Diamond in the Rough

by Isobella Crowley

  Remy stared at the man. “My date is the uninhibited type. That’s part of why we’re, you know, together. I like uninhibited women.” He considered how that sounded. “Loyal, of course, but free-spirited.”

  The man chuckled innocently, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and strolled off in the opposite direction, whistling.

  Once he was gone, Remy poked his head tentatively into the plant labyrinth to make sure Riley hadn’t gotten herself stung. For all he knew, she might be susceptible to bee sting allergies and crap like that while in human form.

  She burst out as he stepped in.

  “They wouldn’t talk to me.” She pouted. “Is it because of how big I am? That’s the only thing I can think of.”

  “Maybe you can’t hear their responses,” he suggested.

  As they resumed their amble toward the pool, a few other males began to hover around them.

  What the hell is this? Remy tried to suppress his irritation. Can’t a girl dress like a circus performer and attempt to converse with yellowjackets without attracting a group of random dudes?

  He would have thought that New Yorkers, of all people, would be more tolerant of what might look like insanity. After all, when he talked to her while she was invisible to most people, the most he ever got was an occasional weird glance.

  Watching the gathering horde, though, he had to amend his assumptions. The various guys made no attempt to police her bizarre behavior, nor were they simply curious what the deal was with her. Instead, seeing her, they responded according to nature.

  Riley was hot. Really, really hot.

  She deliberately bumped into him as she walked. “I think everyone likes my dress,” she quipped. “That guy keeps looking at the slit I put up the leg. I wasn’t sure if I got it right. I guess I did.”

  He glanced at the gentleman in question. “Yup.”

  The guy blushed, bowed out, and disappeared behind a tree. The others, however, watched him continually for any sign of inattention so they could make their move.

  He became so busy watching them that he didn’t notice, at first, when Riley saw the pool and bolted toward it.

  “Riley—wait!” he called.

  She was already at the edge of the water and jumped in to skip amidst the half-dead lily pads and scatter crystalline droplets into the crisp air.

  A security guard appeared out of a nearby conservatory. “Hey—hey! Get out of the water, lady.” He jogged toward the pool, his face distorted with aggravation, and probably contemplated a change of career. “Christ, it’s too friggin’ cold for this shit.”

  Remington, too, ran toward the water. To his annoyance, so did about half a dozen other men.

  An old couple was already helping Riley out of the water. Or, rather, an old man was. He took her hand and pulled her out gently, while his wife watched with her hands on her hips.

  “Young lady,” the geezer commented, “I admire your spirit, but you don’t want to get your skimpy dress all wet at this time of year.”

  Riley merely giggled. Her outfit had twisted in such a way that more of her legs were exposed and the damp fabric clung to her chest and suggested that she probably wasn’t wearing a bra.

  Before Remy could reach her, a big, beefy college kid muscled in.

  “You need to get dry,” he offered, removed his jacket, and draped it over her shoulders.

  “Aww,” she cooed, “thank you.”

  His teeth gritted, her date pushed through the throng, slipped an arm around her waist, and yanked her away from the beefcake to leave him holding his jacket over an empty patch of air.

  They hurried toward what looked like the least-populated area of the gardens. The security guard watched him, probably to make sure he and the college boy didn’t get into a fight.

  For perhaps a full minute, they were alone together. Then, even more men began to drift over and insinuate themselves.

  Remy gave up, for now. He selected a bench that would only hold two people, seated the two of them on it, and opened his picnic basket to distribute the sandwiches. In the end, he munched his cold cuts in silence while Riley chatted with four or five guys between mouthfuls of peanut butter and jelly.

  It occurred to him that he might resolve the situation by announcing loudly that no motherfucker was to talk to his woman and any who dared defy his proclamation was welcome to challenge him. As tempting as the idea was, he refrained.

  Moments passed before he realized why he didn’t do that. It would advertise that he was jealous. He’d have to admit that he cared.

  Fortunately, at least, the fairy did not have a phone number to give out, so when they made ready to leave, all she had was the experience of being the center of everyone’s attention. It sure seemed like she’d enjoyed it.

  Well, at least this suggests she won’t be so desperate to flirt with me in the future. She’s discovered that I’m not the only man in the world.

  They walked arm-in-arm past the visitor center and toward his car.

  “Remy,” the fairy said, “thanks for the good time. The Botanical Gardens are really pretty. I might sneak in again sometime when I’m normal-sized. And I met so many nice people. They liked me too. Maybe I can meet up with them again.”

  “You’re welcome,” he replied. “Hey, let’s go on another date sometime soon, shall we?”

  She blinked at him. “Maybe.” She seemed distracted.

  He hated how much it stung—like a hot needle in the gut—to hear that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Times Square, New York City

  The fairy might be getting over her crush, but Remy concluded that she at least still cared about him. He couldn’t come up with any other reason why she’d nag him like this.

  “You know,” she chided, “if you’d had me with you, this might never have happened. Your dumb friends wouldn’t have even been able to see me, after all. Besides, I think it might have been interesting to see more of what humans do for fun.”

