Detective Dantani walked past a handful of police officers in uniform. He kept a stern face as he moved. Greetings thrown his way were received with nods and barely comprehensible grunts. He had grown up in a small town where adults, for some reason, were obsessed with being greeted. As such, he had grown to hate greetings.

  It had first started with him vowing that his personal, insignificant contribution to society would be becoming an adult that didn’t demand greetings. Somewhere along the line, though, he had ended up becoming an adult that hated being greeted.

  Now, he did any and everything in his power to not be greeted.

  “Morning, detective,” a female officer greeted.

  With natural brown hair and light brown eyes that always seemed to look as if they were taken within a picture with the perfect touch of sunlight, Dantani looked twice as he passed her.

  “Morning,” he found himself muttering. It came out a little annoyed and the woman gave him a confused look.

  He only hoped that she didn’t think he was annoyed with her. The annoyance in his voice had been for him and it had been momentary.

  The lady had small pink lips and a round face that left her looking more cute than mature. Probably in her mid-twenties to his late thirties, she was, in all facets of the word, pretty. She also had curves that her uniform could not conceal. Dantani closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to dispel the momentary distraction.

  Brown eyes on women had always been his weakness. They held him prisoner whenever he saw them. His love for them had often led him to do stupid things when he had been younger.

  Funny how you ended up marrying green eyes, he thought to himself as he slid through an open door, shimmying sideways as a rather large, uniformed officer went through it at the same time. The man headed out of the room as Dantani headed into the room.

  Dantani let out a sigh of exhaustion as he entered the new room.

  The room was large and suffocatingly cluttered. Half opened boxes, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand lay scattered about, abandoned remnants of the bustle of the regular day in the room. He turned one of the small boxes towards him with his leg, looked to see what was inside it.

  He made an interesting expression when he saw the content. A bundle of dollar bills. He could see a hundred-dollar bill. Everything was probably all hundred-dollar bills.

  The air smelled of old leather, stale coffee, and something with a hint of lemon. Dantani attributed the leathery smell to the large, brown couch pressed up against the wall on one side of the room.

  Panning his gaze around the room, he counted at least twelve of the small boxes scattered around. Had the person in the room been packing the boxes or unpacking the boxes?

  How many of the boxes had money in them?

  Moving on to the next box closest to him, he moved it with his foot and looked inside. It had money in it, too. Twenty-dollar bills.

  It made him look around. Whoever had made a mess of the place had not been interested in the money. That told him something. This had not been a robbery. Dantani looked at the police officers around.

  Money of this level at a crime scene tended to motivate the dark side of people. Raising a hand in the direction of the nearest uniformed officer, he called the person to him. When the officer came to him, it was the female officer with the brown eyes.

  “Yes, detective,” she said.

  “All this.” He gestured at the ground, indicating the small packs of money. “I’ve taken them into account but I’m on the lazy side of things this morning. I need you to catalogue the boxes and how many of them have money in them and let me know.”

  “Yes, detective,” the woman said, nodding.

  She went to work before he could say anything else, not that he had wanted to.

  Dantani ignored the rest of the room as he walked forward. The scattered pieces of paper, the torn-up beige carpet at the center of the room, the two broken chairs he believed were meant for the visitors to sit opposite whoever was in charge of the office.

  He walked through the rest of the room, ignoring the other officers moving around in their different tasks. Some dusted for prints while others took pictures of whatever they felt was necessary or somehow important.

  The desk at the end of the room looked like something that had once been neat. Now, however, it was completely clean, devoid of paper or anything else.

  On one side of it, a man’s head rested quietly on the desk. To anyone not paying attention, he would’ve looked like a man who’d worked tirelessly at his job only to fall asleep at his desk. Dantani knew differently.

  The man was dead.

  A man in a white shirt and simple corporate pants was looking over the body of the dead man. He had a clip-on tie on and had the unkempt hair of someone who had just gotten out of bed and forgotten to put a comb through it.

