Breach of Magic: A Druidverse Urban Fantasy Novel
Date: 2023-02-25 05:00:00+00:00
Description: When a string of supernatural murders puts Agent Mendoza on the trail of a bizarre and deadly creature, he’ll stop at nothing to make the beast pay! Something sinister lurks in the shadows of Austin, Texas—and it hungers for blood. Agent Mendoza’s superiors say it’s a vamp, and to let the local coven handle their own messes. Despite their orders, Tony Mendoza can’t leave well enough alone. That’s because he’s seen things—dark, deadly creatures, the kind that make you want to keep the lights on at night. He knows what it’s like to be hunted, and he can’t simply stand by when innocent lives are
Rights: Copyright 2023 M.D. Massey. All rights reserved.

BREACH OF MAGIC

A DRUIDVERSE URBAN FANTASY NOVEL

THE CERBERUS PARANORMAL DETECTIVE SERIES

BOOK 2

M.D. MASSEY

D. WILLIAM LANDSBOROUGH

Copyright © 2023 by M.D. Massey

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Druidverse® and the Druidverse logo are registered trademarks wholly owned by M.D. Massey.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

A Glossary of Terms…

INTRODUCTION

Some of the characters you’ll meet in this story originally appeared in my THEM post-apocalyptic series. The Druidverse® is a fantasy world of my own creation, and I take liberties with it as suits my whim and fancy. When I wrote the Colin McCool series, I used time travel and alternate timeline mechanics to explain the connection between the two series.

Specifically, Tony Mendoza and Captain Lorena Perez (Pérez) appear in the Scratch Sullivan novels. Pérez was my mother’s maiden name, which was why I gave Scratch’s female counterpart that patronymic. As for Gabriela and Antonio Mendoza, I used that name because it’s one of the more common surnames in Mexico and South Texas.

My ancestors settled in South Texas before the Civil War, and our roots run deep in the state. Our family has a tradition of serving in the military and in law enforcement. We are proud to be Texan, proud to serve our communities and nation, and proud to be Latino.

All of the aforementioned characters are based on my experiences growing up in the Tejano culture in South Texas. Any and all related cultural references are mine, and should be attributed to me alone.

A Word On Technical Accuracy

Like many of you, it grates on me when I find basic mistakes in military and detective fiction. Not that I haven’t made some myself—when you write at mach speed, mistakes will be made—but I do my best to get things as close to perfectly accurate as possible. To that end, while co-writing this book I consulted a dear family member who has worked beside federal law enforcement officers for many years. Thankfully, they were able to guide me regarding the law enforcement particulars in these novels.

I also consulted one of my beta readers, SFC (RET) James Mahan, a former Ranger School and Modern Army Combatives instructor, professional door kicker, and career 11B. He helped me get all the military stuff straight, as it’s been about 30 years since I was on active duty. A big thanks goes out to Jim for helping us get certain details right in these novels.

Regarding the martial arts scenes found in this novel, I’d also like to thank my Filipino kali and Jeet Kune Do instructor, Burton Richardson. When I was last able to train with him, Burt selflessly shared many colorful stories with me—stories collected over a lifetime of training with some of the greatest martial arts masters the modern world has known.

Indeed, you’ll find one of those stories in the second chapter of Breach of Magic, adapted and dramatized but no less true for the telling. Guro Burt had a similar experience the first time he trained with the late Grandmaster Antonio “Tatang” Ilustrisimo, founder of Kalis Ilustrisimo. I would be remiss if I did not give credit where credit is due regarding the inspiration for that training sequence, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed hearing the story told by my instructor.

Finally, as always, all mistakes are mine. If you find something that’s not quite accurate in this book, feel free to drop a polite comment on my blog or send me a friendly message on Facebook.

~M.D. Massey

CHAPTER ONE

My first day on the job, Gibbs told me we were nothing more than toys to the fae. Playthings for them to twist around, warp, and toss away when they got bored.

That’s why it surprised me when Strickland asked me to track one down.

Admittedly, this particular fae—a half-gancanagh named Rhys—was pretty low on the fair folk totem pole. He couldn’t bend reality or control minds. All he could do, according to CERBERUS files, was change his looks through some sort of illusion magic.

Rhys didn’t use his magic to blackmail CEOs or rob jewelry stores. No, this fucker made himself look like a 14-year-old kid to catfish teenage girls.

Like most sexual predators, the perp’s illicit proclivities started in the realm of fantasy, then they escalated to acting out against others. According to the intel Strickland had, Rhys liked to spend his evenings soliciting pictures from kids on whatever app was the flavor of the day. That put him firmly in the jurisdiction of mundane law enforcement, so we continued monitoring him while we waited for the feds to round him up in an upcoming sting.

But when he started asking kids if they’d like to meet, we moved him to the top of our shit list. The fae had a long history of abducting children, and they didn’t have a habit of returning them in like-new condition. Preventing fae abductions of humans and recovering abduction victims were mission objectives CERBERUS took seriously, which was why Strickland assigned me the case.

Thankfully, we caught Rhys red-handed—Comms had played him like a fiddle at his own game, catfishing the catfish. Now, the prick thought he was meeting up with a high school freshman in a deserted corner of Blossom Park at midnight.

Instead, he’d be meeting me.

As I crept down a crushed gravel path, senses on high alert for a supernatural pedophile, my heart raced at the prospect of collaring one of the fae. Half-fae, in this case, but one with magic just the same. And, oh boy, was I eager to meet him.

My brush with Khalid had made me wary of magic users, for obvious reasons. I mean, getting cooked alive by magic will do that to you. But rather than going gun shy, I’d learned as much as I could about magic practitioners since the New Orleans incident. At least, I’d tried, digging through dusty manuals and old case files in an attempt to figure out how magic worked—and how to counter it.

As it turned out, CERBERUS had painfully little intel on SNE-MUs. For that reason, the plan was for me to bring Rhys in so Perez could keep him on ice and study his magic. My job was to do so without banging him up too terribly much.

Yeah, we’ll see how that goes.

The park was empty, and almost too quiet for a couple of acres in the middle of suburban San Antonio. A pole light flickered above, the ballast buzzing as it fought against entropy and the damage done to it by our overworked power grid. Few other sounds disturbed the still night air, save for the crunch of gravel under my feet and a barn owl’s lonesome cry in the distance.

The owl’s screech reminded me of stories about La Lechuza that my abuela used to tell me when I was a kid. La Lechuza was a witch who could turn into a large white owl, or a huge owl with a woman’s face in some versions of the story. Yeah, Tejano folklore was pretty weird, and I often wondered how much of it was based in fact.

In hindsight, I’d guess a lot of it was true. The folklore was so pervasive and accepted, our small-town newspaper would occasionally run stories on local La Lechuza sightings. My grandma claimed La Lechuza had come scratching at her window once, trying to get in to do who-knew-what to her. Bedtime stories could get pretty damned dark in South Texas Latino culture.

Probably a good thing. Prepared me for this job, anyway.

A full moon hung in the sky like a silver platter, illuminating open areas of the park in its pale argent glow. Between the occasional pools of manmade light dotting the winding paths that wormed between the trees, dark shadows provided ample space for a pedophilic faery to hide. The more I thought about it, the more those shadows drew my gaze. Soon I found myself looking over my shoulder as often as my eyes scanned the areas in front of me.

My nostrils flared as the wind blew through the trees. Courtesy of SNE-SH 167b—Captain Perez’s gene therapy serum—each scent painted a picture, one that told me Mother Nature was having a rough day.

Damp earth from a storm that had come through an hour ago, rotting foliage, dog piss on tree trunks that still clung to the bark despite the rain… but no fae. Not that I knew what a half-gancanagh smelled like. Probably hormones and desperation, if this guy’s profile was any indication.

The path forked at a playground surrounded by rustling trees. The slides and ladders could’ve been mistaken for twisting metal monuments in the silver light, surrounded by a ring of empty park benches.

And still no fae.

According to Strickland, the perp was supposed to be waiting around for Little Timmy—or whatever name the folks at Comms chose—at the playground.

“Don’t kill him,” the boss had ordered. “It’s not worth riling up his kin. Still, we can’t have him running around snatching kids, so we’ll apprehend him for safe incarceration and study.”

Whatever the hell “safe incarceration” meant, I was confident it made mundane jail look like a vacation.

I was downwind from the playground, so I opted to follow the path around the perimeter and find a place to lie low on the other side. It went wider than I’d hoped, but I resisted the urge to veer off and try to sneak through the trees. For all I knew, the subject had already spotted me, which meant my best bet was to act like some regular Joe taking a midnight stroll.

“No movement on the perimeter,” I heard through my earpiece. Strickland had two teams watching the roads around the park, ready to swarm if I needed backup.

Having backup at all made the whole thing feel like some sort of test, like the director was trying out his latest pet. Considering I’d basically sold my soul to CERBERUS when I let Perez inject me, that was degradingly close to the truth.

The path brought me to a small stone bridge that arched over another trail. Given everything I’d seen, the park was probably nice when the sun was up and a sex offender wasn’t using it as a hunting ground for abductions.

Footsteps that weren’t mine clacked across the stone bridge. A woman, maybe in her fifties or sixties, walked toward me. She wore a light jacket to protect herself from the biting night air, and she clutched her purse a little too closely on noticing me.

“Ma’am.” I nodded, giving her as much space as I could on the narrow overpass.

She averted her gaze as she walked by. There was nothing suspicious about her, but when you were on the lookout for a fae who wielded illusion magic, it paid to be cautious. I sniffed the air as she passed, still not sure what scent I was hoping for, but finding that I smelled nothing at all.

Suddenly, my high strangeness detector went on high alert.

“Excuse me.” I turned to face her before she’d made it more than a few steps. “You wouldn’t happen to be a magical creature trying to lure little kids into your creepy panel van, would you?”

The woman’s confused face was almost genuine before it relaxed into a cruel grin. “Nope, dipshit—I’m the decoy.”

Her body shimmered like a heat mirage before disappearing.

Damn it, Mendoza.

I barely turned in time to see the glint of a knife in the moonlight. The blade was aimed to puncture my jugular, and it was moving fast enough that it almost found its mark. Drawing on my training in Modern Army Combatives, I tried to redirect and grab his wrist to achieve the two-on-one position for a disarm.

My assailant was agile, though, and he attempted a draw cut as he pulled the blade away. I covered my face and neck using the outside of my forearms and hands, just like my instructors had taught me, but it didn’t mean I was going to get off scot free. The edge of the weapon sliced through the back of my hand, its metal covered in a thin layer of my blood that shimmered slightly in the moonlight.

After my brain caught up with my reflexes, I took stock of the situation. Perched atop the waist-high stone wall that ran along the edge of the bridge was a lithe, skinny man wearing a boy band t-shirt under his open leather jacket. His features were sharp, from his thin lips to his pointed chin, and his ears were a hell of a lot longer than any human’s.

The guy looked like the illicit love child of Steve Buscemi and Legolas. Give the guy some chain mail and a bow, and he’d look right at home fighting orcs. Or checking out customers at the local triple X video store—take your pick.

Before Rhys could pull his knife back and go for another stab, I faked a punch at his nuts, then I snagged his jacket sleeve with my now slightly injured hand and held him fast. He struggled, yanking against my grip in vain. He wasn’t much stronger than a normal man, and I was, so his was a futile effort.

Still, the fact that he’d managed to cut me pissed me off. A low growl slipped from my lips, the only warning he had before my other fist connected with his nose. Cartilage crunched under my punch, eliciting a “fuck” from the half-fae.

In response, Rhys produced a knife in his other hand, and he brought it across to slash at me before I could hit him again. I leaned away from the attack, yanking on his arm to pull him off balance. But, like I said, he was agile. Instead of losing his balance, he went with it, slashing downward and opening up my forearm below the same hand he’d already cut.

I swore and let go of him, recoiling before he could do further damage. Now that his other hand was free, he threw the knife at my face with a quick flick of his wrist. To my surprise and his, I caught the damned thing by the handle, not an inch in front of my eye. Rhys’ eyes widened, and he gulped audibly.

“Sorry, not my type,” he said as he tumbled backward off the bridge.

Before I vaulted the low wall after him, I checked the cuts on my arm. The larger wound was bleeding like a son of a bitch, but SNE-SH 167b would do its job soon enough. Within minutes, the smaller wound would close. The larger one would quickly clot and stop bleeding, although it would likely need wound closures or stitches to heal properly. Both would be scabs or fresh pink scars by morning. At least, that’s what I hoped.

My joints jarred a little as I landed on the dirt path that ran under the bridge. Something fresh was mixed in with the damp smell of the park, like what I imagined springtime in Martha Stewart’s garden would smell like.

Wait, is Martha a supe?

The irrelevant question left my mind as I turned towards the bridge and sprinted after the half-gancanagh’s springtime trail. I made it maybe two steps before I basically fell backward and came face to face with…

A troll? An ogre? I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at, but it was big enough to fill the eight-foot-tall passage under the bridge and wide enough to make an offensive lineman look like a kid.

Long, wet hair clung to the beast’s fat face and draped over its shoulders. Based on the size of its fists, Strickland would have to identify me based on my dental records if it managed to hit me.

Before it could bring the meat hammers down, I drew my Glock 20, the sidearm all good boys and girls at CERBERUS got from Santa Strickland, and fired off three rounds: two in the monster’s chest and one between its bulbous eyes. The bullets did nothing.

Not “it shrugged them off” or “they bounced off its skin” nothing. No, the 10mm rounds passed through the ogre-troll-thing like it wasn’t even there.

“Chingado,” I swore as I ran right into the beast. “I’m already over this glamour shit.”

There wasn’t any resistance as I barreled into and through the giant. I expected there to be some sort of feeling, like water or some slimy membrane, but the illusion had no substance to it at all.

And just like that, I was on the other side of bridge. The image of the monster was still looking the other way, fists held threateningly in the air.

“Pursuing subject on foot,” I said into my comms device. “Heading east.”

“Roger, moving out,” a voice answered.

“Negative, stand down. This fucker’s mine.”

If Strickland had tagged along, he probably would’ve chewed me out for the order. But the fae wasn’t just a criminal; he was my quarry. After months at a desk, I needed to prove to myself that joining CERBERUS wasn’t for nothing.

Each shadow cast by the gnarled tree branches was a place the half-gancanagh could hide, each bush a place he could find cover in. But the half-fae’s scent trail led onward. Based on the scentless illusions he’d conjured so far, that wasn’t something Rhys could fake.

Rhys’s trail led me out of the park and onto a dimly lit street. No civilians, no cars. The neighborhood streets were as empty as its park. Still, I doubted the gunshots would have gone unreported. It was only a matter of minutes before the locals showed up.

As I followed the fae’s scent into a vacant lot between two houses, the skies darkened as the moon slid behind a thick cloud bank. Now, the only light came from street lamps behind me that cast long shadows with their yellow sodium glow. As I made my way farther from the streets, the perp’s springtime smell was overpowered by the odor of garbage and rotting food.

The ground was muddy from the recent rain, and I had to pick my way through cacti and over the rock-strewn ground, slowing my pace. The sound of water burbling in a stream somewhere nearby told me we were near the green belt. If I let him reach it, I might lose him in the greenery.

“You don’t want to do this.” Rhys’s voice came from behind me. “Just leave me alone, cop. You don’t want any part of my world.”

I turned and faced him. Somehow, the half-gancanagh was between me and the road I’d come from, but there was nowhere for him to have hidden. Sure, there were small trees and a few bushes he could have crouched behind, but there was no way I didn’t see him.

“You should leave now,” the fae said, although his lips didn’t move.

To my left, another Rhys sat on a large boulder that jutted up from the ground. Lanky legs in black jeans that looked uncomfortably tight dangled off the rock like a kid in a high chair. My eyes snapped between the two figures. They were similar in every way, including the blades they each twirled in their hands.

“You’re out of your depth, pig,” a third Rhys behind me said. “Last warning.”

I laughed. The suspect’s brow furrowed—obviously, that was not the reaction he’d expected.

“You’re no ordinary cop.”

“You’re not as dumb as you look. Stop resisting and make this easy on us both.” I winked at him. “Last warning.”

Rhys bowed his head as he thumbed the edge of his blade. Obviously, the guy was used to manipulating kids, not dealing with actual threats. He might only be half-fae, but he was accustomed to lording power over mundane humans.

Then, he rushed me, all three of him at once. I’d have missed it and been a step behind if I hadn’t seen his eyes tighten just before he made his move. As it was, I only had time to fire at the one in front of me before the trio was on me. My shot hit its mark but passed through that Rhys, just like the troll under the bridge.

One of the other two plunged its blade deep into my thigh and retracted it quickly. Then, all three of them retreated, shimmering and criss-crossing each other’s paths as they regrouped between me and where I’d entered the lot. Just in case the world needed to know how much that hurt, I let out a guttural, frustrated string of curses that would have made a drill instructor blush.

Rhys just grinned at me, the same smug smile on three different sets of lips. All three of their knives had my blood on them. They were perfect copies, but the attack proved only one of them was real.

At only a handful of paces away, I had a small window to test my sidearm on each of them, even if it wasn’t a kill shot.

“You should’ve run, human,” all three said in unison.

Before he could make the choice for me, I drew down on one at random and fired at his shoulder. The three of them burst into motion even as I squeezed the trigger. One rushed me head on, flanked by one of his clones. The third hopped up onto a rock and leapt into the air.

My shot passed through the middle one without stopping, burying itself in a thick oak tree behind the illusory image. I shot at the one springing through the air, his knife poised to go through my eye, and unloaded a round into his stomach.

Maybe it’ll kill him, maybe it won’t. Kind of running out of options here.

Again, nothing.

The third Rhys moved past me before I could get a third shot off or even grab at him. A fiery pain shot up my side as he dragged his knife through my obliques.

“Alive, Mendoza,” Strickland said through my earpiece, his tone both condescending and terse.

Every instinct in me was begging to put a bullet in each of them before they could move again. But something wasn’t right. Even with two copies, why was a weak fae choosing to put himself downrange of a gunman?

Back overseas, there was a street urchin in Kandahar who would hang around the base. The kid didn’t speak a lick of English, but he didn’t need to say a word to make us all lose our money at Three-card Monte. Whoever taught him how to con soldiers had done it well, I had to admit.

But after we’d collectively lost fifty bucks trying to beat a child at his own game, I realized something. The game was rigged from the beginning. As soon as he turned the queen face down, it was gone forever. You could’ve followed it all you wanted—hell, you could’ve had a half-dozen snipers following it—and the kid still turned over a jack every time.

We were his marks. “American suckers,” he would call us with a big smile as he pocketed our cash. Basically the only two words I ever heard him say.

That’s what Rhys was doing to me. He was playing Three-card Monte, and I was the American sucker.

As the three fae taunted me, I focused on the sounds and smells of the empty lot. Underneath the squelch of my feet on the muddy ground, and the scent of gunpowder and juniper pollen, there was something else. Something right beside me.

The smell of springtime. Small, shallow breaths just inches away from me.

I quickly pointed my sidearm across my body, about level with my thigh, and shot the air. A momentary crimson spray resulted, and Rhys screamed.

All three Rhyses blipped out of existence and a fourth—the real one—appeared out of thin air next to me. Blood spurted rhythmically from his leg where I’d shot him. Before he could recover and cut me again, I pointed my Glock at his face.

“Drop it. Normally I’d avoid the extra paperwork, but I’ll gladly make an exception in your case.”

The half-gancanagh complied immediately, though not without swearing and saying some words in a language I didn’t understand. His tone was ugly, but the words were pretty, I’d give him that.

I shoved Rhys onto his stomach against the slick pavement and forced his hands behind his back. Blood mixed with the rainwater on the ground, creating a rapidly spreading pink pool beneath his wounded leg.

“C’mon, man. Let me go, and I’ll get you anything you want,” he begged as I cuffed his wrists in handcuffs etched with runes. Strickland said they would suppress weaker fae magic, which I assumed meant they did shit all against stronger fair folk. “Girls? Or maybe boys are more your thing? Drugs? Money? I can get you whatever you want.”

Alive. It took everything I had not to put a bullet in his head right then and there. Instead, I reached for an Israeli bandage and some Quik Clot from the IFAK on my belt. After all that work, no way was I letting this pissant die on me.

“Target’s secure,” I said as I worked to keep the piece of shit from bleeding out. I forced a piece of clotting sponge into the entrance wound, causing him to scream—so satisfying—then I placed the remainder on his exit wound and bound it tightly. As the supe squirmed on the ground while begging for his freedom, I wondered if fae were technically U.S. citizens. “Say, does anyone know if I need to read him his Miranda rights?”

CHAPTER TWO

I edged to my right, away from the old man’s weapon hand. As I did, I twirled the stick in circles—moulinets, the long-haired, man-bunned fencing coach had called them, but I called it twirling—and kept my hand moving all the while. My movements were short, furtive, and explosive, as I was testing the edge of my opponent’s reach while trying to avoid the last three inches of his weapon.

That hadn’t gone so well. We’d been sparring with rattan sticks, roughly thirty inches in length, meant to simulate a machete or short sword. We wore no protective gear because the old man said I wouldn’t need it.

He’d lied. My right hand and forearm were rife with raised, stick-shaped welts. Each one was a painful, bloody reminder that the thin, wrinkled old Filipino man standing across from me was a stone-cold killer.

His presence here was at Strickland’s request, all part of the unique training program CERBERUS had put together to keep me alive in the field. They’d sent for him after I body-slammed my fencing coach. After he woke up, Zorro quit. The next day when I showed up for training, the boss had the real deal waiting for me.

You wouldn’t know Tonyo was deadly by looking at him, of course. He was in his late seventies, whip-thin except for a slight pot belly that came from enjoying the odd beer and his nightly halo-halo a bit too much. Thick calluses covered his palms, the kind you got from weapon work and hard labor both, and his hands and arms were crisscrossed with knife and machete scars from all the duels he’d survived.

None of those scars were nasty enough to have killed him—“shaving cuts,” he called them. After our previous session, I’d asked him if he’d ever been close to dying.

“Every time,” he said, flashing a mischievous grin. “But I cut ‘dem be-poor ‘dey cut me!”

Rumor was Tonyo had lived through dozens of duels with live blades. He was also a renowned monster hunter in his home nation, having slain many an aswang, sigbin, and manananggal in his time. Currently, I was his latest victim. Despite my best efforts, I had yet to score on the guy.

That was fine when it was just me and the old man in the training room. But somehow word had gotten out that CERBERUS’ own super soldier was getting his ass kicked on a regular basis by some geezer who looked ready for the old folks’ home. Gibbs, Cole, and Smitty had snuck in while I was warming up. The trio sat on a bench against the wall, watching me like a murder of crows waiting to snap up the offal from the weekly hog slaughter.

“Get him, Mendoza!” Cole urged from the sidelines. “I got a twenty riding on you getting at least one good lick in.”

I spoke without taking my eyes off Tonyo. “Are you fuckers seriously betting on this? Really?”

“Yep,” Smitty said. “Got a pool goin’ in the office. Gonna be a weekly thing.”

“Man, fuck you guys,” I muttered.

THWAP!

Tonyo’s stick lashed out like a whip in a lightning-fast witik strike that left another welt across the back of my hand. Of course, that elicited a litany of “oohs” and “oh shits” from the peanut gallery. The pain was immediate, humiliating, and harmless—and a firm reminder that if this had been real life, I’d have lost that hand.

“Focus,” the eskrimador said, his filterless, lit cigarette bobbing from his lower lip as he spoke. “Danger ees here, not dare.”

It wouldn’t be so bad to lose to the old blade master, but he hit me with the same strike every single time. Downward chop to my hand from the standard guard position. He barely moved his feet, taking small shuffling steps that made him look even more like the doddering old man he appeared to be. Yet he was never there when I sprang forward to strike, instead always shuffling away or leaning just out of reach.

And I always paid the price for being too slow—or, rather, my hand did. I was pretty damned resilient, but the more punishment I took, the harder it was to hold onto my stick. Tonyo called it “defanging the snake.”

“You take away da snake’s fangs, what ees left?” he’d said during our first session. “No fang, no bite.”

Then, he’d proceeded to beat my ass like a pawn shop drum set. I’d grown up doing boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, karate—pretty much anything my old man could get me in if it’d help channel my aggression. Won a lot of trophies and medals too, although my papa always said they were worth shit in a real fight.

Later in the military, I’d learned Modern Army Combatives, a hand-to-hand combat system based on Gracie jiu-jitsu and MMA, with a smattering of Krav Maga and Marine Corps knife combat thrown in for good measure. I kept up the BJJ practice after I got out, eventually earning a brown belt for my efforts, no small feat in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I also still hit the kickboxing gym at least twice a week when Strickland didn’t have me on Scooby duty.

Yet none of that shit worked on Tonyo. The old man had magical powers; I was certain of it.

I danced away, doing like Tonyo said as I refocused on the sparring session. Suppressing the urge to wince, I switched the stick to my other hand so I could shake my right out. After flexing it a few times, I switched back to an orthodox grip and took up a middle guard—third position in fencing, more or less.

Circling again, I kept the tip of the stick level with my eyes but pointed at Tonyo’s as I’d been taught. My hand remained in constant movement to avoid another painful lesson. Meanwhile, the fading sting of Tonyo’s stick served as a reminder that all the shit I’d learned prior to this was worth fuck all against a blademaster with a sword in hand.

Which was kind of the point. In hand-to-hand combat against a ’thrope or a vamp, a long blade could be a great equalizer, especially if the other guy or gal didn’t have one. I chose not to think about what would happen if they did. All I knew for sure was that Tonyo’s stripped down, no-nonsense blade art was something I needed in my repertoire, so I kept coming back week after week despite the regular ass-whoopings.

Knowing a direct attack would fail, I came in with a high feint, faking an angle one strike to Tonyo’s head. He failed to take the bait, which was expected, and that was fine because I turned the motion into an angle three slash to his hand. Tonyo’s famed drop-stick strike came at my hand like a flash of lightning, and I realized a bit too late that he’d read my intentions perfectly.

Hell, he’d taught me that move just a few sessions prior. Yet something happened when the old man’s stick was halfway to my hand. Time seemed to slow, and despite the old master’s efficiency of movement and incredible speed with the weapon, for a moment I was faster. Instead of finishing my number three strike, I whipped my hand out of the way, bringing it around for a backhanded, vertical circular strike—the redondo, Tonyo called it.

The old man’s eyes widened slightly, even as his strike missed and mine whipped toward his own weapon hand. With a flick of his wrist, he rotated his hand so that my stick bounced off his own, deflecting my strike as he shuffled and angled out of my reach. I was so stunned at making him miss that I forgot to move. Tonyo’s stick spun around in an abaniko, or fan strike, hitting me twice in the span of a decisecond.

That he’d hit me on the nerve junction at the inside of the wrist did not escape my notice, and as my grip loosened, he grabbed the tip of my stick, snaking his inside and using it as a lever to disarm me. Now with two sticks in hand, he stepped around me casually, whipping the pair in circular motions that split the air with a buzzing whir, like I’d stepped into an angry bee hive made from rattan.

By sound alone, I counted all the strikes that just missed me as he flourished the rattan batons. Six, seven, no eight killing cuts. Rather than try to move out of the way, I stood stock still, knowing that budging even a half an inch would result in yet another agonizing lesson.

Tonyo ended up behind me, and then time sped up again. The whole thing had happened in under two seconds. Fake to cut, counter cut, counter-counter cut, parry, strike, disarm, destroy. A fucking thing of beauty.

“What just happened?” Cole asked. “I blinked, and suddenly the old man was holding both sticks.”

“What happened is you owe us both twenty bucks,” Gibbs said. “Pay up, sucker.”

I heard a stick clatter to the ground. That was Tonyo’s way of giving it back to me, because apparently you didn’t practice handing weapons to your opponent. I knelt to grab it, then I turned to face him, expecting an ass-chewing. Instead, he wore a broad grin, complete with that burning cigarette hanging from his lip and dropping ash all over the mats.

“Good,” he exclaimed with a gleam in his eye. “We go ay-gen!”

* * *

“And that, Smitty, is how I met your mother.”

“Yeah right, Gibbs.” Smitty grabbed the pitcher from the middle of the table and refilled any glass that had the audacity to be empty. “No amount of Viagra could make your limp, wrinkled old pecker do the deed.”

Gibbs, a former homicide detective with HPD, gave Smitty a serious look. “Don’t know how to break this to you, son, but I was only nineteen when your mom and I became, ahem, friends.”

“Shee-it, Gibbs.” Smitty placed his hand on the table next to Gibbs’, the younger agent’s black skin contrasting with the older man’s weathered white. “There ain’t a damn thing you can say that would convince me your pasty ass helped conceive this god-like body.”

When Gibbs laughed, he sent beer spraying from his mouth like a broken fire hydrant, plastering his arm with boozy spit.

“Mendoza,” Gibbs said, shaking his head and wiping his arm off. “Ain’t you got a superpower that can prove Smitty here is my bastard?”

