“The better question is, who are you?” I say. “I mean, it must be killing you to have to sit around in that squat man’s body all day. I bet you’re just itching to change back into your home form.”
He doesn’t show any sign that I’ve touched a nerve, that I’ve caught onto his secret. In fact he doesn’t move at all. He freezes up and even the trembling in his hands stops as he clenches them together.
“That’s right,” I say, fingers curling around the bio-mech gun to activate it. The smooth, flat surface begins to transform. “I know what you are, and by now I suspect you know who I am.”
The muscles around his tiny mouth tighten. “You’re too young to be with them.”
“Let’s just say I’m a special case. As for you, you’re in violation of about a dozen Federal Title 51 chapters—impersonating a human with malicious intent, interference with commercial trade, probably serum tampering. Shall I go on? Or are you going to answer some of my questions?”
He tenses as though to spring forward. I raise the bio-mech gun, which now actually resembles a silver gun fitted to the curve of my hand, and level it with his chest. He freezes again.
“Where is the real Mr. Bole?” I ask, the gun in my hand steady. “What have you done with him?”
The fake Mr. Bole smiles but says nothing. I’m getting irritated. Before I can keep at him, he moves faster than I anticipate. He snatches the coffee cup off his desk and flings it at my face. I dodge to the side but too slow. The cup clips me on the shoulder and scalding hot coffee splashes all over the side of my neck and shoulder. I let out a yelp of pain and automatically clutch my arms in towards my chest. The shapeshifter launches himself from behind the desk and throws us both to the ground. We roll apart for a mere second but it’s enough. I bring the bio-mech gun up and fire. A pulse, visible as a streamlined shockwave through the air, strikes the fake Mr. Bole in the chest and he stumbles backwards onto the floor.
Panting hard through the pain and surprise, I keep my gun trained on him but he doesn’t get up. Careful of the reddening burn on my shoulder, I push myself up and brace myself against the opaque wall behind me. I need to call Hawk. We need to get this shapeshifter out of here somehow before security figures out there’s been an incident. I grab my purse, yank out my cellphone, and hit the speed dial for my brother.
It rings three times before he picks up. “Agent Roe, what a surprise. What do you—”
“I need help carrying a body.”
Silence ticks by until he says, “Uh, what? Sorry, I must not have heard you right.”
“The CEO is a shapeshifter. Top floor. You better hurry.”
This time he doesn’t hesitate. “On my way. Hang tight.”
The line cuts out and I throw the phone back into my purse. I cautiously approach the unconscious shapeshifter, keeping my gun trained on him the whole time. Parts of Mr. Bole’s features have begun to melt away like wax on a candle. I’ve seen this kind of transformation before but it’s still unnerving every time to see two people morphed into a single body when the magic of the change is no longer held together by the shapeshifter. My shoulder aches as I step around him and look out the window. The parking garage almost touches the building it’s so close. If we could get there with the shapeshifter in tow . . .
A black cable catches my eye. I press my face against the window and spot a window washer’s scaffold hanging a floor down. It’s not exactly subtle but it might be our only option if we can’t find another exit.
I walk back out to the cubicles as I contemplate how to even get to the scaffold when the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I spin about and find a lady with a narrow, unpleasant sort of face staring at me from another office further along the glass wall. Her hair is wrapped in a bun as tight as her smile. I thought Mr. Fake-Bole had been the only person up here. I gulp and glance at the gun in my hand.
“Sorry, miss, I’m with the—”
“IMS, I can tell.” She laughs, the sound high and sharp. Okay, so clearly not just some office worker. “Aren’t you a little young to be with the International Monster Slayers? I want to see your badge. Your real one, not that façade about the FDA.”
I swallow my pride. “I don’t have mine yet. I’m a junior agent.”
Her smile twists into a cruel shape. “Oh, I see. Well, why don’t you put down that toy of yours, little girl, before you get hurt?”
“How about you tell me who you are first?” I snap.
