The Agency, Volume I

by Sylvan, Dianne

  It was also pretty obvious that, intentions aside, the man was harmless.

  Jason lowered his weapon, walked over to the altar (a folding table draped in yet more velvet; what was it with these guys and velvet?), and took note of the array of items there, including a cylinder of hollowed-out ivory with gold caps on either end and a series of symbols carved into the side. The whole thing was about the size of his index finger.

  He leaned closer and listened. After a few seconds he heard a quiet scratching sound, as of a dog’s claws on a door, trying to get out.

  Another one. Damn it, he was going to impale whoever was getting this shit into the city past the network.

  Jason holstered his gun and took an evidence bag from his coat, carefully sliding the cylinder into it without touching its surface. He sealed the bag, then reached up and tapped the communicator relay behind his ear.

  [Artifact confiscated,] he said. [Suspect in custody. Send a unit for collection of suspect, Artifact, and farm animal.]

  Tanya, who was the senior dispatch staffer and usually served as his Ear, was trying not to laugh in his mind. [On their way, SA-7. ETA five minutes.]

  [Acknowledged.] He turned to the man lying prone on the floor and hoisted him back onto his feet with one arm, digging out a pair of cuffs with the other. He switched back to verbal communication and said, “Russell Farnsdale, you’re under arrest for violation of section 1.4.1.3-F of the Crowleyan Code as well as a class B misdemeanor, harboring a domestic animal with intent to sacrifice. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say…”

  The man was whimpering, but didn’t resist arrest, a nice change of pace given how Jason’s night had been going so far. He heard the van pull up outside the dilapidated storefront where this little Moonlight Shenanigan had been occurring, and waited for the reinforcements to come in and take over.

  “I…I didn’t do anything wrong,” the man whined.

  “Really? Then where’d you get the reliquary, Mr. Farnsdale? And what’s in it, a demon?”

  Stutters and stammers. Just as well; the boys at R&D would figure out what was in the reliquary, and he’d let SA-14 handle the interrogation and processing. Once upon a time he’d hated delegating, but it was an art he was learning to appreciate.

  The backup Agents entered the building with their guns out, and he gestured for them to put them away. He handed Farnsdale off to another Agent, and told the human, “By the way, we’re taking the goat.”

  He stopped to pat the animal on the head, and it gave him a disdainful glare before returning to the pile of hay that the would-be wizard had thoughtfully left at its feet. It was probably going to hate living at the Austin Zoo with all the other rescued animals, but it was either that or end up roasted with barbecue sauce. Texas was a rough state for hoofed mammals.

  Jason stepped back out into the comparatively cool night air, breathing deeply, glad to be free of the incense smoke. SA-14 was on his way into the building, and he stopped for a status check.

  “Routine,” Jason told him. “Next time we get one of these you can handle it. Tell R&D I’m pretty sure there’s a Loshnar in the reliquary. Make sure Frog and Samuels don’t have to get near it.”

  “Christ, another one? What is it, Loshnar season?”

  “Not until September,” Jason said. “Have the completed case file on my desk by tomorrow sunset.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  SA-7 left the younger Agent to worry about the aftermath, and called Tanya. [Case disposition 5, awaiting final report. What next?]

  [We’ve got reports of suspected werewolf activity off of Guadalupe and 29th. Sending you the coordinates now.]

  As he left the scene, she transferred the address to him—a Thai noodle house near campus. [Werewolves. Right. How do I always end up on patrol on Full Moons?]

  [You volunteered, remember? Beck just finished her patrol month, so she couldn't take this one.]

  [Let the record show that I’m an idiot.]

  [Standing assumption, Agent.]

  He headed up Congress Avenue toward the University, weaving in and out of the crowds of normal everyday Austinites going about their nighttime business. It was high summer, hot as hell during the day and mostly tolerable at night, and today’s temperatures had reached 100. Yet another reason to be nocturnal.

  He was fond of Austin, having lived in a dozen cities and visited half the world’s countries. The city had a restless spirit, but not like, say, New Orleans, with its deep festering grudges and the taste of death in the air. Austin was inquisitive, eager. Live music poured out of the bars he passed, and had it been two hours later he might have stopped off in one, but there was still the rest of his patrol to finish, a pile of paperwork on his desk back at base awaiting his return, and a particular someone he’d been hoping to spend more than five minutes with this week, scheduled to meet him for coffee before sunrise.

  If what he had come to suspect about Rowan was true, however, he was going to end up wishing he’d had a beer instead.

  Such a small thing, but enough to fill his veins with poisonous jealousy and something dangerously close to rage: last Friday, at the end of his weekly meeting with the new trainee, she’d walked out of his office, and he’d caught an unmistakable scent. Incense, oak leaves, something soft and cool that he knew was the smell of immortality, and a faint top note that changed every time—that night it had been strawberries. He knew, because he’d bought them himself.

