Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds

by Fiction River

  “I was wondering if you could tell me after practice what the rules are for officially challenging for your job?”

  “Sure: lose about 40 pounds,” Niki said, laughing for a few moments before stopping. “Wait, you’re serious, aren’t you? You realize for every minute of mine you waste after practice I’m going to make you run a lap?”

  “OK,” Ashley said. “That sounds fair.”

  “Sounds ridiculous,” Niki said. “Go run a lap now for wasting my minute. And another 12 after that for wasting a minute of every girl on this team.”

  Willingly beginning her run, Ashley was on her third lap before she heard Niki starting to yell: “Hey! Where’s my dog? I paid good money for that thing!”

  “Maybe it’s with someone else…?” Portia said.

  “Someone else? Who else has my good taste? They wouldn’t even sell you a dog on the internet…”

  Smiling, and then outright laughing, Ashley continued her run, joyful that Niki’s disappointments were only beginning. The soon-to-be former captain was right about one thing, however, Ashley thought as she picked a jingle bell out of her teeth: The dog really did have good taste.

  Introduction to “Here, Kitty Kitty”

  Annie Reed is an award-winning mystery writer, but her most popular stories are about Diz and Dee, who run a detective agency in a Seattle-like place filled with magic. Last year, Annie went to an anime convention with her daughter.

  “The cosplayers at the convention blew me away with the creativity and variety of their costumes,” Annie writes. “When I got the invitation for Unnatural Worlds, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to introduce Diz & Dee to anime and cosplay. My daughter, of course, takes total credit for providing me with the inspiration for ‘Here, Kitty Kitty.’ She’s not too far off.”

  Here, Kitty Kitty

  Annie Reed

  I dove behind my desk as my miniature Zen garden went whizzing past me. The garden’s stone base slammed into the wall right about where my head had been a split second ago, sand rained down into my hair, and I wondered what else I’d left lying around the front office that the little fairy might decide to throw at me.

  My name’s Dee, and I’m a private investigator. Clients usually don’t show up at my office and launch deadly weapons at me. Along with my partner, Diz, I run D & D Investigations. People—and by that I’m loosely referring to elves, leprechauns, Greek gods, and my family—hire us to find loved ones who’ve gone missing. We rent office space in a shabby building on the inland side of Moretown Bay. The neighborhood’s seen better times, but I like it. A masseuse with a unique flair for marketing and questionable taste in aromatics has a shop across the street, and there’s an Asian store next to the office run by a very nice lady who two days ago introduced me to the little fairy currently hovering over my desk and yelling at me in Japanese.

  I don’t speak Japanese. I think my dog might since his usual Golden Retriever grin was dialed up to a near giggle.

  “Want to let me in on the joke?” I asked him as I crouched behind my desk clutching my battered executive chair like it was a shield.

  Dog didn’t say anything. He only speaks to me in my visions. And yes, that’s his name until he tells me otherwise.

  We’d been having a nice afternoon at the office, Dog and I, up until the fairy barged through the door. Diz was off doing whatever tall, grumpy, gorgeous elves do—by themselves—after they crack a case with their partner. Dog had been curled up asleep in a small patch of actual sunshine coming through the front windows. I didn’t blame him. Clouds, rain, and mist are the norm in Moretown Bay. Rare slices of sunshine should always be celebrated with a good nap. My cat was probably doing the same thing in my upstairs apartment unless she was still pouting. She hasn’t quite forgiven me for allowing a dog to invade her life.

  Faced with an office full of sleeping animals and no cases to work on, I’d been trying to distract myself from obsessing over my terminally single state, this time with Zen meditation. Diz told me recently that I should learn to live in the moment and enjoy the process instead of focusing so hard on the results. He thinks that might help me control my visions. I’m not an elf or a fairy or any other brand of magical folk. Vanilla human, that’s me, only with a seriously unreliable touch of precognition. Since I suck at living in the moment, I thought learning Zen meditation might help; hence the little desk-top sand garden I’d purchased at the Asian market two days ago.

