Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

  “And you’re out of the will?”

  “He told me he didn’t care. He wants me safe, happy, and healthy.” The other things that Pops had said crept in. The orgy stuff. I was a good big brother, much better than Domingo, and I wouldn’t burden Ofelia with that information. Only one of us needed a lobotomy like this.

  Ofelia ran her claws through her braids, gazing thoughtfully at the open bathroom door. Cooper was dutifully holding a candle in each hand while Pops kneeled in the middle of a circle. The air around both of them was distorted.

  “I wouldn’t have expected that,” she admitted.

  “Tell him,” I said. “You don’t need my help—but you do have it if you want it. I just think he’ll be okay. It’ll be better than you think.” My throat felt all thick, and it wasn’t just from the magic. “Pops loves us.”

  Ofelia took in a long breath. She blinked carefully, looked up at the roof. “Yeah. Yeah, sometimes I think he does.”

  My laptop beeped. Frank Franklin’s records had loaded.

  The employee photo showed Fritz.

  It was unmistakable. Narrow face, slicked blond hair, eyebrow arched in silent mirth.

  The reason that it had taken so long to load Frank Franklin’s record was because it was loading the entirety of Fritz Friederling’s career history.

  “The fuck?” I asked.

  Ofelia bent over my shoulder again. “Isn’t that your boyfriend?”

  “He’s more like my husband,” I said, because a half-joke was the reasonable alternative to screaming.

  No. I didn’t want to scream.

  I didn’t feel anything.

  “This is some kind of error,” I said. “I got this information from a werewolf.”

  Ofelia folded her arms. “Are werewolves unreliable?”

  “They’re psychopaths.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yeah, you don’t wanna cross paths with them if you can avoid it. Bad idea, O, very bad idea. One minute you’re arresting werewolves for serial murders and then the next they’re picking your drunk ass up off the floor of a bar and not laughing at your jokes, and it’s terrible. Anyway, this is a mistake. I’ll figure it out.”

  I checked my cell phone. Agent Bryce still hadn’t gotten in touch. That was weird, but not unprecedented; if she’d found anything at the center of the circle worthy of action, she’d have opened a case through legit channels to get support.

  Fritz was the top contact in my phone. I called him.

  I’d get an answer.

  While it rang, I scrolled through his files. Fritz had a long history with the OPA. Longer than I’d realized.

  We’d never talked much about what he’d done before he hired me into the Magical Violations Department, so it was a trip to see that he’d been working there off and on for twenty goddamn years.

  Twenty years.

  Fritz wasn’t exactly old. Kopides never lived to be old.

  He must have been hired as a kid younger than Tate Peterson. Weird, since he was a son of the Friederling family. He didn’t need to work at all.

  His early years had been with the Union. There had been periods where he hadn’t worked at all, though. Fritz could wander off whenever he wanted and always have a job waiting when he came back.

  He’d entered the OPA as a director.

  And then, a few months ago, he had visited the Union warehouse the guns had been stolen from. Visitation records were in there with time cards. He had been at that warehouse on the day of the theft.

  Fritz’s cell phone picked up. “What the actual fuck?” I said by way of greeting.

  A pause. “Cèsar?” It wasn’t Fritz. It was Isobel.

  “Izzy, hey, sorry to be short, but I have to talk with Fritz right fucking now,” I said. “Hand him over.”

  “Oh, Cèsar,” she said softly, almost at a whisper. “Haven’t you seen the news?”

  My heart plummeted. “News? What news? Is he okay? I’d have felt if he died, he can’t be dead, what—?”

  “No, he’s fine,” Isobel said hurriedly, and my heart started beating again. “PRAY has been rushed to the Supreme Court. Tate Peterson is with Justice Mendez, and we’re waiting for the justices to issue their opinion. Fritz is in the middle of everything.”

  My hand was so tight on the phone that I was losing feeling in my fingers.

  “Did Fritz steal the guns from a Union warehouse and hire protesters to do these shootings?” I asked. My tongue barely worked, it was so dry.

  At best, I expected Isobel to deny it.

  At worst, I expected her to act confused.

