Toxic Influence

by Voss Foster

  Swift took a seat right under the TV, which left me with the only remaining open seat, right between Bancroft and Kimmy. A stuffy old fogey and a very angry computer geek. Perfect.

  Once I sat, Swift cleared his throat. "New blood today, we're doing introductions. Though I think he managed to meet most of you yesterday."

  "And I brought coffee." I set the containers up on the table and started to go through the list. It was easier to make a good impression if I was forward and took care of business. And since there was no real telling how long I'd be spending with these people, a good impression felt important. Plus at least one person in this room could blow up my brain with magic. "All right, so Earl Grey tea?"

  "That's mine." Gutt grabbed the cup and took the top straight off.

  "Double espresso is mine, we have two double cappuccinos? One straight, one with sugar."

  "Straight's mine." I handed Swift his coffee. "Sugar is for Kimiko."

  I passed the cup across to Kimmy, who had her hand outstretched. She nodded curtly to me when she got hold of it, but that was it.

  "A green tea with lemon?"

  "Mine, sweetie." Casey leaned over and grabbed it with a wink.

  "Soy milk latte?"

  I almost handed it to the heavyset blonde woman, but then Bancroft took it from the carrier. "Lactose intolerant."

  "And that leaves a white coffee breve."

  "Mine." Her voice came out gruff and ragged. She looked through me with dark blue eyes as she took her coffee, then turned her attention to the front of the room. "Who's the greenhorn, Swift?"

  "Well, that's as good a segue as anything." Swift sat himself in his chair and gestured open-handed to me. "Special Agent Dashiel Rourke. I'm borrowing him from counterterrorism until we can get this case settled and put away. And if we're extra sweet on him, we might just get him to stick around."

  She rolled her eyes. "Don't need someone coming in, thinking they know better than us about how to handle this situation, Swift."

  "He's been on this case since the beginning. And he punched a sorcerer in the face yesterday to stop the last poison attack. Plus he got us one of their gas masks. Got R and D working to reverse engineer them as we speak so we can all stay safe going forward. I think that's all worth a little good will."

  It sounded pretty good put that way, I had to admit. He almost had me convinced I was the right choice.

  The blonde just nodded once. "Right. Thanks for the help, kid." She said that without ever looking at me. "But we can call him right on over if anyone else needs punched. Just saying."

  Swift brushed off her obvious hostility and shrugged. "Abigail King. Special Agent, helped found the OPA. Seattle white collar crimes." He went around the room from there. "You met Casey, alchemical medic. Rhys Bancroft has a Master's degree in mythological studies, and he went back to school to get a second one in preternatural studies. Kimiko manages all our tech needs. Gutt knows the criminal system from the Hidden Kingdoms, and he knows the cultures from over there too. And I got this job because I'm handsome." He smiled at me. "Clear on everything?"

  "Sure." I took a long drink of my coffee before continuing. "So, what's the plan for the day?"

  "Right to work, then." Swift laid his hands flat on the tabletop. "Any of you have any brilliant insights we should know before going forward?"

  "I have a less than brilliant insight." Casey massaged the bridge of his nose as he spoke. "I ran tests through on Dash's blood after the attack, plus the blood samples left from the previous victims. None of it was in great condition, but it wasn't completely useless. Still no idea what this poison is, but it seems exceptionally volatile. It loses effectivity quickly, but it also kills quickly if you get a lethal dose. It was already completely absent from the other victims, and they never got blood scrubbers like Dash."

  Swift nodded. "And what are we talking about for a lethal dose?"

  "Miniscule, if you can trust anyone else's record keeping on the matter. Most everyone dies from it in under a minute of exposure. It causes immediate tissue damage on contact as well, which gets it better access to the bloodstream and speeds the whole process up." He nodded. "So there's that super fun series of factoids to consider."

  "I have one question." Wasn't great to open myself up to volleys immediately, but I needed to know what I was working with as much as they did. "Why aren't we doing all this out of the New York Field Office?"

