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.”

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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.

Upcoming Short Story: The Fae Candle

 

And here's the cover for the next short story in the Terrestrial Affairs universe! Get ready, folks. It's gonna be a wild ride.

Discovery of Obsession: A (fluffy) story

 Growing up, I lived atop a large mountain of cheap stuffed toys. And not the good, expensive, well made stuffed bears you can get for Valentine's day. No. Those got the good place on the bed and did not belong in the great pile. The Pile was mostly the kind of cheap, vaguely mammalian monstrosities you find either on the back wall of a small town carnival's dart-throw, or in a claw machine.

This was partially my fault. But only partially.

When I was about three years old, I remember making frequent drives between McAllen, TX, and Houston, which was where my grandmother lived. A certain recent show about a certain famous tejano singer got something very wrong: There are no mountains in Matamoros, or McAllen. Or Brownsville. There is a lot of green, a lot of palm trees and a lot of flat. Mesquite brush sometimes attempts to become a tree, but this usually ends in failure and a split trunk (this happened to one of our cars, once. There was also a beetle infestation, so it could have been the beetles). This expanse of unyielding green is sometimes broken by small towns and truck-stops, until you hit King Ranch. It's about an hour of driving where there is nothing but privately owned and untamed mesquite brush, belonging to a very much working ranch. There are no turn offs. I think there is one rest stop. The only real break in the monotony is the Sarita or Falfurrias immigration checkpoints, which don't really help keep a rambunctious three year old under control. 

So we would always stop at one of the truckstops immediately before the Endless Expanse, and mom or dad would attempt to find something that would keep me entertained long enough for them to reach the next truck stop. Given that this was the late 80s and the concept of a television in a car was quite a long way away (modern smart phones were Star Trek material) this was a lot harder than it sounded.

In the midst of this desperation, I realized that claw machines existed. In that there was this box, fronted with glass, full of soft, colorful fluffy things that I needed. I had never seen these toys before. I would forget about them as soon as we left. But for the five minutes I beheld the glorious alter of fluffy goodness, I was hooked: I needed that (insert stuffed toy here).

My mom knew that these were rigged games that produced only empty pockets and sadness, so she avoided them religiously. This meant our religions were now in conflict, as I was worshiping the fluff through the barrier of glass. I needed her to get me a stuffy. Any stuffy. And I unleashed every tool in my three-year-old toolbox, which mostly comprised screaming, tantrums and crying.

Finally, Mom decided to show me an objective fact: You cannot get a toy out of a claw machine. She put one quarter in. Maneuvered the silver claw slowly through the sacred space of fluffiness. (I am watching this like the little aliens in Toy Story, mouth agape that the altar is actually doing something) All the while telling me "You'll see. This is a waste of quarters."

The claw stops.

"It's gonna go down now and nothing is going to come up." 

She hits the button. The claw descends, the holy finger of a choosing god that will give me something fluffy to hold. Mom watches it with the sane adult skepticism of a life of disappointment. She knows she is crushing my dreams, but she also knows this has to happen, or else--

The claw has risen.

It holds a cow. 

She stares, disbelieving, as the claw cranks its way over to the near left corner and deposits the cow into the hole. She has to physically restrain me from climbing into the machine to retrieve my cow before she fishes the thing out herself. She looks at it. It is, indeed, a cheaply made stuffed cow. But it is also very much real. She got the cow out of the claw machine. Her base thesis is disproven. 

Every addict can recount that first real hit of their drug-of-choice. For Mom, that moment was the hit of dopamine that came with this accomplishment. She got the cow. She got the cow. She not only accomplished the challenge of keeping me quiet and happy for an hour in a car seat, but she defeated the rigged complexities of the claw machine.

And she can do it again.

And she did.

She began to develop strategies. You never go for what you want, just what you think you can get. Never go for anything on the sides, they've been stuffed down in there. Don't ever hit the machine after the guy has just filled it up, because they pack the toys in there on purpose. She'd limit herself to a couple dollars worth of quarters and then that was it. Every machine she saw got examined for a potential conquest. And the cheap pastel stuffed animals kept piling up.

Sadly, all things must end. In our case, addiction was not conquered. The machine manufacturers simply replaced the well-constructed, durable claws with loosely connected ones that couldn't hold a feather if you superglued it to the struts. Toys that in yesteryear would have been an easy addition to the hoard slipped from Mom's grasp to lie mockingly atop a pile of holiday themed stuffed animals. And as the new model of claw became more profitable, all the old, fun machines were replaced. I've attempted to replicate the claw machine wonder for my own daughter, to no avail.

