A Mate Worse Than Death

by J. L. Ray

  Amanda Newman, well, she had her own reasons for avoiding the Super community. She had not yet shared them with her husband or her daughter, so Anthony and Tony both assumed she supported her husband’s stance from loyalty. Meanwhile, Tony’s younger sister Amelia loved the whole situation. Currently at Georgetown University studying Supernatural Anthropology, Melly fully supported any action that shook up her parents but wasn’t her fault. And Alfred, the youngest Newman, adored his big sister. Tony could do no wrong for Fred. Besides, for the three children, the new world order was the status quo. It had started three years after Tony was born, so none of them knew any other way of seeing the world.

  The day Tony dropped by for cocktails and dropped the bomb of her latest change in work status, a social suicide bomb amongst the Newman’s circle of friends, her parents finally came to realize that they were never going to see their eldest child grow up to be mayor, governor, or president of the United States. As far as they could tell, Tony didn’t see a damn thing wrong with partnering up with an ogre. And, in fact, she didn’t. “The best part is, I get some residual magicks, so I can really work the investigations with Cal! How cool is that,” she told her parents, smiling at them in a way that told them she knew exactly how much they hated hearing that their heir apparent was now able to cast very minor, dime store magic tricks.

  Amanda smiled at her tightly, “Lovely, Antonia darling. I’m sure you’ll, uhm, use them cautiously. And, well, usefully.”

  “You don’t want to see?” Tony began to move her hand through the air as if gathering it to her palm, but her father put his hand out and took her hand in his.

  “Oh, maybe another night, sweetie. We’ve got to leave soon for the concert. Now, you’re sure you don’t want to go see Areosmith with us? I can get another ticket. ” He patted the hand he had taken.

  Tony grinned, “No, no. Too slow for me. How old are those guys now?”

  “Well, with enhancements,” her mother glossed over the magic aspects there, “ I don’t think anyone cares.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t write new stuff anymore. It’s just the same old playlist. In fact, I heard they sold their ability to write so they could stay young enough to keep doing concerts,” Tony couldn’t help yanking her parents’ chain.

  “That’s not illegal, is it?” Amanda asked anxiously.

  “No, not yet, anyway. I don’t see why it would be. It’s a contract. But that’s Dad’s area of expertise, not mine. I solve murders, not contract disputes.”

  Anthony nodded, “Yes, I do have to admit, the new contract law is quite a lucrative business. Those creatures do nothing without a contract.”

  Tony frowned at him. “I really wish you’d be a little less...” she searched for a word that wouldn’t hurt her father’s feelings, “judgmental.”

  He frowned back at her. “I am a contract judge. Judgmental is what I do, daughter.”

  “There may come a point where you need to meet my partner.”

  “The ogre?” exclaimed two horrified voices in concert.

  “And his wife. And his spawn.”

  Amanda recovered first, “ Of course we’ll be hap--” her voice broke for a moment, but not her resolve, “happy to meet them. All of them.”

  Her reward was the sight of her daughter winking at her, “It’ll be fine, little Mama. It’ll all be fine.”

  After almost a year of working together, Tony’s parents had talked to Cal a few times, but the day for the Newmans to meet all of the Kellys had yet to come, if only because Cal and Tony, from the moment they met in their Academy Re-Training for Supernatural Crimes course, got along so well that their arrest rate kept putting other paired partners to shame. And Lt. Azeem kept putting them back on cases, time and again. When Supernatural crimes happened, the Great Geas forced a quick investigation. If the guilty parties weren’t brought to Mundane justice quickly enough, and if the Geas acted on its own, then things didn’t go well for those only casually involved in any Super crime. If the Geas reacted, then it tended to over react, like using a nuclear bomb to swat a fly. Not pretty. Tony and Cal were both overdue for some downtime, but with this latest murder, it didn’t look likely, especially after the head of the GOOEN squad called them in for a report.

