I laid rubber pulling out of the Morning Fresh parking lot and headed west, moving as fast as I could in and out of the traffic. Two cars honked, and a heavily tattooed arm popped out of a window to perform some rudimentary sign language in my general direction.
"Ok, Google, call Landry!"
"Sure. Calling Landry," the AI replied in her agonizingly slow and calm manner. After a hundred and fifteen years, or maybe four seconds, the phone rang.
Mx. Landry picked up just as I slowed, peeked in both directions, and ran a red light, cursing the whole time.
"Always a pleasure, Nowicki."
"Sor—" I choked down the word. "In a bit of a situation here. I'm chasing firetrucks and my gut tells me they're headed toward my skip, but they got ahead of me and I lost them. You got an address on the scanner?"
"Hold on." They literally put me on hold. Soft jazz drifted over the car's speakers.
A school bus rolled out into the intersection in front of me.
I hit the brakes so hard the SUV fishtailed, but I came to a stop with my front tires just behind the white line at the edge of the intersection. My heart banged against my breastbone. The person behind me laid on their horn.
The music stopped. "You still there?"
"Yeah."
"Department three is headed to the No-Tell Motel on Wesley Avenue."
I'm sure the hotel had a different name, but I'd never heard it referred to as anything else and the only sign out front was the one that read: VA ANCY HOU LY RATES.
"Got it, thanks."
"I live to serve." They disconnected.
The light turned green, and I banked hard left. Four minutes and half a dozen additional traffic violations later, I saw flashing lights in the distance. First responders had the road completely closed in front of the motel, so I thumped over a cracked driveway into a liquor store parking lot and hoofed it the rest of the way.
A cop I'd met once or twice before held out his hand in a gesture for me to stop.
Without slowing, I tugged my badge from my back pocket and flashed it in his general direction. "Fugitive recovery agent. I have reason to believe my bounty is in that motel."
"I know who you are, but that place is—"
With a roar, flames exploded out of the roof, and the center of the building imploded.
I staggered to a stop.
"About to blow," he said.
I planted my hands on my hips and panted for air. "Thanks. Got it."
"Who you looking for?"
"Adan Charring, twenty-something female, red hair, green eyes, tall, slim."
"She's a felon?"
"Arsonist." Not exactly, but close enough.
His mouth dropped open. "You're shitting me."
"I shit you not. You know where she is?"
"Yeah. She was sitting right over there with her baby in one of them little umbrella strollers." He pointed toward the bus stop on the corner where the bus was just rolling away and the bench was empty.
I sprinted toward the bus, jumping over a hose and just about getting clipped in the face when a firetruck door flew open in front of me. Behind me, I heard the cop calling for all units to coverage on the city bus that was westbound on Wesley Avenue.
The bus turned left just past the Kroger store.
I cut through the parking lot and tried to ignore my burning lungs. I'd been working out, and I was in better shape than at any other point in my life, but there was a world of difference between jogging on a treadmill and a dead sprint over potholed pavement. As I came around the back of the store, I saw a black and white cruiser, lights flashing, siren wailing, turn behind the bus. Seconds later, I ran up, arriving at just about the same time Chantelle did.
"Your fugitive is on this bus?"
Gasping for air, I nodded. "Redhead... young... with baby."
A male cop was already onboard, talking to the driver.
Chantelle walked with me to stand in front of the doors. "This is the agent with the bounty."
"Nobody here that matches your description, ma'am," the bus driver said.
The cop on the bus looked at me.
Chantelle looked at me.
Another police cruiser pulled up. The driver looked at me.
"Can I check?"
The bus driver shrugged. "Knock yourself out."
I mounted the steps and squeezed past the officer. Two women with reusable grocery sacks watched all this with wide eyes. A young man sat in a seat alone, still and silent. A chubby teenaged girl with frizzy brown hair and gorgeous blue eyes wept in the very back seat.
"Did any of you see a young woman with a baby? Pretty girl? Long red hair?"
They all shook their heads except the man in the middle. "I saw her."
"You did?"
"What'd she do?"
"Pretty sure she set that motel on fire."
"Why would a young mom do a thing like that when she's got a little baby to take care of?"
"It's in her nature."
He didn't say anything further. He just sat there, staring at me.
"If you saw which way she was going..."
