by D. Levesque
William sits back in his chair with a thoughtful look. “Are you a man of technology, Kevin?”
“Nah,” I tell him with a laugh. “My best friend Mike, his parents are. They create weapons, right now primarily for self-defense and hunting. But they also have their hands in companies that do cybersecurity and shit, and probably in big pharmaceuticals as well. But yeah, he is always bringing home the newest toy or gadget. Last month he brought home this drone that was able to fly itself, and it had a camera on it that saw in the dark, could read heat signatures, and was so quiet, I didn’t hear it until the last second. It was pretty amazing.”
“This drone, is this one of those flying things?” William asks me excitedly, making a hovering motion with his hands over the table.
“Yes. Mike’s parents are creating it for protection, in order to keep an area secure. This thing ran on its own and circled around a parameter, and if it found something, it would notify the person in charge of the drone, who would then get a visual and notify the cops if they needed to,” I tell him. Actually, the thing was pretty amazing, and Mike said that each one cost over 400,000 dollars to make!
“Do you see, Marrisa!” William says, going back to her first name in his excitement. “This is what I want us to be aware of! Do you know how hard it would be for us Magical Folk to hide from something like this?”
“We can just use Magic to hide,” she says, but I hear the hesitancy in her voice. “Can’t we?”
“Our Magic is going to get to the point that even humans will be able to break through our ability to hide. We rely on our Magic as our ultimate weapon. But our Magic is dying. Did you know that?” William asks her.
“What? No, it’s not,” she says with a snort.
“Very well. A thousand years ago, how many level 15 Magus do your history books say there were on just Vraka alone?” he asks her.
“What? I don’t know. Three?” Marrisa says, perplexed.
“It so happens that I have been studying this. On Vraka 1,000 years ago, there were over 400 level 15 Magus. On Vamir alone, we had over 1,300. Today we have none. At level 15, your father is the highest level Magus in all the galaxy. This young man here? Being human and a level 10, and I admit, I am curious how that can be, but that question is for another day, is powerful. What level are you, Marrisa?”
Marrisa stays silent and just glares at him.
“I already know, but I wish to make a point.”
“I’m level nine,” she growls at him.
Wait. Am I a higher-level Magic-user than her? How is that possible? She makes it seem like she is more powerful. I look at her and she growls. “I have been taught. That makes me stronger than you.” It’s as if she was reading my mind.
“Ah,” William says, nodding sagely.
“What do you mean, ah?” Marrisa turns to him with another glare. Damn, that girl loves to glare a lot. Almost as much as she likes to say ‘shit’.
“Nothing. Now, do you have enough information to allow me to meet your father?” William says instead.
Marrisa, still glaring at him, grabs the handcuffs off the table, and puts them away in her back pocket. She then takes out a black stone, the PDA, and points it to a free area in the cabin.
“If this a trick of some kind, my father will make you regret it,” she finally says. Suddenly a black Portal opens up in the room, like the one I saw the first time I met her. She gestures to it, and William gets off his chair slowly and walks towards it.
Just before he goes through, he turns to her and says, “You will not regret this. Either of you. You have just made a very powerful ally.” And then he is gone, through the portal.
I look at Marrisa, and she is glaring at the portal, or at the spot where William had been standing before he walked through it. “Shit!” she screams and grabs me, shoving me towards the portal.
Chapter Twelve
“What you doing back!” I hear a scream as I emerge from the portal.
I check to see who had spoken, and it’s Preeka. “You can talk?” I say in surprise.
Preeka, who is standing on a table in Marrisa’s dad’s lab, stands up tall and glares at me. “Course can talk! I not some stupid ogre.”
“No, you aren’t an ogre, Preeka,” Marrisa tells Preeka with a smile before glaring at me quickly. “I’m here to see my dad. Is he around?”
Preeka looks at Marrisa and smiles, or I think that is what she does. Either that or she has gas. She nods and disappears.
