by John Conroe
“If you hadn’t cut off your grandmother, you’d be given VIP treatment in any major city of the country,” Galina said, frowning.
“She wants to control us down to the last detail, Mother. I—we won’t do that,” Tanya said.
“Then face the consequences. How do they say it? Put your big girl panties on and deal with it. Now I must say good day. I’ll barely make it to my coffin as it is,” Galina said, giving me a wink—the first direct attention she had paid me since the call started. “Good day, dear heart, and you as well, dear heart’s Chosen.”
We said goodbye, Tanya warmly and myself a touch suspiciously, and broke the connection.
“Did your mother just make a joke? Coffin? Really?” I asked.
“She has a sense of humor. You just don’t get to see it. It’s a universal right of mothers to keep sons-in-law on their toes,” my vampire said, lying back into the pile of pillows stacked against the headboard, hands on her belly. Around us, the plane thrummed with power as it continued to climb to its cruising altitude. The flight would be short, just two hours, but refueling had taken more time than normal, as Joint Base Andrews wasn’t set up like a regular airport. Purchasing fuel from the government came with red tape—who knew? After gassing up, we had to wait in line for takeoff, behind a KC-135 Stratotanker and a C-130 Hercules.
The three other vampires had retired to day sleep immediately after our debriefing. They had barely stayed awake to hear the details of our visit with the president. Stacia and Declan had disappeared into crew quarters as well, while Tanya and myself had sought more information on the Coven contingent in Vegas.
“So enlighten me about what’s in Vegas?” I asked.
“When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, an Italian Darkkin named Giovanni Tommasi came west to investigate a very young Las Vegas. He invested in a number of burgeoning casinos and began to influence the city. Ten years later, Peter Kolbe arrived from New York as a representative of my mother’s. Tommasi wasn’t excited to share, but Kolbe had the implied backing of Galina, and therefore the Coven. They split the city and, at first, avoided any overt rivalry, although there was competition. But as Vegas grew up faster and faster, a real adversarial relationship formed. Most of the fighting took place on a corporate or business level, but some vicious wetwork occurred, too. Nothing that ever brought the Coven’s wrath down on them, but enough to stir minor rumors,” Tanya said.
“Is that the source of the whole mob thing with Vegas?” I asked.
“To a small degree. The mob connection is real, but many of the vampire deaths would have looked like mob hits, and the two vampires both had strong sources in the local mob infrastructures. But Tommasi had a right-hand vampire, named Arlan Connery, a young Irish immigrant from the East who became a vampire in 1946. He’s relatively young by Darkkin standards, but utterly ruthless. Apparently, according to Mother, he has recently killed his boss and taken his place.”
“What does that mean for us?” I asked.
“I know Peter, met him several times. I have some understanding of how he operates, what motivates him. Money, by the way. But Arlan is a wildcard. He’s really too young to co-run a city,” she said.
“Isn’t he roughly Lydia’s age in vampire years?” I asked.
“Yes—and that’s too young. Most Coven leaders have at least a century and a half under their belts before taking over big positions. But Arlan is hungry… and willing to take huge risks. Killing your boss is very much frowned upon in my grandmother’s Coven. There have been periods of time when it was almost standard practice, but for the last few hundred years, it has been highly discouraged,” she said, looking thoughtful. And cute. Always cute. Mine, I thought to myself.
“Sooo what? Arlan thinks it’s the return of the Wild West?” I asked, slightly distracted by her cuteness.
Her eyes snapped up to meet mine. Then she nodded. “Yes. And mother didn’t indicate he was facing any punishment or retribution. My impression is that Senka has pulled back and is watching. According to Mother, she’s in Europe. Rome, to be exact.”
“Oh. It’s a test—or a punishment—or both. You cut her off, so she’s pulled back from the Americas, relaxing her iron hand. Things will happen; we’ll have to address them. But why?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Senka has been alive longer than most trees. She plays the long, long, long game. I know for a fact that she is absolutely, utterly fascinated with us. She watches us. Deeply placed spies that feed her information,” Tanya said, her expression slightly frustrated.
“You can’t find them? Even with Nika?” I guessed.
“Even with Nika—and no, I don’t suspect Nika or Lydia. But my grandmother influences people, often on an incredibly subtle level. They may be reporting information and not even know they are doing it,” she said, yawning.
“So back to this Arlan. What do we expect?” I asked, hurrying things along so she could sleep.
“Anything, Christian, anything. Now that I know this, I am not as shocked that a Vegas vampire just killed the President of the United States.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s like the mountain climber… who climbed the mountain because it was there. Kill the president because he was there. Or maybe it was to influence a gambling law. Or just a bet,” she said.
“A bet?” I asked, incredulous.
“You know vampires. We don’t think about human life like most humans do. The V-squared changes us, often in unpredictable ways. But then there have been plenty of standard humans who weren’t any better.”
