Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  “I agree.” Liam tipped up his chin. “There are reasons to commit murder, but there’s never an excuse.”

  “True that,” Giannopoulos said in between slurps of yet another energy drink. Glancing at his laptop screen, he added, “I think you guys should get going. Looks like there was an accident on Fourteenth. Traffic’s backed up all the way to Mango. You’ll have to take the long way to Arnold’s.”

  Liam scanned Kat’s outfit, but his eyes held no judgment. “You ready?”

  “Am I ready to stop a murderer in his tracks? Absolutely,” she replied. “But before we set out to do that, you better give me a rundown on that glamour stuff you were talking about yesterday. I really should touch up my appearance before I try an undercover job.”

  “Ah, damn. I knew I was forgetting something.” Liam jutted his thumb toward the stairs. “Let me grab one of my texts from the basement. You can give yourself a crash course on basic glamour techniques during the drive over.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were cruising down Duran Street, along an alternate route to the headquarters of Arnold’s Good Eats that gave the accident scene a wide berth. The longer travel time gave Kat the opportunity to test out a handful of glamour spells, changing the outward appearance of her nose, mouth, and chin just enough to prevent anyone who knew her actual face from recognizing her on the spot.

  It took her several casting attempts to minimize her energy output so that her aura wasn’t blindly obvious to anyone with even the weakest magic sense. But once she managed that, Liam gave her the green light to turn the spell set into a charm.

  After a couple tries, she managed to shove the haphazard glamour spells into a pair of simple gold stud earrings. Then she practiced turning the charm on and off until the transition between active and inert took less than five seconds. “Okay, I think I’ve got it.”

  “Good job.” Liam grinned. “Now you just need to cast an illusion on your fake ID so that it matches your glamoured appearance.”

  Kat groaned. “Why does magic have to be so difficult?”

  He laughed. “The most difficult things in life are usually the most rewarding, you know?”

  “Says you,” she retorted, tugging from her pocket the fake National ID card that Liam had helped her obtain, the one emblazoned with the alias Georgina K. Kingsford. “Okay, now how the heck do illusion spells work on inanimate objects?”

  “Oh, those are pretty simple. You can whip up a spell for an object that small in a jiffy.”

  For the rest of the drive, Kat practiced spelling the card until she produced an illusion that looked similar enough to her glamour to past muster with the security guards who’d be checking IDs at the Radigan estate.

  Just as they were wrapping up the second impromptu magic lesson of the morning, they drove past the back side of the building that housed Arnold’s Good Eats. Kat caught a glimpse of the loading bay, three catering trucks parked before it.

  Inside the bay, a number of employees dressed in black and white loitered in small groups, chatting away while they waited for their boss to arrive and start barking orders. Half of the people milling about had bewildered expressions, as if they only had a scant idea of what they were doing at Arnold’s this morning.

  “We should blend right in,” Kat muttered.

  Liam chuckled. “Nick wasn’t exaggerating about that turnover rate.”

  Parking the SUV in a garage three blocks down from Arnold’s, Liam kept the engine on so the heat didn’t stop flowing while they waited for everyone else to arrive. A couple minutes passed, and Yun’s bulky pickup truck pulled in next to them, followed shortly after by Hunt’s old pickup truck, and finally, by Cortez’s little blue sedan.

  Once the last vehicle came to a stop, Liam shut off the SUV, and they got out.

  “We all good to get this crazy plan started?” Liam asked the whole group.

  Everyone murmured in the affirmative.

  “Let me shoot off a message to Franc, then we’ll head over.” Liam brought out his phone and started typing.

  “I just checked with Casey before I got out of my car,” Cortez said. “He and four other shifters—two wolves, a coyote, and a mountain lion—are on their way to the paint store on Belphar Street, which is run by Casey’s uncle. If we need them to stage a rescue, they can be at the Radigan estate in less than five minutes.”

  Hunt grunted. “I would prefer less than one minute.”

