“Is everyone here . . . ?” I trailed off. I didn’t even have the terminology to finish the question.
“Everyone here actively works for the CIA,” Mr. Pitt said with a froggy smile.
“Hang on, this is a CIA operation?” I was flabbergasted. Maybe I should start believing the Enquirer’s government-conspiracy stories about Area 51 and other bizarre “alien” encounters. If Uncle Sam knew about soul-sight—I mean, about Primordium—maybe there was some truth to those stories. After all, if the Enquirer had printed stories about imps, I wouldn’t have believed them—until today.
“We’re active members of the Collaborative Illumination Alliance,” Mr. Pitt said. His tone implied anyone who wasn’t a member wasn’t worth his time. “You’re the only enforcer in the office, but we all do our part to eradicate atrum and promote lux lucis. And, of course, we’re a bumper sticker company, as well, and we make a small profit from it every year.”
“Will I be doing anything with the stickers?”
“Not unless we’re incredibly busy and need an extra hand, but that’s rare. Standard business hours here are nine to five, Monday through Friday, but enforcer hours are more free-form, as you know. I’ll let you judge how much you need to work once you get a feel for our region. Kyle had it down to about fifty hours a week. We’re a small region, but not an inactive one.”
This may have been the strangest, most bizarre, out-of-this-world job I’d ever had, but it was starting to sound like the best one I’d ever had, too. I was going to do something for the good of humanity, ridding the world of evil—literally. Plus, I was making good money with flexible hours. Best of all, there’d been no mention of used cars, coffee and dry cleaning pickup, or photocopying and collating—all things I’d learned to loathe in my previous jobs. Maybe using my soul-sight for a few weeks would actually be fun.
“Rose will take you around the region.” Mr. Pitt walked me to his office door. “If you have any questions, ask Rose today or me tomorrow. Why don’t you show up here at nine tomorrow?”
I found myself nodding. I could do this. It was like any other job, just with a different skill set. A skill set I’d been born with. I should be more than qualified for anything tossed my way.
Feeling a surge of confidence, I followed Mr. Pitt into the heart of a clump of cubicles. Sitting amidst a tropical oasis of plants was a petite Latina woman. She was all curves and red lips, with long, straight, dark hair. The computer screen behind her was open to a celebrity-gossip Internet page.
“Rose, this is Madison Fox, our new IE,” Mr. Pitt said.
“So I gathered.”
Rose stood and delicately placed her hand in mine, removing it almost immediately, leaving me with a vague impression that we might have shaken hands, but her welcoming smile put me at ease.
“Will you get her settled in and then show her the boundaries?” Mr. Pitt asked. “She needs to be up and running tomorrow.”
“Certainly, boss. Let me shut down.”
Mr. Pitt scuttled back to his office while she closed ten different Internet windows and shut off her computer. I watched him over the tops of Rose’s cubicle, then peered into the vacant adjoining cubicles.
“Oh, those are Joy’s and Will’s. They should be in tomorrow.” Rose’s voice was high and a little nasally, but not off-putting. “Did Brad give you the office tour?”
“Not yet.”
“There’s not much to it. Here’s where all us grunt employees work.” She winked. “You’ve seen Brad’s office.” She pointed at to two cubicles standing alone on the right side of the hall. “The one on the left is yours. Or it will be, once we clean out all of Kyle’s extraneous office leavings. The other one is used by the optivus aegis when he’s in town.”
“Opti-what?”
Rose gave me a curious look. “Optivus aegis. You know, the head honcho enforcer for half the state.” When she saw my blank expression, she continued. “I guess every region’s got their own name for the position. We call it optivus aegis, and when Niko’s working in this area, that’s his home base. But he’s only here when we’ve got some baddies too big for our britches.”
I tried to look like I was following along.
“Something tells me we’ll see him around here soon,” Rose said. She pointed toward the bank of offices along the back. “The office to the left of Brad’s is for visiting dignitaries.”
I didn’t even ask.
