Shaw gaped at me and my entourage from behind his desk with a mix of shock, terror, and hate. I couldn’t be sure if that expression was because I was here in his office, where he very much did not want me, or because he realized at that moment that, because I was here, he was probably well and truly screwed. He probably felt the spell that I just cast on him as well, and while he likely didn’t realize the nature of the spell was to bind him to the truth, the act of the magic taking hold had likely set off every danger sense he had.

His eyes darted to the door and window, probably calculating his chances of escape. I think the translucent, gold-hued forcefield spells that Salem and Kinara had cast made it clear that he wasn’t getting out either way, though. He had no idea what those were and I could see in his eyes the moment that he decided it probably wasn’t worth the risk. Tough luck there, asshole, you’re stuck in here with us now.

I could see the hatred he had for us in his eyes, even as he calculated how to play his hand in this unwelcome scenario. No phone, and no way out, so Shaw quickly transitioned to what was probably his last hope, buying time until help could arrive. “H-how?”

I let out a sigh and rolled my eyes. “What part of magick is real and I am a Demigoddess of Magick aren’t you people getting?

“Y-you can’t be here. Public access…” he tried with another glance toward the door.

“Really?” I asked with an arched eyebrow as I cut off his protest. “That’s what you’re going with? I thought you were the head of an Intelligence agency. Do I really look like a woman who gives a solitary fuck about your security protocols? Well, other than how ridiculously easy it was for us to get in here alone with you. Let me make this clear to you, Director, if I truly want to be somewhere or to do something, there is nothing that your agency can do to stop me.”

I paused for a moment to let all that sink in before driving the last nail in. Apparently, he and the rest of his agency weren’t getting the message through more subtle means, and my little prank in Toronto, so it was time to tell him in a way that left no room for doubt. The message that Loki was delivering to the CIA would be very similar to what I planned on delivering here, only it seemed that Shaw and his people here needed a more direct lesson.

“I just strolled into the heart of your organization with a group of armed individuals who are used to dealing with threats of apocalyptic proportions,” I told him in as casual a tone as I could as I sauntered up to his desk. Then I got to the meat of my threat. “The only one who knows we’re here is you, and that is only because I wanted you to know.”

Nishalle stepped up beside me, leaning over his desk and smiling so that he got a good look at her fangs and glowing red eyes. Then she vanished into her own shadow, causing Shaw to jump and gasp as she reappeared behind him almost before he realized she was gone, leaned forward to grip his shoulder more tightly than was necessary to get her point across, and spoke in a chilling whisper. “I can get to you anywhere and anytime, Asshole. You would never see me coming, there is no place you can hide from me, and you won’t even realize I’ve killed you until you’re in hell. My hell. You’re not safe anywhere, and I just claimed your soul. You can’t outrun death.”

“Nishalle isn’t my only option either, there are so many ways I could swat away a pest like you, and your organization, Shaw. Options ranging from spells like the ones I placed on your assassins earlier this morning, all the way up to the overkill options like the magical equivalent of a nuke. Or with a single word, I could have Lillith there summon an army of thousands of armed and battle-ready Succubae to deal with you and your organization permanently, but I don’t want to be the bad guy, and you are insignificant. You’re like a buzzing mosquito, and frankly, I’ve been dealing with far more important matters than the likes of you. So, consider yourself fortunate that I’ve been busy lately and haven’t had the time to deal with annoyances,” I told him in a tone that told him just how annoyed I was with him. Then I smiled and added, “Until now.”

“You fucked up, Asshole. You crossed the line too many times, and now you have our undivided attention,” Salem’s voice said behind me and the tiny Liyun’shael sounded as pissed off as I had ever heard her. Not that I blamed her, we all had very good reason to be after all.

“I don’t know wh…” Shaw tried to protest earning a slap upside the back of his head from Nishalle that stopped him cold.

“Shut up, unless it’s to answer questions,” she hissed in his ear. “We’ll be getting to that soon enough, but first, you’ve been a bad boy, so you’re going to keep your mouth shut and let the adults talk.” If I wasn’t so angry with this man, I might have laughed at Nishalle treating him like a misbehaving child since he was probably pushing sixty, balding, and what little hair he had left was firmly in the realm of grey.

