Once Darkness Falls (Preternatural Affairs #7)

by SM Reine

  “They disabled the card I pickpocketed from Allyson Whatley. It’s standard Union credentials. High security, but standard.”

  “If it’s not working, then we might be wrong. Maybe Allyson’s not behind this after all,” I said. But even when I said it, I knew that wasn’t true. Allyson knew we were coming.

  “We should turn back,” Mitchell said. “This is a trap.”

  I sneezed into my sleeve. “We're not turning back.”

  “Agreed,” Aniruddha said. He pulled the SUV away from the back parking lot, leading us to the front door of the data center instead.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  Aniruddha parked and got out of the driver’s seat without responding.

  I knew what that meant. He didn’t have a plan.

  For a second I sat in the back seat, wondering what would happen if I changed my mind and never got out of the vehicle.

  It wasn’t an option.

  Just like the alternative—letting Suzy get herself into trouble—would never have been an option.

  I’d made my bed. Even if Suzy had built that bed and walked me toward it with a gun pressed to my skull, I’d still made it. There was no choice but to lie down.

  I jumped out. Slung the strap over my shoulder, held the gun in front of my belly so that it would be able to record through the barrel-mounted camera.

  Cold wind slapped me in the back. I squinted into the chill, but there was nothing to see—nothing beyond the Parking Services building across the street. Just a wall of black.

  It wasn’t just nightmare fog. It was that darkness I’d seen the ichor-infected brutes drag themselves out of when I’d gone after Suzy.

  They were coming.

  Aniruddha stood by the door of System Computing Services, which the window sign abbreviated as SCS. Three little letters, so innocuous, so harmless. He held a handgun beside his shoulder. His finger rested alongside the trigger without touching it. “If they’re shipping abductees out of here, it’s going to be in the gated area out back. That’s our target. We have to get to the rear lot. Ready?”

  I was glad that Agent Mitchell nodded in agreement because I couldn’t bring myself to do the same.

  Aniruddha swiped his card at the front door, and it unlocked with a click.

  Agent Mitchell kicked it open.

  I aimed the gun, and its camera, through the doorway.

  The SCS lobby was empty, with doors ahead and to the right. No sign of demons in either direction. There weren’t any lights, either. Just the flashlight that Agent Mitchell had duct-taped to the top of his gun.

  He led forward.

  There was another door locked by a keycard in that direction. Aniruddha swiped and we were in.

  We were in a long hallway. He brought us around the corner. Past a break room, a dozen unmarked office doors. He badged through another door, and another. I was faced with a room that was filled with boxes of paper, some ink cartridges as big around as my bicep, a few extra floor tiles. A supply room.

  There was a brute against the wall, drizzling black fluid onto the linoleum like an arterial wound had been sliced open.

  Our eyes met, mine and the demon’s.

  It was a dumb thing. Little more than an animal.

  “Take it down!” Agent Mitchell shrilled.

  My finger tensed. Bullets ripped out of my gun.

  I’d trained with handguns, not fully automatic firearms. I was shocked by how little tension it took for bullets to rip out of the AK-47. The gun didn’t fight me. It wanted to kill.

  A sweep of the muzzle from wall to wall, and I carved that demon in half. Its severed segments splattered to the floor.

  Everything would have been recorded by the camera. If I wanted, I’d be able to review it later. Every splattering, horrible moment of slaughtering the demon.

  Somehow I doubted I’d be revisiting that footage.

  I didn’t have time to recover from the shock of slaughtering the demon. The two other agents pushed past me, badged through another door, plunged onto a computer room floor.

  The room shivered with the roars of demons. I almost turned back the way I’d come from—until I realized that all that roaring was punctuated by the rattling of chains.

  “Oh my God,” Agent Mitchell said.

  There were more infected brutes in the room. Maybe a dozen of them, though it was hard to count the shifting bodies against the wall. They’d been tethered into place.

