A Mate Worse Than Death (2 page)

He colored up and m
umbled, “Yes ma’am, I’m on it.”

More gently she added, “Thanks, Officer,” and added as an afterthought, “Oh, Hiller, be aware. They like to make a splash when they show up. If you can take their poofage and posturing in stride, big bonus on the Muy Macho scale.”

He grinned at her, “Thanks for the tip, ma’am.“

“No worries,” she smiled and turned back to her partner, who still had Hiller’s partner Davis under his arm. The poor guy was about to pass out, but it was hard to say if it was from fear or the lack of blood getting to his head. Tony rolled her eyes at her partner.

“Cal, let the nice officer go so he can deal with the GOOENs. We got shoes to find, according to WNTW.”

Cal looked down at the guy and gave him a big smile. Officer Davis valiantly returned it with the most sincere grin he could
manage. “Hey, kid, we’ll talk spring fashions later.”

“Can’t wait,” the man choked ou
t.

CHAPTER TWO

The Supernatural Crimes Investigation branch of law enforcement came into being world-wide instantly as a large side effect of the Great Geas, or Cu
rse, that activated as soon as Supers outed themselves to Naturals, or Nattys, as they liked to call the humans inhabiting earth on the parallel plane. The Outing had not been planned and announced in the Super community. A small faction of Supernatural creatures took matters into their own hands and pushed all Supers from the shadows of myth and legend into the light of ATMs, grocery shopping, retirement planning, and reality TV. Many of the Supers in Mundania at the time had been visiting relatives or on vacation, and suddenly, they had to apply to the Powers That Be, the governing counsel of Supernaturals, for permission to return to Fairie. Very few of them got permission to return.

On the day following the Outing, the more predatory alpha Supers woke up to find that they were conscripted into servitude, “to serve and protect”, in fact. An aspect of the Geas compelled the most predatory types of fae living in Mundania to change their basic natures, to be more sympathetic to Naturals. The Great Geas also dictated that Supers who were living in Mundania when they revealed themselves to the Natural inhabitants had to follow the laws of the Naturals of Mundania, up to a point. If Supers committed major crimes, especially against Nattys, but also against each other, and if the crime wasn’t solved quickly, then the Geas would kick in and wreak havoc on the Supernatural creatures involved, as long as they were part of the Mundane world. If the criminals were caught by the police before the Geas acted, it stayed quiescent. But if the criminals weren’t caught, the Geas over-reacted, taking out anyone involved. The magical Geas operated in a fairly capricious manner. It wasn’t actual intelligence. Instead, It acted like a logarithm. It would run and produce answers, but It didn’t have all the right answers, and some answers made less sense than others in
the Naturals’ world.

The main effect everyone noticed, however, following the announcement of the existence of magic and magical creatures on old style television back in 1989, was that the Supers caught in Mundania during the Outing, whether they had planned to be a part of this new world order or not, could not go back to Fairie. They were stuck. Law enforcement officials all over the world found that they had a whole slew of new employees, many of whom didn’t play well with others unless heavily supervised. And somehow, they all had to deal with it. Those officials quickly recruited open-minded Naturals to act as partners to their new employees, and it became tradition immediately that all Supers acting in public service, especially law enforcement, had a Natty partner to keep them from causing more problems than they solved.

Tony had jumped at the chance to work in the Supernatural Crimes Investigation Bureau in Washington D.C. She had made detective at a relatively young age, and when the opening came for a partner for an ogre, she immediately applied. That she and Cal got along so well was just serendipity. The real fun for her was telling her parents. The Newmans, obscenely rich and socially elite, had been appalled when their eldest daughter Antonia began working in law enforcement before she had even finished her college degree, but they tried very hard to be supportive and encourage her to succeed, preferably to Chief of Police. However, their support did not extend to the new assignment. Tony’s parents were not only leery of the new world order, they actively disliked the Supernatural community. Much of this came from Anthony Newman, who had been bested at the William and Mary’s School of Law by a centaur, a centaur of all things, in his Juris Doctor program, right after the Outing. Poor Mr. Newman still couldn’t wrap his head around it, despite his ridiculously high I.Q., particularly since centaurs weren’t well-known for having high I.Q.s themselves.

