Death by Chocolate (7 page)

Epsi looked at Kevyn. He had definitely graduated from his final steps of training,
because only full advocates were able to manifest the official Thundercloud of Disapproval,
guaranteed to intimidate the most obnoxious, arrogant, self-righteous, malicious pests to ever
stand before the Fae High Court. It wasn't directed at her, but the flames in his eyes and the
sub-zero temperatures radiating from Kevyn's frown made Epsi tremble for a few seconds.

"Could we have a new,
clean
chair for the lady?" Guber said, when Theodosius
cleared his throat in obvious preparation to begin his demands.

The chair appeared immediately. Guber hurried to move the chair to the end of the table,
positioned so Epsi was definitely seated with him and Kevyn, and leaving the other side of the
table all for Theodosius. He held it for Epsi, then pushed it in for her after she sat down.

"Yes, well. I'm sure you know what I want," Theodosius began, to be cut off by Kevyn's
sharp upward flick of his hand.

"We heard. And I'm not dropping my representation of Epsi to take you on," Kevyn
said.

"I'm not asking you to drop her. Just put her case aside until you tend to mine."
Theodosius's oily smile made Epsi want to pull out her compact and touch up her makeup to get
rid of the shine that was probably coating her from head to toe.

"Why?"

"Why? Why--because--well, I'm the Administrator King, of course."

"Former." Kevyn sounded bored.

Epsi wondered if he had taken a class in advocate training to learn how to do that,
too.

"Very well, former. But only because it was simpler to terminate my term than to
investigate--"

"The investigation is going on at this very moment. Advocates and clerks from every
level of the judiciary are working on the allegations and counterclaims." Kevyn sat back in the
chair and crossed his arms. "What made you think the allegations had been dropped?"

"That doesn't matter right now. The fact of the matter is, I'm far too important to simply
allow me to sit in there, cooling my heels, until someone gets around to investigating my
innocence."

"The term is 'determining innocence or guilt.' Which means that until that determination
is made, you could be guilty, so you cannot be allowed to roam freely in any of the realms
hospitable to Fae life. But because you could also be innocent, you are not incarcerated with total
deprivation of magical means to effect your comfort." Kevyn glanced at Epsi. "Do you want me
to handle his case?"

"Not even if he was holding a knife at my throat, or blackmailing me with all the lies he
used to tell to get his way at family get-togethers, back when we were children." Epsi knew that
was far too long of an answer, but she had longed for decades to get a little back at Theodosius.
He'd had an incredible talent, as a boy, for getting to the adults first after some sort of fracas
among the children, and spilling so many half-truths and quarter-truths that it was impossible to
refute anything of his accusations.

She had decided long ago that Theodosius's philosophy was that if he couldn't have fun,
nobody was allowed to have fun. And if he was going to get punished, everyone would get
punished. And inevitably, the adults did punish everyone, just because it would take too much
time and effort and magic to untangle the truth from Theodosius's twisted version of
unreality.

"Epsi, dearest cousin, how can you say that to me?" Theodosius's eyes welled up with
tears, and his fat bottom lip quivered.

"Ummm, because it's the truth? Because I despise you? Because if there was such a
thing as divorcing your relatives, I would? Hello, monitors? My advocate will not be
representing the former Administrator King. Could you--"

"Whoa. Cosmic," Guber said, staring at the temporary black hole that collapsed in on
itself, where Theodosius used to be.

"That's what I call service," Kevyn said. All the dark sternness and cold immediately
vanished from his expression. "Hello, monitors?"

"How may we be of service to you, Advocate?" the disembodied voice responded.

"You are recording all this, aren't you? What I'm telling my client will be of use to the
investigation. The Supreme Advocates and the Ministry of Investigation already have our report
and our theory of carob poisoning and the steps we're taking to find evidence. It would save time
if this was recorded and sent to everyone involved, so we don't have to repeat ourselves a couple
dozen times along the way."

