The Flame Game

by R. J. Blain

  Quinn had come within several feet of showing off his gorgon-incubus doohickey form, and I flattened my ears, counting the bodies, stomping my hoof at the brutality of their deaths.

  Like the poor male at the other bed and breakfast, their serpents had been decapitated.

  “Who?” I demanded, stomping my hoof again in fury over so many lost lives. Worse, the gorgons had been killed in a fashion nobody deserved.

  The dust swirled, creating a haze within the dying barrier, which broke under the onslaught of new magic.

  My magic, given life by anger over those killed, ignored its usual rules, spelling out the name of a man I learned to hate to a whole new level.

  Morrison.

  I resisted the urge to snort, which might erase the precious evidence of Morrison’s misdeeds.

  “Need proof,” I whispered to the dust of the fallen, wondering if ghosts might truly exist. If anywhere in the world might have them, the lounge corrupted into a ghastly tomb surely counted as such a place.

  The dust settled, erasing the bastard’s name and leaving me alone among the decaying dead. I explored their final resting place, the gray clinging to my legs and trailing in my wake, its damp chill penetrating through my coat. The furniture fell to ruin like everything else, but several books on an end table endured despite the years. Taking care with my sharp claws, I flipped open the topmost title to discover a ledger.

  No, not a ledger. A scientific log detailing the progress of the dust batch. Not batches, but batch. Names went with the fallen gorgon, which would allow me to find closure for their hives if they still lived. Quinn’s grandfather would know. I memorized their names.

  In the back of the book, I found the evidence I needed in the form of several receipts for equipment and supplies, and they bore Morrison’s name.

  However contaminated with the dust, it contained the clues we would need to put an end to the man’s plans, whatever they were.

  The log only provided a step-by-step guide on how to make the dust, and its infection rate, a horrific 25.7%, ensured I would be burning the building to the ground to make certain the recipe and the victims never surfaced again.

  “Bailey?” Quinn asked.

  “Stay out. This master batch. Bad dust. Recipe here. Morrison name on receipts used in ex-per-ee-men-tay-shun and creation. Use scanner from window, but barrier broken. Dust may get out. Must burn, Sam. They tested. High infection rate.”

  “How high?”

  “Twen-tee five per-cent.”

  “Did you just say it has a twenty-five percent infection rate?”

  “Point seven. Plus point seven.”

  “Fuck.”

  “No kidding. Need napalm. Barrier. Around building. No let dust out. Make hurry. Bring big dozer to get tanker here. No let this stay. No big snort big enough for this. Must all burn. I stay in building, get information. Bring good cameras? I take pictures of all pages before burn. Done in few hours. Have names of gorgon, notify family.”

  “On it. Find what you can, and I’ll make the rest of this easy on the CDC and just hand over all of Audrey’s files so they can look over everything and do additional investigations. But if this is the master batch, we should be near the end of this mess.”

  One could only hope.

  After Sam confirmed we’d located the same dust found in my apartment and responsible for the devastation at 120 Wall Street, the CDC descended on the place worse than a nest of infuriated hornets. In good news, I was out of their reach, as they didn’t want to send anyone near the building even in a hazmat suit. In better news, I would enjoy as much napalm as I could stomach to make certain I eliminated the entire batch.

  Unfortunately, the discovery brought a cranky Marshal Clemmends my way with Professor Yale in tow. They stayed a safe twenty feet from the building, and my former boss opted to use a megaphone to bother me.

  “Not deaf but will be if you keep using that!” I snorted flame at him, which did not impress the CDC’s asshole head honcho in the slightest.

  “I don’t feel like ruining my voice yelling at you today.”

  How rude. I flattened my ears and snorted again. “Is not my fault I curious and most beautiful cindercorn, and we were hiking!”

  “In the middle of a no-horse closed tourist town? Emphasis on the closed.”

