Armageddon Rules (9 page)

“Well, in that case, I need to give you a few ground rules. Pipe teenage boys to music concerts? No problem. Authorities will smile, people will love you. Pipe adult men to follow you to war or elect you to office?” I drew my hand across my neck. “We’ll get to see how you look with about ten inches off the top.”

“So I can control more than animals?” A dangerous smile spread across her face. One that made me hope she had a good neckline, and no plans for an open-casket funeral.

I looked her in the eye. “Men are just another species of animal.”

“Are you talking about me again?” asked Liam, joining me in line. He picked me up off the ground in a huge hug and then kissed me twice.

Beth looked at him like she’d encountered an ogre.

“Beth, this is Liam. Liam, this is Beth, our newest piper.”

“Pleased to meet you, Beth.” Liam gave her that goofy grin of his and took her hand. “What instrument do you play?”

Beth spent a moment looking guilty, then took her kazoo out of her pocket and waved it at him.

“No, really. What do you play?” Liam asked.

I gave his shin a vicious kick.

“You know,” he said, “I hear that Marissa is looking for help with poodles this year.” I’d make sure he understood his mistake later.

“I’m still not sure how I’m going to help,” said Beth, giving my boyfriend far too friendly a smile for my tastes.

If she tried her “follow me” trick with him, I’d introduce her to the business end of a bus in short order. “Beth wants a job where she can earn a little green and a little gold. I was about to tell her that I might have a position opening up.”

Liam raised his eyebrows at me, but kept his mouth shut, even giving me a hand kicking rats out of the elevator. I figured we’d have plenty of time to eat while the rats figured out a way up, and whenever they arrived, well, that would be our signal that the lunch special just ended.

Once we were seated, Beth alternated between inhaling platefuls of pasta and staring at the view. I’d brought her to this place on purpose. I needed to impress her, needed her commitment to help with the Poodling, and I figured the view from a restaurant over a mile in the sky would be just the thing.

It was.

The longer she stared out the window, the less she ate. When she finally came back she looked completely dazed. “I never thought I’d see something like this.”

“You never thought you’d be followed by hordes of rats. You never thought you’d need to keep them away with a kazoo, and you also never thought there were at least two additional layers to the city that you’d never known existed.” I figured that if she was going to deal with stuff, I might as well make her deal with it all.

“I’m a piper.” She turned the kazoo over in her fingers, like it was magic instead of a few cents’ worth of plastic.

“Yes. So tell me, Beth. Will you help me with my poodle problem? I’ll train you to control your power. I’ll teach you to stop calling waves of rats. You will help me send about a thousand tiny monsters to their death before they kill half the people in the city.” I stared at her, knowing what I needed her answer to be.

“These ‘poodles.’ They’re dangerous?”

I nodded. “We lose people every year to ‘Oh, what a cute little dog. Does it want a treat?’ What they want is your liver, preferably torn straight out of your chest. You’d be saving people.”

“Then you’ve got yourself a deal,” she said. A grin spread across her face like I hadn’t seen before. “But I want my piercings back. At least a few of them.”

“Long as you don’t die of lead poisoning, you can va-jazzle yourself to your heart’s content.” At last I could relax. Beth would learn to control the poodles enough for us to run them off into the ocean. Grimm would once again get to say “Marissa, you were right,” my favorite phrase to hear from all the men in my life.

Beth got up from her chair and looked around. “I, umm, need to use the restroom.”

“The restroom? Or the restrooms?” Liam pointed over his shoulder at a set of doors. “Those are the restrooms. If you actually need to go to the bathroom, you want that one over there.” He pointed to a much smaller set of doors.

Beth looked at him like now the third eye had attached to his head.

“Beth, with a name like ‘The Mile High Club,’ didn’t it occur to you that there might be people having sex almost anyplace private?” I smiled as a look of shock spread over her face. “Small restrooms are for using the bathroom.”

