The Gorgon Agenda: A SPI Files Novel

Book 4: A SPI Files Novel

by Lisa Shearin

Genres: Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

A planet-killing weapon, sinister sisters, and immortal monsters.
All in a day’s work for the agents of SPI.

I’m Makenna Fraser, seer for SPI (Supernatural Protection & Investigations). I knew SPI protected some of the world’s most dangerous relics, but I didn’t know our draconic founder, Vivienne Sagadraco, kept them in a vault deep below Manhattan.

Until the most lethal relic of all was stolen.

The Aegis is the shield once wielded by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. The center of the Aegis contains the head of Medusa, making it the ultimate weapon. All who look on it or its reflection are instantly turned to stone.

Old enemies and new adversaries have descended on New York—and one of them now has the Aegis:
Tiamat—Babylonian goddess of chaos, and Vivienne Sagadraco’s sister
Stheno and Euryale—Eight-foot-tall, snake-haired gorgons, granddaughters of the Titans, and Medusa’s sisters
The Sisterhood of Medusa—An ancient gorgon military order
The Cabal—A supernatural terrorist organization

Those behind the theft have declared war on humanity, with a hatred that was millennia in the making, and a heist that was centuries in the planning.

Our mission is simple yet impossible: Retrieve the Aegis and save the world. But we can’t do it alone. We’ll need our friends, family, and some unexpected new allies if we’re to stop this ancient evil once and for all.

 

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Release date: January 24, 2023

Publisher: Murwood Media LLC

Print pages: 298

Sample

1

Did you ever get the feeling you were being watched?

I glanced over at my dad. Yes, he was watching me. But not in a bad way.

It was a statue, a desktop version of my dad.

Cernunnos. The Master of the Wild Hunt.

I’m good friends with a dryad, a witch, and  werewolf. My manager is a vampire. My boss is a dragon. And I’m in a serious relationship with a goblin. Now I had something new for the list. My dad is the Master of the Wild Hunt.

When I’d come back to work after Christmas, the statue had been waiting for me on my desk.

At SPI (Supernatural Protection and Investigations), it was known as desk flair, mementos of particularly memorable missions. When your coworkers deemed your actions deserving, they’d gift you with desk flair.

It was from everyone. They’d all chipped in.

It was about twenty inches tall and looked like it belonged in a museum—or on an ancient altar.

It was carved from exotic wood. At first I thought it’d been painted, but it was masterfully carved to reveal the grain. Tan where the skin was, blond for the hair, ebony shadings for the armor. All from a single block of wood.

Kylie O’Hara, our director of Media and Public Relations, had reacted with wide eyes and no words when she’d seen it. If a wooden carving impressed a dryad, it didn’t just look flawless, it was flawless.

It was as if my dad had been miniaturized and taken up residence on my desk, complete with secretive smile and perpetually amused expression.

Whenever I was at my desk doing paperwork, I’d steal quick glances to try to catch him winking at me.

I had maybe a dozen pieces of desk flair. My partner Ian Byrne, aka SPI’s version of 007 meets Rambo, had shelves of the stuff.

From action figures out of an assortment of horror and fantasy movies to shell casings from impossibly large guns. More than a few of the monster action figures were missing their heads, or had sharp, pointy objects sticking out of them.

Fairy tales are fairy fact.

Magic exists. Monsters are real. Fighting the forces of evil is a full-time job.

At least there’s hazard pay.

SPI was founded in 1647 to fight the forces of supernatural evil. We’re headquartered here in New York but have offices and agents worldwide.

My name is Makenna Fraser. I’m a seer. I can see through any kind of ward, shield, or spell a supernatural criminal can use to disguise itself from the human population. My abilities also apply to cloaks and veils that render their wearers invisible. You can’t apprehend what you can’t see. I do the seeing. Agents like my partner do the apprehending.

Ian and I had been hit over the heads in the past year with our pasts. Not pasts as in what we’d done, but in who we were.

