by Logan Byrne
“If you incant it without confidence, it won’t work as well. Come on, we have to go,” she said, picking me up, the two of us running away.
“What happened? Why didn’t you come back the way you were supposed to?” Xelia asked as we picked back up with them.
“There were too many guards inside. The hallways aren’t very wide, and we didn’t have a way to get by without them noticing us,” I said, out of breath.
“Did you get it? The evidence?” Blake asked.
“Yeah, we both got pictures of everything we could inside the baby room. I think there were more baby rooms, but this should do,” I said.
“Great, we’ll get this put together and give it to the judge as soon as possible. Let’s get out of here before we’re seen,” Xelia said.
•••
“This mission isn’t going to be fun, nor is it going to be easy,” Mirian said, with a small crowd gathered around him. He was speaking in front of thirty or so of us, all ready for the raid on the club, with the sole purpose of getting the babies out of there. We’d told the judge we suspected they were also farming mortal women, turning them, and that was where the babies were coming from. He urged us to rescue them, and anything else illegal we found was under our jurisdiction with the warrant. “We need to cover all our bases. There are three main entrances and exits into the building. The front, the back, and one entrance on the west side of the building. We need three officers on each entrance, maybe four if we can spare it, and we need the rest of you inside searching.”
“What are we searching for, exactly?” an officer asked from the crowd.
“We have verified intelligence that the vampires running the club are kidnapping mortals, mainly women, and transforming them before impregnating them and making them give birth to vampire babies, which we all know can be very powerful and dangerous. They’re incubating both the women and babies, and we need to mount a full-scale rescue mission. Obviously we also need to take every single vampire or other being or creature inside that building into custody. The current club patrons will be in the club portion, and nobody will be allowed to enter or leave unless they’re somebody who’s currently in this room right now. Are we all clear?” Mirian asked.
“Yes,” we all said in unison. I looked around, never expecting this many officers to be a part of this mission, but I was glad they were. I knew word had to be traveling to Kiren soon, if it hadn’t already, and time was of the essence. Mirian knew that as well, which was probably why he was trying to hurry us along.
We had portals ready to take us outside the club on all sides, with officers keeping guard being teleported around the building so nobody could escape if they called out we were there. “Ready?” I asked Charlie, just before we went through the portal.
“Let’s do it, partner,” he said, running through.
I jumped through, being shot outside the rear entrance of the club where Britta and I had gone in before. Our other officers were already engaging, some of the vampires running out and trying to cause problems, while two others were in cuffs on the ground. “We need backup!” an officer said.
“Arma Maximus,” I said, waving my wand, covering him as a vampire charged him. He bounced into the barrier, falling backwards, his speed not quite matched to my spell.
“Rigormorio,” I said, freezing him in place. I thought the more powerful of the immobilization spells was necessary for fully-fledged vampires. They were powerful—Xelia had made me realize that much—and we couldn’t afford any of them breaking free and getting word out about our arrival.
“You guys go inside, we have it out here,” an officer said to Charlie and me, as well as four other officers who were with us.
The hallway was as I left it—cold, desolate, and without remorse. It looked like the type of place you went to die in a nightmare, though none of us had any desire to do that tonight. There were officers running around, shifting, throwing spells, and doing whatever they could to gain an upper hand on the vampires inside. The vampires yelled to one another about the product, instructing each other to keep us away at all costs. They knew what we were after, and they’d do whatever they could to protect it.
I started to wonder if they considered how we knew what we were coming after. Maybe they didn’t know we were aware of the babies and women’ maybe they thought we were after their drugs or whatever else illegal they had going on in here. Maybe they were panicked, thinking that we would find them out and they would get in so much more trouble than they would be in for their drug operation.
With my wand out, I walked into the fray, Charlie shifting with a cat-like hiss escaping his throat, before he ran up the stairs. I covered him, throwing bolts from my wand at any vampires who dared go near my partner. We were in perfect sync, like two souls dancing together as one. I had his back, and I knew he had mine. We were yin and yang, and our goal was just around the corner.
Charlie pinned down a vampire, another officer running up with special tungsten handcuffs that vampires couldn’t escape from. “Rigormorio!” I shouted, zapping a vampire who tried to jump above the kneeling officer.
“Thanks for that. You guys go on ahead, we have this,” the officer said, as some backup came to help him subdue the suspects.
“It’s right up here,” I said to Charlie as we neared the doorway Britta and I had gone through.
“Hey! Put them down, you’re under arrest under the authority of M.A.G.I.C.” Charlie hissed as men inside the room were packing up the babies for transport.
“We said to freeze!” I yelled, my wand pointed straight at them. They smiled for a second, before I felt myself get smacked over the back of the head. I fell down, my wand escaping my grasp and rolling a few inches away, my vision shaky and the room spinning.
All I heard was Charlie shriek, the same way a cat would, as my hand scoured the floor looking for my wand. The men ran past us, the babies in tow, as I heard things blow up outside. “Charlie,” I said softly.