She shuffled off to the small bathrooms, eyeing everyone else at the tables she passed with suspicion.

Liam caught my hand, and smiled at me. “Remember the scene in that one film where the lady in brown meets her cousin’s husband? What did she tell him?
Il ya un gopher dans mon pantalon.
It means ‘Things are going to be fine.’”

Despite his claim of having a gopher in his pants, I almost believed him.

Eight

FRIDAY CAME TOO soon. The truth was, if Friday had come next year, it would have come too soon. I’m not a controlling, possessive woman. Okay, I am possessive. I’m terribly jealous, and impossibly in love, but it wasn’t just that. I missed Liam already, and he wasn’t even gone.

We drove to the airport, and Ari came along to give me company on the way back. I had hoped for trouble getting through security. Or a long baggage line, or a problem with Liam’s passport. Anything to give us more time. Airport security selected me for the random mammogram and anal probe and let Liam breeze through.

We sat in the terminal, lines of passengers rushing past us and announcers blaring out warnings in every language on earth. I leaned up against him, and he put his arm around me.

“It’s only two weeks, M. Then we’ll have enough Glitter to end this curse. Enough money to retire on, if you want. We can raise our kids and work when we want to, if we want to.” His chin prickled the top of my head as I looked up at him.

“Kids?” We’d talked about one. I wanted a daughter of my own. Liam wanted a son. The thought of being responsible for another life scared me worse than a platoon of gremlins in an espresso bar, but it would give me the chance to love someone the way I wished I had been.

Liam misread the look on my face. “We don’t have to have a whole litter.”

“How ’bout one, to start? We can add on later.” I didn’t bother trying to hide the tears that came to my eyes.

Liam wrapped me in his arms and held me. All my adult life I’d always been the strong woman. The one who could walk into a room full of goblins knowing I’d be shooting someone. The one who climbed a beanstalk in spite of my fear of heights and did a low oxygen jump to escape. With Liam, I didn’t have to be that person.

“Don’t go,” I said, holding on to his shirt with both hands.

He put his hands over mine, rough and warm, and smiled. “I’ll be back before you know it. Like that guy said in the third film,
Si seulement il y avait un moyen de sauver les canards
. It means ‘I couldn’t ever forget you.’”

He’d actually lamented not being able to save the ducks, but I didn’t feel like pointing that out. Liam was leaving. No matter what I told him, no matter what I said, he was going to get on that plane and fly to Europe. I’d spend the rest of the month alone while he worked a job that only mattered to him because of our future.

Then it was time for him to board. We kissed. I said I loved him more times than I could count, and he walked away to security. I stood, isolated in a throng of passing people, alone in a crowd.

*   *   *

ARI WAITED FOR me back at the car, lost in her own thoughts. As we drove back, I finally spoke. “How’d training go?” I hadn’t seen Ari the rest of Wednesday but heard she didn’t get back until well after three in the morning.

Ari rubbed her fingers together, generating surges of lightning as she worried.

“You failed the retake in civics?” I privately resolved to make it clear to Grimm that if he cut into her study time, he was footing the bill for her retaking the class.

“The damage from the Wild Magic isn’t healing as fast as Grimm thought it would.”

I had to write a five-paragraph paper on each of the sources of magic during training, then had to rewrite when an off-leash hellhound ate not only the paper but the courier carrying it back to the Agency for me. The way I understood it, a seal bearer’s magic came from three sources: first off, the realm seal itself. Secondly, from inside the seal bearer herself. Those two were limited. The magic in the environment, around us, that was Wild Magic. It could be safely used as long as it was mixed with a little of the other two.

“Grimm will think of something. I’ll make him.” I silently worried as I drove back. Magic couldn’t directly oppose magic. Damage from one type of magic couldn’t be undone with another type, normally. Then again, nothing about magic-wielding, seal-bearing princesses was remotely normal. So maybe the same rules didn’t apply. Maybe.

