I returned to the office after a changing into my grey coveralls in my car. Walking the streets with blood all over me tended to attract the wrong kind of attention. Not to mention that I smelled. Sweat, blood, smoke, booze and gunshot residue. Not terribly pleasant. The change of clothes helped somewhat, but I desperately needed a shower. Before that could happen, however, I needed to report in. The office was in a non-descript high-rise downtown; an area so crammed with non-descript offices that you would be hard pressed to pick it out, even if you had been there before. Hell, sometimes I had trouble finding the place, and I had worked here for over 10 years. But I needed to find it tonight. They would want to talk with me after what happened. Not that what I had done had been that unusual, but the debriefings were part of the process. The elevator door slid open on the 11th floor. A sign proclaimed that these were the offices of Friedmont Pest Control Services; the little skull and crossbones on the sign matched the patch on my coveralls. I had always privately wondered if the name was a bit tongue in cheek, or if it was purely a practical deception, given how often we needed to operate, mostly unnoticed, in hotels, clubs, bars, restaurants and theatres. Strange work hours were also common. There was a lot of overlap, between our line of work and the legitimate pest control business. Tom was sitting at the reception desk, smiling his best public-relations smile. As one of the Immune, he wasn’t suited for field work, but he was an excellent administrator and security agent. I’d once looked behind that desk he sat at, and there was enough fire power back there to take over a small country. If anyone came here looking for trouble, they would get more of it than they bargained for. Tom inclined his head to me,
“Welcome back, Ray.”
“Tom,” I smiled back at him.
“Just can’t keep yourself out of trouble, can you?”
“Wouldn’t be doing my job if I did. When trouble is occupied with me, it doesn’t have time for anyone else.”
“Fair enough,” he chuckled. “The girl make it out ok?”
“Yeah, medics said she would be fine. Not going to be feeling too well for a few days, but she’ll recover.”
“You let him feed on her?”
“He’d already gotten to her by the time I marked him.
“Really? I thought you Partials were supposed to be better at that sort of thing.”
“I’m not bad,” I smirked. “She didn’t lose much.”
“Lucky for her.”
“Yeah. If we hadn’t gotten a tip about that club, we would have found her body in that alley in the morning. No doubt.”
“Oh yeah? I mean, he wouldn’t necessarily kill every time, would he?”
“Guy like that? Doubt he could stop himself. You should have seen him, he was twitchy, pale, had the shakes bad. He was one of the ones that needed the kill. Addicted, I expect. I’ve seen it before.”
“Tragic, when it goes that way.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, we will have to thank our allies for the tip.”
“They do a good job of keeping tabs on their people.”
“Not good enough to make us unnecessary.”
Ray shrugged,
“You keen on finding another job?”
“No, just on finding less corpses.”
Ray nodded solemnly, then chuckled,
“I doubt a lawyer’s office would let you clean guns at the reception desk.”
“I don’t know, they might. Saves them money on hiring security. Lawyers love to save a penny, from what I’ve heard.”
The phone on his desk buzzed once. Tom answered and nodded,
“Yes, sir.”
He hung up,
“Boss wants to see you.”
“Better not keep him waiting.”
I winked at Tom, and headed back towards the inner offices. I swiped my key card and unlocked the heavy security door marked Employees Only. This part of the office was not for outside eyes. Inside, the skull and crossbones logo was replaced with the eye and the sword, matching my own iridescent tattoo. Vigilance and duty. It was a symbol vague enough to look like any other tattoo, a little bit gothic, maybe even cliché, but to those who knew, the ink and the placement, along with the symbol, marked me as a designated enforcer of the Organization. That meant, in matters like those in the alley, my authority was absolute and not to be questioned. I enforced the Pact, and those who resisted tended to wind up intimately acquainted with their own mortality. Most knew better than to resist. They would get a fair investigation and trial, if they came quietly. It wasn’t precisely the order of events favored by the more… mundane authorities, but the nature of the predators that we dealt with demanded that society be made safe, before much time was spent investigating. It was laid out very clearly in the Pactus Ubarae. I had read the whole thing once, a requirement of the job. Dry as week old toast, but very clear; quite the accomplishment, for a centuries old legal document. It was why there was nothing to fear in this meeting. This was a normal part of my job. I swung open the door and my captain, James Herron rose to greet me,
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“Rayna,” he clapped me on the shoulder in greeting, looking me over carefully, eyes lingering on the scratch marks on my neck.