  Worst of all, underneath the combined scents of all those things was the smell of sex. She’d showered since it happened, but it was recent enough that his heightened senses could pick it out easily, which meant in the last two days or less. Vampires could tell the difference between a cabernet and a merlot at a distance of a hundred yards. No human would be able to discern what he could, which was that she’d been with one person, a male, someone with opiates in his system…and it hadn't been the first time.

  Strawberries and sex. The thought had driven him to the shooting range several times already to empty an entire clip into a single human-shaped target.

  Jason shook his head and tried to focus on the task at hand, but it was difficult given that he knew he was walking into nothing. There were no werewolves in Austin, at least none on the registry, and any illegals would have been spotted long before they got that close to college students. Most likely it was a dog or a prank.

  [What’s the background on this?] he asked Tanya.

  She beamed him the original report, and he frowned. A 911 caller had claimed she found a body ripped to shreds back behind a dumpster off Guadalupe, and the officers who responded had verified an animal attack of some kind. They were still on-scene with the Medical Examiner.

  [Tell APD I’ll be there in five minutes, and to get their hands off the body. If it is a lycanthrope they could pick up the virus even through latex gloves.]

  [Calling them now.]

  True to his word, he made it to the dingy little restaurant quickly, and rounded the back corner just in time to hear one of the officers mutter something about “Fucking FBI.”

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, emerging from the shadows into the flood lamps the police had set up around the crime scene. “Thank you for waiting.”

  He recognized the woman in charge as well as the ME. “Oh, Christ,” the detective said. “Not you again.”

  He strode up to where they were clustered around the body, flashing his badge and giving her his version of a charming smile, which he then turned on the ME, a young human male who blushed and started stammering under the vampire’s gaze. Everyone stepped back out of Jason's way as he approached.

  “I told you I was sorry about your uniform, Detective Harding,” he said calmly. “Next time I say ‘stand back,’ you should listen.”

  She snorted. “I didn’t call for the Feds,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  He stepped over the body and crouched beside it, much closer than any of the police; a couple, he noticed
, were green and sick looking at the sight of so much blood. Murders were far rarer in Austin than many larger cities, and one like this was practically unheard-of.

  “Male, Caucasian, early 40s, homeless from the look of it,” the ME said, regaining his composure. “It looks like he was mauled by a bear.”

  “I hate those city-dwelling bears, don’t you?” Jason muttered, leaning over, trying to keep his coat out of the mess. The man had been mauled, all right, torn open from neck to knees, long gashes parallel to the spine. There was blood and viscera drying everywhere, and the stench was overpowering, or at least, it would be to a human. Intellectually he could say it was a disgusting sight, but in reality he didn’t find fresh corpses that disturbing, having been one himself. Decay, now…vampires hated decay. It was the antithesis of their existence, and scared many of them on a nearly atavistic level.

  There was a dark green slimy substance in the edges of some of the wounds. He tapped his relay again. [Tanya, I’m sending you images of our John Doe.]

  The second part of the Ear, a device on his belt, could be switched into several modes; he spun the click wheel until red letters flashed in front of his mind’s eye saying “Camera.” There was a faint flash of light, and he switched back to communicator mode and sent the picture to dispatch.

  “Any ID?” he asked, looking up at Harding.

  “No,” she replied tersely. “Can you tell me anything useful or are you just here to rubberneck?”

  Jason straightened, just in time for Tanya to beam him the information he wanted. “Victim is Donald Ray Bowman, age 43. Former patient at the VA hospital, paranoid-schizophrenic. No family in Texas. You can run a search for next-of-kin. The substance in the wounds suggests a Felthrais demon, but I’ll have to take a sample to be sure. If it is, you guys are off the hook on this one. Give me five minutes.”

  He knelt again, this time removing a small glass vial attached to a tube from his coat, along with a probe and a pair of gloves.

  “Doesn’t the FBI have forensics people who do this sort of work?” the ME asked, looking uncomfortable. Jason didn’t really blame him; he’d be irritated if a Fed tried to do his job, too.

  “I have extensive experience in this field,” he said, pulling on the gloves and capturing a small dollop of the slime with the probe. Once it was in the vial, he capped it and stripped the gloves off, tossing them in the dumpster, then connected the tube to the device on his belt and switched the Ear’s setting again.

  “Analysis Running” blinked in his mind telepathically.

  “Not to mention,” he went on, “if this is a Felthrais, this goo is toxic and will eat right through human skin.”

  “And what, you aren’t human?” Harding asked with a snide laugh. “Come on, Adams, you’re not that special.”

  He ignored her, as he often did with conversation not to his taste, and asked Tanya, [How’s it coming?]

  [R&D has a preliminary report—definitely Felthrais. Six out of eight markers match. We’ll probably have all eight in another few minutes. I’m dispatching two units to the scene right now.]

  [Shit. I guess I know what I’ll be doing with the last hour of my shift, then. Can you get me a track on the demon?]

