by J. L. Ray
“This must be why they work with Mundanes at all.”
Tony looked back at the figure. Once upon a time, people had disappeared into the Fairie Realms. While some were snatched, mostly children, others had walked through on their own—right through Tempos, temporary portals in the Fairie Realms that crossed over into the Mundane universe. Usually the portal was an accident, a build up of anti-magic caused by some kind of magical abuse. The build up manifested as a conduit between Fairie and Mundania. However, Tempos could also be created by immensely powerful wielders of magic and had been used to travel to either side of the Great Divide. Generally, the level of power that creating a Tempo required only came from one source in Fairie—a Wizard. The figure they had dismissed as a charlatan turned and gestured to them impatiently to follow him.
“Does that make magic-boy there—“
“A wizard. Perhaps.” Baz nodded grimly. “Not a witch after all.”
While witches had a rep for bat-shit craziness at a level of eight on a scale of one to ten, wizards were the ten that set the scale.
The bat-shit was about to hit the fan.
Phil walked into the downtown SCIB station house and over to the desk sergeant, Sergeant Hubbard. She looked up from the papers on her desk and over the top of her reading glasses.
“Good evening, Sergeant Hubbard. How are you tonight?” Phil asked her as pleasantly as he could, given that the last time he’d seen her, she’d done her best to detach him from Tony and send him away.
“I am quite well,” she said pleasantly. She added less pleasantly, “When I see the back of you heading out that door, I’ll be even better.” She looked at him expectantly.
Phil had faced down angry clients, from commoners to so-called, often self-called, gods and goddesses, and while the sergeant’s stare-down skills were formidable, they couldn’t compare to those of Medusa, especially since a Being couldn’t look directly at her at all. He continued to stare the sergeant in the eye, and then said, still as pleasantly as possible, “Unfortunately, I told Detective Newman that I would meet her here after she finished work tonight. And here is where she will find me, no matter what time she returns.”
“Humph.” Sergeant Hubbard pushed her glasses back up her face. “Well, in that case, you might as well make yourself useful, then. The front area needs a good sweeping. Folks have been tracking in sand left over from that last snow. There’s a broom right there in the corner.”
Phil looked at her and grinned a wicked grin. Then he put out one hand, palm down, forefinger slightly higher than the rest of his hand. He flipped his hand and lifted it and suddenly the uneven layer of sand hung suspended, about six inches off of the entry floor.
“My dear Sergeant,” Phil lifted one black eyebrow in question, “where would you like this deposited?”
Sergeant Hubbard surprised them both by breaking into a hearty laugh. “You little devil!” she said. “I suppose in the trash can, if that’s no bother.”
“None at all,” he told her, gesturing toward the can with his hand. For the next few minutes, the sand moved toward the can and rained into it as it reached the mouth. When it was done, Phil brushed his hands together.
“There, my dear Sergeant Hubbard. Have you any other task you might set me?”
“Oh, I’ll think of something, no doubt,” and the sergeant smiled evilly.
Before she had time to come up with a task that might actually make a demon sweat, Cal walked into the station pushing an ogre-sized baby carriage. The desk sergeant changed instantaneously from hardcore-taskmaster to puddle-of-goo. She jumped down from her stool and trotted around to the front of the entry, and it was this action that caused Phil to realize that despite the imposing figure she presented at the front desk, Old Mother Hubbard actually stood closer to five feet tall. In fact, she might be gnomish or part gnome rather than high fae. No one was sure of her exact origins, and she wasn’t talking.
“Hiya, Sergeant!” Cal said to her, as he pulled out a convenient, built-in set of steps that the carriage sported for just such a well-wisher, or baby-sitter. It folded off the side of the carriage and allowed the onlooker to gain a full foot of height, which meant the sergeant could see in. Unfortunately, she still couldn’t quite reach little Newman, who was cooing and gurgling and drooling at her as if he knew his job was to get his Dad in good with his desk sergeant.
“Oh! Such a cutie!” she cooed at Newman, adding, “Isn’t hims just the prettiest little ogre us ever did see? What is hims doing? Is hims trying to eat his iddle toesies?” She suddenly sounded clipped and serious, “Detective, he is trying to eat his toes! Quick! Bottle!”