“My, that is a very good specimen of a goblin. Is your dad by any chance hiring out any of the family?” William says, looking at the spot where Preeka had been standing. That’s a very good specimen? Jesus, what is a bad one like?
“I, unfortunately, have to say no. Her family has been with mine for ages. Marrisa, why do you have Sir William Tonlia in my office without permission?” Magus Targun’s voice says from a doorway.
“Hi, Dad,” Marrisa says with a scowl. “Meet my Bounty, Sir William Tonlia.”
“Bounty?” her father says, coming into the room. He has a perplexed look on his face. “Who put out the Bounty?”
“My sister,” William answers before Marrisa can, earning a glare from her.
“Under what reason?” Magus Targun asks him.
“That I went feral,” William says with a soft smile.
“Bullshit,” he says, slamming his staff down on the floor once. “No Vampire has gone feral in over a thousand years. What’s the real reason?” he asks, now glaring at all three of us.
I shake my head and point to Marrisa. He zeroes in on her. “Marrisa?”
She turns to me and glares, again. Come on, what the fuck am I supposed to say. This is way outside my league.
“It seems that Sir William Tonlia’s sister has been making it difficult for him to get a meeting with you,” she tells him.
At that comment, her father gets a puzzled look on his face. “Why? My offices are always open, especially for the Royals.”
“Yes, normally they would be. But it seems that William has a request and his sister has been making it impossible for him to get ahold of you.”
“Aren’t you and your sister both vying for a seat on the Council?” Magus Targun says to William, uncertainty in his voice.
“No, I do not wish to have the seat. But my sister, who knows the request I wish to make of you, feels that it’s wrong. So instead of allowing me to speak to you, she wants to get rid of me. I just came up with a plan that would bring me face to face with your daughter, so that I could ask her for help.”
“What? Start from the beginning,” Magus Targun says in a huff. “This makes no sense. Preeka!” he yells suddenly. As I expected the yell this time, I don’t jump, but with a grin on my face, I notice that William, who had not expected it, does.
The little goblin pops up next to him in midair. He looks at her and says, “Drinks for everyone, please,” and she disappears.
“Now, you, start from the beginning,” he says in a dangerous voice, and I see William suddenly swallow hard.
“Why, that conniving little,” Magus Targun starts, but then he stops himself before finishing his thought. He has an angry look on his face, and remember that pressure I said I felt earlier in the cabin? Well, I feel it here a thousandfold. It almost feels physical.
“Dad,” Marrisa starts, but he holds up his hand.
“Don’t defend her,” he says with a growl.
“I wasn’t going to. I was going to say Lady Tonlia had a legal right to a Bounty, based on the evidence that even he, himself,” and she points to William, who is sipping a glass of red wine, “spread out.”
Usually, I’m not too fond of wine, but this stuff isn’t bad. Not enough to make me stop drinking beer, but enough that if I were given a bottle, it would not go to waste.
“She is correct, sir,” William says. “But it was the only way I could come up with to see you. Through your daughter.”
“Preeka!” Magus Targun yells suddenly, and
clearly none of us expected it, as William and I end up spilling some wine, and Marrisa, who has a beer, almost drops her bottle.
Preeka appears in midair again and looks at him with a question in her eyes. “I need the paperwork to rescind a Bounty. I will then need paperwork for an Earth Exemption for Learning. Forms three and eight, I think. Oh, might as well get form nine as well. And also, can you top off my wine please?”
Preeka nods, disappears, and then reappears with a bottle in her hand, which she pours into his glass. Once she is done, she is gone yet again.
“Form nine, sir? I haven’t seen that form,” William says.
“Ah, form nine is a grant of sorts. You will be fully paid for whatever course you take, and for the first five years, you will be working under me, as a type of consultant.”
“What!” William blurts out in shock. So much so that his glass ends up falling out of his hands. “Are you saying that this will be a Council sanctioned position?”
