Summoner of Storms (16 page)

A line of guards stands just outside, eyes
wide, weapons held nervously at the ready. “Shit, it’s the drakul!”
one of them shouts. Apparently word of what they face has not yet
spread. Perhaps their superiors fear the guards will flee if they
know ahead of time.

Gray surges out of the shaft and onto the
concrete of the garage, just as they open fire. It
hurts
,
the tear of silver-jacketed lead through his body, smashing bone
and shredding organs. He ignores the pain, charging them with bared
fangs, a roar of anger rolling up out of him like the crash of
thunder.

He grabs the nearest one, claws sinking in,
and hurls her into the line of parked SUVs. The others close on
him, not daring to shoot now lest they hit one another. It is a
mistake, and they realize it almost immediately, but it is too
late.

He falls on them, ripping any flesh within
reach. They try to overwhelm him with numbers, but they lack even
the strength of the demons he hunts. Still, the slash of their
knives and strike of their batons is painful. He would try to break
through their line, but he must cover Sean’s retreat.

Tires squeal on concrete, painfully loud to
his sensitive hearing. Sean’s sedan screeches to a halt by Gray,
the door flying open. Most of the guards are injured or dying at
this point, and Sean’s eyes are wide with horror. “Get in,” he
says.

Gray tumbles into the car, slamming the door
behind him. His suit is soaked with blood, fabric shredded by
gunfire. He coughs and spits, body bringing up fragments of
lead.

“
God, I hate this part.”

Sean guns the engine, screaming through the
tight turns of the garage. They emerge into the lot above, barely
avoiding an armored vehicle moving to block the exit. A few seconds
later, the car bursts through the flimsy wooden arm of the gate,
tires shrieking as Sean pulls onto the road and leaves SPECTR-HQ
behind.

John peered out between the thin curtains on
the hotel room window yet again. They’d waited for hours—where the
hell were Sean and Caleb?

“Sit down, Starkweather,” Tiffany ordered.
The Vigilant operative who had given them the thumb drive to use on
Forsyth’s computer gave them a laptop as well, encrypted to hell
and back and virtually untraceable. She sat in front of it, surfing
news sites. “Wearing a hole in the carpet isn’t going to make them
show up any faster.”

“Something must have gone wrong,” John said.
He let the curtain fall closed, but didn’t sit down.

“Or it just took them a while to get the job
done. It’s not the sort of thing to rush, not if they did it right.
So sit your ass down.”

He crossed the room and sank onto the little
couch to one side of the single king bed. If Sean betrayed them a
second time...Goddess. Why had John ever gone along with this plan?
In hindsight it seemed monumentally stupid, trusting Sean with all
their lives. What had he been thinking?

A knock sounded on the door.

John all but leapt toward the door, barely
remembering to check the peephole before throwing it open. Sean and
Caleb stood there, Sean a bit rumpled, and Caleb—

“What happened?” John shut the door behind
them, then hauled Caleb into his arms. “Are you okay, babe?”

Caleb looked like he’d been through a war
zone, his suit pocked with bullet holes and stiff with blood. Gray
had already restored his hair to a long fall of shining black silk.
Give it to Caleb to have his own set of priorities.

“I’m fine,” Caleb said, hugging him back.
“Well, I will be after I get this damn tie off and take a shower.
Sorry it took us so long to get back, but we had to ditch Sean’s
car, find something old enough to hot wire, and steal it. After
swapping a few sets of plates around.”

“And someone insisted on stopping for
dinner,” Sean muttered. “Good thing Charleston is infested with
ghouls.”

“A few less now.” Caleb shrugged at John’s
concerned expression. “Gray spent a lot of energy healing us.
Topping off seemed like the smart thing to do.”

“Did you get the data?” Tiffany asked.
Cutting right to the chase, as usual.

Sean rummaged in his pocket for a minute and
tossed her the drive. “Yep. Did you get a shipping address?”

While Tiffany plugged the drive into her
laptop, John shifted his weight uneasily. “Yeah. And
it’s...weird.”

“Weird?” Caleb asked. “What do you mean?”

“Forsyth cleared out the Atlanta storage
facility. There isn’t a single bottle left, out of space for
thousands.”

Sean let out a low whistle. “Christ. Where
did he send them?”

“All of them went to the same address. Which
a quick search on the internet turned up. It’s the mailing address
for the Fort Sumter National Monument.”

