Once Darkness Falls (Preternatural Affairs #7)

by SM Reine

  A month had felt like too little time.

  Now I didn’t even have an entire day.

  Tonight. Lucrezia will be here tonight.

  I found Suzy in an armory west of the garage. She was getting ready to roll out into Reno again. She was wearing black cargo pants, combat boots, and one of those Union bulletproof vests, which was too big for her slight form. It took her curves away, shrunk her stature, made her look like a child. A child with a fucking AK-47.

  I didn’t think to establish wards before speaking. “You can’t go to UNR.”

  She opened her mouth to argue with me, but as soon as she saw my face, her mouth snapped shut again. Her eyes filled with alarm. “Did you dive face-first into a wood chipper?”

  “Close,” I said. “This is Fritz’s work.”

  She set the gun on the table and pulled me away from the others in the armory. “How’d you piss him off?”

  “Kissed Isobel.” The weird part was that the kissing didn’t seem to be a problem, but the thing where I didn’t want to keep kissing her.

  Suzy rolled her eyes. Any shreds of sympathy she might have felt had vanished in an instant. “You deserved everything you got, dumbass. Now what’s this about UNR?”

  “You can’t go. Tell me you’re not going.”

  “I’m not going now,” she said. “We’re going to sweep a neighborhood near Vista Boulevard. A lot of people vanished from that area, so we’re going to see if we can figure out where they’ve gone.”

  I wasn’t sure that the where mattered anymore. People had gone missing. That was the long and short of it.

  The why was the critical thing now.

  And I couldn’t let Suzy get tangled up in that.

  “Stay at the base today.”

  “I have a mission,” she said. “Did you forget what Director Friederling assigned to me?”

  It would have been impossible. Our missions, presented as separate and distinct, were deeply intertwined in a thousand hideous ways. “Sit this one out. Send someone else. Delegate responsibilities. I need to talk to you, and you can’t leave the base, Suze. Not right now.”

  She should have argued with me. If Suzy had been her usual self, she would have.

  But she faltered.

  That moment of hesitation told me everything I needed to know.

  “I’ll delegate for you,” I said. “Wait here.”

  I tracked down Agent Bryce, a witch who I worked with frequently in Los Angeles. She was good people. Deeply competent. She had already been assigned to Suzy’s detail, so she was halfway ready. I told her she was in charge, and she took charge.

  Suzy hadn’t even unzipped her damn flak jacket when I returned. “I have to go,” she protested, even though she hadn’t budged an inch.

  I seized her shoulders. “Zettel knows. He’s called Lucrezia de Angelis, and she’s coming. She’ll be here tonight.” I hadn’t spoken quietly enough to keep the people around us from hearing what I said, but it didn’t really matter. There was nothing we could do to evade surveillance. Who cared what a few random agents thought?

  Suzy’s eyes went round with fright.

  She finally took off the armor.

  Suzy hurried after me as I rushed out of the armory. “I’ll skip out on the operation this afternoon. Agent Bryce can handle things as well as I would. But tonight…”

  “I know,” I said.

  Suzy wouldn’t miss out on the case she was working with Aniruddha.

  Not willingly, anyway.

  I pulled her to my room in the barracks. She looked shocked to see my place, as shocked as I had been to see how small Krista’s room was. Or maybe she was shocked by all the blood that Fritz had kicked out of me.

  Once I saw the blood, and once I had Suzy somewhere fractionally safer than the armory, the pain caught up with me.

  Fuck. Fritz had made sure I’d spend every waking moment remembering our conversation.

  I might have gotten off easier if I’d dived face-first into a wood chipper.

  “There’s no way Zettel can know what we’re doing. We’ve been so careful talking about the operation,” Suzy said.

  I shook my head. “Not as careful as you think.”

  She looked wounded. “But…”

  “Don’t talk,” I said. We couldn’t risk it, even in my room. Especially in my room.

  Suzy finally nodded, accepting the bad news that I delivered with great reluctance. “Okay. I get it.” Relief flooded my veins. I’d been expecting a fight. “But I still have to go.”

