by J. R. Rain
The mother regards me with a look of mild distrust. She grabs Adriana and retreats a step, looking back and forth between me and the two men. “W-why are they just standing there? Even if you run them off, they will come back.”
I smile at her. “No they won’t. At least not these three.”
“You’re an American?” asks the teen girl, a hint of a smile peeking out from under her tears.
“Yeah. Is my accent that obvious?” I pivot the AK down and shoot the first man in the chest twice.
Neither Adriana nor her mother flinches at all.
“What are you doing here?” The mother blinks at me.
“My flight made an unscheduled stop.” I walk over to the two catatonic thugs. “If you have to fly, don’t take Garza airlines. They’re a total letdown.”
The young woman and her mother both gasp as I pull Kidnapper One into an embrace and bite down on his neck.
“Y-you’re a vampire!” blurts the mother.
My lips still clamped on the man’s neck, I stare into her eyes. It seems a bit wrong to make a sarcastic remark to a woman who almost watched her daughter forced into prostitution, so I merely say, Yeah telepathically.
Her eyes widen in fear.
One good thing about finding a piece of shit like this after a dive from an airplane is that I don’t have to fight my hunger while feeding. With each mouthful of blood, the dull aches and pains that had been suffused throughout my body fade away. Sigh. I evidently hadn’t healed all the way. A minute or two later, I drop his corpse and debate taking a bit more from the second guy. Yeah, screw it.
My mental compulsion wears off within seconds of biting him, so he starts screaming and flailing around. I reapply a state of calm by accelerating his face into the side of the pickup truck a few times. The bang, bang, bang startles a couple birds out of a nearby tree. I’m beyond full before taking enough blood to be lethal to the second guy, so I throw him to the ground, and feed him a couple bullets from the AK.
The girl stares at me with a mixture of awe, gratitude, and revulsion.
Since it’s only been like twenty years since my kind revealed ourselves to the world, I probably should do a little PR. “We usually never kill when eating, but these three deserved it. I hate kidnappers.”
“Please, you take Adriana as a thrall, yes?” asks the woman.
“Mom!” The girl stares at her, ‘oh hell no’ written plain on her face.
“Go with her. It is much better than you winding up with men like these.” The woman hugs her again as if to say farewell.
“No, Mama!”
While I can understand the woman’s opinion that being enthralled to a vampire is a fate superior to forced prostitution, I don’t much like the idea of that either. Kidnapping is kidnapping regardless if the restraints are physical or psychic.
“Relax, both of you. I don’t take thralls.” I grab the first dead guy and toss him into the pickup truck’s bed. “And the others I know who do, only accept willing ones.” That isn’t technically a lie, since knowing someone and knowing of someone are different things.
The body hits the truck with a dull thud.
Adriana’s eyes widen at me with a grateful expression.
“You’ve killed these men but others will come,” says the mother. “They always do. I do not want my daughter to be…” She chokes up and covers her mouth with one hand.
“I can’t take her with me, nor does she want to be anyone’s servant.”
Adriana nods at me, then looks toward her mother. “Those men are from Ocotal, they won’t come back here, Mama.”
While the two of them get into a whispery argument over the mother’s willingness to let me take her daughter as a servant, I collect the other two dead guys and toss them in the truck. Adrianna stops arguing first when I approach them holding the three AK-47s.
“Here. If more come back, these should help.”
Adriana takes one eagerly. Her mother less so, but she grabs the other two by the straps.
“Which way is it to Dipilto Viejo?” I ask.
Both of them point up the road.
“Go that way. First time you can turn left, go left. It’s six miles after the turn.” The mother eyes the rifles like she’s not exactly sure how to even hold them. “I don’t know if this is going to work. They’ll only kill us.”
“I’d rather die,” mutters Adriana.
“Is there nothing more you can do for her?” Her mother stares pleadingly at me.
