by J. L. Ray
“Well, I’ll just go barefoot for this.” She turned and looked into Baz’s worried face. “I reckon it’ll all be fine. Just don’t leave ‘til I git back. Make sure that I do!” she told him. Then she turned to the Being. “Well, come on! Time’s awastin’.” Then she followed the billowing black figure, who was running across the warehouse toward what could be her worst idea ever.
Chapter Five
Cal took Phil down to the shower area and loaned him a towel and soap.
Phil looked at the container of liquid soap for a second. It had a picture of several kinds of flowers, the most prominent being honeysuckle. His eyebrows went up, but he decided, better flowers than baby vomit. “Thank you.”
“I, uh, have to stay here with you because you’re, uh...”
“A demon?” Phil asked sardonically.
Cal snapped back, “No, no! A civilian. You aren’t allowed in this area without an officer.” The acoustics in the room and Cal’s voice at that volume combined to rattle the metal lockers. Cal slapped a hand up to his mouth. Only Jacques Perrault got written up more often for building damage, but he was a giant, so he had his own facilities off site. If any damage happened, they’d assume it was Cal.
Phil smiled and walked over to the shower stalls. He waved a hand as he walked into the stalls and his clothes disappeared. Cal heard the sound of the water running and a deep sigh.
“You and Tony are going out later, am I right?” he called out over the sound of the shower.
“I certainly hope so,” Phil told him. “We are finally going out on a first date. You should check on the betting pool.”
“Too late for that!” Cal was silent for a moment, waffling over his phrasing, but he finally decided that honesty was best. “That suit you had on is incredible, am I right? Corneliani, right? But since you have a choice, you should go a little more casual for a date with Tony. Especially a first date.”
Cal was relieved when Phil only said, “I will take that under advisement.”
“I’m really sorry little Mannie puked up all over you. They can’t help that, y’know?” He added, “I guess maybe you don’t know, right, being that you don’t have any of the little goobers of your own. You get used to cleaning a lot of gooey shit, and I mean that literally, gooey shit, gooey puke—”
Phil interrupted the list of bodily fluids produced by young children. “It is truly a heroic undertaking, raising children.”
“You’re just pulling my leg.”
But Phil responded, sounding quite sincere, “No, no. Even I would refrain from so suicidal an act as pulling the leg of an ogre, friendly or not. Calvin, you have four of these, uhm, little goobers. You are a brave Being, as is your good wife Berthell.”
Cal laughed, the rumble of it echoing loudly in the tiled locker room. “The little ones are actually the easier ones. The oldest is a teenager, almost ready to go to college. Angel’s the big problem lately. No matter what we do, it’s wrong. Whatever we say, she says the opposite. Teenagers!” He sighed, “Blood and Bones, but the spawn grow up too fast.”
“It is a heroic thing you do.”
“Come on, people do this every day.”
“Such everyday heroics are the hardest. It is easier to do something large and showy, even if it means death, than it is to go through every day, dealing with the minor annoyances and issues and to do it well and kindly and decently. If there is one thing I have learned in over three thousand years of providing Naturals and Supernaturals with that for which they most wish, it is that most Beings have no idea what joy they already have in their lives. You know your joy.”
“That’s kinda sweet.”
Phil came out of the shower, and as he pulled off his towel, slim fit jeans and a dark purple Bugatchi button down flowed over him, much more casual than the suit that had been slimed earlier, if almost as expensive.
“Sweet? Not really, Calvin. No, it simply means that I recognize in you a Being whom I could never manipulate.” Cal started to tense up, feeling as if there was a challenge in that comment, but then Phil added, “That makes you a perfect partner for Tony, as far as I am concerned.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I shall always know where I stand with you. I have nothing to offer you; therefore, if you favor my relationship with her, it is because you favor it, not because you wish any favor of me.”
“Hey, I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Cal rumbled. “Well, that’s good.” He looked at Phil’s new clothing choices. “Very good, much more first-date-with-Tony-ish. Are those jeans Diesel?” Cal sounded just a little wistful. The upscale clothing market had yet to really adjust to providing the larger sizes needed for the largest Supers, and for a fashion aficionado like Cal, the choices seemed both limited and pedestrian.
