Whip Smart, page 24
part #6 of The Salt Mine Series
Table of Contents
Whip Smart (The Salt Mine, #6)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Preview Chapter One
Text Copyright © 2020 by Joseph Browning and Suzi Yee
All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published by Expeditious Retreat Press
Cover by J Caleb Design
Edited by Elizabeth VanZwoll
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The Salt Mine Series Money Hungry Feeding Frenzy Ground Rules Mirror Mirror Bottom Line Whip Smart Rest Assured Hen Pecked Brain Drain
Whip Smart - The Salt Mine 6
Chapter One
Detroit, Michigan, USA
22nd of September, 10:00 p.m. (GMT-4)
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The hard rain drummed against the windows, forming rivulets along the panes of glass. A flash of lightning streaked through the sky, and Sarah held the warm mug of cocoa in both hands as she started counting. One...two...three...four...five...the crack of thunder erupted before she could reach six. The residual low rumbles in the distant night sky confirmed her count—the storm was in retreat. She loved a good thunderstorm, especially when she was safely indoors to appreciate it...although there was something to be said about playing in the rain.
The summer had been long and hot, and it wasn’t quite ready to relent, but it was fighting a losing battle. All the signs were there: the shortening days, the dropping temperatures, and the precipitous dips in barometric pressure that were coming more frequently. The transition from berry bounty to apple harvesting had already begun and soon, it would be time for Sarah to pick out a pumpkin straight from the patch. The rally cry had already been raised against the evils of pumpkin spice, not that it slowed popularity or consumption. No, resist as it may, summer would yield eventually and its surrender would usher in a new season.
Sarah always loved autumn, which she loosely defined as anything that required a light jacket or a sweater, not the puffy winter coat that hung in the back of her closet. It wasn’t just the joy of getting warm and cozy against the chill or the cold-induced carb-loading; autumn heralded the holiday season, starting off with Halloween.
She turned her attention back to the notebook in her lap and considered the sketches and doodles. It wasn’t too late to produce a killer costume, but she knew she only had so many nights and weekends left to spare. By this time last year, she had already started sewing. As of late, however, she’d had more important undertakings.
Sarah ran her hand through her short hair and reflexively stroked the red jade charm on the choker around her neck. Her fingers traced its smooth familiar contours. There were all sorts of powers attributed to the precious stone for those who believed in that sort of thing—a talisman of good luck, a channel for power and vitality, a stimulator of life force, nothing short of a warrior’s stone. Not that Sarah subscribed to such notions; she only knew what called to her.
The rap of a tree limb on the window quickened as the wind picked up outside, bringing her back to the here and now. The pensive brunette finished the last of her hot cocoa and removed the cold pack from her right thigh to assess the damage. A fist-sized collage of blacks, blues, and angry reds glared at her. It was tender to the touch despite the general numbness from the icing, but it was nothing a few ibuprofen and time wouldn’t mend. She’d weathered worse and knew this was far from the last bruise she’d have.
Sarah gingerly rose from the couch, unlocking the joints that had stiffened in place during her respite. After a few steps, her body remembered how to walk again and she returned the reusable pack to the freezer—it would be responsible for keeping tomorrow’s lunch cold.
Somehow, time had crept up on her once again; the weekend was over and tomorrow was the start of another workweek. It was time for Sadie to fade into the background so Sarah could bring home the bacon. Casual office attire would cover her bruises, and tepid coworkers would replace her fierce roller derby sisterhood. Too bad being Sadie didn’t pay the bills, Sarah ruefully sighed as she put away her gear and readied her satchel for work.
Her mother had originally given her the nickname, and for years, Sarah loathed it. It sounded so WASP and old-fashioned, like “would you like more pâté on the veranda before we play another round of badminton?” The fact that Sadie wasn’t any shorter than her actual name—in number of letters or syllables—was doubly irritating. It became marginally cooler after she found out the Beatles used it in a song, but Sarah never really embraced it until she reclaimed it from her mother. That was how Slashy Sadie was born. In many ways, she felt her alter ego had become her true self, and it was Sarah Pullman that was the pretense.
As she reached for her laptop, she fought off the urge to check her work e-mail before securing it in her bag. There was no point in getting ahead of what waited for her tomorrow, because there would just be another thing to take its place in an endless string of requests. She was unwilling to relinquish what was left of her evening to work; whatever was in there could wait until morning, when she was on the clock. After all, she didn’t have to adult for another ten hours.
Sarah walked to her draft table, destined for the dumpster before she’d rescued and refurbished it. Now, it was a large flat surface for her to craft her designs—the pencil-to-paper kind reserved for her personal projects, not the drag-and-click ones that paid the bills. She rubbed the cascade of fabrics between her fingers and selected one from the stack. The material was slippery and it would be a pain to sew, but there was only one way to tell if it was “the one.”
