Aleksei’s office was exactly as I remembered it. The definition of minimalism with a stellar view overlooking all of Eastport. Likewise, Aleksei was his same immaculate self. Today he had forgone the tuxedo and was wearing an ornate vest and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal dual arm-sleeve tattoos. For accessories he had gone with that classic leather gun-holster to match a slick white-handled revolver stashed under his arm and a golden wristwatch that looked more expensive than the repair bill on the apartment building that got torn apart yesterday. With his shock of white hair done up in such a slick hairdo, he looked like what the world’s youngest, fittest, and most badass grandpa wishes he looked like.
I needed to find out who this guy’s tailor was. Damn.
“Agent Tabitha, to what do I owe the pleasure? Ah, and I see you’ve brought Operator Io with you, what a treat!” He smiled warmly at both of the girls. When he swiveled his head to see me, his expression instantly fell. “Oh. You.”
Choosing my response carefully, I decided to go with the strong silent approach and simply folded my arms across my chest and stood beside the girls. I had grown nearly a foot since the last time I stepped inside this office. Aleksei may not have liked me, but even he had to admit I wasn’t the snarky pushover who first strode into his office and disrespected him.
Aleksei took in my new look and my new attitude with a disgruntled twitch of his mustache. Maybe he had wanted me to start some shit. Interesting. He then turned back to Tabitha and leaned against his desk.
“Well? How can I help you?”
Tabitha, never one to beat around the bush, cut right to it. “We know about the Signal that’s forcing monsters to go Feral.”
Aleksei’s left eyebrow rose up towards his scalp. “Who told you?”
“You did. I overheard your conversation with that hot-assed doctor lady two nights ago,” I said.
Aleksei slow-blinked and rose to his full height. “You mean my wife?”
Shit. Shit, shit, fuck, and also damn. Play it cool, Ryan. Strong silent type, remember?
I shrugged noncommittally and decided to go for broke. At the very least if I went down, I was going to die a goddamn legend. “What can I say, boss, your wife’s a total milf. You’ve got good taste.”
Io and Tabitha both looked at me like I was crazy—which to be fair, I was—and Aleksei’s right hand twitched up towards the handle of his sidearm. His pupils turned to black slits and for a moment I really thought he was going to pull the gun and start blasting.
But he composed himself and played off the hand-twitch by reaching up to stroke his beard instead. He scoffed to himself. “You’re damn right I do, kid. You know something? You must have some real balls to say something like that to the most powerful man in the hidden world. Kinda reminds me of me when I was your age?”
I smiled. “Bold?”
Aleksei’s face fell into a mask of complete disdain. “Stupid.” He reached up and undid his tie, unbuttoning the first two buttons from his shirt and yanking them aside to reveal the uppermost piece of a nasty burn scar. “The old director of the Bureau gave me this for hitting on his daughter.”
Grimacing slightly, I—stupidly—asked, “What did you do next?”
Aleksei’s smile struck me as far more predatory than any look I had seen to date. No monster, not even Boris, had ever struck me as so frighteningly deadly as Aleksei did in that moment.
“I killed him, married his daughter, and took his desk. Now I run the Bureau. Which is why when I tell you that what you overheard is classified, and that I want you to forget whatever you think you know about this Signal, I’m not saying it as your friendly boss. I’m saying it as the man who took the most powerful seat in the hidden world right out from under a demon and held onto it for eighty god damned years.”
Eighty?
Tabitha shifted uncomfortably. “But, Aleksei…if monsters are going Feral for reasons out of their control, shouldn’t we be focused on detaining them instead of killing them? We should be trying to find the source of this Signal and putting an end to it before more monsters go out of control!”
Aleksei tossed his tie down on his desk and shook his head. “We tried that already. The truth is we don’t have the space in this facility to detain that many monsters, nor do we have time to build new facilities or the manpower to run them. Recruiting and training enough new agents to run a monster prison takes time we just don’t have. At the rate the Signal is spreading…what am I saying? You three need to forget you ever heard about any of this. Get out of my office and go do your damn jobs!”
Tabitha paled. “Aleksei, you promised to always tell me the truth.”
