SS The Poop Thief (v5.0)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Most of the non-magical have no idea the power held in a single turd.

  Hell, most of the magical didn’t either.

  But the ones who did, well, they were all damn dangerous.

  And I’d already lost too much time.

  ***

  It seemed odd to call Mall Security at a time like this, but that was the first thing I did. Mine wasn’t the only store with magical creatures.

  If someone was stealing from me, then maybe he was stealing from the pet store down the way, the organ grinder monkey show just outside the food court, and the various holiday setups with their real Easter bunnies and Christmas reindeer and Halloween bats. Not to mention all the working familiars accompanying every single mage who walked into the place.

  I let Carmen talk to Security. She was young enough and naïve enough to think they were sexy. She had no idea that most of them were failed magical enforcers or inept warlocks who’d been demoted from city-wide security patrol to Enchantment Place.

  I stayed in the back room, bending a few rules because this was an emergency. Anyone who took that much poop had a plan. A big plan—or a need for a lot of power.

  At first, I figured this thief simply wanted the magical support of a familiar without actually getting a familiar. Magical crime blotters were full of minor poop thieves who stole rather than get a new familiar of their own. They’d mine someone else’s familiar, using the poop as a tool with which to obtain the magic, and no one would notice until that familiar got sick from putting out too much magical energy.

  Maybe what we had here was a more sophisticated version of the neighborhood poop snatcher.

  Which made Zhakeline a prime suspect.

  But Zhakeline’s magic had always been shaky at best, even when she had a familiar. That was why she looked so exotic and had so many affectations.

  She had to appeal to the civilians who think we’re all weird. She mostly sold her small magic services to them. If she predicted the future and was wrong or if she made a love potion that didn’t work, the civilian would simply shrug and think to himself Ah, well, magic doesn’t really work after all.

  But the magical, we know when someone can’t perform all of the spells in the year-one playbook. Zhakeline barely passed year one (charity on the part of the instructor) and shouldn’t have passed from that point on. But that happened during the years when telling a kid that she had failed was tantamount to murdering her (or so the parents thought) and Zhakeline got pushed from instructor to instructor without learning anything.

  Which was one of the many reasons I didn’t want to give her another familiar.

  And that was beside the point.

  The point was that Zhakeline, and mages like her—the ones who needed the magical power of familiar poop—didn’t have the ability to conduct a theft on this massive scale, at least not alone.

  And even if they tried, they’d be better off going to the back yard of a mage with a canine familiar. There was always a constant poop supply, and it provided enough power—consistent power (from the same source)—so that the thief might become a slightly less inept mage, for a while, anyway.

  Next I investigated my assistants. Most had no magical powers of their own, but had come from magical families. They knew that magic existed—and not in that hopeful I wish it were so way that a civilian had, but in a this is a business way that led them to peripheral jobs in the magical field.

  They worked hard, most had a love of animals, insects or reptiles, and they often had a specialty—whether it was cooking the right kind of pet food or calming a petulant hyena.

  I couldn’t believe any of the assistants would be doing something like this because they would have to be working for someone else.

  The nonmagical don’t gain magic just by wishing on a powerful piece of poop.

  I scanned records and employment histories. I scanned bank accounts (yes, that’s illegal, but remember—emergency. A few rules needed to be bent), cash stashes and (embarrassingly) the last 48 hours of their lives. (Which, viewed at the speed of an hour per every ten seconds, looked like silent movies watched at double fast-forward.)

  I saw nothing suspicious. And believe me, I knew what to look for.

  Although I wished I didn’t.

  ***

  You see, I got this job, not because I have a particular affinity with animals or I’m altruistic and love pairing the right mage with the right familiar.

  I got it because I have experience.

  I know how to look for mages heading dark or mages who should retire or mages who mistreat their magic (and hence their familiars). I know how to take care of these mages quietly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss.

  It didn’t used to be this way. In the past, places like Familiar Faces existed on side streets and had just a handful of creatures, few of them exotic. Only in the last few years have the mega stores come into existence at high-end malls like Enchantment Place.

  And even though we’re supervised by the rules of the mage gods like all other familiar stores, we’re run and subsidized by Homeland Security—Magical Branch.

  (Not everyone knows there’s a Homeland Security—Magical Branch, including the so-called “head” of Homeland Security. Hell, I even doubt the president knows. Why tell the person who’s going to be out in four or eight years one of the world’s most important secrets. Knowing this crew, they’d probably try to co-opt the Magical Branch into something dark. Better to keep quiet and protect us all.

  (Which I do. Most of the time.)

  My job here is to watch for exactly this kind of incursion. Technically, I’m supposed to report it, and then wait for the guys with badges to show up.

  But I didn’t wait for the guys with badges. I doubted we would have time.

  (And, truth be told, I did want the glory. I was demoted to this position [you guessed that already, right?] for asking too many questions and for the classic corporate mistake, proving that the boss was an idiot in front of his employees. I’m a government employee and as such can’t be fired without lots and lots of red tape [even in the magical world], so I was sent here, to Chicago where I grew up, to Enchantment Place where I have to put up with the likes of Zhakeline with a smile and a shrug and a rather pointed [and sometimes magically directed] suggestion.)

