Cold Spectrum

by Craig Schaefer

  “Hey, hey, what do we have here?” he said. “Ain’t seen you two around before.”

  “We’re new in town,” I said. “Looking to make new friends.”

  His hands massaged the women’s bare shoulders, fingers wriggling like centipedes. They wore plastic smiles in silence.

  “You came to the right place. I’m a friendly guy.”

  “This is more business than pleasure,” Jessie said. “Opportunity knocks.”

  “That’s one door I always open.” He patted his companions’ shoulders. “You wanna excuse us for a moment? Don’t go far.”

  The women in the smoke-colored dresses rose as one, sharing a knowing glance, and stepped around us. Not sure why, but I turned to look behind me.

  They were gone.

  “Care to have a seat?” Giannetti patted the vacant cushions.

  “We’ll stand,” Jessie said. “We understand you’re a big man in this town. The kind of guy who gets things done.”

  His smile could have lit up the lounge. We didn’t need April’s help to crack into Giannetti’s brain: he walked around with a user’s manual tattooed on his forehead.

  “You heard that, huh? Where at?”

  “Everywhere,” I said. “Where don’t they talk about you? Back home, everybody told us the same thing: when you get to New York, you’d better look up Tony Four-Ways. Nothing happens without his say-so.”

  He ducked his head and gave an expansive shrug, a picture of false modesty. “I wouldn’t go that far, but yeah, I got some juice. Where do you call home, doll?”

  “We used to call it Los Angeles, but we’re looking for a change of lifestyle,” Jessie said.

  “You could do a lot worse than New York, if that’s what you’re thinking. This is the place to be.”

  We’d rehearsed our approach on the subway, concocting a story that would get the hound’s attention. Now I just needed to sell it.

  “I wish it was that easy,” I said. “We have certain ties back home. Ties we need help cutting.”

  “This a family thing?” He gave me a closer look, squinting. “Nah. Capital-F family thing. Lemme guess: You got a jealous boyfriend? Guy with connections? I could make a few phone calls—”

  “Different kind of underworld,” Jessie said. “We hear you know people in the Court of Windswept Razors. Powerful people. They say you’ve got their hound on speed dial, and when you talk, the hound listens.”

  He nodded, appraising her. “True. True. But I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking me for. Lay it on the line for me.”

  I stepped closer to the couch, voice low, and dangled my baited hook.

  “We’re agents for the Court of Jade Tears,” I said. “We want to defect.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Giannetti’s eyes glittered like he’d opened a pirate’s treasure chest. Before, he’d been appraising our bedroom potential. Now we were commodities.

  “The Jade Tears don’t employ many pure-bred humans,” he said, “and you don’t have the cambion look . . .”

  I held my drink in one hand and cupped the other, raising my palm between us. Then I reached to my magic. A swirling spark became a marble of flame, casting shifting shadows across our faces. His eyes widened. Then I curled my fingers and snuffed out the light.

  “We have talents,” I told him.

  “So you do. Now, when you say ‘agents’—”

  “We work with Caitlin,” Jessie said. “Her personal staff. And yes, that means we know where the bodies are buried—figuratively and literally.”

  “We took three terabytes of files from her private server before we left,” I said.

  We had no idea if Caitlin even owned a computer. Still, modern age, modern tools, and the agents of hell we’d met mostly seemed as tech savvy as we were, so it felt like a safe gamble.

  Giannetti rubbed his greasy chin. “That’s a big number.”

  “I imagine certain people would pay a big number to get it, too,” I said. “But the files aren’t for sale. We’re looking to give them away. They go to the first court that offers us new jobs and new identities. Any chance you could swing an introduction to the hound for us?”

  “Have to think there’d be a reward involved,” Jessie added.

  From the look on his face, Giannetti was thinking the same thing.

  “Let me make a couple of phone calls, real quick.” He pushed himself off the gray velvet sofa and stepped between us, going out of his way to brush his hand across my arm. I forced myself to smile. Once he was out of earshot, Jessie leaned in close.

