Free Agent

by J. C. Nelson

  Rosa came in. She’d been the receptionist longer than I’d worked there. I figured she came with the building. “Evie, your client is out front.”

  Evangeline left to get ready for a day’s work. Probably Ari. Probably about Liam. I tapped on the mirror. “Grimm, what do you got for me? Troll? Maybe a few elves in a shoe factory?”

  He answered from the mirror down the back hall. “My dear, I was thinking that perhaps you might want to do inventory on the storage room. The lost-and-found pile has started moving on its own, and something ate everything in the office fridge last night, containers and all.”

  I sat up, cold shivers running down my back. “Including the cheese wheel?”

  “Marissa, don’t be ridiculous.”

  It figured. There was a running debate—one might say legend—among Grimm’s hourly workers over how the cheese wheel actually came to be in the fridge in the first place. One rumor was that it was whole milk when it was first put in, and had solidified through the years, exposed to Grimm’s magic. Another said one of Grimm’s previous agents was a vampire, and that when she was breastfeeding she accidentally left milk in the fridge and it corrupted an entire wheel. Another said it was a normal block of cheddar. There was a reason the store owners always sliced cheese wheels into little pieces. Cheddar could be evil. Truth was, the wheel had shown up in the fridge the morning after my first “Welcome to the Agency” party, in a box with my name on it.

  Every intern I’d seen attempt to remove it died horrible, bloody deaths within days. Six interns came and went. The cheese remained. Grimm was taking it easy on me, the bastard. “You don’t have anything more interesting? No shoplifting? No blackmail gathering? Hey, isn’t today wolf-day?”

  “Wolves have never been your style, my dear.” Three weeks ago he’d complained that I never wanted to ride shotgun on visits to the wolves.

  “Yeah, they’re Evangeline’s, and she’s cleaning up my mess.” I opened my bottom drawer and took out my box of special ammo, labeled by problem creature. Genie, imp, cheerleader—there it was: wolves. “Either you let me ride shotgun, or I’m taking on the cheese. Assuming I don’t leave in a body bag, it’s leaving in a garbage bag. Either way, one of us is going.”

  Grimm squinted at me for a moment and shook his head. “Oh, all right. The van leaves in twenty minutes. If you aren’t armed and on board I won’t have them wait.”

  A visit to the wolves was exactly what I needed to cheer me up. A quick stop off at wardrobe and I’d be ready.

  In the loading bay on the bottom floor they brought in the pigs. Not magic pigs. Normal porkers, and pigs stank. We’d load them into the trailer, hook the trailer to the van, and drive all the way into the country to make a deal.

  Billy checked the tires on the van. He was a rotund man with a belly like he was carrying triplets and more chins than Chinatown. I knew from experience he was cold and calm under fire. Billy was the driver on wolf runs most days, and he was the negotiator all days. “Miss Locks, you’d best change before we head off.”

  “Not gonna happen, Billy. Think it’ll get their attention?”

  He shrugged. As a teamster, Billy got double time for doing work with the wolves, so it didn’t matter to him how things went down. “Think it’ll get you killed, Miss Locks. He know?”

  “He knows everything,” I said, though I knew that wasn’t exactly true. “Not like negotiations don’t wind up messy anyway.” So we got in the van and he put it in gear. We drove out to a place only marginally better than Inferno: Jersey. Billy in his ball cap and me in a red sweatsuit with (of course) a hood.

  Time was we’d have gone in guns blazing, but Grimm insisted on talk first, bullets later. That was a sign of his genius, in my opinion. It was damn hard to kill a werewolf, but it was easy to bargain with one if you had the right goods.

  “Where’s Evie?” Billy asked as we drove along the countryside. “She normally makes the dog run.”

  “Evangeline is busy,” I said, not wanting to mention what she was busy with.

  We rode in silence to the edge of a village. Smokehouses dotted the landscape here, wood smoke rising up through the air, and everywhere was the smell of bacon and ham. The wolf guard met us by the road. I only saw him, but there were doubtless half a dozen others.

  “Afternoon,” said Billy. “Just here to barter a bit.” He gave the brakes a pump, which sent the pigs squealing.

