Toxic Influence

by Voss Foster

  "Any idea what they gave you?"

  "I'm sure someone knows. I was very unconscious at the time."

  "Well, that does impede information gathering, doesn't it?" He grabbed a clear glass beaker, poured in a generous portion of some sort of dried leaves or petals I didn't recognize. Then he let the tap run until it steamed and filled the beaker up. "We'll let that steep a few minutes, then we can get to your lungs." He grabbed a vial of some clear liquid from the cart next and shook it in front of my face. "In the meantime, this is going to sting like a bitch. But we may as well get your legs back in working order, right?"

  "If possible, yeah." Though my lungs and throat and all of that seemed the most important of all. My voice had gone from sounding like a metal singer to a pack a day smoker just since waking up in that car. "But they look pretty bad from here."

  "Oh, sweetie, this is surface level damage, and thanks to a little magic getting you here, it's fresh. No promises, but they don't pay me a criminal amount of money just for my good looks. I'll do what I can." He popped the top off the vial and fitted what looked like the top of a spray bottle into the opening. "So, you want my belt to bite on, or can you handle the sting like a big boy?"

  "Do I get a lollipop if I do?"

  Casey chuckled. "When I said sting, I meant hornet sting. Sorry."

  "Just spritz away." Had to be better than…dying.

  He went to work and I clutched the edge of the table. One hornet sting would have been okay. Even a few. This was a nest, whatever he was spraying down there, and he worked methodically all the way around. Didn't want to miss a single inch, which I should have been happy about.

  "How you holding up?"

  "Unicorn kisses."

  "Well it is unicorn saliva, so that makes sense."

  "You're…serious?"

  "No. That would be unsanitary." He finished my right leg and moved on to the other. "It's a combination of a few different botanicals all steeped in a special cauldron until it turns clear again. It doesn't do anything to treat pain—"

  "Yeah. Noticed that."

  "But what it does do is stimulate tissue growth. The fresher the dead cells, the stronger the reaction it has. So if it feels like an angry chihuahua gnawing on your legs, that means it's working."

  "You know your descriptions of the pain are getting worse, right? Let's go back to stinging."

  "Oh grow a pair." He rose and set the half-spent vial on the cart with everything else. "Your muscle's stitching itself back together, and once that's done it's going to hurt a lot less. How much of the stuff did you breathe in?"

  "A little." The pain in my right leg was subsiding a bit, which was good. It tingled as though it had just gone to sleep, now. "I was coughing up blood, so maybe more than a little."

  "Well that's not good, is it?" He went back to the beaker, strained it out into a second beaker, and handed it over. "Drink your medicine. It should do the trick for the moment. Better than nothing."

  I nodded and forced my arms to move. Everything hurt, and everything hurt a hundred times more when I moved. But I brought it to my lips, and Casey stepped in to hold the bottom of the beaker. I'd expected bitterness. You know, medicine? But it wasn't bad. Sort of like tea. Not my favorite drink, but eminently better than it could have tasted.

  Casey took the beaker back once I'd drained it, then grabbed a couple long, thin silver rods. "All right, let's take a look at what we've got going. You should at least start feeling better."

  "What are the sharp metal things for?"

  "Oh, they're not sharp. No stabbing unless you ask nice, promise." He rubbed them together between his palms, rolling the silvery rods back and forth. They let out a tiny sound of scraping metal, but it was almost too faint to hear.

  "Go ahead and take off your shirt, Mr. Brave and Heroic. Assuming you can." He looked me up and down. "Didn't exactly exchange pleasantries, did we?"

  "Dashiel Rourke." It was slow, painful going, but I was able to take it off by myself, so that was a win I wasn't entirely expecting. "Call me Dash."

  "I'm Casey. Dr. Casey Daniels." He took my offered shirt and set it on the counter behind him. "You FBI or civilian casualty?"

  "Counterterrorism."

  "Ooh, keeping our country safe from threats foreign and domestic. I like it. Sorry if anything's cold, I did my best." He placed his hands, with one rod in each, flat on either side of my chest. "I'll have you know, I used to charge for this level of personal service to strapping young men."