  I’d been sitting at my desk raking lines in that stupid little plot of sand for what seemed like hours, trying to stop thinking about my partner’s pointy ears and the one time I’d witnessed the tantalizing curve of his towel-covered derriere and just be in the moment, when our latest supposedly happy client flew in the door, picked up the Zen garden, and threw it at my head. I ducked just in time. She’s got quite an arm for someone only ten inches tall.

  “Okay, okay!” I said from behind the safety of my desk. Which, let’s face it, isn’t all that safe when the fairy hurling weapons at your head can fly just about anywhere she wants to. “I get that you’re angry. Want to let me in on why?”

  After all, Diz and I found the ceramic figurine the fairy had hired us to find. We don’t normally track down missing objects, but Mrs. Takahashi, the nice lady who owns the Asian store, had asked...well, nicely. Two days after we were hired, we delivered the four-inch tall, white ceramic figurine of a cat to Mrs. Takahashi, who thanked us profusely and assured us she would give it to the fairy right away.

  That had been two hours ago. It was pretty safe to say something had gone wrong, I just had no idea what.

  The office door flew open again. I risked taking a peek around the corner of my desk to see what new trouble had descended on my quiet afternoon.

  Mrs. Takahashi stood in the same spot of sunshine Dog had been sleeping in before he decided, like me, that hiding behind my desk was a pretty good idea.

  Short and slender and about sixty years old, Mrs. Takahashi was the most well-liked person I knew. Even my cat liked her. I didn’t know if there was a Mr. Takahashi. I don’t think anyone did. From what everyone told me, Mrs. Takahashi and her store had been part of the neighborhood long before Diz and I opened our business. She was kind and patient and pretty much kept to herself. I’d never even heard her raise her voice.

  Until now.

  At least she wasn’t yelling at me. The little fairy who’d tried to bean me with my desktop garden had turned her tirade on Mrs. Takahashi, who sounded like she was holding her own in the argument. I couldn’t tell for sure since Mrs. Takahashi wasn’t speaking English either.

  “Think we should make a run for it?” I asked Dog.

  He sneezed and shook his head.

  Yeah, probably not a good idea. It’s not wise to annoy fairies. It’s even worse to run from them.

  I raised my hand, wishing I had a white flag I could wave. “Truce?” I asked.

  The rapid-fire argument ceased.

  When I poked my head up from behind my desk, both the fairy and Mrs. Takahashi were staring at me. The fairy had her hands on her tiny hips. She was dressed in a white leather skirt and matching lace-up vest that bared her belly and managed to leave her wings unencumbered. Black hair frizzed around her head like dandelion fluff dipped in India ink. She wore white chunk-heel boots, and she was hovering about six inches away from Mrs. Takahashi’s face, the beat of her wings making Mrs. Takahashi’s grey hair flutter in the breeze.

  The fairy was beautiful—most fairies are—but her outfit made her look like one of the ball-joint dolls Mrs. Takahashi kept in a locked case behind the checkout counter in her store. The dolls looked like a cross between someone’s Asian schoolgirl fantasy, with their pleated skirts and white blouses and knee-high socks, and the delicate-faced characters I’d seen on the covers of the manga books Mrs. Takahashi sold. I’d asked her once why she kept the dolls locked away since they were the only things she kept under lock and key. She said they were very expensive, and the
n she quoted me a price for the smallest doll that was more than a month’s rent for my office and apartment combined. I don’t think she’s ever sold a single doll. I can’t say that I’m surprised.

  Since the little fairy didn’t look like she was about to throw anything else at me—at least for the moment—I quit using my chair as a shield and sat down in it instead. “So,” I said. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on? In English?”

  Mrs. Takahashi inclined her head at me. “So sorry. It appears you and your partner were duped.”

  Duped?

  She gave a quick sideways glance at the angry fairy. “The little statue you found was not the right one. She says you have tricked her. She is very angry.”

