Pivotal (Visceral Book 3) Read online

  Tsenka Cho’s caramel skin and narrow eyes teased a mix of ethnicities. She stood five feet eight inches. A few more with the proper footwear. For this visit, she wore a forest green shirt under a sleeveless jean vest with pants to match. The shirt hugged her well-defined bicep and forearm muscles.

  Cho blinked her HUD visible. The time read half past nine. She rang the doorbell a second time, shifting around to ensure she was in view of the camera located in the corner of the porch. The house was a nondescript bungalow at the south edge of the city. Assured by her superiors that this was the place, Tsenka overcame her skepticism and fear to make an introduction.

  A voice came through the speaker above the door frame. “Yes?”

  Tsenka opened her mouth but found it difficult to start. “Hi,” she forced out. “Is this Matthias Trent?”

  “Who is asking?” said the voice.

  “My name is T-Tsenka Cho,” she stammered. “Did Kate tell you about me?”

  “No… shit, maybe,” answered Matthias. “What can I do for you?”

  Tsenka sighed and her posture relaxed. “I’m with the intelligence service. I would like to talk about some… current issues. I’ve brought your monthly briefing.”

  She could hear Matthias breathe through the speaker. “So pointless. Where’s the normal guy?”

  Cho kicked her right foot against her left. “Well. I requested this. I actually wanted to meet you.”

  A few seconds passed before he responded. “I don’t want to seem rude,” he began. “But if what you know about me is stories from the NRI or dime novels, then you don’t want to meet me.”

  “I’ll set the bar low,” she fired back, then bit her lip, wondering how he would take the jab.

  “Oh, that’s great,” he replied. “Fine, come in.”

  The door clicked open and Cho stepped into a small living room. The interior was clean and looked to have been renovated recently, using contemporary design schemes. A divider split the living room from the dining-kitchen combination.

  Cho heard another door open, and a few moments later, Matthias stepped out of a hallway. He wore a bathrobe over a white tank top and pajama pants. Tsenka tried not to smile. The former agent was pale, with patches of stubble dusted across his cheeks. Dark brown hair was pulled back tightly into a ponytail. His features were sharp, Caucasian. He was thinner than Tsenka expected.

  “Don’t judge me,” said Matthias, striding up to his guest.

  “I wa-,” she tried.

  “I can see every little twitch the human face makes,” he assured. “And it’s still early in vampire time.”

  “Right,” she nodded slowly while grinning.

  “Suppose you want a handshake,” he said. Tsenka wasn’t sure if he "ok was addressing her or just airing his thoughts. Before she could decide, he reached out his hand. She took it lightly and shook.

  “Now that is a weak handshake,” said Matthias, releasing her.

  “I don’t get into grip contests with supernatural beings,” she informed him.

  Matthias gave a short chuckle. “A wise decision. Nice to meet you, Miss...?”

  “Tsenka Cho,” she introduced. “And you are the great Matthias.”

  Matthias sighed. “Bar still not low enough.”

  “I lied,” she said. “Had to get in the door somehow.”

  “Never trust the feds,” Matthias said. “Okay, Miss Cho, please have a seat.”

  She did as instructed, sitting at one end of a long tan leather couch that sat opposite a smart wall in paint mode, relying on exterior light for viewing. It had a few stock symbols and a weather forecast on display. Matthias looked at the couch, then moved to a chair placed perpendicular to it and sat.

  The vampire put a hand flat on each thigh. The intelligence agent leaned back into the couch casually. She looked around, studying the interior of the house, and smiled. She was really in his home.

  “So where’s the briefing?” asked Matthias.

  “Here,” said Cho, handing over a tablet used specifically for secure documents.

  Matthias took it and swiped through a few pages. “Got any bullet points I shouldn’t miss?”

  “They say you can lift a car above your head,” she said, beaming.

