“You’re still talking like the things are real,” Scott said.
Ashton stopped and half-turned to look at them. “Who says they aren’t?” As Scott tried to dredge up a retort, he signaled to them again. “Come on. We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?” Riley demanded, but Ashton didn’t answer. He started to walk again, and Scott and Riley had to scramble to keep up.
“Any ideas what’s going on here?” Scott asked Riley, drawing up alongside her.
“No clue, but I’m getting really tired of Scarface’s tall-dark-and-mysterious bullshit,” Riley muttered. “It makes me want to throw things.”
“No need to get violent. Yet,” Scott replied. Riley grinned.
Ashton suddenly stopped before the window and stood, arms folded over his chest, staring past the bars and through the window, frowning as he studied something intently. As Riley approached, that something slammed into the glass from the inside of the room, rattling it in its frame.
“Whoa!” Riley yelped. She took a step back, closer to Scott. “What the hell was that?”
Riley didn’t get an answer right away. Instead, Ashton continued to stand, motionless and silent, in front of the vibrating glass. Despite his trepidation, Scott slipped around Riley and took a cautious step toward the window, peering past the bars to see into the near-darkness beyond. A form sat hunched inside, its skin gray and brittle, its head hairless. Scott’s eyes were drawn to its hands; the fingers were unnaturally long, terminating in sharp nails that reminded him of wolves’ claws. As he watched, the creature on the other side of the glass lifted its head and looked at him. It had sharp, angled cheekbones and thin lips, the skin on its face as gray and cracked as the rest of it. But its eyes were what caught Scott’s attention. They were a bloody red that seemed to glow with intensity and pure, undiluted evil.
Riley drew in a breath behind him. She’d seen it too. She’d felt it too—that rolling wave of menace emanating from the inside of the room. He was sure of it. “And I’ll ask again: what the hell is that thing?” she demanded.
“That would be what I asked you to come see,” Ashton replied. “Except you showed up early, and I’d hoped to have it sedated so you could get a closer look.” He shrugged. “Ah well. Not like they’d be sedated in the field anyway.” He glanced at them as if checking their reactions, then said, “I told you I would show you something that would make you a believer. This is what I wanted to show you. Agent Walker, Agent Hunter, meet your first vampire.”
~*~
“Oh, you’re shitting me!” Riley exclaimed before she could stop herself. She took a step forward, her eyes wide with amazement. “That’s a…that’s really a vampire?”
“A newborn, as far as we can tell,” Ashton confirmed. “Maybe a month old, give or take a week or two.”
Riley narrowed her eyes and studied the gray-skinned creature beyond. “I always thought vampires would be, I don’t know. More Brad Pitt and less…Nosferatu.” The thing in front of her certainly didn’t resemble the woman who’d killed Kevin in the slightest.
“There’s more than one species of vampire,” Ashton replied. “But that’s something to be discussed after the meeting, when your training officially begins.” He beckoned to them. “Come on. Zachariah should be in the office by now, assuming he isn’t crashing out all day again. We’re going to cover your new assignment, which is related to what we’re doing here.” He started to walk away from them. Riley scrambled to follow, not looking back to see if Scott was behind her.
“Wait, the whole Smithsonian thing is—” she started to ask. Ashton put up a hand to silence her, which brought a scowl to her face, and shook his head.
“Not out here,” he admonished. “You know better than that. Wait until we’ve made it to the office before you start throwing stupid questions at me.” He sped up, as if eager to get away from her.
Ashton’s office was one of the few enclosed areas in the warehouse, aside from the entrance hallway and the cell holding the vampire. Two desks were inside, one mahogany and one cherry wood, black leather office chairs behind them. A thick cream carpet covered the floor, and a wall of security monitors was behind the mahogany desk. A closed white door was on the other side of the room.
Slouched in the office chair behind the cherry wood desk was Zachariah, his elbows resting on the desktop and his head in his hands. His dark hair was disheveled, and when he glanced up at Riley, his eyes were bloodshot, his face drawn and pale. She frowned, concern welling up in her, but she tamped it down as Ashton circled the desk and knelt beside Zachariah’s chair with difficulty.