  “I got that part.”

  My scalp was starting to itch. I rubbed at it, and sand sifted down on top of my desk. It wasn’t bad enough my hair frizzed when it was damp, which was pretty much all the time, now I had a headful of sandy dandruff. Too bad that wasn’t the sum total of my problems.

  Fairies are difficult beings to do business with. “Doing business” is perilously close to bargaining, and fairy bargains rarely turn out well for the non-fey involved. The only reason I’d agreed to find the little ceramic figurine for this particular fairy was because Mrs. Takahashi had asked. Nicely.

  “Please tell her I’m very sorry for the mix up,” I said to Mrs. Takahashi. “My partner and I, we weren’t aware there would be more than one figurine that fit the description she gave us. We’ll be happy to keep looking for the right one.”

  I waited while Mrs. Takahashi translated. When she finished, the little fairy still looked angry, but at least she no longer looked lethal.

  “I do have one question,” I said. “If there’s more than one white ceramic cat figurine like that one out there, how can we tell when we’ve got the right one?”

  While I waited for the translation, Dog came over and rested his head on my leg. I petted him and he wagged his tail. Sometimes I almost think he’s just a dog.

  The little fairy’s response was short. Mrs. Takahashi kept looking at her like she expected the fairy to say something else, but the fairy just gestured in my direction.

  Mrs. Takahashi shrugged. “She says you’ll know.”

  “We’ll know?”

  “Yes. That is all she’ll say.”

  We’ll know.

  Oh, great.

  Diz was just going to love this.

  ***

  “We’ll know?”

  Diz did not love this if his pacing back and forth in our front office was any indication. Well, that and the glower.

  My partner’s not the most Zen elf in existence, which, when I thought about it, made his advice to me to enjoy the process definitely a pot say hello to kettle kind of thing. Back when Diz and I were both detectives with the Moretown Bay Police Department, he was bad cop to my sympathetic cop. Since he’s built like The Rock before The Rock became a movie star and has the intense stare to go with the muscles, Diz was a natural at bad cop.

  I got stuck with Diz because no one else in the department could put up with his bad disposition. Although to be fair, he got the short end of that deal. No one wanted to partner with me either since my only qualification for the magical side of police work was a smidgen of precognition that kicked in whenever it felt like it. All this “be in the moment” stuff was supposed to help me control my precog visions. So far it had worked once, which was the vision where I met Dog. I’d thought he was just part of the vision—a part that talked back to me, no less—then Dog had shown up at my door and made himself at home.

  As soon as Mrs. Takahashi and the fairy left, I’d called Diz to give him the bad news. While he was on his way back to the office, I reviewed every step of our investigation, trying to spot where we’d messed up.

  The little ceramic figurine was a family heirloom. The fairy said she had to leave it behind when she immigrated to the United States with her family. As soon as she’d scraped the money together, she arranged to have the heirloom shipped to her. It had been bundled with a shipment of goods from Japan headed for Mrs. Takahashi’s store and other retail outlets not only in Moretown Bay but throughout the Pacific Northwest. The shipment had arrived on a cargo boat as scheduled, but when Mrs. Takahashi’s portion of the shipment arrived at her store, the box containing the ceramic figurine was missing.

  The fairy was convinced pirates had stolen it. In my experience, the days when pirates stole trinkets just because they were pretty were long past. Modern pirates only stole merchandise they could sell without a hitch. Protection spells cost a bundle, and unless a pirate expected a big payday at the end, stealing small stuff from a fairy just wasn’t cost-effective.

  I was pretty sure the shipment had been misplaced. I’ve worked with shipping companies before, and if you don’t pay extra for homing spells, there’s no telling where a package could end up. Diz and I spent a day and a half running down every package that had arrived on that shipment until we finally found the little ceramic figurine, still in the box, in a comic book store in South Bay.

