by RJ Blain
Someone prodded my nose. “You’re drooling on my desk, Gardener.”
I snorted, blew several sheets of paper and some envelopes to the floor, raised my head, and blinked at Perky. “Purr-key.”
Behind Perky, a freshly groomed Quinn stood, scowling at me. “Hey, lawbreaker. Up for a plea bargain? Admit you’re guilty to every last crime you committed getting us here, and I’ll let you off easy.”
Uh oh. Cranky human was out for blood—mine. “You did not make me swear to fol-low laws. But I liss-en. Still won bet.”
Quinn sighed. “Yes, you won. Here’s the deal: someone called in a large-scale gorgon bile mess about five minutes after we got here. The gorgons we have on call are both out of town. Can you deal with it, please?”
How did he expect me to deal with the bile without hands? Roll in it and play in a bonfire? Wait. Could he really be giving me a chance to solve a gorgon bile problem with fire?
Best. Day. Ever.
“Fire? You’ll let me solve your gorgon bile problem with fire?” Since I was trying to be more polite, I added, “Please?”
“God save my soul, but yes. You can solve this problem once—and only once—with fire. Only this once.”
“Fire!” I squealed. “Purr-key come with me?”
“Feel up for a decontamination job, Perkins?”
“For the record, I hate you both,” my new partner replied.
Chapter Seven
Whoever had designed 120 Wall Street must have been really hungry. “Big cake. What a waste. I can not eat that con-crete cake, Purr-key.”
I also couldn’t eat the huge crowd of people who surrounded the building and flooded Wall Street, ensuring we would be unable to reach the entrance without help or magic. I sighed, staring at the glass-fronted revolving doors, something I couldn’t maneuver through as a unicorn even if I wanted.
I hoped the two windows flanking the main entrance also doubled as doors, or I’d have to find a different way in—or use even more magic. Sighing again, I twisted my head around to wearily regard my rider.
“They really evacuated the entire building over some gorgon bile?” Perky echoed my sigh. “Lovely.”
Unless I wanted to wade my way through hundreds upon hundreds of people, I’d need to hitch a lift on a sunbeam and take Perky with me. My success with Quinn during the run offered the hope I’d manage the trick without incident. “Call cops there? Make room by door. I can get us there.”
“Really? Nice. You have some neat tricks up your sleeve as a unicorn, Gardener. Maybe we should keep some of those transformative pills handy so you’ll actually be useful around the station.”
“I will eat you, Purr-key.”
“No, you won’t. I’m stringy and wouldn’t taste good.” Shifting his weight in the saddle, Perky retrieved his phone and made a call. Within a few minutes, the cops blockading the door moved out of the way. “That good, Gardener?”
“Very. Hold tight, Purr-key. No fall. Would hurt.”
“Why am I already regretting my decision to come with you?”
“Purr-key is smart, that is why. You’ll be safe with me.” I stomped a hoof and picked my mark, bracing for the inevitable surge of motion and vertigo associated with zipping along at the speed of light from a stationary position. Teleporting with a rider was harder than I expected. In the future, I’d try to catch a ride on sunlight from a run. It was less disconcerting.
Perky yelped, groaned, and slumped over, his hands clutching at my neck and mane. His body shuddered, and he gagged.
Apparently, Perky didn’t handle teleportation magic nearly as well as Quinn. “No puke on me, Purr-key! That’s rude. Bad. I get to deal with enough bile here. Off, off! No puke on me!”
“I hate you, Gardener. I hate you so much.”
I believed it, but I opted to play along as though he meant it sarcastically, just in case he did. “You know you love me, Purr-key. I let you ride me, a u-nee-corn. I am most con-sid-er-ate. Now, off!”
To my relief, Perky managed to slide off my back without throwing up on me, although there was definitely a greenish cast to his skin. “I’m walking back to the station. No wonder the chief was so irritated. You did that to him, didn’t you? That should classify as torture.”
The man groaned and leaned against me, panting and swallowing in his effort to keep his stomach under control.
