Courts and Cabals by G.S. D'Moore (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

around the man’s neck and squeezed. The murderous daydream was the product of a really shitty start to the day, which was in the middle of a really shitty week. With no leads, and no excuse to stay Upstate, he’d returned to the city with nothing to show for it.

“Nothing,” the Director had raised an eyebrow when he reported in. “No evidence, no leads, no witness statements, no forensics; are you honestly going to tell me that you have exhausted all options in your mission to discover who broke the law at St. Vincent’s?”

“Yes,” he answered simply, but he didn’t look her in the eye. He wasn’t used to failure, and neither was she.

She also didn’t rub it in. She nodded her head in acknowledgment, and dismissed him. She punished him by having him sit on the sidelines for a few days to stew in that shameful feeling. It made him think, rethink, overthink and come at the problem from every possible angle.

He called Wood, not only to thank her for her assistance, but to see if anything else had popped up. The locals had moved on, but he had her send their dispatch records for the last week anyway.

He sat at his desk in the corner, his eyes on his tablet, as the giant threat board at the front of the room showed current and future problems. He knew he shouldn’t be focused on the past, but this case was an itch he just couldn’t scratch.

The Sheriff’s data didn’t offer anything new. A local pizza joint had seen a wall knocked down with an adjoining pharmacy, but no drugs were stolen. While Wood didn’t buy the owner’s story – who happened to be another shifter – of a renovation gone wrong, it didn’t look like it had anything to do with his case.

Tuesday night, before he left the office, he was about ready to pull his hair out. “I need more data,” and that meant putting in a request. That pushed him out of his comfort zone.

Like any field agent, Vernon hated the loopholes he had to jump through with a bureaucracy as big as the UN. He made do with the information available on his tablet because that was all he usually needed. Now, he needed the real power of the WRA’s data-gathering infrastructure behind him.

He half expected his request to get denied because someone thought he didn’t need the data. He desperately wanted it, and it was his last shot to get closure on something that was driving him absolutely crazy. Surprisingly, his request was approved, but the precious, allotted server time was being cut short by fucking traffic.

This wasn’t the first time he’d questioned his decision to take a government car to and from work. The subway was easier, but he was required to be armed at all times; and if he was armed, he needed his badge. The few times he’d done it out of necessity, the transit cops had judged him hard, and the looks he got from his fellow New Yorkers hadn’t been friendly. Driving, while a pain in the ass, helped restore his faith in humanity a bit by keeping him far away from them. Sometimes, a person just needed some alone time.

Now it was hump day, and if this clusterfuck didn’t start moving, he’d be humping it the rest of the way in to work. He was running out of time. He’d already received a warning order for his next mission. That meant this therapeutic mindfuck the Director was allowing was over, he’d exhausted her patience. There was a group of wendigos out in the plains that were leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. It was his mission to make sure they became the corpses.

Technically, it was pieces of corpses the supernaturals were leaving in their wake. Wendigos were cannibals who needed human flesh to survive. Like vamps, wendigos were perfectly capable of surviving with a vegetarian lifestyle. Vegetarian for them meant eating humans after they were dead. There was a national program set up for morgues to donate corpses to food banks for the various supernatural species that needed to feed on flesh.

On an intellectual level, Vernon knew these creatures didn’t have a choice. They needed to eat people to live. The solution wasn’t perfect. He preferred to eat a freshly cooked burger rather than one that had been sitting in the fridge for several days.

“Tough shit,” was his frame of mind when it came to things like this. Supernaturals like wendigos were a problem, people had found a doable solution, and if they didn’t take it, it was his job to stop them.

The only problem was he didn’t want to leave the St. Vincent’s case open to chase wendigos for a few weeks. If there were any leads, or clues buried in the data, they’d be long gone. It was literally now or never.

He pulled his car into the UN employee garage nearly half an hour late, went through security, and for the first time, went to his private office. It was a blank slate with a desk and pair of chairs. There was a musty smell in the air from disuse, and since wasted space was sacrilege at the HQ, he got some dirty looks from employees walking past the door.

Everyone else looked to be at least forty or fifty in human years. You had to be someone to get an office, and they were all wondering who this kid was. Vernon completely ignored them and attached his tablet to the desktop’s port. He had a pair of screens, so he could take in more info at once.

Once he was into the master data feed, he needed to create filters and sort to get what he desired. He started with the most obvious data point, “Lightning strikes.” That was a mistake, it took forty-five minutes to complete the