by Molly White
“That’s interesting!” Dani, the mayor’s aforementioned girlfriend, exclaimed. “My gift is sensitive to that sort of thing, too.”
Dani’s colorful, creative, and slightly snarky style was a considerable contrast from Sonja’s—form-fitting jeans with a crazy quilt inset to cover a hole in the knee, a necklace made from rainbow resin T-rex bones, and a t-shirt that featured a llama ringing a doorbell. It read, “Llama-llama-ding-dong.”
Dani continued. “I have dynakinesis, which is a fancy way of saying I can manipulate energies around me, like the energy coming off the rift. But I have to watch what I eat. The fewer processed foods and artificial sweeteners, the better. No coffee.” She paused to choose a slice of apple caramel pie from Sonja’s careful presentation. “But I give myself permission to eat pie, because otherwise, I might be a threat to myself and others.”
“Very sensible. Also, are we really eating pie at nine in the morning?” Cordelia asked.
“Pie is pretty much an all-day food in Mystic Bayou,” Sonja told Cordelia, who claimed a piece of pumpkin bourbon. Now that she wasn’t overwhelmed by the Halloween crowd, Cordelia could feel Dani’s gift radiating off of her, a sort of mental glow. She seemed happy and balanced in a way Cordelia couldn’t even dream of for herself. But it was nice to bask in that light.
“I’ll make sure I stock decaf tea for you in the future.” For her part, Sonja took this discussion of psychic powers and pie in stride, like she seemed to take most things about their extraordinary surroundings. She didn’t have a gift that Cordelia could sense, but she shared that same settled happiness. Maybe it was something in the bayou water? Maybe if Cordelia stayed there long enough, she would achieve that aura of satisfied peace.
Cordelia took a bite of pumpkin custard and flaky crust and moaned indecently. This was the best pie she’d ever tasted. It was everything you’d hope a dessert could be—rich and sweet, without being too sweet, spicy and buttery. If her mother had ever baked, Cordelia would have hoped it would taste like this. A warm comforting weight slid down into her belly, centering her in this room and her task at hand. She would find the baker of this pie and offer them all of her money.
Rather than being offended by her pornographic pastry responses, Dani and Sonja just grinned in unison.
“Siobhan’s pies do that to everybody,” Sonja assured her.
Dani leaned forward, an eager expression on her face. “So, I’ve never been able to ask Miss Bonita about her gift, because, well, she’s a terrible gossip and I’m afraid anything I say to her or anything she sees will be repeated to everyone in Mystic Bayou.”
Cordelia frowned. “Miss Bonita?”
Sonja slid gracefully into one of the comfortable wingback chairs in front of Jillian’s desk. “Our local postmaster has a similar gift to yours, but her abilities aren’t nearly as strong.”
“Really?” asked Cordelia. “You didn’t consider asking her to consult on the artifact?”
“Jillian didn’t feel right asking a civilian to take on what amounts to hazardous duty,” Sonja said. “This is the League’s mess to fix…since technically, factions within the League have been surreptitiously making the rift worse since we arrived.”
Cordelia’s mouth dropped open. “That…was not mentioned in my assignment briefing.”
“I should really let Jillian cover it,” Sonja said, fondly. “I tend to over-summarize, where she’ll have bullet points and subpoints, and probably a reading list.”
“There will be homework. Jillian is really sneaky about making you learn stuff without you realizing it, but ultimately, you’re going to be a better, more well-rounded person, so you might as well just go with it,” Dani said. “So, how does your gift work? I mean, with mine, I have to do a lot of visualizing and hand-waving to get the energy to bend to my will. But you—seeing everything that you see has to be scary and fascinating and weird all at the same time. When you touch something, does whatever you see show up like a movie in your head?”
