Darkness Returns (29 page)

“The low ones like you are, sweets. How’d you get access to a wolf’brary?”

Teresa’s grin stretched so wide it almost hurt. “Of course, you haven’t heard. I’m the Alpha now.”

Teresa savored the stunned look for a few seconds, then continued. “During my research, I learned that pixie’s were nearly extinct. In fact, the rumor was, only one still remained, and she had escaped to the mortal plane.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need the history lesson. I lived it.”

Her voice started to slur. They didn’t have much more time. Thankfully, the women returned. Between them they carried an iron pot, something you might cook a stew it. They lugged it as if it contained stone stew. That was the problem with turning a wolf into a witch. They lost their physical strength wasting all that time with their faces in books.

Teresa took the pot from them and hefted it easily to the pedestal. “That’s the thing with history,” she said and set the pot on the floor, far enough away that the pixie, even headless, could gaze down to see it.

When Teresa stepped back, the pot gave one, angry shake, as if something had bumped into the inside wall.

The pixie’s nose flared. She could smell the iron. Much like silver to a vamp, pixies didn’t much get along with iron. It didn’t kill them outright like silver could a vamp. For them, it worked more like an allergy to the element.

“What’s that for?” the pixie asked, a tremble along with the slur.

“Something history missed,” Teresa said. “The
real
last living pixie.”

The pixie’s eyes bulged. Her chin quivered. “A wee one?”

Teresa smirked, nodded. “That’s right. Unlike you, she didn’t adapt to the mortal plane. She resembles Tinker Bell a little better than you.”

“What are you gonna do wiff her?”

“These ladies here are going to make good use of her dust while it lasts. Once she’s stopped producing, we’ll move onto her blood. Which I promise to take better care of than I did yours.”

“Seemed mine took fine care of you.”

Teresa remembered the burns. But the pain was a memory. She was a wolf now, and things like a little singed fur and burnt skin didn’t stick long in one’s craw.

“We could also let her go,” Teresa said. “I’m not Hitler. I don’t want to be responsible for wiping out a whole species.” Her gut tensed and a sick green feeling filled her as she said this. She tried her best not to let any of it show on her face. She played it hard instead, tensing her jaw and crossing to the pedestal where she leaned down and looked the pixie straight in her rheumy eyes. “Give me everything you can about the Agency facility, and I’ll let the pixie go.”

“You promise?” If she’d been any more than a reanimated head, tears would have skated down her cheeks. “I mean, if she’s really the last… You got to promise.”

Teresa found it odd the pixie she killed would accept a promise of any kind from her, but her desperation—which Teresa had banked on through this whole ruse—made Teresa’s word good enough.

Teresa nodded. “Promise.”

The witches had to stir the young girl from the sofa and use more of her blood to prolong the reanimation. Teresa never figured why they couldn’t use their own. Not powerful enough, she supposed. It took over three hours for the decapitated pixie to describe the fortress Romeo Kress had built from scratch, the new facilities installed since their becoming an official government agency, and the methods for which they could break in with an army of wolves.

The magnitude of the place left Teresa in awe. The prize was even larger than she could have hoped. But it would take some doing, even with all of Nevada’s wolves at her command, to take over the facility. After that, they wouldn’t have much time to entrench themselves and put out the necessary threats to keep them protected. As close to the president’s command as this Agency operated, plausible deniability might have him order a nuclear strike and answer questions later.

The two Alpha dogs would have to come to a certain understanding.

In any case, the pixie gave them everything she could before the reanimation spell finally sputtered out. Her eyes filmed over. Her mouth seemed to zipper shut. The smell of sugar and rot plumed from the head as if it had sat on that pedestal for weeks.

Once Teresa was certain the pixie was long gone, she bent over and opened the pot as promised. The ferret inside hissed at her, ran in a circle around the pot, then leaped out and scurried under a bookshelf.

“Sorry, love,” Teresa said, and set the lid back down on the pot. “You really were the last.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Lockman called in the gnome.

