Hunters in the Night (3 page)

I’d
learned long ago that it’s best to avoid being the first to talk about
compensation in a job interview, and that was exactly the kind of situation I
suddenly found myself in. “That depends,” I said. “What exactly are you
offering?”

“A
civilian consultant’s position,” Dominique said. “You would report to me, and
only me. You’d have the same pay rate and privileges as a senior NATO official,
but with none of the responsibilities of that position. In exchange, I want you
to provide me with as much information as you can about . . . what do you call
yourselves anyway?”

“Nightcrafters,”
I said.

“Right.
I’d want to know all about your nightcrafter training.”

“I
told you I dropped out. Never completed the training.”

“But
you’re still light years ahead of the rest of us,” Dominique said.

“I
can’t teach anybody how to become a nightcrafter.”

“I
don’t expect you to. I just want information, not instruction.”

“I
. . . dunno about this,” I said. “Nightcrafting has remained secret for a very
long time for some very good reasons.”

Dominique
raised an eyebrow. “Reasons like what?”

“Protecting
the general public from people who would misuse the power.”

“Kal,
I think tonight’s events show very clearly that the activities of the
nightcrafters have done nothing to improve the safety of the general public.”

“Point
taken,” I said.

“I’ve
read about incidents like this in a few extremely classified documents,”
Dominique continued, “but I didn’t really believe any of it until now. Those
things in the dark don’t belong here, and they wouldn’t be here unless
something was dragging them out of their normal habitat. The people responsible
for all this don’t seem to give a damn about the lives they put at risk. That’s
a problem. Until this point, it’s been a problem we’ve had no solution for. But
maybe you can change all that.”

“The
nightcrafters don’t believe the problem is all that bad,” I said.

“I
don’t care what they believe,” Dominique said, and her face muscles tightened
as her emotions finally betrayed her controlled exterior. “Tonight, I lost a
man who was more than an employee. He was my friend. Tomorrow I will have to
inform his seventy-year-old mother that her only child is dead. And when she
asks what happened, I will have to lie to her.”

“I
get your point.”

“Do
you?” she said sharply as she leaned forward to stare right in my face. “Do you
really? Because the worst part of all this is that there’s no closure here.
This wasn’t a one-time freak accident. It’s happened before. It will happen
again.”

“I
know.”

“So
only one question remains,” Dominique said, leaning back into her seat. “What
are you going to do about it?”

* * *

So
I went to work for NATO.

Dominique
set me up with a nice deal. In addition to what she offered that fateful night,
she got me a new apartment near her office, and a new car with government
plates. I was feeling pretty good about my new lot in life.

Then
the tests started.

Dominique
decided that the first order of business was to find out as much as possible
about nightcrafting from a scientific standpoint. That meant a lot of poking,
prodding, and scanning. This all would take place in a secret laboratory buried
in the basement of a drab U.S. Government building in Manhattan that was not
very far from Dominique’s office at the United Nations headquarters. She sent
me there with an escort of two very large men with obvious gun-shaped bulges in
their blazers. Once at the building, my two new buddies stayed in the lobby
while I got into the elevator. The elevator doors closed as soon as I got in,
and I automatically descended to a floor that didn’t have a corresponding
button on the floor selection panel.

While
on my way down, I did a mental check of the quick briefing Dominique had given
me about the situation. The science guy who supervised the lab and its
experiments was Newton. His parents were huge nerds too, which explained the
odd name choice. He was named after Isaac Newton (the guy who gets all the
credit for refining the theory of gravity). That was all I knew until the
elevator doors opened, and he was standing right in front of me.

“So
you’re the magician,” he said. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Kai.”

“Call
me Kal,” I said, “and don’t call me a magician.”

“No
problem,” Newton said, smiling. “Sorry about that. I’m just a little excited.
We’ve had a lot of strange test subjects around here, but you definitely
qualify as the strangest.”

“Uh
. . . thanks? I guess?”

“You’re
welcome,” Newton said.

