by Annie Bellet
“I don’t want this for her.” A bad feeling, like a hand gripping my guts, clenched at me at even the mention.
“Why? If you want to keep her around, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t.”
“I don’t want her thrust in the center of what I think is coming,” I said, pushing off the tree.
“Yeah, but that’s just a damn conspiracy theory right now.”
Something bad was coming and I didn’t want her anywhere near it. There was something strange at work with her, but I’d never utter a word about it to anyone. She appeared to be human, but she wasn’t cut from the same everyday mortal cloth as them. I couldn’t risk her becoming a pawn in the disruption of order I feared was coming.
A Mercedes pulled in and a man got out of his car. My loophole around my authority problem had just appeared. His name was Charles; he was a local doctor, and he was also fated to be with someone else.
She walked over to him and they greeted with a peck. She loved him. He loved her. It just wasn’t the blinding passion she deserved, but something more lukewarm, safe.
I reached out into the heart of the Universe, and a moment later, his phone was ringing. He grabbed it out of his pocket and glanced down. He muted the ring and then slipped it back into his pants, muttering an excuse. She glanced at where the cell phone sat in his pocket again.
As he spoke to her, my hands curled into fists. She knew deep down but she couldn’t come to terms with it yet. They always knew on some level. Why was she staying with him?
But the reminder was enough. She might not have been ready to face the betrayal yet, but there would be a fight tonight about something. Maybe he’d bought the wrong thing at the store or finished the last of the tea she liked in the fridge.
“I need you to do me a favor.” I never took my eyes off the couple as I made my request.
“What?”
“She needs to leave town tonight. I want you to make it happen.”
“You know that might draw attention to me.”
“I need this.”
There was a long, drawn-out sigh before he nodded. “Does it matter where?”
“No.” As long as she wasn’t here, she had a chance. Reroute her life and she’d live another day. I didn’t know what was coming for the rest of us, but I could feel the storm in the air, smell the charge. If she died, I had a really bad feeling she’d end up in the eye of it.
But Cutty came through, and four hours later I watched her leave to visit her friend in Virginia after a bad fight with her fiancé. I knew I’d crossed a line as I watched the train leave the station. Some shit was too important to sweat what column it fell into. She was going to be okay, even if it was with that simpleton. He was so wrong for her, but whatever. At least she’d have a life.
***
Three Days Later
I walked into the hole that was our office. It was amazing that no matter how many times we moved, the places never seemed to improve.
“Where’s Harold?” I asked Bobby when I saw him and the two other Jinxes hanging out at the broken table near the water cooler.
“Dude, what do we look like? His goddamn nursemaids?” His mouth froze after he said it, and the little blond heads of his cronies were shaking, in a that wasn’t a good move, dude.
“Watch it,” I said. I wouldn’t tolerate being treated like they did the rest of the world.
The blond head dipped. “Sorry, dude. Just slips out sometimes. I don’t even know where it comes from.”
My phone started vibrating in my pocket and I looked down to see it was the exact person I was seeking.
I stepped away from the Jinxes. “Yeah?”
“I need you to meet me. We’ve got a new recruit for the karma position,” Harold said.
“I thought that was going to be left open,” I said, my hand tight on the phone.
“I don’t make the rules. You helping or not? I don’t know if this one will make it without you.”
I dropped my arm for a second but brought the phone back to my ear.
“Details.”
“I’ll meet you over at this place in Surfside. The recruit’s name is Camilla Fontaine—”
It was as if everything in my world shut down in that second. “Not possible. She’s out of town.”
“Yeah, well, she was on her way back when her train crashed.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute, even thought I heard Harold asking if I was still on the phone. Finally I said, “I’m coming.”
I pocketed my phone.
I was Fate. Of all people, I knew better than anyone that you couldn’t escape the Universe’s plans for you. Looked like we were getting a new member of the team whether we wanted one or not.
If you enjoyed this story, click here to read Karma.
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Donna Augustine’s lifelong ambition was to become the crazy cat lady. Unfortunately, when family allergies cut short her dream of living in a house full of furries, she turned her ambitions toward writing. Combining her love of fantasy, scifi, horror and romance, she tries to string together interesting twists on urban fantasy.
A native of New Jersey, when she isn’t writing or over dosing on caffeine, she can occasionally be spotted in disguise at the local dog park.
De Facto
Annie Bellet
Verity Li and her magic-sniffing familiar catch illegal magic users, and then dump them into the legal system. She stamps her time card, goes home, and feels utterly detached from her life. Just a bureaucratic cog, going through the motions, everything handed off to become someone else's problem. Until she interrupts a kidnapping next door, discovering an illegal hex-making ring, and now all the problems are hers.
Roosevelt Park slid by outside the bus window as Verity Li found her usual seat five back from the driver and sank down onto the scarred plastic. It wasn’t a long bus ride home from the Office of Banned Magic satellite building adjacent to Michigan Central Station, but every afternoon it seemed to stretch on a little bit longer. Knowing they were on their way home, her magic-sniffing rat, Ruby, stirred inside Verity’s sweatshirt pocket, sticking the tip of her pink nose out.