  "Well, you take Paypal? I can get you right now."

  "Oh, no, I stopped hooking as soon as my student debts were paid off." He rolled the rods back and forth in different patterns along my chest. Nothing was cold at all. In fact, it was almost uncomfortably warm.

  Casey sighed and nodded. "Looks to me like we caught that lung damage in time Lucky for you. Too much longer and you'd be looking at a lot worse than downing a little tonic." A few more rolls of those metal rods. "Looks like they focused on the lungs in New York. I can see the work they've done in there. Good on them."

  I nodded, then inclined my head toward the metal rods he'd laid aside on the cart. "Is that some kind of magical X-ray or something?"

  "More or less. No pretty pictures to hang on the wall and point to, but it tells me where the damage is, what we've got going on, and it latches onto a lot of impurities in the body that an X-ray would miss. Not a replacement, but it's a hell of a lot faster, and I don't have to irradiate your testicles to see what's wrong."

  "My theoretical children thank you. Also my testicles aren't in my chest."

  "Really?" He shrugged. "Crazy human anatomy."

  I was slightly unsure until he winked. It was a joke. Joke was good. Not knowing where all my organs belonged would have been less good.

  I cleared my throat in the hopes it would fix my voice a little. It did not. "So my legs are feeling better, and you said my lungs are working on it…what now?"

  "I want to get a blood sample. You're alive and you have active toxins in you. Since this sounds like it's officially one of our cases, now, I need to get to work figuring out what the poison was." He came back around with a tourniquet, a syringe, and a pair of gloves. "Hope you're not squeamish about needles. You're the first chance I'm getting to take a crack at the poison myself."

  "Go ahead." I didn't love needles, but after the affair with my legs, I could handle that tiny prick.

  Casey made quick work of snapping on a pair of purple gloves, tying off the tourniquet, finding the vein, and swabbing my inner elbow. Then he popped his fingers against the skin a couple times.

  "Why do doctors tap your arm like that?"

  "It helps dilate the blood vessels so we can actually hit it." He held the prepped syringe up to the light, checking for something, I guess. "Okay, you ready?"

  "Yeah."

  In went the needle. Hopefully he wasn't watching, because I winced.

  "You okay there, hon?"

  He was watching. "I'm good. I may have lied, though. I don't like needles."

  "Well, the worst part's over, now. It's in." He drew back and the vial filled with deep red. "We'll just take this, then. You need some water? You must be dying of thirst."

  I ran my tongue along the suddenly arid roof of my mouth. "Well I wasn't until you mentioned it."

  Casey chuckled. He slipped the vial out and pulled out the needle. "That is enough of that."

  As he walked away I couldn't help but notice how young he was. "So, sorry if this is too prying, but were you one of those child prodigies or something? Doogie Howser kind of shit?"

  "Yeah, you could say that. I started college at fourteen. Worked out pretty well for me. I was working in hospitals at twenty-six, but I was also studying alchemical healing, so the OPA snatched me right up and plopped me into a cushy government job where I get to play nursemaid to all the attractive young agents who lose their tangles with harpies and demons and shit."

  I nodded. "Well, I owe you one."
/>   "Oh, let's not do that. I might try to cash in that favor one day, and you might not be gay." He filled up the beaker I'd drank from before and handed that over. "Go ahead and wet your whistle."

  I took the beaker and drained that down. It was the best water ever. It helped that I wasn't in complete agony anymore.

  I handed him the empty beaker and took a few seconds to catch my breath.

  "Okay then." Casey nodded. "I think we've had long enough. I want to see you walk, see how that's coming along. Your lungs are on the mend, so let's refocus."

  I did feel a little better. I wasn't plagued with the urge to cough. At least not as much. So something was happening.

  Before I could get up, the door opened, revealing a very tiny woman. Burnished peach skin, sharp features, and long black hair streaked through with platinum. Also she scowled into the room as though we were both literal piles of shit. That's what it felt like, anyway. For a woman of her size and stature, I felt like a little squished stink bug when she looked at me.

  Didn't seem to bother Casey. "You need something, Kimmy?"

