Back From the Undead (2 page)

“I’ll get the duct tape.”

And that was how I spent the evening while waiting for my new lover to finish work and come over for our first full night together.

One night.

One amazing, lousy night.

*   *   *

“Jace,” he whispers.

I roll over, sleepily. He’s lying on his side, propped up on one elbow, one leg bent at the knee. Classic pose for a classic body. I usually think of Cassius’s looks in terms of surfer boy meets CEO, but the only suit he’s wearing at the moment is the one he was born in, and the dim light softens his golden skin to something closer to honey. His blue eyes are a little less vivid, but still striking. Right now the rumor that he was the actual model for Michaelangelo’s
David
is a lot easier to believe.

“Mmmm,” I say. That’s me, always a fountain of eloquence first thing in the morning.

“Sorry to wake you. I have to go in to the office.”

“Awready? Whatime zit?”

“Early. Go back to sleep.”

“
Was
asleep. You woke me up.” That might sound a little cranky, but I say it around a yawn and a smile. Memories of last night are percolating through my brain—and other parts.

“I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye. Among other things.”

I sit up. “Like what?” I’m not fully awake, but there’s still a note of caution in my voice.

“Like how much last night meant to me.” He says it simply, with no trace of sentimentality. A fact. Direct, honest. Beautiful.

“I … me, too.”

“I know you don’t do well with certain emotions, and I don’t want something as ridiculous as embarrassment to come between us. Plus, we should maintain a certain amount of decorum at the office.”

“I’m not following. Pre-coffee, brain no good.”

He smiles. A knowing smile, the kind that somehow says he’s appreciating me on a whole bunch of levels at once, with affection and wry humor and even a little impatience tempered by acceptance. The kind of smile you get from someone who really understands you—and loves you anyway.

“I’ll keep my sentences short. You know how I feel about you.” A statement, not a question.

I swallow with a suddenly dry mouth. “Yeah.” For a little while during my last case I was actually
in
Cassius’s head, and I got to see myself the way he sees me. I have no doubts, none at all, about his feelings for me. It’s my own emotions I’m a little unclear on.

“It’s a lot to get hit with, all at once. I understand that. But if we just ignore it, it’ll become the elephant in the room—we’ll always know it’s there even though we never talk about it.”

“So we need a way to talk about it
without
talking about it?”

“I suppose.” He reaches out, puts one cool hand on my hip. “I don’t want to overwhelm you, I don’t want to drive you away … but I won’t deny what you mean to me, either. I—
we
have to find a balance.”

I nod. “No L word for now, okay? I mean, I know that you…” I stop. Damn it, why is this so hard? It’s just a simple noun, after all.

No. I have no problem with it as a noun. It’s when it becomes a verb that I start screwing up. Relationship grammar, as diagrammed by Jace Valchek, Professional Word Understander.

“Tell you what, Caligula,” I say. “If you really need to express how you feel about me, let’s be professional about it. We work in the intelligence field, right? So let’s devise a code.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Well, it’s the L word I have a problem with, and it’s the elephant in the room … so let’s go with that. El words: elevator, elemental, elegant.”

“You want me to say I
elevator
you?”

I let my hand drift down from his hip. “Oh, I already know that. The question is, can I elevator
you
…”

“Going up or down?” he murmurs.

“Oh, hell. Let’s just press
all
the buttons and see what happens…”

*   *   *

And then he disappears.

I don’t hear from him all day. He’s not in his office, and his cell number goes straight to voicemail.

I should make something perfectly clear. I am not a woman who defines herself by her relationship. I’m a stubborn, pushy, sarcastic, opinionated female with a fully functioning brain. I don’t back down, I don’t give up, and I sure as hell don’t base my self-worth on whether or not a guy approves of what I do or who I am.

However.

I will admit to a certain amount of insecurity in the dating area. Not so much in what I think I have to offer; I know my own strengths and weaknesses, and they balance out into a challenging but damn fine package. No, it’s my own judgment I’m suspicious of, largely because of a lying, manipulative fellow FBI agent that once not only persuaded me he was worth dating, but that he was in fact a regular human being and not a sociopath who would betray me and steal my promotion. Yeah. And when you consider that
identifying
such people is line one in my job description, it tends to shake my confidence a little.

