“I’ll have a black coffee, Marissa,” says the blond man.
The waitress scribbles that down and looks expectantly at Ella, who hesitates before adding, “And I’ll have a Coke?”
“Okay. I’ll be right back with those.” The waitress writes down Ella’s drink preference and nods in a way that signals her discomfort with this awkward situation. But she heads back through the door to the kitchen without another word anyway, leaving a sixteen-year-old girl alone with an adult man who could have very well beaten her up. (He didn’t, but how could “Marissa” know that for sure?)
Ella scowls at the swinging kitchen door until the blond man raps the tabletop to get her attention. She crosses her arms and sits up straight before she meets his stern gaze, trying to project a level of confidence she doesn’t feel. She has no idea what these DSI people might do to her for stealing a folder filled with secrets the general public is obviously not supposed to know. Lock her up in a cell in the middle of nowhere for the rest of her life? Execute her for reading top secret information? Something worse she can’t even imagine?
The blond man observes her for a full minute without uttering a word. Then he starts flicking up the corner of the manila folder with his thumb, again and again, without breaking eye contact. “I’m assuming you read the contents of this file while I was running around the neighborhood like an idiot.” His voice, Ella notices, is distorted from the nasal swelling, but his tone is still grim enough that she can’t find it funny. “So we’ll have to deal with that breach regardless. But it can wait for the tail end of our conversation. The first two things I want to know are Who the hell are you? and How long have you been following us?—and if you can answer those questions without throwing another punch at me, I’d appreciate it.”
The waitress swings by in the silence that follows his words, drops off their drinks, and prompts them for their orders. Ella hasn’t even read the menu, so she orders the first thing to catch her eye, a pancake and egg platter. The blond man follows up with what must be his usual order, rattling off a series of modifications to one of the diner’s featured value meals. When the blond man stops talking, the waitress shoots him that same questioning expression as before, but the man shakes his head, dismissing her, so the waitress shrugs and walks away.
Ella grabs her Coke and sucks on the straw for nearly thirty seconds, giving herself more time to answer the blond man’s questions. If she tells him the truth about her identity…Wait. If he was at the scene of the crash that day, and if his team has been working her mother’s murder case since the beginning, then shouldn’t he already know who she is?
“You mean you don’t recognize me?” she says.
The blond man is taken aback. “Why would I recognize you? Have we met?”
“Are you serious?” Ella snatches the file from the middle of the table and flips through the pages until she finds the one with a bunch of pictures paper-clipped to it. Everyone involved in the case, from Abigail Dean to the transport truck guards who died in Sartell’s escape, is represented in a series of small, rectangular photos that remind Ella of the shots you take for a yearbook. Among these photos, on the bottom row, is an actual yearbook photo of Ella. It’s the one from eleventh grade. (She was in the hospital on picture day this year.)
Ella removes her picture from the page and holds it up for the man to see. Her name is scrawled in black ink across the white bottom border. “I really hope you’re not some kind of detective,” she says, “because you’re not so good at putting puzzle pieces together.”
The man rips the snapshot from her hand. He looks from the picture to Ella to the picture to Ella, and his severe expression softens. Just a little. “Ella Dean,” he murmurs. “I honestly didn’t recognize you.” He gestures to her shoulders and neck. “It’s the hair. You look a lot different with that short cut.”
“Yeah, well, most of my hair got burned or torn off when I was flung from a car after a wizard shot a fireball at my mom.” Ella interlaces her hands and drops them on the table hard enough to rock the salt and pepper shakers. “It’s going to take a little longer than six months to grow back.”
“Oh, that’s…” The blond man winces and sets the photo on the table next to his silverware. “Let me reevaluate this. You’re Ella Dean, daughter of Abigail Dean. You stole our case file to, I assume, learn more about your mother’s death. And when I caught you, you punched me in the face.”
“I’m not apologizing for that.”
The blond man prods his sore nose. “You should.”
