Natural Consequences (52 page)

“They’re in Federal custody, not a dungeon,” retorted Amber. “We’re not your enemy here.”

“Yeah, you keep saying that,” Jason said. “What’d you arrest them for?”

“I wasn’t there,” she dodged. “But you’re charged with assault, arson and conspiracy,” Amber winced, and then glanced over to the two unconscious men on the floor. “And kidnapping police officers now, probably. Jason, this is only going to get worse.”

“What is your team’s agenda?” demanded Lorelei.

Amber bowed her head. “I can’t answer that.”

“Why,” said Jason, “because it’s all bullshit?”

“Jason, I know you’re one of the good guys!” Amber snapped. “But you’ve broken the law. A whole lot of laws. This mess doesn’t get cleaned up by you going around breaking even more laws. Either of you.”

His eyes came to Lorelei’s. She could read the conflict in his heart.

“Jason,” Lorelei said, “there is only one woman in this room who has never lied to you or used you as a tool against those you care about most.”

He took a deep breath and looked back to Amber. “She’s got a point.”

“I don’t blame you if you’re angry. You’re obviously in a bad spot. We haven’t explained much of anything. We’ve been a little rough. See, we’re dealing with some serious, ugly business, Alex—business you’re familiar with—and we don’t have the advantages you have. We don’t have the allies you’ve had. So we have to be extremely careful, and yes, a little rough.”

Alex sat opposite Hauser
at the conference table. Handcuffs secured his wrists to the armrests of his chair. Two other agents, whose names he’d learned were Keeley and Nguyen, stood nearby with their eyes trained on him. Two armed guards lurked on the other side of the closed door, too. His back still hurt from the scuffle at the van. He said nothing.

The room felt old and long unused. It felt musty. Some of the paint sagged. The light fixtures worked, but Alex suspected this room hadn’t been used in at least a decade or more. He wondered where they’d taken him.

“So I imagine you’d like that explanation now?” Hauser asked, sitting down in the chair across from Alex. Hearing nothing, Hauser put a small stack of manila files on the table. He opened one in front of Alex and drew from it a series of close-up pictures of various people, each attached to a standardized form. Other than the fact that these were all primarily facial pictures, there was little to unify them. Some were old, some relatively new. Most of the subjects were fairly young. There seemed to be an even spread of men and women.

“Do you recognize any of th
ese people, Alex?”

He looked over the photos. He glanced at the text on the files. It all seemed to be personal information: name, date of birth, physical description. Most were from the west coast. Many were from Seattle or its neighboring towns.

“Am I supposed to have a lawyer for this?”

“We can arrange that, but it’ll take time. Until then, Alex, I need to know: have you seen any of these people? Because it would help put a lot of fear and pain to rest if you have.”

“Why don’t you try explaining all this to me instead?”

Hauser leaned forward in his seat. “Everything I’ve seen and heard of you says you’re a stand-up guy, Alex. Everything says you’re one of the good guys. Law-abiding, honest, compassionate, patriotic… up until recently. Then things got weird. Are you still a good guy, Alex?”

“Are you?” Alex asked. “Were you ever?”

“Oh, yes,” Hauser nodded. “You weren’t kidnapped. You were arrested. We’re not thugs. We’re the FBI.”

“Cops can be bought.”

“Yeah, they can,” Hauser agreed. “I’ve seen it. I’m not bought. Alex, if I
were a paid tool for the people who are after you, I wouldn’t keep the act going this long. Those kinds of people would just strap you down on a table and hurt you until you talked. You already know what that’s like.”

Alex stared at him, his eyes narrowing. “Explain.”

“I’m with a special task force formed under secret national security orders to deal with supernatural crimes,” Hauser said. “If that sounds crazy, you should ask yourself how crazy it would be if there
wasn’t
such a task force, because you know the kinds of things that are out there in the shadows. You know they get sloppy. You know what modern technology and organization can do.

