“OOOH, that one,” said LAX TSA Agent Fenton Samuels, eying the line of travelers. “Let’s do it to her.”
“Wow, yeah. Will you look at those things? Wherever she goes, they arrive like a half hour before she does.” Fenton’s co-worker, Agent Danny Trenton snickered like an adolescent, mesmerized by the woman’s not-insignificant assets.
They were deciding who they were going to pull out of the line for extra screening. They had a quota to meet, after all. Might as well make the best of it.
“No, wait,” Samuels whispered excitedly, tugging Danny’s sleeve. “Not her. That one. Check out the tall one.”
Danny turned his gaze, not expecting to see much that interested him. But then his eyes landed on an almost freakishly slender and tall woman. She was easily six foot five, possibly even more. She looked nordic: with high, sharp cheekbones, and moon-blue eyes, big as saucers, glancing this way and that from beneath a bob of straight, black hair. It framed her face with Betty Page bangs, and curled around the sides of her head.
She swept into line, her unbuttoned long coat twirling behind her like a cape, everything about her just so.
“Oh, wait. That’s weird.”
“What?”
“I think she’s missing a pinky.”
Danny squinted. As if on cue, the woman raised her hand to brush an errant strand from her eyes. It was true. “Oooh. Yeah. That is weird. A nine-fingered Nina.”
“Still puts the B in Boom for me,” Samuels judged. “And she’s rich.”
“Yeah. You can tell,” Danny agreed. The woman was non-plussed; she was not troubled by anything. “She has bitchy resting face. Richy-bitchy face.” Danny squished his face into a snarl. She pissed off the diminutive Danny by simply existing. This woman was the kind of person who just slide-glided through life: some arrogant, elegant, overly-tall faery without a worry in the world.
Well. He was going to fix that.
DOCTOR ELSPETH LUNE was worried, however. Very worried. She just didn’t let it show. Her clinical and practiced exterior was a mask. She projected serenity in the emergency room — as well as the real world.
Her husband, Oscar Cyrus, had been missing for a week now. He had gone to the Arizona desert for business — and had never returned. Elspeth was on her way there now to meet with the Nogales police — who seemed to be exactly zero help and know exactly nothing. In fact, they were rather nonchalant about the whole thing, actually, which really pissed her off. They had their hands full, they said, what with the Mexican gangs infesting many of the border towns. It was a war there, a real war with bullets and bodies: a missing person was small potatoes. Here, fill out these forms, we’ll email you when we have something. There’s also an app you can download that will —
Bullshit! She was going there in person to raise the noise level, to intimidate them. She was good at that. Oh, she didn’t have to scream. Should could just loom. Everyone noticed her immediately. By virtue of her height, her simple presence was always turned up to eleven.
She couldn’t help that. So she might as well use it.
The TSA line at LAX was intolerable as usual. Bored and twitching, she was about to call her mother for the third time that evening when she noticed something very odd.
A man in a suit was browsing the newspaper rack. There was nothing odd about that, of course. But this man was bald, and his entire head was covered in white paint. Written over the top of this paint were hieroglyphics, as if his body were the inside of an Egyptian tomb. The writing covered even his eyelids, such that when he blinked, a complete text was formed.
