by Voss Foster
But he walked out anyway, leaving it to just me and Lenva. Which was perfect. Sure, I definitely wanted Gutt working at a hundred percent if we were going to get attacked. That didn't mean it was my only motive. I wanted to know as much as I could about Lenva. She wasn't exactly an open book, but if I was alone with her for long enough, then surely my inherent charms would erode her silence.
Or I'd be incessantly annoying enough she'd talk to get me to shut my trap. Either/Or.
The thought of her going back into captivity still didn't settle well with me, and when the time came, I wanted to be completely behind whatever decision I made. Whether that was to argue against her going back into containment…or to argue for it. For either of those, it was time to get more familiar with this Class-A hag.
I pulled my chair right up to the bars. "Lenva? Do you need anything?"
Slowly, she lifted her head to look at me. Her eyes were that dark, stormy blue again, but seemed dulled at the moment. "I don't need anything. Unless you're willing to do the right thing."
"You're still on that assisted suicide thing? Well I've got to tell you, that's not going to really fly with me. I'm not much for following orders."
"Then don't kill me. Please. Let me live."
"Well since you put it like that." It was a joke. A sparse, sad one, but she'd made a joke. Improvement. "Do you want to talk to pass the time? You don't look like you're anywhere close to falling asleep, and I'm awake as long as I'm needed. If we both sit in silence, it'll get pretty boring."
"I haven't had anyone to talk to in over four-hundred years. I'm used to it. And I don't really sleep."
Touché. But I wasn't about to be deterred by a reasonable argument. "Well then, you've got to have four-hundred years' worth of talking to do, and you're in luck because I'm a sparkling conversationalist."
She shifted a little, releasing the death grip from her knees and putting her arms to her sides. A tiny spark of life showed up in her eyes. "I've never been to the Mundane…I'd heard about it before I was sealed, but…what's it like?"
"Well, a lot different from when you got sealed. Four-hundred years ago, we were working on not dying from contaminated water and painting rich people. Now we've stopped painting rich people quite as much, and at least in the US, we have the contaminated water handled. Mostly." Put like that, it didn't seem like we'd come far at all since the sixteen-hundreds. "There's a lot of disparity across the world. Some places are still in really bad shape, but some places are really advanced. Like here, in the United States, you're never more than a couple hours away from an airplane that can take you anywhere else on the planet."
"Doesn't seem like much compared to remote transport."
"No, it doesn't. But we don't have magic. Give us a little break."
"I just struggle to imagine that. No magic? How do you get anything done?"
"Everything takes longer, and it takes more effort. But we're always trying to get things done better and quicker." I dug into my pocket and pulled out my phone. "We made this. I mean, not me, but humans developed this. You can talk to anyone in the world, read almost anything that's ever been written. We're more connected today than we probably ever have been, no matter how big the distances."
Lenva scooted a little closer, finally letting her legs dangle off the edge of the bed. "Connection…I missed that the most. My family saw me off when they sealed me. They were allowed to stay as long as I remained calm and in control…it wasn't long. They'll all be dead, now." She squeezed her eyes shut and sniffed, then looked back at me. "Tell me about your family."
"My family?" Every muscle in my body tensed. I didn't talk about them. Not on the job. Any little bit of information was dangerous to share out.
But as I looked at Lenva, slender and broken, her eyes glistening dark, her skinny fingers tightening into pleading fists, the fear passed. I swallowed back all the training and personal barriers I'd built up around them. Then I got up. "I'll make a deal with you. We eat, and I'll talk about my family."
"I don't need to eat."
"I don't need to eat either. I mean, eventually, but not right now. But it's been four centuries since you've tasted anything. Doesn't just part of you want to?" I hoped. I really hoped. I wanted to see some sign in her that she hadn't completely lost the will to live.
After a moment, she nodded. "I've never had Mundane food."
"Well, we don't exactly have high-end cuisine here in the FBI offices, but I can rustle something up."
