“I told ya, Angie. You shoulda taken that job with cousin Maurice.”

“I know, I know, but my whole life’s here.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not gonna be for much longer if you stay; a seventh girl’s now gone and the police still don’t have a clue as to what’s doing it, “the man warned the young woman, to then trail off as he muttered,” Though that don’t change much from the usual…”

Despite the annoyance of being held up, Donny waited patiently for his change as the vendor went on.

It was probably nothing, just another of the many tragic events that frequently happened within his fair city—but when you were in the business you had to listen to such things, just in case nothing turned out to be something.

It would more than likely be nothing, something for someone else to deal with. Even gussied up, no one would ever mistake either he or Frank for being young, let alone woman, but Donny had twice made the mistake of ignoring what he had assumed was merely idle gossip, only for that chatter to then turn out to be something that then affected him later on. More importantly, it had been something that he could have prevented before…well, before.

Pushing back old memories, Donny waited patiently to finish his purchase, then went to the corner of the street to sit on a bench so that he could begin reading the paper he had just purchased. It was not the ideal location to do so, the early morning hustle as people went to work sometimes deafening with the amount of noise it generated, but he could never get any peace in the office anyhow, not while Frank was there, at least.

More so now that they had added a third member to their little crew.

Normally, it was the only chance for him to unwind before the day would see him screw up tighter than the lock on Frank’s wallet, but the damnable heat bombarding the city denied him even that small relief.

It was typical weather for this time of year, but the past few weeks had been oddly cold, with the occasional bout of rain too. Enough so that many, including himself, had deluded themselves into believing that the month would be rather uncharacteristically pleasant for once. But then the heat had returned with a vengeance. Merely stepping out into the daylight would see you feeling like the wrong side of a cat’s tongue as the ungodly temperature turned you into a walking ball of sweat and grime.

Donny tried to be careful in handling the cheap stack of paper he now held, but his sweat soon saw the print upon it smearing under his thumb. It was not as if had ever intended on keeping the thing, but Donny found the feeling of seeing something ruined by his own hand aggravating, even with something like the disposable rag he now read, the material of it recycled so many times it was damn near see through. With the dangers of the outside, the city could ill afford any waste, so reusing everything was a must.

Still, even knowing that the paper would probably end up back in his hands or someone else’s after he was done with it, albeit with a different day’s print, he could not help but grouse every time he left a print of his own as his thumb met the seemingly still wet and runny ink of each page.

It was all bad news, anyway—even the funny papers, the contents proving to be something he was finding himself needing to get more and more used to as of late.

A massive headache.

Something he would need to deal with.

Sensing the theme of the day, rather than procrastinate, Donny rolled up the paper and placed it into the right pocket of his coat before rising with a sigh.

He was just across the road from the office, so it was barely a minute before he entered the five-story building that housed his place of work, the shade within offering him little reprieve from the swelter outside. The climb from there saw that little relief quickly vanish as the effort caused Donny to then sweat from the effort needed to ascend.

The sound of Frank raging could be heard before he even reached their floor, the noise of it causing Donny to frown in frustration. He had been expecting it for some time now, the debacle at the museum promising such an inevitable reaction.

Tentatively opening the door to the office, Donny saw Frank leave for the side room just as he entered, the man near screaming as he slammed the door to that room behind him. As his partner continued to rage unseen, Donny entered the room properly, his eyes never leaving the door that led to the once former kitchen that now served as their filing-slash-breakroom.

Eventually, sensing that Frank would be in there for some time more, he turned his head to the scribbling boy to his left, offering the kid a small nod in greeting.

The boy, Goodie, looked up, offering him a glance after looking towards where Frank had stalked off to before then pushing forward a newspaper precariously position near the edge of the school desk the kid now worked on.

Donny, rather than taking the offering, instead reached to his side and pulled his own paper from the pocket where he had placed it and held it just high enough for the boy to see, saying nothing as he did.

Instead of then putting it back, he dropped the rag onto the small table next the worn leather couch meant for their clients before he himself dropped onto said couch, the heat already having drained much of his fatigue just from the effort of getting up here—the prospect of Frank’s wrath depriving him of the rest.

He then pulled his hat down over his head as he tried to ignore his partner’s continuing racket, noticing the boy doing a better job of it as he returned to whatever he was drawing.

‘Another annoyance,’ Donny thought as a particularly loud, metallic bang from the filing room forced him to wince.

Since the museum, Donny and Frank had been…they needed time to rest. But their business was not so lucrative that they could afford to do so, so they had to work despite that need. That said, they were still recovering, so they had to keep their efforts light, mostly to just basic paperwork.

The average citizen of his fair city was too poor to afford a real lawyer, and too ignorant to do much themselves, so freelances like himself and Frank were often called on for assistance. Despite his and Frank’s supposed lot being to deal with the many, many things that went bump in the night, assisting people with the law was actually the bulk of their business, and one of the reasons why they and the enforcers of said law were rarely on good terms with each other.

Still, dealing with paperwork still required some effort, so even that proved burdensome to their recovering bodies. Enough so that they needed to rely on the boy and his abilities now more than ever.

