Eldritch Ops

by Phipps, C. T.

  “Saunders Beach!” Shannon said. “A vampire I killed while trying to find you owned it. It’s where I’ve been squatting.”

  “Is that wise?” I asked.

  “No, but it’s an awesome house!” Shannon said, her enthusiasm infectious. I ended up thinking no thoughts at all as I clung to Shannon, enjoying the ride until we arrived at a beautiful beach house with red tile roofing and white walls. Its lawn was well tended and there were even a couple of pink flamingos standing on the front. It was the opposite of the sort of place you’d expect a vampire to live, yet I could remember slaughtering its owner here, along with all her bodyguards.

  The monster you killed here deserved to die, Bloody Mary whispered. As did her slaves for protecting her.

  You’ll forgive me if I don’t trust your standards, I said.

  I used your standards to judge her, Bloody Mary said.

  That makes it worse, I thought.

  Shannon pulled her motorcycle to a stop and let me off before rolling it into the beach house’s garage. “We’ll be safe here until we can figure out our next move.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t safe,” I said.

  “I was joking. Penny set up about a hundred wards over this place to make sure the vampires don’t come looking for it.” Shannon walked out of the garage, closing it behind her.

  “I’ll take your word on that.” I sighed, looking up to the sky. It was gray, with signs of a storm coming. “Do we have a computer, so we can upload the flash drive’s contents?”

  “It’s the twenty-first century and I’m a spy, so yes,” I said.

  I almost asked her not to be snide, but that seemed like an elephant telling a cheetah to lose some weight. “Thank you, Shannon. This means a lot.”

  She looked at me, noticing perhaps for the first time how exhausted I was. “You look like you could use some sleep, Derek. By the way, where did you get all those tattoos? Get drunk and decide to make some poor life choices?”

  “Sure, let’s go with that. As for sleep? I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Probably not even then.”

  Shannon looked down at the ground. “I’m sorry about keeping my relationship with Christopher a secret.”

  “How much of a relationship was it?” I asked, wondering how to ask what was on my mind.

  Shannon raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to go there?”

  “Yeah, I know, this is an odd time to be jealous. I still want to know.”

  “Well, it was a long time ago. Christopher was doing something I’m not comfortable talking about. It’s something that would put you in an awkward position.”

  “You mean smuggling people out of the House?”

  “You knew about that?” Shannon asked.

  “I am sort of a spy.” I stuck my tongue out halfway. It was a childish gesture, but childishness was about the only thing that got me through some days.

  “Yeah, but you’re kind of a crap one.” Shannon smirked. “You’re sort of the ‘shoot-up places and sneak in to strangle people’ sort of spy. Really more of an assassin.”

  “I’m wounded.”

  “Twenty-four times, according to your files. Seriously, though, Derek. The only reason I wasn’t worried about you is you’ve survived almost a ridiculous number of insane situations.”

  “True.” I took a deep breath. “Could you tell me why you chose to keep Christopher’s survival a secret from me?”

  Shannon looked away. “I admitted I was wrong. Isn’t that enough?”

  “We promised we’d never keep secrets from each other.” I didn’t want to push Shannon, but this was a non-negotiable point of our relationship. I was comfortable with just sex and friendship, but if that was the extent of our relationship, I wanted to know.

  Shannon crossed her arms and turned back to me. She pointed at my chest. “What you’re asking is harder than it sounds. I’ve got a lot of ugly in my past I don’t want you to see.”

  I knew enough of what she was talking about to be sympathetic. “Believe me, I know, but I tell you everything. Including stuff that should never be shared with anyone and inflicts insanity just looking at it.”

  “The sad fact is, I believe you,” Shannon said, looking guilty. “You’re the person I trust the most in this world. If I didn’t have a good reason for holding back the truth, I wouldn’t have. I swear by God, the saints, and on my mother.”

  Now I was starting to get irritated. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  Shannon looked down at her feet. “Okay, fine. I thought you might hunt him down and drive a stake through his heart. He’s a friend of mine, no matter what he’s done, and I’d rather you not do that.”

  “As someone informed me, I’d have better luck killing him with an orihalcum bullet.”

  “Not funny.”

  “It’s not meant to be,” I said, kicking one of the lawn flamingoes. Shannon’s reaction perplexed me, and it took me a minute to realize what she was worried about. “Wait a second—you thought my reaction to discovering my old friend was still alive would be to track him down and execute him? Just because he was a vampire? That’s how little you think of me?” This conversation had a lot of subtext and it wasn’t all about Christopher.

  Shannon frowned. “Not just because he was a vampire. I figured you’d take it personally that he’s probably turned over all sorts of information on the House.”

  “I’m not enthusiastic about the fact that he’s a traitor, no. I would have thought the past year would have taught you I want peace with the other supernatural factions, though.”

  “You kill monsters, Derek. That’s what my past year with you taught me. You’re just better at differentiating among them than the rest of the Committee, except with me.”

