Demon Driven (6 page)

“Americade in Lake George and the Laconia
motorcycle week in New Hampshire,” I said.

Her eyes locked on mine as she nodded,
“Exactly. Which brings us to the second reason we're here.
Twenty-eight days ago an attack occurred in Southern Vermont, just
outside of Bennington. The victim, George Lassiter, survived what
he claimed was a wild animal attack. Mr. Lassiter has since
disappeared into the Green Mountain National forest. The attack
coincided with three Loki members passing through.”

“You think they came back for him?” Fran
Demarco asked.

I answered her question, “No, they think he's
infected and the moon will be full tomorrow night. He'll go rogue
without another were to guide him.”

Without the guidance of another, experienced
were, infected humans invariably went berserk during their first
change. A natural born were could handle the change without aid,
but not so the bitten ones. The pain and terror of the
transformation, along with the animal instincts of their new form
were too much for an unguided human psyche.

“Very good Chris. It's funny you should be
the one to put the pieces together, because you'll be helping us
track the rogue down tomorrow night,” Briana said.

The squad looked as one to Roma for
verification. The Inspector grimly nodded and addressed us all.

“A rogue were is just too big of a problem.
Chris, I have agreed that you will help the D.O.A.A. Group with
tracking down the were and I have insisted that Gina accompany you,
as Agent Duclair's group are unfamiliar with our protocols.”

His gaze was serious as he said this, looking
directly at me. I nodded, thinking it through. A rogue were was a
nightmare for a human-only group to track and destroy. Human
intelligence, animal ferocity and senses, superhuman strength and
speed, all controlled by a mind driven insane.

Briana's eyes gleamed in triumph and I felt a
little queasy, despite knowing I needed to do this.

“I'm sure we'll have no problem finding the
rogue with
your tracking
skill,” she said,
sarcastically.

Eric Adler, a large presence against the
wall, snorted.

When we first met, I had introduced myself as
a tracker, which was completely true, if woefully incomplete
information. She had swiftly dug around enough to know that I was a
lot more than that.

“Ahh, anyway, Chris, you and Gina will be at
the Downtown heliport tomorrow at seven-thirty AM for a joyride in
a federal helicopter. I know you'll be properly prepared.”

He nodded to Agent Duclair to continue.

“Loki’s Spawn have grown to over eight
hundred members, and while not the largest motorcycle group, they
are easily the meanest. Super violent, well-armed, and completely
ruthless. Since the Bureau has been aware of them, they have
managed to intimidate virtually every other gang in their area of
control. They have also cleaned out several smaller covens of
vampires in Mexico and we think they’ve killed or driven away two
large werewolf packs out west,” she added.

I hadn’t heard anything about lost covens
from Tanya or Lydia, but we didn’t always talk business, not to
mention that they were really only running the New York Coven.
Elder Senka, on the other hand would most likely be concerned.

“Being as they are a gang of weres, they are
tough in a fight and extremely hard to kill with standard ammo. The
human gangs either accede to their wishes or cease to exist,”
Briana said.

“The only information we have on their leader
comes from an FBI agent who has infiltrated a human gang that has
chosen to submit to the Spawn. They call him El Bastia”

“The Beast,” Gina translated.

“Fitting name for a were leader.” Fran
remarked.

We spent another hour on material, but there
really was very little hard intelligence on Loki’s Spawn.

Chet provided some Wikipedia background on
the god Loki – a Norse god, who was among other things a
shapeshifter and who fathered the Fenrir wolf. The wolf was
foretold to be the killer of gods, including Odin. Not hard to see
why the gang had chosen that name.

Chapter 7

I went to lunch with Chet, Fran, and Brian,
after assuring Gina that I would meet her at the helipad by six
forty-five in the morning. Chet wanted to run some experiments with
me as the test subject. He had apparently designed and built some
kind of charged particle detector and wanted to see if my violet
aura generated any detectable particles.