We were still human, but the kind that came with significant upgrades.

Ian was the direct descendant of Lugh Lámhfhada, a king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a supernatural race considered heroes and deities by the ancient Celtic people. Lugh’s claim to fame was killing his grandfather Balor, the last king of the evil race of sea monsters called the Fomorians. Balor’s death in an ancient battle broke the Fomorians, and the Tuatha Dé drove them into the sea and kept them there for thousands of years with a curse. Recently, the Fomorians had tried to stage a comeback led by a megamage and demigod wannabe named Janus, who’d been stalking Ian for years.

Now we knew why. Ian was the last of Lugh’s direct line. His death would have released the Fomorians from the curse and their exile. Janus had been the captain of Balor’s personal guard and had been tasked with finding Lugh’s descendant and sacrificing him so the Fomorians could once again emerge from the oceans and walk the earth.

SPI and our allies had collectively rained on the Fomorians’ return tour, banished Janus, and sent the Fomorians back where they came from.

And me? I got a special surprise during Christmas vacation with my family. My father hadn’t died before I’d been born, as I’d always been told.

I was the daughter of Cernunnos, the Master of the Wild Hunt. When my mom had sowed her collegiate wild oats, she hadn’t messed around.

I was the daughter of one of the supernatural world’s apex predators. My dad, as leader of the Wild Hunt, commanded a raging, unpredictable, and unspeakably ancient force of nature. Dad himself was one of the most powerful supernatural entities in existence.

And I was his little girl.

Two months ago, Janus tried to break the curse that kept the F

omorians in exile, this time by becoming a god himself. He’d used me and my mom as bait to lure Cernunnos into a trap—and his plan for taking my father’s power had come entirely too close to succeeding. Dad and I had orchestrated Janus’s final and permanent demise by tag teaming with a couple million really pissed-off souls that Janus had imprisoned.

I was still coming to grips with what being Cernunnos’s daughter meant in terms of who and what I was. Mostly I was still the me I’d always believed myself to be. Over the past few years, I’d acquired a few new—and quite frankly, disturbing—abilities. I now realized they’d come from my dad and not through a brief mind-to-mind contact with a psychotic, megalomaniacal Russian oligarch/dragon.

That was a huge relief.

If any new talent popped up that I didn’t understand, I could call Dad and ask him about it. Not call in the speed-dial sense, but via a gold wrist cuff covered in Celtic scrollwork he’d given me when I’d last seen him in the wee dark hours of Christmas Day.

Since then, I’d occasionally sensed his presence, psychically checking in on me, or however it was that Celtic gods kept tabs on their progeny.

I hadn’t called him directly. I knew he was busy hunting the wicked and gathering the souls of the dead and all that. And being well-nigh immortal, time passed differently for him. A year to me was a few minutes for him, and no one wanted their kid constantly tugging on their sleeve. I’d just gotten a father and wasn’t about to annoy him by being one of those “Dad, Dad, Dad, watch this” kind of kids. He’d told me to call if I needed him. However, there might be rare times that he wouldn’t be reachable, but those would be few and far between.

When he reached out to me, I reached back, and we exchanged a quick hand-squeeze kind of thing. He knew I loved him. And yes, I did love him, even though we’d spent only a few hours together.

For the first time in my life, I had a dad. B

est Christmas present ever.

Though I did get another present from my family that was equally awesome.

I took my boyfriend, goblin dark mage Rake Danescu, home with me for Christmas. Turned out me being a nervous wreck about the whole experience had been completely unnecessary. He not only won over my family, but also the entire population of my hometown. Helping to save said town from an awakening primordial evil had earned him some serious points.

When I’d come back to the office after the holidays, no one had asked what I’d done on vacation. Juicy news like that had already arrived and spread like wildfire. My stock had risen in the eyes of some of our senior-most agents as well as those of our not-easy-to-impress department directors.