So despite all the rock-solid evidence to the contrary, I start to second-guess myself about Cassius’s intentions. Was this all a scam? He’s a professional spook, after all, as adept at hiding his true agenda as a giant rabbit is at hiding eggs. Maybe I didn’t
really
look into the depths of his soul; maybe I just got past the first few layers, into a cover story that he prepared years ago and planted inside his own head with sorcery.

Sure. Because I’m so irresistible that everything we’ve been through together has just been part of an elaborate scenario designed to get into my pants.

Okay, I may be a damn fine package, but I’m not Helen of freaking Troy. And Cassius isn’t Lucifer, Prince of Lies, either. I give myself a kick in the mental butt and tell myself to grow up. Cassius is an important man in an important job—a job with global significance—and I can’t get all antsy because he decided that putting out a brush fire in the Middle East was more important than returning my call.

That works for the rest of the day … but when the day ends and I go to bed alone, I start worrying again.

*   *   *

The next day, I get a call from Gretchen Petra, the head of the NSA’s intel analysis unit, asking to see me in her office. Gretch is a good friend, the mother of my godchild, and a whip-smart pire who took her first sip of blood in Victorian England. I walk through her open door and say, “What’s up?”

She looks up from the slim electronic tablet she’s tapping at with one crimson-nailed finger, and smiles. She seems tired, which is a first; usually, she’s as steady and unstoppable as a tank. “Jace. Good to see you. Have a seat—but close the door first, will you?”

I ease the door shut, then sit down on the other side of the large steel slab she calls a desk. There are no windows, just six large flatscreen monitors on the walls that feed her a constant stream of text, video, and data from all over the globe. Even with the overhead lights on, the screens still project enough illumination to give the whole room a subliminal, flickering glow.

“I’ve got some news about David.” Gretch is one of the few people I know who call him by his first name—even I still think of him as Cassius. “He’s on assignment.”

“Assignment? I thought he was the assigner, not the assignee.”

“Yes. Well, this is a … special situation. And, needless to say, a situation that calls for the personal involvement of the director is not one I can divulge details about.”

She’s right, but it still feels like he’s ditching me and getting his secretary to call with a message that he’ll be working late. I push that thought angrily away—not only is Gretch practically family, she’d never tolerate that sort of behavior from Cassius. She’s loyal to a fault, but she also has a backbone that steel would envy.

I nod and force a smile in return. “I get it. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even be telling me this much, right?”

She leans back, brushing behind her ear a strand of blond hair that’s come loose from her normally tidy bun. Yeah, her body language is definitely exhausted; slack shoulders, bad posture. “Probably. But I have no choice; I’m operating under a direct order from Director Cassius himself. He said—and I quote—‘Tell Jace I’m sorry about this but it couldn’t be avoided. Don’t worry, the solution is elementary.’”

The last word makes my smile tremble a little; not sure if it’s trying to run away or metamorphose into a grin. “Direct quote, huh?”

And then Gretch does something I’ve never seen her do before: She
yawns
. Not that pires don’t yawn—they sleep, after all—it’s just that Gretch usually seems tireless.

“You okay?” I ask.

She nods. “Just a long night. Anna’s teething.”

I wince. “Ouch.”

“Yes. I’m glad pire fangs can’t pierce pire flesh—but that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.”

Anna is Gretch’s child. A spell cast here at the end of World War II lets pires have kids, but there’s a catch: Both parents have to age six months for every year their offspring does, until the parents judge that the child is an adult and call a halt to the aging process, locking the whole family back into immortality again. Gretch is a single mom, but Cassius offered to share the time-debt with her after Anna’s father was killed. She’s still as strong and hard to kill as all pires are, but it looks like even her stamina is being tested by a blood-drinking toddler with teeth issues.

“So. Any idea when the bossman will be back?”

