Bring On the Night (3 page)

In our dorm floor’s kitchenette, I heated the towel in the tiny microwave. When I got back to our room, Tina was sitting on the bed again, listening to her MP3 player and gritting her teeth as she wrote. I held out the steaming towel.

She glared at me through a pair of taped-frame glasses, which she’d put on after taking out her contacts. “What the hell is that?”

“For your hand. Moist heat’ll help the ache.”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is you have to pull that six-foot stake out of your ass and be a real person to me. Or neither of us will pass orientation.”

Tina’s mouth tightened, but she lowered her gaze to her legal pad. “I can’t stop writing. Kaplan wants a thousand reps of this by 0600.”

“Your fingers will fall off. Give it to me.”

Another stunned look, but she shook her head. “It has to be in my handwriting.”

“Not a problem.”

Tina bit her lip, then traded me the pad and pen for the towel. “Thank you,” she whispered. She placed the towel on the inside of her wrist and let out a groan of relief. “I’m not used to writing by hand. Haven’t done it since sixth grade.”

I wrote
Cooperation before coercion
in Slot 207 in a passable forgery of her handwriting.

She looked at the page with awe. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“Parents taught me.” I sat on my bed and kept writing.
“They were professional fakers.”

“Wow.” She took out her earbuds. “Are they in jail?”

“Yep.”
Two out of three of them,
I thought but didn’t add out loud. I was hoping that a little openness on my part would thaw the chill between us, but as a rule I preferred to keep my personal details—both past and present—locked safely away.

“It makes sense now.” Tina shifted her hand on the towel. “The way you are, I mean. Smart and jaded and… you know.”

“Selfish?”

“Self-preservative.”

We shared a laugh. I let my posture relax, relieved my gamble had paid off in goodwill.

Tina’s humor faded, however, when she saw my Romanian history book.

“Why are you reading that?” she snapped.

I ordered my hackles to stay down, hoping to restore the brief harmony. “It’s for school,” I said, resisting the urge to add,
not everything is about you.
“Hey, since you’re sort of Romanian, can you suggest a good paper topic?”

“I suggest you pick another country. You don’t want to mess with my people.”

“I’m not messing, I’m just researching.”

“I mean it, Ciara. Blood is in our blood.”

The way she uttered those words sent a chill down my back, which was probably her intended effect.

“It was crazy when I left.” She winced as she flexed her hand. “My parents got me from an orphanage in Bucharest when I was five, right after the revolution.”

“I didn’t realize.” Since she’d told me her parents here in the states were Romanian, I’d assumed they were her
original mom and dad. “Your birth parents died?”

“Maybe by now they have.” She tugged her black bangs to veil her eyes. “My father got taken away. Maybe he was a Communist. My mom couldn’t afford to keep all her kids, so she dumped me and my little brother at two different orphanages. I think she got money for us.”

I didn’t know what to say. My biological mom couldn’t take care of me either, but at least I’d ended up with my dad and the woman I’d thought was my mother for the first twenty-four of my twenty-six years before I found out the truth. “I’m really sorry.”

Tina shrugged as she moved the hot towel atop her wrist. “She had to survive. And it was for the best.” Her posture straightened into her usual haughtiness. “My adoptive parents picked me out of two hundred kids. You know why?”

The sharp look in her eyes told me there was definitely a right and wrong answer, so I just shook my head.

“They could tell I had magic.”

“Huh.” I’d perfected the noncommittal grunt through years of discussing Lori’s fruitless ghost hunting with the Sherwood Paranormal Investigative Team (SPIT), of which Tina was the treasurer.

“I know you don’t believe in that stuff,” Tina said, “but that doesn’t make it not true. I’ve spoken to the dead.”

“I speak to the dead every day. They’re called vampires.”

“Not
un
dead. Dead dead.”

“Do they talk back?”

Her gaze faltered, and she adjusted her glasses. “Not yet.”

“Then how do you know they hear you?”

“It’s in my blood.” Her voice turned urgent. “My father—the one who adopted me—said that he could tell I was
of noble Romanian heritage like him. He says there’s more magic in the Carpathian Mountains than in the rest of the world put together.”