“Even better,” Magus Targun says. “You will be working directly under me.” William doesn’t say anything, but slowly sits back down in his chair.
I lean over and whisper to him. “Is that a good thing?”
He turns to me and slowly nods. “Yes,” he mumbles. “It means I might end up having more power than my sister in the end.”
“Hey, that’s good, right?” I ask him, confused by his reaction.
“Yes. Sorry,” William says, shaking his head. “It means that as a consultant to him,” he points to Marrisa’s dad, “I can one day become a Council member that would be more powerful than anyone from my world. As the position is not one given because of my world. It’s not inherited, as they would say, but earned.”
“Oh shit. Your sister isn’t going to like that, is she?” I tell him.
Suddenly, William has a shit-eating grin on his face, and he says, “No, she isn’t. Is she?”
Preeka suddenly re-appears and hands the papers to Magus Targun. He takes them and turns to the lab desk behind him. He begins to write things out, filling out forms, I’m sure. Finally, he hands them back to Preeka, who had waited patiently next to him the entire time.
“Make sure that the last page gets to his sister’s office, Preeka. Thank you,” he tells her with a smile.
Preeka smiles, or passes gas, at him, takes the papers, and disappears. Turning to the three of us, who had been waiting as well, he points to William first.
“Your paperwork is done. It begins in four days. So for those four days, keep low. I assume you have somewhere to hide?
“I do,” William tells him.
“Good. In those four days, I shall be looking in on these people,” he says, holding up the blue notebook that I had passed to him earlier. “If the information you gave us is false, you will regret it.”
“They are real, sir. I swear!” William tells Magus Targun enthusiastically.
“Good. That last paper I gave Preeka to give to your sister is a rescinding order for the Bounty. She won’t try that again. Ever.”
“Thank you, sir.” Standing up, William bows to us and waves his hand. Next to him, a black Portal appears. He walks to it, but before going through it he looks at me and says, “Kevin. Until next time. I would love to talk to you about this friend of yours. I might need contacts in the human world. It would be interesting to consider you a friend.”
“Sounds good,” I tell him with a nod. Damn, did I just make a Vampire friend? And a Royal one at that?
Once the Portal is gone, Magus Targun looks at us both and shakes his head.
“What?” Marrisa asks him defensively.
“Nothing. If we are done here, I have some work to do now. I need to talk to some other members of the Council. Please see yourselves out.” With that, he gets up, grabs his staff, and walks out of the room, leaving me with Marrisa, who is still glaring at the exit her father just left from. Not interested in a fight, I take a sip of my wine and keep my mouth shut—no use arguing in the home of someone who I respect.
Marrisa finally growls something under her breath and takes out her PDA, creating a Portal next to us. She waves me towards it. Finishing my wine slowly, I get up and head to it. This time, it’s my turn to stop before I go through.
“Asking politely will get you better results than just ordering me around,” I say, but I don’t wait for her response as I walk through it, and end up inside her apartment. Deciding to piss her off, I head straight for the bathroom and don’t even ask for permission to use the shower. Fuck that. I’m done. She can drop me off back on Earth after and then she can deal with her own shit. They want to use me as some kind of Magus slave? At least I will learn Magic. Because I doubt I will from Marrisa.
She is so angry and pissed off all the time. No wonder she has no partner. And from the little tidbits Lori let slip, no one wants to be her work partner either. I can see why. She’s annoying, angry all the time, short-fused. And my God. She thinks she is right all the time, and when she is proven wrong, she doesn’t admit it. She just glares at you like you called her out on something personal. Yeah. I don’t need that.
I’m glad the shower is cold since it reduces my anger from a burning inferno to a dull roar. Once I’m done, I dry off and just put my pants back on. I open the door, expecting the light to be on and Marrisa to be glaring at me, but instead, it’s dark. From the light coming in from the window, I can see a body on the bed.
