Cops have a special way of knocking on doors, precisely calculated to scare the shit out of people. That’s how I know I was never a real cop. Nobody ever taught me the knock.
I was already awake when two DMA agents came to my door the morning after the funeral. They yelled, “DMA!” while they were knocking, but it was obvious who it was before they said it. It only took me a minute to walk to the door from my bedroom, but that was still too slow for these guys.
By the time I got there, they weren’t just pounding on my door, they were throwing something heavy against it, like they were about to force their way in. They forgot my door was built to Reclamation Code, with special hinges and a steel core. A regular door would have been splintered by the time I got there.
I opened the door and saw two familiar faces, standing behind a robot tank with a battering ram. Not familiar faces, exactly, but familiar shapes in sunglasses - a pair of DMA agents I had seen somewhere before, although I couldn’t place them immediately.
The senior agent with the dark hair shoved a piece of paper in my hand and hit me with some kind of scanner in his glasses.
“Identified Timothy Erin Kovak,” he said. “Bluestar ID TEK 0413. Please be aware this interaction is being recorded. I’m Agent Wood. This is Agent Poole. We’re here to inventory and claim any DMA property in this residence, including any equipment or trademarked items that might have identified you as a member of the Bluestar organization.”
I let them push their way past me as they asked, “Do you have any pets, security systems, autonomous robots, or unregistered supernatural entities in this house?”
That last one sounded really specific, but I said, “No,” trusting Lydia to hide herself. The five guys in uniform were wearing MRT armor, but nobody here looked like a mage.
“And there is no one else here?”
“No. I’m alone.”
“And you’re sure you don’t have any robots in here? If I see an iDog or an automated vacuum, it’s liable to get shot.”
“I’ve got nothing that would move right now. Vacuum is in the closet.”
“All right,” Agent Wood said, shoving a piece of paper in my hand. “I need you to turn over everything on this list of items purchased from the Bluestar equipment kiosk, including any scanners, weapons, electronics, or clothing that carries the Bluestar trademark.”
“Wait. You’re here to take my clothes?”
“Pants, shirts, jackets, and boots imprinted with the Bluestar logo are for employee use only. Items imprinted with logos from the Bluestar mall, Bluestar gift shop, or Bluestar online retail may be retained, as they are imprinted with a similar but legally distinct trademark used for fan merchandise.”
The agent wasn’t quite smiling as he said this, but he looked like he wanted to. “And yeah,” he said, delivering the punch line. “I’m gonna need your clothes, including what you’ve got on.”
“I was gonna turn the jacket in tomorrow, but you brought a Metahuman Response Team in here to literally take the clothes off my back?”
“Underwear and socks are considered personal items and are not imprinted with the Bluestar trademark. You can keep those on. You can also keep any opened bottles of shampoo or tubes of toothpaste you got from the store.”
I turned around and started to head back to the bedroom, but the agent said, “No! Disrobe here, please. Stay where we can see you.”
“You’re gonna strip me down at gunpoint in my own living room?”
The agent flicked his microphone off and whispered, “Don’t worry, honey, you’re not my type,” before flipping it back on and nodding for the camera.
I kicked my boots off and started to strip like it was no big deal, like I was just making casual conversation in the locker room.
“Do I know you guys from somewhere? Oh shit, you’re the two idiots who tried to take Benito!” I pointed at the blonde woman, Agent Poole. “I saved you from getting slammed into the side of a house. Does that count for anything?”
Agent Poole refused to speak, so I turned back to Wood. “Who did you piss off to get this job?”
Wood smiled his chilly Fed smile again. “Are you kidding? When we saw a Property Recovery Order for the smartass who fucked up our child welfare case? We volunteered.”
I stripped down to socks and underwear and Wood gestured to my pants on the floor. Empty your pockets please, onto the desk. Slowly. And please confirm you don’t have any weapons.”
“No weapons in the house,” I said. “And no old silver, in case you were worried.” That was a lie, by the way. Cecilia’s Knife was in the top drawer of my nightstand, after I had taken it out of my jacket the night before.
I pulled out pocket lint, breath mints, a pack of wet wipes, and reluctantly, my Datacore processor and put them all on my desk.
Wood produced a small plastic box and said, “Please put your interface lenses and ear filaments in this case.”
I had forgotten I had replaced my interface stuff with Bluestar versions. At least my sweet military-grade lenses were still locked in my desk drawer, thankfully still functional after taking a blast from Phil’s EMP.
