Hostile Takeover (Vale Investigation Book 1)

by Cristelle Comby

  I was trapped, with nowhere to hide and only one way out. And that way out was also someone else’s way in. Shit … if they caught me here, I’d be arrested yet again. This time, Morgan would make sure I wouldn’t see the light of day for a month or two. With my bad luck, Lady McDeath would consider this to be a breach of my contract and end me there and then.

  I did the only thing I could think of. I moved to the side of the door, flattened my back against the wall, closed my eyes, and flicked off the lights. The steps kept coming closer until they stopped at the door. I held my breath as I waited for whoever was on the other side to push it open.

  As soon as I heard the door opening, I snapped the lights on and re-opened my eyes. The woman who’d just entered let out a soft, pained moan as the harshness of the lights blinded her momentarily, and I seized the opportunity to push her out of the way and dash from the room. I was out of there in a matter of seconds, running like the Devil was after me. I never saw her face and caught only a glimpse of long blonde hair and a whiff of lily-scented perfume.

  I was out of the building less than a minute later, squeezing out the same way I’d come in. I’d been expecting the security alarm to be blaring out by that point, but the streets remained silent as I got back to my car.

  I pondered the situation as I waited in the Stingray for the adrenaline rush to subside. The memories had been hazy, disjointed and, for all I knew, inaccurate. I never got a good look at the beast as emotional resonance has a bad habit of exaggerating some details while ignoring others. Even if the time limit didn’t apply, there was no way I’d ever agree to go back inside Mallory’s head. I’d seen and experienced enough of the macabre for one night.

  One thing was certain—it wasn’t a wolf. It wasn’t even an animal. Through the haze, I’d seen the thing stand on two legs as it lunged for Mallory and clawed at his back.

  This creature, whatever it was, had killed twice already and if Lady McDeath was telling me the truth, it wasn’t going to stop. The attack on Mallory had happened during the day, while Nicholls had been gutted in the dead of night, so there was no connection there. Right now there was no way of knowing whom its next victim would be. But it seemed certain that it would kill again and that it would enjoy every second of the experience.

  As far as I knew I was the only one even looking for it. The rest of the city slept, oblivious to the threat, and there was no help coming. Thanks to that passive-aggressive game of phone tag I’d played with their answering service, it was clear that the Conclave wasn’t going to do anything. They were the authorities in charge of this sort of stuff, yet they’d elected not to send anyone. So if I couldn’t find this creature, more people would die.

  That’s when it hit me.

  “I’ll be damned,” I muttered as I marveled at why I hadn’t put it together sooner. If I couldn’t find this thing, more people would die. A nervous giggle escaped my lips. That bunch of jackasses … they had sent someone to deal with the situation … me. I punched the steering wheel with what strength I had left.

  “Well, shit!” I grumbled as I leaned back in the seat. “Guess we’re screwed.”

  Damn deities and their twisted mind games. Couldn’t they, just for once, be straightforward about something? Wait—didn’t that also mean Lady McDeath was part of the Conclave? Once again, she’d left out critical information that I might have wanted to know about. It was almost as if she wanted me to suffer.

  Well, if she didn’t want to play fair, neither would I. I had one option left for getting inside info. She wouldn’t like it, but it was either that or start roaming the streets saying, “Here wolfie, wolfie.”

  I turned the ignition on and drove down to the old docks, to the one place where I might get a foot in the door. Because, as they say on the streets, “If you want info, you best go to the Indigo.”

  Chapter six

  The Indigo

  The Indigo was a games arcade, one of the last, nestled in a warehouse by the docks. You wouldn’t know it judging by its bland exterior of off-white metallic walls and darkened windows, but it’s a real geek nirvana inside. The Indigo was one of those places that would never need to place ads on- or offline to draw in customers. It had a niche clientele, near all of them regulars. Word of mouth survives in the Internet age.

  I pushed the metallic door, which had the arcade’s name spray-painted on it, open. As soon as I was through, I felt like I’d entered another dimension. Throbbing bass-heavy music shook the walls. There were glowing neon lights everywhere. An S-shaped bar stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by dozens of tables heaped with various pieces of computer equipment. Tangles of wiring climbed up to the ceiling before coursing left and right.

  As always, I stood out like a sore thumb amongst the regular clientele with their multi-colored hair and/or half-shaved heads. I was at least ten years older than the oldest gamer present and not showing nearly enough tattoos, piercings, or even bare skin.

  A young girl with one half of her hair dyed blue and the other half pink gave me a look so full of subtext it made my pants feel a size too small. I gave her a polite nod and a smile and crossed the room without looking back. Sure, I’m a dog but I’ve got standards. I wasn’t interested in a fling with an underage wannabe hacker with daddy issues.

  I headed straight for the door at the back of the room and punched in a code on the digipad. The door clicked open and I took the stairs down to the real Indigo. The regular crowd called it “the Indigo Below.”

  The lower level of the structure was a study in contrasts with the upper floor. Here, everything was quiet, ordered, and clean. The people walking about the place were all employees, dressed in immaculate suits with a golden pin on their collar in the shape of a caduceus, entwined snakes on a stick surmounted by a pair of wings.