One brief trip to the vending machine later—I figured junk food and candy bars would be the most likely to give someone the will to carry on with such short notice—I was in the middle of telling her about my parents. "My dad went back to school and got an actual business degree when I was still in high school. He, uh, he didn't get to use it. He passed between me graduating and getting into college. But he was so damn proud of that degree. My mom put it up next to his picture at his funeral."
"Could I ask what happened?"
"How he died? Cancer. I don't know if you have cancer in the Hidden Kingdoms." I stuffed another bite of chocolate into my mouth to buy a couple seconds. I didn't think about my dad dying very often…for pretty obvious reasons, I thought. "His cells multiplied like crazy. He had growths in his internal organs, and they ended up shutting down." I'd made it through, and immediately pushed into happier territory. "But my mom and my brother and I were there for each other to get through it."
Lenva nodded. "Before I went away, I made my brother promise he'd look after the others. I don't know what ended up happening, obviously." She shook her head and sighed, then took another bite of the Twinkie she was slowly working her way through. "He swore he would, though."
"I'm sure he did." I sighed and cracked my neck side to side. "If he's anything like my brother he did, anyway. We were super close back then. I've been busy with work, haven't seen him in a while, but he sends me messages all the time just to stay connected." I was kind of a shit brother in a lot of ways. I hadn't seen any of them in over a year, and I wasn't at all sure I'd be able to make it back for Christmas. OPA work was more than a little unpredictable, and preet criminals had even less respect for the holiday season than Mundane criminals.
Still, it would be nice if I could make it back to Rhode Island, at least for a couple days.
Lenva leaned her head back against the wall. "What about you? You went to a university, didn't you?"
"I went to Norwich University to study National Security." How much of that she understood, I couldn't say, but I just kept going. "Not so much using that in this job, but I was a counterterrorism agent before I started working here."
"Counterterrorism?"
"Kept people from harming civilians in the United States. More or less." I sighed and scratched back through my memories. "You had at least one or two terrorist groups in the Hidden Kingdoms, I think. The Seven-Fingered Hand?"
"The Hand." She nodded solemnly. "Before even my time, but still fresh enough in the collective memory to make an impact. They were a danger in their day, under the guise of fighting for freedom."
"That tends to be the way terrorists work. They talk a good game, but they're never what they claim to be." Well, almost never. Sometimes terrorists were just labeled that way by a government that wanted people out of their way. And sometimes as well, terrorist groups didn't bother with pretense or subterfuge and just said what they meant, full stop. "So could I ask you a question?"
"I suppose I owe you an answer after all of this."
Had to go for the heart of it while I had an opening. Figure out exactly what the hell. "What is it you can do? That makes you so dangerous?"
Immediately, she withdrew. The light fled from her eyes. "It's enough that I'm dangerous. Any other question, please. I'll answer it."
She still wasn't budging on that one vital piece of information. I wracked my brain, looking for any other question I could throw her way. I wanted to keep her talking, keep her interacting with me, learn
about her, and maybe have a shot at dragging her away from abject suicidal depression. "All right. Which Kingdom are you from?"
It took a few moments, but she did finally respond. "I'm Lenva of Droshheim. But I haven't been back there since I was young. Well before I was sealed. Before they even knew I was a Class-A." She was actually stringing words together, and I wasn't about to interrupt. "I remember it, though. The palace grounds, covered in living ice sculptures. Roads of polished granite. The massive walls around the Archives of Brenath."
"The Archives of Brenath?" Gutt lumbered back through the doorway. He looked a lot less "nearly dead" than he had before I made him go take a nap. I glanced at the clock, and somehow it had been a bit over an hour.
I nodded to Gutt. "Lenva was telling me about Droshheim."
"Droshheim?" With a groan, he lowered himself into the seat next to me and crossed his legs. "You come from Droshheim?"
"Originally, yes." A slight, wistful smile pulled up at the corners of her mouth, and for a single moment, she looked…normal. But it passed. The smile faded and she once again had that weary, terrified look about her. "As I told Dash, I haven't been back in…well, in centuries. But those are the sights that stuck in my mind."
