Elemental Disturbance

by Voss Foster

  "But for magical restraints to cause abrasions, they wouldn't have been terribly advanced." Gutt lowered himself down at a desk, groaning. "More rudimentary magical gags can cause some mild wounds, assuming the victim is struggling. I would hazard that, whoever this is, they're not very skilled."

  "Or we're dealing with someone who wants to give the appearance that's all they're capable of," said Swift.

  Something about that niggled me the wrong way, too. One too many assumptions in a case where all of our assumptions seemed to be falling apart around us. "We're sure this is just one person?"

  "Not sure of anything," said Swift. "But right now, we don't have any evidence to suggest this is a group effort, and it's not doing anyone any good if we split our focus trying to find some shady organization that's not there." He gave me a slow, zen grin. "You've got to get your head out of counterterrorism a little more. It's not always a dark and mysterious cadre of criminals. More often than not, it's just that asshole Rick who lives down the street." He shrugged. "And if you could somehow find a guy named Rick attached to this, that would be good. I could be a damn psychic."

  He was right, of course. Not about the weird Rick bullshit. That was a hundred percent him trying to cover and keep his veneer of calm. But he was right about me, that's for damn sure. Swift tended to be right about a lot of things, but people most of all. Maybe it was my time in counterterrorism, or my first case in the OPA, or just my wildly overactive imagination, but I did have something of a tendency to jump straight into the malicious group of evildoers. Kidnapping and child murder lent itself so well to the Legion of Darkness, though, that I didn't think I could be entirely blamed for that. It was those superhero comics that addled my perception, really.

  In spite of knowing that, I couldn't fully divest from the idea that this was more than one person. But I'd just stick that in my back pocket and hope I was wrong. Last thing we needed was another shady organization we had to try and topple.

  Swift jumped to his feet. "I need coffee. Gutt, is there any way to use the leftover traces of that magic to find out if it even was Karak? Maybe it was some other elemental we could track down."

  "Unfortunately, no. That's time magic. Even if I was skilled enough, it's prohibited to research settings and…desperation."

  I couldn't hold back a snort of contempt at that one. "Is there something more desperate than this?" The laws of the freaking Kingdoms had a bad habit of getting in the way of our cases.

  Gutt nodded, slowly and severely. "If we couldn't use it for Jörmungandr, then I don't see where we'd be able to use it for one murder and one kidnapping. However tragic these are, the Kingdoms would be making a poor decision to allow us time magic for this. Like giving a doomsday device to a toddler and hoping it goes all right."

  Whoa. "Time magic is really that bad?"

  Gutt nodded once more. "Aside from the normal 'mucking about in the space time continuum,' simply unsealing time magic is…well, I won't say it's quite as dangerous as unsealing a Class-A preternatural, but certainly a Class-B with serious psychotic tendencies."

  "That would be bad."

  "Yes it would." Swift rolled his shoulders back. "I still might ask you to run and try to get permission if this boils out of control."

  "And I will listen faithfully when you do. But you should know, it will be an utter waste of time."

  "Noted." Swift nodded. "I'm getting that coffee. Who needs it?"

  I raised my hand. Gutt didn't, of course. It was too harsh for his delicate trollish intestines or something to that effect. Swift walked off to the little coffee pot in the corner and I pulled up a chair to the desk there. "I don't suppose anything's happened like this before? In the Kingdoms or something?"

  Gutt shook his head. "It's the first thing I checked. None of the escaped prisoners did anything like this. The ones twisted enough were under much stronger security, or they've been caught already."

  "Worth asking." I sighed. "Anyone turned up anything connecting the two families while we were gone?"

  "Not that I've heard. Kimmy's running that through her system to be safe, but Ballinger and the other officers assure us that they would never have interacted. The second family, the Rothles, were horrid racists, so they'd never have willingly interacted with the Lopezes."

  There went that theory. "Any chance they paid for it to happen, and then they got turned against after the fact?"