  But she was quiet.

  She didn’t say anything.

  If Fritz had been executing Machiavellian plans, then he would have told Isobel. She was his equal. His partner. A zombie lawyer who was smarter than him, as ruthless as him, and as fiercely protective.

  She also operated in a moral vacuum sometimes. Just like Fritz.

  Isobel was silent.

  “Why?” I whispered.

  “Let’s plan dinner after the judgment,” Isobel said.

  She might as well have told me that it was true, that it was all true. That Fritz had been letting me run around on this case, let me think that Weston Connors was working with Lucrezia, let me chase my own goddamn tail.

  And it had been him all along.

  I just couldn’t understand why.

  “Found her!”

  Pops’s triumphant roar from the bathroom was accompanied by a magical slap upside the head. It was hard enough that I dropped the phone. Hard enough that I sneezed until I couldn’t breathe.

  Through my watery eyes, I saw Cooper and Pops bending over a map of the Washington D.C. area. There was a tiny flame smoldering on the paper where Lucrezia’s ward had been detected.

  Isobel’s tiny voice piped over the cell phone speaker. “Cèsar? Are you there?”

  I picked it up again. “I’m here.”

  But I’d lost her attention, or she’d dropped the phone, or something. I heard shuffling on the other end. When Isobel spoke again, she was muffled. “What are you doing? Why are you…? No, wait. No! No!”

  “Isobel!” I shouted into the phone.

  The line had gone dead.

  Ofelia picked up Pops’s map and her face went pale. “Lucrezia de Angelis is at the Supreme Court.”

  Chapter 26

  Have you ever tried to get to the Supreme Court Building on First Street during a time of intense turmoil? Right when a catastrophic opinion is about to be issued by the highest court in the land?

  Yeah, I know. Who hasn’t?

  “Fuck, we’ll never get through this,” Ofelia said, gazing hopelessly out at the crowd surrounding the Supreme Court Building.

  There were so many signs that it looked more like a sea of poster board than a sea of human beings. Only a double line of black-suited Union personnel mingling with Secret Service managed to hold everyone back. The towering columns at the front of the building were like candles on a birthday cake, and they looked as likely to catch on fire.

  Cooper rolled up his sleeves. He had crazy vascularity, like what I’d seen on gym guys supplementing with too much T and sugar-free Red Bull. “I can get us through.”

  “No,” Ofelia said, resting a hand on his creepily veiny arm.

  I happened to have a Union Bluetooth earpiece from one of my last cases. I could have used it to call up the troops, summon Agent Bryce, beg for help getting inside. Or I could have flashed a badge, real or fake, and muscled my way through.

  Those solutions would take time.

  I had no clue what was happening in the Supreme Court Building at that moment. All I knew was that Fritz was in there—Fritz and his insane plan—and Tate Peterson, and Lucrezia, and every single Supreme Court Justice, and God only knew who else.

  “I need to look for another way in,” I said.

  “I got an idea.” Ofelia shucked her jacket. She was wearing a spine holster underneath, and that shotgun s
he called Bo Peep formed a steel stripe from her braids to her butt.

  She reached back, pulled the gun out, broke it over her arm to check the ammo. The only thing hiding Bo Peep from the crowd was the snow tipped tree Ofelia leaned against. If she started shooting, nobody would see it coming.

  Ofelia offered her shotty to me.

  “Treat my girl nicely,” she said.

  I took Bo Peep.

  Pops reached into his sweater, and his hand came out with a sheaf of papers. They were covered in black runes. He’d gotten rune magic too—probably from the same place as Weston Connors, since they had friends in common.

  “I’ll go first,” Pops said.

  He stepped around the tree, tossed the paper into the air, and roared a word of power.

  Even though the magic was directed away from me, toward the front door of the Supreme Court Building, I still felt the bulk of it in my sinuses.

  I was panicking, so I managed to suppress the sneeze.

  Hard not to panic when total chaos had suddenly descended on the crowd.

  Pops’s spell had made a wave of scalding wind sweep through the crowd. It shoved people to either side, melting the snow on their jackets, sending poster board signs flipping into the air. The wave carved a path all the way up the steps. It made the men in black stumble.

