by L. J. Red
Brigit flopped down into her seat. For once, her desk was practically empty. It was weird to be able to see the chipped varnish; usually it was completely covered in case files. Brigit, feeling useless, turned on her computer and stared at the loading screen, tapping her nails against the desk. Brigit hated sitting around twiddling her thumbs. She needed to be doing something, solving a case. That was her life.
Dana becoming a vampire had caused changes in more than just their friendship. No one was sure what it meant for the Chicago PD. Was Dana technically dead now? Could a dead person work? Could a vampire also be a cop? Brigit knew Dana had gotten very good at ignoring the stares and mutters from their fellow cops. Brigit had put her own job on the line, telling their captain she’d walk out if Dana was fired. She might be struggling to accept her friend as a vampire but Dana was still her friend, and she wasn’t going to let her get fired just because she sacrificed her life to protect the city. Captain Davis had gone to bat for Dana, ensuring that she kept her job and her position as Brigit’s partner, but Brigit knew he was taking a lot of shit from higher up. Which meant he had to be extra careful about which cases to give them. Brigit glanced at her empty desk. Which was why her desk was so damn tidy.
“Hey, where’s your vamp partner? Sun’s down. Shouldn’t she be here now?” Sanders called from across the room.
“What, you want me to hold your hand, Sanders? You scared?” She looked him up and down scathingly, from the tips of his short hair to the greasy stain on his shirt. “Don’t worry, she doesn’t eat junk food.” The cops behind him jeered. He flushed, his sandy blond hair standing out against the red of his skin, and sent her a rude gesture. What a dick. It was one thing for Brigit to worry about the state of her and Dana’s friendship, but it was a totally different thing if some asshole decided to insult her. Dana and Brigit had caught enough flak being women on the force. She wasn’t going to stand up for any more insults.
The door to the bullpen rocked open and Brigit tensed, but it wasn’t Dana. It was an unfamiliar man: tall, with dark skin and close curls with a dusting of gray. He was wearing a suit. She sat up straighter. A nice suit. A Fed suit. He paused for a second, scanning the room, then fixed his eyes on the captain’s office and walked through the room toward it. The bullpen fell silent in his wake and Captain Davis appeared at the doorway to his office, clearly tipped off by the unusual silence. Brigit only then noticed the two people following the black guy. This first was a short man, thick bottle glasses balanced on his nose and messy brown hair. A step behind him was a woman with a short black bob and skin a shade lighter than the first Fed. All three disappeared into the captain’s office.
“What’s that about? Dana’s voice came from directly behind Brigit and she jumped about a foot in the air.
“Holy shit!” she said loudly. Everyone turned to stare. Oops. Brigit glared them all down.
“Sorry.” Dana slipped into her seat opposite, looking remorseful.
“You scared the crap outta me. You’re like a cat.”
“I know, I forgot—” Dana broke off.
Forgot she had vampire skills now. Brigit swallowed nervously. “It’s cool,” she said into the silence before it could stretch too long. She sent a small grin at her friend and Dana returned it. Brigit caught a hint of fang behind Dana’s lips and looked away quickly. Every now and then Brigit forgot what had happened, and then she’d see something like Dana’s fangs and remember. She’d see a light in her friend’s eyes. A quality to the way she moved, a kind of grace. A restrained strength that seemed to go beyond the muscles in her arms to something deeper—a core of strength that no human could carry. It was impressive. Brigit couldn’t deny that, but it scared her a little. Sometimes she missed her human friend. They couldn’t go out in the sun anymore to catch a coffee. They were constrained to late shifts, and while Dana seemed happy, Brigit wondered if she ever missed the sunrise, or if the thought of drinking blood turned her stomach.
