The Department of Wacko Containment - 1

Title: The Department of Wacko Containment

Genre: Paranormal

Rating: R (for graphic description, language)

Story Type: Novel - incomplete/WIP
Warnings: holocaust references

Word count: (chapter) 2,635

Summary:  Cassie has always wanted to be an agent with the Department of Preternatural Security and Cross-Dimmensional Transportortaion Securement.  By the end of her current case, though, she just might start thinking about early retirement.
Author's Note: This is part of an incomplete manuscript.

      

   
The scarf stuffed in my mouth and tied around my head smelled like jasmine, with the distinct scent of human sweat underneath.  When I got loose, I could easily hunt that silly twit down and shake her like a Polaroid picture.  The jasmine was so strong that I couldn’t tell the scent that was on the necktie that held me bound with my hands behind my back to the most uncomfortable wooden chair ever made.  I was trussed up like a hostage in a bad gangster movie, and I was never going to live this down.
   
Humans were not supposed to get the jump on me.  That’s why I was hired for this job.  I was stronger than them, smarter than them, and their bonds couldn’t hold me.  It wasn’t like that spell Miss Spooky Witch popped on me in my first week with the Department of Wacko Containment.  I had no firsthand experience with magic, and didn’t know that she could pack such a whammy.  A few charms and blessings, and that never happened again.
   

They were going to laugh this up back at the office.  The great huntress, youngest one to sign up and get accepted to the Department had managed to get herself caught by humans.  What was up with that?
   
The plus side here was that they didn’t know who or what I was.  That was evident by the flimsy things they thought would keep me down.  The negative was, I had no idea where they were, what they were up to, or if I was too late to stop them from summoning that demon.  No, scratch that.  We’d all be dead by now if they’d finished the summons, so at least I knew they hadn’t gotten that far yet.
   
They tied me up!  Hit me in the head and tied me up!  It was that damned jasmine.  The smell was everywhere and it overloaded my sense.  I couldn’t smell the one that snuck up behind me, and I lost my advantage.  Though, plus side was that the jasmine was probably overpowering the sulfur, which was why the world was still demon-free from the actions of these morons.  Always find the plus side, I say.  It stops you from becoming a raving cynic that thinks the world is so messed up it deserves whatever the lunatics do to it.
   
Okay, enough whining.  I had to get free, and I wasn’t going to get loose sitting there and complaining.  Another plus side.  They didn’t know what they were dealing with, so they didn’t use anything too strong.  Your average blonde bimbette couldn’t get loose from the navy knots tied behind my back and around my ankles.  Good thing I’m not your average blonde bimbette, huh?
   
One good pull and the tie around my wrists fell in shreds to the floor.  I snapped my legs apart in a split so wide that my high school cheerleading coach would have been proud, and that took care of the whatever it was that tied my ankles to the chair legs.  And finally, I snatched the insipid, stinking jasmine-infested scarf out of my mouth and spat.  That did no good.  I could still taste it, and I could still taste her.  Plus side, again.  At least I could find the twit and make her pay.
   
I stood and stretched.  I was knocked out long enough that my muscles were cramped.  Not good when I depended on those same muscles to help me leap tall wackos in a single bound. No plus side to that one.  It just sucked to have cramped muscles.
   
My eyes closed, and I concentrated, not on smell, but hearing.  There were six of them in their little coven or whatever they wanted to call it.  Those combined voices would make a very distinct murmur, and beyond sniffing out the scarf chick, I needed to know where they were in the incantation.
   
Only humans used incantations.  Something about the lyrical quality soothed them, and helped them rationalize that they weren’t doing anything that was too bad.  Something musical couldn’t be all bad, could it?  Uh, yeah, dumbass. 
   
Anyone with magical training knew that the incantations weren’t necessary.  It didn’t matter how something was said as long as the key words and the ingredients were right.  The real ones we worried about in the Department were the baddies that got right to the point.  They skipped the pomp and circumstance, and went straight to the nitty gritty.  They were the ones that caused the most damage.  Humans rarely ever made it through the incantation before they were caught.  It was like bad guys monologuing.  They wasted so much time and made so much noise, it was easy for us to find them.
   
