“You knew who I was?” Sola asked, shocked.
“Not who, but what, yeah,” Fred replied. “Damn kid was killed before I could convince him you might be useful in the siege.”
Sola frowned at that.
“If you knew, why didn’t you say anything?” he finally asked.
“Because it wasn’t my place to say anything,” Fred replied. “You wanted to be incognito. Outing you wasn’t my place.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that you saved my life,” Sola said.
“True. It also doesn’t mean I haven’t regretted it from time to time over the last century,” Fred replied maliciously.
“So, the siege is underway,” Sola continued, slightly chastised. “The Chinese shelled the Legations, and exploded mines under them. I did what I could for the wounded, working with the Legation medical staff. I remember the Germans being forced from the position they were holding, and then the Americans counterattacked.”
Fred snorted at that.
“The siege wound on and things did not look well for us,” Sola said, sipping from his glass. “On the 13th of July, I went to the French Legation to check on the wounded, and Chinese sappers detonated a mine under it. I was trapped in the rubble, and Fred dug me out,” Sola said, ending on a simple note.
“How’d that happen?” I asked.
“You ain’t gonna believe this shit, but Captain Myers knew what I was,” Fred said, out of respect for the true bardic forms. “You might have noticed, I’m big for one of my people, so I ‘pass’ for human. That’s one of the reasons the Engineer sends me out to deal with humans and others. Anyway, the Skipper gave not one shit that I was a dwarf, but he did make a couple of jokes about his ‘mining expert’ in passing.”
He paused, pulled out a pocket humidor, and stuck half a cigar in his face without lighting it.
“Sola told y’all about the sappers destroying the French Legation, but he left out the part about the Japanese and Italians falling back to their last defense line,” Fred continued, chewing on the cigar sticking out of his mouth. “The 13th of July was a really shitty day, overall. When the Chinese were done giving us shit, Captain Myers decided we needed to be sure that the French Legation was untenable, so he voluntold me to take Private Daily into the Legation to make sure, and to make sure they hadn’t left anybody behind.”
“Private Daily?” Jed asked. “Sergeant Major Dan Daily?”
“Yeah, that’s him,” Fred replied, taking a drink from his glass. “Daily wasn’t much bigger than I am, so he and I could get into more places than the bigger Marines could. We’d made sure there was no way in hell to hold the position, and had just started to exit the Legation, when Daily heard moans in the rubble, so we worked our way into the pile, found Sola here, dug him out, and got him back inside the lines. A few days later, US Minister to China Conger made contact with the Chinese, and they backed off—it probably didn’t hurt that another 20,000 troops had landed and were on the march to Beijing, either.”
“So that’s the story?” Diindiisi asked.
“Well, there’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the bones of it, yes,” Sola said.
Fred nodded.
“Seems somewhat anti-climactic,” Diindiisi replied.
“Real life often is,” Fred replied. “About those chains?”
“They’re in lab two, with what’s left of the implants,” Sola said, leading us out of the break room.
He’d forgotten he was cosplaying Elvis by this point, praise be to God.
* * * * *
Chapter Four
Fred got the chains and lab space out of Sola. With that, it still took two days for the dwarves to figure anything out. A meeting where they’d explain what happened in simple terms to the people who might be killing things that broke the rules was out of the question. That was Fred’s original plan, he confided later. However, the head of the Chisos Mine wanted to know what had happened, so she Skyped in. Not to be outdone by a mere dwarf, the head of Mystical Operations at QMG in Dallas wanted to sit in as well, which meant having to do a formal presentation—ye olde PowerPoint dogge and ponnie showe in three part harmony.
Which meant another day before the field teams got information that was pertinent to them—some days QMG was as bad as the fucking federal government. The month was waning, the moon was waxing, and the field teams were tense—we were getting reports of something big shaping up out on the streets, but had nothing beyond that.
