Serve

by Laura Wylde

  “An ancient cult,” Adonis finished for him.

  “What is this? ‘June 9, 11:45 pm. Coney Island. Interview completed with M’Rith Lei concerning suspicious activity near subway within vicinity Gravesend Bay. M’Rith describes putrid smell and…’ The rest is all in Greek. Who is M’Rith and what is she or he doing poking around in the Coney Island bay at midnight? And why is the rest of the interview in Greek?”

  “It’s a lassie,” volunteered Todd. “As fine a lassie as you’ll ever meet, except you won’t meet her. She’s sensitive about being around people that don’t have fins.”

  Adonis interrupted him hastily. “Todd, if you can’t hold your liquor, I’m going to start restricting your drink. M’Rith is a stage name. She performs at one of those night-clubs that features mermaids.”

  “That doesn’t explain why she was at the Gravesend Bay at midnight.”

  “She lives there,” Todd exploded.

  Adonis jabbed him in the ribs. “She swims there,” he corrected. “She practices swimming in the bay.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous for one woman to be out there, alone, late in the evening?”

  “She’s an excellent swimmer.”

  The pain between my eyes was becoming so great, it was leaking out the far corners, beating at my temples. “Alright. I’ll accept that for now. What was the suspicious activity you investigated and why was it necessary to write the report in Greek?”

  “It’s a very precise language,” said Adonis defensively. “You can’t squabble over the word use like you can in English. You create a sturdier case.”

  “Fine. It’s all about solidarity. And the activity?”

  This time, they all paused and looked at each other uncomfortably. Even Adrien looked up for a second, then shrugged and returned to his phone. “Illegal waste material dump,” Adonis finally said. “Some very nasty stuff. We had a team come out and dispose of the matter.”

  “Did you catch the culprit?”

  “We disposed of the matter,” he repeated.

  Ah. Corporate cover-up. It was one of the toughest moral calls. Many within the police department would rather just clean up the toxic messes left behind than fully investigate the big companies that made them. As far as I could tell from the formal reports, they had followed the chain of command and reported to the commissioner, who was probably being dangled like a puppet from even more powerful strings.

  That took care of one puzzle, but there was still a mountain of questions behind the intentionally obscure reports. One thing was clarified from cross-referencing their documents with FBI records. The Special Unit was the one assigned to the most peculiar cases in a city where the entire population seemed peculiar. Their expertise was in creating group profiles.

  In New York’s tangled streets and dark alleys, every type of cult and clan exist. There are groups that practiced voodoo, dark magic, paganist rites. There are vampire worshippers who have ivory fang insets inside their mouths. There are groups that pump themselves up on amphetamines and streak through the parks at night, believing themselves to be werewolves. Groups that believe they can change into animals. Somehow, Adonis’ team understood them and was able to track them to their lairs. It was an unusual gift, but the more I studied the records, the more they seemed to flounder in mysticism and fantastic creatures.

  Their explanation didn’t include why the interview with M’Rith was included in the witness statements concerning the events around Turtle Pond. “What does a toxic waste dump have to do with disappearances and cannibalism?” I wondered out loud. My fingernails drummed on the desk, waiting for a reply.

  “It wasn’t related to any known industry,” answered Adonis vaguely. “It seemed to fit with unknown metals and short people who lived in wet places.”

  “What makes you think they live in wet places?”

  Adonis was clearly uncomfortable, so Thaddeus answered for him. “From the witness reports. They slid around in the mud and reeds without making a single disturbance. All the attacks were…” He glanced at Adonis whose mouth had disappeared in a single straight line. “In water.”

  I pried for more information. “Then they could be a sea-faring group, a tribe with abnormal growth development; like dwarves?”

  “Somewhat like dwarves,” Adrien mumbled, still preoccupied. “Larger chests and heads. More powerful builds.”

  “You’re familiar with them?”

  Adonis shook his head. “No. There was a group like this reported in Western Europe over eight hundred years ago.”