I looked up, still nursing my second Corona like it was the last one on Earth. My head throbbed, my eyes begged to be shut, and in a cruel twist of fate, alcohol didn’t seem to help much. Another side-effect of the Doc’s experiment: I metabolized booze faster.

Glancing from Gibbs to Smitty, I made a half-hearted attempt at focusing my thoughts.

“You hear me, Deputy Dawg?” Gibbs asked when I didn’t answer right away. The nickname they’d all given me when I arrived more than six months ago still stuck around. I’d gotten used to it by now, and it beat “fucking new guy” by a mile.

“Of course I heard you,” I said, pulling on my Corona. I sighed. “I hear everything.”

It was a Tuesday night, but the bar we were in—a dive called Roadhouse U.S.A off I-10—was nearly packed. Locals, mostly, each of them bitching about some local problem.

“My boss is a piece of shit.” That was from a woman chatting with her husband at the corner of the bar, unbuttoned plaid barely covering some electronics store uniform.

“I think Marcy’s cheatin’ on me.” White guy, mid-fifties, cheap suit. Getting a pat on the shoulder from a friend who could very well have been the one Marcy was cheating with.

“You have any craft beer on tap?” Some San Antonio hipster and his buddies who thought they’d visit an “authentic dive outside the city.”

Worse than that were the odors. More than half a year since Perez had injected me with her mystery serum, something with the catchy name SNE-SH 167b, and I was still struggling to control my sense of smell. This place was a combination of stale beer, urine, unwashed ass, and sex hormones, and it smelled as bad as it sounds.

As for the rest of it, the enhanced hearing and vision came in waves I could normally control. No complaints there, except it’d be nice to have it settle in for good. Increased strength was fun to have, especially when I wanted to hit things—and I felt the urge a lot lately. As for healing, I hadn’t been injured since I took down Khalid. But if that experience was any indication, my healing factor was coming along just fine. Hell, the enhanced regeneration the serum provided had me back on my feet just a few short days after going nine rounds with a fire elemental.

But fuck, my nose was working overtime. All the previously mentioned smells, cheap perfume and aftershave, what Smitty had for lunch, the cigarette Gibbs had smoked outside—all of it combined to make my nostrils burn and my stomach churn. Even the fumes from the cars and trucks passing in the lot outside wafted in every now and then. It was tough to focus on anything in a place like the roadhouse.

It was the only place Smitty, Cole, and Gibbs would go for a drink, though. Far enough down the road from the country club and the rich assholes meeting up with their twenty-something mistresses while their wives fucked the pool boy. And not too close to the base and the bars where the CIA analysts, field operatives, and handlers we shared Stanley with would go.

There’s something really fucked up about sharing a bar with CIA spooks, knowing you have the weirder job.

“You know damn well I can’t prove that,” I said to Gibbs. By now, all CERBERUS members knew what the serum had done to me. “Just like you know damn well that you haven’t nutted any viable sperm since well before Smitty was born.”

A bellowing laugh escaped Smitty’s mouth at that, prompting Gibbs to simply mutter a soft “fuck you clowns” before taking another sip from his pint. I chuckled and rubbed my eyes in response.

“You doin’ okay, Mendoza?” Gibbs set down his pint. The former detective was more caring than he let on—and clearly, he was concerned that I’d lose control again. Both men at the table packed tranq guns, in addition to the large caliber sidearms they’d been issued. Out of respect, they pretended the change in kit was due to reports of a rogue ’thrope in the area—but we all knew better.

We might be friends, but neither of them would hesitate to fill me with elephant tranquilizer if I lost my shit again.

It was nice to have friends like that.

“Just stinks in here,” I replied. Smitty sniffed as if to confirm what I was saying. He was lucky all he could smell was the stale booze. “And Scooby duty’s taking a toll on my sanity.”

“Strickland still have you checking teenagers’ social media accounts?” Smitty’s smirk made his face very punchable.

Being put on Scooby duty was the CERBERUS equivalent of bottom bitch work: scrolling for hours a day through clout chasers on social media who posted fake supernatural footage. I’d watched thousands of videos without coming up with a single lead.

I nodded. “Been nothing but that, training, or tests with the Doc.”

“I wouldn’t mind if she’d run a few tests on me,” Smitty added.

“Hear, hear,” Gibbs said, raising his glass in response to Smitty’s comment before he took another swig of his beer.

I took a long pull of my own, draining the last of the warm Corona. Sure, she was hot, but Captain Perez reminded me too much of the women I’d grown up with in the Valley, the tías and abuelitas who helped raise me. The ones who’d knock you upside the head with a chancla when you stepped out of line.

Honestly, I couldn’t hear Perez’s voice without seeing my nana’s face. No way would that work, in any universe. Besides that, she knew her shit. And she was an officer, a good one. In the short time I’d known the Doc, I’d come to greatly respect her.

I flagged down the waitress for another round, then I fell silent as I tried to focus on dulling my senses. Perez was working on a way to temporarily lessen the effects of the serum, but no dice. Until something worked, she’d suggested “mindfulness and meditation” to dampen the smells and sounds I experienced, and to control my rage.

That was the biggest side-effect of SNE-SH 167b. I’d already been a prickly bastard before, but the serum made it so much worse. Now, my prey drive was through the roof, my temper had a hairpin trigger, and most days it took everything I had to resist smashing someone’s head through a wall just for breathing too loud. I was all fight and no flight—a bomb waiting to go off.

“Any word on what Ops bagged up north?” Gibbs’s voice cut through the noise.

I tried focusing on just him and Smitty, to use some of that mindfulness the Doc had suggested to drown out all the other sounds. After several false starts, it was finally starting to work. In the beginning? Not so much.

After my first session, I hadn’t had the heart to tell Perez that I’d gotten pissed and smashed my phone against the wall when I couldn’t focus. It was only when I found a brand-new phone sitting on my desk the next morning, with a Post It note that said, “Keep trying,” that I accepted she was on my side.

Yeah, Perez was alright.

“Nah, nothing,” Smitty answered. “Strickland has Cole going up to fetch a sample, but I haven’t heard a thing from him.”

“Heard it was some sort of sasquatch,” Gibbs said with a shrug.

“Your ex?” To his credit, Smitty didn’t so much as crack a grin. “Thought she was out in Florida now.”

The pair went back and forth like that, as they usually did whenever we were out drinking. It was either that or bitching about Strickland where we knew—or hoped—he didn’t have ears on us.

I wasn’t one for gossip, but blowing off steam about your CO wasn’t so much gossip as it was therapy. Once we left the bar, we’d be soldiers again. We were all disciplined enough to keep our trash talk confined to the bar. Besides, a few beers went a long way toward our collective mental health and unit esprit de corps.

The mindfulness shit soon took hold, thank goodness. Little by little, the smells and noises of the bar started fading away. I didn’t have my eyes closed or anything, because I didn’t want to be that guy, especially with Gibbs and Smitty sitting at the table. But after a few minutes of focusing on the back-and-forth going on across the table, the rest of the roadhouse went from death-metal-concert loud to almost what a bar should’ve sounded like.

Still smelled like a frat house soaked in diesel, but even that seemed a little more subdued. Then I caught a whiff of citrus and Vanilla Fields that heralded the approach of the waitress and my Corona, which came complete with a slightly brown lime wedge shoved halfway down the bottle’s neck. Despite my past complaints, the bartender at Roadhouse U.S.A. seemed incapable of sending out a bottle without the lime.

“Thank you, Mitzi. You’re a lifesaver,” I said as she set the bottle down.

When Mitzi smiled at me, crags and lines deepened across her face, revealing miles beyond her years. She was kind the way any forty-year-old woman who’d worked at the same restaurant her whole life was, and I liked her for it. “No problem, hon. Anything else for you boys while I’m here?”

“All good for now.” Gibbs pointedly returned her smile. Ever the pro, Mitzi nodded politely and turned to check on her other customers. As she exited scene left, Gibbs observed her departure.

“Gibbs got a thing for that young blood,” Smitty observed.

“She could be Mendoza’s mother,” Gibbs quipped, keeping his eyes on Mitzi’s retreating form.

“Yeah, but she’s young compared to your tired old ass.”

Gibbs picked his nose with his middle finger, keeping his gaze on the waitress all the while. Looking, not leering. I was moderately certain that he really had a thing for her, one he’d never act on. I got the impression the senior agent was a family man, at heart.

“What about you, Deputy?” Gibbs ripped my attention back to the conversation, flooding my senses with sounds and nauseating smells once again.

I hid the twitch in my eye by rubbing it with the bottle in my hand. “You don’t have to worry, Gibbs. I’m not out to get your girl.”

“Fuck you, Mendoza—you know what I’m talking about. Any insight on what Ops is up to? Anything show up on your Tweeter page?”

“It’s not Tweeter, it’s—” I sighed, disappointed that I’d become the kind of person who corrected someone about proper social media nomenclature. “Nevermind. No, nothing online about it.”

Smitty took a swig from his beer, then he tipped the neck in my direction. “Hey, Mendoza, you want us to order some food so you can post a pic of it?”

At least that got me to break a smile. “Already snagged a few when you guys weren’t looking. Comments are saying the food looked good, but the company looked like hammered shit.”

“As if, rookie—my shit is always tight.” Smitty pulled his phone out and started scrolling through his socials, checking to see whether I’d actually taken the time to create such an inane post.

In reality, the comms team at CERBERUS was responsible for running the shell account I logged into. They’d post something on the account every few days, giving the illusion there was a genuine angsty teenager behind the wheel. Even though I only monitored the account, the guys in the office teased me about it relentlessly because I’d let slip that my fake handle was “xxSpookyGurlxx.”

Thank God agents aren’t allowed to follow those accounts. I’d never hear the end of it.

CERBERUS personnel were forbidden from associating with any of the shell accounts to maintain some degree of separation. It didn’t mean Smitty couldn’t check in on me from time to time and tell me how great my posts were looking.

Before I could call him a dumbass, a loud voice from the bar cut through all the crowd’s noise.

“C’mon, sugar tits.” Male, mid-thirties, plaid shirt with sleeves cut off to show the biceps he probably dedicated each day to maintaining. “Just tell me when you get off work.”

A pack of his buddies surrounded Biceps, four equally muscled men who jeered him on or smirked at the comments. The entire group gave off the vibe of wannabe truck drivers who couldn’t bring themselves to stop suckling on daddy’s money teat. Clean-shaven, not a trace of dirt or oil on their shirts or hands, hair slicked back or to the side with product that was probably more expensive than our entire tab.

My eyes narrowed on the pack. Even from here, I could identify the pungent cologne that each of them lathered on like soap. A big, wolfish smile spread across my face.

Here I was thinking tonight was going to be another letdown.

“Sorry, fellas,” the girl behind the bar replied. Whoever had forced lime wedges on me was nowhere to be found. “Shift just started. Plus, I don’t think my boyfriend would approve.”

“Oh yeah?” Biceps downed his beer and slammed the bottle on the bar top. “You can tell that pussy to come say that to my face.”

The bartender ignored him, instead asking a couple if they wanted another drink. I was no stranger to chatting up pretty bartenders, but there was a line between flirting and harassment. And that line wasn’t all that fine. Biceps was just an asshole who thought he could get anything he wanted.

“Answer me, bitch.” Apparently being ignored made Biceps look small in front of his acolytes. “Is your boyfriend too much of a pussy to talk to me?”

Both Gibbs and Smitty looked at me, then each other, before starting to stand. Neither of them was the type to let some prick harass someone for no reason, least of all to boost his limp-dick ego. Gibbs probably felt compelled to intervene by his paternal instincts and cop’s sense of duty. Smitty, despite all his off-handed remarks, was a good soldier, the type who joined to make the world a better place.

Before either of them could get out of their seats, I shook my head.

“Relax, guys.” I stood slowly so as not to draw any attention to myself. “I’ll handle this.”

Captain Perez was doing all she could to help with my overloaded senses, which was great, but she had yet to find something to help with my rage. The meditation mostly made it worse. Medication didn’t help. Hell, I had a lifetime of experience keeping that simmering anger under the surface, where most people couldn’t see it, but even that wasn’t enough sometimes.

I still had flashbacks to Perez’s lab when she gave me the serum. There was so much fury, like a primal instinct to just lash out at the world, that I had almost killed her and Strickland.

While it hadn’t been nearly as bad since, bottling it up was like keeping the lid on a bottle of Coke used to play football. It was roiling around inside of me, ready to explode at anything that gave me the slightest cause.

And no stupid fucking app could help. Instead, letting the lid off and pointing my rage in a certain direction—say, at an asshole in a bar—was much more therapeutic.

Glancing around the bar, it was clear to me that no one else was going to intervene. No security guard present, which wasn’t surprising given it was a Tuesday. The other patrons awkwardly glanced over at Biceps, who was still running his mouth about how much stronger he was than the boyfriend he’d never met. But no one moved to stop him or his buddies.

The pack of assholes—or is it a gaggle? A herd?—didn’t even notice me approaching, all of them too caught up in egging their leader on. As I got closer, their scents became stronger. Underneath the expensive colognes were moisturizers, gels, fabric softener, and a lot of booze.

“Excuse me,” I said as softly as I could, sliding in between two of the rich kids as if I was trying to get to the bar. Right next to Biceps.

“Hey, back off, bro.” Biceps tried to shove me away and looked surprised when I didn’t budge.

When our eyes met, it was clear he understood what he was facing: a predator. A killer. Even through all the thoughts of manscaping and the hopeful dream of sleeping with a stranger on a Tuesday night, the realization of his dumb fuck mistake manifested in his expression.

Sorry, kid. Too late.

Before Biceps could squirm away or force out an apology—something he probably reserved for his dad whenever he needed cash—I slammed his head down against the bar. A loud crunch cut through the ambient drone of the joint, meaning I hadn’t been rough enough to crack the lacquered wooden bar top.

Just his nose.

Before any of his buddies could react, I turned and gave them a “back the fuck off” stare. Hell, I might have even snarled a bit.

Bicep’s friends, predictably, were all show and no substance. One of them tripped over a barstool as he backed away, landing ass-first on a floor coated in years of dried beer and liquor. I could hear the sticky surface peel away from his hands as he crab-walked away from me.

I grabbed the stunned Biceps by the scruff of his plaid collar and dragged him towards the front door. By now, all the other noise in the roadhouse had fallen away, save for the jukebox blasting Me and the Devil Blues by Robert Johnson. The muffled, scratchy song and its piercing twangs made me wonder if Satan had dragged Johnson into Hell the same way I was dragging this asshole to the parking lot.

“What the fuck, man?” His words were muffled from a hand on his face trying to stem the blood pouring from his nose.

None of his friends did anything as I dragged Biceps through a door painted with a vertical flag. They looked at each other, then at their leader for some sort of direction, too stunned or useless or both to operate independently.

A few other patrons followed us into the parking lot, including Gibbs and Smitty. They’d make sure no one interrupted. Or that I didn’t go too far.

When we got to the gravel lot, the fight—if that’s what you wanted to call it—was already over. I knew it, the crowd knew it, but apparently Biceps didn’t get the memo. Even with a broken nose, the guy was more worried about his injured pride.

I shoved him forward, giving him a good few steps between us so he could make the right decision. But Biceps wasn’t even fully upright again before he spun, stumbled forward, and swung wildly at me.

Even if he had been sober, his form was sloppy, and I stuffed his punch without much effort. As I blocked, I grabbed him in a headlock with my other arm, then I pivoted into a hip toss, following him down and landing on his ribs for good measure. Then, I tied him up in a scarf hold and waited for him to recover from getting the wind knocked out of him.

He struggled a bit more, but his heart wasn’t in it. Finally, Biceps yielded with a pathetic grunt.

“Listen, man, I’m sorry.” Tears and snot were starting to mix with the blood on his face, and his cheek was already swelling up. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

I transitioned to knee on belly, then I disengaged and stood. “Not me you need to be apologizing to.”

A crowd had gathered outside the roadhouse, some of them with their phones out, some of them laughing. I turned to hide my face from the cameras.

Last thing I need is Strickland up my ass about blowing off a little steam.

Part of me wanted to transition to an Americana hold and crank his shoulder right out of its socket. Another part of me—thankfully, a more dominant part of me—knew that the fun would come with consequences.

Before I could make up my mind, the roar of a gunshot echoed through the air. To everyone else, it was loud. To me, without the chance to brace for it, the sudden noise was deafening. I flinched, ears ringing in the aftermath of the shot, before realizing I hadn’t been hit. On instinct I dropped my hand to where my sidearm should have been, but I’d stopped carrying while I was drinking at Perez’s insistence.

“That’s enough, boys.” It was Mitzi, holding a Mossberg 12 gauge in her hands. Smoke still wafted from the barrel as she pumped it with practiced ease. “I think he’s learned his lesson.”

Sobs shook Biceps’ body. I looked at him, then at her, then over to Smitty and Gibbs. Smitty shrugged as if to say, Don’t you think she’s right?

“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a nod.

I didn’t bother looking at Biceps again, didn’t say a word. I just walked over to the truck we came in and waited for Gibbs to unlock it. The two other CERBERUS members berated me about “stealing all the fun” and “trying to show off my superpowers” as we left the parking lot.

The whole time, I barely registered the conversation. Instead, I focused on the breathing exercises the Doc had given me, breathing away the post-fight adrenaline in the hopes that I might get some sleep later. It was worth a shot.

CHAPTER THREE

The next morning, I moved through my normal routine when on rotation at CERBERUS HQ: running along the perimeter of Camp Stanley, grabbing coffee and breakfast at the mess hall—hardboiled eggs and oatmeal with as much personality as our director—before sitting down and trying to catfish some monsters as xxSpookyGurlxx.

The office itself was on Sub-level 1, the same as Strickland’s and one up from Dr. Perez’s lab. It featured plain white walls decorated with only a clock and a picture of Gibbs’s family—a portly woman with graying hair and a college-aged daughter who had her mom’s green eyes. The ex-homicide detective shared the room with me, though he at least had the pleasure of taking the occasional day trip to investigate a false claim of a supe or paperwork assigned by Strickland.

I, on the other hand, had been on Scooby duty for so long that even filing reports sounded like an exciting job. Subduing Rhys was the first field assignment Strickland had put me on since New Orleans, and it made me hungry for more.

It was Wednesday, which meant no training with Tonyo or tests with Perez. Just scraping through social media accounts and hoping—praying—to find some unfortunate soul online who’d caught a glimpse of a monster.

It wasn’t even lunch when I shoved myself away from the monitor and groaned. My neck let out a series of cracks when I tilted my head left and right, freed from the rigor mortis instilled by Scooby duty.

“Don’t we have some kind of bot to do this? Maybe a technomagic AI or something?”

“We do,” he said. The smell of cheap cigarettes wafted across the room on his breath. “But it can only catch the shit that’s hashtagged or whatever the hell you’re supposed to do. And it won’t pick up anything that isn’t clearly in frame.”

Standing, I took my standard government issue mug and filled it with shitty coffee from the pot that stood guard by our office door. I’d only been here a few months, but there was already a respectable ring of brown residue inside the cup. As I admired the fruits of my coffee drinking, dish soap avoiding labor, I offered the pot to Gibbs.

He shook his head before adding, “Plus, you’re just so damn good at it.”

But I wasn’t. Or I was just the unluckiest bastard in the world. Six months of spending hours each day in front of that screen, and I’d only found false leads. Things that just wasted time and taxpayer money, even if taxpayers didn’t know that’s what they were paying for. Even the half-gancanagh had been Comms’ lead, not something I’d picked up.

Sitting back down, coffee refilled, I clicked on the thumbnail for a YouTube video called Top Five Scariest Videos of the Week - Austin Edition.

Most of those videos went the same: abandoned building, shaky camera work, then a shadow or small object moving in the corner of the frame. If it had been forty years ago, maybe the videos would have caused some panic.

Inevitably, each one was either demonstrably fake, the result of a slight breeze, or so inconsequential they couldn’t even be a Class 1 SNE.

“Thank you for watching this week’s scariest videos from Austin,” the voice squeaked through my headphones at an inhuman frequency, courtesy of 2x watch speed. “Don’t forget to use the hashtag #ScariestVidsATX for a chance for your video to be featured. And stayyyyyyy spooky!”

Deep breaths, Mendoza. Deep breaths.

Even if all five of the “scariest videos of the week” were a waste of time, at least I could use the hashtag to look somewhere new. I pulled up virtually every social platform I could and searched for #ScariestVidsATX.

“Gotta find Smitty,” Gibbs said on his way to the door. I nodded.

Whatever the account was that reposted the videos wasn’t very large, and neither was its associated hashtag. Half the content I found was a collection of jokes making fun of the channel, and most of the other videos used the tag without knowing it was linked to a specific account. Still, there were a few dozen posts that were supposed eyewitness accounts of monsters in Austin.

A blurred shadow cutting in front of a street light at night.

A lightless alleyway with a moan coming from it.

A “satanic” ritual of kids passing a bong around.

Another bust. What a surprise.

Nighttime. Another alley—there was no shortage in Austin—this one lit by a green neon light that showed a woman carrying grocery bags. From the way she was hunched over, she must have been in her seventies or eighties.

“Hola,” a voice shouted down the alley from behind the camera. The voice had a Texas drawl to it, and the camera shook as the person filming jogged a little down the alley. “Excuse me.”

I paused the video and opened the account that had posted it in a new window.

I swear, if this asshole is about to steal this old woman’s groceries for views…

The account was named “Throw_Away2468” and lacked any bio or profile picture. There was only the one video posted to the account, the one I already had loaded. No caption for the video aside from #ScariestVidsATX, #DowntownAustin, #SpookyVideos, #Monsters. While none of that screamed credibility, it at least didn’t seem like a prank account.

I switched back to the video and let it play.

“Can I help you carry those?” the man behind the camera asked when he was only a few dozen feet away from the old woman.

So he’s trying to be a nice guy. Because God forbid you do something good without filming it for your friends to stroke your ego later.

“And rushing after an elderly woman down an alley is a sure way to get pepper sprayed,” I added out loud.

I’m not sure what I was waiting for, but there was so much movement in the next two seconds of footage that I struggled to comprehend it the first time around. It was only when the camera fell to the ground and filmed the man’s feet sprinting back down the alley that I realized something had gone FUBAR.

I hit the left arrow on my keyboard to rewind the video a few seconds.

“—carry those?”

The camera focused on the woman, who was turning to face the man jogging towards her. Then, from the top of the frame, a grayish brown smudge streaked into view, descending onto the woman before moving upwards again. As the phone fell, I could see the woman’s bags drop to the ground, but she had vanished.

“What the fuck?” I asked the empty room around me.

No matter how many times I replayed the video, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. There wasn’t any obvious editing to conceal someone off-camera pulling piano wire or fishline, or framing to hide the woman ducking out of sight. It all happened in under two seconds—within the span of a few frames, the elderly woman had vanished.

There were no options to slow the video down or manipulate it online. Instead, I scraped it with the software one of the Comms guys had installed for me, and I saved the account URL to see if it could be traced. Once I had the video downloaded, I played it again, frame by frame.

Either the guy had an older model phone or some of the quality got lost in the transfers, but the smudge that moved into frame was too pixelated to see clearly, at least in the first frame.

As I clicked through the stills, I watched the gray-brown smudge not just move into frame but fall onto the old woman. The video became a slideshow of the smudge moving towards her, then on top of her, inches at a time. As the mess of mottled color moved upwards again, I realized it was taking the woman with it. There were only a couple frames where she was being lifted off the ground, her bags falling from surprised hands.

Then, she was gone.

I kept going, analyzing each millisecond of the phone’s descent. You couldn’t see her—or a younger, nimbler person dressed as her—running out of shot. No botched editing jobs or weird lighting caused by someone who just learned how to splice videos and layers.

She was just gone.

I spent the next hour going through that video, backward and forward, frame by frame, looking for every minuscule detail I could find.

In one frame, when the blob landed on the woman, it almost looked like a claw was digging into her shoulder. And the way the smudge got wider right before it took off again…

Does it have wings?

Just the idea of some supe with claws and giant wings was enough to make the hair on my arms stand up.

Without wasting another moment, I printed stills from the video and left the office. I needed someone to tell me if I’d gone batshit crazy or if I’d finally found something.

* * *

“What the hell am I supposed to be looking at?” Gibbs shuffled through the printouts in rapid succession, barely taking the time to notice the difference between the images that were milliseconds apart.

Smitty stood on the opposite side of the unmarked CERBERUS SUV from Gibbs. He was going through his own handful of printouts, duplicates of what I’d given Gibbs.

“I don’t know, man,” Smitty muttered. “Yeah, there’s something there. But how do you know it wasn’t faked?”

I didn’t even realize I was pacing until I stopped. “I’ve watched thousands of these videos in the last month alone. I’ve seen crappy fakes and Oscar-worthy performances. Something about this feels different. It’s quick, not flashy. You can barely see it happening. That doesn’t get clicks, right? People want a show.”

Both men shuffled through the images again. Smitty sighed, unconvinced. He dropped the pile of images on the hood of the SUV and shrugged.

Gibbs, however, seemed a little more interested. He held up one of the pieces of paper, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to look closer or if his eyesight was failing him in his old age.

“Goin’ blind, old man?” I quipped.

“Keep flappin’ those lips, Deputy Dawg, and I’ll have you fill out a form 40-972 on these photos, each and every one. As your T.O., I can make you do that.”

“Cold.” Smitty whistled. “You’d be doing paperwork for a week.”

Gibbs kept looking at the photos, even as he spoke. “Now, do you want my opinion, or do you want to continue vying for the paper pusher of the year award?”

I raised an eyebrow at Gibbs. “Forget I said anything. And please, share your hard-earned wisdom with us, oh great and powerful training officer.”

Gibbs looked at me, then Smitty, then back at me. “You got yourself a mothman.”

“Jesus, not again,” Smitty lamented. “You and your damn mothman conspiracies.”

Looking at the images again, I tried to think of anything I knew about mothmen while Gibbs and Smitty engaged in a cutthroat back and forth. A movie from the early 2000s and urban legends of a humanoid with wings were the only things that came to mind. Those, and Mothra from old Godzilla movies. I’d always loved staying up late to watch those flicks with my papa.

“Let’s stay on point, eh?” I said, perhaps a little too loudly. “Smitty, respect your elders. Gibbs, what’s a mothman?”

Between shifts of Scooby duty, I’d taken it upon myself to dig deeper into the files CERBERUS had on supernatural threats. Ghouls, vampires, references to fae, even some monsters from Africa and Southeast Asia that had popped up on this side of the world.

I’d learned a thing or two about ghosts, including an entire file dedicated to Bloody Mary, our resident specter who hadn’t been a fan of mine since I’d filled her mouth with table salt.

But nothing in any of the files I read had mentioned a mothman, or at least nothing notable enough to warrant Gibbs’s enthusiastic response.

“Not real, is what it is,” Smitty bemoaned.

“Of course they’re real. Real as you and me, Deputy Dawg.” Gibbs pulled a crumpled box of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and knocked one out. He put the cigarette to his lips and lit it as he drew out the suspense.

“Today, Gibbs,” I said. Patience had never been my strong suit, and that character flaw had gotten worse lately.

The former detective looked me up and down, then asked, “You ever been to West Virginia?”

I shook my head.

“That’s where the first sightings were. Officially, at least. Big sucker, taller than you. Bulkier, too. Covered in gray fur, with huge wings and big, buggy red eyes.”

While Smitty moaned and made a snide comment, I inspected the images splayed out on the hood of the truck.

It’s definitely kind of gray. Maybe fur? And those things have to be wings.

The longer I stared at the pixelated image, the more I convinced myself I could see individual strands of hair, like some sort of flying silverback gorilla.

“First sightings go back to the sixties, so well before either of you two brats were a thought. Hell, they even blamed one of them for a bridge collapsing… and the forty-six casualties that went with it. Mind you, this was before social media and the Internet, so it only spread through the papers and local news.”

“And then the men in black showed up?” Smitty rolled his eyes.

“Son, we are the men in black. But yeah, they did. Or some group did. Doubt Strickland was around back then, but he might know more about it. Some suits showed up, just like we always do. The fact that we don’t have any information on mothmen means we didn’t manage to bag one.”

“Or that it doesn’t fuckin’ exist,” Smitty interjected.

Gibbs took a long pull on his cigarette. “They exist. Hell, they started popping up everywhere after that. Can’t blame CERBERUS for not getting too involved, though. If one of them could take down a bridge, what do you think they could do to a person?”

Smitty was clearly unconvinced, but there were plenty of things I thought weren’t real before combing through CERBERUS files and fighting a half-ifrit psychopath. Gibbs was a believer, but the old man had a tendency to get carried away with his tangents.

Sighing, I gathered the printouts into a pile. “Guess I’m going to see the man in charge.”

