The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

"Well-" The image of the succubus in blue leaped into my mind, as fully three-dimensional as the little demon had been herself. "As a matter of fact, yes." I did my best to sound sheepish, but I didn't know how good my best was.

Judy left me hanging for a couple of seconds before she started to laugh. "Good," she said between chuckles. "If you'd told me anything else, I'd have figured you were lying - succubi are made to be succulent, after all. I wish I'd been there; I could have leered at some of the incubi.

Watching is fun, though I think men may be more apt to enjoy it than women."

"Maybe," I said. "It didn't seem to matter much to the traffic, though. Everybody was staring, men and women both."

"Oh, God, I hadn't even thought about that It must have been awful." Commuting every day from Long Beach up into East A.C., Judy knows all about traffic tangles and loves them as much as anyone else who has to get on the freeway to go to work.

"It was worse than that." She laughed again when I told her how the strong-minded priest had foiled my effort to escape down Veteran. Thinking back on it, I decided it was funny, too. It certainly hadn't felt funny why I was sitting on my carpet twiddling my thumbs for an extra twenty minutes.

"So how was your day?" I asked.

"Certainly not as interesting as yours," she answered.

"Very much the usual: looking at sheets of parchment and making little marks on them in red. It keeps me out of the baron's Paupers' Home, but past that it doesn't have a whole lot to recommend it. I can't wait to finish my master's so somebody will hire me to work on the theoretical side of sorcery."

Then you'll be working in virtuous reality all the time, if it turns out to be as important as you think it wffl," I said.

"It will, and I will. Then I'll come home and we can be less than virtuous together." Judy hesitated, just a beat "But we'll be married, so it'll be virtuous after all. Hmm. I'm not sure I like that."

"I think it'll be fine any which way," I said. "And speaking-indirectly-of such things, do you want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?"

"Indirectly indeed," she said. "Sure, I'd love to. Shall we go to that Hanese place near your flat again?"

"Sounds good to me. You want to meet here after we get off work?"

"All right," Judy said. 'It'll be good to see you. I love you."

"Love you too, hon. See you tomorrow. Bye."

Thinking of seeing Judy kept me going through a miserable Tuesday at the office. I did get some of the small stuff done. Lord, the things that show up on an EPA man's desk sometimes! I got a letter from a woman up in the high desert asking it the ashes of a coyote's flesh had the same anti-asthmatic effect as those of a fox's flesh when drunk in wine and, if so, whether she could set traps for the ones that kept trying to catch her cats. Just answering that one took a couple of hours of research and a phone call to the Chief Huntsman of the Barony of Angels (in case you're interested, the answers are yes and she had to buy a twenty-crown license first, respectively).

The environmental study on importing leprechauns, though, took a large step backwards. I got a very fancylooking legal brief from an outfit that called itself Save Our Basin, which opposed allowing the Little People to establish themselves here. SOB put forward the fear that, once we had leprechauns here, all the Sidhe would henceforth pack up and move to Angels City. I'm condensing, but that's what the gist of it was. Now on first glance this stuck me as one of the more idiotic environmental concerns I'd seen lately. The climate here, both literal and theological, isn't congenial to Powers from cool, moist Eire. But the Save Our Basin folks had so many citations in their brief - from the evocatio of Juno out of Veil and into Rome to the establishment of the Virgin at Guadalupe in what had been a purely Aztecan thecology - that I couldn't dismiss it out of hand. It would have to be countered, which meant more research, more projections - and more delay. I wondered how long leprechauns could stay in hiberniation. I hoped it was a long time.

I looked at the names on the letterhead of the Save Our Basin parchment I didn't recognize any of them, but somebody in that organization was one clever lawyer. As far as I could see, none of the citations in the brief was precisely analogous to what would happen if we imported leprechauns into Angels City, but they were all close enough to being analogous that I (and, again by analogy, our legal staff) couldn't afford to ignore them. We'd have to examine every one of those instances, demonstrate that it was irrelevant, and withstand challenges from Save Our Basin trying to establish that the instances weren't irrelevant at all.