-lived supernaturals who had accumulated their wealth over many human lifetimes, the man might have more to worry about than just being fired.
“We are,” Ian told him. “I’m Special Agent Byrne, and this is Special Agent Fraser.” Ian didn’t make any move to shake Winthrop’s hand, either. So there.
We wore our badges at our belts, and they looked almost exactly like the ones the FBI carried. Ian hadn’t claimed that we were FBI; however, we were agents, and my mom had always told me I was special. No lies, therefore no foul.
I didn’t feel like being nice, but I could be professional. “I understand, Mr. Winthrop. I didn’t mean to imply that the bank hadn’t taken every precaution to protect their clients’ valuables. Could the contents of more boxes be missing?”
In response—and without looking at me—Winthrop flipped a switch by the vault door. A thin, pale blue glow outlined each of the boxes, except for the five outlined in bright red.
“The wards are intact on all of the others,” he explained.
“I can see that. Nice work.”
Winthrop frowned in profound disapproval at the red outlines. “We certainly paid enough for it.”
It sounded like the mages who built those wards were going to be getting a highly irate call from their customer, namely one Richard Carlton Winthrop. Though if he didn’t change his attitude, Winthrop could find himself in worse shape than his wards. You watched your words around mages with enough power under the hood to construct level 12s.
“Who owns those boxes?” Ian asked him.
“I cannot divulge the names of the boxes’ owners, or the contents of the boxes themselves. The latter because we do not know what our clients keep in their boxes. It is a private matter.”
The contents of the safe deposit boxes weren’t safe from thieves, but the names of the owners and what they’d kept in those boxes were safe from us. That made all kinds of sense.
“Okay, let me see if I have this straight, Mr. Winthrop,” Ian began. “There was a robbery, or at least there are five empty safe deposit boxes sitting on a table in a vault that had been locked. You called us to investigate the robbery, but we do not know what was stolen or who the stolen items even belong to because of client confidentiality.”
We found ourselves on the receiving end of an actual smile. “Yes, so good of you to understand.”
“No, I don’t understand. We are here to investigate. We can’t do that.” Ian’s jaw tightened. “Nor can we find who ate your guard—unless we know what was taken. I’m certain that your customers whose valuables were stolen want them returned. We can’t get them back unless we know what we’re looking for. I do understand your customers not wanting their confidential information shared with just anyone. We’re not just anyone. A little cooperation would go a long way right now toward finding who or what butchered your guard.” My partner’s eyes narrowed. “You do care about your own people, don’t you?”
“Of course, but—”
“If it’s ‘of course,’ then there is no ‘but.’ The family of that man needs and deserves closure, your valued clients want their valuables back, and I want to do my job to see that both happen.”
The banker swallowed audibly. “I will see what I can do.”
“I would appreciate that.”
I waited until Winthrop had left and my partner’s shoulders had relaxed before saying anything. “I love the smell of cooperative bureaucrat in the morning,” I quipped to lessen the tension hanging in the air.
Ian sighed, though it sounded more like a pressure release valve. “Judging from his determination to be as uncooperative as possible, I believe the owners of those empty safe deposit boxes are a particularly dangerous and long-lived breed of supernatural.”
“Vampires.”
“Yes.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Gotham Bank & Trust is exclusively for one percent of the one percent. Aside from dragons, only vampires live long enough to amass that kind of wealth. A dragon’s valuables wouldn’t fit in one of those little boxes. They hide their hoards themselves, and provide their own security.”
I looked to where Winthrop had shut himself in his office. Hopefully to get the information we needed. Probably to call his lawyer and make sure his will was up-to-date once his vampire clients found out their goodies were gone.
7
NOW it was my turn to work hard for the money.
With every door locked, five safe deposit boxes empty, and one dead security guard, there had been a portal opened somewhere in the Gotham Bank & Trust Company.
It was my job to find it. Now. The bank wasn’t all that large, at least not in terms of a football field, but it wasn’t exactly a neighborhood branch office, either. Considering that my last encounter with portals had invo
lved a demon lord, a sadistic elf dark mage, and a yellow brick road of brimstone leading to a Hellpit, I should have felt at least marginally better about the one I was looking for now.
I didn’t.
This one had been used by ghouls. Ghouls that were led by the ghoul—or whatever form he was taking now—that had killed and eaten Ian’s NYPD partner, and had tried to do the same to Ian.
Logic said the portal would be near the vault. But if the portal was near the vault, why was the dead body of the guard upstairs?
I knew from experience that a portal could be opened anywhere, even if the other side of the wall was packed dirt or solid rock. Those ghouls hadn’t wanted to escape to whatever was on the other side of the wall where the portal had opened. I knew that stepping through that portal could have put them a block from the bank, hundreds of miles away, or in an entirely different dimension.
I opened my senses to any magic in the building, willing myself to be receptive to anything that gave me the heebie-jeebies.
It didn’t take me long to find it. A bloody handprint on a white wall on the main floor was pretty much impossible to miss.
So was the dead body surrounded by bright lights and a forensic team a few feet away.
“I don’t know whether to be glad for the assist,” I muttered, “or insulted that the head ghoul thought I needed it.”
Ian scowled. “I’ll add it to the list of things I’m going to take out of his hide.”
That sounded disturbingly similar to what the ghoul wanted to do to Ian. I didn’t point it out. Besides, Ian wasn’t the one who’d killed and eaten a guard. That was plenty enough difference for me.
“So you’re sure this is it?” Ian asked.
“Oh yeah. I don’t need a snootful of brimstone for confirmation. The wall’s flat, but it’s like I’m wearing 3-D glasses. That handprint is smack-dab in the middle of a ghoul-sized and indented section of wall.” I blinked rapidly and had to look away. “And all wavy-like and more than a mite quease inducing.”
