According to the file in front of her a tip from an informant somewhere in North Austin had led the SA to believe that this Shewstone, which was apparently a Type 7 Artifact and therefore dangerous, had been sold to a high schooler named Terry Winthrop. The Agent's case notes were there, typed up dutifully, but she could sense that the Agent involved had been a little irritated about the whole thing, especially when he discovered the Shewstone was a forgery and the kid had bought it to impress his girlfriend.
"Suspect is about as psychic as a box of dryer lint," she read, and her burst of surprised laughter rang off the metal cabinets. "Poss. Level 1 Empathy. Artifact confiscated, disc. as resin with gilt paint. R&D authentication unnecessary. Seller of Artifact fined $10,000 for violation of Paranormal Artifact Trafficking Statute 1477.0 Section B. Buyer given warning and released, no further charges filed."
At the bottom of the printout was a short form filled out by the Agent: name, rank, ID number, dates, et cetera. Her eyebrows shot up as she saw who it was: Jason Adams, Shadow Agent 7.
God, no wonder he'd been pissed, if they'd sent someone as important as him out to investigate a tenth-grader with a fake rock.
A quick look through a few of the other files showed they were all very similar. There were a lot of false alarms. Only a couple more files bore SA-7's signature. As she paged through them she could sense faint wisps of residual energy coming off a few, revealing the emotions attached to the case. Most of them, being routine, held a sense of "here we go again."
The last, however, was so soaked in emotion that she could barely hold it in her hands. Anger, hot and dark, was burned into every line of the Agent's notes, and the signature had been made in almost a scrawl of rage. Almost shaking, Sara took a deep breath and lay the folder down, forcing herself to ground and center, an old Witch's exercise as basic as shielding that helped her regain her calm and focus. It was just an echo, she told herself sternly. Whatever had happened had been before she even came here--the file was dated February 8, and she hadn't even arrived in Austin until the first of April.
The case was a ritual murder investigation in a suburb of Dallas. A seven-year-old girl had been skinned alive, her heart cut out, as part of a ceremony to summon some kind of demon.
Sara's vision swam. Things like this really happened? There were people who would...how could there be anyone warped enough to skin a little girl?
She read the file cover to cover, her heart pounding. Not only was it real, it had worked. The demon had been lured out of its dimension, a place designated simply "MAGOS-9," by the promise of flesh; in return for doing the human's bidding, it was given the girl's heart. The demon was noncorporeal, and required a child's skin to wear to keep it manifested on Earth.
Some sort of energy detection system the SA had in place had raised an alarm, and Agents were dispatched to deal with the situation before the demon could get loose. The team included a ceremonialist of some kind, who banished the demon back to its world, and the Agents destroyed the ritual circle; during the raid the man who had called the demon, an investment banker by day, was shot in the head.
All of the SAs in attendance reported the same thing: the suspect was shot attempting to escape. Sara, however, could feel the truth radiating from the paper in front of her. The senior Agent had been so disgusted and angry that he had walked up to the man and shot him to keep from tearing him limb from limb with his bare hands.
She was thankful that the crime scene photos and video were all on the thumb drive where she didn't have to look at them. She couldn't imagine being the one to catalog all of that, much less have to face the man who had done it. It made sense, now, why Frog was grateful he wasn't psychic, if that was what being an Agent meant.
To her surprise, the SA who had held the gun was Jason Adams. She wouldn't have expected someone who wasn't even human to get so upset over a child's death that he was willing to shoot someone in cold blood--but then, depending on how vampirism really worked, he might have been human once. Hell, he might have a daughter of his own out there somewhere. He had a sister, after all, and she hadn't thought that was possible. Who knew, in this place?
“Demons,” she muttered, closing the file. “Demons and vampires and Elves…oh my.”
Putting the folders in numerical order took all of two minutes, which was fortunate, because the second she finished straightening up the stack, the door opened.
“Hi there,” said the woman who walked in. “You must be Sara.”
Sara blinked. “Hi.”
“Dru Carter. I’m the Office Manager.”
Sara found herself shaking hands with the shortest adult woman she’d ever seen—Dru might have been five feet if she stood tiptoe. That wasn’t the interesting thing, though.
Dru was blue.
Literally.
Head to foot, her skin was a smooth and shiny robin’s egg blue, with a smattering of darker blue freckles over her nose and neck. She had dark blue dreadlocks that were held back from her face with a silver clip. Her facial features suggested African American, and her eyes were a burnished silver color. To further spin Sara’s logical mind off kilter, Dru wore perfectly normal office clothes, heels, and jewelry.
“I can tell you’re new here,” Dru laughed. “You’re trying not to stare. It’s all right, I’m used to it.”