Harvey, the wererabbit who’s the head of the local branch of the Rodent Liberation Front—yeah, therianthropes got different factions just like everyone else—showed up and demanded to see Goodhart for an explanation of our plans. He left, unhappy, with Goodhart’s answer of ‘Nutz.’
I actually missed the dog and pony show—Diindiisi and I were at lunch combining business with pleasure, tracking down a lead on the PBR Street Gang, and I wasn’t high enough on the food chain to sit in on an executive level meeting. QMG actually having an ‘Investigations’ group probably would have stepped on too many official toes with law enforcement, so in our munificent spare time, we got to run down leads on top of everything else.
The Daves—Dave and Other Dave—had managed to track some of the posts from the Street Gang to routers in multiple coffee shops. I was a bit upset when I saw one of the names on the list—I’d been going there since I’d moved to Austin, so when I broke out the assignments, I took Mocha Joe’s.
We had drawn the lucky straw—again, for given values of lucky—because the three idiots walked in about ten minutes after we’d settled in. We didn’t have their names yet, and even on their ‘Free the Undead and Otherkin’ website, they used ‘cool’ street names which were a mouthful of redonkulousness, so we’d assigned them codenames as well; Handlebar, for the crappiest handlebar mustache since Kaiser Wilhelm II’s; Monocle, he had one jammed in his eye; and Fedora, who was wearing a trilby, un-ironically.
Diindiisi and I sat and listened as the trio spent the next twenty minutes carefully explaining to the waitress how they wanted her to mix the perfect latte, Americano, and cup of cocoa—the chocolate-to-soy-milk ratio has to be perfect, and the chocolate is fair trade, right?—we watched as they pulled out various electronic devices and checked into the world. Conversely, they let the world know where they were, as well. If things hadn’t been so damn serious, it would have been funny as hell, although Diindiisi couldn’t see the humor in it. Finally, Monocle looked around the room to make sure they were alone. I was listening to them, but the Three Amigos hadn’t realized that all the conspiratorial looks in the world did nothing when you shouted at the top of your lungs in an empty coffee shop.
“They killed that poor lycanthrope,” Monocle said.
I almost choked on my tea when he said that. Not because his terminology was wrong, but because he knew about it in the first place.
“What?” Handlebar asked, and Fedora looked up from stirring sugar into his cocoa.
“Fucking fascist assholes,” Fedora said, sipping from his cocoa, which was no longer the perfect 145 degrees. “We know what happened?”
“They were ‘interrogating’ her, and she died,” Monocle said.
“Interrogating her how? Bet the fascists were waterboarding her!” Handlebar almost shouted.
That one got me, I admit, and I gasped for air before putting out a hand to keep Diindiisi in her seat.
“I just don’t get how Michael lets them treat his fellow Otherkin like that,” Fedora said.
“Otherkin?” Diindiisi whispered.
“I’ll explain later, love,” I replied.
“He’s obviously internalized the oppression,” Monocle said, polishing his eyepiece. “Poor bastard is confused, doing what he thinks will make his masters happy and keep them from staking him.”
Good thing I wasn’t drinking when he said that, because I’d have probably drowned. Michelangelo suffering from ‘internalized oppression’ was probably the last thing I’d su
spect of the old bloodsucker. He’d spent the last four hundred and forty odd years looking for the vampire that had cursed him so he could die in God’s favor. He’d told Abraham Van Helsing how to kill Dracula and to be sure that Vlad the Impaler was finally dead. I would have paid to see the look on Michael’s face when he heard them say that to him.
“There’s another problem,” Monocle said. “They’ve promoted those assholes on the Brute Squad to ‘Oversight,’ which probably means they’ve got enough hunter assholes in town to make up more teams to oppress our brothers and sisters Who Have Looked Beyond the Veil.”
I swear you could hear the capital letters.
“Well, with them in charge, we should get more information, at least,” Fedora piped up. He seemed disappointed in his cocoa for some reason.
