Sensational Six: Action and Adventure in Sci Fi, Fantasy and Paranormal Romance

by Sasha White

  The so-called music being perpetrated on stage was still rudimentary at best and pretty awful at worst. However, it was loud and it did have a beat. A beat the dragon’s wings were flapping to.

  “Count, I think the dragon was attracted by the music that’s being played, the Gods and Monsters alone know why. It doesn’t seem aggressive. The humans on the ground do, any time the music stops, but they haven’t noticed our visitor in the air.”

  “Yet,” Sexy Cindy said.

  “Suggestions, Agent Wolfe?” the Count asked. “I share your junior agent’s views that the noticing, on either side, is just a matter of time. And while I would prefer not to offend Samael or those whom he watches over, I would prefer not to have a dragon running amok even more.”

  “There’s no amoking from the dragon at this precise time, Count.”

  “There will be unless steps are taken. Steps I feel you should be taking, Agent Wolfe. You are the one who called the dragon in.”

  “Yes, yes, on it. I just…the dragon’s not doing anything wrong, Count. The humans might, at least if the music stops for any length of time, but the dragon’s just…enjoying the music.”

  “Your unwillingness to arrest a law abiding citizen of the Draconian Plane is duly noted. Does the Chief of Police share your views?”

  “Crap. I need to check in or we’ll have all of the Night Beat here in riot gear.”

  “We’ve got a dragon in the skies,” Sexy Cindy said. “All of Prosaic City P.D. and all of Necropolis Enforcement should be here in riot gear. Right now.”

  “Maybe.” Or maybe not. The base of my tail felt that the dragon was far more normal than the crowd’s reaction to the music. “Count, while we should be on alert, I’d rather have specialists than dragon removal at this time, if that’s okay with you.”

  “I unlive to serve, Agent Wolfe. Who are you requesting?”

  “Aerial support, but the kind that won’t cause the dragon to worry.” Angels made dragons worry for some reason, possibly because angels were immune to dragon fire. “I mean, have a dragon cleanup team standing by, but I’d like to see if we can deal with our visitor without undue force.”

  The Count sighed. “Has Samael visited you recently?”

  “No, why?” The Ruler of Draconia wasn’t one of my regular gentleman callers, so to speak, and never had been.

  “No reason, I’m sure. I’ll ask Agents V-Seventeen-Seventy-Five and V-Seventeen-Seventy-Six to join you. Anyone else?”

  “I think we need Merc and L.K. This is a musically based issue, or at least appears to be.”

  “Do you want heavier hitters than our Tour Bus staff?”

  “Not yet.” Sure, Merc and L.K. still ran the Bus, but they were now annexed into Necropolis Enforcement under the Specialized Assets Division. “I’ll let you know if we need to bring them in, or Merc or L.K. will.”

  “Your reinforcements are advised and should be to you shortly.”

  “Thanks, Count.” Once the Count had disconnected I called dispatch. “Darlene, what’s the word from the uniforms?”

  “Have not heard from any uniformed officers at the scene since they called for backup, Detective Wolfe. What’s the word from you?”

  As I’d recently learned, Darlene and the Chief were both aware that Prosaic City resided on the human plane essentially right on top of Necropolis on the undead plane. They were among a select few humans who did.

  Normally I’d have worried about regular humans hearing my discussions with my superior officer and police dispatch. But it was clear that those around me were listening to one thing only – the sounds of bad music.

  “Believe we have a spell of some kind. Necropolis personnel seem unaffected.” I looked up. The dragon was still bobbing to the beat. “We have a visitor from very far away who’s also enjoying the music scene here.”

  “Do we want to know?” Darlene asked.

  “Not really. We don’t think we need reinforcements yet.”

  “Okay, call if you change your mind.”

  We hung up and Ralph nudged me. “If the so-called musicians stop playing for too long, we’re going to need help.”

  No sooner were these words out of his mouth than the song did indeed end. The crowd turned ugly again.

  “Hey,” the boy on the stage said, sounding uncertain. “Thanks so much, everyone. But, if it’s okay with all of you, Cleo and I would kind of like to take a break now.”