Gibbs nodded. “Best bet. But be careful. I know you got some super soldier shit going on, but these things are dangerous. Class 3, at least. You want my opinion? Let it run its course and move on. They usually only hang around for a few days before the sightings stop. Don’t know if they hibernate or migrate or find another one of their kind and procreate. Regardless, they don’t stay in town long.”

“Which means we need to act quickly,” I said.

Looking at the retired detective, I couldn’t blame him for his aversion to any sort of real supernatural threat. What was he supposed to do against a lycanthrope or a ghoul? No offense meant to him, but Gibbs was well past his prime—physically, at least. His detective skills and intuition were likely valuable to CERBERUS, and Lord knew what he saw that got him roped into the operation in the first place.

But I wasn’t like Gibbs. I couldn’t just let shit go. Especially considering how therapeutic chasing a giant, flying monster could be.

“You aren’t seriously thinking it’s a mothman, right?” Smitty asked as I tucked the papers back into a manilla folder.

“It’s that or back to Scooby duty,” I said.

Smitty just shook his head, swore, and left with a “whatever” as his goodbye.

Leaving the garage, I descended to Sub-level 1, the floor that housed offices, debriefing rooms, and a series of blast doors that would drop without a second’s warning. The hallway was empty, devoid of both life and unlife—though I didn’t know where Mary spent her time.

Strickland’s door was less nondescript than the hallway it stood in. It was a metal security door, maroon-colored unlike the plain white walls of the hallway. “Director Strickland” was engraved into a plastic placard that was glued to the door. I knocked twice and waited for an answer.

A minute of silence passed, but I’d learned months ago that it took a moment for Strickland to pull his nose out of a report.

“Enter,” a voice finally commanded.

I opened the door and walked towards the director’s desk, standing in a loose parade rest. Despite the stupid sunglasses Strickland wore at all times—at night, inside, probably even while fucking his wife—he was still my superior. I had even stopped calling him Agent Wonder after the late, great Stevie. Out loud, at least.

Another moment passed. We had been through this dance before. If I showed any sign of impatience or tried to get his attention, he’d raise a finger and make me wait. And I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Yes, Mendoza?” he finally said, shaded eyes still looking down at an open folder on his desk.

He had no computer on his desk. No phone, even. Just stacks of neatly organized paperwork and folders. I couldn’t tell if he was a traditionalist or too paranoid about others listening in on him. Given what we did, the latter wasn’t too unlikely.

“Sir, I think I might have found something online. From Austin.”

That got his attention. The director looked up at me, his starched suit and perfectly creased collared shirt barely shifting with the movement. Behind his sunglasses, I saw one of his eyebrows rise.

“This better not be another gnome.” Strickland sighed and held out his hand for my folder.

A few months ago, I had brought a similar folder to his desk, convinced that I had found a gnome or some other forest creature in a video. Turned out I’d been the victim of second-rate editing, a garden decoration, and “an overeagerness to return to the field,” according to the director.

And, as I later learned when the others heckled me for two solid weeks, gnomes didn’t even exist. At least, not the tame, cherub-cheeked kind. No, the grainy surveillance photos they showed me had looked nothing like that.

“No, sir.”

He flipped through the images, taking a few seconds on each one to study the individual frames. Once he had gone through them all, he set the pile back down and aligned the edges into a neat stack.

“What am I supposed to be looking at, Mendoza?”

Resisting the urge to be sarcastic, I answered, “I’m not sure, sir. It was a video that showed an elderly woman being taken away by—er, something.”

Strickland didn’t try to hide the disbelief in his voice. “Something?”

“The video hadn’t gone viral and was from an account with no followers or other content. It wasn’t there for the views. More like a way to ask for help.”

“So, you’re a mind reader now?” His tone was serious, though I knew he chose the question to be insulting. “Is that a new side effect of SNE-SH 167b? Does Captain Perez know about this?”

I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction. “No, sir. I—”

“An empath, then? Could you feel the cry for help through the screen?”

“No, sir. I can’t read minds, and I’m not an empath.”

What the fuck did I do to end up in a place where a guy wearing sunglasses underground is my commanding officer?

But Strickland was in charge of this whole outfit, which meant he had to answer for every mission, every piece of collateral damage, and every dollar Uncle Sam gave us.

“So, you can’t read the mind of the person who posted this, nor can you feel what they were feeling. And you think a blurry image from a video posted by a burner account is worth spending resources on? Did you at least look into missing persons reports? Jane Does? Anything that could tell us this woman was actually taken by an SNE?”

Fuck.

That all made sense and was something I should have done. But I hadn’t. I was too excited to get out of that office and track down a monster like Khalid or Rhys again.

“No, not yet.”

Somehow, Strickland’s silence was worse than any verbal admonishing he could have thrown my way. Still, I stood there, straight-backed, eyes forward.

“Tell Gibbs to head to Austin and look into it.”

“Gibbs?” I hesitated. Strickland looked up at me, impatience burning holes through his tinted lenses. “Gibbs thinks it’s a mothman, sir. He wants to steer clear of it.”

It was like the comment caused Strickland’s operating system—because I was half-convinced he was a robot in a meat suit—to cease functioning. Then, he massaged his temples with his fingertips and took a deep breath.

“Even if mothmen were real, you don’t get paid to take on the assignments you want.” He emphasized the last word with vitriol. “The American people don’t pay you to protect them when it’s convenient.”

But they pay me to roleplay as a goth e-girl online?

“Either Agent Gibbs investigates it, or it gets dropped. As for you, go see Perez. Clearly something’s wrong with your cognitive processing if you can’t even do basic due diligence.”

He handed the folder back to me while turning his attention back to his files. I had to will my hand to unclench itself before I could reach forward and take the printouts.

“Yes, sir.”

I didn’t mind that the door slammed behind me on my way out.

* * *

Navigating the maze of Sub-level 2 was second nature to me. I was there three times a week, running physical, psychological, or bloodwork tests with Captain Lorena Perez. To anyone else, the grid of hallways and vacant lab rooms would look like the gateway to The Backrooms. But to me, they were starting to look like home.

To access the area, you had to go through a biometric scan just to enter the elevator down to that level. Then there was the steel blast door that required a simultaneous eye and handprint scan, all while you were being tracked by an automated pair of Vulcan rotary cannons. Pointing at your back, mind you—they were meant to keep things in, not out.

Just another day at the office.

Unlike Strickland’s office, I didn’t knock or announce myself when entering the Doc’s lab. Captain Perez was all business, a serious woman who was just as beautiful as she was focused on her work. A little too focused, sometimes. I’d once stood out in the hall for half an hour after knocking, waiting for an invitation to enter.

Truth be told, I’d used it as an excuse to get away from Scooby duty, pretending that I thought she’d been out to lunch. I sat there playing Candy Crush on my phone, giving it some time before I knocked again. Thirty minutes later, she poked her head out the door to invite me in. No shit, she waited thirty minutes after I knocked to tell me to come into her lab.

Yeah, I liked her, but she was fucking-ay weird as shit.

As I entered, the buzzes and beeps her lab equipment made were as familiar to me as the drone of the underground building’s constantly-running HVAC system. Yet no matter how many times I came here, I’d never forget the first time I’d been in the Doc’s lab. On that day, I’d nearly killed her and Strickland after they injected me with a gene therapy serum derived from werewolf DNA and other unknown shit.

Good times.

When I entered, Perez was examining a vial of clear, bright blue liquid. She gently placed the vial in a centrifuge and turned the machine on, sending it whirring to life. She annotated something on a tablet nearby, ignoring my presence even though she knew I was there.

“Excuse me, Captain,” I said, standing at attention. “Strickland sent me down here for, um, psychological evaluation.”

“Pinche Strickland,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air as she spun around on her lab stool. “Doesn’t he know I don’t have time for this? Tell me, what did you do this time?”

When I explained the whole video and mothman situation in Austin, she shook her head.

“I think I’m going stir-crazy, Doc. Maybe I’m just making things up.”

“No, your cognitive functions are higher than average. If anything, you’re processing too much information from the things you’re watching. Combined with your training, you might even be noticing extraneous details others wouldn’t.”

“Great, so I’m bored as shit—sorry, bored as hell, Ma’am—and I’m more acutely aware of how monotonous my existence is?”

“Exactly.”

The centrifuge slowed down and stopped its droning. Perez extracted the vial once more and examined it, its contents now a dull green.

“Damn.” Turning to me, she locked her brown eyes on mine. “Listen, Mendoza, this day of all days I don’t have the time or patience to tolerate Strickland’s power trip. If he wants an evaluation, I’ll give him one.”

“Oh-kay, meaning…?”

“I heard about your little show at the bar last night.”

“Yeah, about that…”

She raised her hand to shut me up. “You didn’t kill the guy or even put him into a coma. By all accounts, you were collected. More or less in control. Maybe it’s time to see how you do in a low-stress public setting.”

“Not sure I’m following, Doc.”

“What I’m saying, Mendoza, is I’m sending you to Austin to test your ability to control yourself among the general populace.”

It took a second for the unspoken words to click. I smiled. “Thanks, Captain.”

“For doing my job? If anything, you’re impeding my research right now. So, get out of my lab.”

I turned to leave, but Perez called after me again.

“Oh, and Mendoza? Still no firearms in night clubs and bars. Strickland will cut my funding if you accidentally shoot some mouthy drunk.”

“Ma’am, I’ve never accidentally shot anything.”

“That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence, Agent. Now, shoo. I have work to do.”

CHAPTER FOUR

While the job perks at CERBERUS weren’t anything to brag about, the off-duty vehicles provided to us were so far down the list, light couldn’t reach that deep. So, when I rolled into Austin nearly two hours after getting my orders from Perez, I was feeling a lot like a divorced mom in the black 2012 Chevy 200.

“Inconspicuous” is what Gibbs had called it when he tossed me the keys. I hadn’t told him about Strickland’s orders to pass the mothman case off to him.

Better that way.

But I didn’t feel very inconspicuous cruising into downtown ATX. The city had changed a lot in the last decade: a blue metropolis in a red state, glass towers reaching up to the sky, electric cars driven by tech millionaires and investors. I didn’t mind that, unlike a place like San Antonio, the city was whiter than not. What I did mind were the pricks in collared shirts with watches pricier than most houses in Texas, acting like they owned the air you breathed. Not that said douchebags were common. But I could easily pick them out as I toured around downtown.

Even then, I couldn’t deny the atmosphere the place had. Modern, vibrant, and living. Food trucks around the corners from convenience stores. Buskers and street performers showing off their skills. Even a young pickpocket, barely in her teens, relieving the aforementioned douchebags of the also aforementioned watches.

Not my problem. Not unless she shape-shifts into a giant gray creature that eats old ladies.

I drove around until I found a place with reasonably priced parking and forked over a ten to the attendant in the booth. CERBERUS didn’t issue corporate cards, and I doubted Strickland would’ve approved this expense even if they did.

Finding the alley in the video wasn’t going to be easy. The video was tagged with #DowntownAustin, so I figured it gave me a place to start, at least. Without much more than that, I just set off towards the food trucks I’d seen earlier.

Never track a monster hungry. Strickland should have put me in charge of CERBERUS orientation.

I barely made it a dozen steps from my car before the sea of noise that was downtown Austin threatened to rupture my eardrums and knock me on my ass. The city was loud, everyone knew that. But I could hear every voice within fifty yards of me, every jackhammer that tore up asphalt to make way for a new sidewalk or stack of apartments. Every blaring horn—and there was a metric fuck ton of people honking.

Only then did I realize how long it had been since I’d been downtown anywhere. Wave after wave of noise crashed down on me, and I had to steady myself against a beige sedan just to stop my knees from buckling.

“Just focus, Tony,” I forced through gritted teeth. “Drown it out. Take control.”

With Perez’s advice about finding my center and removing each noise one by one, I had things back under control in a matter of moments. Maybe there was some merit in all the new-age crap kids loved posting online.

My nose, on the other hand, wasn’t so cooperative. But unlike the painful cacophony that assaulted my ears, the bouquet of downtown Austin—from its restaurants and bakeries to its sewage lines and dumpsters—was exciting. Like I said: the city was alive.

Even with the flood of scents, I was able to pick out individual trails like some bipedal bloodhound. It was as if each of the smells told a story. One in particular, a food truck that wasn’t afraid to actually spice its food, was calling my name.

Picking my way through the bustling sidewalks, I was thankful it was nearing the end of most white-collar lunch breaks. It meant fewer bodies to move through and, more importantly, fewer clouds of cologne to fill my keyed-up nostrils.

The food truck that was tempting me was close to half a mile away, the smell becoming stronger with every step I took. Despite the lunch rush being over, there was still a decent line between me and my food. With a growl, my stomach told me how much it disliked the idea of waiting.

I took the time to get my bearings, though. There wasn’t much to go on from the video: an alley, a dumpster, some garbage, and debris you’d find behind almost any building. While the line trudged along, I pulled up the video again on my phone to look for any additional clues. Nothing.

Is it fake? Can anywhere be that unremarkable?

No matter how many times I watched the video, slowed it down, or zoomed in on details, the only thing that stood out was the green neon that flooded the entrance to the alleyway. I could spend all afternoon wandering around and not find a damn thing.

It wasn’t like I could turn to the person behind me in line and ask him if he recognized the spot where an old woman was abducted by a mothman. The last thing I needed was to give Strickland another reason to ream me out when he found out about my little field trip, even if it was sanctioned by the Doc.

“What’ll it be?” The guy inside the food truck broke my train of thought. Young kid, strong jaw, maybe in his early twenties. His skin tone made me think he had some Latino in him, at least.

The line had moved quicker than I had realized. I scanned the menu on the side of the truck. As I did, I was acutely aware of the groan from the man behind me—and even more aware of how few fucks I gave.

The menu included duck confit tacos and “Mexican-style crêpes,” whatever that meant.

Maybe not as authentic as it smells. That’s some ATX gentrification for you.

Then, I smiled. All the rich, modern amenities had given me an idea.

“Two orders of the tacos al pastor, por favor. And do you know where I could take out some cash?”

With a nod, the kid took my card and rang my order through, then pointed over at a bank on the other side of the street. I thanked him, waited for my order, then I went across the street to pull a twenty out of an ATM. Downing the first order of tacos to appease my rumbling stomach—I had to admit, they were pretty damn tasty—I held on to the other and started scoping out my surroundings for construction sites or parks.

Downtown Austin had become too neat, too tidy. Looking around, all I could see were well-dressed business types, nice cars, bougie restaurants, and overpriced condos. And the space between all those buildings? Empty.

Not too long ago, you would have seen tents and makeshift cardboard shelters in those alleys. But visual reminders of the homeless were too much for the upper-class sensibilities of downtown Austin, so they’d made it illegal to sleep or camp in public places. Not a problem if voters can’t see it, right?

But there were few people who knew the veins and arteries of a city like those who lived on its streets.

Anywhere that provided shade and some form of shelter—the trees in a park, stalled developments—was a potential home, even for a night. There was no shortage of construction going on in Austin, but most of them had crews on-site, which meant anyone sleeping there would be kicked out. Numerous parks surrounded downtown, but the city wasn’t particularly known for its abundance of old trees.

I wandered a few blocks northeast, eventually coming to what looked like the beginning of a new apartment building. Five floors had been constructed, but who knew how tall it was going to be when it was finished. Best of all, the lot was empty. Metal behemoths slept on the edge of the dirt lot, but no other vehicles were around.

A temporary fence, lined with a green tarp, surrounded the perimeter of the site. It was easy enough to slip between the gates, courtesy of whoever had left too much slack on the chain that was supposed to lock it.

White plastic sheets blocked some of the otherwise exposed interior of the empty building. They’d provide some protection from dust and sand being kicked up by the warm Texas wind.

In a tactical sense, the half-built complex was a great place to camp out. It could provide shade during the hottest parts of the day and shelter in case of a storm. The cops might swing by now and then, but probably not unless they were called in. Anyone who kept their head low could find shelter there until the crew arrived to continue work.

Inside the structure, behind some of the plastic sheets, would have given someone the best chance at staying safe and undetected. So, I headed straight for the exposed interior. As I got closer, I heard shuffling from beyond the plastic, followed by soft muttering.

Before pushing through the plastic, I called out a simple “hello” to keep whoever was there from being surprised. Behind the tarps was a man, a tattered sleeping bag, a backpack leaned against the wall, and some empty fast-food containers on the floor.

“I-I-I don’t want no t-t-trouble.” The voice was quiet, shaky. The words almost came out like a whimper.

Their speaker was a short, hunched black man dressed in faded, oversized jeans and a tank top that had once been white but was now a palette of yellows, browns, reds, and other stains. His caramel skin was weathered and creased, with liver spots clustered in patches across his face and hands. Track marks climbed up and down his exposed arms, and his gaze kept darting to me then to either side of his vision.

I held a hand up to calm him down. “Calmate, güey.”

“You ain’t la chota?”

Not anymore. Not unless you’ve got a tail or fangs.

“Nope, no cops. Just wanted some help.”

He eyed me suspiciously before his gaze flicked away again. He scratched at his temple with dirty fingernails.

“Name’s Tony.” I held out my other hand to offer the tacos to him. “You hungry?”

The suspicious gaze returned, this time focused on the food. An internal debate played across his eyes as he tried to decide whether the offer was genuine or some sort of trap.

Eventually, hunger won the fight. The man took the tacos and quickly shuffled back against the wall farthest from me. Every movement sent another wave of noxious odors at my nose.

“They call me Topo,” he said. “T-thank you. Whatcha n-n-need help with?”

Moving slowly, I pulled my phone out from my pocket. Before I showed it to Topo, I made sure to pause the video on the widest angle of the alley, right near the beginning. Green light washed over the two walls bordering the lane, and the elderly woman was still struggling down the path with her groceries.

“I’m playing a game with a friend, and she challenged me to find this spot downtown. Was wondering if you might know where it is, Topo.”

I offered him the phone, which he took with a hand now coated in red al pastor spices. He set the food down on an overturned bucket at his feet and held the phone so close to his face I questioned whether he could see anything at all.

Topo chuckled. “Yeah, I r-r-recognize i-it. See that marking there?”

He turned the phone to me and pointed at one of the alley walls. Between the pixels and the debris, I couldn’t see a thing. Still, I nodded.

“Just a few b-blocks south of the c-c-county jail. The g-g-green is from a sign. Owner’s nice, lets us use the b-b-b-bathroom if we don’t shoot up.” Topo made a few other noises, something like a stuttering snort, before taking a deep breath and handing back my phone. He crouched down and started eating the tacos again.

“Thanks, Topo.” He nodded. I pulled the twenty out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Same deal, though: no shooting up with it, bueno?”

Topo nodded once more before stuffing the bill into the pocket of his disheveled jeans.

One step closer to bagging this mothman.

* * *

Sure enough, Topo was right. I only had to walk for fifteen or so minutes down San Antonio, south of Travis County Jail, before I found the alley. I held up my phone so the paused video fit almost perfectly in line with the buildings on either side. A match.

On my left was the source of that green: a bright sign that read “Fifth Corner Convenience” above a glass door. The convenience store was just one unit in a much larger building that climbed ten or so stories tall, but its neon-fueled sign wrapped around the corner, catching as much traffic as it could.

To the left, an equally towering structure flanked the alley with a wall of grayish blue paint that yielded to a classic red brick facade that faced the street. A few lights dotted the alleyway, but they’d been overpowered by the bright green in the video.

The litter from the video—a few boxes of recycling and what I discovered to be extra sandbags and signs for the construction going on around the corner—still speckled the tight laneway.

All of that was secondary to the rancid odors spilling from the alley, though.

Iron so strong I could almost taste it. Rotting flesh, like a corpse left out in the sun. Skunk spray potent enough the actual animal might as well have squirted up my nose. Also, something musty, old, and dead, like the cemeteries of New Orleans.

And was that… flowers? I couldn’t quite tell, as the scents were all confused here. Maybe if I followed the trail further it would start to make sense. Not that I wanted to, of course, as the odors were making my stomach churn and my nose twitch.

Doing my best not to breathe more than I needed to, I made my way back to the street and into Fifth Corner. The Middle Eastern man behind the counter greeted me, but I just nodded to him. Talking meant breathing.

I grabbed a bottle of water and a pack of gum, paid for them both, then went back outside and gargled a mouthful of water before spitting it out in the alley. I made short work of the rest of the bottle, then popped two pieces of gum into my mouth. The sharp spearmint was a welcome reprieve from not only my vomit, but the combination of smells that caused it in the first place.

Why didn’t I think of this before? I looked at the gum before pocketing it. Actually, why didn’t Perez and her PhDs think of this before?

“Tony? Tony Mendoza?” The question came from just outside my peripherals, but the female voice had a thick, native Mexicana accent.

When I turned to the speaker, I saw a portly Mexicana woman with thick glasses and swept white hair framing a round face. Even in the heat of the afternoon, she was wearing a knit sweater and a heavy skirt. She gripped a cane in one hand, a large paper bag in the other. The woman’s eyes were kind, curious, and strikingly familiar.

It took me a moment to remember the woman in front of me. “Isabelle?”

“Tony, mijito, it is you! Look at how big you are now.” Before I could properly greet her, Isabelle took her cane and smacked me on the arm just hard enough to sting, then used it to point at where I’d spit out the water. “I know your abuelita taught you better than that.”

I chuckled at her tone. “Perdóname, tía. I had a bad taste in my mouth.”

Isabelle shook her head, but her eyes crinkled in a smile. “It’s alright, mijito. Tell you what? I’ll cook you something to get rid of that bad taste.”

Even with its former contents on the ground barely a few feet away, my stomach rumbled at the thought of Isabelle’s cooking. The woman had helped raise me, was basically family, but it had been more than a decade since I’d last had a meal with her.

“I could never say no to that. Are you living in the city now?”

She shook her head, her white hair barely shuffling. “Just visiting my granddaughter, Carmen. You remember her, yes?”

I nodded. Few of the boys from where I grew up would ever forget Carmen.

“She lives here, working for some big-shot company now. But she never stops to take care of herself!” I could relate. Isabelle looked at me from head to toe. “You must join us for dinner tonight, Tony. She’s single, you know. Her last boyfriend was… how do you say it? A moron?”

That sounded just like Carmen. I didn’t have the heart to tell Isabelle I had something going on with a bartender back in the Big Easy. I still wasn’t entirely sure what that something was, but I was enjoying it so far.

“Unfortunately, I have a date with my job tonight, tía. Do you have a phone? I can give you my number and come by later this week.”

If Strickland ever lets me leave the base again.

Isabelle nodded and held out her paper bag for me to hold. She dug through her purse for her phone. “You kids are always working so hard.”

“And who do you think we learned it from?” After I entered my info into a new contact on her phone, I handed it and her groceries back. “Call me, alright? I need to get going, but I’m going to take you up on that offer.”

She nodded, kissed my cheek, and said goodbye as she shuffled down the road. I watched her go, only for a moment, then took in a deep, calming breath.

Amidst all the djinn, fae, and mothmen, I almost forgot what normal felt like. And, eating most of my meals at Camp Stanley or Roadhouse U.S.A., I almost forgot what a home-cooked meal tasted like.

Maybe, for once, fate hadn’t just thrown bullshit in my face. I smiled at the thought of having a normal dinner with normal people.

I just needed to kill a monster first.

CHAPTER FIVE

Reluctantly, I swallowed the gum that was shielding my nose and let the vile scent from within the alley fill my nostrils again.

“Fuck.” I tried spitting the odor out of my mouth but could still taste it almost as much as I could smell it. Still, I walked deeper into the alley, picking the smells apart and seeing if there was any other evidence left from the abduction.

The farther down the lane I went, the stronger the smells became. They hung like a miasma that I almost had to swim through. It was like walking through the world’s nastiest strip club, only without the tits and overpriced drinks.

Then, something strange happened. Part of the scent—the skunk and iron—disappeared, leaving the flowers and graveyard smell behind.

No, it hasn’t just pulled a Houdini. I backed up a few steps and sniffed around again to confirm my hunch. It flew away.

The revelation made sense with what I’d seen on the video. But the old woman who’d been taken didn’t strike me as the type to smell like lilacs and graveyard dirt.

Not yet, anyway.

Either her scent was long gone, overpowered by these other ones, or humans didn’t have a strong enough smell for me to pick up this long after she’d been abducted. That left the New Orleans corpse and flower vendor smell.

A few more steps down the alley and that scent changed direction, too. It hadn’t gone straight up like the mothman but hopped up onto a dumpster that sat underneath a fire escape.

Maybe it’s following the mothman, too?

As I got closer to the dumpster, the scent trail became more distinct. It was female, based on the faint lilac perfume I detected, mingled with graveyard dirt and blood. A vamp, maybe? Perhaps an accomplice?

I climbed up onto the dumpster to follow whoever—or whatever—had come before me and quickly realized your average athlete wouldn’t have the vertical to make it up to the fire escape ladder.

In an unfair move to all the track stars out there, I didn’t just have CrossFit to back me up. Looking both ways down the alley to make sure I wasn’t being watched, I loaded my legs like two meaty springs and leaped a good three feet into the air. My arm reached just far enough for my hand to wrap around the bottom rung of the fire escape ladder, and I hung there like an urban orangutan.

With a groan, the ladder shifted downward just an inch, jamming again in a bone-rattling thunk. I tried shifting my weight a little before clamping my other hand on the ladder, ensuring it wasn’t going to give out on me. Despite my best efforts, it seemed to be well and truly jammed.

I wouldn’t want to be one of the poor saps in this building if there was a fire.

As I scaled the ladder onto the metal scaffolding and followed the stairs to the roof, I realized I wasn’t so much following the scent as I was moving parallel to it. It was more like the death scent scaled the side of the wall, and I couldn’t tell if the scuffs in the brick beside the scaffolding were claw marks confirming my paranoia or something else.

I had to use the drain spout to get from the topmost platform to the roof, but I finally rejoined the corpse smell on top of the building. The afternoon sun beat down on me, pulling moisture out of my pores and onto my skin. Whatever had left the smell walked the perimeter of the roof before ending up on edge opposite the one we’d come up.

Then, it plummeted down to the street.

“Fucking monsters,” I muttered.

Even if there hadn’t been a decent crowd of people on the sidewalk below me, I didn’t think Perez’s serum buffed me up enough to stop me from turning into a red, slushy puddle if I started stepping off roofs.

Backtracking, I went down to the alley again and around the building, picking up the trail wherever the second creature had landed. The scent went east, down Cesar Chavez. I followed it for an hour, tracking it out of downtown, along the Colorado River.

What I couldn’t figure out was if the two vamps were working together.

Do different SNEs cooperate?

Pausing to collect my thoughts, I recalled the SNEs I’d encountered before. The giant in Kandahar lived alone, though that might have had more to do with the desert it lived in more than anything else. Khalid had controlled a fire elemental, but that was more like subjugation considering how happy the flame creature was to melt Khalid’s face the second it had a chance.

I knew SNEs like vampires operated in hierarchical covens—CERBERUS had some information on that, at least. But nothing I’d read alluded to monsters working together.

Which was probably in mankind’s best interest.

No, this is a beast being hunted.

Whatever was after the mothman was skilled enough to track it, even while its quarry was airborne. And now, I was tracking the hunter.

Some might have thought that was a bad idea, but no one ever accused me of thinking ahead too much.

I crossed the Colorado under 183 and ended up on a nameless gravel path that jutted out from Old Bastrop like a cracked finger. The road, if it had ever once been that, extended into the wetlands that encroached on southeast Austin, the land acting as a sponge from the river that snaked through it. Overhead, a plane roared as it descended into Austin-Bergstrom.

Smells of animals and stagnant water bled into the scent I was following. But it was clear the monster-hunting SNE had been down this path. The farther I went, the more the trees and tall weeds on either side seemed to close in on me, cutting me off from the urban sprawl just a mile back.

By the time I reached the end of the laneway, the sun had already started its descent to the other side of the world. Long shadows swept over me, hiding whatever predators—natural or supernatural—might have been lurking. If it hadn’t been outlined by the glow of the setting sun, I might have missed the decrepit, crumbling house at the end of the dirt path.

From what I could see, the house had probably been nice back in the day. But fuck if I knew when that day was. Wooden siding had been warped or stripped away. Kids had tagged almost every inch of the front of the house with indecipherable letters and dicks of various sizes. None of the windows on the first floor were still intact, though one of them on the second floor still had a piece of glass in one corner.

Most importantly, the New Orleans corpse had entered the house. As I got closer, I recognized the second monster’s scent again. It was faint, but the combined odor of iron and skunk was unmistakable.

With the safety of public streets and the light of the sun gone, I approached the house with the same mindset I would have in any OE. Sure, all my firearms were back at Stanley, but that was a minor setback.

Between me and the house was a pile of junk the locals had created after years of not wanting to pay the city dump. A toilet bowl, rotted mattress, torn open bags of household waste, and more crap lined the side of the path. I stopped and grabbed a jagged wrought iron rod the length of my forearm. It was much heavier than the rattan sticks I used with Tonyo, but not completely unwieldy. Swinging it around once or twice, I decided it would do in a pinch.