Monocle’s monocle fell off and into his Americano. He fished it out and wiped it dry.
“You know, you look a perfect upper-middle-class ass wearing that thing,” Handlebar said, stroking his moustache.
Diindiisi was whispering under her breath and moving her hands under the table. I continued to eavesdrop on the three idiots.
“Have you got a better way to secretly carry a magnifying glass?” Monocle asked.
“I don’t know, hmm, in a leather pouch in a pocket?” Fedora replied with a laugh. “You’re not Peter Whimsy, you know.”
“It’d ruin the lines of my suit,” Monocle replied.
He was wearing a tight, cheap, grey blazer over a T-shirt, and a pink pair of what I had seen advertised as ‘Your Girlfriend’s Jeans’ that were, from the way he was squirming, too tight in the crotch.
“Besides,” Handlebar said after sipping his latte, “monocles are so fascist.”
“You’ve been watching the wrong movies again,” Monocle replied.
“Nah, they’re pretty fascist,” Fedora replied. “If you have to wear something to distract from your lack of ability to grow proper facial hair, you could wear pince-nez and not look like a goddamned Nazi. Or, if you absolutely have to wear that fucking thing, get rid of that dark grey jacket you wear everywhere.”
I found the facial hair comment pretty damn funny—Fedora looked like someone had randomly glued theatrical hair to his face in spots, and Handlebar’s mustache was ragged.
“I’ll give it some thought,” Monocle said. “But gray brings out the color of my eyes.”
“You could even change your online handle to Monocle, wearing the pince-nez. It’d be ironic and shit,” Fedora said, grinning.
“I said I’d think about it,” Monocle said, rising from the table. “But I’ve got to take a leak; I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Anything else from our source?” Fedora asked when Monocle had gone around the corner to the bathrooms.
“Oracle hasn’t sent anything other than the death report and the changes to the org chart here,” Handlebar replied. “She said she’d get back in touch when she had something important for us, though.”
I thought about texting Dave or Other Dave, and then discarded the idea. If the Three Amigos had a mole at QMG monitoring traffic for them—there were any number of ways they could do it—they were getting everything, because all the company phones dumped copies of messages to a central server, for safety reasons. That policy had let us pay back more than one monster after they killed a team. For now, all contact with the Daves would be face to face.
Monocle came back to the table, sans eyewear.
“You guys are right, I’ll get a pocket glass and some pince-nez,” he said, sitting back down.
“Why? What happened to your monocle?” Handlebar asked with a malicious grin.
“I…I dropped it,” Monocle replied.
“Dropped it where?”
“If it’s any of your business, I dropped it in the damn urinal and pissed on it, so I left it there,” Monocle snapped.
These clowns were a better accidental comedy act than all of the professionals who had come to Iraq with the USO.
They lingered for another twenty minutes or so, discussing minor crap, then left, carefully noting on their electronics that they were leaving and where they would make their next appearance. I waited until they had paid out and left the parking lot—in what was obviously a rental, replacing their hand-painted Honda Odyssey—and signaled for the waitress.
“S’up Jesse?” she asked. Over the last couple of years we’d come here a lot, and I made sure to tip well.
“Those three, they come here often?”
“Those three idiots? About once or twice a week,” the waitress replied. “I’m surprised you haven’t run across them before. Usually they’re trying to cage free drinks, ‘cause they’re ‘media influencers’ who’ll drive traffic to the shop. Course, the managers gave ’em free drinks for a while, until the traffic never showed up. It’s always the same line of bullshit—drinks ordered and they kill ’em with sugar, or just sitting here then complain they didn’t get what they ordered or the drink is cold. If it weren’t for the amusement factor, I’m sure the owners would have tossed them a long time ago.”
“Sounds about right,” I said.
“Oh, they usually won’t come in if the cops from the local station are in having breakfast before they go on shift. Apparently, they’re some sort of desperados or something like that,” she said, filling my water glass and walking over to another table.
