One of the great joys in writing is the other writers you meet along the way. I’m so excited for this blog cross over with D.H. Willison (as a huge fangirl of Harpyness is Only Skin Deep which is one of my favorite books of 2020 which if you haven’t read the 2020 Self Published Fantasy Blog Off entrant, you should get on that right now. Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You can follow D.H. on Goodreads, facebook, and twitter!
And when you do read Harpyness is Only Skin Deep, let me know, because I need to talk to more people about Rinloh (she’s my favorite)
In all seriousness, thank you so much, D.H. for joining me in celebrating the release of Mark of the Void. Best of luck in SPFBO, we’re all rooting for you!
Now without further ado. While Iris and Adrian are solving cases in Mark of the Void, the agents Kirk were on a different sort of adventure……..
Portals and Prosecutables
“Why are we on portal duty again?” Agent Justin Kirk leaned over the center console flicking through the case file his wife just handed him. “And why Bakersfield of all places?”
Agent Penelope Kirk checked her glamour in the rearview mirror. Her glamour held, no fangs in sight. Good, it only takes one slip up to have to call in the memory wipers, and that was a hassle she did not want again.
“We go where the Syndicate sends us,” Penelope muttered.
Justin flipped to the next case, reading aloud in his best concerned parent voice, “My daughter started acting strange when she left for college. Come on, people, this is college! What do they think happens there?”
“But in this case, you have to admit they are correct, dear. Being replaced by an alien is not a part of the normal college experience… unless you went to New Mexico State, but that’s beside the point.”
“Yes, yes, but it makes sifting through all this a nightmare. Hundreds of reports of people acting strange, and we have to try to correlate them with portal abnormalities, and then again to these ridiculous advertisements.”
“I have great confidence in your sleuthing abilities, dear.”
“You mean you’d rather drive than sort through files.”
“It means I trust your ability to read more than your ability to drive a manual.”
He was the brains of the operation; she was the brawn. He played with gadgets and doohickeys, she played with engines and punching bags. Two hundred years together, their partnership in and out of the field never floundered because they understood that simple principle.
Normally Penelope acted as the driver and architect of distraction. She’d wield her glamour to keep the innocent away while Justin and the shifter part of their trio tracked dangerous preternatural beings across the country.
With Williams on medical leave, the sprites were stuck investigating silly human after silly human acting “not quite right.” To Penelope, it was just another day at the office. For the unsuspecting non-human shyster, it would be a day to remember.
“King Arthur’s Pole, The Leather Lounge, The Kinky Codpiece,” Justin read off the list of location sites where the known portal abnormalities had been detected, “Fantasy Palace? For glamour’s sake, P, are we going to strip clubs?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Portals, portals, portals, what is this world coming to?”
“Not so much what the world is coming to, it's where they’re going,” P laughed. Justin had read quotes from the last pair of agents to work on the case. The humans claimed they were looking for adventure. “Can you imagine thinking this is the difficult dimension. I swear humans just get dumber the closer their technology gets to magic.”
“Adrian’s pet doesn’t seem that stupid,” Justin remarked.
“She’s the dumbest of them all,” P said, “She mated Adrian. She could do so much better than bark boy.”
“Eh, that’s what my parents said about you.”
“They did not. Your parents love me after I helped them secure a hotel room at the World’s Fair.” P turned the blinker on. They were nearing their destination but the windy roads were ridiculous.
“P, we talked about this. Having a room in that hotel during the Chicago’s World Fair isn’t something to brag about.”
P rolled her eyes and stole a glance at her husband, “They lived, didn’t they? Now, portals.”
“Why are we on this case again? This screams Od-squad.” Justin whined. Any case he didn’t want he claimed belonged to the Outer Dimensional Abnormalities, Preternatural Apprehensions and Warnings Squad, or Human Augmentations and Memories Squads.
Justin flipped through more pages of the folder, “I mean come on. Did you see the advertisement’s these guys are using for lures? Ultimate LARPING?”
“Huh the what?” P asked.
“Live Action Role Playing,” Justin explained, “You know like when we saw all the humans dressed as fairies when we investigated the fairies using a Renaissance Faire to swap babies for changelings?”
P suppressed a snarl, “Sprites do not all have wings and even if we did, mine would not be pink.”
***
The first portal was a bust, as was the second.
“Let’s forget the passive surveillance for this last one, and just go in. We go in, pose as a potential client, see what happens.
Justin shot Penelope a suspicious glance. “And by we, you mean me, right?”
“I suppose I could pose as an ‘entertainer,’” she said, checking her glamour in the rearview mirror. Still good, no fangs.
Justin sighed. “I’ll go.”
“You have your paper?” Penelope asked.
Justin held up the printed screenshot from the website, “Now to look like a… LARPer.”
“What does a LARPer even look like?” Penelope asked, flipping through the case folder, “Oh, this. LARPers look like this missing guy.”
“Ooof. Do I have to glamour myself to look like this guy? No one would be intimidated by this.”
Penelope bit back a remark that Justin couldn’t intimidate anyone in his usual glamours. Her husband was many things, but the big warrior type was not one of them. It usually worked to her favor though, while hunting the most dangerous criminals on the Syndicate’s Most Wanted List, the really dumb ones focused their attention on the shifter. The sort of smart ones focused on her. Only the really clever ones thought Justin could pose them any harm.
Justin released his glamour from his hands. He squinted at the picture of the missing human again before squeezing them shut. Justin grumbled, swirling his magic around his body. The luminescent sparks left his fingertips and latticed from his shoes until they reached his head, enveloping him in the visage of a stereotypical basement-dwelling human man.
“I do love a beer gut on you.”
“Let’s just get this over with, okay?” Justin tugged at a faded black t-shirt with a wildly inaccurate looking griffin emblazoned with the name of the hit video game, Fantastic Worlds.
He pulled out a boxy metallic device. Penelope cringed, she hated the Dimensional, Ethereal Abnormalities Detector aka the DEAD. Using tech to do what rightly belonged in the realm of magic was flat wrong.
“You remember how to work this thing?”
Penelope grimaced. “What could possibly happen in the five minutes that you are inside?”
Justin punched buttons sparking the metal device to life. A small parabolic antenna spun in slow circles while the joystick beeped.
“Maybe I should go in as the nerd and you can work the DEAD.”
“Okay, so if I’m the Dimension Dealer and I ask you about your LARP experience you’d say….”
Penelope grabbed the DEAD from her husband, “Fine, I’ll work the doohickey.”
“Don’t forget this one,” Justin pulled another gadget from his pack, “With Williams off boffing the void, we need to keep an eye out for non-humans.”
“Ugh, not the EIEIO.”
“No, the BINGO, Biological Indicator Non-Global Osteolocator. We’re looking for bone-in human replacements.”
“Why do all your gadgets have names that make no sense?”
Justin grinned at her, the expression was gross on the face he’d assumed.
“Let’s just get this over with.”
Justin stepped out of a van in the very empty parking lot of the Unicorn Firehouse strip club, crumpled screen print in hand. The DEAD monitor had shown a portal generator in the building earlier, but it wasn’t active at the moment.
“Stop stalling, and get in there, ya big baby,” she said, giving Justin a solid slap on the ass.
“I really--” Justin was cut off by a bark from the BINGO unit.
“Freaking techno feys,” Penelope muttered, switching from the DEAD to the BINGO to search out the target. An aging blue hatchback pulled into the parking lot, and a cosplay enthusiast walked past the van. With a minor difference to typical cosplay. This was a green-skinned alien disguising themselves as human.
“Bingo.”