SPI was one of the few places you could work and have “daughter of the Celtic god of death” not only be widely known, but also be the crowning glory of your resume.

However, other than seeing portals, talking telepathically to dragons, and being able to ride a horse without falling off, I still felt

like the same Makenna Fraser. I’d been tempted to tell everyone as much, but our boss, Vivienne Sagadraco, had instructed me to simply say nothing, or “thank you” if the comment was congratulatory, and move on. That’s what SPI’s boss lady had said, so that’s what I had done. After all, I was Cernunnos’s daughter. No stretching the truth there. I wasn’t claiming to be anything more. Ms. Sagadraco had added that if people believed otherwise, that was on them, not me.

In addition to now having ties to legendary bloodlines, Ian and I had come into possession of some legendary weapons.

Ian had his ancestor’s spearhead. Being a famous mythological weapon, it had more than one name, but it was most often known as Lugh’s Spear. Fortunately, it didn’t need to be attached to a shaft to do its thing. Ian couldn’t exactly walk around town with a seven-foot spear; even jaded New Yorkers would have a problem with that.

Probably.

That didn’t mean Ian wouldn’t have easy access to his ancestor’s weapon. All the power was contained in the spearhead, so Ian did the concealed-carry thing under his jacket.

The spearhead no longer glowed when Ian touched it, but I sensed a thrum coming from it now. Maybe since the blade now knew Ian better, it didn’t feel the need for extreme PDA, just a quiet acknowledgment of affection.

In addition to the aforementioned wrist cuff, which took up half my forearm, Dad had given me his hunting knife. In my hands it was more of a short sword.

Dad hadn’t told me what the cuff did. Initially I’d thought it was just a museum-quality piece of jewelry. He’d given one to me and one to my mom. After I’d discovered that Dad was able to check in with me, I’d called Mom. Yep, he was doing the same with her. I figured that was what the cuff did, except it was gold and gorgeous.

Our R&D folks had created a chip that could be mounted on the cuff’s underside that hid it from view, kind of like its own little cloaking device. During cold weather, it’d been easy enough to conceal under long sleeves, but it was early spring, and soon it’d be

short-sleeves weather with no way to hide it. Not to mention every time the sun hit it, the reflection off the gold nearly fried my retinas.

I didn’t think the cuff did anything else until my first mission in early January. We’d been searching an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn when Dad’s gift warned me that our suspect was closer than we thought. Like right above our heads close. The cuff had given me a mild electric zap. Having my skin try to crawl up my arm had a way of getting my attention. I’d looked up and there was our spider monster.

It made sense. Dad wanted to protect me and Mom, but he couldn’t be here himself, so he’d given us each a cuff.

So far, it hadn’t done anything else, though that was plenty. It could deflect bullets like Wonder Woman’s bracelets for all I knew. The chance to test that theory hadn’t come up, and I’d be just fine if it never did.

Zap.

My entire body shivered in response.

Speak of the devil.

Ian looked up from his laptop at the desk next to mine. “Cuff?”

I tried to look everywhere at once. “Uh-huh.” Nothing but SPI’s bullpen as far as the eye could see, with agents working and going about their business.

The cuff gave me another zap, as if it knew I was still clueless.

This was SPI’s world headquarters, the safest place on the planet. Well, one of the safest. There was that time when my evil doppelganger had walked in with a bowling bag full of hatching grendel eggs.

We’d made significant security improvements since then.

My eyes flicked to the ceiling above my head.

Nope, no spider monster.

The cuff gave me a seriously sharp zap. I yelped.

Ian stood. “That wasn’t nothing.”

Then I heard it, but not with my ears. It was Vivienne Sagadraco, SPI’s draconic founder. Ms. Sagadraco was British born, or hatched as the case may be, and was proud of her unflappable reserve. She got angry, but she did not show it.

She was showing it now.

I felt her outrage, along with disbelief and fear. Vivienne Sagadraco was afraid. I didn’t know it was possible for her to be afraid of anything.

