Darkness Returns (4 page)

He didn’t draw his weapon, but he did march across the office, circled the desk, and yank Kress up to his feet by his shirt collar.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”

Kress used a standard martial arts maneuver to knock Lockman’s hands away, probably something he learned for one of his dumb movies. Lockman easily countered the move by grabbing both of Kress’s wrists, then shoved his fisted hands in so that Kress punched himself in the face. Not hard. Just enough to startle him, like a pair of brother’s horse playing in the backseat on a long trip. It caused Kress to stagger, trip against the casters on his office chair, and thump back down into his seat.

That’s when Mica came charging in. She did have her weapon drawn, a Sig Sauer P250 with a healthy barrel that stared Lockman right in the eye. “Ease off, duke, or I’ll retire ya right here.”

“Both of you stand down,” Kress shouted, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. “This is a damned federal agency for the love of God.”

Lockman almost choked. “I worked for a real federal shop, Kress. And while it wasn’t perfect by far, it wasn’t anything like this joke you’re running.”

“Joke or not, I’ve got the president and the Pentagon backing me up, and you just struck your commanding officer.”

Kress used all the right words, but Lockman would be damned if he could ever consider him a true CO. Especially after learning what he had tasked Jess with. This was him running his supernatural country club with government funding, all in the name of his obsession over a prophecy.

“I’ll let it pass,” Kress said, brushing absently at his crooked collar, “since I gather this is coming from a protective father. But I’d suggest you never lay hands on me again.”

“Got that right,” Mica popped in.

Lockman ignored her. He pulled the folded paper the lab guys had given him after looking at the hairs he’d found at the scene in New Orleans. He unfolded the paper and slapped it down on the desk.

Kress gave it a disgusted once over, as if Lockman had dropped a dead animal in front of him. “What’s this?”

“Lab report. You didn’t want to listen before, but this might get your attention. I found a lock of hair at that slaughter in New Orleans. They belong to Teresa Stevenson.”

Kress’s brow wrinkled. “Your old partner? So what?”

“I’ll give you the short version. Her sister was turned into a vamp. I had to kill her. It’s caused some friction. Now she’s out there, using amateurs to go on a slay-spree, and she’s gotten a fair amount of mortals killed in the process.”

The tiny, thoughtful nods Kress made gave him the look of a bobble head. Lockman would have loved to have smacked that bobble head clean off its spring.

“So she’s a liability,” Kress said. “But she isn’t a priority.”

“Why did you send us out there in the first place, if you didn’t plan on following up?”

“I’ll have some men look into it. Meantime, we have more pressing matters.”

“My daughter’s insane ex-boyfriend, locked safely in a hospital, is more pressing?”

Kress started to counter, but Lockman barreled on.

“Forcing my daughter into an emotionally volatile situation after all the shit she’s already been through is more pressing?”

The click of a pistol hammer going back came in answer. “You’ll want to dial it back, love,” Mica said, shoulders squared, her firing stance firm, her gun lined up with Lockman.

“Mica,” Kress said slowly. “I don’t think the gun’s the right choice for this situation.”

She glanced at him. He nodded. Some silent communication passed between them. A corner of her mouth quirked up just barely as she holstered her weapon. Lockman almost missed it, but he was trained to notice small things.

He tossed Mica a bored smirk. “Get any closer to try and sprinkle your dust on me, and I’ll send you off to Never Never Land.”

Like a six year-old brat, she poked her tongue out at Lockman.

“Stop it,” Kress said. “Craig, I appreciate your concern, but I’ve talked it over with Jessie and she’s fine with it.”

“You should have talked it over with me.”

Kress must have got tired of craning his neck back to look up at Lockman. He stood, slowly, as if expecting a move from Lockman. Lockman let him stand. Just made it easier to knock him over if it came to that.

“Before I sent you to New Orleans, you asked me to bring Jessie in as a participating operative. Hear that?
You
asked
me
. I agreed. That means she reports to me now. Just like you report to me. And I,” he tapped his chest with a thumb, “report to the man in the big white house in DC. Not to you.”