Verity glanced around, the bus interior shadowed and dull from behind her sunglasses. Most of the seats were full, some people already standing as preference, but no one paid any attention to her. At work she had to wear the lettered jacket that said Detective and OBM in big, easy to read letters. Here she was just another commuter in jeans and a hoodie, bundled up against the September chill.
She leaned back and closed her eyes, opening her mind to Ruby’s through their tattooed spell-link, letting her cat-sized friend tell her about the world through their joined noses.
Someone had stuck fresh gum to the bottom of the seat. Ruby was interested in that but Verity slid a hand inside her sweatshirt pocket and stroked the rat’s super fine white fur, keeping her in place with a little tug on her harness. Grease. Dust. Human sweat. Stronger smells of charms, the fresh mint of protection charms and the pine sol bite of charms that were supposed to ward off the common cold. All legal magics, the kind of minor things that anyone over the age of eighteen could purchase from licensed venders.
The bus stopped and a new wave of scents slipped over her. Wet cement. Half-eaten yogurt. Then a sharp, fake-watermelon scent found Ruby’s nose. She twitched and gave her signal squeak.
Verity opened her eyes and tightened her grip on Ruby’s harness. That was the smell of a banned kind of magic, invisibility. She looked around, spotting the offender by where her eyes refused to stick, the person a blurry outline that her brain didn’t want to focus on. Ruby could have taken her right up to the person, if she’d asked. She reached into her jean’s pocket and pulled out a Pez dispenser, dropping a banana pellet into her sweatshirt pouch and mentally sending calming thoughts to her rat.
It was misdemeanor level magic. And she was tired, off duty, and wanted to stick it in her SEP
file. Somebody Else’s Problem. If the kid, because it was probably some stupid kid, was over twenty-one, he or she would be fined and have to register in the Spell Offender list. Cameras would catch anything they did, since charms like that only really worked on the human eye, and not perfectly.
At her stop, she walked past the blurred shape of the kid to exit the bus.
“You overpaid for that spell, idiot,” she said over her shoulder.
Her building was a new high-rise, part of the “urban renewal” effort a few blocks from One Detroit Center. Half the floors had been designated as affordable housing, with a break for government employees. Which meant that no one bothered to renew charms against leaks, breakages, outages, and anything else, or do the manual labor half the time. Tiny HOA fees, tiny benefits.
At least Ruby was always happy to be inside the dingy walls. This was her favorite time of day. Home meant pineapple treats and videogames on the giant touch-screen television that Verity had sunk three month’s overtime into.
Images of Ruby’s favorite matching game, red, blue, green, and purple squares with simple shapes on them, flashed through Verity’s mind. The moment she had the door open to her tiny one bedroom, Ruby leapt free of her pocket and raced across the oatmeal-colored carpet to the TV, reaching up to push the power button. Then she danced in tight circles, her leash trailing and tangling in her long, scaly tail, sending her desire to play across the mind link.
“Let me get my shoes off. And your harness. Brat.” Verity smiled, unable to maintain her exhausted, annoyed mood in the face of this after work ritual.
She turned on the game and unbuckled Ruby’s harness, some of the tension draining out of her shoulders as the familiar dings and beeps from the game came on. The tattoos that let her and Ruby share senses and communicate in basic ways were visible on the large rat’s body, showing black through her snow white fur. Verity had the same tattoos in the same places, on her back, ribs, and down her scalp from top of head to base of spine, though her thick black hair had grown back in to hide it.
No one else at the academy had wanted the runty albino rat. Their loss. Ruby, which Verity called her due to the rat’s bright red eyes, had excelled as a magic sniffer and their link was stronger than normal, flowing both ways instead of just from rat to human handler. She and Ruby had more collars than anyone else who had graduated from the Detection program.
Spells had a smell, each one subtly or not so subtly different. Once people had figured that out, they’d started trying to train animals to detect magic, same as they used them to detect land mines, drugs, and some kinds of disease. Her, and Ruby’s, job was to sniff out magic, sorting the legal from the illegal and signaling her enforcer partners to take down those who broke the law. Her guideline was that if it was a magic that could harm someone or be used to invade privacy, like the bus kid’s invisibility charm, it was probably on the books as illegal.
Not that it matters, she thought as she pulled herself away from watching Ruby match shapes and colors to see to her own needs. The late twenty first century’s war on magic was about as effective as the last century’s war on drugs. No one knew why all the magic had, well, magically started working. No one knew how to turn it off. So they tried to control it, and when that didn’t work very well, they regulated the hell out of it. The laws of what was and wasn’t allowed in the States changed almost daily it seemed, with both the lawyers and the criminals getting fat on the results.
Just a job to Verity, though she wouldn’t give up Ruby for anything. She stuck to it, though the exciting new car smell was long gone. Ruby made up for a lot of disappointments in life.
She opened the fridge and grabbed a small bottle of orange juice from the pack of fifty that took up the whole top shelf. Snagging the vodka from the freezer, she dumped out half the orange juice and refilled the bottle with booze. She was half way to the couch when a woman next door started screaming.
