That brought Maven up short. “You don’t suppose that Old Man Duggan is trying for another underworld take over do you? And using a hellhound to accomplish his goals?”
Jake shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to say. I would have thought with his son dead as well some of his best soldiers, he wouldn’t have any strength left to try for a take over.”
“But a hellhound on the scent of an old debt would take care of a lot of underworld enemies, as well as put some serious fear into those who might try to oppose Duggan as lord of the underworld,” Avery offered.
“My thoughts, exactly,” Jake agreed.
“Wait, what?” Tasha interrupted.
“Hellhounds are supernatural. They, uh, collect debts.” Avery answered.
“They do more than that, my dear,” Maven spoke. “They collect the souls of those who owe a debt. A very specific debt. However, they also have to have a specific talisman of some kind, in order to trace the debtor.
“Now, we’ve got at least one hellhound unaccounted for as well as the talisman that would direct it to its targeted victim. That is more than enough cause for concern. If it is Duggan who in possession of it, and he plans to use it as you have suggested, then we need to put a stop to this immediately. Crime bosses are bad enough, but to have a bad Fae with a hellhound at his disposal as the top boss, well, may the seven heavens help us. Very well, then, Jake, I’ll let you get on with your investigation. Will you keep me updated? I’ll leave my phone on, call me day or night. And whatever resources you require, do not hesitate to ask.”
“Will the Council now be considered my client, or will I still be answering to Burly?”
Maven gave him a half smile. “Since Burly works under the sanction of the Council, you already work for us, technically. But I see no need to jumble the string of command that a change like that would surely bring. No, continue to report to Burly, as he has a vested interest in this matter, just include me in the loop.”
“Yes, lady. With your leave then?” Maven nodded.
Jake turned to Tasha, gripping her gently by both arms. “Will you be okay by yourself?” he asked softly. He was still angry, Tasha could tell, but she could also read the concern in his eyes.
She smiled up at him, touched by that concern. “Will I be having any unwelcomed visitors?”
Jake’s smile was feral. “No ma’am.”
Tasha suppressed the shiver that wanted to run down her spine. “Then I’m good. I’ll see ya when I see ya.”
Jake gave her a wink before looking over her shoulder at Avery with an unspoken question.
“I’ll see that she get home safely,” Avery offered.
“And we can continue this discussion at another time,” Jake said sternly, accompanied by an even sterner look.
“Oh goodie,” Tasha retorted, without blinking an eye.
“Yes Jake, I think I like her just fine,” Maven said before she turned and left.
Chapter 6
It had been two nights of little or no sleep followed by two days of work with no time for rest. Tasha was near the point of exhaustion. She also felt, well, odd. Not sick, not exactly, but she felt a restless sensation deep inside that radiated throughout her entire body, causing all of her limbs to twitch every now and again.
Towards the end of the workday, Tasha was seated at her desk, answering an email inquiry, struggling to stay focused when she heard the door chime, alerting her to that fact that the front door had opened. As she looked up to greet her visitor she noticed a man in a cheap, rumpled suit that did little to accentuate the positive or diminish the negative. Though not short, his suit made him appear shorter than what the measurement on the doorframe guide said he was. The suit also made him look fat, though, if his lean face was any indication, that was probably not correct either. Maybe the suit was a size too small, she couldn’t decide, but he definitely needed a makeover. And it was definitely meant to be a distraction, as she nearly missed the way his small, beady eyes where set to close together on his face, or the way his flat nose drew her eyes to his thin, chapped lips. Or how his greasy hair was combed over to cover a balding patch on the top of his head.
Tasha put on her friendly business face and stood to close the distance between her and the odd looking man.
“How may I assist you?
“Is, um, Jake Wolf in the office?” Tasha noticed how his eyes shifted about, taking in everything but not looking into her own.
“No, he’s out on business. Can I help you with anything?”
“I just have a few questions.”
