The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel (20 page)

Vivienne Sagadraco smiled, predatory and eager. “Meanwhile, I will investigate the CIA angle. I have a few contacts who should be able to provide the information we require on former-Agent Fitzgerald.”

She stood, as did Ian and Moreau. I kept my seat. After nearly being fired, killed, and knowing I had a doppelganger who’d damned near made both happen, my legs were a wee bit on the wobbly side.

Sagadraco nodded curtly and left the room.

Grendels without. Doppelgangers within. And my dragon boss chomping at the bit to sink her teeth into a vampire ex-CIA agent. This was shaping up to be one hell of a holiday weekend.

 • • • 

Ian stopped Alain Moreau outside the conference room.

“Mac and I are going over to the Full Moon for a quick bite to eat.”

“Madame Sagadraco requested—”

“I know what she wants, but my partner and I haven’t slept and have barely eaten in twenty-four hours. The Scandinavian team will be here soon. Between now and then, our seer needs food and rest. Any objections?”

“None, Agent Byrne. However, I must insist that you take at least one guard with you; preferably two.”

“I won’t need the help, but Yasha and Calvin are welcome for the company. Are they acceptable?”

“They will be adequate.”

The two men held eye contact for a couple of seconds, and then Moreau nodded curtly, turned, and went about his business. I guess in alpha male speak that meant Ian had won this round.

Ian saw me trying not to smile.

“What?”

I raised my hands. “Nothing, nothing at all. By the way,” I added quietly. “Thank you.”

“Dragons and older vamps forget that we mere humans have to eat and sleep. You’re not going to be any good to anyone if you’re too tired to see straight. Hunger and fatigue will get you killed.”

“That’s not what I was thanking you for; though I haven’t eaten in so long I think my stomach’s forgotten what food is. Thank you for saying that you knew I wasn’t a traitor—even without the powdered sugar.”

There was an awkward silence.

“I call it like I see it,” Ian said.

“Well, thank you for seeing me that way. I appreciate it.” Then I remembered that the boss wanted me to give Moreau a rundown of where I’d been and when I’d been there for the past forty-eight hours. “Dang it, I promised Moreau that list of my whereabouts.”

Ian put a hand on my shoulder and firmly turned me in the opposite direction. “And he can wait another hour to get it. Let’s grab our coats and get out of here.”

13

AT the end of the block, two buildings down from the café, which I swore I was never setting foot in again, was the Full Moon.

If I had to pick a place to eat a last meal, the Full Moon would be it. The barbeque was slow cooked, the burgers were rare, the steaks tartar, and the regulars were furry. The Full Moon also had the distinction of having one of the best collections of single malt scotches in the city, scotches that’d put even more hair on a werewolf’s chest.

Bill and Nancy Garrison were a nice werewolf couple who’d come from North Carolina to spread the gospel of barbeque to the heathen Yankees—and to give homesick Southern werewolves a taste of home. I came for the pulled pork platter, banana puddin’, and sweet tea.

The Full Moon billed itself as New York’s Official Werewolf Bar. They even had a gift shop up front. The place was dark wood, dim lights, and decorated with every werewolf cliché the Garrisons could come up with. Werewolf movie posters hung on the walls, werewolf movies ran on the big screen TVs, and on Friday and Saturday nights when the mundane came in, Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” was in heavy rotation on the state-of-the-art sound system. In my opinion, Bill and Nancy’s booming business had been a flash of brilliance. Hide in plain sight.

They still had their Christmas decorations up. My favorite was the life-sized fake werewolf looming in one corner. In honor of the holidays, he was wearing a festive scarf that Nancy had knitted and a red Rudolph nose. The bloodred light from the nose shone up into its glittering eyes. Christmasy, yet with creepy bonus points.

It was a little after six o’clock on the night before New Year’s Eve, and the place was already packed. Werewolves made up a big part of the dinner crowd, but with three days until the full moon, the younger werewolves would be sticking close to home—something to do with lack of control. I could see where being in a packed restaurant would cause control issues in the younger werewolf set—especially with all those two-legged, warm-blooded potential meals crowding the bar area.