Aleksei paused, his slit-pupiled eyes locking onto her for a moment. “No, sweetheart, I promised never to lie to you. Those are two different things. The truth is, I’m not telling you anything more about the Signal. And you are not to breathe a word of it to anyone outside this room, that’s an order. You three have just bought yourselves an express ticket to my shit-list. For the foreseeable future you are on round-the-clock patrols all across Eastport. Now get out of here before I think of something worse. Go. Now!” He moved to his chair and started tapping away at what I assumed was just a bare desk, but a holographic keyboard sprang to life at his fingertips and a portion of the window suddenly darkened and became a computer monitor.
Io swallowed nervously and started to slither back down the hallway.
Even I started to follow her, but Tabitha stayed put.
“Do you know?”
Aleksei gave her a very stern look. “Tabitha,” he warned.
“Do you know what Boris is doing to these monsters? How he’s executing them and feeding them to his hellhounds? Do you think…do you think if this Signal got to me, he would put me down the same way? Are you okay with that?”
Aleksei stared down at his desk for a long, silent moment before looking back up at Tabitha. Whatever their strange father-daughter relationship was, it was clearly straining at its boundaries, ready to break apart completely.
“Agent Boris has been with the Bureau even longer than I have. I want you to think very carefully before you go picking fights with him, Agent Tabitha. You know what he is. What he is capable of. Are you sure that is someone whose methods you want to question?”
Tabitha snorted in disbelief. “You wouldn’t lift a finger if he killed me and fed me to his dogs, would you? I can’t believe I ever looked up to you. You’re just a pathetic, scared old lizard in a monkey suit. You can go fuck yourself, Director Aleksei.”
She pivoted on her heel and stormed past Io and me, speeding down the hallway in the blink of an eye. Io sped after her.
Shaking my head, I turned to go after the girls.
Tabitha was silent the entire elevator ride, standing perfectly still and staring at nothing. After a second, Io awkwardly reached over and pressed a button that took us to a different wing of living quarters than where Tabby’s room was.
We stood there in awkward silence for a while until the doors opened and Io led the way to her room, letting us both in and closing the door behind us.
Io’s room was decorated with two standing desks, four computers, and a long L-shaped couch instead of a bed. Both desks were covered in joysticks and gaming controllers, and the monitors were those brand new full-immersion hologram emitters that I’d seen on commercials but never gotten a chance to check out up close and personal. Every clear space of the wall was filled with posters of either birds of prey or aircrafts. Most of the aircrafts were fighter jets and other military vehicles, but a few were roto-copter rescue vehicles.
Quite different from Tabitha’s room—I was a little preoccupied when I first walked in—which was pretty much just a bed tucked in the corner, a workbench covered in tools and weapons, and a bookshelf filled with martial arts training manuals, fitness magazines, and firearm catalogs.
Quite a pair these girls are. A gun nut and fitness freak, and a busty geek who dreams of flying. If we weren’t trapped in this current situation I’d consider myself pretty lucky. Fuck who am I kidding, I am pretty lucky.
Io sighed as she activated her tablet and swiped through several notifications. “Aleksei already has us signed up for back-to-back missions. We’re leaving headquarters and moving into a safehouse in T-minus two hours. I’d better start packing all my drone equipment. If you two have anything to pack, now’s the time.”
Tabitha shrugged. “I was trained from a very young age to pack light and move fast. Low drag, killer instinct, all that jazz. All I need is a go-bag and my guns.”
Io frowned and swiveled to me, a silent question hanging in the air.
“Oh me? I don’t really own any personal property at the moment. I sleep in an empty cot in the barracks and wear whatever basic shit they put in my gym locker. Olson gave me some cool guns for the last mission but those all got taken from me when I was being debriefed so yeah I pretty much just own myself and that’s it. I’m good to go whenever, wherever.”
Tabitha and Io exchanged a glance and both girls shook their heads.
“Dude, we need to get you a room and a wardrobe,” Io said, her voice softening like she was appalled to hear that was how I had been spending the past three weeks. It really wasn’t that big of a deal. Shaking her head, she started packing things from her desks into a big silver suitcase filled with strange little mechanical winged shapes.
“Until then, you can share my room,” Tabitha chimed in. “And we can swing by the Armory on our way out. He likes you, so when he hears you weren’t allowed to keep your guns he’ll probably give you something even cooler than last time.”
I made a face. “Cooler than the Roulette? I don’t see how that’s possible.”
Tabitha managed a weak smile, but her heart wasn’t really in it. I could tell she was still bothered by our encounter with Aleksei, and I decided to do something about it. But I needed to be subtle about it so as not to upset her by bringing up a sore subject while she was still rattled.