He was whimpering, still in his jaguar form, when Britta ran in the room. “Guys! We need assistance! Two officers are down!” she yelled down the hall.
“They just ran out with the babies. Go…go after them,” I said, sitting up against the wall.
“Other officers will take care of it, Lexa. We need to get you out of here,” she said.
“No, I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving this mission so don’t even suggest it. I’ll be fine, just give me a couple minutes, please,” I said, as two officers came into the room.
“They said they aren’t leaving. I think they just got knocked down. I’ll take care of them, you two go try to secure the men who ran off with some of the babies,” Britta said.
The officers ran off the way Britta pointed, taking her order. “Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Just shut up and take it. Here, this might hurt a little. Costa Cranius,” she said, her wand pointed at my head.
“Ow! Damnit, Britta!” I yelled, the surge of the spell stinging at first before I felt the pressure in my skull relieving.
“Costa Instaurabo,” she said to Charlie, who whimpered some more before I heard his ribs crack back into their rightful places. He stood up on all fours, shaking his head.
“Thank you, Britta. You’re the best,” he said, rubbing up against her side like a house cat.
“I’m staying with you two, there’s no way I’m letting you guys run off on your own tonight. It looks like you need me,” she said, smiling, knowing we totally owed her for saving us.
“There has to be some kind of office here or something. Maybe they have something we can use,” I said, dusting myself off, before we ran out of the room.
There were a couple more stories to the building, a myriad of rooms offering dead ends. The number of vampires running around or trying to attack us dwindled. Officers were everywhere, I was even sure there were more than when we started the raid. After five minutes of searching, we finally found a door with a glass insert in the window tha
t said “Office” on it.
“This has to be it,” I said, busting the door open. Nobody was inside, the office bare, though a half-smoked cigar was still burning in an ashtray.
“Somebody left in a hurry,” Britta said as we walked inside.
“They really keep their files pretty disorganized, don’t they?” Charlie asked.
“No, I don’t think they do,” I said, walking around the giant oak desk in the center of the room.
“They’re all over the place,” Charlie said.
“But look at them, I think he was trying to take something before they left. Maybe there was some damning evidence that they didn’t want the police to find out about. Evidence that gave away names, or even just about the operation itself,” I said.
“I think Lexa is right on this one. I think the boss had to get rid of evidence when he saw us coming up,” she said, pointing to a few monitors off to the side showing security camera footage. We could see all our men outside and around the building, cuffing their henchmen and taking them back to the precinct through portals.
“There has to be something, though, right? Something must give us a clue as to who this person is, this boss, and what he was doing in this club and trying to hide,” I said, sorting through some papers on the desk.
It was mostly boring stuff, some employee files, random documents, and even some bills, but nothing that gave us any real evidence. There weren’t any documents about the babies, the women, other locations where they might be hiding them, or backup locations to take them. It was like they just disappeared.
“What’s this?” Charlie asked, handing me a thick postcard-like rectangle.
“It looks like an invitation of some kind. It’s for a week from now,” I said, looking over the glossy black invitation. “It’s in New York, the mortal realm, and it looks like some kind of important event.”
“What if the boss is going?” Charlie asked.
“Why would he leave that around, though? Or leave it behind?” Britta asked.
“It’s probably not a high priority for him to keep that in a safe place. After all, it’s just some invitation he got in the mail. He probably cared much more about getting his documents out of the building before he cared about some fancy invitation to some gala he probably didn’t want to go to in the first place,” Charlie said.
“Maybe Kiren will be there,” I said, poring over the invitation.
“Maybe, but maybe this boss will be there,” Britta said.
“How would we know which guy is him, though? There aren’t exactly any family photographs sitting on his desk, are there?” Charlie asked.
“The cigar,” she said, pointing at the gently smoking stub in the ashtray. “It doesn’t seem that common in this day and age, so maybe he would have one on him. If not, Charlie could definitely track the smell to somebody, couldn’t you?”
“Yeah, it smells like a dirty old man. That kind of scent isn’t exactly easy to get rid of, you know,” he said.
“I think we should get it to Mirian,” Britta said. “We should probably get out of here.”
I had somewhat different plans with this gala. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to take down the man doing this to these poor women, but there was a bigger picture at stake here that I wanted to explore. Kiren was behind this, behind the kidnappings, this club, and I knew he would be at this gala. This sort of fundraiser was right up his alley. He was always demanding money from his constituents, and this event would be no different. All I needed to do was research this building, and then I could figure out my next steps. I didn’t know what I’d do if he were there, but I knew I’d do something. I couldn’t let him run free any longer.
12
“Lexa, they’re going to be taking some of the women off their sedation,” Charlie said, gasping for air like he’d just ran a marathon.
I perked straight up, putting my things down on my desk and running with him to the infirmary where they were holding some of the newly minted vampire females from the club raid last night. We’d rescued them, at least the ones who had already had babies, as the vampires in the club left them behind like yesterday’s trash.