Ugh. I can’t take some random kid back to the States. I gaze into her eyes and implant a few memories of combat training. I’m no Special Forces commando—some of those guys can put a bullet into a one-inch circle at twenty feet without even looking over the sights—but even the fuzzy, watered-down quality of inserted knowledge should be enough for her to deal with these morons.
Her eyes flutter when she lifts out of the mental fog. She glances at the rifle, eyebrows furrowing in confusion at the sudden knowledge of how to use it.
“There. That’s as much as I can do to help. Gotta go.”
Adriana offers a grateful smile. “Thank you. You’re like an angel from heaven.”
I raise a finger, about to make a quip about falling out of the sky, but nah. After nodding at the mother, I trot over to the pickup, hop in, and head off down the road, looking for a spot to ditch the bodies.
Chapter Two
Time Sensitive
The clicking of my shiny black heels on the marble tiled floor is so damn loud I think everyone in Langley is watching me. At least, everyone I can see is. Not that a grey skirt suit stands out in CIA headquarters. A woman my apparent age might get a raised eyebrow or two since I still look like I’m two months out of college.
No, they’re really all stopping in their tracks and staring at me because I’m the Agency’s only vampire. My bright amber eyes are a bit of a tell, at least to anyone observant enough. Though, it could’ve been worse: red and violet are much more obvious. Oh, the bosses are trying like hell to recruit more vamps, but thus far, I’m the only one who’s bored, reckless, idealistic, or random enough to accept.
The pay’s not bad either.
And yeah, I know my parents are loaded. But, the downside of being a vampire? We don’t really do the inheritance thing since we’re immortal… at least as far as time goes. Meaning, we never die of old age but there are ways to kill us. So, their money is going to stay their money. Not like there’s bad blood between us or anything, but our kind tends to have an independent streak. Sharing space with a lover or spouse is one thing, but ‘living with the parents’ or even spending serious amounts of time around them stops as soon as we’re all grown up, and for me, that happened fifteen years ago. I’m 125, but I stopped aging—the sign that we’ve reached maturity—in 2003. It takes a few years for anyone to realize they’ve ceased appearing older, so no vampire jumps straight out of the nest the instant we ‘mature.’ And no, the moment our bodies decide they’re done growing up doesn’t come with a tingly feeling. For most, it takes a while to even notice.
Once my parents realized I’d ‘ripened,’ we had a whole big party and everything as is tradition. Those events are somewhere between a Bat Mitzvah and a debutante ball: a few hours face-timing all the vampires in a 200-mile radius, accepting gifts, and trying not to be bored out of my mind. The worst part had been suffering the disapproving stares everyone gave me upon noticing I had a daughter already. In human terms, I would’ve been eighteen when I had her back in 1983. Fate sometimes has a strange sense of humor. My birth year was 1893. Not that I believe in any of that ‘power of numbers’ stuff, but it’s a cute coincidence. Still, humans get funny about girls becoming pregnant too young, and a lot of my kind have the same idea. Then again, it’s not terribly easy for us to get knocked up—not like humans who breed like damn rabbits—so no one gave me too much attitude over it. Propriety only goes so far when a woman having a baby once every 200 years is considered a lot. Hell, my mother is
a minor celebrity for having my sister and I so close together. My sister, Ayla, was born in 1841.
As my heels click away, Bill, a guy from the cyber unit, passes me in the hall, giving me a look like he’s checking out a hot new sports car. He totally wants to hook up for a one night stand, but he’s too scared to ask. I’m just guessing, by the way. I’d promised not to mind read anyone in the Agency—unless ordered to—but obvious stare at my boobs is, well, obvious. I return a pleasant sort of ‘go die in a fire’ smile at him as we brush shoulders, then pick up my pace down the hallway.
I’m hoping for a quick meeting with my immediate supervisor and maybe a quiet week or two working at my desk. Maybe even a vacation. A week of having nothing to do sounds pretty good after spending three months in the Central American heat.
