C.A.E.C.O. a novel of the Demon Accords Read online

  C.A.E.C.O.

  A novel of the Demon Accords

  John Conroe

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 John Conroe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Smashwords addition

  The Demon Accords:

  God Touched

  Demon Driven

  Brutal Asset

  Black Frost

  Duel Nature

  Fallen Stars

  Executable

  Forced Ascent

  College Arcane

  God Hammer

  Rogues

  Snake Eyes

  Winterfall

  Summer Reign

  The Demon Accords Compendium, Volume 1

  The Demon Accords Compendium, Volume 2

  Demon Divine

  C.A.E.C.O.

  The Demon Accords Compendium, Volume 3 (coming December 2019)

  The Zone War series:

  Zone War

  Borough of Bones

  Web of Extinction (coming Fall, 2019)

  Cover art by Gareth Otton.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 1

  The Reis family lived in the middle of nowhere, deep inside New York’s vast Adirondack State Park. Their address listed the town of Keene, but it must have been on the edge of the town limits with the next burg over being named something like Desolation, Nowhere, or Abandon Ye All Hope.

  Listen to me. I sound like my old boyfriend. Hardly the way to give a proper report. I’ll start over.

  The suspects, family name Reis, consisting of Robert, Helen, and twin children Maurice and Victoria, lived at the end of a three-quarter-mile dirt driveway, seven miles to the east of the center of the township of Keene, in the central portion of the Adirondack Park.

  Our government-issue SUV was bouncing on the rutted-dirt, single-lane driveway and my threat assessment conditioning was maxing out at the multiple textbook-perfect ambush sites that we rolled through at a steady pace.

  Special Agent Mitchell Allen was driving, while our boss, Special Agent-in-Charge Lois Jay rode in the shotgun seat. Me, Agent Caeco Jensen, had the backseat all to myself. Which was good, because that way my superiors couldn’t see that my right hand was locked on my issued 9mm for most of the trip.

  Literal hairs stood up on the back of my neck, something to do with the warning sign that said trespassers would be killed, which had been posted out by the main road. A warning that was throughly reinforced by the five Eastern coyote skulls tacked to a big oak halfway down the driveway.

  Eastern coyotes should actually be called coy-wolves, as their western coyote DNA was co-mingled with a pretty good slew of wolf genes. The hybridization occurred when eastward-migrating coyotes bred with Canadian wolves on their way to populating the East Coast of the United States in the 1950s and 60s. Just nature refilling the predatory hole left when the native gray wolves had been eliminated by man.

  Instead of twenty to thirty-pound canines, the Eastern variety was more like thirty to fifty pounds, with some males approaching seventy. The Reis family had killed a whole pack and posted their naked skulls as a warning. Most normal people didn’t do that, thus reinforcing the idea that the Reises weren’t normal people, confirming why we were here in the first place.

  Also confirming why we, as in the FBI’s Special Threat Response Team, were handling the call instead of the local Bureau agents out of Albany.

  The STRT used to be called the Occult Task Force, but that got changed recently, about the same time that our leadership changed. Our group flies or drives around the country, responding to any situation where special circumstances may have occurred. By special I mean supernatural, but the Bureau can’t actually bring itself to utter that word, so we use special instead. It’s supposed to be less scary than the term occult. Less scary to the public or to Bureau agents, I don’t know.

  Lois Jay was new to her post, having replaced STRT’s first boss, Agent Krupp. The switch came immediately after Krupp went off the reservation and tried to apprehend possibly one of the most dangerous targets she could possibly find while also arresting a fey prisoner, a black dog, who escaped federal custody only a day later, leaving three agents dead and two horribly disfigured.

  Having a whole slew of agents draw down on Declan O’Carroll had been sheer idiocy, which I told her, several times, but, hey what do I know? Just dated the kid for like a year, that’s all. Saw him call lightning like it was a dog, channel thousands of volts of electricity, burn multiple targets to ash with his mind, form tornadoes at will, and direct a tractor-trailer-sized load of dirt to stand up and walk at his command.

  But no, she had had a major issue with him, almost from the moment she met him, and had tried to go all hardass on him. Wrong decision. Should have held back and let his teammates calm him down. Like I suggested.

  Instead, she decided to bull forward, which was dumb for a lot of reasons. First, he was arguably the most powerful witch known and could have killed every agent or cop on the scene with basically a stray thought. Second, his child was the computer that controlled the world’s entire stockpile of nuclear weapons, which is, to my mind, a pretty good reason to tread softly, and third, he was, at his core, one of the good guys.

