Bob snickered. I draped an arm over his shoulders and we turned away from the door. We both looked around when we heard Ralph talking to someone in the foyer area.
His back bowed to minimize his height. Ralph was talking to a tiny elderly woman. He held one of her gnarly hands in both of his own massive paws and was nodding kindly, obviously listening carefully to everything she was saying.
“Looks like you have a new client,” I told Bob.
We approached Ralph and as we neared, I heard him say, “Don’t worry a thing about your husband, Mx. Diamon. We’ll get to the bottom of this. I promise you.”
“Hello.” Bob held his hand out to the elderly client, a gentle smile on his face. “I’m Bob Gleason.”
She smiled and let him clasp her hand. I watched Bob’s face carefully. I had recently learned that he was an empath. He could read the emotions and map the electrical signatures of some races. He was particularly good with humans.
Like a ripple across still water in a soft breeze, Bob’s non-threatening face showed a very brief disturbance, which I would have missed if I hadn’t been watching closely. He smoothed it over quickly and offered the old woman a smile.
His momentary blip made me focus my extra sight on the woman. Her aura was human. Almost too human. It was thick and opaque, with smooth edges and very few nicks or holes in it.
Unusual. But not unprecedented. It just meant that the woman had no magic at all in her gene pool. She was pure, unadulterated human.
Or she was damn good at manufacturing auras. I knew that some shapeshifters were able to create fake auras.
“This is Mx. Phelps. She works with us occasionally.” Ralph placed a hand on my shoulder. “Astra, this is Mx. Diamon. Her husband has apparently been abducted by unknown magical beings and she’s come to us to help her find him.”
Lacking my officemates’ people skills, I grimaced at the woman in my inimitable fashion and asked, “Demons?”
Her rheumy eyes flashed with something that I couldn’t read before she gave me a tremulous smile. Her voice, when she spoke, warbled and was thick with tears. “I don’t know what took him, dear. That’s why I came to you people.”
Smackdown. Delivered in a wobbly old lady voice.
Alrighty then. No wonder old ladies gave me the creeps. They’re really just demons in wrinkly skin.
“But you don’t believe he was abducted by humans?”
She shook her head and began to vibrate alarmingly from her tiny feet to the top of her small blue-haired head.
My first thought was that she was possessed.
Fortunately, Ralph understood elderly humans better than I did and figured out that she was probably just scared and overcome with grief. “Let’s have a seat, shall we, Mx. Diamon?” He took the old woman’s arm and helped her to a chair.
He gave Bob and me the look that said, sit down and help me get the facts.
So we sat.
“Tell us exactly what happened, Mx. Diamon.” Bob’s voice was gentle with persuasion and the old woman responded nicely.
“We were just sitting in our little house, drinking our hot tea. Henry so loves that new Martian blend, Little Green Tea Leaves. It has a sweet undertone that he appreciates. It’s really hard to get though, even on the underground market. And the cost…”
“What happened next, Mx. Diamon?”
She blinked, sucked in her wrinkly cheeks and glanced at me, as if it was my fault Ralph had interrupted her.
I gave her my best wide-eyed innocent look. She gasped and clutched her chest.
Damn. I really needed to work on that one. Ralph glared at me and I shrugged.
“Go on, please,” Bob encouraged.
“Well, as I was saying, we were just drinking our tea. And then the air behind Henry started to kind of pulse and sparkle and something appeared.” The old woman’s voice shook at the memory and one gnarled hand lifted to her mouth. She started to vibrate again. When she spoke her voice was muffled behind those wrinkled fingers. “This thing opened its beak and spit out something that glowed purple. It looked slimy and it spread all over Henry before he could even make a surprised noise. Then he just…disappeared. Teacup and all.” She sobbed and dug in her little clutch bag for tear-drying spray.
“What did it look like?”
Her faded brown gaze swung toward me. “It was mostly black, with a gray belly and a bright blue spot above its eyes. It was small, really small, and had ragged black wings and a sharp-looking face.”
“Like a beak?” I frowned, it sounded like a bird demon, but that meant someone had sent it to capture Henry Diamon.