  That was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the room.

  No. That would have been the medical cart positioned out of claw reach from the demons.

  That cart held needles and beakers filled with sludgy black fluid—the ichor that had infected the demons, I assumed.

  The question was whether the ichor had been drawn out of the demons, or if the Union was the one administering it.

  Bellamy had been shocked to learn that I’d encountered infected demons downtown. They shouldn’t have been there—not since the Mother of All Demons had been killed.

  I had a feeling that the Union had been administering it.

  “Damn,” Aniruddha said. He’d come to the same conclusion that I had. “You getting this, Hawke?”

  I was supposed to be filming it. Right.

  I did what I could, but I was so addled with adrenaline that I had no clue if I got much.

  The brutes weren’t happy to see us. They snarled anew when we moved past them. Their fists swiped so close to us that I could feel the wind blow past me.

  Aniruddha referred to a drawing he’d scrawled on a scrap of paper. “This way. Through the next door.”

  We went to the next room.

  Blood was smeared across the white tile through the doorway. Through the circle of Agent Mitchell’s flashlight, I couldn’t tell if the blood was black or red, demon or human.

  But I could see the woman crouched behind the nearby bank of terminals.

  She wore the austere uniform of a Union employee with reflective white lettering on her back. She also held a gun a lot like mine, though she dropped it when we approached. Must not have had any ammunition. I wondered how long she’d been crouching there, alone in the darkness.

  Aniruddha dropped to his knees by her side. “Agent Carthay!” He let his gun dangle from his shoulder strap as he inspected her for wounds. “She was scouting the scene for us,” he explained to me. Then he addressed Agent Carthay again. “What happened?”

  “You need to leave,” Agent Carthay hissed, clutching his elbows. “He’s here.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  Agent Carthay just shook her head over and over again, wordless. Horror filled her eyes.

  “Where are they?” Aniruddha asked. He’d always been a weenie, but I’d never heard him use a tone so gentle before. He didn’t baby anyone like that, not even Suzy.

  Agent Carthay lifted a trembling finger. “There.”

  That seemed to be all that Agent Mitchell needed to hear. He erupted from around the bank of computers, plunging into the darkness beyond.

  “Mark!” Aniruddha hissed.

  His only response was Agent Mitchell’s screaming. A wet, strangled screaming, like his throat was being torn out.

  Agent Carthay tensed. Aniruddha held her down with a hand on her shoulder and glanced over the edge of the desk.

  “Wait,” he whispered to us. “Wait.”

  As if he needed to tell me that.

  I squinted into the darkness, trying to see if Agent Mitchell was still moving out among the servers on the computer room floor. Of course, if there had been motion, there was no guarantee it would have been coming from a human.

  Agent Mitchell’s screaming ended. Aniruddha made no motion to save him. He just fucking sat there. One hand on his gun, one hand on Agent Carthay.

  After the screams stopped, I only heard dripping.

  Plip. Plip. Plip.

  It echoed through the data center.

  Footsteps whispered through the room
.

  Then nothing.

  “I think he’s gone now,” Agent Carthay said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Him,” she said.

  Aniruddha slipped around the bank of computers. I expected him to scream the way that Agent Mitchell had, and I readied myself to run. Hey, if the whole mutiny died, then Suzy wouldn’t have anyone to ally with anymore.

  He didn’t start screaming, though. Rubber squeaked against linoleum. A door swung open.

  “This way,” he called through the darkness.

  “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath.

  When I leaped around the desk, all tense and afraid, nothing attacked. Agent Mitchell had cleared our path.

  I raced after the sound of Aniruddha’s footfalls. The dim red glow of my camera illuminated a door swinging slowly shut where he’d just passed through.

  Slamming it open with my shoulder, I followed.

  I was in a room filled with cubicles. The sign on the wall identified it as Network Services. Judging by the notes scrawled on the whiteboard in dried-out marker, it was the department where they had once handled video conferencing.

