Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

  “Lucrezia’s bad. Cain’s bad. There are some bad members.”

  I waited to see if he’d go on, but that was it. He was quiet. His eyes were on the donut box. Even humorless apes wearing neckties loved donuts.

  “All cards on the table,” Zettel said, reaching over his desk to grab another twisty donut. He must have been on a bulk too. “Lucrezia de Angelis is no longer vice president of the OPA. She’s president. Her predecessor was killed, so she took his position. I want Lucrezia dead because it will make the agency’s presidency available to me.”

  Government agencies didn’t have presidents other than the actual president of the United States. The OPA was an exception for one big reason: it had never served the USA. Its origins were as mysterious and cultish as the Apple’s.

  “Who was the last president of the OPA?” I asked. I’d never actually heard of him.

  “An angel named Metaraon,” Zettel said. “He founded what you know as the Union, and he directed the OPA until his head got ripped off. The circumstances are irrelevant. He’s dead, the agency is destabilized, and I want the presidency next.”

  The pieces clicked together. “Kopides want to be heroes, and you think you can heroically fix the OPA if you’re running it from backstage.” It sounded kind of nice. Too bad it was probably entirely bullshit. “So why’d you let Weston Connors go?”

  He frowned. “Who?”

  If he was lying to me, he was lying skillfully.

  “I’d tell you to look it up in our database but it’s probably been scrubbed by Lucrezia,” I said. “By the way—you know who killed Senator Peterson. I saw your letters. So why’d you have Fritz and me dragged cross-country to look at him?”

  “I wanted to see how Friederling would react,” Zettel said simply. If he suspected my kopis of skullduggery, he was barking up the wrong tree. The only kind of killing Fritz did was lady-killing. “That’s all the information I have for you. What do you have for me?”

  “More donuts,” I said.

  Zettel didn’t smile. He did grab another one. “Are you getting closer to finding Lucrezia’s location?”

  I’d seen her in my goddamn hotel room. “Hard to tell.”

  “Keep working,” he said.

  My phone beeped. It was Agent Bryce reporting that she had news for me, and her text messages were vague enough that I suspected she’d found another power surge. It was time to stop talking and start moving again. “There’s a case. I have to go.” I stood and grabbed the box of donuts.

  “Those can stay,” Zettel said.

  I set the box on his desk. “Thanks for your time…sir. This talk was enlightening.” The best word I could use for it. “You know, I’d been thinking of not coming here. I’m glad I didn’t listen to my chickenshit shoulder devil who wanted me to run.”

  Zettel stood too. “You survived the MOAD incident. You’re working alongside someone who orchestrated the assassinations of OPA directors. And you met Cain and lived to tell the tale.”

  A weird frisson settled over my scalp. Was Zettel telling me that I wasn’t chickenshit? Of all the people I knew, Secretary-senpai was being…nice?

  We shook hands.

  “Don’t wait to find Lucrezia,” Zettel said, his fingers tightening on mine until it hurt. I squeezed back. It was easier to arm wrestle with him than Cooper. “She’ll kill you once she knows you’re looking.”

  She already knew. She knew, and I wasn’t dead.

  Not yet.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I didn’t get a chance to figure out how the fuck I was going to get Cain into the OPA database that night, or the next morning. All the magical surges kept me on my toes. Big circles of power kept blowing up and vanishing before we could get there.

  “I’m starting to get really fucking annoyed,” I said when Agent Bryce and I arrived at the fourth power surge to find a great big nothing. It had occurred behind a grocery store, where they usually got shipments. The salt on the pavement suggested there’d been a ritual, all right. But there was no residue, no witch, nothing.

  “The system didn’t even automatically generate a case number for this circle,” Agent Bryce said, showing her tablet to me. “Someone’s changed the code. Someone is still deliberately hiding these circles of power.”

  “Surprise surprise,” I said.

  She glanced around at the parking lot like she expected someone to be listening in, but we were alone. We hadn’t bothered dragging a team out for this one. “Did you talk to the dead body?”