Lockman clenched his jaw and his fist. “Suppose I take Jess and move on. You can play general and chase after your prophecy without us.”

“Seeing as you are both agents of the US government, that would be considered treason. You’d spend the rest of your lives with every arm of law enforcement hunting you down on orders to execute without prejudice.”

“You make some dramatic threats, Mr. Kress.”

He hitched a shoulder, all casual. “It’s the performer in me.” Kress stood a few inches shorter than Lockman, but he had presence, and he knew how to work his posture so that presence expanded. Chin lifted. Chest puffed. Shoulders pulled back. “Let’s not forget what happened when you were in charge, Craig. More than eight hundred lives lost. I know you don’t care much for supernaturals, but those folks looked up to you as their leader, and you led them straight into a slaughter.”

His fist shot out and struck Kress in the chin so quickly, Lockman had to depend on the sting across his knuckles to know he’d even done it.

Kress stumbled sideways, leaned against the flag-draped wall to keep his feet. A thin line of blood curled down from the corner of his mouth to his chin.

Mica had her gun out, the barrel a few inches from Lockman’s temple. The knuckle on her trigger finger bulged. Lockman turned to face the barrel, and saw the hate in the pixie’s eyes. She was definitely no Tinker Bell, even if she’d had wings. He showed her a stone face to make sure she knew he wasn’t a bit afraid. Then he turned back to Kress.

“Real easy to preach about leadership from behind a desk. You like being boss so much, you wait until you have to face the real consequences of that role.”

“Fair enough,” Kress said, dabbing at the blood on his chin with the back of his wrist. “In the meantime, you have a mission. Escort Jessie to Detroit. We’ll have you cleared to question the boy by the time you arrive.”

Lockman snapped off a salute. “Yes, sir.” Mica still had the gun in his face, but he stepped around her as if she were nothing more than a potted tree.

As Lockman stepped through the door, Kress called from behind him, “The doors are ready now. You can use those for travel. You head out first thing after sundown Eastern time.”

Lockman kept walking, without any acknowledgment that he’d heard Kress.

Chapter Four

Her scalp still stung where that motherfucking vamp ripped out her hair. Though she turned out lucky compared to the rest of her team. A bloody scalp, some lacerations and bruises, but otherwise all her body parts still attached. The only one to survive that clusterfuck. But that’s what she got for hiring a bunch of meatheads from a biker bar to slay demons with her.

The bells of St. Louis Cathedral chimed the tenth and final time, pushing over a silence in the night that felt oppressive. Teresa stood in the shadows of Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter, the last place she saw her sister, Mandy, before the vamps took her, turned her. The smell of piss rose off a nearby puddle. The sounds of normal life drifted over from Bourbon Street, jazz music, a car alarm, a peel of drunken laughter. Pretty mild, though. Valentine’s Day didn’t warrant the same celebratory glee of Marti Gras. People apparently didn’t like to party so much in the cooler February air.

Teresa shuffled into the center of the alley, her boots chuffing against the concrete. She held her hands tucked in the pockets of her leather jacket, the jacket’s collar up to hide the finger-shaped bruises welling up from when the vamp had tried to strangle her. Dumbass hadn’t anticipated the old-fashioned wooden stake tucked in her boot. Sometimes the old ways were the best ways.

Gritting her teeth, she imagined slipping into a vamp nest and staking the sleeping monsters one after another. Watching their chests cave in, and their borrowed blood spew from their mouths. Of course, an attack like that would never work. The whole nest would wake up to the screaming of that first vamp. One thing vamps were good at besides sucking blood and tearing flesh—fuckers knew how to scream.

She had to admit, in the short time she’d spent in the Big Easy, she had slain a shit load of vamps, both on her own and with her civilian helpers. Not enough, though. Never enough. Because after New Orleans, there was the rest of Louisiana. And after Louisiana, the rest of the country. The world. Shit, maybe vamps lived in outer space, too.

Stop talking like a crazy bitch.

Her sister’s voice. Only, not really. After only a couple years, Teresa found it hard to really
hear
her sister’s real voice. Just the one she’d constructed in her mind. And Teresa didn’t have a home anymore. No archives of home movies. Not even a photo album. She’d joined the Agency straight out of college. Everything she owned still in boxes in her parents’ basement. A house fire had destroyed it all.

