Elemental Disturbance

by Voss Foster

  "We don't know what this points to yet, or what it could possibly point to. But we do know that they want us to work with them." Swift turned his gaze toward Gutt. "Did you touch base with Bancroft yet?"

  "He's already in Vermont. He knew the family of the ice elemental from the first incident."

  Swift's eyebrows rose for a second, then he nodded. "Good. I could use someone with insider knowledge when we get up there. Dash and Gutt, you'll go back up to Vermont with me. King can stay here, hold down the fort. I want all of you on call if we need to get hold of you. We'll touch base with Bancroft while we're up north." He looked back to Gutt, then to me. "You two ready?"

  "Not really. I hate the cold." I took another glance at the pictures displayed on the screen, then got up. Better than sitting there looking at that just so I could look at it again in person in ten minutes. "I'll go get my coat. Be back here in five."

  "Just go to remote transport," said Swift. "I'll text Zar the address."

  Gutt waved his hand through the air, then he and Swift stepped through and out of sight. I had a coat on hand, but chances were I didn't actually need it. Sure, I wanted it when I was in the ice house of death, but chances seemed low that Vermont would have completely frozen over and the OPA as a whole didn't hear jack about it. I just…damn it, I didn't want another dead kid burned into my fucking gray matter. Go figure. Not a super fun thing that I enjoyed. I'd rather watch auto racing for twenty-four hours straight, complete with commentary they pretended was interesting.

  Honestly, I'd rather do a lot of things than go around exploring more child murders. Almost anything, in fact.

  I stopped by and grabbed my coat from the back of my chair, then headed off to the Remote Transport room. Zar was, as usual, asleep. You were supposed to let sleeping dogs lie, presumably so they didn't bite your hand, but there was no such adage about sleeping demons. I gave her shoulder a quick nudge and Zar's eyes popped open. "Dash. Morning."

  "For once it is morning. You know, in all the reports I've delivered, I never once mentioned you're falling asleep on the job."

  "And I appreciate it, but you can. What's Svenson going to do? He's afraid of me more than he is of Gutt." She tapped crimson claws lightly against her large, sweeping horns. "I'm a spooky scary demon."

  What was Svenson going to do? Try to shut down the OPA. Install agents to watch over us. If the bad part of the report was about a preet and none of the human agents, then it would just increase Svenson's suspicion and anger. "Swift texted you an address. I need to get there."

  She dug her phone out of her pocket, tapped a few times on the screen, then opened the portal against the blank wall behind her. "Have at her, whirlwind. Can I ask what the case is?"

  "Dead elemental children."

  Her face turned sour. "Damn. That's bad."

  "Tell me about it." I slipped on my coat, steeled myself against what was coming, and walked through the shimmering portal into mundane, everyday Vermont.

  Right. Mundane, everyday Vermont, but with giant mysterious rocks jutting out of a random colonial in the middle of the street. Plus there were cops swarming, and neighbors peering through parted curtains. The journalists were either already here and being routed away by some brave police officer, or they'd be pulling into the fray anytime, now. Hell of a good ratings day for them. Two dead preet kids in the same town, five miles apart from each other. There'd be some great headlines coming out, great scroller bars on the news channels. Exciting for them and everyone else in the area. Not so great for all the families involved, but what did they matter?

  I was standing in front of the white house with the giant rocks pushing through the walls and windows. I glanced back to see the portal vanish. I walked through the door, holding my ID at the ready to fend off any overeager police officers who hadn't seen me the first time. Or more realistically, who focused more on Gutt than they did on me. I mean, I probably would have been in that same boat if I didn't work with him every day. Seven-foot muscular blue troll was a bit of an attention grabber. White boy from Rhode Island was not.

  Inside, Chief Ballinger was there again, looking stressed and unhappy. He nodded when I walked in. "Your guys are already over there. Thanks for coming in on this. Well, far, and beyond our wheelhouse."

  "Not exactly our normal kind of case either." But not exactly outside the realm of possibility, either. Such was my life, now. I nodded back at him and moved on to where Gutt and Swift stood over the preteen elemental's body. He was in basic jeans and a long-sleeved gray polo. Unlike the elderly couple, he looked sort of serene in his death.