  “Craig Kriste, yeah. He was getting a package with…” Shit, was I supposed to tell Agent Bryce about the guns? “Someone killed him before he could get a drop. Remember Weston Connors?”

  “That’s who killed Kriste?”

  “He’s a person of interest,” I said. “He’s been associated with protesters, but he’s since disappeared. We should find him.”

  That should have been enough for Agent Bryce to start digging, but she hesitated again. “This location,” she said.

  “What? The grocery store?”

  “Not just the grocery store.” She tapped on her screen again to bring up a map and showed it to me. Red dots highlighted each of the D.C.-area surges we’d seen.

  “Fucking A. This is going to turn into a pentagram, isn’t it? They’re preparing for a bigger ritual.” I’d seen it happen before. It had led to fire ripping a big fucking hole in Los Angeles.

  “In this case, I think it’s a circle,” Agent Bryce said. “A hollow circle, with the Potomac at the exact center.”

  I tilted my head as I looked at the map. I wasn’t real familiar with what was in the area. “What’s the Potomac like around there?”

  “I thought I’d look into it,” she said, “unless you have a better suggestion.”

  My watch said it was time to get to meetings that Fritz had set up on Capitol Hill. “Be careful. There are a lot of bodies on the ground already, and it seems like we’re not going to have any OPA support.”

  Agent Bryce nodded sharply. “I’ll contact you if I find anything.”

  I met Fritz an hour later—how long it took me to get through all the protesters clogging up D.C. traffic. He was waiting in an OPA office dressed like he was going to meet important people, and he looked relieved to see me, which was more than I could say about anyone else in my life.

  “Hawke,” he said.

  “Hold still. Your tie is crooked.” I adjusted it. “So what’s on the agenda? You dumped a million meetings on me all at once without any details.”

  “At the moment, I don’t trust my calendars to be secure. I’d have given you details if you were around last night.” There was a note of questioning to his voice.

  “Sorry, I had a close encounter of the Cain kind,” I said.

  Fritz’s eyes widened. “Cain. As in, the werewolf?”

  “Lucrezia hired him after we arrested him. Both of them are in the Apple.” Even though there was nobody else in the office with us in the moment, I kept my voice down. Hopefully the jock jams Fritz’s laptop was playing would keep the bugs from distinguishing my voice.

  “You’re certain of that?” he asked.

  “You could ask Suzy to corroborate my story if she didn’t hate all of us. She was there.”

  “You were with Suzy last night?” Fritz asked, tone bland.

  I shot him a sideways look. “Yeah.”

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes you’re incredibly transparent through the bond,” he said. “I didn’t recognize the pair of legs you were between, so I was curious. It makes perfect sense now.”

  Too bad I didn’t drink coffee. That would have been the perfect moment for a spit-take. “You were spying on me?”

  “Try thinking more quietly next time and I won’t. I don’t see all of your trysts with Belle.” Implying that he did see some of them. Jesus fucking Christ. “What did Cain want from you?”

  “He said he’d give me Lucrezia if
I gave him access to the OPA database,” I said. “He wants to use it to contact all the members of the OPA in the Apple. He’s going to take them out of the organization.”

  “Nobody in the Apple left in the OPA?” Fritz nodded slowly. “A win-win, don’t you think?”

  “Any time someone like Cain wins, it feels like someone’s losing big.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. “I’ll get you a device that can access the database. You can give it to Cain. In the meantime, we have meetings to attend.”

  It wasn’t until I was shadowing Fritz up the hallway that what he’d said registered.

  I didn’t recognize the pair of legs you were in between.

  It didn’t actually creep me out to think Fritz had been watching. Fuck, it was a thousand times more awkward for him to spy on his wife. Landing someone like Suzy made me feel proud. I wanted to rub that shit in.

  The problem was that reminding me of Suzy…well, reminded me of Suzy. It was hard enough to focus on circles of power when I was thinking about her.

