by Voss Foster
Swift stood next to her, leaning over the desk and staring at the screen. "Kimmy, news out of Burlington, Vermont. An ice explosion."
She cocked her head to the side, one eyebrow raised. "The fuck is an ice explosion?"
"Do I look like I know? It's weird. If it wasn't weird, local PD wouldn't have called for consult, and I wouldn't have bothered you with it."
She shrugged and typed away, bringing up a bunch of Facebook posts and tweets. Plus a couple pictures of…well, it was an ice explosion. Exactly what it sounded like. A gray and maroon two-story, frosted and frozen over like the singular victim of a miniature ice age.
"We have anything else on this?" I figured it was time to start gathering info, because if there was anything that would get us working on a case…well, this certainly seemed like the sort of thing that would get the job done.
"Everyone's dead inside." Swift was already drumming his fingers on the desktop, the only nervous tic I'd ever identified from him. "Human family of four, plus a preternatural. That's all the info I've gotten from Chief Ballinger right now."
That raised my eyebrow, that was for sure. "The chief of police actually came out for this one?"
"When the other officers were stumped, they called him out. He's just as stumped." Swift cracked his knuckles against the desk. "Weird shit travels upstream. And we're pretty much the headwaters."
"Was this an elemental?" Gutt leaned in as though that might actually help him discern something from the grainy cell phone photos.
"Don't know, because he didn't know. I figure we're better off going in and checking it out than waiting for information to be released." Swift nodded at Gutt. "I'll stay here and wait for word, get everyone up to speed. You two can check things out."
I probably didn't need to be there, but it got me out of doing paperwork for a few more minutes. And I guess, depending on the attitudes in the room, having a human agent show up might cause a little less of a reaction than just the massive blue troll appearing out of thin air.
Gutt created another shimmering portal in the air and stepped through. I followed, moving past the bright colored walls and pastel streets of the Hidden Kingdoms, and into a bustling, cordoned off crime scene. And it was the weirdest fucking thing I'd ever seen. That was counting the thousand foot snake materializing in the middle of Central Park, and the OPA's medic regrowing all of the skin on my body. Three times.
My litmus test for weird had changed a lot in the past few months.
The picture back in the vault showed an ice explosion, but standing there in the middle of it really drove it home. It wasn't like a bomb that blew out the walls and scorched the ground around it. I came from counterterrorism. I knew a bomb site when I saw one. This was a house with no more windows, large, sharp chunks of ice jutting out like vicious fangs. The ground around the house for a solid eight to ten feet was frosted over, the ice thicker toward the center. It was a bright day. Vermont didn't get Death Valley heat as a rule, but even this was enough to melt the ice around the edges, leaving the ground soft, squelching underfoot.
"This is an ice elemental. I'd put money on it." Gutt cracked his huge knuckles. "Come along, I want to get a look at this."
We walked up the front steps and onto the too-perfect little porch. The front door was open, but with a thin, elderly white guy standing guard. He nodded to each of us in turn. "Chief Ballinger, Burlington Police Department. You two spooks?"
I nodded. "Agent Rourke, and Agent N'Gutta."
"Call me Gutt. And call him Dash." Gutt flashed his ID, although honestly this guy sounded so done with this mess he probably didn't care if we were legit or not. "Can we take a look?"
"You'd know better than I would about this stuff." He stepped aside. "It's not a pretty sight."
Gutt moved ahead, and I followed as closely as the arctic environment would allow me. It was a struggle to stay standing, the floor covered in a thick layer of ice and littered with giant chunks of the stuff. Balancing on one foot on the ice in the cold…not fun, and not exactly covered anywhere in training, police, FBI, or OPA.
"I should have brought a coat." To punctuate that point, the words puffed out on little clouds of steam. Gutt stopped in the doorway to the dining room, and I pulled up even with him to take a look.
Everything else dropped out, and if I wasn't cold before, I damn sure was at the sight before me.
