“You’re sure?” Eveth asked the Borren publican of the tea house, pointing at the picture in Grodray’s hands.
She and Grodray had ended up back in the office with the tea house keeper. It was a tiny space with high ceilings and little art on the walls. The door was open, but that just let them see back into the kitchen, rather than the public space.
They had printed the image of a Sky Patrol Field Agent, minus all the explanations of what the thing actually was, but even then, it was never allowed out of Grodray’s immediate control.
“Indeed, officer,” the man said, tapping the chest. “The design was quiet interesting. I have considered doing it as a piece of art. Could I get a copy of that?”
“No,” Grodray said with quiet emphasis. “In fact, if you were to put it up, Accord Security might take exception. I’d rather your shop not be shut down for potentially-criminal behavior. What say you?”
“Oh,” the man said.
Eveth watched the manager blush, which was always interesting on one of the Borren. They were the standard biped design, but exceptionally tall, often nearing eight feet in the male, and over seven for a female. But they were also stick-thin. At a full six-foot-seven, Eveth probably outweighed the man, despite only coming up to his shoulder.
The eyes were large, compared to most species, with a long, flat, narrow nose, and a tiny mouth, but it allowed them to see in far lower light than most species.
And they were pacifists, as a rule. Great shopkeepers, though.
He leaned back as politely as he could, putting emotional space between himself in comfortable robes, and Eveth and her partner.
“And they left after an hour?” Eveth pressed, raising her voice just enough to keep the shopkeeper’s attention.
“Indeed,” he agreed. “Keelee served them, and they left a good tip.”
Eveth turned to look back to the kitchen.
“Keelee,” she said in a loud voice at the few employees lingering and probably listening.
One of them looked up in shock, while the others edged away. She was a young Grace. Her tentacles still weren’t to their full growth yet, so not that long out of school. She turned utterly umber under the force of Eveth’s gaze.
“Join us?” Eveth ordered in a polite fiction that only sounded like a question.
She had left her jacket in the car today, so her armored bodysuit with the badge over her heart was obvious. Normally, a nice tunic covered it with softer lines, but today, the harshness of the blue-gray scales stood out. As did the knee-high armored boots, the holster on her hip, and the utility belt normally hidden under the tunic. Eveth had tied back her hair, but the bangs needed to be cut. She blew one up to clear her eyes.
Next to her, Grodray still had his jacket on. It made him look diplomatic.
Eveth was here to play bad cop.
Keelee shuffled over, head hanging and tentacles nearly motionless with embarrassment. The rest of the employees made themselves scarce.
Eveth caught the girl under the chin with her right hand, lifted the face up to look at her. A few tentacles carefully explored Eveth’s suit, but none made it as far as her hand.
“Two Yuudixtl, and a small Vanir?” Eveth pressed, pointing at the picture. “The Vanir dressed like this?”
“Yes, sir,” Keelee answered quietly.
If anything, the young woman’s blush got worse. She nearly turned brown and her pupils dilated.
Eveth played a hunch.
“Did you taste the Vanir, Keelee?” she asked quietly.
That was frequently a major faux pas with strangers. But if he was what Grodray thought, then the stranger might not know any better.
“Girl?” the manager bellowed.
Eveth silenced the man with a hard glance. After a moment, she stepped out of the doorway to the manager’s office and pulled it shut it behind her. The Senior Constable could keep him in line.
And Grodray was a guy. He might not understand.
“You can tell me, Keelee,” Eveth said carefully. “They’re fugitives from justice, but you had no way of knowing that.”
“I did, sir,” the young woman said.
Her head would have fallen, but for Eveth holding it up. Having more than a foot of height, and the muscles to match, helped.
“What did he taste like?” Eveth asked, disguising her tone as well as she could.
Keelee didn’t need to hear Eveth’s disgust.
Some species knew no bounds, but Eveth had never considered anyone that wasn’t a Vanir. And precious few of them.
Most men were either too timid around her, or too competitive.
But Keelee had stopped breathing.
Eveth nodded.
“He wasn’t a Vanir, was he?” she asked.
“No, sir,” the girl said. “I’ve never tasted anyone like him. So warm. So purple. So dreamy.”
Shit, they really did have a human on the run in the Accord of Souls. And a witness.
“You can never tell anyone about him, Keelee,” Eveth said. “Except me or the Senior Constable in the office. Not your family. Not your coworkers. Not your boss. If you did, and I found out, someone would have to arrest you and probably put you in jail for decades.”
