Deader Still

by Anton Strout

  “Whatever,” I said, and headed upstairs to find the Inspectre. He stood behind his dark oak monster of a desk, his hands resting lightly on top of two stacks of paperwork.

  “Close the door behind you, please?” he said, his voice concentrated yet quiet.

  As I shut the door, I couldn’t help but get that whole summoned-to-the-principal’s-office vibe. By the time Inspectre Quimbley gestured for me to have a seat in one of the big leather chairs opposite him, I felt like a third-grader.

  “I suppose you’re feeling like I dressed you down a little there,” the Inspectre said. He sat down himself and shifted one of the piles of paper crowding his desk out of the way so I could see him better.

  “A little, sir, yes.”

  “Perhaps you think I acted a little less enthused than you would have liked?” he asked.

  “The thought had struck me.”

  “I’ll let you do the mental legwork on this, son,” he said. He folded his hands on top of his desk. “Why do you think I reacted the way I did?”

  Away from the crowd, I hoped a cooler head would prevail, so I set my mind to putting myself in the Inspectre’s shoes. How would I have reacted if one of my agents had just made a bold and possibly terrifying accusation that would affect every other division in the Department?

  “Because . . . of the mixed company we were in?” I asked, piecing my thoughts together as they came.

  The Inspectre grinned. “Continue . . .”

  “Well,” I said after a slight hesitation, “there were members of every division on hand down there, including the Enchancellors. If you had blown your cool in front of all them . . . Well, I’m sure there was a lot at stake politically, all dependent on your handling of the situation.”

  He nodded in agreement. “I meant what I said in front of all them, Simon. The wheels of change and progress are indeed slow around here. We will be investigating this matter, but most likely it won’t be at the pace that either of us want.”

  “So we’re just supposed to sit here and wait it out while the Enchancellors send out interoffice memos and get all the right signatures lined up?”

  “I didn’t say that, either,” the Inspectre said, raising a finger. He gave me a wry smile mixed with a look of what I hoped was infinite patience. “If we’re dealing with vampires, it’s a big thing to mobilize troops and equipment for dealing with them. The Enchancellors answer to the city of New York and err on the side of being obsessively careful in these matters. You forget, though—you’re part of the Fraternal Order of Goodness. We have been around much longer than the Department and we answer only to ourselves. The Department rose up around us only because there was a need for us to interface with modern government, but F.O.G. allows you to work above and beyond the constraints of the Department in some capacities. In some cases, while the governmental red tape of the Department will take forever, the secret nature of F.O.G. will allow us to start moving forward more quickly. I believe that something of this caliber would be such a case. If vampires don’t count, frankly, I shudder to think what would.”

  “So is there something I can do to get the ball rolling on this?” I said, feeling a bit overwhelmed at the prospect.

  The Inspectre nodded. “Until the Enchancellors say the rest of the i’s are dotted, yes. I want you and Connor to continue looking into this on the sly, but do not, under any circumstances, put yourself in serious harm’s way.”

  I wanted to ask if it was okay to put myself in minor harm’s way, but stopped myself. I wasn’t about to get into what constituted the fine line between the two. Frankly, coming in to work at Other Division every day was, by definition, putting myself in harm’s way.

  “Now,” the Inspectre continued, “since this is technically Fraternal Order business, I’m putting you in charge of this.”

  “Over Connor?” I said, not wanting to outrank my mentor. It didn’t feel right.

  “He’s not part of the Order, son. He can assist you on this, but you have to be careful to keep Order business out of his ears. It’s a fine line between the D.E.A. and F.O.G., I know, but it’s up to you to walk it.”

  “Wait,” I said, raising my hands like I was waving back the idea. “Inspectre, please, you can’t. My partnership with him is already strained . . .”

  The Inspectre dropped his fatherly tone, dead serious.

  “Dammit, boy. When I first told you that you’d face severe challenges by being part of the Order, I wasn’t merely talking about the Things That Go Bump in the Night variety. Part of your responsibility is learning to handle others.”

  I sat silently, not wanting to say anything to exacerbate the situation.

  “Is this going to be an issue, son?” he asked.

  Of course it was going to be an issue. “No, sir.”

  “Good,” the Inspectre said, returning to his usual self. He began rummaging through one of the file folders on his desk. “I need you to keep the Order’s eye on things in this investigation, Simon, until the Enchancellors are ready to make a move. I’ll try to hurry along the process, but you can well imagine how long that might take.”

  After my three months of paperwork settling the case of the ghost of Irene Blatt and the whole Metropolitan Museum of Art debacle that came with it, I imagined it might take roughly an eon or two to light a fire under the right people in the Department. At the moment, though, I was powerless to do anything about it. Maybe I could talk to Davidson to speed things up downtown. That was, if Connor didn’t kill me for being put in charge of him on this.