“Ah.” I went back to copying sentences, the politest response I could think of.

“Daddy would know. He’s psychic.” She rushed out the words as if their speed could overtake my skepticism. “Plus he and my mom are both high-level necromancers.”

“Uh-huh.” I wrote faster.

“And he’s in charge of the Immanence Corps.”

As I looked up, Tina gasped and clamped her hand over her mouth. I remembered a shaded triangle on the far edge of the Control organizational chart. “What is the Immanence Corps? None of the Control people will talk about it with recruits.”

“Nothing,” she said, but her hand muffled her voice, so it came out “Mumfig.”

I suspected her slipup had been intentional, so I turned back to the legal pad and approached the question at an oblique angle, feigning ignorance. “What exactly does a necromancer do? Is it like the mediums on TV?”

She lowered her hand and took a deep breath, as if she’d been suffocating herself. “They communicate with the restless spirits of the dead.”

“Let me guess: they’re all restless.” Or at least the ones with relatives who have more cents than sense.

“Actually, no. If a spirit’s at peace, it takes a lot more skill to raise it and a lot more work. Besides, it goes against a necromancer’s ethics to disturb those who’ve fully passed on.”

I wanted to change the subject, but I wanted even more to find out about this Immanence Corps. Holding my
metaphorical nose, I kept digging. “Do they do séances?”

“Sometimes, but most of the ritual is just for show.”

“The show is everything. My parents used to be ‘faith healers.’” I mimed the obligatory air quotes. “They would sing and pray and work the crowd into a money-giving frenzy.”

“Did they really heal people?”

“They faked it. Some of the folks were shills we paid to pretend they couldn’t walk or see. I could’ve won an Oscar for my cute-crippled-kid act.”

Tina stretched the fingers of her right hand, not wincing this time. “What about the regular people, the ones who weren’t hired?”

“They felt better after my father touched them, but—”

“So they were healed.”

“They were gullible. In the heat of the moment, people will believe anything that gives them hope. I’m sure once we left town, the pain and suffering came right back. Along with much lighter bank accounts.”

Tina groaned. “Why won’t you see?” She snatched the legal pad out of my hands. “Belief is a powerful force, Ciara. Just because your crooked parents made money off it doesn’t mean it’s not real.” She plopped back on her bed, creaking the mattress, and reinserted her earbuds before scrawling out the next
Cooperation before coercion.

I wanted to tell her that
dis
belief was just as powerful as belief. Thanks to my soul-deep skepticism (with a little genetics thrown in), one taste of my blood could heal vampires’ holy-water burns or release them from traps sprung by religious artifacts. For the last two and a half years, I’d been donating blood samples to the Control so they could study this odd trait I’d inherited—in the most potent form
ever seen—from my Irish Traveller ancestors. The agency hadn’t shared any of their conclusions with me, but my con artist father said the strength of the anti-holiness lay in my capacity to create my own reality—and not buy into those that were fed to me.

Which meant that if I ever believed in anything, I’d lose my abilities.

I often wished I was normal, so I wouldn’t have to
worry about becoming some crazy vampire’s personal pharmacy. When I first started giving my blood to the Control, it was only to buy my double-crossing father some leniency. Then it was part of a deal—which included this year of service—to let Shane visit his human family, a privilege forbidden to nearly all vampires.

But I’d started to realize it wasn’t just about me. It was about a world on the edge of another Dark Age, with superstition feeding the fires of hatred, and belief taking the place of thought. I couldn’t stop nutcases from blowing up planes or shooting physicians, but maybe I could help answer a few questions about the nature of good and evil.

Because against the armies of zealots, the rational world needed more than convincing arguments. It needed its own magic.

Kryptonite

Sunday morning I sat on the non-colonel side of Lieutenant Colonel Winston Lanham’s wide oak desk, waiting for my assignment. I counted the awards lined up along the wall and tried to convince myself that I didn’t care where they put me. I could survive anything for a year.

Obviously they wouldn’t assign me to Enforcement—I wasn’t much for kicking ass, at least not with my muscles, which still ached from my final physical assessment test.

