Page 32 of Transfiguration
Kelly glanced his way. “Sure…” He let the word trail off like he had questions, but Con suspected Kelly knew little of the Fellowship. He’d likely encountered it in the past as he helped young witches escape dangerous situations, but did he know what it was?
“You have questions?” Con asked.
“Just like… what you do there? I thought you worked at the bar and that was it. But you’ve got some Clark Kent thing going on?”
Con snorted. “I’m not Superman. I work in retrieval.”
“Which means?”
“I find stuff. Artifacts, books,” he glanced back at Bella, who was tapping away at her new tablet. “Now kids, apparently. People aren’t usually my gig.”
“But Hart wants you to retrieve Pierson’s body?”
“Yes.”
Kelly looked at him in horror.
“I’m great at retrieval,” Con said. “I specialize in hard to find stuff. B&E type stuff.” He added the last, hoping he coded it enough for the kids not to understand.
“But Pierson was a monster. And could be a demon.”
Con shrugged. “Met a lot of monsters in my life. Most are mortal. All people have a little monster inside them. Some just let it out more than others.”
“Have you met a demon before?” Kelly asked.
“No,” Con admitted. He knew little about them. Though he knew Rou had met one once. “You?”
Kelly shook his head. “Only stories from Seiran. He said it’s an overwhelming essence of something suffocating, like darkness, evil, whatever. If you find something like that, can you abandon the mission? Would Hart get mad? I don’t know much about him. He comes across as scary, but I know you all work with him a lot.”
“If a demon has Pierson, we’ll need to get rid of the demon,” Con said. “Can’t have it using a vampire to wander around and do bad stuff. Assuming that’s what demons do? Religious texts don’t really mention them. And angels do some scary shit. So, are they truly bad or something other, like the fae? Won’t know until I encounter one and try to remove it.”
“But you don’t know how to do that. Get rid of it, find it, or anything?” Kelly pulled them into the parking garage of the building that led up to Con’s Fellowship office. He was on one wing of the main building, fifteen floors up, with an entire floor devoted to retrieval. His office was only one of ten, but the building itself was one of the quieter Fellowship spaces. Books, paperwork, even recruits like enforcers or trackers came from the other buildings on request. All protected by guarded skyways and lots of scanning stations.
“That’s why I need information first. I do a lot of my own investigating. You okay waiting here a few minutes?”
Kelly nodded and parked near the elevator after using Con’s badge information to get through to the private lot.
“Be back in five,” Con said as he got out.
Up the elevator and through the guarded entry, he made his way down a hall filled with very plain and boring offices. None of them appeared occupied, no personal touches or even names by the doors. Some were open offices. A few, like Con’s space, were closed, and locked to normal perusal. He headed to his door at the end, unlocking it. Inside, like the rest, there were no touches of him. He didn’t keep pictures of his guys here. It was a space to access his computer without worry of anyone hacking in.
Con put his hand to the scanner on the wall, and the walls lit up with color, and his saved maps of thought, which always led to his retrieval. He could access the maps elsewhere, but not in this sort of layout. He updated a few things in his notes about the book, adding the symbol he’d found and hadn’t researched. The leads he’d worked hard to track down not panning out, but saved the file, and turned it off.
There was a knock on the door, and Con turned to find Nate there. He was one of the I&R guys Con worked with pretty regularly. Nate was good at digging up what looked to most as useless information and still passing it on to Con, who turned it into something. The last few leads for the book Con had failed to find were intel from Nate’s group. Con swallowed back his annoyance with himself over not finding it.
Nate had a stack of files in his hands. “Heard you had a bit of an adventure this time out.”
“Always an adventure,” Con said. Finding Bella cut the adventure a little short. Con crossed the space as Nate held out the stack for him. “Stopped in for this stuff. You ready for a new case?”
“Always,” Nate said. He was a witch, though Con didn’t know what his element was. Nate was very muchthe call me, Nate, bro, sort of guy that Seiran would hate and Sam would snark at, very football player, typical American white dude. He looked mid-twenties, but it was hard to tell with witches, and had that sort of sandy-blond hair, cut short on the sides, long on top, and blue eyes. Fit, but not gym bunny muscular. Overall, Con often thought of Nate as average, not unattractive, but really not memorable, the sort of guy who could vanish into a crowd while not moving at all. Maybe that was part of what made him good for I&R. Con knew little about the guy outside of the job, and he preferred his co-workers that way. He shared none of his life with anyone at work and didn’t ask for theirs. “This last case is pretty locked down. Orders from the top, but mentions of a kid? Everything okay there?”
“Yeah. Mostly. Didn’t find the book. I’ll need more leads on that.” It was interesting to know that Hart had kept Bella’s information out of the regular archives. Maybe that was for the best, since her power was the sort that people liked to exploit.
“I’ll put the team on it,” Nate promised.
“Can you see if you can find anything on this symbol?” Con asked, pulling up the wax stamp with the bone in flame. “Found it on some crates at my last lead. Nothing in the crates other than some dehydrated meals. Supplies for some organization, maybe?”
Nate stared at the image and frowned, squinting like he was thinking. “Strange. I’ll dig into it.”