“Poor Purr-key. You stay here, feel better. But you ride back to station. You whine as much as the chief. Gor-gon bile po-tent. Stinky. You stay here and not be sick.”
“Chief Quinn will kill me if I let you go in there alone. There will be a murder—mine—and there will be no need for an investigation. Chief Quinn will hang my body in his office as an example for others. No, Gardener. You’re not going in alone.”
Why did humans insist on being so insufferably stubborn? I swung my head around in search of the nearest cop. “Chief cry if I go alone. You take Purr-key, I take some-one else? Make every-one happy. I clean bile, your cop watch? Use ex-ting-guish-ur after I make fire?” I paused and sighed. “Yay. Bile.”
“Wow, Gardener. I had no idea it was possible to cram so much disgust and sarcasm into two tiny words.” Perky straightened and gave my shoulder a solid thumping. “Want us to take those contraptions off you before you go in?”
“No. I wear sad-dle and bri-dle. You need to ride back to station. So. Who goes with me?”
After a brief but intense huddle, two cops were assigned to go into the building with me. Both were armed with a pair of extinguishers, one meant for fires while the other contained pressurized neutralizer. One was a woman, pretty enough I suspected they used her as a spokesperson whenever possible, with her long brown hair tied into a tail.
She stood tall and proud, her chin lifted high, her gaze sweeping the crowds for any sign of trouble before she gave me her full attention. “Ma’am.”
I bobbed my head in a greeting. “Off-ee-sur.”
The second cop, stuck somewhere in his thirties and probably a candidate for a midlife crisis, stepped back, put his hands on his hips, and looked me over. “You’re a horse with a horn. What is with that… fur? I thought women were supposed to groom themselves before leaving for work.”
Perky straightened and drew in a breath. Before he could say anything, I swiveled my head around and bumped his chest with my nose.
If anyone was going to put the cop in his place, it’d be me. I concentrated so I could speak clearly. “I am a unicorn.” Professor Yale would have applauded my handling of a word with more than two syllables.
The cop didn’t seem at all impressed, and the woman shot her partner a glare. “I’m Lieutenant Downing. Please, call me Janet. My partner is John Winfield—a cadet.”
Wonderful. A green recruit thought he was better than the one person in the city who stood between him and getting turned into a stone statue. He’d never know how fortunate he was I would never intentionally put someone at risk of exposure to any dangerous substance, no matter how much of an asshole he was. I abandoned my effort to mask my difficulty with speaking English and said, “Here how this work. I go to con-tam-in-ate-ed area. I clean. You stay safe. Do as I say. You no close-er than twen-tee feet. More if able. You watch, bored. Un-der-stand? When fire start, you ex-ting-guish when told. Neu-tra-lize when told.”
“Copy,” Janet replied, straightening. “If you don’t mind me asking, ma’am? What’s your certification level?”
Explaining all of my qualifications would make my mouth hurt, so I bumped my nose on Perky’s chest again, careful to keep my horn clear of him. “Purr-key?”
Few dared to scratch my chin, but I enjoyed the feel of his fingers digging into my fur. “Miss Gardener is a top-tier specialist, Officer Downing. Chief Quinn calls her in on critical cases as a consultant. Right now, she’s the only one in the city capable of handling all classes of gorgon material. She’s also certified in the handling of other substances. I’ve worked with her before. She’s very good at her job. She
has a perfect record preventing additional exposure.”
“What containment gear will you need, Miss Gardener?” Janet frowned, her gaze sweeping over me. “We don’t have equipment for centaurs or equines, but I think given ten minutes, we can put something together. We’d have to wait for someone to bring suits over, though—the hazmat crew isn’t even here yet.”
There were no hazmat crews at the building yet? Where were they? New York had multiple response teams. In the time it took me to get Perky to Wall Street, one of them should have already arrived.
Perky chuckled. “That’s not necessary. Miss Gardener doesn’t need equipment to handle gorgon bile. As she’s going in without a suit, there are a few ground rules you will both need to follow. Should Bailey tell you to stand on one foot and cluck like a chicken, you will do it. She will be contaminated during the clean up. If you make the wrong move, you will end up being a statue. If you let her do her job, you’ll be safe. Cadet, you stick close to your supervisor.”
