Shift happens, p.3
Shift Happens, page 3
Angela looked at the woman with a newfound respect. "Really? You called the chief out in public?"
Candace shrugged. "He's not going to fire me. I used to work in his group. I know where too many of the bodies are buried. And it's not like it's a big surprise that you do ninety percent of the work down here."
It was a big surprise to Angela that anyone else had noticed. "So what did he say?"
"Matt has more 'leadership presence'," she said, sketching quotes in the air. "Which I think just means he has a penis and you don't. So now Matt's in there reorganizing the case load." Her headset lit up and she turned toward the door. "You've got to apply for that position. I don't think I can work here with Matt in charge." She hit a button on the headset and her voice changed pitch. "Magical dispatch, what is the nature of your emergency?"
Angela started to head back to her desk, then halfway there changed her mind and took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the hall to see if Vicky was around. The deputy district attorney was in her office, but packing her briefcase to leave.
"I have to be at an arraignment in twenty," Vicky said, pausing to look around her desk then snatching a pen and putting it in her bag. "But while you're here, I have news about your testicular assault case."
Angela winced. "How bad is it?"
"Not bad at all. They're dropping the whole thing. It never happened."
At least one thing was going well. "Any idea why? Is it just because the captain dropped dead? Because Matt's in charge for the moment and if having them file charges against me will make it more likely he'll keep that spot permanently, I'm screwed."
Vicky closed her briefcase and ushered Angela out of the office, heading back to the elevator. "Don't worry. The officer in question has at least one complaint pending against him for acting like a complete asshole and making sexist remarks during an arrest. His body camera wasn't on during that arrest, so it's a he-said she-said thing. But." She hit the elevator call button and turned to face Angela. "They reviewed the footage from yesterday. Some of the stuff he said was word for word what the other woman claimed in her complaint. They gave him the choice of resigning or being fired. So your case just got tossed. No charges. Never happened."
The door chimed and they got on the elevator together. "Never happened except that now all the cops are going to blame me for getting someone fired," Angela pointed out.
Vicky tilted her head, conceding the point. "They'll forget about it in a few months when they have a chance to remember what an ass he was."
Angela sighed. With any luck she wouldn't need backup any time soon. She shook her head to force that thought away. "Good luck in court." She ducked out of the elevator on her floor.
Walking into the office, she found Matt and Caleb at the armory cabinet pulling out the big equipment cases, the ones with stunners and magically charged restraints, the ones that only got taken out when everything was going to hell. When Matt saw her he nodded. "Oh good, Angie, you're here. One of the partners at a law firm downtown snapped and turned into a dragon, knocked down half the floor, charred the rest of it, and ate at least one person."
A dragon large enough to eat a person.
Downtown. She'd known there was something going on there.
A fire-breathing dragon.
That was the kind of thing that showed up once in a career. Angela grabbed her keys, adrenaline making her arms tingle. The dragon must have been what had been disturbing all the magical energy in the city.
Matt closed the cabinet and locked it. "I need you to take anything else that comes up while Young and I deal with the dragon. I was going to have you start the HQ notification for the dragon, but I think Candace has a case on hold already. We might be gone a while."
Angela opened her mouth, then stopped and tried again. "Wouldn't it be better if I went along on the dragon? I've got more experience—" Her rankings were also higher, but he knew that too.
Matt held up a hand. "I get it. Everyone wants in on this one, but this is a dragon. This guy isn't going to just need a few wind chimes and breathing exercises." He turned to Caleb. "Ready? Let's change this!" With the catch phrase from Shift Enforcers ringing through the air, they barged out of the room.
Angela waited until she heard the stairwell door slam closed and called after them. "I hope that thing burns the hair off your asses." She gave in to temptation and kicked her desk, which responded with a satisfying metal clang.
"Angela?"
Candace's voice behind her made her sigh. Angela turned. "I used my 'Get out of jail free' card on the wrong thing this week. What's up?"
"There's a woman that shifted to a mouse at the Biltmore Hotel. Seventh floor conference room." The dispatcher handed Angela a sticky note with the address.
Angela sighed again and picked up her bag. "Right. I guess I'll go deal with a mouse." She headed for the door.
4
The drive to the Biltmore gave her a chance to feel sorry for herself for a good fifteen minutes, and then she decided it was time to get over it. Sure, a fire-breathing dragon the size of a small house was cool, but a shape-shifted mouse was… Nope, she still needed a few more minutes to get over it.
At least the presence of the dragon solved one of her questions. Dragons were immensely strong, second only to salamanders in the order of power creatures. The lawyer’s magic must have been over the Bernhoefer threshold, the level at which second-order effects became important in how stray magic was drawn in. He would have been attracting magical energy from all over. Latent shifters in the area would have also been absorbing it. Granted, it was a little odd for someone to exceed the threshold needed to warp the magical flux before shifting the first time, but dragons were only exceeded in power and rarity by salamanders. Maybe that was normal for them. And now she'd never know, because while there was a dragon downtown, she was heading in the opposite direction to take care of a mouse.
Her mood wasn't helped when she got to the hotel and found out they'd turned the electricity off.