“Seems like a huge risk to take for just a bet,” I said.
“Good gamblers will hedge their bets. So we need to grab this vampire in Memphis. She might not have much of a future back in Vegas,” she said, slumping back into her pillows and closing her eyes.
Our plane would land in two hours or so. Still morning. Tanya could day walk, but it was a strain for her, and with the pregnancy, it was that much harder. She would be sleeping hard when we landed. That left myself, Stacia, and the kid. And ‘Sos. For one five-year-old vamp. Overkill.
Chapter 9
That’s probably enough foreshadowing. I’m sure you got the point. Overkill my ass.
We landed in Memphis and had Captain Simkins taxi as close to the Fed Ex hub as we could get. Then we exited the plane and went on foot. We were all tired, but Stacia and Declan had maybe four chopped-up hours of rest and I had slept for maybe a total of two. It would have to do. ‘Sos, who spends most of his time snoozing anyway, was trotting in wolf form, fresh as a daisy.
Workers looked up and stared as we approached the busy hub. Fingers got pointed, radios were involved, and soon a trio of boss types headed our way, backed by a squad of security police and another group outfitted like SWAT.
“Mr. Gordon, I’m Stan Pagano. I’m in charge of the facility. How can we help you?” he asked, his tone and expression cautious yet respectful. His two companions looked mostly shocked as they looked at myself, Declan, and Stacia, along with the massive wolf by our side, recognition stopping them in their tracks. The security guys looked alert… and maybe nervous.
“You have a plane load that just came in from Baltimore in the last hour or so. There’s a package on board that contains a comatose vampire. We need to talk to her,” I said.
“A vampire?” he asked, visibly trying to get his head around the topic.
I heard Omega tell Declan where the package was in the massive hub, including its tracking number, which he wrote down on a piece of paper.
“Here’s the number. I think it’s over there,” the kid said, pointing across the tarmac to one wing of the massive hub building. We started toward it.
“You think it’s there?” Pagano asked, frowning in disbelief, moving quickly to catch up.
“Actually, I know it is. Just being polite,” Declan said.
“Just how would you know where a package is in our building?” Pagano asked, a frown f
orming on his face.
“Mr. Pagano, you know who we are, and you must have at least a general idea of what we do, right?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “Then is it too far outside the realm of belief that we might have ways of knowing things that others don’t?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said, drawing the word out slowly. “I can’t let you open packages though.”
“It’s being pulled from its stack now,” Declan said aside to me.
“What? Young man, what are you talking about? This hub is one of the most technologically advanced buildings on the planet. Nothing happens here that our computers don’t control,” Pagano said, now angry.
“Sorry sir. The place is amazing. We’re extremely impressed,” Declan said.
Pagano may have thought he meant the three of us, but I knew who he really meant.
We entered the giant building amid a constant flurry of moving forklifts, small cargo trains, people, and packages everywhere. People stopped briefly to glance at us but otherwise kept moving. Declan led the way, which totally confused the Fed Ex people, as he obviously knew where he was going.
“Mr. Pagano, I appreciate your constraints. But if I told you with absolute certainty that one of your packages contained a living person, would you at least examine the package?” I said.
In the middle of a huge industrial open space, we arrived at an empty spot just as a forklift zoomed up and lowered a large, heavily reinforced box to the ground.
“Here it is, Mr. Pagano, sir. Just as requested,” the forklift operator said.
“Who the hell requested it, Jerry?” Pagano yelled back at him.
“I don’t know sir. Came up on the queue—rush status. Thought you ordered it, sir,” the bewildered driver said.
Stacia was already circling the box, studying it. “Hotter than ambient temperature, but not as hot as a human. Her heartbeat is super slow.”
“Daytime coma. Slows everything even further,” I said. My own vision showed me an orange outline of a curled human body through the thick cardboard.
That’s when the first guard pulled his sidearm and started shooting the box.
Chapter 10
It wasn’t the leader of the security force, but the fourth guard down the line. Just pulled his Beretta and started to shoot. He even got off a shot before Grim surged to the surface and pushed a focused blast of aura straight through him and his gun. The gun jammed on the second cartridge as the aura wave changed the already burning smokeless powder’s chemical composition to something much less able to combust.
His one shot hit the box, though, and Stacia leapt across the open space between them and hit the guard once in the head.
Two more guards and one of the SWAT guys reacted as one, guns coming out of holsters and an assault rifle pulling up. One turned to shoot Stacia, but the other guard and the SWAT guy drew down on the box.
