“All right, where are the packages?” I asked in agreement.
Michael gestured for me to follow him and led me to a silver sedan. He pulled two packages, looking identical to Direct Courier’s standard boxes, from the backseat and handed them to me.
“This box,” he said, hefting the larger of the two—the size offices bought printer paper in, “you will keep with your shipment and send out—it is already labeled for shipment. This one,”—he showed me the smaller box, about the size of a shoebox—“you will leave with the head loader, Bryan Filks.”
“Your service is appreciated,” he told me, and I answered with a grunt before taking the boxes and leaving him standing there in the freezing winter air. Served him right.
I tucked the boxes under my seat and headed back to the office, where I promptly handed the Starbucks confection to Trysta.
“I figured you could use the extra time to sort out the bonding or whatever it was,” I told her with a wink as she gratefully accepted the gift. “How’s Jake?”
“Bad,” she admitted. “From what Bill said, he’s fractured his shin and his thigh bones, and has broken his hip in at least four places. His kneecap is intact, thank Goddess, but he’s going into surgery for them to try and fix his hip in about two hours.”
“Have Bill pass on my best wishes,” I asked her, and she nodded agreement.
“The bonding is done,” she said, trying to be all business, though the fact that her eyes were trying to match her red hair caused her to fail at least a little. “You’re cleared for the airport shipment. The GPS has the security gate you’ll need to go through loaded into it and the offloading dock you’ll head to from there.”
“Thanks, Trysta,” I said. I reached over to squeeze her hand. “I’m sure Jake will be okay, so let’s get this handled so he doesn’t yell at us all when he gets back.”
That got a weak smile from her. I don’t think anyone in the company had ever heard Jake so much as raise his voice.
I LEFT the shoebox under my seat and loaded the bigger one into the truck before pulling up the two pallets of boxes and loading them in on top of it. I carefully shifted the box so it was about a third of the way back in the truck, and then filled everything else in over it.
The entire drive up to the airport, I worried that something about the two boxes would attract some sort of additional attention, or get me arrested, or something similarly horrific. By the time I pulled up to the security checkpoint, I had mostly managed to put my fears aside—it wasn’t like the Wizard’s people had any reason to try and screw me over.
I was still aware that being a changeling and sharing much of the fae’s lack of ability to sweat was the only thing keeping me from nervously sweaty palms, and I couldn’t help glancing at the guards’ holstered weapons as two of them walked out to check out the van.
“You’re the temp driver for Direct?” the first guard greeted me.
“Yeah,” I told me. “Not sure how temp, either—Jake managed to bust himself up pretty good.” I gave the guard the quick summary of Jake’s injury.
“Poor guy, always seemed nice enough,” the guard said with a groan of sympathetic pain. “Can you open up the back of the truck and step out, please?”
“Is this normal?” I asked carefully as I stepped down to the ground.
“Yup,” the guard said cheerfully. “We run you and the packages through chem sniffers, looking for bombs. Always got to worry someone will blow up a cargo plane, after all,” he added with a wink as he ran a metal detector over me, picking out the metal buttons on my jacket, which he quickly checked, and my belt buckle.
The two guards checked me and the van out quickly and efficiently, probably motivated by the freezing cold outside.
“All right,” the guard doing all the talking told me as his companion retreated to the warmth of their security booth. “You know which dock?”
“The GPS does,” I said, pointing at the gadget on the dashboard.
“Cool.” He waved me forward as the other guard hit a button to open the gate. The GPS promptly resumed spitting out directions, and I followed them into the commercial zone of the airport.
A few minutes later, I pulled up to an offloading dock. A smoking man in coveralls guided me, and when I stepped out, his nametag revealed him to be Bryan Filks.
“Give me a moment; I’ll grab a couple of guys to help you,” he told me.
“Wait up a sec,” I said. “Bryan Filks, right?”
He checked his nametag. “Yup,” he grinned at me.
“This is for you.” I passed him the box, and the grin faded as fast as it had appeared. “I was told you’d know what it was.”
“I do,” he said flatly, and something about the way he said it suggested asking more would be unwise. He took the box quickly. “I’ll grab you that help,” he told me, and vanished into the building.
For several minutes, I shivered in the cold, and then Filks and two more guys in warm-looking coveralls arrived to help me start unloading boxes. We worked quickly, but even the work wasn’t enough to keep us warm. When the last box was loaded, we closed the van up, and the airport guys looked me over.
“Come in for a minute and grab a cuppa hot chocolate,” Filks told me. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”
I nodded agreement—there’d be no argument on that point from me in this city! A minute or so later, they dropped a steaming cup of hot chocolate into my half-frozen hands. I wanted to cuddle up to the thing and never let go, but a tiny voice in the back of my mind suggested that these guys might know something about how the vampires got here, even if they weren’t inhuman.
Filks vanished as I took my first sip of hot chocolate, and I eyed the other two—Tom and Harry.
“You guys only ever work on the shipping side?” I asked.
“Nah,” Harry replied. “Other than Filks, most of us working here are those on workers’-comp ‘limited lift weights’—Tom and I are normally heavy cargo receiving, but we both managed to gum up our backs within two weeks of each other. I’ll be done here in two weeks, though.”
“Lucky shit,” Tom grunted. “Docs say mine won’t ever be what it was—I’m on light or semi-light for life, it sounds.”
“You must see everything come through here,” I said. “What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?”
“Dinosaurs,” Tom laughed. “A few years back, the zoo updated their animatronics display, so we had these crates with full-size fake dinos in them come through. One of them got ‘accidentally’ turned on—no fucking clue how; they don’t have batteries, after all—but you should have seen the reaction around here when a T. rex roar, right out of Jurassic Park, came blaring through the main cargo hangar.”
“Almost as spooked as when that load of cadavers came through,” Harry agreed, with a shiver as he mentioned them.
“Load of cadavers?” I drawled questioningly. That sounded promising.
“About nine months back,” Harry said, thinking slowly. “There was a special refrigerated cargo container came in on an express cargo flight from Philadelphia. Some of the paperwork got fucked up, so security checked it out—it was full of corpses. Thirty of them. It was two days before everything got sorted out and some muckety-muck from the med school at the U came over to grab them.”
“People were really spooked,” Tom agreed. “Kelly thought he saw one of the corpses walking around the airport the night before the doc came for them. Like I said, spooked.”
“Who was the doc?” I asked, trying to fake passing curiosity and drinking more hot chocolate.
“Sigurdsen? Sanderson?” Harry shrugged. “Something like that.”