After lunch, Chet took me to the Nevis lab at
Columbia University, where he had been working on a neutrino
detector with some physics grad student friends of his. Security in
the building was excellent, with a magnetic passcard required not
only at the main entrance, but at various control points throughout
the building. When he finally ushered me into the High Energy
Particle Lab I was expecting something that would look like the
offspring of an illicit relationship between a MRI machine and
Robby the robot.

The device he pointed at triumphantly was
considerably different.

“Dude, that's a trash can!” I said.

“Correction, that's a portable neutrino
detector that was built for under $500 bucks,” Chet said.

“It's a trash can. A pimped-out trash can,
but still a trash can.”

The device had started life as a galvanized
steel waste can with a fitted lid, the kind that had been kicked
around and thrown by garbage men for decades. A soup can sized
metal tube entered the thirty-inch high pail about mid-way up one
side, a thick bundle of wires running from it to a computer on a
nearby desk.

“It was designed to test an idea for creating
a city wide detector here in New York using rooftop water
reservoirs,” Chet said.

My expression must have said it all because
he launched into further explanation without me saying a word.

“There are thousands of water tanks on the
top of New York's buildings. It has been a long standing way to
deal with poor water pressure from city mains. Pump the water to
the roof, let gravity provide pressure for the buildings
inhabitants,” he said. “Four or five years ago, a group of
university physicists came up with the idea to harness theses
rooftop pools of water to capture and detect neutrinos.”

“Water captures neutrinos? I thought they
went through entire planets?” I asked.

“Well, the water doesn't so much capture them
as slow them down and cause a bit of detectable radiation to be
emitted.”

“So this R2D2 wanna be is filled with water?”
I asked, pointing at the shiny can.

“Yup, and special photo voltaic sensors
inside will pick up charged particles that pass through.”

“And you get a read-out or graph or something
on the PC over there, right?” I asked.

“Right in one,” he agreed.

We started slow with me concentrating on
moving my aura or chi or whatever it is from my right hand to my
left with the garbage can in between them. The monitor immediately
showed Chet

figures that had my geeky friend more excited
than a lunch date with William Shatner and Leonard Nemoy.

Next he had me stand back and give it simple
aural blast from my right hand, maybe as strong as I would use to
snap a Wyrm from a victims back. The numbers on the monitor jumped
exponentially.

“Now give it a little harder pulse,” he
directed.

So I did. The numbers jumped for a moment
then went to zero across the board.

“Uh oh! Try again,” Chet said, looking
worried.

This time nothing happened at all. The lanky
technician sighed.

“That's what I was afraid of. I think it's
fried.”

“Chet, I didn't use much juice at all. How
can it be fried?” I asked, worried that I had broken yet another of
his technological toys.

“But even your little pulses were almost off
the charts,” he said, examining the log of the previous successful
attempts. “I have been thinking of what your doctor friend
suggested and this proves it. You are somehow generating mad crazy
amounts of charged particles of all types!”

He was smiling despite the evident demise of
his detector.

The lab door lock snicked, the door opened
and a thin grad student type came in, raising his eyebrows when he
saw us.

“Yo Aikens! How're your Buckys hanging?” he
greeted Chet. He had East Indian features and a pure New Yorker
accent.

“Hey Jacob! They're low and blacker than
soot! You?”

“Concurrent,” Jacob replied, moving off to
another section of the lab.

“Er, what was that all about?” I asked.

“Physics humor. Buckys are buckyballs...you
know fullerenes?”

I just looked at him.

“Buckyballs are spherical clusters of carbon
atoms, also known as Carbon 60 or fullerenes. They've been found in
soot, and so well, it's a physicist thing,” he finished. “Anyway,
let me just save this data to my thumbdrive, delete it and we're
done for the day.”

“What about the trash can?” I asked.

He held his finger to his lips. “We'll just
let the others think they did it.”

Finished with his work, we were headed toward
the door, when Jacob's head popped up from the rear of the lab.

“Hey Chet, can I use Trashy later?”

“Yeah, but don't break it. It's been acting
sketchy today.”

He winked at me and we left the lab.

“Trashy?”

“What do you expect? It's a trash can!” he
said.