Caleb frowned. “That’s the civil war place,
right? On an island in the bay.”

“Yeah,” Sean said. “Big tourist attraction.
But the park service closed it for repairs a couple of months
back.”

“I don’t think there are really any repairs.”
John sank down on the edge of the bed. Caleb sat by him. “It’s the
perfect place to carry out something you don’t want anyone else to
know about. Not only was it built to be a fortress, but there’s no
way on or off except by boat. It’s government property. No one is
going to think twice if guards run off any sightseers who try to
get a closer peek while it’s closed to the public. And yet it’s
conveniently located just a half-hour’s boat ride from
Charleston.”

“Okay,” Tiffany called. “I’ve got the files
up. And I already see something I don’t like.”

They joined her at the small desk. “What?”
Sean asked.

The drive held three folders: Drakul, Baikal,
and Email. Tiffany pointed at the screen. “Look here at the
creation dates. See the one for
Drakul
?”

John’s gut twisted. “Three years ago. He’s
been interested in the drakul for longer than we realized.”

“Fuck. I thought it was just stuff on Gray.”
Caleb leaned against John, as if unconsciously seeking comfort.
John slid an arm around Caleb’s waist, ignoring the tang of dried
blood rising from his clothes and skin.

Tiffany opened the folder and scanned the
contents quickly. “Forsyth is the orderly type—no surprise there.
He collected a lot of the vampire lore. Possible
sightings...nothing certain. Of course the Vigilant erased any
sightings we could, to keep people like him away from the drakul.
Forsyth must have creamed his jeans when he realized the very thing
he was looking for had shown up in Charleston.”

“Ew, not a mental image I wanted,” Sean
said.

“Life is full of hardship.” She scanned a
couple of files, clicking to the top level.
“Baikal?”

“It sounded familiar,” Caleb said.

“It ought to. I mentioned it to you. Lake
Baikal is where the Soviets supposedly imprisoned the drakul they
summoned.”

John blinked. “What?”

Tiffany nodded, not taking her eyes of the
screen as she opened the folder. “Rumor has it...oh shit. According
to this, it’s more than rumor.”

Scans of old documents, interspersed with
grainy photos stamped Top Secret, filled the folder. Tiffany
glanced through them quickly. “Okay, here’s a summary. The Soviets
summoned a drakul into a living host in 1953. They did it at a
gulag and used the prisoners for sacrifices to raise the etheric
energy. Something went wrong, but they managed to trap the drakul
before it was too late. Imprisoned it in tons of steel and
concrete, and dropped it to the bottom of Lake Baikal, a solid mile
down.”

Caleb shuddered. “It’s...it’s still down
there, isn’t it?”

John’s chest ached at the thought. Goddess
have mercy; to be down there, alone in the crushing black, trapped
for decades...and he’d thought the bottles were bad.

“Yes,” Tiffany said. “And someday it will
break out, either because it manages to claw its way through, or
because the concrete and steel will eventually crumble around it.
Let’s just pray it doesn’t get loose anytime in the next thousand
years.”

Caleb turned away, his regrown hair falling
to hide his face. John put a silent hand to his shoulder.

“Hell,” Tiffany said.

“What now?” Sean asked. “Christ, tell me
there’s some good news in these files somewhere.”

“Not here.” She shook her head, braids
sighing over her shoulders. “See this?”

The screen showed what looked like a bad scan
of a page in a book. “Oh hell. It’s a summoning ritual for
drakul.”

“Not the sort of thing we want someone like
Forsyth to have his hands on,” she agreed grimly. “But hopefully
nothing we have to worry about right now. Let’s take a peek at his
email.”

John leaned over her other shoulder while she
opened the final folder. A long list of subject headers and
recipients scrolled past. “There,” he said, pointing. “Those are to
the director.”

Tiffany opened one and hissed. “Look at the
subject. ‘Project Baikal.’”

Surely not even Forsyth was that crazy. “They
aren’t trying to retrieve the drakul from the lake, are they? The
Russians wouldn’t stand for it.”

Tiffany just shook her head. “I think it’s
just a code name. The emails are threaded...looks like a series of
reports...here Forsyth is confirming Gray is really a drakul in a
living host. Ha, you’ll like this one, Caleb. ‘The host displays
antagonism toward figures of authority and is unsuitable for
recruitment.’”

