Eldritch Ops

by Phipps, C. T.

  A long-haired Chinese man launched himself at me, his hands having grown bear-like claws and his face a contorted parody of a human’s. He showed far too many teeth and all of them were razor-sharp. He was faster than the others of his kind, but to me was moving in slow motion.

  I laughed at his assault, slashing through both of his arms before bisecting him with the Bloodsword. The vampire had recently fed, so it was like popping a balloon, all of the blood inside him exploding outward in a violent spray.

  I drew power from the spilled blood on the ground and stared at the vampires before me, no longer thinking of escape but of feeding. There was a hunger in my chest, almost sexual in nature, driving me to kill them all. I was barely aware of the low oxygen around us and how the plane was rocking from its disrupted atmosphere.

  Elizabeth and Minka aimed their pistols at my chest, taking position in front of the other vampires. I felt like I could tear the guns apart with my mind, but I rebelled against that thought. The confidence generated by the sword was a false one, luring me into believing I could fight my opponents one-on-many.

  I needed to find a way to escape.

  “Impressive,” Dracula said, stepping in front of the two vampire women. “But you forget who is the master.”

  I charged at Dracula, but he just raised his right hand and snapped his fingers. All of the blood on the ground flew upwards and became like pieces of broken glass. I felt cuts all across my legs, chest, shoulders, and arms. Dracula stretched out his hand and my blood started to boil, the cuts giving him an in to manipulate me.

  I fell to my knees, feeling pain like I’d never felt before in my life. It was as if my insides were on fire, the pain moving through every nerve ending and then somehow doubling back stronger than before. I could feel the pain intensify to the point where I was ready to black out, but couldn’t. Dracula was going to kill me with pain, and I could see the joy in his eyes as he did so.

  If he had been trying to kill any other agent in the House, I suspect his plan would have worked. The problem was that I wasn’t a good wizard—I was a pretty terrible one, in fact—but I was a pretty damn good martial artist. I used it to supplement my magic, and one of the first things I’d picked up was how to push aside pain. Suppressing the pain, I cleared my head enough to do a single spell and drew on the Bloodsword’s power to do so, channeling everything I had into a single drop of blood in my right hand that I hurled with my fingertips towards the emergency exit.

  I underestimated the power of the magic flowing through me, because as I watched the little droplet fly through the air, it glowed with an ever-expanding aura of energy that exploded when it struck the door.

  I’m not speaking figuratively. Half of the plane detonated in an explosion of white light, and every individual inside, myself included, was sucked out into the wild blue yonder. It was a level of magic I’d never had to deal with, and the fact that I wasn’t killed stunned me. Unfortunately, I was still flying through the air with no parachute and saw the blue waters of the Caribbean stretched out before me in every direction.

  I said the first word that came to mind. “SHIIIIIIIIIIIT!”

  I was about twelve thousand feet in the air—not a high distance, but still enough to flatten me when I struck the waves below. It was beautiful seeing the ocean reflected against the setting sun. I was hurtling free-form and couldn’t think of a way to prevent my death. Still, I struggled to slow my descent with magic, covered myself in protective spells, and prayed to all my gods for salvation. In the end, I struck the water, and everything went black. My last thoughts? That this was a crappy way to end my life story.

  Chapter Nine

  I wasn’t aware of whether I lived or died for some time thereafter. You might find this strange but knowing there was an afterlife meant I was prepared to spend days, if not weeks, in the limbo between life and death. What does one do in this state? I’m sorry to say reminiscing about life is about it. Memories are the sum of who we are. Daoism teaches that it’s the present that matters rather than the past, but we are the products of our past interacting with the now. That, if I may take a moment to go all Yoda on you, is what shapes our future.

  Too often, we let our imagination fill in the gaps and alter our pasts to live with ourselves. We remember ourselves being bullied when we, ourselves, bullied others. We remember the past better than it was. We even forget important details because they’re too painful. When you were an agent of the Red Room, you didn’t have that luxury.

