by Eli Grant
I had a heartbeat to breathe, to realize what I’d done. I looked at the vampire, who was staring at me with an expression of surprise and definite interest that made worry coil in my stomach. I started to say something, explain myself. Then the leader of the werewolves, apparently having recovered from having his head put through a tile counter, staggered to his feet and fired three rounds.
I heard the freezer doors shatter behind me as time seemed to stop, panic gripping my heart like a squeezing fist. The vampire was there a second later, striking a precise blow to the werewolf’s temple that knocked him out cold.
As the vampire pried the gun from his hand, I searched myself for bullet holes with shaking hands, and found nothing. He missed. He must have missed.
The back door creaked as it opened and Dwayne wandered in. His cigarette fell from his mouth as he took in the destruction before him.
The vampire cleared his throat and smiled at me again.
“Are you still absolutely certain you don’t want that job?”
chapter
2
THE BIGGEST INDIGNITY OF IT was that the cop was cute.
The sun was coming up, I felt and looked like hell, and fate had decided the police detective that was going to go over my statement for the third consecutive time would be the one with the chiseled jawline and the big brown eyes and the warm, easy smile like he just stepped out of a Hallmark movie about a cowboy who raises golden retrievers. Son of a bitch belonged in an ad about the good old days, wearing flannel against a backdrop of gently waving cornstalks. He hadn’t called me darlin’ yet but I was so ready for it that when it finally happened I’d probably punch him out of sheer reflex and spend the next twenty-four hours in lockup.
At least staring at his ass kept me from falling asleep at his desk while he was across the room talking to the beat cop who had been the first on the scene. The precinct was noisy and bustling, their day just getting started, but I have a gift for sleeping absolutely anywhere.
My eyes slid closed for all of a second before the sound of a clipboard dropping onto the desk brought me abruptly back to alertness. The guy had the grace to at least look apologetic about that as I blinked and squinted at him like a stunned owl. And he’d brought me coffee, which almost made me forgive him.
“I’m sorry to make you go over this again,” he said, sitting down while I sipped the coffee and tried to will my headache away. “There’s just a couple of inconsistencies I want to make sure are ironed out so we don’t have to bother you again after this.”
“Officer Pornstache over there didn’t see any vampire then, I’m guessing?” I asked. My eyes itched but rubbing them just made it harder to keep them open. The detective tried to hide a smile, but I spotted it.
“Officer Green,” he said, emphasizing the beat cop with the bad facial hair’s name like I had any intention of remembering it, “actually admitted that he did see the vampire you described in your statement—”
“Who told him it would be better for his health if he pretended to be blind for five minutes while the bloodsucker ducked out, I assume.”
“Officer Green did not believe the vampire was involved,” the detective said with admirable diplomacy considering even I could tell that he didn’t really buy that. “And that mentioning him wasn’t relevant to his report.”
“Yeah, I’m sure the fifty bucks the leech slipped him wasn’t relevant either.” Rolling my eyes required more energy than I had to spare, but rest assured my soul was broadcasting max sarcasm anyway. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I told you, the guy wasn’t involved in the robbery. He just stopped the assholes and left. Can I leave now?”
“You seem pretty hostile towards the guy you’re claiming saved your life,” the detective pointed out, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I’m super racist against vampires,” I replied. “Just a huge bigot. Can I go?”
He gave me a long look, probably trying to guess if I really was a vampire racist. If he was one of those people who genuinely thought you could be racist against vampires then no amount of hotness was going to make up for that, or convince me to sit here trying to explain privilege for another hour.
He dragged the clipboard with my written statement on it towards him again. God damn it.
“So, in your statement—” He ignored me dropping my head onto his desk and groaning. “You said when the men approached the register you were behind it and the vampire was standing between the wolves and the door, at the magazine rack.”
“Yes. For the five hundredth time.” I didn’t even lift my head from his desk. It was too comfortable. “One of the wolves pulled a gun, the vampire took them out, then he left me behind to clean up the mess.”
“Right. And when did the vampire move around to the other side of the register?”
I looked up finally, nose scrunched in confusion. “What?”
“When he slammed one of the assailant’s heads into the front counter hard enough to break the tile,” the detective said casually. He tapped the crime scene photos on his desk, including one of the head-shaped dent in the counter. “Unless there’s a really tall werewolf still wandering around with a concussion somewhere, the guy I have in lockup could not have made that impression in the tile with his face unless he and the person slamming him into it were standing behind the register. Not to mention the bullets we pulled out of the freezer section. Either that wolf was a phenomenally bad shot, or he was aiming at someone behind the counter, not on the other side of the room by the magazine rack.”
Shit.
“So I forgot where he was standing.”
“You forgot he was standing behind the register next to you?
I bit the inside of my cheek and leaned both elbows on his desk.
“Listen, Detective,” I said.
“Carpenter,” he provided. “Ryan Carpenter. Ryan is fine.”
Of course his name would be something like that.