  Cortez raised her hands, palms out. “There are no businesses on the street where Radigan lives, and no street-side parking. If they park a strange vehicle in a random driveway, some busybody might call the cops on them and blow the whole operation.”

  “Best hope we don’t find ourselves in a situation that requires immediate backup then.” Hunt reached up to adjust the strap of something—his shotgun—only to remember it wasn’t there. He dropped the hand to his waist instead, indicating that the looseness of his white shirt was not the result of recent weight loss.

  He was hiding something under there. Probably more than one thing. If Kat had to guess, she’d say at least one handgun and a pouch full of small charmed objects. And maybe some of that spelled salt he’d used in the shotgun blast that took off Cunningham’s head.

  “Franc got into position ten minutes ago,” Liam announced. “So it looks like everything’s set. And we all remember the ‘order of operations,’ yes?”

  Yun, who looked greatly refreshed after an abundance of sleep, raised her hand and counted off with her fingers. “First, we playact part of the catering team until we have a good grasp of how the brunch and auction will proceed, and how Radigan will interact with those proceedings.

  “Second, when the opportunity arises, Liam and I will sneak off upstairs to search Radigan’s home office and bedroom for clues. Kat and Gabby will sneak off downstairs to search the basement level for anything suspicious.

  “While we’re busy doing this, Hunt will stay on the ground floor, ensuring that the party doesn’t get disrupted by the demon, unless one of the pairs gets into trouble and needs his help.

  “Third, once we obtain irrefutable evidence that Radigan is behind the murder scheme, we confront him and subdue him. And when the magician and demon inevitably show their faces, we beat the crap out of the former and send the latter back to the Inferno.

  “And finally, we call in the cop cavalry via Franc, who will report a ‘disturbance’ at the Radigan estate. If we pull this off correctly, the cops will arrive to find Radigan handcuffed and evidence of his guilt neatly piled up around him.”

  Hunt smoothed down his gray hair. “There is no way in hell this will go that smoothly.”

  “That’s why we’re a team of sups and not a team of mundanes,” Liam said, patting his waistband, underneath which he’d hidden his charmed knife. “Because when this goes sideways, we’ll be able to defend ourselves from both the mundane security and the demon-summoning magician.”

  “Let’s just do our best to keep the fighting away from the main floor.” Cortez adjusted her white blouse, which was a tad more professional looking than everyone else’s shirts. “I don’t want to risk spurring any accusations that the shifter community is attacking the city’s mundane elite without cause. Which is what those elite will claim if we disrupt the event but don’t manage to definitively prove Radigan’s guilt while we’re there.”

  “My worry is that Glasya-Labolas will intentionally attack the crowd to incite panic if it sees us trying to interfere with its master’s plans,” Hunt said. “If we had more time, I’d recommend a visit to the fae to consult on glamour disguises, as well as fake ID cards to more thoroughly cover our tracks.”

  “Well, one of us already has a fake ID,” Kat murmured.

  Hunt gave her a bemused look. “I’d figured as much. I would like to know why that is though.”

  Yun and Cortez pressed their lips together, and Liam scowled. Hunt was the onl
y one in this group who didn’t know Kat’s big secret. She had half a mind to just spill the whole thing on their walk to Arnold’s, but Liam held a lot of distrust for the man due to his history as a Circle Enforcer.

  Kat herself had yet to make a judgment on whether he was trustworthy. But she had a feeling that what was about to happen inside the Radigan house would be a good test of his character.

  “If we bring down Radigan today,” she said, invoking her glamour charm, followed by the illusion spell for her ID card, “I’ll tell you all about it during our celebratory dinner.”

  Hunt’s lips quirked up. “I’ll hold you to that, Ms. King.”

  With that, they set off for Arnold’s Good Eats.

  The sidewalk was dark, the streetlights dim, long shadows trailing behind them, and Kat sensed they were being watched from within every pitch-black alleyway they passed. She didn’t know who or what was doing the watching, but she could guess.

