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I don’t know if noticing that is what made me snap back to full consciousness. Maybe a rush of adrenaline kicked in, or my system had just had time to bounce back. Whatever the reason, and despite being in a considerable amount of pain, I was pretty close to fully alert.

Close enough to find my badge, lying under the radiator.

I grabbed it and pushed myself off the floor into a sort of defensive crouch. The closest to it I could manage, anyway. Note to self – take that unarmed combat course you’ve been putting off, I thought.

At least I could see what was happening again, and there was a lot to see.

Bradley was out – of the fight, and of the room too. It looked like the perp had thrown him right through the door. Bradley was lucky the door wasn’t made of something more resilient, because I suspected he’d have gone through it anyway. As it was, he was in the hall, prone, and I couldn’t tell much more than that – like if he was conscious, or alive for that matter – because the perp was between us, his back to me, and making for Bradley.

I pulled my gun, and fired.

The shot went wide – I was shooting one-handed because I was not going to let go of my spurking badge one more time today, so of course the recoil was fierce. I was aiming for his head, and managed to hit his left shoulder.

Even at his size, the shot should have spun him off his feet and left him on his knees hugging the doorframe. Nothing that satisfying happened, but he did stop going after Bradley.

On the downside, he turned back to face me, and behind his matted grey hair and below his shaggy eyebrows, I could see cold rage burning in dark November eyes.

“I’ll have your guts for garters, Iron Badge” he hissed, then added, “Literally.” He started for me, the claws that catch raised in the air.

I held up my badge. He stopped, and drew back, just a touch.

“Are you going to come quietly?” I asked him, “Or do I have to get rough?” and I managed to keep my voice and hands from shaking. Mostly.

He smiled, showing far too much ivory for my liking. “You can hold me off with your little shield, woman. But you can’t hurt me with it.”

“Yeah? It seemed to get your attention before,”

He growled. “You got lucky,” he said.

I desperately wanted to look around, find something that might be more help than the gun, which was going to be mostly useless. But I didn’t dare take my eyes off him. Was there anything behind me I could use?

Nothing. Just a shelf with a single plate, a single fork, a chipped mug and…

A hot plate.

I reached behind me, still watching him, and set my gun down on the shelf.

He feinted to my left, then lunged from the right. I kept my badge held high and level. He backed off again, his fingers twitching and claws clicking with impatience.

I fumbled around until I found the dial of the hot plate, and turned it – to maximum if I was guessing right, to something less than that if I was screwed.

I reached and grabbed until I found my gun again, grabbed it and swung it around to bear on him – knocking the mug off the shelf in the process. It bounced off the radiator and landed somewhere off to my left.

“I think I chipped your mug,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“I’ll use your skull for a mug, bitch,” he snapped.

“Not while I’ve got this, you won’t” I said, shaking the badge at him.

It looked like an impasse, but it wasn’t, not really. We both had a way out of the standoff, but I was hoping to keep him busy enough that neither option would occur to him. Point for me: I had my cell phone in my pocket. Point for him…

“Fine!” he snapped, “If you won’t fight fair, maybe I’ll just see what your friend there keeps inside his insides, eh?”

Yeah, that was his impasse-breaker. He started to turn away towards Bradley, who still wasn’t moving.

I shot him in the balls.

I never said that my gun was totally useless. He was big, and strong enough that even the fairly specialized ammunition that I use had about the same effect on him as getting punched by a two-year-old. But just like everyone else who’s ever had to baby-sit a toddler, I knew that sometimes, where force is directed is much, much more important than how strong it is. Even the toughest guy on the block is going to react if he gets sucker-punched in the stones by a two-year-old.

So, mission accomplished. I definitely had his attention.

Yay?

I didn’t smell what I expected, but more on that in a moment. What occurred to me immediately, along with a rush of relief, was that certain smells were absent. What smells? Well, clearly Glenn Jackson wasn’t in the habit of using scented fabric softeners, or detergent, for that matter. But other smells were missing too, smells that you might have expected to be there.

Like alcohol, or stale pee, vomit, or unwashed body. Not even a hint.

I sat up quickly. Bradley, by now, could tell that something was up, and looked at me with eyes full of questions.

I glanced at Jackson, still down on his hands and knees peering at the papers on the floor. I thought of trying to express in gestures, Hold on, something’s very off here. Hang back and follow my lead. But ASL is not one of my languages, so I settled for holding up a hand, hoping he’d get that I wanted him to wait.

