Chapter Two – Sam

 

“Kris,” I said, leaning onto the edge of my nominal boss’s desk, my fists firmly planted on the old, heavy wood, “this is bull, and you know it. This isn’t what the old man wants us doing.”

My name’s Sam Fitzgerald. Ex-military, ex-government, and all heart.

“Oh yeah?” Kris Cole asked as she leaned back in her desk chair, crossing one long leg over the other as she folded her arms in front of her chest. She looked at me with smoldering hazel eyes that slowly began to glow a subtle, neon green like they were backlit from within her cranium. “You think you know what the colonel wants more than me, huh? I’ve known that man more than a decade, Sam. A fucking decade. We’ve seen shit together that you can’t even imagine, and you’re trying to tell me what he wants us to be doing while he’s away?”

She was a red-haired beauty, and wouldn’t have looked out of place up on a movie screen or a billboard advertising some fancy French perfume. Looked, though, was the operative word. Because, with a fiery line of dragon blood going through her family tree, she sure as hell would have been. In most circumstances, I’d have given her more than a wide berth. After all, dragon-blooded shifters weren’t exactly known in the stories for suffering fools lightly, and their patience certainly wasn’t limitless.

But, I was a wolf shifter. And wolves weren’t exactly known for backing down and giving up territory, either. Dragon or no dragon; glowing green eyes or no glowing green eyes.

“Away?” I asked, straightening up and pushing my shoulders back. “Really, Kris? Come on. You know as well as I do that—”

“Enough,” she said, leaping from her chair, her eyes flashing even brighter for a moment. “That’s enough. You don’t know. None of us do.” Her words never rose above a normal conversational volume, but the amount of sheer force and determination behind them was enough to make me almost take a step back.

Almost. “Listen,” I growled, “this has nothing to do with you. This has everything to do with us not doing the job we’re supposed to be doing. I’m not going to just keep babysitting these rich bastards or these corporate clients while we’re supposed to be hunting the bad guys! There are people out there who actually need us, people who just want to live normal lives. That’s what we’re here for! Not playing bodyguard to some fucking pop singer that’s in town for the weekend!”

Her eyes flashed brighter. “You want a case, then?”

“Yes,” I nearly roared back. “Yes, I want a damn case!”

“Well, I don’t have one to give you!”

I just stood there for a moment, shocked, my mouth open but not working. There it was, plain as day. The truth. I wasn’t getting any cases because there weren’t any to have.

We’d been hunters once. As members of the Paranormal Research Board, we’d been men and women who put our lives on the line to stop supernatural creatures and powers. All we’d done was stop threats to the United States government. Some bad guy found a magical artifact buried in a tomb somewhere and thought he could threaten our citizens? We’d relieve him of that little toy. A rogue shifter was causing problems somewhere in the mountains of Arizona or Utah? We’d track them down. A banshee was hunting the members of Irish Parliament? Guess who had earplugs.

A couple years before, though, our boss Colonel Harrington had parted with the federal government and dissolved the PRB, and we’d gone with him. Together, we’d formed Full Moon Security. The idea was to sell normal security services on the side; that way, we could focus on smaller threats that mattered just as much to normal people. After all, stopping a terrorist from releasing a Sumerian daemon was all fine and dandy, but that was halfway across the world.

Who was supposed to stop the knocker in the coal mines of West Virginia that was killing miners, or the poltergeist that was trying to abduct little Carol Anne?

“Close your mouth,” she said. “You look like something the fisherman would throw back.”

With a shake of my head, I turned away from her and stepped off from the desk, my mouth firmly shut. “We don’t have anything? Nothing? Nada?”

Hunting those creatures down had been the whole reason I’d agreed to this thing. I’d wanted to return to civilian life, to find myself a mate. Settle down, maybe, have a nice little pack of pups. Grow up to be a grandfather somewhere in a nice little town. Anything other than this, especially if there wasn’t any purpose other than me just helping out the hoity-toities of the world. I was good at the security work, and I enjoyed it, but that didn’t mean it was all I wanted. There had to be something more for me.