  I toyed with rewinding time in all of the habitats—another no-no, but it would have been protected under the Patriot Act, like most no-nos these days. But rewinding time takes time, time I didn’t really want to waste looking at creatures moping in their personal space.

  Instead, I did some old-fashioned police work.

  I went back out front where Carmen was still flirting with some generic security guard (and the mice were leaning over so far to watch that I was afraid one of them would fall down the poor man’s ill-fitting shirt) and beckoned the lioness, Fiona.

  She frowned at me, then rose slowly, stretched in that boneless way common to all cats, and padded through the portal ahead of me.

  When I got back to the back, she was sitting on her haunches and cleaning her ears, as if she had meant to join me all along.

  “We have a poop thief,” I said, “and I think you know who it is.”

  She methodically washed her left ear, then she started to lick her left paw in preparation for cleaning her right ear.

  “Fiona,” I said, “if I don’t solve this, something bad will happen. You might not get a home of any kind and none of the other familiars will be of use to anyone. You might all have to be put down.”

  I usually don’t use euphemisms, and Fiona knew it. But she didn’t know the reason that I used it this time.

  I couldn’t face killing all these wanna-be familiars. And it would be my job to do so. I’d get blamed for the theft(s), and I’d have to put down the creatures effected. It was the only way to negate the power of their poop.

  She put her newly cleaned paw down on the concrete floor. “You couldn’t ‘put us down.’” She used great sarcasm on the
phrase. “It would set the magical world back more than a hundred years. There wouldn’t be enough of us to help your precious mages perform their silly little spells.”

  “Which might be the point of this attack,” I said. “So tell me what you saw the last few days.”

  And why you never said a word, I almost added, but didn’t.

  “I’m not supposed to tell you anything. I’m not even supposed to talk with you.”

  Technically true. Familiars are only supposed to talk to their personal mages. But I get to hear and every one of them speak when they come into the store to make sure they really are familiars and not just plain old unmagical creatures looking for a free hand-out.

  But Fiona had spoken to me before, mostly sarcastic comments about the store patrons. I’d tried pairing her up with a few, but she always had an under-the-breath comment that convinced me she and that mage wouldn’t be a good match.

  “I haven’t seen anything,” she said.

  “What have you heard, then?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “The system is working just fine.”

  That sarcasm again, which lead me to believe she was leaving out a detail or two deliberately, hoping I would catch it.

  Damn lions. They’re just giant cats. They toy with everything.

  And at that moment, Fiona was toying with me.

  “But something’s bothering you,” I said.

  “Not me so much.” She picked up that clean right paw, turned it over, and examined the claws. “Roy.”

  Roy was the lion to her lioness. He wasn’t head of the pride because there was no pride. We knew better than to get an entire pride of lions into that small habitat. No one would ever be able to see their individual natures—and no mage was tough enough to get that many catly familiars.

  “What’s bothering Roy?” I asked.

  “Ask him.”

  “Fiona…”

  She nibbled on one of the claws, then set her paw down again. “There was—oh, let me see if I can find the phrase in your language—an overpowering scent of ammonia.”

  “Ammonia?”

  “And a very bright light.”

  “An explosion?” I asked. Fertilizer mixed with the right chemicals, including ammonia, created the same thing in both the magical and the non-magical world.

  A bomb.

  Only the magical bomb made of this kind of fertilizer didn’t just destroy lives and property, it also cut through dimensions.

  “It’s not an explosion yet,” she said. “He claims he has a sixth sense about things. Or did he say he can see the future? I forget exactly. But it was something like that.”

  “Or maybe he just knows something,” I snapped.

  “Or maybe he just knows something.” She sounded bored. “He does say that because he’s king of the jungle, the wanna-bes tell him things.”

  Which was the most annoying thing about Roy. He really believed that king of the jungle crap. Too much Kipling as a cub—or maybe too many viewings of the Lion King.

  “I should really send you back to the habitat until this is resolved,” I said to Fiona.

  She hacked like she had a hairball, a sound she (sort of) learned from me. She thought it was the equivalent of my very Chicago, very dismissive “ach.”

  “I’d rather be out front, watching the floor show,” she said.

  And I sent her back out there because I had a soft spot for Fiona. Technically, I don’t need a familiar. I have more than a thousand of them.

  But if I did need one, I’d pick Fiona.

  She knew it and she played on it all the damn time.

  I waited until she was through that little curtain of light before I stepped through the hidden door into the habitat area.

  It was always surprisingly quiet inside the habitat area. The first time I went in, I expected chirping birds and chittering monkeys and barking dogs—a cacophony of creature voices expressing displeasure or loneliness or sheer cussedness.

  Instead, the area was so quiet that I could hear myself breathe.