And yet, being a vampire seemed to suit Dana more than being human had. She seemed more comfortable in her skin. Then again, perhaps that was less due to her vampire nature and more due to the man who had turned her—Lucian, the leader of the Shadows, and apparently Dana’s soulmate. Brigit had been skeptical that such a thing was even real. Soulmates sounded like a fairy tale, and vampires sure weren’t fairy tales, or if they were, it was the old ones—the dark, powerful, terrifying kind of ones. Brigit shivered. Was it worth it, she wondered, to give up your human life to gain a soulmate in return? She supposed she would never know. After all, there was no soulmate out there for her. Brigit McReeve was not the kind of woman who found a soulmate. Nope, she was one hundred percent modern American: no soulmates, no vampires, no strings, no drama. That was how she liked it. If she needed to scratch that itch she’d find a one-night stand in a noisy club; no muss, no fuss.
Oh sure, Brigit had believed in the whole true love thing. She knew what she looked like: a tiny, baby doll blonde. That was all anyone saw when they met. Her mom had tried to dress her in pretty dresses when she was a kid until she’d come home from the park with her brothers with ripped dresses and skinned knees enough times that her mom had finally admitted defeat and let her wear jeans. Brigit had fought against the cute little girl crap until her teens, when she’d discovered makeup and boys and realized there could be a kind of power in being five-foot-nothing with big eyes. Of course that hadn’t stopped her joining the academy and learning just how to use that five-foot-nothing against attackers twice her size. She was good at her job. She was proud of it, but if people were going to see her as just a pretty little thing? Well, then she’d use that against them.
“Anything new?” Dana asked, breaking Brigit’s train of thought.
She flicked through the handful of cases on the computer. “Someone threw a brick through the window of a vampire-owned shop.”
Dana frowned. “Another vandalism. Dammit, why do people keep doing this crap.”
Brigit nodded. The city was still so torn up; it had been months since the Monster of Chicago had died but anti-vampire feelings were still heavy in Chicago. For a short while, things had finally been starting to change and then, just last month, the Vampire Ravagers, a gang of vampire criminals, had attacked the Sanctuary. The battle had been splashed across news headlines up and down the country. “Vampire criminals gone mad.” “Vampires roam the streets of Chicago.” They weren’t far wrong. It had been a mess. All the police had been able to do was clear the surrounding area. The fighting had been so thick and so dangerous they couldn’t even get near the Sanctuary. Then, when they were finally able to carve a path through, the battle suddenly, explosively, ended. The Shadows were still standing, the Sanctuary building was half-wrecked, and inexplicably, all the Ravagers were dead, some of them just disintegrating where they stood, leaving creepy skeletal corpses of ash and dust. Brigit still had nightmares.
Brigit leaned back in her seat and let her eyes fall shut. She wasn’t sure if she preferred the nightmares over her other dreams. For the past few weeks, her dreams had been… weird. Foggy and indistinct. Usually she remembered them after waking, but lately she hadn’t been able to pin them down. All she remembered was searching, searching desperately for something, or someone. She couldn’t explain it. It was like she was pulling on a thread that attached her to someone else, someone hidden from her. The strange unfulfilled feeling lingered long after she woke. She rubbed her eyes and opened them again. It had to be some weird stress thing. Too many late shifts in a row.
The noise of the TV suddenly blared across the room and Brigit looked up. A man with a gray crewcut and ruddy face was speaking angrily on the TV.
“Oh, not this guy again,” Brigit said, recognizing him. “Turn it off.”
“No, I wanna hear what he has to say,” Sanders said, nodding to one of the other cops to turn it up. Brigit gritted her teeth, trading a wary look with Dana.
“We have Mr. John Cleaver with us today,” the interviewer
said, “Mr. Cleaver, isn’t it true that your political campaign has been built on the idea that vampires pose a threat to the rest of humanity.”
“I believe that humans should protect themselves,” he said, his beady eyes flicking to the camera, then back to the interviewer. “Look at what happened in our fine city of Chicago only recently, the vampire war that spilled out across the streets.”
