“This is only twenty-five hundred,” I said after counting it. “I usually get a five-thousand-dollar combat bonus.”
“I know. It’s completely unacceptable. Soldiers who go into war zones overseas don’t get that much nearly as often as you’re getting it.”
“Soldiers who go into war zones overseas don’t have to buy their own magical weapons from people who don’t accept credit cards, not to mention traveling all over the Pacific Northwest and staying in hotels without TDY pay, which I don’t get because my position doesn’t officially exist. Willard’s whole office doesn’t officially exist.”
“Giving you that much money is ridiculous, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve started an investigation. Magical weapons.” He scoffed.
I was suddenly certain he’d never encountered a magical being himself. Well, too bad. If he was going to work in Willard’s little unit, he’d learn soon. This wasn’t Fort Lewis out in the tree-filled boonies. Seattle was a port city and a hotbed of visitors of all kinds. All kinds.
“I’m sure you’ll find that Colonel Willard keeps impeccable files.” I made my tone as reasonable and logical as I could. “And I hope you’ll find the contract she has for me, the one I signed that lays out exactly what bonuses and pay I get, because I need to buy a new Jeep. Unless you want to provide me with one?”
I’d intended to ask Willard if the army would lend me a vehicle until I could get the insurance claim straightened out. I doubted this kid would lend me a bicycle.
His gaze flicked toward one of the big windows overlooking the busy street. I spotted a black sedan with government plates under a tree. I was almost more shocked that he’d gotten a parking spot around here than that someone in his office had deemed him worthy of a car.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’ll be investigating the various reimbursement papers you’ve submitted very thoroughly. And I’ll be investigating you. All the work you’ve done these last ten years. I find it highly suspicious that the government is paying for your services at all. You didn’t even bring proof that you’d completed the assignment. I’m hesitant to turn this envelope over to you.”
“Colonel Willard thought it was gauche when I brought decapitated heads of monsters in and plopped them down on the table. This is her favorite place, you know. She likes the nitro cold brew.”
“I will be investigating her too,” Sudo said coolly. “Do not think I will be intimidated by her rank or your reputation. If I find out that she’s been colluding with you and keeping half of the money—”
I slammed my hand down on the table, startling the kid into shutting up. “Colonel Willard has been going above and beyond at her job since before you were born. Don’t you slander her in front of me.”
Admittedly, I hadn’t known Willard for her whole career, but based on the last four years I’d worked for her, I was positive it was true. I wished I could make my eyes glow like the dragon had, and that the kid would wet himself.
“We’ll see,” Sudo said tightly, standing up, his keys jangling faintly with the movement.
I wanted to punch him. On an impulse—not a wise impulse—I stuck my hand in his pocket instead, startling him like a deer with a semi roaring down on it. I tugged his keys out before he thought to try to stop me.
“Since you’ve cheated me on my bonus, and my insurance agent wants to stiff me on the Jeep, you’re going to lend me your car for a few days.”
“I will not.” He lunged for my arm.
I caught his wrist and applied enough pressure to make him wince. I might not be able to kick a dragon’s ass, but after the creatures I had fought, someone with purely human reflexes was no problem.
“Thanks for understanding,” I said politely, noticing a couple at a neighboring table looking our way. “I’ll bring it back when my claim goes through and I’m able to replace my Jeep.” Whenever that was.
As I turned, I almost knocked over the poor waiter. He thrust the chilled bottle of coffee at me and skittered back. I was three inches taller than he was, and even though I’d combed the ferns out of my hair, I could look intimidating when I was pissed. Which I always seemed to be lately.
I waved and thanked him politely. The lieutenant didn’t try to chase me as I strode for the door. Instead, he lifted his phone to make a call. That was probably worse. What were the odds I’d make it through the day without being arrested?
