I pulled myself into the tiny room and, ignoring the claustrophobia threatening to claw its way down my throat, moved to the case. It opened as I approached, which was a little scary even though it always had done that previously. Something about biometric sensors, but I was pretty sure it was just for effect because stepping into the room always made me feel a little like Batman.
When I was nearly to the suit, I held my arms out and smirked. “Suit up!” I cried and as the words left my lips, gears began to whir and clank within the room. It was a little weird because that had never happened before. I spun around, gun held up as I backed toward my suit. Before I reached it, I felt something crawling up my legs.
I yelped and pointed my flashlight at the ground to see a puddle of black gelatinous goo oozing up my body. Before I could do anything, it had slithered up over me and settled like a second skin. I screamed. I couldn’t help it, but after my initial fright, I realized the stuff sort of resembled a suit. A translucent film covered my face, lighting up like a HUD in one of those video games, displaying all sorts of information like the air temperature and my heartbeat.
To my left, I noticed a broken case with a blackened sign next to it. The only word I could make out was “experimental.” I looked down at my suit, and now that it’d stopped moving, it seemed just like normal clothing. I touched it tentatively even though it had covered every inch of my body, pulling at a spot on my stomach. It sort of felt like I was tugging on cookie dough.
Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be bad. I’d just have to ask Chuck what it was before I left. It was either that or freak out and keep screaming. I was pretty sure that wouldn’t help the situation… much.
I moved back toward the exit, hoping to get out of here, and as I did, the suit changed so a light glowed on my chest, illuminating the ground before me. Well, that was pretty cool. I tossed one final glance at my training suit, and its inherent body armor, vaguely wondering if I should take it anyway, and as I thought about it, the goop stuck to me morphed to look exactly like my training suit.
“Well, that’s neat,” I said to no one in particular and made a mental note not to think about going swimsuit shopping while wearing whatever this stuff was. If it changed to look like whatever I was thinking about, well, I’d keep my thoughts nice and parka-like.
I exited the room and glanced down at the weapons strewn across the floor. I picked up a giant kukri style knife, and as I went to sheathe it, the blade disappeared somewhere into my suit. It was creepy. I grabbed at the spot where it’d vanished frantically, my heart pounding in my chest, and felt something slither up my arm. The next thing I knew, the knife was in my hand, ready for beheading zombies at a moment’s notice.
“What else do they have in here?” I murmured as my heart slowly stopped trying to beat its way out of my chest. “What other nifty things does the agency have hidden away?”
I was about to go and look for more but decided against it. What if I found something way unfriendlier than my superspy suit? Besides, for all I knew, this thing was giving me brain cancer. I settled on grabbing a few more guns and holstering them along with a few grenades, but like the knife, they vanished into whatever spatial pocket the suit held gear in.
I wasn’t sure how much it could fit, but it was neat having weapons appear in my hands. After playing with it for only a few minutes, I swear, I made my way back toward the medical bay. Hopefully, Chuck would know where I could find Flash and Bang. Besides, as cool as my new suit was, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t dissolving my insides.
6
I felt like an evil Bond girl as I stepped into the medical bay. It didn’t help that the doofy medic stared at me wide-eyed. It made me fight the urge to cross my arms over my chest. It wasn’t like it’d stop him from staring anyway. Instead, I made my way up to Chuck and smiled at him.
“Remember me?” I asked, rapping on the glass with one knuckle, much to the ire of the still leering medical person. Good. Screw him.
Chuck turned in his fish tank and stared at me for a long time. “New look?” he asked, noting how I was wearing what looked like skin-tight black leather with a red cobra emblem over my chest. I wasn’t sure why I’d wanted to look that way, but there it was. I was just glad it’d stopped making me look like Lara Croft, and not the Angelina Jolie version.
“So I found a magic suit that seems to change shape at will…” I muttered, pulling at the cobra emblem stretched across my breasts. When I realized what I’d done, my cheeks burst into flames, and I dropped my hand.