“You look…hung over,” Riley commented, tilting her head to the side as she watched the interaction between Zachariah and Ashton. Zachariah, for his part, didn’t seem to hear her statement.
“What happened?” Ashton asked, his voice hushed. He rested his hand on the table beside Zachariah’s elbow, his fingers twitching like he wanted to grab the other man’s arm.
“Close call,” Zachariah replied, his voice shaking. “Last night. Sorry, I’m still rattled.”
“How close?” Ashton demanded, pulling at the collar of Zachariah’s shirt. Even from where she stood by the door, Riley could see the small punctures in the man’s neck, still raw and bloody. “Shit,” Ashton hissed, his voice stunned. “Was it—”
“An elder, yes,” Zachariah confirmed. “She caught me. If I hadn’t already been on my guard…a few moments more and she’d have taken me.”
“What stopped her then?”
Zachariah shook his head. “I don’t know. I think—” He broke off, glanced at Riley and Scott, and passed a folder to Ashton. “My preliminary report. We’ll discuss it later.” Then he sat up and pasted a tight, tired smile on his face. “Come on in, both of you. It’s about time we got started, huh?”
Ashton didn’t look at them, too intent on glaring at Zachariah. Despite the brewing argument between the two men, Riley dropped into one of the visitor chairs across from Zachariah’s desk. Scott settled onto the edge of his own chair and looked around warily. Ashton rose to his feet and locked the office door before perching on the edge of Zachariah’s desk to the man’s right.
“So what’s going on here?” Riley asked without waiting for Zachariah to begin. She waved her hand at the closed door. “What is all that out there?”
Zachariah reclined in his chair, moving as if it pained him. He glanced at the door before returning his eyes to Riley, his expression serious. “That out there?” He pointed at the door with a casual hand. “That would be the official headquarters for The Unnaturals. It’s where we do research, development, and training to handle the creatures we’re tasked with handling. It’s not busy right now because most of the agents that work for us are out in the field or on rest leave. But all told, we employ around one hundred agents and scientists. Well, usually. We’ve been having trouble recruiting, so our numbers are down.”
Scott shook his head, putting up a hand to signal for Zachariah to stop. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said in a rush. “I thought you said you keep the existence of The Unnaturals a secret, that it’s totally classified. How can you recruit without word getting out that you exist?”
“We recruit through your handler,” Ashton said. “When we catch wind of suitable candidates for the program, we approach the agent’s handler and petition for the agent’s transfer. They tell us no, that’s it. The agent never hears about us. If the handler says yes…”
“Then we have a meeting, much like we did yesterday,” Zachariah said, picking up where Ashton left off. “Unfortunately, Brandon and Henry were the first to tell us yes in quite some time.”
“And I’m assuming you believe us now,” Ashton added. “How could you not, after what I’ve shown you?”
A look of disappointment crossed Zachariah’s face. “Well, since Ashton has apparently spoiled the surprise and probably with less drama than I’d have used,” he said, “we’ll continue with the next part o
f the program.” He cut a glance at Ashton, and the other man gave him a tight-lipped smile that didn’t quite reach his eye. “Spoilsport.”
“You know it,” Ashton replied.
Riley, beginning to feel impatient with the exchanges between Zachariah and Ashton, cleared her throat pointedly. “So what’s on the menu after that display out there?” she asked.
“A history lesson,” Zachariah said.
Scott reclined in his chair. “I always hated history class,” he muttered.
“Me too,” Riley agreed. “I like this kind of thing with popcorn, and I don’t have any, so keep it short and sweet, would you?”
“I’ve never heard two more impatient agents in my time with the Agency,” Ashton commented. He still had that thin smile on his face, and Riley tried to ignore the rising urge it caused inside her to throw something at him. Instead, she focused on Zachariah, who had opened one of his desk drawers and removed a file folder, dropping it onto the desk with a loud smack.
