Turn to Stone sample chapter

 

Chapter One

 

“You should kill me,” I said.

FBI Agent David Acton nodded and handed me a cup of coffee. “That is not going to happen.” I suspected he was horribly biased. Not killing me was a horrendous mistake that he was going to regret, but he liked me enough to sleep with me on occasion. That might be clouding his judgement. This might just be one of those relationship-ending disagreements people talk about in bad movies.

I sat in his sedan, wearing his spare clothes. I’d been naked when he found me. I supposed I was still technically naked. The reality-warping illusion that made me look human was somehow letting me wear David’s off-label linen khakis and his extra white cotton shirt. I was also wearing a simple wooden disk on a leather strap. It had no carvings or visible spell work, but to magical eyes it glowed like a star. That held the glamour that made me look human. Without that, I wasn’t going to fit into this shirt that smelled of leather and Stetson cologne. I wasn’t sure I could explain that to him, though. I could barely explain it to me.

The clothes were fine. The smell was the problem. It wasn’t unpleasant. David’s unique scent was almost as comforting as the man himself. My sense of smell was alien to me now. It gave me too much information and I was unsure how to process it. For the first time I smelled the heavy chemicals, the twinge of artificial musk. Beneath that was a deeper signature, something of coffee, exhaustion and the indefinable scent of him, leather and spice. The subtle thread that helped bind our relationship, now yanked from mild context and expanded a thousand-fold. I’d buried myself in his arms more than once, inhaling deeply of that scent. It offered comfort with no strings, needs met, long languid sighs between bedsheets, a business made of tongue and teeth. But that was all gone now. It had to be. I could have no possible hope for any future.

There was a monster in these soft, quiet, Texas back roads. It lurked in the post-storm silence, in the drip of rainwater off mesquite brush and live oak branches, in the shadows cast by the last storm-clouds racing across a sky going dark with threatening night. The monster was big, the size of a large, tall man, with webbed and clawed hands. It had huge baleful yellow eyes. Its skin glowed with deep water phosphorescence, a tentacled and tendrilled obscenity. It hungered for wet and raw meat. The pulse of every creature, from the small rabbit nearby to the man beside me, made its mouth fill with venomous saliva. It had magic that had fueled the nightmare stories historians kept under lock and key. It didn’t know how to use that yet. I was terrified it would learn.

I wore the illusion of humanity, as borrowed as Acton’s cheap suit. The monster was me.

The knowledge held me in its teeth, paralyzed. Every movement shook. Every sensation was numbed by terror. The monster I had become wasn’t a danger, it was a disaster. It didn’t even belong here—oh god, did I feel that I did not belong here—but belonged to the Deep. The places of dark and heavy water, where the glow of its blue tendrils could be lost in the regular ebb and tide of the sea. The only thing you could do with it was kill it. Which meant the only thing I could do was die.

It wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me.

But it was.

I wasn’t human anymore.

This kept surprising me. It wasn’t that I forgot, because I couldn’t. Every bit of sensory input screamed it. Every brush of fabric against my skin, the exponentially more complex cries of the world as the sun slowly sank past the horizon…none of it was familiar. And yet I found room to think of other things. A reflex for normalcy. Here’s a phone. I should call someone. Here’s a thermos. I’m thirsty. Here’s someone I love. I want to touch them, hold them, let them hold me. But wait, none of that matters anymore. The enormity of my transformation blotted it all out. I looked human only because something big, bigger than any other power I had ever known or heard of, had decided I was necessary.

Necessary. This was necessary.

Reality crashing in, over and over, tidal waves against a shore. My thoughts were disjointed islands, now normal and placid in greens and blues, now volcanic and ashen. Shame and hope, charring me down in between.

I wanted to eat the man standing over me.

I wasn’t going to. Clearly, I had enough self-control to avoid pillaging a countryside (not that there was much to pillage. It’s the Texas backcountry. Pillaging options are cows, manure, and maybe if you’re lucky a couple cotton bales.) But the fact that it was even a possible choice…I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t know if ravenous drooling bloodthirsty monsters did that sort of thing.

David wasn’t alone. His companion was absent, but I could scent the other person. Scent. Like a dog. Or maybe something more reptilian. I tasted the flavors of the air. Once each breath got a little bit past my glamour, the whole world exploded into a myriad rainbow of complexities. David was musk and leather, cheap deodorant, and cologne, brown tones in the luxurious compliment of fine wine. This other man, whoever he was, smelled like a bonfire. A good one, with the low heat of resinous incense and burning cedar wood, the kind surrounded by ritual work, by dancers in spangled silks, by altars to gods more benevolent than cruel. David had given me this other man’s coffee. He hadn’t said as much, but David had spent enough time at my house for me to know how he drank his caffeine. Just enough cream and sugar to cut the bitterness. Like me, he was used to chugging the stuff on route to one disaster or another. This bonfire-stranger liked theirs with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon, the bitterness complimented instead of muted. It was stronger than anything I’d ever tasted before, in ways I couldn’t just chalk up to having an entirely different tongue. A part of me wondered if this was someone David had known before—

Before.

Before my ending, my change, my might-as-well-be-death transformation. Crashing back down over me, grinding me to dust. Breathless and reeling all over again, traitor memory turned to whiplash.

Life had bifurcated. Before, I was human, something I’d taken for granted, my flaws suddenly laid bare in stark relief. I’d downplayed my own attractiveness because social pressure made pride in your appearance uncomfortable, a negative. Brown hair, brown eyes, slender, white. I’d read like a checklist of idealized features and I’d somehow tried to play coy about it.

Now I sat in the after, and everything was ashes.

You’d think that an “after” as monumental as this one would have a better car. It was FBI standard issue, the same make and model as Terrestrial Affairs’. Boring. Dull. Though at TA, we tried to avoid beige and black so as not to spook the clients. Who would be spooked anyway. Government cars usually look the part. But if this had to be the last car I ever sat in (and I was convinced it had to be) I wished it had been David’s Scout. That was a good little car…though, regretfully, we’d never gotten a chance to make good memories in the rear bedspace.

