I wasn’t alone after all and shouldn’t be throwing myself a pity party when I had such an awesome sort-of-familiar in my life, as well as a lot of people, human and otherwise, whom I cared about deeply.
“You know what, Mog?” I stroked his head. “You have a point. Thanks.”
Retracting his claws, Mogwai closed his eyes in satisfaction and purred just a bit louder.
Twenty-seven
For the next week or so, things were fairly quiet in Pemkowet. No rutting satyrs, no threatening obeah women, no suspicious hell-spawn lawyers, no abducted teenagers, not even a hobgoblin prank.
It was a relief. Tourist season doesn’t actually end after Labor Day—the PVB does its damnedest to make Pemkowet a destination all year long, and with the exception of the frigid months of January, February, and March, it’s gotten some results—but every local I know, myself included, counts on things ratcheting down a notch. This year, between Emmeline Palmer’s ultimatum, an unexpected visit to Little Niflheim, and the melodrama out at the House of Shadows, I hadn’t had the chance to properly appreciate the fact that I could find a parking place downtown on a weekday without circling the block or get a cinnamon roll at Mrs. Browne’s bakery without waiting in line.
Now I did.
There wasn’t more than a few hours’ worth of filing to be done at the police station, but I had the entire backlog of the X-Files to comb through, and in a moment of expansive generosity, Chief Bryant had agreed that I should be paid for the time spent developing the database. On the one hand, it made sense—it would, after all, enable me to do my job better—but on the other hand, since I’d made it clear that I would be the only person to have access to it, he would have been within his rights to deny my request to log those hours on the department’s budget.
To be honest, the chief hadn’t been too thrilled with my stance. It had come up when I’d reluctantly refused to identify the membership of our local coven after their meet and greet with Sinclair. But we had a long talk about confidentiality, honor, respect, and the eldritch code, and although he didn’t like it, he understood. A lot of the same principles apply in the police force, even in a tiny one like ours.
For example, Chief Bryant knew that Bart Mallick had been first on the scene at the satyr orgy and had failed to respond thereafter. Given what had gone down at Rainbow’s End that evening, there could pretty much be only one reason for it, but Cody and I had covered for him—I think our report said something to the effect that Officer Mallick was engaged in conflict resolution, which was certainly one way of putting it—and the chief hadn’t requested clarification. Like I said, he understood.
Anyway, I was grateful to get paid for the work.
I took a shot at tracking down the mysterious lawyer, whose full name was Daniel Dufreyne, in my spare time and hit a dead end. I got his name and contact info from a business card he’d left with Amanda Brooks at the PVB, but the weird thing was there was no business listed on it, nor a physical address—just a cell phone number and a Gmail address. Definitely sketchy. Amanda seemed surprised that she hadn’t noticed, which I chalked up to the whole powers-of-persuasion thing. All I could do was leave a vague voice mail message and send an equally vague e-mail and hope Dufreyne responded. So far, he hadn’t.
Most of the time, I concentrated on poring over the X-Files. While I didn’t have an actual base in which to enter the data yet, the process helped me identify concrete working examples and additional criteria to provide to my genius programmer, Lee. For instance, I’d completely forgotten about the phooka that haunted the fields around Columbine Creek. One of the Donaghue kids came away with a broken arm a couple of years ago after the phooka took him for a wild ride. So, yeah, while I’d be responsible for entering all sensitive data such as the particulars of the incident, Lee needed to create a listing for phookas under the categories of eldritch beings, and a location listing for the creek.
I met with Lee a couple of times to give him my input and discuss the project, which was shaping up to be a lot fancier than anything I’d envisioned, insofar as I’d envisioned anything, which