Courts and Cabals 2 G.S. D'Moore (the little red hen read aloud .txt) 📖

training schedule on it, and it seemed to encompass all my free time from now until the end of time. I saw his face in my mind’s eye, and there it was; the ball of power just waiting to be utilized.

“Well, it ain’t perfect,” Lark found my trigger funny. “We’ll fix it, but it’s what we’ve got to work with. Now, let me teach you how to do a glamour,” the grin on his face looked a little like Lucifer; not the biblical one, but the Tom Ellis one from the aptly named show. “Trust me, Cam, this shit will change your life.”

He was right.

Chapter 13

The only light in the hotel room was the laptop screen on a low-power setting. The blinds were drawn except for a slight sliver to peek out of. Vernon stood looking through the crack in the blinds, his eye to a telescopic lens, and his dick in his hand.

“Ah,” he gave a groan as he drained the main vein. It was tough to fit his tip into the Gatorade bottle, so the possibility of spillage was an issue. Still, he didn’t take his eyes off his area of responsibility.

Christmas had come and gone, and by his watch, New Years was less than an hour away. Revelers were all over the streets of Las Vegas, and there was a party in full swing over at Caesars. His vantage point at the Bellagio gave him a great view of the partiers out on the balconies. More than one couple was engaged in a heated necking, but his eyes didn’t linger. He was looking for targets; the targets that had eluded him for the last week.

Lilith Veritas, Xamira Veritas, Dani Underwood, and Cameron Dupree; their pictures were taped to a whiteboard in the center of the room. There should have been time and date stamps under the photos cataloguing the sightings, but they were all blank. No one had seen these four kids since their escape from St. Vincent’s Academy. An escape that had put his girlfriend in the hospital.

He had to pinch off his stream and get a new bottle, which didn’t improve his already shitty mood. He went to place the bottle on the table, bumped the edge, and sloshed some golden liquid all over the faux wood. The room was permeated with the stench of fast food, BO, and stale urine. He’d gotten used to it over his forty-eight-hour shift, but the fresh scent upset the balance. His shifter nose wrinkled, and he cursed as he got a new bottle into position and started to fill. There weren’t many worse things than having to cut off a much-needed piss midstream.

A forty-eight-hours surveillance shift was not standard operating procedure for the UN Response Division, but you worked with what you had. This mission had started out as a high priority; unregistered kids, novel supernatural, cop put in the hospital. When it started on the twenty-second, he had plenty of resources at his disposal. Even though he knew it was coming, he took some serious hits to his manpower over the holidays.

First, he had people with approved leave to spend time with their families. When it was tough to get people to join your organization in the first place, you needed to make them happy. He’d lost a quarter of his surveillance people to holiday leave. They’d be back after the New Year, but in his gut, Vernon knew if they didn’t catch Dupree soon, they wouldn’t nab him at all.

The second drain on his manpower came from the holidays themselves. Ever since the Revelation, and magic coming out into the open, the holidays were always filled with a rush of supernatural events. For a police agency that was already struggling with personnel issues, these were tough times when they had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Vernon had lost another third of his people to incidents that broke out all over the US.

Vernon wasn’t sure why things always went to shit anytime there was a three-day weekend, he didn’t really practice that type of magic, but the UN’s theurgy gurus had briefed the agents that mass belief in something was enough to give it power. When that massed belief had a focal point, like a holiday, it made things possible you usually wouldn’t believe.

The best example to date was what people called the Turkey Rumble. In the mid-90’s, outside Dallas, a legit fifty-foot turkey manifested and battled a giant spaghetti monster. Vernon wouldn’t have believed it, but he was from the Lone Star State, and that shit had been all over the news for weeks. No one was hurt, but to this day, people showed up in the hopes of seeing round two. It had become part of the Thanksgiving holiday for many in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

This year didn’t see turkey versus spaghetti monster the sequel, but a bunch of morons out in California tried to summon Santa Claus. Maybe they wanted a white Christmas, or more toys underneath the tree, but whatever the motivation, they were all dead now.

The critics were still out on jolly, old St. Nick. They didn’t know if he was a manifestation of the belief in Christmas, a Fae, or an elf. Elves, while one of the most popular fantasy races in stories, were basically an endangered species. They were immortal, and more talented in elemental magic than any human; they commanded control of all the elements, not just one or two.

Their problem was they were weak. They were tall and skinny, their bones less dense than a human child’s. A guy with a baseball bat could sneak up and kill an elf with ease. There had been more elves before the Revelation, and those that were left after the world’s governments got their shit together, withdrew into enclaves. Some people believed one such enclave was at the North Pole, but surveillance flights