“Someone’s following us,” Alex noted.
“It’s Molly and Onyx,” Lorelei replied. “We haven’t seen Drew or Wade.”
“I got a text from them a couple minutes ago,” Jason announced. “They’re okay, but they don’t seem to know anything’s wrong.”
“If you can warn them subtly, do so,” Lorelei told him, keeping her eyes on the road, “but put nothing in the open. We do not know how closely we’ve been watched.”
“Way ahead of you,” Jason said, typing out another message.
Alex let out a long, shuddering breath, leaning forward to put his face in his hands. His forehead rested on the dashboard. The sounds that accompanied his breathing were somewhere between loud shivers and sobs.
Lorelei reached out to touch the back of his neck with one hand. “You are safe, love,” she said. Her eyes flicked to the mirror. “Has Alex acted strangely?”
“He kinda had an ass-whuppin’ freak-out, yeah,” Jason said. “Didn’t always speak English. Got madder than I’ve ever seen anyone. He saved our necks, too, but still.”
It was all Lorelei needed to hear. “Alex, you are with me, and you are safe,” she told him again. “We are in a car headed home in Seattle. Let your sorrows go. They are not yours to bear.” She kept one hand on the wheel and the other on him, lightly rubbing his neck and passing her fingertips through the hair on the back of his head.
Amber watched all of this with uneasy interest. For all the stress of the moment, Lorelei seemed perfectly calm. She took everything seriously, but Amber saw no worry or fear. Lorelei seemed completely confident in the face of vengeful supernaturals and a boyfriend going through a mental meltdown.
“You must stay with us tonight,” Lorelei said, breaking Amber from her thoughts, “at least until sunrise. We have space. You are much safer with us than home alone.”
“No argument,” answered Jason. Amber just gave a shrug and a nod.
“Did they say who they were?” Lorelei asked. “Or what they wanted?”
“There were a few dozen of ‘em,” Jason said. “I think the ones in charge were a guy from New York and another one in a toga, said he was from LA.”
“Cornelius?”
“You know them?” asked Amber.
“I’ve had my share of unpleasant encounters. He is quite dangerous.”
“Oh,” said Jason. “Well, Alex goaded him into a swordfight and killed him.”
Lorelei’s head tilted slightly. “Splendid.”
* * *
“Website says this station was closed as of today, just after eight,” said Lanier. He rode in the back of the van with his laptop open. Nguyen’s driving made for some tricky work on the keyboard, but he was getting used to that. “I’d have to dig to see how far back this goes or when it was planned.”
“I’m betting it wasn’t at all,” said Hauser. He sat in the front seat, strapping a black Kevlar vest over his chest. White letters emblazoned on both sides marked the piece as Bureau property. “Get your body armor on and lock and load. We don’t have time to soft-shoe this one.”
Lanier obeyed, closing up his laptop without objection. The Bureau van offered a pair of shotguns and an M4 carbine, the latter of which Lanier handed off to Hauser. Long experience had taught the task force not to go lightly when it came to firepower.
“Just park on the street, Nguyen,” Hauser instructed. “We’ll commandeer whatever local police turn up as soon as they arrive, but let’s not call them ahead of time. We need to get the first look at the scene.”
Nguyen pulled around the last corner and did just that. They saw nothing out of the ordinary. The street was quiet, with the occasional car passing by and a Metro entrance under a department store façade blocked off by orange traffic cones and yellow emergency tape. “Doesn’t look like anything blew up here,” Nguyen observed. “No smoke, no crowd, nothing.”
She pulled up onto the curb as she spoke. Hauser was out of the passenger side door as soon as she stopped. Lanier followed quickly with his shotgun at the ready. They crept up to the entrance in smooth, trained movements. Nguyen hurried into her vest and grabbed the other shotgun, catching up before her teammates began their descent down the stairs.
They found a completely darkened tunnel and the smell of smoke, but no clouds to match. All three agents turned on the flashlights attached to their weapons and swept the hallway before moving in.
“Wow,” murmured Lanier. The whole structure remained steady and firm, but signs of fire were evident a short distance down the broad hallway. Soot covered everything from floor to ceiling. The remains of burned and fallen chandeliers littered the floor. Here and there the agents saw smoldering piles of clothes and ash. Large fuming lumps of things that might have been large dogs or wolves could be found among the remains.
Two sets of footprints trailed through the soot, leading from the entrance on down toward the green ticketing booth at the end of the hall. From the wide spacing between each print, it seemed clear that the pair had been running. The field of soot ended well before the booth. It was difficult to see which way the runners went from that point.
Hauser held up one hand to halt his comrades. Then he reached into his pants pocket to pull out a simple, ordinary set of rosary beads. With his right hand still filled by the grip of his carbine, Hauser had to wind the beads around the fingers of his left hand with a swirling motion.
Nguyen watched him curiously. In her few years on the task force, Hauser had never struck her as the religious sort. She also knew just as well as her boss that the vampires had no special aversion to holy symbols. Yet as soon as Hauser had the beads wrapped up, with the cross on the rosary beads dangling from his palm, he brought his left hand back under the barrel of his carbine and got moving again.
“What the hell kind of fire burns like this but gives off hardly any smoke?” Lanier asked quietly. Nguyen just shook her head. The two followed Hauser.
He walked carefully and stealthily, sweeping back and forth with the light from under his weapon’s barrel and taking in his surroundings. He paused briefly, tilting his head as if listening to something, and then turned off to the left, ignoring the trail of footprints. The other agents followed wordlessly.
At the landing of a nearby staircase, they found the body. The man lay face down on the stairs, clad in a leather jacket, jeans and boots. Blond hair spilled out on the floor all around his head. Hauser motioned for the agents to spread out as they approached. All three kept their weapons at the ready.
“FBI,” Hauser declared. “You awake there?” He stepped forward, still ready to shoot, and kicked at one of the man’s feet.
The leg jerked to one side as the formerly lifeless body started to twitch. The man seemed to want to crawl away, but could not rise or make his limbs work.
“Don’t move,” Hauser ordered. “Don’t move or we’ll shoot. Got me? We’ll shoot you right in the head.” The twitching stopped cold. Hauser looked to Nguyen and Lanier to coordinate, and then stepped forward to grab the man’s shoulder and roll him over.
His head rolled limply on the ground as he was turned onto his back. Hauser and his agents saw angry eyes and a snarling face. The chain mail shirt under his leather jacket seemed somewhat suspicious. So did the ugly wound in the center of the man’s neck. The horizontal gouge looked like it ran deep, but he bore only traces of red stains where his blood should have coated his whole chest and pooled out on the floor underneath him.
“Jesus, I don’t think he can move under his own power,” said Nguyen. “Someone must have stabbed right through his spinal cord.”
“Yeah, but he’s awake and aware,” Hauser muttered, “which means he’ll heal that mess with time. Get out your cuffs, people. We’ve got to get him secured before the locals show up.”