*   *   *

BACK AT THE Agency, I sank into a normal workday. I convinced the kobolds to leave by telling them I’d seen a dead deer in the alley on my way in. I sent Payday George away with a twenty-dollar bill and received a promise not to come back. A promise that would last at least until Monday. I returned another call from the owner of a shoe factory in west Pennsylvania who couldn’t figure out why his factory machines turned themselves on at night. That one I’d have to deal with. If you think child labor laws are restrictive, elf labor laws are about a dozen times worse.

Then I put my head down on my desk and wished for the day to be over.

You’d think that having worked the last eight years for the Fairy Godfather, I’d get at least one wish. No such luck. Rosa poked her head in the door.

“Someone I need to take care of?”

“Yes.” In eight years, I’d come to believe that if Rosa spoke more than six words at a time, she’d explode. Single syllables, a glare that could turn your blood to ice, and a sawed-off shotgun kept our lobby in order.

“Send them in.”

A moment later, a soft knock on the door preceded a trio of dwarves entering my office. Three feet tall, nasty beards, and every last one of them had a beer bottle in one hand. And I recognized these three. “You’re too late. Liam’s flight was this morning. Didn’t he tell you he was going to Europe on business?”

The tallest of the three (by about an inch) took the red cap off his head and walked forward. “Magnus Mage, ma’am. Ms. Locks, we were hoping that you could help us. It ain’t about yer man.” He shuffled forward and dropped a jewelry box on my desk. “And we were ’posed to have this ready Monday, but Yiffy there bet me he could go on a longer bender.”

I picked up the box, black metal with invisible hinges, and snapped it open. Inside lay a single gold band with a diamond inset. A ridiculously large diamond inset. I know my gems, and there was no way this wasn’t real. “You made this for Liam?”

“Aye. Though I think ’twer for you. He been giving us the fire to forge it for the last few months.”

Gaze locked on the ring, I lifted it, slipping it on. “He wasn’t playing cards.” Right then I knew I’d never take it off. “So tell me what you need.”

The second dwarf stepped forward, hat in hand. “No authorities, miss. We were hoping you could handle this without their involvement. It’d be best if you saw for yourself.”

“Few ground rules: If you’ve killed someone, I’m calling the cops. If you are dealing drugs, I’m calling the cops. If you are wanting me to buy Girl Scout cookies, I’m calling the cops. Anything else, I’ll help you with.” I grabbed my purse, put on my jacket, and headed for the door.

“Rosa, tell Grimm I’m doing some field investigation,” I said as I left. She gave me the stink eye like always. Then I took three wee little men down to my car and we went for a drive.

It took almost forty-five minutes to get there, mostly because the dwarves couldn’t see over the dashboard to give me direction, and wouldn’t sit in the booster seat I kept for exactly that purpose. When we finally pulled up in front of a tired strip mall at the edge of Chinatown, I was so glad to be there I almost forgave their constant bickering.

“Small Wonders Jewelry,” read the sign outside the shop. The dwarves piled out of the car and into the shop, opening bars and grates and finally opening six different locks. Once we were inside, they locked the whole thing behind us.

“I thought you guys were forbidden to have shops anywhere outside of Kingdom.” Generally speaking, you don’t find anything but humans roaming the city, and definitely not setting up businesses. Dwarves, however, could pretend to be little people.

“That’s practically an Americans with Disabilities violation, right there,” said Magnus. I followed them into a back room, into a vault, and there Magnus unlocked a door a toddler would have trouble fitting through. I recognized the room inside as an elevator. “You’ll have to go down by yerself first, on account of your hideous size and smell,” said Magnus. “We’ll be along after you. Don’t touch nothing.”

So I crammed myself into the box, pulling my knees up to my chest, and panicked as the elevator plunged downward. The ride went on for what felt like two or three eternities. I really can’t say how far it went down, traveling so fast my stomach caught in my throat, but when the elevator finally slowed and the door opened, my legs were stiff.