The Merging Read online

  “That’s nice, Agent Cress.”

  Rachel’s eyebrows arched. “Seriously?”

  “Any new reports of supernaturals doing nefarious things, Lydia?” I asked before an argument could get started.

  “Nothing, honey,” she replied, “but I figured out where that finance seminar was.”

  “Oh?”

  “You destroyed three supernaturals who were all reported as being out at the conference,” she started, “so I pulled up their files with a little help from Turbo and found their vehicle signatures.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They all drive nice cars, sweetie,” she said, “which means they all have GPS. I tracked them down.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Behind the Chapel of Flowers.”

  “Great work, Lydia,” I said with a grin. “You’re the best.”

  “You can thank me properly later, sugar.”

  Rachel threw her arms up. “Oh please!”

  I stifled a laugh at her jealousy, mostly because I couldn’t tell if she was jealous of Lydia or of the fact that Lydia treated me differently. My ego wanted to believe the former, but reality suggested it was the latter.

  “Could that Reese guy have even survived that explosion?” Chuck asked. “It was pretty intense.”

  “Good question,” said Felicia. “We barely made it out alive and we’d all gotten pretty far away from the blast point.”

  “True,” said Jasmine, pursing her lips. “But I think Reese is way too powerful to be dumb enough to blow himself up. Besides, he appeared extremely confident in his abilities.”

  “True, but we did piss him off pretty good,” I pointed out. “He wasn’t exactly operating under a blanket of calm at the end there.”

  “That’s valid.” Jasmine looked thoughtful. “Still, I’d find it hard to believe that he’d be subjected to his own destruction, especially since he knows damn well he’s more powerful than us.”

  We all stood there thinking for a few minutes.

  Obviously, we had to assume that Reese survived. To do otherwise would be careless.

  “Right,” said Portman. “Good luck with catching that bastard, if he’s still out there. I gotta bolt.”

  Portman took off as the rest of us got on the road to check out what was happening behind the Chapel of Flowers.

  Chapter 24

  The Chapel of Flowers was a nice place for couples to tie the knot. It sat about halfway between the old strip and the new, and it had a nice little setup for all sizes of weddings.

  But we weren’t turning in to the main driveway. We were pulling behind the building next to the convenience store.

  There were multiple fancy cars parked there, which looked a bit out of place. Why the vampire, werewolf, and fae didn’t drive them away from here, I couldn’t say, especially since Fido seemed capable of driving my car without a hitch.

  We matched up the licenses and did a little digging into each of the cars.

  “I’ve discovered something,” said Griff, holding up a piece of paper that he’d pulled from a white BMW. “It’s an invitation and directions. We are definitely in the correct location.”

  “The chapel or the convenience store?” asked Felicia.

  “The parking lot,” he answered as he walked around, studying the ground.

  “So, let me get this straight,” I said while watching him. “Executives from a few major hotels in Las Vegas got invited to a parking lot located between the two strips to talk about finance?”

  “Not precisely.” Griff held up a finger and then knelt down and traced the symbol that was on the invitation he was holding. The ground shimmered momentarily and a set of stairs appeared. “They met down there.”

  I glanced around to see if any normals had their eyes on us.

  “Don’t worry,” Griff said, obviously noting my concern. “We’re standing in a null zone.”

  “Ah, good.”

  Null zones were areas set aside where supernaturals could gather without normals seeing them. There weren’t a lot of these places about, and each required strict regulations and proper permitting. It explained why the fancy vehicles were the only thing on this side of the lot. Normals would see an available spot but something would tell them to find somewhere else to park. Null zones were notorious for normals avoiding certain areas due to “gut feelings.”

  “You think Reese is down there?” I asked.

  “Hard to tell,” Griff said with a shrug. “There are a plethora of protections around this entire area.”

  “Anything dangerous?” asked Felicia.

  “I would have to defer to our resident wizard.”