To this day my mother still sometimes holds her coin purse and looks at the stuffed animals within the glass box. She knows she can't get anything out of it. 

But maybe she could.

For the first time in forever...NEW BOOK!

Agents of Terrestrial Affairs are more glorified social workers than cops. 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 Master 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...

 Yes, my lovelies! For the first time in...way too long I am writing again! AND WE HAVE A SHORT STORY TO SHOW FOR IT.

Welcome to the universe of Terrestrial Affairs. The magical and the mundane live side-by-side and the boogeyman works minimum wage same as the rest of us. Astrid Stone and her coworkers at Terrestrial Affairs agency work every day to maintain the safety of everyone under their mandate. But this conviction gets pushed to the limits when a spell gone wrong threatens the life and safety of a desperate little girl. 

Best of all, this introduction to my latest literary obsession is free on Amazon for the 15th-17th. Perfect for a little light weekend reading.

...why are you still here? The book is there! Go get it already!

Nicaragua

(This was originally posted on Reddit) 

My dad is special.

If you peruse my post history you'll notice that he and I don't see eye to eye anymore and that he maybe probably most definitely has narcissistic personality disorder and was/is rather hard to live with. At times he is a nuclear level asshole. But my dad is also my hero because I love him and always will. His life history seems to have fallen out 50-50, good and bad. He's done some mean, moronic, bone stupid and awful stuff in his life, but when he did good, he did really good.

My dad is a Vietnam vet. Like most vets he came home and was promptly treated like the maggot-ridden mouse the cat dragged in. The concept of veteran support was slightly better in the 70s than, say, the 1940s, but only slightly. Plus there was some stuff the Air Force decided didn't happen, so Dad couldn't talk about that at all. Dad basically drowned PTSD and memories of Danang under approximately all the alcohol. This tanked his first marriage and left him in the position of having to either dry out and face his ghosts or die.

Eventually, he dried out, and like most recovering addicts he became an evangelist for sobriety. Dad made his living as a salesman, and felt better selling sobriety to drunks than he did selling diamonds or eye glasses or paper. And he was good at it. Which is how he landed in a group home for teenage boys in the French Quarter of New Orleans back in the 80s.

Again, my dad has issues. At times he can be a selfish bastard and at his absolute best, he's doing things for his own benefit first. But I am not exaggerating when I say that he saved the lives of a lot of these kids. These were kids who came home from school and discovered that their whole family had moved away without him. These were kids who thought the other kids were lying when they said Milk comes from cows, because they had seen with their own eyes that milk comes from the store. My dad's job was to keep them from killing each other, keep them sober, and try to teach them some kind of life skill because as soon as they turned 18, they got a bus ticket to the city of their choice and couldn't contact anyone from their group home for several years. The kid who told me this story was one of several who hunted my dad down as soon as it was legal to let the only father figure they'd ever had know that they were okay. When Dad had a stroke out of state, about four of his former foster kids sat with him because he is, and always will be, their dad. He fucked up by the numbers, alright, but he also did good by a lot of these kids.

But it wasn't easy. Sometimes the kids needed a lesson and consequences. And there's a whole list of things you can't do to kids in foster care, especially a highly supervised setting like a group home. You can't spank or restrict food. Confinement is out. Chores are reasonable but only up to a point. And you've got this whole behavioral pattern called "negative attention seeking" that basically meant most of the kids wanted to be yelled at and punished, because being yelled at and punished was the only kind of attention they ever got. It was familiar and safe, to these kids, to be beaten, sent to bed without supper, and be yelled at in the morning for good measure. These kids couldn't understand why the house parents didn't do that. They kept trying to force somebody, anybody, in authority to do the kind of violent bullshit they expected from parents. So whatever consequences you used couldn't feed into that cycle. It made working with these kids a challenge.

One area that nobody could seem to fix was Family Night. Every Wednesday the group home was supposed to take their battered collection of kiddos out to do something fun and normal. Bond with them. Give them a chance to see that normal and safe is kind of the opposite of having an abusive parent, and that love means something other than getting hit. It's a great theory. But putting it into practice meant getting ten plus teenagers to all agree on the same thing: "Where do you want to go tonight?"

And the battle would start. The movies. The arcade. The mall. The roller-rink. No, I want the movies. I want the mall. We did the mall last week. On and on, moving into fist fight territory. And nothing gets on Dad's nerves like stupid, pointless, ballsy, immature bickering. He wanted to teach these kids a lesson and get them to knock that shit off. But he couldn't. Most of the parental go-to tools just...don't work on these kids.

