My mind dropped back to Reaper jumping on the Empiric.
Shit.
“All right, Chief,” I said finally, “what’s your point?”
His eyes locked in on mine. “That I need my best officer to help improve my other officers.”
“What? I’m not a fucking teacher!”
“Watch your language in here, young lady,” he said hotly.
“Sorry, Chief.” I knew he hated it when I went all potty-mouth around him. “But we’ve got an escaped prisoner who is up in the Overworld feeding on normals and doing something fu…messed up to their DNA. Is this really the time for me to be playing sensei to some dude who has spent his entire existence waiting for people to die?”
Without hesitation, Carter said, “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Gallien Cross is not just some basic escapee, Piper.”
That stopped my angst.
“He’s not?”
It was Carter’s turn to look concerned.
“Didn’t you read the full dossier on him?”
The chief had asked that question in a very accusatory tone. I wasn’t fond of that one because it usually meant I’d done something wrong.
“I might have missed a few things,” I said, chewing my lip, “like everything after his face, name, the fact that he is a vampire, and that he likes feeding on normals.” I threw up my hands when the chief shook his head at me. “What’s the problem? He’s a bad guy who escaped and needs to be brought back. I do this all the time. They comply or die. Simple. I don’t care what they did or didn’t do.”
“So much for you being my best Retriever,” Carter said with a sigh as he threw a file at me. Carter was still the type who preferred paper to digital. “Read it.”
I opened the doc and read the summary.
Gallien Cross is a vampire who was imprisoned for feeding on normals. He was captured in 1982 and sentenced to 50 years in prison without parole. He was also slated to go through deep reintegration every year until his date of release.
“Yeah,” I said, holding out the folder, “I’ve read this already.”
“Go to the next page, Officer Shaw,” Carter said, using my title.
I hated it when he did that.
Cross was most widely known for working with mages and wizards to infuse vampirism with magic and the blood of the normal. This caused normals to become vampires who were easily controlled by him. His goal was to create an army of them. The tell-tale sign of an infused normal is their black eyes. The practice came to be known as the Blood Crossed Rituals.
I’d heard the stories about this, of course. It was in the Retriever training program and everything. In my defense, it wasn’t like the name “Gallien” was unique in the Netherworld, and there had been a Gallien Cross who held political office at one point, too. Different guy, but that was in the nineties, so he was more recent.
“Oh,” I said, feeling sheepish, “that was this guy?”
“Obviously,” Carter said, snatching the file from my hands. “Maybe I should stick Reaper with someone else.”
There was a light at the end of the tunnel.
“Agreed, Chief,” I said, looking as downtrodden as I could manage. “I’m not worthy to be anyone’s teacher.” I groaned for effect. “The shame of it all.”
“Nice try, smart-butt,” he said. Again, he wasn’t one to use foul language. “Unfortunately, for you, I know you’ll learn from this, which I can’t say about a lot of people.”
“I probably won’t,” I chimed in. “Honestly, Chief, I just can’t be trusted.”
“Seeing that you will learn from this,” he continued with that same level of grit I’d been cursed with, “I’m going to make things even more interesting for you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“We’ve got a couple of officers who have been wanting to get into the RTP lately.”
The RTP was the Retriever Training Program. It’s where every officer had to go in order to get into the Retrievers. Graduates were few and far between, which made me wonder why Reaper had made it through. He wasn’t exactly the best candidate I’d ever seen. My only guess was that his unique perspective on life, or death, was deemed useful.
“You’re worrying me, Chief,” I said, noting the twinkle in his eye.
The twinkle stopped.
He just wasn’t great at being a disciplinarian.
“Look, Piper,” he said, putting his elbows on the desk, “I know you want to go after this guy alone, and I honestly thought you’d have a chance when I assigned you this case, but—”
“I could have had him if it weren’t for Reaper, Chief. He caused me to hesitate. I can’t do this job if I’m hesitating.”
“So you said,” he replied. “Fact is, though, that you also said Cross has a suite of goons and he’s been feeding, and the normals he’s feeding on all have that blackened eyes thing that stuck Cross in prison in the first place.”
“Right?”
“You need backup, Piper.”
The three most dreaded words in my time as a Retriever were “You need backup.” I didn’t want backup. I wanted to sneak around, slide up behind a perp, knock his ass out and drag him home, or shoot him and drag what was left of him home.
Backup sucked.
I couldn’t do stealthy with backup.
“Oh, come on, Chief,” I whined. “So I didn’t read the full dossier. I never read the full dossier.” Okay, probably not something I should have said. “But I will going forward. You’ve got my word.”
“That’s not why I’m doing this, Piper,” he replied. Then he bobbed his head around slightly. “Okay, it’s partially why I’m doing this. But the real reason is that you need backup and that makes this the perfect scenario.”
“Sticking me in a teaching role while dealing with a very dangerous perp is the perfect scenario?” I countered.