“The one on the right is for our accountant. She’s a part-timer. The skinny door on the far left leads to our break room; it’s small, but it has a microwave and a fridge. The door on the far right leads out the back. Let’s go out the front.”
Sharon watched us leave, her dour look apparently the only expression in her repertoire. It was eerie the way she didn’t blink or so much as twitch a finger, only tracked us with her eyes.
Rose held her fingers to her lips when we were around the corner in the public hallway. She was shorter than me by almost a head, even with her red-leather, three-inch-heel boots. When we exited the lobby, she turned to me.
“Be nice to Sharon. Always. You don’t want to get on her bad side.”
“That was her good side?”
“Yep. You drive. My beast sucks down the gas.” Rose patted the chrome bumper of a large yellow Hummer as we walked by.
“Where are we headed?” I asked once we were settled in my green two-door Civic.
“Let’s go out Douglas to the freeway. Hand me your phone and I’ll input everyone’s numbers while we drive.”
“Ah.” I cast her a quick glance. “I don’t have a cell phone. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?”
“Do you have bad credit?”
“No.” I frowned at her.
“A stalker?”
“No.”
“Are you a technophobe?”
“Would I know if I was?”
“What reason could you possibly have for not having a cell phone?”
Confessing that I didn’t have anyone I felt I needed to be in constant contact with (read: boyfriend) seemed rather lame.
“Money’s been tight.”
“Time to let loose.”
“We’d better stop by my bank first,” I said, picturing my two-digit account balance and then, much more happily, the signing bonus check Mr. Pitt had handed me minutes earlier.
As I drove, it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to have to avoid my parents’ calls any longer—my previous mature plan. My parent’s well-meaning monetary offers, partially suppressed concerns, and unsolicited advice while I was unemployed made me feel guilty—guilty that I hadn’t followed in their footsteps, launching a successful career right out of college, and guilty that they still felt they needed to be my financial crutch. Plus, with all their free time now that they were both retired, they were geared up to take on my life as their next fix-it project. The thought made me shudder.
Now that I had a job and money in my bank account, I could confidently assure them I didn’t need their support, or their master plan for my future. I simply couldn’t tell them what the job was.
Maybe this needed a little more thought.
Forty minutes later I’d deposited my check and was the proud owner of the prettiest phone I’d ever seen. It was, sleek, had a screen half the size of my laptop, and the frame was a flashy metallic green. I was in love.
I really wanted to call a bunch of people, or at least my best friend Bridget, and be properly welcomed to the twenty-first century, but Rose and I still had to tour the realm of my new employment.
“We’ll get that modified soon,” Rose said as we settled back in my Honda. She used her chin to gesture at my pretty phone. I petted it, discreetly, to soothe its hurt feelings at being so rudely referenced. You need a name, my pretty, I thought to my phone. Sally? Simone? Silly Pants? Oh, no, wait: That’s me.
“Modified?”
“Sure. We’ve got a guy who can load sta
ndard enforcer apps. Don’t worry about it. Let me program a few numbers you’ll need during emergencies.”
Just like that, my bubble popped. I kept forgetting about the whole fighting-evil part of my job. If Kyle said I could do it, I can. I just have to believe, I thought as I handed her my phone and started the car. I wasn’t reassured that my mental pep talk sounded like it had been copied from the script of a Disney cartoon.
3
I Brake for Firemen
“Don’t worry, honey. You’ll do fine,” Rose said. “Head toward I-80 on Douglas. This boulevard is the dividing line of our region. Everything south of it is not our problem.”
“Oh. I live over there.” I pointed back toward my apartment complex on the south side of Douglas. “I thought I lived in this region.”
“Nope. Of course, near the boundaries, things overlap, so you’re close enough to count if it matters to you.”
“Who is the illuminant enforcer over there?” The title sounded corny when I said it.
“The IE? Summer’s been there a few years, and I don’t think she has plans of going anywhere soon.”
“How many regions are there?”
