by RyFT Brand
Fortunately my little flower ward was easily distracted.
“Moxie, look,” I said and turned her in sight of the vessel of MirthMix7 in front of me. She set loose a bird-like chirp of delight, licked her lips and rubbed her pudgy belly. I let her go and she flew straight in, making a loud pop as she squeezed through the narrow neck. The vessel glowed with her golden light as loud slurps echoed from inside. This was good; Moxie would leave me alone for a bit and I didn’t really like mallow-made beverages.
“You’re going to break her heart one day, you know?” DJ said and took a swig from her bottle.
I said, “I know.”
“Eventually you break everyone’s heart,” Parry said.
“I know,” I said with an insulted rasp.
“Oh, I know you know,” Samuels said.
I held up my hands in surrender. “Okay, are we done with the Jazz attack here? Because I was fine sitting here all by my lonesome.”
“You weren’t totally alone, technically.” DJ tapped the pickle jar with her drink vessel like she was making a toast, sending a dozen glowing specks shooting through the goop then fading out like a fireworks display.
They all seemed intent on making me as uncomfortable as possible. “Yes, DJ, I’ve been bathing my magical healing stone in a solution made of a thousand suffering souls, I screwed up. I should have checked this gunk out years ago, I’m a very bad person, now how about you all leaving me alone again?”
My rant was broken by an incredibly loud burp that sang out from my drink vessel. Moxie’s head popped out of the bottle and she tried to pull herself out, but her belly, swollen full of the beverage, wouldn’t let her pass through the spout, so she crossed her arms on the rim, laid her head down, and settled in with a satisfied gleam on her face.
We laughed. We all laughed, even me. The release felt good. It lightened the room. Uncle came over and set a dark, wrinkled hand on my pasty-white forearm. “You want another MirthMix7?”
“Nah,” I said and shook my head. “I think I’m off enchanted drinks for a while.”
“Whatever, but I’m having another,” he said and walked for the door. He stopped, straddling the doorframe. “Now everyone behave yourselves in here while I’m gone, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll set up the vidarama set tonight.” He walked away.
“Vidarama,” Samuels said. “Does he think we’re kids?”
Parry sat up straighter. “I thought that sounded fun.”
Samuels turned his head away and said, “You would.”
Parry’s slim face bunched with angry lines. “Why are you even here, captain enforcer squad? Shouldn’t you be with your corps friends pretending to catch bad guys on the vid vision?”
“Parry, relax,” I said. “He’s only playing around.”
“Yeah, kid, relax, I didn’t mean anything by it.” Samuels reached out and gave Parry’s upper arm an ‘okay guy’ double pat. As he did the scarf covering his face slid off, revealing his visible muscles, tendons, veins, bones, and other assorted human internals.
“Ahh!” Parry went to leap back out of his chair, but only managed to tip it over, which he immediately collapsed into. He landed on his butt tangled between its legs.
“Whoa, settle down,” Samuels said, stood, and reached out to help my secretary up.
All Parry saw was a skinless face leaning for him. Kicking like he was in a tube floating in a swimming pool, he slid the chair across the floor it until he hit the wall.
Samuels looked at his gloved hand like there must be something gross on it, but there wasn’t. Then he looked at me. I motioned across my face with a finger.
Samuels, realizing his scarf had dropped off, turned his back to us and hurriedly got his covering back in place.
I hadn’t moved. DJ finished off her drink. Samuels turned back around. He raised his hands and let them slap against his thighs in a release of tension. “Sorry about that.” Then he reached toward Parry. “Here, let me help you up.”
Parry waved his hands. “No! No, no, I’m fine.” He leaned his head back at an awkward angle and crossed his legs at his ankles, which were sticking up in the air. “It’s really pretty comfortable.”
Samuels looked from Parry to me.
“Just sit down, he’s fine,” I said.
The inspector hesitated, and then took his seat. That’s when I noticed that he hadn’t touched his drink.
I reached across the table and yanked his scarf off. “Go on, enjoy your drink,” I said and dropped the scarf in a ball.
From behind the glasses that hid his fully exposed eyeballs, he glanced apprehensively from me to DJ.
