A Girl’s Best Friend (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 3)

by Isobella Crowley

  Remy reminded himself that the man did seem to be a damn good bodyguard and explained further.

  “I only…I worry that she’ll try to lock me in a box, so to speak. You know? ‘This is for your own good, Remington,’ like she’s my grandmother babysitting me while the parents are out of town. Of course, it’s only because she cares, but it’s so…patronizing.”

  The other man replied almost at once. “Pardon me, sir, but you may be mistaken,” he commented. “It’s really not like Taylor to care much about anyone else.”

  Remy blinked, temporarily stunned. That was definitely not what he had expected to hear.

  “What the hell?” he retorted. “I could tell that the two of you were acquainted, but that’s awfully familiar for a butler type. Exactly how well do you know her, anyway?”

  Conrad blushed again but seemingly overcame it quickly. His demeanor had grown harder and grimmer than usual. He cleared his throat before he answered the question.

  “She and I dated—for a brief period—several decades ago. A little before your time. Or perhaps right around when you were born. I can’t recall. Sadly, things did not work out in the long run.”

  He almost sputtered as he wracked his brain for a way to respond to this. “Taylor used to go on dates? The idea of her having a boyfriend is beyond fucked up, frankly. She’s a complete ice queen. You weren’t simply her BDSM slave, were you?”

  Even as he said this, he remembered his conversation with Por at the bar last night and his own notion that Taylor was trying to…expand upon their relationship. Something in his gut roiled uncomfortably. Maybe he needed breakfast.

  “Yes, ha,” the lycanthrope replied and pretended to be amused by his reaction. “The part about her…uh, dating, I mean, not the ‘slave’ part. We had a…relatively normal relationship, I suppose.”

  He paused and his hands grasped the wheel more tightly so the knuckles stood out against his skin with the tension.

  “However,” he went on, “we never reached the point at which she invited me to move in with her. I wasn’t about to beg and, well, she certainly never asked.”

  Conrad turned his head to him and fixed him with a subtle look of concentration as the office appeared a little farther ahead of them. “For you to have received that kind of offer, sir, you must be something special in her eyes.”

  Remy took a deep breath while his mind considered that statement.

  Jesus. It’s too damn early for me to deal with this kind of crap. I have a job to do here, a business in need of success, and the last thing I need is a ton of emotional drama. Especially if it involves Taylor of all people.

  He tried, therefore, to shove any thoughts or feelings pertaining to the matter far, far away from his consciousness. Some of them, however, lodged between the squiggly parts of his brain and refused to leave him alone.

  Specifically, the notion of Taylor and Conrad being…intimate. The fact that he did not want to even consider it made it almost impossible to completely blot out the image.

  No. Seriously, no. We are not dwelling on that. It’s not even the allure of the forbidden because there’s nothing alluring about it. It’s plain wrong, goddammit.

  “Sir,” the lycanthrope interrupted, “are you okay? We’re here, but I’m sure we can spare half an hour if you’d like to get something to eat, perhaps.”

  “Uh,” he mumbled and snapped back to reality, “no thanks, I’ll be fine. I’ll have Bobby or the intern get me another cup of coffee, and maybe…I dunno, have a mint off the reception desk or something.”

  His companion shrugged. “If you say so.” He parked the car toward the rear of the lot and they both emerged into the frosty mid-morning air before they pushed through the door into their place of employment.

  Bobby was already set up in the lobby and waved to them as they entered. “Hi, guys, good morning and all. I sent Alex off to get donuts. Do you want any coffee in the meantime?” She wore a tight red sweater that did not reveal much but nevertheless earned its bones by accentuating both the size and shape of her bust.

  Remy shrugged himself out of his coat and draped it over his arm. “Definitely, absolutely, and thanks. Donuts don’t sound too bad either. Ugh, I had to miss an MMA class so I’m going to have to find some way to burn off the extra calories as soon as possible, though.”

