Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

“When are you going to accept that this is our life, and there’s no escaping it even in death? We are permanent, Cèsar. This is permanent. I’ve chosen to spend the rest of my life with you and Isobel.”

  “You don’t really mean that,” I said.

  He paused a few stairs down, lifting an eyebrow at me. “Oh?”

  “You don’t let me and Isobel spend time together because it’s ‘our life.’ You just don’t want Isobel to disappear again, so you’ll let her do anything she wants. Or anyone she wants.”

  “I’m not worried about losing Belle again. Her death was an isolated incident. As far as our relationship goes, we’ve never been better, and your relationship with Belle isn’t something I merely tolerate.”

  “Really, Friederling? Really? You’re sure that you’re not so afraid of losing Izzy again that you’ll let her get away with anything?”

  “I’m absolutely certain,” Fritz said.

  “You let her eat Oreos for breakfast.” True story. It had been her favorite food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner ever since the wedding.

  “She’s an adult woman. She can eat anything she wants for breakfast. Also, it’s not as though she’ll die of heart failure because she’s had too much sugar. Her heart already barely beats.”

  I chased him down the stairs toward the sidewalk, the fog of my breath trailing me. “I just can’t believe anyone could have Izzy and, you know, not want to keep Izzy for himself.”

  “Do you want to keep Izzy for yourself?”

  “That’s not a loaded question,” I said.

  The truth was, no. I didn’t want Isobel for myself, without sharing. It would have been like trying to cage a hurricane.

  “Listen to me, Hawke: having Belle means that I have you too,” Fritz said. “There are so few things in this world that are pure, but you are among them. I want both of you for myself. Just not exclusively.”

  I wasn’t sure if I was more off-put by the idea that Fritz “had” me or that I was pure. “I’ve told you before, I’m not—”

  “Yes, I’m well aware you’re firmly heterosexual. I am too.”

  “You just said—”

  “You are closer to my heart than a brother. That doesn’t mean I want to pound you in the ass.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I’d be a top if I was a gay dude. I would be doing all the ass-pounding.”

  Fritz’s mouth twitched. “Be honest with yourself.”

  “All right, fuck. But I’m a power bottom, all right? I don’t even know what that means but it has the word power and if I’m taking it in the ass, I’m doing it powerfully. Fuck you very much, asshole.”

  He unleashed his massively dorky laugh. Yeah, that’s right. He could pretend he wasn’t head-over-heels gay for me but he couldn’t pretend I wasn’t hilarious. Fritz had good taste for a peg-legged faggot.

  “Only thing is, I think Isobel and I are done,” I said. “She’s still pissed at me. Really, really pissed. And Suzy…” Just saying her name was enough to give me a raging boner again.

  I was the mechanical bull.

  Jesus Christ, I was the mechanical bull.

  “Suzy?” Fritz surveyed me with an expression that was unreadable behind the scarf wrapped around his head.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Suzy.”

  He nodded slowly. “She strikes me as the possessive type.”

  “You’ve got no idea.” I scratched the back of my neck. “Things with Suzy are…complicated.” Mostly because she was in a cult. But also because she didn’t like sharing. “She doesn’t want me with Isobel anymore.”

  “That would be a shame,” Fritz said. He didn’t sound worried, though. Why would he be? Even if Isobel and I called it quits, I was still going to be Fritz’s aspis. “I’m certain Suzy will see reason.”

  “If you use the word reasonable in relation to Suzy, then you don’t know her well at all.”

  “Maybe you’re misreading her. You’ve misread me several times in your assumptions that I must be gay if I would dare to have a close platonic relationship with another man.”

  I shot him a sly, sideways look. “Okay, but if I was gay, you’d have sex with me. Right?”

  Fritz kept walking.

  The answer wasn’t important, I guess. But now that I’d thought of it, I was stuck on the idea. And a little bit insulted that he wasn’t saying yes.

  He rounded the corner and I chased after him. “Would you fuck me? Hey! Fritz! Don’t ignore me! Tell me if you want my asshole! I’d want your asshole!”