  It was times like this I remembered how much Shannon hated being lilin. It was the reason the House had accepted her as a member. That and divine intervention. Shannon believed with all her heart the lilin were evil and deserved to be destroyed. Ninety-nine percent of the time, at least. Other times she thought of herself as the beautiful and wonderful woman she was. No matter how often I tried to increase the number of times she thought that, I could never get over the rage she felt against the supernatural blood in her veins.

  “I don’t think of you as a monster, Shannon.”

  “That’s the problem. I’ve killed more people than you. You think two hundred is bad? I’ve killed twice that.”

  I paused, processing that information. Her file had listed only the kills she’d committed as a member of the Red Room. “That’s quite—”

  “Mostly people who didn’t deserve it.”

  I snorted at the idea that all of my kills were deserved. “I dropped a missile strike on a vampire plantation earlier this week, Shannon. Old men, housekeepers, children, and habitual victims of the vampires died by the dozens. All because of a careless comment I made and the job I’ve done.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Shannon sighed, looking more guilty than combative. “I wasn’t prepared to find out that Christopher, someone I knew as a human, had become one of the monsters. He was a good man, someone who could be trusted. He helped a lot of people get away from the Red Room who couldn’t survive the life we led. When he said he wanted to talk with you and make peace between our factions, I was torn. I wanted to believe that even though he’d become a Fang, he was still the good person I remembered. I spent months doing check-ups on his past and giving him tests to prove his decency.”

  “You could have just come to me.”

  “The only thing that scared me more than the possibility that Christopher had become an irredeemable monster, Derek, was that he was sincere. Then I knew you’d do everything in your power to prevent him from dying. I didn’t want you risking your life trying to protect the vampire race from a war with the House.”

  “The vampire race isn’t synonymous with the Vampire Nation, at least not to me. Have you had a chance to look at
the flash drive?”

  Shannon pulled it out of her pocket and lifted it up between us. “No. This was it in the safety deposit box. Well, this and a note saying that you shouldn’t use the Bloodsword to kill anyone because it’ll link you to a demon inside.”

  “Something he could have told me earlier.”

  Oh, like you haven’t benefited from our association, Bloody Mary muttered. I should take away the power I have given you just to show you how much you need me.

  And statements like that are why I don’t trust you, I said. That and the demon thing.

  Racist, Bloody Mary said.

  Shannon held the flash drive tight. “At this point, I don’t care what’s in this. I see you out there breaking all the rules and doing your own thing knowing that the consequences won’t affect you. Either that or not caring. I don’t work like that, though. I need the rules to keep me sane.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  Shannon shook her head. “I’m saying I need to choose who I am loyal to through all this. It’s not Christopher, it’s not the Committee, it’s you.”

  It wasn’t the sort of promise Shannon made casually. “All right, then. I promise to never do anything as a Committee member to make you compromise yourself. I will instead ask you to do the right thing. As difficult as that may be to figure out in a world where Sumerian gods can be summoned by morons at any given time.”

  Shannon looked up to me. “Thank you.”

  I smirked. “Though I am going to look forward to ordering you to do some things.”

  She rolled her eyes. “In that place we’re going to remain equals. Actually, scratch that—whenever it’s about our relationship, I’m in charge.”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  I walked over to her and took her by the hands, looking into her eyes as a light rain began to pour down on us. Shannon was beautiful. The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. It wasn’t her features that made her gorgeous in my mind. No, it was the fact that I loved her. It had been a long time since I’d felt that sort of feeling and even now, I felt like it could go away at any moment. This moment, though, was ours. All that mattered was there was one person on this blood-soaked, violent, war-torn hellhole of a planet who I wanted to be with.

  “We’re going to get through this,” I said. “We’ll stop this war and Dracula, and discover whatever Christopher was trying to bring to my attention.”

  “The fact is, I don’t care. It just matters if it’s with you.”

  “The same.”

  I put my hands on her cheeks and kissed her. Shannon pulled me closer and deepened the kiss. We made love that night, a distraction from the creeping darkness that seemed to pervade everything. Unfortunately, my dreams were no longer my own.

  As I lay with Shannon, exhausted from our passion, Bloody Mary made me once more relive the worst night of my life.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The blackness parted, and I was in a metropolis I’d never much cared for: New York City. Plenty of local agents and non-House personnel would hang me from my toes for suggesting it wasn’t the greatest place on Earth, but that didn’t change how I felt. There was just something about the Big Apple that left me feeling cramped and paranoid.

  I blamed it on the fact that I was used to looking at everyone as a potential threat, be they disguised monsters or humans who’d somehow decided today was the day they’d take me out. Being in the city with a million stories, I felt like I was surrounded by twelve million potential attackers. Either that, or it was because I was from Massachusetts.

  Yet it was New York City I was assigned to. One didn’t get to choose where one was sent on a job when one was a newly promoted senior agent. Besides, Christopher seemed to love the place, and his presence helped take the edge off.

  The two of us were eating hot dogs in a subway station the House had cordoned off for repairs. It was a cold day in late December, and the two of us were wearing winter coats, gloves, and scarves while we waited for our contact to arrive.

  “So, you want to pick up a couple of hookers after this?” Christopher said, taking a bite out of his hot dog.

