“Not very often,” she replied. “At least not from what you’ve told us.”
They had supported me when Rachel was kidnapped in London. Other than that, it was rare to get useful intel out of them. Still, I suppose it wasn’t easy being in their positions, especially when it came to working with someone like EQK.
“I think it’s time to pull the team together,” I said, pushing myself up from the desk. “We need to figure out how to approach this pixie problem we have.”
Chapter 12
My crew was deadly serious when I walked into the room. We were usually a bit more lighthearted than this, even though our work wasn’t exactly all pixies and fairy dust.
Okay, bad example.
The point was that things had gotten pretty heated. We needed to get loose again or we were going to start making mistakes. There’s a saying in hockey that if you go on a losing streak you’ll start holding your stick too tight and that’ll make you miss easy shots. Frankly, I never had a problem with holding my stick too tight. In fact, I rather preferred it that way.
“All right, everyone,” I called out, bringing their focus on me, “we all know the score and we’re all pretty pissed off about it. But getting more and more angry isn’t going to help us solve anything. So let’s table our emotions as much as possible and get back to work.” I scanned the area. “Where’s Turbo?”
“I’m here,” he said, zipping into the room a moment later. “Sorry, I was trying to find my cap.”
“Good to see you have your priorities in place.”
“Thanks, Chief.”
I frowned at him.
“Right, so we have a pixie running around town creating monsters out of normals. Any suggestions on how we can track the little asshole?” I then caught myself. “Sorry, Turbo.”
He looked up at me. “About what?”
“Uh…never mind.” I coughed. Then I looked at him again. “You don’t happen to know of any pixies who are really good with their dust, do you?”
Turbo turned and put his hands on his hips, giving me a stern look.
“No,” he said flatly.
“What’s with the attitude? I just asked a question.”
“You asked it as if I know every pixie in the world. Just because I’m a pixie doesn’t mean I know all of them.” He sniffed at me while shaking his head. “Do you know every amalgamite in the world?”
“Yes,” I replied without hesitation.
“Okay, bad example,” he acquiesced. “Still, I—”
“He was just asking a question, Turbo,” Chuck said, coming to my defense. “There’s no reason to get all wound up about it.”
Turbo crossed his arms and harrumphed. Then he groaned and said, “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. It’s just that whenever someone in my race does something like this, everyone starts giving me the stink-eye.”
“Everyone?” I asked. “Like who?”
“Nobody here,” he replied. “But people in my apartment complex shake their heads at me and such, and I don’t even want to talk about what people say to me when I go to Starbucks for my morning coffee. It’s annoying.”
Before you ask, some Starbucks—and most every store out there—have hidden areas set aside for supers who aren’t able to shape change.
“That’s not cool,” said Felicia. “Is this happening already? This pixie situation just started.”
“It not happening yet, no,” Turbo admitted. “I just know it’s coming and so I’m touchy about it.”
It was kind of tough for me to empathize seeing that there was only one of me, but I could surmise the feeling. My guess was it was similar to what I felt whenever I took my clothes off around a new chick. They always assumed I was a Chippendales dancer.
“Well, look,” I said gently, “if you can figure out a way for us to track this dude, it’ll take him out of the public eye quicker.”
Serena sat up suddenly, her eyes darting around.
“I think I can track him if I can get to wherever he is as soon as he’s cast his dust,” she said. “I’d have to be there within ten minutes or so, though. After that, the connection would fade and I’d miss my window.”
“Hmmm,” said Turbo as he began pacing around on the table. Then he snapped his fingers and pointed at Serena. “I can rig up the cameras we have around town to track any anomalies. If anything hits, I can have the system send you all screen captures and locations. You’d be able to drive around town and pick up anything that happens in a heartbeat.”
“That’s good,” I said, nodding. “I could probably get a permit for an instant portal for you, too, Serena. Considering the circumstances, that should be doable.”
I’d have Lydia get in contact with the Netherworld Portal Authority and get the proper permissions. It wasn’t always allowed, but this was an extreme case. Plus, if push came to shove, I had a feeling that the Directors would step in at this point to make it happen.
They owed me one.
Hell, they owed all of us one.
“That’s great. How long will it take you to get the tracking set up, Turbo?”
He scratched his chin.
“That depends on how fancy you want it,” he answered. “I can make it in color, if that would help. Oooh, I could add a three-dimensional effect, with—”
I held up my hands to stop him. “We just need it to notify us when the dude casts his spell, Turbo.”
“Well, in that case…” He started doing calculations in the air, squinting his left eye a few times in the process. Finally, he nodded to himself and said, “Three weeks.”
I put my hands on the table and leaned forward until I was right in his face, giving him a dark stare.
“You’ll have it done by tomorrow night, Turbo,” I instructed in a cold voice. “I don’t care what resources you need, and I don’t care if you have to work straight through until it’s done. You’re going to make it happen. Are we clear?”
He nodded and I backed away.