  As a spy, memories are doubly important because you must remember things exactly as they are on missions. The truth is often painful, humiliating, and ambiguous. We rarely know why people do things, so we fill in the blanks with stories to make sense of it all. That man killed his wife because she was cheating on him, or that woman stole from her employer because she needed the money for drugs. Many times, things just happen, and we never know the whys or the how.

  In my case, I didn’t have many happy memories as an adult. I didn’t have a troubled childhood. I was a spoiled little shit if you must know the truth, but I’d more than made up for it upon graduating the Black Room’s field academy. Aside from some brief moments of happiness with Cassandra, Ashley, Christopher, my family, and Shannon, my life was a series of traumatic events interrupted only by the dull tedium of office work. I’d been an agent of the Red Room since I was twenty-one, and it appalled me to realize the past thirteen years of my life had been about 80% filing reports. Gods and immortals, no wonder I hated being a Committee member.

  I tried to hang on to the good memories, so I kept reliving them: my wedding with Cassandra, my trip to the Hollow Earth with Shannon, the Vegas mission, when I first told Ashley I loved her, and volunteer work with Christopher at the House’s summer camp for superhuman children. But the dark ones sneaked past. I saw a blood-splattered school lunchroom, Cassandra’s dead body leaking out brain matter on the ground, and Christopher being dragged away. The worst memory, though, was when I realized I could never escape the House. That I was a prisoner by choice.

  That memory I experienced as if it were happening anew. It was All Hallows Eve on an unusually busy night. Halloween was typically a dull time for monster hunters. Why? I dunno. The lab guys might have a specific reason, but I guessed it was because most of the creepy crawlies considered it too gauche to menace people on the supposedly most haunted night of the year. Despite this, I'd come back to the family mansion with my first partner after a case. She was upstairs getting changed while I was playing pool with my father in the billiard room. We’d put down a banshee at Chicago Stadium, but it hadn’t darkened our mood for revelry.

  Yes, billiard room. Hawthorne House was large enough that it had all the rooms from the Clue game, and then some. I once made a joke that the place had its own phone extension, only to find out it did. Despite my present modest means, I came from money. The kind people used to buy and sell islands with. That night was the night I broke with my father and all his wealth.

  That night was the event that changed everything.

  Nathan Hawthorne was not what most people pictured when they imagined the most powerful wizard on Earth. He was handsome, looking no older than his late forties, with a strong resemblance to Robert Redford in his prime. I’d long suspected my father, not content with being a master magus and richer than God, had used magic to adjust his appearance.

  This night, he was dressed in an all-black business suit with a small white handkerchief in his left front pocket. It was a stark contrast to me, wearing a ball cap, blue jeans, and a loose t-shirt. Neither of us were dressed for a party, perhaps because my father never bothered to relax unless it was to indulge himself with his latest mistress or his rampant Sinophilia.

  “I need you to kill Ashley Brea Morgan,” my father said, having gotten us alone in my family’s sprawling mansion.

  “If you were anyone else, I’d put a bullet in your head right this second,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

  How did on
e react when a loved one, the man you admired most in the world, threatened the person you cared for the most deeply? For me, I was confused and on the verge of violence. If it had been anyone else, I’d have thought it a sick joke. But my father never joked about work, not when it involved murder.

  “I’m not the one who ordered her death,” Nathan Hawthorne said, picking a pool cue off the wall rack before chalking the end. “This is an order that comes straight from the Chairman. I said I’d handle it and I wanted to bring it to you first.”

  I looked to the doorway, knowing Ashley was waiting upstairs for me. “I brought her here to meet the family. I intend to marry her. You know I’m going to do everything in my power to protect her.”

  I’d been a solo agent for much of my career, the Black Room’s teachers determining I didn’t work well with others. That had changed when I recruited Ashley, training her even as she taught me a great deal about how the outside world functioned.