Cordelia quirked her lip. “It sounds like you have to actively engage to work your gift, but I’m surrounded by mine all the time. It’s like I’m a big exposed nerve, always open to seeing something, because our thoughts and our emotions leave an echo on the things we touch, the walls around us, the ground we walk on. The bigger and louder those emotions, the stronger that echo. And if I touch something or someone or, if I’m really unlucky, walk into a room where the echo is particularly strong, then all of a sudden I’m in an unwanted virtual reality experience, the full three hundred and sixty degrees.” She paused to take a bite of pie. “I’m seeing it from the perspective of the person who left that echo, everything they felt and intended and thought. It can be really overwhelming, particularly if the memory is negative, but in a room like this, where I feel like most of the echoes are positive—except for something involving blue lava and the…wastebasket—it’s not all that uncomfortable.”
“That’s fascinating. Would you mind sitting down with me sometime for an interview?” Jillian asked. “I’m still putting together a cross-section study of all the different types of magic found in the bayou, including the League employees.”
Cordelia looked up to see Brendan and Jillian standing in the doorway. Brendan was wearing very dark sunglasses, which he pushed on top of his head to rest in his hair. While Jillian beamed happily and assumed her seat behind her desk, Brendan stared at Cordelia with concern. She assumed that he’d heard her description. Was he concerned because her gift was similar to his? Was this a professional insecurity thing? She certainly hoped not—and not just because she would be very disappointed in a backward attitude from someone she found so interesting—but because it was just tiresome. She’d had more than enough of that during her days with the carnival. She expected much better in a professional setting, even if those professionals were shifters and psychics and whatever the hell Brendan was.
Even now, the way he stared at her, like he was trying to memorize her, was unnerving. What was he? Why couldn’t she feel anything when she touched him? How were they going to work together if he was a blank slate to her? She’d never worked with a partner before. Artifacts were left in the wall-mounted storage boxes in her DC office each morning. She examined them, wrote reports, returned them to their boxes, and then new artifacts appeared the next morning. Even her supervisor primarily contacted her through email.
The novelty of not being able to read him was wearing off and she was starting to get annoyed—and yet even more annoyed that Brendan appeared to be drinking a double-extra-large coffee that smelled like heaven in a cup. Just because she shouldn’t have caffeine didn’t mean she wouldn’t French kiss that man just to get the sensation of having a cup by proxy.
“Sweetie, we’ve talked about the academic lurking,” Sonja sighed as Jillian waved Brendan through the door. “It’s creepy, even if it’s in the name of science.”
“I would knock, but it is my office,” Jillian said airily. “Sorry I’m late. I was with the department heads. As usual, they were…talkative.”
“And she’s being too polite to point out that I’m still struggling with the time difference,” Brendan noted, sitting in the only seat left empty and taking a long drink from his travel cup.
“It’s fine today,” Jillian assured him. “In a few weeks, not so much, but you deserve to take a beat on your first day.”
“Is the sun always so…bright, here?” he asked, hooking the sunglasses into the collar of his dark gray dress shirt.
“Afraid so,” Sonja told him. “But we should be getting some rain next week.”
“You’re lovely for humoring me,” he told her.
“Now, since the three of you are the happy few League employees who will interact directly with the rift and the artifact, I thought it was important for you to meet at the very start of Brendan and Cordelia’s tenure,” Jillian said. “Normally, we would introduce you at a staff meeting involving the department heads, but I thought that might make you
uncomfortable. Also, I thought it would be a kindness to spare you Adam McTeague’s bragging about how he has single-handedly turned the tide for southern Louisiana’s economy. But, honestly, Dani’s work is the most pertinent to yours. She’s been working with the rift for several months now, but unfortunately, outside forces have ripped it open even wider than it was before I showed up.”
Brendan frowned. “Outside forces?”
