When everyone left the room, Riordan crossed back over to the nearest window and looked out. Somewhere amidst the plethora of buildings and houses stretching as far as the eye could see was an unseen enemy. One that threatened everything he had accomplished.
Somebody was onto the alliance and was playing for keeps.
Chapter 12
Heidi thought she and Angelica were just passing through downtown Fort Worth. However, Angelica cut off the highway via the Belknap Street exit, heading over the bridge and into downtown Fort Worth. Just before the courthouse, the former bodybuilder turned right, curved around, and got onto the Main Street Bridge. Heidi recognized the spot, inhaled sharply and closed her eyes, trembling.
“Sorry to do this, babe,” Angelica said, emotionlessly. “But, the first step in training is to face your fears. Isn’t that what you tell the women in your training class?”
Forcing herself to calm down, Heidi slowly opened her eyes. She looked hard at Angelica and then sighed again. She nodded in agreement, sitting back as Angela parked in a lot at the low end of the bridge. She waited as Angelica climbed out. After some hesitation, she climbed out, too.
“That’s the Fort Worth Police Department right across the river,” she pointed out. “Aren’t you worried I’ll be recognized since I am, officially, a missing person?”
Angelica shook her head. “To the powers that be, you’re just another faceless person.”
“This is so embarrassing,” Heidi said, as they carefully made their way down to the jogging path that ran alongside the river.
“Hmm, not quite the reaction I expected,” Angelica noted. “This is where you basically died and became a vampire, and, you’re embarrassed?”
“Ah, no, I mean I always tell my clients to face their fears,” Heidi explained, sheepishly. “I had a woman in one of my classes who was raped and refused to go back into her own bedroom for years afterward. I got her through it. But, something happens to me and I act like some novice student instead of the instructor. What does that make me?”
“Human.”
Smiling at Angelica, Heidi thanked her for the support. She stopped at the pathway where she had been attacked and stared hard. The blood was gone now but her memories remained. Angelica kept watch, her eyes darting about while her right hand remained near her jacket pocket.
“This is almost too much,” she said, slowly.
“You almost died,” Angelica answered. “You have a right to be anxious.”
“No, I mean these past few days have been so weird,” Heidi clarified. “Just when I thought I was going to learn something, Jesus says we’re leaving town. Then, Ryker and Marcus have a Mexican stand-off, and Wesley actually got into a fight with Cantrell. If this is what passes for training to join the group, I might have to rethink this whole thing.”
“Can’t blame you,” Angelica sighed. “Ryker’s definitely a product of his environment, but that doesn’t excuse the rest of us. We have definitely got to get our…crap together.
“Strange as it might seem, I can actually sympathize,” Heidi countered, much to Angelica’s surprise.
“Really?” Angelica said, with more sarcasm than she meant.
“A couple of nights ago, all I wanted to do was kill vampires,” Heidi explained. “I don’t think I could imagine what drove the rest of you into this fight. People are shaped and altered irrevocably by past experiences. I’ve often referred clients to psychiatrists and therapists, but I imagine there can’t be many, if any, of those types available for people like you and Dolores and the others.”
“May I ask what your degree was in, Heidi?” Angelica asked, curiously.
“Psychology,” Heidi replied, with a slight blush. “Never got to practice, though. I thought teaching women to defend themselves was of more immediate importance. Seems like I should have kept at my profession. Then, maybe I could get to the root of this Moonrise thing.”
Angelica shook her head, as the wind blew her tresses across her face.
“I don’t recommend going there, Heidi,” she warned. “You haven’t been around long enough to understand even a little bit of what went on there.”
“Then, he had a point with Moonrise?” Heidi asked. “Ryker, I mean.”
“Just drop it, okay,” Angelica snapped, looking back over her shoulder.
Heidi walked closer to the river. “I guess I’m not the only one who needs a first step. Maybe Dolores letting Ryker stay is that first step.”
