Jazz: Monster Collector In: Crime Scenes (Season 1, Episode 9)

by RyFT Brand

that the dismantlement order came from on high.” Samuels’ shored his features into a stern scowl. “I’d love to think differently, you know I would Cole, but I don’t really know who’s side you’re on most of the time.”

  I crossed my thin arms, drew myself up to my full five-foot-five inch height, and tried to make my hundred and fifteen pound frame look impressive. “I’m going to be on the winning side officer. Maybe instead of asking what side I’m on, you should wonder what the sides even are.”

  Samuels heaved out a deep, reluctant sigh. “I’ll stall them as long as I can, tie it up in bureaucracy. But I’d say you’ve got a couple days at the most. That’s it.”

  The time limit framed things into a deeper shade of reality and I uncrossed my arms. “How much is this going to cost me?”

  “With impound and transfer fees, and compounded interest, ten thousand blue.”

  That was more money than I’d made all year. “I’ll come up with it, I have to.”

  Mickey looked down at his big, artificial foot, like the big lug felt bad for me.

  “You’d better, Jazz.” Samuels started out of the room, but stopped in the doorway. “I’ll look into those attacks, let you know what I learn.”

  I wasn’t listening as something was prying at my mind, like I’d forgotten something important, like my car keys or that I’d left a stove burner switched on. Then it hit me, why wasn’t Samuels being properly annoyed. “Parry. Where’s Parry?”

  Samuels shrugged and the big foot looked bewildered.

  “I haven’t seen him. The office door was standing open when I got here,” Samuels said.

  I pushed past him and ran into the waiting area. I scanned the room and my secretary’s meticulously arranged desk. “I sent him to your headquarters to get my bike out of impound.”

  Samuels followed me. “He never showed as far as I know. You’re bike’s still sitting there.”

  I spotted something on the floor, a small, silver disc, about the size of a nickel. I picked it up and held it between my fingers, staring in bewilderment.

  “What is it?” Mickey asked, sniffing hard.

  I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t know, but because it didn’t make any sense.

  “You know what it is, don’t you?” Samuels said.

  “Yeah.” I dropped the disc into my palm and squeezed it in my fist. “It’s a battery.”

  Samuels’ brow wrinkled. “What’s a battery?”

  Before I could explain, a cadre of clowns charged, bellowing hideous battle cries, into my office. They poured through the door like sewage from a burst pipe—goblins, orcs, and nasty, little belmars—all dressed in hooded capes, their monstrous faces pained up like circus clowns.

  “What the nether-realms?” Samuels’ shouted; his face agape in a mix of panic and horror.

  I’m not sure why, but my first reaction was to swallow the battery. The next was to draw my MacDaddy revolver and shoot the nearest belmar as it raised its two fingered claws and opened its disgusting mouth. Belmars looked like a gnome had crossbred with a puppet. Their disproportionately huge mouths flap down like a castle gate as they’re hinged at the bottom. They can work simple magics very well, dark, scary stuff. But, aside from being no taller than a barstool, they’re not terribly tough. Before it could invoke a single syllable my bullet passed through its fuzzy forehead. It’s bulging, frog eyes crossed, then it crashed over backwards to the floor.

  But there were two more. I had to take them out, take them out fast. But a particularly large orc hit me from the side just as I drew aim on the second magic-user.

  Orcs are stronger and faster than any human, even me. Without my battle armor the single blow would have killed me. Even still it hurt like hell.

  I slid across Parry’s desk, sweeping clear the well ordered surface, and went down hard on my side. I was hurting, especially the gash in my side that had, despite the elven magic, never fully healed. I pushed the pain aside and managed to roll onto my knees, raising the gun again as the second belmar, arms held high, began chanting some invocation that could do none of us any good.

  “Raaara!” But the orc had followed me and, with a slash of sharp claws, ripped the gun from my hand.

  “Ahhh!” I clasped my bleeding hand and wished I’d left my plated gloves on. My face clenched with rage as I snapped to my feet. But my opponent was still ahead of me. He grabbed the top of my head like it was a basketball, lifted me off my feet and tossed me into the couch in the waiting area. I bounced hard off the cushion and dropped to the floor. I could feel dents in my skull where his fingers had held me and my brain spun through a wave of dizziness.