The Anonymity Division? Possibly, given my con artist expertise in forgeries. Maybe I’d get a job creating and arranging new identities for aging vampires.

My fiercest wish was to work for the Contemporary Awareness Division. Predominantly an internal branch, CAD had been created to counteract temporal adhesion, the tendency of vampires to remain stuck in the eras in which they were turned. CAD taught vampire Control agents how to live in the present—how to speak, dress, and act like twenty-first-century humans. Every Control vamp was required to report for regular CAD sessions and attend an annual two-week cultural immersion seminar.

I was musing on how I could wrangle funds to share
CAD resources with non-Control vamps, when Colonel Lanham entered.

Instinctively I stood at attention, though as a contractor I didn’t have to observe military customs and courtesies. Lanham exuded a mixture of hard-ass authority and cool competence that even I had to respect.

He was still wearing the ceremonial dress blacks from our graduation ceremony, a double-breasted uniform with a column of brilliant brass buttons. An array of medals on his chest reflected the recessed ceiling lights, as did his closely shaven head.

He nodded as he strode behind the desk. “Ms. Griffin.”

“Sir.” I sat when he did, resisting the urge to clear my throat.

He set down a hard black leather briefcase. “Congratulations on completing Indoc.”

I grimaced at the official name for the Control’s orientation program: Indoc, short for Indoctrination. “Thank you, sir.”

His thumbs flashed over the combination locks, then snapped them open simultaneously. “My apologies for the delay.” He pulled out a multicolored stack of file folders. “I needed one last high-level signature for your assignment. I think you’ll agree this is worth the wait.”

Lanham extracted a thick indigo file—the only one of its hue. He returned the other files to his briefcase, which he snapped shut and locked. Despite the efficiency of his movements, the colonel seemed to be dragging out the moment to torture me.

“The Immanence Corps is an elite special operations
force within the Control.” Lanham rested his hands atop the file. “Its composition is roughly half vampire, half human, but every IC human possesses paranormal abilities.”

My heart slammed my breastbone. “What exactly is an ‘immanence’?”

“The word has a variety of meanings. Theologically, it signifies the divine presence in our world. Among pagans, it refers to an event that occurs in the mind.” His steel blue eyes studied my face, as though he were expecting a reaction. “But by its purest definition, it means ‘inherent.’ IC agents are born with their powers.”

“I don’t have any powers. I just have funky blood.”

“We both know it’s more than that.” Lanham tapped his pen against his briefcase. “Though we’re a secular agency, many of our weapons depend upon the faith of those who wield them. Others, such as holy water, are intrinsically powerful.”

“And those are the ones I can neutralize.”

He gave an almost imperceptible nod. “The Control would like to know which principle applies to the abilities of IC agents.”

“That makes sense.”

We sat there for a few moments, blinking at each other, before I grasped the connection. “Wait, wait, wait. You want to use me to experiment on my fellow agents? What am I, a chemical in a test tube?”

He shook his head calmly. “I assure you—“

“It’s not enough just to study my blood. Now you want to throw me into a pool of alleged paranormals and see if I neutralize them just by hanging out?” I fought to keep the anger out of my voice. “When you recruited me, you said you wanted my brains and talent. But you just want to study
my freakiness.”

Lanham’s face remained impassive. “You have a unique quality. You should share it with those who can best help you deploy it.”

My spine chilled at the word “share.” “If I join the Immanence Corps, I’ll have to tell my colleagues why I’m qualified.” I could see us all sitting in a circle on Day One:
Hi, my name is Ciara, and my magic is really anti-magic. Please don’t bite and/or kill me.

“Not to worry.” Lanham leaned back in his chair, spreading his hands. “Immanence agents maintain absolute secrecy regarding one another’s powers. You’re not the only one whose abilities could be used for nefarious purposes by vampires or humans.”

“Do I have a choice in assignment?”

“There’s always a choice. But not if you want to maintain our agreement.”

Two and a half years ago I’d signed a contract to join the Control after I finished college. In return, the agency would allow Shane to maintain contact with his human mom and sister in Ohio.