We’d managed to arrest about eighteen vampires, with probably just as many escaping, though none of the ones we arrested were talking, which was to be expected. Vampires were as thick as thieves, especially when they were part of a brotherhood or organization like this, and they’d likely never rat on one another, but we could at least put pressure on them. They weren’t going to have any contact with the outside world, and if they knew we had the women and they were talking, one of them, just one of them, might give us a shred of information we could act on.
“Where am I?” one of the women asked, opening her eyes. “What, what are you?”
She looked shocked. The nurse leaning over her, a troll, was probably causing her extreme shock and disbelief. “You should take this one,” the nurse said to me before walking out.
“Hi, my name is Lexa, and I’m a police officer. Can you tell me your name?” I asked.
“Where am I? I don’t understand why I’m here,” the girl said.
“Can you please tell me the last thing you do remember?” I asked.
“It was last night, my friend Stephanie asked me to go with her to this new club in the Meatpacking District. We went, and I think I passed out or something. Now I’m here,” she said.
“Do you remember the date of this occurrence?” I asked.
“It was yesterday—Tuesday,” she said.
“No, I mean the actual date,” I asked.
“The third, I think,” she said.
“Of?” I asked.
“September?” she replied, as if I should know.
“That was over a month ago. A month and a half, to be more precise,” I said. The look of shock and horror on her face was enough to freeze a Gorgon. You would’ve thought I told her a flesh-eating tentacle was eating her brain and the only solution was to sing polka music until her tongue fell out of her mouth.
“I’ve been unconscious that long? Why does my stomach hurt? I feel cold,” she said. “And why did that lady look so weird? The nurse.”
“That’s a lot of questions, and you need to calm down. What I’m about to tell you isn’t going to make a lot of sense to you just yet. You’re under a lot of stress, your body and your mind, and you need to just promise me you’ll keep calm,” I said.
“Just tell me where I am,” she said.
“You’re in the infirmary ward in the M.A.G.I.C. building. You’re in the magical realm, not the mortal realm where you were born,” I said.
“Lexa,” Charlie said.
“No, she deserves to know. Wouldn’t you want to know in her situation?” I asked.
“What situation? What’s wrong with me? Why is my skin gray?” she asked, looking at her arm.
“That night in the club, you didn’t just pass out. You were bitten,” I said.
“By what? One of those jungle bugs from the cargo ships?” she asked, shaking.
“No, a vampire,” I said.
“Okay, really funny, aren’t you supposed to be a cop? Are you allowed to pull stunts like this?” she asked, annoyed.
“This is Charlie,” I said, pointing at him. “Watch him.”
He sighed, obviously not up for my games, but he shifted anyway. The girl’s eyes almost rolled back into her head as if she’d just seen a ghost, which ironically she might if she went a few rooms over.
“See, I knew it was too much,” he said, shifting back. The nurse came back into the room, giving the woman some black liquid into her IV.
“This will calm her down,” she said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Wolfsbane. It can be lethal for werewolves, but a nice, calming sedative for vampires. Works wonders if you have the right dosage. I think it’s best we just let her rest for now. She and the rest of these girls aren’t going to like what’s coming their way when they wake up. Can’t imagine h
aving your entire existence changed like that. Shame,” the nurse said, shaking her head, before walking out of the room.
“She’s right, I can’t imagine it. I was born like this, always knowing about the magical realm and all the beings and creatures in it. Imagine waking up one day and being something, someone, totally different than you always thought you were,” Charlie said, walking out of the room too.
I looked at the girl again. We weren’t really all that different, she and I. Maybe a vampire didn’t bite me, but I did wake up one day and started living an entirely new life, being given abilities that I never would’ve dreamt of before. Maybe we weren’t so different after all.
•••
“Good job on your raid last night. You all did a wonderful job and I couldn’t be any prouder of your work in finding this club and getting the evidence needed to secure the warrant,” Mirian said, congratulating Charlie and me in his office.
“We also found this,” I said, handing over the invitation. I’d spent the night memorizing it. I didn’t know if Mirian would want to keep it or not, or if Charlie would’ve stolen it from me, but I had to make sure I knew what was written on it before I handed it over, just in case I didn’t get a chance to see it again.
“I’ve heard about this gala, it’s an annual event hosted by the current administration. They do fundraisers for various charities in the magical realm,” Mirian said.
“How come it’s in the mortal realm? I looked up the address,” I said.
“I’m not sure, but this company at the top, the building, rings a bell. I think they might be magically owned, but it isn’t much of our concern, is it?” he asked.
“What do you mean? The boss at the club had this in his office. Shouldn’t we investigate it further because of that? What if he’s there?” I asked.
“I’m not sure about that, Lexa. Are we going to burst in with a unit and find a single man and arrest him in front of everybody in attendance? I’m not sure that’s the smartest move to take,” Mirian said.
“We can’t just leave it, Mirian. I feel very strongly about this,” I said, challenging him and his authority for what felt like the first time.