  And the relief was gone.

  “If you fight against the OPA, you’re going to lose,” I said.

  “It’s not about winning! It’s about dismantling them!”

  “Do you think you’ll get that if you lose?”

  “Fuck, Hawke. What else am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to keep working for these people, pretend I don’t know anything?”

  “You don’t know anything,” I said. “Until you walk through the doors of that data center, all you’ve got are suspicions. And after you walk through those doors, you’ll give Gary Zettel the evidence he needs to have you arrested by Lucrezia de Angelis.” Or worse.

  “I’ve got a hell of a lot more than suspicions,” she said. “I’ve been in the detention center. I’ve seen what the Union does to people they don’t like. And my arrest was above the board. What do you think they do when nobody’s looking?”

  I would have bet that Allyson Whatley knew. Allyson, her ribbons, and her infected brutes in the basement of the data center.

  Allyson, who I couldn’t turn over to Lucrezia de Angelis without Gary Zettel ruining my life.

  None of that mattered now. Zettel had made his move. My life was on its way to ruined, and the only thing I could do now was keep Suzy from fucking up her life, too.

  “Cancel the operation,” I said.

  She paced the length of my room, massaging her temples. “You keep repeating yourself like it’s going to change my mind, but it’s not… You can’t…” She wavered on her feet, like she was about to pass out.

  Jesus. She’d been heading into Reno in this condition. “When’s the last time you slept?”

  “Not since the chopper crashed. I don’t know that being passed out counts, either.” It was weird seeing the fear in her eyes when she was usually so good at concealing it under a mask of bravery. “The nightmares downtown—they made me remember. We’re here again, Cèsar.”

  I understood completely.

  Last time we’d been in Reno, our investigation had led into abandoned mines. Turned out that there were giant spiders waiting for us. I hadn’t liked it, but it hadn’t stuck with me—not the way it had for Suzy. She’d gotten a hell of a lot more mauled than I had.

  When I thought back on those mines, I thought about the first time I’d met Malcolm and Bellamy. Cool guys. They’d saved us, and we were fine.

  Suzy remembered being pinned under spiders the size of cows, dripping venom onto her face.

  She didn’t have a kopis shielding her mind from demon powers. There was nothing to save her from the nightmares, both natural and infernal.

  I sat her down on the edge of my cot. “Settle in, Suze. This is going to take a few minutes.”

  The kitchenette in my barracks wasn’t much, but it had one of those tiny, shitty coffee pots that they put in motel rooms. It would work as a makeshift cauldron. While water heated, I threw wards up around the room.

  “You’ve gotten better,” she said. “The wards. That’s impressive.”

  “I learned from the best.” Suzy really was the best. The airtight wards I’d learned to cast, she could generate in her sleep.

  I had skills of my own, though. Not special skills, mind you, but I brewed potions like a boss. My skill was more helpful than Suzy’s for once. I mixed ingredients together. Shook stuff out of jars without measuring, rolled herbs over my fingers before sprinkling them in, mixed it clockwise.

  Blue magic sparked over the surf
ace of the mug. I took it off of the heating element.

  “Drink,” I said.

  She sniffed it and shoved the mug back. “This is one of your sleeping potions. I have to do the operation tonight.”

  “I mixed it light—you’ll only nap,” I said.

  Suzy sniffed it again. The tightness around her eyes relaxed. “It’d be nice to sleep without dreams.” She sipped the potion. “Still tastes like ball sweat.”

  “Only from the best balls,” I said.

  Suzy pulled out her ponytail, kicked her shoes off, and stretched out on my cot. She almost fit into it like a proper bed, whereas my limbs hung off every which way, like a greyhound trying to sleep on a cat pillow. “Thanks for helping, Hawke. You’re good at that. You’re nice without making me feel useless.”

  “You’re a lot of awful things, Suze, but useless isn’t one of them.” I settled on the floor beside the cot, arms propped on my knees.

