Edgar woke up early to someone banging on the door of his apartment. He decided to go back to sleep but they wouldn't leave him alone. He went to see who it was and found the pair of occult detectives who pestered Thad at the register the night before. They pretended to believe he was a fellow occult detective investigating the KFC. He tried to turn them against the Church and the Court. They went along with his bullshit and encouraged him to share paranormal information. Manny, the fed with a combover, tried to hypnotize Edgar, who shook his head and snapped out of it after losing a few seconds. The guy lost his cool and started yelling, trying to intimidate him. The disgraced detective kept his mouth shut and Sebastian took over. They didn't need to know anything Edgar could tell them about alternate universe portals or giant bugs. They just needed a Special Order. Either he delivered them one, or they'd put in a tip that Ada Kallio was diverting drugs to feed her painkiller addiction. He had a day to decide, after which she'd leave the hospital in bracelets.
Jazzy walked down the irrigation trail from the mobile home park. The
trail was next to a concrete ditch partially filled with water,
separating the trail from the backyards of adjacent homes. One house had
a handful of llamas or alpacas in the back yard. The wooly creatures
were all clustered at the edge of the yard, afraid of something
snuffling in a pile of hay. The creature lifted its head up out of the
heap. It was golden yellow in color and it had no face, only a toothless
sucking opening it used to taste the air. It turned its head toward
Jazzy. A group of guys came around the house. Latin farmhands and a
White guy in a cowboy hat with a pin shaped like an apple. They carried
agricultural tools and catch poles like animal control. The monster
spotted them and ran for it, but they looped it around the leg before it
could jump in the irrigation ditch. The yellow apple maggot struggled
but the White guy spoke to it in a language Jazzy didn't speak. He gave
one of the farmers a command in Spanish, and again when the guy didn't
want to do it. The poor guy rolled up his sleeve and let the monster
drink his blood.
Jazzy shouted to the victim in Spanish. The leader noticed him on the other side of the ditch, recognized him, and shouted something to the farmhands. One of them scooped up the yellow monster man and hauled him away, the other three tried to jump the irrigation ditch. One fell in, two made it across. Jazzy tried to run, didn't get far and leaped into the ditch. He floated serenely and soon outdistanced his pursuers. The last thing he heard was one of the laborers asking why the boss had such a hardon for this guy. The boss replied in Spanish and Jazzy only understood a little. Something about a garden and apples and a gate he opened. It wasn't freezing outside but the water was very cold, when he climbed out of the ditch he shivered and sneezed the rest of the way to the restaurant.
Ozzy Packard and Nadia Gage were already there when Edgar and Jazzy arrived for the night shift. There was a fat kid at the counter who asked if he could get something off the secret menu. The one that summoned giant bugs, magick swords and portals to other worlds. They told him they didn't know what he was talking about, served him a special order and then went back to planning their covert activities for the night. Nadia told them they did a good job with the cops but now they needed to address real social issues instead of collaborating with the police. They didn't want to get a reputation as tools of the authorities. She thought about just giving up a special order to the occult detectives, she could make ten of them a day and if they ate it they would suffer whatever random magickal effect they deserved. But based on what they told Edgar, they already knew that. They had a plan and she didn't want it to go ahead. So they thought about ways to save Ada instead. She was their lead in the city's healthcare system and if they couldn't keep her out of trouble it would show they couldn't protect the state security apparatus they had just worked so hard to neutralize.
Edgar wanted to use Epideromancy to flesh sculpt someone else into a duplicate of Ada that the cops would arrest instead of her. Either
- A volunteer, willing to be physically transformed with magick and do time for drug diversion
- An enemy, transformed against their will and then injected with fentanyl so they would be found in the act by law enforcement
- A corpse, modified to look like Ada so they could fake her death.
Ozzy scraped congealed grease off the floor and volunteered to throw his life away for the sake of the operation. Nadia pulled her Tokarev and told him if he kept trying to work himself to death she would shoot him. He was not expendable and anyway the whole operation was contingent on Ada accepting the switch. All three plans would require her to go on the run and get a new identity, especially if she wanted to continue working in healthcare. They needed to talk to her first before they started stacking bodies.
They intuited that Special Agent Mordigian (the combover fed) was probably tapping their phones based on what he yelled at Edgar. They avoided phoning Ada and instead just showed up at a place she mentioned meeting her friends on her days off. Edgar and Laine had made a good impression during the rescue of the new mothers and babies, and Ada had let slip that they could meet her at the cigar room down by the river. The cigar bar was actually a normal bar with a humidor box and a covered outdoor smoking area. It was within walking distance of the KFC, which was good since neither of the burger warriors had a car.
Ada sat outside eating nachos and drinking beer and laughing with her friends. They recognized Alice Alcazar from the public outreach event, now clad in a business suit and chewing on a Torpedo with her metal teeth. The other four they didn't recognize at first. It was the redcoats from the 33rd Regiment of Foote, out of uniform and smoking pipes. Jazzy hung back, these guys would recognize him as the hat thief. Ada shouted at Edgar and invited him over. She introduced her friend Alice and the other four:
- Lieutenant Colonel Ravinder Bhoja, smoking a wooden pipe
- Sergeant Edith Falling Drum, smoking a pipestone pipe (the Cadre realized Edith was a lady but during performances played the role of the male Sergeant Eaton)
- Corporal Danny Obierika, smoking a meerschaum pipe
- Private Gerald Maw, smoking a clay pipe
Alice grinned and told Edgar that Ada was telling her all about the disgraced cop's exploits saving the babies and freeing the prisoners from the apple stockade. This was the problem with having drug addicts in your illegal conspiracy. It was why IRA men didn't get drunk and modern crime syndicates didn't let their members shoot up heroin. They didn't know when to shut the fuck up.
