Free Orphan of Mythcorp by R.S. Darling Page B

beefcake away?
    Grunts and cussing from the evening gloom,
filling the night with disturbing sounds. “Oh man.” What could I
do? I didn’t know this Nimrod from Santa Claus. For all I knew,
whoever had taken him was in the right. And I needed to get my
curse lifted. So, I stepped inside the records building.
    The grunts and cries died behind me.
    It was pitch black inside. Why hadn’t I
brought a flashlight? Maybe because I’d never performed a B&E
before, didn’t know the rules. This was nuts. “What am I doing?”
Who was this Nimrod guy and how did Ash know him?
    I felt blindly along the wall, listening more
than feeling for a light switch. “Dangit!” Something had snagged my
foot. It received a well deserved kick. This wall was a lost cause.
I backtracked, began feeling/listening along the left wall. “Ah,
there you are.” The switch clicked and halogens flickered on. My
eyes adjusted instantaneously. It’s one of the advantages of having
nanites roaming around inside your head: they function as
neurotransmitters and thus fire the appropriate synapses with
preternatural swiftness. I marched across the open floor, heading
for the wall of filing cabinets. There were about six blocks of
these cream-colored buggers, each one comprised of nine drawers:
this could take all night.
    Ten minutes later I complained, “This is
taking all night.”
    I slammed the second ‘M’ drawer shut and
grunted. Looked around. Wimpy fans tucked up in the iron-girder
ceiling were spinning, their droning like engines in my ears. As I
considered the idiocy of my search for classified files in public
filing cabinets, my thermo beeped. Body temp had dropped two
degrees. A press of the side button switched the body temp readout
to room temperature readout.
    “ Thirty-nine?” I said. “Jeez.” The air
was getting colder quickly, for no apparent reason. Part of my
curse, I figured, getting that creepy sense again that someone was
watching me.
    I stretched—because Dr. Wilmut had told me to
do that whenever I thought about it. Not being able to sense any
pain or Charlie Horses or any of the thousand things normal’s whine
about has its disadvantages too. Satisfied that I was okay, I
glanced around the main office. If the files Ash wanted still
existed, they wouldn’t be here, where any curious cookie could walk
in and snatch them up. They’d be hidden under lock and key
somewhere, someplace secure.
    A door with a brass placard reading BASEMENT
caught my attention. The brass did not twinkle as it would in a
movie, but it might as well have. I marched over to it, tried the
handle.
    Locked. A promising sign, right?
    Like an idiot I wiggled the knob, yanked on
it, banged and cursed. The next step, naturally was to kick it.
Three successively harder kicks produced no results.
    “ Dangit!” slapping the door now, since
kicking stuff tends to cause injuries. “Open up!”
    “ Move.”
    “ Holy jeez,” I jerked around. Nimrod
was standing directly behind me, a fat lip and a black eye (his
real eye, the augmetic peeper was untouched) giving him an even
zanier look than before. “What happened? Who was that attacked
you?”
    “ Move,” he growled again.
    I moved. Nimrod stepped up to the door,
inhaled, and then slammed it. The door blew in and hung limp on one
surviving hinge.
    “ Wow,” I said, looking in at the steps
descending to the basement. Found the switch easy-on-my-squeezy
this time. Looked back at Nimrod. “So, who was that you were tussling with? Cause he seemed
ready to kick your—”
    “ Malthus,” Nimrod snarled. “His name is
Malthus. He’s been hunting me for sixteen years.” He spoke slowly,
clearly enunciating every word so that I had no problem hearing the
hatred poured onto each one. “That demon has served his master long
enough. I have a spot picked out for him in my trophy
room.”
    Did he mean a real demon, or was that
Nimrod-slang for jerk? “So ah, why has he been hunting you?”
    Nimrod pointed