Evangelina

by MaryJanice Davidson

  Walking through the mangled lawn to the smoldering building, they realized there would likely be no helpful evidence inside. Fire and rescue had beaten the flames, but the worst was done: medics were lifting and wheeling out two covered bodies. Art asked and found out the family name: Nuwa.

  "I recognize that name," Lue said upon hearing it. "Folks down at the station say that Harry Nuwa started a medical device company down near Minneapolis. It grew like bonkers and he sold it for millions and millions." He looked glumly at the covered gurneys. "He had a wife, and a bunch of kids. They've all grown up."

  "Someone should contact them," Art said.

  Mercy nodded.

  "If they were dragons like all the others," Lue asked, "why would they let themselves burn to death? Why not change shape. Wouldn't dragon skin be flame resistant?"

  Art pointed skyward. Even though it was daylight, the gibbous moon was still in the sky. "Many dragons are limited in when they can change shape. They're tied to the moon phase."

  "Evangelina's not."

  "Evangelina's exceptional."

  Lue chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. "I hear other dragons can control when they change shape. They use special leaves."

  Mercy and Art both turned and faced him. He swallowed hard. "I would prefer not to reveal how I know that, except to say: I am not a dragon."

  "It's okay, Lue." Mercy gave a small smile. We have to trust one another. "In any case, if those leaves exist, these people didn't have them. Or didn't use them."

  "Okay, I guess. So now I wonder: how did the fire start?"

  "Evangelina started it. She's a dragon."

  "Pretty quick jump, Agent March. Has there ever been a case of Evangelina breathing fire?"

  Art shook his head.

  "Okay, witness reports from Saint George's suggest she spits something venomous and/or acidic," Mercy allowed. "No one knows if it's flammable or not. But the facility did catch fire."

  "We'll find out the fire's origin soon enough," Art said. "That's what arson investigators are for."

  "I bet they discover it had an entirely human origin."

  "What, like an accident?"

  "No, Agent March. Like an arsonist."

  "Who could be Evangelina Scales."

  "Or the Regiment's next Pamela Pride."

  "Aw, Lue, c'mon. Aren't you putting the horse ahead of the--"

  "Dragon? No, Agent March, I am not."

  "Heh." They both looked at Art; for him, that was bursting into laughter. "Horse ahead of . . . heh."

  "Great, Art. Glad you liked that. So!" Lue's back must have felt better, because he was waving his hands in the air. "Is it only me, or is it odd that Miss Pamela of the Secret and Terrible Unicorn Panty Brigade is dead and . . . whoops! Evangelina has radically and suddenly altered her behavior, tactics, and activities? Perhaps she has dyed her hair blonde and taken up jogging as well!"

  "And started collecting unicorns," Art added loyally.

  "Exactly!"

  Mercy wrinkled her face good-naturedly at Art and continued. "We're standing outside a smoldering building where we saw Evangelina Scales. Not hanging around, not calling for help, but running away like a guilty demon. That happened, we can agree, right? We've got another big mess and she was on the scene. I can't speak for you guys, but that's good enough for the FBI." And others. "I still want her. You still want her?"

  "Stay focused," Art said, nodding, and it was the biggest help; she wasn't sure he knew what a big help he had been. Because it was Art, she and Lue knew he meant it in the most neutral way: Evangelina may, she may not, but either way, let's get her.

  And either way, we are going to get you, my girl.

  Mercy climbed back into her car, a determined and feisty young sedan that, despite the abuse piled upon it today, gamely started up.

  Mercy could relate.

  CHAPTER 38

  Her mother was impeccably dressed and made up, as usual. Years ago, Mercy had studied how the woman managed it--but even with her front-row seat, helping her mother with hair and makeup in the bathroom, Mercy was still dazzled by the results. She wasn't sure she would be able to carry on that particular legacy herself, as she aged.

  "Hi, Mom. Where's Dad?"

  "Good morning, Picklechip. I told your dad to go nap. I understand you've been keeping busy."