Was chasing two monsters into an isolated house with nothing but scrap metal stupid? Maybe. But it might’ve been the only chance I had before Strickland ordered me to drop the case for good.

He’ll probably revoke my field trip privileges, too. I needed proof.

A quick sweep around the old house didn’t reveal much; even with the windows shattered, it was too dark to see much inside. What I could see showed signs of teenage bush parties that had left broken bottles, soggy cigarettes, and mostly used joints. I didn’t peer too closely at a discarded, off-brand condom wrapper.

If fucking in an abandoned house and kicking up black mold gets you off, who am I to judge?

More interesting to me were the smells. Anything that could have been attributed to the contents of the house—old booze, weed, and tobacco, mostly—was muted from time. But the two scents were much stronger. I caught whiffs of the hunter all over the place. They’d probably done the same thing as me.

The mothman’s scent came in from one side of the house above me and trailed away from another, though. It seemed older than the hunter, more faded. And it hadn’t hung around for as long.

Before I’d completed a full circle of the building, something shifted inside. Not the way a house on the verge of collapsing shifts from the wind or the sunken foundation, but the scuff of a shoe. The crunch of glass under a heel. The noise was barely perceptible, but it was enough to give me two choices.

Option one: tactical retreat. I had enough information to at least get Strickland to consider the case, even if he shipped it off to ops.

Option two: rush the perp. Surprise was still my ally, even if I didn’t know what the SNE was. A head would be more than enough proof for the director.

The thought of someone else taking over the case, especially when I was this close, was a new form of heresy. Whether that was me or the serum talking—if there was even a difference anymore—wasn’t clear. But getting sidelined wasn’t an option.

Gripping the iron rod tight, I shouldered through the front door of the house, sending splinters flying from the rotted frame. Inside, I took a quick survey of the interior. Rooms to my left and right. Stairs ahead of me that had collapsed a long time ago. A hallway beside the stairs to the back of the house.

I knew the hunter could climb, so the stairs being out were more a problem for me than it. But its scent was strong all around me, much stronger than it had been outside.

Is it waiting for the mothman to return?

Waiting around wasn’t an option for me, not if I wanted to capitalize on my surprise. The smells seemed stronger to my left, so I pressed myself against the wall that separated the entrance and the room on that side of the house. A quick scan inside revealed nothing, but the sun was completely gone now and, with it, any light that illuminated the interior of the building. Even with my new eyesight, I couldn’t make out any real details in the room.

Still not wasting any time, I switched on my phone’s flashlight. I held it in my left hand, iron rod in my right. I panned the light across the room, sweeping for threats. A few discarded lawn chairs, a minefield of crushed cans and broken bottles, but no supernatural entity.

A door on the far wall led to the back of the house, but I turned back towards where I’d entered from. If the hunter escaped or, worse, attacked me from behind, this was all for nothing.

Then I caught that odor, stronger now—lilacs and grave dirt. Shit.

As I turned, the ancient, animal part of my brain barely registered the glint of eyes above me in the corner of the room where wall met ceiling—the shine of a predator’s gaze reflecting my phone’s light.

I hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, as my mind tried to accept that instinctual warning. It was long enough for the predator to spring into action and knock me to the floor. My grip held onto my makeshift weapon, but I wasn’t as fortunate with my phone. It went spinning across the floor, slowed to a stop only by the litter in the room. Luckily for me, the flashlight pointed upward and flooded the room with white light.

A few things became clear to me as I scrambled back to my feet. First, the monster in front of me looked human: a woman, nearly six feet tall. She had heterochromatic eyes, one blue and the other hazel, framed by blonde hair that fell down to fairly broad shoulders. Her body tapered to a small waist and hips—a frame built like an Olympic runner, though she stood in a fencing stance.

That made sense with the second thing I noticed: the saber she held between us. Its curved blade threatened me like a steel fang.

Who the fuck uses swords anymore? Psychopaths, that’s who.

Lastly, and this was more a feeling than an observation, I was completely outmatched. The hair on my arms and neck were standing up like tiny spikes to warn me that whoever this woman was, humans weren’t meant to survive her.

“Not my usual type,” I said, slowly shifting my feet to inch closer to the front door. “But there’s something undeniably attractive about a beautiful, sword-wielding killer.”

The woman shook her head and rolled her eyes. “And there is something undeniably repugnant about a human who speaks to me this way.”

When she spoke, it was with a thick Russian accent. All her “w” sounds were “v” sounds, “th” came out more like “dzh,” and “is” became “ees” due to her use of the long “e” sound.

“Call me crazy, but the combination of the accent and the sword is really working for me,” I said as I batted away the tip of her blade to pass her by. “If I had the time, I’d ask for your number.”

Faster than any person should have been able to move, she repositioned herself between me and freedom. The tip of her sword hovered barely a foot from my chest.

“What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” she asked.

“Just hunting a monster,” I said. “Maybe two.”

That got a chuckle from her, a sudden burst of the most condescending laughter I’d ever heard in my life.

“You should be begging for your life,” she said. “But I commend this display of bravado.”

She was right, of course. Anyone who carried around a sword probably knew how to use it, and whatever the hell she was gave her an advantage over me, even with my super soldier shit going on. But she was cocky, which meant she underestimated me.

The thing about being cornered by a predator is that it makes you desperate. Give me a little desperation and a knife—or, in this case, a jagged piece of metal—and I will show you the definition of violence of action.

I exploded into movement, driving my body and weapon forward before the woman could react. Or so I thought.

From the slightest shift in my footing, the track star in front of me was already moving, predicting my moves before I even thought of them.

She sidestepped my rush and slapped my ass with the flat of her blade, using her body and weapon to shepherd me away from the front of the house. Her chuckle hurt more than the spanking.

When I turned and rushed her again, roaring as I brought the iron rod to bear, she simply swatted my weapon down with her own before scoring a shallow cut on my shoulder. The cut was close enough to my throat to let me know she could have ended my life then and there.

A grin from the woman revealed fangs that didn’t belong in a human mouth. Vampire.

The rational, disciplined side of my mind that had been molded through years in the military was screaming for me to get out of there. But the instincts fueled by Perez’s serum wanted this fight more than anything. The disciplined voice pointed out that jagged metal wouldn’t be enough to take down a vamp. The animalistic voice told me this was what CERBERUS had spent six months training me for, and it was time to prove I was worth the investment.

“Stand down.” The vampire sighed, bored, but she didn’t drop the tip of her blade. “You are not my prey, human.”

“You mean the mothman? Don’t worry, I’ll get him when I’m done with you.”

“I’m sorry, the what?” That condescending laughter exploded from her lips again. “You have no idea how out of your depth you are, do you?”

If she was goading me, it worked. At least I had the sense not to overwhelm her with speed—she clearly had me beat in that regard. Instead, I stepped forward and slashed at her with the piece of iron, the same angle one strike I tried to fake Tonyo out with. She took a single step back, not even bothering to use her weapon to block my attack, then advanced and bashed me on the bridge of my nose with the pommel of her sword.

Something made a crunching noise on my face, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t her weapon. Blood streamed from my broken nose, and I half-expected her to go crazy over the sight of it.

Hell, she cut me already. Shouldn’t she be tearing my throat out?

But the woman in front of me was all poise. For some reason, her ability to remain calm while serving me my own ass on a silver platter made me even angrier.

So, I did the illogical thing and swung at her again. This time, the vampire parried my attack and thrust her saber into my shoulder, driving me back against the wall of the ruined house as she advanced.

An explosion of pain erupted between my shoulder and collarbone as the blade slipped through my flesh and pinned me to the wall. A guttural noise rose from my gut, but the strength drained from my body. I was helpless.

The woman stood in front of me, hand still firmly holding her sword. “Is painful, da?” she asked.

I grunted.

“Good. Because that was pathetic, even by human standards.” She sniffed and reached a finger out to collect some of the blood—so much blood—pouring from my shoulder. From the edge of my fading vision, I could see her place the drop of gore on her tongue like a college kid taking ecstasy. Her face scrunched up. “But you are not completely human, eh? Well, is good to know you will recover soon.”

As more blood wept from my wound, the angry, animalistic side of me relaxed. A clang told me the iron rod had slipped from my fingers.

“You gonna kill me?”

“Luther would be upset if I did, da?” The vampire reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet.

Who the fuck is Luther?

“No, I won’t kill you, Agent Anthony Mendoza. But let this be a warning: stay out of coven business. Keep out of my way, and I will not have to embarrass you again. I will even turn off your flashlight so your phone might still have some juice when you wake up. Call it… gesture of good will, eh?”

“Wake up?” I asked. Sure, I was losing a decent bit of blood, but not enough to make me pass out. I looked up at the vampire.

Just in time to catch her fist in the side of my face.

CHAPTER SIX

“We gonna to talk about it?” A dumb grin was plastered across Smitty’s face.

“I’d really rather we didn’t.”

“I really think we should,” he pressed.

“And I think you should shut the fuck up and focus on the road.”

To say I’d woken up cranky was an understatement. At least the vampire had the courtesy to lay me down on a moldy, stained with God-only-knows-what couch after she’d knocked me out. The blood from where she’d stabbed me added to the couch canvas, though I doubted it was the first time blood had seeped into the fabric.

It was the rumbling of a plane overhead that had shaken me awake. When my eyes opened, the sun was already filtering through cracks in the house walls. Blood suctioned my shirt to my chest, but my wound was already shining with scarred flesh. I was lucky it had been such a precise stab.

My nose, on the other hand, had felt strange since I’d woken up. Sure, the serum made it heal quickly, but not at the proper angle, which meant I’d need to get Perez to re-break it and set it properly later.

True to her word, the vampire had turned off my flashlight. She’d even put the phone on battery saver. It had lasted long enough for me to wander back towards 183, where I got some service and called Gibbs. He and Smitty had found me outside a small coffee shop that served “craft” espresso—which was admittedly delicious.

Gibbs lectured me as we drove back to my car, which had a ticket on it and was probably close to getting towed. The ex-detective drove the outdated Chevy back to base, while I had to tolerate Smitty’s sarcastic remarks the entire drive back.

“You know this is a safe space, right, Mendoza?” he asked.

“Fuck off.”

“At least tell me that’s not your blood and the other assholes look way worse.”

When I didn’t answer, he let out a quiet “huh” before turning on the radio.

An hour later, we were back in the garage. Strickland was out for the morning, though no one really knew where, so I dodged a bullet… for now. But before I could get over to the elevator, Gibbs cut me off.

“I’m not in the mood for more patronizing, Gibbs,” I said.

“Then you should’ve listened to me and left the fucking mothman alone.”

The older man just mentioning the word brought back memories of the vampire laughing in my face.

“Gibbs, with all due respect, there’s no such thing as a mothman. So, take your conspiracy theories—which have to be all sorts of fucking insane to not fly in this place—and shove them up your ass. Some of us are here to actually do something about the weird shit out here, alright?”

Before Gibbs’s face could get any more cherry red, I hopped into the elevator and went down to Sub-level 1.

Did I feel bad for lashing out at the old man? Yeah. But my shoulder still hurt like hell, I was pissed about getting my ass handed to me by that sword-wielding supermodel, and neither Gibbs nor Smitty knew when to let something drop.

I checked my phone for the hundredth time, but it had died on the trip back from Austin.

Of course.

When I got to my bunk, the clock told me it was just after oh-eight-thirty. Which meant it wasn’t too early for me to grab the cheap bottle of tequila I kept in my locker. I brought it with me as I headed to the latrine to wash the blood and grime off my body.

* * *

Gibbs and Smitty had the sense to avoid me for the next few hours, though I figured I’d have to find the old man sooner over later and apologize. Before I could do that, though, me and my bottle of el Jimador had a date with CEBERUS files.

A couple hours passed under the unyielding hum of the fluorescent lights, but this was much more important than the normal Scooby duty I slaved away on in the same room. I read through everything I could find on vampires on the CERBERUS servers—all those I had access to, at least. Despite how numerous and powerful the bloodsuckers were, there wasn’t all that much I could access.

It didn’t help that the documents I could see were two inches shy of useless. Almost all of the information was redacted. More of the documents were blacked out than not, and anything that was digital was simply a scan of more redacted files.

From what I could tell, vampires were less like Hollywood movies than I thought. The words virus and host were visible, which made me think something turned humans into vampires.

So, they’re not like djinn. They were human at one point.

But the virus turned them into undead predators, like the one I encountered in the abandoned building. Those who successfully bonded with the virus gained superhuman strength, speed, vision, awareness… honestly, a lot like me, but more.

And they were dangerous. From what I could tell, some of them possessed powers or abilities. The kind of shit that bordered on magic.

Magic’s a whole other ball game. And I was in the minor leagues against magic users.

Even after my run-in with Khalid, who wielded magic himself, and the months since, I still didn’t understand magic. Maybe Strickland did, and Perez was always looking for ways to merge it with science, but there was more magic than I could wrap my brain around.

And there were other vampire things, too. Like nosferatu, which were like vampires but not as human. And the real vampires apparently didn’t like them.

Honestly, I’d seen redacted files before in my life, but nothing like those. The whole thing stank more of politics than security, as classified information usually did.

There was a vampire group—a coven, according to the bloodsucker who’d impaled me—that operated out of Austin. She mentioned someone named Luther, though he didn’t pop up in the files. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was involved with this coven somehow, but that didn’t explain where the woman stood in all of it. And why was she hunting the mothman, or whatever the hell it was?

By the time I’d gone through all the folders and files and their mostly blacked-out text, half my tequila was already gone.

But I was feeling invigorated and confident. So, rather than doing the smart thing and dropping the case, I put the files away, took another pull from the bottle, and marched down to Strickland’s office.

By the time I got to the maroon door, my confidence was at an all-time high, thanks to what I’d seen and a little help from el Jimador.

Every part of me wanted to pound on the door and demand Strickland to listen to me and all the evidence that I collected, but I thought better of it just before my fist came down. Instead, I rapped lightly, waited the obligatory moment or two, then entered.

But Strickland wasn’t there. The office was empty. The fact that it wasn’t locked was strange, since Strickland seemed like the most paranoid man a human being could be.

Then, a voice from behind caught me unawares. “Mendoza, what are you doing here?”

I turned. There was the director. Sure enough, wearing his sunglasses and Smoking Man suit.

“Looking for you, sir. Got a little worried that the door was unlocked.”

“I have nothing to hide.” We both knew that wasn’t true. “I’m just returning from Forensics, taking a look at the SNE Cole brought back. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have some work to catch up on.”

“Sir, I don’t think this can wait.”

He looked me up and down, probably deciding whether to reprimand me for speaking out of turn. CERBERUS was, after all, a branch of the military, even if no one knew we existed. There was a chain of command to be respected. But people were dying, and I needed a win.

“Okay, make it quick. But if I hear the word ‘mothman,’ this conversation is over.”

I nodded and sat down, Strickland taking a seat across the desk from me in his chair. He folded his hands on top of his desk, and looked at me with something that resembled patience.

“Let me get this out of the way: I don’t think it’s a moth—that, anymore. Not even sure those things exist.”

Strickland nodded at that. “That’s a start. And?”

“I went to Austin yesterday, sir.”

“You what? I told you to drop this, Mendoza.”

“I know, I know. But Captain Perez wanted to see my progress in a social setting, so she ordered me to go.” Strickland shook his head, and I hoped I hadn’t thrown the Doc under the bus too much. But I was too excited—and a bit too buzzed—to dance around my words. “And when I was there, I picked up a trail.”

It was tough for me to describe my abilities and enhanced senses to other people who didn’t quite understand them. Especially when I spoke about my sense of smell, I didn’t like to be thought of as some sort of mutt. Strickland was different, though. He didn’t look at me as a war dog so much as a piece of CERBERUS property.

“What kind of trail?”

“Scents, sir. A pair of scents that I ended up following outside of Austin.”

“Of course you did, Mendoza. And did you find anything?”

“Yes, sir. An abandoned house where one of the creatures seems to have been roosting. The other one followed it there. Hunted it, I believe.”

“And did you get a look at either of them?”

“The first one, no. I believe it’s the thing that took the woman in the video. It flew to the abandoned house, then left again by air long before I got there. At least, that’s what the smell seemed like. And the other, sir… I believe she was a vampire.”

Strickland took a deep breath and looked down at his fingers, then back up at me. “A vampire?”

“Yes, sir. I read up on the files once I got back. I know they exist.”

“Of course they fucking exist, Mendoza. Not only do they exist, but they’re one of the biggest threats we face, short of some god-like supernatural entity we haven’t encountered yet.”

“God-like entities, sir?” I already had too much on my plate. I wasn’t too proud to admit that dealing with deities could have sent me to a psych eval.

“Not the point. The point is, we don’t mess with vampires in Austin. We don’t mess with vampires, period. If there’s a rogue vamp, the covens take care of their own. They like to keep out of the spotlight, so to speak.”

“More like keep out of the sunlight.”

“This isn’t the place for jokes, Mendoza.”

I nodded. It was time to digest information. “So, we know vampires exist. We know they’re a threat, but do nothing.”

“Don’t and can’t. Until SNE-SH 167b was successful on you, we didn’t have anyone that could go toe to toe with a vampire.”

I didn’t say it out loud, but considering how the encounter had gone with the female vampire, we still didn’t seem to have a soldier that could do that. Not yet, anyway.

“That all makes sense, but it seems more political than that. I saw how redacted the files were.”

Despite the sunglasses, it was easy to read the frustration on Strickland’s face—and in his voice when he spoke next. “That’s public service for you. The vampires operate with more or less governmental indifference in Austin, and wherever covens have been established throughout the United States. Not only are they too powerful for us to take care of, but they’ve inserted themselves into the economy, local politics, crime networks, and more. To take action against them would mean impacting human lives. More than that, though, it is the physical threat they pose that we just aren’t equipped to deal with. Why do you think I have you training with Tonyo?”

“And we haven’t found a cure for vampirism?”

“One of the things Captain Perez is working on. But, so far, it’s only made things worse.” He paused for a second. “Mendoza, I want you to listen to me. Don’t mess with the vamps. Leave them to their own devices. If this thing you’re hunting is a rogue vampire, a ghoul, or a nosferatu, they’ll take care of it. It’s not our problem.”

“And if it isn’t one of those, sir?”

“Then a vampire wouldn’t have been hunting it in the first place.”

“Got it,” I said. But a question still loomed in my mind. “How will we know either way?”

Strickland didn’t answer right away, as if he wasn’t expecting me to follow up with any more questions. And I felt green asking, but it needed to be said. He’d recruited me to make a difference, right? I was there to hunt monsters.

And of the two monsters I’d encountered so far, I’d only gotten to kill one of them.

“Listen, Mendoza. I want the same thing as you. If it were up to me, we’d be out there bringing the fight to them. The only good monster is a dead monster, as far as I’m concerned.” I wondered what he considered me, then. “But we have to be smart about this. The last thing I need is another dead agent. So, drop it. That’s an order. If I hear you asking questions about vampires again, Scooby duty will look like a fucking vacation.”

I nodded again, if only to appease Strickland and his dick swinging. But in my head, I decided I couldn’t just let this one go. Something was off; I could feel it. Besides, I owed a certain Russian vampire a little payback.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Unsurprisingly, Gibbs was in the garage, having another smoke. He saw me come up from the elevator, made eye contact, then pointedly looked away.

Grown man acting like an angsty kid. Got it.

I didn’t have time to apologize for lashing out at him, not then. It wasn’t his fault the monster wasn’t a mothman. Sure, his obsession with the things bordered on conspiratorial, especially considering the agency of monster hunters didn’t think it existed. And Strickland seemed likely to believe any potential threat could be real, so that was saying something.

But stopping to apologize or even say hello to Gibbs meant another moment the director had to figure out I was defying a direct order. I’d already wasted enough time getting my CERBERUS-issued sidearm and my personal .45 Derringer. The Glock 20 sat on my right hip, while I tucked the Derringer into my waistband. I didn’t think Strickland knew I kept the .45 on-site, but it had saved my life more than once, so I wasn’t letting it go anytime soon.

Nothing I’d read told me how to kill a vamp, and I didn’t have time to log back into my computer to check. Odds are, Strickland had the files locked down the moment I stepped out of his office—though without a laptop, I don’t know how. He struck me as the type who had contingencies for contingencies, though.

But I had some basics: a crucifix around my neck that hung on a silver chain. That covered two ideas. Wooden stakes weren’t something I kept on hand, and the idea of carrying a wreath of garlic just seemed stupid.

I figured a mag of 10mm rounds would be enough to slow the lady vamp, and I could stuff the crucifix, silver chain and all, into a bullet hole if I got the chance.

As for the other thing… well, I didn’t have any ideas for that. First step was to find out what the hell it was.

Stepping into the same outdated Chevy I’d used the day before, I turned to look at Gibbs one more time before I started the ignition. He stared back at me with a mix of suspicion and concern.

The man might have dreamed about mothmen, but he wasn’t stupid. His detective mind would figure out what I was up to, or at least realize I was about to do something stupid. Which, honestly, was par for the course for me.

When he didn’t look away, I raised a single finger to my lips in a silent plea for him to keep his mouth shut.

Uno momento, hermano. I turned the keys and put the car into gear. That’s all I need.

Gibbs had a good poker face, I had to give him that. He didn’t nod or so much as look towards the elevator, but something about the way he watched me drive away gave me hope he understood why I was heading off to face an unknown supe.

Besides, Gibbs wasn’t a runner. I’d be off base before he could hustle his portly frame down to Strickland’s office.

I was in Austin again nearly two hours later. The sun was already creeping towards the horizon, which meant I was running out of time to get the information I wanted before the normal citizens of the city packed it in for the night. And then, my hunt would begin.

First stop: the coroner’s office. If the flying supe had been hunting people, bodies were bound to turn up. I wasn’t basing my ideas solely off Hollywood and B-rate TV shows, but it made sense to follow up with the victims. That’s what I would have done if I was hunting a perp and not a flying man-eater.

Plus, I didn’t even need to fake my credentials. Very few people questioned authority, especially one as big as DHS. Sure, they probably got freaked out or hated the department’s guts, but it opened doors. I checked for the third time since I’d left the base that my credentials were in my pocket, then got off the 290 at Springdale and pulled into the last of the dozen or parking spots outside the medical examiner’s building.

Admittedly, I hadn’t been to a lot of morgues in my life. Really only ever thought I’d visit one after taking a bullet to the head or drinking myself to death. The county seemed to have dropped a pretty penny on this building, though. Tall, blue-tinted windows lined the front underneath a massive overhang that protected a few benches from any threat of rain.

I wasn’t expecting the place to be so busy, but it worked to my advantage. Two clusters of people, families from the looks of them, huddled in circles that filled most of the lobby.

“Pardon me,” I said as I squeezed through the two groups.

When I came out the other side, a kind-looking receptionist glanced up from behind her desk. She was old enough to have a few gray hairs streaking through her usual black, but young enough to try to hide them with cheap dye. Her wide glasses made her eyes look almost comically large, but they sat well on her pale, round face. The nametag on her floral print dress told me her name was Michelle.

“Hello.” Her smile was as good as anyone could muster this close to the end of a shift with that many people still filling the lobby.

“Hello, Michelle.” I paired her name with a smile of my own, one I’d perfected for middle-aged women just like her from my time as a deputy marshal. I slid my DHS credentials over to her as discreetly as possible. “I don’t want to make a scene for the families behind me, if that’s alright? Just looking for a body that probably came in yesterday. Might’ve looked like an animal attack.”

The receptionist read through every detail of my identification, and I only then realized how much faith I was putting in Strickland and the outfit he ran. He told me from day one that I had DHS cover, but was that official? Or did they just print cards that looked legit to someone who’d never seen one before?

Luckily for me, I passed Michelle’s scrutiny.

“Oh dear.” Her worried expression was genuine. She looked over at the groups behind me, then she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Must be something really dangerous to get you guys involved. What is it, an escaped zoo animal?”

While Michelle laughed at her own joke, I simply smiled bigger. You’d be surprised.

“Hopefully none of that, ma’am. Just happened to be in the area and figured I could cross something off the list. Better safe than sorry is what my mamá taught me.”

“Seems she taught you right.” She punched a few things into her computer and nodded. “Tell ya what, head down the hall here and take the elevator down to the morgue. I’ll have Dr. Houser meet you down there. He’s a good kid.”

“Excellent. Thank you for your help, Michelle.” I winked before I headed to the elevator. “Hope I don’t see you too soon, if you know what I mean.”

That got a laugh out of the receptionist, one she quickly silenced after getting some angry glares from the families in the lobby.

* * *

Dr. Houser wasn’t who I was expecting. He was Korean-American, and he was young. So young that I struggled to believe he’d graduated med school already.

Maybe he’s some kind of child prodigy? Fast-tracked himself through school?

The young doctor greeted me outside the morgue doors, which were just across the hall from where I came out of the elevator. I flipped open my DHS identification, but it was clear Dr. Houser hadn’t seen anything like it before.

“Uh…” He looked at the badge as if it were written in an alien language. “Cool. Yeah, that checks out. Nice to meet you, Agent Mendoza.”

I shook his offered hand. “You too, Dr. Houser.”

Apparently I said something funny, because the coroner laughed and looked down at the wrinkled lab coat he was wearing underneath a butcher’s apron. The apron was covered in dark blood and a yellow liquid that reminded me of fruit that goes so bad it sticks to whatever it’s sitting on. In a display of pure awkwardness, he ran his hands down the coat around the apron, as if pressing the creases out.

“Yeah, sorry about that.” He kept his eyes from mine. “Shelley’s nice and all, but I’ve asked her many, many times to stop calling me doctor. It just confuses people.”

Consider me confused. “You aren’t the ME?”

“No, sir.” He chuckled. “It’s an inside joke around here. Last name Houser, first name ‘Doogie’? You know, like that old TV show.”

“Ah,” I said as it finally clicked.

“My name’s actually Ross though, and I’m just an assistant. I only finished my undergrad last year, and I’m working here until I get accepted to med school. My step-dad knows Dr. Stanton, the actual medical examiner, so he got me an internship last summer. They made a position for me, since most people are too queasy for this line of work, you know? Mostly just cleaning up and filing reports.”

I nodded. Yeah, I can relate.

That, and the gut-wrenching smell of death that hung in the basement was enough to turn anyone off.

“Dr. Stanton’s out for the day. He left me with some paperwork to finish up, but I should be able to call him up for any of your questions.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem, Mr. Houser.” The kid beamed when he heard the formal address. He even stood up a little straighter. “I’m just here to investigate an animal attack, to rule out cartel involvement. I promise not to take too much of your time.”

Ross’s eyes lit up at hearing that last bit. I didn’t even need to feed him any other bullshit, because he already knew exactly what I wanted to see. And the fact that it made him go from postured and proud to anxious and twitchy confirmed I was on the right path.

“Yeah—an animal attack. Follow me.”

Pushing through the double doors, the kid revealed the full unholy glory of the morgue. I was never one for TV crime dramas, but those I’d seen always painted a much more romantic picture than what I saw in front of me.

Sure, there was a table in the middle with some lights and a small stand on wheels for holding surgical instruments. But that’s where the crime drama similarities ended and the slaughterhouse began. The concrete floor became more discolored the closer it got to the steel table and the drain underneath it. A pile of discarded body bags sat in one corner, waiting to be scrubbed clean of their former occupants’ entrails and juices.

Death and rot weren’t the only smells in the room, either. Formaldehyde gave the air an unmistakable scent that, unfortunately, wasn’t strong enough to mask the shit we all let go of when we die. Tack on infection, puss, and a car air freshener that was struggling to stay relevant by the doorway we stood in, and the entire room begged for my lunch to come back up and add to the bouquet.

Ross led me over to the walk-in freezer, which was opposite another door I assumed led to an office. The airtight seal peeled away as the freezer door opened, allowing Ross to step in, grab one of the many gurneys with a full body bag on it, and wheel it out into the light of the autopsy room.

“Head’s up, it’s not pretty.” He held the zipper at the top of the body bag and looked to me to make sure I was ready.

“Trust me, I’ve seen worse.”

Ross sighed and unzipped the bag. “It’s more what you don’t see.”

Underneath the black plastic was a woman with gray hair and a mountain range of wrinkles across her pale face. Deep gouges cut through part of her cheek, a trio of precise wounds that looked more like they’d been caused by steel than claws. Teeth that were much more jagged than what cut her face had torn away part of her neck. Her chest was riddled with the same claw marks as her face, exposing the white of her ribcage in a few spots.

Despite the violence, the coroner—or his assistant across from me—had done a good job of cleaning the wounds and removing the bloodstains from her skin. But there was one thing they couldn’t fix.

The woman’s lower half was missing.

Not so bloody or torn up that her legs were barely recognizable. No, her entire lower half had been torn away. Literally torn by the way her skin and flesh were frayed and sagged like soggy paper.

