Hungering Blade Chapter One (Patreon)

-This is still technically a draft, and could potentially change before publishing-

“I need you over here!” My partner shouted at me from the office next door.

“It’s Collins’ turn!” I shouted back.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Lee shouted. “What does Collins have to do with anything? And he isn’t even in today!”

I hit a stopping place in my paperwork and pushed back my chair. I didn’t really want to write the report I was working on anyways.

“Sup?” I asked Lee as I stepped into her office, which was about two feet away from mine. We didn’t really need to shout.

Lily, “With one ‘L’”, looked up from her computer. “I need you to look at this.”

“What is ‘this’?” I asked as I walked around her desk to get an angle on the monitor, “And why?”

“If I’m right, the ‘why’ is self explanatory. As for the ‘what’…” She turned her monitor to face me better. “I’m pretty sure this is cursed.”

I leaned closer, peering at the image on the screen. My one visible eye widened as I slowly started panicking internally. “Please tell me this is a terrible practical joke. It’s Friday.”

Lily pushed herself back in her chair. “I’m right, then.”

“I mean, it’s got all the hallmarks in the report, so we have to check it out.” I sighed.

She printed out a copy of the report, then hopped to her feet and strut out of the office. Lily is shorter than average for a woman, standing at only five feet, has a self admitted addiction to shoes, and somehow manages to strut everywhere. We had a case in the Rockies once and she strut up the mountain, in heels. I like to joke that she’s got extra magic for that, and a little more to cover her sense of balance. Not that she needs any extra magic.

 I followed Lily out of her office and down the hall. Down a few turns and some more hallways, is our bosses office, which is significantly nicer than ours. Seniority has its perks.

A quick knock was followed by an “Enter.” We stepped inside.

Without a word Lily set the print out on his desk.

He glanced down at it, then up to our faces. Seeing the expressions we had, Lily stoic as she gets, and me feeling sick to my stomach, he looked back down and gave it a closer look. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I can tell you with all sincerity, I wish.” I complained.

Our boss, Senior Special Agent Christiansen, drooped in his chair. “I did not want to get one of these on a Friday. You two are on this weekend’s shift!”

“I don’t want to get any at all!” I complained. Whined, more like. But it was warranted!

“Please.” Lily rolled her eyes at me. “Who else were they going to call?”

“Anyone else?”

“Like?”

“…”

“That’s what I thought.”

Christiansen grabbed his phone, a corded model, the government isn’t all that concerned about upgrading our office phones, and started dialing. “I’ll make the calls. Get done with this quickly so we can get the aftermath over with.”

“What’s this ‘we’ business you’re talking about?” I demanded. “I’m the one that has to deal with the aftermath!”

My boss glanced up at me with the receiver of his phone trapped between his ear and his shoulder as he typed something into his computer. “I’ll deal with the insubordinate attitude because I know your feelings about this. I have to call a bunch of cranky agents and tell them they don’t get this weekend off after all. Get going.”

I snorted a laugh as we stepped out of his office and headed towards the elevator. The boss deals with “insubordinate attitudes” constantly and takes it all in stride. He is perfectly aware of how much all his agents respect him. The Magical Crimes Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not need the formalities of respect. We accept actual respect, in any form, and also results.

I stood in silence through the entire elevator ride. When the doors opened on the underground parking lot, Lily finally decided to call me out.

“Stop sulking, Alex.”

“Independence Day is on tonight!” I snapped, throwing my hands in the air. “And you promised to watch with me!”

She rolled her eyes at me again. “We can still watch the movie.”

“Sure. But it’ll be with a half inch glass barrier in between us. I hate quarantine.”

“Just be glad they found a glass that’s resistant enough to magic. Otherwise it’d still be that concrete hole.”

I sighed. “I am very grateful they don’t stick me in the damn hole anymore.”

“You see the silver lining. Good.” Lily nodded as she unlocked our standard issue black SUV with the remote. “Now shut up and get in the car, Alex.”

***

We pulled up to the one of the local police evidence storage warehouses and parked in the relatively empty parking lot. Not a lot of visitors to this place.

