Broken Ice (Immortal Operative Book 1) Read online

  Despite knowing he’s playing a role, I find his conversation endearing. He’s either a wonderful actor or actually a sweet guy… another reason I want to listen to that uneasy feeling rattling around in my head.

  I hop out of bed and slip into my bodysuit, adding a miniskirt and loose top over it along with comfy socks and low-top boots. The exposed part of the suit looks like ordinary leggings, though the black metal scabbard on my left leg peeks out past the skirt. I relocate it to my back, handle down so I can get at the blade quick if need be. My jacket hides the short sword as well as the Beretta under my left arm. I hadn’t expected to spend too much time in Germany, so I traveled light. Everything fit in one backpack. Most humans would’ve had a problem carrying a wakizashi onto an airplane, but security can’t confiscate what they don’t remember seeing. After gathering my stuff—and making three passes around the hotel room to make sure I didn’t forget anything—I head out the door.

  The hotel stands next to a parking garage, a convenient spot to find a lift. In order to relocate our meeting at the very last moment, I will need transportation. My plan is to still meet Jake at the park, but not wait around for the shitstorm I expect. The less time we spend at the appointed meeting place, the better.

  Two flights of stairs take me to the ground level. I head out the back to an awning-covered strip that connects the hotel building to a five-story parking deck where a few people make their way about in search of their cars. I pretend to be a clueless tourist who forgot where she parked, wandering around while searching. The fourth floor deck is devoid of people, which makes me smile... maybe a little deviously.

  A nice black Beemer catches my eye. It looks new enough for my ‘universal key’ to work, a legit spy gadget that comes in handy. I’m not quite a quarter of the way across the floor when a sudden, rapid motion to my left comes out from behind a column. I dive into a somersault an instant before the muted pop of a silenced firearm goes off three times. Loud pings skip off the concrete floor behind me one after the next. At the end of the tumble, I scramble to cover behind a concrete column.

  “Shit,” mutters a man in German. “Missed.”

  “Obviously,” replies another male voice with a note of sarcasm.

  The first man sighs. All of which I can hear easy enough.

  Grr. Dammit. I knew the op was going to go off the rails, but an ambush right outside my hotel is unexpected and not a good sign. This mission is far more compromised than I’m comfortable with. I reach under my jacket and draw the Beretta.

  Two sets of footsteps creep up on my position. The muffled echo coming from my left is most likely the one who fired at me. His friend circles wide on the right. He sounds farther off, so I swing out to the left, aiming at a late-twenties guy in a blue jacket with a handgun raised.

  I fire twice, expecting him to be flat on his back dead before he even realized I moved—but a puff of gas bursts out of the end of his silencer in time with my hollow point bullets ripping into his chest. A streak of pain cuts across my left cheek. He emits a gurgling wheeze and collapses down on one knee, clutching his wound.

  Dammit. They’re not human.

  The other guy runs into view thirty feet away on my left, a rapid pop-pop-pop from his weapon accompanying the zips and pings around me. I leap back against the column, now spattered with blood from the bullet that sliced across the side of my head and ripped off my earlobe. Both of them are going for head shots, which tells me they know I’m a vampire. After all, blowing my brains out is a sure way to render me useless for a few hours.

  A loud wheeze from the man I shot announces him recovering from the bullet to the heart. He sits up groggily.

  I casually aim and shoot him square in the forehead, bursting the rear of his skull open with a splash of gore. His expression—for the two seconds of consciousness he has left—is equivalent to a middle finger. He flops over backward. Rapid footsteps rush at the column from the other side. I pivot to aim at where the guy’s going to appear, firing a split second before he bursts into view. The shot to the chest doesn’t slow him down too much. He hurls himself into me and we grab at each other’s gun arms, struggling for control in a spinning grapple. Nose-to-nose with this clown, I can tell he’s a night walker. After a few seconds of staring into my amber eyes, he apparently catches on that I’m not like him, no not at all. His scowl of exertion shifts to worry. In that moment of hesitation, I overpower him and hurl him off his feet, launching him face-first into the rear window of a Mercedes SUV.

