by R. L. Naquin
Riley, stood over me, gray eyes twinkling. “You’re just going to run off and leave me at the party by myself?”
“I’ll be back,” I said. I scratched my upper thigh and sprang another hole. “Five minutes, I swear.” I tried to turn toward the house, but he held me in place.
“It seems rude to leave the party when you’re part of it. Don’t you think?”
While he talked, he ran soft fingertips up my sides. His thumbs moved over the ragged holes that exposed the sides of my breasts. Under any other circumstances, his light, teasing touch would ignite a fire in me and lead to sweaty, breathless things. This time all it did was cause the itching to feel like I’d caught a bad case of poison ivy on top of chicken pox after being doused in itching powder.
“Riley, I really have to go change.”
He kissed me. I melted into him, while his fingers traced a delicate line up my spine, causing new places to itch. Of their own volition, my arms curled around his neck, and my mouth welcomed his kiss. The rest of my body struggled for freedom to scratch. A low keening started in my throat.
Riley chuckled and let me go. “Let’s get you in the shower. I’ll scrub that stuff off your back and get you an antihistamine.”
I slapped him in the chest with my open palm. “Seriously? You were torturing me on purpose?”
He grinned and shrugged. “I’ll race you home.”
I returned his grin and bolted across the yard before he had a chance to move.
We took a bit longer than the promised five minutes. Riley’s fault. Showering alone takes a lot less time than showering with a helper. He did clean off every strand of spider web on me, and even took care of some places the webbing couldn’t have possibly gone.
He was quick, but thorough. After all, we did have a party to get back to.
Downtime alone was hard to come by these days. In the last month, we’d been so busy. Sure, we’d rescued a lot of Hidden from the Collector and her auction, but people were still missing.
We had families to reunite, wounds to tend, and dead to bury.
The auction we’d stopped hadn’t been the first, so we were in the process of setting up a missing Hidden network to try to work out who was remained out there.
Alma Dickson, the head of the Sausalito City Council had been keeping fairies in iron cages in her greenhouse. How many more Hidden were out there—caged or forced into servitude? I couldn’t go door-to-door all across America looking for them, but I could at least learn who we were searching for.
It was a start.
Of course, we were looking for a few humans, too. The Collector had taken all the other Aegises to care for her inventory of Hidden. When we defeated her, someone else took all the Aegises from right under our noses. Including my mother. This was more than my wish for other Aegises to share the burden of helping the Hidden.
I wanted Mom back.
I turned off the shower and the buzz of my phone vibrated across the bathroom sink. It stopped and Riley’s went off. We exchanged a worried glance and scrambled for our phones, both of us dripping on the tile and dangling our unused towels while we checked our messages.
In the short time we’d been otherwise engaged, I’d received four frantic voicemail messages, and Riley had three more. Bernice, the head of the Board of Hidden Affairs, needed our help.
So much for the party.
I dialed her number and put her on speaker so Riley could hear, too. And also so my hands were free. If there was a major problem, I didn’t relish the idea of hearing about it while I was naked and standing in a puddle of water.
Bernice answered on the first ring. “Zoey, hallelujah. I’m going nuts over here. I need help.”
That was a new one. I often called Bernice for advice or information. She would then try to convince me to move to her super-secure compound in Kansas, surrounded by barbed wire, miles of nothing as far as the eye could see, and probably some sort of supernatural mojo to keep out invaders. She wanted to keep me safe. The conversation had almost become a ritual between us—the price I paid to get her assistance on whatever new thing had cropped up. Not once had she called me for help.
“Riley’s listening too, Bernice. What do you need?” I did my best to sound professional and hoped like hell the acoustics in the bathroom didn’t give away our location. Nothing ruined a person’s street cred like conducting a business meeting near a toilet.
The woman’s stress leaked through the phone and washed over me in a tight wave. My shoulders tensed in response, and my heart pounded faster in my chest. As an empath, I tend to keep my defenses up so I don’t feel all the emotions from every person I come in contact with. At home, I don’t keep myself quite as guarded. After spending time in the shower with Riley, all my walls were down.
I couldn’t help Bernice with whatever her problem was if I couldn’t think past her emotional upheaval. I took a deep breath and rebuilt my barriers. My shoulders lost their tension.
“The goblin switchboard is lighting up with reports,” she said. “We have multiple Hidden sightings all across the country, and one of them is in your area.”
I frowned and looked at Riley. “Goblin switchboard?”
He shook his head.
Bernice grunted in frustration. “I can’t explain how it works right now, Zoey. If you’d come here for training like I’d asked you to a million times, you’d already know.”
Riley covered his mouth so his boss wouldn’t hear him laugh, and pointed, as if to make fun of me for getting in trouble.
I rolled my eyes, though I wasn’t sure if it was at his immaturity or her lecturing. “What do you mean, Hidden sightings, Bernice?” I refused to give her the satisfaction of an argument.