  The crowd surged a little closer. Ralph nudged me again as we surged with the crowd, which isn’t as easy to do as it sounds, at least, not if a being wants to stay on their paws. “Look up,” he said urgently.

  I did as requested. The dragon was no longer flapping and bobbing happily. I wasn’t really up on dragon expressions, but it, like everyone else, didn’t look happy.

  Werewolves can jump high and far, and I chose to do both. My first leap got me over the wrought iron fencing. My second got me out of the crowd, and to the steps that led up into the gazebo. There were all of five of them, so I chose to jump those, too.

  Normally someone jumping like this would have awed or frightened the humans who saw it. No one so much as blinked. They were all too busy demanding that the music start again.

  “Prosaic City Police,” I said to the musicians. “Start playing again. Now.”

  “Linus and I only know five songs,” Cleo said rather plaintively.

  “We’re not that good,” Linus said, earning this moment’s understatement of the year. “I don’t understand why they like us so much.”

  “I don’t either, but they do. You start playing, we’ll continue chatting.”

  “We’ve played each song we know at least ten times,” Cleo said, as a lick of flame hit the ground near the gazebo.

  Clearly the dragon wanted another encore, too. Rethinking my “no dragon wranglers” mindset seemed like it might be wise.

  “Go for eleven, because if you don’t, I think we’re all dead.”

  Chapter 4

  Linus and Cleo did as requested. “Why are you two here?” I asked them.

  “We came to make our fortune,” Cleo said. I looked at them more closely. They were younger than I’d first guessed.

  “Where from?”

  “Kansas,” Linus replied. “It’s hard to make it as a band there.”

  “There are two of you. That makes you a duo, not a band.”

  “There used to be more of us,” Cleo said. “But the others didn’t want to leave home.”

  Probably because it would have kept them out past their bedtimes. “How old are the two of you? And please don’t lie. We police of Prosaic City don’t like lying, and we’re really good at spotting it.” Werewolves can normally smell when beings are lying, which is a great advantage.

  They looked at each other but to their credit, they didn’t stop playing. “We’re both twenty-one,” Linus said.

  I snorted. “Don’t try to pull my tail, kid. I put you both at no more than eighteen.”

  “Linus just turned nineteen,” Cleo said defensively.

  “Excellent. So, the other members of your ‘band’ are underage, right?” They looked at each other again, then nodded. “So, the two of you decided to try to make it here, under the idea that if you could, you could make it anywhere?” More nods. “You’re aware that New York, Nashville, or Los Angeles are considered the smarter choices?”

  Linus sighed. “Yeah, but Prosaic City’s where my –”

  “Why are you asking us questions?” Cleo interrupted. “We haven’t done anything wrong.” She shot Linus a look that clearly said “shut up”.

  “I’m a police officer. As such, I get to ask questions of whomever I want and they get to answer. It’s a fun job. So, why are you here, and by here I now mean specifically on this sort-of-stage?”

  “Oh,” Linus said. “Well, we were trying to make a little money, you know, playing on the street kind of thing.”

  “We don’t need a license for that, do we?” Cleo asked worriedl
y.

  “Not usually. This is not the street, however.”

  “Yeah, well, we started to play on the street and people surrounded us,” Linus said. “We sort of got shoved over here, and once we were on the grass and had so many people listening, we figured they could hear us better if we were here.”

  “And we figured they couldn’t trample us as easily, either,” Cleo added. She looked around. “How are we going to get out of here?”

  There were a lot of rules in law enforcement – never leave your partner behind, try to remember to read the perp their rights, a good donut shop is a treasure to be protected – but never admitting ignorance or a lack of control of the situation were the biggies. “I’ll handle that,” I said with confidence I didn’t actually feel. “I still want answers, kids.”

  “We told you what you wanted to know,” Cleo said.

  “Not really. I’d like Linus to finish explaining who he’s come here to find.”

  Linus looked guilty and Cleo looked worried and protective. “Our fortunes, we told you,” she said before he could speak, as the rest of my team finally reached the gazebo. Decided I’d ask what had kept them later.