  It also had no smell—unless you counted that dry scent of air conditioning. The animal smells—from the pungent odor of penguins to the rancid scent of coyote—existed only in the individual habitat.

  Just like the noises did.

  If I went through the membrane on my left (and only I could go through those membranes—or someone I had approved, like the assistants), I would find myself in a cold dark cave that smelled of rodent and musty water. If I looked up, I’d see the twenty-seven bats currently in inventory.

  We were always understocked on bats. Mages, particularly young ones raised in Goth culture, wanted bats first, wolves second, and cats a distant third. I’d given up trying to tell those kids to get some imagination.

  I’d given up trying to tell the kids anything.

  If I went through the membrane on my right, I’d slid on polar ice. Here the ice caps weren’t melting. Here, my six polar bears happily fished and scampered and did all those things polar bears do—except that they didn’t attack me. They didn’t even bar their fangs at me.

  I stopped between the two membranes and frowned. Whoever took the poop hadn’t taken it from inside the habitats. It was simply too dangerous for the unapproved guest.

  Hell, it was often dangerous for the assistants. I’d had more than one assistant mauled by a creature that didn’t like the way he was looking at it.

  And the poop was not registered as collected either. So whoever had taken it had spelled it out between gathering and delivery into the outside system.

  I walked between dozens of habitats, trying to ignore the curious faces watching me.

  I did feel for the wanna-bes. They were like children in an old-fashioned orphans’ home. They hoped that someone would come to adopt them. They prayed that someone would come to adopt them. They were afraid that someone had come to adopt them.

  And the only way they would know was if I brought them out of the habitat to the front of the store. (Except in the case of the dangerous exotics or the biting/stinging insects. In those cases, the mage had to enter the habitat without fear. That rarely happened either.)

  Finally I got to the Serengeti Plain.

  Or what passed for it in Roy and Fiona’s habitat. It was kind of an amalgam of the best parts of a lion’s world minus the worst part. Lots of water, lots of space to run, lots of space to hide. A great deal of sunshine and never, ever any rain.

  I slipped through the membrane and, because of my past experience, paused.

  The first step into Roy’s world was overwhelming. The heat (about twenty degrees higher than I ever liked, even in the summer), the smell (giant cat mixed with dry grass and rotting meat from the latest kill), and the sunlight ( so bright that my best sunglasses were no match for it—and as usual, I had forgotten any sunglasses) all made for a heady first step into this habitat.

  More than one assistant had been so disoriented by the first step that Roy was able to tackle, stand on, and threaten the assistant in the first few seconds. After you’ve had several hundred pounds of lion standing on your chest, with his face inches from yours—so close you could see the pieces of raw meat still hanging from his fangs—you’d never want to go back into that habitat either.

  Unless you’re me, of course. I expected Roy to scare me that first time.

  I didn’t expect him to catch me off guard.

  So when he did, I congratulated him, told him he was quite impressive, and warned him that if he hurt a human he’d never graduate from wanna-be to familiar.

  And from that point on, he never jumped on me again.

  But he always snuck up on me.

  On this day, he wrapped his giant mouth around my calf. His teeth scraped against my skin, his hot breath moist and redolent of cat vomit. He’d been eating grass again. We were going to have change his diet.

  “Hey, Roy,” I said. “I hear you have a sixth sense.”

  He tightened his jaw just enough that the ed
ges of those sharp teeth would leave dents in my flesh—not quite bites, not quite bruises—for days. Then he licked the injured area—probably an apology, or maybe just a taste for salt (I was instant sweat any time I came into this place).

  Finally, he circled around me and climbed a nearby rock so that he would tower over me. If I weren’t so used to his power games, he’d make me nervous.

  “It’s not a sixth sense,” he said in an upperclass British accent. That accent had startled me when we were introduced. “So much as a finely honed sense of the possible.”

  “I see,” I said, because I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t even been certain he would talk to me, and he’d done so almost immediately.

  Which led me to believe the king of the jungle was more terrified than he wanted to admit.

  “You realize I am only speaking to you,” he said with an uncanny ability to read my mind (or maybe it was just that finely honed sense of what I might possibly be thinking), “because great evil is afoot, and I have no magical counterpart with which to fight it.”

  I almost said, It’s not your job to fight it, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to insult the poor beast. Instead, I said, “That’s precisely why I’m here. I figured you know what was going on.”

  “Bosh,” he said. “Fiona told you. She has a thing for you, you know.”

  “A thing?” I asked.

  “She wants to be your familiar.” He opened his mouth in a cat-grin. “She doesn’t understand—or perhaps she doesn’t believe—that you have hundreds of us and as such do not need her.”

  I nodded because I wasn’t sure what else to do. And because I was already thirsty. I’d forgotten not just my sunglasses but my bottle of water as well.

  “Well,” I said, “you do know what’s happening, right?”

  “Oh, bomb-making, dimension hopping, familiar murder—all the various possibilities.” He laid down and crossed his front paws as if none of that bothered him. “And just you here because you seem to believe that you can save the world all by your own small self.”