An angry red flush crosses the woman’s face—then the red keeps spreading until all of the woman’s skin is the fierce color of blood. Her entire body expands like a freakish balloon and her fingers lengthen into hideous spike-like claws. She’s a shapeshifter but not a normal one. A crazy powerful, super angry version—a berserker.
I draw up my gun and fire. She ducks but the blast hits her in the shoulder. She slams against the opaque glass of her office, creating spider-web cracks through it. I begin to advance to make sure she’s down when she kicks out and sends a water cooler flying towards me. I try to leap out of the way but it catches my right leg and sends me spinning. A deluge of water falls around me as I fall flat on my face four feet away and taste coffee-stained carpet.
Without even looking behind me I push myself up and begin running back through the building. A loud, hideous shriek follows me so I start to zig-zag through the cubicles. I fire blindly over my shoulder and accidently hit a computer. I keep running as its box frame explodes and sets fire to the stacks of paper surrounding it. The berserker pauses at the flames, giving me a chance to slide under a desk and get out of sight.
A few heartbeats later a storm of paper flies up into the air a couple of cubicles away from where I’m hiding. Shredded scraps rain down all around bearing client data in cramped typeface. Invoices and spreadsheets continue to fly until it’s hard to see anything clearly. Smoke rises and flames crawl across the loose papers.
I pant and clutch onto the bio-mech gun desperately. Peering out from beneath the desk, I can barely make out the cracked glass of the office down the length of the open room. I listen for movement but can’t hear anything over the rustling and crackling of paper still falling and catching fire.
“There you are!”
I gasp and roll onto my back. The berserker is standing almost directly over me, one enormous clawed hand raised, ready to rip me to shreds. It pulls back its lips with a hiss to expose sharp, shark-like teeth, its blonde hair now the shade of blaze orange.
A shockwave ripples the air above me and the berserker is jerked back by the pulse of a bio-mech gun. I scramble away out of reach and get to my feet as Hawk strides forward with his own gun in hand. His expression is furious and he marches unfazed through the clouds of paper. When he reaches me, we stand shoulder to shoulder and face the berserker with guns raised. It’s grasping onto the sides of a cubicle, sinking down and effectively crushing a computer monitor. Wheezing escapes its repulsive form.
“You’ll never stop us!” it shrieks.
“You’re under arrest,” Hawk and I say in unison. Our fingers are on the triggers at the same time and we unload. Blast after blast jolts through the berserker until it’s spread out on the floor, the redness fading from its skin and its body slowly shrinking to the size of a normal human. Once we’re sure it’s really down, I let my gun hand drop and we survey the room. The paper has settled on the floor and everywhere else like some kind of peculiar snow. Flames spread out to each cubicle, eating up the abundant source of fuel.
“Well,” Hawk says and tucks his gun into an inner pocket of his suit jacket. “That could have gone better.”
The next second the overhead sprinklers turn on and we start getting dowsed. An alarm rings through the building.
“Oops,” my brother says nonchalantly. “Time to go. I hope you have some sort of a plan or we’re screwed.”
Police and firefighters are sure to be on their way soon. There’s no way we can go back down the way we came and escape before they arriv
e. It’s not even an option with two bodies to carry. I stride past him to the office at the back, raise my gun, and fire into the glass wall. It cracks, spiderwebs, then blows outward from the force of the bio-mech pulses. Hawk stares at me when I turn around to start hauling up the berserker’s limp body.
“There’s a window washing scaffold,” I say.
He gestures widely to the window I blasted out. “You could have opened it.”
I shrug. “Too late to argue now.”
Together we drag the unconscious berserker and other shapeshifter to the blown out window. Hawk holds my hand to anchor me as I lean out far enough to grab the cable to the scaffold. I’m breathing fast as I cling to it, water dripping from my hair, and slide down into the scaffold. I’m dizzy and lightheaded at this height. I avoid looking down, focus on the pulleys, and hoist the scaffold up to the window. Hawk shoves the bodies over and I make sure they don’t fall off before he climbs in. The first thing he does is look over the side and his entire body shudders.