“It is. I like their cut. They feel both casual and elegant.”
“Nice! Very good choices. So, you ready to get back upstairs? Tony should be back any time now, right?”
“I hope so. I didn’t make reservations.” He winked at Cal, a wicked smile on his face. “But the hostess owes me.”
“Which restaurant are you going to take her to?”
“Oh, that is her choice. That is why I didn’t make reservations.”
Cal scratched his head, “So how do you know the hostess owes you if you don’t know where you’re going to eat?”
“In this town?” Phil smiled again, making Cal even more glad that he was apparently Mephistopheles-proofed. “Oh, they all owe me, in this town. The only place I could have a wider choice is the City of Angels.” He paused a moment. “Or perhaps Nashville.”
Cal’s f-light buzzed. “It’s the Lieutenant,” he said, puzzled by getting a call from the one who had most adamantly put him on leave. He answered, “Yes sir, what’s up?”
“Calvin, Sergeant Hubbard said you are in the building.”
“Yes sir, I brought Newman in for a visit. Do you want me to come by your office?”
“I do, Calvin, but not for a visit. There’s a problem and I may need your help. Now.”
“Yes sir, on my way. What’s the problem?”
“Detectives Newman and de Groot are on a sting operation and they’ve gone dark. Their ear bugs are dead. We lost contact ten minutes ago, and we can’t get any reading from our seer.”
Phil grimly cut in, “I’m coming, too.”
For a second, they heard only silence. Then came a grudging, “Very well.”
Tony stalked up to the portal, since runway model stalk was the fastest maneuver possible in those shoes. Unlike the orderly doors to Fairie controlled by the Powers That Be, Tempos were messy. The assigned portals in populous areas were vaguely door-shaped, pulsing with a shimmery blue light and roughly outlined in a shade of blue closer to white. This Tempo portal was red, angry, pulsing with orange and yellow at its heart. It looked like a mouth, roughly ovoid and large enough that their rental truck could have easily driven through it.
“You have to go now!” the frustrated Being next to her said, wringing his hands, his voice sounding strained.
“Sweet pea,” Tony told him as she brought up each foot and took off a shoe. “This is gonna cost you. Just remember that.” She shoved the velvet shoes into his hands and then stepped forward. For a second, she hesitated in front of the Tempo and then strode through. And despite the fourteen minutes it should have stayed open, the pulsing red mouth of a gate snapped shut behind her.
Tony arrived in Fairie just seconds after walking into the Tempo, but as with her prior portal experience, it had felt longer than seconds, and this time it felt much more painful. When she was well and truly through the light, she collapsed down to one knee, gasping for breath. As she knelt there, she felt the dread of premonition and took deep calming breaths, hoping to stave off an episode. Falling down and raving about things she couldn’t see would definitely blow her cover as Mundane with the smuggling ring.
“Hey!”
Startled, she looked up, very far up, a
t a giant standing over her.
“Oh, shit,” she muttered. Giants in Fairie were not like her buddy and co-worker Jaques. Nope, resident giants in Fairie embodied all the badassedness that the fairy tales in Mundania described and then some.
Tony stood up very carefully, looking around at the woods to her left and the cottage in front of her for potential cover. The cottage was thatched, white-washed, covered in blooming flowers, quaint, picturesque, adorable, and really large—large enough that it was clear that the giant lived in all that cuteness. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Hi there,” she said to the giant. “How’re you?”
The giant stood, looking perplexed. On the plus side, he didn’t grab her and start gnawing off an arm or a leg. But he wasn’t talking either.
She decided to try a different tack. “Are you my contact for the merchandise?”
For a moment he just stood there, looking at her. Finally the creature spoke. “Hey Mundy person. You’re supposed to have something for me,” he said, blinking.
“We had some technical difficulties on our end and couldn’t manage to transport the merchandise,” Tony started, and then realized she might have to make this a little more simple. Giants weren’t naturally stupid. Jacques, in fact, was a Grand Master in chess. This giant seemed more like a tic-tac-toe kind of guy. He looked a little puny for a giant, too, only about fifteen feet high.
