All in all, money looked like the only incentive.
“What’s in it for you?” I asked.
“Respect.” His sigh gusted harsh across the phone receiver. When he spoke again, his voice escalated in volume, and I held the phone from my ear to spare my eardrum. “If I had a bigger region, people might stop stuffing their heads up their own Jolly Ranchers when I enter the room. Do you think I like working out of taffy turd offices like our new headquarters? Having every acquisition request denied by rote? I swear the CIA has a butterscotch-blasted ‘denied’ stamp with my name on it. I’m sick and tired of it.” He paused, then added, softer, “I’ve been living under the shadow of my past long enough.”
A week ago, Brad wouldn’t have been this forthright with me, but that was before I’d saved his life and our region. I’d earned the right to his trust, which included being told the truth about his past. At one time, Brad had been in charge of the largest, most coveted region in California, but when one of his enforcers had gone rogue and another died, he’d been demoted to our scrap of a region in Roseville. From what I’d seen from his interactions with his peers, his reputation had taken an even larger hit.
Maybe his fall from grace should have alarmed me, but in the short time I’d worked for Brad, I’d come to trust him with my life. He’d hired me, a completely inexperienced enforcer, gotten me training, risked what remaining credibility he possessed to support me, and had done everything within his power to keep me safe. He’d never been anything but honest with me—often frustrated and overprotective and short-tempered, but always honest. He had recognized the evil in Isabel when no one else did. He had good instincts and the best interest of his region at heart.
I sighed, realizing I would have done everything in my power to make sure he got the regional expansion he wanted, raise or no raise. It was the least I could do.
“Are you sure impressing Pamela is our only option? What about being judged on past accomplishments?”
“This isn’t the time for jokes, Madison.”
“You haven’t seen me with a palmquell.”
“That was before you were properly motivated. Soul breakers aren’t cheap.”
“How not cheap are we talking?”
The sum he quoted dropped my jaw. “Are you going to spread that across three paychecks or four?”
“Two, if we keep this region.”
I did quick mental math of my potential new salary, and my mouth gaped again.
Not privy to my imitation of a dying fish, Brad drilled on. “Pay close attention to Doris tomorrow. Show Pamela you’ve got the drive and skills it takes to handle this region. Anything less, and we don’t stand a chance.”
No pressure.
I stumbled from bed the next morning, bleary-eyed and clumsy, almost trampling Jamie. Nothing about my apartment qualified as “spacious,” least of all the bedroom. I’d squeezed a full-size bed, narrow dresser, and tiny desk into its confines, along with enough plants to replenish my lux lucis twice over. Jamie’s circular, cushioned doggy bed took up the remaining space.
As was his habit, Jamie had transformed into a Great Dane before bedding down last night, and I’d tucked a fuzzy plaid blanket around him. He’d kicked the blanket off at some point, and he greeted the morning sprawled on his back, his hind legs braced against the side of my bed, his front curled against his chest. Ebony fur coated him from nose to tail, accentuating the fluffy gray-and-white ball of Dame Zilla curled against his neck.
Mr. Bond jumped from the bed, landed beside Jamie, pausing long enough to yowl in his face. Then he hopped over the pooka’s deep chest and trotted out the door, meowing louder than the beeps of the alarm clock. Dame Zilla’s head popped up and she chirped, stretched, and cantered after him. Jamie grinned, adding a soft whuff to the animal chorus.
Thus begins another day at the Fox household zoo.
“Put on some underwear before you come out,” I reminded him, heading for the bathroom.
After dressing in yesterday’s clothes straight from the dryer, we fed the cats, and Jamie got his first taste of the darker side of pet ownership when I designated him collector of litter box offerings. By the time he returned from the Dumpster, I had breakfast on the table: Greek yogurt, granola, and fresh berries—honest to goodness grown-up food. Too bad it didn’t taste like donuts.
I ate yogurt by the vat these days. Absorbing lux lucis from plants replenished any I expended, but consuming lux lucis increased my base level of power faster, or so Niko claimed. For food to retain its lux lucis, it had to be a raw plant or still living when it passed down my throat, like the probiotics in yogurt. I supposed any fermented food would work just as well, but I’d take yogurt over kimchi or sauerkraut any day.
