Darkness Returns Page 2

  The agent waved the White House letter and envelope in Lockman’s face. “Oh, no. I didn’t get anything. This has the markings of a takeover. At least I had tabs on this guy. Whoever’s taking over, I don’t have anything.”

  “It’s not a takeover.”

  The agent’s eyes narrowed. “Then what? Vigilantes?”

  That’s when Lockman tossed a phrase he hadn’t said in a long-ass time.

  “It’s classified.”

  Once they had all the cops cleared out, they could get to the real work. Lockman hit a button on his smart phone and put it to his ear. After only half a ring, she answered with, “‘Sup?”

  “We’re free of pedestrians.”

  The line broke without a follow up. A second later, Jessie dropped onto the balcony and came in through the French doors. She was dressed all in black, her black hair pulled back in a bun. Aside from her gray pallor and the black veins prominently running under her skin, she looked almost the same as she had when Lockman first met her on his doorstep in California.

  Jessie’s jaw dropped, showing off her fangs, as she took in the sight of the room. “Ho-lee shnikies.” She sniffed. Made a face. “I bet that smell makes you guys sick.”

  “I’m over it,” Lockman said.

  Mica didn’t bother with an answer. She never said much to Lockman. He had the sense she blamed him for Kate’s death. Which was fine. He blamed himself. The only thing that kept it from overwhelming him was knowing that Kate had forgiven him.

  “Yeah, well, it makes my mouth water. All that blood?” She scowled with a bitterness a hundred years beyond the age of her face. “The poop, however, is making me gag.”

  Lockman wasn’t sure whether to marvel or worry at this return to her glib self. The last couple years had dried up that part of her personality. Getting turned into a vamp could do that. She had just lost her mother, too. If anything, she should have fallen into a deeper funk. It was hard to tell if she was faking.

  A conversation for another time. They had work to do.

  “Anybody here believe this was a scuffle between drug lords?”

  Jessie raised her eyebrows. “I’m seeing vamp parts. And this guy…” she grabbed the body slumped over the desk by the hair and pulled him up. Half of his face had sloughed off like warm putty. The other half matched Jessie’s pallor with those same black veins. He wore a button-up shirt with about half those buttons undone, exposing the bony, pallid chest underneath, the collection of gold chains around his neck, and the wooden stake jammed in his heart. “I guess you could call him Scarface.”

  She let go of his hair and the dead vamp flopped back onto the desk.

  “Do vamps deal drugs?” Jessie asked.

  “Vamps do whatever they want,” Mica said. “Least these days.”

  Lockman did a quick scan of the room, mostly the floor, to confirm his initial thoughts when he’d first entered. “You see some of the torsos with Kevlar?”

  Jessie and Mica both nodded.

  “Mortals,” Lockman said. “Not one of them with any shots in the Kevlar.”

  “Vamps like to use their hands,” Mica said.

  “Not all vamps,” Jessie said, eyeing Mica hard.

  Mica raised her hands in surrender. “I don’t count you in their company, love.”

  Lockman pushed on with his observations. “How many whole bodies you see?”

  “Two,” Mica and Jessie said in unison.

  “And they are…”

  “Vamps,” Jessie said first. “With lots of silver slugs in them.”

  “So these are our guys.” Mica picked a path through the room, carefully keeping entrails off her boots. “Looks like they didn’t fare so well this time.”

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” Jessie said and crossed her arms. “Why do you think this scene’s so much worse than the others?”

  They had visited or studied the police casebooks of four crime scenes that featured vamp remains since arriving in New Orleans. A couple had mortal casualties, bystanders that had taken a stray bullet in both cases. As far as Lockman could tell, this was the first scene with claws-on vamp casualties. And the one with the highest amount of dead on either side. This little vigilante group they’d been tracking had slipped up, and good.