“I’ve been nice,” I lamented as I looked over the man behind the desk. “I haven’t killed you, or any of your people, no matter how much you might deserve it. I’m trying to make peace, and that can’t come on a pile of corpses. You’ve crossed the line too many times, though. First, you started a national manhunt for anyone related to Pegasus Entertainment, making them out to be terrorists and irreparably damaging their reputations. Those people were innocent, and you know it. Then, you had the DCA kidnap, incarcerate, torture, and kill innocent Changed people. My people. Strike three, though, that was sending someone to assassinate Robyn Reyes.”

I let the fury that I was feeling for this man be heard in my voice and I could feel my aura once again shifting to my Justice aspect. I could understand, trying to kill me, hell I even expected it to some degree. I knew that I wasn’t going to be popular with a lot of people in high places, not just because I wasn’t human, but also because my message and the direction that I had to try to push the world into taking was going to cause a massive shift in the balance of power, probably worldwide.

This man had involved innocents, though. He repeatedly condoned actions to grind other people down and dispose of anyone who might stand in the way of his racist agenda. He had gone after Robyn just because she was trying to uplift the same suffering people that he seemed to want to crush under his boot. This man was the worst kind of filth.

I still had the feeling that he was getting his orders from someone else, but from the undisguised hatred in his eyes, I doubted that he had much of a problem following them. He wanted to see us all dead and/or suffering. Well, that would make this easier then, I wouldn’t have to face any moral quandaries about a man who was just following orders. He would tell me what I wanted to know, and then he would face Fae justice for his crimes.

“Let’s get this questioning over with,” I muttered to the others before turning my attention back on Shaw to ask, “Tell me, did you happen to see your failed assassins on the news yet?” I had while we were waiting for Harley and Lillith to contact us, and it was hilarious. They, and their American counterpart, were blabbing secrets left and right, and I think the media hounds were starting to get sick of the phrase, I fucked with the Fae, honesty is the price I pay.

“Fuck you, freak!” he began to bluster before his eyes widened in surprise as he blurted out a simple, “Yes.”

I allowed a nasty smile to curl my lips upward at the expression on his face. He hadn’t intended to give that answer. “Oh, good, so you’re already familiar with the spell I cast on them, compelling them to answer any questions truthfully. I cast a similar spell on you when we entered this room, though, not quite as permanent and without some of the more annoying additions. I doubt you’ll take my word for it, though, so let’s give it a test run. So, tell me honestly, what are your deepest, darkest, and juiciest secrets?”

Perhaps I should have bound him to only speak the answers as well as compelling him to answer questions truthfully. However, I did get the answer, after a tirade of expletives and some truly sickening yet creative racial slurs against my kind that I will not be repeating. Once he was finished with those, I really regretted asking him that question.

Shaw had a lot of skeletons in his closet, more than I ever wanted to know about. He was a veritable fount of corruption and greed. He had used his position to make several people who were potentially dangerous to him disappear, accepted bribes to get his agency to look the other way on some truly heinous matters involving some former and current politicians, and was having several extra-marital affairs, including one where he was acting as a sugar daddy to a seventeen-year-old girl. The man made me sick, and now I wanted him to face justice even more.

He probably would have continued to spew out such horrendous secrets for a while longer if Lissany, who was as sickened as I was, hadn’t punched him in the gut just to shut him up. This was Lissany, sure she could be an utter terror on the battlefield, but otherwise she never lost her temper and would never hurt someone unless they either really deserved it or were some sort of monster. Shaw counted as both.

“So, I wonder how one gets something like the DCA set up in such a short time without an oversight committee or any kind of motion in the senate,” I stated conversationally once he could breathe properly again. I wanted him to fear what questions I might ask him next before getting to the meat of the matter. “That just reeks of shady back room deals to me, and it’s probably above your pay grade. Where are you getting your orders from, Shaw? Who is pulling your strings? Who ordered the hits on me and Robyn Reyes?”

After another litany of expletives and racial slurs, I got my answer. It was the Ministry of Defense, and Shaw was getting his orders directly from the Minister of Defense himself, Markus Fergusson. Honestly, none of us were really surprised by that answer.

“So, then, what do we do now?” Venika asked while Salem cast a spell to properly restrain the director of CSIS. I considered her question as I watched my paramour work, and by the time Salem was finished, he was so wrapped up in vines that you couldn’t see him underneath them, except for a small gap over his nose that would allow him to breathe.

When I finally spoke, it was to ask Rei, “How do you feel about pretending to be that asshole for a couple hours? Just long enough to make some phone calls and rescind some of the orders he’s given recently? You could also help to draw his boss into a trap. Then we can lower the boom and be done with these assholes.”

