by A. J. Aalto
I frowned after him, listening to the soft pad of his Oxfords descending the stairs. I took my mostly-uneaten oatmeal to the compost bin and scraped the bowl, bracing for the cold chill that snagged my belly whenever Harry fell to rest. It took him a few minutes of settling in and getting comfortable, and feeling me out through the Bond to make sure I was all right, and then he died. Everybody’s always dying on me, I thought bitterly. The absence of him in my veins was like being repeatedly two-finger punched in the chubbybubbles.
I popped into my day-off clothes, which were pretty much the same as my work clothes; basic black, head-to-toe, with a hoodie to keep my neck warm. Throwing some clean workout clothes in my gym bag, I tossed it into the hall. I turned the TV on briefly in passing to listen to the weather forecast – cold with a chance of mixed precipitation. Blerg. Pausing in the bathroom once more, I applied burn salve to my neck, which was just Harry’s revenant nectar and Fijian tamanu oil whipped with Vaseline for staying power. I wound a light cover of gauze gently over it so as not to choke, and repeated the treatment on the bite wound on my right forearm, trying not to be emotionally triggered by either. Every time something welled up, I stubbornly brushed it away to focus on Harry’s wishes: Don’t cause the sheriff more collywobbles. I’d try very hard not to. Especially once I figured out what the fancy fuck collywobbles were.
I did a safety check of my gun and tucked it in its hard case, deciding it needed to go in the trunk; rolling up on the Lambert Country Sheriff's Department armed like a gunslinger didn’t sound like a bright idea, even if it was only Rob’s place. He had a new chief deputy who wouldn’t know me on sight, and two new deputies besides. I didn’t need to get shot on my day off. I hadn't enjoyed it when I'd gotten shot and stabbed on the job, either, though.
I double-checked the new security system I’d had installed when we came back from Svikheimslending. There were cameras on the yard, sensors on each ground floor window, and monitors in my office, bedroom, and Harry’s room, where we had also installed a fireproof door with a big security bar. We were counting on the iron door if I was away from home during Harry’s VK-Delta rest and someone broke into the cabin.
The problem was, the control panel was right beside the doorway to my home office. The room was, Harry said, a disaster, a whirlwind of scraps of paper and coupons and half-consumed Sudoku books. There were worse things in the room, though, and worst of all was a sweet, dark river of temptation emanating from my herb cabinet; the sensation had begun the night we returned home from the revenant seat of power at Skulesdottir. Sometimes, when I sat at my desk, I could feel the power stir to life as if it tasted me nearby, and I tasted it. I knew the source, of course: Ruby Valli’s black-magic grimoire.
You don’t know it’s all black magic, a papery whisper cajoled, and there was a yank in the front of my brain that caused a tickle so sharp I had to slap at my forehead like a mosquito had alighted and was going to nail me for a snack. Maybe she started with basic kitchen witchery. Maybe there are healing spells that could stave off the lycanthropy virus. Are you going to go Full Fox because you’re too stubborn and uppity to peek inside and maybe put a stop to it?
This time, I slapped my cheek, hard. There was nothing in that book for me. Touching it would be a crime. Even considering the possibility of touching it was making all my alarm bells ring; the problem was, those bells were getting dangerously dim. It felt so good to startle Buddy yesterday, didn’t it? That look on his face as he ran from you. Delicious. The fear when you hurt him, the power when you took it. The surprise when he’d realized he’d underestimated you. He ran. And then, most dangerously yet, that papery whisper suggested, They should all run from you. The temptation was a sweet purl in my veins like lust, hot and thick and promising satisfaction deeper than I’d ever felt. No, that was a lie. I'd felt lust that deeply, giving Harry quarry to chase through the forest. I shivered with something the polar opposite of cold, and briefly lamented that Harry was at rest and couldn't enjoy the memory though our Bond. Asmodeus, I'm sure, was somewhere in hell, smirking, and maybe having something unspeakable happen underneath his leather kilt. How do you like them bremelanotide apples, Three-Face?
I got the immediate and very clear impression he liked them quite a bit, which, all things considered, really shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. Blerg. I reminded myself, not for the first time, Don't invite the demon voyeur into the bedroom, dumbass.