“Well, I’m not.” She cocks her head to the side, not caring if she looks like a puerile brat. “If you wanted me to play nice, you should have visited me months ago and told me the truth—that magic is real, and a wizard killed my mom—instead of letting me languish in sessions with psychiatrists who kept insisting I was crazy when I said I saw a man shoot fire out of his hand.”
The blond man rubs his temples and sighs. “First of all, we’re not allowed to hand out that information freely, Miss Dean. We have to get permission to reveal the truth to civilians. And secondly—unfortunately—when two members of my team visited you in the hospital shortly after you woke up, you didn’t seem to remember the events surrounding your mother’s death. So it was decided, not by me, to keep you out of the loop and the murder case at large, in case your involvement spurred Sartell into adding you to his hit list.”
Ella’s throat tightens. “You came to visit me in the hospital?”
“Not me, personally.” He sips his coffee. “My captain, Mortimer, and a senior teammate, Chantel. They spoke with you at length, but you were practically incoherent.” His tone sharpens. “We told the doctors to inform us if you regained any significant memories, but it seems that order got lost somewhere along the way. If we had known you remembered Sartell’s attack on the car…”
“You would have told me magic is real?” she says, deliberately loud.
The blond man raises his hands in a plaintive manner. “Please, Miss Dean. We keep these secrets for a reason.”
The waitress returns with their food, and they both wait until she’s gone to continue.
“So,” Ella says, pouring syrup on her pancakes, “what now? I go to jail for whacking you in the nose? You lock me up in a dark, dingy cell for the rest of my life?”
He takes a bite out of a sausage patty, brows furrowed. “Of course not. Though you did technically commit a felony by punching a law enforcement agent, the fact you’re still a minor would shield you from any real fallout, especially given the oversight in our follow-up procedures that led to the theft of your mother’s file in the first place.”
“Do I hear an apology in there somewhere?” Ella stuffs a huge bite of pancake in her mouth and smiles while chewing.
The blond man’s cheeks turn pink. “Oh, so I have to apologize to you for an administrative oversight I wasn’t directly involved in, but you don’t have to apologize to me for breaking my nose?”
“Hey, I got hurt in that chase too.”
“You ran into that bicycle yourself. Don’t blame me because you didn’t look where you were going, and don’t—” He cuts himself off and shoves a whole buttermilk biscuit in his mouth. After he swallows, he mutters, “I’m not going to spend the rest of my day arguing with a child.”
“Oh, now you’re throwing that card?” She points her fork at his face. “I’m just a stupid kid, so you don’t have to give me valid excuses for your mistakes? You’re just going to brush me off and say, You’ll understand when you’re older? Because if that’s your best plan, Fox Mulder, you’ve got another thing coming.”
The man blinks in confusion for a moment, before it clicks. “Fox Mulder? The X-Files?”
Ella waves her fork up and down, gesturing to his clothing. “You’re literally a mysterious government agent who investigates paranormal incidents.”
He stares at her, lips skewed at one end like he’s suppressing a smirk. “Fair enough. I’ll let that slide.�
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“And?”
“And what?”
She leans against the back of the booth. “And what’s your alternative to brushing me off? Because I’m not going to let that slide.”
He wipes his fingers with a napkin. “I don’t understand, Miss Dean. You read the file, didn’t you? You know what happened to your mother, you know we’re on the case, and you’ve confirmed that your supernatural experience with Sartell was genuine and not a figment of your imagination. What’s left? What is it that you want?”
“What do I want?” Ella sets her fork down, reopens the file folder, tears a picture of a rough-looking Sartell, all sunken eyes and grungy facial hair, off the page of pictures, and shoves it in the blond man’s face. “I want this bastard burning in a fiery pit in hell. That’s what I want.”