  Now I knew that Thaddeus was sincerely trying to bridge the communication gap, even if his boss wasn’t forth-coming in his explanations. “It’s unusual for them to gather as a group,” he told me, his eyes rapidly looking around for uninvited listeners. “You might run into one or two and they can be unpleasant, even downright nasty, but mainly, they just want money. They don’t usually murder. Not unless…” He put his hands to his head and tore at his luxurious, dark hair. “There was a time in history,” he moaned. “There was a time. They were hideous when they came, grinding their teeth, the bloodlust glowing in their eyes.”

  For a moment, I was afraid Thaddeus was going to have a nervous break-down right there in the office. He buried his face in his hands while Todd patted him on the back and promised special entertainment when they went out to drink in the evening. The flat foot was really starting to annoy me. “Officer Murray, do you have anything to add to this investigation beside free booze?”

  Murray nudged his moaning companion. “Tell her, Thaddeus.”

  He looked at me with dark, tormented eyes, pleading release from their memories.“The boy is still alive.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, my voice straining to remain patient. His answer caused a shockwave to numb even my twisting gut.

  “Because they don’t eat their victims right away. They fatten them first, so they’ll be tender.”

  “That would be about right,” said Adrien, setting down his phone. He glanced up, giving me my first real look at him. He had wide brown eyes and an unusually soft face, like a Botticelli painting of a young man. “A diet of corn and dairy to sweeten them.” Leaving the phone behind, he went to the door, turned and said, “excuse me. I have a date with the porcelain gods.”

  Old joke, amazing opportunity. He had separated from his super-device to go to the john. I glanced down to see what he had been studying so intently. Trolls! He had been reading up on trolls! It did make a weird sort of sense. In the fairy tales, trolls lived under bridges. They committed their fair share of atrocities. They were stout and big-headed. If vampire worshippers could have fangs implanted, why couldn’t a group of psychopathic, big-headed dwarves have their dental works include a double row of vicious carnivorous teeth? Suddenly, the work around the site at the Turtle Pond Bridge seemed intriguing.

  “I want to thank all of you for your cooperation,” I told them, shutting my tablet and sliding it into my handbag with my standard issue, Glock .40. “Your information has been…” I cast about in my head for an appropriate word. Bizarre? Unpalatable? “Enlightening,” I finished.

  With an odd sense of urgency, I left them and rushed to the site.

  Adrien

  I’m gone five minutes and the office falls apart. Adonis gave me one of those, “it’s all your fault” looks, when I walked back in, although I had no idea what I had done. He held up my phone. “She’s gone back to the site. She’s going to get herself killed.”

  “What does she think she’s going to find?” I asked, rescuing my device and putting it in my pocket. The others were all checking their weapons and putting on their field jackets, so I prepared myself as well. None of us really cared for standard police equipment. Guns weren’t very reliable for taking down certain types of monsters, like demons, Gollum and gorgons. Electric stun guns fed some creatures more power. Our best weapons were our talons when we shape-shifted. The only real reason for carrying the light artillery was to look like normal p
olice officers.

  “She has some notion about looking around the pond itself,” said Adonis irritably. He hated to be around water. He hated the mere mention of working around water. When we conducted our interview with M’Rith, he had stayed one hundred-fifty feet away from the shoreline. Todd and I had waded in just enough that she could keep her tail submerged.

  The activity M’Rith had complained about was a griffin who had made his home in one of the subway tunnels. He was a fastidious griffin who was cleaning out all the excrement left by the last set of illegal squatters. We told him he would have to move on, and he grumbled about it, stating all the best places had been taken. We finally agreed to let him set up housekeeping in an abandoned section of the tunnels. Griffins can never be lumped together in a single class. Some are noble. Some are vicious. Some are mercenary soldiers. This one represented the gentleman’s class, who used his image for fine cigars.

