“No more excuses! Bodyguard means you guard that body.” The manager looked out in the hall, saw me, scowled, and slammed the conference room door so hard it shook the wall around it. It didn’t do much good, because every agent in every cube between here and the employee breakroom could still hear him yelling.
I just stood there. “I don’t report to him, do I?”
“Oh my, no,” said a petite older lady from behind me. “As the agency seer, your assignments come directly through your manager, Mr. Moreau.”
Jenny from HSR (that’s Human and Supernatural Resources) made it sound like a good thing, but I still wasn’t entirely convinced.
My manager was a vampire, and our CEO was a dragon.
It was my first day at work. First night, actually. Full moon. Busy, all-hands-on-deck kind of busy.
My name is Makenna Fraser, a small-town Southern girl with my first job in the big city; well, at least the first one I’d be willing to write home about. I work for Supernatural Protection and Investigations, also known as SPI. They battle the supernatural bad guys of myth and legend, and those who would unleash them. Bottom line, if you were human, you called the NYPD; if you were a supernatural living in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, you called SPI.
Yep, creatures from myth and legend were real.
And for them, our world and dimension now ranked at the top of their “Best Places to Live, Work, Play, and Eat” list. Unfortunately, the “eat” part often included humans.
Why all the attention? From what I understand, it all started with two little words: indoor plumbing.
Folks usually think of creatures of myth and legend as living in fairy-tale castles, enchanted forests, and having magical this, that, and the other thing—but it’s basically a medieval kind of existence. And I don’t care how it sounds in books or looks in movies, that kind of life ain’t pretty. It doesn’t matter how highfalutin a Seelie royal you are, or how much magical mojo you’ve got going on, or how much gold and jewels you’ve got piled in your treasure room, you still gotta go. So for a Seelie royal, their chamber pot might be gold, but they’re still pissing in a pot. My grandma Fraser told me that the big influx to our world was kicked off by the invention of the flushable toilet. Heck, I’d cross over for indoor plumbing.
And now that human technology had reached smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets that would have previously been called magical, there was no keeping supernaturals away. Think about it. What would you rather have: one guy singing off-key with a half-tuned lute in your great hall, or Lady Gaga, the Stones, Hank Williams, Jr., or anyone else you wanted to hear. on your phone, anytime, at your fingertips? That there’s a no-brainer.
The wealthier supernaturals (Seelie Court royals and the like) or those with long life spans (or death spans, if you prefer) like dragons, vampires, and werewolves, have had time to save their pennies into hoards to be able to bankroll any lifestyle to which they wanted to become accustomed. Other less well-to-do supernaturals have come here wanting the same things as the rest of us: a good job, nice house, 2.5 kids/spawn, and a dog.
However, regardless of species—human or supernatural—there’s always a small percentage that are power hungry, megalomaniacal, or just plain bat-shit crazy. As an added bonus, their powers get a boost when they come here, which in turn has an unfortunate tendency to supersize their greed. And when the treaties or bindings that may have made them behave back home don’t mean squat here, you might as well put out a sign for the all-you-can-take-or-conquer buffet.
SPI’s mission is twofold: keep the world safe for supernaturals and humans alike, and keep humans in the dark about things that go bump in the night. SPI has offices worldwide, and their agents are recruited from the best of the alphabet agencies, police forces, military special ops, and are supported by the sharpest scientific and academic minds.
Then there’s me.
I wouldn’t be doing my new job with a gun, blade, or hand-to-claw combat.
I was the only seer in the New York office, and only one of five in the entire worldwide company. A seer’s job was to point out the supernatural bad guys, then step aside so SPI’s badass, commando monster hunters could take them into custody—or if necessary, take them out. As a seer, any veil, ward, shield, or spell any supernatural could come up with as a disguise might as well not exist. I could see right through them. I got the satisfaction of keeping the world safe, and I got full medical coverage. If Bigfoot was on a rampage hurting innocent campers, I’d hunt him with a butterfly net if it meant having a decent dental plan.