“Hey. What’s with the weird father-daughter energy between you and our boss?”
Nailed it.
Io inhaled sharply. “Ryan, I don’t think that’s—”
“No, it’s okay Io. Ryan and I are partners. He’s been completely open with me, and I don’t have a problem returning the favor.” Tabitha looked up at me with a tired expression on her face. “When I was a little girl, my parents took me and my brother to those campgrounds up by Embercreek Ravine. We used to go there all the time so they got it in their heads that it was safe. We all did. Anyway, I climbed to the top of this great big rock and declared myself princess of the forest, right? And suddenly we hear this howling sound off in the distance.”
Oh shit.
“Turns out what me and the other kids mistook for the lights from a passing lander was actually the light of an anomaly that we just,” Tabitha took a deep breath to try and steady herself, “walked right through, right into the World of Monsters. Yeah. So, while I was nice and safe up on my rock, my shout carried for miles and drew in a bunch of hungry werewolves who descended on all the kids that went off playing in the woods. My brother. My best friend. All of them. Just ripped them apart and devoured them…a lot like Boris’s hounds got Claire, to be honest.”
I was not at all happy to be reminded of that moment in the midst of this childhood story.
But Tabitha wasn’t done. “One of them, this great big alpha female, spotted me up there and shifted into a humanoid form, trying to lure me down with promises that not only would she not eat me but that she would raise me as her own daughter. They left me up there to think about it for two whole days. Her and all the other wolves thought it was funny. On the third day she got tired of waiting and climbed up to me. True to her word she didn’t eat me, but instead she turned me into a werewolf and told me I was her daughter now.”
Somewhere between ‘laughing’ and ‘climbed’ I knelt down beside Tabitha. All I could do was listen. There was no going back and undoing what was already long over.
“She pushed me off the rock and I fell all the way down. Broke, just, so many bones. But they started to heal, and as they did the others gathered around me and started trying to feed me bits of some other human hikers who had wandered in from the mortal world. I refused, so they beat me. More broken bones. More healing. Then all of a sudden there was a gunshot in the woods. Aleksei, who was a Keeper at the time, had elected to step through the anomaly into the World of Monsters and come to my rescue.” Tabitha looked up into my eyes and made sure I was listening to this next part. “Aleksei and his old partner. Boris.”
Chills crept up my spine. The way Aleksei had spoken about the man had lacked any sort of familiarity I might have associated with two old buddies who went way back. No. He had spoken of Boris with fear. What did a guy who went around calling himself ‘the most powerful man in the mortal world’ have to fear.
I wasn't sure I would like the answer.
“Aleksei and Boris slaughtered all of the younger werewolves but the alpha female got away. Boris tried to kill me, too, but Aleksei stayed his hand. He picked me up in his arms and carried me back through the anomaly. He spoke to my parents, explained it to them and offered them a place at the Bureau. I guess they refused because from that day onward I never saw them again. Aleksei raised me as if I was his own daughter. His perfect little prodigal protege,” the venomous way she spat out each word of that last sentence made me think she had been thinking about saying it for a long time. “He promised me he’d never lie to me. He protected me even from Boris. But I guess that was a long time ago. Somewhere along the line he changed. He made too many compromises. Traded away his morality. Now I’m not his daughter, I’m just Agent Tabitha; the lone wolf, the loose cannon, the liability who doesn’t fit anywhere.”
I scooted closer to her and just made myself available. She fell into my arms of her own accord and stayed there. “I’m sorry Aleksei changed too much to keep looking after you. But I’m here now. I’ll never let Boris touch you.”
“I know. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.” Tabitha held me a little tighter, and waved Io over for good measure. Stopping in the middle of packing, Io slipped down to the floor and crawled over to us, draping herself across our laps and stretching to make herself more comfortable.
As her blouse struggled to contain her breasts in this new position she casually reached up and undid the top button in what I was quickly coming to think of as her signature move.
“C’mon Tabs. Grab a tit. It’s better than therapy,” Io offered.
Tabitha laughed.
Io smiled up at her and offered a wink.
Tabby shook her head and kept her face buried against my shoulder, unable or unwilling to speak. For a long moment nobody moved, then I glanced down at Io.
“What about you? How’d you end up with the Bureau?”
