The door locks slammed into place. The door, which seemed light as a feather, was built to the same standards as a Class III vault door—which meant we were going to have to deal with this on our own. Alternatively, we could hope the foggers knocked an enraged and semi-transformed werebear out before she ate us.
God, I’ve been informed, is on the side of those who bust their asses for themselves, so I turned and slapped the crash bar on the emergency kit, hard.
Squelch!
I turned just in time to watch Jennifer somehow manage to bite the head off of her lawyer with jaws that were no longer human, but weren’t quite those of a bear.
Diindiisi was chanting in Ojibwe. The kit finally opened, and Jennifer tried to pull the table loose from the floor—in that, at least, she was frustrated, because they’d sunk the table into the concrete to anchor it when they’d poured the floor.
That’s why I insisted they put the werebear on the other side of it, just in case.
“Jesse?” Diindiisi said, breaking her chant.
“Hold one,” I said, grabbing the Ithaca Roadblocker from the emergency kit.
Usually a twelve-gauge pump, this one was part of a special order in ten gauge. It was going to be brutal on our hearing when fired in an enclosed space without hearing protection.
Jennifer had finished eating the ‘choice’ bits of Netobuvi and had mostly transformed. There were still areas that were human—just above the manacles and shackles on her wrists and ankles. They stood in stark contrast to the golden fur on the rest of her body. She raised her bloodied muzzle and roared again, before smashing down on the table with her forelegs. I stroked the pump, prayed the first round in the tube was a slug, and fired.
God looks out for those who do good work, I guess, because the first round was a slug. Normal, modern ammunition is made from hard alloys of lead—with steel being used in bird shot for ‘ecological reasons’—but Hopalong Ginsberg, the resident mad genius/armorer in Dallas, had insisted, for what we were doing, a softer lead alloy was better in the shotgun slugs, and then produced pages of research to prove his point. Thanks to his work, we used soft lead slugs with an inverted silver cone in the center of the slug. One of his arguments had been based on the most common amputation during the American Civil War—the left forearm, because it was the first thing hit by the big, slow-moving Minnie balls used by troops on both sides, smashing the forearm beyond the ability of surgeons then—or today, for that matter—to repair. The soft lead alloy flattened on impact, and the silver core flattened as it slammed into the target, which meant a world of damage to whatever was on the receiving end.
I cut Jennifer’s left front leg off just above the wrist, where it was still human. I racked the slide and put the next one center of mass. The big .775 slug flattened out, shredding her heart. Even that wouldn’t keep her down forever, so I racked the slide one last time and socketed the gun in her left eye before pulling the trigger.
At that point, she became a good werebear, in my opinion. Dead. Entirely Dead. Diindiisi came up with a machete and removed what was left of Jennifer’s head as the body started returning to human form.
“Well, that was exciting,” Diindiisi said with a long, shuddering breath.
Naturally, that’s when the foggers kicked in, bathing us in a rush of holy water and colloidal silver.
* * * * *
Chapter Three
“I’m going to give you a fifty-fifty on last night’s work,” Jed said over breakfast the next morning.
“You think?” I replied.
“Yeah, something like that,” he replied with a grin.
“Who missed the damn implants?” I asked, chasing a bit of egg around my plate.
“According to medical, they looked like stents when they x-rayed her, and we didn’t have her medical records.”
“Jesus, Jed, she was a freaking werebear. Why the hell would she have stents?”
“The medic who reviewed the X-rays said it was from before she was a werebear,” he replied, with a shrug. “He figured she’d only changed recently, so…”
“Damn, who’s running medical training these days?” I interrupted.
“Rhetorical question, I know,” Holt said across the table, “but Jesse has a point. We grabbed her after at least one complete, witnessed transformation. According to everything we learned in training, there are no medical implants left in a therianthrope’s body after the first transition because of their healing factors. It’s like vampires and tattoos or other body mods.”
“Yeah, I got nothing, honestly,” Jed said with another shrug, “and to make matters worse, all we got of the implants to study is a pile of burnt metal and arcane, smoldering bits that show evidence of having been highly spelled.”
