ChapterThree
The ODP dealtwith all kinds of problems caused by the fae on a daily basis. We dealt with the Gifted, too. They were creatures who didn’t come from Faeya, and nobody really knows how they were created, just that they exist. There were only six kinds of them: werewolves, witches, vampires, wraiths, revenants, and loups—and they liked to cause trouble just as much as fae, so our hands were always full.
My title was agent, but I was basically a call center agent. What I did was answer calls and organize different crews who specialized in dealing with all kinds of things, while I sat at the desk for nine long hours every single day.
The ODP Headquarters was a large building in the middle of Manhattan, but most of the floors upside the earth were empty. The building went three floors underground, too, and that’s where we did most of our work. I was in the first underground level. The second had spaces for crews, equipment, vehicles, training, and God knows what else. The third level were the holding rooms—reinforced with so much steel and magic, it was impossible to get out of them. They were like a prison, meant to hold all kinds of monsters and creatures who misbehaved and caused trouble out there. The actual prison for the supernaturally enhanced—like some called it—was on an island somewhere, and it was said that it was impossible to escape it because the waters around it were guarded by an actual kraken. Anybody with a head on their shoulders would choose to be locked away for eternity if the only other option was to get eaten alive by a kraken. Just the thought of it made me shiver.
But lucky for the world, krakens were rare, and most creatures we dealt with here weren’t half as dangerous.
As the day went by, I filled my log sheet with all the jobs I’d accepted and completed: a lutin infestation in Harlem; a hobgoblin attack in Hell’s Kitchen; a magical explosion-- possibly from knockers (the little uglies loved to make things explode)—on the East Side that burned two cars to a crisp and wounded five people; another lutin infestation; and the possible sighting of a gorgon. Out of all of them, the gorgon was the only dangerous thing. Not that the rest couldn’t cause death—they could. They just didn’t do it often. Lutins were tiny creatures, possibly three inches tall, that broke into apartments and made food go bad, stole things, and cut the hair of humans while they were asleep. They didn’t kill. And hobgoblins were nasty, and they sometimes attacked humans because they felt they looked at them wrong or said something inappropriate, but again—they didn’t kill. Knockers were a bit more dangerous, though. Like most fae species, they were tiny, too, but they loved to make things explode. It helped that they had an uncanny sense of smell and a keen understanding of acids. They loved to test all kinds of mixtures and made their own bombs by stealing from supermarkets and pharmacies. Their explosions sometimes killed people, too, but not often. And not on purpose, I guess.
But gorgons were a different story. They were said to be achingly beautiful, their faces designed to lure in their prey. Once you looked at one, you just couldn’t look away no matter what. And when they got you where they wanted you, they brought forth the snakes living in their skulls and turned you to stone. They were very, very rare, and I’d never had a call about them in the two years I’ve worked here, but apparently, one was sighted in Long Island by the ODP scouts, so I had to send a specialized crew to check it out.
Maybe that’s what I should have been doing. Maybe I should have been in one of those crews. There were over fifty of them, and they all specialized in different species and were only called in when the creatures they hunted caused trouble.
Maybe I should have been in the Lutin crew. They were the ones with the most work, always out in the field, working twenty-hour shifts sometimes. Never a dull moment.
But, no—I’d wanted to be an agent, run my own missions, coordinate said crews out there in the field. Make a difference. Make the world a better place.
What a ridiculous dream it seemed to me now.
I opened my journal and made a sad faced emoji in grey under noon—for my mood. Rarely any of the days in my calendar had a red or even a pink mark under noon anymore. How much more of that grey until I called it quits?
“Get your pink ass up, Pink,” Hunter said, his eyes on my open journal. It was a thick notebook, half of it an agenda, and the other half just empty lines for me to write my thoughts in.
I grinned at him. “You wish you could see what’s in here, don’t you,” I teased, and he flipped me the bird.
“One of those days, I’m going to find a way to read that thing,” he said and turned his back to me.
Empty threats—he couldn’t read anything I wrote with my special pens and markers if he tried. The ink of them was mixed with my blood and germin powder. The powder was made from the leaves of a very specific plant that only pixies could grow. My mom always sent me a big box of it in her monthly packages. I even had a couple of small bottles in my backpack at all times, and I wasn’t going to give it to any of them until they stopped calling me Pink.
Which probably meant never, but oh well.
Soon, my friends and I went to lunch. I talked with them, laughed with them, but regret and disappointment were two constants in my chest that I couldn’t shake off no matter what.
That’s why I told them I had something to take care of and left early from the restaurant down the street where we usually ate lunch. I didn’t go back to the office but to the janitor’s closet where I always hid and tried to talk myself into a better mood sometimes.
Ever since that first day I arrived here—with so much will and motivation and hope, it was ridiculous now that I looked back at it—I’d always loved this place. And ever since that first time, I always turned the light on to make sure I was alone first. Then, I sat on the floor by myself and thought. Not about the prick I’d met here that day—no, because to think about that always made me uneasy. It reminded me just how naive I’d really been.
Because even though I had said nothing, done nothing to offend that man in any way—I was sure of that after replaying the conversation we had a million times in my head—he’d treated me worse than the scum of the earth. A day after our meeting, when I’d already picked my desk and gotten comfortable, I’d seen him going to the staff kitchen, and like a fool, I’d followed. Like a fool, I’d hoped to apologize for behaving the way I had and to even tell him that his words, what he’d said before leaving, hadn’t offended me.
Instead, the kitchen had been full of my new colleagues, and I’d approached him while he was taking some protein bars from the cupboards, and he’d looked down at me once, sneered, and walked away like I disgusted him.
Just like that.
He’d never again said a single word to me in the two years that we worked in the same space.
I’d cried myself to sleep that night. I don’t know why it had stung so much, but come morning, I’d decided that I was never going to say another word to him again for as long as I lived.
And even though the thought of it still hurt, I had other things that hurt more.
Like my family.
They had lived on an isolated island in the Coral Sea ever since they came here from Faeya. Our pixie clan was one of the bigger ones out there, and there were over two hundred of us living in what we called Everer, like the name of our clan. We were far away from humans and everyone else who made a home out of this world. Only a handful of people even met with traders who came in their huge cargo ships twice a month, to buy our plants and herbs and powders or supply the island with essentials, everything we couldn’t grow or make on our own. That’s a pixie’s life—we’re born, grow up and make it pretty close to our two hundredth birthday, and die in the same spot, surrounded by our own and nature and the crops we grew with so much love and passion.
That’s how it was for most pixies. Except me.
I could never really grow anything in my life. Pixie magic was connected to nature. We didn’t have a lot of it, but it was perfect for growing trees, vegetables, flowers—anything that came out of the ground. The weather or the soil didn’t even matter. Plants were supposed to speak to us, tell us their secrets, their needs, so we could better tend to them. They were also supposed to fuel our magic, make us stronger.