I raised my voice. “Hey, Director Cueto. You strike me as an honest guy. Knock on the glass twice if this weasel is telling me the truth about what’s in this phonebook.”
Thump thump.
Well, crap. “Okay, Stricken. That’s pretty convincing. Good for you. You’ve hoodwinked the President. Makes me glad I didn’t vote for the guy.”
“Aw, that’s cute how you still think voting matters.”
Since we were in the offices of an agency that existed to lie and commit fraud, he probably had a point there. “So you got a deal. Now why did you need to talk to someone like me?”
“Well, Pitt, there’s two reasons for that.” He extended an abnormally long finger to start a new count. “Number one, there is a massive problem looming that only someone of your unique nature can handle—or one of the other Chosen, should your dumb ass get killed in the process. It’s not a world-ending kind of threat, yet, but it’s a make-life-really-uncomfortable-for-a-lot-of-innocent-people problem, and by uncomfortable, I mean violently dead. Regardless, it’s Chosen business. I was just going to nip this little problem in the bud myself. I’d prefer to handle it myself, because I don’t trust you clowns to not screw it up, but as you can see, I’m currently indisposed.”
“Bullshit. You don’t care about innocent people dying.”
He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “True, that hero nonsense is more your thing. But stopping this crisis would be a favor for one of those aforementioned potential allies, who would be a huge help down the line. I’ll fill you in on the details later, but it’s nothing that one of Sir Isaac Newton’s Ward Stones couldn’t handle. Which was why I was trying to buy this one off those stupid reptoids.”
So much for me not telling the Feds about what MHI was trying to steal. Ward Stones were so incredibly rare and super valuable, I could only imagine that Beth was making a very frantic phone call right this very instant.
Stricken must have caught the pained expression on my face. “The really sucky thing, Pitt? My former coworkers are probably losing their minds right now. They’d kill for another Ward. A little-known fact is that the strategically placed one that protects Washington DC is dying. It’s running out of juice. And the other one we have in inventory, belonging to the Department of Defense? Well, they don’t dare move it because it’s the only thing keeping something ancient and super nasty bottled up under Cheyenne Mountain, which is the real reason we built the base there to begin with. But that’s super classified.” He put finger number one to his lips and went, “Shhhh.”
That was probably one of those secrets that would get me killed one of these days. Wards were strategic assets. Defensively, undead or unearthly beings couldn’t cross their boundary without exploding. Offensively, they were the only thing mankind had which could obliterate a Great Old One. Except the secret to making them had been lost to time. What was out there was all that was left, and there hadn’t been very many to begin with.
“The lizard people found this one, lost and abandoned, deep underground somewhere. I was going to use it to do something good . . . Don’t laugh. It’s true. But if Unicorn gets it first, it’s going straight to DC instead, and all those poor orphans and widows and kittens will get mulched. But that’s on you now. It’s out of my hands, and thousands of people are going to die . . . unless, of course, MHI agrees to take care of it. I’d sleep a lot better if you promise me you’ll handle this problem.”
“Fine. I’ll look into it.”
Stricken had a sly, evil grin. “Excellent.” He raised his voice. “I assume you heard him say that, Harold.”
“You’re such a douche,” I said, as the realization sank in that I was getting dragged into someone else’s nonsense once again. But if there was even a tiny chance that what Stricken was saying was true, I couldn’t let a bunch of innocents get massacred and not at least try to stop it.
“Just a heads-up in the meantime, and this part is really important. The auction contract for this Ward specifies that if the seller failed to deliver the item, there’s an entity on retainer to punish whatever party broke the deal. Your wife damaged the Dark Market’s reputation so badly that they’re adding free insurance to every deal they broker now. And by insurance, I mean they’ve got some incredibly deadly beings contracted to handle any problems that pop up. So that little scamp who stole my rock, she’s about to get wrecked. If she’d just waited until after I had it in my possession, free and clear, she’d be off the hook. But now? This thing will not stop. You’re going to need to find her before it crawls up from hell, because once it’s on the trail, things are going to get really messy.”
“What kind of entity are we talking about here?”
“Powerful shit that even I don’t understand what-all it can do. There’s thirteen of them to choose from. Which one will get called up, I can’t guess, but all of them are bad. These things are the unliving embodiment of the word relentless.”
“Call it off.”
“I would if I could. I can’t. It’s called a Drekavac. Look it up.”
“I will. You could have just sent me an email about all this and spared me from this interrogation.” I shoved the agreement closer to him. “Now sign your stupid form so I can go back to work.”
Stricken picked up the cheap pen in his left hand and clicked it, poised to sign, but then he paused. “Do you realize, Pitt, that this isn’t just mere ink and paper. An agreement made with Harold watching isn’t just symbolic. Signing my name to something created by the PUFF Adjuster would be