  “We shoot, we score. Sounds like he bought it.”

  “Now we just need to see if the hound buys it,” I murmured back. “Are defectors even a thing with these people? We need more intel on how the courts operate.”

  Of course, now we knew why it had always been so hard to get that intelligence. Vigilant Lock had been kneecapped from day one. We were meant to be disposable weapons of the eastern courts all along, skilled enough to be a thorn in their enemies’ sides but never informed or strong enough to pose a real threat. I wondered how many field reports were quietly dustbinned instead of being disseminated to Vigilant’s other teams. How much data on the monsters we fought—critical, lifesaving information—had been deliberately swept under the rug?

  I thought about the Wunderkammer, Vigilant’s storage facility for captured artifacts and dangerous manuscripts. The lockup was firmly under the eastern coalition’s control, all that power at hell’s fingertips. The relics we’d captured, the demons we’d trapped in soul bottles . . . we’d given it all to them. Signed, sealed, and delivered.

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” I said.

  “Amen.” Jessie sipped her cocktail, then glanced at the glass in my hand. “You gonna finish that?”

  “We’re on duty.”

  “Yeah, but they’re damn good drinks. Besides, no telling when we’ll be back here again.” Jessie’s gaze swept across the room. “I don’t think we’re hip enough for this place.”

  “I don’t think anyone is hip enough for this place.”

  Giannetti came back, all smiles, arms spread wide like he was hoping for a hug.

  “Good news. Prospero—that’s the Razors’ hound, good guy, great guy—is very interested and would love to have a sit-down with you ladies. He wants to hear what you’re bringing to the table, then hopefully he’ll be making you an offer. Call it a job interview.”

  Jessie ran her fingers up his arm like she was playing a piano. “Everything they said is true. You’re the man, Tony. The real thing.”

  “Hey, don’t you forget it.” He flashed a couple of gold-capped teeth as he basked in her approval. “And don’t forget me when you find yourself moving up in the world, yeah? We’re gonna be neighbors now. Anyway, he doesn’t see any reason to wait on this: the meet’s tonight—I’ll give you the address. It’s on Bridge Street in Vinegar Hill. That’s Brooklyn, out by the waterfront.”

  “Well, then,” Jessie said, tossing back the last of her cocktail, “we’d better not keep him waiting.”

  Brooklyn was a subway ride away. The train rattled through the night, the frigid tunnels like veins under the city’s stone skin. We rode in silence. The subway doors hissed open, and a gust of cold wind washed over us. We stepped out onto the platform, following the sparse late-night crowd to a staircase blanketed in harsh white light.

  I called April.

  “Do we have any information on a demon calling himself Prospero?”

  “Prospero, as in Shakespeare’s Tempest?” April asked. “I don’t have much in the way of research material here, but I’ll see what I can dig up. Are you—hold on, Kevin is wildly gesticulating in my direction. Ah. Linder’s calling in.”

  “Can you patch him through?” I asked. We stepped off to the side, hovering on the platform’s edge.

  I waited, listening as a string of clicks echoed across the line.

  Then Linder’s voice, an edge of tension under his u
sual calculated dispassion. “Agents.”

  “What have you got?” I said. “Any idea how Panic Cell found out we were in New York? And how are they tracking us?”

  “I’m not remotely certain. Director Crohn’s behavior has grown increasingly . . . erratic since you escaped him in Washington. His body is intact. His pride, grievously wounded. At any rate, he’s shutting me out of the pursuit, and given the circumstances, I can’t risk drawing attention by asking too many questions.”

  “He’s intact,” Jessie said, almost cheek to cheek with me as she leaned into the phone. “Any chance he killed Nyx?”

  “Negative. Street cameras show her injured but fleeing the scene. In human form, thankfully. I called to update you on my end of things. I’m making inroads with Dick Esposito, the Bureau’s deputy director. He’s motivated, ambitious, he hasn’t been compromised by our enemies—oh, and he and Crohn despise each other. I think we can turn him into an asset.”