The first time I’d gone to the Board’s headquarters, Bernice almost didn’t let me leave. She’d had me locked up in a suite while her creepy golem automatons stalled for her and told me they’d let me know when Bernice had time to see me. So much had happened since then, our initial meeting seemed a bit ridiculous in retrospect. We knew each other now. I knew her limitations, and she knew I couldn’t be pushed around. Besides. I was the only active Aegis to the Hidden in the entire country right now. That meant all the supernatural creatures would have no one to go to for help if I ran off to the middle of the country and hid from danger.
“Sightings by humans.” Bernice sighed through the speaker, and some of her frustration dribbled through my filters. “It’s all unraveling, Zoey. Some of the Hidden are taking it into their heads to go on a walkabout. I need the two of you to go to San Francisco pronto. A member of the Hidden community is out in broad daylight parading in front of the public eye.”
I couldn’t imagine what kind of creature could get away with something like that. A djinn, for instance, looked human, so it was never an issue for my friend Kam to be out in public. Likewise, Darius, the mothman who worked with her, passed for human—at least during the day. No big deal. But if Maurice started doing the grocery shopping, that would be another matter. I shuddered at the thought of business-suited citizens with pitchforks and burning torches marching up my driveway.
Riley’s face smoothed into a more serious expression. “Do we know who it is or what sort of creature we’re dealing with?”
“No idea. People are reporting a monster, so it could be anything. Last report was from the Ghirardelli Square area. Just follow the screams, I suppose.”
“Then what?” I asked. “Are we supposed to tackle him and bring him in? I thought you had a department that covered this.”
Bernice went quiet for a moment. “Zoey, if the O.G.R.E.s were doing their jobs, you wouldn’t have had the Leprechaun Mafia knocking on your door last year.”
“Oh. Yeah. Okay.” I winced. I knew the local Oversight and General Rule Enforcement (O.G.R.E.) patrol had gone AWOL in Sacramento, allow
ing the leprechauns in the area to take their shady dealings on the road and into my town. I hadn’t realized all the O.G.R.E. patrols had wandered off from their duty stations. That meant nobody was policing the Hidden. And apparently, some of them didn’t want to stay hidden.
“Use your best judgment,” Bernice said. Weariness trickled through the phone, and her voice was smaller somehow. “If you think the creature is dangerous, I’ll get someone out there to pick him up as soon as I’ve got a team free. Otherwise, do what you can.”
I frowned. “You have teams?”
“A few freelancers, like your friends Darius and Kam. It’s not ideal, but when Iliandra Northrup died, I didn’t have anybody running the Covenant Enforcement Department. Art’s doing his best to get everything back in order, but until we identify who killed the rest of the board members, we can’t leave the compound. Putting the squads back together or creating new ones requires someone to go out in the field.”
I grunted. Darius was a freelance soul catcher. The last time I’d seen him, he and Kam rode off into the sunset together with a plan to train Kam to help him, attempt to find—and release—Hidden who’d been sold at the Collector’s auctions and, most importantly, look for clues as to where my mother and the other Aegises had been taken. The idea was they were already traveling as soul catchers. With luck, they’d find more than escaped souls. The fact that Bernice now had them rebuilding O.G.R.E. squads as well was news to me. It was also a testament to how shorthanded she was.
Riley, having dried himself, tucked his towel around his waist and straightened his spine, all business. “We’re on it, Bernice. On our way in five minutes.”
“Do whatever you have to do.” She paused, as if deciding how much more to tell us. “Just get whoever it is off the streets. If the general population knows about the Hidden, the Covenant will be broken and it’ll make our current troubles look like a bad hair day.”
The call blinked out on the display. “Well, that sounded dire. I guess we better get dressed,” I said, wrapping my head in a towel turban.
Riley already had his pants zipped and one arm in his shirt. “I’ll run out and let Maurice know where we went then meet you in the car.”
I nodded. “Tell Molly I’m sorry we’re missing the party.”
It was more like ten minutes before I stepped off the porch. I wore a pretty white sundress covered in cherries, and my low-heeled sandals had matching cherries on the straps. The purple fedora didn’t exactly match, but it was the first hat I’d grabbed to cram over my wet hair to avoid insta-frizz. My dark red curls would turn to a snarled, angry mass the minute one of us opened a window while we drove down the highway.
When in doubt, wear a hat.
When I stepped off the porch, Riley was already behind Mabel’s wheel with her engine running.
I frowned and ducked my head into the open window. “If we’re taking my SUV, why do you get to drive her?”
“Because I got dressed faster.”
“Why aren’t we taking your car?” I glanced over at his green sedan. “It’s less noticeable.”
“We’re taking yours because we have no idea what flavor of Hidden we’re picking up. We may need the extra space and the tinted windows.”
I pulled a face. I wasn’t over losing my VW Bug a month ago. A thunderbird had fallen from the sky right on top of it. Mabel was its replacement. I’d given in to peer pressure and my own sense of responsibility and bought something more suitable for conveying monsters and mythical creatures. I had nothing against Mabel, exactly. But I missed my Bug. And for the record, I didn’t name her—that was all Maurice.
