“So we knew we were dealing with the same crew. Pete had known the husband and wife from the pawnshop. It had been on his old beat. He wouldn’t wait; he said he couldn’t live with himself if they got away, not after what they’d done, what they’d keep doing unless someone stopped them.”
Ian paused and sat back when our drinks arrived. With barely a flick of his thumb, he popped the cap off of his longneck; and with suddenly shaky hands, I peeled the paper off my straw and put it in my sweet tea.
Ian took a long pull from his beer, set his bottle down, and raised his eyes to mine. “Pete went in.”
“What did you do?”
“I did what a partner does; I backed him up. The ghouls were waiting. They must have been disappointed at first when they saw there was no one to slice up this time, so they waited for us. We’d seen three in the shop, but there were five of them and two of us. Pete thought he’d gotten the drop on them. Ordered them to take off their masks. The leader did, and he laughed while he did it. Then we saw what they were. Pete froze.”
“No.” Like me saying that could make it go back and not happen.
“The leader was on him before I could even react, fangs tearing at his face and throat. I shot the thing, and kept shooting. He raised his face from Pete’s throat, covered in my partner’s blood, smiled, and told me to be patient, I was next. I emptied two mags into those things and they didn’t even flinch. Then three of them came after me. I hadn’t seen their fingernails until then. I fought . . . and they cut me up. When I was in the hospital, the investigators assigned to the case tried to tell me that they’d used switchblades. I knew the truth. I knew what I’d seen, but I also knew enough to keep my mouth shut to avoid getting transferred upstairs to the psych ward. One night I got a visit from Vivienne Sagadraco.”
“Who made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”
“An offer I jumped at. Lying in that hospital bed, I’d sworn to myself that I’d get the things that had butchered my partner, and I couldn’t do it working for the NYPD. The lady offered me a job, and after I got out of the hospital a month later, I took it.”
“Did you get those ghouls?”
“Oh yeah. Paid back with interest.”
“Ian, I’m not going to freeze at the sight of ghouls. Just because I didn’t take that shot—”
“This has nothing to do with this morning. This is about being smart and staying alive.”
“I chase little old ladies. I don’t chase ghouls, and I sure as hell won’t chase a grendel.”
“Which is precisely what the boss is telling you to do.”
“It’s seeing through that veil—or whatever those things are using—and telling the team where they are.”
“It’s putting yourself within killing distance.”
“It’s my job.” Here it comes, what Ian really thought of me. I was going to beat him to it. “And you don’t think I can do it.”
“You’re plenty qualified—as a seer.” He leaned forward. “Mac, this situation is a first. I don’t know how monsters supposedly that primitive are making themselves invisible, but they shouldn’t be able to. Whether you’re responding to what sounds like a routine call—or a hunt in dark tunnels for two grendels—a situation can go to shit in the blink of an eye. It takes less time than that to get killed. If you put someone who’s not trained on the front line, bad things will happen. Maybe not the first time, but eventually, they will happen.”
My mouth suddenly went bone dry. “And I’m not trained.”
“Not for this. Not even a little. SPI’s never given their seers combat training. They don’t think it’s necessary.” He paused and took another swig of beer. “Combat training’s a hell of a lot more than necessary when you’re hunting monsters that rip off heads and arms, and gut you with one swipe.”
I sucked down half a glass of sweet tea through my straw.
“You’ll be with me,” I said.
“I was there with Pete, too.”
“And you’re saying Pete would still be alive if he’d listened to you and waited for backup.”
“I don’t know that for sure.”
“But you think it.”
“Yeah, I think it. I think it all the damned time.”
“My grandma thinks that good comes out of bad. If you and Pete hadn’t walked in on those ghouls, Pete might be alive now—and you might still be with the NYPD.”
“Your point?”
“I’ve seen the stuff on your desk. Your desk flair would give me nightmares; I can’t even imagine what you had to do to earn all of it.” I was silent for a moment. “You’ve done a lot of good here, and a lot of people are probably alive because of it. You would’ve never had a chance to do those things if you’d still been a cop. There’s plenty of men who can be good cops, but it takes a man who’s a lot more to storm the gates of Hell before lunch.”
Ian’s teeth flashed in a brief grin. “So Yasha has been talking.”
“Who knew the gates of Hell were in Hoboken?” I looked down at my tea, suddenly uneasy. “And if you hadn’t been here, the boss might already be looking for my replacement.”
Ian put his big hand over mine. “The boss made you my responsibility; it’s my job to keep you alive. Pete was my partner; he was my responsibility.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“What happened that night was something I could’ve never predicted. Neither one of us was ready for five ghouls. But I know what’s out there now. You’re my partner, so I’m going to make damned sure you’re ready.”
“Uh . . . it’s a little late for this time.”
Ian sat back, pulling his hand back with him, leaving mine bare and cold. “Yeah, it is. After this—and there will be an after this—we start work.” His lips twitched at the corners. “I can guarantee you’re not going to enjoy it; but when I’m finished with you neither will any monster that crosses your path. Or at the very least, they’ll get one hell of a shock.”
