Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

  “That sucks too,” he said. “Have another shot.”

  I had another shot. “But you know, you can’t blame all werewolves for what one of them did to your mom. They’re still legally people. Human beings. American citizens.”

  “Just like the human being who tried to kill you the other day?” Tate asked.

  “Okay, yeah, so everyone can get kinda violent. Like the floor. The floor’s looking violent. Hello, floor. Take that.” I had fallen off my barstool.

  A hand grabbed me.

  It wasn’t Tate’s hand.

  When I was pulled to my feet again, I found myself face-to-face with Cain’s scowl.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said. “Please tell me I’m hallucinating you because of drunk.”

  “Is this agent bothering you?” Cain asked. The question was directed at Tate.

  “Nah,” Tate said. “He’s keeping me company. How’d you find me? I thought I’d done good hiding my scent this time.”

  “You can’t hide your scent from me. I’m a werewolf.”

  “Wait, wait,” I said. “You guys know each other?”

  “He’s the head of my security team. We’ve been touring together. Plus…” Tate rolled up one of his sleeves, and he showed me a tattoo.

  A bleeding apple.

  I had been getting drunk with one of them.

  And now my level of intoxication had edged past dizzying-but-fun and dived straight into terrifying. But I was also too drunk to get away. Couldn’t break free of Cain, couldn’t escape Tate, couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t even good at standing up straight.

  Cain was strong enough to throw me one-handed, but I still sagged too quickly for him to catch me. Tate slipped under my other arm. He slapped my face lightly, laughing.

  “You are a lightweight, dude,” he said.

  “You’re with the Apple,” I said hoarsely. “Isn’t the Apple evil?”

  “Lucrezia de Angelis is evil,” Cain said. “I am a visionary.”

  “I bet that’s what all the evil guys like you say to agents like me,” I said.

  Tate laughed, but Cain didn’t smile. No sense of humor. He might not have been unequivocally evil but he still kinda sucked.

  “This is for me,” Cain said, grabbing the laptop case.

  “Wait,” I said. “Before you take that—I need to look up some employees. I need more information about some people who were working at a warehouse on a specific date.” I managed to wave at the soggy papers on the bar. “Those people.”

  “In exchange for what?” Cain asked.

  I didn’t have anything else to offer him. “Because I asked nice?”

  It shouldn’t have worked. There was no universe in which Cain should have been willing to do anything for anyone who asked nicely.

  But Tate said, “You might as well. It’ll just take a second.”

  And Cain said, “One second.”

  He opened the laptop on the bar. He expertly used the dongle to login, and then he searched the names on the database, and he forwarded their information to my email. How did he know my email? What didn’t Cain know after all his time in the OPA?

  “Make sure to get Commander Frank Franklin too,” I said.

  Cain typed for a moment. “There’s no Frank Franklin.”

  “He’s listed as commanding officer for these employees during the time that they worked at the warehouse.”

  “That’s the only record of him.”

  “Then who’s Frank Franklin?” Tate wondered aloud.

  A great question.

  “The name Frank Franklin is connected to another file. I’ll send that one to you.” Cain snapped the laptop shut. “The deal is done, Agent Hawke,” he said, returning the equipment to the laptop bag. “And here’s what I promised you.” He stuck something small into my pocket: a stone covered in runes. His personal warding device. “Thanks for giving me an army.”

  He slapped my back and walked away. I’d have watched him go if I could have focused my eyeballs on anything that far away. Instead, I fixed my bleary gaze on the whiskey-stained papers I’d stolen, and I wondered who Frank Franklin was.

  “Looks like you and Cain are getting along,” Tate said lightly, sliding onto the barstool next to me again. Couldn’t tell if he was pale or if my eyes sucked that bad.

  “Cain’s a werewolf,” I said. “A werewolf killed your mom.”

  He took a longer, slower drink. “Different werewolf.”

  “What’d your mom think of you being in the Apple?”

  “My grandma was in it, so I think she’d be fine. The Apple’s usually a family thing. Goes through the generations. Witches passing it on to witches.”

