by RJ Blain
“I’d say you’re a rather fleshy color, opaque in nature.”
Smartass medium. “You’re joining Luke on his shit shifts.” I crouched, untied my sneakers, and pulled them off, inspecting my ankles. They seemed normal, although my left one felt cooler than my right. “Do you see anything now, Ethan?”
“Your ankles. I shouldn’t be looking at your ankles. Don’t you have to marry someone who looks at your ankles? Hey, Ray? If you ogle her ankles, you have to marry her.”
Yep. Ethan was stressed over the short meeting with Euthal, not that I blamed him. I wanted to go home, take the detective to my bedroom, and put him to work forgetting about my warlock problem for a while.
Jamie dug in the back of the SUV and retrieved a vial for Isaac, who gathered Euthal’s blood. “I’ll fix the asphalt once we get this photographed, and I’ll leave an imprint of the site so I can reconstruct it later.”
That would fit investigative protocols, barely. “Raymond, can you call in to your boss and warn him we’ve had a sighting? Notify him that Euthal is using some sort of illusionary magic to dodge detection but the high sensitivity scanner can pick him up.”
“Can I finish staring at your ankles first? Hey, Ethan? How long do I have to look at her ankles before she’s required to marry me for having lost her purity?”
“That should be long enough,” Ethan declared. “Just keep any additional ruinations of her purity private.”
I grabbed my shoe and flung it at the medium. He sidestepped with a smirk, picked up my improvised projectile, and handed it back to me. “You dropped this.”
Laughing, Raymond headed for his cruiser, which left me alone with Eddy, Luke, and his quad. Eddy stared at the asphalt where I’d stabbed a spear of ice through Euthal’s foot. She pointed at the spot. “Hey, Olivia?”
“Yes?”
“That’s a little crazy. You skewered him.”
“I’d say the bastard deserved it. I should’ve just speared that damned ice through his heart.”
“Dial back the aggression,” the dragoness ordered. “Don’t make me put you in the corner for the rest of the day.”
If I annoyed her too much, she’d put me in a corner and sit on me with her scaly rump. I pressed the scanner to my ankle, waited for it to run a diagnosis, and repeated the process on my other foot. It remained silent. “I didn’t hallucinate seeing that fish, right?”
Luke shook his head. “You didn’t. The scanner was definitely registering Hypnos. It’s vanished, though. I guess it wanted to fake you out before ditching.”
“Great. Just great. Eddy, call your brother and take care of that end of things and get forensics over here yesterday. Jamie, once you’re done fixing the sidewalk, check the cars and make sure I didn’t damage any of them. If so, get the reimbursement forms prepped. Play nice with the salesmen, too. I’m not good at playing nice with salesmen.”
“We’d guessed that when you ran away and had Raymond pick your car. That was some smooth delegation,” Jamie replied. “And you didn’t touch the cars. As always, you’re precise. You almost caught that bastard in the burst, too.”
“I hate missing. I hate it.”
“Well, you didn’t miss with that lance of yours. I’m impressed he managed to teleport while anchored. That’s some serious magic.”
“Warlock,” I reminded the earth elementalist.
“Does that mean we get to skip the research trip at the library?” he asked.
“No. It just means we need to haul ass about it because he’s obviously keeping tabs on us. I want to know why that bastard got so close.”
“You had his pet fish, Olivia. I bet he was trying to get his pet fish back.”
“Well, his pet fish ran away again.”
“Can’t say I blame the little bastard for running away. If a warlock was after me, I’d run, too.”
“Can I run away? I’d like to run away.” I eyed Luke’s tires but resisted the urge to kick one to vent my frustrations. “I have to call Donners.”
Luke sighed. “I can call him if you want.”
While tempted to take Luke up on his offer, I shook my head. “I’ll deal with him. Gotta grow up one of these days,” I muttered, digging out my phone and digging through my contacts for his information. Bracing for the worst, I connected the call.
“What can I do for you, Olivia?” Donners answered.
“If I give you a vial of Euthal’s blood, do I get a Christmas present this year?”
“You get a Christmas present every year, but I’ll get you an extra one. We’ve been after a DNA sample for years. How’d you get it?”
“Bastard came up behind us cloaked and the scanner caught him. I missed with my first blast of ice, so I decided to skewer his foot into the pavement. He teleported away, but he left some shoe leather and a nice sample of blood for us. Isaac is collecting the blood into a vial now.”
“Nobody was hurt?”
“Only Euthal and a small chunk of asphalt. Jamie is going to repair the asphalt and smooth feathers with the salesmen.” I drew in a steadying breath and explained how Hypnos had come to me as a small, floating fish.
“This case gets weirder and weirder. I thought I’d already seen everything, but Euthal’s determined to prove me wrong. You’re all right?”
“I’m fine, as is my crew. Hypnos got away, however.”
“To be expected. Euthal probably needed to be close to recapture his prize. At least we know why he dumped the statuette. He doesn’t need it. We’ll still have the statuette evaluated; there’s a possibility it might be what’s required to contain this Hypnos so it can’t be used again in the future.”
“Or at least mitigate the risk.”
“All things can be destroyed one way or another.”
