“Ow.” Daniel smacked his hand away before rubbing his arm.
His partner dragged his chair over the last few inches with a jerk forceful enough to bang their chairs together.
“Are you telling me that woman was there? Again?” Rubbing his face, he shook his head. “Unbelievable.” He dropped his hand, narrowing his eyes. “She’s why you went inside.”
“I saw her walking up to the house with nothing but a sword. I thought she was insane. I had to help her.” Daniel leaned back in his chair, letting his eyes unfocus. “Turns out she didn’t need it. She ended up saving my ass, giving up her chance to get at Puck.”
Ray leaned back, too, crossing his arms. “I get it. You ended up taking her car when you went after them.”
“Something like that,” Daniel muttered, his mind going back to that crazy ride in the storm drains.
The hell of it was, he would have enjoyed something that wild and dangerous under normal circumstances. He was a tried and true speed demon and adrenaline junky. Sky-diving, car racing, whitewater rafting…he’d done it all.
“What else aren’t you telling me?”
He weighed telling Ray the truth about Serin. Would his partner believe him or would he strap him into a straitjacket before he even finished the story?
“Not here, man. Let’s go up to the roof.”
A few minutes later, they had chased away the smokers who haunted the roof on their breaks. Daniel watched the grey sky.
“It looks like rain,” Ray said.
Daniel said nothing.
“So what is it? Was I right about the Yakuza or is the mysterious lady working for someone even worse?”
Daniel racked his brain for the right words. “Not worse. More powerful, or at least that’s what she claimed. And from what I saw, she’s not lying. There are some serious forces at work here, some heavy-duty shit.”
“So she works for Uncle Sam?” Ray asked, jumping to the obvious conclusion. “Is this just some big cross-departmental communication fuckup? Did we not get looped into the right channel?”
Daniel nodded. “It’s something along those lines, but us not being looped in wasn’t an oversight. We weren’t meant to find out. I’m out of my depth here.”
Scowling, Ray rubbed his eyes. “So…again, let me get this straight: Eileen—Serin—is part of some black-ops group, one of those super-secret off-the-books operations?”
Just say yes! But this was Ray, the man who’d had his back for the better part of a decade. “It’s not the government. It’s above that.”
“What is higher than ‘the man’?”
A woman. That was assuming Serin had been sticking to traditional gender roles when she said Mother.
Daniel took a deep breath. “Ray. I have something to tell you.”
“Okay…”
Daniel just stared at him.
“I’m waiting.”
“Magic is real.”
He hadn’t meant to say it, but once he’d started talking, he hadn’t been able to help himself. He didn’t have any secrets from Ray.
“Huh?” His partner scratched his nose, waiting for more.
“Serin is some kind of witch… Although, she really hates being called that. I saw her do magic. She did it on me. It’s how she saved my life. And when I mean magic, I mean wave your hand and break the laws of reality type of magic. Not special effects, not classified advanced technology. Magic magic.”
That was as specific as he wanted to get. Getting turned into a puddle and hurling through the pipes to escape a team of gunmen was too much information for day.
Ray cocked his head. Comprehension flashed across his face. “I should have known.”
“What?”
His partner threw him a disgusted glance. “That girl dosed you once. The fact you let her do it again is unforgivable. For Pete’s sake, you are a seasoned agent, but you keep letting this girl get around you. God only knows what hallucinogen she slipped you this time.”
“That’s not it,” Daniel insisted.
“Look, I know you’re embarrassed. You should be. Getting drugged once was bad enough, but twice is a pattern of failure. If anyone else in the office finds out, you’ll be a laughingstock—and that D.C. job will be off the table. “
“Err…” Daniel didn’t know what else to say. He’d witnessed something miraculous, but that was the nature of miracles. If a person didn’t see it with their own eyes, how would they ever be convinced?
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anyone, but you have to get checked out by a doctor. You never know what damage might have been done. There are some crazy-ass drugs out there these days.”
Daniel was a little surprised. Ray was a bit cynical, but he went to church whenever he could. Maybe he was just paying lip service to the divine, but he’d expected a tiny bit more openness.
“Maybe you’re right… Not about the drugs, but about what I saw. It was a high-pressure situation. My mind could have been playing tricks on me.”
Ray rocked on his heels. “If that’s the story you want to stick to, fine. But when there are guns, there are usually drugs. I’m going to head back downstairs. There’s a lot of traffic-cam footage to go through if we’re going to find these guys. And Serin or whatever she calls herself. “
Daniel turned around, alarmed. That wasn’t a good idea.
Even if Serin was a criminal, could he, in good conscience, go after her knowing what she could do?
She had been spot-on. The department was totally unprepared to handle magical criminals. What would they do if they managed to catch up with her again? Cuff her and throw away the key? There was no jail in the world that could contain her.
Belatedly, Daniel realized how she’d managed to get off the Reaper’s estate. If she could escape from there through the pipes, she could bust out of anywhere. Hell, she could turn into a puddle and blend into the groundwater.
He turned back to the horizon “I regret pursuing this case. It’s gotten…complicated.”
Ray swore. “Are you suggesting we stop going after these guns?”
