Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

  Fine with me. “You’re perfect.”

  Suzy’s cheeks got redder. “Don’t be sappy,” she said, pushing my head between her legs.

  Which was a great place to be.

  I wasn’t exactly watching the clock, so I had no idea how long I spent figuring out how to get all kinds of sounds out of Suzy. Long enough. Long enough for her to end up boneless and sweaty and laughing on her pillow, an arm flung over her eyes.

  “Jesus Christ,” Suzy gasped when I finally came up. “Where did you learn that? Never mind, I don’t want an answer.” She slid a leg around my hips. For a short woman, her legs were ridiculously long.

  It was an invitation. And I’d be all over that invitation in just a minute.

  For now, I was looking at her. The messy hair. The flushed cheeks.

  Suzy grinned back at me. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said, flipping her over on the bed. “Just thanking the blessed goddess.” I was feeling very spiritual all of a sudden.

  And I was distracted enough that I might not have noticed what was on Suzy’s ass if it hadn’t been on…well, her ass. Which I was even more excited to get acquainted with than her tits. Suzy’s ass had one hundred percent of my attention, so I definitely noticed that she was tattooed.

  Suzy’s tattoo was about the size of a silver dollar. It was a circle of rich red fringed by green.

  Leaves. An apple.

  Blood.

  “What the fuck?” I asked.

  Suzy flopped onto her back again. She sighed. “Yeah. About that.”

  “Are you—?”

  “The movement I’ve been working with is the Apple,” Suzy said, her cheeks flushed with either arousal or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell. She smiled weakly at me. “Surprise?”

  I was surprised. The most surprised I’d ever been in my entire life.

  Up until five milliseconds later, when a pulse of magic slammed through the Batcave.

  Someone had ripped open Suzy’s anchor.

  My face basically exploded with all the sneezing. Which was a shame, considering I was face-first in Suzy’s unexpectedly tattooed ass, so it was kind of a terrible place for sneezing.

  Especially when a handful of men came storming down Suzy’s stairs, led by a guy with matted yellow hair and a face that would even look angry at Disneyland.

  I’d met that angry face before.

  “Suzume Takeuchi,” said Cain, the werewolf leader of the Apple, “get your fucking clothes on and get on your feet. You’ve been looking for me? You found me.”

  Chapter 19

  I was pioneering all kinds of new awkward experiences these days. I’d never gotten caught mid-fuckytimes by a werewolf cultist and encircled by his flunkies while I tried to stuff everything back into my clothes.

  Once the two of us were dressed and standing up, I felt a fraction braver. But only a fraction.

  “I know your face,” Cain said, pointing at me.

  I didn’t piss myself so clearly I was very brave. “We’ve met.”

  That was a nice way of putting it. I’d gotten to watch a fight between Cain as a wolf against Fritz, who was the best fighter I’d known. Cain had won. He’d ripped Fritz to shreds. Thanks to his kopis blood, Fritz hadn’t been infected, and he’d survived, but it still wasn’t an experience I’d wanted to repeat.

  Yet here we were.

  Because Suzy was part of the Apple.

  Suzy is in a cult. Suzy is part of the Apple. Holy shit, what the fuck?

  “You’ve been looking for me,” Cain said, breaking me out of my thoughts.

  I glanced nervously down at Suzy. She didn’t look anywhere near as nervous. In fact, she looked downright pissed off, which was what I’d have expected from her under literally any other situation. “I’ve been looking for the Apple,” she said. “Help from the Apple. Not whatever this is.”

  “It’s a trade. You want help, and so do we.”

  “Where’s Scott Whyte?” Suzy asked.

  “He’s not with the Apple anymore. He was shot in the head.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Of fucking course he was shot in the head, the dumbass.”

  Cain strolled around us, examining Suzy’s pocket dimension. Couldn’t tell if he admired it or not. He walked with lupine liquidity, like he had more muscles than any human should have.

  Basically he looked like he could rip my head off between heartbeats and I’d never know he was coming.

