by Rob Cornell
Laz was right. They’re straits had gotten dire. But as a former preacher, Laz should have had an easier time of keeping the faith.
Laz opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling as if speaking to God. “The black mold creeping up the walls in the bedrooms? I lived better when I was on the streets.”
Roddy jerked his chin up. “Then maybe you should go back, you ungrateful bitch.”
Earl slapped the table. “No. We ain’t having any infighting. Laz has a right to air his grievances. You all do.”
“In that case,” Tony said. “I got a few myself.”
Tony sat on Earl’s left-hand side. He looked down at the table, picking at a threadbare piece of the felt, his nail making this annoying click each time it scraped the wood underneath.
Tony was the only black on the crew. Boy had muscles on his arms as big as a baby’s head. He had the best aim out of all of them too. Could fire any kind of weapon you handed to him. Handled the supernatural laser beam thing Mr. Dolan had helped them find in one of Earl’s dreams as if he’d carried such a thing back in his Desert Storm days.
Negro or not, he had skills this team needed.
Tony pointed across the table at the fella who went by Whisper. He had a build to match his name, all elbows and knees, and an Adam’s apple that jutted out like a warhead. He wore tiny little John Lennon glasses and a sad excuse for a goatee as patchy as a bed of weeds. Hell, Roddy could grow thicker facial hair.
“Whisper Boy here jacks off so hard he shakes the bunk. Snores like a motherfucker too.”
Whisper glared at Tony over the tops of his circle lenses. “I have apnea.”
Tony rolled his eyes and ran his hands over his kinky hair that always looked like a rat’s nest to Earl.
“It’s true,” Roddy chimed in. “I can hear Whisper spanking it from my bunk across the room. It’s gross.”
Whisper crossed his arms and leaned back. “You’re both just jealous that I’m man enough to express my sexuality without shame.”
This time Earl hit the table with a fist. The table cracked under the felt. Another strike and the blasted thing might collapse. A far cry from the metal cafeteria table they had at their last place. The old missile silo had worked perfectly for them. Plenty of room. No need to crowd six men into a single bedroom because the other room’s floor had rotted out, making it utterly useless.
Funds had run out fast once Earl got fired as shift manager at the metal shop. Fuckers didn’t want to give him the sick time he deserved. Excessive tardiness and absence, the pink slip had claimed.
They had no idea the importance of what he was working on on the side.
Now they lived off the meager scrapings from the few part-time jobs his men held, including the paper route Roddy still had from when he was in middle school. The kid, bless his heart, gave everything he earned toward the cause. On the other hand, Earl suspected Tony and even Art were holding back some of their salaries, though he couldn’t prove it so couldn’t call them on it.
The snap of the table cracking won the crew’s attention. All eyes flicked to Earl.
He trailed his gaze around the circle, meeting each of his men’s eyes before moving onto the next.
“If you’d all stop bickering, you could listen to what comes next. Things are about to turn around for us.”
Tony leaned his elbows on the table. It wobbled on its legs, but held up the Negro’s bulk. “You finally come around to my idea? With that weapon we got, we could storm any bank we wanted and blow the vault right open. We’d be set for years.”
Earl pointed a finger in Tony’s face. “We ain’t criminals. So just get that idea out of your head.”
“If we ain’t criminals, why we got to hide out in ratholes like this?”
“We ain’t hiding. Jesus pissing in a pot, won’t you all stop blabbing and listen?”
Tony sucked air through his big nostrils.
That boy never would have dared act so uppity back home in Tennessee. Earl had half a mind to move the operation south just to keep the black boy in his place. But a dream had told Earl that he needed to stay close to Chicago. Some kind of resource was supposed to be nearby. The dream hadn’t been all that specific.
Didn’t matter. Earl trusted Mr. Dolan. He would travel straight to hell if the master asked.
Ain’t that kind of what he’d done visiting the Inbetween?
After Tony backed down, Earl sat a little straighter. He finally had their attention and he could ease their minds about their current situation.