“Please tell me you didn’t take the untested, experimental body armor?” Chuck asked, a horrified look on his face.
“Um…” I muttered, biting my lip.
“That stuff will give you cancer and liquefy your insides,” he said, face turning white as a sheet, which was interesting because he was in a vat of raspberry jam.
“Really?” I squealed, trying to tear off my clothing until his laughter filled my ears.
“No, not really, but by all means, please strip.” Chuck stared at me smugly, giving me that weird look he did from time to time. It was the one that told me he didn’t find me attractive but enjoyed giving me a hard time anyway. It was creepy, to say the least. Especially because even though he looked like he was barely twenty, he was like eighty years old.
“I dislike you a lot,” I replied, turning away from him and stomping toward the medic who was still staring at me. He looked down at his clipboard, face flushing as I approached. Without making eye contact, he reached out and handed me what looked like an ordinary pink cell phone. The moment I touched the device, it vanished within the suit. I sighed. The whole suit absorbing things I touched thingy was starting to get old.
“No, you don’t,” Chuck called before clearing his throat. “I’ve sent all the relevant information to that phone. Basically, you’ll need to rendezvous with an agency contact named Morris. He’s currently stationed in Athens, Greece. You’ll have to find him because, for some reason, he isn’t answering our hails.”
“And why do I need to find Morris? I’m supposed to be going after Flash and Bang,” I said as the phone reappeared back in my hand. I opened an application labeled Morris and a red dot appeared on a map Greece. Then it started blinking.
“Morris is a field agent assigned to keep tabs on Flash and Bang. If anyone will know what’s going on, it will be him.” Chuck’s voice was distant sounding as I turned back toward him. “The agency jet will take you to Athens. Just follow the GPS locator we’ve implanted in Morris, and you’ll find him, likely passed out in a bar.”
“It’s going to take like twelve hours to fly to Athens from here,” I protested, the pink phone vanishing back inside my suit. “And how am I supposed to get this through airport security?” I gestured at my ninja suit.
“Like I said, you’ll be in an agency jet. Consider yourself lucky. It’ll have you there in two hours.” He looked like he was going to say more, but stopped himself. “Good luck, Abby. I have total faith in you.”
“Really?” I asked, my eyebrows snaking up on my forehead though I didn’t mean for them to move. According to Chuck, I wasn’t exactly worthless, but I sure was bumbling. It wasn’t my fault because I’d never really been trained. Instead, I’d had a bunch of skills downloaded into my brain. It made it so I could hack into a computer or Kung Fu the crap out of an attacker, but I didn’t have the sort of situational experience needed to get out of tough situations. I was more a hammer and less a precision laser.
When dealing with a group of bad guys, it usually wasn’t an issue, but trying to get out of certain situations had turned out dicey at best. It was why most of my training at his hands had involved placing me in ridiculous situations designed to foil even the most experienced operatives.
“Yes. I’ve been training you for something exactly like this,” Chuck replied, placing one hand against the glass. “Give ‘em hell.”
“Will do,” I said, suddenly brimming with confidence as I
turned and made my way to the door.
“Um, excuse me,” the medic mumbled, and as I turned toward him, I realized he was bright red.
“Yes?” I asked as he held out a pen toward me. At least it looked like a normal pen and not a nice one either. Just one of those cheap ones I always stole from my teacher in homeroom.
“Take this,” he said, pressing the object into my hand. “It’ll help.”
“What’s it do?” I asked as he stood there empty-handed. It was almost like he didn’t know what to do with himself now.
“It writes, but if you get into trouble, try throwing it at the enemy.” He paused and smiled at me. “It works especially well on bears.”