  But the FBI hadn’t found an organizational way to come to grips with the emergence of the supernatural world when it busted out into open society. The bureau still struggled with its domestic law enforcement identity in an America that had werewolves, vampires, and witches, all of who could perform superhuman feats of strength, speed, regeneration, or long-distance destruction.

  I mean, sure, they set about gathering silver handcuffs and reinforced restraints, special holding cells, and getting supplies of silver, iron, and witch-spelled ammunition designed to stop supes, but they completely failed at establishing useful procedures, policies, training, and tactics for dealing with super powerful preternatural criminals.

  The pressure from the brass, the conflicting signals, the power struggles at the top all came down on poor Krupp and pretty much bulldozed her off the rails. So she chose to focus on a skinny white boy who looked like a pushover. And she completely ignored the advice of the only team member with firsthand intelligence on Declan the Menace—that being, of course, me.

  So, Krupp was gone and Jay was in and the verdict was still out. I knew very little about Jay, other than she had some Native ancestry, hailed from out West somewhere, and was handpicked for the job.

  “Jensen, thoughts?” SAC Jay asked suddenly.

  “Don’t like the coyote skulls. Had a girl at Arcane, one of the witches, whose family used animal skulls as major no trespassing signs.”

  “So you think they’re witches?”

  “No. Tami’s family used all kinds of skulls: deer, badger, coyote, anything. Those back there were an entire pack of coyotes. That’s more like one set of predators killing off competing predators that had encroached on their territory, then leaving them as a warning to others. So I’m thinking they might be weres of one kind or another. Just a possibility. Too early to draw conclusions.”

  We were heading in to talk to the Reis family because of comments made by both Helen and Robert Reis on various social media sites. Both had posted some twisted stuff, but the bulk of it was written by Helen.

  At this moment, the whole country—hell, the whole world—was a stirred-up mess over the supernatural situation. Are they still human? Do they have rights? Are they going to contaminate everyone? Should they be arrested? Should they be killed outright? Not to mention the other side that preached love thy neighbor and maybe get life-extending benefits from being vampire food.

  On top of that powder keg was the looming threat of alien invasion by the Vorsook, and the fact that only supernaturals, led by Chris Gordon and Tatiana Demidova, had so far been successful in stopping said aliens. So when Mr. and Mrs. Reis started posting about supernatural people exerting themselves over the sheeple, as they stated it, well, the Bureau got interested. Especially when they used rather violent words
and graphic phrases to portray their proposed solutions.

  Mitch glanced at me in the rearview mirror, a slight grimace on his face. “Shit, I hope it’s not witches,” he said.

  “Well, witches have an old saying: Never attack a witch in her home,” I said to cheer him up—not. A girl’s gotta have her hobbies. Picking on team members was one of mine.

  Mitch Allen had been part of the team Krupp had with her on that day when Declan had pitched a little temper tantrum. And as I kept telling everyone who would listen, his earthquake had been just that—a little temper. Tiny, really. The Declan equivalent of a verbal tirade. Then he and Chris had gotten into it and the whole thing could have gone to real shit except Declan’s current girlfriend, Stacia Reynolds, had stepped up and choked the punk out. Even I had to give her props for that one. Bold move. And, yet somehow they were still together. Go figure. I let him fight his own battles and we’re kaput. She chokes him senseless and he’s still all smitten.

  “Do you have any suggestions, Agent Jensen?” Jay asked.

  “Yes. First, we should tread carefully. Second, I should take point, and third, we need to be respectful.”

  “One and three are the same thing,” Mitch protested. Our boss shot him a look. “Well, they are.”

  “Why, Caeco, should you take point?” Jay asked me, ignoring Mitch’s comments.

  “First, my warded necklace is much more powerful than the standard team artifacts you got from our witch supplier. Mine will protect me from a lot of spells that yours won’t. Second, I have much faster reflexes than either of you, and third, because I will possibly recognize what we’re dealing with first,” I said, ticking off a finger for each point. Then I shut up and waited for her to ignore them.

  “Okay. Valid. You take point, but you have to provide us as much warning as possible if it’s going to go tits up,” she said, earning raised eyebrows from Mitch and immediate credit with me for listening. Plus, tits up? What agent says that? Me—from this moment forward, that is.