“Oops!” Cal leapt into action, digging through an enormous bright blue bag on his shoulder that was covered in rainbows and galloping unicorns. “I know I have something in here,” he muttered as he dug in the bag that, like Tony’s Louis Vuitton tote, magically held much more than it should hold, while the volume that it should hold was prodigious in and of itself.
“Hurry, Detective,” Sergeant Hubbard suggested in a voice she reserved for anti-Magic protestors who had invaded her entryway.
“Allow me,” Phil said smoothly as he walked over to Cal. He put his hand out over the mouth of the big bag as Cal held it open, and a large bottle of a milky substance rose so fast from it that it slapped into Phil’s palm, knocking his hand up almost a foot in the air. His hand barely fit around enough of the ogre-spawn sized container to keep a grip. He turned to Old Mother Hubbard and handed her the bottle, which she took with both hands. At that point she realized that she couldn’t reach far enough in, even with the step, to give Newman his bottle.
“May I?” Phil asked her and gestured toward her feet.
“What are you going to do, demon?”
“Give you a little boost,” he told her. When she narrowed her eyes, he added, “No touching, of course.”
She nodded, and he waved a hand at her feet. She rose up just enough to be able to lean in and give Newman his bottle. On the plus side for Phil, he had just bought a bucket-load of credit with the sergeant. On the minus side, his actions led to an immediate and nauseating resumption of inane cooing at the baby.
“Look at hims with his iddle boddle. Hims is so sweet. Hims were a hungry iddle ogre, right sweetums? Yummy, yummy, in your tummy! Now drink up, iddy one.”
Phil took a deep breath and tried to unclench his jaw. He just didn’t get it. Why did people act like that around small creatures? It was so demeaning! Surely no child, Natty or Super, wished to hear someone murder the language like that. Two seconds later he was pulling himself back to an upright position after the impact of a hearty slap on the back from Cal. He was pretty sure that Cal was in a good mood and that the assault had been a gesture of friendship, but he checked, just to be sure.
“I did the right thing?” he asked Cal.
“Definitely. Thanks for that, Phil! Good save!”
Phil nodded and then looked over at the carriage. “Are you out giving your spouse a chance to sleep undisturbed?”
“Oh yeah,” Cal slumped a little, yawning prodigiously in the process. “We’re both getting a little old for this baby stuff. It’s been a while, y’know?” He perked back up. “Still, they are a lot of fun most of the time. It’s just mainly...” he suddenly yawned again, “the sleep deprivation...am I right?”
“I know of this phenomenon, of course, having granted the requests of more than a few young mothers, but I myself have no spawn,” Phil commented mildly.
Cal looked stricken, “I am so sorry! I didn’t mean to—I mean, I wasn’t trying to—y’know, rub that in!”
Phil lifted one brow. “No harm done. I chose to have none. There is no wound in which to rub salt.”
Cal scratched his head and shook it. “It ain’t the easiest job, but hey, it keeps life lively.” He stepped back from the carriage and gestured to Phil to drop back with him. “Say, what’re you doing here?” He held out his hands in a placatory gesture. “Not that you don’t have ev
ery right, but with Tony not working and your case concluded...?”
“But Tony is working.”
“What?” Cal asked. “I thought the Lieutenant had us both on vacay for two weeks. She didn’t call me!”
Phil’s lips thinned as he replied, “Apparently, something came up and he needed her assistance. She is out now. I told her I would pick her up here when she returned.”
“That’s odd, right?” Cal rubbed at his face. “I figured she’d be chasing down leads on her twin.”
Phil looked a little uncomfortable as he told Cal, certain that Tony would tell her partner everything anyway, “Her parents are opposed to the idea of finding her twin. Her mother, actually, is opposed.”
“That’s not good.”
“No, no, it is not.”
“It doesn’t make any sense, either. Why would a mother not want to go looking for her child?”
Phil’s face shuttered. “Why, indeed.”