Everyone keeps looking at me as I go by, all probably wondering if I’m breaking the rules by reading their minds. That’s one thing I had to agree not to do—reading their minds, that is—but they really only have my word on that point. Not like any human would know if I peeked. Still, I suppose the only thing any of us really have in this universe is our word. And yeah, I know I’m a spy, and as a spy I need to deceive, trick, and lie constantly—but doing it to the bad guys is different and totally okay. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
My handler-slash-boss, Andrew Carson, is waiting for me in our usual conference room, where everything is blue-grey and as lifeless as any normal government-issue décor. He appears to be in a good mood. The poor guy’s only forty, but he’s gone full silver already. Someone started calling him ‘Grey’ like a codename and it stuck. And yes, the jokes are quite overdone. Last year, we left fifty pairs of sunglasses in his office.
“Mina…” He stands to shake my hand as I walk in. “Nice job eliminating that problem down in Nic. Made it look like a plane crash, too.”
I sit. “It was a plane crash. Not my idea. Who knew if two idiots pump sixty rounds of 9mm into the console of a fly-by-wire Learjet the thing would have issues staying airborne? Damn idiot Garza didn’t even have a parachute on board.”
He cringes. “Do I want to know how you managed to survive that?”
“Simple matter of obeying the law.”
“The law?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Gravity.”
Andrew smirks. “Right. So, I went over your reports. You found no link to the Dominion at all?”
“I don’t generally make a habit of omitting important details from my reports.” I clasp my hands in my lap. “Garza was affiliated with them, but his activities in Managua had no discernible ties back to them as an organization.”
“Just a thug.”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before. My kind aren’t any more virtuous than humans, Andrew. We have our criminals, too.”
He exhales, fluttering his lips. “Yeah. Hard to process that you guys have been around so long.”
I smile. “It is nice to be out in the open finally. Growing up, I was stuck inside all day. Didn’t really have friends.”
“Stuck inside a mansion, if I remember right.”
“A large prison is still a prison. It was either that or we moved every two or three years. Some of my kind used to move before anyone noticed they weren’t getting older, though it’s more difficult to blend in as a child who isn’t growing up as fast as they ought to be.” I take a sip of water, wondering if Andrew forgot me explaining that my kind ages more slowly than humans, appearing to grow one year older for about every five that pass for mortals… until we finally mature. Then we look the same until something bad happens.
“Right…” He taps his fingers on the table in a mindless rhythm. “Did you celebrate birthdays every year or every five years?”
“We age every year, just far slower than humans.”
“So is that a... yes?”
“Of course it’s a yes. We celebrate birthdays every year.”
Andrew grin makes me think he was chapping my hide.
“Anyway… nice work in Nic.” He pulls a manila folder out of a slim, black briefcase, sets it on the table, and pushes it in front of me.
I eye it, sighing mentally. “I haven’t been back in the states for a full day yet.”
“Sorry. Can’t be helped.”
“Andrew, I’m supposed to take the spawn this weekend.”
A note of regret tilts his eyebrows. “I’m sure she’ll understand. Greater good and all.”
“She’s only thirty-five. She doesn’t understand that stuff.”
Andrew blinks, then stares at me. “Oh, right. Duh. That’s like what, seven?”
“Yes, and she hasn’t seen me for the three months I’ve been down in Nicaragua.”
“Have you told her you’re back yet?”
I sigh. “Of course. What kind of question is that?”
He shrugs with a weak smile. “Just figuring it would’ve been easier on her if she never knew you were back in country before leaving again.”
“I’m going to spend the night at Julian’s.”
“Your ex?” Andrew’s eyebrows both shoot up.
“Ex implies we’d been anything more than lovers, which is all we were. We were never married or even officially a couple. In order to hate someone, there needs to have been love first. Julian and I fell in lust. Chloe was an unexpected surprise.” I peer over the folder at him. “We’re rather cordial now, since that spark has long since died.”
My daughter always stays with Julian when I go away on assignment.