They shook hands; Dru had a firm grip and a friendly, infectious smile. “If you don’t mind my asking…”
“What the hell am I?” Another laugh. “I don’t mind at all. I’m a Naiad.”
“A river nymph, like from Greek mythology? God, is all of that stuff real?”
“In a way. My people are mostly gone now; the SA rescued my mother from an accident, and after I was born I lived here on base—next to the pool.”
“There’s a pool?”
“Yeah, in the courtyard across from the labyrinth. I’d prefer a river, really, but it’s the best they could do with the existing building. I go to the lake every chance I get.”
“So you don’t live in the water.”
“No, that’s part of the myth. There are creatures who do, like mermaids, but they don’t associate with humans, and besides, having them work here would be kind of messy. I can breathe underwater or on land.”
Dru should have been the one named after an amphibian, then…did she have gills under her suit jacket? Sara decided not to ask. “Wow. I thought I’d seen everything already after I met SA-5.”
Dru had a wonderful laugh—it did, indeed, sound liquid. “Oh, Rowan’s plenty strange. Wait until you see him in the winter.”
She decided not to pursue that one just yet. “So, um…you’re in charge of the whole Admin team?”
“That’s me. There are six other Admins besides you, and everyone reports to me. We’re going to start you out on filing for probably the first month, then Ness wants you to train with Rowan so you can do dispatch out on the Floor. As I understand it you’re way above the telepathy level they need, but there are a few skills you’ll need to develop to use the system.”
Finally a glimpse of the SA’s plan for her! “So that’s why they hired me?”
Dru’s smile turned mischievous. “For now. At any rate, today I’d like to show you around the sub-levels, introduce you to everyone, and get you started in here on current cases. I’m assuming while you put those guys in order you poked through a few of them?”
Sara bit her lip. “Um…”
“Everyone does, their first day. Don’t worry about it—you’ve got clearance for case files, just not Personnel files. Nobody can get into those but me and Ness without submitting a request form.”
Dru beckoned for her to follow, and they headed back into the hallway. “Now, the basic layout of the place is pretty simple,” she began, as Sara fell in stride beside her—one advantage to Dru’s height was that it was much easier to keep up with her than with Steve. “You’ve seen where Ness’s office is located. Several of the senior Agents have their own offices off the Floor,
too. Now, over here, this hallway leads to the Agents’ locker room, and also to the combat training arena…”
*****
Filing for a secret government organization, it turned out, was pretty much like filing for anyone.
It took her all of one full morning to learn her new job, which was a bit disturbing seeing that she was going to have to do it every day for a month at least. She was quite willing to do whatever they wanted her to do, but if she were perfectly honest she would have to say that by the end of the first week she was bored out of her mind.
She could have been working for the IRS for all the excitement she had. Every morning she got up, showered, dressed, and went to the cafeteria for breakfast; she was allotted three meals per day for free, but could go back for snacks at her own expense. She could also keep anything she liked in her little fridge, so when Frog stopped by again she could offer him a beer. The cafeteria served an astonishing variety of food, and it even had a coffee bar, which was usually her first stop of the morning.
After breakfast she took the elevator down to the Floor, then crossed the room to Current Files, where she spent the day alphabetizing, organizing, and storing.
She was, as it turned out, too efficient for the government; by the first Thursday Dru had already started giving her more tasks. She was granted access to the main files and to the computer, and learned how the case files were assembled, so she could take the piles of haphazard notes the Agents threw together and turn them into an official record of the case. She printed labels on the special label machine attached to the computer, which was fun in a very nerdy way.
She could also get into the media files on the thumb drives now; her security clearance had already been upped to B so that she could pull files off the server and copy them to the thumb drives.
That first week she hardly saw anyone; she had learned all the Admins’ names, but they were so busy nobody had time for anything but a “Good morning” and a “Have a good night.” She saw Dru every day, and that was good; she already liked the Naiad immensely. Beyond that, though, Sara’s interactions were with the files, and occasionally with Frog for coffee or dinner in the cafeteria.
Frog, bless him, didn’t seem to mind that she peppered him with questions about the Agency, many of which he couldn’t answer.
Sara started to have dreams about black file folders chasing her naked across the Floor. At that point, she asked Dru if there was anything else she could help with.
Dru was amused. “I knew you were going to make short work of this department. How about you help me do some copying? It’s not that interesting but it’ll occupy your for an hour or two.”
The copy machine, a massive beast that did everything but wash cars, was out on the Floor, so Sara jumped at the chance to see something besides the antiseptic white walls of Current Files. Dru handed her a pile of interoffice mail envelopes and instructed her to copy the contents of some, scan others, and give them all back when she was done.
Glad to have something new to do, even something as banal as copying, Sara all but bounced out of the file room.
When she arrived at the corner where the copier stood, someone was already using it, and again, Sara found herself staring.
