‘Thanks, I really appreciate it.’ Doug wrote his phone number on a napkin and stood up.
‘Wait. I need some of your hair. Even one strand is enough.’
Doug froze like a man who had enough curses thank you very much.
‘It’ll help me figure out what’s going on. I promise, no bad workings.’
Doug still looked uncertain.
‘Pixie swear,’ she said, holding up three fingers.
‘You were a Girl Scout?’
‘Sure, I’ve been lots of things.’
Doug plucked a hair and handed it to Fey. She watched Doug pay for their food and walk out the door to his dark blue Impala. One of the doors was brown. Who would bother working any kind of high-intensity fix on a guy whose car doors didn’t match? But it was odd that Doug couldn’t talk about his curse. Usually, people raved about the mark and no one listened and then it was too late. And she really shouldn’t be able to see his pentagram.
‘What do you think, Reynard?’ Reynard blinked at her and went back to watching the leaves swirl across the street. It was getting cold. Fey folded Doug’s hair in the napkin with his phone number on it and put it in her coat pocket. She pulled out one of the straws in the container on the table. It was the bendy kind. Reynard’s favourite. Reynard mewed and they walked back home.
‘I don’t usually do this with a client’s hair,’ she told Reynard. ‘I’m not even sure if it will work.’ She made a fire of hickory leaves and Doug’s hair, and it did work. According to her scrying, Doug worked at Ephemera, a company that required unusually high security measures for an office park off the highway. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem a glamor could not solve, but there was something else about the hair, something more potent than she expected and not just malevolent, but intentional. It wasn’t what she would expect from someone doomed to be a werewolf’s next kill. Someone had worked a truly potent magic on poor Doug.
‘Looks like someone did put the whammy on Doug.’
Reynard snored a deep kitty snore.
‘Yeah, you’re right. Time for bed. I’ll visit Ephemera tomorrow.’
Fey lay down in her bed of yellow and gold leaves and stared at the dark clouds wondering who could make someone a werewolf’s next victim? Who could push fate? She thought about trying to discover how it could be done. She would focus on finding whoever cursed Doug and maybe she’d get somewhere on how to break the curse. There was usually only one way of making something, but there were a thousand ways to break it.
The next morning, Reynard was asleep in the filing cabinet drawer where she stowed the skins she used as disguises. Digging around fifteen pounds of sleeping Reynard, Fey found the one she wanted—male, early forties, Caucasian, a corporate freelancer. She enjoyed going undercover. She would shake hands. She would grab her belt and hitch up her pants. And she would wear a suit, but not just any suit—a rumpled navy blue suit that was just a little too big in the shoulders and short in the sleeves, the suit of a man who worked hard and was proud of being his own boss and answering to no one.
Fey left her .44 Magnum at the bottom of the drawer. She saw a .44 in a movie once and it seemed a very serious gun. One that could unmake a lot of problems. More practically, the large calibre fit her fairy darts. She’d wrapped the revolver’s butt in deer skin and duct tape so that she could hold it safely. Steel didn’t burn quite as bad as iron, but it still gave her the jitters. She didn’t like the jitters and especially didn’t like being jittery while holding a gun. Fey decided to leave Reynard and take her black Dodge Charger. Fey didn’t have a license, but then she didn’t drive so much as she convinced the car to go where she wanted.
Ephemera Technology Resource Systems rented a blue glass office building on Innovation Drive, just off I-94. There was a gate preventing free entry into the parking lot. Fey asked the car to pull up to the window so she could talk to the attendant.
She glanced at the attendant’s nametag and said, ‘Hi, Chantelle.’
‘Good morning, What’s your business?’
‘I’m here as a consulting management coach. I’m hosting an on-site webinar on leveraging human resource deliverables.’
Fey pulled out a handkerchief and sneezed. ‘Excuse me. Stubborn cold.’
‘Bless you.’ The attendant glanced at her list. ‘What’s the name?’
Fey raised her handkerchief again, but this time she blew a fine, glittering powder into the attendant’s face. ‘You should find the name Noel Coward on there, Chantelle. That’s me.’
