Chapter 3

Jaelyn and Ruby head out for ice cream, but are interrupted by three hungry ghouls, a man, and his baby. (The art for this chapter was provided by officialpainsetta.tumblr.com)

The Saturday sun was at its apex. Jaelyn passed Ruby a cone piled high with rocky road ice cream and paused to enjoy her own mint chocolate chip shake--though the people at this particular drugstore called it “Grasshopper”.

The demon had his ice cream down to nearly the level of the cone in moments, then grimaced. Jaelyn snorted.

“Tongue to the roof of your mouth, dude,” she advised him. “Best cure for brain freeze, besides the preventative measure of not eating your ice cream too fast in the first place. So, found anything out yet?”

He shook his head, pausing a moment to follow her advice and press his tongue against his palate. “I’m not good at the research thing, you know that. Opal’s really th’brains of the fam. I’m just the bodyguard for when the guys in black come in sayin’, ‘You know too much,’ and tryin’ t’kill ya.”

“Point taken.” She sighed, eating another spoonful of her shake. “What about the new guy? You heard any rumors about him?”

“Naw. He’s sorta a hermit, doesn’t like t’be around people if he can help it.” He took a cautious lick of his ice cream. “There’s the regular new-kid rumors, like he was kicked outta his old school on account of blowin’ up the theater or something’, or his parents’re some kinda demons that disagree with the integration and sent their kid in to infiltrate, like a ‘sleeper agent’, but we know all that’s garbage.” He bit into his cone. “‘M gonna try and get close t’him later on. I got a couple classes with him, and you have one, too. I vote we both befriend him. If there’s really nothin’ wrong with him, he might be an asset to the team.”

Jaelyn paused in her steps, spoon raised halfway to her lips. She dropped the spoon back into the cup as he, unaware of her momentary stop, kept walking. “We’re not replacing Carol,” she growled.

Ruby turned and stared at her, a line between his brows. “No, we ain’t,” he agreed. “Ain’t no-one replacin’ nobody. ‘Sides, I don’t think he’d be a good white mage. He strikes me as more of a ranger.”

Her moment of anger turned into reluctant amusement. “You still on about the whole RPG class thing?” she asked a bit incredulously.

He gave her a crooked grin. “Figure it’s the best way to describe the four of us,” he pointed out. “Fits better’n a racoon in a garbage can.”

Jaelyn pursed her lips. “How about ‘better than a glove on a princess’? The garbage can thing doesn’t speak well about our functionality as a team.”

“Shoot, you’re right,” he frowned. “But the princess thing doesn’t fit the way I talk, now does it?”

“Me, neither,” Jaelyn agreed. “Maybe we should steer away from analogies.”

He grinned. “Nope.”

They walked in silence for a moment. Jaelyn savored her mint while watching Ruby try a few times to eat his more quickly without giving himself brain freeze again, a small, amused smile on her face.

Then he paused, cocking his head. The point of his ear twitched and Jaelyn perked up. Ruby had better hearing than her; he could hear an insect buzzing half a block away and usually tell whether it was a bee or a fly. This time, she was pretty sure it wasn’t an insect. That suspicion was confirmed when he looked over at her, a hard look in his eyes.

“Somethin’ goin’ down in the residential district,” he said. “Sounds like a lesser ghoul. Think we’re closest to the scene.”

She nodded, setting her shake aside. “Good thing S.O.S doesn’t charge too much for their ice cream. We’re gonna have to get more later.”

Ruby looked regretfully at his cone. “Maybe somethin’ less pain-inducin’. Like a pizza.”

“Your treat,” she said with a wink.

The two nodded to each other and raced off. Jaelyn followed after him, matching him step for step. Matching his pace had been difficult at first, but her years of practicing with him in everything from combat to running had gained her the capability to keep up. Now, she liked to think the only reason for the sweat was the summer sun beating down.

A couple of blocks away, they spotted the scene of the currently unfolding crime. A lithe man with gray skin and silver eyes was hissing threateningly at a more stocky man, blond and tan with a baby strapped to a carrier against his chest. The baby was crying loudly despite its apparent father shushing it. There were two more of the gray-skinned ghouls arguing with each other behind him.

Jaelyn knew this ploy. The two were there to distract the human, make him feel like the team didn’t have it all together and give him a chance to escape; which would bring his guard down enough for the three to jump him once he’d started running. Except, he didn’t seem to be buying it. Jaelyn couldn’t see his eyes owing to a pair of gold-rimmed, red sunglasses shielding them, but the crease in his brow and the set of his jaw was familiar. It was a calculating look, no sense of wavering anywhere about him. He didn’t have a weapon, but he held a fist in the hand that wasn’t patting the baby’s back, and judging by the tonage…

No, Jaelyn didn’t think he was falling for it. And neither did the ghoul by itself before him; she could tell by the exasperated way he rolled his eyes.

The ghoul looked over their way and his eyes went wide as silver moons as he saw them; two high school students, sure, but both with openly worn weapons and probably more adult expressions than one would expect. He knew what they were.

“Preters!” he snarled, and spun on a clawed heel to take off. Ruby and Jaelyn looked at each other and nodded; Ruby peeled away to pursue the leader, while Jaelyn drew her sword and raced across the street, circling around to cut off the escape of the other two.

The man turned to watch her. She didn’t know what sort of change their arrival would have made to his expression, but at the moment she had two more important matters to deal with. The ashen-skinned demons had attempted to run but found themselves face-to-face with her, their faces reflected in the blade of her sword.

“Going somewhere?” he asked amicably, tilting her head.

