“Hello Anil,” Lona smiled up at the boy. “We’re not using it. Have you met Lucy yet? Lucy, this is Anil Sloan, Saba and Johnny’s son. You’ll meet them tonight at the meeting.”
“Nice to meet you,” Lucy smiled.
Anil cocked his head and squinted at her. “Are you a hunter?” he asked.
“Not yet, I’m just a trainee, but I’ll be going to the meetings from now on.”
Anil studied her for a moment. “You can’t be much older than me.”
“How old are you?” Lucy asked.
“Sixteen, for two more months, Evan won’t let me join the team yet. I’m sure that’s my mom’s doing.”
Lucy laughed. “I’m twenty four, which isn’t really much older, no, but aren’t you still in school?”
“I’m in advanced classes and I could be done next semester if mom would let me, but she wants me to do the whole year.” He looked intently, and somewhat distrustfully, at Lucy. “Are you really twenty four?”
“Of course,” she laughed. “Why?”
“You don’t look old. Hey wait a minute.” Anil tossed his hair away from his face, revealing golden brown eyes just a few shades darker than hers. “You’re not a vampire, are you?”
Lucy tried not to look flustered and smiled tightly. “Well yes, sort of, it’s a bit complicated. I don’t really understand it myself.”
“Lucy’s half vampire, but she has the same enzyme you do,” Lona supplied. “But Lucy is also an adult and I happen to agree with your mother.”
Anil rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I’m going to go get my homework done so mom doesn’t freak out when I play video games.”
“Good boy,” Lona joked.
“It was nice to meet you, Anil,” Lucy said as the teen waved goodbye to them, dragging away the chair and swiping his hair from his forehead again.
Lucy arrived at Evan’s office at the same time as Miles. Looking out over the sea of unfamiliar faces, she was glad for it. “Where’s Hugh and Lance?”
“It’s their night off. Dennis and Michelle as well, but I’ll introduce you to them tomorrow night. Evan rotates us, so that no fewer than four teams are out on any night.”
“So where’s your partner?” Lucy asked, scanning the room. She was surprised to see two other women. Both, she noted with some dismay, looked like they had stepped out of an advertisement for a health club.
“Normally it’s Andre, but Evan and I pair up when he’s gone. Evan hasn’t had a permanent partner for a few years, but when you start we’ll be back to even numbers.”
Lucy wondered if Evan would be her partner. It made sense, of course. Having the least amount of experience, Evan would probably want to keep her close by. But the idea that all of her rookie screw-ups would be observed by the big boss was still unsettling. She didn’t have much time to dwell on it though because Evan had stepped into the room and was calling the meeting to order.
“Before we begin tonight I’d like to introduce our newest recruit, Lucy Soriano.” Evan nodded in Lucy’s direction and all eyes turned toward her. She tried to smile confidently, but knew her cheeks were probably bright red. “I’m sure you have all heard about Lucy by now, though whether your rumors have a grain of truth or not, I don’t know. In any event, Lucy has just started weapons training and will be out in the field with us very soon. Until then, she’ll be attending our nightly meetings and then joining Mike in security to get acclimated to our technology and routines.”
This was new. Lucy looked around, trying to figure out who Mike was and when she would get a chance to sleep again, but turned her attention back to Evan, who had begun speaking again.
“I’d like each of you to introduce yourselves to Lucy when you get a chance. I’m sure you have questions for her, but she’ll probably have more for you, so keep that in mind. Now,” Evan clicked a remote control and the wall behind him illuminated with a map of the city marked with red X’s. “Nothing new to report, unfortunately. Attacks are continuing to happen farther out from the city center, which means we need to be on high alert. Back up could be as far as an hour away if things get sticky. I want regular check-ins every thirty minutes, if possible. Assignments are as follows: Miles and I are in quadrant one, Jordan and Lou in quadrant three, Saba and Johnny in quadrant two, which leaves quadrant four for Carlos and Edgar. Sign out in,” Evan checked his watch, “thirty-seven minutes.”
Everyone, it appeared, wanted to use their last half hour in to meet Lucy, but Evan got to her first and motioned for her to join him in the hall. “Lucy, this is Mike, head of security and dispatch.”