  “Right. Let me be clear. I and the other officers with me are well within our rights to arrest both of you. Public performances of this size do demand a license, and, normally, a different venue. You’re also the cause, as near as I can tell, of a huge riot, or what will be a riot if you two stop playing. As such, I want an answer, and I want it now.” I allowed a little growl to enter my tone with the last few words. Werewolf growls hit humans right in the soft, squishy parts, and for good reason.

  Both of them gulped. Linus looked at Cleo. She grimaced. Neither one spoke.

  Sexy Cindy joined us up on the stage while Ralph and Freddy stayed on the grass, ostensibly on guard. She rolled her eyes. “Look, we get it. You’re runaways and you don’t want to go back to the crap-hole you ran away from. You’re finally in the big city and you don’t want to leave.”

  “How –” Linus said.

  “Shut up,” Cleo said through clenched teeth and under her breath. Linus immediately closed his mouth. It wasn’t taking great deductive reasoning to figure out who was the one in charge in the relationship.

  “You’re both in love and no one else understands,” Sexy Cindy went on. “They want you to go to school and get degrees and make something of yourselves, instead of understanding how your love is the love of the ages, and your music is in your souls, and if you just had a chance you’d show the world.” She sounded bored and like she’d heard this tale a hundred times. She probably had. Teenaged runaways made up a huge part of the street hustler population in every city.

  The kids stared at her. “Wow,” Linus said finally. “It’s like you can read our minds.”

  “No, it’s like you’re not original or new or different,” Sexy Cindy replied. “Trust me, I been there.” She looked at me. “I say we take them in and question them at the station.”

  “Great plan.” I chose not to ask her just how she thought we’d manage this plan. As the senior officer on the scene, it was pretty much incumbent upon me to figure that out.

  “It might be better if we moved off all these humans first.” Amanda Darling, vampire, and my best friend, joined us from out of nowhere. Well, it seemed like out of nowhere, particularly to Linus and Cleo. At least I took them both jumping and dropping their instruments to mean they were startled.

  “Pick those up and keep playing,” I barked. The kids did as ordered.

  “Vicki, darling, why so tense? Too much caffeine?” Maurice Darling, Amanda’s brother, flounced into view. Maurice was gay and he really relished playing up the gay vampire stereotypes to their limits.

  “Too much fun up in the friendly skies. And this music sucks, no offense, kids.”

  “I’d agree with you if we didn’t have all those people rocking out,” Linus said. “We’re normally a lot better, but these aren’t our instruments. We were mugged when we got here and they took everything, including my guitar and Cleo’s drum set.”

  “You ran away from home with a drum set?” Amanda sounded like she’d now heard everything. Maurice and Sexy Cindy both had “kids these days” expressions on their faces. Vampires had excellent hearing, and both Maurice and Amanda were pros at the whole turn-to-mist-and-back-again thing, so I presumed they’d been listening longer than they’d been seen.

  “Yes. It was a small set, on wheels. And we were mugged at the bus station,” Cleo added. “There weren’t any cops there.”

  I chose to ignore her implication and her choice of what to take with her on the road. Because what Linus had said begged further inspection. “If these aren’t your instruments, where did you get them?”

  “A nice man saw us getting mugged,” Cleo said. “He gave them to us, so we could try to earn money.”

  The rest of us exchanged a look. The same look. The “there’s no way we have someone that kind in this town, especially since we have a dragon in the skies” look.

  “That settles it. We need to get them to the station, now.”

  “Why?” Cleo asked, sounding panicked. “We didn’t steal these!”

  “No one in their right mind would steal those, I grant you. We need you to sit down with a sketch artist and describe the nice man who gave them to you. So we can find him and thank him for his generosity.”

  Linus and Cleo exchanged another look. He cleared his throat. “Okay. But…how are we going to get there without, um, the crowd kind of…killing us?”

  Everyone, not just the kids, looked at me. Fortunately, I’d been giving this some thought. “Simple. You two keep on playing. Maurice, you take Cleo, Amanda, you take Linus. Fly them slowly out of here.”