  Matthias shook his head, still looking down at the tablet. “And I’ll save the children, but not the British children,” he said, quoting media from his youth. The vampire looked up at her with a grin, sure it would bewilder her.

  With a straight face, she said, “You’re no George Washington.”

  His grin faded and his brow furrowed.

  “But there are a few old hats at the agency that talk about you like a founding father of the Republic.”

  “How do you know about that?” he demanded.

  “Everyone knows what you’ve done. Some of it is on video.”

  “No,” he said. “About Washington.”

  Tsenka laughed. “Of course, that’s what you care about.” She stared at him, soaking in the moment before answering. “I’m a big history buff. I watch tons of stupid—I mean, pre-Collapse videos.”

  “It must be part of some compilation,” concluded Matthias.

  “I get it, by the way,” she said. “The memes give you a link to an old world everyone misses now and it’s fun to say something that should be funny, but confuses people.”

  “I never really thought about why I do it,” he said. “And yes, I could lift a car over my head.”

  They sat quietly while Matthias pretended to read the tablet. Occasionally, he glanced up at Tsenka. He hadn’t really looked at her before because she had been inconsequential, but now somewhat intrigued, he began to study her features.

  “Why’d you quit the team?” she asked.

  He set the tablet down. “These briefings are pointless, aren’t they?”

  Whether rhetorical or not, she didn’t answer.

  “But Kate insists,” he continued. “How is she?”

  Tsenka’s smile lessened. “She’s well, all things considered. Still doing great work.”

  “Of that, I’m sure,” said Matthias.

  “The world is still full of problems,” said Cho. “And the Republic could still use your help.”

  “The world will always be full of problems, with or without me,” he retorted. “What got you into this mess?”

  “You did,” she said, this time with no smile.

  “Jesus, kid,” he replied, straightening up in his seat. “I think you might have a problem.”

  “I grew up to stories about you and Kate and Taq,” expounded Cho. “Learned about you in school—”

  “That had to be a short course.”

  “Watched all your interviews after you went public.”

  “I gave like three,” he countered.

  “I snuck over to a friend’s just so we could watch the Haven fortress crash over and over,” added Cho.

  “That’s awful!” Matthias reacted.

  “And yes I’ve read all the dime novels, as you call them,” she said, leaning forward. “Some of them are good, and some are supposedly based on classified leaks.”

  “None of them are based on anything!” he said with his hands out and above his head.

  “This was my childhood dream,” she said, smiling again. “I’ve read all the intel on your ops with the agency. Though I may have made a few embellishing assumptions about missing details.”

  “That’s very flattering, really,” said Matthias. “But I’m just a guy, a vampire guy, and as I’m sure you now know, the work is not that glorious. How could I be this interesting?”

  Tsenka shrugged. “You changed the world. Sure, Wu was important, others too, but they all had something to gain. You were just fighting. Like you always had.”

  “You know, it’s nice to have a fan,” he said, nodding. “I should stop complaining.” Matthias looked down at the floor, then back up at Cho. “What do you mean, like you always had?”

  “Oh,” she said, crossing
her arms. “You were with Noxcorp investigations before the founding.”

  “What do you know about that?” asked Matthias.

  “A little,” she replied meekly.

  “Really?” he said. “I doubt much of that would be accessible even through the agency.”

  Cho didn’t reply but waited for him to continue.

  “It was good to meet you, Tsenka, but perhaps it’s time to go.” Matthias stood.

  “Oh, no,” said Tsenka. “I’m screwing things up. Just wait a second.”

  “What do you know about Noxcorp?” he asked again.

  Cho stood to face him. “I didn’t bring it up earlier because you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Bring what up?” he asked.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “Just something that got me interested in you.”

  Matthias put his hands on his waist. “Go on.”

  “I was told stories as a kid,” she started. “My mother said that you and her mother fought together during some top secret operation, but she died.”

  “I partnered up with your grandma,” summarized Matthias with a skeptical grin.

