The Junkyard Druid Box Set 2

by M. D. Massey

  Mama cat was about to inch back into her den, secure in the knowledge that the predator wouldn’t be hunting her or her kittens tonight. Just as she began her quiet retreat, a can clattered across the alleyway. At the noise, the spider-thing paused in its task. Mama cat held her breath, because she knew what was coming.

  In the flash of a sparrow’s wings, the spider-creature dropped the silk-wrapped package it held and leapt across the alleyway, sinking its fangs into a fat man-child who had been hiding behind some trash cans nearby. The child yelped, then twitched and spasmed. Finally, he was still. The spider-thing dragged him back into the alley, where it began to wrap this newer, smaller, juicier prey in silk as well.

  Mama cat crept back into her den and snuggled up to her kittens. She remained alert long after the presence left her alley, and did not sleep until the sun rose again.

  6

  “Gah!” I snapped out of my trance and back to reality with a start, the fear and trepidation the mama cat had felt still gripping me. My mouth was dry, my palms sweaty, and my heart was beating faster than normal. The poor cat had been terrified, and after sharing her memories, I could see why.

  Kenny stood in front of me, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. “Did you astrally project? You did, right—I mean, leave your body? What did you see? Did you see where Derp went?”

  I stuck my hand, palm out, in his face. “No, I didn’t astrally project. Astral projection is dangerous and it’s a bit beyond my current skills. I simply took a peek inside the cat’s mind, so I could sift through her memories.”

  “You can do that, like read minds and stuff? Do you talk to animals too, like Dr. Doolittle?”

  “Do you ever shut up?” I barked, still on edge from living through the cat’s brush with whatever had taken Derp. The look on Kenny’s face instantly made me regret losing my temper. This is not like you, Colin, not at all. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you. Just—just give me a minute.”

  Kenny stood, half turning away from me. “Derp’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

  “It’s not looking good, Kenny. Whatever took him is bad news.”

  “What did it look like?”

  I had no intention of giving him details. Doing so would only give him rope to hang himself. “I—didn’t get a good look at it.”

  “Can’t you put out some sort of mystical APB on it? Or a magical BOLO on Derp? Maybe get your fairy friends to help?”

  “They’re not my friends, and they don’t like to be called fairies. They consider it demeaning, a racial slur. And no, nothing like that exists. Let me think for a minute.” I needed to give him something useful to do, to keep him out of trouble. “Kenny, can you get me a couple strands of Derp’s hair? If so, I might be able to cook up a locator spell. Also, did Derp’s phone have a tracker on it?”

  “The hair thing I can do, but tracking the phone is a dead end. Derp’s parents already tried using the ‘find my phone’ thing, but they couldn’t get a location on it. Either Derp turned off his GPS or someone pulled his SIM card from his phone when they took him.”

  I sucked on my teeth and tapped my chin with a knuckle. “Well, that’s what I would do if I was abducting someone. Kind of funny that a supernatural creature would be that tech-savvy, though.”

  “Freeze, Austin Police!”

  Shit. There were two uniformed Austin PD officers standing at the end of the alley. One had his hand on his service weapon as he approached me, and the other was calling it in on their radio.

  “Dispatch, this is patrol unit 29. We’re 10-23 at the last known location of the Martin child, and currently 10-26 on a potential 10-31 involving another child. Over.”

  “Understood, unit 29. Sending additional units to your 10-20 now,” was APD dispatch’s reply.

  The cop who was approaching me looked pretty damned serious. “Sir, step away from the child and put your hands in the air—now!”

  I did as he asked, slowly raising my hands as I turned to face him. “Officer, this isn’t what it looks like. Kenny is friends with Derp—I mean, the Martin kid—and we’re just trying to help find him.”

  The officer wasn’t having it. “Sir, turn around and face the wall!”

  “I’ve never met this man in my life, officer,” Kenny said, suppressing a grin. “He offered me some candy, and told me it was hidden here in this alley.”

  “Kenny!” I snapped as I turned to look at him. “Stop it, this is serious!”

