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CHAPTER 19


On the way home I had a layover in my old stomping grounds of Seattle.

It was tempting to just go to Saury and get some good sushi, but there was one other avenue of investigation into the mava that I had not pursued yet.

The night club was in a bad part of town. It was an ugly brick building with no signage. There was a big metal door, and when you knocked on it, the bouncer looked at you through a slit. The vision slit was about a foot and a half higher than I was tall, which would be your first clue this wasn’t a normal club.

I knocked and got eyes.

“What’s password?” The bouncer had a very deep voice.

“Party, party all night long,” I said, trying not to sigh. “Party little Princess ’til the break of dawn. Shake your little groove thing, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shake your little groove thing, Princess Shallala.”

“You gots do dance too. Princess says you gots do the dance when you says the password!”

“I’ll slip you twenty bucks if I can skip the dance part.” There weren’t any witnesses, but I had my pride. “Just tell Shallala I did it.”

“Deal.”

I stuck the money through the hole and the door opened. The bouncer was a troll. Trolls make good bouncers. As tough as my friend Decay is, he had nothing on this guy. Shifty bastards though. He’d probably spend that twenty on porn.

At night there would be human customers and human employees and the Fey servants would hide, and Shallala would put on a glamour and mingle. But during the day, there were no humans inside. There was movement in the shadows, but any Fey creatures who were here must have smelled that I was a Hunter and were hiding.

“Princess in her dressing room.” The troll pointed.

I knocked on that door and she yelled for me to come in. She was at a table, in front of a mirror, putting makeup on.

Shallala wasn’t using glamour.

“Aaagh!” I yelled, turning my face away. “For God’s sake, Shallala! Glamour or something!”

Royal Fey weren’t beautiful, to humans, in their natural form. Quite the opposite. Their actual form was utterly alien. Truly “different” in a horrible and terrifying way. I had no question they were from another dimension or planet. Whatever they were, the Fey weren’t saying.

“Like, you humans look just as bad to us!” Shallala said, but when I turned back she was glamoured. “I’m all, like, ‘grody’ all day surrounded by monkeys, you know. Gross!”

And this was why I had not bothered to see if the Fey knew anything. If there was a Fey out there who wasn’t insane or an asshole, I had not met them yet.

“Like, what now, Chadwick? I’m getting ready to go out!”

I was apparently looking into her vanity mirror. She was now illusioned as a naked and beautiful blonde human female. Yeah. Right. Once you see Fey-ugly, it’s one of those things makes you wish there was a brain scrub. She might look like a supermodel now, but I could still only see the Fey.

“We’ve got a situation.”

“Again?” Shallala said. “You had a situation here before. I, like, totally had to save the day for you.”

“This is a bit different,” I said. “Are you aware that Old Ones leave larva behind on planets?”

“Shushukanala,” Shallala said, shrugging and continuing to put on makeup. I don’t know why she felt the need. The glamour covered it. “Gag me with a spoon, human. Like, everybody knows that. How dumb face can you be? They’re more like big stupid eggs. The eggs are asleep, like forever since they’re totally immortal, until, like, wakey wakey, and then boom! I just ate your stupid planet, losers.”

“What causes them to ‘wakey wakey’?”

“Usually by, like, food being around and, like, people being dumb butts and using Old One magic. Like necromancy and stuff. Depends on how much, like, food and worshippers are around,” Shallala said, shrugging and continuing to trowel on makeup. “Blood sacrifices. Whatever.”

“What if they had, like, a totally very-into-magic entire city over them?” I asked. Shit, fucking insidious Fey magic! “With, like, lots of food and plenty of worshippers?”

“Not long, then. We were, like, totally killing them before you humans stole fire. Fey courts always kill them as soon as we find them. ’Cause they’re, like, totally grody and if they get to adult they’re, like, impossible to kill. Like, you got to totally kill them when they’re young, or sucks to be you! Wait…” She stopped putting on makeup and actually looked at me, suspiciously. “Like, how come you’re asking?”

“There’s, like, one under New Orleans.”

“What?” she screamed, her glamour suddenly dropping. Fey-ugly again and clearly upset. The makeup goop was clear on the gigantic Fey bug-eyes and it was…wrong. “No way! How big is it?”

“It’s, like, about two hundred meters long. Is that bad?”

“How big is that? What’s that in real words? The metric system is lame! Tell me it’s little. Like the size of a car.”