Sarah unfurled a few feet off the cardboard bolt with a familiar flick of the wrist and draped the swath across the dressmaker’s mannequin beside the table. The adjustable dummy was her double in every way—same height and dimensions at the shoulder, bust, waist, and hip, and from shoulder-to-elbow and elbow-to-wrist. The only thing it was missing was a head, and that was hardly necessary for holding up clothing in progress.
Much to Sarah’s delight and dismay, the midnight blue crêpe de chine hung just right. I never make it easy on myself, do I? she chided herself. Of course, she didn’t mean it. Otherwise she wouldn’t have purchased the fussy fabric at a remnant sale in the first place. She switched on a floor lamp, and a beacon of bright light flooded the otherwise dim room. As the iron heated up, she cleared the other rolls of material from the table and reset its tilt to neutral. She slid a large cutting mat over the surface and gathered her tools: pattern, fabric scissors, rotary cutter, and fabric weights.
The silky bolt unfurled with ease as Sarah measured the required length against the ruler on her mat. She placed the rectangle of Plexiglas on the mark and ran her rotary cutter along its edge, using her body weight to push the wheeled straight razor away from her. She locked the blade before carrying her selection to the ironing board where she gently worked out the creases on low heat, careful not to stretch the fabric in the process. She pulled the plug on the iron and gave her paper pattern a quick once over with the warm iron before it lost all its heat.
Safely deposited on the cutting surface, Sarah moved the pattern pieces around on the pressed material, imagining how she would have to cut and sew for the grain and seams to meet just so. It was a 2D-to-3D translation that all who sewed sewers eventually learned, sometimes the hard way. Once all the pieces of the pattern were strategically organized to minimize waste, Sarah dropped the weighted metal rings that would hold the pattern in place while she carefully cut out each piece. If the fabric had been more forgiving, she could have used pins and fabric scissors, but with crêpe de chine, the rotary cutter was the only way to get a true cut.
She became lost in precision as an ill wind blew in through a crack in the windowsill. The edges of the paper pattern rustled under the fabric weights as the wind crept deeper into her converted loft. Sarah shrugged off the chill as nothing more than another gust that broke through the shoddy insulation of her stylish but notoriously drafty abode.
She’d run her rotary cutter around all the pieces, but there were always stubborn spots that didn’t quite cut through with the old blade. She kept meaning to buy a replacement, but
If she had come to her senses sooner, perhaps she could have fought off her attacker, but such speculation became moot as the mortal remains of Sarah Pullman slumped onto her draft table, her blood seeping into the freshly cut swatches.
Chapter Two
Detroit, Michigan, USA
23rd of September, 3:45 p.m. (GMT-4)
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Deep in the bowels of Zug Island, Teresa Maria Martinez—codename Lancer—sat in her subterranean office, laboring over her keyboard. Despite the lack of natural light, the room was adequately lit between the circular brass fixture mounted on the ceiling and the articulated desk lamp positioned between her two widescreen monitors. The saline walls absorbed the rapid staccato of her typing as she muttered to herself. After a busy week in the field, she’d spent the day catching up on her administrative work. She was determined to wrap up everything by the end of the day. However, her fingers struggled to keep up with her internal monologue.
Things had been busy since had Wilson vanished three weeks earlier. An investigation of his movements prior to his disappearance had led them to Siberia, but once he’d left the mortal realm, his trail went cold. Wherever Wilson was, he was still alive—the wards on the 500 were still active—and there was no evidence to suggest Ivory Tower had him. But it was a small consolation.
With one agent missing, everyone’s workload had increased. As the newest agent, Martinez was kept closer to home and was generally the last to be sent abroad for missions. She was glad to give her passport a rest, but covering all local surveillance and interventions on her own was taxing. Luckily, she never backed down from a challenge.
Martinez paused and blinked her chestnut eyes a few times until the transient fuzziness in her vision cleared. The full spectrum bulbs were a vast improvement over the fluorescents that came with the office—last held by agent codename Patron—but hours at the computer were still hard on the eyes. She pulled her shoulders back and stretched her neck before focusing again on the monitors.
Unsurprising, spell check didn’t recognize “rovalfairui,” also known as a rust-wing faerie. A pair had crossed into the mortal realm and gotten loose in Detroit. While they were generally considered an avoidable nuisance in the Magh Meall, rovalfairui could cause untold damage in a world made of metal and steel. Unlike most fae, rovalfairui could not only touch cold iron without injury, they considered it a rare delicacy. As they were voracious eaters, the real danger in the mortal realm lay in a breeding pair. Without their native predators, it wouldn’t take long for an infestation to take hold and exponentially worsen the problem.