  Waiting for my head, and my vision, to clear, I watched a blurry Inspector Samuels draw his stun-pole, a non-lethal weapon the enforcers corps carried that were generally something less than useful. Substantiating my low opinion of the volunteer corps digital training methods, Samuels ignored the belmar and charged the biggest orc, the one that had tossed me, and nailed it from the side with the stun-pole. The beast squealed with the pain of the stick’s discharge and folded to the floor.

  “Adam!” I shouted a warning, but too late. The dope had made the classic mistake of judging the biggest monster in the room as the most dangerous. He was wrong and he paid for it.

  The belmar, still chanting in some wretched tongue, was surrounded with magical energies, black energies. That’s another effect of my shadow sight, the ability to see into the magical spectrum, and what I saw was a spell ready to be cast.

  It lowered its claws, aiming the gnarled walking stick at Samuels. A bolt of magical energy burst from the end of the stick and nailed Samuels in the chest. He went limp, like someone had just switch off his power button, and floated toward the ceiling surrounded by a brilliant light.

  Dizzy or not, I had to do something. Still sprawled on the floor, I drew my zoom stick, letting it snap open, hit the charge button and threw.

  “Weeeee!” the belmar squealed, enveloped in my boomerang’s web of mallow-charged current. His entire body went rigid with the voltage, a bolt of magical energy shot from his staff, and then he collapsed.

  With a flash the light around Samuels turned glaring. Everyone in the room closed and covered their eyes—everyone except me as it hadn’t affected my shadow sight. Adam’s skin dissolved away until he was nothing more than muscles and tendons and veins.

  Then the light went out and Samuels dropped to the floor. Amateur, that’s what I was, a stupid amateur that was getting the only people that really mattered on this inter-dimensionally occupied planet killed.

  The most I could hope for from the Sasquatch was for him not to join the other monsters attacking me. I was on my own. But I had an advantage. The occupants in the room were trying to blink and rub their eyes back into focus. I hadn’t been so affected. Waves of magical energy surrounded the remaining belmar, though still flash-blind, the twerp had a powerful spell in his chamber. Belmars were powerful, but weren’t particularly smart.

  I began taking quick, deep breaths, working my belly like bellows on a fire. It was a trick I’d learned years ago; it got the juices and currents of life all in motion. I pushed through the pain and got myself to my feet as I drew one of the nroxi fang-tipped darts from the sleeve of my battle jacket. “Your shoe’s untied,” I shouted. Every monster in the room looked down at their feet, including the belmar who wasn’t even wearing shoes, and I threw.

  Clutching its neck with both two-fingered claws, the blemar began to writhe, choke, and foam. Within three seconds it collapsed dead on the floor.

  Nroxi are a long, snake-like creature armed with a single fang and a powerful venom, a venom that is only toxic to beings of or that are melded with magic, beings like the belmar. Harvesting the fangs is dangerous work for me, being that, like it or not, I’ve got a good dose of magic in myself. But moments like that made it well worth the risk.

  But the horde of Clowns surrounding me had had sufficient time to clear their visi
on and, with Samuels out of action, turned on me.

  I stepped back onto the couch and put the wall to my back as I drew three throwing stars and a chili pepper bomb from my concealed bandolier.

  When I showed them the bomb the Clowns froze in place.

  But this was a faint, and the painted monsters would figure that out soon enough. Yeah, personally I’d have given the pepper a good squeeze, breaking the membrane and mixing the natural chemicals inside causing the flash inferno explosion. I’d willingly give up my life in the name of taking out a gang of cretinous monsters any day.

  But Adam lay defenseless on the floor. He was probably dead, but I couldn’t know for sure. And DJ—the one person who really believed in me—was counting on me to rescue her from the forest elves. And there was something else, the battery in my belly and that thing I’d taken off the paleo bear, they were the first real clues I’d had toward ending the paradisiacal lie called, Mirth. For the first in a very long time I had something to live for. Too bad I was about to die.

  One of the goblins grunted, this one brandishing a stout length of pipe. “She won’t do it. She ain’t got the guts.”

  Whatever apprehensions the monsters had ended with that one assumption. In a bevy of roars they charged. With a pang of regret I dropped the bomb and threw the stars. One caught the big-mouthed goblin square in the chest. With a squeal and a thrashing of arms it dropped. I