Free The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel by Lisa Shearin Page B

told him.
    Kenji arched one dark eyebrow. “Poof?” Minus the funky haircut, he looked disturbingly like a young version of the Mr. Spock candy jar he kept filled with wasabi-covered peas.
    “Incendiary,” Ian clarified. “Delivered to her home.”
    Yasha muttered something under his breath in Russian. I didn’t understand the words, but they sounded impressed.
    “He must be a major talent with an equally major death wish,” Kenji noted.
    I just stood there being confused. Ian noticed, and surprisingly, explained it to me.
    “Sending an incendiary note to Vivienne Sagadraco took balls and then some,” he said. “Sending one that could elude her detection took scary skill. And sending it to her at home was just nuts.”
    “So . . . the guy with the scarab tattoo and without a head was working for a magically talented nutcase.”
    “Or he could have been freelancing on the side and his boss took offense,” Ian said. He gave me a sidelong glance. “Like somebody else I know.”
    “Not gonna let me forget that, are you?”
    He jerked his head toward the screen. “Considering what happened to that guy, should I?”
    “No, I don’t believe you should.”
    Kenji turned his chair so we’d all have a front row seat for what was about to happen, then he leaned back, removed the top of Spock’s head, and started popping wasabi peas like he was eating popcorn at a movie.
    “Regardless,” he said, “Ollie had information on his computer that Dr. Falke—or whoever he was working for—wanted in a bad way.”
    “Can you hack into Ollie’s computer?” I asked.
    Kenji stopped popping and just looked at me.
    “Sorry. Let me rephrase that. Have you hacked into Ollie’s computer?”
    “Yes. Nothing even remotely interesting. Whatever this guy was looking for, Ollie didn’t keep it on a computer, or at least not that one.”
    Yet another reason to pull Ollie out from the rock he’d crawled under.
    On the screen, Falke stopped clicking keys and started listening. On the opposite screen, the camera focused on the front door showed me and Ian coming into the shop. Falke had heard the bell ring above the door. The camera captured video only, so while we couldn’t hear the word he spat, we saw it just fine. He listened for a moment longer, then having apparently determined that we weren’t coming upstairs, he went back to what he’d been looking for, but did it a lot faster.
    Seven and a half minutes had passed according to the clock in the corner of the screen when a huge shadow fell over the man.
    The creature had been in the office the entire time.
    I’d been in Ollie’s office before tonight. It didn’t even have a closet, so there’d been nowhere for the thing to hide. Dr. Falke had been nervous enough when he’d heard us, but apparently he hadn’t heard a ten-foot-tall monster so much as breathe before it started killing him.
    “I didn’t know veils could hide sound,” I said in a small voice.
    A single muscle twitched along Ian’s jaw. “Apparently this one can.”
    Yasha spat a single word in Russian. I didn’t need a translation for that one.
    Dr. Falke must have heard the floorboards creak when we did. The screams started right after that—when the poor man had seen what was about to kill him. The screams were silent in the video, but we’d gotten to hear it at full volume and in person.
    Now I was grateful the camera didn’t record sound. I’d heard it once, and it’d probably be the soundtrack for my nightmares until something even scarier came along. The camera’s field of vision was only what was directly in front of the window. Ollie’s office wasn’t all that large, so even if Falke had had a chance to run, there’d been nowhere to go, and in a matter of seconds, blood spattered in a sheet across the window, and even Kenji stopped eating.
    The monster was too fast—for Falke and the camera. It was almost like the thing knew it was being filmed and stayed just out of sight.