As Wes and Penelope approached the entrance of the brothel, a prostitute wearing a trench coat immediately whipped out of the entrance, slammed the door behind her, and turned to face the pair. She looked Southeast Asian - maybe Indonesian or Filipino - and shouted something in a language Wes didn’t understand.

“Ma’am, we heard the scream. We’re not police, just a couple of concerned citizens. Anything we can do?” Penelope approached slowly and spoke softly, stooping her posture slightly to meet the shorter woman at eye level.

Wes could hear commotion upstairs. Shouts of alarm and muffled crying, and the sound of the back door flapping open and closed and pairs of feet thundering on the stairs. As the two women stared each other down to his left, he saw fed-up-looking men shuffling on their clothes as they made hasty exits out from the back to the right. Several of them were pink in the face - definitely interrupted, Wes thought - and many were missing their shoes or other smaller items. He heard shouting in other Asian languages around back - among them, his native Chinese:

“「Get them out!」”

Wes turned back to Penelope and the woman in the doorway just in time to catch the woman whip out a pocketknife from somewhere in her coat. It was a simple - probably cheap - spring-loaded knife, with a chunky 2-and-a-half or 3-inch blade. Nevertheless, he instinctively stepped back. Penelope raised her hands and backed away just as slowly.

“Easy. We’re not here to hurt you.”

The woman turned to Wes and gestured away with the knife, back in the direction their spurned customers were heading. The message was clear, but Wes decided to chance it. He had a suspect in mind, an event happening now, right now, in front of him. Wes inwardly grimaced as memories of a fire licked the edge of his brain.

“「Chinese?」”

The woman raised her eyebrows. “「A little bit.」”

“「We’re not police. Just passing by. Anything we can do to help?」”

The woman’s face curled into a scowl. She lowered the knife, but nodded towards Penelope’s camera.

“「Lying. You press?」”

Wes abruptly realized the implications of the press trying to gain access to what was most likely a crime scene before calling the cops. He turned to Penelope. “She thinks we’re nightcrawlers or some tabloid rag.”

“Not really too far off the mark, honestly.” Penelope still had her hands up, and keeping her body straight on, she only turned her head. “But we need to get in here.”

“Why aren’t we calling the -” Before he could finish his sentence, Penelope’s eyes went wide and she vigorously shook her head in a small motion - almost as if her head was vibrating. No police? Wes mouthed.

Illegals, Penelope mouthed back.

Wes thought for a second, and his newly-superpowered self could only come up with the most stereotypical answer to the situation. He answered the woman, and she briefly looked them up and down again, then nodded. Still holding her knife in one hand, she went back inside, closing the door on them. There was a poster of a woman in lingerie on the door along with the text ANGEL LADIES - GIRLS + DRINKS and a phone number. About a minute later, the door opened a crack, revealing a different woman, wearing a loose robe over what seemed to be nothing. She tilted her head back slightly. Upstairs.

As they entered, Penelope shoved her hands into her pockets - closer to her gun. “What did you tell them?”

“That we were detectives. PIs.”

“You do realize you just put our services up for sale, right?” Penelope sighed. “You really have a knack for getting people into a world of shit, Wes.”

“Isn’t that why we were here?”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The smell was when Wes first became aware that something was different about this particular brothel.

The brothel’s overriding smell was the heady scent of sex and B.O. unfortunately mixed with a heavy, cheap perfume desperately trying to cover it up. True to the name, the inside was almost exclusively lit in reds, pinks and violets - and when the lights reflected off of the decorative bead-curtains leading to private rooms, they cast tiny specks of light on the walls like a hundred disco balls. The inside was surprisingly clean despite the smell - although there were pipes protruding from the walls and chips in the white paint, the floor and walls themselves were clean.

The prostitute in the trench coat led the pair up the stairs, past a first floor and a second onto a third. Wes was aware of the same smell permeating the first two floors, and it hit him in the face as he exited the landing into a second-floor hallway lined with doors. As they were led up, hastily dressed prostitutes crowded the hallway and stairs, whispering and casting looks at them and down the hall. Some of them, particularly the younger-looking ones, were weeping. A woman with only a baggy T-shirt on raised a cigarette shakily to her lips, realized she didn’t have a lighter, and sighed.

They continued down the hall as Wes tried his best to place the overpoweringly sweet scent. Up ahead, two heavies blocked the way - a wiry man in a tracksuit and a thickset, stocky woman with an aluminum bat. As the prostitute leading them talked to the guards, Wes coughed, trying to get the smell out of his nose. He’d made the mistake of opening his mouth. At that point, the heavy, almost alcoholically cloying smell forced its way down his gullet as well as his airway.