Chantelle look a little dazed and then said, ‘Okay, Mr. Coward, pick up your visitor’s pass at the front desk. I’ll let them know that you are coming.’
‘Thanks, and have a great day.’
‘You, too.’
Fey’s car parked in the visitor’s lot. She asked the car to wait and decided that it agreed when it sat contentedly in its spot. A good sign. Fey hitched up her pants and headed in through the mirrored doors to the building’s security desk.
‘How are you? Noel Coward. I have a nine-thirty on-site webinar,’ Fey said to the guard standing behind the desk. He had a unibrow and no name on his tag, just a number and a small, swooping five pointed star. The security guard gestured towards the metal detector taking up most of the entrance. It had the same swooping star and ‘BALOR SECURITY’ printed on it. Beyond the machine’s gate, there was a low black leather upholstered bench beside a single elevator and what she assumed was door to the stairs.
‘I’m going to have to ask you to put all your metal items in the tray before passing through security, sir,’ the guard said. Fey dropped her phone, keys and nineteen cents into the tray. The guard picked took the tray and watched her walk through the metal detector. The machine beeped.
‘Step, over here, sir.’ Fey complied, glad that she’d left her gun at home. The guard swept a hand-held metal detector over her. There was a beep at her belt buckle and at her left hand breast pocket, where she kept her pouch of pixie dust.
‘Sir, I’m going to need to you to empty the contents of your jacket.’
It couldn’t be detecting her pixy dust. Fey dropped her wallet, handkerchief and pouch in the tray. If she had to, she could let Noel take the fall. Fey was so busy thinking of how she’d explain the pouch that she didn’t notice the guard passing the wand over her again. There was no sound from the machine just a steady green light over its gate.
‘It’s easy to forget those inhalers have metal canisters in them,’ the guard said, flashing very white teeth.
Fey glanced in the tray and, sure enough, there was an asthma inhaler in the tray with her wallet, keys and change. ‘Yeah, I didn’t think of it.’
She picked up her stuff. The inhaler looked like an inhaler, but had the soft, silky feel of her chimera skin pouch. As she slid the pouch back into her pocket, Fey heard a laugh behind her. She glanced back. The guard was noting something in the computer. He had a hardware catalogue on his desk opened to big deals on chain in bulk. She wasn’t sure he could laugh. ‘Fourth floor,’ he said handing her a visitor pass with Noel’s name and the date on it. ‘There’ll be someone waiting for you.’
‘Thanks, have a good one,’ Fey said as she stepped into the elevator.
The elevator doors opened on a small waiting room. There was a water cooler, a counter with a coffee pot, microwave and mugs, and two more of the black upholstered benches. Fey associated those kind of benches with art galleries, which she always enjoyed, so she took them as another good sign. The receptionist stood and leaned a bit over the edge of the low wall that separated her desk from the rest of the waiting room. Her nameplate read, ‘Gail Denha, Reception.’
‘Mr. Coward? There seems to have been a mix-up. I’m afraid we don’t have you on our schedule for today.’
‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, I have it right here on my phone.’ Fey waved her phone around. ‘Ephemera
’s between events at Cavalier Enterprises and the Henry Ford Museum.’
‘If you’ll just wait, someone will be here with you to straighten everything out.’
‘I hope so. I’m cutting the training at the Henry Ford very close as it is.’
‘It won’t be a moment, Mr. Coward. Help yourself to coffee or tea. We have cookies today, too.’
Fey hitched up her pants and walked over to the counter. There was coffee, a basket with variety of teas, sweeteners and a box of Voortman’s windmill cookies. She’d never understood the appeal of speculaas cookies. They were the saddest gingerbread pressed into the most Calvinist shapes and left to cure on grocery store shelves for years. Besides, animating windmill cookies just wasn’t as fun as animating gingerbread men. As she pondered speculaas, she noticed the water cooler was glowing, but only when she looked at it slantwise.