We
left the elevator and went into the lab. It was divided into about a dozen
smaller chambers, each one full of all sorts of equipment and each walled off
by tall transparent glass panels that went from floor to ceiling. Newton led me
into the farthest of them and tapped a button on the tablet he was holding. The
glass walls frosted and went nearly opaque.

Newton
talked the whole time, but I didn’t catch much of what he said. He spoke at
rapid-fire pace with a ton of technical jargon. He was your stereotypical geek
in a lot of ways — he wore glasses, had the fashion sense of a color-blind
farmer, and looked like he hardly ever combed his hair. But he was cute, and
there was no doubt that he loved his job. He had an infectious enthusiasm that
made me a little less uncomfortable with the idea of being a science
experiment.

“I
won’t keep you long,” he said after a long diatribe about quantum entanglement.
“We just have a few tests to run. But before we get started . . . could you . .
. you know.”

“No,
I don’t know. What?”

He
waved his hands about and said, “Do some of this magic I’ve heard of.”

I
sighed. “Newton, I’m not David Copperfield. I don’t do shows.”

“I’m
not asking for that,” Newton said. “I just need to know what I’m working with.
I want to make sure we’ve got the real deal before we get going with all these
tests.”

“Fine,”
I said. “Turn the lights out.”

Newton
laughed and said, “The last guy who told me he was going to show me something
magical said the same thing.”

I
couldn’t help but smile at that.

Newton
hit the lights, and the lab went dark except for the little multicolored LEDs
on the equipment. I took a moment to consider what kind of display would work
for Newton, and came up with nothing. So I figured I’d just ask him.

“What
do you think of when the word ’magic’ comes to mind?” I said.

“Making
things disappear and reappear,” Newton said. “Like pulling a coin from
someone’s ear.”

“Okay,”
I said. “That’s a good one. Easy. Classic magic trick.” I looked around the
room for something handy and set eyes on a gadget. I grabbed it. “Let’s use
this for our demonstration. What is it, anyway?”

“That’s
a voltmeter,” Newton said.

“All
right,” I said. “Your voltmeter is in my hand right now. Watch it disappear.”

I
focused my mind and sought out the Rift. But this time, instead of drawing
power out of it, I was pushing something
into
it. This process always feels
weird. Imagine you’re in a pool and trying to push a beach ball down from the
surface to submerge it. There’s resistance, and movement, and it’s a little
tricky. The physics really don’t want to let that big buoyant ball get
submerged. But you keep pushing hard, and eventually . . .

There
was a little pop sound like another jar of pickles opening. The voltmeter was
gone.

“Well
I’ll be damned,” Newton said. “Where did it go?”

“It’s
on the other side of the Rift now,” I said.

“What’s
the Rift?”

“It’s
. . . hard to explain. Think of it like . . . I don’t really know how to put
it. It’s just something that’s always around, but at the same time it’s never
around. It’s like a rip in a membrane between our reality and some other place.
But that other place isn’t made of the same stuff that we’re made of. Instead,
the matter over there is a special kind of material that seeps through that rip
in the membrane. That material is the source of our magic, but it can only
exist in the dark. Light annihilates it.”

“Annihilates?”
Newton asked. “Like a matter-antimatter reaction?”

“Maybe,”
I said. “I’ve never actually seen one of those, but maybe it works the same. My
teacher just told me that the forces that hold the Rift-material together get
weakened by exposure to light.”

“And
this Rift is everywhere?”

“Not
really,” I said. “It’s just in certain places. I don’t know the exact
boundaries, and I’m not sure anyone does. I remember hearing something about it
originating in Western Europe, and the coverage there is pretty wide. But the
Rift doesn’t spread far into North and South America. It’s strong here in New
York and New England, but go fifty miles west of here and there’s nothing.”

“So
there’s no magic in, let’s say . . . Cleveland?”

“Nope,”
I said. “Same thing with Indianapolis, Vancouver, or Mexico City. The Rift just
isn’t there. That’s a good thing, in a way. It means bad things only happen in
a few spots. But it’s also a problem in the locations where the Rift exists.
All the nightcrafters live in the same areas, and all that concentrated
activity draws a lot of creatures out of the Rift.”

