The novelty of not being able to read him was wearing off and she was starting to get annoyed—and yet even more annoyed that Brendan appeared to be drinking a double-extra-large coffee that smelled like heaven in a cup. Just because she shouldn’t have caffeine didn’t mean she wouldn’t French kiss that man just to get the sensation of having a cup by proxy.
“Sweetie, we’ve talked about the academic lurking,” Sonja sighed as Jillian waved Brendan through the door. “It’s creepy, even if it’s in the name of science.”
“I would knock, but it is my office,” Jillian said airily. “Sorry I’m late. I was with the department heads. As usual, they were…talkative.”
“And she’s being too polite to point out that I’m still struggling with the time difference,” Brendan noted, sitting in the only seat left empty and taking a long drink from his travel cup.
“It’s fine today,” Jillian assured him. “In a few weeks, not so much, but you deserve to take a beat on your first day.”
“Is the sun always so…bright, here?” he asked, hooking the sunglasses into the collar of his dark gray dress shirt.
“Afraid so,” Sonja told him. “But we should be getting some rain next week.”
“You’re lovely for humoring me,” he told her.
“Now, since the three of you are the happy few League employees who will interact directly with the rift and the artifact, I thought it was important for you to meet at the very start of Brendan and Cordelia’s tenure,” Jillian said. “Normally, we would introduce you at a staff meeting involving the department heads, but I thought that might make you uncomfortable. Also, I thought it would be a kindness to spare you Adam McTeague’s bragging about how he has single-handedly turned the tide for southern Louisiana’s economy. But, honestly, Dani’s work is the most pertinent to yours. She’s been working with the rift for several months now, but unfortunately, outside forces have ripped it open even wider than it was before I showed up.”
Brendan frowned. “Outside forces?”
“Unfortunately, that’s an aspect of the situation we’ve had to leave out of the reports. The rift is being sabotaged. Just after Dani arrived, it became apparent that someone was undoing her repair work. It was a League employee with a similar talent to Dani who claimed to be working for a supernatural group trying to create a New World Order, supervillain crazy speech, blah blah blah. At first, we thought it was a group outside the rift trying to cause trouble. And then, earlier this month, another League employee spent months redirecting League money to fund his search for this artifact. Cole Lydon claimed that he was working with a faction inside the League to sabotage the rift in some strange effort to make more humans into remade magique. He said they were tired of waiting around for humans to be ready to accept magique into their midst, and they’re trying to force the issue. They figure if everybody is magique, that will eliminate all the anxiety from the equation.”
“Like the first X-Men movie?” Brendan asked.
“That’s what I said!” Sonja exclaimed, looking pleased. “Also, for the record, the rift doesn’t change everybody. Some of us, with clinically quantifiable stubborn DNA, manage to spend time near the rift without changing at all.”
“That’s a relief,” Brendan muttered.
Jillian opened a file from her desk and slid a pile of printed photos across her desk. Cordelia and Brendan both took a few, studying the images of a black stone casket, carved with symbols she didn’t recognize. “Cole Lydon had a telekinetic magique pull that out of the swamp. She tried to break it open—because, apparently, that’s what crazy people do when they find an ancient important artifact of unknown origin and power.
Sonja smiled at her fondly. “Sweetie, you’re wandering off-topic.”
Jillian pressed her lips into a thin line. “Point taken. The repercussions were that the rift got much bigger. And the psychic was turned into dust. We can’t see inside with x-rays or known scanning technologies because, well, it won’t let us. We have no idea how old it is, and taking scrapings off of it to run tests…seemed to make it angry. So we’re not going to do that again. We thought maybe it’s Meso-American, but our experts say the symbols carved into it don’t match anything they’ve seen, and it seemed much older than any culture they’ve documented. Also, the obsidian doesn’t match samples from Central or South America. Testing and examination have been complicated because anyone who touches it directly…well, Will probably has a medical term that sounds more intelligent than ‘lots and lots of seizures,’ but here we are.”
“How did you move it if you can’t touch it?”
“One of our employees is a shurale. I’ll spare you the terrifying backstory but basically, she’s technically dead. Because her body doesn’t work like ours, the artifact didn’t affect her blood pressure, her cognitive functions, respiratory systems, and so on.”
“And trust me when I say when living people get near the rift or the casket, all of those systems and more get all scrambled to hell,” Sonja said. “I nearly died and I spent a grand total of thirty minutes around them. While the employee in question has been very helpful in moving the artifact safely, she has other duties. We need someone devoted to this full-time, which is why Brendan was recruited.”
“I’m sorry,” said Cordelia. “I’m struggling to make the connection between this other employee and Brendan.”
“I know it’s considered rude to be so blunt about this sort of thing,” said Jillian. “But Brendan is a banshee—which also puts him in the realm of technically dead, so he can handle it safely while Cordelia gets her readings. We just need you to examine it, find out what it wants. Dani said it wants something. We would be willing to open negotiations if it would just stop ripping our dimension apart.”
“And if we can’t convince it to play ball? What if it wants something we don’t want to give?” Cordelia asked.
Jillian jerked her shoulders. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We just need all of the information we can get from it. How old it is. Where it came from. What is it? Maybe that would help us determine how would anyone at the League have any idea what it is and what they want with it? And more importantly, what’s their plan?”
“That’s a lot of information,” Cordelia said, swallowing heavily.
“It is. To be clear, I don’t want you touching it directly, Cordelia, unless it’s absolutely necessary. And even then, I want to review multiple safety precautions beforehand. And if something does happen while you’re reading the artifact, it will be Brendan’s job to get you to safety.” Jillian reached across the desk as if she was going to pat Cordelia’s hand, and then drew her arm back. And while the gesture might have seemed awkward, Cordelia appreciated her thoughtfulness. Cordelia had rarely been in the position of having someone offer that comfort, much less take into consideration how uncomfortable the contact would be. Between that and instructions meant to prioritize Cordelia’s safety over deadlines, her anxiety began to ease a bit.
“This is a high-priority project and time is of the essence. But I want you to take your time, approach it slowly and deliberately. I want you fully rested, eating regular nutritious meals and all that responsible adult stuff. We don’t want you hurting yourselves…and we also don’t want to make the rift worse or open the box and accidentally summon Chtulhu or something.”