  “Didn’t know was closed, we wanted to hike. Yes, hike. In snow, where pretty. This pretty!” I blew a larger flame, which glowed blue. “Except for the dust. Why not explore cool place left empty? Exploration fun! We honeymoon. Exploration, exploration!”

  Professor Yale, who remained relaxed with his hands in his pockets, regarded me with interest. “You’ve really improved your basic speech, Bailey. Well done. However, I can’t help but notice you’re freezing and you seem to like it.”

  “Tiny terrors fault. Burn extra hot.” I pointed my horn at my husband, who was chatting with Alan. “His fault. We adults, we make tiny terrors. Doc-turs make me uni-corn at least several times a week. Good for tiny terrors. Also, need poisons.”

  “You do not need poisons, Bailey,” my husband announced without even glancing my way.

  “Do!”

  “You need venom,” he corrected.

  Oh. “I need venom,” I dutifully informed the old professor. “Many different gorgon venoms. Good for tiny terrors and their immune sys-tems. Very good. You help provide, yes? I stand in box and you use me to teach if you get me good venoms.”

  “Deal. I’ll talk with the CDC and see what I can get for you. Has your honeymoon been going well?”

  “It go well until we find bodies. We explore Queeny’s past because he see things I not see before, and I never travel before him. His past full of sad things, but therapy may help.”

  “That’s funny,” Yale replied, shaking his head. “We have a slight problem regarding the equipment. That dust is too potent to risk, so we can’t even bring it to you, and we were barred hazmat access.”

  “Put camera on stick give me stick, use longer stick to hand me camera on stick.”

  Clemmends grunted but headed for one of the vehicles they’d managed to use to traverse the trashed trail, attaching a cell phone to a selfie stick. “All right, Quinn. This is how this works. We have a controller for the app, and we’ll take pictures while you hold the stick. You will accept me yelling at you with this megaphone without complaint while we record the images we need. We’ll need to take a photograph of every piece of evidence before you have access to any napalm.”

  “Okay. Can do. Yale do controller while you yell?”

  “That’s the current plan.”

  With Yale handling the pictures, I had confidence the evidence would be appropriately gathered and handled. “Okay. Good. Other Chief Quinn help with cop stuff while I do this. No headset. No safe to put on head. Sad. Headset useful. Also, rabies contagion here. Confirm scanner, not sure where source.”

  “I’m going to guess the rodents infesting the place. There’s evidence of mice all around the exterior. We’ll do treatments of all staff and animals we can catch to be safe. We have sufficient evidence of a connection between this and the rabies outbreak to bring it to trial. Once was a coincidence. Three times is not a coincidence,” Clemmends replied, using a long pole and some string to deliver the selfie stick and phone to me. I grabbed the stick in my mouth and pulled it free.

  Clemmends wisely dropped the pole, where it would join the dust batch in burning as soon as I finished my work. “All right, Quinn. Show me your stuff, and make it good this time.”

  With my mouth full of selfie stick, I couldn’t tell him I was good all of the time, although I shot him a baleful glare before getting to work.

  I began with the books on the end table, listening to Yale and Clemmends confirm each time they snapped a good picture of the text. The second book, which I hadn’t checked, horrified me even more than the first.

  It contained a list of names, when he had tested the dust on the victim, if they had become infected, and
what he had done with their body post infection or failure to infect. I wanted to run out of the building and light my hooves on fire, for I stood on a mass grave.

  I set the selfie stick on the book and trotted to the door. “This Morrison handwriting?”

  My husband, who worked with Yale and Clemmends at a folding desk on the other side of the cordon around the building, sighed and nodded. “I’ve seen it enough times to know it. Yeah. That’s his handwriting, without a doubt.”

  “It good evidence?”

  “It’s good evidence.”

  “Squish him like mother fucking grape! Squish! Stomp! Burn! Stomp! More stomp. Make Morrison vintage wine with stomping. He kill many. Better I kill, do so quickly and with much stomping. Jail? He die. Maybe with soap in shower by angry burly man. This leave scars.”

