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  Chase paused at the arch leading into the foyer. “Listen, I wanted to warn you about something. I don’t think you fully realize how much of an effect the portals opening have had on our society here.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “It’s polarized society. On one hand, you guys are rock stars—celebrities—in case you’re not sure what that means. On the other hand, some people see you as demons. Which is their right, as long as they keep their hands to themselves. But there are some hate groups rising who are preaching action rather than rhetoric. I don’t trust them. We live in a violent world. Earthside has seen so many wars that we can’t even count them. And in this country, the answer to a lot of people’s problems seems to be found in the trigger of a gun. I’m not sure what you’re used to over in Otherworld. I don’t know whether it’s faerieland—all happiness and joy, or what. I assume not, given you are part of the military.”

  I glanced at Menolly and Delilah. That seemed to be a common misconception.

  “Trust me,” I said. “We’re used to plenty of violence. While we may not have guns, we have magic and swords, and both of those can be lethal. Otherworld is rife with its own form of hate groups. Rather than a utopia, Otherworld is filled with prejudice, assault and murder.”

  Menolly cleared her throat. “Drug abuse is both common and legal. Slavery is legal, as well as servitude.”

  “Sounds like a barrel of laughs. So you really aren’t any more progressive than we are?” Chase frowned, looking a little disillusioned.

  “No,” I said softly. “Really, our worlds aren’t terribly different. We have magic, you have technology. But even there, the divide isn’t all that wide between the two. And even now the elfin mages are working on ways to combine the two.” I walked him to the door. “Go around back with your men. Menolly and Delilah will meet you there. It’s better if I stay inside. Trust me, I’m not the athlete my sisters are, and I don’t trust my magic around your men. Because of my half human heritage, it backfires all too often and can be dangerous.”

  Chase gazed down at me. “I know you think I can be a sleaze, but I’m really not all that bad. And neither are you, Camille D’Artigo. So stop thinking you’re defective in some way.” And with that cryptic statement, he let himself out the front door and shut it softly behind him.

  While I was waiting for them to return, I washed the dishes and puttered around, trying to keep busy. I hated feeling useless, but I was more of a liability out there than I was an asset. Finally, I curled up in the rocking chair with a book.

  Forty minutes later, the door opened. Startled, I dropped my book on the floor as Delilah, Menolly, and Chase entered the kitchen. “Did you find anything?”

  “No, unfortunately we didn’t. Well, we didn’t find any creature, but we found this.” Menolly held out her hand to show me what looked to be a finger bone. It was covered with runes drawn in what appeared to be dried blood. A copper wire was wound around one end, right below a knobby joint.

  “What the hell?” I reach for it, then stopped. “Magic. That’s filled with magic. I don’t think I’d better touch. It might implode if my energy doesn’t mesh well with it.”

  “It looks like a metacarpus, a bone in the upper hand.” Chase scowled. “I’m not sure if it’s human, or possibly Fae. Or maybe something altogether different. But I’m pretty sure it is a hand bone, regardless of the source.”

  “Set it on the table so I can see it easier.” I motioned to Menolly and she gingerly placed it on the table.

  I leaned down, holding my hand close over the bone. The energy radiated off of it like ripples in the ocean. The energy was forceful, although I couldn’t sense a presence behind it. I lowered my hand, bringing it closer to the bone, and the force grew more insistent, trying to find a way around the energy of my hand.

  “It reminds me of a thick gelatin. I know that sounds strange but the energy is trying to find a way around mine. It has a tremendous amount of power behind it, but it’s not trying to push my hand away. It’s just trying to go around me, as though it’s trying to swallow my hand up.”

  “Like the blob?”

  I looked up at Chase. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

  “An old movie.” He paused, then added, “The Blob is an old movie about an alien creature that lands on earth. It’s a blob that grows as it swallows people up. It reminded me of your reference.” His voice trailed off and he looked almost embarrassed.