  Gutt kneeled next to him, in the spaces between the jutting rocks, moving his massive hands over the frail, limp body. "This is looking about the same, Swift. I'd send it back to Casey to be certain, he has the proper medical knowledge, but I don't sense any seals left intact on him, either. It was a smaller outpouring of magic, but I would guess too much for him to survive."

  Swift nodded. "Take him back. Once Casey finishes the report, run it back here." He turned to look at me. "We need to get together with Bancroft and the first family. Hopefully we'll be able to track down the family on this one, too."

  Oh great. Talking to distraught parents always made things better for everyone. We'd struggle to get salient information, they'd struggle with having to face up to what had happened…I was beginning to look fondly on my Miami swamp crotch.

  I'd never been to a preet's house before. I didn't know exactly what to expect. I knew well enough it wouldn't probably be a castle, or some glowing, organic building like the ones I saw inside the Hidden Kingdoms.

  But it still stood out when we got there. A bright cornflower blue cottage outside the city limits, trimmed in hand-carved, white painted friezes. Miniature evergreen trees filled out the garden beds, and festooned the rather wild, overgrown yard. Other than the lawn, it really was a neat, tidy house. Just vibrant and a little off.

  A male ice elemental—pale like the girl, but with his white hair cropped short and dull, puffy eyes—opened the door for Swift. "You are from the Office of Preternatural Affairs." His voice wasn't what I expected, either. A sort of grumbly, halfway-hard to understand voice. Kind of like a drunk. Hell, maybe he was drunk. Couldn't blame him if he took a nip or ten.

  Swift nodded. "I'm Agent Nathanael Swift. This is Agent Dashiel Rourke. If it's all right, we'd like to come in and just cover a few things with you."

  "Of course." He stepped aside. "Come. Take a seat. Rhys is already here."

  It took me a minute to put together that that was Bancroft. Rhys Bancroft. Practically predestined for pretentiousness. And sure enough, when I walked in, there sat frumpy old Bancroft, holding the hands of a stout female ice elemental. She had dark blue skin, the same color that you sometimes saw in icebergs, and frizzy, pale blue hair that exploded around her head like a starry frost pattern.

  As soon as Swift and I walked in, Bancroft patted her hand, then rose. "I apologize for not being in at work when I was supposed to be." He nodded to me for some reason, then to Swift, which actually made sense. "I assumed you wouldn't have an issue, given the circumstances."

  "Would you have come back if we got another case?"

  Bancroft nodded, his mop of white hair tossing and flinging around. "Of course. I may have requested to do the work from Vermont instead of Quantico, however. It's not as though working at the office is vital to what I bring to the party, so to speak."

  After a second, Swift nodded. "Sounds like you're doing what you need to be doing." Swift turned to me. "You put this in the report to Svenson, too. If he has a problem with it, he can bite me."

  "Should I include that in the report, too?"

  "No need. He already knows he can bite me if he doesn't like how I run things." Swift sighed, turning to the man. "Can we take a seat?"

  "Yes, of course." He gestured to the high-backed sofa across from the loveseat. Once we sat, he lowered himself next to his wife. Bancroft took the other open seat on the sof
a. The man rubbed his face, all the way down to his neck. "I'm Ixta. This is my wife Aletra."

  I started in with my notetaking, although my spelling was probably terrible on those names. I'd get the right ones from Bancroft before it was time for a report to go out. But notetaking also meant I didn't have to engage in the whole "ask questions about your recently murdered daughter" part of this process.

  I left that to Swift. "I'm going to try to keep this short, but we do need some information."

  "Our daughter is dead." Aletra shook her head at Swift. Her voice was thickly accented. Sounded Eastern European…or I guess whatever the Hidden Kingdoms equivalent of Eastern Europe was. "Our daughter was taken and now her picture is all over the internet, it's all over the news."

  "There's nothing any of us can do to fix that, and I am so sorry." Swift shook his head. "What was her name?"

