Free Agent

by J. C. Nelson

  “Why on earth would she do that?” Grimm’s look told me how much trouble I was in. I’d seen that look when people brought frog princes in after a month, when the spell was permanent, or asked if they could visit a baby a year after the imp took them.

  “Because she threatened my family.” I swallowed, my mouth dry. “Also I hit her with a few pieces of obsidian. The mirror bled.”

  Grimm scrunched up his face like I’d slapped him. “You struck a fairy with obsidian.”

  “She fixed the mirror with fleshing silver and the blood just disappeared.” From the way he looked at me, I knew that this was a thousand times worse than the blessings. Maybe more.

  “She will never forgive you.” His magic reached out and surrounded me. I felt it pouring through the bracelet like hot water, enveloping me. “While you are under my protection, she cannot so much as scratch you. I worry for you, my dear. There are ways to wound that do not leave a mark.”

  “You know, I think it’s too coincidental that a fae child goes missing, the Seal gets stolen, and then a new fairy godmother shows up in town. Remember the magic show you took me to?” He once sent me to a theater where I watched it over and over until I could spot the cues and the hand movements that gave everything away.

  “I do. If this is what we are meant to see, what do we not see?”

  His question reminded me of something else eating at me. “I need to use the Visions Room.”

  Grimm rolled his eyes. “Keep playing with those things and you’ll go blind.”

  “This isn’t about my blessings. A witch said something to me. Something I need to check out. If Ari’s spirit sight is as bad as her normal vision, I wouldn’t trust her to tell me how many arms I’m holding up, let alone details.

  Grimm’s gaze went to my hand, and I wondered if he was telling me the truth about not being able to see the mark. I’d found an engraving of it in the book, but part of me needed to know if it was really there.

  “My dear, the Visions Room is undergoing maintenance. I’ll have the contractors work overtime to get it functional again. Someone has been putting tiny stress fractures on the prisms.”

  “Grimm, if I had the handmaiden’s mark, you’d tell me, right?”

  He flashed over to the cream decanter. Grimm leaned in toward me and spoke softly. “Spirit sight is not one of my formidable powers, my dear, but if it were, and if I could see it, and if you did have the handmaiden’s mark, I still would not tell you. The mark appeared on dozens of girls during her reign. It was a curse of its own kind. These girls were thrown out of their homes, driven away, sometimes killed for something they could neither see nor control. Most never heard her call.”

  At that moment, the world exploded into gunfire and crashing, and I heard screams from the back room. Grimm was gone from the mirror. By the time I made it out the door and down the hall, the Agency was silent. A hole the size of a refrigerator was smashed through the back of the office. Jess lay twitching in a pool of blood, feebly trying to move her hands.

  Ari came out from under the table. “It took him. A troll.”

  Liam was gone. I glanced out the smashed window, and my stomach churned. Panic flooded my brain, threatening to drown me.

  “Run,” said Grimm, in my ear, “straight for the window, and when you get there, jump.” Grimm had never recommended suicide before, so I figured he had a plan. I sprinted down the hallway at full speed to the gaping hole and did a perfect swan dive. I fell toward the ground, and as I did, I passed the troll. It was climbing its way down the building, Liam still in hand. The pavement was coming for my head, and fast.

  I saw a glint of gold as the magic took shape, right before I hit the concrete. It felt like pillows, rolling into pillows. I came to my feet wondering why we didn’t use this more often. The troll dropped the last story down and landed on the trunk of a car.

  Twelve feet tall, wide as a truck, with muscles like chewing gum, the troll looked at me and growled like an elephant and a lion mixed together. His sallow, yellow skin had mottled spots, and each hand had three fingers, long enough they wrapped clean around Liam’s rib cage.

  “Stop,” I said, putting a bullet in one of its feet. “Or I’ll shoot.” I squeezed off a few more shots at the troll’s knees. It dropped Liam in a heap and came for me, but I had practiced this a dozen times. I rolled to the side as it stomped at me. I put another bullet into its knee and one in its butt. It roared with rage and kicked backwards at me. I almost made it out of the way. The foot hit me like a hammer. I heard a couple of ribs break and went flying into a windshield. Liability did not cover troll damage.