“I’m starting to think I really don’t like heights,” he says in a high-pitched voice. “Do you have any idea how high up we are? You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between me and chili if I fell from up—”
“Hawk,” I say sharply. “Focus. You’re not going to fall. Tie yourself in.” I toss him a line of rope lying in the bed of the rickety scaffold. He wraps it around his waist and ties himself to the railing. I do the same.
Hawk mans the lever to the pulleys and we leave the destruction of Werevine Pharmaceutical’s executive floor behind. Bright flashing lights of police cars and fire trucks pass below on the main street as we begin the long descent to the ramp of the parking garage directly below us. Hawk is right—we are very high up.
“Crap, they’re moving fast,” Hawk says. Men in blue uniforms and firefighter gear surge towards the building. We both hunker in the scaffold hoping not to be seen. “Hold onto your guts, Phoenix.”
“What? Why?”
He yanks on the lever and we begin to skyrocket down. My stomach slips into my throat. Half of me feels like throwing up, the other half wants to scream like I’m on a roller coaster ride. The floors of the building flip past like slides of old film—each one an image of startled workers staring out from cubicles, spilling cups of coffee, or jumping out of their chairs in surprise.
Once we’ve past thirty some floors Hawk hauls on the lever and a billow of smoke rises from the cables with a shriek worse than that of the berserker. The scaffold shudders and comes to a very jerky, unpleasant stop. It takes me five seconds to remember how to breathe properly again and uncoil my numb hands from around a bucket I didn’t realize I had been clutching. Holding back my breakfast, I look over the edge of the railing and see we’ve stopped nearly level with the ramp of the parking garage.
Hysterical laughter finds its way out of my throat and Hawk joins in as he throws an improvised hook on a rope to catch the cement side of the ramp. Together we pull ourselves over so the scaffold leans at an awkward angle and the two unconscious bodies thump together against the thin railing. I hear shouts as the police spot us.
“Go, go, go,” I urge my brother. He hops the cement wall and holds the scaffold steady as I heave up the bodies and dump them onto the ramp. Hawk lets go of the scaffold once I’m out as well and it swings back to bang against the windows of the glass building. He dashes into the structure to find our car while I sling one body over my shoulder and drag the other. It’s times like these when I really appreciate my strength. I might not be as special as the shapeshifters but I have gifts of my own. Well, really just the one gift. I am strong.
I stumble along in the dark of the parking garage and hear Hawk begin arguing with another familiar voice. I finally reach our black SUV and bang on the hatch door.
“Hey, open up! These guys are starting to get heavy!”
Hawk shouts some more and the door clicks open. I lift the bodies into the open hatch and hear him arguing with our supervising agent.
“Cobb, we had no choice,” Hawk says. I shove the fake Mr. Bole—who looks like a completely different man—into the back. He’s become a lot taller and I have trouble fitting his legs inside.
“It was supposed be a routine check!” Cobb shouts. I catch sight of him in the driver’s seat when I flip the berserker on top of the other shapeshifter. Her face catches on the edge of the SUV and I have to really shove her in.
Hawk laughs nervously, the sound of the police sirens nearly drowning him out. “Oh, it was routine up until some crazy shapeshifters decided to kill Phoenix.”
“Are you two insane? You managed to attract the attention of half the police in the city!” Cobb is nearly hysterical at this point. I can see his floppy mop of brown curls shaking above the driver’s seat. I tuck the berserker’s foot into the hatch, slam the door shut, then rush around the side of the SUV and hop into the second row of seats.
“Why are we still sitting here?” I ask loudly. “It’s too late to argue about what we should have done. Get us out of here, Cobb.”
He turns around in his seat to give me the crazy eyes, but Hawk fastens himself into the passenger seat and we both look at Cobb expectantly. The sound of sirens is hardly muted inside the car. Cobb’s crazy eyes grow wider but he finally puts the car into gear and we fly out of the garage to the sound of squealing tires.
