Chapter 13
Aurelia Hernandez shot up out of bed, sweating profusely. Despite the perspiration, she was shivering. She rubbed her eyes and arms before throwing back the covers of her bed. She looked out the window and saw it was still night.
She needed to call Ian. She wanted to know what he’d found out from Diane Simmons. After all, that balderdash about witness protection had been a farce dreamed up by Lin Tang. She shivered again, thinking of Lin’s ambush in the hospital parking lot. The woman was crazy, Aurelia had told herself. She’d actually bitten her!
Sure, the enforcer had quickly closed the wounds, but that did not diminish the true terror of the attack. In the moment when she was bitten, Aurelia could only see her children’s faces. She felt an intense fear like she’d never felt before. That had driven home the need to find Duke’s killer that much faster, before Lin Tang took care of the matter herself. It didn’t take a genius to see Tang would add the detective to the ranks of the half-deads.
To avoid that fate, she needed Ian to come through. At the thought, she switched from being frightened to being angry. She wanted Ian, but had to let him go into the clutches of Diane Simmons. Nausea threatened to overpower her stomach and she reached over to her nightstand for the half-full glass of water she’d left there earlier.
She felt completely helpless. She’d lost Ian, Riordan was losing faith in her abilities and Lin Tang had had actually threatened her family, the one thing she cared most about in this world. And she was powerless to stop it.
Or was she?
She reached over to her phone, picked it up and dialed furiously.
“Hello, Kamarov, this is Aurelia,” she said. “Yes, I know it’s late. I have a job for you. Yes, it’s urgent.”
Cantrell Ryker typed furiously into the computer, navigating through at least three Internet search engines. He found pages, copied them to regular document files, and moved onto to more research.
For hours on end, since that turbulent night less than twenty-four hours earlier, he devoted himself to his plan. It was all he really had, all that kept him from the street, from another stretch of being a fugitive.
“Need some help?”
Ryker glanced at his computer screen and saw from the reflection on the monitor that Kelly White Cloud had just entered the makeshift computer lab.
“I’m fine,” Cantrell muttered. “You shouldn’t be here. I might be infectious.”
“Coffee break then. Can you spare the time?”
Ryker looked over his shoulder. It was then he noticed she carried two extra large cups of something hot and steaming. He relented a bit and accepted one from her. It smelled like French vanilla cappuccino, his favorite.
He took a quick sip and apologized for his behavior. “I shouldn’t be taking my frustrations out on you. And, yeah, I’ve got time. This little project here was something Dolores dreamed up to sideline me.”
“I’m sorry it had to happen like this,” Kelly said, slipping into the room and onto a folding chair. “But, if you ask me, it’s been building for a long time. Some days, it seems like we’re just a bunch of people standing around instead of a team of professionals. Hell, I’ve been stuck at base since you brought me in. Because I might run into one of the half-deads among the three million people in this county.”
Ryker couldn’t argue.
“What are you looking at?” Kelly asked, changing the subject.
“Computers.”
“Okay, wise ass, what are you looking at on the computers?”
“Searching for information on our targets,” Ryker replied, setting his coffee down on a side table. “Sixteen clan masters together in one place has never happened before. That I know of. This is more than just a social gathering.”
“You said there were rumors of an alliance?” she asked between sips of her coffee.
“It’s possible,” Ryker confirmed. “Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. But, it’s one of those things you don’t joke about. This war is already lopsided. An alliance would be the final nail in our coffin.”
Kelly shivered at the thought and its implications.
“Hold on,” she suddenly said. “What if Dolores and Jesus are right? Maybe they’ll leave town once their business is finished. They can be an alliance from afar, right? Like at the United Nations?”
“You’d think, but you’d be wrong,” Ryker answered, solemnly. “There’s another reason for an alliance that doesn’t involve us. In fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t even know we exist.”
“Then, who would they blame Duke’s death on?” Kelly queried.
Ryker typed something into his computer and a screen popped up with a sinister dragon logo. Kelly studied it and saw it was some sort of European family crest, for the dragon held a shield and a sword. Kelly also noticed that the monster had vampire-like fangs.