“You guys can have the gum in those pockets,” I said, gesturing to my Bluestar jacket. “You might as well take that first. I loved that jacket, but it kinda hurts to look at it now.”
“Poole, take him to the bedroom and watch him get dressed. And take a photo of his closet before we start taking stuff.”
Agent Poole gestured, and I led her back to the bedroom.
“Can I scratch my ass real quick,” I said in the hallway, “or is that harassment?”
Poole had done all the talking when the agents were sent to retrieve Benito, but she was strangely quiet now, refusing to rise to the bait, as if she didn’t want to risk looking bad in any of these recordings.
She stood there patiently as I dug in the back of my closet for one of my four remaining t-shirts and my last good pair of jeans.
I had given away four boxes of clothes when I got the Bluestar job, thinking I would never need them again. The only things I kept were souvenirs and things with sentimental value, like the one good set of clothes I bought for Judy’s play, still in the wrapper from when I got them dry-cleaned.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Lydia had picked out some fancy tourist clothes for me during our weekend in Providence, but I had quietly returned those to the store, as soon as we got back.
I came back to the living room barefoot, wearing my animated Sonny Mao t-shirt. It wasn’t even meant to be clothing. It was supposed to be wall art, a framed promotional item from Angel of Death 4, but the frame broke sometime in high school. I don’t remember how it broke. I think I just came home and found it broken one day, and never asked how or why.
It was a black shirt with a simple animation of Sonny in gold, screaming as he unloaded his Blessed Holy Assault Rifle on any bad guys who might have been standing in front of me. I kept the sound off, but let the animation play over and over again, just to see if I could piss somebody off.
They kept me in the living room while a pair of MRT guys gathered up five pairs of Bluestar cargo pants and ten uniform shirts from my closet. Damn, I was gonna miss those shirts. That milspec monocry cloth held up better than anything I could buy on my own.
“I only see ten of fifteen shirts here,” Poole said. “We got two from your locker at HQ, but you’re still missing three. Any idea where they are?”
“Probably destroyed,” I said. “Acid spitters are sneaky. You can’t always tell you got tagged until somebody else sees the hole. I’m sure I just melted or burned them somehow and had to throw them away.”
“Just mark them as lost,” Poole said. “We’ll bill you.”
Agent Wood wandered over to my desk and picked up my Datacore. He put it to his eye and whistled. “Military grade processor, off book. Unregistered, with no export controls. I should confiscate this.”
I had been playing it cool to this point, but that Datacore had Taltorak on it, one of two things in this apartment that I would fight and kill for.
Wood put the processor back down in front of me like he wanted me to beg for it.
“This is my personal property,” I said, slipping it into the pocket of my jeans, “but if you want it, maybe you should try and take it from me.”
I was trying to be cool, but an involuntary surge of magic made my eyes light up. I immediately heard five different sets of clacking and scraping sounds, as five MRT officers leveled shotguns, assault rifles, and a special tantalum taser at my chest.
They would all be using armor-piercing bullets with tantalum cores. Would those bullets be good enough to punch through my wards? How badly did I want to find out?
Wood and Poole were both leveling fancy DMA pistols at me. I swear they looked like ray guns from a sci-fi movie, more than anything anybody would use in real life. God knows what alien plasma shit was about to shoot out of those.
I took a deep breath and held my hands out, palms up, in a gesture of surrender. In a very calm voice I said, “Officers, I apologize for losing my temper. Agent Wood,” I turned to him. “I should have explained. This processor was a gift from an old friend who wanted to help me when I started my hero career. I never saved any official Bluestar data to personal storage, so everything should be accounted for in the cloud.
“I’m not sure where my friend got this, but I would be happy to run a scan on it and register the processor with the proper authorities while you guys are standing here. I meant to do that months ago, but it wasn’t a high priority. Would you like me to do that now?”
I was bluffing, ready to shout my hard wipe panic word to Jeeves and see how many feds I could take out before they killed me, but Wood seemed to like my tone, and the exaggerated look of terror on my face, as I pretended to be afraid of his gun.
Wood and Poole put their ray guns away, and the MRT officers seemed to relax, lowering their weapons in response.
“Well,” Wood said, expansive and generous. “It’s not on my list, and I don’t see any need to stir up trouble… for a subject who’s cooperating.”
He turned his mic off and whispered, “Nice try, kid, but you got no poker face. You wanna take a swing at me?”
“Not really,” I said. “Right now, I just want my pants back.”