  The effect on the guard was immediate. He sniffed the air and his mouth hung slack. “She ain’t the usual one.” He bared his teeth at me. If you were a person, or a wolf in human form, baring your teeth didn’t actually serve to intimidate. In fact, I felt a curious urge to tell him my dentist could lighten his teeth by at least three shades.

  “Get on in,” said the guard.

  The wolf town looked like old Amish meets trailer park. Shoebox white houses made of rickety wood and low cinderblock barns perfect for keeping pigs, kids, or both. The only real giveaway was that every house had a dog door big enough for a Saint Bernard to fit through. The village was run-down, stank of butcher blood, and was filled with ravenous creatures that would rip your throat out for a snack. All of that I could deal with. The thing that made it truly abysmal was that it was in New Jersey.

  We pulled ahead to the village square, where Billy made turning a trailer around look easy. Evangeline told me that once (and only once) he’d left the van parked in the wrong direction, and nearly didn’t get out.

  The wolves came out in force, and not all of them were fully human. Hell, given where we were, it was possible some of them couldn’t even turn fully human.

  Billy got out like he was going to the feed store. He slapped the hood. “Stay with the van. Be ready.” He walked across the square into a building that looked like a bar combined with a dress consignment shop.

  Where would they be? I wondered, looking at the cinderblock barns that lined the square. Like I said, used to be we would go in shooting, but the results were messy.

  See, wolves had a nasty habit of collecting kids. Stupid kids, slow kids, confused kids, kids who made bad decisions. Most weeks we could bargain for them. It was the power of bacon, which was also near magical. Some weeks the wolves were extra hungry, or had extra kids, and we did extended negotiations, the kind with bullets or buckshot. I actually hoped for those.

  As the minutes passed, the wolves got closer and closer to the trailer. The pigs might stink, but they weren’t stupid—they knew what surrounded them and were about to stampede inside the trailer.

  About the time I figured Billy would be coming out with the trade tickets, he came out all right, blood on his shirt, running at top speed for the van. We’d gone into sudden-death negotiations. I came prepared. In my view, “talk first” meant the sound of my voice needed to get there ahead of the first bullet.

  The head wolf was about four steps behind Billy, and I dropped him with a nice clean shot, but the noise brought growls from a dozen points around the village beyond the square. I followed up by shooting anything and everything between Billy and me. The wolves that had been sniffing the trailer retreated to a respectable distance.

  Billy slid into the van. “They ain’t in the mood to bargain.”

  “Hungry?”

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his chest where bloodstains spread. “I’d say scared if I knew anything that scared a wolf.”

  Nothing scared wolves that I knew of. They’d run at you knowing they were going to get shot if it had been more than a minute since you last reminded them. The door to one low cinderblock building caught my eye. It had a wire gate, and through the gate I saw a tiny hand wave. I threw the door open and jumped out, grabbing the shotgun from behind the seat as I went.

  “Now is not the time, Miss Locks.”

  I waved the shotgun at the wolves nearest to me. “We aren’t leaving without them, deal or not.”

  Billy revved the engine, pulling a few feet forward. “Get back in. We’ll come back
next week and rescue some others. This is not how we do things, young lady.”

  “It is now.” I ran back to the trailer.

  Wolves stood in a circle all the way around us. The leader ran toward me at a trot. He still bled from where I’d blasted him. His voice came out like coarse gravel. “Are you an enchanter?”

  I saw the look in his wide eyes, and his face was pale for a wolf. Something had them frightened all right. I held up the shotgun like a wand. “Yeah, I’m an enchanter. Back off or I’ll turn you all into sausage.”

  He leaped six feet back in one smooth, graceful motion. With a single swing of his arm he smashed the wolf next to him in the head and tossed him toward me. “Enchant him. It was his idea.”

  I wasn’t going to bring up little details, like the fact that I had no magic ability, at the moment. We stood as tense seconds rolled by, then the leader growled. “You’ve got to the count of twenty. Either we eat him or you.” The wolves began to change. Arms grew shorter, mouths longer, and their smell—well, their smell stayed about the same. Wolves smelled like nursing homes and the entrails bucket at a slaughterhouse combined with cheap cologne.

  I tried to think of things I’d heard the help say, or the little rhymes they used to transform terrorists into toads and such, but I hadn’t paid that much attention. Fifth or sixth time you see someone turned into a toad it gets old. What came out would have made me the laughingstock of enchanters everywhere. In the trailer, pigs squealed and screamed in terror as wolf howls filled the air. I swept my arm back and forth and chanted.

  “This little piggy made pork chops.

  This little piggy made ham.

  This little piggy made bacon.

  This little piggy made spam.

  This little piggy cried wee wee wee and got cut up for dog food.”

  With that, I threw the trailer gate open and let loose a blast with the shotgun. Pigs went everywhere.

  The wolves were mostly animal by now and reacted on pure instinct, chasing the pigs through the square. A wolf leaped on the first one and tore into it. The scent of blood drove them into a frenzy.

  I made a run for the building where I’d seen the hands. It isn’t hard to shoot off a lock, but there’s hardly ever reason to. This wasn’t designed to keep people from getting in. It was meant to keep them from going out. I pried open the rusty latch using the shotgun as a lever, opened the gate, and let a flock of kids gush out. Must have been eight of them in that tiny shed, the youngest maybe six, the oldest eleven.

  “Run for the van,” I said, and they did. I glanced inside and saw him. A child, a child who glowed in the darkness, and not with light. Magic. The tattoos on his face marked him as a fae child. The moment I saw him, I felt something snap into place between us, a feeling so powerful I dropped to one knee. I shivered as his fear washed through me. I couldn’t leave him.

  The screams of pigs filled the country air, and if we didn’t hurry we’d be adding ours to it. I kicked the door to get his attention. “Come on.”

  He looked at me and then back down. There’s this thing about the fae. You don’t ever touch them. For one, their touch can be deadly, or so I was told. The other problem of course was they considered us diseased and filthy.

  I stepped into the larder, ducking my head to fit, and approached him. I took a deep breath and put my hand on his back. It tingled like an electric fence, but my heart didn’t stop, so I took his hand and led him out, one step at a time.

  At the entrance I met a wolf and gave him my last shotgun shell. I knew I’d told everyone in the wolf village where I was. The fae child didn’t flinch at the gunshot. He looked at the gun as if it were curious and then looked up at me with those gray and white eyes. I tossed it on the ground and ran for the van.

  Billy had the good sense to open the van door, and most of the kids were in. A howl went up from one end of the village. The wolves had noticed my pantry raid. “Run,” I yelled to the child, but he continued his plod toward the van like he was sleepwalking.

  My gun carried the same wolf ammo we’d always used: silver, garlic, and holy water. Silver hurt them in a way that didn’t instantly heal, garlic messed with their allergies, and the holy water was just to piss them off because they couldn’t stand being mistaken for vampires.

  I dropped one wolf with a couple of rounds from the nine millimeter, and now I had the attention of a bunch more, which was exactly the way I wanted it. The longer they kept looking at me, the better, so I pulled on my hood and began shooting as they came. I’d learned a little bit of history from Grimm, and the Riding Hood incident was still a sore spot with wolves.

  According to Grimm’s history books, “Red” was the name the wolves gave her after she dyed her cloak in the blood of an entire wolf clan. Depending which side of the Kingdom Channel you believed, either the wolves were innocent victims who barely even nibbled on Red’s family, or horrible monsters who had it coming. The genocide that followed left the wolves scattered loners at the outside of society. Wearing a red hood was a good way to tick off every wolf in the village.

  It worked better than I could ever have wanted—they ignored the kid and came for me with howls of rage, barely giving me enough time to change clips. Billy revved the van engine. The fae child stopped at the door, simply staring at the van.

  “Get in!” I yelled. I ran toward the van, shooting wolves as I went, and lifted him under the arms, tossing him into the seat. My arms burned from the sheer amount of power he contained. I threw the van door shut, and in that instant my months and years of training saved my life. I can’t say why I ducked, just that I did. A huge, hairy claw smashed the van window, causing the kids to scream. The van started to roll away and I realized Billy would leave me there in the middle of a pack of wolves.

  I’d been left worse places over the years; once in the middle of a stampede, and once at a bagpipe concert where they played “The Sound of Silence.” Garfunkel made me want to tear my ears off, but these wolves would tear my throat out.

  I grabbed the trailer gate and swung myself inside. As we bounced down the gravel road the wolves gave chase. A lot of them had already started to eat the pigs, but didn’t mind dine-and-dash, particularly when it might mean dining on us.

  Billy kept the accelerator all the way down. With every passing step the wolves fell farther behind and I felt better about my impromptu raid. The biggest wolf realized we were pulling away, and instead of leaping at the sides of the trailer or the van, it leaped directly into the trailer with me.

  I pointed the gun right at its head and it froze in place. “What a big head you have, Grandma. The better for me to put a bullet through.” It bared its teeth and I pulled the trigger. My gun clicked. A guttural growl that sounded like laughter came from deep inside the wolf, as it pulled back its lips in what I’m sure was a grin.

  When it leaped this time I dove forward, letting it go over me and hit the back of the trailer. As I stood I slipped in the muck and almost fell out. Asphalt whizzed by a few feet away, and I didn’t have time to reload.

  The wolf crouched and sprang at me, and right then, I released the trailer gate. With one arm I held on to the gate while I held the other over my face and throat. It slammed into me and clamped down on my arm right by the elbow. The trailer bounced and we swung out over the road together, me clinging to the gate, it clinging to me. The wolf had my arm in its jaw for a moment, shaking his head and biting deeper. His legs hit the pavement and he was torn away. I kicked my feet back into the trailer and collapsed. Drenched in pig filth, I sat and wrapped my arm, Little Red Bleeding Hood.

  Eight

  WHEN WE PULLED into the loading bay back at the office I could barely sit still. I’d tried to raise Grimm from the moment Billy let me back in, but when Grimm’s busy, he’s busy. He’d be upstairs, and I couldn’t wait to share our haul. Oh, the regular kids were great, and you could bet most of them would be returned for a reward—cash from the normal folks, Glitter from Kingdom kind—but Grimm wasn
’t stupid.

  If the family couldn’t pay up he’d still return the kid. You never know when you’re going to need the services of a plumber or funeral director in the middle of the night. Also, if he kept the kid he’d have to feed, house, and clothe it. The real haul was the fae child. I had no idea what the fae would give to get one of their kids back, but it had to be good.

  I slapped the front desk as I walked in. Rosa saw me, and her face went flush.

  “Hit the mother lode, Rosa. You won’t believe what we rescued,” I said as I buzzed myself in. In the lobby a group of kobolds sat in matching bright green uniforms. They came every week and the answer was always the same—Grimm wasn’t going to help them form a professional soccer team. As I walked back toward Grimm’s office I heard yelling through the door, and Evangeline answering.

  I barged into his office without bothering to knock. “You’re gonna want to kiss me, Grimm.” I took a lot of comfort in the knowledge that he couldn’t.

  “You!” he shouted, so loud a crack appeared along the edge of the mirror. “How in Kingdom did this happen?”

  “Look, I don’t care what Billy told you, I wasn’t going to leave them. And I don’t know really. I think the wolves snatched him like normal, but how’d they get ahold of a fae child in the first place?”

  Evangeline looked at me and shook her head, trying to warn me of something while Grimm disappeared. When he returned, he looked confused. It’s not a look I’d often seen on him. He set his face like stone. “Tell me how this happened.”

  “The wolves didn’t want to bargain, and I couldn’t just—” I stopped.

  Grimm’s jaw was set and he glared at me, while Evangeline kept her eyes on the floor. He wasn’t talking about the wolves. “Grimm, what’s going on?”

  When he spoke his voice was cold and calm. It was the same tone he used to order a nest of poodles destroyed. “Marissa, I’m afraid you are the only one with the answers, but I promise you won’t leave my office until I have them as well. Do you know who I got a call from today?”