by RJ Blain
“No, I’ve created positive reinforcement. When she does something we like, we take her for skydiving lessons. She’s just like our son. If we want her cooperation, we’re going to have to bribe her. Your tally of viable bribes is now up to two. Be grateful.”
My grandmother was wise, and I wanted to be like her if I ever grew up.
“I can’t win this one, can I?”
“No,” my grandmother and I chorused.
My grandfather sighed. “We can’t do another dive because it’s too late in the day, Tulip. It’s too dangerous. While I enjoy a good thrill, I really don’t want to have to explain to your father that you died skydiving too close to dark. Thrill seeking is one thing, recklessness is another.”
“That’s a good reason. Honestly, I need to get back to job searching anyway.”
While I’d never admit it, my hand throbbed right along with my head, and skydiving hadn’t done me any favors. I’d spend a few minutes making a list of potential jobs to look up, then I’d take the biggest dose of painkillers I could before chasing after sleep.
“And unlike our son, she can be reasonable given a logical reason. Obviously, Rufus had done some research before deciding he needed a mermaid princess as his bride. Now, if only we could convince him to start a hive of his own or have a son. A son would be useful.” My grandmother sulked, and her serpents lowered their heads.
They still wore their little hats, and I struggled to contain my laughter at the ridiculousness of so many little snakes wearing tiny hats.
Getting in the car and buckling in bought me enough time to control my mirth, and I grimaced at the twinge of head to toe bruising setting in. By morning, I expected my muscles would be filing a petition to leave the Union right along with my wardrobe.
The skydiving was worth it. I’d regret punching a lycanthrope in the mouth tomorrow around the time the painkillers wore off. After my humiliating defeat by a tiny white pill at the hands of Justin Brandywine, I’d put the prescription painkillers far out of reach, preferably in a trashcan, so I wouldn’t be caught off my guard again.
“What do you want for dinner, Tulip?” my grandfather asked.
“Justin and his bacon,” I replied.
“I’m afraid Justin and his bacon aren’t available for your consumption.” Sighing, he got into the car and started the engine. “I’m going to have to warn that poor boy to escape while he can.”
“Why would you do something like that?”
My grandmother cackled. “Give it up, dear. Rufus was no different when he first saw his mermaid. Justin’s just going to have to fend for himself and ultimately surrender, preferably before she starts taking after her mother and conquering nations to get her hands on him. You should be grateful Rufus didn’t attempt to take over the mer kingdom. He would have needed our help, and things would’ve gotten messy.”
I didn’t want to imagine a trio of gorgons attempting a hostile takeover of the mer kingdom so my father could catch my mother. Worse, I couldn’t guess which side would emerge the victors.
Petrification would give the gorgons an advantage, but fear-induced violence might win the battle.
I’d need a lot of popcorn and a good camera to watch that showdown.
“The object of our discussion isn’t making helpful commentary,” my grandfather whined.
“Obviously, my father didn’t inherit his headstrong tendencies or pride from his father.”
My grandmother snickered. “You earned that, dear.”
“Perhaps it’s better she’s not interested in becoming a hive’s queen. Kings would wage war to have her, only to learn they’d brought the battle to the hive. Rufus will gain a reputation of producing unobtainable jewels.” My grandfather sighed, and unlike earlier, he made a point of obeying most traffic laws. He even avoiding accelerating through the yellows.
“If I don’t fall over dead from being some weird hybrid, I’m pretty sure my mother expects me to rule her kingdom when she retires. Not the brightest decision ever made,” I admitted. “She’ll approve of Justin and his bacon skills, however. More accurately, I think she’ll be more interested in his professional responsibilities, as she’s certainly not going to find a responsible ruler in me.”
In reality, she’d been working on me since the day I’d been born, so if I did suffer the unfortunate misfortune of reigning over the mer kingdom as a queen, I had the tools and capabilities of doing the job, the army to support my claim to the throne, and enough islands to ensure I could see to my duties.
If the worst happened and my mother did want to retire, she’d add to her crimes and find some sort of magic enabling me to visit the kingdom I’d be forced to rule. I’d have to step up my bodyguard-avoidance game, as the instant a crown touched my head, I’d have a swarm of concerned mer watching my every move.
My grandfather grunted and turned off the main road for the cobbled lane that would eventually reach my father’s home. “Your mother does have a tendency to conquer inhabited islands. When Rufus told me she’d conquered Madagascar, I didn’t believe it until I checked the news. I’ll have you know, when I was researching her as a match for my son, I had no idea she’d develop such an interesting hobby.”
“Hobby? No, it’s not a hobby. She takes the conquest of islands very seriously. She’s easily bribed, though. A good string of pearls will redirect her attention to another island for a while.”
“That seems like a small price to pay for national security.”
“I never said it made sense.”
“I’m beginning to believe nothing you do does,” my grandfather groused.
I smirked, pleased I’d accomplished the one thing guaranteed to keep my more sinister activities off his radar. In a world of murder, mayhem, and vigilante justice, logic ruled.
