The Flame Game

by R. J. Blain

  “That doesn’t seem highly problematic. We’d just have play dates with all the kids. At the rate we’re going, is anyone going to notice an extra gorgon whelp running around under our feet?”

  “Probably not,” he admitted.

  “Just make it clear I’ll cut the dick off any gorgon who deliberately cracks their eggs. And I’m unavailable for any other gorgon nookie.”

  Quinn chuckled. “If being an emergency surrogate is something you want to do, I can register you with the CDC for specifically that exception. I’ll give you a full list of when a second surrogate might be needed, and you can pick the options that you like best. They’re all post fertilization, so that’s not something I mind.”

  “As you’d be the primary participant, at least as far as I’m concerned.”

  “That’s right.”

  I pointed at my flat stomach, which wouldn’t show any signs of pregnancy for at least a few months. “What stage does this become a no fly zone for such efforts?”

  “No gorgon male will use a pregnant surrogate. It’s too dangerous for the unborn, and it goes against their general beliefs. Brides are precious—and even the paid surrogates are, for the time she’s carrying their child, effectively their bride and precious. They won’t risk the unborn. However, I’d just ask my grandfather to verify if it’s safe, which would override that. But until we see how you handle pregnancy in general, this is only a theoretical discussion. I fully support the idea, but it needs to be done safely for you and all children involved. And that said, it’s so rare it might only happen once every twenty or thirty years.”

  “Because most cracked eggs break?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Even if it doesn’t happen, I’d still feel better if we could.”

  “Then we will. And now that we’ve detoured from the main point, if we can’t get to the bottom of the rabies issue, gorgons will have a lot more problems than the rare cracked egg.”

  Right. “My father had a few suggestions.”

  “If your father is offering advice, it would be wise of us to listen. What did he tell you?”

  “He told me that I’d be a lot happier with the situation if I dealt with three key things, including activities on your ex-wife at the time of and before she’d decided to be a cheating asshole, the rabies problem, and Chief Morrison and his whereabouts. There was also someone in the crowd at the demonstration I want to look into. I took a picture of him. I was supposed to start this earlier, but for some reason, I got distracted.”

  “I am your ultimate distraction when I want to be.”

  He really was. “Do you think my father realized I’d be busy for a while?”

  “I’m sure he was aware I would be despoiling his daughter thoroughly. I was quite enjoying myself thinking about the things I’d do after making sure you’d eaten enough to be appropriately energetic for my plans. That was entirely on purpose.”

  “You’re pure evil.”

  “I love you, too.”

  I grinned at that, separated the laptop boxes, set aside the laptop marked as for work, and freed my new toy from its packaging. “I’m proud I didn’t run from the altar. Or throw up on you. Or do anything even more humiliating than what I babbled.”

  “As always, you were perfect.”

  “No, you’re perfect. I’m just really lucky. And jealous.”

  “I love your jealousy. To answer your question, I have my dress uniform with me.”

  I stilled, staring at him with wide eyes. “What does a woman have to do to get you out of those pajamas and into your dress uniform?”

  Quinn chuckled. “Ask, but only after we get some work done. Try not to destroy my dress uniform when you get your hands on me, as I’d rather not go in for a fitting before we go back to work. Did your father give you any hints on where we should start?”

  “He’s mostly concerned about rabies, as I have a reputation. It involves me rescuing animals from dumpsters. If people didn’t leave animals in dumpsters, I wouldn’t fetch them.”

  “It would be good for my blood pressure if you stopped rescuing rabid animals from dumpsters, but I understand why you won’t stop. And Blizzard is a good puppy despite the fact you acquired him from a dumpster. Well, he’s as good of a puppy as a husky can get.”

  “And he was only a little rabid. Do you think Blizzard and Avalanche are okay with the children? How about Sunny?”

  “They’re fine, Bailey. Our pets and our children will be back soon enough, and I’m sure they miss you. I’m not sure where to start with the rabies outbreak.” Quinn sighed and leaned back against the couch, muttering something under his breath. “Under normal circumstances, I would assign an investigative team to gather the base information, and I’d be available if they needed me. I’ve worked some investigations, but only as time allows—which isn’t as often as I want. So, we’re going to have to make this up as we go, especially since we’re not in New York. If you have any ideas, now is a good time to share them.”

  “Tracking the health records for rabies treatments is the first thing to come to mind. There’d likely be a surge of rabies cases, probably in wild animal populations. That would create a surge of rabies treatments in the general area where they were developing the virus, especially if they’re trying to make it more contagious.” I opened my new laptop to discover a password prompt. “What’s the password?”

  “Something you wanted for Christmas.”

  “Suit model!” I typed the phrase in, and as Quinn liked secure passwords, I exchanged the space for an underscore, substituted letters for numbers, and hit enter. To my delight, the system unlocked. “Not only did I get the suit model for Christmas, I’m getting pictures. And I got the naked model, too. That’s one of my favorite models. But most importantly, there were several photographers around while you were wearing your suit. One of them will surely give me pictures of you just for me. And Perkette has my back. Oh! We should ask Perkette for help with rabies tracking. I bet she already has good data because of her work.” I chuckled, as the laptop was already linked to Quinn’s phone for internet access. “Is the hotel’s internet too slow for you?”

