by Ramsey Isler
“I can’t see anything,” Dominique said.
“Just feel it out. There’s not much to d—”
SCREEEEEEE
My words were cut off by the terrible screeching of metal shearing as the nachtjäger shredded its way through the security gate. We didn’t have much time.
“Work fast, Dominique.”
We worked feverishly. I could hear Dominique breathing hard. My heart was pounding so fast I could practically feel it in my ears, and I was sweating despite the frigid temperatures. I had to guide Dominique’s hands to finish the last of the connections, but in twenty long, agonizing seconds we had the setup complete.
I damn near pissed myself when the storefront window exploded as the shadowy creature burst through. I could feel the floor shake when it landed.
“Stand behind the lights,” I told Dominique. “It’ll come after you.”
“You’re just going to shine some lights on it?” she said. Her calm composure was starting to crack, but she still did as I told her.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s all we need.” The nachtjäger bounded forward. I could feel its hunger and excitement through the Rift as much as I could feel its thundering footsteps through the floor.
“I see a flaw in your plan,” Dominique said. “Don’t we need electricity for these things?”
The nachtjäger sprinted towards Dominique — right into the center of the four lights we had set up.
“They’re battery powered,” I said. Then I hit the “on” switch.
Brilliant white light streamed from the lamps and bathed the dark animal in radiance. For just a fraction of a second, I could actually see our stalker with my eyes. It was terrifying — muscular and massive. Its claws were like long, gleaming, obsidian scythes. Its face was a mask of scales and teeth. The image of the fearsome creature lasted only long enough to register in my brain before the bright lights annihilated it. The nachtjäger dissolved into nothing more than wisps of shadow, like cigarette smoke floating away on a lazy breeze. I heard a loud “POP”, like the sound of a huge vacuum-sealed jar of pickles opening, and I knew that the creature was gone forever.
Dominique exhaled a breath she’d probably been holding for a few seconds. “Is that it? Is it over?”
“For now,” I said.
“Thank you,” Dominique said.
“You’re welcome.”
Dominique leaned against the nearest wall and wiped sweat from her brow. “So . . . who are you exactly?”
“No one in particular,” I said. “My name is Kalani. You can call me Kal.”
“Okay, Kal. What do we do now?”
“We sit here,” I said, “wait in the light, and hope these batteries last until sunrise.”
CHAPTER 2
It turns out we didn’t have to wait until sunrise. Instead, Dominique called the cavalry.
She and I sat in the center of those bright, hot lights for an hour. It took that long for the boys in black to arrive. These were not the boys in blue — not your typical NYC beat cops. These guys rolled up in a massive black truck with huge floodlights on the top and a plow attachment that tossed the snow aside like it was just confetti. The men wore black gear and masks, and they carried sub-machine guns. The local police were just the junior varsity squad. These guys were the all-star team.
When they showed up, I figured my work was done and I’d disappear into the remaining bits of early morning darkness. I’d never missed my tiny apartment, but in that moment it was the only place I wanted to be. But Dominique had other plans. She grabbed me by the arm and said, “You should come with me. I have to reward you.”
“I didn’t do it looking to get rewarded,” I said.
“That’s exactly why you should be,” she answered. “Come on. It’s cold, and you must be tired. I’ll get you a room at the nicest hotel in the city.”
“Really. It’s not necessary.”
Dominique frowned. “A generous woman with some well-armed friends just gave you a nice gesture of gratitude for saving her life. It would be impolite to turn her down.”
“Fine,” I said.
The guys with guns swept Oscar’s place thoroughly before they retraced our path to retrieve Dominique’s car and the corpse of her unfortunate bodyguard. Then they made way for some new guys carrying an assortment of cases and gadgets; equipment I’d never seen before. Dominique led me into the back of their now empty truck and we sat down on the cold metal benches. One black-clad soldier stood guard outside.
“So,” I said, pointing my thumb at our guard, “are these friends of yours?”
“Employees,” Dominique said. She reached into a metal compartment next to her, retrieved a small laptop, and started typing.
“So they work for you?” I said. “Where do you work?”
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
I gave her a blank stare.
“NATO,” she said.
“Ohhh,” I said. “Yeah. This all makes sense then.”
Dominique gave me a wry smile. “You have no idea what NATO does, do you?”
“Sure I do. It’s like the United Nations . . . but with guns, and no Russia.”
She nodded. “Something like that. NATO doesn’t have much of an official presence here in New York, but my department works as a special . . . unofficial . . . liaison to the UN.”
“Unofficial, eh?” I said. “Don’t I need security clearance just to talk to you?”
“You would if we were talking about things that both of us didn’t already know about.”
“Yeah,” I said, wincing. “About tonight . . . obviously that’s some stuff I wouldn’t suggest talking about in public. People might think you’re crazy. Let’s just keep this between us.”
“The proverbial cat is already out of the bag, Kal. We already know about your kind.”