  The kid stifled a laugh. “He said he wanted to touch me in the butt, officer.”

  “Kenny, stop!”

  The officer had his eyes locked on mine. “Sir, turn around and place your hands on the wall, or I will use force!”

  “Seriously, officer, this isn’t what it appears. My young friend here is trying to play a joke on me.” I looked at Kenny. “A very serious joke, I might add.”

  “Last warning, sir!” the cop yelled.

  “But I—” I didn’t have a chance to finish that thought, because the cop pulled out his taser and lit me up. I did the hokey-pokey on my feet for a moment, then dropped like a rock and did the fish flop on the ground. I could still see Kenny from where I’d fallen, and noted with quite a bit of resentment that he was recording the whole thing on his phone.

  “Holy shit,” he squealed. “This is absolutely the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Mercifully, the cop stopped zapping me a few seconds later, and I allowed them to cuff me and put me in the back of their cruiser. Kenny gave the cops a statement, and while I couldn’t hear the entire thing, he did actually admit that he knew me.

  Unfortunately, the cops didn’t know what to believe at that point. They had a missing kid on their hands, and they’d found his best friend with a strange adult in the alley where the missing kid’s cell phone had last pinged a GPS signal. All told, I must’ve have looked like the biggest Chester in the world to them.

  Kenny glanced over at me, sitting uncomfortably in the back seat of the cruiser with my hands cuffed behind me. When the cops weren’t looking, I silently mouthed I’m going to kill you at him. He flipped me off while brushing the hair out of his face, so the cops wouldn’t see.

  Fifteen minutes later, Sergeant Klein showed up on scene. After a brief discussion with the uniformed officers who’d arrested me, and a longer discussion with Kenny, she sauntered over to the black and white and opened the back door.

  Klein looked at me over the door with an inscrutable expression. I couldn’t tell if she was upset or about to crack up laughing.

  “Colin McCool—if anyone was going to piss in my cornflakes this morning, it was bound to be you.” She drummed her fingers on the top of the window, frowning. “You may as well climb out of there so I can uncuff you and find out what the hell is really going on.”

  Sergeant Klein sent the uniformed officers on their way, then she led us around the corner to a coffee shop so we could chat. Klein had been the officer we’d turned to when we’d broken up a massive fae child sex trafficking ring. Necessarily, she’d been clued into the world beneath, and Maeve’s people had set it up so she’d get all the credit for finding the kids.

  Understandably, she was a bit of a local celebrity now, and while her fifteen minutes of fame were over she was still APD’s golden child. So, when she told the officers to let me go, they obeyed without question. It was fortunate that she’d heard my name over the radio, else I might have spent an uncomfortable night in jail.

  I grabbed us a few coffees—decaf for Kenny, of course—while Klein snagged us a table in the back corner of the shop. It was a franchise, so the coffee wasn’t nearly as good as it was at Luther’s, but I was feeling cranky after getting tasered so virtually any source sugar and caffeine would do. As I headed back to the table, I saw that Klein had sat with her back to the wall, just like all cops tended to do.

  Klein frowned as I sat down next to Kenny, glaring at each of us in turn. Finally, she ran a hand over her close-cropped hair and heaved
a sigh. “Alright, McCool, let’s get this over with. Go ahead and fuck up my day by telling me why you were at a crime scene with this juvenile delinquent. And please don’t tell me that the fae took this kid’s friend.”

  “It wasn’t the fae, it was goblins,” Kenny interjected.

  Klein shot him a cross look, raising a finger in front of his face. “Shut your trap, Harris—I’ll get to you in a minute,” she growled.

  “You two know each other?” I asked, taking a sip of my coffee. The java was acrid, bitter, and it smelled like shoe polish, which was pretty much everything I expected from a corporate coffee conglomerate. It was sad when even Mickey-D’s could brew a better cup of joe than the biggest coffee shop chain in the world. I tore open four packets of sugar and poured them in as Klein dished on Kenny.

