Jeff Davis closed his eyes, forcing himself to be still, and wished for the tempting agony to stop.
#
The four-ten turned out to be a woman with a needle full of tainted heroin that would have plunged her into a sleep deep enough to be classified as a medical coma. I knocked it out of her hand and Sloane restrained her while we waited for the narrative to snap and let her go. As soon as we were sure that she was clear I called the police—no need for a cleanup team on this one, since nothing impossible had actually happened—and stayed with her until a squad car came to haul her off to the hospital. Our old friend, Officer Troy, made the pickup. That was by design. Anyone else might have held us for a statement. He just looked tired, shoved our would-be Sleeping Beauty into his backseat, and peeled off down the street, lights and siren blaring.
“He’s going to wind up the target of some hungry Greek monster one day,” observed Sloane, leaning against the rough brick wall of the alley. She had produced a nail file from somewhere—possibly from our junkie’s purse—and was shaping her already-perfect nails. “A name like ‘Troy’; he’s just begging for it.”
“Your opinion is duly noted and dismissed as crap,” I said. I raised the walkie-talkie, depressing the button, and asked, “Agent Robinson, are you there? Report. Agent Santos, I’d like to hear from you too. We’re sort of thin on the ground out here, and the city’s turned into some kind of fucked-up storybook nightmare.”
Sloane raised an eyebrow.
“More fucked-up than usual,” I amended. “Sloane and I need backup. What’s your position?”
I released the button. There was no reply.
“You know, if I believed in having feelings—which I don’t—this is about where I would start getting really worried about the assholes we work with,” commented Sloane, still filing her nails. “I mean, we’ve put down, what? Three memetic incursions so far tonight, and they’re still off the table? Either they’re having pizza somewhere and laughing at us behind their hands, or they’re in serious trouble.”
“I wish I could think that it was pizza.” I raised the walkie-talkie again. “Agent Davis, have you heard from Robinson or Santos? We’re starting to worry a little, and we could use the backup if the evening is going to continue in its current vein for much longer.”
There was a long silence after I released the button. A sudden chill washed over me.
“Agent Davis, this is Agent Marchen. Please respond.”
This time, a whisper came back over the airwaves, so thin and flattened out by the transmission that I had to strain to hear it. “They won’t stop … Henry, they won’t stop banging …”
Sloane straightened. “Banging?”
I held up a finger, motioning for her to hold on, and pressed the button to speak. “Jeff, what are you talking about? Are you still in the van?”
His response was instant, if no louder. “They want me to work with them, but I don’t want to, Henry. I don’t want to, I don’t like that story. I don’t like the way it ends …”
Oh, crap. “Jeff, are you in the van?”
“… yes.”
“Hold on. We’ll be right there. Just hold on.” Our current position was almost half a mile from where Jeff was parked. I lowered the walkie-talkie, clipping it back to my belt, and slanted a sharp glance at Sloane. “Don’t wait for me if I fall behind. We need to get to Jeff, and we need to do it now.”
She nodded, pushing herself away from the wall. Before I could say anything else, she broke into a run, racing out of the alley and down the street. I followed her, fighting to catch up even though I knew I couldn’t.
Hold on Jeff, I thought. We’re coming …
#
Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 440 (“The Frog Prince”)
Status: ACTIVE
Getting away from a troll the size of an angry gorilla was easier said than done. Thank God for Tasers—now there was something that needed to go on a T-shirt. Andy collapsed onto the riverbank, panting and glaring at the rapidly dissolving mass of mud that had been the bridge troll—right up until he ran several hundred volts through its ugly face.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Suck on that, you ugly-ass bastard.” He’d lost his wallet and his walkie-talkie when the troll dropped him in the creek. Hopefully Henry wasn’t trying to get hold of him yet. She probably had everything under control and was grumbling about waiting for the rest of the team to reach the extraction point. Night like tonight, with at least three stories going concurrently, she was going to have a lot to grumble about.
Well, she was going to have to wait a little longer if she wanted to extract him. His ass hurt from its impact with the rocks under the water, and every inch of his clothing was soaked through. Groaning, Andy bent forward, pulled off his shoes, and began peeling his sodden socks off his feet. There was only so much a man could take.
Besides, he needed to find those damn goats before he officially declared this memetic incursion dead in the water. The last thing he wanted to do was jump the gun and get yelled at for leaving a narrative unfinished—
A splash from the nearby bank drew his attention, and he turned to see a large, dark green bullfrog with enormous yellow eyes sitting next to him in the mud. “Well hello, Mr. Frog,” he said, knowing that exhaustion was powering his lapse into silliness and not caring overly much. At least he was still alive. “I hope that troll wasn’t a friend of yours.”
“I am not a friend to trolls,” the frog replied. It had a very faint British accent, like someone who had been watching old Hugh Grant movies for too long, and had forgotten how their vowels were normally pronounced. “But you, my friend, have lost something in these waters. Something that I could recover for you, if you made it worth my while.”