"I don't think you much care what happens to her or her baby. You're a bounty hunter, right? This is about payday for you."
"She's accused of a serious crime and there's a real chance she just committed another. I don't understand why you—"
He chuckled. "Pretty lady, I bet there are a lot of things about me you don't understand. I saw your girl running as this bus pulled away. You know where the bus was so she can't have more than a two or three minute head start on you. That's all you're getting from me."
I took a step toward him.
Chantelle's hand clamped around my wrist. "Thank you for your help, sir."
He nodded at her.
She guided me off the bus, and we all watched it pull away.
"Can you guys help me look? If she was at that bus stop and running on foot with a baby, she couldn't have gone more than a couple of blocks."
We fanned out and spent the next two hours roaming the neighborhood in cars and on foot, talking to everyone we passed.
As far as we could tell, the fire fairy had vanished into thin air.
Chantelle was philosophical about it. "She'll turn up, but we can't have half the police force out looking for her right now."
"Yeah. I get it."
"You find her, and you need backup, you call me, okay?"
I promised I would, but then stopped her before she got in her car. "What happens to the baby if we catch her?" I'd never actually captured a skip with a child before, as far as I knew.
"If she has family, they'll probably step in. If not, child protective services will take the care of it."
Did supes have child protective services? I added that to my list of things I needed to learn about. Most days it felt like a lifetime of study would never whittle that list down to a manageable size.
Back in the Bronco, I turned on the seat warmer and cranked the heat. Winter had decided not to let go yet, and the damp chill in the air was the kind that could seep into your bone marrow and leave you shivering the rest of the day. The clock on the dashboard display told me it wasn't even lunchtime yet, and I wasn't sure how that could be possible since I'd already had at least three day's worth of activity since my stupidly long sleep.
Now what?
Definitely wasn't going to call Nick.
Drake would probably be closing up for his daytime break soon, but it would probably be best to wait until after Chantelle grilled him for information. Not to mention, if Hawwa was there, that would just be awkward. What do you say in that situation? "Hey, Mom! Good to see you. Isn't my friend an absolute ten in the sack?" I hoped to avoid that weirdness for as long as possible.
Finally, I shifted into gear and headed back to The Agency where I could research crocottas.
When I got there, Mx. Landry glared through the glass. "You're missing a fairy."
"She got away."
Whatever noise they made in response didn't filter through the speaker.
"I need to do some research," I said.
The security door popped open. I passed through and met them by the half wall that separated the hallway from their workspace.
"Can I ask you a personal question?"
They peered at me suspiciously. Dark smudges of eyeliner circled their eyes. "You've got first amendment rights like anybody, I suppose."
"Do you sleep?"
"Why do you want to know?"
An excellent question, and one I wasn't sure I had the answer to. After a moment's thought, I said, "You've had a rough couple of days. Seems like you deserve a good rest, but you're here, working."
They turned away and fished for a cigarette amid the clutter on the desk, but they didn't light it. "I don't sleep as much as you do, but yeah. Some. Having a little trouble with that lately."
"Because of what's going on with Nick?"
"Is that what you really wanted to talk about?"
"No." I sighed. "I don't know. I don't know anything. I'm ignorant and I'm exhausted and I'm kind of a mess and, frankly it seems like everyone else is too, and I'm not sure that any of us should be hunting in the states we're in but since Rider skipped out and Nick is... what? What the hell is going on with Nick, anyway?" Tears burned my eyes. I heard my voice getting louder, but I wasn't sure how to stop it. "One minute he seems... and the next he's... and then... what... how am I... argh!"
A small portion of the weight they were carrying seemed to lift from their narrow shoulders. Their thin, darkly painted mouth curled into something resembling a smile. "That's the first thing you ever said that I completely agree with."
I was either laughing or sobbing. Not sure which.
They handed me a tissue.
I wiped tears and snot from my face. Sobbing then, I guess. "What's with apologies? Why are they forbidden around here?"
They tossed their unlit cigarette toward the ashtray and missed. It bounced and rolled, coming to a stop against the edge of a scroll that looked about five thousand years old. "Nick and I both have djinn blood. Apologies are a form of debt commitment."
"So, if I were to apologize, I'd be in debt to you?"
