ONSET: Blood of the Innocent

by Glynn Stewart

  “Bitter swallowed his pistol in 1798,” the librarian said quietly.

  “I’m not surprised. Let’s pull this film, and I’ll see what I can find. No need to keep you up into the late hours, Miss Williams.”

  THE LIBRARIAN SHOWED him how to find both the roll of microfilm and the index entry referenced by the database.

  “All right, I can take it from here,” David told her as he carefully fed the roll into the projector.

  “I’m on shift until midnight, sir,” she pointed out. “And there isn’t that much demand for my services in the late evening, even here.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said with a chuckle. “And I read slowly enough that I hate having someone read over my shoulder.”

  “All right, Commander. The intercom by the door can reach me if you need me,” Williams told him with an understanding nod. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “So do I. Thank you, Miss Williams.”

  The librarian left him alone, and the burly ONSET Commander turned his attention to the projector screen now showing the relevant pages. It appeared more like a journal than any kind of formal report, with curt phrases written in a plain hand still legible after two-hundred-odd years of style shift.

  David appreciated the long-dead Judge’s careful hand. He hadn’t been exaggerating by much why he hated having people around when he was reading.

  JUNE 6.

  Rumors of ghosts at St. Paul’s Church at the ruins of Fort Cornwallis. Dead redcoats from war?

  Have not met ghosts. Would be a first. Will investigate.

  JUNE 21

  Not ghosts. Rumors and wind.

  Priest reports missing woodsman though. Will look since here.

  JUNE 22

  Found woodsman. Two others. All dead by exsanguination.

  Same as Joseph. Might be different beast. Might be same.

  Ordered my guard to load silver in their muskets and sleep armed.

  JUNE 23

  The beast is here. The priest is dead.

  We are being hunted.

  THE REST of the page was blank, marked with what David suspected might be bloodspots. A tap of the controls, however, brought up the next page of the journal, where Bitter continued writing.

  JUNE 25

  It is over.

  Wilbur, Aaron and Cork are dead.

  The beast was fast and strong, but like most, silver wounded it.

  I will bring its remains to New York to study.

  THE NEXT FEW pages were more ordinary, and David wondered if he’d be able to find the autopsy. The report of Bitter’s encounter with a vampire was…well, normal for a vampire encounter, from his understanding. A group of mortal men had fought a superhuman creature and killed it, losing most of their number in the process.

  Nothing in this report really touched on Charles’s concern about how the war started. David wasn’t even sure this was part of the war, so much as a single vampire—but then, one of the questions he needed to understand was: at what point had it become a war?

  It could easily have been when Joseph Reginald had met his first vampire and apparently died. Or it could have been much later, when the Familias took something closer to their modern form.

  David looked back at the list of documents dealing with vampires on the computer.

  This was going to take a while.

  9

  Three days of research brought David up to about the 1830s. There hadn’t been a lot of vampire encounters in those early days, one every two or three years, few involving more than one vampire. It wasn’t until the 1820s that someone sufficiently knowledgeable about European folklore got involved for them to even call them vampires.

  Before that, they were simply “the beasts,” the single most common type of creature those first monster hunters encountered. If any of the men whose journals and reports David was reading had tried to speak to the vampires they encountered—or if the vampires had tried to speak to them—it wasn’t recorded in the documents he had.

  The sinking realization that there may have never truly been a start to the war, just two groups so antithetical to each other that bloodshed had been the only option, led David to abandon the Archive on the third day.

  He brought a stack of printouts from the microfilm, including the St Paul’s report as well as the report on Joseph Reginald’s death, with him when he retreated to his apartment. He dropped the papers on one side of his coffee table and a large bottle of bourbon on the other.

  Pouring himself a glass of the bourbon, he pulled a report at random from the stack and glanced at the microfilm headers he’d attached to the printout.

  There had to be some mistake. He’d done a search for the last few reports flagging Joseph Reginald, the first Omicron Circuit judge killed by vampires…but Justice Reginald had died in 1794. The report now sitting in his hands was dated 1832.

  The author, however, was the same as the report he’d read on Justice Reginald’s death. Oscar Nelson had been Reginald’s secretary, though he’d become an Omicron Justice himself twenty years later.

  MAY 5, 1832

  I have seen what is both a miracle and an abomination against God.

  I have seen Joseph Reginald again.

  I saw my old teacher walking the streets of New Orleans last night. Unchanged, he looked as he did the day that vampire drained the life from his body.

  It was not an illusion or a nightmare. I called out to him and he came to me. We spoke of things only we would remember, laughed at stories of old while his two companions sat with us and smiled silently.

  I did not wish to question, but my oaths and my duty demanded it. I steeled myself with the strength of God and demanded of him how he still lived, long after a man’s four score and ten years.

  The vampire I had believed killed him did not. Even the ham-handed bungling of our surgeon’s autopsy did not slay him, for he arose after his burial, alive once more by the power of Hell itself.

  My mentor, my dearest teacher, had become a vampire.