“I don’t know in your terms.” Did Fey use the inch pattern? Never checked that at Oxford. “But more like the size of a high school football stadium. Including the bleachers.”

“There’s never been one on earth even close to that big! How did you stupid humies let one grow that big? That’s like practically adult!” She screamed again, starting to put her makeup away. She still hadn’t reglamoured. I think she was panicking. “Do you know what one of those does when it grows up? I’ve got to go. Nice planet you had here. Now we’re going to have to find a new one! That’s, like, what we get for letting you stupid primates try to run things!”

This thing scared the crap out of a Fey princess who could probably level an SRT without breaking a sweat.

“Don’t worry. We’re going to handle it…What are you doing?”

“Looking for my suitcase! I’ve, like, gotta pack!”

“We could use your help. There’s a clause in the contract—”

“Stick the contract up your big dumb butt! Try an’ enforce it after your planet blows up!”

She had the troll escort me out.

* * *

Frandsen had a lot of stuff. Shitloads of stuff. Charts. Plats. Pages that were just columns of numbers. Early computer printouts. I hoped somebody would understand it, I sure as hell didn’t.

The next question was what to do with it. This wasn’t MHI level; this was MCB, but I wasn’t even sure SRT could handle it. The last time a mava was attacked it wiped out a sepoy regiment. Before that, it was five thousand crack Chinese soldiers. What did the MCB do in situations like that, call the DOD? We were going to need some serious firepower. Air strikes. Napalm. If it hatched, Katy Bar the Door.

We had to at least inform MCB. Seriously inform them as in formally and full up. Write a report, submit it to DC. I’d just cost them millions of dollars, so why would they believe evidence I’d gathered from a discredited crackpot? That was going to go over like a lead balloon.

It was a long flight back. I pored over what I could understand of all the geology gobbledygook and considered how to kill the thing, preferably without digging up the Superdome. Pump holy water in through the drill? Could you do that?

I have a real hard time admitting when I’m in over my head, but as soon as I landed, I had to swallow my pride and call Earl Harbinger for help.

* * *

Ray Shackleford was the one who made MHI’s case concerning the danger posed by the mava directly to MCB Director Wagner. Even though I was the one who had done most of the research, I stayed in New Orleans. As far as Ray’s presentation went, that Hunter who had just sued them for millions of dollars didn’t exist. Chad who? Sorry, Director, don’t know the guy. He sounds like an asshole.

Unfortunately, Special Agent Campbell also attended the meeting. His position was that there had not been a kifo outbreak all summer. In fact, the last time one had been seen had been when Agent Robinson had lost his life. MCB New Orleans’ official stance was that the creature had probably gone back to sleep, the idea that it was actually a larval Old One was laughably absurd, and any operation sufficient to destroy it would pose too much risk of exposure.

We’d done our homework and come up with a plan that would allow us to bring a maximum amount of firepower with a minimal number of witnesses. We simply needed MCB’s permission, oh…and the whole Marine Corps waiting nearby, in case things got out of hand, would be nice. That was a hard sell.

Trying to convince them that the real reason New Orleans was such a supernatural hotspot was because of this entity’s true nature, and thus worth the risk to attack it directly, was a harder sell.

In the end Campbell wanted to pass the buck. He was more worried about the very real chance of witnesses than the tiny off-chance that the mava was a world ender waiting to bloom. New Orleans had been relatively quiet for months, the Select Committee was off his back, and Director Wagner wanted to keep it that way. They would conduct their own investigation into the threat…Of course, under the new oversight rules that investigation might take “quite some time.”

Of course, Ray wanted to know what “quite some time” meant.

Sadly, since their recent lawsuit, the MCB was revamping their policy and procedures concerning nonimmediate supernatural threat assessments. Once the new policies were in place, then they would investigate this matter accordingly. If things heated up before then, the MCB would “reassess the situation.” In other words it was, “permission denied. Thank you very much, Mr. Shackleford. You can show yourself out.”

* * *

Hoodoo Squad and Team Happy Face had been waiting around the team shack for word from Ray. After he called, everybody who had gotten their hopes up that the MCB would do the right thing for once was pissed.

Earl waited for the anger to die down before making an announcement.

“As long as that thing is down there, innocent folks are gonna keep on dying. Fuck the MCB. There’s too much at stake. We’re gonna put this town right once and for all, even if we have to do it ourselves.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” I asked.

“I am. We’ve made a plan. Now we’ve got a lot to do to get it ready. Let’s get to work.”



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Framed