And now I’d ever be behind the wheel again. Our job as TA agents was to keep monsters alive, but things like me were the one gigantic exception. And I didn’t have the option of keeping it secret, either. In the moments before I killed my captors, I’d texted my boss to let her know what had happened to me, so that someone would be able to stop them if I failed.

They’d had to die. My captors. I felt no guilt. What they’d done to me, they’d done to others. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of others…except I had only been transformed. I’d kept my essential me-ness, my sense of self. There was still something here that could call itself Astrid Stone. The other victims had been obliterated.

And now it was supposed to be my turn. Why wasn’t anyone putting me out of my misery?

A small part of me, squished down to a basic instinct, knew that I was catastrophizing while wallowing in a mire of self pity. If I were my own client I’d be sitting me down with a glass of cold water and a snack, and I’d make me breathe into a paper bag or count backwards from ten. Terrestrial Affairs Agents are more glorified social workers than anything else. I’d coached more than one shifter—usually werewolves, but there’d been a couple other varieties—though the first real waves of panic. But I’d never practiced using these tools on myself. There’d been a smug superior assumption, now shattered, that I was never going to need them. It was as if my clients had to be forced into survival, but I could have the privilege of my world ending before the consequences kicked in.

Reality, I guess, doesn’t work that way.

We sat in his car, equidistant from Houston, Refugio and San Antonio. If Texas has a spirit, it’s this place. No big city brightness to wash the stars away. The sky burned orange as the day went to embers, trees throwing skeletal black fingers across the apricot clouds. This was big sky country, where openness made you feel naked. There’s just you, and miles of empty, haunted mesquite.

Maybe I could have found some lovely romantic comparison to take my mind off the lonely dark. That was how I functioned, before. Look at the world and find the glimpse of paradise masquerading as someone’s trim little garden. Luxuriate in the stretch of beach no one has stepped on yet. But to find peace here, you couldn’t have your skin crawling at the most basic idea of who and what you were.

Somewhere in the pitch blackness around me were the destroyed remnants of other ex-humans. A man named Hawthorne Hunter had brought us together. He had changed us because he was looking for something bright and wonderful that, if he’d found it, would have shattered the world. Hawthorne hadn’t cared what his actions freed. Only that he escaped the consequences while reaping full benefits.

We monsters of the deep places are supposed to all be under the control of the One Below. It was a singular creature, something of such great indolence and enormity that the sense of His body was suffocating. The individual minds of the Deep Ones rolled in His grip like marbles, held and repressed while that thing's terrible will filled every corner of mind, blotting out any chance for self.

He nearly had gotten me.

I’d fought him. And by doing so I had played into my captor’s hands. Hawthorne Hunter wanted an immortality serum. He needed the blood of a free Deep One to make it, and none had existed. They were effectively extinct. The species did not breed. They reproduced through forced assimilation…and in doing so, obliterated what Hawthorne had needed. And he had thrown countless lives and minds into the bottomless well of the One Below's hunger in his search for something like me. A human who, on the cusp of change, could rip their mind free.

And I was free, for all the good it would ever do me. There was no space in the world for me like this. No protocol for freedom, no exceptions to the rules. I had changed, and I had killed Hawthorne, and his wretched sister, and every one of his captives.

I didn’t know if that was enough to save me, or damn me to the same hell that they deserved.

I sipped Acton’s offered coffee because it kept my mind busy. The sensation of liquid was strange. At some point my mouth quit being part of the glamour I wore, the mask that somehow allowed something of my shape and size to sit here in human clothes. The taste multiplied exponentially, and I couldn’t decide if I enjoyed it. The depth of taste, in other circumstances, would be fascinating…but it reminded me that in my other form, I had more than one tongue. If I thought about that too long, I would never stop screaming.

 It also reminded me I was thirsty. No. I was dry.

People died out here in the brush for want of water, hundreds each year. The green of mesquite and scrub was like a dry mist in drought season, the ground reddish and cracked. Most of the deaths were illegal immigrants, dropped off somewhere before the checkpoints at Sarita and Falfurrias and told to walk to Houston. They were given no supplies, not even a change of clothes. Sometimes there would be emergency stations with gallon jugs of water and a satellite phone to call for help, but nationalist militia groups sabotaged these, pouring the water onto the ground, slicing the bottles so they cannot be refilled, ripping the wires out of the phones so that help cannot be summoned. I wasn’t the only monster out here in the brush.

The nighttime air was mild, but I wanted water. I wanted food. I wanted to drop this disguise of fake humanity because I could feel my true form piled up against it, like girth against a corset. I wanted none of that. I wanted to die.

But my life was no longer my own. I’d made a deal for this illusion of humanity, this little disk and leather strap wrapped around my throat. I had no idea what my benefactor was. Fae? Some kind of god? Something else? But I owed him. And that meant I had to keep on living.

Wind whispered around us, David and I. Since finding me, he’d been on the phone. Calling his superiors, the police, the Rangers. There weren’t a whole lot of warm bodies available right now. We’d just had a tornado blow through here; judging by the debris trail, it was a big one. Speaking of which…

“Why are you here, David?” I asked. I didn’t mean to complain about the timing, but it felt hinky.

He frowned into his phone, then looked up at me. David was pretty. He hadn’t caught my eye when we met because his pretty had been hidden under the veneer of government agent-man. My ex-husband, Jonas, had been that movie-star dazzling that could make even an undead heart go pitter-pat. David wasn’t as sharp-edged, but that was a good thing. Shining blue eyes, brown hair short on the bottom and shaggy on top. He was like a warm fire on a cold day, the kind that came with contentment and hot cocoa. His smile was killer, because it was genuine.

“We got a tip. A recommendation that we come out here and spend some time looking around.” David didn’t sound happy.

There was a very short list of people who’d known I was out here. All of them should be dead. “Who told you?”

