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| 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.
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.
The Camille Ward Case
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.”