“Fascinating,”
Newton said. “And you’ve been trained to control this Rift?”

“No,”
I said. “I can’t control the Rift itself. I don’t think anyone can. But I can
have some control over the material that comes out of it. I can draw power from
it, and I can sense things made out of it. And, with a lot of training, I
learned how to put things from our side of the Rift into the other side.”

“Can
you pull things out of it?” Newton asked.

I
nodded, and reached back into the Rift, right at the spot in mid-air where I’d
left the voltmeter. My fingers grasped its hard rectangular form, which I could
still feel even though the device was on the other side of the Rift. I focused
my mind on the spell I needed and I pulled. The voltmeter popped back into
existence in the visible world. Its plastic body was a little cold, but the
heat of my hand warmed it up quickly.

“The
stuff I put over there generally stays exactly where I put it. But after an
hour or so it starts to move around.”

Newton
blinked, twice. “Well . . . okay then. You are definitely what Dominique said.”

I
handed the voltmeter to him. “Happy now?”

He
turned the gadget over in his hands, feeling its realness. “Happy? I’m freaking
ecstatic. Let’s get started.”

* * *

Newton
was such a pleasure to be around that I didn’t mind it when he coaxed me into
an adjustable hospital bed and plugged me into an assorted collection of
monitoring devices. I only had one real complaint: the electrodes he popped
onto my forehead and face. They itched like hell.

He
put me through a number of tests. Some of them were mildly stressful, but for
the most part it was all boring, and so many of the tests were done in the dark
that I fell asleep about midway through. At some point I woke up and all the
lights were back on. Newton was seated a few feet away from me, chewing on a
candy bar and gazing at his tablet computer. He saw that I was awake, and
smiled. There was caramel in his teeth.

“Are
we done?” I asked.

“Almost,”
Newton said. He ran his tongue over his teeth and cleared away the debris. “I’m
running the scan results through one more computational analysis. It’ll be done
in about ten minutes. In the meantime, we have one more test.” He removed the
remains of his half-eaten candy bar from its wrapper and handed me the block of
chocolate.

“What
the hell do you want me to do with this?” I asked.

“Put
that over into the Rift please,” Newton said.

“Why?”

“I’ll
explain later. Just humor me.”

I
didn’t bother arguing. It was simple to put something so small over there, so I
did it in a flash. “Now what?” I asked.

“Wait
a few seconds, then bring it back.”

I
pulled the bar back out of the Rift, the chocolate a little less sticky because
of the characteristic coolness of the other side. Newton grabbed the candy bar
out of my hand and took a bite.

“Tastes
different,” he said. “Ever noticed that before?”

“I’ve
. . . uh . . . never eaten anything out of the Rift. I’m not sure you should either.”

“We’ll
see about that in a second,” Newton said. He grabbed a scalpel and sliced off a
tiny piece of the chocolate before taking it to a brightly lit corner with an
assortment of fluids and gadgets.

“Give
me a second while I prep this,” Newton said.

“Prep
it for what?” I asked.

“You’ll
see.”

A
few minutes later, Newton took his little sample of chocolate and put it into a
machine at the opposite end of the room. I recognized that gadget from my
high-school science field trips. It was an electron microscope. Newton made a
show of pressing buttons and twiddling knobs on the thing, and soon an image
popped up on the computer screen next to the microscope.

“Well,
that sure is . . . something,” Newton said. “The chocolate is different. Not by
much, but it’s different.”

“And
that means what?” I asked.

“Not
sure yet,” Newton said. “Maybe something to do with organic compounds. Or may—”

A
computer across the room let out a piercing ring and Newton seemed to abandon
his thought. “Analysis complete!” he shouted as he jumped over to his tablet.

“What
do we have?” I asked.

Newton
tapped his tablet screen a few times then turned it over so I could see it. The
screen showed a graph of some sort. “This is your brain,” Newton said. Then he
pushed an on-screen button. The graph shifted dramatically.