City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  To which Cooper responds, “No, no, I’m okay here. I’ll eat and take a nap. Did something bad happen? Something related to the case?”

  “Nothing too bad. But it could get worse. I’ll let you know how it all goes down when I get back later.” Shuffle up to the front door. Grab the knob. Turn the knob. Open the door.

  “Oh, well, good luck, Cal! Tell Ella and everybody else I’m fine. Really. Just tired and a little sore.”

  “I’ll do that, Cooper. I’ll do exactly that.”

  Exit my apartment. March to the elevator. Take the elevator down. Find my truck. Get in my truck. Start the engine. Put on my seatbelt. Back out of my space and head for the road that’ll take me where I need to go. Ignore the alarmed responses to my text message, questions, questions, concerns, more questions. Press the pedal to the floor, until my truck groans its way far beyond the speed limit. Ignore the ringtone I reserved for my captain, even when it cuts off, starts again, cuts off, starts again, cuts off, starts again—until I come to a red light, the only red light on my entire trip, like some kind of omen.

  I pick up the phone, and I hit the answer button, and I say without a greeting, “The answer to the riddle is Arnette’s Strip Club, the one in Gloston Square.”

  Then I hang up the phone and charge into the belly of the beast.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It’s a confrontation two and a half years in the making, and I shoot first.

  Twenty minutes on the highway, running a cool seventy-five—the only reason I don’t get pulled over, I surmise, is because all the cops are busy at the Wellington Center—and I turn off onto Henson Street, which leads to Gloston Square. As the thin traffic in front of me spills into the Square proper, I take in the sight of a neighborhood in Aurora I haven’t dared to visit in years. Not since that night. Not since that bloodbath. Not since that failure. Not since that loss.

  The Square has changed little in that time. The same tiny park with the same scraggly bushes and the same wiry trees and the same dusty footpaths. The same townhouses with aging, stained façades and the same duplexes occupied by three families. The same barbershop that went defunct, the building still sitting empty. And the same strip club—Arnette’s—next door, the most popular establishment in the whole area.

  It was Arnette’s, I now realize, that made me blurt out strippers in relation to the riddle. I never actually went inside the building, but the Gloston Square serial killer case culminated in a showdown in the alley next to the club, a showdown that cost me so much, gained me so much, changed me so much. A showdown with a rogue vampire who slipped right through my fingers, the PD’s fingers, DSI’s fingers, and vanished into the night, never to be seen or heard from again.

  Or so I thought.

  My tires screech against the asphalt as I skid to a stop in a fifteen-minute parking zone across the street from Arnette’s. Lights are on in the club, dim through the tinted windows, and diffuse silhouettes move about the main room, a few on the raised stages, swinging around poles, a few carrying trays of food and drink to the tables, but most of them seated for what I can only imagine is a private party at this time of day. (It’s too early for regular service.) A bachelor party, maybe. Or a single man’s birthday party, courtesy of generous friends.

  Whoever they are, they have no idea their lives are in danger.

  I jump out of my truck, slam the door behind me, and cross the street, my steps a determined march, my posture straight and rigid, my hands already caressing the grip of my holstered gun and the hilt of the biggest knife I carry while on duty. I may not have my beggar rings, but if this confrontation ends how I expect, I’ll still give it my all. I can shoot. I can stab. I can punch. I can claw. I can kick. I can bite. I can fight.

  I refuse to be helpless in Gloston Square for the second time in a row.

  Fuck my stitches. Fuck my splint. I don’t care if I shatter every bone.

  I won’t surrender in this battle, and that’s all there is to it.

  As I ghost by the front door of Arnette’s, I feel a noble urge to poke my head inside and demand everybody evacuate, that the owner shut the place down until further notice. But while I have a fancy FBI badge in my coat that’ll let me muscle my way in, there’s no way I can convince the owner to abandon his strip club without proof that it’s destined to explode. And the man is not going to accept invisible scribbles on the walls as proof. If I can’t show him something that approximates a bomb, he’ll brand me a crazy liar.

