Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (53 page)

As he shifted, his rumpled coat fell open, and steadily, strange luminous symbols began to glow up through the threadbare material of his undershirt. The rubber bands ringing his long fingers twitched like reviving centipedes. And something in his coat pocket pulsed with the rhythm of a beating heart.

Jason clenched his eyes closed. He hated this uncertainty, despised the sense of reality slipping out from under him like quicksand. He didn’t want to be afraid to just open his eyes. Why couldn’t his mind just work? Why couldn’t he stop seeing monsters and weird creatures all around him? Why couldn’t he just be normal?

“I imagine you have a lot of questions for us.” The vagrant’s voice was soft, but somehow Jason thought he could feel the warmth of the man’s breath against his ear, whispering other words.

You haven’t gone mad, Jason. Just hear me out.

“I’m Agent Henry Falk and the striking gentleman with me is Agent Gunther Heartman. We work for the NATO Irregular Affairs Division and we’re hoping that you might be able to help us in apprehending a criminal.”

None of this was anything Jason had expected. Reflexively he sat up, staring at the two.

“What did you say?”

“We’d like you to help us out, if you can.” Agent Falk offered him another of his easy, crooked smiles and his whole body seemed to throw off a radiant light. He didn’t look anything like a government agent, but Jason didn’t feel certain enough of his senses to point that out.

“According to your W2 you’d been employed by Mr. Phipps for close to two months.” Gunther set his paper coffee cup aside and as he did so Jason noticed that his taloned, bony hand cast a weirdly human shadow. Jason wondered if it was a little glimpse of reality. The rest of Gunther’s shadow fell in a pool at his feet but seemed smooth and benign in comparison to his jagged white body.

“Mr. Shamir?” Gunther prompted.

“Uhm…yes, that’s right. Seven weeks, come Wednesday.” Belatedly, Jason realized where this might be leading. “Has something happened to him? Is Mr. Phipps hurt?”

“As far as we know, he’s fine.” Annoyance sounded through Agent Falk’s gravely voice. “You’re the one that nearly disappeared.”

“What?”

“Phipps brokered a deal with a foreign entity to sell you,” Agent Falk told him. He took a quick swig from his flask and the blaze of his eyes seemed to dim.

“To sell me…That—that’s got to be some kind of a joke.”

“It’s not,” Gunther informed him. “If our agency hadn’t raided Phipps’s shop when we did, you would have been handed over this morning.”

“No…That’s crazy,” Jason said, though he felt weird, looking at these two and calling anything crazy. Still he went on, “Who on earth would want to buy me?”

“Someone who knew what you could do,” Falk replied.

“What I can do?” Now this really did have to be some kind of elaborate joke, didn’t it? “The only remarkable thing I can do is survive for two years on nothing but dry breakfast cereal. That and collect loose change from parking lots—”

“You can see through transformations, through spells and even glamours, straight to the truth,” Agent Falk cut him off. “That’s what you’re doing right now, as you’re looking at me and at Agent Heartman. You’re seeing what no one else does. The truth at the core of us.”

Jason went very still, though his heart pounded frantically in his chest. No one had ever suggested anything like this to him before and it had to be madness…and yet it felt like a revelation, like an assurance, at last, that he wasn’t insane. He wanted to believe it so badly that it terrified him, because it was just the kind of delusion that would lead him to a complete break from reality.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jason said carefully.

“Yes, you do,” Falk replied softly and with certainty.

“I don’t.” Jason could hardly force the words out of his clenching throat.

“All right.” Falk shrugged. “Tell you what, I’ll drop the whole thing if you just tell me what color Agent Heartman’s eyes are.” Falk flashed a wide, wicked smile and Jason glimpsed the silver fire dancing behind his teeth. “Just tell me the color. Easy peasy, yeah?”

Jason gave a stiff nod.

Gunther closed the distance between them in quick steps and then bent so that his face was only inches from Jason’s. Jason fought against the instinct to recoil.