  "We can get there in a minute or two with the right magic," said Swift. "Our time's as good as or better than it would be working there, and here we have everything on hand we could possibly need." He drummed his fingers against his cup. "Question for you, though. Why wasn't counterterrorism in the field office yet?"

  "New York's got one of the best counterterrorism units in the whole bureau." For obvious reasons. "We wouldn't have done any better than they did on their own, so we worked on it here for an outside perspective. Concurrent investigations."

  "Well at least New York has one good thing." Abigail—Agent King, I needed to remind myself—sipped from her cardboard cup. "Their OPA is a joke."

  "That's not entirely fair," said Gutt. "They get good results, and they have a significant local preternatural population. Not to mention their outreach programs, which I might remind you all, we are sorely lacking."

  Abigail snorted at that. Swift said nothing, just plowed ahead. "Okay, if that's what we're working with, I want Kimmy, Abigail, Bancroft, and Casey back doing what you've been doing. Need you to try and track down that poison, look for any similarities or connections between the victims and the areas that got hit. Gutt, I want you taking Dash through our criminal database. I'm hoping his eyes'll pick up something yours or mine wouldn't and maybe we can lay the whole thing flat out and call it done."

  Gutt nodded. "Sounds good to me."

  Swift clapped his hands. "Okay then. Get on it. We don't know how long we have to stop these assholes, but so far they've been quick on the draw. I don't want them hitting again. So find them and stop them, if it's not too much of an inconvenience."

  Everyone split off, leaving the room, until it was just me sitting with Gutt.

  He looked me up and down. "You look terrible."

  "I'm not feeling so hot. But I'll be fine. Nothing another six coffees can't fix." I jumped up to prove it to him. "So let's get down to business. What kind of database are we looking at?" I mean, there were lots of them across different departments and different agencies, but I doubted I'd run across this one before. "Are we looking at a glowing tablet buried deep underground?"

  "That's precisely what it is, yes. If by tablet you meant computer, and buried underground you meant in the next room." His lips turned up into that same smile. "It's been a decade now, Dash. Preternaturals have by and large adapted to life here, or stayed home."

  "Right. Sorry."

  "Certainly no need to apologize." Gutt chuckled softly. "Come along."

  We walked out of the conference room and over to Gutt's cubicle. I pulled a chair from one of the empty desks and moved it in next to Gutt…well, as next to Gutt as physical limitations would allow. Seven foot troll and a six foot tall muscly dude didn't leave a whole ton of space to work with inside an eight-by-eight square.

  But I squeezed in just enough that I could see Gutt's screen. "So how big of a database do you spooks work with?"

  "It's fairly sizable. All the criminal records from the Hidden Kingdoms, including all the escaped prisoners from ten years ago, and anyone who's recently made some poor life decisions in the Mundane. I don't think anyone has an idea of how many individuals it reaches, given its scope, but there are easily hundreds of millions of individual records."

  "That's…big."

  "It most certainly is. Luckily it's a computer, not a glowing tablet, so we don't have to read all of them to find what we need."

  "How long until I live that down?"

  "Approximately the rest of the day. I can't go completely without hazing the new hire." Gutt tapped
away at his keyboard and clicked on an innocuous, circular icon that brought up a long string of text in tiny, tiny font. "We can filter, so it would be prudent to do so."

  I didn't have much idea where to go. Not yet, anyway. "May as well start with sorcerers and see where that rabbit hole goes."

  Gutt nodded and tapped away on his keyboard a few times. Our list shrank…but not a lot.

  Gutt glanced at the screen, then to me. "I do hope you have a way to narrow this."

  "Well…me too." I rifled through what we'd put together in counterterrorism, pulling out what I knew of the profile we had, and everything I'd learned about terrorism. Which suddenly, faced down with this task, felt like approximately zilch. "Okay. Terrorists tend to be males in their early twenties. They want to belong to something, and a terrorist organization makes them feel important."