  Mercy snorted. "If you mean have I been following Evangelina but not catching her, yeah. Real busy." She remembered her earlier thought to get a self-reflecting window and practice eliminating her poker tells, then realized that by now, she didn't care. Progress? Or despair? "If you're looking for an update--"

  "Can't a mother simply bid her daughter good morning?"

  Mercy let the long moment slide by until her mother broke the silence by admitting, "Yes, well, I have gone over the intel you submitted to Bill--what there is of it--and thought you might find a chat helpful."

  "I think I will, too, Mom. Because I couldn't help but notice--and neither can any of the state or local authorities on-site--that Pamela Pride is dead, and evidence of past crimes is piling up, and it's almost like--ha, ha--Evangelina might not be guilty."

  "She certainly is."

  "Well, okay, probably guilty for the death of Pamela Pride for sure--"

  "I take issue with the word guilty." Valera's eyes were slits; her mouth was a line. "It doesn't suit your line of work."

  Mercy took a breath, let it out. "What I meant was, I think our investigation has turned up new evidence."

  "That's not important. You're close to catching Evangelina Scales. That's important. So catch her."

  "I don't know that we're going to get very many more chances, Mom. The dragons may have left this area. And in any case, Mom, I'm not sure you get what I'm trying to say."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, I think we're looking in the wrong direction. I need to--"

  Mercy heard a hard click and realized her mother had set--almost slammed--down her tea. Four thousand miles away, her dad was in for nasty nap-rousing. "You need to do your job, as I have said."

  "Mom. I'm trying to do what you taught me. What makes me a good agent is attention to detail, and trusting my instincts. And right now my instincts along with some startling new details are telling me we need to consider new possibilities which, naturally, I wish to follow up on."

  "Ah, yes, because Evangelina Scales might not be guilty. Yes?"

  Mercy let herself have a long blink.

  "Never mind guilty or not," Val continued. "Let's focus on what we know will happen. When we get her, all your questions will be answered at the trial, yes?"

  "Yes," Mercy admitted. And oh, did she have questions! Hours and hours of them! She was finding herself daydreaming about the hours and hours of questions. What they could learn! It always sounded so stupid when the science guys said it, but it was really, really true: what they could learn. The thought was dizzying, like a first kiss. "Yes, of course, the trial, that's been the whole--"

  "Right, excellent, I'm glad we're agreed. Glad--nay, relieved--as always to have your approval. Of course, if you should see fit, as agent in charge, to kill Evangelina Scales on sight--for example, should you judge her an immediate threat to yourself or your colleagues--I can promise you the full protection of this organization, and a great deal of gratitude from your masters at the FBI for saving everyone a heap of time and trouble."

  It took Mercy a few seconds to realize her mom was almost . . . nervous? She had assumed the woman was rushed, but it was more than that.

  Val continued. "If you have all the assurances you need, perhaps now you could refocus on the job you've sworn to do?"

  "Back to my work," Mercy paraphrased, mocking the accent and watching the immobile, beautiful face on the screen. "The refrain of the authority figure with no other argument upon which to fall back."

  "You're pushing your luck, Picklechip."

  "Pamela Pride probably never pushed her luck, did she Mom? Whoever she was, wherever she cam
e from . . . I'm sure she was a much better Regiment soldier than I am, Mom. Am I right?"

  "You've been in the States for too long."

  "Maybe if I had a weird thing for unicorns tracing back to an odd childhood trauma, or some other ridiculously obsessive neurosis, I'd make a better mindless killing Regiment automaton."

  "Mercia Fallon March!" Val's exterior calm crumbled, and Mercy found herself straightening in her seat. "I do not expect mindless obedience from you! I expect you to use your brain and come to sane conclusions! The March family legacy is one of intelligence, courage, and resourcefulness! I expect you to show those qualities and reflect well on your mother, and her parents, and those parents before them!"

  Mercy rubbed her palms against her bare thighs in tight circles and swallowed. "Okay. Got it. Give my love to Dad--"

  This time her mother was the one to slap the laptop closed.

  Mercy sat in her seat for a long time, crying . . . and thinking.

