Broken Ice (Immortal Operative Book 1) Read online

  “Oh pshaw. We’re nothing like the movies make us out to be.”

  I take an off ramp for a road that’ll bring us out to the countryside. Should probably ditch this car at some point and find a different one.

  “Oh? What did they get wrong?”

  “Pretty much everything except that we have retractable fangs and consume blood. For example, I’m not undead.” I take hold of his hand. “See? We’re warm.”

  He looks at our clasped hands, then into my eyes. Oh, damn. That’s a spark, isn’t it? His grin tells me I just blushed. Oh, come on, Mina… I’m not seventy anymore. What’s with the tween crush thing?

  “Quite warm. And are all of you so... beautiful?”

  I glance at him, about to make a sarcastic comment… but he’s not just saying that to get into my pants. The thoughts at the tip of his brain mostly consist of a fading adrenaline high from watching me—a woman—drive like that. He thinks I’m awesome. And pretty. And he wonders what my lips would feel like on his. I feel myself blush again, manage a weak smile, and turn my attention back to the road.

  First order of business is getting Jake out of Germany intact.

  Second order... maybe follow up on that kiss.

  After all, I’m wondering the same thing.

  Chapter Seven

  Myths and Memories

  We make a brief stop at an EDEKA supermarket to trade the Beemer for a red Audi.

  I chose that particular car because the owner parked it across two spaces. That always bothers me, people who think they’re better than everyone else. Sure, some will call me a hypocrite for being a vampire since most of us think we’re better than humans. To get technical, we’re stronger, faster, immortal, can see in the dark, have psychic powers, and don’t really get sick.

  An argument can be made that we are better than humans. But that doesn’t mean I have to rub their noses in it. They do have one major advantage: numbers. Our supernatural strength isn’t like Hollywood shows it. I can’t throw cars around or punch holes in cinder block walls. I’m somewhat stronger than a professional bodybuilder. And yes, vampires can work out and stuff. Maybe if one of us hit the gym hard enough, he might be able to lift a car… but I have yet to see even one vampire take it to that extreme. Wanting to look like an overinflated lumpy life raft is mostly a human preoccupation.

  “So, where are we going?” asks Jake after about an hour of silent driving.

  I glance at my phone’s GPS app. “A property that I vaguely remember from a list of assets. It’s on the outskirts of Steingaden. Should be a safe spot to catch our breath.”

  He laughs.

  “What?” I give him the side eye.

  “Breaths? You’re a vampire.”

  “Ugh.” I sigh. “We still breathe. I already told you that undead thing isn’t true. Well, not totally anyway. We still need air, but we can hold our breath longer than humans… like maybe a half hour or so.”

  “Oh, only a little longer,” He says sarcastically, then leans back with one finger tapping his chin, appraising me the way one might a statue in a museum. “I’ve never met a vampire in person before, you know.”

  “Well, now you have.” I wink at him.

  “What did you mean by the undead not being totally true.”

  “Night walkers,” I mutter.

  “Zombies?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “That’s our term for once-humans who’ve been turned into vampires. They’re not the same as us.”

  “Us?”

  “Former humans call us Origin vampires. We’ve always been… from birth. Never human. We’re completely alive.” I suspect Jake knows some of this. Spies aren’t stupid, after all, and a lot of this public knowledge. That said, I also suspect he wants to make small talk. I like small talk... with the right person.

  “What about that turning into wolves or bats stuff?”

  “Total fiction.”

  “Really…” He rubs his chin. Okay, I think this surprised him.

  “Yes, really.” I gun the engine to get around a slow-moving tractor. “A person writing something in a book doesn’t make it true.”

  “What about holy water, crosses… holy symbols? That whole ‘you have to be invited inside’ thing?”

  “All bullshit. No idea where any of that came from… just humans making stuff up for stories I guess.”

  “Stakes?”

  I raise an eyebrow at him. “Let me ram a stake into a human and see how well that goes for them.”