  Warren stepped up and began tracing a symbol in the air. It left behind a little shimmering dust that grew and solidified until it was rather large. Once it stopped growing, it fell and illuminated a set of runes covering the entrance to the underground room.

  “Notification runes, mostly,” Warren said after a few minutes. “I don’t see anything deadly. At least not up here.”

  “Can you nullify them?” I asked, not really wanting to have another run-in with Reese until we knew more about what he was up to.

  “Give me a few minutes.”

  As Warren worked on dispelling the runes, I spoke with the rest of the crew regarding our next encounter with the lovable demon-wielding mage.

  “The only way we’re going to have a shot at taking him down is if we knock out his power supply,” Rachel stated as fact. “Jasmine and I combined our energies and it was like a gnat fighting a dinosaur. He’s just far too powerful for us.” She then winked at Jasmine. “Plus, he was pretty hot.”

  Jasmine nodded. “I’ll say.”

  “Hard to argue that,” agreed Felicia. “I prefer dark-haired guys, but there’s no arguing Reese is one hell of a good-looking man.”

  “Word,” said Chuck, and then glanced up at Griff. “Sorry.”

  Griff grimaced in response and then sighed.

  While the rest of us had been impacted with strong libidos due to the genetic enhancements we received upon joining the PPD, Griff’s properness kept him from engaging in our often juvenile rhetoric. Everyone was warned that not only would their personal skills and aggression increase after they were genetically modified, but so too would their sexual desire. It wasn’t like any of us joined the PPD unawares. There was even a document we had to sign that absolved the PPD from lawsuits and such. This was because we’d be working together and things were bound to… happen. Still, I seemed to get the best of it, though the rest of them probably considered that I got the worst.

  “Right,” I said, breaking the tension. “Now that we’ve agreed on how studly that bastard of a mage is….”

  “You think he looked studly, too, eh?” teased Rachel.

  “Har har,” I replied, using one of the very few chances I got to roll my eyes at her. “Point is that he’s going to turn up at some point. Our bullets are pretty useless against him, though maybe my Desert Eagle will up the threat a little.”

  “You’re getting an Eagle?” said Felicia.

  “Already been requisitioned. Rachel’s getting one, too.”

  “What about the rest of us?” asked Chuck. “I’m not going to be running around with a pea shooter if you’re carrying a portable cannon.”

  “Ask Lydia to get you one,” I said. “Anyone else want one?” Their hands all went up, except for Griff’s. “Okay, okay. Put in the request and I’ll approve it. We’re going to need to get Turbo to build us up some ammo for them though.”

  “Guns are so uncivilized,” chided Griff as Warren waved his hand at me.

  “You want a Desert Eagle, Warren?” I said, shaking my head at him. “I gotta say that I’m surprised at that. You’ll need to take shooting lessons, though, because it’s not like pointing a wand.”

  Warren furrowed his brow and scratched his beard for a moment. “I don’t know what a Desert Eagle is, Chief, and I certainly have no interest in taking shooting
lessons.”

  “Oh… I thought you wanted a gun like everyone else.”

  “No, thanks,” he said, sitting up in shock. “Those things are uncivilized.”

  I looked up at Griff. These two must have been reading from the same book.

  “Says the guy who puts black goo all over demons,” noted Felicia.

  “I had no choice. If I had—”

  “Let it go, Warren,” I interrupted. “She’s just trolling you.”

  “Ah.”

  “What did you want to tell me?”

  “I’ve cleared out all the runes,” he replied, “but there’s nothing else down there.”

  “Nothing?”

  “It’s completely empty.”

  “Damn.”

  Chapter 25

  We’d all climbed down to the room below to have a look around. Sure enough, the place was devoid of anything. No chairs, no filing cabinets, no carpet, no pipes. Nothing. It was just a 20x20 gathering place.

  “Any residual power signatures?” Rachel asked as she studied one of the walls.