Their rounds never hit the box, hitting me instead. A short, sharp burn, then my own mutant version of the V-squared virus numbed the wounds and immediately started to heal them. Their guns jammed on useless rounds as Grim widened the aura arc to include all the security forces. Stacia jumped at the SWAT guy, clotheslining the regular guard who was fumbling with his gun. The SWAT member tried to draw a blade, but his hand was just reaching for the hilt when a small, werewolf-powered fist popped him in the left cheek, the facial bone breaking with an audible snap. He dropped like a rock. The other guard moved forward, only to catch her roundhouse kick in his face. He went down pretty hard, too.
The guard that had turned to shoot Stacia never got off a shot. I think, to his fellow guards’ eyes, he would have simply disappeared. But I saw him get flung by invisible forces straight up into a steel support beam high overhead. He hit with a thunk and then fell the twenty feet back down. Both impacts would likely have killed him, but there was a barely perceptible slowing at either end of his trip, which meant his impact on the concrete was simply leg-breaking instead of spine-snapping. I spared a glance at Declan and found him tight-lipped with fury, but maintaining control—barely.
“What the hell?” Pagano demanded.
“That’s actually my question,” I said, unable to keep Grim’s deeper tones out of my voice.
He looked at me sharply and his two assistants pulled back a bit, leaving him alone.
Looking around at the unconscious men, both Pagano and the actual team leader looked completely bewildered and confused.
“You’ll need to call both the police and ambulances. My people pulled their hits but there are still broken bones,” I said, moving to the big box that was the whole reason we were here.
The single bullet to hit it had gone through the top third of the box and out the other side before leaving a streak on the concrete beyond. I smelled no blood, but the scent of young vampire wafted out of the bullet holes.
“Your security force is compromised. They were going to kill our suspect,” I said.
“Suspect? How would they even know she was in there, if she’s even in there?” Pagano said, looking confused and outraged, and more than a little scared.
Declan was examining each unconscious guard, looking at their nametags and mumbling the names out loud.
“Sir, I vetted all of these men myself,” the team leader said. His nametag said S. Truman.
Omega spoke softly in Declan’s earpiece, but Stacia and I heard him clearly. After hearing what he had to say, I turned to Pagano and Truman.
“I think you will find that they all accepted outside employment. I’ll bet you that each of them has a wire transfer from a Midwestern bank in their personal bank accounts. Each of them will have similar text messages on their smart phones instructing them to destroy the contents of this box,” I said, running an aura-edged finger down the heavy packing tape.
The double lids popped open and I looked inside. A small blonde vampire, wearing black leggings and a silky black long-sleeve shirt, was curled in a fetal position in the bottom, day dead and completely oblivious to all the noise and confusion now around her.
Stacia and Pagano both looked over the edge of the open box, the werewolf nodding once and stepping away, the hub manager looking paler than the vampire. I felt something in my torso moving. My fingers found the wound opening and pulled out the pistol round that was being pushed out by my body.
Mr. Pagano looked up and saw both my wounds, the blood on my clothes, and the bullet I was holding up. “Silver. They came loaded for vampire,” I said.
“Or werewolf,” Declan said, picking up the Beretta from the guard he had KO’d with telekinesis. He dropped the mag and ejected the round out of the chamber. It froze in mid-air, silver bullet gleaming in the florescent light. Rotating the takedown lever, he stripped the steel slide from the aluminum frame and tossed it up with the bullet, dropping the grip frame onto the ground. The slide hung eerily in space, no bobbing or motion of any kind. The other cartridges popped free from the ejected mag on their own and rose, one at a time to hover with the pistol slide and other bullet.
Everyone in the vicinity had stopped moving, all staring at the free-floating pistol parts. Declan raised one hand and made a spinning motion. The slide began to twirl. He held up his thumb and index fingers of his right hand and made a spreading motion like he was enlarging a photo on a smartphone. The bullets popped out of their cartridge cases one, two, three, down the full stack of fifteen, like a munitions zipper opening in mid-air.
The spinning slide had begun to glow, and now the bullets swarmed to it, alighting against the metal and sticking. The combined mass of metal glowed bright red and spun too fast for most eyes to see what was happening. Not mine. I watched the rectangular slide collapse into a ball like a large orange, the silver bullets melting into the now-molten metal.
Suddenly it stopped dead, the red changing in an instant to bluish-black splashed with dots of silver, the whole thing covered with frost. Eighty feet away, the white top exploded off a sports-team-sized, portable orange water dispe
nser, steam billowing out of the opening.
Faces snapped to the cooler then back to Declan, only to find him frowning at them while the apple-sized orb of blue and silver-spotted metal swung around him in perfect orbit. He wasn’t showing off—he was sending a very strong warning. Almost every man looked away from the young witch, all understanding his crystal clear message: Don’t point shooty things at the pretty platinum blonde by his side.
“May I?” I asked, not waiting for his answer as I snatched the orb from the air. I needed to take things down a notch, keep the remaining security personnel on our side.
Look at me—the voice of reason. If Lydia found out, I’d never live it down.