My Kitsune fiancé did not look enthused about the idea, to say the least, not that I could blame him. “Honestly, Babe, the thought of being him for any amount of time makes me feel like throwing up. I get what you’re saying though, so I guess I’ll do it. For the greater good and all.”

I leaned in to kiss him, gently caressing his foxlike ears in the way I knew he liked. “Thank you, my love, your sacrifice is greatly appreciated,” I whispered lovingly before turning back to the others. “Kinara and Venika, I want you to take that pile of waste back to Varüus’kiel. Venika, make sure he doesn’t go anywhere and, Kinara, I want you to start arrangements for the Wild Hunt. Salem and Daenyss, I’m going to need you to use your phones to do some searching online and then make a lot of calls for me. As for the rest of us, here’s what we’re going to do…”

Meanwhile, in Langley…

Director Allen Eglund had the worst headache. Today had not been the greatest day so far, but he had gotten used to both headaches and bad days since he first took the job. The job was never easy and there was often more bad news than good, that was just to be expected in his position. It seemed like he was always juggling politics, dark secrets, and danger to both himself and his organization. That was par for the course, though, just another day at the office so far as he was concerned.

Today, though, it looked like it was shaping up to be the worst day in his career, and it was only noon. The first blow came as soon as he arrived at the office. That damn hacker struck again last night. Their cyber security division was supposedly one of the best in the world and whoever this ‘Whisper’ was, she was making them look like rank amateurs. This time, she had managed to access an off-site agency server that only five people in the country had the security access to know even existed.

The only saving grace was that the CIA wasn’t the only target of Whisper’s activities last night. Three-letter agencies across the country had fallen victim to her, as well as other agencies in Canada, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Not that he gave a shit about other agencies that might be suffering from the hacker’s activities, he needed to worry about the problems in his own backyard right now.

The biggest of those problems was that whoever this hacker was, they seemed to be untraceable and were now in possession of some of the agency’s most closely guarded and darkest secrets. Current operations, black sites that they were operating, assassinations that they had publicly claimed no part in, all of that was now in the hands of a hacker, one who was disseminating the worst of the classified information to the public and media. Heads were going to roll over this, and he had a sinking feeling that his would be the first.

In his gut, he just knew that this Whisper must somehow be tied to Taelya, the self-proclaimed Demigoddess and Empress and thorn in his side. The hacker’s activities certainly seemed to be in support of her cause since she always seemed to prioritize revealing certain information: their attempts to bring Pegasus Entertainment to heel and get their hands on their technology, top secret black sites for studying and getting information from the ‘Changed’, and now their assassination attempt on Taelya herself.

Whisper had to be working with that pointy-eared freak and her followers. They had reacted to the information about the last black site internment camps before the information was even released to the public. Those freaks had raided the last three of those sites in the early hours of the morning to free the prisoners, destroying any data they found, and they hadn’t even bothered trying to hide the fact that it was them this time.

No, this time they attacked the sites brazenly. They just materialized out of nothing, subdued the guards, freed the prisoners and test subjects, and disappeared with them. The dangerous-looking one, the man with white hair and a pair of swords, even looked directly at one of the security cameras and flipped it off before leaving.

Allen had been expecting good news today. Intel suggested that Taelya would be making an appearance at a press conference yesterday with the pop star, Robyn Reyes, and he had sent an operative to take care of the potential problem permanently. Not only had Agent Kingsley failed to get close enough to kill her, but another attempt on her life from their Canadian counterparts suggested that this Taelya could somehow stop bullets, or at least that was what she had the press who were there believing.

Now, both his operative and the two sent by the CSIS to kill Taelya and Reyes were sitting in jail cells in Vancouver. The three had been found tied up and naked in front of a police station two hours ago by the media, and all three had either gone insane or were trying to burn their respective agencies, going by what the media had gotten out of them before the police broke things up. Better to believe that than that this Taelya had actually cast some spell on them to compel them to tell the truth. Perhaps she used some sort of hypnotic suggestion when she had them alone.

Well, if Agent Kingsley was going to try to burn the agency and sound like a madman while doing it, as the Director of said agency, he would just have to deny things and try to get ahead of that particular problem. It would have been easy enough to claim that Kinglsey was a madman and had no ties to the agency if that damn hacker hadn’t released files concerning ongoing operations, including Kingsley’s current assassination assignment. Now he would have to find people to poke holes in that narrative and question the validity of the files that were released without making it look like an obvious cover-up.