  "Absolutely," said Gutt. "There's also a chance that they were all magical constructs and someone did this entirely to waste the police department's time because they think it's a useless institution." He grinned, tusks bared, and winked. A weird fucking thing to see, even after three months. Mostly because nobody winked and smiled outside of emoticon land. They didn't normally go together, and the inclusion of his bone-crushing teeth didn't make it look more natural or comforting. "There's a chance it could be a lot of things. Are you feeling all right, Dash? You're not normally prone to jumping to quite this many conclusions about our cases."

  Right on again. People were sure making a lot of observations about me, and they seemed to be awfully correct. I guess the stress was making me a little less subtle than I was used to. "It's the kids." I shrugged. I knew I was a little off right now, too. I was a college graduate, for fuck's sake, so not a complete moron. I was moderately self-aware…sometimes. At least in this case. "They're throwing me off. I don't deal well when kids get involved in the cases."

  "That's all the more reason to set your nose to the grindstone and work it out." Swift dropped off a Styrofoam cup of black, slightly grainy coffee. "I want this stopped so there aren't any more kids turning up dead. Which means staying level-headed and thinking it through like it was nothing but a trip to the grocery store." He sat back down and took a long drink from his coffee cup. "Gutt, I want you and Bancroft monitoring the magical situation in the area. Anything spikes too high, that's the thing we need to check out." He sighed before turning to me, and I knew that could only mean sunshine and rainbows in my future. "Dash, go back to middle school and get what you can."

  Yep. Super fun. Middle school was just the best time of my life, so I was looking forward to reliving it at age thirty. Just like I was looking forward to getting an early colonoscopy. You know, just for kicks. "They for sure got a car this time, right?"

  "It's out in the parking lot. Two of them, to be safe."

  "Good." I slipped my wallet out of my pocket, pulled out the neatly folded pair of cab receipts, and handed them to Swift. "You can reimburse me for those whenever it's convenient."

  He stuffed them in his pocket without ever looking at them. "I'll get right on that."

  And hour and a half later, I tossed myself into a chair next to Swift in the station. "I hate the Fundamentalist Humanitarians. Am I allowed to say that?"

  "You're allowed to say it, but I'm not allowed to hear it." Swift nodded. "FHC cases come through our office too often to have strong feelings on them one way or the other until they're finally designated a hate group or a terrorist organization or something. Laws haven't caught up yet."

  "Then I definitely don't hate them."

  "Good to hear." He shifted higher in his chair. "You had to deal with some of them, I assume?"

  "The new social studies teacher who's marking preet kids ten percent lower on their work, and the principal of the school who is just a large ball of casual racism, but with power and ego pushing it, and a title to convince him he's somehow right." I pulled out my notepad, still woefully sparse of anything useful. "But I don't think any FHC presence in that school is involved."

  "I'd be surprised as hell if the Fundamentalist Humanitarians had anything to do with this," said Swift. "If there's one thing they're good at besides bigotry, it's PR. It's hard for them to sell racism if they're out there kidnapping and blowing up kids." His phone rang and he answered. "Agent Swift. What's going on, Bancroft? Hey, okay, all right, we'll be over as fast as we can get there. Just keep everything as calm as you can."
<
br />   "Agent Rourke, Agent Swift." A familiar, hard-edged voice came across the room. Heska marched in, his face blanched to pale sandstone. "My friend. Fire elementals." The fog of that middle school visit burned away with his words. "Her son."

  "We're already on it." Swift pocketed his phone and marched for the door. "Heska, can you pull off remote transport? Gutt is off doing his own work."

  After a moment, the man nodded. "Of course." He waved his hand through the air.

  Neither Swift or I waited, just walking through. I guess passing through magical portals was a normal part of my life at this point. Hello Kingdoms, goodbye Kingdoms, into a badly charred house. Not the pale shell of a house, though. It was still standing, four walls and a roof, but clearly fire-damaged and still smoking. A quaint little home, more of a one-story cottage than anything else.

  Swift turned to look as Heska stepped through the portal after us. "Where are we?"

  "Colchester. Twenty minutes north of Burlington."

  Swift nodded. "Stay out here. We're handling this."