Io groaned a little and repositioned so her head was resting against my thigh, a little closer to my groin than was strictly necessary—but judging by the way she winked at me, she sure as shit didn’t seem to mind.
“My origin story is much less exciting or heart-wrenching I’m afraid. I was a little lamia girl in a big wide world with an unfortunate skin condition and a dream.”
I frowned. “Skin condition?”
Io looked up at me and reached up to pinch my chin affectionately. “You’re so cute when you’re oblivious, y’know that Ryan? Skin condition is a little code for ‘my scales were the wrong color.’ I guess you wouldn’t know being from the Mortal World and all, but lamia’s typically come in either red or blue patterned scales. Your girl,” she gestured to herself and her long purple tail, “doesn’t fit either of those bills. Meaning my mommy and daddy broke some pretty important rules. Namely ‘don’t fuck the enemy,’ and ‘don’t fall in love with the enemy,’ and most importantly, ‘definitely don’t impregnate the enemy.’ As you can imagine, things didn’t end well for mom and pops. Not that I ever met them. I grew up with a bunch of other purple-tailed freaks in this zoo filled with other oddities that got paraded across the Magical World. Luckily for me, at a certain point an anomaly popped up and zipped me off to the Mortal World, and I never looked back.”
Tabitha perked up from her place cuddling my shoulder. “I don’t know, that sounds pretty heart-wrenching to me. Your parents were killed because of forbidden love, and then you got shipped off to be some sideshow at a magic carnival? That’s messed up, Io.”
Io waved away the suggestion. “Different world, Tabs. Different rules. It was actually especially lucky because the one thing I wanted more than anything was to be able to fly, and this is the only known world with such high-quality flying machines. Nowadays I can load up my flying sim games and zip around outer-freaking-space in a starfighter. So I sort of already found my happy ending,” she admitted. Then she winked up at both of us. “Of course, if you want any help with a happy ending of your own, I’d like to take this opportunity to mention that lamia jaws can unhinge, and we have no gag reflex to speak of. So uh,” she tapped my bulge suggestively and let her forked tongue slip across her lips, “just say the word.”
I shifted uncomfortably and tried to ignore the sudden stirring as the blood started rushing to my groin. “Uh, I don’t really…look. I grew up not knowing magic and monsters existed, and in the mortal world monogamy is considered the gold standard. You both seem super comfortable with the idea of sharing me, but where I come from that’s sort of taboo.”
“Meh. Lamia men take multiple females all the time. So do dragons, werewolves, ogres, all sorts of creatures across the six known worlds practice this sort of relationship style. It is pretty much the standard. Humans are actually the odd ones out in this regard,” Io pointed out.
Tabitha chirped up as well. “She’s right. And for the record, I grew up in the same world as you, Ryan. I may have grown up in an underground bunker learning how to fight monsters, but I know that this is one of humans’ many, many taboos. Buuuut…it’s also supposed to be every guy’s ultimate fantasy, so why are you fighting us on this? Hell, even your dead ex said you should go for it. What’s your hang-up?”
Io frowned. “Dead ex?”
“I’ll explain later,” Tabby said, then she went back to staring at me, awaiting an answer.
She was sort of right—and very hot, which made it hard to think of an answer as to why I was resisting this, and Io wasn’t helping as she trailed her extra-long tongue along my dickprint.
What the fuck even is my hang-up here? Focus Ryan. Decision time.
“Fine,” I decided. “There’s an old rule of three that basically says if one person tells you something, ignore them. If two people tell you something, keep ignoring them, but maybe let it simmer in the back of your mind. But if three people tell you something, it’s time to start listening. Well, I’m listening.” To prove my point, I unzipped my pants and let my growing cock unfurl between both girls. “You want to share me? Convince me.”
Io’s eyes flashed with excitement, and Tabitha gripped my shoulder, a broad smile crossing her face. “You won’t regret this!” she promised.
She was right. I didn’t.
Maybe it was my imagination, but for a second there I could’ve sworn I saw Hannah’s ghostly afterimage sitting on Io’s L-shaped couch, playing with herself while the two girls went to work. I smiled, let my head fall back against the wall, and embraced my new normal. With fewer and fewer hesitations holding me back from enjoying myself by the second, I eventually found myself wondering why I had ever resisted in the first place. But I didn’t tell them that. Oh no. I definitely needed convincing.
You know that old saying ‘two heads are better than one?’
Whoever coined that particular phrase knew what the fuck they were talking about.