Worst of all, the iron skunk smell from the day before was all over her. The scent was so powerful I had to turn away and stop myself from gagging. It was way more potent than it had been at the house or in the alley, like mutilating the woman had aroused the supe.

When I turned back around, Ross tried to hide his “I told you so” look. I’d seen people lose limbs before, even get cut in half like this woman had. I thought back to the aftermath of IED blasts, seeing the odd .50 cal round hitting flesh, and the sick shit insurgents posted online—but somehow, this was worse.

I couldn’t say I was itching to see another half-person, but it was the beast’s scent that made me want to add some puke to the fluids dripping down the drain in the middle of the room. Before I turned back to the body, I pulled the package of gum from my pocket and popped a piece in my mouth. The synthetic mint smell was a welcomed relief.

“Tell me, Mr. Houser,” I said, turning and trying not to breathe too much, “what kind of wild animals do we have around here that could do this to a woman?”

The assistant coroner shrugged. “In city limits? Not sure. We sent off some hairs for testing. But I’ve grown up here my whole life, agent, and the most dangerous wildlife I’ve ever seen were some coyotes that wandered into town. “

Even Ross didn’t sound like he believed coyotes could tear a woman in half.

“Must’ve been damn big coyotes,” I muttered.

“And a damn big pack, too.”

I looked up at Ross and raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, agent.” He looked back down at the Jane Doe as if eye contact with half a corpse was easier than with me. “Just not the first person to end up like this in the last week or so.”

After a few seconds of silence, I realized Ross wasn’t going volunteer more information. “How many others have there been?”

He looked around nervously. For the first time, I wondered if the room was bugged. “Four.”

“Four other bodies? All like this? You know, missing half of themselves.”

The assistant coroner nodded.

“How the fuck has that stayed out of the news?”

Again, Ross looked around to make sure no one was listening. I almost reassured him the corpses in the room didn’t have ears. Confident we were the only living things in the room, he leaned over the Jane Doe, undisturbed by the half corpse or the skunk smell attached to it.

“Listen, I don’t want to get no one in trouble here, okay? But with you being DHS and all, I figured this is important. Dr. Stanton is a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s been real quick on labeling the bodies as animal attacks. Hell, I basically had to fight to even send the hair off for testing.”

“Any reason he’d be trying to hide something?”

Ross shrugged. “I didn’t think so. But then I saw a Russian lady this morning, real early. Normally I’m here before anyone, but today her and Stanton were already down here when I rolled in. She handed him a coffee, they chatted, he showed her the body, then she left. When I asked him about it, he just told me to ignore it and focus on work.”

Of course she’s involved.

“The Russian woman, was she tall? Maybe six feet, blonde hair, built like a runner?”

“How’d you know?” Ross failed to hide his surprise. “I didn’t want to be, you know, racist or anything. Not like she’s a Russian spy or something, right?”

That would be easier, actually. Still, I forced a chuckle for Ross’s sake.

“Just an old friend of mine,” I said. “Same line of work. Say, is there a garbage can around here? Can’t chew the same piece of gum for too long, you know?”

He pointed towards the closed door I’d pegged as an office. Blinds blocked a large window next to the door that would have let anyone working in the office see out—or let the dead see in.

With a nod, I walked towards the door. “Bag her back up, if you don’t mind, and grab me one of your business cards if you have one.”

I didn’t look back to see if he was listening. Through the door, the coroner’s office looked about as drab as I was expecting. A few degrees on the wall, a wooden desk with a computer in the middle of the room, a bookshelf crammed with medical texts, and a large filing cabinet made up most of the decor. Next to the desk was a mesh wire trash bin.

Sure enough, a coffee cup was sitting on top of a small mountain of crumpled pieces of paper. I picked it up, sniffed it—which made me feel really fucking stupid—and immediately recognized the New Orleans graveyard smell from the lady vamp.

The coffee cup was branded with an all-caps LA CRÈME. I’d never heard of the place before, but it was a lead, at least. Before Ross could get suspicious, I dropped the cup and swallowed my gum. It gave me some small measure of pride to know that I’d been smart enough not to leave a physical trail behind, unlike the Russian supe.

Outside the office, Ross was awkwardly standing next to the doors that led back to the elevator. He handed me a business card.

“Ross Houser, Morgue Technician,” I read the card aloud. “Thank you for your help today, Mr. Houser. I’ll give you a call if I have any further questions.”

He nodded. “And the thing about Dr. Stanton?”

“Just between you and me.”

Either Stanton was a vampire or he was on the take. Either way, I knew where I was headed next.

* * *

At least it wasn’t tough to find the café. Technology can be a real pain in the ass with all the hot takes, dancing, and stupid shit people post in an attempt to get famous, but it makes tracking down a vampire coffee shop really easy when you have a name. A quick search not only gave me the address for La Crème, but it pulled up a bunch of social posts and news articles with a familiar name: Luther.

Of all the people I thought Luther might have been, café owner wasn’t one of them. I made a mental note to look more into the entrepreneur and presumed vamp after I was done with the case.

I had to admit, though, I was expecting more than the café I found. Maybe some heavily tinted windows, heavy metal playing, and a much darker BDSM vibe.

Vampires are into leather and bondage, right? Is that stereotyping?

But parked across the road from the café, everything looked… normal. Hipsters leaving with coffee cups as wide as their forearms, beanies on despite the early evening heat. Maybe they were students pulling all-nighters in need of a caffeine hit. Or they were getting drinks filled with syrup and plant milk that took five minutes just to order right.

I sat there for over an hour, long enough for the surrounding buildings to cover the street in shadows. Every moment that passed where I wasn’t doing something drove the serum-driven dominant side of me closer to boiling over. I had satiated it by tracking the vampire and the not-mothman. Even visiting the morgue seemed to keep it calm.

Anything that took me one step closer to proving myself kept it at bay. But sitting here, doing nothing, made me twitchy.

Instead of giving in and kicking down the coffee shop’s door, I turned on the app Perez had recommended through the car’s speakers. Whether or not the ocean noises and soothing British voice actually helped was up for debate. But I didn’t get out and do something stupid, so I considered it a win.

For a good ten minutes, at least.

The darker the streets got, though, the more I realized I was wasting valuable time. If the thing that killed the Jane Doe and those four others was hunting at night, nothing was stopping it from killing someone else as the sun set.

So, I stepped out of the car and crossed the street, earning myself a honk from someone I cut off.

Ignore him, Tony, I repeated in my head.

Instead, I flipped the driver off and continued to the sidewalk in front of La Crème. My phone vibrated in my pocket, but I ignored it. Probably Strickland wanting to reprimand me for disobeying a direct order. Again.

Through the window, I could see baristas helping a line of people get their drinks, some couples sitting at tables, and a handful of college kids on laptops, either working on their future screenplay or homework.

The door opened before I could reach for it. Warm air spilled out from inside the café, carrying the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, baked goods, and corpses. It was like a dozen different variations of the New Orleans grave dirt smell all mixed into one.

Before going in, I stopped and popped another piece of gum into my mouth. A few people left the café before I got a chance to step in. The aromas of cinnamon, chai, and warm milk reminded me I hadn’t eaten for a while, a fact reinforced by the growl of my stomach.

After the last person stepped out, I caught a whiff that was a combination of garden soil and engine grease. It was some ginger kid with a swoop haircut, wearing too tight jeans and an old-school leather jacket.

I really don’t get hipsters and their weird-ass cologne.

The kid looked at me, gave me a nod, and walked on. I reached for the door that was falling shut behind him. Just before I could wrap my fingers around its handle, someone shoved me from behind, away from the door, and kept pushing me until I started walking towards an alley a short way down the sidewalk.

“It seems I didn’t hurt your pride enough last night.” The Russian accent was all-too familiar. “What in the fuck are you doing here, of all places?”

Turning down the alley, I did an about-face and locked eyes with the female vampire. My hand immediately dropped to the Glock at my hip. Shooting her in public wasn’t at the top of my list of best ideas ever, but maybe I could use the gun to coerce her into somewhere a little less full of witnesses.

But my hand never made it to my sidearm. Instead, she grabbed onto my wrist, holding it still with an insane level of strength.

“Listen to me, Agent Anthony Mendoza…”

Fuck, I forgot she went through my wallet.

She stepped closer to me, whispering, “You should not have come to this—”

I slammed my forehead into her nose and came away grinning at the crunch of bones I’d heard.

“Damn it, human.” The vampire staggered back just a step and wiped away the tiny trickle of blood that oozed from her nostrils. Even with my amped up hearing, her feet didn’t make any noise. It was a short-lived victory, since her nose would heal in no time, but it was worth it. “You’re making it very difficult not to kill you.”

“Just returning the favor. Though I can’t say we’re even, considering the sword you shoved through me.”

The vampire laughed, a noise that made my skin crawl. It must have been how prey felt when they heard a hyena cackle or a wolf howl.

“You’re a stubborn one, I’ll give you that, Agent Mendoza.”

“Just Tony. Or Mendoza.”

She didn’t acknowledge the correction aside from offering her own name. “Sophia. I’m surprised to see you with so much spunk in your step. But you’re lucky I stopped you from making an ass of yourself in Luther’s.”

The vampire—Sophia—seemed completely relaxed. Her body language basically screamed that she wasn’t in any danger, which only made me angrier.

But she was right. If the bouquet of cemetery dirt was any indication of the number of vamps in the building, the café was a dangerous place for someone looking for a fight.

“Impulsive decisions are my specialty, I guess.” I shrugged along with the statement. In my pocket, I could feel my phone vibrating again. Strickland would have to wait.

“Self-awareness is an important trait, Agent Mendoza. Just as I am aware of how nice I am being to you. So, leave before my kindness runs out.”

She turned sideways and swept her arm towards the mouth of the alley. Her arrogance was infuriating.

“At least tell me you got the thing afterward.”

Sophia shook her head. “Nyet. It is tough to follow trail when it flies.”

“What is it?”

Strickland kicking me off the case was one thing, but a sword-swinging, badass lady vamp was another. Still, I wasn’t about to go home empty-handed. Even if I confirmed it was a rogue vampire, I could at least pass that info to Gibbs when I apologized.

The vampire looked behind her, then shook her head and whispered, “At first I thought it was nosferatu.”

A sort of wild vampire. More savage than actual vamps—possibly the genetic precursor to their species. I learned that much from the files back at base, at least.

“The violence it unleashes is nothing short of feral,” Sophia added. “But, then, I saw it fly away with that woman. I am wondering if a necromancer has been experimenting with nosferatu flesh.”

Right, necromancers. Why not?

“I was waiting for it to return to house, which I assumed it used as nest, when you stumbled in like angry, pouty bull. Without horns, though.”

I hissed and held up a hand in protest. “Wait a minute… you knew that was where the creature hid?”

“Da.”

“And you left me there, bleeding out?”

She frowned slightly and shrugged. “Then, I do not know you or have use for you. Now, have use.”

“Well, it’s nice to know I’m wanted,” I said, shaking my head.

“Eh, stop whining and focus on task at hand. There is creature killing humans in Austin. Is bad for humans, and bad for coven.” She tapped a long, slender finger on her chin. “The more I think about it, however, the less it makes sense.”

I resisted the urge to ask if it was a mothman, considering how funny she’d found the idea the night before. My mind started flipping through all the dossiers and files I’d read on SNEs back at HQ, but nothing was coming to mind.

“So, what’s the working theory?” I peered behind her as I asked, making sure no one was watching us—and no flying mystery monster was creeping up on us.

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

For the first time since she started speaking, I noticed her fangs. The casual nature of her posture, her almost conversational tone, even the way she clearly didn’t view me as a threat… it all made it easy to forget that the woman in front of me was higher up on the food chain than me or any other human who walked past the alley. I wasn’t sure if I liked that knowledge or if I’d rather be one of those ignorant assholes wandering past with their soy lattes.

Once again, my phone buzzed in my pocket, interrupting my thoughts.

“For the love of God, Agent Mendoza, answer your damn phone.” Sophia rolled her eyes. “The vibrating is annoying.”

Who the hell is this woman? I pulled out my phone but didn’t recognize the number on the screen.

The phone buzzed one more time, and I considered ignoring it. But there was a chance it was someone from CERBERUS who needed help. Worst case, it was Strickland demanding I get back to base before he had me locked away with all the other disobedient monsters.

Sliding my thumb across the screen, I raised the phone to my ear.

“Mendoza,” I stated.

All that answered was a bloodcurdling scream.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The scream nearly ruptured my eardrum. It was filled with the kind of primal fear that most people would never experience in their lifetime—the kind that either makes you into something colder, breaks you down to something weaker, or acts as a banshee’s cry for your own death.

Sophia cocked her head and gave me a perplexed look as I moved the phone away from my ear.

Then, the scream stopped.

“Who is this?” I asked, tilting the phone so the microphone was near my mouth but the speaker was as far from my ear as I could manage.

More silence from the end of the line. No, it wasn’t silence. Underneath the whisper of static came panting breaths. Not like an athlete who just finished a sprint. Older. Raspier.

Then, a voice spoke through the speaker. “Tony?”

A familiar elderly woman’s voice, a thicker accent than I’d expect from a Chicana woman.

“Tony? Are you there? Quiera Dios, please be there.” More labored breathing.

“Isabelle?” It suddenly clicked. “Isabelle, what’s wrong?”

Silence. Some sobbing.

“Are you still there, Isa—”

“It’s after me!”

The woman was clearly panicked, but I needed something more than “it” for me to be helpful.

“Someone’s after you? Did you call the police?” I turned away from Sophia and pressed the phone against my ear to take back some semblance of privacy. The vampire looked annoyed at the interruption but didn’t stop me.

From the heavy breaths, I figured Isabelle was running. Or walking as quickly as her aged knees could manage. She went to say something, but a horrid screech pierced through the phone’s speaker, a terrible combination of tires squealing and a wolf howl.

The hairs on my arms stood up at the noise, like cadets standing at attention. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before.

“What the—Isabelle, are you okay?”

There was sobbing coming through the phone, the kind of defeated sobbing that only bubbles to the surface when someone has given up.

“Tony.” I recognized Sophia’s voice by accent alone. She stalked up behind me, impossibly silent, her tone almost somber as she continued. “That noise… is beast I am hunting.”

My mind took one valuable second to process that piece of information. If Sophia was right—and that howl certainly sounded like it could be a flying monster capable of stealing away human-sized prey—then Isabelle was as good as dead.

“Isabelle, I need you to tell me where you are.”

“It cut me,” the old woman said through heaving breaths. “Tony, it hurts.”

I pulled the phone away from my face and let out a “Fuck!” as loudly as I could get away with. “I know, Isabelle. But don’t worry. Just tell me where you are, and I’ll come get you.”

Some more low static cut through the call. A few agonizing seconds later, Isabelle spoke again. “I was on Third, walking back to the apartment. But it chased me away from there. I—I see train tracks. Those big buildings where people pay to keep their stuff.”

Storage units.

“That’s good, Isabelle.” I turned to Sophia, who I hoped had a better working knowledge of Austin’s less-populated areas. “Third, storage units, railroad. Any idea where that might be?”

She thought for a minute before nodding.

“I’m on my way, Isabelle. Stay on the phone with me and find somewhere to hide.”

But if this thing’s a predator and it cut her, it can probably smell blood better than I can.

“Okay.” Isabelle’s voice was trembling with a combination of fear and shock.

Before I could tell Sophia to follow me to my car, the vampire was already climbing the wall beside me. Without thinking, I reached up and grabbed her belt, then yanked her back down to the alley floor.

“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” I hissed. I muted the phone in case I had to say something that would confuse or scare Isabelle.

She just shrugged. “Your friend is already dead. I can get there faster than you. So, it only makes sense that I go and kill it before you slow me down.”

She wasn’t wrong, but that revelation only pissed me off. And no way in hell was I going to let Isabelle get mutilated by a flying monster while I just stood in an alley with my dick in my hands.

Plus, Sophia had made it clear she wasn’t thinking about saving Isabelle. She was all about killing whatever was bringing attention to her kind. I was okay with doing both.

“Fuck that.” I grabbed at her shoulder, but she jumped up from the ground and held my arm in a grip so tight she’d give a trash compactor a run for its money. “Please, Sophia. There’s a chance I can save my friend. But I can’t find her without you. Get me there and the SNE’s yours.”

Isabelle cocked her head again. “SNE?”

“It’s coming back! Tony!” Isabelle shrieked over the phone again, breaking the static silence.

My eyes belied the sincerity behind my plea. “A goddamn monster.”

The vampire exhaled, considered her options, then nodded. I unmuted the phone.

“Isabelle, I’m on my way.”

* * *

The Chevy’s tires squealed on every turn. More than once, Sophia told me she could drive, even wondering out loud if my driving could be a newly discovered way of killing vampires.

I kept my mouth shut the whole time to stop her from jumping out the car window and continuing alone on foot. Hell, I didn’t even know if vampires could burst into a cloud of bats and fly away or change into a cloud of mist to slip through the car’s vents.

All that was in the back of my mind, though. I wished I could have said I was worried about Isabelle or that I was running red lights out of some sense of urgency. And both those reasons were at least partially true.

But my blood was pumping at the prospect of killing that flying son of a bitch.

No, I didn’t want Isabelle to die. Far from it; she had always been kind to me. She was basically family. And some part of my brain knew how fucked up it was that I was speeding through downtown Austin more for bloodlust than her.

“I think it found me.” Isabelle’s voice came through the speakers of the car. I hadn’t hung up on her—even I wasn’t that much of an asshole—but I kept her muted when I wasn’t directing her or offering what reassurance I could. “Tony, what do I do?”

If she ran, it would be on her in a heartbeat. If she fought, it would play with her before it killed her. If she stayed hidden, it would find her.

Hell, it probably already knows where she is.

“Listen to me, Isabelle.” My voice was calm, precise. “Staunch the bleeding if you can. Don’t move more than you have to. Don’t make any noise. I’ll be on the phone the whole time, but your best bet is to hide until I get there.”

Sophia didn’t even try to mask her doubt. In the pit of my stomach, I knew Isabelle was dead. Short of some divine intervention, we’d be lucky if we even found a corpse.

The vampire reached over and muted my phone. “The longer she stays alive, the fresher the trail will be.”

“You’re a real optimist, you know that?” I blew through another red, then hung a right on Fifth. Sophia thought the storage locker was somewhere ahead, between us and the tracks. Unmuting the phone, I told Isabelle, “We’re almost there, tía. Just another min—”

That piercing screech cut through the crappy car speakers, filling the cabin with an unbearable clamor. Underneath the noise, I heard Isabelle screaming, then crying, then begging for me to help.

And then all of that was replaced by the worst noise of all. At first, it sounded uncannily similar to someone stirring a pot of mac and cheese. It took me a moment to realize that rustling through someone’s intestines would sound the same.

“Fuck!” I slammed a fist against the steering wheel hard enough to bend it. Another thing Strickland could reprimand me for when I returned to base.

As the mac and cheese noise continued, a faint gargling crackled across the phone line.

“Tony.” Isabelle coughed on the other end of the call. “Please…”

Isabelle didn’t make another noise after that. The sound of the monster rifling through her guts stopped a few seconds later, followed by another screech and the beating of wings.

Then, nothing. Just silence occasionally broken by the honk of a distant horn. Neither Sophia nor I dared to make a noise.

A minute later, the vampire pointed at a self-storage lot. As we turned, I rolled down the car window and let the cool night air roll into the cabin.

It was thick with the beast’s skunk smell.

I pulled the car over and slammed it in park. Both Sophia and I sprang from the vehicle, eyes peeled. My sidearm was ready, though I didn’t know if it would do a damn thing to the beast. Sprinting ahead of me, Sophia was unarmed.

Where’s her sword?

She didn’t have it with her when she confronted me in the alley. Made sense, since someone carrying around a saber would attract all sorts of attention, and vampires didn’t seem like the type who were fond of public scrutiny. From the night before, though, I knew she was strong enough to hold her own.

“Move quickly, human.” She was already scanning the area around the road for any sign of the SNE. “The trail gets colder every second.”

“Sure thing, comrade.”

I was scanning the sky with the business end of my sidearm, though. We knew the creature could fly, which meant it could have been circling above us, waiting for a chance to strike.

The road was saturated with its scent, so thick I couldn’t get a fix on where it had found Isabelle’s hiding spot or which direction it took off in. Still, I had other means of tracking. Broken branches on one of the thin trees that lined the road, disturbed dirt that looked too large to be a human footprint. All signs that Sophia had picked up, too.

The distance from where we parked to the train tracks down the lane wasn’t far, maybe one hundred yards. Next to the tracks were some bushes dense enough to potentially hide in. I figured they were our best bet.

Finger hovering over the trigger, I used my other hand to call Isabelle’s phone. A ring—the default one on most devices—beckoned from the other side of the bushes I’d spotted.

“There,” I called out to Sophia, but she’d already noticed and was rushing towards the noise. In the dim light of the streetlamps, she was nothing more than a silent blur.

That’s how quickly vamps can move? It was an uneasy thought for a sleepless night in the future.

As I approached the phone and the Russian vampire, the thick skunk smell grew stronger, but so did something else: the smell of blood. Lots of it. Sophia was already crouched down next to the crimson puddle. She sniffed the air too, then dipped her fingertip in the puddle and touched it to her tongue.

“Definitely human.” She smeared her finger through the blood before licking it clean again. “She didn’t manage to get a hit in, it seems.”

“Of course she didn’t. She’s pushing north of eighty.” I hung up my phone to silence the ringing one next to the gore and turned away from the stomach-churning sight of Sophia tasting Isabelle’s blood.

The vampire was so engorged in her thoughts and the taste of Isabelle’s blood that she wasn’t even paying attention to me. She was fast, but I could have easily emptied two rounds into the back of the vampire’s skull before she had time to react.

Would that kill her? Or just piss her off?

And whoever this Luther guy was, he seemed important. If killing one vamp sent a whole coven after me—and, by association, after CERBERUS—was it worth it?

Before I could answer any of my own questions, a loud, wet thunk echoed from the parking lot opposite the self-storage building. I glanced over at the five-story structure made of concrete and glass. The parking lot was empty, and didn’t even have a security truck to show the place was monitored.

The only thing I could see was a crumpled, bloody mass of flesh less than a stone’s throw from us: a pair of legs from the faded sneaker still on the one remaining foot.

“Sophia.” She ignored me until I repeated her name, then looked at me as if annoyed I had interrupted her blood-induced reverie.

My gaze climbed the concrete building from where the legs had landed. All the way up to the beast sitting on the edge of the roof.

Long limbs protruded awkwardly from a lean, hairy body. Its arms were at least twice as long as its torso, ending in hands that each boasted three fingers and a thumb. Each of those digits ended in claws the size of combat knives. Its legs were a similar length, though the dew claws on its feet were more hooked than the rest of its gleaming talons.

Thick, leathery wings slowly spread and retracted rhythmically, almost to the same beat as a breath. And its long, angular face was reminiscent of a bat, though the way its unhinged jaw hung open was more similar to a snake.

“The fuck is that?” I whispered, barely loud enough to hear myself.

It’s not a fucking mothman, that’s for sure.

The gangly bat creature sat on the edge of the roof the way a kid might sit on the edge of a bench that was too high for them. Its long legs were dangling and swaying back and forth in utter contentment.

And it was probably elated, considering its arms held the other half of Isabelle.

Her torso, head, and arms were all still attached, but the bat-thing held Isabelle upside-down. Its sharp elbows were bent so they stuck past the top of its head, holding the woman just below its chin.

A long, writhing tongue slithered into the raw flesh of Isabelle’s exposed stomach and intestines. If not for my enhanced vision, I likely wouldn’t have been able to see the tongue throbbing as the bat-thing drank from Isabelle’s corpse.

At the same time, one of its feet gripped onto Isabelle’s dangling left arm, talons cutting deep into her flesh, and slid down her bone. The dead woman’s skin and muscles came away as easily as if the beast were peeling a banana. Those same talons gripped the fresh strips of meat and, in an unnatural display of the world’s most flexible hips, deposited them in its mouth, tucking the bloody food behind its pulsating tongue.

Isabelle’s face, even upside down, was frozen in a mask of pure terror. Her eyes stared at Sophia and me, begging to know why we took so long, why I didn’t answer the first two times she called.

Her eyes weren’t the only ones watching us, though. The bat-thing, while gorging on Isabelle’s flesh and blood, was staring at us with eyes that were nothing more than black orbs with a prick of white in the middle.

“It knows we’re here,” I warned Sophia.

“Da, and it does not care.” I figured that pissed her off as much as it did me. “You don’t happen to have a saber in that outdated ride of yours, do you?”

I looked at her like she’d sneezed. “Sorry, left my last one back at home. I have this, though.”

She turned her nose at the Derringer I pulled from my waistband. Still, she reached out and pinched the finger loop with her index and thumb.

“How… crude.”

“Hey, that thing killed a djinn.”

Okay, it happened to blow off a djinn’s finger that had a fire elemental-controlling ring on it, and the elemental burned the djinn to a crisp. Semantics.

Sophia didn’t look convinced.  “If you say so.”

We turned back to the bat-thing, which was still holding Isabelle’s corpse and swinging its gleefully dangling legs. As we approached, the beast raised Isabelle’s torso, using its hands and feet in combination to rotate the corpse around. Its tongue retracted back into its mouth while its unhinged jaw stayed open until it surrounded Isabelle’s face with needle-like fangs.

Without taking its eyes from us, the monster tore Isabelle’s face off, chewed it, and spat it in a wet wad of flesh down at the parking lot.

Is it taunting us? If it is, it’s working. The way the bat-thing stared us down, and how it used Isabelle’s body to try and get under our skin, displayed a concerning level of intelligence.

“So, what’s the plan?” I adjusted my grip on my sidearm, ready to level it at the slightest hint of movement from the creature.

“Just stay out of my way, Agent Mendoza.” Sophia burst forward without warning.

Tu puta madre. I hustled after her as quickly as I could, pistol trained on the bat-thing as I moved.

But before Sophia even reached the base of the building, the creature dropped Isabelle’s torso and used its wings to launch itself into the air. The top half of Isabelle hit the pavement like a pomegranate, chunks of flesh exploding outward.

Among all the gore, though, there wasn’t a drop of blood.

The beast swooped down after the corpse, veering up at the last moment to soar over me and Sophia. The rancid skunk smell trailed in its wake as it beat warm air down at us.

I fired off three 10mm rounds. The first missed completely as the creature corkscrewed in the air, but the other two found their marks. One bit into the gray fur of its abdomen while the other simply bounced off its right wing.

It wasn’t necessarily a surprise when the beast didn’t fall to the ground, but it was still a disappointment. I might as well have thrown a couple of pebbles at it.

“Are you waiting for a fucking invitation?” Sophia grabbed me by the collar and basically dragged me back to the car. “Drive. And give me your gun.”

Though I wasn’t normally one to take orders from people who had run me through with a sword, I’d be lying if I said the vampire’s strength, attitude, and predatory aura weren’t convincing. And more than a little attractive.

Keep it together, Mendoza. Use your upstairs brain and kill the fucking monster. Besides, Cara would rip your heart out if you tried that.

Stumbling towards the driver’s side of the Chevy, I tossed Sophia my Glock and hopped in the car. She sprang up on the hood, then settled on the roof of the sedan. A horrible screech of scraping metal sang from above me, which I could only assume meant Sophia had dug her fingers into the roof.

“Strickland’s going to kill me,” I muttered.

“Drive, asshole!”

The accelerator struck the floor of the 200, and we tore off after the man-eater.

CHAPTER NINE

The sweet sound of 180-grain, subsonic gunshots filled my ears like music as we chased after the airborne SNE. It appeared Sophia was skilled with more than just a blade, as round after round either found its target or missed by mere inches. For someone gripping the top of a vehicle going sixty on a pothole-ridden road, it was impressive.

Rather than flying across the Colorado, the creature turned west and flew along the railway tracks. For a mile or so, we tailed it along a road that ran parallel to the tracks, keeping up just enough for Sophia to get her shots off.

We were in an empty enough part of the city—only industrial buildings and the rail line on either side of us, but we were quickly approaching the MoPac Expressway and the tangle of ramps that fed into it.

The rail line the beast was following snaked underneath the highway before running in between it, but I knew we’d lose it if I tried to get up on the MoPac. I shouted for Sophia to hang on and jerked the car hard to the left.

A rusted chain-link fence tried in vain to stop the vehicle from crashing through and landing in a small, grassy ditch next to the tracks. My head smashed against the steering wheel, splitting skin open just above my right eye and filling my vision with stars, but I pressed through and kept my vision trained on the creature. A few seconds later, I was straddling one of the train tracks with the car, only a dozen yards behind our prey.

“Damn it!” Sophia pounded a fist against the roof above me. “A little better warning next time, yes?”

There wasn’t time for a witty remark back at her. Instead, I tailed the bat-thing along the rail line. It kept low, presumably out of view, as our paths cut underneath the highway ramps and ascended up between the two halves of the MoPac.