  I’m a Kook after all, not an upstanding young cop anymore.

  Luckily, I have until tomorrow morning, the riddle deadline, to solve the evacuation issue. Right now, I have more pressing matters to worry about.

  The entrance to the alley is only ten steps away.

  I unclip the strap on my holster, draw my gun, and creep toward the edge of the strip club’s wall with quick, quiet steps. When I’m a hairsbreadth from crossing the gap, I press myself flush against the grimy brick exterior and slowly peek around into the shadowy alleyway. Heart palpitations flutter in my chest, my pulse pounds in my ears, and my hands quiver as I glimpse for the first time in two and a half years the exact place in Aurora where my life was forever altered.

  Like the rest of the neighborhood, the alley hasn’t changed.

  Uneven, cracked concrete dotted with gas-stained puddles tracks back to the adjoining street thirty feet away. A dumpster overfilled with black, torn trash bags sits off to one side, reeking. A narrow door, a side entrance to the old barbershop, is chained and padlocked, the metal painted with bright orange rust. And the fire escape, the one I dare not follow to the roof, lies bolted to the side of Arnette’s, slowly wasting away from disuse.

  The only difference between then and now, that night and this day, is the lack of a patrol car parked in the alley, and the carnage all around it. The blood. The guts. The mutilated body. And me.

  For a second, I almost see myself, or at least what my mind imagines I looked like that night, sitting in a pool of blood and dingy water near the dumpster, rocking back and forth, bawling, gasping, screaming. I close my eyes and shake the image away. I don’t need to picture myself from the outside. I know how that experience felt from the inside. And standing here now, after so long, after I worked so hard to overcome the devastation wrought on my psyche in the wake of that night—it makes my soul ache in a way that’s scarily physical. Raw. Pulsing. Frigid cold. Almost like…

  Keep it together, Cal. You can handle this.

  Gulping down my unease, I reassert my grip on the gun and finally turn the corner. At the exact same moment my left foot passes into the first shadow, a figure steps out from hiding on the opposite side of the alley, mirroring me. I freeze for a split second, then whip up my gun, training the sight on the chest of the man who was waiting for me. He must’ve watched the street for my arrival, and moved into position as I was closing in on my side of the alley. He wants this encounter to unfold on his terms. But I won’t let that happen.

  I take one step forward.

  He takes one step forward.

  I take two steps forward.

  He takes two steps forward.

  And then a ray of sunlight, breaking through the cloud cover, shines down into the alley and illuminates the man across from me, who was, until this moment, no more than a hulking human-shaped mass in my vision. The light casts his features into stark relief, and every single alarm in my head goes off at once—because those features strike a chord in a recent memory. A wide-brimmed hat. A dark coat. A mysterious figure in the distance.

  He was there, that day last month when Team Riker accidentally chased Melissa Reeves into traffic. He was the one standing at the corner of the café, the one who caught my attention, the one I almost confronted before I was distracted…by a bird I highly suspect was owl man, warning me away from danger.

  He was there, like he was at my apartment earlier today and last year, once during the Ammit case and once during the Etruscan case. He was there, like
he was at Gloston Square two and a half years ago, on the night the very foundation of my life crumbled beneath my feet, and I fell, fell so far, fell to a place I thought I’d never climb out of, the real rock bottom, cold and dark and broken beyond repair. The place that haunts all my nightmares even now, calling for me over the shoulder of big blue monsters, whispering to me underneath the vicious howls of wolves, laughing at me along with a taunt I’ve never forgotten: Better luck next time, kid.

  He was there then.

  And he’s here now.

  Standing across from me in the alley outside a strip club in Gloston Square, where my partner died two minutes to midnight two and a half years ago…is the vampire who killed Mac.