  “I’ve seen faster turtles. I’m spoiled, Bailey.”

  “Sure, sure.” I tapped in a search phrase for rabies outbreaks, my brows rising at the ridiculous number of results. Adding the year didn’t help. As the general internet refused to be of use, I logged into the backend of the CDC, chuckling I hadn’t lost access to their databases yet, and did a search for rabies treatments. “I should probably be doing work on my work laptop, but this one is mine.”

  “For the record, if you want a new computer or phone at any point, all you need to do is ask.”

  “I was fine before.”

  “Only because you kept stealing mine.”

  “That was half the fun, Queeny.” I considered what my father had said about the timing of my husband and his cheating ex-wife. “My father thinks Audrey is more significant than we might appreciate. As such, your job is to look into recorded gorgon matters from when you met her, before she met you, and up until she started being a cheating asshole. That way, I won’t interrogate you again with stupid questions and reminders I made your life a living nightmare until you were able to wisely ditch her. I think my father may be right about one thing he told me, though. She was totally a training program so you could cope with the disaster I tend to be.”

  “You’re not a disaster, Bailey. That said, I did learn a lot about tolerance, patience, and keeping my cool while married to her, that is for certain. No, she wasn’t a good wife, but I also wasn’t the ideal husband for her, either. Frankly, after a year or two, I think we had equal disdain for each other. Honestly, even without your help with that, the marriage wouldn’t have lasted much longer. You just made it a lot easier for me to get through the paperwork and take minimal financial losses from my stupidity.”

  “You weren’t stupid, Sam.”

  “Oh, I was. I was young, tired of
being treated like a stud, and she offered a loveless marriage. She did her fair share of treating me like a stud, but since I had agreed to marry her, it seemed fair.”

  “All she gave you was a loveless marriage with a side of bad sex.” I frowned, considering my husband. “Well, bad sex for you. I can’t imagine you being capable of not doing your best by your partner. The whole incubus thing.”

  “That whole incubus thing is why we ever had sex at all,” he muttered, shaking his head before reaching over me and snagging my work laptop. “I’m borrowing this because I’m too lazy to go get mine, which is buried somewhere under the presents.”

  “It’s gone forever. Goodbye, laptop. Rest in pieces.”

  “The presents aren’t that heavy. Well, most of them. I’m sure my laptop is fine.”

  As trudging through the CDC’s database gave me a headache on a good day, I downloaded every rabies treatment record for the past ten years, dumped them into a spreadsheet, and groaned at the eighty thousand records, amazed the laptop and the program could handle so many results. “Rabies is even more of a problem than I thought. Looks like eight thousand on average a year that have been reported to the CDC in the past decade.”

  “And who knows how many cases weren’t reported to the CDC,” my husband muttered, shaking his head. “Now I understand why the other chiefs told me I’d appreciate the shit I dodged before being dumped into my rank.”

  “At least I had some training before being thrown at you.”

  “Yeah. You’re definitely better trained than I was before I became a cop. Actually, I think you’re better trained than most of our cops. You just have unconventional training, and you’re missing some of the fundamentals. That’s something we’re going to have to address once we’re at the station. I want to revamp our training programs.”

  “Do you have any say over training programs?”

  “I have a lot of control over what supplementary training courses my cops go through after they’re out of the academy. I’m thinking I will see if we can hire one or two extra cops so we can have an hour of supplementary training as a part of every shift. I also have some concerns about our gun handling. I’d like to see Amanda run more cops through unarmed training. General gun usage has been down, so there are concerns of inappropriate use of force.”

  “I’m going to regret having a salary, aren’t I?”

  “Matching work shifts,” he reminded me. “That means more sleep for you, my beautiful.”

  “You’re just making me walk the walk after talking about how good I am at budgeting.”

  “You’re not just good at budgeting, Bailey. If someone told me you were a goddess of budgeting, I would believe them. I’ve seen what you’ve done with our household budget. And not only do you handle the budget to save us money, you do not shirk on the quality. That is very important—we can’t afford to shirk in terms of quality and services, so the budget is a very careful dance.”

  “The budget doesn’t have enough in it for coffee,” I warned him.

  “That’s easily solved. We will put a tip jar on the eighth floor and make a note that all tips go to buying coffee and low-grade pixie dust for the station. You’re going to keep your pixie-dust license, and we’ll make a system to help make sure the cops are level-headed during stressful shifts. I already encourage them to get a low-grade dose on the way to work. Our job can get pretty damned stressful, and the dust dulls the edge.”

  “You’ve done work performance tests, haven’t you?” I accused, as my husband would do just that to make certain his cops were in the best health possible.

  “Absolutely. Getting rid of ticket quotas helped almost as much as encouraging pixie dust.”

  “What is the deal with ticket quotas anyway?”

  “Revenue. I had ticket quotas removed from all Manhattan precincts, and general performance of the cops increased fairly significantly; they were able to worry about more important calls and catching dangerous drivers. Once upon a time, we were also responsible for issuing parking tickets, but we lobbed that over to the city level. Last I checked, they had community service workers handle issuing standard parking tickets and checking meters.”