DJ pursed her lips; her narrow eyes projected an air of disinterest. “Doesn’t bother me at all.”
I shrugged and adopted DJ’s air. “Be my guest.”
When Samuels smiled I could see his jawbones hinge and the muscles that controlled them draw back as blood surged. And when he tipped his head back to take a drink, I saw his throat expanding and contracting.
Okay, so DJ and I had both lied. Watching him was just about the most horrible thing I’d ever seen. But I felt at last partially responsible for the policeman’s condition. He had been helping me and Mickey the sasquatch protect my office during an attack by a cadre of goblins, bvorks, and three belmar magic users. Now in my defense, Inspector Samuels had broken into my office, but I should have been quicker, should have taken out the belmars straight off. One of the creepy little pucks managed to spout half a spell before I killed him. The result was that Samuels’s beautiful, brown skin had been turned completely translucent. Thus far he’d been able to conceal his condition, successfully avoiding questions that would lead us all, mainly me, into trouble with the wizards council, the major governing body on the inter-dimensionally conjoined planets called, Mirth. I’d been using my underground network to help Samuels find a counter spell, but thus far we hadn’t found a single being that even knew a spell that could have such an effect.
Samuels set down his vessel and, apparently feeling less self-conscious or more comfortable, whichever was more appropriate, removed his glasses exposing his eyeballs, and related muscles, nerves, capillaries, and other disturbing viscous. We humans are not pretty on this inside.
“So what are you doing here?” I asked him.
Samuels’s emotions had become impossible to read—no visible face—but I sensed he was feeling hurt and that was confusing. The inspector and I had had our moments in the past, but our relationship was a distant working one of very limited trust on both sides. He’d sworn to enforce the rules and I’d sworn to break them. I bucked the system and he was the system and that’s what I was comfortable with. I was starting to wonder if more than just his skin had changed.
He cleared his throat. “I have some information. And I wanted to see you.” He paused, his eyeballs turned down to the tabletop and I think he bit his lower lip, hard to tell as I couldn’t see it. Then he looked back up. “And I had nowhere else to go, looking like this.”
“Looking like what?” DJ asked like she was oblivious to his condition.
“Okay DJ, don’t overdue it,” I said.
DJ shot me a wink. What the heck? The little devil was intentionally lightening the moment. She too was changing in unexpected ways.
“What’s the information?” I asked.
He pulled a recordstone tablet out of his inside jacket pocket and set it on the table in front of me. Recordstone was a mallow infused mineral that could absorb and store psychic information. The information could then be read back with an attuned reading device, unless it had been locked.
“What’s this?”
“The file on the explosion that destroyed your office,” he said.
“Is it unlocked?” DJ asked.
“No.” Samuels shook his head. It was interesting how the veins on the side of his head bulged with the movement of blood as he did.
He caught me staring and I looked quickly to Parry, still feigning comfort in his awkward position on t
he floor. “Parry, see if you can get this file open.” Then I turned back to Samuels, who’d donned his big sunglasses again, thank goodness. “Give me the gist?”
“The file was off limits, even to me, and no one would tell me why. I do know that the explosion’s been officially labeled an unstable mallow accident. They’re charging you with smuggling unrefined mallow inside the city limits.”
“Oh goody, yet more bounty on my head.” I tapped my thumb into my chest. “This monster collector’s become the collected.” I felt my brow tighten further as my aggravation increased. “Wait; there was no unrefined mallow in my office. That means that either someone faked the spectrum signature, very difficult to do even for a wizard, or that someone high up in the system altered the records, someone high enough up to lock you out of the file.”
Inspector Samuels turned his palms up. “Was there a question in there?”
“So which was it? Who is setting me up here, a powerful wizard, or someone of high status in the system…or both?”
Samuels sighed. “I have no idea; I don’t even know how to find out. I have no access to the council. Heck, I don’t even have access to the cud demon that scrubs the council’s toilets.” He tapped a finger against the rectangular stone tablet. “No one will tell me who ordered the file locked. This thing that’s going on, whatever it is, is coming from higher up than I can access; maybe straight up and outside of the system.”
“Inspector Samuels,” I said, tilting my head at an inquisitive angle, “are you accusing