“Okay,” I said a little slower than was probably necessary. Why the hell had he given me a pen without telling me what it did? I thought about asking, but what if he was playing a trick on me or worse, was something I was supposed to know about. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he replied, spinning on his heel and moving toward Chuck as the pen vanished into my suit. I sighed. I was going to have to get a handle on the whole suit holding everything thing, or I was going to wind up absorbing a kitchen sink.
I let out a slow breath and made my way outside. Agents had managed to clear the stairs so I wouldn’t have to shimmy up any elevators, but I was still several floors from the runway. It took a lot longer to reach than I’d have liked, but when I arrived I was surprised to see a plane sitting in the middle of the hanger. Not surprised by the plane being there, more by the fact it sort of looked like one of those old-fashioned prop planes and was painted bright fuchsia.
There were two seats on the plane. One in the front and one in the back, but the first one appeared to be filled by a massive octopus. I wasn’t sure what the agency’s deal was, but this facility, unlike the others I’d had the displeasure of visiting, seemed filled to the brim with ridiculous creatures.
As I approached, the purple octopus turned toward me and flashed me an infectious grin. “Hello, Abby. Are you ready to go?” it asked in a voice that sort of reminded me of Neil Gaiman.
“Uh, yeah,” I replied, the urge to head back down the sixty-seven flights of stairs and smack Chuck upside the head filling me to nearly the brim. “Are we going in that?”
“Yup, Coraline here is the best plane we have!” He smacked the side of the vehicle with one tentacle. The thwack of it was strangely wet sounding. “The fastest too. It will get you wherever you want, lickity split!”
I rubbed my temples with one hand as I approached and climbed into the plane without muttering a word about how insane everything seemed. The passenger spot was strangely roomy, and I had enough room to stretch my legs out. I buckled my seatbelt as the octopus spun around and watched me, eyes strangely focused on the harness.
“Ready?” he asked, and when I nodded he spun around, his tentacles flew over the controls in front of him. A glass hood raised from the sides of the plane, covering the cockpit in a shell. The propeller at the front of the plane began to spin, but the sound of it was drowned out by music as Like A G6 by Far East Movement began blaring inside the cockpit
“Now put your hands up,” the octopus called, and the next thing I knew we were airborne and hurtling through the sky so quickly, my stomach hurt.
7
Two hours later, we were in Athens, and while I was thanking my lucky stars the journey had been quick, I wasn’t exactly happy with the pilot. For one thing, his music collection left something to be desired. For another, well, his drop off plan was a little… extreme.
“There are all these open fields around here!” I cried one last time, scrambling to fasten the straps of my parachute on as the plane circled over the heart of Athens, Greece. “Can’t we land somewhere a little more low-key? Please?”
“Ready, set, go!” the octopian pilot screamed, ignoring me like it had every single time I’d voiced a concern. It was like the thing was designed to piss me off.
The ground beneath my feet evaporated. I plummeted downward, the Athena Parthenon barely visible below me. My heart jumped into my throat as I fell, suddenly supported by nothing but thin air. I shut my eyes for a brief second and let my body do its thing, trusting in the instincts implanted into my brain to keep me from ending up splattered on the sidewalk. Thankfully, my hands found the ripcord and jerked on it. My parachute exploded open, catching the wind and slowing my descent to just this side of absolutely terrifying.
While I’d done night jumps before, this one was particularly scary, especially since I was pretty sure we were over protected airspace. The only other time I’d even used a parachute was when I’d had to escape a blown up helicopter. I guess, in comparison to that time, this was fairly pleasant.
My feet touched down a moment later, and the impact was a lot harder than I’d expected. I found myself tumbling forward as my knees buckled. My hands instinctively released the parachute’s straps, detaching the fabric from my body before it could catch the wind and pull me off the cliff. I stumbled forward, barely able to catch my breath in time to see a flashlight beam coming up over the cliff.