“It was just a question, Mina. Sheesh…” Andrew winks, gestures at the folder. “Unfortunately, we need you to go to Germany. Specifically, Munich, to meet with a deep-cover asset who has obtained time-sensitive, important information he needs to hand off. I suppose leaving in the morning won’t be too much of an issue.”
“They have this thing called email, don’t they?” I half smile and open the manila. “Or is his secure connection down? When did we go back to the 1950s? Am I to follow him to a train station and pluck an envelope out of a trash can?”
Andrew snickers. “Not exactly. The information is not in a form amenable to electronic transfer. Also, we’ve become aware that the asset’s cover may have been compromised. If you have the feeling he’s no longer secure, you’re to extract him.”
“Unbelievable.” I briefly look over a portrait photo of a man in his later twenties. The guy somewhat resembles a surfer dude who pulled his act together and attended West Point. He’s got a laid back quality in his stare, but the posture of a soldier. He’s pretty easy on the eyes. I find myself randomly thinking about priests. That confuses me until I flip the dossier to the next page and see the man’s name: Jake Bishop. “You know I haven’t been in the US for a full twenty-four hours yet. A ‘nice job’ back pat usually comes with a ‘take a day or three off,’ not an immediate next assignment.”
“I know. Sorry. Can’t be helped. It’s vampire related, or we’d send a normal agent. We’re operating under the educated assumption that the Dominion wants the information Mr. Bishop has discovered.”
I groan internally. Of course, the Dominion again. Being the only vampire in the Agency definitely comes with that downside. Every time the D word comes up, it lands in my lap. And I swear, if one more Agent makes a SPECTRE joke, I’m going to bite them. For the first, oh, nine months of my tenure here, I let it go, figuring the humor was so obvious they couldn’t resist. A secret organization of other vamps part way between corporation and crime syndicate focused on influencing the direction of the world? Yeah. The only thing stopping me from laughing at them is they don’t have a hidden island fortress somewhere. At least, I don’t think they do.
Still, they are vampires with an agenda, and sending mortal agents after them won’t accomplish anything. A lone operative attempting to infiltrate an organization of mind reading vampires is doomed to failure, no matter how good the agent might be. It would be like a human trying to infiltrate the Russian Security Service with ‘I am a Spy’ tattoo
ed on their forehead.
“All right. But I’m still spending the night with my daughter, at her father’s house, who’s definitely not my ex. You have a problem with that?”
“Not in the least. And you can be scary sometimes.”
I grin, which may or may not reveal my canines.
“I’m a kitten. See you tomorrow.”
Chapter Three
Munich
My daughter Chloe may only be thirty-five, but she’s mature for her age.
Most humans would regard vampire children as creepy. Our mental acuity often outpaces slower physical development—as in, we are smarter than we look for our age—though our ‘emotional maturity’ can vary and remains closer to what our outward appearance would suggest. By around age twenty—or like a human four-year-old—we’re mostly past behaving childish and come off as tiny adults, to a point. Every now and then a situation can stress us out and we may display what would be considered a typical emotional reaction for a child—like a meltdown.
Such as Chloe sobbing her eyes out when I told her I only had one night back in the States.
Unlike what a human child of seven probably would’ve done, she remained more or less calm despite constant crying. While she didn’t throw a tantrum, she did cling. Julian was his usual charming self, though I can’t say I care too much for his current wife… a young, pretty, auburn-haired human. She’s nice enough—and yes, I did do a thorough background check on her since she’ll be around my kid—but she’s one, a human, and two, the woman is all starry-eyed to be with a vampire, to the point even mind-reading can’t discern if she’s truly in love with him or just in love with the supernatural. Chloe tolerates her, though she does get a little bratty with her new step-mom. Sometimes when she’s discussing that woman, it sounds more like she’s talking about her father’s pet cat.
We had a reasonably pleasant night, despite the crying and clinging. I spent the night there, held my daughter, talked about everything under the sun, and headed straight to the airport at five the next morning. Yeah, I slept the on the plane, with my blackout mask on. Fortunately, my kind don’t need much sleep.