by Logan Jacobs
A week ago, the entire sum had been paid off in one chunk, but where there would normally be a name attached to the payment, there were instead a series of numbers.
“Geez, am I glad I didn’t go to college,” Ariette muttered behind me. “I could think of fifteen other things to do with that money than get a degree in Plant Genomes. What even is that, anyways?”
“I think it’s the study of plant DNA,” Danira volunteered from behind us, “or plant environments. Though that might be biomes.” She tapped her cheek thoughtfully. “Which one is it, Kal?”
“It’s about the chromosomes,” I muttered distractedly. “Kal, what are the numbers for?”
“Okay, so,” Kalista interjected like she hadn’t paid any attention to the conversation, “the numbers are the identification code for a wire service. Basically, you give them the money, they send it for you to the designated place. No names, no date, and no way to trace it back to the original lender.”
“So we’re in the dark?” Ariette questioned, and her hands had already balled themselves into frustrated fists.
“Nope.” Kalista grinned. “We are not in the dark because, believe it or not, your little dwarf friend is a tech genius.”
“I’ll have to congratulate Sal the next time I see him,” I joked playfully, and Kal whipped around and shot me a narrow-eyed glare.
“You know normally, I’d say you’re not getting sex because of a comment like that, but I don’t believe in punishing myself.” She sighed. “You’ll just have to promise not to enjoy it.” She frowned. “Though I’m not sure I want that either.”
“Just tell us, would you?” the elf demanded.
“Fineeeee,” Kalista blinked her large violet eyes and sighed dramatically. “The wire service is very much a real business. Which means they have records of where the money came from originally. So as long as this guy didn’t give them cash, we will have a name as soon as I get inside their system. And, maybe it’s just me, but usually briefcases full of that much money cause questions.”
“You are brilliant!” Maaren exclaimed.
“Finally, some acknowledgement,” Kalista replied with a dramatic flourish of her hands. “Alright, folks, everybody step back and let Kalista work her magic.” And with that, the dwarf turned and tapped away on her keyboard.
“Uh oh, she’s speaking in third person,” Ariette said as she leaned close to me, one hand cupped over her mouth conspiratorially, “That means it is game time. Why, we could fuck right here, and I doubt she’d even hear us.”
“Now, that’s a thought,” Maaren said as she sidled toward us. “Wanna try it out?”
“I can hear you!” Kalista growled as she flipped through the system’s pages, cleared the password barriers, and hacked into the database to find what she was searching for. “But it is gonna be awhile, so if you are gonna do that, do it elsewhere.”
“I dunno about you, but I for one, feel bad for whoever those people’s IT team is,” I said as I peered over Kalista’s shoulder and watched her work her magic. “They’re totally getting fired after this.”
“No because that would mean they’d realize I was here, and they won’t,” Kalista said with a laugh. “Jesus, a one armed brownie could hack this with its eyes closed.”
“A brownie? Don’t those only come out at night?” I asked with a shrug as Ariette and Danira both leaned back against the wall with their eyes closed and their breathing even. “Unless you mean the pastry but that seems weird because those don’t have eyes.”
Kalista spun around in her chair and kissed me hard on the lips before pushing me away. “Milton, you’re a doll, but just give me a minute please.”
“Right,” I said as I glanced back at Ariette and Danira. We had busy lives, and we all needed to take the moments of rest where we could get them. I could feel the sleep that weighed heavily on my body and mind, and I sat down in a swivel chair with a heavy thud. I was pretty surprised any of us were still able to move, but I also knew we were all running on adrenaline at this point.
Maaren still stared at Genevieve through the one-way mirror, but she turned to look at me when she felt my eyes on her. The hunter flashed me a soft smile and a quick wink and then turned back around to face the suspect. In the last week and a half since Maaren had joined us at the guild, she had become an important pillar of the team. She was a “femme fatale” in every sense of the word, a woman who could be seducing you one moment and then kicking your ass the next. In short, she was my kind of woman.
