Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

  By the time I started narrowing down dates, I was running out of time.

  Two minutes left.

  Fritz’s estimate of thirty minutes had probably been modest, right? He wouldn’t have given me an exact window. He’d have given me some wiggle room.

  I’d just found the month I wanted in the box when the lights in the facility turned off.

  Exactly two minutes later.

  It was instant and silent, the darkness that took over the storage room. I hadn’t heard a single footstep or a light switch getting flicked. It was bright one moment and dark the next. I couldn’t see the boxes I was digging through.

  “Fuck,” I whispered under my breath.

  I stuffed a handful of files from that part of the box into the briefcase. Hopefully it would include the right day. Or else I was just stealing a shit ton of files nobody wanted.

  Then I dropped into a low crouch and slid behind bookshelves.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness slowly. There wasn’t much to adjust to. There were no windows, and the only light that remained on was the glowing green fire-exit sign mounted on the back wall. It was just enough for me to make out the dim shape of the work table, the bookshelves on its other side.

  It was barely enough for me to see the men stepping quietly into the room.

  I couldn’t get an accurate count. Three of them? Four of them? More? They moved carefully and quietly, but not gracefully. They weren’t kopides. Probably not Union-hired security staff coming in to close down for the night.

  When they closed in on the laptops, I took the moment’s distraction to step behind a different bookshelf, getting a few more feet between them and me.

  “A device is missing,” one muttered to another. “He’s here.”

  “Don’t let him out of here,” said a third.

  “Find him.”

  Fuck. Fuckety fuck.

  I hadn’t brought my Desert Eagle on this trip. OPA agents of my ilk weren’t issued firearms and we didn’t have special permission to carry on government property. People like Suzy packed heat wherever they wanted, but I didn’t.

  I really should have.

  The only thing I had was a pocketful of charms taken from an OPA storage cupboard that morning. Little flash powder, some wind-charms. It’d have to be enough.

  Unless I could get to the exit door before they found me.

  I made it two more rows before I heard the footsteps closing in. I froze on the opposite end of a shelving unit, back pressed to the wall, fists clenched on two charms.

  The footsteps got closer. Closer.

  And then they turned to go the other way.

  “We need lights.” A woman said that from the far end of the room, loud enough that I could make her words out clearly.

  “Just start shooting,” a man said. “The guns are enchanted. The bullets will hit someone.”

  These were Weston Connors’s people. They knew I was close to figuring them out, and they’d gotten sick of playing hide-and-seek in the dark with me. They were going to randomly shoot at me instead. With enchanted bullets.

  I needed to get to the back door.

  Even though my feet didn’t make a sound on the hard carpet, the sheaf of papers sticking out of the laptop bag crinkled as I hurried along the aisles. It was a quiet sound. Barely a sound at all.

  Someone heard it.

  “He’s here!”

  I spun to face the voice and flung a flash charm at the speaker. It was so bright that it turned the room to daylight—and it let me see that I’d been caught by a man I recognized. He was missing an eyebrow because it was mangled with scars. I’d been staring at him during Fritz’s interview today.

  He was one of the protesters who ran with Pops.

  The flash charm got so bright that it blinded the both of us, and I hit the ground clutching my face and groaning.

  A hand scrabbled at my ankle.

  I kicked—felt my heel connect with something that crunched.

  Then I was crawling.

  I was still seeing nothing but green shapes when I bumped into a pair of legs. Hands grabbed me by the shoulders, hauled me to my feet. I got pushed into a wall. It was Eyebrow Guy again. He fumbled inside his jacket and came up with a gun.

  My fingers closed around his wrist. I shoved up a heartbeat before the bang.

  The bullet embedded in the ceiling. Tile showered around us.

  Slamming my elbow into his face sent him tumbling. I yanked the gun out of his hands. Now I was armed and no longer helpless.

  A woman came around the corner of the stacks aiming a matching pistol at me. I pulled the trigger first. Blood spattered off of her thigh, leaving a sloppy ring behind her.

