by J. L. Ray
Anthony’s face came up first: I talked to your mother, and she has not budged. I don’t know what to say to convince her to change her mind, but I will think of something. Be patient and trust me. His image frowned. I hope you are resting. His voice underscored the last word, making it clear that he hoped Mephistopheles was anywhere but with Tony.
She grinned. Then the next message rolled up.
Amanda’s tear-stained face, stony and calm: Please do not pursue this. Please trust me. I love you.
Tony frowned, pushing her hands through her hair and giving her scalp a good rub. “This kind of sucks. I feel like I’m hurting them.” Then her f-light rolled the signal for an attempted call, origin unknown, and no message.
“That’s odd,” she mused, as the f-light separated personal calls from work calls, and her f-light data for personal calls would be hard to obtain. “Maybe it’s Phil.” Then she realized that she had given him her direct contact data already, so his call would have been identified. “Hmmm.”
The message function shifted to work calls, and odd got strange. It was the Lieutenant, asking her to check in, apologizing as he did so since he was the one who had insisted she take a two-week medical leave. She had been in the hospital for observation for three days, so her break should have just started. I’ll explain when you get here. Contact me before you come, he growled, not angry, just a Sphinx in an obvious hurry to get the words out. I’m sorry to call you while you’re off duty.
She looked at his face, the frown and furrowed brow of his humanoid features surrounded by a golden mane, and then she turned off her messages. “I guess I go back to work,” she told herself. “Shortest two week break ever.” More than anything, she wanted to find Adele. But given her mother’s reaction, and the fact that Tony needed her help to get started, maybe going in to the office would give her mother time to come to terms with whatever was making her think Tony shouldn’t start the search. Surely Mama didn’t think the family owed Caridwen for a deal brokered before they were all born?
She dropped her f-light by the bed and headed for the bathroom. “At least I got one good sleep in. But there goes the long soak.” She gave her clawfoot tub a sad look before stepping in for quick shower instead. If the Lieutenant was willing to interrupt the leave he had insisted she take, odds were that the faster she got there, the better.
Lieutenant Azeem greeted Tony and then sat for a minute, looking at her where she sat across from his desk. Tony wasn’t sure what was up. It wasn’t like her supervisor to be much of a Sphinx when it came right down to it. He didn’t tend to be short with the information or comments, and he rarely spoke in annoying riddles. So when the silence lasted long enough for him to suddenly give one paw a few licks, she knew something really weird was up. She found herself wishing that she had bailed on whatever the hell this was. Just when she was ready to speak to end the silence, the Lieutenant finally got to it. He realized he was comfort-cleaning his paw and dropped it.
“How are you feeling, Detective?” he asked.
“Good, sir. I haven’t had any episodes since that first night, so the Mundane doctor and the hospital’s magical practitioner both signed off on my release.” When he just sat looking at her again, she added, “Even Phil thought I was good to go.” Then she regretted adding that, since Lieutenant Azeem winced at the sound of Phil’s name. Odd that mentioning Phil would cause a wince. She wondered if it had something to do with whatever the hell the Lieutenant was not talking about after calling her in to talk.
“Good, good, that’s...” Azeem just didn’t seem to want to move things forward, “fine, that’s fine.”
“Uhm...sir?”
“Yes, Detective?”
“You called me,” Tony reminded him gently, hoping to get this party started before her hair went gray from waiting. She didn’t need magic to have a premonition that whatever was coming wasn’t going to be fun. Maybe Vice was short of folks to play hooker, although with the SCIB, they usually didn’t look for a Mundane officer to play that role. If they were, well, that certainly would make the Lieutenant this hesitant to get to the point when assigning a detail. He always found Vice a bit embarrassing, maybe because he didn’t seem to have many himself. Maybe it was something worse, she speculated, as the silence dragged on, again, just a bit too long. Maybe it was her witch blood. There wasn’t a regulation against hiring witches, was there? Did she need to talk to her Union rep? What about Glinda the Good? Glinda had worked in the Washington D.C. SCI Bureau since the Geas activated, and if ever a witch there was, well, Glinda was one. In an attempt to stop the increasingly more spectacular and unlikely scenarios running through her head, she tried again. “Sir?”