“First of all, Mr. Dolan has given me a location to one of his old safe houses. We’ll find a stash of cash there that will lift us out of our hard circumstances.”
Tony’s bright eyes lit up. “How much we talking?’
“It don’t matter. It’ll be enough.” He gave Tony a chance to gripe, but the boy stayed quiet. Though Earl could hardly hope the Negro had learned his place. “We’re also gonna find some things to help with our ritual.”
Roddy started fidgeting like a coon in a trap again. “What’s the ritual gonna do?”
Earl smiled. “It’s going to bring our master back.”
Art slowly leaned in toward Earl. He placed a hand on Earl’s forearm. The shadows across his face shifted like a dark spirit, the kind Earl’s momma used to threaten would get him and his brother if they didn’t go to sleep at night.
“You sure about this?” Art whispered.
“Why? You scared?”
Art’s deep set eyes gleamed. “Sounds impossible, is all.”
“Have any of my dreams been wrong?”
Art didn’t have nothing to say to that. He took his hand off Earl’s arm, nodded.
See? Art knew his place. Another reason he sat at Earl’s right side.
“We’ll get the stuff for the ritual from Mr. Dolan’s stash,” Earl continued. “But we still need the fucking girl.”
Whisper snickered.
Earl shot him a look he hoped reminded the skinny punk of the last time he crossed Earl, putting moves on Kit. The nose holding up Whisper’s tiny glasses was a still a little crooked. Earl had no stomach for pedophiles, especially when they tried to prey on his niece. The only reason Earl hadn’t kicked Whisper from the group was because of his computer skills. Pasty freak had skills with electronics equal to Tony’s way of handling weapons.
“Something funny?” Earl asked.
Whisper shrunk back, but the smirk on his face didn’t totally fade. “Naw, just thinking of something.”
Earl didn’t bother asking. He didn’t want to know.
“Then tell me you still have that tracer thing on her?”
“It’s not on her. It’s in her. She swallowed it when I slipped it into her drink at that club. So, yeah, I still have a signal. Or at least, I did until she entered a black zone.”
Roddy wrinkled his brow and curled his lip. “If she swallowed it, won’t she just shit it out eventually?”
“It attaches to her stomach lining, dumb ass.”
Earl waved his hands. “Hold on a sec. What the hell you mean by black zone?” He thought Whisper sometimes talked funny just to make Earl feel stupid. What was worse was that it worked. “Do you know where she’s at or not?”
Whisper adjusted his glasses on his nose. “I have a general location. The signal dropped somewhere in the middle of Indiana.”
“Indiana?”
“My guess is the Agency has a base there. So it makes sense they have some kind of anti-surveillance system in place. All we have to do is wait until she moves and we’ll pick her up again.”
Tony leaned a little harder on the table. It creaked. Damn fool seemed to want to break it. “Why don’t we head to Indiana and storm the place? We could tear the place apart with the weapon.”
Whisper made a face and spat air. “Yeah, right. Secret government agency with a cadre of covert agents trained to kill monsters? We’ll make short work of them, I’m sure.”
“Damn right we will
.”
Whisper raised his eyebrows and giggled like a girl. “Are you stupid or something?”
Earl chopped a hand through the air before Tony could respond. “Enough.” He looked to Tony. “Even with the weapon, we’d be outgunned, assuming we could get in the place to begin with.”
“Or see it, for that matter,” Whisper said. “I doubt it’s sitting out in the open with a welcome mat at the door.”
“So we have to sit on our asses and wait?” Roddy asked.
“We don’t sit on our asses. We get the stuff of Mr. Dolan’s. We prepare. We have everything ready, so when we get the girl, all we have to do is bring the master back where he belongs.”
Art crossed his arms. “And where is that?”
Earl grinned. “In the girl.”
Chapter Nineteen
“YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?”
Jessie sat at the big conference table, polished oak or some other kind of fancy wood, that shined under the fluorescent lighting. Normally the table would look pretty beautiful. But not under this light. It just hurt Jessie’s eyes looking at it.