“Pleasure to meet you Lucy,” Mike said, shaking her hand. He was a large man, nearly as tall as Hugh, but with pale skin, red hair, and a mustache that made him look somewhat like a walrus. Shockingly, his most striking feature was a scar on his neck much like Evan’s. Lucy realized she was staring and dropped her eyes. She also realized that this was the man who had been Lona’s intended victim fifteen years ago.
“Nice to meet you too, Mike.”
“Mike’s going to show you what goes on here in the office and go over some of the equipment you’ll be using. Abe will be in later tonight to get you set up with your lenses. I’ve got to rescue Miles. I’m sure the others are pumping him for information on you.”
“I’ve never felt so interesting,” Lucy muttered.
Mike laughed and patted her on the shoulder. “Get used to it, kiddo. It’ll die down once they realize you’re no different than they are. Right now you’re just the newest bit of news.”
Except, Lucy thought to herself, I’m not really like them, am I? Of course, she couldn’t say this out loud, so instead she smiled and allowed Mike to lead the way to the control center, a large room with computer monitors on the wall. A half circle console with a switchboard and desktop computer sat in the middle of the room, facing the screens. It reminded Lucy of the front desk at most offices, only more advanced.
“Pull up a chair, I’m just doing my routine check, it’ll only take a minute.” Mike situated himself at the console and began flipping switches and typing commands into the computer. A few of the monitors blinked and changed screens. Lucy found a chair and seated herself near the console, but back far enough to stay out of Mike’s way. With a final keystroke, Mike sat back and smiled. “Okay, just over ten minutes until the first team leaves, so I’ll give you the five cent tour. The main screen here is the navigation system.” He indicated the middle monitor, which was about the size of a large flat screen television, displaying what looked like blueprints marked with numbers. Multi colored lights blinked in different areas.
“The blinking lights are the teams. Right now, I’m zoomed in on our building. When they start to move, I’ll pull back and we’ll see what part of the city everyone is in. At any point, I can zoom to within one block and target one signal to show their exact location.” Mike punched a few keys to demonstrate and the screen zoomed out, showing them a map of the city. “The smaller monitor on the right is also a GPS of sorts, but for pickups. The poison discharged by your weapon emits a frequency that can be traced by our NAV system. Occasionally it isn’t possible to immediately load the body, so in those cases I dispatch a recovery team.”
“Load the body?” Lucy blanched.
“Of course! We don’t want hapless civvies finding corpses in the street. Typically you’ll load them into the van right away, but that’s not always possible.”
“Right.” Lucy swallowed back the urge to be sick. “So who recovers them?”
“Watchers, mainly, though I suppose you haven’t met them yet, most prefer to stay offsite. Watchers are folks like me, who haven’t got the gene to hunt, but keep an eye on the streets and alert the team to possible vampire activity. If they have to do a recovery, it is always with a police escort. Which brings me to the last monitor.” Mike indicated the wall again. “The commissioner has been kind enough to allow Evan to patch into the department’s own GPS. This is the position of all on duty
patrol cars. Rather handy to have if trouble should arise. And sometimes we do run into problems of the non-vampire variety. These things happen when you go poking your nose into dark alleys and whatnot.”
The speaker set into the console emitted a series of beeps and Mike pulled the microphone on his headset to his mouth. “Twenty-two hundred hours, team one is cleared for departure. Team two, standby for clearance.”
Within five minutes, all teams had left the building. Lucy watched in fascination as the dots on the main monitor twisted through the secret passages in the building, each leaving from different hidden exits, headed in four different directions. As they got further away, Mike zoomed out and the neon outlines of the city streets came into view, looking more like an old arcade game than a map of anything recognizable.
“Alright, Lucy, everyone is on their way and things will be quiet for a while, so we can get started programming your phone.” Mike showed her a phone, similar in design to her own personal cell, with a glass touch screen. The only difference was that this one didn’t appear to have any outward power buttons.
“How do you turn it on?” Lucy tried tapping the screen and sliding her finger across it, but nothing seemed to work.