"Shutting down the electricity is in the protocol," the hotel's head of security told her, holding up the spiral-bound notebook.
Angela grabbed it from him, scanned the section, and pointed to the footnote. "Only for unknown creatures. A mouse is not going to tap into the electrical grid and start throwing lightning bolts." She pushed the notebook into his chest. "Never mind. Just point me at the stairwell." She took the flashlight from his desk, headed into the stairwell, and started climbing stairs.
Six flights of stairs in the dark with no fresh air circulating wasn't anything to write home about, but she felt a little better about the McDonald's slip that morning. Surely she'd burned off the apple pie at least. She opened the door onto the seventh floor, and took a moment to catch her breath while trying to figure out where the conference room was.
The beam of light finally hit a map for the floor, and she followed it to a small room with a round table crowded with laptops and paper coffee cups. She pushed the door open slowly. "Hello! I'm Officer Angela Jones with the Magical Probation Department. Is anyone here?"
For a moment she thought the room was deserted — and wouldn't that be a thing, trying to find a tiny mouse in a ten story building while the guys with less seniority, fewer qualifications, and just generally less sense were out dealing with a fire-breathing dragon the size of a house — but finally a quiet voice answered.
"I'm here." The voice sounded female. Young. Hesitant. Someone used to being overlooked.
Angela took a moment to push her irritation with the day away. There was nothing she could do about the dragon, fire-breathing and all, but right now there was a scared human who had just shifted into a mouse and needed her help. "Do you mind if I come in?" She took the silence for assent and moved forward slowly, flipping the lock on the door as it closed behind her and using the flashlight to make sure she didn't step on anything. Rolling one of the abandoned chairs closer to the table she sat down. "Are you okay if I relax here for a bit? I had to come up the stairs and my knees aren't what they used to be. What's your name?"
"Clara."
"Nice to meet you, Clara. You can call me Angela. Having a bit of a rough day today, aren't you?"
"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean for this to happen!"
Angela smiled reassurance in what she hoped was the right direction. "Trust me, I've been doing this for thirty-five years and nobody means for this to happen, at least the first time. Quite a lot of people grow to like it later, but I think the first time is a shock for everyone."
Movement on the desk drew Angela's eye and she saw a sleek brown and white mouse sitting on her haunches, nose twitching.
"My dad is going to lose it. Not about the shifting, you know, just the mouse part."
A quick glimpse with her other sight verified that this was the right creature, and also that she had a huge bundle of magic. This case wasn't going to get added to Angela's list of anomalies. Clara would have shifted sooner or later even without the city's magic going haywire. "Is he scared of rodents?"
A weak laugh greeted her words. "My dad? He's not afraid of anything. Nobody's allowed to be afraid of anything around him."
Angela nodded. Shape was nearly always determined by identity, need, and power. Darren, who had just wanted everyone to leave him alone, had become a porcupine for a reason. Angela suspected she wouldn't have to look too hard to figure out why Clara identified with the shape of a mouse. "Old school, your dad?"
Clara nodded, her whiskers shining in the glow of the flashlight. "I've always been a huge disappointment. Maybe he's psychic."
Or maybe he was just an asshole and a bully, but Angela didn't say that aloud. "He doesn't shift, though, does he? You've got magic that he doesn't. That puts you quite a few steps ahead in my book."
"But a mouse? He'd throw a party if I'd turned into a bear or a tiger. A mouse is something he'll have to hide from the neighbors. And I'll probably get fired. He'll have to hide that too."
Angela sniffed. "Most of the large predators I know wish they had turned into mice. Do you know how many of them hurt or killed someone the first time they shifted? At least you don't have to live with that for the rest of your life." She paused to let that sink in, then continued. "As far as the job goes… If you have half the magic I think you do, you'll have so many opportunities you'll have to hire someone to read through them all."
Ah, that had gotten Clara's attention. "Why?"
A sudden wave of heat made Angela start sweating and she flapped her shirt to create some air movement. Damned hormones. "Do you know how hard it is to keep a mouse out of someplace? You can go places, find out information, fix problems, and do all sorts of things just because you're so small. Trust me, if you don't have at least ten great job offers by this time next week, I'll buy you gourmet cheese for a year."
A squeaky laugh greeted her words.
"So what do you think? Want to start working on getting back to your human form, or would you rather hang out this way for a while? I have to say, they might not turn the electricity back on until we leave, and it's starting to get a little muggy in here."
Clara shuffled forward a few steps. "So, um, that's sort of what I was working on before you got here. And I'm not having a lot of luck."
A mouse with big magic and the self-awareness to start trying to change right after her first shift — they would be throwing money at her before she got done with the first day of training. "Not a problem. You probably just need a little help figuring out what to do." With someone like Darren the porcupine, she could overpower his magic completely and push him along the right path. With the bulk of magic Clara possessed, Angela would need to lead the way and Clara would have to figure out how to follow. In some ways they would need to cover the first two days of training just in order to get her to the class. "It might take a bit of patience, though. You ready to try some things?"