I felt a grin coming on. “So you think you’re that good of a teacher?”
“I know I am.” He paused. “And I think you’ll be that determined of a student.”
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. “So you’re going to teach me to be a badass?”
“I’m a teacher, not a miracle worker. Let’s start by teaching you how to stay alive. In the meantime, until this is over, it’s about survival. I’ll never be farther from you than I am right now.”
Our food arrived and we ate. And in my relief at knowing Ian would be sticking with me, I found I actually had an appetite.
• • •
We’d finished eating, and Ian had paid the humongous bill—Yasha and Calvin had eaten like it was their last meal, too—when Nancy Garrison dropped by our booth.
Make no mistake about it, Nancy was a ferocious werewolf, but as a human, she was perky personified. Heels, stylish pantsuit, and her ever-present pearls—she was a Southern steel magnolia who just happened to go furry and fanged once a month.
“How was everything?” she asked.
“Fabulous as always,” I said. “And today, it was much needed.”
Nancy’s perky faded a little. “I’m hearing that something’s about to hit the fan.”
“We’re going to do everything we can to keep that from happening,” Ian told her without elaborating further.
Nancy and Bill were clued in, and they knew about SPI, but unless events directly affected specific supernaturals, company policy was to keep the details under wraps. Nancy knew that, too. I’d always thought it was that whole don’t-incite-a-public-panic thing. The Full Moon always threw their own New Year’s Eve party, so Ian knew that the Garrisons wouldn’t be going anywhere near Times Square tomorrow night.
“You should come bowl with us sometime,” Nancy was saying.
I looked from Nan
cy to Ian and back again. “Me?”
“Yes, dear,” Nancy said. “You.”
“Bowl?”
“Since you’ve got your own ball and everything. Or are you already in a league?”
“I don’t bowl. I mean I have, but I suck at it, and I sure don’t have my own ball.”
“I could’ve sworn I saw you carrying a bowling bag into work the other day.”
Ian and I traded a glance.
“Which other day?” I asked.
Nancy thought for a moment. “Day before yesterday.”
“You’re sure?” Ian asked.
“As sure as I am that I saw a bowling bag.”
“What color?” he asked.
“Red and white. Vintage looking. Like something from the fifties. Nice bag.” She looked at me. “Are you saying that wasn’t you carrying that bag?”
“I’m saying something was carrying that bag that wasn’t me.”
Nancy’s big brown eyes suddenly flashed gold. “You’ve got a doppelganger making trouble for you?” Those gold eyes said loud and clear that my doppelganger had better pray it never crossed Nancy Garrison’s path again—on a full moon or any other time.
Jeez, did everyone know about doppelgangers except me?
I nodded. “In spades.”
“Honey, those things are nothing to mess with.” Then Ian was the target of those gold eyes. “You sticking close to this girl?”
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “When I guard a woman, she stays guarded.”
Nancy barely nodded, signaling that she acknowledged his ability to do that. Barely.
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her.
“You be careful.”
“As much as I can.”
I waited until Nancy had moved on to the next table. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Since SPI doesn’t have a bowling alley, I probably am.”
“It’s the package that CIA vampire was talking about.”
We didn’t have to say anything else; we were both thinking the same thing.
A bomb.
Or since we were dealing with supernaturals—something even worse.
14
THE four of us ran down the block, across the street, and back into Saga Investments. Ian had tried getting Moreau on his phone, and when he didn’t answer, he tried Vivienne Sagadraco. No answer. No voicemail.
Meanwhile my mind was racing. What if being seen as me wasn’t my doppelganger’s main reason for being sent to SPI? I didn’t know anything about bombs, but I was pretty sure you could get a whole lot of boom into a bowling bag. If the vampire ex-CIA agent worked for the adversary and hired the doppelganger to infiltrate SPI, delivering a bag full of boom was a distinct possibility. They’d turned a pair of grendels loose on New York. We wanted to stop the grendels. So following the bouncing logic ball, one could assume that they’d want to stop us.
Hence a big boom.
In the bull pen, things were still business as usual. Nothing ticking, no smoke, no fizzing fuses or however it was that bombs did their thing.
But something was going on, something big.
Kenji Hayashi’s work area had become a hive of activity for those of the brainy persuasion, the folks at SPI who rarely came out of their labs.
“Looks like we’ve got an answer on that flash drive,” Ian said. “Mac, find out what the deal is. Yasha and Calvin, stay with her. Don’t let her out of your sight. I’m going to find the boss and Moreau.” And he was gone, running for the stairs.
The lab folks around Kenji’s computer were equal parts excited and . . . okay, they were just excited. I stood back a little, waiting for the brainiac brouhaha to die down enough to ask Kenji what he’d found on that flash drive.
“Don’t think I’ve ever seen the lab rats this excited,” Calvin noted.
