Chapter Eight – Kris Cole

 

Leather jacket wrapped tightly around her, Kris stood in the entryway of Col. Harrington’s home, a large house in one of the upper scale suburbs on the outskirts of St. Louis. The house was eerily quiet. Like a sepulcher, where the only thing living was the memories of those who arrived from the lands of the living.

And, even then, after just a few months of no contact, those memories were already beginning to fade. It might take years, or decades, for them to be totally erased by the slow, constant pressure of time. But, Kris knew they would eventually go. Just like all things. How many people, how many cultures, how many events had been lost to the sands of time?

She’d come straight here from the FMS offices. At first, she’d just been driving on autopilot, the radio blasting some old 70s rock her father had always liked. But, somehow, she’d ended up here, her hands naturally turning the steering wheel this way and that as she sped westward out of St. Louis and into the ’burbs. Kris had almost been in awe when she parked the car in front of Harrington’s old place.

But, she’d just sighed with resignation and climbed out of the car, trudging up to the big house that had always seemed like much more than the colonel ever needed. After all, it wasn’t like she’d had any plans for tonight. Being the head of a security agency, and having all the responsibility that entailed, meant you didn’t have much time for anything else. Or, for that matter, anyone else, either. It was lonely at the top, made only lonelier by her nature as a dragon shifter. After all, what man would want to mate for life with a woman like her? A killer, a soldier, a mess of loyalties and ties that were almost indescribable to others.

When the colonel had just up and disappeared, she’d had Tabitha hack the security system and change the codes. Afterwards, Kris had had Hunter Jackson, the agency’s resident lock expert, fit a blank of their own into the door so he could carve her out a house key. Hunter Jackson might have been an asshole, a womanizer, and the most obnoxious dragonkin she’d ever met, but he knew how to do good work when it came to locks.

Now, as Kris walked through the house, she flicked on lights to mark her passing, slowly illuminating the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. Under the soft lights, the place actually looked lived in, if only at a glance.

She hadn’t been back here in a couple months, not since just after her boss’s mysterious disappearance. The trail had been cold, so why bother looking any further on this path? Now, dust lay over everything. Dust on the sand-colored walls, dust on the leather and wood furniture, dust on all the colonel’s prized first editions of novels and reference books.

Kris walked into the living room.

“Why am I even here?” she grumbled as she looked around at all the bookshelves, heavy with their leather-bound volumes. They seemed to tower over her and the room, looming like giants of untold knowledge as they stood against nearly every wall. They might hold clues to all the world’s secrets, both natural and supernatural, but Kris knew they didn’t hold a single answer as to the whereabouts of her old boss. “Just wasting my time.”

Shoulders sagging, she went and slumped down on one of the couches with a sigh, dust pluming into the air around her. She leaned forward, head in her hands, trying to parse everything.

Col. Harrington had disappeared three months before. Cars, laptop, books, clothes. Everything was still there. Even his bolthole bag, the one they all kept as last ditch effort to keep yourself safe if everything hit the fan, was still there.

No sign of a physical struggle. Tabitha couldn’t detect any sign of supernatural intrusion. And all her contacts in the worlds of spirits and ghosts and other inhuman things said the same thing: Col. Harrington was nowhere.

And they’d know, too. The old man had created quite the reputation within the community, based more on notoriety than anything else. If anything, they’d probably breathed a collective sigh of relief when he’d gone missing. After all, he was the bogeyman to the bogeyman.

She slumped back on the couch, put her head back against the leather cushion. No sign of him for three months. For three long, tortuous months during which she’d been dropped into the responsibility of helming Full Moon Security. Of finding them work, of paying bills, of making payroll, of keeping a roof over everyone’s head.

Or, like now, of being concerned about having an operative in the field. She knew Samuel Fitzgerald was good. One of the best in the world, in fact, and more than capable of watching himself and his own back. But that didn’t make the idea of losing an agent on her watch any more bearable. If anything, it made it worse.