  He held a hand up to Conrad to indicate that the man should wait in the lobby, while he went to his office to hang his coat and turn his computer on.

  “At least Taylor won’t be in for a few hours yet,” he muttered, “so I’ll have more time to wake up and decide what to tell her. On the other hand, it might be nice to get it over with, so perhaps she’ll make one of her surprise early appearances.”

  After entering the boot-up password, he left his computer to load and wandered into the lobby, where their receptionist had already returned with a tray set with three steaming paper cups.

  “Ah.” He sighed and smiled for the first time that day. “Thank you, Bobby. Somehow, the caffeine tastes better when someone else makes it.” He snatched a cup and drank half of it in one long gulp.

  Conrad took one, too. “Actually, sir, caffeine is virtually tasteless, except in large and concentrated quantities. Such as if you were to get it in its pure, powdered form, which is available at some health-food stores, although significant doses can be toxic.”

  “Thanks, Conrad,” Remy quipped. “I’m learning a ton of useful info here.”

  The werewolf gave a mostly fake chortle at this and turned his attention to his coffee, the better to save himself from having to respond.

  As they drank, waiting for Alex to get back with his fried and sugared bread, Remy watched Bobby lean back behind her desk and raise an issue of The New England Inquirer in front of her face.

  “Huh,” he remarked. “I must be moving down in the world. The front-page story isn’t about me for once.”

  She peered at him over the paper. “Oh, ha-ha, right,” she agreed. “There’ve been a few that weren’t about you, but yeah, now that I think of it, those have mostly been the recent issues. You were an extremely popular subject for them last fall.”

  “Oh,” he began and allowed himself to be flattered for the moment, “I know, I know.”

  The receptionist returned to her reading and, bored, he examined the front page in more detail.

  Existence of hard-drive backups for human brain proved by politicians’ behavior, the headline shouted. He leaned closer and squinted at the text of the story proper.

  Bobby looked at him again. “I already read that one, Mr Remington, so if you’re curious, I can tell you what it’s about.” She smiled.

  “Sure,” he said. He didn’t have anything better to do for the moment.

  She set the paper down and turned the cover toward him. “So, there’s this city councilman and a couple of his aides…and, like, an alderman and a couple of sheriff’s deputies, and this lady who runs the sanitation department, and they’ve all acted really weirdly lately.”

  “Oh? Interesting…” he commented as he nodded and glanced at the clock.

  “Yeah,” she went on. “The reporter—that Jenny Ocren lady, actually—noticed that all these politicians have acted the same way, though. They are always seen wandering around outside late at night and trying to sleep during the day and stuff. The councilman passed out at a meeting, even.”

  Now, both men listened intently.

  “And…” Bobby’s eyes widened. “They keep having mysterious chest pain. Like they’re having a heart attack, only it comes and goes too fast for it to be cardiac arrest—they’re in agony one second and perfectly fine the next. The sanitation chick said she was talking to her doctor about it, but they haven’t heard anything yet.”

  “Well,” Conrad quipped, “that is rather curious.”

  The receptionist nodded. “There’s more, too. People are reporting that they’ve all been eating a ton of red meat. Even one of the deputies, who’s a vegan. Isn’t that
weird?”

  “I’ve heard weirder,” Remy observed, “but yes.” What he did not say, however, was that all the symptoms she’d mentioned had a curiously vampiric feel to them.

  “It’s so scary,” she continued. “Like, the article goes on to talk about this super-obscure experiment done in Russia in the eighties before the Soviet Union broke up, where they tried to make the human brain compatible with a computer.”

  The investigator somehow doubted this had much to do with vampires, but if she had no goddamn idea what she was talking about, that was just as well.

  “Like”—she raised a hand as if gesturing to something that wasn’t there—“this Russian scientist was trying to make a kind of floppy disk for the whole human neural network, or at least the important stuff, that could be plugged in and out of one of their super-computers. You know, the ones they used to open a portal to another timeline over Tunguska. The fabric of the continuum was really weak there after the 1908 Tunguska Event.”