  The wife shuddered and clutched to her husband's hand. "Her name is Niila."

  Her name is. It didn't pass me by. She wasn't fully dealing with the death yet, and eventually she would, and she'd get a hell of a lot worse. Still, I wrote down the name, staying silent.

  "No one took us seriously." Ixta rubbed his thumb up and down Aletra's hand, speaking softly. "We told the police that our daughter was missing. That was a week ago."

  "A week?" I couldn't stay quiet. Not at that. "A week, and you're telling me they didn't do anything?"

  "I'm telling you that you're the first officers we've seen here to ask us any questions since she disappeared."

  My fingers tightened around the pen and the notepad. "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "So am I." Swift's voice was lax and calm as ever, but he sat up steel-rod straight, hands firmly grasping his knees. "I'll be sure to bring that up with Chief Ballinger when we're done here. But you can rest assured that we'll be looking into this. I wish we could do something to bring her back, but we can solve this, and we can bring whoever did this to her to justice."

  Aletra shuddered again, and Ixta nodded. "Anything we can do to help, we will."

  Chapter Three

  Swift marched into the Burlington Police Department, livid and rageful, and I let him. They needed to experience a little righteous anger, and I was happy to witness it. A week spent not investigating a child's disappearance? They better have a damn good explanation, or proof that those parents were wrong, that's all I had to say on the matter.

  Actually, I had nothing to say on the matter. All I would have been able to bring to bear was swearing and maybe a few punches to a few jaws of a few old men. FBI would probably frown on me decking the local PD, so Swift would be doing the talking. He barged into Chief Ballinger's office and slammed his hands down on the desk. "You owe me and this family an explanation, Chief."

  Ballinger looked up, bewildered and wide-eyed. "Do you mind shutting the door and explaining what this is, Agent Swift?"

  "I do mind shutting the door, and I don't mind explaining." He pulled back and stood tall. "Niila of Skaltgard was reported missing a week ago, and according to the family, we're the first officers they've seen around asking questions."

  Ballinger got to his feet, walked past us, and shut the door. "That's news to me, Agent. We haven't gotten one report about that as far as I'm aware."

  "They're certainly laboring under the impression that they talked to you, and you've done nothing for them." Swift sat down in one of the chairs opposite him. "Either you and yours aren't being completely honest with us, in which case you won't like the outcome of going on the wrong side of the OPA, the grieving family isn't telling the truth, which I'd like to think I'm seasoned enough to notice, or there's something rotten in Denmark."

  Ballinger clucked his tongue off the roof of his mouth. "What day did they bring the report in?"

  I flipped through my notes. "Last Tuesday, early morning. They came in person."

  "That narrows it down." Ballinger pulled up something on his decrepit old computer. "Our intake officer from that morning happens to be in the office today." He got back up, opened the door, and stuck his head out. "Dennison, my office for a minute?"

  He came back in, and was shortly followed by a stocky, middle-aged man. And he was white. Not every anti-preet racist was white…but I would certainly suggest the majority were. "What is it, sir?"

  Ballinger sighed. "You want to explain to me and these agents what happened last Tuesday morning? Something about a family of ice elementals?"

  Immediately, I saw it. I was sure Swift saw it, too, and if Ballinger was worth a damn, he saw it, three. Officer Dennison looked straight down, and his face blanched. But damn, he still tried to cover his ass. "I was manning front desk Tuesday morning. Officer Gansett apparently got a stomach bug, didn't think it was smart to come in."

  "Anything happen that could be relevant to the current situation?"