Which meant it was time for Dad to get creative.

Now, my dad tried most of my life to get a hobby. He tried dozens but none of them stuck. My mother thinks it's because he tried too many at once. I think it's because his real hobby is fucking with people. My dad is never as happy as he is when somebody gives him an opening to con them. He once took my brother for twenty bucks on a trick pool shot, and he won by walking the cue ball around the obstacles. He once spent two hours feeding the pair of us utter bullshit and only broke character when he told us he had made it all up. When you become the beneficiary of his hobby, he will try to be benevolent and bring you in on the joke so you have some fun too. He's not a sadist. But his goal is still fucking with you.

And dad figured out real quick that he didn't have to punish these kids, he just had to make their lives miserable. Do what Dad wants, have a good time. Don't do what he wants, twist in the wind. He just had to do it in a way that didn't violate the program's framework.

So one day he's checking the movie times while the kids are fighting over where they're gonna go, and he sees it: The answer to the problem. The most beautiful solution his devious, brilliant, self absorbed mind could conceive of. So he tells the kids he will put up with the battle tonight, but they needed to pick their weekly activity out before next Wednesday, or he was gonna do it.

Picture a dozen-plus juvenile boys, most of whom have very poor respect for authority, looking back at a kind of scraggly quasi-hippy who is overly fond of ponchos. This is the guy who planted a container garden to show them that eggplants don't produce eggs, who spends a lot of time talking about twelve steps and Jesus. He's got socks on with sandals. The Big Lebowski hadn't come out yet, but when it did these kids immediately tried to figure out which rug was tying the whole room together, man. Picture them looking at him like what's the worst you can do, old man?

Dad folded up the newspaper and let them fight. The lesson would go best if they didn't take him seriously.

Wednesday comes around, and they haven't picked an activity. This is now, after all, an authoritative battleground. This is a supervised group home. Dad can't make them go shovel shit, if he tells them to sit and do homework they can just say they won't. Being put on restriction, they've done that before. There is no way my Dad could make these kids decide on a fun group activity a week in advance. They now had a place to fly their defiance flag high and prove they were bigger and harder and badder than my dad. And they could do it by not agreeing to have fun. No sir. We will not agree. No fun will be had. Fuck the man.

The kid who told me this story was in his late twenties, early thirties. He had just gotten out of the navy and there were at least fifteen years between him and that home in New Orleans. And I could still hear the horror and awe in his voice when he told me what my father did next.

He folded the newspaper and said, "Alright. My pick."

And then this die hard pro-capitalism Republican veteran took a dozen teenage boys to the local communist club's student documentary on the starving children of Nicaragua.

The kid who told me this story said that he finally broke when an old Korean war vet stood up, shook his fist at the screen and shouted "God Bless Ronald Regan," halfway through the film.

When it was done, Dad took them home because that was the group activity, as promised, and they didn't get another one until next week.

Next Wednesday, Dad asked, "So what are we doing tonight?"

Oddly enough, they already had a movie picked out.

The Pool and the Game

(Note: This story was originally told on Reddit)

 I once worked front desk at a public pool.

 It was horrible, but one interaction stands out, both for how malicious my compliance was and for the fallout. Our swim team had just launched and parents came to sign their kids up for every single thing they could because it meant after school activities and freedom! Yay!

 My responsibility was The Form. First, I had to help design The Form, because the design the city gave us (made by a woman who was making more than minimum wage as a pool desk caddy) was not enough for my boss and my dumb ass let her know I could make MS Word sit up and do tricks for e-cookies. Once The Form was approved (and by then I was taking proofs home to burn as catharsis) my job was to make sure that every single parent had signed The Form and paid their fee.

Enter Daddy T. His daughter was on swim team, and he had this charismatic grin and confident way of speaking that immediately put my alarm bells into “Danger, Will Robinson". He was a little…too smiley. A little too happy. And vaguely familiar. There was something kind of off about him. I wasn't sure what it was, but it made me want to be as far under his radar as possible.

Unfortunately, while his kid was signed up for swim team, he still needed to sign The Form and pay for her entry. Which meant I needed to interact with him.

Most females, and not too few males, know that gazelle-on-the-veldt feeling. Something is off. Something had the hair on the back of your neck standing on end. You don't know what it is, and the rules of social interaction demand you keep your mouth shut and play nice.