I’d yet to see any results from my new and improved diet, but I could get behind a meal plan that didn’t require cooking.
Jamie pounced on his food with an enthusiasm I suspected he’d learned from Mr. Bond. The least picky eater I’d ever encountered, the pooka would consume dog food kibble and Brussels sprouts with equal delight, no matter what his current shape. The first time I’d witnessed him shoveling kibble into his human mouth with a spoon, I’d gagged and instituted a strict rule: People ate people food; dogs ate dog food. Jamie found my squeamishness perplexing but funny.
We ate in silence, accompanied by the crunching sounds of Mr. Bond and the rustle of Dame Zilla stalking through the jungle of plants crammed into my front room. I’d barely polished off my bowl of yogurt—and Jamie hadn’t finished inhaling his third helping—before a pounding rattled the front door. Padding across the carpet, I peered through the peephole. A black sleeping bag with arms and a white-haired perm bounced on my doorstep. I checked the microwave clock: 6:56. Early, as expected.
Snapping back the dead bolt, I opened the door. Frigid air swirled around my feet as Doris trotted in, and I slammed the door behind her.
“Well I’ll be damned. It’s true,” Doris said, staring at Jamie.
Jamie stared back, his hand hovering over his bowl, yogurt clinging to the fingers he’d been using to scoop out the remnants. At least he didn’t have his face in the bowl.
Doris whirled and slapped my arm hard enough to sting. “I leave for a few weeks and you get yourself bound to a pooka? You do move fast, girl. I thought for sure Brad was pulling my leg.”
Rubbing the pain from my bicep, I blinked to Primordium, relieved to see Jamie’s soul twirled with peaceful braids of lux lucis and atrum. So far, the only person to rile Jamie by sight alone had been Sharon, the creepy receptionist at our headquarters, which I secretly thought proved Jamie had good instincts.
“Hi, I’m Doris.” The retired enforcer strode to the table and extended her hand to Jamie. She didn’t exhibit fear or suspicion, which placed her a step above Summer and Pamela.
Jamie eyed the yogurt on his fingers, then made a lux lucis–coated fist and offered it to Doris. They bumped knuckles.
“I’m Jamie,” he said.
“I’m a simple woman, Jamie, so here’s the deal: If you don’t mess with me, I won’t mess with you, and we’ll get along great.”
“Deal,” Jamie said, showing off the granola in his teeth when he grinned.
Seeing they were capable of playing nice, I hustled to the bedroom to collect Val and our coats. The handbook spent his nights tucked safely away in the closet, well out of reach of Mr. Bond. Something about Val’s nature hit Mr. Bond’s senses like crack-laced catnip, and he would fixate on Val unless the handbook was out of sight. Dame Zilla wasn’t immune, either.
Sliding the closet door aside, I hit pause on the audiobook running on my laptop and lifted the earbuds from Val’s cover. After his initial hesitation to explore fiction, Val had developed a passion for fantasy and science fiction, and I had spent over a hundred dollars in audiobooks for him in the last few days. As soon as I got a chance, we were headed to the library, but in the meantime, providing the handbook with entertainment during the lonely nights see
med the least I could do for him. Plus, it had the added benefit of improving the grumpy book’s mood.
When I returned to the front room, Doris had her coat unzipped and spread wide, flashing Jamie.
“Have you ever seen anything cuter?” she asked.
“Yep.” Jamie darted around the table and scooped Dame Zilla from behind the TV. “This is my kitten,” he announced with the pride of a new father.
“She’s yours?” Doris stroked her fingers through Dame Zilla’s fur, earning an immediate purr.
“Madison got her for me.”
Doris arched a gray brow at me. “Okay, hot stuff, you be the judge. Which is cuter, the kitten or my great-granddaughter?”