“You sure you want to know?” He said, and sighed.

That meant it was bad. If it wasn’t bad, he’d have told me. “Might as well,” I whispered.

He set a hand on my shoulder. Comforting. Reassuring. “Michael Hunter.”

Well…shit. That really wasn’t good, though Michael Hunter did technically count as dead. He was the Vampire Master of Houston, somebody I’d pissed off comprehensively in a record amount of time. He was also Hawthorne Hunter’s brother…and my ex-husband’s son. Still, that was like a mafia boss calling the FBI on the whereabouts of the last poor shmuck who dinged their car. It didn’t sit right.

Oh, why bother? It wasn’t like I was going to be involved in this case, or any case. Ever.

David’s hand stayed on my shoulder, radiating the warmth of human contact that I did not deserve anymore. I wanted to shrink from his touch. What lay beneath his hand had as much to do with humanity as a volcano does to stone.

That was my last name. Stone. Agent Astrid Stone. I had to remember that because I was fraying around the edges like a cheap rug. Anything to cling to would help me keep the essence of me-ness. Anything that would let me do my job.

That used to be working for Terrestrial Affairs. TA agents aren't cops. Our job is to act as a kind of investigatory body and social services for residents of this plane of existence. We protect the magical from the mundane, and vice-versa. Network ghosts to exorcists. Council werewolves through the bad parts of the change. Make sure freshly dead vampires make it to the blood bank in time. That kind of thing.

Except I didn't think it was a we anymore. My friends would be on their way to work the horrific crime scene contained by Hawthorne's house. And to kill me.

If they were smart, they would bring my ex-husband along for the ride. Jonas Hunter had taken his name from the Hunter Lodge system, an organization of vampire hunters that he ran. They weren’t exactly shadowy but they didn’t like the spotlight. And the one reason they were tolerated in the modern legal climate was…well, they eliminated things like me.

Jonas was very good at killing Deep Ones. I’d watched him do it.

Jonas was Hawthorne's father. I had killed two of Jonas's children. His daughter Irene had been there too, a willing and eager participant. I could not and did not regret it. I had faced, during the incalculable battle for my mind, the complex and damning contradictions between who I wanted to be and reality. I was better than a murderer, but not by that much. Maybe Hawthorne and Irene could have lived. But anyone who could destroy so many people in a quest for immortality was the kind of rabid dog that needed putting down.

Discovering why his children had to die would probably destroy Jonas.

Hunters are a necessity in our world. As a TA agent, my mandate and theirs had often clashed. They have a black and white view where I am paid to admit shades of gray. When Terrestrial Affairs runs an exorcism, it's a therapy session with fireworks. We are just as invested in getting the spirit safely out of the host as we are in the host's safety. When a Hunter runs an exorcism, the ghost is toast. But there are big things out there that TA doesn't have the guns or connections to handle, that Hunters do. Deep Ones are on the top of that list. My friends would not touch me now with a ten-foot pole. Jonas would, if that pole were a moon-silver pike he could aim for my vitals.

I had explained all of this to David, multiple times. Maybe a little hysterically, but my self-loathing felt cool, logical and entirely justified. I’d thought David understood. Instead, he canceled the call for an ambulance and called his superiors, taking and making more calls between plying me with clothes and intensely strong coffee. He was questionably vague, instructing his people to call my director as soon as they could. Which meant the unavoidable interagency pissing contest was predictably under way.  And here I was without popcorn.

Could I even eat popcorn anymore?

FBI does not like how inclusive Terrestrial Affairs tends to be. It’s the nature of the job. Here in Texas we had a big Hispanic population, so experts on South American magic were a must. The native creatures survived colonialism better than their patrons, so we kept experts in Aztec, Inca, Coahuilteco, and Karankawa lore on payroll. And because America is a melting pot, we have experts in Islam, Paganism, Shinto, Hindi avatars, Slavic religion, basically anything that might buy a house in our jurisdiction. We need these people. We pay through the nose to keep them.

But the FBI likes to pigeonhole people into threat categories, and they aren’t too nice to the brown colored pigeons. And while they are getting better about it, we had transfers from the Dallas office that remembered running a literal gauntlet after 9-11, clocking in to work bleeding with contusions, and various LEOs would just stand to one side and watch. New York had to pay some hefty bonuses to keep their Muslim, Hindi, Persian and Yazidi staff from quitting. Those of us in the deep south had done without for a very long time.

And there was always the chance that we weren’t getting better at blunting hate; others were just better at enduring quietly.

Either way, my life depended on how well my boss felt like playing inter-agency happy families. I knew she went to war for her people. I just didn’t know if I counted anymore. She kept a polished and functional lion spear in her office. It was her grandfather’s, well worn. Her hands fit on the shaft with a competence anyone sane had to respect. In short: she was scary. I just had no clue which side of scary was going to be pointed in my direction: the shield or the blade.

David Acton might very well be the only thing standing between me and an early grave. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted him to stand or move.

Why would a Master Vampire call the FBI?

“Michael Hunter called you?” I asked. “Why? And how did you know to come here?”

“He said he’d heard from Hawthorne. We’d put out an APB for the two of you, when you disappeared from the pump station,” David said. We’d been thwarting one of Michael’s more rebellious members when Hawthorne abducted me. “He gave me a list of addresses. We’d already been to two of them. We saw…” He trailed off, glancing at me.

“Mummified Deep Ones?” I guessed. The ones I’d seen had been dark as dried blood, desiccated down to the bone…and still living. Things like me could survive being mummified. Not a reassuring fact.

“Yeah,” David said.

Memory threatened to eat me alive. “Did you kill them?” I asked. I remembered the ones I’d killed. Nothing should be alive like that. Twitching. Suffering.

“Yes,” David said.

“Good,” I said. “How many other addresses are there?”

“Just one. I’ve got the FBI on it. They’re calling your people. They’ll wipe out the rest of what Hawthorne was doing.”