  When I caught up with him, he was breathless with laughter at the side of the road, wiping tears out of his eyes.

  And surrounded by OPA directors who had just stepped out of a limousine to meet Fritz for an afternoon meeting.

  “This is garbage,” Director Vance said, tossing a binder to the table. That binder represented hundreds of man-hours of work by underpaid interns. Fritz had been trying to draft an alternative to PRAY. “Is that all you’ve got?”

  “That’s a set of reasonable preternatural regulations that will protect all Americans,” Fritz said. He sounded as convincing as he had during the interview. And he looked as suave as young Brad Pitt again. But the OPA board of directors was a lot less charmed than a random YouTube journalist.

  The meeting room was dead silent. There were a lot of unamused faces on the other side of the table, and only Fritz and I were on our side.

  “These regulations will protect preternaturals,” Director Vance said. I hadn’t met her before, since she was new to the organization. We’d had to replace a lot of directors when Zettel and Lucrezia assassinated the last ones. I didn’t like the newbies.

  “There are no special protections for preternaturals,” Fritz said. “Only guarantees of equal rights and—”

  “It will never fly,” Director Vance said. “I’m not signing off on that.” She pushed her chair back and stood. “This is a joke.”

  She stormed through the doors.

  It didn’t take long for the other directors to follow. Only one of them stopped to give me a weird look before leaving.

  Within moments, I was alone with Fritz again.

  “Back to the drawing board?” I asked, dragging the binder toward me.

  “Something like that,” Fritz said.

  There wasn’t enough time to get back to the drawing board and we both knew it.

  Nobody was willing to put an alternative PRAY forward at this point.

  And PRAY was going to pass as-is. We still didn’t have a way to convince Tate Peterson to talk to Justice Mendez for us. We couldn’t stop Lucrezia’s cousin from making all the protesters look violent. The mundane public would be happy if we made death camps for witches at this point.

  Luckily, there were no death camps in PRAY. Just a whole lot of legislation that made sure we could protect the American public.

  Fritz slipped me two badges. There was an eagle feather clipped to one of them. “Belle sends this with her apologies,” he said.

  “This is one of her glamours.” I rolled it over in my fingers, savoring the familiar sense of Izzy’s magic. “And the badges…”

  “They’ll give you access to an OPA storage facility. You’ll want to find a laptop and dongle for Cain in the tech rental area—it should be enough for him to get the information he needs, and for us to find Lucrezia de Angelis,” Fritz said. “Finding Lucrezia is now our only chance to stop PRAY.”

  “Storage facility? Does that include original unredacted records?” I asked.

  “Yes, those are there too.”

  “So I could figure out who was working at the warehouse on the day that those guns got stolen.”

  “There won’t be enough time between security shifts for that. We don’t need to verify that Lucrezia de Angelis or Gary Zettel are behind these attacks anyway. This is an extrajudicial operation, after all.”

  Fritz was a lot more comfortable with the idea of that than I was.

  I didn’t want to assume someone was a bad guy
and that the person we were destroying probably deserved it. I wanted to be sure. Very sure.

  When we weren’t sure who was guilty, that was how we ended up with people like Suzy detained by the OPA, and then joining the Apple because she was pissed off.

  “I’m still not sure that we should cooperate with Cain,” I said. “He’s a member of the Apple, and we’re pretty sure that the Apple is evil…aren’t we?”

  “Very evil,” Fritz said.

  Fuck. “So we need to find another way.”

  “The Supreme Court is meeting soon. We don’t have time for another way.” Fritz squinted at me. “You look pale.”

  Suzy isn’t evil. Suzy isn’t evil. Suzy isn’t evil.

  “I’m fine,” I said, finally lifting up the badges to examine them. Both sets of credentials were fake. Mine said that my name was Chuck Eagle—Eagle instead of Hawke, ha ha, very funny, Fritz—and the second one belonged to a woman supposedly named Usagi Tsukino.

