Nightshades Read Free Page B

Alex grabbed his shoulder, steering him toward the exit. “Come on, you can buy me lunch to celebrate.”
    “Ugh. Fine. McDonald’s it is,” Chase said, still looking morose.
    There wasn’t actually a McDonald’s nearby, but they walked two blocks to Heroes, a sandwich bistro with decent, if overpriced, food. It was always populated with plenty of FBI agents and staff, and Alex found himself waving several times before they could place orders. When they had been seated in a window booth, Chase asked in an airy tone, “So what makes you think I even want to follow you to Chicago?”
    “Um, let’s see. It’s a promotion, and you’ll make more money. You love money, and you hate Philly. Plus, you’ll get to work for your best friend,” Alex said, ticking off the points on his fingers.
    “Oh, you’re not my best friend,” Chase corrected. “I’m obviously
your
best friend, but I have many other social options I choose not to talk about.”
    Alex ignored this, his foot jiggling up and down with excitement. “Come on, man. Ride my coattails. It’ll be fun.”
    Chase didn’t smile. “Seriously, Alex. We could die out there.”
    “We could die anywhere,” Alex pointed out. “Don’t you want it to be somewhere with deep-dish pizza?”
    Chase looked at him for a long moment, then finally shook his head, acquiescing. “All right. You had me at ‘deep-dish pizza.’”
    “Whatever, man. You’re as curious about these things as I am.”
    “Maybe,” Chase replied. “Or maybe I just figure you’ve got a better chance of staying alive with me there.”
    “Touché.”
    “How fast is this gonna happen?” Chase asked. “I mean, Harding puts in the paperwork, then what, a couple weeks to get packed up and move? We gonna get a U-Haul and drive out there, or—” He broke off. “Alex, I do not like the look on your face right now.”
    Alex swallowed his massive bite of French fries, looking guilty. “About that,” he began.

    Four hours later, Alex and Chase had nearly covered the large conference table in one of the Bureau’s many meeting rooms. The FBI was as dazzled by the idea of a paper-free society as any other large organization, but they still believed in building paper files for employees and applicants. Little by little the piles of rejected agents had grown and migrated down the table, while the stacks of prospects dwindled bleakly.
    Pickings were slim. Only a couple of weeks earlier, the BPI had been flooded with requests for transfers. Shade investigation had briefly been considered the hot new track in the Bureau, and Chicago was a desirable office. After so many agents had been killed, however, many applicants had called to withdraw, and the stacks of files had dwindled to about twenty. Most of them fell into one of two groups: the hardcore anti-shade activists—people who referred to them as the “vampire plague”—or the Bureau’s serious troublemakers, agents who were desperate to transfer out of a bad situation, usually of their own design.
    Alex didn’t have any problem with hating shades, but hardcore obsessives rarely made good team members, in his experience. He was slightly more forgiving of “troublemakers” than the average agent, being keenly aware of how unfairly reputations could be made, but there was a science to picking a cohesive team, and putting in too many cowboys wasn’t going to help them stay alive.
    And that was part of the problem, he’d realized: figuring out how to stay alive. Alex had put teams together before, on temporary operations and a couple of minor task forces he’d run, but this was the first time he was faced with having real, immediate power over not just careers, but lives. Nine agents had been killed so far, enough that the rest of the BPI was calling the Chicago office “Death’s Waiting Room.” Alex was all too aware he could be choosing people to die. They needed three competent agents, although four would be better. Then they could