Which meant Jonas was going to find out. Maybe not about me, not right away, but he’d know about Hawthorne. And Irene…if the tornado hadn’t taken it, her body still lay on the floor of Hawthorne’s makeshift torture trailer. I’d killed her with my claws and teeth. It wasn’t like you could hide it.

“Why was Michael calling you?” I said. “Master Vampires don’t do favors for free.”

He grimaced. “Yeah. Well. We’ll talk about that in a minute. I just want to make sure—”

A flash of light cut him off. Oranges and reds, hot and pure flame. Followed by a boom that shook the entire car. The windshield cracked from the impact. And off to the left, in the darkening sky, rose a mushroom cloud of smoke and fire, thick with toxic power.

TURN TO STONE will be avaliable on Amazon in October 2021

STONE'S THROW and BLOOD FROM A STONE are both here!

 

The Terrestrial Affairs series has officially begun with two full length novels! Yes, this announcement is a bit late, but the books weren't, and that's the important part.

As for where we go from here, the next book in the series is being edited as we speak. Our tentative release date will be in October. We will have at least one, and likely two, novellas between now and then to tide y'all over. 

...why are you still here? The books are over there! Go get them!

STONE'S THROW SAMPLE: Chapter One

Available July 4, 2021

 

Chapter One

 

Magic almost killed the Senator from Texas. It happened in Washington, at three-forty-two p.m. on Friday. On Monday, he became my problem.

But Mondays are for problem children, either those you put off for a few days or the ones that resurrect themselves while you enjoyed some theoretical downtime. I walked into Headquarters juggling the three Cs of Terrestrial Affairs: Coffee, computer and case files. It hadn’t been much of a weekend. One of our ghost cases had turned into a full-blown non-consensual exorcism. That always came with the kind of paperwork that made drinking yourself into oblivion a logical coping skill.

Consensual exorcisms are relatively easy. You get consent from all parties, living and not, sign a couple extra billing forms, locate a good therapist, and dial up the first available spirit worker once the shrink says “go.” But non-cons are ugly, dangerous, and expensive, and this one had been no exception. We’d had to get an emergency certification that the victim—in this case a fifteen-year-old girl—was actually possessed. Given her age, we needed a specialized child advocate and a couple members of CPS to witness, plus an ambulance, paramedics, and monitors. And most spirit workers don’t do non-cons because of how violent they can be, so just finding an officiant was a problem. The honest-to-God retired Catholic priest we’d finally dragged out of bed had been very grumpy, and he charged an eye-watering amount of money per hour.

It could have been worse. At least this time the resident ghost wasn’t the non-consenting party. It was the host who was clinging to the dead soul with all her might, poor kid. But the paperwork made it truly god-awful, because all services get charged to us, Terrestrial Affairs, and my job was to make sure we got reimbursed for everything. Twisting grant guidelines and client health insurance coverage into pretzels had become a survival skill.

I just wished it hadn’t been short notice. Normally a ghost possession is less of an emergency than, say, a malignant poltergeist or a demon, and those have different protocols. A ghost is not a complete being. They’re the splinters of a true soul, and without regular magical reinforcement they decay rapidly. Too rapidly to do much long-term damage to the host’s brain or personality. You would be amazed at how fragile the human psyche is. But children are more malleable, and this kid had been getting regular “recharges” from a well-meaning-but-clueless neighbor. God save us from weekend witches. The first psychic examiner we’d dragged the kid to had taken one look and turned pale.

So we had to do the whole exorcism song and dance, complete with bell, book and candle. It took both the expensive priest and our resident witch, Magdalena Gonzales, two hours to draw the spiritual mess into the open and another three to untangle it piece by piece. And neither I nor my partner, Peter Jennings, could leave until the priest, medical team, and official witnesses signed off on the right forms. And then we had to have a form for the psychology work the ghost had needed, and a form for involuntary committal of the host, who had implied she was a risk to herself and others about nine times during the whole ordeal.

And that didn’t begin to touch my usual caseload, or the wholesale slaughter of trees required to keep up with the documentation. We aren’t supposed to spend our downtime doing paperwork, but everyone does it. Despite lip service to the contrary, there is no such thing as work/life balance in social services. You either spend your evenings catching up, or you cheat. And they don’t like it when you cheat. Some people are terrified of vampires, some are scared of werewolves. I have nightmares about paperwork and the Joint Commission. There are times when having my name, Agent Astrid Stone, on a business card is just not worth the trouble.

I almost ran over Peter Jennings on the main path into the building. He did the same 3-C juggling act as I, albeit with far more panache. He looked like a Black Ichabod Crane, all long angles and shockingly red hair, and when he moved it was like watching silk pass through a ring. His hair was nearly waist-length and a few shades darker than Celtic ginger, and a lot of people assumed that he dyed it. He didn’t. (The amount of money he spent on curl relaxers, conditioners and oils was another matter entirely. That enviously soft twist he maintained wasn’t cheap) Those who knew the color was natural would then assume that he was some kind of mage—there is a tradition in America and several European countries that a Black man with red hair is a born sorcerer. Pete hates both the assumption and the tradition. One of his public speaking presentations in college had been how that tradition connected to the slave trade. He had a whole PowerPoint on the subject. A couple weeks ago he’d even let me borrow it.

I’m more of a boring beige myself. Oh, I hit the brief for pretty, I’d cop to that. Skinny, brown hair, brown eyes, the kind of white that doesn’t tan so much as crisp. With effort I could shine up pretty well. And being attractive is useful. You’re more likely to trust a pretty, put together person and when you have to talk magical clients out of trees on the regular, you need every advantage in the playbook. But if you pushed me, I’d admit to going out of my way to be attractive wallpaper. The saying you catch more flies with honey doesn’t mention that most of us don’t want the pests at all.