  That’s when Liam picked up the bumper from the car he’d been dropped on and swung it, hitting the troll right upside its runty little head.

  Troll skulls were mostly bone. It turned to grab him, giving him a squeeze for good measure until he turned blue. It lumbered off, dragging him along. I shook the glass out of my hair and ran. Straight across the tops of the cars I ran, ruining six different paint jobs. At the corner I jumped onto its back.

  The troll grabbed me with a free hand, bringing me around to bite with a pair of jaws like a snapping turtle. Troll eyelids were heavy bone as well, but I put one bullet into each nostril, and let that bone hold the bullet in as it bounced around. The troll fell forward and dropped us.

  The troll got up exactly once, at which point Evangeline came roaring around the corner at full speed, driving her yellow convertible straight into its chest. That was the sixth convertible she’d destroyed that year. Ari came running from the building to help me up, and as she slid her arm around me, I cried out. Broken ribs hurt.

  Liam kicked the troll a few times in the head, managing only to stub his toe. I think he was trying to feel like he had contributed something to its death. He limped over to me, a look of wonder in his eyes. “You jumped out a building? And attacked that thing?” He reached out to wipe a speck of blood from my hair. “Are you crazy?”

  Ari put her hands on her hips and looked at him with those blue eyes of hers. “No, you idiot. She’s in love.”

  Twenty-Five

  THE NEXT FEW minutes were some of the most awkward in my life. Liam kept looking at the troll, as if he expected it to evaporate. He’d look back at me, and I wanted to evaporate. I’m honestly not sure which of us had the bigger impact on him. If you go to the bookstore and look up books on “How to tell the man you accidentally cursed after dumping him because you thought he was someone else that you still have feelings for him,” you won’t find any. I speak from experience.

  Once Ari decided there wasn’t going to be a chance of me running into his arms, she ushered me inside to have my ribs x-rayed. I got nine celebration stitches on the back of my head, and by coincidence, pink was the only suture color available. There isn’t much you can do for broken ribs except wait, and so we went home. There I called Grimm, to thank him for the magic.

  Grimm chuckled and gave me a smile. “Marissa, your heart went out the window first, I only thought it right you follow it. Anyway, I don’t do that nearly often enough. It felt good to stretch my muscles, as it were.”

  “Magic is a supplement for your mind. That’s what you taught me.” I’d heard that statement so often my first year, I dreamed about him saying it. “How’s Liam doing?”

  “My dear, do you remember when you met your first harpy?” The smile fled his face and now he looked serious.

  I certainly did. I stayed locked in my room for about a week, and Evangeline had to pull me out by my heel. I detest pigeons to this day. “I remember.”

  “It’s about a hundred times worse for him. No convenient stories about accidents or terrorists or hallucinations. Though I must say, I think you had a greater impact on him than the troll.”

  “Thanks.” I didn’t mean it.

  He held up his hands. “In a good way. Give him time. It occurs to me, he might be more important than I had considered. Still, you aren’t doing anything for a few weeks. You need
to heal.”

  “We don’t have time. The solstice is coming, and no offense, but I don’t think even you can stop the sun.” If there was an emergency, we’d deal with it now. Wounds were patient and would still be with us when more pressing concerns were dealt with.

  He shook his head. “We don’t have time to rush into things. I have two wounded agents and a puzzle that will take all my attention to understand. You’ll feel much better with rest, my dear.”

  He called me his agent. That meant I’d be back to work, eventually. “Grimm, why don’t you have any male agents? You let men drive, guard, and haul.”

  Grimm’s face broke into a wide grin. “If you need something broken or burned or bashed, a man will do just fine. I have nothing against them, and they do those tasks well. If you need a problem handled, you need a woman. Now rest. Heal for a few days. You’ve taught me something important, Marissa. I’m done driving my employees to the breaking point.” He faded away, off to commit a rabbit genocide, I’m sure, trying to figure things out.