Cal scrunched up his face as he gazed over at Newman, happily slurping down his bottle. “If some hag had zoomed in and taken Newman…” He paused, and in that moment his face took on a look that almost, almost made Phil nervous. Then Cal shook off the look and turned back to Phil. “Something’s going on here. I’m gonna wait for Tony with you.”
Phil’s face became more than unusually expressionless. Then Newman made a sound and he turned to the carriage. “I wonder if that is wise?”
“Whaddya mean, wise?” Cal asked, his old antipathy for the demon responding to a word rarely associated with ogres, and a bit of a sore spot with most of the species.
Phil nodded at the carriage. “I got the sense that she would be late. How long do want to keep Newman out?”
Cal’s reaction went straight to laughter. “Berthell is getting her first good nap in three days. I’m gonna stay as long as that little ogre seems content to be with Daddy.” He rubbed the back of his head. “When Mama’s had some sleep, everyone’s gonna be happier.”
Sergeant Hubbard, who had been giving Newman his “iddle boddle,” which probably held a full gallon of liquid, stood up straight again, setting the empty bottle at the end of the carriage and putting both hands on the back of her hips as she stretched. “I didn’t realize how uncomfortable that position was until I wasn’t in it anymore,” she muttered. Then she turned around to Phil. “Let me down easy, demon,” she ordered him.
“Certainly,” Phil told her, gesturing her way and letting her float, not to the step, but all the way to the floor.
“I better get back to work,” the sergeant said as the desk phone started ringing. She gave Cal a pointed look, “And you better burp that baby. I know I can’t do it!” She trotted back to her station and picked up the phone.
Cal reached over and, plucking Newman out of his blankets, threw him up to one shoulder and started patting his back. Just as he started, he got a distressed look on his face and turned to Phil. “Grab one of those diapers for me, okay?”
Phil’s eyebrows raised and his nostrils flared. “Does he need a change?”
“No, but we may if I don’t have something to catch—” and as he spoke, Newman’s ogre burp spewed half-digested, milky white fluid out across Cal’s shoulder. Since Cal had instinctively turned to grab the diaper himself as the burp started, Newman’s considerable spray, suddenly aimed right at Phil, hit the demon in the face, and rolled down the front of his dark gray Corneliani suit and whimsical Versace Medusa tie, which he had chosen deliberately for his first date with Tony. The spraying ended, and all of the adults, even Sergeant Hubbard, went completely still in horrified silence. Then Newman, from his perch on Cal’s shoulder, began chortling at the sight of Phil dripping on the station floor.
“Can I...do you want me to...?” Cal was trying very hard to be helpful and to control the urge to laugh. Mephistopheles could do a lot of damage if he was offended.
Help came from an unlikely quarter, as the sergeant came around the desk with a box of facial wipes. “Here you go, demon,” she told him, not at all unkindly as she handed him the box.
Expressionlessly, he pulled out handfuls and began wiping his face. It actually just made things worse. He decided to concentrate on his mouth, as he wanted, very much, to avoid getting any of that stuff in it. That seemed to work.
“Y’know,” said Cal to Sergeant Hubbard, “I can walk him down to the showers, if you’ll keep an eye on Mannie for a bit?”
“All right,” she told him. “But if I were you, I’d rethink that nickname.”
“Mannie?”
“Yeah, it sounds a little too Mundane.”
“Baz,” Tony asked, “What’s the plan to stall? I need to know because I got nothin’, dude.”
The cloaked figure turned back to the truck, which was still idling in park behind him. The fellow stomped one foot and came stalking back, angered at the delay, cloak billowing in a kind of breeze that had to be manufactured by the very figure walking in it. The interior of the warehouse didn’t have any breeze, so what might have seemed impressive just looked contrived.
“Okay, I don’t care how powerful he is. What a walking cliché,” Tony muttered. “Like a bad version of Gandalf. Hey, Baz, seriously, how do we stall? You’ve got about thirty seconds.”
“Engine trouble,” he said.
“Can you magically affect the engine from here?” Tony asked, puzzled.
