[96] This had a fifty-fifty shot of working. Some metahumans, such as vampires, were very big on the matter of appearances. If one of theirs had grossly fucked up and broken the laws to the extent we had to get involved, clearly they needed to be dealt with and we’d receive cooperation. For Vampires, who preferred the shadows and back alley dealings, it was generally a mark of shame to let things get so far that MCD had to step in. They wanted this black mark dealt with as quickly as we did. If Joe went the way of vampires, this would be a quick fix. If he went the way of werewolves, we’d have some trouble.
[97] Ghosts, unfortunately, are real. And since the government only has two classifications for sentient beings, Human and Metahuman, dealing with them fell to us despite the fact they are not, in any way, considered alive. Most ghosts are anchored here by something that keeps them from moving on. The nice ghosts seek things like making sure their family is alright or that their kid graduates college. The nasty ones are those that want vengeance for their deaths or who attack any who might distract their child from graduating college. Standard Operating Procedure is to contract someone who can do exorcisms and send the ghost on. Unfortunately, most ghosts do not approve of being ripped from this world and sent to the next, which meant that people who could get through the rites and ceremonies quickly were in high demand. The Chicago MCD contracted a former thief by the name of Carter Biggs for most of our exorcisms, partially because he did the work as part of his parole and partially because he had a unique set of exorcism rites that meant he could banish most ghosts in under ten seconds. He was infuriating to work with so we tried to teach his rites to other people. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work. Since Biggs had refused any testing or government assistance that would require him to register and be tested under the Metahuman Assistance and Research Act (MARA for short) there was no way to legally confirm he was a metahuman. Still, man did good work, even if he was a cagier than a pet store and more annoying than a yapping dog..
[98] It’s true. The Rockford pack used to claim Chicago proper as part of their domain. Then the Walkers got a furry ability as part of the Mayan event. There wasn’t even an attempt at peace. Someone, we’re not exactly sure who fired the first shot, tried to wipe the other group out and every so often a werewolf would turn up dead. Not sure what happened, but about three years ago the Rockford group retreated and left the Walkers in charge of Chicago proper, to Org Crimes' lament.
[99] One of the few bits of Werewolf lore the ARCHIVIST system had was about the Hunting Shroud. The “Hunting Shroud” is a first generation werewolf term for the mentality of isolationism from non-werewolves. To summarize the best explanation I’ve ever received: “Werewolves are hunters and survivalists and such, despite any superiority that may or may not exist, their pride as hunters first and foremost demands that they never give up any potential advantage. Which means that they do not let humans know they exist when possible, do not reveal the full extent of their abilities, and do not engage in knock down drag out brawls if they can avoid them.” Many werewolves consider the Shroud broken by the Mayan event, but some still stick to it, out of reverence for the old ways. Those that do adhere tend to also be the most anti-establishment types and the biggest problems for the MCD.
[100] Larsson is a shorter woman, somewhere around 5’2” and is built like someone who worked in a field for a living instead of being a museum curator. Most incongruous though is her face, which has a structure that looks far more at home in a renaissance painting than in the modern day. Her hair was black as it could possibly be, which made me think it was dyed. Those two combined with the fact that her left pinky was missing from the second joint down and I suspected that there was much more going on with her than met the eye.
[101] A first for any werewolf I’ve ever met.
[102] Larsson explained that werewolves would know if there was no smoke, even without entering the building, so we had to start a fire. Times like this is where I really wish Quinn was around, but we made due with heating elements and the small bar.
[103] Let me tell you this, the urge to wave was strong.
[104] I felt awful. Twice on this case, I had the chance to do a movie moment, and moved past them. And sure, Temple of Doom would’ve been inappropriate, but when else in your life are you going to get a chance like that? I consoled myself with the fact that I had been able to slam on the brakes with Miles a few nights back.
[105] Also, shortly after this, thoughts of Brecht Halthore’s manifesto came to mind, and Larsson treating Miles like something harmless and cute became slightly darker in my mind. Halthore had released The Fury and Fang shortly after the Event proclaiming that it was time for the werewolves to claim their place as the masters of the world as the clearly superior race on the planet. Comparisons had been made to Mein Kampf, and they weren’t entirely wrong. Danvers would argue that it was something closer to Stephens’ “Cornerstone” speech, drawing explicit comparisons to how much like Stephens’ explicitly stated slavery was the “natural and normal condition” of Africans since they were lesser than white folks, Halthore was demanding that “homo sapiens accepted their place in the world as the lessers and servants of Lupus superior.” I started to tune out after that as he devolved into talking about Latin and taxonomy, but I guess he had a point. Enslaving an entire race seems almost worse than killing them en masse.