Caleb snorted. “Damn right.”

“‘Tests can still be done...host will be
terminated and a suitable dead body provided to attract the
drakul...I believe it will prove somewhat more manageable in a
corpse.’”

“Sekhmet preserve us,” John breathed. His
stomach turned over, and bile stung the back of his throat. He’d
known Forsyth didn’t have Gray or Caleb’s best interests at heart,
but to see it spelled out this cold-bloodedly made him ill. The man
must be a sociopath to pretend he meant to exorcise Gray, while the
whole time intending murder and imprisonment.

Etheric energy lapped against John’s skin.
“We want him dead,” Caleb said, but his voice fell into a register
somewhere in between his ordinary tones and Gray’s bass rumble.

“Agreed,” John said. He turned back to
Tiffany, only to see her skin had taken on a grayish hue, and her
hand stilled on the track pad. “What’s wrong?”

She swallowed thickly before answering. “The
last email. It’s from yesterday. Forsyth says with Caleb on the
loose, the timetable needs to step up. ‘
The summoning will take
place Saturday night
.’”

John’s lips felt numb. “The summoning?”

She nodded. “Yes. I think...I think I get it
now. Why Forsyth has been kidnapping victims. Taking demons. He’s
not going to create an army—he’s going to become one.”

“What do you mean?” Sean asked.

Tiffany closed her eyes. “Judging by these
emails, he’s going to summon a drakul into himself. And once he
does, we have no hope of stopping him.”

* * *

“Are...are you sure?” Caleb asked into the
ensuing silence. But even though he stood directly beside John, his
voice sounded impossibly distant. Someone speaking from a world
that still contained hope.

“Project Baikal.” John’s hands had gone cold,
and he folded his arms over his chest, tucking his fingers into his
armpits in a futile attempt at warmth. “He retrieved the summoning
ritual from the Russian files. He has victims to sacrifice. And
demons to feed on afterward.”

“But it didn’t work for the Russians. Why
would he think it would be any different this time around?” Caleb’s
brown eyes had gone wide, begging for John to agree with him.

John shook his head. “It didn’t work for
them. But it worked with you.”

“But Gray’s situation was different.”

“Everyone thinks they’re different,” Sean
said. “Remember Leland? He thought he could control a lycanthrope
because he had pure intentions. Senator Olney thought his kid could
handle an incubus because God wouldn’t have let him get possessed
otherwise.” Sean shook his head in disgust. “If Forsyth had any
doubts to start with, once he saw a skinny civilian like you
handling a drakul, he assumed he’d do even better. Probably told
himself the Soviets brought it on themselves somehow, used a
disloyal soldier, a prisoner from the gulag, who knows. Not a real
man, a real patriot, like him.”

“Okay,” Caleb said, glancing from Sean to
John to Tiffany. “What do we do now?”

Tiffany shook her head slowly, still staring
at the damning words. “Now? Now we kiss our asses good-bye. Forsyth
is going to kill—” Her breath caught sharply, and John remembered
members of her own family numbered among the kidnapped. “Going to
sacrifice those he’s taken. Maybe more—God only knows, he’s
probably been collecting undesirables for weeks now. The Vigilant,
homeless, ICE detainees. Then he’ll slurp down all those tasty
bottled NHEs.”

She swallowed convulsively. “Even if, by some
freak of luck he doesn’t lose control, he’ll hunt down everyone who
stood against him. And if we’re right, if the lack of the sort of
cushion Gray had will doom the drakul to madness...the entirety of
the low country is in danger. Maybe the whole state. The whole
southeast.”

Silence. Sean took out his pack of
cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it in defiance of the no indoor
smoking policy. John turned away from them all and wandered to the
window.

Forsyth had planned this for years, with the
full knowledge and cooperation of the director. The rot at the
heart of SPECTR wasn’t new. Hell, given the apparent age of some of
the scanned photos,
someone
knew about the drakul and the
Soviet experiment for a while, probably since SPECTR formed in the
‘70s.

He’d believed in SPECTR. In his friends and
fellow agents. In the chain of command above him. He’d trusted they
held to the same ideals taught in school and at the Academy. The
paranormally-abled weren’t freaks or damned or evil. They could do
real good in this world. SPECTR acted not as a sword, but a shield
held between innocent people and the NHEs who would hurt them.