The guy spends a few minutes of charismatic smiles (I had never seen teeth like that outside of channel ten news presenters) acting like he's having trouble reading The Form. I designed The Form over the course of multiple painful weeks and know you would have to be severely brain damaged to have issues understanding it. My boss had me dumb it down to the point that a kindergarten student could know where to scribble a name approximation. And this guy is well spoken and clean cut, and he's got the sharpest (and most familiar!) gaze I’ve ever seen. I cannot think of any reason for him to be this obtuse honestly. And I begin to suspect he is hitting on me. Which for multiple reasons has me creeped out by several orders of magnitude. I just want this guy to go away.

Finally, after agonizing minutes of him struggling with a form that a two year old could sign, he hands it back and says (still with that same confident, charismatic smile) “Read it to me.”

I was at a low point in my life. I hated every single thing about my life. I had untreated PTSD and the thought of anyone hitting on me made me want to go scrub a layer of skin off. The realization that this guy had me pinned to a desk I could not leave until he signed The Form made me want to punch him. But I needed this job, and my boss would grind me into flour and turn me into concession stand specials if I even pretended to stand up for myself. So instead, I complied. I shifted into Happy Customer Service Mode and I read him that goddamn Form. I summarized legalese. I dumbed things down from Kindergarten to PreSchool. I did it all with the sweetest smile I could muster and tried to be about as asexual as the desktop computer right next to the counter window. I made it a point to be The Most Cheerfully Helpful Person, and hoped that somehow this would translate to go the fuck away.

And it worked. He signed. He left. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Until next week, when The Form had to be supplemented by The Sign In Sheet and the whole fucking song and dance repeated itself. He asked me to read him the goddamn sign-in sheet. And I did. With a smile. That couldn’t have been more forced if he had a gun to my head. At this point I was heaping lit coals on his head and practicing my “obtuse as fuck" face. I might be a captive audience but I would be damned before I let him know he got to me. I maliciously treated him like any other customer. I hated to see him arrive, and when he left I cheered

And this went on for weeks, because every session the boss would need a new form signed, and every session that guy asked me to read it to him, and I managed it by channeling my inner robot. I even began highlighting his daughter's name—what kind of shit dad “forgets" his daughter's name—and our interactions became a game. Him trying to get to me. Me, refusing to be got. It almost felt like chess.

Then it came time to distribute the Swim Team Gear, and that brought a whole new set of forms. Which meant That Guy asked me to read him every single one of them.

And just when I’m contemplating leaping out the nearest window while doing s full body Silkwood decontam, he suddenly meets my eyes and this layer of pretense I hadn't ever noticed drops away. He has tears, literal tears, in his eyes. And he says “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much."

See, the entire time I had been maliciously complying with him, by being the best reader ever? I'd been struck by how familiar he looked. But I didn't ever really watch the news. I just sat and read books while my parents watched it instead. Which is why I didn't recognize our local weatherman when he began bringing his daughter to swim practice.

It's also why I didn't know why he had recently retired. He'd been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, you see. And they'd just finished a round of surgery and chemo to save his life that they weren't sure would actually work. His odds sucked. It really had been all over the news. They even gave him a really nice, heartbreaking sound off that I never watched because of my own depression and isolation. I found it on YouTube later. It's the kind of thing all of us would pray someone do in out memory.

He thanked me, because ever since his surgery, his ability to function had been compromised. He could mask most of the damage with his charisma and training, and usually could fake-it-till-you-make-it with the best of them, but he'd lost a lot of his capacity to read. It was a struggle he’d obviously never faced before and it frustrated him that after all his college education and decades being the face of the local weather, he suddenly couldn't even read a basic form for his daughter’s swim team. And he was so thankful (he was crying) that I was taking so much time out of my day to help him. And not just to help him, but to be so un-patronizing. I had treated him like he was normal. He said that I made him feel sort of…whole, again. He made every effort to make it clear: he was genuinely, sincerely grateful for how helpful I had been.

And I am suddenly reviewing every insult I thought about him. Every time I questioned his mental capacity or quality as a parent. He was so low that what I meant as a mockery and a punishment was, to him, a gift. I made him feel normal.

There aren't words for that kind of shame. I thought it was a game. I really did.

People still talk about how he touched lives. I know he touched mine.

Don't Mess with Slim

(This story was originally posted on reddit. I wrote it. I figured it needed to be preserved for posterity)

 Uptown got its hustlers, the bowery got its bums, and the first time I heard that Jim Croce song, I knew it was really about my daddy.

