Blue Light of Home (14 page)

She came home, kicked off her shoes and put the leftover pot roast in the oven to warm. She had just finished slicing herself some store-bought pie (apple, which Tom hated) when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. She’d done the dutiful thing and made a missing person’s report the day after the…incident. “Okay,” she muttered to herself as she went to answer the door. “Just like we rehearsed. You don’t know where he went, you only know he hasn’t been home all weekend. You had a fight over your toad-raising scheme and he walked out, and that’s all you know.”

She didn’t recognize the man standing on her front porch, and he wasn’t dressed like a policeman, but something about him screamed ‘cop’ all the same. He was a tall man, with a lean, aristocratic stamp to his features. He wore a black suit, one that was very well-tailored, but oddly-cut, with a bib-like frill hanging over his chest and shoulders, but as long as Batman’s cape in back. His hair was too long for a policeman’s, and although he kept it neatly tied back, it still hung halfway to his waist in a white fall; he must be prematurely white, because his face was youthful, almost timeless, its delicate features saved from femininity by his eyes, which were very pale and very intelligent, the sort of eyes that didn’t miss much. He looked at her with those clear, uncompromising eyes. It was a profoundly assessing expression, and at the same time, one not without a tinge of uncertainty. “Hm,” he said. And frowned.

“Good…good evening…?” Eve gripped at the door and tried not to let too much nervousness show.

The man on her front porch seemed to reach some sort of internal decision. “Eve Hopler?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Of Hopler’s Happy Toads?”

The name she’d sold her husband under at the Expo, the name that had headed each of the care sheets she’d given away with the toads. She hadn’t bothered with a business license. Was that what this was about? Did they really have IRS agents staking out every Reptile Expo from coast to coast? “Yes?” she said again, even more uncertainly than when she’d thought he was a cop.

The tall man stepped inside without an invitation and Eve backed up before him. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s just cut to the chase, as you people say. Who was he?”

“W-who…what?” Eve stumbled away from him, but the stranger matched her step for step. “I don’t know what…You can’t just barge in here! I’ll call the police!”

“As is your right,” he replied, and suddenly gave her living room walls a hard, long look. “Hm,” he said again, and drilled another of those assessing looks into her. Abruptly, he smiled. The smile was wholly warm, wholly wonderful, and it turned him from a menacing home-invader into a very handsome man in a dizzyingly short space of time. “Mrs. Hopler,” he said gently, “We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way.”

Tom had said that to her once or twice. The memory of what followed froze the embryonic kernels of attraction that she had begun to feel into chips of ice. “I’ll call the police,” she said again. Her voice cracked.

“I am the police,” he told her. He reached into his strange jacket and pulled out a smoked glass disc. Floating ghostlike over the surface was a hazy, red star. He watched her face closely as she stared at this inexplicable thing, and said, “Hm,” a third time. He followed that up with, “My name is Faisal Hammerlane. I’m a sentinel.”

She stared at him.

“A representative of the Wizarding Host,” he added. “Specifically, of Acrimonious Magic Misuse Investigations.” He studied the complete incomprehension with which she met this declaration, and then shook his head as he put his badge away. “Mrs. Hopler, I received a very serious complaint today from a rather irritated witch who purchased several of what you assured her were marbled cane toads and which turned out to be…who, exactly?”

Eve opened and closed her mouth a few times, backing steadily towards the box of party wands (back in the shoebox and hidden under its multi-striped knitted scarf) on her coffee table. She had no idea what she thought she was going to do once she’d reached them. She didn’t even know what ‘Bubble-Bind’ or ‘Pony’ actually did.

The tall man, Faisal, looked around the living room, his eyes resting here and there—on Tom’s golfing trophies on the mantle, Tom’s leather slippers peeking out from the corner of the sofa, Tom’s jackets hanging on the hooks in the hallway—and finally he looked at her again. “Mrs. Hopler,” he said politely, “Is your husband at home?”

Eve ran.

Hopler’s Happy Toads by Robin Smith

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