Turn 16
December 2, 2009
9:00 P. M.
Sears Home, Portland, Oregon
“Fils de pute! That lying, cheating, sneaky little girl!”
“Mad you lost at bowling?”
“Of course not! I’m delighted to have a granddaughter like her, if only in name. You raised her well, Seth.”
“… that’s not much of a compliment if she had to cheat to win.”
Some would argue about the practicality of having both a study and an office, but I found it was always better to separate one’s learning and thinking by pleasure and by business. While the former was much bigger, a good quarter of the house, the office suited our needs fine as I typed away at a laptop, Pierre pacing the deck behind me as he celebrated his loss the only way he knew how; smoking.
“So.” The Frenchman asked after a long drag. “What’s the plan? Torch a few flag factories? Send some kind of Muslim death threat through the mail?”
“What, as if that doesn’t already happen? No, we have to come up with something a bit dastardlier, something that’ll cause Tyler to want to go underground and stay there until the heats off him. What causes a businessman to close up shop and disappear?”
“A scandal?”
I nodded with a smile. To think I was actually beginning to like the man for more than a few brief moments. “Cheating on a wife, gambling one’s fortunes away, poaching and indulging in all sorts of crimes and criminal activities… we Americans hate slime balls, especially when they represent our national pride. Normally we have defenses against this sort of thing, lawyers and PR managers who can pay our black mailers off…
“But our list of associates isn’t exactly normal now, are they? Do you know what a Dancer is?”
“As in, Shalashaska’s Dancers?”
“The same. I have one working for me, someone who came to my employ about a year after Sylvester passed. Probably a sort of ‘sorry I had your wife killed’ gift from Alucard, now that I think about it.
“You’d do well to keep your mouth shut. Niya can be a little… edgy.”
Land lines were dead and untrustworthy, and these private cell phone towers did little more to sooth my nerves. No, a video conference call using a server created by my own technicians was much safer, set up to alert me if anyone so much as dared to ping it without the correct password that changed every six hours. It might not have been person to person, but it would do.
Niya didn’t necessarily agree, but she wasn’t necessarily human either. While she wore an effective disguise during the day, being at her mansion (a building twice the size of mine) allowed her to show her true colors; a light blue skinned humanoid with darker, also blue hair that happened to match my own daughter’s shade, she wore a tank top and short shorts even though the world around her must have been freezing. Auto-heat regulations built into her bio-synthetic form was just one of the many features that made her the so called evolution of humanity.
For all the superiority she had physically, none of it extended to her emotional range. She acted like a human, a particularly pist off one at that, behaving like I was wasting her time with most of the requests I had for her. I’d fire her on the spot if she wasn’t so useful.
“Good evening, Niya. How’s your daughter doing?”
“Well, I was putting her to bed, until you just had to reach me. I’m charging you overtime by the hour, Seth. Make it quick.”
Scratching my face, having given up on shaving since my time in the vault, I obeyed the secretary as I opened up my browser, talking as I finished a message and prepared to send it to her.
“Niya, I have a very important job that I need you to take care of as soon as you can in the morning. I don’t care what else you have to do, you’ll do this before anything else. Got it?”
“On the condition that I get the rest of the day off, paid, if I do.”
Dam this woman. She was just as good at blackmailing, if not better, than I was. “Fine, but only if you can do it in under two hours.”
“Anything you ask I can do in ten minutes. What’s up?”
“The email I just sent you contains about thirty images and a folder that’s password protected. Don’t try to open any of them; it’s all gay porn.”
Niya, who’s normal face with me was a frown, actually raised her lips into a soft, easy and slim smile. “Really now? Decided to come out of the closet, Seth? I knew Sylvester was just a cover up.”
“Screw you too. Anyway, I sent you the name of a man na-
“Tyler Dunham.”
So Sherry had talked to her. Leaning back, looking over my shoulder when I saw Pierre jump at the sight of a duck that nearly stole his hat, I tried to keep my focus even as he cursed
“Yes… when did Sherry tell you?”
“Sherry and I made a bet. She said it’d take three players before you went to me to help take care of everything for you. I said one person before I started doing your job. Looks like I just won ten grand.”
Pierre, firing and missing a silenced pistol into the night as the deranged duck flew away, stuffed the pistol into his holster and yelled from the outside
“L'enfer qui a dix mille dollars pour jouer?”
I’m not going to even pretend I understood what he said, even though Niya laughed at it. How is it everyone understood French but me?
“Anyway, Tyler Dunham. It didn’t take long for me to find out that he just so happens to send out an annual letter thanking his employees and any client who’s opted into the company newsletter, which just so happens to include a long list of photos of the best and craziest flags they’ve sold throughout the year.
“I want you to hack into their servers, replace the flags with porn, send the letter out and place the folder on his desktop all before five p.m. tomorrow night. Frame the man and let the mobs do the rest.”
“Easy enough. I’d do it tonight if it weren’t for the fact that I’ll make more doing it tomorrow. Is there anything else you want me to do, boss, or would you like to thank me for being a badass and the only reason why your company still exist.”
Pierre’s curiosity got the better of him, the man stepping into the camera with a burning cigarette in his mouth. While I already knew he tended to be attracted towards some… interesting sorts of people… this absolutely took the cake as his eye lit up like a Christmas tree. Taking the smoke out and blowing the excess into my face, kicking me out of the picture with a yelp, the man put his usual swagger on as he tipped his hat and said
“Ah, I wondered what kind of goddess could have such a wonderful voice, and now I see I’m far from disappointed, ma jolie. What’s your name, Mademoiselle?”
“Niya Azula.” The Dancer replied, already bored with Pierre. She had been designed to be the cutest of her race, according to some sources; getting hit on wasn’t unusual for her. That a Frenchman was doing it was simply another scratch on a long list of failed suitors. “Yours?”
“Why, I am Pierre Peuchet Belmont, expert vampire hunter and mercenary for hire for Monstres Sans Frontières. The killer of a thousand FTM, a miracle worker who saved my homeland of France and Europe itself, the man to take down-”
A blond haired, green faced child popped up mischievously just then, Niya herself surprised but delighted to see her young daughter Peri emerge from the shadows as she crawled up like a cat into her mother’s lap. Having the skin and hair color of her departed father Perry, it would have seemed he simply cloned himself it if weren’t for the eyes; Peri’s Blue eyes were the true copies, matching Niya’s lash for lash and dot for dot. She was her parent’s child in image, even if she was a bit more mischievous than both of them together.
“Mom?” Peri asked, the child being somewhere between eight to ten. Time is such a confusing estimate once you begin to cross into alternate dimensions; someone takes a vacation for a week and they come back looking five years older.
“Yes hon?”
&nb
sp; “Why is this woman hitting on you? Is she a lesbian like Aunt Paz?”
There was no salvaging the situation as Pierre began to glow with embarrassment, trying to hide his long braid behind him as Niya busted up into laughter. Peri, all too knowing of what she had done, pulled the skin beneath an eye down in mocking as the Frenchman finally closed the laptop, rushing to the balcony to smoke in peace as I myself chuckled at his misfortune.
Better. I chuckled the night away.
Times of Peace: Volume 1 of the side adventures to The Mercenary's Salvation Page 57