  The shifter murders had sparked the curiosity of the city’s sup elite, the vampires and the faeries. The eyes of their spies were now seeking answers from all avenues. And here was a motley crew of sups, all gathered on a chilly morning, heading somewhere that those spies knew they didn’t belong.

  Even if the mundane world never discovered the extent of their involvement in what happened at the Radigan estate today, the sup community would know it all by dinnertime.

  Kat had the urge to wave into one of the alleys and mouth, Good morning, Auguste Vanderhall or Kiss my ass, Caoimhe O’Connor, knowing the message would probably get back to the addressee forthwith. She refrained from doing so only because something else took precedence over her irritation: their arrival at the squat building covered in peeling white paint that looked more like an abandoned factory than the headquarters of a functioning company.

  Following Giannopoulos’s instructions, they headed around to a side door that someone had propped open with a cardboard box full of plastic cups. The place had no security, not even a camera above the door, so anyone could have snuck in and stolen all their food—or blended in with the crowd to infiltrate one of their events.

  They all slipped in single file and found themselves in a storage room whose warping shelves were piled high with non-food supplies, several mountains of paper plates threatening to fall over and bury whoever was walking by at the time.

  Past the interior door of the room came the din of fast-paced food prep.

  They crept over to that interior door, which was open a crack, and Liam peered out, surveying what must have been the kitchen. After a moment, he opened the door wider, revealing a chaotic scene.

  A half-dozen people stood before various stoves and ovens, stirring pots of soup and pans of sauce, or flipping strips of sizzling bacon and sausage patties at light speed. Behind them, six more people loomed over cutting boards, rapidly chopping up a variety of fruits, and filling metal bins according to the labels.

  All around the chefs and prep cooks, there were people running back and forth like skittering ants, barely avoiding collisions that would lead to major burns. Some of these people looked like they knew what they were doing, their hands sure and their eyes focused on their tasks. But others seemed as if they were barely keeping pace, sweat beading on their temples, hesitance in their every move.

  More of them fit the second category.

  “Hey,” barked a gruff female voice, “you guys more temps for today?”

  They turned to see a middle-aged woman with cropped hair wrapped in a bandana standing off to their left, a clipboard in hand.

  “Yeah, we were the ones called in at the last minute,” Liam answered without missing a beat. “Something about you guys needing more people than you originally thought?”

  The woman sniffed in an irate manner. “I always tell Arnie to double-check the size of the venue, but the bastard doesn’t bother to look past the number of zeroes on the check right up until crunch time.” She glanced at the paper affixed to the clipboard. “Guess you guys must be the final five. Liam, Georgina, Elmore, Gabriella, and Yun?”

  “That’s us,” Liam confirmed. “From the Forrester Temp Agency.”

  “Awesome,” she said, not sounding the least bit awed. “We have enough people in the kitchen right now, so you guys go out to the bay and help load the trucks. We got a lot of boxes of fancy dishware and silver-plated utensils to transport, because we’re dealing with the rich fucks today.” She jutted her thumb over her shoulder at a set of swinging doors. “Go on and get started. Earn your shit pay.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Liam replied curtly.

  The group hurried past the woman, several of them suppressing snickers.

  For the next hour and a half, they all acted as part of a human chain, passing heavy boxes and plastic totes down a line to a pair of men who recklessly tossed everything into the trucks. Once all the dishware, utensils, and napkins were packed away, they stood aside as the cooking crew emptied out of the kitchen with all their bins and bowls and platters.

  After the freshly prepped food was slotted into place, everyone stood before the jam-packed trucks, not at all admiring a job so sloppily done.

  Good thing this isn’t our actual day job, Kat thought.

  A sharp whistle sounded off behind them, as the crass woman who’d greeted them earlier stepped out into the loading bay and dropped a large cardboard box on the floor.