[106] The fact that McCoy had leverage over a supernatural was perfectly acceptable. The possibility that anyone, especially a supernatural, had leverage over her was a potential major breach of protocol and was possibly a fireable offense. Though, maybe it wasn’t a secret from Slate and he decided not to share with us. I didn’t know and I was largely okay with that. Compartmentalization is a good thing as I learned from my time in the military. The fact that it was being talked about in such a brazenly obfuscated way was the real and extremely frustrating issue.
[107] McCoy glaring at him in the mirror might’ve been a factor too.
[108] A subsection of a werewolf pack. If the pack is like the entire house of representatives, then a knot is one of the voting blocks or committees.
[109] Procedure dictated we put her into an interrogation room or a holding cell. I personally believe that giving that large of an insult to a werewolf was a bad idea. Like something flimsy like a cell door or reinforced glass would really stop her if she wanted out.
[110] Sure, we could arrest him. All we needed was probable cause. But judges and largely the rest of the law enforcement world hated to do that without the evidence to press charges because it opened us up to harassment charges. Not that werewolves were likely to sue, but it was the principal of the matter and us being worried about opening the door to questions of corruption in the papers.
[111] My quick math, since showing your work is important. The average person walks a mile every twenty minutes, swims it in thirty. Additionally, you generally die from drowning after three minutes traditionally. If we assume that he’ll regenerate when he passes out. That’s around the one minute mark. Using the swimming speed for walking along the bottom of the lake, that would mean for every mile we drag him out into the lake, he’d die thirty times minimum assuming he could walk back to shore.
[112] I hate that safe house and was happy to see it go. The actual safe house was a 1970’s house boat that always smelled suspiciously of Spam. It was donated to us by someone who’s father managed to live due to the witness security division. Somehow, I think we got the short end of that tax write off.
[113] Elephants, and it’s theorized many dinosaurs, don’t truly run due to the amount of mass they have. It’s a combination of the increased momentum being harder to stop, the inherent risk of falling over, and simple physics of having that much mass airborne, which is required for a true run, being nearly impossible to balance.
[114] A surprisingly brazen move on his part, what with him normally being scared of her since the door kicking incident. I chalked it up to a good mood or him being too absorbed
in his success.
[115] Things on this list included, but wasn’t limited to: Doppelgangers, mimics, werewolves, Carter Biggs, elementals, teleporters, phasers, cloakers, and people who move too fast to be picked up by a camera. I was far more concerned about the intrusion from within. Occam's razor indicated that it was easier to use the existent access than to try to steal some. Then again, I was a cynical bastard.
[116] Harpoon cannon might’ve been more accurate. I’m not entirely sure where he got it, but the thing looked like it had actually been used to hunt whales at one point. The thing was easily as big as I was, but Carlson tossed it around like it was a football. I wasn’t sure how we were supposed to use it ourselves. Then again, I wasn’t sure if anything smaller would actually hold Voigt.
[117] As the person who was on the phone more often than not since I was the one who spoke the lingo, I became the effective comm officer. Learning to pay attention to communication irregularities was possibly the hardest part of the military but damn was it useful. Most of the time for me that meant that I was paying attention to odd tone shifts, phone calls that didn’t have people on the other end, or a dozen or so other issues commonly associated with line tapping. Thankfully, the training covered issues such as extra static too. My guess was a signal jammer, which most infantry would tell you, generally meant a trap.
[118]Those three people are Telemarketers, Slate, and my mother. Every time I managed to dodge a call from one of them, I thanked Kazuo Hashimoto for inventing caller ID.
[119] In a way that uncomfortably reminded me of what my mother would do when my father started telling military stories.
[120] I was guessing with a shotgun blast to Larsson’s head.
[121] A werewolf euphemism for differentiating between the types of werewolves. 1st gens were “Full Moon” and 2nd gens were “New Moon” if people were being nice. “Broken moon” was a more disparaging slang for 2nd gen werewolves who responded by referring to the 1st gens as “Hollow mooners”. And I thought name calling stopped in middle school.
[122] I made a note of this for later. Werewolves acting against their leader’s words for their best interests? It was the first piece of evidence the marshal’s had that the rule of the Alpha wasn’t absolute. Then again, that might’ve been because Larsson wasn’t the Alpha yet.
[123] “AWWWWWWWWWWW, someone’s got a crush!”
[124] I wasn’t about to do the awkward thing and look at the furry bits to figure out a gender. They would do as a pronoun.
[125] Later, I talked to Larsson about this, she told me that werewolves, particularly second gen ones, all have what were referred to as “Awakened Names” which are their individual tickets to and from the Shade. As part of the werewolves’ coming of age ceremony they are walked into the Shade and stranded there to undergo a vision quest to find who they are.
However, even walking through the realm of truth presents it’s difficulties when there are no mirrors and you can’t see your full body. The idea is by interacting with the environment and its denizens you gain the truth of yourself. When you got enough of an idea of that, you try to encapsulate that idea in a short phrase, subject to your personal interpretations. The young pup tries to speak that phrase and if they’re right, they come out of the Shade and are welcomed to the pack. If they’re wrong they wander more until they figure out their Awakened Name.