  “That sounds interesting. I’d like to see it someday,” Delilah said absently, as she leaned down to watch my hand. “I can almost see sparkles. Not quite, but almost. But I think I can feel the interaction between your energy and that of the bone. It’s like they’re having an argument.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. And if I were to grab the bone I have a feeling something nasty would happen. I don’t know if it would be big nasty, but I know it wouldn’t be good.” I had enough of shocks and bruises for one night without trying for another. My butt still hurt even though the rocking chair had a thick cushion on it.

  “So what do we do? Who do we contact about this? Do you have anybody on your force who might be able to tell us something?”

  Chase scratched his ear. “I’m not entirely sure. You know, nobody has ever had to field anything like this. What if you girls help me write up some sort of procedure? We can scout out resources, maybe create a file of willing participants to whom we can refer whenever we have something like this that we need help with?”

  It sounded like a good idea. “That makes sense, and it will help us get to know people around the area. Delilah, do you want to take that on?” I really wasn’t trying to foist the job off on her, but since she was the shyest of the three of us, this seemed a good way to get her out there, interacting with others. Otherwise, I had the feeling she’d park herself in front of the television and only leave the house when she had to.

  She shrugged. “All right. I can do that. Chase, should I come by your office tomorrow? And while I’m there, we can finish going over what I need to know about the PI business. I suppose it’s like being an agent for the OIA, in a sense, but for private clients?”

  “That’s probably the best way to look at it. All right. Do you feel safe enough tonight? Do you want me to leave a couple of men to guard the land?”

  I knew how stretched thin his personnel resources were. The OIA had managed to engage the FBHs’ help in order to plant a few spies Earthside. They were also using the alliance as a way to conveniently dispatch agents whom they didn’t want to deal with, but couldn’t conveniently fire. Due to our father’s place in the Court and Crown, they couldn’t just kick us out. So they sent us on a special mission, guaranteed to take us out of the picture.

  “Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine. Now that we know something is out there prowling around, we’ll be careful. Maybe we can use the laptop and the internet to find out what the creature was.” The internet fascinated me. That so much knowledge was available at the touch of our fingertips boggled my mind. It seemed one of the greatest inventions, ever.

  Chase stood. “All right. Call me if you have anymore problems tonight. Don’t go back out there unless you’re armed. From what you said, the creature’s hungry and is looking for lunch.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Menolly said with a slow smile, staring at him.

  With a nervous glance at her, he exited the kitchen. I followed him into the foyer.

  “Don’t mind her. She knows she makes you nervous and so she’s going to play that up for all its worth. The more you buy into it, the more she’ll tease you.”

  Chase lowered his voice. “Why does she do that? Do I remind her of somebody she hates?”

  I shook my head. “Not exactly, but…how much were you told about us, Chase?”

  “Just what the official documents said. You’re agents with the OIA, on special assignment. You’re sisters, and you are all half human, half-Fae. You’
re a witch, Delilah’s a werecat, and Menolly is a vampire.” He looked so confused that I decided to take pity on him.

  “Let me walk you out.” I followed him onto the front porch, closing the door behind us. As we paused at the top of the stairs, I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the night. I could hear traffic in the distance, and the sound of the wind rustling through the trees. A few birds echoed in the stillness, and Chase’s men were murmuring as they stood near the patrol cars.

  “Chase, I’m going to tell you something so there are no misunderstandings down the road. My sisters and I were sent over here to get rid of us. Let’s just say that…I…” But I couldn’t talk about Lathe. The fact that we had been punished because I hadn’t knuckled under to him ate at me. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t been able to stop him.

  “What is it?” Chase’s gaze was warm with concern.

  Finally, I said, “We did our best, but our best wasn’t good enough. There are blots on our records. Our father is positioned within the Court and Crown, and it was the YIA’s fault that Menolly ended up a vampire, so they couldn’t just strip our commissions.”

  “The YIA?”

