Page 2 of The Vampire and the Case of the Hellacious Hag

He gave a noncommittal grunt and left me to my internet search. I Googled ‘mining in Portlock’ and discovered that there used to be two mines: the Reef Mine and the Chrome Mine. Only the latter was still running.

Gunnar interrupted my search. ‘Tell me about Shadow,’ he demanded. ‘What happened? You said he was stranger than usual?’

I put down my phone and thought back to the incident in the basement of the State Trooper Academy. Rogue MIB agents had captured Connor, Sidnee and me, planning to send us to a black ops site to experiment on us. The pricks were a secretive subset of the MIB and were behind the deadly drug, fisheye. We’d turned the tables on them, kicking ass and taking names. Shadow had stepped up and stopped one of them from fleeing the scene.

‘Shadow raced ahead of the agent who was escaping and transformed into a two-hundred-kilo version of himself. His smoky coat vanished and he looked like a regular silvery lynx in colouring – though not in size. He was huge! It was crazy.’ Shadow’s transformation had been helpful for sure, but a little unnerving.

‘He what?’ Gunnar asked, aghast.

I leaned against the car door and twisted to look at him. ‘After we cuffed the MIB bastard, Shadow shrank back to his regular size. And get this – when he did, his shadow seeped back until his coat was smoky again.’ I gave a heavy sigh. ‘Gunnar, what the fuck is my cat?’

Gunnar grimaced. ‘I’ve got no idea, Bunny, but I sure am glad he’s on our team.’

‘Me too.’ I sat in silence a while, my anxieties stewing inside me. ‘Gunnar, what if—’

‘Stop there. I know what you’re going to say.’

‘You do?’

It was my boss’s turn to sigh. ‘It hasn’t escaped any of us that Shadow has a lot of powers like the beast beyond the barrier. You even told us about seeing a giant lynx behind the beast’s smoke.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I think they’re related somehow, but everything I’ve seen of Shadow makes me think he’s good people. Maybe the beast started out the same a long time ago but something happened to change it. I don’t have any answers, just theories, but I don’t think that we should tar Shadow with the beast’s brush. We all have the opportunity to be more than our parents were.’

I nodded solemnly; I certainly hoped so, because my parents sucked. My mum had even shoved me in front of a bus once to try and make my magic manifest; it hadn’t and I’d broken some bones instead. That was something I didn’t think I could ever forgive, no matter the rash of apologies she’d made of late. Maybe with time, I could rise past it. And Gunnar was right: we each carved our way in life. Even if we used the imperfect tools our parents had given us, we could still build something spectacular. Shadow deserved that chance, too.

Gunnar might be right, but we were both wilfully ignoring the alternative: Shadow was only a juvenile rightnow, but there was a real risk that he might grow up to becomeexactlylike the beast beyond the barrier.

There was a distinct possibility that we might have already invited the enemy in.

Chapter 2

The Chrome Mine was beyond Kamluck Logging in a place I’d never been before around the back of the mountain. Kamluck – and Connor – were my usual destination.

I looked around with interest as we rolled into the area. The mine looked old but well maintained. The wooden buildings that pushed up the mountain were on stilts in some places, halfway into the earth and surrounded by thick forest, like almost everything in Portlock.

We pulled into a car park where the signage pointed to the main office and I collected our trusty black bag from the back seat before we headed into the office to meet Thomas. Apparently the deadly human had his fingers in a lot of pies around town: he owned the only taxi company in Portlock, hunted naughty supernats and apparently co-owned the mine, together with the two female council members, Liv and Calliope.

The office was rustic like its exterior but there was a bevy of modern conveniences nestled inside the ancient timber: computers, signage, climate control. The mine seemed to be in good working order as far as I could see, not that I had anything to judge it against. At least it wasn’t a shambolic mess.

Of course, we hadn’t gone inside it yet. Maybe inside it was in a real state. Maybe that’s why Helmud Henderson had died from a heart attack. The thought made me uneasy. ‘The mine’s safe, right?’ I muttered to Gunnar. ‘Like, it’s not going to collapse on our heads?’

Gunnar grinned. ‘You’re a vampire, you’ll be fine. Connor would find you eventually.’

I grimaced. I was a hybrid vampire and I didn’t think I’d do as well as he thought; for starters, as a hybrid I still had to breathe and that might be tricky in a collapsed mine. I tried not to think about it. As Nana would have said, no point in borrowing trouble.

Fluffy sniffed around but nothing appeared to set off his spidey senses. He returned to my side and I gave him a pat for a job well done.

Thomas was talking to what I assumed was a dwarf. The dwarves kept themselves to themselves and it was rare to see one in town. I’d had a full class about dwarves at the academy, and a lot of it had been about their strengths andweaknesses. Apparently they were irascible, prone to fights and especially sensitive about comments related to their small stature. When fights between dwarves broke out, most often it was fisticuffs and not a cause for concern. They didn’t usually wear weapons so their bust-ups were rarely deadly. Even so, they were very handy with a pick and an axe.

Their culture was secretive and they were hyper-protective about their dead. The academy had taught us that we wouldn’t be able to take custody of a dead dwarf’s body because it had to be released immediately to the family. An autopsy was a complete no-no, meaning that cases involving them were far harder to work. Luckily, Helmud Henderson was wholly human, though he’d obviously known about the supernat world because he’d been hired by the dwarves.

Thomas was talking to a dwarf about four feet tall with a wild scrub of hair that had been forced – incompetently – into a couple of braids. His long red beard was so full that only his eyes, nose and a hint of lip showed through, which made it tricky to read his facial expressions. He was dressed in brown denim overalls over a thick flannel shirt with a heavy denim jacket on top and wearing brown steel-toed leather boots. He didn’t have gloves and I could see that his hands were large and callused.

He glared at Gunnar and then at me with his copper-coloured eyes. I guessed it wasn’tthathard to read his expression after all: this one had a clear ‘fuck off’ vibe.

Gunnar shook Thomas’s hand then offered his huge paw to the dwarf who glanced at it, curled his lip and promptly ignored it. The Nomo let his hand fall, his expression mild and unoffended by the dwarf’s blatant rudeness. He turned to his friend instead. ‘Thomas, thanks for letting us examine the scene of death. Sorry for the inconvenience.’

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