Clay White: A Bureau Story (The Bureau) Read online

  Clay White

  Kim Fielding

  A Bureau Story

  Copyright © 2017 by Kim Fielding

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  www.kfieldingwrites.com

  Cover Art: Reese Dante http://www.reesedante.com

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  Clay White

  Kim Fielding

  Chapter One

  I knew what he was as soon as I saw him. He’d likely fool the fresh meat, the half-zonked kids who writhed around us. To them he was just a smoking-hot guy, a few years older, whose pale eyes reflected oddly in the dancing light of the disco ball. But I knew what he really was.

  I went to him anyway.

  He must have seen the truth of me too. It wasn’t just that I had some years on the boys around me; a few other men in the club were also old enough to remember MySpace and flip phones. But I’m… rough around the edges. I can scrub myself clean, shave the dark stubble from my face, and tame my curls into something respectable. I can wear jeans that are not threadbare and frayed at the seams, a shirt still crisp with the manufacturer’s starch. But I can’t do anything about the tension that sits so deeply in my muscles that it’ll be there after I die. Or the hardness in my gaze. I can make my lips curl upward, but I’m only baring my teeth. It’ll look more like a sneer than a smile.

  He saw all this, but he didn’t move away.

  Instead he cocked his head slightly and parted his lips, revealing the slightest flash of fang. And he held out his hand, palm upward. Inviting me.

  That surprised me. I expected him to run away, or maybe to attack. Yet there he stood, asking me to dance.

  My legs carried me toward him, and my left hand—without my volition—rose to clasp his. He pulled me close enough to smell his odor of old smoke and copper pennies. My right hand proved just as willful as its mate and found purchase just above his tautly denimed ass.

  I don’t know what music was playing. No doubt something fast, mostly rhythmic with very little melody, the meaningless lyrics lost beneath the pounding electronic beat. We ignored the music, swaying in time to nothing but my heartbeat. He was graceful, dammit. They all are, as if they’ve forgotten altogether the meaty drag of a mortal body, as if gravity has no more influence than do the passing years.

  I had been a clumsy boy, always tripping over feet that had grown bigger overnight, always dropping things from fingers that were slower than my mind. My father beat me for it and called me stupid, but the whippings didn’t make me more agile—just scarred and enraged. When I grew up and joined the Bureau, I worked hard to learn control of my body. Long, sweaty months of punishing work, and eventually I could wield weapons with deadly force and accuracy or, if need be, use my fists and feet and bulk as handily as any demon. But I still couldn’t dance worth a damn. This vampire’s facile movements made me angry, even as he managed to pull me along in his shadow.

  “You’re tall,” he said, as if he’d just noticed. He was too, but at six foot five, I had a few inches on him. He had to crane his neck to whisper in my ear. “And strong.”

  “I eat my Wheaties.”

  His laughter was a rumble against my chest. “And you’re not wearing any of those awful colognes. Good.” He had a very faint accent, one I couldn’t place. Something European, I supposed. His skin looked as if it had been light even when he was human, and his hair might have bordered on ginger in the sunlight. I wondered how long it had been since he’d seen the day. Fuck, it might have been weeks since I’d been out between dawn and dusk. I’d become a nightwalker too.

  The song ended and another began, indistinguishable from the first. Boys gyrated around us, but we were an island. He was slimmer than I am, his tight jeans and tighter T-shirt accentuating his lean frame. His mouth would have seemed too wide if it hadn’t been balanced by a long nose and flared cheekbones, and I wondered whether he groomed his eyebrows or if the arches were naturally perfect. I could feel his strength through his hands, one on my hip and the other midway up my back. I wanted to lean my full weight against him because I knew he could hold me.

  Halfway through the third song—or maybe it was the fourth—he pulled me closer. Now we fit so closely together that his hard cock fit into the hollow near my hip. I was hard too. Aching. Had been since he first touched me.

  We rocked against each other in a slow pantomime of sex, his cool breaths as jagged as my own. “What’s your name, agent?” he asked me.

  “I’m no agent,” I growled.

  He huffed, unbelieving, but I wasn’t lying. It had been three months since I left the Bureau— Fuck. Since the Bureau left me.

  My body must have stiffened, because he stroked my back as if I were a nervous pony. “I’m Marek,” he said. “I use many names, but I’d like you to know my real one. The one my father gave me.” I couldn’t tell if his tone was mocking or wistful.

  I wanted him to know my real name as well. I’d always figured a certain honesty was owed between hunter and prey. “Clayton White.”

  “Do your friends call you Clay?”

  I shrugged in his embrace. They might if I had any. The other agents had just called me White. A color rather than an identity.

  Marek undulated against me and sniffed at my neck, and my right hand slid slightly lower to grip his tight ass. The fabric of his jeans was thin enough that I could have torn it if I’d tried.

  Two boys bumped into us. They were pretty, one dark and the other blond, each of them delicate enough to snap barehanded. They smiled in hormonal, pharmaceutical bliss and spun away.

