I clench my teeth, or rather, what’s left of them. “Got something you need to say?”
“Oh, do I.” She smacks her cheek and sighs. “But some of it can wait. Two things can’t though. Firstly, this is probably a given, but if anyone from the ICM comes knocking, don’t mention my involvement in this disaster. Everyone who saw me here is either dead, or one of you Crows, so I expect a little discretion on your part. And I know you’re not the person to ask for that, Cal, but Riker’s out of it, the rest of your team is half dead, and I don’t know any of these other weirdos. So, help a girl out?”
I nod the best I can lying down. “Of course. I’ll do whatever I can to erase any mention of your involvement from the case files. And once Riker is back on his feet, or at least at his desk, I’ll make sure he plays defense for you.”
“Thanks.” She raps on the carpeted floor with her knuckles. “I appreciate that. Especially since we still don’t know how high this goes in the ICM. No point in painting a target on my back quite yet. I have a feeling there’s a hell of a lot more going on here than we’ve discovered so far.”
“Glad I’m not the only one with that feeling.” I tip my head back and groan softly at the ache in my…everything.
Picking up my slack, Cooper asks Erica, “What’s the second issue?”
Erica quickly scans the area, searching for eavesdroppers. “The enemy. The whole reason Marcus and Halliburton and those damn Wolves undertook this insane plot in the first place. I’ve been trying to tell you since last night, but things kept getting in the way…”
I lift my head again, spurred to attention by the bleakness of her tone. “What about the enemy? Do you know who they are?”
“I have an educated guess.” She dons an expression you could only describe as desolate. “Throughout the turbulent history of the global supernatural community, spanning over two millennia in written records, there has been a prominent pattern of war among the major species. Whenever two of the Big Three have joined forces, it has always, always been for the purpose of fighting the third. So if the humans and the werewolves are working together in secret to perform illicit magic, predicated on the idea that a great and powerful enemy is about to rise up and burn the whole world down, then it can only mean that enemy is…”
A cold like nothing on this Earth freezes the blood inside my veins.
And I whisper aloud the one word I fear more than any other:
“Vampires.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Let’s start with the good news: no one on Team Riker died. (Hooray!)
Unfortunately, that’s about all the good news in Aurora right now.
The bad news?
Where to start…
Firstly, my entire team is on medical leave for six weeks.
Desmond lost a chunk of his intestines and earned a large, jagged scar across his lower back. Amy’s broken arm required invasive surgery and had to be fitted with a much bigger cast. Ella earned herself a concussion and so many cracked bones (not to mention the internal bleeding) that Navarro demanded she be on bed rest for three weeks, no exceptions. Riker reinjured his leg—again—so badly that he had to be shipped to a special facility that deals with complex knee injuries. That facility is in Ohio.
And me? I had my tibia shoved back into place, got fitted with an even larger cast than Amy, had a pair of crutches tossed at my head (literally), and was, after a week in intensive care, finally screamed out of the infirmary by a pissed-off Navarro, who told me he’d kill me himself if I came back to the office anytime, for anything, in the next month.
And, oh, that’s only the beginning.
The even worse news?
The ICM is having a nervous breakdown. After it came out that Marcus spearheaded Ammit’s summoning, along with Halliburton and at least two other practitioners in Aurora, the entire community went berserk. Arguments that devolved into fistfights. Protests that devolved into riots. And the great Wizard Ambrose, claiming he had no connection to Marcus’ summoning scheme whatsoever, fled back to the safety of the High Court’s headquarters in Europe, leaving Aurora with no ICM leadership to speak of.
The hundreds of practitioners in the city and its suburbs have collectively jumped ship on the whole magic society thing—fearing more rogues in their midst—and broken down into virtual gangs based on magic disciplines, family lines, friendships, and other forms of nepotism. As of yesterday, there have been at least twenty-seven incidents of gang-on-gang violence, the different groups accusing each other of being in on the “Marcus Plot,” as they’re calling it.