Wertz sat on some government procedure manuals stacked on the chair across from Kress’s desk, the cuffs of his Armani skewed, one button undone, his tie now crooked, and his hair sticking up in back as if recently woken from a nap. But Lockman saw in the little man’s red veined eyes, the weariness that goes along with a heavy weeping session.

“You doing okay?” Lockman asked, surprised at himself for not getting straight to business.

The gnome waved a hand. “Easy come, easy go. You mortals got that expression from us gnomes, only it makes a lot more sense in the original gnomish.”

Lockman would have to take Wertz’s word for it. They didn’t have time for a language lesson.

Wertz seemed to recognize the same urgency. “What’s the plan, boss?”

His tone was neutral enough, but Lockman couldn’t help taking the
boss
as a dig of some kind. “Do you have an issue with my current leadership role?”

Another wave of his small hand. The pair of gold rings on his fingers glinted. The gesture also waved over the scent of an exotic cologne that smelled vaguely animal veiled with a sweeter musk. “I got enough problems occupying my mind to give a shit that the muscle is now in charge.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You really want to make an argument out of it, boss?

That time he undoubtedly used
boss
as a dig. He didn’t let it bother him. Wertz didn’t know Lockman was as unexcited by his new role as nearly everybody else at this Agency. But the insult before that, he couldn’t let go.

“Is that what I am to you? Muscle?”

“You’re a warrior. One the ogres worship as if you’re a god. Me? I like a little bran with my muffin. Something to keep me satisfied more than an hour past breakfast.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know
of
you. The stuff of legends, my friend.” He leaned forward. “Fourteen.”

Lockman felt the set up coming, should have stepped back and got to the business at hand. But unlike Wertz’s assessment, Lockman did like to use his brain, and right now it was telling him he needed to know… “That supposed to mean something to me?”

Wertz took a long, shaky breath. His attitude shifted. He came in feeling confident. Now he appeared to feel his size. It would take Lockman nothing to toss him through one of the plate glass walls of the office. Not that he would. But Wertz had it in his head that was exactly how Lockman operated.

The gnome wiped sweat off his hands onto his miniature designer slacks. He set his mouth, came to some internal decision, and leaned toward Lockman. “That number should mean a whole lot to you, Mr. Lockman. It’s how many gnomes you got killed sending them into Barrow, Alaska earlier this year.”

Lockman’s whole body sagged in his chair. The hole in his stomach felt so real, he absently touched at his belly, expecting to feel blood and stomach acid on his shirt.

“Gnomes,” Wertz continued, “are not warriors. Not even close. We’re business men, we’re chefs, we’re swindlers, and even thieves. But we don’t fight, and you should have known better than to march them against a vampire army.” He covered his eyes with a hand and shook his head. The hue to his skin turned yellowish, which highlighted the dirty stubble on his cheeks—another fashion faux pas Wertz would never normally make.

Lockman’s fingers still felt for that hole. His mind skipped back to that moment he stepped last through the portal to Alaska, last because he was the leader, not a frontline soldier. That status had saved his life. It had also offered him a view of the largest slaughter of supernatural and mortal beings he could have imagined. So many dead. Some still struggling to fight even as vampires chewed open their throats and drank themselves to three times their natural strength. Lockman had sent everyone in at once, because it was supposed to be a surprise attack. Instead, he had delivered a meal to a waiting army of vamps.

He squeezed his eyes shut, which only made the images more vivid. The smell of snow and blood and the whisk of an Alaskan wind cutting through his parka like dozens of straight razors.

When he opened his eyes, he found Wertz staring back at him. The yellow cast to his skin made him look sickly. The hard chill in his eyes made him look lethal, all three feet of him. “What do you want from me, Lockman? Unlike most of my brothers and sisters, I can shoot. But I’m no commando. If you’re planning a second run at Vegas, I can talk logistics, but fuck you if you think I’m going.”

“You talk to Kress like that?”

“Kress has purpose, an ideal. A real fucking goal.” He worked at his tie, managed to make it crooked the opposite way. “What’s your purpose?”

“To protect my daughter at all costs.” The answer dropped from his lips as if he’d studied for the question. “Which makes me a hell of a lot more honest about my
purpose
than Kress.”

