“I'd like to speak with my attorney,” I say. “You said you have a phone?”
He nods. The sheriff's deputy comes over to uncuff me and leads me to an old yellowed phone on the wall. I'm in the middle of dialing Jefferson, anxiety knotting in my stomach, when the door at the end of the hallway opens and Charlie is escorted in. The two officers guiding him are stony-faced but, surprisingly, he's smirking. He spots me at the phone and gives a quick shake of his head and mouths, trees. What? Trees? Uncertain, I glance to the phone and back to him. He mouths it again as he's pushed up against the counter. Now that he's closer I think I get it. Trace, not trees. Any phone call I make from the jail will be traced, probably recorded too. Duh. Well, then I can't call Jefferson. I’m not sure what would be a safe number to call.
I hang up the phone and turn to the deputy keeping a hold on my arm. “I guess I don't actually remember the number.”
“Do you want to try a phonebook?” he asks.
Charlie speaks up behind me. “I would love a phone call, thank you.”
“Quiet,” my officer says sternly.
Charlie smiles in response. “This is all a big mis-understanding. Just let me make a phone call.”
“The phone's in use.”
I clear my throat and shrug my shoulders. “Sorry, I'm done. I'll pass on the attorney, thanks.”
“Are you sure?”
“I'm positive.”
“Okay, then keeping your rights in mind, would you like to give a statement now?” the officer asks. Beside him Charlie mouths, No.
I sure hope Charlie has a plan. “No, I won't give a statement.”
The officer makes a sweeping motion to the deputy clutching onto me and I'm escorted further into the room to something that looks like a copy machine except there’s a place for someone to place their hand.
“Give me your right hand,” the deputy says in a monotone. I hesitate before holding out my hand and the deputy begins cleaning off my fingertips. Pixies, I’m going to get put into the system. Bad, bad, bad—well, I can forget about doing the trials early this summer. Director Knox is going to kill me.
Behind me the other officer reads through the page of rights and Charlie answers immediately that he understands and wants the phone to call his attorney. The officer finally lets him and Charlie rushes the phone as the deputy plants my hand on the scanner.
“Agent Boyd, we’ve got a situation,” Charlie says quickly into the phone’s receiver. “Yup. That’s exactly where we are. You’re as perceptive as usual.” He actually laughs. “No, I have not been man handled, but we haven’t reached the cellmate introductions yet.” The mirth in his voice instantly vanishes after whatever Melody says on the other end of the line. “You wouldn’t dare . . . dang it, Melody! Fine. Fine. Sure.”
I can’t help but try to watch the scene over my shoulder as the fingerprint scanner beeps and the deputy has me readjust my hand to get a better scan.
Charlie holds out the phone to the lead officer. “She would like to speak with you, Sergeant.”
“Who did you call?”
“Agent Melody Boyd, FBI. She’d like to have a few words with you if you could kindly spare the time.”
The sergeant doesn’t budge and looks annoyed. I think that’s a pretty fair reaction given what Charlie just said. “I don’t have time for pranks—”
“It’s not a prank.”
The officer looks like he wants to roll his eyes but moves around the counter and takes the phone out of Charlie’s hand.
“This is Sergeant Miller. To whom am I speaking?”
As the sergeant listens to what sounds like a winded rant that I can almost make out, Charlie leans back so we make eye contact again and he winks. Well, at least he seems to be getting a kick out of the whole being arrested thing. I’m having the worst time trying to make out his character—bitingly sarcastic, then deadly serious, poignantly angry, and now blissfully at ease and even humored in our current situation. I can’t pin him down.
“Yes, ma’am,” the sergeant finally says. “As soon as you come to the jail and provide proof of that, I’d be happy to listen. For now, these two remain in my custody.” More shouting through the line but this time the sergeant chuckles. “No argument here. I’ll be waiting at the front desk for you.”
He hangs up and moves away from us to have a private conversation with the other two officers that brought Charlie in. After a quick whispered discussion, the two officers exit through a door on the other side of the room.