  Dantani assumed that it was an intentional look. It had to be.

  “What do we have, Chase?” he asked, walking over to the other side of the corpse.

  Chase raised his head, revealing spectacles over his eyes. He squinted at Dantani. “Why do you look like your breakfast was sour?”

  Chase wasn’t the only person here in the Brooklyn police department that he liked. Dantani didn’t hate the others, he would just rather not have to deal with them. In the one week since he’d been sent here Chase was the only one he liked. The man treated him with a certain level of… unimportance and wariness.

  “Why do you look like you forgot to comb your hair?” Dantani shot back.

  The man, young and skinny as he looked, didn’t even reach for his hair on reflex. He returned his attention to the corpse on the table, checking under its fingernails with a pen.

  He frowned as he moved on to the collar of the corpse’s shirt. “It looks like I forgot to comb it because I forgot to comb it, detective.”

  “What are you, five?” Dantani held out his hand. As if in sync, Chase pulled out white rubber gloves from his pocket, never once taking his eyes off the corpse, and handed it over to him.

  Dantani frowned at the gloves as he took it. Chase had given him the medical gloves with a white powdered substance inside it. He had no idea what the substance was all about. But he wasn’t going to complain.

  “So,” he said, putting the gloves on, “what do we have here?”

  “Thirty-five, male.” Chase moved around the back of the chair. “Eyes are yellow, so either his liver failed long before he died or something else caused the effect of yellow eyes.”

  Dantani shrugged, stepping aside so that the man had more space to work.

  “So, liver failure?” he asked.

  Chase stopped putting his pen through the corpse’s hair to give him a flat look. “If only we were so lucky, Detective. If only if we were so lucky.”

  “This isn’t an eighties movie, Chase,” Dantani pointed out. “You can just say it once.”

  “And you can stop looking like I stole your girlfriend.”

  “No girlfriend.” Dantani raised his hand. Hopefully, the swell of his wedding ring beneath the glove was obvious enough. “Wife. And you couldn’t steal her even if you tried.”

  “Congratulations,” Chase said with the blandest voice. “So did the wife piss you off before you left the house?”

  “The wife pissed me off when she went on tour a month ago,” Dantani muttered, not that he was really angry. He knew she was a marine when he married her and knew she would be going on tours to serve her country.

  “So that’s the problem.” Chase scattered the corpse’s hair some more. “You are dry?”

  Dantani blinked in confusion. “Dry? What does that mean?”

  “Well…” Chase paused to make a vague gesture with the pen in his hand. “Dry. Backed up. You know, sex. You haven’t been laid in a month. I’ll be pent up, too, if I were you.”

  “How would you know?” Dantani frowned as Chase went back to poking through the corpse’s hair. “And I don’t think the work place is anywhere to be bragging about your sex life.”

  Chase raised his left hand up. It was gloved. “No ring.”

  “So you’re not married,” Dantani said, matter-of-fact. “I never said you were.”

  “No girlfriend… too.” His voice dropped at the end like a man who had just been distracted from his line of thought by something more interesting. “I haven’t gotten laid for over six months.”

  Dantani’s eyes widened in surprise. He would’ve stopped them from widening if he could, but he couldn’t. The thought of not getting laid for six months seemed terrible. Thankfully, his wife’s tours never lasted for more than two months.

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  At least he usually had his kids to distract him from his sexless life during that period. Not that he’d brought them to Brooklyn with him. Right now, he’d left them at home while he helped out over here. His younger brother was more than happy to stay with them so there was no problem there.

  “You see this?” Chase said, suddenly.

  Dantani leaned in, peered at the back of the head on the, black desk. “What am I looking for?”

  “Mana impact.”

  Dantani shook his head. “I don’t see it.”

  “Don’t be blind.” Chase pocketed his pen and shifted the medium length hair to the side. “Right there. Yellowish bruise. Like four injection points stacked together.”

