The Good, The Bad and The Undead. Ким Харрисон

made a scoffing noise deep in his throat. I was used to wary distrust from most humans. This guy wasn’t afraid, and it was ticking me off. “Detective Glenn, ma’am,” he said.

      “Ma’am,” Jenks said, laughing. “He called you ma’am.”

      I scowled at Jenks. He looked young to have made detective. The FIB must have been getting desperate. “Well, thank you, Detective Glade,” I said, mangling his name. “You can drop me off anywhere. I can take the bus from here. I’ll come out to see Captain Edden tomorrow. I’m working an important case right now.”

      Jenks snickered, and the man flushed, the red almost hidden behind his dark skin. “It’s Glenn, ma’am. And I saw your important case. Want me to take you back to the fountain?”

      “No,” I said, slumping in my seat, thoughts of angry young Weres going through my head. “I appreciate the lift to my office, though. It’s in the Hollows, take the next left.”

      “I’m not your driver,” he said grimly, clearly unhappy. “I’m your delivery boy.”

      I shifted my arm inside as he rolled the window up from his control panel. Immediately it grew stuffy. Jenks flitted to the ceiling, trapped. “What the hell are you doing?” he shrilled.

      “Yeah!” I exclaimed, more irate than worried. “What’s up?”

      “Captain Edden wants to see you now, Ms. Morgan, not tomorrow.” His gaze darted from the street to me. His jaw was tight, and I didn’t like his nasty smile. “And if you so much as reach for a spell, I’ll yank your witch butt out of my car, cuff you, and throw you in the trunk. Captain Edden sent me to get you, but he didn’t say what kind of shape you had to be in.”

      Jenks alighted on my earring, swearing up a blue streak. I repeatedly flicked the switch for the window, but Glenn had locked it. I settled back with a huff. I could jam my finger in Glenn’s eye and force us off the road, but why? I knew where I was going. And Edden would see that I had a ride home. It ticked me off, though, running into a human who had more gall than I did. What was the city coming to?

      A sullen silence descended. I took my sunglasses off and leaned over, noticing the man was going fifteen over the posted limit. Figures.

      “Watch this,” Jenks whispered. My eyebrows rose as the pixy flitted from my earring. The autumn sun coming in was suddenly full of sparkles as he surreptitiously sifted a glowing dust over the detective. I’d bet my best pair of lace panties it wasn’t the usual pixy dust. Glenn had been pixed.

      I hid a smile. In about twenty minutes Glenn would be itching so bad he wouldn’t be able to sit still. “So, how come you aren’t scared of me?” I asked brazenly, feeling vastly better.

      “A witch family lived next door when I was a kid,” he said warily. “They had a girl my age. She hit me with just about everything a witch can do to a person.” A faint smile crossed his square face to make him look very un-FIBlike. “The saddest day of my life was when she moved away.”

      I made a pouty face. “Poor baby,” I said, and his scowl returned. I wasn’t pleased, though. Edden sent him to pick me up because he had known I couldn’t bully him.

      I hated Mondays.

       Two

      The gray stone of the FIB tower caught the late afternoon sun as we parked in one of the reserved slots right in front of the building. The street was busy, and Glenn stiffly escorted me and my fish in through the front door. Tiny blisters between his neck and collar were already starting to show a sore-looking pink against his dark skin.

      Jenks noticed my eyes on them and snorted. “Looks like Mr. FIB Detective is sensitive to pixy dust,” he whispered. “It’s going to run through his lymphatic system. He’s going to be itching in places he didn’t know he had.”

      “Really?” I asked, appalled. Usually you only itched where the dust hit. Glenn was in for twenty-four hours of pure torture.

      “Yeah, he won’t be trapping a pixy in a car again.”

      But I thought I heard a tinge of guilt in his voice, and he wasn’t humming his victory song about daisies and steel glinting red in the moonlight, either. My steps faltered before crossing the FIB emblem inlaid in the lobby floor. I wasn’t superstitious—apart from when it might save my life—but I was entering what was generally humans-only territory. I didn’t like being a minority.

      The sporadic conversation and clatter of keyboards remind me of my old job with the I.S., and my shoulders eased. Justice’s wheels were greased with paper and fueled by quick feet on the streets. Whether the feet were human or Inderlander was irrelevant. At least to me.

      The FIB had been created to take the place of both local and federal authorities after the Turn. On paper, the FIB had been enacted to help protect the remaining humans from the—ah—more aggressive Inderlanders, generally the vamps and Weres. The reality was, dissolving the old law structure had been a paranoiac attempt to keep us Inderlanders out of law enforcement.

      Yeah. Right. The out-of-the-closet, out-of-work Inderland police and Federal agents had simply started their own bureau, the I.S. After forty years the FIB was hopelessly outclassed, taking steady abuse from the I.S. as they both tried to keep tabs on Cincinnati’s varied citizens, the I.S. taking the supernatural stuff the FIB couldn’t.

      As I followed Glenn to the back, I shifted the canister to hide my left wrist. Not many people would recognize the small circular scar on the underside of my wrist as a demon mark, but I preferred to err on the side of caution. Neither the FIB nor the I.S. knew I had been involved in the demon-induced incident that trashed the university’s ancient-book locker last spring, and I’d just as soon keep it that way. It had been sent to kill me, but it ultimately saved my life. I’d wear the mark until I found a way to pay the demon back.

      Glenn wove between the desks past the lobby, and my eyebrows rose in that not a single officer made one ribald comment about a redhead in leather. But next to the screaming prostitute with purple hair and a glow-in-the-dark chain running from her nose to somewhere under her shirt, we were probably invisible.

      I glanced at the shuttered windows of Edden’s office as we passed, waving at Rose, his assistant. Her face flashed red as she pretended to ignore me, and I sniffed. I was used to such slights, but it was still irritating. The rivalry between the FIB and the I.S. was long-standing. That I didn’t work for the I.S. anymore didn’t seem to matter. Then again, it could be she simply didn’t like witches.

      I breathed easier when we left the front behind and entered a sterile fluorescent-lit hallway. Glenn, too, relaxed into a slower pace. I could feel the office politics flowing behind us like unseen currents but was too dispirited to care. We passed an empty meeting room, my eyes going to the huge dry-marker board where the week’s most pressing crimes were plastered. Pushing out the usual human-stalked-by-vamp crimes was a list of names. I felt ill as my eyes dropped. We were walking too fast to read them, but I knew what they had to be. I’d been following the papers just like everyone else.

      “Morgan!” shouted a familiar voice, and I spun, my boots squeaking on the gray tile.

      It was Edden, his squat silhouette hastening down the hallway toward us, arms swinging. Immediately I felt better.

      “Slugs take it,” Jenks muttered. “Rache, I’m outta here. I’ll see you at home.”

      “Stay put,” I said, amused at the pixy’s grudge. “And if you say one foul word to Edden, I’ll Amdro your stump.”

      Glenn snickered, and it was probably just as well I couldn’t hear what Jenks muttered.

      Edden was an ex-Navy SEAL and looked it, keeping his hair regulation short, his khaki pants creased, and his body under his starched white shirt honed. Though his thick shock of straight hair was black, his mustache