Golem in My Glovebox (13 page)

He nodded. “Something like that. More like the Bigfoot shows, though.”

Now she did the side-to-side looking around thing, as if she were in on Riley’s big conspiracy. Her voice dropped to a stage whisper—the quietest a person can get in a busy bar and still be heard. “You know there’s a creature running around the outskirts of town. I’ve heard things.”

“That’s why we’re here,” he said with a wink.

Janis brought her face even closer. “My cousin Sadie saw it. You should go talk to her.”

Riley smiled. “She’s already on our list. But we’ll tell her you sent us.”

She patted Riley’s hand and nodded. “I’ll put in those onion rings for you, hun. Soon as I see Frankie, I’ll send him over.
Quietly
.”

When she was out of earshot, I laughed. “Well, that was something to see.”

“Don’t laugh. I bet we get extra onion rings.”

He was right. Our plate of golden, greasy rings was considerably larger than the one a few tables over. They were far too hot to eat right away, since Janis had probably been hovering over the cook, waiting to run them out to us. Or rather, to Riley. While we waited, a burly guy, maybe four feet tall, with a shaggy mop of dark hair appeared next to our table.

“I hear you’re looking for me.” His eyes were almost lavender, a color that had to be the result of contact lenses. They gave his eyes a piercing quality that felt like he was examining my soul for wrinkles and lint.

His inspection went on long enough to make me squirm in my seat, then he shifted to Riley, giving him the same, burrowing examination. Riley held still and waited. After a moment, the other man nodded and took a seat across from me.

“So,” he said, helping himself to a scorching onion ring and biting into it without flinching. “An Aegis and a reaper looking for me. I have to assume the Board sent you. Yes?”

Riley and I exchanged a look. “Yes,” I said. “We’re here to set things right.”

“How much?” He snagged another ring. Saliva sizzled in his mouth when he bit through the crunchy coating.

“How much what?”

“My team is owed a pretty hefty amount in back pay. We didn’t just walk off the job because we wanted more vacation time, you know. We have families to feed. Bills to pay. Working for free isn’t the American way.”

Part of me wanted to give him a rundown of all the shit I’d been doing for free. How much my entire life had been upended and tossed into a tornado. But I understood where he was coming from. Being an Aegis wasn’t so much my job as who I was. As much as I might have wanted to a few times, I couldn’t quit. I couldn’t stop being who I was. This guy? He’d been doing his job until long after the paychecks kept coming before he and his team halted work. Sure, it put the world in danger for him to walk away, but you wouldn’t see a lot of human cops continue to walk their beats if they weren’t getting paid anymore. Why would these guys?

My purse jerked and nearly fell off the table. Muffled sounds rumbled from within. I’d completely forgotten Gris had climbed in on the car ride over. He’d tossed all my stuff out of the glove compartment and turned the space into a comfortable apartment. For the last day or so, he’d been in there reading the owner’s manual for my car and memorizing my insurance number. Knowledge is power, I guess.

I cracked the bag open and peered inside. “What?”

“Let me talk to him, please, Aegis. This is my job, for heaven’s sake.” Gris sat on a package of tissues, hands on his hips, glaring at me.

I slid my purse toward Frankie. “Um, someone would like a word.”

Frankie bent over the purse and looked inside. “Yes?”

“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Griswold Octavius Barnabus Ozimandeus Abernathy. I am your Board liaison, and have full clearance to offer you a considerable bonus, as well as back pay owed to you and your team.”

I coughed into my napkin to keep from laughing. Every time Gris introduced himself, the name got longer. I regretted not bringing him out to the Cadillac Ranch with us, since it meant he’d met Kam and Darius separately, giving him two new names—Octavius and Barnabus. I wondered how long his name would get if he ever had the misfortune to wander into a cocktail party.

Frankie frowned. “We’ve heard nothing from the Board for six months.”

Gris’s speech sounded practiced to my ears, though I supposed that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. “We sincerely apologize for the temporary disruption in the flow of communication. There was an unfortunate break in the chain of command, but that weakness has now been uncovered and rectified. Rather than have you report to a coordinator as you did in the past, we’d like to offer you a promotion, making you the coordinator for your own squad. You will then report directly to Art Ferguson, head of the Human/Hidden Liaison division.”