“In Roseville? Two. East and west. We’re east. That’s considered Citrus Heights,” she said, pointing toward my apartment and Summer’s region. “Our region is kind of small, which if you know what’s good for you, you won’t mention to Brad. Where are you from, anyway?”
“The Bay Area.” Looking like a fool in front of my new coworker was less appealing than letting her believe I was new in town. Plus, I hadn’t exactly lied. Even though I’d lived in Roseville for almost four years now, I’d grown up in Berkeley.
“Huh. Get on the freeway here.” I merged onto I-80 going east. “We’re everything that side of the freeway,” Rose continued, gesturing expansively at the back of Fry’s, Home Depot, and the entire eastern horizon.
“Just how much smaller is this region?”
“To give you a comparison, Jacob’s region is nearly three times as large as ours. He’s the IE for west Roseville—and most of Lincoln and Rocklin, too. His warden holds several regions.”
“Did you say ‘warden’?”
Rose gave me a long once-over, then touched a fingertip to the back of my hand. “Well, crap.” She wiped her fingertip on her skirt. “You haven’t worked a region before, have you?”
So much for hiding my ignorance. I tried to sound nonchalant. “Nope.”
Her eyebrows shot to her hairline, but all she said was, “A warden is the boss of a region. In your case, that’s Brad.”
That had an ominous sound to it. I vaguely remembered Kyle mentioning wardens in our surreal interview, back when I thought he was insane. Maybe he still was, and I’d merely joined him.
We rode in silence while Rose finished programming a slew of numbers into my phone, then she slipped it into my purse in the backseat. I drove past the Eureka exit, then the Highway 65 exit. The farther we went, the more nervous I got. If this is considered a small area, I hope the ratio of imps to humans is very, very low. I eyed all the shops, the huge hospital, and all the houses on the Sierra College hill. My stomach fluttered. Why did I feel like I was in way over my head? Because you are, a small voice screamed. I drowned it out with happy thoughts about paying rent, eating out, and buying a new pair of shoes—or twenty.
“What exactly do you do for Illumination Studios?” I finally thought to ask. We’d exited the freeway at Rocklin Road, and were cruising past the junior college and the bisecting Sierra College Boulevard named after it.
“I do most of the design and some of the sales, but Joy and Will are a lot better at sales than I am. Oh, you meant non–bumper sticker duties, the stuff I do for the CIA. I’m an empath.”
“As in you can tell what I’m feeling?”
“Yep.”
“Okay, maybe this is rude or hypocritical, but—prove it.”
She laughed. “Take a right on Barton Road. Hum, how can I prove it?” She hummed “If You Believe in Magic” while she thought. “Well, for starters, you’re feeling really skeptical right now.” She winked at me. I laughed.
“Okay, that’s true but not good proof.”
“How about before I met you, I knew the exact moment you saw Niko.”
“Who?”
“The optivus aegis. Niko Demitrius. Tall guy, skin like Belgium dark chocolate, eyes that could melt your soul. Aha, I see this is ringing a bell.”
Mr. Dark and Deadly. Which meant he was an elite enforcer. That wasn’t difficult to believe.
“You’ve got a lot of lust packed into that skinny little body,” Rose said. I blushed to my roots.
“You could feel that?”
“Um-hum.”
“No, wait. That’s still not proof. Any woman would have reacted the same.”
“Good point. How about this: When I told you we were going to modify your phone, you got protective.”
I chanced a glance at her expression. We’d left the city of Rocklin a few miles back, and our surroundings had transformed into rolling rural country landscape. Apartments and shopping centers had given way to white-post fences and large, sprawling ranch-style homes. We’d passed horses, goats, a few llamas, and more mansions, RVs, trailered boats, and Corvettes than I could count. This was Granite Bay at its finest: big money and coveted acreage.
“You don’t have to believe me,” Rose said. “I can’t see the Primordium dimension and I can’t work with lux lucis, but I can feel it through my empathy. I can feel the darkness or sickness in people.”
I was getting the feeling that lux lucis was important, but before I could ask Rose what exactly it was, she switched back to driving directions.