“I’ll do my best to keep it short,” he promised. “Of course, the history’s long, but I’ll hit the high points.
“The first indication that something outside ourselves existed was in 1590, in the event that later came to be known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island,” Zachariah started. Riley raised her eyebrows and relaxed in her chair, crossing her legs. She remembered references to the Lost Colony when she’d gone through the little of high school that she’d finished; the concept had fascinated her then, and now that it had been brought up again, she didn’t regret the lack of popcorn as much as she initially had. “In 1587, a man named John White was sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to the area to establish a colony at the behest of Queen Elizabeth I. He took 150 men, women, and children with him to found the colony. But when their numbers became thinned to just over 100, and with hostile Native American tribes hounding the colony, White left for England to request help and supplies.
“No one has ever been sure what happened while he was in England, but when White returned in 1590, the colony was gone. The settlement had been deserted, and the colonists he’d left behind were gone without a trace—save for the word ‘Croatoan’ carved into a post. According to official records, the accepted theory is they were either taken in by the nearby Croatan Indian tribe or moved to present-day Hatteras Island, but no concrete evidence of either was ever obtained.”
“Let me guess,” Scott said. “You have proof to the contrary.”
“In fact, we do,” Zachariah said. He opened the thick folder and pulled out a thin tome inside a protective sleeve, the cover crumbling and flaking with age. “The existence of this book is unknown to historians. We’ve kept it that way because of its contents.” He set the book down and picked up a stack of high-resolution photographs, passing them to Riley. “These are scans of the diary’s pages,” he explained. “It was begun by Eleanor Dare, the mother of Virginia Dare and the daughter of John White, just a week after he left for England.
“The diary starts off basically enough. For the first month or so, the entries focused on general colony life and the Dares’ lives in particular.” Zachariah thumbed through a few photos of the diary’s pages. “Then, about a month and a week after White left, the first man went missing. A man named William Sole went out alone to forage for food and never returned. This wasn’t particularly alarming in itself. Colonists had disappeared before. Most of those disappearances were attributed to the Native Americans in the area.
“But then it happened again—Ambrose Viccars. Then his wife Elizabeth a day later. Then five more men, one after the other. Then it hit the children. That was when the panic that had already begun to simmer under the surface exploded.”
“What’s this got to do with our assignment?” Scott interrupted. “I mean, it’s fascinating and all, but—”
“Patience, grasshopper,” Ashton said with the faintest of smirks. Riley stifled a laugh. She was amazed—even shocked—to hear Ashton crack a joke. “We’re getting there.”
“Thank you, Ash,” Zachariah said. He turned back to the pages in front of him. “At the same time that all of this was going on, the nearby Croatan Indians were having similar problems of their own. But, unlike the colonists, they’d seen the being taking their people. Eleanor describes a meeting with several of the Croatans where they described a spirit that came and went with the darkness and the light, that drank the blood of their people and left them for dead, and that the ones who still lived when the spirit left burned to ashes with the sunrise.”
A smile spread across Riley’s face before she realized it. “A vampire,” she murmured.
“Exactly,” Ashton said. “An elder vampire. We don’t know where it came from or how old it was. We just know it was there.”
“So what happened?” Scott prompted.
“The Croatans’ shaman created a weapon that was capable of killing an elder vampire,” Ashton said. “And as far as we know, it worked. But it appears it worked too well. Either that or those who were wielding it didn’t know what they were doing with it. By all appearances, it took out the colonists and most of the Croatans.”
“Jesus,” Scott breathed.
“When White returned, he went to the Croatans, and their shaman told him what had happened and entrusted the weapon he’d created to White. The weapon was stored in a black box, where it has been ever since.”
“And it somehow ended up in the Smithsonian, which is why we have to break in and steal it, right?” Riley asked. Zachariah nodded, and she added, “So what exactly is the weapon?”
Zachariah and Ashton exchanged a look. “We’re not sure,” Ashton admitted. “The weapon has never been described. Just its container, with the warning that the box should never be opened. There was reference in John White’s notes about the user’s intent, but we don’t know what he meant.”
