Wiretaps & Whiskers (The Faerie Files Book 1)

by Emigh Cannaday

  Wiretaps & Whiskers

  The Faerie Files Book 1

  Emigh Cannaday

  Copyright © 2021 Emigh Cannaday

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. I mean, c’mon, y’all. Cats will definitely let you know you how they feel, but they can’t speak with words. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Cover design by Fantasy Book Design.

  To Kel Carpenter, the most badass babe I know.

  Thanks for being such an amazing friend.

  In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods.

  They have not forgotten this.

  — Terry Pratchett

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. Elena

  2. Logan

  3. Logan

  4. Elena

  5. Logan

  6. Elena

  7. Logan

  8. Elena

  9. Logan

  10. Elena

  11. Logan

  12. Elena

  13. Elena

  14. Logan

  15. Elena

  16. Logan

  17. Elena

  18. Logan

  19. Elena

  20. Logan

  21. Elena

  22. Logan

  23. Elena

  24. Logan

  25. Elena

  26. Logan

  27. Elena

  28. Logan

  29. Elena

  30. Logan

  31. Elena

  32. Logan

  33. Elena

  34. Logan

  35. Elena

  A Quick Word…

  Also by Emigh Cannaday

  About the Author

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  1

  Elena

  “Watch out. Harris is on the warpath,” Allan warned me as I swiped my FBI badge and walked into the office of the Occult Crimes Division. “You might want to . . . ” He hesitated long enough to give me a blatantly judgmental once-over. Was it my uncombed hot pink hair? I was on day three of dry shampoo. Was it the slept-in makeup look I was rocking today? My ripped up black jeans? Or was it my wrinkled Arctic Monkeys t-shirt that smelled like the dirty laundry bin I’d pulled it out of?

  Probably all of the above.

  Compared to the neutral ocean of boring gray and navy business suits that surrounded me, I stuck out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, I’d worked at the OCD long enough that nobody gave me a second look anymore. I think they’d given up on expecting me to conform. Allan pursed his lips as if coming to the same realization. “Just stay out of his way. He’s in a mood.”

  “Thanks for the heads up,” I said, sliding into my cubicle. I took a chug of my Mountain Dew and spun around in my chair, taking a look around my workspace. Even by my standards, it was a disaster. Pulling open the top drawer of my desk, I rifled through piles of papers and broken pens until I found a bag of Sour Patch Kids. As I crammed a few into my mouth and washed them down with another drink of soda, I was aware of Allan still hovering nearby, watching me with a curious expression.

  He’d started as an intern at the end of last summer and had somehow never left the office. Nobody knew quite why he was still hanging around, or what he did exactly, aside from gossip. He was a prissy little neat freak and he had shit on everyone, which is why I never went out for drinks with him after work. I looked up to see his nose poking down over the cubicle wall.

  “What are you looking at?” I frowned.

  “All the candy on your desk,” he said, clearly disapproving of my life choices. “It’s like a piñata factory exploded. Where do you even put it all? You’re skinny as a rail.”

  “I dunno,” I shrugged. “Faerie genetics?”

  “You know, if you didn’t do that weird magic spark thing with your hands, I’d never believe you weren’t human like everybody else.”

  “That’s kind of the point of being undercover.”

  I’d been living up on the surface since I was a little kid. Only one person alive knew what—and who—I really was; my boss, Chief Harris. To everyone else, I looked like a normal human. Well . . . as normal as a human with long hot pink hair can be.

  Fine. So I ate an alarming amount of sugary junk food and I thought cake and gummy worms were two of the basic food groups. Sure, I had the ability to understand animals, to talk to the forest, to feel the pain of plants, and to hear what the music of an oak tree sounded like. And maybe my eyes were a peculiar shade of green no one had seen before, and maybe my skin was a bit more shimmery than it should be. But unless you knew me, I mean really knew me, I was just like everyone else.

  Kinda . . .

  “How do you get any protein?” he pestered. “Aren’t you worried about your health?”

  Shutting the desk drawer, I slowly spun around in my chair to face him, taking care to keep my face completely deadpan.

  “Some people like coffee. I like sugar. Is there a reason why my food choices are affecting you?”

  Allan’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

  “Awesome. Now be a doll and fuck off, would you? I have work to do.”

  He disappeared back over the wall like a cat that had been sprayed with a squirt gun. Finally alone, I was free to log into my computer and start my day. Sometimes it felt as though the FBI was more interested in pen-pushing than actual fieldwork. And that sure as shit wasn’t what I’d agreed to when I joined the bureau. For better or for worse, the very moment I loaded up my first spreadsheet, a voice boomed across the room.