  “They’re amateurs,” Lockman said. “And they bit off more than they could chew this time.” He walked over to a fat arm that lay on the floor as if pulled off from a mannequin, except for the stump of bone at the shoulder, and all the blood, of course. The arm had a tattoo of an American flag clenched in the claws of a soaring bald eagle. A thick banner curled underneath the tat with printed lettering that stated, These colors don’t run.

  Lockman pointed at the tattoo. “No self-respecting soldier would get that shit put on his arm. These guys are wannabes.” He toed the AR-15 laying on the floor inches away from the severed arm’s fingertips. “Well armed wannabes. Worst kind.”

  Mica lifted a thin shoulder. The tank top she wore showed off a collection of her own tattoos up and down only one arm, all sorts of pictures and symbols fitted together like an abstract puzzle. “What’s the big deal? Recreational vamp slayers ain’t such a fuss.”

  “I said the same thing to your boss.”

  She didn’t like his tone. He could tell by the way her jaw set and she pinched her eyes. You couldn’t say much about Kress without Mica getting touchy, Lockman had noticed. He wondered if their relationship was more than professional. Not that it mattered to him.

  “This falls into our territory because of the mortal casualties. And because they don’t know how to clean up after their damn selves. Since Barrow, the prez has got a bug up his ass about keeping the supernatural on the down low.”

  “So we’re the clean-up crew?” Jessie’s lip curled as she surveyed the floor as if calculating how much scrubbing it would take to clean the carpet.

  “We’ll set a match to this place when we’re through. But we have to figure out who these jerk offs are before they do any worse. Shining on the local PD is one thing. Laying a gag order on the DEA…” Lockman let them fill in the rest.

  “So we’re looking for clues,” Jessie said, “in a big pile of guts.”

  “Suck it up.”

  Jessie cocked her hip and gave Lockman her disgusted teen face. “Really?”

  “What?”

  “Suck it up? You think that’s funny?”

  Mica actually snickered, yet somehow managed it without smiling.

  Lockman caught up. He rolled his eyes. “When have you ever known me to make a pun? Give me a break. I meant, deal with it.”

  Jessie cracked a smile. “Nice to see I can still get a rise out of you.”

  “Yeah, right.” He turned his head down to start searching the remains, and to keep her from seeing his own smirk.

  Twenty minutes later, Lockman found it.

  He had moved to studying the vamp at the desk, the DEA’s apparent drug lord whom they had no idea was a vampire. What a shock that agent would have received if Lockman had let him stick around to investigate the scene.

  The thing that caught Lockman’s attention was something grasped in the drug lord’s fist, a sprig of blonde held like a flower stem. Death had turned the vamp’s fist into stone. Lockman had to use a letter opener off the desk to pry the fingers open.

  The lock of blonde hair floated from the vamp’s hand to the desktop. Several ends of the hair had bits of skin still attached as if he’d ripped the hair off a scalp. The lock, itself, measured about seven or eight inches.

  The inside of Lockman’s belly prickled. His subconscious shot out a conclusion he couldn’t tuck away once it bounced around freely in his mind. He was certain a lab analysis—or the mojo equivalent, if that was Kress’s preference—would back up what his instincts told him.

  Teresa.

  He picked up the lock of hair in his latex-gloved hand and opened his mouth to call Mica and Jessie over, but his phone buzzed against his hip. He pulled it from the clip on h
is belt.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need you to bring your team in.”

  Kress, his gravel train voice, immortalized by his films, unmistakable.

  “We’re smack in the middle of a crime scene. And I’ve got—”

  “Drop what you’re doing and bring the team in. Something’s come up.”

  Lockman lifted the lock of hair as if Kress stood there in person and could see it. “Would you listen a second. I have something—”

  “That’s an order, Lockman. Commander in Chief put me in charge and you as my second. Don’t forget that.”

  “And this place? Do you have any idea of the mess here?”

  “I’ll send a clean-up crew.”

  Before Lockman could say any more, the line went dead.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “What is it?” Jessie asked.

  “The boss is calling us in. We’re done here.”

  Mica snapped off her latex gloves and tossed them to the floor, brushed her hands together, and already started for the door, dutiful as ever.