“Unfortunately, that’s an aspect of the situation we’ve had to leave out of the reports. The rift is being sabotaged. Just after Dani arrived, it became apparent that someone was undoing her repair work. It was a League employee with a similar talent to Dani who claimed to be working for a supernatural group trying to create a New World Order, supervillain crazy speech, blah blah blah. At first, we thought it was a group outside the rift trying to cause trouble. And then, earlier this month, another League employee spent months redirecting League money to fund his search for this artifact. Cole Lydon claimed that he was working with a faction inside the League to sabotage the rift in some strange effort to make more humans into remade magique. He said they were tired of waiting around for humans to be ready to accept magique into their midst, and they’re trying to force the issue. They figure if everybody is magique, that will eliminate all the anxiety from the equation.”
“Like the first X-Men movie?” Brendan asked.
“That’s what I said!” Sonja exclaimed, looking pleased. “Also, for the record, the rift doesn’t change everybody. Some of us, with clinically quantifiable stubborn DNA, manage to spend time near the rift without changing at all.”
“That’s a relief,” Brendan muttered.
Jillian opened a file from her desk and slid a pile of printed photos across her desk. Cordelia and Brendan both took a few, studying the images of a black stone casket, carved with symbols she didn’t recognize. “Cole Lydon had a telekinetic magique pull that out of the swamp. She tried to break it open—because, apparently, that’s what crazy people do when they find an ancient important artifact of unknown origin and power.
Sonja smiled at her fondly. “Sweetie, you’re wandering off-topic.”
Jillian pressed her lips into a thin line. “Point taken. The repercussions were that the rift got much bigger. And the psychic was turned into dust. We can’t see inside with x-rays or known scanning technologies because, well, it won’t let us. We have no idea how old it is, and taking scrapings off of it to run tests…seemed to make it angry. So we’re not going to do that again. We thought maybe it’s Meso-American, but our experts say the symbols carved into it don’t match anything they’ve seen, and it seemed much older than any culture they’ve documented. Also, the obsidian doesn’t match samples from Central or South America. Testing and examination have been complicated because anyone who touches it directly…well, Will probably has a medical term that sounds more intelligent than ‘lots and lots of seizures,’ but here we are.”
“How did you move it if you can’t touch it?”
“One of our employees is a shurale. I’ll spare you the terrifying backstory but basically, she’s technically dead. Because her body doesn’t work like ours, the artifact didn’t affect her blood pressure, her cognitive functions, respiratory systems, and so on.”
“And trust me when I say when living people get near the rift or the casket, all of those systems and more get all scrambled to hell,” Sonja said. “I nearly died and I spent a grand total of thirty minutes around them. While the employee in question has been very helpful in moving the artifact safely, she has other duties. We need someone devoted to this full-time, which is why Brendan was recruited.”
“I’m sorry,” said Cordelia. “I’m struggling to make the connection between this other employee and Brendan.”
“I know it’s considered rude to be so blunt about this sort of thing,” said Jillian. “But Brendan is a banshee—which also puts him in the realm of technically dead, so he can handle it safely while Cordelia gets her readings. We just need you to examine it, find out what it wants. Dani said it wants something. We would be willing to open negotiations if it would just stop ripping our dimension apart.”
“And if we can’t convince it to play ball? What if it wants something we don’t want to give?” Cordelia asked.
Jillian jerked her shoulders. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We just need all of the information we can get from it. How old it is. Where it came from. What is it? Maybe that would help us determine how would anyone at the League have any idea what it is and what they want with it? And more importantly, what’s their plan?”
“That’s a lot of information,” Cordelia said, swallowing heavily.
“It is. To be clear, I don’t want you touching it directly, Cordelia, unless it’s absolutely necessary. And even then, I want to review multiple safety precautions beforehand. And if something does happen while you’re reading the artifact, it will be Brendan’s job to get you to safety.” Jillian reached across the desk as if she was going to pat Cordelia’s hand, and then drew her arm back. And while the gesture might have seemed awkward, Cordelia appreciated her thoughtfulness. Cordelia had rarely been in the position of having someone offer that comfort, much less take into consideration how uncomfortable the contact would be. Between that and instructions meant to prioritize Cordelia’s safety over deadlines, her anxiety began to ease a bit.