“Oh, that’s just great,” I said. I leaned back in my chair and turned to the other table. “Diindiisi? You have anything to ask our oh, so helpful leader here?”
Diindiisi sat chatting with the leader of the dwarves from Terlingua, at their request. They’d caught the first thing smoking—which had to be their own plane, because there are no regular flights from anywhere to or from Terlingua—when we’d reported that Jennifer the werebear had broken the chains. The head of the mine in Terlingua—the ‘Engineer,’ for reasons known to dwarves everywhere—had sent an entire team up to look at the chains and determine the point of failure. Dwarf-made gear comes with an ironclad warranty.
“No,” she replied, “but Fred here does.”
Fred Blyballong was a typical member of his race—broader than he was tall, arms as thick as most humans’ legs, with fists that looked like mauls. He reminded me of an angry, biker version of Santa Claus. Bald as a cue ball, he’d shaved his greying beard into a very un-ironic goatee. Since we were in the office, he was only lightly armed—a dwarf-made copy of the Le Mat revolver under one arm, and a copy of the Smith and Wesson Number 3 under the other.
“Your report says she was a young therianthrope?” Fred rumbled in a voice like millstones grinding as he joined Jed and me.
“According to what she told us, less than three months since her first change,” Jed replied.
“That is not good,” Fred replied, stroking his beard. “Those chains should have kept an ancient wyrm transformed and calm. Instead? A youngling breaks them. Something has changed, and not for the good.”
“We think there was some heavy-duty sorcery on the implants. That could have contributed to her ability to break the chains,” Jed said.
“Yes. But it would take more than simple magic to bypass the magic woven into those shackles,” Fred replied.
Others have remarked that I’m a smartass. Sometimes my mouth just gets ahead of my brain.
“What about elven magic?”
Fred gave me a look that was on par with one my drill instructor had given me at San Diego before ordering me to, quote “get ’em, hundreds of ’em,” end quote. For that matter, shave the beard and add about four inches in height, and Blyballong could have been my DI. I just grinned back.
“High elf magic perhaps, but none of the tree hugging, pot smoking, tie-dye wearing elves you’ve got around here could come close to breaking those spells,” he said finally.
“Besides, most of the local elves are too damn stoned all the time to even contemplate anything besides making mandalas out of their belly button lint,” Jed said. It’s Austin, so naturally our elves tend to favor Willie Nelson’s favorite herbage when it comes to recreational pharmaceuticals.
“True,” I said. “That doesn’t answer the basic questions, though.”
“And to answer those will take time we probably don’t have,” Diindiisi said, pushing her chair under the table. “Do we have anything on the implants or the variant in her therianthropy?”
“It’ll take seventy-two hours to run the DNA analysis on her therianthropy vector,” Jed said, then coughed. “And our top researcher in sorcery is working on the implants.”
“Obediah is in a coma,” I said. �
��So that leaves…oh, fuck me with a chainsaw, running. Not the Wacky Wizard.”
“Yes.”
“Who is this Wacky Wizard?” Diindiisi and Fred asked at the same time.
“He’s a top member of the research staff,” Jed replied weakly.
“That’s because he’s usually so high he’s floating against the ceiling, stoned out of his fucking gourd, ‘testing’ some new compound,” I replied.
“An elf,” Fred said.
“Oh, not just an elf,” I replied. “The Elf. Numero Uno. El Guapo himself, Sola Stellus.”
Fred ground his teeth together.
“Not him,” he said finally. “His reputation is…erratic.”
“Erratic is putting it mildly,” I said.
“How so?” Diindiisi asked.
“You remember interviewing the guy who castrated himself with a pair of scissors?”
“Poor Thomas Corbett, yes,” she replied.
“Sola Stellus makes that action look like something done by a reasonable human being, not a total frigging loon,” I replied.
“By Corbett’s standards, that was the action of a reasonable human being,” she replied. “Besides, Sola Stellus is an elf.”
“Honey, love of my life, she who will be my support if I survive to old age, Sola Stellus works for us because the local elves thought he was a fucking loon by their standards.”
