Imperium (Caulborn) (3 page)

Galahad’s face goes calm, the dangerous kind of calm. He reaches up to his neck and pulls the white priest’s collar out. “Go to Hell,” he says in a level voice, and I can hear the capital H when he says it. He throws the collar on the floor and turns on his heel. The Glimpse faded, and I was returned to the here and now.

I tried not to let on that anything had happened. I’d known that Galahad had been clergy at one point, but he’d never told me about this. I rubbed my forehead and Galahad smiled as he walked up to me. “Welcome back, Vincent.” He gestured to the woman at his side. “This is Megan Hayes. She’s recently been assigned here from New Mexico.”

I extended my hand. The top of Megan's head barely came up to my chin, and her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked like a petite china doll, but her grip was strong. “New Mexico?” I asked. “Were you part of the Roswell detail?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said in a chirpy tone. “I was part of the Diplomacy & Negotiations branch.” Her smile was bright, and a dimple formed in her left cheek. “I’m very happy to meet you, Vincent.”

“Megan is going to be training with us for a while, Vincent.” Galahad said. “I think it best if she shadowed you.”

“She’ll know the best places to eat by the end of the week.” I smiled. Megan grinned back, her dimple deepening and her ice-blue eyes twinkling. Dang, she was cute.

Leslie came down the hallway and Galahad excused himself to speak with her. Megan began flipping through her binder. As the pages turned, I could see photos and Caulborn documents.

“What do you have there?” I asked.

“Some material on the local legends and paranormal phenomena in this part of the country,” she said. “Wow, I thought a lot of this stuff was just scary bedtime stories, but these things are real.” She looked like a kid paging through a Toys R Us catalog. A moment later, Galahad returned to us.

“Vincent, Leslie tells me that Miguel has not checked in today, and he’s not answering his phone. I'd like you and Megan to stop by his apartment and make sure he’s all right.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

I dropped Miguel’s package off in his office, and then Megan and I headed for the elevator. “I read your personnel file, Vincent, and I have some questions if you don’t mind.” She turned those dazzling blue eyes up to me, seeking permission.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Okay, you’re not exactly human, right? You’re a half-god, the son of Janus and a human woman. Galahad brought you in six years ago, specifically to handle a fae situation. You helped an Urisk get back to his home realm, and now the Urisk worship you as their god. Your file has the notation Vincent Corinthos, God of the Dovers, but the people you helped are called Urisk. Where’s Dover come from?”

Wow, this girl could talk fast. I tried to put my thoughts in order. “Ever hear of the Dover Demon?” I wasn’t surprised when she shook her head. “Okay, back in the seventies, a handful of teenagers saw this ugly creature with gray skin and luminescent eyes running around Dover, which is about twenty miles west of here. The papers dubbed it the Dover Demon. Now, there are all kinds of wild theories on what the Demon actually was, but in reality it was an Urisk who came to our world from the Bright Side. The Dover Demon nickname stuck, so sometimes you’ll hear people call them Dovers.”

We left the building as we talked. “I’ll drive,” Megan said as she led me over to a blue Toyota Tercel. “I need to learn my way around the city.”

We drove over to Miguel’s apartment. The ride was short, and Megan’s GPS did most of the talking. She seemed extremely focused on the road, and not wanting to distract her, I kept my mouth shut, except for when I told her where to park. We walked inside Mikey’s building and headed up to the fifth floor. I knocked three times on the door. “Mikey? It’s Vincent. You okay in there?” No response. I waited a minute and knocked again. When no response came a second time, I tried the door. I yanked my hand back in surprise.

“What’s wrong?” Megan asked.

“The door handle is cold. Freezing cold,” I said. I put my hand into my jacket pocket and used my coat to turn the handle. The door wasn’t locked, and that made me cringe. Door handles can be cold, hot, or they can even talk to you in this line of work and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But an unlocked Caulborn’s door is always a sign of trouble.

The apartment was so cold I could see my breath. Patches of frost were on the furniture, and the windows were covered with ice. Megan whistled and rubbed her arms as she stepped inside. It was a good twenty or twenty-five degrees colder in here than it was outside. “Mikey?” I called. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get an answer.