“Jeez,” he mumbled a few seconds later. “Why bother to ask how much time I need if you’re just going to yell at me about it anyway?”
I rolled my eyes and looked over at Serena.
“Anything you need to do in order to get your tracking plan underway?”
She nodded, glancing over at Turbo. “Yeah, but don’t worry, I’ll have it done by tomorrow night.”
I sighed.
Chapter 13
Since I had two crew members working around the clock, I stayed at the office as well. I wasn’t the type of manager who demanded that others do something I wasn’t willing to do myself.
Rachel had gone back to my place to get some sleep, giving me much needed time to go over documents and such.
Each of my officers were on their five-year review cycle. That meant I had to write up their positives and negatives, ride with them for a week each, and give them deserved increases in pay, etc. Overworld PPD officers tended to get the majority of their expenses handled because they were on the clock a lot. Still, if you wanted an upgraded place to live, that came out of your own pocket. This wasn’t an issue for me because I was independently wealthy, but that wasn’t the case for everyone on my crew.
“Puddin’,” Lydia said through the connector, “I’ve got Paula Rose on the phone for you.”
I stared at the mountain of files that Rachel had tidied up for me and blew out a long breath.
“Put her through to my normal line, Lydia.” My cell beeped, signaling that the connection was set. I put her on speaker. “Hi, Paula.”
“Do you have any suggestions for how I’m supposed to handle this, Ian?”
She was talking about the dead normals, of course, and she knew damn well that I had no answers for her. It wasn’t my job to put the spin on things. If it was, I wouldn’t be staring at all of these files right now.
“Sorry, Paula. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“They’re going to have my head on a platter,” she moaned. “This isn’t going
to be one of those things that easily disappears, and I don’t think anyone is going to go for a new show where supernatural cops kill touristing normals.”
“Probably not,” I agreed. “You do realize that we didn’t know there were people in those dinosaurs, I hope?”
“Obviously,” she replied. “I suppose I could just say that it was all due to technical difficulties. That would solve it after some time, anyway.”
“Doesn’t help their families,” I pointed out.
Neither of us said anything for a little time. Paula clearly felt just as bad regarding what had happened as I did. She was a corporate mogul in the making, sure, but she wasn’t so powerful that she’d lost her conscience…and hopefully she never would be.
“So you’re dating Rachel again?” she asked out of the blue. “I know that was an awkward change of topics, but there’s really not much more we can say about the other situation.”
Ah ha. That was the real reason for her call.
“Yes, we’re dating again.”
“I have to say that she was kind of nice to me and Murphy earlier.” She paused. “Well, not at first. Actually, she was pretty rude at first, but once she apologized and everything, she was almost pleasant to work with.”
I looked up at the ceiling, putting my head in my hands.
“I’m glad to hear it. I think she’s really trying to make things work this time.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“Do you want things to work out, Ian?”
“Yeah,” I said sincerely. “I really think I do. It’s not going to be easy, and I’m sure there will be some bumps along the way, but it’s pretty obvious that Rachel and I were meant for each other.” That’s when my subconscious reminded me that Paula was one of my ex-girlfriends. “Uh, I, uh—”
She laughed.
“Don’t worry, Ian. You didn’t hurt my feelings. You and I never would have made it beyond the physical. We both know that.”
“True.”
Paula and I had been very compatible in the bedroom, but we couldn’t function in normal society very well. Both of us were career-driven, and those careers were of the type where I made her life difficult by putting her in situations like the one we were in right now. That, in turn, bled into our physical relationship, knocking us out of sync repeatedly.
“I’d still love to go for a swim in her canal,” noted The Admiral out of nowhere.
“Under normal circumstances,” I agreed, “so would I.”
“What’s normal? She’s a chick, right? You and I are a team. You sweet talk ‘em and I make them call us ‘God.’”
“Classy.”
“Anyway,” I spoke up before The Admiral could fire another verbal volley my way, “I’m sure we’ve not seen the last of the pixie who is messing with us, but you can rest assured that we’re going to be exceedingly cautious before we just blow away anything he or she creates.”
“Do you have any leads?”
“Not yet,” I answered. “Turbo is in the process of putting together a way to detect whenever the pixie creates the beasts. He should be done by tomorrow night. Serena is testing ways to track the guy from the scene, assuming she can get there quickly enough.”
“Good.” Paula sounded very tired. “I do think that a show like this would be very profitable.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we can plan for it to happen in a few years, after everything blows over.”
“Maybe, yeah.” I drummed my fingers on the desk. “Well, I’d better get rolling, Paula. I have a lot of paperwork to do and I can’t ever seem to find the time to do it.”
We said our goodbyes and I pulled the first folder over and began to study it.
Officer Chuck Taylor. He’d been on the squad for twenty-three years. Vampire. Good with weapons and hand-to-hand combat. Fast thinker. Loyal. These were all things I knew, but the forms were to remind me of each positive point so I wouldn’t have to drum up things on my own. Seemed silly. Maybe bigger precincts, like the one in London, would require this little bundle of reminders, but when you worked as closely with your crew as I did, you were constantly reminded of their individual strengths and weaknesses.