The kid had a gift. Everyone did, but the key component to employing any magical ability was the magic. And few had access to that particular element. Even fewer having it naturally.

The boy could see far-off things, some deviation of the ability to predict the future, only focused instead on the ‘here and now’ instead.

Not a particularly unique ability, but the lad had a better than average proficiency with the gift, so most who came calling saw their needs satisfied. And all without having any of them needing to set a foot out of the office. Most of the time.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Admittedly, they did more than a fair amount of legwork with each of the boy’s drawings beforehand to ensure the success of each case, but the kid’s detections were often right about seven or eight times out of ten, so that work was usually just to be sure of it. Given that being regularly right about half the time would have put him ahead and beyond the majority of the people that shared his kind of ability, the kid proved himself a goldmine for their agency. Something Donny hated to admit—mostly due to Frank being the one to have brought him in, that and the inevitability of the big fat ‘I told you so’ that was sure to come from the blowhard sooner or later.

Having to acknowledge that his man-child of a partner had once again been correct was an aggravation Donny was unwilling to suffer right now. Especially when he had so many other concerns to already burden himself with at the moment.

Much like the kid had done when Frank first found him, they had gone after bounties on mundane affairs rather than anything in their line that could prove troublesome. Bail jumpers, debtors, cheating husbands…the general riffraff. Even then, they only informed the authorities as to their location, not handled anything themselves.

It bought the money in, sure, and easily too, but it still was not enough.

Much like their current physical state, the state of their business was…unhealthy. Compared to the more established agencies, their resources could only ever have been described as modest at best—if you were being nice, that is—but what little they possessed had taken them years to acquire, usually through blood and sweat spilt than with any amount of pretty paper, so it was not as if they could just buy themselves back to where they had started off.

In actual fact, thanks to Goodie doing near everything this past month, they had a tidy collection of bills stored in their safe here and at the bank. But as much as they had, they also, strangely, had nothing. You could not buy magic piecemeal, so everything was earmarked for that end.

So, they had bricks of cash just lying around to gather dust.

Still…last time they suffered like this, another screwup by the government—one that had not cost them even a tenth of what the museum had—Frank and him had needed two years to get back on their feet. And even then, it was a close call. The way they were going now, they would only need two or three more months before they could start accepting proper jobs again.

Not that they particularly wanted too, mind you. Whatever Donny’s concerns with the kid’s presence were, it was nice not having to break his back—sometimes literally—just to scrape enough together to cover the rent for once.

Financially speaking, their return was at a break-neck speed; so fast, in fact, that they might actually need to slow down to allow themselves the time to recover physically.

The docs—their docs, had patched them up as best they could, so he and Frank were technically fit for the job again, but magic was, ironically, not magical. Not as magical as most people thought it was, at least. Burns healed, broken bones mended, and all the other signs of damage recovered from so completely that even they who had suffered those injuries would need to put some effort into trying to remember what it was exactly that afflicted them so. But all that took nutrients. Vitamins, minerals, and whatever else it was that the thinkers said was in the human body. All the stuff that made it work would need to be restored. Slowly. Muscles retrained, too, the healing sometimes undoing years of exercise as flesh was renewed.

But all that was the physical side of things.

There was little the docs could do to heal what was not; and what options there were…were not for him and Frank to even consider. You did not mess with the mind and soul lightly, and Donny had never seen anyone who had dared do so end up right in the end.

Sometimes those poor schmucks got even worse for the doing of it.

Over a month ago and Donny was still on edge because of that damn museum—experiencing nightmares that left him restless when the ungodly heat did not, and every once in a while, he would just freeze in the middle of whatever he was doing, paralyzed by the fear of a danger that was no longer present.

…the usual suffering that the business put you through.

But Frank…? Frank was different.

The museum had not seen him physically injured, not in any way that anyone could find, that is, but something had happened to him there.

But, suffering was the one area where the idiot did not like to open his big mouth, the man keeping whatever he experienced after they had separated to himself. Though whether that was for wounded pride or to keep something hidden, Donny could not say. Even now, as the man raged over what had been written in the newspaper, his actions somehow felt…hollow.

Frank yelled, he hit things, and even threw them—the sound of another crash from the unseen side-room attesting to that fact, but it all felt like the man was merely going through the motions. The shouts would last a moment too long or too short, the objects would not have the same genuine force behind them that true rage would have seen them thrown…but it all might have just been stress rather than anything…unnatural.

Which was not a good thing, either. An unsound mind in their work could prove itself more dangerous than any uncanny infection or some slavering beast from beyond.

And as he thought of the devil, so too did he appear, Frank then bursting into the room, his entrance forcing Donny and the boy to flinch as the door to the filing room slammed against the wall, both of them releasing more than a few choice words into the air as it did. Something Frank, too, continued to do as he stormed over to his desk and the tormented chair behind it.

Rather than sit, his partner grabbed an unseen third paper and thrust it towards him.

“You see?! You see?! I told you! I GODSDAMMED told! A Long Betty, a Godsdamned Long Betty! You see?!”

As Frank tossed the paper away, the individual pages then bursting into flower of print as they scattered around the room, Donny could not help but remember that it was, if fact, he who told Frank that—but for obvious reasons he made no effort to correct the man.

