To have a human criminal kingpin who was also a member of the Hundred was rather unnerving. To have him in partnership with a demon lord was alarming. I wondered how many cops, judges, and politicians he owned. But if I could expose him to the Ten, it wouldn’t matter. The Magi ignored laws when it suited them, and enforced their own rules, whether written or not.
Of course, none of the evidence I had compiled was useable. If anyone in authority even knew I had the ability to search bank records the way I had, I’d either be dead or serving a life sentence in Antarctica. I didn’t even tell Kirsten about that talent. She wasn’t terribly computer savvy, and although she knew my magik allowed me to access the datanet without a computer, I didn’t tell her about the banks and corporate firewalls.
It was late afternoon, and I had spent most of the day inside the datanet. I wrote up a quick report for Whittaker and Justus Benning and shipped it off, then went looking for Kirsten.
I found her in her laboratory—a concrete building in the backyard—mixing potions and spelling charms to sell through her store.
“There you are,” she said with a smile. “I wondered if you’d ever pull your head out of that computer.”
“I’m starving. Buy you dinner?”
“Sounds good to me. Where are we going?”
“Annapolis for crabs?”
“You do love me.”
The nice thing about picking crabs is you don’t have to get dressed up. We hopped on our bikes and headed south along the coast. Motorcycles were too weird to turn into flying machines, but I was able to install magikal gyroscopic stabilizers in them. That made them almost impossible to tip over and much safer.
Annapolis had been hit hard by the rising ocean water. The old tourist area downtown was gone, and the new buildings were built on stilts high above the marinas. Our go-to place, though, was one that Kirsten’s father turned us onto when we were kids, and he learned of the restaurant from his father. It was a family-run business south of town on one of the Chesapeake’s many inlets, with butcher-paper-covered trestle tables outside overlooking the water, and large pitchers of cold beer.
The day’s offerings—fresh fish, oysters, and blue crabs—were posted on a chalkboard. A young woman wearing a hygienic mask came to our table and took our order. After that, she made two trips to our table, once with the beer, and the second time she dumped a bucket of steamed crabs on the table, set down a bowl of hush puppies, and left us to it.
We had decimated half of the bucket when my phone rang.
“Ignore it,” Kirsten said.
I glanced at the number and began frantically wiping my hands, which were covered with spices and crab bits.
“James.”
“Sorry to call on your day off,” Whittaker said without a trace of regret in his voice, “but we have an incident involving multiple Rifters.” He gave me an address southeast of Baltimore and as close to Annapolis as it was to my home in Baltimore.
“I’m in Annapolis,” I told him. “It’s going to take me at least half an hour to get there.”
“I’ll let Novak know. Make sure you don’t try to go through Essex. There’s a food riot going on there, and we’ve got it blocked off.” Essex was a poor area with a history of pollution dumping. At the same time that people such as Kirsten and me were dining on fresh crabs, a few miles away people scraped to afford yeast and soy.
“So much for our quiet dinner out,” Kirsten said.
I tossed her my credit card, drained my beer, and said, “Sorry. Finish them off, or take them home. Be careful, okay?”
“You be careful. Are you armed and armored?” she asked.
“Yes, and yes. In my saddle bags.”
I hurried out to where we’d parked our bikes, shrugging on my jacket as I went. I pulled on my helmet, kicked the engine to life, and rode out.
Once I reached the highway, I triggered the cop lights and the siren, then punched the bike up over a hundred.
The location Whittaker had provided was a waterfront bar—the Middle River Boat House. The working-class area had been subject to Rift openings in the past, so I passed through a number of streets with old boarded-up or half-demolished houses and shops.
The main Rifters who interacted with humans were demons, vampires, shifters, and Fae. The Arcane Division of the Mid-Atlantic Metropolitan Police were charged with holding the line between the Rifters and a human population, most of whom the Rifters considered prey.
The marshy areas near the Bay were home to a number of predators that had crossed the Rift and carved out new roles in the ecosystem. Since the Rift first opened, the Chesapeake Bay and its shores had been inhabited by non-Earth creatures. The common term for most of them was ‘monster.’ Like the purple pizza-trash thing, though he was intelligent. No one seemed to know where they came from. A lot of them were simply animals from different worlds.
The afternoon’s entertainment at the bar involved a concert with three bands. Whittaker’s brief synopsis said a biker gang had gotten into a fight with a group of vampires.
The sun was setting and an ambulance was leaving when I pulled into the parking lot. The colors on the water were pretty, and I knew it would be the same where Kirsten was finishing off my share of the crabs. There were a lot of cop cars and three more ambulances, not to mention at least thirty motorcycles. I showed my ID to a uniform and left my bike where several cop cars were parked. Then I went looking for Lieutenant Kelley, the officer in charge, according to the uniformed cop.
Around the back on the deck, I found ample amounts of bright red human blood and dark maroon vampire blood. At first