Lily jumped out of the passenger seat as I rolled up the windows and turned off the SUV.

She stepped around the vehicle and held her hand out, palm up. I said nothing and obediently handed her the keys. I used to argue with her, seeing as how I like to drive. She likes to drive too though, and she wins our arguments more than I do.

We walked to the front entrance and I held open the heavily reinforced door for her, then followed behind into the unobtrusive front office.

“Can I help you?” The young looking officer sitting behind bulletproof glass asked us.

We pulled out our badges and flipped them open, held so the officer could see them. “Agents Hart and Lee, MCD.” I told him. “We’ve gotten word you’ve picked up a possible high level cursed object. We’re going to need to take a look at it, and if necessary, confiscate it.”

The officer stared at us. “Umm…”

I sighed. “Call Martinez, tell him Hart and Lee are here.”

Bringing up the name of a superior jump-started the officer’s thought making process and he called like I asked.

A few minutes later, the increasingly familiar heavy-set bulk of Sergeant Martinez came around a corner. “Hart and Lee. What’ve we got?”

Lily handed him the picture we had of the item. “Should have come in yesterday.”

He looked at it for a second before grunting. “Yup. I remember this one, c’mon.” He grabbed the handle of the door leading deeper into the warehouse and looked over at the officer at the desk. With a harsh buzzing noise the door unlocked and he pulled it open, letting us pass him before he let it close.

We headed inside, then paused in front of the very heavy and massively reinforced door leading into the warehouse proper. Martinez started entering codes into the attached key pad while I stopped to take a few fortifying breaths.

“Ready?” Martinez glanced back at me, his hand on the door.

I sighed. “Do it.”

He nodded and pulled the door open. We stepped into the evidence warehouse and I promptly got blinded by the massive number of magical signatures everywhere.

I halted and grimaced, rubbing the skin under my eye-patch covering my right. Not that it helped much. And yes, that’s right, under my eye-patch. The basic assumption to make when someone wears an eye-patch is that the person wearing it doesn’t have a working eye underneath. Like many assumptions made about me, that one would be wrong. I have a working eye under my patch, it just isn’t my original eye. It’s much better.

Thanks to my magical prosthetic eye, I can see magic, have what amounts to x-ray vision, and do all kinds of other cool stuff. Yes, I can see through walls, and clothes, and skin. And thanks to that second one, I have to take a butt-load of ethics classes every year to account for the fact that I can look at people naked anytime I want. Not that I do. A majority of people don’t look any better naked than they do clothed. It does make it really easy to find hidden weapons though.

So I stood there, blinded by all the magic coming off of the various accumulated evidence brought in by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department, when my partner got impatient.

“Move.” She ordered as she pushed me.

I stumbled forward and grabbed the railing that surrounded the platform in front of the doors. “Dammit Lee, don’t do that!”

“Still haven’t figured how to turn it off?” Martinez asked sympathetically.

“Its been six years since he got it.” Lily replied for me when I didn’t reply. “If he ever figures that out, he’s going to throw a party.”

“Damn straight.” I grunted.

And yes, in my head or in private she’s Lily, in public she’s Lee. We’re best friends, but professionalism is important in our line of work.

When I finally recovered enough to actually walk, I followed the other two down onto the floor. In front of us were a seemingly infinite amount of metal shelves stretching the width and breadth of the warehouse. The facility we were in lay on the very outskirts of the city limits, and housed all of the magical items that were included in evidence of criminal activity. There’s another warehouse to hold all of the mundane evidence picked up farther inside the city. This one is in what amounts to the middle of nowhere for safety reasons. Not that it’s really necessary, seeing as how the MCD shows up to take anything actually dangerous to more secure sites. Or sends me in to deal with anything cursed.

“This way.” Martinez took us down a series of tight turns until I would have no idea how to get out if it weren’t for my eye. I left Lily in here one time and she almost killed me when she managed to make it out.

Martinez stopped in front of a shelf and pointed. “It’s this… one.”

We stared at the blank space on the shelf with a small tag describing the item.

“Well, wherever it went, it was here just a moment ago.” I told them, looking at the traces of magic it had left behind. “It was taken less than five minutes ago.”