  “Doing the pied piper thing may not work in our favor,” Maurice said. “The humans seem rather mindless. There are enough of them to take down a few of the buildings.”

  Amanda nodded. “The crowd’s bigger than when you arrived. I checked with Ralph on the way in, and he said the crowd hadn’t reached outside the Cultural District when you got here. Now it’s spilled into the streets surrounding us.”

  “Well then, I’m open to ideas.”

  “Why don’t you have the dragon scare everyone away?” Cleo asked.

  We all stared at her. “Excuse me?” I managed.

  “There’s a dragon,” Cleo said earnestly. “In the sky. We saw it. It was one of the reasons we decided to come in here.”

  “So the dragon could, what, burn you in style?” Maurice asked. “It’s a wooden structure, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “Yeah, we noticed,” Linus said. “Um, you two flew in here. And she,” he nodded his head towards me, “jumped like no human could ever do. You’re the only ones who aren’t acting like we’re playing the best music in the world. So, I figure you have to be something other than human.”

  “And you didn’t deny that there’s a dragon,” Cleo added.

  “You’re right, we didn’t. Before we do anything else, I want the answer you both keep on trying to avoid giving me. Just who here are you trying to find? Tell me, or we take those instruments, and we all fly away, and you get left here in the middle of the riot.”

  Cleo’s eyes narrowed. “You said you were a cop. Cops aren’t supposed to do things like that.”

  I allowed my fangs to grow, just a little. Maurice and Amanda followed my lead. Cleo’s eyes widened. Linus went pale. Time for us to play Bad Cops. Ralph and Freddy could be Good Cops, if we needed them.

  “We are cops,” I said, with much menace in my tone. “We’re also tired of asking nicely. And we’re all a little hungry since you’ve made us miss our donut break.”

  “M-my older brother,” Linus said quickly.

  “Does this older brother have a name?” Linus looked like he didn’t want to tell me. So did Cleo. I did the low growl thing. “I want your brother’s name, first and last, and I want it now.”

  Linus heaved a sigh. “Elvis
. Elvis Presley.”

  Chapter 5

  We all stared. I couldn’t speak for the others, but I was doing simple math in my head. “There’s no way.”

  Linus looked pained. “Not the Elvis Presley. We’re no relation. But my parents were big fans and our last name is Presley.” He grimaced. “My older sisters’ names are Priscilla and Lisa Marie.”

  “How did they get Linus?” Amanda asked.

  “They liked Peanuts, too. I have younger sisters named Sally and Lucy.”

  My birth name was Eudora, so I could relate to parents making terrible naming decisions. But I chose not to share that with Linus and Cleo at this precise time. “I get why you felt running away was a good plan.”

  Cleo shook her ratty tambourine a little harder. “We didn’t run away. We’re adults. We left town to pursue our fortunes.”

  “Right, right. Pardon me.” A thought occurred and I looked around. “You know, I requested more backup. Where are Merc and L.K.?”

  Maurice shrugged. “They took in the scene, shared that there was a powerful spell at work, and said they were going to start a counter spell. We’re still waiting for that to take effect.”

  “So we’re stuck here until your friends figure out what to do?” Cleo asked. “You’re not very good at your jobs, are you?”

  “Can I kick her ass?” Sexy Cindy asked. “One of you can take over shaking that tambourine off beat while I do it, I’m sure.”

  “No. In part because you have to appreciate someone who can mouth off to all of us without wetting herself.” I sniffed. Neither Linus nor Cleo smelled undead. They both smelled stressed and scared, but not undead. They also didn’t smell like minions, which, all things considered, was nice and something of a relief.

  Ralph and Freddy joined us on stage. It was a big gazebo but it was getting crowded. “Merc just called,” Ralph said. “They’re starting their counter-spell. Expectations are that it’ll take effect and draw the people away.”

  “They want us to get out of here the moment the crowd’s attention’s on them,” Freddy added. “I know vamps are strong, but I don’t know that Maurice and Amanda can carry all of us.”