“Next time, I will have something for you,” she told him. “My contact said the merchandise on this end had to come back through, so he sent me to you.”
The giant’s face scrunched up and she ducked, assuming he was going to take a swing at her. When he started crying, she didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t a sight she had ever thought to see. It was downright heartbreaking.
“Here now, sugar, bless your pea-picking heart. I’m real sorry about this. We couldn’t get the merchandise out fast enough. How about I bring you something real special next time. What do you want?” and she almost called him Little One, like her mother tended to say to her and her sibs when they were in distress, but the sheer incongruity of it made her choke on the phrase.
“Something special? For me? Just for Bogey?”
“You’re Bogey?” He nodded to her. “Sure...Bogey. Tell me what you want and I’ll get it for next time.”
She almost ran when the big guy started hopping from one foot to the other. “I know, I know, know what I want!”
“What’s that, Bogey?”
“A signed guitar from Ace Frehley!”
She blanked out totally, but in fond hopes that whoever Ace Frehley was, he was still living, she started nodding, “Sure thing, buddy. Now, we have got to move—we’ve got about—“ she looked at her f-light, “nine minutes left before the portal goes...” she turned around and looked behind her and just as she came to the awkward realization, she heard Bogey.
“The portal is gone already. Where did the portal go?”
“Aw, hell.”
“Where is that?”
“No, no, it didn’t go there. That’s just a saying.”
“But you said it went there.”
Tony put her hand to her forehead and stopped talking for a minute to think.
“Mommy makes that face, too. Was I being bad?” he asked Tony so sadly that she couldn’t be frustrated.
“It’s okay, buddy. I just said a bad word. I’m sorry. I said a bad word, not where the portal went, that’s all.”
“Is ‘hell’ a bad word?” he whispered to Tony.
“It’s a word you shouldn’t use,” she told him. At this point she realized that for all his size, Bogey was probably a giant teenager, maybe even her brother Fred’s age, but a lot younger in other ways. And as adorable as he seemed, he was still big enough to squash her like a bug, so she needed to be very careful.
“Bogey, where is your mommy?”
“Mommy goes away when the portal’s open and leaves me in charge,” he told her proudly. “I trade out the merch...merch...the stuff with the Mundies that come through and then Mommy gives me something. I have a lava lamp and a Hello Kitty lunchbox and a G.I.Joe with the kung fu grip and a Walkman that plays Kiss and they are the best band in all the Realms! And I have all of their albums on cassette tape! But my batteries ran out and they were supposed to bring batteries this time ‘cause I want to hear my music! Mommy promised me they would bring me batteries. Do you like Kiss?”
“Sure!” Tony told him cheerily, buying time while she sorted out the conversation. “They are pioneers of rock and roll.”
“Huh?”
“They make good music.”
“Yeah!”
Bogey did a fist pump, which left Tony with an adrenaline rush. She did not, however, flee. She took some pride in that.
“What is your favorite song by them, Mundy lady?”
“You can call me Miz Maybelle,” she told him. “I guess ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’?” Mainly she picked it because it was one of the few titles that she could remember offhand.
“That’s my favorite, too,” he told her, wide-eyed. “I like you, Miz Maybelle.”
“Well, that’s great, Bogey, I like you, too.” She stood there for a moment, wondering how in the hell she was supposed to get back if the portal was gone. She also realized from Bogey’s list of goodies from Mundania that he was the go-between for the smuggling ring on this side. Since he seemed very young and more than a few bricks shy of a small building, he couldn’t be the brains of the operation. That suggested that it was probably his bitch of a mother, using her kid as a front. Suddenly, she heard a whooshing sound overhead and a horrible cackle. “Incoming!” she yelled at Bogey, recognizing the sound of a low-flying witch on a broomstick from Teraphina’s capture over eight months ago. A witch on a broomstick had a tendency to leave havoc in her wake. As she yelled, she threw herself to the ground.
“Hiya, Mommy!” Bogey yelled.