“We’ve been looking,” she said. From the sound of her voice, I could tell she’d turned away from me and was addressing the giant office window that looked down on the city below, and the Gateway Arch beyond. Thirty stories up, and all the buildings and people below us looked like little toys tossed onto the earth by a disinterested toddler, the blue strip of the Mississippi River twisting through the middle of it all as it wound its way down the border with Illinois.

All around us spread our boss’s office, with its heavy wooden furniture, thick leather tomes from ancient research on the magical and supernatural world, and oil paintings of famous magicians and hunters of the creatures who went bump in the night. The office he’d left behind with his spiritual fingerprints all over it.

“But, the kinds of things we hunt, they don’t just show up in a Google search, Sam. I’ve got Tabitha scrying, talking to her…people. But, for right now, all we have is normal work.”

I turned to her. “Nothing? Really? Don’t we know anyone still in the government? Someone who could help us?”

She looked back at me over her shoulder, and I noticed her eyes had switched from their toxic nuclear neon green, and returned to her normal hazel. “He compartmentalized us too well. That was the point. That’s how we got out. Do you know anyone still working for the feds?”

“No,” I admitted. “No, I guess I don’t.”

“See? He was too good at his job. Probably the only reason they let us all leave, to be honest. How could we go to the press or reveal this whole parallel world to everyone when all we knew was each other?”

“How’d he find them, then?”

She turned back, gave me a half-smile. “Think I know? That Harrington left a how-to manual just lying around?” She shook her head and raised an impotent hand as if to say this was all she had. For the first time, I noticed how she’d applied her makeup more heavily underneath her eyes in an effort to cover up the rings forming there. It did the trick unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. “Come on, Sam, you know he never worked like that.”

I took a deep breath, went back to one of the leather chairs in front of Kris’s desk, and flopped down into it with a grunt. Three months ago, Col. Harrington had just up and disappeared on us. Left his cars at home. No signs of magic or any kind of supernatural presence at his home. Just, one moment he was there. The next, he wasn’t.

“I’m not going to apologize,” Kris said after a while, “because you’re out of line. But I will say I understand where you’re coming from.”

“You know, I think that’s the closest I’ve ever heard you come to an apology.”

Her smile dropped as she returned to her seat. “It’ll be the last time, probably.”

“What’s the plan, then?” I asked, crossing my legs.

“Well, we need to pay the rent,” she said. “This office doesn’t keep itself going on its own.”

“Oh, come on, you know that’s not what I mean. How’re we going to find something to hunt down? What’s the point in us staying in this ivory tower, living comfortable lives?”

And, just like that, the phone rang.

But not the one on her desk.

“You hear that?” I asked, my ears perked up with their unnaturally strong hearing.

From the speaker quality, and the cheapness of the MIDI ring tone, it was clearly coming from an older phone.

Already, Kris was out of her chair and over at one of the ancient bookshelves lining the walls. The way the set of shelves was pushed against the wall, it looked flush. But, as I got up and moved across the room to join her, I realized the sound must have somehow been coming from behind it.

“Sounds like it’s coming from here,” I said, pushing myself against the wall and trying to look behind the shelf. A little glow of pale, electronic light shone against the wooden back of the shelf.

“See it?”

“Yeah,” I said, reaching back between the shelf and the wall and grabbing the source of the ringing. Just as I suspected, it was an old phone. A flip phone, in fact. The kind you could buy at a bodega or cheap gas station anywhere in the country and just prepay the minutes. A burner. Battery on these things lasted forever, too, as long as you didn’t use them. I looked down at the blocked incoming number, eyebrow raised.

“Don’t—” Kris said as I flipped open the phone and went to answer it. Before she could finish her sentence, though, the phone was already to my ear.

Silence. Wait, no, a slight crackle and pop of static. Then, a little breath.

“Hello?” I asked the void. “Anyone there?”

