Toxic Influence

by Voss Foster

  "Yes, now." Gutt waved his hand through the air. In front of us, there was a shimmer, like a heat mirage. A shimmer that was way, way too familiar to me after the last few months working with the Office of Preternatural Affairs: magic. Honest to God magic that was going to carry our happy asses back to the Miami PD where we could hand this guy over. He wasn't a big enough deal to take him back to the Miami Field Office, let alone DC. And honestly? I didn't want to deal with that paperwork, and I was pretty damn sure Gutt didn't want to either.

  I pushed through the shimmer at a creep, just in case the portal let us out a little too close to a concrete pole or something. As we passed, the world lit up into neons and pastels and colors you didn't see outside of the Las Vegas strip and shroom-induced hallucinations. It was the Hidden Kingdoms, the secret spaces where the preternaturals lived perfectly on their own…well, until recently, anyway. Once they had a massive prison break that threw the human world into chaos, they didn't have a lot of choice but to reveal themselves to us. Dragons burning up wheat fields in Kansas and sorcerers tossing around exploding balls of light in downtown Chicago could only escape human notice so long.

  All of us poor rubes in the OPA were still cleaning up the mess that caused. Ten years down the line and most of the escaped convicts were still on the loose somewhere, either in the Kingdoms or in the Mundane, plus we had a ton of other magical problems that needed to be handled. With the last mess in NYC a few months back—all human life almost ending, terrorist attacks, mysterious poison that killed almost instantaneously—we were definitely a little busy as of late. Anti-human and anti-preet crime had both taken a nationwide uptick after that.

  We passed through the Kingdoms and back out into a parking lot. Right in front of a nice, empty parking spot instead of a light post. "You're good, Gutt."

  "Yes, I'm well aware of that fact."

  I turned off the car, hopped out, and grabbed the drug-dealing selkie. "You paying for my dry cleaning to get the sweat stains out of this shirt?"

  And by god, he responded with actual words that time. "You could have let me go. No running, no sweat."

  "Right. Let you go so you can get more kids hooked on a drug that'll leave them…Gutt, what's the fancy word I'm looking for?"

  "Exsanguinated."

  "Exsanguinated. Yeah. Let you do that? I don't think so." I dragged him out of the car and led him to the door. "I didn't go to medical school, but I'm led to understand that losing all the blood in your body? Not great for your overall health and wellbeing."

  I got him through the doors, Gutt right behind me, and handed him off to the waiting officers. Sherriff Barcelo, an older Cuban gentleman with a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, nodded at me as the selkie went past. "Anything special with him?"

  "Keep him hydrated," said Gutt. "Fresh water will keep him going, but selkies need significant exposure to salt water no less than once per day. At least twenty eight ounces. Directly out of the sea is best, but table salt in tap water can do in a pinch."

  I nodded as though I actually knew the specifics of imprisoning selkies. "Keep watch around the schools for a while. Don't know if there might be more lurking around somewhere. This might be a bigger operation." Dragon's dew came from a dragon's conflagratory system, or the equivalent in non-fire-breathing dragons. It was rarely used by certain alchemists to treat bad illnesses or issues in dragons, and far more often used by preets to get high on a plus-size magic spike. But even with dragons, using too much or in the wrong situation would attack the veins and arteries, not to mention the heart damage. Preets didn't hold up that well to it, and the sudden rush of magic into a largely non-magic population had already turned up half a dozen dead kids and a dozen or more dead adults, depending on who you asked and which reports you read. If there was more to this, it needed to be weeded out.

  Barcelo nodded, clicking his tongue affirmatively. "You've got it. Thank you for this. We were at a loss."

  "That's why the OPA exists, Sherriff." Gutt rolled his shoulders back. "Now if you excuse us, we have paperwork, I'm sure."

  And we left on that. "Want to take bets on how fast Svenson's going to ask for my report?"

  We piled into the SUV. Gutt waved his hand lackadaisically behind his head to create the portal we could back up through. "Svenson's still on you?"