  One minute Tony was sitting at her desk, syncing her f-light to the viewer so the fairy-magic light could update her desk viewport and display her holographic pics of the crime scene, the next she and Cal, who had been nearby at his own desk waiting for her to send the holopic images, were somewhere else entirely. With the GOOEN squad involved, it was always better not to ask too much about exactly where “somewhere else” really was. As long as it had breathable atmosphere, the majority of the detectives considered it a win.

  Tony picked herself up off of a relatively solid surface, the expanse around her swirling in brownish fog. She put a hand down to Cal, who started laughing as he stood without her help.

  “Kid, ya crack me up,” he told her as he picked his super-solid bulk up from the same surface. “Over a year of working together and you still think you can give me a hand up.”

  “It’s a reflex,” she grinned, pulling back the hand she’d offered. “I was raised right, what can I say?” He just shook his head and rumbled.

  They turned around to see who had called them and found the usual GOOEN theatrics--a nebulous figure in a hooded robe, surrounded by a swirl of purple, green and orange fog.

  “We get brown, he gets the colors of Halloween. Rude,” Cal muttered.

  Tony gave him kick in the ankle. “Play nicely with the mage, Cal. I want to eat dinner with my folks this coming weekend, not try to recover from a transmutation spell.”

  A hollow voice boomed at them, “WE” and clearly the figure used it in the Royal form, “ DO NOT play games with our partners in law enforcement.”

  Tony and Cal looked at each other and tried not to roll their eyes. GOOEN had quite the reputation for exactly that, but recent smackdowns from the Powers That Be suggested that even members of GOOEN had to answer to Them. In the past few months, the GOOENs had suddenly ratcheted down from their normally over-the-top reactions to perceived insults from the enforcement officers they were meant to be assisting. Most of the gossip locally attributed the attitude adjustment to a transmu-spell that hit the wrong Being. Instead of transmuting the human partner, who was known for truly tasteless jokes and bad attitude, the spell had hit a highly decorated troll officer, his patient and long-suffering partner, turning her into the largest, scariest damned Canadian goose ever seen on the face of the planet. And it had taken a week for Officer Heft to return to normal. Since she was also a princess in her own right, the Powers That Be had taken umbrage. As had her condo association, once they saw the amount of normal biological transmutation one gigantic goose could affect in a formally pristine green space. Since she had proved to be the only officer willing to work with the human partner who had caused the whole situation, even he got angry on her behalf. The resulting complaints were the kind even the GOOEN squad tried to avoid, whenever possible. On the bright side, for a week, the condo association was able to save money on lawn care. And they had natural, well Supernatural, fertilizer to spare.

  “Yeah, sure, we know you’re all fine with us,” Tony said, waving Cal off from the comment he so obviously wanted to make. “Hey, you called us. What’s the word?”

  “The word?” this time the voice forgot to boom. “Oh” and the boom was back, “You mean what did we find at the crime scene? It would be more effective if you Naturals incorporated the correct verbiage to inquire about the results of our investigations. We spend far too much time invoking colloquial dictionaries and translating your ridiculous dialectic nuances in order to decipher the meanings obfuscated by the elliptical mutterings, colloquialisms, and figurative sayings that you insist on uttering.”

  “What the fuck?” muttered Cal.

  “Right,” Tony waved her arms as if waving a magic wand as she translated for her partner, “You
want us to use clearer language.”

  “He coulda just said that,” Cal frowned at the shrouded figure.

  The boom came back, “That is precisely what I said.”

  Tony threw out a hand to stop Cal’s compulsive need to continue these exact types of exchanges. “And we’re so very grateful for your assistance. What are your findings, sir?” She gave Cal a warning look as he opened mouth, preparing to comment on her excessive civility.

  “WE” again Royal, as these mages all treated their findings as a group gestalt, not an individual work, “find that the corpse, who was high fae, was in all probability murdered.”

  Tony shot Cal another look before he could thank the Mage for the obvious. Their reward was the real bombshell the Mage wanted to drop.

  “The murder is the result of exsanguination from the bite of a vampire.”