"Centuries." Gutt sighed. "You never got to see the ice gardens. The royal family had them installed when I was a child."
"Ice gardens?"
"To go along with the living sculptures filling the courtyard. They grow and bear fruit just as any botanical garden would." Gutt sounded childlike as he described it, and that wonder leaked through the bars of the cell to encircle and lift up Lenva. She sat straighter, eyes sharpening as she listened. "I haven't been there myself in over a decade, but I still have a blossom from one of the rose bushes. It's harder to keep it alive here in the Mundane, of course, but worth the enchantments it takes. And the fruit. Sweet and cold. They're not always open to the public, but at the very least for every festival. During the peak of summer…" Gutt sighed and shook his head. "Apologies. It's not fair for me to rave on about such things as…such things."
"Things I'll never get to experience." She nodded. "Please. If we cut off all conversation about things I don't get to see or hear or taste in my life, what would I have to talk about? I need something to dream about when they seal me away again, since you all seem to be so unwilling to let me out of this any other way."
And just like that, all the heat fled from the room. Our talking, my opening up, her memories of Droshheim…none of it had made any difference. She still considered suicide the best way out of the world.
I sat back silently and listened to her and Gutt conversing between themselves about Droshheim, but suddenly I'd lost interest in participating myself.
Chapter Five
When our shift was over, a pair of preet agents I didn't recognize came to relieve me and Gutt. I glanced into the cell to see Lenva, sitting just as she had been before. Knees to her chest, staring emptily outward.
Gutt stretched side to side and thanked the two agents. An elf and a gnome, borrowed from some other department somewhere. With the OPA in DC being so small, standard operating procedure was to call on preet agents from other parts of the FBI when we found ourselves in need of a couple more magical bodies.
Gutt yawned. "Did you sleep well?"
"No." During the short bit of rest I'd taken during the shift, I'd been wracked with images of Lenva being carted away and thrown into some great bottomless chasm. No offense to the psychiatric profession as whole, but that didn't take a degree to interpret. "Damn cot's not exactly fit for someone my size, either."
"Yes, I'm sure it was tragic for your petite human form." Gutt chuckled as if we weren't playing babysitter to a woman about to be sentenced to multiple more life sentences in solitary confinement. A woman who also wanted to off herself. I'd spent a lot of my time not asleep thinking about that.
We walked out and Gutt directed me into the main offices. "We can be off shift soon, but Swift wants the whole team together. Those two are just in long enough for us to all get caught up."
"I'm surprised they'd want anything to do with this job. She is a Class-A, after all."
"Well, they might not have taken the job if it was any longer than a few minutes. No offense meant to the Sentient Resources Department, of course. I couldn't do their job any better or any longer than they could do mine. But I imagine they weren't terribly excited at the prospect."
There, I couldn't blame them. Sentient Resources sprung out of Human Resources once we got the picture that preets planned to move into the Mundane. Served mostly the same purpose, but it involved a lot of new blood and a lot of retraining the old blood to be more inclusive. What it definitely didn't involve was chasing preternatural criminals across dimensional borders or getting sliced to shit by a pack of harpies or any of the other stupid crap we put up with. Also told me that they weren't likely the first choice. Or the second choice. "We probably shouldn't keep them there too long. Just in case."
"Precisely." We wandered our way into the meeting room at the far end of the OPA space. Gutt and I were the last ones to arrive, even though we'd literally moved into the building for the evening.
"How is it I showered, did my hair, and got coffee, and I'm still here before the both of you?" Agent King, the senior-most member of the OPA, leaned forward. Her voice was gruff as usual, backed up by an impressively sturdy frame, but she had a glint in her eye that betrayed her false ire as play. The fact she also pushed a disposable coffee cup toward me also helped. I'd been here a year, and King was still sometimes inscrutable even to me, but I was fairly certain I had the right read on this one.