“Oh.”
There was a lot of freight in that simple ‘oh.’ Diindiisi had met some of the local elven population over the last month or so—they weren’t, as a whole, as bad as Blyballong had described them—but Tolkien had gotten the bad blood between elves and dwarves right and a lot of the rest wrong. Both groups were incredibly long-lived, and they could take holding a grudge to lengths that made the dispute between the Arabs and the Jews over which group were the ‘true’ sons of Abraham look like a minor argument over who was going to pay the check. On the upside, most of them faked it well enough to get along with humans and each other. Sola Stellus wasn’t able to fake it with his own people, but got along fairly well with certain humans—mostly those who were willing to kiss his ass, but he had a thing for Marines, so he gave neither Jed nor myself much shit. That didn’t mean he wasn’t incredibly frustrating to work with, on all levels. When he wasn’t dressing like Elvis, he had the fashion sense of a perpetual sixteen-year-old from about 1984 or so, coupled with a monumental ego and a complete lack of fucks for the common niceties that allowed society to function. Which, oddly enough, made him perfect for the research department.
Sola was also in charge of monitoring my team after our return from the Shadow Lands. Which meant visiting him for an entire range of tests at least once a month. Familiarity was fast breeding contempt.
“So to see the implants, I would have to talk to Stellus,” Fred said.
“Something like that, yeah,” Jed admitted. “And he really hates dwarves.”
“Yes. He thinks he has a reason for that,” Fred admitted. “However, I think I can convince him to see me.”
He pulled off his black metal jacket—hey, dwarves, metal, and all that. Underneath, he was wearing a coyote brown T-shirt, and he rolled up the left sleeve. On that arm was probably the oldest moto-tattoo I’d ever seen—the pre-1868 USMC Eagle, Globe, and Stars.
“That should work,” I said. “Although I thought you guys sank like stones.”
“We do. With work, one learns to swim,” he said, rolling his sleeve back down and swinging his jacket back in place. “Besides, since the Head of the Mine had made the mistake of supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War, it was decided that we had to show our loyalty to the Union when the war was over. I joined the Corps as the best of a bad lot.”
Once everything was in place, we rose collectively, policed our tables, and headed out into the sunshine of an early fall day in Austin.
It was a ten-minute walk across the compound to the Research and Development (Magic), building. R&D(M) had managed to blow themselves and the building up often enough in the past that Henry Keith, QMG’s Head of Operations, had put his foot down and insisted on a separate building for them, which was built along the lines of a fireworks factory or a 19th century gunpowder mill—the walls were over a foot thick, and the roof was designed to blow off as the point of least resistance. Sola had grumped about, according to hoary company gossip, for over a month because the rebuild messed with the Feng Shui of the building.
“Mother fucking no. Not that shit,” Jed said when the speakers on the outside of the building started playing “Unchained Melody” by Elvis Pressley.
“Christ save us, not the Elven Bard,” I said, shaking my head.
“What do you mean, the Elven Bard?” Diindiisi asked.
“Ok, so, look, we said Sola Stellus is a bit erratic, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“So one of the research assistants, Smith I think it was, got tired of having to warn people what kind of mood her boss was in, and installed speakers that play music indicating his mood. Today, based on the music, he’s dressed like Elvis Presley,” I said.
Diindiisi liked Elvis. I was kinda meh on the subject—some of his less-played works were ok, but the radio stations played Elvis’ music into the ground, even today, in my opinion.
“This is a good thing, yes?” she replied.
“Not necessarily. If it were late 1960s leather jacket Elvis, or 1950s sports coat Elvis, I’d say yes. But that? That song is pure late 1970s Fat Bastard in a Sequined Jumpsuit Elvis. Things do not bode well for this meeting,” I said.
Jed shrugged and led the way into the building.
Inside, things were worse. Someone, probably Sola, had converted the atrium into a 1970s disco, complete with mirror ball. Bad 1970s Fat Bastard Elvis in a sequined jumpsuit songs thundered from the speakers.
“How does he get away with this?” Fred shouted over the music.
