It had to be weird to be an embed. He wore multiple identities, all “ordinary”—FBI agent, City of Portland, County Sheriff, even reporter, depending upon what was needed. An Embed could draw on the resources of the Hidden to help keep ordinary people in the dark. But that was as far as it went.
“Okay, fair enough,” I said. “We’ll get back to our work.”
“Good luck,” he said. “Really.”
He strode off, head down, hands in his trench coat.
A gust of wind blew. I shivered, and zipped up my biker jacket all the way.
“I could use some coffee and a donut,” I said to Tully.
He smiled faintly. “Isn’t that a bit on the nose?”
“I like coffee and donuts. Besides we are magical cops. Sort of.”
He snorted. “Not really, but some coffee does sound good about now.”
“And donuts,” I added. “Don’t forget about the donuts. Most important part of a balanced late supper.”
Suddenly, it felt like the two of us were in synch and ready to solve this outbreak assignment.
I was wrong on both counts.
7
I took Tully to the nearest Donut Magic, which wasn’t too far away.
We grabbed a booth in the back. He had a glazed old-fashioned donut, while I went the extra mile and ordered the Witches Delight, a chocolate covered moon-sized concoction filled with chocolate crème, and some of their star-shaped donut holes to go with. I was partial to the purple ones. Tully went with a sixteen-ounce latte, whereas I ordered the biggest Americano I could get my freezing little hands around.
"What do you think is going on here?" Tully asked me.
I finished off the Witch's Delight, wiped my mouth with a crumpled napkin. "Well, let's see, there's the gremlin outbreaks."
Tully closed his eyes. "Sarcasm isn't going to make this better," he said. "It needs to be productive, and that isn't productive."
The napkin stuck to my sticky fingers, and I concentrated on peeling the bits of paper off. Tully didn’t deserve flippancy. He had helped a lot tonight while I cast that spell. And sarcasm wasn’t going to help.
"Something that doesn't fit the norm for the supernatural," I said. "I guess. I mean, normally, we'd have an obvious marker. At least, you could see it, right?"
"I can see the link to the manifestation from the catalyst. Only, I'm not seeing any catalysts right now. What I'm seeing is just the manifestation, pulling at all the available mana.”
"Maybe you're just missing it." That came out harsher than I intended. Curse it.
Tully lifted his chin. "You think that's what this is, a newbie mistake? I may be new, but I wasn't born yesterday. And unlike you, I can see the links, like I said. I've seen them before."
I swallowed, hard. “Where?” I asked, my voice quiet.
Tully’s eyes suddenly looked through me. “When I was in the army.”
I leaned forward. “You served?”
He nodded. “Two tours in Afghanistan. I was military police. It was during my second tour, when I was stationed at a forward operating base in Helmand province.” He looked at the ceiling, remembering. “I’d been assigned to help guard a fuel convoy coming down from the north to Camp Leatherneck. MPs do a lot of road escort.”
I wiped my suddenly sweaty palms on my jeans. “Must get tedious.”
“We used to joke about it being routine danger. I was mid-convoy, riding shotgun in a Humvee, two hours short of reaching Camp Leatherneck, when the lead Humvee at the head suddenly flipped, dirt and sand billowing up around it. We hit the brakes, figuring the Taliban had detonated an improvised explosive device. The sand and dirt began swirling, faster and faster, becoming a dust devil. The sky grew dark, and suddenly we were in the middle of a howling sandstorm. We couldn’t see more than a foot past the window, the sand was so thick.”
He glanced down at his hands, clenching his coffee cup. He let go, looked me in the eye. “That was when I saw it, inside the sand storm, floating in the air. A nude man-thing.”
“A djinn,” I whispered. Ancient manifestations that roamed deserts. “What did you do?”
He laughed softly. “I hunkered down in my seat. My driver and the third soldier in the back didn’t see it. No one else saw it. Hades be cursed,” he finished. “I thought I’d gone nuts.” That was the first time I heard Tully swear, and in the arcane way, like sorcerers were supposed to. Words mattered for us, especially curse words. We had to keep our thoughts focused on the arcane.
“Tough way to learn about the supernatural.”
“Are there any easy ways?” He asked.
He had me there. There certainly hadn’t been for my sister and me.
Tully watched me, obviously waiting for me to spill my origin story with the arcane. But there wasn’t time. Instead, we needed to get back to the matter at hand.
"Look,” I said, “I don't want to be a jerk about this, but you are the new guy."
"So, rookie failure, is that it?"
He never raised his voice, it just grew taut, like a bow string.
So much for the renewing power of coffee and donuts.
"Listen, that's not what I meant."
"Oh, what did you mean, then?"
I took a deep breath, tapped the table, thinking. We needed to focus. "I'm, I'm sorry," I said. Yeah, that was like pulling teeth for me. Apologizing didn’t come easy, not for me. It’s just the way I'm built. You might like it, you might not, but it was who I was.
He nodded. "Just take this seriously, that's all I ask. Please."
I swallowed. "Sure thing," I mumbled. Shame was also a feeling I didn't like experiencing. "So, what do you think is going on?" Suddenly, I was the rookie asking the veteran.
"Something we can't see," he said. That much is clear.
I ran my fingers around the blood charm in my jacket pocket. Even now, the edges felt sharp against my skin. I wasn't wearing it, and yet it continued to