It was just not logical in the way most wanted to think about, a little like how a mer queen might be dissuaded from conquering islands with a simple gift of pearls. My mother had won the battle with the Queen of England, and the necklace was her trophy.
With one gift, the Queen of England had acknowledged my mother could conquer her island, and my mother liked it best when she conquered the places no one thought she could.
It was more fun that way.
My grandparents had a fondness for meat, and I thanked my lucky stars they remembered I needed mine cooked. They took theirs raw, and I watched them, brows raised, while they devoured their chicken. The bones occupied them for longer than I found comfortable despite having spent most of my life surrounded by mer, who committed similar culinary atrocities and liked it.
If my father had the same food preferences, I’d be doing Justin a favor if I took him far away.
Long after I’d eaten my fill, my grandparents tore through an entire flock of birds, and I slipped away while their attention was fixated on their meal.
If they asked, I’d tell them the truth. I was tired, my head hurt, and I needed some peace and quiet. I also needed to do some research on my temporary new home. My father would have to live with his disappointment the day I relocated to somewhere new.
My first job would be to identify if Rapid City had a serial killer or two lurking within it. Killers inhabited every city, but serial killers were a special breed, deliberately preying upon others to add to their tally or accomplish their twisted goals.
I fell into the latter category, and my goals involved removing one more threat from society, ideally until no more remained. That would never happen, but with every murder, with every calculated revenge, I came a little closer to creating a safer world for everyone.
Back in my room, I began where I always did, researching the local missing persons databases. The initial count wasn’t promising.
Eight men and seven women were labeled as missing, one case was over fifty years old, and the rest had little in common. Most were human, which fell in line with missing persons databases in other parts of America. While magic could give humans an edge in a fight, the other species we
re a lot tougher. The pair of lion centaurs, missing for five years, intrigued me; lions were an intimidating force, and the brothers had disappeared together.
Their file suggested they’d gone on a hike, never to be seen again.
An unsolved mystery intrigued me. What could make two lions disappear? Why would anyone target lions? Had nature—or magic—caused their disappearance?
The lure of the unknown had dumped me head first into my secret profession right along with my morbid curiosity.
According to the database, the lions had operated a successful business, moving money around to make the already wealthy even wealthier. My interest in investing began and ended with meeting the financial needs of an entire species.
The instant I’d learned how to count, my mother had begun teaching me, taking advantage of my inability to leave land to develop her wealth. One day, she would take over a nation with the powers of her wallet alone, and I dreaded that day.
If she discovered she could assimilate nations through the power of money, her goal would be to rule the entire world. I’d have to stop her, we’d have a fight, she’d probably win and take over the world anyway. Then, angry I’d attempted to defy her, she’d make me manage her new holdings so she could find something else to conquer.
I prayed for good fortune and hoped my father could keep her distracted for more than ten consecutive minutes. With her fear of snakes, my father might even keep her on the run for years before he tired her out and caught her.
Or she hid under the waves where he couldn’t go.
With my mother, it could go either way. As long as the chase amused her, she’d keep him nipping at her heels. With some clever encouragements, I could stir up some trouble.
My mother hated losing, and it’d only take a few words to rile her up. Manipulating my father would take more work; I didn’t know enough about him to know which buttons to press to get him to do what I wanted.
I’d figure him out soon enough.
I stared at the picture of the brothers, both centaurs smiling for the camera. Before my father had crashed into my life, before my mother had taken over Madagascar, I would’ve viewed the missing men as my next goal without hesitation.
Finding a serial killer was about solving little mysteries and finding bodies people didn’t want found, then from the remains of the dead, piecing together the truth. When I finished with my job of killing the killers, I notified the police so the victims’ families could get closure.
One day, my search for justice would lead to my demise. I’d make a mistake, and when I did, I’d fall prey to someone as my victims had fallen prey to me. The circle would go on. Someone else would eventually take my place, hunting the hunters until they, too, were hunted.
I supposed my interest in Justin stemmed from wanting to one day retire and become an unsolved mystery, unknown by most and soon forgotten by the few. Reality was a brutal thing. When I’d killed my first killer, I’d had no way of knowing how much of a toll death would claim.
Killers like me never retired. Until the day I died, I’d have to keep running and hiding. There was always someone out there who wanted to solve an unsolved mystery.
Serial killers stirred the imagination while stoking fear. Until someone found me, I would be hunted.
Not even a professional bodyguard like Justin could protect me from that, and neither could my mother or my father. No one could. Justice came for everyone. I worked to make it happen sooner than later for those who preyed on the weak and innocent.
Above all, I wanted to play at being normal, leading the sort of life good women did when they could ignore the dark shadows of the world. I couldn’t. Those shadows ate away at me, too, but I meant to use mine for some good.
It was too late to turn back, but when I didn’t allow anticipation to rule, I doubted everything, especially myself. I needed a purpose.
Until I could find something better, solving the mystery of two missing lions would do.