Those that weren’t gathered around Kenji’s screen, talking, debating, and arguing nonstop, had broken off into white-coated clumps, scribbling on tablets—both the paper and electronic kind. One enterprising group had commandeered a whiteboard, filling it with numbers, symbols, and diagrams that made absolutely no sense to me, nor I suspect to anyone with less than three math or engineering degrees.
“Whatever it is, they do seem to be enjoying themselves,” I said.
I caught Kenji’s attention, and the tech elf stood and pushed his way out of the human and nonhuman crush of his fellow science nerds, and made his way over to us.
“So what’s got the smart kids in a tizzy?” I asked.
Kenji was grinning like it was Christmas morning. “Just the coolest thing ever. The actual working schematics for a device that renders its wearer visually and audibly undetectable.”
“Uh . . . you mean unseen and unheard?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Not unless you’re in Mensa.”
Kenji’s dark eyes sparkled with geeky joy. “It’s a cloaking device. The thing’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and will conceal anyone wearing it—from sight and sound. Eat your heart out, Romulans.”
“It works like a veil?”
“It takes a veil about fifty giant leaps forward. Veils just project an altered appearance; this thing can conceal you completely.”
“So how does it work?” Calvin asked.
“We understand about eighty percent of the science involved, but it’s got some woo-woo crap going on that we haven’t figured out yet.”
I just looked at him. “Woo-woo crap?”
“Magic.” Kenji scowled. “It’s looking like we’re going to have to call in the Merlin types up on the fourth floor.”
“That’s a problem?”
“It is when the head of the sorcery department’s a pompous asshole. Tries to take over every project he’s called in on. Thinks just because he’s a couple hundred years older than the rest of us that makes him smarter. All it means is he’s had more time to piss off more people.”
I thought back to the grendel we’d seen on the surveillance video. Adam Falke hadn’t seen or heard the monster looming in the corner. Then when Falke started screaming, it was obvious that he had.
“Does the device have a switch of some kind?” I asked.
Kenji nodded. “A button. A simple on and off.”
“Then if the grendel picks up a weapon while he’s invisible, would the weapon be invisible, too? Or would the cloaking device only cover the grendel itself?”
“Like I said, this thing’s made of twenty percent Grade-A woo-woo crap. We have no idea what it can or can’t cover. Yet.”
“Sounds like we will find out hard way,” Yasha muttered.
“Some of the best scientific discoveries happen in the field.”
Calvin snorted. “Unless something in the field eats them first.”
Kenji shrugged and grinned. “Maybe if we can get the grendel to wear a natty dressing gown and sunglasses we’d be able to see him.”
“You lost me,” I said.
Yasha smiled and nodded. “Claude Rains. The Invisible Man.”
“A werewolf that likes classic monster movies,” Kenji noted with approval. “Borderline ironic, yet cool.”
I grimaced. “So . . . you have to be naked for the device to work?”
Kenji gave me a flat look. “I don’t know. I was trying to make a funny, lighten a tense workplace situation. See prior statement regarding mysterious woo-woo crap.”
“Well, do you know if it’s buildable?”
“Buildable, and probably built,” Kenji said. “The files for these plans were dated from four to six months ago, covering conception through revisions, testing, and final product.”
“By chance did the plans have the inventor’s name on them?”
“They sure did. Dr. Jonathan Tarbert.”
Kenji whistled. “That wouldn’t have made Dr. Tarbert’s employer happy at all.”
I went still. “That wouldn’t be the Department of Defense by any chance?”
He nodded. “Affirmative. Said so right on the plans. And the DOD is so not known for their sense of humor.”
An outraged squeal came from Kenji’s computer. One of the white coats had made himself at home in the elf tech’s chair. “Dude!” Kenji shouted. “Don’t touch her there.” He gave a long-suffering sigh. “Engineers. Gotta go.”
“The MiBs in the back of that van didn’t look like they appreciated a good joke, either,” I told Yasha and Calvin.
“Sounds like that ex-CIA vampire has been dipping into the DOD toy box,” Calvin noted.
Yasha frowned. “Sounds like crazy person who made grendels not seen or heard already did.”
• • •
My phone rang. It was Ian. He’d found the boss and Moreau in the main lab.
The crates had arrived from the Tarbert mausoleum.
SPI’s lab was normally a busy place. Tonight only two of the senior research staff were there with the boss and Moreau. Every available tabletop was covered with open crates, and the air was thick with smells that didn’t agree with what I’d just eaten—or with the rest of me that didn’t like being around dead things.
That’s what was in every crate I could see from where I was standing.
Dead things. Dead supernaturals to be exact, displayed like hunting trophies.
Human skulls with fangs. Some were just the jaws—lowers and fanged uppers. Vampires.
Massive wolflike skulls and pelts. A few skulls had been taxidermied. Werewolves.
Baby dragons preserved in jars or in cross-sectioned eggs. Skulls of adults, and stuffed younger and smaller specimens.
Plus a whole bunch of other deadly looking creatures that I couldn’t identify.
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