The floor vibrated beneath my feet, as did Dad’s statue on my desk, and I knew it wasn’t an earthquake.

Our boss, the dragon lady, was growling. We all heard and felt it. The bullpen went silent as every agent stopped what they were doing and looked up to the source of that growl.

The fifth floor was home to the executive suites and Ms. Sagadraco’s office. The outer walls of her office were glass and overlooked the bullpen. The boss’s rumbling growl was now shaking the five stories of steel catwalks connecting offices, labs, and conference rooms.

Suddenly that growl erupted into a full-throated, enraged roar, a

nd the glass spiderwebbed with what sounded like multiple shotgun blasts. The glass didn’t fall, but the agents directly below weren’t taking any chances and scrambled clear.

The silence that followed was absolute.

My phone buzzed with an incoming text, as did Ian’s.

All eyes were instantly on us.

We picked up our phones and read the message.

It was from Alain Moreau, ancient French vampire, the boss’s right-hand legal eagle—and our manager.

Madame wants to see you both. Now.

 

2

Getting called into the boss’s office had never marked the beginning of fun times. That said boss had just roared loudly enough to break glass that was bulletproof, explosion-proof, and everything-else-proof, guaranteed this wasn’t going to be good news.

The elevator doors closed, and Ian pushed the button for the fifth-floor executive suite.

Curiosity may have killed a few cats, and it’d gotten me in trouble more than once. Regardless, I wasn’t the shy sort.

“Did we do anything wrong?” I asked my annoyingly calm partner.

“What do you think?”

“If I’d done something that bad, I’d know.”

“Exactly.”

“Then why does she want to see us?”

“In a few minutes, we’ll find out.”

“I’d rather know going in.”

The elevator dinged as we reached our destination.

“Well, that’s not going to happen, is it?”

The doors slid open, and Ian politely indicated that I go first.

“Gee, thanks.”

“My mom taught me to be polite.” He flashed a grin. “And not stupid.”

My partner had known Vivienne Sagadraco much longer than I had. If he wasn’t worried, I’d at least try not to be. I wouldn’t succeed, but I’d try.

The elevator door opened into Ms. Sagadraco’s reception area, and I saw we weren’t the only ones who’d been summoned, though I was still plenty confused as to why.

Alain Moreau’s presence was expected. The other two men I knew, but why they were here was a mystery.

Martin DiMatteo, director of SPI’s demonology department, was our resident expert on Hell and all that lived there. Martin was a

nice guy but was best described as quirky. Though if it hadn’t been for his knowledge, we’d never have escaped a pocket dimension with a pit that led straight to Hell.

I’d only heard about Mortimer Winters, who was the director of SPI’s sorcery division. He wasn’t as old as Vivienne Sagadraco. No one at SPI was, but office rumor had it he came closest. Ms. Sagadraco was already enraged. The worst she could do was go dragon and stomp on the offending party like a ketchup packet. Mortimer Winters could turn them into one.

Finding these two men cooling their heels outside the boss’s office meant what had happened was catastrophically huge.

Ian greeted both men with a solemn nod. Director Winters and I had never been introduced and I didn’t anticipate that happening now, so I followed my senior partner’s lead with a nod of my own. I knew Martin well enough to go with a smile and a little finger wave, though considering the tenseness of the situation, I kept my smile and fingers to myself.

Mr. Moreau made no move to open the door to the inner office or otherwise announce our arrival. Our manager was at least three hundred years old, but looked like he could be Anderson Cooper’s vampiric twin brother.

“Are you saying I don’t know when my vault has been breached?” Ms. Sagadraco snapped from inside her office. On a normal day, her upper-class British accent could cut glass. Right now, any diamond in her immediate vicinity was in danger.

And some poor unfortunate in there with her was on the receiving end.

“You must be mistaken, Madam Sagadraco,” said a tinny voice.