"Recording. Please be notified that several administrative levels have requested
immediate access to anything you clear for distribution to the investigation team. You might be
interrupted by questions, if anyone joins the conference in real-time."

"That's fine with me. How about you, Epsi?"

"Uh, sure. Let's get it over with." Epsi checked her clothes. They weren't her best, and
she hadn't anticipated being put on a couple dozen report globes, streaming to as many
dimensions, when she got dressed that morning.

"You look great," Guber whispered.

If she could have leaned across the table and kissed him and gotten away with it, Epsi
would have. Guber might be a total Human-phile geek, but he was alert and sensitive enough to
know when a girl was feeling entirely too self-conscious, and to know exactly what to say to
make her feel better.

Could she hope that maybe he was expressing his opinion, too? Or was that asking for
too much, considering her circumstances?

She sat back and listened as Kevyn paced around the table, speaking to the invisible
audience. He gave a barebones history of the case, the implications linking to her, how he had
become involved in the case, and what Will and Phill had told him about her reaction to carob,
and how that whole theory came into being. Then he turned the education portion of the
testimony over to Guber, who explained his device and the tests. He described the carob or
carob-mixed-with-chocolate samples that had been tested already and set up as standards for
judging and calibrating the sensitivity of the device he had put together.

Epsi found it amusing that every couple of sentences, Kevyn interrupted with a layman's
interpretation, as well as putting it into advocate-speak, for those who had a hard time
understanding plain talk after decades of wrangling with the finer points and hairsplitting of
language.

"What we propose, honored committee members," Kevyn said, after Guber finally sat
down, "is to start with the easiest cases first. We will test all chocolate that came from Human
sources. Every person who gifted the late queen on the occasion of her coronation was required
to report where it came from. All gifts originating in the Human realms will be tested first, on the
theory that this is the most likely source for the quantities of carob that poisoned the late
queen.

"At the same time that we are testing the chocolate, we request that the Ministry of
Health as well as the Ministry of Culinary Protection set up their own testing program in
conjunction, to determine just how sensitive Fae are to carob, to identify the different reactions
that are possible, and try to determine if different bloodlines react differently.

"It might be beneficial if emergency medical procedures are set up to automatically kick
in as soon as symptoms are noticed in the future. With the increasing traffic into the Human
realms over the last few decades, especially for the sake of obtaining chocolate, the chances of
innocent Fae unknowingly obtaining adulterated chocolate and poisoning themselves without
realizing it, could be increasing."

He nodded toward Epsi. "My client started the line of thought that led to this suggestion,
and I request that she be given credit for what could result in life-saving measures for other Fae
in the future."

Epsi blushed so furiously, she could feel the sparks whizzing past her cheeks. To avoid
looking into the reception globes that transmitted the proceeding in the meeting room in all six
dimensions, she looked at Guber. He mouthed "teacher's pet," which set off a fit of giggles in her
that were hard to control. At least she stopped blushing.

Kevyn covered over most of her reaction by continuing his recommendations for the
testing. The late queen's bloodline needed to be tested first, to determine if it was a specific
susceptibility that made her swell up and die, or a combination of factors.

Epsi couldn't believe how long the report and testimony and questioning by the
investigation committee took. When she was sent back to the holding dimension and her cubicle,
she was exhausted. The lights had dimmed in the living areas, meaning it was technically
nighttime there.

She found several of her friends camped in front of the doorway to her cubicle, and the
protective coded doorway buzzing and hissing and arcing, shooting off sparks sporadically.

"What happened?" She nearly forgot to keep her voice down.

"Theodosius decided to have a temper tantrum in your cubicle. Or at least
try
to
have one in there. Whatever your advocate said, it really set him off," Lucentio said with a grin.
"We're pretty sure he worked off most of his temper just trying to slam through the door. He
finally got sent to the medical dimension after he knocked himself unconscious for the third
time."