  The Inspectre looked lost in thought as he went through the file in front of him. I realized he had moved on from our conversation.

  I backed toward the door, showing myself out. Just as I was about to close it gently behind me, the Inspectre spoke up again.

  “Oh, my boy,” he said, looking up from his paperwork.

  I pushed the door back open.

  “Sir?”

  The Inspectre raised his hand and stroked his handlebar mustache. “I think we should step up your combat training to meet Fraternal Order levels, you know, with all this vampiric activity going on. For now, I want to see you every day for Unorthodox Fighting Techniques. I’ll see to it personally, of course, so put aside some time starting later today, won’t you?”

  A ball of dread filled my stomach, but I nodded. More training most likely meant more danger in my near future, and that never filled me with the warm fuzzies. I gave a weak smile and closed the Inspectre’s door.

  I headed for the stairs, wondering how much I couldn’t tell Connor while moving forward with all this. If a scrub like me tried to pull rank on a mentor like him, I suspected he wouldn’t take it well, even if passing the Oubliette meant I was technically now his equal in the Department.

  5

  Fate, it seemed, had cut me some slack. When I returned to my desk, Connor wasn’t at his, so it looked like I was momentarily spared figuring out how to implement my new orders. Tension in my shoulders, which I hadn’t even realized was there, melted away, and I dropped into my seat feeling exhausted.

  The rest of the office had returned to normal, and the buzz of the hive activity was soothing to my ears. I hated being in this position. It was one thing to have been chosen for the Fraternal Order—that was beyond the scope of the work Connor and I did together. Holding sway over Connor in an official capacity after only six months with Other Division, though, would be an entirely different situation.

  For now I made the decision to keep Connor in the dark. Maybe I could handle the situation so that he never realized I was in charge. I was new to the art of deception, and the guilt was already eating at me. To compensate, I started thinking of ways to make it up to him.

  Then it hit me: his brother. When we had first started testing my power of psychometry, a beat-up Spider-Man PEZ Dispenser led to the tale of how his brother had vanished one summer at Cape Cod back when they were kids. Unfortunately, any follow-up had been pushed aside when the craziness wi
th cultist-rights leader Faisal Bane and occult bookstore owner turned paranormal drug czar Cyrus Mandalay ensued.

  But now I finally had a chance to get back on the ball with helping Connor, even if it was to ease my own guilty conscience. No time like the present for starting on the brother stuff.

  I glanced around the office before standing up and heading over to Connor’s side of the partners desk. It was marginally neater than mine. Instead of three-foot-high stacks of casework, he had only one-foot-high stacks. I could only aspire to such streamlined paper-stacking skills, but until I had Connor’s many years’ experience under my belt, I’d have to contend with my larger Leaning Towers of Paper.

  We had used the Spidey PEZ Dispenser several times since that early training session, and I knew he kept it in the desk somewhere. I sat down at it, excited at the prospect of helping out Connor with his missing brother, and not for a second feeling guilty about going through his desk. In the past six months, I had been over there hundreds of times to get forms, Post-its, and whatnot from him.

  I slid the desk drawers open, one by one. The usual assortment of crap was in them—Post-its, pens, a microcassette recorder, an assortment of half-empty vials, presumably for that ghost-capturing mixture he always had on him. In the bottom-left drawer, a clipped bundle of papers caught my eye and I pulled them out. Some of them were Xeroxes from the historical archives, but others were simply newspaper clippings or memos. The top article came from in-house and showed the archives’ heading. Underneath the heading was an article detailing the night I had dressed as Zorro at the Sectarians’ museum bust. I flipped to the next page. This copy of a file described the night I had assisted Connor with that rogue spirit in an alley near Washington Square, the very night Connor had become a White Stripe. I skipped all the way to the bottom of the pile and found that even the first entry was also about me—a welcome mention in the Department’s HR newsletter. Connor had kept all of it. Having found this emotional treasure trove made me feel a little awkward about going through his desk, even though my intentions were good. I stood up and shut the drawer. I couldn’t do this right now.

  I was both warmed by the discovery and ashamed by my behavior. Only when someone nearby spoke up did I snap out of it.

  “Lost?” Connor asked, half joking and half suspicious. I looked up and there he was, standing in the main aisle by our desks, still in his trench coat.

  “Umm, I was looking for a requisition form for getting myself a new cell phone,” I lied, patting his stacks of casework as if I had only been giving a cursory look at what was visible. “What with the old one melting in the Oubliette . . . I thought you might have a form.”

  Connor shrugged. “Not sure, kid. I’d check with the supply room. I think they have a twenty-pager you have to fill out, one of the kinds that still uses carbon paper, so your fingers should be good and purple by the time you’re done. And remember to press down firmly. I think it’s a 21-10, if I remember correctly. And you’ll have to get Jane’s signature on it as well.”

  “Jane?” I said, startled. “What for?”