  CHAPTER 39

  "So," Lue began later that morning in the war room, as the three of them stared listlessly at piles of new information that didn't answer a single real question they had. "Who has the next brilliant brainstorm?"

  Mercy scratched her neck under her curls and bit her lip. "I think I might."

  "Please regale us!"

  She smiled back. "We were asking yesterday: why was the Nuwa family not on Pamela Pride's list?"

  "Yes," Art and Lue agreed.

  "Well, think of who they were. They were a rich transplant from the Cities--not Winoka--an older and successful couple with grown-up kids and nothing but leisure and volunteer work ahead of them. This world was very good to the Nuwas."

  "Until they were burned to death, yes."

  "Let me get to my point, Lue. With that kind of wealth, they could buy a certain amount of secrecy and privacy. They could isolate themselves, cut out a great deal of external observation, and likely confound any conventional attempts to learn who they were."

  The two detectives nodded appreciatively. "Okay, that makes sense," Lue allowed. "So they never get on anyone's list. Still, once they saw other dragons--people they knew, who were in their social network--get killed or leave town, why would they stick around?"

  "Well, I'm speculating here," Mercy admitted, "but what if they simply weren't afraid? They didn't live in Winoka, so they never saw that town destroyed. What if years, decades of success in this world--starting and selling a company, raising children who survived all the way to adulthood, buying lakefront property, working cleverly around the moon phases, never being discovered by anyone--all that made them feel, I don't know, invincible? Maybe they believed themselves intelligent, courageous, and resourceful enough--a sort of family legacy they felt they needed to live up to." Thanks for that, Mom, she thought bitterly.

  Lue snapped his fingers. "I like it. Mr. and Ms. Nuwa figure, why go anywhere? We can hold off any threat with what we have. Their children can make their own choices. Speaking of which, our efforts to contact those children have come to zilch."

  "They chose more wisely," Art deduced.

  "Is it really that wise, though?" Lue stood up and began to pace. "Think about wherever these dragons are going. Elizabeth Georges Scales said, we will not see them again. They want us to let them leave. Leave to where? Is it a dragon paradise of some sort? If so, why would any dragon choose to live here in this world? No, if dragons are forced to go there, it is probably less pleasant than staying here."

  "But somehow safer."

  "Sure, Art. Safer. Any place that has a lack of law enforcement hunting them twenty-four seven, would probably feel safer to dragons. Dragons are probably at the top of every other food chain in history."

  "Yes, Lue." Now Mercy was standing up. "The Nuwas liked what they had. They didn't want to give it up. They decided to take their chances in staying."

  "And they lost."

  "Yes." Excited now, she sat down at her laptop. "So who else is in Moorston, who's in these networks . . . who is well-off enough to take the same risk?"

  Lue hovered behind her. Art wheeled his chair alongside.

  Five minutes later, their mouths were all agape.

  "How could I not have seen this," Lue muttered.

  "She's only one of three," Art said. "What about the other two?"

  Mercy got up and checked the Moorston map with red and green pins, and the printed address list alongside it. "The Taylors have been out of town for four months. The Hollenbecks have been missing since early this week."

  "That only leaves her," Lue admitted. He looked at Mercy as he began dialing his cell phone. "I have to call her on her day off. You realize, this will do nothing to help local-federal law enforcement relationships."

  Chief Linda Smiling Bear did not answer her phone--not even her emergency cell--and no one at the station seemed to know where she was. Mercy drove the three of them; the chief lived less than a mile west of the Nuwa estate.

  "Casino money," Lue pondered as he braced himself in the backseat. "We all knew she had it. No one really knew her any better than that."

  "I imagine no one tried."

  Lue frowned at the back of Art's head. "What do you mean by that--that I was the kind of guy not to try?"

  "I didn't mean you. You're new in this town. You didn't have time." Art turned and gave him a reassuring half grin. "You would've figured it out eventually."

  Lue slouched back into his seat, and Mercy could see the detective wasn't so sure. Her mother's voice, unbidden, came to her mind: we're never quite as clever as we think we are, are we, Picklechip?