"Ouch." Epsi grinned, and bit her tongue to keep from asking if anyone had recorded the
battle between enraged Fae bully and security-spelled door.

It took her a few minutes to repair the twisting and damage done to her spell before she
could open the door. She washed up and changed her clothes, and came back out to the common
area. She wasn't surprised to see that twice as many people now waited to hear what had
happened.

It surprised her to learn that more than three-quarters of her friends had gone to the
Human realms to obtain chocolate novelties for Mellisande's coronation gifts. Epsi realized that
her news gave them all hope. Everyone who had Human-made chocolate could claim innocence
in the matter, if they could prove they had no idea that carob even existed before the whole
incident.

* * * *

"Let the madness begin," Guber muttered, taking a step back from the cobbled-together
monstrosity that was part magic, part wishful thinking, part Human technology. It also
incorporated a few borrowed pieces from other dimensions that weren't officially in an
Intellectual Property trade agreement with the Fae. He nodded to Kevyn and his five cousins who
were officially monitoring the entire operation for six different oversight ministries. Each one
snapped their fingers in perfect synchronization, igniting the spells that broke the seals on the
portion of the testing procedure that was directly under their authority.

A brown cloud rose up on a sigh of moist air and hovered over the machine that
stretched the width of one end of the former Administrator Queen's chocolate warehouse. Guber
watched the cloud, amused at the awareness that anywhere else, especially in the Human realms,
that cloud would be considered pollution. Here--especially in a warehouse filled with every kind
of chocolate possible in ninety-seven percent of the realms where Fae were able to live--that
cloud was chocolate.

"Eat your heart out, Willy Wonka," Guber murmured.

He watched one of the lab technicians in his lavender lab coat lean forward into the
cloud as it descended around him. Guber almost envied him, being surrounded by clouds of
chocolate for as long as the testing--

What was he thinking?

It was pollution in the worst sense of the word. As in, poison.

"Don't inhale!" he shrieked, and flung a handful of half-coherent spells at the technician
and his six buddies who looked on the verge of following his example. The seven froze, their lab
coats turning from lavender to gray as time froze and a bubble of scintillating electric blue magic
formed around them.

"Nice touch," Kevyn muttered, coming up behind him. "I think we probably should have
adapted some gas masks before we got the first round of tests going. What were we
thinking?"

"It's too deep in our brains," Guber said, as he wiped the sweat from terror off his
forehead. "Even knowing about carob, it's hard-wired into us to think chocolate equals good and
safe and healthy."

"Got them!" someone yelled from farther down the floor, after they used four fork-lifts
to move the frozen lab technicians out of the settling cloud of gas.

Guber gagged, seeing how all seven of them were coated in a fuzzy brown film. His
magic had included an impermeable skin to keep that possibly poisonous fog from actually
touching their skin. However, that assurance didn't do much to fight the nauseating mental image
of poison seeping through their clothes and skin, into their bloodstream. There wasn't enough
antihistamine in all the Fae realms to handle--cancel that thought. There wasn't any antihistamine
in the Fae realms, period.

"Yeah, and we think we know what we're doing?" he moaned, as he conjured up a
couple of shipping crates of Benadryl and other equivalents--pills, capsules, and liquid form for
swallowing as well as intravenous application. Just in case.

"Nobody got hurt," Kevyn assured him, as they watched the forklifts take the seven
chocolate-coated statues to the decontamination chamber. "That's the important part."

An hour later, the seven technicians were back to work, and everyone in the warehouse
walked around inside semi-permeable bubbles that filtered the air. For added protection, their
controlling spells were Ether-wired directly to the computer controlling the tests on the chocolate
in the warehouse. Every time new information on carob was found, another spell adapted the
filtering spell implanted in the bubbles. Even if half the chocolate in the warehouse was
contaminated with carob, and flash evaporated in an industrial accident into fog that filled the
warehouse, it wasn't going to poison anybody.