  And he marched, ID held out in front of him, straight through the firefighters and police officers gathered together around the entrance of the house. I followed suit, because apparently it worked for him. Good news, that meant the house was probably relatively safe. Bad news, that meant things were done and we'd be looking at nothing but remains. I didn't want more remains. I didn't want more dead kids.

  We walked into the next room, and there sat a woman. A living woman. Pale brassy skin and dreadlocks of copper running down her back. An EMT hovered near her, but didn't touch her. Considering she had flames coming off the side of her face, and her tears were steaming when they hit the floor, I had a pretty good idea why. But she wasn't burned. She wasn't dead, which was a new break in this case so far.

  I didn't feel good—I couldn't, looking at her and knowing full well there had to be a dead kid somewhere in this place—but it finally felt like there could be some movement. Our rock and our hard place were maybe, finally grinding their way past each other. That flaming woman there was our first potential witness to what actually happened during these kidnappings and attacks.

  Swift and I both moved past her for the moment, hard as it might have been, and…there he was. Right in the doorway to a blackened out bathroom. He was draped in what scraps remained of a towel, not covering his shame. If I was guessing based on what I had in front of me, he was sixteen or seventeen years old. Probably just out of the shower, which meant someone busted into, like, inner sanctum levels of this house, this family's life.

  He wasn't burned or charred. Just like before, everything around him was affected. Everything but the mother. But unlike the rest of the incidents, the house hadn't been engulfed. Just the hallway, the bathroom, and the surrounding walls.

  Swift shook his head. "He's older than the others."

  "Yeah. Noticed that. Changes the target profile again."

  "They just need young. Not super young."

  Yeah. Teenagers were fair game. "Is it weird that's comforting?"

  "I don't think so. It's a little, bitter comfort to know they'll take babies up to seventeen, not just babies." He rubbed a hand down his face. "Check the kid, I'm going to talk to our witness." He gestured to the boy on the floor, as though there might be some confusion as to which kid he was talking about. "I'm guessing EMT hasn't done much with him. Fire elementals tend to wig out the medical folks. They're afraid of touching them in case they get burned. So…look for signs of life."

  "They don't burn if they're dead, do they?"

  He shook his head. "So no offense, but I hope that your hand miraculously burns up crispier than a chunk of Cajun chicken."

  "Yeah…I kind of do too." Swift walked off and I kneeled down on the hardwood. Sure, maybe my heart was in my fucking throat, so close to him amid the char covering his house. If I'd known what I was getting into, I might have stopped somewhere to try and pick up some welding gloves or something.

  I hovered my hand over his neck, trying to feel if the heat was radiating like the fucking sun. No sun, just a warm body. Residual heat from the explosion. His mother—I assumed she was his mother, anyway—was so hot her tears boiled.

  I bit the bullet and pressed my fingers to his neck, checking for a pulse.

  So imagine my fucking shock when I found one. Not even a weak one, but a good, solid pulse. Slow, but even. I was immediately back in Madison Square Park. Another kid, about this age, covered from head to foot in black and red scarring from the poison gas, surrounded by his family's corpses…but alive. Oscar, now living with his aunt because the rest of his family died in the same attack that almost took him out.

  "Swift! He's not dead."

  Chapter Five

  Swift was back at my side in a second, kneeling down next to me, checking the pulse on his own. "Son of a bitch."

  He ran back off, leaving me with the kid…and soon the mother walked up. She stood behind me, shaking, radiating heat like a fire. "Selal, he's alive?"

  I turned and nodded to her. "He is." Somehow, miraculously, he was alive. "He doesn't seem to be responsive, but it didn't kill him. We have healers, and we'll get him to a hospital to get him taken care of." I figured I should actually test to see if he was responsive. Just to be sure. I pressed down on his nailbed as hard as I could. Something I'd picked up from a nurse It hurt like a bitch, so if there was any responsiveness to be had at all, people would react.

  His hand tensed, and he gave a weak pull away. "He's doing better than I thought."

  More tears from her, dropping steaming and bubbling to the floor. "He'll be okay."