  “That’s right,” said Tsenka. “She was an awakened, lived in the KC university.”

  Matthias laughed. “Now I think I’ve heard it all.”

  Tsenka frowned and her gaze lowered in shame.

  Matthias straightened up. “Hey, come on,” he said. “You have to admit that sounds kind of funny. Shit, maybe it’s true. I worked with a lot of people, and I don’t remember half of them. What was your grandmother’s name?”

  Tsenka Cho looked the nocturnal in the eyes. “Her name was Sandra Haulstein.”

  * * *

  “You know this isn’t going to be very interesting,” said the swarthy Hispanic man in a hoodie. He sat in a round black chair opposite Perry Walters. His holo tag read “Preston Nunes, NRI Specialist.”

  “I’ll consider that a challenge,” said Perry.

  “There will be a lot I can’t talk about,” said Nunes, with what Perry guessed was a South American accent.

  “That’s fine,” said Walters. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Boss sort of ordered it,” replied Nunes. “Said someone had to do it, and I think he sent me just for his own amusement... Wait, that’s off the record.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Nunes, we’ll let you review the tape after we’re done.”

  Nunes leaned back. “Eh, fuck it, who cares.”

  “Alright then,” laughed Walters. “Shall we begin?”

  “Sure,” he said, pronouncing the s sound rather than sh.

  Walters shifted in his seat, adjusting his posture. “Preston Nunes, a New Republic Intelligence specialist, is with us this evening. Welcome, Mr. Nunes.”

  “Of course,” said Nunes. “Great to be here. You can just call me Preston.”

  “Preston,” Perry addressed. “How many years did you work alongside Tsenka Cho?”

  “Two years, give or take,” said Preston.

  “Isn’t that a short period of time to work in intelligence?”

  “Sure, somewhat,” Preston answered.

  “Why not longer?”

  “The incident, as you know.”

  “So Ms. Cho was still rather fresh when her time with the agency was interrupted,” extrapolated Walters.

  Preston leaned to one side of the chair and put his hand out in a kind of stop sign. “To the agency, yes. In fact, she was our youngest field agent. But she came highly recommended from the New Republic special forces.”

  “Some have said maybe the NRSF was trying to transfer her out,” asserted the journalist.

  “Some have, of course,” said Nunes with a tense smile.

  “Do you question those reports?”

  “I don’t need to,” assured Preston. “We had access to all of her files, every little thing good or bad. And we ran two ops together before she put together a team of her own.” He bit the inside of his lip, frustrated that he may have said something still classified.

  “Let’s switch gears for a moment,” Perry said. “There’s an unverified report that previous to the incident, Tsenka Cho was a patient at Saint Luke’s for roughly a month. Is there any truth to that?”

  “If she was, I wasn’t aware,” Preston said flatly. “I wasn’t working directly with her at the time.”

  “Okay,” started Walters. “Let’s go back then. You were her trainer when she first joined?”

  “We call guys like me training wheels,” answered Nunes. “But yes, my role was to make sure she had protocol down and to give her some training.”

  “And how did she get along, early on?”

  “I don’t think it would be appropriate to give specifics,” the intelligence agent cautioned. “But I think it is fair to say that she was very confident. Ambitious too. Had her own ideas for how things should be done.”

  “Maybe I’m reading too much into that, but it sounds like you are saying there was some difficulty,” Perry pried.

  “Difficulty,” Nunes pondered. “This was once the state of Kansas. 'Ad astra per aspera', right?”

  * * *

  Somehow Matthias had found himself in his own worst nightmare. He cursed himself for his selfish thoughts. The nightstalker stared at the mummy prone on the hospital bed. The night staff wouldn’t let him in, so he went in anyway. Kate accessed the immediate physician’s report. Every organ had been damaged to the point of failure. He called it a miracle, a word typically reserved for hyperbolic conversations with family members, that she had survived.

