Family Affairs - Sierra Aguirre-Stoker and Carmen Stoker

Sierra Aguirre has been in this holding room for six hours, twenty-four minutes, and fifteen seconds, according to the clock in the cage on the wall.

She should probably get used to it. She messed up, got caught, and she’s not entirely sure what they do to vigilante vampire hunters. She’s never heard of any trial or sentence that goes with that crime. If it even is a crime. The Morris Avengers were a little vague on that front.
It must be, to whoever these people are. And one thing she does know, that the Avengers were very clear on, if you get caught by the 'Men in Black', you don't come back.
Given that the people who apprehended her were wearing black leather jackets like a biker gang and driving a black Pontiac GTO (with a ton of aftermarket mods, and a performance enhanced engine she’d like to get a look at), she’s fairly sure that’s who has her.
When the door lock clicks, she doesn’t acknowledge it.
“My name is Carmen Stoker.” The name drags Sierra’s eyes up from the scarred metal table. The figure in the doorway is a sturdy, square-shouldered woman with silver-streaked black hair in straggling bun, her clearly once perfectly-pressed crimson suit wrinkled. She doesn’t look like some kind of underworld public defender, but she also doesn’t seem like the polished and poised person Sierra would have expected to hand down her fate.
And that name…
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I very much am not.” The woman sits down in the chair across from Sierra’s. “Almost everything in that book was the truth. But you already know vampires are real.”
“Real, and dangerous.” Sierra snaps.
“Some are. But what you and other vigilantes are doing is still wrong.”
“I think holding someone without charging them with a crime is also against the law. Or was last time I checked.” Sierra raises an eyebrow. “How do I even know you’re a legitimate branch of law enforcement? No one showed me any ID. Just some badges anyone can make these days.” To be fair, there’s no more validity to an ID. She’s had a fake one since she was fifteen.
“Are you familiar with the Treaty of Blood?” The woman asks. Sierra shakes her head. She feels like it was mentioned somewhere in the whirlwind training sessions, but given she cared more about the correct grip on a stake and how to make a clean takedown with a silver bullet in 30 mile an hour winds, she hadn’t paid much attention to a document they fully intended to disregard anyway. “Agencies like this were established outside human justice systems. We’re not bound by the same technicalities. For good reasons.”
“Reasons that went out the window a few years ago when some agency in LA lost control of a daywalker.”
The woman flinches slightly. That’s right. We all know it was hunter incompetence that brought vampires into the open. You people like to flaunt the ways you’re above the law, can operate outside it, but at the end of the day all your exceptions didn’t do what you wanted.
Finally the woman nods, as if acknowledging a point she has to concede. “Procedure moves slower than public opinion, but rest assured, as of right now, this agency still has the power to hold you indefinitely at its own discretion as a perpetrator of vampire-related violence.” She slides some papers across the table. “However, we also have the power to pardon any such offense in exchange for cooperation with a larger effort.”
“So basically, you want me to inform on the vigilantes in exchange for not spending the rest of my life rotting away in a legal loophole. For doing your job, and doing it better than you.”
“These people don’t care about justice. They don’t care about what’s right. And they don’t care about you.”
Sierra snorts. She knows that. She never was fool enough to believe they did. They just want more warm bodies killing vampires for them. But she wanted to kill vampires. So it didn’t really matter.
“You have a choice, now. Amarillo wants the Morris Avengers. Badly enough to overlook your unsanctioned stakings in favor of the greater good. Help us dismantle them, and you’ll have a chance to start over, doing what you do the right way. For the agency. Refuse, and we can’t in good conscience let you walk away knowing what you do, with the skills you have.”
Amarillo has arrested vigilantes like her before. She was warned about the risk in training. But they’re offering her a deal. She doesn't like something about it. Clearly no one else agreed. Or they didn’t succeed at the attempt. Either way, there's something strange.
“You give this speech to everybody you bring in and hope someone bites?”
“We’ve tried, before. But the others we’ve captured have a near fanatical loyalty to their cause. Or are too afraid to go up against a group that well organized.”
“Why should I be different?”
“Because if you’re anything like your father, you’ve got what it takes. And somewhere inside you, you’ve got his moral compass.”
Sierra laughs, a hollow sound that echoes in the cold room. “News flash, my dad ran away from us when I was ten, and not so much as a postcard for the last decade. And Mom knew enough to know she shouldn’t ask him what he did for a living. So you’re right, but it’s not going to work in your favor.”
“Trust me, this agency has a file an inch thick on that man. But you and I both know he’s not who I’m talking about.”
Carmen pulls out a faded polaroid and lays it on the table. Sierra recognizes that face. She’s seen it in the photos that were tucked away with the journal in the box in the corner of her mother’s attic.
“This is my brother. Gabriel Stoker.”
For the second time in six months, Sierra’s world comes crashing down around her with six small words.
I staked my first vampire tonight.
This is my brother, Gabriel Stoker.
Sierra knows what the song and dance earlier was about, now. Carmen was trying to convince her to turn on the people she might reasonably have been expected to consider a family. But they’re not family. Family is right in front of her.
She’s no true believer, not in their cause, not in their view of vampires. But if these are the people Gabe worked for, they’ve just become her best shot at finding out more about him than that journal will tell her. Now she understands why the Morris Avengers were keeping the truth from her. Why they pretended it wasn’t easy to get the answers she wanted.
Maybe, someday, when she proved her loyalty, they’d have told her who she really was. But she'll never know now. This the only shot she still has at real answers. And maybe the name of the vamp she needs to kill to make things right.
“What do you want me to do?”