As they approached the scene, Wes saw the wings first.

A pair of wings about the height of a person extended out of one of the doorways to the side rooms. The wings were composed of small, emerald-green motes of light, like fireflies or glow-worms, bunched together to form shapes and thicknesses in a way reminiscent of old comic-book dot-shading. The outline of the wings were butterfly-esque - curved and sloping but generally triangular. The interiors hypnotically rippled with patterns.

Wes flinched and Penelope turned to look at him, then at the woman leading them. Wes followed her gaze, and noted that she didn’t seem to react at all. She called down the hallway:

“Madam? The detectives are here.”

The wings folded and shrunk in on themselves as their owner seemed to turn around within the room. A hispanic woman in her mid-forties, head shaven and draped in an oversize faux-fur coat, emerged from the room. She would have been intimidating, but her eyes belied a newfound fear - she was a little pale, and Wes’ trained eye noticed that her hands were shaking before she had carefully drawn them behind herself.

“Miss Smith.” Her voice was rough, choked - restraining emotion. “You’ve come at a bad time.”

“Madam B.” Penelope held herself steadily, looking the Madam in the eye.

“And you must be the new guy who fucked up those Red Caps.” Madam B turned to Wes. “I thought you’d be taller.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Don’t have to be too tall to deal with the Caps.” Wes replied, guardedly. He looked at Penelope, raising his eyebrows. Smith? She looked at him, then quirked her head to one side. Is what it is.

“You’re no saints, and I don’t believe for a second you were just passin’ by.” Madam B’s wings slowly unfurled behind her, but she didn’t tense up or call for help. Nevertheless, Wes’ hands involuntarily balled into fists.

“Gotten a lot of new girls in, lately?” Penelope asked, a little too casually.

“Gimme a break.” Madam B’s face, carefully arranged so far into a tense facsimile of a smile, suddenly dropped into a grimace. The sweet, floral scent intensified, and Wes finally identified it, dredged up from the depths of childhood memory. Narcissus? He slowly inched his closer to a stance. “I don’t have time for bullshit.”

Penelope held up her hands, again. “Let’s discuss business, then.”

“Business?” Madam B let out a harsh, short laugh - more like a shout. “Sure.” She pointed at the door she’d just stepped out of. The grimace didn’t leave her face.

“Let’s talk in the office.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The spartan “office” was distressingly ordered. A simple wooden wardrobe and chest of drawers occupied the western half of the room. A folded towel sat next to a cheap mood lamp that probably should have been pink, but instead lit up the room in a bruised scarlet. The top drawer had been pulled open, revealing a stockpile of condoms - probably multicolored, but all cast in dark colors from the red lighting.

Wes scanned the left, noted its relative normalcy, turned to the right, and immediately dry heaved onto the bare floor. Penelope curled her lip in distaste. Madam B simply stared, grimace remaining on her face.

The right side of the room was occupied by the bed. The sheets were torn and rumpled, half of the mattress-cover hanging off the bed onto the floor. The space between the cover and the wall was occupied by a corpse. The naked prostitute laid flat on the bed, devoid of the thousands of tiny movements a living sleeper would be making; nothing more than a husk, now. Her arms and legs were bent at uncomfortable angles. Her long nails were chipped and broken. Matching long and short rents in the wallpaper near the head and middle of the bed were speckled with blood.

Wes retched again.

“What was her name?” Penelope asked, quietly.

“Gemma.” Madam B’s voice was a heavy sigh, and she ran her hands over her head, through a phantom tangle of hair.

Gemma’s head was unnaturally twisted, not just sideways, but vertically. Though her head was supported by a pillow, it lolled limply over the side and back in a way that would have made Wes wince if he wasn’t already nauseous enough as he was. He dared to look again, though his stomach groaned at the thought. Vivid fingermarks, black in the purplish-red light, stood out like brands on her throat. Another bruise, its edges and texture ragged, crawled up and charred the left side of her neck. Her expression was one of abject terror, and splotches of haemorrhaging dotted the whites of her eyes. Wes forced himself back to a standing position, back from his doubled-over nausea. A hot wave of shame crawled down his spine.

“Don’t worry about it.” Penelope said, as if reading his mind.

“This happen a lot in, uh, our line of work?”

“In our world, not always.” Madam B had put her hands in her pockets, as if attempting to act nonchalantly. Wes had a feeling it was to cover up the shaking. “But in this neighborhood, yeah. You saw that little fuck, when he was leaving, right?”

Wes looked at Penelope, hesitant to bring up the van and the fact that they had been staking out Angel Ladies. Penelope nodded, and took the lead.

“Punk-rocker looking guy. Pink undercut.” She paused. “Now I’m wondering why you didn’t go after him, if you knew.”

