Casey waited for a heartbeat and said, “Special unit for what? You don’t want to elaborate, do you?”
The man smiled another tight little smile. “No,” he said.
“And you won’t tell me what this is specifically about?”
“No, ma’am. If I could just talk to the lady in question…”
“How do you know the person you want is even here?”
“I know, ma’am.”
“How do you know I’m not her?”
Drake sighed and then said, “I’ll show you.”
He stepped quickly aside. Behind him, obscured by his large frame, was a strange leopard-like creature with mottled and speckled green and brown fur, a broad nose, and large padded feet. Casey recognized it at once as a luak hunting-lion. Without fuss, the large cat pressed its nose into the two-inch gap in the door, rumbled a growl and then, magically and impossibly, squeezed its heavyset body through the tiny breach.
Casey gasped as the stocky beast brushed past her legs and loped down the hallway, where it came to a halt right in front of the frozen form of Abby Hall. The creature sat gracefully and looked at Abby intently and inquisitively, through great golden eyes. Abby shifted under the scrutinizing gaze.
Instantly, although the placid expression on the hunting lion’s face did not falter, a deep, resonating growl emanated from the big cat’s throat. Just as the sound of police hammering on a door is immediately identifiable, even to someone who’s never heard the noise before, so this deep growl told the little, jiggly animal cells in Abby’s spine and brain that moving a hair would be a terrible life choice – possibly her final one.
The rumbling growl reverberated down the hallway.
“That,” Drake said, “is how I know the woman I want is here.”
With that, he stepped back and delivered a sledgehammer kick to the door. Casey, recognizing what was about to happen, just had time to step aside before the door flew open, the security chain snapping like it a rubber band.
Drake dashed down the hallway, his heavy boots sounding like a drumroll, building to a crescendo. He found the luak hunting-lion still sitting in front of the frightened young woman, its tail flicking happily back and forth on the rug.
In the kitchen, the still-naked Derek was now standing and drinking straight from a carton of orange juice.
Drake gave him a long, stringent look from behind his sunglasses before ordering, “You. Out.”
It was not a tone that brooked argument.
“Okie dokie,” Derek said and, still clutching the carton of orange juice and buck-ass naked, he legged it briskly out of the apartment and into the stairwell.
Drake turned his attention back to Abby.
“You’re Abby Hall?” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, but –”
“Miss Hall, you are suspected of being in possession of caffeine.”
Abby didn’t say anything.
“Oh, come on,” Casey said, tugging her T-shirt down to make sure that it wasn’t showing any of her naughty bits. “Abby works in a coffee shop! She’s not some badass caffeine dealer.”
Drake ignored Casey and pulled a little instrument out of his pocket. “Miss Hall, please scrape this over your tongue and the sides of your mouth.” Abby did as she was told while the luak hunting-lion continued to watch her unblinkingly. She handed the little device back to the intimidating man who, she couldn’t help noticing – even numbed as she was with shock and panic – was gorgeous.
Drake took the swab back and inserted it into the bottom of a small machine that he’d extracted from a pocket. He held it out so that it was level with Abby’s mouth and then said, “Now, if you could repeat ‘Half an ounce of medium-roast Liberica’ into the machine, please.”
Abby repeated the sentence into the bottom of the little silver gadget. Drake thanked her curtly and pressed a button. There was a beep and a green light blinked on.
“Now, look,” Abby said, finding her voice from somewhere. “It’s clear that things have gotten a bit out of hand. If I could just explain –”
“You’ll get to explain, miss, don’t worry about that,” Drake said.
“You make that sound so ominous!” Abby said, her voice rising.
Drake raised an imperious eyebrow at her. She lowered her voice.
“Look,” she said, “there’s been a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“Sort of.”
“A sort of mistake?”
“Will you stop repeating what I say and making me sound like some stupid little girl! I’m trying to explain what happened. You don’t understand. I don’t understand.” Abby rubbed nervously at her slim thighs, which were more than a little bit on show, thanks to the miniskirt she was still wearing.