  She wanted to hear that more than anything in the damn world. I knew that, could see that hope shining bright behind the dull flames in her eyes. And I couldn't stand there and lie to her, feed that hope just to have it dashed. Even if he was responsive…hell, I didn't know jack shit about elementals, other than the fact they were dying in droves in Vermont for some reason. Who was I to try and judge his fitness, his chances?

  "The medics and doctors will take a look at him and make that call. I really can't. But…it's a better prognosis than it was when we assumed he'd died."

  Swift came back to save me from trying to deal with her and her emotions. And me and my emotions because, hey, this was almost dead kid number three. "The ambulance is on its way, and our medic is coming up from DC to look in on him and make a game plan with the doctors at the hospital." He nodded and reached out for the woman, but stopped short of touching her. Considering she was still steaming and flaming and burning hot, it was probably the right call. I was three feet away and dripping sweat.

  The woman nodded. "Thank you. I should have…I assumed, with everything happening…"

  Swift nodded. "Can I get your names?"

  "My son is Selal. I'm Chetra. Chetra of Al-Sekar." She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, leaving her cheeks bone dry for just a moment or two before more tears formed. "When will they be here?"

  "It won't be long. You should sit. Do you want water or anything?"

  After a moment, she shook her head. "I should be asking you."

  "It's fine." I smiled at her, as reassuringly as I could manage. "Go ahead and sit. I can find the kitchen."

  More tears. I turned away fast and started scouting. The kitchen was just past the bathroom, down a short hallway. It was mostly spared from the fire. All in all, this was a small situation to handle. I pulled a glass out of the drain rack, filled it with water…and my phone rang. I had a sinking feeling I knew who it was, and glancing at the screen told me that, yep, I'd guessed right.

  "Director Svenson. So nice to hear from you. Busy."

  "I assumed you would be busy. And how many times do I have to tell you to call me Eric?"

  Forever. It was a good way to waste his time the same way he was wasting mine. I wasn't beyond being that level of petty. "I can get back to you as soon as we're back at the police station, but I'm currently at a crime scene, Sir."
/>
  "I want updates on this case. Weekly. Maybe more. Whenever something interesting happens."

  Of course he did. It did cement one thing: this was an actual case. A real, big one. The kind that definitely warranted FBI involvement. If Svenson wanted to be kept in the loop more regularly than usual, that meant he thought there could be a screw up in the OPA, or something that could embarrass the FBI. There was national potential here.

  "I'll keep you informed as best the case allows. Unfortunately, I have a barely conscious teenage boy, a distraught mother whose tears are boiling their way out of her eyes, and a house fire that was only recently put out. Sir."

  It was a few seconds before he responded again. "Fine. I want a call from you as soon as you're done."

  "Right-o, sir." I hung up the phone, grabbed the water, and marched it out to Chetra, now sitting on a stone sofa. I guess that held up to heat better than fabric. Good for fire elementals.

  She took the water and nodded. "Thank you."

  We sat in silence as she drank. It wasn't exactly a comfy situation, trying to talk to her about this. Or about anything. Her son had very nearly died, had been presumed dead by everyone else, including her. But we had spare time waiting for an ambulance, everything would be fresh in her head, and she was so far the only person who might have seen something. At least until Selal woke up.

  If he woke up.

  I bit the bullet because someone had to, and Swift had done enough brunt-taking for a while. "Chetra…can you give us any idea of what happened?"

  Quite a bit of silence followed, Chetra fidgeting, setting her glass aside, fidgeting some more. But Chetra did finally pull herself together and respond, quietly, hoarsely. "I don't know, exactly." She sniffled, a slightly dry sound—I guess the kind of body heat she had probably left your sinuses pretty parched, too—before continuing. "Selal shouted in the bathroom. I was in my bedroom putting away clothes. I came running and he was in the doorway, clutching his belly. I thought he'd gotten sick, needed to go to the doctor. Then the fire started in his mouth. It covered his whole body." She squeezed her eyes shut, but kept talking. "The flames came out…then it was done." She looked into me, eyes dead in spite of the flames sparking and whipping there. "He looked at me while he burned. He was so scared."