  “Efficient.”

  “It saved us a fortune.” Quinn admitted. “Unfortunately, how we saved ourselves a fortune is going to make our search even more difficult. While the police will help augment animal control as needed, we don’t keep much in the way of records unless it’s a notable instance.”

  “Like the Chief of Police’s wife being caught with her ass sticking out of a dumpster while being slobbered on by yet another rabid puppy?”

  “Precisely. Don’t forget about the one with distemper.”

  I sighed, as that poor dog had been too far gone to save, but I’d stayed with him the entire time before being carted off to be treated for rabies, distemper, and any other disease a dog might pick up on the streets. “They had to put that one down.”

  “I know.”

  “I guess I can’t turn into a unicorn and burn any assholes behind the rabies outbreak, can I?”

  “However much I would enjoy helping you do just that, we can’t. It’s tempting, but we’re the good guys because we don’t do that unless required.”

  “That ex-cadet deserved to be squished like a grape. He was going to hurt you.”

  “That is an excellent example of when it’s acceptable to ram all six or seven hundred pounds of your unicorn self into somebody. However, next time, please try to avoid being poisoned with ambrosia.”

  “I didn’t do that on purpose.”

  “I can handle being poisoned with ambrosia almost as well as you can, so try to remember that next time.”

  I wrinkled my nose and went to work properly labeling my spreadsheet, creating a pivot table, and getting statistics on rabies infections by year and state.

  Vermont came in at the top with six thousand rabies cases, and with a frown, I filtered by year, discovering a surge in rabies cases in the state six years ago. When I filtered by species, I discovered most of the victims of the virus were raccoons with wolves nipping hot on their heels. “Hey, Quinn. How many wolves live in Vermont?”

  While Quinn worked on a search to find out, I adjusted my filters to include the month, discovering a pack of a hundred and fifty wolves had been found to be rabid in a single month in the state.

  “According to the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, the state can likely sustain no more than a hundred wolves spread across several packs. That’s a rough estimation. According to this, there are currently two packs in the state. One has twelve known members, and the other has eight.”

  “Six years ago, in March, they found a hundred and fifty rabid wolves. The same month had a thousand rabid raccoons.”

  “Where the hell did Vermont get a thousand rabid raccoons?”

  “How the hell did they catch a thousand rabid raccoons?” I added the locations, and sure enough, there were clusters of rabid animals. I pulled up a map of Vermont and plugged in the name of the town closest to the largest cluster. “Long Lake’s rural area has a population of around seven hundred, but there’s almost ten thousand people if you combine all of the surrounding towns, villages, and hamlets.” I filtered to add a column to get a number of how many citizen-killed animals had been reported to the CDC. “Apparently, Long Lake residents take rabies seriously; they killed eight hundred rabid raccoons and asked animal control to deal with the wolves, all hundred and fifty of them that had moved in. Maybe hunting the eight hundred rabid raccoons? How many wolves can eight hundred raccoons feed?”

  “Considering how much Sunny can scarf down for breakfast, I’m going to say not as many as you would think.”

  “Don’t say such terrible things about my puppy. Sunny is the best puppy. So is Blizzard. We have the best puppies.”

  “And I’m going to guess our new wolf will also be your best puppy when she’s ready to come home with us.”

  I grinned at my husband. “Absol
utely. She can become a little pack with Sunny and Blizzard. Blizzard is a wolf trapped in a husky body.”

  “I have no idea where we’re going to find a house big enough at a decent distance from work to have an entire animal sanctuary, but it looks like I’m going to have to figure that out. Is it only raccoons and wolves on your list?”

  I checked, and once I determined some people had been infected, I checked their treatment status, relieved to discover everyone had been successfully cured. “A few humans, but they were treated. No deaths.”

  “Gorgons?”

  “Not in Long Lake.” I restored the sheet settings, filtered by species, and selected gorgon. My eyes widened.

  According to the CDC, over three hundred gorgons had been reported as infected with rabies, and according to the treatment status field, there were precisely two survivors. Cringing, I included the name field, and sure enough, I found Beauty and Sylvester listed. “Three hundred and sixty-seven gorgons have been infected with rabies, and only two have been listed as successfully treated, and they’re our kids.” I checked the other records. “There are twenty gorgons listed as actively being treated, so that number may go up. How are gorgons getting infected with rabies, Quinn?”

  “That is a very…” With a frown, my husband grabbed his cell phone, dialed a number, and held it to his ear. “Grandfather, ask Beauty or Sylvester what their hives fed their snakes, please.”

  I blinked. While I slipped Quinn’s serpents bacon and other treats at a shameful interval, he made certain I didn’t overfeed them, and once a week, they were fed a proper meal. The details on the proper meal turned my stomach, but we made a trip to a butcher once a week for chicks, which he cut into several pieces and fed to his cobras.

  They ate everything, including the feathers.

  “Okay. Thank you. Please tell the children we love them, and we’ll see them as soon as they’ve finished their basic schooling with you.” Quinn hung up. “Feeder mice.”