Page 10 of Almost Midnight

He knew why they were screaming.

He understood their distress, but he couldn’t focus on it or he’d lose it for real. If he let his blood rise more, if he let himself grow truly irrational, then things would get ugly fast. Moreover, he strongly suspected that was part of their goal here. Maybe not for Lara, but definitely for these Leash pricks. They wanted him to lose his cool. They wanted him to lose it, period, so they could put him down like a rabid dog.

He couldn’t give them the excuse.

They could act with utter impunity here, given what he was.

They could then tell the press anything they fucking wanted.

He was a terrorist, and anti-human agitator.

He threatened humans. He consorted with seers and hybrids.

He was a dangerous animal.

He knew how the Human Racial Authority, or H.R.A., worked.

He knew how they thought.

He knew how their enforcement arm, The Leash, worked, in particular.

The Interracial Enforcement Bureau (a.k.a. “Intereb” or “The Leash”) was feared and loathed by vampires and hybrids alike. They were the terror that came in the night, that murdered their kind on the flimsiest of excuses, or sometimes for no reason at all. Worse, they could disappear any non-human without cause, without recourse, without even the pretense of a trial or due process. Once a non-human fell into the clutches of the Intereb like that, they’d likely never see daylight again. They’d be disappeared into a prison on another continent somewhere, usually under horrific conditions. They’d be experimented on, tortured, bled, fucked with, until they lost their minds. Vampires committed suicide rather than be taken by the Leash.

They turned to the White Death, if they had the connections.

Some fully became the terrorists they’d been accused of being.

Either way, Nick didn’t kid himself he had any rights here. Any vampire with half a brain knew the threat loomed over everything they did in the human world; it was why the White Death would never be short of new recruits.

Technically, the H.R.A. didn’t answer to international law, either.

Their jurisdiction spanned every human government, nation, and all protected areas.

While vampires generally saw the most of them, and the worst of them, seers and hybrids weren’t immune to their reach, either. The Leash always approached vampire-seer-human relations with a sadistic enthusiasm that made Nick, and likely a lot of other vampires, wonder exactly how they recruited and trained their agents.

They all really seemed like psychopaths.

Did they come in that way? Or did the Leash turn them into that?

Nick suspected it was a bit of both.

Unlike racist assholes like those two cops out on Long Island, “Rick and Rob,” agents who worked for the Leash generally weren’t stupid, either. They acted more like serial killer surgeons, like they’d spent decades learning how to inflict pain on vampires in creatively drawn out and impossible to anticipate ways.

Even their cruder tools were employed strategically.

They didn’t use cattle prods and organic binders only to hurt or restrain vamps.

They used them to elicit instinctive reactions that would give the Leash agents an excuse to do a lot worse, up to and including a full custodial claim. It also gave them an excuse for simply killing them outright, without bothering to bring them in for questioning. One wrong move from Nick right now, one wrong word, one wrong look, and one of the uniformed men St. Maarten had accompanied out here might decide to put a bullet in his brain.

Anything negotiated from that point forward would happen without his input. He’d either be decapitated on the spot, set on fire, or, possibly more likely in his case, wake up in a cell, naked, shackled to a metal table.

He’d definitely be unconscious until well past all of this was over.

They’d already killed two of their number tonight.

The only reason Nick figured they wanted him questioned or in a cell was because if theydidn’twant him alive, they likely would have killed him already. They’d decapitated Walker’s girlfriend and that other poor vampire fuck right in front of them already. They hadn’t bothered with excuses. They didn’t even ask them any questions.

Walker himself still looked like he was in shock.

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