Wicked Creatures

by Jessica Meigs

  Still, it was worth it. It would always be.

  Damon took his fifth bite of Philly cheesesteak and was chewing slowly, savoring it, when his cell phone rang. He grimaced, chewing rapidly, trying to clear the food from his mouth as he fished the phone from his pocket and glanced at the small screen on the outside of it. It was Tobias Ismay, his unofficial partner in crime and about as close to a best friend as he had.

  Just for a moment, Damon contemplated not answering the phone. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to Toby. It was just that he’d been hoping to sneak out after finishing his sandwich so that he’d have enough time to take a shower before meeting Mary. Tobias knew that, so if he was calling Damon now, that meant something had happened, and he really didn’t want to deal with it. Swallowing the last bit of his mouthful of sandwich, Damon sighed and answered the phone.

  “Hey, Tobe,” he greeted, keeping his tone light. Maybe Tobias was just calling to wish him luck on his date with Mary, he thought optimistically. “What’s up?”

  “I need you to get down here,” Tobias said without any preamble.

  Damon bit back another sigh and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Where exactly is here?” he asked, tossing the napkin on his desk and starting to rewrap his sandwich.

  “Out on the Mall,” Tobias replied. “By the Reflecting Pool on the Lincoln Memorial end.”

  “Should I ask what’s going on?”

  “If I tried to explain it, it probably wouldn’t make a damn bit of sense,” Tobias said. “And the faster you can get down here, the better. The local cops are already out here, and I think this is something the Agency needs to be handling.”

  “I’ll be there as quick as I can,” Damon promised, and he hung up, looked mournfully at the remains of his sandwich, then dropped it in the trash.

  Twenty minutes later, he arrived at the requested location, only mildly surprised to discover there was quite a commotion going on. There were several police cars and an ambulance parked on the scene, their lights strobing over their surroundings. Police officers were calling out orders, but Damon couldn’t see who they were talking to. He spotted Tobias near one of the police cars and went to him, his forehead creasing into a frown.

  “Hey, you made it,” Tobias commented as soon as he saw him approach.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “There’s some kid over there covered in blood,” Tobias answered.

  “Kid?” Damon craned his neck, trying to get a look at the kid in question. He was expecting to see a small child, someone pre-adolescent or younger, but he couldn’t see anything from where he was standing; there were too many cops in his direct line of sight.

  “I say ‘kid,’ but he looks to be about eighteen or nineteen,” Tobias explained. “And when I say ‘covered in blood,’ I mean covered in blood.”

  “So how exactly is this our problem?” Damon asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Because he’s speaking something that sort of sounds like Enochian,” Tobias replied.

  “You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

  “Not in the slightest.” He motioned toward the general direction of where the cops where clustered around the young man in question. “He doesn’t seem to be able to speak or understand English, and you’re the only person I know who can speak something that resembles whatever it is he’s saying.”

  “So that’s why you called me out here?” Damon asked, unable to help the note of almost teasing that slipped into his voice. “Just to play interpreter?”

  “And keep him out of the police’s hands,” Tobias added.

  Damon nodded in agreement and searched his pockets for his FBI badge, which was practically standard issue in the Agency now, even though they weren’t even remotely affiliated with the FBI. “Go get my SUV and pull it around,” he said, tossing his keys to Tobias. “I’ll get him wrestled away from the cops.”

  Tobias nodded and went to do as he asked, heading in the direction Damon pointed out. Damon watched him walk away then squared his shoulders and approached the gaggle of cops nearby, ready to argue if need be. “Hi,” he greeted the nearest officer, flipping open the wallet cover that contained his ID. “Agent Damon Hartley,” he introduced. “My partner called me, said there was someone connected to a missing persons case that we’ve been working on here.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about that,” the cop—“Henderson,” his name badge read—said, handing the wallet back to him after a momentary examination. “We got a call about a bloodied, confused man wandering around, and this is what we found when we got here.” He motioned toward the subject in question, and Damon looked that way.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see, but whatever it was, it was probably not what was standing there. It was definitely a young man, and he figured Tobias was pretty close to right putting his age around eighteen or nineteen. His hair looked to be dark brown and fairly long, falling to about halfway down his neck, and it was wet with either water or blood, Damon wasn’t sure which. He wore a pair of black pants that were tattered at the ankles and a button-up dress shirt that had once been white but was now sort of pinkish with watered-down blood; his feet were bare. His skin, which was pale like he hadn’t seen sunlight in years, was equally streaked with a thin sheen of blood, and his startlingly blue eyes were wide with fright as he looked wildly about, his arms wrapped around himself, his shoulders hunched as he hugged himself.

  Damon’s first order of business, he figured, was to get the young man calmed down. He could probably accomplish that simply by getting all these people to back off, because their clustering around him certainly wasn’t helping. After shooing them all back, which took a little more effort than he had expected, he cautiously approached the young man, his hands up in a placating, non-threatening gesture, a careful, reassuring smile on his face.

  “Hi,” he greeted in English, keeping his voice warm and friendly and soothing. “My name is Damon.” He touched his chest with his palm. Then he extended a palm out to the young man and prompted, “What’s your name?”