  I looked at the rearview and found Mitch’s eyes. One eyebrow was raised in what I took to be surprise. Yeah, point goes to SAC Jay.

  The driveway curved to the left and we came around to an open view looking out over a forested valley. A small ski chalet-style house sat on the property, its back to us. Based on the peaked roof that I could see from here, the front was likely a wall of windows that would look out over a hell of a nice view. A small satellite dish explained how they connected to the internet.

  That’s all the time I had to think about houses and vistas because a tall, muscular man stepped out of the back door with a pump shotgun held easily in one hand. Tawny brown hair and eyes that appeared yellow to my enhanced vision. Then the smell hit my nose, brought in by the car’s heating and cooling system. Cat. No. Cats… specifically… cougars.

  Great, a family of werepanthers. I opened my door and stepped out. We were at the extreme range of buckshot but well within the death envelope if he was packing deer slugs. Keep as much car between you and the shotgun, Caeco. My right hand hung near my holstered Glock.

  “Sir, we are FBI agents. Please put down the shotgun. We’re here to talk,” I said loud and clear, although his own hearing should be about as good as mine.

  “We’ve done nothing to warrant arrest,” he yelled back. His voice was urgent yet he never moved the shotgun at all. My neck hairs went up. I paused and listened, sniffing the air. The wind came from the house side of the lot, toward us, so anything behind us was downwind, able to scent us but invisible to my nose. A leaf shifted in the woods to our left. A tiny noise, but all other noises had stopped—no birdsong, no skittering of rodents.

  “Sir, put down the shotgun and please call your wife out of the woods,” I said, waving a hand to my left as I moved away from the car.

  He couldn’t stop the surprise that filled his face.

  “We’re here to talk—that’s it. You and Helen wrote some inflammatory stuff on social media. We want to discuss those remarks, that’s all,” I said. Behind me, I felt Jay and Mitch Allen stepping out of the car, Jay on the right, Mitch almost behind me. I put my left hand down by my leg and folded the little finger with my thumb, leaving three digits pointing down, waving it toward the woods on the left. It was our hand signal for weres, although I was holding it upside down. Immediately I heard Mitch rustle in the open driver’s side of the car, then turn to face the woods. Couldn’t see him, but I was absolutely dead certain he had turned to watch the dangerous forest to our side. I don’t know how I know, whether it’s the nano particles in my blood or the spliced genetic material that gives me certain instincts, and frankly, when it happens, I don’t usually have time to ponder it.

  I was also reasonably certain that Mitch now had a short-barreled 5.56mm HK rifle in his hands. That had more to do with knowing Mitch than any esoteric ability. He habitually kept a rifle loaded with silver-tipped ammo in a discreet pack on or near his person on every trip.

  Robert Reis observed us for a moment, then slowly set the shotgun on the ground. Not that he even needed it. There had been only one werecougar at Arcane, but she was a real tough bitch.

  “Mr. Reis, I’m Special Agent-in-Charge Lois Jay. With me are Agents Mitchell Allen and Caeco Jensen. We are just here to discuss your social media posts. Please call your wife in.”

  We all stayed where we were, waiting, seconds ticking by while he thought it over. His eyes, a buttery yellow, kept coming back to me with a little frown forming between his brows. Finally his posture shifted, almost infinitesimally, relaxing just a tiny bit. Then he turned his head to the woods and chuffed twice, which ended any lingering doubts I might have had about what he was.

  Nothing happened for almost three minutes except I thought I heard very, very slight rustles in the woods, sounds that moved back toward him. Then, suddenly, a naked woman strode out of the forest, lithe and graceful, eyeing us without expression as she walked around behind her husband and into the house. When the door shut behind her, he waved us forward.

  “Let’s hear what our corrupt government has to say,” he said, turning and leading the way to the door. The shotgun lay on the ground like an afterthought.

  Chapter 2

  The inside of the Reis’s house was a surprise. I’d expected animal pelts and deer antlers and more skulls, maybe a butchered deer hanging from a rafter. Instead it was wood, iron, fieldstone, and Adirondack accouterments like birch bark furniture and old snowshoes on the walls. A big stacked-stone chimney was the primary focal point of the living room, with a built-in wood stove and a bluestone hearth. The mantle was a stripped and stained half log, holding an odd assortment of items. A bird’s nest, an empty snapping turtle shell, a large lump of garnet-encrusted granite, and a family photo showing all four of them—in human form.