  Her eyes were already drooping. “You’re useless. Stupid Agent Cèsar Hawke.” The mug she still clutched in one hand tipped over, dripping the remnants of the sleeping potion onto the cot.

  “Love you too, Agent Takeuchi.”

  She didn’t reply. She was out.

  I plucked the mug out of her hand, dropped it in the sink, rinsed it out thoroughly. Had to be careful with a sleeping potion brewed that strong. Just a taste of it could knock a man my size out for twelve hours.

  Someone like Suzy wasn’t going to be awake for at least a day.

  I strengthened the wards. Tied them tighter, bound them to Suzy’s sleeping form. Nobody would be able to get in until she broke them.

  Then I grabbed my gun, my jacket, a scarf.

  And I headed out to find Aniruddha.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ANIRUDDHA WAS WAITING BESIDE an SUV with Agent Bryce when I found him. He was watching the doors, checking his watch, shifting on his feet. He was waiting for Suzy. Wondering what had happened to her.

  He didn’t look happy when I was the one who showed up.

  “I’m pulling you off this,” I said. “Agent Bryce, head to Vista on your own.”

  I spoke with enough authority that she didn’t question me. She just nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  I grabbed Aniruddha by the shoulder. “Not you. Stay here.”

  He searched my face, as if he wanted to ask what I was doing, but was afraid to speak. That must have meant that Agent Bryce wasn’t part of his mutiny. Good—one less person to worry about getting dragged down with Aniruddha.

  She loaded up with the rest of the team and headed out the doors.

  “We need to go to UNR now,” I muttered to him, barely moving my lips.

  He jerked as though struck. “Now?”

  “We’ve been found out. Someone’s coming to stop us tonight. It can’t wait.”

  Aniruddha’s eyes flicked around the garage. He seemed to think someone would be listening in. It wasn’t an unreasonable fear, all things considered. “Agent Hawke—”

  “Shut up and let’s get going,” I said. “If we don’t go now, we’ll never get to go.”

  “What about Suzume?”

  “She’s not coming,” I said, and I tried to interject all of the “don’t you dare fucking question me” tone into those three words that I could.

  Aniruddha must not have been in a combative mood because he didn’t fight me on it. “Okay. But they’re still expecting me to go to the Vista neighborhood. We’ll have to divert on the way.”

  He led me to another SUV, where another agent was waiting for us. I’d done missions with him before—some guy I vaguely recalled as being called Agent Mitchell, though I couldn’t summon his first name to memory.

  “Agent Banerji?” asked Agent Mitchell.

  “He’s with us,” Aniruddha said curtly.

  So Mitchell was with the mutiny. Fine by me. I didn’t know the guy well. If he wanted to put a target on his back, that was his problem.

  Aniruddha pulled to the gates and flashed his badge. We were given access without questioning.

  It was far from nightfall, but it was dark outside of the fence protecting the Union warehouse. The sun had been blotted out with a mixture of nightmare-black and storm clouds. Looked like snow was coming.

  “What’s happening?” Agent Mitchell asked. “Where am I going?”

  “Wait,” Aniruddha said.

  He reached under the dash, eyes unfocused as he concentrated. He tugged hard on something.

  The dashboard went black. Everything was disabled.

  Union vehicles were usually lit up with all kinds of surveillance equipment, GPS devices, and computers that connected us to HQ. It had been a long time since I’d had to do a patrol with the Union—everyone who enlisted with the OPA had to do patrol with the Union—but I remembered it as clearly as the morning that I’d climbed aboard the chopper with Fritz.

  Aniruddha pulled out a warding ring like the one Suzy had used and set it behind the steering wheel.

  “We’re moving up the operation,” he said.

  Agent Mitchell sucked in a breath. “SCS might be staffed at this time of day.”

  “It’s now or never, apparently.” Aniruddha caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. “You’ve got five seconds to change your mind about joining us so I can dump your ass by the freeway.”

  I’d have been lying to say it wasn’t tempting, but Suzy wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sit back while the Union committed acts of evil. I had to see what Allyson Whatley was doing at the data center. I had to know what my organization was doing.

