Clay White: A Bureau Story (The Bureau) by Kim Fielding

Author:Kim Fielding [Fielding, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-05T18:30:00+00:00

I was going to spend the night in a cheap motel—the rental car being far too small to sleep in—but Grimes unexpectedly offered to host me for the night. Since I was exhausted, I headed into the bookshelf-lined spare bedroom, leaving Grimes and Tenrael talking softly in the living room. The mattress was comfortable and the darkness surrounded me like a warm cloak, yet I had trouble falling asleep. My closed eyes couldn’t stop the images of all my wrong decisions and the people who’d been hurt by them. Not just those children. I’d had a lover once, when I was in college. He was a fellow student, a slightly chubby boy who thought of himself as undesirable, but I’d seen beauty in his quick mind and warm smile. By the time we graduated, he’d begun to speak of the future, of building a life together. But I’d been so certain of my destiny—an agent bound to die young—that I’d abandoned him, breaking his heart in the process. All the years since, I’d refused to speculate on what might have been. Yet tonight, in this little bungalow by the sea, I caught myself wondering.

“No,” I mumbled and turned to face the wall. There was no point in torturing myself. And that long-ago lover? No doubt he’d recovered and found someone kinder, smarter, better. Someone who was happy to daydream about mortgages and gardens and children instead of skulking through nighttime streets in search of monsters.

Monsters. How could I properly identify them, even define them, anymore? Yes, I’d encountered—and often slaughtered—a great many creatures that undoubtedly qualified. Ghouls that stalked graveyards and morgues in search of fresh flesh, relatively speaking. Revenants mindlessly seeking revenge. Shifters that let their animal impulses control them. Demons far more terrifying than the one currently hosting me. All manner of things that went bump in the night. And vampires, of course. Quite a few of them.

But as one of those vampires had recently pointed out, humans were fully capable of monstrous acts, of attacking their own kind—sometimes even their own families—with unmatched ferocity. Or, more often, making stupid decisions that got other people killed.

How to judge a living being? By his species? His actions, past or present? His intentions? I didn’t know. And as I lay there, I realized it was hubris to even try, especially when I couldn’t fairly judge myself.

I imagined I heard the soft shush of flapping wings, and I fell asleep thinking of Marek and the tender way he’d touched me.

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