  “The Apple?” I hissed at Suzy.

  She rolled her eyes. “I was going to tell you, but you fucked it up.”

  “At your parents’ house? I thought you were going to…I don’t know, confess another thing.”

  “That I’m in love with you? Ha ha, dumbass. Cute.” Suzy’s eyes went a little misty. “I might be in love with your tongue now but—”

  “Stop talking,” Cain said, almost casually.

  We stopped talking.

  “The Apple is done with the Office of Preternatural Affairs,” he said. “We’ve gotten everything that we need out of it, and there’s nothing left to do.”

  “You’ve gotten everything you need, but you don’t speak for the entire Apple,” Suzy said.

  Cain smirked at her. “I don’t?”

  “You don’t speak for me.”

  “The OPA can only get in my way now, so I am leaving and taking everyone in the Apple with me,” Cain said, in this whole don’t-argue-with-me tone.

  “The OPA’s gonna be gutted if you take everyone,” Suzy said.

  I whispered at her from the corner of my mouth. “Seriously, how many OPA employees are Apple members too?”

  She elbowed me in the ribs.

  “I don’t care if the OPA survives,” Cain said.

  “Then what do you care about?” I asked.

  Cain gave me a too-smart look. I hated the intelligent villains. “You were in Reno, weren’t you? You were there when I was arrested.” He laughed. “Thanks. You got me access to hundreds of members of the Apple I’d have never been able to indoctrinate without being arrested—and then offered a job by Zettel and de Angelis.”

  Cold washed over me. Not that I was surprised that my superiors had enlisted an arrestee; that was kind of their favorite way to get staff. But I felt sick over the idea that this moment was my fault. That Cain still existed, and still had power, because of me.

  Because I’d introduced him to Lucrezia de Angelis.

  A thought struck me. “You work with Lucrezia de Angelis.”

  “Not anymore. One might say we have divergent goals.” The last words came out more growl than anything else.

  “You didn’t trip the alarms on my hotel room when you broke in because you have a personal ward, just like Lucrezia de Angelis,” I said.

  Cain circled around, stopped in front of me. “What about it?”

  “I need to find Lucrezia,” I said. “If I could get a version of her personal ward, I could track her by following its vibrations. So if I had your personal ward—”

  “No,” he said.

  Suzy had caught on to my line of thinking. “If we get Lucrezia, we will stop PRAY.”

  Cain rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “That would get the OPA out from under my feet.”

  “Great for whatever evil plans you have,” I said, suddenly less enthusiastic.

  He turned to Suzy. “Is this why you’ve been trying to get in touch with the Apple?”

  “Pretty much,” Suzy said. “Lucrezia’s at the head of the movement. I thought if—”

  “By the movement, you mean the Apple,” I said.

  Her brows lowered over her eyes. “If someone would just tell me where to find her, then we’d stop PRAY and be done.”

  “At what point were you going to tell me what the movement was?”

  “Never, if you’re going to act like a little bitch about it,” Suzy snapped.

  “If you didn’t know that the Takeuchi family is one of the Apple’s oldest, most distinguished members, then you don’t de
serve to be told,” Cain said.

  Great. Now Suzy was teaming up against me with an evil fucking werewolf.

  “I’m only in town for a few days,” Cain said. “I need to reach the members of the Apple in the OPA now. They must be rallied to my call so that I can execute the next stage of my plan.”

  I cleared my throat. “Which is…?”

  “If he told you, he’d have to kill you,” Suzy said, totally seriously.

  “It’s true,” Cain said. He ruffled Suzy’s hair hard enough that her head twisted around, and she jerked away from him, looking as pissed as I’d ever seen her.

  “Cain’s got his own plans that have nothing to do with the Apple,” she said. “He’s taking advantage of them. Just using them as his foot soldiers. It’s been about a billion years since the Apple had compelling leadership, so these morons don’t even care that they’re following a murderous werewolf thug around.”

  He didn’t look insulted. Maybe a little flattered.