‘Our coffee is excellent. We have a proprietorial blend and use imported spring water in our brewing.’
‘The same water in the cooler? I don’t recognize the label.’ In fact, the label was covered in runes.
‘Yes, we get a new shipment every two weeks.’
‘That must really set you back.’
‘Our Chief Operating Officer, Ava Killmorin, furnishes it herself. Ms. Killmorin says a company’s most important asset is employee morale.’
‘Sounds like a great place to work—scheduling issues aside.’
‘I’m really sorry about that, Mr. Coward. I don’t know how that could have happened.’ While Gail filed papers to hide her irritation, Fey poured a little of her pixy dust onto her handkerchief. She was running low. It was that planning thing again.
Fay leaned on the wall in front of Gail’s desk. ‘It’s alright. Doug Stokowski asked me to come. Maybe he forgot to tell you.’
‘Oh, you know our office manager? I’m afraid Doug’s out sick today.’
Fey felt kind of bad about tricking Gail, but something was up at Ephemera and Fey wanted to know what it was. She blew dust into Gail’s face.
‘Gesundheit,’ Gail said.
‘Sorry about that. This darn cold.’
‘Maybe something’s going around.’ Gail gave her head a shake. ‘I feel like I might be coming down with something.’
‘Say, Gail, how about I go wait in Doug’s office?’
‘He doesn’t have an office. We have an open work space. Just go straight through the door, turn right at the end of the hall and his desk is in the far left corner.’
‘Gail, you didn’t see me here today. I must’ve come in when you had stepped away from your desk. You won’t see me when I leave.’
‘Okay. Let me buzz you in.’
‘Thanks, Gail.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Fey went inside. The hall was empty. She passed four or five doors and turned right. The silence was eerie in a room of fifteen or twenty people. No one seemed to notice when she entered the work space. They stared intently at their computers. Each desk had one worker with two screens. And each worker had a cup of coffee and a windmill cookie. These people really enjoyed windmill cookies.
Doug’s desk was right where Gail had said it would be. Fey felt a little bad about tricking Gail. Maybe she could make it to her up somehow. Doug’s desk had a view of a green lawn and the next office building about one hundred yards behind Ephemera, part of the loop Innovation Drive made on its way back to the highway. Fey wiggled the mouse on Doug’s desk and wished Reynard were here. Reynard was much better with machines. She preferred something she could talk to. Computers like this were all networked together. It was like trying to talk to ants. Wiggling the mouse had no effect. She tried touching the screen and it lit beneath her fingers.
‘You’re not Doug,’ the computer said.
‘What?’ Fey turned to see if anyone else had heard. She was both relieved and disturbed to see the room still full of humans staring at their computers, typing, drinking coffee or eating cookies.
‘Who are you?’
Fey thought about how to answer and decided simple was best, ‘I’m Fey.’
‘You set off the detector at the entrance?’
‘Yes,’ Fey said. ‘Did you help me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not a computer, are you?’
‘I wasn’t, but now I am in this one.’
Fey felt nauseous. ‘Did you tell Doug?’
‘Yes. He promised to help me get out. He promised to help all of us. He didn’t know. We are here in the computers, running the machines. Some in one. Some in another. Some linked together. Some alone.’
‘Are you... sidhe?’
‘I don’t know anymore. Now I hear the machine’s song instead of my own. There are many here, but not all sidhe. You should leave now. Balor will help you. Don’t let her prick you.’
Fey didn’t know if she had found what she was looking for, but she was scared and she was leaving. She hurried past the rows of workers and into the corridor. She stopped dead when a woman in an immaculately tailored white suit stepped out of one of the doors between her and the reception area.
‘Hello, Mr. Coward, I’m Ava Killmorin, Ephemera’s COO. We are so sorry we’ve kept you waiting.’ Killmorin held out her hand and Fey shook it.
‘We can reschedule. I have another on-site webinar that I need to get to.’
‘Surely you’d planned a longer presentation than fifteen minutes.’