“Stop processing her for now,” Sergeant Miller says.
The deputy had finally managed to get a good scan of my hand but nods, presses a few buttons on the machine, and returns me to the plastic chair. While I’m recuffed to the metal rail, Sergeant Miller brings out another plastic chair a few feet from me and does the same with Charlie. The sergeant returns to paperwork and the deputy turns off the video camera before standing guard, bored and relaxed in the corner with a magazine.
With nothing to do except wait for Melody to show up, my nervous ticks surface. I rub my thumbnails with my fingertips, bite my lip, and flex my toes in my shoes. Charlie sits hunched, his head bowed low, eyes trained on the floor. He never looks up. I can’t see his expression from the way he’s holding himself but I can see the furrow in his eyebrows and barely make out his lips moving like he’s talking to himself in his head. An enigma wrapped inside a riddle and stuffed up a unicorn’s butt, that one.
The minutes drag by and I occupy myself by trying to figure out why exactly that vampire made such an effort to get to Enger Tower. He had been muttering something about “she’s not here.” Was he looking for his female vampire companion for help, hoping to lure us into a trap?
The far door opens and an officer peeks his head in. “She’s here.”
“Keep an eye on them,” the sergeant says to the deputy and rounds the counter.
Before he can make it to the door, however, it flies open and Melody stands there like a five star general commandeering the station. She stands tall, shoulders back, lightning sparking in her livid eyes. Her presence almost reminds me of Draco when he came to find me at the cabin. There’s something about the way she holds herself that draws all eyes to her. That, and the fact she starts making demands the second she barges in.
“I want both of them released immediately,” she orders, jabbing a finger in our direction. She speaks in a strictly American accent. I haven’t known her for long but it still doesn’t sound right coming from her. “Any records you made, I want them now and all other copies destroyed. No fingerprints, no file. This all gets erased from the system. Are we clear?”
“Under what authority?” the sergeant challenges. “These two caused three car crashes and seriously endangered the lives of everyone on the road and nearby.”
“They sure did! You’ve no argument from me!” Her eyes fall on Charlie and me—I feel like a cockroach under her glare. “But they are also working for me on a classified undercover operation, which they have now blown wide open. Trust me, they will be properly dealt with, but this whole fiasco needs to fall through the cracks. I still have a chance of recovering what’s left of my operation unless they’re charged and this all becomes public.”
The sergeant still holds out. “I’m going to need to speak with your supervisor and confirm all this.”
“You do that.” She whips a business card out of her jacket pocket. “And you tell them I want a new job while you’re at it.”
He slips out the door. Melody remains where she is, hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. I keep my eyes averted and try not to move or give her any other reason to be mad at us. A couple minutes later the sergeant returns and nods to the deputy. Most of our items are returned to us but they hand the weapons over to Melody. Not long after, the three of us walk out of the jail together. Melody carries a manila folder with everything the police had collected regarding the incident. The rest—as ordered—has been destroyed. Once we reach ou
r vehicle Melody wordlessly passes back our weapons and we climb in. We don’t speak a word to each other during the entire drive to the Duluth Field Office. The SUV pulls into the underground garage and we get out in silence.
Melody leads the way through the lower level, heading in the opposite direction from where they had held Ashley, and we enter a rather well-furnished medical suite. There are two hospital beds on opposite sides of the room with curtains able to close them off if needed. Along the walls are metal cabinets, trays of medical instruments, boxes of plastic gloves, rolls of athletic tape, and a fridge with a glass door holding bags of blood inside. Next to it is a flat screen television mounted on the wall with the volume on low and the news on.
Gillian occupies one of the hospital beds—Nessa stands on one side and Hawk on the other. Once we enter the room, Hawk immediately walks over to me, grabs my shoulder to turn me sideways, and inspects the side of my head where I got conked and the deputy slapped a Band-Aid on it.
“What happened?” he asks. “Are you okay?”
“We, uh . . . well . . .”