  "I'm surprised, too. I'm thinking of starting an actual pool, see when he's going to finally get off my ass." I backed up, into the bright colors and back out into our parking garage in Quantico, full of other black Fords. I shifted around, pulled into the spot, and turned off the car. "You want first dibs on the betting?"

  "I might take you up on that."

  We got out and went to the elevator…and I don't know, maybe Director Svenson had secretly installed a tracking chip in the back of my neck, but my phone lit up as soon as we headed up and into the range where my cellphone could actually pick up signal. And yeah, it was Eric Svenson, FBI Director and fairly recent pain in my ass. "Director Svenson."

  "Eric, please. Call me Eric."

  Yes, there was that worthless attempt at trying to connect with me, make us allies in his attempt at controlling the OPA from afar. "We got three of the drug runners out of Miami. They're in custody with Miami PD. No evidence that there's anyone more than that, and if there is, we can get back down there and clean up a little more. Everything was textbook."

  "And your report?"

  "It'll be on your desk, sir." Along with a pile of cat shit, if I had my way. I was "normal," so he wanted me reporting on all the other spooks down in the OPA. He couldn't be bothered to come down himself, convinced the OPA would be lying to him any time he tried to pay a visit. I didn't know if it was anti-preet bigotry or something else entirely, but what it definitely was, was a pain my ass.

  "Good. Glad you got things down there cleaned up. Those preet drugs should stay on their side. We have enough trouble with meth and heroin. Nice work. I look forward to reading that report."

  Right. He looked forward to the dry as fuck report. "Yes sir." And I hung up before we could keep on with our super fun conversation. The elevator doors slid apart. "You think he'd notice if I copy and paste the report from two weeks ago?"

  "I can almost guarantee he's going through each report with a fine-toothed comb." Gutt pushed the doors to the main OPA office open. "It's simply a part of the job, now. It doesn't take that much time."

  "My issues aren't with the time commitment." Although anything that took time away from the actual work I was supposed to be doing didn't rank high ony my list, either. "They're…ethical. Moral."

  "Yes, it goes against principle for you to have to report in on us for no reason. But everyone knows that's the case, now. You made certain of that."

  I nodded, lowering myself down at my desk. "I'm still annoyed by it. Just more today, I guess." We'd cleaned up a big problem in Miami, and here I was, having to file an extra round of paperwork, just for the FBI Director.

  As I was filling out the first set of reports, Agent Swift strolled up, calm and cool and suave. Not at all looking like the leader of a major unit of the FBI, but he was the black, middle-aged man that I answered to. "Everything's copacetic down in Florida, I take it?"

  "Yeah. Next time you should go so that Gutt has someone to talk to while I chase down the drug dealers. He seemed so lonely."

  "Gutt gets stuck in narrow alleys, and I speak from experience when I say it is a bitch and a half to get him loose again. Don't have enough Crisco for that in all of Georgia." Swift leaned over my desk, peering at the papers, then sighed. "You're filing two reports again. Wish he wasn't wasting your time."

  "Welcome to the club. I'll make commemorative pins." I continued to scribble out the basic information on the forms. "We have access to a dragon, right? Can't we sic him on Svenson, get him to stop wasting my time reporting on all the terrible things we're not doing down here?"

  "That might fall under misuse of FBI resources." Swift drummed his fingers on top of the wall o
f my cubicle. "He's going to drop it eventually, Dash. Just muscle through, and keep being honest with him."

  "Oh, honest. Right. My bad. I guess I should cut out the part about how we summoned the Class-A that caused that earthquake in China last week? I thought it would make for a more interesting story."

  "Yeah, if you don't mind leaving that particular lie out, I think that would be best. Interesting as it might be to consider. Next major earthquake, I guess we could investigate." Swift righted himself. "Sherriff Barcelo already called me up, thanked me personally even though I was sitting up here on my old withered ass doing nothing. He's impressed with you two, and I may have jumped on the opportunity to get some better training on his mind for dealing with preets."

  "Yeah, they seemed completely undertrained for dealing with even one preet in custody. He had to ask about keeping an elf." Other than excessive longevity and the worldview that came with living for a thousand plus years, they were functionally identical to humans.