Peter looked exhausted. Oh, no. I hoped that didn’t mean bedroom trouble. He’d found a very, very pretty Asian boy who reminded me of my ex so profoundly I’d almost set up a decontamination shower on the spot. He and I had bonded, in part, over our similarly catastrophic taste in men, so neither of us had been all that optimistic. But if it wasn’t destined for a happy ending, I at least hoped it was a happy right now. I guess his weekend had gone even worse than mine.

“You need any help getting your paperwork squared away?” I asked, gesturing with my casefiles to the similar manila folders under his customary double expresso shot.

He shook his head, a bit longer than necessary. I read this as two things: No, he did not need my help with the papers and no, he did not want to talk about his weekend. Damn. It must have been bad. I complied, and simply paced him as we walked up to our lobby.

Terrestrial Affairs Corpus Christi HQ sits somewhat near the Bayfront, between the new Federal Courthouse—neat, trim, with echoes of a dude ranch cowboy—and the old—a moldering abandoned ruin. The latter is on the historical registry so it cannot be demolished, but the state of decay—not to mention the unpaid property tax—is so severe that no one has successfully remodeled it. Every couple years somebody rakes in enough donations to attempt it, but you might as well pour that money into the bay. Emergency repairs sit on the building in an increasing patchwork of desperation. It is not, despite many rumors to the contrary, haunted. CCTA would be in poor shape if we allowed ghosts to flourish so close to our headquarters.

Our building is a boring, nondescript beige, brick under stucco. If a post office and a warehouse had a baby, it would be our HQ. It is surrounded by a near-wall of overgrown, pale white oleanders. The poisonous bushes are harder to kill than most cockroaches and, when permitted, will outgrow whatever they’re planted in. They’re a landscaping staple down here. Ours had to be chopped back twice a year. We were at the stage when they appeared untamed and wild, a residence for malignant goblins. (There weren’t any. We check. There is a brownie in the half-dead mesquite tree next to the electric meter; he’s the rare, mostly harmless type of Fae. His caseworker keeps trying to get him better housing, but he always turns her down.) Landscaping would haul out the clippers and hack the bushes back in another month or so, when it looked like they were about to pull up roots and start consuming people. We can, technically, see the ocean from here, either as a shimmery mirror behind palm trees and traffic, or a drab, gray, ghostly expanse nearly indistinguishable from the horizon. The water looms, even on a good day.

We passed through the front doors, and both of us stopped walking. Everything looked the way it was supposed to. Reception’s glass fronted windows there, brown tile where it ought to be. Berber carpeted waiting area neat and tidy and sufficiently magazined—never under-estimate the value of National Geographic when taming restless waiting rooms—and of course our ever-efficient triage center was staffed and squared away. But still, we felt it, like fingers on the nape. Something was wrong.

It was too quiet. TA is almost always busy. We keep the building open 24/7, because vampire services are a solid thirty-five percent of our caseload. And during dayshift we try to run at least three workshops a week. Give the public a chance to learn about their neighbors and maybe to come in discretely for services of their own. Lycanthropy and You, Witchcraft 101: Basic Wards, and What to Know About Hauntings are our three most popular classes (our efforts to combat pro-Fae propaganda required a more proactive approach; instead of workshops we held meetings in school gymnasiums and explained why you shouldn’t actually leave anything out for the Tooth Fairy). Mondays were the wolf-shop, when the local Alpha, Dame Madra would show up with a couple sandwich trays and a case of soda pop. Madra (proper name Marianne Mitchell) and her wife, Yuki, have great taste in food and we get the leftovers. But this morning her corner was empty. Neither she, her pack, her wife or her kids were present. The lights in that conference room were off.

Nor was anyone cloistered in one of the numerous small alcoves set up with chairs, tissue boxes, and a nearby source of water. No one sat in the waiting room, struggling their way through the first set of intake forms. And sure, we were between intern batches, but there still should have been a half dozen warm bodies (and maybe a couple cold ones; we did have undead on staff) running paper between computers and today’s functional printers. Meaning either nobody was seeking help, or we’d been told to turn people away at the door.

And even that didn’t explain the strange, church-like silence that had descended upon my workplace. I looked up. The second floor is open, loft style, to the entrance atrium. This allows senior agents to have a space apart from the public—necessary to preserve client confidentiality—while still having an ear out for whatever was going on downstairs. The familiar sounds of work—phones ringing, hands typing, printers coughing out pages—was muted. And nobody was talking. Sure, I heard voices answering phones, but that wasn’t talking.

There are only two events that could completely silence the floor here at CCTA: The death of an agent, or somebody pissing off the boss. And I knew which one I’d rather deal with. Burials were cheaper.

“Maybe Lavell finally strangled Arrows with a cat 5 cable,” Peter said.

“Maybe,” I said. Dominique Lavell was one of the two graduating interns. She struck me on introduction as being a delicate flower, but once the pressure got turned up she was one tough cookie. Her aura of fragility was deliberately and stubbornly cultivated. Domi knew who she wanted to be, had marked out her hills to die on, and had entrenched herself long before darkening the agency door. She also made friends easy, though it had taken her a while to open up about being trans. Max Arrows, the other graduating intern, was much less popular. As he and I hadn’t really worked together yet, all I could go by was the opinions of others.

Peter and Arrows got along the way forests burn: disastrously.

“We can’t put it off,” Peter said.

“We could,” I said, looking up at the ceiling two stories above me. “We’d just get written up for skipping out.” But I was the first to start moving. It’s best to confront today’s demons before they get a chance to eat you.

The elevator going up to the second floor must have been some reject from a horror movie. Its fluorescent lights not only flickered when the doors closed, they changed tone from warm to cold when the engine engaged. The whole carriage moved with a jittery, sea-sick lurching that made me white knuckle my case files. It dinged cheerfully as it let us out onto the floor, though, as if to apologize for the stress.

Everyone had their heads down, looking intently at monitor screens. That ruled out the first motive for silence. When an agent dies, we survivors huddle around refreshments like refugees with warm fires. My coworkers were racked into their cubicles like bullets in a magazine. Every monitor displayed our casefile management software. Not one tab of Facebook, YouTube or solitaire to be seen.