In the week following the summoning of Ammit, fourteen DSI agents have been injured, one critically, while breaking up fights between ICM practitioners on the snowy streets of Aurora. With my team out of the running, and an uptick in supernatural cases outside the city as well, our forces have been severely overtaxed.
Cooper, who’s been reporting all this internal strife to me, since I was grounded by Navarro, tells me there’s a rumor going around the office: if the streets don’t calm down by Christmas, Mayor Burbank is going to inform the entire Aurora Police Department about the reality of the supernatural super-community, so that the PD can back up DSI during these ICM bitch fights for the foreseeable future.
Boy, that’ll go over well.
And you know what? That’s not even the worst news.
The worst news is that, despite all the shit my team went through during the Ammit summoning, despite Liam Calvary’s murder by McKinney, despite the death of the plainclothes agent outside the Primrose house (his name was Aidan Walker, by the way), despite Erica risking everything to take down one of her own, despite all this carnage and panic in the wake of the revelations that have shocked the Aurora ICM community…we still don’t know who murdered the Jameson trio. The triple homicide is unsolved.
I honestly don’t think it was owl man—although I still don’t understand his role in all this. (I haven’t seen him since that night he helped me escape from McKinney and friends. For all I know, he’s left Aurora, his mission, whatever it was, completed.)
I don’t think the killer was a werewolf either, or a practitioner. And I certainly don’t think it was a normal human. If Erica is right about the enemy being the vampires, then maybe it was one of them. Maybe they sent an agent to wipe out the Jameson trio, thinking their deaths would prevent Ammit’s summoning. Maybe…
You know what? I’ll worry about it later.
I have a promise to actually keep right now. As much as this particular promise annoys me.
At noon on this overcast Monday, I park my truck in a street-side space across from a small diner called Dot’s. It’s on the very edge of Aurora proper, one of the few indie establishments in the city to survive the mass franchise expansion over the last decade.
After I pop the door open, I maneuver my cast-covered leg out of the vehicle, then bend over and grab my crutches from the passenger seat. The snow has been plowed recently, but the road is still slick, so I carefully cross the street with my attention focused on every bumpy patch of ice on the asphalt.
When I reach the sidewalk, a nice passerby opens the door to Dot’s for me. I thank him and enter. As the door swings shut behind me, the bells stuck to the glass with a suction cup jingle, announcing my arrival. A waitress behind the counter points to a sign near the door: PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF.
After a quick scan of the restaurant, I move through the obstacle course of tables toward a big booth in front of a window. My left crutch catches a chair leg, and I stumble, but I right myself at the last second to prevent a humiliating fall. Reaching the booth at last, I sigh in relief, set my crutches against the side of the table, sit, and grab the menu in front of me.
Four minutes later, my lunch buddy arrives.
Detective Matt Lassiter looks as tired as I feel. He tosses his beanie on the table and flops down, boneless, rubbing the heavy bags under his eyes with his middle fingers. His dark hair, streaked with gray, sticks up at t
he ends from the static of his hat, but he doesn’t seem all that concerned about his appearance. He shakes his head, blinks blearily at the ceiling a few times, and finally casts his gaze on me. It lingers on my visible injuries—the facial bruising, the bandages, etc.—then flicks to my crutches before settling firmly on his own menu.
“Doesn’t look like dropping you off at the DSI infirmary did much good, Kinsey,” he says. His voice is dull, even more exhausted than his face. “You’ve got more injuries than you did the last time I saw you.”
I run my finger down the offerings on the laminated menu. “Yeah, well, there was another incident I unfortunately got involved in shortly after I was released from the infirmary.”
Lassiter hums. “Would that incident be related to Primrose Avenue?”
“You guys get dispatched there?” I ask, tapping on the listing for today’s lunch special. A hearty vegetable soup and a large, toasted sandwich. I could go for some warmth.