  The fairy’s figurine had arrived along with the rest of the store’s order of manga and anime products. The guys at the comic book store had been too busy getting ready for a big trade show at the convention center to even unpack the shipment, so they didn’t know they had one more box than they should have. The owner of the store had been more than happy to hand the figurine over without a fuss when he learned it belonged to a fairy.

  I’d checked the shipping information on the box against the printouts Mrs. Takahashi had given us confirming that the box had been shipped from Japan. The numbers matched. The box had been opened, but Customs opened a lot of boxes coming from overseas. The figurine looked like the one in the photo we’d been given, and that should have been that.

  In hindsight, it was pretty obvious what had happened. Somewhere along the way, someone had switched the figurine inside the box with an exact replica. But why? According to what Mrs. Takahashi told us, the figurine was only important to the fairy’s family.

  “How do we know the real thing’s not still in Japan?” Diz said, not bothering to pause his pacing.

  We didn’t. But going to Japan wasn’t in the budget—the fairy hadn’t paid us a retainer, after all—so the logical place to start was Moretown Bay. We’d only tracked the package the first time around. We hadn’t investigated anyone who worked on the cargo ship, in Customs, at the port, or with the delivery service, which was one honking long list of people.

  Not to mention that if someone had swapped out the real figurine with a fake one, the real figurine could be hidden somewhere on the ship. Cargo ships probably had about a zillion places to hide a four-inch tall figurine.

  Or whoever took the figurine could have pawned it in any one of dozens of pawn shops in the area.

  Or sold it on the black market. I didn’t know if white ceramic cat figurines were big on the black market, but no one knows why people take a shine to the things they do. Last year the hot new item had been zombified replicas of real-life political figures. As far as I was concerned, most politicians already looked like they’d been bitten by the undead, but stores couldn’t keep those ugly little things on the shelves. The goblin gangs who ran the black market in Moretown Bay knew a hot property when they saw it, and pretty soon legitimate businesses had to hire armed guards to protect their shipments of undead politicians.

  I thumped my sand-saturated head on my desk. Missing persons were easier to find than this. Our simple little case had just turned into a major investigation.

  I didn’t hear Diz pause in his pacing, but the next thing I knew, I felt the gentle touch of his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t suppose you’ve had any luck...” he began.

  He didn’t have to finish the thought. I knew what he meant. He wanted to know if I’d had a vision.

  “The sum total of my Zen is currently sifting through my hair onto my desk,” I said. “And Dog isn’t talking to me.�
�

  Diz wasn’t one-hundred percent fond of Dog, mainly because he’s pretty sure Dog wasn’t one-hundred percent canine. Diz can sense when beings use magic. He described it to me once like feeling a tingle on his skin, anywhere from a slight sense of static electricity in the air to the sensation of being swarmed by a million ants all at once. It all depended on the intensity of the magic. He’s learned to tune out low-level magic, otherwise he’d be twitchy all the time. Trust me. Twitchy and grumpy are not a good combination in an elf with his size and strength.

  When Dog came into our lives, Diz told me he sensed some kind of magic in the Golden Retriever, but it was the low-level kind, not nearly the amount a shape shifter or changeling would generate. Most dogs don’t put out any magical energy at all.

  Just like Diz, I was pretty sure Dog wasn’t a normal dog, but unlike my partner, I was okay with that. In the vision where I first met Dog, he’d been one of the animals in a live outdoor Christmas nativity scene. He’d looked me straight in the eye and told me—in perfect, non-accented English, no less—to get my butt out of the vision and get to work. It said a lot about Diz that he never questioned Dog’s part in my vision, and that he accepted Dog in our lives on my say so.

  “You need to relax,” Diz said.

  Dog came over and nudged my arm with his nose. I patted his broad back with one hand and sighed. Telling myself to relax was like telling myself not to think about the bean paste rolls I bought from Mrs. Takahashi. Which I now couldn’t stop thinking about.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “It’s a human thing.”

  Diz snorted. He had so many “elf things,” as he called them, like scaling the side of a building without the benefit of rope, I couldn’t help but retaliate every now and then.