“I will try to answer them as best as possible. Would you care to sit?”
The man shook his head no and instead of asking anything, stood there, looking about his surroundings. Tasha had learned from experience that sometimes potential clients weren’t sure where to begin, so she stood quietly, waiting on him.
“How many employees?”
“Two.”
Then the man finally looked at her and took her in, head to toe but not in a lascivious way, more like someone sizing up an opponent.
Tasha was a tall five foot ten. Her hair was long, almost to her waist and glossy black. Her eyes resembled the gray color of the storm clouds that had been filling the autumn sky for the past week. Her lips were prettily shaped and her skin resembled porcelain. She enjoyed physical exercise and her physique showed it but she still had the feminine curves to prove she was all woman.
As the man continued his appraisal, Tasha arched an eyebrow and she entwined her long, slender fingers together in an act of practiced patience. She was on the verge of being annoyed, however his behavior piqued her interest somewhat. He was a curious study for sure, but the longer his appraisal lasted, the less curious she became and the more uncomfortable he made her feel. Before she could put voice to any further questions, he spun on his heal and purposefully walked out the door. Unnerved by his behavior, Tasha followed him to the door and observed him as far as she could without opening the office’s street entrance. Only after he suspiciously ducked around the corner of a neighboring building did she decide to lock the front door and scurry towards the bowels of the store front office.
Jake had once told her that their office had originally been a pawnshop. Jake’s personal office had been the ultra secure cashier’s cage, with rebar reinforcements and steal supports and concrete built into the walls. Cell service was horrible in there. However it made a wonderful make shift panic room, which she had used as such exactly once since her employ with Jake, but it was to his office where she headed, entered the office and closed and locked the door. The strange man and his even stranger behavior had, quite frankly, given her the creeps. She wasn’t afraid, exactly, but she had felt a sudden compulsion to seek the refuge of the safest room in the office.
She plopped down in Jake’s large, comfortably padded, desk chair and propped her feet up on Jake’s big, wooden desk, seeking comfort in normalcy. She folded her hands over her stomach and was trying to decide weather or not she should bother Jake in regards to her bizarre visitor when the private line rang.
She picked up the receiver. “Hello.”
“You sitting on the phone waiting for it to ring?”
“Something like that. Actually, I was just wondering if I should call you or not.” She told him about the peculiar man.
Jake did not speak for a moment but finally answered. “Yeah, that is a little out of the ordinary. What does your gut say?”
Jake was a huge proponent of using the gut as a means of deliberating any possible action or reaction.
“My gut says that the guy’s a creep. I’ve locked myself in your office.”
Jake chuckled. “That bad? Did you see him walk away, or did he leave by vehicle?”
“He walked down the block, crossed the street and I lost him behind the Credit Union.”
“Have you locked up?”
“Yep.”
“Good. Want to get out?”<
br />
Tasha narrowed her eyes. She knew a set up when she heard one. “What am I going to be doing?”
“Oh, just take a little drive, do a little sight seeing.”
“Okay,” she said hesitantly. “Where to?”
“Go change, we’re going to be out in the field. I mean, literally, a field. Meet me out at the casino, I’ll pick you up there.”
“Then where?”
Jake sighed. “I need you to come out to Old Man Duggan’s place.”
Tasha paused before intoning sarcastically. “Uh, that may put me in danger. We are talkin about a dangerous crime lord here.”
“Don’t be a smart ass,” Jake growled and then sighed, slightly exasperated. “Look, I’ve been snooping around all yesterday, last night and all day today. I have come up with exactly zero evidence that Duggan was the intended buyer of those hellhounds. What’s worse, I can’t find the damn hound. Those things are more than bad news. Only a fool would think they could actually control one.”
“Well, that explains why you sound so tired. Jake, you’ve barely recovered from your injuries and you haven’t slept since. No wonder you can’t find anything. Even supernatural beings need sleep every now and again.”