“Not Covenant Enforcement?”

“The two departments have merged for the time being.” Gris spoke in a straightforward, no-nonsense voice that didn’t invite further questions. Board business was Board business.

Frankie’s piercing eyes burrowed into my purse as if he were trying hard to read the toxic shock warnings on a box of tampons buried in there. “This promotion. I assume there will be an appropriate raise to go with it?”

“Of course.”

Frankie scratched his chin. “You have paperwork to reflect this?”

“Indeed. If you’ll join me somewhere we can speak privately, I have everything you need right here with me.”

Frankie rose from his chair, then nodded at me. “I’ll have this back to you in a few minutes.” He grabbed my purse and walked off into the men’s room with it.

I frowned at Riley. “What the hell just happened?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think you just gave your Amazing Magic Purse of Holding to some thug in a biker bar and he took it to the bathroom with him.”

“Maybe he started his period.” I picked at a piece of fried batter that had cooled enough to eat. “These are really good.”

“Did you know Gris brought contracts and a checkbook?”

I bit into a ring and sucked in air to cool the inside of my mouth. “Maybe his body is a tiny TARDIS. Otherwise, I have no idea where he put them.”

* * *

An hour later, with contracts signed, back pay delivered, and my purse returned to my care, we found ourselves in the midst of a party. The O.G.R.E. squad for the northwestern United States sat around us, drinking, laughing, and gorging on a third plate of onion rings.

I marveled at the creatures around me. In the short time I’d been involved in the world of the Hidden, I’d met very few creatures who could pass as human, thereby affording them the freedom to walk the streets, interact with the general public and hang out in bars like this one. Kam could pass without a thought, as long as she kept the gems embedded in her wrist covered. Darius could pass during the day, though he was still imposing as hell in his human form.

Several humans with supernatural abilities had flitted through or were part of my life, my mother, my friend Andrew who read auras, and Emilia, the psychic whose shop was up the street from my office.

Riley was a different sort of human. He hadn’t been born with any special gifts—aside from devastating good looks and enough charm to convince a mermaid to hand over her comb and mirror. The Board gave him a reaper ring as part of his job, and that gave him the freaky powers he sometimes manifested when pressed, like the ability to see people who were invisible, ward off fear spells, or scare the bejeebus out the Hidden with the activation of his Super-Reaper-of-Doom voice.

The O.G.R.E. squad was different. Every one of them was Hidden. And every one of them came damn close to not passing for human.

Their leader, Frankie the Imp, actually was an imp. And those weird eyes were not contacts. But he passed. Dwarfism isn’t too uncommon among humans, and most people assumed like I had that the unnatural eye color was from contacts. His ability to read people was unsettling, but some humans did that, too. Put all of it together, though, and he stood out.

His team was even more bizarre. He’d explained his philosophy to us that a good O.G.R.E. squad included at least one member for each of what he called
The Four Ms
—muscle, magic, mental, and management.

The two-person muscle of his six-person team nearly caused me to embarrass myself. First came a stout woman with quite a bit of facial hair. She was roughly my height, average for a woman. Frankie introduced her as Meg, the world’s tallest dwarf. Right on her heels, before I could react, came a doughy man with blond hair and a pug nose. Garfield stood about six feet tall and, we were told, was the world’s shortest giant.

The only thing that kept me from falling out of my seat in mad, cackling laughter was Riley’s calming hand squeezing my thigh under the table.

Meg pulled up a chair and sat in it backward, glaring at me across the table and stroking her chin. Her very hairy chin.

I smiled, squeezing Riley’s hand as hard as I could.
We’re totally being punked.
I
won’t fall for it.
We’re going to sit here and make conversation as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
I sipped my beer and nodded at her.

She nodded back.

Garfield sat next to her. A definite mouth breather. I would have guessed he was muscle rather than mental without being told. The light in his eyes was one of those low-wattage money savers.

The magic representative slipped in almost without being noticed. Shelby was a plain girl with lank hair, a figure with few curves, and eyes the color of dirty tap water. Not ugly so much as forgettable. She could have easily passed for a human in her gray cardigan and plain dress.