Baz snuffled, then reached down below the steering wheel and pulled some wires. The engine abruptly died. “No need. Besides, I can’t use magic. I am a magic-holder, not a magic-wielder. This will work, I think. It is likely that this Super will know nothing about machines or how they work.”
The Being began running when the engine died and skidded to a stop in front of Tony’s window. He grabbed the door.
“What is the delay, now? Why isn’t this machine running?”
Baz put his hand behind his head and rubbed at it. “Cain’t say yet. Gotta take a look at the engine.” He started to get out of the truck.
“There isn’t time for this!” The cloaked Being, almost hysterical with fear more than anger, pointed in the window at the two of them. “You’ll have to walk through. Do you have something to use to carry the merchandise?”
Tony took over speaking to the contact. Baz had done well, but he still sounded more Norwegian than Appalachian. Probably the distinction would be lost on this Being. He seemed too intent on himself to notice anything in his vicinity. His reaction to the delay hadn’t been lost on her either. This guy definitely wasn’t the big boss.
“Lookee-here,” she told him, “we don’t want to be on foot over in Fairie.” She opened the door, forcing the figure at her window to back off abruptly as she slithered out of the door and onto the ground, landing as carefully as she could in the velvet stiletto heels. “Could I outrun an angry ogre in these shoes?” she asked the Being forcefully, while pointing at her feet. “Nuh uh. I don’t think so. Now, if you’d atold me I was goin’ to Fairie on foot, why then I’d aworn m’shit-kickers. But th’ain’t no way I walk, haulin’ a whole passle of pink flamingoes in these shoes.” She folded her arms under her chest in an imitation huff, making sure to give the Being a bit of a show with her bust line and distract him as Baz tucked the wires up in the steering column and hopefully made the damage to the vehicle less obvious.
The Being, taller than her, and certainly appearing broader because of the cloak which was, yes, still over-dramatically billowing even while he stood still, reached out one leather gloved hand and grabbed her upper arm. “Look here,” he sneered, in a rough imitation of her accent that made him sound much younger and less stodgy than before, “you will cross that portal and exchange the merchandise, or I will end this business partnership. Permanently.” The subtext implied murder, but surely this Being wouldn’t risk the retribution of the Geas?
Tony decided the Sutherlands were probably ace grafters. They’d certainly taken in her division. No way would Maybelle cave to this kind of threat. Instead of strug
gling against his hold on her arm, she moved in as close as she could, managing to brace her legs in those silly shoes at the same time. She leaned in and put her right hand up to his shoulder, looking as if she was using his shoulder to stay on her feet, but actually placing herself for a good solid knee to what she hoped was his groin area under that annoying cloak, if it came to that.
“Sweet pea, you must need them flamingoes awful bad. I think the price just went up. Now, the folks we been workin’ with always make us wait until we return to give us the inventory on our take. Maybe we ought to git that inventory first, this time, see what it is we’re takin’ such risks to git.”
He shook her arm. “There won’t be a ‘this time’, you stupid Natty, if you don’t go through the portal.” He shook her again, which was about to get on her last nerve. “This temporary portal will close in fifteen minutes!”
“Well, that’s just a cryin’ shame. Because we don’t like your terms and there’s no way on this green Earth that we can git them flamingoes unloaded and across there and then pick up our merchandise and return, all in fifteen minutes. Why isn’t it open for longer?”
The Being dropped her arm and clutched his cloaked head. “Are you all so stubborn and stupid?”
“I hope that’s a rhetorical question, honey, cause now you’re just pissin’ me off.” Tony heard Baz snort behind her at that.
“This is a special situation. The cargo coming through includes something very special for another client who will NOT be happy when it doesn’t arrive. In fact, you can keep the flamingoes. Just go through! Bring back the cargo!”
Tony made a split second decision. It might be a bad one, but what the hell. She didn’t think she had much witch blood. It was pretty diluted. Hopefully, this wouldn’t be as dangerous as it would be for someone like Baz, who was fully Supernatural. “Mickey, honey, you stay with the truck and I’ll trot across and see what’s got this fellow’s cloak in a knot.”
“But what about your...shoes?” Baz caught himself just in time.
