Thankfully, they were eager for an update. Especially after noticing the blood and dust on me.
Once I held their entire focus, down to the last child, I yanked hard on Colby and summoned a light mist from my wand that spread through the restaurant. As the patrons inhaled, the spell latched on, and click went their brains. They switched off, leaving me front and center before a roomful of zombielike stares.
“A monster movie was being filmed downtown tonight. What you saw were animatronic creatures doing battle for the final showdown. The buildings will be repaired by the production company in a timely manner.” I smiled, and, as one, they smiled back. “Everything is okay. Everyone is okay. We need your cooperation for a bit longer, and then we’ll let you all go home.”
The room nodded in sync then fell into staring at me again, their empty eyes following my every move as I met Asa at the door.
“Clay helped Dad fight off Parish,” I told him quietly, “but he doesn’t remember any of it.”
“That’s not like Clay.” Asa scanned the street behind me. “His mind is like a vault.”
“Exactly.” I hated to think it, let alone say it. “But there’s a key.”
The director.
He gave Clay orders, and Clay always followed them to the letter. He had no choice.
But, as much as I would love to pin this on him, he wasn’t here. So where did that leave us?
Tires squealing drew us out on the sidewalk as three vans skidded into the parking spaces in front of the restaurant. Men and women dressed in biohazard suits spilled onto the street, broke into teams, and set about earning the title of cleaner. Each one carried a kit resembling a tacklebox, and one of them hefted a case of the supernatural equivalent of bear spray with a yellow sticker reading EXPERIMENTAL.
Kudos to them for trusting an R&D project to save them from a rampaging dragon.
“Thank the goddess. I really didn’t want to be responsible for scrambling this many people’s brains.”
These folks stood a much better chance of making a full recovery with pros on the job.
“I hoped the cleaners would arrive in time for me to join you, but I didn’t trust the humans to stay put.”
Put more than two people together, mix in an ounce of excitement, and you became an instant cat herder.
“You were right to keep watch over them. It’s not their fault Parish earned a smackdown, or that Dad was too enraged to see straight. This is an incident with a capital I. They exposed themselves to humans in a populated area with no attempt to deescalate the situation.”
As far as I could tell, Dad didn’t care who got hurt so long as he got answers from Parish. I had to hand it to him. One sure-fire way to dethrone the director and abolish Black Hat was revealing the existence of the supernatural community. And if the cleaners missed one speck of evidence tonight during their wipe down, that was exactly what he had done.
“Let’s greet them.” He rested his hand at the small of my back and guided me. “Then we can go.”
“I need to make a statement.” And yet, I allowed myself to be led. “This is going to get…sticky.”
“The cleaners will have their hands busy with the humans,” he reasoned. “They can find you later.”
“After I’ve had time to think up a good story?”
“Precisely.”
With the director wounded, and his second-in-command dead, the Bureau was rudderless.
We had to do one of two things: Get the director back on his feet or elect our own interim director.
The latter was laughable, really. Who could we trust? No one.
Anyone who snatched leadership out of the jaws of this turmoil wasn’t looking to save the Bureau, or its agents. More than likely, they would run Black Hat into the ground faster than you can say chupacabra. I doubted anyone left would make that power grab except as an escape route.
With the title came the power to abolish the Bureau, to release the agents from their service, to free the prisoners in the belly of the compound.
Agents, pardoned from their duties, would fall into old habits and wreak havoc.
Prisoners, half-starved and brutalized, would devour entire towns to sate their hungers.