Chapter 24: A chance at normal
The taxi dropped Gwen off at Shadow Guard headquarters.
She paid the driver without really looking at him, her mind still processing the morning’s revelations while her body went through the familiar motions of entering the building that had been her professional home for the better part of a decade.
The security checkpoint was routine—badge scan, brief nod to the guard who’d been working the morning shift for three years, elevator ride to the third floor where the operational divisions maintained their offices and briefing rooms.
Colleagues passed her in the hallways with the casual acknowledgment that came from years of working together in an environment where people regularly disappeared for weeks at a time on classified assignments.
"Morning, Patricia," called Detective Martinez from the Supernatural Crimes Division, juggling a stack of case files and what looked like his fourth cup of coffee. "How’s the inspection going?"
"Still ongoing," she replied, which was technically true even if the inspection had nothing to do with her current preoccupations.
Her office was small and modest—a single window overlooking the parking garage, a desk that had seen better decades, two chairs that squeaked when anyone shifted their weight, and filing cabinets that contained enough classified information to probably get her court-martialed if the wrong people decided to conduct a thorough review of her activities.
She settled into her chair and pulled up the database interface, scrolling through recent vampire attack reports.
Residential area incidents were up twelve percent from the previous month. Commercial district attacks had remained stable.
The usual concentration of activity in the older parts of the city where the sewer systems and abandoned buildings provided convenient hiding places for supernatural predators.
Nothing unusual. Nothing that suggested coordinated vampire activity or the kind of systematic hunting that marked the presence of powerful Originals in the area.