  Sure enough, just as Tobias had said, the words that came out of the young man’s mouth were definitely not in English. But where Tobias had said it was Enochian, it wasn’t quite like any Enochian Damon had ever studied. It took Damon a long moment to figure out what the kid was saying—“Stay away! Stay away! Leave me alone!”—but once he did, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the young man was going to bolt. He couldn’t allow that.

  Damon put his hands back up, still trying to reassure him, and said, in a fumbling version of Enochian, “It’s all right. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help.” His accent was probably atrocious.

  But the young man’s response was nothing short of electrifying. His eyes widened and he lurched forward, visibly excited, grasping Damon by his biceps and rattling off something in Enochian too fast for him to follow. He was shivering in the chill evening air. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Damon urged, trying to get him to slow down. “Come with me and my friend,” he said slowly, struggling to remember the words so he could say it as properly as his limited knowledge would allow. He could see Tobias approaching, his eyebrows raised, and he nodded to him that everything was okay. “We’ll keep you safe.”

  The young man nodded, almost frantically, and Damon shrugged out of his suit jacket, draping it over his shoulders. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

  “Where are we taking him?” Tobias asked Damon as he led the young man over to him. The three started toward the SUV that Tobias had pulled up as close to the scene as humanly possible.

  “Let’s go to my house,” Damon suggested. “We can get him cleaned up there and hopefully find out more information about who the hell is he and where he came from.”

  Riley Walker was going stir crazy.

  There were no ands, ifs, or buts about it: if she spent another day trapped in this motel room, she was going to lose her mind. She couldn’t take the tenseness of the room’s atmos
phere anymore, the heavy blanket of grief that lay over them all, too heavy to push off. They’d been mired in the same place for the past three days, none of them able to pull free from their stupor long enough to figure out their next move. And it was driving her nuts.

  The previous month of Riley’s life had been nothing short of unbelievable—not in a good way. If someone else had told her all about everything she’d experienced in that time, she wasn’t sure she’d have believed a word of it. It’d started when she’d been dragged—kicking and screaming, she might add—from her rather comfortable job as a government-employed assassin with a secretive group called the Agency into a different secret agency that hunted supernatural creatures that posed a threat to humanity’s existence, things that only came out of horror novels and children’s fairy tales. Creatures like vampires, werewolves, and demons. All of which she’d already faced off against in the miniscule amount of time she’d been in this little group that had dubbed itself The Unnaturals. Of course, it couldn’t be something so simple as a scuffle between herself and some storybook beasties. Oh no, she had to get pulled in deep. She had to get infested with some kind of supernatural power that left her with weird, scar-like marks on her hands that were steadily crawling up over her wrists to her forearms. Her poor partner, Scott Hunter—assigned to work with her at the onset of all this—had gotten bitten by a werewolf and infected by whatever made werewolves werewolves; he was still struggling to come to terms with his new status as an Alpha werewolf, the kind of stronger, tougher werewolf that seemed to rule over all other werewolves in its vicinity. Her brother, Zachariah Lawrence, had managed to get himself turned into a vampire and back, though not without some pretty dramatic, lingering side effects. And her new boss, Ashton Miller, the director of The Unnaturals…

  Well, Ashton had gotten dead.

  His condition was through no fault of his own. No, the fault lay completely with Brandon Hall, who had pulled the trigger of the gun that had killed Ashton. It was all Brandon’s fault they were stuck in this position, holed up in some shitty motel on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., not even trying to figure out what to do next.

  There was a clatter in the room next to hers, followed by a soft swear, and Riley looked up from the television she’d been staring at emptily to eye the connecting door between the two rooms. Scott, who lay sleeping on the double bed beside her, didn’t stir at the sound, didn’t lift his head from the arm he had his face buried against. She kept her eyes locked on the door, waiting for any other noise, and when it didn’t come, she turned back to the television, idly punching the channel buttons. She stopped on an infomercial about some sort of floor-cleaning robot and stared at it absently, watching it suck up a trail of cereal spilled with such precision that there was no way it could be considered realistic, and listened.

  Another clatter. Another curse.

  Riley set the remote on the mattress between her and Scott and rolled off the bed. He didn’t stir as the bed shifted with the removal of her weight. Damn, what is he doing? Sleeping the sleep of the dead? she thought as she straightened her black t-shirt and headed to the connecting door, which she’d propped open earlier that day precisely so she could listen out for the other room’s occupant. She stepped into the doorway, glanced at the window to see the faint haze of dusk coloring the curtains a soft, muted gray, and leaned against the doorframe. She folded her arms as she observed the thin, dark-haired man sitting at the small table by the window, a pistol on the table’s surface alongside a handful of loose bullets. As she watched, he tried to jam one of the bullets into the magazine he held; his hands shook, and the bullet clattered onto the table.

  “Fuck,” Zachariah snarled under his breath. He picked up the bullet to try again.

  Riley unfolded her arms long enough to gently tap on the doorframe to get his attention. He didn’t look up from his task. It was like she didn’t even exist.

  “Hey, Z,” she greeted, trying with speech this time.

