You Can't Handle This

When we got to the room, Maria strode in first, leaving me to follow and close the door behind us.

When I turned around, she was standing on the far side of the room, arms crossed, shoulders raised, mouth frowning, and brows drawn together and giving off an aura of displeasure so thick it was palpable.

“Let me stop you there. When you say she was giving off an aura, do you mean that you could actually see her aura?”

I sigh at Cathy’s question but immediately know that’s not fair. “Sorry, Cathy. I have a pretty good sense for reading people, excluding the first time I met Constantino… or my ex… so, okay, maybe it’s not so great. But, what I meant to say is that I could sense her displeasure like anyone could, not through some special ‘vampiric vision’ or whatever.”

“Oh, okay. Sorry to interrupt, again.”

“It’s fine, but where was I?”

“Maria was scowling at you.”

“Ah, that hardly narrows it down, but I remember.”

So there I was, standing in front of Maria, the agent in charge and my nominal superior, who was glaring at me like I pissed in her coffee, just waiting for the shoe to drop.

She began with a series of questions delivered low and so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to defend myself.

“You think you’re ready for this? You think that you’re somehow special and that makes this okay? You think that you can just rely on some fangs to keep resolving all your problems{if carCrash < 1}, like you solved your problem with Mister Gutiérrez{endif}? You think that somehow, you can just step in and fill the spot that Meyers-Jimenez spent months preparing for?”

With each rhetorical question, she stepped closer to me, like a looming predator over cornered prey.

“You’re not ready. You’re not special. Your little fangs aren’t going to save you from these people. You’ll never be prepared for undercover work,” Maria said, still approaching.

“You’re weak. You’re soft. And, you’re afraid. You saw me yesterday. Do you think that I had all that done on an adolescent whim? No. I did it because that’s what my cover required. To this day, I carry the marks that remind me of the price I paid, because that’s what my nation needed of me. And, you know what, the physical marks are nothing compared to the marks it leaves on the mind.

“You think you’re ready, well how do you think it feels to fuck a serial killer? How about going in there and doing it day after day, knowing the whole time that if you make the tiniest mistake and these people find out who you really are, they’ll stretch you over a table while the man you’ve been fucking literally cuts you to pieces with a chainsaw?

“I’ve done that. I did it for months on end. It changes you. It hardens you. It makes your old life seem trite and blissful. That’s the price I paid and, you know what, I was one of the lucky ones. I completed my mission; I didn’t die like so many do.

“Do you actually think that you can go undercover and do anything other than get yourself killed horribly?”

What Maria said made my gorge rise to the point where I was worried I’d throw up when I tried to reply. Yet, there she stood, poking me in the chest painfully with a pointed fingernail and managing to look down on me from below.

She was demanding an answer, so I gave the only one that came to mind, “For Mira, yes. For her, I’ll do it.”