Andy barely managed to swallow the urge to groan. Talking to the frog was a rookie mistake: anyone who had been with the Bureau for more than six months should have known better than to start a conversation with anything that wasn’t supposed to answer back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t make deals with amphibians. No offense.”
“None taken,” the frog replied, and this was just plain ridiculous—a frog didn’t have the jaw structure for human enunciation, much less the cranial capacity to form a complete sentence. A frog was basically just a squishy sack of muscles and organs, waiting for something bigger to come along and gulp it down. “I just thought you might like to have your wallet returned, that’s all. Lots of things in that wallet. Lots of good memories, I’m sure. You even put that plastic sheeting over your pictures to protect them from the elements—I mean, I’m just a frog, and you don’t make deals with amphibians, but it seems to me that a man doesn’t put plastic over his photos if he doesn’t care about them.”
Protocol said that he should tell the frog to go away, thus preventing a four-forty scenario from solidifying around him. But suddenly, that wallet felt like it was just about the most important thing in the world. He couldn’t imagine going home and trying to explain to Mike that he’d lost all their pictures in the creek, especially since his NDAs meant that he wouldn’t be able to tell his husband why he’d been crossing that bridge in the first place.
“What would you want in exchange for getting my wallet back?” The words hung in the air between them, heavy with narrative potential. It was too late to snatch them back. The air seemed suddenly warmer, and it smelled of honeysuckle and brine.
“Oh, not much,” said the frog, and hopped a foot or so closer. Frogs can’t smile.
In the dim evening light, it looked like this one was trying.
#
The van doors were closed and—as I learned to my dismay when I tried to wrench them open—locked. I slapped my pocket and swore. “Sloane, I don’t have my keys!” I shouted. “Do you?”
“Like you people let me drive? Fuck, no, I don’t have keys to the van.” She bent, picking up a large rock from the curb. “On the other hand, I don’t really need them, do I?”
<
br /> “Sloane—” My protest died when I heard Jeff scream inside the van. It was a shrill, agonized sound, and it hurt my heart in ways I hadn’t known were possible. “Throw the fucking rock, Sloane!”
The words had barely left my lips before Sloane’s rock was smashing through the driver’s side window and she was hitting the button to unlock all the van’s doors. I wrenched the rear door open with a fierceness that would leave my shoulders aching for days. In that moment, I didn’t care.
The field van has a fairly basic configuration: front seat, middle seat, open back area that can be used for storage in a pinch—even body storage—or as a makeshift work area when we need someone to stay behind and coordinate. Jeff was huddled in the corner next to the folding desk that he’d been using as a temporary command center. His laptop was still open, the screen casting enough light that I could see how he was shaking. He had one arm looped around his knees and the other holding his head down, like he was afraid that he would float away without something to anchor him.
“Jeff?” My voice sounded small and useless in the thin night air. He didn’t respond.
Gravel crunched as Sloane stepped up beside me. Her small gasp was enough to tell me that I wasn’t overreacting to his appearance. I motioned for her to stay where she was and climbed into the van, crouching down beside him. There was no point in crowding the man and making the situation even worse than it already was.
“Jeff?” I murmured. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
He didn’t say anything. He just kept on shaking.
“He’s story-struck.” Sloane sounded frightened. That wasn’t a good sign. I glanced over my shoulder at her, raising my eyebrows in silent indication that she needed to keep talking. She shook her head and said, “Jeff went active with his narrative years ago. It shouldn’t be able to tangle him up like this anymore, but it has. Something’s feeding it enough power that it managed to throw a rope around him, and now it’s trying to reel him in.”
“Wait.” I put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder, trying to ignore the way his body jumped and twitched beneath my fingers, like he was dancing himself to pieces. “Are you telling me he’s being drawn back into his goddamn fairy tale?”
Sloane nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. I don’t know how it managed to get its hooks into him again, or what he’s hearing right now, but our little shoemaker’s elf is falling toward ever after, and he’s falling fast and hard.”
“So how do we make it stop?”
She hesitated. Finally, voice surprisingly soft, she said, “I have no idea.”
#
Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 327A (“Hansel and Gretel”)
Status: ACTIVE
“Kids? Gregory? Hannah? Are you out there? Your parents are really worried about you. I need to get you home before they worry even more. Answer me and let me know that you’re there, okay?” Demi took another step forward into the forest, which seemed deeper and darker and less possible by the second. “Hannah? Gregory?”
The only answer was more of that sweet, childish, mocking laughter. Demi scowled, her fingers clenching convulsively tight around the body of her flute. How dare they laugh at her, Demi Santos! Didn’t they know who she was? Didn’t they know what she could do? If they forced her, she could—
She froze with the thought still only half-formed. She could what? Play a come-here-kids song on her flute and lure them out of the woods against their own free will? That might have been a good option, but Jeff hadn’t given her any sheet music, and if she called the rest of the team out of the field because she couldn’t catch up with a couple of stupid kids, there would be hell to pay. Just the thought of Henry’s bloody lips pursed in disapproval—again—made Demi’s stomach turn. They kept saying she was one of the most versatile story types in the Agency, but it sure didn’t feel that way. Not when Jeff could do three times the paperwork with half the effort, and Sloane could slap the story right out of half the fairy tale princesses they encountered, and Henry—
Henry was Henry. Demi had always liked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves when she was a little girl, but now that she’d met the real thing, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to watch it again without shuddering.