Mike smiled. “Well you just did, but right now it’s only on the login screen. I’ll need to program it to recognize your touch, kind of like the locks on the doors here. Of course, you can’t see any of that yet. Abe should be up in a minute with your new eyes. It’s a pretty brilliant bit of technology.”
Lucy didn’t have long to reflect on what she wasn’t understanding before Abe showed up with a small tote and the welcome gift of fresh coffee.
“Howdy, Mike, Lucy. Lona told me you may need these.” He handed them each a steaming cup for which they expressed their gratitude. “Now Lucy, have you ever worn contacts before?”
Lucy shook her head no. Abe produced a small mirror, a bottle of saline solution, and several small foil and plastic packages with brightly colored lenses floating in them. After showing her the proper way to hold and insert them, he selected a blue pair and let her try putting them in. Lucy was surprised when they easily slid off her finger and into her eye. She blinked several times and noticed that while she couldn’t feel the lenses, her vision suddenly seemed much sharper. She scanned the room, surprised to see that the desktop monitor that she had thought was off was on, and Mike appeared to be carrying on conversations with several people over some sort of messenger application.
“Oh wow!”
“Congratulations, Lucy, you now have night vision plus. The plus would be perfect twenty-twenty vision, under any lighting conditions.” Abe packed up the tote and handed it to her. “Here are several pairs, all different colors. You’ll also notice that you won’t need your sunglasses if you wear these during the day, they’re UV shielded.”
“Wow, thanks Abe!” Lucy stole a peek at herself in the mirror and marveled at how alien her face looked with blue eyes. With her pale skin, her hair looked unnaturally dark, as if she had dyed it. She couldn’t wait to see what the other colors looked like.
“I’ll let Mike get back to the lesson now. See you later.”
Lucy reached for the phone and swiped her finger over the screen again. This time it blinked to life and a red square glowed in the middle.
“Pretty neat, huh?” Mike commented. “Touch your thumb to the red square until you feel a pulse.”
Lucy did as she was told and the phone unlocked, displaying an assortment of icons, none of which resembled any of the apps she had on her own phone.
“This phone is already linked into our NAV system,” Mike explained. “This button here opens the same program I’m running on the main screen, but it’ll be set to your position. You can zoom in and out, and you’ll be able to see the positions of the rest of the team as well. This function is always on. In fact, the chip is nearly indestructible, so even if the phone is damaged, as long as you have it with you, we will know where you are.”
The next hour was spent showing Lucy the messaging system, how to link into the open channel that all hunters used to communicate, and the distress system that used different codes to signify what each emergency was. There was little activity reported from the team, other than their half-hourly check-ins, until about three in the morning when Evan and Miles disrupted a robbery. Mike placed a call directly to the squad car that was closest and Lucy watched it rendezvous with Evan’s position on the main screen.
By four o'clock Lucy was having trouble keeping her eyes open and Mike told her to get some rest, for which she was very grateful. She slogged her way back to her room and was asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.
Chapter 11
The next week was a blur of exercise and weapons in the afternoons, and equipment training through the night. While she was definitely making progress, her new enhanced schedule made Lucy very grateful for her two hours off in the evenings. She would usually slip away as soon as she finished dinner, and hole up in her favorite corner of the garden with a book or surfing the internet on her computer. But more often than not, she found her solitude broken by curiosity seekers and well-wishers.
As Evan requested, the other members of the team had introduced themselves to her. Lucy was surprised at the variety of personalities and the different ages. The youngest member, Jordan, was just twenty-two and fresh out of the navy. His partner, Lou, who also happened to be his aunt, was instrumental in recruiting him to the team. On the other end of the spectrum was Dennis, a sixty-three year old Vietnam veteran. Dennis’ partner, Michelle, was a wiry Cajun woman, whose short, spiky white hair made her look deceptively older than her forty-two years. She blamed her prematurely white locks on being the mother of two teenaged girls.
Carlos and Edgar were about the same age as Lance, somewhere in their mid-thirties. Both men had military backgrounds, though Lucy did notice that they spent a lot of time ribbing each other about their respective branches with potshots that were only just within the realm of civility. Carlos had been in the Marines and Edgar had been in the Navy. This made Lucy consider Hugh’s previous comment about Evan’s partnering technique more seriously.