Especially not with Frank continuing his glorified tantrum as he was, a slew of foul words streaming from the man’s mouth in an unending stream as he went on and on about the many, many flaws of the government.

He was not wrong, though. The government had screwed them all over.

A Long Betty was a manner of gaslighting cooked up Betty Cartwright, a deplorable shrew of a woman that had made the lives of freelancers everywhere all the more difficult with her constant manipulations and lies. Naturally, she worked as the liaison between them and the government, as the head of that Department at the time.

Her favourite technique was to use technicalities and half-truths to distort the actual truth of any event to favour herself or her side of things.

As the government had done now.

Magic was not a simple thing that could be confined with simplistic rules. Sometimes something worked, sometimes it did not. And sometimes those times were the exact same time.

And he and Frank had forgotten that as they were assaulted by the shadow-thing.

The creature had drawn back from the light, had kept itself confined within the museum during the daytime; so, naturally, they assumed that illumination could harm it. And maybe it could? The daylight, that is. But the light of their lamps, lighters and whatever else they could bring out?

It was a slaughter, all of them lambs before the lion; their assumption a purposeful trick by the entities or entity that they had pitted themselves against. To hold the advantage, to toy with them, or simply to pass the time? …who knew?

Of course, they had only found this out after everything was well long past the time that that information could have saved lives.

The government, to cover their own arses, had lain the blame entirely on the freelancers, but in such a way that left them little room to fight back. Whoever wrote the story had done a masterful job if it, too, painting a picture with words that depicted them all as brave heroes for the sacrifices made to protect their city.

Brave but stupid heroes.

The words written behind the print had all but stated that they were all a bunch of brain-dead thugs that had gone in half-cocked and gotten themselves killed for that stupidity.

The government would hand out medals and some other piss-poor tokens to reinforce the image described by the official report, of course. Further means of barring them from complaint for fear of losing even that small offering. And if anyone of them did raise a voice in protest, all the public would hear would be a bunch of people whom the public did not often hold a positive opinion of screaming about how they were not the heroes, how they had not thrown themselves courageously into the fray…and that they wanted lots of the taxpayer’s money for not doing so.

Even if they could get the man on the street to listen to their side of things, doing so would break several clauses in their shared contracts with the government, thus freeing those bastards from having to pay them for their sacrifices at all.

If they won, they lost; if they lost, they still lost.

Donny sighed in frustration.

They would probably try and worm their way out of giving them those medals also, but if the freelancers were to give them just cause, then they could get away with everything scot-free and not even look bad for doing any of it.

So, he, Frank, and anyone else who survived would just have to keep their mouths shut and bend over like good little boys.

…and do it all with a smile too.

In the end, it was a small Italian man that had finished it—some first generation immigrant that could barely speak a word of English—the man having smashed some mirror in the Egyptian wing that the creatures had crawled out of.

There was a big picture of the foreign man on the front, shaking hands with one of the city-heads; Howard Johnathan Lind, the darling of the city, his perfect, pearly whites a gross contrast to the Italian man’s motley brown.

Frank was still going on somehow, the man barely stopping for breath, but the man’s torrent was then cut off as Goodie then spoke.

“I’m not working for you lot anymore.”

It took a moment for the two of them to register what he had said, but when they did, Frank yell out, “What?! Why?!”

“First, I’m tired of sitting at the literal kiddie’s table,” Goodie told them, slapping the top of his school desk…”

“Well, we can get a better desk…,” Frank was quick to offer.

“And second?!” Donny spoke over him before the man could offer up his first born.

“No juice.”

“Hanna’s got plenty of…”

Frank was cut off again as the boy turned over the pad of paper he had been sketching on.

He and Frank frowned as they realised why the boy would no longer work for them. His scribbles were just that: scribblings; the picture shown not of any person or place or even an object. One could confuse what the kid had drawn for a pattern of some sort, but it would have to have been one from the mind of a madman, so Donny had to conclude that the kid was out of magic.

Donny looked to his partner, who in turn looked to him, his forehead furrowing as he realised he was just taken for a fool.

“Godsdamnit!” the man screamed, sounding genuine for the first time in weeks.

“Well, we needed to go there any…,” Donny started.

“I know! I know.”

The man stormed of back to the filing room to pout, but not before shouting out, “You’re taking him!”

Donny caught himself before yelling back, but still thought, ‘One of these days Frank! One of these days!’

Shaking his head, he lay back against the couch. A moment later, he looked back to the boy and said, “Nice one, kid, but you ain’t earning yourself any favours with shit like that. And that desk isn’t coming out of my pocket.”

“Can’t imagine clients respect the sight of me sitting her like this.”

“Probably, but I still ain’t paying for one.”

“Fair enough; noon, then?”

Donny needed a second to get what the kid was asking.

“Morning” he replied, “earlier even, the government does not move fast here.”

“Do they anywhere?”

“You’d know better than me, kid…you’d know better than me.”

And, as Frank started up another tantrum, Donny pulled his hat back over his eyes and pretended to go to sleep as he and the kid, having nothing else to do, took the day off.