Drake, from behind his sunglasses, ran his eyes over her slim body, the long blonde hair, the pert nose, and bright blue eyes. He gulped, regaining his focus.
Nudging the lion aside with his boot, he hitched up his coral pants and crouched down in front of Abby.
“Miss,” he said, “if you could just quit your jabbering for a few seconds, I need to do a couple of physical examinations.”
Abby leveled her gaze at the athletic cop. “Oh, I fucking bet you do,” she said acidly. “Do you need me to pull my skirt up and turn around so you can do a cavity search while you’re at it?”
“Don’t push your luck,” Drake said as he reached up and held Abby’s face firmly, but lightly, in his strong hands.
Despite the simmering rage and the fear of what was going to happen to her, Abby couldn’t help but notice that the handsome officer’s hands were callused in places, yet as sure and gentle as any doctor’s. She tried not to look at him as Drake pulled one eyelid down and then the other. Then he put his face near hers and took a slow, deep breath. Abby tried to block her nose in a vain attempt to ignore the way the man smelled seductively of vanilla and coffee and some other scent she couldn’t put her finger on.
“Everything to your satisfaction, sir?” she asked quietly, their faces only a couple of inches apart.
Drake didn’t answer. For a second, Abby thought that a small smile might crack the stern veneer of the man’s face, but it didn’t. Drake got to his feet and walked into the kitchen. He searched quickly through the cupboards until he found a cup and saucer and brought them back. He handed the cup and saucer to Abby and said, “Hold these, please.”
“Why?”
“Just hold them!”
Abby took the cup and saucer and held them out straight, unsure what it was that Drake wanted her to do. They rattled slightly in her hand as she held them and, try as she might, she couldn't get the faint rattling to stop.
Drake nodded and told her that she could set them down.
“Why are you making me do this?” Abby asked.
“Those are a couple of standard field tests for jitters,” Drake explained. “I was checking on pupil dilation and hand steadiness.”
“Hand steadiness?”
“When someone has been on caffeine, it increases their heartbeat, which in turn causes certain physiological tremors: facial twitching, shaking hands, things like that.”
“Well, have you thought that her hands might be shaking because you’re scaring the coffee grounds out of her?” Casey butted in.
“They’re just field tests,” Drake snapped. “Not conclusive in their own right.” There was a tiny ping from inside the pocket of his pants. “However,” he said, “that noise is conclusive.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the device that he’d used to measure Abby’s saliva and breathe . He glanced at it and put it back in his pocket. Then he looked down at Abby. “All right, you’re coming with me.”
“But – but – but I need to explain to you what happened!” Abby started to ramble. “I need to tell you what happened! About the fiery man and Chaz and the blue light and the ash and Chaz and – and –”
But Drake was pulling her quickly to her feet, her ar
m grasped by his hand. Abby instinctively tried to wrench herself away, but her arm might as well been encased in iron. Drake steered her out of the room, ignoring the protests of her sister. The luak hunting-lion loped ahead of them and disappeared out the door, Drake marching Abby along behind.
“Where are you taking me?” Abby yelled, struggling in the adamantine grip. “Where the raven-fuck are you dragging me?”
Drake said nothing, just pushed her down the hall and out into the stairwell. Casey was yelling and cursing behind Drake’s back. The big cop turned on the threshold and went to close the door, but Casey barred it.
“Where are you taking my sister?” she hissed in the man’s face, her voice all venom and ice.
“Wherever it is, you won’t be following,” Drake said in an infuriatingly calm and assured tone. “Especially not without any pants on. Wait here.” Then he pulled the door forcefully closed.
“Where are we going?” Abby asked again. Sobs were forming in her throat, but they dissolved when she realized that they were not heading for the street, but upwards.
“Why are we going up?” she asked. “What’s on the roof?”