“They’re human, as far as I can tell,” Diindiisi said when the waitress had walked off.
“That kind usually are,” I replied.
“Jesse, what’s an Otherkin?” she asked after I’d had a chance to sip from my glass.
“Usually it refers to people who think they’re other than human—they think they’re dragons, or horses, or whatever. In this case, those three are using it to refer to therianthropes and various other things that keep us employed,” I replied. “Are you about done?”
“Yes,” she replied, finishing her cup of coffee. “Why?”
“Because I need to go talk to the Daves. Or Other Dave, at the very least.”
Twenty minutes later, Other Dave and I were standing outside the office in the smoke pit—not that Other Dave smoked anymore, but he had set off the smoke detectors more than once with his vape, so the authorities had pushed him outside. Which suited Other Dave fine—he’d set up a mini-office, complete with desk and power access, and spent most of his days in the smoke pit.
“So you think they’re getting info from the inside?” Other Dave asked.
“Yeah, the way they were talking, they’ve got at least one mole on the inside,” I replied. I was standing upwind of Other Dave, mainly because I didn’t want to smell like whatever the hell it was he was putting through his vape.
“Hmm, I can run a check against any of the MAC addresses,” Dave said, fogging for mosquitos with his vape.
“What is a MAC address?” Diindiisi asked.
“Short form, it’s a number that identifies a piece of equipment on the internet,” Other Dave said.
“So a serial number?” she replied.
“More or less. Problem is they can be spoofed, making it harder to track the equipment.” He paused, noting the look on Diindiisi’s face. “Spoofing makes the device in question appear to be a different device. It’s easy to do. It’s not illegal, either. But I’ll start looking at the MAC addresses for those clowns, see if they’re spoofing their addresses, and if so, I’ll look for a pattern,” Other Dave said.
“Thanks. And…”
“Yeah, I know. Nothing over the network until we find the leak,” he said with a wry grin.
“Thanks, man.”
* * * * *
Chapter Five
Even with support, things take time. So, while we were waiting on R&D(M) to figure out where the new implants were coming from, and IT to get us a link to PBR Street Gang, we had time for mandatory training. Again.
The only thing worse than ‘mandatory fun time’ when I had been in the Corps had been mandatory trainin
g. QMG had taken that horror and distilled it further, and mandatory training was like the opening levels of hell in Dante. It probably wouldn’t have been horrible if it had been something like running drills in the shoot house or burning ammo on the range. QMG has a huge ammo budget, but then again, one of the founders was a man who understood the concept of compound interest almost at the genetic level. If it had been the bi-monthly ‘New Monsters’ class with Texas Parks and Wildlife, we’d have probably had a ball.
Today it was ‘The Press, care and feeding thereof.’ The only thing worse than dealing with Austin traffic is dealing with the press, in my opinion. The class was a six-hour long PowerPoint presentation complete with ‘role playing to better understand the important roles played by the press in society.’ Seriously.
I tried to escape and evade. No good. I tried medical. Nope. Dental was out, since I’d just had my teeth cleaned a week ago. Therefore, I was sitting in a classroom, watching the presenter read the damn PowerPoint slides to my team as if we were four-year-olds when my phone went off. That got me a look from the presenter, a one-armed individual.
“Sorry, got to take this,” I said, looking at my phone and answering it. “Send it.”
“Father Salazar,” the sultry voice of Dispatch said, “a road crew has found something, and your team is next up.”
“Roger that,” I said, sending a quick prayer of thanksgiving to Murphy, patron saint of being dropped from the frying pan into the fire. “Where?”
“Howard Lane and Scofield Ridge, at the crossroads.”
Shit. People bury things at crossroads for reasons.
“Roger that. ETA twenty minutes,” I said, breaking the call.
My team was standing, and our go bags were waiting, racked and stacked by the entrance to the training room.
Blood Moon Eclipse (The Shadow Lands Book 2) Page 4