Well, whatever. Ada was under the Colonel's protection and he still needed her. Edgar asked her to come with him, she gulped down the rest of her pint in a single pull and went with him.
The bar was a short walk from the riverfront park. Edgar and Jazzy took Ada there for a difficult conversation. They told her a pair of paranormal investigators were onto her and were going to report her to local police for drug diversion. She vomited. Then started coughing, the smoke from the bar was drifting to saturate the little bench they picked for the discussion. Jazzy realized that Ada was a suicide risk, there was a real risk she would overdose and kill herself. The Cadre told her they had a plan.
The nurse calmed down enough to figure out how exposed she was. Everything she took out of the pyxis was for legitimate purposes and she marked everything unused as legitimate wastage, so there was no paper trail. The security cameras were unlikely to be an issue, she never shot up in line of sight. The drug test would finish her. Did they have a plan for that? She'd seen Edgar use his flesh magick to resurrect a dying baby. Could he use it to suck the opiates out of her system so she pissed clean? Maybe, he said. He prevented the weird salamander thing in the garden from overdosing on meth. This would require stronger magick. The fleshweird smashed his hand with a hammer to get the necessary power, placed his hand on Ada and willed her to sweat it out of her body.
Nothing happened. The fent was stronger than Edgar's magick. He came up with a new strategy. They didn't need to clean Ada's entire body, they just needed her to pass a drug test. A symbolic transplant would do it. Jazzy was a delinquent in many ways but he didn't fuck with opiates. He pissed in the grass, Edgar wet his mutilated hand in the artificial dew and pressed it to Ada's abdomen. He worked his magick and, without intending it, his hand sank through her skin and into the muscles of her core to a depth of a few inches. Ada had an orgasm and voided her bladder. Which was fine. It was symbolic magick and the next time she pissed she would piss clean.
Edgar apologized profusely and made sure he hadn't just gouged a hole in her stomach. Her skin was unmarked when he withdrew his hand. Ada didn't mind. Ada was a registered nurse and Edgar had all his teeth. If they'd met under normal circumstances he'd be exactly the kind of man she'd sexually harass. The smoke cloud still hung over them, localized to their position. The Cadre gave Ada a special order they took from the restaurant, then left her to her own devices. When they looked back, a man in a white suit sat next to her on the bench as she tore into her extra crispy sandwich.
The Cadre returned to the restaurant to find a standoff in progress. The open carry guys from the Church stood guard around a slick looking early middle aged guy in a business suit. He wore a cross for his lapel pin and the Church guys were unarmed. They wore empty holsters and rifle slings clipped to nothing. Either it was a friendly visit or he wanted his goons to deliver a beating that wouldn't accidentally get out of hand. The threat wasn't lost on Ozzy and Nadia. The communist gunslinger stood behind the register with one hand out of sight, wrapped around something below the counter. Ozzy meaningfully held the fryer basket at a low ready, heavy metal still superheated by immersion in grease.
The leader of the intruders was Edgar Vespier, owner of the dealership where Thad burned the cursed bill that the local petty tyrant had supposedly drafted. He was disappointed that Thad wasn't here, but with Jazzy and Edgar (no relation) local to the premises he could deliver his message. They wanted his attention and they got it. He was going to squeeze them for donations to the Grace Church. Their souls were all fucked up and they were destined for hell but if they paid up their good works would persuade him to step off. Otherwise, he had a health inspector who would love to shut the store down over their copious safety violations.
The Cadre negotiated with Vespier. Surely this wasn't really about money. He assured them it was, but if they wanted to pay their debt another way they could do him a favor. One of his friends in the church was having trouble making headcount at one of her events. They could all attend a religious retreat free of charge and he'd consider the matter settled, until they made trouble for him again.
Nadia interjected. She was the manager and if he wanted to talk scheduling he would talk to her. And right now the only thing on his schedule was getting the fuck out of her restaurant. Next time he brought his little militia they had better bring their guns because they would fucking need them. Edgar grinned and led his troops out of the KFC, dismissively tossing a fistful of normal, unmarked bills over his shoulder.
Edgar and Jazzy debated accepting the invite. It was an obvious trap but it was a way to figure out what was going on inside their operation. They could pull off their demon summoning plot while they were there and really do some damage. Soaked in sweat, eyes glassy, Ozzy plunged the fryer basket back into the oil and loaded it with potatoes and volunteered to act as bait. Nadia threatened him again and the Cadre saved the loyal laborer's knees by explaining to their commissar the success of the day's operation. The mention of Alice's name made the red-scarfed Marxist nervous. Saving Ada was good, it meant they didn't have to kill her to stop her giving up information. It showed that the Colonel could protect his people and it preserved their source of free off the books medical care.
They had the rest of the night shift to work. Edgar took his spot at the drive through while Jazzy hefted a thing of syrup to refill the soda machine. In the break room, Nadia stood on her toes and embraced Ozzy, but whatever she said to him was lost when the pressure fryer shrieked.
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