  Now it was filled with kennels. Just like Aniruddha had said.

  We’d found the missing people.

  Some of them, at least. A quick estimate told me that there were three dozen cages in the room, stacked two high against the walls.

  Three dozen wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing.

  I peered into the nearest cage. The man inside was unconscious. Judging by the needle marks pocking his arm, he’d been sedated. Many times. Of course, the Union couldn’t make it easy for us to liberate the people that they’d captured.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t thought I’d really come across what Suzy and Aniruddha had said. Sure, the OPA was evil, but not like…evil, evil. Evil to its employees, but only in pursuit of the greater good.

  Kennels filled with missing people wasn’t in the interest of anyone’s good.

  “God is great,” Aniruddha whispered. It sounded mostly like he was trying to convince himself of that fact, not that he believed it. He fumbled at the nearest lock.

  I crouched beside him to unlock another cage, gun and camera braced under my arm to record. It wasn’t going to be the most dignified shot, but it’d be what people needed to see. Slavery.

  At the sight of my face, the guy on the other side—a naked man splattered in blood—started screaming. I hadn’t shaved in a while, but I didn’t deserve that.

  He wasn’t looking at me, though.

  “Oh hell,” Aniruddha said with heat, gripping my shoulder.

  I spun.

  Someone new stood in the doorway that we had come through, Agent Carthay sobbing at his feet.

  It was a tall, lean man with pallid skin. He wore a black suit cut in slim lines with a high neck and a silver pin on the breast. He surveyed us with a look I could only describe as empty. No feeling. No thoughts. No mercy.

  He wasn’t with the Union.

  “Identify yourselves,” he said.

  Aniruddha stammered.

  Smooth, asshole. Real smooth.

  I stepped up, even though getting even an inch closer to the guy in the black suit made my skin writhe like I was skinny dipping in a vat of worms. “We’re with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. Magical Violations Department. This is a routine inspection of the facility.”

  The stranger didn’t move at first. I almost thought that he’d believed me.

  But then he began to swell.

  It was the only word I could use to describe it. His bones grew, and whatever else was inside of that bag of flesh he wore expanded, too. The skin didn’t. It shredded as he went from six feet tall to seven, and then eight, surrounded by a nimbus of shadow.

  Whatever would follow the enlargement of our nameless friend, I didn’t want to see it.

  “Run!” I shouted, shoving Aniruddha.

  He dived behind the aisle of kennels. “Routine inspection? Nice excuse, Hawke!”

  “I didn’t hear anything better from you!”

  “You didn’t give me time!”

  Something smashed into the other side of the kennels. They tipped over, smashing into my shoulders with the force of—well, dog kennels with hundred and fifty-pound human beings inside of them.

  People screamed. Shouted.

  I scrambled away on all fours. The strap of the AK-47 slid off of me, allowing the gun and camera to skitter across the floor.

  “Get out!” Aniruddha roared.

  There was another door a few feet away. I thought it led toward the parking lot in the back, but it was hard to tell—I’d lost my bearings.

  More kennels shattered behind me. One of them hit my leg.

  I’d never crawled so fast in my life.

  My hands scrabbled at the door handle. It was locked. I needed a badge like Aniruddha’s to open it.

  Aniruddha screamed wordlessly.

  He was clutched in the grip of the slender man. That demon—because that was all he could be, a demon—had his long fingers curled around Aniruddha’s throat, lifting his entire body weight with pressure under his chin. It was a dangerous way to hold a guy. Tight enough that it might pop his head off.

  My gun was halfway between the demon and myself.

  There was a part of me—not a small part—that wanted to leave Aniruddha to the demon. It was his fault we were even there.

  But he was still Suzy’s boyfriend. And, like it or not, he was my coworker.

  Fucking Aniruddha Banerji from the accounting department.

  I lunged for the gun.

  Agent Carthay reached it first. She rolled onto her back, aimed straight up at the demon holding on to Aniruddha.