  “Uhm...” No one, no one questioned a mage-result, but, “Uhm...”

  Cal cut Tony’s cautious dithering off, “You gotta have that wrong. Am I right?”

  The Mage hung in the colorful fog, those lights around it swirling slowly, then faster and faster. The speed was making Tony very, very nervous.

  “Uh, sir. I don’t think Cal put that quite clearly.”

  “Please, clarify for US. WE would like to know how a mere Natural and a cut-rate Ogre would know more than the entire Magical Order.”

  Cal finally had the sense to realize that he might have put his size 22 foot down his throat.

  “Oh, no, no, she’s right, and I’m wrong, and what I mean is, well, revenant, right? Not vampire? Aren’t they, well, extinct?”

  The swirling fog slowed, and though they couldn’t see a face within the hood, they could hear the self-satisfied smile as the figure boomed, “It would seem that the report of their demise is somewhat premature.”

  Just as suddenly as Cal and Tony had landed in the foggy nothingness, they returned with a vengeance to the police station, landing butt-first on the floor. Due to funding cuts, the part where Cal landed kept its concave shape for some years to come.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On their return from, well, wherever, Tony and Cal headed down to the morgue to see what slightly more mundane methods had yielded in the way of results. The chief pathologist for the Supernatural Crimes Investigation Bureau, Dr. Caligari, got excellent results, but the good doctor hadn’t won Calvin over yet, and he hated going to the morgue when the chief examiner was on duty unless Tony was with him. They never talked about it. Tony could have given him grief. Cal stood about 7 feet 6 inches, and Caligari was closer to 4 feet 4. In fact, the little man was actually a goblin. But that was the problem. Without the Great Geas, goblins and ogres were about as mixy as the average sorority sister and hipster chick. Not happening. The Geas had led to some odd interactions, and Cal just couldn’t seem to get past this one. Tony, however, had a soft spot for the doctor, who had volunteered to work in law enforcement rather than having been forced to do so. He had always been, in general, a good creature, despite being born a full-blooded goblin.

  “Hiya Dr. C,”Tony smiled as she ducked her head in the door. “Can Cal and I enter?” She was always very careful about the doctor’s dignity.

  “Of course, of course,” he told her in his vaguely boarding-school British, sing-song voice, rubbing his long, slim hands round and round, which Tony had found out was a kind of comfort gesture for goblins. She suspected he enjoyed Cal’s presence as little as Cal enjoyed being there, but it was what it was. The Geas had flipped a lot of old rivalries on their heads--some rivals, too. Literally on their heads, when they didn’t behave. So they all made do.

  “I have some interesting results for you, my dear,” he told her, his words lisping just a bit to cover his very pointy teeth. He didn’t cover them for just any Natty in the Bureau. He was especially fond of Tony, perhaps because she tended to take every Super she met at face value, reserving judgement until one of them actually did something wrong, like try to bite a chunk out of her.

  Cal blurted out their news, “GOOEN just reeled us in for a report and claimed it was a vampire kill.”

  Tony and Caligari both turned to him with a frown, Caligari’s magnified by the coke-bottle lenses he wore. Cal hunched back from them both in distress, “I mean, they’re wrong. Right, Doc?”

  Caligari shook his head and sighed. “Those mages, such prima donnas. I wish I could tell you they were wrong, my large compatriot, but no. It looks like vampire.”

  Cal and Tony looked at each other and then back at Caligari. “So they aren’t completely eradicated?”

  “Like cockroaches, they are very hard to kill and tend to hide in dark, hard to reach places,” Caligari laughed at his own joke, then noticed no one else was laughing. “My dear Detective Tony, I would have said yes, they are gone. But the evidence you brought to me says otherwise. However, I have more specific proof for you. Come to the table.”

  Cal and Tony walked over to look at the corpse, which still seemed fresh and had that ecstatic look on its face, even hours after death. Caligari reached out and touched each of their four hands, initiating a ward so that they could touch the remains without compromising the results. Then he drew them over to the head of the table.