Amanda Newman, well, she had her own reasons for avoiding the Super community. She had not yet shared them with her husband or her daughter, so Anthony and Tony both assumed she supported her husband’s stance from loyalty. Meanwhile, Tony’s younger sister Amelia loved the whole situation. Currently at Georgetown University studying Supernatural Anthropology, Melly fully supported any action that shook up her parents but wasn’t her fault. And Alfred, the youngest Newman, adored his big sist
er. Tony could do no wrong for Fred. Besides, for the three children, the new world order was the status quo. It had started three years after Tony was born, so none of them knew any other way of seeing the world.

The day Tony dropped by for cocktails and dropped the bomb of her latest change in work status, a social suicide bomb amongst the Newman’s circle of friends, her parents finally came to realize that they were never going to see their eldest child grow up to be mayor, governor, or president of the United States. As far as they could tell, Tony didn’t see a damn thing wrong with p
artnering up with an ogre. And, in fact, she didn’t. 
“The best part is, I get some residual magicks, so I can really work the investigations with Cal! How cool is that,” she told her parents, smiling at them in a way that told them she knew exactly how much they hated hearing that their heir apparent was now able to cast very minor, dime store magic tricks.

Amanda smiled at her tightly, “Lovely, Antonia darling. I’m sure you’ll, uhm, use them cautiously. And, well, usefully.”

“You don’t want to see?” Tony began to move her hand through the air as if gathering it to her palm, but her father put his hand out and took her hand in his.

“Oh, maybe another night, sweetie. We’ve got to leave soon for the concert. Now, you’re sure you don’t want to go see Areosmith with us? I can get another ticket. ” He patted the hand he had taken.

Tony grinned, “No, no. Too slow for me. How old are those guys now?”

“Well, with enhancements,” her mother glossed over the magic aspects there, “ I don’t think anyone cares.”

“Yeah, but they don’t write new stuff anymore. It’s just the same old playlist. In fact, I heard they sold their ability to write so they could stay young enough to keep doing concerts,” Tony couldn’t help yanking her parents’ chain.

“That’s not illegal, is it?” Amanda asked anxiously.

“No, not yet, anyway. I don’t see why it would be. It’s a contract. But that’s Dad’s area of expertise, not mine. I solve murders, not contract disputes.”

Anthony nodded, “Yes, I do have to admit, the new contract law is quite a lucrative business. Those creatures do nothing without a contract.”

Tony frowned at him. “I really wish you’d be a little less...” she searched for a word that wouldn’t hurt her father’s feelings, “judgmental.”

He frowned back at her. “I am a contract judge. Judg
mental is what I do, daughter.”

“There may come a point where you need to meet my partner.”

“The ogre?” exclaimed two horrified voices in concert.

“And his wife. And his spawn.”

Amanda recovered first, “ Of course we’ll be hap--” her voice broke for a moment, but not her resolve, “happy to meet them. All of them.”

Her reward was the sight of her daughter winking at her, “It’ll be fine, little Mama. It’ll all be fine.”

After almost a year of working together, Tony’s parents had talked to Cal a few times, but the day for the Newmans to meet all of the Kellys had yet to come, if only because Cal and Tony, from the moment they met in their Academy Re-Training for Supernatural Crimes course, got along so well that their arrest rate kept putting other paired partners to shame. And Lt. Azeem kept putting them back on cases, time and again. When Supernatural crimes happened, the Great Geas forced a quick investigation. If the guilty parties weren’t brought to Mundane justice quickly enough, and if the Geas acted on its own, then things didn’t go well for those only casually involved in any Super crime. If the Geas reacted, then it tended to over react, like using a nuclear bomb to swat a fly. Not pretty. Tony and Cal were both overdue for some downtime, but with this latest murder, it didn’t look likely, especially after the head of the GOOEN squad called them in for a report.

One minute Tony was sitting at her desk, syncing her f-light to the viewer so the fairy-magic light could update her desk viewport and display her holographic pics of the crime scene, the next she and Cal, who had been nearby at his own desk waiting for her to send the holopic images, were somewhere else entirely. With the GOOEN squad involved, it was always better not to ask too much about exactly where “somewhere else” really was. As long as it had breathable atmosphere, the majority of the detectives considered it a win.