We headed our own ways outside the lab, Chet
back to his computers at Police Plaza; me back to my place to get
my gear ready for the next morning. Despite my general dislike of
Briana Duclair, I was genuinely interested in seeing how her team
operated in the field.

My trip home took me, naturally enough,
through a corner deli for a meatball parm sub and then an order of
perogies from a Polish place near my building.

My gear was already in good shape, but I
always like to go over it before a raid or field case. My handguns
were already cleaned and reloaded with silver-filled hollowpoints,
but I re-holstered both in my vest rig. Tactical vests are all the
rage with law enforcement types for the simple reason that they
keep everything handy and organized. Mine has a cross draw holster
for one of my Glocks and an attached thigh holster for the other.
The many pouches hold multiple pistol mags, as well as a flashlight
(don't seem to need that much anymore), first aid supplies (use
that more for other people now), protein bars (need more of those),
zip ties, handcuffs, evidence bags, latex gloves, industrial grade
handiwipes(great for getting blood off your skin) and all the other
paraphernalia of modern law enforcement. A long narrow pouch under
my left arm was intended for a collapsible baton, but I had
re-purposed it. Snugly tucked inside were two silver spikes roughly
the length of knitting needles, the butt end of each wrapped with
black parachute cord to form handles.

Tanya had presented them to me as one of my
Christmas gifts. Whether it is odder that vampires celebrate
Christmas or that Tanya choose to give me the silver darts that had
pinned her to a cinderblock wall when we first met, I'll leave to
you. To her, they were sentimental good luck symbols of our first
meeting. She had carefully wrapped the ends to provide me a solid
handle whenever I should use them as the weapons of self defense
she intended them to be. She had had to wear latex gloves to
protect her skin from the almost pure silver content of the spikes.
The fact that I could handle them without gloves had been a huge
surprise to the vampires. As I am riddled with the V-squared virus
that makes a vampire…well, vampy, everyone felt I should have the
same allergy to silver. But for whatever reason that I'm not a
vampire, I’m also not sensitive to silver as weres and vamps
are.

Tanya had also given me the long silver
plated bowie knife that the Hellbourne had dropped at our first
meeting when I smacked it with a plastic crate. The knife was
strapped to the vest's back, upside down in a very tight fitting
kydex sheath that I had ordered for it. I could reach the handle
with either hand should its use be necessary.

My roll out bag got a once over to make sure
it had sketch pad, pencils, extra clothes, raingear and more food.
That food part isn’t just ‘cause I like to munch. My pimped out
metabolism will literally consume me from the inside out if I don’t
keep it fed, especially if I engage in fighting or chasing bad
guys.

My gear set, I kicked back and watched some
tv and generally puttered around, waiting for darkness so I could
attempt to explain my coming absence to Tanya. Her connection to me
started to fade at about two miles distance. She didn’t much care
for anything less than a full signal. Can you hear me now?
Good.

The only time I had left the city in the last
seven months had been a Christmas visit to my Gramps back in St.
Lawrence County. Tanya had done just fine with that, mostly ‘cause
she had gone with me. Her and like about thirty of the Coven. Well
maybe only ten, but it had still been funny to see them all bunked
out in the back building at the farm. Gramps had been concerned as
that building has no heat, but Darkkin aren’t much bothered by
cold. It’s got to be well below zero to force them to put on a
jacket and even then a windbreaker will keep them just fine.

Just before twilight I headed out the door,
figuring to time her awakening to my arrival. The trees lining the
streets were well on their way to being fully leaved, and all the
smells of spring washed across my face as I walked. I was upbeat,
pretty sure Tanya wouldn’t have too much trouble with me taking a
quick helicopter ride to Vermont. My senses automatically dialed up
in the warm evening gloom. I could hear conversations in every
residence I passed, could smell a thousand dinners being cooked,
see everything that should have been hidden in the deepening
shadows. The Demidova residence was oddly muted as I closed in on
the front doors. Not that it’s ever loud, but I usually hear the
soft sound of classical music as I get near. Today, nothing.