  Dantani squinted. It took him a very brief moment to spot it. “Mana impact.”

  “A [Mage] did this,” Chase said, leaving the corpse. “This is the third body in the last week.”

  Dantani frowned. This was what he had been invited over to Brooklyn for. A week ago his department head had informed him that the Brooklyn police department was looking for a fresh set of eyes on a new gang war going on. So, they’d sent him.

  A groan escaped his lips, and his hands settled on his waist in annoyance. “So, the other team’s got a [Mage] now.”

  The [Mage] class was not common, and no one knew of a weak [Mage]. With all the bodies turning up, Dantani would be surprised if the [Mage] was working with anybody else.

  A single [Mage] would go through the gangs in this side of Brooklyn like a hot knife through butter.

  How the hell did they expect him to stop a [Mage].

  Mana impact was an effect of a spell as far as anyone knew. It was ambient mana, reconstructed because of a [Mage]’s spell, to cause damage. They didn’t always leave a mana impact, but sometimes they do.

  “That will explain the yellow eyes,” Dantani muttered, moving over to the other side of the corpse so that he could take a look at its eyes. “He was probably hit in the face with the skill. Hence the yellow eyes.”

  Chase nodded. “But what kind of spell doesn’t leave any external impact?”

  Dantani knew a few.

  “Probably something designed to fry his mind?” he mused. “Is this guy in the file you guys have on the gang in this area?”

  Chase shrugged. “No idea. You’ll have to ask Detective Alfa about that one. She was the one in charge of gang activities, this side of the city.”

  The person I replaced, Dantani thought.

  From what he’d heard, she was under some kind of obscure suspension. Relegated to desk duty, she had no business in the field. When he’d arrived at the precinct, he’d gotten all the files on the active cases that she was dealing with on his desk.

  As for the famous woman herself, he never found her in her office. And the few times he had the luck of running into her, she was always in a hurry. Personally, he believed she was avoiding him.

  “Apart from her office, do you know anywhere else in the precinct that I can find her?” he asked Chase.

  Chase shook his head. “No idea. I just investigate the corpses.”

  “Did we at least get an I.D on this guy?”

  Again, Chase shook his head. “Nope. No idea who he is, just how he died. A spell to the face. Must’ve been a powerful one to take him out in one blow.”

  Dantani agreed, after all, there was no such thing as a spell that wasn’t powerful.

  He pointed at a harsh black stain on the table. “What’s that?”

  “No idea.” Chase shrugged. “My best guess is an attack that missed. Just charred the table a little.”

  Now, he had to find this elusive Detective Alfa that kept on avoiding him. He turned to leave when he paused.

  “Chase?”

  The man looked at him. “What’s up?”

  Dantani held up his gloved hands. “Why am I wearing this if you didn’t need me to?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Chase muttered with a shrug. “You were the one that asked for them.”

  That was true. Dantani remembered being the one that had asked for the gloves.

  With a shake of his head, he turned away.

  It was time to head back to the precinct.

  He was at the door when the female officer with brown eyes stopped him.

  “All the boxes are accounted for,” she said. “I counted sixteen boxes.”

  Dantani nodded. “Did all of them have money in them?”

  “All,” she replied with a nod. “The lowest denomination is one dollar bills.”

  Dantani nodded once more. “Thank you, officer…” he looked down at her breast pocket where her name was supposed to be. Noticing the size of her breasts was inevitable. “Shiela,” he finished.

  Shiela nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

  Dantani moved to go around her when she spoke again.

  “Sir.”

  He stopped to look at her. Beautiful brown eyes stared back at him, and it was all he could do not to gulp.

  “Yes, officer Shiela?”

  “You’re new here,” Shiela said, sounding a little nervous. “I was just wondering if you know your way around town yet.”

  “Not yet,” Dantani said. In truth, he didn’t care to. If he was lucky, he would not be here long. This new [Mage], however, was trying to extend his stay.