So, ‘Storm Before the Calm’ was all about ‘Earning peace through unfortunate violence.’ ‘Decapitates the Leech’ was dedicated to “Removing the parasites and undeserving from society.’ ‘Lupus Noctis’ was just as unimaginative, plain, and bad at Latin as his name implied. I then asked about those who never figure out their name and got a glare that stopped me from asking any other questions.
[126] Steven Hotchkiss’ honorary Awakened Name. Even though he was a first gen, apparently he commanded that much respect. Larsson refused to tell me hers, but did confirm that she had received an honorary name too.
[127] I decided to mentally abbreviate that as SBtC. It was shorter and so much easier to keep a straight face when saying.
[128] Were I a clever man, I would’ve called him a Manaconda on the spot. Sadly, it wasn’t until Leo Walters at the Tribune wrote the story about this entire shit show that I even heard it, and by then it was too late for my brain to contemplate taking credit. In fact, by then I was too frustrated that human life, especially metahuman life, had been reduced to pithy one liners.
[129] The average werewolf, when shifting into their wolfman form, gained between one and two feet in height, nearly 45 to 75 pounds of muscle, their teeth sharpened to a razor sharp point, and their nails extended into claws that were between two and three inches long. Larsson was on the upper end of all those ranges. Can you understand why I don’t want to be on their business end?
[130] Also Silver ammo was expensive. Using it because it was the only option for the situation was unfortunate, but tolerable. Wasting it would’ve just added to the headache that was the situation and would’ve earned me a much deserved tongue lashing.
[131] It was very similar to how my body healed, though from what I saw, my body had a much lower threshold. Needles and stitches were often easily shunted, but there was a time I had a bullet lodged in the arm and the flesh just healed around it. Worst part was that the body kept trying to heal into the bullet and couldn’t. By the time I got to surgery, cutting the bullet out was buried deep under freshly healed skin and the anesthetic barely worked. In order to avoid that from happening again, I signed myself up for classes at this point to help me brush up on field medicine skills so I could cut them out by myself and save everyone the hassle.
[132] Odd word to describe a noise coming out of something canine, but it’s the only one I have that really does it justice. I don’t know a word for canine predatory pleasure, but the moment they come up with one, I’ll use it.
[133] Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Carlson looking away, but McCoy was still watching analytically. Filed that away as interesting information.
[134] There’s a common expression in the military, “Friendly Fire, isn’t.” Thankfully, I wasn’t in an active combat region since my main duties were acting as a translator and Cultural Liaison for Captain Lee Winters, a Civil Affairs Officer. One of the guards around the camp however, was part of a friendly fire incident as the shooter, crippling an infantry man. The entire incident ruined him mentally, having hurt someone on his own side like that. And the Army sweeping that under the rug to save face only made it worse. In exchange for keeping quiet, he got transferred to a post of his choice, and decided to push for the most quiet job possible, intentionally wanting to be a fobbit. Anyways, long story short, I’ve seen what that guilt can do to a man, and I’m glad that McCoy wouldn’t be crippled from it.
[135] And in no shape, way, or form, jumped. Nope, not at all.
[136] McCoy paid me back the 20 dollars in mixed drinks that were half alcohol. I might’ve won the bet, but I didn’t win the night.
[137] The one errant thought I had was, “Use the Force Luke!”
[138] Forgetting that she was out of ammo, if I was totally honest.
[139] Both major players on the City Council. Fererick was the first openly homosexual Alderman and was loud advocate for both LGBTQ and metahuman rights. Lockwood’s rise to power is nothing short of meteoric and there were already rumors that he was planning on running for mayor when Old Man Westervelt went the way of Richard J. Daley.
[140] Miles had insisted we start at the lowest levels and build our way to the point of cardiac arrest level shocks, in the name of scientific rigor. Good idea, but considerate and rigorous did not make for engaging. After about an hour of sitting on a stool and feeling next to nothing as he worked through the lowest settings on the defibrillator, I was half asleep, which is the only reason I fell off the stool.
[141] He had also apparently invited Jennings, but didn’t get a response until three days later. The response was, and I qu
ote, “Sorry, I was busy trying to communicate with one of my alternate selves via an entangled aetheric resonance. Long story short, it didn’t work and I spent a week and a half talking with myself.” And that’s why I don’t invite Jennings places.
[142] Well not entirely glorious. The bathroom break while we changed disks was decidedly average.
[143] Normally, when someone works their way into being a friend, I call them by their first name. I decided that Michaelis never could be my friend because I didn’t want to be confused between her and Quinn Eckles. Coming up with a way to differentiate sounded hard.
Acknowledgement
Again, thanks to my beta readers, also to all of you who have picked this book up to read. I'm already working on editing book two and writing book three in the series.
Hope to see you all then.
World Wonders Page 22