Quietly I head to the living room, and while it’s darker in there, I can still see well enough to know that the pillow and blanket I used last night are still on the couch. I would kill for a beer from her fridge right now, but honestly I’m too damn tired to bother. So I go to the couch, pull up the leg piece, and lean back, throwing the blanket over myself and staring at the ceiling.
Just as I feel myself drift off to sleep, something brushes against me, making me jerk awake in the dark.
“Just hold me,” I hear Marrisa whisper to me.
I look at her but can barely make her out in the dark. Not understanding what or why, I open my blanket to her and she cuddles down next to me. She lays her head on my chest, and that’s when I feel the wetness on her face.
Shit, what the hell? Is she crying? What for? I thought she was a tough as nails, hard-ass kind of gal? What’s making her cry now?
I can ask, but she won’t answer me, I’m sure, so I just wrap my arm around her and hold her. No questions.
And that’s how I fall asleep. With my arm around the catgirl on my chest, offering whatever comfort I can as she cries softly. My last thought before I drift off is, just what the fuck is going on with her?
Chapter Thirteen
Waking up the following morning, I notice that Marrisa isn’t against me. But I do hear the shower. What the hell was all that about last night? I thought she hated humans? I get that we humans are not exactly perfect, but it has to be more than that. Something else must have happened to her. As I sit there, I smell coffee coming from the kitchen, which is most likely what woke me up.
I must have kicked the blanket when I was asleep last night, or Marrisa took it off when she got up, as I see it’s on the floor. Yawning, I get up off the sofa and stretch my sore back. Man, I am either going to have to find my own place or start sleeping on the floor. That sofa wasn’t meant to be slept overnight on. Though, I don’t even know if I get paid as a M.A.G.I. Bounty Hunter. I have savings on Earth, but can I even use that here?
Going to the kitchen, I grab a cup from the cupboard and pour myself a cup of coffee. I open the fridge, remembering that I had seen some milk in there, and I grab it and pour some of it into my coffee. I can’t find any sugar, though. Oh well, it won’t be the first time I’ve had coffee without sugar.
As I’m drinking my coffee, I hear the shower turning off. Not bothering to turn around, I wait until I hear the noise of padding feet coming from the bedroom.
“If you are pouring coffee, I would love some, please. Black,” I hear Marrisa’s voice says from behind
me.
Turning around, I start to say sure but stop dead in my tracks. Her ears and tail are gone. She still has long black hair, but that luscious tail and the ears on her head are gone, replaced with human like ears. She’s wearing a pair of baggy shorts and a t-shirt, and is using a towel to dry her hair.
“What?” she asks me when she notices my staring.
“You look human!” I blurt out.
“Oh,” she says with a blush. “We Changelings can look human. I do this since it makes taking a shower much easier and quicker. Less fur to dry off.”
I hand her a cup of coffee as she walks over and leans over the cutout. “Thanks,” she says, taking a sip and enjoying the coffee. Black? Damn, how do people do that? I can drink it without sugar, but without sugar and cream?
“Listen,” Marrisa says, staring at her coffee instead of looking at me. “I’m sorry about last night. It’s just been a real rough couple of months, and having a body here was nice. Although I won’t apologize for how I have been treating you. I have my reasons. I still don’t like humans, but since you’re my partner, I will have to get used to it.”
“Listen,” I tell her softly. “I’m not sure what issues you have, and I am not asking you to tell me,” I say to her quickly, “but if this is going to work so that you don’t go to jail and I don’t get hurt doing this job, I need help, and I have tons of questions.”
Nodding, Marrisa takes a sip of her coffee, still not looking up. “Fair enough. What kind of questions?”
“Well, for starters. Do I even get paid for this Bounty Hunter job? I never signed any HR paperwork or anything like that. I mean, I should get my own place, even if it’s just so I have a bed to sleep in. But I have no clue how much that will cost me. I have funds back on Earth. Not much, but I was saving for, well, not sure what I was saving for. Since I was dying, I was about to donate it to a charity.”