I scowled at the thought of destroying the statuette. “That’s the type of talk that gets the dead rolling in their graves. I can think of a list of the deceased who might take offense to that idea.”
“Humor me.”
“Let’s start with Elizabeth Donalds, her father, and the craftsman who made it. Of course, I’m assuming the craftsman is no longer among the living.”
“A valid point.”
“Then there’s also the fact it’s a five million dollar statuette and a work of art. I’ll take personal offense if it’s destroyed.”
“And as you’re the owner of said statuette, that’s a pretty compelling argument on why we should probably avoid destroying it.”
“I’m so glad we don’t have to continue this discussion.” I huffed. “Is this really your first blood sample of this guy?”
“He’s the master of clean getaways. I have no idea what he’s going to do now that you’ve tagged him.”
“He shouldn’t have tried sneaking up on us, then. Also, any teams assigned to this guy want the high sensitivity scanner with them. It can detect the bastard. I missed, but the scanner squealed when he got close.”
“It’s not like you to miss.”
“Well, it didn’t help I got verbal directions on where he was standing. He moved. I hit him the second time, but as I said, he teleported away.”
“He’s a lot of things, but he’s not stupid. Are you still going to the library?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Be careful, Olivia. This guy may not be a powerhouse, but he’s still dangerous.”
I’d already figured that one out on my own, but I dutifully replied, “We’ll be careful.”
I hitched a lift with Raymond, but because Luke was an asshole, I got shunted into the back again. While my quad laughed at me, Eddy waved cheerfully before abandoning me with the detective. “I’m not sure I’m ever going to understand those idiots.”
“They think you need to get laid, and for some reason, they think I’m your best chance of that happening.”
“They’re not wrong, but they’re still idiots.”
“They also think I’m a prude who won’t take a hint. They’re helping.”
“They’re still idiots.”
“You’re just mad you’re locked in. Honestly, they’re doing it because it’ll take a lot more than a half-baked warlock to bust into there. It’s one of the safety precautions they put in this specific cruiser. The dampening field in there is rated for most death-zone survivors.”
Hello. I enjoyed a good challenge. “Is that an invitation to see if I can bust out?”
“Please don’t.”
“But it sounds like fun. More fun than just being locked back here.”
“The cruiser is equipped with an electrical control system. If it detects you trying to bust out, you’ll get a rather painful jolt. If someone tries to bust in, it’ll do the same to them, too. It was one of the requirements to let me work on the force.”
I could see that being useful in every quad SUV. “Who installed the system? Can you get me into contact with them? I think I need to get some SUVs equipped with that.”
“It’s expensive.”
“I’ll bill the FBI. If it’ll keep assholes like Euthal contained, they’ll dish out for at least one vehicle equipped with the system.”
“Chief Kirkland knows. I just drive the cruiser. They added a lot of tricks to this car because of that.”
“I will stalk Chief Kirkland for that while nagging him about your dog. I’ll also make it clear that your new SUV for your pup needs the same system installed.”
“Why do I have a feeling you’re going to nag him to a near-death state?”
“I see you have been paying attention. It’s one of my joys in life to annoy the local police chiefs. They go crying to my old man, and he tries to pick a fight with me over it, and I ignore him. It works great.”
“If you want to fight, it certainly does.”
“It’s how we show we love each other without actually having to say it. We’re not too good at the expressing love thing. My dad is the kind to cut the head off a rubber duck to drive my mother up a wall.”
“I had noticed that. Should we be scheduling in arguments to go along with the seductions?”
“I wouldn’t worry about the arguments. They’ll happen. What matters is that we sort our shit out before we go to bed. I hate going to sleep fresh off an argument. It pisses me off, and I wake up angry, and then it’s worse the next day.”
“And if it’s an argument that we can’t resolve in one night? Those do happen.”
“Rain checks work.”
“So you want to schedule the fight’s continuance?”
I scowled. “Okay. Yeah. Yes, I guess we’ll need to schedule in some of the arguments. But other arguments will just happen.”
“That’s part of being human. I’d be concerned if you were the equivalent of an emotional vegetable. Bottling it until you burst isn’t healthy, either.”
“I used to be,” I confessed.
“Following New York.”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody expects you to act like everything is all right after something like New York. New York shocked the entire nation. The other nukes were bad, but New York wiped out so many lives.”
The other nukes had surprising survival rates. Some cities counted their dead in the single digits. Seattle had suffered three fatalities, and they hadn’t even been attributed to the nuke itself. They’d been in resulting car accidents along the coastline.
“You’d be surprised on that score. ‘You survived,’ they like to say, as though survival makes it somehow easier to handle so much death. It doesn’t.”
“And, from what I’ve gathered, you stayed in New York for months after the nuking.”
“Water elementalists can survive on the very moisture in the air. Did you know that? Three months. That’s how long I could feasibly survive without anything other than taking nutrients from the very air or nearby water sources. I had no idea I was even doing it.”
“I regret to inform you that I’ll be expecting you to eat good food while we’re sharing the same roof. If you want to go indulge in water from the air, you can do it while I’m on shift.”
I laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “The first time Donners coaxed me into eating, I threw up on his shoes.”