An entire family of four was there, all encased in slowly dripping ice. A Hispanic man and a white woman, both middle-aged with blue lips and their eyes firmly frozen open and unmoving. A boy who looked like his mother and a girl who looked like her father.
And a third child who wasn't frozen in the ice.
"I was right," whispered Gutt. "It's an ice elemental. I didn't expect this, however."
"Am I wrong thinking this is…a kid?" Maybe I was. Maybe this was something about the way elementals aged, and this one was several hundred years old and lived a long and fruitful life.
"I would hazard a guess at…seven years old? Eight?"
My stomach fell straight out, and I already felt a headache sneaking up on me. Plus nausea. Yeah, nausea was there, too. "You think…you think a kid did this?"
"I think any elemental child could do this." Gutt shook his head. "Elementals have a natural gateway to their own sealed magic. Each of them is a living portal to a sealed dimension."
"I know." Part of training with the NYPD, since we had so many living in the city. Training didn't cover this, though.
Gutt nodded. "Of course. When elementals are born, only the mother and a practitioner are allowed into the area. As the baby is born, their power is sealed. Otherwise, they become highly destructive, but with no ability to guide their magic. Their entire life force will be cast out in one burst of power."
"And that's what we're seeing here?"
Gutt's eyes darkened to forest green. "An autopsy is the only way to be certain, but I would guess yes. A newborn is capable of leveling buildings, razing fields of crops. It's clear this girl had some training already, but not enough to stop the magic on her own." His mouth turned down into that fierce scowl. "This should never have happened."
There were dozens of questions that needed answering. Where did this girl come from? Who was she? Why was she in this house? Where were her parents? Was this purposeful or an accident? Why did these people deserve to die…and her?
"Is this a 'come back to the cop shop' kind of autopsy, or 'OPA needs to take this case' kind of autopsy?"
"I think Casey should handle it." He closed his eyes for a few seconds, breathing deeply, his nostrils flaring. Then he turned around and walked up to Chief Ballinger. "We need to take the elemental child back to DC for an autopsy when you're done with her."
"We're done with her." He stuffed his hands in his pockets, shaking his head. "Any idea what happened?"
"We can't be certain until the autopsy results come in, but I could hazard a guess. I believe her magic was somehow prematurely unsealed, and this is the result every time. It's akin to giving a six-year-old a tank full of sarin gas. It's never going to end well. For anyone."
Ballinger shook his head. "It's a damn shame." He looked to me, then back to Gutt. "Go ahead and take her back. Keep me updated." He gestured around the room. "Anything to be done about this ice? Unfreeze the bodies and maybe avoid damaging this house any more than it's already been damaged? We've done the work we need to with it, so unless you need to keep it around…"
"Of course." Gutt turned and pressed his palms together. Whatever he was doing, the ice around him was disappearing. Not melting and leaving the carpet damp, but simply vanishing.
Ballinger whistled. "Impressive. Where can I get one of you?"
Gutt turned, raising one massive eyebrow. "How often are you finding yourself having to clean up ice like this?"
"In Vermont? Every winter."
The rate of ice disappearing increased, leaving a massive wave of clear behind it with only the slightest shimmer of frost.
It was fucking real pretty. Or at least it would have been if it wasn't for the five corpses in the dining room.
Once the ice was gone, Gutt nodded to Chief Ballinger. "We'll take the girl back, the rest of them are for you. And we'll be in contact once we have information."
"So will we."
With that, Gutt turned and went back to the ice elemental girl, lying there on the floor, surrounded by the family that owned the house.
Serious past tense on owned.
Gutt gingerly lifted the girl off the floor. Her limbs were stiff from the cold, but her core went limp as he took up her weight. Dead weight. My guts twisted at the sight of her there, cradled in his arms. So tiny and frail, her skin a pale blue, stark against Gutt's slate-colored flesh. Long, white hair draped over his arm, and the pretty, matching dress flowed with it. If you'd asked me what a young ice elemental looked like, hers would be the picture I'd pull out of the ether.