  “If you don’t mind, I could show you around.” Shiela gave him a small smile. “Brooklyn’s not much but it’s actually an interesting place.”

  Dantani felt his heart beat a little faster at her request. It was a lot of men’s dreams to be approached by women who had all the physical qualities that they wanted.

  “Maybe we could have dinner sometime,” Shiela added, her smile widening. “Something simple and quiet. A real Brooklyn experience. Bills on me.”

  Dantani opened his mouth, then closed it. A thoughtful line creased his forehead. With a sigh, he removed the glove of his left hand and held the hand up.

  It was covered in white powder that annoyed him, but his wedding ring was clear.

  “I’m married, officer Shiela,” he said calmly. “And while a nice dinner might be nice--or it might not, I tend to be bad company—and office friendly, I wouldn’t want to do anything to make my wife ask questions she would not want to ask.”

  The smile waned on Officer Shiela’s face, and she took a polite step back. “I understand, sir.”

  “I’m glad you do.”

  With that, Dantani turned and walked out of the room. Thirteen years ago, he would’ve jumped at the opportunity. Now, he hadn’t even hesitated to turn it down.

  In his opinion, it was always a good thing to be married to a woman that loved you as much as you loved her.

  It helped to deal with certain temptations.

  …

  It was always annoying when your boss reminded you that he was your boss—or at least your superior.

  Being confined to a desk was no longer about punishing her as far as Alfa was concerned, it was now about simply being cruel. Of what use was she sitting on her desk behind a computer when she didn’t even get anything as simple as a work email. All the time she spent in the office now would be better spent at home with her husband.

  Since the portals stopped opening around the world—something that was currently worrying almost all the Delvers she knew—The Blight, her husband, was always home. This would’ve been the perfect time for a vacation. Just him and her together, doing what married couples do.

  But no, she still had to come into the office while on suspension. It irked her to no end. Worse, the only productive thing that came out of coming to the office was no longer productive.

  Naymond that had once been teasing at nuggets of information, but even that was gone now. All the [Sage] ever did when she came to him now was offer her consoling smiles and talk about how she should talk to ‘the boy’ when the time came. Apparently, it was the only thing that could save her if she was ever given a disciplinary hearing.

  But all those weren’t her current source of annoyance. Her superior had demanded that she be in her office for an important emergency meeting.

  Now, here she was, with a man that was not her superior seating on the other side of her table.

  “You have a clean desk,” Detective Dantani from New York commented.

  Alfa nodded. “Because all my files are on your desk. Why am I here, Dantani?”

  “Because you are a difficult woman to find,” he answered casually, leaning back against his chair. “And I really needed to find you.”

  In his late thirties, the detective was very fit. He looked like a man who hit the gym for athletic purposes not strength purposes. A detective from the Gifted department of the New York Police Department, he was a B-rank [Swordsman].

  “So you had my superior call me in?” she asked with a little too much venom in her voice.

  Dantani sighed as if he was dealing with a child. “Is there a reason you’re avoiding me, Alfa? Do you think I’m here to take your job?”

  Alfa knew he was not. In fact, she knew that it was not his fault that he was here. But it did nothing to calm her down. Everything was just annoying her, so her annoyance was spilling out, affecting those related to what was happening to her. And, as if things weren’t already bad enough, Naymond had told her to be careful with her former teammates. Apparently, they could not be trusted.

  As much as she liked to call it one of the [Sage]’s games, she could not. Naymond was not one to lie about such things.

  “I understand, Dantani,” she said finally. “I’ve been avoiding you because everything has been stressing me. It’s not an excuse for it or a justification, just a reason. But you’re here now. What can I help you with?”

  Dantani slipped a hand into the breast pocket of his deep blue shirt and pulled out a pocket sized picture. He placed it on the table and slid it over to her.

  “What do you know about this guy?” he asked.