“Sorry, Detective, I was trying to decide how to spin this.”
Tony grimaced, “Go for straight up, please sir. You’ve got me more worried than I hope I need to be!”
“Worried?”
“About keeping my job? After we found out that I’m part, y’know, witch? Is that a problem?”
“No!” And here the Lieutenant looked horrified. “Nothing like that, oh, nothing at all like that. We don’t discriminate in hiring. The Geas doesn’t allow it.” He made a strangled noise that suggested laughter. “I am sorry if my silence gave you the wrong impression. No, I am not firing you. I am…I am embarrassed.” He paused and nodded before moving on. “I wanted you and Detective Kelly to take a break, but I find that I need you back for an operation. It isn’t fair to you. I know that you want to pursue leads that might help you find your sister—”
She interrupted him, “Sir, I do want to find my sister, and I plan to, but I have to convince my parents to help with that, and my mother is dead set against it, at the moment. I need her help to know how to start.”
Azeem nodded. “I am sorry to hear it,” he told her, not meeting her eyes as he shuffled something in front of him on the desk.
Tony managed to conceal her reaction to his statement. She had worked in the SCIB for just over a year now, and certainly, that was no time at all when discussing a Being as old as Lieutenant Azeem. However, she had a good feel for non-verbal communication. Azeem didn’t actually seem surprised about her mother’s recalcitrance, and he didn’t look sorry either. What the hell? Why would the Lieutenant be okay with that? Great. Now she had an idea of where to start the questioning, just not how to start it. How would she go about interrogating her own supervisor to find out what he knew about her Fairie-snatched sister? She decided to take the path of least resistance and find out what this meeting was about first.
She cleared her throat. “Yeah, I’m sorry, too. It’s going to make this a much tougher prospect if I can’t get information out of Mama,” she told him earnestly, waiting for his reaction. He didn’t react, which in itself made her suspicious. There was definitely something there. However, he finally transitioned into the reason for contacting her.
“Well, then. I am not going to call Detective Kelly for now, if I can avoid it. New offspring need to be integrated into the family, especially in some of the larger of the Supernatural races…” He paused for a moment in thought, both of them aware of the way new babies born to some of the dark fae could go very, very wrong early in life. Most of their police work centered around such problem children. “I need someone to assist Sebastian de Groot with an investigation.”
“Oh, the new Super? I haven’t seen him much, or his partner?” She made the comment into a question.
“You and Detective Kelly do stay busy,” the Lieutenant purred. Then he added, “Michael Falk was exposed to a pox during their last case. They were tracking down a suspicious death that turned out to be a case of Plaidpox.”
“Yikes,” Tony shuddered. “Falk was exposed? Has he thrown out a tartan rash?”
“No rash as of yet, but you know the drill. It’s a mandatory two week isolation.” Azeem shook his head. “We’re hoping the magical practitioner got to him in time with the antidote.” Plaidpox was a rare and ugly death—really ugly.
“And de Groot wasn’t exposed?”
“He was, but he had been inoculated and Falk had not.”
“Bad luck for Falk,” Tony commented. “I guess for me as well since I’m filling in for him?”
“We do need this particular case seen to, though it isn’t a Geas-level crime,” he said, indicating to Tony that she and her partner for this case wouldn’t be on the clock working against a magical slapdown. That meant, at the least, potentially fewer sleepless nights for Tony and de Groot since they wouldn’t be trying to meet a literal deadline. Azeem continued, “We have a smuggling ring in the city.”
Tony looked taken aback. “Smuggling? Smuggling what exactly?”
“There is a steady line of Mundane kitsch headed to Fairie.”
Tony snorted, the piggy sound that Phil apparently found attractive. “Yeah, Phil mentioned that Mundane items are trending in Fairie right now, but I don’t see why this would need SCIB action, sir. Seems like we ought to thank them instead, especially if the take includes those awful dogs-playing-poker prints!”