“Not quite,” Angelica corrected. “She allowed Ryker to not get booted out. We’re still leaving. Dolores is just letting Cantrell come up with possible plans to use against Riordan and those clan masters, should we find out that they’re actually planning something that could harm us. Does that explain it?”
“Yeah, sure,” a disbelieving Heidi replied. “In other words, she sidelined him. And when we get to the safehouses, would it be too much of a stretch to say that he won’t be called back in when – or if – we decide to rejoin the fight?”
Angelica said nothing and didn’t even look in Heidi’s direction.
“Thanks for clearing the air on that one,” Heidi said.
“You know, you’re right,” Angelica stated. “You might get recognized. We’d better go pick up Patel from the hospital.”
Heidi knew she wasn’t going to get anything else out of her guardian. Reluctantly, she nodded. After one last look at the spot where she had died, she shivered and quickly turned away to catch up with Angelica.
Chapter 13
Aurelia Hernandez shot up out of bed, sweating profusely. Despite the perspiration, she was shivering. She rubbed her eyes and arms before throwing back the covers of her bed. She looked out the window and saw it was still night.
She needed to call Ian. She wanted to know what he’d found out from Diane Simmons. After all, that balderdash about witness protection had been a farce dreamed up by Lin Tang. She shivered again, thinking of Lin’s ambush in the hospital parking lot. The woman was crazy, Aurelia had told herself. She’d actually bitten her!
Sure, the enforcer had quickly closed the wounds, but that did not diminish the true terror of the attack. In the moment when she was bitten, Aurelia could only see her children’s faces. She felt an intense fear like she’d never felt before. That had driven home the need to find Duke’s killer that much faster, before Lin Tang took care of the matter herself. It didn’t take a genius to see Tang would add the detective to the ranks of the half-deads.
To avoid that fate, she needed Ian to come through. At the thought, she switched from being frightened to being angry. She wanted Ian, but had to let him go into the clutches of Diane Simmons. Nausea threatened to overpower her stomach and she reached over to her nightstand for the half-full glass of water she’d left there earlier.
She felt completely helpless. She’d lost Ian, Riordan was losing faith in her abilities and Lin Tang had had actually threatened her family, the one thing she cared most about in this world. And she was powerless to stop it.
Or was she?
She reached over to her phone, picked it up and dialed furiously.
“Hello, Kamarov, this is Aurelia,” she said. “Yes, I know it’s late. I have a job for you. Yes, it’s urgent.”
Cantrell Ryker typed furiously into the computer, navigating through at least three Internet search engines. He found pages, copied them to regular document files, and moved onto to more research.
For hours on end, since that turbulent night less than twenty-four hours earlier, he devoted himself to his plan. It was all he really had, all that kept him from the street, from another stretch of being a fugitive.
“Need some help?”
Ryker glanced at his computer screen and saw from the reflection on the monitor that Kelly White Cloud had just entered the makeshift computer lab.
“I’m fine,” Cantrell muttered. “You shouldn’t be here. I might be infectious.”
“Coffee break then. Can you spare the time?”
Ryker looked over his shoulder. It was then he noticed she carried two extra large cups of something hot and steaming. He relented a bit and accepted one from her. It smelled like French vanilla cappuccino, his favorite.
He took a quick sip and apologized for his behavior. “I shouldn’t be taking my frustrations out on you. And, yeah, I’ve got time. This little project here was something Dolores dreamed up to sideline me.”
“I’m sorry it had to happen like this,” Kelly said, slipping into the room and onto a folding chair. “But, if you ask me, it’s been building for a long time. Some days, it seems like we’re just a bunch of people standing around instead of a team of professionals. Hell, I’ve been stuck at base since you brought me in. Because I might run into one of the half-deads among the three million people in this county.”
Ryker couldn’t argue.
“What are you looking at?” Kelly asked, changing the subject.
“Computers.”
“Okay, wise ass, what are you looking at on the computers?”