  “Hey,” he grunted out, voice hoarse from disuse.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. She kept her voice neutral; the last thing she wanted was to antagonize Zachariah in some way. Especially when he had a firearm on the table in front of him. Not that she really thought he’d shoot her.

  “Loading my gun.”

  Riley took a step into the room for a better view of the table and recognized Zachariah’s Desert Eagle pistol in front of him. He had two of them, she knew, ones that he carried around in a manner that made her think of an Old West gunslinger, and she didn’t understand why he picked them as his weapons of choice; they were monsters that used .50-calibre bullets, and the one time she’d fired one, she’d nearly ended up on her ass. She didn’t want to imagine the mess that one of those bullets could make of a human body. The thought made her shudder.

  “What are you cleaning your gun for?” she asked, resisting the compulsion to take the weapon from him. She imagined him lying dead on the floor, and now that it had crossed her mind, she couldn’t get the image out of her head.

  Zachariah glanced at her, fleetingly; his green eyes were rimmed with red, like he’d been on a three-day bender, which made his eyes look even greener. “I’m not going to kill myself, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, cutting his eyes away from her and back to the task at hand. “Not yet, at least,” he added in an almost inaudible mutter. If he hadn’t wanted Riley to hear that part, he failed miserably.

  “Z…”

  “Please don’t use that tone with me,” he said. “I can’t take hearing it right now.” He fumbled another bullet; it clattered to the table and rolled to the carpet, landing with an audible thump. “Son of a fucking bitch,” he snapped, leaning to pick up the bullet. He seemed to forget what he was doing halfway into the motion and sat back up, emptyhanded. “You need to tell Damon to stop giving me fucking Valium,” he said. “I can’t think straight on this shit.”

  Riley could believe it, if his shaking hands were any indicators of the effect the Valium their former boss—their father, she reminded herself—had been injecting him with was having on him. She understood why Damon was doing it: he was terrified that Zachariah would kill himself the first chance he had. It was a valid concern; Zachariah and Ashton had been lovers for three years, almost as long as they’d known each other, and on some level, Zachariah had died when Ashton had. She’d realized that the second, three nights before, when all the fire had gone out of his eyes.

  “What do you need your gun for, then?” she asked, sinking into the chair across from him.

  “I’m going to kill Brandon,” Zachariah replied, as smoothly as if he were giving her a weather report.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, well, get in line, Z,” she said. “Because, believe me, you aren’t the only one who wants to see him dead.”

  Zachariah fumbled another bullet, and she reached across the table, took the magazine and bullets from him, and started loading the magazine for him. He let her do it, opting instead to rest his forehead on the edge of the table with a soft groan. “I feel like shit,” he commented.

  “You look like shit,” she said, snapping one of the large bullets into the magazine.

  “Damon shouldn’t have given me Valium,” he added, lifting his head to prop it against one of his hands. He dug the heel of his hand into his temple, as if he had a headache, and closed his eyes.

  “Why not?”

  “I have addiction problems.”

  “Since when?” she asked.

  “Since about three years ago when my cover was blown on an assignment and…” He trailed off and shook his head, like he had no desire to finish that thought. “Not something I want to talk about right now. It’s ancient history. What I’d rather discuss is the revenge I’m going to take out on Brandon’s ass.”

  “You know what dear ol’ Dad is going to advise you to do, right?” Riley finished loading the magazine and set it on the table, and he promptly handed her another one to fill. “He’d
counsel you to wait, give Brandon time to relax and let his guard down, and then come at him when he least expects it. Of course, Brandon trained both of us, so we know how much bullshit advice like that is, so you know what I say? I say just tell me how I can help.”

  She glanced up to see him giving her a small but grateful smile. “Thanks,” he murmured. “I’m probably going to hold you to that.”

  “You’d better,” she replied. “If you hog all the fun, I’ll never forgive you.” To her delight, Zachariah chuckled, though there wasn’t much heart in it. “Speaking of Damon, where did he and Angelique go?”

  “Not totally sure,” he said, rolling one of the monster .50-calibre bullets back and forth on the table. “Said something about dinner. They took…her, the girl, with them.”

  The girl. Katie Hunter. Scott’s niece. “They’re not taking her home yet, are they? Damon promised Scott—”

  “No,” he said. “They just went for food. I think she needed to get out of the motel for a bit. Stir crazy. So Damon took her with them.”

  “He better not let anything happen to her,” she commented. “There’s no telling what Scott would do to him if he did.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Something like that.” He slapped a hand down on the rolling bullet and stared at it, an empty look in his eyes. “Do…do you know where Damon buried him?” he asked hesitantly.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t,” she admitted. “Damon wouldn’t let me go with him. He made me stay here with you.”

  Zachariah nodded and tapped his finger against the table restlessly. His fidgeting, the almost nonstop tremor in his hands, worried Riley. He was definitely in no condition to go on a revenge kick against Brandon, not yet. “I felt him die,” he said quietly, not looking at Riley. “Not just physically,” he added. “Up here.” He tapped the middle finger of a shaky hand against his temple. “I could feel him in there,” he murmured. “He was scared, and he was hurting, but he was…relieved, too. Like he was just glad he’d accomplished something successfully.”