Ah, speakerphone. Lucky for the owner of that voice.

“You’re implying I do not know when an item from my vault is missing?”

“No, no. That is not what I meant at all. I merely—”

“So, the link I personally have to each artifact in that vault is faulty?”

“Not at all, ma’am.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“That when you arrive, I will be waiting to escort you to your vault to assess the loss.”

“Loss?”

“Theft, ma’am. If you said your hoard has been robbed, then that is precisely what has happened.”

“I will be there within the half hour.”

Holy crap.

“Some suicidal idiot robbed the boss’s hoard?” I blurted.

The door to the inner office swept open.

“Yes, Agent Fraser.” Vivienne Sagadraco’s voice was crisp with righteous indignation. “Some suicidal idiot has done just that.” She stepped back from the doorway. “Please, everyone come in.”

The design of the agent bullpen was the epitome of a modern office. Vivienne Sagadraco’s office looked like something out of Hogwarts—with the exception of the wall of now-cracked glass overlooking said bullpen. The furniture was dark wood upholstered in rich fabrics. There was an actual fireplace on the far wall. The fireplace was real, but the fire crackling in it was magically generated. The air in the office was thick with suppressed rage, and it didn’t take my seer senses to know it was all too real.

The boss’s hoard had been robbed.

Now I understood the roar that’d spider-webbed the glass and sent veteran agents scurrying for cover. Vivienne Sagadraco valued two things above all else.

Her employees, and her hoard.

You messed with either one at your extreme peril.

Dragons, especially the ancients, were highly territorial. In the old days, it probably had to do with carving out a sufficiently large hunting ground. It took a lot to top off a dragon’s tank. Then there was their hoard to consider. Nothing stoked a dragon’s fire faster than someone getting within stealing distance of their sparklies.

I’d been in Vivienne Sagadraco’s office many times before, but what had always been a wall of Tudor-style oak paneling was now open, revealing what had to be at least twenty flat-screen TVs. A control panel ran the length of the screens and was nearly identical to the surveillance setup our IT guru Kenji Hayashi had downstairs in the bullpen. We called it his command center.

I wondered what else was concealed behind the boss’s office walls.

Ms. Sagadraco went directly to the monitors and gestured that we all join her. “Agent Fraser, I need your opinion in particular as to what happened.”

Suddenly, all eyes were on me.

“Me, ma’am?”

“Yes, you. Last year at the Regor Regency, you were able to see the cloaked intruder on the hotel’s security cameras. I need you to do the same here.”

No pressure.

When I got close enough to see what was on all those monitors, i

t was all I could do to keep my jaw from dropping.

So this was how tech-savvy dragons kept watch over their hoards.

Each screen was split into sections and displayed treasures and wealth I could only imagine. Actually, my brain was having trouble believing what it was seeing.

Some of the screens showed what looked like bank vaults, others appeared to be rooms in castles, still others were caves, or judging from the wide-angle views, caverns. And each and every one was filled with treasure and art. Piles of coins, jewels, gem-encrusted weapons, plus paintings, statues, and anything else considered beautiful and valuable on the planet Earth. And I swear, one of the caverns looked just like the treasure room under Hamunaptra in The Mummy. Actually, quite a few of them did, but were filled with treasures from different time periods.

Martin gave an impressed whistle. Coming from a man who took regular field trips to Hell, that said a lot.

“Do pardon the mess,” Ms. Sagadraco told us. “It is difficult to get reliable help these days, or any other days for that matter.”

Ian’s eyes scanned each and every screen. I guessed what he wanted to know, and I’ll admit I was curious myself, but some questions you simply didn’t ask. One was asking a woman of a certain age how old she was. Even more dangerous was asking a dragon how many hoards they had. Vivienne Sagadraco qualified for both.

“The vault that was compromised contains twelve artifacts requiring special precautions,” she told us. “It is secured with the latest technology and the most ancient of magics. ...