The ghouls looked at each other, then cackled, their voices raspy like the rest of their species. One stepped forward and combed scraggly white hair from her eyes with a gnarled claw.

“Your partner’s pretty rude,” she said, taking a step closer. Jaelyn held her sword point steady, at the level of her adversary’s throat. “Going after the one and leaving you to be outnumbered.”

“Oh, Ruby just knows I like the chance to show off for strangers,” Jaelyn said with a shrug and a wink at the human still standing there. With that, she lept into action.

She swung a foot up toward the ghoul’s jaw in a roundhouse kick, a loud crack reaching her ears as her heel connected with her mandible. She ducked as, enraged, the second ghoul came at her. Backing away to let the first ghoul fall forward, she pivoted around the second one and, once facing his back, brought the hilt of her sword to the side of his skull.

He crumpled on top of his mate and Jaelyn flourished her blade a split second before sheathing it.

Her eyes darted to the man she’d just rescued and she winked at him before crouching down, casually slipping a pair of cuffs from her belt and putting them on one each of the ghoul’s wrists. Then she unhooked a walkie from the other side of her belt and pressed the button.

“This is Junior PITF agent Jaelyn Aurelius. I’ve apprehended two suspects, class D ghouls on the corner of 4th South and Center. My partner went after the third. Requesting a patrol car to take the suspects into custody.” She waited for radio confirmation before clipping it back onto her belt, then glanced up at the human, who’d stared dumbfounded at her while she spoke. Even the baby had quieted down, and was now fussing irritably. “Hey, thanks for waiting up. Think you could tell me what happened?” She got out a small notepad from her pocket.

Junior agents for the Preternatural Investigation and Tactical Force weren’t usually expected to take care of criminal cases. Normally, they simply job-shadowed more veteran members until they were allowed to join in on a case. But it had been a similar situation to this that ultimately gained them the titles of “junior agent” to begin with, and no one had contested their involvement. Besides, this was sort of an emergency.

Her belt contained a walkie-talkie, one pair of cuffs, a flashlight, and a can of mace. It was the same with everyone else on her team, but hers was the only one that also held her silver-bladed katana. Carol and Opal usually carried repelling items--silver crosses for werewolves and garlic cloves for sanguivores, among other things--and Ruby carried a gun with silver bullets that he never touched. The demon usually relied on his brute strength to take down criminals, and he was damn good at that.

The notebook was also standard issue. It was her job, once the criminals were taken care of, to discern exactly what the story was, why there was a situation in the first place. As she couldn’t go after Ruby with two unconscious ghouls to watch, it was the perfect time to ask this guy a few questions.

“I’ll need your name, number, and address, please,” she began, keeping the unfortunate ghouls in her peripheral vision.

He nodded. He seemed to have kept his cool despite what had almost happened. Judging by his build, Jaelyn could discern that he could have easily taken care of at least one of his assailants if he hadn’t had the baby to worry about. “Clove Walker,” he said, giving her his contact information. “This is Dove. I’m raising her alone.”

Jaelyn nodded. “Okay. Now, Mr. Walker, what were you doing prior to this altercation?”

An eyebrow arched over Clove’s sunglasses, and he gave her an amused smirk. “You know, somehow all those formal words don’t sound like they fit in your mouth.”

She snorted. “Nah, you’re right.” She glanced around him, noticing Ruby approaching with the other ghoul slung over his shoulder. He gave her a victorious thumbs-up. “Okay, lemme reword it. The heck’re these jerkwads doing here?”

“That sounds more natural,” Clove said. “I’m actually just out for a walk. I live up the street there, in that apartment building. I didn’t get far--obviously--when I heard those two arguing, and I stopped to ask them what was up. Then that guy came up behind me, and that’s when the two of you showed up.”

“Okay, and you haven’t seen ‘em before today, right?” Jaelyn asked, scribbling down his answers in her notepad.

He shook his head. “I’ve seen guys like them, but they were always pretty cool. I live next door to one. These guys know there’s a bloodbank up the street, right?”

“I’m guessin’ they care about as much as a horse cares about the haystack twelve feet away from where it’s grazin’,” Ruby said, slinging his catch down with the rest of the unfortunate group.

Jaelyn blinked at Ruby. “Does it care?” she asked.

Ruby shrugged. “I don’t know, I never actually worked on a farm.”

A bloodbank was an institution established for sanguivores--vampires, ghouls, and the like; anyone that was sustained by the consumption of blood--that was essentially like a grocery store was to humans. They would provide vampires with either blood bags or humans willing to donate their blood on a more regular basis. It was a good source of income for some people. Ghouls were a strange sort of sanguivore; they were mainly sustained by the blood of a vampire, though human blood would suffice in a pinch. Some preferred human blood. But they were, unlike humans, required to be in the service of a vampire to avoid just such altercations as this. The fact that these ones would attack a human not a few blocks away from one of the establishments gave Jaelyn a bad feeling.

“Okay, well...can we get the apartment number of the ghoul that lives by you in case we need to ask them a few questions?”

Clove nodded. “Apartment A7,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

“We may need y’all to stick ‘round ‘til the coppers come to get these’uns,” Ruby said, toeing at one of the ghoul’s shins. “Just in the case that Jaelyn here ain’t been too thorough, but she usually is, so y’ain’t got nothin’ to worry about.”

The man nodded, frowning. He gave his baby a finger to gum on, and the stark contrast of her pink, chubby digits against Clove’s dark tan struck Jaelyn as somewhat adorable.

She let herself inwardly fawn over that for a moment as she heard the sound of sirens fade in from the distance. She looked at the perpetrators they’d caught and pursed her lips.

Something told her that there was more to this particular story than met the eye.