My partner sighed. “I don’t want to be here all day. Especially not with what’s coming after this. Can you look out for it?”

“Looking out” was our own personal slang for me letting loose. I turn off my self-imposed limits on my sight and start tracking whatever it is we’re looking for.

“I’m going to have such a headache after this.”

“I’ll but you something to make it up to you.”

“Ooh, treats.” I grabbed onto Lily’s shoulder with my left hand to anchor myself, and used my right to pull my patch off.

Martinez grimaced and looked away.

Lily glared at him, but I don’t really blame people who do that. To start, there’s the really big scar running across my face, from the center of my forehead across my eye and cheek, stopping at my jaw. It’s big and ropy and not fun to look at. Then there’s the smaller scars that radiate away from my eye like some kind of morbid star burst. Then there’s my eye itself. The only part of it that looks like an actual eye is the fact that it’s round, part of the carvings on it resemble an iris, and there’s a hole that mimics a pupil. The “pupil” never dilates, which is subtly unnerving to the human mind by itself. Then there’s the fact that the entire thing is gold. There’s no color variation between the sclera, the part of a normal eye that’s white, and the iris, the part of a normal eye that is colored. The only reason you can tell there’s an “iris” at all is the relief carving that creates it. The two things about my eye that really freak people out are, first, the carvings. The surface of it is absolutely covered in various symbols carved into it. And they move, constantly roaming about in slow drifting moments. And second, the eye itself can rotate three hundred and sixty degrees. I can see in any direction I choose at any given moment, and due to my fairly well developed sense of paranoia, I constantly monitor the area surrounding me. So with all of those put together, I’m not surprised people don’t like to look at me when I’m not wearing the patch. Honestly that’s really the only reason I wear it at all.

I took a deep breath and shut my left eye. “Right, here we go.” With a burst of concentration, I focused on the traces of magic left by the cursed item. Locking onto them like a homing beacon, my eye spun as I followed the path taken by whoever had stolen the item. Besides the x-ray vision it gives me, the eye also lets me move my point of view in a sphere around me. It’s helpful since the x-ray part only goes so far out. People who have flown a drone using the goggles that let you look through the drones camera can kind of understand what its like to look through my eye when I do that. My point of view just flies off and I just drive it around with my thoughts. 

The path drifted through aisle after aisle, headed towards the back. I frowned. “Martinez?”

“Yeah?” Due to what I was doing, I couldn’t really see the area around me, which was why I was holding onto Lily tightly in order to not fall over, but I could hear Martinez just fine.

“Is there any reason for one of your employees to jump off the loading dock with this thing?”

“They did what?!”

Just then I managed to follow the trail to it’s maker. “And they’re running down the street with it. Oh! They just trucked that guy. They’re definitely stealing it. Lee, can you grab them?”

“Show me.” My partner demanded. “How far out?”

“Half a mile.” I estimated, and activated the fun artifact implanted in my left arm. The doctors that looked me over after I was rescued estimated that I’d had at least thirty artifacts implanted in me during my imprisonment. I’d managed to use four of them. The one in my left bicep was a thin sheet of metal engraved with symbols that were designed to be used to share magic with emergency responders in order to keep them going during emergencies. I’d figured out how to use it in order to share my vision with others.

“I see him. I’m going to let him get past that group then grab him.” I couldn’t see it, but based on long experience I could imagine my partner sharply lifting her hand, palm cupped. And since I was watching our runner, I could see the results, four pieces of solid rock rising out of the ground and trapping him in.

“Ooh.” I winced as I watched the man run head first into the wall in front of him a collapse to the ground. I dropped my vision and took a second to balance.

“We got him.” Lily told Martinez as we started walking towards the back.

“Can you tell me who it is?” He asked as he led us.

“Didn’t see a name tag. Dirty blond hair, little bit shorter than me, kinda skinny.” I described the guy.

“Tattoo on his shoulder?”

“Didn’t see one.”

Martinez shook his head roughly. “That’s probably McKinna. He’s one of my best guys! The hell is he doing stealing evidence?”