We did a quick loop of the apartment. The entire place was cold, but nothing looked out of place until we got to the bedroom. Some of the furniture had been knocked around, and I found Mikey’s 10mm on the ground next to the bed. There was also a large patch of ragged ice on the floor. It looked like there might have been a larger block of ice there at one point, and the main piece of it had been broken off and carried away. There were thin tracks on the floor through the frost as well, like tiny sled skids or wheels. I waited a moment, hoping my Glimpse would kick in. Nothing.

I walked back to the front door and checked the wards Mikey had laid. Any non-Caulborn who crossed over them should’ve been hit with a staggering amount of electricity. They had been detonated. Something had crossed over that and survived? I shuddered.

“What could do something like this? Some sort of ice demon? Or maybe a frost-based fae?” Megan asked as she snapped pictures of the apartment with a small digital camera.

“A freeze cannon,” I responded. “One designed to drop a target’s body temperature down to absolute zero and hold them indefinitely.”

Megan tilted her head at me. “And you know that how?”

I gestured for Megan to follow. We left the apartment and I locked the door behind us. “We’ve dealt with someone like this before. Her name is Keri Greene. Let’s see if the building’s security caught anything.” We headed down to the building’s superintendent’s office. The super recognized me from before. He didn’t know exactly what Mikey did for a living, but Mikey told me the super thought he was some kind of CIA spook. So the guy never even asked me for ID; he just said he understood. We were given a copy of the last two days worth of tapes, and the super let us use his office to view them.

Galahad had seen Mikey yesterday afternoon, so we found that point on the tapes and watched them on fast forward. Sure enough, at about 2 a.m. this morning, three men came out of the elevator, and one of them was pushing a large box, about the size of a coffin. They made their way down the hallway and picked open Mikey’s door. Two of them produced weapons and they dashed inside. There was a dazzling flash of light, Mikey’s wards being detonated. A moment later, the third man pushed the box into the apartment. About five minutes later, all three of them came out of the apartment, pushing the box. A thin tendril of fog curled out of the apartment as they left. I cursed.

Mikey had been kidnapped.

Chapter 4

Begin Coded Transmission
Because of his partially divine heritage, Vincent Corinthos is codenamed the Godling in most Caulborn documentation. Born with a caul, Vincent was marked as a potential agent from very early on. Any traits he may have inherited from his father are classified and will require additional work to obtain.
Galahad XI recruited Corinthos specifically to work with an Urisk named Lotholio. The particulars of why Galahad chose Corinthos for this task are unknown. What is known is that Lotholio had crossed from the Bright Side thirty years earlier and had been across the country and back again, seeking aid for his people from America’s supernatural community. He had apparently given up and was about to return to the Bright Side when he was discovered by Caulborn agents in Massachusetts. This encounter would be the first step toward Corinthos’ ascension as a deity on the Bright Side.
-NS
End Coded Transmission

I took the tapes in hopes that we might be able to electronically enhance them and get a better look at the men’s faces. We went back to headquarters and up to Galahad’s office. He called for us to enter when we knocked on his door.

The chamber beyond was a sparsely furnished study. The walls were bare, save for a simple charcoal drawing of Christ looking up to Heaven. A small table with three chairs sat in the middle of the room, and beyond that, a wooden writing desk. The only thing that seemed out of place was the sword that was thrust into a block of red marble. It always reminded me of Excalibur, and from what I’d Glimpsed, the story wasn’t that much different.

Back during the days of the round table, a sword appeared in a block of red marble. None of Arthur’s knights were able to draw it, and Arthur decreed that any knight who could would be the greatest of them all. Lancelot’s son, the original Galahad, was able to, and he went on to find the Holy Grail. Since then, the sword in the block of marble has reappeared at various points in history. The person who has drawn the sword has always become a great champion of good, a Galahad. Joan of Arc found it once. So did George Washington. There have been nine other Galahads since the original, making the man across from me the eleventh. I’ve never learned my Galahad’s real name, even with my Glimpses.