  “Can he clear our names?” I said.

  “Not yet, so keep your heads down. Esposito’s completely in the dark when it comes to Vigilant, and I’d like to keep him that way for as long as possible. That said, if we were to pave the way for his career advancement and earn his gratitude . . .”

  “Like proof that Crohn is shady?” Jessie asked. “Not occult-underground stuff—details on bribes, crimes, anything that we can put in front of a news camera.”

  “It’s an option. One way or another—burn the contracts or burn his career—Crohn’s removal is our top priority. But we have to think about follow-through. If he suddenly drops dead, it won’t magically make the charges against you go away. If anything, considering he fabricated them, it could be even harder to prove your innocence. I’ll keep grooming Esposito. Dig deep, Agents. Bring me leverage.”

  He disconnected the call.

  I put my phone away and looked sidelong at Jessie. “If there’s any dirt to be found, this Prospero guy’s gonna have it.”

  Jessie nodded. “Along with the contracts, if we’re lucky.”

  “If we’re lucky,” I said.

  “Not even gonna bother crossing my fingers,” Jessie said. “Okay, so . . . two options. One, we do a covert pass-by on the address Tony gave us, check it out, see if we can get eyes on Prospero from a safe distance. Then we tail him and hope he leads us to the goodies.”

  “And the other?”

  “We keep the ruse going,” she said. “Show up for the job interview. If we play this right, he might walk us right into his office, or wherever high-ranking demon creeps happen to keep their important files. If we go for stealth and then lose this guy, we’re right back at square one.”

  “And if we go face-to-face and he thinks we’re lying, we’ll be a lot worse off than that. Hounds are supposed to be the best of the best. I mean, we barely fought Nadine to a draw, and you saw her back in Portland—she was scared of Caitlin. Whatever this Prospero is capable of, I think we need to be better prepared than this.”

  “Danger is my middle name,” she said.

  “Georgeanne is your middle name.”

  She stopped walking, tugged down her dark glasses, and glared at me.

  I shrugged. “What? I looked at your driver’s license once.”

  “Harmony,” she said, “there are things you don’t need to know about me.”

  New York hummed electric at night. Even long after dark, in the cold hours past midnight, the streets were alive with people and traffic. Up in Vinegar Hill, with the lights of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the distance, a soft and steady thrum from a power plant filled the air. We walked down side streets where old worlds and new stood shoulder to shoulder, a five-story condo pressed between antique carriage houses. Belgian blocks, vintage bricks shaped like cobblestones, clacked under our feet.

  We’d gone far enough off the beaten path to leave the pedestrians and the late-night taxicabs behind.

  I checked the address Giannetti gave us. It was an apartment complex up ahead, a squat U-shaped antique in dirty white brick with a central courtyard. Half the windows dark, the rest draped with bedsheets or cheap and mismatched blinds. Jessie lowered her glasses and squinted.

  “He gave us the place but no apartment number,” she said. “What are we supposed to do, knock on doors?”

  Our answer came in the full-throated growl of a motorcycle engine. Then another, and another, until seven more joined the chorus. Bikes rolled out of the courtyard and onto the street like a military convoy. Headlights washed over us, pinning us where we stood.

  “I think he’s coming to us,” I said.

  “Huh.” Jessie’s right hand curled into a fist. “Looks like we’re trying my plan, after all.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  We stood in the middle of the street as the caravan of motorcycles circled us, closing ranks, swirling like slow and hungry sharks. The riders, decked out in black leather and patches, looked like sharks themselves as they flashed gnarled, jagged teeth. One pulled up his tinted goggles to show us a pair of runny-egg-yolk eyes.

  “Cambion biker gang,” Jessie breathed. “Great. You wanna take the four on the left, I’ll take the four on the right?”

  A ripple of unfocused magic sent a nervous shiver up my spine, ready to be called upon. I kept my hands easy and open.

  “Wait for it,” I said. “When it comes to the courts of hell, cambion are errand boys at best. We want the big boss.”