  "But these are preternaturals. Our gender dynamics are not the same as they are in the Mundane."

  "Then don't sort it off by sex or gender. Whatever age for a sorcerer would be relative to the early twenties. And put special attention on anyone with a history of particularly violent crimes, anything related to poison or inciting mass panic, hate crimes—"

  "Hate crimes?"

  "Before terrorists become terrorists, they're almost always angry about something, and they tend to blame one specific group for whatever hardships they're suffering. Queer people ruining the sanctity of marriage, people of color asking for special handouts, immigrants ruining the economy, atheists coming in and destroying good, faith-based values. Whatever the bullshit reason of the week is, it's a common sign of people who end up linked to a terrorist organization." I was taking "terrorist" a little more broadly than I maybe was supposed to, but the warning signs were all but identical between hate groups like the KKK or the Fundamentalist Humanitarians and groups like Al Qaeda. "And you can eliminate anyone who wouldn't have sufficient magic to pull this off, obviously."

  "We're not sure what sort of magic is required for this."

  "Educated guess. We can refine it out later."

  More tapping keys. The screen flickered, and the scrollbar got significantly larger. Gutt nodded at the results. "We're down under a hundred."

  Under a hundred. It was a good start. Our sorcerer could very well be on this list. Or in the hundred million other pieces of data floating around on the database that I'd cut out in broad sweeps. Statistically, that was more likely.

  But at the very least, we'd be able to cut out almost a hundred wrong answers. For whatever that was worth. "All right. Let's see what we've got."

  Not very much is what we had, apparently. We had some options from the sorcerers—Kimmy was running those through her system to pull up better information than what the database managed to spit out for us—but not the sorcerer. None of them appeared to be the one that we'd encountered in New York. The rabid, mildly obsessive part of me wanted to dive back in with different parameters and try to weed him out. But every other part of me knew that was dumb as shit. Move forward. I had to trust not only myself, but I had to trust that the OPA agents weren't going to let me do anything detrimental.

  And that included leaving important stones unturned.

  Gutt cracked his knuckles surreptitiously as he spoke. "The crimes are only occurring in New York. We've gone through criminal backgrounds once, looking for anything specific to the city, but perhaps you could do something more with that."

  "What about preets who take issue with the whole of the Mundane?"

  "Anti-human." He finally popped his last knuckle and set to typing. "There are groups in the Hidden Kingdoms who harbor hatred for humans. That was one of the things we cross-checked already. Nothing of import came up, but we can go through it again if you think there's something more there." He finished on the keyboard with a flourish. "I've sent you the information."

  I nodded. I wouldn't use it. At least not now. They'd been there. They'd been everywhere, through every preternatural that made sense.

  A lightbulb went off. "What about humans? What if there are humans involved?"

  "No." Bancroft spun his chair around and pushed his glasses back up his nose. "We keep a very close eye on any humans who've begun to unseal magic. If this sorcerer was enough to give Gutt a hard time, then there's significant magical skill and training, and we can assume the mysterious poison no one can figure out would require equally as much training to release. Beyond what any human has at their disposal." He sighed. "Even I can't so much as create a flame, and it's my job to research and learn about all of this."

  He turned around and set back into whatever he'd been working on before. I just looked back at Gutt. "Mercenaries from the Kingdoms?" If that was the case, they could be working for anyone. But at least we'd have a place to start.

  "There are certainly a number of organizations who would have sufficient skill. It's worth looking into." He turned to the side and reached into the bottom drawer of a slightly dented file cabinet. He came back out with a sheet of ivory paper. Instead of scrawling out with a pen, he snapped his fingers. A tiny blue light appeared on the tip of his middle nail, and he scratched out glowing, jagged symbols across the page.

  Familiar glowing jagged symbols.

  "What are those, Gutt?"

  "Runes. Nordic runes, here in the Mundane." He carried on, scratching them away on the paper. "I'm sending a message to some contacts in Droshheim. They'll be more capable of finding the information than we will in the Mundane."