  “We’re off in twenty, everybody, so wipe your sweat, comb your hair, and grab your coats.” She kicked the box to emphasize the coats were inside. “The boss is in one of his moods today, so he’ll be meeting us at the venue. If you run into him while we’re setting up, keep your eyes on your work and answer in monosyllables. As all you full-timers know, he doesn’t like chatty grunts.”

  The woman returned to the kitchen, prompting all the “grunts” to whisper among themselves about Arnold’s temperament. The full-timers informed the temps that, yes, indeed, Arnold was a massive asshole who treated his employees like they were no better than mushy leftovers after a party. If anyone stepped on his toes, figuratively or literally, during today’s event, they’d be fired on the spot and escorted from the venue by armed security.

  Kat made a note to watch where she put her feet. She didn’t want to ruin the operation before it even got started.

  The coats in the box came in only two sizes, large and larger. Though Kat wasn’t tiny, she also wasn’t large, so the coat hung off her frame and made her look like a child trying on a parent’s clothing. Yun didn’t look much better, and the two of them laughed at the idea of trying to serve people food while they were swimming in a sea of white fabric.

  Thankfully, Cortez came to the rescue with a package of safety pins and a bit of tailoring expertise. She altered the waistlines and the hems of Kat’s and Yun’s coats, making the larges look slightly more like mediums.

  “Thanks, Ms. Cortez,” Kat said.

  “No problem at all.” Cortez smiled, and quietly added, “By the way, you can call me ‘Gabby.’ When you call me ‘Ms. Cortez,’ it makes me feel like I’m in the classroom.”

  Kat returned the smile. “Okay. ‘Gabby’ it is.”

  All the other female employees, having seen the fine work Gabby could do with the white, wrinkled sacks bearing the Arnold’s logo, flocked around her and asked if she could help with their own coats. By the time the angry woman, who Kat had learned was a supervisor named Patricia, marched back into the loading bay, Gabby was fresh out of safety pins and all the ladies looked like they’d stopped in at the nearest tailor’s shop this morning.

  Patricia paused for a moment and eyed the altered coats. “Huh. Not bad. You do temp work in textiles too?”

  Gabby shrugged. “I take whatever’s available, but I have some sewing experience.”

  “Cool.” Patricia gestured toward the trucks and raised her voice. “All right, everybody. Pack your asses in the trucks, wherever you can find space.�
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  Everybody followed her commands, cramming themselves into every empty nook and cranny in the trucks. Only about half the employees were given the gift of seatbelts. In the event of a crash, the other half would get flung against the walls—and also crushed by flying food containers.

  Given Kat’s recent history with vehicular accidents, she spent most of the drive to the Radigan estate mentally rehearsing her shield and teleportation spells. It never hurt to be prepared for the worst-case scenario.

  When their truck came to a long stop, Kat peeked over the front seats to discover they’d arrived at the back gate to the Radigan estate. Their truck was the second in the lineup, so Kat got to watch while the security guys, burly men in black suits with earpieces who reminded her far too much of Reagan and Kline, flipped through a stack of IDs and marked the names off on a list.

  When all the IDs from the first truck cleared the basic check, they returned the IDs to the driver and started walking toward the second truck.

  Kat tensed, and a deluge of anxious thoughts flooded her head. What if her ID didn’t pass scrutiny? What if they called the cops on her? What if they…?

  “Hey, guys,” their truck’s driver called out. “Needs your IDs for a sec.”

  Swallowing her nerves, Kat dug her spelled fake ID out of her pocket and passed it up the line to the driver. One of the security men took the ID stack from the driver and read off the names, while the other quickly ticked off each name on his clipboard sheet. The man scrutinizing the IDs also looked at each picture and then into the back of the truck, searching for a matching face.

  Kat felt like his eyes lingered on her a moment longer than anyone else, but she knew it was her imagination. The man moved right on to the next ID, not even sparing Kat a second glance.