“How do you know my name?” I asked, noting that she was attractive and maybe three or four years older than I.
“I’d be a pretty poor journalist if I couldn’t get that much,” she said, a little snippy, but still struggling with her fear of me.
Taking another bite, I considered. Grim had pretty much swept the room with our expanded senses as soon as she sat down. Nothing and nobody was paying attention other than the cursing photographer who was now trying to fix his cell phone.
“What do you want?” I asked, finishing the burger with a final bite.
“I would like to interview you,” she said, watching as I picked up burger number two. I could just about see the moment she realized how much food was piled in front of me. Curiosity replaced some of the fear.
“About what? I’m a pretty boring guy,” I said, pausing in my burger frenzy to take a big slurp of shake. I drank straight from the glass, the straw too slow for my hunger.
Her eyes bugged a bit, then her mouth twitched a little, almost like she was going to smile. She pointed at her own upper lip. “You’ve got a little… yeah, right there,” she said as I wiped away the shake mustache.
“Really, Mr. Gordon, you’re the least boring guy in the city. At least, the police think so. They’ve brought you in on at least five occasions in the last two months. Everything from a supposed gas leak in an apartment building to today’s homicide scene in the Park. And the commissioner seems to hang on your every word. What was that you drew today that had all their attention? And what did you do behind that screen?”
“I’m sorry? Who are you?” I asked.
“Oh, sorry. Brystol… Brystol Chatterjee,” she said. After a moment, she stuck her hand out for a shake. It trembled ever so slightly.
I shook it, feeling a frown on my face. “And you’re a reporter, Brystol? For who?”
“I’m freelance. I sell to many of the city’s daily papers and some Internet sites,” she said, pulling her hand back with a jerk. “I have a blog site, too. It’s called the Cryptic News site.”
“And your boyfriend at the counter? Who does he work for?”
“Barry? Oh, he’s not my boyfriend, he’s my photographer,” she said, following my glance toward the counter where Barry was doing everything but banging his phone on the counter.
“So what stories are you working on that involve me?” I asked, switching to some cheese fries.
“Several. But the immediate one is about demons… and gateways to Hell,” she said, eyes watching my face intently.
“Demons?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
She smiled a sly little smile. She didn’t smell as afraid, and I could almost see her mind shifting to tackle the conversation.
“Mr. Gordon,” she started, but I held up a hand.
“Chris. My grandfather is Mr. Gordon. I’m just Chris,” I said, succeeding at surprising her.
“Ookay. Chris, did you know that homicides are up almost forty-three percent this year? That most of the murders in the city are unrelated to drugs or normal crime? Random murders involving friends and family members without much in the way of motive. Then there are those five cases that I mentioned. Like the apartment buildings where violence broke out on a mass scale among the residents. Churches are having a sudden unexplained upswing in attendance, and the clergy are getting ridiculous amounts of calls and questions about the Devil and his demons. And it’s happening all across the country; in fact, across the world.”
“Nope,” I answered, slurping more shake. “Didn’t know that.”
Well, I knew some of it, but the part about church attendance climbing was news to me. Maybe some deep instinct was driving humans to seek the protection of the church.
“I don’t believe you, Mr… er… Chris,” she said. “I think the authorities call you in to fight the demons and close the gates to Hell.”
Okay, there it was. She just dropped it out like I was politician with my hand in the public cookie jar or cheating on my wife with taxpayer-funded prostitutes.
“So let me get this straight. You’re investigating a statistical upswing in demonic activity, and you have me pegged as some kind of spiritual consultant for the City? Who tracks demon statistics anyway? What papers are buying these kind of stories? Oh, wait, I get it. Listen, did you write that article about Bigfoot fathering children all across the Bronx? That was a beauty,” I said.
She frowned, now smelling of anger, and leaned forward. “I don’t write that crap. My stories have substance. You’re just deflecting. I nailed it and you’re trying to make
me
out to be crazy.”
Damn. She was rapidly becoming a major pain in my ass. One I was having trouble removing.
I frowned and waved my hand a little threateningly in her direction. The fact that I was holding a cheese fry might have diminished my fearsome demeanor.
“Then if you think I’m some kind of demon hunter, why are you so afraid of me? Why were you shaking when you sat down?”
She looked at the cheese fry, an incredulous look crossing her face, before frowning. Then she pulled back a bit from her aggressive lean. She remembered something, getting that funny look of recall that we all have when we’re pulling memories.
“I wrote a story last month about a kidnapping in Owl Head Park in Brooklyn. A military team took a little girl and died doing it. They were all highly trained killers, some equipped with tech straight out of the movies… armored suits and stuff. They were destroyed to the last man. There was like almost twenty of them and they almost failed because of just one unarmed man and his… wolf. You’re that man.”
Shit. She had just stepped up to a searing pain in my posterior.
“Miss Chatterjee, I think we’re done here. You’ve got some interesting angles for stories that inquiring minds might believe if they were high and hallucinating. For some reason, you’ve chosen to involve me in your make-believe world. But anyone can make up stories. It’s the proof that’s hard to come by. I’m just an ex-cop who consults with my old employer from time to time.”
She raised both eyebrows. “You were a cop for all of maybe nine months. Most of that was probationary training. I don’t know a single law enforcement agency that considers that to be such a vast wealth of experience that the police commissioner would seek you out. And as far as proof, I don’t really need any for myself. You see,
Chris,
I was there that day in the park. I was thirty feet away when those agents killed that little girl’s bodyguards and I was right there at ground zero when
you
and whatever that beast is wiped those kidnappers out. I still have the clothes that I wore that day. You must know that blood doesn’t come out of clothes all that well. I don’t know what you are, but I’d be the biggest idiot in the world not to be afraid of you,” she said, sitting back and crossing her hands in front of her on the table top. Her body language had gone from aggressive to resigned. She looked up at me, afraid, but steady.