  The vampire takes off his hat, revealing a youthful, handsome face, well-styled brown hair, and otherworldly amber eyes—a sign of a turned vampire, not a natural born. He smirks a haughty smirk, a fang peeking out the side, and says in a voice like silk, “Hey, kid, been a while since we last—”

  I shoot him in the chest. Over and over. Until my gun clicks empty. He staggers back on the first bullet, not expecting the impact, but stands his ground and absorbs all the rest like his skin is a bulletproof shield. It’s not. The rounds tear him wide open, shredding his expensive coat and the white button-up beneath, boring holes in his olive skin that gush blood in the aftermath. But the vampire, despite the damage, doesn’t even flinch. That smile remains plastered on his face. For ten seconds, fifteen, thirty. And then bent bullets clink on the concrete, pushed out of his skin by his insane vampiric healing factor.

  Werewolves heal fast.

  Vampires heal like no other creatures on this Earth.

  I knew that before I shot him, but I wanted to shoot the fucker anyway. I release the magazine on my gun and rip another from my belt, reloading before the man has a chance to get any closer to me. Finger back on the trigger, I point the gun at his face this time. A headshot won’t kill him either, but well-placed bullets have been known to leave vampires with permanent memory loss. That’s the least he deserves for what he did to Mac, and all those other innocents he murdered.

  The vampire checks his ruined clothes, then glances at my gun, amused. “You know, that kind of hurt, kid.”

  “Kind of wasn’t what I was going for,” I hiss.

  He cocks an eyebrow. “A little trigger happy, huh? Didn’t peg you as the type.”

  “Not in general.” I adjust my aim, so my next shot will nail him between the eyes. “That’s something I’ve been saving for you.”

  “Oh, really?” He brushes some dirt off his hat, like it’s the only article of clothing that matters. “You got a vendetta against me? Why? Because I kidnapped that cute little archivist? Your boyfriend, maybe?” He shuffles forward three feet, coming to stop right where the trunk of the patrol car was that night. “Or is it because of that cop partner of yours back in the day? The one that died right about here? Is that what has your blood boiling? Because, if so, I get it. He was your buddy, his death was gory—”

  “Shut the hell up!” I shriek, my voice carrying out into the street. “Don’t you dare talk about Mac like he was some worthless piece of trash you threw out at your earliest convenience!”

  The vampire purses his lips. “Why not? That’s what he was. It’s not like I had any personal beef with him. He was part of the mission, a name on a page, that’s all. I could not have been more apathetic about snuffing him out.” He clears his throat. “But, like I was saying, I understand that you, being a young, impressionable bystander, might have been unsettled by the events of that night. And I have, on occasion, thought maybe that warranted an apology. Because I may have gone a little overboard on the whole—”

  “Hold on!” My thoughts are racing at light speed. What did he say just now? “What mission? You’re a fucking serial killer.”

  “Ah, see, that’s actually why I asked you to meet me here.” He tucks a thumb in his pocket and sinks into a casual stance more appropriate for a lunch meeting between old friends. “I’ve been handing out those sticky notes to you from time to time because, up until now, it’s been convenient to point DSI in the right direction on cases relevant to my own goals. But thanks to that bullshit at the convention center, I’m in a bind, so I figure it’s time we clear up some of the confusion over what’s been happening in Aurora for the past several months. To DSI’s benefit. And to my own.”

  The aim of my gun falters. “I…I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Okay, I see. You’re not thinking straight. I’ve got you all wrung up now.” He points at himself and shrugs. “My bad. I apologize. Let’s make this simpler and start from the beginning.” He takes on a more “official” tone of voice, as if we’re having a business meeting in this disgusting alley of broken dreams. “My name is Lucian Ardelean,” he says, “and I’m a spy for the noble House Tepes of the Vampire Federation.”

  “You’re a…spy?” My frenzied thoughts all abort at once, and my gun dips toward the ground. “But that doesn’t make sense. If you work in an official capacity for the Federation, then why were you traipsing around Aurora two years ago, killing innocents left and right?”

  “I wasn’t,” he answers in that frustratingly smooth voice of his. “I was knocking off targets on a hit list compiled by my employer. And unfortunately for you, kid, that cop partner of yours was on it.”