  It helped that she’d returned to her usual size, not to mention made herself imperceptible to most mortals again. She was once more his co-worker, his sidekick, and his bodyguard rather than his date.

  As they strolled down the sidewalk, he waited for a relative lapse in human traffic combined with an increase in noise from the street before he responded to her.

  “It wasn’t actually all that much fun—intoxication, wandering around, spending money, saying stupid shit, and acting like an asshole, basically. I used to think things like that were the best possible way to spend my time. Well, that and snorting cocaine. Which is even worse.”

  “Hmph.” She frowned and put her hands on her hips while she fluttered in midair. “If you have to snort it, I’m sure it can’t be very good. That’s simply weird.”

  They were now close to Ninth Avenue, which was approximately where the ski-masked prick had almost turned him into someone’s oversized hood ornament. With the holiday season approaching, shoppers were everywhere.

  “I agree,” he said, “on that. No more nasally ingested substances for me, unless I suddenly develop allergies to something other than cats and need a prescription for those awful nose drops. More importantly, though, this is the place.”

  He gestured with his hand. The concrete and asphalt looked distressingly familiar.

  “Okay,” the fairy began, “but there isn’t much I can do if you don’t have anything from him.”

  Remy stood and stared at her. “Wait, what? What do you mean, from him?” Then he recalled, with a mental clap of thunder, that in the past, she had always had some kind of scented trace of her quarry.

  “Like hair,” she reminded him, “or something. Anything I can smell or taste. Or maybe a picture of him. But I guess you don’t have one of those either, now that I think about it.”

  His jaw clenched as a few pedestrians grumbled and maneuvered their way around him. “Shit. I forgot about that. For some reason, I assumed you could maybe astrally recreate the scene by taking a sna
pshot of a past point in time…or something. One of these days, I’ll have you type up a detailed list of exactly what your magic powers are.”

  A large, biker-esque man passed and gave him a skewed, skeptical look before he vanished into the crowd.

  “I’m only talking to my trusty fairy,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Ugh, and in this day and age, someone will probably catch it on camera.”

  Riley floated up and around to examine the street from above, seeking clues.

  Remington stood quietly, tried not to be too obstructive to foot traffic, and allowed his own words to echo in his mind. After a moment, his eyes bulged, and he brought his hand up to snap his fingers in front of him. “Aha! That’s it. Riley! Get back down here. I have a solution. Kind of.”

  The fairy wafted to eye level. “Really? What?”

  “Cameras.” He smiled, overjoyed to be cocky again. The power of overconfidence surged through him and made his extremities tingle. “At least some of these businesses probably have security cams. They might have caught the bastard during the assault or perhaps later when he fled the scene.”

  Then, he frowned. “He wore a ski mask, granted, but now that I think back, it almost looked like he was starting to lift it up when he ran away. He must have had trouble breathing in the damn thing, superhuman stamina or no.”

  “Okay,” she acknowledged, “how do we watch the camera footage? Don’t we have to pay an admission fee?”

  “Eh,” he countered, “not quite. What we need to do is…be persuasive.” He checked the inner pocket of his jacket. A couple of business cards for Moonlight Detective Agency were still there. That was a start.

  He scrutinized the establishments on this side of the street in the direction in which the unknown assailant had bolted. The first was a Chinese restaurant.

  “Hello,” the hostess greeted him as he stepped into the eatery’s pleasant shade and splendid décor. “Only one?”

  “Actually,” Remy began, “I’m an investigator.” He whipped a business card out.

  The woman frowned as she read the text.

  “Don’t worry.” He chortled and put on his best public relations smile. “You’re not in any trouble. I’m actually here to look into that Times Square brawl from a couple of days ago. Do you remember that? If you might be able to help me, we’ll be able to keep this neighborhood safe from similar incidents in the future.”

  The woman became slightly standoffish once she realized that criminal matters were potentially involved, but he layered on the charm as thick as he could and mentioned that he’d heard good things about this restaurant and would love to spread the word.

  He also strategically opened his jacket a little and made sure the lady caught sight of the large wad of cash he had in another pocket.

  “So,” he went on, “I’d be happy to help your establishment if you can help me. Let me speak to someone about reviewing the security camera footage from that morning. I saw you have a camera out front. It’s a good idea, these days.”

  After he’d slipped her a couple of twenties and repeated his spiel to the manager—an elderly Chinese gentleman who seemed slightly more receptive to cooperating with an investigation—he finally found himself viewing a recording of the cam from the pertinent time period.

  The device was positioned to give a better view of the storefront than of the sidewalk but nonetheless, after a moment, a figure in black streaked past. They caught a brief glimpse of his ski-masked head and that was all.

  “Damn,” Remy sighed. “Well, sir, this won’t be of much use to us, but thanks anyway for your cooperation, and I promise to recommend this restaurant as soon as I can. Hell, I’d even stay for dinner myself if I had time.”

  He noticed that the old man glanced at a position over the investigator’s shoulder—where Riley hovered. He said and did nothing, however. Still, it occurred to him that he might, later on, want to mention this to Taylor. The man was perhaps simply old-world Chinese enough to believe in the preternatural. At the very least, he seemed to sense that something was off.