  Suddenly there was nobody in between me and the Supreme Court Building.

  I took two steps before Cooper caught me by the collar, making me stop to look at him. In the vivid winter sunlight, his eyes looked like yellow quartz. “Yell for me if you need help.”

  I only had a moment to feel confused. That offer opened me to a lot of questions that there was no time to ask.

  Then I started running with Bo Peep in both hands.

  My feet splashed through puddles of newly melted snow, splattering mud on my pants, making my feet cold. By the time I reached the stairs, some of the Secret Service were standing again. They didn’t see an OPA agent rushing to save the day. They saw a crazy fucker with a shotgun.

  About six men jumped at me at once.

  Pops had followed me through the crowd, fast for an old man. He was a couple yards back. Close enough for another spell.

  Don’t ask me how Pops made the lightning only hit Secret Service. It missed me completely. I was sneezing into my sleeve when I exploded through the front door with a shotgun, and I found that inside it was…

  Totally quiet?

  That couldn’t be right.

  From the moment that Ofelia had drawn her gun until the moment I ran through the crowd, barely a minute had elapsed. It wasn’t surprising that nobody had caught me on the way in. But the security team’s response was still great, and there should have been guys with guns waiting to greet me on the other side of the doors.

  Instead, silence.

  Of all the people in the building, I only knew where one of them might be. I checked the directory and raced upstairs to Judge Mendez’s office. Took the stairs three at a time, four at a time. I was flying. Panic had lifted me from the ground.

  The door was open.

  I kicked it in and brought the shotgun to bear.

  Instead of facing a Supreme Court Justice and my new gay drinking buddy, I found Lucrezia de Angelis. I hadn’t even been looking for her yet, but there she was, standing next to the desk in a crisp dove-gray pantsuit. She’d shed the jacket. Her blouse had no sleeves. The apple on her arm was stark.

  Lucrezia wasn’t alone.

  My eyes tracked from Lucrezia’s rigid face to the barrel of the gun pressed into her cheekbone. I followed the arms down to a boxy woman wearing black clothes and a terrified expression.

  “Agent Bryce?” I asked, lowering Bo Peep. “Thank God, you found Lucrezia. But…” Agent Bryce didn’t have any reason to hold a gun on Lucrezia. She didn’t know that the agency’s president was a bad guy.

  And hadn’t Agent Bryce just been looking for Weston Connors?

  A tear slid down my partner’s cheek. “I’m sorry, Agent Hawke.” She barely opened her mouth when she spoke.

  “Help us.” I hadn’t seen Lucrezia this nervous before. Her pits had sweat marks. “Agent Bryce is being controlled.”

  Dread surged inside of me. I lifted Bo Peep again but didn’t know where to aim it. “You found Weston Connors, didn’t you? You found out what his giant circles are meant to do.”

  “They channel raw energy,” Agent Bryce said. “You have no idea what magic he’s capable of performing.”

  Her other hand lifted. She had a second gun—another enchanted one. I’d have bet my life on the idea that Weston Connors had given these guns to her.

  The second one pointed right at my face.

  Agent Bryce must have been fighting it because her arm moved slowly. I could have shot her first. Instead I eased my finger off the trigger.

  “I told you to stop Gary Zettel,” Lucrezia said. “I told you—”

  “He’s not the one controlling Connors,” I said.

  Genuine confusion flicked through her eyes. “Who?”

  I couldn’t say it. I still wasn’t sure.

  Or else I didn’t want to believe it.

  “Can you put the guns down?” I asked Agent Bryce. I was sweating through my shirt too.

  She shook her head. Her eyes squeezed shut, her jaw clenched, and she groaned. “I’m supposed to take everyone into the courtroom. I’m supposed to…” Her eyes popped open. She was staring at her hands, her shaking fingers. “Walk to the courtroom. Right now.”

  She was going to shoot us if we didn’t.

  That was how I ended up walking down the hallway with Lucrezia de Angelis, Bo Peep, and nobody to shoot. The building should have been constantly busy. Especially now.