“Could be its stealing him.” Lily told him as we rounded a corner.

“What?”

“If its powerful enough, it might have grabbed him as a vessel if he got to close to it. He might not be in control of his own actions.” I explained.

Martinez cursed and started moving faster. It only took us a few more seconds to clear the last of the shelves, and then we jumped down the loading dock and hurried down the street. Or, really Martinez and I jumped down. I turned around and grabbed Lily, setting her down on the ground before she could react. She scowled at my grin but didn’t say anything. She’d probably get revenge later.

Who was I kidding? She’d definitely get revenge later.

We made it to the improvised holding cell my partner had made a moment later, and with a gesture she pulled it down.

The McKinna whirled to face us, still holding the jar that’d started this mess, and that might have been controlling him. “You! You did this!”

“Yeah, I did. Put the jar down and step away from it.” My partner ordered him, not bothering to reach for her gun.

“Put the jar down? You think I’m going to put it down?! Why would I put it down?! With this I will rule over all of you! With it’s power…”

I sidled over to Martinez, keeping my eyes on McKinna as he ranted. “Hey, does this guy have a significant level of power?” I asked him.

Martinez glanced over at me. “No, he’s pretty weak, why?”

“Well…” I drawled as I watched sparks start to dance around McKinna as he began floating slightly above the ground.

He was still shouting. “With this artifact I shall-” Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

“Pass out from magical overload.” My partner finished for him.

“That.” I told Martinez before stepping closer and taking a closer look at the unconscious man. “And I can say with certainty that McKinna was not in charge of this little encounter. He’s probably going to need therapy, but he won’t face charges.”

Martinez sighed in relief.

My partner stayed a few feet back, not needing me to remind her not to touch the jar. Making sure to use my right hand only, I reached forward and slowly pulled the jar out of McKinna’s grasp and stood up.

“Agent Hart!” A strident voice cried out from behind me.

I sighed despondently and turned around.

One of the banes of my existence came to a stop in front of me, panting. The thin yet out of shape man drew himself up and shoved a finger in my face. “I demand that you stop draining that artifact right this insta-”

“I’m not draining it.” I interrupted him.

“-nt. It could very well… What?”

“I’m not draining it.” I repeated. “All I did was pick it up.”

Dr. Smalls, PhD., snorted. “Right. I completely believe that-”

“Was I just supposed to leave the cursed item with the victim it had already influenced into stealing it? Let it keep corrupting him until he’d need years of therapy to recover?” I interrupted him again. He hates being interrupted, which is why I do it as often as possible.

“Well… no I wouldn’t want that, but it could have been someone else who-”

“Who exactly?” 

He scowled at me for interrupting him a third time but I ignored him and kept going.

“Should my partner have picked it up? She’s the only other trained MCD Agent on site. Would you have liked her to pick up the cursed object that can influence others? Is that what you would have liked?” I pointed at her where she was staring the doctor down.

He looked over at her and blanched. “W-well, no I don’t think that-”

“Then stop hounding me about it, please.”

The reason I describe Agent Lee as an absolute badass is because she is one. Besides the fact that she’s incredible at both hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship, my partner is a true elementalist. Those individuals capable of controlling one of the four elements are called elementalists. Hydromancers control water, pyromancers manipulate fire, aeromancers control the wind and air, and terramancers shape the earth. True elementalists can use all four elements. Not only is Lily one of the very rare true elementalists, she’s also a Rank Three magical on the power rating scale, which goes from Ten at the weakest to One at the strongest. So my partner is not only incredibly versatile with her ass kicking abilities, she’s also really really strong.

I just look scary and can do a few interesting tricks.

***

“Balor the Wicked!” Someone shouted.

I looked past Dr. Smalls and saw the rest of his team coming up behind him. The person who’d called me was Dr. Terrance Fishburn, who also has a PhD. Like his colleague. As a side note, his name is weird. Ostensibly Dr. Smalls’ colleague, in reality they were constantly fighting over control of their research project, which covered experimental means of removing curses from people and items. Which is where their interests collided with my job.