  He chuckles.

  “Seriously, it leaves us nearly paralyzed and weak until it’s removed. Stops the heart, but doesn’t kill us.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. We’ve got mad healing abilities. But you know that.”

  I wink; so does he.

  “Okay… garlic? I’ve always wondered about that.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. That”—I hold up a finger—“is a little more truthful. But there’s no magic involved. It’s a simple allergy. Kinda like how peanuts can affect some humans. Only, instead of killing us, our natural regenerative abilities get into a battle royale and it isn’t pretty. Eating it results in about ten minutes of feeling like my blood has been replaced with boiling water. Garlic fumes redden my eyes and make my throat close up. I suppose it’s similar to the reaction humans have to tear gas. Not all vampires react to garlic, only about nine in ten.”

  “Right. Anything else I’m missing?”

  “I smile sweetly. I can’t give away all our secrets.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Trust a spy? Never.”

  “Can’t you read my mind?”

  “Some of it. Not the hidden chambers and older memories. Plus, it takes time to read a mind.”

  “What am I thinking now?”

  I give him the side eye again. “You think I’m cute but not the kind of woman you could settle down with.”

  “To be fair, I don’t think I could settle down with any woman.”

  “Few people can. Settle down, that is.”

  “And I’m pretty sure I didn’t use the word cute.”

  He hadn’t, of course. The word ‘sexy’ flitted across his mind more than once, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Even vamps have some modesty.

  ***

  Over the course of the next hour and a half, we wind up talking about our pasts.

  It’s probably against some protocol to get so personal with each other, but I can’t help it. He briefly mentions growing up with a foster/adoptive family in Indiana who treated him reasonably well, though with little emotion, more like a small roommate than a son. I argue that doesn’t strike me as ‘reasonably well’ given that humans need emotional connections.

  Mostly, he peppers me with questions about my ‘exotic’ life. To him, my childhood must sound like some romantic thing out of Elizabethan England, only transplanted to a Chicago suburb… young girl mostly left to her own devices with the run of a big house, spending all her days running around barefoot in the garden trying to catch imaginary faeries or exploring the big, scary library at night. I honestly found the isolation somewhat soothing—for the most part. Though I did have my moments where I hated having to stay out of sight. The library saved my sanity. Turned out I had a real love for reading.

  Anyway, since my parents didn’t want to relocate every few years, they concealed my existence by making me hide all the time. I wasn’t allowed to show myself to any guests, have friends my age—who weren’t also vampires—and so on. Some of the locals probably thought our mansion haunted since I frequently amused myself by spying on the visiting adults.

  Jake enrolled in ROTC after high school and hasn’t been back to Indiana since he graduated college and went to boot camp. After some years with military intelligence, he got in the door at the Agency. This Munich operation had been his first field assignment.

  We also have one thing in common: neither one of us looks as old as we are. He’s actually thirty-o
ne. I had him pegged for late twenties. The more we talk, the more I’m intrigued by this weird desire to be around him. I used to think Julian strange for having a human girlfriend, but I kinda see the appeal. The reluctance isn’t any sort of species superiority, rather it comes from knowing that they don’t live very long. An inevitable truth of vampire-human relationships: someday, he’ll be a wobbly old man and I’ll still be exactly the same as I am now.

  It’s not terribly different when I stop to really think about it. Most vampire couples I know—which isn’t all that many—lasted six to eight decades before they parted ways. Maybe it’s possible for two people who are so totally compatible that even our endless lifespan won’t make them sick of each other, but it has to be rare.

  Six or so decades is about the most one can expect from a human/vampire relationship, so perhaps it’s not all that weird after all. Just… the sex would get kinda messy toward the end.

  “Something wrong?” asks Jake.

  “Hmm?” I blink and glance over at him. “No, why?”

  “You just made this face like someone spilled cold cereal in your lap.”