  While he extricates himself from the car, I stuff the Beretta in its holster and reach around for the sword behind my back. A squeeze of the release button lets the wakizashi slip into my grasp. The guy stands out of the smashed window in a rain of broken glass bits. I spring forward as he turns, pinning him to the Mercedes with my blade at his neck.

  “Wait,” he whispers. “Don’t. They didn’t tell us the target was an Origin.”

  “They?” I ask with a raised eyebrow, already telepathically hearing the word ‘Dominion’ in his head.

  “The Dominion.” He tries to lean away, but can’t move without cutting himself on my sword.

  I narrow my eyes. “Why did they send you after me?”

  “No idea.”

  He thinks about a picture of me that had to have come from the airport yesterday. The Dominion told him—and his friend—to shoot me in the head and bring me to another parking garage in Berlin.

  “How much do they know about why I’m here?”

  The guy trembles, clearly afraid of me. Heh. Humans aren’t the only ones with tall tales about vampires. Some night walkers form underground communities and there are no shortage of bullshit stories about us, the ‘true’ vampires. Yeah, we are superior to them in most ways, but not by enough that this guy should be metaphorically shitting his pants.

  “How should I know?” He reaches up to grab my arm holding the blade at his throat, so I push the edge in enough to draw blood, which makes him stand still.

  His thoughts betray the lie: he knows the Dominion purposefully leaked the time-sensitive, important information Andreas/Jake has—to lure me or someone like me here. No, wait. Definitely to lure me, in particular. Apparently, they’re not happy with one of us working for US Intelligence and want me gone.

  Great. This mission is more than compromised, it’s entirely a lure. Perhaps it isn’t completely pointless, however. This guy believes they risked actual, useful information as bait, they want me that bad. Not only is the mission comprised, so is my identity. Grr. That said, whatever Jake has is something they don’t really want to let out of their hands. Wonderful. That means they’re going to come after us... and hard.

  Yeah, that meeting in the park? That’s not happening. I have to get Jake out of here, wherever he is.

  I tense my arm about to end this guy for good, but something about the pathetic look on his face gets to me. His genuine fear of what I could do to him makes me feel like I’m about to torture a puppy. They say compassion and empathy are best set aside when doing this kind of work, but most CIA agents don’t have the ability to erase memories—at least not without using bullets. I can’t affect the mind of another true vampire, but night walkers are only slightly tougher than humans to play with mentally. Probably why they’re afraid of us.

  A minute later, this guy doesn’t even remember what the Dominion is. I leave him with a strong urge to find a hiding place and lay as low as possible for the next two days.

  That done, I lower my blade from his throat and give him a shove toward the ramp.

  Distant sirens warn me that the police are almost here. Naturally, someone heard the gunfire and called it in. I rush over to the ‘unconscious’ one I shot in the head. The wound already appears smaller, but he’ll likely be out cold for a few hours. It’s impossible to rearrange memories inside a brain with a giant trench through it, and I don’t have the time to wait with the cops nearly here.

  I grab a fistful of hair and pull him up sea
ted, then with a quick swipe of the wakizashi, take his head off. That’s a permanent kill for a night walker. Beheading a ‘true’ vampire (or an Origin as they call us) is merely inconvenient. It can be fatal, but only due to the gradual starvation of being unable to feed. And that takes a year or two. The head loses consciousness after about thirty minutes, which is the longest we can hold our breath. We can recover from a beheading, but someone else needs to put the head back on the neck and hold it there for the time it takes everything to seal back up. Most of the time, that doesn’t happen… so beheading is basically game over for us, too.

  “Sorry. Not much choice. Hope your next go ’round works out better for you.”

