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  “The Inside Man”

  A Jane True Short Story

  Nicole Peeler

  When someone comes into your office and tells you that small towns in the Midwest have gone dull, you don’t rush out with the cavalry.

  But when the biggest, meanest supernatural boss in Chicago knocks at your office door, with the same complaint . . .

  Well, then you take notice. It’s either that or risk losing an appendage.

  Which is how I, Capitola Jones, found myself in a football field in the middle of nowhere, fighting for my soul and the souls of those I loved.

  And here I thought the worst thing to be found out in the country were cow pies and rednecks.

  They don’t tell you about the killer clowns.

  —

  EARLIER IN THE week, the assignment had sounded like a joke, even though the guy asking us to do him a “favor” was the least funny person I could imagine.

  “So we’re supposed to drive south and find out what makes country towns so boring?”

  The man across from me tore his gaze from my breasts to stare at my Afro, then looked back at my breasts, only to return to my Afro. Once again, the hair won. I wear it natural, and as big as I can make it. It’s sort of my trademark.

  “If you want to put it like that, sure,” said Vince the Shark, pulling on his goatee with one of his small hands. Those hands were attached to short arms, which were attached to a lion’s body. His face, however, was human enough to leer at me.

  But while Vince the Shark looked like something from Dungeons & Dragons and talked like a mobster off The Simpsons, he was no cartoon character. A pureblooded manticore with tremendous power, he had tiny arms that hadn’t stopped him from carving out for himself a large chunk of one of our most lawless cities, Chicago, using brutal force and extreme cunning.

  I stayed well off his grid for a lot of reasons, the main one being that Vince was a psychopath. So to say I was displeased at his sitting in my office with me and my business partners, Moo and Shar, was the understatement of the year.

  “So you believe some external force has made your sister . . . dull?” Moo’s voice was calm, as always. The daughter of a human woman and an Alfar who’d set himself up as an Egyptian god, Moo had been trained from birth to be his goddess-consort.

  Which meant she had lots of daddy issues but great comportment.

  “My sister was never a firecracker, but she was never like this. Something changed her.” Vince’s lion shoulders shrugged like a Mafia heavy, his jowly human face giving me a “What are ya gonna do?” look.

  “Is she like you? Powerful?” Shar asked, her usually lush voice uncommonly monotone. Half succubus, my friend had tuned her mojo to zero. Vince had that effect on the ladies.

  “She’s my half sister. Like you and your friends, she’s got a human mother.”

  I wondered what it would be like to mate with a manticore and decided that was not something I wanted to pursue, even mentally.

  Vince also didn’t answer my question.

  “Moo here is a halfling, and she could tear this building off of its foundations,” I said. My friend acknowledged what I’d said with an elegant nod of her head before settling back into her listening pose, her ebony flesh and long braids motionless as that of a statue.

  Victor grimaced, his approximation of a smile, and wheezed out a laugh.

  “True, but my sister’s a more typical halfling than are you ladies. To be honest, she’s not gotta lot going for her in any category, and she’s a total dud when it comes to power—might as well be a fucking human. But she’s family, so I like to keep an eye on her.”

  “That’s very nice of you,” I said drily, thinking of Don Vito Corleone.

  “She’s my sister.” Vince gave another wise guy shrug. “But the last time I spoke to her, she wasn’t right. So I sent someone to check on her. They brought her here, to me. She’s not the same person she was.”

  “In what way?” Moo asked.

  For the first time Vince’s face expressed an emotion other than that of a made-for-TV-movie caricature. Genuine grief tightened his jaw and furrowed his brow.

  “She walks and she talks, but she’s not . . . there. It’s like she’s dead inside. Her husband and children, they are the same. I sent out my boys to find out what happened. The whole town is like this. And there is a chain of towns, running to the East Border.”

  Vince didn’t mean Indiana, he meant the border where the neighboring, Alfar-controlled lands started. He couldn’t cross that line, so we couldn’t know if the same thing was happening in other states.

  “So what do you want us to do?” I asked, cutting to the chase.

  “I want you to investigate. I don’t often ask for help,” Vince said. It felt more like a threat than an admission, however. “But I’ve sent dozens of my own people out there, and they have found nothing. Or . . .”

  “Or what?” I asked, although I knew Vince was, undoubtedly, going to drop the other shoe.

  “Or they didn’t come back at all.”

  I sighed. “Great. So your people keep disappearing, and you want us to investigate?”

  Vince gave me a toothy grin. “You are specialists at this sort of thing, are you not?”

  Victims of our own success, I realized. We’d started Triptych intending to be simple private investigators for the supernatural community, but we’d had a few cases that should have been straightforward veer wildly off course into shitballs-crazy territory.

  Soon enough, we’d earned a reputation for dealing with the weird.

  I gave Vince a curt nod. “Fine. But if your people couldn’t discover anything, what are we supposed to do?”

  “Simple. Succeed where they failed. Find out what did this to my sister.”