I took a deep breath in through my nose and acknowledged that temptation was coming from a place of vulnerability and helplessness; on a long exhale through pursed lips, I resolved to remain strong against it. Setting all the beeps and buzzers on the alarm, I stepped back from the office and shrugged into my leather jacket before grabbing my gun case and gym bag and locking the cabin up tight.
The day was cold but bright, and the snow in the sunniest patches had begun to melt. I paused to shoot Ajax the debt vulture a considering look, turning away from the sun and to the west where the forest was still blanketed in shadow. The big bird did not react to my attention, and never had. His bald head was tucked down to his chest and both wings were hugged up tight, not against the cold or the chill wind, but against the press of the daytime hours until his quarry, my Harry, would revive and be of interest. I wondered if he preferred being alone, now that Wesley’s vulture, Homer, had followed him north. Debitum naturea were a preternatural creature, and did not flock together in a wake or kettle as other vultures did. The icy morning wind ruffled his neck feathers but did not disturb his rest. He'd been on the job for hundreds of years, waiting to collect Harry's soul, and had probably seen the worst weather imaginable; a random Rocky Mountain Tuesday was no great shakes.
The sun was rising behind me. I did a quick scan for any of the carrion beetles or spitting carrion spiders that usually followed the undead and their debt vultures; the colonies were usually large and teeming and easy to spot, especially against fresh snow. My shadow stretched winter-long before me as expected, but forked in two, the left half dancing off crazy and wiggly, the right half slumped over like a flaccid dick. Since I was pretty sure I wasn't doing either of those things, much less both of them, I managed to notice something weird was afoot.
“Ummm, hey ladies? Gals? You two broads gonna…” I nudged the shadowed snow with the tip of my boot. I closed my eyes and looked again. Still forked. I moved to get into the Buick and glanced behind me. The forked shadow followed, of course; one half capering madly, the other slouching. I felt my lips pucker sourly, and said to my audience of no one, “Well, that can’t be good.” I tried to remember which shadow was cast by which aspect of the self, and what caused them to fragment, but it was all a jumble, and I wasn't sure which one looked more like I felt, so that wasn't giving me any clues.
I drove carefully, choosing to focus on the road rather than the odd development with my shadow. It didn’t take a genius to realize that I’d done something stupid, and since the first thing that popped to mind — using black witchcraft to magic missile a pair of scissors into some jackass' glutes — seemed the likely culprit, I couldn’t ask anyone about it. The answer is in Ruby Valli’s grimoire, I thought, and immediately dismissed the persistent temptation. The damn book squirmed; what was written on those pages was not meant for people like me. Isn’t it? Didn’t you inherit it, like you inherited Harry? Would it be wise to turn your back on so much knowledge?
I turned the radio on and hit the preset for the local pop station, and jacked the volume up, letting Nicki Minaj reassure me that the night was still young, and so were we. When the radio offered What Does the Fox Say?, I poked it off and drove the rest of the way accompanied by the hiss and yowl of my winter tires on the Colorado slush. “Not funny, Universe,” I muttered, possibly answering Ylvis' question.
The cool, early sun sliced between the mountain tops as the road wound up and down. I came out of a tunnel and the light stabbed at my eyes. I flipped down the visor as I passed the Ten Springs sign, population: 540. I
remembered Golden taunting, “541” after Batten moved to Waterdown Avenue. Not anymore, I thought bitterly.
Main Street was dead quiet this early; the only lights on were the quaint street lamps and the utilitarian-but-practical LED fixtures at the sheriff’s office, a squat brown building directly across from the Indian Gourmet and Saloon, and Bobbi-Sue’s Classi Hair where my hairdresser, Clarice, worked. I pulled into the police lot and parked in the middle, away from the slushy puddles that dotted the perimeter.
Jill, the blonde dispatch lady in front of the long plate glass window, wore many hats in the small sheriff’s department; in between calls, she logged me and my weapon in, checking it carefully; gave me a very unnecessary visitor’s badge, as she never failed to do; pointed to the right, down a hall that I’d been down a hundred times before; and let me know she’d tell Sheriff Hood I was in when he got there. She also held up a finger at me, pressed a button, said, “How many, Greg? Five? Are they rowdy? Just digging? Okay, I’ll give Jeffries a shout and he’ll send someone around.” She rolled her eyes after she hung up. “Dog trouble. Not our problem. Can’t have this guy call Animal Control himself, though, can I?” She sighed. “Can I do anything else for you, Marnie?”