  A security guard stopped me at the foot of the stairs. He was one head taller than me and had arms the size of my legs. I reached inside my jacket pocket for a similar winged pin and put it on. He moved to the side without a word.

  “Hi, Bob, is Zian in?” I asked him.

  The bulky man kept his mouth shut but gave me an affirmative nod.

  “Well, thank you very much, my chatty friend,” I said, treating him to my most amiable smile. “Er, Tom, have you ever heard the joke about the Irish monk and the Swedish blonde?”

  The guard remained silent but I saw his jaw tense. I leaned in closer, gave him a pat on the arm and said, “I know, that one cracks me up every time.”

  His eyes screamed murder but he remained unmoving, his lips sealed. Yes, I know it was childish but I couldn’t resist it. It was like poking fun at the guards standing watch in front of Buckingham Palace.

  “You know, I’d love to chat some more with you, Steve, but I’ve got to go,” I told him. “Have a nice day.”

  I walked past him and I swear I heard him groan. I smiled. It was the most I’d ever heard him say.

  I walked down the corridor, proudly presenting my silver pin. It was the rarest kind of accreditation for this place, meaning I was an authorized visitor in the secured zone. I turned a corner and carried on past the largest server room I’d ever seen. The guys in Cupertino would have wet their pants if they could have seen it. The next corridor I took conveyed me past several cubicles with people working at their desks. Finally, I came to the entrance of the room I wanted and started looking for a familiar bleach-blond mop of hair.

  Zian was seated in the far left corner tonight. I made my way over to his desk. He brightened up when he saw me coming.

  “Bellamy, my friend,” he said in his rapid, faintly British accent. “What on earth brings you by at this hour?”

  He pushed his chair backward and sprang to his feet. He was a deal shorter than me, thin and with pale skin, but that was all right by him. In the information world, he was eight feet tall if you went by the standards of data collection.

&nbs
p; “Morning, Zian,” I said as we shook hands. He had quite the vigorous and energetic grip despite the fact that it was two in the morning. “I need a favor.”

  His bright blue eyes widened as he peered up at me. “A favor, you say? And what type of favor would that be?”

  “Information,” I replied.

  He laughed good-naturedly at that. “Information … well, as always, Bellamy, you’ve come to the right place.” He straightened his back, tugged at the bottom of his black T-shirt and passed a hand through his mess of bleached hair in a vain attempt to tame it. “After all, information is what I do best,” he proclaimed in his most serious tone.

  I smiled. Despite his best efforts and the fact that he was closer to thirty than twenty, Zian looked like a goofy teenager on a sugar rush. He was trying, though. Hells, he’d even put a gray vest on over his blue jeans and black T-shirt to try to make himself look more professional. But for all the effort he made to look like he meant business, the corners of his pale lips couldn’t help but turn up in the beginning of a lopsided smile that told you just how much fun he had at his job.

  “I know,” I said with a nod. “I wouldn’t settle for anything less than the best.”

  A full-blown grin bloomed on his face at that and I got to admit it was contagious.

  “So what can I do for you today?” he asked, clapping me on the shoulder.

  “I need your help with a case I’m working on. I’ve got two dead bodies and a mysterious creature roaming the streets.”

  Zian’s smile died a little at that and he peeked apprehensively around the room. Then he steered me into the nearest private office available and locked the door behind us. He looked alarmed.

  “I can’t help you with that kind of stuff, Bellamy. We both know that.”

  “Story of my damn life,” I muttered. “Look, Zian,” I told him, rubbing the bridge of my nose, “I have no one else to turn to here. I promise you won’t be breaking protocol this time.”

  He snorted at that.

  I raised my hands up, palms turned towards him in a placating gesture. “I promise. Public domain.”

  “I won’t do it, Bellamy,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest like a petulant kid. “The rules are very strict on this. People like us can’t get involved with people like you.” He pointed an accusing finger at me. “Sweet Aphrodite, you shouldn’t even know that this place exists in the first place! If the Conclave ever found out that I’d given you that pin you’re wearing, they’d kill me.”

  “It’ll never happen,” I assured him. “We both know that in order to kill you they’d have to stop sitting on their hands. See that happening anytime soon?”

  Zian smirked. “True enough.” Then he frowned. “But my father is a bit proactive and it’s never pleasant when he’s angry. I’m sorry, Bell. I can’t help you.”

  I shrugged, placed my hands in my pockets and laid down the last card in my hand. “Others can’t, but you can. I mean, you’re the king of information, right?”

  “I’m not the king of information,” Zian corrected me as he leaned over the desk to turn on the computer sitting there. “We both know who that is and I’m telling you, for our mutual good, that he wouldn’t be pleased to know what you’re up to.”

  Then he moved to sit down at the desk as the computer booted up. His fingers start tapping keys at NASCAR speed.

  “Thank you, Zian,” I said with a smile, knowing I’d won. “You’re the best.”

  “What are you thanking me for?” he asked as he stopped typing just long enough to glare at me. “I haven’t agreed to help you yet.”

  “But you’re typing.”