  As if we were two sumo wrestlers sizing each other up, Connor territorially circled to his side of the desk and I went back to mine.

  “Well,” Connor said, slipping off his coat and sitting down, “technically, she’s the official offending witch for melting your cell phone, and the Department likes to keep records on that sort of thing.”

  Even though Jane had been taken under Wesker’s wing in Greater & Lesser Arcana, I hadn’t really thought of her as a witch. Until she had turned my phone into a smoldering mess, I hadn’t even known she had the ability to do such a thing. Now I knew differently. She was clearly dabbling in something powerful.

  “Where’d you run off to?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

  Connor grabbed about an inch of paperwork from the top of the pile in his in-box. He winced in faux pain and dropped the paperwork on his desk, flexing his hand.

  He sighed and said, “Couple of Faisal’s old followers were brought in and some of the White Stripes needed a hand getting them down to booking. Got a little rough.”

  I was shocked to hear the mention of Faisal Bane. “You mean the Sectarians are still operating?” I asked. “I had hoped we’d put them out of business.”

  Connor laughed and looked up at me.

  “Cultists don’t just go away because their public funding does, kid. The Department will be chasing down Sectarians long after you and I are both gone; that’s for sure.”

  I stood at my desk, feeling somewhat defeated.

  “So any victory we gain will always be undermined by a second, third, or even fourth wave of evil washing over this city. It never ends.”

  “Pretty much,” Connor said. “We’d be out of a day job if it did.”

  What it really meant was that the piles of paperwork sitting on my desk would just keep growing with each and every encounter.

  I decided to get out of there. If I went down to Supply, got the forms, and then headed over to Tome, Sweet Tome for Jane’s signature, I could at least start the requisitioning process for my new phone. With a day as shit-filled as this one, I’d take the small victories wherever I could get them.

  And then, of course, there were the vampires to find . . .

  6

  The guys down in Supply were thrilled for once I was only coming for a phone requisition and not for the usual assortment of odd equipment requests I had made over the past several months. Once I had the form in hand, I headed to the Upper West Side to Tome, Sweet Tome. After the day I’d had—almost dying in the Oubliette, working the convention show floor, confronting a shipful of bodies, everything back at the office—seeing Jane would be a welcome relief.

  Or so I thought. The front section of the store was unattended except for a few kids checking out the child-friendly section. Happy painted wizards and witches on the wall seemed to follow me with their eyes as I looked around the front of the store. I knew Jane had been doing a lot of exploratory work back in the Black Stacks, so I weaved my way through the shelves and teetering piles of books until I found the Stacks. As I approached the copper caged area, I could hear Jane’s voice. She was laughing. It was good to hear a little happiness for a change, and my mood brightened.

  Until I actually saw her.

  I had learned to be cautious when entering the Stacks, so I pushed the gate open all the way and entered slowly. Many of the books here had a mind all their own, but luckily none of them came flying off the shelves to attack me like they had when we chased Cyrus through here months ago. I found Jane two rows in—with Wesker. She was poring over a book with a smile on her face while Wesker looked over her shoulder, leaning too close for my liking and touching the small of her back. My heart always leapt when I saw her long blond hair, her beautiful features, and, of course, the low riders she was wearing, but not this time. I cleared my throat and the two of them turned in unison. Wesker, I noticed, dropped his hand from her back in a heartbeat. Jane’s eyes lit up and she snapped the book shut before running over to me. Her ponytail bobbed as she ran, and she barreled into me with such force that her hair flipped up on top of my head when she hugged me. I hugged her back, relishing the affection despite my discomfort.

  “Simon,” she said. “You’re okay!”

  “I told you he was alive,” Wesker said, sounding disappointed. He looked at me. “Could you please not hug the help?”

  “I’m here on official business,” I said. I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the form. “Jane has to sign off on whatever she did that melted my phone earlier today. They can’t replace it until I have all the signatures.”

  “Oh, by all means,” Wesker said, losing all traces of the good humor he had been in before I had interrupted his alone time with Jane. “Don’t let me stop you.”

  Jane grabbed the form and smoothed it out. She pulled a pen out from behind her ear and leaned up against the nearest bookcase.

  “Oh!” sh
e said. “I hear congratulations are in order on passing the Oubliette.”

  “Only on a technicality,” Wesker added.

  I looked at him and said, “If the damn thing hadn’t been tampered with . . .”

  “I bet that’s why they passed you,” Jane said. “Improvising under real danger like that!”

  “Not everyone who voted on it was in agreement,” Wesker added. “Calling Jane was cheating.”

  “Was not,” I said.

  “I wish I knew exactly what I did over the phone,” Jane said, taking a moment to sign the form I had brought.

  “Yes,” Wesker added. “So do I. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Since when are you a technomancer? You’re not authorized to be doing Greater Arcana yet.”