“Detective Carpenter,” I said very deliberately. “On a good day, I get maybe four hours of sleep after a closing shift at Harvey’s. I get off around four am. I eat while I’m walking home and I collapse as soon as I get in the door until maybe eight, if I’m lucky. I then have all of maybe a half an hour to inhale a pizza, shower, remind my brother I exist as more than text messages telling him to brush his teeth, before I’m expected at that shitty burger place on Mission Street where my shift started—”
I paused to check the time.
“About two hours ago,” I finished. “They won’t let me work a shift there longer than seven and a half hours, or they might have to give me full time benefits. So after that I pick up shifts washing dishes and bussing tables at the restaurant around the corner until nine or ten, when I’m expected for the night shift at Harvey’s and I get to do the whole thing over again. Which is a lot of words to say, basically, I am very, very tired. So I’m sorry if I forgot precisely where the god damn vampire was standing, but you have wasted literally all the time I had to sleep and you’re now actually cutting into my paycheck which, in case you couldn’t tell by the three jobs, I really need. So, I will ask you again, Detective Carpenter. Can. I. Go?”
Carpenter took it all with a surprisingly straight face. I half expected him to slap handcuffs on me just for mouthing off. Whatever, I’d sleep in the cell. As long as there was a horizontal surface and nobody asking me questions, I’d be satisfied.
But instead, Detective Wholesome Boy-Next-Door set the clipboard down with a sigh.
“Alright, Miss Barr,” he said. “You can go. Sorry for taking up so much of your time. If you need a ride home I can—”
“I’m fine,” I said before he could finish, already standing up. “Just do me a favor and if you have any other questions, don’t call me.”
He nodded, but as I started to turn away he spoke again.
“Oh, wait, one last thing,” he said, grabbing the clipboard. “Sorry, just a paperwork formality. You
forgot to fill in your race on the form.”
I turned back to look at him, sitting there with the form and pen in hand.
“Just tell me and I’ll write it down for you,” he said helpfully.
“What do I look like?” I asked, putting the last energy I had into my most offended, scornful expression. “A fucking goblin?”
I left before he could respond to that, shaking my head as though the question had been too stupid to answer. Which is a great way to get people to fill in their own assumptions when you don’t have a real answer to give them.
I almost tripped going down the steps from the precinct. The sun felt like someone was rooting around in my head with an icepick, even through the magical UV filtering that tinted the air faintly lavender. I bumped into a surly looking troll in construction gear, who just growled at me and kept walking, even after I flipped him off. I stepped back for a minute while my eyes adjusted, leaning against the wall of the police station, which blazed with the shifting, glittering color of a witch-graffiti mural. Some innocuous multi-cultural abstract. I preferred the one across the street which depicted a cartoon Dracula flanked by werewolf bodyguards, drinking the earth like a capri sun. Someone had balls, splashing that up right across from the precinct. It wouldn’t be there long though. A uniformed wolf was already barking at a group of sour looking goblins in juvenile corrections vests and handing out the bristle brushes and whitewash.
A group of preteen witch girls, on their way to the occult day school around the corner judging by the uniforms, turned to cross the street and avoid the community service brigade. One of the goblins flicked whitewash after them. They shrieked and ran while the wolf cop smacked the goblin in question over the head and the others laughed. The girls dodged the flow of early morning traffic, though there wasn’t much to dodge. Mostly just the ghostly after images of cars and pedestrians passing through shared space in the mundane world, unaware. The flickers that bled through the borders between this little pocket of magical space and its mundane counterpart were harmless, as insubstantial as fog. The girls ignored them, focused on the handful of vehicles capable of actually running them over. They darted around a big black car with tinted windows, which presumably belonged to a vampire with bad sleeping habits, and stepped out in front of an old junker. The driver, a goblin in a booster seat, slammed on the breaks and leaned out the window to shout obscenities at them in Trollish. They made rude gestures back and, distracted, were nearly flattened by a huge, pearly pumpkin carriage pulled by a skeletal horse. It went shrieking up the road at frankly unsafe speeds as the girls dived for the safety of the sidewalk. I scowled after it as it barreled around a far corner. Probably Fae. You’d think with how uptight they are about the law they’d be better drivers, but apparently traffic law doesn’t count.
A couple of witches shot by overhead, one on a carpet, another hanging on to an umbrella and floating like a dandelion seed, a third just taking impossibly long steps between the roofs of the buildings. The wolf cop with the goblins shouted at them—enchanted objects used for transportation are still technically vehicles and they’re supposed to use the roads and obey the lights and signs or whatever, but no one enforces that shit unless they’re being a dick. The witches pretended not to hear him and kept flying, the one with the umbrella grabbing the tassels of his friend’s carpet as it sped up.
It was all too much color and noise for me at the moment. Making my headache worse. I needed to get home.
When I could see without squinting, I crossed the road and headed down Valencia. Where a conspicuous crack in the pavement split the road, I glanced up at the power lines and the much less conspicuous black boxes that sat humming like fat, glossy insects on the wire. Any time I crossed out of Fae-space and back into the mundane world, part of me worried the transformers wouldn’t let me back in again. That the Otherside, the magical world, would realize I wasn’t one of them and spit me out, like a bit of eggshell in an omelet. It was a stupid, irrational fear. People like me went in and out of Fae-space a hundred times a day all over the city. But it gnawed at me anyway.