  Yeah, I’m pretty sure reincarnation is a thing. I don’t really understand the mechanisms involved, but vampires always come back as vampires, while humans sometimes incarnate as animals or other humans. It’s almost like we—vampires I mean—are outside a closed loop of Earth’s spiritual energy. There’s a whole mess of bizarre pseudo-history that I’m not sure I believe in that does line up with that idea, but it’s too weird to take seriously. My mother believes in it, though, and connects it to our super-low birth rate. She thinks no new vampire children happen until after one of us dies. Like the number of vampiric ‘souls’ on Earth is a constant. No one has conducted any true census of my kind, and a lot of us are still ‘in the closet,’ so it would be an arduous task to study that theory.

  The echo of tires on the garage ramp announces the arrival of the cops.

  I slip the wakizashi back into its sheath, then sprint across the parking deck. Not too worried about surveillance cameras since those two guys did attack me. The police wouldn’t be too happy about me having a gun despite obvious self-defense, but I doubt they’d turn the city upside down over it. Especially since the dead guy is—was—a vampire, albeit a night walker. We may be out in the open, but humans don’t exactly lose sleep over our deaths. In some cities, killing a vampire doesn’t yet count as murder.

  Upon reaching the edge of the deck, I jump off, spin, and grab the railing to catch my fall before swinging down one parking level. Shouting voices from the police above don’t give off any sense that they know I’m here. They’re ordering the guy I spared to get down. Oh, that will be interesting. He doesn’t remember me or the Dominion. Probably won’t know why his friend lost his head or even what brought him to this parking garage.

  Good luck, bub.

  With the police distracted attending to their suspect, I creep over to another, less nice, BMW, and pull out my universal key. The little electronic device lights up when I push the main button. Hazard lights flash from car to car around me while the device pings the wireless systems it detects nearby. As soon as the lights on the car in front of me flicker, I click the button again. Seconds later, the other button lights up. Pushing it unlocks the car. Until I reset the device, it’ll mimic the key fob for this car, letting me drive it. Whoever invented wireless authentication pushbutton start needs a raise. It really makes my job easier.

  Someone in the bowels of Langley designed this thing. And, yeah, every car thief and his mother would love to get their hands on it.

  I hop in and check my injury in the sun visor mirror. Yeah, I can see myself in the mirror. Why wouldn’t I? Light reflects off my skin as surely as it does any other living thing on the planet. Silly humans. Anyway, the rip across the left side of my face has healed already, and my earlobe is back. However, I’m a bloody mess. I wipe myself off as best I can with my hand, licking the blood from my palm. My jacket absorbed most of it, keeping my shirt clean, so I pull it off and wad it up to hide the stain. Another mirror check looks good. My hair is probably full of blood, too, but it’s black so no one will notice.

  The car starts without protest. I back out of the space, turn, and drive down the ramp like an ordinary person doing ordinary things. Blue lights flash from numerous police cars on every floor. An officer at the garage entrance motions for me to stop and approaches the driver side window when I roll to a halt. Wearing my most innocent smile, I lower the window.

  One good thing about my visible age freezing when it did: I can do the ingénue act really well. I was equivalent to twenty-two when I stopped looking older. Depending on cosmetics, attitude, and expression, I can pull off a reasonable portrayal of anywhere from seventeen to almost thirty. My elder sister Ayla matured with a somewhat older appearance than me. She’s blonde, and mostly drop-dead gorgeous, but she can’t do the ‘cute and harmless’ act quite as well. Haven’t seen her much since the mid-sixties. Rumors that our kind prepared to reveal ourselves to humans went around even back then, so she ran off to charm as much money as she could out of people before losing the element of surprise.

  The cop leans close, giving me the eye.

  “What’s going on?” I ask in German, my voice a little higher than usual, eyes wide. “Why are there so many police here, officer?”

  “You didn’t hear or see anything unusual?”

  “Where? At the hotel?”

  He points up. “On the parking level above.”

  I shake my head. “No. I had music on. Maybe too loud.” I flash a cheesy smile.