  “Oh yeah, we’ve met. Kenny here used to like to shoplift. I picked him up for it back when I was on the beat. Kid actually tried to steal a game console from a Target, can you believe it? He waited until the store employee opened the case, then he lit a smoke bomb and tossed it in the center of electronics to distract everyone. Might have gotten away with it, if he’d thought to remove the security tag before leaving the store.”

  Kenny rolled his eyes. “I was eight, give me a break. You think I’d make that mistake twice?”

  Klein actually chuckled. “Not when you can use stolen credit card numbers to order whatever you want online,” she replied. Where moments before Kenny had defiantly met her gaze, now his eyes looked anywhere but at the cop. “That’s right, Harris. I’ve been keeping tabs on you.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned back in my seat. “Do tell.”

  Klein tsked at Kenny before turning to me. “Back when I was partnered with Erskine, we were assigned to the Commercial Burglary division. We got a tip from an online retailer who’d sent an order of electronics and video games to the kid’s neighbor’s house, only to get charged back by the credit card company after the order had been delivered. Since Mrs. Thompson is seventy-two years old and can barely dial in NPR on her console stereo, we connected the dots pretty quick. Eventually, some of the shit ended up in a local pawn shop—but since Harris here isn’t old enough to take out a loan we could never pin it on him.”

  Kenny squirmed in his chair. “I plead the fizzith.”

  “Smart move,” I replied. “And don’t think we’re not going to have a talk about this later, young man.” Kenny waited until I was looking at Klein before mocking me. I ignored him, deciding it was best to choose my battles. That’s what my mom had always said when I was his age.

  “Enough about our future license plate maker here,” Klein said. “I want to know what the hell happened to the Martin boy.”

  “She means Derp,” Kenny said.

  Klein slapped a hand on the table, hard enough to shake the condiments. “And I told you to shut your trap,” she snapped at Kenny before turning back to me. “So, what’s the scoop, McCool? Did the fae take him, or was it ‘goblins’ like dipshit here said?”

  “Honestly? I’m not sure what took him, Sergeant Klein. But I know it wasn’t anything human. I also know that your people aren’t going to get very far in tracking him down, because the thing that took him was smart. It didn’t leave a trace of evidence in that alley, not a single clue—although Kenny here did find Derp’s bus pass by a dumpster in the alley. Show her, Kenny.”

  “Okay, but I want it back.” He tossed it on the table in front of the detective.

  Klein pulled out a plastic bag and slid the card into it with her pen. “It’s evidence, kid—might have prints on it, so I’m handing it over to Missing Persons.”

  “It won’t have anything on it,” I said.

  “I still need to turn it in,” Klein replied.

  “Man, I was going to use that to get home,” Kenny sulked.

  “Anything else I need to know?” Sergeant Klein asked. “This isn’t my case, but I can make it my case real quick if you need some space to work. Your name is going to get back to whoever is working it, and they will follow up by questioning you.”

  “I’d certainly appreciate it if you could keep them off my back. One last bit of info that I failed to mention—I think that whatever took Derp is responsible for abducting the young men that have been going missing downtown. That’s actually why he was down here, because Kenny and Derp were looking into things that are better left alone.”

  “Speaking of which,” Klein remarked, “how are these two kids clued in? Do I even want to know?”

  I sipped my coffee, wincing at the taste before taking another sip. “Long story short? Last year I rescued them from a tribe of juggalo goblins who planned to sacrifice them to their evil clown god.”

  Klein clasped her hands in front of her and hung her head. “Nope, I didn’t want to know that. Shit, McCool, how deep does this myths and legends stuff go? I mean, how much of it is true?”

  “Pretty much all of it, Sergeant Klein. Most of the folklore and fairy tales you’ve read or heard have some basis in the truth.”

  “Except for orcs, the Loch Ness monster, and Bigfoot,” Kenny stated. “That stuff is total bullshit.”

  “What a relief,” Sergeant Klein deadpanned as she stood. “Look, I’m going to go snag this case from Missing Persons so I can run interference for you. Just do me a favor and don’t get arrested again, alright? There’s only so much I can do to keep you out of trouble.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant Klein.”

  “You can thank me by finding the kid,” she said.