“We have to run a few more field tests,” Drake said.
They made their way up nine flights of stairs, surrounded by the scent of spilled beer and stale urine. Drake never hurt her, but his grip was such that Abby didn’t even entertain the notion of trying to make a run for it. Even if she’d been able to break Drake’s hold, the man looked like a coiled spring; he’d run her down before she got three paces.
They emerged out onto the roof, the rusted fire-door squealing as Drake forced it open with his boot. Abby squinted against the bright sunlight. It was a glorious day, the sky so blue it was almost purple at its zenith.
She heard Drake say something, but the breeze blew his words away. For the time being, Abby could barely see anything; her eyes were full of tears and sunlight. Eventually, she managed to brush the tears away, and she saw that she and Drake were not the only two people present.
A couple of women stood in the dead center of the flat roof. They were both short – very short, being only four and a half feet tall. Both of them had the bluest hair that Abby had ever seen. It was the shade of blue that you saw on nature documentaries, the iridescent blue of flickering fish moving over coral reefs, of sea anemones, and the stripes of the boxing shrimps found in the deep waters off the coast of Ravencharm. Abby had never seen anything like it on the head of a person.
“We had to clean up your mess last night, Abby,” he said, marching her across the roof – not to the two tiny women, but toward the edge of the roof. His tone was slightly less austere than it had been in the apartment; nevertheless, it was still imbued with absolute surety and steel.
Abby said nothing. She suddenly got the impression that things were a great deal more severe than she had initially thought. She also realized that Drake had never shown her a badge of any kind.
Drake stopped at the edge of the roof, his strong arm locked around Abby’s slender bicep. Abby saw that they were gazing out over Rotwood Harbor, toward where the river ran sluggishly in its looping course.
Drake gave a great sigh. “Aren’t you sick of living in this place, Abby?” he asked.
“No, of course not. Rotwood is goddamn paradise, isn’t it?” she replied drily.
Drake snorted. “You’re a smart woman. Beautiful too, if you don’t mind me saying. You have a degree in chemistry, for gods’ sake. You’re made for more than this.”
Abby didn’t know what to say to this. It wasn’t at all what she had been expecting from the imposing cop.
“Well, that’s very easy to say,” she said, “but you know what this economy, what this world of ours is like. It’s a great place if you’re rich or connected, but for the rest of us, it’s all about surviving the best we can and hoping for one opportunity to haul our asses out of the shit-heap.”
Drake glanced at her and then fixed his eyes back on the spread of Rotwood below them. “Well, you’ve got what it takes, Miss Hall,” he said. “You’ve at least got a shot at changing your stars.” He turned to her and his chiseled face was suddenly cold and grim. “But you’re also up to your eyebrows in trouble now.” His grip on her arm tightened and she felt him pressing her inexorably closer to the edge of the roof.
“Hey!” she said. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing? Stop it! You’re going to push me over.”
Drake ignored her. “Yes. You’re in a load of trouble, all right.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve never done anything to anyone before! Please, I’m clean!”
“It’s hard to be clean when you’re up to your neck in shit, Miss Hall.”
“Look, if this is about last night, I can explain,” she pleaded. “Just let me go. Preferably after you’ve dragged me back from the edge!”
“Of course this is about last night,” Drake said, holding her farther out, so that only one of her feet was still touching the roof. “Did you think that you could brew up a couple of cups of the strongest coffee ever to hit the streets of Ravencharm, smash up your place of work, reduce your manager to a heap of ashes and then wander off for a sleepover at your sister’s place? You didn’t think that there’d be repercussions?”
She tried again. “But I don’t know what happened! One minute Chaz and I were at work and then that fucking Drunk Willy guy came in and then Chaz made some coffee and then this fucking thing walked in and burned him up like a twig or something! I swear I didn’t have anything to do with it!”