  My father rolled his eyes and placed the cue ball to break. “Don’t be so melodramatic, Derek.”

  “Melodramatic? What is wrong with you!” I slammed my fists down on the other end of the pool table. If I’d known magic, I would have shattered it.

  I was young and idealistic back then. Despite being a secret agent who’d killed over a dozen people, I still had delusions of being the good guy. I pretended the monsters didn’t have human feelings, the Red Room was all about protecting humanity, and we were there for one another. How wrong I was.

  “She contacted a reporter,” Nathan said, not showing the slightest bit of remorse or sympathy. He took a shot and half a dozen striped balls went into three different pockets. “Several, in fact. My agents managed to squash any hint of a story, but not without considerable time and expense. Things they wouldn’t have needed to do if you’d kept watch over her. She’s your partner, your responsibility.”

  My blood ran cold. “You’re lying. Ashley knows better than that. She wouldn’t . . .”

  But I knew she would. Ashley loved me, but she hated the House. Ashley hated the lies, the murders, the blackmail, and the constant fear-mongering that allowed us to stay one step ahead of the supernatural races. She was too honest for spy work, let alone what we did, and would live openly as a psychic if she could.

  “Wouldn’t she?” Nathan said, ignoring my trailing off. He went around the table and put billiard ball after billiard ball into the nearest pockets. His voice rose with each one he sunk. “When did you start sleeping with her?”

  “That’s none of your damn business,” I said.

  “Michaelson Peak, six months after your separation from Cassandra,” Nathan said, taking a deep breath. “It’s in your files. Everything you do is monitored by the Blue Room. You were a fool to think you were being discreet.”

  I bit my lip. “We weren’t—aren’t—doing anything wrong.”

  “Oh, but you were. How long has she hated us?”

  “Always. You recruited her at gunpoint,” I said, taking off my hat and wiping the sweat caused by the hot lamps above me.

  “You recruited her at gunpoint,” Nathan said, reminding me of how we’d met. “She was seeking out others of her kind when you found her—an untrained psychic of immense potential. It was a choice of joining the Red Room or removing her abilities with surgery. You made the judgment call she could be made to fit in.”

  “She’s done excellent work.”

  “Because she’s in love with you,” Nathan corrected, once more reminding me of the real issue at stake. “That doesn’t mean she’s fitting in. If I weren’t your father, you’d both have had bullets put in the backs of your heads by now.”

  “Listen—”

  “She loathes everything we stand for. She’s a risk to every man, woman, and child on this Earth.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Am I? The Truth must be suppressed. The reason people are able to live normal lives in this world, Derek, is because they do not know how much danger they are in!” Nathan finished knocking in the last ball into the corner pocket. He was apparently not actually playing pool but just distracting himself. He proceeded to conjure Ashley’s file into his right hand. He tossed it into the air, the document opening and hovering over the pool table. It was her psychology report, and I had no doubt it contained damning testimony.

  “You can’t tell everything about a person from reports,” I said, biting my lip. I was ready to beg now, plead with him to use his influence to make this right. “Father—”

  “Shows an unwillingness to use violence against supernatural and human opponents, questions the necessity of hiding the Truth from the masses, shows unnecessary sympathy to nonhumans, has an insubordinate attitude regarding superiors—”

  “We can’t all be as loyal as me,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. The irony was, before that night, I’d been a company man through and though. People had praised me for my willingness to obey orders without question.

  “My enemies are going to discredit you with this,” Nathan said, looking up from the pool table. “Discredit me. Discredit your siblings.”

  I felt sick. “Is that what this is about, your damn position?”

  “You brought her into the House, you convinced Penny to pass her on in the Black Room, and you insisted on partnering with her. You’ve been holding her hand the entire way—”

  “And?” I said, gritting my teeth.

  “And they will bury you with her,” Nathan said, tossing his pool cue to the side. “If you’re not the one to pull the trigger, they’ll have enough evidence to kill you next. Nothing will save you. You’re too good of an agent to lose.”