My eyebrows shot up and my mouth dropped open. “You do?”
“Yes. Although I believe I’m the first NATO staffer to actually meet one.”
“What do you know?” I asked.
“We know you have some very special abilities. That’s about it really.”
“Who told you this?”
“No one,” Dominique said. “We discovered people like you on our own. It might have been easy for you people to hide a hundred years ago, but we have many more information gathering techniques at our disposal now.”
“What exactly would those techniques be?” I asked.
Dominique shook one of her fingers at me. “That is one of those classified things you don’t have clearance to know.”
“Interesting,” I leaned back and crossed my arms. “I’m guessing your generosity isn’t just about gratitude.”
“I won’t deny that I don’t want to waste the opportunity to have someone with your abilities join my team,” Dominique said.
“Join your team? Whoa now, girlfriend. Back up the truck.”
“I’m just putting all the cards on the table,” she said. Her laptop beeped and she turned her attention back to it. “I see no point in trying to deceive you. You said you never finished your training. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that you didn’t leave on the best of terms.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m eager to roll into a government job.”
“This isn’t an ordinary government job, Mr. Kai,” Dominique said.
I paused. “How . . . I don’t recall telling you my last name.”
“You didn’t,” she said, pointing to her laptop. “But you did tell me your first name, and there aren’t many men under forty named Kalani in the state’s ID database — which I happen to have access to.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s just . . . great.”
“Back to the job offer,” Dominique said. “You’d be in a unique role, and the perks would be considerable. I strongly suggest you accept.”
“NATO doesn’t exactly have a flawless reputation,” I said. “I have plenty of reasons to leave right now.”
“Tha
t’s very true. So what wonderful things can I do to make you stay?”
“Are you trying to seduce me?” I asked.
“In a way, yes. But not with sex. I get the impression you wouldn’t be interested anyway.”
“You’re damn right about that,” I blurted out before thinking. Then my sense of decency made me wince. “Sorry. No offense.”
“None taken,” she said. “So what will it take for you to consider joining us?”
I’d learned long ago that it’s best to avoid being the first to talk about compensation in a job interview, and that was exactly the kind of situation I suddenly found myself in. “That depends,” I said. “What exactly are you offering?”
“A civilian consultant’s position,” Dominique said. “You would report to me, and only me. You’d have the same pay rate and privileges as a senior NATO official, but with none of the responsibilities of that position. In exchange, I want you to provide me with as much information as you can about . . . what do you call yourselves anyway?”
“Nightcrafters,” I said.
“Right. I’d want to know all about your nightcrafter training.”
“I told you I dropped out. Never completed the training.”
“But you’re still light years ahead of the rest of us,” Dominique said.
“I can’t teach anybody how to become a nightcrafter.”
“I don’t expect you to. I just want information, not instruction.”
“I . . . dunno about this,” I said. “Nightcrafting has remained secret for a very long time for some very good reasons.”
Dominique raised an eyebrow. “Reasons like what?”
“Protecting the general public from people who would misuse the power.”
“Kal, I think tonight’s events show very clearly that the activities of the nightcrafters have done nothing to improve the safety of the general public.”
“Point taken,” I said.
“I’ve read about incidents like this in a few extremely classified documents,” Dominique continued, “but I didn’t really believe any of it until now. Those things in the dark don’t belong here, and they wouldn’t be here unless something was dragging them out of their normal habitat. The people responsible for all this don’t seem to give a damn about the lives they put at risk. That’s a problem. Until this point, it’s been a problem we’ve had no solution for. But maybe you can change all that.”
“The nightcrafters don’t believe the problem is all that bad,” I said.
“I don’t care what they believe,” Dominique said, and her face muscles tightened as her emotions finally betrayed her controlled exterior. “Tonight, I lost a man who was more than an employee. He was my friend. Tomorrow I will have to inform his seventy-year-old mother that her only child is dead. And when she asks what happened, I will have to lie to her.”
“I get your point.”
“Do you?” she said sharply as she leaned forward to stare right in my face. “Do you really? Because the worst part of all this is that there’s no closure here. This wasn’t a one-time freak accident. It’s happened before. It will happen again.”
“I know.”
“So only one question remains,” Dominique said, leaning back into her seat. “What are you going to do about it?”
* * *
So I went to work for NATO.
Dominique set me up with a nice deal. In addition to what she offered that fateful night, she got me a new apartment near her office, and a new car with government plates. I was feeling pretty good about my new lot in life.
Then the tests started.
Dominique decided that the first order of business was to find out as much as possible about nightcrafting from a scientific standpoint. That meant a lot of poking, prodding, and scanning. This all would take place in a secret laboratory buried in the basement of a drab U.S. Government building in Manhattan that was not very far from Dominique’s office at the United Nations headquarters. She sent me there with an escort of two very large men with obvious gun-shaped bulges in their blazers. Once at the building, my two new buddies stayed in the lobby while I got into the elevator. The elevator doors closed as soon as I got in, and I automatically descended to a floor that didn’t have a corresponding button on the floor selection panel.
