by A.M. Burns
20
Dusty's reaction time had always amazed me, but the speed at which he threw me down into the small nearby patch of lawn and covered me with his body was almost as frightening as the sound of the building we just left exploding behind us. It seemed a lot longer than the couple minutes that we lay there on the ground. As my breath came back to me, I felt a couple of pieces of shrapnel hit Dusty, but luckily none of them contained any silver. I waited until I was sure most of the immediate danger was over before shifting under his weight.
“Dude, I don't mind you laying on top of me, but we need to see if we can help,” I said when it had been a minute or so since I felt the last piece hit. “You okay up there?” I asked when he didn't immediately reply or move.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice shaky. “One of those pieces hit a bit harder than I thought it might. Give me a sec.”
“Where did it hit?” I was concerned. It wasn’t like Dusty to get slowed down by something like a bit of flying mortar.
“Lower back. Just kinda knocked the breath out of me for a minute there. I'll be okay.” He shifted slightly so that I could move out from under him.
“Let me look at that,” I said and moved to a seated position next to him. I pushed him gently face down on the grass, next to the large piece of brick and mortar that struck him. The back of his shirt was already torn, so I just ripped it a bit more to take a closer look. A long gash across his lower back was already mending, in a few minutes there would only be a red spot, within an hour, not a trace. Wer healing is an amazing thing.
“Just take it easy for a minute or two,” I said. “It could’ve been a lot worse.”
“It takes more than a bit of old building to slow me down,” his voice already a little stronger. He stretched a bit and groaned as the movement reached his lower back. “Okay another minute or so I think.”
My cell phone rang with Tiffany’s ring. I sat back in the grass next to Dusty and flipped it open.
“Are you two alright? The police bands are going nuts!” She sounded worried. I knew that as soon as she’d realized there was a problem, she’d probably checked on us magically. She would’ve felt Dusty’s injury and gotten worried.
“I’m fine and Dusty will be soon,” I explained. “We were outside the building when it blew and he shielded me from the debris, but he took a large piece of building to the back. He’s almost mended.”
“So what happened?” The tone of worry dropped from her voice, replaced by the cool investigator tone that she normally used.
“Not sure yet, we’d just left when the building exploded.” I glanced around as neighbors began to come out to see what happened. Behind us a large plume of dust rose up into the sky.
“Start checking for magical residue. There was some kind of magical shockwave that went off just as that building did. Seems to be centered nearby. It didn’t feel like the sort of thing that would’ve caused an explosion, but there may have been something in the building that reacted to it.”
If there’d been a magical shockwave, why had we not felt that as well as the explosion? Maybe Dusty had felt it and reacted by protecting me. I missed it due to flying through the air under my werewolf. Tiffany was close enough at the office to have felt it there. But what in the building had triggered the explosion since the explosion had just affected the single building? Something had to have been preset there so that when the shockwave triggered, it exploded.
“I’ll check the rubble for something that may have reacted to the shockwave.” I could hear sirens in the distance and Dusty groaned and sat up next to me. “How long until the authorities arrive? Can you get a hold of Paul and have him come over and smokescreen them while we do some digging?”
“The scanners are saying about two minutes before they get there. I’ll call Paul and see if he can meet you there.” I heard a soft beep on the line. “Shit that’s Carmine. I’ll call you back if she has anything interesting to say.” And she clicked off.
I turned to Dusty, he was unusually pale under his freckles. “You going to be alright?”
“Sure, get up, give me a hand up and we’ll start digging. You realize that the first thing the authorities are going to do is try to find survivors. “
I offered him a hand. “Yeah and if we’re helping with that, it’ll give us a chance to check for anything that could have set this off.”
I pulled him into my arms as he stood up, careful not to put pressure onto his healing lower back. His lips were warm and reassuring. The kiss was too short, but we didn’t have time for more than a quick one. Luckily, no one would shoot us for our little public display in the gay ghetto.
“This may take a little while. Tiffany should probably reschedule our other interviews for this evening if possible,” Dusty reminded me as we walked toward the pile of rubble that used to be an apartment building.
I pulled the phone out of my pocket and flipped it open. “Good point.” People from nearby were already converging on the scene beginning to dig through looking for people as I dialed.
“Okay, we get to bill Carmine for this,” Tiffany said, sounding almost cheerful. “She wants a full report from you ASAP on what happened over there. She sent the cleanup crew and they’re already telling the news media that it was a meth lab explosion. I’m about to start calling your other interviews for this afternoon and have them pushed back to either this evening or tomorrow. Anything else you need?”
“Nope, was calling about the interviews, just in case you forgot.” I loved her efficiency. Gods, I hoped she was always around to keep me organized. “So we’re going to start digging through the rubble.”
“Oh yeah, Paul will be there in about twenty,” she said as she clicked off on her end.
That left twenty minutes of dealing with the authorities without his help. Well twenty minutes isn’t that long, particularly in a disaster situation.