  The excrement the griffin had shoved into the bay was what placed the interview in the disappeared people file. The excrement clearly came from one of the dark, underground creatures who preyed on the weak and unsuspecting. The slimey’s and oozies whose horrible stench offended the above-ground dwellers. Adonis and the others discussed several theories concerning what new group had moved into the neighborhood, but none had thought about trolls. Trolls didn’t care for salt water, but if they were migrating, this is where they would land first, then move inland towards marshes and ponds.

  If we were going to work around water, this was probably an appropriate day for it, as the sky was overcast, with fitful rains that came and went in spurts. We would not be able to avoid getting wet, so immersion didn’t seem much different. Most of the searchers had moved away from the marshes and were now concentrating on the area around the bridge. They nudged their poles into the water gently, not wishing to disturb the marine life swimming placidly under the algae.

  Agent Winslow was a hands-on operator in the field. She jaunted along the edge of the embankment, checking each tiny flag where a fragment had been found and glancing from the marsh to the pond. By now, the flags were like a trail of bread crumbs that Winslow insisted on following. Adonis walked halfway down the path that led under the bridge, then sat down heavily. I sat down beside him and pulled out my phone, checking for any videos made that day. The area was closed off to the public, but wherever there is a closure, there is a curious public, ready with their cameras for a video shot and five minutes of Internet fame. So far, the social networking sites were clean. There was only one clumsy shot of a pair of boots approaching the viewer and escorting him out of the roped- in area. The caption read, “what are they hiding?”

  “Why are you sitting here?” Asked Adonis.

  I looked at him with surprise. “Because you’re sitting here.”

  He groaned. “Put that damned phone away and go see what that woman is doing. I’m sitting here because I’m your captain and I can sit where I please.”

  Todd pulled me to my feet by the ear. For a short guy, he had a lot of leverage. “Come on, whippersnapper,” he said. “You haven’t clocked in enough hours to sit on your tail yet.”

  Midway down the embankment, he whispered, “You know the Captain doesn’t like large bodies of water.”

  “None of us do,” I said. “He needs to get over it. It doesn’t look good for him to sit up there on the bank, while the agent pokes around under the bridge.”

  “You’ve never lost someone you had sworn to protect,” chided Todd. “It does something to you. It leaves you hollow and empty inside. With time, some of the empty spaces fill up, but you never forget what it was like. It’s not fear. It’s total despair.”

  “Has it happened to you?”

  “It happens to everybody eventually, if they live long enough. When your brain matures enough to access your ancestral memories, you’ll probably find a few hollow thoughts. Sometimes the bad guys win, no matter how much we struggle against it.”

  Agent Winslow was beckoning to us from one end of the pond. We scuttled under the bridge that gave us both an uneasy feeling. Something malicious had lurked there. There was still an odor wafting up from under the bridge pilings. She was more interested in something she saw immersed in shallow water. It was metal and completely covered over with underwater weeds. “What do you think it is, players?” She asked, standing so close to me, for a second, all I could think of was her scent, fresh and clean as soap, as sharply sweet as lavender.

  “It looks like a drainage grate,” I suggested. I wasn’t too willing to poke around. The grate was slimy. The area surrounding it, full of sludge. Weed tendrils slithered down and wrapped themselves around the grill.

  She gestured to her team to stake off the area around the grate. “I wonder where it goes,” she said speculatively.

  Todd hunched his shoulders together and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Well, lassie, we shall see soon enough, won’t we?”

  We had started up the hill when Adonis met us halfway down. “What did you find?” He asked, his face an unhealthy color for a deeply tanned man.

  We told him. “Good. Good,” he said briskly, nodding.“We’ll get a diving team out here to check it out. Todd, instruct the uniformed officers to keep a close guard around the area of the bridge and the pond. I don’t want some teenagers playing pranks to accidentally get caught up in things. There could be crossfire. The kids could be mistaken for the murderers or get captured themselves. This is a code one alert.”