Then there was the grating voice of Kinga Kowalski as she laid out the dumbest mission in the Agency’s history using a freaking slide show on a plasma screen TV twice the size as the one in Jessie’s suite—and that one was pretty freaking huge.
The last slide showed on the TV now. Jessie stared at it, mouth hanging open. The itchy fabric on the chair’s padding made her feel like she had those proverbial ants in her pants. Again, the Agency’s budget had room for giant televisions, but skimped on the simple comforts. Typical.
“Why would you think this a joke?”
Chalkboard with nails scraping you? You are outclassed by this woman’s voice.
“This isn’t the kind of mission we do,” Jessie said. She swiveled her chair to face Ree, who sat in the middle of the table to her right. The setup reminded her of that movie gag where a couple sit at a giant dining table on opposite ends and one asks the other to please pass the salt. Under Borscht’s rule, things had already gotten weird. “Is it?” she asked Ree.
Ree took a couple seconds before he answered, Jessie could see the wheels turning and the steam coming out his ears. Jessie hated her position in this new regime, but she sure as shit didn’t envy his. She still couldn’t believe Ree was on their side. He had to come to his senses now, though, after King’s presentation. Right?
Finally, Ree spoke. “It’s a sound plan.”
“I’m not talking about the freaking plan. I’m talking about the mission.” She pointed at the map on the screen, the big red circle around some boonies village in Iraq. “This shit has nothing to do with the Return and everything to do with politics.”
Jessie might have imagined it, but it looked like Ree twitched. God, he had to know this was a mistake.
“I thought I made it clear,” Kinga said. “The group that has taken over that village is not Al-Qaeda. They are a band of vampires with a frightening new technology that could threaten humankind. How is that not in line with the Agency’s mission statement?”
Jessie quirked up an eyebrow. “We have a mission statement?”
Kinga sighed and shook her head, playing schoolmarm again. (Whatever marm meant. Jessie never had figured that out.)
“You’ve clearly operated in a silo, unaware of the larger operations here.”
What the fuck was she talking about? “You mean, like a missile silo?”
Another sigh, another smarmy glare. “Each department in the Agency currently operates as a silo. There is little awareness of what happens outside of each department’s silo. The general plans on changing that.”
“Yippie doo. We’re all going to meet and hold hands.” She shook her head. Maybe the part of her brain that interpreted language had come loose and all this talk of silos was really something else entirely. A girl could hope, right? “I don’t understand what this has to do with the Return. You know, the whole point of the Agency nowadays? Or did you miss that memo when you barged in here and took over?”
Kinga sucked in her lips. Looked like she might have been biting one. It created an odd expression. She turned to Ree. “Is she always this insubordinate?”
Ree glanced at Jessie. A deer in headlights had nothing on Ree at that moment. He cleared his throat. “She has her own style.”
“Well,” Kinga barfed as if the word had been caught in her throat. “We don’t have time for style. The general has laid out a detailed strategy for the coming months that will keep Ms. Lockman quite busy.” She aimed a nasty, fake smile at Jessie. “Perhaps it’s time you matured to the level of your position.”
Jessie drew back. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means—” She cranked up the smile while her eyes looked a little crazed. Grace Kelly had turned into Mommy Dearest. “—you should show a little respect for your superiors.”
“Superiors?” Jessie choked on the word. “Let me tell you something, Kingaroo. I don’t like to get cocky, but this whole Agency realigned itself to back me up on my mission. I am the Return. And without me, you go back to trying to fight supernaturals the old way, shooting everything up and asking questions you can’t answer later.”
And there went the phony smile, putting Kinga into full rage mode. “I will not tolerate this disrespect. Neither will General Borscht.” She pronounced neither as n-eye-ther. Of course.
“You and the general can kiss each other’s—”
“Jess,” Ree hissed through his teeth. “Please.”
