Page 55 of Client from Hell

Damn it.

Fortunately for me, the place had seen better days, which meant it took me less than five minutes to find a broken piece of glass with a nice, sharp, and narrow tip I could use to draw the appropriate runes. Unfortunately for me, the only place with a large enough, flat surface was the concrete wall near the dumpster, which saw more cleaning than the rest of the building, likely because the stench offended the researchers’ noses as much as it offended mine.

I regretted everything leading up to my decision to draw an aversion near a shit-filled dumpster, but I went to work.

The glass piercing my finger hurt a great deal less than any one of my cancer treatments. Wrinkling my nose at the sting and my awareness I likely infected myself with even more illnesses, I began with a circle. Of all the shapes runes could be, I favored the infinite possibilities of the circle, its robust nature, and tendency to withstand mistakes and general abuse far more than the other shapes. Squares and rectangles tended to fracture if someone looked at them wrong. Ovals shared some of the properties of a circle, but I found they would cave under pressure much like the angular shapes. Triangles could take a beating, but they required more care than a circle.

I’d have to use a triangle within my circle to protect the innocent animals trapped in the lab.

Saving the hardest work for last, I inscribed my intentions around the outside of the circle, using smaller circles to link my magic with the primary rune. The main working, resembling a series of broken Celtic knots, linked to the main circle with ovals, would drive away anyone with sense. Once satisfied the spell would catch everything but mindless amoebas, I turned my attention to the space inside the circle. The triangle went in first before I dipped into Egyptian hieroglyphs to protect a broad assortment of animals. When I’d first started working practitioner magic, I’d selected a pair of wings as my symbol, which I used to engulf and shield the animals within the safety of the inner triangle.

Intent mattered with my magic.

Then, as I needed to dodge detection, I etched in the runes I used to create illusions, making my protective wings disappear from the awareness of those under my spell.

Jonas might forgive me later—once he left my field of influence and remembered that I existed.

To activate the working, I breathed onto it and willed it to come to life.

The animals inside remained quiet, but within moments of the magic taking root in the concrete wall, footsteps and muffled curses within warned me my magic had done something. I peered into the nearest window to spot men in white lab coats hurrying towards an inner door, leaving everything behind in their wake.

I smiled, straightened, and circled the building to get a closer look inside and learn just what Modern Miracles Pharmaceuticals was up to.

My aversion worked well enough that those within the building had left without taking any precautions, including securing their access badges. As such, in the lobby, after poking around the security desk, I located a key card able to get me through the automatic doors.

Their security system needed work, and I used magic to reveal the codes needed to enter the few places barring entry with keypads. The animal lab proved to be such a place, although in the researcher’s hurry to get out of the building, one of them had left the door jarred open with a fallen box. To make sure the entry stayed open, I piled on a few extra boxes after taking a moment to investigate their contents. Two contained various brands of canned cat and dog food.

One contained a briefcase with a bunch of unmarked vials, which I decided would come with me when I left. I put it on one of the metal examination tables inside the cage-filled room.

As intended, the animals didn’t seem to notice the aversion, and they ignored my presence. I could only assume the workers kept them drugged, as they made minimal noise and showed no evidence of discomfort. Like the horror house in John’s Creek, the lab had a bunch of otters of different species.

Unlike the horror house, several of the cages were loaded with baby otters, and their feeding schedule indicated they still drank milk and would need to be bottle fed in an hour.

I wondered if I could get all four cages of baby otters to fit in my Lamborghini.

Scurrying around the lab, I stole a pair of latex gloves to help keep my fingerprints off everything, snagged a bottle of cleaner to remove the evidence of my presence, and blitzed through the place in search of incriminating evidence, suppliers, and other useful names and numbers to help me put an end to their operations. In an adjacent office, I struck gold.

One of the workers had been going through a file of people on his desk, and one of the folders included Diana’s picture. Snagging a clean sheet of paper, I drew a linked pair of circles on it, stole as much blank printer paper as I could find, and duplicated the sheets to take with me without tipping the fucking assholes off I’d been helping myself to their files of interesting people and places.

To my disgust and dismay, I realized I would be able to take the data or the animals, not both.

Hating myself for what I needed to do, I made sure I fed the baby otters and other animals with a delicate feeding schedule, careful to follow the instructions to the letter. I duplicated every feeding and care sheet I could find and added it to my pile.

Then, because I was a bitch and had room in my bra for a hitchhiker or two, I snagged a pair of baby white otters with red paws, as I’d never seen anything like them before. I pocketed enough of their food to last a few days, used a clean hand towel to create a nest for them in my bra, and grabbed my stolen goods, creating one final rune to destroy the rest of my workings, including the aversion I’d left in blood on the wall.

I made sure to be at least a block away before activating the magic, and I took a convoluted path to Lucille.

The aversion I put on the car had done its job as far as I could tell, but I took the extra five minutes to do another working to cover my tracks and make certain nobody noticed anything unusual about the car beyond the Lamborghini being excessively expensive for the area.

My new pets squeaked and played in their towel, which I set on the passenger seat. I set the temperature controls to similar to the lab’s conditions, started the car, and headed back for Athens.

Calling Lucifer would reveal my hand in the burning of his house, so I opted to confess my sins to Diana. I called the woman, grinning over my infiltration of the warehouse-turned-lab.

“You are something else,” Diana said instead of a proper greeting. “Jonas was supposed to accompany you to keep you safe, yet he’s literally hiding under Lucifer’s bed right now. What did you do?”

“I may have used an aversion to clear out the building, as they have an active lab going. I’m guilty of two counts of otter theft, and I stole a lot of paperwork from the back. The paperwork has information on you. The aversion also had an illusion to make people forget I was there or not notice my presence.”

Diana sucked in a breath. “You’re serious. They had paperwork about me?”