  “What if people don’t want to join even though their grandma did?” I asked.

  Now I was certain that Tate’s eyes were ringed with shadows, haunted by information that no twenty year old should have to live with. “Do you have any family that you can’t tell no?”

  Pops’s face swam through my mind.

  And then Suzy’s. And her parents’ faces.

  “Maybe the Apple’s not totally evil.” I wasn’t totally sure that I said those words out loud.

  My phone blooped. I’d gotten the email from Cain.

  All the answers I wanted about Frank Franklin and the warehouse theft were on there. I also had the personal ward in my pocket that would let me track Lucrezia de Angelis…assuming that I could get help from a witch like Suzy.

  Goddammit, but I couldn’t even see the phone screen anymore.

  I shoved it in my pocket with the ward and rested my forehead on the bar. It was wet. My hair stuck. “Did I convince you to make Justice Mendez to stop PRAY?”

  “No, but maybe a few more drinks would change my mind. Not here, though. That other table of guys is molesting you with their eyeballs.” He tossed cash at the bartender. “We’re done and feeling good!”

  Tate pulled my arm over his shoulders again. He wasn’t tall enough for me to stand upright. Pretty sure I out-massed him by a lot. But Tate must have had experience drunkenly hauling around drunk friends, because he still managed to get my feet under me.

  “My friends hate PRAY and PRAY should stop,” I said.

  “I hear you.”

  I was clutching the staff files against my chest. No briefcase to put them in anymore. No Cain to look after Tate, no Fritz to look after Cèsar. “Where are we going?” I asked when Tate steered me toward the door.

  “Next bar,” he said. “Lots of bars with great drink specials around here. Hold my blunderbuss.”

  “I usually make a guy buy me dinner before I do that,” I said.

  Tate laughed.

  And we were in another bar, where Tate seemed to know some of the people. Or else he just made really fast friends. We didn’t get to talk more about PRAY—we were too busy trying out those great drink specials.

  There was another bar after that, and another one.

  Lost count after a while.

  Washington D.C. was a wildly different place from this perspective. I was staggering around with the son of a political dynasty. He had endless money, post-adolescent stamina, and a taste for strong liquor. Once I started drinking, I couldn’t seem to stop. More and more just kept coming my way.

  Until the drinks started coming back up.

  “Oh, gross,” Tate said when I heaved all over his blunderbuss.

  And that was the last thing I remembered about the night.

  It wasn’t the first time I woke up with a hangover in an unfamiliar room, but it was the first time since my college days. “Oh God,” I groaned, curling my arms around my head to try to block out all light and sound.

  The headache crawled from the top of my head down my spine. My toe hairs were nauseous within my socks. I could only peel one eye open a tiny crack and peer through my arms to try to figure out where I was. Anything more than that and I was going to vomit. Again.

  At the moment, I seemed to be lying on a bare mattress. No fitted sheet. The wa
ll above me was plastered with posters. They’d been recently relocated; there were holes where tacks had been previously placed.

  These were movie posters. Cheech-and-Chong stuff, something about time travel in a hot tub, miniature cheeseburgers, various campy stupid stuff. And also a Bob Marley poster.

  “Where the fuck…?” I rolled over slowly, carefully, swallowing down the taste of bile.

  There was a naked guy in bed with me.

  “Shit,” I said, sitting upright.

  Too fast.

  I braced my head on my knees and waited for the urge to vomit to subside.

  The guy next to me wasn’t actually naked. Just pantsless. He was wearing socks, boxers, a shirt stained with booze. It was Tate Peterson. I was in bed with Tate Peterson, a cultist and America’s sweetheart and Cain’s best buddy. Judging by the antique furniture and the wainscoting, I was gonna guess I’d woken up in the Peterson house.

  Fuck me.

  I lifted the sweaty tangle of sheets to look down at myself. I was wearing briefs and socks and my chest hair.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Tate didn’t move when I got out of bed. He did snore louder.