But there were moments, every so often, where I saw the hint of a much softer Maaren, the woman I assumed she’d be if she’d never discovered who her father was and had gone about her life in her simple human form. Right now was one of those moments. Unlike Ariette and Kalista, it wasn’t exactly Maaren’s choice to join the guild. Sure, she seemed to love it, but I wondered if she would have chosen a different path if she could have. Maybe a path that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, sure, but a different one all the same.
“Hey, Kal, it’s been fifteen minutes. Have you found it yet?” Danira mumbled from the corner with her eyes still closed.
“Well, I’ve got the original source of funding here,” the dwarf grunted, “but that account was sent money from a different account, and it went through some dummy banks in the Bermuda Triangle. Give me a few more minutes.”
There was a light knock on the door as Kalista dove furiously back into the keyboard. Her spiky silver hair bounced along with the rapid movements of her arms. The dwarf’s eyebrows were furrowed in concentration that didn’t even break when the knock came again, only louder.
“Oh for goodness sakes,” Danira called, “you can come in.”
The door popped open, and in walked a very nervous looking young satyr. His horns were just two little stumps that poked out of his mess of brown curls, and his face was totally clean shaven. There was an outbreak of pimples splattered across his forehead that he had tried to hide behind a few loose locks, but it hadn’t worked. His hooves clanked on the floor as he stepped just barely inside the door, and he continued to shift from side to side as he looked around the room with brown eyes that blinked way too much.
“Hey,” I finally said when he just stood there. “What can we do for you?”
“Hello,” he replied. His voice was extremely high, even for someone so young.
“Do you need something?” Ariette prompted.
“Oh, um,” the satyr said as he shuffled around, “the jailkeeper wants to know what you would like to do with the prisoner. I’m supposed to escort her wherever you want her to go.”
He finished his explanation with a nervous look at Genevieve, who had become a lot more relaxed in the last ten minutes. It was almost laughable that she made him so nervous.
“Give her a bed and a twenty-four-hour guard,” Danira ordered the young satyr, and he looked at her in shock before he scrambled to comply.
“Yes, sir,” he cried out as he turned to exit. “Um, is she, you know, dangerous?”
A mischievous grin spread across Maaren’s face as she looked at the apprehensive young satyr.
“Oh yeah,” she replied. “Be super cautious with that one. We already lost a guard to her, but you look like you can handle some danger.”
The satyr gulped heavily before he drew himself up to his full height under Maaren’s sultry gaze.
“I’m kidding,” the hunter finally laughed, and the satyr quickly took on an expression of haughty annoyance. I bit back a laugh as he straightened his spine to a full four feet tall and pranced out of the room.
We watched as he opened the side door to the interrogation room and pridefully walked in to collect Genevieve. She stood up and walked out of the room slowly, with the young satyr right behind her. He kept a watchful eye on the elf as they exited the room.
“That wasn’t fair,” I complained to Maaren. “That poor kid was terrified for his life.”
“But it was funny,” the hunter said with a shrug
. “Everyone tells me I need to lighten up, right?”
“It’s only funny until he’s finding you in the dining hall every afternoon and acting like your lover,” Ariette pointed out playfully.
“Aw, give poor Arendor some slack,” I shot back sarcastically. “It’s not his fault you’re so magnetizing.”
Ariette winked at me, and I caught the excited way she drew her bottom lip into her mouth and brushed her blonde hair back from her face.
“I’ve got a name!” Kalista exclaimed excitedly, and then her happiness instantly faded. “Oh no. Oh no, no, no. You’re kidding.”
“What is it?” I demanded. “Who’s the owner of the original account?”
“Well, somebody decided to leave a trail of funny clues,” the dwarf grunted. “The name on the account is Enaron Shrike. He was the original Phobos leader, but …”
“But he was put to death very publicly over fifty years ago,” Ariette finished. “Like, it was all over the news and everything. So the name means nothing.”