  She opened fire.

  Her aim was good. Better than mine.

  But aim didn’t matter.

  Bullets vanished into the demon’s face.

  He turned a chilling black gaze upon her, and I knew she was dead. I knew it seconds before the demon lifted his heel and brought it smashing down on her skull, cracking it like an egg on the edge of a mixing bowl.

  If I’d gotten to the gun first, that would have been me.

  I threw myself into a roll, evading the second blow of the demon’s massive foot. He swelled up huge, bigger than ever should have been able to fit inside the Network Services room, surrounded by all of the fallen kennels and the spilled brains of Agent Carthay.

  It hurt my brain trying to look at him. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how he fit among everything else when it seemed like he was three stories tall in a room with ten-foot ceilings.

  “Hawke,” Aniruddha spluttered. I couldn’t tell if that was meant to be a Please help me, Hawke or a Run for it, Hawke.

  Either way, I couldn’t do jack shit against the demon.

  I snatched Aniruddha’s badge off of the floor, bolted for the door, and swiped the badge over the lock. It blinked and unlocked.

  I ran into the hall. The walls shattered behind me with a chorus of screams.

  That giant demon had walked straight through the doorway, shattering it with his too-big shoulders and crushing a few kennels under feet.

  Feet that were only a few inches behind me.

  I raced down the hall, refusing to look behind me. Refusing to see what was making those shattering, explosive noises.

  Refusing to see what had happened to Aniruddha.

  System Computing Services wasn’t big, and I reached the back of the building. Skidded around a right-hand turn. Leaped through a row of desks that must have once belonged to administrative assistants, punched through a window, burst through the door into the cold night.

  It was more than cold outside. It was black. Beyond black. I couldn’t see further than the fence, but I didn’t need to: I could make out the generator, the backup batteries, a couple of old pickups with government plates.

  There was also a pair of semi trucks that hadn’t been there when I’d arrived. At least, I hadn’t been
able to see them when I arrived. My sinuses itched with the urge to sneeze. There was illusion magic on the fence. I hadn’t been able to see them from the outside because the spells had been too strong.

  Now I could see everything.

  The shipping containers behind the semis stood open, so I could see that there were more kennels inside. The semis were protected by infected brutes collared by embroidered ribbons.

  Allyson’s ribbons.

  My worst fears were confirmed. Allyson was using that ribbon magic to control the demons, which meant that she was the one loading up those captives to ship them…somewhere. The Union really was behind the disappearances. Everything I owned, everything I’d paid for with my own money, had come from paychecks signed in blood.

  The brutes didn’t attack me. They stood still as statues, dripping ichor. Waiting for something.

  The demon that was chasing me?

  I couldn’t resist the urge to look behind me anymore.

  But when I turned, there was nothing to see. No building. No broken windows. No desks, no towering demon, no Aniruddha.

  Just black.

  “Fuck,” I said, and my breath came out in stark white fog.

  A floodlight slammed to life, puddling me in a brilliant circle. I lifted a hand to shield my eyes and squinted up at the sky.

  I couldn’t see what was making that light, but I recognized the sound of a helicopter.

  The Office of Preternatural Affairs.

  “They’re in there!” I shouted at that light, pointing at the place SCS should have been.

  Ropes spiraled into the light, spilling from the underbelly of the helicopter. Agents wearing black encircled me, guns lifted.

  Aimed at me. Not at the brutes.

  “Get down on the ground!” they shouted.

  They were talking to me.

  “They have Agent Banerji,” I said as I got face down on the pavement.

  They didn’t seem to care. My arms were forced behind my back and cold metal was clasped around my wrists.

  I had been arrested.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IF YOU’VE BEEN ARRESTED once, you’ve been arrested a dozen times. At that point, I wasn’t even upset to be taken into custody by my own people. Better than getting my skull smashed open by some reality-defying demon.