The mouse nodded. "What do I need to do?"
"First thing to do is get comfortable." Angela rubbed her arms, suddenly chilled as the hot flash passed. "Now close your eyes and just pay attention to yourself. I'm going to tug on your magic. If you can feel that, it will help you focus on what you need to do, okay? Here we go."
Angela switched to her other sight and looked at Clara. To her it looked like two different colors of light swirling around, purple and green, like two pieces of glowing thread traveling an impossibly complicated path around each other. Other people visualized it differently. One of her classmates had seen smoke and water, another some sort of Escherian tree with two canopies that blended into each other depending on how he looked. Angela didn't know how her classmates made changes, but she just visualized tugging gently on one of the threads.
"Do you feel that?"
Silence, then a slow shaking of the tiny mouse head. "I don't think so."
"Not to worry." Another wave of heat went over Angela and she leaned forward so her back wasn't touching the chair. "Yell if you start to feel something." She tugged harder, pulling on a different strand. For shifters with less magical power, she could just pull the strands apart and make the human strand dominant, essentially unraveling and reconstituting them as human. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, but that was what Caleb and Matt usually did when they had enough of a power differential to pull it off. That solved the immediate problem, and if the shifters took longer to get over the trauma and learn to shift themselves, well, that was what the training weeks were for. Angela preferred a more gentle approach, generally starting the process and allowing the shifter to finish it once it was under way. It took longer, but they didn't go into training too scared to shift.
When Clara didn't respond to the stronger pull, Angela used her magic to form a wedge between the two strands, levering them apart while pulling them in opposite directions. Sweat formed on her brow, from effort this time. Right about the time the mouse squeaked, the strands flung Angela's magic back, the rebound making her whole body vibrate. She shook her head to clear it. Clara had some of the strongest magic she'd felt in years.
"I felt something that time," the mouse said, holding her tail in her paws and looking at it as if she didn't know what it was.
Angela took a breath and let it out slowly. "Can you feel the difference between what it's like now and when I was tugging on it?" She pasted a reassuring smile on her face again. "It's okay if you don't yet. It's normal for it to take a few tries." Someone who identified with the form of a mouse was likely predisposed to be hesitant. Add that to the strength of her magic and Angela suspected this might be one of the more challenging transformations of her career. Building up Clara's confidence was going to be key.
Making a wedge with her magic again Angela forced the two strands apart a bit then stopped. "Can you feel that?"
"It tickles." The mouse lifted one back foot to scratch her belly and Angela found herself thrown back again.
The lights flickered on, followed a few minutes later by the rattle of air conditioning, for which Angela was grateful. Her shirt was already plastered to her back and her skin was burning.
"Okay, let's try again."
They kept going, Angela trying to conserve her power in the face of the tight bundle that was Clara's magic. An hour later, she pushed her hair back and sighed. Clara could vaguely feel her own magic, but her attempts to manipulate it had so far been unsuccessful. "Let's take a break for a few minutes, okay? I need to check my messages."
Angela pulled out her phone. It had been buzzing with new texts intermittently the entire time, so she wasn't too surprised to find thirty messages waiting for her. Most of them were public service announcements that Candace had sent out, advising people to avoid the area where the dragon had shifted. Apparently, Matt and Caleb weren't having the easy time of it they'd planned. Now the mayor was getting involved. The early deaths and ongoing property damage were bad, but Angela found it hard to feel sympathy toward her coworkers.
"Good news?" Clara was checking out everything on the table, reaching up to touch the flower arrangement, and getting used to her new form.
"Just the opposite," Angela replied. "I'm afraid I'm not being very nice." She gave Clara a quick summary of what was going on across town. "I really shouldn't be gloating, but I have to admit it makes me feel good that they're having problems." She texted a quick update to Candace, letting her know she'd be unavailable for a while longer.
"If I turned into a dragon, I think I'd just stay that way."
Angela cocked her head and looked at the mouse as she explored the items on the table. "It's tempting, isn't it? Still, it would be inconvenient. Can you imagine breathing fire and then getting the hiccups?" She waited until the mouse looked up at her. "Let's try something different while I'm resting. Can you tell me what you were feeling when you first shifted?"
Clara hunched down and remained silent. Angela waited.
"We were having a team meeting. My director was in town, which was why we had the meeting here. He says it wastes too much time to commute to the office."
So instead of having one person travel to the office, he made fifteen people travel to the hotel. Angela resisted the urge to sigh.
"We were going around the room giving status updates on our projects." Clara paused. "My project has had a bunch of delays because of things I couldn't really control. The lead developer's mother died, and then the requirements changed, and…" She trailed to a stop. "We're behind and I've brought this up with my boss before now, but she wasn't at the meeting, so I had to be the one to tell the director and he just kept asking questions and getting madder and madder." Clara scratched at her side. "I just wanted everyone to stop staring at me."
Looking with her other sight Angela could see Clara's core of magic tightening as she talked, until it looked like a solid purple bundle and she had a hard time seeing any strands of green at all. To the average magical eye, Clara looked like every other mouse. Intelligence agencies would be all over her when she finished training.