  His compatriots pointing all the guns at us showed no signs of life, so they probably were morons, like Suzy said. Brain-dead gun-toting members of a cult with apple tattoos on their boring asses.

  Cain stooped down to stick his face in Suzy’s. “Are you going to try to stop me?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” she said.

  “But will you?”

  Suzy said, “No. I owe fuck-all to the Apple, especially lately. And if you’re going to strip all those dumbasses out of the government where they’re causing nationwide damage, then I should be thanking you.”

  He straightened. Turned his golden eyes on me. All werewolves had bright-gold eyes like that. “How about you?”

  Telling a bad guy “no, I am not going to foil your evil plan” seemed like the exact wrong thing to say. It wasn’t me. I upheld the law, I was a good guy. On some level I even liked my job. Well, I tolerated it.

  But Suzy was right. Cain wanted to perform an exodus of the Apple, which would render people like Lucrezia de Angelis helpless.

  Even if he marched hundreds of the Apple into a town and started killing, it’d be less damage than if he had control of the White House.

  Neither option was great.

  “If you give me your personal ward so I can find Lucrezia de Angelis, I’ll pretend we never met again,” I said. Ofelia’s voice was in the back of my mind: Chickenshit.

  “I’ll give it to you,” Cain said, “if you give me access to the OPA database so that I can contact the members of the Apple.”

  “If I give you access ability, you could do a lot worse than that.”

  His teeth glinted white as he smiled. “I could. But then you’d have Lucrezia de Angelis.”

  And PRAY would be stopped, making all the people I cared about happy, infuriating Lucrezia, and making the world a better place.

  Except for the corner of the world with a murderous werewolf in it.

  “We’ll do it,” Suzy said. “One extra condition: You can’t touch my parents. You can’t even invite them to go on your crusade.”

  I opened my mouth to interject concerns—but nothing came out.

  “It’s a deal,” Cain said.

  For whatever reason I didn’t feel like having sex with Suzy once the Apple had cleared out of her cave.

  “I didn’t know my parents were in the Apple, if that helps,” she said. “Not until I got out of the Union detention center and started dating Aniruddha—who is in the Apple. Then I asked around, it turned out my parents were doing it too, and…”

  “And you joined a cult,” I said.

  “Oh, fuck you, like you make all the best decisions,” Suzy said. “I wouldn’t be alive now if it weren’t for support from the movement.”

  “The movement known as the Apple.”

  “You’ve worked with dozens of Apple members over the years—gone to Canyon Creek with them, shared drinks with them, beat the bad guys with them. The Apple’s not a monolith. Most of it’s just people who worship Adam.”

  “You said you’re Episcopalian,” I said.

  “The Apple’s not a religion. Are you having trouble following along?”

  My head was spinning. Sitting down on Suzy’s couch and digging my hands into my knees wasn’t grounding me. “I just can’t believe you’d never told me.”

  “There’s plenty of shit I didn’t tell you,” she said.

  “The Apple assassinated all those directors in Reno, didn’t they? You were already in the cult by then.”

  “Yeah, why do you think I’m on their shit list? Because I don’t back their murderous plans.”

  “If you’d told me that murderous plan, maybe we could have saved everyone!”

  She had the decency to look sheepish. “I didn’t know enough details until it was too late.”

  From anyone else, that would have been a shitty excuse.

  From Suzy, I believed it.

  If she could have saved people, she would have. Unlike me, she wasn’t a chickenshit. It didn’t change the fact that she was working with a cult. Selectively helping was still helping.

  “Look, the Apple’s not all bad,” Suzy said. “There’s the Lucrezias and the Cains and then there’s me. Aniruddha. The Whyte family.”

  “All with apples on their asses,” I said.

  “Most of the tattoos aren’t on butts.”

  “And now we’re going to give an evil werewolf access to government employee information so that he can raise an army.”

  “Cain’s small-minded,” Suzy said. “He’s got this grudge against these werewolves he knows—and that’s seriously all he’s going to do. He’ll go after one werewolf pack. Who the fuck cares about a werewolf pack?”