  I nodded. “Consider it done.”

  As Klein headed for the door, she stopped to address me one last time. “And, McCool? Don’t make me regret this.”

  After Sergeant Klein left, I grabbed a fiver out of my wallet and handed it to Kenny. “Listen up—you need to take the bus home and stay there. No looking for Derp, no checking out clues and leads, and definitely no more credit card fraud.”

  “Aw, you’re no fun. Besides, I wasn’t the one who stole the numbers. I just agreed to grab the packages when they arrived at Mrs. Thompson’s house. She’s always asleep in the afternoons when they deliver, so I knew I wouldn’t get caught.”

  I leaned over the table and got in Kenny’s face to make sure he was hearing me. “Kenny, you need to listen to me and listen good. Becoming a druid-trained hunter gives a person a lot of power. I know it sounds corny, but it comes with a ton of responsibility, and it’s not something you teach to people who don’t practice a moral code. If I even think you’re doing anything illegal, there is no freaking way I’m going to train you or recommend you to anyone else. Am I clear?”

  He popped a dent in his plastic cup and let it pop out again several times, avoiding eye contact. “Yeah, I get it. But you don’t know how hard it is, living with a single mom on welfare in a trailer park. If I don’t come up with extra money, bills don’t get paid and sometimes we don’t eat. You can talk about morals and right and wrong all you want, but when your stomach’s empty all that crap goes out the window.”

  “I am not going to discuss moral relativity with you, because this is not a negotiation. If you need to make extra money, I’ll give you a part-time job at the junkyard. But—”

  Kenny’s eyes lit up as he cut me off. “You’re giving me a job? At the junkyard? That’s freaking awesome!”

  “Hang on and let me finish. What I was going to say was that school comes first, and since you’re only thirteen it’ll have to be odd jobs for cash. And it’s not going to be easy work.”

  “Say no more, I can handle it. When do I start?”

  “After I find Derp. Now, go home, stay out of trouble, and contact me if you hear anything that can help me track him down.”

  Kenny stood, pocketing the five-dollar bill I’d given him. “Done. See ya around, McCool.”

  As he was leaving the café, I yelled after him. “And don’t think I’ve forgiven you for getting me tasered and arrested!” A couple of patrons in the shop gave me nervous glances, maki
ng me wish I’d used my indoor voice. After the day I’d had, I felt like flipping them off, but instead I ignored them as I gathered my things and headed out the door.

  On the way to my car, I took a shortcut through an alley as I typed out a quick text to Belladonna. Sry bout bout wot hapnd. pls caL me so I cn explain. I kept checking my phone to see if she’d replied, a habit that Finnegas and Maureen often chastised me about. Situational awareness was a big issue for hunters, because you never knew when something was going to jump out of the sewers or shadows and try to eat you.

  Despite the risks, sometimes I let my guard down when I wasn’t on the job anyway, because being at DEFCON 1 all the time was exhausting. Imagine having to live every second of your life on edge, alert for danger around every corner. It’ll make you crazy, believe me. Considering the day I was having I should have known better, but I still had my face in my phone when I felt the eerie tingle of a spell being spooled up.

  I ducked as I reached into my Bag for my sword. That was a mistake, because I got hit full in the face by a push spell cast with bad intent. A push spell wasn’t true telekinesis, because it was damned hard to lift or otherwise control organic matter with your mind. Instead, the spell controlled air molecules to send a tightly-focused microburst of air at the target.

  In this case, the target had been my stomach, but since I’d ducked it nailed me in the head. It pretty much felt like you’d expect—as if a young Arnold Schwarzenegger had hit me in the skull with an old-school New York City phone book. And believe me, being hit in the head with a phone book is no picnic.

  A second later, I found myself laying flat on my back in an alley, looking up at four very large, very angry-looking men who wore an assortment of tacti-cool clothing. You know, the stuff they sell at sporting goods stores that’s supposed to help you blend in when you’re carrying concealed, but in reality it screams “ex-military” or “off-duty cop.” It was like an unspoken dress code for wannabe pipe hitters or something.