  “Y’Elestrial Intelligence Agency. The OIA is an offshoot of the branch. Anyway, it’s directly their fault that Menolly was turned. They sent her into a dangerous situation to spy on a nest of vampires. The leader—a vamp named Dredge, also known as the Scourge—is a terror. One of the worst vampires ever to walk Otherworld. He’s far worse than Dracula.”

  Chase let out an audible gulp. “Dracula’s real?”

  I gave him a long look, realizing that he had no clue how real some of the legends and nightmares were. “Yes, Dracula’s very real. He was going to be sent to the Subterranean Realms about a thousand years ago when he escaped over to Earthside, through one of the portals. I don’t know whether it was left unguarded or whether he was just clever, but he made his way over here and took up life as Vlad the Impaler. There’s a lot your history books don’t say about him, but yes, he was…and is…Dracula. And when Vlad “died” he just shifted back into his Dracula persona and took up from there. The stories of Vlad’s death are merely a cover-up. Dracula still roams the planet, though I have no idea why he’s stayed so low-key since then.”

  “Well, what do you know? Maybe he got his fill of life in the public eye?” Chase let out a short laugh. “So, Dracula’s real. And Dredge is worse than he is.”

  “Dredge is far worse than Dracula. Dredge is carnage incarnate. Anyway, so Menolly was sent to spy on him. She was a jian-tu, basically a super-athlete. She could climb walls, cling to the barest of outcroppings, put any acrobat to shame, walk tightropes…but our half-human blood landed her the curse of occasionally losing her grip. You see, the jian-tu are born, not bred. And now and then her skills would vanish. She fell from the hiding place where she was spying right into the middle of Dredge’s nest.”

  “And they turned her?” Chase’s expression had gone from curious to horrified.

  “Not at first. She actually managed to get free and had almost escaped. In fact, she made it out of the cavern system and to the hilltop above. She was hurt, but she still managed to escape. But just as she about to run over to the woods and hide, Dredge appeared. She couldn’t fight him. He took her back into the lair, where he spent the entire night torturing her. He used a dull knife to cover her body from her throat to her wrists with carvings—he basically carved her skin. Then he raped her, forced her to drink from him, and then he killed her. Of course, she was reborn a vampire. As a final insult, he sent her home to destroy her family.”

  Chase leaned back against the railing. He closed his eyes as he rested his head on the newel post. “We have monsters like that over here. I suppose the fact that Dredge is a vampire makes it worse, but we have very real, very dangerous monsters of our own, Camille. Predators who prey on children, who maim and torture them. That’s one of the reasons I became a cop. I couldn’t face the thought that there were perverts running free, and I wasn’t doing anything to stop them.”

  His words made me see him in a new light. Chase truly cared about his job. He cared about the innocent.

  “Menolly arrived home, crazed. She was like a rabid animal, with Dredge’s instructions filling her mind. Delilah and I were home, along with one of the serving women. When Menolly came bursting through the door and I realized she was vampire, I sent Delilah upstairs to hide. I told the serving woman to get out. Then, I lured Menolly into the safe room that my father had provided in case of a vampire attack.”

  “Vampire attacks are that common over there?”

  I shook my head. “My father’s paranoid. He hates vampires with a passion. Menolly broke my arm in the process, but I managed to lock her in. The YIA took her away for a year. My father threatened to expose the fact that they had sent an agent, known for not having a lot of experience, into harms way. We had proof that Menolly had repeatedly asked for backup during the two weeks prior, when she was first assigned to spy on Dredge, but the YIA ignored her. Father made it clear that it wouldn’t look good to the general public to find out what had actually happened.”

  Chase was silent for a moment, then he asked, “if your father hates vampires, how does he feel about your sister?”

  It was my turn to hesitate. Father had treated Menolly like she had the plague. Oh, he was courteous to her, but all three of us knew that his love for Menolly had died the same day she had.

