by Voss Foster
Sovereign Malpractice
Office of Preternatural Affairs Book Three
Voss Foster
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons is entirely coincidental or beyond the intent of the author.
Sovereign Malpractice © Voss Foster 2021
Cover Art © Wicked Smart Designs 2021
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author.
Requests to use the material will be considered and may be directed to:
Voss Foster at: [email protected]
For Dan Beich, who taught me more than his job ever required.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Author’s Note
Also By
About the Author
Chapter One
Working for the Office of Preternatural Affairs was a lot of things. It was me riding a dragon and jumping into the skull of a giant snake. It was letting some old elf lady fiddle around in my brain to unlock my memories. It was me chasing down magical drug dealers because local PD still hadn't figured out how to handle preternatural criminals in most of the country.
Days like this? It was me unboxing a crate of gnomes about to be sold as slaves for the uber wealthy.
"I'd like to growl about humans over this." Gutt, my big, blue troll partner lifted a particularly emaciated gnome out of the box. They were crammed into the wooden crate so tight I wasn't even sure all of them were alive anymore, so the first priority was getting them loose so everyone could breathe. The one Gutt had was at least alive enough to shiver once he was out of the mass. Wisconsin winters weren't exactly the warmest in the world. Still nice to see signs of life.
"You growl about humans all you want." I got another gnome out, this one a woman, her sides and arms bruised purple. Either from being jammed into this box, or from whatever efforts it took for her seller to get her to comply. "I mean, you're not going to offend me. I'm pretty down on humans at the moment too."
"Yes, well, gnome slavery is not exactly a new idea. It would hardly be fair to lay the blame at the feet of humanity." Gutt shook his head as he gingerly lifted a very young gnome out. The others were finally able to start moving a little bit, and so far I didn't see any who were blatantly dead.
"Still, I think humankind could have arrived at 'enslave small beings' all on our own." I pulled an ancient gnome out. His eyes were rheumy white, with what looked like burn scars around them. He swiveled his head side to side, but no way in hell could he see. His condition wasn't natural either, if I was going to hazard a wild guess. "We need to get them some attention. Hopefully they're not so far gone they can't be fixed up."
Gutt nodded. There was enough free space now that he could get his fingers in without putting the gnomes inside at risk. He yanked on two of the vertical slats, snapping them loose and creating an opening for the rest of the gnomes to begin filing out into the train car proper. "Call Casey and tell him we have incoming."
I nodded and slid out my phone. Casey, like the rest of the OPA team, was on speed dial. I'd started my time with the OPA having Casey regrow most of the tissue on my legs, so I kept him set to number two.
"Dr. Casey Daniels, OPA."
"Casey, it's Dash." I sighed. "You have room for three dozen gnomes in bad shape?"
"We're already waiting. Swift told me you guys would probably have them soon, so I called in backup. Go ahead and ship them our way."
"You're a lifesaver, Casey."
"Yeah, well don’t forget it come Christmas time."
"Santa-themed strip tease, show for one?"
"Make it reindeer and we can talk."
He hung up and I turned to see Gutt already opening remote transport back to Washington, DC. The air shimmered faintly where he'd waved his hand, that oil slick effect the only identifier that he'd done anything. Well, other than the gnomes scrabbling through and disappearing into nothing.
Once they'd all been transported, Gutt sighed. "Any possibility we've snuffed out the illegal preternatural slavery business?"
"As much chance as me turning out to be a Fundamentalist Humanitarian this whole time."
Gutt snorted a tiny, derisive laugh. His olive eyes remained dark, sharp, and focused. "I suppose we'll be back here again soon, then."
"This exact dead drop in Wisconsin?" I shook my head. "We'll scare them off from using this one for at least a few months."
"Ah, so we'll just have to find them all over again."
"Exactly." I clapped him between the shoulders, not an easy task when he was several heads taller than me. "That's the job, right?"
"Right." Gutt shook his head. "At least these gnomes are safe for now."
He walked into the portal and I followed. The thrill of those neons and pastels around me as we stepped momentarily through the Hidden Kingdoms should have gotten old by now. Traveling through dimensions was officially an almost everyday thing for me since starting with the OPA. But a flicker of excitement still ran through my bones as mint green and glowing white and cotton candy pink moved around me. All in the space of a breath, then I was back in the Mundane. Indoors, which my frigid fingertips were thankful for, and surrounded by gnomes and sterile white floors and three medics in white coats. Two of them were preets. I recognized the elderly dryad woman from the New York Field Office. She'd helped stabilize me during my first outing with the OPA. The other was an elf. Couldn't tell at all how old he was, but he had a calm demeanor and sat cross-legged to deal with the gnomes as close to their level as possible.