“Oh, I bet it means something,” Danira said. “It means the Phobos are behind this, for sure.”
“But I don’t get it!” I exclaimed in frustration. “Why steal a bunch of baby animals? What’s the point? It’s not like some trained monsters would do much good against an entire world of Fae and humans.”
“Maybe not these animals,” Danira said darkly, “but they could have been a test run. Learn how to train some semi-dangerous animals before you go after the real ones.”
“Like what?” Maaren asked.
“Like a banshee,” the older warrior replied darkly, “or a siren, or a hundred other terrible dark creatures that can destroy entire cities with ease. A siren could very easily turn an entire population of humans against each other, or the guild, with a simple song.” Danira sighed. “Or maybe it’s for some kind of world ending rituals. Those things always seem to require baby animals for some reason.”
My heart beat faster in my chest, and I felt a knot twist in the bottom of my stomach. The Phobos were behind this. All I knew of the extremist Unseelie terrorists was that they wanted elves to rule over the world and thought humans and other species weren’t much more than slaves. I also knew there was a prophecy about keeping evil from reigning over the world.
A prophecy that included me.
Somehow, I was supposed to be the guy to stop that, and more and more, it seemed to me that the Phobos was the evil. At least, that’s what the dragon had told me when I first came to the guild. Despite how much I loved my job and my Fae powers, and regardless of what I had seen over the last two weeks, I wasn’t sure I was ready to face this big destiny of mine. It seemed too distant, somehow, like it was really about some other guy named Milton who was thousands of years old and was completely prepared to fight the Phobos single-handedly. It didn’t seem like something that was my destiny, and it certainly didn’t occur to me that it could happen in the very near future.
“It sounds like the Phobos are thinking pretty far ahead,” I replied. “They’re getting ready for some sort of mass terrorist attack. Or, even worse, a war.”
Chapter 12
“Alright,” Ariette started. “So, we know the Phobos are behind this, and that they’re training deadly animals to be their weapons. That just begs the question, how do we stop them?”
“We can’t just wander the sewer for hours and hours and hope we find a member of the unseelie,” Kalista finally said. “The city’s too big and, from the way you two came back, it’s way too gross. No offense, but I don’t want to be washing sewer stank out of my hair for the next month.”
“Is there an address or any sort of location attached to the account?” Danira asked hopefully.
“There’s a P.O. Box,” Kalista responded with a sigh. “But I can guarantee they aren’t raising giant, dangerous animals in a two foot square in the middle of a post office.”
“What about their next target?” I asked suddenly. Three sets of eyes, and one lone black eye, turned to me in surprise, but Kalista quickly caught on to what I meant.
“Oh, Milton, that’s brilliant!” she exclaimed as her violet eyes went wide.
“They’re not done,” I replied with a broad grin as my idea fully began to take form. “They’re going to want more animals and more powerful ones. Really dangerous stuff. And they’re going to want babies because they’re easier to train, right? There can’t be that many mythical infants around this city. So… If we can get a location on all the creatures currently in Jefferson City, I bet we could beat these guys at their own game.”
“Of course,” Ariette said as she snapped her fingers. “We show up and stop the robbery before it happens.”
“Precisely,” I said with a nod.
“Nice going, HC!” the elf exclaimed, and then she lunged forward to press a hard and fast kiss to my lips.
“Okay,” Kalista muttered, almost to herself. “So if I do an algorithm for… yep, that should work. And then we’ll know…”
“Hey, Kal,” I interrupted, “none of us are mind readers here.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said distractedly. “I need some time. Go get some sleep or something.” With that, the dwarf snatched the laptop and hurried off to go develop whatever algorithm she had been mumbling about.
The moment she said sleep, it was like someone pulled a trigger in my brain. I instantly felt the heaviness in my limbs and the way I struggled to keep my eyes open. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any sleep at all, and now that Kal had brought it up, there was nothing I wanted more in the world.
“She’s got a point,” Ariette said with a huge yawn. “Getting tossed around by a hydra really takes it out of a girl.”