Cars still sped in either direction down the highway, headlights flooding the concrete arteries of the city with illumination that almost extended onto the train tracks. Anyone driving past might have wondered why a sedan was driving down the railway, and the most keen-eyed ones might see the tall, blonde woman crouched on top of it.

But the bat-thing was smart enough to swoop back and forth into the darkest patches of night. It might have been taunting us before, but it apparently knew enough to stay hidden and keep its prey ignorant.

Some thumping above me preceded Sophia’s head popping into view outside my window, upside-down.

“Can’t this piece of crap go any faster?” Her Russian accent somehow made the question more insulting.

In response, I pressed down harder on the pedal, closing the gap between us and the monster.

“Oh,” Sophia said as her face disappeared above the car again, replaced almost immediately by her hand, “and I need more bullets.”

She’d at least been smart enough to hold her fire while we were near the highway. One bump on the tracks or sudden turn could have sent a round through some kid’s head. But there was no question her restraint was to avoid undue attention rather than spare human lives.

After a few seconds of fishing around, I pulled out a spare mag and handed it to her. At the same time, the bat-thing twisted and dove to its left, banking away from the train tracks towards a grassy hill that sloped down towards a street running beneath the expressway. I yanked on the steering wheel, turning hard to hop off the tracks and onto the grass before Sophia had a firm grasp on the mag.

Sophia said something in Russian that sounded pretty harsh, and I didn’t think she was complimenting my driving. Her fingers scrambled to hold on to the magazine while I kept my grip to give her some sort of anchor. In response, she hissed at me and cursed in Russian again.

“¡Lo siento!” I muttered. “Sheesh.”

When we swerved onto the road, an intersection and a big, glaring red light stood before us, but there was no sign of the bat-thing. It had just… disappeared.

Slowing to a crawl, I pulled off to the shoulder and let the one other car on the road pass.

Sophia climbed through the passenger-side window. “Go right.”

“You hit it?”

“Half a dozen times, at least.” She handed me back my Glock, which I held in my lap. “Didn’t even phase it.”

That wasn’t concerning at all. I turned right onto a two-lane road that ran alongside the MoPac. Sophia kept her head out the window to keep track of the beast’s putrid trail. On the left, a tall concrete wall separated the road from a neighborhood. On the right, a greenbelt gave way to a construction lot.

“Wait.” Sophia lifted her index finger at me.

I slowed the car down and let the air from outside fill my nose. Nothing.

“Did we lose it?” By then it was pitch black outside, the only illumination coming from the occasional street light and ambient glow of the city. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the creature had let us drive right past it.

“No, it’s like it vanished.” Sophia leaned further out the window and peered into the empty construction lot. “It’s like it flew—”

The window behind me shattered and the driver’s side of the car crumpled as the bat-thing slammed into it, twisting metal and sending the Chevy into a tumbling rollover. I was tossed around like a ragdoll in a washing machine. Little claws of jagged metal and plastic tore at my skin. Daggers of broken glass punctured my arms and abdomen.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought I saw the Russian vampire in the passenger seat nimbly right herself even as the Chevy tumbled down a dirt hill towards the vacant tract of land. At some point, she sprang out of her window, leaving me to finish the most painful wash cycle in the world.

Eventually, the car slid to a stop, upside down. Gasoline pooled all around the crumpled car, which was absolutely where I didn’t want it to be. My body was alight with painful gouges, and my face was covered in so much blood that I struggled to see. Without waiting for Sophia or the bat-thing to find me, I started crawling through broken glass before the Chevy erupted in flames.

“Yeah, Strickland’s going to have my ass for this.”

I’d barely made it out of the vehicle when I heard the beating of wings getting closer. With a groan, I turned onto my back and forced my sidearm upward.

It might be for nothing, but I’d rather give this fucker a mouthful of lead before it gets me.

Jaw open so wide it looked like a caricature, anteater tongue sloshing behind it, the bat-thing plummeted down at me. I squeezed the trigger once, twice, then a third time before it was close enough to do anything. The blood covering my eyes made it tough to see if I had hit the creature, but I’d hit harder targets than a giant, flying asshole before.

Whether the shriek it let out was in anger or bloodlust, I didn’t know. But just before it landed on me, a blurred shape from the periphery of my vision barreled into the bat-thing, returning the favor from before.

Both Sophia and the monster went tumbling away, leaving me lying there like a college kid who had five too many shots of tequila.

“Come on, Tony. Time to get to work.” The mere idea of getting up was exhausting.

Every muscle hurt like hell, but I forced myself back onto my stomach and pushed up to my hands and knees. A spider’s strand of blood and spit trailed from my mouth.

Off to my side, Sophia roared, a jungle cat with just a twinge of humanity. The bat-thing had scored a hit across her midriff, but she sprang forward and answered with a punch that would have left a hole in my chest.

The monster seemed less concerned with the attack, though. It twisted a little, then lashed out with its wing, tossing Sophia aside as if she weighed nothing. Then, the bat-thing’s white pinprick pupils turned to me. I swore they widened in excitement.

I’m just more prey to this thing.

It lumbered towards me on all fours. As quick as it was, the beast’s arms and legs were so long they made its run look awkward and unnatural. Its body had to sway side to side just to accommodate its gait, which made its tongue lash back and forth outside of its jaws.

If adrenaline hadn’t been working overtime to fill my emptying veins, I probably would have pissed myself. My arms didn’t want to respond, but that just wasn’t an option. I willed them into movement.

My one-handed shots were sloppy and barely slowed the creature, anyway. Instead, they were more of a distraction so the man-eater didn’t see my left hook coming. Not until I blindsided it with a punch to its hideous chiropteran face.

Bone cracked—mine and its—from the strike. I was confident the serum pumping through my leaking veins would deal with most of the trauma I’d experienced, but punching the monster felt like punching a boulder.

“Mierda, eso dolió.” My knuckles were ablaze with pain, and one of my fingers was bent in the wrong direction.

Sophia blitzed the creature from my right. They grappled for a moment, tumbling in a mess of claws and blood. Both vampire and bat-thing let out grunts of pain, neither of them paying me much mind.

Shooting into the melee wasn’t an option; even if my bullets didn’t kill vampires, stunning Sophia might give the creature an advantage. And it wasn’t like shooting the monster did much of anything.

A quick glance around the construction site revealed little I could use to be helpful. An excavator, bulldozer, and sprinter van all slept next to a shipping container-turned supervisor office. Most of the work that had been completed seemed to be clearing, digging, and leveling. A stack of two by fours sat on the other end of the lot, nearly half a mile away. By the time I got there and back, Sophia would probably be dead.

Behind me, though, was a pile of broken concrete. One particular piece of rubble was the size of a soup pot and had a piece of rebar as long as my arm sticking out of it. If my punch managed to at least fracture something in the creature, I was willing to bet a concrete sledgehammer would do some damage.

Even without a potentially lethal car crash turning my body into a poster child for internal—and external—bleeding, lifting the makeshift hammer would be a challenge. Now that my lifeblood and energy were draining at similar rates, I could barely hoist the rebar up. I had to rest the business end on my shoulder just to stop it from falling back down to the ground.

Once again, Sophia tumbled past me. This time, more blood covered her body. The ichor around her mouth was darker than the rest, likely from tearing at the bat-thing with her fangs, but her movements were becoming sluggish.

“Is that a joke, Agent Mendoza?” She was panting between breaths. “Just stay out of this. Let the adult handle it.”

I was obviously out of my depth against this thing, at least in my current state, but it was clear Sophia was, too. Even as she sprinted back towards the beast, there was a clear difference in which SNE was on the losing end of this fight. And it wasn’t the one with wings.

When the two of them started tearing at each other once again, I decided Sophia could shove her condescending words up her vampiric ass and shambled towards them as quickly as I could with my new weapon. Which, admittedly, wasn’t very quickly, but it seemed the two monsters had more trouble tearing each other up than they did humans.

As I approached, I could better make out Sophia’s movements. Part of me wished I carried around a sword so that she was better equipped, but she seemed to put the same principles of her fencing style into her hand-to-hand combat.

When the bat-thing lashed out with its clawed hand, she used her own arm to go over the attack and shove it out of the way, opening the beast for a strike of her own.

The creature answered by sweeping out with one of its legs in a way that looked impossible, bringing it around like a third arm. But Sophia managed to kick her feet back so the dagger-like talons only cut through the air beneath her hips.

But the bat-thing had the advantage. Its hide was thick, and it had six weapons—a pair each of hands, feet, and wings—to use against Sophia. That wasn’t even considering its mouth, which we just learned could tear a face off with discomforting ease.

The pair disengaged, each sizing the other one up. Both of them paid me absolutely no mind.

I’ll teach you to ignore me, asshole.

Sophia’s left arm was hanging limp, dislocated at the shoulder. She was standing on the other side of the creature, keeping its attention as I shambled up and lifted the hammer over my head. But she didn’t seem to notice me either as she renewed her assault on the beast one-armed.

Just before vampire and bat-thing met again, I swung my concrete hammer down at the base of the monster’s skull.

It barely turned to catch the hammer in its hand. With little more than a flex of the corded muscles in its arm, the beast shattered the concrete and left me holding a plain piece of rebar like a dumbass.

At least, it did for a moment. An extension of its wings knocked both me and Sophia to the dirt, each of us on either side of the creature. My rebar didn’t come with me, though. It stayed in the clutches of the monster.

Before either of us could recover, the bat-thing turned and slammed the rebar through Sophia’s chest, pinning her to the ground. The vampire didn’t move.

Is that it? Is she dead? I tried to push the thoughts from my mind and get back to my feet. Sophia might have been gone, but I would be joining her if I didn’t move.

The bat-thing had different plans for me, though. As I rose, it planted a clawed foot against my chest and kicked, launching me back six feet onto my ass.

“How does everything fucking hurt?” Every cell in my body was begging me to lay still, while every instinct I had was fighting back, urging me to stand up and beat the shit out of the SNE.

The decision was made for me when the bat-thing crawled over and pinned me down—one foot on each of my legs, one hand holding each of my arms. It looked at me with its tiny white pupils, then leaned in close to sniff at my blood. Its knees and elbows peaked above its body a good two feet, like four thick spider legs supporting the man-eater.

I could have sworn I saw it grin when it caught a whiff of my blood.

That’s when its anteater tongue dropped from its mouth like a thick, wet noodle. The appendage slapped against my chest, giving me a better look at it than I ever wanted.

The end of the tongue opened up like one of those nasty microscopic parasites that had no right looking the way they did. Its pink, slimy shaft lolled around against my chest, dragging the tip around to vacuum up the blood that covered me. Not only that, but the tongue was covered in wicked little hooks. The barbs tore at my chest, ripping open shirt and flesh so even more blood could spurt up like a fountain.

Its tongue lifted into the air and danced around to catch the tiny eruptions of blood. With each sip, the bat-thing quivered and let out a series of clicks and shrill screeches.

And all I could do was lie there and watch this thing tear me apart.

Then, the tip of its tongue burrowed into one of the gashes on my chest and became a fleshy straw for the bat-thing to start drinking my blood.

What little light had filled my vision faded. I realized I was going to die, drained dry just like Isabelle had been, and the last thing I would see was the horrible grin of the creature.

Still better than Scooby duty. My eyes closed.

Something warm splattered against my face. The tongue retracted from my chest, tearing muscle and flesh as it went, and the bat-thing squealed in pain. I managed to open my eyes, just a little, and saw the rebar it had used to impale Sophia sticking halfway out of its chest. Dark blood poured freely from the wound, covering its gray fur.

“Payback is bitch, no?” Sophia muttered from behind the beast. She jerked the rebar upward, eliciting another squeal.

Before she could capitalize on her attack, the bat-thing reared up and spread its wings, knocking Sophia down once more. It climbed into the air and clawed at the metal rod that stuck out both sides of its chest, yanking the bar free as it ascended.

I considered trying to get a few more shots off at it, just for good measure, but my arms decided against that idea. Sophia, on the other hand, pulled out the Derringer I’d given her and fired both rounds at the beast. One hit, the other went wide, but the bat-thing was already flying away into the night.

Sophia started listing off words in Russian that I could only assume were too vulgar for my gentlemanly sensibilities. She stood over me, one hand pressing down on the hole in her chest where the rebar used to be.

“You going to die on me?” she asked.

I barely managed to shake my head. My consciousness was fading fast. “No, I think I just need a quick power nap.”

Then, the world slipped away.

CHAPTER TEN

Waking up after almost dying was never fun. Hell, getting put on tumble dry in the car would have been enough to kill any normal person. If it wasn’t for Perez’s experiment coursing through my veins, I wouldn’t have been able to crawl out of that wreckage.

I guess all those tests she put me through paid off.

By tests I meant “let’s see if Tony can survive this method of extreme pain.” The Doc wasn’t malicious, I’d give her that, but my well-being never seemed like a top priority for her when there was data to be collected.

And even though she’d never come up with an experiment that involved a dangerous rollover and giant bloodsucking monster getting to third base with me, I couldn’t deny that her tests had built up some resilience for extreme situations.

“Thanks, Doc,” I mumbled.

It was only when I heard my own voice that I realized I was alive. Or Hell was an endless void of nothing where the only sounds were my own voice.

No, not just my voice. That sounds like a car honking.

Then another horn blared, someone swore, and I had never been so happy to hear another human being before.

When I opened my eyes, I could see a water-stained popcorn ceiling above me. Something light covered me—a sheet, maybe—but I couldn’t see anything else. It was dark in the room, with only a faint glow coming in through blacked-out windows in my peripheral. And my neck didn’t feel like rotating my head to see anything else.

Eventually, I was able to wiggle my toes, shift my shoulders, and turn my head. Wherever I was, it looked like someone had set me up in a small bedroom. Two windows, a closet, and a door that led out to who the hell knew where.

Beside me was a stainless steel IV pole on wheels. A clear bag was hanging from one hook, only a few fingers of blood left in it. It connected to my arm with a plastic tube, and a pile of empty bags covered the bedside table beside me. Some of those bags looked like they’d been torn open at the top rather than fed through an intravenous tube.

After a few moments of lying there, I decided it was time to sit up. It was surprisingly easy, which gave me the confidence to shift my legs out of the bed and sit on the edge of the mattress.

Sometime during the night, someone—I’m assuming Sophia—had taken off my clothes. She’d at least had the decency to put me in pants again, but they were sweats that were too short. Criss-crossing lines of bright, shiny flesh covered my exposed chest. I touched the scars and sent a small current of ache across my ribs. The deepest wounds, especially the one where the bat-thing had shoved its tongue into my chest, were still raw. SNE-SH 167b made me heal quickly, but the pain wouldn’t disappear for a while, and the worst injuries would take hours, maybe even days, to vanish.

Standing up, I grabbed hold of the IV pole to steady myself. In a few steps, I was opening the door and stepping out into the space beyond.

Wherever I was, it looked like a modern apartment. Large kitchen, living space, even an island with a breakfast bar between the two. Darkness filled that space too, with the windows covered in the same thick, black paint as the bedroom. Across the hall from me was a bathroom, which was my first stop.

I figured I wasn’t being held hostage, since I wasn’t tied to the bed and forced to piss myself. So, I went to the kitchen next, answering the loud growl rumbling from my stomach. On the breakfast bar sat my wallet, Glock, Derringer, and cell phone. No keys—they were probably in back in the car—and no gum, which would have been nice to help tone down the overwhelming smell of blood and graveyard dirt in the apartment.

Even with the scents of death, I was starving. But when I opened the fridge, all I found were bags of blood. Stacks of them, organized by type, but no actual food.

“Seriously, I’d even kill for a vegetable right about now.” My stomach growled in agreement.

“Sorry, not really our kind of food.”

I spun towards the voice, eyeing the pistols on the counter. Across the room, in the darkest corner of the apartment, Sophia sat forward in her chair, leaning out of the shadows into the glow that filled some of the room.

“You look like a real Lugosi lurking in the shadows, you know that, right?” I went to the island and turned on the tap. The cold water felt good when I splashed it on my face and even better when I cupped some and slurped it down.

“First of all, that is offensive,” Sophia said. She stood up and crossed over to the breakfast bar. “Second, you’re welcome for saving your life.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “Thanks for that one. Where are we? Is this your place?”

She laughed at that. “You think I would let you know where I live? No, this is one of our safe houses. Closest one I could get you to. You lost a lot of blood, Agent Mendoza, but you heal quick when you aren’t on the brink of death.”

“Yeah, one of my many talents.”

My phone vibrated on the marble counter in front of her, its screen lighting up and revealing Sophia face in full. She was no longer covered in blood—her own or the bat-thing’s—and it appeared as if her damaged arm was perfectly fine.

She slid the phone across the counter at me. I looked at the caller ID on the screen. Strickland.

“It has been going off nonstop,” she said without trying to hide her annoyance.

“My boss is going to flip his shit when I tell him what happened.”

“Since when is Homeland concerned about supernatural monsters?” Subtlety didn’t seem like one of her strong suits.

“Since when do vampires bother saving humans?”

She looked me up and down as if deciding whether or not to tell the truth. “You have a very black and white way of looking at things, Agent Mendoza.”

When Strickland finally gave up, the phone screen briefly flashed to my notifications. Fourteen missed calls, six messages, and a critically low battery warning. The phone also told me it was almost nine in the morning.

“I can’t say I’m in the mood for nuances with a monster flying around Austin, cutting old ladies in half and drinking their blood.”

The Russian vampire shook her head. “I made a few calls about that. I was not far off on my nosferatu theory.”

“And?”

She stood up and told me to follow her. I shuffled over to one of the armchairs in the living room as she opened a laptop. The screen made my eyes ache, even at its dimmest. When my vision adjusted, I was greeted by a picture of a massive sloth monster.

“Sorry, this is our guy?” I couldn’t hide my disbelief.

Sure, it had long limbs like the thing that nearly killed us. But it didn’t have wings, the right teeth, or even the same bat-like face.

“Is tough to get good picture of something that rarely leaves survivors.” Sophia swiped across the laptop’s screen, scrolling through pictures.

Each of them was similar: a long-limbed, hairy monster that ate people or drank their blood. Some had wings, some had an anteater tongue. None of them matched the bat-thing exactly, but I was starting to see a familiar pattern.

“Is called an asanbosam,” the vampire said. “At least, is what most records call them.”

After a handful of images, Sophia swiped down and switched to a PDF. It was an electronic dossier of the creature.

“Practicing magic is forbidden amongst vampires,” Sophia continued as I scanned through the dossier. “For the sake of keeping the peace between us, the dogs, and the fae, is—illegal.”

“Right, the fae.” I only had the pedophile, Rhys, and what Gibbs had told me about them as reference.

“Most of what we know comes from Africa, where these things were endemic centuries ago. The asanbosam,” the word came out like it offended her taste buds, “is what happens when a nosferatu tries to empower itself with magic. We do not know exactly what ritual is, but it always twists beast into more powerful version of itself.”

It would explain the taste for blood.

The document went into more detail about its hunting patterns, how it would perch in tall trees and wait for unsuspecting travelers to pass below. Not only did it drink blood, but it had a penchant for cutting its victims in half at the waist and, like it did to Isabelle, drain the blood from the top half.

The dossier also detailed how strong the beast was, that it was nocturnal, and how ancient cultures had revered them as apex predators.

No shit.

I scrolled down some more, but Sophia swatted my hand away.

“Trust me, you do not want to read that part.”

Unsurprisingly, that made me want to read it even more.

“‘The asanbosam has been known to wipe out entire bloodlines and towns of people who have wronged it. If it catches a scent in its nest, it will hunt down the intruder and take pleasure in draining its prey.’” I paused, digesting the information.

“Agent Mendoza…”

Love was a foreign concept to me. The only two things I’d ever loved were my mamá and the playmate of the month in the first Playboy I ever stole as a kid. And I was confident the latter was just pre-teen hormones talking.

But Isabelle had come pretty damn close to making that list. She’d raised me like family.

And she’d seen me just hours before I found the asanbosam’s nest.

“You’re telling me this thing picked up my scent from that shithole on the edge of town and used it to find Isabelle?” My fists clenched so hard I thought the ligaments in my wrists would snap. “You’re saying I got her killed?”

My head flooded with Isabelle’s last words to me, the panic in her voice as it came through the crappy phone speaker. Her screams echoed in the back of my head over and over again.

Soon, all those noises were replaced with the furious pounding of my heartbeat. The raw skin on my chest throbbed. I very much wanted to put my fist through that bat-winged motherfucker.

“Why didn’t it go after your people?” Rage was making my vision darker in the already dim room. “You’re the one who tracked it there. And you smell a hell of a lot worse than I do.”

“Tone down attitude, Agent Mendoza. I am not your enemy.” The for now went unspoken but acknowledged. “It is probably smart enough to know that it cannot take on many of my kind at once. Old ladies make for much easier targets.”

Even through the rage, I couldn’t deny her logic.

“So, how do we kill it?” The question came out more as a growl than words.

Sophia sighed and slumped back in her chair. “I am not certain. The last reported asanbosam was from before I was born. Beheading probably works. Perhaps fire?”

“Iron clearly doesn’t have an effect,” I added, remembering the way it had held onto the rebar just fine. Sure, Sophia stabbed it with the iron rod, but it flew away without much difficulty. “Lead doesn’t seem to do much, either.”

The vampire nodded. We both sat there in silence, illuminated by the soft glow of the laptop screen. If we were going to kill this thing, I needed to put my big boy pants on and make a call I didn’t want to make.

“I might know someone who can dig up some information on it.” Another groan escaped my lips as I stood, but I could already feel most of the aches leaving my body. “You got a charger for my phone in here?”

She nodded and directed me to a kitchen drawer filled with miscellaneous cables. Once I found the right cord, I plugged my phone into the wall and scrolled down the small contact list.

Cara, Capt Perez, Cole.

I made a mental note to get on a flight to New Orleans to visit Cara if I didn’t get cut in two by the asanbosam. But business came before pleasure.

Gibbs’s entry stared back at me further down the list. As nuts as his obsession with the mothman was, I still felt bad for belittling him. It wasn’t his fault a nosferatu twisted by a magic ritual was terrorizing Austin. Hell, was that any more likely than a mothman?

Still, if I were Gibbs, I’d hang up the second I saw who was calling.

Hitting the phone icon under his name, I just prayed he was a better man than me.

The phone rang four times before Gibbs answered in a short, monotone voice. “What?”

“Listen, Gibbs, I was an ass to you. I know I owe you a drink or ten. But I’m in some serious shit right now, buddy, and could use a hand.”

For a moment, the line was so silent I thought he might have hung up on me. Even so, I’ll admit I was too proud to ask if he was still there.

“Strickland will have my ass for breakfast if he finds out I’m helping you,” Gibbs finally said. “He’s been throwing a temper tantrum all morning. Even threatened to cut the Doc’s funding if she aided and abetted you again. He’s considering sending Ops after you.”

Perez didn’t deserve to face Strickland’s wrath, especially since coming back to Austin was all my idea. But the Doc was a force all her own, and Strickland knew how valuable her studies were. He probably just needed an outlet.

As for Ops… I just had to hope Strickland gave me a little more time.

“Well, if you help me, I’ll either end up dead—so I won’t be able to piss him off more—or I’ll be returning with a trophy for him to mount on his empty walls.”

“He’s not one for decorations,” Gibbs countered.

“But he is one for dead monsters.”

The ex-detective couldn’t argue with that. “Fine. I can’t just let you get eaten or possessed or whatever the fuck is about to happen to you. What do you need?”

I explained what had happened the night before, including Isabelle’s murder and how the beast tracked her down. He’d never heard of an asanbosam either, but Gibbs assured me he’d look into the files and see what he could find.

Other than research, I asked him if he could drop off some supplies for me: clothes, ammo, a bigger gun. Maybe 10mm rounds didn’t work on the asanbosam, but not many bodies functioned right after a 12-gauge blew a hole in their gut.

“Give me a couple hours. You said it used to be a nos? If I can’t find anything, I’ll bring you some vamp-killing tools.”

I resisted the urge to be a sarcastic asshole and ask for a hot cocoa, too.

If that’s not personal growth, I don’t know what is.

“Thanks, Gibbs. Seriously. I’ll text you where to meet.”

The older agent didn’t say anything back before he hung up.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” Sophia asked. She probably heard the whole thing.

“Just a friend I don’t deserve.” I dragged the IV pole and its blood bag back over to the chair in the living room. “If we’re going to kill this thing, we need to work together. I’m a fan of the lone wolf shit too, trust me, but it’s stronger than either of us, and we looked like real idiotas last night.”

When she didn’t answer right away, I thought Sophia might have placed the blame on me. Sure, I hadn’t been much help after crawling out of the Chevy, but it was clear she wasn’t able to take on the asanbosam alone.

“You able to call in any reinforcements?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I got someone to check out its nest, and it looks like the bastard is still using the same house. He might join us, if I ask nicely. But as far as the rest of the coven is concerned, if I cannot do the job I was given, then I will have failed on my own merits.”

That was a sentiment I respected. “So, what’s the plan?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Time already wasn’t on our side, and the sun seemed to move faster than normal. Sophia and I came up with a plan that had the potential to go the way we wanted, but it came with a hell of a lot of risk.

It was more than we could hope for.

While the sun was still up, I drove across Austin, making my way back towards the ramshackle house where my new ally had run me through with a sword. Sophia lent me one of her vehicles, considering mine had been left upside down and battered. I’d have to let Strickland know to send some guys to get it from whatever scrap yard it ended up in. He didn’t seem like the type to let CERBERUS agents’ fingerprints get left on something like a trashed car.

Instead of the outdated Chevy, Sophia set me off in a Mercedes EQS. Not only did the vamps seem to like riding around in style, but they were watching their carbon footprint, too. Not that their food source was particularly great for the planet.

The fact that I was still alive, combined with the torn blood bags I’d seen beside my bed, told me Sophia and her kind weren’t necessarily ones for a free-range diet. Probably for the best if you wanted to lie low, but I wondered if they missed that certain je-ne-sais-quoi of a homeless guy or a drunk who stumbled down the wrong alley.

You’d think that nothing could really rock your world quite like learning all the things that go bump in the night are real. But there was something even more disconcerting about learning how seamlessly some monsters had integrated into society.

“Cafés, luxury cars, mid-town apartments.” I shook my head. “Monsters are living better than me.”

It wasn’t lost on me that the bed I woke up in just hours before was more comfortable than anything I’d slept in over the last decade. A series of military bunks, a cardboard sheet masquerading as my mattress back in New Orleans, or even the ground when out on missions all served their purpose, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the hug of the memory foam that had cradled me while I recovered.

And it’s not like we had memory foam mattresses back at Stanley, either.

As I coasted through downtown Austin, I looked at the pockets of people wandering the sidewalks. People going to and from work, meeting one another for a morning coffee, hanging out with friends and family…

How many of them were monsters?

Of the fifty people I could see milling outside the capitol building, were there apex predators we didn’t know about? Supernatural entities that were once worshipped as gods?

“Fuck me.” I squeezed the bridge of my nose to release a headache I felt forming.

I tried to shove the existential crisis down into the depths of my mind. It could pop up again the next time I tried one of Perez’s mindfulness sessions.

For the rest of the drive, I imagined each and every person I drove past was just that: a person, and a potential victim. Even though the sun was still up, it helped me focus on the fight to come.

The asanbosam outmatched us in strength and durability. But Sophia was faster, and I was angrier, so those things had to count for something.

We also figured we were smarter than it. It clearly had some sort of intelligence—enough to taunt us and hide in the shadows to ambush our car—but it was more beast than anything else after imbuing itself with so much magic.

Still, it had wings. Pun not intended, flight put it on a whole other level. Sophia thought we could use somewhere closed in like an alley, where she could scale the walls to attack it in the air. That put them in a one-on-one fight in a space where it had the advantage.

That’s why I pulled into a parking lot across the unfinished apartment building I’d visited two days before. It would be isolated enough at night, and Sophia could scale the half-finished structure if the asanbosam tried to get airborne. Hell, even I could get up a flight or two to even the odds with a flying vampire monster.

If we figure out how to kill it. I was really relying on Gibbs for that one. But, if worse came to worst, there was always Sophia’s method of tearing its ugly bat head off.

And that was if we could lure it there. Given its penchant for tracking down those who had wronged it, we figured it would be happy to come after me again. So, I pushed through the plastic sheet where I’d met Topo to shield myself from any onlookers.

Not a trace of his encampment remained, which meant he was either arrested or moved somewhere else to avoid getting caught. Either way, it was for the best; he’d just be food for the SNE.

Giving the area one more look, mostly to make sure the construction crew wasn’t just out for an early lunch, I took a small knife from one of the pockets of the too-small sweatpants and sliced into my hand.