  Warren gave her an appraising look and then started tracing another symbol in the air. While I loved wizards, especially ones with the ability to save me and my crew from an exploding building, they were rather slow. I know this all stemmed from the fact that their spells were intricate, required a lot of study and patience, and didn’t allow for mistakes. Mistakes could be very bad indeed. But I wasn’t exactly known for my patience.

  “There were many lifeforms here within the last twenty-four hours,” he said finally, pointing at a set of spheres that hovered where I’d assumed people had been standing. “Based on the colors and luminosity of each, I’d say we have a vampire, a fae, two werewolves, and a succubus.”

  I looked up, seeing all eyes on me, except for Warren’s. He was still moving around the scene.

  “What?” I said. They collectively shook their heads. “What?” I said again, this time with more fervor.

  “There are also a few very powerful signatures here,” Warren continued as he knelt down near an orb that was glowing a red so dark that it nearly looked black. “This is a demon.” He jabbed his finger in the air at the rest of the red spheres. “There are nine in total.”

  “Three of which have already been eradicated by your black goop stuff, right?” I asked hopefully as I tried to redirect everyone’s thoughts back to the issue at hand.

  “That would be my guess,” he said. “Which means we’ve still got six unaccounted for, and that’s only assuming they were all down here to begin with.”

  The orbs were slowly starting to fade as Warren moved to the largest of them all. It was bright white with traces of black and green spinning tightly in its center. There was a mix of beauty and horror to it.

  “How many demons did you see acting as batteries?” Jasmine asked Rachel and me. “Please say six.”

  “I only saw three,” I replied.

  “Four,” Rachel said once I’d finished. “The fourth one was behind the outer wall.”

  “It was?”

  “You couldn’t have seen it, Ian,” she noted. “Your eyes are great in the dark, but they’re not much for spotting energy signatures through concrete.”

  “Right.”

  “This last one must belong to the mage,” Warren said in a voice laced with awe. By now the rest of the orbs had all but disappeared. “I’ve never seen a signature this powerful before. It’s… scary.”

  “So was the dude himself,” Chuck quickly pointed out. “And if he’s still on the loose, we’d better hunt him down quick or we’ll be in a world of hurt pretty damn soon.”

  “Agreed.” I started climbing out of the meeting place. I didn’t much enjoy being trapped in enclosed spaces. “Let’s get back to base, pick up our new weapons, and head out in the field before night closes in. My gut says that this Reese guy works primarily at night.”

  “Don’t most of our kind?” Rachel said.

  “Yep. Thank goodness.”

  “Just a moment,” Griff called out as I approached the driver’s side of the Aston Martin. “We’ve picked through the vehicles here, and we know about the three people we’ve already dispatched, but there was another werewolf and a succubus on the list that Warren gave out.”

  “So?” said Chuck.

  “So we have two more cars here.”

  “Ah,” I said, snapping my fingers. “Run the plates and we can figure out who the other two are. Maybe we can make a move on them before they start behaving badly.”

  “Indeed,” Griff agreed.

  I got back on the connector with Lydia and asked her to get in to central and figure out who the owners of the vehicles were.

  “Jeffrey Case and Brittany Miller,” she replied almost instantly. “Sorry, puddin’, but I already picked up the signals on the GPS units next to the cars I’d tracked and then did a loop back on them.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Any trace of where they went?”

  “I’ve put in calls to their superiors, babycakes. They’ve not been seen nor heard from since leaving for the seminar.”

  “You’re really amazing, Lydia, you know that?”

  “You just make it easy on me, lover.”

  Rachel said, “I think I’m going to be sick,” and then got in the car.

  I smiled at that and glanced around at the others.

  “We can’t do anything until Reese and his baddies show up again, so let’s head back to base and pick up our new weapons.”

  Chapter 26

  Everyone had received their Desert Eagles. They were beautiful. Deadly, but beautiful.