“We’ve been around since the nineties. Before that, it was just independent agents and individuals in local law enforcement all feeling like they were alone. Like nobody would believe them or help them with the shit they knew was out there. We answer to proper, designated officials within the Department of Justice. We have
real judges that handle all of our trials. Everyone gets his or her day in court. Or night, for most of our suspects.”

“Supernaturals,” Alex frowned.

“Yes. Vampires. Werewolves. You’ve fought a few. You’ve taken on a couple of demons, too, and that’s a step up from anything we’ve dealt with as far as we know. How you tell a demon from your garden-variety monster with delusions of grandeur I really don’t know, but I’m hoping you can help us with that.”

“What happens to these supernaturals you catch?”

“Like I said, when they commit crimes, they go on trial.”

“Supernaturals get trials? Terrorists don’t
always get trials.”

“This task force and the courts we answer to didn’t get set up under the same circumstances that brought us the war on terror. That gets played by different rules. We got set up before that, so we have to adhere to constitutional rights and legal code as closely as possible.”

The younger man’s brow furrowed. “And that never changed?”

“The existence and functions of this task force was never, ah, fully disclosed to the Bush Administration. It kind of ran on its own until 2009.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Hey, would
you
have told those guys about all this?”

“You don’t look like a Democrat to me.”

“I’m not,” Hauser admitted with an uncomfortable frown, “but it wasn’t my call.” He waited for the skeptical look to come off Alex’s face. It never left, so he continued. “Alex, we’re trying to bring down murderers and organized criminals with powers most people think exist only in fiction. They do real harm, though. You know that.”

He tapped one of the pictures in front of Alex. “These people are all missing. We have reasons to believe
they are all victims of various vampires whom we haven’t caught yet. So I’m asking you, have you seen any of these people?”

Alex looked down at the pictures again. He tried to keep his face clear of emotion, but his breath deepened. “What does all this have to do with me?
”

“C’mon, Alex, don’t play dumb,” Hauser said patiently. “You kicked one of my guys in the face today because you knew he was going to cast a spell on you.”

“I kicked a guy who came at me with a wooden stick and a handful of some sort of powder,” Alex replied. “Lotta different ways to read that.”

“So I haven’t made it obvious enough that I know what’s going on with you?”

“Seems kinda stupid to admit or deny anything without talking to a lawyer.”

Hauser reached into another file folder and slid out a detailed, high-quality sketch. “Do you recognize this woman?”

Alex glanced down at the face of Lady Anastacia—twice, though he didn’t mean to. He brought his eyes back to Hauser’s. “Should I?”

The agent pulled a glossy sheet of paper from a third file folder. This one contained several different pictures of the same man from various angles and ranges. “Have you met this man?”

Alex looked down only once this time. He knew instantly that he shouldn’t have even done that much.

“You’re no bullshit artist, Alex,” Hauser said. “You might know when to keep your mouth shut, but it takes a lot more than that to throw a guy like me off a scent. You’ve seen Kanatova before, and you’ve seen him. I can tell by your face.

“This man is Carlos Medina, and he’s not a vampire. He’s been missing for over a month. He comes from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, and he’s a high-ranking member of a large and nasty cartel of drug traffickers and murderers. They sent him up here and he disappeared along with his wife and two of his thugs. When a guy like that goes missing, all sorts of bad things happen.”

The younger man’s eyes fell away. He stared at the table, then off to one wall.

“I need to know what happened to Carlos Medina, Alex. People could get hurt. Innocent people. Cops. Federal agents. People with families. I need to know.”

It could all be bullshit
, Alex thought.
It could all be bullshit and this could all just be a long con to get something out of me.

A voice he couldn’t actually hear said,
You can’t take that chance. People could die. Can you live with that?

“Alex, this is bigger than you. You need to talk to me.”

He’s right. It’s bigger than you.

Alex swallowed hard. “He’s dead.
You won’t find a body.”

“Do you know who killed him?” Hauser asked, his voice easing further.

Tell him. Tell him everything. He needs to know. People could die.

“Am I being charged with something?”

