Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (14 page)

As soon as Mrs. Takahashi and the fairy left,
I’d called Diz to give him the bad news. While he was on his way
back to the office, I reviewed every step of our investigation,
trying to spot where we’d messed up.

The little ceramic figurine was a family
heirloom. The fairy said she had to leave it behind when she
immigrated to the United States with her family. As soon as she’d
scraped the money together, she arranged to have the heirloom
shipped to her. It had been bundled with a shipment of goods from
Japan headed for Mrs. Takahashi’s store and other retail outlets
not only in Moretown Bay but throughout the Pacific Northwest. The
shipment had arrived on a cargo boat as scheduled, but when Mrs.
Takahashi’s portion of the shipment arrived at her store, the box
containing the ceramic figurine was missing.

The fairy was convinced pirates had stolen
it. In my experience, the days when pirates stole trinkets just
because they were pretty were long past. Modern pirates only stole
merchandise they could sell without a hitch. Protection spells cost
a bundle, and unless a pirate expected a big payday at the end,
stealing small stuff from a fairy just wasn’t cost-effective.

I was pretty sure the shipment had been
misplaced. I’ve worked with shipping companies before, and if you
don’t pay extra for homing spells, there’s no telling where a
package could end up. Diz and I spent a day and a half running down
every package that had arrived on that shipment until we finally
found the little ceramic figurine, still in the box, in a comic
book store in South Bay.

The fairy’s figurine had arrived along with
the rest of the store’s order of manga and anime products. The guys
at the comic book store had been too busy getting ready for a big
trade show at the convention center to even unpack the shipment, so
they didn’t know they had one more box than they should have. The
owner of the store had been more than happy to hand the figurine
over without a fuss when he learned it belonged to a fairy.

I’d checked the shipping information on the
box against the printouts Mrs. Takahashi had given us confirming
that the box had been shipped from Japan. The numbers matched. The
box had been opened, but Customs opened a lot of boxes coming from
overseas. The figurine looked like the one in the photo we’d been
given, and that should have been that.

In hindsight, it was pretty obvious what had
happened. Somewhere along the way, someone had switched the
figurine inside the box with an exact replica. But why? According
to what Mrs. Takahashi told us, the figurine was only important to
the fairy’s family.

“How do we know the real thing’s not still in
Japan?” Diz said, not bothering to pause his pacing.

We didn’t. But going to Japan wasn’t in the
budget—the fairy hadn’t paid us a retainer, after all—so the
logical place to start was Moretown Bay. We’d only tracked the
package the first time around. We hadn’t investigated anyone who
worked on the cargo ship, in Customs, at the port, or with the
delivery service, which was one honking long list of people.

Not to mention that if someone had swapped
out the real figurine with a fake one, the real figurine could be
hidden somewhere on the ship. Cargo ships probably had about a
zillion places to hide a four-inch tall figurine.

Or whoever took the figurine could have
pawned it in any one of dozens of pawn shops in the area.

Or sold it on the black market. I didn’t know
if white ceramic cat figurines were big on the black market, but no
one knows why people take a shine to the things they do. Last year
the hot new item had been zombified replicas of real-life political
figures. As far as I was concerned, most politicians already looked
like they’d been bitten by the undead, but stores couldn’t keep
those ugly little things on the shelves. The goblin gangs who ran
the black market in Moretown Bay knew a hot property when they saw
it, and pretty soon legitimate businesses had to hire armed guards
to protect their shipments of undead politicians.

I thumped my sand-saturated head on my desk.
Missing persons were easier to find than this. Our simple little
case had just turned into a major investigation.

I didn’t hear Diz pause in his pacing, but
the next thing I knew, I felt the gentle touch of his hand on my
shoulder. “I don’t suppose you’ve had any luck...” he began.

He didn’t have to finish the thought. I knew
what he meant. He wanted to know if I’d had a vision.

“The sum total of my Zen is currently sifting
through my hair onto my desk,” I said. “And Dog isn’t talking to
me.”