  "I have been sent as a runner to go get someone called Dashiel Rourke." Her voice dripped disdain. "I assume he's the shirtless wonderhunk?"

  "Shirtless wonderhunk. Should have been in my personnel file." I laughed weakly at my own joke. Her face remained unchanged. "Yeah, I'm Dashiel Rourke. Call me Dash."

  "Call me never." She turned her full attention to Casey. "When he's back in one working piece, Swift wants him."

  Casey raised one eyebrow. "What for?"

  "Messenger. Lackey. Runner. Don't ask me why he needs anyone with such a pretentious name." She turned on her heel and walked away. "Get him quick. You know Swift has other shit to do."

  And she was gone. I turned my head to look at Casey. "She is…"

  He laughed in the trailing off pause. "She is Kimmy. She is very gruff. And she can do things to a computer that would put your jaw straight on the floor, so she gets a big pass on everything else." He nudged me in the side. "Plus her bark is much worse than her bite. And she has that cold, sexy, distant dominatrix thing going for her."

  "You're less gay than I assumed."

  "I'm approximately fifty percent more gay than you probably assumed. But I'm not blind. Just because she doesn't do anything for me doesn't mean she doesn't do anything for anyone else." He shifted his arm lower around my back. "Okay, let's try getting up. I'll be here to catch you, but I do damn good work, so you should be fine."

  He sounded less than convinced of his own skill, but I just swallowed back that moment of panic as Casey slowly guided me to the edge of the exam table. "Right. Good work." Nothing hurt the way it had when I came in. It should have been easy to take that step, but I couldn't quite bite back the nerves entirely. They moved up my throat with the bile and I had to force myself to breathe as I slid off the table and put the first little bit of weight on my newly healed left leg.

  It held. No pain. No collapse. No skin sloughing off into a disgusting pile on the floor. Another one, and I was walking. As much as I couldn't hold back the nerves, I couldn’t hold back the laughter, either. "I feel…okay."

  "Well all things considered, I don't think we can expect more than okay right now." He stepped back and sat himself on the exam table. "Take a few more rounds through the room and I'll be convinced you're healthy enough for release."

  I obliged happily. When I saw my legs at first, I assumed I was down for the count for a while. I wasn't running any marathons anytime soon, that was for damn sure. But I made it more than two steps. It felt more like I'd had several really strenuous leg days in a row. A little stiff, incredibly tight, super uncomfortable. I wanted to sit…but I didn't have to, which was an incredible improvement. "You guys plan on sharing this stuff with the rest of the bureau?"

  "When I got hired on at OPA, an email went out to the head of every department and Director Svenson. If people feel weird about magic, that's their own problem. It's here if they want it."

  Yeah. I'd had a little more exposure to magic than most of the other agents in counterterrorism. It was still weird for me, but so many people got squicked out by it, or thought it was the work of the devil, or any of a hundred other reasons not to interact with it…or with the preternaturals.

  On the third round through the room, I stopped to look at him. "So who's Swift?" I had zero desire to cough, and my voice sounded creaky, but otherwise decent. "Do I need to be worried?"

  "Head of the OPA. He probably just wants to talk, since you were right up close and personal with the perp. Or he wants to sacrifice you to the dark god we keep locked up under the toilet. Fifty-fifty, really." He clapped his hands down on his knees and popped up. "I think you're good to go. If anything goes wrong with the legs or the lungs or you just feel a particularly odd illness coming on, come see me immediately. No offense, but I'm really hoping I don't have to see you strolling back through that door."

  "Not offended, believe me." I went to where he'd put my secondhand hospital shirt and picked it up. It had faded horses running on the front, and some text underneath them that I couldn't make out with even the most impressive eye squint. "Say what you want, but I owe you one, and I'm not taking no for an answer." I slipped my shirt on and nodded to Casey. "But one more thing—"

  "Swift's office is right in the main room. Just go back out the way you came to get here from the atrium and take the doors across from the service elevator. He's tucked into the back left corner from there. Don't go into the other office, though."

  "A second dark god?"

  "You wish. Grumpy Special Agent with a chip on her shoulder. Poke the bear at your own risk."