  Shit. I just shot a woman.

  It had been an act driven by instinct, not careful thought. Normally I didn’t hurt women. Occasional punch if they were a real threat to my life, but shooting?

  The gunshot in the thigh didn’t upset her too much. She lowered the gun…and she shot.

  Before she aimed.

  So the bullet shouldn’t have gone anywhere near me.

  It felt like a bee stinging my shoulder. Probably would have hit the meat of my chest if I hadn’t lunged away. Was still hard to be grateful for being slightly shot instead of really shot.

  I wheeled away, bolted for the door.

  A couple guys got in my way.

  Guys. Not women.

  I still felt guilty shooting them.

  But I also felt badass. The runes on this gun were more precise than the ones on my Desert Eagle. They didn’t adjust a bullet’s trajectory by millimeters, but inches. Magic stung my sinuses as the shots zoomed straight toward these guys.

  Pretty sure they didn’t hit anywhere fatal.

  The men still fell.

  My path to the door was clear once I jumped over them. I would have made it if I hadn’t been wearing the laptop bag. If it hadn’t twisted around to get in front of me. The bag tripped me up. I hit my knees, hit my face, and lost my grip on the enchanted gun.

  When I got up, I was staring right down the barrel of that pistol I’d just dropped.

  My instinct was to throw my arm in front of my face, for all the good that would do against an enchanted gun that didn’t need to be aimed.

  I was about to get shot, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to run. Just shield my face.

  But then Eyebrow Guy fell.

  Standing behind him was a young man with neatly trimmed hair, narrow shoulders, and a blunderbuss clutched in both hands. The end of it was stained with blood. He’d just bludgeoned Eyebrow Guy with an antique.

  Tate Peterson had saved my life.

  Ten breathless minutes of blind running later found me two blocks away in an alley with the grandson of a dead senator. I glanced around the wall to see if Weston Connors’s guys had followed us, but nope. Streets were empty. We were in a no-protester zone and curfew was approaching, so the snowy sidewalks didn’t even have any footprints but ours.

  “We’re good,” I said, falling back against the wall with a sigh.

  “Man, you run fast for someone as big as you,” Tate said. “You look like a linebacker but you move like Usain Bolt.”

  That was probably an exaggeration, but it was a very flattering exaggeration. “I guess there’s nothing I can say except thanks. And also, what the fuck were you doing in an old records office with a blunderbuss?”

  “I was taking this piece of crap to the office upstairs. I’d promised it to a charity auction this old bitch organized, and she works there.” Tate swung the gun around like a baton. “I saw a bunch of guys heading into the basement and they looked shifty, so I followed.”

  “You followed a bunch of shifty looking guys into an empty building? Alone?”

  Tate shrugged. “What were they going to do to me?”

  “I don’t know. Kill you?”

  He shrugged again, like that wouldn’t be the worst thing.

  “You don’t expect me to believe
that was a coincidence,” I said.

  “I might have seen you going into the building earlier,” he admitted. “I was waiting for you to come out.”

  “Waiting for me?”

  “I wanted to talk to you. We didn’t get a chance at the memorial.”

  At this point, I’d forgotten I’d even gone snooping around at the memorial. I felt guilty all over again. “Sorry, man. I wasn’t trying to scare you. I was just—”

  “You didn’t scare me,” Tate said with a laugh. “You? Scary?”

  “I’m kinda scary.” I’d just shot a woman. Not that I’d admit to that. It had been a total accident. “Why’d you wanna talk to me at the memorial?”

  “You’re at least three degrees more human than anyone else I’ve seen working for the OPA. I want to hear your side of everything.”

  “Perfect timing.” I pulled the sheaf of papers out of the stolen laptop bag. “I’m pretty sure I have proof in here somewhere that OPA leadership hired the protesters who’ve been shooting people.”

  Tate lifted a hand. “I’m not looking at that.”

  “But you said—”

  “I want to talk about you.” He pointed at me with the blunderbuss. It really was a stupidly shaped weapon.