  I had one last card to play, an appeal to the heart. “What would you do if they asked you to kill my mother?”

  “Who’s to say I didn’t?” Nathan said, shattering any trust I had in the man.

  That allowed my emotions to come together with my conscious mind, letting me know what I had to do. “I understand.”

  “You do?” my father asked, his voice skeptical.

  “I’ll take care of it. Tonight.” My mouth was dry, but I no longer felt any reservations about my situation.

  “Of course,” Nathan said, taking a deep breath. “It’s for the best, Derek. Millions benefit every year from the House’s acti—”

  “Don’t speak to me,” I said, my voice cold and empty. “Ever again.”

  “Derek—”

  “No,” I said, closing my eyes and sucking in a steadying breath before opening them. “As far as I’m concerned, any relationship we had is gone. You’re not my father and I don’t want anything from you. Not your money, not your support in the House. I’ll make my own way from now on.”

  “Derek—” Nathan said, looking annoyed rather than hurt.

  I walked out the door and slammed it behind me.

  For a second, I saw a glimpse into the future. There was a beautiful redhead, myself, and my uncle Talbot. I saw a rotund white-bearded man with one eye grinning at me. Cassandra had a smoking gun pointed at my bleeding arm. There were also other images of Washington burning, two versions of me staring at each other, my hands wrapped around the world, a little white-haired girl about twelve years old, and my body twisting to become a metal dragon with glowing eyes. Not being a wizard yet, I dismissed it as random imagery and shook it away. You got used to strange images when you were a Red Room agent.

  Heading up the stairs of the palatial estate, I went to my old room and knocked on the door. Whereas once Hawthorne House had felt like home, it now felt like a gaudy prison. Whereas I’d once seen just the excess, I now saw how much good could have been done with the money instead. It was shameful, in retrospect, to have all of these revelations come out of a reaction to my father’s words, but they’d shaken me to the core.

  “Come in,” Ashley’s deeply Southern-accented voice spoke on the other side of the door.

  Moving my hand to the bronze knocker, I turned it and headed on in. I wasn’t the agent I’d
become in later years, but I wasn’t stupid, either. Looking down at the floor, I reached into my pocket and clicked the end of a mechanical pen I’d outfitted with an illegally-modified Ring of Veritas. Everything that happened in this room would be blinded to both mundane and mystical monitoring techniques.

  In my head, I was already working out how to fool the Red Room into believing Ashley was dead. I also was questioning how many friends and colleagues I would be willing to murder to keep her safe. The answer? As many as it took. I was surprisingly calm about it. I knew what I was willing to do and had no regrets about it. In a weird way, this was the moment I became the agent I’d always wanted to be.

  “How do I look?” Ashley spoke, drawing my eyes up at her.

  Ashley was a tall, curvaceous woman with shoulder-length brown hair. She wasn’t traditionally beautiful, her gray eyes too large and her frame more muscular than Hollywood said was allowed. However, looking back, I could honestly say until Shannon I had never thought anyone as beautiful. Tonight, she was wearing a bright yellow spandex outfit with a white strip in her hair. “I love the outfit,” I said, my breath running away from me. How was I going to tell her? How was I going to do this? “Rogue from the X-men?”

  “Pre-Anna Paquin,” Ashley said, smirking. “I have your Gambit costume over there.”

  I frowned. “I’m sorry to say I’m not in the mood to play dress-up.”

  “I figured since we managed to put that poor woman’s ghost down—” Ashley looked to the ground.

  “It was a banshee,” I corrected her. “She, it, wasn’t a woman anymore. It never was. It was the ghost of a dead fairy with neither human values nor attitudes.”

  “Whatever. What I was saying is …” Ashley trailed off before wrinkling her brow. “Wait, you’re going to fake my death?!”

  “What?” I said, looking over my shoulder. “No, I’m not.”

  “I’m a psychic, dammit!” Ashley said, appalled. “What the hell is going on?”