He could smell the tobacco on Gunther’s breath and see the fine striations in the hundreds of jagged teeth protruding from his deathly white jaws. His scarlet eyes gleamed like fresh wounds.

Jason forced himself to stare hard into those red slits, searching for any sign of human eyes. A faint reflection of his own strained face floated up to him but nothing else. A cold sweat beaded his brow.

“Brown…” Jason guessed at last, because brown was the most common color of human eyes—the color of his own eyes.

Gunther drew back, stole a quick glance at Falk, then returned his attention to Jason.

“You really can’t see me, can you?” Gunther sounded both puzzled and awed.

“His eyes are blue,” Falk supplied. “Bright blue.”

Somehow that was the last straw. Jason just didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. He stared down at the shadows on the floor. “I couldn’t see them.”

“Not at all?” Gunther asked.

“Not the way other people do…” Jason admitted.

Gunther cocked his grotesque head. “What do I look like to you?” he asked in a tone of idle curiosity.

Like a monster
, Jason thought.
Like the things that murdered my father. But he didn’t want to say as much.

“I’ll bet he sees the snow goblin you would have been if you hadn’t been transformed,” Falk stated as if anyone would draw such a conclusion.

Gunther scowled like he’d just stepped in dog shit. Falk fished through one of the deep pockets of his trench coat and brought out a small black book, which he tossed to Gunther.

“Page twenty,” Falk instructed. “See if I’m not right.”

Up close Jason could see that the book cover was badly scuffed and the binding had split in several places. Gunther turned through the pages and then stopped.

“Talk about your old-school goblins,” Gunther commented.

He turned the book to Jason, exposing a page of tightly packed print and a hand-colored illustration. Jason instantly recognized the gaping creature depicted with a human skull gripped in its talons.

He stared at the picture with the same kind of wonder that he’d felt the first time he’d read a stanza of his favorite music and had realized that many people had known this melody before him.

“That’s it exactly,” Jason admitted.

“I don’t look anything like this woman,” Gunther muttered. He took the book and scowled at the open pages before handing the book back to Falk.

To Jason’s surprise, Falk laughed.

“The truth hurts, Gunther. But on the bright side, if this job ever goes south, you could make a killing performing drag with that pretty goblin face of yours.”

“Yeah, that’s great to hear. Remind me to thank my parents for choosing such a sensitive man to be my godfather.”

Falk simply shrugged, then plucked a pair of cheap plastic glasses from his breast pocket and spat on the lenses. His saliva gleamed like mercury as he smeared it across the lenses with his thumbs. Then he stepped to Jason’s side and thrust the plastic glasses out at him. “Try these on and tell me what you think.”

Jason accepted the black-framed glasses gingerly. The plastic radiated heat against his fingers.

“Go on,” Falk told him. “They can’t make Gunther look worse than he already does.”

Gunther shot Falk a sinister look, but then Jason thought that any expression would appear sinister on such a face.

“They’ll allow you to see the world in all its illusions, just like the rest of us do,” Falk told him.

“Some kind of reverse spell projectors?” Gunther asked.

“Something like that.” Falk nodded.

Jason slid the glasses on and for a moment he simply stared around himself in wonder. The room changed only slightly—one of two doors evaporating beneath the bare surface of a beige wall—but both Falk and Gunther were considerably altered.

Jason gaped at the tall, tan man Gunther had become. With his strong build, handsome face, glossy black hair, and brilliant blue eyes he looked more like a film star than a government employee. He offered Jason a dashing smile and Jason felt a flush spreading across his cheeks. He was beautiful.

Embarrassed, Jason turned his attention to Falk.

His transformation was more subtle but in a way stranger, because Jason had grown almost used to the luminous quality of the man. Now his eyes and mouth looked like dull shadows beneath the harsh angles of his sharp brow and crooked nose. Blond stubble mottled his jaw and his pale hair jutted out as if it hadn’t been brushed or washed in days. He stood several inches taller than Gunther, but where Gunther looked toned and healthy, Falk seemed rangy and hungry.