“Well,” the interviewer interrupted, “couldn’t you argue gang violence has always been—”
“No no, gang violence is one thing, but vampire gangs are quite another.” He leaned forward. “It’s undeniable that vampires are stronger than us, faster than us, and they can’t be killed as easily. We, humanity, need to protect ourselves.”
“I understand your campaign has attracted a great deal of attention from the group known as HUNT, the Human-Undead Neutralization Team.”
Cleaver leaned back quickly. “My campaign has no affiliation with HUNT. Of course, I don’t condone violence.”
Brigit scoffed. “What a liar.” She didn’t know how connected he was to HUNT but it was people like him that encouraged the attacks and vandalism she’d been seeing across the city.
Cleaver’s little eyes were screwed up, dark and ugly. “But,” he said, “I understand that our citizens feel threatened by the danger that vampires pose. Look at the Monster of Chicago that so recently killed his way across our city. Law enforcement was no help whatsoever. Firm measures must be taken.”
The feeling in the bullpen changed at that.
“I like how he doesn’t mention that it was police and vampires who saved the city from the Monster in the end,” Dana said.
Brigit glanced at Dana. “Ignore him. He’s just saying whatever will get him the most votes from scared, angry people. And turn that shit off,” she said loudly. There was some grumbling from Sanders, but one of the other cops grabbed the remote and turned the channel to a different station.
“Lewis, McReeve, get in here.” Captain Davis’s voice cut through the room.
Brigit jerked upright. “Sure thing, boss,” she said, leaning in toward Dana. “You know what this is about?”
Dana shook her head. “The Feds are still in there right?”
Crap, Dana was right; they were. Were they in trouble? Was this about Dana being a vampire? Shit, were they going to lose their jobs?
“This is Special Agent Morrell,” the captain said, introducing them. “Agent Novak.” He pointed to the guy in glasses. “And Agent Franklin,” he finished, pointing at the woman. “Detectives Lewis and McReeve are the officers you want,” he said to Agent Morrell. “Lewis is the one to speak to about the vampires,” Captain Davis added.
Wait, vampires? What was going on here? Brigit opened her mouth to ask but the captain fixed her with a look and she held her tongue. The special agent turned to both of them, standing up.
“This is unorthodox. I’m just going to come out and say it. We’re putting together a joint task force. You, Detective Lewis, are the only vampire law enforcement official in the US currently, and Detective McReeve”—He turned to her—“You’ve worked alongside a… vampire”—He glanced back at Dana—“who you also knew as a human. Put simply, you’re the closest we’ve got to experts. We want to create a joint task force to deal with vampire-related crime. We would have approached the vampires directly but… they’re not the easiest to get hold of.”
Brigit and Dana just stared at him. So. Not losing their jobs. Cool. A joint task force with the Feds… Brigit shuffled her feet. This was not how she expected today to go.
“We want to put you and my two agents together into a team,” Special Agent Morrell continued. “A test run here in Chicago. If it works, we want to roll the model out to other cities, other states.” He looked at them both, his eyes earnest and tired. “We need to get a handle on vampire-related crimes and I believe this is the way to do it. I’m going out on a limb here; not everyone at the Bureau wants to work with vampires. We’re just as angry about what’s happened in this city as anyone else.” His voice grew stronger. “But I believe that working together is the way to solve it. Not fracturing along our differences.” He paused for a moment and Brigit tried to gather her scrambled thoughts. He wanted them to work together? Feds and cops got along about as well as cats and dogs on a good day, and that wasn’t even mentioning the whole vampire situation.
“There is one further thing,” he began. “We need more vampires in on this.” He looked at Dana, and Brigit saw her friend’s eyes widen. “The Shadows, I believe that’s what they call themselves?”
“Yeah,” Dana said roughly, and while her face was impassive, Brigit heard the surprise in her voice.
“Will they do it?” Morrell asked. “Send one of their people to join the team?”
Dana was silent for a moment. “Who’s in charge?” she asked.