I’m kinda slow on the uptake sometimes. Lydia says I have the emotional intelligence of a cockroach. I think she’s being a little hurtful, but I do admit I’m not all that much of a Sherlock for figuring out human emotions. It finally came to me.
“You think I’m going to hurt you? To… to kill you?” I asked suddenly, my forward motion making her jump a little. Grim noted that the bearded guy had his hand in the pocket of his field jacket and was twitching as he watched us like he was a primed grenade.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” I asked, starting to get angry myself. “Why the hell would you think that? And why would you come here and brace me down with that load of crap, thinking I was going to… well, thinking what you were thinking? Are you insane?”
“I saw you kill those people. Why wouldn’t you kill me? But Barry is recording this so the world will know what you are,” she hissed.
I studied her for a moment, taking another bit of my last burger. Hell if I was gonna waste it.
“And just what am I, Miss Chatterjee?” I asked.
“I think you are a demon yourself… or at least part demon,” she said, defiant.
I was too shocked to speak, but lucky for me, female laughter approached us from behind my shoulder. We both turned to look. So did most of the restaurant. A stunning blonde headed our way, weaving gracefully between tables. Tall, curvy, and beautiful, she was dressed in black leggings with a blue blouse and a brown leather designer jacket. Blue high heels that matched her blouse carried her effortlessly past the diners. Her green eyes were focused on us, and she was laughing in delight. Arriving at our booth, she shoved my shoulder lightly, making me scoot over. She slid in next to me and immediately stole one of my cheese fries.
“Hey!” I said, frowning at the blatant theft of food.
Ignoring me, she smiled brilliantly at Brystol and held one tanned hand out across the table.
“Hi, I’m Stacia and you are one seriously funny girl,” she said, still amused.
Brystol looked flummoxed, both anger and fear thrown out the window by Stacia’s entrance.
“This is Brystol Chatterjee, Stacia. She’s a reporter and I’m her story,” I said.
“Yeah, I heard what you said about Chris and almost peed myself. Really, I can’t wait to tell the others,” she said. “Lydia will literally fall down.”
Somehow, the wolf girl who was my friend had arrived at a cordial relationship of sorts with Lydia, Tanya’s right hand and sister in all but genetics. I still hadn’t figured that one out. They weren’t friends, but they coexisted and worked together. Sort of an armed standoff with an intelligence sharing arrangement—like Russia and the US cooperating on terrorists.
“It’s not funny.
You
don’t know what he is,” Brystol said.
“Sweetheart, I know all about who he is. It’s you that has stumbled on a teeny-tiny piece of information and suddenly think you have all the answers,” Stacia said with a smile. It wasn’t as friendly a smile as her other ones had been. A hint of wolf showed through.
“If you’re gonna ram around town and spout off about this all this supernatural stuff, don’t you think you should get your facts right? You’re just fishing right now, but tell me, do you really think a demon would let you live? Or did you feel deep down it was worth the risk to brace Chris here
because
he wouldn’t actually hurt you?”
“No! That’s why I brought backup,” Brystol said, turning and pointing at Barry, who had his phone apart and wasn’t really paying too much attention. He looked up at us and jumped slightly when he realized we were all looking his way.
“Solid choice,” Stacia said. “You’re either suicidal or, like I said, not really believing what you’re saying.”
“He has a gun,” Brystol said.
“And do you even know if guns work on demons? Is it loaded with special ammo like say, silver for, you know, weres and vamps, or iron for Fae?” Stacia asked.
A shadow of dismay crossed Brystol’s face before being shoved aside by anger. “Well then, what is he? If he’s not a demon, then just what is he?”
“No. You don’t get to slam your way in here and demand answers. Throwing crap around. We don’t know you, and we don’t owe you. Trying to bull your way into this world will get you killed straight up. You
and
your backup.”
Brystol sat back, momentarily nonplussed by the conversation. Then she shifted forward and looked me in the eye. “That your answer? To let your girlfriend fight your battles?”
“Battle? Girlfriend? Do I look like the kind of girl that would be with him? Look at him. Okay, ignore the perfect body and the razor cheekbones and the eyes that don’t exist anywhere else on earth. Look past all that. Do I look like I would be with a guy who you claim hunts demons for a living and closes Hellgates? Who tracks down and rescues little girls from evil assassins against all odds?”
For a moment, I thought Brystol might answer her—say something like
you look like you only date rich playboys
.
That
would have been suicidal. Stacia might have been forcing Brystol to reassess me, but that didn’t mean she would take many, if any, personal insults from the reporter. She was constantly being stereotyped by her looks, and it was a sore subject. And werewolves with sore spots are best left alone.
Maybe her tuned journalistic instincts warned her to back off, maybe she wasn’t really all that hell-bent on suicide after all, because she didn’t say a word for a moment. She did what Stacia said and looked me over with her eyes while I could almost see her brain reanalyzing what she knew. She sat back and thought about it. Then she turned her attention to Stacia and I could see more thinking going on under that attractive face. If she was good, really good, she would see past the actress looks and swimsuit model body, past the fashion and the polish.
“You have remarkable hearing, Stacia. You heard a ridiculous amount of our conversation from across a crowded, noisy restaurant. That doesn’t seem… natural,” she said.
Stacia shrugged. “Good genes. Now listen, Brystol, do you have a card? Some way of reaching you? Because if you’re going to race around half-cocked, spouting off stuff about the supernatural world, you aren’t gonna live real long. To live, you’re gonna need some guidance. We
might
be able to help with that.”