“Ruling crest of the Supreme Council,” Ryker explained. “Sometimes they go by the Tribunal or a few other names depending on who’s in charge at the moment. They run things in Europe, as well as parts of Africa that used to be European colonies. They’ve been around for centuries, at least since the time of Vlad Tepov, a.k.a Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Dracula.
“The most powerful and aged of these Hominus Nocturna formed the Supreme Council to take care of their affairs in the Old World, what you know as Eastern Europe. Eventually, they expanded to all of Europe, plus colonies in Africa and the Middle East. They were who first decided it was best to keep vampire numbers small and controlled. They created rules and formed networks to help protect their kind. Later, when European explorers reached the New World, they began organizing things here on this side of the Atlantic. However, they tended to use proxies as few wanted to venture to such a faraway land. Let’s just say that, without discipline, these proxies went a little overboard.”
“And the clans here formed Mafia-like families to run their own affairs?” Kelly asked.
“Not at first,” Ryker explained. “But, plans were made, especially when the Supreme Council failed to protect their own from the Salem Witch Trials and the Puritans.”
“The Salem Witch trials were real?” Kelly gasped.
“They didn’t get any witches, but they cleaned house of the vampire menace,” Ryker expounded. “Ironically, it was an alliance of Puritans and Native Americans, a feat unto itself considering all the bad blood between colonists and Indians after the Great Swamp Fight and the Narragansetts’ burning of Providence.
“Anyway, the clans got bigger and bigger until they directly challenged the Supreme Council. The Council reached a truce because it had to. However, as part of the truce, they got to build the equivalent of a consulate in the main city of each clan’s territory. To iron out differences and problems, according to the official line, which is pure bull.”
“They’re trying to influence the smaller clans to ally with the Supreme Council, right?” Kelly deduced. “To contain the big clans, hem them in so they don’t get too strong.”
“Hey, I’m not the only smart one around here,” Ryker quipped, visibly impressed. “But, that’s the gist of it.”
Kelly silently sipped her coffee as she absorbed the history lesson. Ryker, getting no further cues, shrugged and went back to his work.
“What happened to you, Cantrell?” Kelly said, suddenly.
Caught off-guard by the question, Ryker raised an eyebrow and turned around again. He half-expected Kelly not to follow through on the question. So, he was surprised when she pressed the issue.
“A long story would be an understatement,” he admitted. “Let’s just say I went from good guy to the quarry almost overnight.”
“Quarry, eh? You make it sound like something to do with mining.”
“Well, I don’t take it for granite,” Ryker quipped, though his smile disappeared when he saw the blank expression on Kelly’s face. “Hmm, must work on my humor. Seriously, though. I can’t talk about it and it’s over the head of Dolores and Jesus. Way over.”
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br /> Kelly gave Ryker a confused look.
“Then, what about Moonrise?” Kelly said. “No one wants to talk about it, but it seems to factor into everything, every decision that’s made. And, it all seems to be aimed straight at you.”
Ryker couldn’t complain. He’d always encouraged young people to learn by asking questions. How could he fault Kelly for asking a sensitive question?
“Moonrise was a big organization,” Ryker said, at last. “More than sixty members, active and in reserve. That’s huge for anyone in this business. Of course, with so many members and so many missions – vampires, witches, cults, werewolves, lycanthropes, et cetera –there was a lot of infighting. The group had been broken into three parts for ease of administration, but they all drew from the same resource pool.
“The end result was each group vying for funding, computer time and other resources. Add in some of the members were more visible than others, which led to clashes of egos. That’s how it was when I joined in. There were two others, besides me, who ended up being liaisons between the groups.”
“So, you never got anything done?” Kelly asked.
“On the contrary,” Ryker countered, strongly. “We had success. Mixed success, but success nonetheless, especially in the deprogramming area. In fact, we had one big operation right after I joined. This cult recruited and brainwashed fifty college students. The aim was to send them back to their colleges to recruit others, in some weird black Sabbath MLM.”
“Sounds like something went wrong,” Kelly said.
