Promethean Read online

  “That’s quite the hole someone made for you. In a really inconvenient place. Linked to something from your job, do you think?” The man was smooth sounding, though he did look over at Liam several times. Seeming agitated by his presence.

  What he didn’t do was point his weapon in that direction. One of the people, who was in the distance, who was shorter and seemed to have a female form, if one disguised by a heavy blue jacket, simply stared at him. Her eyes didn’t waver much at all. Then, as Brenner spoke to the pale man the lady officer slowly put her weapon away and walked toward him.

  She shook a little as she did it, stopping about five feet from him.

  “Okay, that’s impressive. I feel like starting a fist fight with you and you haven’t even done anything yet. Let me… Everyone, stay back from the kid here. That drug reaction crap is real. Even if it sounds like bull to me. Sounded like.” She sucked in a big, rather deep breath and then nodded her thin face. “Your eyes are different as well.”

  Liam wasn’t good at lying, having seldom done anything like that. Yet. It was probably the best plan to go with what Brenner had just claimed for him though. He was sick, or at least had problems, and the drugs had reactions.

  He whispered then, letting a smile cross his lips.

  “This is their natural color. The drug treatment changed my skin color. I’m normally a jaundiced yellow, so that part isn’t too bad. Plus, my huge hands and feet… Birth defects. They aren’t life threatening, though I’m working with a specialist to try and fix some of them, since people notice. I’m hoping that I won’t have to take the drugs for too long. That’s to help with my vocal cords. Right now they don’t work right.” His voice was soft, meaning the officer had to move closer to him. Her right fist clenched hard as she did. Ready to hit him in her anger.

  A thing she didn’t do at all.

  Instead, looking very stiff, she pulled a small writing pad out and a pencil. Then she started to scribble.

  “Name and date of birth, please.”

  Liam nearly froze then. Not due to the name. He was able to come up with that one easily enough, having one. Even with a new addition to it at the end. The trick was in getting his age right. He’d been told that he looked to be about twenty, though some thought he was younger due to his small size.

  “I’m Liam Brenner. Liam Frank Brenner. Um, the middle name, it’s actually Frankenstein. I hear there were drugs involved in the choice. Which kind of explains some of the rest of things. Don’t worry, Tiffany isn’t my bio-mom. So the FBI isn’t actually letting their Agents mess up that much.” Which was all true, though the angry police woman didn’t so much as grin at the words.

  Instead she nodded at him, tightly. Like she might really want to shoot him, if she had a reason for it. Possibly even if she didn’t.

  “That’s pretty fucked up. Date of birth?”

  He gave the real day and month, which was August twenty-seventh, then subtracted twenty years for the date. That was a round number and not that hard for him to work out, in his head. He knew how to do basic math, already. Not the clever and complex kinds though. Algebra was about as high as he’d managed to learn so far, since it was needed for many medical procedures. Or, rather, it wasn’t, strictly speaking. He had to make adjustments to things on the fly at times, since he was earning his keep by providing medical services, illegal ones, to anyone that came to Tiffany for such things. That had happened a few times per week.

  All of those people were other than human and none had been too troubled by him. Not like the poor woman in front of him. The one who was holding herself together rather well, compared to most people that reacted to him in a similar fashion. It was, he decided, kind of impressive.

  “Now, what did you see?”

  He recounted the tale quickly, including going over the blue truck, the man with the black mask and light-colored skin and that the plates were local ones, he thought. She frowned at him then.

  “No numbers though? That doesn’t help a lot. There are probably a million blue trucks in the state, which is how things are sorted. We can narrow that a bit, though not a lot. Do you think this is about someone that’s pissed at you for this drug thing?” She waved at him, still ready to harm him, it seemed. Her words were very tight, even if she wasn’t that old. Really, she was probably about five years older than Liam looked. Taller, as well. By about five inches.

  Tilting his head, to show he was thinking, Liam shrugged.

  “I have no way of knowing that. Normally when people come for me, they come for me, not the innocently standing by drive way. It could be that one, or something that Tiffany has going on at work? She doesn’t tell me about a lot of that.” Some, though the truth was that Liam got a lot more data from Agent Sanchez, her partner, on that sort of thing than from the woman herself. For that matter he got more from the vampires than he did Agent Brenner.

  Even given that, most of what he knew about what was going on came from patients that he’d treated. Since he didn't charge them anything for the work, and most of them couldn’t go to the hospital, they tended to think of him as being friendly and useful. That meant they told him things. A lot of it was fairly easy to understand, of course. Several of them had mentioned pregnant women they knew, since they didn't have a good local mid-wife who was willing and able to work with supernatural beings. The hint there had been for him to get trained in that field, in case of emergencies that way.

  Which Liam had looked into, instantly.

  The babies would be coming, eventually and the parents would need help, from someone. Given that most called him Doc Liam, even if he didn't have a medical license or real training, it was clear that they’d be showing up on Tiffany’s doorstep once things started to happen. The word had gotten out, meaning that he needed to get in more equipment and had started on learning other skills, as well. Such as dentistry. No one had come to him for that yet, but he needed to get ready for anything, including teeth cleanings and minor oral surgeries.