“Papers.” Fishburn declared as he shoved said papers into my free hand. He held out his hand and wiggled his fingers. “Gimme.”

I glared at him. I like Fishburn more than I like Smalls. That doesn’t mean I like Fishburn. “What did you just call me?”

He paused in place. “Balor the Wicked? The Formorian king from Irish legend? Only had one eye that did all kinds of magic stuff?” He sighed in annoyance when I just stared at him. 

I handed the paperwork to my partner and continued staring at the doctor without saying a thing. Silent staring freaks people out. If he annoyed me anymore I’d pull the eye-patch off again. That would really unnerve him.

“Yeah, sorry Fishburn.” Lily looked at the first page of the set of documents, “These don’t work.”

“What?!” He demanded. “That’s ridiculous! Those are direct authorization to retrieve the item!” He tried to snatch the jar from me, but I just held my arm slightly higher and he couldn’t reach it. Being tall has it’s advantages.

“Yeah but,” Lily flicked a portion of the paper dramatically, “This authorizes you to take possession of ‘the cursed item currently in the custody of the CPD.’”

“Exactly! So give it to me!”

Lily ignored his demands and kept talking. “It does not, authorize you to take possession of the level two influence capable object currently in the possession of the FBI, In fact, this clause,” She helpfully pointed at said clause, “On page three, strictly denies you the right to take control of any artifacts capable of any danger level higher than four. It’s a two. You don’t get it.”

“What- I- This- Argh!” Fishburn spluttered before storming off.

My partner and I shared cordial waves with the members of the team we actually liked, and glared at the rest of them.

“Calling the boss.” Lily told me and pulled out her phone.

I stood there and stared at the jar. “What do you do…?” I wondered. With enough experience, you can tell if somethings cursed by looking at it. Sometimes. Alright, pretty much only if its got creepy moving symbols on it like the jar did. I can tell if something is cursed by looking at it with my special eye. When I look at magical things with it they glow, and curses glow in creepy ways. They all look evil.

“Stop talking to inanimate objects.” Lily absentmindedly scolded me.

I ignored her, both because she was on the phone, and also because I wasn’t interested in repeating the same argument again.

“Hey boss.” I heard her start to talk to him over the phone.

I rotated the pot as I looked it over, searching for any visible hints about its origin or purpose. It was small enough to be held in one hand, but just barely, and made of some kind of earthenware. It was a normal “pot color”, kind of tan brown, but the symbols on it were some kind of incredibly stylized Asian language that glowed a dark red.

“Yeah we got it. One of the employees grabbed it and ran. No, it was influencing him. No, I didn’t touch it. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

The jar had a lid that hadn’t fallen off in all the commotion, but that wasn’t surprising. Enchanted or cursed objects will often resist coming apart to natural forces, and will only respond to intelligent intent.

“He’s unconscious, and his boss is here too. Sergeant Martinez. Yup. That works. Yeah we can wait. No, he’s looking it over. I’ll call you back if he figures it out. Yes sir, talk to you later.” She hung up and put her phone away. “Got anything?”

“Looking inside next.”

“Don’t open it!” Martinez exclaimed from where he was standing by McKinna.

I gave him a dry look. “I’m not going to.” I reached up and tapped my eye-patch.

He deflated, looking a little embarrassed. “Right.”

I held the jar up in front of my eye and freed my eye with my other hand. I concentrated and looked through the jar. Honestly I don’t really need to move the patch out of the way, but it helps me concentrate. Kind of like how I don’t need to turn off the car radio when I get lost, but it helps me anyways. Also, if people think I do have to remove the patch, it could give me an advantage against them. Like I said, I’m paranoid.

Inside the jar was a really big bug. It looked like a centipede, except it was about two feet long and at least four inches thick. It’s mandibles were about the size of my pinky finger and it stared at the inside of the jar where my hand was holding it. The thing glowed with a nasty, toxic magic.

I grunted and looked over at Lily, where she was checking something on her phone. “Kodoku jar.”

Her head snapped up, her eyes wide as she looked at the jar. “Is the bug still inside?”

“Yeah, we’re good.”

She released a relieved breath. “Well, that’s good news on an otherwise not great day.”