  “Well,” Riley said as they exited, “I don’t think he saw me. But that didn’t work anyway, did it?”

  Remy waved them farther down the street. “Let’s keep trying.”

  Next up were a bar and grille, a souvenir shop, and a tourist agency offering guided bus excursions through the city. In each one, he repeated a slightly modified version of his pitch to the Chinese restaurant. And at each, until the last, they succeeded in looking at the security footage, only to fail to see anything substantive.

  Now, watching the camera recording in a back room at the tourist agency, he saw the attacker dash by. In the next instant, he yanked his mask up and glanced around.

  “There,” he snapped, suddenly afire with excitement. “Go back to that and slow it down. If possible, I need a freeze-frame of this guy’s face.”

  The manager, a constipated-looking little fellow who clearly hoped this would be over soon, grimaced and did as he asked. It took a couple of attempts, but they finally got a still frame of the assailant looking almost directly at the camera.

  “Ha!” Remy laughed. “Bingo. Don’t worry about making a copy. I’ll take a picture of the monitor. That should suffice.” He retrieved his camera and snapped a photo. There was no appreciable loss of detail.

  It wasn’t a great picture but it still provided a fairly good indication of what the man looked like. He was an almost nondescript white guy, blond and tanned, and probably in his late twenties or early thirties. The expression on his face, he realized, was mostly fear.

  He could tell Riley wanted to say something but she remained silent as they thanked the manager and headed to the door.

  They wandered out onto the street. It was the middle of the afternoon, now, and nightfall wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours away.

  Riley drew a long breath in, then let it out in a tiny puff. “Okay, with a graven image of him—or phone image, I suppose—I can cast the tracking spell and we can see where’s he’s been since the picture was taken.” She hesitated. “It’s only that…well…”

  Remy turning to look at her and raised an eyebrow. “Only what? Is the picture quality too low? I might be able to run it through a high-res, image-crisping program or something, but I don’t think we’ll find any other photos or motion still of him better than this one.”

  The fairy glanced around and bit her lip. “No, it’s not that. I’m worried.”

  “About what?” He had a hunch that he knew where this conversation was going but he resolved to hear her out and tried not to get annoyed in advance.

  She looked at him with her tiny, bright eyes. “You. This is dangerous. That man almost killed you before, didn’t he?”

  He frowned. “Kind of. Okay, he tried, and I got banged up, but nothing serious. But I was drunk at the time and he got the drop on me from out of nowhere. This time, the tables will be turned. He won’t know what hit him.”

  A smile grew as his thoughts turned inward to fantasies in which he kneed the prick in the face, hurled him through a plaster wall, and maybe ass-smacked him with a frying pan or a broom.

  No, we’ll be professional about this. I’ll apprehend the guy, bring him back, and let Taylor question him. He’ll cooperate if properly persuaded. There’s no need to get messy. Think of how impressed she’ll be.

  Riley interrupted his reverie. “Remy, we don’t even know what he is. I think he’s a human, but everyone says he has some kind of…powers. We don’t know how well he’ll be able to fight back or protect himself. My magic usually works well, but not always. And I can’t directly harm a human, remember?”

  Remington glanced around to make sure no one was too close before he responded to her. “No one’s asking you to kill the guy. That would be pointless. All you have to do is stop him from killing me until we can get him to surrender. We faced a whole group of mobsters and thugs at that warehouse and got through with a few scratches, but not many.”
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br />   “They were regular humans,” she pointed out. “Aside from the werewolf, that is. But at least we knew what he was. I think we should take this picture to the office and let Taylor and that Gilmore lady apprehend him.”

  The muscles around his jaw clenched and his teeth ground in frustration. He wasn’t angry at the fairy, exactly. The rational part of his mind understood what she was saying and under other circumstances, he might even have conceded that she had a point.

  But there was more to it than simple rationality. This was about his dignity and his competence. The vampire had tried to use him as bait, only for him to have his ass kicked, then arrested, then scolded and told to lie low because he couldn’t handle one asshole with superhuman strength. She still treated him almost like a child.

  “No,” he proclaimed, “we’re doing this. Don’t worry. I’ll be smart about it and have already made a few preparations, in fact. Besides, I have faith in your powers. With you by my side, we could probably even go all the way to Israel and capture whoever this master vampire is. This is probably only one of their little underlings.”

  It looked like she might protest again, so he cut her off. “I’m tired, Riley, of bait duty. Not to mention being left out of the decision-making process. And of people thinking I need protection even during very basic tasks. And the constant sting of rejection and condescension. It gets old, it really does.”

  Her lip trembled and her eyes were even shinier than usual. Afraid she might cry, he decided to reassure her but he would not give in.

  “It’s not you, honestly. You’ve been great, Riley. It’s Taylor, mostly. Oh, and my family. And most of the rest of New York. Those cops looked at me and decided I was such a clown that they didn’t even afford me the dignity of being treated like a potentially dangerous fuck-up, for God’s sake. I’m sick of it all. It’s time I won at something.”

  Now, the fairy merely squinted in confusion. “Remy, I don’t understand why—”