  Especially since it might have been my last chance to find out.

  “I’m in this,” I said.

  “All right. You know what Suzume was supposed to do on this operation, right?”

  “Chew your nuts up and spit them out?” It seemed like something that Suzy would have done, especially to a guy who called her Suzume all the fucking time.

  “Kill,” he said. “When she’s not casting magic, Suzume’s a dead shot.”

  He wasn’t going to get that out of me. She’d been going to the range with me, but I was still about ten years behind her skill level. “Killing what?”

  “Anything that attacks us,” Aniruddha said.

  “Or anyone,” Agent Mitchell added.

  “I said I’m in this, and I mean it. I’m in this. Whatever I have to do,” I said. I managed to make myself sound confident.

  “Great.” Aniruddha tossed me a strange camera. “That will film under any light conditions, including total darkness. Affix it to the top of your gun. Don’t turn it off.”

  I wouldn’t have known how to turn it off if I’d wanted to. “Why?”

  “We need evidence to present to the OPA board,” Aniruddha said. “We need to be able to prove that the Union’s fucking things up.”

  “I thought the OPA was complicit.”

  “The OPA is a big organization. Some people are complicit, some aren’t. If we can get the right people on our side, we can start a civil war.”

  That was possibly the worst idea I’d ever heard, and I was heading into nightmare-infested post-apocalyptic Reno after drugging Suzy. “What do you expect to film?”

  Agent Mitchell loaded his gun with ammunition. His fingers were swift and sure on the metal, the brush of dry calluses against steel. “God only knows what we might find. Anything. Everything.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for responses that irritatingly vague. “Like pink elephants on parade?”

  “Anything,” Aniruddha said.

  We followed Agent Bryce a couple streets, and then fell back. She took a corner about half a mile ahead. Aniruddha turned off and headed in a new direction. Without the equipment on the dash, there was no way for her to contact us.

  The base in Fernley and the University of Nevada weren’t far apart without traffic slowing us down. It took an hour to get from Carson to Anaheim around rush hour, and they didn’t have any empty desert between the two of them. By the time we spl
it off from Agent Bryce, we weren’t twenty minutes from the UNR exit.

  Aniruddha shared his intelligence while we drove. “There isn’t enough space at System Computing Services to hold the majority of people who have gone missing. We believe they’re only temporarily holding people on campus before shipping them off…somewhere. I expect we’ll find dozens of people on the premises—maybe hundreds, depending on the conditions in which they’re being kept.”

  “System Computing Services?” I asked. That must have been the white building I’d seen Allyson dragging demons into. “How could you fit hundreds of people in there?”

  “We’ve witnessed broken kennels being tossed into waste disposal. I suspect they have the missing people in similar kennels.”

  Agent Mitchell showed me a picture on his phone. I recognized the waste pile in the back corner of the Fernley base. It was hard to get a sense of scale from the photo, but the broken kennels didn’t look big enough to fit a full-size human being.

  “Why the fuck would the Union keep people in kennels? Where are they shipping them?” I asked.

  “Load the gun, Agent Hawke,” Mitchell said, shoving a box of ammunition at me, like I’d have any clue what to do with that shit.

  “Don’t change the subject,” I said.

  Aniruddha skirted Ann’s neighborhood, pulled us around McCarran, and slowed as he entered the university’s parking lot. He parked the SUV near the fence where Allyson Whatley had taken those infected brutes.

  The data center didn’t look like it was occupied by the Union. There were no checkpoints, no guards, not even any cameras that I could see. The only thing that differentiated the white building from downtown Reno was the fact that it hadn’t collapsed.

  He rolled down his window, and the cold air bit at my face. He swiped a badge. The card reader beeped a sour note and the light flashed red.

  “Damn,” Aniruddha said. He swiped it again. Another sour beep. “Damn.” He flung the card in the cup holder. “You’re right, Agent Hawke. They know we’re coming.”

  My sinuses itched. I scrunched up my face, trying not to sneeze. “What makes you say that?”