  “So much more freedom than when I was their age,” Marek said. “I never touched another man while I was alive. Or woman. I died a virgin. Such a waste.”

  “Not even the vamp who turned you?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “Not even. I was intended simply as a meal. Accidents happen.”

  Again his tone was light, but there might have been an undercurrent of sorrow. I didn’t want to acknowledge the answering twinge in my own heart. My parents had needed a shotgun wedding, and my father never forgave me for it.

  “How old were you?” I asked, not intending to. It seemed I had little control of myself tonight.

  “Twenty-four. Old for a virgin, even in my time. I’ll bet you didn’t make it through high school untouched.”

  Untouched—such an old-fashioned way to put it. I shrugged again. My first was a wild girl two years older than me. She’d set her eyes on me the first day of my sophomore year, and although I’d already been fairly certain I played for the other team, the offer had been too good to refuse. I hadn’t fucked a man until college.

  Marek huffed with irritation or laughter—I couldn’t tell which—and snaked a hand between us to squeeze my erection. “It’s a pity when youthful lust goes to waste,” he said.

  “I’m not youthful.” Hadn’t been for a very long time. Hell, possibly never was. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and concluded that I’d been born old. My body was only now catching up to my real age.

  “I was old before your grandparents were born. You are youthful.”

  He massaged my cock a moment more, and I didn’t reply. I was wondering exactly when
he’d been turned and what that meant to me. New vampires are impulsive, prone to biting before thinking. Makes them easy to destroy. The ones who survive for decades have learned caution and self-control.

  The song ended. When another began, Marek remained unmoving against me, his mouth inches from my neck. “Will you follow me, Clay?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He took my hand and led me across the floor. A few dancers leered our way and others reached toward us, but I glared and they pulled back. Instead of going to the front of the club, which was crowded, Marek took us to a side door. He pushed it open, and we exited into a narrow alley that reeked of garbage and cat piss.

  I thought he might pause there. Darkness bathed the alley, nobody else was nearby, and the thump of music from the club would have muffled any sounds. But he kept a gentle tug on my arm, sometimes turning his head to give me a small smile as we left the narrow space between brick buildings and turned onto the sidewalk. I knew it was my imagination, but it almost seemed as if his footsteps made no sound while my own boots clomped heavily enough to crack the pavement.

  The calendar showed us well into September, and yet San Francisco baked in an early-autumn heat wave. Even now, hours after sunset, sweat beaded on my skin. Marek’s dry palm absorbed the moisture, as if his body would take in any of my fluids. Perhaps it would. Sweat isn’t so very different from blood, both being cousins to the seawater that birthed us all.

  A few blocks away, the neighborhood turned seedier, although several newly refurbished buildings proved that gentrification was creeping in. Nowadays even falling-down shacks fetched a million dollars or more from tech company employees. I couldn’t afford to live in the city, not even with my severance package from the Bureau, which I called “fuck-off money.” Just enough to send me on my way quietly. Just enough for a shitty apartment in the East Bay, where the cockroaches resembled some of the demons I’d killed when I was an agent.

  Marek finally stopped at the door to a defunct Chinese restaurant. Brown paper lined the inside of the windows that still sported painted lettering offering lunch discounts on beef chow fun and wonton soup. The red awning had faded to pale pink and was tattered at the edges.

  To my considerable surprise, Marek pulled out a key and unlocked the door. Then he bowed deeply and gestured me inside. “Please. You’re invited,” he said.

  I scowled at his little joke. We both knew that the old saw about vamps needing an invitation to enter was horseshit. As was most of the other crap people wrote about the monsters. They are damned hard to kill, but you don’t need to stake them or drag them into sunlight. The Bureau issued special bullets—silver with tiny wooden particles—and as long as you aimed well, they’d do the trick for vamps, shifters, and most other species. They’d work just fine on humans too.

  I don’t know how long ago the restaurant had closed, but the interior still carried faint odors of soy sauce and oil. Several yellowish lights cast a dim glow, revealing the few tables and chairs that remained on the scuffed tile floor. A thick layer of dust shrouded the long counter, and discolored walls showed lighter patches where pictures had once hung.

  “Why here?” I asked, kicking at a pile of stained tablecloths.

  “Privacy.” Marek had closed and locked the door as I was looking around. Now he approached me with his hands loose at his sides and the corners of his lips curled upward. Even his walk was graceful, as if music were playing and only he could hear it. Maybe there was music. Vamp senses were better than human to begin with, and too many years of shooting firearms had dulled my own ears a bit.

  “Okay,” I said when he was almost within reach. “But why here specifically?”

  His smile faded and his gaze shifted to the floor. “It’s where I’m staying. For now.”

  I wondered whether desiccated corpses lurked in a storeroom or somewhere in the kitchen.

  When Marek looked at me again, he somehow looked both very young and exceedingly ancient. “Are you ready, Agent White?” he asked quietly.

  “I’m not an agent!” It had been a long time since I raised my voice, and I startled myself a little. I’d thought myself no longer capable of true anger. I’d been picturing my amygdalae—the almond-shaped spots in the brain that process emotions—as withered and shrunken. But Marek’s words made my hands shake and the blood churn through my head.