Wood laughed and leaned in again, like he didn’t want surrounding microphones to pick it up. “I had to let it go the first time because you were with Hardy’s daughter, but next time a DMA agent gives you an order, you say, ‘Yes, sir’ and get your newbie ass back in the car. Am I clear?”
I didn’t trust myself to answer, so I hesitated too long, until he shouted, “Am I clear?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir.”
Wood smiled. “Good. I’m glad we got that worked out. And I changed my mind.” He waved at one of the MRT officers. “Take his socks.”
I stood there, mute, trying not to surge magic or turn red in front of this guy. Finally, once his men had retrieved all the uniform socks from my top drawer, Agent Wood clipped his business card to the piece of paper, signed it, and left it with me.
“That’s your receipt for everything we took. Should probably hang on to that. Don’t lose my card, and don’t leave town for the next couple weeks, in case we need to come back and search the house.”
* * *
I caught a flash of movement as the door closed and realized what it was just in time. She was moving too fast for me to catch her, so I had to shout, “Stop! Lydia, stop! Do not hurt those men!”
Lydia stopped in her tracks, creating a little bow wave in astral space as she popped out of the gray and came to a screeching halt in my living room.
She was facing away from me, almost to the door, but when she heard me shout, she whipped her head around… and I had never seen her like this. I didn’t realize how hard Lydia worked to look human, until she was suddenly too angry to keep it up. She snapped her head around too far, too fast and hissed at me, spitting on the ground like a gypsy grandmother cursing the land.
Her blue eyes had changed to black with glowing red flecks, like her rage was a physical thing rising up from inside her. I had never seen Lydia lose her shit like this, even during our fight with Titus.
Every time I thought I knew who she was, I found another level, like every battle we fought was peeling back another layer, slowly showing me the real Lydia, the demon Lydia, the avenging angel of the Kovach family, bringing death to their enemies on black wings.
Her voice was tight with rage, slipping into that demonic reverberation thing I associated with Titus and Baalphezar. “In six hundred years of serving your family, I have never let anyone talk to a Kovach like that and live!”
“I know,” I said, trying to calm her down. “But we gotta let this go. Some things are more important than my pride. Please, Lydia, promise me you will let this go. No vengeance, no retaliation. Just let it go.”
Lydia thrashed her tail and turned away from me, and I realized she was panting, sounding more like a beast than a woman.
For a moment, I honestly thought she was gonna defy me and turn those men into a pile of body parts on my lawn. Finally, her eyes started to turn blue again, and she seemed to calm down.
She turned to me and said, “I will obey your command, but you bring shame on your family today.”
I smiled a bit and dipped my head as she jumped back on the wall, tail still thrashing like she wanted to choke somebody with it.
I looked up at her and said, “Lydia, I will never be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know a setup when I see one. Those men were sent here to pick a fight, to provoke me into doing something stupid so DMA would have an excuse to kill me.”
Lydia scoffed, “Those men were no threat to you.”
“No,” I agreed. “Not those men. Those men were just cannon fodder, dressed up with armor and weapons so I would be more likely to smack them around, just long enough to get myself declared a red level threat, and help them justify calling in a Bluestar team. No, those men weren’t the ones expected to kill me, but I should probably make a call.”
* * *
Minerva answered on the first ring.
“Hey Jane,” I said, “I didn’t realize you’d be staying in Boston.”
“They told me to hang back and spend the night,” she said, not bothering to deny it.
“And how long are you staying?”
“They said they would only need me for a few hours.”
“Did they tell you you might have to kill me today?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I would have tried very hard not to.”
“I appreciate that. I was calling to tell you, the DMA just came here, collected all the Bluestar stuff from my house, and left without incident. I’m gonna go ahead and send you a copy of this receipt, just so there’s no confusion about that.
“And Jane, if those agents decide they forgot something and need to come back here at two or four or six in the morning, tell them I’m gonna leave my door unlocked, so if they need something they don’t need to smash a window or bust my door down. They can just come on in, and I’ll help them find whatever they need. You think you and Kyle can get that message up the chain?”
Minerva said, “Yes.”
“Great,” I said. “It was good to hear your voice again. Be safe out there.”
Minerva hung up, and Lydia started to look scared, finally seeing the outlines of the trap I had just wiggled out of. Just barely wiggled out of.
“Timothy, if this goddess attacks, can you defeat her?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But only if you’re fast enough to kill an owl.”