“I don’t have time. I need to find that hound.”
“I know, Jake. I’ll help, but I don’t know what good I’ll be. I mean, after all, you’re the big, bad werewolf, with bionic hearing and super sniffer! You are a natural born hunter. I am just a mere mortal,” she teased.
“Yeah, well, mere mortal or not, you see things I don’t. Those hunches you have at least get me to thinking differently, and that gets me pointed in the right direction. Sometimes I rely too much on my immortality, my superior strength and senses. And I miss the most obvious things.”
“Awe, I complete you,” she laughed.
He snorted on the other end of the line. “Yeah, somethin like that. Look, meet me in an hour, okay?”
“I’ll see you in an hour then.”
Chapter 7
Tasha didn’t pick up on the fact that she was being tailed until she pulled into the parking lot of the Tribal Casino. Normally, she would have caught on earlier. She blamed her fatigue for her failure.
She drove her little car to an out of the way area, pulling into a parking slot under a large oak tree, its brown leaves dropping like a gentle rain. She considered that the spot she had chosen may not have been ideal, considering that she was being followed, and again, proceeded to blame her lack of judgment on lack of sleep but decided to stick with the original spot.
She grabbed her leather coat out of the back seat of her car, casually checking around as she did so. A beat up van with large letters along the side declared it to belong to George’s Landscaping Service. The windows were tinted, so she couldn’t see who was inside, but whoever it was, was giving her the willies.
The phone she had tucked into her pocket vibrated. She pulled out the phone and read a text from Jake. He was wondering if she knew who was in the van. She didn’t look around but knew that Jake had to be near. A second text instructed her to meet him at Franklin’s.
Casually, she slung her jacket over her shoulder and strode into the casino. As she pulled the large glass door open to the aging establishment and stepped inside, she was hit with the smell of tobacco smoke and saw its fog hanging low over the semi dark gambling area. A single, faint, ding, ding, ding of a slot machine could be heard, but not much else. The bingo crowd would be in their bingo hall, but for the most part, the place was deserted at this hour. Wednesday afternoon was not a popular gaming time evidently.
Without hurry, Tasha ambled around this bank of machines and that, her eyes constanstly roaming, checking mirrors as she passed to check behind. The guy from the van had followed her in, but it wasn’t until she was about to stroll into Franklin’s that she could tell it was the strange man that had come into the office earlier that day.
The creepy feeling she had about him increased ten fold.
Tasha sat in her customary seat at the bar; the last seat at the end of the bar, next to the kitchen. Vince, the bartender, gave her a smile; not the warm one he usually extended her, but a more generic, this-is-the-smile-everyone-gets kind of smile. Tasha knew by that smile that business was not as usual. She cautiously glanced up into the mirror that was set behind the bar to see Mr. Creepy stride past the entrance of Franklin’s bar, pause but for a moment at the doorway, then continued on to finally halt in front of a slot machine not far from the door and pretended to gamble.
Buzz vibrated Tasha’s phone, which she had set on the bar top. It was a text from Vince this time; Jake’s in the back. Tasha tucked her phone into her front jeans pocket.
A young woman, Franklin’s niece and Tasha’s second oldest friend in River City, came in from the kitchen area, walked over and sat next to Tasha. She appeared to be about the same age a Tasha, which would make her thirty, give or take a year. She was dressed in business attire, as she was Franklin’s accountant, secretary, sales rep, product procurement, whatever it was that Franklin needed, she was it. “Tasha, I’m glad you could make it,” she greeted with her hand extended.
Tasha took her hand in a firm shake, and smiled, picking up on the play act. “Anytime Pauline. Franklin mentioned the other day that you had some forms for me to sign if I want to ever perform with him again?”
“Why yes I do.” Pauline winked. “Come on back and we’ll get them all signed and get you back on your way.”
She followed Pauline through the leather padded swing door, through the kitchen, past the office and out through the back door of Franklin’s establishment. “See ya Tash,” waved Pauline as she pulled the large, metal door shut.