Except vibrant and alive and surrounded by frost. Not…this.
Gutt opened a portal again. "I'll get her to Casey, you fill Swift in on what we've got going."
"And do my paperwork." I swallowed all the emotions down and put on the glibbest façade I had at my disposal.
Gutt nodded. "And do your paperwork. It'll be a while before results are back on what happened. Depending on what it is, might need to put in a call to the Kingdoms to try and crack the riddle. But here's hoping not." He gazed down at her, shaking his head. "Tragic."
Tragic. That seemed like absolutely the right word. A big fucking tragedy in a tiny little body.
Chapter Two
I managed to get through the forms for Swift and Svenson for the last case and fill Swift in on what we found in Vermont, all before Gutt and Casey came back into the main offices. It wasn't a pretty sight. Gutt scowled and Casey—little, blonde, quarter-blooded hag Casey—was pale and clearly…off. Shaken. Just the way he should have been. Just the way everyone was going to be with this case. A seven-year-old god damn girl, laid out on the autopsy table.
Swift met them right next to Gutt's desk, and hence right next to mine. "You found something out already?"
Gutt nodded. "Her seals were completely removed. Nothing was holding back her magic anymore. There wasn't even the suggestion that they'd been there."
"An elemental her age would have already died without seals," said Swift. "She wouldn't even have made it to that old."
Gutt nodded. "Exactly. And the fact that there's no trace…it wasn't a mistake or some sort of wild, free-floating magic that happened across her. Removing it that completely is no error or accident, I guarantee it. Someone took them off. Someone…set off a nuclear bomb in Vermont."
Swift snorted. "Great. Who'd be able to do this?"
"A number of no investigative value." Gutt shook his head. "Any elemental could manage it, most healers, and pretty much any practitioner could learn how. I never bothered to look into it, but half the guards working with me knew how it was done, and I daresay they weren't all the best and brightest of the Kingdoms."
Swift stayed stone silent for a few seconds, just in case the gravity of that hadn’t quite sunk in as soon as Gutt said it. "All right, I'm batting this one back up north. Nothing else we can do with it right now. I'll have Ballinger keep an eye on things around there so we're hopefully not surprised again. If he finds something, he knows how to get hold of us."
Swift stalked back to his office. Gutt sat at his desk. Casey just stood there. I made eye contact with him. "You good?"
"She was so young." His voice came out hollow. "And there was nothing wrong with her when I did…I don't like doing autopsies on kids."
I nodded. "You know you'll get through it."
"Yeah. I know." He shook himself foot to head. "But sometimes I hate this job."
Sometimes I hated this job. There were days when it was just damned difficult to have any faith left in humanity or the preternatural community. Kids were always, always the worst of it, and the OPA seemed to deal with a lot of kids. Certainly a lot more than I liked.
Casey didn't turn and head back to medical. He walked straight into Kimmy's computer vault. I glanced to Gutt. "How do those two actually get along so well?"
"It's not my business. They're friends, and it's best not to question friendship, however odd it may seem. Besides, Kimmy's not that bad. She likes you well enough."
I couldn't suppress a snort. "Yeah, I could tell. That basket of cookies she never delivered really drove that message home."
"Kimmy didn't bake cookies. Neither did I. Clearly I want you dead." He smirked, typing away at his computer, not making eye contact as he spoke. "If Kimmy didn't like you, she wouldn't waste her time talking to you."
"Yeah, I know. But a genuine smile would be nice."
"She smiled when you tripped with the coffee last month."
I rolled my eyes and left it at that. I checked my email to see if anything important had come through, or some complaint from Director Svenson. There were some old messages, nothing more. "Okay, what's the next case, then? What kind of fairy invasion are we needing to stop?"
"No fairies." Agent Abigail King, seniormost agent in the OPA, marched out of her office. She never looked particularly well-rested, but she looked really tired there, with dark circles under her eyes, dirty blonde hair a bit bedraggled and bird's-nest-y. But she wasn't sluggish at all, storming her way through the office. A woman of her broad stature, that was not the kind of train you wanted to get in the way of, so I made sure to squeeze myself back against the wall until she came to a stop. "We just got something worth looking at."