I know that I’m kind of dwelling on smells, or lack thereof, but there’s a reason for that. I had just consciously verified something that my intuition had noticed a spurk of a long time before I did: That nothing in Glenn Jackson’s little room smelled, except for him. And that just didn’t make sense, if he’d been in here for hours sleeping it off and being indiscriminate with his bodily functions.

It did make sense, though, if he was wearing that stench like a suit of armour… or a costume.

Now my intuition was telling me that something was worrisome about what I did smell in Jackson’s bedding, but I didn’t have time to think about that right away.

Because I looked down, and there, at my feet, in plain sight, were what looked to me like discharge papers from the Canadian Armed Forces.

But I’d seen him search that part of the floor already. He could be stalling us, I thought. But why?

The other possibility, of course, was that he had no idea what the papers he was trying to find actually looked like.

I stood up, reached into my pocket and palmed my badge. I cleared my throat.

Jackson stopped going through the paperwork, and looked up at me.

“Do you like living here, Mr. Jackson?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We can’t all live in a fancy condominium, eh? It’s crap here, but it beats the shelter, or sleeping rough. Ever tried living under a bridge this time of year? I’m dry, I’ve got a bed and a door that locks.”

“You’re awfully close to the Border, though,”

He stood up, grimacing – a bit theatrically, I thought. “Eh, I don’t bother the Little People, and they don’t bother me. Where’s the fun in troubling a broken-down old man with their tricks, right?”

“Some of the Little People aren’t so little. And not all of them care much who they play tricks on… or what they eat, for that matter. I noticed that you don’t even have a ward on the door, like your neighbours do.”

“Used to, used to,” he said, not meeting my eyes, “But I lost it.”

Then, “You don’t ask a cop’s questions, Officer MacAvoy.”

“Sorry,” I said brightly, “I should have introduced myself. Officer Roberta MacAvoy,”

I held out my hand. Reflexively, he clasped it – clasped my hand, where I was still concealing my Iron Badge.

“Borderland Guard.” I added.

He screamed, in pain and in rage at the touch of cold iron, shoved me away. I flailed as I fell and dropped my badge.

And he staggered back, clutching his hand to his chest as though it burned him.

And he changed.

At last, a long, low groan broke the almost-silence, the first real indicator that there was someone alive on the other side of that door – although, from the sound of it, he wished he wasn’t.

“Glenn Jackson?” Bradley called, more quietly now.

Silence fell again.

“Mr. Jackson, this is the police. Open the door.”

Another groan. Then, some muttering that sounded like muted but strongly-felt profanity.

We waited

More sounds: Feet shuffling, more cursing and then – from just on the other side of the door – a long bout of tubucular coughing.

We waited.

Finally, a voice, albeit slurred and shaky, “Can’t fool me. Already talked to the cops. Go ‘way.”

“We have a couple more questions for you,” Bradley said to the door, and added, with a glance at me, “This shouldn’t take long.”

“Yeah, well… If you’re a cop, let’s see a badge, flat-foot.”

Bradley blinked, then said, with what I thought was, for him, a remarkable degree of patience, “The door is closed, Mr. Jackson. How can I show you my badge?”

A moment passed, during which I like to imagine that Jackson blinked as well, just for symmetry’s sake, then: “Well-reasoned, well-reasoned,” he said.

The door opened, and Glenn Jackson poked his head out.

He looked very much like Jenny Kim had described him: Skinny, hunched over in a way that made it hard to say how tall he was, ill-fitting clothes that looked like Goodwill fodder, long uncombed grey hair and a scraggly beard to match.

Not that I took all this in right away, because the stink that erupted from the open door to his apartment made my eyes water too much for finer details at first. Puke, and stale booze and the tang of unwashed body.

He was a textbook example of a derelict on a bender.

Maybe… a little too textbook?

Bradley, when we could both see again, held up his badge, “I’m Detective Bradley. This is Officer MacAvoy. You’re Glenn Jackson?”

Jackson peered at Bradley’s badge, “Well, of course I’m me. Who else would I be?”

“So you won’t mind showing us some I.D.?” I asked.

He scratched his head. “I got the papers they gave me when I got out of the army.”

“That’ll do for a start,” Bradley said.

Jackson turned and walked into the room, “Well, come on in then. I’ll find them for you. They’re around.”

Bradley turned to me, “After you,” he said.