And our medic was there, too. Casey Daniels. I suppose technically he was a preet as well, but he was only a quarter hag. Until he got old enough for his magic to really mature, he was just our resident medical prodigy/gay twink who liked to flirt with me.
Though not at the moment. At that moment, he looked a little more like a hag and a little less like a sprightly young thing. His blonde hair was already a mess when he walked up to Gutt and I. "Were there any dead in with them?"
Gutt shook his head. "All alive, thankfully."
"Good, good." He scrubbed a hand up and down his face. "There's a couple in bad shape on a perfunctory examination, but if they're the worst of it, I think they'll all be fine." He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut. "Have I mentioned lately that I really hate this job? Like, really hate it."
"I don't think being a regular doctor would be any better." I rubbed his shoulder. "Gore is still gore."
"Yeah, that's not the part I hate, sweetie."
I nodded. He didn't need to say anything more. Like all the rest of us, Casey got to see what lurked underneath the extra slimy rocks of existence. Human and preet alike did some vile shit, and if it happened inside US borders…well, that made it our problem to handle.
&nbs
p; I patted Casey on the shoulder. "We'll leave you to your work."
"Oh, bring me horrible work, then take my eye candy away from me, too?" He had that slight twinkle back to his eyes, muted as it may have been by all this gnome bullshit. "I see how it is."
Gutt walked away, phone out, and let me and Casey keep on. "Hey, look on the bright side. It's been a minute since I've been gravely injured, so I'm due for a trip to your office soon anyway. And that tends to involve me taking my clothes off."
Grinning slightly, he shook his head and turned back around to the gnomes, but not without firing off one last retort. "I'm not so hard up you need to hurt yourself just so I can check you out, sweetie. There's plenty of actual gay guys I can look at, and they tend to be totally functional, not begging me to regrow their body parts."
Then he was back into the gaggle of gnomes with his borrowed healers. I turned back to Gutt just as he was hanging up. "You call in a team to check out the area?"
He nodded, sending his massive, floppy ears to quivering. "They won't find anything, unfortunately. There wasn't even a whisper of magic in the area."
"There's never a whisper of magic anywhere until there is. That's what makes this shit so hard." I sighed. "We should go tell Swift what's up."
We took the short, silent walk back through the hallways to the glass doors of the Office of Preternatural Affairs. The whole space always gave off a distinct aura of "who gives a shit." Nothing in the space was new, save for some high-quality locks and door handles, and some of the computers. Everything else looked at least a decade old, and the whole space was slightly crooked, the walls narrowing away from the doors. Any chance any the cubicles had to be square went right out the window with those walls. I'd never gotten confirmation, but from the first time I walked in, I got the distinct impression this space had been carved out for them where no office was really supposed to be.
Or, with magic at their disposal, maybe the whole space had been mystically tacked on by Gutt or Rothiel or some of the other preets. That was always a possibility as well. The OPA was only looking at its eleventh anniversary, after all. Before shit hit the fan, nobody but the loons thought trolls, elves, and dragons were actually real.
Big plate of crow to eat when it turned out that not only were they right, but those same fairy tale creatures just had a massive prison break into the Mundane. Us stupid humans? Not exactly equipped to handle murderers who could enchant the blood out of your body, so thankfully the Hidden Kingdoms deigned to actually help us out. Hence why Gutt was actually here and able to work these cases.
Which was good, because those preets who preferred life here were a blessing in a lot of ways, another part of our big old melting pot. But any sufficiently large community also brought crime, and magical criminals weren't just those who busted out of prison a decade ago. Plenty of home-grown preet criminals lived in the US, plus plenty of anti-preet criminals and hate groups. Both categories fell under our jurisdiction as well.
We headed across the cockeyed room and straight to Agent Swift's office. His door stood open, propped by a mesh wastepaper basket. His office wasn't the same beige expanse as the rest of the OPA space. Everything was mahogany, umber…some other dark, warm brown I wasn't educated enough to name off the top of my head. No windows, so the whole space seemed very tight and cozy…and okay, sometimes claustrophobic.
Didn't seem to bother Swift any, though. He sat there, tall and slim, dressed as every bit the professional department head he was.
He looked up as we stepped closer to his desk. "You intercept the shipment, boys?"
"Of course," said Gutt. "Also, I'd like to point out I'm almost fifteen years your senior."
Swift waved that off with a lazy flick of the wrist. "Trolls age considerably slower than my human ass. What are you relative to human years? Forty?"
"Roughly, yes."
Swift chuckled, a surprisingly deep sound, and leaned back in his chair. "Get back to me when they start mailing you crematorium coupons." He glanced over to me. "They're with Casey?"
"And a couple other healers."
"Good. No dead?"