  “And I now will never look at wine the same way ever again. Thanks, Bailey,” my husband complained. “I liked wine until today.”

  I snorted. “You like sniffing wine and sipping here, sipping there. Leave wine to sips. You like sipping wine, and over entire night, you might finish baby glass. Not lose much.”

  “Ruthless.”

  “Can stomp to goo. Not make wine make goo. But would have goo on hooves, not pleasant.”

  “There’s already a warrant out for his apprehension dead or alive,” Clemmends stated. “Frankly, I don’t give a shit if you deal with him, just turn the body into the FBI or CDC when you’re done with his body and leave enough to be recognizable.”

  “Leave head intact but squish rest? That gross.”

  “You know what? Forget I said anything. Do what you want with him. We have sufficient evidence here to warrant excessive force, and if anyone complains, he is aware of the restraining order and shouldn’t have been in your range to begin with, so it’s his own damned fault for violating his restraining order.”

  “I like. Okay. Take stick, explore more. Shout extra loud if I go far and you need take peek-ture.” I retrieved the selfie stick and phone, exploring everything room by room. Several more books and logs of evidence ate away an hour, and when I finally made it down to the basement, I only descended several steps before the sea of little red beady eyes sent me bolting back upstairs.

  I ran to the window, dropped the selfie stick, and snorted blue flame. “No. No, no, no. Burn! Burn now.”

  “Bailey?” Quinn asked, raising a brow.

  “Burn it to the ground!”

  “Why?”

  “Beady eyes. Millions of beady little eyes. In basement. They get me. Burn it to the ground. Now. Give me nay-palm. Beady eyes.”

  Professor Yale laughed, and he wiped tears from his eyes. “I’m guessing there’s a rat or mouse swarm in the basement, she went downstairs, and the light from her flaming breath reflected in their eyes. Honestly, I would have run, too. Go around the rest of the place, and we’ll start getting the hoses ready so you can deal with it. We shouldn’t kill the rats or mice, though.”

  “Con-tam-ee-nay-ted,” I insisted.

  “If they’re contaminated, why aren’t they petrified?”

  I squealed my alarm. “No. No gorgon-rat-mice doohickeys. No. No. No mutant gorgon-rat-mice doohickeys. No.”

  My husband sucked in a breath. “It can’t be possible. Rats or mice couldn’t be infected with the gorgon virus, could they?”

  “That is something I’d like to test, but I’d need one.”

  “Gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys scary,” I whined.

  “You’re a cindercorn, Bailey,” Yale chided.

  “Not mean gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys not scary.”

  “Rabid, too,” my husband added with a wicked smirk.

  Evil, evil gorgon-incubus doohickey. “You are still the best doohickey, but rabid gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys scary. What if infect humans? Much risk, say no.”

  Yale sighed. “However much I hate agreeing with her, it would be very difficult to get them contained without someone getting some sort of infection. Okay. Here’s a plan. We’ll do the sentient test. If they prove sentient, we get them out and contain them and try to help them. If not, they burn.”

  “Okay. Rabid gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys tested for sentience. How?”

  “Simple. Go to the basement, ask them to line up, and pretend you’re the pied piper. If they’re sentient, we’ll just whip up a barrier in the supply van.”

  “Many more than van fit.”

  “We’ll worry about it after the test. Get the phone, please,” the professor said.

  I stretched my head out of the window, picked up the selfie stick, and set it somewhere safe before going to the steps, aware of the beady eyes staring up at me from the darkness. “Okay, gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys. Come if you want to not die.”

  The beady flashing eyes drew closer, and the swarm squeaked at me.

  Fuck. “Come if you want to not die in nice neat line, no scary squeaks or eating cindercorn. I rare, so want to not die. Puhlease.”

  The beady flashing eyes continued to come closer, and to my horror, they did so in a nice neat line, and they stopped squeaking.