  Swift sighed, leaning slightly closer. "Not every police department has gotten on the bandwagon yet, although Miami's got enough of a population…well, it's not my job to judge whether or not they should be up to snuff by now or not." Swift shrugged. "Have fun with your paperwork. I'm going to dust off the old training systems and see what we need to change. No one's been interested enough in one for a couple years."

  He took a couple steps back toward his office, then his phone rang. I was starting to fill out the actual report for Svenson—as pared down as I could, since it was a waste of everyone's time involved—and Swift was at his office door. Except he never actually went in the office. He stayed at the doorway until he hung up his phone and marched back my way. "We've got a weird one. Meet in the vault."

  I looked at Gutt and shrugged. "Damn, I guess my paperwork has to wait."

  "You sound positively heartbroken."

  "Well yeah, but I think I'll recover." We got up and went into the little side room. The computer vault with one wall of screens and a whole desk full of mice and keyboards. And Kimmy. This whole room was Kimmy's domain, and she currently sat in her office chair throne, long, dark hair tied back into a ponytail that hid her single platinum blonde streak somewhere in the middle. And of course she was dressed in all black, as per usual.

  Swift stood next to her, leaning over the desk and staring at the screen. "Kimmy, news out of Burlington, Vermont. An ice explosion."

  She cocked her head to the side, one eyebrow raised. "The fuck is an ice explosion?"

  "Do I look like I know? It's weird. If it wasn't weird, local PD wouldn't have called to try and get us working on the case, and I wouldn't have bothered you with it."

  She shrugged and typed away, bringing up a bunch of Facebook posts and tweets. Plus a couple pictures of…well, it was an ice explosion. Exactly what it sounded like. A gray and maroon two-story house, frosted and frozen over like the singular victim of a miniature ice age.

  "We have anything else on this?" I figured it was time to start gathering info, because if there was anything that would get us working on a case…well, this certainly seemed like the sort of thing that would get the job done.

  "Everyone's dead inside." Swift was already drumming his fingers on the desktop, the only nervous tic I'd ever identified from him. "Human family of four, plus a preternatural. That's all the info I've gotten from Chief Ballinger right now."

  That raised my eyebrow, that was for sure. "The chief of police actually came out for this one?"

  "They called him up to take a look, and he didn't have a clue." Swift cracked his knuckles against the desk. "Weird shit travels upstream. And we're pretty much the headwaters."

  "Was this an elemental?" Gutt leaned in as though that might actually help him discern something from the grainy cell phone photo.

  "Don't know, because he didn't know. I figure we're better off going in and checking it out than waiting for photos and information to be released." Swift nodded at Gutt. "I'll stay here and wait for word, get everyone up to speed. You two can check things out."

  I probably didn't need to be there, but it got me out of doing paperwork for a few more minutes. And I guess, depending on the attitudes in the room, having a human agent show up might cause a little less of a reaction than just the massive blue troll appearing out of thin air.

  Gutt created another shimmering portal in the air and stepped through. I followed, moving past the bright colored walls and pastel streets of the Hidden Kingdoms, and into a bustling, cordoned off crime scene. And it was the weirdest fucking thing I'd ever seen. That was counting the thousand foot snake materializing in the middle of Central Park, and the OPA's medic regrowing all of the skin on my body.

  My metric for weird had changed a lot in the past few months.

  The picture back in Quantico showed an ice explosion, but standing there in the middle of it really drove it home. It wasn't like a bomb that blew out the walls and scorched the ground around it. Working counterterrorism, I'd seen enough bomb sites after the fact. This was a house with no more windows, large, sharp chunks of ice jutting out like vicious fangs. The ground around the house for a solid eight to ten feet was frosted over, getting thicker and icier as it moved toward the center. It was a bright day. Vermont didn't get Death Valley heat as a rule, but even this was enough to melt the ice around the edges, leaving the ground soft, squelching underfoot.

  "This is an ice elemental. I'd put money on it." Gutt cracked his huge knuckles. "Come along, I want to get a look at this."