“Yes, sir!” both replied.
After giving me a final scratch and untangling his fingers from my fur, he turned his full attention to Janet. “If anything happens to her, Chief Quinn will be exceptionally unhappy. There are three people qualified to handle large scale incidents like this, and two of them are out of town for an unknown period of time. Her safety is your responsibility.”
To her credit, Janet didn’t laugh outright at Perky’s comment, but her lips curved in amusement. “I think she is the one protecting me, sir.”
“Don’t tell her that. It’ll go to her head, and we’ll never hear the end of it.”
While tempted to nip Perky for teasing me, I turned my attention to my job so I could hunt down something to eat and a quiet place for a much-needed nap. “Where bile?”
Janet turned to the building and pointed up. “Twenty-first floor, ma’am. I’ll give you the full details inside.”
As I had hoped, there were side doors, sparing me from having to bust through the glass revolving doors. Janet held the door for me, but before I could do more than take a single step, the cadet blew by me. The temptation to snort fire at him stirred. Smoke trailed out of my nose.
Perky yanked on a handful of my mane. “Don’t. Chief Quinn really will kill me if I let you attack an officer, even a useless cadet with an attitude issue.”
“One nip?”
“No, Bailey. Behave. Please.”
I sighed. “You stay here, no puke on other cops.”
“If you promise not to tell anyone this happened, I’ll pay for your dinner tonight.”
“Sold. Be back soon. May-be. De-pends on bile.”
“Good luck.”
I eased my way through the door, lowering my head so my horn wouldn’t slice through the door frame. It was a tight squeeze, but I made it into the building’s lobby. A short flight of stairs led up to a spacious room, its marble floors broken by columns rising to an arched ceiling. I tossed my head high and leapt up the four steps, landing with my hooves clattering on the tiles. The sound echoed, and the eerie silence unnerved me. “Too quiet.”
“It rather is.” Janet waited for the door to close before joining me. The cadet glared at me, taking the steps two at a time.
“Where ell-ee-vay-tur?”
“This way.” Taking off at a brisk walk, Janet guided me to the elevators. The sheer number of them astonished me. How many people did they cram into the building to need so many elevators? “Here’s the situation. Somehow, someone put gorgon bile in the ceiling. We think they used a time-delayed blasting cap and a minor amount of C4 to break the vessel containing it. Headquarters is unwilling to send anyone in hazmat suits in, as they don’t know if there are more explosives. I have a camera and a monitor with me, so you’ll go in and photograph the scene. Once you get close, I’ll evaluate whether it’s too dangerous to proceed with clean up.”
The evacuation of the building made more sense after hearing the culprit had used explosives in the ceiling to deliver the gorgon bile. I’d seen the tactic used before. A second detonation and more gorgon bile was a possibility.
Someone had done it several years ago, and I’d been the lucky one to get a second dose of bile. Shards of the glass container used had pierced my suit, and I had needed stitches.
“No haz-mat guys when fear of bomb. Un-der-stand. I have done this be-fore.”
Janet sucked in a breath. “That was you?”
“Yes. I was the cleaning crew. No prob-lem. I know roo-teen. Even if second dee-vice, I can han-dle.”
Only an idiot would attempt to bomb a fire-breathing unicorn. During Professor Yale’s experiments, very few incendiary devices bothered me. In the explosive conclusion of my species testing, he had strapped C4 to my back, put me on an ammunitions range, and blown it all up to scare the liver out of every last one of the bomb techs in a joint operation. He had even let me eat the extra C4. Of all the explosives and fuels I’d taken a nibble of as a unicorn, C4 was my second favorite. Napalm came in at the top, but they wouldn’t let me have more than a taste to prove it wouldn’t hurt me.
Stupid safety supervisors.
“That’s very reassuring, Miss Gardener. We evacuated the building in case there were additional explosives, but with a high risk of a copy cat—or the original bomber—we’re worried we’ll end up with an even worse situation.”
Or a bigger bomb, but if she hadn’t figured that out yet, I wasn’t going to tell her. I worried. I could eat fire and explosives and burp flame, but could I do it fast enough to protect the two cops accompanying me? I had no idea.
With the risk of reversal, no one had been willing to put my abilities to the test, myself included. I liked living.
“Where bile in building?”
Janet pressed the up button on the elevator, and one dinged and opened right away. “It’s in an office close to the middle of the building. From our initial investigation, we’ve determined there are between twelve to twenty victims. The spray radius is at least twenty feet in a cubicle environment. One of the workers who escaped claims they heard a bang before the crash. The victims are still in there.”
I stepped into the elevator and used my hoof to hold it open for the two cops. “Many desks? Cu-bee-cle farm?”
“Exactly. At least two of the victims were exposed to the bile when they tried to help their co-workers.”
Ah, good old New Yorkers. In a pinch, they could always be trusted to get the job done—or get killed trying. When disaster struck, they stuck together, for better or worse. It made crowd control interesting for police in serious situations. At least most knew better than to try to handle the truly dangerous substances without certification. “No more after? Twen-tee max?”
“As far as we know. After the evacuation, we cleared the building—even us.”
Something wasn’t adding up for a gorgon bile removal coupled with a small-scale bomb. While I appreciated the precautions, clearing the floor should have been sufficient until bomb techs could examine the scene. What was I missing? Then again, after the gorgon dust in my apartment, I could understand the police being exceptionally cautious.
A pinch of the dust could turn hundreds of people into statues—and possible carriers—within a few minutes.
It didn’t take long for the elevator to reach the twenty-first floor. “Which office?”
Janet pointed to the right down a broad hallway which ended at a glass-fronted office. “It’s that office on the end. The contaminated room is adjacent to the reception. We’ve been informed the interior doors were all left open.”
The door leading into the affected suite was ajar, too, and it looked like someone had hit the glass hard enough to crack it. “Come. Stay in hall near re-cep-shun. Will ee-val-u-ate sit-u-ation in-side. Cam-er-uh. You have?”
Janet pulled a small sphere from her pocket, which was attached to a lanyard. “We call this a fish eye. We normally tether it to a line for dropping into holes and pipes to help get a view of rescue op situat
ions we have a tough time reaching. I will have the controller, and I will be able to get a full range of visibility from the sphere.”
The cadet snorted. “Never thought I’d see the day a horse could do a man’s job, especially when she can’t even handle basic English.”
Perky had asked me really nicely not to attack other police officers, but would one bite really be that bad? Maybe I could step on the man’s toes. Humans didn’t really need their toes, did they?
Janet’s cheek twitched, and I got the feeling the cadet was known for using ‘woman’ instead of ‘horse’ when he tossed that line under normal circumstances. I started with his face and made a show of looking him over, noting his darker complexion, dark brown eyes, and signs of probable South American descent. “Been in America long?”
Cadet John Winfield’s eyes bulged. “What? How dare you!”
I snorted and allowed a small trail of flame to billow from my nose.
“Winfield, enough.”
Perhaps showing the cadet my serrated teeth broke every etiquette rule in the book, but I did it anyway. “This u-nee-corn eats meats. Breathes fire. You might taste good with ketch-up. Crunchy and tasty, yes?”
“Please don’t eat Cadet Winfield, Miss Gardener, even though he deserves it. He’s very sorry.”
“I am no—”
Janet stomped her foot on his. “He’s very sorry, ma’am.”
I left Janet and the idiot cadet just outside the doors leading into the office. I carried the camera and a meter with my teeth, both rigged with straps to make them easier for me to handle. In what classified as a miracle in my rather humble opinion, Janet’s choice of meter and settings worked best for amateurs with no idea what they were doing.
It’d catch any dangerous substance from gorgon spittle, which was generally harmless unless someone decided to bathe in it, to phoenix feathers. No one wanted to screw around with a phoenix feather, which could incinerate anything given ten seconds. The damned things had a mind of their own, too. Someone could carry around a pretty little white feather, which to all appearances looked like it came from a pigeon, and then bam. Fire, and lots of it.