"We've got more news." Swift met her there between the cubicles. "You got the call already, Abigail?"
"I made some friends in Vermont during that mess with the gorgon serial killer sisters a few years back. They clued me in on the shitshow."
Vermont. Great. What were the chances this was completely unrelated to the other case out of Vermont? "What are we looking at?"
"Another dead kid, and word got out about the first one. Her parents are unhappy, to say the least." King nodded. "I don't think we can pass this one back."
"We can't," said Swift. "I got off the phone with Ballinger. He's requesting we step in with this, and at this point I'd say it's definitely one of our cases." He jerked his head toward the briefing room. "Go on. I'll get the others. Does anyone have a clue where Bancroft is?"
Gutt fished his phone out. "I'll call him. He took off for lunch, but I haven't seen him since. I assumed he'd gone off doing work."
"Not that I'm aware of."
Swift left, and the three of us walked over to the briefing room, a closed off space with a massive TV screen opposite the door and a kidney-shaped table in the center. I sat next to Gutt, and King took a spot across from us, next to Swift's head seat.
Gutt brought the phone to his ear. "Bancroft? Where are you?" His eyes widened a bit, and I soon learned why. "You're in Vermont right now? Yes, we know what's going on, how do you know? All right, we'll probably be in shortly." He hung up the phone, shaking his head. "Bancroft's a step ahead of the rest of us. He knew the ice elemental family from some research project or something like that."
Small fucking world.
"Well good," said King. "We can use him to collect some information and try to figure this whole thing out."
Swift walked in with Kimmy and Casey in tow. And he closed the door behind him, which was just straight up not normal. I wasn't sure, but I couldn’t remember a time when he'd closed the door on a meeting. Maybe during Jörmungandr. Maybe.
But that was just an existential threat. This…was not. This was disgusting. This was dead kids. And if there were pictures to be shown, then yeah, that door probably needed to be closed. God I hoped there were no pictures.
Swift didn't sit down…and he turned on the screen. Turned out there was no God. No pictures yet, but they were definitely coming. The screen threw out a palpable fog of tension through the room, thick and heavy and c
linging to the skin like swamp humidity.
Swift scanned across the room. "The young ice elemental, you've all heard about. Examination revealed that the seals on her magic were removed. That's what killed her as well as the four humans in the house with her at the time." He grabbed the remote and tapped it, bringing up a one-story white house, big yard, and all completely broken and shattered by stones jutting up out of the earth. Some as large as small cars. No bodies yet, thankfully. "This came out of the same town, about five miles to the north of the first location. The elemental involved was a few years older, so the level of magical exposure wasn't as high, but of course a stone elemental is going to cause much more immediate property damage than an ice elemental."
King leaned forward. "How many casualties?"
"The elemental and a human couple, both in their seventies. If it was about murdering them specifically, then it's a bit of a strange choice in victimology. So far, nothing superficial has come up to link the two attacks together besides the presence of the young elementals."
"But that's more than enough for a link to be made in my book." Agent King rolled her shoulders back. "I haven't had enough coffee yet for this shit, Swift."
"Well, I'd get some more as soon as possible." He flicked to the picture I didn't want to see, that nobody wanted to see. A dull brown preteen boy laid out on the ground. Just like with the ice elemental, the magic never seemed to touch him, rocks starting a few inches away from his body.
The other pictures were a bloodied elderly couple, the same rocks jutting through their midsections, their limbs. They were pierced through. At least with the ice elemental, the victims were at some sort of…peace. Cyanotic, blue peace, but peace. This was violent, probably painful and slow. Crushed tissue, broken bones, bleeding out. Definitely not the top of my list for how I want to die. But then, it would be hard to beat out "heart exploding after downing four all meat pizzas" on ways to go.