The man grabs her wrist, gently this time, and coaxes her to lower her arm. “Look,” he says, sympathy bleeding in, “I get it. You’re frustrated that Sartell is still out there instead of rotting in jail like he should be. And I feel the same way. But this is a delicate case, a complex case, not something we can resolve with brute force alone. Sartell is a dangerous wizard on a vengeful warpath, and if we screw up our investigation, our security details, anything, not only do we risk losing Sartell—he could be in the wind at a moment’s notice—but also the lives of countless innocents at the DA’s office and throughout the Aurora justice system.”
Ella crushes Sartell’s photo. “I want to testify.”
“What?”
“When you catch him,” she clarifies, “I want to testify. At his trial. I want to look him in the eye as I recount how he murdered my mother. I want to be there, in the courtroom, when the judge declares his life sentence and the guards drag him away for a virtual eternity in a dark, dank coffin of a cell. I. Want. To. Testify.”
The blond man sits there in shock, lost for words. He doesn’t snap out of it until the waitress comes back around and refills his coffee.
When the woman walks off again, he clears his throat and replies, “That’s very brave of you, offering to testify in the face of a dangerous criminal, but—”
“No buts,” she demands in the coldest voice she can muster. “Put me on the witness list, or I’ll tell every news channel and paper in town what really happened.”
His mouth drops open. “You wouldn’t…”
“Try me, Mulder.”
He gawks at her in disbelief, then smiles that bitter smile people use when they won’t verbally admit defeat. “My name’s not Mulder.”
Ella shrugs. “Don’t care.”
“Well, start caring. Because if I’m going to plead your case to my captain, Miss Dean, you’re damn well going to be polite to me while I do it.” He pushes his empty plate away, gathers up the ruined case file, and gestures to Ella’s half-finished second breakfast. “Now ask Marissa for a box, get your little butt out of that booth, and follow me. My team had to leave me behind when they got an emergency call, so we’re going to have to walk to the bus stop and hitch a ride to the office.” He pulls out his wallet and drops two twenties on the table. “Come on. Make it snappy.”
Ella obeys his instructions. After she tucks her box of leftovers into her backpack, she trails the blond man to the diner exit. He holds the door open for her, and she steps out onto the sidewalk, back into the warmth of the late May day. As the door swings shut behind her, bells jingling all the way, the man gives her a onceover, cataloguing her injuries from the chase, sighs deeply, and says, “My name’s Nick Riker.”
Chapter Four
The “office” turns out to be an old two-story building on the outskirts of town, squeezed between a utility company’s headquarters and a defunct factory. It’s one of the ugliest buildings Ella has ever seen, its redbrick exterior stained from decades of fallout from the factory’s smokestacks, all its skinny windows blocked by off-white shades, its asphalt parking lot cracked like an earthquake hit, weeds growing up between the gaps. There’s a black outline near the roof where a large sign was once attached; what that sign said, Ella cannot guess. And from what she can see, the sign was never replaced with a newer, more accurate one to indicate DSI now owns the place.
From the bus stop on Elmore Road, Ella and Riker cross the street and walk through the parking lot dotted with familiar black vans up to a lonely, narrow door. There’s a white decal on the door, faded from repeat exposure to harsh Michigan winters, that says, RESTRICTED ACCESS. VISITORS MUST ENTER THROUGH THE NORTH DOOR. Instead of taking her around to said north door though, Riker tugs an access card out of his pocket and waves it in front of a black box attached to the doorframe. The little red light on the box goes dark, a green light flickers on in its place, and a moment later, a loud buzzer sounds off as the door unlocks. Riker opens the door and gestures for Ella to enter.
The cramped hallway beyond is poorly lit compared to the bright day outside, and it takes Ella’s eyes nearly a minute to adjust as she trails behind Riker into the bowels of the building. The adjustment does not, however, make the interior of the building more attractive than the exterior. The décor is 70s chic, with bland highlights, plain tile flooring, and blank wooden doors sporting plastic, engraved tags that bear numbers, names, and room types. Whoever built this office was striving for the most mundane, utilitarian architecture imaginable, and Ella thinks they succeeded with flying colors. Those colors being white, black, gray, brown, and beige.