Amidst the jumble of panicked thoughts and sparking suspicions about what her future might hold, Abby thought that Drake was most probably trying to get the location of the bag of caffeinated coffee out of her. She speculated whether she should tell him where it was or play the ignorant card until she figured out what the hell was going on. She’d hidden the gold-foil packet on her way home from the coffee shop, stopping to cram it into a hole in her favorite tree in Rotwood Park. She couldn’t get busted with it, so she decided that maybe she should hold out.
Abby was not an idiot. She was a chemistry graduate and had spent years learning how to coolly and logically interpret data to form unbiased conclusions. That said, it was evident to her that, although she wasn’t exactly up to date with the police procedure, hanging someone over the edge of a ten-story building was probably not standard practice. She had an inkling that she had, somehow, managed to get herself embroiled in something a whole lot bigger than she could have possibly imagined.
“This is your last chance to tell me what I need to know, Miss Hall,” Drake said.
“You can’t just drop me off the side of a freakin’ building,” Abby said, trying to inject her words with some confidence. “The RCPD would be up to their necks in negative press quicker than it takes to brew a pot of coffee.’”
“Ah, but have you even seen a badge? Am I wearing a uniform?” Drake countered.
Abby gulped.
Drake turned her slightly so that she could make out the two mysterious little women, who had wandered over for a closer look at how things were preceding.
“These are my colleagues,” Drake said. He nodded at them, and the two unbuttoned the long dark coats and shrugged them off.
Abby’s mouth dropped open.
The little women had wings. Wings. They were long and iridescent as a dragonfly’s, with threads of bright blue veins shooting through them, the same color as their hair.
“What the –” Abby breathed.
The two little women giggled and bowed at her.
“Where is the rest of the coffee, Abby?” Drake asked. He still had her arm in his grip, but Abby was leaning so far out over the edge of the building now that if he were to release her, she’d topple over.
“The rest of what?” she asked. Her eyes were pinned to the pavement, as if gravity was pulling particularly hard at her eyeballs.
“The rest of the beans. The rest of that bag that came from Mount Hy
po.”
Abby’s eyes involuntarily flicked up to Drake’s. He smiled. “So you’ve heard the name. That is some potent product for someone to hit on their first time. It’s no surprise that all those tests I ran before were a dead giveaway for someone who’s been hitting the beans the night before.”
“Look, it was Chaz. Chaz had the bag. I didn’t even know that it was some a special roast until after he’d made the coffee!”
“Where’s the rest of the bag?” Drake asked.
The wind whipped around Abby’s bare legs, running invasive fingers of air up to caress her ass cheeks. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Unless you want to end up spread out like a dropped raspberry frappe on the sidewalk, you’ll tell me what I want to know, Miss Hall.”
Abby looked at the handsome face of the man threatening her life, at the white teeth and dusting of stubble on his jaw. She was confident that Drake was a good man. Something about him told her that he might have a good bark, but he wouldn’t do her any harm.
“I don’t know anything,” she said, a tear leaking from one eye.
“So be it,” Drake said, and let her go.
Abby was so taken aback by the fact that she had just been pushed off a building to her death that she didn’t even scream as she started to fall. She had the strangest sensation that she was floating in mid-air, while the building quickly stretched away and unraveled above her. She watched, her mouth open in shock, for a second as Drake receded from her vision, his arm still outstretched as if he was waving her farewell.
Drake watched the girl fall away from him, surprised and impressed that she didn’t utter a word or a sound as she went.
She’s tougher than she looks, he thought.
Abby turned in the air, buffeted by the wind. She’d heard that, when you were about to die, your whole life flashed before your eyes. As it was, she rather thought that the life flashing before her eyes was the part that had just happened – between her being born and now – because she felt that she hadn’t gotten up to too much in that time.
The pavement rushed up to meet her. And her final thought – which surprised even her, considering the situation – was to ask herself when she’d last shaved her legs, and whether Drake had thought they were sexy.
Caffeinated Magic: Supernatural Barista Academy Page 3