OPS: Rodham and Hodgkin

"Listen to me, Hillary. I'm going to do whatever I can to keep us safe, but we have to stop him," Dorothy whispered to the new teen recruit.

"I know. I'm getting better at the protection shield spell you taught me. We won't have a repeat of last time."

They crouched behind bushes trying to blend into the forest bisected by the small road that would lead to the highway.

"You did great in Cuba, girl. That spell really saved our asses. Missing the target was my fault. We'll have to up our game this time if we want to stop Khrushchev for good."

"Dr. Hodgkin, listen."

They tried not to move a muscle. From kilometers away, the roar of the 1962 Black Volga GAZ bleated through the dead silence. Dr. Dorothy Hodgkin didn't expect this to be her life in her fifties. She thought by now, she'd be the dean of the British branch of the order. Now she has another kid to train. An American to boot. At least this one has a sense of herself and more determination than the rest of them.

"They're getting close. Maybe two or three kilometers off." Dorothy unclipped the guns on her hips. They weren't firearms exactly. She designed them herself combining the power of a handgun with the output for hypodermic darts. These weren't tranquilizers that put wildlife to sleep. They were specially equipped cartridges filled with antigen-V negative blood serum. RhV positive mammals were the only ones who could be turned into the bloodsucking creatures usually known by legends as vampires but took many names.

Hillary took a perfume bottle out of her bag. It wasn't Chanel's famous No.5. Ms. Chanel, another member of OPS, worked with Lillian Masediba Matabane Ngoyi of South Africa. Mma Ngoyi discovered that what the northerners were lacking in their werewolf repelling potions was Duvernoia aconitiflora available in her country. Straight Aconitum napellus or Aconitum carmichaelii was not enough. It only bought someone a few seconds in close range of a werewolf. Mma Ngoyi's discovery was potent enough that the lycanthropes reverted back to their human form for as long as a week.

"Khrushchev sounds like the most powerful upyr on the planet. Is there any photographic evidence of him having a werewolf with him?"

"Sergei hasn't confirmed anything, but it's best to douse yourself with Mma Ngoyi's potion just to be on the safe side."

Dorothy snapped the last injectable vial into place in the customized magazine clip for her guns. Hillary spray herself then her mentor.

"Can we really trust him?" Hillary had never met him before. In Cuba, only Dorothy went on the rendezvous.

"Sergei?"

"Yeah. How can we be sure he's interested in defecting from his father's regime?"

"We were assigned the mission from the Order. We have to have faith in their intel."

Dorothy didn't have a tremendous amount of admiration for the Order anymore. She used to be the most loyal servant, dedicated to the magick of science. In her public life, she was revered. When the Ordre de Protection des Sorcières (or Protective Order of Witches aka OPS) doubted her testimony that a vampire had infiltrated Britain's Parliament, they continued to refuse her promotion which would get her out of field work. She harbored the bitter resentment ever since. Each time a new recruit passed final challenges, she would get another one and promised it was the last one. Now she's out in the Russian wilderness with a rookie who barely knows how to hold together a protection shield and neither of them speak the language.

"Hey, kid, what else are you packing in that bag?"

"The standard starter kit: a silver cross, aconitum cherry bombs, and a stake made of hawthorn from my home town. Just a few more odds and ends I picked up before I met you in Florida."