“Oh, thanks,” I replied, and followed Jackson in.

I’ll come right out and admit it: It was one of the more sullen car rides I’ve been a party to.

It wasn’t just Bradley, although if sullen was a pot-luck nobody could say he hadn’t brought his share. No, it was coming from me, too, and my contribution to the feast was lavish.

I didn’t know who I was madder at, Colby and George, for putting me in this situation, or Bradley, for being Bradley.

I glanced at him, trying to be surreptitious. He was driving with an air of irritated detachment, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. If he’d had a moustache, it would have been quivering with poorly-concealed anger. I was disappointed at that, actually — I mean, his lack of a moustache. It didn’t make sense; except for the absence of facial hair, he was every inch the Perfect Cop. I took it quite personally, his ’stache-lessness. A moustache would have annoyed me, sure, but at least it would have been a simple, direct, external thing to be annoyed about. A lightning rod. Unlike all the other, less visible fault lines of tension that we were dealing with.

Of course, while this was going through my head, he caught me looking at him.

“Something on your mind?”

I shrugged, and went with the elegant simplicity of a lie. “Just running through how I want to handle it when we get to Jackson’s place.”

“Ah,” he said. Non-committal, yeah, but welcome as a step or two up from outright contempt.

He lapsed back into silence, and I wasn’t feeling any too chatty myself. Bradley, to be fair, was clearly making an effort. So was I, and as a result the truce was holding, for now. But we were facing one another across a conversational Salisbury Plain, and it would be much, much too easy for another battle to break out. And deliberate provocation versus snake-based misunderstanding wouldn’t matter at that point.

So, rather than trying to deal with the issue of Bradley’s tragically naked upper lip, I looked out the window and watched the city roll by as we drew ever closer to the home address of Glenn Jackson.

George and Colby walked out of the interview room and down the hall towards us. They were talking – quietly enough that I couldn’t hear them, which in retrospect should have set off my warning bells, knowing my partner as I did. Just as they pulled into earshot, George said a final, muttered word and Colby actually laughed. It was the most animation I’d seen him exhibit all day, and maybe that should have alerted me too.

But no, poor naïve fool that I am, I took the two of them getting along like a house afire as a sign that we’d cleared away the obstructions and misunderstandings, that we could actually go after the spurk who was responsible for this mess. As a good sign, in other words. And of course, that was true. But there was a bit more to it than that.

Meanwhile, in my innocence, I was actually thinking about something else entirely as they approached. I was thinking about words, and how they have power. Trite, yes. But also true.

“You’re under arrest.” Those words have power. “I love you,” that has power too, of maybe a different kind. And then there’s magic. Magic, that I watch for and ward against every day, that haunts my dreams every night, that has taken friends from me and that I will probably never truly understand – and that is, at its heart, the unleashed power of the word.

I walked up the hall to meet George and Colby with some enthusiasm. Bradley followed, but without the enthusiasm, because we both thought that we knew what was coming. We knew that we were about to witness – to be part of – the unleashed power of words, of a kind of magic.

George winked at me, glanced at Colby and stood a little taller, trying for a degree of formality as he uttered the ritualized, but potent, words of power.

“Given that this investigation shows clear evidence of magical and/or other supernatural and/or unauthorized local-Fairyland trans-border activities, and in accordance with relevant federal, provincial and municipal laws, the Canadian Borderland Guard hereby take responsibility as the primary investigative body from this point forward.”

I like to think of it as bureaucratic alchemy, transforming base iron into the purest gold.

I waited for Colby to say the words that would finish the working. “We acknowledge that the Borderland Guard has primary jurisdiction in this matter.”

I almost missed it, then realized that amidst the familiar and routine words, there’d been one that I hadn’t expected.

Primary jurisdiction, not exclusive. That meant that –

“You’re going to keep working the case?” I asked.

“Your partner,” Colby said, “Agreed with me that we should continue to be involved, with you as the leads of course. There may still be elements of the case that fall within our purview.”

Spurking George. He’d gone behind my back, made some sort of arrangement with Colby, and sprung it on me. Knowing all the while that it was so perfectly reasonable that I couldn’t say word one against the idea.

“Okay,” said Bradley, and he sounded even less happy about the news than I was. I think he’d been looking forward to seeing the last of us. Or rather, me.

“Okay,” he said again, and drew himself up as he added, “So. It’s your show now. How are you going to run it?”