In short, Allen’s morning was nothing short of horrendous. There were far too many fires to put out, he had been ignoring his constantly ringing phone for the past hour, and as he made his way back to his office from taking a leak, he was seriously wondering why he had let himself be talked into this job in the first place. Now, as he stepped back into his office, nearly slammed the door behind him, and saw the object on his desk, he had a terrible feeling that his day was about to get so much worse.

Allen froze mid-step as he caught sight of the device that now dominated the space atop his desk. It was a bomb, or at least meant to look like one, but it looked more akin to something that someone would see in an old cartoon than in real life. An old-fashioned analogue alarm clock fastened to what looked like oversized pieces of dynamite amidst a jumble of wires and fuses. As soon as he had stepped through the door and it had closed behind him, the device had begun ticking very loudly.

He had only been gone for two minutes! How had someone managed to get into his office and place such a large and unwieldy device on his desk without being noticed by his secretary? He was just about to slowly inch his way back toward the door when a far-too-sweet, feminine voice emerged from the area of the bomb. “Good morning, Director Eglund. I would suggest that you stay very still if you don’t want this to go boom. I know, this probably looks a little old-fashioned, but it got your attention, didn’t it? I figured that if I was going to threaten you, I should at least be obvious about it this time. For spy agencies, you and the CSIS don’t seem to get subtlety very well, after all.”

Allen recognized that voice; he had heard it enough during that ridiculous press conference yesterday when she was claiming that magic and Gods were real. The very same woman whom Kingsley had failed to assassinate. Despite the cheerful sweetness in that voice, he froze in his tracks.

While he stood there in fear for his life, the voice continued to speak. “Anyway, so here’s the threat, and this will be the only warning I give you. You aren’t safe anywhere. If you do something that makes me want you dead, you will die. If your agency continues to cross me or cause my people harm and suffering, I will repay you in kind. The only way your country will get access to technology like the F.I.Ts developed by Pegasus Entertainment is through diplomacy and negotiations. Thanks for listening, and have a nice day.”

Allen was amidst a massive sigh of relief when the annoyingly cheerful voice added, “Oh, and don’t worry, the music and visual effects should only last a few days.” He only had a moment to stand there in complete confusion at those words before the bomb exploded with glitter and light, and the building’s power went out.

As he was standing there in the darkness only mitigated by the light coming through his office window, he heard an all too familiar melody that quickly materialized into the song Party in the CIA by Weird Al Yankovich. Fuck, he hated that song. When his eyesight finally adjusted, he found that his office was liberally doused with craft glitter. It would probably take the janitors weeks to get rid of it all.

He was covered in glitter too, but of a different sort; it almost seemed like sparkling colored lights, like some sort of bad fantasy photo filter. The glittering lights stood out especially well in the dim light until the emergency power kicked in. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t brush it off.

With the lights back on, he could now see that he was also wearing what seemed to be a neon pink T-shirt on top of his suit. He couldn’t take that off either; it was like it was some sort of illusion. Whenever he tried to take it off, his hands just moved right through it, and he could only feel the material of his suit jacket. It was infuriating, almost as much as that song playing in the background, and he couldn’t even find whatever device might be playing that damn song. Well, at least the song was almost over.

Just as he sighed in relief as the song ended, the song started again, and only then did he get an inkling of how truly sadistic and diabolical this Taelya truly was as her last words replayed in his mind. “Oh, and don’t worry, the music and visual effects should only last a few days.” That was when he heard the frantic pounding on his office door, and he realized that his bad day had only just begun.

It turned out that not only did that bomb somehow cause an EMP that killed every non-shielded electronic device in the building, but his bomb experts had no idea how it was done. There were only traces of craft glitter in the remains of the bomb itself, and then there were the other effects to be considered. Every person in the building, without exception, had suffered the same horrific fate as Allen himself.

Not only was everyone hearing that infernal song playing on an infinite loop, but they were all sparkling with glittering lights that were bound to draw the wrong type of attention, had illusory and hugely exaggerated elf-like ears over their real ones, and wore those phantasmal neon pink T-shirts that covered anything they tried to wear to conceal the problem. The T-shirts had a simple phrase written upon them in easy-to-read black text that stood out for all to see. “Don’t FUCK with the Fae!”