Kris didn’t know how much more she could take. She was a warrior, not an administrator. A soldier, not a manager. She didn’t know how Harrington had managed it over the last couple years. The monotony. The pressure of being the person everyone looked to. The worry of losing someone in the field, the lack of sleep it brought.

But then, there’d been that phone call that Sam had answered.

There were more than a few things wrong with it, things that Kris found questionable and didn’t like even at first glance. How did they know it was Sam who’d answered the phone? How did they even know about what the agency really was? The records of Paranormal Research Board agents were all sealed, double and triple sealed if that were possible.

She doubted even the President of the United States knew of their agency’s existence, let alone the names on the files of the individual operatives. And, moreover, Kris was pretty sure that, had the White House discovered their existence, they’d probably just want to kindly forget about it.

After all, learning about the things that actually went bump in the night wasn’t good for your health. Or sanity. Hell, she was one of those things, and she’d like to forget herself sometimes.

So how did they know about FMS? And Kris? And Sam?

Was it through some connection to Col. Harrington?

Had to be. He’d been in this business for a lot longer than any of them, and he was bound to have made contacts throughout the world.

Had Harrington left that cell phone behind? As some sort of clue to tell them about where they’d gone? Kris had had Tabitha go over it with a fine-toothed comb, but it had been as clean as the day it was purchased. No fingerprints except for Sam’s, and no incoming or outgoing calls before the one they’d received earlier that day.

No, there was more to this than just what she was seeing. That much was obvious. She heaved herself up from the couch and trekked out of the living room, headed upstairs to Col. Harrington’s living areas.

Paintings of far-off places covered the walls of the wide upstairs hallway that led down the center of the upper floor. No medals, no awards, no commendations were anywhere to be seen, just open doorways to guest bedrooms. Mainly because the colonel hadn’t received any in the time since he’d set up the PRB. He’d always been good about compartmentalizing, but also about being passionate and caring. Like a father, really, to all of the shifters at Full Moon. He’d push you and push you, trying to get the best you were capable of. And when you fell along the way, he’d pick you right back up and dust you off, then throw you back at the problem.

Failure wasn’t an option. Ever. Because failure meant death.

She stopped at the last door on the right, the one just before the colonel’s closed bedroom door. His office.

She stepped inside, flicked on the lights. For a moment, Kris was taken aback once again by all the books surrounding the place, by the assortment of foreign souvenirs he’d brought home from his travels. He’d lived a long life and seemed to have something from each corner of the world.

A foot-tall fertility goddess statue from Africa, with her wide hips, large breasts, and nondescript face. She stood watch over the room and his massive mahogany desk from a corner pedestal, blind for her lack of eyes. On another shelf stood a piece of obsidian, a chunk of volcanic glass the size of her head. He’d told Kris he got it from a battle with Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology back in the 80s when the Russians had tried to raise it. They’d mistranslated the texts, thought they could control it, but Harrington ended up having to work with them to finally put it back within the abyss where Odin had supposedly imprisoned it years before.

Who knew it could breathe fire? Who knew they’d accidentally almost cause Ragnarok?

Now, the only evidence of the creature’s presence in this world was in the chunk he’d knocked loose with the hammer of Thor. They hadn’t let him keep the hammer, for obvious reasons, so he’d had to settle for the obsidian.

No matter what job he’d gone on, he’d always managed to collect something, somehow. Whether it was just a trinket or small memento, he’d kept track of his travels through the world by collecting here and there.

She went around his massive desk, running her hands over the wide, dust-covered surface. She pulled out the big, leather-bound office chair and sank into it.

Never pictures, though. He’d never taken pictures. Not even once. He had while he was in the military, but he’d never taken any while he worked for the PRB.

“Why not?” Kris had asked one night as they sat right there, right in this very room, glasses of bourbon in hand.