Chapter Twelve
Everything had a beginning, and everything had an end. That was the one truth I could rely on. To discover what had happened to the pair of lions, I would need to learn their secrets, which meant research, and a lot of it. The beginning of their end would lead me to their final moments—if they were dead.
Some disappeared because they didn’t want to be found, running from something they couldn’t face. I’d met a few like that, and when I found them, not the victims I’d believed them to be, I’d turned away and pretended I’d never located them.
Some had been abused.
Some had faced tragedy and emerged broken and beaten but alive.
Some had wanted a better life but believed they couldn’t rise from the ashes of their lost hopes and dreams like a phoenix.
Some I had tried to help, leaving them gifts to find. I checked on those from time to time. Life had many lessons, and one stung more than the others.
Some people didn’t want to be helped.
Endless possibilities stretched out before me, and I hoped the challenge would keep me busy for a while. My work began with the names of the two missing centaurs, Luis and Theodore Shaw. As I did with victims of serial killers, I researched the circumstances of their birth; too often for my liking, killers targeted the children of someone they hated, tormenting their true target through the deaths of loved ones.
Either their mother had lied about the identity of their father, or the Shaws were an anomaly; their mother was a human, and their father was an incubus. The incubus likely had enemies; their tendency to cause infidelity among any female with functioning ovaries put them in the line of fire of jealous men.
The women were forgiven for what they couldn’t control, but the incubus?
A jealous man would sometimes don the hat of demon hunter and look for some revenge. Human nature never changed, and for those men, it usually ended poorly for them. Where incubi went, succubi surely followed, and they were the next to fall prey to a sex demon on a mission.
How had a human woman given birth to two lion centaurs? They weren’t twins, either, and they shared the same father.
Fishy, fishy, fishy.
Incubi could reproduce with just about anything, but their offspring usually matched the species of the mother. Magic worked in mysterious ways. I could waste hours trying to figure out how a human mother had carried two lion centaurs to term and learn nothing.
Investigating the mother first would be the easiest; incubi could be thousands of years old, going dormant when magic left the world. In reality, I doubted I’d do more than scratch the surface of the incubus’s history. That he’d stuck around long enough to have two children with the same woman interested me.
Why would he stay so long? Two children with the same woman implied something, but I wasn’t sure what.
Within ten minutes of beginning my search for Alexandria Shaw, I discovered her end. A car accident had claimed her life when her youngest son, Theodore, had been five years old, which led me to a different beginning.
Alexandria was survived by her husband, who happened to be the incubus.
I hadn’t known incubi ever married or committed to a single woman. The idea astounded me so much I went to the CDC’s online species database.
Sure enough, less than one percent of incubi married. Succubi were more likely to tie the knot with a human man, but the notes claimed such relationships were for breeding purposes only and often ended in divorce as soon as the youngest child reached sexual maturity. Few men managed to ensnare a succubus for life, but it happened, and it almost always involved having a lot of children.
Some things would never cease to amaze me.
With their mother dead long before they’d grown to adulthood, I doubted their disappearance had anything to do with her. It didn’t fit.
While disappointed, I did my due diligence, spending several hours profiling Alexandria Shaw, her connections, and possible motivations for someone to target her sons. I saved the file, sh
ut down my laptop, and stared at the darkened screen.
Nothing in what I had read implied Alexandria Shaw was anything other than human, but the existence of her sons claimed otherwise. One lion centaur was a fluke.
Two was a genetic consistency. She hadn’t been completely human, but her species remained as much of a mystery as her sons’ disappearance.
Like my grandparents on my mother’s side of the family, my grandparents on my father’s side grew bored of me and returned to their home, trusting in the lack of a vehicle to deter me from leaving my father’s home. I liked the arrangement; my father kept a few men and women on staff, and when I left them alone, they left me alone.
I had one disagreement with the cook, but we’d come to an understanding within the first twenty-four hours.
He’d let me cook, or I’d twist him into a pretzel. I didn’t even need to demonstrate my skills on him, as he sighed, lifted his hands in surrender, and requested I leave his kitchen intact when I was finished with it. As intact gave me a lot of room for error, I figured as long as I cleaned up after myself and didn’t destroy any appliances, it counted. And if I did destroy something, I’d have the evidence I needed to prove I needed Justin’s bacon, else I’d be a risk to myself.
My bacon wasn’t anywhere near as good as Justin’s, but I turned making breakfast for myself my morning ritual while I spent the first week of my stay at my father’s home learning about the area and researching the missing Shaw brothers. I spent a great deal of my time trying to pin down their mother’s species, but the circumstances of her birth were as mysterious as their disappearance.
There were no records of her ever attending school.
No hospital had records of her birth, nor was I able to find any evidence she had a birth certificate.
She’d gotten her first driver’s license at thirty, a year before Luis’s birth. She didn’t exist on social media, the internet had little about her, and the one place I’d found where she’d worked hadn’t been receptive about my one phone call.