“What did Mr. Pitt mean, something was blipping on and off his radar?” I asked Rose when we were cruising along in my Civic.
“That’s a warden’s job. Brad lets us know where things are getting dark in our region and sends the appropriate people to fix it.”
“It won’t always be me?”
“Nope. We all pull our own weight. Like how today I’m along to make sure you don’t end up rolling on the ground in terror. Again.”
I decided to change the topic. “Is Mr. Pitt always so, um, eloquent?”
“Nah. He’s in a mood today. The sooner you’re performing up to par, the better. The fact that not knowing what you’re doing doesn’t slow you down will definitely help. Kyle was all about planning, doing research, developing a strategy, and thinking things through before jumping in. You must learn best by doing.”
“Something like that.” How did one go about researching evil, let alone developing a strategy?
“There’s our spot.”
We passed up a construction site on the left side of the road, a landscaped divider forcing us to travel up the hill to the next light before backtracking. There were a plethora of “No Parking” and “Trucks Only” signs at the entrance, so I cruised beyond it again, finding parking on a side street nearly four blocks away. Rose and I got out and walked back, and I was cursing my heeled shoes before we’d gone two blocks. I’d forgotten to ask about a dress code, so I’d opted for business attire this morning, which meant I was overdressed in tan slacks, an emerald cashmere V-neck sweater with my black jacket over it, and black calf boots with one-inch kitten heels. Rose was even more dressed up than me in a tight, short black skirt with black stockings and a boat-neck silk fuchsia top that strained across her breasts, but she sashayed along with no difficulty despite her stiletto heels.
Cars rushed by us at forty-five-plus miles per hour. My dark brown hair whipped around my face in stinging slaps, and I tried to hold it down with one hand. I’d pulled it half back again today to keep it out of my eyes, but now I was wishing I’d kept the ponytail I’d originally thrown it in for my rushed visit to Dr. Love. I hadn’t expected to be marching in the wind today, and besides, I liked leaving my wavy hair loose to fall down my back. As Bridget was fond of saying, my ego was in my hair, and I needed a pick-me-up after my terrible morning. Leaving my hair loose, the scent of my shampoo drifting around me, made me feel deliciously feminine, confident, and in control—traits that I sadly needed to be reminded I did occasionally possess.
I had a feeling that Bridget would have had something pointed and insightful to say about my “ego” repeatedly slapping me in the face as I strode toward my first assignment. I chose not to think about it.
The sidewalk ended abruptly where the construction site began. The housing development was going up in stages. Three tiered levels of dirt lots ramped away from the main road, and I assumed more went down the back side of the barren, bulldozed land until it came up against the greenbelt and biking trails in the protected shallow ravine beyond. Houses were being built on the ridge of the property; the front tiers nearest the busy road were only flattened lots cluttered with equipment. I’d driven by this housing site many times before construction had begun, admiring the tall, old oak trees and beautiful rolling hills of wild grass. After they’d toppled the trees and scraped away the layer of life, I’d been disgusted by the sight but a capitalist enough to want to buy one of the properties on the back side near what was left of the natural landscape.
A Jeep full of college guys roared past, the guys whistling and making cat calls at us.
I rolled my eyes.
“See anything strange?” Rose asked.
Reminded of our purpose, I blinked. The bright morning light swapped with darkness like I’d thrown a switch that turned day into night. My gaze was on the road when I refocused, and I was unexpectedly hypnotized by the streaming white lights of people as they seemed to float down the hill and past me in the loud, dark bodies of their cars.
“Is there something in the road?”
“Uh, no. Just cars.” I turned my gaze to the construction site. The hills of dirt were gray mounds of dead soil. Near the top of the hill, easy for me to see without the glare of the sun or shadows of half-constructed houses, were the shapes of construction workers. I scanned the ground for imps, finding none. “I don’t see anything. Let’s get closer.”