A woman screamed in the night.

Teresa’s hand instinctively drew from her pocket and reached behind her for the .45 tucked at the small of her back. Hesitated.

The scream came again, but tapered into laughter.

Another drunk girl with no idea of the dangers around her. No idea that the shadows could peel away from the walls, grab her, sink fangs into her, drain her, change her.

Teresa squeezed her eyes shut. A mild breeze felt cooler than it was against her hot face.

I’m sorry, Mandy. I’m so sorry I let them get to you.

She turned her back to the cathedral at the end of the alley and walked out the way she had come. She strolled out onto Bourbon Street, hands back in her pockets, mind grasping for a direction. She walked down lesser known streets. She dared the shadows to attack.

Tonight, the shadows were not hungry.

Either she and her crew had wasted enough of them to make them shy, or she was just lucky.

Damn shame. She wanted to kill. So badly. She had another stake in her boot going to waste.

When she came back to New Orleans, she thought she could sate her rage. Kill enough vamps, and eventually she would feel better. But there were more dangerous things out there than French Quarter vampire clichés. In fact, she knew personally the most dangerous vamp of them all. One that should have been put down a long time ago.

Going after her, however, would take more than a gang of fleshy bikers. It would take a group with real power. A group that knew what they were doing. And one she could convince to help her.

In other words, some friendly supernaturals.

But she had severed her ties with the friendlies. The ogres, the gnomes, the merefolk, and all the oddball in-between things that didn’t have names or mortal folklore to describe them, but who had gathered together to fight the threat of a vampire army. Lockman’s people. The ones, Teresa heard, he had led into battle and got killed.

No friendly supernaturals left.

Teresa stopped on the corner of an intersection. She had no idea of the street names. Instead of blues bars and Cajun restaurant, pawn shops and voodoo boutiques lined the sidewalks, most of them with metal grates or steel doors pulled over their storefronts. One of these solid storefront shields had the “A” for Anarchy symbol spray painted on it in deep red. The paint ran like blood from the A’s feet and the ring around the letter. Instead of anarchy, though, it made Teresa think of Alpha.

One of those subconscious clues that sometimes drops into the conscious mind and rattles like cast bones. All at once, it seemed, Teresa knew what she could do to recruit the muscle she needed and take out the world’s most dangerous vampire.

Chapter Five

As the van pulled through the gate leading to the hospital grounds, Jessie glanced at her reflection in the mirror on the visor again. She couldn’t help it. The team back at headquarters had done an amazing job. Guys Kress knew from the movie world, apparently, and they could work magic with makeup and effects as stunning as any display of her own real magic power—except maybe when she turned those werewolves inside-out.

Her dad sat behind the wheel, face illuminated by the lights from the dashboard, and glanced at her as she admired herself. He hadn’t said anything about the work they’d done, but she could tell it freaked him out. After all, she looked exactly the same as she had before getting turned into a vampire. No matter how hard she scrutinized herself in the mirror, she could almost convince herself all the vampire stuff had never happened. They’d even done a trick with her fangs, capping her teeth so that they all matched up and looked normal.

Jessie smiled at herself.

An electric ping shot up from her belly to her chest.

I’m me. I’m a normal teenage girl.

“You all right?” Craig asked, directing the question at her, but maybe she should have been asking
him
that.

“I’m great,” she said. “This is unbelievable.”

“It’s just makeup, Jess.”

She sighed from way back in her throat. “Do you have to poop on every parade? You’re like a freakin seagull sometimes.”

He pulled the van up in the circular drive in front of the hospital, a white building about a dozen stories tall, that looked like it was made out of stone Legos, all blocky and straight. Jessie had pictured something more like the haunted asylums from the movies. An old, sprawling mansion kind of deal. Maybe a pair of stone gargoyles standing sentry on either side of the entrance. Instead, the hospital had a trash bin and one of those old cement ashtrays with a sign on it declaring this a “Smoke Free Zone.”

In other words, this was just a plain old hospital.