“This is a high-priority project and time is of the essence. But I want you to take your time, approach it slowly and deliberately. I want you fully rested, eating regular nutritious meals and all that responsible adult stuff. We don’t want you hurting yourselves…and we also don’t want to make the rift worse or open the box and accidentally summon Chtulhu or something.”
Cordelia felt like her brain had stuck on a blue screen of computer death. So much information to process at once. The artifact was a mystery box of doom that she might not be able to handle without keeling over. The League was being attacked from within. And Brendan was dead. She was just sitting there with her mouth hanging open, trying to make coherent human sounds.
Suddenly, the cool skin and lack of sweat made sense. Was that why Cordelia couldn’t feel anything from him? Clearly, his brain was functional, and he had nervous systems in play, but maybe his emotions just didn’t register in a way she could read? She didn’t know how to feel about the fact that she’d been ogling a dead man the night before. Did that make her a deviant?
“While we’re on the subject, what sort of readings will Cordelia be taking?” Brendan asked. “Do I need to worry about radiation or some such?”
“I’m a touch-know,” Cordelia asked. “Sometimes, when significant events happen around objects, those objects hold onto emotional vibrations, and those vibrations create images in my head.”
Brendan’s expression was skeptical. “I’ve never met a psychic. I’ve never really bought into that sort of nonsense.”
“Psychic talent is nonsense…to a banshee?” Cordelia asked.
“Well, there’s foreseeing a fella’s death and then there’s claiming to be able to pick the winning lotto numbers because you saw them in a dream,” Brendan shot back.
She rolled her eyes. “Well, then I’m not sharing any winning lotto numbers with you.”
“I’ll have to live with that,” Brendan said, winking at her.
Jillian snickered. “So, those NDAs you signed? Take them very seriously. Do not discuss the exact nature of your work with anyone outside this room. Do not discuss the artifact with anyone outside this room. I live in this town. The people I love live in this town. For your own protection, do not do anything that puts those people in danger, or you will deal with the consequences.”
Jillian smiled sweetly and snapped her fingers, creating a rather large flame. Dani and Sonja didn’t react at all, so it seemed that they were used to this sort of casually issued threat. Cordelia added “my new boss can create fireballs with her hands” to the list of things she had to mentally process.
> “But why are you telling us all this?” Brendan asked. “For all you know, we’re working with those League factions to help undermine you.”
Sonja looked a bit sheepish. “Actually no, I know that you’re not, because Siobhan put a teeny tiny little enchantment on the pie so that you would blurt out anything you knew about the rift and the artifact when it came up in conversation.”
“What?!” Cordelia cried.
First Brendan was dead and now people were messing with her dessert? Was nothing sacred?
“It’s not personal, it’s just magic in the name of self-preservation,” Jillian said gently.
“People tend to take it personally when you mess with their sweets,” Dani reminded her.
“I didn’t eat any pie,” Brendan noted.
“Where did you get your coffee this morning?” Jillian asked, looking pointedly at the to-go cup that read, “Bathtilda’s Pie Shop, Home of the World’s Best Chocolate Rhubarb Pie.”
Brendan’s mouth dropped open. “Of all the sneaky, underhanded—”
“We had to be sure,” Jillian said, shrugging. “Now we know we can trust you, at least with this much information. And that’s a considerable comfort to me. Sonja, is there anything else I need to go over?”
“The acting executive director thing?” Sonja suggested.
“Oh, right, I am only acting director for now. Due to the above-average amount of sabotage associated with this project and the fact that I am pregnant with an enormous metal egg—”
Both Brendan and Cordelia winced at the visual.
“The League is sending a new executive director to take over the research village. I will stay on in my community liaison position while A.J. Lancaster takes on more responsibilities. But he’s agreed to let me continue to oversee this particular operation because I understand the full scope of the problem. So, you three will have a new boss, but you’ll still report to me.”