  “I’m not talking about me without talking about this.” I shook the papers at him.

  “Fine,” Tate said. “But not until you have drinks with me.”

  “Drinks? We just escaped from certain death and you want drinks?” He suddenly reminded me of Suzy despite looking absolutely nothing like Suzy. “I mean, I can come with you if you want a drink, but I don’t do alcohol.”

  Tate flashed a lot of even white teeth at me. He looked like the charismatic leader of a college fraternity, all rich and sculpted and never having worked a day in his fucking life. “You do alcohol if you want me to listen to you babble.”

  Chapter 24

  And that was how we ended up at a bar in Chinatown, trying to keep the stolen staff files out of beer puddles while tossing back whiskey shots.

  “This tastes like ass,” I gasped.

  “No, ass tastes like ass. This tastes like death.” Tate threw back another shot.

  For a twenty year old who couldn’t legally drink yet, Tate sure could pack that stuff away. I was starting to wonder if he had a prosthetic leg like Fritz and was just draining all the booze into it.

  “I thought you weren’t into drinking,” I said. He’d mentioned that the first time we’d been at his family home.

  “I’m not into drinking. Just like I’m not into smoking pot or fucking men.” Tate took another shot. “One more, and then I’ll look at the papers.”

  I wasn’t sure I could do one more without barfing.

  But I did.

  Drink one more shot, that is. Not barf. Not yet. My head was getting that heavy swimming feeling of liquid mercury in a glass vial.

  I hadn’t been drunk like this in years, and for good reason.

  This was also a good reason.

  While Tate waved down a bartender, I shuffled through the papers, trying to organize them. “All the guns from the protester shootings were stolen from a Union warehouse. I’ve got the date it happened on this inventory sheet here… Yeah, right here.” It was getting hard to read.

  Tate snatched away the inventory Lucrezia had given me. He skimmed it with eyes that focused better than mine. “Oh no, look at those guns that got stolen. Who the fuck cares? I steal pens from the OPA all the time.”

  “How many people have you killed with them?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “The fuck you have,” I said. “Bet you’ve never even killed a fly.”

  “I used to live in farmville. I’ve killed like…millions of flies. Millions.” He drained another shot glass. Two shot glasses. A third. The blunderbuss fell over and he picked it up again.

  For our whole night, Tate had been keeping the gun propped against his knee under the bar. He’d informed the bartender that it was a prop with a totally straight face, and the bartender had believed him. And that, my friends, is how you take a firearm into a bar in the same town as the White House.

  I shuffled through the stolen papers. Some of them were soggy. I still managed to find the date that the guns had been stolen, including the list of employees who’d been working on that date.

  “Here they are!” I spread the papers out.

  Tate dropped a shot glass on one of them and burped. “I don’t recognize any of those names.”

  Jesus, I should have been having this conversation with someone useful like Suzy. Homophobic Teen Heartthrob here was not my choice of partner.

  But he was here. He was useful for another reason.

  I shoved the shot glass off of the page so that I could show him the list of employees. “Look who was working the warehouse on the shift the guns were stolen. And then look at whom these people usually work with.” I flipped the pages back and forth, trying to read them. “Shit. Um.” I couldn’t read.

  Tate slung an arm around my shoulders, leaning against me so that he could stay upright while pointing at the page. “They worked under Commander Frank Franklin. You’re right, that is a crime.”

  “Frank Franklin? Someone named their kid Francis Franklin? God, evil is real,” I said.

  That cracked Tate up all right. It was so satisfying to hear the belly laugh from someone.

  Wait, what had I been trying to say?

  There was another glass in my hand. I drank it. That was a gin and tonic. Not even sure who’d ordered that.

  “It came from the table over there,” the bartender said, pointing at the opposite wall.

  There was nothing but dudes sitting at that table.

  “Why’d one of them buy me a drink?” I asked.

  “Same reason anyone buys anyone a drink,” Tate said.

  “But they’re guys.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And this is a gay bar.”