  “What were you doing in Justice Mendez’s office?” I muttered to Lucrezia.

  “No reason,” Lucrezia said, a little too casually.

  “She was going to kill Justice Mendez,” Agent Bryce said from behind us. Her fingers might have been shaking as she tried not to shoot us, but her voice wasn’t. She was confident.

  I rounded on Lucrezia. “You were what?”

  “Tate Peterson spoke to Justice Mendez this morning,” she said without looking at me, like she couldn’t bear to face me.

  “I know, and Tate loves PRAY, so you must be psyched,” I said.

  “Tate told Justice Mendez to vote against PRAY.”

  “He what?”

  “You fucked your way to the vote you wanted, Agent Hawke. Congratulations.”

  “Whoa, hey there, Tate and I just slept naked together, there was no fucking.” That didn’t sound like much of an argument. Whatever. “How’d you know about my sleepover?”

  “The Peterson building has more surveillance than the White House. I saw you leaving his room in his clothes.”

  I leered at her. “Then you’re a voyeur, huh? Did you like me wearing some other guy’s clothes? Push your buttons?”

  Her scathing look suggested that it had done nothing for her at all.

  Her loss.

  “Through those doors,” Agent Bryce said, jabbing us toward the court room. I got a gun barrel between my shoulder blades. Something about cold metal against my spine made my sense of humor suddenly vanish.

  We entered the highest court in the land.

  The real one, not the basketball one.

  Weston Connors stood on the desk at the front of the room. Dead justices were face-down on the table behind him, slumped in their chairs, slack faces beaten bloody.

  There were protesters standing on the floor in front of him. People I recognized, even though I’d never learned their names. They were folks that had been working with my family to protest PRAY. I couldn’t tell if they were like Agent Bryce, with their free will stolen by a madman who looked like the human version of Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, or if they were just murderous assholes.

  They were holding a whole lot of enchanted guns aimed out at the room. The pews were filled with cowering people.
>
  I didn’t see Izzy or Fritz.

  “I found more,” Agent Bryce said stiffly. Scripted words, not her choice.

  “Lucrezia de Angelis,” Weston Connors said, rolling a rock between his hands. “And Agent Cèsar Hawke. Exactly the two people I wanted to see.”

  He lifted a hand.

  Bo Peep flew out of my grip and landed somewhere across the room. I sincerely hoped that the shotgun wasn’t damaged. I wouldn’t survive Ofelia’s wrath.

  Connors stepped off the edge of the desk, landing so lightly that it looked like he weighed as much as a feather.

  That rock he was holding…it looked just like one of the rocks from the circles of power. That was his focus. That was where all the power was coming from.

  And it was a hell of a lot of power.

  The pressure in my sinuses was getting painful. Like someone had driven ice picks into my cheekbones, angled toward my eyeballs.

  “Look at this,” Lucrezia said with cool, impenetrable calm. “You’ve stopped the vote.” In the most horrifying, blood-splattering way possible. “It seems I owe you a favor.”

  “I didn’t do any of this for you. Did I? You’d have let PRAY pass if Gary Zettel had put your version of it forth. You just didn’t like having his name on it. You didn’t like having no control.” Connors approached us, and I realized with a jolt that he really wasn’t walking on the ground. His feet were an inch up.

  My eyes blurred. My lungs twitched, and I gasped for air.

  Connors lifted the rock in his hands and magic lifted with them.

  “I don’t owe you anything,” he said.

  His palms thrust toward Lucrezia.

  She staggered with a cry, clutching her chest. Her hair ripped out of its bun. White strands fell around her perfect face, turned red from exertion. She’d burst a blood vessel in one eye.

  For a moment she gagged on it.

  Then she collapsed onto all fours, head hanging between her shoulders.

  I took a deep breath and stepped toward him. Out the corner of my eyes, I searched for Fritz and Izzy. “The circles. The spells. You were just funneling power so you could do anything you want. What’s it you want, Connors?”

  “I’ll start with good PR.” He waved a hand toward someone at the edge of the room. “January! Over here!”