“You,” replied a woman’s voice with a British accent, a kind of Judi Dench-sounding type, “are one of Colonel Harrington’s men, I presume.” She pronounced “colonel” the British way, sounding out all the vowels and consonants. I could tell from just that one sentence, and the diction of her speech, that she was older, cultured. Sophisticated.

“I am.” I’ve never been much for more words than necessary. And then something clicked in my brain, and I realized she’d mentioned Col. Harrington. Before I could say anything to her about it, though, she was already moving on.

“Good. I have a job for you. There is a small town in east Texas named Potterswell. My contact in the FBI has informed me that there is a rash of livestock mutilations that just began a few days ago, that their resident medical examiner called to inform him of them. I believe it’s worth looking into.”

“Now, hold on just a minute—”

“Goodbye, Mr. Fitzgerald,” she replied, cutting me off with a dead phone line.

As I took the phone away from my ear, I slowly began to realize that Kris was staring at me, tapping her foot, her eyes glowing that nuclear disaster green of hers. “What the hell was that?” she growled, and I began to feel the heat rolling off her. When dragonkin get angry, they get angry.

I didn’t care, though. A feeling of new purpose had suddenly suffused my being, crept into every inch of me. Hell, I didn’t even mind that the weird British lady on the phone had known my name.

“A case,” I replied, tossing the phone to her.

Having to snatch the falling cell out of the air must have put her off her game, because the lights in her eyes immediately began to sputter and die.

“A case?” she asked.

I relayed the message I’d received, leaving out the part where the British woman knew my name. “Think we have enough to start looking into it?”

She ran her free hand back through her hair and went over to her desk—or, rather, Harrington’s desk. “I don’t know, Sam. I mean, you just got a weird phone call from some British woman! Is that really enough to start an investigation?”

On one hand, she was right. It was kind of silly to start something like a formal investigation off a strange phone call I’d just received on a phone that had been behind the back of my missing boss’s bookshelf. On the other hand, though, what was I missing out on? Guarding some pop singer icon?

“What else do we have?” I asked.

“Nothing. You know that.”

“Then give me a few days with it. Tabitha can be my backup contact here and start to research everything while I drive down there. It’s less than a day’s drive. I can be there before nightfall, easy.”

“Sam,” she said again, a sharp edge of uncertainty to her voice, “I don’t know about this. Harrington gone? People calling on a phone he hid? What if—”

“What if what?” I asked. “What if they kidnapped him? Why, Kris? Why would they do that, then feed us lines on disturbances? What sense would that make? Maybe he actually disappeared for good reason, you know, and he gave that number to them in case something needed our help. Or, maybe, if they needed something small for a disturbance that wasn’t an international incident?”

She took a deep breath, and let it out in a painfully slow sigh. She fixed me with those hazel eyes of hers, with her red hair hanging down around her face like a wreath of flames.

“Come on,” I said, “what can it hurt? If it’s something, I’ll save some lives. If it’s not, I’ll be back by tomorrow evening. Whatta you say, boss?”

I threw in that last “boss” part just to soothe her ego. Because if you were going to get anywhere with a dragonkin, it was through flattery.

It must have worked, too, because she finally nodded in acquiescence. “Okay, okay. Fine. You’ll get Tabitha for support over the phone, and by email. But things go sideways, or it’s something bigger than you can handle, and I want you out of there.”

I barely registered her warnings in the last part, though, as I turned on my heel and headed right for the office door. “Sure thing, Kris, whatever you say. I got it.”

Caution, worry, and any thoughts that this might be something more than it seemed, were shoved from my head as soon as I got her okay.

All I knew was that I finally had a case I might be able to sink my teeth into.

“And don’t forget to take your kit!” she yelled as I shut her office door behind me.

At that last part, I stopped for a second, almost turned around and went back in to give her a piece of my mind. Who did she think I was, anyways? Some amateur?

Of course I wouldn’t forget my kit. I was a professional.