I glanced around as a gust of wind caught my parachute and whipped it against a marble pillar with a sound like a thousand flapping bats. I cringed inwardly, hoping I hadn’t just destroyed a two-thousand-year-old shrine to the Greek Gods and sprinted off toward the exit, careful to keep out of the flashlight beam. I wasn’t exactly sure what the punishment was for leaving my parachute inside a temple dedicated to a Greek deity, but I was pretty sure I’d just accumulated some very bad karma. I sighed. Bad karma was exactly what I needed now…
The octopus had decided to drop me here because Morris’s beacon was only a couple of blocks away. Evidently, this place was relatively empty since it was well after midnight, and the Parthenon closed at 8 PM. I, on the other hand, had argued parachuting into a national landmark was absolutely insane.
Unfortunately, my answer did not compute. The octopus had even told me so in a tone-deaf voice, but I think he was mocking me since most of his other phrasing had carried some semblance of normal human speech, even if most of it seemed to be ripped directly from hip hop songs. It made me wonder about the guy who had taught him English.
The flashlight beam swept by me, fixing on my parachute, and I heard a sudden intake of breath. A radio crackled to life a moment later, but I’d already slipped by the thin, pencil-necked guard in the dark, my suit blending in with my surrounding like it was made of chameleon skin. I was instantly happy I had stolen the experimental suit even though I was one hundred percent positive it was dissolving my liver.
The marble stairs were surprisingly slick beneath my feet, but after almost slipping once, the grip on the soles of my boots changed, and I no longer had any problems. So the suit learned… Hopefully, it already knew how to deflect bullets. I wasn’t keen on it learning to do that after the fact.
I scrambled down the stairs as quickly as I could, now more worried about being spotted than slipping over the edge and falling a couple hundred feet to my death. Hadn’t the Greeks heard of handrails? As I was about to reach the exit, I realized I had not one, but two problems. Firstly, not only were sirens cutting through the air, but there was another person coming toward the gate. The second problem? The gate was locked.
I glanced around, looking for another exit. Finding none, I sprinted toward the chain link. I hopped over it with a grace I’d never before possessed and landed on the other side just as a flashlight beam caught me in the face. My suit reacted by darkening the material over my face as I sprang forward, slamming my fist into the guard’s temple and knocking him unconscious with a single blow. Mike Tyson had nothing on me. As he slumped to the ground, I sort of felt bad because he was pretty much the definition of wrong place wrong time.
“Sorry,” I mumbled as I sprinted past him and turned down the trail next to a giant red and white marble rock where I’d been told John the Baptist had converted the first Greek to Christianity.
I soon found myself standing in the deserted square of the town and made myself scarce as police vans filled with full on riot gear rolled down the path I’d just come down. I’d gotten out of there just in time.
My clothing morphed into jeans and an Athens 2004 Olympics sweatshirt complete with matching baseball cap as I walked along the street, suddenly very aware I was a girl walking alone down a dark alley in the middle of the night. That seemed… bad. I knew I could probably take on anyone who came for me, but it was still a bit unnerving.
“I wonder if the feeling of being a helpless girl will ever go away,” I muttered to myself as the phone appeared in my hand. “I sure hope so…” Despite all my super skills and new training, I’d spent most of my life being relatively helpless and more than a little clumsy. Being able to take out a squadron of highly trained ninjas was still pretty new to me, and it hadn’t quite overridden the years of being scared of dark alleys. I pushed the thoughts away and fired up the application labeled Morris.
It wound up leading me to a bar with a name written in an alphabet I couldn’t decipher. It was a little weird because as I looked around, everything was written in Greek and I, well, didn’t speak the language. I don’t know why, but I guess I’d just sort of expected everything to be in English.
I tried to shove down the fact I was pretty much the epitome of an ignorant American as I stepped up to the doors. They were made of thick dark glass and had a certain grunginess to them I didn’t understand. The walls attached to the doors were covered in graffiti, and now that I was looking around, I realized a lot of walls and doors were covered in graffiti.
Magic for Hire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Found Magic Book 3) Page 4