Martinez had hunted them down to an abandoned factory. While most of the machinery had been scrapped long ago, there was always metallic debris and when that dried up, the structural supports. By the time she’d cornered them, they had gorged so much their tawny gossamer wings were no longer able to lift them into the air, making them significantly easier to target. But even with their grossly distended bellies, she still found them almost too pretty to shoot. She knew it was petty, but it made her happy that fae could get fat—a serious blow to such haughty, vain creatures. Lancer dispatched them back to the land of the fae, and once she was sure there was no hidden brood secreted away in the dark corners of the old factory, went home herself.
With a few clicks, Martinez added “rovalfairui” to her dictionary, and a sea of red underlines disappeared. Isn’t the first new entry, and won’t be the last, she thought as she rubbed her temples for the final bit—the expense report.
Even though the Salt Mine was a secret black ops agency tasked to monitor and manage supernatural activity, that didn’t absolve the agents from filing paperwork. Just like FBI agents had to account for every bullet discharged from their weapon at the scene, Salt Mine agents had to account for every use of magic—how much, how was it used, and was it commensurate to the threat as perceived in the moment.
Agents would be compensated for expenditures deemed reasonable, using a set of algorithms based on historic estimations adjusted for inflation—which Martinez found hilarious—to help agents offset accrued karmic debt. Those deemed excessive but ultimately helpful to the mission received partial recompense. Any deemed unnecessary were the agent’s responsibility. For an organization funded by dark money siphoned from both the CIA and FBI and property confiscated from malevolent practitioners, they were ridiculously penurious with reimbursing karmic mileage.
Expense reports were also used to keep track of equipment use: either spent, damaged, or destroyed. This helped Harold Weber—quartermaster and Salt Mine inventor extraordinaire—keep tabs on inventory. That’s why getting the incident report right was so important. Capturing a true picture of what happened for future reference was a noble intent, but justification of and compensation for arcane resource use was a much stronger motivation.
Martinez filled in the cells of the standardized form: ten salt casts, ritual scrying (eye of the needle), one casting of true sight, two castings of immobilize, two banishment bullets (North America). She scanned her narrative for typos and missing words her brain had filled in but her fingers had missed. Once she was certain it supported her use of magic, Martinez sent the file to the appropriate department on the intranet with a few clicks.
With the die cast, she allowed herself to relax; that last one wasn’t too bad, but the longer and more convoluted a case got, the harder it was to pull everything together. Martinez cleared her desk and started winding everything down. She removed today’s dailies to make way for tomorrow’s, shut down her computer, and packed up her things. Just before she was about to turn off the lights, Martinez reached over and stroked a delicate buttercup petal of the potted Narcissus flower on her desk, her purloined souvenir from the Magh Meall.
Once upon a time, Martinez had known that faeries were the stuff of children’s stories, magic was little more than slight-of-hand and expensive props, and demons and devils were allegorical creatures evoked to elicit obedience to the religious structure of the time. She’d allowed that they all had a place and purpose in human consciousness, but they couldn’t be real. Until that fateful day she found out that they were.
All things considered, Martinez had taken it in stride, and ten months in, she almost felt like she had found her footing at her new job. She was grateful for Wilson’s tutelage in those early days, but it wasn’t until these past few months that she’d had her first real taste of being a Salt Mine agent. When Wilson was around and just across the hall, she’d still felt like she was on probation, but with him gone, she had to stand on her own two feet or fall flat on her face.
Of course, she wasn’t entirely on her own. She had Chloe and Dot, the conjoined twins that ran the Salt Mine’s esoteric library, and Weber kept her well-supplied and always made time for her inquiries. Martinez was pleasantly surprised to discover not all the Salt Mine Agents were as anti-social as Wilson. And then there was Stigma.
Officially, Alexander James Husnik died five years ago battling a wendigo, and Stigma’s deep cover, Petty Officer Boris Mikhailovich Petrov, drowned last month in the waters west of Sal Island, Cape Verde with the rest of the crew of the Yantar, a Russian naval vessel renowned as a spy ship in the intelligence community. So when David LaSalle deposited Stigma on her doorstep with no formal identity and a broken leg, she wasn’t sure how long he was going to be there or how well they would get along. Martinez never quite mastered the art of cohabitation, platonic or otherwise, but she didn’t have the heart to leave him convalescing in the Salt Mine. He would still be housebound, but at least it was in a real home.
There was only so much of doing nothing that Stigma could take, and two weeks into his convalescence, he’d started helping out more. He had already deepcleaned the house. Twice. He had changed all the burnt-out bulbs and tightened every loose screw he could find on a handle, cabinet, or door. With his help, Martinez now had a fully stocked ritual room behind the secret panel in the basement. He did the dishes as soon as they hit the sink and emptied the hamper regularly. Given the right seasoning mixes, Stigma wasn’t a half-bad cook. Martinez had come to understand why so many men sought out a full-time housewife.
