A computerized tone filled the room, signaling the start of an intercom announcement. "Quad Two, report to Ops immediately. Quad Two, report to Ops," said Rufus's disembodied voice.
I groaned. So much for my shower.
"Do you think this is about the Pride?" I asked.
"We'll know soon enough," Wyatt said.
We left the bathrooms, both of us dressed in yesterday's clothes (not incredibly unusual) and smelling of sex (less usual). It was still early, so we didn't see many people in the corridor. Marcus came down the hall from the opposite direction, dressed in workout sweats, a towel draped over one shoulder.
Milo, dressed in sweat-shorts and a T-shirt, was already in Ops when we got there, learning against the desk where Rufus sat in his motorized chair. They weren't talking, but there was a strange air of tension around both men. Astrid strode over from another computer station, and the look she cast said this wasn't going to be a happy conversation.
"What's going on?" Wyatt asked. "The Bengals?"
"I'd like to tell you we saw this coming, but I'd be lying," Astrid replied. "And it's an additional complication that we do not need right now."
"Thank you for the dramatic preface," I said. "Care to get to the problem so we can go about dealing with it?"
She pointed at the computer. We all shifted so we were standing in a semi-circle facing the monitor. A video player was frozen on an image of three people—a man and woman sitting on a sofa, and a second man on a chair opposite them. It looked like an interview setup, and the ticker at the bottom of the screen said "Parents Worst Nightmare."
I studied the woman. Her heart-shaped face and thick, brown hair, and somehow I knew she had freckles on her nose. Just like I did. Holy fucking hell.
Rufus hit Play on the video.
"…been six months since the Frosts have had contact with their daughter, Chalice," the single man said.
My heart nearly stopped. Beside me, Wyatt put an arm around my waist, and I clung to it as the full weight of the video hit me like a gargoyle's stone fist. On May 20 of this year, Chalice Frost committed suicide in her apartment bathtub. She was found by her best friend Alex, who called the police. Chalice was taken to the morgue at St. Eustachius Hospital. A few hours later, an elf performed a magic spell that brought me, the murdered Evangeline Stone, back to life—in Chalice's formerly dead body. While small threads of who Chalice had once been lingered in my mind, she was gone. Dead and mourned and technically nonexistent in this city thanks to some gremlins running computer interference.
In all of the incredible drama of my afterlife, it never consciously occurred to me that her parents were still out there somewhere, wondering what happened to their daughter.
The camera angle switched to a close-up of the parents, and their names appeared on screen: Stephen and Lori Frost. I had only the vaguest sense of familiarity. They might have been the parents of the body I was in, but they weren't my parents. I never knew my loser father, and my mother died when I was ten. But the pain these two people were in still felt important. Real.
"Our daughter Chalice moved here three years ago," Stephen said, straight to the camera. "I remember the day she left home. But no one in this city can find a record of her ever being here. She took classes part time, but the university has no file on her. She had an apartment, but her name isn't on the lease and her roommate died on May twenty-second. Her old employer remembers her, but says the computer has no information on her employment. It's as if someone made our daughter disappear."
Next to him, Lori was doing a poor job of holding herself together. She clung to her husband's arm as tears rolled down her cheeks. The resemblance to me was uncanny, from hair to eyes to cheekbones.
Stephen squeezed his wife's arm, then continued. "Six months ago, we got our last phone call. It wasn't about anything in particular, but she sounded so sad. I know Chalice struggled with depression, and local police keep telling us to prepare for the idea that she took her own life, but I can't believe that."
I let out a grunt. Showed what he knew about his own kid.
"My wife and I aren't rich people, but we are willing to pay a monetary reward for any information that helps us find our daughter. We just want to know the truth, so that we can bring her home"—he wiped his eyes—"or put her to rest. Please."
Lori broke down and fell into Stephen's arms. The camera cut to a close-up of the interviewer. I didn't recognize him or his news show. "If anyone has information on the disappearance or whereabouts of Chalice Ann Frost, please contact the Metro Police Department Major Crimes at—"
He rattled off a phone number as the screen changed. To my face. Or rather, what looked like a school ID photo of Chalice, taken maybe a year or two ago. She wasn't smiling, her hair was pulled back in a messy bun, and her eyes were haunted. It was a face I'd seen in the mirror every day for almost four months, but it was also the face of a stranger. And it was being broadcast all over the city and the fucking internet.
Rufus hit the Pause button on the video.
One by one, everybody turned their head to look at me, but I couldn't stop staring at my photo on the computer. This was going to make my life way more complicated than it needed to be right now—just like Astrid had said.
"Well, shit," I said.
"Your parents are still alive?" Milo asked.
"They're not my parents. They're her parents." I pointed at the screen.
"And that's your face, Stone," Astrid said. "The last thing this operation needs is a lot of tips going to the police, and them coming looking for you. You don't have police protection anymore."
Too true. Back when the Triads were active and effective, we had three moles in the police department who made files disappear, reassigned cases, and kept the cops off our asses while we did our jobs. Up until the Triads were wrecked and those supposed moles all killed themselves in a group suicide. We found out too late that they were all sprite avatars—fully controlled by three sprites who reported back to Amalie, the queen bitch who'd betrayed us all.
The closest thing we had to an "in" with the police was James Reilly. A former West Coast cop, he became a private investigator after his own partner was killed by a vampire, and his investigations led him here. We managed to snare his loyalty by providing him with answers to a lot of burning questions, and he in turn was able to work his police contacts in our favor. To an extent. Even he couldn't do anything about this shit-tastic problem.
"There's no way to halt the broadcast?" Milo asked.
"It's been showing since last night," Rufus replied. "Even if we could get it off the internet, it's been seen. And it doesn't sound like the Frosts are going away."
"They want to know the truth about what happened to their daughter," Wyatt said.
Rufus turned his head away, but I saw the flinch. He was keeping a very large secret of his own from Wyatt, and sooner or later he'd have to spill.
"This is going to be a major problem for us," Astrid said.
"No kidding," I replied. "What would you like me to do? Resurrect myself into somebody else?"
"Hardly."
"And don't even say you want to bench me, because there's too much going on right now—"
"May I speak?" A slight feline growl came out at the end of that, so I shut up and let Astrid talk. "I was going to say exercise extreme caution when you're in the field. I can't afford to bench anyone right now, but you've been racing around the city for months wearing this girl's face. People are bound to remember they saw you, and others will be flat out looking for you."