“Searching for information on our targets,” Ryker replied, setting his coffee down on a side table. “Sixteen clan masters together in one place has never happened before. That I know of. This is more than just a social gathering.”
“You said there were rumors of an alliance?” she asked between sips of her coffee.
“It’s possible,” Ryker confirmed. “Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. But, it’s one of those things you don’t joke about. This war is already lopsided. An alliance would be the final nail in our coffin.”
Kelly shivered at the thought and its implications.
“Hold on,” she suddenly said. “What if Dolores and Jesus are right? Maybe they’ll leave town once their business is finished. They can be an alliance from afar, right? Like at the United Nations?”
“You’d think, but you’d be wrong,” Ryker answered, solemnly. “There’s another reason for an alliance that doesn’t involve us. In fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t even know we exist.”
“Then, who would they blame Duke’s death on?” Kelly queried.
Ryker typed something into his computer and a screen popped up with a sinister dragon logo. Kelly studied it and saw it was some sort of European family crest, for the dragon held a shield and a sword. Kelly also noticed that the monster had vampire-like fangs.
“Ruling crest of the Supreme Council,” Ryker explained. “Sometimes they go by the Tribunal or a few other names depending on who’s in charge at the moment. They run things in Europe, as well as parts of Africa that used to be European colonies. They’ve been around for centuries, at least since the time of Vlad Tepov, a.k.a Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Dracula.
“The most powerful and aged of these Hominus Nocturna formed the Supreme Council to take care of their affairs in the Old World, what you know as Eastern Europe. Eventually, they expanded to all of Europe, plus colonies in Africa and the Middle East. They were who first decided it was best to keep vampire numbers small and controlled. They created rules and formed networks to help protect their kind. Later, when European explorers reached the New World, they began organizing things here on this side of the Atlantic. However, they tended to use proxies as few wanted to venture to such a faraway land. Let’s just say that, without discipline, these proxies went a little overboard.”
“And the clans here formed Mafia-like families to run their own affairs?” Kelly asked.
“Not at first,” Ryker explained. “But, plans were made, especially when the Supreme Council failed to protect their own from the Salem Witch Trials and the Puritans.”
“The Salem Witch trials were real?” Kelly gasped.
“They didn’t get any witches, but they cleaned house of the vampire menace,” Ryker expounded. “Ironically, it was an alliance of Puritans and Native Americans, a feat unto itself considering all the bad blood between colonists and Indians after the Great Swamp Fight and the Narragansetts’ burning of Providence.
“Anyway, the clans got bigger and bigger until they directly challenged the Supreme Council. The Council reached a truce because it had to. However, as part of the truce, they got to build the equivalent of a consulate in the main city of each clan’s territory. To iron out differences and problems, according to the official line, which is pure bull.”
“They’re trying to influence the smaller clans to ally with the Supreme Council, right?” Kelly deduced. “To contain the big clans, hem them in so they don’t get too strong.”
“Hey, I’m not the only smart one around here,” Ryker quipped, visibly impressed. “But, that’s the gist of it.”
Kelly silently sipped her coffee as she absorbed the history lesson. Ryker, getting no further cues, shrugged and went back to his work.
“What happened to you, Cantrell?” Kelly said, suddenly.
Caught off-guard by the question, Ryker raised an eyebrow and turned around again. He half-expected Kelly not to follow through on the question. So, he was surprised when she pressed the issue.
“A long story would be an understatement,” he admitted. “Let’s just say I went from good guy to the quarry almost overnight.”
“Quarry, eh? You make it sound like something to do with mining.”
“Well, I don’t take it for granite,” Ryker quipped, though his smile disappeared when he saw the blank expression on Kelly’s face. “Hmm, must work on my humor. Seriously, though. I can’t talk about it and it’s over the head of Dolores and Jesus. Way over.”
Kelly gave Ryker a confused look.