“I’m afraid not. It could be days—but it might be weeks. He’s appointed me acting director in his place.”

I frown. Not that I disapprove of his choice—Gretch could run the entire world quite efficiently, given the chance—but because it’s a bad sign. It means …

It means nothing, oh paranoid brain of mine. It doesn’t matter if you’re planning on being gone overnight or for a few months, you leave your best in charge. This is the NSA, not an advertising firm—you don’t just call up a temp agency:
Yeah, I’m gonna need someone to fill in for me for a few days. Make sure they have some experience in running a national security agency, maybe a little background in black ops, some international diplomatic credentials … oh, and they have to be proficient in Word.

“Thanks, Gretch. I appreciate the heads-up.” I start to get to my feet.

She waves me back down. “That’s not all. I have other information for you—information that’s considerably more positive.”

“You’re giving me a muzzle for Charlie?”

“Funny, he asked me the same thing about you … no, this concerns an old acquaintance of ours.”

She leans forward, her eyes intent.
“Aristotle Stoker.”

Now
she’s got my attention.

Aristotle Stoker. Descendant of the infamous Bram, who on Thropirelem gained fame not only for writing
Dracula
but also for the Whitechapel Vampire Murders—sometimes carving up prostitutes with a silver-edged blade, sometimes killing them with a wooden crucifix sharpened into a stake. On my world, Stoker never had children; here he did.

And a few generations later, Aristotle was born. He became a legend in the human underground, a killer of pires and thropes as elusive as a shadow and as a lethal as a silver guillotine. He racked up quite the body count before he used an internal political dispute to fake his own death and reinvent himself with an even scarier persona, that of the Impaler. The Impaler leapt from serial killing to mass murder, and hid so efficiently that for years no one knew for sure if he was even a real person or some kind of urban myth. I was the one who uncovered his real identity—well, he revealed it to me, actually—and I was the one who stopped his plan to turn a large percentage of Thropirelem’s supernatural residents into immobile, living mummies.

We’ve run into each other since then. Despite the fact that he was a homicidal lunatic, I had a certain amount of grudging respect for him, at least at first; he was a human being on a planet full of monsters, doing his best to fight back against a status quo that had seen six million of his own kind sacrificed to an Elder God. It was hard not to see him as a heroic revolutionary—until I processed a few of the crime scenes he left behind.

He wasn’t a revolutionary, he was a terrorist. His plan had nothing to do with righting wrongs or seeking freedom; it was about revenge, carried out indiscriminately. What was done to the human race here was horrible, but killing a bunch of innocent civilians decades later isn’t the answer. I’m not sure what the answer is, or if there even is one, but I know Stoker’s approach isn’t going to solve anything.

He can help
me
solve something, though.

He can help me get back home.

TWO

“We have a confirmed sighting?” I ask.

“Yes. But there’s both bad news and worse news attached to it,” Gretch says.

“Lovely. What’s the bad?”

“He’s contacted us directly. Seems he wants our help—more specifically, he wants
your
help.”

Uh-oh. Gretch is right, this can’t be good. Stoker is every bit as cunning and manipulative as Cassius, with the added bonus of fanaticism. Whatever he wants from me, it won’t be pretty.

But Stoker is the reason I was brought here in the first place. I signed a contract with the NSA—nothing satanic, just regular lawyer evil—stating that I would be returned to my own plane of existence when I captured or killed whoever was murdering thropes and pires in remote locations using bizarre yet ritual means.

That turned out to be Aristotle Stoker. He’s my ticket home—and he knows it.

“What’s the deal?”

“He claims he’s uncovered a pire trafficking ring. Slave traders. Says he needs your help to eradicate it.”

I scowl. I took down a ring just like that not long ago, a Mafioso operation that was smuggling pire women from Third World countries into the US to work as prostitutes and using the same network to send Gray Market lems from here to South America. “So he knows what I’ve been up to. Baiting the hook with something he thinks I’ll chomp at.”

“Perhaps. But this operation isn’t trafficking in pire women, Jace; Stoker claims its stock-in-trade is pire
children
.”