Free Armageddon Rules by J. C. Nelson

or elect you to office?” I drew my hand across my neck. “We’ll get to see how you look with about ten inches off the top.”
    “So I can control more than animals?” A dangerous smile spread across her face. One that made me hope she had a good neckline, and no plans for an open-casket funeral.
    I looked her in the eye. “Men are just another species of animal.”
    “Are you talking about me again?” asked Liam, joining me in line. He picked me up off the ground in a huge hug and then kissed me twice.
    Beth looked at him like she’d encountered an ogre.
    “Beth, this is Liam. Liam, this is Beth, our newest piper.”
    “Pleased to meet you, Beth.” Liam gave her that goofy grin of his and took her hand. “What instrument do you play?”
    Beth spent a moment looking guilty, then took her kazoo out of her pocket and waved it at him.
    “No, really. What do you play?” Liam asked.
    I gave his shin a vicious kick.
    “You know,” he said, “I hear that Marissa is looking for help with poodles this year.” I’d make sure he understood his mistake later.
    “I’m still not sure how I’m going to help,” said Beth, giving my boyfriend far too friendly a smile for my tastes.
    If she tried her “follow me” trick with him, I’d introduce her to the business end of a bus in short order. “Beth wants a job where she can earn a little green and a little gold. I was about to tell her that I might have a position opening up.”
    Liam raised his eyebrows at me, but kept his mouth shut, even giving me a hand kicking rats out of the elevator. I figured we’d have plenty of time to eat while the rats figured out a way up, and whenever they arrived, well, that would be our signal that the lunch special just ended.
    Once we were seated, Beth alternated between inhaling platefuls of pasta and staring at the view. I’d brought her to this place on purpose. I needed to impress her, needed her commitment to help with the Poodling, and I figured the view from a restaurant over a mile in the sky would be just the thing.
    It was.
    The longer she stared out the window, the less she ate. When she finally came back she looked completely dazed. “I never thought I’d see something like this.”
    “You never thought you’d be followed by hordes of rats. You never thought you’d need to keep them away with a kazoo, and you also never thought there were at least two additional layers to the city that you’d never known existed.” I figured that if she was going to deal with stuff, I might as well make her deal with it all.
    “I’m a piper.” She turned the kazoo over in her fingers, like it was magic instead of a few cents’ worth of plastic.
    “Yes. So tell me, Beth. Will you help me with my poodle problem? I’ll train you to control your power. I’ll teach you to stop calling waves of rats. You will help me send about a thousand tiny monsters to their death before they kill half the people in the city.” I stared at her, knowing what I needed her answer to be.
    “These ‘poodles.’ They’re dangerous?”
    I nodded. “We lose people every year to ‘Oh, what a cute little dog. Does it want a treat?’ What they want is your liver, preferably torn straight out of your chest. You’d be saving people.”
    “Then you’ve got yourself a deal,” she said. A grin spread across her face like I hadn’t seen before. “But I want my piercings back. At least a few of them.”
    “Long as you don’t die of lead poisoning, you can va-jazzle yourself to your heart’s content.” At last I could relax. Beth would learn to control the poodles enough for us to run them off into the ocean. Grimm would once again get to say “Marissa, you were right,” my favorite phrase to hear from all the men in my life.
    Beth got up from her chair and looked around. “I, umm, need to use the restroom.”
    “The restroom? Or the restrooms?” Liam pointed over his shoulder at a set of doors. “Those are the restrooms. If you