Crimson blood spilled out through the cut, just enough to create a small pool in my palm. I picked a part of the floor that looked the cleanest—we still weren’t sure if Perez’s serum prevented infections—and smeared my blood against the concrete in a long line. My nose was good, but I was working under the assumption that the asanbosam’s was better. It had to be, if it tracked its prey’s scent from the air.

From there, I headed south until I hit Cesar Chavez. Every time I lost the scent of my blood, I stopped and found an inconspicuous place to leave some more.

Rinse and repeat.

All the way along Cesar Chavez, under 183 where it crossed the Colorado, and down the no-name road that stretched out into the wetlands. Almost two hours passed before I made it to the abandoned house again.

Standing in front of the rotting house, I knew the asanbosam was watching me. Not only did the entire property reek of its iron skunk scent, but the hairs on my arms and neck stood on end.

It was in the house. Somewhere in the shadows beyond the broken window panes, the bloodsucker was staring at me with its tiny white pupils.

Sophia and I assumed it wouldn’t attack during the day, though we weren’t sure if that was because it was nocturnal or because the sun hurt it. Who could tell if the magic the nos infused itself with protected the beast from the sun? No matter the reason, I was putting a lot of faith in my perceived safety.

But part of me—no, all of me—wanted the bastard to come out of the house. I didn’t give a shit that it was stronger than me or had a disgusting, barbed tongue that was a little too phallic for my liking.

“I’ll tear you limb from fucking limb, you freak,” I shouted loud enough to scare off a flock of birds behind me. Then, a guttural, primal noise bellowed from my throat. A challenge to see who was the stronger monster.

One that went unanswered.

“Pussy.” I spat on the ground, raised my hand into the air, and sliced deep into my palm with the pocket knife. This time, blood streamed out like a tiny red waterfall. I let it pool on the ground in front of me without taking my eyes from the house.

A loud screech pierced the air from inside the building. It could have been a trick of the high sun’s light, but I swore I saw the creature almost come to the edge of one of the shattered windows.

“You want it?” I squeezed my hand harder to force more blood out. When the wound slowed to a trickle, I turned and walked back down the gravel path. “I’ll be waiting.”

* * *

Gibbs sent a text telling me he was on his way to Austin with weapons and information before I made it back across the river. I sent him the location of the construction site and told him I was going to bring him some lunch, my treat.

What can I say? I’m a people person.

Even with a quick detour to the food truck from my earlier trip to the city, I managed to beat Gibbs to the lot. He parked the same unmarked SUV he always drove on the street in front of a bench I’d found.

“I just need a second. I’ve been walking across Hell’s half-acre this morning, and last night wasn’t particularly fun for me.” I gestured to the space beside me on the bench and held out the tacos as a peace offering.

He looked at the food but didn’t immediately reach for it. “You know, my dad had a saying. ‘Assholes don’t make good food.’ And I never knew if it meant not to take food from someone who’d done you wrong or that you shouldn’t eat shit.”

“Or maybe he just wasn’t a fan of your mom’s ass.”

Gibbs rolled his eyes, took the food, and sat down. We ate in silence for a few moments.

Once we were done, I broke the silence. “Listen, Gibbs, I know I—”

“For the love of God, Deputy, drop it. I’m not some little girl that needs her hand held because you hurt my feelings, and I’m sure as shit not some old man that gets upset when he’s wrong about something. I figured you thought better of me than that.”

“I do,” I said with a laugh. “That might be the problem. Maybe I respect you too much.”

“Yeah, we both know that’s a crock of shit.” He got another laugh out of me.

With a deep inhale, the older agent got to his feet and beckoned me over to the SUV. He opened the back, revealing a large duffel and a reinforced briefcase. Inside the duffel was a fresh set of clothes—black jeans, a blue t-shirt, even a fresh pair of socks.

Underneath the clothes was a Remington Model 870 shotgun, matte black, as well as a few boxes of shells and 10mm rounds.

“It’s like Christmas morning.” I looked at the rotund man beside me. “Thanks, Santa.”

He didn’t bother to answer, and his eyes probably hurt from rolling so much. As I quickly got changed, he opened the reinforced briefcase. Inside were some documents and a thick, leather-bound book that filled my nose with the smell of an old wardrobe.

“I never liked getting books for Christmas.”

“I didn’t think you could read, Deputy.”

“No, but momma says I can start on picture books soon.”

Gibbs pulled the papers out and spread them across the trunk of the SUV, then he hoisted the old tome and opened it to a page he’d bookmarked.

“This thing you’re hunting, an asanbosam, doesn’t have an official record. No dossier on this bastard.” That didn’t surprise me. If the vamps didn’t have complete details on something that was basically part vampire, CERBERUS’s database of SNE files likely wouldn’t. “So, I went to the library.”

“We have a library?”

Gibbs ignored me, though that was genuine news to me, no matter how much it sounded like sarcasm.

“I found some references to it.” He pulled a few pages out from the pile, handed them to me, then moved the book directly in front of me.

The sketch on the book’s yellowed pages was surprisingly accurate, especially when compared to the pictures Sophia had on her laptop. The grey fur, upturned nose like a bat, and strangely long limbs that ended in wicked talons. Even the black eyes with the pinprick pupils were right.

Despite the accurate drawing, the information about the asanbosam in the papers was minimal. Most of it was folklore, nothing about how to kill it.

“This thing eats bullets like they’re cereal, Gibbs. Tell me you have something that can hurt it.”

“You think I’d be here if I didn’t?” He pointed at a line in the book. It was handwritten in faded ink, which made it hard to decipher. Thankfully, Gibbs put me out of my misery. “The asanbosam shows an aversion to halite and Asian allium.”

A proud grin spread across the ex-detective’s face.

“Sorry, Gibbs, I didn’t take Latin or whatever the hell words you just said to me. Am I supposed to know what halite and Asian allium are?”

His grin turned into a frown, one that was accompanied by a groan of disappointment.

“Rock salt and garlic, Deputy. Kids these days, I fuckin’ swear.”

“Sorry, salt and garlic? I’m supposed to season it to death?”

Gibbs reached into the duffel and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was a small shotshell reloader, a bag of driveway salt, a braid of garlic, and a bottle of garlic powder.

“Ask my wife how good my cooking is and she’ll insist I smoke a brisket for you.” Gibbs gestured to the press. “Rock salt and garlic was all I could find, so it’s the best chance you’ve got. I suggest you load some on top of buckshot in three-and-a-half-inch shells. If you hit him at close range, buckshot should push the salt and garlic into the wound channels.”

I didn’t bother asking why CERBERUS didn’t have shells ready-made with garlic and salt. Besides, I figured Gibbs was sick of my charm anyway. It wasn’t difficult to modify shotgun shells, and if the salt and garlic were enough to stun the asanbosam, it could give us the edge we needed.

“Your shotty up front?” I asked. “Wouldn’t hurt for us both to have one.”

That got a laugh out of Gibbs. “You outta your fuckin’ mind, Deputy? I told you the day we met to keep your head down and let Ops deal with this shit. I ain’t looking to get listed KIA, okay? I don’t have that superhero juice pumping through my veins. You got your intel. Hell, I’ll even go find a bar and wait in case you change your mind and want a ride back to base. But my happy ass is staying away from any and all flying, carnivorous, bloodsucking supes.”

Maybe if it had been ten, even twenty years ago, the man standing beside me would have said something different. Even if Gibbs hadn’t been exposed to the World Beneath, he was a cop, and people were dying.

Somewhere, deep down, I think he knew that.

At the same time, I couldn’t blame the aging, out-of-shape agent for doing his part in his own way. Hell, there was a good chance the asanbosam would tear me in half and drink me dry, and that was with my superhuman powers backing me up.

Gibbs was just a man, squishy and vulnerable. Sure, the human body could go through the ringer. God knew mine had over the years. But I’d take a cave full of insurgents over a flying bat monster any day of the week.

“Loud and clear,” I said. “I’ll give you a call in the morning when this is all over, okay?”

He nodded at me, put everything back in their respective bags, and helped me haul the cargo down to my car.

From where the sun was in the sky, I figured I had a few hours left until sundown. Even though the asanbosam could follow my trail in a fraction of the time it took me to walk it, the warped nosferatu seemed to enjoy the darkest hours of night the best, when less people were around to see it or protect one another.

“Damn it, Deputy.” Gibbs let out a long whistle when he saw the Mercedes. “You get a raise or something? Or did you steal Strickland’s car just to add to the list? He always struck me as a Benz guy.”

With my hand to my heart, I feigned an outraged expression. “Me? Steal? Sir, I am a former marshal.”

“Then you gotta be making a shit ton more than me.” He laughed and loaded the duffels into the trunk of the car.

“Just borrowing it from a friend, who I should be getting back to with all this intel before she kills me.”

Gibbs raised an eyebrow. “Friend, huh?”

An image of Sophia flashed in my mind. Tall, blonde, fit, and covered in blood.

Jesus Christ, I’m fucked up.

The woman was gorgeous, there was no doubt about that. I just didn’t know if the whole vampire thing turned me on or off. Or both.

“Just a friend.” I closed the trunk and opened the driver-side door. “She’s not really my type. I don’t think, anyway.”

“If Smitty was here, he’d tell you to send her his way.”

I grinned. “She’d eat him alive.”

We both had a good laugh at that. I thanked Gibbs again, told him I’d see him in the morning, then headed back to Sophia’s safe house.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sophia wasn’t one for small talk, which I appreciated in a person, vampire or not. When I got back to her safe house, she simply nodded at me, then turned back to whatever she was doing on her computer before I got there.

While she brooded in silence, I loaded Winchester Double X Magnum three-and-a-half-inch shells with garlic and rock salt. The process was simple—dump out a few double-ought buckshot pellets and add back in the garlic and salt. Then, seal up the shells.

Sophia walked by the table, wrinkling her nose in displeasure. “Garlic? Is silly idea, old wives’ tale. Waste of time.”

I shrugged. “According to my guy, it’s the only thing that hurts asanbosams—or is it asanbosami? Asanbosamas? Anyway, it’s a longshot but I’ll take any possible edge I can get.”

She sneered. “I light candle. Smell is affront to my nostrils.”

I loaded twenty shells with rock salt, garlic, and lead, sealed them with the reloader, and popped six of them into the Remington. Three more went into the sidesaddle, taking up half the spaces along the side of the firearm. I slotted the remaining shells into a bandolier I found at the bottom of the duffel.

A Kevlar vest was waiting for me in the bag, too. Sure, the asanbosam wasn’t running akimbo with pistols, but I didn’t mind the idea of something durable between my skin and its tongue or claws.

After I was done, I had plenty of rock salt and a bit of garlic left over. Just for shits and giggles I dumped some in the tip of a few fancy-ass hollow point slugs I found loose in the bag, then I sealed them with wax from the candle Sophia lit. Since I didn’t know if the other shells would work I figured I’d keep the slugs in reserve, so they took the last few spots on the sidesaddle.

The question was, would it work?

If I’m desperate enough to use garlic on a vampire, we’re probably fucked anyway.

Just as I was sealing the last slug, someone pounded on the apartment door. I swung the muzzle of the shotgun towards the noise, ready to fill any unexpected company with buckshot and kitchen spices.

“Chill out, Agent Mendoza.” I don’t know when Sophia got up from her chair, but she was suddenly beside me, pushing the barrel down. “It’s not like the asanbosam is going to knock first.”

She had a point.

The deadbolt turned, and a tree of a man stepped inside the apartment. Probably seven-and-a-half-feet tall and as thick as an old red oak, the guy ducked slightly to get through the doorway.

He dressed like a wannabe gangster: full Adidas track suit, stark white sneakers. He looked Eastern European, maybe Russian. Square jaw like Ivan Drago. Probably hit ten times as hard. A combination of overpriced cologne and graveyard dirt followed him into the room.

Another vampire. Great.

The pair of undead conversed in Russian for a few minutes without acknowledging me. The 870 stayed pointed at the ground, but I wasn’t sure enough of the guy to let go of it yet. Not that I had any idea if the shot I made would do anything to an actual vamp, but at least I’d get the satisfaction of making him hurt before he got to me.

“This is Alexei,” Sophia said to me. “He owed me a favor and promised not to tell anyone I was working with a human.”

I nodded at the male vamp. “Tony. Mind if I call you Dolph?”

Dolph muttered some more Russian to Sophia, to which she replied with an exasperated, “Nyet.” Either he didn’t speak English or wasn’t one for my particular brand of charm.

“Lundgren is Swedish, asshole.” His fangs flashed when he spoke to me.

So, it was the latter.

“Really?” I sat down at the breakfast bar, shotgun ready to snap up. “You learn something new every day.”

“Place nice, boys.” Sophia gestured towards the chairs by her computer. “Let’s go, Alexei. I’ll fill you in.”

The vamps went off to do their undead thing, leaving me to my own devices. My phone told me it was basically dusk, which meant it was almost time for us to head out. I did a quick check of my gear. Vest on, bandolier across my chest, 870 in hand, Glock-20 on my hip, Derringer in my waistband.

I didn’t have any blades. When I asked if they had any stakes lying around, just in case, Sophia said they dealt with other vamps by beheading them or lighting them on fire. That didn’t clarify whether or not a stake would work on a vampire—or a vampire off-shoot—but she didn’t care to elaborate.

Alexei and Sophia’s conversation ended, but the male vampire pulled out his phone and started talking to someone in Russian. I thought about taking the time to try some more of the Doc’s meditation crap, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw one of two things.

Isabelle’s body torn in half and the asanbosam drinking her blood from the space where her hips used to be.

And me tearing the beast in half, then reaching up inside it like a puppet and yanking its tongue down through its guts.

Physiologically accurate? Probably not. But there was only one way to find out.

“You ready, Agent Mendoza?” Sophia broke my attempt at manifesting.

She and Dolph—I didn’t give a damn where he was from—were standing by the door. Both of them were wearing long jackets to conceal their weapons. Sophia had a saber hanging at her side, probably the one she asked about the night before, but my working knowledge of swords was admittedly limited.

I noticed Dolph had an AK barrel sticking out from under his coat. Sophia had likely told him how ineffective gunfire had been on the creature, but perhaps 7.62 would have a greater effect than 10mm. Hopefully, dumping a mag in the thing’s chest on autofire would get better results than I had earlier.

“Yeah. Let’s kill this thing.”

* * *

Even after dark, people wandered through the streets of the city like there wasn’t a cursed flying monster feasting on their neighbors. To their credit, they didn’t know. But it made me wonder just how many supernatural threats were out there that all but us lucky few were ignorant of.

Sitting on the tread of an excavator in the vacant lot, duffle beside me concealing the Model 870 and a few other items I thought might be helpful, I realized part of me missed the days when sex traffickers and murderers were the worst things I’d be hunting.

Well, human sex traffickers, anyway.

The sun had disappeared hours ago, and midnight had come and gone. Either the asanbosam wasn’t going to show or it was smart enough to wait, to lurk in the shadows until fewer eyes were around.

If the second option was true, then it was probably watching me. And if it was smart enough to be patient, it likely recognized a trap.

But it had gone on the offensive the night before. It could have escaped when it forced us to veer off the train tracks, but attacked instead. The asanbosam knew it outranked us on the food chain, so I hoped that cockiness would work in our favor.

Patience wasn’t one of my virtues, though. The longer it made me wait, the more I envisioned Isabelle’s severed, lifeless body. Every few minutes, I had to consciously choose to unclench my fist just to let blood flow to my fingers again.

Somewhere amongst the rows of construction vehicles and a few shipping containers, Sophia and Dolph stayed out of sight closer to the half-finished building, ready to back me up when the party started. Sophia would tap her sword against a corrugated steel container every fifteen minutes to let me know they were still there.

Either the asanbosam would see me and attack, or it would follow the trail to my blood, where the vampires were waiting.

We assumed option one, but that didn’t mean I was a huge fan of being bait. We figured I’d get at least a shot off with the shotty and punch a hole in one of the beast’s wings. Without flight, the vamps would drag it inside, where their speed would give them an advantage and the walls and pillars could provide me some form of cover while I filled the asanbosam with lead and rock salt.

When I asked about police showing up when the party started, Dolph simply told me, “Don’t worry. No police.” Couldn’t argue with that.

So, things were all set. But what I wasn’t expecting was to see a familiar homeless man stumble into the lot just before one in the morning.

“Hey!” Topo shouted from twenty yards away. “It’s the t-t-taco man! I thought it was you. W-we neighbors now?”

While he seemed much more enthusiastic about seeing me than the last time we met, the way his words slurred made it sound like he’d found the bottom of at least one bottle already. I thought he’d moved camp, but Lady Luck wasn’t that kind to me.

“Damn it, Topo,” I muttered.

He walked towards me, swerving from left to right in a serpentine pattern only alcohol could map out.

“Topo, you need to get the fuck out of here right now.” I didn’t have time for fake pleasantries.

The words caught the homeless man off-guard. “C’mon, m-m-man. I thought you —”

His words were cut short by the asanbosam’s high-pitched shriek above us. I looked up just in time to see the bat creature descend from the night sky.

“Now. Move!”

Nothing sobers a person quite like the wail of a supernatural predator. I didn’t have time to see how far Topo made it past the apartment building when he saw the flying monstrosity above him. I just hoped he knew of a hole in the fence that way. But I had to push the homeless man from my mind.

In a fluid movement, I drew the 870 from the duffel, aimed it at the asanbosam’s wing, and unleashed a spray of buckshot, garlic, and salt.

The shotgun kicked with a loud report, but I kept my eyes on my target. The asanbosam let out a long screech, one that I hoped meant I wounded it.

Unfortunately, there was no gaping hole in its wing like we hoped. The asanbosam was still airborne and aimed right for me, tongue trailing out the corner of its maw as it closed in for the kill.

In that split second, however, I noticed there were some small holes in the wing I’d hit, each of them trailing a tiny rivulet of stinking blood along the thick, leathery membrane.

Well, something hurt it.

There wasn’t any time to make sense of that before the beast was on me. At the last second, I dropped backward. Stars filled my vision when my head smacked against the compact dirt, but the asanbosam glided over me, just far enough for me to feel the air disturbed above my face as it lashed out with its talons.

I aimed and fired again. Singed hair and gunpowder blended with the creature’s skunk smell as I unloaded a shell into its gut.

This time, it wasn’t just a screech but a bellow that filled the night air, then it tumbled past in a plume of dust. I rolled over and moved to a kneeling position, drawing a bead on the creature for another shot.

But the asanbosam was already on all fours, hunched like a cornered cat, large globules of blood dropping from its abdomen to the dirt. One of its massive wings came up to shield the beast from the blast.

The thing is guarding its gut. Stomach is weak. Got it.

I stood, racked, fired. If the monster sprang into action, I wanted to be close enough to blow off its face before it got to me.

Where the fuck are the vamps? A wave of dread washed over me at the notion of the pair fucking off and insulting me in Russian as they shared a blood bag.

Then, Isabelle’s terrified, lifeless face flashed in my mind.

If that’s the case, I’ll kill the creature myself.

I fired another shot into the asanbosam’s wing. More tiny holes, but not enough damage to keep the beast from flying if it wanted to. With one shell left before I ran dry, I waited, baiting the creature to open its wings and give me the opportunity to end it.

That opportunity didn’t come before a hail of gunfire rained down from behind me. Dolph was cackling as he walked up beside me, the trigger of his AK held down like his life depended on it. All gangster, no discipline. Not that I could blame an immortal apex predator for being cocky.

But it gave Sophia enough time to get behind the asanbosam and slide her saber into its back, right between its wings. She withdrew her blade and flourished it as the asanbosam roared in pain again.

Right before Sophia ate one of the creature’s wings in the face.

The vampire tumbled back a dozen yards, toppling ass over head until she crashed into the side of a bulldozer. Then, the asanbosam turned its sights on me and Dolph.

Beside me, the giant vamp was reloading. Not that the bullets did any good. I looked for an opening on the beast, but its wing shrouded its body, and its elongated limbs were adept at staying covered.

Then the creature bolted towards us, keeping low by running on all fours, wing held in front of it like a ballistic shield. It closed the gap in seconds, much more quickly than its body ought to have moved.

I rolled to the side, speed-loading two more shells on the fly as I came up. Dolph wasn’t as smart, though, and he stood his ground. It was becoming painfully clear—for the vamps, at least—that they were naturally overconfident. I guess having real superhuman powers and being semi-immortal would do that to you, but it seemed pretty dumb from a tactical perspective.

He managed to get a few more ineffective shots off before the monster collided with him. Vampire and asanbosam tumbled in a ball of wings, claws, and gunfire. With them thrashing around like that, there was no way to get a clear shot.

Not until the melee stopped, and the asanbosam stood on top of Dolph, that was. I squeezed the trigger, felt the kick of the shotgun, and swore as the shot only made a few pinpricks in the other massive wing that now shielded the beast from me.

Beyond the wing, Dolph was pinned to the ground. One of the creature’s feet pressed down on his leg, the thumb-like talon puncturing Dolph’s thigh. The other foot was on his chest, claws buried deep through the vampire’s ribs.

And the asanbosam’s hand palmed Dolph’s head like a basketball. With no time to fully reload, I started sliding shells into the shotgun as I fired.

Snikt. Pump the action. Squeeze off a round. Repeat.

Sophia blitzed passed me as I continued the pattern, feeling utterly helpless. No super-soldier strength could match up to this thing, and our best chance at killing it was proving to be completely useless.

I fumbled for more shells as the chiropteran creature started pulling on Dolph’s head. For such a big man, the scream that left his lips was weak, almost mewl-like. Suddenly, he was scared.

His scream was cut short as the asanbosam tore the vampire’s head from his shoulders. Skin stretched, flesh tore, and my enhanced hearing picked up the snap of each tendon, one after the other, and the pop of his vertebrae separating.

No crunch of bone, though. Maybe Dolph was lucky enough that the asanbosam had severed his spine before tearing his head off.

Sophia brought her sword down on the creature again and again, furious screams accompanying each strike. But I didn’t—no, couldn’t move. This beast had taken out a vampire, the same type of monster that had handed me my ass without breaking a sweat, in seconds.

We’re fucked.

Rage guided Sophia’s movements, adding extra weight to each swing but making her form sloppy. Her counters weren’t as clean, which let the asanbosam’s claws through to rake at her arms and stomach. As I fumbled to load another six shells into the 870, I realized I was watching a battle of attrition.

Neither beast nor vampire was looking for a single killing blow; they were hacking at each other until one of them fell. And that wasn’t a fight the vampire would win.

“Down!” I shouted, hoping Sophia would hear me and our enemy didn’t understand English.

The vampire dropped into a crouch. She even swung her sword at the asanbosam’s legs to force the beast to focus on her rather than me.

Before it could bring its claws down on her skull, it was knocked backwards by a spray of pellets and rock salt tearing at its chest.

The asanbosam scrambled to get back to its feet, only to meet Sophia’s blade once more when it finally stood. A wing came around in a desperate attempt to defend from the steel onslaught.

But the finely honed edge of the blade, combined with Sophia’s supernatural strength, cut through the wing like it was a piece of fabric. She made two quick cuts in the shape of an X, leaving four pieces of thick, triangular membrane flapping in the middle of the asanbosam’s wing.

Which made for a shitty shield against my next shot.

The 870 roared as it shredded more of the creature. Dark blood pooled underneath the asanbosam, which couldn’t take flight to escape with its injured wing. But before either of us could wound the warped nosferatu again, it turned and scurried into the darkness of the apartment building.

“Damn it, Alexei,” Sophia swore.

She was in rough shape. The vampire was riddled with gashes, some of them deep and wide enough that I thought I saw bone. Blood—her own and the asanbosam’s—covered her so barely any of her skin was visible.

“You can mourn him later.” I know I sounded like an asshole, but we had a job to finish. “It might not be able to fly right now, but it’s fast. We should move while we still have the advantage.”

She nodded. “Give me moment to heal. I will catch up.”

I reloaded and counted how many shells were left. Eleven, plus the three slugs. And not a scratch on me, which I liked a lot more than the head trauma and tonguing I suffered the night before.

“Got it. Figured we might need it, so there’s some blood in the duffel. O-negative, if that’s to your taste.”

Before waiting for a response, I rushed after the asanbosam. If I was lucky, it was lying in wait to kill me. If I was unlucky—which I usually was—it was already on the top floor, waiting for its wing to heal so it could fly off into the night.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Without the sun, the inside of the half-finished building was dark enough in places that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Some dwellings had been roughed in, completely shutting out the ambient light of the city. Those were the worst: 800 square feet of shadows for an asanbosam to lurk within.

But I had to check them all, even if at a quick pace. The beast was smart, I knew that for sure. Smart enough not to put itself in the open.

The hallways stank of the concentrated skunk smell and, more potent, the asanbosam’s blood. I sent a silent thanks that the tacos I’d eaten earlier were past my stomach, because the scent was nauseating. Even though I assumed it scurried out the other side of the building or up the stairs, my nose was too overwhelmed to eliminate the first floor as an option.

It wasn’t pretty, but I pinched my nose closed and tried listening instead.

Traffic in the distance.

Plastic rustling.

A muffled scream above me.

Mierda.

I took off towards the scream, shotgun ready in case the beast showed itself again. It wasn’t until I got to the roof—or an exposed top floor—that I found the creature standing in the middle of the flat concrete expanse. We weren’t high up by most city standards, but the wind was stronger up here than down on the ground.

“Found you,” I whispered. Since I was downwind from it, the twisted nos didn’t hear or smell me.

Without giving it a chance to turn, I closed the distance between us, firing off three shells in rapid succession. Its back turned from a carpet of gray into a canvas of dark blood and lumpy gore.

But the asanbosam didn’t wail like before. Hell, it barely even budged as the three shots landed.

And then its flesh started regenerating.

New meat grew across its back, stitching together the wounds I’d just inflicted with white, shiny skin devoid of hair. Its wings flexed and quivered in the air the same way they had when it drained Isabelle.

The wing that Sophia had slashed open was slowly sealing the triangles of loose membrane back together to form a solid sheet of skin again.

I sent two more shots downrange, each one tearing small holes in the regenerated wing only to have the damage instantly repaired.

When the beast finally turned to face me, it wasn’t just its black eyes that met mine. Its claws were embedded deep in an emaciated body. Black skin clung to the body’s bones like brittle latex, a pale hue tinging the man’s flesh. The asanbosam’s tongue had punctured Topo’s neck and was pulsating as it sucked out more of his blood.

“Damn it, Topo.” I loaded the last five shells from my bandolier. “You shouldn’t have stopped running, man.”

We stood there, two sets of dead eyes staring at me. One of the clawed hands slid out from Topo’s flank and, using what could have been its index finger, drew a single slit across the dead man’s stomach.

No blood dribbled from the wound, but the gaping tip of the asanbosam’s tongue slithered out of the corpse’s flesh and probed at the air as if searching for more blood. And I swear I saw the monster’s mouth of needles turn upward into a smile.

“Hey, dumbass.” The smile didn’t fade as I took a step forward and aimed the 870 at that ugly face. “Thanks for telling me you’re out of blood.”

Unsurprisingly, a wing flexed and swung forward to protect the supe’s body. At the same time, the asanbosam dropped Topo’s corpse and rushed towards me, fleshy shield up to take the brunt of my next shot.

But I wasn’t just a pretty face. From down in the construction lot, I knew it favored a head-on attack. It was strong, fast, and could tear a body apart.

I also noticed that it couldn’t see past its wing when it was protecting itself from gunfire. Only the impact of another body would cause it to reveal itself, like it had with Dolph.

I fired off another shot to make sure it kept its wing up, then I racked the next. Three shots left until I was down to the sidesaddle.

There’ll only be one chance for this. Don’t fuck it up, Tony.

Just before impact, I flipped the shotgun over in my hands and held it like a baseball bat—or, in this case, a two-handed rattan stick. Just as Tonyo had shown me again and again, with the memory of the searing pain reminding me of his attacks, I sidestepped the asanbosam’s tackle at the last second and swung my improvised weapon down with every ounce of strength I could muster.

A sharp crack echoed through the construction lot, though I was pretty sure it was from the stock of my shotgun and not the beast’s bone. Still, whether it was from surprise or momentum of both, the asanbosam tripped forward, landing on its stomach and pinning the wing it used to shield itself to the ground.

Not giving the beast a chance to recover, I riddled its back with lead and rock salt once again. It screamed and thrashed on the ground, twisting just enough to get a wing up to block my next shot.

I tried to kick its wing out of the way for my last shell, but the warped nosferatu punched across at the barrel with its other wing at the same time I squeezed the trigger. The shot went off but only struck the concrete next to its head. The kick of the shell, combined with the strength of the asanbosam’s attack, nearly knocked the 870 from my hands. If not for my finger getting caught in the trigger guard and snapping at the knuckle, the gun would have gone flying.

You fucked it up, Tony.

The shotgun was still hooked on my broken digit as the asanbosam sprang to its feet and barreled into me. We clashed like two football linemen, only I was built more like a running back and it was built more like… well, like a giant bat monster.