“Nah.” I started to go, but returned to lean on the counter for a moment. She paused in the act of digging something out of her desk drawer, looking busted.
The Blue Sense reported her guilt, so I guessed, “Cigarette?” She shook her head and showed me a half-eaten chocolate bar with the wrapper peeled back. Kit Kat. She offered me one of the sticks, miming that she’d snap me off one. I smiled and shook my head. “If you’re cheating on your diet, your secret is safe with me.”
“Rob’s helping keep me on track,” she said.
“So you’re cheating on Sheriff Hood with chocolate. Been there.” We shared dirty smirks of conspiracy. “Your new chief deputy happen to be in?”
Her eyes lit up. “Oh, he’s always early. Probably in the locker room. He jogs here instead of driving.” She added, as if I’d ever need to know, “Windham Street. That new apartment complex.”
“He ran in this crap?” I wrinkled my nose and looked out the window, where the clouds had rolled in again, and the sky was starting to spit horrid, frosty splotches of wet snow. “It’s cold and gross. Nothing sucks like wet sneakers. Or stinks like 'em.”
“Well,” she allowed with a twinkle in her eye, “if you’re going to keep up his kind of physique, I figure you have to be very active.” She ate the rest of the Kit Kat and licked her fingers, giving me the know-what-I-mean-girl eyelash flutter and pursed lip combo as she tossed her trash into the bin.
I didn't need any Talents to pick up what she was laying down. Carb-loading for some naked, horizontal cardio was very much on Jill's mind, even without any kind of suggestive positioning of the candy bar. Damn, girl. I had to see this guy.
That thought apparently wasn't as inside-voice as I'd hoped, because she sang under her breath, “He’s not married…”
I pointed at her but didn’t say anything. She fished out a second Kit Kat with a wicked giggle and peeled it open. “I’m telling on you,” I hissed at her and then ducked down the hall.
Jill laughed merrily behind me, and I found myself smiling broadly for the first time in a long while on my way past the offices and into the ill-heated garage that served as a workout room. The smile felt good. My step was lighter. Taking a left out the back, I found myself in the tacked-on building that housed a three-booth shooting range and put my gun case on the bench. It was colder back here than in the main building, and the ventilation wasn’t great, so the room smelled faintly of rubber and the cheap, padded carpeting slabs in front of the booths, as well as gunpowder and the shooter's sweat that was present no matter how good the airflow might be.
Typically, the police range was off-limits to visitors, but Hood had made an exception for me, since driving an hour to Boulder, where the FBI’s Preternatural Crimes Unit was housed, wasn’t always practical. I'd offered to plink off rounds towards the lake from my back porch, but that had elicited enough side-eye from Harry and Hood to start a landslide. Hood probably rules-lawyered some paperwork, since I could technically have been considered a government agency sub-contractor after I quit the PCU, even though I wasn't on his staff. Chapel maintained my office space in the bowels of their facility in the hope of luring me back, I guess. I hadn't returned since Batten's fatal hunting fail, and hoped that somebody had remembered to water my plants and feed my bugs.
I stopped in the process of grabbing a set of ear protection muffs. A hunting fail. That’s all it was. It was bound to happen eventually. He couldn’t have had success every single day for his whole life. It was a massive miscalculation, but he had it coming. You play with the dead, you’re gonna fall to the fang. It was inevitable that one day he’d hunt prey that was beyond his skill to take down. Somehow, seeing it like that made it seem more reasonable. It was a mistake, and it was dumb; I couldn’t get around how dumb had been. But he was only human. Humans made mistakes. Batten had made a mistake. It was a tiny change in how I was thinking of it, but I felt a kernel of something like forgiveness. Huh. Imagine that. I spun the earmuffs around my finger and approached a booth.
“Hold up, hold up,” a man called out, his voice echoing with uncertain command in the cement block of a room. I turned to watch a lean figure hustle over, wrestling to finish pulling on a white t-shirt with the Ten Springs Sheriff's Office crest on the chest. The collar was apparently hung up on his close-cropped hair and one of his ears, giving me a few moments to admire some seriously washboard abs, set off beautifully by their contrast with his t-shirt.