  “Our father is a soldier. He loved our mother more than anything. Her death hit him hard. He withdrew, leaving me to take care of my sisters. I think over here it would be called emotional neglect. He tries to ignore the fact that Menolly was turned. He’s written her off.”

  The words hurt, but they were true.

  Chase sat down on the top step. He motioned for me to sit beside him. “My own father was addicted to heroin. He vanished by the time I was five. My mother had to go on social welfare—a system that’s supposed to provide for people in need, but all too often falls far short. She couldn’t cope very well. I found work as soon as I was fourteen. I worked at a fast food joint during the afternoons and delivered newspapers in the morning, while going to school and keeping up straight A’s. Later, when I was old enough to drive, I added a third job in the evenings. I became a delivery driver for another fast food restaurant.”

  I looked at Chase. “I guess being a kid sucks no matter what world you’re from, doesn’t it? But to answer your original question: No, you don’t remind Menolly of Dredge. But you’re a man in a position of authority. All she’s ever received from men in power has been pain and neglect. When Dredge turned her, she lost her fiancé and her hope for her future. She lost the love of her father and bears constant reminders on her skin of that night. What can I say? Menolly doesn’t have a chip on her shoulder, she is the chip on her shoulder.”

  “I guess that sort of thing would be hard to recover from. I can’t imagine what she went through. Please tell me that you found the vampire who did this to her? That you were able to stake him?”

  I shook my head. “I wish, but no. He’s still out there, somewhere. If the YIA could find him, they would execute him. But Dredge has walked the world for thousands of years. The chances of finding him are slim.”

  With a sigh, Chase pulled himself to his feet. “On that note, I’ll be off. Thank you for telling me about her past. It gives me a better idea of how to relate to her. She does make me nervous, but now I understand some of her reasoning.”

  As he left, I slowly scanned the yard, searching to see if anything was out there. But all I could sense were the rustling of trees with their long roots diving into the earth, and the hush of animals creeping through the undergrowth. After a moment, I returned to the kitchen, locking the door behind me.

  Chapter 7

  The Indigo Crescent was gleaming by the time the taxi dropped me off the next morning. As I entered my shop, the smell of lemon and lilac filled the air, and Iris ca
me bustling out from the back, a white and blue apron over her denim skirt and tank top. She was carrying a broom, and her golden locks were wrapped up in a braid that coiled around her head.

  “How long is your hair?” It looked like she had masses of it.

  “It reaches my ankles.” She flashed me a sparkling smile and my mood lifted. Iris had a way of making people feel happy when they were around her.

  I shrugged out of my jacket and she held out her hand for it. “Have you ever cut it?”

  A cloud washed across her face, then she shook it away. “Only once, and I never will again.”

  It felt like there was a story there, but I decided it wasn’t my place to ask. Not if it made her look so glum. “So what’s on the agenda today?”

  “Well, I pulled together a seating area over there, for customers,” she said. “And I thought we’d start out with me teaching you how to run the cash register, which will take about ten minutes. At ten, we open for business, and while we wait for customers, we can set up a ledger system. Sound good to you?”

  I nodded, my mind still back on the creature we’d fought the night before. “Is there any coffee?” Ever since the first taste of the mocha the Chase had ordered for me, I had fallen in love with caffeine. In fact, it had only taken a couple days until I was hooked.

  “There’s a coffee shop next door. Why don’t I run over and get us some coffee and pastries?”

  “You’re just a bundle of energy aren’t you?”

  Iris could run rings around all of us.

  “It’s my nature. I’m a house sprite. We like to keep busy, and busy to us is what overwhelmed would be to most people. I like being active. I get antsy and edgy when I am forced to sit around too much.” And with that, she grabbed her wallet and headed out the door.

  While she was gone I wandered around the shop, running my hands over the spines of the books. How many of these could I read before we were sent home? I decided to start keeping a running booklist. I hadn’t been kidding when I said that, when our time here was up, I’d be carting home boxfuls of books with me.