  My clothes were wadded up by the door. When I picked them up, I learned why I’d gone to bed naked. I’d barfed all over myself. See? That was why I didn’t drink tequila. This was all the tequila’s fault.

  I couldn’t go out wearing these clothes.

  “Can I borrow some stuff?” I asked Tate’s unconscious form. “Great, thanks.”

  I found his clothes from the previous day, which were also crusty with bile. He’d dragged me to his house after I’d spewed three days’ worth of food all over both of us and let me pass out in his bed.

  Despite the fact Tate was an evil cultist, I owed him a huge apology, and yet another huge thanks. I’d have plenty of time to thank him when I returned his sweat pants and t-shirt to him later.

  He was a lot smaller than me. The sweat pants exposed my hairy anklebones and his shirt bared an inch of midriff when I moved. But hey! There was no vomit on them.

  “Wait,” I muttered, stepping in front of the mirror.

  This was a high-school shirt. High-school sweatpants. I’d just shared a bed with a guy who’d come from high school so recently that he still had clothes with the GVHS logos on them. First I had accidentally become polyamorous, and now I felt like a fucking pedophile.

  My day was only going to improve because it was time for the walk of shame.

  I didn’t run into anyone in the Peterson house on my way out, even though there were plenty of people to run into. It was early in the day, not even six a.m., and there were already suited staffers working in his living room. They didn’t spot me.

  With my nasty stained clothes clutched to my chest, I jumped out the front door into the cold morning air.

  Pops, Ofelia, and Cooper were waiting on the sidewalk outside.

  None of them were smiling, so I did the smiling for them.

  “Good morning?”

  Chapter 25

  I am really bad about blacking out while drinking. This is something that I discovered when I was in college. You know, college. When you’re supposed to learn things. It’s hard to learn shit when your stupid classmates are rolling you into lecture halls in a wheelbarrow because you hit the Bloody Marys too hard after a night of hitting a keg too hard.

  Not that I remember the wheelbarrow. It was a legend around UCLA, and I assumed it was true because it sounded like something I would do.

  That was when I’d quit drinking, and I hadn’t had a blackout incident again until Suzy managed to pour enough tequila down my throat that I killed a succubus in my bathtub and forgot about it.

  And now this.

  Ofelia played the cell phone video again, laughing wildly.

  “Ofelia,” Drunk Cèsar said, “Ofelia, my beautiful butterfly, my perfect baby sister, I changed your diapers. I wiped your butt. And now it is time for you to repay me.” This video looked to have been taken in a dark closet because the camera angle was directly underneath my nose.

  Tate grabbed my phone and we got a shot of his nose. “My house! Tomorrow morning! Hi Ofelia!”

  Then the video returned to Drunk Cèsar.

  “I’m so bad at magic, baby sister-o-mine, so bad. I need you to track someone tomorrow using this thing. This ward thing. Look at it. Look at it!” I’d spit on the camera at some point so Cain’s personal ward was blurry when I brandished it. “Help me, Ofelia, you’re my only hope!”

  “Come to the Peterson house tomorrow,” Tate said, shoving his face next to Drunk Cèsar’s so that their cheeks smashed together. Both guys looked gross by that point. “Come alone! Or die!”

  “Not die, fuckwad,” Drunk Cèsar said.

  “You’re the fuckwad, fuckwad.”

  The video ended with a slap fight over the phone and a lot of laughing that terminated very suddenly. Only to be replaced by Ofelia’s laughter now, in reality.

  Try keeping any semblance of dignity after sending a video like that to your sister.

  “You’re bad at following instructions,” I said, resting my head on my hands again. I’d never had a hangover quite like this one. I wondered if it would be possible to decapitate myself but continue working for the OPA as a headless zombie.

  Anything to stop the hangover migraine.

  We were back at my family’s motel room. The one with the holes in the carpet and the bedding on the couch, because Cooper wasn’t allowed to sleep next to his secret wife according to Pops.

  “Your video was really loud,” Ofelia said. “Cooper overheard it and told Pops that you were in trouble. We came together.”

  “Fuck me,” I said to the stained comforter.