We wobbled along the side of the road, clinging to the edge of the pavement for balance. I should have had an easier time of it than Rose since my heels were negligible, but I lacked her years of experience. When you’re five-ten, you don’t need three-inch heels to give you height. In fact, it’d only been since college that I was comfortable towering over people. Even then, I preferred my flats and tennis shoes for most activities.
After the fourth time tripping and scuffing the toe of my black leather boots, I blinked to normal vision so I could see the contours of the ground more easily. I had to stop and hold my arms out for balance at the rush of color and light. The cars barreling past close enough that my pants rippled from the buffeting winds no longer looked pretty or fascinating—they were just scary.
“After all this effort, there’d better be some cute ones. I’m not walking all this way for some beach ball–bellied balding men,” Rose declared.
“Hear, hear.”
We dodged out of the way of an empty gravel truck leaving the main entrance and Rose boldly walked onto the private property like she had been invited. I followed after a brief hesitation. The workers saw us coming and stopped what they were doing to watch. Or more accurately, they saw Rose; I wasn’t sure if I was visible next to her swaying hips and breasts—not that I wanted that kind of attention, of course.
I ran my hands through my hair, which was doing a much better job of staying in place now that we’d left the busy road behind, and I straightened my posture.
“Hi, there!” Rose called, waving a hand at her admirers.
It may have been early November, but there were still a few shirtless bronze-chested young men standing around with nail guns and pneumatic staplers. There were also a few leathery-skinned old men with their shirts off, but I chose not to focus on them.
“You seeing anything suspicious?” Rose asked me out of the side of her mouth.
Oh. Right. I blinked. We were almost upon the men, at which point, I sincerely hoped Rose had a story for them, because I couldn’t think of a good reason why two business women would be roaming a private construction site in the middle of the day.
For the most part, the men looked like what I expected: mostly light gray souls with patches of darker shades. Two had dark oil running through the white of their souls. Doris had lectured a little about people’s souls—or life force—while we’d been driving around last night. People could be good or evil, but most were a shade somewhere in between. Everyone was born with a white soul. Then little evil acts make the soul turn gray. Large evil acts make the oil-like black spots appear.
Doris hadn’t given me a specific scale for what constituted a light gray consequence and at what point a negative action crossed the line to charcoal and black. She claimed that the more I used my ability to examine people, the better judge I’d become, and I’d develop an instinct for judging a person’s proclivity toward evil. It’d felt like a cop-out answer.
However, Doris had assured me that adults were easier to judge and predict future choices based on their souls than teenagers were. Judging adolescents would get easier with time, or so she’d promised, but she’d agreed I shouldn’t make any important decisions regarding teens for a while.
“If bad actions turn a soul black,” I’d asked, “can good action clean it back to white?”
“You betcha,” Doris had said. “The soul’s constantly in flux. But by the time most people are in their twenties, their personalities—and the fates of their souls—are pretty much set. The amount of good and evil stays in relative balance
from there on out, barring extreme circumstances and interference of evil minions or us good folk, of course.”
Last night I’d been satisfied with her answer, but now I wondered about myself. I’d made my share of bad decisions and I wasn’t a saint, but I couldn’t see so much as a smudge on my soul. Could I simply not see my own failings, or did my soul’s purity have to do with my ability to see Primordium and work with lux lucis? The latter made sense, given that all the souls of my coworkers were equally as pure. We were crusaders of light. You couldn’t have a tainted soul and do that, too, could you? I didn’t think so. And I was positive that if I told Rose I thought of us as “crusaders of light” I’d have to carry her back to the car because she’d be laughing too hard to walk, and then she’d never let me hear the end of it.
Remembering my task, I scanned the area around the men. Right away, I saw two imps, but they were farther up the hill, too far for them to notice me, especially not when there were several other easier victims between us. One of the oil-stained-soul guys had three imps attached to him, one at the elbow, two on his calf. I watched their ticklike mouths suck at his soul and felt lightheaded. Squaring my shoulders, I headed for him.