I glanced at the glass-walled breakroom out of reflex, but the TV wasn’t talking about any big disaster. What could be so serious that not one of my coworkers was interested in goofing off?

I glanced towards the boss’s office. The floor-facing windows were frosted, but shadows were cast on glass by uncaring lamplight. I counted five separate heads, plus some less defined shades moving around. That wasn’t a good sign.

Nobody has ever called the boss “Dragon Lady” out loud, because most of us don’t know what would happen if she heard us. She is not a bad boss. If you worked for Director Ngasa, she’d have your back until the heat death of the universe. She saved the favors that could have gotten her political advancement to cover for her people instead. But she had the sense of humor of a deep freeze. Screw up bad enough, she’d make sure you understood the scale of error you just made. You left that office freshly shriven, though perhaps “flayed” would be a better description. Director Ngasa did not manage via terror; she just produced it as a useful byproduct.

The Camille Ward Case

Peter and I were both still on thin ice. A client had died on our watch and that was the story that we were sticking to on pain of being fired. The true complexities of Camille Ward’s death weren’t as easy to parse as the official paperwork implied. If we maintained client confidentiality, we could leave the dead vampires alone, but there was still anxiety about our standing. I can’t be sure what drove Peter to his desk without asking what new, fresh hell motivated the office atmosphere, but it was probably the same employment concerns that propelled me towards mine.

But I paused when we turned the corner. Pete and I are partners, so our workstations are side-by-side. And Max Arrows was sitting in Peter’s cubicle.

He wasn’t at Peter’s desk. All of Pete’s things were intact. Computer, stack of papers, Pete’s collection of Jordan Peele movie posters, and the irreplaceable photos of his deceased parents: all there. Max sat at a freshly assembled desk, with a brand new-to-him computer tower and monitor, and he was glaring at IT as they performed the complex ritual known as cable management. Max looked like a pissed off, white fireplug, but then the guy was the poster child for Napoleon Syndrome. Both he and I are some flavor of European Wonder bread. Down by the beach, you could call us toasted WASPs. Max was about as appealing as a yellowjacket, that’s for sure.

Interns did not get desks, but agents are supposed to have their own cubicle. Something strange was going on. Did it have something to do with the shadows in the Director’s office? Did werewolves shit in the woods?

I looked at Peter. Peter’s jaw looked like he was about to crack teeth. He settled himself, strode to his desk like a man walking into fire, and set his laptop and casefiles down on the smooth, black tabletop. “So. I take it you made Agent?”

“Probationary,” Max said. He didn’t look at Peter. “How long does it take to hook wires up to a box?”

The IT tech was Jan Xiao. I liked her. She was one of those happy smiley people who would look genuinely gleeful at her own funeral. Her smile was undimmed. Her grip on her tools, however, was much tighter than normal. “We have regulations,” she said, and pointed at the large box of clips that had to go on each wire. These were standard issue spell-circuits, small pieces of metal with a spell-form cut into them. Everybody who deals with protected information uses them. If they detect unauthorized magic finessing its way up the wires they guard, they shut everything off.

“Yeah, but you could put those on when we’re done. I want to work,” Max said.

“If you don’t have the clips on, you don’t access our databanks. Without that, you can’t work at all,” Jan said. She sounded like a kindergarten teacher lecturing a recalcitrant student.

He sighed and dramatically crossed his arms.

Funny. I kept thinking the guy was young, but Max was pushing forty. I read his body language—arms crossed, head down, slumped in chair like a sack of oatmeal—from my periphery and thought teenager, but his face was weathered, frown lines deep as canyons around his eyes, and his military-style crew cut was shot through with silver. Older than me, I thought. Old enough to not be an intern.

But I had bigger concerns than Max.

“Hey, Jan,” I said. She glanced at me, nodding in permission and acknowledgement as she continued to clip the tiny wards to USB cables. “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” she said. Her smile could sell toothpaste.

“The last time it was this quiet was when that guy got caught with succubi,” I said. That agent had survived. His capacity for future erotic encounters hadn’t. Demons were nasty.

She glanced at Max, then sighed as if steeling herself for something unpleasant. “The FBI showed up today. They’re in conference with the Director.”

“Shit,” Peter said. “Who fucked the dog this week?”

Jan stopped applying clips. Her whisper became enthusiastic, conspiratorial. “Nobody. They had me in to install some watchers on a feed directly from Quantico. They’re bringing us into an investigation.”

I heard a sound from inside our director’s office. It was one of the few closed rooms on this floor, and it was technically soundproof. Technically.

“I haven’t ever heard her shout before,” Max said.

“You haven’t been here that long,” I said. “And that’s not screaming. That’s…instructing.” Another noise from the closed office doors. “Loud instructing.”

Jan quickly wrapped up her job on Max’s computer. “Whatever’s going on, somebody else screwed it up and that works for me. Arrows, you’re all set.” She tapped the computer box. “Have fun.”

And she began packing her tools.

I was about to make a pithy comment about Max’s welcome when the Director’s door opened. A tall, Black woman stepped out, a battle-hardened monarch exiting her war-room. She was nearly model slender and easily the tallest person on the floor. and her gaze made one think of hawks, eagles, and falcons. Director Augustine Ngasa’s presence was an almost numinous call to bravery. We would all die for her. What made her scary was that someday, she might ask us to.

She stared straight across the floor and her laser-sight eyes found mine.

My gut plummeted.

“Stone. Jennings. Arrows. My office,” she said, with just a hint of Britain in her vowels. “Now.”

New book alert! Lilac and Briar

 

Yes indeed my lovelies, we have a brand new book! Lilac and Briar is my reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty story. Other details are in the picture. It's the perfect read for the coming weekend. 

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The Vampire Belle comes out NEXT WEEKEND people. NEXT WEEKEND.

I have decided as a birthday gift to myself, because my birthday is next week, that I will be publishing The Vampire Belle next weekend!