  The convoy rumbled to a halt.

  One of the bikers, the one with the goggles, looked our way. “You girls look lost,” he said. One of his buddies, behind us, let out a wolf whistle.

  Giannetti had written the address down on a smoke-gray napkin, along with a squiggle that looked like some kind of personal sigil. I held it up, the ink glossy black in the streetlight.

  “We’re right where we’re supposed to be,” I said. “We’ve got an appointment with Prospero. Don’t think he’d like it very much if we were late.”

  The biker locked eyes with me. I held his gaze, counting under my breath. One, one hundred, two, one hundred—

  “That’s where he meets Prospero.” He made a gun with his fingers and pointed it the other way. The far side of the street, the door to a second-floor walk-up above a repair shop with a dirty yellow awning. “That’s where you meet him.”

  “Does he own the whole block?” Jessie asked.

  “He owns the whole city. You’ll remember that if you’re smart.”

  The circle of bikes parted. They walked their rides back, opening a hole just wide enough for the two of us, aiming us at the door. The battered metal knob wriggled under my hand as it turned, and the rickety wooden door yawned wide.

  “Be seeing you,” the biker called out behind us. “Or not.”

  A narrow staircase waited beyond the door, bare and dusty steps that groaned under our feet. We knew Ben Crohn reported directly to Prospero. The way I saw it, there were two possibilities. Either Prospero was a hands-off manager, or he was in the loop. If he was in the loop, he’d know who we were on sight. Crohn’s pride and his sense of self-preservation were our best allies right now. Would he admit what was going on and risk his boss’s wrath, or try to keep it hushed up and handle it himself? I knew what I would pick, considering Prospero could kill him with a single lit match.

  My hand brushed the Sig Sauer under my windbreaker. The other called to my magic, feeling the faint and flickering current like a wave of static electricity.

  I felt Jessie’s palm against the small of my back. “Hey,” she murmured. “We can do this.”

  “Do I look tense?”

  She tapped the side of her nose and gave me a lopsided smile.

  “Right,” I said, “wolf senses.”

  “Just remember, we’ve got two goals here: get as much intel as we can going in; do as much damage as we can on our way out.”

  “Sounds doable,” I said.

  “Very doable. Especially the damage part. After the shit we’ve been through these last few
days, I really want to break some stuff.”

  She wasn’t alone there. At the second-floor landing, a bare wooden door awaited. No sign, no number. I knocked twice.

  The figure who opened the door, standing on the threshold and gazing at us from behind tortoiseshell glasses, didn’t look like my idea of a demon prince’s right-hand man. More like a moderately successful accountant, with his ash-colored hair in a wispy comb-over, and spearmint-green suspenders holding up his slacks. His eyes were a little too big for his face, his chin a little too small. If I’d seen him out on the street somewhere, I would have looked past him without a second glance.

  Up close, though, what I felt clashed with what I saw. Waves of power rippled off him like a heat mirage in the desert. He was an open gas main, turning the air around him toxic, just waiting for the flick of a lighter to drench the world in flame.

  “My new friends,” he said in a nervous, uneven voice. “I hope we’ll be friends. Won’t you please come in?”

  He ushered us into his office, a staid room that smelled like mothballs. Books on law and accounting lined floor-to-ceiling shelves, and a lamp with a green shade sat on an immaculately clean desk. Behind the desk, off to the right, a narrow window looked out onto a back alley.

  “I hope the welcoming committee didn’t give you any trouble.” He let out a high-pitched giggle. His left eyelid twitched. “Cambion. So boisterous. Eager to please, eager not to please—they can hardly make up their minds.”

  When he turned his back, stepping behind the desk, Jessie shot me a look. She twirled one finger around her ear. I didn’t disagree. Something was just off about Prospero. Then I looked past Jessie and nodded at the bookshelves. One section of books, right in the middle, didn’t match the rest. Unlabeled covers, squeezed too tight and too evenly together, and filling the shelf from top to bottom. Fakes. Like a concealed lid for a wall safe, possibly.