Until she spoke.

“I’ll just have whatever’s on tap.” She said it in a shy, quiet voice, yet it reverberated through the bar like a symphony. The room hushed, and everyone looked around, as if trying to find the source. She ducked her head and said nothing else for the rest of the evening.

Such is the life of a siren with a social anxiety disorder.

Last came the two brains of the operation, a husband and wife team. Hector and Felicia lumbered inside, dressed head to toe in black leather, chains, and spikes. The crowd parted to let them through. They were big. They were ugly. And they were both grinning, which revealed large, sharp teeth.

To me, they didn’t look human at all. Ogres on the O.G.R.E. squad? The thought wasn’t ridiculous. But they shouldn’t have been allowed to come tearing into a bar in public. Shouldn’t they be arresting themselves or something?

And then I really looked at the people around us. Tattoos. Multiple facial piercings and other body modifications. A guy at the next table flicked a forked tongue at his glass, then laughed at a joke his companion had made. His teeth were pointed and sharp, too. I hadn’t noticed them before, mostly because the bright blue Mohawk kind of took over.

The more I looked, the more I realized that half the bar was probably some variety of Hidden, and the other half had decorated themselves in ways that made them actually blend with the Hidden. If anything, Riley and I—and poor Shelby—stood out more than anyone else.

Normal is all relative.

Hector and Felicia shook our hands and joined us at the table.

“You called, we came,” Hector said to Frankie in a snarly, gravely voice. “Show us the money.” Janis came around with a tray and placed full glasses in front of everyone, including the newcomers. She also dropped a fresh basket of rings and a second one of fried mushrooms on the table. As she left, she winked at Riley. He winked back and sipped his drink.

I blew on a mushroom and grinned. I thought it was hilarious.

“Wait,” Felicia said, narrowing her eyes at us. She pointed a meaty finger at me. “You’re that Aegis. The one who saved everybody from the auction.”

I nodded. “Yes.”

She looked at Riley, back at me, then back at Riley. “You’re the reaper boyfriend of the Aegis.”

“Awesome,” he said. “How’d I get to be the sidekick?”

“You’re totally my arm candy,” I said. “Ask Janis.”

He snorted and grabbed a mushroom. “I’m still scary. I’m scary, right guys?”

As one, they nodded, and made sounds of agreement that seemed more placating than convinced of my boyfriend’s tremendous power to rip out their souls from their living bodies.

I patted his shoulder. “I think you’re losing your edge.”

Hector shook his head at me. “It’s not that. It’s you. You’re kind of a legend these days. Don’t you know that?”

I had no words to respond. I didn’t want to be a legend.
The next thing you know
,
somebody will pull out a lyre and start singing a ballad about me.

“I’m really nothing special, guys. My friends were in trouble. And people helped me. You’d all have done the same.”

“Nothing special,” Meg said, picking something out of her teeth. “Everybody knows somebody who was involved in that whole thing. I don’t know about everybody else, but even without the bonus, I’d have gone back to work for the Board today, if only because you asked.”

The rest nodded in agreement.

Celebrity didn’t sit well on my shoulders. In fact, I was kind of freaked out to learn the things I’d been doing had gotten around to such an extent.

“And now,” Frankie said, pushing away from the table, “it’s time for us to get going. It’s been an honor meeting the both of you. But we’ve got a chupacabra to set straight.”

I couldn’t help but notice how oddly coordinated the strange group was as they walked out the door in formation—almost as if they were doing a slo-mo shot during the opening credits of their own television show.

“I’ll just leave this with you, sugar.” Janis dropped the check on our table, smiled and walked away.

Riley picked up the slip of paper and looked at the total. “Awesome. They didn’t pay for a damn thing.”

“Nice,” I said. “We can’t even write it off on our taxes as a business expense.”

“Those guys can really knock it back, too.” He shrugged and reached for his wallet.

My purse wiggled, and a muffled voice rose from the tiny opening on the top. “If you’ll slide the bill in here, I’ll be happy to take care of it. It’s part of my job.”