  None of this was mentioned to the officer in front of him. Officer DeLay. He knew that since she very helpfully had a name tag on her shirt. The jacket tried to cover it, but he was able to see a glimpse of it, which was enough, even in the dim light. Most of that was actually coming from the window behind him, not the sky, any longer.

  Several other cars came, about half an hour into the whole thing, with Agent Sanchez flashing his badge, several times. He approached Brenner and the man she was dealing with, the female officer glaring at Liam, then the others that had come.

  “I hate the feds. They always roll in and take all the interesting cases. Do you think that’s what is happening here?”

  That took thought, though Liam was able to shake his head. He wasn’t a lawyer or an FBI agent, having put most of his data collection time into medical endeavors over the last months. He’d looked into some things that way, since he was still being kept away from Mary, his creator. She wasn’t allowed, by court order, to contact him directly. They spoke, almost every day, over the phone.

  Oaks hadn’t been by nearly that often to see him, having come almost every two weeks, so far. That one was obvious as to why, naturally, since the man considered himself Liam’s father. Having provided the instructions as to how to work the chemical process that turned dead flesh into a living person, if of a specific sort and the funds to make it all possible for Mary to get the work done. It counted as much as anything could, in Liam’s world.

  The creature was also clearly grooming Liam for something. A known thing, since Mary had mentioned the plan to make an army of people like themselves to take over the world. A few times that sentiment, that they could take everything over had been mentioned to him by his father. Nothing too overt that way. So far, truthfully, the rather homely giant had simply helped explain things and made himself useful. Attempting to win Liam over as a friend.

  It was kind of working, he had to admit.

  Mary, his mother, was upset that they’d met. Then to her
way of thinking, Oaks was looking at Liam as a tool to use, not a real son. That would probably end up being the case, of course. Still, it hadn’t been demonstrated yet, so he was willing to play along and see where things went. His own mother had told him to run, instead of facing the man.

  He’d gone a different direction.

  Smiling, he shook his head, ever so slightly, not wanting to set the woman with the gun off, if at all possible. It would be too hard to explain why the bullets didn’t kill him.

  “Not likely, unless there’s information that we don’t know about. They handle things that cross state boundaries. This is local, as far as anyone has told me so far. I could be wrong, but… If they try to take over, your people get to laugh them off, right now.”

  The woman nodded at him then, still visibly upset.

  “Got it. Well, I have everything I need from you. You could… Maybe go sit to the side there? Away from people? If you aren’t too cold. I don’t want you out of sight, I just can’t think of a good reason to let you freeze to death out here for my own comfort.” She grinned then. It wasn’t nice, though her words seemed honest.

  Liam nodded and went to the side, where there was a grass lawn and simply sat down, cross legged, on it. It was tempting to run his fingers over the short blades, letting the springing leaves caress his palms. He refrained, since that would seem a bit off. People that looked like him didn’t play with the world idly, or so he’d read. Some did. They were looked down upon though as not being mentally stable. He was supposed to be ill or at least lightly broken. Not high on illegal drugs. He looked like an adult, so had to act like one.

  That meant waiting, until the police all, rather carefully, pulled out of the driveway. Avoiding the hole that had sprung up there earlier. That left the FBI men and women, each of whom either stayed well away from him with a certain sense of purpose, or who waved lightly and didn’t join him, due to the fact that they were trying to work the case. Even if it wasn’t theirs, strictly speaking.

  A thing that Liam understood. The local police might not do as good of a job as they would, so even if it was strictly against the rules, they were planning to find whoever had attacked Brenner’s driveway and shot at him on their own. For his part, he was planning to look into things as well. Not that he had the same skill set as professional investigators.

  No, it was his plan just because he was nearly certain that the government wasn’t going to share their information with him, even if it was important for him to know.

  That just seemed to be how the world worked, day to day.

  Chapter two

  It was hours later when Brenner, Agent Sanchez and four other FBI men and women walked into the living room of Brenner’s home. One of those was Agent Carlisle, who took one look at Liam, grimaced and then shook his head.

  Angrily.

  “Fucking monsters. We should kill it before it gets a chance to kill anyone else.”

  That Liam had killed several people, all werewolves, was apparently something that had been reported to the FBI. No one had mentioned arresting him for murder yet, which, to him, meant they were probably willing enough to cover up what had happened that night. Except, it seemed, for Agent Carlisle.

  They’d only met once before, the man having been just as angry at him then, it seemed. Without a handy murder accusation thrown in. That Liam had been in a position where he’d either killed people or a young girl was going to be murdered apparently didn’t matter to the man.

  Rather than just take it this time, feeling a bit upset at dealing with angry people for hours, Liam nodded.

  “Agent Carlisle. Where were you earlier this evening? You hate me enough to shoot at me, clearly. That means you’re a suspect, doesn’t it?” He was being mean and about half the faces in the room indicated that. The interesting thing was that Carlisle, who sneered, also shook his head.

  Then he nodded.