I wasn’t sure I cared. Right now, all I wanted was to see Colonel Willard and—I swallowed around the lump in my throat—figure out what was going on. With her—how could she be so sick out of nowhere?—and with Lieutenant Dickhead. He couldn’t possibly be in charge of her office while she was out. He was too young, too raw, and too much of an asshole.
6
I knocked quietly on the door to the hospital room. Rain had started outside and beaded on the window at the end of the hallway. The muffled mumble from inside might have been, “Come in,” but it was hard to imagine Colonel Willard issuing anything but a firm, crisp, and audible-through-a-door command. At least she was awake and able to have visitors.
When I opened the door, Willard blinked in surprise at me. It was probably weird for her to see me anywhere but our usual meeting spot. It was definitely weird for me to see her here and out of uniform. She sat propped up in the bed and wore a flimsy hospital gown, green-plaid pajama bottoms, and fuzzy orange cat slippers. Was that Garfield?
I squinted at her, wondering if this represented secret tastes I hadn’t known about… or a descent into a childlike mental state.
No, her dark eyes were coherent as they considered me. They were the only normal thing about her. With her brown skin, she couldn’t exactly be labeled pale, but she didn’t look like herself. Her square face was wan, and as short as her wiry black-and-gray hair was, it managed to seem unkempt.
Forcing a smile, I walked in. My step faltered as I saw flowers in vases all over the place. I should have brought flowers, or something nice, not a bottle of no-longer-entirely-chilled coffee that probably wasn’t allowed on whatever special diet they had put her on. At the least, I should have brought a six-pack wrapped in gift paper. Did fancy coffees come in six-packs?
“Val?” Colonel Willard’s southern accent gave my name a longer vowel than usual. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to find out why a snotty lieutenant met me at your coffee shop.” I walked to the side of the bed and plunked the bottle down on a tray full of pill bottles. “And to bring you this. I figured the flowers had already been handled.”
“I’ll say. I do appreciate the members of my congregation thinking of me…” She waved to the Bible resting beside her on the bed. “But they could have pooled their funds and spared the lives of a few flowers.”
“I’m pretty sure those are grown in greenhouses for the explicit purpose of being ruthlessly slain for sick people.”
“True.” Willard took the coffee bottle and wrapped both hands around it, gazing down at the label.
I wasn’t sure what to make of that reaction. “I hope that’s the right kind. If it costs more than five bucks, it’s possible I stole it. I flustered the waiter.”
“Did you show him your sword?”
“No.”
“Your tiger?”
“Also no. I did almost smack him with my braid when I turned around.”
“It is an intimidating braid.” Willard opened the bottle and inhaled deeply. “Bless you, child. It has been six days since I had a decent cup of coffee.”
I eyed the pill bottles. Willard had never tried to bless me before, and I wondered anew if this indicated an altered state of mind. Or, I amended as she took a long swallow, maybe she was just missing her fix.
“Don’t you have a delivery app on your phone? I saw three independent coffee shops on the way in.”
“I don’t think you can get coffee delivered.” She tilted her head. “That doesn’t seem right, does it? In Seattle of all places.”
“I think you just didn’t
try hard enough.” I bit my lip and looked her up and down, groping for something to say.
I didn’t intend to inspect her for signs of magical energy or tampering or anything out of the ordinary, but I realized as I stared toward her lower abdomen, I sensed… something. It wasn’t like when I sensed that someone had elf or dwarf or a hint of some other magical being in their ancestry. This wasn’t something in her blood. It seemed more like one of my charms tucked out of sight under the blanket. A small magical artifact.
“They’re my niece’s slippers,” Willard said, mistaking my expression and the direction I was looking. “I did enjoy Garfield as a girl. The cartoons in the paper and the little books full of them I got from the library. My mother was always encouraging me to read. She said an education was the best way to get out of the poor town I grew up in. She wasn’t impressed by the comics.”