Diz wasn’t one-hundred percent fond of Dog,
mainly because he’s pretty sure Dog wasn’t one-hundred percent
canine. Diz can sense when beings use magic. He described it to me
once like feeling a tingle on his skin, anywhere from a slight
sense of static electricity in the air to the sensation of being
swarmed by a million ants all at once. It all depended on the
intensity of the magic. He’s learned to tune out low-level magic,
otherwise he’d be twitchy all the time. Trust me. Twitchy and
grumpy are not a good combination in an elf with his size and
strength.

When Dog came into our lives, Diz told me he
sensed some kind of magic in the Golden Retriever, but it was the
low-level kind, not nearly the amount a shape shifter or changeling
would generate. Most dogs don’t put out any magical energy at
all.

Just like Diz, I was pretty sure Dog wasn’t a
normal dog, but unlike my partner, I was okay with that. In the
vision where I first met Dog, he’d been one of the animals in a
live outdoor Christmas nativity scene. He’d looked me straight in
the eye and told me—in perfect, non-accented English, no less—to
get my butt out of the vision and get to work. It said a lot about
Diz that he never questioned Dog’s part in my vision, and that he
accepted Dog in our lives on my say so.

“You need to relax,” Diz said.

Dog came over and nudged my arm with his
nose. I patted his broad back with one hand and sighed. Telling
myself to relax was like telling myself not to think about the bean
paste rolls I bought from Mrs. Takahashi. Which I now couldn’t stop
thinking about.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “It’s a
human thing.”

Diz snorted. He had so many “elf things,” as
he called them, like scaling the side of a building without the
benefit of rope, I couldn’t help but retaliate every now and
then.

“Relax,” he said.

“How am I supposed to relax? I have sand in
my hair.” No one could relax with sand in her hair.

I thumped my head against the top of my desk
again, and that’s when Diz started to massage my shoulders.

Diz had given me a shoulder massage once
before, and it had been marvelous. His fingers are long and strong,
and he seems to know exactly where to apply pressure. I wasn’t sure
how he’d learned to do that—he’d probably tell me it was another
elf thing—but right about then I didn’t care. Any day that included
making one of the fey angry enough she hurled things at me was
bound to make me tense, and Diz knew just how to work all the tight
muscles in my shoulders and neck.

Dog nuzzled at my arm again, but right about
then I didn’t feel like I had enough energy to keep petting him. We
had things to do, people to interview, a ceramic cat to find, and I
should really get busy on that before the fairy decided she’d been
patient enough, but I didn’t feel like I had enough energy to do
that either. All I cared about was the wonderful feeling of my
tight muscles finally letting go. It was a marvelous feeling. It
was an awesome feeling. I could live in this moment for the next
hundred years and I wouldn’t care one—

And just like that, I fell into a vision.

***

I’ve had precog visions since I hit puberty.
My mother, after she got over the fact that her daughter wasn’t
exactly normal, treated my visions like the ultimate locator of
lost objects. Heaven forbid if anyone misplaced a set of keys or
couldn’t remember where they left their wallet. According to my
mother, I could just gaze into the crystal ball inside my head and
find whatever had gone missing.

Well, my visions don’t work that way. For one
thing, I could never control when a vision decided to show up, no
matter how much my Great Aunt Betsy needed her reading glasses.
Besides, my visions showed me glimpses of the future. If Great Aunt
Betsy had already lost her glasses, I couldn’t help, no matter what
my mother thought.

Most of my early visions were just hints of
things, like a smell that didn’t belong or a glimpse of something
out of the corner of my eye. I still remember the first time I
realized the smell that had been driving me nuts was really a
vision. Two hours after I’d started to smell Chinese food, right
down to the sweet and sour sauce and hot oil mixed with ginger, my
father came home with takeout.

These days my visions ranged from an
out-of-place smell to a full-blown 3D movie complete with digital
surround sound. The vision where I’d met Dog had felt like I’d
piggybacked someone’s dream, which, as it turned out, I had.

Diz and I focused on finding missing persons
instead of objects because my precog visions put me in the point of
view of someone else. When I got lucky, that someone else was the
person we were looking for.