  Jessie came over to Lockman’s side and pointed at his raised hand that held onto the blonde lock. “You find something?”

  “Damn right I did.” Lockman pulled a plastic baggie from his pocket and bagged the hair. He’d have some techy look at it back at HQ whether Kress wanted to follow up or not. If Teresa Stevenson was running her own vampire kill club in New Orleans—which made perfect sense, considering what happened to her sister here—she never would have let a mission like this go so sideways. Not unless she had gotten sloppy. And sloppy meant unstable. Slaughtering New Orleans vamps on some revenge kick. A dangerous path.

  The boys in this room had learned that the hard way.

  Chapter Two

  Her dad was keyed up. Jessie could feel the buzz coming off of him the whole flight back to headquarters. Mica rode with her eyes closed, though Jessie could tell she wasn’t sleeping. Did pixies sleep? Who knew?

  Dad, though, couldn’t keep from fidgeting, and his hand kept going to his shirt pocket where he’d tucked that baggie with the hair in it. When she’d asked him about it, he gave her one of his I Ain’t Talking About it grunts. She knew him well enough by now to recognize any further questioning would win her nothing but more grunts.

  It bugged him, though. Which meant it bugged her, too.

  When the three of them filed into Kress’s office for a debrief, Dad started right in.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, but I’ve got something you need to see.” He put his hand to his pocket, but Kress raised his own hand.

  “I’ll look at it later. Right now, I need to speak with Jessie.”

  Her dad’s face grew all sorts of lines. He looked older than Jessie had ever noticed before. “About what?”

  “That’s between the two of us.” He nodded once each to Lockman and Mica. “If you don’t mind stepping out for a minute.”

  The lines in her father’s face deepened. The burning in his eyes made Jessie’s cold vampire skin a little colder. He looked about ready to throat punch Kress, and then maybe eat his face.

  “It’s okay, Dad.” She rested a hand on his arm. “He’s gotta know I’ll tell you whatever he says afterward. No secrets between us.”

  Kress lifted one eyebrow. “You’re a part of a government organization now. I could order you to keep our conversation private.”

  “Yeah, and the teen girl with the fangs is just gonna roll over and do whatever you say.” Jessie snorted. “Besides, what are you gonna do? Put the Chosen One in prison?”

  Kress’s mouth curled down. He smoldered much like his famous movie villain characters would after a glib rebuke from the starring hero. Then he sighed, steepled his fingers, and said, “I’d only like a moment alone to discuss a situation that directly relates to you. I’m not asking you to keep any secrets.”

  “Good enough for me.” She looked at her dad. “It’s totally cool.”

  His cool gray eyes studied Jessie for a moment, the deepest lines around them softening. “You are so much like your mother.”

  Something sharp pinched Jessie in the side, like a runner’s stitch, only deeper. She didn’t want to talk about Mom. Didn’t want to think about her. Not yet. Better to get caught up in the supernatural superhero stuff, go out and kick monster butt.

  “Whatev. Go do what you gotta do while I have my special meeting.” She tried to point with her gaze at his shirt pocket, but couldn’t tell if he got the hint. He just gave Kress one last glare, then grunted and stormed out of the office.

  Mica tilted her head to Kress. “Let me know you need anything, love.” Then she turned and followed Lockman out, leaving Jessie and Kress alone in the office.

  “Have a seat,” he said and gestured to a chair across from his desk.

  Jessie had flashbacks to those days in school getting sent to the principal’s office, or worse, the school counselor. She folded her arms. “Cool if I stand?”

  “Suit yourself.” He leaned back in his chair, mouth open to say something, but winced instead.

  “Something wrong?”

  He took a deep breath, let it out slowly through his nose, and shook his head. “Just some minor back pain. In Battle Cry 2, I had the brilliant idea of doing my own stunts. Never again.”

  “Battle Cry 2, huh? Not one of your best flicks.”

  His eyebrows went up and a light smile touched his face. “You’ve seen it?”