"And there'd be no force in Heaven or Earth that could break the bond connecting us until the debt was paid in full. Goes both ways, too. Djinn who are indebted to others are the basis of every genie in a bottle story you've ever heard."
My face went all numb and tingly.
Mx. Landry took a step back. "Tell me you didn't apologize to Nick."
"I didn't. He made it very clear from the beginning it was forbidden."
They relaxed again. "Alright, then. You said you have research?"
"I need to study up on crocottas." I almost sounded normal. Impressive considering the truly extraordinary internal freakout I was experiencing at that moment. Bond? Genie in a bottle? What in the world did that mean? And they assumed that I created the mess, not Nick, which meant that Nick didn't have a history of creating this particular brand of mess, apparently.
Seeming to buy my fake calm, or maybe just too tired to really care, they waved their hands at the storage unit wall, and it vanished. "Benji's back there, too. Touch the books. Only the books." They jabbed a finger in my direction. "Only the books that you can identify. Absolutely nothing else, do you understand?"
"Yeah. I got it."
They peered at me as I slipped past them and entered the cavernous warehouse. I made my way to the aisle with the books and found Benji sitting on the floor, wearing thick leather work gloves, sorting through a shoebox full of sparkling gemstones.
"'Sup?" she asked.
"I just needed a book."
"Plenty to go around." She set the emerald in her hand aside and picked up an amethyst, held it up to the light. "Whoever sorted these needs to have their head examined. They've got everything from plain old funeral ashes to demonic curses in the same box. Not every sparkly rock is equivalent."
I muttered something that I hoped sounded like a knowledgeable agreement and started scanning the shelf for the right binder. Once I found it, I settled onto the concrete next to Benji.
A weird little reptile peeked out from under a shelf.
"I've got nothing, pet," Benji said. "All the ashes are up front today."
"Are you human?" I always thought she was, but she had the weird kind of perfect beauty that I associated with supes.
She stopped what she was doing and grinned at me. "Yeah. Are you?"
"Yeah, but you knew that already. How long have you been doing this?"
"Forever. My dad was a hunter. Not a bounty hunter. Just a straight up hunter. Prejudiced asshole."
"Asshole fathers is something we have in common, then." I couldn't think what else to say, so I flipped the book open and read through the table of contents. The section about crocottas started on page thirty-five.
Crocotta are primarily found on the Indian subcontinent, though since the invention of air travel, some members of the species have migrated to other areas of the globe. It is a natural-born creature with no contagion spirit capable of infecting humans.
Crocotta are mimics and will imitate the sound of a human's loved ones to draw them near. Once close enough to feed, it will draw the soul from the body and consume it, leaving the human alive but utterly without will.
"Oh, eesh."
Benji looked up from the sapphire in her hand.
"They eat souls?"
"What do?" she asked.
"Crocotta."
"Never heard of that. Tracked a shokujinki once, though. They're soul eaters. Nasty chase, that one. Ended up bringing it in cold." She dropped the sapphire and picked up another ruby. "Ha! This is it." She pocketed the gem, scooped the discards back into the box and jumped up, lithe as a jungle cat, to slip the box onto a nearby shelf. "Good luck with the crocotta," she called over her shoulder as she jogged away.
I looked back to the book, somewhat cheered to know that Benji The Beautiful Badass didn't know everything about everything.
A crocotta can be disabled by any major injury to the spinal cord and killed via severing the spinal cord at the base of the neck.
Crocotta are relegated to feeding within the parameters of section 172 of The Code (S.4. P. 558-565).
Gross. I had no desire to jab a dagger into the back of anybody's skull. Hopefully, my skip would be an easier capture than Benji's. Not counting the train wreck at the abandoned factory because that hadn't really been my job; there'd only been two times so far when I had to kill my skip to avoid being killed. It was messy and disturbing by every measure. It also resulted in a ridiculous amount of paperwork and a very unpleasant inquiry in front of a board of Organization examiners.
My phone rang. I tugged it from the pocket, checked the screen, and swiped the green button. "Hey, Busia. What's up?"
Busia's voice quavered as she spoke. "I'm at the hospital, Tygrysku. Jaja's sick. His heart. Can you come? I don't—" Her sentence broke off in a sob, but it didn't matter what else she meant to say.
I was already running toward the exit.