Jake rotated his cell phone so that Tasha could see a picture. It was the man from the office and who had been following her. “This is the guy from the van,” Jake said matter of factly. “Look familiar?”
Tasha didn’t even ask how he had managed to obtain a picture of Mr. Creepy. She nodded. “Yep. He’s also the one who came in asking the random questions today.”
Jake nodded.
“Do you suppose he’s got anything to do with this hellhound business?”
Jake shrugged as he started to walk towards the employee parking lot. “Hard to say. We just got done with one case, got another on the books, as well as this hellhound situation. I’ve sent this picture to Avery, asking if he’s got any idea who it is. But right now, we’ve lost him, so lets get on to the business at hand.”
After reaching Jake’s truck, they headed out onto a two-lane highway that led into a remote area just outside of the city that was heavily wooded.
Tasha had questions, but she wasn’t sure how to ask them. “Jake, I, uh, well, this case.”
“What about it?”
“It’s not on the books.”
Jake rubbed at his eyes. “No, it’s not. Well, not officially anyway.”
“I’m wondering, how many other cases we work on that aren’t officially on the books?”
Jake tapped a thumb on the steering wheel, his jaw muscles flexing slightly in his silence.
“All right, I get it. I’m going to guess the times that you up and leave to do ‘errands’, what you’re really doing is working on an unofficial case.”
“Perhaps.”
“Don’t perhaps me Jacob Wolf. I’m not under any delusions. The amount of case work we do is okay for one person, but it’s not enough to keep the both of us busy, let alone be able to pay my salary as well as afford that fabulous office.”
“That office was cheep. I bought it years ago before downtown was a place people wanted to be instead of avoiding like the plague. I also own the buildings on either side of the office, as well as the garage at the end of our block. I’m what you might call a slum lord.”
“Stop it,” she interrupted. “I want to know what the real deal is.”
Jake sighed. “Tasha, you know when I was so upset about
you and Avery being at the warehouse? I wasn’t just worried about your safety. The more you know about, well, my world, the more dangerous life in general could be for you.”
“Ah yes, we’re finally getting around to that are we? So, what? I know about werewolves and now I know about the reality of magic and mages and fae. Big deal.”
“It is a big deal. We’ve spent centuries trying to keep our selves hidden from humans. In the past, humans have hunted us almost to extinction. As a result of that, some of the Elder Fae have a heavy dose of hatred for humans.”
“Maven, she’s an Elder Fae?”
“The Eldest. Well, in North America anyway.”
“Oh,” now she was beginning to understand the respect that bordered on reverence that everyone at the warehouse had shown her. “She mentioned something about me being tolerated.”
“Yes, and that’s a good thing. As early as fifty years ago, you would have been killed outright, no questions asked. But killings call for investigations, and we can’t have humans investigating Fae business.”
“Great. What about the memory thing?”
“As early as twenty years ago you would have had an accident that would have erased the memories of the last two years that you’ve been working for me. That could still happen, by the way.”
“But Maven said…”
“That’s the Lady Maven from here on out. At least in public, okay?”
Sigh. “Yes Jake.”
“For now, Maven can keep the council from giving you a mind wipe. Later the council can always vote to rescind that decision, but Maven has some considerable pull within the council. Just keep in mind that you don’t want to give these guys any reason for wanting to change their collective mind.”
“She mentioned something about meeting with the council?”
“That will be next week. It will be brutal. They will ask you all manner of questions, kind of feel you out, to see just what you’re all about. How that session goes will determine your status as merely tolerated or accepted.”
“Accepted means?”
“That you are in and it would be very difficult for anyone to bring up further discussion of mind wipes or even death in regards to you. To be considered Accepted can take years, but once you’re in, well, you’re in. Now, either way, you’d have to hold to the Rule of the Fae, but we’ll discuss that when we get there.”