Хлоя Нейл - Hard Bitten

Tonight, I needed to go south.

You’d think a name as fancy as

“Ombudsman” (which really meant “liaison”) would have gotten my grandfather a nice office in some fancy city building in the Loop.

But Chuck Merit, cop turned supernatural administrator, was a man of the people, supernatural or otherwise. So instead of a swank office with a river view, he had a squat brick building on the South Side in a neighborhood where the lawns were surrounded by chain-link fences.

Normally, the street was quiet. But tonight, cars spilled across the office’s yard and down the street a couple of blocks. I’d seen my grandfather surrounded by cars before—at his house in the midst of a water-nymph catfight. Those vehicles had been roadsters with recognizable vanity plates; these were beat-up, harddriven vehicles with rusty bumpers and paint splatter.

I parked and made my way across the yard.

The door was unlocked, unusual for the office, and music—Johnny Cash’s rumbling voiceechoed throughout.

The building’s decor was all 1970s, but the problems were modern and paranormally driven.

So, I assumed, were the boxy men and women who mingled in the hallways, plastic cups of orange drink in hand. They turned and stared at me as I wove through them, their smallish eyes watching as I walked down the hallway. Their features were similar, like they might have been cousins related by common grandparents. All had slightly porcine faces, upturned noses, and apple cheeks.

On my way back to the office Catcher shared with Jeff Christopher—an adorable shifter with mad tech skills and a former crush on me—I passed a large table of fruit: spears of pineapple and red-orange papaya in a watermelon bowl; blood orange slices dotted with pomegranate seeds; and a pineapple shell full of blueberries and grapes. Snacks for the office guests, I assumed.

“Merit!” Jeff’s head popped out from a doorway, and he beckoned me inside. I squeezed through a few more men and women and into the office. Catcher was nowhere in sight.

“We saw you on the security monitor,” Jeff said, moving to the chair behind his bank of computer monitors. His brown hair was getting longer, and nearly reached his shoulders now. It was straight and parted down the middle, and currently tucked behind his ears. Jeff had paired a button-up shirt, as he always did, with khakis, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, presumably to give him room to maneuver over his monstrous keyboard. Jeff was tall and lanky, but what he lacked in mass he more than made up for in fighting skills. He was a shifter, and a force to be reckoned with.

“Thanks for finding me,” I told him. “What’s going on out there?”

“Open house for river trolls.”

Of course it was. “I thought the water nymphs controlled the river?”

“They do. They draw the lines; the trolls enforce them.”

“And the fruit?”

Jeff smiled. “Good catch. River trolls are vegetarians. Fruitarians, really. Offer up fruit and you can lure them out from beneath the bridges.”

“And they prefer not to leave the bridges.”

I glanced back. Catcher stood in the doorway, plate of fruit in hand and, just as Mallory had said, rectangular frames perched on his nose.

They were an interesting contrast with the shaved head and pale green eyes, but they totally worked. He’d gone from buff martial arts expert to ripped smart-boy. The Sentinel definitely approved. I also approved of his typically snarky T-shirt. Today’s read I GOT OUT OF BED FOR THIS?

“Mr. Bell,” I said, offering a small salute to my former katana trainer. “I like the glasses.”

“I appreciate your approval.” He moved to his desk and began stabbing the fruit with a toothpick.

So, Catcher was a sorcerer, and Jeff was a shifter. Vampires were also represented, at least partly. Because Chicago’s Masters were pretty tight-lipped about House goings-on, my grandfather had a secret vampire employee who offered up information—a vampire I suspected, largely without evidence, was Malik.

“Do they live under the bridges?” I wondered aloud, returning to the trolls.

“Rain or shine, summer or winter,” Catcher said.

“And why the open house? Is that just maintaining good supernatural relations?”

“Now that things are escalating,” Catcher said, frowning as he used the toothpick to push out the seeds from a chunk of watermelon, “we’re working through the phone book. Every population gets a visit—an evening with the Ombudsman.”

“Things are definitely changing,” Jeff agreed.

“Things are getting louder.”

We all looked back as a broad-shouldered river troll with short, ginger hair looked into the office. His wide-set eyes blinked curiously at us.

He didn’t have much neck to speak of, so his entire torso swiveled as he looked us over. A light breeze of magic stirred the air.

“Hey, George,” Catcher said.

George nodded and offered a small wave. “It’s getting louder. The voices. The talk. The winds are changing. There’s anger in the air, I think.”

He paused. “We don’t like it.” He shifted his gaze to me, a question in his eyes: Was I part of the problem? Making the city louder? Adding to the anger?

“This is Merit,” Catcher quietly explained.

“Chuck’s granddaughter.”

Awareness blossomed in George’s expression.

“Chuck is a friend to us. He is . . . quieter than the rest.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what George meant by

“quiet”—I had the sense it meant more to him than simply the absence of sound—but it was clear he meant it as a compliment.

“Thank you,” I said with as much sincerity as I could push into those two words.

George watched me for a moment. Thinking.

Evaluating, maybe, before he finally nodded.

The act seemed to carry more significance than just an acceptance of my thanks—like I’d been approved by him. I nodded back, my act just as significant. We were two paranormal creatures—members of different tribes, but nevertheless linked together by the city’s drama and an Ombudsman trying diligently to stem the tide—accepting each other.

The connection made, George disappeared again.

“Soft-spoken,” I commented when he was gone.

“They are,” Jeff said. “The RTs keep to themselves, except when the nymphs request it.

And even then, they appear, they work the task, and they head back beneath the bridges again.”

“What kind of things do they do?”

Jeff shrugged. “Generally they do the heavy lifting. Playing muscle for a nymph along her chunk of the river if there’s a boundary dispute, maybe enforcing the peace, maybe helping clean up that chunk of the river if the waters are moving too quickly.”

Apparently done with his explanation, Jeff stretched out to straighten a silver picture frame now on one corner of his desk. I’d previously seen the many-tentacled plush doll that sat atop one of his monitors, but the frame was new.

I walked over and peeked around his desk to get a glimpse of the picture. It was a shot of him and Fallon Keene. They’d apparently hit it off when the Keene family—and representatives of the rest of the Packs—had come to Chicago to decide whether to stay in their respective cities or head off to their ancestral home in Aurora, Alaska. The Packs had voted to stay, and the Keene family hadn’t yet returned to their HQ in Memphis. That respite must have given Jeff and Fallon time to get to know each other.

In the picture, Jeff and Fallon stood beside each other in front of a flat brick wall, their fingers intertwined, gazing at each other. And in their eyes—something weighty and important.

Love, already?

“You look very happy,” I told Jeff.