“From the top, I am,” he said. “On the ground”—He glanced at Captain Davis, then back to Dana—“you are.” Dana nodded slowly, and Brigit was impressed that she took it in her stride. Hell, she wouldn’t want to be in charge of a crazy idea like this. She almost didn’t want anything to do with it at all, except for how, dammit, she agreed with Morrell; unless they worked together it was going to be assholes like Cleaver out there calling the shots, and more bricks through more windows.
“I can speak to them,” Dana said. “I can speak to Lucian. They want to protect the city as much as we do.”
“Good,” Agent Morrell said. “I’ve got paperwork to submit, but if you can get the vampires in, I can get this greenlit on my end,”
“You’ve got my support,” the captain spoke up. “Lewis and McReeve are my best detectives. If anyone can pull this together, they can.”
Agent Morrell nodded. “You’ll be running it from here, the Bureau is keeping us at arm’s distance,” he said with a wry glance at the other two Feds who had been silent the whole time. “I’ll leave you to make the arrangements, You two with me,” he said, gesturing to the other two, and with that they left in a sudden flurry of movement, leaving a shell-shocked Brigit in their wake.
“So,” she said after a moment, since the captain and Dana weren’t saying anything. “Are we honorary Feds now or what? ‘Cause, to tell you the truth, I always wanted one of those fancy windbreakers they wear.” Captain Davis stared at her impassively. “You know,” she continued with a grin, “with FBI written on the—”
“Get out,” he said.
Brigit laughed, and she caught Dana cracking a smile out of the corner of her eye.
“Don’t make me regret recommending you, McReeve.”
“No, sir. Thank you, sir.” Brigit grinned.
“Take the back room,” Davis said, pointing. “You can clear out the boxes; it isn’t being used for meetings anymore. Should be some extension cords around somewhere… This could be a big deal, not just for the two of you, but for the city, hell, for the entire country.”
“We won’t let you down,” Dana said firmly, and Brigit nodded next to her. She might crack a joke to break the tension, but she knew how unusual this was. How important it was.
The captain eased back down behind his desk with a sigh. “I’ve got miles of paperwork to send through on this before we can get anywhere. You two are dismissed. I want you back here tomorrow and you can get started clearing the room and setting up.” He sent them out.
Brigit walked back to, she guessed, what was no longer her desk. Could she bring the coffee stains with her to the back room? They seemed kind of comforting now that she was going to lose them. She slowly pulled her coat on. She needed to say something to Dana, apologize for being weird about the whole vampire thing. It had gone on long enough. Brigit steeled herself. What could she say? She was sorry but she needed time to get used to the fact that her best friend was no longer human?
“Detective McReeve?” the uniform at the desk shouted out.
Thank God, Brigit thought silently to herself and looked up. “Yeah?”
&
nbsp; “Someone for you.”
Brigit nodded. “Coming.” She turned back to Dana. “Um, see you tomorrow then?” she said awkwardly before walking away, feeling like a coward.
Outside, the uniform directed her to the front of the precinct. “She wouldn’t come inside.”
Brigit frowned. “Weird.” She walked outside. The streetlights lit up the street in yellow-orange, but shadows clung to the corners of the building and it took Brigit a moment to realize she recognized the diminutive form standing against the wall.
“Sparrow,” she said in shock. “Holy shit. You’re alive.” Sparrow, the homeless and unreliable informant that Brigit and Dana had given up for dead as one of the unnamed victims of the Monster of Chicago, stepped into the light. Her brown flyaway hair was in a cloud around her head and her light brown eyes extremely wide. “Brigit, you have to help me,” she said. “They want to kill me.”
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Also by L.J. Red
Vampire Mate
A Bloodline Warriors Novel
* * *
Warrior. Vampire. Soulmate?
In the supernatural underworld of Chicago, vampire warrior Lucian has met his match.
* * *
Brutally dangerous and scorchingly sexy, Lucian is the leader of the Shadows, elite vampire warriors caught in a deadly battle against the wild and power-hungry vampires who want to rain terror on humankind.