  “I’ve seen just about every movie ever made…” Her shoulders sagged. She noticed that iron smell that seemed to follow her everywhere. “Before I went vamp, anyway.”

  Kress cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for that. But you do realize how special you are? This turn in your fate, becoming a vampire who retained her soul, having access to the power of millions of souls—”

  “Like the one responsible for wiping out over eight hundred people, and who made me kill my own mother?” She curled her lip. A muddy taste filled her mouth. “Yeah. Real special.”

  “You have to understand, the tragedies you’ve suffered have all served a greater purpose. Those events brought you here, to me, to this facility, to a point where you can fulfill the prophecy so many have heard about, but so few understand.”

  Jessie’s jaw hung open. She could feel the recycled air of this underground level of Kress’s precious facility drying out her tongue. “You know what you sound like?”

  He leaned forward, hands folded on his desk, all interested in what the little vamp girl had to say.

  “A psycho religious zealot. All these bad things that have happened to you. All part of God’s plan.” She pointed a finger toward the ceiling. “It’s bullshit from them.” She pointed at him. “And it’s bullshit from you. In case you haven’t noticed, all I’ve managed to do is make things worse in the world, not save it.”

  “You staunched the threat of a vampire army. The death of all those vamps gathered in Barrow has the rest of the population spreading thin for fear of something similar. These groups still holding together, our Agency is systematically obliterating with drone attacks and black-ops strikes.”

  A feeling of having to burst filled Jessie’s chest. The only way to relieve it was a jagged, barky laugh that echoed back to her from the corners of the room and made her cringe. “You’re nuts. Barrow was a freaking bloodbath. Four-thousand people killed or turned into vamps.”

  “Yet it could have been so much worse.”

  “It would have been if my mom and dad weren’t such a fucking badasses. They stopped me from leading a bunch of sunwalking vampires on a cross-country feeding spree.”

  Kress sucked in a long breath and let it sigh out like a leaking tire, his eyes slightly rolled back in his head. He drummed his fingers on his desk. “There’s no point in arguing about it. What’s done is done. And fate has brought us to a place where we can finish the rest.”

  Even underground, Jessie could sense the sunrise outside, her vampiric circadian rhythm m
aking her sleepy. She gave in and took Kress’s offered seat, rubbed her eyes, then stared him down. “You didn’t send my dad out so you could spend time telling me how special I am. What do you want?”

  “Did Gabriel ever tell you about The Return?”

  “All he ever said was that he didn’t believe in it.”

  “Didn’t believe in its purpose, or didn’t believe it possible?”

  She shrugged. “Just that he didn’t believe in it. He never elaborated. Wasn’t on his agenda, I guess.”

  Kress leaned back in his chair. A large American flag hung on the wall behind his desk like a stage backdrop. On either side of the flag hung framed copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Another, small flag sat on his desk next to a cup full of pens. Trappings of a government office that seemed so out of place considering what Jessie knew about their operation. The bulk of the core staff at the Agency weren’t exactly from America. They weren’t even from this plane of existence. Heck, the Agency’s headquarters had been built into a facility that belonged to Kress, as if he owned the Agency himself.

  She didn’t know why it bothered her, but it did. There was something false about it all. Mere props to satisfy an ideal that no one here truly respected, or cared about.

  As if to prove this point, Kress said, “Despite our official role as decreed by the president, the only real mission I care about is facilitating The Return.”

  “Your hobby, funded by tax-payers’ dollars.”

  “Don’t get glib. Your mother understood the importance of The Return. But no one has had a chance to explain it to you.”

  “I’m not an idiot. I get it.”

  “The Return means ridding the mortal plane of all the things that don’t belong here. Vampires, werewolves…perhaps even ghosts.”

  She knew he was trying to bait her with that last one. Jessie’s friends and family hadn’t had the best of luck when it came to non-corporeal specters. But she didn’t bite. Kept quiet.

  He waited a couple seconds, then changed tacks. “The reason I wanted to talk to you—”