  “Thank you, but no. I’ve never felt the need to pay for my company.” I looked at my hot dog, disgusted with its taste.

  “I don’t need to pay either, but it’s a service like any other. It cuts down on the hassle of who, what, when, where, and calls,” Christopher said.

  “You’ll forgive me if I still decline. I’ve seen too many rings of mesmerized girls and boys to trust anything is consensual.” I threw my hotdog into a nearby wastepaper basket before changing the subject. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know how you can eat those things.”

  Christopher rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry they didn’t have tofu dogs, Mister Daoist.”

  “Please don’t mock my religion,” I said.

  “I’m just saying you kill people,” Christopher said. “A lot of people. Daoism is a passive, life-affirming religion. You’re not going to balance your chi or whatever by not eating meat when you carry around a sniper rifle in your luggage.”

  “The sniper rifles are usually provided for me on site,” I said.

  “It’s a metaphor, Derek,” Christopher said.

  I snorted. “It’s a poor one. I choose clean living as part of a larger attempt to bring myself in harmony with the universe. The Dao is individualistic and cannot be defined, my path being different from everyone else’s.”

  “Says the white man to the Chinese guy,” Christopher said.

  I frowned. “That joke would be hilarious if the kids in the Hamptons didn’t call me and my sister the Mutt twins.”

  “That joke is hilarious because you grew up in the Hamptons,” Christopher said.

  He had me there. “Do we have any idea when our contact is going to be arriving?”

  Christopher smirked. “Should be any minute now. You’ve been on edge since we got here. Do you have a problem with the mission, or is it just my rousing rendition of ‘New York, New York’?”

  “A little of both. You need singing lessons,” I said.

  Christopher placed a hand on his heart. “I was trying to imitate the Kurgen from the movie Highlander.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m just not comfortable with missions that take us against the Network.”

  The Network was a new organization, having sprung up in the past couple of years and uniting several previous smaller organizations. Its stated ethos was to passively resist the House in all things. It attempted to smuggle magic users away from the House’s recruiters, disseminate the Truth to people who might believe whenever possible, and distribute free knowledge of magic (particularly spells designed to thwart the Red Room’s monitoring systems). Rumors attested it had the assistance of groups like the Hand of Allah, Righteous Defenders of Judaea, and other religious groups.

  The Red Room had thankfully not overreacted to their presence. Aside from a few near-misses with WikiLeaks and other internet news agencies, they hadn’t done much to damage our cause. I’d argued cracking down with maximum force would just turn it into a group of martyrs. For once, my superiors had listened to me. As a result, we were still gathering information. It was my hope to discredit the group rather than send in a bunch of commandos.

  “Feeling a wee bit sympathetic to the poor distressed multitudes of lesser, witches, and psychics?”

  “A little bit, yes.”

  “I don’t.”

  “How . . . ironic.” I didn’t bring up the fact that Christopher used to be a smuggler. I didn’t have to.

  “If they were just trying to organize so they could avoid being drafted, I wouldn’t mind. However, they’re against the Great Lie, and that could lead to some serious shit.”

  “How much damage could a bunch of hackers and activists do?”

  “I’m not sure whether you’re being sarcastic or just ignorant.” Christopher raised his ring hand and lifted his thumb and pinky.

  Electricity flowed through the two
like an open circuit, creating a tiny lightshow. “Besides, they’re not just hackers. They’re magicians just like you and—”

  “Actually, just you.”

  “Sorry, I keep forgetting you’re our Muggle senior agent.”

  “I don’t read children’s books.”

  Christopher snorted. “How did it end up skipping a generation, anyway? Your sister is one of the toughest witches I know. Shouldn’t you have some sort of magic power that doubles when you touch each other?”

  “We’re not the Superfriends,” I said.

  “Ah-ha!” Christopher exclaimed.

  “I said I don’t read children’s books,” I backtracked. “Not watch cartoons.”

  “That’s worse,” Christopher said.

  I smirked. Christopher always won our arguments. “I dunno, it just passed me over. Most of the other members of the family can work magic, big or small. I just don’t have the knack.”

  Christopher shook his head. “It’s a skill, Derek, not a mutation. Even if you don’t have the same level of aptitude as the rest of your family, you should be able to learn ritual magic, if not sorcery. If the House was so inclined, we could be teaching it in schools like algebra.”

  I smiled. “I didn’t pay much attention to my algebra teacher, either.”

  Back then, I still had my mental block on the practice of magic. As Christopher indicated, it wasn’t something that was inborn, but learned. The difference was certain bloodlines had access to more magical “oomph” than other people. If you were related to a god, a demon, or a fairy, or had practiced inbreeding with other magical bloodlines (always a bad idea), then you probably could channel more power than the quote-unquote normal people of the world.

  The thing was, there were ways around that for both regular humans and those who already had access to power. Saints and sinners could exalt or deform their souls while others crafted enhancers to channel their magic for them. My grandmother, Anne, kept a familiar in the form of a falcon. Even if you couldn’t do sorcery or magic on the fly, everyone could do a well-prepared magical ritual if they believed in it enough. I just...couldn’t.