  He stands there for a moment, staring at me. Damn. He’s thinking my eyes are a weird color, wondering if I’m a vampire. Grr. Amber eyes aren’t that weird. Humans have them, too, just not all that often. Okay, perhaps not quite as intense as mine, but still. Not that I’m at all worried about people—generally—knowing what I am. Only when it compromises my assignment… like being identified as a vampire at a scene where a night walker lost his head. Even if I hadn’t been responsible for that, the police would assume me involved if they realized I’m a vampire. It’s generally common knowledge that some Origin vampires look down on night walkers enough to slay them for trifling insults. I don’t know if Germany considers destroying vampires illegal or not, but I’d rather not risk drawing attention to myself.

  The cop keeps staring at me, suspicion growing… and he’s noticed the blood on my shirt collar. Having no choice left, I alter his perception of reality by inserting a suggestion that he sees me with ordinary brown eyes… and I’m a ditz who clearly has nothing to offer his investigation. The blood’s also gone as far as he knows… oh, and he rather desperately needs to find a urinal.

  The cop stands and waves me off with a dismissive huff, crossing his legs.

  I smile vapidly at him, then pull out of the garage and drive off down the street.

  It’s tempting to send Jake a message through the dating site asking him if he can meet me earlier. However, since I’m now certain the Dominion is watching him—and probably has been for some time—I don’t want to risk giving away that their trap is exposed. If luck is with me, they’ll assume I simply killed the one guy in self-defense... and won’t find the other one until I’m already out of Germany.

  Here’s hoping.

  Chapter Five

  Castle Park

  It’s a few minutes past ten in the morning when I leave my borrowed car on Pagodenburgstraße, a quiet street north of the park, three spaces from a bicycle/hiking trail leading into the trees.

  This spot is closer to the location where I’m supposed to meet Jake, and from here, I don’t need to cross a large canal spanned only by a single bridge. Considering the density of the woods, any ambush waiting for me is going to be a close-range affair. I can handle close range affairs. The only tall structure anywhere in the area is a high-rise over a mile away to the northeast, and I doubt even a vampire sniper on a roof that far away has any chance of nailing a person-sized target inside heavy tree cover.

  I spend the next few hours roaming the area around the meeting point in an increasingly wider spiral, searching for signs of a Dominion presence. Nothing; at least, nothing that I can see. The lack thereof tells me that either they figured I would do exactly what I’m doing now and didn’t set anything up to avoid scaring me off, or they simply planned to follow Jake and move in close when we started o
ur ‘date.’ I have to assume that he’s been completely compromised. If the Dominion knows enough about him to leak information the CIA would send me to get, they also know he’s not really Andreas Kline. It’s a veritable certainty that another vampire has been all over that man’s brain.

  Used to be that agents were good at keeping secrets. They still are—from humans. With vampires now part of a potential equation, the Agency has been compartmentalizing information more and more. Individual assets know only enough to perform their tasks, with little to no details about any other operatives, contacts, or resources in their area. Another veritable certainty is that other vampires elsewhere in the world have done what I’ve done—aligned with various governments’ intelligence services.

  Twenty years ago when we revealed ourselves, Saudi Arabia attempted to declare us ‘ungodly’ or something like that. Two days following their king making an announcement on television that vampires were ‘illegal’ in his country and would be subject to execution if discovered, he lit himself on fire in front of the government building after saying something to the effect of ‘humans continue to live because we allow it.’

  His successor reversed the law declaring vampires to be killed on sight within an hour of taking office.

  While part of me laughed at that whole thing, such a conspicuous display of mind control didn’t do much to foster trust between humans and my kind. The Agency believes what amounted to an assassination had been carried out by the Dominion, or at least vampires with a similar worldview: that humans are livestock. At least two televangelists in the US initially tried to turn public opinion against us, but one spent a full month clucking like a chicken every time he tried to speak and the other devoted his next hour-long special to telling his viewers that he wasn’t a real man of God and had been conning them for money. To ‘atone’ for that, he’d given away every penny he had to various charities. I think that guy is still tangled up in lawsuits trying to get his money back.