“I think he’s still around. Garfield, that is. Uhm, are you wearing any trinkets or anything?” I tapped mine, knowing she knew about my magical charms and weapons. I couldn’t imagine her wearing anything in the vicinity of her lower abdomen—a magical belly button ring?—but she could have something under the covers.
“No. I wish. Do you have anything for cancer?”
“Uh, this one protects you from fireballs and also the UV radiation of the sun. I don’t suppose it’s a skin cancer?”
“No. Ovarian, and it’s spread quickly.” A haunted look entered her dark brown eyes.
It was as unfamiliar from her as the Garfield slippers and hospital gown, and I didn’t know how to respond. A hug? A pat on the shoulder? It was hard to imagine the no-nonsense colonel wanting either. The only time I could remember us doing anything like hugging had been on a judo mat, and I’d ended up thrown over her shoulder afterward.
“I’ve had a fever and infection they can’t pin down too,” Willard added, “so they haven’t let me leave the hospital. It’s been a lovely couple of weeks.”
“Is there a plan? How, uhm?” My gaze drifted to a folder on a tray on the other side of the bed. “Do you have scans of, er, it?”
“Yes. I asked for all the information they had. Are you a practicing oncologist when you’re not slaying monsters? How did the wyverns go?”
I took the second question to mean she would rather not talk about details. She must have already started treatment.
“Got the last one. I ran into a dragon though.” I moved around the bed to pick up the folder.
“A dragon?”
“He wrecked my Jeep. And almost me with it. We were after the same wyvern, and I… tricked him and got it first.”
“How did you survive?”
I would have liked to talk about how clever or skilled I’d been, but the truth was, “He let me live. And warned me never to get in the way of his work again.”
“His work? I’ve never heard of a dragon here on Earth, not since ancient times. They used to consider this a purgatory of a sort, at least for themselves. My understanding from the data I’ve gathered from the various magical informants and witnesses we’ve worked with is that dragons are why so many of them came here to start with, to avoid the so-called justice of the Dragon Justice Court.”
“Yes.” I looked up from the scan—the angry blobs on it did not look good, but I couldn’t sense anything magical from a picture itself. “That’s exactly what he called it. He said he was a Lord Zavryd-something-unpronounceable.”
“Lord? Not an arbiter?”
“I didn’t catch everything he said before I got my translation charm turned on, but it sounded like he was basically a cop, there to drag criminals back for punishment and rehabilitation—that’s what he called it. The wyvern was quaking in her scales.”
“Whatever he is, I’m sure he’s more than a beat cop. All of the dragons consider themselves a sort of nobility. Everyone is either a king or a queen or prince or princess, though females are born less frequently than the males. They’re often more powerful, and they’re usually the rulers—the males fight each other, often to the death, for the right to present themselves as mates to one of the females. I guess since they kill each other off, it doesn’t matter that the numbers are skewed.”
“We didn’t get into all that.” I was more concerned about whether I would run into Zav the Self-Righteous again, not if he had the grit to find a dragon mate. “I asked him if he was going back to his realm, and he said no. He had more work to do here. That’s when he warned me to stay out of his way.”
Willard leaned back into her pillows, looking tired, as if the speaking wore her out. Should I leave? Maybe the coffee would revive her, though she hadn’t taken much more than that first long swallow.
“If for some reason the dragons have decided to police the problems they’ve inadvertently caused for us, then that could be a good thing, but this is, if not unprecedented, something that hasn’t happened for a thousand years. Magical beings have come here, fleeing the reach of the Dragon Justice Court since humans were smacking flint together in caves to make fire.” Her eyes narrowed. “We have been wondering why so many more magical beings have appeared in our world lately. Wyverns didn’t used to swoop down and eat children in broad daylight. Or at all. We had more than twenty years after the elves and dwarves left when there weren’t any sightings of the magical at all.”
“Yes, my blissful childhood.”
She glanced at me. “I always forget you’re older than you look.”
“It’s the elven blood.”