“There are still people alive in there,” Dusty said just loud enough for me to hear. “I’ll shift and be right back.”
Dusty took off down the nearby alley. We often used his wolf form to get us out of being noticed when doing things. It’s amazing how many people just think he’s a big German shepherd. Usually he posed as a seeing-eye dog while I pretended to be blind. Or like the thing we pulled with Reynaldo Reyes where he just thought Dusty was a loyal pet. Today he’d be a trained search-and-rescue dog. He came back wagging his tail with a silly look on his face as the first emergency vehicle, a large fire truck, came around the corner.
“Not to confuse things, but the smell of OD magic is really strong back down that alley,” he told me mentally as he pushed his head into my hand.
“Good, show me.” I really needed a break right now. This case was starting to get extremely irritating with its growing body count.
Dusty led me back behind one of the dumpsters that had been overturned by the explosion. “Its strongest here. Almost smells like a pixie, but their scent is faint. This one is not.”
Something similar to a pixie, but larger meant a fairy of some sort. I scanned the area, looking for other signs of a fairy of some sort. But how had a fairy caused a magical shockwave that could destroy an entire building? I realized that we were behind one of the bars and that a security camera was aimed into the alley. I pulled the phone back out. Tiffany answered before it even rang.
“Hey can you see about getting the security feed from the rear cameras over at Bobby’s Place? We think there may have been a fairy in the alley right at the time of the explosion.”
“Sure, Tech just got here, so I’ll have him check into it for me.”
“Why did Tech come by?” I thought they had finished with Magee’s computer.
“He brought me some lunch. Isn’t that sweet of him?” She almost giggled. Tiffany never giggled. I suppressed a shudder.
“Yeah sweet. Let me know if you get something.” I clicked off this time.
Dusty barked a come-over-here bark. I went over to where he had dug something out of the tra
sh from the fallen dumpster. It looked like a giant dragonfly wing. It was torn and singed, and some of the veins across the top of the wing were mangled. Someone had forcefully torn the wing off a rather large fairy.
“Any sign of the rest of it?” I poked around a bit more.
“None. Just the one wing.”
I pocketed the wing. I would give it to Carmine to have it run through the database of legal ODs and see if it was one that was allowed on this plane. Dusty and I searched the alley for a little while more but came up empty. We headed back toward the destroyed building.
Paul arrived while we were searching the alley. He was helping the others dig through the rubble. I could tell he realized we would be doing the search-and-rescue angle by his brief nod to us before he called out. “Search and rescue team over here.” He pointed where he’d been trying to move some of the bricks away from the former corner of the building. Dusty ran over and whined like the trained dog he pretended to be.
“I guess you know there are survivors?” Paul whispered to me as I set to work next to him.
“Yeah, we would’ve been here when you got back but we found a bit of evidence over there.” I nodded toward the alley. “Someone pulled a wing off a fairy.”
Paul looked dubious. “And that would cause this how?”
I used a bit of TK to help me lift a chunk of debris that was heavier than my physical muscles could handle, but not so big that it would attract attention. “Not sure yet, I’ve got Tiffany trying to get the security feed from Bobby’s Place. They had a camera pointed at where we found the wing.”
“But could a fairy have done this?” Paul lobbed a couple of bricks into the growing pile near the curb.
“Not under normal circumstances no, but it’s a bit of a lead.”
Dusty barked frantically as a hand was uncovered in the pile. Other workers came over to help dig it out. Paul and I worked in silence while others were too near for comfort. The hand turned out to belong to a young girl. She was alive, but her legs had been crushed. The first ambulance arrived as we lifted her free of the rubble.
Hours later, with two more survivors and five bodies, we found the remains of Xan Landron. It looked like his apartment had been ground zero for the explosion. Most of his body was gone. Dusty identified him for me by the smell of one hand that was somehow intact. The police would have to run a DNA analysis on him to make an official ID.
Around the hand was an odd circle of glitter that seemed to pulse with a magical light. I scooped up a little bit into one of the evidence vials I always carry in case of emergency. They were almost as handy as Ziploc® bags. Tiffany could get it analyzed, but my bet was on fairy dust.
“Well that accounts for everyone who lived in the building,” said a brawny police officer. “We are losing the light too. Boss wants to call it a day. We’ll have fresh team out here in the morning. Thanks for your help in finding the survivors.” He offer a hand to me as we moved through the rubble, past the front end loader that had shown up sometime in the middle of the afternoon to start removing the debris that we had gone through to make getting people out easier. His grip was strong and honest.
“Just happy we could be of some help,” I said with a weary smile. Dusty whined at my side.
“Sounds like he’s ready to go home too,” Paul said from my other side. Looking at his dust-covered face and clothes, I could just imagine what I looked like. I’d need a shower before heading out to any more interviews this evening. I only hoped I’d get through a couple of them without some kind of disaster striking.