  I did not believe him until he proved it by showing me his fangs and those of his companions.

  He offered me immortality, though he warned the risks were high.

  Any truly God-fearing man would have struck down the monster my friend had become…I failed. I fled.

  MAY 6

  I have spent the day in prayer and consultation with my contacts here. I have gathered a group of men wise in the ways of light and darkness. We shall hunt.

  THE NOTES in Nelson’s hand ended. A final note was scrawled at the bottom of the page in someone else’s handwriting.

  THIS JOURNAL WILL BE RETURNED to Washington with Justice Nelson’s body. He was found in gentle repose in the entryway to the St. Louis Cathedral.

  Of the posse mentioned, we have found no survivors or bodies.

  DAVID WINCED. The Omicron Justices had barely been qualified to understand vampires, let alone fight them. Three vampires? Likely with allies, to have been openly walking at night. Even if Nelson had gathered twenty or thirty men, he likely would have failed.

  So, one of the first Omicron Justices had been turned into a vampire—a far riskier and less certain process in the eighteenth century, with the Seal of Solomon that blocked away magic strong. Even now, as he understood it, the vampires could intentionally turn someone only half the time.

  The rest of the time, the intended transformee died. It was better odds than someone bitten without thought of transformation, who would die ninety-five percent of the time, but given that success could mean immortality…

  He slugged back the glass of bourbon he’d half-ignored, feeling the burn as he swallowed it. That chance meeting between Nelson and Reginald appeared to have been the first peaceful meeting between a vampire and a member of the United States’ guardians against the supernatural.

  It was perhaps inevitable that Nelson, the son of a Protestant minister and militant guardian of humankind for his entire life, had reacted the way
he had. With almost two centuries’ more of low-level bloodshed between humanity and vampires behind him, however, David couldn’t help but wonder if the vampiric ex-Justice might have been a chance for a better way.

  On the other hand, the vampires had turned one of the men charged with dealing with supernatural affairs into a vampire…and it wasn’t like he’d tried to reach out to his old colleagues. It was hard to tell from the ink and pen of long-dead men what the likelihood of a compromise had been then.

  It certainly didn’t seem very likely now. David might have spared this particular set of fledglings, but the normal state of a fledgling vampire he encountered was charging at him. Survival alone would leave him no choice.

  He filled the tumbler with bourbon again. David White knew his limitations. He preferred to leave these kinds of thoughts to wiser men and women—except that Omicron had written off the vampires as vermin to be destroyed years before.

  And David White had talked to too many of them now to believe that compromise was impossible.

  EVEN WITH HIS regeneration and the ridiculous metabolism that came with it, drinking bourbon by the tumbler was a less-than-advisable practice. David still made it through three drinks, almost half the bottle, before he began to feel any effects at all.

  He was eyeing the bottle and empty glass speculatively when he heard a knock on his door. For several long seconds, he considered the possibility of ignoring whoever it was in favor of the bourbon, but then he sighed and rose to answer his door.

  He was surprised to find Kate Mason on the other side of it. The blonde ONSET Commander had changed out of her armored bodysuit into a long black skirt and a tight red sweater, probably enough to stand off even the chill mountain spring air.

  With half a bottle of hard liquor in him, it took David a moment to realize he was staring. He coughed in embarrassment and stood back to let her in.

  “Come in. What brings you to my door this fine spring night? I thought you were still in Reno.”

  “You’re not getting the updates anymore,” Kate pointed out. “Reno is wrapped. The rescuees are in controlled-environment counseling, the bodies are bagged and tagged, the surviving Thralls are under OSPI’s care for rehab and eventual prosecution.”

  “Of those who survive,” David said quietly.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “When no vampires showed up for this long, we figured we could pull the security detail. There’s a team of OSPI cops with Elfin Warriors on hand for backup. If anything else goes up, the local team will handle it.

  “ONSET Fifteen is officially on leave for fourteen days,” Mason concluded. “I can’t help but feel that’s related to your situation. I think the Major and Colonel think burnout might have had something to do with you letting them go, so they looked at who else had been going as hard for as long…and top of the list was my team and O’Brien’s.”

  Michael O’Brien’s ONSET Nine had been the team both David and Mason had served in before gaining their own commands. The big werewolf had been in command of supernatural strike teams for longer than either of them had been alive, which made him an extremely valuable resource for everyone around him.

  “I won’t deny my people need the break,” David told her, “but I will be fucked before I will attribute not shooting a bunch of chained-up prisoners to burnout.”

  His companion chuckled, stepping past him to take a seat in his living room. She eyed the bottle and shook her head.

  “You’re drunk, David,” she said gently. “I figured that out when you were staring at my tits, but it’s a damned good thing it’s just me.”

  He flushed at her reminder of his moment of distraction but joined her on the couch.

  “Join me?” he asked, gesturing at the bottle. “I’ve got more glasses somewhere.”

  “I’m not a bourbon girl, and I doubt you have anything resembling drinkable wine in your apartment,” Mason told him. “I’ve never seen you touch anything more than beer.”