So please, my awesome readers, please be ready to pick it up and read if it strikes your fancy. Sample chapter is over here and, just to stay abreast of news, my newsletter is over here. Make me happy by subscribing and we can probably start funneling some exclusive stuff to the newsletter crowd. 

The Vampire Bell--Free Sample!

 

Chapter One

 

“I hate kids shows about racism,” Peter Jennings said. He was my work partner here at Terrestrial Affairs, and currently sported the costume of Ichabod Crane. His vibrantly red hair—a little darker than Celtic ginger—was, for once, tied down into something approximating an early 1800’s hairstyle. He was Black and very dark skinned, so strangers often figured the ginger came out of a bottle. It didn’t. This assumption annoyed him almost as much as the tradition that a Black man with red hair is some kind of sorcerer. Mentioning that was a good way to get him to burst into flames. He was Ichabod because someone had once compared him to the literary coward, and he delt with insults by making them a game. He’d been balancing a Styrofoam pumpkin with artificial flames on his knee all night. He wasn’t in a very good mood.

I steered our government sedan down Ocean Drive in Corpus Christi, Texas, at two AM, heading towards Louisiana Avenue. This is the ritzy, slinky neighborhood in Corpus, a kind of low-rent River Oaks. Still a bit high-end for our normal clients. Movies want you to believe that being a witch, wizard, vampire or similar flavor thereof is a one-way ticket to wealth and celebrity, but the boogeyman works minimum wage same as the rest of us. It’s one reason Terrestrial Affairs exists. Predators target the vulnerable, and the magical are uniquely exposed. But some of our clients have the connections to afford wealth, and tonight we needed to check in on one of the wealthiest.

She was always a headache.

 Normally Pete and I work day shift, but the November Child annual rabies push meant all hands on deck at night. The streets this late were mostly deserted. Corpus did have a club scene to attract night fauna. It just wasn’t a very big one. November Child Day is our chance to educate the public about Terrestrial Affairs, which our boss had read as “make sure they know we aren’t cops”, despite us having some credentials that might say otherwise. We were strongly encouraged go out tonight in costume as soon as the office Halloween party was over. Peter’s burning pumpkin was a hit every year. I had dressed in the rags and patches of Pippi Longstocking and went unrecognized. Our conversation about ignorance of the classics and the merits of kids movies had now brought us well past my safe comprehension zone.

But Pete was my friend. You take risks for friends.

“Alright, I’ll bite. Why do you hate kids shows about racism?” I said.

“Because they let you pretend you’ve done something. Using a metaphor like, I dunno, kitty cats vs. discount Shirley Temple. Racism and equality, and everything’s fixed with a song. Nice on paper. But you should be comparing apples to apples, and you're doing apples and felines. Saying you should treat both the same is great, but you’re also saying that Black apples are cats. We get that you see us as a different species. That doesn’t need any more reinforcement.”

I was white. Basically Wonderbread. I knew when we were having conversations above my paygrade. But I also knew when Pete was on his last nerve and that had been about six hours ago. This wasn’t for my benefit. “Or like that kid’s movie about a bunny rabbit saving predators? Which was sorta saying that the people discriminated against are the predators?” I said.

“Oh, you caught that one?” He said, then nodded. “Yeah. That.”

I flipped on my blinker to change lanes again. I’ll admit, I was more than a little worried. Pete had immediately shut off the jazz tape he’d been playing earlier. He’d been going through a classics phase the last couple weeks. Louie Armstrong. Ella Fitzgerald. Little bit of BB King. At home he went straight for Usher, Beyonce and the Weekend, but he did have to behave himself in an Agency car. Music was a part of Happy Pete, and Happy Pete hadn’t come to work today. We both knew why, and we both weren’t talking about it.

Terrestrial Affairs has jurisdiction over supernatural residents of this plane of existence. We take on supernatural events that involve extradimensional entities and provide specialized investigation services for mundane law enforcement. That’s the government copy, anyway. In reality? We soothe ghosts and network them to the good exorcists. Same with the legitimately possessed. Werewolves and vampires have their rabies shots updated, and we try to keep the freshly changed away from the gangs and nastier packs. We combat child-targeted Fae propaganda like Tinkerbell, and make sure the Halloween novelty witch kits can’t summon anything bigger than the nearest consenting poltergeist. You’ve got the right to be a witch, a vampire or a were-wolf, but your neighbors also have the right to be safe.  Balancing that friction is the heart of what we do.

The workload is hell. Being able to call myself “Agent Astrid Stone” on a business card feels spiffy, but most of the job was just connecting Client A with Resource B, and then doing the paperwork, which is evidence of demonic influence all by itself. Poltergeist activity got a lot less scary once I understood the ghost just needed cognitive behavioral therapy, but I’m still terrified of the checkboxes on that specific billing sheet.

But there are some things that are unique to the job.

November Child Day is always the first Tuesday in the titular month. It memorializes the death of the unidentified Patient Zero in the rabies outbreak of 1967. That outbreak, and the political fallout that followed, motivated the government mandate that eventually became Terrestrial Affairs. On that day, educational materials are presented, children escape school, and we go door to door to our at-risk clients and make sure their rabies paperwork is in order.

And as most of those clients are vampires…night shift. My dashboard clock read 2:05 am, and the streetlights raced us by.

“That movie about aliens in South Africa was pretty decent,” I said.

Peter rubbed his temple. “They were portraying apartheid with literal aliens. That’s as other-species as you can get. And the ones that really grind my gears are the ones that use vampirism as a metaphor. Like that HBO show with the pretty blond chick. Vampires suffer from discrimination! And hey, here’s a good idea. Let’s showcase that in the south.” He shook his head, laughing silently to himself.

“Not to be the devil’s advocate, but that’s kind of true,” I said. Sure, they got grandfathered into the Rights of Magical Persons Act, but it wasn’t a felony to kill one without a warrant until the late 80s. Besides, it was more than a little dehumanizing to get the same shots as the family dog if you wanted to avoid life-shattering fines.