  “Agent Rivera!”

  I craned my neck to look over the cubicles. I could see Chief Harris standing in the doorway to his office staring right at me. Not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing me race to him like a lapdog, I took my time standing up and slowly ambled my way over to him.

  “Late night again?” he asked, looking me up and down.

  Everyone in the building was scared of him. Everyone except me.

  The guy might have towered over me at six-foot-three with the personality and looks of a grizzly bear, but I’d seen things more terrifying than his worst nightmares. I’d seen the things that go bump in the night—and laughed in their face. Well . . . most of the time. Sometimes they hit back, although I was still standing. As far as some lowly human in a suit was concerned, I wasn’t scared of shit. And I think he knew it.

  “Yeah, I had a late night.”

  Harris lingered in his doorway for a moment as though he was waiting for me to apologize for my unkempt appearance, but I just stared at him impatiently and
crossed my arms. I wasn’t here for decoration. I was here to get shit done. And unlike most of my coworkers, the FBI had recruited me . . . not the other way around.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t just call me down here to talk about my night,” I said, already bored.

  “No. You better come inside.”

  Ushering me into his office, he closed the door behind me and to my surprise, closed the blinds.

  Shit.

  This must be serious. He hardly ever closed his blinds.

  Harris was a man of ritual. He left the door open when he wanted a quick word, and he left the blinds open when he was having a regular meeting. But closed blinds? I’d only seen him do that when the bigwigs from the Pentagon showed up.

  “Please, take a seat,” he said, waving his hand over to the chair across from his desk.

  I didn’t like to sit in other people’s spaces. It made me feel small, almost vulnerable. But the expression on Harris’ face told me something was deeply wrong and he had no time for my games. I lowered myself into the seat and watched as he reached into his desk for a bottle of Scotch.

  “Sir, isn’t it a bit early for a drink?”

  He glowered at me in response.

  “Maybe not,” I added with a fake smile.

  “Are you joining me? After what I’m about to tell you I think you’ll need it.”

  “Sure.”

  It felt surreal to watch him hand me a glass of Scotch. Not just because it was nine in the morning, but because it almost felt like we were friends. Were we bonding now? Did this mean I was in his good graces? Was he going to expect to be invited to dinner to discuss work?

  “So what’s the news?” I asked him. “I’m guessing you didn’t call me in here just for your usual run-of-the-mill case.”

  “No,” he said. “It most definitely isn’t run-of-the-mill. And you’re not one of my run-of-the-mill agents. Which is why you were the first person I thought of when I received a call in the middle of the night from a concerned sheriff in Tennessee.”

  He sat back in his seat and took a sip of his drink, swirling it around his mouth for a moment. He frowned into space as though he wasn’t quite sure where to begin.

  “What’s the case, sir?” I prodded.

  “Kids,” he began. “They’re going missing right and left.”

  His words hit me with a deep uneasiness that wormed its way up from my gut. Missing persons cases were par for the course, but kids? Only sick fuckers preyed on kids. My eyes flicked over to the photo on his desk, where his two chubby-cheeked kids were cuddling the family dog. No wonder this case had him all torn up.

  “It started in the Smoky Mountains, but now the situation has reached a crisis point.”

  “Crisis point?”

  “And beyond,” he replied. “The Smokies are just the tip of the iceberg. The phenomenon is spreading, mostly in the Rocky Mountain states. We even have reports south of the border in the Sierra Madres. Children are vanishing under almost identical circumstances.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, kids go missing and fall victim to crimes every day. It’s tragic, but it’s not a single phenomenon. The way you’re talking about this would suggest it’s one crime taking place. All the children going missing because of the same cause.” I crossed my legs and leaned back into my chair. “If it’s happening in Mexico, it might be the cartels.”

  Harris sighed as if I should’ve known better than to suggest such a thing.

  “Rivera, I’m not talking about your standard abduction cases!”

  The anger in his voice stunned me. Not because he was practically shouting at me. He was always shouting at everybody. I could see beyond his anger, and he wasn’t just angry for the sake of it. He was mad because he cared. It wasn’t just testosterone-fueled anger gushing out of an alpha male. This was a paternal sort of passion that set his eyes ablaze with the need to find those kids.

  “You need to understand something,” he growled. “These disappearances don’t fit any mold of the expected child abductions we’re used to. You know, the ones taken by sexual predators, random wackjobs and human traffickers. Even the cartels don’t want kids this young. This is something different.”