“Megan, Vincent,” he said with a smile. The smile faded when he saw the look on my face. “What’s happened?” I told Galahad what we’d found and my suspicions. He blessed himself and folded his hands in front of him for a moment. “It sounds like you’re on the right track, Vincent. Do what you need to do to get Miguel home to us.” He pressed an intercom button on his desk. “Leslie,” he said, “please print off directions to Keri Greene’s most current address. Vincent and Megan need to pay her a visit.” Leslie chirped back a yes, and less than two minutes later, Megan and I were headed to her Tercel with a set of directions that were still warm from Leslie’s printer.

“So tell me about this Keri Greene,” Megan said as she slid behind the wheel.

“As far as we know, she’s the only priestess of an obscure god called Thollan. About four years ago, she got it into her head that Thollan was going to come to the world and scour life from the planet with flames. She was convinced that the only survivors would be the ones that she encased in ice.

“Greene worked in cryogenics, so she had access to a bunch of freezing technology. She modified it and created a freezing apparatus that was colder and more powerful than any other cryogenic device in the world. She stalked a bunch of people that she thought the world would need after its fiery cleansing; doctors, construction workers, farmers. She froze about seventy people before we caught her.”

“What happened to her?”

“Miguel, Kristin, Miguel’s ex-partner, Nathan Singravel, and I confronted her down in a warehouse. She was convinced that the scouring flames would happen that very night, and told us that we were interfering with the will of a god, the usual monologue you might expect. She tried to freeze herself, too, but Nathan stopped her. We held her down until the time had passed, and then she just fell to the ground weeping. When she realized Thollan’s apocalypse wasn’t going to happen, she started the thawing process and surrendered.

“We took her to Ashgate and she only served a few years of her sentence. She was a model prisoner and was paroled about a year ago.”

“Ashgate? Isn’t that the local paranormal prison? If she wasn’t paranormal herself, why did she go there?”

Dang, it was beginning to look like Megan always asked multiple-part questions. “Yes, Ashgate is the local prison. It’s out on one of the islands off the coast. Galahad will probably take you out there personally to introduce you to Warden Garside. As for why Greene went there instead of a normal jail, it’s because of the nature of the situation. We weren’t sure if Thollan would retaliate at the people who had imprisoned his priestess, and wanted the appropriate security measures in place.”

Megan nodded. “Back to Greene. You think she believes this Thollan is going to try something else?”

“Maybe. She’s the only person I know who can make things that cold.”

“So who were the men who kidnapped Miguel? Hired help? Thollan cultists?”

“Not sure. Greene was charismatic enough that it wouldn’t surprise me if she’d built up a cult. She didn’t the first time around, but this time, who’s to say?”

We drove to Keri Greene’s townhouse. She was lucky enough to have one of the end units, with a relatively private balcony. Let me tell you, in Boston privacy is something you have to pay through the nose for. In fact, I’m pretty sure you have to sign over one of your kidneys and your firstborn child to get a spot like this one.

Megan knocked on the front door. It swung open. I hung my head. I had a bad feeling about this. “Keri Greene?” Megan called. “This is Agent Hayes. My partner and I need to speak with you.” There were no sounds coming from inside, not even a TV. “Ms. Greene, we are concerned for your safety and are coming in. If you need help, please let us know where you are.” We walked in. Megan had produced a 9mm and held it ready. I had the Urisk’s faith prepared for a quick telekinetic thrust, and my switchblade was tucked comfortably up my sleeve.

The front door opened to the living room. The room was furnished in tasteful tans and blues; I’m sure Thad would’ve made some remark about the feng shui of the place. The walls were decorated in a musical motif. There were instruments hung directly on the walls, alongside paintings of sheet music.

From the living room we could see into the kitchen. We did a quick check there, found nothing, and then headed upstairs. The first room we found was a home office. This room looked like it had been ransacked. Desk drawers were lying on the floor, the closet was open and a myriad of boxes and envelopes were scattered all over the floor. There were papers everywhere. “Wow,” Megan said. “Someone wanted something pretty badly in here.”