It was a serious threat. Eveth Baker was a serious cop making it. And a decade sounded like forever when you were twenty.
“Do you understand me, Keelee?” Eveth asked, trying to be reasonable while firm.
“Yes, sir,” Keelee said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I had to find a way to taste him.”
Huh.
“Have you ever been that way before?” Eveth asked.
“No, sir,” Keelee wailed quietly. “I’ve always been a good girl. I’m still a virgin.”
“Well stay away from that creature and you’ll be safe, Keelee,” Eveth instructed. “Find yourself a good boy or girl of the Grace and make art instead.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’ve done well, Keelee,” Eveth reassured her. “Now we know where to start, so we can find them. But you need to keep our secret. Can I trust you?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Keelee brightened.
Eveth sent her on her way and knocked on the closed door.
The Grace were all about art. Being able to see, touch, taste, and smell with those tentacles meant they lived in the richest sensory world possible.
Eveth figured she’d go nuts in a hurry, surrounded by that level of sensory bombardment, all day every day, but she wasn’t an artist. Nothing like the Grace.
No, that wasn’t true. She did have an art. A passion.
Hunting down criminals and bringing them to justice.
The Senior Constable emerged a moment later, shooting the manager a significant look that probably mirrored what was on Eveth’s face. Perhaps a touch more refined and polite, but no less adamantine.
She nodded and headed for the front of the shop.
Out on the sidewalk, the sun was pleasantly warm, but not enough so that Jackeith would remove his jacket.
“What did the girl tell you?” he asked as they got some privacy.
The uniforms ensured that. The Constabulary were the Accord’s police. There were other, more dangerous agencies, hidden deeper in the shadows cast by the cops, but most people still gave them a wide berth. Eveth assumed everyone was guilty of something, however small, and could use that as leverage. She was rarely wrong.
“She confirms we have a human on our hands,” Eveth said. “Alien of a type she had never tasted, anyway. I didn’t tell her what he was. The manager confirmed the uniform, so we know what we’re dealing with. Where do we go from here?”
“Cinnra’s organization were the ones behind the last human scare,” Grodray mused. “But he’s no longer in the picture, according to some sources. One theory was that he did manage to recruit a human.”
“So did some other underworld organization decide to engage in an arms race?” Eveth asked. “Get their own human? But could they get a worse target than a human cop, Jackeith?”
“Maybe it wasn’t random luck on their part?” he contemplated. “Maybe it was intentional?”
“Are you nuts, Grodray?”
“Let’s employ deduction,” he began.
Eveth knew to shut up at those words. Anything she said trying to derail her partner now would just extend the conversation that much longer. He would not be budged. Not when he got like this.
She nodded, trying not to hustle him or roll her eyes.
“Suppose Cinnra got himself a human, an assassin,” Grodray pondered. “And lost control of the creature, since a human killer wouldn’t necessarily only kill the people Cinnra wanted.”
“Speculation, but sure,” Eveth injected into the spot she was supposed to say something.
“And the human killed Cinnra,” Jackeith continued. “That explains some of the upheavals and shenanigans we’ve had to deal with on various worlds. Turf war and maybe a new boss shaking things up.”
“With you so far.”
Without a single eyeroll, even.
“Who would want a human cop?” Grodray posed the million-credit question.
“Someone in Cinnra’s band of criminals who wants to cover his ass?” Eveth guessed. “They would be the only sort of people who would know how to get a human, outside of some very shadowy agencies that would have never let one run around unchaperoned. And they might want someone who wanted to take the first human down, and had the human violence to do it.”
“Holds water, Eveth,” he said.
“Fardel,” she replied. “That means we’ve got a potential race war on our hands. Two uncontrolled killers, gunning for each other, with a whole Accord worth of innocents potentially in the way.”
“Worse,” her partner noted. “I’m not sure we can tell anyone, with as flimsy as our evidence is. And if we do, they’ll take it away from us in a heartbeat.”
“You want to take Cinnra’s gang down as hard as I do?” Eveth pressed.
“Probably more, Baker,” he replied. “I know things about those bastards than you do not.”
Eveth wanted to ask. So desperately wanted to know the truth. It probably included an explanation of how her partner, a lowly Senior Constable, managed a security clearance at least as high as a Senior Inspector.
But she didn’t dare ask. If they trusted him that much, he had no choice but to keep quiet.
Eveth wanted that level of trust placed in her by those same people, one of these days.
First, she had to take down at least one human genocide machine.
Maybe two.