She nodded. “Its little face curved to a sharp point and it had these horrible red eyes.”
I turned to Bob and Ralph. “Bird demon. Someone wanted her husband very badly. Bird demons are retrieval and abduction demons. Very effective. And very expensive to use.”
“Do you have any idea why someone would want to take your husband, ma’am?”
She shook her head and tears began to flow down her pale, paper-thin cheeks. “I just want my Henry back.”
Ralph threw us a pointed look and stood up to usher Mx. Diamon to his office. “Let’s go get some information down on flash memory and I’ll see that you get back home, Mx. Diamon. Do you have someone who can come stay with you?”
We watched them walk away. The old woman was shaking her head. “Oh no, I’ll be fine.”
“But you can’t stay there alone. It’s not safe.”
Their conversation closed off behind the door to Ralph’s office. I looked at Bob. “What do you think?”
“I think we’ll need to put you on retainer for this one. I know a shifter gang in the city that routinely commits bird demon abductions. They specialize in lending money to humans and going all Lord of the Rings on their asses if they’re so much as a day late with their payments.”
“You’re thinking old Henry might have made some bad investments?”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking. Ralph and I can handle the shifters. But we’ll need your help with that demon.”
I nodded. It sounded like just the thing to keep my mind off my own wide range of problems. “Just tell me what you need from me.”
* * * * *
“You want me to what?” Was that me shrieking?
“It’s just for a few days, Astra.”
“She doesn’t want a strange man in her house with her, Phelps. And she doesn’t have any male relatives below the age of sixty. So that just leaves you.” Bob was using his soothe-the-wild-woman voice.
Never a good thing.
I shook my head. “I’m not a damn bodyguard, guys. I have a real job. What am I supposed to do in some little old lady’s house? I’m allergic to fluff and I can’t stand tea!”
“We’ll come around every day to relieve you. We just need to tell her you’re the one she’ll get, or she won’t agree to the protection.” Ralph didn’t bother with the crazy-woman tone, he knew it was wasted on me.
I was much too crazy to be soothed. I paced away, shaking my head stubbornly and struggling to think of a way to get out of the assignment. I’d already offered to help, so I’d need a good reason to back down.
“Little old ladies terrify me” wasn’t a good enough reason. Even if it was the truth.
Nothing came to mind.
“Please, Phelps?” Bob was reduced to pleading.
I turned back and looked at his nondescript but pleasant face. He waggled his eyebrows at me until I laughed.
“We’ll give you ten hours of consultative work in exchange,” Ralph offered.
I thought about this for a long moment. Narrowing my eyes on him, I presented a counter offer. “Twenty hours.”
He agreed far too readily and I knew I’d been had. They’d been prepared to go much higher. “You guys suck.”
They chuckled. “Don’t blame us because you’re horrible at negotiating, Phelps,” Ralph said.
* * * * *
Mx. Diamon lived in the same skybound condo complex as the one where I’d found the dead demon. This was just too much of a coincidence for me.
I dropped the Red Knight onto the landing platform at the front of the small uber-modern home with ludicrous additions meant to make it look homey. The efficient lines of the structure had been wrapped in fake vines and doused with flowers. The wide windows were cluttered with lacy-type draperies.
Despite the butchering of the home’s recognizable architecture, I felt a sense of déjà vu crawling up my spine. Warning bells were pounding around inside my head, turning my brain to mush.
I climbed out of the Knight and pulled my power forward, checking the knives in my boots to make sure I could get to them easily.
I briefly considered calling for help, but knew I’d never live it down if I asked for help against one little old lady. Besides, just because the old woman lived within a few clicks of my other client’s home, that didn’t mean she was a furry, razor-claw-wielding shapeshifter with a taste for my delectable flesh.
Of course it didn’t mean she wasn’t, either.
In my world you could never trust an old woman with wet brown eyes. Chances are it wasn’t an old lady at all but something evil, with big teeth and lethal claws, in disguise.
Or worse, it could just be an old lady who drank tea and tried to iron your clothes when you weren’t looking.
Can you tell I didn’t grow up in a nurturing environment?
