The MCB Blackhawk was downright plush compared to my usual ride. Okay, it was still pretty Spartan, but I didn’t see anything wrapped in duct tape. Agent Franks sat across from me. Of course, he didn’t feel like talking, and he just sat there with an F2000 rifle resting on his lap. The pilot and copilot were the only other people on board. Franks had given them a few instructions and we’d taken off, heading east. I couldn’t tell what direction we’d gone from there because it was dark and the rare lights out the windows didn’t reveal any landmarks.

My few attempts at conversation had ended in some variation of “Classified” or a blank stare. I swear that sometimes he was like this just to piss me off. Franks acted like he had an exact number of words allotted to him every day, and that he’d be heavily penalized if he went over his limit. Sadly, he saved most of his complete sentences for threatening people, and managed to accomplish most of his communicating through scowling, blinking, and radiating malice.

I knew his secret. The thing that we all knew as Agent Franks had been the inspiration for the fictional Frankenstein’s monster, and had been around for a very long time. His creator, the alchemist Konrad Dippel, had died in the seventeen-hundreds, so Franks had to have been first stitched together sometime before that. His very existence piqued my curiosity, but it was all for naught.

“So, Franks. When did you come to America?”

“Classified.”

“You weren’t…” I tried to think of the right word. “Born here. Why’d you immigrate?”

He stared at me for a second. “Classified.”

Sweet. I had gotten both possible responses to a single question. I was making real headway here. After that achievement I decided to take a nap.

A change in air pressure woke me up. Franks didn’t appear to have moved an inch, but my watch told me an hour had passed.

“ETA, five minutes,” Franks stated. “When was your last psychic episode?”

It took my sleep-addled brain a moment to process that. “What?”

“When was your last psychic episode?” he repeated.

He wasn’t supposed to know about that. Franks had been my bodyguard during the incident with the Condition and my last exposure to the Old Ones, but I’d done my best to keep it from him, though he’d certainly been around for enough to know that I wasn’t ordinary. “No. I’m not—” but he just kept staring at me with those remorseless, merciless, borrowed eyeballs of his. “Fuck you, Franks. Classified.”

He tilted his head to the side, probably deciding how to kill me without messing up his nice helicopter. “If I cared, I would’ve did something last year.”