Not quite what Ella was expecting as the home base for a secret government agency.
“So, Nick,” she asks as they approach a pair of elevators at the end of the long hallway, “did DSI buy this place because it was the most nondescript office in existence, or was that just a consequence of buying on the cheap?”
Riker stops in front of the elevator panel and presses the up button before glancing at her over his shoulder. “The latter. We don’t have the biggest budget. The legislative subcommittee responsible for redirecting money to DSI has to code each yearly allocation of funds behind a roll of fake organization names—an effort that must stand up to scrutiny if the press comes snooping around.”
“So does everyone in the city government know about DSI?” Ella watches the numbers above the elevator. There are only three, two floors and a basement level, but the elevator takes its sweet time dropping a single story.
Riker shakes his head. “DSI’s existence is on a need-to-know basis. For now. There are plans in place to introduce the organization in a semi-public fashion, putting on a smokescreen for the general populace, so that we can act with fewer restrictions. But that introduction is still in the planning stages. Probably won’t happen for three to five more years.”
The rickety elevator clangs to a stop, and the doors squeak open.
As Ella steps in, she says, “You’re not going to come clean, right? You can’t just tell everybody that magic is real, surely.”
“Correct.” Riker follows her in and presses the worn-down button for the basement level. “And even if we wanted to reveal the existence of the supernatural to the public, we don’t have the authority to do so.”
“Who does?” Ella grimaces as the doors attempt to shut themselves three times before they actually work. “The federal government or something?”
“No, no. You misunderstand. See—”
Riker jumps when the elevator suddenly lurches downward. Which Ella takes to mean that the machine’s performance has grown worse over time. Comforting.
Riker calms himself and continues, “See, we’re not the only players in this game, Miss Dean. And out of all the major players, we’re by far the smallest.”
“Players?”
“Organizations involved in the supernatural underworld.” He looks to the ceiling, considering how to best explain. “The Department of Supernatural Investigations”—Ella commits that name to memory—“was founded in order to capture, prosecute, and incarcerate supernatural criminals who break normal human law. Up until the last few decades, supernaturals w
ere basically running wild, beholden only to a handful of governing bodies that had, and still have, poor track records for properly punishing their own. DSI’s mission is to narrow the gap between the percentage of normal human criminals who are appropriately punished for their crimes, and the percentage of…less-than-normal criminals.”
Ella rubs her arms while she sifts through his words. A few of them stick out like a sore thumb. “Human criminals? So, you’re saying that people who can do magic, wizards and witches or whatever, aren’t the only supernatural criminals you handle? There are inhuman ones?”
Riker nods. “Yes, there are inhuman creatures among us.”
“What kinds?”
“Many you’ve heard of.”
The elevator shudders as it stops at the basement floor.
“You can’t mean…” Ella bites the joint of her index finger. “Like vampires and werewolves and stuff?”
Riker smiles faintly. “Yes, Miss Dean. Like vampires and werewolves and stuff.” The elevator doors finish shrieking open, and he points into another poorly decorated hallway. “After you.”
For the rest of the trip through the winding maze of basement corridors, Ella chews on this new information like it’s a tough piece of meat. She can’t quite tear all the way into it, can’t reconcile her experience of the world with the idea that bloodsucking vampires and wolf men have been walking among regular people all this time. Wouldn’t they have exposed themselves by now, especially in this day and age, when everybody has a disposable camera stuffed in their glove compartment? And what about the media? Surely an on-scene camera crew would have caught something suspicious while recording for the eight o’clock news. Unless…
Unless they’re actively covering up their mistakes.
Riker said these supernaturals have governing bodies, and implied it was at their discretion that the “supernatural underworld” stays secret. So it would make since for those same governing bodies to put effort into covering up incidents that could lead to public exposure. Bribes and payoffs. Political bargaining. Men in unmarked vans disappearing troublemakers into the night, never to be seen again.
Dream Snatcher Page 4