Doris pulled the edges of her knee-length puffy coat aside. A thick pink sweater engulfed her from neck to midthigh, a giant rectangular photo of an infant in a panda onesie printed across her chest and stomach. Jamie lifted Dame Zilla up, and she kneaded the air, her purr revving louder.
Apparently, I was the hot-stuff judge. “Oh, ah, it’s too close to tell.”
Doris snorted.
“You’re the cutest, aren’t you?” Jamie murmured, snuggling the kitten to his chest and carrying her to the top perch of the cat tree. He’d spoken in the exact tone I used with Mr. Bond.
“Not a sight I ever thought I’d see,” Doris whispered to me, watching the pooka and kitten interact. Never shy, Mr. Bond threaded through her legs, rubbing on the shifting hem of her coat and meowing for attention. Doris gave herself a shake, clapped her hands, and announced, “I hear we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. Chop-chop.”
After saying our good-byes to the cats, I locked up and we clattered down the stairs to my Civic. Doris called shotgun, then had to explain what that meant to Jamie. While they talked, I set the defroster to full blast, our body heat having instantly fogged the windshield. The temperatures had sunken to record lows last night, and frost coated the grassy hill in front of my parking space, turning the green blades a crystalline gray in the lamplight. If not for the awning above the car, I would have been scraping ice off the windshield. Eliminating the frost moths last night obviously hadn’t been enough to restore Roseville’s typical balmy winter weather.
“Is that a handbook?” Doris asked when she saw me adjust Val’s strap to get my seat belt situated.
“His name is Val.”
Doris released a low whistle. “Brad must really like you to spring for one of those. Hand it over.”
I unhooked Val and passed him to Doris. She ran her fingers gently over his cover before opening him. “Hi, Val. I’m Doris.”
Text scrawled across Val’s page, unreadable from my angle. When Doris thumbed through him, black writing coated every single page. Val had a firm policy of showing only the entries he felt the enforcer reading him was ready for, which meant more than ninety percent of the book remained blank for me.
Sparing a glare for my traitorous handbook, I checked Jamie in the rearview mirror to make sure he’d latched his seat belt, then backed out of my spot.
“Where to?”
“The Quarry Ponds center,” Doris said.
“Where the Christmas tree stand burned down?” The stand had been a casualty of Isabel’s strategic destruction of my region, all the fresh-cut trees fodder for one voracious pyro salamander. I’d cleaned the residual atrum from the site Thanksgiving morning, and Brad hadn’t mentioned it as a problem area since.
“That’s the place. It’s guaranteed to have frost moths.”
“I don’t need to practice killing moths. I need to work on my aim for taking out drones.”
“It’s called multitasking, and with tyver coming, you can’t afford not to.”
The Quarry Ponds shopping center squatted beside Douglas Boulevard, squeezed between a dated feed and tack store on the right and protected marshlands wrapping around the left side and back. Across the cattail-studded water behind the complex towered multimillion-dollar homes on manicured lots larger than the average Walmart. The architects of Quarry Ponds had attempted to capture the same grandeur in the center’s stone facade and tiered fountains, falling short. At best, they’d succeeded in creating an illusion of tranquility, making the most of a deep parking lot and plenty of trees to separate shoppers from the Douglas traffic hurtling by at freeway speeds. On a Sunday morning at sunrise, we had the lot to ourselves.
I parked near the feed store. Beyond it, a forest of pines stood in unnatural clumps, corralled into rows by festive red and green rope. The burned-down Christmas tree stand had been restocked the next day, the charred rubble of the old stand removed and the ash-matted dirt converted to a makeshift parking lot. Electric-blue frost moths drifted over the tree stand and through the parking lot like ghostly butterflies. I gave up counting them when I reached twenty-five. No wonder the dozen we’d killed last night hadn’t made a difference. Three times as many moths sullied this tiny center. How many more were spread throughout my region?
“Hang on,” I said when Jamie reached for the door handle. “You know the rules, right?”
He met my gaze in the rearview mirror, his expression guarded.
“Today’s like last night: Only use lux lucis. No atrum,” I said, just to make it clear. “And don’t—”
“Feed anything. I know.” Anger sparked in Jamie’s eyes before he shoved from the car and slammed the door behind him.