  The female fae’s body had been autopsied, so it lay face up, arms to the sides, head propped up. Caligari turned the head so that the neck was more visible. “Look here at these bite marks.” He pointed to the two puncture wounds. “A revenant has not the length of tooth nor the dexterity of motion to cause a bite this clean. Had it been a revenant attack, the neck would have been worried, like an animal chewing its way in. So that is one cause of the evaluation.”

  He stepped away from the body and pointed at the table where he had his written report. “This female is high dark fae--she should have 12 pints of blood in her. She has less than one. So that is the second cause of the evaluation. A single revenant couldn’t consume so much, so it would have been several, not one. You would know if this was an attack by multiple entities. There would be many wounds. There are not.”

  He walked over to his f-light and picked it up. “Finally, I ran an old spell from this, one that I used, well, “ he looked up and grinned, showing more tooth than normal, “before the Great Change. It is a spell that detects the essence of the vampire.”

  “Essence?” Tony asked, “ Not...like soul?”

  “Oh no, they have no souls. That’s why we tried to destroy them even before the Outing. They are truly evil. But essence, “ he added, “like their stench, their rot, you see?”

  “F-light bloodhound?” Tony asked.

  Caligari nodded, “Yes, yes, you see.” He turned the piece of equipment, part modern electronics, part pure magic in his hand, a smile on his face as he said simply, “They are so useful.”

  Tony nodded, “Knocked smartphones right off the market in no time flat when they showed up. Super magic and Natty science make some beautiful toys, huh?”

  Caligari laughed and nodded.

  “So,” Tony said, “essentially three reasons for the vampire as COD. And the GOOEN squad came to the same conclusion.”

  “They had the extended version of something very like my spell, so with both, we can assume that, indeed, it was a vampire that killed your victim.”

  “How did it sneak up on her? How did it get her? High fae? I mean, isn’t she going to be hard to kill?”

  Caligari nodded and said, “And that is where my other find may be of some service to you.” He reached for the desk holding the victim’s clothing and personal effects. “ I found this,” and he pulled out a business card out of the items on the table.

  MONSTER-MATE.COM

  Looking for love in all the wrong places?

  Tired of being alone in a Natural/Supernatural World?

  Contact MONSTER-MATE.COM and find your perfect match.

  Tony raised an eyebrow at Calvin. “Seriously? There’s a Mageline dating service for Supers?”

  Cal shrugged, “Don’t
look at me girl, I’m married. If I ever clicked on that, even out of curiosity, Berthell would have my ears for lunch. And I mean that, by the way. She would eat my ears.”

  Caligari waved a hand at them. “I have a profile on Monster-Mate. I have been on a couple of dates and attended a singles event.” He continued on, blithely unaware of the wide-eyed stares from both Tony and Cal. “I had to leave. There were a few, uhm, members, who didn’t behave well together.”

  Tony looked appalled, “What do you mean? They tried to eat each other?”

  “No, no,” Caligari shook his head. Then he reconsidered, “Well, yes, actually, and their sexual gymnastics were most distasteful and, and, and public.” He kept shaking his head as Cal and Tony traded looks. “Terrible, terrible. One would expect better manners, truly. And more clothes. The first owner ran a reputable company, not a Roman orgy, but the owner while I was a member did not uhm...fulfill that side of his contract. There is another new owner since him, so I’m sure that the clientele has improved.”

  Tony stared at Caligari, still working her way through that last comment. Her partner watched, more relaxed around Caligari than he had ever been. Knowing the doc had to deal with the singles scene while he was happily at home with wife and spawn had changed his feelings toward the gnome. Cal grinned as Tony finally got the full meaning and gave him a look. He nodded and watched her mouth pucker in a horrified “Ooooh.” Then he turned to the doctor and put out his hand for the card, which Caligari placed carefully in Cal’s far wider palm. “Do you know where the office for this place is?” he asked the goblin.