“I bet that’s one of his favorite memories.”
“They were his favorite shoes. He wasn’t happy with me.”
“Well, he shouldn’t have had his feet where you could throw up on them.”
“I’ll pay you to tell him that.”
“I’ll do it free of charge just to see his expression. May I ask how long you stayed in the city?”
“I don’t remember,” I admitted. “I remember details of what happened, but the days melted into each other, and I had panic attacks whenever someone tried to tell me the date after Donners was assigned to me. It took him several months until I could tell him my name and make arrangements for me to come back to San Francisco. I started going stir crazy a few months after that, which was when they started looking into work I could do. I went back to school, but I changed my major. And it was a guaranteed pass; they used school as a method of therapy, and well, no one cares what your education level is when you’re a death-zone survivor. I wasn’t recruited by the FBI for my brains.”
“They got more than they bargained for with you, then.”
I forced another laugh. “That’s one way to put it. They tried to put me in with a quad in Los Angeles when I first started. It didn’t work well.”
“Oh? You can’t just tell me that without elaborating, Bubbles.”
“I was so anxious someone in the quad might die I never let any of them do their jobs, and it drove everyone, myself included, pretty crazy. That’s when they figured out I could manage people and do the overprotective supervisor thing with a certain amount of finesse. Dad was not happy with that. He wasn’t happy with me serving on a quad, either, but I had to do my draft time like everyone else.”
“I hated that I was excluded from the draft,” he admitted.
“I bet you hated being put on a pedestal, too.”
“You’d be correct. Not having any magic doesn’t make me any better than anyone else. If anything, it puts me at a huge disadvantage. If I let the government have its way, I’d never leave home or interact with any supernaturals at all. I had to wage a legal battle to be allowed to join the force.”
“We’re like opposite sides of the same coin. I have too much magic. You don’t have enough.”
“An apt enough way to view it. I drive the government evaluators crazy. They can’t tell if I’m just immune to magic or if I’ll become like everyone else if I’m exposed to radiation. Worse, I absolutely refuse to father children with some woman just because she’s a pure.”
My brows rose at that. “They want you to have children with another pure?”
“They’ve pitched it as preserving the last vestiges of pure humanity.”
“What a load of shit.”
“That’s what I told them. I told them if I was going to become a father, it’d be with a woman I married. Then they tried to get me to date every pure woman they could find.”
“Is your ex a pure?”
“She’s a pure pain in the ass, but no. She’s a low-grade fringe survivor. Almost as good as a pure in the eyes of the government except they really weren’t happy when they found out she’d tried to evict me from the gene pool through a shove down the steps.”
“And yet she shows up trying to get back with you?”
“I never said she made any sense, Bubbles.”
“That’s true. What do you think our first fight will be about?”
“How you’re already planning our first fight when we haven’t even gotten around to our first scheduled seduction.”
“Huh. I’m screwing this up before we’ve even gotten started, aren’t I?”
“I figured this wouldn’t be a breeze.”
Damn. I’d have to be careful around the man. If I cared too much about his opinion, he’d bomb my self-esteem into oblivion. “I think my mother ha
d the right idea about the free rent. Putting up with me will be worth every cent.”
“You’re not that bad.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m that bad. I’m totally the reason I miss blind dates.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’ve decided planning a date without you being aware of the details would be a recipe for a disaster.”
“That’s not what a blind date is, Raymond.”
“It’s not?”
I rubbed my forehead. “You have no idea what a blind date is, do you?”
“Never been on one.”
“It’s where your friends set you up with a mystery date. It’s blind because you have no idea who you’re going to be dating.”
“Why on Earth would anyone do that?”
“I don’t know. That’s part of why I’ve always missed them. Thing is, people who know me are usually too smart to try to date me. Not only am I a workaholic, I’m a workaholic with baggage. I thought you knew what a blind date was.”
“I just thought you were amusingly deranged when I was in your office,” he admitted.
“Deranged?”
“Amusingly so. Possibly a psycho. But then you were showing off your legs. I figured it was worth sticking around rather than looking for someone to explain what was going on. By the time Luke came in, I was having too good of a time to want to leave. Setting your security guards to run me around was sly and ruthless.”
“It’s so much fun to toy with the cops. It really is. I can’t help it. You were just so damned ballsy. I had to play with you.”
“The first time you fail to do the dishes, we’re probably going to have a spat,” Raymond admitted. “I get unreasonable about the kitchen work. I’m okay with doing the cooking, but to hell with doing the cooking and the cleaning.”
“That would make you a tolerably reasonable person. Nobody likes being the household slave.”
“I’m also a little pissed you didn’t neutralize the warlock.”
“Yeah. Go ahead and yell at me for that one. I should’ve taken him out. That’s all on me. Thing is, I try to use non-lethal force by default, and I reacted without thinking. That’s the problem with the death-zone survivors. And it’s our weakness. We have to use non-lethal methods first, or we’ll be the ones neutralized. You’re right. I should have neutralized the bastard then and there. But I didn’t, and I’ll have to live with the consequences of that. But, on the other hand, if he’d been someone other than Euthal, I wouldn’t have to live with killing the wrong man.”