  “Uh…” Remy coughed. “Yeah. You don’t think it could be indicative of…uh, anything else?”

  “Nah,” she countered. She rambled on for a couple of minutes about how the bizarre experiment in question led some of the patients to report symptoms similar to the ones described in the article.

  For good measure, she also mentioned a couple of Ms Ocren’s previous articles, in which the woman claimed to have “inside sources” in the US government who claimed they had stolen the Soviet intel at the end of the Cold War and had tried to develop the technology ever since.

  “This proves that it’s true,” Bobby urged and slapped the page emphatically. “They’ve reported on it here and everything, with all this in-depth research and evidence, but I’d bet any money that no one will ever actually talk about it. This stuff is right in front of our faces.”

  Remy nodded blankly. What was right in front of his face, of course, was the prospect that Moswen had acquired a few thralls in the local government. That scared him more than a few rumors in a no-account paper about a Russian urban legend older than he was.

  “Bobby,” he asked, “could I cut that article out to have a look at it? I think Taylor might find it interesting also.”

  “Oh, sure,” the receptionist said. She produced a pair of scissors from her desk drawer and carved the entire front page off. “I’m done with the other side, too, don’t you worry.”

  “Thanks.”

  He turned to Conrad. “Hold on a sec. I’ll be right back.”

  The man nodded and simply sipped his coffee.

  With the clipping in hand, the investigator walked through the space toward Taylor’s office. She wasn’t there yet, but he could easily leave the article on her desk so she could immediately evaluate it after she arrived.

  When he rounded the corner, he almost bumped into Volz.

  “Watch your step,” the dwarf rumbled. “I’m reinforcing a few wires here, as you can see. There’s also the matter of my feet. I can guarantee you wouldn’t want to step on those, even a human of your relative boldness.”

  Something about the dwarf’s mischievous smile, almost hidden under his mustache, improved Remy’s mood, at least a little.

  “Right,” he agreed. “You guys seem to more than make up in mass what you lack in height.”

  Then, something occurred to him. The dwarf was the only preternatural in the office right now. Things seemed a little empty.

  He stepped carefully over both feet and wires but on the other side, paused to ask Volz another question. “Have you seen or heard from Riley, by any chance? We…uh, misplaced her at a drug party—these things happen—and she never found us afterward.”

  The dwarf furrowed his brow. “Hmm, no, I’m afraid she never showed up last night, nor has she been in this morning. Usually, it seems that after a mission with you, she returns to the office and falls asleep at that ridiculous upended coffee mug you gave her to use as a ‘desk.’ Or occasionally, she’ll even help me with my work.”

  Another pang of worry struck Remington. Volz was right. The fairy was not acting like herself lately at all. And hearing the dwarf say as much confirmed that it wasn’t only his suspicions. Now, it was obvious to everyone.

  “I see,” he replied. “That’s…odd. She can handle herself, mostly, but she was in human form last we saw her, and she…well, loses most of her powers when she does that.”

  He put his hands in his pockets to keep from suddenly needing to adjust his tie or wipe the sweat from his hands. “I only hope she had the good sense to transform before anything dangerous might have happened.”

  Volz nodded. “Likely she did. The fae are wily when it comes to their own self-preservation, I’ve found.”

  Remy had noticed the same thing. But Riley was atypical for a fairy, and even by her own standards, she hadn’t displayed much interest in self-preservation.

  He sighed. “Well, I need her. For work, I mean. So it looks like it’s back on the hunt.”

  After a quick glance at the piece of paper in his hand, he decided not to bother with Taylor’s office. She might have locked it, anyway.

  “Say, Volz,” he inquired instead. “Could you see to it that Taylor gets this article when she comes in? You’re good at remembering stuff, and it’s definitely something that I think she’d want to have a good, long look at. Hell, you might as well.”

  The dwarf took the clipping and glanced at it. “Oh, ye gods—the Inquirer. This ought to be amusing. But yes, I will ensure that she receives it.”