“I didn’t say that. But we should stay as far away from Serin as possible.”
“You mean you should stay as far away from her as possible, which is just fine by me. I, on the other hand, intend to bring her in and charge her ass with assault and administering a controlled substance, among other things. The president himself would have to bail her out. In person. Because no one messes with my partner, even when he’s gone soft in the head over a crazy, sword-wielding, Beyoncé knock-off.”
“Hey. There’s no need to get nasty. Why bring Queen Bey into this?”
Ray rolled his eyes. “Go home or to the doctor. Either one works for me. Don’t come back until you get your head straight. I’m gonna go back to my desk—where I’m going to do your job and mine for the rest of the day. And stay away from the boss. He’s kind of pissed at you.”
Well, who isn’t?
Daniel watched Ray go. As much as he resented his partner’s honesty, he couldn’t fault the man his opinion. If their position was reversed, he’d be giving Ray a serious talking to as well.
But Ray hadn’t seen what Daniel had seen. He didn’t understand. Daniel wasn’t sure he did, either.
The question was…who had he lied to? Had it been when he told his partner he was going to drop it, or when he’d told Serin she hadn’t seen the last of him?
A drop of rain hit his cheek. He waited, but no more followed. Despite the dark clouds promising rain all day, only a single drop fell on him.
It was the tiniest of nudges, but it was all he needed.
17
Serin slammed her head into the man’s face once and retreated, feinting right to avoid the second assailant’s inept thrust. He waved the ancient trident weapon like a switchblade or a prison shank.
The first man screamed, blood spurting from his nose. When he doubled over, he knocked over several flasks and decanters from the counter. He drop
ped the Sai she’d used to find them on the floor. At the other end of the room, a thin curly-haired mark was crawling to the door, unable to stand on his feet because she’d broken his ankle.
Her blind ambush was going well, all things considering.
She hadn’t expected to find the Sai a second time. Anybody with half a brain would rid themselves of it. But the arms dealers she was tracking weren’t very bright. They also hadn’t been treating the Sai with any special significance as far as she could tell. One of their lowly underlings named Tony had been using it as a backscratcher in between playing with it, pretending he was a cartoon mutant reptile.
“Really?” Serin huffed, putting her hand on her hips when the Sai clattered the ground. “I scryed for hours to find that. It’s over a thousand years old.”
She tsked, picking up the trident and slamming the tip through the shoulder of the second man as he ran up to her.
This one didn’t scream. His mouth dropped open in shock. “But you said it was a thousand years old,” he wailed.
“And I honor it by employing it for its intended use.” Serin pulled out the point, punching him with her free hand.
He went down, groaning before losing consciousness. She turned her attention to Tony, who was still doubled over, holding his broken nose.
Serin bent at the waist, holding the weapon in his line of sight. “Where did you get this?”
Tony only glared, breath ragged. “You crazy bitch!
Smiling sweetly, she reached for his hand and bent one of his fingers back.
“Fuck!” he screamed.
“Name calling will only get you more broken bones.”
Kicking him over, she straightened and examined the lab. It had two long workbenches. They were covered with vials, Bunsen burners, and welding equipment. There was a smelting setup in one corner. Dozens of boxes of bullets were stacked haphazardly on it. Some very large guns and a few other less utilitarian firearms were lined up neatly on the shelves—they even had a medieval crossbow hanging on the wall.
She withdrew the second Sai from the sheath she wore on her back, admiring the pair together for a moment before holding them up to the three men groaning on the floor.
“They’re a pretty picture, aren’t they?” With practiced grace, she twisted them in the air, spinning them acrobatically. “Pretty, but not valuable despite what Alec thought. He’s a scholar, so he underestimates the public’s general lack of interest for true craftsmanship. Maybe they’d be worth something to the right collector, but there aren’t enough of those on the ground to make stealing them worthwhile. So why are they here?”
No one replied. Serin narrowed her eyes at the skinny man with the broken ankle. He had head geek written all over him.
She stepped over him, peering down at him with the eyes of a predator. “Are you sure you don’t know?”
The man’s eyes flared and darted to the other two, but he wisely weighed his options and decided, quite correctly, that she was a bigger threat.
“He thought it might help,” he said, gulping. His pronounced Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “We tested it because it was supposed to be special, but while the metal is old, it’s not anything rare for that time. So we set it aside and focused on his other instructions.”
“Shut up, Hyde!” Tony shouted.
Serin rushed over and kicked him in the testicles, eliciting a shriek from him, but at least he stopped talking. “Whose instructions?”
“The client.”
Finally, she was getting somewhere. She knelt in front of Hyde. “I know you’re the brains these two are supposed to be protecting. Tell me, do you make all of your outfit’s next-gen guns in here?”
Hyde nodded, his thin mustache clumping with sweat. “I was supposed to test the metal. Our client said it might be special. He gave it to the boss a few days ago.”
“I said shut up!” Tony wheezed, clutching his crotch.
Serin and Hyde both ignored him. “Tell me about this new client,” she coaxed. “Have you met him?”