  “Gotcha Captain,” he agreed, trotting off. Code one was when we assumed the worst; that there were hostile species involved who were more of an endangerment to humans who knew they were there than to humans who didn’t. Random killings became personal killings when the underworld’s true faces were revealed. Code one meant that the uniformed guards would all be shape-shifters; bears, badgers, wild cats, and wolves and our plainclothes detectives would all be Special Unit Phoenixes.

  Tara simply thought it meant the police force’s highest security level. “I know what I said about no publicity, but aren’t you afraid by tightening things up too much, we’ll attract more attention?”

  My hand had sneaked into my pocket and curled itself around my smart phone, purring, happy for an excuse to access it. I began to inch it up and out until Adonis barked, “leave it there.”

  I dropped it but left my hands in my pockets. “We’re already being accused of hiding something,” I explained grudgingly, unhappy with having to use words instead of just showing them the video. “It’s better to leave them guessing than to risk lives.”

  “You still think it’s a group?” Asked the agent. I nodded, so she continued, “of big-headed dwarves practicing cannibalism?”

  “It’s a cult,” said Adonis, rescuing me from an awkward reply. “It all fits. Because of their deformities, they fashioned themselves after trolls and developed a troll-like identity.”

  “Very dangerous people,” added Thaddeus. “It’s not the first time this anomaly occurred. During the civil wars…”

  “Please don’t give me another history lesson,” she begged, but there were no longer icicles dripping from her words. She was warming up to us, or at least to Thaddeus. “They were terrible times, but you’re too young to remember them. You need to be honest about the events that happened in your own life if you wish to face your PTSD and conquer it.”

  He started to argue, then considered how his words would sound. “You’re probably right. I’ve seen some fearful sights, but I think, Agent Winslow, this might be one of the most fearsome of them all. We should use every precaution.”

  “I want to go down there,” she said. Her voice had a strange, dreamy quality that made me inch closer and inhale her scent once more. “My guts tell me there’s something down there.”

  “Mine do too,” answered Adonis. “But they also tell me to leave it to the divers. They are experts in this type of environment.”

  She grinned. “Your posse? Isn’t the sheriff supposed to ride at
the head?”

  Thaddeus defended our boss man hastily. “That has nothing to do with it. If these people are who we think they are, they are incredibly vicious and twice as dangerous in the water as they are on land.”

  “If these people are who you say they are, the divers will alert them. They’ll be gone before we can organize a strike team.”

  Adonis disagreed. “Four divers, that’s all we need to get the layout. It’s too dangerous for anybody to go down there alone.”

  “Four divers are too much attention. We only need one to verify what’s behind that grate.”

  The two faced off against each other, both of a fiery will, both driven by duty, both proud and unbending. Adonis was a protector. His duty included protecting this wild Montana fury who stood by her duty to rescue an innocent child. Adonis tried his best paternal voice, which never does come off very effectively because he looks more like an Olympian rock star than a father. “Please, trust us on this. We’ll send our best underwater combatants. They’ll be careful. If they see anything unusual, they’ll report immediately for back-up. They’ve been in underwater search and rescue operations before.”

  “The clock’s ticking away for a seven-year-old boy.”

  “We have the entire area under surveillance. Believe me, we have units so good at camouflage, you would never know there are humans nearby.”

  Her face softened, and she gave a laugh that wasn’t quite a jeer. “Total ninja’s, eh?”

  “You could say that.”

  I began wondering how long I would have to remain a passive face pretending interest in a conversation that was the age-old battle of the sexes. Gender roles don’t confuse me. They are just utterly senseless. Maybe the others had been born with a set of instructions as to male and female roles in society. They were older than Methuselah, or at least their memories were. I’m only twenty-eight in earth years, which is a baby by phoenix standards. I haven’t talked to a single ancestor and I’ve just begun developing my powers, but I do know people are going to do what they want to do without a single gender consideration, so it was stupid to attach a gender label to behaviors.