  “Right. I really do feel that way. I was at the office though, so it would at least indicate that I have a personal alibi. Not that I couldn’t be in on setting something up like this, though. I wouldn’t do it, of course. We’d need to hit you with a larger bomb than that and it needs to at the very least destroy most of your body. Then we’d need to dump your remains in acid, that or cremate them. Shooting at you would just piss you off.” The words could have been kind or simply honest, coming from someone else.

  From this particular man they seemed more like a plan. A decently well thought out one.

  Agent Douglas, the only other person there that Liam had learned the name of, settled into a chair and shook his head. His dark skin was deeper and richer in color that what Liam had now. It went well with the dark suit jacket he had on.

  The man, who’d been friendly toward him before, smiled a bit.

  “I was there, so I can confirm that alibi for Carlisle, which also works for me. Not that it would have been any of us, of course. Like Carlisle here said, or at least implied, it was too stupid. At least on the surface. It could be a warning, or an attempt to scare you into taking action. That situation with the Hodler family has to indicate to anyone paying attention that you won’t be easy to intimidate, I’d have to think.”

  Which was likely true enough. The girl of the family, Clarissa, had been having sex with a neighbor of theirs, a human drug dealer, named Noah. She was thirteen and Noah was, as it turned out, twenty-nine. They’d been told he was younger than that at first, though not by enough to make it okay for him to have relations with a little girl like he’d been doing.

  Her people had decided that she’d screwed up by attention being paid to them due to her actions, so had set up a trial by combat. A rigged thing, put together by people from much higher up in their leadership structure. The original plan had been for the girl to fight seven adult werewolves, to the death. On her own. Except that Liam had been there and it was allowed for anyone who wanted to jump in on either side of things, so he had. Even if he didn't know how to fight at all. Darrel the vampire had given him some quick and dirty instructions, then they and several others had fought to protect the girl.

  Before that no one except the ghost of her aunt had tried to do anything.

  There was a reason for that, which Carlisle helpfully pointed out, glaring at Liam while he did it.

  “You went and killed three adult werewolves, unarmed. That’s hard to do and I bet a lot of families are holding a grudge now. Do we really need to look any further than that?”

  Tiffany did her own sneering then, at the other agent.

  “You know better than that. It’s one of the best traits of that kind. Wolves don’t hold stupid grudges. There was a fight to the death and some of them died. That’s how the game is played, for them. They aren’t human beings, not any longer. Acting like they are will just waste our time. It could be one of the other groups, I suppose. Only, I doubt it. Everyone is fairly pleased with Liam right now. He’s been working as a doctor in a set of communities were that kind of aid is hard to come by. Doing a good job of it too, before you ask. Killing off the main source of care that way is generally frowned upon. As in even trying to do that could set off a real war. It probably wasn’t that at all.”

  The words got Sanchez to nod then, his hands moving from the top of the table he was at to wave at the room.

  “It could be a lot of things, really. Sure, Liam is here and some people have a problem with him on sight. Really though, Carlisle, you were fine with him for the last months. Even after the Hodler thing. Until you got in sight of him. We’ve talked about him and you were nearly sweet in his direction… Until you got here today.”

  The other man, slightly red faced from anger, nodded.

  “Yeah. He’s just… Pissing me the fuck off right now. I could see someone passing him on the street deciding to follow him back here if they were being hit the same way.”

  One of the remaining agents, the female one that Liam didn't know, cleared her throat then.

  “They followed him back h
ere with masks, rifles and a hand grenade? Fragmentation, too, which most people don’t have in the glove box. I can’t really see that one as being too likely. Also, why didn't they throw it toward the house? It was about ten feet inside the driveway, where it meets the road. Even if they don’t know what they are doing, it had to have been thrown from further away than that, or we’d have noticed the bits of body, if not the corpse that was left behind.”

  That seemed right to Liam, who moved to the table, near Sanchez and started to type on his laptop, which had been left open after he’d run outside.

  After a few moments and six different searches, done at a high level of speed, he looked up, at the new lady, since it had been her idea.

  “At a minimum the blast should have created a zone five meters away from the center of the blast which would be lethal for most people to be inside of. If it was thrown from the back of the truck, it should have gone further, not been closer like that. The only thing that makes sense is that they were driving the other way, stopped and threw the thing, then came back around. Even at that, it wasn’t a very good toss as far as distance went.”

  He could do a lot more than that and obviously military personnel could as well. They wouldn’t use grenades, otherwise. That was, according to the web-page he was looking at the death zone, it really needed to be thrown a lot further away to be safe.

  Shaking his head, he spoke in a low whisper.

  “Which… Really, that it wasn’t thrown closer might be some kind of message? It would be dangerous to be too close to it when it exploded, so unless they went into the woods on the other side of the street and did it from there, they were in the wrong place.” For a human.

  He could have done it, and even if hurt, probably wouldn’t have a big issue with it that way. Vampires would be in a similar state, he didn't doubt. The big difference there was that he doubted that any of that type of person would come for him, or Brenner, that way. They might use explosives, he guessed, if they had the skills for it and wanted to cover up that it was them. None of that sort would do it that poorly, however.