  It was a little heavy without a payload, but staring at this gem was enough to know I’d get used to it.

  Turbo, who was like the non-douche version of EQK, had brought us in and was showing us the new ammo. It looked like a standard mag setup with a seven-round maximum. He’d built out the breakers to conform to the 50-caliber specs, and they were quite large.

  “Each one is imbued with both silvers and woods,” he said with an excitement level that only pixies could muster. It probably had to do with their tiny statures and their never-ending supply of energy. “I also mixed negation strands in there.”

  “Seriously?” I said with wide eyes—the kind of eyes you got as a kid when your parents had a bike sitting by the tree on Christmas. “You mean I don’t have to pick and choose anymore?”

  “Nope!” He pushed up his Coke-bottle glasses and smiled wide. “Frankly, though, you probably don’t need the breakers at all. This gun is like a mini cannon!”

  I stared lovingly at the beast. The gun, not the pixie. Turbo wasn’t my type. The gun was. It had a six-inch barrel, black finish, combat sights, and it fit my hand like Serena’s hips. I glanced up at the crew reflexively at that little fantasy, thinking it would be best to never mention that fact aloud.

  “I’ve also added in a field stabilization system and a full dampener.”

  “What’s that for?” asked Chuck, who was playing a game of quick draw with his Eagle.

  “Silences it and reduces the kick of the weapon,” answered Turbo as his wings flapped even faster. “Firing those guns without one of those will wake up half the city!”

  I thought I’d been in love with the thing before, but having a gentle recoil and a silencer built in only added to my infatuation.

  “Turbo,” I said, “you’re a genius.”

  “Aw, shucks,” he replied, waving a dismissive hand at me. “I know.”

  We went to put on headgear so we could start firing, but Turbo shook his head at us. It was hard to believe that we wouldn’t need ear protection, but I’d never known the little guy to steer us wrong. Even if the crack of gunpowder exploding in the chamber was loud, my ears would heal soon enough. It was everyone else’s ears I was seeking to protect.

  I leveled the gun, noting quite a weight difference between it and my standard weapon. There would definitely be an adjustment period. But I got the feeling that
I only needed to fire in the general vicinity of whatever I wanted to hit. The wind alone would probably kill an ogre.

  I lined up my shot, aiming at the gel-based target that sat twenty-five feet out.

  The trigger action was so smooth that it reminded me of getting in a new car and stepping on the brakes. The first time you did it, the car would lurch so much that you nearly kissed the steering wheel. There was only the faintest popping sound and almost no kick at all. But the target damn near exploded on impact.

  My jaw dropped open at the sight of all the silver and wood shards that filled the gel from edge to edge. With my old weapon, there was a decent spread, but this thing damn near sent bits flying straight out of the target. I focused my vision tighter and spotted the worming black shards as they continued meandering through the gel. Nasty.

  “Damn,” I heard Rachel say. “I don’t know that I can approve of using this thing.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, stepping back from the partition slightly. “I think it’s great.”

  Her face was almost completely white. “For monsters like we’ve been fighting recently, sure. But we can’t fire these at just anyone.”

  “Why would you go around firing at people?” I asked.

  “I mean criminals, you walnut.”

  “Oh, right.”

  She had a point. Against beasties like Fido, it was almost a requirement to have a gun like the Eagle on your side. But for your average, everyday villain, it was overkill. Literally.

  “So we’ll carry both.”

  “I think I’ll stick with magic,” she said, putting down the weapon. “I thought I’d feel differently about it, but it’s just too much for me.”

  “Okay. You are still planning to carry a knife around in your boot, though, right?”

  “Of course,” she said, grimacing. “I’m not an idiot.”

  Jasmine followed suit. Griff nodded knowingly at them as they all exited the room.

  This wasn’t completely unexpected, being that they were mages. Again, they still had their own weapons of choice, but a Desert Eagle was apparently beyond the scope of what they’d deemed reasonable.