It was another small woman, probably five-five, but ivory skinned instead of blue. She had a mop of jet-black hair streaked through with vibrant red, the same color as her lipstick. The woman wore black fatigues, the standard dress of SAs, but over it was a black patent coat, matching the shiny steel-toed boots that laced up to her knees. Her eyebrow and nose were both pierced.
She looked up at Sara’s approach. “Do you know how to use this piece of shit?”
“Um…” Sara stammered, taking in the woman’s face—a carbon copy of another she’d seen, but a little smaller and more feminine. “What are you trying to do?”
“I was thinking of photocopying my ass. Or this.” She held up her document, a binder clip full of field notes. “I want it front and back.”
“Oh, easy. Look…” Sara moved closer, feeling a twinge of atavistic fear; her instincts knew exactly what she was standing next to, even if she wasn’t ready to say it aloud. She tapped the copier’s screen, bringing up the menu that she needed, and within seconds the woman’s paperwork was zipping through the document feeder, copies spitting onto the tray.
“Cool.” The woman looked her up and down, blatantly examining her. “You’re the new girl, right? Did you make the coffee this morning? It tasted like bong water.”
“There’s coffee down here?”
A tip of her head to the right. “Third hallway left of Ness’s office. Staff lounge. They have donuts.”
“Oh, do you…eat…donuts?”
The woman had a loud, bell-like laugh, one that sounded like she used it a lot. There was a Puckish glint in her eye. “No. Solid food makes me vomit. It’s all liquid for us, all the time, and thank god that includes vodka or I’d have staked myself a long time ago.”
She reminded Sara strongly of the watercolor “bad faeries” by Amy Brown—sort of punk, sort of wicked, and far younger than she really was. The contrast between her and her twin was nothing short of amazing.
“So you’re Beck, right?”
“The one and only. How’d you guess?”
“Well, you look a lot like your brother. Sort of.”
Beck snorted softly. “Two different eggs, two different planets. You met him?”
“Yeah. He interrogated me. And shot me with a tranquilizer dart.”
“Rock on.” Beck picked up her document and leafed through it, checking it over; then, she muttered, “Speak of the devil.”
Behind Beck, on the far side of the Floor, SA-7 emerged from the hall that led to the Agents’ locker room. He looked like he’d just had a shower, as his dark hair was damp and a bit tousled. His coat was slung over his arm and instead of regulation black he was actually wearing a pair of jeans and a plain white t-shirt that allowed a much better view of both his muscles and a tattoo, a black dragon with the Moon in its claws, covering his left bicep.
Sara had never seen anything so sexy in her entire life.
Unfortunately she had a bad track record with attractive men, so by the time he reached the copier area, she had completely lost her hold on the English language and just gawked like a teenage groupie.
He strode up to Beck and handed her something—a small brown paper bag. Beck looked in it and rolled her eyes.
“You are such an idiot,” she told her brother.
“And you’re going to be late,” he replied. Sara started to wonder if his facial expression ever changed, but right then a smile passed briefly over his lips, and he added, “As usual.”
Beck saluted him. “Sir, yes sir. Coding on for my patrol shift right away, sir.”
“Fuck off, little girl. Have you seen Smurfette around anywhere?”
Beck shrugged, pointed at Sara. “Ask her.”
Jason finally seemed to acknowledge Sara’s presence; his eyes fixed on her at first as they might a particularly troublesome bug, but then she saw recognition. “The Witch.”
Sara realized how stupid she must look staring at him; whether his attitude was due to arrogance or something less obnoxious, she had every bit as much right to be here as he did. Plus, she’d had a glimpse that there was more to him than disdain, reading over his case files. There was wry humor in them, but also, more subtly, real compassion. She knew he cared about his job and the people the SA protected.
Still, he didn’t have to act like a dick.
“The jackass vampire with the big gun,” she responded evenly.
He stared at her for a second, seeming almost astonished, then gave her a dazzling smile. “Do you know where I might find Dru?”
“Last I saw she was heading for her office. Does she know you call her Smurfette?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ve been calling her that since before you hit puberty.” He looked her up and down as Beck had, and Sara knew she
was blushing but stood her ground under his scrutiny. She wasn’t sure what he was evaluating her for, but apparently he found it, because he said, “So Rowan isn’t as crazy as I thought he was.”
“That remains to be seen,” Beck told him, smacking him lightly on the arm with the paper bag.
Jason gave her a look that Sara couldn’t begin to interpret, and then said curtly to Sara, “Welcome aboard. Office 303, next door to the coffee.”
He turned and headed for Dru’s office, and Sara tried not to be obvious in checking out his ass as he walked, but failed pretty spectacularly.
Beck shook her head. “Honey, don’t waste your time. You’re not his type.”
The Agency, Volume I Page 4