  [No, sorry. The attack must have been more than two hours ago—there’s no remaining energy signature.]

  [I’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way.]

  “All right, Detective, you can all go,” he said. “We’ll take it from here.”

  She was pissed. They were always pissed. It was her bad luck that she had dealt with the SA more than once; in an average year there were perhaps ten supernatural murders in Travis County, and most of them were handled from beginning to end by the SA. Only a handful, like this one, failed to trip any sort of energetic alarms.

  While he waited for the units to arrive, he examined the rest of the crime scene, looking for evidence that would point him toward the Felthrais. There were usually two reasons a demon ended up on the physical plane: it was brought there by a human, or it escaped from its home dimension when a doorway or crack opened up between there and Earth. In either case the protocol was the same: destroy on sight. A demon wasn’t an animal, or one of the recognized allied races. It was a construct designed to kill, maim, or destroy, if not all three.

  In a way the ME hadn’t been far off; Felthrais did look something like bears. Lizard bears with six-inch teeth, but still. Luckily they weren’t very bright, and tended to leave a trial of debris from running into things. Not far from the body he found a board knocked loose from the fence, and there in the mud beyond, paydirt: three-toed footprints and the drag mark of a heavy tail.

  The Agents were arriving, and the police were leaving. Jason drew his pistol and replaced the standard rounds with a special clip he’d made himself: hollow-core bullets filled with acid.

  [I’m going after it,] he informed Tanya. [Do me a favor and let SA-5 know I may be late.]

  [As always,] she said. [Good hunting.]

  *****

  Three hours later he took one of the subterranean tunnels that crisscrossed Austin back to the base, avoiding the swiftly-lightening sky; it was half an hour before sunrise, long after he would prefer to be in bed. His shift had him keeping hard hours for a vampire, rising too early and resting too late, but it was the only way to get everything done. As it was, if he wanted to have coffee with the Elf he was going to have to put off his paperwork and get up even earlier the next evening to finish it.

  He stopped at the base’s main underground entrance and let the security system scan his retinas, fingerprints, and badge. The computer prompted him for his verbal code, and he said into the mic, “Shadow Agent 7. Adams, Jason. Authorization 47075-9.”

  “Authorization accepted. Welcome home, Agent 7.”

  The doors slid open, and he made his tired way to the Armory, where he repeated the identification process to gain access to his arsenal.

  The Armory was long and narrow, lined with benches on one side and labeled metal drawers on the other. Each Agent had a drawer that held his or her weapons and gear, with slots for the individual guns, knives, and specialized ammo that they carried.

  The last thing he took off was his Ear, but first he said, [SA-7 coding off for the night. 47075-9.]

  Tanya sounded as sleepy as he felt. [Coding accepted, SA-7. Get some rest and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.]

  He tucked both pieces of the Ear into his locker and pushed it back into the wall, where it beeped and the locks engaged.

  Arming and disarming every night was a ritual he had performed for decades. It was always followed by a much-needed shower. He stripped off his filthy uniform, including the coat; the Felthrais had bled all over him, and as a result there were holes in all his clothing. He’d also jumped over a fence in the pursuit and landed rather embarrassingly in a thorny rose bush, so he was scratched all over. He dropped the uniform down the chute outside the showers; a clean one and a new coat would be waiting for him at his next shift.

  Just before he tossed the coat down with the rest, he removed the bag in the left interior pocket: a mango, hopefully not too bruised, purchased before he'd been called to deal with the wizard wannabe. He set the bag on a seat outside the showers and got in the stall, turning the hot water on full blast.

  Finally, clean and dressed in garments that didn’t stink of flowers and demon blood, went by the lockers again, this time entering a command override that allowed him access to all of them. He pulled open Beck's drawer and put the bag with the mango inside—he usually gave them to her personally, but he wasn't going to see her until the next night, and this was another ritual he never failed to keep. She'd be back from her own shift already, but her weapons were still out, so she must be in the training rooms fine-tuning the simulator. Good; the mango wouldn't have time to get mushy.

  He went to his office, intending to call and ask Rowan if they could meet in the subterranean lounge instead of the cafeteria. The sun would be well up by now, an
d while the surface-level windows had ultraviolet blocking screens and indirect radiation wouldn't kill him, it would leave him nauseated with a bitch of a headache as tired as he was.

  To his surprise, the Elf was waiting for him, leaning back in his desk chair.

  Jason's stomach tightened with automatic nerves, but he smiled. "You're the first good thing I've seen all night," he said.

  Rowan smiled back, and they held each other's eyes for just a beat longer than Jason would have with anyone else. "Long shift?"

  "Full Moon."

  "Oh, bless your heart. All the crazies come out—anything good?" Rowan got to his feet and the two walked side by side from the office, across the Floor toward the smaller of the sub-level lounges; they preferred that one because the larger was usually more crowded, though the coffee was better there.