He steers me to the other bed and pushes me down onto it before getting a cold pack out of the fridge. He tosses it to me and I press it to the side of my head, wincing at the shock of cold and pain.
Melody turns to the television as the news begins a story covering our intense car chase through the city captured by some pedestrians with their cellphones.
“That’s what happened,” Melody snarls and jabs a finger at the television. Her British accent is back in full swing. “Do you know what that looks like to me?”
“Looks cool from that angle,” I say under my breath as I watch our SUV glide beautifully between cars on the road. Just like the movies.
“Excuse me?” The look Melody gives me could have cut through ten feet of concrete.
To my surprise, Charlie starts to laugh but then quickly stops and clears his throat when Melody looks like she might murder him. He tucks his head down and leans against the metal cabinets, one hand gripping the top of his right arm.
“That,” Melody continues, “looks like two bloody duffers out on a joy ride. You could have gotten yourselves or someone else killed pulling a stunt like that.”
Charlie sighs and rubs the back of his neck. “We had a shot to catch the vamp—”
“And did you?”
“Well, no, but—”
“No. No buts. If you saw the vampire and he got in a car, grab the plate number! Get a description! We could have run the vehicle, tracked him through surveillance cameras—”
“And shown up too late to stop him from hurting someone else?” Charlie thunders back, sweeping an arm towards Gillian for emphasis. “By the time it would take us to get the video, comb through it, and maybe trace him somewhere, he could have grabbed someone else!”
“We do this the right way, Charlie!”
“I’m sorry, I’m confused.” He pushes off from the cabinet to go toe to toe with Melody. I don’t think I’ve seen him this angry yet, even when he was fighting with me. “Trying to stop a vampire before he snatches another victim is the wrong way?”
“Acting rashly only cocks everything up and you know it. You’re not your uncle.”
The color drains out of his face and he flinches like he’s been slapped. “Don’t,” he says darkly. “Don’t you dare do that, Mels.”
Her expression and hard edge to her eyes soften. Needless to say, I’m intensely curious what’s going on because I have no idea. Clearly something personal. The rest of us in the room glance to each other awkwardly, not sure what to do.
“Did you get anything useful at least?” Melody says with a sigh, no longer hell-bent on chewing us out it seems.
“I overhead him muttering,” I say. “The vampire. He fled all the way to—”
I look to Charlie for help and he says, “Enger Tower. Top of the hill.”
“When we cornered him there, I heard him saying something about ‘she’s not here.’ Maybe he was talking about his lady friend with the pink scarf? He could have been running to her for help. There could be clues left behind up there.”
“If the police haven’t tramped all over it looking for clues about us,” Charlie says, acknowledging an uncomfortable truth. “And there aren’t any surveillance cameras up there. The area’s a blind spot.”
“It’s worth a shot, though, isn’t it?” Hawk says, one hand cupping his chin. “I’m a decent tracker. Maybe we can pick up his trail.”
“We’ll have a run at it,” Melody says. “If we can at least track him to a road, we might be able to pick him up on surveillance further out.”
“Sounds good.” Hawk nods.
“I’ll go with,” I say.
Melody shakes her head and crosses her arms over her chest. “I don’t think so. I have a feeling the bobbies will be keeping an eye out for you. It’s best if you stay out of Duluth for a while. Hawk and I can manage on our own.”
Anxiety rises in the pit of my stomach. We haven’t tried a test of Hawk going solo like this before. If they come across the vampire and get into a fight, Hawk’s werewolf instincts could kick in. Any werewolf on the serum could stop from transforming under pressure if they tried, but Hawk’s not on the serum. I’m his personal anti-werewolf-lunacy battery. If I leave town, Hawk won’t be in range of my powers, and if he transforms things could get ugly real fast. He wouldn’t be Hawk sniffing out a crime scene. He’d be a wolf completely.
“Are you sure that’s necessary?” I ask, hoping I can convince Melody to change her mind. “We work great as a team.”