As I stepped over the crack in the street, the air shimmered and the world shifted imperceptibly to the left. Beyond the boundary, the world was flatter. The structures and streets were the same, but the murals and graffiti no longer danced or sparkled. The shops sold souvenirs and cell phones instead of alchemical reagents and Fae magitech. The crowds were weirdly one note. All mundane humans with relatively little variation in shape or size or color. I spotted one or two people on their way towards the boundary who were probably glamoured. Even under careful magical disguises, they stood out, like they were in slightly more saturated color than the rest of the world. Even those that looked more or less human, like witches, had a shine to them that set them apart. I wondered if anyone saw that shine when they looked at me. I fucking hoped not. I might worry about not belonging on the Otherside, but I’d have to be an idiot to think I belonged in the mundane world either.
I caught a cable car on Mission street and tried not to doze off among the morning crowds as it rattled through the Mission District, on past Noe Valley and Bernal Heights. The dense downtown architecture and high population of wolves and trolls gave way to picturesque middle-class residential neighborhoods packed with witches raising families and the occasional down on their luck vampire. Most of the vampires lived up around Presidio or West of Twin Peaks. The Fae that bothered to keep homes in the mundane realm kept them around Potrero Hill.
Then we crossed 280 and property values started dropping again. At Francis Street I got off and shuffled like a zombie the rest of the way into Excelsior. The narrow, colorful buildings closed around me like the growing heat of the day, familiar as it was uncomfortable. The graffiti that splashed across the dilapidated storefronts of my street was significantly less polished than that in the Mission. And less tourist friendly. One of my mundane human neighbors sat on his curb smoking, looking as tired as I felt, while his wife gave a statement to the police. Another break-in judging by the fucked up state of his front door. He waved listlessly at me as I passed and I waved back, feeling more guilty than ever for leaving my door unlocked last night. That could have been me, easy.
“You’re alive!”
Aaron met me at the door with a hug, and then punched me in the shoulder. He was scrawny for a kid his age, and I’d taken harder punches already today, but I pretended it hurt anyway. You know, for the sake of his ego and shit. Not that he generally had much of one. He had the same wild curly brown hair I did, and tended to look like he’d just stuck a fork in an electrical socket. But where I was known for my tragically incurable case of resting bitch face, Aaron was almost cartoonishly expressive, with big eyes and a bigger mouth. He never seemed to stop moving either, which was currently making me feel slightly nauseous.
“Why didn’t you answer my texts?” he demanded.
“Phone died,” I lied, squeezing past him into the apartment. “You should be asleep.”
The ad had called this place “cozy” and to be honest I hadn’t cared about shit but the price and that it was in range of Aaron’s school. I suppose cozy was a word you could use to describe it. Closet-like, would also work. Possibly claustrophobic.
The front door opened onto a tiled entryway about a foot across with the wall on one side and the counter of the galley kitchen on the other. The narrow tunnel funneled me along like sheep in a pen into the living room, where the coffee table pulled double duty as a dining table, currently stacked with the remains of several nights of fast food dinners that were starting to stink. The only windows were a small one over the sink on the front of the house, and a larger one in the far wall over the couch. Its view was of the side of the neighbor’s house, letting in a negligible amount of sunlight. Which was great for the AC bill in the summer, honestly, but not exactly cheerful. Especially considering the dust-colored walls, orange carpet, and the general mess strewn over everything. I was fairly numb by now to
the state of cleanliness. A seventeen year old boy lived there practically by himself and I sure as hell didn’t have time to clean up. So the stacks of takeout boxes and scattered laundry were just the accepted background static of home. All I cared about was the sweet embrace of the lumpy brown sofa.
“How was I supposed to sleep when you were missing and not answering your phone?” Aaron asked. He shut the door behind me as I stumbled towards the couch, shedding my shoes and unhooking my bra at the same time. I left both where they fell and flopped into the cushions with a sigh of relief as their softness, generally dubious but today like the gossamer bosoms of an angel, gently enfolded me.
“I told you I was working late,” I said, my eyes already closing.
“Bullshit,” Aaron countered.
“Language,” I replied, half-heartedly throwing a sock at him.
“I saw that your store got robbed on the news, you dumbass. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
I grimaced and turned my head to hide my face in the cushions.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” I grumbled.
“Then maybe you should have answered your phone and told me you weren’t dead,” Aaron countered, throwing my own sock back at me. It flopped across my face and I flailed to be rid of it, sitting up. “I was about to start calling hospitals, Evangelina!”
I caught myself before I told him he sounded like Mom. That wouldn’t have taken the conversation anywhere either of us wanted to go.
“I’m fine, Aaron,” I said, exasperated. “Jesus. I would have told you if something happened, alright? It was just some stupid wolves, and the cops caught them and everything. I’m fine.”
Aaron crossed his arms, unconvinced, but let it go as I flopped back onto the couch and closed my eyes.
“How was school?” I asked, because this was probably the only chance I’d get to talk to him today and I didn’t want to end it on that sour note.