“Think anyone would’ve believed me, even if they had seen them?” he asked with a wry smile, his voice low and full of bass. “’Sides, I couldn’t have proof, real proof, that we’d been anywhere. Even back then, it was all strictly Black Ops stuff.”

Black Ops. Work for the government where you’d be disavowed entirely if some power tried to capture you. As far as they were concerned, you were just a rogue agent taking matters into your own hands.

Remembering the bourbon he’d shared with her all those years ago, she reached down and opened up the bottom drawer, dragged out the half-filled bottle from where it sat in a haphazard nest of paperwork and old novels. The level was a little lower than she remembered, but the amber liquor swirled inside deliciously like the elixir of the gods, tempting her to have another taste.

It was a special whiskey, he’d told her. One his friend had distilled himself in the hills and hollows of the backwoods of Kentucky. Just a plain glass bottle with a cork in the top, no marking or labels to identify where it had been distilled, just a year on the side, written in black marker: ’95.

She set the bottle on the desk and frowned as she looked around the room. No glasses.

“Oh well,” she said to herself and the empty room, and locked her teeth around the cork, wrenched it from the bottle’s neck with a jerk of her neck like a pirate or soccer hooligan, and spat it into the palm of her hand.

She took a swallow from the bottle, the burning liquid warmth traveling down her throat and into her belly like a hot summer’s day. Kris lifted the bottle a little, tipped it back away from her. The liquid continued to swirl inside, and somehow she was reminded that she was sitting in her mentor’s empty home. Drinking his liquor.

On the one hand, she felt awful for clawing into his privacy like this.

On the other, though, she felt completely justified. He wasn’t here, after all, and she was trying to help find him.

Of course, she was drinking his liquor without permission.

Frowning, she stuffed the cork back in the bottle’s mouth and yanked the drawer open, roughly placing it back inside with a hollow thunk.

Hollow? That didn’t seem right.

Raising an eyebrow, she paused, lifted the bottle again, and placed it back down, harder this time. Instead of the solid thud of glass, she got something more resonant than she would have expected. She took the bottle and knocked it side to side against the sides of the drawer, all of which sounded exactly as she would have expected.

“False bottom?” Kris asked as she began to pull the drawer all the way out of its guides and set it on the desktop. She pulled out the paperwork and old Louis L’Amour books, setting them aside in neat stacks that quickly tumbled to the side and became a disheveled mess. Ignoring the fresh mess, she reached to the small of her back, unsheathed the Ka-Bar combat knife she kept there beneath her leather coat, and began to use the tip to lever up the side of the drawer’s false bottom.

“What in the hell?” she breathed as a piece of wood that was almost perfectly flush with all four sides came up. Beneath it lay a series of small keys, all with little plastic tags on them, numbers written on each one. Two digits for some, three digits for a few, and four digits for the rest. She reached in and began to pick up the keys at random, holding them up to the light for inspection.

From their small, somewhat generic cut, Kris could tell they were keys for padlocks and lockers. The kind you’d put on storage units, or the kind you’d find in train stations around the country. But now, the real question was how they were going to find where all these keys went. And what did they all contain?

“How did we not find this?” she asked the empty room as she stood there, still holding a small key up in weird supplication to the lights above.

But, as she stood there in the emotional gloom of the abandoned office, with its layer of dust covering a long life’s collection of books, memorabilia, and mementos, she suddenly knew the answer to her own question.

“We never looked. We never fucking looked.” Everything had seemed out in the open with the Colonel. They’d forgotten, though, that he’d been a metaphorical spook well before he ever established the Paranormal Research Board or Full Moon Security and began his fight against the real ones.

“Guess you still had a few tricks up your sleeve,” Kris Cole said as she began to dig for an envelope to stuff the keys into. She needed to get these somewhere else, or to someone else, who could help her find out where they belonged. And who better than Hunter Jackson, the resident safe-cracker, and locksmith for the agency?

“Yep, you were more twisty than Loki himself. Weren’t you, Colonel?”