I located the brood two floors up.  Their chanting held the flames of frustration.  They must have been on their second or third repitition and nothing was happening.  The jasmine was messing it up.  The sulfur said that they were calling someone from a dirty dimension, and pretty flowers didn’t entice them.  I wasn’t going to tell them where they messed up, though.  The longer they screwed up, the more time it gave me to save some face.
   
I inched my way through the dark basement, soft bottomed boots shuffling along the dirty cement floor.  Dust kicked up around me and I held my sneeze back.  A few twists and turns around stuff that would have served better purpose at the Goodwill, and I found the steps.  They were broken.
   
This was supposed to be an easy job, the easiest that I’d had in a year.  My last job, I dislocated my shoulder.  The one before that, I broke the heel of my favorite pair of black alligator boots.  Before that, I scorched my hair and before that, I lost a necklace when it was snatched from around my neck.  I was kinda tired of breaking things, so humans it was.
   
I jumped up and did mid-air splits.  My feet caught on each side of the wall and I open-legged walked up the stairs until I reached a section that wasn’t broken.  I had never used so many of my old cheerleading tricks so much on one case, especially one that involved human dumbasses trying to open dimensional portals.
   
The lights almost blinded me when I opened the basement door and stepped into the dirtiest kitchen I had ever seen.  Sludge and grime clung to every surface and spilled in clumps out of rusting pots.  A rat skittered across the floor and, bully for me, I didn’t jump up or scream or anything.  No girly behavior over rats from the big bad federal agent.  Nope.  Never.  Riiight.
   
I kicked a pizza box out of the way, and this time I did jump when a big black spider crawled out of it.  I crunched the sucker, too.  That was just disgusting.  Had these people no decency at all?  Obviously not.
   
Onward and upward, I moved through the house.  Everywhere I went, the lights were on, and I could see the filth clearly.  Even if the lights were out, the place was such a mess that my acute night vision would have taken it all in.  When I called in the big boys for clean-up, they’d take pictures of everything.  This place was probably going to make it into the book of WTF that we had sitting around.  The book of WTF had the most disgusting, degrading, and/or ridiculous things that we’d found at crime scenes.  This was definitely in the top ten of disgusting.
   
There was molding food everywhere, and worse, decaying carcasses.  I was glad to find that none of them were human, but the bunnies and puppies and kittens got to me.  They didn’t really have access to the big boys, the monkeys and larger, but house pets, no problem.  They’d been practicing for a while and didn’t even bother to get rid of their leftovers.  Some people just didn’t know how to conceal a murder properly, even if it were just an animal murder.  The regular cops would have found them easily if they’d murdered people. 
   
I made it upstairs and they were still chanting.  There were six of them standing around a circle drawn on the floor.  Candles were lit in the middle of their circle.  There was also a pentagram written on the floor.  Animal blood.  I sniffed again, just to be sure.  Yup, all animal blood.  Either they weren’t going for one of the big boys or—
   
“We call you, Daimonatè.” 
   
Nevermind.  They were just stupid.  They had the name of one of the biggest and baddest, but didn’t have the stomach to really call him.  Daimonatè needed fresh human blood, and not just a drop or two.  He needed a full-on kill, and either they didn’t know or they couldn’t do it.  My bet was that they couldn’t do it.
   
Daimonatè was a legend at the Department of Wacko Containment.  He’d been caught and sent back six times.  He should have been disintegrated, but they couldn’t find a witch with enough guts to actually do it.  The spell that got rid of him once and for all was a doozy, and supposedly, there was a chance of death with it.  None of the witches that we had at our disposal wanted to take that risk.  I didn’t blame them.  I wouldn’t take that chance, either.  Good thing I wasn’t a witch, huh? 
   
They did get hazard pay, though, if they went for it.  I guess the money wasn’t enough to persuade anybody, so the Department was left with its only option.  Sending him back every time somebody with the guts to commit murder called him out.
   
It was always a pain in the ass to get Daimonatè back where he belonged.  The spell was easy enough, and there were specific, trained agents to contain him when we knew for a fact that he was lose.  The pain in the ass part was cleaning up once he was sent back, reinforcing the block on his dimension (obviously unsuccessfully), and the press conferences when the head honchos had to explain how he’d gotten loose... again.
   
At least we wouldn’t have to worry about it this time.  These guys weren’t smart enough actually bring him through.  They had too much jasmine in the room, they didn’t have the kill right, and from what I could tell of their incantation, they weren’t even focusing on the right dimension.  Now that I was untied, they were making this too easy for me.
   