Hyde’s thin shoulders shifted, curving in slightly. “No, I’ve never spoken to the man. But he’s really involved. Always calling with instructions and recipes. He wants very specific mixtures of alloys and coatings.”
“Coatings? Do you mean on the bullets?” Coating the guns would have been pointless.
Forgetting about his ankle for a moment, Hyde leaned forward conspiratorially. “It’s a little weird. I mean, who cares what they’re coated with? It’s the form of the bullets and how the metal pierces the body that matters, but he insists we dip every bullet in these vats of premixed solutions. The mixes aren’t even poisonous, but the stuff is foul to work with and the ventilation here sucks. But the boss won’t shift our operations to a proper lab, not until after we get paid for delivering the product—and it won’t matter afterward.”
After standing, Serin started checking the benches around them. There were some noxious substances here, ingredients that could be components in a spell if this were any other place.
But these were humans, not witches. Nevertheless, there had been a taint of magic throughout this affair. And they were taking their instructions from someone else. The outfit was adept at customizing or adapting to someone else’s needs.
A witch or fae practitioner was tangled up in this. And they were dictating to arms dealers, making sure their instructions were being followed, all while helping the process along with ingredients and tools like the Sai.
“This client has given you a lot of other things to test and incorporate into your weapons, right?” she guessed.
Hyde nodded. “Not as much as I would like, but yeah. He’s been doing business with our boss for almost a year now. When the deal started, he shipped us boxes and boxes of stuff—weird herbs, acids, and raw spices from all over the world.”
“Were there any pre-mixed solutions?” A few of the scattered vials would have been ideal to hold spells, and they didn’t fit the appearance of the other glassware. Corked bottles with beveled edges were too traditional. Modern laboratory vials were smooth and had screw-on caps.
“How did you know?” Hyde asked. “He wanted me to take the mix apart, figure out the components, and then play with the proportions. But I’m not a chemist. Eventually, the client gave up on having me work it out. I figured he outsourced it cause he started calling in with more specific recipes for the coatings.”
A rush of disquiet filled her.
This bizarre tie of arms dealer and renegade fae was starting to make a lot of sense. The Supes had largely ignored the human world’s issues with firearms, but the explosion in the use of such weapons was impossible to ignore completely.
Logan’s mate had been gunned down just a few months ago. He’d survived, but what if the bullet had been coated in wolfsbane or silver nitrite? Silver did work on wolves, but it took some time for the metal in the bullets to leach into the blood. A colloidal silver compound—something that dissolved and was easily absorbed—would be far deadlier.
The possibilities were chilling.
Large swaths of the fae were allergic to iron, but there was a big chunk who wasn’t. They did have other vulnerabilities. Every Supernatural species had their own weaknesses.
Vampires were thought to be too fast for guns. That had been the case since they’d been invented, but from what she’d seen at the farmhouse, machine guns were evolving, closing that gap. Even an old vampire would have trouble outrunning that wave of bullets.
The guns this outfit was making decimated the farmhouse. She had barely escaped with Romero. And Loki was taking too long to recover. She hadn’t given his sluggish healing much thought, but now she was worried.
What if this mystery client had purchased items from the Elemental hoard as raw material for the manufacture of weapons, ones tailored to work against specific Supes? Or worse—those that worked on more than one kind?
“Well, that’s the problem with bosses,” she commiserated with Hyde, he
r mind rapidly following different scenarios. “They find it remarkably easy to ignore their men in the trenches. Believe it or not, I know how you feel.”
The Mother’s silence weighed heavily on her, but she shook it off. She pointed at a laptop case on the bench. “Is this where you get your information? By email?”
Hyde shook his head. “It’s on Tony’s phone. He’s the only one the boss calls.”
“For fuck’s sake, shut up!” Tony cried from behind her.
Hyde stiffened. It was her only warning. She spun on her heel. Tony had grabbed a jar of liquid from the bench. She didn’t have to read the label on it to know it was acid—she could smell the caustic solution the second it began to fly, straight at her face.
Serin reached out, calling the water all around them.
It was a wild overreaction.
Hyde may have been right to complain about the ventilation, but his boss hadn’t skimped on the emergency showers. They were part of all legitimate labs, ready to douse a hapless scientist when they spilled something toxic on themselves or their clothing.
The taps on the sinks also worked.
Water exploded from all sides, a sentient wave that splashed over her at the same time the acid did. Her skin heated, already burning, as the water rushed over her skin. It diluted the corrosive liquid before it could do any permanent damage.
She flung an arm out, sending the water to slap Tony down with enough force to knock him off his feet. His mouth was too full of water to call her another name. He flailed on the ground.
“Um…magic lady?” Hyde asked in a whimper.
Serin scowled at him. “What?
“Sorry to interrupt, but I think Tony keeps his phone in his pocket.”
Swearing, she shut off the flow of water abruptly. Her leather boots splashed in the large puddles surrounding Tony. She reached into his pockets, fishing out a dripping black smartphone. Tony was coughing too hard to put up a fuss when she slapped one of her mother’s braided charms on his wrist.
She took out two more and turned to Hyde, testing them with her mind to make sure they weren’t defective.
Water: The Elementals Book Three Page 13