“Why? Because he wanted to go home? Be with his people? Understand his illness? Oh, and save the mortal world against an eventual paranormal apocalypse. Can’t forget that little detail.”

“It was all about him.”

Wertz shook his head. “You’re wrong. He started the search for the key to The Return long before he experienced any of his…symptoms. But if you want to argue that his personal goals have muddled his judgment more recently, I can’t argue. After all, he put you in charge.”

“I don’t like it anymore than—”

“Don’t try to bullshit a gnome. You like being in charge just fine. What you don’t like is the responsibility comes along with it.”

“I like being in charge of myself. There’s a difference.”

“No, it’s another way of saying exactly what I just said.”

“I didn’t call you in to argue semantics. You’re right. We need to hit Vegas again before Teresa tries to make another move. If—”

A strange, musical tone filled the office. It sounded like Jessie listening to her iPod with the volume cranking high enough to turn her ear buds into regular speakers, only this tune repeated the same bar over and over, and the instruments all sounded like various sized bells.

Wertz’s eyes tripled in size. He stared up as if the music came from the heavens. His tiny mouth turned into a tiny O.

“What the hell is that?” Lockman asked.

“A fucking miracle,” Wertz said, his eyes wet. “If the doors are locked down, but one of us needs in fast, we each have special security tones we can broadcast straight to the command center here. That tune belongs to Mica. It means she’s alive.” Wertz slipped off the stack of books. A few books toppled off with him and thumped to the floor, crinkled their pages. “Mica’s on her way in. We have to open the doorway.”

Lockman shot to his feet and tried to make a grab for the gnome across the desk, but the gnome slipped out of the office as fast as if he had wheels in his small, designer shoes. Lockman’s gut pulsed in time with his heart. He’d looked into her eyes. They were dead eyes. He’d been around death enough to recognize it.

And all that glittering blood.

Too much spent. She couldn’t have survived. Could she?

A corkscrew of cold burrowed through Lockman’s spine.

Not a chance.

As he ran around that infernal desk, making a promise to never sit behind it again, he reached out again as if he could grab Wertz and stop him. The gnome was long gone. Lockman shouted as he raced out of the office.

“Don’t do it, Wertz. It’s a trap.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Lockman took the stairs, could hear Wertz’s miniature shoes clopping along the metal steps at least two floors below him. Then he heard the creak and clang of one of the doors to the stairwell opening and slamming shut.

The doorway room sat three floors down from the command center. Wertz knew the codes to get into the room—hell it was part of his job to operate that room—and the gnome had a hell of a head start. With his expertise, Wertz could have an interdimensional door open before Lockman reached the floor.

Still scrambling down the steps, Lockman glanced over the railing, judged the distance to the landing of the doorway room and thought,
Hell with it
. He stopped, grabbed the railing with both hands and swung his legs over. The space in the center of the stairwell went down at least another twenty stories. Lockman had to throw his weight just right so he could—

The wind exploded out of his lungs as his chest slammed against the railing along the edge of the floor’s landing. His hands scrabbled for purchase. He had meant to swing the bulk of his weight over the railing, but misjudged it and now he felt himself slipping, falling into the gap.

When his fingers locked around the railing, his legs dangling below, he pulled with all his might until he lifted himself high enough to cock a leg up and get purchase with his foot between a pair of metal bars bolted to the floor.

He took half a second to catch his breath, then pulled himself up and over the railing. Gasping, ignoring the tremor in his legs and the image of him flailing uselessly down the stairwell, Lockman charged into the door to get out onto the floor proper.

His shoulder thundered against the metal, but the door didn’t budge. He slapped the metal release bar again and again without effect. The fucking gnome had locked the door.

Now Lockman stood no chance of keeping Wertz from answering Mica’s emergency ring tone as he’d come to think of it. He could go up or down a floor and take the elevator—assuming Wertz hadn’t overridden the ‘vator as well. Lockman doubted he would have taken the time when he could just as easily lock himself in the door room and operate without any interference from Lockman.