“Oh, you gotta be kidding me,” Tony muttered, looking up from the mud she’d managed to land in when she ducked the broomstick flyby. Mommy might or might not be a bitch, but she was definitely a witch.
Lieutenant Azeem was pacing back and forth in his office, which was just big enough to accommodate a medium-length pace, not a full-steam pace. He was pushing the limits and knocking things over with his tail as he moved around the office. His f-light sat just above his desk on hover mode, and as he paced, he barked out orders to the officer in charge of working communications for the operation that Tony and Baz had been running.
“How many minutes since last contact?” Cal and Phil heard him say as they came through the door.
“Fifteen minutes now. It’s all quiet out in front of the building. There are two guards, but they look like pretty low-level Supers. One of them is just sitting there, drooling. They may just be lookouts.”
“Dammit, can’t you get an eye in the warehouse?”
“Sir, the specialist in charge of infiltration is out sick with an infection he picked up the last time he sent one of his eyes out on an op.”
Startlingly, the normally imperturbable Lieutenant roared. “Find another way then, but find out what’s going on. Now!”
Cal and Phil stood in the doorway, leaving Azeem plenty of room.
“Sir, what can we do?” Cal asked grimly.
“That remains to be seen. Phil, do you have a way to search for Tony?”
Phil looked uncomfortable but nodded.
Azeem huffed. “I assumed you would, given your interest in her.”
Cal looked from one to the other, “For some reason, that sounds like a bad thing, am I right? What’s the deal?”
Phil shrugged one shoulder. “It means that I have...borrowed...a bit of her essence, which allows me to sense her presence from far away.” He looked at the ogre, who was narrowing his eyes, “And yes, I did take that without asking. However, it was completely altruistic. And necessary. It happened during the emergency at the hospital.” He paused for a moment then added, “Borrowing
her essence allowed me to pull her back to her own mind and body when she had those episodes. Without holding that bit of her, I would not have been able to keep her mind tied to her body.”
“Borrowing suggests returning, Mephistopheles. You should have given her essence back to her after you were done,” Azeem said flatly.
Phil looked down at his feet encased in Ferragamo leather loafers. His head still down, he looked up at them both from under his black brows, “I meant to. I did mean to return it.”
“Why didn’t you?” Cal asked.
Phil just shook his head. He didn’t want to tell them that the little bit of Tony that nestled just inside of him made him feel more alive than he had felt in a thousand years. He really had meant to give it back. He had not used her essence to spy on her, even though he could have. He should have said that, but it sounded too ridiculously sappy, even to him. He also suspected that Tony would hate it if he did watch her from afar, so he had not. But neither had he made the effort to return the bit of her that he had kept. Instead he had held it and felt its warmth, the comfort of it spreading through him like the heat from a fireplace, easing tension he had not realized he carried.
“I...have not gotten around to it yet,” he told them, and even to himself, he sounded like a liar. “Besides, there might be another episode.”
Azeem growled. “I suppose it’s just as well, isn’t it? Given the circumstances. So. Where is she now? Can you get a location? Is she still in the warehouse?” He didn’t ask if she was still alive, but the message was clear.
Phil grew still, closing his eyes and reaching down with his magic and his own essence to touch hers. He gasped and his eyes popped open. “She is in Fairie. She is not in this Realm.”
“Shit!”
Phil turned to Cal, “Indeed.”
“Mommy!” Bogey yelled, as the broomstick landed between him and Tony. The woman on it was not classically attired in rusty black, voluminous robes, a pointy hat on her head. Instead, she wore a zoot suit, black with silver pinstripes. Her wingtip shoes were smartly polished, her black fedora at a jaunty angle on her head, the gray feather in it like an exclamation mark. Her hair was apparently clipped short and slicked down against her skull. The entire ensemble created a surprisingly attractive look for one of the sisterhood. She wasn’t as old as most witches presented. Her face lacked wrinkles but was still liberally sprinkled with moles, and her nose jutted out, imperiously declaring itself as she looked around her. Apparently, it was a face that Bogey could love. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” He leaned over and picked her up and hugged her to his chest. “I’m so glad you’re back!”