I went for Miss Jasmine first.  I was still pissed off that she stuffed that nasty ass thing down my throat and I gravitated towards her.  They were all engrossed in their chanting that they didn’t even notice I was there.
   
I came up behind Miss Jasmine and put a hand across her mouth.  This was one of those times when I had to control my strength and the desire to rip her head from her shoulders.  Instead of snatching until blood splattered the room, I pinched down on the nerve in the side of her neck until she passed out.  Talk about self-control! 
   
Not really.  If I’d ripped her head off, the blood would have hit the circle and then, even calling to the wrong dimension, Daimonatè might have found his way through anyway.  Blood had a bad habit of making demons rear their ugly heads.  Murder scenes were always a pain in the ass, especially when I had to share them with the regular cops.
   
With Miss Jasmine’s voice gone, the chanting slowed, softened, and then stopped.  There were four men and one other woman in the group.  All of their eyes opened and their heads turned to me.
   
“What’s up?”  Not the wittiest line in my repertoire, but I liked to save those for the deserving.  These guys were definitely not deserving of my wonderfully witty personality.
   
They stared bewildered.  They really didn’t know what I was.  They thought their bonds would hold me.  “The stairs were ruined.  She couldn’t have gotten out of the basement.”  Or maybe not faith in their bonds.  Faith in their destructive power, instead.  Those poor stairs, ruined for nothing.
   
“So, yeah, this whole thing?  Not gonna happen.”  I dropped Miss Jasmine to the floor and put my hands on my hips.  “Why don’t you guys make this easy on me?  Just line up so I can knock you all out, then I can get a cleaning crew out here and get back home.  I’ve got better things to do on a Saturday night than mess around with you idiots.”
   
Yeah, that never really worked.  I was hoping that it would, though.  Eventually, it had to work, right?  This wasn’t eventually, though.  This wasn’t even close to eventually.  They shook off their shock and rushed me.
   
I took them down easily.  They weren’t fighters.  They were weirdos without lives who thought that calling a demon from a hell dimension would make them cool... or let them get revenge on all of the people who’d been cool enough to call them losers to their faces. 
   
All I got were wild punches, some kicks that felt like I’d bumped my knees against a table, and the chick pulling at my hair.  Basically, I got more nusiances than actual fights.
   
I put them down quick, didn’t even break a sweat.  Within minutes, they were all unconscious and flex-cuffed.  I had a pile of idiots at my feet, and I felt nothing.  Usually I was jazzed after a confrontation.  My whole body buzzed and I was bouncing off the walls by the time the clean-up crew showed up.  This time, there was nothing.

This easy job thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

A sniffing sound caught my attention and my head turned towards the pentagram.  It was facing the wrong direction for who they were calling.  The head was pointed north instead of south.  Morons.
I knelt down and stared as the air around one of the scented-candles (cucumber melon, can you believe it?) started to shift and waver.  It was like when you looked out your windshield on a really hot day and could almost see the heat pushing through a few yards away. 

A head pushed out and I pressed a finger against what I figured was the bridge of its nose.  It looked like the bridge of its nose, or would have been if it had a nose.  “Uh huh.  Where do you think you’re going?”

“I smelled cucumbers.  Love cucumbers.”

“Uh huh.”  Yes, there were things in the not-so nice places that liked fruits and vegetables.  They were typically seen as losers and weirdos by their own species.  No wonder it came sniffing around my own freaks and geeks.

“Can I just have the candle?”

Jeez.  Where were the good, hearty demons?  Oh, that’s right.  We’d locked them in their dimensions or disintegrated them.  Damn.

“Fine,” I said.  I blew out the candle and stuffed it into the hole.  “Now, go away.”

It disappeared, leaving a little bit of transitional slime on my fingers.  Gross. 

I closed the accidental portal to Loser Land, then pushed a button on the band around my wrist.  It was kind of a watch.  It looked like a watch.  It sounded like a watch if you listened close to it.  Only thing—it didn’t tell time.  Someone down in the electro-factory had been watching James Bond movies again, but hadn’t figured out exactly how to make the watch part actually work.

“Yeah, it’s Cassie.  Got ‘em all.  Send me a clean-up crew so I can get the hell out of here.  And watch out for the critter caracasses.  Some of ‘em actually twitch.”