  Weirdly, I wasn’t dwelling on Suzy the night before. But Suzy at the bar we used to hang out at in Los Angeles. Canyon Creek, it was called. A Western-themed bar. Not as classy as the Olive Pit where we used to hang, but Canyon Creek wasn’t run by a gang of incubi, so I dealt with it.

  Their wings had been tasty, prolific, and cheap, which had been a huge bonus for a teetotaler like me. And the wings had been served at a bar with a great view of a mechanical bull. Which Suzy never rode.

  Except once.

  Most of the time, we were at the bar with coworkers. And Suzy had a carefully cultivated “one of the guys” persona, which she claimed kept the harassment to a minimum. Really she harassed others more than I ever saw anyone harass her. Maybe Suzy just wanted to make sure she did it first, and so thoroughly that nobody else would fuck with her again.

  Anyway, that one night we’d been in the bar, and everyone else had been on a case. I’d gotten out of that investigation for some reason. An injury, I think. Don’t really remember. So Canyon Creek had been empty, and Suzy’d had a few drinks, and she’d given the mechanical bull a go.

  I’d always known Suzy had a great ass, but that was the first time I’d gotten the inkling that she had great hips, too. And she knew how to move them.

  Me? I got on a mechanical bull once, fell forward onto the pommel, and broke my nose. Suzy was the stereotypical hot nerd on the bull who suddenly looked like a porn star.

  Not gonna say I ever did anything filthy while thinking about that slow ride, but I definitely was going to now. For many moons to come, I was going to have a head full of Suzy’s hips rolling over and over on the mechanical bull at Canyon Creek…and over me.

  It actually kinda hurt to be hard this long. Wondered if I should see a doctor about it, like they said in the Viagra commercials.

  “Did you sprain something?” Fritz asked, glancing back at me. “You’re walking strange.”

  “Oh, yeah, maybe. When I was running away from Cain.” Or because I have not been this horny since I was a teenager.

  You try walking normally when you’ve got a demon-possessed dick.

  Fritz didn’t seem all that interested in my answer. The rest of his staff had caught up with us. He was being primped by the makeup artist, which suggested we were about to be in front of cameras.

  “I thought we had private meetings all day,” I said.

  “I do have private meetings too, yes,” Fritz said. “First, I’ve agreed to meet with protesters to answer questions about PRAY, the preternatural, and the OPA. They’re filming it for their YouTube channel. How do I look?”

  “Like a greasy asshole,” I said. “As always.”

  He smirked and pushed through the doors into a small conference room.

  A woman with a clipboard started rapid-fire debriefing him on the day’s news, all the talking points that the protesters might bring up, and the names of the people who had died as a consequence of violent protests.

  This wasn’t Fritz’s style. Even if he didn’t want PRAY to pass, he’d never been a fan of hanging out with the public. It’s just not something billionaires do. Why listen to a hundred people whining about their poor-people problems when you could be partying with rappers and princes from the Middle East?

  Fritz’s mysterious depths just kept on getting deeper.

  If I was going to be protecting Fritz for an interview with potentially murderous protesters, then he needed my full attention. I definitely couldn’t lose myself thinking about mechanical bulls.

  “They’re here, sir,” said one of the new hires, who’d poked her head through the door.

  “Send them in,” Fritz said.

  The door opened wider. Protesters started filing in, and most of them hadn’t dressed for the occasion. Most people probably hadn’t packed much professional wear for their trip across the country to protest in D.C.

  There was one person who hadn’t even bothered to get out of his tracksuit, though. A bright lime-green tracksuit with white stripes down the sides.

  And suddenly I understood why Fritz had decided to invite protesters into his office.

  I hadn’t brought Fritz to meet Pops, so he had invited Pops to come meet him.

  Chapter 21

  While others set up the lights and cameras, Pops cornered me beside a bust of Abraham Lincoln. “The fuck are you doing here?”

  “That is a great question,” I said. “Right back at you. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Protesting. Same thing I’ve been doing the whole week I’m here. You going fucking deaf?” He rapped his knuckles on the top of my head, hard.

  I winced away from it. “You should leave.”