Fey hitched up her pants. ‘It’s best to be short and sweet when talking about efficiencies in leveraging human resource deliverables.’
‘A tour is the least we can do after this inconvenience. We all love Doug, but he can be... unreliable. You must let me make your visit worth the trip.’ Killmorin smiled immovably.
Fey followed Killmorin as she turned left at the end of the corridor and stopped at a metal door with a blank black panel beside it and a light above. The light reminded Fey of a red eye.
‘You’ve already seen where our entry and acquisition specialists work. Now I’d like to show you something we’re very proud of.’ She swiped her hand across the black glass surface and the red light blinked above the door. Killmorin looked back at Fey, ‘After you, Mr. Coward.’
‘Ladies first, Ms. Killmorin,’ Fey said. She didn’t like this and anybody with any sense would push the appointment excuse or just run. But Fey was not sensible and she was very curious. Killmorin led Fey into a room lined with white boxes on the right, a long stainless steel table at the far end, and an enormous smoky grey glass screen on the left. Fey shivered as she saw the restraints attached to the table. Ms. Killmorin placed her palm on the glass screen. ‘Ava Killmorin,’ she said.
‘Noel, this is the heart of our operation. Each of these boxes contain thirteen wands, each wand is a drive that installs true intelligence into any computer or server.’ Killmorin slid open a box. The lid was incised with runes. Fey felt dizzy trying to read them. Killmorin pulled out a rod with a latticework of red light like capillaries spread over the luminous ivory surface. It looked like a bloody bone. The wand appeared solid, but Killmorin’s fingers left indentations and bruised light. Fey heard a faint groan. ‘Computers that can run and power our systems and never fail. It is a self-monitoring, self-sustaining technology. Do you understand what that means?’
‘Isn’t this something that you should keep secret?’
‘Oh, I think you know why I’m telling you, Noel. I’m sure our office manager told you as much as he could. The fascinating thing about your kind is that you are so malleable. It isn’t hard to fit something like you into a wand once we understood the rules. Why create an intelligence when we can simply and cheaply transfer one?’
Fey backed towards the door.
‘Oh no, I’m not going to convert you. I have some questions I would like to ask. As you can see, I’ve figured out quite a lot on my
own, but I believe we have not come close to fully leveraging the potential of this new resource, the seemingly supernatural beings living at the margins of the human world. You could help me immensely and it would profit you immensely.’
‘Look, I don’t know what you mean by my ‘kind,’ but I’m certain that I couldn’t help. Now I have to get to the Henry Ford.’
Killmorin bent the wand very slightly between her hands and whatever was inside groaned louder.
‘Three questions, Noel. Three questions and I’ll free you.’
‘What makes you think I’m not your kind, Ava?’
‘Because anyone who comes in to our building is bound. If you drink our water, you are bound. If you wear a visitor’s pass, you are bound. If Noel Coward were your real name, then that pass would’ve bound you to me.’
Fey looked at the pass more closely and saw more runes mixed in with the numbers of the pass’s bar code.
‘Clever.’
‘We really have only begin to realize the power of integrating these new technologies into our current systems.’ Killmorin held the wand between both hands again. ‘Do we have a bargain?’
Fey hesitated.
‘You know these wands can break, quite easily. Would you like a demonstration?’
‘We have a bargain. Three questions.’
‘Good. You will answer them factually?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you fairy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are the first fairy I’ve ever seen who looks like a middle-aged white man. Most unusual, but my mirror does disperse glamours.’ Killmorin raised her tone slightly as she finished that thought.
‘Is that a question?’
‘No. But you must understand what an opportunity you are for us. We understand so little of you, especially of your physiology.’
Killmorin touched the screen again. ‘Research. File F-1: Supra-Ordinary Hematology,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately, research subjects expire before any usable data can be gathered. And converted intelligences are necessarily uncommunicative about their previous form.’ Killmorin showed Fey a brief video of a syringe embedded deep into a limb, but drawing no blood. ‘We cannot acquire a blood sample, let alone get a fix on cellular structure of creatures like you.’
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