“Must be nice.” Willard flicked a few fingers. “If you see the dragon again, you better stay out of his path. If he’s dragging off the beings that have committed crimes here, then there’s no point in killing them. Though from what I’ve heard from talking to some of the snitches, that punishment and rehabilitation is not pleasant. There’s a reason they flee to Earth and the Wild Worlds to avoid it. You may have been granting mercy in killing that wyvern before the dragon took her.”
After what those wyverns had done, mercy hadn’t been in my mind. “Well, if the dragon is going to handle all the criminals—admittedly, it sounded like the wyvern had committed crimes in their realm, not that he was here because of the children on Earth that were killed—then I guess I can retire.”
Willard snorted. “And do what?”
Good question. A few years earlier, I’d finished my bachelor’s degree in aviation, mostly so I could get a raise, but it had been almost twenty years since I’d flown anything. When the army had discovered I healed quickly and had a few other preternatural abilities, they’d hustled me off into a special program to learn to be a good killer.
“I’m pretty agile. I could probably get a gig with Cirque du Soleil.”
She snorted again. Which was the closest I’d ever gotten to a laugh from her.
I set down the folder since my aviation training couldn’t tell me anything about the scan, other than that the blobs vaguely resembled cumulus clouds, but my gaze drifted toward her abdomen again. There was definitely something there. And it seemed to be in the area of the tumors. Was it possible this wasn’t a natural cancer? What if it wasn’t cancer at all? Could some magic mimic the disease? Or cause it to start up and develop far more rapidly than usual? And if magic had caused it, could magic cure it?
“You seem pensive,” Willard said. “Is it because I look that bad? Or are you imagining yourself whirling through the air, thrown by hunky male circus performers?”
I debated whether or not to tell her what I sensed. I didn’t want to give her false hope about a cure, especially since I didn’t know any alchemists or magical healers who might be able to suss out what was wrong and come up with a way to fix her. Maybe it was foolish to even think such a thing could be possible. But she was the only one who would know if she’d rubbed someone in the magical community the wrong way or had been attacked outright.
“I’ve told you about my run-in with a dragon. Have you had any run-ins with magical beings? Especially in the weeks leading up to this… this.�
� I waved at the hospital and her in bed.
Her brows rose.
“Unless you’re wearing a magical belly-button ring or lying on some charm or artifact, there’s something magical about you.” I pointed to the spot.
Alarm flashed in her eyes. Willard pushed the blanket aside, slid out of bed, and patted the mattress through the sheets. Then she lifted up the mattress and looked under it.
“No, I—”
The door opened, and a nurse walked in with a dinner tray. Then halted and stared. Willard, not having found anything under the sheets or mattress, lowered her bed to the proper position.
“Colonel Willard, you’re not performing unauthorized exercises again, are you?”
“No, ma’am.”
The nurse frowned suspiciously at me. I lifted my hands in innocence, even if I had been responsible.
“I’ll set this here. If you need to adjust your bed, please use the remote.” The nurse deposited the food tray and pointed to the device cabled to the bed frame before leaving.
“I’m a troublemaker.” Willard sighed and climbed back into bed.
“I knew that already. The magic moved with you. It’s definitely in there.” I pointed toward her abdomen.
“Shit.”
“Have you made any enemies lately? Accepted candy from strangers? Scratch that. Accepted a salad or grass-fed hamburger patty from a stranger?”
She gave me a flat look. “You’re the one who makes the enemies. I just sit in my office and collate data.”
“Did any magical beings visit you in that office in the last month?”
“A couple of snitches have been by—it would have been nice if someone had given me a heads-up on the dragon before I sent you out—but the usual guys. The fae coffee shop owner and the female orc who had cosmetic surgery and started one of those axe-throwing businesses. But they’ve been coming in for years. They especially like to rat out anyone who’s competition, magical or otherwise.”
I’d met them both and made a note to look them up. “Anyone come by your apartment?”
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