He was shaking his free hand, which stuck out of one sleeve like the neck of a Canada goose looking for a fight with the guy who had taken the last bread crust at the pond. As his head popped free, he shook it in negation. “This isn’t a public shooting range, ma’am.”
I flashed back on the day Agent Golden tried to shoo me from my new office at the Preternatural Crimes Unit, and tried to use my people skills to make this go slightly smoother than that had. “But I’m Marnie Baranuik, so it’s okay.” I probably needed to talk to Elian some more to get them back up to speed, because, oof.
He blinked at me uncomprehendingly and gave another slow shake of his head. He had a severe chin and strong jaw, but soft hazel eyes that looked as if they were constantly at risk of lighting with laughter. In sunglasses, he probably looked intimidating and stern; without them, he reminded me of Damon Wayans, Jr. or Michael B. Jordan, like he could only maintain super-serious for so long before breaking into silliness. Suddenly, I could see him as a long, wiry stoat, hypnotizing his prey with goofy antics. That made me the bunny rabbit. I didn’t wanna be the bunny rabbit. I was, I reminded myself, a bad-ass. I needed to bring the new guy up to speed, now that he wasn't losing a wrestling match with a t-shirt.
“They didn’t tell you about me?” I asked. When he continued his blank stare, I became offended. “I’ve heard about you twice already, and no one in this two-bit cop shop mentioned me at all? I’m Sir Marnie of Toots, dammit, and I earned that title. The Great White Shark? The harbinger of the Trollpocalypse?” I made come-at-me-bro motions with my arms open. “Check it: Litenvecht Späckkenhuggar, Stretch.”
He did a skeptical but concerned double-take; it would have been comical if it hadn’t been insulting. “Ma’am, do you need me to call you an ambulance?”
“I’m not having a seizure,” I said. “Jill didn’t tell you about me? Rob? Deputy Eric? What about the little guy who looks like Justin Timberlake in his two-sizes-too-big Stetson? None of them said anything?” I made a disgusted, injured noise in my throat. “I’ve been in lockup twice. I mean, I’m not a criminal. But…” I popped the earmuffs up on my head, leaving my ears uncovered. “I’m known.”
He held up his hands placatingly, but also subtly taking up some of the space between us. “I don't know,” he said, doubt coloring his voice.
“You were at my office yesterday, macking on my office manager, from what I heard. Breaking and entering? Scissors in a guy's ass?”
A glimmer of recognition kindled, and he smiled faintly, probably thinking about Maim, but he took another couple of steps towards me, his hands coming away from his body in a gesture I'd seen Hood employ during our grappling sessions. Did he think he was going to have to restrain me? “What’s with the get-up?” he asked, giving my hoodie a skeptical review. “You robbing a bank on your way out of town?”
“Could if I wanted to,” I retorted. Not my best comeback, under the circumstances, and it showed in the confused quirk of his brows. Also, with only one bank in Ten Springs, it wasn't exactly an obscure target.
“Not if I stop you,” he said, sounding equally lame. It pleased me in its lack of reach. He paired it with a ridiculous little neck wriggle that jogged his head back and forth.
I mirrored the neck jog while I looked him up and down; his was a lightweight boxer’s physique, lean and deceptive. “Think you’re all that, eh?”
The quick double pump of his shoulders said, pretty much. He cut his eyes towards the front desk; apparently, he'd picked up on Jill's opinion of his bod. Just once, I'd like to meet a hot guy who didn't already believe the hype.
I rolled my own shoulders to loosen them up. He kept a wary eye on me, and took a half step towards where my gun case sat on the shooter's bench. The Blue Sense said he still wasn't convinced that I belonged here and might still be a threat. I had to think of some way to de-escalate things before he slapped the cuffs on me and made me perp-walk to the holding cells, or, worse, to the front desk, where Jill would laugh at me.
“I'm not some kind of Terminator, here to mow down everyone and drop snazzy one-liners. I just want to get some time on the range. So how about we make a deal, Deputy Dude; if you can best me in single combat, I'll fuck off.” I gave him my brightest smile, which, under the hazy fluorescent lights, probably came off as moderately unhinged.