Dutifully, I turned south onto Auburn-Folsom Boulevard, a two-lane major thoroughfare, and kicked my speed up to fifty. “The region continues all the way to Folsom Lake”—Rose gestured east through the million-dollar housing division—“but there’s no other connecting road. From here, it’s back to Douglas, and we’ve completed our loop.” She paused. “Now you’re nervous again. Girl, you gotta trust me. You’ll do fine.”
Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one who had to root out all the evil in this not-at-all-small-by-my-standards area. It was a hodgepodge of a region, too, with everything from office parks to horse ranches, a college, strip malls, suburban sprawl, and two hospitals. All it needed was a nuclear power plant and it’d be complete. Good job. Now you’re thinking positively.
Rose pulled a cell phone out of her purse. It was a generic black phone. Nothing like my beautiful phone. Maybe I should name it Gaea, the green goddess of all cell phones.
A hideous screech erupted behind my seat, dying down to a metallic warble. I swerved and ducked, frantically checking the backseat for a Godzilla-esque creature of evil attached to that predatory roar.
“Watch the road, crazy!” Rose shouted.
I jerked the car back into the lane. “What was that?”
Rose started laughing and reached behind me. She held my phone in front of my face. “Ringy-dingy. Your new lifeline. I was making sure I had your number correct. Sheesh, you’re jumpy.”
I glared at the phone, then back at the road. How could something so pretty sound so awful? I dub thee Medusa, you obnoxious, gorgeous thing.
“Ring tones, that’s what you need. I’ve got my phone programmed with a different ring for each person. So have you seen any evil lurking around?”
“What? You mean while I’ve been driving?”
“Yeah. When else?”
“I can’t look around in soul—in Primordium while driving! I would crash.”
“You’re definitely going to have to get over that,” Rose said with absolutely no compassion. “Not while I’m in the car, though. Pull over here. You look for evil, I’ll look for firemen.”
“That’s hardly fair,” I grumbled. I pulled over in a turn-around space near a fire station. We both got out. I studie
d the scenery. A few homes across the road. A lot of BMWs, Corvettes, and Cadillacs zooming past on Auburn-Folsom Boulevard. A field behind the fire station with a couple of hedges and a patch of blackberry brambles. I did my own quick search for firemen. I could really do with a dose of handsome.
“Is there some evil, maybe over there?” Rose gestured to the fire station. “Maybe we should take a closer look.”
“What would we tell them we’re doing?”
“I think your car was sounding funny.”
“No, it wasn’t—oh. I see where you’re going with that.”
“You’re a quick one.” She rolled her eyes at me.
I blinked. Primordium replaced color, daylight, and familiarity. I braced my hands on my knees and stared at the gray dirt at my feet until gravity rebalanced itself. I took a quick peek at the sky. The cerulean cloudless expanse had been swapped with black—solid, unrelieved black. I could still feel the sun on my face, though I couldn’t see it in the sky. For all I knew, I was looking straight at it.
I shuddered and made a point not to look up again. Instead, I scanned the fire house. There were people upstairs and something small and white just inside the bay doors. A cat? I turned to look at Rose. She glowed a pretty, opaque white. It was nice to know that not everyone who worked for the CIA looked like they had a sun stuck up their ass. Unlike Kyle, Rose’s features looked like they were cast out of pure white marble, not radiating light. She was also in possession of one of the cleanest souls I’d seen in a long time, aside from my own and Kyle’s. Even if I was dangerously deep in a world I knew nothing about, it was reassuring that I was on the good side.
Now why hadn’t I thought to look at Mr. Pitt’s soul?
Because you’re trying not to use this sight, remember?
Too late for that.
I scanned the field. Only the blackberry brambles glowed. They were bright white, a mound of light with tendrils stretching across the dead field. Normally blackberry bushes tended to look sinister with all their thorns and the tenacious, mindless way they choked out other plant life. Now they looked like a beautiful oasis in a field of death.
A Fistful of Evil: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 1) Page 3