Peter gave me one of his patented, blister-chrome-off-a-trailer-hitch looks. “Astrid. What’s the demographic on American vampires again? The ones over fifty? The kind they make movies about?”

Right.

Vampires skew white. Really white. If I am Wonderbread, they’re dissolved in bleach. There are arguments about random selection and chance, but that’s just window dressing. Vampires skew white because the vampire Masters—the older, magical powerhouses who typically lead gangs—are mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who only ever turn other WASPs, and the Masters are typically the best at keeping their fledglings alive. The majority of over-fifties in the south that weren’t their Master’s pets survived under the bedsheets of a certain group with a fondness for, let’s say, konsonants with a triple k.

That part doesn’t make it into the movies much.

When Terrestrial Affairs was formed via the Rights for Magical Persons Act, thus giving future me a job, the undead from other races began living long enough to see a couple anniversaries and maybe sire their own fledglings. But new vampires don't typically last long. The average lifespan for a vampire is six months from date of turning. And that average includes the multi-century old survivors like Dracula. The kids in the Fluffy Intern Pool come fresh out of college with visions of stakes, garlic, and holy water, and leave once they realize it’s more numbers for the blood banks and late nights with a dust buster so the surviving family have something to bury. All agents of Terrestrial Affairs know a dead vampire. It’s a good week if you aren’t flushing ash off your work shoes. But under the RMPA, vampires do have a right to exist. And even if a vampire’s specific attitude chafed at you, you had to learn how to deal.

But tonight, Peter was raw. Even more-so than usual.

There was a small chance this was romantic tension. Peter was gay and had the same sort of romantic history I did: Assholes. Lots of them. This was his usual attitude when he was in the discard phase of the latest narcissistic pretty boy he’d brought home. But usually he’d have something of a honeymoon phase first. Glee and hope with rose-tinted glasses uninhibited by experience or reality.

No. The client was the problem.

“At least nobody mistook you for the queen of childhood overcompensation,” I said, as we parked on Louisiana. I liked Pippi Longstocking. Everyone had called me Pollyanna.

“It’s because you’re white and optimistic and that movie was on the Hallmark channel last night,” Peter said, glowering, as we got out of the car.

“I had red yarn braids held up by wire,” I said. I’d ditched the wig in the trunk as we secured laptops. Our car trunks are spell-proofed by a couple different occult methods, as per federal regulations. It also stored our Moon Silver jewelry, which we were already wearing. Dark Fae, vampires and Inducted members of Deep Cults are all allergic to the stuff. When your job description includes servicing all but the latter, it’s a pretty good idea to make it a regular fashion choice. I held my hands out to indicate the size of my braids. “I don’t see where the confusion is.”

“You’re lucky they’re not calling you Raggedy Ann,” Peter said, then glared up at the current client’s house. “Fine. Let’s get Camille over with.”

Older vampires understand that a good image and better patrons are a must for survival. Camille Ward had spent her decades cultivating the cotillion and debutante crowd. She presented as one part Scarlett O’Hara, two parts Steel Magnolias, a shining survivor of the Antebellum South and a homing missile aimed right at the country clubs set, where Southern Nostalgia is its own genre. Of course, this might have suffered somewhat if they knew her history. Some centenarian vamps survive without resorting to wanton murder orgies. Camille hadn’t been one of them.

And she was part of what had Pete wound up so tight.

Camille had moved to Texas when Hurricane Katrina decimated her historic former plantation and had moved from Houston to Corpus because Houston’s Master Vampire despised her. She was already here when Peter and I began working together six years ago. Each November, we trotted up to her door and endured the theatrical sighs and occasional angry rant about how she was not a, pardon her language, damn dog, she didn’t need a (pardon her language) damn dog tag, and bless her heart (flutter of wrist and eyelids, extra honey on that pure Georgia Peach accent) if this wasn’t more than she’d stand. Cue fanning motion as if it were possible for her to feel hot. This was always followed by an attempt to get Peter to come inside and eat something. Vampires can’t eat, by the way. Anything edible would have been catered for our benefit. Each year we left, feeling dirty. And each year Peter took a detour to the magnolia tree growing at the corner of Camille’s spacious home and shit into her begonia bed.

I told him it was stupid and he would be fired when caught the first couple times he did it. That was when he told me Camille had refused to work with any other agent. Camille was going to be his client, or Camille wasn’t going to be anybody’s client. And our Director, who had all the bedside manner of dry ice, had told him to suck it up.

We walked up to her door, and Peter was already eyeing that tree. “Huh. She replanted. It’s a zinnia bed now.”

“Pokier leaves,” I said. Then, “You know, I could do this alone. You can go run through Sanctuary way out Weber.” The halfway house on the south side of town was for newbie vamps; there were always five or six fledglings in residence at Sanctuary House. Some of them even lived long enough to graduate.

But Camille wanted Peter.

“No, thanks,” He said. “It’s not your job to shield me from things, Stone. Especially not when I dig the holes myself.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

Camille’s house was a replica of a French Quarter apartment block. Red brick, wrought iron painted green on the upper floor balconies. It stood out, even on this street. This was not Camille’s creation. It predated her arrival by a couple decades. Almost as if it were meant to be…or so she said every time we interviewed her.

I knocked on her door.

Or at least, I tried to.

I had expected the resistance of closure, but it opened at my touch. I stumbled a bit, my feet tangling in a spread of fabric draped carelessly in the foyer. The hallway within was illuminated by a set of crystal-and-brass imitation gas lamps. Not bright, but they did glimmer in the pile of crumpled silk and crinolines sitting on the marble tile, topped by a wagon-wheel hat profuse with feathers. The scent of gunsmoke almost overpowered the traces of decay. But I couldn’t mistake that smell. Not when the ash swirling out of Camille’s clothes left those neat, white stains where it touched my shoes.

All agents of Terrestrial Affairs know a dead vampire.