Playing with Fire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)(30)
“I am no—”
Janet stomped her foot on his. “He’s very sorry, ma’am.”
I left Janet and the idiot cadet just outside the doors leading into the office. I carried the camera and a meter with my teeth, both rigged with straps to make them easier for me to handle. In what classified as a miracle in my rather humble opinion, Janet’s choice of meter and settings worked best for amateurs with no idea what they were doing.
It’d catch any dangerous substance from gorgon spittle, which was generally harmless unless someone decided to bathe in it, to phoenix feathers. No one wanted to screw around with a phoenix feather, which could incinerate anything given ten seconds. The damned things had a mind of their own, too. Someone could carry around a pretty little white feather, which to all appearances looked like it came from a pigeon, and then bam. Fire, and lots of it.
Fortunately for society at large, phoenixes disliked cities and guarded their precious feathers as though they were their first-born hatchlings. I’d only seen a feather outside of training once, and it had still been attached to the phoenix, who had agreed to come to the CDC auditorium for a demonstration in exchange for some undisclosed favor.
A phoenix feather or two would come in really handy torching gorgon bile. Of course, the feather would likely torch the entire building in the process, but not even napalm could reach the same temperatures as a phoenix. If the CDC brought in the full bird, 120 Wall Street would be reduced to a big pile of ash within twenty minutes.
I wondered how I’d compare to a phoenix if I let loose and went on a rampage. The thought tempted me, although the presence of the two cops ensured I only considered it for a moment. Still, who didn’t like the idea of going full-out pyromaniac for once in a lifetime?
Instead of indulging, I sighed and gave both cops a sour look. “May-be step back more feet. To be safe.”
Janet obeyed, dragging her pair of extinguishers with her. The cadet did not. Why was I not surprised? When I got out of the building, I’d give Chief Quinn a piece of my mind for allowing the NYPD to even have such a useless cadet in training. What were they doing at the academy? Twiddling their thumbs and scheming ways to add chaos to an already chaotic—and dangerous—job?
“Meter set to fif-teen feet, Janet?” I asked around a mouthful of lanyards. A girl could hope, right? The meter was set to mass detection; that much I could tell from the screen icons. Maybe my luck would hold for once in my life.
“Yes, ma’am. The CDC recommended the settings. I just did what I was told and confirmed everything with them.”
“Good job. Purr-fect.” Fifteen feet would give me enough of a range to avoid general contamination and get a good feel for how much the bile had spread in the office. If the initial spatter radius was out twenty-feet, I expected some of the gorgon bile to have gotten on shoes or other materials and been spread around. The worst I’d seen was when one man had stepped into a puddle of it and tracked it thirty feet before it’d gotten through his socks and petrified him.
Maybe I’d get lucky and no one had gone on a long hike with bile all over their feet. I doubted it, but at least I’d know before I stepped in any trace residue.
I squeezed my way through the door and made it two steps before the meter shrieked an angry chorus of warnings, too shrill and piercing to indicate a simple gorgon bile contamination. Lowering my head, I set both devices down on the tiles, unsheathed a claw, and hooked the edge of the meter to flip it over so I could get a look at the back-lit display.
The screen flashed red, indicating a critical contamination. I tapped the diagnostic button and waited for the result. While I expected gorgon bile, and likely the concentrated, A+ grade stuff no one ever wanted to deal with since it stuck to everything and took several rounds of neutralizer—or intense heat—to get rid of, I got something even worse.
Gorgon dust.
Why did I always end up with the gorgon dust cases? Why couldn’t it be bile? The meter confirmed the strongest source was at the fringe of its current detection range, but as I initiated a more thorough scan, it picked up a trace source within three feet of me.
Crap.
“Back!” I twisted around and blew a gout of flame at the hallway to drive home my point.
Janet hightailed it to the elevators while Cadet Winfield stood around and gaped at me. How had I gotten the idiot cadet without real training? Why me?
Maybe if he didn’t move or breathe, none of the dust would reach him. I returned to my work and glared at the meter, and hoping for a misreading, I tapped away at the device’s thick rubber buttons, grateful the CDC had rejected the idea of touch screens, which did not play well with hazmat suits or unicorn claws. I did a full reset of the device, a procedure that cost me three minutes, and I reset all the settings before running the test one more time.
Nothing had changed. I still had multiple sources of gorgon dust nearby, and by the rulebooks, standing within three to five feet of a trace source classified as contaminated. I lifted my head and eyed the receptionist’s desk, which wasn’t close enough to be the nearest source of dust. The gray and brown granite floor tiles gleamed under the office’s lights, doing an excellent job of masking the presence of dust.
I snorted and smoke trailed from my nose.
“What are you doing?” Cadet Winfield demanded.
“Do you want to die?”