Gutt and I slid into place and I immediately downed a scalding mouthful of FBI roast. But I just swallowed, desperate to suck down whatever caffeine sat before me. What did I need taste buds for, anyway?
Swift stood at the outer curve of the kidney-shaped table, right in front of the blank TV screen hanging on the wall. Next to him was Kimiko, our resident tech genius. Long, straight black hair, with a single streak of platinum blonde hanging down on her right. Her clothing was equally black, and she had her nearly perennial scowl across her lips. Then there was Casey, looking much more refreshed than when we'd delivered the gnomes to him the day before. Then King, and then Bancroft. He was the OPA's head researcher, and one of the humans with the greatest knowledge base about the Hidden Kingdoms…anywhere. Certainly in North America. He looked like the perfect, stereotypical egghead. Frizzy white hair, receding back from his forehead. Thick glasses. A little pudgy, and with fashion sense straight out of Leave it to Beaver.
Not even Wally and Eddie. Like, Ward, but after a bender.
The Office of Preternatural Affairs was a small department, both by virtue of its youth, but also because Agent Swift—and before him, Agent King—was a picky department head. That was actually a bit of a point of pride for me. He'd plucked me from complete counterterrorism obscurity for what turned out to be a pretty damn elite department of the FBI.
Sure, it meant my human ass was on the line against selkies and orcs and centaurs 24/7, and a good portion of FBI and local law enforcement liked to shit on me, but still. A bit of a point of pride. Just a small bit.
Once Gutt and I settled into place, Swift nodded and splayed his long, thin fingers out across the tabletop in front of him. "So, long story short, we have a Class-A preet under our protective custody, Ambassador Cyrex is struggling to get in contact with anyone in the Kingdoms and is likely going to have to cross and visit them in person, and we have no idea what the nature of her magic is at the moment, but she just about knocked Gutt out cold by existing in the same building as him. Sound like fun?"
King snorted. "Sounds like a Monday."
"Today's Thursday."
She shrugged. "My answer still stands. Sounds like a Monday."
Swift nodded. "What this means is that we'll be splitting off into shifts to watch over her until Cyrex gets word from the Kingdoms and they can take it over. S
he's got some folks after her who want to capture her, and since she's under a preternatural threat, that makes keeping her safe our job to handle."
"Do I need to go digging to try and find word about her, or do you really trust the Kingdoms to come through before she melts all the brains on the Eastern Seaboard?" Kimmy rolled her eyes. "Or should I be pretending I can't get into their systems?"
I raised an eyebrow at that. "You can get into the systems for Class-A containment? Any reason you didn't do that when we were staring down the barrel of the giant poison snake?"
She scoffed. "Because I couldn't back then. Believe it or not, Wonderhunk, I've been improving my computer systems." She feigned wide-eyed shock. "So am I digging or not?"
Swift nodded. "If you can get in there, be my guest. But it's absolutely necessary they not figure out you were there. We're strictly forbidden from interfering in their containment matters without prior approval."
"You know, I have been here for seven years, Swift. I know what I'm doing. I'll need either Oona or Rothiel to help me cover my tracks."
Oona and Rothiel were a pair of preets—an elf and a ghoul, respectively—who ran the OPA's research and development department. They didn't come out to work with us very often, mostly just doling out arms and tools when we needed them. But we were about to be stretched thin as it was, so I had a feeling we'd be seeing a lot more of them until Lenva's case wrapped up.
"Take Rothiel. Oona is next on shift with King to watch over our Class-A." Swift then turned to Gutt and I. "Anything to report that we should know about with her?"
Gutt nodded. "Dash and I were able to do a little bit of reconnaissance last night. Found out she's from Droshheim." He inclined his head slightly toward Kimmy. "So you should be able to narrow your search better."
"Well, that should pull her up pretty fucking fast. You actually helped."
Gutt smiled into her acerbic comment. "If I didn't help quite regularly, we'd all be dead."