  “You think I can’t handle a professional environment? Think I’m no good at politics? Think I’m too stupid to realize that woman wasn’t a hooker?”

  I hadn’t said any of that, or even implied it. But that was so Pops, wasn’t it? Those thoughts were in his head and he wanted to stick them in my mouth so he had an excuse to be angry. Funny, because he never needed excuses to be angry at me. I usually gave people good reason to be pissed the fuck off.

  A man I didn’t recognize approached us. He was nervous-eyed, rubbing his palms on his slacks. He was so sweaty that he’d managed to dampen the cloth. “They want us to get seated. Who’s this? Is there a problem?”

  “This is my grandkid, unfortunately,” Pops said. “Grandkid, this is Mack. Mack, this is grandkid.”

  “Agent Hawke,” I said.

  “Agent…? Oh.” Mack started rubbing his palms harder. He was wearing a really bulky sweater or else I’d have bet he would be hosing sweat puddles from his armpits too. “We need to sit.”

  “If that’s okay with you,” Pops said, giving me an openly hostile look.

  My head was throbbing. At least my boner was finally dead. “Fine. Fuck it. Stick around, have fun. It’s not my goddamn problem.”

  There wasn’t a lot of protesting for the visiting protesters to do, though. One woman sat down to interview Fritz. I didn’t recognize her. Everyone else was arranged behind the interviewer, their chairs carefully situated so that the number and diversity of them would be caught on camera.

  It didn’t take long. Fritz had a press assistant who could keep conversations moving. They’d slotted a half-hour for this meeting from beginning to end, starting with the moment Fritz came in and ending when the camera stopped rolling.

  Fritz didn’t usually do PR, though. He was rich, not famous. He liked it that way.

  Didn’t mean he wasn’t good at PR.

  He looked like a different guy in front of the camera. He knew how to angle himself in the lights so that he didn’t have such an ugly weasel face, and he knew how to sit so that he looked professional, powerful, and accessible.

  Since when did my narrow-faced, nasal-voiced kopis look like a charming young Brad Pitt with a peg leg?

  Wasn’t fair, man. Some of us were doomed to always look like B
enjamin Bratt after gaining a hundred pounds of muscle and running into a brick wall face-first repeatedly, no matter how we sat.

  Not mentioning names. Just some of us.

  “You’ve become known as an opponent of H.R. 2076,” said the interviewer, who looked so shocked by coming face-to-face with Fritz. Didn’t think she’d prepared to interview a movie star. “What is your concern about the bill?”

  “Well, Felicity—may I call you Felicity?” Fritz asked.

  Her shock melted. “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “I’m deeply concerned any time that rights are taken from the American people,” he said.

  Felicity started running her fingers through her hair, even though it looked fine. Her cleavage looked fine too. I was only looking to make sure there were no hidden weapons. “Which Americans are you hoping to defend?”

  They kept talking, and I kept behind the camera where I wouldn’t be filmed. Didn’t want to commit my budget-brand Benjamin Bratt face to the internet. Plus it gave me a better perspective to watch all the other protesters for signs of aggression.

  I didn’t see anyone who looked like Lawrence Lefebvre—nobody who was angry, nobody who seemed to be at risk of going gun-crazy. There was one particularly ugly guy who was missing an eyebrow because of all the scar tissue. Even he was watching Fritz and his interviewer attentively.

  Things looked fine enough that I found it hard to focus on the interview at all.

  My mind drifted. It floated away from stressful present and into a beautiful world filled with mechanical bulls and rolling hips.

  “That’s it,” the interviewer said. “That’s all the questions I have. Do you want to make a closing statement?”

  “I think we’ve covered everything,” Fritz said.

  As soon as the cameras turned off, he stopped affecting the more charming personality. He went cold. Stood up, turned from Felicity without saying goodbye, stepped back so that chairs could be removed.

  “I didn’t know you were capable of falling asleep standing up,” Fritz muttered at me.

  Shit, he noticed. “Didn’t get enough sleep last night. Too many distractions.”