  "Great. But the symbols. They look like the ones that were on the gas mask I took."

  Gutt stopped scratching away and looked at me. "You're certain?"

  "I was poisoned, panicking, and trying to save people. I'm not certain of anything that happened beyond me punching him." I scanned back over the sheet of glowing symbols. One in particular stood out, a capital H, but with two diagonal lines instead of the regular crossbeam. I pointed to it, careful not to actually touch the paper in case I somehow fucked up the magic and got myself exploded. "That. I'm pretty sure I saw that one on there." I tried to muster up a clear image of the sorcerer, or the gas mask, or anything from those tense moments right up close and personal with the bastard. "I'm pretty sure." It was all the closer I was getting at the moment.

  Gutt sat a few minutes, then finally nodded. "Hagalaz. If you did see it on the mask, that in itself could be a useful clue to the origins of this magic, and by extension the nature of the practitioners." He quickly finished up scribbling out the runes on the paper and banished the light from his fingernail, then folded the paper and, with a wave of his hand, sent it off into the ether somewhere.

  Then Gutt stood and waved me toward the main doors. "We need to get to R and D and take a look at that mask."

  "Gutt, Dash!" Swift rushed out of his office and over to us, his jaw set hard and tight. I had a feeling we officially were not going to R and D anymore. "New attack. You need to go."

  Shit. Guess I was right. "Where?"

  "Madison Square Park." He shook his head. "Go. Check for clues, check for survivors, you know the drill." He pointed toward the main doors. "NYC OPA is en route. Might already be there."

  "Swift." Gutt's voice was oddly calm, given what we'd just been sent off for. "Dash says the gas mask had Norse runes on it."

  Agent Swift nodded. "Right. I'll get Bancroft on it. Now get out of here."

  With all that out of the way, I headed for the doors, Gutt right behind me…and then right in front of me. Even with a head start, no keeping up with that stride. But we made it to the SUV. He started it up and backed out of the space, then waved a hand in front of him. The air shimmered around us and, when we pulled out, I saw a flash of pastel sky and neon bright colors. Apparently that wasn't part of a poison-fueled hallucination. Just part of teleporting.

  Then it was gone and we were in fucking Jonestown. I'd seen some stuff in the past year with the FBI, and as a cop before that. I don't think anything could have honestly prepared me for the dozen bodies littering Ma
dison Square Park. All splayed out, grossly burned around the fountain. Most of them, even from far off, showed white peeking through the red and black. Bone.

  I looked at Gutt out the corner of my eye, doing my best to hold down my breakfast of nothing but coffee that now churned inside me. "Did you know exactly where the bodies were, or is this just…a lucky guess?"

  He shook his head, face taut and strained, his bluish skin pallid as he grunted out his response. "That wasn't on me. I took us to Madison Square Park. The fountain…it's the only landmark here I was familiar with, so I used it to ground the transport."

  I nodded and swallowed back the unwelcome bile. "Let's go." If we'd stumbled on this many randomly…how many more bodies were we about to find?

  Out I stepped. It shouldn't have been quiet. A major Manhattan park shouldn't have been this damn silent in the middle of the day. The only sound that broke the endless mute was the fountain tinkling gently right next to us. And right next to the dead.

  An agent walked up, blonde hair tied in a messy ponytail, standard issue gas mask useless on her hip. "Are you OPA?"

  "Agent Rourke." I jutted a thumb at Gutt. "And my partner."

  "Call me Gutt. What information do you have?"

  The woman nodded. "Special Agent Regina Clark." She glanced furtively at the nearest body, then back to me. "Sixteen confirmed dead so far. No sign of the attacker. We got here as soon as we could—"

  I nodded to her, my mind going full force. "Get samples from the fountain, and in radial spreads every five feet out from the fountain. Check for anything suspicious." Faster we could identify the actual poison in question, faster things would come clear, and this seemed like our best bet at the moment. "Which victims still need to be checked?"