Dad was an MP at Da Nang, so while he wasn’t actively a target most times, he saw shit. He was there for the Tet Offensive. He was at the gate when the nearest barracks took a direct hit from rockets and he watched as the guys came out in pieces and on fire. Little kids would run up to eat the bugs the spotlights attracted and he got to decide if these were just kids or really young Charlies about to shoot the idiot gate guard (they were just kids). He was patrolling the armory when that took a direct hit, so he got to see a couple million bucks of artillery go off all at once from really close up. All in all, he did not have a good time.

When the military cut him loose, the landing resembled the wet bar on the Hindenburg: visible, catastrophic, and filled with copious amounts of alcohol. He eventually came up for air shortly before he met my mother. He didn’t just have bark on him, he had the whole damn tree. He wasn’t too sure why the pretty blond hippy lady wanted to date him, but he was gonna try the best he could not to fuck things up. He really wanted to impress her AND her family.

Unfortunately for Daddy, my mother’s family most closely resembles a sack of rabid cannibalistic cats halfway through dining on each other. My mother was and is the only sane one. He did not realize this at first, but oh God did he learn.

Now, despite being sober, my dad frequently took my mother to bars. Not for the booze, but for the pool. In the unemployable stage of his alcoholism, Dad made his living snookering suckers at the pool tables. He kept his hand in once he sobered up because figuring out the necessary English to hook one ball around another helped the world make sense. He hated disco because all the good clubs took out their pool tables and put in dance floors, and that was just unforgivable. When he and Mom went out, he ordered tonic water so the bartender would ignore him, restrained himself for a couple games with Mom, and then mopped the floor with anybody dumb enough to challenge him.

So Dad didn’t quite understand what was going on when the Queen Cersei of my maternal lineage, my aunt, invited him and my mom to a bar so they could “visit”. Dad knew academically that most people socialize via alcohol consumption (One of the things about an alcoholic is they lose that concept of recreational boozing. You're either doing it to get shlitzed or you've got no business being in a bar). He figured they were gonna shoot a couple friendly games while they got to know each other. Mom, sweet summer child being her default setting, assumed the same thing. But my aunt invited her sister's recovering alcoholic boyfriend to a bar specifically so that he would have to watch as she and my uncle, the Ultimate Dipshit, attempted to drain it of intoxicants. Her goal, which remained unchanged for the next twenty-five years, was to get my father drunk. The Ultimate Dipshit was glad to help her because it meant he could drink, and to him alcohol was the one true meaning of life.

Dad caught on real quick, ‘cause when your hobby is fucking with people, you recognize when someone wants to screw you. He ordered his tonic water and stuck to the parts of his life appropriate for polite company. Cersei and Dipshit weren’t polite, of course, but Dad really wanted to impress my Mom and didn’t think eviscerating her family was going to do the trick.

Then the Dipshit, for some reason, became fixated on Daddy's pool skills. He decided that Dad was not as good as Dad claimed, and basically began poking him with a verbal stick. Why don’t you show us how good you really are? How about a nice game? Man to man? Cause you a man, right, dude? I mean you got that nice military record and that makes you a man, right, dude? Right?

Dad did not have enough sobriety or distance from Da Nang to respond. He knew that beating the Dipshit in pool wouldn’t give him enough satisfaction, and beating the Dipshit into the bar would get him and the cute blond lady he was dating thrown out. He was kind of used to getting tossed out of bars, but he really wanted my mom to like him. So he drank his tonic water and did his best to be a very sober rock.

And then the Dipshit did it. He pulled on Superman's cape. He spit in the wind. He made his play for the lone ranger mask and he chewed on my Dad's last goddamn nerve. He pointed at the piece of shit pool table in one smoky corner and said “You liar, I bet you couldn’t even clear that table over there.”

Daddy looked at the piece of shit table and registered that it was seriously a piece of shit. Improperly leveled. Plywood bed at best. Pilled felt, stained and nasty. He drained his water, turned to the Dipshit and said, “I bet you everyone's drinks tonight that I can clear that table with a broomstick.”

Dipshit said, “you just go do that, then.”

Daddy smiled.

He politely asked the bartender for the pool balls and the broom. After he racked ‘em up, and somehow managed to get the cue ball to stay put, he unscrewed the broom head and chalked up the blunt end. Sight the ball. Adjust for warp and the fact that this is an unbalanced broomstick. Commence play. Daddy spanked my uncle’s drunken little ego into the ground by sinking every single ball, with a final little flourish on the 8 ball at the end.

He walked back to the bar, screwed the head back on the broom, gave it to the bartender, got my mom a beer, and then ordered another tonic water on the Dipshit's tab.