  Tsenka Cho had been admitted unconscious, and unconscious she remained. Her body, head to toe, wrapped in bandages with Matthias standing as a statue before it. He studied the monitors connected to cables that buried themselves underneath the wrapping. He didn’t know much about the output displayed, but he could see that her brain activity was faint and her blood pressure low.

  “Ay, boss,” said a voice in his ear. A voice so familiar and so directly connected to his thoughts that he almost dismissed it as his imagination.

  “Kate,” he acknowledged as if to remind himself.

  “Did you get in?”

  “I am with her now.”

  “I am still wrangling intel and bringing people in,” informed Kate. “Is it as bad as it reads?”

  Matthias exhaled. “I don’t know. She appears whole at least. But she’s all covered, unconscious. Still breathing. Told her not to go, dammit.”

  “It’s dangerous work… I’m s-sorry, Matthias. What can I do?”

  “More security up here,” he said without hesitation. “Put me on the detail.” He instinctively felt for his pistol at his hip.

  “I will get it done.”

  “Take care of her,” he demanded. “If—when she wakes up, Tsenka will need support, surgeries, rehab. Bean counters are going to fight it. I don’t want to hear any bullshit.”

  Kate didn’t respond immediately. Matthias sighed. “Kate…”

  Kate knew she had to respond eventually. “If she wasn’t… who she is, would you still p-push for special treatment?”

  Matthias clenched his teeth. “If you put me in front of anyone like this, yeah, I would. Please, Kate.”

  “You know how these things work,” she replied. “I will g-get her what she needs, but I may have to fall back on some old habits.”

  “I understand,” he replied.

  “Consider though,” she said. “That it may not be enough, or you m-may not like the result.”

  “It’s too late for what I like to matter.”

  Episode 2: The Dinner

  “I don’t see the resemblance,” stated Matthias after an awkward pause, as his head swelled with a multitude of emotions buried over forty years in the past.

  “Well, it’s true,” Tsenka insisted.

  “Okay, but Haulstein was even whiter than me.”

  “So you at least remember her,” she pointed out.

  Matthias grunted quietly
. “I remember. But she didn’t have kids.”

  “Apparently she did.”

  “And she was a mage,” said Matthias. “You inherit any of her abilities?”

  “I can’t do any magic, don’t have the right aura, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You know how all this sounds, right?”

  Tsenka got up and walked to the front door.

  “Hold on a second,” said Matthias, following.

  Cho stopped and turned. “You think this is some weird con?”

  “Had occurred to me,” he replied with a shrug.

  “And to what end?” she demanded. “To ride Matthias’s massive cock?”

  The vampire was taken aback, with a stunned expression to match. “Who told you it was massive?” he said, recovering his composure.

  Tsenka rolled her eyes. “Sarcasm.”

  Matthias shoved his hands into the pockets of his robe. “You’re right. There’s no reason to question your heritage. I guess I am just a little paranoid.”

  Cho rested her hand on the front door’s handle and stared at the floor. “Never told anyone that story. You made me realize how silly it sounds. Maybe that’s all it was, a story.”

  Matthias moved closer to Agent Cho. “I don’t remember what it’s like to have the weight of expectation on my shoulders. That’s the burden of the young. Is that what this is about, feeling like Sandra’s legacy?”

  Tsenka swiped the door, causing it to spring open a crack with a soft chime. “I’m not that simple.” She pulled the door open. “I’m glad I got the chance to meet you, Mr. Trent.”

  “Your grandmother was more interesting than what you’ve read, I’d bet,” he said before she could make her escape.

  Tsenka stopped and put one hand to her hip. “I’m listening.”

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  “Really, you’re just waggin’ about now.”

  “Bring an appetite,” he said with more warmth than Tsenka had seen all evening. “I will tell you all about her.”

  “Dinner?” she scoffed. “Like a date?”

  Matthias cocked his head to the side. “A date, dinner, a reset button. Call it what you want.”