  “Thanks. It may be only a gossip sheet, but broken clocks and twice a day…uh, however that expression goes. Taylor will know what to make of it.”

  He spun on his heel and headed to the lobby to collect his werewolf. Alex came through the front door as he arrived, carrying a large flat box.

  “I got us some donuts,” he announced.

  Remy stepped forward and opened the box while it was still in the intern’s arms and plucked out a vanilla crème-filled one.

  “Thanks, Alex.” He closed the box and made a shooing motion for the man to take it to the lobby table. “For someone who tried to kill me a couple of times, you’re not so bad, after all.”

  The intern sighed. “Don’t mention it, mate.”

  Conrad stepped forward. “What now?”

  “Reinforcements,” he stated. “You’re good to have around and all, but to round things out, what we really need is…”

  He trailed off. Rather than saying “fairy” in front of Bobby, he made little wing-flapping motions with his hands.

  “Ah,” the lycanthrope responded, “say no more.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Park Avenue Shopping District, Manhattan, New York

  “Confession time.” Remy almost groaned. “I do not have a plan to locate Riley beyond driving or stumbling around and hoping we see her. Granted, that exact method has usually worked in the past since she always seems to stick to a few streets, I think. Let’s hope she hasn’t expanded her repertoire or whatever.”

  “Hmm,” Conrad responded and stroked his goatee. “It’s possible I might smell her or hear her voice before you could. That does give us one advantage.”

  He almost made a comment about buying a supersonic whistle and using it to punish the bodyguard for bad behavior but reined himself in at the last split-second. Right now, the main thing was to find their friend and make sure she was okay.

  And if she wasn’t there in the shopping district, the only other place that suggested itself was Melrose. After the ugliness in the shipping container, he had no desire to go there again anytime soon.

  They’d begun the search at the most obvious locale—Fluttershire, in Fort Washington Park—and it had proven to be a bust. Mainly because Riley hadn’t even been there, but they’d also caught the colony’s guards in an even worse mood than usual.

  “Who,” the blue one had insisted, shrill with anger, “exactly who is this foul lycanthrope, and why have you brought him to our sanctuary? Have
n’t you already brought enough outside influences into our domain?”

  Conrad had attempted to introduce himself. “Hello,” he’d said tentatively, “my name is Conrad Warfield, and I’m only here to protect both Remington and Riley, once we locate her. I’m under contract with Taylor, and I can assure you that—”

  “Silence!” the orange one had interjected. “We know all too well why you’re here. The meat of the fae is as the sweetest morsel to the tongue of the dog.”

  The werewolf had almost visibly bristled at that. “Wolf, if you don’t mind the correction.”

  After more pointless squabbling—during which a couple of other fairies had emerged to fling baseless accusations that Remy planned to marry Riley off to the werewolf without paying the required dowry—he had thrown his hands up in disgust, turned, and marched away.

  Conrad was all too happy to trail behind him and tried not to look or sound as flustered as he obviously was.

  “They’re certainly…contentious,” he’d griped after a moment.

  “You know,” he had observed and felt as though an epiphany were upon him, “they’re actually more dog-like than you are in that most of their behavior is an act designed to convince people to give them a treat.”

  The lycanthrope, struck by this insight, hadn’t replied immediately.

  “Almost every time,” Remy continued, “they act as though they don’t remember who I am. It’s as if I’ve never done anything for them and can’t ever be trusted to make up for it but every time, they suddenly love me as soon as I give them some or other honey-based product or sugary nonsense. In this case, we weren’t here to actually procure services from them—only a little recon and info-gathering—so, screw ʼem. They can wait until I need to renew Riley’s weekly contract. Then, I’ll buy them…I don’t know, a bag of butterscotch candies or some crap.”

  “Fair enough, sir.” His companion had shrugged. He wondered how much interaction he’d had with the Fair Folk, even in his preternaturally long lifetime.