I walked around the small house before knocking on the door, throwing out my sensing power to “taste” the area. Nothing obvious jumped out at me.
Finally, I knocked on the metallic front door with its ridiculous hanging spray of pink and purple flowers, my gaze sweeping the area around me with suspicion.
After a moment the door creaked inward, showing me the wrinkled, seemingly harmless countenance of Mx. Diamon, her rheumy gaze filled with welcome. “Hello, dear. Thank you for coming.”
I frowned but kept my big mouth shut. It wasn’t as if I was there for a social call.
“Come in, come in. I have your room ready.”
And with those few words my world came crashing down around me. Reality smacked me between my beady green eyes. My heart stopped beating and my lungs clenched.
I was gonna have to stay there, in that gingerbread house, with that scary little old lady. My battered brain immediately pictured a huge furnace filled with scorched bones and a platter of cookies cooling on the top.
My fingers twitched with the need to pull my power forward. Then I remembered I was supposed to be there to protect the woman.
When had I made it all about me? Weird.
I forced myself to step inside the house and immediately recoiled at the abundance of pinks, purples and swirly-type woven things on table surfaces.
The walls were decorated with kittens and puppies and small, adorable dragons.
The air smelled of lilacs and cinnamon.
My eyes started to burn and I was afraid they’d bleed.
“I’ve made cookies, Mx. Phelps. Follow me.” She marched down a hallway toward the back of the house, her well-padded hips swaying with happy purpose. Glancing back at me with a wispy smile, she added, “I hope you like sugar.”
Shriveling up under saccharine overload, I stumbled after her down the hall, already feeling as if I’d gone twelve rounds with Satan himself.
In fact, I realized with a start, I’d rather deal with Satan. Him I understood.
She turned at the end of the hall and disappeared into a brightly lit room that smelled suspiciously tasty. I stopped just outside the door and bent to slide a knife from one boot, keeping my other hand free in case I needed to fling a ball of power at the furry monster I knew was waiting beyond that door.
My muscles taut with expectation, I slid around the corner, holding my breath.
With a gasp, I came face-to-face with the monster under my bed.
Mx. Diamon held a small plate of perfect white cookies with crisp golden edges in front of my face, a smile on her pleasant, wrinkled face. “Milk, dear?”
I sagged visibly, dropping heavily into a nearby chair. I would never survive two nights in the woman’s home.
* * * * *
An hour later, I was surprised to find that I was still alive…and I really did like sugar cookies. I sat in a comfortable chair at a small round table and looked around, feeling as if I’d been taken back in time to the twenty-first century. It was an honest-to-Him kitchen, with a large cooling apparatus that had actual food in it and lots of devices for preparing and cooking food.
Not a food valet in sight.
“What makes you think the kidnappers will be back?”
The old woman settled another pan of cookies onto the top of an enormous metal contraption, which she called an oven, and stood with her back to me, staring at the perfect golden circles on the pan.
“Because they didn’t come for my Henry.”
I stopped chewing, anticipating a revelation I wasn’t going to like.
She turned and fixed me with a brown gaze that sparked with intelligence.
“They came for Betty.”
I blinked. Betty? Why did that name sound familiar?
She nodded, licking her lips in a way that reminded me I was sitting way too close to the oven contraption. “I brought her here to keep her safe. They’re after her.”
I glanced around like a moron, thinking I’d see Betty sitting across the room giving me a little finger wave. I’d been sending my sensing power around the home since I’d arrived and had sensed nothing. “Where is Betty?”
At this point of course I was thinking that ol’ Mx. Diamon might be just a little bit loop-de-loo.
She crossed the room, pulling thick mitten-type contraptions off her small, gnarled hands. “You don’t need to worry about that. I just want you to keep them out of here. I can take care of Betty.”
“I need to know, in order to protect you.”
The brown gaze sharpened and for a blip in time something dark overlaid her soft features.
Meoowwww.
I leapt from my chair and braced myself for battle in the center of the room. There was a knife in my hand that I didn’t remember pulling. A power ball sizzled in the palm of my hand.
Jumpy much?
Looking around for my enemy, I found only a surprised-looking orange cat that looked familiar.