“I want you out of my city, Phoenix,” she says coldly. “We’ve drawn enough heat as it is. You can come back once they’ve stopped putting clips of your escapade on the telly.”
And to think Melody used to be my favorite person in Duluth. My face burns and I lower my eyes, defeated.
“I’ll need backup,” Hawk says, trying a different tactic. “We really could use all hands on deck for this if we’ve got a loose vampire gang out there.”
“Oh, I know it,” she growls.
“We can help,” Nessa offers. “Me and my kin. We all want to put an end to this menace and find out why they took my sister.” Her hand tightens on Gillian’s shoulder. “Just tell us where to go and we’ll follow.”
There’s something akin to awe in Nessa’s voice when speaking to Melody. I don’t get it. I thought they didn’t get along. Something about Melody threatening one of the selkies? Granted, I punched Nessa and she ended up liking me. Whatever. My head hurts enough as it is without trying to think that one over too. We still haven’t fixed the problem of Hawk being out on his own.
“Then what about me?” Charlie speaks up, still clutching at his right arm. Has he been doing that the whole time? “You’re kicking Mason out for being a trouble magnet. Does the same apply to me?”
“You either stay locked up in the office with no outside privileges, or head to the Moose Lake Field Office for a time if they’ll take you.”
His eyes narrow. “You want me out, don’t you?”
“I don’t want you putting your neck out where it’s going to get chopped off,” she says quietly. “I expected better of you, Charlie.”
The open vulnerability in his face is quickly replaced by anger. “Well, then,” he says, grabbing a handful of gauze out of the nearest cabinet and moving for the door. “I guess I better not keep you waiting then.”
The next second he’s gone, a dark silhouette down the hallway quickly sinking into the shadows of a doorway. An uncomfortable silence follows and no one moves for a long time. Hawk rests a hand on my shoulder. He’s steady and doesn’t look nervous to me—basically the exact opposite of how I feel.
“Are you good?” I ask quietly. What I’m really asking is if he’s going to be able to handle this without me. I don’t need to elaborate to know he gets the message.
“I’ve got it under control,” is all he says.
Enough trust exists
between us that I don’t question it. If this was going to be a problem, he’d give me a sign. If he says he’s got it under control, then he’s got it under control.
Melody walks over, her demeanor friendly again like the woman I first met. It’s almost scary to know what’s really underneath that open kindness and British accent.
“Grab Charlie and head out in our SUV. Hawk can drop me off to get my other one in impound, then drive himself home after we try to track this vampire.”
I pass the cold pack over and rise to my feet. Hawk holds his hand out at his side and I give him a low five before moving off to find wherever Charlie disappeared to. Under orders to go and with Hawk’s assurance he’ll be okay, I’m ready to leave as soon as possible. At least it doesn’t take me long to find Charlie. The third door on the right is slightly ajar so I knock and push it open to step inside.
No posters or pictures adorn the walls. The space is neat and tidy, bare of most anything except a stack of books on the nightstand. There isn’t even a solitary family picture which he can gaze lovingly at when he goes to sleep at night. It’s too . . . sterile. He’s sitting on the bed, his jacket and scarf laid out neatly beside him. He’s unbuttoned his navy blue dress shirt and has pulled his arm out of one of the sleeves, pressing a wad of gauze to the side of his bicep.
“Are you bleeding?” I ask and slip further into the room without waiting for permission.
“Bullet grazes cause that kind of thing to happen,” he says without looking up and continues to dab at a shallow graze across his upper arm.
“Why didn’t you say anything earlier? Or do this in the med room?”
“Could you hold that in place for a second?” He points to the gauze on his shoulder then reaches for a roll of athletic tape beside him.
I roll my eyes but press my fingers to the gauze to keep it in place. “You’re pretty demanding, you know that?”
“And you’ve been so accommodating.” He tosses me a rather insincere smile then focuses on taping the gauze to his arm one-handed.
The Bite of Winter (International Monster Slayers Book 2) Page 13