  “Queeny?” I wailed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The rabid gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys un-der-stand English.” I stood my ground despite the gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys coming closer, obeying my command to form up in a nice neat line. To test if it was just a freaky coincidence, I unsheathed a claw and tapped a row of ten spots in front of me. “Make lines here. Go safe place, much food. Nice. Bath? Like bath? Food? Good food. And help not be sick?”

  For rabid gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys, they possessed a rather phenomenal ability to coordinate themselves as a group, and within ten minutes, I’d created a tiny legion of gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys organized into perfect little rodent columns. As I’d already plunged into the deep end, I lowered my nose to the first gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys.

  The one nearest me offered a little rodent kiss.

  I led my gorgon-mice-rat doohickey army to the window. “We adopt gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys? We need new house, make basement for them, but a clean tidy basement with nice house for them.”

  “Seriously? You went from terrified to wanting to adopt them?”

  I reached for the selfie stick and pointed it at my gorgon-mice-rat doohickey army and waited for the phone to click before setting it down. “They smart, speak English. Good little gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys. Probably scared, probably hungry, probably sick.”

  Professor Yale sighed. “That demonstration passes the sentience test, Sam. There’s no doubt. She talked to them, she lined them up, and they’re following her. They might not be actually speaking English, but she had zero interaction with them before the test, and they understood what she asked of them. For all we know, they may be transformative victims. The logs stated they’d done some experiments with that.”

  “Fuck,” my husband announced.

  While unfair play, I stared at my husband and sighed. Longingly. With extra longing thrown in for good measure.

  “Wow. She’s giving you the mare stare on steroids, Sam.” Professor Yale chuckled. “You can help be their temporary custodians once they are deemed safe for the general public. The first stop is to somewhere they can be treated for rabies, because my meter is screaming about it from over here, and it’s the bad kind of rabies.”

  “Bad kind?”

  “Airborne.”

  I froze. “It airborne?”

  “We have confirmation this strain is airborne. It takes a long time to kill, but its death rate seems to be equal with the standard disease, and it can be spread through the air.”

  Well, that explained the high level of spread in Long Lake and similar areas. “How treat wild animals? All? Many ill?”

  “Neutralizer and prayer,” Professor Yale replied.

  The sun set long before I marched my army of rabid gorgon-rat-mice doohickeys to the trailer brought in to transport them to a care facility until they could be treated and helped as much as possible. Someone had
gotten the idea to put down blankets, and after each of the little critters underwent a brisk neutralizer bath from volunteers in hazmat suits and given a few spoonfuls to drink, they were put inside to settle in.

  Their trust in us to do the right thing hurt.

  As I was undoubtedly contaminated with the dust, I waited by the building for the next phase, which involved a lot of fire and burning the entire resort area to the ground. All of the buildings and everything around them would be destroyed before nature was left to regrow as it saw fit.

  By the time they began pumping the neutralizer, no sane restaurant would be open. “No noo-dles with sea bugs tonight,” I said to my husband, who stayed closer than anyone else liked to the contaminated building. “Is okay. We get some tomorrow.”

  “You’re still getting your noodles with sea bugs, but the husband of one of the CDC reps will be making it for you. She lives thirty minutes from here, so he’ll start making your noodles and sea bugs once we leave, we’ll eat there, and then head to a hotel for the night. Then we’ll continue our vacation. Again.”

  “We get to spot on time?”

  “We will, but you’ll be tired. We’ll need to skip therapy tonight.”

  How sad. “Worth it, even if the gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys scared me at first.”

  “Well, to be fair, if a bunch of beady, red little eyes stared at me, I would’ve made it halfway home before stopping. But my beautiful cindercorn will get her noodles with sea bugs tonight. Good behavior is rewarded, and you helped the rodents.”

  “Gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys.”

  “I really hope that does not become their official species designation.”

  “They’re the ones who must deal. Give choice of designation, make vote. Most votes win.”

  “For some reason, that terrifies me.”

  “Well, they might willfully decide to become gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys, and while awesome, also terrifying.”