While on my way down, I did a mental check of the quick briefing Dominique had given me about the situation. The science guy who supervised the lab and its experiments was Newton. His parents were huge nerds too, which explained the odd name choice. He was named after Isaac Newton (the guy who gets all the credit for refining the theory of gravity). That was all I knew until the elevator doors opened, and he was standing right in front of me.
“So you’re the magician,” he said. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Kai.”
“Call me Kal,” I said, “and don’t call me a magician.”
“No problem,” Newton said, smiling. “Sorry about that. I’m just a little excited. We’ve had a lot of strange test subjects around here, but you definitely qualify as the strangest.”
“Uh . . . thanks? I guess?”
“You’re welcome,” Newton said.
We left the elevator and went into the lab. It was divided into about a dozen smaller chambers, each one full of all sorts of equipment and each walled off by tall transparent glass panels that went from floor to ceiling. Newton led me into the farthest of them and tapped a button on the tablet he was holding. The glass walls frosted and went nearly opaque.
Newton talked the whole time, but I didn’t catch much of what he said. He spoke at rapid-fire pace with a ton of technical jargon. He was your stereotypical geek in a lot of ways — he wore glasses, had the fashion sense of a color-blind farmer, and looked like he hardly ever combed his hair. But he was cute, and there was no doubt that he loved his job. He had an infectious enthusiasm that made me a little less uncomfortable with the idea of being a science experiment.
“I won’t keep you long,” he said after a long diatribe about quantum entanglement. “We just have a few tests to run. But before we get started . . . could you . . . you know.”
“No, I don’t know. What?”
He waved his hands about and said, “Do some of this magic I’ve heard of.”
I sighed. “Newton, I’m not David Copperfield. I don’t do shows.”
“I’m not asking for that,” Newton said. “I just need to know what I’m working with. I want to make sure we’ve got the real deal before we get going with all these tests.”
“Fine,” I said. “Turn the lights out.”
Newton laughed and said, “The last guy who told me he was going to show me something magical said the same thing.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that.
Newton hit the lights, and the lab went dark except for the little multicolored LEDs on the equipment. I took a moment to consider what kind of display would work for Newton, and came up with nothing. So I figured I’d just ask him.
“What do you think of when the word ’magic’ comes to mind?” I said.
“Making things disappear and reappear,” Newton said. “Like pulling a coin from someone’s ear.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s a good one. Easy. Classic magic trick.” I looked around the room for something handy and set eyes on a gadget. I grabbed it. “Let’s use this for our demonstration. What is it, anyway?”
“That’s a voltmeter,” Newton said.
“All right,” I said. “Your voltmeter is in my hand right now. Watch it disappear.”
I focused my mind and sought out the Rift. But this time, instead of drawing power out of it, I was pushing something into it. This process always feels weird. Imagine you’re in a pool and trying to push a beach ball down from the surface to submerge it. There’s resistance, and movement, and it’s a little tricky. The physics really don’t want to let that big buoyant ball get submerged. But you keep pushing hard, and eventually . . .
There was a little pop sound like another jar of
pickles opening. The voltmeter was gone.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Newton said. “Where did it go?”
“It’s on the other side of the Rift now,” I said.
“What’s the Rift?”
“It’s . . . hard to explain. Think of it like . . . I don’t really know how to put it. It’s just something that’s always around, but at the same time it’s never around. It’s like a rip in a membrane between our reality and some other place. But that other place isn’t made of the same stuff that we’re made of. Instead, the matter over there is a special kind of material that seeps through that rip in the membrane. That material is the source of our magic, but it can only exist in the dark. Light annihilates it.”
“Annihilates?” Newton asked. “Like a matter-antimatter reaction?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve never actually seen one of those, but maybe it works the same. My teacher just told me that the forces that hold the Rift-material together get weakened by exposure to light.”
“And this Rift is everywhere?”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s just in certain places. I don’t know the exact boundaries, and I’m not sure anyone does. I remember hearing something about it originating in Western Europe, and the coverage there is pretty wide. But the Rift doesn’t spread far into North and South America. It’s strong here in New York and New England, but go fifty miles west of here and there’s nothing.”
“So there’s no magic in, let’s say . . . Cleveland?”
“Nope,” I said. “Same thing with Indianapolis, Vancouver, or Mexico City. The Rift just isn’t there. That’s a good thing, in a way. It means bad things only happen in a few spots. But it’s also a problem in the locations where the Rift exists. All the nightcrafters live in the same areas, and all that concentrated activity draws a lot of creatures out of the Rift.”
“Fascinating,” Newton said. “And you’ve been trained to control this Rift?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t control the Rift itself. I don’t think anyone can. But I can have some control over the material that comes out of it. I can draw power from it, and I can sense things made out of it. And, with a lot of training, I learned how to put things from our side of the Rift into the other side.”