“We got some calls in from concerned neighbors, but when our uniforms showed up, DSI had the entire street blocked off. Wouldn’t let us in for anything until they cleared the area of what I suspect to be evidence of a very violent battle.” Those judging eyes land on my bruised face again. “For all the trouble you went through, I hope you bastards at least won.”
“We did.” I glance at the waitress heading our way. “In a manner of speaking.”
Lassiter and I place our orders—I notice he picks the most expensive meal possible, probably because I’m paying—and the waitress smiles and walks off.
“Okay,” the detective says, crossing his arms. “Let’s cut to the chase. Tell me what the hell is happening in my city. All of it. Don’t skip anything. I want to know what you Kooks do, really. I want to know what the heck happened to you, really. And I want to know what’s causing this sudden, ridiculous surge of violent crime on my streets, really. No excuses. Tell me the truth. Tell me about this supernatural shit.”
I lock my fingers together and peer out the window as I consider his demand. The day outside is cold and bleak, and I don’t mean the weather. “All right, Lassiter. I’ll tell you everything, but only if you know what you’re getting into. Once you learn all this, you won’t be able to ignore the strange occurrences in Aurora anymore, the weird happenings that everyone else can dismiss because they’re so sure their reality is ‘normal.’ Every odd detail you’ve ever picked up on during an investigation, every unexplainable thing you’ve witnessed going about your daily life—you’ll gain the power of hindsight after you learn the truth, and it’ll change the way you view your entire life. You ready for that?”
Lassiter stares at me in surprise. Not shock, just surprise, like he wasn’t expecting so eloquent a speech from the young and brash Cal Kinsey. Then he smiles, his dimples deep, crow’s feet trailing out from the corners of his weary eyes. “Look, kid. I’ve been a homicide detective for eighteen years. I’ve seen children’s corpses left rotting in ditches, pregnant women ripped apart by jealous ex-boyfriends, teenage girls gang-raped to death and tossed nude into fields, dismembered limbs in trash bags, and a thousand other nightmare scenarios. You want to tell me that, in addition to the all-too-human monsters roaming in the shadows of our fair city, that there are also werewolves and ghosts and vampires? Go ahead, Kinsey. You can’t knock me off my rock. I’ve been chained here way too long.”
Now it’s my turn to stare at him in surprise. I knew he was a savvy cop and a bit jaded—most senior cops I met during my short stint at the PD were—but for him to be so sure, unshakeable in his belief, that his experiences in Homicide are worse than (or equivalent to) any reality about the supernatural world I can throw at him…That’s wise, grounded in a way I didn’t expect. An ability to compare vastly different events on the same scale, to understand the relativity of personal experiences without first running straight into the knee-jerk denial of the supernatural most people cling to—that’s a power even I lack.
“What’s with that look, Kinsey?” he asks.
“I underestimated you. I apologize.”
He holds up his hand. “No need.”
The waitress returns with our food, faster than I expected, but it gives me the chance I need to think about how to tell Lassiter such a long story over a short lunch. I had months of classes at the DSI academy to learn all the information I’m about to shove down this man’s throat in forty-five minutes.
As the waitress slides the last plate over to Lassiter, I decide to pick the easiest starting point, even though it’s the most painful one. My starting point. The night of the stakeout in Gloston Square. The night Mac died.
The waitress leaves, and I steel myself.
Then I pick up my fork, twirl it in my fingers, and meet Lassiter’s curious eyes. “So, a little over two years ago, I was a rookie cop…”
Lassiter listens with rapt interest in my story of a bright, hopeful cop turned slightly cynical DSI detective, and in between bites of my delicious sandwich and spoonfuls of soup, I manage to create a reasonably well-detailed framework of the global supernatural community and its dynamics in Aurora, including the recent issues with the ICM and werewolf rogues that have their respective governments throwing hissy fits. When I wrap up my tale of death, destruction, and barely avoided disasters, Lassiter leans against the back of the booth, strokes his stubbly chin for a minute, and then…starts laughing?