Verity dropped the bottled screwdriver and sent a command to stay at Ruby, pushing away the querying flood of images her rat sent at her. She fumbled with the safety chain and got her door open as another scream echoed through the walls, followed by a crash and a heavy thud.
Another scream, this time sounding more like a child than a woman, pulled her down the hallway. She reached for her gun and remembered it was locked up tight at work as her hand closed on emptiness where the weight at her hip should have been.
Screaming. Thud, thud. Heavier than the last one.
Verity sized up the plain gray door, which looked like every other door in this building. “Fuck it,” she muttered, and kicked it in.
The apartment was laid out exactly like her own with a few differences, two bodies on the floor, one covered in blood with a young boy crying over it.
A broken floor lamp lay next to a big man who was half-conscious, blood leaking from his receding hairline as he shifted and groaned. Verity moved around him, focused on the child and the heavily bleeding woman.
“You okay?” she asked the boy as she knelt next to the woman. She reached to feel for a pulse but pulled her hand back as she saw the blood no longer pumping, just leaking from a gaping hole in the dark-haired woman’s neck. It didn’t take triage training to tell her this lady was a goner.
“Lydia,” the boy whispered.
Verity met his eyes, unsure what to do or say. Someone was calling 911, she assumed. She had to get the boy out of the room. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten, all elbows and knees and big dark eyes, wearing a thin black tee-shirt and a pair of shorts that were too big for his narrow frame. He had blood on his arm.
“You mom’s going be okay,” Verity lied, using her best cop voice to convey that she was in charge and the situation was under control. “Are you hurt? We should go wait for the police in my apartment.” Her mind was already writing the report, part of her wondering if she should restrain the groaning man. Domestic situations were a serious bitch and seriously not her cup of joe. There was nothing magical about an asshole attacking his wife and kid.
The boy looked down at his arm, drawing Verity’s attention back to the blood there. He was scratched, pretty deep. Maybe from the same weapon that made the ragged hole in his mother’s neck. TGIF my ass.
Verity stood up and moved around the mother, pulling off her sweatshirt. She wrapped it around the boy’s arm as she guided him to his feet with her other hand. His back beneath her fingers was bony and hot, the ridges and warmth reminding her of Ruby.
“She’s not my mom,” the boy said, putting his hand over the sweatshirt and applying pressure without her having to direct him. “Will you help me?”
“You’re gonna be fine,” Verity said, wondering where the neighbors were, or the cops. This was big time SEP stuff, but fucked if she’d leave a bleeding boy in the middle of it all. “What’s your name?” She led him toward the door, moving around the guy again. The big man’s eyes were closed and he had stopped moving much. One problem at a time.
“Andre.” The boy’s dark eyes widened and his body went stiff.
French fries and gravy and everything fattening and delicious in the world hit Verity’s nose as Ruby pushed on the link. Damn rat hadn’t stayed in the apartment; Verity could sense her in the hallway now, but the amazing smell was coming off the kid.
She had no time to process that. The delicious smells died away in a wave of rot and sourness, like her nose had just jumped down the garbage chute the day before pick-up. Ruby started squeaking, signaling banned magics.
“Ruby, no!” Verity let go of the kid and ran for the door. Whatever was out there making that smell was bad news.
Pain ripped through the link, knocking her off her feet like a physical blow. Black and red spots danced and exploded behind her eyelids as her face found the floor. Dimly, she heard Andre screaming again. A dark shape stepped over her and she twisted, trying to close off the link with Ruby enough to see properly. She grabbed at a leg. Her fingers closed on denim. A sharp kick forced her
to let go and then a boot descended onto her head, putting out the lights.
***
Verity came awake as the police arrived, reaching through the tattoo link for Ruby. Her rat was okay, bruised and upset, but burrowed against Verity’s side with no serious harm done to her. Verity pulled Ruby into her arms and curled around her, breathing in the rat’s warm pineapple and sawdust smell.
“There’s no boy registered as living here and only one bed, no clothes or nothing,” the officer, a plainclothes detective who had taken his sweet ass time arriving, told Verity as she finished giving her account. When she’d awoken, only the corpse of the woman was left, and a broken, bloody lamp the only sign of the first man. No sign of the boy, except one.
“That’s my sweatshirt with his damn blood on it,” Verity said, pointing at her light gray Vassar hoodie where it lay on the floor just inside the door. It was smeared with dark brown streaks as the blood soaked in and dried. The cops hadn’t bothered to bag it yet. “Someone came here, grabbed the boy. Someone using very bad magic.”
“Very bad magic,” the detective repeated, pretending to write it down. She looked into his corn-fed, annoyed face and wondered if he was even literate.
Her next thought was if she looked that bored at her job. She shoved that one away.
“Thank you, Detective,” the police detective said, emphasizing her title as though he wished he could use a different word. “We’ll let you know if we need any follow-up. Don’t leave town.” He winked at the last, probably thinking he was funny.
Verity pushed Ruby up onto her shoulder, wincing as the rat’s soft body rubbed against her bruised cheek. She waved off the hovering paramedic and bent down; grabbing her sweatshirt off the floor with a look that dared the detective to tell her it was evidence.