  I sat upright so quickly that I knocked a glass over. I got my stolen papers out of the way just in time. “It is?”

  “Didn’t you notice all the shirtless guys dancing together?” Tate asked.

  I’d been too busy trying to talk this guy into stopping PRAY. “This is a gay bar. I’m in a gay bar.” Suzy was never going to let me hear the end of this. Assuming she wanted to have anything to do with me ever again.

  “I’m sensing some animosity toward the gay community in you,” Tate said, waving his hands at me like a psychic. “Did you know I’m an empath? I can feel other peoples’ feelings.”

  “I’ve been with the OPA for years and never heard of empaths. They’re not a thing.”

  “My mom used to say I’m an empath. Are you saying my mom’s wrong?”

  “Moms are never wrong,” I said. “Women are never wrong.”

  “And I’m right about this. You’ve got hang-ups about this sort of, you know, thing. I’ll tell you that at least three quarters of the homophobes I’ve met are just pissed off because they’re trying to ignore their homo feelings. So there’s like a seventy-five percent chance you’re actually gay.”

  “I’m not gay, and I’m not homophobic. Sure, I’ve sworn to spend the rest of my life with another man, but I love pussy. Love it! I’m not into stupid gay shit.”

  “See, stupid gay shit,” Tate said. “You’ve got hang-ups. You’re scared.”

  “I’m scared of a lot of things.”

  “You scared of PRAY?”

  “No, I think PRAY sounds great,” I said. “But everyone I love hates it, and I don’t love stupid people, so there’s got to be a good reason they hate it.”

  Tate propped his chin on a hand. “You’re not trying very hard to convince me of Director Friederling’s agenda.”

  “I’m being honest. The whiskey’s not giving me any choice.”

  “I’ve been reading H.R. 2076, you know,” Tate said. “Hey! Bartender! Gimme the whole bottle of whiskey!” He sounded authoritative enough that he got the bottle, and fast.
Tate poured two more shots for both of us. We were going to get alcohol poisoning.

  “The bill’s over five hundred pages long,” I said.

  “My opinion’s going to influence a lot of lives. I can read five hundred pages.”

  “You’re an ex-gay, ex-stoner shill for the OPA.”

  “And?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. “So what’s it say?”

  “Well, witches won’t lose their right to have kids yet, but a lot of people will. Families will be destroyed. Lives will be ruined for generations. But mundane humans are at immense risk of violence from preternaturals.”

  I was impressed with how many multisyllabic words he was using, since he’d slithered low enough on the stool that his chin now rested on the bar. His eyes were barely open.

  “I think you’re overestimating it just because you’ve lost your grandpa to a demon attack that he kinda brought on himself,” I said. “Sorry, but it’s true.”

  Tate’s eyes definitely weren’t open now. “He’s the second one who got killed by a preternatural murderer. My mom…” He groaned. “Tequila.”

  “No way. I’m not having tequila.” Tequila was how I’d ended up with a dead half-succubus in my bathtub.

  “Tequila!” he said louder.

  And tequila appeared.

  “Courtesy of the table over there again,” the bartender said.

  Tate swung around on his stool to wave a shot glass at them. “Thanks guys!” he hollered, pouring it down his throat. “Your turn, Agent Hawke! And I’ll tell you all about how my mom got killed by a werewolf.”

  Fuck it. Whatever.

  I drank. Came up gasping for air. The whole bar was swimming around me. “Dude, I’m sorry about your mom.” I slammed the tequila shot down. Another took its place. Wait, where had that whiskey bottle gone? “So sorry.”

  “She got eaten,” Tate said.

  “I figured it was something like that.” Werewolves loved eating people. Well, maybe not loved, I wasn’t sure werewolves loved anything. They were evil monsters.

  “I’ve been without a mom since I was seventeen,” Tate said. “Sucks, dude.”

  “I’ve never had a mom,” I said. “Not preternatural shit. Just…life. Life and drugs and whatever. PRAY won’t do anything about that.”