Yasha and Calvin cleared a path through the bar like the bow of a destroyer through a sea of rubber duckies. I could see Yasha’s nostrils flaring at all the meaty goodness; you couldn’t blame the man for sniffing.

We didn’t have to wait for a table. The Full Moon was a favorite place for SPI offsite meetings, so the Garrisons kept a reserved sign on a quiet booth near the back—or as quiet as the place ever got.

Ian pulled Yasha and Calvin aside. He spoke briefly, the two other men nodded, and then took a seat at a nearby section of bar. Ian slid into the booth next to me.

“What’s all that about?” I asked.

“I want to talk to you without anyone overhearing.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

He answered me with silence.

“You’re supposed to tell me I’m wrong.”

“Can’t do that.” He looked up and sat back. The waiter took our drink order, and since we knew what we wanted, he took our food order as well. Unlike other couples seated together, Ian and I weren’t on a date, and we most definitely didn’t have time to relax and have a leisurely dinner. But I wasn’t about to let a pair of rampaging monsters cheat me out of dessert. I’d get that banana puddin’ to go if I had to.

As soon as the waiter left, Ian’s attention was on me.

“Do you know how I started working at SPI?” he asked.

“Not one for small talk, are you?”

“Not normally; and certainly not now.”

I sat back in the booth. “I haven’t heard.”

The edge of a smile appeared. “You mean you couldn’t get Yasha to tell you.”

Busted. “Or Calvin or Kenji or anyone else.” I shrugged. “Digging up info no one wants out there is what I do.”

“Well, you can stop snooping. I need your cooperation, so you need to know.”

“Cooperation?”

“I thought it might work better with you than ‘obey.’”

“You thought right. Let me guess, this cooperation would be with you.”

“Correct. Though how I came here isn’t good dinner conversation, but we’re out of time.”

“Not much about SPI is fit for the supper table. I can take it.” Maybe. Probably not. But I wasn’t about to tell Ian that. I’d made enough mistakes to make myself look incompetent in the past day and I wasn’t about to add anything else to it.

“Almost four years ago, my partner and I responded to a call of a robbery in progress at a high-end jewelry store.”

“NYPD?” I asked.

“Yeah, I was still on the force then. It was a silent alarm, so we knew there was a possibility that we’d show up while the perps were still there. They were there, all right.”

“Let me guess, not human.”

“Ghouls.” Ian paused. “Had you dealt with ghouls before you came here?”

“We’d have one pop up occasionally back home.”

“No swarms?”

“Swarms?”

“That’s what a group of ghouls is called.”

“That’s a new one on me,” I said. “I thought it kinda odd that they’d work together like they did at the storage place, but I was too busy at the time to ponder it much.”

“There’s about as many ghouls in the world as vampires and werewolves,” Ian told me. “And they’re just as organized. That night in the jewelry store there were five of them. Though when me and Pete got there, we only saw three; and they were wearing masks, so we didn’t know what they really were. I called for backup. Pete didn’t want to wait. He’d looked around back. There was a white van with a dint in the driver’s side door. It fit the description of a getaway vehicle used in a robbery the month before, this time at a pawnshop known to carry high-end jewelry. The pawnshop owner and his wife were there when the robbers hit.” Ian paused, a muscle clenching in his jaw. “They’d been tied up and taken into the back . . .”

With a sickening dread, I knew what was coming next.

“They cut pieces off of them. The medical examiner said it had been done slowly, one then the other, and then back again until they both bled out. They never found the pieces.”

Ian didn’t need to say it. We both knew what had happened to those missing parts, and those parts had probably been eaten while their victims had been forced to watch.

“So we knew we were dealing with the same crew. Pete had known the husband and wife from the pawnshop. It had been on his old beat. He wouldn’t wait; he said he couldn’t live with himself if they got away, not after what they’d done, what they’d keep doing unless someone stopped them.”