Madam B smiled. It was a disarming thing, meant to put their mind at ease, but the intent Wes detected behind the smile that made him shiver. Something about the hidden tension in her neck and shoulders coupled with the gentle ease of the smile made him think of a shark, or a crocodile.

“Because you’re the only ones who can.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The trio moved out of the brothel, into the street, underneath the awning of Angel Ladies. A weepy, 3-AM rain had begun to fall. Wes and Penelope stood just underneath the awning, while Madam B leaned against the doorway.

“Don’t want you two getting any more involved in my business than I need you to be.” Madam B was getting back into form again. Elegant and blunt, like a Louisville Slugger. “Find our guy, bring him to me, and you’re squeaky clean.”

“Don’t like this.” Wes whispered to Penelope. “We’re playing into something way bigger than us.”

Penelope whispered back, sarcasm heavy on her breath. “You think?”

Madam B waited expectantly for them to finish conferring. Droplets pattered weakly against an exposed bag of nearby garbage. When both Wes and Penelope looked back up at her, Penelope spoke first.

“One thousand, cash up front. Two-fifty deposit first, then the remainder when we deliver your man.”

“I’ll do you one better.” Madam B smiled her shark’s grin again. “Two grand if you get him to me this week with no questions asked. No snooping, no cops, no bullshit. A quarter of that up front.” A faint, floral smell hung in the air.

“Sounds good.” Penelope said. Wes briefly noted she had a kind of thousand-yard stare, looking at nothing in particular.

“Yeah.” Wes found it hard to disagree. A thousand was more money than he had seen in the past month. His part-time trainer job was just enough to pay all the bills and scrape by. He wondered what it’d be like to get a nice dinner, maybe. He hadn’t had a good steak in at least a year.

Madam B leaned in close, and handed Wes a regular, white envelope. Then she was gone.

The pair walked in a floral daze back to their van, as if preprogrammed, Robotically, Penelope pulled open the driver’s side door, shut it, then inserted the car key into the ignition -

And gasped, breathing in deeply. She looked around, as if waking up from a dream to find themselves in an unfamiliar place. Penelope scanned her left hand - nails unpainted, callus on her middle finger from holding a pen - then shakily exhaled. She looked around again.

Wes stared blankly through the windshield, passenger door hanging open, before his eyes snapped sharply into focus. He balled his right into a fist and slapped it against his open left palm. The pain and sound shook off the last vestiges of whatever influence was slowing down his brain. He looked over at Penelope, who coincidentally looked over at him.

“She just put some whammy on us, didn’t she?”

“I think so. But her ability didn’t seem like it was persuasive. We weren’t convinced to agree. It just was like -”

“Autopilot?”

“Yeah.” Penelope looked over at the envelope in Wes’ lap. He picked up, and leafed through.

“A cool five hundred, all accounted for.” Wes breathed. “Whatever that bullshit was, at least she was honest about our deal.”

“You’re not serious, right? Wes?” Penelope held her chin in her hand, in thought, other hand still holding the key in the ignition. “That was the sketchiest thing I’ve ever been made to agree to. Who the fuck is this guy? What’s his deal? Why doesn’t Madam B want us looking into it?”

“Dangerous, is what he is.” Wes spoke low, measured - cagey. “That body, that was real shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“MMA fighters don’t actually strangle people for a reason. Any choke is an arm or leg lock, usually, because arms and legs are stronger than fingers.”

Penelope cocked her head. “I’m not following.”

“Bones are strong as hell, and that girl’s neck was clearly broken. Fingermarks means punk rock guy didn’t actually know how to choke someone. But, not only did he choke her, he did it hard enough to break her neck.”

Penelope breathed in sharply. “So even if it was an accident, we’re dealing either with an someone incredibly strong -”

“ -which he didn’t look like, since we saw him - ”

“ - or he’s got powers, as well.” Penelope sighed. “Which is more likely, given the whole steaming pile we’ve been handed here.”

Wes reclined back in his chair. Despite the late hour, the situation had left him wide awake. He wondered aloud. “So then, what’s the move? Can’t exactly say no, now.”

Penelope’s mouth was set in a thin line. “We break the rules, of course.”

“What?”

“We need leverage.” At this point, Penelope was talking with herself, and Wes was just listening. “We’re in a spot where we don’t know anything about who or what we’re dealing with.” She paused for a second, fingers drumming a vague rhythm on the steering wheel. Finally, she turned to Wes.

“We deal in information, here. Once we have what she wants, we can know what we want to know.”

“Got it.”

There was another silence, as both waited for each other to reply. Wes broke the silence, as he flipped open the file and read through again.

“So uh, where do we start?”