“Go get some sleep, team,” Danira said as she clapped me on the back rather roughly. “You deserve it. We’ll reconvene when Kal figures out their next target.”
The three of us all but ran to our rooms, nearly stumbling over ourselves at the prospect of sleep. None of us bothered to even say goodbye, and instead, we just rushed through the halls in a race to get to our beds first.
Storm greeted me the moment I stepped through my door. I reveled in the comfort of her warm fur and face licks before I patted each head once and laid down on my bed. Thankfully, she got the idea this time and curled up into my side like a miniature heater. Both of us dozed off immediately.
My dreams were plagued with the prophecy of the Racmoth. Suddenly, I was back in the dungeons on my first day at the guild. The dragon flew up from the depths of his pit and landed on that rock, appraising me with his red eye.
“You are not yet ready, Milton Bailey,” he roared.
“What am I supposed to be ready for?” I yelled back at him.
But the beast said nothing more. Instead, he rose from his rock, and I noticed that the chain on his back leg, meant to keep him from escaping the guild, was no longer there. As he rose higher and higher, the rock wall that separated us disappeared, and he hovered in the air above me. Then, he opened his enormous maw and rained down a stream of fire directly onto my head. My body was encapsulated in excruciating heat, and all I saw was red. That was, until I spun around in the dark and found myself in a completely new place.
Now I was down in the sewers, except it was no longer completely pitch black. An eerie yellow glow filled the whole place and gave everything a hazy white halo. The walls were covered in graffiti and painted skulls. There was no water in the bottom, and instead I walked on the concrete of the tunnel floor. Something crunched beneath my feet, and I looked down to see that I had stepped on the leg of a skeleton and shattered the bone beneath my boot.
“Well, if it isn’t the Racmoth, come to save the day,” a chilling voice spoke from behind me.
When I whipped around, there was no one there.
“Who are you?” I demanded into the empty sewer.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” the disembodied voice cooed back devilishly.
Before I could do anyth
ing else, I was abruptly ripped from my dream by the blare of my alarm clock. Storm jumped up at the sound, spun around to face the door and growled menacingly at it. Her antics were very cute, but I could only imagine how terrifying that growl would be once she was fully grown.
“It’s okay, Storm,” I said soothingly as I reached to turn off the awful alarm. “It’s just my alarm clock, see?”
She didn’t acknowledge me, but she seemed to calm down a bit as she lowered her hackles and sat down. I rolled from the bed with a groan and rubbed my eyes tiredly. They were heavy with sleep, and my heart palpitated in my chest at the now distant memory of my dream. I looked down and realized that my shirt was soaked with sweat, so I quickly pulled it off and tossed on a new one. I didn’t need any questions about why I was so sweaty when I got to the command center though they would probably all just assume I was getting busy with one of my girlfriends.
Before I left, I put some food in Storm’s dish and made sure she had plenty of water. Kalista told me she had assigned an intern to “puppy duty,” as she called it, and that the intern was ordered to take Storm for a walk and a potty break once an hour. Though the puppy whined as I left, this time, she simply sat in the middle of the bed and watched the door shut behind me. Finally, progress.
As I walked through the halls, I shook off the memory of the dream. There was no sense in worrying about something that hadn’t even happened yet. Besides, I didn’t even know if everything the dragon had told me was true, and even if it was, it probably wasn’t going to go down how I saw it in my dream. I was going to work my ass off to be ready for this destiny whenever it came. It wasn't enough for some prophecy to call me the Racmoth, I had to do everything I could to make sure that I was.
Kalista and Danira were seated at the center round table when I walked into the command center, and they poured over a catalog full of elegant dresses and handsome suits. I looked over their shoulders just as Ariette and Maaren walked in.
“Milton, would you like a black or gray suit?” Kalista demanded as I walked into the command center. Thankfully, none of the other teams were there at the moment. I really wasn’t in the mood to deal with Elvira.