“Generally his,” I started as the music cut out. Fucking Elven humor. “His department, anyway, does what’s asked of them on budget and under deadline, so Goodhart looks the other way when Sola plays games.”
“He also doesn’t pull this shit when Michelangelo is around,” Jed said, opening the door that led into the labs.
It took a while to run down exactly which lab Sola was in. I said he gave us less shit, not no shit, and to his way of thinking, if you weren’t willing to jump through hoops to see him, you really didn’t need to see him.
“I have come to expect brownies from a brownie recipe, not gibbering, otherworldly horrors. But maybe you have had different experiences in the kitchen!” someone was shouting as we strode into the main lab.
It smelled of chocolate and trans-dimensional goo. Never a good sign.
“Yes, well, uh-huh, go check on the nanner and peanut butter sandwich experiment if you will, Cathe, uh-huh,” Stellus replied in what was probably the worst Elvis impersonation, ever.
Sure enough, he was standing there in a stuffed, white, sequined jumpsuit with a collar that reached the middle of his ears, a Gibson J 200 slung across his back.
“Now, how can I help…?” Sola started, turning toward us. He caught sight of Fred. “You!”
Then he did the strangest thing I’d ever seen a ‘high’ elf do—he ran over and slid to his knees in front of the dwarf, kowtowed, and then hugged the dwarf.
Fred stood there and took it, a disgusted look crossing his face.
“I told you last time this wasn’t necessary,” Fred said when the elf finished.
“And I told you I owed you my life,” Sola replied.
“I think I hear a sea story,” Jed said, sotto voce.
“Yes,” said the researcher. She had ‘Smith’ embroidered on her lab coat. “Do tell us why you’re kissing dwarf ass, El Guapo.”
“I owe Fred—it is still Fred, right—my life,” Sola replied somewhat haughtily. At least he’d lost the mouth full of nanner sammich accent. “Let us go to the break area, and I’ll tell the st
ory.”
We followed Sola to the break room—yet another damn disco—where he turned off the mood lighting with a wave of his hands, made sure to seat us comfortably, and personally placed a drink in our hands. Well, except for Cathe. He made her take her own off the tray he’d thrust into her hands.
“This isn’t getting us a look at the chains,” Fred rumbled.
“True,” I replied, “but I haven’t heard a good sea story in months. Think he’ll start with ‘no shit, there I was’ outta respect for the true bardic forms?”
I got another DI look from Fred.
“I am old,” Sola said, a single light making his sequins sparkle. “Also something of an oddity here in Austin—I was actually born here, well, where Austin would be built, oh about four thousand years ago. Now as you know, from time to time, elves go other places, to visit, to learn new things, or just to get out of our parents’ hair,” he said with a chuckle and a shake of his pompadour.
Smith passed around tentacle-free brownies.
“I had travelled to China to study in 1899 when the Yihetuan Uprising occurred,” Sola said sonorously.
“The who-what?” Holt asked.
“The Boxer Rebellion. He’s talking about the Boxer Rebellion,” Fred replied with a sigh.
“Yes, that’s what they call it in the West. But I’d met with some of the leaders before it started and still feel a connection with them to this day,” Sola replied loftily.
I could hear Fred’s eyes roll in their sockets.
“I avoided the conflict by staying in the mountains with monks and other elves as much as possible. However, events forced me to go to Beijing in June of 1900, and I arrived 14 June. On the 20th, the Yihetuan and Chinese army laid siege to the foreign Legations in the city. Agents of the Yihetuan forced me into the British Legation before that, and I feared for my life. Fortunately no one recognized me as more than a local Chinese elf,” Sola said.
Fred roared with laughter.
“What?” Sola asked.
“You were recognized the day you walked through the gates of the Legation as non-Chinese,” Fred replied. “There was a half elf with the British Naval Detachment, and he spotted you right off—but since you were a pure blood, and he was a half caste at best, from a small seaside village, he couldn’t speak with you. Fucking traditional elven caste system.”
Blood Moon Eclipse (The Shadow Lands Book 2) Page 3