Dead Waters - Anton Strout [11]
Ever since a set of even more draconian Departmental cuts than usual a few weeks ago, and the loss of lots of ancillary staff members, I knew things had been rough, but I hadn’t realized it was so bad they had to be going over the books in the midnight hours. I switched my focus to farther back in the coffeehouse over by the service counter where Inspectre Argyle Quimbley was surrounded by a few other people. The old Brit leader of Other Division was in his usual tweed, twirling the ends of his walrus-like mustache as he looked over a folder. Next to him was a dark-skinned woman whose hair was pulled back off her shoulders in a no-nonsense ponytail—Allorah Daniels, doing double duty as a member of our governing Enchancellors as well as our resident vampire hunter. She held a folder identical to the one in the Inspectre’s hands.
I headed across the room to them, addressing my boss. Connor and Jane followed. “Inspectre. . . ?”
Despite the concern on the old man’s face, he smiled when he saw me. “Hello, my boy,” he said.
“What’s going on?” I asked as a horrible thought dawned on me. “We’re not. . . fired, are we?” I could barely say the words, and when I did, a panic rose in my chest. The last thing I wanted was to be forced back into a life of thieving to survive in the skyrocketing real estate market that was Manhattan. My apartment down in SoHo was my last holdover from those days, the one thing I had kept to ease into the transition to using my powers for good.
The Inspectre sighed. “I won’t lie,” he said. “The budget doesn’t look good.”
“That’s an understatement,” snorted Allorah from next to him. “We’ll be lucky if the Enchancellorship keep their jobs.”
Something in me snapped. “No offense, Enchancellor , but I’m not worried so much about the upper management,” I said. “Most of them are retirement age, anyway. I’m worried about me and my fellow agents.”
Allorah gave me a dark look. “Your compassion is underwhelming, Mr. Canderous,” she said.
“Hey, I’m just saying that since you got the order a few weeks back to trim the fat, I think it would make sense to keep the agents out in the field. If we’re going to clean house, start at the top. Mediocrity rises, after all.”
“Don’t worry,” Allorah said, looking through her folder. “You Other Division people are always safe when it comes to the budget.”
Connor laughed. “Of course we are,” he said. “Us Other Division folk are such multitaskers by designation that we can be set to any task. We’ve had to kiss any downtime good-bye these past few weeks.”
“We had downtime?” I asked. When no one answered, I felt my blood rising. “I thought all this would have changed when we became the heroes of the city. Money should be raining down on us, right? Didn’t the Mayor hear that we saved the city from a bloodbath of vampiric proportions?”
Connor walked past me and threw himself down into one of the lounge chairs nearby. “That’s the problem, kid. There wasn’t a bloodbath.”
I looked at him, frustrated. I tossed up my hands. “And that’s a problem how?”
“Not enough of a body count,” he said. I went to speak, but Connor held his hand up to silence me. “Think about it, kid. If you have a regular-world shooting in this city, suddenly there are all these extra resources to go around. . . more cops and cars on the street. Puts on a big show, sends a message out to the general public: Bad guys beware! But what we do, well, it’s secretive. Everything we do is masked in seclusion. And let’s face it. To the power brokers down at City Hall, nothing bad happened, technically. No one died, so how are they going to justify putting a lot of money toward the Department? There wasn’t enough of a bloodbath to justify more money coming toward us.”
“That’s insane,” Jane said. She grabbed onto my arm and squeezed like she was trying to