  At that point, I looked over at Moo, who gave me a small nod, then at Shar, who shrugged. They were acknowledging what I already knew—that we were going to take this case whether we wanted to or not.

  Vince wasn’t a man who took no for an answer.

  “All right, Vince. Give us the facts. What’s your sister told you?”

  “Nothing. She can’t remember anything. But my boys have been digging, like I said. They know there was something that happened all at once. An event. We just don’t know what.”

  “Then how do you know . . .” began Moo. Victor didn’t let her finish.

  “We have sources, who talked about getting called.”

  “Like a phone call?” I said.

  Vince shot me a Look. I wasn’t easily cowed but I felt that Look like the edge of a razor to the thin skin over my throat.

  “Who are your sources?” asked Shar, piping up to come to my rescue.

  Vince shuffled, obviously uncomfortable. It took me a second to recognize that he was scared, and so not used to being scared he didn’t know how to express it. But whatever he’d heard or seen about this “event” freaked him right out.

  “In each location there was at least one person who was physically immobile. One guy was in traction with a broken neck. Another lady was so fat, she’d have to take a wall out of her house to leave. People like that, who could not physically leave their premises, told us what happened. They also told us they tried.”

  “Tried to what?” I asked. Vince’s lack of detail was frustrating. I knew he was a badass, used to getting anything he wanted done without question, but we needed someth
ing, anything, to investigate this farce.

  “They tried to follow this . . . call. They say they suddenly knew they had to be somewhere. And they did try, even though there was no way they could. The guy in traction nearly killed himself, and the fat lady actually clawed at her walls with a hammer.”

  “A really strong glamour could call people like that,” I said. I really wanted this to be a normal case.

  This wasn’t going to be a normal case.

  Vince’s lips stretched around his three rows of teeth in a horrible grimace of pain. He truly grieved for his sister, psychopath or not.

  “My sister, even though I love her, she hates me. Or hated me. She hated everything I did, everything I worked for. She wanted nothing to do with me even though I was always generous. Now she doesn’t care. She let me move her into my house. Her and her family. She wouldn’t let me within fifteen feet of her children before. Now they are in my guest bedrooms, watching reality television. All day. Reality television.”

  We three marveled at that.

  “Okay,” I said, “we’ll look into this. But it’s going to cost you.” Vince may be psycho, but he also knew the value of appearing to be a good businessman.

  “I’ll pay,” he said. “Anything. Just find out what happened to my sister.”

  I perked up at the “anything.”

  “We have a deal,” I said, reaching out for his paw. “We need to know where you went and what you found out in each place, to try to anticipate where this ‘event’ will strike next.”

  Vince nodded, waving at one of his goons posted by the door. As we got to work, I hoped this case would be pretty open-and-shut—a siren with delusions of grandeur, or some wayward Alfar with a god complex.

  But while “anything” in the way of money goes a long way in my book, it didn’t take much in the way of facts to dent my confidence. Actually, all it took was a highlighted sentence in the notes of a flunky sent to investigate the event.

  The line read, “Fat lady heard music, like from a circus.”

  A circus?

  —

  “IS IT REALLY going to be this easy?” Shar asked, a pair of night scope binoculars obscuring her Middle Eastern features. I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of her peering through the window of our Jeep. She looked like Aladdin’s Jasmine had decided to become either a spy or a supervillain, what with her soft, rounded body encased in the leather catsuit she’d insisted on wearing.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  Moo grunted from the backseat, her power stretching out in her own version of radar. If anything used magic near us, she’d know. After all, Moo’s father may have been an asshole, but he did pass on to his daughter a tremendous amount of power.

  “It will come to this town,” Moo said, absentmindedly touching the map at her side. “Our event is predictable.”

  We had decided to call it “the event.” We weren’t sure if the fat lady was right, after all, in calling the event a circus.

  And I, for one, really didn’t want it to be a circus.

  “Every thirty-three miles,” Shar said, repeating the pattern we’d discovered when we’d studied Vince the Shark’s notes.

  “And Harmony is exactly thirty-three miles from the last site,” Moo said. I reached over for the binoculars, nudging Shar when she didn’t notice. After she’d handed them over, I took a look through them at Harmony. The town wasn’t much: a small main street with a few shops, two half-assed attempts at tiny strip malls, and a clustering of houses that might once have been grand. Well, grand-ish. There were more people than just this in the town, of course—farmers were scattered around in their houses across the countryside. From what we could make out from Vince’s notes, the “call” for the event seemed to affect people in a five-mile radius.

  “I’d raise shields,” I said to Moo, eyeing the clock on our dash, which read 11:30 p.m. The Alfar halfling rolled her eyes at me, but her power boomed out in a palpable barrier that brushed over my skin. Her shields were nigh on impenetrable when she put her back into it, so I wasn’t worried. Plus, we hadn’t seen any evidence of supernaturals being affected by the event. Not that the lack of supernatural victims really meant anything. After all, not a lot of supes went in for living in Podunk towns, so there may have been no supernatural creatures to victimize. Except for Vince’s sister, of course, but she was practically human.