  “You made a Sailor Moon reference?” I asked, wagging the badge at him. “I thought you hated Sailor Moon.”

  “I hated the movies. They were terrible and added nothing to the franchise.”

  On any weekend where we didn’t have active investigations, we’d been abusing Fritz’s home IMAX theater. Last month had been anime classics. Which meant Miyazaki movies, the whole Trigun show, a bunch of kaiju stuff, and of course Sailor Moon. The namesake for Suzy’s fake badge.

  I tried not to get hung up on the idea of Suzy wearing a Sailor Moon costume and failed. I only managed to choke out, “Thanks.”

  “I’ve made arrangements for security to be absent in the records facility between seven thirty and eight, so get a laptop for Cain and get out. Don’t linger looking at warehouse records,” Fritz said.

  “Right,” I said.

  He stood, straightening his jacket. “And please tell Suzume I said hello.”

  Chapter 23

  The storage facility was on the other side of town, stuck in the basement of government offices that looked like they wouldn’t have modern plumbing, much less laptops. The sun was drooping in the sky when my cab arrived, inching through protesters who turned every trip from ten minutes into ten million hours.

  My phone kept buzzing me with news alerts as the major networks blew up. Fritz’s interview had hit the airwaves. Mack’s attack had hit the news too, even though there was no way that it should have gone public. It was being sold as an assassination attempt against Director Friederling of the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

  Weirdly, bad PR for the protesters translated to extra-good PR for Fritz. The talking heads loved him. At least, they liked him better than Zettel.

  News anchors had good taste.

  I switched to my text-messaging app and opened the last message from Suzy’s burner phone. “Where are you?”

  She responded moments later. “Around. Fuck off.”

  “I’m getting the thing for Cain,” I wrote back. “Want to come?” And then I put in the address.

  Her response was, “See you soon.” There were no curse words in it. Either she wasn’t angry with me, or she was so angry that she wouldn’t deign to swear anymore.

  I switched back to stream the news on my phone again.

  “I don’t want to paint all of the protesters with the same brush as a few violent radicals,” Fritz said in a phone interview. “There’s a lot of anger right now. People are acting out. However, as a whole, the preternatural population are normal, harmless American citizens.”

  “Damn straight,” my cabbie said. “I like this guy.”

  “I do too,” I said. Not that I’d ever admit that to Fritz’s face.

  I paid for my ride and jumped out. Like all government buildings at this point, there was police tape cordoning off the block, preventing demonstrators from getting near enough to do damage.

  I found Suzy swaddled in sweaters and scarves at the far corner. I flashed our credentials at a couple of cops, and they lifted the tape to let us in.

  “Took you long enough to get here,” Suzy grumbled. Even when she was dressed like a burrito and sounded angry with me, I was still hard again in seconds.

  “You got here faster than I expected,” I said.

  “I was around,” she said. “Not like there’s much for me to do. I’m sick of the Batcave and the movement still doesn’t want me around. So…”

  “It’s nice to have your help.” I held the fake badge and the feather toward Suzy. “Isobel sent this.”

  She scowled. “Toss it in the fucking trash.”

  “Come on, Suze. It’s for your safety.”

  Suzy grumbled, but she took it.

  Once she jammed the feather into her hair, her whole appearance changed.

  It was one of a dozen magical pieces that Isobel used to make herself more like Isobel Stonecrow rather than Hope Jimenez, attorney at law, and it didn’t try to make Suzy look Izzy-like. It slimmed her down, made her hair longer, shifted her face bones. She looked only different enough that she wouldn’t pop up on automatic face recognition.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “What? Do I have two noses?” She ran her hands over her face. “What did Isobel do to me?”

  “You look fine,” I said. “But I prefer you the normal way.”

  “Yeah, you better,” she said.

  Despite my thundering heart, security let us into the building with barely a glance at our badges. The guards didn’t seem to notice I was as nervous as sweaty Mack pre-assassination attempt.

  We didn’t meet anyone else on our elevator ride down to the basement.

  “Looks like the end of Indiana Jones,” Suzy said when we stepped out of the doors.