“So what is this?” Riley asked, picking up the photo of the box again to examine it. “A Pandora’s box kind of thing?”
Ashton gave her a tight smile. “Possibly. We’re treating it as such until we’re able to examine it for ourselves.”
“So why is it so important for us to get our hands on it?” Scott asked.
“Because the vampires are after it,” Zachariah said.
“It’s vital that you get your hands on it before they do,” Ashton added. “And preferably not get killed in the process, because we still need you to continue with your investigation of the vampire-related murders of the twenty-seven agents.”
The four sat silently for several minutes. The thought of the deaths of the agents who’d already been murdered and the possibility of more deaths to come was enough to sober Riley. She stared at the photograph of the box, her mind on thoughts of Kevin. She missed him. She missed his jokes, his easy laughter, the twinkle in his eyes when he teased her. The memories pulled the pervasive loneliness she’d felt since January back to the surface.
Scott cleared his throat, and Riley startled as she was yanked back into reality. He stared at her with an expression of confusion and concern, but he didn’t comment on her reaction. “So what exactly do you need us to do?” he asked the two men at the desk across from them.
“Like the file you received yesterday said, you need to retrieve the item from the Smithsonian and bring it here,” Ashton said. “It bears repeating that under no circumstances must you open the box.”
“So what happens if we don’t bring it in?” Riley challenged. She was only half-serious; mostly, she was curious what Ashton and Zachariah’s reactions would be. That would tell her a lot about the enormity of the situation.
Ashton gave her a hard look, and his jaw clenched. “If you don’t bring the box in, then the vampires will be the least of your worries.”
Chapter Eight
When Zachariah and Ashton finally dismissed them from the S Street offices, new access badges in their pockets, their guns loaded with silver-coated bullets, and hands-on training on how to kill a vampire rattling in their skulls, Scott fou
nd that Zachariah had let them out of the exit door on the back of the building. The sun had set while they were inside, and pools of yellowish light from streetlamps lit the road. Scott tilted his head back and squinted at the stars, barely visible in the city lights, and then let his eyes slide over the roofs of the buildings across the street, searching for potential threats. Checking the buildings around them didn’t do much good—a skilled sniper could perform his job from far enough away that he’d never be connected with the act—but it made him feel better. Especially since Riley was absorbed with running her hands over the motorcycle parked next to the black van.
“You know, I’m not sure the owner of that bike will appreciate you fondling it,” Scott commented.
“I don’t care,” Riley replied, trailing her fingers over the leather seat. “This thing is gorgeous. Do you have any idea what it is?”
Scott took a step toward the bike to get a closer look at it. “A…motorcycle?” he said with a shake of his head. “Riley, I don’t know one motorcycle from the next. I just know I don’t like driving them but they’ll get me from point A to point B in the extreme situations when I can’t find something with four wheels.”
“It’s a Harley-Davidson Knucklehead,” Riley said with awe. “When I was fifteen, I got arrested for stealing one. You have no idea how badly I want to steal this one. I’d happily go to jail for it.”
“I’m not sure ‘jail’ would be the place in mind for you if you’re caught lifting someone’s motorcycle outside of The Unnaturals’ headquarters,” Scott warned. He took her elbow and gave it a squeeze; the bones felt fragile under his fingers, and he was fleetingly concerned over how she managed to tough out as many missions as it was rumored that she had without breaking into pieces.
Looks can be deceiving, his brain reminded him. He had to keep in mind that just because she was a relatively small person didn’t mean that she couldn’t take care of herself in a fight. He was sure that by this point in her career, she’d been involved in plenty. Besides which, he was supposed to be watching her. His new assignment from Internal Affairs demanded it. Now wasn’t the time to underestimate her. He released her arm and rocked his head to the side, indicating that they should get moving. “Come on. We need to find the car and get back to the hotel. Maybe we can get room service and start our research for the next step of our assignment,” he suggested.
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