This time when the vision hit, I found myself
staring out at the world from the point of view of the ceramic cat
figurine.

In the vision, I smelled absolutely nothing.
Which made sense, considering that something made out of ceramic
couldn’t smell, but the total absence of smell felt so alien it
almost kicked me back to reality, and I had to fight hard to stay
right where I was.

I shouldn’t have been able to see, either,
but that sense worked just fine. I appeared to be in a huge room.
Exposed pipes ran beneath a stadium-height ceiling, all painted
white, and banks of fluorescent lights hung in neat rows extending
as far as I could see. Books featuring Japanese-style cartoon
characters on the covers packed the wire mesh shelves in front of
me. I couldn’t move my eyes or turn my head, but I thought I saw a
wall of stuffed animals off to one side, only these animals were
made of felt instead of the fake fur toys I remembered from my
childhood. An annoying buzzing sound filled my head, like white
noise only louder but muffled at the same time.

Something came into my field of vision—the
top of someone’s head with a pink headband on which odd-looking,
droopy ears had been attached—and then a hand reached out to grab
me.

As soon as I saw that hand, my heart kicked
into high gear, my flight-or-fight instincts coming down firmly on
the side of flight. I wanted to run right now, right now,
right
now
, only I couldn’t move, and Dog wasn’t in this vision to
help me. The world tilted to the side as the hand picked me up. I
caught a glimpse of a teenage face surrounded by long, straight,
strawberry blonde hair. Next to her I saw the dreadlocks of a
pirate I knew all too well.

Oh, brother. I’d seen enough.

My heart still hammered double-time in my
chest when I came out of the vision a moment later. “You can stop
now,” I told Diz. “The massage worked.”

He stopped rubbing my shoulders. My muscles
felt all tingly, and except for my heart, which had finally started
slowing down, I felt pretty darn relaxed. Too bad we had a figurine
to find. At least I had a pretty good idea where to look.

“Remember the trade show the guy at the comic
shop mentioned?” I asked.

“Vaguely,” Diz said.

I wouldn’t have remembered now except one
word on the stack of flyers advertising the show had caught my
attention, so I’d asked the guy behind the counter what “cosplay”
meant. He’d told me way more than I needed to know. Or so I’d
thought at the time.

“I think we need to head over to the
convention center,” I said.

My partner groaned. I guess he remembered
after all.

***

“Aren’t you a little big to dress up as a
video game character?” the girl dressed as a bondage version of the
Queen of Hearts asked Diz.

He glowered at her. She giggled and asked if
she could take his picture. She hadn’t been the first, and I
doubted she’d be the last.

The thousands of fans who’d descended on
Moretown Bay for the Northwest Regional Anime Convention had taken
over the entire convention center and all the fast food restaurants
and hotels within a three-block radius. From what I could tell, at
least half of them were in costume, or what my friendly comic store
guy told me was “cosplay.” Diz and I had to register as attendees
to get inside the retail sales area, which was where I was pretty
sure my vision had taken place. With the cute little convention
name tag adorning Diz’s normal outfit of cargo pants, boots, and a
style of shirt that’s more tunic than polo—today’s color dusty
green—no wonder people like the Queen of Hearts thought Diz was in
costume. All he needed were a bow and arrows and a jaunty hat.

The convention center stretched over two city
blocks and had six different levels connected by escalators,
elevators, and glassed-in skyways that crossed the streets below.
We had to ride up three sets of escalators, cross two skyways, and
make our way through a never-ending line of people waiting for a
chance to meet their favorite voice actors before we finally found
what the convention called a “dealer room,” which turned out to be
an auditorium the size of three football fields and packed wall to
wall with shoppers.

“Which way?” Diz yelled down at me to make
himself heard over the din of the crowd.

I had no idea. Most of the booths in the
immediate vicinity had been constructed of the same kind of wire
mesh shelving I’d seen in my vision. The booths were jam-packed
with everything from artwork to tee-shirts to costumes to
realistic-looking swords to boxes upon boxes of vinyl and resin
figures. I didn’t see anything made of white ceramic.