I flinched and clicked my teeth shut. Our fragile truce hadn’t lasted past sunrise. It’d been foolish to think a single apology and some fun time with the cats would be enough to bring Jamie around. Getting him to accept Pamela’s new, stricter rules would take time.
“He’s testing your authority,” Doris said.
“Is that what Pamela told you?”
“No, that’s what my eyes told me. Pamela said he’s calling the shots.”
I swallowed my protest. Arguing about my relationship with Jamie wouldn’t change Doris’s—or Pamela’s—mind.
“Whoa! Does he do that often?”
I whirled around in time to see Jamie finish stripping down to his birthday suit. Fortunately, the car door shielded his lower half, sparing me the need to poke out my own eyes. I scrambled for my door handle. I had to stop him before—
Jamie’s soul flexed and bubbled in a complex net; then his human shape melted into an enormous Great Dane. The fluid transformation took less than five seconds.
“Doesn’t that beat all,” Doris whispered on an exhale.
I agreed. I’d seen Jamie shift between his human and dog form a dozen times, and it still took my breath away.
I finally found the handle and popped the door open. Bitter cold air slapped my cheeks, sliding icy fingers down my neck as I exited the car. Scanning the lot, I confirmed we were alone and no one had witnessed Jamie’s metamorphosis. We had a rule against changing in public. Technically, he hadn’t broken it, but his transformation had been an obvious act of defiance.
I tightened my scarf and tugged on my beanie, silently arguing the merits of scolding him. Deciding my words would not only fall on deaf ears, but also make me look weak in front of Doris, I pinched my lips together and marched around the car to collect the pile of clothes Jamie had abandoned on the pavement.
Doris straightened from the car, Val open across her palm. “It’s a bit like one child leading another, isn’t it?” she asked him as she watched Jamie trot to the nearest tree, lift his leg, and mark his territory.
Only scarier, Val agreed in font large enough for me to read.
Lovely. Today’s training would be accompanied by heckling from the peanut gallery. Why had I gotten up early for this?
9
Only Left-Handed People Are in Their Right Minds
Gritting my teeth, I stuffed Jamie’s clothes into the backseat and his boots onto the floorboard. After mentally shoving my anger after them, I slammed the door shut.
“Is he bigger as a dog?” Doris asked.
“Than as a human? I think he weighs about the same.”
Muscled through the shoulders and chest, sleek everywhere else, and tall enough to ride, Jamie’s Great Dane form stretched from door to door when he lay in the backseat of the Civic, and if we were standing side by side, he wouldn’t have to stretch far to stick his nose in my armpit. Despite his impressive doggy form, his short dark fur wouldn’t provide much insulation from the freezing morning air.
“Jamie, come put on your sweater before you catch a cold,” I called. Hearing my words, I snorted. I sounded like my mother.
The pooka took his time, detouring on his way back to the car to sniff various patches of ground. I pretended not to notice his subtle rebellion and instead walked to the trunk to retrieve a giant canine sweater we’d picked out together at an overpriced pet store—the only place we could find a garment for a dog his size.
When I straightened from the trunk, Jamie sat beside me, a tongue-lolling grin on his face. My irritation fizzled out, and I swiped a hand across his lux lucis–coated forehead. He leaned into my touch, and the bond threaded thicker between us, losing its brittle edges. I let out a soft sigh, keeping my back to Doris. I couldn’t explain the importance of being in sync with my pooka without it sounding like I was under his thrall, so I preferred to avoid the topic altogether.
I suspected getting the sweater on a normal dog would take a great deal of wrestling or a very patient dog. Jamie made it easy, thrusting his head through the neck hole and standing for me to connect the Velcro strap under his stomach. I stood back to admire the outfit on him. With bunched cotton riding up his neck to his floppy ears and thick fleece draping his back and flanks, Jamie looked every part the hipster dog.
He twisted back and forth, checking himself out, and whined at me.
“You look quite dapper,” I assured him.
A Fistful of Frost Page 11