“Then, what about Moonrise?” Kelly said. “No one wants to talk about it, but it seems to factor into everything, every decision that’s made. And, it all seems to be aimed straight at you.”
Ryker couldn’t complain. He’d always encouraged young people to learn by asking questions. How could he fault Kelly for asking a sensitive question?
“Moonrise was a big organization,” Ryker said, at last. “More than sixty members, active and in reserve. That’s huge for anyone in this business. Of course, with so many members and so many missions – vampires, witches, cults, werewolves, lycanthropes, et cetera –there was a lot of infighting. The group had been broken into three parts for ease of administration, but they all drew from the same resource pool.
“The end result was each group vying for funding, computer time and other resources. Add in some of the members were more visible than others, which led to clashes of egos. That’s how it was when I joined in. There were two others, besides me, who ended up being liaisons between the groups.”
“So, you never got anything done?” Kelly asked.
“On the contrary,” Ryker countered, strongly. “We had success. Mixed success, but success nonetheless, especially in the deprogramming area. In fact, we had one big operation right after I joined. This cult recruited and brainwashed fifty college students. The aim was to send them back to their colleges to recruit others, in some weird black Sabbath MLM.”
“Sounds like something went wrong,” Kelly said.
“Don’t get ahead of the story, please,” Ryker lightly admonished. “As I was saying, we had to use the entire organization and were still outnumbered three to one. Absolutely, horrible planning. A bunch of cultists escaped because we weren’t coordinated.”
“Like I said, something went wrong.”
“You get a cookie,” Ryker snorted. “Now, shut up and drink your coffee. Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to be active in field ops, but, I had to go in to stop all these guys, including Lo Chang, from getting away. It was like the O.K. Corral. Bodies were dropping like flies.”
“Wow,” Kelly whispered, stunned. “Were the cops there?”
“Not until the end,” Ryker replied. “When I realized just how much clout this cult really had. I mean, the cops should have been there by accident considering the whole operation took the better part of a day. But, the cops got all the credit when the news cameras showed up.”
“You got no credit for anythin
g?”
“Not a thing,” Ryker answered, with a shrug. “I still don’t know how it got covered up. Guy must have had a whole lot of favors owed to him. Oh, sorry, Guy Laroux was one of the founders of Moonrise. He used to run with Dolores and Jesus back in the so-called good ol’ days. Yeah, right, as if there were any good days in this war.”
“You don’t sound happy,” Kelly noted. “I would have thought a mission with such a resounding success would be cause for some of those good ol’ days.”
“You’d think, but the success gave us hubris,” Ryker said. “Well, not me. I tried to get the others to analyze the battle and fix the mistakes, but it’s hard to convince a victorious army to do things like that. That sense of being unbeatable didn’t last long.”
“You mean the incident in California, right?” Kelly asked.
Ryker sighed and nodded, his shoulders sagging.
“We got word on this incredibly well-organized, religious cult,” he said. “Guy and the others insisted we had to take it down, no matter the cost. Somehow, he’d gotten wind of something really big, possibly between the cult and one of the big vampire clans. I objected and got shunted aside. No way were we ready for something like that. They went ahead anyway and you know the rest. Everybody died, on both sides. A hundred or so in all. Complete disaster.”
“Wow, no wonder Dolores and Jesus and the others were so emotional,” Kelly stated, whistling low.
“The founding members of Moonrise were friends with Jesus and Dolores,” Ryker said. “Jessie, Horace, Angelica, Elvis, Manuel, Marcus; they all had a friend or two in the group that died that day.”
“And they blame you for living?”
“I committed the ultimate sin in their eyes,” Ryker commented, his arms crossed and his head hung low. “I was a cancer to team unity. As Guy said, I was opposed to the whole spirit of Moonrise. I was expected to mold myself to fit the ship, so to speak. It was all flowery, but I’d read Sand Pebbles, too.
Dark Tidings: Volumes I & II Page 23