Death by Chocolate

by Michelle L. Levigne

  The interesting part of the report was that the queen's friends, secretaries and assistants had all been interviewed to find out who had shared what delicacies with the queen. More than a dozen people corroborated the same story: several of the ministers of the queen's cabinet had helped themselves to the anchor and part of the top rail of the boat.

  Mellisande had been so furious, everyone assumed the resulting illness of the ministers had been an overflow of her anger, an unintentional punishment. They had all recovered, but now that the medical authorities knew what to look for, the symptoms could all be traced to carob poisoning.

  Epsi had been proven utterly innocent. The infusion of carob into the boat was the Human designer's choice. She didn't even know carob existed until she inhaled the aroma from Lori's carefully preserved stash, and nearly blinded herself and scorched her lungs.

  So the question remained--who poisoned the queen, and was it intentional or accidental? Laziness and cheating on the part of the human chocolatier, or obliviousness and ignorance on the part of the Fae who bought it?

  Epsi promised herself she would be part of the process of finding that answer. She was getting out of the holding dimension, after all. Guber's message had contained an invitation to join the team that was making adjustments and additions to the testing gizmo and the procedure. Epsi didn't know what she could do to add to the process, but it was the fact that Guber wanted her there that made her heart pitter-pat until she was nearly breathless.

  She hadn't felt this way about a male of the Fae species in decades. Maybe not ever. It was exciting. What amused her was that Guber was not the sort of Fae male she would have chosen to get pitter-pat excited over, and her aunties and uncles and matchmaking relatives would be infuriated.

  Which made him even more attractive. Which meant she had to be careful not to fall for Guber for the wrong reasons.

  Epsi suspected the question of right and wrong reasons for falling for someone was moot, because she might have already tripped for Guber, at the very least, if not fallen altogether. What was it about the man that just made her feel lighter than air and put blue and yellow sparkles in the air?

  Then she read the third message globe, which included several reports from different sources on the Eraser attack while Guber was alone in the warehouse. He apologized for frightening her, but he wanted her to be warned and on the alert--and he strongly urged her to come work with him because security had been quadrupled around the warehouse, so Guber knew she would be safe.

  Epsi tossed aside everything but two thoughts, and even those were nearly drowned in the floodwaters of emotion that crashed through her.

  Guber was worried about her. That made her giddy.

  Someone had tried to kill Guber because of his high concentration of purple blood. That infuriated and terrified her. Those blue and yellow sparkles turned into angry red neon flashes on the order of a nuclear blast on the horizon.

  Somebody was trying to hurt Guber? Her Guber? The guy she had just realized was a thousand times cooler and smarter and more fun than she had thought when they had to endure those horrific family parties together as children?

  Ain't no way, honey! As soon as she got out of this detention dimension, she was attaching herself to Guber's side, and anybody who tried to hurt him was going to have to go through her, first!

  * * * *

  Epsi was the coolest chick Guber had ever spent time with. And not just because she wasn't laying traps for him right and left, prompted by the growing insanity of impending Need that smashed the brains of far too many cool Fae chicks--at least, in his opinion.

  She understood Star Trek. She liked old movies--especially ones starring Errol Flynn, Tyrone Powers and James Cagney. She wasn't afraid to admit she didn't know padiddly about tech, and she liked to listen to him talk about it.

  In the four weeks--Human time--since she had been released from the holding dimension, they had spent nearly all their days together, studying and throwing ideas back and forth about how to track down the carob that the testing teams kept finding in the gift chocolate. She didn't mind when he sat her down at a table and presented her with a pile of books to get a general understanding of the principles of Human tech that he was trying to adapt to Fae magic.

  Even more important, in his book, she could understand and explain all the legalese that Kevyn kept bringing up, whenever he reported on the progress the other advocates were making in debriefing their many and varied clients. Epsi not only understood, she could explain it to him in terms he understood, and she didn't make him feel like a slow child or a particularly dense foreigner. Even better, she seemed to find great delight in translating into the tech-fandom-Human speak he enjoyed, so that Kevyn, standing right there in the room with them, got the craziest look on his face, as if he couldn't understand half the words she said.