  He didn’t back away from my fury. Stone-faced and soft-voiced, he said, “Not anymore.”

  I bent and reached into my right boot.

  The rules are clear. When the Bureau terminates an agent, there’s paperwork. Mounds of it. Then the agent—the former agent—turns in his badge, his ID, his gun. He’s escorted to the door by grim-faced men in dark suits. And fuck-off money is deposited into his bank account.

  Although most of the details were gray and blurry in my memory, there had been one important deviation. When I’d set my gun on Townsend’s desk, he gave me a long, narrow-eyed look before downing the generous shot of scotch he’d poured himself when I sat down. Then he slowly pushed the weapon back toward me. “Keep it,” he said.

  “But the Bureau—”

  “Rules. There’s ways around them, White. You worked here long enough to know that. When a guy’s spent some years rounding up monsters, killing some of ’em, he collects enemies. I’m not coldhearted enough to send him back into the world unarmed.” He moved the gun a little closer to me. “Take it.”

  And I had. He hadn’t asked for my Bureau-supplied bullets either.

  I’d had to buy a boot holster, since they weren’t standard-issue for the Bureau. And I wasn’t licensed to carry the thing. But that hardly mattered to me.

  So in the overly warm wreckage of that Chinese restaurant, I pulled my old gun out and pointed it at Marek.

  His smile reappeared, brittle as old glass, but he didn’t move.

  “I’m a good shot,” I informed him. “Always have been.”

  “Doesn’t matter much at this distance, does it?”

  “Not really.” I kept my hand steady and hoped my confusion didn’t show. “You got a death wish or something?”

  That made him laugh. “That wish was fulfilled nearly three hundred years ago, my friend.”

  I was too shaken to respond to that last part. Three centuries. I’d heard of vampires that old but had never met one. “Forget the semantics. You’re lively for a dead guy—are you aching to be a bona fide corpse?”

  His expression went somber. “No. I’m not sure why, but even after all this time, I’m not eager to depart this plane.”

  “You’ll depart real quick when I pull this trigger.”

  “Yes,” he said. And then he moved so fast that my eyes couldn’t track him. Before my instinct to shoot could even kick in, my gun was skittering across the floor and Marek’s arms were wrapped around me in a python-like embrace. I couldn’t lift my hands to defend myself, and although I tried to kick him, he held me so still that I couldn’t get enough momentum to do any harm. His fangs scraped my neck as delicately as a razor.

  But he didn’t bite.

  I should have been struggling, even if I knew he was stronger. I could have shouted and screamed. I could have spit empty threats of retribution from the Bureau. But I didn’t do any of those things, and my heart continued to beat slow and steady. Despite the sharp teeth pressing against my skin, I wasn’t afraid.

  “Who has the death wish?” Marek whispered. He sounded amused.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “Perhaps.” Still holding me, he moved back a little so he could look me over. “You’d make a wonderful vampire. Beautiful and quite terrible. Is that what you’re hoping for?”

  I growled my denial and he smiled. “Good, because I won’t do it,” he said.

  “Then just fucking kill me.”

  As the words left my mouth, I realized the truth. I did not honestly want to die. But life was a heavy burden, and ever since I’d been a small child, I’d expected one of the monsters to
finally win. No waiting any longer—which was some sort of relief.

  But Marek released me and took a step backward. “If I wanted to murder you, I would have done so before you pulled your gun.”

  “Then what do you want?” I shouted.

  He stood looking at me. Something in the way the light hit his eyes, something in the way he held himself… I don’t know. Maybe it was just the goddamn fangs. At that moment he appeared completely inhuman, a creature as alien as a space dragon from Mars. Distant and inscrutable.

  But he didn’t frighten me, and in that strange alien face, I recognized something familiar. Something I saw every time I looked in a mirror.

  “I need to warn you,” he said.

  Instead of listening I moved toward him and grabbed the back of his head. And I kissed him, fangs and all, feeling the sharp pricks on my tongue and tasting the hot metal of my own blood. He could have broken away—he’d already shown his strength—but he pressed closer and laced his fingers behind my neck. I didn’t know if he wanted me the way I suddenly wanted him or if he only craved a light meal, and I didn’t really care. For that moment I had him against me, hard and solid, and he gave his mouth to me freely. Nobody ever gave me anything.

  We fell, Marek and I, landing on the dirty floor in a tangled pile. I was on top. Our mouths never lost their connection, but now his hands roamed over my shoulders, my back, my ass. Sometimes he squeezed me hard enough to hurt, as if reminding me what he could do if he chose. The little bursts of pain spurred me on, and I ground against him.

  I’m not a thinking man. Never have been. I do things, sometimes rashly, sometimes to great detriment—yet my recklessness has saved my life more than once. I pawed at Marek’s clothes, heedless of consequences, wanting only to touch him, to penetrate his body as I was penetrating his mouth. If he killed me in the process, well, there are worse ways to go. I’ve seen them.