“Don’t get ahead of the story, please,” Ryker lightly admonished. “As I was saying, we had to use the entire organization and were still outnumbered three to one. Absolutely, horrible planning. A bunch of cultists escaped because we weren’t coordinated.”
“Like I said, something went wrong.”
“You get a cookie,” Ryker snorted. “Now, shut up and drink your coffee. Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to be active in field ops, but, I had to go in to stop all these guys, including Lo Chang, from getting away. It was like the O.K. Corral. Bodies were dropping like flies.”
“Wow,” Kelly whispered, stunned. “Were the cops there?”
“Not until the end,” Ryker replied. “When I realized just how much clout this cult really had. I mean, the cops should have been there by accident considering the whole operation took the better part of a day. But, the cops got all the credit when the news cameras showed up.”
“You got no credit for anything?”
“Not a thing,” Ryker answered, with a shrug. “I still don’t know how it got covered up. Guy must have had a whole lot of favors owed to him. Oh, sorry, Guy Laroux was one of the founders of Moonrise. He used to run with Dolores and Jesus back in the so-called good ol’ days. Yeah, right, as if there were any good days in this war.”
“You don’t sound happy,” Kelly noted. “I would have thought a mission with such a resounding success would be cause for some of those good ol’ days.”
“You’d think, but the success gave us hubris,” Ryker said. “Well, not me. I tried to get the others to analyze the battle and fix the mistakes, but it’s hard to convince a victorious army to do things like that. That sense of being unbeatable didn’t last long.”
“You mean the incident in California, right?” Kelly asked.
Ryker sighed and nodded, his shoulders sagging.
“We got word on this incredibly well-organized, religious cult,” he said. “Guy and the others insisted we had to take it down, no matter the cost. Somehow, he’d gotten wind of something really big, possibly between the cult and one of the big vampire clans. I objected and got shunted aside. No way were we ready for something like that. They went ahead anyway and you know the rest. Everybody died, on both sides. A hundred or so in all. Complete disaster.”
“Wow, no wonder Dolores and Jesus and the others were so emotional,” Kelly stated, whistling low.
“The founding members of Moonrise were friends with Jesus and Dolores,” Ryker said. “Jessie, Horace, Angelica, Elvis, Manuel, Marcus; they all had a friend or two in the group that died that day.”
“And they blame you for living?”
“I committed the ultimate sin in their eyes,” Ryker commented, his arms crossed and his head hung low. “I was a cancer to team unity. As Guy said, I was opposed to the whole spirit of Moonrise. I was expected to mold myself to fit the ship, so to speak. It was all flowery, but I’d read Sand Pebbles, too.
“You see, groups like Moonrise are like the Marines, or police SWAT teams, or Special Forces. They’re tight knit, like family. I was the outsider, brought in by the leadership to add fresh blood, so to speak. At first, it was good because, as a stranger, people could open up to me and say things they wouldn’t say to friends. Then, it got bad. Real bad.”
Kelly didn’t realize that she’d been holding her breath during the last explanation. She slowly let it up and drained almost the rest of her coffee to settle herself.
“How come everyone thought you were dead?”
“Laroux had a list of the people involved in the operation on his person,” Ryker said. “Incredibly stupid, of course. Another silly mistake. The FBI got hold of the list and my name was still on it, so, with the incident spread all over the news, I was officially dead. And I had to stay dead.”
Kelly sat silently for several minutes. Ryker said nothing to break that silence. Instead, he went back to creating his plan on his computer.
“You weren’t with the group during the operation?” she finally asked. “Where were you during that time?”
“Nowhere,” Ryker answered, without emotion. “I got sidelined.”
A knot formed in the pit of Kelly’s stomach. Easing herself out of her chair, she headed for the doorway. There, she ran flush into Marcus.
“Oh, hey, Marcus,” she said.
“Can you give us a moment?” Marcus asked.
“It’s okay,” Kelly answered. “I was just leaving. Thanks for answering my questions, Cantrell.”
“Cantrell,” Marcus announced after Kelly was gone. “We need to talk.”
They Call the Wind Muryah Page 22