  Which made it even funnier, because Kevyn was his pal in all things fandom, especially when it came to Trek, Galactica, Galaxy Quest, Dr. Who, and Discworld. With a heavy dose of Highlander, Stargate, and Harry Potter on the side. After a few seconds of thought, Kevyn always caught up and agreed that Epsi had explained it better, faster than he could. Guber enjoyed teasing Kevyn that his time studying to become an advocate had petrified some of the cooler parts of his brain. Kevyn usually agreed, laughing.

  The time Guber and Epsi spent together wasn't all work, though. She was learning to enjoy baseball with him. Today, they were at Lanie Zephyr's house, relaxing in front of the TV, watching the latest chapter in the battle between the Indians and the Tigers. Lance and Glori were with them, having come to Neighborlee for the weekend.

  Guber liked Lanie. Especially since the chick didn't freak out knowing she was in a room with four Fae. She didn't stare at their ears all the time, and didn't ask a lot of stupid questions that were rooted in the efforts of the Ministry of Misinformation to make sure no Humans could ever recognize a real Fae if they ever ran into one.

  It still freaked Guber, a little, when Epsi made remarks about their current problem and mission in front of Lanie. It just wasn't part of his programming to be that relaxed to take off his mask in front of Humans. Sure, Lanie knew about the problem, and she had offered some suggestions based on her own weirdness quotient. Still, it was like breaking deep conditioning to talk about the business at hand in front of someone who didn't have ear points.

  "Too bad we don't have instant replay for the last couple months of the queen's life," Epsi murmured, during a time out in the game.

  "Say what?" Guber's internal radar went off so strongly, it physically manifested as fireworks that shot up from the tips of his ears and exploded through the spectrum from red through green-blue and then back to red.

  "The commentators were just talking about it. They don't have instant replay in baseball, like they do in other sports." She gestured at the TV, where the coaches of both teams were going nose-to-nose with every referee on the field, "discussing" the recent play with visible heat.

  "We can backtrack someone through time," Glori offered, "but it takes up a lot of magic, and it only focuses on one person at a time. The sheer bureaucratic mess of getting permission to backtrack each person, using that much magic...and that's after identifying each and every person who might even remotely be a suspect. The numbers alone make it impossible."

  "Yeah." Epsi's ear points drooped for a few seconds. "It could take years, identifying everybody who might have come in contact with Mellisande who might have had an opportunity to poison her and might have had motivation."

  "Do you have the equivalent of security cameras in your government buildings?" Lanie popped a wheelie and pivoted around to face Guber.

  He was standing at the snack table, which was situated behind the couch and easy chairs where the five of them were relaxing, watching the game.

  "If you can narrow it down to just the ones who actually went anywhere near the warehouse, and anyone who went through the dimensional gates to Earth to get chocolate, wouldn't that c
ut the numbers? And you'd have proof to bring up in front of all your bureaucrats and the paper-pushers who make the decisions. That ought to help."

  "Not recorded, but..." Epsi knelt on the sofa to look over the back of it at Guber. "But there are trace impressions that are left, enough to backtrack them, right?"

  "Trace impressions, like radio signals. Yeah." He nodded, his mind churning through a dozen different mental images that merged and created a dozen more, creating a geometric progression that soon had his head full and buzzing with energy. "The trick is recording them so you can sort through them ..." He grinned, and sparks shot out of his ears to zoom around the room with fizzing sounds. "Epsi, baby, you are a genius!"

  "Well, I wouldn't say--" Then she couldn't say anything, because Guber leaped over to the sofa, grabbed her shoulders, and planted a long, loud, fireworks-encrusted kiss on her.

  The other three in the room had the courtesy to focus on the baseball game on television. Lanie turned up the volume with a flicker of her telekinetic power. She had to, because Guber had left the remote on the table with his plate full of food.

  Despite the volume being loud enough to make the lamps on the end tables vibrate, Guber could still hear the hammering of his heart. Or maybe that was Epsi's heart? She stared at him, real sparks swirling in her eyes, gold and green, and the goofiest crooked grin on her face.

  It almost physically hurt when he had to let her go. She must have felt the same way, because she held his hand when they sat down to talk with the others and start hammering out the details of what they wanted and needed, and how to get it.

  Guber wondered if maybe the really lucky Fae males went through their own version of Need. Whatever was happening to him, it was pointing at Epsi and shouting, "Her! Gimme her! Now! Forever! No substitutions allowed!"

  * * * *

  Will and Phill had the resources to obtain the equipment. Lori and Brick provided the workspace in the unused basement of a Willis-Brooks College building. Kevyn and Sophie explained the theory behind the device Guber planned to build, and obtained permission from the judiciary as well as the Ministry of Temporal Observation and Privacy.

  Sophie camped out with Epsi and Guber. Alexi and Megan took a short break from their Las Vegas work and brought Bethany and Harry with them, thereby providing all the hands they needed to get the massive job done. Or so Guber hoped. He couldn't be sure this would work until they actually got it all assembled and tried what they envisioned. They worked together to assemble more than ten dozen VCR and DVD recorders, and then hooked them into the temporal bandwidth of the ether surrounding the Fae Enclaves, focusing on the entrance gates that monitored traffic between the Fae and Human realms.

  Using the list of all those who had given the queen suspect, tainted chocolate, they focused the temporal tracing spells on them. The machines then recorded their lives and actions from the present, backwards to five Human months before Mellisande was chosen to replace Theodosius. The judiciary had decreed they had to go that far back, just in case the first rumors that led to Theodosius being de-crowned and de-throned were the trigger for all that had happened.

  A panel of advocates, made up almost entirely of Kevyn's relatives, came to oversee the spells that would filter through the recordings, to safeguard the privacy of the innocent. And it was agreed that anyone who actually spoke the word, "Carob," would be arrested immediately and considered guilty until proven otherwise.

  "Cosmic," Lanie murmured, when she and Angela from Divine's Emporium brought dinner for the team. "So in a sense, time travel really is possible."

  "Just not physical time travel," Guber said, sharing a grin with her. "See, all action is not ephemeral, there and gone, like most people think. Actions and words involve energy, and energy is not destroyed. One of the Fae laws of thermodynamics. Whatever is done and said is preserved, because it's energy. The trick is just unraveling all the multiple permutations of that energy, to see what was done ten years ago, a thousand years ago."

  "Some trick." Lanie frowned at the banks of monitors filling three of the four walls of the massive basement room of the WBC building. "So, does thought come under that category? It's energy, right? Could you technically read someone's mind, using this same thing?"

  "Sure. But who'd want to?"

  "I wouldn't want to read my own mind," Epsi said, coming over to join them. "Have you ever sat down and really tried to track down the thoughts going through your head? Talk about the tangled web we weave!"

  "The more intelligent the mind, the more talented the person," Angela offered with her trademark serene, slightly smug smile, "the more tracks the mind follows at any one time. Geniuses often have no idea where they got their flash of insight, because their minds move on so many tracks at the same time. It might drive them insane to try to control the traffic, so to speak."

  "So for those who do read minds?" Epsi prompted. "How do they do it, and how do they filter out one stream of thought?"

  "They guess." Guber chortled when she gave him a narrow-eyed look and frowned at him. "Yeah, they pick up a lot of clues, and they know what they're looking for, and they guess."

  "You've done it?"

  "Ain't got the patience, babe." He was delighted when her eyes widened for two seconds, then she burst out laughing. The relief he felt, knowing Epsi understood, that she thought like he did, that she caught on, was a little frightening. And gratifying. And comforting. Which didn't really make sense. He liked Epsi. If they spent every day working together like this for the next dozen centuries, he'd be the happiest man on the planet--and the thirty contiguous dimensions of reality.

  * * * *

  After weeks of recording and filtering and webbing and tracking and pinpointing, Kevyn and his team of forensic advocates came up with enough evidence to not only catch the murderer of Queen Mellisande red-handed, but cover him with enough red paint to drown him.

  Using simplistic freezing, blinding, and memory-wiping spells, the culprit caught up with over three hundred Fae who had bought chocolate as gifts for the new queen. While each person was temporarily disabled, he inserted small quantities of carob into each gift. Never enough to disrupt the taste or texture or smell of the chocolate. However, the poisonous qualities of carob remained in the body longer than chocolate did, and if enough was eaten, it could build up to dangerous levels.

  In some of the test subjects, the allergic reaction to carob created a craving for more chocolate, which led to a larger build-up of the substance in the blood, which led to a stronger craving, in a vicious cycle. Since many Fae tended to turn to dark chocolate first as a cure-all for any slight physical or mental or emotional ailment, it turned into a recipe for disaster.

  "At first," Epsi said, explaining the report to the rest of the team, "the healing properties of chocolate were protecting the queen. But she was one of those who were hyper-sensitive to the build-up of carob. The more she ate, the more she craved it, the more damage it did, and the less help the good chocolate did her. Kind of like the episode of 'The Trouble with Tribbles', where the tribbles were eating poisoned grain. The more grain they ate, the less good it did them. She literally starved to death, gorging herself on what should have helped and healed her--in this case, a vault of chocolate instead of a storage bin full of grain."

  Whoa, Guber thought, gazing at Epsi through a golden and purple haze of admiration. She is definitely my kind of girl. Classic Trek all the way!

  After weeks of filtering the records of activities and the traffic through the various portals to Earth, the pattern was obvious enough that even his most ardent--or blackmailed or intimidated--supporters agreed that the murderer was indeed guilty.

  Theodosius, former Administrator King, was guilty of causing the death of Queen Mellisande IV.

  Since the queen's poisoning had been done by stealth, over time, and spread out over large quantities of chocolate, Theodosius's punishment would be carried out the same way. The judiciary panel was convened and judgment handed down
in a private, need-to-know, secrecy-to-protect-the-community-from-emotional-damage session. An elite team of Fae commandos infiltrated the holding dimension where Theodosius and only a dozen or so of his closest supporters were still sequestered. He was rendered unconscious and taken under cover of darkness, and a good silence-and-darkness spell, to the warehouse. Then he was sealed in with all the queen's chocolate gifts, good and bad, pure and tainted, with all the tags and labels and wrappers removed, so it was impossible to tell what chocolate had come from whom. His fate was to stay in the vault until all the chocolate was eaten. He could confess, saying he knew about carob and what it did and how allergic the queen was, and he knew what had killed her. Confessing would get Theodosius the standard punishment of time in the dungeon dimensions, disbarment from all public office for life, and denied access to the Human realms as well as all Human-oriented forms of entertainment. Theodosius was addicted to French art films, and to be deprived of them might be the worst punishment imaginable.

  Which might have been why he didn't confess. He probably decided to take his chances with the carob, banking on the pure chocolate to protect him from whatever carob he ingested. So he stayed silent, ignoring the communication opportunities that came once each day during the first four days of his incarceration.

  Those involved in the investigation would never know how allergic Theodosius was, because on the fourth day of his imprisonment, the monitors reported that he had thrown himself into the swimming pool of chocolate syrup and drowned.

  Review of the security recordings, which were now standard practice, thanks to Guber's invention--and the royalties would provide him income for life--revealed that Theodosius had started his sentence by eating Epsi's chocolate boat. Within two hours of devouring the unicorn figurehead, Theodosius broke out in purple and green spots, and sneezing that blew him from one side of the warehouse to the other. His tongue swelled up so badly that he couldn't speak clearly. This was a benefit to those who had to review the recordings, because it was obvious from his face and tone of voice that he was venting the most horrific, rancid curses imaginable. It also explained why he didn't respond when communication channels were opened between the sealed warehouse and the authorities monitoring his incarceration.