  Reaching forward, she took the picture and looked at it. “Second in command to one Navari.”

  “Navari.” Dantani rubbed his jaw in thought. “I know that name. I think I got it from your files.”

  Alfa nodded. “He was in charge of a gang that was working with some Romanian organization that our once resident [Sage] brought to our attention.”

  “The [Sage] that I’ve still not met?”

  “The [Sage] you should hope you never meet,” Alfa corrected. At this point, she couldn’t trust Naymond to not taint anything that came in contact with him.

  She gave the picture a second glance. She hadn’t expected Navari’s second in command to be gone so quickly. He was usually a harder man to find than even Navari.

  “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “Got done in by a [Mage],” Dantani answered.

  Dropping the picture back on the table, Alfa folded her arms over her chest. “Do we know why a [Mage] killed him?”

  Dantani shrugged, retrieving the picture. He slipped it back into his pocket. Alfa wondered where the man kept his sword. It was odd for a [Swordsman] to have no swords.

  “You’ve heard of the strings of violence going through your town,” Dantani asked. “From what I’ve been informed of, it’s been going on for over a week now.”

  “Isn’t it the reason they brought you in?”

  “It is,” Dantani confirmed with a nod. “Since the entire thing has been happening, we’ve had more of casualties than deaths. Brutal casualties, to be precise. This,” he patted his pocket, “will be the fourth death.”

  “With—if I’m not mistaken—twenty-three people hospitalized.”

  “And counting,” Dantani added. “But this one seems special. He was alone in something like an office space. What’s a two-bit Gifted gangster doing with an office space?”

  “His name is Trest,” she told him. “And, believe it or not, it’s his actual government name.”

  “And what makes Trest important?”

  “Being Navari’s second in command, he’s usually in charge of the money. Amongst other things. People don’t usually know of him.”

  “And yet someone took him out. My working theory is that this has something to do with a gang war. A new crew is moving in to take over, but they have to clear out the competition. What do you think about that?”

  “Good theory,” Alfa said. “But the question is who? And what type of gang would be willing to bring in a [Mage] for a gang war?”

  “The Romanians?” Dantani tried. “I heard that the deal Navari had with them went south.”

  Alfa frowned, searching Dantani’s eyes. Was he poking, looking to get a rise out of her? All she saw was a man brainstorming.

  “It is possible,” she agreed. “They would have the money and resources to afford a [Mage]. But I don’t think it’s a…”

  Naymond had been warning her about things getting worse. What if this was what the [Sage] was talking about?

  What if this entire thing was all about the boy?

  She shook her head. It wasn’t possible. The boy’s parents were powerful people, apparently. But she couldn’t see any reason for them to be going after the entire Navari crew. If they were to go for anybody, it was going to be her and Naymond.

  To her surprise, she got a new mail.

  It most have shown on her face because Dantani asked, “Is there a problem?”

  “I hope not,” she answered, moving her cursor to open the email. “I’m supposed to be on desk duty with no mails. But I just got one.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “That’s what I want to check.”

  When she clicked on the email. Her surprise shifted to anxiety. The long awaited email had finally come. The topic was simple and straightforward. It read: Disciplinary Hearing.

  “I guess they’ve finally found the time to set up my disciplinary hearing,” she said with a frown. “I’m sorry to say that I currently cannot help you. You should probably speak to one of my former teammates. Tony knows as much as I do. I have a hearing to prepare for.”

  Dantani seemed happy to leave.

  “When is the hearing?” he asked, sliding the chair he had been sitting on back into place. “It’s always good to be ready for these hearings. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience.”

  “Two days from now,” Alfa said, adding in a lower tone, “Two days from now.”

  It seemed a lot of things were about to be put into motion. She got up as well, sliding her chair back into position as she put her computer to sleep.

  She had no idea what she was about to walk into. But there was someone who did.

  It was time to go see Naymond again.