“Where’re you going?” Rose hissed.
“To save someone.”
“Aw, shit.”
“Hi!” I said brightly to the men around me. I blinked to focus on the terrain and tripped sideways into the nearest dusty man. He caught my elbow and I gave him an overly large smile.
“Can we help you?” one of the less dumbfounded, older men asked.
I searched for the man I planned on saving. He was the youngest in the group, covered in tattoos, and scowling at me fiercely enough to make me pause.
“I’m, I’m . . .” Think, Dice! “I’m a real estate agent. I wanted to come by and see the property.” Brilliant. “This is my assistant, Ro—uh, Romaine.” I tossed Rose an apologetic look. She glowered at me, then turned her full smile on the man who was questioning us.
“You gentlemen look like you’re doing a fine job,” she said, strutting up to place her hand on the questioning man’s sweaty arm. The proximity of her ample breasts to his arm seemed to momentarily transfix the man, and I used the advantage to meander up the dusty, nail-strewn path to the house. I didn’t beeline straight for Rebel Boy, not wanting to look too obvious. I peered inside the framework of the house and blinked.
There weren’t any other imps inside. Just the three leeched to Rebel Boy. I double-checked the other man who had black streaks in his soul. Whatever he’d done had left him tainted but imp-free. I’d made it within a few feet of the boy when a booming voice stopped me in my tracks.
“What’s going on here? Who are you, and what the hell are you doing on private property?”
I spun to see a large, solid gray figure barreling down the hill toward us. I didn’t need to see a name badge to see supervisor written all over the guy. Nor did it take a genius to realize we were moments away from being evicted.
“Sir, we’re here to check out the properties,” Rose explained, cool and brisk. She stepped into the man’s path and he obligingly stopped.
Rebel Boy adjusted himself and spat. He tossed a hammer idly in his hand, most of his attention on the scene unfolding a few feet away. Were we going to be fined? Thrown in jail? Fired? Shit, shit, shit.
I blinked while turning my head. The world spun toward my feet. I staggered, clutching my mouth to hold in vomit. Color rushed into the world, and I found myself staring at a gelatinous lugie. I sucked in air and blinked again, swallowing convulsively. I tripped when the world made an unexpected duck left. When my head cleared, I realized my hand was touching something warm. I looked up into the eyes of Rebel Boy.
“Oh! I’m so sorry! I’m not usually this clumsy,” I said, feeling a blush rush to my cheeks. I stepped quickly back. Behind me I could hear Rose arguing with the supervisor. I stared at the imp attached to the boy’s arm and grimaced. Just do it, Dice! I pushed lux lucis into my hands and grabbed the imp. It imploded the moment I touched it, and my hands flared brightly, out of control. Before I could think about it, I dropped to a crouch and grabbed, two-handed, for the imps on his calves. They imploded and I quickly released the excess light.
“What the fuck are you doing, lady?” Rebel Boy demanded, scuttling backward.
I blinked, steadied myself against the ground, then slowly stood. Rose was calling to me. The supervisor was shouting. I met Rebel Boy’s eyes. He looked scared, and I was suddenly aware of how crazy I must have looked lurching at the air around his body.
“I, uh, I—” I turned and escaped toward the scowling supervisor and Rose. “We’re leaving, sir. I’m so sorry to have troubled you.” I grabbed Rose’s elbow and trotted her along with me. “Won’t happen again,” I called over my shoulder.
Rose jerked her arm out of my hand when we were halfway down the hill.
“Who do you think you are? The karate kid? What were you doing back there?” Rose demanded.
“He had imps on him. Did I look totally crazy?”
Rose paused in the middle of the construction road and mimicked my slicing motions through the air, throwing in a kick or two that I hadn’t.
“Not here! They can see you.”
“They already saw your smooth moves, girl,” Rose said, laughing. I tried to get her moving again, but she started chopping the air around me. “It was like you were grabbing at flies or something. Whoo-eee, Madison! You’re a riot!”