Azeem chuffed his own version of laughter, but quickly got serious. “The cultural kitsch items going out are not the problem. It’s what they are being exchanged for that is. Magical items are coming in, some relatively harmless artifacts, others not.”
“How are they managing that? I thought visitors to or from Fairie couldn’t bring anything back unless the PTB gave permission?” Tony asked, remembering Phil’s comment when they had stopped at his home in the Realm for information. “Is there a workaround that they found?”
“There must be, of course. That is one of the questions this investigation must answer,” he grated out, and Tony heard his tail thwacking rhythmically against the file cabinets behind him as he swung it back and forth in irritation. “Obviously, the PTB are quite interested in the answer.”
“So folks here in Mundania are paying for magic-imbued paraphernalia with velvet Elvis paintings and dashboard hula dolls?”
“Exactly, Detective,” a deep, gravelly voice behind her broke in, and she turned in her chair to find Sebastian de Groot looming over her right shoulder. Tall, at least six feet four inches, with chocolate brown hair and a face too tough and beaten up to be classically handsome, de Groot had, nevertheless, been major hottie water cooler gossip for various interested personnel in the office from the day he joined the D.C. branch. That he was dark fae was about all Tony knew. She rarely had time to join the gossip. Both de Groot and Falk had transferred from a branch in Minnesota about three months earlier when two of the original detectives from the D. C. branch had retired at the same time. The retirees had started in the SCIB together in 1989 and decided to retire from it together as well. Since the new detectives had transferred in, Tony and Cal had had so many back-to-back Geas-level cases that they had to solve quickly, they hadn’t done more than nod to the new detectives in passing.
“Detective,” de Groot growled, holding out a hand to shake Tony’s just as she suddenly realized she’d been staring with her jaw hanging open. She had to be making a fabulous first impression, if he liked idiots and lackwits. He was just so damn large. The office felt like it had shrunk. That sort of thing tended to happen when Changelings from predator species walked in humanoid form, especially if they had spent most of their time in non-humanoid form. Apparently de Groot had lived most of his life in Mundania in the mountains of Norway, trapped in the form of a giant brown bear.
Standing up to shake his hand, Tony tried to pull on all the years of etiquette classes she’d been forced to attend as a pre-teen. “Detective de Groot, good to see you.” Unfortunately, she suddenly remembered that she had skipped out on her etiquette classes to go hang out with her friends and play ultimate frisbee on the Mall pretty often. Maybe she’d look less like a carp and more like a cop if she’d just kept going to Madame Richelieu’s Conduct Classes. Then again, maybe not.
“Call me Baz,” he told her, his voice clearly suggesting his years in Northern Europe as he looked intently into her eyes and shook her hand. She made an effort to keep her jaw under control as she looked up into the darkest blue eyes she had ever seen. As she stared, he suddenly nodded, dropped her hand, and turned to the Lieutenant. “She’ll do,” he told their boss, the comment so unconsciously arrogant that she laughed instead of taking offense.
“She’ll do what, dude?” she asked him as she turned back to Lieutenant Azeem. “Is this guy for real, or what?” She turned back to stare at Baz when she heard a grunt come from him.
“But of course, I am real,” he frowned. “I have not been forced to change since the Geas was invoked. I have control now.”
Tony suddenly realized that she had royally put her foot in it and tired to make amends. “Detective de Groot, I am so sorry! I didn’t mean...that is...I wasn’t referring to your... uhm...condition. I mean, when you said ‘she’ll do’ it was a little obnoxious...” Tony threw Azeem a look of eye-rolling desperation, and he came to her rescue.
“What Detective Newman is trying to say is that she was teasing you about your reaction to her, not commenting on your own background as a Changeling.”
“Oh,” Baz de Groot turned back to her and gave her a formal sort of half bow. “My apologies for misunderstanding.” He paused, then added, “I am a little...sensitive about my condition.”