James was the only one allowed to call me Rayna. I preferred Ray, but I let my mentor get away with it. He was out of the field now, always joked he was too old for it these days, but no one was better at assessing the strengths and weaknesses of his people, and placing them according to their skills. I trusted him with my life. I rubbed my hand over the bloody lines across my neck,
“Club girls with manicures,” I shrugged. “They should have to register those nails as weapons.”
“Well, I hope you disinfected. That can breed a nasty infection,” he stepped back around the other side of his desk and consulted the case file.
“Looks like you had a productive night.”
“I try my best.”
“The incubus has been taken to a medical holding facility. The DNA will take a few days, but the fingerprint results are in. It confirmed his involvement in several kills recently. You think he was a rogue element, or just an addict?”
“Looked like an addict to me. Had all the usual symptoms.”
“Good,” Jim nodded. “Simpler that way. It’s the rogues that you really need to look out for.”
“They kill, just the same.”
“But the addicts are simpler to catch. Sloppy, reckless. The rogues always rack up a bigger body count before they get caught.”
“True, but they are rare,” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d pulled a real rogue.
“Small favors,” Jim agreed. “Anything else to report about tonight?”
“Not really, Jim. Very routine. The tip was good. The idiot ran. I finished it.”
Jim nodded,
“Alright. Seems pretty straight forward to me. You want the next file now, or you want to get some rest first?”
“I’ll take it now. Good bedtime reading, I’m sure.”
“Right,” Jim rolled his eyes.
He pulled out his tablet and transferred the file to me.
“Go get some sleep. Let me know if you need anything to help you track this target.”
“Will do, Jim. Have a good night.”
I left the way I came in, bidding Tom a good night as I did. The scratches on my neck were starting to itch. Jim was right, I needed to disinfect that.
My apartment was on the 4th floor. Far enough up that no one could easily get in through the windows, but close enough to the ground floor that I didn’t have to take the elevator. I hated elevators. They were too enclosed, too… automated. Some might say that this was just a manifestation of my control issues, but people who willingly relinquished control didn’t last long in my line of work. So, I took the stairs two at a time, instead. If nothing else, at least it was good exercise. My place wasn’t anything special, but it had all of the things I valued in a home: thick, concrete walls, a reinforced steel door, reclusive neighbors, plentiful hot water, and my good first aid kit. It was the last two that I was most looking forward to at the moment. I locked the door behind me, three bolts and a chain, and armed my alarm system. Then I turned on the shower and heated the water until it was just short of scalding. I scrubbed myself until my skin was fresh and pink. Then I slathered the scratches in antibiotic salve and bandaged it to keep it sterile. All cleaned up, I checked my watch. 3 am. Time for dinner. I went out to the kitchen to heat a frozen pizza. This was the best part of living alone, not having to worry about disturbing anyone. I had tried living with roommates before, rent was expensive in the city after all, but my unusual hours and… particular nature made me a less than ideal person to share a place with. The last straw was the girl I lived with for a time who had a nasty tendency to leave the door unlocked when she went out. It was just too much of a risk, so eventually I bit the bullet and found my own place. It was small, but it suited my purposes just fine. It wasn’t like I did a lot of entertaining. Hell, lately I was barely home at all. At the moment, there were more open cases than the Organization could handle. They had always been perpetually short staffed, but lately it seemed worse than ever. It was a tough problem to fix, they couldn’t just hire more agents when they needed them, after all. Few people were suited to this line of work and finding those that were was complicated. In practice, that just meant that I never got to use up my vacation days. Or get a full night’s sleep. I stifled a yawn at the thought, retrieved my dinner, flopped onto my couch and opened the new case file. It was best if I got through it before I went to sleep, that way I could let the information process, come up with a plan for tomorrow. Well, later today I supposed, if you wanted to get technical. It was pretty typical, as these things went. Several young men, otherwise healthy, had been found dead in their hotel rooms, seemingly of heart failure. Their deaths had been ruled as natural causes by the authorities. Preliminary investigation showed that they had last been seen with a woman, one that no one could describe very well, save for drooling over her exceptional good looks. A couple of witnesses even expressed jealousy that the victim had been able to spend his last hours with a being of such ethereal beauty. The fact that it had probably killed them didn’t seem to bother the witnesses one bit. That wasn’t unusual, either. Creepy, but not unusual. A good succubus could really mess with a person’s head. Usually without even trying. The whole file was so routine that I didn’t even manage to finish it before dozing off on the couch, with my tablet resting on my chest.