  We walked up the front steps and onto the too-perfect little porch. The front door was open, but with a thin, elderly white guy standing guard. He nodded to each of us in turn. "Chief Ballinger, Burlington Police Department. You two from the FBI?"

  I nodded. "Agent Rourke, and Agent N'Gutta."

  "Call me Gutt. And call him Dash." Gutt flashed his ID, although honestly this guy sounded so done with this mess he probably didn't care if we were legit or not. "Can we take a look?"

  "Spooks would know better than I would about this stuff." He stepped aside. "It's not a pretty sight."

  Gutt moved ahead, and I followed as closely as the arctic environment would allow me. It was a struggle to stay standing, the floor covered in a thick layer of ice and littered with giant chunks of the stuff that I had to step over. Balancing on one foot on the ice in the cold…not fun, and not exactly covered anywhere in training, police or FBI.

  "I should have brought a coat." To punctuate that point, the words puffed out on little clouds of steam. Gutt stopped in the doorway to the dining room, and I pulled up even with him to take a look.

  Everything else dropped out, and if I wasn't cold before, I damn sure was at the sight before me.

  An entire family of four was there, all encased in slowly dripping ice. A Hispanic man and a white woman, both middle-aged with blue lips and their eyes firmly frozen open and unmoving. A boy who looked like his mother and a girl who looked like her father.

  And a third child who wasn't frozen in the ice.

  "I was right," whispered Gutt. "It's an ice elemental. I didn't expect this, however."

  "Am I wrong thinking this is…a kid?" Maybe I was. Maybe this was something about the way elementals aged, and this one was several hundred years old and lived a long and fruitful life.

  "I would hazard a guess at…seven years old? Eight?"

  My stomach fell straight out, and I already felt a headache sneaking up on me. Plus nausea. Yeah, nausea was there, too. "You think…you think a kid did this?"

  "I think any elemental child could do this." Gutt shook his head. "Elementals have an opening to their own sealed magic. Each of them is a living portal to a sealed dimension."

  "I know." Part of training with the NYPD. Training didn't cover this, though.

  Gutt nodded. "Of course. When elementals are born, only the mother and a practitioner are allowed into the area. As the baby is born, their power is sealed. Otherwise, they become highly destructive, but with no a
bility to guide their magic. Their entire life force will be cast out in one burst of power."

  "And that's what we're seeing here?"

  Gutt's eyes darkened to forest green. "An autopsy is the only way to be certain, but I would guess yes. A newborn is capable of leveling buildings, razing fields of crops. It's clear this girl had some training already, but not enough to stop the magic on her own." His mouth turned down into that fierce scowl. "This should never have happened."

  There were dozens of questions that needed answering. Where did this girl come from? Who was she? Why was she in this house? Where were her parents? Was this purposeful or an accident? Why did these people deserve to die…and her?

  "Is this a 'come back to the cop shop' kind of autopsy, or 'OPA needs to take this case' kind of autopsy?"

  "I think Casey should handle it." He closed his eyes for a few seconds, breathing deeply, his nostrils flaring. Then he turned around and walked up to Chief Ballinger. "We need to take the elemental child back to DC for an autopsy when you're done with her."

  "We're done with her." He stuffed his hands in his pockets, shaking his head. "Any idea what happened?"

  "Her magic was somehow prematurely unsealed, and this is the result every time. It's akin to giving a six year old a tank full of sarin gas. It's never going to end well. For anyone."

  Ballinger shook his head. "It's a damn shame." He looked to me, then back to Gutt. "Go ahead and take her back. Keep me updated." He gestured around the room. "Anything to be done about this ice? Unfreeze the bodies and maybe avoid damaging this house any more than it's already been damaged?"

  "Of course." Gutt turned and pressed his palms together. Whatever he was doing, the ice around him was disappearing. Not melting and leaving the carpet damp, but simply vanishing.

  Ballinger whistled. "Impressive. Where can I get one of you?"

  Gutt turned, raising one massive eyebrow. "How often are you finding yourself having to clean up ice like this?"

  "In Vermont? Every winter."