  Rage meets confusion in my head the way a cold and hot front collide, producing deadly storms. “Are you trying to tell me Mac was some kind of shady character? Mac?” I scream. “He was a recently divorced, depressed, middle-aged man whose worst habit was drinking the occasional excess beer. You expect me—”

  “He was an informant for the Methuselah Group.”

  My fury fades to a sudden silence, and my gun falls to hang at my side. I whisper, voice cracking, “What is the Methuselah Group?”

  Lucian Ardelean stares at me with something akin to pity in his inhuman eyes. “They’re the people you’ve been calling the ICM rogues. Sort of. See, this whole rogue practitioner thing goes back a lot further than you think, kid. All this shit that’s been happening in Aurora over the past year is a culmination of twelve years of competing covert operations between the Vampire Federation, the Methuselah Group, and a rebel faction of vampires known as the Black Knights.”

  The gun slips out of my hand and clatters across the concrete. “T-Twelve years?”

  “Yeah, twelve. This isn’t a new conflict, by any means. It’s just relatively new on this continent.” Lucian sticks his hat back on his head. “Let me give you the quick rundown: Twelve years ago, the Vampire Parliament caught wind of a growing faction of rebels within our ranks, rebels whose plans involve what I can only describe as ‘world domination,’ cheesy cartoon villain style. These rebels, once discovered, branded themselves the Black Knights. Then they immediately turned around and exposed their existence to the ICM in order to spur cross-community panic on a scale that would hamper the Parliament’s anti-Knight countermeasures.” He pauses for a breath. “However, the ICM High Court, on assurances from the Parliament that the vampires would deal with the issue in house, elected to take no action against the Knights. Not everybody was happy with that decision.”

  “And the unhappy people,” I mutter, “formed the Methuselah Group?”

  “Right! You’ve got this, kid.” He claps his hands. “The Methuselah Group operates under the insane delusion that the Black Knights are a false flag operation designed to steer foreign intelligence organizations away from the Parliament so us evil vampires can plot a global supernatural war in peace. As a result of this belief, the Methuselah Group has spent the last decade attacking both the Black Knights and legitimate agents of the Vampire Parliament. And when I say attack, I’m talking all-out street warfare, no holds barred.”

  “But…if that’s true, why haven’t we heard anything about it?”

  “Because the Parliament and the High Court have been sweeping it under the rug.” His voice sharp
ens. “In Europe, the old country, the supernatural have power and influence. We always have. So we can make a firefight in an abandoned warehouse on the harbor become a tragic illegal night club fire on the news. We can make mass murders in the street look like gang violence taken to new heights. Assassinations with magic spells turn into mob hits with double-taps to the back of the head. And so on and so forth. It’s a massive, ongoing cover-up, courtesy of the combined resources of the ICM and the Federation. And up until recently, everything was going swimmingly. Or, at least, we had a status quo.”

  Lucian sighs. “Then, two years ago, the Methuselah Group suddenly made a play for America. In a matter of weeks, they established a widespread informant network across the United States and Canada, followed by a large-scale recruitment effort of North America-based ICM practitioners. Their advertising was hardcore. The Vampire War is coming! Join us to protect the free world! and Save our species from the Vampire Menace! That kind of shit. A full-on World War II propaganda machine, one that was totally invisible to the general public, and to us for far too long. By the time we caught on over in Europe, the Methuselah Group had already grown a thousand roots here.”

  The tight energy to attack, attack, attack starts to wane inside my chest, as my drive to kill this goddamn vampire unwinds in my confusion. “And these roots included…normal people? Regular humans.”

  “Unfortunately.” Lucian strolls closer to me, and I flinch, so he stops. “It was a clever play. We usually ignore normal humans on principle, except the occasional interfering Crow, because they’re ignorant at worst and ineffectual at best. Utilizing an informant network of normals meant that the Methuselah Group could insert ears and eyes in pretty much any public setting, and, even better for them, could collect information from the high ranks of normal authority, like police commissioners, mayors, and governors—people who are informed about the supernatural.”