  Springing from his seat, he ventured over to his filing cabinet and pulled out a beige file. Slamming it down on his desk, he pointed at what looked like an ordinary spreadsheet. But as I leaned forward, I saw the statistics it held were far from ordinary.

  “These are for the last twelve months alone,” he said, stabbing his index finger into the page. “Last November, seventeen children vanished in the Appalachians alone. In December, twenty-three. Fast forward to September of this year and we see the disappearances spreading out to Colorado, Montana, and even California. As many as three hundred kids simply walked off the face of the Earth that month. They’ve never been seen again. Then there was last month . . . ”

  He paused as though he was trying to mentally prepare himself to tell me the number. Slowly, his eyes moved up from the page and met mine. His gaze appeared more haunted than ever before.

  “Four hundred and seventy-three,” he said.

  For a second I thought I’d heard him wrong.

  “In October?”

  He nodded.

  “Four hundred and seventy-three children. All in the woods. All with their parents. All healthy, well cared for, and thriving. All of them were standing beside their parents one second, then gone the next.”

  “That sounds . . . ” I trailed off, rubbing my temple in confusion. “That’s almost unbelievable.”

  But I knew it was possible. In my job, I’d seen things that nobody would believe. Things that brought me to the brink of sanity more than once. It didn’t take long working in the OCD to figure out one very certain fact. Absolutely anything, no matter how crazy it sounded, was possible.

  “Sir, that’s . . . that’s a fucking epidemic.”

  Harris nodded and took another drink of his Scotch.

  “And just shy of three hundred of those took place within the Smoky Mountains. By the looks of it, that seems to be the hub of activity. A base from which the phenomenon spreads out. Here—look at this.”

  He flipped the spreadsheet over to reveal a map of the US covered in red dots. There were so many around the Smokies it looked as though the entire area was completely covered. The red dots spread out further, leaving a slight rash in Colorado and Montana, with only a few specks in Wyoming and California.

  “Should I assume that you’re telling me this because you’re not entirely convinced humans are the cause of this phenomenon?” I asked.

  “That’s exactly why I thought of you. But there’s another reason. I think it’s something that only you would understand. Follow me.”

  Without waiting, he jumped out of his seat and left the room as though he just expected me to be on his heels. I followed him out the door, but not before grabbing my drink. Then when I reached the door, I changed my mind, returned my glass of Scotch to his desk, and reached for the bottle instead. By the sounds of it, I was going to need it.

  The cramped computer room had me and Harris squashed up shoulder to shoulder in front of the screen. It was the closest I’d ever been to him, and I didn’t like it one bit. I could smell his sweat, the sour kind of human perspiration that I found slightly nauseating. His cologne on top of it was overkill.

  Holding my breath, I took a swig from the bottle of Scotch and handed it over to him.

  “Don’t let the other agents catch you with this,” he said, holding it to his mouth. “They’ll get jealous.”

  “Do you really think I care what the other agents think of me?” I laughed. “I’m not here to make friends.”

  Which was almost true. It wasn’t that I didn’t like any of the other agents or that I loathed them to the point of being enemies. It was simply that there was a divide between us . . . a major one. They were human, I was fae. I put up with them but I couldn’t trust them. Not entirely, anyway.

 
There were people I occasionally met like Harris or even Allan that I thought I could trust, but I could never quite extend this feeling to the rest of the human world. It just wasn’t in my nature.

  As we both stared at the screen, Jake from IT fiddled with his mouse until he brought up a video.

  “Skip to fifteen minutes and nine seconds, Jake.”

  “Right on it, Chief,” he squeaked back.

  I could see he was starting to sweat too. The back of his shirt was growing damp. I got the impression he never spent much time with Chief Harris. When he looked up at him, there was a childish sense of wonderment in his eyes as though he was meeting a celebrity.

  “Right there. Stop. Alright, Rivera. Look at this.”

  As Jake pressed play, a video began to play showing a small interview room where at the back, a small child no older than seven was hunched inside a giant coat. Beside her, a crying woman I assumed to be her mom was nervously fiddling with her long, brown hair with one hand and pressing a tissue to her eyes with the other.

  In front of them, a police officer with a thick country accent spoke softly to the child. He looked more like Santa Claus than an officer of the law, appearing almost as wide as he was tall, yet the girl didn’t appear afraid of him. If anything, she was leaning towards him as though he was bringing her much needed comfort and safety.