  By the time they got to Smiling Bear's house, a European chateauesque that featured a football-field-sized front lawn and a brilliant, endless expanse of impossibly tall wildflowers in the back, they feared they might be too late.

  "Call it in," Mercy said. Art already was.

  The sweeping, steep-pitched roof was already bleeding smoke. Mercy swerved the car into the driveway and then pulled onto the lawn, a safe distance from the structure. Art and Lue drew weapons as they got out, but Mercy went instead to the trunk and opened it up.

  "Over there!" Art called.

  Slipping out from the back side of the building and racing out through the wildflowers as tall as cornstalks, was a stout but quick figure--more compact than Art, Mercy figured. He had short-cropped red blond hair and wore dark blue jeans and a maroon University of Minnesota sweatshirt. His backpack, Mercy was sure, contained more than unicorns.

  As she opened her mouth to suggest one of them chase the suspect while the other two evacuate Smiling Bear--for she was now certain Smiling Bear was in that house--a tenebrous shape pounced out of the middle of the field and wrapped itself around the astounded U of M fan. With a single swift movement of mandibles, the shape let the man go and headed into the house. Behind her, her prey shook violently and collapsed as gouts of blood coursed from his throat.

  "Huh," Lue remarked. "She caught up to the second Regiment agent a lot more quickly than the first."

  "Pamela Pride was more subtle," Art offered.

  "Pamela Pride had the magical, mystical power of unicorns on her side," Lue supplemented.

  "Pamela Pride didn't race through fields of wildflowers with no clue as to what lay within," Art continued.

  "Pamela Pride was hot," Lue concluded.

  "Boys. Shall we?"

  Lue shrugged. "You want us to go in after her, after what we saw here? Agent March, you must agree now that Evangelina did not set the fire."

  "We can't be sure."

  "She came here to save the chief. In less than a minute, the two of them will come through that door."

  "We have no more evidence of that than we did yesterday!"

  "Mercy." Art approached her and clapped a hand on her shoulder. "We can both get what we want here. Let's take position outside and see what happens."

  "If that woman burns to death . . ."

  "She won't."

  All right. If he can wait,
so can I.

  They took positions close to the door, Art and Mercy opposite each other, and Lue facing straight into the house. Mercy backed up a few steps after a minute, trying to keep as wide a view of the entire house as possible in case Evangelina chose another escape route. The sound of the fire within was deepening, and they could hear beams fracturing and glass exploding. The smoke thickened, and several upstairs windows suddenly shattered, revealing a surge of bright flame.

  The half-dragon monster finally came out tail first, through the same door she had entered, legs scrambling and wings folded protectively in front of her. It was hard to see past those massive triangles, but everyone knew who it was that this thing dragged in her mandibles. After a few seconds, they could make out the bruise on the unconscious woman's face.

  Oblivious to any others around her, the dark beast wrapped itself into a new shape . . .

  . . . and Mercy got her first direct view of Evangelina Scales. She was hypnotically beautiful, and Mercy recalled childhood stories of spiders who could weave potent sorceries with their very eyes. Dark curls tumbled down her shoulders, framing a sharp face full of worry for the woman who lay before her.

  Getting to her knees, Evangelina leaned over the unconscious woman and began CPR.

  Mercy looked at Art, who looked at Lue, who looked at Mercy. All three of them had weapons raised. Mercy was the first to put away her Beretta, and the other two followed suit.

  They stood there for another ten or twenty seconds, rooted to the short strip of manicured lawn that separated the burning house from the vast, unkempt meadow. Finally, Evangelina's patient sputtered, and Mercy heard Art exhale.

  So did Evangelina. She snapped her head around and spotted him. Immediately after, she saw Lue and got to her feet. Mercy, being behind her, remained unseen.

  "Easy," Art said, and Mercy could see how nervous he was from the way his outstretched corduroy sleeve trembled. "Take it easy."

  Evangelina did not take it easy. She caught Art's eyes, whirled to face Mercy's direction, and then hissed as she broke shape at alarming speed. In less than a second, the full fury of the shadow monster was bearing down on Mercy, fewer than thirty feet away.