The adrenaline tapered off, and even though I was blushing hot enough to break a sweat, I giggled. Rose started walking, but every time I stopped laughing, she hacked the air around us, making us laugh all over again.
We were almost to the car when she stopped chuckling. Shaking her head, she said, “You can never trust an alpaca.”
“Excuse me?”
“The supervisor. He’s going to die, trampled by alpaca.”
“What? Why would you say that?”
“I get these feelings.”
“You get feelings about how people will die?”
“Sure. It’s sort of a hobby of mine. I can predict people’s deaths.”
“Accurately?”
Rose frowned. “Of course.”
I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. I pictured Rose sneaking into morgues and memorial services, double-checking on people whose deaths she’d foreseen.
“Is that something all empaths can do?”
“Doubt it. The other deaths weren’t as obvious. Took a little time, but the boy you were scaring with your cha-cha skills will die bungee-jumping, choking on his gum. The other ones were boring: tree felling gone wrong, mob hit, and avalanche.”
“How is an alpaca trampling obvious?” A heart attack would have been my guess for the supervisor, if his girth and temper were anything to go by.
“Trust me, once you’ve met an alpaca owner, you’ll recognize the next. That guy is hip deep in alpaca farming, but he’d get out if he had any sense.”
I didn’t even want to ask what crazy deaths she’d predicted to think that a mob hit was boring. That sounded like a bizarre way to go, the type of death reserved for cinematic characters, not real people.
Since we’d reached my car, and the conversation had veered into uncomfortable territory, I decided to change the subject. “You know, that would have gone a lot smoother if I’d had a wand thingy.” I envisioned the lux lucis–filled stick Doris had used the night before. Rather than lurching around Rebel Boy like a drunken grope gone wrong, I could have waved my wand, pretending to point with it, or something equally sly and in no way embarrassing.
“A what?”
“You know, a weapon.”
“I think your dangerous enough all by yourself.” Rose tossed a kick in the air, with a loud “Hee-yah!” then grabbed the open car door for stability.
“Not a real weapon,” I corrected with a grin. “A lux lucis one.”
&nbs
p; “Oh, you mean you need accessories. Let’s go shopping.” Rose gave me directions to a place at the end of Douglas Boulevard in Granite Bay that made “specialty items.”
The strip mall looked like an intercity transplant, not a shopping center in the most affluent zip code in the county. The stores had been built in the seventies and I doubted they had been repainted since. We bounced through uneven pavement to a parking space in front of a shop with the creative name Accessories and More. The windows were barred with wrought iron, the door had a cage of metal on it, and there was more neon in the window than five bars combined. Everything about the place screamed “Go Away, Come In.”
The interior of the shop was dim and packed so tight that we couldn’t walk two abreast down the aisles. Everything from cell phones to purses to gum to watches was crammed haphazardly on metal shelving units usually reserved for mini-marts and gas stations. The white tile floor was smudged gray and the pattern was worn away from the door to the counter. The store had probably opened with the shopping center, and nothing inside except merchandise had been moved since.
There were no other customers, and all the other vehicles in the parking lot were bunched two doors down in front of the liquor store.
“Musad, Muhamad,” Rose called to two men standing behind a glass-case counter that doubled as the register.
“Rose. So good to see you,” one of the men said. They were twins. The one on the left wore a red shirt, the one on the right wore a striped orange and black shirt, but otherwise, they were a mirror image of each other, both with thick black hair that was losing the battle against gray, rounded beer bellies, and dark skin. When they smiled at Rose, even their movements and mannerisms were identical.
“Who have you brought with you?” the man in the orange and black shirt asked.
“Fellas, this is Madison Fox. She’s our new IE.” My eyebrows shot up. Was I the only person in Roseville who didn’t know about illuminant enforcers? Maybe the secret society I’d been initiated into wasn’t a secret at all. Maybe I was just the last person to find out.
A Fistful of Evil: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 1) Page 10