“Damn, Kinsey. I knew you DSI guys had it rough sometimes, but I didn’t know you were constantly running around no-man’s land, barely avoiding a hail of mortar fire.” He picks up a cucumber slice from his plate and tosses it in his mouth. “To think all this time, there’s been a guillotine hanging over my city, ready to drop the second the Kooks, of all people, make a mistake. Really sheds some light on why the mayor lets you butt in on certain cases. I guess Burbank can’t play favorites when a monster might come charging out of another dimension and raze Aurora to the ground.” He scrunches his nose, like it physically hurts him to admit that a) monsters are real, and b) the Eververse exists.
I understand that feeling.
I had the same one the day after Gloston Square.
“One question though,” he adds, gulping down the last of the tea in his glass. “If it’s such a big deal to keep this stuff on the down low, then why does DSI operate semi-publicly? You go X-Files top secret with the details, but you flaunt your fancy black uniforms and unmarked SUVs, and you frequently talk to the press—if only to brush them off. Why’s that?”
“Ah, there’s a purpose to that.” I wolf down the last bite of my sandwich. “See, if we operated only in the shadows, nobody would know to come to us when they have a negative supernatural experience. Victims of supernatural violence wouldn’t know who to call for help, and people bent on retribution, or preferably on justice, wouldn’t know there was a place they could go, a group they could join, to make a difference. A DSI rep came to me, after Mac’s death, and explained what I just told you—minus current events. That discussion is what made me quit the force and join DSI. Because if what happened to Mac could happen to other innocent people, then I wanted to be part of the organization working to protect them.”
I set my spoon down and grab a napkin to wipe my face, the next words churning in my gut for a hesitant moment. Then I take the plunge: “I’ve wanted to be a hero since my mom showed me what heroism really meant, when she risked and ultimately gave her life to save the lives of her employees. It was DSI that showed me what kind of hero I could really be, what difference I could really make, in a world on the brink of a war it can barely comprehend.”
Lassiter doesn’t reply to me for the next two or three minutes. He taps his fingers on the table and directs his attention outside, to the blustery winter day, to the nearby snow plow gearing up for another pass, to the citizens walking down the sidewalks, waiting for buses, shopping for Christmas, none the wiser to the constant supernatural threats hiding around every corner.
At last, the detective offers me a
nother smile. This one is brighter than his others, and more deferential. “Smart words for a young kid, Kinsey. Still a tad on the idealistic side, I think, but I get where you’re coming from. You had an experience you couldn’t shake off, and you let that guide you to becoming the sort of person you wanted to be. A healthier option than many choose after trauma, for sure. And I respect that.”
He reaches inside his coat pocket and removes a folded piece of notebook paper. “Here’s my cell number. If something comes up, and you need a little extra help—the sort of help I can provide, you understand—then don’t hesitate to ring me up.”
Wary, I pluck the paper from his fingers. “I’m not sure how to read your response here. Do you want to be involved in the supernatural…or not?”
“It’s not about what I want.” He wipes his mouth with his own napkin, crumples it, and throws it on his empty plate. “Personally, I think the mere existence of the supernatural means we’re all involved, whether we like it or not. It’s less a matter of involvement and more a matter of participation. I have no intention of participating in this circus of monsters on a regular basis—because I have my own monsters to manage, the ones with the human faces and, worse, the human hearts. But if there’s a time, like this ‘Ammit’ business, when you all need some extra hands to avoid a nuclear winter scenario, then please, yes, drag me into it. I’ll participate then. Because as much as this supernatural crap weirds me out, I want to keep on living, and I want the world to keep on spinning. And if that means I occasionally need to throw in with the Kooks”—he shrugs—“then so be it.”
He reaches across the table and offers me his hand.
I take it, and we shake.
You know, I think I kind of like this guy…
“Now,” he says, pulling his beanie back on, “if that’s all, I got to get back to work. Late-night homicide down on Ram’s Head Lane. Mugging gone wrong, looks like.” He clicks his tongue. “A little mundane for you, I know, but that’s how I roll on Mondays.”
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