The drive from Bolinas to San Francisco took about an hour, so whoever the problem child was had a good chance of getting gone before we could be in the area. I watched the rolling patchwork of hills on our way to the city. Going out on an assignment was a new experience for me.
In the last year, I’d discovered my empath abilities, met and tended to a host of fantastical creatures, and taken down an incubus, the Leprechaun Mafia and a crazy sorceress bitch. I’d also discovered that, like my mother, I was an Aegis—a protector and caretaker to the Hidden. We had no clues as to why every other Aegis, including my mother, had been kidnapped by someone with a twisted sense of humor and sloppy handwriting.
The kidnapper had left a childish note stuck to a ragdoll where my mother had last been seen. It said “She’s my mommy now. Come and find us, Aegis. Let’s play!” Not much to go on. Other than that, we had nothing. Riley had been to Mom’s house, searching for clues, but since the Collector had been the one to take her from there, he found no leads to the person who had her now.
Since I was the only Aegis, the Board of Hidden Affairs wanted me to sit tight, take care of any Hidden who appeared on my front porch and above all, stay safe.
But now, Bernice had me going out on an assignment. This nagged at me and made my stomach queasy. Before all the Aegises had been kidnapped, most of the board members had been murdered. We’d thought one of the missing board members had been a mole and was responsible for the gruesome deaths of his or her fellow members. With each body, the suspects narrowed, until the last board member’s body appeared about three months ago. Only Bernice and Art remained—and Art was a new addition at my suggestion. Up until last year, he’d been middle management and Riley’s boss. He hadn’t known about the Board’s problems until recently. And Bernice—well, you can’t fool an empath. Her surprise and grief were genuine. Whoever had killed the board members had come from the outside.
Apparently, Riley and I were now one of Bernice’s freelance teams. I found it exciting to get a chance to do something a little different, something out in the field. But it meant Bernice was getting desperate. My queasiness outweighed my excitement. The entire Hidden world was unraveling, and there weren’t many of us left to reknit it.
“So,” I said, tilting myself toward Riley in the car. “What’s this ‘Covenant’ thing? Bernice made it sound like the apocalypse was coming if we don’t sort this out.”
He took his eyes off the road for a second to shoot me a serious look. “You know about the First Story and how the Hidden came to be, right?”
I shrugged. “Sort of. Maurice gave me the gist of it.” I’d figured it was mostly something monsters told their kids at bedtime. Monster fairy tales. “When humans started telling stories, it sent out a spark of creativity that grew and evolved until the first Hidden was born.”
He nodded. “Something like that, yes. Each new story fed the spark a new bit of material which created—and continues to create over time—new forms of Hidden.”
“That’s why we’ve got chupacabra, right? Because that’s a fairly new story.”
“Exactly. But humans don’t do anything but start the idea of a Hidden. The Hidden grow and evolve on their own after that.”
I tucked one leg under myself, getting comfortable. “Okay. But there are plenty of things we tell stories about that I haven’t seen.”
Riley signaled and changed lanes to get around a pickup truck packed with furniture that looked like it could fall off and hit us any minute. He grinned at me. “Like sexy vampires?”
“Sure. Or even ugly ones. If everything is possible, why haven’t I seen any vampires or werewolves?”
“No zombies, either,” he said. “Those three creatures—and a few others—have something in common.”
“They’re all snappy dressers and blend in?”
He shook his head. “They all have the ability to infect humans and turn a human into one of them.”
I stared out the window at the passing cars while I thought about that. “So, where are they?”
“They have their own worlds. Like the demons and the djinn. They keep to themselves. Anything that feeds off of or can infect a human must, by Covenant law, live in a separate world.”
“In their case, the djinn are the vulnerable ones. Humans feed off of them, in a way.”
I nodded. Kam had been held prisoner for a very long time in a cramped, wooden box until we’d freed her from doing her master’s bidding. “So, this Covenant keeps the Hidden and Humans safe from each other.”
“Yes. Thousands of years ago, when humans had more magic than we have now, the shamans and elders and wise men of the various tribes came together with the leaders of all the existing types of Hidden. The demon queen and the king of the djinn worked with them to create other worlds, and to this day, they still control the portals that keep us all safe from each other. The Hidden who remained agreed to stay out of sight, and the humans agreed to form a secret government to care for them. That’s why the Board exists.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “We made a pact that they would stay undercover, and in exchange, we would govern them? That kind of sucks.”
“The Board does a lot more than make rules and enforce them. When it’s functioning, a lot of wonderful programs keep the Hidden safe, sheltered, well fed, and happy.”
I snorted. “Sounds like the humans are breaking the Covenant before the Hidden get a chance, considering how the Board has been decimated. Without the Board, we’re struggling to keep up our end of the bargain.”
“I’ve been worried about that myself. It’s a mess, but so far, the Covenant is holding from our end. I think that’s mostly due to you.”
I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable with the idea that I was holding back some mysterious apocalypse. “So, what happens if the Covenant is broken—either because we’re not taking care of the Hidden or because Hidden are exposing themselves to humans?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe all the portals will open and hot vampires will spill into the world, stealing all our girlfriends.”