  “You need to drink more! Hair of the dog!” barked Pops from the bathroom, where he was casting a circle of power.

  I didn’t have the requisite witching skills to pull apart Cain’s personal ward and track down Lucrezia’s version of it. Suzy would have, but Suzy was still pissed off at me. Isobel couldn’t do it, and she wouldn’t have if she could.

  Ofelia had the power. She had Hawke power, Mejía power, and she had the stubbornness to make any spell work.

  Too bad Ofelia wasn’t allowed to cast magic around Pops.

  That left Pops as my only option, so I was about to owe my asshole grandfather another favor. At some point I was going to have to start paying him back for everything he’d done for me throughout my life, but today wasn’t that point.

  Fresh magic jolted through the room and I sneezed again. Sneezing with a hangover sucks. It felt like my brain was going to squirt out my eye sockets.

  Cooper’s voice rumbled from the other side of the bathroom wall. “What next?”

  “Over there,” he said. “The bowl. Get it. Fill it with distilled water.”

  A moment later, Cooper stalked out of the bathroom to grab a jug from beside the bed. He was moving too fast. I got dizzy just watching him, and I pressed the heels of my palms against my temples to try to keep my brain inside.

  “You don’t have to help him,” Ofelia said, tipping her face upward so that Cooper could kiss her.

  “It’s interesting,” Cooper said. “You okay, Cèsar?”

  I had bowed over to put my head between my knees. “I’m great.”

  “Hair of the dog does help.” Ofelia rubbed her hand along the line of my spine. “I can make you something, cabrón.”

  “Thanks, O, but I’ll pass. Need a clear head.” Really I needed to travel back in time and just not let Tate push me into drinking so much. Unfortunately time travel remained far outside the realm of the possible for anybody I knew, so for now, I just needed to get sober and hydrated fast. “Got any Gatorade?”

  “Powerade,” she said. “Tastes better.” She fished a bottle out of the mini fridge for me. The Powerade was warmer than room temperature, so the fridge was slightly broken.

  Cooper headed back into the bathroom with Pops.

&nb
sp; I took a big swig of Powerade. My mouth was still full when Pops’s magic slapped me again, and it went up my nose. I coughed Powerade everywhere.

  “Sorry.” Ofelia tossed a towel at me.

  I wiped down. “It’s okay. Better than a Neti Pot.”

  Just a little fluid had my head a lot clearer. Clear enough that I could open my laptop to look at the detailed employee records that Cain had sent me the night before. These were privileged Union files that OPA employees normally couldn’t access. I had full time cards: check-ins, check-outs, overtime. Everything.

  Ofelia leaned over my shoulder to watch me scroll. I should have stopped her. If the Union knew what kind of access violation we were committing, we’d both be fucking dead. But my focus wasn’t good with the tracking magic sizzling in the bathroom, not to mention the hangover. I needed a second set of eyeballs. Having my baby sister at my back was as good as having two Cèsar Hawkes. Maybe better.

  “Wait,” she said. “What’s that?” Her pierced pinky nail poked my laptop screen.

  I clicked on the link for Frank Franklin. The computer’s cursor whirled as it thought. “It’s this guy who doesn’t exist. He’s listed as supervising officer for the warehouse employees during the time period that the guns were stolen, but…”

  “Frank Franklin did it,” Ofelia said. “He’s the one who’s been loading up protesters to kill people.”

  “How d’you figure?”

  “His name is Frank Franklin. It would drive anyone to evil.”

  The record was taking extra time to load because it was long, real long. Longer than any of the other employees, even though Cain had said that the man didn’t exist.

  I’d give it a minute to load.

  I sat back, shooting a look up at my sister. Call it a trick of the light, but from this angle she looked like the little girl who used to paint my toenails on boring Friday nights.

  “Have you talked to Pops?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “We wouldn’t be here together if I had. I don’t think I can do it, Ceez. He’s just warming up to Cooper, and—I mean, it’s been nice being with him. Real nice. I don’t want to blow this.”

  “I told him about my life. About the poly-whatever.”