Above all else Jason noticed that, devoid of his radiance, Falk seemed worn—not gray haired or wrinkled—but weathered and scarred like the rundown rooms of the flophouse where Jason slept these days.

Jason took a few more moments, allowing himself to accept the full impact of these plastic glasses and the new world he viewed through them.

I’m not crazy. It’s just the way I see…

It seemed almost too relieving to believe.

“Mr. Shamir?” Gunther prompted and then he glanced to Falk. “Did you do something really weird to him?”

“I’m fine,” Jason said quickly. “I just…This is unbelievable.”

“But true, all the same,” Falk said with a certain finality. He lifted his flask but then dropped it back into his coat pocket without drinking from it. Jason absently wondered what else he secreted in those pockets.

“Having true sight probably hasn’t been all that useful to you,” Falk said. “Most of the folks with it end up in mental institutions.”

Jason felt the color drain from his face at the memory of St. Mary’s. If either of the agents noticed, they didn’t remark on it. Falk went on speaking.

“But the ability to see the truth can be valuable when it comes to magics. It’s particularly useful in dealing with the sidhe, the fae in particular, who traffic in illusions and glamours. Even the best technology we have can’t pierce the faerie glamours that you could see past at a glance.”

“Faerie glamours?  Like magical litltle faries?” Jason tried not to sound skeptical because he was wearing what appeared to be some kind of magic glasses. But still…faeries?

“Nah, not just faeries.” Falk replied. “I mean not unless you’d call a troll or a goblin a faerie.”

“We prefer to be called the Luminous Ones,” Gunther commented. Falk smirked at that.

“Yeah, and I’d like to be called Prince Charming, but it isn’t what I am.” He scratched the blond stubble of his chin. “The point is that you, Mr. Shamir, have a great talent and value. Your employer, Mr. Phipps, made it his business to trade in such things, and when you fell into his hands, he put you up for auction—”

“For auction?” Jason wished that he could stop feeling shocked and out of his depth.

“Yes. He sold you,” Falk said as if this sort of thing happened every day and warranted no more surprise than a parking ticket.

“And someone actually bought me?” Jason asked. He couldn’t imagine them paying much.

“Someone certainly tried to.” Falk nodded.

“Who?” Jason asked.

“That we don’t know,” Gunther admitted. “The buyer paid in gold dust—half up front, apparently—but we can’t reliably track it back to a source. And the brownie sent to retrieve you and make the second payment is too infected with spells to be able to tell us, even if he wanted to.”

“Which he doesn’t,” Falk added.

“No, he really doesn’t,” Gunther agreed and he looked oddly grim for a moment. Then he picked up his coffee cup and frowned into the depths of its contents.

“So, it boils down to this,” Falk went on while Gunther drank, “we’re pretty certain that Mr. Phipps made previous illegal sales to this same buyer—possibly previous employees. We need to track the buyer down before he can find a new supplier or, if the goods exchanged were human beings, before he decides to dispose of them to hide his crimes.” Falk’s shadowed gaze settled on Jason. “We’d like you to help us.”

For just an instant Jason stole a glimpse over the top of his glasses. Falk’s eyes shone like the blue flames of a gas stove.

“How?” Jason asked.

“We’re betting that Phipps will attempt to turn you over to his buyer; he’ll want the second half of his payment. We’ve shut down all of his accounts. He doesn’t have any other source of revenue open to him and he’ll need money if he hopes to relocate to another realm.”

“So…” Jason considered this as best he could without getting caught up on the idea of faeries and gold dust and brownies. “Are you asking me to let him abduct me?”

 “You’d be protected the entire time,” Gunther said quickly. “We’d have agents tailing you and at least one planted with you.”