Chapter 2
I never appreciated how well Cobb could drive until he manages to evade every police car trying to find us. I also never realized how many profanities Cobb knows. He lets them out in a spew until he regains himself enough to phone in to the director of the Minneapolis Division of the IMS. Cobb explains the situation and requests agents to secure the Werevine Pharmaceutical building and scrub all the surveillance footage before the police can identify Hawk and me.
I stare out the window and listen to the director yell through the cell phone. Hawk and I share a look of apprehension. It’s not like we had a lot of options at the time when the shapeshifters were trying to kill me, but this is bad. Drawing attention to our work is one of the worst things we can do, but that’s exactly what happened. I gaze out at the Mississippi River on my left. The sun is still high and the water reflects painful shards of light into my eyes. The trees bordering the river are nearly bare as fall creeps over Minnesota, each October day growing colder. The leafless birches and poplars wave boney fingers at me as the SUV curves along the road.
“Yes, sir,” Cobb says into his phone, holding it slightly away from his ear as the director continues to shout at him. “I’m on Main Street right now. We’ll be at the top of the laboratory in a few minutes.” Cobb glances back at me in the rear-view mirror. “Yes, sir. I will.”
As soon as he hangs up, Cobb chucks the phone into the cup holder in the center console. “Why do I have to be the one to babysit a couple of delinquents? Are you two insane?” he snaps at us.
We both remain silent. We quickly discovered from the beginning to keep silent during Cobb’s frequent tirades. Interrupting him only makes him angrier.
He swings off Main Street and into the Supra Energy Power Park. After a quick chat with the guard and a flash of Cobb’s badge, we’re let through. He pulls into the parking lot just past the power park and before the Flumen Laboratory. He backs up to a small cement bunker on the rear side of the lot shaded by trees, rams the shifter into park, stalks out of the SUV, and slams the door behind him.
“How bad do you think?” Hawk asks quietly.
“I don’t know,” I answer. “Optimistically, they’ll just suspend us. I think. Worst case, we get kicked out of Underground.”
I see the muscles in his face tighten and I know he’s thinking the same thing I am. If we get kicked out there’s nowhere for us to go. We’ve been orphans since we were four and Underground is the only home we know. The IMS and its world are our family.
Cobb opens the rear hatch and just gestures to us, apparently unable to look us in the eye. His mop of hair continues to s
hake with his suppressed fury. Hawk and I ease out of our seats and meet him at the back. He points to the bodies, points to us, then starts to walk to the cement bunker. Taking the hint, we lift the bodies ourselves, sling them over our shoulders fireman style, and follow Cobb into the building. Inside are two guards bearing the IMS logo on their uniforms—a dragon crouched over a shield bearing the division’s name. Cobb complains to them, uses a few more swear words, and the guards let us pass through a thick metal door.
I’m familiar with the room and the procedure. This is just one of the many entrances for humans like us to enter Underground. Its walls are all gray cement and there’s nothing in it except for two black platforms that can hold a good twenty people each. We gather on one and Cobb hits a button on the top of the platform’s control pedestal. The platform shudders and starts gliding down an angled tunnel. I have to readjust the berserker across my shoulders to keep my balance as the platform picks up speed.
Cold, wet air blows into my face from intervals along the long tunnel down, down, down. I can almost hear the roar of the Mississippi River as we pass beneath it to the very bottom of the riverbed and a little deeper still until the platform slows to a stop in a nearly identical cement room as the one up top. Bernie, the guard at the bottom of the chute, is snoozing in a chair. His graying hair nearly hides the little horns sticking out of the top of his head but is unable to conceal his deer-like ears. A pair of cloven hooves sticks out of the bottom of his maroon slacks.
When Cobb shoves open the metal exit door and it gives a whiny creak, Bernie jerks awake with a snort and nods to us.
“Hey, kids,” Bernie the faun says with a smile. I always liked Bernie. Every time I see him he’s got a smile and friendly greeting waiting for me. He’s the poster child for faun hospitality. “How did your first mission go?”
“Not well. Idiots,” Cobb growls and hustles through the door.
The Curse of Moose Lake (International Monster Slayers Book 1) Page 2