“Oh, no worries, that’s cool!” she told him. “I mean, it’s not like I’d point fingers at anyone myself right now.”
Baz looked confused and Tony realized that while recent water cooler gossip included him, it was usually about him, not with him. Odds were that he didn’t know the new, odd gossip about her status change from pure Mundane to mostly Mundane with just a soupçon de witch. Awkward.
“Never mind,” she waved it off, reluctant to bring up the “w” word right now. “So what is it that I’m meant to do?”
Both men looked at each other and then back to her. Azeem grinned and replied, “A little undercover work.”
The lieutenant laid out the plan for the operation. Since Baz was relatively new to the East Coast, and Tony was relatively new to the SCIB, Azeem wanted to set them up as buyers. They would pretend to be married, human business partners, taking the place of a couple who had only recently been working the smuggling scene in D.C.
As they discussed the plan, Azeem didn’t mention anything about Tony’s condition, and she was a little ashamed to feel glad about that. She felt reluctant to bring it up, given most Beings’ immediate prejudice toward witches. Besides, there was no real need for that topic to be mentioned. Tony had passed as human for her entire life, unaware of her witch blood. There should be no problem at all in having her pose as full Natural, or Natty, for this sting. And Baz could pass as a Natty in most situations since he could control his Change, for the most part. They should be able to manage the charade.
The couple they would replace had done some deals in the past with the Fairie ring, which had been smuggling in more and more dangerous items, flying just under the radar of the Geas. This couple, the Sutherlands, had been scooped up as a part of tying up the loose ends from Tony’s last case. They had sold the talisman that had allowed Serena Melinoe, formerly the office manager at Monster-Mate, to create the vampire that had killed two Supernaturals. Tony had captured that vampire, formerly a Changeling herself and one of the daughters of the Swan King. The Changeling had been a pawn in Melinoe’s plan to take down Mephistopheles after he replaced Adonis Adoni as the head of Monster-Mate Supernatural dating service. The final death of the vampire had added a third death to the crimes of Serena Melinoe and had convinced the Sutherlands, self-professed pickers, to come in quietly and cooperate with SCIB. Once they were brought in for questioning, the Sutherlands claimed that they had believed they were just making a killing out of buying junk from old storage spaces and selling it to a new kind of buyer. They seemed appalled to find out what they had facilitated. If Tony and Cal had not found the actual perpetrators, the Geas might have targe
ted the Sutherlands, a fact not lost on them in the initial interview. It certainly would have targeted Heraphina, the witch who had bought the artifact from them. In fact, only Serena and Adonis, the instigators of the plot, were likely to have been missed in the general wash of magic. Serena and Adonis had managed to keep their hands, and more importantly, their magic, clean of responsibility. When the Sutherlands learned that they had just missed a sudden, surprising death, they had cooperated with the police.
Once Tony found out why they were going after the ring, she jumped at the chance to finish a case that she had had to bow out of because of her seizures. This would provide a little closure, at least, even if it would necessitate putting on hold her attempt to search for her twin sister. This weighed on her, but until she figured out how to appease her mother, she might as well do something constructive instead of sitting around waiting for Daddy to convince Mama to let her help.
“You’ll need to head down to the armory and pick up your attire and the product you’ll be taking to trade,” Azeem told them.
Tony winced. She hadn’t spoken to Glinda since getting outfitted for her trip to Fairie with Phil. By now, the whole office seemed to know that Phil was doing his best to start something with her. And the last time she’d been down to get set up for an operation, Glinda had gotten very territorial over Phil and then propositioned him. It had been in one of the languages of the Fairie Realms, so she hadn’t understood a word. Felt it in her bones—oh yeah. Some of the languages were painfully high-pitched. But she hadn’t needed any translation when Glinda had essentially made it clear to Phil that she’d be all his when he came back, if he wanted. Since he didn’t want, well, this could get...interesting. She winced as she got up to follow de Groot down to Glinda’s little shop of armors.