  There was the flick of his eyes down again, a little nervous shuffle of his hands. This guy probably lost hard at poker. There was no bluffing, not with those kind of reactions. He also couldn't hold out under pressure, apparently. "I didn't think it was important. We get so many preets coming in, complaining about shit that happens to everyone—"

  "It didn't occur to you once during this past week that a young, missing ice elemental could have had some level of import? Maybe sometime after we found the body of an ice elemental girl in the middle of a multiple homicide?" Ballinger's face reddened as he spoke, and his voice grated hoarser and louder. "Even if it was your job, or anyone else's job here, to decide whether a case is important or not, you should have come to me with this as soon as we got the report in about the ice elemental girl. What the hell were you thinking?" He never got the chance to respond before Ballinger launched back into him, almost spitting. He was apparently upset, go figure. "You're on suspension for two weeks, Dennison, and I'm putting you under review. If you weren't union, you would be out on your ass for this, and if you were a decent person, you'd be handing in your ID card and sidearm." Ballinger was now bright scarlet, eyes narrowed. "Get out of my office and take your bigoted crap with you."

  "There was no way to know—"

  "Stop feeding me that line!" Ballinger crossed the room and slammed the door open. "There were multiple reasons for you to bring this case in. It's your job, if you hadn't noticed. Now get out of my sight right now and maybe I won't shout this entire issue into the office for everyone else to judge you."

  Dennison was boiled chicken pale. He stood silent for a few seconds, then tossed his hands out and marched away.

  Ballinger closed the door and sat back down at his desk. "He was never a great officer, but I never would have predicted this." He massaged the bridge of his nose. "I didn't know, agents. I would have mentioned it, and I certainly wouldn't have ignored the complaints of the family if they made it to my desk. It's possible we could have prevented this." He smacked his hand down on the desk. "Damn him."

  Agent Swift leaned back in his chair. "It happened. Audit out your department and keep an eye on all of this going forward."

  A knock at the office door. Chief Ballinger cleared his throat. "Come in."

  Gutt opened the door and poked his head in. "Report on the second child came back the same as the first. Seals removed and he just died." Gutt sighed, jowls puffing out. "And his father's upset and looking for someone to talk to."

  Ballinger rose, but Swift got up and stopped him. "You stay. Handle your department so you can actually help us out with the investigation. We'll take care of him."

  Ballinger looked like he was going to argue, but he sat back down and nodded. "Thank you. We're not exactly cut out to handle…whatever this case is turning into." He shook his head and turned to his computer. "I have a feeling this wasn't the only one missed, unfortunately. I'll roll the appropriate heads."

  "Sounds like a plan if I've ever heard one." Swift nodded to me. "Let's hope we can get some decent information."

  I followed him right out, but stayed next to Gutt. "Anything else of interest?"


  "Not beyond the autopsy results. Father will almost certainly have better information than I do. More interesting information, at the very least."

  "Right."

  Gutt pulled ahead and led us to a side room. There sat a dark brown stone elemental, wearing a flannel shirt that stretched taut across a barrel chest. He had deep green eyes, and they flashed between the three of us, sharp and harsh.

  Swift sat and took all his attention, leaving Gutt and I to stand in the back of the room. "I'm Agent Swift from the Office of Preternatural Affairs. I'm so sorry about your son."

  The man's jaw tightened. "I'm sorry about my son, too. Did you find out what happened to him?"

  Swift nodded. "We don't know have all the details. But we took him back to our offices in DC. The OPA's best alchemist and medic is leading the autopsy."

  "But do you know how it happened?"

  Gutt lowered himself down next to Swift, the chair only creaking a little under his weight. "Your son. What was his name?"

  "Karak. And I'm Heska"

  "Kingdom of Al-Sekar?"

  He nodded. "Fourteen generations before we moved to the Mundane. What happened to my son?"

  "Karak was still sealed, wasn't he?"

  "Yes," said Heska. "We were working on it, but it's slower going here in the Mundane. There's only myself and two other stone elementals on the East Coast, and none of us can afford to send our children to Arizona or New Mexico for training." Heska stopped and his eyes widened, jaw finally lost the tension. "He was unsealed?"

  Gutt nodded slowly. "I examined him at the scene, and our medic examined him in the lab. Any form of sealing magic was removed in its entirety."

  "No. No, no one would do that."

  "It's the second case we've had like this." Swift leaned in. "You saw the news reports, the ice elemental?"

  "It was the same." He shook his head, hands grasping aimlessly at the air, never quite closing. "Someone's doing this to elementals. To our children."