The Nightwind's Woman Read Free

mentioned weren’t incentive
enough?” he countered. “You don’t find the pay alone enticing?”
    “Actually, no,” she said, shaking her head.
“Those are really good perks but they sure aren’t enough to make me chuck my
life and move to…” Her eyebrows shot up. “To where? Where is the
Beermann Institute?”
    “Tearmann,” he corrected, “and until we
have a firm commitment from you, your signature on the dotted line, I can’t
take you there. As for where it is, you can’t know. You will never know.
That’s part of the deal. What you don’t know, you can’t reveal. The world has
no need to know vampires and werewolves are real and living among them.”
    “All right, I’ll buy that much but what am
I supposed to do if I do sign on?” she asked, feeling her heart pounding in her
chest.
    “Take care of the human population and the
operatives who reside at Tearmann. Handle routine exams and diagnosis for the
creatures who live there,” he answered. “See to their medical and psychological
needs.”
    “Operatives? You mean the otherworldly
types?” she gasped.
    “Many of them were born right here on Earth
so that’s misleading, but yes you will see to them as well.”
    “Without knowing anything about their
physiology?” she demanded. “That would be irresponsible.”
    “There is extensive data on each species,”
he told her. “You won’t be going in blind. There will be a learning curve, certainly,
but just think of the astounding physiologies you will be studying.”
    “You keep saying operatives. What exactly
does that mean?”
    “The entities who are assigned to us are
there for a purpose—to patrol, control and discipline their own kind as well as
run interference on other paranormal and supernatural entities that have made
Earth their home. Sometimes it’s necessary for them to work together to bring a
wrongdoer to justice and sometimes they are required to eliminate a problem if
it cannot be solved any other way.”
    “You mean kill,” she said.
    “We prefer the word eliminate.”
    “I don’t believe in capital punishment,”
she stated firmly.
    “Let me tell you about a mission that
required four of our people to bring it to termination,” he said. “At each of
the facilities, we have an Alpha agent, a Prime. At Baybridge, our operative is
a Prime Reaper. At the Exchange, he is a Hell-Hound Prime Reaper. The
difference being one is lupine and the other canine—a werewolf and a werehound respectively.
At Tearmann, there are actually two Alphas. One is a Panthera Reaper, a
werepanther, and the other is a Nightwind, a very powerful incubus demon. Historically,
these four entities do not play nicely together. They are natural enemies but
they were required to join forces to eradicate a nest of particularly nasty
creatures called drochtáirs that had been found in Antarctica. Had those
fiends not been dispatched many lives would have been lost and the infestation
of the drochtáirs would have spread very quickly to each of the research
facilities on Antarctica.”
    “You’re talking about the disappearances
from Halley Station?” she inquired. At his nod, her brows drew together. “I
read that was attributed to the researchers having fallen through the ice
shelf, the bodies unrecoverable.”
    “ Drochtáirs are blood fiends, Dr.
Delaney, and when they bite, they drain their victims and those they do not
devour, they infect with venom that turns the person into one of their kind.
There are no such things as zombies—that is a creation of Hollywood based on a
very old voodoo ritual. Drochtáirs are very real and very dangerous. Their
victims become nothing more than reanimated corpses with a desire to feed on
others. They are the true zombies of Hollywood fiction. The bodies of those
infected in Antarctica could not be sent back to England. It was necessary for
our operatives to incinerate them. The explanation of the researchers falling
through the ice shelf is easier on