Whatever she had to do to get the kids and get back without making Henry disappointed in her, she was going to do it. “Hannah! Gregory!” She squared her shoulders, trying to push away the unease that had been threatening to consume her since she stepped off the sidewalk and into the shadow of the trees. “You need to come back here right now, or you’re going to be in serious trouble!”
Nothing answered her this time, not even laughter. Demi took a furious step forward, and froze as she saw something pale on the forest floor. She stooped, reaching out to gingerly pick up whatever it was with her free hand. The pale thing was soft and spongy and light. She raised it to her face, and the smell of Angel Food cake hit her, cloyingly sweet and unmistakable.
The kids were leaving themselves a trail of bread crumbs to follow through the wood. Suddenly feeling as if things were much more urgent than they had been a few seconds before, Demi tossed the piece of sponge cake aside and started running again, heading ever deeper into the seemingly endless sea of trees.
#
“There has to be something we can do.” I looked desperately back at Sloane, my hand still clutching Jeff’s shoulder. Part of me felt, however irrationally, like letting go even for an instant would be the same as letting go forever: he would slip away, and I would never find the right combination of words and gestures to bring him back to us.
“I’m not an archivist, okay?” Sloane shook her head. “We could call Dispatch, see if they know anything about snapping somebody out of this sort of fucked-up fugue state—” She took a step forward, reaching for Jeff’s discarded walkie-talkie. Why she wasn’t going for her own, I didn’t know, and I didn’t have time to wonder for long.
“No!” I snapped, putting out a hand to keep her from reaching her goal. She stopped, looking at me quizzically, too confused to be annoyed. “Don’t call Dispatch. Not yet.”
“Why don’t you—oh.” Understanding washed across her face. “You don’t want this going in his file.”
“Not until we know what’s happening.” Jeff had been active but stable for years. If an active narrative flare got entered in his file, he’d be pulled off field duty and trapped in the Archives until someone certified him safe for public duty. It was the exact opposite of the way people with stories like Sloane were treated: the more likely she seemed to flare up, the more likely it was that she’d be shoved into the field at every opportunity. But that was because “evil” stories traditionally had a short shelf life, and human resources wanted to suck every drop of useful service out of her that they could before she inevitably self-destructed. Jeff was a solid, hardworking, domestic sort of a story. He could last forever in the Archives. There were people who thought he should have been there all along.
If they took him out of the field “temporarily,” it would turn permanent with the application of a single stamp. He’d never see the outside of an office building again. And that would be a shame, in every possible way.
Sloane nodded. “Okay, well, here are our options. We could kill him.”
I gaped at her. “That’s not an improvement, Sloane.”
“I didn’t say I was offering options you’d like, but fine, we’ll take murder off the table for right now. It was just an idea.” Sloane shook her head. “We could poison him. A ten-year nap makes most things better.”
“I am not poisoning Jeff. Keep trying.”
“We could find him a handsome prince and get him kissed. Kisses break all the shit that enchanted naps don’t. Hell, they even break enchanted naps.”
For a long moment, I didn’t say anything. Finally, I asked, “Does it have to be a prince who does the kissing? Because I hate princes.”
Sloane blinked. “You’re actually considering it? Damn, you a
re worried. No, it doesn’t have to be a prince; it just has to be someone who the narrative has coded as royalty. You know, kings and queens and the occasional duke’s eldest son who doesn’t know how to feel fear and all that bullshit and—”
Sloane stopped mid-sentence as I pulled my hand off Jeff’s shoulder, grabbed him by the hair, and yanked his head up. His glasses were aslant on his nose, and his eyes were tightly closed.
“Oh, you are not gonna—”
“Please, please don’t file a sexual harassment suit against me for this, okay?” I muttered, pulled Jeff closer to me, and kissed him.
#
Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 440 (“The Frog Prince”)
Status: ACTIVE
“I’m a married man,” said Andy dubiously, still eyeing the frog, which still seemed to be trying to smile at him. It was a creepy thing to see outside of a cartoon, a frog plastering a pleasant expression across its little froggy face like it wanted to be mistaken for something human. “I can’t do anything that would make Mike angry.”
“But you see, that’s where your conundrum comes into play,” said the frog, which sounded more articulate and less … well, frog-like … with every sentence that it uttered. Andy was reasonably sure that was a bad sign, but he was starting to have trouble remembering precisely why that was. “If you lose the wallet, your precious Mike will be angry. So which is going to offend him more deeply, and be more difficult to repair? One little kiss, or an entire missing wallet?”
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