That made very little sense to me.
“Yes.” Again, no hesitation.
“How?”
“Because I have two cops who want to be Retrievers, and you know quite well that seasoned officers must go through a very trying experience in the field before they can even be considered for the RTP.”
No arguing that. Standard cops were used to a certain way of working. They needed to be thrown directly into the shit of what Retrievers underwent so they could see exactly what they were up against.
“What if they get killed?” I said.
“Then they weren’t cut out for the RTP program,” he said sadly. “You know the deal.”
I wanted to gripe some more, but there was no point. Carter’s mind was made up.
Time to get stoic.
“They’ll be fully under my command?”
“Absolutely,” he answered. “I’ll make doubly sure they understand that.”
I leaned my head back and looked up at the ceiling.
“Fine,” I said after taking a deep, cleansing breath. “Who is it?”
“Brazen and Kix.”
I snapped my head forward.
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Language!”
Chapter 9
I headed back to my desk with the chief in tow. Brazen and Kix had their heads down, working on something, and Reaper was messing around with his tattoo.
“Don’t launch any energy pulses in here,” I warned him.
He didn’t bother to dignify my comment with a remark.
The chief gave me an apologetic glance and sighed. He knew how I felt about this, but we all had our jobs to do, so I rolled my eyes and motioned for him to go for it.
“Officers Brazen and Kix,” he said, jolting them from their paperwork, “you’re going to be working with Piper and Reaper in a supporting role.”
Brazen’s face creased at the sound of that.
“A supporting role?” he quavered in disbelief. “To Piper?”
“Well, at least your hearing works, Officer Brazen,” the chief said.
“That’s good. It’ll help when you formally apply to the RTP, assuming Piper vouches for you, of course.”
“I…what?”
Kix could only blink in response.
Okay, so it was kind of fun to watch both of these bozos squirm under the realization that I held their futures in my hands.
Oh, the power.
“Comprehension isn’t great,” stated the chief with a grin. “You might want to improve that.” He smiled at me. “Bottom line is that you two are going to be under Piper’s command, alongside Reaper here, until I say so. Is that clear?”
They both nodded painfully.
“Good. If she passes you, I’ll put in a recommendation to the brass to get you both in the Retriever Training Program; if she fails you, you’ve got another year to wait.” He leaned in and looked at them both. “I’d recommend you not aggravate her, gentlemen.”
This was getting better and better.
“Piper,” the chief announced, “they’re all yours.”
With that, he headed back to his office, leaving me standing there with one glowing-eyed partner and two dumbass apprentices.
Super.
“All right,” I said, taking immediate control of the situation, “here’s the deal: Reaper and I are going to go topside to the warehouse we were at earlier, in the hopes that those runes are still intact.” I glanced at Reaper. “My guess is they’re not.”
“Not likely,” he agreed.
“You two,” I continued, pointing at Brazen and Kix, “are going to scour every piece of information from every intel portal you can to see if you can spot anything that leads us to Gallien Cross. You’ll find his file online. Read the entire thing. Got it?”
“Whatever you say, boss,” Brazen snarked.
I chose to ignore his sass. It wasn’t easy.
“My gut tells me that he’s not going to be all that easy to track because he has goons that we couldn’t see.”
“So?” asked Kix, frowning.
“So we caught up to him pretty soon after his escape,” I clarified. “By now he may be employing the same methods that the goons were in order to avoid detection.”
“Ah, gotcha.”
Of the two, Kix was definitely less of a pain in the ass. He was still annoying, no doubt, but I had a feeling he’d handle his new role easier than Brazen would.
“Any questions?” I asked. There were none. “Good. We’ll be back in thirty minutes, tops. Anything you two can find to help us plan our next move would be nice.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Brazen. “We’re on it.”
Even with his future in my hands, he was still a nutsack.
I headed off toward the portal, not bothering to look back.
“Let’s go, Reap.”
Chapter 10
The warehouse was still dripping and there were a number of firetrucks around.
We’d set the portal to deliver us up the street, away from the warehouse. This way we wouldn’t risk being spotted by anyone who may be lingering at the scene.
Unlike the standard PPD officers, we were able to jump to non-portal sites. We also arrived within a null zone and a hidden zone. This made it easier on us to sneak up on supers who could see into null zones, while not freaking out the normals who couldn’t see into either the null or hidden zones.
“Looks like there’s still a lot going on down there,” Reaper said.
I smirked. “Well, at least your sleuthing chops are top-notch, Reap. Can you lower your headlights?”
“Sorry.”
“Can everyone see those lamps or just supers?”
Last thing we needed was some normal spotting the glowing Mr. Payne. That would send up a shit storm in the local papers. Nobody would believe the guy, but Reaper and I would end up getting grilled by the Netherworld Sensitivity Council, which was never fun. I knew this for a fact because I was pretty sure my number was one of their speed-dial options.