  "Got it. Any other land mines?"

  "You already met Gutt, so it should be fine. And five bucks says Bancroft doesn't even look up from his desk when you come in."

  I chuckled. "Thanks again."

  And I walked out. Suddenly, that sterile, clean, white room felt so warm, and the generic beige hallways of the FBI felt cold and off-putting. Probably because the clinical room left me able to walk, and the beige hallways were leading me to the mysterious leader of the spooks for unknown purposes.

  At the very least, I was eighty percent sure Casey was joking about the sacrifice.

  The other twenty percent hoped I didn't taste very good.

  Chapter Three

  The office space for the OPA was miniscule compared to counterterrorism. Maybe a quarter the size, and almost dead silent. I could actually hear the air conditioning running in the background.

  I passed between two rows of cubicles. One space housed an old, white-haired man and approximately half the books in the known world. Gutt sat across the way from him, typing away on a massive-race keyboard. Corporate America would find a market anywhere, even if it was only for government agencies and particularly tech-savvy trolls, ogres, and orcs. He nodded and smiled that unintentionally unnerving smile at me as I passed.

  But the other cubicles were empty, though there were a handful of side rooms attached to the main body, all of them with their doors closed. I was expecting…more. My initial impression, that this space had never been intended as an office, let alone the epicenter of an entire department, seemed more and more correct as I looked around. Everything seemed just south of totally professional and well-made. Things were slightly off-square, including the walls, which skewed gently toward the far end of the space. That meant that nothing else stood a chance of being straight or even. The cubicle dividers were worn down more than ten years should have accounted for, the carpet was rough and stained in places. And the doors. All but the main doors to the elevator, which were glass, looked like bottom of the barrel overstock doors, but with good quality handles and locks stuck on.

  In the far left corner, one door stood propped open with a mesh wastepaper basket. I assumed that had to be for my benefit. I nodded to try and prepare myself, then strode into the office of the head spook, wearing my borrowed, floppy red cargo shorts and a T-
shirt with horses on it.

  Things were obviously going well.

  There were no windows, which made the already cramped office feel even more claustrophobic. The color scheme also didn't help. Walls painted umber, and filled with dark wood furniture. The two chairs on this side of the desk looked pretty nice, too. Probably not leather, if I could guess at their budget from everything else I'd seen, but a fair imitation in vinyl.

  The man sitting on the other side of the desk was probably late thirties to early forties, black, and looked…stretched. His fingers seemed a little too long, his face a bit too drawn, and his body just slightly sucked into itself. He had wide brown eyes that were currently turned to a stack of paperwork in front of him.

  I reached back and knocked on the door lightly. "Agent Swift?"

  He raised his head slowly and grated his eyes up and down my body, the way old cops always did when I worked NYPD. "You must be Agent Rourke?" His voice was high, tight, and reedy. Stretched out like that, he was like a giant, human-shaped English horn. Which was an image I immediately banished.

  "Dashiel Rourke, yes. You can call me Dash, sir."

  "Call me Swift." He chortled. "Swift and Dash. Quite a pair. Surprised we don't have our own buddy cop show." He shuffled his papers aside, then steepled his fingers and leaned forward. "Go ahead and close the door, Dash."

  His words had a lazy, flowing quality to them, and the brush of an accent I couldn't quite place, and wasn't quite strong enough for me to be sure I heard anyway. But pretty sure. I clicked the door shut. "Do you mind if I sit?"

  "After the day you've had? Be my guest." He stayed in the same position at his desk until I lowered myself into the not-entirely-uncomfortable seat across from him. Then he broke and tilted his head a bit to the side. "What exactly are you wearing?"

  "My apologies, sir." I kept it short and respectful. This was the head spook. I could handle Carlson. Most he'd do was send me off to desk duty for a month. Swift…well, I was still twenty percent convinced they were storing a dark god somewhere, waiting for a sacrifice. Even if they had no such thing, my first run-in with magic hadn't gone well for me. I didn't want to play around with it again. "They took my clothes for testing when I went to the New York Field Office. This was what they had on hand that would fit, sir. I was unconscious at the time."