  “So what are we going to do if it comes?” Shar asked. We’d not had much time to go over a plan. Vince wanted us on the case pronto, so we’d figured out the trajectory of the event as we drove south from Borealis. Then we spent the day driving, keeping our feelers out for anything or anyone with a lot of power and taking every possible route between Harmony and the town it had just attacked. That town was eerily quiet, its inhabitants shuffling around like asylum inmates on too much lithium.

  “I still don’t know how we could have missed anything,” I said grumpily. Moo’s sensors could feel if an incubus so much as got an erection within a hundred-mile radius. How could something capable of sucking the personality out of an entire town sneak past her?

  “They would have to be strong to hide from me,” Moo said, echoing my concerns.

  “You couldn’t have missed it,” Shar said. “So whatever this thing is, either it can fly or it can pop up out of the ground.”

  “Or it can apparate,” said Moo, and I shivered.

  Apparating, the ability to magically move objects or people, meant old magic, and old magic was the real reason we’d earned our reputation and ended up on Vince’s radar. Basically, the cases we’d solved that had made Triptych infamous had involved old magic. Old magic wasn’t elemental magic, like what my friends and I wielded. It was something older, something darker, and something a hell of a lot more powerful. We publicly attributed our success at dealing with cases that involved old magic to our teamwork and Moo’s Alfar power. But that wasn’t the whole truth.

  I looked mixed-race but, like my friends, I was really a half-ling—my mom was a nice Jewish human and my dad a nahual, or shape-shifter, whose human form looked like an African-American male. My genetic cocktail had given me a lovely complexion the color of demerara and fantastically huge hair, but very little elemental magic. Compared to Moo with her nuclear force, I was a Swiss army knife. But—and we kept this on the down low—my genes had given me something in exchange for my dud powers: immunity to old magic.

  I could face the biggest, baddest elemental being, one with power that could knock even Moo’s head off. But anything it sent at me would fizzle, like I had some kind of natural dampening field around me.

  That said, even though I was immune to old magic didn’t mean I wasn’t scared to death of the ancient creatures that wielded it. Especially because they tended to be huge, Godzilla-esque monsters. Being immune to their magic didn’t mean a hoot when one tore you apart limb from limb.

  “If it’s old magic, we’ll deal with it,” I said, sounding braver than I felt. “And our plan for tonight is reconnaissance. We need to find out what we’re dealing with. Don’t engage unless we have to.”

  “Have you ever heard of anything like what happened to those people?” Shar asked. The victims we’d run into hadn’t been overtly sick or anything. But they had no affect. Nothing we did raised anything but a polite, disinterested response—not even Shar flashing her boobs (her favorite trick) or Moo calling fire to dance in the air.

  “My people told stories about an ancient race of soul suckers. Creatures that would trap your soul, eating your memories like candy,” Moo said.

  I shuddered at that image. “Why memories?”

  “We are our memories. So much of who we are and who we think we are is created by how we interpret our lives. I suppose such a creature would eat our memories as a way of consuming our souls, bit by bit.”

  Shar whimpered, “Gross, Moo. Do these things really exist?”

  I watched Moo shrug in my rearview mirror. “I never encountered such a creature. And the e
vidence was never firsthand, so I do not know.” Moo fell silent for a bit, and when I looked in the rearview mirror again, she was wearing her thinking face. “All the stories did have one thing in common, though, when I think about it.”

  “And that is?”

  “Once a person’s soul was trapped, the only way to free them was to free the souls. Killing the one that had trapped it or destroying the vessel holding the soul would only destroy that which it contained.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Good to know. But we can’t rely on legends. We have to see what pops up— Holy shit!”

  That last part was screamed, as I jumped in the driver’s seat so high, I knocked my knee hard on the steering wheel.

  “What the fuck!” I shouted again, my skin crawling like I was covered in maggots. For in front of us stood my worst nightmare:

  A clown.

  He was right there, right in front of our car, with a white-painted face and red paint smeared around his eyes and mouth. He wore a big red wig and a green, blue, and yellow romper with white pom-poms flopping down the front.

  The red paint around his eyes emphasized the fact that they were a solid black that sucked in the light. They had no pupils, no iris, no sclera. Just an empty, eerie black.

  I screamed bloody fucking murder.

  I’m really only afraid of two things: my hair losing its volume, and clowns. I’ve always hated clowns. But who doesn’t? So I hadn’t made a big deal about the whole circus thing, as who in their right mind actually likes clowns? I assumed Moo and Shar were equally freaked out by all things circus and are equally loath to admit it.

  But I was the only one in that car freaking out; at least, I realized that about ten seconds after my last scream died in the air. Shar and Moo sat there watching the clown with impassive expressions as if pop-up clowns were totally normal in parking lots these days.

  “Moo, what is it?” I whispered, using my own sad little feelers to try to tell what we were dealing with. My magic came up with nothing, so I physically turned to my friend when she didn’t answer.