  I’d been expecting clearly delineated storage areas. One spot for records, one spot for laptops. But it was just a huge open room with more shelves than I could count and inadequate lighting. It smelled like mothballs.

  Back in Los Angeles, we had a great team who kept everything organized to an annoying degree. If you like to fudge evidence all the time, like people not named Agent Hawke, they made it really fucking difficult.

  I could have hidden entire bodies in here and nobody would have ever found them.

  “How many weeks do we have to look through this?” Suzy asked.

  “Thirty minutes,” I said.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “At least there’s two of us to look around, huh?” I asked, shooting Suzy a grin. She’d let me play with her boobs last night. I was never going to stop grinning.

  “There should be a lot more than the two of us,” she grumbled. Suzy was not thinking with her clit. She was focused on the task at hand, like an actual useful human being. “If I hadn’t pissed off the Apple…”

  “Then you’d be Cain’s butt-monkey.” I felt a little pang, a jerk deep in my chest. “Or you might be in Hell with Aniruddha. Though you might not mind that too much, huh?”

  She shrugged as we proceeded into the basement, Suzy first and me second, so that I could watch her ass. Even knowing she had a cult mark stamped on it, I could enjoy the shape.

  “We were breaking up when Aniruddha got sold off,” she said. “Being in Hell is bad enough without ending up in Hell with your ex.” She turned a corner, shooting me a look just as she vanished between shelves. “I’m free. No ball and chain. How about you? Are you free?”

  Suzy was asking if I’d quit Fritz and Isobel.

  I’d kinda intended to do it that day. I mean, I’d drawn a line the night before. I’d said, “If you make me choose, I choose Suzy.” But Fritz wasn’t making me choose. He wasn’t even acknowledging the existence of a line. I’d told him I had a life of my own, he’d laughed it off, and nothing had changed with us.

  Everything happening with Fritz and Isobel was more fatal than family, more permanent than marriage, etcetera.

  “It’s complicated,” I said. I’d been saying that a lot lately.

  Suzy’s face darkened. “Remind me what I’m doing here?”r />
  “Helping save America?”

  “Fuck America. America stuck me in the worst jail you can imagine. America wants preternaturals to stop existing. America sucks. I came here for you, not for America, and you won’t even acknowledge that maybe there are good reasons to join the Apple.”

  “I mean, it’s a cult,” I said. “Hey look, the laptops.”

  I hurried over to the shelves of charging laptops. They were old—those big black boxes that needed an ethernet connection. I unplugged the cable before opening the screen, just in case.

  The laptop wouldn’t login automatically.

  “Help me find the dongles?” I asked.

  Suzy hung back. “It’s not just a cult.”

  “If we’re arguing degrees of cult, it’s too much cult, Suze,” I said.

  “Fuck you very much. I can’t believe I’ve wasted this much time for you.” Suzy stalked toward the door.

  “Wait,” I said. “Aren’t you gonna help?”

  She answered by slamming the door behind her.

  Women.

  It didn’t take me very long to find the dongles.

  Suzy hadn’t helped, but she hadn’t hurt either.

  “Suck it, Suzy,” I muttered.

  I “borrowed” a black UKA-labeled laptop case and shoved everything inside. Laptop, power cord, extra ethernet cable, dongle.

  I’d gotten into the facility and found what I needed with twenty minutes to spare.

  Fritz had encouraged me to leave after that.

  But there was this whole other side of the dimly lit basement I hadn’t explored yet. Even from here, I could see fields of Bankers Boxes that had unredacted versions of some database files.

  Somewhere in there, I could find out who’d stolen the guns.

  Who in the Union wants to discredit the protesters?

  “Twenty minutes,” I said, slinging the laptop case over my shoulder. “Twenty minutes is plenty of time!”

  Well, nineteen minutes now.

  I jogged to the other side of the room. They were organized by region of origin, and then the type of record, and then date. I found the warehouse’s region quickly enough. It took me another few minutes to find employee time cards.