Claws found purchase in my flesh, giving the nosferatu a handhold to shove me backward. It beat its wings once, then again, which was all it needed to push us both over the edge of the building. I gripped onto the grey fur of the monster with one hand, the other trying to get a better hold of my 870. The asanbosam had no problem plummeting towards the ground, though. Not when it had a Mendoza-sized cushion under it.

We hit the dirt—or, rather, I hit the dirt and the nos hit me—and everything went black. When my vision returned, I was staring up at a grinning mouthful of fangs and the shotgun was no longer in my hand. Oxygen wasn’t returning to my lungs fast enough for my liking.

I barely even realized one of the asanbosam’s feet had grabbed my ankle. Pain burned up my leg from the sharp claws cutting deep enough to scrape against bone.

Think nails on a chalkboard are bad? Try asanbosam claws sliding down your shin bone.

Then the beast was straddling me, its feet and hands pinning me down in an all-too familiar rendition of the previous night’s events.

“Sophia?” I tried to call out while it gazed at me with its tiny pinprick pupils. “Now would be a good time for you to swoop in and save the day again.”

Just like the last time, its tongue sloshed out of its mouth and landed on my chest. It dragged it back and forth, frustrated that the barbs couldn’t cut kevlar as well as skin. Eventually, the probing tip of its tongue found its way to my arm and realized it could feast there.

Once it raked across my bicep, the tongue dug into my skin and found a vein. I kicked and tried to twist my body, to do anything to get some sort of purchase against the asanbosam’s hold, but it was too strong.

Blood pumped through its tongue as the ravenous monster fed, enough that I felt lightheaded. Then, it did its whole wing shuddering thing again.

“That’s fucking gross.” Strickland didn’t pay me enough to be violated by a magic-obsessed nosferatu.

Just when I thought it was going to completely empty my veins, the familiar roar of igniting gunpowder cut through the air. The asanbosam didn’t bellow this time; it squealed like a stuck pig.

The beast let go of me and stood up. It spun in circles, hands and lethal claws raking at its back to scratch a deadly itch. Talons tore through flesh in a betrayal of spurting gore. Whines not unlike a dog’s filled the air as a fruitless protest.

Whatever the hell was in the asanbosam’s back, it wanted it out more than it wanted its own body intact.

I looked over to where the gunshot came from, expecting to see Sophia there. I even had a witty line ready about how much better guns are than swords.

What I wasn’t expecting was Gibbs standing there, the Model 870 he’d brought for me in his trembling hands. Somehow, the ex-detective had hurt the asanbosam in ways neither Sophia nor I could.

Either Gibbs was a secret wizard or…

The slugs.

Only five shells remained in the shotgun’s sidesaddle, and the only one missing was one of the slugs.

“Gibbs, you beautiful son of a bitch.” He somehow managed a grin, but I could tell the old man was barely holding it together. “Another!”

The asanbosam was still desperately trying to heal, so I drew my Glock-20 and gave it a few more things to worry about in the form of half a dozen rounds. They didn’t do much damage, but I figured any sort of distraction would buy Gibbs an extra second.

When the 870 roared again, the shot obliterated one of the asanbosam’s bony knees. Its shin and foot fell to the dirt, separate from the rest of its body. On its three remaining limbs, the beast tried to scurry away as quickly as it could, wings spread to take to the air.

“Not this time,” I growled.

With the amount of blood I’d lost and who knows how many broken bones, I wasn’t the fastest experimental CERBERUS agent in the West, but I still had enough juice to catch up to a three-legged, mortally wounded monster. Just as the asanbosam started to get airborne, I grabbed onto the edge of the closest wing and dug my heels into the dirt.

Whether the beast was so surprised by the action or wounded enough from the garlic coursing through its veins, it couldn’t get enough air under the other wing to shake me off or go any higher.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said through gritted teeth.

A blur of motion cut through the air from the third floor of the apartment building and landed on top of an excavator arm. Sophia paused on her perch for just a moment to take in the situation before launching through the air and grabbing hold of the other giant wing. Her momentum and the sudden added weight brought the asanbosam crashing to the dusty ground.

The vampire and I made brief eye contact, enough for two monsters to confirm what the other was doing. Each of us pulled on our respective wing with everything we had. The asanbosam tried in vain to reach either of us with its claws, but its wings were longer than its arms or its remaining leg.

Eventually, the fibers of the asanbosam’s muscles yielded and both wings tore away from the beast’s shoulders. The black ichor that spurted out from the two new wounds could only be described as fountains.

Pathetic mewling filled the air, the only way the asanbosam could plead for its life. Claws tore at the ground, black blood coated its gray fur, and its pinprick pupils had widened as it realized its end was imminent.

Sophia plunged her saber through the asanbosam’s remaining leg and drove the tip deep into the earth.

“You, other flesh bag. Give me gun.” She held her hand out to Gibbs, who had come closer to the doomed vamp creature than I thought he would have.

“Not too crude for you?” I gave her the biggest shit-eating grin I could muster.

Part of me—a big part—wanted to be the one to kill the beast. The idea of tearing its tongue out was still very appealing. But I didn’t think I was in any place to argue with a shotgun-toting vampire. Just the thought of it made my chest hurt where she’d run me through with her blade.

“Alexei would approve.” Her tone was uncaring, but the sentiment was not. We’d both lost friends to this thing.

I nodded. The asanbosam still tried to drag itself away, too panicked to think of removing the blade. Whatever magic it had used to transform itself, it was more beast than vamp at this point, an animal whose brain favored fear over logic when its life was in danger.

As it pulled forward, Sophia’s saber parted its remaining leg like the Red Sea. The blade’s fine edge cleanly split thigh and calf. If the asanbosam had another minute or two, it might have had the chance to pull the sword through its foot and free itself.

Sophia didn’t give it that chance, though. She planted a boot between where the twisted nosferatu’s wings used to be and shoved the shotgun—with the last slug chambered—into the blood-matted fur of the asanbosam’s neck.

When she pulled the trigger, the blast obliterated the beast’s airway and spine, and its ugly, bat-like head fell limp against its chest.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“So… are you going to fill me in on that?” Gibbs, hand hovering near his sidearm, nodded at Sophia, who was guzzling back another bag of blood. I thought O-negative would’ve been some sort of vintage, but it appeared that fighting a magically transformed vampire offshoot worked up an appetite.

I shook my head. “No, and we’re not going to mention it to Strickland, either.”

“Don’t want to dig a deeper hole, huh?”

“Probably hit bedrock with him.”

We hoisted a tarp into the back of Gibbs’s SUV. Strickland was going to give me hell, but I figured bringing him an asanbosam head—or, more specifically, to Perez for dissection—might soften the blow.

After finishing her blood and making a quick call, Sophia told us her people were already on their way to dispose of the rest of the cursed nos and Alexei’s corpse. She looked around as if to make sure none of them had arrived. She couldn’t be caught speaking with humans, after all.

“You…were not quite useless, Agent Mendoza.” It was about as much a compliment as I would get from her. “You either, other flesh bag.”

Gibbs stumbled through a string of incoherent noises, unsure if he’d been complimented or put on the menu.

“If it wasn’t for Agent Flesh Bag here, I’d be dead,” I noted.

Sophia shrugged noncommittally. “We will see if that is good or bad thing, eh?”

“We sure will.” I offered my hand out towards her. After staring at it for a moment, she shook it.

“I suppose I owe you, Agent Mendoza.” She released my hand. “Do not misunderstand. We are not friends. But I will not try to kill you next time I see you.”

My shoulder still throbbed from where she had stabbed me, a reminder of being pinned to the wall of the asanbosam’s lair. Her eyes didn’t reveal any humor behind her words, though. They made me wonder how different our first encounter would have been if Sophia hadn’t been hunting some other quarry.

Without another word, the vampire turned and disappeared into the shadows of the early morning. The eastern horizon was already turning a brighter shade of purple than the dark of the night sky. Gibbs gave me one final look before he shook his head, sighed, and told me to load up into the SUV.

Silence filled the cabin as we left Austin, and I even caught a good forty minutes of sleep before a pothole on I-35 interrupted the bizarre dream I was having about Sophia, a firing range, and mint ice cream.

“You’re drooling,” Gibbs said without turning his eyes from the road.

I wiped the corner of my mouth. “Weird dream.”

Gibbs didn’t say anything, focused on the road.

Just get it over with. I knew what I needed to say, but fuck it if I was good at being sentimental.

“You saved my life,” I finally forced out. Gibbs cocked his eyebrow. “I know we’re on the same side and all that, but you came back to face a cursed vampire with me. And if you hadn’t, that fucker would have drained me.”

“If we’re being technical, it was a cursed nosferatu, not a vampire.”

Gibbs obviously wasn’t one to accept praise—maybe twenty years ago when he was working his way to detective, but not now. Still, the man I met six months before had told me to keep my head down and ignore the real monsters. Gibbs had paid his dues and wasn’t the type to risk his life against SNEs that could easily take down Class 2 entities.

Despite all that, he’d shown up. Maybe some liquid courage put him up to it or some latent paternal instinct made him look out for the fuck-ups he worked with.

Hell, maybe he’s just more of a hero than he gives himself credit for.

“You’re right, a freaky, flying, long-tongued nosferatu that was killed by buckshot soaked in garlic.” I shook my head. “Our lives are batshit crazy, aren’t they?”

Gibbs chuckled and nodded. “Yours more than mine, Deputy.”

He was right. Despite the trauma the asanbosam inflicted on my body—from its claws and tongue, from using me as a human surfboard, and from slamming my car off the road the other night—I was somehow still in one piece.

That didn’t mean my wounds didn’t hurt. Hell, it felt like every inch of me had been torn apart and was putting itself back together.

But any other human would have died. Most wouldn’t have survived being impaled by Sophia’s blade, even if she’d intentionally missed my heart and lungs.

It was a strange feeling: healing so quickly that I felt invincible, but coming so close to death from fighting a creature that most people didn’t think existed. The more I thought about it all, the more a pain in the back of my brain developed. Thinking about existential problems usually meant it was time for a drink.

By the time we got back to Camp Stanley, the sun was just peeking above the horizon. Most people at CERBERUS HQ would just be starting their day, but my bunk was calling my name.

“Think Strickland will let me sleep for a week before going back to Scooby duty?” I asked Gibbs when he parked in the agency’s garage.

“You’ll be lucky if the director doesn’t crucify you and hang you up on the wall as an example of what happens to people who go behind his back.”

“I should probably go see him, huh?”

Gibbs opened the back of the vehicle and gestured at the tarp-wrapped head. “You sure as shit ain’t leaving this thing here.”

As if on cue, Smitty shouted from across the garage bay. “Mendoza. Strickland’s office, yesterday.”

“He in a good mood?”

Smitty shook his head. “I don’t talk to dead men.”

As the elevator descended to SL-1, I couldn’t help but wonder if I should’ve been more scared of the asanbosam or Strickland’s wrath when I debriefed him on my insubordination. The severed head at my feet was my only hope for a peace offering.

When the elevator doors opened, I sighed, picked up the tarp like it was a shopping bag, and trudged towards Stricklands office. I knocked once on the maroon door and prepared to wait the obligatory minute before he answered.

Maybe he’ll really make me stew out here. I adjusted my stance in case Strickland made me wait.

“Enter.” Only a second had passed. That was a new record.

Shit. He must be really pissed.

Insubordination wasn’t something to be proud of. If I’d pulled the same shit overseas, I’d have been looking at an Article 15, possibly a court martial, and definitely a reduction in rank. Sure, they encouraged independent thinking combined with violence of action in special operations, but that only got you so much leeway in the field. And Strickland didn’t strike me as the type to accept a “blame it on my experimental super-soldier serum” excuse.

Not that I needed an excuse, though. Hell, I’d killed a fucking asanbosam. What else was I there for? What was CERBERUS supposed to be doing if not that?

Strickland wasn’t jotting notes or reading reports when I entered his office. No, he was looking right at me, fury burning from behind those Stevie Wonder shades. The hairs on my arms and neck stood on end as soon as I entered the room, the same way they did when the asanbosam was near. I never took Strickland as the dangerous type, but my instincts were telling me he wasn’t someone to truly fuck with.

“Sit.”

I complied, setting the asanbosam head next to me. The director was sitting stalk-straight, his fingers laced together on the desk in front of him.

“Tell me, Mendoza, do I look like a fucking idiot?”

The question, I had to admit, took me by surprise. “No, sir.”

Although the sunglasses don’t help.

“Do I look like a pushover?”

I couldn’t say he did. “No, sir.”

“Then walk me through the series of dumbfuck choices you had to make to end up working with fucking vampires in fucking Austin. Because I seem to clearly recall telling you to drop the case and stay away from the vamps.”

My first instinct was to dive into a retelling of what happened and hope he saw why I couldn’t just pull an Elsa and let it go. But that felt like admitting I had done something wrong… and I hadn’t.

“Sir, why am I here?”

The question took Strickland by surprise. “Excuse me?”

“I asked why I’m here.” It was too late not to stand my ground.

“Are you trying to get—”

“We don’t just ‘investigate,’ we intervene. That’s what you said to me on my first day on base.” I stood and hefted the tarp onto Strickland’s desk, at least making sure not to disturb or cover any files. When I unwrapped the plastic, the asanbosam was staring right at the director with its glazed, dead eyes. “This SNE was killing people in Austin, sir. So that’s what I did: I intervened.”

For the first time since I’d met him, Strickland was at a loss for words. He stared at the severed head, the jagged fangs sticking out over its lips, the unseeing white dots in eyes that were more gray than black ever since its head had been so delicately removed.

Then, he smiled. It looked weird as hell on his face.

I blinked, and the smile disappeared. Back to dour ol’ Strickland.

“While the results are satisfactory, your method was unacceptable.” I wasn’t interested in a pissing contest with the director, but it was clear he had to be top dog. Problem was, I’d felt the same ever since Perez’s serum had changed me.

“I know, sir,” I said with a nod.

“Captain Perez will be happy with this sample. But I have a shitshow to deal with now. The Austin coven will kick up a fuss about humans messing with vampire business. We’ll need to make sure they didn’t leave any trace of the SNE behind. We’re down an agency vehicle. Who knows how many people saw your encounters with this creature, so Comms will have to scrub any social posts or photos that might surface.”

Strickland could go on and on, and he would have been right about it all.

“I assume this means I’m back on Scooby duty?” I asked when the director stopped to inhale.

He chuckled humorlessly. “Until I think of something else. Your blood is property of the U.S. government, so I can’t rightfully send you home or discharge you. And you did kill whatever this thing is.”

“An asanbosam,” I clarified. “There’s no file on it, but Gibbs found some information in the library.”

“Then make one. Create an entry and deliver this thing to the Doc.” He sniffed the air. “After you clean yourself up.”

Even though it seemed Lady Luck was finally on my side, I had one more thing to ask. “Sir, one of the victims was family. I’d like permission to attend the funeral.”

Strickland pursed his lips as he considered the request. Then, he nodded, grabbed one of the folders, and started reading its contents. A few moments of silence passed before he looked up at me again.

“What are you still doing here? Get out of my office before I get creative with my reprimands.”

* * *

After a long, hot shower and an even longer stop in my bunk, I managed to find the mythical library Gibbs told me about. It was a tad offensive that no one had shown me the room before, but I wasn’t one to hold grudges. Sometimes.

The room was small, barely bigger than Perez’s lab, and filled with metal shelves. Books lined the perimeter of the room, as well as the dozen or so rows of bookshelves that stood in front of me. It required biometric access just to get in and, strangest of all, was located on Sub-level 2… behind the blast doors and twin Vulcan cannons that would shred anyone who didn’t belong down there.

“They don’t mess around with overdue books.”

Luckily for me, Gibbs hadn’t taken the time to put the other books he’d found on the asanbosam back before packing up and bringing me supplies. And it seemed CERBERUS didn’t make room in the budget for a librarian, so the pile of old, leather-bound tomes of handwritten pages was still on one of the two tables in the room.

A quick skim through a few of the books revealed some decent sketches of the creature, depictions of asanbosam spottings, theories on how they came to be—though I already knew that, thanks to Sophia—and how they behaved. My cursory glances didn’t reveal anything like the weaknesses Gibbs had found in the other book, but there were five different texts to go through.

I stacked them all in a pile, fished a crumpled piece of paper from a trash bin next to the desk, and left a note detailing who I was and what books I was taking. A few minutes later, I was back through the blast door and in the elevator.

The office I shared with Gibbs was just as depressing as I’d left it, but I wasn’t dreading booting up my PC like usual. Yeah, I was in for a lifetime of Scooby duty, if Strickland was feeling generous, which meant Anthony Mendoza and xxSpookyGurlxx would become one and the same.

But I didn’t have to subject myself to fake videos and cringy social accounts when my computer loaded. Instead, I pulled open the near-infinite list of procedures and policies and opened the one titled Creating a new entry for previously unrecorded SNEs, which just rolled off the tongue like poetry.

Though there wasn’t a name attached to the instructions, I assumed it was Strickland who had drafted each word in every policy document. And I had to admit, adding a new SNE into the database was a lot less tedious than I thought.

Asanbosam

Classification: Class Unknown - Vampiric

Origin: Nosferatu, altered through ritual magic (ritual unknown)

Threat Level: Extremely dangerous

Known Behavioral Patterns: Kills for food, but will hunt down entire bloodlines or associates if threatened.

Powers/Abilities: Flight. Superhuman speed, endurance, and strength. Able to rapidly regenerate upon consuming blood.

Situational Protocol: SNE can kill vampires with ease. CERBERUS agents should maintain observation-only status until intervention from Ops or converted SNE-D is possible. Weaknesses include rock salt, garlic, fire, and decapitation. Field encounter has shown that garlic prevents regeneration, at least temporarily.

Class Unknown stared at me like a blind date with a lazy eye. There was nothing in the manual about determining SNE classification. There wasn’t even a Strickland-approved doc in the folder that mentioned it.

A quick scan through the entries for vampires, nosferatu, and ghouls—a lower order of vamps—revealed the standard bloodsucker was Class 2.

The memory of the asanbosam tearing off Alexei’s head flashed through my mind.

“Class 3 it is, then.” I changed the entry and figured it would be years and I’d be dead before anyone thought to question me about it, anyway.

The entry wasn’t finished, though. I figured I could sift through the books Gibbs set aside and add any other info from the handwritten notes. Before I could read the first word, someone knocked on the door. Cole peeked into the office, with Smitty and Gibbs behind him in the hall.

“Hey, Mendoza.”

“Cole. How was the sasquatch?”

That got a laugh. “Turns out it was a North American troll, looking for asylum. Ops transported him in a cage in the back of a moving truck, and he still stank up the cab the whole way back to the air base. Heard you had a pretty exciting couple days. Want to come grab a beer or five while Strickland doesn’t have you shackled to that desk? I wanna hear what happened.”

The idea of an ice-cold beer was more tempting than free breakfast tacos after an all-night bender. Without thinking, I began to close the dusty tome in front of me.

Then, I hesitated.

God damn it, Mendoza. Are you really choosing the responsible option right now?

“Sorry, man, going to have to fill you in later. Forced servitude will be the least of my worries if I don’t get this done.” I gestured at the computer. “Then, I plan on sleeping for a few days.”

Cole looked at me like I was some kind of unknown SNE—which, admittedly, I kind of was. “Look at our little Deputy growing up. Next time, then, if Daddy lets you.”

I could hear the laughs of the three CERBERUS agents even after Cole closed the door.

Sure, I didn’t want to venture any further onto Strickland’s bad side, as much out of respect for my CO as a desire to not have the rest of my life with CERBERUS be miserable. But there was something else.

The asanbosam was the third SNE I’d hunted since I joined this outfit, and the second that, by all rights, should have ended me. If Sophia hadn’t been there to save me and if Gibbs hadn’t discovered a way to kill the creature, Strickland would’ve been signing off on Perez’s request to study my corpse.

I couldn’t let that happen to another agent. The next time someone encountered an asanbosam, they’d know how to handle it.

As for me, I had research of my own to do. Intel had made the difference between life and death for me tonight, and I had tons of it sitting all around me.

I glanced around, then I reached out and chose a volume at random from the stack. When the next mission came in, I’d be prepared to outsmart and outmaneuver the enemy.

After closing out the file entry on the asanbosam, I started reading the manual I’d grabbed. A few pages in I had an epiphany, and I snatched a scratch pad and a pencil from nearby.

-Note: Ask the Doc to whip up some armor-piercing explosive incendiary acidic badass death-dealing ammunition.

After reading the note twice, I nodded to myself.

Next time, motherfuckers—I’ll be ready.

EPILOGUE

Top Secret

MEMORANDUM FOR [REDACTED]

Re: Austin Incident

The subject continues to struggle with controlling the side effects of SNE-SH 167b. Captain Perez will continue to monitor for changes in dominance and [REDACTED].

Austin incident has been contained and any witnesses have been [REDACTED]. Online evidence has been scrubbed. Containment appears successful.

Though the subject successfully dealt with a previously undocumented SNE, subject’s existence is now known to [REDACTED] coven. Operations in Austin will be under increased scrutiny from supernatural factions. We should assume this includes [REDACTED].

Conversely, knowledge of SNE-SH 167b may provide us with leverage when dealing with supernatural factions.

Additional studies are needed to determine the full potential of SNE-SH 167b. Evidence indicates greater promise than previous iterations of the serum.

Will continue to monitor side effects experienced by subject while exposing him to greater stressors in the form of [REDACTED]. More extensive reporting will follow, based on subject’s performance during further field testing under battlefield conditions.

Signed,

[REDACTED]

Director, CERBERUS

* * *

This concludes Breach of Magic, Book Two of The CERBERUS Paranormal Detective Series. But never fear, Agent Mendoza will soon return in Book 3, Felony Magic…

Visit my website at https://MDMassey.com and subscribe to my newsletter to be among the first to know when a new Druidverse novel drops. When you do, you’ll receive two free eBooks, just for subscribing!

A GLOSSARY OF TERMS…

…some real, some fictional. Or are they?

GLOSSARY:

ACUs - Army Combat Uniform.

BDUs - Battle Dress Uniform, the work uniform of the U.S. Army, replaced by the ACU (Army Combat Uniform) in the mid-2000s.

Camp Stanley (Texas) - A secure U.S. Army installation outside of San Antonio, Texas. Camp Stanley is known to have a CIA presence on-site.

C-130 - A four-engine turboprop military plane in use as a troop and freight transport aircraft since the mid-1950s.

Carollo - Refers to Silvestro Carollo, a.k.a. "Silver Dollar Sam", former mob boss of the New Orleans crime family.

C.E.R.B.E.R.U.S. - “Clandestine Enforcement and Reconnaissance Bureau, Extranormal Rampart Division of the United States” a.k.a. CERBERUS.

Chief Deputy - The senior U.S. marshal appointed to a leadership position for a specific geographical area of the United States.

Chinook - A heavy lift helicopter used by Western military forces.

C.I. - Confidential informant.

CIA - Central Intelligence Agency.

COMSEC - Communications security.

Con - Convicted criminal, generally used for criminals currently in the criminal justice system. “Ex-con” is often used to refer to a reformed criminal who has paid their debt to society.

CTE - Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

D.A. - District attorney, a prosecuting attorney at the local level. At the federal level prosecutors are known as U.S. Attorneys. Assistant U.S. Attorneys do most of the work and are referred to as “A-U-S-As” within the courts.

Deputy Director - Second in command over the entire U.S. Marshals Service, answering only to the Director in chain of command.

D.I.C. - Deputy in charge. Pronounced “dick,” but never in front of the DIC.

Deputy Marshal - Field agent working for the Federal Marshals Service (Note: “Marshals” is not spelled in the possessive form).

DHS - Department of Homeland Security.

DX - “Direct exchange (of damaged equipment).” The process soldiers go through when exchanging gear that is no longer serviceable for new issue. Also used as a slang term for retiring something or putting it out to pasture.

E-4, E-5, etc - Enlisted ranks in the military. Below E-4 are junior enlisted, E-5 and above are non-commissioned officers, or NCOs.

Fairfax County - A county in Virginia near Washington, D.C. where many employees of the federal government live.

Facility, The - “The Facility” refers to the secret underground facility, located underneath Camp Stanley outside San Antonio, Texas, where CERBERUS is headquartered.

Farm, The - “The Farm” refers to the covert CIA training facility at Camp Peary.

Fire team - A subunit of the Army infantry squad and Marine Corps rifle squads. Fire teams are generally considered to be the smallest unit of organization in combat arms units. Traditionally, a fire team has team leader, a rifleman, a heavy machine gunner and a grenadier. In the modern Army Infantry, a fire team has two riflemen (one is the team leader), a squad automatic rifleman (carrying an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon or a M240 medium machine gun) and a grenadier.

FLETC - Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, where all federal agents and federal law enforcement officers go for training. (Note: Some agencies, such as the CIA, have their own training facilities where advanced, post-FLETC training is conducted.)

FNG - “Fucking new guy.”

Glynco - Glynco, Georgia, where the headquarters for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) is located.

GS - “General schedule.” The government employee pay grade system. GS-4 and below are usually interns and the like, with GS-5 through GS-12 being pay grades for admin, technical workers, and middle-management. GS-13 through GS-15 are reserved for the highest-paid technical and management positions.

HPD - Houston Police Department.

HUMINT - Human intelligence.

Ifrit - A demonic type of djinn from Islamic mythology, said to be formed from smoke and fire. Ifriti are often considered to be evil in nature and are said to originally be from the underworld. Also spelled “efreet,” “afrit,” and “afreet.”

JBSA - Joint Base San Antonio, a United States military facility located in San Antonio, Texas.

Langley - Metonym for the CIA headquarters.

LEO - Law enforcement officer, a catch-all acronym that refers to all licensed officers of the law, whether they work for local, state, or federal agencies.

Loadout - Gear, weapons, and ammunition carried by a soldier into battle. The loadout is always specifically selected for the purposes of facilitating completion of the mission at hand. Sometimes also known as “kit.”

LT - Lieutenant, generally referring to a junior officer (usually a “butter bar,” or 2nd lieutenant) acting as a platoon leader in Army combat units.

LZ - “Landing zone,” a military term referring to the area where a unit deployed on a field mission would return in order to be extracted from a hot zone.

MOLLE - Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment, which refers to the backpacks, vests, and other gear today’s armed forces use to pack and carry their mission loadout.

MP - Military police, as far as the Army is concerned. In CERBERUS nomenclature, “magic practitioner.”

NCO - Non-commissioned officer. NCOs fulfill leadership positions among the enlisted ranks in the U.S. military.

NDA - Nondisclosure agreement.

O-3, O-4, etc. - Officer pay grades in the military, often used synonymously with rank, although they aren’t always the same. In the Army, O-1 and O-2 are lieutenant pay grades, O-3 is captain, O-4 major, O-5 & O-6 lieutenant colonel and colonel, and O-7 to O-10 are general pay grades.

ODA - Operational Detachment A-team, a 12-man team of Special Forces soldiers. A Special Forces company consists of six SFODAs, each specializing in a different mission-set.

OPR - Refers to the Office of Professional Responsibility, USMS’s version of an internal affairs department.

Perp - Perpetrator, one who is known to have committed a crime. (Note: “Perp” and “con” are only interchangeable after a convicted criminal has gone to prison.)

REMF - “Rear echelon mother fucker.” Refers to those military personnel who never see frontline action. Usually considered to be a derogatory term.

Renfield - A human thrall willingly working in league with a vampire.

Scooby duty - Desk work, bullshit admin assignments given to CERBERUS agents as punishment.

SH - Supernatural human.

SH-MP - Supernatural human, magic practitioner.

SH-Psy - Supernatural human, psychic.

SH-TK - Supernatural human, telekinetic.

SNE - Supernatural entity.

SNE-SH 167b - The most recent and stable version of “the serum.”

SNE-D - Supernatural entity, deity.

SNE-F - Supernatural entity, fae.

SNE-__-MU - Supernatural entity, (race/species), magic user designation.

SNE-Th - Supernatural entity, therianthrope.

SNE-VH - Supernatural entity, vampire, higher.

SNE-VN - Supernatural entity, vampire, nosferatu.

SOP - “Standard operating procedure.”

Special Forces - Refers to the Army Special Forces, a.k.a. “The Green Berets.”

Special operations - A catch-all phrase for all the unconventional warfare units from each of the branches of the United States armed forces, including units such as the Pararescue (USAF), Special Forces (U.S. Army), Force Recon (U.S. Marines), MSRT (USCG), and SEALs (U.S. Navy).

Squad - The second smallest unit of organization in the Army and Marine Corps. Squads generally consist of four to 10 soldiers, and platoons consist of 16 to 44 soldiers divided into three or four squads. In the Army there are typically three or four platoons per company, four to six companies in a battalion, two to five battalions in a brigade, and three or more brigades in a division.

Suspect - One who is suspected to have committed a crime.

USMS - United States Marshals Service.