Tony picked herself up off of a relatively solid surface, the expanse around her swirling in brownish fog. She put a hand down to Cal, who started laughin
g as he stood without her help.

“Kid, ya crack me up,” he told her as he picked his super-solid bulk up from the same surface. “Over a year of working together and you still think you can give me a hand up.”

“It’s a reflex,” she grinned, pulling back the hand she’d offered. “I was raised right, what can I say?” He just shook his head and rumbled.

They turned around to see who had called them and found the usual GOOEN theatrics--a nebulous figure in a hooded robe, surrounded by a swirl of purple, green and orange fog.

“We get brown, he gets the colors of Halloween. Rude,” Cal muttered.

Tony gave him kick in the ankle. “Play nicely with the mage, Cal. I want to eat dinner with my folks this coming weekend, not try to recover from a transmutation spell.”

A hollow voice boomed at them, “WE” and clearly the figure used it in the Royal form, “ DO NOT play games with our partners in law enforcement.”

Tony and Cal looked at each other and tried not to roll their eyes. GOOEN had quite the reputation for exactly that, but recent smackdowns from the Powers That Be suggested that even members of GOOEN had to answer to Them. In the past few months, the GOOENs had suddenly ratcheted down from their normally over-the-top reactions to perceived insults from the enforcement officers they were meant to be assisting. Most of the gossip locally attributed the attitude adjustment to a transmu-spell that hit the wrong Being. Instead of transmuting the human partner, who was known for truly tasteless jokes and bad attitude, the spell had hit a highly decorated troll officer, his patient and long-suffering partner, turning her into the largest, scariest damned Canadian goose ever seen on the face of the planet. And it had taken a week for Officer Heft to return to normal. Since she was also a princess in her own right, the Powers That Be had taken umbrage. As had her condo association, once they saw the amount of normal biological transmutation one gigantic goose could affect in a formally pristine green space. Since she had proved to be the only officer willing to work with the human partner who had caused the whole situation, even he got angry on her behalf. The resulting complaints were the kind even the GOOEN squad tried to avoid, whenever possible. On the bright side, for a week, the condo association was able to save money on lawn care. And they had natural, well Supernatural, fertilizer to spare.

“Yeah, sure, we know you’re all fine with us,” Tony said, waving Cal off from the comment he so obviously wanted to make. “Hey, you called us. What’s the word?”

“The word?” this time the voice forgot to boom. “Oh” and the boom was back,
“You mean what did we find at the crime scene? It would be more effective if you Naturals incorporated the correct verbiage to inquire about the results of our investigations. We spend far too much time invoking colloquial dictionaries and translating your ridiculous dialectic nuances in order to decipher the meanings obfuscated by the elliptical mutterings, colloquialisms, and figurative sayings that you insist on uttering.”

“What the fuck?” muttered Cal.

“Right,” Tony waved her arms as if waving a magic wand as she translated for her partner, “You want us to use clearer language.”

“He coulda just said that,” Cal frowned at the shrouded figure.

The boom came back, “That is precisely what I said.”

Tony threw out a hand to stop Cal’s compulsive need to continue these exact types of exchanges. “And we’re so very grateful for your assistance. What are your findings, sir?” She gave Cal a warning look as he opened mouth, preparing to com
ment on her excessive civility.

“WE” again Royal, as these mages all treated their findings as a group gestalt, not an individual work, “find that the corpse, who was high fae, was in all probability murdered.”

Tony shot Cal another look before he could thank the Mage for the obvious. Their reward was the real bombshell the Mage wanted to drop.

“The murder is the result of exsanguination from the bite of a vampire.”

“Uhm...” No one, no one questioned a mage-result, but, “Uhm...”

Cal cut Tony’s cautious dithering off, “You gotta have that wrong. Am I right?”

The Mage hung in the colorful fog, those lights around it swirling slowly, then faster and faster. The speed was making Tony very, very nervous.

“Uh, sir. I don’t think Cal put that quite clearly.”

“Please, clarify for US. WE would like to know how a mere Natural and a cut-rate Ogre would know more than the entire Magical Order.”

Cal finally had the sense to realize that he might have put hi
s size 22 foot down his throat.

“Oh, no, no, she’s right, and I’m wrong, and what I mean is, well, revenant, right? Not vampire? Aren’t they, well, extinct?”