"Not when we left them." Gutt growled deep and snarled, framing his tusks in a particularly stark manner. "Though who can say how that washes out? Nearly forty of them were crammed into that one crate, and it looked like it wasn't the first time for some of them. We may still wind up with casualties."
Swift nodded curtly. "Well, we got them out of there, at least. Hopefully when this pops its head back up, we'll be able to get a little more concrete evidence and catch the fuckers." His voice didn't take an edge, stayed cool and aloof, like this was all fact. Everything on the same level. The sky is blue, tequila gets you naked, and we were hardly done pursuing these sons of bitches.
"My money is still on Anisar of Tarwald." Gutt shook his head. "Something about him sets off all my instincts."
"We've got an eye on him, and on all the other potentials. If something's going on with any one of them, we'll see it." Swift sighed and leaned forward, folding his hands on his desk. "If that's everything?"
Gutt and I both nodded.
"Dash, while you were out, an intrepid and resourceful journalist actually managed to get a message to me for you." He grabbed a sticky note from his desk and handed it over. "I figured I should reward them for actually making it that far, since very few do."
"Are you going soft, Swift? What happened to no media ever? That was the first rule you ever gave me." Our job with the OPA wasn't just to handle magic-related crimes and catastrophes. Not in Swift's opinion, anyway. For him, part of our job was easing tensions between the preet and Mundane communities. Media coverage had a bad habit of showing how scary and dangerous magic could be as opposed to any of the good it created. Even when they did give more balanced coverage…well, a dozen people's livers being immolated by magic was way more likely to get shared a million times than a dwarf helping protect her apartment building from a raging fire. He didn't think that bias was helpful, and I tended to agree.
"She wasn't asking about anything compromising. And you've been here almost a year. I trust your judgment." He nodded curtly. "Now that the Kingdoms and the shapeshifters have reached a tentative agreement, they were looking for an opinion piece from someone who was there."
I crumpled up the note and tossed it into the basket behind me. "Hard pass, but thanks."
Swift chuckled again. "Well, go on then. File your reports, all of that. Day's almost over with."
Nodding, Gutt and I both walked out of the office and headed for our desks. Gutt barely fit in his cubicle with such a bulky frame. I sat down myself and pulled up the empty report template. Then I immediately ignored it. A year. Close to a year I'd been here, anyway. I'd managed to make a little bit of a mark on my workspace. No family pictures, just in case someone with less than honorable intentions made it in and decided my mom or my brother would make easy targets. A massive electric blue scale sat inside of a black frame on one wall. My one and only trophy from any of my work here. A scale from Jörmungandr, the giant world-ending serpent that started me on this whole trajectory with the OPA. I also had a mouse and keyboard I'd bought myself—more ergonomic—and several books. Not as many as Gutt or Bancroft had around them at any time, but a few core books on preets, the Hidden Kingdoms, and a few informational texts about the biggest anti-preet hate groups.
Did it do my heart good to stare at the stupid crucifix logo of the Fundamentalist Humanitarian Church? Hell no, but it damn well made sure I kept them in mind and could buzz through for information at a moment's notice. I longed for the day they were involved in something and we could actually get them. Violent, hateful racists hiding behind overly broad religious protections.
This space could have belonged to any OPA agent…but it didn't. This was mine. And if you got me drunk enough, I'd maybe even admit this felt more like the right career path than counterterrorism had.
Maybe.
The end of the day came slow a
nd uneventful, which was completely fine by me. About an hour after we'd gotten back, Casey came up and gave us all the rundown, which basically amounted to "all the gnomes are going to be as okay as could be expected, and a couple of them want to talk about what they saw." It was a hell of a lot better than it could have been. Humans weren't always friends, and authorities were definitely not always friends, so preets often clammed up around the OPA. But any interviews would have to wait until tomorrow.
Gutt groaned as he rose from his chair. "The winter is not kind to my body."
"This job isn't kind to your body. Or mine. Or anyone else's." I rubbed the back of my neck to try and work out the crick I'd been dealing with since I woke up. Hooray for aging. "Grab a heating pad and you'll be fine."
Gutt gestured slowly from his chest down. "Do you really think a singular heating pad is going to accomplish anything?"
"Well then, get six. Also, isn't Droshheim basically all ice, all the time?"
"Not all the time. We do have a warm season." He sighed. "Besides, I'm fairly certain Wisconsin winter runs around fifty degrees colder than Droshheim."
I chuckled. "It was a little nippy, I'll give you that."
I walked toward the doors, ready to carry on this conversation. Gutt wasn't following. I turned around to make some smart remark, right up until I saw the set of his jaw and the flash of exposed tusks. His eyes were stony hard and his spine straight as a railroad spike. And his hands…his hands clenched tight, one in a pale-knuckled fist at his side, the other death-gripping the top edge of his cubicle wall, nearly vibrating from the tension wracking his muscles.