  “Oh… umm…” I stare down the road. “Random unpleasant thought.”

  He nods. “Not about me, I hope.”

  Technicalities. No, it’s not about him. It’s about a theoretical fifty-years-from-now him. Or, really, any man after that much time. “Nope. Not really. So, what’s this information? Are you sure it isn’t bullshit?”

  “No. I’m not sure it isn’t, but I have a strong suspicion it’s something important.”

  “What is it?”

  “I haven’t been able to get into the data too much since I had to custom build an interface to even access it. I’d only started to hammer at the encryption before leaving the apartment. What little of it I was able to decipher appeared to be coordinates way off in the Siberian glacial region.”

  I briefly change lanes to avoid a wandering sheep. “That doesn’t make sense. What kind of information did you find? How could you know it’s worth getting back to us with urgency if you’re not even aware of what it contains?”

  He pats his hip. “Because of what the information is stored on. I suppose it makes sense now how something like that wound up at Landau-Neumann. The Dominion wanted me to get my hands on it.”

  “What it’s stored on?”

  “It’s basically a memory fob, like a USB drive… only with a design unlike anything on the market. The connector doesn’t match any known technology specification. Best I can calculate it’s intended for a 1024-bit system. We’ve only barely started dabbling with 512-bit architecture, and that stuff isn’t available commercially anywhere.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, either this thing is from the future or it didn’t come from humans.”

  “Alien tech? Okay, now you’re messing with me.” I grumble at a slow-moving tractor blocking us in at 10 MPH. “Why is this guy in the middle of the damn road?”

  “I’m not so sure it’s alien tech. The materials and overall design look rather close to something I’d expect from human engineering, but it’s too advanced to exist right now. Whether it came from the future or a UFO, I can’t say.”

  I honk. The tractor guy looks back and starts cursing us out… but goes catatonic when I glare at him. Stop hogging the damn road. He blinks at me like he forgot what he intended to say, then faces forward again before pulling to the right so he’s driving half on the shoulder.

  “Neat trick,” says Jake. “Wish I could do that.”

  The Audi revs as I gun it around the tractor. This really is a nice machine. Wonder what two-parking-space-man did when he came outside and found it missing. Dominion notwithstanding, I fully intend to leave the car intact so it can find its way back to him eventually. Just because he’s a jerk doesn’t give me a right to wreck his car. Stealing it briefly is another story...

  “Comes in handy sometimes,” I say. “Okay, so you find this wild tech memory thing, and you assumed it must contain something super valuable because it’s rare tech.”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “You know it’s going to be like 200 gigs of alien porn, right?”

  “Truly the sign of an advanced civilization.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “We drew a penis on Mars.”

  He laughs. “Exactly my point.”

  The GPS app leads me down a one-lane road past farmland, grassy fields, and more trees. Cows we pass regard us with unimpressed glances. This place looks so pastoral it’s hard to believe we had people shooting at us only a few hours ago… or that the modern world even still exists. Driving into the countryside feels more like we’d hopped into a time machine.

  I should know. I was around in the 1800s, even if only as an infant.

  A handful of motorized tractors and cars are all that breaks the illusion of antiquity. Eventually, I pull up to a quaint one-story house at the edge of a field. The farm area behind and to the left belongs to a different property, but it makes this place appear to be a farmhouse. It’s more of a glorified ski lodge, only without the skiing, mountains, or buff dude named Hans.

  The place doesn’t exactly look abandoned, but it falls short of ‘well maintained.’ I pull around back to hide the car from the road and park in a small dirt lot next to a tractor that probably hasn’t moved since the late seventies.

  “I guess they were going for rustic,” says Jake.

  “Well, they definitely hit that mark.” I hop out, shove the car door shut, and glance down at myself, specifically, at the four bullet holes in my shirt and the one in my pant leg. Evidently, another round passed through my left arm that I didn’t even notice. Dried blood is everywhere. “Ugh. I need to clean up.”