Johnny and Saba, who along with Hugh and Evan made up the original team, were a very unusual pair to behold. Johnny, who had been Abe’s lab assistant in the late eighties, was a tall, red haired Irishman with a sincere, if not somewhat goofy smile that reminded Lucy of a famous late night TV host. By contrast, Saba was a tall and gracefully built Indian woman with sleek black hair and the same tawny brown eyes as her son. Like Lucy, Saba didn’t have a military background. She had been a ballet dancer, however, her training involved several forms of martial arts. Saba had been on a national tour with her troupe when she was attacked just months after Evan, in the same neighborhood. Like Evan and Mike, Lucy noted with a sense of guilt over her unusual abilities, the visible skin on Saba’s neck and chest was marred by scar tissue.
The team members had begun to drop in on Lucy’s early evening training sessions to offer advice, different techniques, or just as a new sparring partner. Lance and Michelle, both of whom held black belts in several forms of martial arts, expanded upon the rudimentary self-defense moves Lucy already knew. Within a short time, she could throw everyone with the exception of Hugh, who declined more for Lucy’s sake than his own. Everyone wanted Lucy to show them her sleight of hand trick and she was amused to catch several people fiddling with their silverware at dinner. Jordan had about mastered the technique, but told Lucy that he preferred to stick with his tried and true methods out of fear that he might stab himself. Johnny jokingly informed her that Anil, in true teenager fashion, told him magic tricks were “nerdy.”
Whoosh!
Lucy expertly sidestepped a sandbag that swung at her and vaulted a five-foot wooden hurdle. She ran towards the vampire, Lance in a pair of cheesy plastic fangs, arm cocked to strike, when she heard a loud grinding noise followed by a string of creative curses from Miles. Looking up, she saw tha
t two of the ropes supporting the sand bags had twisted, leaving them dangling together about five feet above her head.
“Hey guys, I’m gonna need some help over here!”
They jogged over to where Miles stood staring at the ceiling with an irritated expression.
“It’s off track,” he said and pointed to one of the pulleys in the corner. “And that’s just the start of the chain reaction.” He traced the path from the pulley to the twisted bags with his hand. “I need to climb up there. Lucy, would you run back to the office and grab the green toolbox? It should be on the shelf behind my desk.”
“Sure thing, Miles,” she said and took off jogging down the hall.
Andre Garnier was jet lagged, tired, hungry, and in a bad mood. He probably should have alerted his uncle to the fact that he was arriving early, but he just wanted to get back to his office, and back to work on the project he was forced to abandon nearly a month prior. Especially in light of the information that he had picked up in Paris. Using an entrance that few employees of EJC were even aware of, Andre avoided human contact, and the inevitable questions about his trip, and made a beeline to his office, grateful to see that Miles hadn’t moved anything on his desk. He flipped on the monitor and crawled under the desk to connect the cables and wires necessary to continue his work.
He was about to crawl back out when a pair of unfamiliar, but decidedly female legs dashed into view. Following the legs up, Andre stared at the back of a woman dressed for workout, in black shorts and a white tank top. Around each wrist was a CPA holster of his own design. Evan hadn’t mentioned anything about new recruits in any of his communications. Of course, Evan had been careful not to mention much in the event that their communications were being monitored. Andre remained where he was, erring on the side of caution and curiosity.
“How do they get any work done? This place is a mess!”
Lucy ran a hand through her sweat-dampened hair, knowing that it was probably frizzing into a fantastic ‘fro. She scanned the shelf several times, but there was no green toolbox. There was a blue box, which might have been a toolbox. She started to reach for it, but stopped. It looked a lot like the case she had seen Hugh pull a rifle out of and she didn’t want to take the chance that there was a gun in this one as well. She decided to check the other shelves. The only problem was that the room was lined with shelves, all of which were overflowing with boxes, wires, gadgets, and books with no visible organization.
The Eyes of the Sun: The Complete Trilogy Page 11