“Normals can’t see them,” he replied.
“Well, that’s good, at least.”
We began our walk down toward the warehouse, keeping to the side of the road and out of sight. There was no point in raising suspicion from anyone down there.
“Why do they get brighter anyway?” I asked as we crept past a car. “You have problems seeing in the dark?”
“I can see fine in the dark,” he answered. “My eyes glow because of my energy. The more amped up I am, the brighter my eyes get. Think of it like your heartbeat. When you’re excited, your pulse races.”
“But you can dim them pretty fast.”
“Yes,” he answered. “Doing so doesn’t diminish my state of arousal. It’s just one more thing I have to focus on if asked.”
I understood that. Still, those flashy things were going to get us in trouble if he didn’t do something about them.
“Another thing they do is allow me to erase any person’s memory.”
I stopped and looked at him.
Had he just said what I thought he said?
“Once again?” I said, blinking.
“Reapers sometimes arrive on a scene to find a person very close to death,” he explained. “We don’t always know if they will survive or not. But in the moments where they hover between the two realities, they can see us. If the person survives, we must erase this memory.”
That was some useful information to know.
“You mean like that flashy thingy they used in the movie Men in Black?”
“I have no point of reference, I’m afraid,” he said, pondering, “but I can say that we are disallowed from using this power except in the most extreme of circumstances.”
Also good to know. Reaper didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would abuse that power, but it was obvious he did do something to warrant being kicked out of the reaper community for a while. That meant he wasn’t Mr. Goody Two-Shoes either.
I started walking down again until we got to the back of the warehouse.
The entire back wall had been demolished and the area where the runes had been was gone, too.
“Damn it.”
“Indeed,” agreed Reaper. “Hopefully our new partners will have found some information we can use.”
“Ew,” I said, throwing up a little in my mouth. “Don’t call them that.”
I went to transport back, when I saw a face off in the distance. It was almost invisible the way it was hidden in the shadows, but I was damn certain that it was a face.
“Wait,” I said to Reaper before he could finish his transport sequence. “Don’t look now, but to my right there is someone standing in the shadows.”
He looked.
I put my hands on my hips. “You’re really not good at following instructions, are you?”
“Sorry.”
“There’s no doubt your glowing orbs were noticed just then, so this may be moot, but do you have any ability to track people at all?” I was struggling to keep my cool “Or is everything in your arsenal of usefulness contained in that tattoo of yours?”
In response, he closed his eyes and began moving his head around. It was as if he were studying the area in some way that didn’t require vision. Either that, or his vision didn’t rely on his eyes.
He stopped.
“There are three people in the direction you indicated,” he said calmly. “They are all radiating the same feeling that I got from the woman I delivered to Dr. Hale earlier, but these three are all male.”
“Can you pinpoint them exactly?”
His nod was almost imperceptible.
That gave me an idea.
“Okay,” I said, turning and walking away from where the three were hiding out, “let’s head up here, turn a corner, and then transport to where they’re located. Once we show up, I’ll drop them, you put them in stasis, and we send Dr. Hale another gift.”
He looked like he was about to argue with me, or at least question my methods, but he held himself in check.
“Sync your tattoo with mine,” he said
finally, “and I will control the transport.”
Now we were getting somewhere.
Chapter 11
We blinked into existence about ten feet behind our prey.
“Turn off your fucking eyes, Reap,” I yelled through the connector.
“Sorry,” he replied aloud.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I answered as the three men spun and glared at us. Well, I assumed they were glaring. It was hard to tell with their eyes being black and us being in a mostly dark area. “Honest to shit, Reap, you’re going to have to fix that problem and get your connector right or I’ll kick your ass from here all the way back to reaper land.”
“I shall get some shades,” he mumbled. Then, he brightened and said, “Would you like me to send an energy pulse at them?”
It was an option, and so was a shield.
But these guys didn’t have any weapons that I could see, so my guess was that they were bitten and left for dead. Either that or they were placed here to keep an eye on any Retrievers who came back to the scene.
The three began to growl.
“Step back, Reap,” I commanded. “My plan is to kick the shit out of these three and then you’ll put them in stasis. Got it?”
“As you say,” he stated before moving back.
This was not one of those fights where I wanted to use a gun. My hope was a couple of quick kicks and a punch here and there would be all it would take to subdue these three. They didn’t look all that dangerous, from what I could tell.
As if to challenge my thoughts, the one on the left hissed and launched at me faster than should have been possible.
I rolled with the swipe of his hands, noting the razor-sharp claws that stuck an inch out from his fingers. Fortunately they only grazed my cheek, because that would have sucked.
Continuing my spinning motion, I swung an elbow around and clipped him on the back of his head, driving him headfirst into the wall of the brick building we were standing beside. There was an unfortunate thud that went along with the collision. My gut said he wasn’t going to wake up from it.
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