  “Yes, I’m typing,” he retorted. “Of course I’m typing. I’m always typing. I’m the prince of information, aren’t I?”

  That he was, both figuratively and literally. In this place, Zian was the only one without a pin on his collar. He didn’t need it. He was at home here on his father’s property. I watched his fingers fly over the keyboard as I moved to stand behind his shoulder.

  I knew there was no Web-connected system Zian couldn’t break into. Given enough time, he could find out anything. It was in his nature, in his blood. Information was the preferred currency of his family. They’d used it to elevate themselves in society. The Indigo was just one of many similar outposts on the planet and it was the tip of the iceberg of what Zian’s father owned. He had shares in all the big Internet companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, PayPal, and so on. He also had stock in the companies that built the computers and smartphones we humans were so keen to use, along with the optic lines that flew the data beneath our feet and along the bottom of the ocean. I’d even heard whispers that he’d become an angel investor for Elon Musk in recent years.

  In other words, all the information that existed on this planet, all those zeros and ones, passed through the hands of Hermes, Zian’s father, on a daily basis. In ancient times, he’d been known as the messenger of the gods, a position he still held all these centuries later. As a matter of fact, he was the only god left on this side of the border. Story had it that he struck a bargain with the creator of the Conclave himself, the Roman Emperor Aurelian, back in 273ad, to stay on Earth while the others got cast away. Why would a god like him want to leave a world on the verge of so much? Some of the more outrageous whispers had him behind every major step humankind had taken since and that he was the guy who really invented the Internet.

  “Okay,” Zian said as his typing slowed. “Two strange murders in Cold City within the same twenty-four-hour timeframe … bet you that pin I gave you that’s what you’re interested in.”

  “I need to find out what did this,” I said, leaning closer.

  Ten seconds later, Zian pulled up a window for the official police reports and several pictures of the victims that could only have come from the ME office. By all the hells, this guy was good.

  “Well, it says right here that a wolf on the loose did this,” he said, pointing at the window of one of the police reports while his other hand kept typing.

  “I got a good look at the thing that did this,” I fired back. “Trust me, Zian, whatever it was is from across the border.”

  Zian’s fingers froze over the keyboard in mid-stroke. That was never a good sign.

  “Rules, Bellamy,” he said again in a chiding voice. “I’m not allowed to give you any information regarding matters not of this world.”

  “And like I said, I just want you to stick to the public domain,” I countered. “I want copies of every official report you can find. Try to get footage from surveillance cameras too, if there is any. And find anything that connects the victims that you can. I can work out the rest from there.”

  Zian smiled and both hands started typing again. “That I can do.”

  A small printer to the side of the desk started getting to work with a loud whirr. In less than thirty minutes I had a binder’s worth of documents to sort through. Zian found a plastic bag in one of the desk drawers for me to fill up with what he’d printed.

  “Ah-ha!” Zian said as something on the screen got his attention. “Now isn’t that interesting?”

  I turned back to face him. “What is?”

  His fingers were fan-dancing on the keyboard at such a furious pace I was afraid the keyboard would break. His eyes were darting left and right as he drank in the information that was zipping across his screen. I moved closer to him, trying to make out what he’d found.

  Suddenly the screen froze. A panicked squeal escaped Zian’s lips. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no …”

  He pressed a series of keys but all that did was make the screen go blue. Now, I was no tech geek, but even I knew that wasn’t good.

  All of the lights in the small office shut off and I heard Zian gulp.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, sotto voce, dreading the answer. It came quick enough.
>
  The wall on our left, which had been white until then, turned blue, making me realize that what I’d mistaken for large stone tiles was, in fact, a bank of flat screens displaying a picture of just that. The blue turned to black and the face of a man appeared on each of the screens. At that, Zian whimpered.

  The man facing us pressed a button off-camera and the screens changed again. They coordinated to compose one single image to scale of a man in a Savile Row suit that fitted him so perfectly it had to be custom-made. He sat at an expensive mahogany desk placed in front of large bay windows. It was mid-morning where he was and the sun was shining.

  “And what have we here?” he inquired in a posh British accent that complemented his dress and surroundings.

  When neither of us answered, one of his eyebrows lifted up. Though small, almost insignificant, the motion carried with it palpable weight. It prompted Zian to speak up, making him utter a weak, almost inaudible, “Just helping a friend, Father.”

  I felt all the air get sucked out of my lungs … Father? That meant … uh oh.

  Hermes, son of Zeus and Mother Night, god of trade, thieves, and travelers, didn’t look too pleased with his son’s answer. He stood up from his desk and moved closer to the camera. The screens on the wall followed his movements and adapted the ratio, giving us an up-to-scale view of Zian’s father. He was as tall as I was, maybe early fifties, with short ginger hair and the same blue eyes as his son.

  “Bellamy Vale, I presume,” he said, though his tone told me he didn’t “presume” anything—he knew. “We meet at last,” he added. I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing from where he stood.

  I wasn’t sure how one was supposed to address a god thought to have been dead for centuries, but the guy sounded British, so I inclined my head a little and said, “Sir.”

  Hermes turned his attention to his son and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zian hunch his shoulders as though trying to make himself smaller.