Still, it was kind of nice to have it all wrapped up in a document.
The basics, anyway.
Forms couldn’t easily collate the nuances. That was for me to manage either by myself or through discussions with fellow officers.
The other officers weren’t likely to be overly critical, though. This was mostly because they also wanted a raise and they knew that Chuck would be giving them a recommendation just as they were recommending him. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. You stab my back, I severely scratch yours.
But so what? My crew were all friends. Hell, I’d go as far as to say they were family. The only family I’d ever really had. They would no more give each other a bad reference than I would.
Thinking of them in that light made me smile.
Maybe doing these reviews wasn’t going to be that difficult after all.
Chapter 14
The valkyries were all standing before me in the arena on the seventh level of Hell. They were almost completely naked, except for their tall, silver boots.
Why this place was ever considered “Hell” was beyond me.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Ian,” said the valkyrie known as Valerie. “It is lonely down here, you know?”
“Sorry, ladies,” I said, but the voice didn’t quite belong to me. I mean, it was my voice, but the inflection was off. “I’ve been dealing with some personal issues. Mostly with me being a pussy and such. But now that you all are around to ride me into oblivion, I think things will start to turn around.”
“Ian, sweetie?” said Lydia, jolting me from my dream.
“Huh?”
I was hunched over my desk with my head on Turbo’s file. Obviously I’d fallen asleep, and it was clear that The Admiral was doing everything he could to get my mind off Rachel, which was why the voice in my dream sounded so familiar. I wanted to slap him, to be honest, but that would have only proved to make things worse.
“I won’t tell, if you won’t,” announced The Admiral.
I groaned and rubbed my eyes, waiting for my brain to become fully awake.
Then I snagged a tissue and sopped up the puddle of drool I’d left on Turbo’s file.
Ew.
“What’s up, Lydia?”
“We just got word that—”
“Chief,” yelled Turbo as he zipped into the room, “my scanners are working! They just picked up massive werewolves down at the Flamingo.”
“Shit,” I said, trying to get my brain up to full power while rubbing my neck. “What time is it?”
“Almost six,” he said.
“At night?”
“Yeah,” Turbo said slowly. “You okay, Chief?” Then he buzzed over and pointed at the open file on my desk. “Hey, is that about my review? And why is it wet?”
“Never mind that,” I answered, slamming the file shut. “Is Serena on the way to the Flamingo already?”
“She left almost immediately, using the direct portal.”
“Perfect,” I said, silently thanking Lydia for getting authorization for that. I then yelled out to the room, “Lydia, please get the other officers down to the Flamingo and let them know I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“I’m coming with you,” announced Turbo.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I might be able to help.”
I wasn’t about to argue the point with him. He may not know every pixie in the world, which made sense when I really thought about it, but he knew better than I did how they ticked. If nothing else, he might be able to help us bring this to a resolution more quickly.
We bolted out the door and nearly got to my Aston Martin when I heard Warren yell, “Hey, Chief, wait up!”
I hadn’t seen Warren all that much since the incident with Charlotte the dragon. H
e had taken that entire ordeal pretty hard. I can’t say that I blamed him, but it honestly wasn’t his fault. Charlotte had used her wiles on him and she’d fooled all of us.
“What’s up, Warren?” I asked.
“I’ve been working all day on a spell that will help everyone know if there are normals encased in the creatures. If there are, I have another spell to protect them while allowing you to destroy the beasts around them.” He ran his fingers through this long scraggly beard. “Well, it should anyway. I haven’t had much time to test it.”
It was better than nothing.
“Okay, come on, then.”
“Shotgun!” called Turbo, signaling that he wanted to sit up front.
We poured into the Aston Martin and I revved the engine.
While it looked ridiculous, Turbo insisted that he be belted in. So I ran the seatbelt across and locked it. Then he flew up to the midpoint of the seat and climbed under the belt.
I shook my head and started driving.
“Everyone on their way?” I asked through my connector.
A bunch of tired affirmatives came back.
“Good. Nobody engage those things until we get there.” I checked the rearview mirror and noticed that Warren appeared apprehensive. I decided to give him some public kudos. “Also, note that Warren has been doing research on a way for us to detect and protect any normals that may be encased in these things, so we’ll have that going for us.”
“Nice,” said Jasmine.
“Thanks, Warren,” agreed Chuck.
“Well done,” stated Griff.
Warren’s face was on the mend.
That was good.
“All right, everyone,” I said, feeling that our feel-good moment was complete, “no theatrics this time. We go in and take care of business.”
“Shall I notify The Spin, lover?” asked Lydia.
“Yeah, baby,” I replied, giving her a little bit of flirt back, which I made sure to do now and then in order to keep her purring. “Also, tell the cops and security crews at the Flamingo to clear the area. We don’t want crowds this time, if we can help it.”
Swarm of Fire Page 5