  “Beer didn’t get me drunk before my body picked up whatever spark of magic fuels what I am now,” he pointed out. “Bourbon can get me there, I kind of like it, and…” He shrugged. “I was being damned tempted to get drunk.”

  She reached over and squeezed his shoulder, turning him gently to look at her.

  “How are you doing, David?” she asked. “I read the full report. I don’t know if I’d have done anything differently, but…they were vampires.”

  Her hand drifted up from his shoulder to touch the two small scars on his neck where a vampire had bitten him, a long time before. A vampire fledgling, with no clue of what she was or what she was doing.

  A fledgling that Kate Mason had killed.

  “I might have shot them all,” David admitted. “I sent my team away so they didn’t have to, but I was going to. Then the Arbiter showed up…and all I could do was be grateful I didn’t have to.”

  “And since then, you’ve spent your time doing research into ancient history around vampires,” she noted. “What exactly are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” he confessed. “It was something Charles said, about how OSPI and ONSET had inherited the Omicron Circuit’s war without necessarily understanding how it had started. But if there’s some secret, something we don’t think to look for…” David shook his head. “Either it’s not in our files or I missed it, I think.”

  “I don’t think there’s some dark secret, David,” Mason said. “They killed people, we killed them, they killed us. So long as they were eating people, there was only one option available.”

  “True enough,” he agreed. “That’s what the Arbiter promised these vampires wouldn’t do.”

  “You believe him?”

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “He might change…but he meant it when he promised it.”

  “Then you made the right call,” Mason told him firmly. “And I guarantee the Commanders who sit on your board will agree.”

  “That’s what the Major thought,” David said. “I…just keep thinking we have to know something about this Arbiter. He can’t have existed in our country for as long as we’ve been a country without us knowing anything.”

  “Yes, he could,” she disagreed. “Our intelligence on the Vampire Familias sucks and always has. Even if I didn’t think they could have hidden an entire section of their society from us—and I think they could have—it could just as easily be we know of him, but not by that name.”

  “There’s got to be something somewhere.”

  “David, are you really the person to be hunting this up?” Mason asked gently.

  He laughed.

  “No, but I don’t know who else to ask. Right now, I’m in a bit of trouble around here, after all. I can’t call on Omicron resources for a case I’m not on.”

  “So, call on other resources,” she told him. “Poke the Elfin. Hell, ask that hacker…what was her name, Majestic?”

  “Loring,” David corrected. “She gave up being Majestic when we gave her a pardon as a reward for saving our asses.”

  Vanessa Loring, AKA Majestic, had broken into ONSET’s emergency communication channel during Operation Sun Net to warn them the whole affair was a trap. It hadn’t saved everyone…but without her, their losses would probably have destroyed Omicron.

  “I have a number for her,” he confirmed. “I could ask.”

  “You should do that,” Mason told him. “And then, my dearest stubborn brute of a friend, I am taking you on vacation.”

  “Vacation?” David asked.

  “Somewhere not here,” she said firmly. “I’m thinking Vegas. The Strip is about as opposite to the Campus as we can find, don’t you agree?”

  When he’d first met Kate Mason, she’d been described to him as the team’s “tame whirlwind.” It was an accurate description.

  “I…”

  “You need to be somewhere where you aren’t staring at a mountain, brooding,” Mason told him. “Vegas, Commander. I could probably even talk Warner into making it an orde
r!”

  “Vegas, then,” he conceded.

  10

  When morning arrived, David was still somewhat bemused by Mason’s decision to turn his suspension into a vacation. He knew she wouldn’t push him if he decided he really didn’t want to, but she was right.

  Plus, they’d barely had any time to spend together as friends since their promotions. The body blow ONSET had taken the previous year had left the new Commanders scrambling to keep everyone’s heads above water. The availability of the Elfin Warriors as backup was only slowly beginning to ease the pressure, as even now ONSET hesitated to send the deputized civilians in as a primary response team.

  The chance to spend a few days with a friend, far away from the demands of their work, sounded good. And that was before taking into account that Kate Mason, while a good eight years younger than David, was a stunningly attractive young woman.

  Before he could go on anything resembling vacation, though, there was work he was planning on getting done or at least setting into motion.

  Sitting at the tiny table in his apartment’s kitchenette, he dialed the number Loring had given him in one of their infrequent email exchanges. The ex-hacker preferred text communication so far as he could tell, but she’d given him the number in case he needed it.

  “Good morning, you’ve reached White Majestic Security Services,” a chipper female voice—not Vanessa Loring, David noted—answered the phone. “How may I assist you?”

  “Good morning,” he replied carefully. “I’m looking to speak to Vanessa Loring, please.”

  There was a measured pause.

  “I’m afraid Miss Loring is booked up in meetings all day today,” the secretary cheerfully told him, and David managed not to audibly chuckle at the lie. “If you’d like to leave a message, I can make sure she gets it.”

  It seemed that Loring had decided one of the benefits of going legit was having staff to answer her phone. But since she’d given David the number…