  He nods and heads to the back door. It isn’t locked, though it doesn’t really need to be. The only people who’d feel inclined to rob this place are too busy haunting antique stores for discounts. I step into a room saturated with the smells of staleness and wood smoke. No one’s been in here for at least a year. And I doubt whoever was here spent a significant length of time inside. A large fireplace takes up most of one wall in the living room, the only apparent source of heat. Good thing it’s not too cold yet. This place would be miserable in the dead of winter. I don’t see a single electrical outlet anywhere, but the roof had a tiny dish. That’s most likely connected to a phone with a satellite link back to Langley, or at least a relay station somewhere. I can hunt for it after a bath.

  Jake crosses to the living room window, peering out over the fields.

  I can’t help but stare at him, but not for an entirely romantic reason. With the security that comes with feeling hidden and safe comes the realization that I’m hungry. He smiles back over his shoulder at me when I walk up to stand near him. “Gonna take a quick bath or shower and change.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hey, this might be a little awkward, but… would you mind if I fed from you? Getting shot up kinda worked up an appetite.”

  The typical human reaction to that idea—eek—manifests in his eyes for only a second before his adrenaline junkie side kicks in and he smiles. “I suppose I could be talked into that.” He turns to face me, stepping closer. “Do I get anything out of the deal?”

  I shrug. “If you’re asking me to trade intimacy for food, we might be able to come to an arrangement.” A wry smile parts my lips. “I am a spy after all. Using my feminine wiles to get what I need comes with the job.”

  Jake manages not to laugh, but doesn’t quite keep a straight face. He groans. “That was an awful pun.”

  It seems I’m not the only one here dealing with a crush. I smile out the window at the countryside. “This is a romantic place.”

  “I’ll get the fire started then.” Jake wags his eyebrows.

  “Are you being literal or figurative?”

  “Yes.” He grins. “Oh, this fire started the moment I set eyes on you.”

  Okay, that makes two of us.

/>   ***

  This house is chilly, but at least it has hot water.

  The old-school bathroom lacks a shower, so I make do with a bath to get the dried blood out of my hair and off the rest of my body. It’s a bit of a project to unpack all the tools and gadgets from my bodysuit so I can wash it, but it needs it bad. Smelling my blood on something is about as appetizing as a normal human smelling vomit. Well, maybe not quite that bad. Still, close. I’m no doctor, and I don’t understand the biological reason why vampires can’t feed on each other’s blood, but it’s both useless as well as nauseating. Much of that disgust comes from the idea of it being cannibalistic. However, there are numerous diseases that can affect my kind if we routinely partake of vampire blood. A tribe of humans somewhere habitually consumes—or maybe consumed, not sure if they stopped—the brains of their deceased. That practice resulted in a nasty epidemic of prion disease among those people. Vampires consuming vampire blood is similar. It goes beyond ‘unhealthy;’ it can really ruin our century.

  Once I’m out of the tub, I drain the water, run some more, and give my bodysuit a brief dunk. I’ve got a little sewing kit in my pack I can use to stitch up the bullet holes… as soon as it’s dry. After hanging it on the shower curtain rod, I head out of the bathroom, still naked. It’s so weird to feel the thrill of doing something I probably shouldn’t be doing mixed with the giddiness of a schoolgirl crush. Admittedly, I adore the wanton recklessness of going all the way with a man I’ve only known for hours, but it’s not like I do this sort of thing often. In fact, this is a first. Something about Jake…

  I knew the moment I made the joke about trading sex for food he’d have let me feed anyway, even if I didn’t want to go there. He may be as psychic as a brick, but even he noticed those little sparks I’d been feeling. You’d think that after 125 years, a spontaneous crush wouldn’t hit me so hard… but it’s my first. Even with Julian, I never felt like this. He’d been more of a mutual lust situation, or what is it they call it today… friends with benefits? He and I don’t do that anymore, not since he found his human wife—Kiara.