I grunted in reply and got ready to wait for a transportation team to show up and take the damn thing from me.

“What’s a kodoku jar?” Martinez asked.

“Curse magic, originates in Japan. You put a bunch of poisonous and venomous bugs in a jar and make them fight to the death. The winner absorbs all the toxins from the dead ones, and the liquids it secretes are an incredibly deadly poison. The bug itself can be used to control people and has shapeshifting powers, limited to various bugs and worms. There’s folklore of the bug bringing fortune to its owner in return for sacrifices of wealth, but no one’s found any evidence of that part.”

“How can you touch it?” He asked, staring at it in only partially concealed fear. "I never thought to ask before."

I pointed at the back of my right hand. “See the bump?”

He nodded.

“This one makes me immune to curses, but the range of it is small. If I touched it with my left hand it’d grab me.” I didn’t mention that stronger-willed people can generally resist those sorts of curses. For one, no point in disparaging the guy who got possessed. Number two, this was a powerful curse, so you’d only be able to resist for so long, even if you were, say, a trained FBI agent.

He nodded again and went back to checking on his fallen subordinate.

“Hazmat just pulled up.”

I looked up from my continued inspection of the cursed jar when Lily spoke up and I saw the same truck she had as it pulled to a stop in front of us.

“Hey you two.” The annoyingly handsome hazmat team member we normally dealt with greeted us. “What’ve you got for us this time?”

“Kodoku jar.” I told him, waving it a little. 

“Oh, fun!” He held out the sealing bag and I slowly dropped it in. When it was all the way inside I quickly pulled my hand out and he sealed the bag before carefully putting it in a marked box one of his teammates was holding.

When that was done, he turned back to us, his perfect teeth flashing in his obnoxiously nice smile.

“So, you want the good news or the bad news first, Hart?”

“Bad.”

“Well too bad! Good news first. You aren’t getting quarantined.”

“What?” I was shocked. I always get quarantined after touching something that cursed. People couldn’t believe that the curses didn’t effect me if I only used my right hand.

“I know, I was just as surprised. But the folks upstairs finally realized that ‘curse immunity’ means ‘curse immunity’. There’s a bunch of paper shuffling going on while they make all kinds of new regulations and stuff. They’ll still probably make you sit in there if it’s something really bad though.”

“Figures. What’s the bad news?” I asked.

“You have to get tested twice as much.”

“Eh.” I shrugged. Four times a year going through a series of tests making sure I don’t turn into some kind of curse bearing plague-starter isn’t that much worse than doing the same thing two times a year.

Apparently done with his news for me, the hazmat guy, who’s name I will admit to having forgotten, turned to my partner. “So, Lily, when am I getting that second date?” He asked.

Thankfully for my rising jealousy, she snorted. “How about on the fifth of never?”

“Aw come on.” He groaned good naturedly. “It wasn’t that bad.”

Her glare informed him that it was indeed that bad and she had zero interest in another date.

Have I mentioned that I’m in love with Lily? No? Well… yeah. I’m hopelessly in love with my partner.

And, yes, there are anti-fraternization policies in the MCD, which is one of the reasons why I’m hopelessly in love with her. Combined with Lily’s repeated diatribes about how dating other agents is stupid, I’ve mostly stuck with loving her from right next to her. Someday we might get assigned to other people as we get more seniority right? So if that happens, I can try. But until then, I’ll wait and be content with the fact that the person watching my back is the person I trust most in the world.

My phone rang as I watched the hazmat guy fail to flirt with Lily. I vaguely wondered what had happened on their date for her to be that annoyed with him. “Hart.”

“Christiansen here. Done with the item?”

I walked a little farther away to hear my boss better. “ It’s a Kodoku jar, and yeah, hazmat just picked it up.”

“Great. No idea what that is. Get back here. There are… issues.” He hung up.

I put my phone away and called for my partner. “Hey, boss wants us back ASAP.”

“What’s up?” She asked as she walked away from the hazmat guy.

“He said there’s ‘… issues’.” I told her.

“Well… dammit.”

My thoughts exactly.