  • • •

  I SLEPT FOR over a day. When I finally did wake up, I decided to finish a pet project. In one of Grimm’s books I’d found plans for a spirit cypher, a fancy term for a box that let me see spirits. Think of it like one of those old-time daguerreotypes, except the prism went inside instead of film.

  Ari and I built the box, painted it flat black, and I snapped my spirit prism into it. I turned off the lights and held it up. “Blessing, curse, come here.” Grimm’s Visions Room had thousands of these, ones that bend out normal light as well. The things I saw in there had texture and color. What my project showed me looked like a badly drawn cartoon, but it worked. I recognized them. Two feet tall, mostly face, and a set of teeth that would cost me a fortune in orthodontic bills.

  “Hey. I missed seeing you.” They seemed to jump up and down, but it got blurry when they moved fast. “Those rocks at the ball, pretty handy. That your work?”

  One of them jumped up and down, which either meant “yes” or “I need to use the litter box.”

  “I have a question for you two. I know you can’t talk, but I bet you see magic better than Ari. Can you see this?” I held up my hand.

  One of them approached. My hand looked gray and almost shapeless through the spirit cypher. My blessing opened its mouth and a tongue like an octopus tentacle slithered out. I shivered as it sniffed my hand, and licked a spot on my wrist. The hairs on my arm stood up as it did so.

  “Is it the mark?”

  They both jumped up and down.

  “Thank you. Stay close.”

  • • •

  GRIMM GAVE US three days before he announced we’d had enough time to recuperate. I already knew what I wanted to do.

  “Grimm, I need the pie box,” I said, as we sat in the conference room. Liam hunched over in the corner, looking like a man lost in a city where everyone spoke a different language.

  “We’ve already analyzed the curse,” said Grimm. As he said curse, Liam winced.

  “Yeah, but I’ve been thinking, and I’m wondering more about the box it came in. Where did they get it? I’m guessing my mugger was royalty, and you know as well as I do they wouldn’t waltz into a grocery store and pick up a pie. I also doubt they’d trust anyone else to handle something like that.”

  Liam sat up. “You called it a curse. Not a disease.”

  “Sir, if the term disease makes it sound more palatable, I would be willing to use it instead.”

  “What is it?” His hands trembled ever so slightly as he waited for the answer.

  “It’s a curse,” I said, and I saw the hope go out of him. “A living spell that attaches to you and changes you.” Since the troll attack, he no longer glared in my direction, but he didn’t smile at me either. Every time I left the apartment, I thought of driving over to see him, and every time I picked up the phone, it was him I wanted to call.

  “Hold on a minute,” said Evangeline, “I think it’s time we cleared up a few things. You,” she looked at Liam. “Sorry to tell you there are bad things in the world. Even more sorry to tell you you’re carrying around one of the worst. You,” she said to me. “Get over him. He’s never going to trust you again. You,” she said to Grimm, “should have been all over the fact that someone sent a troll after him.”

  “Evangeline, are you finished?” asked Grimm. “I’ve given thought to the fact that they were willing to attack here in order to retrieve him, and the only reasonable conclusion is they mean to reclaim the curse.”

  Liam put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. “I’ll give it to them voluntarily if I can have my life back.”

  “They’ll carve it out of you,” said Grimm. “Strictly speaking, they push your flesh through a soul sieve. What comes out one end is sausage to feed the ghouls and what comes out the other is the curse.”

  “I’m no longer interested in volunteering,” said Liam.

  Evangeline slammed her hands on the table, her face turning red with frustration. “I don’t think any of you are hearing a word I’m saying. They sent a troll. Big, ugly, and horribly slow. If M hadn’t done a swan dive on it, we could have eaten lunch, driven down to the next block, and still gotten there before it.”