Jessie speared a finger in his direction. “And you. I’m ashamed to think I liked you. I thought you were different than the other stiffs surrounding me. Guess Wertz was the last one alive that really gave a shit about me. Now I’ve got no one.”
She stood, sending her chair rolling away behind her until it knocked against the wall. Damn the tears filling her eyes. She felt her mascara turning to goo. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist making a black streak across her skin.
“I’m done,” she said, voice wavering. She felt like a petulant teen. She felt like she had back when she and Mom argued all the time. What she wouldn’t give to have those days back.
“I’d advise you take your seat.” Kinga had set aside her rage for a new look. Her pinched stare looked like a threat.
Tears rolling down her cheeks, surely making her look like Miss Piggy, Jessie laughed. “What are you gonna do to me? Demote me? Dishonorably discharge me? Don’t do me any favors.”
Kinga casually walked over to the door leading out of the conference room and stood in front of it. Crossed her arms.
Ree stood. “Lieutenant Kowalski, this isn’t necessary. Jessie is just upset.”
“You’re damn right I am.” Jessie strode up to Kinga. They were practically the same height, which let Jessie stare Kinga down, nose-to-nose. “Get out of my way.”
“Continue this behavior and there will be dire consequences.”
Jessie narrowed her eyes. “You have no idea the shit I’ve been through.” She saw her father. She saw her mother. She saw Marty. She saw Wertz. She saw Ryan. All people she’d lost one way or another. “There isn’t a damn thing you can do to me that would come close to hurting me worse.”
“We’ll see about that.” Kinga stepped aside and opened the door. She held a hand out toward the hallway outside, painted in industrial gray and lined with a track of fluorescent lights like a glowing spine along the ceiling.
A chill rolled in Jessie’s stomach. She didn’t like Kinga’s smug expression. “You’re going to let me out?”
“Be my guest,” Kinga said. “We know where to find you.”
Jessie suspected she might be facing another lockup. Not anything she hadn’t dealt with before. But not something she wanted to repeat. Which meant Jessie had to get the hell out of Dodge. If Kinga and her beloved general were the direction the Agency was taking, Jessie had every intention of traveling the opposite way.
She sm
iled at Kinga. “See ya.”
“Most definitely.”
With that, Jessie slipped out of the room into the fucking blare of the fluorescents. She would not miss this place’s irritating lighting.
She heard Ree call her name on her way out.
She kept walking.
Chapter Twenty
THE URGE TO KILL PUMPED hard in Elka’s veins.
She sat at a table toward the back of a Starbuck’s in Chicago’s Loop. At midmorning, the café was stuffed with people. Their human stink overwhelmed the coffee smell, ruining the peace she craved. Students from the local colleges took up many of the tables, backpacks slung on the chair backs, textbooks open in front of them, or notebooks they furiously scribbled in.
Elka had always planned on going to college.
That bitch had killed that dream as quickly as her friends in black had killed her father.
Oh, how she needed to kill. She imagined the feel of her horn stabbing the girl through the eye, the tip breaking through the back of her skull.
She had a ways to go before that could happen. She had to find the bitch first. But finally—finally—she had a lead, and if the Great Beyond granted her any luck, she would find a trace of the girl left behind in the rubble of that house, giving Elka material to cast a tracking spell.
Unfortunately, she needed mortal help if she wanted to get anywhere near who UniLover69 had referred to as the Chosen One. Seemed the girl’s sole purpose was to rid the mortal plane of supernaturals with that blue light of hers.
Whether they wanted to go or not.
This hitch in Elka’s plans was what kept her in Chicago and brought her to this café. Yesterday she put an ad in the Tribune’s classifieds. Cryptic enough that most mortals wouldn’t understand, but hopefully clear enough to draw the right types. The magic fanatics. Mortals who wanted to expose the paranormal underworld to the light.
A foolish goal.
Nearly the entire mortal population would go insane knowing what lurked around them in secret. Riots. The crumbling of governments. War. Cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria.