The creature’s massive head swiveled toward me. His huge neck muscles corded as he regarded me with an insolent glance.
“Who are you?” the cyclops thundered in a voice that made me think of rumbling volcanoes. His giant blue eye roamed over my body, taking me in. The creature inhaled once, nostrils flaring, and I was pretty sure the creature was smelling me. A grin spread across his face, revealing a mouthful of huge teeth, each one as big as my thumb. “A Dioscuri…” he said, taking a lumbering step toward me. “It’s been ages since I’ve eaten a Dioscuri.”
“Well, I’m not on the menu,” I said, calling upon my magic to enhance my strength and speed, but instead of finding it… I found nothing. It was less like a huge wall had fallen down around me. There was no magic to be found… anywhere, like there was a great thing inhaling it just behind the cyclops. That seemed bad. If tall, bronze, and ugly was just a minion, I was going to be screwed without Shirajirashii.
The cyclops chuckled, a huge belly laugh that made his jowls jiggle as he hefted his hammer in front of me so that it caught the light from the sun. A thousand sapphire sparkles flitted across the concrete between us. I just stood there. I was about to do something, really I was, when Connor rounded the corner and came to a stop with a choked squeal.
“W-what is that?” he stammered, eyes wide in fright. He began to back away, but tripped over his shoes and collapsed onto his butt. “Lillim… what are you doing? We have to run.”
The cyclops cocked his head at Connor and thoughts swam beneath the surface of his huge eye. He glanced over his shoulder, and a shiver warbled down his body as he turned back to me. “The Dragonslayer…” he said, swallowing so hard that I could see the lump in his throat. The cyclops shook his huge head once. “Between you and him, this is too much. Too much…” His face broke into a grin. “I’ll just let the two of you deal with each other.”
He waved the hammer at the air in front of him, turning it into a gelatinous pink pustule of space that vaguely reminded me of my spirit pouch. The creature stepped into the portal and vanished in a flare of pink light.
“What?” I asked the air since the cyclops was gone. “Who are you talking about?” I took a step forward, starting toward the blown out door to find the ‘him’ the cyclops had mentioned when Connor grabbed me roughly by the arm.
“Lillim, we need to get out of here,” he said, and as I glanced at him, his eyes were huge and pleading. I swallowed and shook my head, my lavender hair cascading around my face as I did so.
“He’s gone, Connor. We have to see who is in there. The school’s still smoking, they might need help,” I said, tugging my arm free. Connor followed me with short, jerky steps that made me think he didn’t think this was a good idea. Unfortunately, I agreed with him.
“Lillim… that was a… was a…” he said, as I reached the doors.
“A cyclops, I know.” I turned to shrug at him, to reassure him it was no big deal, but I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I spun back around as an Asian girl with long black hair staggered into me. Blood flowed down her face from a gash above her right eye. It collected at her chin and spilled onto her pink blouse.
“Are you okay?” I called, grabbing her by the arm and steadying her. The wet tinny scent of blood filled my nose as I tried to see past her. Toward whatever was still inside.
“No…” she whispered, turning to point behind her as I pulled her outside. “Something is wrong with Mal. You need to help him.”
Was Mal the guy the cyclops was talking about? The guy he wanted to pit me against? I was about to ask when the school bell rang, reverberating in my ears like a gong. Great, just great. If this ‘Mal’ was some high-powered badass, or worse yet, the guy who had destroyed the shambler, I had to get to him before he made this attack impossible to cover up.
I turned, shoving the bloody girl at Connor. Without waiting to see what he did, I burst inside. It was empty. I spun, trying to find ‘Mal’ but there were so many people flooding into the hallway. A girl screamed, a short staccato blast of sound that ripped down the small space and reverberated off the walls. More people started yelling and pointing. Still, ‘Mal’ was nowhere to be found. Why wasn’t he wearing a giant neon sign or something?
I glanced back at the wreckage and made, what I’ll admit, a highly selfish decision. I turned and sprinted back outside, hightailing it away from the wrecked hallway. Connor sprinted after me, dragging the still bleeding girl along behind him, leaving spattered drops of blood behind them like a macabre breadcrumb trail.
He caught me a moment later as I stopped and leaned against a stone bench for support. My breath was coming out in quick bursts. People began to circle the wrecked hallway, looking around for who could have done such a thing. Chunks of rock were strewn about the ground, and cracks covered the entire side of the building, filling the stone like angry spider webs.
“Be very quiet, Connor,” I wheezed. “I don’t want people to think I had anything to do with that,” I added, waving my hand at the hallway door lodged partway into the brick of the adjacent building.
“Why would people think that?” he asked, voice higher pitched than normal. He looked like he was about to say more when his eyes glazed over. A second later, he shook himself. It reminded me of someone who had been nodding off and suddenly jerked himself awake.
“Okay,” he said. Not even mentioning what had just happened. Evidently, he had gotten over the cyclops really quickly. That was a little odd, right? Shouldn’t he still be terrified? Instead, he seemed calm, and as I stared at him, I realized that there was no more screaming. I looked up, staring past him at the spot that had been blown to smithereens… only… only it was totally normal.
There wasn’t a single trace that something had happened, and for a moment, I thought I must be going crazy. There had been a cyclops there a second ago, right? He had just blown apart the school… so how could there be no damage?
“What do we do about her?” he asked, pointing at the girl like she couldn’t hear exactly what he’d said. It was something I always hated when people did because I was usually the person being talked about like I wasn’t standing right, freaking there. “She hit her head and still needs medical attention.”
I looked at the girl, she was rubbing her head, but it looked like the wound had stopped bleeding, which seemed a little odd. Hadn’t it been worse?
“Are you okay?” I asked before shaking my head. “Sorry, you already said you weren’t okay, my bad. I didn’t see Mal there… too many people…” My cheeks heated up as the words left my lips. Yup, I was that girl. The one who instead of helping, ran away.
Connor gave me a sidelong glance as the girl nodded, a bit too stunned from everything to say much. “I’ll take her to the nurse,” he said, glancing at me. “You get to class. Dr. Matthers won’t like it if you’re late.”
“You really think we should be going to class right now?” I asked, my jaw dropping. “Are you being serious? And why do you think they would even have class after what happened?”
“After a girl tripped in the hallway and bumped her head? Yes, I think that they will still have classes. So yes, I think you should go to class. You’re new, you probably can’t afford to miss any more of your second day. If you come with me to the nurse’s office, you’ll be stuck there all day. Just go to class and meet me after.” He smirked at me. “I’ll take this one for the team.”
I was about to say something about the cyclops, but as I stared around it looked like nothing had happened, which was impossible, right? I was about to press the issue, but instead, I just shrugged. I’d get to the bottom of this after class and thank my lucky stars that I didn’t have to figure out damage control.
“Okay, I’ll go to class this one time, but I still don’t understand why the physics teacher also teaches economics. Those are totally different fields of study,” I said.
“Budget cuts?” Connor offered over his shoulder as he dragged the long-haired Asian gir
l away, her steps wooden with shock.
“Budget cuts,” I repeated, walking toward the classroom as my own mind-fog settled over me. Whatever had brought a goddamned cyclops here was not good, and while it didn’t seem like it was the same guy who had summoned the shambler, I almost hoped it was. If we had two warlocks trying to one-up each other, I was going to be screwed, especially since my dad had decided to skip out of town. Maybe Caleb could… I swallowed as I opened the door to my Economics class. I’d forgotten all about Caleb. What kind of girlfriend did that make me? Not a very good one, I suspect.
“Lillim, are you planning on staying?” Matthers asked as I turned, intending to head back out of the room and find my now stuck in a magic hat boyfriend.
“Um… pass?” I asked, giving him my best hopeful grin.
He glared at me, and pointed at my seat with his laser pointer. My heart sank as I debated ditching right in front of a teacher. Somehow, I figured that would end up bad, especially considering I’d already missed the first few classes. Besides, the chances someone would pin the new explosion downstairs on the mysterious new girl was, well, probably not very high, but I really didn’t want to increase the possibility. All I had to do was get through this class, then I’d have all of lunch to figure out what was going on.
Besides, Caleb was a god now. He was probably fine. That’s what I told myself as I slid into my seat a moment before the tardy bell rang. I know, I know. Caleb was a god. A freaking god, but I had a nagging suspicion he needed my help, and as I stared up at Matthers, the urge to flee increased. Something about the way he looked at me was a little too unsettling.
I was a Dioscuri dammit, and more than that, I was Lillim Callina. It was my job to stop supernatural bad guys, and I was sitting in an economics class where the teacher was prattling on about something called a derivative, and how it crashed markets because we had a fiat currency or something. I don’t even know.
What I did know was that a freaking cyclops had accosted a girl just downstairs, and instead of tracking that guy down, I was here, pretending to be a goddamn high school student. That was crazy, right?
“Miss Callina,” Matthers said, shocking me out of my reverie.
“Uh, yes?” I murmured, realizing the entire class was staring at me, most of them with expressions between amusement and horror.
“Would you like to answer the question?” he asked, glaring at me from beneath his busy orange eyebrows.
“Sure, what is it?” I asked, smiling sweetly at him. You might say I’d been caught unaware in class before, and at least back at the Dioscuri Academy, playing cool always seemed to work best. Never surrender, never admit defeat!
Matthers sighed, letting out a single exasperated breath. “I’d like you to explain how a lead, lag market works.”
“Oh that’s easy,” I replied, smiling because I actually knew the answer. “That’s when you have foreign transactions that expect the price of the currency in the contract to fluctuate. Say I have one euro, and I agree to buy a candy bar from you next week for a dollar. Now, a dollar costs one euro, but for some reason, I expect the dollar to be worth half a euro next week. What I’d do is wait until next week to buy the dollar for half a euro. Then I’d use my dollar to buy the candy bar. That way, I’d have ‘saved’ half a euro.”
The rest of the class stared at me like I had sprouted some sort of talking growth. I swallowed, looking around nervously as the teacher’s gaze softened. “That’s actually… a really good explanation of what I was talking about.”
I felt my cheeks start to burn as I dropped my head against the desk to avoid the stares from the other students. I wanted to tell them that there was a really good explanation why I knew that. It was because since the Dioscuri operated all over the world, they often switched their funds from one kind of currency to another. Ipso, facto we all took classes on ‘Earth Currencies’ back at the academy.
I looked up, glancing around the class. Most of them had gone back to ignoring me, but I still felt the need to let them know I wasn’t some kind of freak, as though knowing the answer to a question in class was freakish.
“That is exactly why the financial markets are rigged,” Matthers said, raising one arm in the air as he spoke. “See—“ he was cut off by the phone. Its shrill cry echoing from the room, and for a moment, he stood there dumbfounded, like he was trying to figure out just what was making the noise. He turned woodenly toward the wall phone in the corner, staring at it wide eyed.
Very slowly, he walked over to it and picked it up, staring at the receiver like it was a snake about to bite him. “Hello?” he asked cautiously.
“Oh?” he said, glancing over at me a moment later, his lips twisting into a grim line. “Okay, I’ll send her right up.”
He hung up and sighed. “Lillim, can you please get your stuff and head to the front office?”
“Um… why?” I asked as the entire class turned to stare at me again. If this kept up, I was going to get a reputation and not one that was going to get me invited to sit at the cool kids table during lunch.
Matthers lips softened into a tiny, annoyed smile. “Evidently, you missed some classes this morning.”
Chapter 6
Matthers had been lying. I knew that the second I got to the office because, instead of seeing a truant officer, or some other kind of disciplinarian, Detective Lang was standing there looking as bedraggled as always. In retrospect, I guess I was glad that he’d lied instead of telling me the cops were here to see me. No good could have come from that.
Either way, when I saw Lang, he narrowed his eyes at me, glaring at me like a suspect, which maybe I was, but I was reasonably sure I hadn’t done anything.
“Hello, Lillim,” he said, voice clipped. He swiveled his body, glancing at the dowdy office lady with long blonde hair and smiling in a way that reminded me of an annoyed hyena. When she didn’t look up, he leaned over the front of her desk, one hand pressed on the edge. “I need to speak to Miss Callina,” he said, before covering his hand with his mouth conspiratorially. “Privately,” he added in a hushed whisper.
The office lady looked up, staring at his face for a long time, her face completely blank. She nodded just the barest fraction of an inch at him. “Okay,” she said a moment later and swiveled her chair so she could point at a closed door. There was a small silver placard embedded in the door that read “counselor.”
Lang stood, running his hand through his greasy black hair. “Thanks,” he added, turning back toward me and motioning toward the closed door with his head.
A moment later, I found myself alone with Lang in a room filled with unicorns. The walls were plastered with the mystical beasts. There was a little wooden shelf to my left covered in ceramic figurines. One in particular featured a musclebound He-man clutching a flaming trident astride a black scaled unicorn with a flaming serpentine tail.
“Lillim,” Lang said as he flopped down in the chair across the desk from me and steepled his hands at me in a way that reminded me of an angry parent crossed with a cartoon villain.
“Excellent,” I said, steepling my own fingers and smiling maniacally at him.
Lang stared at me for a long time, lips compressed into a hard line. “Are you mocking me?” he asked finally.
“A little,” I admitted, smiling sweetly at him. “What’s up?” I asked, deciding against asking him the obvious question of why the hell was he pulling me out of class because, honestly, I was slightly glad he had. Why? It was a welcome distraction from the cyclops and Caleb, both of which I wasn’t going to be doing anything about until I was out of class.
“You know I’m a police officer, right?” he asked, quirking one dark eyebrow up at me.
“Yeah, I know,” I replied. “It’s very impressive.”
“Uh… huh” he said before shaking his head at me and sighing. “Anyway,” he added before smacking the flats of his hands down on the table with a loud thwack that nearly made me jump. “I have a problem.”
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“What’s your problem?” I asked, but before I could say more, he began to unbutton his shirt. I stood, not sure what to do as a blush spread across my face. Was he going to try and… No, surely not…
He pulled off the shirt in one fluid motion and dropped it on the desk. My eyes went wide as I followed the movement. “Please… please don’t try anything,” I squeaked, spinning away so my back was to him.
“Lillim, look at me,” he said, putting one hand on my shoulder and my stomach fell to my toes. This… this was too much. I spun, about to give him a piece of my mind when my eyes fell on his now shirtless upper body. A giant blue octopus tattoo spread out across his smooth chest… only… only it was moving.
“This,” he said, voice so quiet that I almost didn’t hear him while tapping the octopus with one finger. “This is my problem.”
“That’s some wicked ink,” I said, swallowing. “Why are you showing it to me?” I asked, barely resisting the urge to reach out and run my hand over his chest. I didn’t because while I wanted to feel the tattoo writhe beneath my hand, I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. Besides, it would be bad if someone walked in now. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen if they caught me running my fingers along his bare, well-muscled chest.
“That’s what I want to know. It appeared just after you called me about the warlock or whatever. At first, it was just a small bruise. I assumed I had just walked into something, but as you can see, it isn’t exactly going away.” Lang’s voice was strangely calm, which was odd because he should have been freaking out. “It’s growing bigger by the hour.”
“What’d your doctor say?” I asked, standing up and leaning forward over the desk so I could get a better look. The octopus was so lifelike that it looked real.
“That’s the thing,” he said, a thread of fear thrumming just under the surface of his makeshift calm.
“What’s the thing?” I asked as the octopus turned one bulbous yellow eye at me, and its pupil got as big as dinner plate.
Hardboiled: Not Your Average Detective Story (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 5) Page 5