  A grin spread across my face as I understood. “Trolls move too slowly. It couldn’t possibly have been meant to get away with him.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t going to eat me?” Liam looked at me, and for a moment I saw a glimpse of the man I’d met on the pier. I felt like I’d swallowed the butterfly garden at the zoo.

  “Because it could have done that in the office,” I said. “Instead it climbed down with you carefully. And it wouldn’t do it on its own. Trolls have to be told to eat or they’ll practically starve to death. It was taking you someplace close. Or to someone close.”

  “All right then,” said Grimm. “Marissa, you may investigate the bakery if you so desire, though I suspect your box may have come from any one of a dozen grocery stores. Evangeline, you may take the others and begin a sweep of the area. You will search for evidence of a portal; that’s the most likely method for removing Mr. Stone.”

  Liam put his feet up on the table. “What do I do?”

  “You, sir, may watch cable television on my personal HDTV,” said Grimm, “and I will order you pizza, and the beer of your choice.”

  Liam stood up. For a moment I thought he would pull his own hair out as he clenched and unclenched his fists. When he looked up, steel resolve replaced the despair I’d seen before. “No. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t work for you, and I’m tired of being poked and prodded and watched like some sort of freak. I’m going to find out what happened to me and who did it. I’m going to get rid of this thing. Then I’m going back to my life, my workshop, and making little wrought-iron butterflies to sell to the tourists.”

  “Search is out of the question,” said Evangeline. “I give it a fifty-fifty chance the portal’s still active. You step on it, and you’re wherever they meant to take you in the first place.”

  “Fine,” said Liam. “Marissa, you’ll take me with you to this bakery. On the way I want to know everything you know about this curse. Consider it a date.”

  “There you go, M. First agent in history to get a fourth date,” said Evangeline.

  I knew from Liam’s tone it was anything but. “Okay.” I looked around, wondering where my constant companions were. “Come on, blessings. You and I are going down to check out a bakery, and I’m going to need you to help keep me from blowing my diet.”

  “Marissa, were you hit in the head again? The MRI room is available if so.” Grimm peered at me as if I’d started a conversation with a poodle that didn’t involve bullets.

  “No. I’ve been working on a relationship with my little friends. If they have to come with me everywhere, it’s going to be by my permission.”

  “What did I tell you about feeding those things?” asked Grimm. He shook his head in frustration.

&
nbsp; “Since when did I do as I’m told?” I asked, and grabbed my keys off the table. Inside, I knew the answer: always.

  Ari grabbed my hand as we walked toward the car. “You want me to drive? You two could sit in the back.”

  She was hopeless, in my opinion. “Do you know how to drive?”

  The look she gave me was answer enough, like I’d caught her watching the Shopping Channel with my credit card again.

  I patted her on the back. “Thanks, but I choose life. I’ll ask Evangeline to teach you. She taught me.”

  Ari looked a little queasy at the thought.

  Grimm gave me the address from the pie box, and as we drove I could tell Liam was staring at me, waiting. So I gave him the spiel about curses, and did my best to answer his questions.

  He slumped back in the passenger seat until I thought he’d dozed off. When he spoke, I almost swerved. “Enough about curses. Tell me what it is you do.”

  “I told you already. I work for Grimm. For Fairy Godfather.”

  “Granting wishes?”

  “Solving problems, more often. Most of the time what people wish for isn’t what they need. They need their baby back from an imp, or they need a pair of deadly slippers retrieved, or they need a troll to stop punching holes in the taxicabs that drive over the bridge. People need things, and I get them done.” I’d rather have crawled into a witch’s oven willingly than had that conversation right there and then.

  “What about me?” He still wouldn’t look at me, staring pointedly out the window.

  “I made a mistake. Two, actually. I was supposed to be working a prince.” I knew there was no going back now. First I picked the wrong man and dumped him, and then I sent a curse his direction. Lots of women cursed their boyfriends after breaking up with them. Not every ex-boyfriend wound up transforming into a flaming lizard.

  “You make it sound so romantic.” His tone had grown cold as the January wind.

  “Something went wrong with Grimm’s auguries, and I met you instead.”