Ian paused and sat back when our drinks arrived. With barely a flick of his thumb, he popped the cap off of his longneck; and with suddenly shaky hands, I peeled the paper off my straw and put it in my sweet tea.

Ian took a long pull from his beer, set his bottle down, and raised his eyes to mine. “Pete went in.”

“What did you do?”

“I did what a partner does; I backed him up. The ghouls were waiting. They must have been disappointed at first when they saw there was no one to slice up this time, so they waited for us. We’d seen three in the shop, but there were five of them and two of us. Pete thought he’d gotten the drop on them. Ordered them to take off their masks. The leader did, and he laughed while he did it. Then we saw what they were. Pete froze.”

“No.” Like me saying that could make it go back and not happen.

“The leader was on him before I could even react, fangs tearing at his face and throat. I shot the thing, and kept shooting. He raised his face from Pete’s throat, covered in my partner’s blood, smiled, and told me to be patient, I was next. I emptied two mags into those things and they didn’t even flinch. Then three of them came after me. I hadn’t seen their fingernails until then. I fought . . . and they cut me up. When I was in the hospital, the investigators assigned to the case tried to tell me that they’d used switchblades. I knew the truth. I knew what I’d seen, but I also knew enough to keep my mouth shut to avoid getting transferred upstairs to the psych ward. One night I got a visit from Vivienne Sagadraco.”

“Who made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”

“An offer I jumped at. Lying in that hospital bed, I’d sworn to myself that I’d get the things that had butchered my partner, and I couldn’t do it working for the NYPD. The lady offered me a job, and after I got out of the hospital a month later, I took it.”

“Did you get those ghouls?”

“Oh yeah. Paid back with interest.”

“Ian, I’m not going to freeze at the sight of ghouls. Just because I didn’t take that shot—”

“This has nothing to do with this morning. This is about being smart and staying alive.”

“I chase little old ladies. I don’t chase ghouls, and I sure as hell won’t chase a grendel.”

“Which is precisely what the boss is telling you to do.”

“It’s seeing through that veil—or whatever those things are using—and telling the team where they are.”

“It’s putting yourself within killing distance.”

“It’s my job.” Here it comes, what Ian really thought of me. I was going to beat him to it. “And you don’t think I can do it.”

“You’re plenty qualified—as a seer.” He leaned forward. “Mac, this situation is a first. I don’t know how monsters supposedly that primitive are making themselves invisible, but they shouldn’t be able to. Whether you’re responding to what sounds like a routine call—or a hunt in dark tunnels for two grendels—a situation can go to shit in the blink of an eye. It takes less time than that to get killed. If you put someone who’s not trained on the front line, bad things will happen. Maybe not the first time, but eventually, they will happen.”

My mouth suddenly went bone dry. “And I’m not trained.”

“Not for this. Not even a little. SPI’s never given their seers combat training. They don’t think it’s necessary.” He paused and took another swig of beer. “Combat training’s a hell of a lot more than necessary when you’re hunting monsters that rip off heads and arms, and gut you with one swipe.”

I sucked down half a glass of sweet tea through my straw.

“You’ll be with me,” I said.

“I was there with Pete, too.”

“And you’re saying Pete would still be alive if he’d listened to you and waited for backup.”

“I don’t know that for sure.”

“But you think it.”

“Yeah, I think it. I think it all the damned time.”

“My grandma thinks that good comes out of bad. If you and Pete hadn’t walked in on those ghouls, Pete might be alive now—and you might still be with the NYPD.”

“Your point?”

“I’ve seen the stuff on your desk. Your desk flair would give me nightmares; I can’t even imagine what you had to do to earn all of it.” I was silent for a moment. “You’ve done a lot of good here, and a lot of people are probably alive because of it. You would’ve never had a chance to do those things if you’d still been a cop. There’s plenty of men who can be good cops, but it takes a man who’s a lot more to storm the gates of Hell before lunch.”