The Familiar: Fortune's Child, Book Two by Ash Fitzsimmons

Author:Ash Fitzsimmons [Fitzsimmons, Ash]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ash Fitzsimmons
Published: 2024-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

* * *

By long custom, if Pars was home on Saturday morning, he singlehandedly took care of the children to give their mother a few precious hours to herself. Thus, manning the pancake griddle and promising that he’d call if he heard so much as a peep from Sage, he coaxed me out the door with Canna before the kids could drag me in for breakfast.

“He’s a sweetheart,” she said, backing down the driveway. “He’s always been great about sharing childcare duties, but since his hours can be erratic, he tries to make it up to me.”

I grinned. “Like September?”

“Oh, I got several mornings off for that.”

Neither of us was particularly hungry, so as Pars had sent us on our way with travel mugs of coffee, Canna gave me the driving tour of the city. She made a quick pass through the small commercial strip in Old Farm, telling me it would be no inconvenience if I realized I’d forgotten something at home, then headed back downtown and began pointing out landmarks. DOL’s tower I recognized, but she drove past the smaller one where DPP was headquartered—“My first post-internship job was in there, and it’s really not as awful as Laws would have you believe,” she said—then showed me a windowless stone building about half a mile away from DOL where the Division of Intelligence was headquartered. “Never been in there,” she admitted. “It’s an invitation-only sort of place. But Rose, Yven, and a couple of our counselors overnighted there during a big trial, and they said the sleeping quarters are like a hotel.”

“With solid walls.”

“Rose claims there’s a spell that mimics windows. Personally, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been simpler to use glass, but then I’m not a specialist in espionage.”

As we rounded the corner past the relatively squat fortress—it couldn’t have been more than ten stories tall, dwarfed by DOL—I asked, “That’s where’s Rose’s great-grandfather works, right?”

“Mm-hmm. He’s headed it since the beginning.”

“Not a lot of upward job mobility when you’re competing against immortals, is there?”

Canna chuckled. “More than you might think. Most of them get tired of whatever they’re doing eventually and pursue something different. They’ll change agencies or take up basket weaving or whatnot. You get a résumé from an older elf or nymph, and there’s no telling what you’ll find buried in there.” Smiling to herself as she pulled up to a red light, she said, “We advertised for a junior healer a few years ago and ended up bringing on an elf who’d only recently finished his internship. I thought he looked a little older, but it’s so difficult to be sure with them, so I didn’t ask. Turns out he’s four hundred years old, and this is his third career. Started as a blacksmith, taught math for a while, and now he’s with us. Nice guy. Crazy stories.”

“But DOI’s never turned over?”

She shook her head. “They’ve got analysists and support staff of all kinds, but the problem is that you can’t just train to be a farseer.

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