  “What’ll he do once he’s done with them?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. This is how we get Lucrezia de Angelis, stop PRAY, and get a chance to fix the OPA. It’s what we’ve been working on this whole time.”

  Technically, I hadn’t worked on dismantling the OPA until the MOAD incident in Reno, but okay. I wasn’t going to debate.

  When I didn’t argue, Suzy folded her arms. “Well?”

  “Well what?” I asked.

  “Is this going to be a problem? Me in the Apple? You need to make your mind up right now, because I’m not sitting around plucking flower petals. Cèsar forgives me, he forgives me not… Just not my style.”

  The laugh that came out of me felt like it was rotten, like it had gone bad in my chest. “You want me to know if I’m okay with you in a cult right now? I’m supposed to evaluate if having my missing best friend back—”

  “Pussy,” she muttered.

  “—is worth dealing with a huge fucking secret?”

  Suzy groaned. “Okay. So that sounds kind of bad.”

  “Just kind of?”

  She smoothed her hands down my arms. Fuck, okay, that still had Effects on my body, and it wasn’t even a sexy touch. And Suzy smelled great. “Go get Cain database access. We’ll sort all this bullshit out and then sort our bullshit out. Okay?”

  In my head, I said, No, no, no. I do not negotiate with cultists. No.

  Out loud, I said, “Okay.”

  Chapter 20

  How do you get a private meeting with the Secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs during a time of political turmoil?

  The quick answer is that you don’t, especially when the secretary in question is an asshole.

  The longer answer is that anything can be accomplished with enough donuts.

  That was the first target of Gary Zettel’s attention: the big pink cardboard box in my arms. It had already been lightened by his security team, but there were still a few good ones left. And more than a few of those weird flavorless twisty ones.

  Of course Zettel grabbed a flavorless twisty donut. “If you’re here, you better have Lucrezia de Angelis’s position.” Donut crumbs shot out of his mouth as he spoke.

  I flicked a piece off of my lapel. “I don’t know where Lucrezia is. Weirdly, I do know wher
e Cain is, since you hired him into the OPA. You’re a member of the Apple. And it seems you owe me information.”

  The accusation didn’t stop him from grabbing another donut out of the box. “I’ll give you information if you’ll give some in return. Sit down, Agent Hawke.”

  The box of donuts got one chair. I took the one next to it. And then I took a jelly-filled donut and started sucking the filling out, which was similar to what I’d been doing the night before.

  “I hired Cain,” he said.

  I hadn’t expected honesty right off the bat. “The hell is up with that?”

  “Cain said that he could leverage his power over the Apple to get me into the position of OPA secretary. I wanted the job. I made a deal with him. It wasn’t Lucrezia’s idea, but she endorsed it.” Zettel said this crisply, like facts were facts, and this didn’t make him sound like a giant piece of shit. “Where did you see Cain?”

  “Around,” I said.

  Zettel looked constipated. “I don’t owe you honesty, Agent Hawke. But I’ve given it. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Trust that I saw Cain and he had a lot to say about his time with the OPA.” I hesitated, then pushed on. “He wants database access, and he’ll give us Lucrezia in exchange.”

  “No. Cain can’t be trusted with database access.”

  “You hired him into the fucking OPA,” I said.

  “It was wrong. I’ve done a lot of things worse than that, but it was still wrong. I’m not going to make the problem worse.”

  I was getting a headache again. “If you started out all gung-ho about Cain and the Apple, how’d you end up here? Why the change of heart?”

  “I’ve been to Hell, Agent Hawke. I’ve trudged through the rotten bodies of titans, stood on the mouth of Coccytus, and looked into infinity.” Zettel got that hollow stare I saw on OPA agents sometimes, when they’d done a few too many hard cases. “Kopides are heroic by nature. Driven by the need to do good. I’ve done a lot of bad, and when I came back from Hell, I decided I needed to do better.”

  “Meaning that you fractured from the Apple because it’s evil, and all its members are evil,” I said. And Suzy is one of them.