“That depends,” said Hauser. “Right now, I’ve got you on kidnapping and assaulting two people with a deadly weapon, assault on a Federal agent and resisting arrest. That’s just the stuff I can sew up in court right now. It gets much worse once the prosecutor hashes out all the charges that come from waging some wild-assed secret vigilante war in the middle of an American city. You don’t get to blow up houses and bus tunnels and plead self-defense.”

“But you’ll let me off if I talk,
I suppose?” Alex frowned.

“That depends on a lot of things. It depends on how cooperative you are. I already know a lot. I
have plenty to go on from here without you, but it makes a big difference if you can corroborate things. But you have to tell me everything. You have to tell me about the vampires and the demons and Lorelei and Rachel. All of it.”

Alex looked up at him then, a sense of dread growing inside as he considered Hauser’s demands—and where they could have come from.
Some random Seattle vampire might have coughed up Alex’s name in some moment much like this one, but it seemed unlikely that they would know the angel’s name…

“Who talked to you?”

“Your friends rolled over on all this when they got into trouble of their own.”

“Right. Pull the other one.”

Hauser let out a sigh. “No, I haven’t had any luck with that line on them, either,” he admitted. The agent took a sip of his coffee and leaned back in his chair. “That’s a tight group of pals you have there. To be honest, though, they’ve all got their own legal problems at this point. Might help them to know they didn’t have to keep silent on your account.”

Alex stared, his mind racing through conclusions. The pieces quickly fell into place. He winced, feeling an emotional jab that would probably be much worse for someone else. “Damn,” he muttered. “Poor Jason.”

“Yeah, poor Jason,” Hauser nodded with something akin to sympathy.

“You son of a bitch,” Alex hissed.

“Alex. I’m telling you. I play rough because I have to, not because I enjoy it. I’m one of the good guys.”

He didn’t know any better
, said the voice in Alex’s head.
He doesn’t know you or the others. How could he have done anything differently?

Alex looked down at the table once more, wishing the voice he took for his conscience would shut up and leave him alone. Forgiveness and logic didn’t make him feel any better for what his friend would have to endure—if it wasn’t upon him already.

* * *

“I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest one last time that we could all dial this back a few steps,” Amber spoke up from the back seat of the parked car. She sat with her hands still cuffed behind her. Her voice remained calm as she looked up at the tall
trees outside the window. “We’re not the bad guys. I know you’re not the bad guys. We could all just talk this out if you’d ease off from this.”

The woman in the driver’s seat was unimpressed. “You might have started by opening a dialogue rather than making arrests.”

“I wish I could’ve. I don’t see how.”

“No?” Lorelei asked mildly. “After you saw the danger Alex and Jason both faced, you could not have come forward and explained yourself and your agency’s concerns?”

“You know it’s not that simple.”

“The same could be said for our position. I do none of this without regret.” Lorelei turned to Jason, who sat in the front seat wearing a naturally troubled expression. “Can you do this?” she asked him with considerably more empathy than she showed Amber. “You have every right to step aside or object. I will think no less of you for it.”

“You’re still gonna go in and get him anyway, right?” Jason shrugged.

“I would not put you in the middle of it.”

He glanced over his shoulder at Amber. It didn’t help his glum mood or his worries. “I’ve come this far. You’re not leaving me here to protect me, are you?”

“I would never doubt your courage or your wits,” Lorelei shook her head. “I am
simply much stealthier on my own. We may need Amber before this is over, and someone must stay with her. But I am worried about you. It would be natural for you to question me, and all of this. It would even be natural for you to still feel torn over Amber. I know what it is to manipulate someone as she has done. I know how lost and conflicted you must be. This is no test of your loyalties. Not on my part.”

“Hhff. That’s a good line,” grumbled Amber.

Lorelei ignored her, focusing her attention on Jason. “You mean that, don’t you?” he asked Lorelei.

“I have walked this world for three thousand years, Jason. In all that time, I have made fewer friends than I have fingers to count them upo
n.” Lorelei’s hand came to his. “You are one of them. There is no crime I would not commit nor any foe I would not face to keep you safe.”

He smiled a little. “Alex is a lucky bastard.”